They crossed a broad street that she recognized. They were near the bar and boardwalk where the crowd had spotted her, she thought, a little afraid. But this time she wasn’t alone. She looked at her sleeves, staring at the rain jewels there.
Heavily muscled, with bodies and huge heads that reminded her of the granite gargoyles on churches, enormous black dogs were eating something that lay in the gutter. The dogs from her dreams.
Zoe felt Valentine tug her arm. “Don’t look,” he said. “They’re Queen Hecate’s spies.”
Zoe couldn’t help glancing back. “What are they eating?” The dogs hungrily ripped into their food. “It almost looks like a body.”
“I told you not to look.”
Zoe closed her eyes for a few seconds and let Valentine lead her. All her life she’d wanted to live in her dreams with her brother and now her dreams had come true. But they weren’t alone and it was both wonderful and horrible.
When they were well past the dogs, Zoe whispered, “Valentine, what happened to the city? I was just here a day ago and it was beautiful.”
Valentine shook his head. “Nothing happened. The city’s been like this for as long as anyone can remember. Father tricked you with pretty pictures and sweet lies. He showed you what you wanted to see so you’d get the hell out and never come back. Why did you come back?”
“I think I did something bad. I just wanted to see if he was all right.”
“You think you’re going to fix anything? Look at this place. Look at these people. Look at me.” He lifted his head a little way out his high collar. She caught a glimpse of stitches in his face. Not the kind the doctor had given her after she’d fallen as a kid. These stitches were thick and crude, like wires in cheap leather. “Don’t worry. Father hasn’t been here long enough to look like me. But he’s not exactly what you remember.”
“What the fuck is this place? Are we in hell?”
“Yeah, but not the one you mean.” They turned off the well-lit streets into a darker industrial area. Broken fences ringed fields full of strange and fearsome machines: cranes with what looked like claws, bulldozers with teeth. What lay ahead was even stranger.
Just a few blocks off the main road, the streets weren’t straight anymore, and neither were the buildings. They twisted around, over and under each other, like weeds and vines in an abandoned garden. Some buildings stood straight up while others lay on their sides like snakes, wrapping around other twisted buildings, strangling the upright ones so they shrank to almost nothing at the middle but bulged at the tops and bottoms.
Valentine said, “The city used to be called Calumet. That means ‘peace.’ Now it’s Iphigene. Only Queen Hecate knows what that means, and no one’s asking her.”
“That’s the queen the dogs spy for?”
He nodded. “She rules Iphigene. We’re her loyal subjects. She’s been the queen here for over a thousand years. Maybe thousands. No one can say exactly.”
In the distance, Zoe thought she could see a dark apartment building rise from the ground, windows and doors sliding into place as the place unfurled like a blooming flower.
“She doesn’t sound like much of a queen.”
“The city wasn’t always like this. Before Hecate, we had day and night just like anywhere else. They say that when she crowned herself, the first thing she did was steal the sun out of the sky and hide it somewhere in her palace.”
“Why?”
“She’s the moon. The moon is Hecate.” He looked up at the bright white orb hanging over the sluggish ocean. “We can only love her and worship her under the moon. Anyway, that’s what the old-timers told me.”
The road took them under a kind of arch where two buildings had collided and grew upright against each other. Zoe could swear she heard a subtle crunch and creak as the buildings continued to move and grow above them.
“Old-timers. Old spirits, you mean? Old souls.” Zoe was suddenly cold again. “It’s all so real and solid here. It’s weird to think that everyone here is dead. That you’re all ghosts.”
“But that’s what we are.”
“But I can see you and touch you.”
“Spirits are real. And this is a place for spirits. You’re the strange one around here.”
She smiled a little at Valentine. “Thanks for letting me hold on to you. I know you don’t like it, but I really need to right now.”
“I’m just not used to it. It’s kind of nice, in a weird way. No one’s ever really, you know, touched me before.”
Zoe tightened the arm she’d looped through his and pulled him a little closer. He didn’t resist. “There’s Dad. He’s here now.”
“So? I’m just some strange guy in your dreams, remember?”
“No, you’re not. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here. You wouldn’t have . . . well, died.”
“If you’re going to get technical,” he said. Valentine drew in a long breath and blew mist into the night air. “Anyway, I know Father, but he’s doesn’t know I’m around. That’s how I like it, so don’t go doing nothing dramatic.”
“Are you mad at him?”
“Nope.”
“You’re hiding from him like you hid from me that time I upset you up in the tree fort.”
“Maybe. Or maybe just because, okay? Stop asking so many damned questions,” he snapped.
“Sorry.” Two black dogs were fighting over a dead rat in the middle of a deserted intersection. They stopped and watched Zoe and Valentine intently as they passed, then they went back to their fight.
“I’m sorry,” said Valentine. “I didn’t mean it.”
“It’s okay. Can I ask you one more question?”
“Sure.”
“You’re here, but Mom and Dad never talked about you. You’re not . . . Mom and Dad didn’t . . .”
“Am I an abortion, you mean?”
Zoe looked down at her feet. “Yeah.”
“A miscarriage. And that’s your last question about that. You’ve got other stuff to worry about.” On a street of derelict garages, Zoe followed Valentine up a fire escape two floors onto the tilted roof of one building. From three stories up, Iphigene was laid out at Zoe’s feet.
Gazing out toward the beach, she thought that the city didn’t look so bad. Kind of old and run-down, but not in a bad way. But the city was stranger when she looked inland. Nothing made sense. Streets bent and buckled and circled back on each other around buildings that lay like earthworms after a rain. It reminded Zoe of an M. C. Escher print Laura had of crazy stairs that ran into each other at impossible angles. Laura, Zoe thought. What would she think if she could see me now?
Valentine called her to the edge of the roof and pointed to a building at the far end of the boardwalk. “That used to be the city hall. Now it’s Hecate’s palace.” It was an ornate, sprawling building of brilliant white marble. She remembered it from her first visit, but like the rest of Iphigene, the building was different now. There were long curved spikes running around the edge of the roof, like cobra fangs. Towers stood at each corner of the palace, topped with a carving that depicted different phases of the moon, from crescent to full.
“It’s beautiful,” Zoe said.
“Old bones,” said Valentine. Zoe looked at him. “They say when you get close, the walls look like old bones.”
“My friend Absynthe would love that.”
“I remember her. Your Goth girlfriend.”
“She’s not my girlfriend,” said Zoe, and she shoved him a little. Without hesitation, he shoved her back. She smiled and for a second everything was normal. She was in a familiar place, high in the air with Valentine teasing her about some silly thing or other. It’s him, she thought. It really is Valentine.
“Listen. There’s something I haven’t told you. The real reason Father didn’t want you here.” Valentine’s voice was low and slow,
more serious than she’d ever heard him before.
“Queen Hecate is as crazy as the sea is black. She’s been dead and crazy for so long, she doesn’t even remember that she used to be alive. She can’t leave Iphigene, or she won’t. Maybe she forgot that this is just a way station and we’re supposed to move on. But every day the buses leave empty.” Valentine stared out at the palace. “She hates the living. That means she hates you. You need to be careful every moment you’re here.”
Zoe nodded, trying not to look scared. “What should I do? Is there somewhere I can hide until I can figure out what to do?”
“Of course.” Valentine pointed to the next roof. “My house. It’s right over there.”
Valentine’s house was a sprawling shack made of scavenged wood, sheet metal, parts of buses, and tar paper from nearby buildings. The inside was a forest of tools, old clothes, books, and old comics, all junk washed down from the city above. The place reminded Zoe of their tree fort, and she felt safe and at home. Valentine pointed to a relatively clean cot in the corner.
“It’s not much, but I call it nothing,” he said. For the first time he showed Zoe his face and smiled. He seemed more relaxed on his home turf. He took off his greatcoat and hung it on a meat hook by the door. Zoe finally got a look at his arms. They looked like lengths of rebar and pipe held together by wire and ragged welds. When he crossed the room, his legs moved strangely, swinging at odd angles under his loose jeans. She wondered if all his limbs were homemade, and had to remind herself not to stare.
“I have about a thousand more questions,” she said.
“Everyone does when they first get here.” He took a match and lit a small camp stove by a truck windshield that served as a window. “I’ll answer what I can tomorrow. You must be tired now. Why don’t you lie down while I make some tea.”
“Do all ghosts drink tea?”
“Only the ones that know where to find it or steal it.”
Zoe sat on the bed, not feeling at all tired, and watched Valentine move happily around his little home, getting cups and finding sugar. Seeing him made her happier than she’d felt in months. She lay down and looked out at the stars through the truck windshield. Then, without realizing it, she was asleep.
It was strange, waking up in the dark. It took Zoe a minute to remember where she was. The sight of the tools and old, broken toys hanging from the ceiling reminded her that she was in Valentine’s rooftop home, but the memory didn’t make the place any more real to her waking mind. It all felt too much like a dream. When she sat up and put her feet on the floor, however, the pain in her ankle told her that this was very real.
Valentine was over by the window. “Hey, you’re awake. How are you feeling? I have some food, if you’re hungry.” He brought her a bundle wrapped in a white paper napkin. Zoe unfolded it and found a couple of slices of toast with strips of crisp bacon.
“Thanks,” she said, and bit into a strip of bacon. It was like Styrofoam. When she sniffed it, the bacon didn’t have any smell at all. She bit into the toast and found that it was the same, spongy and nearly tasteless.
“Something wrong?” asked Valentine.
“No, it’s fine,” said Zoe through a full mouth. She smiled and tried to look happy.
“Don’t lie. You can barely choke it down.” He picked up one of the bacon strips and sniffed. “Funny. It smells all right to me.”
“An old woman ghost gave me a piece of candy that tasted like this. It’s not really like food. More like the memory of it.”
“I don’t usually eat, myself. Never got the habit. And this is ghost food from one of the restaurants by the boardwalk. I guess I’m not surprised a live person can’t taste it.”
“It was nice of you to try. Thanks. So, if you live up here away from people and don’t go to the restaurant or the bar, what do you do all day?” She thought about that for a second. “Night, I guess. You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, I know. I scavenge. The streets. The canals. The beach. Wherever.” He opened his hands to his packed-to-the-rafters room. “It keeps me sharp and awake, not in denial like the people in the restaurants stuffing their faces forever. Where do you think I got the things for our tree fort? Where do you think I got the telescope?”
Zoe smiled. Valentine almost looked happy talking about his stuff. Her smile faded when she thought about it and understood that this was all Valentine had. An endless night of picking through the world’s castoffs. She tried not to show how sad that made her. “Where are we?” she asked.
Valentine nodded at the floor. “This building we’re in is where people used to make and fix the buses that took people away. But we don’t need them anymore. No one leaves, so all that’s left are the ones that bring in new souls.” He looked out one of the windows at the apartment buildings that crawled over the hills and disappeared into the far distance. “I don’t know how big the city is. Big. Bigger than the living world, maybe. It grows and changes all the time, trying to squeeze in new souls. It’s pretty modern up here, but over those hills, there are people that speak Latin, and others, I don’t know what they speak, but they write with pictures. I’ll look out for you, so you don’t have to be afraid, but you can’t let down your guard here. Not for a second.”
“Well,” said Zoe, having no idea how to respond.
“Sorry. I shouldn’t have said all that at once.”
“No, it’s all right. I want to know the truth.” She looked at the hills where Valentine had been staring a moment before. “If it wasn’t so scary here, I’d like to see the people who write in hieroglyphics.”
“We can’t do that,” Valentine said. “But I can give you what you came here for. I can take you to see Father. I know where he lives.”
“I’d love that.”
“How’s your ankle?”
“Much better.”
“Then let’s go.”
They crossed the roofs under the moon, back the way they’d come the previous night, and descended the fire escape to the street. Then they turned inland, headed toward the heaps of giant apartment buildings she’d seen from the roof. At the corner Valentine stopped her. He turned up the collar on her coat so that it covered more of her face. After studying her for a moment, he ran his hands down the sides of a telephone pole and wiped smeared dirt across Zoe’s forehead and cheeks. He ended by popping a final dot of dirt on the end of her nose with his thumb. “Now you look more like one of us,” he said.
She soon lost track of time as they walked. In the day that was exactly the same as the previous night, the idea of seconds, minutes, and hours became fantastical, like something from a fairy tale. She tried counting the streets, but they were so twisted around she had no idea where one stopped and another began. But they were definitely in an older part of the city. They crossed tall stone walkways lit by bent gaslights and descended long flights of cobblestone staircases to narrow catwalks just inches above murky canal water. Since she couldn’t make out streets, Zoe tried remembering landmarks along the way. There was a half-burned billboard with the remains of a woman’s smile beneath one of the stone walkways.
As they walked, Valentine dragged his boots through debris in the gutters and picked up anything he could find that was shiny, sometimes throwing it away and sometimes pocketing it. She understood now how his little house had become so crowded. His delight when he found something he liked was almost like that of a kid, Zoe thought. In fact, even though he was older, in some ways Valentine felt more like a little brother. She guessed it had something to do with his being dead so long. He never had the chance to go out into the world and grow up like Zoe and her friends did. He started collecting junk when he got to Iphigene and never stopped because there wasn’t anyone to show him that there was anything else to do. He’d been cheated of so much. It didn’t seem fair, but then what was fair in this strange place?
At the bottom of a staircas
e, in a circle of stones made where twisting buildings left an open patch of land, were the remains of what looked like a campsite. Ragged beds, tables, chairs, and lamps had been dragged outside.
“Why would people take their stuff outside where it rains?” asked Zoe.
Valentine didn’t even turn his head.
“Not all the apartments are that nice. Some people prefer the street.”
The camp was all just wreckage now. Splintered wood and gutted mattresses. The place hadn’t been dismantled the way police would do it. It was torn to pieces, as if by angry animals.
Zoe’s bad ankle hurt and Valentine had to help her limp over heaps of trash that filled some twisting streets by some of the old apartments. They were back on a street that looked more like a normal modern city. “Sorry about the trek,” he said. “Truth is, you can take that big street over there most of the way back to the ocean.” He pointed over his shoulder. “But I thought if Hecate’s dogs had maybe heard about you, it would be good to go the long way round.”
“It was a good idea,” said Zoe, panting. She sat and retied the rag Valentine had put around her ankle. She still limped a little but she could walk just fine.
“Anyway, we’re here.” Valentine nodded to the nearest building. The address was 5,111,304 Ouroboros Street.
The apartment building across the street wrapped around the building, tightening it in the middle so it was shaped like an hourglass.
“This is where Dad lives?”
“Yep. Fifth floor, all the way in the back, on the right.”
Zoe nodded, feeling both excited and nervous.
“Before you go in, there are a couple things you need to know. I’m not going in with you for the reasons I told you about last night.”
“Just because,” she said.
“Right. The second thing is that when we’re out like this, if something happens and we get separated, you head straight back to my house. Got it?”
“I don’t think I can find my way back the way we came.”