Sub Rosa, page 21
Jellyfish had come to me before, and I hoped she’d find me again. She probably wouldn’t be able to resist some of my company, her being Glory kin and all. “Let’s save Sub Rosa,” I’d say. “We’ll be famous Glories. No one will every forget us.” Soda pop … sweet tea … embroidered silk … streetlamps … sparklers on top of cakes. I made a list of all the reasons for her to return. The inventory of Sub Rosa favourites was so appealing I lost count of my steps. My map was already flawed and I had hardly begun. It should have been easy to count from one to ten, then draw a short line on my back. Carrying out these two actions demanded all my focus. No more daydreaming, I told myself. I made myself count out loud, one through ten, and deliberately made my mark on the map, not caring who or what might hear me.
After about forty paces, I hit my first building—oddly placed in the middle of my path. I determined it was brick by the way the wall scraped my fingertips as I felt my way along it. I was grateful to have a hold of something concrete. I circled the building twice. It was a predictable square with windows that were taller than me. I reached up to press a couple of pushpins into the worn wood sill to mark my path. Reluctant to leave, I stretched my hands up several times to touch my markers. The building offered no clues or reason to stick around, so I drew it as a square on my back and continued my blind journey. My footsteps began to sound like numbers: left, right, left, one, two, three. My map sprawled across my back, fragment by fragment.
I found my way to what might have been an old town square. The ground was the same smoothly polished cobblestone as the sidewalks of Sub Rosa. I recognized it as soon as I stepped onto it. I couldn’t have done that during my first trip, when I ran dumbly in the Dark with only fear to steer me. I slid my foot from my flip-flop and dragged my toes along the cracks, searching for little plants growing between the stones, but, of course, it was too dark there for anything to grow. I did find water. I traced my foot along a rounded stone lip and almost-warm water splashed under my toes. The basin was perfectly round, and I guessed it must have been a fountain. I placed both feet into the warm pool. Memory soaked into my skin the longer I stood there. I remembered city parks; people posing for photos or taking their lunches on a nearby bench. I remembered happy gangs of dogs wrestling over Frisbees. It made me wonder, just as First did, what else had been lost in the Dark. I searched my pockets and found a coin to make a wish with. I touched copper and she was there.
“I knew I’d find you. You’ve got to save us,” I said. “Sub Rosa is in big trouble. I’ve been sent out here to find a second Advent Ally, you know, a way out. Back to the city. Do you know the way out?” I spouted. She lit up like a lunar ring.
“Yes, lost one, I know a way,” she said. I caught hold of her cool dark wrist. I saw her shimmering fingers lace into mine. Both of us pulled; she was stronger.
The earth dropped out below me and I fell. There wasn’t even time to wonder what had happened, much less why. If my various encounters in the Dark had at all unnerved me, this was far worse. I was ten times more helpless, lost times ten. At least the Dark had filled my ears with a little white noise and given my feet an occasional pothole to trip over. There was nothing in this new Dark. I flailed my arms in wide arcs then stopped, not wanting to propel myself any deeper, if that was even possible. I fell for so long that I exhausted my fear of hitting bottom and began hoping for it. I tried to curl into a ball to fall faster. I couldn’t bring my knees to my chest. I couldn’t wrap my arms around my head and brace for oncoming impact. My body was gone. The word “help” passed me to my left. Another to my right. More cries of “help” percolated below me, where my feet should have been. Without eyes I looked down and there was light. I’m no Christian, like Arsen, but praise be, I was ready for this light to be heaven. Heaven had a red lampshade. Heaven had a burgundy-red lampshade made of velvet nap paper. Heaven had dust on the bulb. Heaven was honeyed-pine side table; there was a tooled-leather cigarette case and a shamrock-shaped ashtray, too. Gauzy threads of smoke ascending. A slim brown cigarette steadily spun out more smoke as it burned. A woman was there. She was nothing like the angels in paintings. Her knuckles were bunched together like the sheets of an unmade bed. For a split second I experienced a sense of ease. As if she was someone I had known forever. But a moment later her presence made no more sense than the lamp or the ashtray. “Am I dead?” I asked, supposing she was a ghost, like Jellyfish. She lifted her head, so I repeated the question.
“Is someone there?” Her face tilted into the lamplight was wrinkled and confused.
“My name is Little,” I said in my nicest Glory voice. “I’m not sure why I’m here, but I’d like to go back to Sub Rosa now.” I thought about telling her more about Sub Rosa for she had the heavy tread of sadness stamped on her like her whole life had been a boot fight. Sub Rosa might have lifted her spirits, but before I breathed a word of it I was back in the Dark, my bare feet against the cobble, my wrist again in the Jellyfish’s manacle grip.
“Who was that woman?” I asked her.
“You must use your real name,” she said, shaking me hard. “You can’t use your Glory name or speak of Sub Rosa. To leave Sub Rosa, you must speak your birth name.”
“What name?” I mumbled. As I stood in Jellyfish’s beautiful phosphorescent glow, I was suddenly giddy. It had been too long since I’d been around Glory charms. “That’s some magic. You’re a Glory,” I practically shouted at her, remembering my mission. “Sub Rosa is in trouble.”
“You want to return to the Rosa?” Her hands clamped down on me too hard and I held my breath. She was handling me with too much force for me to hazard a wrong answer. “You look elsewhere for your Glory, stupid child.” Jellyfish dropped my wrist. My hand throbbed as she faded from view. I called her name many times, though I knew she wouldn’t answer.
If I could tell this story differently, I would. I’d like to say I was transformed then and there. That Jellyfish had wakened something deeply buried: myself. That I had some sort of mortal homecoming. But everything about me was still Glory. Same phantom hand. Same notions of heroism. Even the penny I intended to throw in the fountain was still in my grasp. I wished for the blackout to be over, for the shops to unlock their doors, for the live ones to broadside us with admiration and gifts and money.
The instant the coin hit the water, a terrible buzzing rose from the fountain. The air shifted around me, giving me a swift warning before I was attacked by flying bugs. They clicked and nipped as they hit me. Waving these flying beetles away was useless; I wore my arms out, and they didn’t slow for a second. I screamed, only once, and was immediately choking on a mouthful of beetles. So I ran with my eyes closed to keep them from blinding me. Dozens, maybe hundreds, pelted my back as hard as stones. I crashed into something and fell down on top of dozens more, their bodies crushed under my weight. Dabs of warm ooze were smeared on both my knees where they must have split open. My hands were soon covered in the same goo as I crawled, unable to stand up again as they pressed collectively down on my back. Saliva leaked from my firmly shut lips, but I didn’t dare cry out.
Something other than beetles tapped persistently at my hand. Phantom hand, thinking for itself, though I was in no position to fret over its developing autonomy. It pushed the pack of matches into my palm, and clumsily, desperately, lit one.
The flying beetles leapt toward the flame, blood-veined wings fluttering out from their twisted black bodies. I set the whole matchbook on fire and crawled away, leaving the swarm around the flame. I had less than a minute to find shelter before the matches expired. The something I had crashed into was an empty trashcan. An overturned city-park trashcan. It was sticky as I scrambled inside and pulled it overtop of me.
For a while, I sat with the sound of the beetles hailing down. The clanging was enough to make me want to do a suicide run. The glow from my nail polish revealed sticky red blood on my palms and kneecaps, some of it bug blood, some of it my own. The sight and smell of it kept me from leaving my trashcan shelter. I searched my purse for the second and last matchbook. It had only three matches in it. Three matches and a phone number written beside the name Bob. I took a moment to hate this unknown Bob, wishing it was him out there instead of me. Pieces of Dearest’s almond confetti were strewn inside my purse. I unwrapped one and sucked, letting chocolate coat the bug taste in my mouth. The foil wrapper flashed in my hand. It was the best gift Dearest could have given me.
I proceeded to unwrap and then stuffed all of the confetti in my mouth. As the chocolate dissolved, I peeled back the gauze-thin paper from the foil wrappers. When lit, the paper should separate from the foil, lift off, and burn into the sky. This trick was one I’d done before with the foil from packs of cigarettes. I must be a genius, I thought, lighting the first match. But the flame quit before it caught the candy wrappers. The air inside the trashcan was too thin. I tried again. Propping the trashcan up, I managed to make a good flame with my last two matches. Bugs scuttled for the opening. It was dumb luck that the wrappers were lit before my shelter filled with bugs. One of the burning wrappers took off for the sky and the swarm followed. I edged away from the fire, carrying the garbage can over me as I picked up the pace.
I couldn’t see how well my plan worked, but the sound of beetles splitting underfoot lessened until all I heard was buzzing behind me. I tossed the trashcan off and ran full tilt. Ahead of me there was a sliver-thin beam: a crack beneath a door. I drew close enough to see the painted wood. I was almost there when the first beetle struck my back. Then another. And the horrible sound of the swarm. The door—my great escape—was locked and handle-less, like the one at the Smoke Shoppe. I pounded, though there was next to no chance that someone, someone normal, was inside. Soon the bugs were pounding at the door too, and at me. The blows to my legs made me buckle to the ground. But it was the blows to my head that did me in. I suppose this was when everything would have gone black if it wasn’t already Dark. I wished I would have used my coin differently; in my pain, I wished that I was still with the burgundy-lamp lady somewhere down inside Jellyfish, but these wishes, or any other last wishes I may have had, were buried in bugs. I saw the crack of light warp and disappear.
When I came to, I was still surrounded by buzzing. I must have spent hours like that, dizzy, aching, until I noticed I’d been laid in a bed. A shabby bed with wool blankets that smelled of gasoline and man. Hours more passed before I could turn over to see where I was.
XIX
The garage was littered with car skeletons. Chrome femurs and rusted spines, disconnected parts that had been dead for so long they were unrecognizable. Other cars lay gutted in corners, their hoods open in a rigor mortis scream. Old models I was familiar with only from period films—Studebakers, Ford Galaxie 500s with fins and running boards. The walls and floor and ceiling were the same stained concrete pasted over with weathered posters. Pin-up girls looking just as dated as the car parts. Drawings, not photos, of curvy models in marching-band uniforms, polka-dotted dresses twirling up in the breeze. All of them held a prop—a garden hose, a trumpet, a picnic basket—and all wore surprised expressions on their faces as if taken aback by their own sex appeal. So very different from the girls in the glossy mags at No’s. Those lingerie models stare you down; even their exposed nipples stare. One of the old-fashioned pin-up dames hung right above my head. Her pale thighs were smudged with fingerprints. A lonely man belongs to this bed, I guessed.
“Hello,” I whispered. “Anybody?” All I could hear were bugs raining against the garage roof. They weren’t getting in, there wasn’t a single window to break, and both doors were made of steel. Beside the door, the one I must have come in through, several of them were stamped into red and brown smears on the floor. A man sat sleeping in a bucket car seat leaned up against the garage wall. The thermos of Maggie’s coffee was open by his feet; I guess Maggie made a weak brew judging by his deep-slumbering snores. He was a grease monkey version of Rip Van Winkle, with unkempt grey hair grown over most of his face and neck—even his hands were mittened in hair. The soles of his work boots were coated in bug blood, and a rifle rested on his lap. I wondered whether he was guarding the door so that the swarm didn’t get in or whether he was guarding the door so that I didn’t get out. Either way, it was a bad idea to startle a man sleeping with a rifle in his hands. I slipped out of bed slowly so the bedsprings would stay quiet.
“I’d say it’s a bit soon to be up and around after a stone bug attack, missy,” he said. Two denim-blue eyes checked me out, dark like his unwashed coveralls. “Let’s see how you’re mending, then.” He motioned for me to turn around. I waited for him to put the gun well out of reach before I’d turn my back to him. “Fast healer, eh,” he said. “Must be a Glory.”
He introduced himself only as the Night Watchman. I didn’t press him for a first or family name. He was not a question-and-answer man. He was unable to tell me how long he’d been in his garage, scrunching up his hairy face for several minutes trying to recall. Finally he explained, with great pride, that he wasn’t actually a watchman at all.
“I’m a mechanic by trade. One of the best. There wasn’t an engine that I couldn’t get to purr. American. European. Four-cylinder, six-cylinder, you name it. I do body work. I do brakes. I do transmissions. Or I did, until I got this arthritis. You could say it spoiled my touch. So I wound up living in this garage in exchange for keeping watch on the place at night. Luck is a real bitch sometimes, excuse my language. It could always be worse, though.
“Besides, there’s all sorts of desperate types out there who’d rob the garage just for the scrap metal. Damn fools that can’t tell the difference between a fender skirt and a wing, but they’d steal if they had the chance. Someone’s got to keep lookout while the sun is down; it may as well be me.”
It occurred to me that the sun had gone down for the Night Watchman a long, long time ago. I did the math in my head. Most of the cars must have been forty years old or more.
He showed me his hands—“arthritic” came nowhere close to describing them. They ought to have been soaking in formaldehyde in a glass jar at the freak show: Step right up and see a set of genuine werewolf paws. Tightly packed hairballs, they were. He held a gun with those hands?
He puttered across the room to a row of lockers. “You a Glory?” he asked again.
“Yes. I’m on a quest out here. Or I was until those bugs got me.”
“Stone bugs don’t let up, neither. I expect they’ll buzz around for a good while yet.” I was curious exactly how long a good while was to this man who never saw sunrise. His overgrown eyebrows hooded his eyes as he drew a metal lock box from a locker. I pictured the humble amount of money in there. His wrecked fingers counting out tattered bills. The Glory in me, though still bruised and tired, sensed his simple need. What little effort it would take to make him happy.
“You got something for me in that box?” My flirty question sweetened my tongue. I realized the blackout had had me parched.
“If you want it,” he said, looking a little less sunken. He showed me the old bills, money I hadn’t seen in print before. For a brief moment I worried that money might be counterfeit. But when I held the hundred-dollar bills in my hands, I felt the familiar rush of handling live money. It was as warm as any live one’s payment. Eyeballing the metal box, I’d say there was enough to get several girls out of the Dark Days, paying their dowries. This man was a living trust fund. I took only what I thought was a humble amount. I didn’t want to deplete the resource.
“Take more than that, miss,” he said.
“I didn’t come to the Dark for money,” I said. The Night Watchman screwed up his fur face. The poor man probably wasn’t even aware of the Dark. Maybe that was why he hadn’t turned evil like the zombie men; he was oblivious to his surroundings. “I mean, I wasn’t planning on working tonight. But how can I resist a swell fellow like you?” When I tried to find his cheek for a kiss, my lips were blocked by a thicket of wiry whiskers. His beard smelled dank.
“You could use a haircut and a shave,” I told him.
“I got some scissors, and a barber set in the washroom.” He got up to retrieve the objects. His posture had changed. It was upright as any young man who knows he was about to get some loving.
“Oh, let me,” I said. I wanted an excuse to visit the washroom myself. Too much time had passed without looking in a mirror. For all I knew, I had bug wings caught in my teeth. I passed a fridge humming in the narrow galley kitchen and paused. The handle looked like it had fallen off and been welded back on. Inside there was nothing but glass bottles of Coca-Cola. The cupboards were filled with cans of pork and beans and chicken noodle soup. Rows of cans lined up so neatly they gave me an eerie chill. As if they were organized, poised for attack. But what they guarded was too tempting to prevent me from snooping. The base of each cupboard shelf was lined in newspaper, dog-eared and fraying. I held my breath as I scrambled on top of the counter to get a better look. The print was unreadable, save for one swatch of newsprint, which was cut in a long column and fixed with old, brittle tape to the inside of the cupboard door. The article had yellowed. The grimy fluorescent tube above me barely cast enough light to read. “You find it?” the Watchman shouted from around the corner. I could hear him getting up out of his bucket chair again.
“I just need to freshen up. Make myself pretty for you,” I shouted back to keep him away. I hadn’t seen a newspaper in so long, I wanted time alone with it. Nun Worried about Girls’ Safety was the headline.
Sister Mary Mackenzie, a Catholic nun from the Sisters of Hope of Nazareth, is worried about the safety of local teenage girls, worried they may face the possibility of being kidnapped and transported elsewhere for illicit purposes.
