The New Weird - Ann VanderMeer [9]
"The dead remember only the streets, never the numbers of the houses!"
Verdigris lived with his mother, a woman of some means and education who called herself Madam "L," in Delpine Square. She was always as concerned about the state of his health as he was about hers. They lay ill with shallow fevers and deep cafards, in rooms that joined, so that they could buoy one another up through the afternoons of insomnia. As soon as they felt recovered enough they would let themselves be taken from salon to salon by wheelchair, telling one another amusing little stories as they went. Once a month Verdigris would leave her and spend all night at the arena with some prostitute; fall unconscious in the Luitpold or the Californium; and wake up distraught a few hours later in his own bed. His greatest fear was that he would catch syphilis. Crome looked down at him.
"You've never been to Cheminor, Verdigris," he said. "Neither of us has."
Verdigris stared at the tablecloth. Suddenly he stuffed it into his mouth ― his empty dish fell onto the floor where it rolled about for a moment, faster and faster, and was smashed ― only to throw back his head and pull it out again, inch by inch, like a medium pulling out ectoplasm in Margery Fry Court.
"You won't be so pleased with yourself," he said, "when you've read this."
And he gave Crome a sheet of thick green paper, folded three times, on which someone had written:
A man may have many kinds of dreams. There are dreams he wishes to continue and others he does not. At one hour of the night men may have dreams in which everything is veiled in violet; at others, unpalatable truths may be conveyed. If a certain man wants certain dreams he may be having to cease, he will wait by the Aqualate Pond at night, and speak to whoever he finds there.
"This means nothing to me," lied Crome. "Where did you get it?"
"A woman thrust it into my hand two days ago as I came down the Ghibbeline Stair. She spoke your name, or one like it. I saw nothing."
Crome stared at the sheet of paper in his hand. Leaving the Luitpold Cafe a few minutes later, he heard someone say: "In Aachen, by the Haunted Gate ― do you remember? ― a woman on the pavement stuffing cakes into her mouth? Sugar cakes into her mouth?"
That night, as Crome made his way reluctantly towards the Aqualate Pond, the moonlight rose in a lemon-yellow tide over the empty cat-infested towers of the city; in the Artists' Quarter the violin and cor anglais pronounced their fitful whine; while from the distant arena -from twenty-five-thousand faces underlit by the flames of the auto-da-fe ― issued an interminable whisper of laughter.
It was the anniversary of the liberation of Uroconium from the Analeptic Kings.
Householders lined the steep hill up at Alves. Great velvet banners, featuring black crosses on a red and white ground, hung down the balconies above their naked heads. Their eyes were patiently fixed on the cracked copper dome of the observatory at its summit. (There, as the text sometimes called The Earl of Rone remembers, the Kings handed over to Mammy Vooley and her fighters their weapons of appalling power; there they were made to bend the knee.) A single bell rang out, then stopped ― a hundred children carrying candles swept silently down towards them and were gone! Others came on behind, shuffling to the rhythms of the "Ou lou lou," that ancient song. In the middle of it all, the night and the banners and the lights, swaying precariously to and fro fifteen feet above the procession like a doll nailed on a gilded chair, came Mammy Vooley herself.
Sometimes as it blows across the Great Brown Waste in summer, the wind will uncover a bit of petrified wood. What oak or mountain ash this wood has come from, alive immeasurably long ago, what secret treaties were made beneath it during the Afternoon of the world only to be broken by the Evening, we do not know. We will never know. It is a kind of wood full of contradictory grains and lines: studded with functionless knots: hard.
Mammy Vooley's