Weatherhead Read online

  He fought for the memory even as she continued slapping the face of his door, calling out to him, he fought. He’d never fought for anything for Maggie Mechaine, had he?

  I am going out for a walk. Why did she die? Why did she have to die? Had she eaten her own heart up, this red pillar-crazy divine? Why was she holding her own hand when she stepped out in front of that truck and not him? No. No. She wasn’t dead. She’d just been put back together wrong, that’s all. Yep. That truck’d knocked all the bad out of her and it’d taken shape, replaced her.

  “Why do the horses try and put him back together again? They’re horses.” It was his Silver sister who used to read to him. She loved him so until he got bigger than her and he started loving other women and left sisters and mothers on a schedule of affection, by the fall of the calendar. She loved Maggie Mechaine like a secret sister, hidden from the others. She did not attempt to hide this. And it started early, with her confounding stories about egg-men and impossible horses.

  She’d just been put back together wrong, that’s all. This was his fault, he admitted finally. He’d missed some bits in the snow. She was missing the memories but they’d just been too hard to spot against all the snow. Too many white lies, she might say. And he tried and tried, he insisted, even after he gathered up her 51 parts, he’d sank to his knees on that cold morning and looked and looked but couldn’t find any and why the fuck am I not crying—who was she?—then the gun came out and he put on a good show of despair and anger, the first of many. There’d come a time, he could never pinpoint exactly when, when he’d decided that maybe it was better that the world trouble Maggie Mechaine with its woes no longer. Even afterwards, it wasn’t that he wondered how the world would be without her—but more how she would be without the world. And now he knew.

  And his memories? Couldn’t he have rebuilt her with his? He had had none then. All he knew of Maggie Mechaine was her empty womb, her heart made of smoke, her fleeting flight downstream and the curl of her one look back.

  And now he knew. This was why he had been brought here. He had to remember her now, else she shatter again and again. He looked at the door, he could hear her there, whistling. No—she’d told him once, she hadn’t had him brought here. He’d come on his own. This wasn’t possible. He’d never known this place existed—

  Oh, he had though. The first time he’d heard this phrase, “I’m going out for a walk”, it’d been a summons. The second time he’d read it it’d been a summons. Both summons to hungry, hundred-headed, hound-toothed death.

  This, the third time he heard it, it was again a summons. Her head appeared, pushed through the cardboard door. I’m going out for a walk. Wanna come?

  He didn’t look up at her. He needed time—time to sift through her pieces—he’d made out the edges—was working on the complex interiors—goddammit, where had he read these words?

  She yelped a little. Her head was stuck in the window it’d punched in his cheap paper door. She was yanking herself backwards trying to pull her head free. Oh! The conqueror and scourge of Weatherhead with her head trapped in a cardboard hole! He started laughing. Her chin thrust forward and her eyes squinted and looked revenge on his meat the predator did. A little help?

  Sorry, he hid his smile—were smiles forbidden in Weatherhead? No, because there she went—even with evil born and borne in every bone there still lingered about her bestial contours a little bit of something human, something that she once was. He wagered everything on this. He moved over and struggled with the door, trying to pull it off her head. They both found something fertile here and burst out laughing. He stood back and studied her, hand tucked under his chin. I could, you know, draw a little frame around your face—

  And I could draw a little noose around your neck! Now, free me, stranger! Or ascending crimson knuckles—

  He wrenched at the door, finally resorting to just ripping it off its hinges and ripping it from the side to allow her out. She started laughing again. He saw just then, as she smoothed out her coat and roughspun shirt, that her teeth were all sparkplugs. He looked away. Weatherhead knew.

  Sorry about your—door. She nudged the flaps of ruined cardboard with the toe of her boot. It flopped over pathetically on the dirty floor. She peered around inside the hovel. You stay here? I could give you rooms—

  Which meant evictions at the least, beheadings at best. It’s okay, really. I’d—it’d be nice to go for a walk.

  It was a morning for magicians.

  It was the first time since he’d arrived in Weatherhead that he’d been allowed to explore the land outside the city. He was surprised when she threaded them a path through the weave and warp of the city until they came to a series of consecutive glass panes set into the rear wall of the bottom floor of a caved-in department store. These had once been mirrors, he noted, mirrors for people trying on clothes, feeling a tiny thrill at finding something so ordinary and familiar here in this disturbing place. They’d all been completely shattered at one point and he’d counted up to 91 years of bad luck for the poor fool who’d rendered them so when she waved for him to follow. Behind one broken looking-glass was a simple wooden door. This, she explained, led out of the city, and was a door whose existence and location must remain swaddled in the utmost of secrecies. Only she knew of its existence. It wasn’t even locked, he observed, for she opened it with ease and led him out of Weatherhead.

  They were on the opposite side from which he had originally entered the city with Love, for the god-sized black mountains were not to be seen, nor the chalk foothills that led down onto the plain. Instead a low flat land, devoid of vegetation or anything remotely terrestrial save the fact that there be surface here, lads, he cried to himself, stretched out before them. A few miles away, the dusty wasteland seemed to drop off into another lowland but the wind and distance made any further detail, such as another city, unclear. The light seemed different out here and when he looked back at the toppled jumble concrete jungle of Weatherhead he could clearly see a pall and caul of overcast dark limping counterclockwise above the low buildings. When he mentioned this to her, she just nodded as if it were the most obvious thing ever, this darkness over Weatherhead.

  They strolled along the broken land, talking little. As the land bent before them, they lost sight of Weatherhead behind them. A track of sorts wended its way down a lazy incline. Here and there were some decrepit trees, long-dead—nothing more than stabs in the earth dotting the white hills. They paused here for a moment. Some distance off the track he could see enormous earthworks. When he expressed an interest in investigating it further, she just shrugged and waved him on.

  They stood on the edge of a vast rectangular dig, an excavation of a giant skull. He ogled it as she studied her grime-scullied fingernails with disinterest. It was immense, several stories tall. Whatever body it had fallen from, it had landed on its side and was only half-exposed to the sun. When he squinted at it through the dust, for they were still a good hundreds yard away from it, he could see that someone, the diggers, he assumed, had assembled a rickety wooden staircase scaling its height. It zig-zagged back and forth across the skull’s temple until it levelled off into scaffolding around the single, exposed eye socket. What he had at first taken for grey rigging along this staircase he now saw by their movements to be a slow, shambling line of visitants filing one by one into the eye socket. The sheer magnitude of the thing was terrifying. He gasped, What the hell is that?

  In reply, she pointed with undisguised disinterest at a post nearby upon which hung a sign. To End, it read. He looked at the sign, then back down at the distant pouring of souls into the empty socket.

  Is this about God? He averted his eyes and let them scud across the low, graceless sky.

  She looked at him. Who?

  Never mind. He turned to lead her away from this place. It was worse than the mountains, worse than—Suddenly, he continued, I saw a head like that once. It made a river far from Weatherhead.

  When he said thi
s, her cheeks turned crimson and her eyes were illuminated from within. I’ve never heard you say the name of this place. I may—put my arm through yours—she paused and blinked rapidly a few times as if her own words lacked enough piety to her faith of desecration—if—

  Then she saw the indiscretion for what it was and crossed her arms over her breasts. No. You must never speak of this place. This river. There was once a woman who insulted me from the other side, a woman made up of my parts—

  He grabbed her by the shoulders, Don’t stop! She was remembering—

  I think you are the border between she and I, she shrugged off his hands and walked away from him a short distance. She held her head in her hands, She is looking for me. Looking and looking.

  Then, an enormous form loomed up out of the mists. I thought I heard voices, it said. The lands about Weatherhead were thick with unimaginable horrors this day, he thought, as he retreated from the source of this voice, a broad-chested, black-and-grey bearded hulk of a man. He was fitted out for prey. He bristled with knives and shells and at least two rifles. He made the world illiterate with his filth and mud-caked boots and steppe-father’s horde gear. Dirt had nothing on this earth-spat creature. He wasn’t sure how this hunter, for there was no doubt as to his vocation (it was impossible for the degree of his adeptness to be mere frivolity or hobby: he exhaled hunt), had addressed them, for, to his silent revulsion, he saw that this fellow lacked half a face. From the center of the bridge of his nose out in a lop-sided triangle, his face had been cored out and only the twitching, puppet theater maw, over which twitched the remains of his tongue and his intact uvula remained. The jaw and teeth were gone as well. It took him a moment to realize that the hunter spoke through his rifle which, by means of a curious series of pumps and whistling flutterwheels that ran along his arms, lashed to his sleeves with rope, up his chest and down into the scar-rotted cavity, conveyed the concussions and wish-whispers of his larynx down through the barrel and out the muzzle with tiny powder flashes of speech.

  She drew herself up and her face became stony again. She spat to one side and sidled forward with her thumbs hooked through her own ancient-looking belt. He dwarfed her by several feet but it was apparent she’d take no guff from the fellow. The fellow even made a half-hearted gesture of fealty to her. All the same, he caught a rough dislumen to the hunter’s eyes when they first narrowed at her then at him.

  Prey tell. There was tell in the high voice’s morning blessings that you’d be about, ma’am, came the bassoon curl of his voice out of the weapon he cradled in his arms.

  Prey tell. Watch where you point that thing. We are about, yes. I shewed him that white rot yonder. She spoke to him in altered accents, her drawl had crept back into her voice and back about five hundred years to moors, highlands, and the flap of her once white-dress on a tor waiting for war to spit back out lovers.

  The hunter looked at him with his sick-hooded eyes and nodded thoughtfully. A relic of the war the sky fought against the ground, he told them.

  And lost, her voice lurked about his, seeking out traitorism.

  The hunter slackened a little and stared at him. She wandered off a little ways way from them. It was clear that she afforded this hunter little more than disdain or maybe fake pride in his and his counterparts’ consistent failures. The hunter watched the other man following her with his gaze, nodded, and explained that she hired these hunters, such as himself, out of the deadcreeks that once flowed out of the black mountains into the forgotten sea. They were raised fitfully after some sinister contractions of belch, fire, and mockery had forced them out of some godforsaken loins to tumble to the sandy ground, already shooting, raised in the extinct beds of those half-legendary rivers. They were renowned in the country about Weatherhead as trappers and trackers, but had failed her time and again. He snorted and a bang of powder flashed from his muzzle. Leave it to Love to find you, of all people! The hunter had that beaten-to-the-chase bemusement of the underdogged good sport. That must’ve put glue in her step and sleep! He laughed shrilly, which caused a rat-a-tat-tat of shellfire to burst out of his deathmouth.

  He’d listened to this story with interest for the secrets of the lands about Weatherhead were infrequent in their telling, but he couldn’t shake the idea that he knew this fellow, so he just asked, Have we met before?

  The hunter shrugged. Every story needs its fools, was all he’d say. He pointed at her with his free hand. I thought you two might get on. This was uttered with a sort of wry amusement that didn’t pass unheard, for just then a fog stole across the grey ground. She had walked off into it, summoned it, probably. He eyed the hunter warily. So, what else do you hunt?

  This and that. Extinct things. Masks. We all contract out our work to locals. We stay out of the cities. Those are no places for us. The beasts lie.

  She appeared at his elbow just then. They should go back, she indicated with a flick of her hand. It was clear the chance encounter with this creature was not to her liking. The fog had embroiled the hunter in its conspiracies and he only had time to toss the retreating couple a wave before it coiled around his fingers and faces like cloudy wine and made him drunk on disappearing. But just before they made their way back up the hills to Weatherhead, she had a change of mind, sank her arm into the mist and drew the hunter aside to speak to him quietly. There were not a few glances shot at him, he noticed.

  Thirty-three and twenty-four, he heard the hunter boom. He was counting the shells on his bandolier for her. She shook her head in anger and stormed off, hands clutching at her coat. He dared not ask what had passed between them.

  They trudged uphill as two. After a quarter of an hour or so, still fuming, though who knew why, he bent his head towards her and asked, You hired that man to look for me, didn’t you? But Love found me first. She said nothing so he continued, You didn’t think that Love—

  She fired a glare up at him. What would Love be to a man like you? I know you through and through, stranger. Aren’t you one of those men who can’t sweat without women for salt? Hm?

  He stopped walking. I was, yes.

  And the dead-wife? Did she know about your wolf’s gait that turned your cock into a nose whose only scent was slit?

  The brutality of her words was intolerable. I told her, he flushed with anger, I wanted to tell her. You don’t get it.

  She pursed her lips and chuckled. Why tell her, fool?

  I wanted to tell her, he repeated, I wanted her to leave—I wanted to make her leave me.

  The ruler of Weatherhead started laughing. She laughed and laughed and laughed, kicking up duststorms with her boots, slapping her knees until her palms were as red as her lips. Yet, she gasped, yet you’re here!

  He stared ahead of them, desperate. He thought of the fools of the would-be coup. He looked down at her laughing and skipping about, mockery. He could kill her. He could. Reach right out and snap her neck. Right here and now. Snake his hand up under that greasy-but-lovely crimson and make her deader than he ever had before. But he couldn’t. Killing Maggie Mechaine was not what had brought him here. He had come to remember. This woman standing bent double before him, laughing in his face, maybe even the least sane part of Maggie Mechaine, might be the last, worst piece of her he couldn’t find in the snow. He couldn’t kill her. But nor could he stand her mockery. So he did what he always did when Maggie Mechaine bested him, for she was right. He walked away.

  She was right. Why did Love bring him here when his refrain time and time again against the song that once was Maggie Mechaine had been betrayal, indifference, and an acuity of lightness in the soul? He had wanted her to leave? Was that true? Why, then, as he put her back together again, 51 memories instead of 51 frozen fleshes, did he—did he—

  Ah, stranger, she’d caught up to him, strode next to him, ruddy-cheeked, nose-red, her breath a cheerful phantom of whatever immolation took up with her tongue, pouring out of her grin, don’t take my words to heart. We’ve all abandoned its hiccups, haven’t we? M
aybe—maybe Love brought you here to find—something else—someone else—always on about what went and did and had—you’re like a grandmother fixed on a prowler when all you’re hearing is just the settling of scars in the skin and bones of the house. Let it lie, Man, let it lie. She patted his back. He wanted to strike her.

  He stared at Weatherhead in the distance. He had a sudden thought. People always remember things as better than they actually were, maybe.

  Her features suddenly blackened. Or worse.

  Why am I the only person in these lands who remembers anything?

  She thought for a moment, then brightly she hissed. I remember much.

  No you don’t. You don’t.

  So you say. She shrugged. Memory is erosion, wears you down to something smooth and round, something that skips over water nicely, says the praying mouth. Her darkening eyes alerted him. It always sinks in the end, though.

  ⧜

  “Do you believe in ghosts?” Christmas Eve seemed as good a time as any to ask, he thought, and he’d better answer her with the same question. Back then he wasn’t sure he believed in ghosts so much. Maggie Mechaine’s head popped up on the opposite side of the room where her skinny little body lay in a skinny little bed facing his.

  “Why—are ghosts allowed to sleep together? Probably not.”

  He sighed and raised himself up on an elbow. “Look, my mom—she’s a little old-fashioned.”

  “Old-fashioned I can understand, but we’re gettin’ married in a few months—“