Gears of the City (5 page)

Outside the door was a narrow red-brick corridor, and a staircase. Arjun ran; after a moment the men behind him picked up their dropped spears and followed him, shouting at him to
stop, you bastard, stop.

At the top of the stairs was a door. Beyond that was a huge echoing room, cathedral ceilinged. High wide windows let in shafts of moonlight. The room was full of looming shapes, under white funeral cloths. In front of him as he ran Arjun saw a marble arm gesturing out from under one of the cloths, holding a wreath. There on his left was the exposed hind end of a horse, sculpted in brass. The men behind him shouted and stamped and echoed in the emptiness.

Arjun could hear the Beast’s roaring, too, echoing all through the empty Museum.

At the far end of the room were huge double doors of brass and dark wood. They were open just a crack. Over the door’s arch was a marble frieze. Horses and men and women and coiling snakes and men with the hindquarters of goats and bulls fought—mated?—on the frieze, all in white marble. Someone had methodically chipped away each and every head. A golden plaque caught Arjun’s eye and a fragment of its text stuck in his mind:
raised up from Anterior Pumping Station Seven of the Holcroft Municipal Trust sewer system beneath Fosdyke in the Year …
but he read no further; he slipped through the crack in the door and out onto the wide stone steps of the Fosdyke Museum. He half fell, half ran down them.

I
t was late evening and there was some kind of shabby market in the square outside the Museum. It was clearly winding down; stalls were being dismantled or shuttered, their cheap goods placed on wooden carts or the bent backs of old women. Rank grasses throve in the concrete’s cracks. Sullen-looking teenagers loped idly among the stalls and sized Arjun up for possible violence. Men in grey flannels and grey caps—every one of them in grey, slumping home or standing in little clumps smoking silently—glanced at Arjun as he staggered past and then ignored him, hunching their shoulders, hands in pockets. A pale woman with a single thick black eyebrow who was packing away a stall with three big metal tureens of reeking fish soup stared at him with nervous distaste: he was shirtless and bloody and strange.

After all the Beast’s hysterical talk, he had expected something apocalyptic, awful, the wasteland, the end of days! Not
this
— though with the monster’s voice still echoing in his ears, even that ordinary market scene had something sinister about it, something furtive, unhappy, hungry, frightened … And then he stumbled and looked up, and saw that behind the pale woman—behind her soup stall, and behind the buildings behind that, an ugly industrial sprawl of tenement windows and fire escapes and water towers—and behind the fat-throated factory chimneys venting smoke and sooty flames—and behind the shallow looming domes of gasometers— and for a vertiginous moment it seemed even behind the dull yellow eye of the moon—behind everything was the vast darkness of the Mountain. Streetlights and firelight crawled its lower slopes, like a
bright spill of jewels and treasures, like signs, like bright insistent advertisements for something incomprehensible; but the peak, the peak was so dark. The Mountain was so
close
, here. Elsewhere, everywhere, it was a remote troubling shadow on the horizon; here it
loomed.
How did these people not go mad?

Arjun ducked through the stalls, under their canvases, and into an alley, and another alley, and another. The Beast’s litany of street names rang in his head, floated up at him off street signs, until he wasn’t sure of the difference between the inside and outside of his mind. He ran where his feet took him, until he could no longer hear the men from the Museum stamping after him and shouting after him, and at that point he collapsed against a damp concrete wall and with relief he blacked out again.

Which Door?-Three Sisters-Maps,
Music-Ghosts-The Bosses’ Men

A
dog woke him. The mangy thing—naked spine and fly-thin legs, long whining muzzle—was sniffing and licking at the bloody rags on his hand. Arjun kicked it away. It retreated to the end of the alley, where its eyes shone in darkness.

Darkness. It was night, still; he had not slept long.

What light there was in the alley came mostly from that yellow moon—
sulphur
yellow. So this was a part of the city with smog-pumping industries—that was a thing to know. A little light spilled from the windows of some kind of upper-story meeting hall, where someone shouted angrily and some massed unanimous others stamped their feet.

A large, ugly bird settled with a clang on the fire escape above Arjun’s head. It darted its yellow eyes, shifted its claws on the rails, and emitted a loud noise like breaking wind. There was something shiny in its claws.

“Fak yoff,” it sang. “Faaaaak off. Fakoff.”

It took off into the night on heavy thumping wings.

Arjun recalled vaguely that he was not unfamiliar with fever and madness and hallucination. That was something worth knowing about himself.

The alley stank of animals, coal dust, piss, rot.

His whole arm was numb.

He needed help.

He stood, shakily. There were five, six,
seven
unmarked doors in
the alley’s brick walls. Some of them were painted in peeling red, others in peeling green; all were rusty underneath. Rubbish and slops and ordure were heaped beside each one. He staggered to the closest door and hammered on it with his unwounded hand.

There was no answer and finally Arjun gave up and moved onto the next. When he rested his head against it he heard faint music, as if from a great distance. When he banged on it the music came to an abrupt halt.

The reeking alley wind caught the echo of the shouting in the meeting hall. Something about work and clean living; about enemies and spies; about the Mountain.

A muffled voice from behind the door shouted
go away, leave
—a woman’s voice?—
leave us alone.
He kept hammering.

When the door suddenly opened Arjun nearly fell forward into the muzzle of the shotgun the woman inside was holding. He sort of slumped sideways in the doorway.

She had very green and troubled eyes.

T
ucking the shotgun under her other arm, she helped Arjun stand, and led him through the door and into the room beyond. Arjun hit his head on a low shelf and she murmured an automatic apology; he stumbled over a pile of leather-bound books on the floor and she did it again. She directed him with some firmness to a musty armchair in the corner. She sat across from him with the shotgun ready to hand.

The room was half lit with candles and hazy with dust. Every inch of space was lined with books and scrolls. His first thought was that it was a scholar’s library; his second—having taken account of the little signs and tags on every shelf, and the big brass cash register on the table beside him—was that it was a bookshop.

A pair of yellow feline eyes regarded him distrustfully from under a low shelf.

The woman was quite young, and quite small, which made Arjun realize that he himself was quite small, and slight.

The gun in her lap was absurdly too large for her. She balanced it on her knees. Her dark hair was in ringlets that struck Arjun—he had no idea why—as old-fashioned.

She asked him what he wanted, and he laughed, because the
answer was so obvious, or so impossible, depending on how one approached the question. He held up his gory hand to show her his most immediate and practical concern.

She leaned a little closer to see. She gasped
oh dear.
Her hand rose to her mouth—she wore a number of plain silver rings—and the gun slipped off her lap and hit the floor with a significant thud. It did not go off. The woman scrabbled on the floor for it, and hefted it again into her lap. Arjun had not moved; could not have moved had he wanted to. She flushed a little and put the gun aside.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought you might be … Never mind. You know. What machine, then?”

“I’m sorry?”

“What machine was it? I suppose it doesn’t matter.”

“Please,” he said. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean your accident. Where did you work?”

“Oh. I don’t know. No machine. It was a bite.”

“A
bitei”

“Yes,” he said. “An animal. Please, do you have bandages or ointments? Its bite may be venomous. Or infected. I will try to pay you for them.”

“An animal? A dog?”

“No. I don’t know.” Arjun held his bad hand stiff and throbbing against his chest, and rummaged in his pockets with his good hand. He removed a fold of green and blue notes, clipped together with a gold pin, and some coins of various sizes and shapes with a mess of heads and weapons and birds and animals and flags and numbers stamped on them. He held them out to her. Her green eyes flicked to them for only a second, and she shrugged.

“I don’t know what all that is. Is it money? It’s not money from around here. It’ll only get you into trouble. The pin’s nice. If you have a pin like that you don’t work in the factories. Unless you stole it, I suppose.”

“I do not think I am a thief. Please. My name is Arjun. I do not know where I am. If I have no money that’s good here I can work.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I know what you are. I know where you came from. This close to the Mountain? You’re not the first ghost to come wandering.” She came over and held his wrist. He closed his eyes in agony as she pulled at his makeshift bandages. “Poor thing,” she said. “Poor lonely thing.” It felt as though she was crushing his
hand in a vise; he assumed she was only tightening the cloth. He did not cry out. He recalled that he had a gift for
silence.

She carefully lowered the injured limb and rested it in his lap. He couldn’t bear to look at it. Instead Arjun watched her walk across the room and tug with both her hands at a long thin rope that hung down the wall from a hole in the ceiling. Outside in the street a quiet bell sounded. The woman went and waited by the street-front door. She bit at her thumbnail and looked out through bottle-glass windows into the night.

A
rjun’s eyes were closed when the door opened, and cold air blew in—he’d not realized how warm the shop was until the cold air woke him. He’d been dreaming of a dark river, of being pursued …

He tried to sit up and a woman gently pushed him down again. She leaned close over him and looked into his eyes as if inspecting them for hidden fractures.

Arjun studied her, too. It was—was it?—a different woman. The same green eyes, the same olive skin, the same dark hair—but this woman wore her hair longer and tied back, and was thicker set. Where the woman he’d first met had been thin, slight, nervous, this woman was fleshy, and solid, and her two heavy breasts rose in front of his face as she stood; and then Arjun saw that the woman he’d first met was hovering a few feet away, chewing again on her thumbnail. The first woman wore a simple black skirt and shirt, and jewelry; the newcomer wore brown, and her hands were plain. Were they sisters?

It was very important to not become confused among persons and reflections and echoes, Arjun recalled.

The newcomer said, “I’m Marta. Marta Low.”

The first woman chimed in, “I’m Ruth. Ruth Low. I should have said. Sorry. This is my shop.”

“All right, Ruth,” Marta said. “I’m here now. I’ll take care of him. Go on, put the kettle on. Take this and crush it up. It’s all right, Ruth.” Marta squatted in front of Arjun again. “So who are you, then?”

“My name is Arjun, Marta.”

“You’re not from around here.”

“No. Please.”

“You were attacked.”

“I think so,” he said. “It seems unlikely now.”

“Anyone chasing you? Don’t get strange. I mean the police. I mean the Know-Nothings. I mean bosses’ men.
Real
things, real
people.
Anyone like that?”

“There
were
some men. I was asleep in the alley outside for a long time and if they did not find me then, then I think they are not chasing me anymore.”

“Did you give them cause?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you say anything to them? Anything strange, anything mad? Any of that I-Am-Come-Down-from-the-Mountain-to-Tell-You stuff?”

“I said nothing. I found myself in a dark room and I ran away.”

“Are you from the War?”

“What War?”

“I don’t know. A lot of you say that. I don’t know what War you mean. Where are you from?”

“I do not know.”

“What was it like?”

“I do not recall.”

“Did you find what you were looking for?”

“I do not recall.”

“Poor ghost. Thanks, Ruth, there’s a love.”

Marta took a clay mug from Ruth’s hands. The black liquid in it smelled of aniseed, swirled thickly with broken leaves, gave off heavy fumes—she lifted it to Arjun’s mouth, and he let her, passively, thinking
sometimes I am passive, then
—fumes that numbed his head and darkened his vision.

A
rjun woke in the darkness of an attic full of moonlit clutter, under sagging rafters. He sat up simply to determine that he was not bound down. The experiment was a success; he lay back again, somewhat relieved.