China Miéville - The Last Days of New Paris

“Did you find phantoms in the forest?” Thibaut says. Her calm energy is beyond him. “‘Chemical-blue, twisted machines of jujube-trees of rotten flesh’?”

“Yes,” she says. “And I took their picture. They’ll be in the book. I want the ruins. Soldiers. The Resistance.” She takes a picture of him in his nightclothes.

“Is it not too dark?” he says.

“Not for this camera.”

Thibaut breathes deep and considers. A heavy hardback. Photographs, eulogy, the nights and days of Paris after the blast. Who will write the text?

“So the Nazis saw you taking pictures and came after you,” he says. “With those wolf-tables. They think you’re a spy. What was it you photographed?”

Sam examines her camera. “Mostly what I want is the manifs,” she says. He thinks he sees distaste when she says that, alongside her eagerness. “I’m not leaving until I catch them all.”

They listen to the hooting of predators and the calls of prey astounded to exist. From behind the ripped-up car a feathered sphere the size of a fist rolls into view, sending up dust. It opens. In its center is a single, staring blue eye.

Sam stares back at it.

“It’s eating,” Thibaut says. “They live on looking.” It feels good to tell her things she does not know. “You can catch them and make them fat if you show them bright colors. Then we roast them.” The meat was greasy with everything they’d seen. A horde of the things rolls into view behind the first. Sam takes pictures as they regard her.

Thibaut decides he will stay with her a while.

Mosquitoes come. “I heard about a cell of your people,” Sam says. “A big one, maybe the main one. That there was a plan. I heard they were ambushed.”

Thibaut says nothing and he doesn’t look up. He continues to divide his food. He has bread and smoked meat. Sam has chocolate she says she bartered from an American secret agent on some mission of murder.

“They’re all in here,” she says when she sees him looking at it. “This place is crawling with that kind. They’re on their own in here.”

“This secret agent can’t have been very secret,” Thibaut says.

She laughs. “He was at first. They always tell you in the end.”

When the Germans sealed the city, the U.S. government, like every, expressed its outrage. And, also like the others, was relieved. That the manifs and their energies—and, or, the devils—would be contained.

“But you can’t keep this in,” Sam says. “Best you can do is slow it. Things have started happening.”

She tells him of the North Africa campaigns, the dragged-out misery of the Pacific, Europe after the rain. But what Thibaut wants to know most is what she can tell him about Paris. Because perhaps he has been too close to see. The mission is vacant.

The glow of the nearest streetlight comes up, then wanes. An animal lands on a windowsill, a winged monkey with owl’s eyes. It watches them.

From somewhere there is a loud crack and it flies instantly away. The building groans like a ship.

Something is creaking within, something knocks and approaches. Something descends behind the door.

“Fold over paper,” Sam whispers. “Fold it over and what might come out?”

Step step step. Sounds approach them, beyond the wood. A scratching and the slow slow click of a lock. The door swings open. Inside it is darker than the street.

Thibaut does not breathe. With a careful jerking step, something comes out of the shadow.

A towering, swaying thing. Three meters tall. More. It blinks with alien gravity.

It stands like a person under a great weight, swaying on two trim legs. At its waist it is made of lines, offcuts of industry. A tilted anvil-like workbench, bits and machine pieces higher than Thibaut’s head. He stares up at a pole of fetish objects. A clamping bench on engine parts on patient human feet. At the top of it all, an old man’s too-big bearded face looks down at him with obscure curiosity. In his beard, a steam train the size of a cudgel, its chimney venting smoke into the bristles. The old man wears a larva on his head. Some limb-long bright caterpillar, gripping an outsized leaf. It wriggles and the leaf-hat flutters, hedgerow chic.

A random totality, components sutured by chance. It stands. Thibaut stares at this thing. It looks back at him, as the first manif he ever met, its cousin, did through its helmet grill, years before.

Sam’s camera clicks. “Exquisite,” she whispers. For the first time, Thibaut hears fear in her voice. “Exquisite corpse.”

An ugly percussion shocks them out of awe. There are shouts and shots. Out of the dark, German soldiers come running.

Thibaut ducks behind the remains of the car and fires.

Behind the attacking Nazis a jeep is rocking over the rubble toward them. How long have these soldiers been waiting?

Thibaut fires as they come and tries to focus and counts and calculates what he can see. There are too many. His heart slams. Too many. He holds his breath and reaches into his pocket, for the card, this time, he thinks, in time.

But the exquisite corpse is striding into the road. The soldiers gape and fire. It raises its limbs and all the German bullets, even those misaimed, curve in the air, fly right into it, stud its body with resonant sounds.

Some of those shots were at Thibaut.

The soldiers have nets and strange engines. He can feel them. A lasso whips and snares the manif. In the jeep Thibaut sees two men, a thickset uniformed driver, a black-coated priest. He glances at Sam and she looks as if she is saying a prayer. Thibaut slams his rope cosh, the twisted wolf-table lash, against the ground.

The exquisite corpse leaps. For the moment of its jump everyone in the Paris street feels as if they are on the mezzanine of a snake-flecked staircase.

The world torques—

—and Thibaut and Sam and the exquisite corpse are standing a long way from where they were, meters from the Nazis. There is the silence of confusion.

The rope still snags the manif, stretching back into a now-distant engine on the jeep’s flatbed. A pulley starts to grind, and the cord tightens, strains to reel the exquisite corpse in.

It tugs back like a playful horse. It turns in ancient-eyed attention to the officers of the Reich. It puffs out its cheeks and semaphores its limbs, wheezes into its beard, rips into the street with the edges of its machinery body.

A tear full of white. The edges of reality break. The Nazis stagger on the wrong side and broken bits of car crumble into that papery void.

The exquisite corpse nods, and the Nazis all lurch and fall and slide away as if it shoved them.

Sam is running away from the rip and the soldiers. Thibaut hesitates, grips with his innard sinews, and goes to the exquisite corpse. He pats it gently with the tip of the rope-cudgel.

Its body resonates under his tap like a hollow oven. It turns slowly and looks down at him with its man’s head and eyes. He moves back. With skittish steps, the manif follows him.

“Come on!” Sam shouts. The Nazis fire from beyond the reknitting hole, and Thibaut spreads his pajamas into a shield, like a weaponized sail, and, the exquisite corpse behind him, he runs.

“Did you smell the exhaust from that jeep?” Thibaut says.

“Blood smoke,” Sam says. “That doesn’t run on petrol any more. They must’ve refit it with the help of demons.”

“They were trying to snag this thing,” Thibaut says. “Like with the wolf-tables. They’re trying to control manifs. And they almost did.”

“Not this one they didn’t,” Sam says. She looks back uneasily and away again. “They didn’t have a hope.”