fiction

Years ago, Yuki lost her children to winter. Grief took her wandering alone in the snow. Miles passed beneath her and it was a long time before she realised she might die out in the silent hills. One night, starvation stripping her of beauty, Yuki came to find the cooling leg of a man half-concealed between the drifts. Yuki had never eaten the flesh of men, but hunger makes many things easy. Eventually the corpse had been light enough to drag into shelter. Eventually Yuki had eaten his heart, and crawled inside his husk.

Early that spring, Kaito found Yuki living in a cave. Her tongue was blue and she would not speak. Her eyes were gold and her face beautiful. Her roughly braided hair always shone like fire, even though she never lost the hint of frost from her skin. Yuki walked back to Kaito's village. No-one ever found him. That summer, after she had been taken in and clothed, something snuck into the pens and tore the chickens apart. Yuki stayed silent and licked her fingers clean. That autumn, when the cherry blossoms fell like snow, four of the youngest men disappeared among the trees, one after the next. No-one would ever see Yuki eat anything but fruit and berries.

She never settled and never spoke a word. Sometimes, when a woman took her in out of pity, she would be caught on her haunches in a doorway, steaming amber from between the legs. When a man took her in for her beauty, she would spend all day learning from others, how to wear her two braids perfectly, which kimono were best. Yet she always screamed when men entered her. By the next year Yuki took to wandering the hills much of the time. Travelers, when travelers survived the road, would tell of dancing fire out in the same hills, dreams of snow amid summer, falling blossom amid winter, of bones found half-buried, gnawed clean. Some would tell of an eerie wail echoing between the pines, but none of the travelers that told tales had followed it.

This is the story of how Robert stopped drinking. It's only a short story. Until he stopped drinking Robert lived in Las Vegas. Now he travels a bit more and mostly to old places. Once upon a time, because this is the kind of story that starts that way, he was a guard in a casino, and sometimes a victim of it too. There's not an awful lot else to do in Vegas except hookers and drinking. Once upon a time, once among many a time, Robert was drunk, a quiet drunk, stumbling from one row of glassy eyed gamblers to the next into the small hours of the morning. Which is how he met the Sphinx.

Sometimes, when drunk, it's best to lean up against something solid until the orbit of the earth levels out a little. Better still is leaning your head against something cool, metal maybe, glass, or stone. One of Robert's many secrets is that the statue in the foyer of The Cleopatra is just about the perfect temperature at around 2am. Another secret is that there are other qualities of that leonine beast, out of place, ragged, and oddly majestic, that make it occasionally less than comforting.

"The first age of man, writ anew."

Gravelly tones, so low as to be more vibration than actual sound, quiet enough to be intimate, each syllable echoing out dusty and ancient where every other time the limestone had been silent. Robert, frozen in place from sheer surprise.

"Pathetic."

The drinking had affected him badly before, but never with this. He had kept his eyes firmly closed, as if to make it all just an alchohol dream. Even now though, resting on the shore of an Aegean isle, he remembers the dense material rippling under his brow like cool muscle.

"I have seen civilisations rise and crumble, and ever it was thus. A crawl in the dirt, a short jerk of the spine, and a hope that your ills will purge with your dinner."

Edward has the name of the age, and of the King. Which is a waste, really. History will leave him utterly forgotten. Edward is a clerk in almost every regard. Accidents of birth and education have given him a knack for literacy but no real excess of intellect. Edward has only one uncommon advantage on his side. Of a morning, when he looks at himself in the mirror, constellations are picked out across his pale skin. Not dock-side tattoo trophies but a natural coincidence of moles and marks. They make him feel small, but so does everything else in Edward's life. What they give him, that nothing else provides, is a certain contentment at the end of the day. Before sleep Edward can look across his body and know that it is perfectly alright to be inconsequential. He knows deep within himself that no matter how far the King, his namesake, is elevated above him, they are both barely dust on any scale that matters.

When he dreams, he stands in front of himself and orates equations and balances as if from a ledger, 'To be important is to burn with the mass of light. To matter is to fill the sky with glory. How could God value a man, when the stars exist?'.

What Edward does not understand is that the stars have stories only as gifts. He is a quiet heretic. That he exists, and has meaning, is a glory as great as the rising sun.

I keep on having a dream. It goes like this: I am running through the cities I have lived in, Compton Street to Mount Royal, to Haight. They lock onto each other so that I rush from one street to the next, perilious in heels. I burst into shops of all sizes, search through them in a hurried daze, and leave. The longer the dream goes on, the more frenzied I become and the less sure I am of where I should be looking. It is not Christmas, everyone else is calm and smiling. The sun is shining even as the day gets old. It is not for a last minute birthday. There is something I need, not a gift. There is a hole beneath my shirt where my ribs stop short. Somewhere, there is my heart sitting on a shelf. I imagine it perfect, moist, the colour of raspberries. A little tag is attached by a thread. My hair keeps getting in my eyes. The cities keep on coming: Queen Street, Montana Avenue, Gentleman's Walk.

I hope that I have enough to pay for it.

And I wake up, and shower, and go to work.

Drunk, you've always found it easier to let your feet guide you home. To let your mind wander as your feet stay true to course. A restful night's slumber beckons, and around its edges, thoughts without consequence mill and mingle in disarray. In that state it's easy to get misplaced, to switch back and forth from one street to its parallel, edging closer and closer to the centre of an urge to sleep. There is a midnight panic, a wondering fear that keeps its eye on dark alleys and the breeze, but the shadow of that littlest death pulls on.

As you walk up the path, filaments catch on your fingertips, whisper against your face, but they're almost absent amongst the alchohol haze. Unless you've heard of the House of Spiders you could almost imagine them hair from your own head, the wind ruffling the fuzz on your forearms. Open the door, though, and you are left without doubt. This close you can feel web split before you, spun across the threshold. The door will sigh at your touch, swing open unlocked, and the house is there for you to see. Just a normal house, but not yours, unlit. Just another in a row of nameless Petrichor houses, all just the same. Perhaps the carpet here glistens more than usual. It's possible it crunches underfoot. A hundred thousand discarded shells and wings of prey. The sound of it makes your head itch. But maybe that's the young landing on the breeze. Each step flutters the hair on the back of your neck, fans a fear crisscrossed with silk. Take another step, take two. Your skin crawls with the dry stink. Crawling from the ankles up, the littlest death flowers into chitin and fangs, and pulls on.

I have it in my hands, but I don't understand it. Mirah peers over my shoulder, grins in my periphery, and pokes at it. The amber cloud reacts to the gravity of her digit instantly, particles drifting into a new configuration of spin. As she removes her finger, the light spirals back into something like its original shape, spitting out loops of fire and tiny shrapnel as it goes.

"Where did you find it?"

I'm motionless with awe, listening to a low rumbling growl and very much aware of the plume that keeps it afloat. I'm afraid that I'll drop it. I'm afraid that it will burn through my hands.

"The Monks. The Physic Monks."

She says this carelessly, idly, as if the fact is not important, staring at the thing in front of me all the while.

"The Physic Monks? The same Monks who split atoms for ritual? The same Monks who keep a pet black-hole on the Mountain? The same Monks who will murder us if they know we have...whatever... it is?"

"In the Mountain, and they call it a tamed Singularity."

Mirah is suddenly an expert on these things, on the monks who worship Shiva and live on the Mountain. All the rest of us know is that they have turned creation and destruction into idols, that they make bombs too small to see, and then wipe them away. Somewhere in their temple is a wheel, a torus, which pulls strange matter into the world. Suddenly the thing in my hands is sinister. Suddenly it has the capacity to not just burn me, but unmake me, as if I never was. Fear and wonder orbit its shrouded centre amid a multitude of glowing embers.

"Think of it as a glorified lock-pick." She says, "Think of it as a key. That's what it's for."

I've never been able to leave well enough alone. I always ask the inevitable question.

"But, what is it?"

I am Alessandro Cagliostro. I am an actor, in a play, performing the role of Cagliostro. During this play, I select members of the audience to come on stage, and then place them in small open coffins, lined with silk. Some of my victims are nervous, and some of them are clearly very scared, but none of them try to resist in any way. I then cover these coffins with silk, and disappear from the play, to discretely appear in the front row of seats, watching out the rest of the show. It is about Cagliostro, and suggests unspoken volumes about an unrecorded necromantic ability, but he is outside the spectacle. When the play is finished, and the hall is almost empty, a hall which suggests that this play is in a school or maybe college, someone from the audience comes up and sits behind me. They are quite convinced that I really am Cagliostro, and no matter what I say, I cannot outright deny the accusation. Everything that comes out of my mouth seems to insinuate that maybe I am him, and slowly I realise that my theatrical beard is not a prop. Slowly I realise that I actually am Alessandro Cagliostro.

and mesh. Nothing here is protected, there are no display cases, no pins to hold tattered wings in place. The shelves are sturdy but the items they hold are jumbled in disarray, spacing unequal and sequence without meaning. There is a thread here, but it is temporal. Every item preceeds the next. A snowglobe, a string of tinsel, a crimson ribbon, the feel of sheepskin, the warmth of open fire, the smell of orchids, the taste of sugar, an echo of an eyelid closing, the whisper of skin, a vial of sweat, a gasp, a perfect arch, comfort, a russian cigarette, an empty bottle, and the scent of brandy.

All of this stored as memory, as sentiment.

All of this one after another, for years, and years, and years, and each object tarnished with carelessness, dusty in places. Some abraided, some sandblasted, some crushed into tiny glimmering pieces, but nothing destroyed. Gossamer tendrils run over parts of the collection on occasion, and where they come on broken edges they bleed salt water and writhe. With time all edges are blunted, and the further into the dark we reach, lamplight failing and guttering, the more shallow each wound becomes. Some small artifacts are worn with love, and each pit and crease receives a stroke on passing. Miniscule territories becoming darkened, but more complex with the passage of time.

This is how, in quiet moments and places alone, we survive the world.

Dalgriatha pauses from his meal to look up at the palid sky, claws still wrapped around the mendicant’s liver. Hand, wrist deep in the man’s carcass. There is an ache at the base of his rack that warns of coming snow. Crouched still, the collection of horns and antlers atop his skull almost conceals the giant as a hunkering rock and wind-blasted sapling. His light blue complexion blends in amongst the ice and stone as that of his brothers matches the hue of evergreen or earth. The Ogre removes his grasp from the human friar, five fingers on one hand, seven on the other, and unfolds to scent the breeze. Dalgriatha towers, tattoos and piercings gleaming. Behind him, Fathulain, a grimacing Fawn, is having his hide carved with copper and splintering glass in similar spirals to mark his first kill. There is a yellow taint to the air that heralds a storm. Balmalor’s odd numbered eyes weep in the wind. The trees shudder and whisper their confirmation. Their retinue of crows has disappeared.

Grasping his bronzed spear from the corpse’s thigh, Dalgriatha issues a quiet oath to his kin without turning. A last whorl is cut, wounds are sucked dry, and Fathulain, Nemoran, Balmalor, and Gwyngolad reach for their swords, clubs, and victims. The distant front will conceal their kill, but it will also make travelling hard. The hunting party gathers and disappears into the pine. As they run across cliff edge and frigid stream each Walks The Skin, just a little, to outpace the blizzard howling behind them.

The halls move in on him like sharks, crowding, coming in from obscure angles. The whole house is a predator. Up on the moor, it swallows what it can, and spits out the broken remains. The villagers find the victims, sometimes, before they die of exposure. Knocked down by the wind and cradled by heather.

The doors opened up before him, locked behind, and now there are long spars of woodwork beneath his nails. He can feel it. The terror that pours into him and pushes everything else aside, out into the clouds of dust that creep like fog. All the light has turned sepia in reflection from woodwork and brass. All he can smell is rot, and murk, and the corpses of long dead flies. He was scared that his heart would fail, or that he would starve, or maybe drop from exhaustion, but now he realises that he won't be here that long. The house has already taken his name and made it just another echo.

Up on the moor, the heather sings to itself, and waits.