shook her head. “It was all roped off, Ruth. All those corridors. They were
supposed
to be forgotten. You shouldn’t have been down there. I had to come and find you. The Dad had wandered off somewhere, too, to look at old clocks or telescopes or meteorites or something. He always was impatient, even then. His mind always wandered. I found you all curled up under some great hairy monster on its hind legs they called a
bear.
You were hard to wake.”
“I don’t remember that. I don’t remember sleeping down there.” Ruth passed the cigarette across the table to Arjun. He took it and breathed the smoke in, thinking only as it was too late that he should have asked what was in it.
“You slept all the time back then,” Marta said. “The Dad thought you were sick. I said you were just dreamy.”
There was a sudden buzzing in Arjun’s head and he coughed, once, quietly; then the coughing echoed back and repeated and he was soon doubled over hacking. He dropped the cigarette in his bowl. The sisters politely ignored him. He heard Ruth say, “Maybe it was a dream, then, but I remember I went down there because I heard a whisper. It was like there was something down there talking to me.” He heard Marta say, “No you didn’t. You only think you remember it because of what he just said. You know what you’re like, Ruth.” And he heard Ruth say, “It was saying something about Ivy, about ghosts, I remember it,” and he heard Marta snort. After that the argument became too fast and too obscure and too personal for him to follow—it was all
no wonder the Dad…
and
no wonder Ivy …
The cigarette had left Arjun slow and hazy. Had the sisters been talking about the Beast? It seemed they’d been talking about some statue, some dead and stuffed and stitched-together thing—not the breathing and all-too-real monster that had maimed him. He looked back and forth from face to blurry face in the candlelight and said nothing, afraid of making a fool of himself, until finally Marta stood up to go to bed, when he attempted to say
good night
, but to judge from her raised eyebrow perhaps said something else entirely. Shortly afterward Ruth retired, too.
Arjun did not know what to do with the dishes. He decided to ignore them.
“It
was
there,” he said to the candles. “It
did
speak. The Beast owes me answers.”
A rjun took the candle over to a bare table out in the shop front, and began studying his maps. The unfamiliar drug was still in his head and at first his vision blurred and redoubled, and the map-lines seemed to multiply and stand clear of the page, to cast intricate shadows, to vibrate with a pent-up urge to collapse into a single coiling scrawl at the center of the page; but he found that if he covered his left eye with his bound-up left hand, the effect diminished greatly, and after a while disappeared.
He identified the Fosdyke Museum. A little more than a mile from Carnyx Street, on the south side of a space marked as Holcroft Square. That must have been the market he’d stumbled through. Its neighbors on Holcroft Square were a university and a Hall of Trade. He remembered staggering in the darkness past several huge, boarded-up, unlit buildings.
Arjun tried to commit the route to memory.
He raided the shelves. He spent some time staring at a map of exotic and confusing design, lacking legend or label, a black disc depicting the city’s streets orbiting in precise concentric grooves around a central hole, an
absence;
it was only when he checked the scrawl on the sleeve again—The Pullman & Jones String & Brass Band, Op. 101—that he realized his error; it was
music …
One after the other, Arjun spread out the maps. One of Ruth’s refugee cats at once came stalking across them, trampling the city like a monster of the apocalypse. It was soft-pawed and its fur was a grey so rich it was almost violet by candlelight. Arjun lifted it one-handed from the table and it went off to ambush things in the
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