Dead Boys (6 page)

“Half a year,” whispered Leopold, making some rapid calculations on his fingertips. “And the drinks are on you? Splendid!” Jacob stammered as the map was whisked from his hands. “A generous offer, Campbell, and one you won’t regret in any lasting fashion. Bring your little menagerie along, then, and we’ll wet our whistles whilst wending our way to your treasure!”

CHAPTER FOUR

The Underground University

S
o if we’re just going to a bar,” Remington asked Jacob, “why do we need to pay this guy to take us? Can’t he just tell us where to go?”

“Just
going
to a
bar
!” cried Leopold, his head jerking wildly with laughter. “Oh, Jacob, what an adorable little halfwit you’ve adopted. Remington, allow me to enlighten you now, as you’ll soon be too confused to formulate a coherent question.

“One would be better off giving directions to the Minotaur’s residence than to a place as well-hidden as this. It’s quite impossible to overestimate the difficulty of travel in the Tunnels, and the primary reason is that they aren’t a neighborhood at all: they’re Dead City itself, buried and re-buried over the centuries by the caprices of Lethe. Each time our royal river floods, driving the citizens into the hills for safety, she thoroughly reorders the cityscape, tossing its buildings about like a child’s blocks while dragging in new ruins from the Lands Above. Old-timers tell of a Great Swelling in which every building on the surface was driven underground by the weight of half-destroyed architecture, and lesser disasters occur constantly, making navigation below the streets a constant source of adventure.

“Thus, there are myriad strategies for exploration. A timid reveler might climb down through a gaping hole in the street, mosey to the nearest watering-hole, drink away weeks or months, and climb up again when he’s had enough, or run out of gewgaws to trade for swill. Most guzzlers, however, end up too muzzy-headed to stay in one place, and end up lost in the labyrinth, emerging after an absence of years in some far-off corner of the city! And those are the lucky ones: go alone, and you’re liable to be caught in a collapse, or trapped by a riot, or swallowed in a flood. The whims of the city are wondrous; why, I could lead you to the lip of a well at the bottom of which two lovers are arguing in Sumerian, where they’ve been trapped for thousands of years! Every so often we drop a bottle down to them by way of rope and bucket, and are rewarded with their renditions of ancient Babylonian drinking songs.

“But we won’t be touring such wonders on this trip, I’m afraid, due to that cross on Jacob’s treasure map, which needs baring, and quickly! Am I right, Master Campbell?”

“You are, Leopold, you are,” said Jacob from the rear of the train, gazing up at the mangled buildings of his erstwhile neighborhood as if he didn’t know whether to curse them or bid them a maudlin farewell.

Remington, fascinated by Leopold’s stories of the Tunnels, kept up a steady stream of questions as they walked. “Why do they call it the Underground University?”

“It’s the best place in the underworld to learn new languages. Simply sit down at a table where everything’s Greek to you, let the liquor flow, and a few months later, you’ll stand up fluent in a language lost to the Lands Above for hundreds of years.”

“Where do we go to get down there?”

“I’ll tell you all,” said Leopold, “but first, I have some difficult news to break. Bring that bird below, Remington, and you’ll never fluff its feathers again, for nothing is more unwelcome than a crow in the Tunnels, except for an open flame. Crows go for the eyes when they’re cornered, you see.”

“Oh,” said Remington, knocking at his skull. The crow flapped out and perched on a nearby turret, squawking mournfully at their backs.

“Excellent! Now, regarding entrances and exits, the Tunnels have all sorts: some are no more than ragged holes punched into aboveground buildings, while others are great ramps built for the masses. We could take one of those, but then we’d end up in a bar full of immigrants—no offense, boy, but the ones with brains are often odious. The die-hard debauchees prefer out-of-the-way apertures, such as this shaft you’re about to plunge into. Watch your step, boy, or you’ll never walk again!”

Remington tottered at the edge of a mineshaft echoing with distant voices, located incongruously at the end of a zig-zagging alley. At Leopold’s urging, he climbed out of Dead City’s perpetual afternoon into an equally endless night, lowering himself down a rope of knotted bedsheets into pure, obliterating darkness. “You guys, I’m blind!” he shouted as his feet scraped the bottom, but then he raised a hand in front of his face. “Oh, wait,” he said as he waved it around, perceiving its dark outline, the downy hairs on the backs of its knuckles, even the fading color in its cuticles, “I spoke too soon. There’s no light, but I can see—everything!”

“Indefatigability. Post-mortal immortality. Sight without light. Death does have its benefits, I suppose,” said Jacob as he touched down.

“Not to mention freedom from the humiliating pain of a stubbed toe,” said Leopold. “Onward, fellows. Follow the sound of flowing booze!”

“Not that you’ll be drinking any, Remy,” Jacob warned. “You’ll need to keep sharp—and stay close.”

“Don’t you worry, my boy,” whispered Leopold to Remington, “we’ll loosen his apron-strings even if we have to force the swill down his throat.”

Remington laughed as he followed Leopold’s head down a tilted hallway overflowing with echoes. As they crouched down, then crawled on their hands and knees, he struggled to identify the cacophony. It was only when he’d tumbled through a tiny doorway and into a startling openness that he succeeded: it was the oceanic babbling of the human voice rebounding through a chamber as wide as a football field. Remington goggled as he stood, for the space between this gargantuan pub’s improvised pillars was so crammed with the dead that the taboo against physical contact had been abandoned. Skeletons in rags threw their arms around leathery corpses in top-hats and tails, tin cans and brass goblets clanking before a bar built from a shipwreck. Islands of battered furniture shone with the swill that dribbled from a thousand chins, and everyone Remington could see was either laughing, narrating, sobbing, or involved in some combination of the three. Leopold was greeted with fanfare as soon as the party stepped into the room, and when he emerged from the first round of greetings, he pressed a clay cup of swill into Remington’s hand. Remington poured it down his throat before Jacob noticed, and whatever happened from that point on involved so many strangers offering him so many drafts out of so many containers that he soon found himself with a drink in each hand and another clenched between his knees.

“It’s bad enough that our guide is inebriated,” muttered Jacob, “but you—why, you’re but a child! To say nothing of the damage the swill is causing your untreated corpse. At least try to keep it on the inside of your body, Remington!”

The woozy rush reminded Remington of something, from which he surmised that he had, at some point in his short life, been drunk, and that it must have felt more or less like this. “Didn’t it feel more or less like this?” he shouted at a girl with a face like a jack-o-lantern in late November. “Drinking did, didn’t it? When we were—”

“Don’t say it,” she yelled. “Nobody cares what you used to be. This is better. Death is better. Swill is the best.”

“Swill is the
best
!” hollered Remington, tossing back his plastic cup. When he looked up from the stamp at its bottom the girl was gone, and in her place loomed a pile of broken chairs so tall and precarious that it must have taken hours to stack. Looking down again, he found an overflowing coconut-shell in the place of his plastic cup, then lost himself to laughter.

Time was gone. Time was meaningless. He was standing in the midst of the crowd, swaying, directionless, leaning on the shoulders of Adam and Eve.

Consciousness surged in and out of him. He poured drinks into the open necks of the headless. They danced on a splintered table amidst the howls of strangers. Performing for a woman whose lips had melted away, he stuffed his hand through the back of his throat and shook her hand through his open mouth. She bought him a drink and he tossed it back so hard it splashed through the back of his head. “Thar she blows!” the woman squealed.

A child stood on a bar, his skin covered with extravagant mold like the peel of an ancient banana. He was laughing and filling cups from a gourd made of a human stomach. When all were full he poured the rest down his throat and tossed the gourd to the bartender. How old was the child? If he died forty years ago, and he was eight when he died, did that make him eight or forty-eight? Did the years get crammed into his tiny limbs, or would he be a child forever?

“Pardon me. Excuse me. Hiya! Sorry to interrupt, but do you know where we are?” Remington said to the man beside him.

“The Alley of the Shadow.”

“Do you know Leopold?”

“Yes. Have a drink.”

“Yes.”

“Have a seat.”

“Yes.”

“Yes,” said a bespectacled corpse perched at a well-populated table piled high with moldy encyclopedias, “time is the problem, yes, and we’re in this mess because we have nothing
but
time, because the Magnate said from behind his mask, ‘Our time is infinite, now what shall we do with it?,’ and found a solution for all of us in a system of time-debt, a solution for which he cannot be held accountable, for if he exists as a person and not as a moneyed phantom behind a mask, who is he, and more importantly, where? Oh, there he is, over by the bar; he’s taken his mask off at last, hello there Maggie! Let me finish, God’s bodkin, it’s not as if you have somewhere to be; why patience is in such short supply around here I’ll never understand. As I was saying, yes, an economy based around an ephemeral commodity is a danger to whomever uses it, an incomprehensible mess that we can only hope is understood by its architect, for we’re unable, and therefore we spend what we have in a constant rush, before the poor sod whose sentence we’re spending is freed, we drink it away because we’ve come to believe that this impossible currency really exists, because we’re so complacent that we let eternity be reshaped by its artificial pressure, and why? Because our lives prepared us for just this eventuality, and
that’s
why the Magnate wins, because long before our deaths we’d already been trained to let him. All right then, Chuck, the question you’ve been so patiently interrupting me with, let’s hope it’s a good one, let it rip.”

“Why thank you, Matthias: since you’ve got this all worked out, tell us, if you were the Magnate, what would the basis of your economy be?”

“Teeth,” said Matthias, slapping open an encyclopedia to a discolored diagram of the human mouth. “Yes, boys, that’s right, yes, teeth, they’re simple, yet difficult to forge, yes, Issa, that’s right, and we all came down with a mouthful, so it’s fair.”

“Her teeth?” said a corpse with flesh the color and consistency of beef jerky. He waved a pair of pliers at the woman who was leaning, stiff as a plank, against the bar. “I’ve no doubt they have fillings, Grum, but that’s not in the rules, now, is it?”

“I say the rules is what you make ‘em, Grim!” croaked his eyeless compatriot.

“I say that’s anarchy,” said Grim, settling down to remove her wedding ring. “Bits that’s attached are hers by right. You can have her belt, though.”

“Hey,” shouted Remington to no one in particular, “they’re robbing this lady! She can’t move, and they’re taking all her things!”

No one paid him any mind. “Settle down there, boyo,” said Grum, pulling her belt free and starting on her pantsuit. “We’ve led her safely from the river to the bar, we’ve bought her a drink for her troubles and another for when she wakes, and she’s gone and had her rigor mortis, all of which makes her belongings legally, ethically, and in all other senses, our property.”

“They call it the Dead City Welcome, so they do,” said Grim, holding the wedding ring up to one eye. “Lucky you escaped it yourself, lad, or you wouldn’t have those lovely dungarees to trade for swill!”

“Get you a good rate for ‘em if you’re of a mind to trade,” said the Grum. “Even a back pocket will get you nice and toasty for a week or more.”

“Hair of the three-headed dog, Alfie. Hey, kid, that floozy at the far end, is she on the fresher side of the expiration date, or have I got worms in my eyes? Send her one from me, then. Old habits die hard, am I right? It’s a pity men don’t. Though you know what they say about hanged men, don’t you?”

“Have you seen Leopold?” said Remington to a barmaid the color of a deep bruise. “He has a floppy neck. Or Jacob? He’s mostly made of leather. Or Adam and Eve? They don’t have heads, and they were here just a minute ago, but everyone’s gone now.”

The barmaid slid a drink in front of him with a chunk of rotting potato floating at the top. “A minute? You’ve been nursing that pint for a solid week! You’ll make some new friends, hon, just sit still a few more days.” On either side sat rows of corpses with swill dribbling from their sides. Remington pushed off the bar, leaving the pint untouched.