Elizabeth Hand - Winterlong

“Look—look—”

“He has come, the Doctor found him, the one Pearl said, the one, the one—”

“He is here, look, look—”

Giggles and curses; scuffling behind us as they scrabbled across the floor to stare. I felt their small hands touch my ankle or arm, countless children circling me like starveling cats.

“Raphael! It’s me!”

In a patch of orange light Oleander popped up, grinning.

I smiled back. “Oleander! I’m glad to see you—”

And grew quiet; because I was glad.

“I told him, Dr. Silverthorn. Tast’ann—” He lowered his voice. “ The Consolation of the Dead, ” he continued, walking between Dr. Silverthorn and myself and eyeing the other children scornfully. “I told him we had found him, you and me, I told him we found Raphael Miramar, the boy they call the Gaping One.”

Dr. Silverthorn nodded wearily. He handed his bag to Oleander. “Are we to have an audience, then?”

Oleander shook his head. “No. He took more of those pills you gave him, he is making the Saint-Alaban children perform “The Masque of Baal and Anat.’ I think he forgot he told us to bring him.”

Dr. Silverthorn snorted, then waved his hand to indicate that Oleander was to open his bag.

“One yellow and one green one, please,” he said. We had crossed the center of the Cathedral and stood before a door opening onto a dim passage. The air blew fresher from this portal. I breathed gratefully, glancing back at the children scurrying through the nave. They had already forgotten us, all but Oleander.

“Tast’annin will remember about Raphael,” Dr. Silverthorn said after he had taken the capsules. “He has a plan. Worse: he has a vision. Always be wary of men with visions.”

He grinned as he said this, a skull ogling us from the shadows. “Well, Oleander, let us show Raphael to his chamber.”

The passage snaked along the outer wall of the Cathedral, branching often. Stone staircases loomed out of the darkness, a deeper black where they plunged or climbed to secret bays and chapels. Set high up along the smooth gray walls were empty recesses and narrow windows. Some were shattered; some held black traceries that I imagined would show elaborate scenes in colored glass, come daybreak: if day broke here. Oleander kicked through the debris and found a taper which he lit from a smoking pile someone had left beside a door. With him leading us we descended into the Crypt Church.

The air was better here: not the fresh air of trees and sun but cool and still nonetheless, redolent of ancient stone and hidden water. We met no one.

“The children are forbidden here without permission,” explained Dr. Silverthorn. He nodded at Oleander. “ He is a clever boy; a sort of favorite of the Aviator’s, he runs errands and goes where he pleases. As do I; though nothing will hold me back soon, I will go wherever I wish.” A low whistling laugh, air seeping from throat and chest and mouth. “But Oleander races through here like a mouse in the walls. And there are other mice, too, mice in cages, rats in traps.”

I shuddered. I had seen small things scamper across the floor, disturbed by the taper’s uneven light; but I did not like to imagine what he might mean by mice in cages, rats in traps. Everywhere faces glowered at me, white stone figures and flowering columns and bizarre animals, plinths upholding those, whom Dr. Silverthorn had named as Saints and Angels and ordinary men. They observed us impassively, dignified in spite of the decay of years and the occasional spray of graffiti rippling across their severe faces. Oleander walked a few feet in front of us, his broken face pitifully young. He might have been a handsome boy, before the rain of roses; a Botanist for sure, but with a Paphian father I would guess.

“How long have you been here, Oleander?” I asked him.

He shifted the taper to his other hand, shaking wax from his fingers. “I don’t know. A few weeks? We were caught outside, some of us, we were working on the boxtree hedges at the Botanical Gardens. The older ones ran. They left me and a few of the others who couldn’t run fast enough.

“I tried. I tried to take care of them: the little ones. They died soon, except for Lily. My friend Lily.” He was quiet, stopping to scratch one foot. He sighed. “Then she died too. And I went off alone. I found some others, in the woods; I know about plants, so we did all right for a little while, eating things. Then we came here, we heard there was a man here who took care of them, I mean he took care of us, people like us, lazars. He hadn’t been here long; only a little longer than me.”

We followed him silently for several minutes. Then he turned back to us, smiling. “But that was before Dr. Silverthorn got here; and it’s better now, isn’t it? He has medicine and it helps us, I feel stronger than before. He says we’ll get well, if we have medicine and the right things to eat.”

“That’s right,” said Dr. Silverthorn. To me he turned empty eyes that my own thoughts made seem reproachful. In my mind I heard his voice again:

You let them die, you let yourselves die …

Oleander woke me from my daze, pulling at my arm. “Down this hallway.” We entered another passage. This one opened into a wider space where I glimpsed numberless archways leading who knew where, columns carved to resembled huge trees of stone, gates of iron twisted into grape arbors and latticework, statuary fallen from their pediments to stare up at me with cracked faces. In the distance I spied ghostly lights that seemed to dance in the air. When we grew nearer these resolved into banks of tiny colored candles, blue and red and white, burning fitfully on iron tables set against the walls.

“This is the Crypt Church,” explained Dr. Silverthorn. “He makes offerings here. But there is a place where you may rest undisturbed, and Oleander was to bring you food?”

He turned to the boy, who stopped, embarrassed, and fumbled with his free hand through his pockets.

“I forgot,” he mumbled. “Wait—there’s this.”

I took a handful of dried fruit, apples maybe, and swallowed them so quickly I nearly choked. A few minutes later I was rewarded for this gluttony by feeling my insides cramp up painfully; but by then we had stopped.

“Sleep here,” said Dr. Silverthorn. He pushed open a tall iron grille and pointed to a chamber within—how large I could not tell in the taper’s smoky light. Oleander stood aside to let me pass, my heart heavy: I felt as though I were being imprisoned.

“Am I to die here alone?” I asked bitterly. I bumped against some hard object and swore, rubbing my knee. “No light, no food, no water?”

Dr. Silverthorn shook his head. “We can do no more for you now: he will be calling for us, and it is best for you not to meet him until you feel somewhat stronger. Later I will bring you food and water, and light too perhaps. But for now you should sleep—” He, pointed to the floor, where something flat and white had been rolled out as a sort of pallet. “There. And I will give you something to make it easier for you to rest.”

He beckoned me to him. I waited, trying not to weep from sheer terror and exhaustion. I took the capsule he had Oleander give me, watched helplessly as they turned and the boy pushed the heavy iron gate closed.

“Until the morning, then,” Dr. Silverthorn said. Oleander waved. The two of them walked away, the taper fluttering in and out of sight among the arches and columns until the darkness extinguished it completely and I was alone in the Crypt Church.

I WOKE—MORNING? MIDNIGHT ? but it was always midnight there—to find that someone had set a number of candles around me, burning yellow tapers that smelled foul despite the aromatics that had been added to the sulfurous tallow. By their jaundiced light I could finally see my room: a vault really, with a low arched marble ceiling. Its whorls and florid patterns were blackened from smoke and age and seemed to quiver in the light. Besides the pallet I lay upon there were only a number of small wooden chairs for furniture. These were very old, covered with cushions of frayed and rotted embroidery showing strange things: a bearded man covered with birds, wild beasts sleeping at his feet; a storm-tossed boat filled with animals; a white-robed figure surrounded by playing children; a very old man pulling something from a sack. While chairs and cushions alike seemed centuries old they were clean, not covered with dust or mildew as I might have expected. I dropped the last cushion, then paced the length of the chamber. I stopped to rattle half-heartedly the ornate iron grille that kept me imprisoned before stalking to the other end of the vault.