The New Weird (30 page)

He feels his body. Except for the rat, the hooks are empty.

He rolls his legs out of the bed, brings his feet to the floor. He pushes his body upright, steps away from the bed. Without keys, his movements are awkward and extreme, his balance tenuous.

He rests one hand against the headboard for balance. Reaching down, he untangles a ring of keys from the pile and hangs it on his harness. He takes another ring, and another, and another, the heap beside him diminishing, his body growing hard under the weight.

He falls into bed. He pulls the sheet up to his neck. The door opens. "How are you feeling, Brey?" says his father. "Feeling?" says Brey.

His father shakes his head. His father comes to the edge of the bed. His father leans over him. He leans down into Brey's body. He presses his mouth to Brey's mouth.

Brey tastes the taste of his father taking away his breath. His father is all powerful. His father is a myriad-minded man. Brey will be lucky to survive.

The Art of Dying

K. J. BISHOP

MONA SKYE, the duellist and poet of lately tragic fame, lay where her friends had placed her, on brocade cushions in a corner of the smoking room beneath the Amber Tree cafe.

Illness, allowed to run rampant, had repaid the favour with curious gifts. Fever made her long, austere face beautiful. It reddened her lips and made her grey eyes sparkle like stones. As her lean body wasted towards frailty it had come to exhibit the strange liberal grace of a strong thing weakened and perversely unashamed of its new tenderness. Even her pale hair appeared softer and brighter then before.

The disease turns her into that old cliche, the beautiful and beloved thing that can live only a short while...
Vali Jardine could taste her own anger as if it were in the mildly opiated smoke she inhaled through the pipe of the narghile that stood on the carpet between them.

Anger had been Vali's closest companion since the night, back in summer, of the Sending of Sins, when Mona had drunkenly sworn to let Death catch her at last. She would face the grinning bastard, she said; seduce him by being more ardent than he, so that when the end came she would take him, rather than the opposite. She had made this announcement to discomfited onlookers in the crowd gathered on the bank of the Leopold Canal at Jubilee Point to place paper lanterns in the water and watch them float away down the long dark stream, past the porches of the old slumbering floodlit mansions and the new sleepless factories. The next morning she rejected her medicines, throwing all her tonics and powders out onto the little courtyard below the apartment she and Vali shared.

A male voice came out of the gloom on Mona's other side. "She's asleep." A black damask sleeve reached across the cushions and pale fingers lifted the pipe out of her hand. The man's features were visible as faint mouldings in the shadow under a curtain of long black hair. His name was Gwynn. A sometime adventurer from Falias in the snow-swept north of the world, he and Mona had once been comrades in arms and sweethearts down in the canyon country west of the Teleute Shelf. The love affair had been uncomplicated and brief and their friendship had endured. Parted by circumstances, separate routes had brought them to Sheol, where both had found a new metier playing the city's games of justice.

Gwynn drew on his own pipe and looked from his old inamorata to the woman who was now her lover.

"Why don't you take her somewhere cleaner? Out of the city."

"A suburban cure? Rock beats scissors, boredom beats tragedy?"

"Shouldn't the pastoral be expected to win a battle now and then?"

"In its war with the heroic? The famous restorative power of grass and goats might work, but not against the power of her audience here, I wouldn't think."

"Then don't bring her back to them."

"And where should I take her?"

"Anywhere away from the evil comforts of prison." Gwynn exhaled a stream of smoke and pushed his hair back from his face, revealing pale, greenish, heavily slitted eyes.

Vali snorted. "When will you be packing your bags and leaving, then?"

He laughed lazily. "I tried once, but I got homesick. My soul likes it here entirely too much. But that dear soul there is of a different quality. She was always a runner."

She wanted him to be quiet. "You don't have the right to talk about souls. You only know about bodies, Gwynn."

She supposed that even more than his silence, she wanted a fight, which she wouldn't get.

He laughed again, as if he didn't mind the insult at all, and said,

"Well, this body is tired. And so are you, I daresay. I'll get us a cab." Raising himself, he took up his guns and sword from the floor and buckled them on, and took a further minute to impose order on his clothing, lastly pulling on a pair of black kid gloves that he stretched over his fingers with a slightly pedantic air.

Vali watched the back of his damask tailcoat recede into the haze of oily lamp-lit smoke. Almost all of Mona's friends had deserted her, fearing they would catch her illness. No doubt embarrassment had motivated some of them. She wondered whether it was love, loyalty, or something else that kept Gwynn hovering around.

And what about you, whom she rejects along with the rest of the world? Is this only the natural course of love ― the turning away from the partner and towards solipsism, given a public airing? And should you wear the disgrace?

She addressed her reflection in the narghile's glass belly, as if it had some power which could explain her own soul to her. But the image, distorted by the curve of the glass, showed her no oracle, only a woman in mannish clothes: dark of face, not so young, not unhandsome. The old caste scars on her cheeks didn't show in the dim reflection. Her hair was rolled into the long, tight dreadlocks worn by the military clans of Oran, her homeland in the southeastern tropics. She had kept the style for aesthetic reasons and, also, because she had no wish to discard all of her former self.

It was a common saying that everyone in Sheol was a foreigner.
Smells on the wind,
Mona had called the city's population once, on a day when they sat people-watching in a briefly voguish bar on Arcade Bridge.

Vali found her boots and tugged them on. Her fingers were sluggish fastening buckles and laces. All she had got out of the night's indulgence was torpor without calm.

Over the troubled sound of Mona's breathing, Vali became aware of an irregular noise behind her; a quiet scratching that inspired a mental image of a mouse scuttling over a slate floor. She looked around and saw a reedy, fair-haired teenager perched on the edge of a divan, writing in a notebook. Vali would have taken him for one more poet hunting inspiration in pipe dreams if she had not seen him give her the furtive, inquisitorial look of the gutter-begotten press. Well, she would see for herself the nonsense he was writing.

She rose, advanced, and, glaring, snatched the notebook out of his hand and skimmed the jottings therein. He had written:

Society Report: Mona Skye, the renowned sabreuse, sonneteer and despiser of the world, observed unconscious in a drug den on the notorious Sycamore Street strip. The end appears to be nearing for the self-destructing heroine.

At the Cutting Edge: Mona Skye's worsening condition has cast a gloom over the demimonde and beyond. Conversations are not sparkling. Beaus and belles inhale sedatives and dress like undertakers. Expect the chic look this winter to be formal, functional and funereal.

Art Update: Is Mona Skye's slow suicide art? Many think so. Despite the resistance of the conservative establishment, public opinion seems to be with the progressive critics who have been claiming that death as performance is the ultimate art form, an art against which there can be no appeal. They may well be right. Watching Mona Skye, one apprehends a strangely exquisite unfurling of energies, an unravelling of reality and the expected. Killer and victim are one, coexisting in a symbiosis of extended intimacy in a performance as unique as an individual life, a condensation of life as a journey toward death that all must undergo, and a logical answer to illogical life.

It was only the usual drivel, but Vali couldn't help taking it personally. She felt the pressure of fury rising inside her like steam in a boiler. Her mind flung up an image of an autopsy where loafing
pretentieuses
clustered around Mona's body while quaffing aperitifs and gobbling hors d'oeuvres. She rubbed the pommel of the sword at her hip. But words were the only weapons permissible here, and unlike her lover she had little talent in their use.

She said frigidly, "It's in poor taste to serve up a person's suffering as entertainment for the chattering classes."

The boy gave a large twitch, but he attempted no evasion. He was wearing a suit that needed some cleaning and a leather coat that was at least two sizes too big. His hair had the untidy appearance of down on a wet duckling.

"Ma'am," he said, "the last thing I want to do is offend. This city looks to your profession for inspiration in everything, including matters of taste."

Every day she walked past children playing "Chop-Chop" and "Kill 'Um All" on the pavements. Duellists were feted in popular culture. Their images were made into character dolls and reproduced on household items and souvenirs. Wildly fictionalised, lurid stories about their adventures and private lives were printed for an eager public in cheap magazines with titles like
Corinthian, Hearts and Blades
and
Tales from the Theatre of Woe.
Girls dressed up as Mona, painting their faces white and drawing ornamental trickles of rouge down their lips.

This fame had once been Vali's as well. Like Mona and Gwynn, she had employed herself as a professional duellist in the juridical playhouses of the city. However, her beliefs concerning justice had caused her eventually to hang up her mask and withdraw from the milieu of the monomachia. These days she earned a plainer living as a bodyguard and fencing tutor.

Sometimes she saw dolls with her face on sale or collecting dust in secondhand shops. Merchandise featuring Mona's image, on the other hand, was currently riding a wave of popularity.

No one's guiltier of bad taste than she. She's making a shabby exhibition of herself, and I'm accepting a part in it, thought Vali.

"I have a duty to the people," the kid journalist said. "They must have information." He drew himself up, lifting his chin pugnaciously to look Vali in the eye. "The freedom of the press is sacred, ma'am."

Vali looked down at him. "Nothing is sacred," she said flatly. She gave him back the notebook, in which he immediately resumed writing. She had the impression that he was recording the incident which had just occurred.

"Can I quote that? 'Nothing is sacred?'"

She was sorry she had allowed herself to get angry at a magazine hack, of all insignificant people.

"Go ahead," she said wearily.

Gwynn returned then, emerging out of the smoke and shadows. "Our chariot awaits," he said. His gaze took in the pen-wielding youth and he raised a mildly inquiring eyebrow at Vali.

"Let's go," she muttered.

Vali carried Mona. She followed Gwynn up the stairs and out through the back door to the lane behind the cafe. The youth trailed, introducing himself to their backs. His name was Siegfried and he worked for
Verbal Nerve
magazine. Perhaps they read it, or had seen it somewhere?

The vehicle waiting in the lane was a rickety hooded chaise harnessed to a skin-and-bones nag whose ill condition was typical of Sheol's cab horses. Vali and Gwynn were too busy seating Mona comfortably inside to notice Siegfried positioning himself to get aboard. When he squeezed himself in next to Vali, she felt herself at a loss. Gwynn ignored him, evidently regarding him as her guest and her problem. Merely telling the kid to leave seemed a weak reaction to his bizarre effrontery, and if he refused to go, what could she do? To forcibly remove him would likely rebound in publicity of the least desirable kind. She could imagine the tabloid headlines ―
Former Hero's Brawl Shame.
Vali resigned herself to accepting it as yet another strange and uncomfortable situation to be endured, and gathered up her dignity.

"Magnolia Terrace, river end," she ordered the driver of the chaise, a bent and leathery old woman wearing a battered tricorn and a voluminous cloak.

The beldam cracked her whip and the horse lurched off at a trot, taking them down a lane to the left and into the traffic and crowds that filled Sycamore Street from sidewalk to sidewalk despite it being the middle of a cold autumn night.

It was crowded on the seat under the canvas hood. Vali and Gwynn had twisted sideways to give Mona more room. Siegfried found himself poked by scabbards and gun butts wherever he tried to sit. He abandoned the seat and stood on the footboard, and from there began an impromptu interview. Mona being still unconscious, he questioned the other two.

How many people had they each killed? Did they enjoy their work? In their respective views, what was the duellist's role in society? What did they do in their spare time? How were their homes decorated? What did they think of Mona's dance with death? The youth fired questions and chased answers with relentless zeal, in seeming oblivion to the peril he would be in should one or both of his captive subjects lose patience. Or, if he did understand, he was stimulated by the danger.

Vali responded with monosyllables or morose silence. Gwynn gave their interrogator better satisfaction, responding with answers which, whether true or not, would make good copy. Siegfried filled pages with shorthand notes. Vali suspected Gwynn of slightly enjoying the attention. However, her mood was too grim and grieving to allow her to feel any amusement.

To Vali, their progress took on the confused, uncontrollable quality of a dream. She started feeling that she had slid sideways into an alternative, stupidly surreal existence which was crammed full of details that were irritating, strange and boring all at once. Crowds of late-night shoppers and partygoers surged under green and red silk lanterns hanging on wires across the streets, hurrying as if on missions of great and secret importance. The hag put the whip to the horse, which panted like a demon-beast in front of them, white breath steaming from its nostrils and bones moving like pistons under its skin. Mona's lovely head lolled, saliva pooling in the corners of her mouth.