The City of Mirrors (78 page)

She sensed, then saw, a light, a kind of filtered glowing, and in the next instant everything changed: how the air moved on her skin, the way sound behaved, her intuitive sense of the physical parameters around her. Noises expanded and leapt away; the air smelled different, less confined, with a biological tang.

“Leave her there, please.”

The voice—nonchalant, even a little bored—came from someplace ahead. The pressure on her wrists released; her face slammed into the floor. A hot, glowing ball ricocheted around the interior of her skull like an ember spat from a fire.

“
Gently,
for God’s sake.”

Consciousness ebbed, then, like a dark wave returning to shore, broke upon her again. She tasted blood in her mouth; she had bitten her tongue. The floor was cool against her cheek. The light, what was it? And the sound? A low-grade murmuring, not made by voices per se but by a volume of breathing bodies. She sensed the presence of faces. Faces and also hands, lurking in a fog. Her brain told her:
Look harder, Amy. Focus your eyes and look.

It wasn’t good. It wasn’t good at all.

She was surrounded by virals. The first layer was crouched around her at a distance of just a yard or two—jaws clicking, throats amphibiously bobbing, hooked fingers caressing the air with small, syncopated movements, as if tapping the keys of invisible pianos. This was bad, but not the worst of it. The room writhed and throbbed, a population of hundreds. They carpeted the walls. They gazed down from the balconies like spectators at a contest. They filled each nook and corner and perched atop every ledge. The space was squirming like a pit of snakes.

“That all went rather smoothly,” the voice drolly continued. “I’m a little bit amazed, actually. I was worried that their enthusiasm might get the better of them. They do that.”

She was still having difficulty bringing her mind and her body into alignment, to forge the proper chain of command. Everything seemed delayed and out of sync. The voice seemed to emanate from everywhere around her, as if the air were speaking. It flowed over and into her like slick oil, lodging with cloying, buttery sweetness at the back of her throat.

“Would it be too obvious to say how long I’ve waited to meet you? But I have. Since the day Jonas told me of your existence, I’ve wondered, When will we meet? When will my Amy come to me?”

“My Amy.” Why was the voice calling her that? She discovered the sky. No, not the sky: the ceiling, far above, and on it the image of the stars with gilded figures floating among them.

“Oh, you should have heard the man. How
guilty
he felt. How
sorry
he was. ‘Jesus, Tim, you should see her. She’s just a little kid. She doesn’t even have a proper last name. She’s just some girl from nowhere.’ ”

The backward stars, thought Amy. As if the heavens were being viewed from without, or were reflected in a mirror. She felt her thoughts attaching to this notion, and as it did, new ideas began to form. As if stumbling from a dream, her mind began to open to her circumstances; memories were rising to the surface. An image entered her mind: Peter, his body airborne, crashing through a plate-glass window.

A dark chuckle. “Not really funny, I suppose, when you put it in the context of a few billion corpses. Still, the whole thing was quite a performance. Jonas missed his true calling. He should have been an actor.”

Fanning, she thought.

The voice was Fanning.

And everything came slamming back.

“I waited so long, Amy.” A heavy sigh. “Always hoping that my Liz would be on the next train. Do you know what that’s like? But how could you. How could anyone?”

She struggled onto all fours. She was in the west end of the hall. To her right, the ticket windows, barred like cells in a jail; to her left, the shadowy recesses of train platforms. Shrouded windows, both behind her and to her right, pulsed with a febrile glow. Ahead, at a distance of perhaps a hundred feet, stood the kiosk, topped by its pearlescent clock. A man was standing there. An altogether unremarkable-looking man, wearing a dark suit. He was positioned in profile, back erect and chin tipped slightly upward, left hand tucked casually in the pocket of his suit coat, his attention aimed at the dark maws of the tunnels.

“How alone she must have felt at the end, how afraid. No words of comfort. Not the touch of a hand for company.”

Still he did not look at her. All around her, the virals trilled and stroked, flexed and snapped. She had the sense that they were kept at bay only by the thinnest of invisible barriers.

“ ‘I have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.’ That’s T. S. Eliot, in case you were wondering. An oldie but a goodie. When it came to existential exhaustion, the man was one smart cookie.”

Where was Peter? Had the virals killed him? What of Michael and Alicia? She thought: Water. She thought: Time. How much had passed? But the answer to this question was like an empty drawer in her brain. Moving just her eyes, she scanned for something to use as a weapon. But there was nothing, only the virals and the inverted heavens and her heart beating in her throat.

“Oh, I had my books, my thoughts. I had my memories. But those things only take a man so far.” Fanning paused, then said, with more directness, “Consider this place, Amy. Imagine it as it once was. Everyone hurrying, rushing here, rushing there. The appointments. The assignations. The dinners with friends. How gloriously alive it was. All our lives, the one thing we never seem to have enough of is time. Time to work. Time to eat. Time to sleep. Time to love and be loved before it’s time to die.” He shrugged. “But I digress. You came to kill me, wasn’t it?”

He turned to face her. His right hand, now revealed, held the sword.

“Just to clear the decks, let me say that I don’t hold it against you in the least.
Au contraire, mon amie.
That’s French, by the way. Liz always said it was the mark of a truly cultured person. I never had much of a knack for languages, but with a century to kill, you get around to trying new things. Any preference? Italian, Russian, German, Dutch, Greek? How about Latin? We could do this whole thing in Norwegian if you’d like.”

Close your mouth,
Amy’s brain commanded her.
Use the silence, because it’s all you have.

Fanning’s face soured. “Well, your choice. I was only trying to make a little small talk.” He gave a backhanded wave. “Let’s have a look at you.”

More hands upon her: a large, smooth male and a slightly smaller female, with a wispy diadem of white hair on her otherwise featureless skull. They seized her by the upper arms and whisked her forward, her feet skimming the tile, and dumped her unceremoniously to the floor.

“I said gently, for fucksake!”

Looming like a thundercloud, Fanning stood above her, his aura of merry confidence replaced by jaw-clenched rage.

“You.” He pointed the sword at the large male. “Get over here.”

A spark of hesitation in the creature’s eyes—or did she imagine this? The viral scuttled forward. It dropped to its knees at Fanning’s feet and bowed its head submissively, like a subdued dog.

Fanning raised the voice to the room. “Everyone, are you listening? Are you hearing my words, goddamnit? This woman is our guest! She is not a piece of luggage for you to toss around as you please! I expect you to treat her with respect!”

As he raised the sword, Amy covered her head. A crack, followed by a grinding sound and then the thump of something heavy hitting the floor. A wet stickiness splashed the side of her face and, with it, a rotten smell, as if a door had blown open onto a room of corpses.

“Oh, for the love of God.”

The viral was still on its knees, its headless torso folded forward to the floor. Dark, rhythmic spurts were convulsing from its severed neck, forming a glossy pool on the floor. Fanning was staring at the front of his pants with revulsion. His suit, Amy realized, was rotten and threadbare. It hung on his body with the unstructured looseness of rags.

“Look at this,” he moaned. “This is never going to come out. They’re like pets, the mess they make. And the stink. Just god-awful.”

It was absurd, all of it. What had she expected? Not this. Not this whirlwind of instantly changeable moods and thoughts. This man before her: there was something almost pathetic about him.

“Well, now,” he said, and smiled nonsensically. “Let’s get you to your feet, shall we?”

She was hauled upright. Fanning stepped forward; from his pocket he produced a handkerchief, flapped it open with a flourish, and dabbed the blood from her face. His eyes seemed both close and far away, peculiarly magnified, as if she were observing them through a telescope. On his cheeks and chin was a dusting of whitish beard; his teeth were gray, dead-looking. He hummed tunelessly as he went about this chore, then took a step back, lips pursed, brow furrowed, examining his handiwork with a slow nod.

“Much better.” He regarded her at uncomfortable length, then declared, “I have to say, there’s something very appealing about you. A certain innocence. Though I’m guessing there’s more there than meets the eye.”

“Where’s Peter?”

His eyes widened. “She speaks! I was beginning to wonder.” Then, dismissively: “Not to worry about your friend. Delayed in traffic, I expect. As for me, I’m glad the two of us can have this chance to talk amongst ourselves. I hope this doesn’t seem too forward, but I feel a certain kinship with you, Amy. Our journeys are not so very different when you think about it. But first: where, pray tell, is my friend Alicia? This specimen of overgrown table cutlery tells me she’s around here someplace.”

Amy didn’t answer.

“Nothing to share on the subject? Have it your way. Do you know what you are, Amy? I’ve given it a lot of thought.”

Let him talk, she told herself. Time was what she needed. Let him use the minutes.

“You’re … an apology.”

Fanning said nothing further. The virals held her fast. He stepped away toward the train tunnels, where he resumed his original position, gazing forlornly into the blackness.

“For a long time, I wanted to kill you. Well, perhaps not ‘wanted.’ You can’t help being what you are, any more than I can. It wasn’t anything personal. You were merely a symbol, a stand-in for the thing I hated most.” He turned the sword in his hand, studying the blade. “Imagine it, Amy. Imagine the folly of the man. He actually
believed
he could make everything all right, that he could atone for his crimes. But he couldn’t. Not after what he did to Liz. To me, to you.” He looked up. “She was nothing to me, the other one. Just some woman in a bar, looking for a night of fun, a bit of company in her lonely little life. I regret that intensely.”

Amy waited.

“I thought I could forget about it. But that was the night. I see that now. It was the night the truth of the world opened to me. It wasn’t the woman that did it. No, it was the child. The little girl in the crib. Do you know that I can still smell her, Amy? That sweet soft odor that all babies have. It’s practically holy. Her little fingers and toes, the smoothness of her skin. Her whole life was in her eyes. All of us begin that way. You, me, everyone. Full of love, full of hope. I could see it: she trusted me. Her mother lay dead on the kitchen floor, but here was this man, come to answer her cries. Would I give her a bottle? Change her diaper? Perhaps I would pick her up, take her on my lap and read her a story. She had no idea what I’d done, what I
was.
I felt so sorry for her. But that wasn’t the reason. I felt sorry because she’d had to be born in the first place. I should have killed her right then. It would have been a mercy.”

A silence caught and held. Then:

“I see from your expression that I appall you. Believe me, I appall myself sometimes. But the truth is the truth. There’s no one watching over us. That’s the cold heart of it, the grand delusion. Or if there is, he’s the cruelest kind of bastard, letting us believe he cares. I’m nothing, compared to him. What kind of God would allow her mother to die like that? What God would let Liz be all alone at the end, not the touch of a hand or a single word of kindness to help her leave her life? I’ll tell you what kind, Amy. The same one who made me.” He turned toward her again. “Your friends on the boat will be back, you know. Don’t be surprised—I know all about it. I practically watched them sail away from the pier. Oh, maybe not soon. But eventually. Their curiosity will get the better of them. It’s simple human nature. All of this will be dust by then, but here I’ll be, waiting.”

Do it, Alicia,
she thought.
Do it, Michael. Do it now.

“What do I want, Amy? The answer is quite simple: I want to save you. More than that. I want to teach you. To make you see the truth.” His expression darkened. “Hold her tightly, please.”

The clock had run down. Michael glanced at Alicia. “Ready?”

She nodded.

“You might want to cover your ears.”

He shoved down the plunger.

“What the hell, Circuit?”

He drew up the bar and tried again. Nothing. He pulled the positive wire, touched it lightly to the contact, and pressed the plunger a third time. A spark leapt.

He had current; the problem was at the other end.

“Stay here.”

He unscrewed the second wire, grabbed the plunger box and lantern, and tore down the stairs.

The strength of the virals’ grip increased with a hot jab. The pain was eye-watering; bits of confettied light danced in her vision.

“Bring him in, please.”

Peter.

Two virals dragged him from the direction of the tunnels. His body hung floppily, facedown, the tips of his boots skimming the floor.

“It’s the only way, Amy. I wish there were another, but there simply isn’t.”

Amy could barely think. The slightest movement ignited shrieks of agony. It felt as if the bones of her upper arms were about to shatter under the pressure of the virals’ hands, to crumble into dust.

“Ah, here we are.”

The virals halted, still holding Peter by the shoulders. Blood was dripping from his hair, flowing down the creases of his face. Fanning stepped toward him, sword extended. Amy’s breath stopped in her throat. He positioned the flat of the blade beneath Peter’s chin and, with cruel slowness, tilted his face upward.