The Umbral Wake Read online

  “Please,” she said, grabbing at his forearms. They were thick as tree trunks, toned and solid from decades of kneading dough. “I was starving. I just needed one loaf. Please.”

  “Then get a job like anyone else,” he said, pulling her towards a closet. He tossed her inside and Skyla tumbled into a stack of mops and dirty dishrags. “You can think about what you done until the police get here.”

  He slammed the door, darkness consumed her, and Skyla smiled. Well that was easier than I had hoped for.

  She heard the latch click, and tested the door, just to be certain it was locked. It also gave some credibility to the illusion she was his prisoner. Pulling the goggles closed, she turned to the wall, shoving the brooms and crates of flour aside.

  Without the goggles, she would have simply seen suggestions in people’s shadows, saw them as moving tapestries. With the goggles on, the shadows sharpened to became doorways. She stepped through the wall, between the atoms, and into a shifting corridor of negative light…

  And into the face of a dead girl. It wasn’t Melissa this time, or her aunt, or anyone Skyla knew. It was just another passing resident of the afterlife. The girl had a shock of red hair sprouting unevenly from her head, and she stared at Skyla with white eyes. Half her face was burned.

  “Mommy?” she cried. “What happened, Mommy?”

  Skyla ducked from the arms that reached out to embrace her. They were longer than the girl herself. They stretched like vines growing from a neglected garden of flesh and cloth. The girl turned, tracking Skyla by sound, or smell, or whatever it was people used to observe the universe here.

  “Mommy? Where are you going?”

  “I’m not your mommy,” Skyla said, ducking again as a bony arm swung by close enough to lop off her head.

  “Do you know what happened to Mommy?”

  “No I don’t.”

  “But she came through here. I know she did.” The girl began to cry and more vines exploded from her back. They flicked the air and searched for something to cling to. “She said to hide here until the bad man left.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Skyla. “I don’t know where she is.”

  “Can you help me?”

  Skyla knew she couldn’t. She couldn’t help any of them. The dead were dead, and Skyla was just an interloper. Even the slightest touch from one of them had the power to sever limbs, cutting the bond between atoms so cleanly even blood wouldn’t flow. Skyla looked at her severed finger and winced. Once was enough.

  “I can’t. I’m sorry.”

  Red waves of hair emerged from the girl, curled into a fetal position. The vines throbbed with each sob. Skyla ran before they could reach her. There was nothing unusual about this. Skyla had seen it all. She turned to the church where she lived and ran.

  She emerged from the closet in her home as Gil looked up from a pile of books. A collection of metal rods and cogs cluttered her workbench. She wore a monocle over one eye buried under stacks of magnification lenses. Her other eye was blind, filled with a milky white.

  Gil looked at Skyla hopefully, a raven on her shoulder.

  “Did you bring food?” she asked.

  Skyla opened her bag and revealed the loaf along with a few muffins. She tossed them onto the table and they landed hard as stones, rattling along the surface.

  “Mmm… Bricks.” Gil picked one up and rapped it against the surface. “If we ever need to repair a wall these will come in handy.”

  “If you want them fresh, steal them yourself.”

  Skyla plopped down into an old couch on the other side of the room, beneath the shadows of crosses and statues that clung to the walls of the old church like bad memories. Light spilled in from a shattered stained-glass window. Nobody would live in these slums, not even the boy gangs. The stigma of religion still maligned the city like a low fever.

  “What about you?” Skyla said. She sunk into the seat and closed her eyes. The sound of coins hitting the table made her open them again. “What’s that?”

  “Money.”

  “Shiny,” croaked Connor.

  “Oh, is that what it looks like.” Skyla rolled her eyes. “I mean how did you earn it?”

  “I finally found a buyer for that revolver I fixed last week.”

  “The broken one?”

  “I fixed it,” Gil said. Behind her, the workbench was hardly visible anymore from beneath the pile of salvaged gadgets. “Tomorrow I’m going to try and hock a box of fountain pens I managed to fix. We can’t go stealing forever.”

  Well, we could, Skyla thought. “Where do you get the parts?”

  “I buy them from the curio stores. There’s lots of junk they don’t bother repairing. Sometimes they just replace it with new parts from the shipments.”

  Skyla didn’t need to read Gil’s shadow to know a lie when she heard it. Her eyes went to the wall where Skyla’s coat hung from a nail. Inside the front pocket, she could see an ancient coin glowing. The goggles revealed all.

  “And where do you get the money to buy the junk?” she asked Gil.

  “Most of it is just lying there. Other parts I buy with the money I get from selling the things I fixed.” Her voice rose in pitch as she grew more defensive.

  Skyla didn’t press the issue. “Well it beats starving.”

  They spoke no more as Gil went back to her table. Skyla watched her through the goggles, knowing full well the lies and deceptions she would see the next time she raised the lenses. She didn’t take the goggles off. It was nicer to not know for a change.

  But it didn’t stop the dead from screaming at her from behind every shadow. Eventually, somehow, Skyla managed to sleep.

  Chapter 3

  Rhinewall

  HAROLD COUGHED INTO his hand as he sat at his workbench, surrounded by the ticking and clicking of watches, clocks, and metronomes—devices both functioning and malfunctioning. The wall behind him shifted incrementally, alive with tiny mechanical movements. A watch sat open and naked at his fingertips, its parts too small to see without the lenses he wore over his spectacles.

  The problem was a warped gear, its teeth slipping and missing as the tiny device counted away the seconds. Using tiny tweezers, he slipped the gear off its spindle, swapped it for an undamaged one, and then watched as the teeth caught and held. Motion spread in tiny spirals as the rest of the clockwork mechanism came to life. Things like this were easily fixed.

  Harold smiled, the tips of his mustache rising toward his eyes. Sometimes it was all just a matter of finding the right gear. He tossed the warped part into a junk box and closed the face of the watch.

  He coughed again.

  “Monte-gut!”

  Springing to his feet, Harold stumbled out the door of his tiny room. His boss sat at the counter.

  “Yes, Mr. Felton,” said Harold.

  “Are you feeling ill?” He peered up at Harold from behind a newspaper. Bushy white sideburns ran down his cheeks, covering a scar he had received during the Cataclysm.

  Harold cleared his throat. “Just a cough, sir.”

  “Did you complete that watch for Mrs. Williams?”

  “I did.”

  There was only a moment of skepticism in the man’s face. “Good. Have you taken care of the alarm that was ringing too often for Mr. Phillips?”

  “Yes sir. This morning in fact.” He coughed into a fist again.

  “And the grandfather clock—”

  “For Mrs. Rosewood. I did it this morning, sir.”

  “She’ll need it delivered—”

  “On Thursday. I already have it on my calendar, sir.”

  Felton’s eyes narrowed. He looked past Harold and into the workroom. “What are you working on in there, Monte-gut?”

  “Just practicing on some old salvaged devices, sir. I solved a cog ratio issue this morning. I think I’m finally getting the hang of it—”

  “Yes, I saw.”

  Harold said nothing. He could feel his face grow hot.

  “You
think I don’t keep track of your personal projects, Monte-gut?” Felton smirked. He tapped his temple. “These eyes may be old, but they aren’t useless.”

  Harold bit his tongue. At one time he might have corrected the pronunciation, but not now. “I do these on my own time, Sir. I don’t charge you for the hours I spend—”

  “Good. See that you don’t. You show real promise, Harold,” Felton said. His expression had softened. “Don’t make me regret hiring you. A man your age can hardly afford to be unemployed.”

  “I’ll see that you aren’t disappointed, sir,” Harold said.

  Felton cleared his throat, turned to the register and punched a button, expelling the tray. He pulled the cash from inside, a massive wad of paper money, a bag of coins. He stuffed it into his pockets.

  “I’m going to run this to the bank. Close up will you?”

  “Yes, sir. I can do that.”

  “I knew you could.” Felton winked. “I’ll see that you get something for your cough tomorrow.”

  He watched the man leave, bell jingling from over the door. Felton scurried into the fog and vanished. Harold locked the door and flipped the sign to CLOSED. The cough he had been suppressing forced its way up his throat. Harold knelt against the door a moment. Spots formed in his vision as his chest heaved with the hacking. He tasted blood.

  It was a result of the Cataclysm, a huge explosion that had torn a hole in the center of Rhinewall years ago. What most people weren’t aware of was that the hole had originally been a laboratory, a reactor—of the precise nature, he wasn’t sure. He had been there on personal business, revenge business. Beyond that, his memory was fuzzy. Images of moving shadows and dark corridors, memories of his daughter’s hand, her voice, leading him away until he found himself just outside the city, watching the explosion from atop a hill.

  But Melissa had been dead, murdered—the killer walking free and untouchable. Harold coughed again.

  Perhaps I am not as well as I pretend. Feet shuffling, Harold slouched back to his workbench to once again forget his previous life, the memories lost in cogs and gears.

  *

  The next morning, Harold walked through the front door and almost tripped in his surprise. A man, nearly seven feet tall, and wearing a long leather cloak stood at the back of the room. A beaked mask with thick goggles, covered the man’s entire face, and Harold couldn’t tell if the man was looking at him or not.

  “Harold!” Felton said, still buried in his paper. “Meet Quentin.”

  The beaked face inclined slightly, an artificial, clockwork nod. Harold thought he heard ticking from somewhere deep inside the man, but with all the clocks everywhere it was impossible to be sure.

  “I… I don’t have the money for a doctor,” Harold said, hoping he could simply return to his apartment above the shop.

  “Nonsense,” said Felton. “Get in here. Physicians don’t charge.”

  “The doctors I’ve seen—”

  Felton held up a hand. “I said, Physicians don’t charge money, Harold. Do you understand?”

  Harold blinked, the word’s dual meaning seeping in. “We didn’t have Physicians in Bollingbrook, sir. I thought there weren’t any in Rhinewall either. The Church banned them.”

  “They did,” Felton winked. “But I don’t see our city under the scrutiny of the Vatican right now, do you?”

  Harold continued into the shop and took a few cautious steps towards Quentin. Novelty was stronger than caution in this case, and Harold couldn’t help but succumb to the curiosity. He’d never seen one of these except in books. The Physician made no movement, no reaction to indicate it was even aware Harold was nearby.

  “I… I didn’t even know they still trained… made them… I’ve never even seen one… until now. They’re… illegal, aren’t they?”

  Felton grunted, going back to his paper.

  “How did you get it here?”

  “Oh, it isn’t that hard,” Felton said. “I cover him in a veil, pretend he’s a passenger in the back seat of the carriage. Nobody thinks twice about it late at night.” He raised an eyebrow. “I trust you’ll keep this between us.”

  “Yes… Yes, sir,” Harold blinked. “I will. Thank you.”

  “Now, don’t be shy,” said Felton. “Quentin is just here for today. Then it’s back to the house with you.” He tapped Quentin’s shoulder.

  Harold approached the two of them. “Is he old?”

  “An antique,” said Felton. “You won’t find another one for miles… well maybe up in Arist. God knows what archaic inventions they keep alive up there.”

  Quentin inclined his head and spoke. The voice was tinny, crackling behind the mask. It reminded Harold of a fly on a windowsill. “May I feel your forehead, Mr. Montegut?”

  “Oh… um… yes.” He leaned forward, his eyes darting nervously.

  A gloved hand went to Harold’s head and rested there. The leather felt cool. Some minute texture seemed to massage his skin. He thought he could sense a pulse running through the hand, an artificial clockwork heartbeat. Harold had to force himself not to recoil.

  A moment later Quentin pulled away, then raised a needle from a pouch under his arm. He wielded the syringe like a gun. This time Harold did step back. He looked at Felton, but the man was buried in his paper again.

  “Just a shot,” said the Physician. “You have slight exposure. The sickness is caused by rogue energies. Might you have been near the cataclysm when it occurred?”

  “I saw it, yes,” Harold said. “But that was years ago.”

  He had been on a hillside, hearing his daughter’s voice for the last time. Oh, Melissa, if you could only see me now.

  “Please give me your arm.” There was no movement as the Physician spoke, and Harold wondered if there was anything human inside the mask at all.

  “Let the Physician do his work,” Felton said. “Trust me, he’s been practicing medicine longer than anyone I know.”

  Harold rolled his sleeve up and offered his arm and—“Ack!” A gloved hand gripped his wrist like an iron vice. Then the needle was upon him, inserted and injecting. He winced at the pain. The hand released him, and the syringe returned into the pouch, leaving Harold to rub at the place where it had pricked him. The entire movement was so fast he had cried out more in surprise than pain.

  With the procedure completed, Quentin stepped back to the wall and went still.

  “God, that’s unnerving,” Harold said, rubbing his arm and eyeing the man warily.

  “Very well saved your life though,” said Felton. “That kind of medicine is hard to come by. You’re lucky.”

  “He must have cost a fortune,” Harold said, staring at the now dormant man.

  “Oh, not as much as you think,” Felon said. “He’s been with me for ages. Had to sneak him into the city when I relocated out here. I’d be a fool to part with him now.”

  “If the shop fell on hard times, you could sell him and cover the cost fifty times over.”

  Felton gave him a reproachful look. “Quentin is not a commodity, Harold. He is a person like you or me. Now, don’t you have that metronometer to look at?”

  “Yes,” Harold said. He rolled down his sleeve. “Thank you again. I’m indebted.”

  The bell jingled as customers began to enter. Men, women, husbands, wives, fathers, children, they stood one by one at the counter. Families. They purchased toys for their children, presents for their wives. These were patricians and dames, the customers least affected by the Cataclysm, the upper crust of Rhinewall. They joked with Felton and winked at Harold. Children smiled up at him from warm coats and new clothes. Harold had to try harder and harder to suppress the voice in his head.

  Remember being a banker? Remember being a family? Remember being a father?

  After the morning crowd died down, Harold asked if he may be excused. Felton grunted and rustled the paper.

  But Harold didn’t go straight to his workbench; he needed air. He went instead to the rear door, l
eading into the alley behind the shop. Walls glistened with slick mossy brick and a lingering smell of rotting food. It wasn’t fresh air, but it was air just the same.

  They should have called it Brinewall, he thought and took a breath. But the cold air felt good, and after a moment, Harold thought he could function again. He had been about ready to return to the shop when he saw them.

  A group of dirty gang boys rummaged through a box of discarded parts—the same box Harold had been keeping behind his workbench. Felton had thrown it out.

  Such orphans littered the city streets, children disfigured by the cataclysm and the rogue energies given off from it. Many of them were unfortunate survivors, left to scrounge out a life in a city without the means or interest in supporting them. Rhinewall had other priorities, and groups of ten year-old criminals were far from the top of the list.

  Burns ran up the raw leg of one boy; another had no hair, only tufts which sprouted like rotting wheat from his reddened scalp. The boys froze as he glared at them, scattering when Harold took a step forward.

  The boy with tufts of hair, extended his middle finger halfway down the alley, yelling “Ol’ man don run too fas eh? Mebbe ya need em a scootin’ chair!”

  “Learn to speak proper English you little urchin,” he muttered as he stomped over to the box.

  They had picked it clean for the most part, and Harold sighed. Just as well. The last thing he needed was more refuse collecting in his apartment. Still, he wished he could have taken a little better look—

  Eyes followed him from behind the dumpster.

  Harold made a point not to look directly at the orphan, instead picking through the box, fondling a gear or a tube here and there, ignoring the eyes on him. He let a brass chemical cell drop and roll towards the boy, then reached for the tube, slowly. Only when he was close enough did he lunge for the boy.

  His fingers closed around loose clothing. They encircled a wrist. “Got you!” The boy was rail thin, starving.

  Teeth bore down on Harold’s hand and he roared with pain, but didn’t let go, instead reeling the child towards him until he could see the face. The boy was small, maybe ten if that. He stared up at Harold with a grimy defiant expression.