Mike Allen - Clockwork Phoenix

He crumbled to his knees shedding fringe and feather, and his head hit the flagstones and burst. A smell of beeswax and ripe summer wafted from it, and then the body was cold.

The man in the box screamed and did not stop screaming, and Bell wanted to scream for herself, but her throat was empty now and her tongue would not obey. She fell to her knees and dug kidskin into the rough-grouted stones of the Grand Cathedral.

“So be it,” the priests intoned, and the mass dispersed at five past midnight.

Bell led Book home, weeping all the way, to his loft above the racetrack. The garret was stuffed with shedding paperback novels; their pages filtered the light of the rain-streaked slanting windows. She brewed him weak tea in a battered tin kettle and sat him down at table. The tablecloth was stained with ink.

He fumbled for it tentatively, mewling in the back of his age-spotted throat. Bell took off her gloves and put her hands on his, guided them to the chipped china mug bought decades ago from some tourist shop down the coast. Glaze chipped off as she wrapped his hands around it, left a long scratch, fingertip to thumbpad. Blood welled and she sucked the wound, still weeping in noiseless gulps.

When dawn came the skin where Book’s eyes had been melted away, and he opened new dark eyes, quick as ferrets. “You’ve been crying,” he said, and she nodded. Her voice burned in her throat again, warmed it like a heartbeat.

“We can’t do this again,” she croaked in a voice that had been made to sing not scream, and Book nodded.

Bell went back to the dress shop. Her manager scolded her for the scratch on her hand. She wore demure black lace gloves to work until it healed, a seamed line that curved her hand into a fist when she slept. Book went back to the mold-dampened secondhand shop where he spent his days presiding behind the counter, fingering paper and the curve of illuminated letters. He stared at the coin his customers gave for yellowed textbooks too long, the faces of sheepish men who asked him the odds for whole minutes. People avoided his eyes: too young and nervous.

Nobody saw Candle.

The snow melted. Green and careful shoots wended through the soil into the air, budded, burst. The tree in the centre of the Cafe Mariposa bloomed with pink Japanese blossoms, white apple blooms, drunken lavender lilacs, crocus, and mint. New pegs grew from the trunk to hold hats and capes and light spring wraps, and each was tipped with roses.

Bell and Book met in the Cafe Mariposa when the weather broke for certain. The tree stroked her hair with lilypetal fingers when she took off her cloche to hang it up. Book was shaggy and ragged and wore no hat or coat. There was an inkstain on his earlobe.

“I’ve been calling him night and day,” Bell said. There were pouchy shadows beneath her eyes.

“I’ve been writing him every morning,” Book said, and took her hand.

“What if he didn’t come back?”

The wind coming through the patio heard and fell flat on the tiled floor.

“We’ve a job,” Book said doubtfully. “It’s why we’re here. It’s why they haven’t called us back up yet.”

Unless there’s nobody left to call us back, Bell thought for the five thousandth time, and didn’t speak it. Some things were too terrible to speak.

One day I won’t come when you call me, the wind mimicked, and Bell shivered at the touch of winter. “We can’t do this again,” she said, and led him out of the Cafe Mariposa.

The dress shop where fine ladies bought ermine-trimmed capes lay north, along cobbled avenues lit with converted gas streetlamps, where tinsel fluttered in the wind every month of the year. The junk shop where students prowled through Book’s tailings lay east, through drab apartments and noodle shops where the painfully young quoted philosophy to each other all night. Bell and Book went west, west where the gutters clanked with needles and the lonely walked the streets, hungry for love or drink or junk.

They stopped where a workman stood eyeing the whores, across the street from their long-limbed display, stuffing hands in his pockets and taking them out again.

“We’re looking for Candle,” Bell said like a flute. “He lights up the world wherever he goes.”

“I know a Candle,” the workman sighed, “but she’s a woman, a beautiful woman with a gown that’s crimson and green.”

“He—she, whichever,” Bell snapped. “Where has he gone?”

“I wish I knew,” he said sad-eyed, “but ask the whores; I met her walking with them, and her eyes were nothing like the sun…”

They crossed the street. Book shuffled and kicked garbage with his cracked wingtip shoes. A crumpled wrapper hit a drunk slouched between buildings, and he railed at them in a voice like hours upon the rack.

“We’re looking for Candle,” Bell said nervously, plucking at her skirts. The whores were bright and painted just like him, but it was false and made her ache deep down in her gut. “He is varicoloured as a peacock and arrogant and sweet and men and women both would do anything to hold him.”

“We know a Candle,” they murmured seductively, and Book shifted and hopped foot to foot. “But he is not varicoloured but dun grey, and not arrogant but cowed, and went into the Dark House to die.”

Bell swallowed tears and clenched hands in her skirts. “Where?” she asked, and they pointed.

The road curved south. The road curved through the projects, the falling-down Old Quarter, the factories and cemeteries and emptied into the yard of the Great Cathedral, screaming-stone spires melting and cracking in the damp spring air. There was a guard at the churchyard door, armed with guns, leather, a chain, a frown. Book gave him a damp, crumpled roll of small bills and they passed inside.

The doors of the confessionals were cut into counters, and a row of black-suited madams stood within with keys and cashboxes, sour lemon eyes.

“We’re looking for Candle,” Bell said, low and tired. “He burns too fast, and he stings the back of your throat when he’s almost gone, and you lie awake wanting him at night even so.”

“I know a Candle,” the madam said, “but he is with the Marquis, and you’ll have to wait your turn.”

She gave them a number on a plastic card. They waited.

“I… I forgot how bad it was,” Bell whispered in Book’s inkstained ear as the flagellants came and went, trailing love-sweat and tears across the stones of the Great Cathedral.

“We all did,” he whispered back. The crypt lurked below them. It gnawed cold at their toes. He took her hand and squeezed it. “Not your fault. It’s our job. They wouldn’t have given it if it was…”

He could not finish.

A loinclothed novice called their number, and they followed him up the slippery stairs of the hollowed cathedral towers. The stained-glass windows had been smashed long ago, back when the inquisitors were put to the sword, and nobody had replaced them. A few fingers of spring rain gusted through the jagged remnants.

Bell and Book found Candle curled up on a bed, bleeding onto black satin sheets that wouldn’t show the stain. He shuddered when the door opened. The wounds were already closing.

“You’re alive—” Bell blurted.

“I’m alive,” he whispered, arms wrapped around dimpled knees. “I’m alive. I’m alive.”

Bell stripped off her white springtime gloves and touched his cheek with her bare hand, nails dark red and trimmed boy-short as to not catch and pull fine silks. “You’re alive,” she gasped and pressed him close.

He was Candle. He was not made to die.

“I love you,” she whispered, “I love you, I always have.”

“I don’t love you,” he said dully, and hid his eyes behind her sleeve.