BeneathCeaselessSkies Issue010 Read online

  People wandered by, coming in for a drink and a glance. Boys peered in through grimy windows, and by the time the news reached the whores inside, they disappeared, one by one, to get gussied up and return to walk past the table where I sat. None of them spoke to me, though they did a lot of whispering, one to another.

  “Told you you could get a blow for free,” Jim said sitting down with me.

  “I’m old, remember?” I looked around. “Where’d your momma go?”

  “She’s not feeling well. I told her to go back to bed.” He frowned.

  “Ahh.”

  “Meeting’s in two hours,” Jim shared. “And the bell goes off at sundown.”

  I snorted. Trains came during the day too if called. But no one ever wanted to see what they did, so they were almost always rang at night.

  “How’s people feel about things?” I asked.

  “Happy and scared.” The boy played a broken fingernail up and down the table’s grainy wood. “No one wants to mess things up. We need the cargo, bad. But you’re the Hangman….”

  I leaned back and closed my eyes. “It’ll all work out son. It’ll all be all right.”

  “You sure about that?”

  I nodded. “Done this before, remember?”

  He leaned in close, I could feel his presence near, though I didn’t look. “Just because you can’t die don’t make you a good liar.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The meeting was a rough affair in the middle of the street. The Mayor made my case for me—in the intervening time since we’d spoke, his greed had swollen like soaked corn. Made it sound like he’d gone and sent for me himself, that Jim had nothing to do with it. The boy and his momma were strangely absent from the affair but I stood behind the Mayor, my collar pulled low, so they all could see the marks upon me.

  “What if it don’t work?” a man shouted out.

  “He’s done it before—” the Mayor began, but I stepped forward.

  “It’ll work,” I said.

  “How do we know you’re the real Hangman?” asked another.

  I shrugged. “If I’m not, the train’ll eat me instead, and I’ll stay dead. You’ll get what you want, either way.”

  A whisper ran through the crowd. As long as some blood was involved—

  “So we’re set then?” the Mayor asked. No one disagreed. The chance at all a train’s cargo, not just what you could steal while it was distracted by hot flesh—it was too good to pass up. “All right then, it’s settled.” He hit a gavel on a piece of wood and the crowd dispersed until it was just me standing alone in the street.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The sun sank down and I waited at the station. The townspeople waited too, a fair distance back. No one knew the direction the train would come from and no one wanted to be caught in its path. Jim separated from the rest of them and came up to wait with me.

  “Momma’s still asleep,” he said unwilling to meet my eyes. “She—”

  “You can’t let her stay on the dope, Jim. After this, you take her someplace else. Someplace better than this.”

  “Where?” He looked up at me and then around at the whole wide plain. “Where can we go? And how, and—” He reached down to pick up a handful of the rocks that lay at our feet and threw them at the ground. “I ain’t got a choice. I ain’t got a chance.”

  He’d been sold out by the accident of his birth, by his upbringing, by this town. And I didn’t have any good answers.

  “Chance and choice are what you make of them, for yourself.” I turned around. “Don’t wait too long. Waiting’ll get you, in the end.”

  The last portion of the sun dripped away on the edge of the world.

  “Time to ring the bell. Me or you?” I asked him.

  “I’ll do it,” he said and grabbed the hanging rope.

  All the anger he had at his situation and the world he took out on that bell—set it ringing so loud I thought my ears might bleed. “There,” he said panting when he was done.

  “Good. Now get back.”

  Realization of exactly what he’d done settled in his brow. “Hangman—”

  “Get back Jim. Don’t worry. I’ve done this before, remember?”

  He inhaled to argue, but the distant sound of a howling smokestack cut him off.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The full moon let me see it coming. It raged up the path of the old tracks but it wasn’t on them. It wove across them, ignoring their boundaries, sweeping like a snake on sand. It was a long one. It’d be full of a lot of good things—nails, cotton, wood, corn. That pleased me. Made everything a little more worthwhile, as worthwhile as dying ever got.

  It slowed as it approached the borders of the town. Everyone else had fled out of eyeshot but me and Jim. The train’s cowcatcher tilted from side to side, like the beak of a thoughtful bird, then parted in the middle like a locust’s mouth, to click ominously to itself.

  “I’m over here,” I told it and walked forward. “I’m ready.”

  The locomotive wheeled up a few more feet. Perhaps it was more used to the feminine form, the smell of fresh rope, the sound of screams. If it turned tail and went away….

  “Come on. Come on you stupid thing.” I picked up a big rock and threw it at the train. It rattled and bounced off the hollow metal side. “Come on, already!”

  The train’s cowcatcher opened wide then clashed together, over and over again. I nodded at it though I didn’t know how it could see me, if it saw at all.

  “I’m waitin’.” I stood, quiet.

  It reared back in front of me, half of the engine arcing upon itself, then sprang.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  It’d been a long time since I’d died. I’d almost forgotten after the shock of the pain how nice the dark was. Only time I ever got to see it. Only time I ever got to rest.

  “You’re killing him!” The rising voice of a man-child from a distance. As distant from me now as the gnawing sensation at my feet. “You can’t come back to life from being ate alive!”

  Chances were, no, you couldn’t. Here’s to hoping.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “S’like you were lucky, Hangman.”

  I blinked. The sun was high, but a well-placed hat let shadows fall on me.

  “Never was one for luck.” I felt my fingers and my toes. Even my boots always survived with me. If I’d known that bit before they’d hung me I’d have bought a more comfortable pair. I stood and surveyed what I’d done. The train’s carcass stretched out from where I’d killed it, kinked like a pubic hair. Some of its boxcars were already scavenged clean, empty, and these would be put to use, for storage, homes, or torn apart and melted into new metal monsters, ones that might behave.

  The hat belonged to the Mayor. I nodded at him as I dusted myself off.

  “We can do this again,” the Mayor said. “You know we can—”

  “I can’t.” It’s why I stopped helping people long ago. You showed people the gift of death, and they always got greedy. Always thought they knew who should die, who should live, and when. I wouldn’t mind so much I supposed, if it ever worked on me.

  It wasn’t that Sister Crow had saved me from the noose as that she’d taken its power and given it over to me. I was the noose, now, could noose anyone I wanted, as long as I was willing to go along for the ride. Got a taste every time I did, for something I could never quite reach myself. It was novelty, at first, and then a glamour, but now I was just tired. So very, very tired, and there was no true rest in sight.

  The Mayor looked at me, all of me. “Then we’ll just kill her again then the next time we need things.”

  “You kill her, I kill you,” I said and shrugged. “Take what you got. And leave the whore alone.”

  The Mayor inhaled nasally and spat to one side in answer, before stomping away.

  A crow sat atop the dead train’s smokestack. “Maybe next time?” I asked it. It cawed, and took off into the air. “Fair enough.”

  I arched my back, listened
to the bones pop, and then turned towards my home.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  A mile later Jim ran me down. “You’re alive!”

  I looked down at the boy. “I told you, I’m the Hangman.”

  Jim’s brow furrowed. “It’s not how I thought it’d be.”

  “It never really is.” I walked on and he followed for a time in silence.

  “I was the one that burned the silo,” he said. “It was an accident.”

  “Figures.”

  He ran up around to stand in the road in front of me, blocking my path. “And she’s not my momma. My real momma died awhile back. She did take care of me though, till the dope got her.”

  I waited, knowing he had more to say.

  “I’m sorry she ended up like that. And I’m sorry that we’re not related after all. I wish we were.”

  “She isn’t related to me, either.” I turned around. The earth had crested here, the beginning of a rolling hill, and I could see the train and town left behind me. “No one is, anymore.”

  “Sounds lonely.”

  I turned back towards him and shrugged.

  “I could come with you. If you wanted.” His eyes were the color of good soil, staring up at me with fertile hope.

  “I don’t.” A life with me was no life at all. That’s what really happens when you can’t die—you can’t ever truly live. The last time I had lived….

  “Here.” I fished into my pocket, wondering if it’d made it, through death and back again. But it was there, cleaner now, and less worse for the wear than before. A grey noose, woven from the hair of the only woman I’d ever loved. “Keep it.”

  Jim held it in his open hands like a broke-winged bird, scared to touch around the edges. “Really?”

  “Really. Pass it on. Don’t use it unless you have to.”

  He nodded solemnly. “I won’t.” He looked from his hands and what he held, to me, and back again. “Guess this is goodbye then.”

  I reached out and mussed his hair. “For you, at least.” And then I walked on.

  Copyright © 2009 by Erin Cashier

  Kreisler’s Automata

  Matthew David Surridge

  I.

  Whenever Theodore smiled at me I might almost have imagined him an angel. When he leered at me then in the hall of mirrors, on that day of October in the year 17—, I understood certain grim truths about angels previously obscure to me. “Tonight, Ernst,” he said, “you will take her; despoil her of her virtue, ravage her, leave her without a hope in the world. It is all arranged.”

  “No!” I cried. “It is monstrous!”

  He chuckled and led me through the array of glass. “The Prodigy will play before the court tonight at the palace of Count H—. You’ll watch the performance, then find your way to a certain bedchamber. Olympia shall be awaiting you therein. You’ll ask her a question of my devising. No more than that! Speak the words, she will be yours. Helpless.”

  I said nothing. “I know the greatness of your want,” he said. “I am your friend, am I not? I understand it all. Lust, desire; and then, she is beautiful.”

  “Yes,” I murmured. “Yes, she is.” I could not imagine her beauty, could not frame it in my mind; I was helpless before the question it implied, that same question Theodore now demanded of me and which I dared not answer—what would I not do, to touch that grace? We walked on, watching ourselves watching ourselves.

  The mirrored hall was the only entry to a wide fairground not far from the city of V—. A week before, the country field had been waste wilderness; then walls of iridescent metal had been raised, by whose agency none knew. A gatehouse was built in the center of the walls, and mirrors set within the gatehouse. Reports had spread that a fair was in preparation. Yesterday visitors had finally been allowed within the walls, following which the most peculiar rumors had spread, catching the imagination of polite society. Theodore and I had made the short walk to see the truth for ourselves, and to speak on weighty matters. “Do you know much of her history?” Theodore asked suddenly.

  I shook my head.

  “I have learned a fair piece, I think,” he said. “Some of her past. She has been a mystery since she came to court. But not to me. No longer to me.”

  Together, we exited the hall of mirrors.

  We confronted a clock-tower from which depended a banner bearing the words Kreisler’s Automata and the image of a black bird clutching a gear. Beyond was a clockwork city-in-miniature, its structures built not of masonry or timber, but of iron and copper and stained glass, jade and amber and turquoise; they glittered even in the dull grey light of day. The city’s inhabitants were automata: mechanical men and mechanical women, shaped like residents of all the far times and places of the globe. Wandering Turks, Chaldean astrologers, robed Confucian scholars—we set off walking among them, and they paid us no mind.

  “There is a crime in her past,” said Theodore.

  “I will not think evil of her,” I told him. He smiled.

  “As all men say of women they do not know well,” he observed. “But there it is. A thing dark enough that even to hint at it would bring about her expulsion from court. Therefore, merely a question put to her alone shall serve to establish your knowledge. Your dominance. And that is what you wish. Is it not?”

  I stared at the automata around us, very like living ensouled mortals, but also like waxworks, like mannequins, like ambulatory nutcrackers. Their flesh was brass, their eyes quartz, their expressions and fashions painted things. Mostly they were content to counterfeit the habits and motions of animal men, going about their business as normal townsfolk might, except that none of them spoke or made a sound; only, occasionally, one might see them pause, and tilt their heads, as though listening to a music too profound for human ears.

  “I cannot believe what you say of her,” I said at last. “About Olympia there is a glory which lives forever. A glory I wish I might....”

  “That’s a fairy tale,” said Theodore. “Glory. What do you care for glory? You’re rich.”

  I could not immediately answer him. Yes, I was rich; but that was chance and birth. It seemed to me that there was more to be hoped for, to be won or known or dreamed of. And: “Olympia cannot be bought,” I said. “Therefore the value of my wealth is less than absolute.”

  Theodore laughed. “Do not say that she cannot be bought,” he told me. “Say only that you have not yet found her price. But it may be that I will be able to assist you in that.” I said nothing to this remark, suspecting a philosophical difference between him and I that was beyond my capability to enunciate.

  Some of the mechanicals we passed interacted with visitors in a limited fashion. Before a vast tournament-grounds where automated knights jousted, I played a game at chess with a black king; I lost badly, for lack of concentration. We passed the atelier of an artificial painter who was the very image of a master from the Italian Renaissance, and he offered to limn us, displaying for our edification works of his devising; the precision of their perspectives unnerved me. We walked through a bordello of fabricated queens, of Helen and Semiramis and Cleopatra and Beersheba, and observed their curious interactions; I was educated and saddened, and found myself imagining things I dared not dream of but desired still. The whole of the fair was marvelously strange, built with a craft beyond any science I knew. But I had heard so much in recent years of the progress of rationality and of understanding. Who could say what was to be defined as impossible?

  I wondered what else might be built, there in that artificial paradise. Could a new Olympia be constructed, her body put together piece by piece, a machine made for beauty? I, a new Pygmalion, might then have my Galatea with the blessing of the Queen of Love; but no, I was not so far deluded—her identity was hers alone, and what I craved was beyond my power to copy, merely to adore.

  At the heart of the clockwork city Theodore and I found a palace which, like a mad Gothic cathedral, seemed built of arches and colored glass and curious fluted columns. From w
ithin came the sole sound we had heard produced in all the city, a rapid music in a minor key played by a harmony of many instruments. We entered to find the main hall of the palace was a theatre filled by a synthetic orchestra. There were dozens of automata, each with its own instrument; a parliament of mechanical musicians, sitting in ascending rows on our left hand and on our right. Past the aisle diving the facing rows of players was a vast pipe organ on a raised dais, its body bone-white, the pipes coiled round the keyboards like swollen serpents. A black-cloaked figure, the focus of all other musicians, played upon the organ. And before the dais, in the aisle, a man was dancing.

  This was no automaton. He was skin and bones, his waistcoat absurdly tight, the boots at the end of his spidery legs tattered, a long-stemmed pipe waving in one hand. His skull was shorn at back and sides, a wild lock of dark hair fluttering over his brows. His nose was long and sharp, his chin pointed under in-curving cheeks, his ears lobeless. He was twice my age, perhaps, fifty or more. And he whirled toward us in a spray of limbs, his half-mocking smile upon his lips, and as the music ended he completed his dance with a bow: “Master Theodore! Master Ernst!” he cried. “Welcome to the Tick-tock Fair, welcome to Kreisler’s Automated Amusements! And welcome to the clockwork cynosure at the heart of my domain of improbabilities, welcome to the Palace of Wheels-Within-Wheels! Welcome I give you, yes, and welcome again!”

  “Who are you?” demanded Theodore. “How do you know our names?”

  The strange man danced back a step, and bowed again, a deep ironic bow. “I am Johannes Kreisler, conductor and enabler of all you see around you. I know your names, for there is little within this realm that I do not know.” He shot out his arms and black birds fluttered from his jacket; unliving automata. “All the devices of my kingdom provide my wisdom.”

  Theodore’s lips quirked into a smile. “Why did you make all this, all these things? And how?”