Finch by Jeff VanderMeer (29 page)

Each word like a length of rope Finch tried to hold on to as he fell.
Slipping away under his grasp. Burning his palms.

He saw the floor coming up on him, then the ceiling above as he
managed to land on his back. Shoulder feeling crunchy, like groundup glass. Hand scraping against the floor. Crumpled into darkness.
But, thankfully, not Bliss's darkness. Weightless. No nausea here.
No thoughts.

Except the original one: What was Duncan Shriek doing in that
apartment?

Ghosts of light pearling across the uneven surface of ceiling beams.
Came to his senses in his own apartment, on the couch. A lamp on
the stand by his head. Rathven leaning forward to stare at him. Her
gun on the table between them. A battered old revolver. Heavy.
The kind of thing that at close range would take your heart out,
throw you across the room. Not what Finch would've expected from
her. Curled up next to it, Heretic's list, returned, along with Shriek:
An Afterword and Cinsorium & Other Historical Fables.

With an effort, he pulled himself into a sitting position.

"How long was I out?"

"Just a few minutes." Rathven wasn't smiling.

A sudden, suspicious thought. "How'd you get me in here?"
Reached for his own gun. Found it still there. Tried to make a
graceful motion away from it. Too late. Looked up to see Rathven
frowning again.

"What are you afraid of?" she asked. "That I'm really strong or that
I had an accomplice? Or that I'm going to shoot you?"

"No, I meant-"

"My brother helped bring you in here."

Finch nodded, ran a hand across his face. His hand felt like lizard
skin. In his head a sound like waves.

Slowly realized the apartment didn't look the same. Thought it was
him at first, vision blurry. But no: books tossed on the floor. Paintings
smashed or askew on the walls. His other furniture knocked over. The
kitchen trashed, too. Winced from pain in his shoulder.

"Shit, Rathven. What happened?"

"I don't know. It was this way when we came up. There've been too
many strangers in the hotel lately. Why do you think I'm carrying a
gun now?"

"You didn't before?" Ignored the look she gave him. "I've got to get
cleaned up," he said.

"I'll wait."

He checked the table in his bedroom, with the maps on it. On the
floor. The overlay was torn and had a boot print on it. Of the Partial?
The one he hated? Much as he'd hoped during Wyte's mad charge, he
hadn't seen the man.

The map his father had given him was intact. Still on the table. The
bed was tossed. Pillows on the floor, sheets pulled back. Mattress had
knife marks in it.

Finch considered that for a second. Then went into the bathroom.
Shower didn't work. A thin trickle of water from the sink. He took
off his clothes slowly, knees creaky. Like an old man. Washed himself
clean with a washcloth. Waiting patiently for the water. Cold. Bracing.
A lot of sandy dirt. Especially on his feet. He put on clean clothes.
Same jacket. Bullet hole and all. Found some socks and an old pair of
boots. Felt a little bit more human. Still, the face in the mirror looked
defeated, pinched. Eyes he didn't know stared back at him.

He walked into the living room to find Rathven with a broom,
sweeping up broken glass in the kitchen. She'd already wrestled many
of his books back onto their shelves.

"Rath, you don't need to do that," Finch said.

"No, I don't," she said. Kept sweeping.

Whoever had trashed the apartment had left Finch's whisky alone.
He found a glass. A generous pour. Let the taste burn in his mouth.
Sterilize me. Grimaced as his shoulder tightened. Could've been worse.
Could've been the right shoulder. Interfered with drawing his gun. Or
his sword.

He picked up a chair with his good arm, righted it. Sat, watching
Rathven in the kitchen. Admired how she could focus so single-mindedly
on the ordinary.

"Seen Feral?" he asked her.

"No. I'm sure whatever happened scared him."

"Was the door open when you brought me up here?"

"No, it was closed. And locked. I had to get your key out of your
pocket."

Locked? How?

"Do you know a man named Ethan Bliss?" Had to ask the question.

A break in the rhythm of her sweeping. "Bliss? No."

Finch wasn't convinced. "Ethan Bliss. Smaller than me. Dark eyes.
You might have known him as a Frankwrithe & Lewden supporter
before the Rising ... He was the one in my apartment last night."
Although he didn't have time to trash the place then.

No reaction. Which was a kind of reaction.

"We fought," Finch continued. "It's part of why I look this way."

Rathven leaned on the broom. Eyes narrowed. "How does he look?"

"I don't follow y-"

"Because I wouldn't know. I've never met him."

"Never even seen him? He used to be a powerful man for Frankwrithe
before the Rising."

"No."

Hard to read her. Had, for that reason, sometimes been tempted to
request her file from the gray caps. Resisted the urge. Didn't want to
have Heretic asking him why.

In a low voice, "Are you investigating me?" Her tone said, After all
the help I've given you.

"No, of course not." Scrambled for cover: "Could you do me a favor?
He has a couple of aliases I need checked out."

Finch searched for a piece of paper. Wrote down Graansvoort, Dar
Sardice.

The truth: he couldn't really imagine Rathven hurting him. Not
on purpose. Suspected her of hiding something. But that might have
nothing to do with him. Everyone in the city kept secrets.

She looked at the names on the piece of paper.

"It's all getting more and more complicated, Rathven. Hard to keep
it all clear in my head."

"More complicated than Duncan Shriek?"

"Much more complicated." Doors that were more than doors. Wyte
become something greater and lesser than human. Suddenly, the city was
several cities. Time was several times. As if he'd been looking at his
map and the overlay, and suddenly realized more overlays were needed
to really see Ambergris.

The confusion must have shown because she gave him a half-smile.
A kind of peace offering. "I'll be finished soon. Then you should get
some sleep."

In the apartment Bliss can visit anytime he wants to?

He tried to smile back. "But why did you call? Really?" Teetering now.
Two towers. Heretic's skery. Wyte's improbable charge. Dapple sprawled in
the dirt. Dead.

She held his gaze for a moment longer than was comfortable. As if
trying to convey something to him that could not be said aloud.

"Sintra came by the hotel this morning."

"I know. She told me."

"Did she tell you she came down to see me?"

Finch, suddenly alert: "No ..."

"Did she tell you she asked about your case?"

"It was a short phone call." Already marshaling stones, sandbags,
the wreckage of tanks as a barricade.

"Well, she did, Finch," Rathven said. "She asked me about the case.
We talked about it."

"And you told her about Shriek?" Incredulous.

Flat, dead tone. Not a glimmer of humor in her eyes.

"No. She already knew."

Feral came to the door scratching about ten minutes after Rathven
had left. Frantic as Finch undid the locks on his apartment door.
Complaining about the tragedy of not having been fed. That there
should be such injustice in the world. Despite himself, Finch smiled.

Finch locked the door behind Feral. Once again shoved a chair up
against the doorknob. Put down twice the normal amount of food for
the cat. Then lay down on his couch, forcing himself to eat a packet
of gray cap rations. The packet was porous. The contents a swelling
purple. In his mouth, it tasted like onions and salt and chicken. Knew
it was not.

Welcomed the utter fatigue. It emptied his head. Made it hard to think
about unthinkable things. He'd go back to the station in the morning.
Sort it out. Somehow. The apartment still looked like shit, but not as
much like someone had trashed it. Actually found himself hoping it had
been Bliss, come back to finish the job. Otherwise, Stark was already
upping the pressure. Or, there was an unknown element out there.

Too tired to sleep. Poured himself another whisky. Sat down with
Shriek: An Afterword and Cinsorium & Other Historical Fables. He was
facing the apartment door, with his Lewden Special wedged in beside
his left leg. So he could reach across his body to draw it. Sitting upright
eased the pain in his shoulder.

Cinsorium looked like a kind of abridgment of Duncan Shriek's
theories. He started to read it, then put it down. Needed something
first that gave him more of a sense of Duncan's character.

He picked up Shriek, began to skim it. Saw at once the conceit:
Duncan's voice in parentheses, commenting on Janice's history of a
broken family and the first war between the Houses. Skipped to the
end, read the editor's afterword. Duncan's disappearance. His sister's
disappearance and possible death. The manuscript found in a pub
Finch figured must've gone under or been destroyed years ago. With
notes scrawled on the pages by Duncan. Which meant he'd still been
alive when Janice went missing.

Finch turned back to the beginning. Charted Duncan's rise and fall as
an historian, a believer in fringe theories about the gray caps. Almost all
of them now proven true. Obsessed with a student at the academy where
he'd taught history. A long, unhappy love affair. Duncan turned into a
stalker. Discredited. Become unbelievable. Skipped Janice's own rise in
the art world. Beside the point to Finch. He found Janice an exasperating
narrator. She hid things, lied, delayed the truth. To undermine and slant.
Like a particularly crafty interrogation subject.

Gradually, he got a sense of the tragedy of Duncan's life. How close
Shriek had been to success. To being a kind of prophet. An injustice,
his fate working at Finch's sense of fairness. A staggering sense of an
opportunity lost. A path not taken. An Ambergris where Duncan
Shriek was lauded and the Rising had never happened. Or been
defeated. A horror at the idea of nothing really changing in a century.
The Houses had gone from war to war. The city was more fractured
than ever. Would still be fractured even if the gray caps disappeared
tomorrow.

All depressingly similar, and yet he remembered the brief years of
peace more vividly than the war. No matter how hard he tried to
forget. A better life. A better way.

Kept searching Duncan's asides for anything that might point
to why the man would wind up dead a hundred years later in an
apartment he'd once lived in. Found a reference to switching
apartments to evade the gray caps. Another reference to working
as a tour guide while living in an apartment in Trillian Square. The
place had been destroyed long before the Rising. Finch wondered
if the few children growing up now even knew who Trillian was
anymore.

Then there was Shriek's obsession with Manzikert. With the Silence.
And with Samuel Tonsure, the monk who accompanied Manzikert
underground and who never returned, although his journal-half
evidence of an ill-fated expedition, half the ravings of a madmanreappeared sixty years later.

I became convinced that the journal formed a puzzle, written
in a kind of code, the code weakened, diluted, only hinted at,
by the uniform color of the ink in the copies, the dull sterility
of set type.

A quote from a book Duncan had found helpful called A Refraction
of Light in a Prison had an uneasy resonance with the desert fortifications
from Shriek's memory bulb:

Where the eastern approaches of the Kalif's empire fade into
the mountains no man can conquer, the ruined fortress of
Zamilon keeps watch over time and the stars. Within the
fortress . . . Truffidian monks guard the last true page of
Tonsure's famous journal.

Could Zamilon be the place he had seen in the memory bulb vision?

He read, too, about Duncan's own explorations underground, following
in Tonsure's footsteps:

I could disguise myself from the gray caps, but not from their
servants-the spores, the parasites, the tiny mushroom caps,
fungi, and lichen. They found me and infiltrated me-I could feel their tendrils, their fleshy-dry-cold-warm pseudopods and
cilia and strands slowly sliding up my skin, like a hundred tiny
hands. They tried to remake me in their image.

Like Wyte. A few pages later, a section Janice had taken from
Duncan's journal. About doors. About a door. A kind of recognition
from deep within that stirred him to read carefully.

A machine. A glass. A mirror ... But it hasn't worked right since
they built it. A part, a mechanism, a balance-something they
don't quite understand ... Ghosts of images cloud the surface of
the machine and are wiped clean as if by a careless, a meticulous,
an impatient painter. A great windswept desert, sluggish with the
weight of its own dunes. An ocean, waveless, the tension of its
surface broken only by the shadow of clouds above, the water
such a perfect blue-green that it hurts your eyes ... Places that
if they exist in this world you have never seen, or heard mention
of their existence. Ever ... After several days, your vision strays
and unfocuses and you blink slowly, attention drawn to a door ...
The distance between you and the door is infinite. The distance
between you and the door is so minute you could reach out and
touch it.

Skipped a few pages. Found a section where Janice related a
conversation with her brother.

Duncan: The door in the machine never fully opens.

Janice: What would happen if it did?

Duncan: They would be free.

Janice: Who?

Duncan: The gray caps.

Janice: Free of what?

Duncan: They are trying to get somewhere else-but they

can't. It doesn't work. With all they can do, with all they are,