The Weird Part 131

'Not very.'

'Really? Why not?'

He stiffened. If she'd been there, would Rebecca have realized the mansion had become a deathtrap? Would she have smelled the blood, tasted the fear? He served as her eyes, but would he deprive her anything by not describing its horrors in every detail?

'Well...' he began. He shut his eyes. The sick gaze of the solicitor flickering over the scene of his own death. Even as he held Rebecca, he could feel a distance opening up between them.

'You don't need to shut your eyes to see,' she said, pulling out of his embrace.

'How did you know?' He knew what she would say.

'I heard you close them.' She smiled with grim satisfaction.

'It was sad,' he said, sitting down at the kitchen table. 'Nothing terrible. Just sad. The wife had lost her husband and had to sell the estate. She had a boy with her who kept holding on to a little suitcase.' The remnants of the solicitor floating to the ground, curling up like confetti. The boy's stare fluttering between him and the cage. 'I felt sorry for them. They had some nice heirlooms, but most of it was already promised to Slattery and Ungdom. I didn't get much. They had a nice rug from Morrow, from before the Silence. Nice detail of Morrow cavalry coming to our rescue. I would have liked to have bought it.'

She carefully slid the eggs and bacon onto a plate and brought it to the table.

'Thank you,' he said. She had burned the bacon. The eggs were too dry. He never mentioned it. She needed these little sleights of hand, these illusions of illumination. It was edible.

'Mrs. Bloodgood took me down to the Morhaim Museum yesterday,' she said. 'Many of their artifacts are on open display. The textures were amazing. And the flower vendor visited, as you may have guessed.'

Rebecca's father, Paul, was the curator for a small museum in her home town of Stockton. Her father liked to joke that Hoegbotton was just the temporary caretaker for items that would eventually find their way to him, while Hoegbotton had always thought museums h.o.a.rded that which should be available on the open market. Rebecca had been her father's a.s.sistant until the disease stole her sight. Now Hoegbotton sometimes took her down to his store to help him sort and catalog new acquisitions.

'I did notice the flowers,' he said. 'I'm glad the museum was worth it.'

For some reason, his hand shook as he ate his eggs. He put his fork down.

'Isn't it good?' she asked.

'It's very good,' he said. 'I just need water.'

He got up and walked to the sink. The faucet had been put in five weeks ago, after a two-year wait. Before, they had gotten jugs of water from a well down in the valley. He watched with satisfaction as the faucet spluttered and his gla.s.s gradually filled up.

'It's a nice bird or whatever,' she said from behind him.

'Bird.' The gla.s.s clinked against the edge of the sink as he momentarily lost his grip.

'Or lizard. Or whatever it is. What is it?'

He turned, leaned against the sink. 'What are you talking about?'

'That cage you brought home with you.'

A vague fear crept up his spine. Was she joking? 'There's nothing in the cage. It's empty.'

Rebecca laughed, a pleasant, liquid sound. 'That's funny, because your empty cage was rattling earlier. At first, it scared me. Something was moving around in there. I couldn't tell if it was a bird or a lizard or I would have reached through the bars and touched it.'

'But you didn't.'

'No.'

'There's nothing in the cage.'

Her face underwent a subtle change and he knew she thought he doubted her on something at which she was expert: the interpretation of sound.

He couldn't stay quiet for long. She couldn't read his face without touching it, but he suspected she knew the difference between types of silence.

He laughed. 'I'm joking. It's a lizard but it bites. So you were wise not to touch it.'

Suspicion tightened her features. Then she relaxed and smiled at him. She reached out, felt for his plate with her left hand, and stole a piece of his bacon. 'I knew it was a lizard!'

He longed to go into the living room where the cage stood atop the table. But he couldn't, not just yet.

'It's quiet in here,' he said softly, already expecting the reply.

'No it's not. It's not quiet at all. It's loud.'

The left corner of his mouth curled up as he replied by rote: 'What do you hear?'

Her smile widened. 'Well, first, there's your voice, my love a nice, deep baritone. Then there's Hobson downstairs, playing a phonograph as low as he can to avoid disturbing the Potaks, who are at this moment in an argument about something so petty I will not give you the details, while to the side, just below them' her eyes narrowed 'I believe the Smythes are also making bacon. Above us, old man Clox is pacing and pacing with his cane, muttering about money. On his balcony, there's a sparrow chirping, which makes me realize now that the animal in your cage must be a lizard, because it sounds like something clicking and clucking, not chirping unless you've got a chicken in there?'

'No, no it's a lizard.' Now he had, for a second time, admitted aloud that something might indeed be in the cage.

'What kind of lizard?'

'It's a Saphant Fire Lizard from the Southern Isles,' he said. 'It only ever grows in cages, which it makes itself by chewing up dirt, changing it into metal, and regurgitating it. It can only eat animals that can't see it.'

She laughed in appreciation and got up and hugged him. The feel of her, the smell of her hair, made him forget his fear. 'It's a good story, but I don't believe you. I do know this, though you are going to be late to work.'

Once on the ground floor, where he did not think it would make a difference if Rebecca heard, Hoegbotton set down the cage. The awkwardness of carrying it, uneven and swaying, down the spiral staircase had unnerved him further. He was sweating under his rain coat. His breath came hard and fast. The musty quality of the lobby, the traces of tiny rust mushrooms that had spread along the floor like mouse tracks, the mottled green-orange mold on the windows in the front door, did not put him at ease.

Someone had left a worn umbrella leaning against the front door. He grabbed it and turned back to stare at the cage. Was this the moment that Ungdom and Slattery's ill-wishes caught up with him? He drove the umbrella tip between the bars. The cover gave a little, creasing, and then regained its former shape as he withdrew the umbrella.

Nothing came leaping out at him.

He tried again. No response.

'Is something in there?' he asked. The cage did not reply.

Umbrella held like a sword in front of him, Hoegbotton shoved the cover aside and leapt back.

The cage was still empty. The perch swung back and forth madly from the violence with which he had pulled aside the cover. The woman had said, 'The cage was always open.' The boy had said, 'We never had a cage.' The solicitor had never offered an opinion. The swinging perch, the emptiness of the cage, depressed him. He could not say why.

He drew the cover back across the cage, felt someone's gaze at his back, and whirled around to find their landlady, the emaciated Mrs. Willis, glaring at him from the stairway. He had a sudden vision of how strange he must look to her.

Mrs. Willis said, in a clipped tone that admitted no humor, 'I don't know exactly what you're doing, but whatever you're doing I don't believe Miss Constance from the third floor would like that you are doing it with her umbrella.'

'Robert Hoegbotton & Sons: Quality Importers of Fine New & Used Items From Home & Abroad' was situated on Alb.u.muth Boulevard, halfway between the docks and the residential sections that descended into a valley ever in danger of flooding. It took up the first floor of a solid two-story wooden building owned by a monk in the Religious Quarter. The sign exhibited optimism; there were no sons. Not yet. The time was not right, the situation too uncertain, no matter what Rebecca might say. Always in the back of his mind, spurring him on: his brother Richard's threat to swoop down with the rest of the Hoegbotton clan to save the family name should he fail. But fail at what? The missives Richard sent from Morrow every few months were masterpieces of vague and rambling aggression, to which he rarely replied.

The display window, protected from the rain by an awning, held a battered mauve couch, an opulent, gold-leaf-covered chair (nicked by Hoegbotton, along with several other treasures, during the panicked withdrawal of the Kalif's troops), a phonograph, a large red vase, an undistinguished-looking saddle, and Alan Bristlewing, his a.s.sistant.

Bristlewing knelt inside the display, carefully placing records in the stand beside the phonograph. He had already wiped the outside of the window clean of fungi that had acc.u.mulated the night before. A sour smell emanated from these remnants, but the rain would wash it all away in an hour or two.

Hoegbotton plunged on through the open door, ignoring Bristlewing's wave and banging the cage against the frame despite his best efforts. A few b.u.t.ton-shaped mushrooms, a fiery red, fell to the floor.

Bristlewing framed by the window display was a scruffy, short, animated man with a perpetual laconic grin, outfitted with some antiques of his own, courtesy of a sidewalk dentist. He smelled of cigar smoke and often disappeared for days on end. Rumors of debaucheries with prost.i.tutes and week-long fishing trips down the River Moth buzzed around Bristlewing without settling on him. Hoegbotton could not afford to hire more dependable help.

'Morning,' Bristlewing said, on one knee looking up at him.

'Good morning,' Hoegbotton replied. 'Any customers last night?'

'None with any money.' Bristlewing's grin vanished as he saw the cage. 'Oh. I see you went to another one.' He stood and put one hand out to take the cage from Hoegbotton.

'Don't touch it!' The surge of anger surprised Hoegbotton and froze Bristlewing in mid-grasp. Hoegbotton struggled for control, managed to follow up with, 'I'll put it in the back, thanks very much.'

Bristlewing raised one eyebrow, pulling back his hand with exaggerated slowness. 'Suit yourself.' With an effort Hoegbotton asked, 'Are the inventory books up-to-date?'

'Course they're current,' Bristlewing said, turning stiffly away.

By design, the way to Hoegbotton's makeshift office was blocked by a maze of items, from which rose a collective must-metal-rotted-dusty smell that he loved fiercely. This smell, of an authentic and pure antiquity, validated his selections as surely as any papers or certificates. That customers tripped and lost their bearings as they wandered the arbitrary footpaths mattered little to Hoegbotton. The received family wisdom said that thus hemmed in the customer had no choice but to buy something from the stacks of chairs, umbrellas, watches, pens, fishing rods, clothes, enameled boxes, plaster casts of lizards, elegant mirrors of gla.s.s and copper, reading gla.s.ses, Truffidian religious icons, boards for playing dice made of oliphaunt ivory, porcelain water jugs, globes of the world, model ships, old medals, sword canes, musical clocks, and other ephemera from past lives or distant places. And, in seeking out a perfectly ordinary set of dinner plates, a customer might have an even more intimate encounter, be forced, for example, to face the flared nostrils and questing tongue of a Skamoo erotic mask. An overwhelming sense of the secret history of these objects could sometimes send him into a trance.

At the back, Hoegbotton's work s.p.a.ce had been colonized by a similar mora.s.s of riches. His former desk lay beneath a stack of oversized and ancient books, folders full of invoices, a gigantic fire-glazed pot, several telescopes he'd been unable to unload, and a collection of metal and wooden frogs he'd acquired impulsively. Shoved in around the edges, personal keepsakes: a favorite pen, a sh.e.l.l he had found while on vacation in the Southern Isles when he was six, and daguerreotypes of family: Rebecca, his brother Stephen (lost to the family now, having signed up for Morrow's army on a monstrous but historically common whim), and his mother Gertrude standing on the lawn of someone else's mansion in Morrow.

Beyond the besieged desk, against the back wall, stood two doors. The first led to a private bathroom, recently installed, much to Bristlewing's delight. Hoegbotton headed for the second door, which was very old, wormholed, and studded with odd metal symbols that Hoegbotton had filched from an abandoned shrine in the Religious Quarter.

He could hear Bristlewing worrying at some artifact behind a row of old bookcases stacked high with cracked flowerpots, so he pulled the key out of his pants pocket, unlocked the door and went inside. Why should it matter if Bristlewing saw him go in? And yet it did.

The door shut silently behind him and he was alone, except for the cage. The light that cast its yellowing glare upon the room came from an old-fashioned oil lamp nailed into the room's far wall.

Nothing, at first glance, distinguished the room from any other room. It contained a tired-looking dining table around which stood four worn chairs. To one side, plates, cups, bowls, and utensils sat atop a cabinet with a mirror that served as a backboard. The mirror was veined with a purplish fungus that had managed to infiltrate the minute fractures in the gla.s.s. He had worried that the city's enforcers might confiscate the mirror on one of their weekly inspections of his store, but they had ignored it, perhaps recognizing the age of the mirror and the way mold had itself begun to grow over the fungus.

In addition to three inventory ledgers, the table held three place settings. Across the middle of the table lay a parchment, so old that it looked as if it might disintegrate into dust at the slightest touch. A bottle of port, half-full, stood at the far end of the table.

This was his new office, having been driven there by his own acquisitions. Hoegbotton set the cage down beside the table. His hand stung from where the imprint of the handle had branded itself onto his skin.

Bound in red leather, the ledger books were imported from Morrow. The off-white pages were tissue paper thin to accommodate as many sheets as possible. The three ledgers represented the inventory for the past three months. Thirty others, as ma.s.sive and unwieldy, had been wrapped in a blanket and carefully hidden beneath the floorboards in his office. (Two separate notebooks to record unfortunate but necessary dealings with Ungdom and Slattery, suitably yellow and brown, had been tossed into an unlocked drawer of his abandoned desk.) Yesterday had been slow only five items sold, two of them phonograph records. He frowned when he read Bristlewing's description of the buyers as 'Short lady with walking stick. Did not give a name.' and 'Man looked sick. Took forever to make up his mind. Bought one record after all that time.' Bristlewing did not respect the system. By contrast, a typical Hoegbotton-penned buyer entry read like an investigative report: 'Miss Glissandra Bustel, 4232 East Munrale Street, late 40s. Grey-silver hair. Startling blue eyes. Wore an expensive green dress but cheap black shoes, scuffed. She insisted on calling me "Mr. Hoegbotton." She examined a very expensive Occidental vase and commented favorably on a bone hairpin, a pearl snuffbox, and a watch once worn by a prominent Truffidian priest. However, she only bought the hairpin.'

If Bristlewing disliked the detail required by Hoegbotton for the ledgers, he disliked the room itself even more. After carefully cataloguing its contents upon their arrival three years before, Hoegbotton had asked Bristlewing a question.

'Do you know what this is?'

'Old musty room. No air.'

'No. It's not an old musty room with no air.'

'Fooled me,' Bristlewing had said and, scowling, left him there.

3.

But Bristlewing was wrong dead wrong. Bristlewing did not understand the first thing about the room. How could he? And how could Hoegbotton explain that the room was perhaps the most important room in the world, that he often found himself inside it even while walking around the city, at home reading to his wife, or buying fruit and eggs from the farmers' market? That, in his mind, the room and the cage were one and the same?

The history of the room went back to the Silence itself. His great-great-grandfather, Samuel Hoegbotton, had been the first Hoegbotton to move to Ambergris, much against the wishes of the rest of his extended family, including his twenty-year-old son, John, who stayed in Morrow.

For a man who had uprooted his wife and daughter from all that was familiar to take up residence in an unknown, sometimes cruel, city, Samuel Hoegbotton became remarkably successful, establishing three stores down by the docks. It seemed only a matter of time before more of the Hoegbotton clan moved down to Ambergris.

However, this was not to be. One day, Samuel Hoegbotton, his wife, and his daughter disappeared, just three of the many thousands of souls who vanished from Ambergris during the episode known as the Silence leaving behind empty buildings, empty courtyards, empty houses, and both dread and emptiness in the lives of those left behind. With no clues as to what had happened or how. It was now one hundred years since the Silence, and people could be forgiven their loss of memory, for wanting to ignore the horror in the idea that the gray caps might have been the cause. Everyone still thought it, but few said it. What could not be proven should not be given voice. Should be forgotten.

Hoegbotton remembered one line in particular from John's diary: 'I cannot believe my father has really disappeared. It is possible he could have come to harm, but to simply disappear? Along with my mother and sister? I keep thinking that they will return one day and explain what happened to me. It is too difficult to live with, otherwise. It is a wound that never heals.'

Sitting in his mother's bedroom with the diary open before him, the young Robert Hoegbotton had felt a chill across the back of his neck. What had happened to Samuel Hoegbotton? He had spent many summer afternoons in the attic, surrounded by antiquities, trying to find out. He combed through old letters Samuel had sent home before his disappearance. He visited the family archive. He wrote to relatives in other cities.

His mother merely disapproved of such inquiries; his grandmother actively taunted him. 'Yes, waste your life with that nonsense,' she would say from the huge throne of an ancient king they'd bought on the cheap, which seemed to best suit her rock-hard old bones. 'You won't get any farther than your father, or his father before him. The lot of you aren't smart enough to cook an egg properly.' He could not talk to his father about it; that cold and distant figure was rarely home. But he had them both to thank for something at least: he prided himself on rarely sharing his opinions with anyone. Appearing to be a blank slate stood him in good stead in his business.

With his sister, the young Hoegbotton continued his investigations behind his grandmother's back, would act out scenarios with the house as the backdrop. They would ask the maids questions to fill gaps in their knowledge and thus uncovered the meaning of words like 'gray cap.' On his thirteenth birthday, he helped himself to an old sketch in his grandmother's upstairs bedroom that showed the apartment's living room Samuel Hoegbotton surrounded by smiling relatives on a visit. Then, with a profound and uncomplicated sense of happiness, listened from downstairs to her shrieks of displeasure upon finding it missing. But for his sister all of this was just relief of a temporary boredom, and he was soon so busy learning the family business that the mystery faded from his thoughts.

By the age of twenty, he decided to leave Morrow and travel to Ambergris, surprised to see his grandmother crying as he left. No Hoegbotton had set foot in Ambergris for ninety years and it was precisely for this reason that he chose the city, or so he told himself. In Morrow, under the predatory eye of Richard, he had felt as if none of his plans would ever be successful. In Ambergris, he started out poor but independent, operating a sidewalk stall that sold fruit and broadsheets. At odd times at an auction, looking at jewelry that reminded him of something his mother might wear; sneaking around Ungdom's store examining all that merchandise, so much richer than what he could acquire at the time thoughts of the Silence wormed their way into his head.

The day after he signed the lease on his own store, Hoegbotton visited Samuel's apartment. He had the address from some of the man's letters. The building lay in a warren of derelict structures that rose from the side of the valley to the east of the Merchant Quarter. It took Hoegbotton an hour to find it, the carriage ride followed by progress on foot. He knew he was close when he had to climb over a wooden fence with a sign on it that read 'Off Limits By Order of the Ruling Council.' The sky was overcast, the sunlight weak yet bright, and he walked through the tenements feeling ethereal, dislocated. Here and there, he found walls where bones had been mixed with the mortar and he knew by these signs that such places had been turned into graveyards.

When he finally stood in front of the apartment on the ground level of a three-story building he wondered if he should turn around and go home. The exterior was boarded up, fire-scorched and splotched with brown-yellow fungi. The facing rows of buildings formed a corridor of light, at the end of which a stray dog sniffed at the ground, picking up a scent. He could see its ribs even from so far away. Somewhere, a child began to cry, the sound thin, attenuated, automatic. The sound was so unexpected, almost horrifying, that he thought it must not be a baby at all, but something mimicking a baby, hoping to lure him closer.

After a few more moments, he reached a decision and took a crowbar from his pack. Ten minutes later, he had pried up the boards and the door stood revealed, a pale 'X' running across the dark wood. He realized he was breathing in shallow gasps. No one could help him if he opened the door and needed help, but he still wanted whatever was inside the apartment. It could be anything, even the end of his life, and yet antic.i.p.ation surged through him, and he didn't know why.

Hoegbotton pulled the door open and stepped inside, crowbar held like a weapon.

It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. The air was stale. Windows to the right and left of the hallway, although boarded up, let in enough light to make patches of dust on the floor shine like colonies of tiny, subdued fireflies. The hallway was perversely ordinary. In the even more dimly lit living room, Hoegbotton could make out that some vagrant had long ago set up digs and abandoned them. A sofa had been overturned and a blanket used as a roof for a makeshift tent. Dog droppings were more recent. A rabbit carca.s.s, withered but caked with dried blood, might have been as fresh as the week before. The wallpaper had collapsed into a mumbling senility of fragments and strips. Paintings lay in tumbled flight against the floor. A faint, bitter smell rose from the room a sourness that revealed hidden negotiations between wood and fungi. Hoegbotton relaxed. The gray caps had not been in the apartment for a long time. He let the crowbar dangle in his hand.

Hoegbotton entered the dining room. Brittle pages of newsprint lay across the dining room table, held in place by a bottle of port with a gla.s.s beside it. Infiltrated by cobwebs, by dust, by mottled fragments of wood, the table also held plates and place settings. The stale air had preserved the contents of the plates in a mummified state. Three plates. Three pieces of ossified chicken, accompanied by a green smear of some vegetable long since dried out. Samuel Hoegbotton. His wife Sarah. His daughter Jane. All three chairs, worm-eaten and rickety, were pulled out slightly from the table. A fourth chair lay off to the side, smashed into fragments by time or violence.

Hoegbotton stared at the chairs for a long time. Had they been moved at all in the last century? How could anyone know? Unfolded napkins lay on the seats of two of the chairs. The third that of the person who would have been reading the newspaper had not been used, nor had the silverware for that setting. The silverware of the other two was positioned peculiarly. On the right side, the fork lay at an angle near the plate, as if thrown there. Something dark and withered had been skewered by the fork's tines. Did it match an irregularity in the dry flesh of the chicken upon the matching plate? The knife was missing entirely. On the left side of the table, the fork was still stuck into its piece of chicken, the knife sawing into the flesh beside it.

A p.r.i.c.kly, cold sensation spread across Hoegbotton's skin. Had the family been eating and simply...disappeared...in mid-meal? The fork. The knife. The chairs. The broadsheet. The meals uneaten, half-eaten. The bottle of port. The mystery gnawed at him even as it became ever more impenetrable. Nothing he and his sister had imagined could account for it.

Taking out his pocketknife, Hoegbotton leaned over the table. He carefully pulled aside one leaf of the broadsheet to reveal the date: the very day of the Silence. The date transfixed him. He pulled out the chair where surely Samuel Hoegbotton must have sat, reading his papers, and slowly slid into it. Looked down the table to where his daughter and wife would have been sitting. Continued to read the paper with its articles on the turmoil at the docks, preparing for the windfall due with the return of the fishing fleet; a brief message on blasphemy from a priest; the crossword puzzle. A sudden shift, a dislocation, a puzzled look from his wife, and he had stared up from his paper in that last moment to see...what?

Hoegbotton stared across the table again, focused on the bottle of port. The gla.s.s was half-full. He leaned forward, examined the gla.s.s. The liquid inside had dried into sludge over time. A faint imprint of tiny lips could be seen on the edge of the gla.s.s. The cork was tightly wedged into the mouth of the bottle. A further mystery. When had the port been poured?

Beyond the bottle, the fork with the skewered meat came into focus. It did not, from this angle, look as if it came from the piece of chicken on the plate and the plate was nailed to the table.

He pulled back, as much from a thought that had suddenly occurred to him as from the strangeness of the fork, the plate. A dim glint from the floor beside the chair caught his eye. Samuel Hoegbotton's gla.s.ses. Twisted into a shape that resembled a circle attached to a line and two 'u' shapes on either end. As he stared at the gla.s.ses, the questions overwhelmed him, until he was not just sitting in Samuel Hoegbotton's chair, but in the chairs of thousands of souls, looking out into darkness, trying to see what they had seen, to know what they came to know.

The thing that might have been a baby was still screaming as Hoegbotton stumbled outside, gasping. He ran over bits of brick and rubble. He ran through the long weeds. He ran past the buildings with mortar made from bones. He scrambled over the fence that said he should not have been there. When he did stop, gasping for breath, having reached the familiar cobblestones of Alb.u.muth, the pressure in his temples remained, the stray thought lodged in his head like a virus.