The Grimscribe's Puppets Read online

  Every time it happened, he felt he was on the edge of a timeless and profound vision. The world slipped away from him, and a few details of it took on some obscure significance that held time prisoner. As he struggled to break open the mystery, his sight blurred and his hands began to shake. Sometimes he went into a violent seizure, or stood unable to move, or passed out. When he woke up, a desperate hunger took hold of him, and only sugar-rich food could restore him to any sense of himself. In the fight to recover, the hint of a vision was lost.

  Occasionally the blackouts had the fragile perfection of a dance he had never learned but somehow got right first time. One day, coming home from work, Max had lost the plot while opening his front door. The key didn’t work, probably because he was turning it backwards. But he felt sure there was some lesson to be learnt. He checked the door number and even the name of the road. There was no doubt: it was Max’s house. So he must be someone else.

  More often, he was left only with a sense of never having been. Which was quite hard to deal with if he was at work, or in bed with a lover. It was only bearable if he was on his own, able to see his life around him like a shattered bulb. To feel the teeth of the night worrying softly at his throat. Then he could smile and tell himself: Worst episode ever. In company, the only thing that mattered was getting back to normal—even though the blackout’s silent joke had normality as its punch line.

  An unstable phase in his early forties caused Max to experience several bad spells in the office. His manager was unimpressed. “This is a professional environment,” she told him. “You can’t expect support from your colleagues. They’re here to work, not nurse a sick person.” But he only needed to be handed some of his own biscuits, Max said, and the problem would go away. His manager shook her head firmly. “That’s for you to sort out, on your own.” He didn’t mention to her that the blackouts made far more sense to him than the company’s brand meetings.

  If he could only stitch together these damaged episodes, find their common language, he’d have the gateway to another world. But it didn’t help to bring them on deliberately. They had to happen in their own time. The medication he was on had, in the past, been used for shock treatment in mental hospitals and as a form of torture in the interrogation of suspects. It didn’t reveal its secrets to order.

  He met Colin at a patient group meeting in Birmingham’s business district, where hotels and conference facilities were filling the spaces left by defunct factories. The meeting room was far too large for the group. The discussion revolved around new monitoring technology, the balancing of figures; it reminded him of brand meetings at work. Max had nothing to contribute. He’d lost the will to measure his condition. The whisper of darkness inside him was too persuasive. And the people talking about the healing powers of data didn’t look any happier than he felt. Behind their tense smiles was the corrosive fear of losing control.

  Afterwards, drinking coffee and checking that he remembered the way home, Max heard an argument behind him. A man was saying, “But it’s understanding we need, not numbers. In order to make sense of the data you need to look at the individual.” A woman replied: “But the condition isn’t part of the individual. What’s there to understand? If your house is on fire you don’t try to understand the fire, you try to put it out.” Max turned and saw a young man in navy blue denim talking with a middle-aged doctor whose badge had the logo of a private health company.

  Later, as people were drifting away, Max saw him standing alone. Their sightlines crossed and he smiled, displaying small perfect teeth. “I heard what you were saying earlier,” Max said. “About understanding the person. I’d like to know what you mean. Are you a doctor?”

  The stranger shook his head. “No. I work with patients. I’m interested in creative expression.” He passed Max a tiny black card on which the letters were reversed out in blue: Colin Harpa, Outsider Arts. A phone number, an e-mail and a web address were printed over a ghostly image of a human face composed of vapor or ectoplasm. “Have you ever felt the most important part of you was unknown to the people around you? Like a secret even from yourself?”

  Max nodded slowly. Was it possible this therapist, or whatever he was, understood the meaning of the blackouts? Colin’s pale hand touched his own. “Have a look at the website. Maybe we can help each other.”

  He walked back to the city centre in a fine rain that swirled around the yellow streetlamps. The city’s true name was written in the unstable patterns of light above the rotting stone. As he tried to decipher it, memories of the old city wrote themselves over the night again and again. He came to in a taxi that he was only just able to direct to his home address. Later, he realized the driver had charged him twice: at pickup and at drop-off. His rage kept him awake half the night.

  During a mild but overcast winter that felt like an endless hangover, Max and Colin met a number of times in a Jewellery Quarter pub near the old Vyse Street cemetery. It had live music, usually acoustic blues, and an impressive range of spirits. Max wasn’t sure if they had a friendship or a business relationship. The two shook hands, smiled and chatted cozily enough, but Colin always brought something to sell him and he never said no. At the back of his mind were other men, dates from his past, and though he sensed no rapport at that level the script of memory was hard to tear up.

  One of the things he bought from Colin was a small, carefully wrapped pane of blue glass which Max used to repair a window in his bedroom. He’d passed out on his bed one evening and woken up to find the window cracked; he had no idea whether he’d done it or how. At night, the new pane was almost ordinary glass, only slightly tinted. But in daylight, it showed him a garden at night, its bare trees and ruined buildings silhouetted against the city’s light pollution. It could be his garden as it had looked in the past, or would look in the future. Birds flew past in descending arcs, too fast to be seen clearly. They weren’t visible through any other pane in his bedroom.

  Another night, Colin sold him a box of CDs with no text except three-digit numbers, and cover images rather like the view through the blue glass. They held some kind of abstract music, jagged and repetitive, with sharp fragments of sound emerging from dull swirls—like a shattered aircraft falling out of the clouds, Max thought. The music—if it was that, rather than a recording of some industrial process—threatened to reveal something that, no matter how hard he listened, never came through. It was like going into, or coming out of, one of his bad spells. But it didn’t bring them on, and if anything it made him more stable.

  Since the bedroom episode he’d not had any full blackouts, complete with mystical fugues. Just spells of feeling panicky and confused, which didn’t go down well with his friends or family. Was this his real self? Was the more thoughtful Max a tune he’d forgotten how to play? Was there no way he could share what he felt?

  And then there was the drink Colin sold him. A spirit with a dull metallic tang in a bottle with a plain black label. Its darkness emptied his mind, as if he was in tune with the stillness of outer space. He wondered if it was a narcotic, but it didn’t seem addictive enough. He didn’t mind it, but did that make him an addict? And the drink—he thought of it as nothing in a bottle—blocked his appetite for other drinks, as if they were all inferior versions.

  He drank with Colin though, in the pub off Vyse Street, enjoying the younger man’s fey charm and mystical turns of phrase. When he asked Colin why the view through the special glass was dark when the glass itself was not, Colin said: “The light from another world always appears as darkness.” Another time, slightly the worse for Dutch gin, he clapped Max on the shoulder and told him: “You’re an artist of pain, my friend.”

  But what was the art? Colin talked about Max’s “journey of isolation,” but never asked him to write about it or draw it. Max was recurrently aware of wanting to kiss Colin, but he knew that was just a token of a greater need. He didn’t want sex any more, these days; he wanted what he’d once thought sex could give him. It had no name
.

  Winter blurred into a formless spring. Max’s work in the office became more erratic, his phone calls less articulate. He put on weight. When his tailored shirts began to feel like straitjackets, he bought cheaper and looser ones. He missed medical appointments, performance targets, having something to lose. The only thing he still hoped for was to know that his struggles actually meant something. Even if what they meant was something he’d been better off not knowing.

  He phoned Colin on a rainy morning, needing answers but not sure what questions to ask, in the end just saying: “I want to work for you.”

  “You’d better come to the office,” said Colin without missing a beat. It was in Fazeley Street, by the canal—one of the few sections of Digbeth that weren’t either derelict or being redeveloped.

  “Are you working tomorrow?” Colin asked. Max was. “OK, how about this afternoon?” That was fine. “I’ll see you then,” the businessman said. Then he chuckled—a sound he must have practiced, it couldn’t come naturally. “At last you’ll find out who and where you really are.”

  It was still raining after lunchtime, but flickers of sunlight played on the gray canal. Colin’s office was part of a narrow building whose windows were protected by fine wire grids. Mortar was trickling down from between the bricks. Max felt sure that if he waited, the rain would wash away the building’s image from the stone canvas of Digbeth. He rang the bell next to the small OUTSIDER ARTS plaque. Colin opened the door, wearing his most winning smile.

  The office was up two flights of grimy stairs. Max wondered how Colin had answered the door so fast. The climb winded him; wherever he looked the painted walls held a faint smear of yellow light, like distant streets at night. It seemed far away from the city.

  When Colin unlocked the flimsy office door, Max could hardly see into the room for the chaos of objects that covered the dusty floor. Cameras, loudspeakers, amps, lighting stands and other items were crammed together, linked by miles of tangled black cables. None of it looked capable of working.

  “Walk this way,” said Colin. Max resisted the temptation to mimic the younger man’s nervous gait. He had to watch his step in any case to avoid tripping over things. Colin led him through a labyrinth of visual and sound equipment to the middle of the office, where an open trapdoor led down a short flight of stairs to the first floor.

  There was less light here, but Max could see a bewildering array of artifacts clustered on tables and shelves: books, CDs, video-cassettes, framed photographs, sculptures, abstract paintings and items less easy to define. There were multiple copies of each work, so the room had the feel of a warehouse rather than a studio. Max noticed that the blue glass appeared not only in small panes, but in curved panels and even distorted vases. Bottles with plain black labels were ranked on long metal shelves along the walls. Once again, Colin pointed to a central gap in the floor that led to a further flight of wooden steps.

  The ground floor was a jumble of half-lit medical equipment, most of it clearly too old to be any use. Did the whole building belong to Outsider Arts? If so, it was hardly a functioning office: just a random house cluttered with jobs left incomplete or not even begun. The air was damp; Max shivered. Were those bare wires on the black table really trailing from a car battery? What were the translucent shreds of material pinned to a tall wooden block by what looked like a row of glass knives? He glimpsed a peculiarly stained enamel tub, a closet where black shapes hung on wires, a moldy ceramic vat with no lid. Fuck this, he thought, and made for the door. But Colin’s hands were on him, pulling him back, and his body—never on his side—had no power to resist.

  The eager hands forced him into a wire cradle that hung from the ceiling, and attached tight cuffs to his wrists and ankles. Max cried out, but the sound disappeared into the room’s jumble of distorted surfaces. He could barely hear his own voice. Colin switched on a huge steel-bodied lamp with a lens of blue glass. Max saw his own shadow crouching on the wall, twisted into a corrupt fugitive shape. With a craftsman’s delicate touch, Colin adjusted the wire cage to tighten the shadow’s pose. Then he opened a small case, took out a syringe filled with some black fluid, and injected it into Max’s left arm. He felt the sting above the pain of his trapped muscles, adding insult to injury.

  Some time passed. He couldn’t see what Colin was doing. The lamp changed color from blue to white, and then to red, but his shadow remained the same. He wondered if he could move even if the cuffs were taken off. His breath seemed to curdle, tasting sour, almost freezing on his lips, though the air wasn’t cold. A terrible silence echoed in the room.

  Then Colin came back, holding something that Max couldn’t quite see. Was it a piece of broken glass? Ignoring his prisoner, the salesman bent over the trapped shadow and cut it to ribbons. Each slice, the silhouette of a twisted body, curled away and lay twitching on the floorboards. Colin hung them on a rail, one after another. Max could hear them screaming.

  Finally, he felt Colin’s small hands releasing him from the wire cradle. He slipped to the floor, but his posture didn’t change. The slices of his shadow flinched, tortured by contact with each other. Gently, as if handling a broken pot, Colin carried him through the last trapdoor into the unlit basement. The walls were streaked with mold. On the stone floor, Max could just make out a dozen or more figures like himself, lying in fetal positions. Their skin was dead white. Only their eyes moved. Then Colin went back up the steps and closed the trapdoor, and in the dark he left behind there was no sound of breath.

  No Signal

  By Darrell Schweitzer

  When the time came at last, Edmund Marshall, poet, eminent author of books on natural history, professor at a prestigious university, loving husband and father, knew that, however reluctantly, he must leave his satisfactory life forever. It was a seasonal thing, an instinct in the blood, like what birds feel when, after flying north for so long, inexorably, they turn south.

  Therefore he put down his fountain pen, gathered the pages and notes of his latest work in progress into a folder, then scribbled a note on the folder to his chief graduate assistant, I guess you’ll have to finish this, and placed folder and pen in the middle of his office desk. Handwriting manuscripts for someone else to keyboard was a privilege still allowed to tenured senior professors. Perhaps he would be the last ever to exercise it.

  He paused for a moment, trying to organize his thoughts as neatly as that file, to focus on what he should do next. He glanced at the photo of his smiling wife and exquisite, sixteen-year-old daughter, and thought that he should call his wife, not to explain, because no explanation was possible, but just to hear her voice one last time, to make small talk.

  He felt real pain now, and something bordering on panic. His heart was racing. He was beginning to sweat.

  He realized he couldn’t quite bring to mind his daughter’s name.

  He snatched up the phone on the desk and dialed. The line was dead. Then, as he got his coat, he took his cell phone out of the pocket and tried that. No signal. Ridiculous, of course. Here, in the middle of the city, in the middle of the campus, there had always been signal, but now there was none.

  All he could do was put the cell phone back into his coat pocket.

  Outside, he noticed at once that something was gone from the world. A lot of his work, his field work, took him outside, and although his teaching position kept him firmly shackled to an urban office and classroom much of the time, he loved the outdoors and had a sharp eye for living things; but now it seemed as if the world itself were an image badly printed on a magazine cover, with one of the color filters missing. As he walked across the campus, he saw no birds, no squirrels. The spring flowers seemed to lack vitality, as if they were made of paper. If anyone greeted him as he walked, as students often did, he did not hear them. The sounds of the people around him faded into a dull static.

  He continued on his way, like a salmon leaving the ocean forever, to swim upriver one last time to spawn and meet its fate. Only he didn’t
think this had anything to do with spawning.

  He left the campus and made for the subway, as he would when commuting home, though he wasn’t going home, not now. The token he dropped into the slot was, he noted with only minimal interest, featureless.

  It seemed that there were no other people on the platform. Maybe there were, but they vanished in the periphery of his vision every time he turned his head. Any background noise, much less any human voices, faded into a murmur like the sound of waves that you hear when you’re falling asleep on the beach.

  He wished he could have fallen asleep, then awakened from a bad dream back into his real life, but that was not to be.

  The train came for him alone. He stood in the middle of the empty car, surrounded by graffiti and faded, ragged posters for old movies and old products he vaguely remembered from childhood. If there were more stops, he was not sure. If people got on and off around him, if they talked and lived their lives, they were on another wavelength and he could not quite perceive them.

  He tried to weep. He searched around inside himself for that emotion and could not find it.

  The train roared and rocked in the black tunnel, but after a while even that faded into a susurrus of soft background noise.

  He could not tell when the train stopped. He had no memory of actually getting off, and was only aware that he was walking up a flight of stairs, past a broken escalator, out of total darkness into the gray, half-light of an utterly empty, cavernous station in which there was no sound at all, not even the echoes of his own footsteps.

  He passed a newsstand covered with ragged, yellowing newspapers and magazines with curling covers.