CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 2: More Tales of Beauty and Strangeness (6 page)

The air ducts whisper and clank, and go silent.

Someone’s watching.

Six feels the gaze like spider legs on his neck, somewhere behind him where he can’t see, in the dark. But there’s no one on the balcony, no one in the closets, no one in the bedroom of the billet he’s made his own. He peeks careful careful out the never-locked broken-locked door, but nobody’s picking their way through the sixth floor, through the piles of debris that only little kids can get around.

“Uncle Eddie?” Six whispers, skin prickling, belly aching, but there ain’t nobody there but the ghosts.

* * *

He hides from the dead men. From the dead Uncles haunting through the uncleared halls and the live ones drinking up Father’s wine and laughing up their sleeves at his first, his one misfortune, this demand of a seventh son by the alchemists in their black train. He hides upstairs in the clan quarters, in the billet he’ll share for one more night with goddamn Joe the special kid, Joe who’ll be gone from the sheep-fold and the dirt.

When the party breaks up goddamn special blond-curls smartmouth Joe comes up full of sweet cream and holiday raisin cake. Six stares up at him with his empty mad eyes.

“I’ll jump,” Six whispers, holding his pillow against the length of his body. His tummy feels hot and terrible, like the fall of the whole big world. “I’ll die, and they won’t want you anymore, and they’ll send you back tomorrow night and that’ll show you.”

“
So do it,
” Joe screams clean as torchlight, and leaps.

Joe punches like a girl. Six’s never been punched by a girl, but Joe sure’s hell don’t punch like a boy, and half the hits don’t even hurt. Six just holds him off, catching his fists with his own hands or the soft bits along his belly, until Joe lands him one right in the nose and the night goes bright with sparkles.

“God
damn!
” Six roars and throws Joe off him, throws him clear across the mattress and into the wad of baby blanket that he sleeps with every night. He rears back to go after him, to beat the sense right good into his special stupid skull, and his breath comes hot and bitter, liquidy. Wrong.

Six wipes his nose. There’s blood stinking up his mouth and something else: hot and wet and bitter.

It’s crying. Not his. The baby’s crying.

Six feels the red from his face to his elbows, hot right down to his toes. “Hey,” he says, then softer: “Hey. Cut it out.” But Joe doesn’t cut it out, he just hugs himself down in his padded corner and cries without making one sound, cries like the sisters getting ready to throw another nephew, in the worst part where Six gets sent out for water so he can’t hear them stop pushing and make a sound that’s all the lost hope in the world.

Six scrubs at the blood on his right hand with the sheet and it don’t come off.

He goes running down the hall for Mama.

There’s fighting behind the door where Mama and Father make their billet. They always fight in low polite voices, more polite than anyone ever speaks in the clan farm where usually it’s yelling across whole rooms and floors. Six presses his ear to the old brass mailslot in the brown wood door, heart running up against the inside of his chest like it might run right out.
Please be done with it,
he thinks, the first time he’s thought
please
to his parents since Joe got himself a key at seven years old. Maybe when they’re done with it he can knock, pretend he don’t know nothing about it. Get one of them to make that soundless crying stop.

But “They never come back,” Mama’s saying, far and near and far and near. Six pushes up the mailslot, slow and careful hands, and she’s rocking on the long black couch that Father bought her for a bearing-gift after she had Marabel. Her Sunday dress is all wrinkled. Her face is puffed-up crying.

“They’ll raise him up right,” Father rumbles. He’s standing behind her, both hands on her shoulders, resting heavier than they should to hold her back straight. “There’s good education there. Book-smarts. He’ll learn things to help us all build back up.”

“How d’you know that’s what they do?” Mama asks, her voice going high and thin as the fingers she’s got clenched in her lap. “Maybe they kill them. Maybe they use them.
Nobody
comes back.
”

The blood smears down Six’s lip and drips onto his chin. He has never heard his Mama scared, not in his life.

“Talk sense,” says Father, the agribaron of the central district. The most respected man from the north stations to the lakeside where the sugar factory churns. “They’re learned. And they’re the only men in this district or the next who seem to care about—about
why
, about more than eating and shitting and dying.”

“Nobody comes back,” Mama repeats, and shakes off Father’s hands, paces back and forth across their soft-carpeted floor. “I’ve tried to let the boy have fun. I’ve tried to make his life here good—”

“It’s done.”

“He’s only a baby—”

“Martha—”

“I wish you’d never let them in,” Mama says, and slaps Father’s face so hard the silence echoes for a three-count after. And soft, polite and very very soft: “I wish I’d not given you enough children that you can spend them so very cheap.”

Father doesn’t move. He stands still as a pigeon scarecrow, hands straight at his sides and not one single feeling on his face.

Six backs up. He shuffles back on the carpet, eyes big as the bright blue sky.

The mailslot clangs, and the silence spreads out like a strapping.

Six runs.

He scrambles up and runs hard down the hallway, back to the billet and inside and locks the door fast behind him. “Pretend you’re sleeping,” he pants to Joe, and Joe, red-faced and still dripping baby snot, doesn’t say one word against him.

They lie together silent, eyes pressed shut and gulping down their breathing for five minutes, ten, until there’s no steps down the hallway and there isn’t gonna be. Six sits up, lets himself cough. He’s tacky with sweat.

“Is it safe?” Joe asks, curled up in the blankets, one eye open as if the other can keep the nightmares out.

“Yeah,” Six whispers, pats his little fist. Taking care of the baby. “C’mon. I’ll show you a special thing.”

The sixth floor is scary at night. Lucinda’s new beau hasn’t drawn down the power to the uncleared floors, and the emergency lights are long burned out, dead as dead for twenty-five years.

Six’s workshop runs on filched batteries, a beat-up old charger he hides under the laundry pile in their billet on the twentieth floor. He hits one of the old slap-lights and it clicks into glowing, casts shadows across the dusty floor. There’s no feeling like ghosts. Joe holds his hand tight, and it keeps the ghosts away.

“You got a garden,” he says, just as breathless in wonder as he was in fear, and Six feels something he hasn’t in a long time, not since Father let them all know about Joe and his destiny. He feels things going right.

“Yeah. It’s a secret,” he says, and brushes a curled-up leaf with his free right hand.

“What’d you make?” Joe whispers, hugging himself in outlines, in the dark.

“Mint plant,” Six says, and his head comes up a little, his eyes go bright with pride. “Strawberries. The little potatoes Mama didn’t want last year. Spinach.”

“The old seeds.”

“I saved them.”

Six and Joe sit on Six’s old emergency blanket and share out the crop on a beat-up kitchen plate. Their fingers poke each other on the way to strawberries and light-washed spinach. It washes the taste of blood away.

“Thanks,” Joe says sleepy when the harvest’s all done. “S’good.”

Joe’s not a little kid anymore. He’s not half as light as a chicken or a goat. But Six carries him up fourteen floors of stairway to their billet, mouth smeared with strawberries, fast asleep.

* * *

The alchemists’ train is the black train that comes down the tracks come midnight. Six has never seen it up close: by midnight every good kid and even the bad ones have locked the doors of their billets and are fast asleep, full knowing they’ve got a six a.m. wakeup.

The turnstile men don’t guard the station gates when the alchemists’ train comes in. They unlatch the metal bars that’re for strollers and wheelchairs and market-buggies, and everyone walks free to the platform, free out again until the sunlight spills sickly down the stairs and announces it Market time.

The boy who comes through the gate, hooded, face covered ’gainst public eyes is too big for a ten-year-old if you look hard, or look twice. His arms are too thick, his legs too thin and gangling.

He doesn’t say goodbye to his father, who stands at the stairway under his best Sunday hat, mouth a tight line under his bushy moustache.

But midnight’s so that nobody notices: the too-long cloak, the shaky step. The blond-haired brother smuggled down early evening to a broken-backed sixth floor garden, holding himself in outlines, in the dark, with the taste of secret strawberries on his tongue. Midnight’s the alchemists’ hour, and in their hands things go strange.

The wind rises from the tunnel, from the dark. The train comes in.

The midnight train is dark as stars. The midnight train’s painted up with planets, each car banded with the swoop of a heavenly body ringed or striped or pitted. It moves like a snake along the tracks every child in central’s seen so many times on Market days, cheering as the rumble gets loud and the Moving Market comes in.

The doors all open. Nobody cheers the midnight train.

At the staircase, somebody sobs.

The boy in the black rough cloak looks into the dark of the lead car. There’s no lights at midnight on the platform, in the train. He steps from dark to darker; he steps inside.

“Greetings,” say the alchemists, and their voices are sharp like devil weed, bad seed, breaking the rules. The alchemists in their black train, learned men, terror-men, are hard to see for a boy who grew up billeting in a place where it’s never full dark. They’re flashes of patched knees and sunless skin. They’re eyes that reflect metal and never close.

The train doors shut behind him with a hiss of dead men watching. The sobbing’s sliced clean from his ears with metal and rubber seal, and then the only sound’s one he hasn’t heard since he was littler: the train, whish-whisper, the moving of wheels on track.

It’s too much to close his eyes, hands up and ready to fight. But he counts three, counts the deepening of the shadow that’s tunnel-not-station before the boy lets down his cloak.

“I’m not the seventh son,” Six says, and his voice is all squeaky like a kid’s. “I’m bad news. Bad seed. You won’t have him,” he says, and waits to be struck down.

It won’t keep secret more than a day. They’ll open the billet door for breakfast and it’ll be the wrong baby boy lying curled up in the blankets, arm around his stuffy, ruined from Great Destiny by complicity with his bad boy, bad seed big brother. They’ll be so mad. They’ll be furious.

They’ll hug little Joe to their chests and cry happy for his keeping and teach him the garden and the chicken-feed times.

“You must love your brother very much,” the alchemists say, circled, leaning close and closer. Their train smells like paper and dry sweet. No, their breaths. Their breaths are hot and paper. They eat tales. They eat children.

“No,” Six chokes out, and lifts his chin up high even though deep inside he’s crying, crying right to his belly now that there’s no chance of scaring the baby. Pictures himself falling, falling. The tug of the wind. “I hate him.”

There’s a silence.

Then: “Good,” one of the alchemists laughs, crackling, crumple-paged. “I like bad sixth sons.”

His eyes are working again, in the dark; his eyes work enough to see the turn of a chin, the half-light of eyelids drooped low. “We didn’t agree—”

“I
like
bad sixth sons,” the alchemist repeats sharp as a papercut to the tongue, and breaks the hovering circle, steps in close.

His robes rustle like pigeon wings, like the wind going through the tall pasture, and his hands are clean-nailed but rough as any farmsman’s. The walls are covered, lined, padded with books and books and books. His eyes are dark. His eyes are dark as stars, and the smell of his hands and books and eyes is burnt cinnamon toast and the devil.

I’m a brave boy,
Six tells himself, breathing shallow so’s to not get the smoke and devil in.
I grew right. I saved things.
I didn’t hurt no one else.

He takes him by the hands. He leads him into the black, black car as the train pulls free through the tunnels to travel the nighttime tracks.

“Come along, bad seed,” he says, in a voice that echoes like a child’s tunnel scream, a voice that might be kind or hard or mocking. “There’s much to do before morning.”