The Grimscribe's Puppets (8 page)

Since the bedroom episode he’d not had any full blackouts, complete with mystical fugues. Just spells of feeling panicky and confused, which didn’t go down well with his friends or family. Was this his real self? Was the more thoughtful Max a tune he’d forgotten how to play? Was there no way he could share what he felt?

And then there was the drink Colin sold him. A spirit with a dull metallic tang in a bottle with a plain black label. Its darkness emptied his mind, as if he was in tune with the stillness of outer space. He wondered if it was a narcotic, but it didn’t seem addictive enough. He didn’t mind it, but did that make him an addict? And the drink—he thought of it as
nothing in a bottle
—blocked his appetite for other drinks, as if they were all inferior versions.

He drank with Colin though, in the pub off Vyse Street, enjoying the younger man’s fey charm and mystical turns of phrase. When he asked Colin why the view through the special glass was dark when the glass itself was not, Colin said: “The light from another world always appears as darkness.” Another time, slightly the worse for Dutch gin, he clapped Max on the shoulder and told him: “You’re an artist of pain, my friend.”

But what was the art? Colin talked about Max’s “journey of isolation,” but never asked him to write about it or draw it. Max was recurrently aware of wanting to kiss Colin, but he knew that was just a token of a greater need. He didn’t want sex any more, these days; he wanted what he’d once thought sex could give him. It had no name.

Winter blurred into a formless spring. Max’s work in the office became more erratic, his phone calls less articulate. He put on weight. When his tailored shirts began to feel like straitjackets, he bought cheaper and looser ones. He missed medical appointments, performance targets, having something to lose. The only thing he still hoped for was to know that his struggles actually meant something. Even if what they meant was something he’d been better off not knowing.

He phoned Colin on a rainy morning, needing answers but not sure what questions to ask, in the end just saying: “I want to work for you.”

“You’d better come to the office,” said Colin without missing a beat. It was in Fazeley Street, by the canal—one of the few sections of Digbeth that weren’t either derelict or being redeveloped.

“Are you working tomorrow?” Colin asked. Max was. “OK, how about this afternoon?” That was fine. “I’ll see you then,” the businessman said. Then he chuckled—a sound he must have practiced, it couldn’t come naturally. “At last you’ll find out who and where you really are.”

It was still raining after lunchtime, but flickers of sunlight played on the gray canal. Colin’s office was part of a narrow building whose windows were protected by fine wire grids. Mortar was trickling down from between the bricks. Max felt sure that if he waited, the rain would wash away the building’s image from the stone canvas of Digbeth. He rang the bell next to the small OUTSIDER ARTS plaque. Colin opened the door, wearing his most winning smile.

The office was up two flights of grimy stairs. Max wondered how Colin had answered the door so fast. The climb winded him; wherever he looked the painted walls held a faint smear of yellow light, like distant streets at night. It seemed far away from the city.

When Colin unlocked the flimsy office door, Max could hardly see into the room for the chaos of objects that covered the dusty floor. Cameras, loudspeakers, amps, lighting stands and other items were crammed together, linked by miles of tangled black cables. None of it looked capable of working.

“Walk this way,” said Colin. Max resisted the temptation to mimic the younger man’s nervous gait. He had to watch his step in any case to avoid tripping over things. Colin led him through a labyrinth of visual and sound equipment to the middle of the office, where an open trapdoor led down a short flight of stairs to the first floor.

There was less light here, but Max could see a bewildering array of artifacts clustered on tables and shelves: books, CDs, video-cassettes, framed photographs, sculptures, abstract paintings and items less easy to define. There were multiple copies of each work, so the room had the feel of a warehouse rather than a studio. Max noticed that the blue glass appeared not only in small panes, but in curved panels and even distorted vases. Bottles with plain black labels were ranked on long metal shelves along the walls. Once again, Colin pointed to a central gap in the floor that led to a further flight of wooden steps.

The ground floor was a jumble of half-lit medical equipment, most of it clearly too old to be any use. Did the whole building belong to Outsider Arts? If so, it was hardly a functioning office: just a random house cluttered with jobs left incomplete or not even begun. The air was damp; Max shivered. Were those bare wires on the black table really trailing from a car battery? What were the translucent shreds of material pinned to a tall wooden block by what looked like a row of glass knives? He glimpsed a peculiarly stained enamel tub, a closet where black shapes hung on wires, a moldy ceramic vat with no lid.
Fuck this
, he thought, and made for the door. But Colin’s hands were on him, pulling him back, and his body—never on his side—had no power to resist.

The eager hands forced him into a wire cradle that hung from the ceiling, and attached tight cuffs to his wrists and ankles. Max cried out, but the sound disappeared into the room’s jumble of distorted surfaces. He could barely hear his own voice. Colin switched on a huge steel-bodied lamp with a lens of blue glass. Max saw his own shadow crouching on the wall, twisted into a corrupt fugitive shape. With a craftsman’s delicate touch, Colin adjusted the wire cage to tighten the shadow’s pose. Then he opened a small case, took out a syringe filled with some black fluid, and injected it into Max’s left arm. He felt the sting above the pain of his trapped muscles, adding insult to injury.

Some time passed. He couldn’t see what Colin was doing. The lamp changed color from blue to white, and then to red, but his shadow remained the same. He wondered if he could move even if the cuffs were taken off. His breath seemed to curdle, tasting sour, almost freezing on his lips, though the air wasn’t cold. A terrible silence echoed in the room.

Then Colin came back, holding something that Max couldn’t quite see. Was it a piece of broken glass? Ignoring his prisoner, the salesman bent over the trapped shadow and cut it to ribbons. Each slice, the silhouette of a twisted body, curled away and lay twitching on the floorboards. Colin hung them on a rail, one after another. Max could hear them screaming.

Finally, he felt Colin’s small hands releasing him from the wire cradle. He slipped to the floor, but his posture didn’t change. The slices of his shadow flinched, tortured by contact with each other. Gently, as if handling a broken pot, Colin carried him through the last trapdoor into the unlit basement. The walls were streaked with mold. On the stone floor, Max could just make out a dozen or more figures like himself, lying in fetal positions. Their skin was dead white. Only their eyes moved. Then Colin went back up the steps and closed the trapdoor, and in the dark he left behind there was no sound of breath.

By Darrell Schweitzer

When the time came at last, Edmund Marshall, poet, eminent author of books on natural history, professor at a prestigious university, loving husband and father, knew that, however reluctantly, he must leave his satisfactory life forever. It was a seasonal thing, an instinct in the blood, like what birds feel when, after flying north for so long, inexorably, they turn south.

Therefore he put down his fountain pen, gathered the pages and notes of his latest work in progress into a folder, then scribbled a note on the folder to his chief graduate assistant,
I guess you’ll have to finish this
, and placed folder and pen in the middle of his office desk. Handwriting manuscripts for someone else to keyboard was a privilege still allowed to tenured senior professors. Perhaps he would be the last ever to exercise it.

He paused for a moment, trying to organize his thoughts as neatly as that file, to focus on what he should do next. He glanced at the photo of his smiling wife and exquisite, sixteen-year-old daughter, and thought that he should call his wife, not to explain, because no explanation was possible, but just to hear her voice one last time, to make small talk.

He felt real pain now, and something bordering on panic. His heart was racing. He was beginning to sweat.

He realized he couldn’t quite bring to mind his daughter’s name.

He snatched up the phone on the desk and dialed. The line was dead. Then, as he got his coat, he took his cell phone out of the pocket and tried that. No signal. Ridiculous, of course. Here, in the middle of the city, in the middle of the campus, there had always been signal, but now there was none.

All he could do was put the cell phone back into his coat pocket.

Outside, he noticed at once that something was gone from the world. A lot of his work, his field work, took him outside, and although his teaching position kept him firmly shackled to an urban office and classroom much of the time, he loved the outdoors and had a sharp eye for living things; but now it seemed as if the world itself were an image badly printed on a magazine cover, with one of the color filters missing. As he walked across the campus, he saw no birds, no squirrels. The spring flowers seemed to lack vitality, as if they were made of paper. If anyone greeted him as he walked, as students often did, he did not hear them. The sounds of the people around him faded into a dull static.

He continued on his way, like a salmon leaving the ocean forever, to swim upriver one last time to spawn and meet its fate. Only he didn’t think this had anything to do with spawning.

He left the campus and made for the subway, as he would when commuting home, though he wasn’t going home, not now. The token he dropped into the slot was, he noted with only minimal interest, featureless.

It seemed that there were no other people on the platform. Maybe there were, but they vanished in the periphery of his vision every time he turned his head. Any background noise, much less any human voices, faded into a murmur like the sound of waves that you hear when you’re falling asleep on the beach.

He wished he could have fallen asleep, then awakened from a bad dream back into his real life, but that was not to be.

The train came for him alone. He stood in the middle of the empty car, surrounded by graffiti and faded, ragged posters for old movies and old products he vaguely remembered from childhood. If there were more stops, he was not sure. If people got on and off around him, if they talked and lived their lives, they were on another wavelength and he could not quite perceive them.

He tried to weep. He searched around inside himself for that emotion and could not find it.

The train roared and rocked in the black tunnel, but after a while even that faded into a susurrus of soft background noise.

He could not tell when the train stopped. He had no memory of actually getting off, and was only aware that he was walking up a flight of stairs, past a broken escalator, out of total darkness into the gray, half-light of an utterly empty, cavernous station in which there was
no sound at all
, not even the echoes of his own footsteps.

He passed a newsstand covered with ragged, yellowing newspapers and magazines with curling covers.

Outside, it did not seem that hours had passed, that he had somehow made the transition from a spring morning into an unnatural twilight; more a matter that light, too, and color, had been leeched away. The cityscape before him had an oddly two-dimensional look to it, like some vast construct of cardboard cutouts on an amateurish movie set, feebly backlit.

The only thing real to him was the cold. It was very cold, and the air had a dusty, acrid taste. His eyes watered. His throat was raw. He put his hand over his mouth and tried to breathe through his fingers, as if that would somehow help.

Then there were people around him, rushing in the opposite direction from the one in which he was going. He pressed through the stream of them. They buffeted against him, like puffs of wind. Close up, he could see them clearly enough, but in the distance they seemed to flicker and fade, like shadows on an ill-lit wall. They were all, he realized, in flight from something. He felt their muted fear, their exhaustion and despair. One woman, very young, but dirty, haggard, gaunt, with a limp, motionless child over one shoulder clung to his hand briefly and said, “You will help us, sir, won’t you? You will stop him from getting out? You will do it?”

He made no answer, but kept on, one foot ahead of the other. Ahead, the darkness roiled, like smoke.

Then he was alone again. The darkness closed behind him, featureless, with only the cutout buildings looming before him. He found a door. It didn’t have a doorknob, but a crude circle painted where the doorknob should be; yet it opened at his touch. Inside, he passed through many featureless, empty rooms, rendered very slightly less than utterly dark by curtainless, rectangular windows, until he came to a stairway and began to climb, passing a door of the disabled elevator on each landing. He never paused, but continued his ascent because he could do nothing else, go in no other direction, as helpless as the salmon working its way upstream.

That woman had asked him for help, begged him to do what had to be done. He couldn’t think what that might be, but he resolved to try. He
had already
resolved to try. That thought he had already formed, before any of this began. That much he could still cling to. He wished he’d been able to find the words to reassure her. Too late for that.

At the very last he came to a room which, quite shockingly, was lavishly furnished, like a throne room, actually cluttered with faded, dusty hangings and furniture and with vast, crystal chandeliers hanging unlighted from the ceiling, and what looked for all the world like gold-covered mummy-cases lining the walls, only the faces on them were not of stately, Egyptian kings at all, but hideous parodies, diseased, deformed, and lascivious.