Celebrant (48 page)

Where is she?

Overhead, the helicopters seem to bear down on him like droning bores.

She seems to gleam like a phantom planet in a lightless void of her own somewhere.
We find each other in the dark (he thinks).
The image of her and of her body nearly surfaces in his mind, but, with people rushing past him and the street in front of him like a trough lined with grunting pigs, he doesn’t want to risk dirtying her by mixing her in his mind with all these things he rejects.
From somewhere nearby there is a solitary gunshot.
No one looks up.

The blade he pockets in his lungs right away.
Its intangible weight inside him makes him feel a little more composed.
Relentless noise bashes across his back without ceasing, like the pelting rain.

Phryne (he says)

—
just as a man passing him brushes deKlend’s mouth with the bulging front pocket of his corduroy trousers, wiping the word from his lips with the sour fabric.

*

Later, having taken shelter in a mailbox, deKlend sits staring at his hands.
The lid of the box dangles from one hinge, which is fused by rust to the chassis.
Rain trickles down on him from the slot.
The door to the box lies somewhere nearby, and also admits rain when the wind blows.
But the steel at his back and sides makes him feel less exposed to the pedestrians, who are more onerous to him than the rain.

I just hope none of them hit on this box as a handy receptacle if one of them has to puke (he thinks).

He can just see the contorted, shadowy face burst into view above him, the mouth opening half-deliberately, the eyes turning round in surprise to see him in there but unable to stop.
That’s crediting them with the desire to stop.

deKlend looks at his hands, glistening with rain.

Some wizardry this is (he thinks)

Despite the crazed, incessant whooping of sirens, the continuous stream of low-flying helicopters that rattle the earth, the droning, imbecilic shouts of the huge trucks that choke every street, lane, alley, garden path, he manages to fall fitfully asleep.
After his nap in the mailbox, he wakes to find the rain has stopped and it may be nearly sunset.
The air is so dingy and brown in any case that it’s hard to tell.
Emerging stiffly from the box he is immediately borne along the shoving stream of pedestrians and it takes him some time to extricate himself from it by trying to jump on top of a fire hydrant, missing his footing on the big nut on top and plunging forward, luckily alighting on an open place and then leaping onto the top of a low wall and tip-toeing its length, before realizing there is brush and uncultivation on the other side, and jumping down onto that side.

He is at the outskirts.
They seem like only provisional outskirts, in which case you would go through them only to find
inskirts again instead of open country.
He withdraws his sword and examines it critically.
Still a total hash.
The outline he had deliberately scalloped in an effort to make a flambeaux just wavers in shallow, excessively thin protrusions like the edges of a potato chip.
In places the ends of wire and twig are sticking out of the metal, and there are holes in it.

I should throw it away (he thinks brokenheartedly)

In his mind’s eye he watches miserably as his hand tosses it out, the blade landing flat on the waste ground with a muted thump.
A chorus of car horns strikes up on the other side of the wall.

I won’t!
(deKlend thinks defiantly, the inner words are harsh and sudden)

Now, as he looks again through his mind’s eye, he sees how he could fill or smooth the holes, press the twigs and wire ends back in, drop the whole flambeaux idea
—
fatuous anyway
—
and rely on strict simplicity.
That
was the way.

The horns are still blaring.
People are leaning on them, stretching and stretching the noise.
A siren abruptly gargles and barks in their midst.

Shut up!
(deKlend cries)

The words are jerked violently from his lips, and he feels as if he’s made a mistake.
One is supposed to suffer in silence, or, judging by the piteous, forced gaiety of the storefront decorations, to be delighted.
You should rejoice at being wedged into a passionless poison-breathing cold sardine street-brawl.

In his mind’s eye, deKlend sees Phryne singing to him, standing very close to him.
Her face moves in and out of profile, and a strange light plays only on the park beyond her face as she sings.
He longs for her.
There really is no one like her.
He wants to throw himself on her and feel her Medusa’s coils twining around his head.

Picking up his feet high, he makes his way through the rubble and away from the fountaining noise.
The land opens up in front of him for a short distance and then vanishes under a huge belly of murky brown fog.
A wisp of it brushes him and he gets a whiff of it that nearly makes him jackknife at the waist.
Tingling shoots up his soft palate into his sinuses and tear ducts, up to his crown, his feet and hands grow numb and his mouth floods with saliva.
His nose fills with mucus.
He scampers in the other direction, gulping the tepid, porridgey air closer to the town with relish and relief.
No going out that way.

A ruined factory, like a promontory surrounded by scrub land, dwarfs its litter of trampled-looking shacks.
Together they resemble a stricken, steel-hulled ocean liner surrounded by its lifeboats.
The factory alone looks more like two huge open hands thrust up out of the earth, the smokestacks are its separated fingers.

The building in between would have been like the cat’s cradle (deKlend thinks)

A blot of shadow appears in the fog near the roof.
It grows in size and opacity, and then a huge black bird cuts its way from the fog with its knife-like wings.
Balefully, it gazes about itself.
At or near the same moment, there is motion in among the shacks.
deKlend watches as the bird, the Bird of Ill Omen, weaves its course in and out among the remaining smokestacks of the factory, as if it had returned, perhaps out of nostalgic feelings, to consult with the site of a past triumph.
The building between those two gaunt, handlike walls is broken open.
The wall facing the town lies in heaps of tumbled brick, and the roof is torn in half like a sheet of paper, the remaining half canted down at an angle.
It’s easy to imagine a massive, gouging claw plunging down through the building, slicing through all its floors, and pulling the wall away.

Come on my enemy!

deKlend can see the head of the Bird twitching to and fro, the evil flash of the eye as it turns away.
Those eyes seem to find him as the Bird comes around, their touch like a dash of icy seawater.
Now the Bird is circling down, settling toward the roof, or perhaps further down, into the building.

deKlend picks his way through the broad, cluttered street that once led to and from the factory.
The shacks to either side are smashed or sagging or both
—
charred, raw planks, grey and splintery.
Rusted metal.
And huge blots of tar everywhere, still wet and pungent.

The factory towers overhead.
Most of the wreckage of the fallen wall is gathered in piles now bright green with moss.
Entering is only a matter of clambering over a low barricade of tumbled bricks.
There’s a penetrating smell of rust and grease, the earthy odor of wetted concrete.
Crossing into the dim day confined in the walls, deKlend can feel himself press through a membrane of invisible mesh that quivers stiffly as it seals again behind him.

His feet scrape the floor, crunching the grit.
The air is fresh enough.
The space had been split into a great many shops, with rows and rows of small, identical machines in series, most of which still hang like bats from their racks.
A glove lies on the ground like a dead mouse.
A hat is lying flat on the floor.
There’s what’s left of a rifle, rusted to a diseased orange hue, propped against a work table.
Now completely beneath the remaining section of the roof, which dangles high above, deKlend wonders if walking on the ocean bottom would feel all that different from this.

There is (he fancies) the same stillness, and gloom, and oppressive weight, and the fear that something gigantic might explode from out of the darkness like a conjuration of godlike strength and destroy him in a flash.

Suddenly he is standing exactly where he (unwittingly) wanted to be, immediately before an electrical forge.
There is a heap of tools on the steel table to one side, including a stainless hammer and a pair of tongs.
These are seized with rust, but with a fierce pincer motion of his hands he breaks the melted joinings and makes them serviceable.
The forge is a circular dais made of lustrous blue tinsel, covered in mirror-like scars, attached to a generator.
Finding a kerosene can that sloshes when he gives it a shake, deKlend fills the generator tank and turns the key.
The generator catches at once.
The key leaves a mineral residue on his fingers.
The forge sprouts a metal arm with a box on it, and a black knob the shape and size of a rooster’s head on the box.
It clicks when turned.
A distinct snap comes from the forge, followed by a gratifying hum.
The forge looks as though it is standing at attention.

deKlend waves his hand above the flat top of the forge like someone smoothing a bed sheet, and fine wisps of electricity tremble silently up, and trail in a fringe from his arm.
Satisfied, he adjusts the gain and begins heating his blade.
It heats smoothly, fizzing with sparks, and he turn aside to work it.
The sound of the hammer rings out meditatively through the adamantine darkness of the sea-floor.

Adrian Slunj:

Swivelling on his stool, he turns again to face his audience saying

Now,
this
song simulates the screams of the tortured.

His victims are bilious guests, who have overdone it at table and then beached themselves helplessly on the sofas in the parlour.
They’re too stupefied and overstuffed to escape, and Adrian is serenading them;
far too refined in the art of tormenting others to sing about nauseating things, he chooses instead to sing innocuities in a style carefully calculated to produce gastric distress.

From his seat at the spinet, Adrian can see the little bureaucrat in the seat nearest the lamp.
His eyes keep filming over and snotting at the corners.

I don’t have
those
feelings (Adrian thinks smugly) This
is
my face.

To his right, what seem like lights behind an egg head with protractor designs etched on it, but only from his eye corners.

These swiniferous swinifids whose entrails are filled with venomous blonde porridge loll woozily on groaning springs.
A pig boasts about his numbness;
his idea of heaven is filling the whole landscape with his flabby shapeless entrails, churning with tepid pap.