City One

In some quarters they are liked, in others merely tolerated, in others still it is said they carry magic and as such each bears a price on their head. But liked or feared or hunted, in every Quarter they are grudgingly respected, if only for having survived so long without at least one murder to their names, one poorly healed scar to tell of beatings and broken bones, one sorry drunken tale ending with ‘so it was my life or theirs …’

Story by Alan Frackelton

Illustration by Peter Winton-Keirl

 

I

There are four of them, always four; Thomas, Cassie, Quiet One, and Jo. Anywhere on the streets of City One, on the walkways above them and in the caves below, the breath that carries the name Thomas carries the names Cassie, Quiet One, Jo, and the whisper, and the curse, each name tumbling one after another from every clucking tongue. They arrived together and they have stayed together, and to speak of one is to speak of them all.

They are young, Thomas the eldest and not yet a man, Jo with her rag doll army not yet nine. Cassie and Quiet One fall neatly between them, alike enough in appearance (it’s something in the eyes) that people often mistake them for siblings. On the streets of City One, especially City One, four so young should not have lasted a month, a week, before they were taken and used and left to rot in some dark basement corner, or buried in the nearest pit where soon enough new buildings would be erected on their bones. But these four, Thomas, Cassie, Quiet One and Jo, they have called City One home for almost a year.

In some quarters they are liked, in others merely tolerated, in others still it is said they carry magic and as such each bears a price on their head. But liked or feared or hunted, in every Quarter they are grudgingly respected, if only for having survived so long without at least one murder to their names, one poorly healed scar to tell of beatings and broken bones, one sorry drunken tale ending with ‘so it was my life or theirs …’ They might not understand it, the dark and broken people of City One, but it has earned the four their respect.

And they each have a story, Thomas and Cassie, Quiet One and Jo; but everybody in City One has a story. Still, their stories are known more than most, traded and muddled over and marvelled at; people listen when these four names are mentioned. Ask anyone, and ask the price, and there’s a good chance they’ll tell you.

Go to Bridge 41. Wait for the signal – green light, blue light, red light, green. Then crawl through the tunnels Dumkid and his cousins spent half a year painting to look like the inside of dragons’ gullet, and seek out Leona. Offer her a good pair of shoes, say, or a warm winter coat, or even scraps of silk in any colour but white; say, “Thomas …?” and hear -

“Thomas … Thomas is father to the little ones. He could be God, if he wanted, if he was cold as this place would like him to be. But look into his eyes and you’ll see that he’s different. Oh, he’s seen things, don’t doubt that, worse things than I can imagine, but he doesn’t let that touch him. Maybe he knew they’d need him one day, and he buried those things so deep inside him they don’t have strength enough to climb back out and claim him. But know it or not he found them, little Cassie and Quiet One and Jo. Or maybe they found him. Either way they came to City One together and that’s how they’ve stayed. And Thomas feeds them, don’t ask me how, he clothes them, keeps them safe and warm, and don’t ask me how he does that either. I don’t know. But if you’d care to part with that fine jacket you’re wearing, I’m sure I can find out …”

Head west towards the outskirts of the City, if you’ve nerve enough, if you’ve lain awake night after night itching to know; carry gold to buy your life in one pocket and gold to buy the story in another, and soon enough Kill will find you. With a smile as bright as the knife held against your throat, he’ll offer you the choice of purchasing your continued existence, and once the gold is in his hand he’ll likely ask what else he can do for you. Say “Cassie …?” and if his smile doesn’t fade he might say -

“Oh Cassie, she’s an angel, she’s manna from heaven. Take one look at her and I swear you’ll believe. She’s got the face of an angel and the voice of an angel and if she were mine I could buy this stinking pit of a City ten times over every time she sings. I’ve thought about it, don’t doubt that, but a thought like that, you can only take it so far. She’d be someone else without her little family, she wouldn’t be an angel anymore. So, that’s that. But you didn’t pay for my dreams …

“One thing I know for certain – she was in City Twenty-Two when the Fires came. And how do I know? The smell. I was there and I’d know that stink anywhere. It’s in my bones and it’s in her bones too, and that’s how come I know she’s an angel. Because if she wasn’t an angel, why, she’d be just like me …”

Make your way to Yukko’s Yard anytime after midnight to roll the dice and choose a mask, and if your luck is good Yukko will emerge wearing a Smile (masks 50 to 91); say to him, or her, “Jo …?” and one of Yukko’s countless personalities will tell you -

“The little general, yes? With her army of little dolly soldiers? Not as many names as Yukko, but what if I tell you she once lived in a house filled with dollies, and they all had names? Oh yes, even talking dollies that could speak her name. They weren’t an army though, not then, not until the real soldiers came. They did things, those soldiers, oh yes. Ask Yukko 84, she’ll tell you. But I’ll tell you this; when those soldiers were done, little Jo was all alone and every room of that house was filled with little dolly corpses. So she made her own soldiers out of the bits that were left, an army to protect her, and even when Thomas and the others found her she took those soldiers with her. Wouldn’t you?”

Go, Finally, to Market Four, and find the stall selling pages from books (Buy, Sell, Trade. Thieves WILL be executed); talk to Glasses, who will not speak his true name until his stolen spectacles have been returned (posters fifteen years out of date, yellowed and peeling and barely decipherable, can still be found wrapped around redundant lamp-posts or stapled to the trunks of fake trees). Say to him, “Quiet One …?” and with one beady half-blind eye fixed on your hands as they sort through the pages he just might tell you -

“Some bugger stole his voice. Don’t ask me how but some bugger did it. Took him and maybe kept him and maybe said ‘if you scream I’ll kill you, if you cry I’ll claw out your eyes’. Or not. Who can say? But someone did something, so Quiet One doesn’t talk. Not even the great Thomas himself can get a peep out of him. Now, that page you’re holding, read it to me. Yes, yes, both sides, nice and slow …”

Others might charge you more, might wrap what little they know of the truth in the bows and ribbons of so many lies you’ll sell your soul twice over just to reach it, but anyone in City One who knows the streets and knows the people sooner or later will tell you the same.

Four of them. Always four.

 

II

Likewise, there are always rumours.

Go to any City and listen close and the hum will reach you, the singsong approach, the whisper it’s coming …

Go to City One, now, today, and hear in every Cave, beneath every Bridge, from every one of Yukko’s personalities (Smiles as well as Scowls) one rumour, and one rumour only.

He’s coming.

He’s coming, and he’s searching for someone. He will ask first, firmly but politely, and he will give you a name, but if it comes down to it he’ll spill blood and break bones to get the answers he’s seeking. They say he knows a hundred ways to spill blood, a hundred ways to break bone; they say he escaped from one of the Prison Cities, leaving a trail of corpses as he travelled west. Inexorable; unstoppable.

They say he’s coming to City One to finish what he started.

*

Thomas heard the rumour from a crippled fruit-seller on Philimore Street. He heard the rumour earlier that morning, and since then had passed it on himself a dozen times, a chilling free gift with every purchase. He passed it on to Thomas, finally, word for word as he’d heard it, “Oh there’s news today, terrible news …” and Thomas listened, saying nothing, but more than once he glanced across the street at Jo and Cassie and Quiet One where they sat together in the shade of a real tree, taking turns to trace with their fingers the heart carved into the warm, smooth trunk. Thomas listened, finally nodded, and knew as the cripple turned and limped away, the terrible news still clucking on his tongue, that this was the day when he would have to lie.

“What’d he tell you?” Jo wanted to know, as soon as Thomas joined them under the tree. She had ordered her best soldier (part Suzzi, part Aras, part Singing Queen, stitched together with one thousand and fifteen fine loops of silver blue thread) to count the minutes Thomas spent talking to the crippled fruit-seller. Almost twice as long as usual, was the soldier’s report, and those were valuable minutes Jo should have spent eating fruit.

“Nothing important,” Thomas told her, an apple from one pocket for Cassie, a bright fat orange for Quiet One, and twenty three (never more, never less) sweet purple grapes for Jo. “He wanted to argue price, that’s all.”

Jo held the first grape just shy of her mouth, and with her other hand brandished one of her fiercest stitched-together warriors.

“Next time take him with you, Thomas. Then we’ll see how much old crookedy-legs wants to argue price.”

She did not hear the lie. Cassie, her apple already bitten through to the core, did not hear the lie. Quiet One, cutting hearts into the skin of his fruit with a fingernail kept especially long for just this purpose, did not hear the lie. But Thomas, try as he might, could not drop it into the pit. It was too big. It meant too much to him.

He had carried the pit inside himself for over a year, carved out on the night when his old life ended and his new life began, and he had filled it with every piece of darkness he had encountered along the way. But this lie was his, and he knew he would have to carry it out in the open, where he could see it, where he could feel the weight of it press down on him. He had dreamt of this day, dreamt it a hundred years into the future, as far towards forever as he could make it go. But on the streets of City One, forever was a day. It had taken all Thomas’ strength, and all the strength he could imagine, to drag forever into a year’s worth of days.

“Come on,” he said, when apple core and orange peel and grape stems littered the square patch of dirt around the tree, “It’s time we found new shelter.”

“Why now?” Cassie asked, taking his hand. “I like the place we have now. It has windows. It’s ages since we last had windows.”

And Thomas felt the weight of the lie bear down on him.

“We’ll find somewhere with windows, Cas. I promise. And when we do, I’ll tell you all a secret.”

 

III

The cripple, his fruit sold or bartered or eaten, made it all the way across City One to his home in the Fourth Quarter before the rumour found him.

He lived in the bowels of a building someone told him had once been a church. Cheap, true, but also a good place to mourn what is lost and to worship its memory. A photograph pinned to a wall to make a shrine; an athlete, a street-runner, caught in the moment when he crosses the line thirty-nine and three hundredths of a second ahead of his nearest rival.

Looking at the photograph, the cripple knew he would dream of the race again tonight, dream that he was running in that place where the road beneath his feet became the sky. So he lay down and began to close his eyes, his good leg already twitching and flexing and burning to go …

… and it was then that the rumour stepped out of the shadows, bent over him, and whispered a name.

The cripple was trapped and he knew it. The dream came anyway, wrapped inside a wish (let me make it this time, please God just let me make it); the starter gun was fired and the road became the sky beneath him, the blue of a travel brochure photograph, and the air was so sweet. And he made it this time, he really did, except the rumour was there waiting for him at the finish line, saying “Last chance,” and saying the name.

*

The rumour left the building that had once been a church fifteen minutes later, left the cripple still whimpering Thomas’s name, every bone in his body broken but those in his one good leg.

*

In their new shelter, a fire-gutted apartment bought outright with the paper money Thomas had kept sewn into the lining of his coat for more than half a year, Cassie and Jo and Quiet One closed their eyes and began to dream the secret Thomas had shared with them.

*

But in their old shelter Maggie, who loved Thomas, who had loved Thomas ever since he first appeared at her door four months in the past and asked for a room with a window; Maggie whose fear had stopped her from ever telling him, had tricked her into believing there was time, who had only realised her mistake when Thomas came with his beautiful sad smile and told her he was leaving; Maggie who had panicked, nearly weeping as Thomas explained that he could not tell her where he was going, who had watched him lead Cassie and Jo and Quiet One down the stairs and out of the building like refugees; Maggie who could only think I can’t lose him, I can’t! as she pulled on her coat, slipping out of the building and after them like a shadow, ducking out of sight every time Thomas glanced over his shoulder with – was that fear in his eyes?; Maggie who had seen them stop outside a fire-gutted apartment building, paying the man for a top floor room; Maggie tried to blank out the pain that was everywhere and say, for the second time, for the last time, “I … don’t … know.”

And the rumour looked down at her, and smiled.

*

This is what Cassie and Quiet One and Jo dreamt of that night:

Thomas, a year younger and a thousand miles west of City One. He pauses at the steps that lead up to the house, the story of his day suddenly fading because then and there the life he had known stops existing. He stares down at the bright wet splashes of red on the steps, at the drips and the puddles, before lifting his heavy eyes to see a mark that might have been a hand print almost glowing like a warning on the pale wood of the front door. Words and names are tiny frightened prayers on Thomas’ lips as he slowly climbs the steps, trying not to step in the drips and splashes and puddles, the rich warm stink filling the air like his uncle’s farm beyond the hills north of City Fifteen. Slowly, so slowly.

He reaches the front door, not quite closed all the way, so all he has to do is lift his hand and gently push it. He wants to close his eyes then (Cassie, Jo, and Quiet One do too) but it’s already much too late, he’s seen the explosion that used to be a person right there beyond the door and the blackred hole where there should be a face; there are flashes of blue cotton there amidst the red, the blue of the dress his mother had been wearing when Thomas left the house that morning.

The pit begins to open then, deep inside Thomas, a hole wrenched in his heart that reaches all the way down to his soul, and in their dreams Cassie and Quiet One and Jo feel Thomas’ pain as the first piece of carnage tumbles into it. But they do not look away. They watch him reach the stairs, follow him up as he climbs. Tears burn and blind as the pit is wrenched wider, his ruined brother tumbling into it, home all that week because of his broken leg and now the fresh white cast is cracked and open as if it had somehow tried to bleed as well.

They are all right there with Thomas, Cassie, Quiet One and Jo; there as he reaches the door to his bedroom, his name in mismatched letters above a poster of a cheerful blue alien juggling bright stars and suns; they watch him as he pushes the door open, watch him as he takes a single slow step inside. The man is waiting there to welcome them, sitting on the bed and staring almost lovingly at the pristine blue walls, as if he can already see Thomas’ blood painted there and he has simply been waiting for Thomas to arrive and help his make this wondrous vision a reality; he turns his head and looks at Thomas (and at Cassie, and at Quiet One, and at Jo) with a terrible, terrible smile.

The pit inside Thomas opens wide enough to take him then, swallow him whole, but as if he can hear three voices from the future scream run, RUN! he stumbles back, away, out of the room, and finally turns, and finally runs. He gives no thought at all to where he might be running to, down the stairs that drop for miles and across the hall that is a canyon, sliding in all that blood so a cracked pitiful moan escapes him; he simply runs, out of the house and across one field and then another and then a third, never once looking back.

At some point the town appears ahead of him, then surrounds him, people gasping, staring, calling his name first with surprise and then with concern. The men who wear badges and guns all have names, but Thomas can’t remember them; he can only murmur, “Mum … Robbie … the man …” in answer to their questions, just those four words over and over again. When the doctor comes he barely feels the sting of the needle as it enters his arm, but oh, how he welcomes the sleep that it brings him …

*

… But Cassie and Jo and Quiet One would not know until they woke the next morning that Thomas had dreamt of their darkness, even as they dreamt of his. Cassie crawling on hands and knees through smoke black as night blinding choking and everywhere seething heat and laughter, bones and screams; Jo sitting alone in a room filled with corpses, her beautiful dolls bleeding sawdust and stuffing from wounds too numerous to count, their fragile porcelain faces caved in or crushed by soldier’s boots; Quiet One floating in Light, surrounded by the music of Demons, trained by fists and leather and the glowing tips of cigars to never never never tell. Thomas saw it all, joined Cassie and Jo and Quiet One in the dark places where they only ever went in dreams.

But they would not know until they opened their eyes the next morning that Thomas had healed the tears in their hearts, closing off those dark places completely …

 

IV

… And then he opened his eyes.

It was time.

Around him they slept on, Cassie and Quiet One and Jo, and before he walked to the window Thomas paused for a moment to look at them. There was no trace of any dreaming on their faces, but neither were there smiles; peace, perhaps, or acceptance. So Thomas smiled for them, then went to the window and looked down into the street.

He was there, the cripple’s blood on his hands, and Maggie’s, and the blood of dozens upon dozens of unnamed others. He started up at the window where Thomas watched him, and watching him Thomas saw his mouth shape the words.

“Son, it’s time.”

And it was time. Because now, after a year, after filling it with every scrap of darkness he could find, the pit was finally ready for him.

That it was also ready for Thomas, too, was the price he was willing to pay.

 

V

They say Thomas finally sold his soul to the Gods of City One, leaving the others to fend for themselves. They say he was mugged and beaten and left for dead, and when he came to he no longer knew his own name and even now wanders the City searching for – something? someone? They say he was taken by Magi, and boiled alive to the music of whispered incantations; for a price you can purchase a sliver of his tanned and treated skin, which brings love and wealth and immortality.

They say all this and more, spinning tale after tale from the single thread of Thomas’ disappearance.

Only Cassie and Jo and Quiet One (who is quiet no longer, but keeps the name like a charm, or a talisman) know the truth.

But no one has ever asked them.

*

That morning Cassie woke first, and she knew at once that something was different. Not wrong, although she reacted to Thomas’ unslept-in bed with momentary panic; no, not wrong, just … different. She woke Jo and Quiet One once she had checked every room and found them all empty, and they looked at her, aware of it too. They were unafraid, though a little uncertain, as they tried to identify what it was that was new in each other’s eyes.

Cassie decided, with the faintest of smiles at the thought because it did after all surprise her, that they might as well have breakfast. So Jo went across the street for bread and milk (and it was here that the rumour of Thomas’s disappearance originated; Val, whose stall Jo went to that morning, was naturally curious not to see Thomas himself, and so naturally asked Jo where he was; Jo, with a smile not unlike Cassie’s, merely shrugged, before taking her change and wishing the speechless Val a good day) while Cassie and Quiet One folded away the blankets and, privately, tried to find a name for exactly what it was they were feeling. When Jo returned they sat down together to eat, saying very little, but laughing – all three of them – when Jo drank all her milk in a single breathless gulp that left a glistening white moustache around her upper lip.

And afterwards Cassie, perhaps recalling a particular memory, a similar morning and something Thomas may have said or done; Cassie said, with no trace of sorrow, “I’m going to miss him.”

“There’s no need,” Quiet One told her, in a voice that was calm and assured and that surprised none of them. “There’s no need.”

 

Alan Frackelton’s short fiction has appeared in Murky Depths, Title Goes Here and Fantastique Unfettered, amongst others, online at The Future Fire, Colored Chalk, and Darker, and in the Brimstone Press e-anthology Black Box. He plans to write several more stories set in the same world as ‘City One’.