Elizabeth Hand - Winterlong

“Toby Rhymer! Yes, of course I know them. Toby Rhymer and the talking troglodyte, Miss Scarlet Pan. I wept once when she performed: oh, it was lovely!” I hesitated. “There was a boy from Persia who joined them, Fabian—”

The folds of the skeleton’s gown flapped as he interrupted me, shaking his gloved hand. “Your sister is with them! I am certain of it.”

I frowned. “How could she have found them? Surely she and the Saint-Alaban would have died, alone in the City—lazars would have caught them, or the rain of roses, or—” I did not want to admit to this learned Ascendant that I feared the aardmen, so I gestured in the smoky air. He shook his head, candlelight pricking the roiling wet shadows of his eyes so that they glittered shrewdly.’

“They did not die. I do not know if Wendy Wanders can die: although many patients she touched at HEL did. Perhaps her Paphian savior is dead now too: my guess would be that he is.” He sucked in his breath and laughed hoarsely. “But she is alive: I know it.

“After her escape we began to hear stories, hearsay about a boy in the City, an actor commanding audiences and calling himself Aidan Arent.” He paused, waiting for me to show some recognition.

“You must forgive me,” I said. “ My last few months were spent among the Naturalists, who have little use for Players—or Paphians either,” I added bitterly. “That name means nothing to me.”

“He is described as being seventeen years of age, with tawny hair once close-cropped but now growing longer, gray eyes, a surpassingly beautiful face and voice. He possesses a supernatural ability to charm and terrify his audiences. And despite the fact that he usually takes the feminine roles in performance, a number of Paphians in his audiences have remarked upon his startling resemblance to a favored catamite now feared dead, one Raphael Miramar.

“Knowing Wendy, and having seen you, I can attest that this at least is true: you are her mirror image.”

I sat in silence, oddly disinterested. It was as though he spoke of someone besides myself. And of course he did speak of someone other than me; although perhaps it was that this Player, Aidan Arent, sounded more believable than did Raphael Miramar. I shook my head but said nothing.

Behind Dr. Silverthorn the candles burned more and more brightly. The tallow melted into smoking pools upon the altar. Rivulets of flame ran down its marble facade as the burning fat dripped to the floor. In front of this flickering display Dr. Silverthorn glowed like a taper himself, the brilliant light glowing through his robes so that the bones beneath showed stark black, and I could see inside his chest a small dark shape like a fist clenching and unclenching. When he spoke again his voice rang loudly, though it still rasped like a saw through his throat.

“Some of those who have seen Aidan Arent perform have said he is the Gaping One.”

I stared back at him, shaking my head. “That’s impossible.”

He grinned, carmine light dancing from his teeth. “Why? Because you are the Gaping One?”

“Of course not!” I said, but he went on as though he hadn’t heard me.

“The Mad Aviator thinks you are. That’s why he’s brought you here.”

I stood, bewilderment and anger vying inside me, and stalked to the gate. In the distance I could see the little candles in their banks of dusty glass holders. The wavering shadows made it look as though figures darted back and forth in the murky light; but I heard nothing there. “Why are you insulting me?” I demanded hoarsely. “Isn’t it enough that you brought me to this crypt—”

“If Tast’annin hadn’t ordered the children to capture you, you would be dead now.”

“Better that than this!” I grabbed the iron bars and bowed my head, grief striking me like a stone. “Better you had killed me!”

He shrugged. “Better I had died after that viral strike, the way Gligor did. But I did not, and you did not. I have only a little time remaining; perhaps you have longer, perhaps you have less. But you have power, Raphael; and not all your friends are dead.

“In the evenings I go among the prisoners here and minister to those I can, to ease their last days. The Consolation of the Dead would have it that way,” he said with soft irony.

He walked toward me. I backed against the gate, frightened by how quickly he moved, the light in his eyes extinguished to malicious darkness. “There is a little girl imprisoned here. She was captured yesterday near the House Miramar with a party of mourners. I saw her last night. When the child heard where I had been she described you, and asked if I had seen Raphael Miramar among the corpses at the Butterfly Masque. I told her you were here, and alive.”

“Fancy,” I whispered. I had not forgotten her; rather had spent the last hours refusing to think of her, making a gift of her memory to those minor deities Grief and Exhaustion. “Where is she?”

“Here. I can tell you no more than that. As I said, my allegiance is to the Aviator. If he is pleased with you; if she does not succumb to madness or illness or the lazars; if you do not fall prey to this place: well then, he may treat you kindly, and treat her kindly, since she is your friend.

“The children told him of meeting you by the river. Pearl was another— favorite of his.” He grimaced at some unpleasant memory. “She too thought she had met an Angel walking in the forest; and this gave the Madman an idea.

“He has many interesting ideas.”

He stood near enough that I could smell the sweetness of his decay, the bitter chemical residue of the antibiotic ointment. He reached for me, his gloved hand moist and cold as it gripped my chin, firmly as though it were held by metal forceps.

“How odd,” he murmured. Through the thin gloves, damp and already starting to rot into strings of dirty cotton, the blades of his fingers cut into my chin. I was still terrified of contagion, but feared even more his anger and the plunge back into solitude if he left. “You look exactly like her …

“She was so beautiful, our Wendy; but mad, we all knew she was quite mad. All of them were by the end. It was one of the secondary effects of the Harrow Project, because of course they were all grossly flawed children to begin with; and who could endure such a life, living constantly the nightmares and hallucinations of others day after day after day, and never waking from your own dreams? But we made of them the walking vessels of our madnesses and it made them more lovely and then grotesque, the gynander Merle sprouted more breasts, Taylor’s eyes turned from gray to white and finally calcified like granite pearls, Gligor began to smell of carrion and butterflies flocked around him in the garden, Anna woke one day to find in her bed a shriveled homunculus with her own face and withered male genitals …

“But Wendy only grew more beautiful and deadly, although of course she could not see it, she was incapable of recognizing anything but pain and horror and fear and she embraced those, oh she did. Emma Harrow was a fool, not to see what was happening to her prize changeling, that stolen child now stealing with no thought or reason the fancies and desires and finally the very hopes of all she touched, leaving only despair in their place …”

I listened fascinated to his ravings. He let go of me and began to pace, three steps and then back, three steps and back, as though some imaginary cage about him was shrinking to the size of his ribs. In my mind a strange picture took shape, the image of this creature called Wendy Wanders: a girl so like me she could pass for a boy and fool my own people into thinking they saw me upon a dusty stage. But with this grew something else, a sensation so hard and bitter it was like an unripe fruit I had swallowed to rot and fester inside me: the idea that all of the horrible things that had happened to me had happened by mistake. It was not Raphael who should have seen death and dishonor and abandonment, but this other thing, this awful simulacrum called Wendy that had somehow broken free from the Ascendants’ prison, and in so doing had loosed the rage and grim delight of the Gaping One upon the City.