Somewhere Beneath Those Waves (17 page)

She was following Sean as best she could. Her grief was too raw and black to admit of any other course of action. But she intended her suicide also to be a memorial, a testament to the tremendous jagged void Sean left in the world. Sean had told her about the seraphic trains, had told her some of the stories about them, and she had heard the longing in his voice. She could not end things until she, too, had watched a seraphic train sweep by and leave her behind, scorning her offering.

She lifted her guitar out of its case, tuned it, and began to play. She paid no attention to the passengers waiting for the next train, no attention to the cold air or the bad lighting; nothing existed except the music and the trains that roared and howled and gibbered their way past. Each of them was an ordinary train, and Bram kept playing.

She started with folk songs, some Bob Dylan, Beatles songs that she’d been playing since her first guitar lesson at the age of eight. She segued into her own stuff when fingers and voice were warm, when she could feel the strength of the music all the way down her spine. It would be cheating not to play her best, and she knew it would make no difference. No seraphic train would stop for her. Midnight came and went, and she was still playing. She stopped only to get drinks of water. She felt that her heart was opening wider and wider, that it was pushing open the stone carapace of grief and her music was soaring out like dragons.

There was no self-consciousness left when she started playing “Why Do You Linger?”, a song she had half-despaired of ever finishing. But tonight she understood it; tonight it was as clear and brutal and precise as a glass dissecting-knife. Tonight she understood what the song was trying to say, that the truth was still beautiful, even if it came out of something painful and ugly and heart-breaking.

The song ended; she looked up, arming sweat off her forehead, and saw the train standing at the platform, doors open; there were faces at every window, looking at her, and not a single one of them was mortal.

A seraphic train had stopped for Bram Bennett.

my love waits for me in green

The Fairlawn Memorial Garden is always deserted. Funerals are held here, the grounds are immaculately kept, but, no matter when you visit, you will never see another living soul.

The Thiboudeau Hill Cemetery is noted for the yearly funeral procession of the city’s fifth mayor, Henry Hamilton Carr. Cemetery workers from all over the city gather at sundown on March eleventh to watch the spectral procession, though no one now knows who the mourners are.

The city’s most famous (or infamous) resident, the poet and critic Francis Burnham, is buried in St. Mary’s Cemetery. Stories were whispered throughout the city of his debauched ways: his orgies, his absinthe and opium, the fortunes he squandered and the young men he ruined. He went mad at last—and the reasons given for his madness are as many and varied as the people who tell the story—and hanged himself in the cupola of his house on Grosvenor Avenue, where his last sight would have been of the city below him. His house now belongs to the city’s most influential judge, who does not welcome sightseers.

The Three Oaks Cemetery, though sadly neglected, has some of the country’s finest examples of nineteenth-century funerary sculpture. The weeping angel on the tomb of Hester Lyall repays the effort it takes to climb the overgrown path, and the sad, somber dignity of the family group which marks the Addison graves is undiminished by the ivy which twines around their lower bodies. Some long-ago vandal made off with Mrs. Addison’s head, and every St. Valentine’s Day a posy of belladonna is left by persons unknown on the stump of her neck.

The city has one crematorium, which operates only at the dark of the moon, and what is done with the ashes it is better not to ask.

singing home the rooks and ravens

Sean stood at his dorm-room window, staring out at the quad-
rangle. Behind him on his desk, a poem lay abandoned in the middle of a line. He was thinking about Clair.

More and more frequently these days, as he tried to work on
The Stag of Candles
, he found himself thinking about Clair. Her delicate face, her Medusan eyes, came between him and the page, leaching the strength out of his words. He was aware that he was writing less, and what he wrote came harder, and, when it did come, it was feeble, thin, twisting restlessly away from what he wanted it to be.

It’s Clair, he thought, and although his eyes were looking at the fountain in the quadrangle, mute and desiccated with the winter, and his hands were clenched white-knuckled on the window sill, in his mind he saw only her, felt the silkiness of her hair beneath his fingers. Somehow, in some way he could not describe or explain, he was losing his poetry to her.

He had felt this, uneasily, not quite consciously, for months; although he could not stay away from her for long, he had been trying to find ways to distract himself from Clair. He had even, in the extremity of his desperation, starting going to open-mike nights at Café Xerxes. Everyone was tremendously impressed with his poems, and although he loathed himself for it, he could not help being flattered, gratified. One of them, hero-worship all over her face, had even made a shy, clumsy, stammering pass at him the week before. He had turned her down, but not unkindly. Bram Bennett was actually a pretty good songwriter, and she was a fierce little Goth; she made a good shield against the talentless and overwrought.

But no matter how he felt about them, their reaction was so different from Clair’s, the difference between water and salt. Clair let him read his poems to her, the poems that awed the children at Café Xerxes, but her cold indifference was never shaken. And that hurt—it was the slow torture of the rack—but he also knew those poems weren’t his best work.
The Stag of Candles
was stronger, stranger, unafraid. But he had shown that to no one.

And he couldn’t stop thinking about Clair. I have to break her spell, he thought. I have to win free, face her as an equal.

There was an open-mike at Café Xerxes that night. Sean decided he would go and read, and if Bram Bennett was there, maybe he’d buy her a drink. And maybe, when
The Stag of Candles
was ready, he would give it to Clair to read.

dead leaves

The most notorious case of suicide off the Liliard Bridge is that of Mr. Horatio Prynne. On the night of Friday, November second, 1894, dressed in complete and impeccable evening wear, Horatio Prynne started across the Liliard Bridge from the west, stopped at the highest point of the bridge’s arc, set down his cane, removed his hat and overcoat, and without visible distress or hesitation, stepped up to the parapet and leaped off. A cabman witnessed the event and summoned the police; when the body was at last recovered, at two a.m. on Saturday, November third, it was discovered that the deceased was wearing a money belt laden with silver dollars. There was no doubt that his death had been intentional.

As the Prynnes mourned, the police set about retracing Mr. Prynne’s movements on the last day of his life. He had gone driving with his sister in the morning, and had seemed quite normal. He had lunched with friends, who likewise testified to his calmness and good-humor. He had then gone to visit his fiancée, Miss Lucasta Fremont, and had spent much of the afternoon walking with her in the gardens of the Fremont house on Grosvenor Avenue. Miss Fremont, though prostrated with grief, explained that she and Mr. Prynne had talked of their upcoming wedding and that she had told him details of her family history in which he had expressed an interest. Nothing had occurred to upset or alarm him, and he had left very much in his usual good spirits.

The Fremont butler remarked that Mr. Prynne had appeared to be in a great hurry.

At a quarter to five, he walked into the First Municipal Bank on Sheldon Avenue. The bank-teller testified that Mr. Prynne was “visibly agitated” and “very white about the eyes.” He had withdrawn four hundred dollars from his account and had insisted that the money be given him in silver dollars. The teller counted out the money, and Mr. Prynne took it away.

That evening he attended the opera with his fiancée, his sister, and his cousin, Mr. Tobias Kingsley. Although Miss Fremont claimed to have noticed no difference in his attitude toward her, Miss Prynne and Mr. Kingsley agreed that he had seemed less attentive to Miss Fremont than usual, and both of them remembered wondering if the couple had quarreled. Mr. Kingsley further testified that on one occasion when Miss Fremont’s hand brushed Mr. Prynne’s shoulder, Mr. Prynne quite visibly flinched. Miss Prynne had not witnessed this awkward moment, and Miss Fremont explained that Mr. Prynne had apologized in the intermission, telling her that he, not expecting the accidental touch, had believed it to be a spider.

After the opera, the three agreed that Mr. Prynne had mentioned a headache and a desire for fresh air. He told them to return home and that he would take a cab when he was ready. No further witnesses to Mr. Prynne’s actions could be found until he appeared at the west end of the Liliard Bridge at a quarter to midnight.

Horatio Prynne left no note, and the final verdict was suicide while temporarily unbalanced in his mind. The
Telegraph-Clarion
described his death as a great loss, both for the Prynnes and for the city, and a custom was established of leaving flowers at the spot from which he had leapt. This custom eroded with time and had ceased entirely by the end of World War II.

In 1896, Mr. Tobias Kingsley married Miss Lucasta Fremont. The wedding was small and private, but the guests remarked that both Mr. Kingsley and his new wife seemed radiantly happy. They honeymooned quietly in the Kingsleys’ summer home on Lake Michigan. It was when they returned that Tobias Kingsley’s slow decline began. He became quieter and more withdrawn even as his wife, blooming and vivacious, gained a reputation as a sparkling society hostess. Finally in 1905, he was committed to a private rest-home, where he quickly lapsed into catatonia, dying in 1910 at the age of forty-two. The last words he was known to have spoken were to his lifelong friend Mr. Barnaby Munroe, who visited him in the rest-home in the autumn of 1905.

Mr. Kingsley had not spoken to anyone for a week, and for some time he did not speak to Mr. Munroe, either. But finally, as the shadows were drawing down and Mr. Munroe was preparing to leave, Mr. Kingsley looked up at him and said, “Finally I understand poor Horry.”

Only this and nothing more.

lying under the gallows-tree

The noctares brought Bram to a building she recognized; she had to cram her fist against her mouth to keep back a spasm of hysterical giggles. Of all the things she had expected to see in the underworld, the absurd Victorian gazebo from Lafayette Park had surely been last on the list. But there it sat, a debutante in an abattoir, looking self-conscious against a dark byzantine tangle of girders and pipes whose function Bram could not imagine.

Then she saw the figures waiting beneath the gazebo’s arches, and her laughter withered and turned to dust in her mouth.

There were twelve of them, tall men robed in dark blood-red. As she came closer, she could see that they each wore the same mask, a stark, stylized face in unpainted white porcelain. The eyeholes of the masks were empty, but behind them she could see gears and cogwheels meshing and turning. She swallowed hard and stared at the steps of the gazebo to keep from being mesmerized by the endless spinning clockwork. The noctares let go of her arm, and when she looked around, it had vanished.

One of the twelve Clockwork Kings stepped forward and said, “I speak for all.” Its voice was the voice of a clockwork mechanism, full of rust and oil, dust and dead spiders and fragments of macerated time. The other eleven bowed their heads and stepped back into the shadows of the gazebo, but she could still see slivers of light glinting off the moving clockwork in their eyes.

There was silence; unlike mortals, the Clockwork Kings did not shift or grumble or even breathe. Only the clockwork, ever moving, revolved and revolved, but it made no sound.

Bram licked her dry lips and said, “I’m looking for someone. Sean Lacroix.”

“And what will you do when you have found him?” said the Clockwork King.

“I want . . . ” She had to stop, wrench her gaze away again from the whirling gears. “I want to take him back with me. To the world.”

“He is dead.”

“There’s ways around that, aren’t there?” Bram said and flinched at her own boldness.

“A few. But why should we do this for you? Why is your love greater, your pain deeper, than that of any of the thousands of people grieving in the city above?”

“The train stopped for me,” Bram said, knowing it was not enough.

“It stopped for your music, not your errand.” One of the other Clockwork Kings made some tiny motion, a bare rustle of fabric, and the first said, “And yet you have answered our question. Play for us.”

“Play for you?”

“Play for us. And if your music pleases us, we will let you talk to your friend, and you may take him back if it is what he wishes.”

Hands shaking, barely daring to breathe, Bram took out her guitar, tuned it, and began to play. She played a song of her own, “Soaring Jilly,” that she’d played often and always to generous applause. But the rapture that had possessed her on the Grandison Station platform was gone; she was aware that her playing was no more than adequate and her voice was thin and strained and tending to sharp, and the Clockwork Kings were watching her with their arms crossed. She began to imagine she could hear a clock ticking, and then to be sure that she really did, although she could not tell where the sound came from; she had only a limited amount of time to catch the Clockwork Kings’ attention before they would dismiss her and her request, and she would have to go back to the world, to life, alone.

A strange thing happened then, and unlike the other events of that terrible night of wonders, it happened in Bram’s head. The situation flipped upside down, and she realized that that ticking clock, imaginary or otherwise, was running every time she stepped up in front of an audience. There was always that narrow window of opportunity to make them care, make them listen, and, despite everything, this was no different. She straightened up, took a better breath, and vamped her way down from “Soaring Jilly” into the song of hers that Sean had always liked best, “Cast Shadows.” And now she’d got to the place inside herself where she needed to be; the music opened up and let her in. She felt the difference, and she could tell that the Clockwork Kings felt it, too; they were listening now, not judging, and she knew she had won.