City of Saints and Madmen

I

The hall contained the following items, some of which were later catalogued on faded yellow sheets constrained by blue lines and anointed with a hint of mildew:

• 24 moving boxes, stacked three high. Atop one box stood

• 1 stuffed black swan with banded blood-red legs, its marble eyes plucked, the empty sockets a shock of outrushing co on (or was it fungus?), the bird merely a scout for the

• 5,325 specimens from far-off lands placed on shelves that ran along the four walls and into the adjoining corridors — lit with what he could only describe as a black light: it illuminated but did not li the gloom. Iridescent thrush corpses, the exhausted remains of ta ered jellyfish floating in amber bo les, tiny mammals with bright eyes that hinted at the memory of catastrophe, their bodies frozen in bri le poses.

The stink of chemicals, a whiff of blood, and

• 1 Manzikert-brand phonograph, in perfect condition, wedged beside the jagged black teeth of 11 broken records and

• 8 framed daguerreotypes of the family that had lived in the mansion. On vacation in the Southern Isles.

Posed in front of a hedge. Blissful on the front porch. His favorite picture showed a boy of seven or eight sticking his tongue out, face animated by some wild delight. The frame was cracked, a smudge of blood in the lower le corner. Phonograph, records, and daguerreotypes stood atop

• 1 long oak table covered by a dark green cloth that could not conceal the upward thrust that had splintered the surface of the wood. Around the table stood

• 8 oak chairs, silver lion paws sheathing their legs. The chairs dated to before the reign of Trillian the Great Banker. He could not help but wince noting the abuse to which the chairs had been subjected, or fail to notice

• 1 grandfather clock, its blood-spa ered glass face cracked, the hands frozen at a point just before midnight, a faint repressed ticking coming from somewhere within its gears, as if the hands sought to move once again — and beneath the clock

• 1 embroidered rug, clearly woven in the north, near Morrow, perhaps even by one of his own ancestors. It depicted the arrival of Morrow cavalry in Ambergris at the time of the Silence, the horses and riders bathed in a halo of blood that might, in another light, be seen as part of the tapestry. Although no light could conceal

• 1 bookcase, lacquered, stacks with books wounded, ravaged, as if something had torn through the spines, leaving blood in wide furrows. Next to the bookcase

• 1 solicitor, dressed all in black. The solicitor wore a cloth mask over his nose and mouth. It was a popular fashion, for those who believed in the “Invisible World” newly mapped by the Kalif’s scientists.

Nervous and fatigued, the solicitor, eyes blinking rapidly over the top of the mask, stood next to

• 1 pale, slender woman in a white dress. Her hooded eyes never blinked, the ethereal quality of her gaze weaving cobwebs into the distance. Her hands had recently been hacked off, the end of the bloody bandage that hid her le nub held by

• 1 pale gaunt boy with eyes as wide and twitchy as twinned pocket watches. At the end of his other arm dangled a small blue-green suitcase, his grasp as fragile as his mother’s gaze. His legs trembled in his ash-gray trousers. He stared at

• 1 metal cage, three feet tall and in shape similar to the squat mortar shells that the Kalif’s troops had lately rained down upon the city during the ill-fated Occupation. An emerald green cover hid its bars from view. The boy’s gaze, which required him to twist neck and shoulder to the right while also raising his head to look up and behind, drew the a ention of

• 1 exporter-importer, Robert Hoegbo on, 35 years old: neither thin nor fat, neither handsome nor ugly.

He wore a drab gray suit he hoped displayed neither imagination nor lack of it. He too wore a cloth mask over his (small) nose and (wide, sardonic) mouth, although not for the same reasons as the solicitor.

Hoegbo on considered the mask a weakness, an inconvenience, a superstition. His gaze followed that of the boy up to the high perch, an alcove set half-way up the wall where the cage sat on a window ledge. The dark, narrow window reflected needlings of rain through its tubular green glass. It was the season of downpours in Ambergris. The rain would not let up for days on end, the skies blue-green-gray with moisture. Fruiting bodies would rise, fat and fecund, in all the hidden corners of the city. Nothing in the bruised sky would reveal whether it was morning, noon, or dusk.

The solicitor was talking and had been for what seemed to Hoegbo on like a rather long time.

“That black swan, for example, is in bad condition,” Hoegbo on said, to slow the solicitor’s relentless cha er.

The solicitor wiped his beaded forehead with a handkerchief tinged a pale green.

“The bird itself. The bird,” the solicitor said, “is in superb condition. Missing eyes, yes. Yes, this is true.

But,” he gestured at the walls, “surely you see the richness of Daffed’s collection.”

Thomas Daffed. The last in a long line of famous zoologists. Daffed’s wife and son stood beside the solicitor, last remnants of a family of six.

Hoegbo on frowned. “But I don’t really need the collection. It’s a fine collection, very fine”—and he meant it; he admired a man who could so singlemindedly, perhaps obsessively, acquire such a diverse yet unified assortment of things —”but my average customer needs a pot or an umbrella or a stove. I stock the odd curio from time to time, but a collection of this size?” Hoegbo on shrugged his famous shrug, perfected over several years of haggling.

The solicitor stared at Hoegbo on as if he did not believe him. “Well, then, what is your offer? What will you take?”

“I’m still calculating that figure.”

The solicitor loosened his collar with one sharp tug. “It’s been more than an hour. My clients are not well!” He was sweating profusely. A greenish pallor had begun to infiltrate his skin. Despite the sweat, the solicitor seemed parched. His mask puffed in and out from the violence of his speech.

“I’m sorry for your loss — all of your losses,” Hoegbo on said, turning to the mother and child who stood in mute acceptance of their fate. “I won’t keep you much longer.” The speech never sounded sincere, no ma er how sincerely he meant it.

The solicitor made a noise between a groan and a choke that Hoegbo on did not bother to catalog. His thoughts had returned to the merchandise — rug, clock, bookcase, phonograph, table, chairs. What price might they accept?

Hoegbo on would not have included the cage in his calculations if the boy’s stare had not kept flickering wildly toward it and back down again, gliding like Hoegbo on’s own over the remnants of a success that had become u er failure. For all the outlandish things in the room — the boy’s own mother to be counted among them — the boy most feared the cage, an object that could no more hurt him than the green suitcase that hung from his arm.

A reflexive sadness for the boy ran through Hoegbo on, even as he noted the delicacy of the silver engravings on the chair legs; definitely pre-Trillian.

He stared at the boy until the boy stared back. “Don’t you know you’re safe now?” Hoegbo on said a li le too loudly, the words muffled by the cloth over his mouth. An echo traveled up to the high ceiling, encountered the skylight, and descended at a higher pitch.

The boy said nothing. As was his right. Outside, the bodies of his father, brother, and two sisters were being burned as a precaution, the bodies too mutilated to have withstood a Viewing anyway. The boy’s fate, too, was uncertain. Sometimes survivors did not survive.

Nothing could make one safe. There had been a great spasm of buying houses without basements or with stone floors, but no one had yet proven that such a measure, or any measure, helped. The random nature of the events, combined with their infrequency, had instilled a certain fatalism in Ambergris’ inhabitants.

The solicitor had run out of patience. He stood uncomfortably close to Hoegbo on, his breath sour and thick. “Are you ready yet? You’ve had more than enough time. Should I callSla ery or Ungdom instead?”

His voice seemed more distorted than the mask could explain, as if he were in the grip of a new, perhaps deadly, emotion.

Hoegbo on took a step back from the ferocity of the solicitor’s gaze. The names of his chief rivals made a li le vein in Hoegbo on’s le eyelid pulse in and out. Especially Ungdom — towering John Ungdom, he of the wide belly, steeped in alcohol and pork lard.

“Call for them, then,” he said, looking away.

The solicitor’s gaze bored into his cheek and then the foul presence was gone. The solicitor had slumped into one of the chairs, a great smudge of a man.

“Anyway, I’m almost ready,” Hoegbo on said. The vein in his eyelid would not stop pulsing. It was true: neitherSla ery nor Ungdom would come. Because they were afraid. Because their devotion to their job was incomplete, insufficient, inadequate. Hoegbo on imagined them both taken up into the rain and torn to pieces by the wind.

“Tell me about the cage,” Hoegbo on said suddenly, surprising himself. “The cage up there”—he pointed—”is it for sale, too?”

The boy stiffened, stared at the floor.

To Hoegbo on’s surprise, the woman turned to look at him. Her eyes were black as an abyss; they did not blink and reflected nothing. He felt for a moment as if he stood balanced precariously between the son’s alarm and the mother’s regard.

“The cage was always open,” the woman said, her voice gravelly, something stuck in her throat. “We had a bird. We always let it fly around. It was a pre y bird. It flew high through the rooms. It— No one could find the bird. A er.” The terrible pressure of the word after appeared to be too much for her and she fell back into her silence.

“We’ve never had a cage,” the boy said, the dark green suitcase swaying. “We’ve never had a bird.

They le it here. They le it.”

A chill ran through Hoegbo on that was not caused by a dra. The sleepy gaze of a pig embryo floating in a jar caught his eye.Opportunity or disaster? The value of an artifact they had le behind might be considerable. The risks, however, might also be considerable. This was the third time in the last nine months that he had been called to a house visited by the gray caps. Each of the previous times, he had escaped unharmed. In fact, he had come to believe that late arrivals like himself were impervious to any side effects. Yet even he had experienced moments of discomfort, as when, at the last house, he had walked down a white hallway to the room where the merchandise awaited him and found a series of dark smudges and trails and tracks of blood. Halfway down the hallway, he had spied a dark object, shaped like a piece of dried fruit, glistening from the floor. Curious, he had leaned down to examine it, only to recoil and stand up when he realized it was a human ear.

This time, the solicitor had experienced the most unease. According to the talkative messenger who had summoned Hoegbo on, the solicitor had arrived in the early a ernoon to find the bodies and survivors.

Arms and legs had been stuck into the walls between specimen jars, arranged in intricate poses that displayed a perverse sense of humor.

The light glinted so ly off the windows. The silence became more absolute. All around, dead things watched one another, from wall to wall — a cacophony of gazes that saw everything but remembered nothing. Outside, the rain fell relentlessly.

A tingling sensation crept into Hoegbo on’s fingertips. A price had materialized in his mind, manifested itself in gli ering detail.

“Two thousand sels — for everything.”

The solicitor sighed, almost crumpled in on himself. The woman blinked rapidly, as if puzzled, and then stared at Hoegbo on with a hatred more real for being so distant. All the former protests of the solicitor, even the boy’s fear, were nothing next to that look. The red at the end of her arms had become paler, as if the white bandages had begun to heal her.

He heard himself say, “Three thousand sels. If you include the cage.” And it was true, he realized — he wanted the cage.

The solicitor, trying to mask some small personal distress now, giggled and said, “Done. But you must retrieve it yourself. I’m not feeling well.” The cloth of the man’s mask moved in and out almost imperceptibly as he breathed. A sour smell had entered the room.

On the ladder, Hoegbo on had a moment of vertigo. The world spun, then righted itself as he continued to the top. When he peered onto the windowsill, two eyes stared up at him from beside the cage.

“Manzikert!” he hissed. He recoiled, almost lost his balance as he flailed at empty air, managed to fall back against the ladder… and realized that they were just the missing marble eyes of the swan, placed there by some prankster, although it did not pay to think of who such a prankster might be. He caught his breath, tried to swallow the unease that pressed down on his shoulders, his tongue, his eyelids.

The cage stood to the right of the ladder and he was acutely conscious of having to lock his legs onto the ladder’s sides as he slowly leaned toward the cage.

Below, the solicitor and the boy were speaking, but their voices seemed dulled and distant. He hesitated.

What might be in the cage? What horrible thing far worse than a severed human ear? The odd idea struck him that he would pull the cord to reveal Thomas Daffed’s severed head. He could see the bars beneath the cloth, though, he told himself. Whatever lived inside the cage would remain inside the cage.

Now that it was his property, his acquisition, he refused to suffer the same failure of nerve asSla ery and Ungdom.

The cover of the cage, which in the dim light appeared to be sprinkled with a luminous green dust, had a drawstring and opened like a curtain. With a sharp yank on the drawstring, Hoegbo on drew aside the cover — and flinched, again nearly fell, a sensation of displaced air flowing across his face, as of something moving. He cried out. Then realized the cage was empty. He stood there for an instant, breathing heavily, staring into the cage. Nothing. It contained nothing. Relief came burrowing out of his bones, followed by disappointment. Empty. Except for some straw lining the bo om of the cage and, dangling near the back, almost as an a erthought, a perch, swaying back and forth, the movement no doubt caused by the speed with which he had drawn back the cover. A latched door extended the full three feet from the base to the top of the cage and could be slid back on special grooves. Stained green, the metal bars featured detail work as fine as he had ever seen — intricate flowers and vines with li le figures peering out of a background rich with mushrooms. He could sell it for 4,000 sels, with the right sales pitch.

Hoegbo on looked down through a murk diluted only by a few lamps.

“It’s empty,” he shouted down. “The cage is empty. But I’ll take it.”

An unintelligible answer floated up. As his sight adjusted to the scene below, the distant solicitor in his chair, the other two still standing, he thought for a horrible second that they were melting. The boy seemed melded to his suitcase, the green of it inseparable from the white of the a ached arm. The woman’s nubs were impossibly white, as if she had grown new bones. The solicitor was just a splash of green.

When he stood on solid ground again, he could not control his shaking.

“I’ll have the papers to you tomorrow, a er I’ve catalogued all of the items,” he said.

All around, on the arms of the chairs, on the table, atop the bookcase, white mushrooms had risen on slender stalks, their gills tinged red.

The solicitor sat in his chair and giggled uncontrollably.

“It was nice to meet you,” Hoegbo on said as he walked to the door that led to the room that led to the next room and the room a er that and then, hopefully, the outside, by which time he would be running.

The woman’s stubs had sprouted white tendrils of fungus that lazily wound their way around the dried blood and obscured it. Her eyes were slowly filling with white.

Hoegbo on backed into the damaged table and almost fell. “As I say, a pleasure doing business with you.”

“Yes, yes, yes, yes,” the solicitor said, and giggled again, his skin as green and wrinkly as a lizard’s.

“Then I will see you again, soon,” Hoegbo on said, edging toward the door, groping behind him for the knob, “and under… under be er… “ But he could not finish his sentence.

The boy’s arms were dark green, fuzzy and indistinct, as if he were a still life made of points of paint on a canvas. His suitcase, once blue, had turned a blackish green, for the fungi had engulfed it much as ivy had engulfed the eastern wall of the mansion. All the terrible knowledge of his condition shone through the boy’s eyes and yet still he held his mother’s arm as the white tendrils wound round both their limbs in an ever more permanent embrace.

Hoegbo on later believed he would have stood at the door forever, hand on the knob, the solicitor’s giggle a low whine in the background, if not for what happened next.

The broken clock groaned and struck midnight. The shuddering stroke reverberated through the room, through the thousands of jars of preserved animals. The solicitor looked up in sudden terror and, with a so popping sound, exploded into a lightly falling rain of emerald spores that dri ed to the floor with as slow and tranquil a grace as the seeds of a dandelion. As if the sound had torn him apart.

Outside, Hoegbo on tore off his mask, knelt, and threw up beside the fountain that guarded the path toAlbumuth Boulevard. Behind him, across a square of dark green grass, the bodies of Daffed, his daughters, his other son, smoldered gray and black. The charred smell mixed with mildew and the rain that stippled his back. His arms and legs trembled with an enervating weakness. His mouth felt hot and dry. For a long time, he sat in the same position, watching pinpricks break his reflection in the fountain.

He shivered as the water shivered.

He had never come this close before. Either they had died long before he arrived or long a er he le. The solicitor’s liquid giggle trickled through his ears, along with the so pop of the spores. He shuddered, relaxed, shuddered again.

When his assistant Alan Bristlewing questioned, as he o en did, the wisdom of taking on such hazardous work, Hoegbo on would smile and change the subject. He could not choose between two conflicting impulses: the upswelling of excitement and the desire to flee Ambergris and return to Morrow, the city of his birth. As each new episode receded into memory, his nerve returned, somehow stronger.

The boy’s arm, fused to his suitcase.

Holding on to the lichen-flecked stone lip of the pool, Hoegbo on plunged his head into the smooth water. The chill shocked him. It prickled his skin, cut through the numbness to burn the inside of his nose.

A sob escaped him, and another, and then a third that bent him over the water again. The back of his neck was suddenly cool. When he pulled away, he looked down at his reflection — and the mask he had made to hide his emotions was gone. He was himself again.

Hoegbo on stood up. Across the courtyard, the Cappan’s men had abandoned the bodies to begin the task of nailing boards across the doors and windows of the mansion. No one pulled the shades open to protest being trapped inside. No one banged on the door, begging to be let out. They had already begun their journey.

One look at his face as he staggered to safety had told the Cappan’s men everything. No doubt they would have boarded him in too, if not for the bribes and his previous record of survival.

Hoegbo on wiped his mouth with his handkerchief. The merchandise he had bought would molder in the mansion, unused and unrecorded except in his ledger of “Potential Acquisitions: Lost.” Depending on which hysteria-induced procedure the Cappan had adopted this fortnight, the mansion grounds might be cordoned off or the mansion itself might be put to the torch.

The clock struck midnight.

The cage stood beside him, slick with rain. Hoegbo on had gripped its handle so hard during his escape — from every corner, Daffed’s infernal collection of dead things staring innocently at him — that he had been branded where the skin had not been rubbed off his palm. He bore the mark of the handle: a delicate filigree of unfamiliar symbols from behind which strange eyes peered out. In the fading light, with the rain falling harder, the fungi appeared to have been washed off the cover of the cage. Perversely, this fact disappointed him. With each new encounter, he had come to expect further revelations.

Blinking away the rain, Hoegbo on let out a deep breath, stuffed his mask in a pocket, wrapped the cloth around his injured hand, and picked up the cage. It was heavier than he remembered it, and oddly balanced. It made him list to the side as he started walking up the path to the main road. He would have to hurry if he was to make the curfew imposed by the Cappan.

Ambergris at dusk, occluded and darkened by the rain that spla ered on sidewalks, ra led against rooftops, struck windows, hinted at a level of debauchery almost as unnerving to Hoegbo on as the way, whenever he stopped to switch the cage from his le to his right hand and back again, the weight never seemed the same.

The city that flourished from wholesome activity by day became its opposite by night. Orgies had been reported in abandoned churches. Grotesque and lewd water puppet shows were staged down by the docks. Weekly, the merchant quarter held midnight auctions of paintings that could only be termed obscene. The fey illustrated books of Collart and Slothian enjoyed a popularity that placed the authors but a single step below the Cappan in status. In the Religious Quarter, the hard-pressed Truffidian priests tried to wrest back authority from the conflicting prophets Peterson and Stra on, whose dueling theologies infected ever-more violent followers.

At the root of this immorality: the renewed presence of the gray caps, who in recent years came and went like the ebb and flow of a tide — now underground, now above ground, as if in a perpetual migration between light and dark, night and day. Always, the city reacted to their presence in unpredictable ways.

What choice did the city’s inhabitants have but to go about their business, hoping they would not be next, blind to all but their own misfortunes? It was now one hundred years since the Silence, when thousands had vanished without a trace, and people could be forgiven their loss of memory. Most people no longer thought of the Silence on a daily basis. It did not figure into the ordinary sorrows of Ambergris’

inhabitants so much as into the weekly sermons of the Truffidians or into the worries of the Cappan and his men.

As Hoegbo on walked home, street lamps appeared out of the murk, illuminating fleeting figures: a priest holding his robe up as he ran so he wouldn’t trip on the hem; two Dogghe tribesmen hunched against the closed doors of a bank, their distinctive green spiraled hats pulled down low over their weathered faces.

Of the recent Occupation, no sign remained except for painted graffi ti urging the invaders to go home.

But Hoegbo on still came upon the faintly glowing, six-foot-wide purplish circles that showed where, before the Silence, huge mushrooms had been chopped down by worried authorities.

Hoegbo on’s wife was already asleep when he walked up the seven flights of stairs and entered their apartment. She had turned off the lamps because it gave her the advantage in case of an intruder. The faint scent of lilacs and honeysuckle told him the flower vendor from the floor above them had been by to see Rebecca.

A dim half-light shone from the living room to his le as he set down the cage, took off his shoes and socks, and hung his raincoat on the coat rack. Directly ahead lay the dining room, with its mold-encrusted window, the purple sheen burning darkly as the rain fed it. He had checked the fungi guard just a week ago and found no leakage, but he made a mental note to check it again in the morning.

Hoegbo on found a towel in the hall closet and used it to dry his face, his hair, and then the outside of the cage. Again picking up the uncomfortable weight of the cage, he tiptoed into the living room, the rug beneath his feet thick but cold. A medley of dark shapes greeted him, most of them items from his store: Lamps and side tables, a couch, a long low coffee table, a book case, a grandfather clock. Beyond them lay the balcony, long lost to fungi and locked up as a result.

The fey light almost transformed the living room’s contents into the priceless artifacts he had told her they were. He had chosen them not for their value but for their texture, their smell, and for the sounds they made when moved or sat upon or opened. Li le of it appealed visually, but she delighted in what he had chosen and it meant he could store the most important merchandise at the shop, where it was more secure.

Hoegbo on set the cage down on the living room table. The palms of his hands were hot and raw from carrying it. He took off the rest of his clothes and laid them on the arm of the couch.

The light came from the bedroom, which lay to the right of the living room. He walked into the bedroom and turned to the le, the closed window above the bed reflecting back the iridescent light that came from her and her alone. Rebecca lay on her back, the sheets draped across her body, exposing the long, black, vaguely tear-shaped scar on her le thigh. He ran his gaze over it lustfully. It glistened like obsidian.

Hoegbo on walked around to the right side and eased himself into the bed. He moved up beside her and pressed himself against the darkness of the scar. An image of the woman from the mansion flashed through his mind.

Rebecca turned in her sleep and put an arm across his chest as he moved onto his back. Her hand, warm and so, was as delicate as the starfish that glided through the shallows down by the docks. It looked so small against his chest.

The light came from her open eyes, although he could tell she was asleep. It was a silvery glow awash with faint phosphorescent sparks of blue, green, and red: shivers and hiccups of splintered light, as if a half-dozen tiny lightning storms had welled up in her gaze. What rich worlds did she dream of? And, for the thousandth time: What did the light mean? He had met her on a business trip toStockton, a er the fungal infection that had resulted in the blindness, the odd light, the scar. He had never known her whole.

Who was this stranger, so pale and silent and beautiful? A joyful sorrow rose within him as he watched the light emanating from her. They had argued about having children just the day before. Every word he had thrown at her in anger had hurt him so deeply that finally he had been wordless, and all he could do was stare at her. Looking at her now, her face unguarded, her body next to his, he could not help loving her for the scar, the eyes, even if it meant he wished her to be this way.

II

The next morning, Hoegbo on woke to the fading image of the woman’s bloody bandages and the sounds of Rebecca making breakfast. She knew the apartment be er than he did — knew its surfaces, its edges, the exact number of steps from table to chair to doorway — and she liked to make meals in a kitchen that had become more familiar to her than it could ever be to him. Yet she also asked him to bring back more furniture for the living room and bedroom or rearrange existing furniture. She became bored otherwise. “I want an unexplored country. I want a hint of the unknown,” she said once and Hoegbo on agreed with her.

To an extent. There were things Hoegbo on wished would stay unknown. On the mantel opposite the bed, for example, lay those of his grandmother’s possessions that his relatives in Morrow had sent to him: a pin, a series of portraits of family members, a set of spoons, a poorly copied family history. A le er had accompanied the heirlooms, describing his grandmother’s last days. The package had been waiting for him on the doorstep of the apartment one evening a month ago. His grandmother had died six weeks before that. He had not gone to the funeral. He had not even brought himself to tell Rebecca about the death. All she knew of it was the crinkling of the envelope as he smoothed out the le er to read it. She might even have picked up the pin or the spoons and wondered why he had brought them home. Telling her would mean explaining why he hadn’t gone to the funeral and then he would have to talk about the bad blood between him and his brother Richard.

The smell of bacon and eggs spurred him to throw back the covers, get up, put on a bathrobe, and stumble bleary-eyed through the living room to the kitchen. A dead sort of almost-sunlight — pale and green and lukewarm — suffused the kitchen window through the purple mold and thin veins of green. A watermark of the city appeared through the glass: gray spires, forlorn flags, the indistinct shapes of other anonymous apartment buildings.

Rebecca stood in the kitchen, spatula in hand, framed by the dour light. Her black hair was brightly dark. Her dress, a green-and-blue sweep of fabric, fit her loosely. She was intent on the skillet in front of her, gaze unblinking, mouth pursed.

As he came up behind Rebecca and wrapped his arms around her, a sense of guilt made him frown. He had come so close last night, almost as close as the boy, the woman. Was that as close as he could get without…? The question had haunted him throughout his quest. A sudden deep swell of emotion overcame him and he found that his eyes were wet. What if, what if?

Rebecca snuggled into his embrace and turned toward him. Her eyes looked almost normal during the day. Flecks of phosphorescence shot lazily across the pupils.

“Did you sleep well?” she asked. “You came home so late.”

“I slept. I’m sorry I was late. It was a difficult job this time.”

“Profitable?” Her elbow nudged him as she turned the eggs over with the spatula.

“Not very.”

“Really? Why not?”

He stiffened. Would Rebecca have realized the mansion had become a deathtrap? Would she have smelled the blood, tasted the fear? He served as her eyes, her contact with the world of images, but would he truly deprive her by not describing its horrors to her in every detail?

“Well… ” he began. He shut his eyes. The sick gaze of the solicitor flickering over the scene of his own death washed over him. Even as he held Rebecca, he could feel a distance opening up between them.

“You don’t need to shut your eyes to see,” she said, pulling out of his embrace.

“How did you know?” he said, although he knew.

“I heard you close them.” She smiled with grim satisfaction.

“It was just sad,” he said, si ing down at the kitchen table. “Nothing horrible. Just sad. The wife had lost her husband and had to sell the estate. She had a boy with her who kept holding on to a li le suitcase.”

The remnants of the solicitor floating to the ground, curling up like confe i. The boy’s gaze flu ering between him and the cage.

“I felt sorry for them. They had some nice heirlooms, but most of it was already promised toSla ery. I didn’t get much. They had a nice rug from Morrow, from before the Silence. Nice detail of Morrow cavalry coming to our rescue. I would have liked to have bought it.”

She carefully slid the eggs and bacon onto a plate and brought it to the table.

“Thank you,” he said. She had burned the bacon. The eggs were too dry. He never complained. She needed these li le sleights of hand, these illusions of illumination. It was edible.

“Mrs. Bloodgood took me down to theMorhaimMuseum yesterday,” she said. “Many of their artifacts are on open display. The textures were amazing. And the flower vendor visited, as you may have guessed.”

Rebecca’s father, Paul, was the curator for a small museum inStockton. Paul liked to joke that Hoegbotton was just the temporary caretaker for items that would eventually find their way to him.

Hoegbo on had always thought museums just hoarded that which should be available on the open market. Rebecca had been her father’s assistant until the disease stole her sight. Now Hoegbo on sometimes took her down to the store to help him sort and catalog new acquisitions.

“I noticed the flowers,” he said. “I’m glad the museum was nice.”

For some reason, his hand shook as he ate his eggs. He put his fork down.

“Isn’t it good?” she asked.

“It’s very good,” he said. “I just need water.”

He got up and walked to the sink. The faucet had been put in five weeks ago, a er a two-year wait.

Before, they had go en jugs of water from a well down in the valley. He watched with satisfaction as the faucet splu ered and his glass gradually filled up.

“It’s a nice bird or whatever,” she said from behind him.

“Bird.” A vague fear shot through him. “Bird?” The glass clinked against the edge of the sink as he momentarily lost his grip on it.

“Or lizard. Or whatever it is. What is it?”

He turned, leaned against the sink. “What are you talking about?”

“That cage you brought home with you.”

The vague fear crept up his spine. “There’s nothing in the cage. It’s empty.” Was she joking?

Rebecca laughed: a pleasant, liquid sound. “That’s fu ny, because your empty cage was ra ling earlier.

At first, it scared me. Something was rustling around in there. I couldn’t tell if it was a bird or a lizard or I would have reached through the bars and touched it.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No.”

“There’s nothing in the cage.”

Her face underwent a subtle change and he knew she thought he doubted her on something at which she was expert: the interpretation of sound. On a calm day, she had told him, she could hear a boy skipping stones down by the docks.

For a moment, he said nothing. He couldn’t stay quiet for long. She couldn’t read his face without touching it, but he suspected she knew the difference between types of silence.

He laughed. “I’m joking. It’s a lizard — but it bites. So you were wise not to touch it.”

Suspicion tightened her features. Then she relaxed and smiled at him. She reached out, felt for his plate with her le hand, and stole a piece of his bacon. “I knew it was a lizard!”

He longed to go into the living room where the cage stood atop the table. But he couldn’t, not just yet.

“It’s quiet in here,” he said so ly, already expecting the reply.

“No it’s not. It’s not quiet at all. It’s loud.”

The le corner of his mouth curled up as he replied by rote: “What do you hear, my love?”

Her smile widened. “Well, first, there’s your voice, my love — a nice, deep baritone. Then there’s Hobson downstairs, playing a phonograph as low as he can to avoid disturbing the Potaks, who are at this moment in an argument about something so petty I will not give you the details, while to the side, just below them”— her eyes narrowed—”I believe the Smythes are also making bacon. Above us, old man Clox is pacing and pacing with his cane, mu ering about money. On his balcony, there’s a sparrow chirping, which makes me realize now that the animal in your cage must be a lizard, because it sounds like something clicking and clucking, not chirping — unless you’ve got a chicken in there?”

“No, no — it’s a lizard.”

“What kind of lizard?”

“It’s a Saphant Click-Spi ing Fire Lizard from the Southern Isles,” he said. “It only ever grows in cages, which it makes itself by chewing up dirt, changing it into metal, and regurgitating it. It can only eat animals that can’t see it.”

She laughed in appreciation and got up and hugged him. Her scent made him forget his fear. “It’s a good story, but I don’t believe you. I do know this, though — you are going to be late to work.”

Once on the ground floor, where he did not think it would make a difference if Rebecca heard, Hoegbo on set down the cage. The awkwardness of carrying it, uneven and swaying, down the spiral staircase had unnerved him. He was sweating under his rain coat. His breath came hard and fast. The musty quality of the lobby, the traces of tiny rust mushrooms that had spread along the floor like mouse tracks, the mo led green-orange mold on the windows in the front door, did not put him at ease.

Someone had le a worn umbrella leaning against the front door. He grabbed it and turned back to stare at the cage. Was this the moment that Ungdom andSla ery’s ill wishes caught up with him? He drove the umbrella tip between the bars. The cover gave a li le, creasing, and then regained its former shape as he withdrew the umbrella. Nothing came leaping out at him. He tried again. No response.

“Is something in there?” he asked the cage. The cage did not reply.

Umbrella held like a sword in front of him, Hoegbo on pulled the cover aside — and leapt back.

The cage was still empty. The perch swung back and forth madly from the violence with which he had pulled aside the cover. The woman had said, “The cage was always open.” The boy had said, “We never had a cage.” The solicitor had never offered an opinion. The swinging perch, the emptiness of the cage, depressed him. He could not say why. He drew the cover back across the cage.

Footsteps sounded on the stairs behind him and he whirled around, then relaxed. It was just Sarah Willis, their landlady, walking down from her second floor apartment.

“Good morning, Mrs. Willis,” he said, leaning on the umbrella.

Mrs. Willis did not bother to respond until she was standing in front of him, staring up at him through her thick glasses. A flower pa ern hat covered her balding head. A matching flower dress, faded, covered her ancient body, even her presumably shoed feet.

“No pets allowed,” she said.

“Pets?” Hoegbo on was momentarily bewildered. “What pets?”

Mrs. Willis nodded at the cage. “What’s in there?”

“Oh, that. It’s not a pet.”

“No animals allowed, pets or meat.” Mrs. Willis cackled and coughed at her own joke.

“It’s not… “ He realized it was useless. “I’m taking it out now. It was just there for the morning.”

Mrs. Willis grunted and pushed past him.

At the door, just as she walked out into the renewed pa er of rain, apparently counting on her hat to protect her, she offered Hoegbo on the following advice: “Miss Constance? On the third floor? She’ll have your head if you don’t put back her umbrella.”

Located on Albumuth Boulevard, half-way between the docks and the residential sections that descended into a valley ever in danger of flooding, Hoegbo on’s store— ”Robert Hoegbo on & Sons: Quality Importers of Fine New & Used Items From Home & Abroad”—took up the first floor of a solid two-story wooden building owned by a monk in the Religious Quarter. The sign exhibited optimism; there were no sons. Not yet. The time was not right, the situation too uncertain, no matter what Rebecca might say. Someday his shop might serve as the headquarters for a merchant empire, but that wouldn’t happen for several years. Always in the back of his mind, spurring him on: his brother Richard’s threat to swoop down with the rest of the Hoegbo on clan to save the family name should he fail.

The display window, protected from the rain by an awning, held a ba ered mauve couch, an opulent, gold-leaf-covered chair (nicked by Hoegbo on, along with several other treasures, during the panicked withdrawal of the Kalif’s troops), a phonograph, a large red vase, an undistinguished-looking saddle, and Alan Bristlewing, his assistant.

Bristlewing knelt inside the display, carefully placing records in the stand beside the phonograph. He had already wiped the window clean of fungi that had accumulated the night before. The detritus of the cleaning lay on the sidewalk in curled up piles of red, green, and blue. A sour smell emanated from these remnants, but the rain would wash it all away in an hour or two.

When Bristlewing saw Hoegbo on, he waved and inched his wiry frame out of the window. A moment later, shielding his head from the rain with a newspaper, he was opening the huge lock in the iron grille of the door, his mouth set in the familiar laconic grin that itself displayed some antiques, courtesy of a sidewalk dentist. A few bu on-shaped mushrooms, a fiery red, tumbled out of the lock as the key withdrew, rolling to a stop on the wet sidewalk.

Bristlewing was a scruffy, short, animated man who smelled of cigar smoke and o en disappeared for days on end. Stories of debaucheries with prostitutes and week-long fishing trips down the River Moth buzzed around Bristlewing without se ling on him. Hoegbo on could not afford to hire more dependable help.

“Morning,” Bristlewing said.

“Good morning,” Hoegbo on replied. “Any customers last night?”

“None with any money… “ Bristlewing’s grin vanished as he saw the cage. “Oh. I see you went to another one.”

Hoegbo on set the cage down in front of Bristlewing and took the ring of keys from him at the same time. “Just put it in the office. Are the inventory books up-to-date?” Hoegbo on’s hand still stung from where the imprint of the handle had branded itself on his skin.

“Course they’re current,” Bristlewing said, turning stiffly away as he picked up his new burden.

By design, the way to Hoegbo on’s office at the back of the store was blocked by a maze of items, from which rose a collective must-metal-ro ed-dusty smell that to him formed the most delicate of perfumes.

This smell of antiquity validated his selections as surely as any papers of authenticity. That customers tripped and frequently lost their bearings as they navigated the arbitrary footpaths ma ered li le to Hoegbo on. The received family wisdom said that thus hemmed in the customer had no choice but to buy something from the stacks of chairs, umbrellas, watches, pens, fishing rods, clothes, enameled boxes, deer racks, plaster casts of lizards, elegant mirrors of glass and copper, reading glasses, Truffidian religious icons, boards for playing dice made of oliphaunt ivory, porcelain water jugs, globes of the world, model ships, old medals, sword canes, musical clocks, and other ephemera from past lives or distant places. Hoegbo on loved knowing that a customer might, in seeking out a perfectly ordinary set of dinner plates, come face-to-face with the flared nostrils and questing tongue of a Skamoo erotic mask.

An overwhelming sense of the secret history of these objects could sometimes send him into a trance-like state. Thankfully, Rebecca understood this feeling, having been exposed to it from an early age.

Emerging from this morass of riches, Hoegbo on’s office lay open to the rest of the store like an oasis of sparseness. Five steps led down to its sunken carpeting — crimson with gold threads, bought from the old Threnody Larkspur Theater before it burned to the ground — and a simple rosewood desk whose only flourishes were legs carved into the shape of writhing squid. A matching chair, two work tables against the far wall, and a couch for visitors rounded out the furniture. To the le of the office space stood two doors. The first led to a private bathroom, recently installed, much to Bristlewing’s delight.

The desk lay beneath an organized clu er of books of inventory, a blo er, a selection of fountain pens, stationery with the H&S logo emblazoned upon it, folders full of invoices, a metal message capsule with a curled up piece of paper inside, a slice of orange mushroom in a small paper bag, a shell he had found while on vacation in the Southern Isles when he was six, and the new Frankwrithe & Lewden edition of The Mystery of Cinsorium by Blake Clockmoor. Daguerreotypes of Rebecca, his brother Stephen (lost to the family now, having signed up for the Kalif’s cavalry on a monstrous but historically common whim) and his mother Gertrude standing on the lawn of someone else’s mansion in Morrow added a personal touch.

Bristlewing had already made himself scarce— Hoegbo on could hear him pulling some artifact out from behind a row of old bookcases stacked high with cracked flowerpots — and the cage stood on the sideboard of his desk as if it had always been there.

Hoegbo on hung his raincoat on one of the six coat racks lined up like soldiers in the farthest corner of the offi ce. Then he took the past day’s book of inventory and purchases and walked to the door that led to the room next to the bathroom. The door was very old, wormholed, and studded with odd metal symbols that Hoegbo on had taken from an abandoned Manziist shrine.

Hoegbo on unlocked the door and went inside. The door shut silently behind him and he was alone. The light that cast its yellowing glare upon the room came from an old-fashioned squid oil lamp nailed into the room’s far wall.

Nothing, at first glance, distinguished the room from any other room. It contained a tired-looking dining table around which stood four worn chairs. To one side, plates, cups, bowls, and utensils sat atop a cabinet with a mirror that served as a backboard. The mirror was veined with a purplish fungus that had managed to infiltrate minute fractures in the glass. He had worried that the Cappan’s men might confiscate the mirror on one of their weekly inspections of his store, but they had ignored it, perhaps recognizing the age of the mirror and the way mold had itself begun to grow on the fungus.

The table held three place se ings, the faded napkins unfolded and haphazard. Across the middle of the table lay a parchment of faded words, so old that it looked as if it might disintegrate into dust at the slightest touch. A bo le of port, half-full, stood on the table next to a bare space in front of the fourth chair.

By tradition, recently-established, Hoegbo on sat there for his daily readings from the books of inventory. Bound in red leather, the books were imported from Morrow. The off-white pages were thin as tissue paper to accommodate as many sheets as possible. The two books Hoegbo on had taken with him represented the inventory for the past three months. Sixteen others, as massive and unwieldy, had been wrapped in a blanket and carefully hidden beneath the floorboards in his office. (Two separate notebooks to record unfortunate but necessary dealings with Ungdom andSla ery, suitably yellow and brown, had been tossed into an unlocked drawer of his desk.)

Yesterday had been slow — only five items sold, two of them phonograph records. He frowned when he read Bristlewing’s description of the buyers as “Short lady with walking stick. Did not give a name.” and

“Man looked sick. Took forever to make up his mind. Bought one record a er all that time.” Bristlewing did not respect the system. By contrast, a typical Hoegbo on-penned buyer entry read like an investigative report: “Miss Glissandra Beckle, 4232 East Munrale Mews, late 40s. Gray-silver hair.

Startling blue eyes. Wore an expensive green dress but cheap black shoes, scuffed. She insisted on calling me ‘Mr. Hoegbo on.’ She examined a very expensive Occidental vase and commented favorably on a bone hairpin, a pearl snu ox, and a watch once worn by a prominent Truffidian priest. However, she only bought the hairpin.”

If Bristlewing disliked the detail required by Hoegbo on for the ledgers, he disliked the room itself even more. A er carefully cataloguing its contents upon their arrival three years before, Hoegbo on had asked Bristlewing a question.

“Do you know what this is?”

“Old musty room. No air.”

“No. It’s not an old musty room with no air.”

“Fooled me,” Bristlewing had said and, scowling, le him there.

III

But Bristlewing was wrong. Bristlewing did not understand the first thing about the room. How could he?

And how could Hoegbo on explain that the room was perhaps the most important room in the world, that he o en found himself inside it even while walking around the city, at home reading to his wife, or buying fruit and eggs from the farmers’ market?

The history of the room went back to the Silence itself. His great-great-grandfather, Samuel Hoegbo on, had been the first Hoegbo on to move to Ambergris, much against the wishes of the rest of his extended family, including his twenty-year-old son, John, who stayed in Morrow.

For a man who had uprooted his wife and daughter from all that was familiar to take up residence in an unknown, sometimes cruel, city, Samuel Hoegbo on became remarkably successful, establishing three stores down by the docks. It seemed only a ma er of time before more of the Hoegbo on clan moved down to Ambergris.

However, this was not to be. One day, Samuel Hoegbo on, his wife, and his daughter disappeared, just three of the thousands of souls who vanished from Ambergris during the episode known as the Silence—

leaving behind empty buildings, empty courtyards, empty houses, and the assumption among those who grieved that the gray caps had caused the tragedy. Hoegbo on remembered one line in particular from John’s diary: “I cannot believe my father has really disappeared. It is possible he could have come to harm, but to simply disappear? Along with my mother and sister? I keep thinking that they will return one day and explain what happened to me. It is too difficult to live with, otherwise.”

Si ing in his mother’s bedroom with the diary open before him, the young Robert Hoegbo on had felt a chill across the back of his neck. What had happened to Samuel Hoegbo on? He spent many summer a ernoons in the a ic, surrounded by antiquities, speculating on the subject. He combed through old le ers Samuel had sent home before his disappearance. He visited the family archive. He wrote to relatives in other cities. His mother disapproved of such inquiries; his grandmother just smiled and said sadly, “I’ve o en wondered myself.” He could not talk to his father about it; that cold and distant figure was rarely home.

His sister also found the mystery intriguing. They would act out scenarios with the house as the backdrop. They would ask the maids questions to fill gaps in their knowledge and thus uncover the meaning of words like “gray cap” and “Cappan.” His grandmother had even given them an old sketch that showed the apartment’s living room — Samuel Hoegbo on surrounded by smiling relatives on a visit.

But for his sister it was just relief of a temporary boredom and he was soon so busy learning the family business that the mystery faded from his thoughts.

When he reached the age of majority, he decided to leave Morrow and travel to Ambergris. No Hoegbo on had set foot in Ambergris for 90 years and it was precisely for this reason that he chose the city, or so he told himself. In Morrow, under the predatory eye of Richard, he had felt as if none of his plans would ever be successful. In Ambergris, he had started out poor but independent, operating a sidewalk stall that sold fruit and broadsheets. At odd times — at an auction, looking at jewelry that reminded him of something his mother might wear; sneaking around Ungdom’s store examining all that merchandise, so much richer than what he could acquire at the time — thoughts of the Silence wormed their way into his head.

The day a er he signed the lease on his own store, Hoegbo on visited Samuel’s apartment. He had the address from some of the man’s le ers. The building lay in a warren of derelict structures that rose from the side of the valley to the east of the Merchant Quarter. It took Hoegbo on an hour to find it, the carriage ride followed by progress on foot. He knew he was close when he had to climb over a wooden fence with a sign on it that read “Off Limits By Order of the Cappan.” The sky was overcast, the sunlight weak yet bright, and he walked through the tenements feeling ethereal, dislocated. Here and there, he found walls where bones had been mixed with the mortar and he knew by these signs that such places had been turned into graveyards.

When he finally stood in front of the apartment— on the ground level of a three-story building — he wondered if he should turn around and go home. The exterior was boarded up, fire-scorched and splotched with brown-yellow fungi. Weeds had drowned the grass and other signs of a lawn. A smell like dull vinegar permeated the air. The facing rows of buildings formed a corridor of light, at the end of which a stray dog sniffed at the ground, picking up a scent. He could see its ribs even from so far away.

Somewhere, a child began to cry, the sound thin, a enuated, automatic. The sound was so unexpected, almost horrifying, that he thought it must not be a baby at all, but something mimicking a baby, hoping to lure him closer.

A er a few more moments, he reached a decision and took a crowbar from his pack. Half an hour later, he had unpried the boards and the door stood revealed, a pale “X” running across the dark wood. He realized he was breathing in shallow gasps, anticipation laced with fear. No one could help him if he opened the door and needed help, but he still wanted whatever was inside the apartment. It could be anything, even the end of his life, and yet the adrenalin rushed through him.

Hoegbo on pulled the door open and stepped inside, crowbar held like a weapon.

It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. The air was stale. Windows to the right and le of the hallway, although boarded up, let in enough light to make patches of dust on the floor shine like colonies of tiny, subdued fireflies. The hallway was oddly ordinary, nothing out of place. In the even more dimly-lit living room, Hoegbo on could make out that some vagrant had long ago set up digs and abandoned them. A sofa had been overturned and a blanket used as a roof for a makeshi tent, broadsheets strewn across the floor for a bed. Dog droppings were more recent, as were the bones of small animals piled in a corner. A rabbit carcass, withered but caked with dried blood, might have been as fresh as the week before. The wallpaper had collapsed into a mumbling senility of fragments and strips. Paintings that had hung on the wall lay in tumbled flight against the floor, their hooks having long since given out. A faint, bi er smell rose from the room — a sourness that revealed hidden negotiations between wood and fungi, the natural results of decay. Hoegbo on relaxed. The gray caps had not been in the apartment for a long time. He let the crowbar dangle in his hand.

Hoegbo on entered the dining room. Bri le fragments of newsprint lay sca ered across the dining room table, held in place by a bo le of port with glass beside it. Colonized by cobwebs, by dust, by mo led fragments of wood that had dri ed down from the ceiling, the table also held three plates and place se ings. The stale air had preserved the contents of the plates in a mummified state. Three plates. Three pieces of ossified chicken, accompanied by a green smear of some vegetable long since dried out.

Samuel Hoegbo on. His wife Sarah. His daughter Jane. All three chairs, worm-eaten and rickety, were pulled out slightly from the table. A fourth chair lay off to the side, smashed into fragments by time or violence.

Hoegbo on stared at the chairs for a long time. Had they been moved at all in the last hundred years?

Had freak winds blowing through the gaps in the boarded up windows caused them to move? How could anyone know? And yet, their current positioning teased his imagination. It did not look as if Samuel Hoegbo on’s family had go en up in alarm — unfolded napkins lay on the seats of two of the chairs. The third — that of the person who would have been reading the newspaper — had not been used, nor had the silverware for that se ing. The silverware of the other two was positioned peculiarly. On the right side, the fork lay at an angle near the plate, as if thrown there. Something dark and withered had been skewered by the fork’s tines. Did it match an irregularity in the dry flesh of the chicken upon the matching plate?

The knife was missing entirely. On the le side of the table, the fork was still stuck into its piece of chicken, the knife sawing into the flesh beside it.

It appeared to Hoegbo on as if the family had been eating and simply… disappeared… in mid-meal.

A prickly, cold sensation spread across Hoegbo on’s skin. The fork. The knife. The chairs. The broadsheet. The meals uneaten, half-eaten. The bo le of port. The mystery gnawed at him even as it became ever more impenetrable. Nothing in the scenarios his sister and he had drawn up in their youth could account for it.

Hoegbo on took out his pocketknife and leaned over the table. He carefully pulled aside one leaf of the broadsheet to reveal the date: the very day of the Silence. The date transfixed him. He pulled out the chair where surely Samuel Hoegbo on must have sat, reading his papers, and slowly slid into it. Looked down the table to where his daughter and wife would have been si ing. Continued to read the paper with its articles on the turmoil at the docks, preparing for the windfall of squid meat due with the return of the fishing fleet; a brief message on blasphemy from the Truffidian Antechamber; the crossword puzzle. A sudden shi, a dislocation, a puzzled look from his wife, and he had stared up from his paper in that last moment to see… what? To see the gray caps or a vision much worse? Had Samuel Hoegbo on known surprise? Terror? Wonder? Or was he taken away so swi ly that he, his daughter, and his wife, had no time for any reaction at all.

Hoegbo on stared across the table again, focused on the bo le of port. The glass was half-full. He leaned forward, examined the glass. The liquid inside had dried into sludge over time. A faint imprint of tiny lips could be seen on the edge of the glass. The cork was tightly wedged into the mouth of the bo le. A further mystery. Had the port been poured long a er the Silence?

Beyond the bo le, the fork with the skewered meat came into focus. It did not, from this angle, look as if it came from the piece of chicken on the plate.

He pulled back, as much from a thought that had suddenly occurred to him as from the fork itself. A dim glint from the floor beside the chair caught his eye. Samuel Hoegbo on’s glasses. Twisted into a shape that resembled a circle a ached to a line and two “u” shapes on either end. As he stared at the glasses, Hoegbo on felt the questions multiply, until he was not just si ing in Samuel Hoegbo on’s chair, but in the chairs of thousands of souls, looking out into darkness, trying to see what they had seen, to know what they came to know.

The baby was still screaming as Hoegbo on stumbled outside, gasping. He ran over bits of brick and rubble. He ran through the long weeds. He ran past the buildings with mortar made from bones. He scrambled over the fence that said he should not have been there. He did not stop ru ning until he had reached the familiar cobblestones ofAlbumuth Boulevard ’s farthest extreme. When he did stop, gasping for breath, the pressure in his temples remained, the stray thought lodged in his head like a disease. What had Samuel Hoegbo on seen? And was it necessary to disappear to have seen it?

That was how it had started — following a cold, one hundred-year-old trail. At first, he convinced himself that he was just pursuing a good business opportunity: buying up the contents of boarded up homes, fixing what was in disrepair, and reselling it from his store. He had begun with Samuel Hoegbo on’s apartment, hiring workmen to take the contents of the dining room and transplant it to the room next to his offi ce. They had arranged it exactly as it had been when he first entered it. He would sit in the room for hours, scrutinizing each element — the bo le of port, the plates, the silverware, the napkins haphazard on the chairs — but no further insight came to him. A er a few months, he dusted it all and repaired the table, the chairs, restoring everything but the broadsheet to the way it must have been the day of the Silence. In his darker moments, he felt as if he might be ushering in a new Silence with his actions, but still he came no closer to an answer.

Soon even the abandoned rooms of the Silence lost their hold on Hoegbo on. He would go in with the workmen and find old, dimly-lit spaces from which whatever had briefly imbued them with a ghastly intensity had long since departed. He stopped acquiring such properties, although in a sense, it was too late. Ungdom,Sla ery, and their ilk had already begun to slander him, spreading rumors about his intent and his sanity. They made life difficult for him, but by ignoring their barbs, he had survived it.

Hoegbo on did not give up. Whenever he could, he bought items that had some connection to the gray caps, hoping to find the answers necessary to quell his curiosity. He read books. He spoke to those who remembered, vaguely, the tales their elders had told them about the Silence. And then, finally, the breakthrough: a series of atrocities at one mansion a er the other, bringing him closer than ever before.

Hoegbo on finished reading the ledger, took a last sip of the port he had poured for himself, and walked out of the room in time to hear the bell that announced the arrival of a customer. He put the books back in their place and was about to lock the door to Samuel Hoegbo on’s dining room when it occurred to him that the cage might be more secure inside the room. He picked it up — the handle seemed hot to the touch — walked back into the room, and placed the cage on the far end of the table. Then he locked the door, put the key in his desk, and went to a end to the needs of his customer.

IV

That night, he made love to Rebecca. Her scar gleamed by the light from her eyes, which, at the height of her rapture, blazed so brightly that the bedroom seemed transported from night to day. As he came inside of her, he felt a part of her scar enter him. It registered as an ecstatic shudder that penetrated his muscles, his bones, his heart. She called out his name and ran her hands down his back, across his face, her eyes sparking with pleasure. At such moments, when the strangeness of her seeped through into him, he would suffer a sudden panic, as if he was losing himself, as if he no longer knew his own name. He would sit up, as now, all the muscles in his back rigid.

She knew him well enough not to ask what was wrong, but, sleep beso ed, the light from her eyes dimming to a satisfied glow, said, simply, “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” he said. “Your eyes are full of fireflies.”

She laughed, but he meant it: entire cities, entire worlds, pulsed inside those eyes, hinting at an existence beyond the mundane.

Something in her gaze reminded him suddenly of the woman with the missing hands and he looked away, toward the window that, though closed, let in the persistent sound of rain. Beside the window, his grandmother’s possessions still lay in shadows on the mantel.

The next day, as he sat in Samuel Hoegbo on’ s room writing out invoices for the past week’s exports—

Saphant carnival masks, rare eelwood furniture from Nicea, necklaces made by yet another indigenous tribe discovered at the heart of the great southern rainforests, all destined for Morrow — he noticed something odd. He drew his breath in sharply. He pushed his chair back and stood up.

There, growing at a right angle from the green cloth that covered the cage, was a fragile, milk-white fruiting body on a long stem, the gills tinged red. It was identical to the mushrooms that had appeared in Daffed’s mansion. He cast about for a weapon, his gaze fixed on the cage. There was nothing but the bo le of port. Beyond the cage, the fungus that had infiltrated the cracks of the mirror appeared to have darkened and thickened. Irrationally, he decided he had to remove the cage from the room. The room had caused the fruiting body. Picking up a napkin, he wound it around the handle of the cage and carried it out of the room, to his desk.

He stared across the store, trying to locate Bristlewing. His assistant stood in a far corner helping an elderly gentleman decide on a chair. Hoegbo on could just see the back of Bristlewing’s head, nodding at something the potential customer had said, both of them obscured by a column of school desks.

Slowly, as if the mushroom was watching him, Hoegbo on slid his hand over to the top drawer of his desk, pulled it open and took out a silver le er opener. Holding it in front of him, he approached the cage.

Images of the woman and her son flickered in his mind. He couldn’t keep his hand still. He hesitated, wavered. A vision of the mushroom multiplying into two, three, four came to him. Hoegbo on leaned over his desk, chopped the mushroom off the side of the cage. It fell onto his desk, leaving behind only a small, circular white spot on the green cover, as innocent as a bird dropping.

Hoegbo on pulled his handkerchief out of his breast pocket and squashed the mushroom in its folds, careful not to touch any part of it. Then he stuffed the handkerchief into the wastebasket at his side. A moment’s hesitation. He fished it out. Decided against it and placed the handkerchief back into the wastebasket. Fished it out again.

Hoegbo on realized that both Bristlewing and his customer were now standing a few feet away, staring at him. He froze, then smiled.

“My dear Bristlewing,” he said. “What can I help you with?”

Bristlewing gave him a disgusted look. “Mr. Sporlender here was interested in a writing desk, for his son. We’ve a good, solid chair but nothing appropriate in a desk. Anything in storage?”

Hoegbo on smiled, extremely aware of the dead mushroom in his hand. The irritation caused by the handle of the cage flared up, pulsing across his palm. “Yes, actually, Mr. Sporlender, if you would come back tomorrow, I believe we might have something to show you… “ Or not. Just so long as he le the shop — now.

Hoegbo on nudged Bristlewing out of the way and guided the man toward the door, through the crowded stacks of artifacts — babbling about the rain, about the importance of a writing desk, about anything at all, while Bristlewing’s disgusted stare burned into the back of his skull. Hoegbo on had never been more impatient to reach the rain-scoured street. When it came, it was like a wave — of light, of fresh air. It hit him with such force that he gasped, drawing a sharp look from Mr. Sporlender.

As they stood there, on the cusp of the street, the iron door at Hoegbo on’s back, the man stared at him through narrowed eyes. “Really, Mr. Hoegbo on— should I come back tomorrow? Would you truly advise that?”

Hoegbo on stared down at his hand, which was about to rebel and throw the handkerchief and mushroom as far away as possible. Some of the early a ernoon passersby already stared curiously at the two of them.

“I suppose you shouldn’t, actually. We don’t have a desk in storage or anywhere else… I have a condition of sudden claustrophobia. It comes and goes. I cannot control it.”

The man sneered. “I saw what you put in the handkerchief. I know what it is. Will I tell? Why bother—

you’ll be dead soon enough.” The man stalked off.

Hoegbo on immediately began to fast-walk in the opposite direction, past sidewalk vendors, a thin stream of pedestrians, and an even thinner stream of carts and carriages, which the rain rendered in smudges and humid smells. Only a er three or four blocks, soaked to the skin, did he feel comfortable tossing the handkerchief and its contents into a public trashcan. He already had an image in his head of the Cappan’s men searching his store for traces of fungi.

A man was throwing up into the gu er. A woman was yelling at her husband. The sky was a uniform gray. The rain was unending, as common as the very air. He couldn’t even feel it anymore. Everywhere, in the cracks of the sidewalk, in the minute spaces between bricks in shop fronts, new fungi was growing.

He wondered if anything he did ma ered.

Back at the store, Bristlewing was grumpily moving some boxes around. He spared Hoegbo on only a quick glance — watchful, wary. Hoegbo on brushed by him and headed for the bathroom, where he scrubbed his hands red before coming out again to examine the cage. It looked just as he had le it. The green cover was unblemished but for the white spot. There had been no proliferation of mushrooms in his absence. This was good. This meant he had done the right thing. (Why, then, was it so hard to draw breath? Why so difficult to stop shaking?)

He sat down behind the desk, staring at the cage. The inside of his mouth felt dry and thick. Nothing happened without a reason. The mushroom had not appeared by coincidence. This he could not believe.

How could he?

Almost against his will, he reached over to the cage and pulled the cover aside, the green giving way to the finely-etched metal bars, the shadows of the bars le ing the light slide around them so that he saw the perch, gently swinging, and, below it, a pale white hand. Slender and delicate. The end a mass of dried blood. A vision overtook him: that he was Samuel Hoegbo on, staring across the dining room table at the cage, which was the last thing he ever saw… The hand, he had no doubt, was from Daffed’s wife.

What would it take to make it go away?

But then his mind registered a much more important detail, one that made him bite down hard on his lower lip to stop from screaming. The cage door was open, slid to the side as neatly as the cover. He sat there, motionless, staring, for several seconds. Throughout the store, he could hear the hands of myriad clocks clicking forward. No mask could help him now. The hand. The open cage. The fey brightness of the bars. A rippling at the edges of his vision.

Somewhere, Hoegbo on found the nerve. He reached out and slid the door back into position with both hands, worked the latch shut — just as he felt a sudden weight on the other side, rushing up to meet him. It brushed against his fingers and chilled them. He drew back with a gasp. The door ra led once, twice, fell still. The perch began to swing violently back and forth as if something had pushed up against it. Then it too fell still. Suddenly.

He could not breathe. He could not call out for help. His heart was beating so fast, he thought it might burst. This was not how he had imagined it. This was not how he had imagined it.

Something invisible picked up the hand and forced it through the bars. The hand fell onto his blo er, rocked once, twice, and was still.

It took five or six tries, his fingers nimble as blocks of wood, but he managed to find the cord to the cover and slide it back into position.

Then he sat there for a long time, staring at the green cover of the cage. Nothing happened. Nothing bad. The sense of weight on the other side of the bars had vanished with the drawing of the veil. The hand that lay on his blo er did not seem real. It looked like alabaster. It looked like wax. It was a candle without a wick. It was a piece of a statue.

An hour could have passed, or a minute, before he found a paper bag, nudged the hand into it using the le er opener, and folded the bag shut.

Bristlewing appeared in his field of vision some time later.

“Bristlewing,” Hoegbo on said. “I’m glad. You’re here.”

“Eh?”

“You see this cage?”

“Yes.”

“I need you to take it to Ungdom.”

“Ungdom?” Bristlewing’s face brightened. He clearly thought this was a joke.

“Yes. To Ungdom. Tell him that I send it with my compliments. That I offer it as a token of renewed friendship.” Somewhere inside, he was laughing at Ungdom’s future discomfort. Somewhere inside, he was screaming for help.

Bristlewing snorted. “Is it wise?”

Hoegbo on stared up at him, as if through a haze of smoke. “No. It isn’t wise. But I would like you to do it anyway.”

Bristlewing waited for a moment, as if there might be something more, but there was nothing more. He walked forward, picked up the cage. As Bristlewing bent over the cage, Hoegbo on thought he saw a patch of green at the base of his assistant’s neck, under his le ear. Was Bristlewing already infected?

Was Bristlewing the threat?

“Another thing. Take the rest of the week off. Once you’ve delivered the cage to Ungdom.” If his assistant was going to dissolve into spores, let him do it elsewhere. Hoegbo on suppressed a giggle of hysteria.

Suspicious, Bristlewing frowned. “And if I want to work?”

“It’s a vacation. A vacation. I’ve never given you one. I’ll pay you for the time.”

“All right,” Bristlewing said. Now the look he gave Hoegbo on was, to Hoegbo on’s eye, very close to a look of pity. “I’ll give the cage to Ungdom and take the week off.”

“That’s what I said.”

“Right. Bye then.”

“Goodbye.”

As Bristlewing negotiated the tiny flotsam-lined pathway, Hoegbo on could not help but notice that his assistant seemed to list to one side, as if the cage had grown unaccountably heavy.

Five minutes a er Bristlewing had le, Hoegbo on closed up the shop for the day. It only took seven tries for him to lock the door behind him.

V

When he arrived at the apartment, Hoegbo on told Rebecca he was home early because he had learned of his grandmother’s death. She seemed to interpret his shakes and shudders, the trembling of his voice, the way he needed to touch her, as consistent with his grief. They ate dinner in silence, her hand in his hand.

“Tell me about it,” she said a er dinner and he catalogued all the symptoms of fear as if they were the symptoms of loss, of grief. Everywhere he turned, the woman from the mansion confronted him, her gaze now angry, now mournful. Her wounds bled copiously down her dress but she did nothing to staunch the flow.

They went to bed early and Rebecca held him until he found a path toward sleep. But sleep held a kaleidoscope of images to torment him. In his dreams, he walked through Samuel Hoegbo on’s apartment until he reached a long, white hallway he had never seen before. At the opposite end of the hallway, he could see the woman and the boy from the mansion, surrounded by great wealth, antiques fit for a god winking at him in their burnished multitudes. He was walking across a carpet of small, severed hands to reach them. This fact revolted him, but he could not stop walking: the promise of what lay ahead was too great. Even when he began to see his head, his arms, his own legs, crudely soldered to the walls using his own blood, he could not stop his progress toward the end of the hallway. The hands were cold and so and pleading.

Despite the dreams, Hoegbo on woke the next morning feeling energetic and calm. The cage was gone.

He had another chance. He did not feel the need to follow in Samuel Hoegbo on’s footsteps. Even the imprint on his hand throbbed less painfully. The rain cla ering down made him happy for obscure, childhood reasons — memories of sneaking out into thunderstorms to play under the dark clouds, of taking to the water on a rare fishing trip with his father while drops sprinkled the dark, languid surface of the River Moth.

At breakfast, he even told Rebecca that perhaps he had been wrong and they should start a family.

Rebecca laughed, hugged him, and told him they should wait to talk about it until a er he had recovered from his grandmother’s death. When she did not ask him about the funeral arrangements, he wondered if she knew he had lied to her. On his way out the door, he held her close and kissed her. Her lips tasted of honeysuckle and rose. Her eyes were, as ever, a mystery, but he did not mind.

Once at work, Bristlewing blissfully absent, Hoegbo on searched the store for any sign of mushrooms.

Donning long gloves and a fresh mask, he spent most of his time in the old dining room, scuffing his knees to examine the underside of the table, cleaning every surface. The fungus embedded in the mirror had lost its appearance of renewed vigor. Nevertheless, he took an old toothbrush and knife and spent half an hour gleefully scraping it away.

Then, divesting himself of mask and gloves, he went through the same routines with his ledgers as in the past, this time reading the entries aloud since Bristlewing was not there to frown at him for doing so.

Fragments of disturbing images flu ered in his mind like caged birds, but he ignored them, bending himself to his routine that he might allow himself no other thoughts.

By noon, the rain had turned to light hail, discouraging many erstwhile customers. Those who did enter the store alighted like crows escaping bad weather, shaking their raincoat wings and unlikely to buy anything.

By one o’clock, he had only made 100 sels. It didn’t ma er. It was almost liberating. He was beginning to think he had escaped great danger, even caught himself wondering if another rich family might experience a gray cap visitation.

At two o’clock, his spirits still high, Hoegbo on received a shock when a grim-faced member of the Cappan’s security forces entered the store. The man was in full protective gear, clothed from head to foot, a gray mask covering his entire face except for his eyes. What could they know? It wasn’t time for an inspection. Had the man looking for a desk talked to them? Hoegbo on scratched at his wounded palm.

“How can I help you?” he asked.

The man stared at him for a moment, then said, “I’m looking for a purse for my mother’s birthday.”

Hoegbo on burst out laughing and had to convince the man it was not directed at him before selling him a purse.

No customers entered the store for half an hour a er the Cappan’s man le. Hoegbo on had worked himself into a fever pitch of calm by the time the messenger arrived around three o’clock: a boy on a bicycle, pinched and drawn, wearing dirty clothes, who knocked at the door and waited for Hoegbo on to arrive before le ing an envelope flu er to the welcome mat outside the door. The boy pulled his bicycle back to the sidewalk and pedaled away, ringing his bell.

Hoegbo on, so ly singing to himself, leaned down to pick up the envelope. He opened it. The le er inside read, in a spidery scrawl:

Thank you, Robert, for your very fine gift, but your bird has flown away home.

I couldn’t keep such a treasure. My regards to your wife. — John Ungdom.

Hoegbo on stared at the note, chuckling at the sarcasm. Read it again, a frown closing his lips. Flown away home. Read it a third time, his stomach filling with stones. My regards to your wife.

He dropped the note, flung on his raincoat, and, not bothering to lock the store behind him, ran out onto the street — into the blinding rain. He headed upAlbumuth Boulevard, through the Bureaucratic Quarter, toward home. He felt as if he were running in place. Every pedestrian hindered him. Every horse and cart blocked his path. As the rain came down harder, it beat a rhythmic message into Hoegbo on’s shoulders.

The raindrops sounded like tapping fingers. Through the haze, the dull shapes of buildings became landmarks to anchor his staggering progress. Passersby stared at him as if he were crazy.

By the time he reached the apartment building lobby, his sides ached and he was drenched in sweat. He had fallen repeatedly on the slick pavement and bloodied his hands. He took the stairs three at a time, ran down the hallway to the apartment shouting “Rebecca!”

The apartment door was ajar. He tried to catch his breath, bending over as he slowly pushed the door open. A line of white mushrooms ran through the hallway, low to the ground, their gills stained red.

Where his hand held the door, fungus touched his fingers. He recoiled, straightened up.

“Rebecca?” he said, staring into the kitchen. No one. The inside of the kitchen window was covered in purple fungi. A cane lay next to the coat rack, a gi from his father. He took it and walked into the apartment, picking his way between the white mushrooms as he pulled the edge of his raincoat up over his mouth. The doorway to the living room was directly to his le. He could hear nothing, as if his head were stuffed with cloth. Slowly, he peered around the doorway.

The living room was aglow with fungi, white and purple, green and yellow. Shelves of fungi ju ed from the walls. Bo le-shaped mushrooms, a deep burgundy, wavering like balloons, were anchored to the floor. Hoegbo on’s palm burned fiercely. Now he was in the dream, not before.

Looking like the exoskeleton shed by some tropical beetle, the cage stood on the coffee table, the cover drawn aside, the door open. Beside the cage lay another alabaster hand. This did not surprise him. It did not even register. For, beyond the table, the doors to the balcony had been thrown wide open. Rebecca stood on the balcony, in the rain, her hair slick and bright, her eyes dim. Strewn around her, as if in tribute, the strange growths that had long ago claimed the balcony: orange strands whipping in the winds, transparent bulbs that stood rigid, mosaic pa erns of gold-green mold imprinted on the balcony’s corroded railing. Beyond: the dark gray shadows of the city, do ed with smudges of light.

Rebecca was looking down at… nothing… her hands held out before her as if in supplication.

“Rebecca!” he shouted. Or thought he shouted. His mouth was tight and dry. He began to walk across the living room, the mushrooms pulling against his shoes, his pants, the air alive with spores. He blinked, sneezed, stopped just short of the balcony. Rebecca had still not looked up. Rain spla ered against his boots.

“Rebecca,” he said, afraid that she would not hear him, that the distance between them was somehow too great. “Come away from there. It isn’t safe.” She was shivering. He could see her shivering.

Rebecca turned to look at him and smiled. “Isn’t safe? You did this yourself, didn’t you? Opened the balcony for me before you le this morning?” She frowned. “But then I was puzzled. You had the cage sent back even though Mrs. Willis said we couldn’t keep pets.”

“I didn’t open the balcony. I didn’t send back the cage.” His boots were tinged green. His shoulders ached.

“Well, someone brought it here — and I opened it. I was bored. The flower vendor was supposed to come and take me to the market, but he didn’t.”

“Rebecca — it isn’t safe. Come away from the balcony.” His words were dull, unconvincing. A lethargy had begun to envelop his body.

“I wish I knew what it was,” she said. “Can you see it? It’s right here — in front of me.”

He started to say no, he couldn’t see it, but then he realized he could see it. He was gasping from the sight of it. He was choking from the sight of it. Blood trickled down his chin where he had bi en into his lip. All the courage he had built up for Rebecca’s sake melted away.

“Come here, Rebecca,” he managed to say.

“Yes. Okay,” she said in a small, broken voice.

Tripping over fungi, she walked into the apartment. He met her at the coffee table, drew her against him, whispered into her ear, “You need to get out of here, Rebecca. I need you to go downstairs. Find Mrs.

Willis. Have her send for the Cappan’s men.” Her hair was wet against his face. He stroked it gently.

“I’m scared,” she whispered back, arms thrown around him. “Come with me.”

“I will, Rebecca. Rebecca, I will. In just a minute. But now, I need you to leave.” He was trembling from mixed horror at the thought that he might never say her name again and relief, because now he knew why he loved her.

Then her weight was gone as she moved past him to the door and, perversely, his burden returned to him.

The thing had not moved from the balcony. It was not truly invisible but camouflaged itself by perfectly matching its background. The bars of a cage. The spaces between the bars. A perch. He could only glimpse it now because it could not mimic the rain that fell upon it fast enough.

Hoegbo on walked out onto the balcony. The rain felt good on his face. His legs were numb so he lowered himself into an old ro ing chair they had never bothered to take off the balcony. While the thing watched, he sat there, staring between the bars of the balcony railing, out into the city. The rain trickled through his hair. He tried not to look at his hands, which were tinged green. He tried to laugh, but it came out as a rasping gurgle. The thought came to him that he must still be back in the mansion with the woman and the boy — that he had never really le — because, honestly, how could you escape such horror? How could anyone escape something like that?

The thing padded up to him on its quiet feet and sang to him. Because it no longer ma ered, Hoegbotton turned to look at it. He choked back a sob. He had not expected this. It was beautiful. Its single eye, so like Rebecca’s eyes, shone with an unearthly light, phosphorescent flashes darting across it. Its mirror skin shimmered with the rain. Its mouth, full of knives, smiled in a way that did not mean the same thing as a human smile. This was as close as he could get, he knew now, staring into that single, beautiful eye.

This was as close. Maybe there was something else, something beyond. Maybe there was a knowledge still more secret than this knowledge, but he would never experience that.

The thing held out its clawed hand and, a er a time, Hoegbo on took it in his own.