The Suburb Beyond the Stars Read online

  And after an hour, they reached the entrance to the caverns.

  It was in a cellar. A rotten door set in the stone. “I remember it being a foundation to a new house,” said Brian.

  He looked out over the landscape. Beneath the sliver of the moon and the high clouds, the suburb lay like an organism, glistening with lights, its streets curved and curled. An SUV crawled along one dead end. The lights peppered the wood as far as Brian could see.

  That was just like he remembered it from the previous year, he thought. The lawns. The lanterns. The dead ends. Was that right?

  He stood, transfixed by the distant, bruising glow of cities on the horizon. The clouds were dingy with their light.

  The night was crawling with life.

  Kalgrash, below, was heaving the wooden door aside.

  “I’ll go a few steps down,” he said. “Then once we can’t be seen, you light the lantern for yourself.”

  They trotted down the spiral staircase. Brian shrugged the sagging door closed over his head. Now in complete darkness, he held on to the lantern, concentrated, and spoke the Cantrip of Activation.

  The lantern glowed and picked out Brian’s round cheeks and Kalgrash’s spiky teeth.

  They continued downward, toward the city — and the prison where Gregory, Prudence, and Sniggleping were trapped, far beneath the earth.

  TWENTY-THREE

  When Gregory tumbled out of the hirsute throat of wizardry, he dropped on a floor of stone. The fall was rough. For a while, he lay on the ground, writhing, grabbing at his own arms, flexing his burned hand, rocking back and forth, convulsed in pain.

  A Norumbegan lantern lit the dungeon, but not well. The room was too large, the shadows tremendous. Dark bars were cast across his scalded palm.

  As he stopped rolling and began to take notice of what was around him, terror struck. He was surrounded by kreslings.

  They stood without moving. He propped himself up. “What do you want?” he asked them.

  Two came forward roughly, jammed their claws under his arms, and pulled him to his feet. Their flesh smelled of burning tires. They dragged him to the wall.

  Then he was truly terrified.

  Because there, in front of him, was Prudence.

  He had wanted to find her so badly.

  But not like this.

  Nothing like this.

  His cousin was already slumped on the floor, hands behind her. She could not see him. She had on some kind of helmet. On its crest was a small, old-timey movie projector. In front of her eyes were long tracks leading to some kind of screen, which caught the image from the projector above. The projector rattled and ratcheted. Gregory could not see the movie Prudence watched, but it obviously blared colors, which shrank and grew and dissolved across her forehead and eyes. As they changed, she twitched and grimaced. Her mouth was pulled into ugly shapes. She did not seem like a sentient human anymore, but like something that was broken.

  Wee Sniggleping was next to her. He also wore a helmet with a projector and a screen a few inches in front of his eyes. He no longer moved. He stared, vainly, at the screen, his mouth open, his hands unclasped on the stone beside him.

  “What have you — what is this?” Gregory asked.

  The kreslings did not answer.

  He called out Prudence’s name. She did not respond. He called it out again.

  She turned jerkily, trying to see him. But she could not see past the movie. She raised a hand to try to feel him. Her body jolted with the darts of color that assaulted her.

  He was horrified this could happen to her — his clever, sly cousin — but now, there were no Rules to stop the wrong from winning — and here she lay, hardly human.

  Gregory reached out to her with both his hands. One was red, one pale. He called her name again.

  The kreslings forced him down to the ground. They tried to shove a helmet on his head. He fought them. He brought his elbows up to shield his skull. They batted his arms away. He clenched a fist and ducked.

  They got the helmet on him regardless.

  He shrieked Prudence’s name again, but he couldn’t see her anymore. There was only a white screen in front of him.

  He did not have to ask. He knew what this was. Brainwashing. Somehow, they’d try to get him to soften up for colonization. There was no way, he vowed — no way that they’d break him.

  He felt a click resound through his jaw. Someone had turned on the helmet’s movie projector, and it wouldn’t, he had a feeling, go off soon.

  The colors started. Bold. Flying at him. He ducked. It was like they were three-dimensional. He knew they weren’t real. He closed his eyes.

  The machine purred on his head. He saw the colors through his lids — just a blush.

  It seemed like more trouble to keep his eyes closed than to open them. He peeked.

  The colors came at him in a barrage. Some subtle. Most glaring. Swimming up at him. He tried to wipe them away, but his hands were restrained by claws. He could not reach his own face. The colors were always there. The colors always would be there. For hours, for days, he would watch the colors. They crowded out every thought. He screamed, but he couldn’t hear his own voice above the nattering of the projector.

  He tried to fix his thoughts on the things he knew — on home — on his mother, his father, his house. He saw the house, the kitchen, with an arrangement of dried grasses in a vase on the counter. A calendar of Vermont landscapes covered by fog — covered bridges, pony teams, valleys. The dishwasher … (everything turned purple before his eyes) … the dishwasher had a different compartment for powdered soap than for liquid. His father was there, putting away plates. Gregory thought as hard as possible about that room — the place he knew so well — with the cabinets and the arrangement of dried grass and the men with the dark rings around their eyes, the pointed ears, sitting on the tabletop. There was never a hope for brownies in that house. The Thusser ate them all. The walls were orange — no, yellow, or … with a green stripe … the walls … weren’t the walls …?

  Gregory’s head rocked back and forth as the colors assaulted him.

  He lay on the floor, deep in that vault, and forgot everything he knew.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The stairs curled around themselves forever. Centuries before, they’d connected a turret, a mountain outpost, with the maze of caverns beneath. Norumbegan soldiers had rushed up and down these steps during the Wars of Thusserian Aggression. Their halberds had clanged on the stone.

  Down these stairs, in this late, unmythical age, a boy in glasses and a troll dressed for a joust descended into silence. As they passed farther and farther into the mountain, the chill grew. The summer’s warmth never penetrated here.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Brian hesitated. They were coming out into Snarth’s Cavern, where, the previous fall, a blind ogre had stomped and raged and nearly flattened Brian and Gregory both.

  Kalgrash poked around the cavern first, knees akimbo, ax ready for smiting.

  He found that Snarth the blind ogre was long deactivated. He sat in a pile, head sagging between his warty knees. His mechanism had run down. He had not been wound for months.

  This calmed Brian down a lot. They crossed the cavern, Brian shining his lantern to pick out stalactites and stalagmites, the mucilaginous flow of rock around which Snarth had nosed his way in former days.

  “You know,” said Kalgrash apologetically, “you’re going to have to switch off the lantern.”

  “Why?” Brian asked.

  “Because once we get into the cavern with the City of Gargoyles, the light will alert things that we’re there. Whatever is waiting for us. And then it’s nothing but claws, tentacles, tentacles, claws, teeth, spines, acid spouts, whiskers, cleavers, katanas, shillelaghs …”

  “Okay,” said Brian, “but how am I going to see?”

  “… fireous breath, razor-sharp dorsal plates, cat-o’-nine-tails — you get my drift.” Kalgrash sputtered with his lips.

 
; “I won’t be able to see.”

  “But I’ll be able to see better in total darkness than with your lamp. I’m a troll. Or at least, a good fake of one. And we won’t get munged by anything with scales that happens to slither by.”

  “You’ll have to guide me.”

  “Even better,” said Kalgrash. “You sit on my shoulders. Holding up the blunderbuss. Then: Clank. Clank. Clank. We progress into the City of Gargoyles. We’ll be like a tank. Medieval tank.”

  Brian extinguished the lantern with a Cantrip of Deactivation. Kalgrash lowered himself to one knee, and Brian clambered on his shoulders. The arrangement required the dismantling of some of Kalgrash’s armor. There were too many spikes on it.

  So it was that they came to the vast arch that looked out over the City of Gargoyles.

  Kalgrash could not see with complete precision in the total darkness, but he could certainly make out the city streets and the dark bay. At the head of the grandest avenue of the city rose the spires of the cathedral and, next to it, the Palace of the Norumbegans. It was in that palace that the prison cells lay. They had been abandoned by Norumbega ages ago, and now, Brian guessed, were being put to use by their adversaries.

  “We have to make it the whole length of the city,” Kalgrash said.

  Brian stared into the gloom. “Do you see anything unusual? That shouldn’t be there?”

  “I can’t make them out exactly. I see the sacs on the city streets. They look gray and very big. I bet they’re Thusser luxury homes.” He scanned the horizon. Brian could feel the troll’s head swivel. “And there’s … there’s someone moving … up above the grand boulevard … someone … I can’t really see from this distance. It’s a little man.”

  “What’s he doing?”

  “Floating. Or hovering. I guess he shouldn’t be doing that. Gravity’s not just a good idea — it’s the law.”

  “Do you think you can get us to the castle without going past him on the boulevard?”

  “Side streets, hmm? We’ll give it a shot.”

  Brian could not judge their progress. It seemed to take forever. They did not speak as the troll advanced, rocking, beneath him. Brian felt each jolt through his legs. He held the blunderbuss in readiness, but could see nothing to aim at.

  He could hear, by the faint jingle and clank of the troll’s armor, that they passed through wide spaces and narrow. He felt them trudge up steps and down through sunken channels.

  The darkness was claustrophobic or frightening, even though there was nothing pressing down on him, nothing closing him in. There was just the vastness of blank space and chill around him. He couldn’t tell if there was nothing above his head for five hundred feet, or if a stone beam or lintel was about to bash him senseless.

  He found himself ducking instinctively to try to avoid hazards that weren’t even there.

  He wished Gregory were there to make a joke about his blindness.

  Suddenly, Kalgrash jerked sideways. He slammed backward into a stone wall. Brian fumbled to keep hold of the blunderbuss.

  “What is it?” the boy croaked.

  Kalgrash moved swiftly backward. Then to the side.

  Brian couldn’t tell what was going on.

  “Can’t even close its mouth,” said Kalgrash.

  Brian heard something approach. Claws on stone.

  Kalgrash said, “Ready!” He reached up, grabbed the tip of the blunderbuss, and aimed it into the darkness.

  A jolt — Kalgrash had been hit. He rocked backward, stumbled to keep his balance with the boy on top of him.

  He cried, “Fire!”

  And Brian cast the Cantrip of Activation.

  Flare bloomed.

  In the brief shock of fire, Brian saw something lizardlike and vicious, maw so wide and so deeply fanged it drooped open. It burned.

  Kalgrash began running.

  Brian asked, “Are there more of them?” At each step, he juddered up and down, slapping against the troll’s spaulders.

  “No,” said the troll. “Worse. The light of the blast.”

  “Who saw?”

  “That floating guy. He saw.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I can see him over the roofs.”

  “Flying?”

  “No. I think it’s little cords. It’s Gelt the Winnower. He’s headed this way.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Suspended above the boulevards, suspended, too, between life and death, Gelt the Winnower, once a man (or something like one), now a monster, patrolled the dark spaces beneath the mountain for his Thusser masters. The cords erupting from his hands, his legs, his chest, his eyes, all gently lofted him through the cold subterranean air. They caressed the smoothness of marble, the rough heft of granite. He felt the cold stone all around him, and pulled himself along in utter gloom.

  Dimly, he could recall life lived upon his own feet — another world — much more noise, more glow, delightful color (for others, never for him). People leaned together at cafés and in homes, and he remembered attachments to people who called him by another name. He did not regret that he had chosen a strange and wayward route to power. He wanted only to destroy more effectively, and here he hung, feared by all.

  His thoughts — husky in his brittle, dried head — were limited to the routes he’d followed in the last twelve hours, surveying the dead city to ensure that none of its former citizens, alerted, had returned. He had wound himself a cocoon, a spiral web, of his own silver cords, perched atop the peak of a conical turret on a defunct banker’s house; he’d hung there for fifteen minutes, filaments twitching around him, searching for movement.

  And then — there was light.

  A burst: a gun.

  Without sound, rapid as a cat, Gelt unwound himself. He drew himself silently along rooftops, up shingled planes, down gutters, through alleys, chin forward, eyes bristling with strands. In his dead heart was the joy of the hunt and the desire, after the chase, for embrace — to clutch his enemy tight, tighter, until the cords cut and the flesh failed and he was left alone again in silence.

  He rushed to meet his adversary.

  Kalgrash bounded through the deserted alleyways. They had no light to give them away, true, but Brian could tell what a clatter the armor made. He was sure it echoed loudly above the silent city. Gelt would be upon them in moments.

  Now the darkness filled Brian with panic. It was as if the ink in the air were a substance, something he breathed into his lungs with the chill, and he was sunk deep in some sea. He did not know from which way the cord would come, plucking at him, garroting him as Kalgrash thumped on, unawares.

  He just wanted it to happen, to be over with, because he could not stand knowing that the danger was all around him and invisible, the fibers waiting to strike.

  Brian’s arm knocked against the wall of a house. It stung. He swayed on the troll’s back. He gathered himself and hissed, “Inside!”

  Kalgrash nodded, made an abrupt turn.

  The space was close. Brian could tell from the echoes. Down a flight of stairs.

  Deep in his nostrils, the scent of dust.

  “Get down! Get down!” Kalgrash demanded. He lowered himself to one knee. Brian scrambled off.

  Kalgrash pushed Brian down more steps. The troll half held him, half shoved him. Brian shuffled on the stone, barking his shins, slamming his hands into granite walls.

  They were in some deep, small place. A cellar, maybe.

  “Sit,” Kalgrash demanded.

  The two of them crouched on a dirt floor, their backs against frigid stone.

  They tried to calm their breathing. Their mouths were open. They tried for silence.

  For a minute, the air was as empty of sound as it was of image. Brian had only the sensation of rock in his back to mire him in the world of objects. Otherwise, there was nothing to suggest a world was there at all.

  And then, a sound came. A stealthy ticking.

  Gelt was above the house. His tendrils looped and cur
led down through its windows, under its lintels and across its floors. They crept along, feeling for humankind.

  Brian could barely breathe with panic.

  He heard the cords making their way through rooms.

  Kalgrash whispered, “This isn’t going to work. Hiding here.”

  Brian didn’t want to respond. He didn’t want to say anything, and to have that hushed word be the thing that got them caught.

  Kalgrash said, “I’ll lead the Winnower away and come back.”

  Brian had already lost Gregory. He couldn’t lose Kalgrash. Chest pounding, he tried not to breathe. He could hear the tendrils licking the house, tapping through each room.

  “I’m going,” said Kalgrash.

  “You can’t do that,” Brian insisted.

  Then Kalgrash lunged. He stood. “Stay where you are. Exactly,” the troll demanded, and leaped up the steps.

  Brian sat absolutely still and waited for the troll to come back, or the Winnower to find him.

  Kalgrash saw the cords draped through the windows and doors, looping through rooms.

  He ran past them, heading for the exit.

  Feeling the percussion of armor on stone, Gelt’s cords twitched and sought the troll harder. His servant fronds hopped and scurried through the house. Kalgrash leaped over them.

  He jumped through a window and started bolting down the alley.

  He saw, above him, the hideous, mangled form of Gelt. The slack, white body hung in the air, supported by the silver cords that now whipped out of windows and reached for the troll.

  Kalgrash wanted to make it a few blocks away before he was caught. He wanted to give Brian as much space as possible.

  A cord brushed his shoulder. He leaped into a house.

  The tendrils poured in after him.

  Kalgrash was already lumbering down a corridor, breathing heavily, looking for another — preferably confusing — way out.

  The tendrils turned all corners at once.

  Kalgrash put a heavy foot on the stone sill of a window and prepared to heave himself out.

  A cord tapped, confirmed — then grabbed.

  It was around his neck. He was astonished that something so gentle, so pliable, could suddenly snap taut and kill.