Elizabeth Hand - Winterlong

“Wait,” he said. “Can’t you hear him?”

“I hear nothing.”

He shook his head, still watching the hallway. “The stones shriek as he passes them, and in their crypts the bones of the dead shiver into pale dust; but to the living he is silence itself! It is a wonder.”

He mused for several minutes, his fingers cutting into my hand until I could bear it no more and moved away. “I’m sorry, Raphael,” he said. He still did not look at me. He ignored my physical presence completely now, except for the moments he had held my hand.

After a little while he said, “I thought I would have more time. But it is coming fast now—”

“What is?”

“My sight is blurring,” he announced, as though he had not heard me. “I’m surprised it lasted this long,” he added matter-of-factly. “But I am seeing other things. Come with me, Raphael—”

Abruptly he stood, his hand clawing at the air. I gasped at his face. His eyes had finally collapsed like melting wax. He could no longer see. Soon he would be dead.

I took a deep breath to steady myself. Then I took his arm, flinching at the touch of raw bone beneath the fabric. “Where are we going?”

“To walk a little while, before he comes to claim you. My material eyes are dead now, but I have other ways of seeing. I would have you guide me, Raphael; and I will tell you what I see, and perhaps it will comfort you when I am gone.”

WE PASSED INTO THE dark corridors of the Crypt Church. I carried the lantern and Dr. Silverthorn’s black bag, lighter now than it had been the day before. My companion’s arm rested upon mine like a nearly weightless splint of wood. We walked slowly, my footsteps silent upon the cold stone floor, Dr. Silverthorn’s joints creaking alarmingly, so that more than once I saw the tiny shadows of rats racing away at our approach. Dr. Silverthorn laughed at this, and I wondered aloud how he could see them if he was now blind.

“There is no longer a veil of flesh between myself and the world,” he said. He halted and pointed to one side. “What is there?”

I shrugged. “Nothing: a gray wall of many stones. The narrow passageway continues there, and …”I squinted. “There are some kind of statues up ahead, but here the wall is empty.”

He tilted his head to me. His sockets held only ruined jelly, like the tallow smeared upon the children’s altar. A little longer and even that would be gone. “But they are lovely!” he whispered, letting go my arm to gesture at the blank expanse of granite, smooth except for where names, thousands of names, had been incised in the stone. “Can’t you see them?”

I peered at the wall, stretching my hand to touch its surface, cold and faintly damp, as though I might find there the impression of what he saw. I felt only the engraved letters, and the grit lodged within them. “I see nothing,” I confessed ruefully. “What do you see?”

“Wonderful things,” he murmured. “Many sleeping faces, ancient men and women dreaming of the morning. I think that I recognize some of them. Perhaps I may find Gligor here …” His voice trailed off and his hands dropped to his sides. I realized that he referred to the dead who had been interred within the Cathedral walls.

“You see revenants.” Shivering, I stared at the wall, as though they might start to pour from there like smoke.

“No,” said Dr. Silverthorn. “They are not revenants. They are but sleeping, it is but a long sleep, not to be feared. If only I had known …”

He continued on. With each step I felt him drifting farther from me. It seemed now that he could see through the veil that separated us from the immaterial world, that he walked between the two. He spoke of flowers within the granite walls, and faces peering from empty niches; of many voices raised in song in the great nave above us, and black engines buried in the fruitless earth. The minutes passed dreamlike: the whisper of cloth against my skin the only evidence that I did not walk alone, the whisper of cloth and a soft voice intoning wonders into my ear.

We turned a corner. Far off in the darkness faint yellow lights bloomed. I could no longer hear Dr. Silverthorn’s harsh breathing. His voice had dwindled to a rustle, nearly inaudible; it might have been a voice inside my head.

“He comes,” whispered my guide. The sleeve of his robe trembled as he tried to point at something. “There—they bear him to meet you.”

I squinted. My eyes had been playing tricks on me all this time, giving life to stone and imagining trapdoors in every crevice. It was several minutes before I finally saw that the misty lights in the distance had grown more distinct, formed themselves into bobbing globes. They were drawing nearer. In a few minutes more I saw that they were some kind of torches carried by moving figures; that the figures were weighted beneath something black and solid; that they were indeed bearing something, or someone; that they were coming now to meet me.

“Dr. Silverthorn!” I dropped his bag. My voice cracked; sweat broke out on my neck as I groped for his hand. It was not there. “Is that him? Tell me!”

Dr. Silverthorn had slipped a few feet away, caught between the ruddy light of my lantern and the torches’ smoky glare. He swayed at their approach.

“Greetings, Margalis.” His voice was surprisingly loud and strong, echoing through the space about us. “You have come just in time. I was preparing to leave you.”

The soft thud of heavily padded feet upon stone; a stench of smoke, and of the bier. I forced myself to hold the lantern high enough to cast its glow upon them.

They were aardmen.

They carried a litter of wooden beams wrapped about with rope and cloth, and upon this lay a man. But all I could see were those others: six of them, their spines arched so that they seemed to lope even though they proceeded slowly, vestigial tails switching behind them as they bore their injured master. Large eyes set beneath deep brows, jaws jutting from faces a little too large or too small; long curved yellow teeth rising from blue gums. Ears pressed against sleek dark skulls, pricking up as they drew near, nostrils dilating as they scented me and their tails lashing excitedly.

“Stop here,” commanded a clear voice. They halted, growling softly as they swept their heads back and forth, snuffling, their bright eyes fixed upon me. “Is that him, Lawrence?”

Dr. Silverthorn stepped beside me. “This is the Paphian boy named Raphael Miramar, whom you asked be brought to you.”

The insistent voice said, “But is he the one the girl told me about? The one she met by the river, the one she called the Gaping Lord? Boy!”

He turned, gesturing in the dark behind him. Someone else stepped into the torchlight: no, not one, but two slight figures—the boy Oleander, and, winding about his feet, my white jackal familiar.

“Anku!” I cried. He sat back upon his haunches, tipped his head to stare at me with glowing eyes. Then he raised his muzzle and yelped once, sharply. Beside him Oleander shifted from one foot to the other, trying to keep out of hand’s reach of the man upon the bier.

“That’s him,” the boy stated. He moved anxiously from the jackal and into a pool of ocher light. “ Tell him, Dr. Silverthorn.”

The other propped himself up on his elbows to stare at me. He would be a very tall man standing: big-boned but thin, with sandy hair fading from a high brow and eyes of a piercing clarity, even in this eternal dusk: almost transparent eyes. Later I would see that they were palest blue, like periwinkles whose color had been washed away by dark water. The aardmen had broken his face. Seams stretched across his taut skin from cheek to chin to forehead, ragged scars like cracks in parched earth. One eye had been drawn too near the bridge of his nose and bulged slightly, and the corner of his mouth pulled upward, as though he were perpetually stifling a smile.