Section 3[1]: Crooked Worms and Roses

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

--Dylan Thomas

 

 

            She flew out of the hills on humming wheels driven by a silent motor, with the dead at her back. Her spirit and body were as empty as her guns as she fled from the suburbs of the dead and the nightmare of its half-life.

            The sky lightened perceptibly, but not markedly, as they approached Gertrude’s apartment at the northern end of Dusk City, where the torches and lamps and electric bulbs guttered dimly, and the streets were mostly empty of both living and dead. As the population shrank, it drew in towards the Barricades and, generally, towards the Central Gate, the main artery for passage between Day and Night. And as the people crept inwards they gave up the outlying neighborhoods, not yet to the dead, but to the criminals, to squatters, and to those who, like the Intruder, valued solitude and freedom more than the company of the living.

            To reach it, she took one of the axial roads running the entire width of the valley—though that was, of course, only a few hundred miles. The equatorial roads, which no longer existed but in memory and a few maintained stretches in Dayside and a small stretch of boulevard in Dusk City, once ran the circumference of the world. No one had used them, though, since Clock stopped.

            She inhabited the middle two floors of a small, six-story office building. The place wasn’t very homely, but it still drew both water and power, and it had a nice view. It also had a nifty cage that had once been used to store a/v equipment and petty cash, and that she now used to store bounties and other prisoners. She parked the girls there with Sophie’s lute and a couple pieces of steak from the freezer, quickly microwave-defrosted. ‘Trude seasoned them by slicing a long, shallow cut in her left arm and letting a dozen or so drops of blood fall onto the steaming, damp meat. It would round out the meal for them. She took her to cover the wound before taking the food in to them, however.

            She’d found the tip on blood in the back of Aquitaine’s manuscript, a special appendix on the care and maintenance of the dead, which he’d doubtless researched for Sophie’s upkeep. ‘Trude had been almost miffed to learn that the old trapper’s adage about fresh blood, which she’d always regarded as superstition, had a factual basis.

            To be kept in good condition, the dead must consume flesh; it is better it were warm, and best it were human, but fresh human flesh is hard to come by. Most commonly, in their natural environment, the dead will eat the flesh of their own kind—those, especially, who have gotten slow in their pseudo-age. Such a diet does little for the condition, appearance, and energy of those who eat it.

            The reason the dead should eat the livest and most human flesh available is that they are nourished not by the substance of the stuff, but by the spark of life within it, which fades fast after death.

            Thus, if fresh meat is unavailable, fresh blood will liven up leftovers and help maintains the healthy pallor and active lifestyle of your dead.

 

            While she was at it, she defrosted and fried some of the steak for herself. The stuff was expensive, but she was paid well, and it was worth it. It had to be kept frozen until right before use, of course, because it would otherwise spoil, and because it might also wonder away, since animal flesh, too, obeyed the rules of Clock, and must remain eternally half-awake. What could not be used by the butchers was either taken by smugglers to nightside and dumped illegally, to wander the hills as bone and sinew, or else was treated chemically to render it inert and then buried in legal landfills, or, like some of the human dead, was cremated, which tended more to change than to solve the problem, as it generated the strange, quasi-sentient ash storms that wander about the valley, occasionally blanketing cities and fields like plagues of locusts.

            All in all, it was generally best that the dead go their own way, into the cities of deep Night that claims that they claimed as their own, and ultimately to that Swarming City beneath the mountains, where they wandered eternally, lost in the catacombs.

            Thinking of that place, Gertrude pondered the age in her bones and felt, dimly, as one feels someone’s shadow fall on their back, the weight of her own mortality, of her destiny in those darkened halls.

            Then she shook herself, like a wet dog, and returned her focus to the steak, which had begun to squirm.

 

            She did not awaken when the sun crept through her bedroom (once corner office) window, because this place had never, in living memory, seen the sun. And no alarm sounded, triggered by clockwork or quartz. Rather, somewhere in her, something had had its fill of sleep’s fantasies, and let her go from their many folds.

            She rose and dressed with deliberate slowness. Setting each button in place, waiting for her spirit to finish returning from the dreaming place, which was full of light and movement and many seasons. She had to give it time to reinsert itself in her chill, thick hands, put her back on as she put on her clothes.

            She brushed her hair back with one massive finger and pondered the stony eyes in her weathered face, reflected in an old mirror she’d brought with her from—some other place, that she could almost remember. Her father, she thought, had shaved in it once. But maybe not; she had worked to forget so much, and she was not about to try to get that back.

 

            She greeted the girls and put out coffee for them spiked with blood, thinking that she’d need to find a butcher who could supply it in better quantities. Sophie was still trying to play that black-starred lute, striking the strings with fingers blunted and slowed by death, so that the chords jumbled up into each other, only a little of her sad tune escaping the chaos. Frustration showed in her face, but the little one was still transfixed by her playing, and urged her on with gestures and hungry eyes. Gertrude listened, too, finding any sound beyond her own breath to be music in this silent place.

            Perhaps, she thought, she’d been alone too long.

            Leaving them to themselves, she went over to the cabinet where she’d left the loot from her excursion, and took out Pseudo-chronography and Applied Chronothanatology. She sat in one of a dozen little cubicles, within earshot of Sophie’s haunting half-music, and began to read.

 

*           *           *

 

She was going to see Murray the Buzzard, a mid-level crook for whom she did some work, including the philosopher’s lab. It seemed Aquitaine had been borrowing money from him to fund his private researches, and Murray’s famed patience had finally given way to his equally famed greed, and he’d sent Gertrude to collect the results.

            But she wasn’t going there directly. She knew that the Buzzard wouldn’t be satisfied with the prototype, especially since she didn’t plan on bringing him the manuscript either. She would have to bring him an offering of some kind, to assuage him. Hopefully she could get something good enough to make him forget about the philosopher.

            But what do you get the man who’s already taken everything?

            You get him the man who’s taken something from him. You get him Hands.

 

            Hands McIlheney was a born thief. They say he stole the watch off the doctor who delivered him and stashed it in the afterbirth, but that’s impossible. No one wears watches anymore.

            But the essence of the story was true—that Hands would steal anything from anyone, for little or no reason. He took the obvious stuff—money, jewelry, cars, appliances. But he took knick-knacks, trash, old clothes, too. And he loved taking candy from babies.

            He got good, fast, because otherwise he’d’ve gotten dead, faster. Natural selection, baby, he would say. As it was, he’d been caught twice stealing from people like the Buzzard, and they’d used an old-fashioned punishment: they’d cut off a hand, each time.

            But the old methods didn’t always work on Clock. And each time, Hands had gotten hold of his severed appendage before it could be destroyed. And he’d simply stuck the hand on the ragged stump and waited for it to taste blood.

            And now he was a thief again, even better than before, in fact, since what the hands lost in dexterity they more than made up for by their detachability. But he’d made a third and final slip—he’d taken something from Murray, and one of his men had spotted the hands making off with it. A price was soon declared, and that should have been that.

            But hands had made a new friend, a rival gangster who had made a business of smuggling things across the Barricades. Hands’s hands were perfect for him, because the ever-vigilant guards hadn’t been trained for anything like them.

            The gangster, named, of all things, Bob, had a hideout not far from Gertrude’s, an old department store emptied of most of its wares. He kept a small army there, and so far no one had put forth the necessary effort to get the bounty from the Buzzard.

            ‘Trude pulled up a block away and strapped on the necessary weapons—her pistols, a big stick, and a large burlap sack.

            The guards at the most obscure side-entrance were easy—bip-bop, and she was on. Once inside, she clung to the shadows of the shelves, and froze like the garishly redecorated mannequins whenever a drunken patrol went by. She was glad that their incompetence enabled her to avoid killing them, at least for now.

            On the third floor, where the gangster’s staff lived, she waylaid a guard from behind, bringing her stick across his throat, just tight enough so he could whisper and nothing more.

            “Where’s Hands?”

            “I don’t—“

            She pressed a little more, to make her point. The guard managed to tell her, and then she choked him into unconsciousness and left him beneath an artificial Christmas tree.

            Hands, the guy’d said, was living in the sporting goods section on the other side of this floor. He had a tent where he stayed, alone, because no one liked his smell.

            Cautious, silent, she went there.

            There was a sea of tents, in between a forest of fishing poles and a veritable arsenal of rifles and shotguns and even a few crossbows for the really old-fashioned. The tends were all dark, undifferentiable, no signs of life. She sighed silently and moved amongst them, listening for breath, sniffing for the scent of the dead flesh of his hands. In the dark behind her there were soft rustlings of vermin and leaves blown through broken windows.

            She found him in a big, round, all-weather model, awake, and sitting near the entrance. He was a little man, thin and scrawny and vaguely tuberculotic-looking. His hair was the color of hot coals, his eyes the color of dead ones. He was not wearing a shirt, shoes, or hands, but he was smiling like a cat.

            She threw herself aside as something whistled past her head and tore through the wall of a nearby pup tent. Then a clatter as a crossbow was tossed aside. She scowled at the thief, then turned to search the ranks of weapons for his errant parts.

            As she did so, however, a soft whirring arose behind her, and then a sharp pain pulled at her arm, and she was tugged back by—

            A fishing hook.

            She started to remove it, then thought better. She grabbed the slender line and pulled; it cut deep into the flesh of her fingers, but she as vastly outmassed the holder of the rod, it came flying toward her. Swinging her stick lightly, she bludgeoned the hand that came flying at her. It fell to the ground a few feet away, broken in several places. Hands writhed on the ground, whimpering. The Intruder snatched the thing off the floor, and twisted.

            Hands screamed.

            Somewhere in the depths of the building, someone stirred in their drunken slumber. Haste was needed. She spoke to the weapon-filled gloom.

            “You gonna come peacefully, or do I have to start lopping bits off your twin here?

 

*           *           *

 

            The ride to the Buzzard’s place was uneventful, once she gave up on her usual restraint procedures and just cuffed his feet to the anchor loop and tied the bag of hands to the bumper.

            At the gate, the guards waved her straight in, which wasn’t necessarily a good thing, since the territory inside the Buzzard’s demesne wasn’t necessarily the safest place to be, or the easiest to leave at will.

            The Buzzard held court in a place with no shadows; he spent a fortune regularly on lights—electric, oil, wax, ethereal, biochemical—efficient illumination derived from dead fireflies, certain fish, and a number of emergent species adapted to nightside through self-luminescence. The Intruder had never divined precisely why he disliked the dark so much; perhaps it was simply his personal way of flaunting wealth.

            Murray perched at the head of a long hall. He sat behind what must once have been a judge’s pulpit, and while he didn’t go so far as to don the black robes, he loomed above his minions, gazing solemnly and cruelly down his hooked nose at them like some ancient god of merciless retribution.

            ‘Trude had practically to carry Hands down the length of the hall, and in truth she couldn’t blame him.

            “Gertrude, my dear,” Murray purred. “You bring me a gift. What is the occasion? Have you forgotten our anniversary?”

            She shivered a little. He’d never called her by any name before, and she doubted it was a good sign.

            “It was on my way,” she said honestly enough. “It was no trouble.”

            The Buzzard liked the sound of that. He liked it a great deal. He laughed long and hard, until windows rattled and candles fluttered.

            “No trouble,” he said. “No trouble. We’ll see.” A pause, and the grappling of eyes in the dancing light. “Tell me,” he said after a while, “About the Philosopher.”

            Oh yeah, she thought. Trouble.

 

            She gave him the short version. She left out her houseguests, she left out the book and the chronograph. She ended by walking forward, reaching up to the top of his pulpit, and placing the prototype gently yet firmly onto the polished surface.

            He ran his fingers over the case lifted it carefully in his hand. He looked at it, really looked, with the entirety of his being. His eyes swirled and wobbled with the twirling arms. He saw something there, something more than Gertrude saw. And then she understood that Murray the Buzzard was not just lending money to one of the ten thousand disaffected sons of morning who came to night to burn out slow. He possessed, if not the knowledge of what Aquitaine had done, some canny intuition of it, the upshot of which was that ‘Trude was screwed. He knew what it was, maybe even why it didn’t work. And if he didn’t know that the finished product had been taken from the lab, he still wouldn’t be satisfied with this.

            Hopefully Hands was enough.

            He put the watch down and slid down off his high stool. He came around to face ‘Trude and Hands. Even without the added height of the stool and the added dignity of the pulpit, he loomed subjectively and objectively. He towered over even the Intruder, lanky and grim in white shirtsleeves and black suspenders, smiling down at them without humor.

            “Hands, my gift, how are you tonight?” He picked the sack out of her hands, squeezed the contents, tossed it back and forth. Hands, during this time, stood stock-still, growing paler and paler until the lights of the hall shown through him as through a filmy cloth.

            “You stole from me, Hands, and you’ll be properly punished this time. Gertrude,” he turned, using her name again, “You get credit for bringing him to me.

            “But you brought him to me for a reason. You brought him because you know  you failed to bring me either the Philosopher or some return on my investment in him.

            “So you bring me this lovely trinket. A nice thought, indeed, but I am not a child!” he slammed his fist against the front of the pulpit, “To be distracted by shiny objects. And between us grown-ups, it isn’t the thought that counts.

            “You have never failed me before, Gertrude. And you did, of course, bring this insulting but valued trinket. These factors will mitigate your punishment accordingly.”

            “Hold on a minute,” she said, easing one hand toward her gun. “I can think of three objections to your little summation there. The first is that you judge failure hastily, since the philosopher and his lab are still there, and may still yield some ‘return,’ second—“

            “Not so.”

            “Huh?”

            “The man’s family decided to take back their errant son. He’s in a sanitarium morningside as we speak.”

            “The lab?”

            “Empty. They’ve given it all to the doctors treating the boy. Might provide some insight into his madness. Except for what’s illegal or too heavy to move, and that’s being guarded by our Sheriff herself. Go figure.”

            Gertrude sighed. She’d had no idea the family was so influential; they must be someone serious to the dayfolk. If she’d had any inkling of their speed and completeness in tidying the lose end that the Philosopher must represent to them, she’d have taken him along, from the lab and probably to Murray tonight. But now it was obviously too late for that, and now she knew why Murray was so irate.

            “Second,” she forged on regardless, “I am not your toady, your minion, your creature, like these—“ she gestured vaguely to the others in the hall. “You do not mete out punishment to me. You pay or do not pay my fee, according to my performance. If you’re disappointed with what I brought, simply send me away with empty pockets. I owe you no advance.”

            “What you owe me, Gertrude, is an opportunity. You did not fail at a task to which I can now set some other. You failed at a task which is now impossible to complete. It is gone forever. And that is what you owe me. This transcends mere money.”

            Mere money?! Was this really Murray? She knew no greater greed than his, and could conceive of no stronger force than it within his pocked and twisted skull. Except, possibly—

            She looked closer, looked into the bottomless eyes like black shadows in black pools in darkened valleys, sunk too far for Murray’s thousands lights to reach fully. And there she saw fear, the same grim fear that hid in her own eyes, writhed in her own chest.

            The Buzzard was old, and he, too, felt the ever-tightening grip of age. He was motivated by the same dim impulse that had driven her to keep the book and the watch. He hoped, she saw now, for the same—but what was it for which she hoped, really? She had only the cryptic ramblings of the Philosopher, who believed he had found the key to his lover’s freedom. Maybe Murray knew, but if he did, it would never profit her, as he would share such a secret no sooner than he shared the blood of his body.

            “Well, then, I suppose we arrive at my third protest. Which is simple really. You see—“

            Two things happened then, one motion really, with two consequences. The first consequence was that the sack containing Hands’s hands flew from the Buzzard’s grasp. The second was the sudden, half-seen motion of the Intruder rolling, hard, out of the bare central hall, into the midst of the lightweight spectators.

            Then it was chaos, running, and gunfire.

 

            The survivors of the shootout said little about it afterward. Mostly they claimed not to have seen much in the confusion beyond running and falling bodies, and the occasional scream. The woman in the dark coat was everywhere, and nowhere, even in the pervasive, penetrating light that the Buzzard had paid so much for.

            She was lost in the fray and after considering the bleeding bodies on the ground they made no special effort to find her. Also lost was all of Hands McInhereny, to whom she was apparently as disposed to do incidental kindness as harm. And, of course, the Buzzard’s left eye, caught by a flying fragment of lantern-glass.

            Since then, the gangster has grown more taciturn and more vengeful, but he has never again spoken of Gertrude the Intruder. It is unknown whether he plotted some revenge or was content to add her to his great list of unrequited hates, which sat, unseen by any but his eyes, atop his pulpit, next to a shorter list, unguessed at as well as unseen, as his vanished loves and hopes, all long since lost or bargained away.

 

*           *           *

 

            She arrived home bloodied and bruised, but whole. Mostly, she was tired, tired with a fatigue that transcended the physical. She felt that the black half-orb of nightside Clock was the half-seen surface of the Buzzard’s eye, and the night with its horde of watchful, distant, above all dim stars was the dark cavern of his face in which that eye was set. And at the heart of it all, and everywhere in its midst, the spectre of death, and age, and their child fear.

            She tried to find shelter in the walls and drawn shades, but she could not: they were ephemeral barriers, that could not shout out the night or permit the illusion of day.

            She found Sophie and Pearl in good enough shape, though. They’d dug their way into the chest of diversions that she kept in the wire prison to entertain her captives. They might have been playing chess, ‘Trude thought, but the pieces didn’t move right. Their paths were attenuated and crooked, so that the knights moved in circles or spirals rather than decisive “L”’s, the bishops stumbled off their angled paths, and the queen seemingly pursued interests all her own, unaware of the game entirely, or playing some other in her dreams, until she was awoken.

            She fed them again and tried to find some comfort in a sleep of her own. There would be no tomorrow morning, she knew, but the next waking would nevertheless be a dire one, and require her to be rested.