Benjamin Percy - The Dead Lands

“I can’t walk around my own city?”

“No, you can’t. There are plenty who would like to kill you.”

“I want you to take me below.”

“Below?”

“I want you to take me to see Jon Colter.”

His lips might thin. The skin might tighten around his eyes. Otherwise, Slade’s face is as hard and featureless as the stone blocks stacked into walls around them. “I’ll get the keys.”

There is a wind turbine located on top of the building, and the lights pulse on and off at a steady rhythm, so that after a while you get used to the passing darkness, as if a great eye were opening and closing. Slade does not bother to fetch a lantern, so every few paces they pause and wait for the lights to brighten again.

When Slade keys open the door at the top of the stairs, the smell comes rushing out and nearly knocks Thomas back. It is almost tactile, something that grows hair and pisses and shits, something that can crawl down your throat and claw out your insides. He brings a hand to his nose so suddenly he slaps himself. His eyes film over with tears.

Slade says nothing, but his mouth horns at one corner, the beginning of a smile. He leads Thomas down the stairs. With each step his boots thump and his keys rattle, but over the top of this Thomas can hear something else. The sound of many people breathing, like an uncertain wind. A voice muttering. A moan that goes on so long it becomes a wretched song.

At the bottom of the stairs, before a caged door, the lights fade and black out and they wait there for a few long seconds. The noises grow louder. Thomas can hear feet padding against concrete. Hands gripping bars and rattling them. A stream of urine splattering the bottom of a bucket. Whispers.

The lightbulb above them sizzles to life. Slade unlocks the door and the two of them pass through and it shuts behind them with a clank. To their right reaches a cinder-block wall — and to their left, ten cells, their bars a chipped white. Several of the men are naked. Their hair is long and matted. The ones who are white are as white as grubs from lack of sun. Some of them crouch in a corner; some lie on their cots and observe the visitors with craned necks. Others press their faces between the bars, like this man, who looks like a skull with slimy hair and who hisses and spits until Slade slams a baton against his hand and sends him whimpering to the floor.

There are only two lights socketed into the length of the room. They dim and die just as Thomas and Slade reach the final cell. In the bewildering darkness Thomas tries to remember how close he stands to the bars and wonders how far a man might reach. He can hear someone, in the near distance, breathing. He imagines fingers ghosting through the air, grabbing hold of his neck.

He waits, and he waits, what feels like an interminable length, and just as he is about to call out a question to Slade and ask if something is wrong, a surge of light brightens the air. He blinks until he finds his focus.

The man at first appears like some shadow that clings to the cell. He stands with his back to them. He has been imprisoned here as long as Thomas has been mayor, a year now, but confinement has not softened him. One of his arms is raised and his back and shoulders jump with muscle. He is short but square, built like a blunt weapon. His attention is focused on the wall, which he has sketched over, made into a mural. In his fingers he pinches a piece of metal, maybe a nail, and he uses this to scratch the concrete. There are many-headed beasts battling men with swords, naked bodies twined together in lust or combat, severed heads trailing ropes of blood, skeletons dancing, every inch of wall etched into some curious detail. The floor, too, has been sketched over. And small bits of stone carved into what look like trolls, fauns, beasts.

“Turn around,” Thomas says.

The man adds some flourish, a horn on a head. “There.” He drops his hands to his hips and turns to face them. The light is faint, making every line on his body stand out with shadow. The muscles rippling across his stomach. The scars, too. There are many of those. He appears like several bodies stitched together, many membranes of skin pulled taut and discolored, the most noticeable of them across his face. The left side of it has been torn away, one eye like a white egg deep in a nest of scars. His ear merely a hole, the hair around it gone and the skin a mottled gray. His teeth reach across his cheek, so that half his face appears always gathered up in a grin.

“You’ve been busy,” Thomas says.

“Have to find a way to pass the time. Otherwise, a man’s likely to go crazy.” His voice sounds rough-edged, rusted out. “You’ve come to say you’re sorry?” His permanent half smile makes it difficult to tell whether he’s joking.

“I’ve come to offer you your freedom,” he says to Colter, first in darkness and then in light, as the lights sizzle off and on. “And ask for your help.”

Colter’s tongue worms along his bottom lip. “Why would I want to help you ?”

“Because this”—Thomas steps close enough to the cell to knock the bars with an open hand—“is your alternative.” The clang of metal shakes the air.

Colter runs a finger along his arm, tracing the purple ridge of a scar. “What about my wolves?”

“Still alive. Still scaring children. We’ve kept them at the zoo.”

“All of us in cages, eh?”

“Not anymore. Not if you bring me back some heads.”

The lights crackle off again, and in the dark the men keep their silence. Several seconds later, there is a sputtering hum and the air goes from black to gray to yellow, and Thomas sees that Colter has crept closer, to the very edge of the cell, his fingers curling around the bars to either side of his ruined face when he says, “Let me out then. Let me out and bring me my wolves.”

LEWIS WAS SUPPOSED to be her supervisor, her teacher, though often their roles seemed reversed. Ella did as he asked, but with some complaint or revision. They had a set of rules between them. She did as she was told — she looked to him for guidance and instruction — but so did she point out his every failing. He did not like his schedule disrupted. He suffered always from headaches and moodiness. He grew peevish and short when he couldn’t find what he was looking for, and on and on. He was a difficult person, she told him often, and he did not deny it.

Together they discovered his dead mother. The way he held her, with his arm behind her back, made her body arch as if she were a torture victim suffering some unimaginable pain. When Ella touched him on the elbow, when she told him to set his mother down, he let out a guttural cry but otherwise said nothing and did as he was told. She then took his clammy hand and dragged him down to her height and kissed his cheek.

She doesn’t know he is gone, not for sure, until the deputies come looking for him. He has been missing all day. She has never known him to break his routine, but figures, with the recent death of his mother, he may have earned an excuse. After the deputies rip through his office and bedroom, after they knock down bookshelves and turn over his bed, they drag Ella to a medieval display, a room full of lances and flails and tapestries, where Rickett Slade is waiting for her.

Of course she has seen him before, dropped her eyes when they passed in the street, but they have never spoken. He sits in a massive gold-trimmed throne. He barely fits, the arms of it biting into the sides of his belly. Across his thighs rests a baseball bat — her bat, the only weapon she keeps in her quarters, with the word Peacemaker burned by a magnifying glass across its cracked, wooden length. On the floor, tossed aside, lies the sign she wrote in careful calligraphy, Please do not sit on the display .