Somewhere Beneath Those Waves (31 page)

“You need not fear,” he said, starting down the aisle. “Our doors are left unlocked for a reason.”

As he came closer, I saw that he was a young man—probably four or five years younger than I—and that his resemblance to a marble angel in a cemetery did not end with his wings. He had the high forehead with the bar across the supraorbital ridge, the straight, patrician nose, the proportionally weaker mouth and chin, which nonetheless held an expression of great gentleness and sweetness. His skin was alabaster pale; his hair, curly and overlong, was tow-colored. As he passed through a puddle of candlelight, I saw the final, capping, dreadful resemblance: his wide-set eyes were blank, perfectly white, like the eyes of a classical statue whose colors have been washed away by centuries of rain.

“Are you an angel?” I blurted.

His laugh was enchanting, self-deprecating and rueful. “A demi-angel, only. But you cannot be one of my parishioners.”

“No, I beg your pardon. I did not mean . . . that is, I am . . . ” I hesitated, and decided on the stark truth. “I am lost.”

“Lost,” he said thoughtfully, as if the word had some deeper meaning of which I was unaware. “Will you come sit down and tell me? The nights are long and lonely here, and I,” and his lips curved in a gentle smile, “I am unquenchably curious about travellers in our city.”

“I . . . I’m not . . . that is, I don’t think I am a, er, a traveller. I’m just lost.”

“All the more reason to speak to me,” he said. “Perhaps I can help you become found again. I am Clement, the dominie of St. Christopher’s.”

“My name is Kyle Murchison Booth,” I said.

Clement found a pew with a light sweep of his right hand. He sat, his wings wrapping round him like a cloak, leaving space for me; I sat beside him. He smelled of vanilla and nutmeg. His hands, folded restfully in his lap, were as beautiful as his face, long-fingered and smooth. I clasped my own hands, with their knobby joints and chapped knuckles and ink-stained fingertips, between my knees, and told Clement as best I could about my insomnia and my walks and the strange city I now found myself in. He listened without any trace of restlessness or impatience, although his feathery brows drew together slightly as my tale unfolded.

“Do you know, er, the other city?” I said. “Have you heard of Fairlie Road?”

“No,” he said.

“I feared as much.”

“But it is possible that I can help you all the same. If you will help me in return.”

“I will do anything I can,” I said, knowing it was rash, but also knowing that I did not have a choice in any meaningful sense of the word.

Clement smiled at me radiantly. “It is not as difficult as your voice suggests you fear. But it is most desperately important. You see, the goblins have stolen St. Christopher’s Glass.”

“St. Christopher’s . . . I’m sorry. I, er . . . ”

“It is our relic.”

“Relic.” I supposed it was foolish of me to be surprised. Clearly the boundary between this nightmare city and the waking world was all too permeable; if random persons such as myself could cross, why not the remains of saints?

“It’s a glass ball, about the size of my thumb joint. Warm to the touch. It contains one of St. Christopher’s tears, and the sunlight reflected in it.”

“It . . . I’m sorry. I don’t think I understand you.”

“This is the night city,” Clement said, his beautiful face sad. “We have no sun. It is why the vampires are so strong.”

“Vampires? You, er, do mean the blood-drinking sort, not some other of which I am unaware?”

“They leave the city at moonrise to hunt. I am told it is terrible to witness.”

“I’m sure,” I said faintly.

“The city is theirs, you see. The shadows are their thralls, and we cannot travel without protection.”

After a moment, I realized that his ‘we’ was the demi-angels. “Are you all blind, then?”

A tactless question, but he did not seem to notice. “Yes. We stay in our churches, where the vampires cannot come, and do what we can to help the shadows.” His wings drooped as his shoulders slumped. “Sadly, it isn’t much.”

“Why can’t one of these, er, shadows go after your relic?”

“The vampires would notice their absence,” he said, seeming shocked that I had to ask. “They are very strict overseers.”

“Ah. And you—the demi-angels—cannot go because of your blindness, and it’s obviously useless to ask the vampires.”

“Oh, they mustn’t know it’s gone,” Clement said earnestly. “It’s the only thing that keeps them in check at all.”

He had boxed me in very neatly with the solution he wanted, although I did not think, looking at that beautiful, gentle face, that he was aware of his own manipulation. “Very well,” I said, although I could not quite repress a sigh. “I hope that you can at least tell me where I must go.”

“Shift ends very shortly, and the shadows are allowed an hour before they have to sign the registers of their dormitories. One of them will show you the way. But, please, I would hear more of your city, if you would tell me.”

It would have been difficult to resist his shy entreaty, and I reflected that I would probably get more useful information from the shadows. So, shy myself, I told Clement about the museum, and the neighborhoods I walked in on the weekends; the library, the zoo, the Alethea Wing Parrington Botanical Gardens. I described the Nicodemus Kent Building and the Public Water Utility, and the city’s other architectural marvels, both the beautiful and the grotesque, and some that were both. I told him about the Resurrection Hill Cemetery, where my ancestors were buried, and a little about the old, gracious neighborhood in which I had spent my childhood. I described the city to him as I knew it, and both of us became wide-eyed as children with the wonder of it. I managed to forget so thoroughly where I was and what was being asked of me that I jumped and flinched when the church door opened, and a voice called, “Dominie Clement?” It was a soft voice, a little asthmatic, indeterminate as to sex.

“In the nave, my child. Come here, there’s someone I want you to meet.”

The patter of bare feet, and I turned to watch the shadow come into the church proper. It was child-sized, very pale, limbs long in proportion to the torso, giving it an unpleasantly spidery appearance. It wore its pale, cobwebby hair scraped into a topknot, which looked incongruously savage juxtaposed with the sober, tidy laborer’s clothes. The face was unremarkable next to Clement’s beauty, the eyes large and dark and much inclined to blink.

They blinked at me, puzzled and reproachful, and the shadow said, “’Oo—Who is this?”

“Is that you, D-7-16? This is Mr. Booth, who has very kindly agreed to retrieve St. Christopher’s Glass for us.”

The look of alarm had to be due to the goggle-eyed blinking, I decided, for D-7-16—if that was indeed the creature’s name—said, “That’s very nice of you, sir,” and sounded sincere and even eager.

“Mr. Booth is a stranger to our city,” Clement said, “so I need you to show him the way to the Goblin Door.”

“It’ll have to be now, sir.”

“Yes, I know. D-7-16 will take good care of you, Mr. Booth.”

I looked at the blinking eyes, the sly thin-lipped mouth, and was not so sure. But there did not seem to be any way I could say so; therefore, I got up—this time the blinking was definitely in alarm, as D-7-16 backed hastily away from my gangling height—and said, “Thank you. I’ll do my best.”

“Oh, I’m sure you will succeed,” Clement said, almost gaily. “The goblins are nasty little brutes, but they’re not really
dangerous
.”

How would you know? inquired an unpleasant voice in my head, but I bit my tongue and did not say it.

“This way, sir, please,” said D-7-16, making urging motions without actually approaching me. “There’s not much time.”

I wished I had a better option, but I did not. I followed D-7-16.

The night city, as Clement called it, was not less
unheimlich
for having a companion. D-7-16 padded unspeaking on long pale feet, only nodding in a self-important manner at the other shadows we met or passed. They were all indistinguishable to my eyes, with their pale topknots and subfusc clothes and fish-like blinking eyes. And no less so when the street lamps were lit, as they were by other shadows, just as pale and goggling—though I could not tell if the lamps were meant to signify day or night.

I felt terribly tall and awkward and out of place—which differed from my waking life, I supposed, only in that no one here would expect me to feel otherwise. The thought was queerly emboldening. I said to D-7-16, “Do all shadows have, er, names like yours?”

The blink this time was clearly contemptuous. “That isn’t my
name
.”

“Oh. I beg your pardon. Then, er . . . ”

“It’s my designation. Factory D, seventh level, technician sixteen.”

“Oh. And your real name?”

“The vampires have that,” D-7-16 said, sounding scandalized that I would feel it necessary to ask.

“The vampires have your
name
?”

“Shhh!” D-7-16 said, rather frantically. “Never know who’s listening.” But oddly—for I knew it did not like me any better than I liked it—it must have wanted to answer my question, for it said, “It’s why we work for them. Earning our names back.”

“But how did they get your names in the first place?” I was wondering if I had been mistaken in what type of vampires these were. Onomastic vampires?

“Protection,” D-7-16 said. “We give ’em our names when we’re born, and they protect us from the dragons. And we can earn our names back working in the factories—as adults, of course.”

I firmly put aside the temptation to ask about shadow child-labor laws. “And, er, what happens when you do?”

“The dominies have a system. We give them part of our wages every month, and whenever anybody buys their name back, the dominies take money out of the kitty and buy ’em passage on a ship to Heft Averengh.”

I was about to ask if that happened very often when D-7-16 stopped short. “If I go any farther, I shan’t get back in time to sign the book. Just keep following Clair, though—”and it jabbed a long skinny finger at a sign proclaiming this to be
Clair Street
—“and you can’t miss it.” And it bolted like a rabbit, not so much as pausing to wish me good luck.

But when I turned to continue in the indicated direction, I saw why D-7-16 had been in such a hurry and cursed it as not only a rude and sullen rabbit, but a cowardly one as well.

It must have smelled the vampire coming.

I cannot describe the vampires of the night city in any way that will truly convey the experience of meeting one. To begin with, the miasma that surrounds them if one gets too close—a stench of blood both fresh and very old, compounded by a cloying reek of roses that I guess to be the scent of the vampires themselves—is like nothing I have ever encountered, before or since.

They are somewhat like the demi-angels in shape, being tall and well proportioned and winged. And they are pale-skinned, pale-haired: albino.

But their wings are the naked leathery span of the bat, and their faces, too, have nothing that is human or beautiful about them.

Round faces, almost chinless, with a nose that is nothing more than nostrils, and a lipless inverted V slash of a mouth, the sharp teeth plainly visible with every word spoken. They eyes are round and bright, very red and very old.

I yelped at finding myself face to face with such a creature, the yelp only not a scream because the stench of roses and blood choked me; the vampire winced, its hands going up as if to protect its ears, and said in a lovely, perfectly modulated mezzo-soprano, with only the slightest trace of a lisp, “I beg your pardon. I did not mean to startle you.”

Somewhat incoherently, I begged pardon in return, chiding myself inwardly for being surprised that such an ugly creature should be female. But I could not help it: I
was
surprised, as if her sex ought to make her exempt, as if something that hideous could only be male.

She said, “You are a stranger here, are you not?”

“Yes.”

Her head tilted, and her mouth moved in an expression that I thought was intended as a smile. “And let me guess. Dominie Clement has talked you into going after that tiresome relic for him.”

The expression on my face made her laugh, and if her voice was beautiful, yet her laugh was the shrieking, tittering noise her bat-like physiognomy suggested. The passing shadows, all of whom were carefully on the other side of the street, covered their ears and walked faster.

“But please,” said the vampire, collecting herself. “I forget my manners.” She extended her hand, very long and very white, and the fingers plainly tipped with claws, not nails. “This is the correct observance? And we tell each other our names.”

“Only if I won’t have to pay to get mine back,” I said.

“Your name is entirely safe,” she promised, and for some mad reason I believed her.

It required a considerable effort of will to take her hand. But her skin was warm, her palm furry against mine, and she was very careful of her claws, so that I felt only the slightest tickling scratch against my wrist. “Kyle Murchison Booth,” I said.

“Mirach,” she said in return, and I hoped I hid my relief adequately when she released my hand. “That is a most charming ritual.”

“I, er, that is, I’m glad you find it so.”

“And it means we are not enemies,” she said triumphantly, “so you need not fear any longer that I will bite you.” For one heart-stopping second, she bared her teeth at me, as sharp as if they’d been filed, and I knew she could have torn my throat out in a single snapping mouthful of blood and skin and gristle. And then she relaxed and stepped slightly away from me, and after a moment I was able to relax, too. Infinitesimally.

“Come,” said Mirach. “Walk with me.”

I was not certain whether it was invitation or command, but it seemed wiser to obey, regardless. I followed the vampire through a wrought-iron gate, out of which she must have emerged to intercept me, down a long, wide spiral of stairs circling a great empty space like a ballroom in which no one had ever danced, and then through another gate and onto a brick-paved promenade beside a river which, after one glance, I tried not to look at too closely. There were others strolling along the river-walk, but they were vampires, and they did not approach us.