Richard Kadrey - The Grand Dark

Among the people I interviewed for this piece, Frau Mila Weill’s story is typical of the area. She lives in a cramped apartment with her children and grandmother. Herr Weill died suddenly from the Drops a few months earlier, leaving Frau Weill as the sole breadwinner. There are many explanations for the Drops among the ignorant class in these poorer districts: that foreigners from the southern colonies put it in the food shipped north or that chimeras that gobble trash in the gutters spread it with a bite. Frau Weill saw her husband die in agonizing convulsions and wonders if that is her fate too. She has a chronic cough, which is typical in the area, and it has advanced to the point where there is often blood in the sputum. Unable or, perhaps, afraid to go to one of the city’s hospitals for the indigent, she relies on the advice of her grandmother. The old woman tries to comfort Frau Weill using the only tools she has: folk remedies from the ancient past. She assures Frau Weill that she merely has a “touch of Rote Lungen,” and that “thistle-root tea will clear that right up.”

Frau Weill wants to believe her grandmother, but no amount of tea helps her condition. Each day, the red marks on her handkerchief grow. During one of our interviews she confessed that she had thought about finding someone—anyone—to marry so that he would be obliged to care for her family after she was gone. (There was an awkward moment in that day’s discussion when I suspect she considered asking me.) Though she still uses her grandmother’s tea remedy, she continues to believe that her condition is really an early stage of the Drops. However, she has formulated her own theory: that the disease isn’t spread by foreigners or chimeras. Frau Weill believes that it comes from the very air.

Spurred on by what can be seen only as a new urban folk belief, one morning Frau Weill took some of the household money and attempted to buy a gas mask from one of the cleaners in Kromium. She says that he laughed in her face. To make matters worse, the conductor on a tram asked her to get off, as her coughing fits were disturbing the other passengers. Since then, she remains at home, waiting for what she believes is the inevitable. Frau Weill keeps a constant watch on her arms and legs, certain that someday soon the convulsions will come. As our final interview came to a close I once again had that sense that she was on the verge of proposing marriage, and I was obliged to leave more abruptly than is my normal fashion.

Whatever the truth is about Frau Weill’s condition, we must agree on one point—that the “city silver” air in Lower Proszawa is as much a defining characteristic of the place as prewar High Proszawa’s clear blue skies. While the high city was known for its universities, museums, and sprawling stone mansions, the swirling gray gusts of the low city represent progress, industry, and strength. And while those things might inconvenience some, the power plants that fuel the place and the armaments factory that keeps all of Proszawa prosperous and safe are national treasures every bit as much as the high city’s more traditional elegance. 1

While the trip to Haxan Green had been fast and pleasant, his arrival in the old district was decidedly less so. Largo hadn’t been in the Green in years and the place was grimmer—and grimier—than he’d ever seen it.

The Green had once been a fashionable district where wealthy families from High and Lower Proszawa enjoyed their summers, spending many nights at the enormous fair at the end of a long pier. But the pier and fair had collapsed decades ago and were now nothing more than a pile of waterlogged timbers festooned with canal garbage and poisonous barnacles that killed wayward gulls.

The derelict homes that lined the broad streets had once sported gold-leaf roofs and sunny tower rooms that gave the inhabitants views of both the High and Lower cities. Now the buildings were rotting hulks, the gold leaf long gone and the roofs crudely patched with wood from even more run-down habitations. Most of the lower windows were blocked with yellowsheets and covered with metal bars from fallen fences. Few had any glass to speak of. The addresses of the old homes had all been chiseled away. This was by design rather than neglect, though. Only those acquainted with the district could find any specific dwelling. Fortunately, Largo knew the Green well.

He chained his bicycle to the charred skeleton of an old delivery Mara outside one of the tower blocks. Skinny, filthy children played war in the weed-strewn yard, throwing imaginary grenades of rocks and dirt clods at one another. The children stared at Largo for only a moment before going back to their game, but he knew their eyes were on him his whole way into the building. He checked his pocket to make sure he had a few coins so there wouldn’t be any trouble later.

He walked up three flights of stairs littered with stinking, overflowing trash cans and sleeping tenants too sick or drunk to make it all the way home. There were holes in the walls where old charging stations for Maras and wires that provided light for the halls had been torn out, the copper almost certainly sold to various scrap yards along the canal.

Without numbers identifying the individual flats anymore, this could have been a difficult delivery, but through long practice, Largo knew how the apartments were laid out—even numbers on the north, odd on the south—so he found his destination without trouble.

Out of habit, Largo straightened his tie before knocking on the door of the flat, then felt foolish for it. A straight tie was the last thing that would impress Green residents; it might, in fact, make them hostile. But it was too late now. He’d already knocked.

A moment later an unshaven man wearing small wire-rimmed glasses opened the door a crack, leaving the lock chain across the gap. “Who the fuck are you?” he said.

Largo took the box from his shoulder bag and said, “Delivery,” in a flat, indifferent voice. Saying anything more might invite suspicion. Speaking any other way definitely would.

The unshaven man tilted his head, taking in Largo and the box. His hair was gray and thin. There were scabs on his forehead near his hairline. It looked like he’d been picking at them. “Where’s the other one?” he said.

It took Largo a second to understand that the man meant König. He shook his head. “He doesn’t work there anymore. It’s just me now.”

“Huh,” said the man. “You’re a bit pretty for this neck of the woods.”

Largo straightened, feeling the knife under his jacket. His sense for the mores of the old neighborhood was coming back to him—as was his hatred for them. He knew what would come next from the scabby man and how he was supposed to respond, and the cheap game brought back frightening childhood memories. He said, “Fuck off, my fine brother. I grew up by the canal on Berber Lane.”

“Did you now? You’ve cleaned up since then.”

“My compliments to your spectacles.” Largo loathed the ritual posturing of the Green, and he’d hoped never to have to do it again. Yet his promotion had brought him straight back to this awful place. It wasn’t an auspicious beginning for the new position. He pressed on, holding up the little box and waggling it up and down. “Do you want it or not? I don’t have all day.”

The man was starting to say something else when a piercing scream came from somewhere in the flat. “Wait here,” he said, and closed the door. Standing in the hall, Largo heard more screams through the door. Questions and images flowed through his head. Had the scabby man kidnapped someone? Was someone—a woman, he was sure it was a woman—being beaten in another room? Or was she dying in childbirth? The next scream wasn’t just a wail, there were words: “Now! Now! Now! Now!” Largo dug his heel into a splintered part of the floor as it dawned on him that he recognized the screams.