Somewhere Beneath Those Waves (16 page)

“I’m going to bring him back,” Bram said, articulating for the first time the plan which had sprung full-formed into her head as soon as she had seen the open doors of the seraphic train, and the dead girl, after a disbelieving moment, rocked back on the bench and went into a terrible dry spasm of laughter that sounded like someone choking to death on a bone. The two tortoiseshell child-kittens stopped a moment, staring at her with grave wonder, but the green-skinned woman called to them, and they ran to her.

“Man, you are just fucked up,” the dead girl said, and after that she would not speak to Bram again.

our story crumbles in my hands

When you go to the office of the city’s oldest paper, the
Telegraph-Clarion
, and ask to see their archives, you will be admitted to a room crammed to bursting with the huge black ledgers in which the city’s entire journalistic history is preserved. In those grim and brittle ledgers, you will find births and deaths and marriages, records of parades and speeches—a relentless marching army of facts that will not surrender up the answers you can sense, like rats in the wainscoting, behind the bland, prosperous wallpaper of the articles’ words.

But even the
Telegraph-Clarion
has not always been able to flatten the oddity out of the city’s dark flourishing. In the 1870s a factory girl living in Prosper Park was reputed to tell the future. Not major events such as wars or assassinations or stock-market crashes, but predicting the number of kittens in a litter, or how many tries it would take a boy to hit a target with a stone. In 1877 she threw herself under one of the Metropolitan Transit trains and died. The brief popularity of apocalypse preachers at the end of ’77 can hardly be coincidental, a fear that her tiny, trivial talent had shown her something too dreadful to be borne. But no such calamity ever occurred.

Similar cases abound: a classics professor who chased rainbows until his disappearance in 1964; Caroline Hayward, who was discovered weeping in Asherton Park in October of 1905, her hands stained with blood that was not hers. No victim was ever found, and Caroline Hayward could speak, stammering, sobbing, only of falling leaves.

And there is the story of Phoebe Gruenstahl.

Phoebe Gruenstahl was institutionalized in 1909; she was seven years old. Her parents told everyone that she had died, and in time, freed from their strange, mute, savage child, they came to believe it. She was an inmate of St. Catherine’s for twenty-nine years, and then one sweltering August night in 1938, she escaped. No one, then or later, ever discovered how.

The city was in a panic for seven days. It became generally accepted that she had gotten into the sewers, and there were expeditions with dogs and rifles to bring her out again, but no luck. In fact, there were no confirmed sightings of Phoebe Gruenstahl until February 1939, when her body was dragged out of the river less than half a mile from the then newly completed Enoch J. Hopkins Bridge, the first bridge to allow the Metropolitan Transit trains to cross the river above the ground.

Cause of death could not be determined.

Everyone who examined the corpse remarked on its astonishingly beautiful smile. In life, Phoebe Gruenstahl had never smiled, never once.

your face, dark behind the glass

Sean Lacroix was born and raised in Prosper Park, one of the city’s oldest and grimmest neighborhoods. When Sean was seven, his parents moved the family from their increasingly cramped apartment to a house backing onto the Metropolitan Transit tracks. Sean had a tiny bedroom to himself, at the rear of the house; if he stuck a broom handle out his window, he could bump the tracks with it. The noise and shaking of the trains bothered him at first, but quickly became a mere fact of existence.

One night in July, Sean sat by his open window, watching the trains go past and trying not to listen to his father yelling at his mother in the room below. The trains roared by, and Sean pretended they were fabulous monsters, but he knew they were just trains.

At 1:39 a.m. he heard an approaching train, although the next train wasn’t due until 1:50. Curious, he leaned forward even as the train let out a chuffing yowl like the hunting cry of some great beast.

It roared past in no more than five heartbeats, so fast that Sean had no idea of it overall, but individual images, like fragments from a kaleidoscope, lodged in his heart and would stay with him until the moment of his death.

A dead woman, wrapped in a blood-stained shroud, tenderly stroking the hair of a sleeping child.

Two tall, beautiful people—whether men or women he could neither then nor later decide—dancing together, their wings trailing behind them like iridescent gossamer.

A saber-toothed tiger yanking at its chains with human hands.

Two queens, crowned and jeweled and with the heads of foxes, playing chess.

In the last car, a man with the head of a white stag. The man wore black velvet, and on every branch of his wide-spreading antlers a tiny white candle burned serenely, anchored in its own wax. The man’s dark, lambent eyes met Sean’s, and Sean knew, then and ever after, that that stag-headed man understood him and loved him as no one in his life ever would.

And then the train was gone.

wings, torn from cloudy moths

Lying together in the darkness.

They had just had sex, awkwardly and uncomfortably, on Sean’s narrow dorm-room bed. It had not exactly been Bram’s first time, but it couldn’t count as more than her second. She hadn’t said anything about that to Sean, but she was afraid he’d been able to tell anyway.

“Sean?” she said into the darkness.

“What?” Sean said. He sounded sleepy, maybe a little irritated.

“Oh, nothing. I just . . . was I okay?”

“Sure. You were fine. We aren’t being graded, you know.”

“I didn’t mean that. It was just . . . ” She lost her nerve and said, “The bed’s pretty narrow.”

“Hey, we didn’t fall off. Ten points out of ten.”

“Okay,” Bram said, although she was only partly reassured.

But Sean was awake now; Bram felt him shifting position, sitting up against the headboard with the pillow behind his back. She stayed as she was, lying on her side, pressed against the wall, her head inadequately supported by what she would later find to be a pair of Sean’s roommate’s sweatpants.

Sean said, “What do you want your music to do, Bram?”

“What?”

“Your music. What do you want to do with it?”

“I don’t know. I guess I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Don’t you have any aspirations?” Sean said, a stinging flick of contempt in his voice.

“Of course I do. I just . . . they’re hard to articulate, you know?”

“No, they’re not. Not if they’re real.”

“Well, what’s your aspiration then?” Bram said, defensive and yet hoping that perhaps Sean was working around to asking her to read his poems.

“The city,” Sean said. “I want to capture the truth of the city.”

And when she asked him what he meant, Sean told her about the seraphic trains and the river and the city’s tenebrous history. But he did not show her his poems.

her blood

Things Lost in the City and Never Recovered:

• 3 canvases by the American surrealist painter, Frank Attwater:
The Sum of All Objects in the Room
,
The Dirigible Eaten by Stars
,
The Andiron

• the diary of the novelist Susan Kempe (burned by the author before her suicide in 1988)

• St. Roque’s Hospital (destroyed in the fire of 1922)

• a key to the secret room in the house at 549 Grosvenor Avenue

• 7 life-size wooden marionettes, representing Henry VIII and his 6 wives: Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn (with detachable head), Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard (with detachable head), Catherine Parr

• a packet of Agathe Ombrée rose seeds

• a stained kidskin left glove missing the index finger, said to have belonged to the Confederate spy Rose O’Neal Greenhow

• the Maupin Boulevard subway station

the moon’s pyre

Bram climbed the stairs from the subway station and emerged in the middle of a brick-paved plaza. There were benches around the edges of the plaza, and tall, ornate streetlamps; the plaza was almost disappointingly normal, except for the fact that it was underground. The air was cold, but stuffy, and the sweetish scent of dust was everywhere.

She looked up, but the streetlamps did not cast enough light for her to see if the ceiling of this place was natural or man-made. She squeezed the handle of her guitar case, for reassurance, and started to walk toward the edge of the plaza opposite the head of the stairs. She wished, a tired, aching thought, that she had any idea of where she was going.

Bram walked through the Court of the Clockwork Kings. The houses loured on either side, crammed cheek-by-jowl, tall and narrow-fronted and stern. There were no lights behind any of the windows, but she could not shake the faint, frightened impression that the houses were not deserted, that the rooms behind those staring windows were not empty, and that those who waited in those airless, dusty rooms (and waited for what?) were watching her as she went past. She walked a little faster, but that made the echoes of her footsteps mime the increasingly rapid and panicked rhythm of her heart, and she had to slow down again.

After a time—she did not know how long, and she was afraid to look at her watch—she saw a different kind of light up ahead. It bloomed like a rose against the darkness, not the right color for a fire, although it was naggingly familiar. She got a little closer and realized it was pink neon, as lurid and tasteless as anything one might see on Jefferson Avenue. Bram stopped, bewildered, suddenly afraid in an entirely new way.

And it was at that moment that she became aware of a hand on her arm.

She jerked away and turned, in one motion, and found herself staring at something that looked like a man but wasn’t one. It was tall and deathly white—not the same white as the chalk-white gentlemen in the train, this was a dead white, like the undersides of rotting fish—and wrapped in trailing black that might have been a cloak or a shroud or a pair of nebulous wings. Its eyes were blood-red slivers of glass.

“What are you?” Bram said, her voice shrill and shaking. “What do you want?”

“We are the noctares,” said the creature, and Bram looked around wildly, but there was nothing like it in sight; its words, though, were blurry, echoing, as if it spoke with more than one voice. “We serve the Clockwork Kings. What do you seek, you who breathe, in the Court of the Clockwork Kings?”

“I . . . I’m looking for someone.”

Its head tilted, slowly and jerkily, like a rusty piece of machinery, to the left. It said, “You do not belong here, you who breathe. Go back. Go home. Walk beneath the sun and stars and taste the air of the world. Do not walk in this city of darkness.”

“I can’t. I’m sorry, but I just can’t. I have to find him.”

It stared at her, its red glass eyes unfathomable, and said, “If you will not go, we must take you before the Clockwork Kings. We who do not breathe and never have, we beg you: go now. Do not look back. Let go of that which does not breathe.”

“Wh . . . what will they do to me?”

Its head tilted, with the same slow jerkiness—clockwork, Bram thought and then wished she hadn’t—to the right. It said, “The Clockwork Kings do no harm.”

“Then I will see them. I am not afraid.” A lie, a lie, but she could not go back, not without Sean.

It bowed its head. “You have made your choice. Come with us.” And its hand, as white and cold as death by freezing, took Bram’s arm just above the elbow. This time, Bram could not pull away.

those cold mirrors

Clair was the only person Sean had ever loved. When she kissed him, when she smiled at him, he felt almost breathless with awe. He told her things about himself he had never and would never tell a living soul. The first time he had seen her, the first time he had looked into her eyes, he had thought he saw his Stag of Candles reflected there. He had been trying to find that reflection again ever since, but all he ever saw was himself.

bone needles

Sean sat in the dusty dimness of St. Christopher’s small parish library. He was working on a poem about St. Christopher’s, his own parish church, for
The Stag of Candles
; he had spent the afternoon looking through the contents of a box labeled simply
From Convent
. Most of it was incomprehensible to him, but down at the bottom, he found an accordion file of documents relating to the case of a nun who was committed to St. Catherine’s in 1942. She claimed she heard angels singing in the roofs of the transepts—this, the last in what was apparently a long history of visions and voices, some of them distinctly secular, all of them highly suspect. Moreover, in a letter written to her sister but apparently never sent, she gloried in the fact that only she could hear the angels, her tone that of a spoiled child gloating over a birthday present. When she would not recant—when she became blasphemous and violent before the Bishop—she was committed to St. Catherine’s. She died of pneumonia nine years later, insisting to the end that angels had sung to her from the roof of St. Christopher’s.

Sean jotted down some notes; as he was starting to tidy the contents of the box, the ancient and almost senile Sister Mary Bartholomew tottered over to the table, peered at Sean’s pile of documents, and nodded to herself.

“Did you know her, Sister?” Sean asked, not hopefully.

“Her and her angels.” Sister Mary Bartholomew snorted. “We all heard them—but only Sister Mary Jude was fool enough to say so.”

And she tottered away again, leaving Sean staring after her. He was suddenly very cold.

long-held breath

It was past eleven on the fifth night after Sean’s death. Bram crossed the campus without seeing the stark, strange beauty of the bare oak trees against the sky. She made for the nearest Metropolitan Transit stop, bought a ticket she had no intention of using, and climbed the narrow, scaffold-like staircase to the platform.