Stations of the Tide - Michael Swanwick [40]
His voice gonged and reverberated, coming deep and from a distance, like a vast drowned bell tolling from the bottom of the sea. The bureaucrat tried to raise his arms, but they responded oh so slowly. It was as if he were consciousness alone, seated within the head of a carved granite giant.
They beat him with a thousand fists, blows that rippled and overlapped, leaving pain in their wake. Then, abruptly, it was over. A round face, limned with witch-fire, floated into view.
Veilleur smiled down on him mockingly. “I told you there were ways and ways,” he said. “Nobody ever takes me seriously, that’s my problem.”
He took up the briefcase.
“Come on,” Veilleur said to the others. “I’ve got what we were after.”
Then gone.
* * *
Time was a flickering gray fire constantly consuming all things, so that what appeared to be motion was actually the oxidation and reduction of possibility, the collapse of potential matter from grace to nothingness. The bureaucrat lay watching the total destruction of the universe for a long time. Perhaps he was unconscious, perhaps not. Whatever he was, it was a state of awareness he had never experienced before. He had nothing to compare it to. Could one be drugged-conscious and drugged-asleep? How would you know? The ground was hard, cold, damp, under him. His coat was torn. He suspected that some of the dampness was his own blood. There were too many facts to deal with. Still, he knew he should be concerned about the blood. He clung to that island scrap of surety even as his thoughts spun dizzily around and around, lofting him high to show him the world and then slamming him down to begin the voyage again.
He dreamed that a creature came walking down the road. It had the body of a man and the head of a fox. It wore a tattered pair of dungarees.
Fox, if Fox it was, halted when he came to where the bureaucrat lay, and crouched beside him. That sharp-nosed face sniffed at his crotch, his chest, his head. “I’m bleeding,” the bureaucrat said helpfully. Fox frowned down at him. Then that head swung away again, dissolving into the air.
He was whirled up into the ancient sky, thrown high as planets into old night and the void.
7
Who Is the Black Beast?
The common room was dark and stuffy. Thick brocade curtains with tinsel-thread whales and roses choked out the afternoon sun. Floral pomanders sewn into the furniture failed to mask the smell of mildew; rots and growths were so quietly pervasive here that they seemed not decay but a natural progression, as if the hotel were slowly transforming itself from the realm of the artificial to that of the living.
“I won’t see him,” the bureaucrat insisted. “Send him away. Where are my clothes?”
Mother Le Marie placed soft, cool brown-spotted hands on his chest and forced him back down on the divan, more by embarrassment than actual force. “He’ll be here any minute now. There’s nothing you can do about it. Be still.”
“I won’t pay him.” The bureaucrat felt weak and irritable, and strangely guilty, as if he had done something shameful the night before. The water-stained plaster ceiling liquefied and flowed in his vision, its cracks and imperfections undulating like strands of seaweed. He squeezed his eyes shut for an instant. Nausea came and went in long, slow waves. His bowels felt loose.
“You don’t have to.” Le Marie tightened her jaw, a turtle trying to smile. “Dr. Orphelin will do the work as a favor to me.”
In the hallway, the coffin-shaped coroner hummed gently to itself. One corner caught the light and glowed a pure and holy white. The bureaucrat forced himself to look away, found his gaze returning anyway. Two bored national police officers lounged against the wall, arms folded, staring into the television room. Who was the father? old Ahab roared.