world with his eyes open. Dradin sensed the scuffl e of feet on the pavement behind and in front, and the darkness became claustrophobic, close with the scent of rot and decay.
“We are being followed,” Dradin said.
“You are mistaken.”
“I hear them!”
“Shut up! It’s not far. Trust me.”
“Trust me?” Did Dvorak realize the irony of those words? How foolish that they should converse at all, the knife at his back and the hushed breathing from behind and ahead, stalking them. Fear raised the hairs along his arms and heightened his senses, distorting and magnifying every sound.
Their journey ended where the trees were less thick and the fog had been swept aside. Walls did indeed cordon them in, gray walls that ended abruptly ten feet ahead in a welter of shadows that rustled and quivered like dead leaves lifted by the wind, but there was no wind.
Dradin’s temples pounded and his breath caught in his throat. On another street, parallel but out of sight, a clock doled out the hours, one through eleven, and revelers tooted on horns or screamed out names or called to the moon in weeping, distant, fading voices.
Dvorak shoved Dradin forward until they came to an open gate, ornately filigreed, and beyond the gate, through the bars, the brooding headstones of a vast graveyard. Mausoleums and memorials, single tombs and groups, families dead together under the thick humus, the young and the old alike feeding the worms, feeding the earth.
The graveyard was overgrown with grass and weeds so that the headstones swam in a sea of green.
Beyond these fading statements of life after death writ upon the fissured stones, riven and made secretive by the moonlight, lay the broken husks of trains, haphazard and strewn across the landscape. The twisted metal of engines, freight cars, and cabooses gleamed darkly green and the patina of broken glass windows, held together by moss, shone especially bright, like vast, reflective eyes. Eyes that still held a glimmer of the past when coal had coursed through their engines like blood and brimstone, and their compartments had been busy with the footsteps of those same people who now lay beneath the earth.
The industrial district. Dradin was in the industrial district and now he knew that due south was his hostel and southwest was Hoegbotton & Sons, and the River Moth beyond it.
“I do not see her,” Dradin said, to avoid looking ahead to the squirming shadows.
Dvorak’s face as the dwarf turned to him was a sickly green and his mouth a cruel slit of darkness.
“Should you see her, do you think? I am leading you to a graveyard, missionary. Pray, if you wish.”
At those words, Dradin would have run, would have taken off into the mist, not caring if Dvorak found him and gutted him, such was his terror. But then the creeping tread of the creatures resolved itself. The sound grew louder, coming up behind and ahead of him. As he watched, the shadows became shapes and then figures, until he could see the glinty eyes and glinty knives of a legion of silent, waiting mushroom dwellers. Be hind them, hopping and rustling, came toads and rats, their eyes bright with darkness. The sky thickened with the swooping shapes of bats.
“Surely,” Dradin said, “surely there has been a mistake.”
In a sad voice, his face strangely mournful and moon-like, Dvorak said, “There have indeed been mistakes, but they are yours. Take off your clothes.”
Dradin backed away, into the arms of the leathery, stretched, musty folk behind. Cringing from their touch, he leapt forward.
“I have money,” Dradin said to Dvorak. “I will give you money. My father has money.”
Dvorak’s smile turned sadly sweeter and sweetly sadder. “How you waste words when you have so few words left to waste. Remove your clothes or they will do it for you,” and he motioned to the mushroom dwellers. A hiss of menace rose from their assembled ranks as they pressed closer, closer still, until he could not escape the dry, piercing rot of them, nor the sound of their shambling gait.
He took off his shoes, his socks, his trousers, his shirt, his underwear, folding each item carefully, until his pale body gleamed and he saw him self in his mind’s eye as switching positions with the Living Saint.
How he would have loved to see the hoary ejaculator now, coming to his rescue, but there was no hope of that. Despite the chill, Dradin held his hands over his penis rather than his chest. What did modesty matter, and yet still he did it.
Dvorak hunched nearer, hand taut on the rope, and used his knife to pull the clothes over to him. He went through the pockets, took the remaining coins, and then put the clothes over his shoulder.
“Please, let me go,” Dradin said. “I beg you.”There was a tremor in his voice but, he marveled, only a tremor, only a hint of fear.
Who would have guessed that so close to his own murder he could be so calm?
“I cannot let you go. You no longer belong to me. You are a priest, are you not? They pay well for the blood of priests.”
“My friends will come for me.”
“You have no friends in this city.”
“Where is the woman from the window?”
Dvorak smiled with a smugness that turned Dradin’s stomach. A spark of anger spread all up and down his back and made his teeth grind together. The graveyard gate was open. He had run through graveyards once, with Anthony — graveyards redolent with the stink of old metal and ancient technologies — but was that not where they wished him to go?
“In the name of God, what have you done with her?”
“You are too clever by half,” Dvorak said. “She is still in Hoegbotton & Sons.”
“At this hour?”
“Yes.”
“W-w-why is she there?” His fear for her, deeper into him than his own anger, made his voice quiver.
Dvorak ’s mask cracked. He giggled and cackled and stomped his foot. “Because, because, sir, sir, I have taken her to pieces. I have dismembered her!” And from behind and in front and all around, the horrible, galumphing, harrumphing laughter of the mushroom dwellers.
Dismembered her.
The laughter, mocking and cruel, set him free from his inertia. Clear and cold he was now, made of ice, always keeping the face of his beloved before him. He could not die until he had seen her body.
Dradin yanked on the rope and, as Dvorak fell forward, wrenched free the noose. He kicked the dwarf in the head and heard a satisfying howl of pain, but did not wait, did not watch — he was already running through the gate before the mushroom dwellers could stop him. His legs felt like cold metal, like the churning pistons of the old coal-chewing trains. He ran as he had never run in all his life, even with Tony.
He ran like a man possessed, recklessly dodging tombstones and high grass, while behind came the angry screams of Dvorak, the slithery swiftness of the mushroom dwellers. And still Dradin laughed as he went — bellowing as he jumped atop a catacomb of mausoleums and leapt between monuments, trapped for an instant by abutting tombstones, and then up and running again, across the top of yet another broad sepulcher. He found his voice and shouted to his pursu ers, “Catch me! Catch me!”, and cackled his own mad cackle, for he was as naked as the day he had entered the world and his beloved was dead and he had nothing left in the world to lose. Lost as he might be, lost as he might always be, yet the feeling of freedom was heady. It made him giddy and drunk with his own power. He crowed to his pursuers, he needled them, only to pop up elsewhere, thrilling to the hardness of his muscles, the toughness gained in the jungle where all else had been lost.
Finally, he came to the line of old trains, byzantine and convoluted and dark, surrounded by the smell of dank, rusting metal. One backward glance before entering the maze revealed that the mushroom dwellers, led by Dvorak, had reached the last line of tombstones, fifty feet away.
— but a glance only before he swung himself into the side door of an engine, walked on the balls of his feet into the cool darkness. Hushed quiet. This was what he needed now. Quiet and stealth in equal measures so that he could reach the relative safety of the street beyond the trains. His senses heightened, he could hear
Spider-like, Dradin moved as he heard them move, shadowing them but out of sight — into their clutches and
