Clockwork Phoenix: Tales of Beauty and Strangeness

BELL, BOOK, AND CANDLE by Leah Bobet

Bell, Book, and Candle met for the five thousand and fifty first time on a rainy November night.

Bell hung her cloche on Cafe Mariposa’s gnarled hatstand and left her gloves on. She worked in a fancy dress shop on the other end of town and was wary of needles and pins. Book had got them a table. He hunched over it, tweed and brown, his hair thinning monklike at his spiraling centre part. A rough-shouldered gambling man slipped him a twenty, and he smiled sharks-teeth and made a notation in his brown leather notebook.

“Book,” she said in greeting, and ordered a cardamom coffee; her voice plucked violin counterpoint to a glam-fusion-rockabilly band. She hummed a few bars with them, but her singing voice came down rough, stuck on the gears between the march of the wooden soldiers and Jack getting ready for the chorus.

Bell blushed. Book patted her hand. He smelled like binding glue and the sweat of fine horses.

Candle was late.

He arrived on the arm of a Duchess, and bright sea-green ribbons twined through his trouser laces. He hung his hat on the tree that grew through the floor of the Cafe Mariposa, and it sparkled with forest-dark velvet, gold trim, a feather that bowed down in passing to waiters and witches and kings.

“Darlings,” he said, bright-flushed and drunken, and perched on his seat like a fairy. His shirt was trimmed with lace. Bell wanted to touch it with her naked hand.

Book pursed his lips. “You’re late.”

Candle laughed and heads turned. Candle waved and a drink was brought. He tossed it back, and the Cafe Mariposa watched the duck and swell of his long golden throat. “So tell me,” he said, his voice striding through shattered conversations and dancing on the shoulders of the stereo music. “What word?”

“No word,” Book grunted. Bell’s shoulders sagged. No word.

“Of course there’s no word.” He waved his hand expansively. It glittered with jewels; they refracted light over the tables around. Hands reached out for a million reflected rubies and closed fingers around air. “There’s never word.”

“Wick,” she said, and took his right hand. He pulled it away. “We’ve just got to be patient.”

He shot her a dark look—even his darkest look was dazzling. Hearts trembled, thighs warmed under the edges of his scorn. She put her hands between her knees to keep them prim and straight. “If we were to be called for, they’d have called for us already.”

He was likely right. It had been centuries. But Bell always felt like that when he was in the room. “We just have to be patient,” she repeated, and because she was the voice he subsided and drank his liquor, a fizzing bright-coloured thing that was not as bright as he.

“One day I won’t come when you call me,” he said, and kissed her on the cheek with a nip that drew blood.

He left on the arm of a Baron, and the lustre of the moss between the world-tree’s bark faded when the door slammed shut behind him.

“Want him?” Book asked, and Bell blushed high and hot, sunburned with desire.

“Everyone does,” she said, and put on her hat to go.

The snow fell. The fairy lights were strung and restrung over shopfronts and around trees: the electricity strangled dryads and kept the brownies away. Bell, Book, and Candle gathered at the Cafe Mariposa, where the speakers threw Bing Crosby at crumbling stucco murals of Puerto Rico and false butterflies glimmered in the ceiling foliage.

The leaves had fallen off the hatstand tree. They crunched underfoot on the flagstones as the waiters danced between wrought-iron tables, bearing sugar-plum tea on silver trays. It smelled like winter and cinnamon inside.

Bell ordered hot cider spiced with rum; it warmed her hands through the black kidskin gloves. Book waited in muffler and fedora, his thick suit pilling at the lapels, his breath redolent with sixteen-year-old highland whiskey. “There’s word,” he said, and scratched another notation onto a curling crimson page.

Bell almost spilled her drink. “For when?”

“Tonight.” Book’s hands shook. The gamblers stayed well away, threading through the corners of the room and fingering bills in their pockets. Book’s hands frayed and fretted at his old quill pen’s feathers.

Bell rubbed at the absence on her shoulder blades until they were sore. And asked for more rum in her cider.

Candle swept in like the Puerto Rico summer, wrapped in a red velvet gown that flared and dragged behind him heedless of the dirty churned snow. Holly and mistletoe girdled his waist; the admirers he pressed close gasped as it pricked their bellies and then stared after him, dabbing the blood away. He took off his curled honey-coloured wig and doffed it to Bell elaborately, and there was a chorus of laughter and sighs.

“There’s word,” Bell told him. Flat and unmusical.

Candle clenched a fist. The chandeliers in the Cafe Mariposa trembled, hissing with electricity, and every bulb blew in a shower of sparks.

Bell, Book, and Candle walked single file down Dry Street South in the snow, picking their way around puddles: Bell’s patent-leather boots and Candle’s stiletto heels clacked one-two against the concrete. Book consulted notes taken in his own arcane hand, scribblings and arrows and dashes and dots, and they stopped at the Grand Cathedral at the centre of the city. It twisted with sculpture and screaming mouths and rubble: it was long-ago ruined. Bell tightened her hat.

The doors of the broken cathedral were open. The ironbound wood hung slick with rot: a night insect crawled out of one hole and into another. Bell kept her hands clasped behind her back and squinted into cobwebbed darkness.

“Book,” she whispered. “What do you see?”

Book took her elbow, eased her carefully aside. “An altar with the gems dug out,” he said. “Tapers rusted into their chandeliers. Rats in the nave. Bats in the belfry. The ringer’s rope, frayed, and the vestments in dust.” He paused. “Light.”

They followed the light.

It glowed soft down halls with niches of marble, stripped of their statues and gilt. It glowed brighter along the curving stairs to the crypts, the sea-kissed crypts where coffins floated and the dead screamed to be saved from drowning whenever it rained all night. Bell lifted her skirts and followed Book down into a chapel cleared and dusted, ringed with men in coats of brushed, severe black wool. They wore inquisitorial masks. Bell’s skirts hissed and tangled from her trembling.

“We’ve come,” Bell said, and the room echoed with ringing like a cathedral mass. “We didn’t think you’d call again.”

“We are still here.” A voice, bitter as strong coffee. “We’ll always be here.”

“We… we serve,” Bell said, hesitant. It had been so long since they’d been asked for. She’d forgotten all the words.

Candle took her hand and squeezed it so it hurt.

“Who is brought before us?” asked the man with the voice like coffee, and the gathered rumbled a reply, a name magnified into nothing by the stones of the falling crypt. Men moved up to surround them, cloaked and hooded, marked with cross and censer and axe.

“We separate him, together with his accomplices and abettors, from the precious body and blood of the Lord,” he began, and Bell’s back straightened with the anxiety of ritual, the reflexes of performance. Someone whimpered beyond the light, mashed flat by cloth and rope. Words blurred in her ears. Voice built in her throat, hot and poisonous.

“Ring the bell,” the high magistrate said, and the cork on her mouth loosed and Bell screamed.

“Close the book,” the high magistrate said, and fairy glamour passed over Book’s eyes and smoothed them away.

“Snuff the candle,” the high magistrate said, and struggling to contain him, the soldiers of the Inquisition slit Candle’s throat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nobody saw Candle.

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

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

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

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

“What if he didn’t come back?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He could not finish.

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

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

“You’re alive—” Bell blurted.

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

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

He was Candle. He was not made to die.

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

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

“S’okay,” Bell said, and ran her other hand through his hair. It was bound and garlanded with thorns. She picked them out one by one. They stung her fingers to bleeding. “We weren’t made for this. We’re not this anymore.”

“Bent to it,” Candle said, and flickered the cold of the tomb. “It’s our job now. Got no other.”

He was cold, too cold. His hair lay rank with smoke.

It set her to burning.

“Never again,” she told him fierce as trumpets, and he sagged into her arms.

She took him home to her flat over the Aniseed Bakery, where old men drank strong coffee in quail-egg cups and told the same stories daily about the last war. She fed him figs and strong cheese, champagne and lobster, and sang him lullabyes in her crow-voice when he shook at night. She hung his room with peacock feathers; they swayed in the breeze and swept rose and poppy petals in tea-leaf patterns on the floor.

She lay awake when he slipped in at three, four in the morning, and stripped off his paints and pearls and torn pantyhose, and ached as he hummed hearthsongs.

On Midsummer morning he stayed out until seven, past sunrise, and brought in the post with him. Bell sat at the kitchen table with a mug of weak tea, stirring it this way and that with her lace-covered index finger. “What’s that?” she asked, alto. The bitterness seeped through her fingers and soured the tea.

Candle held it out between fingernails painted like galaxies. It was tied with a ribbon, musty, yellowed, stamped with symbols in running black ink.

“From Book,” she said, and put on her boots and hat.

Bell, Book, and Candle met at the Cafe Mariposa, and Book hunched over the wrought iron table. Ladybugs fluttered around his balding head and landed, freckled with concern.

“There’s word,” Book said, and squeezed his old hands in hers. They came away bloody.

“Book,” she said, mouth open. “What’s happened?”

“I lost a bet,” he said, and closed his eyes—Book never lost bets. The seams between lid and lash were so thin she thought they did not exist. “They made me call.”

Bell caught her breath. It tasted like a poison scream deep in her throat. She looked up at Candle’s eyes, and the life in them flickered, guttered, dimmed.

“Run,” she choked.

Wool-coated men blocked the door to the Cafe Mariposa, even though it was high summer. Wool-coated men lined up on the patio, a masked and cloaked barrier between the glass-dangle birds and the street. Bell backed against Candle and Candle picked up Book. They had not been called for centuries: she’d watched the inquisitors put to the sword and wept, oh help her, wept for the loss of their purpose.

Where had they all come from?

Somewhere behind them struggled a young man, bound at wrist and ankle and roughly gagged. His terror straightened her spine. “We’ve come,” Bell said automatic, and clamped her hands over her mouth.

The high magistrate smiled. She could see it through his mask. She could see through his flesh and bones. “Do you serve?” he asked, and the cream on the tables soured.

“Run,” Candle whispered, and levered into the tree.

Bell dug one leather-booted toe into the gaps of the hatstand tree and climbed. Rose-thorns pricked her stockinged legs. Bell grabbed the knobby hat hooks of generations past, levered herself up between the rivers of moss, the beetles that fished them and lived on their shores. Candle flitted upwards like a burning rainbow, Book slung over his shoulder, birds querying anxiously into his delicate pierced ears. The inquisitors swept in after them, dangled their prey on a hat-hook, displacing a thin shawl printed with acres of puffy-clouded sky. Thorns thickened and spiraled about them, tugged at her feet, blocked out the light.

Candle reached down and hauled Bell into the nest of branches of the Cafe Mariposa’s tree. The thorns closed around them and sealed the exit. Bell, Book, and Candle huddled together in the waving, endless leaves and breathed hard.

“Do you serve?” the high magistrate called, and she quivered.

“You speak,” Book whispered, arms cradling his slit belly. “Just don’t answer.”

Bell pressed her palms against her ears and shut her eyes tight tight, clamped her lips down on the words that centuries of ritual had hardwired onto her tongue. She shook her head once, twice, focused on the jerk and fly of her short-cut hair instead of the burn in her throat.

Won’t. She thought. Never again.

Where had they all come from?

The acid bubbled up into her mouth. It was going to burn her voice out, it was going to scorch her throat for good and she’d never sing again even in a voice mutilated from centuries of screaming—

“We serve,” she choked out, and wailed as the ritual took her.

“Keep her quiet,” Book hissed—he scribbled and scratched, dipped pen in his own seeping blood to keep it wet and live.

“We separate him, together with his accomplices and abettors—” the magistrate said, and the tree shook with anger, leaves raining down in a rustling diving assault. “Ring the bell.”

Weeping, she opened her mouth to speak, and the words were stopped by Candle’s lips upon hers. Candle’s tongue in her mouth. Candle’s hands on her waist.

“Ring the bell?” the high magistrate called, a fearful note in his voice, but she felt nothing but Candle’s kiss.

Bell spoke. Book carried messages, saw, described, deciphered. And Candle—Candle burned. Candle’s kisses warmed her to the centre, set her hips rising below his flower hands, shuddered through her like the end of a spell of rain. His hands danced upwards, splayed and expert upon her breasts, and the doom receded from her throat.

She smelled cinnamon and honey and baking on his skin. He lifted her skirts with one practiced caress.

“Ring the bell—” might have come up plaintive, and then Book notched a satisfied note in pen and blood in his battered notebook, and silence. The pen dripped red-black on the page, and Book’s book looked much bigger for a hot, fevered moment: millions of pages and dates and names, the cover all of spidersilk, the ink blotting out each name sooner or later until it was pages and pages of night sky.

Candle parted her legs, and the tree shuddered with her as he pressed inside.

“Once I was an angel with a bright sword,” she gasped, whispered, wept. “Once I was a guard on the road to the city, at the gate to the city, and I stood alone and burned. Once I had a voice that sang not screamed, and wings of powdered silver and when they scratched me I did not bleed but sunlight poured out of the holes in my flesh and I would have swept down flaming and singing and they would fall upon their knees with the alleluia chorus—”

“Shh,” Candle whispered back into her mouth. “Shh.”

When it was done she lay curled-up in the arms of the tree, feeling its slow sap heartbeat spiked with the scent of tea leaves and time, the faint clinking of dishes and the hiss of a barista machine. When it was done she shook herself like a cat and sat up, summer light filtering through the branches onto her hand. Candle leaned against a branch opposite, looking cool and sleek as ever, his golden hair touched with flame.

“There’s no word,” Book said, still holding his stomach. The bleeding had slowed. He sat better now.

“Thank you,” she whispered, to him, to both of them. “I couldn’t have… I couldn’t have not spoken.”

“That’s why we work together,” Candle said, and wiped the kisses off his soft, hot mouth.

Bell, Book, and Candle were to meet for the five thousand and fifty fourth time on the eve of summer turning to autumn, with the leaves just yellowing at the tips on the broad avenues between Dry Street and the open plains. Bell did not call; there would be no word. But she went down to the Cafe Mariposa.

She ordered a Korean drink of cinnamon and honey and sipped it slow; it reminded her of the taste of Candle’s skin. It reminded her of the smell of his bedsheets, which she had not changed since the night they slew the Inquisition, since the night he sauntered out the door of Cafe Mariposa and did not return for his feathers and pearls. She slept in his alcove now, restless with the inadequacy of her own skin. But if she thought of him, sometimes, it was enough.

Book had not seen him. Bell had not seen Book. He never lost a bet, and he had lost one somehow, and would not speak of how or why. All she knew was that the tattered Great Cathedral had burned from the bottom up in the week after midsummer, and pages, thousands of pages swirled in the air like ash and settled upon its gutted corpse.

They were keeping something from her.

But she’d remembered wings.

Book came into the Cafe Mariposa with a new hunch to his walk, his pocket stuffed with pawn tags and a track card in his hatband. The newspaper was folded under his arm with his brown leather notebook, and a hardcover romance peeked out between its pages. He sat at the wrought iron table and dropped his parcel on its glass top.

“Bell,” he said, and ordered a double shot of whiskey. He looked old. But his wrinkles were smiling.

“Is he coming?” she said, with a catch in her voice.

Book shook his head. “It doesn’t say.”

They waited.

At five to midnight Candle swept through the door on the arms of two girl-children barely old enough to drink, their dark eyes shining with his reflected light. His legs were wrapped in knotted silk scarves and his torso bare and muscled, and he wore no hat but a vineyard wreath, which he hung on a hook on the World Tree as he passed its thick trunk by. He stroked their hair and sent them to the counter with a wink and a wave, then perched backwards on his wrought-iron chair, cradled its back between his thighs.

“What’s the word?” he asked, with a saucy wink and a bow to the Count three tables down.

“No word,” Book breathed, and sagged back in his chair.

“No word,” Bell said, and took his hand. “Wick, you’ll—”

He kissed her hand elaborately and something moved in her throat. “I’ll see you next month,” he said, and stood, and lovers took each others’ hands and snuck away to the rooms veiled in silk and gauze in the hotel upstairs.

Bell, Book, and Candle left the Cafe Mariposa just before close.

Bell sung the changes all the way home.