smoke-fouled clouds was painting quicker.
On the seat next to Proffit the globe felt like a heft of dead flesh.
They passed the university hospital. Horseplay on the top floor. The cabby laughed, hands batting the steering wheel.
A pitched battle on the silvery swirl of lines feeding the railway station. A shape swept overhead; its stubby wings looked barely adequate for the job of keeping aloft the bundle of limbs. Ahead was the Railway Hotel.
The cab braked hard to a rocking sudden standstill. Proffit got out and went around to the driver's door. The driver viewed Proffit's handful of change with contempt, then relented as Proffit thought he might. 'Go on then — though I'm thinking money's heading to be a game like everything else.'
The facade of the hotel was as lightless as a cliff. The canopy before the entrance hung in rags. Backing away, a cat spat at Proffit.
From a high window opposite the hotel, a child chuckled hoarsely. Pr6ffit's shoes ground glass on the steps rising up to the foyer.
The entrance hall was deserted. Slashed sofas grinned foam. Clothes were frozen in mid-clamber from an abandoned suitcase. There was an opened-out road map with an alternative network of bloodstains. Proffit went to the reception desk and leafed through the visitors' book. The large windows, most divested of their glass, let in sounds of a tumult that appeared to have passed through here — and, Proffit feared, might yet return. The light was gilded with an unnatural sunset.
Here was H. HUMPHRIES, neatly written amongst the previous two days' arrivals.
With each step, the soles of Proffit's shoes peeled away audibly from the sticky carpet. Alcohol fumes sweetened his way past the black mouths of the lifts to a grand switchback stairway.
An anticipatory apprehension invigorated him as he climbed the stairs. Would Humphries be here, and if he were, what could Proffit say when the city was speaking so madly for itself? The globe was an irrelevance. I'm leaving the city, he'd said to Esther, floating an idea he'd not seriously intended to act upon. He felt differently now. From a rural retreat he could have watched the city, or cities, totter in TV news items, and ended the conflict with the OFF on his remote control. But the more he thought of it, the more fantastical seemed any place of repose and peace.
He began to hope Humphries might provide a more balanced perspective. Here was the fourth floor. Past a right-angle another long corridor. All doors were open onto wrecked rooms. How was that avuncular persona, from another world, dealing with this one?
Well enough, Proffit had to concede. Ahead a voice, a plummy, equal-to-anything, voice. Open your eyes Humphries. Proffit ran. It sounded like Humphries was alone and talking into a telephone.
Room 408 coming up. Proffit swung around the door, 'Here's the damned…'
No lights were on but he could see adequately. It was a large room with two tall windows; one had a single mountain peak of glass. Outside a flash underlit the clouds; a moment later a dull explosion.
No sign of Humphries, though he sounded only a yard or so away.
And he was, in a sense. Profit dropped the globe.
There was a dressing table with a three-leafed mirror. Someone had pulled it away from the wall. In the large central glass Humphries stood bathed in a sunny afternoon. The white hair was a radiant oval frame, from high forehead to chin. No wonder Humphries didn't have a care in the world, for he wasn't exactly in this one. Proffit's hands clasped his mouth; it felt real enough to confirm the reality of everything else. Light spilled from the mirror to the plush patterned carpet; Proffit went to stand in it and face the mirror.
'Course,' Humphries was saying into his mobile phone, 'I was sceptical from the beginning. And right to be as it turned out. But I had high hopes with this one, this being Lostock's home patch. What…? No I shouldn't think he'll contact me again. Cold feet I expect… Oh, maybe some shoddy imitation based on a bit of research — if he'd taken the trouble to make one at all — which I doubt, and which in any case wouldn't have hoodwinked Yours truly…'
The person on the other end of the line said something that made Humphries chuckle. The chuckle escalated. Humphries shook as if his torso might lift off from his legs.
Proffit's face contorted. If Humphries had been a bodily presence Proffit would have relished smashing him, pulverizing him — just one more act of violence in a city saturated with it. But all he could do was lift the dressing table chair and swing it with all the force in him, straight into the mirror.
The rain of glass took the day-lit room with it, took away the cruel illusion of a better world elsewhere from which he'd been insidiously sidelined. There had been no bifurcation. There was this city, and no other. Until the authorities took control, individuals like him would have to take matters into their own hands.
The things he could see dipping their curly mops out through the undersides of the clouds could be shot at and brought down. Had nobody thought of that? A savage, incoherent shouting, down in the street. A woman screamed laughter, or for mercy. A flurry of leader less furious voices grew, then faded.
Proffit didn't doubt he'd find someone who'd know where to obtain a gun. With a sense of purpose burgeoning inside him he left the room.
Along the corridor, down the stairs. He didn't hesitate in the foyer but headed straight through. Determined to engage with it, and not seek the reassurance of its boundary, Proffit went out into the city.
CAITLIN R. KIERNAN
The Ape's Wife
Neither yet awake nor quite asleep, she pauses in her dreaming to listen to the distant sounds of the jungle approaching twilight. They are each balanced now between one world and another — she between sleep and waking, and the jungle between day and night. In the dream, she is once again the woman she was before she came to the island, the starving woman on that
She leans forward, and her breath fogs the lunchroom's plate-glass window, but none of those faces turns to stare back at her. They are all too occupied with their meals, these swells with their forks and knives and china platters buried under mounds of scrambled eggs or roast beef on toast or mashed potatoes and gravy. They raise china cups of hot black coffee to their lips and pretend she isn't there. This winter night is too filled with starving, tattered women on the bum. There is not time to notice them all, so better to notice none of them, better not to allow the sight of real hunger to spoil your appetite. A little farther down the street there is a Greek who sells apples and oranges and pears from a little sidewalk stand, and she wonders how long before he catches her stealing, him or someone else. She has never been a particularly lucky girl.
Somewhere close by, a parrot shrieks and another parrot answers it, and finally she turns away from the people and the tiled walls of the lunch room and opens her eyes; the Manhattan street vanishes in a slushy, disorienting flurry and takes the cold with it. She is still hungry, but for a while she is content to lie in her carefully woven nest of rattan, bamboo, and ebony branches, blinking away the last shreds of sleep and gazing deeply into the rising mists and gathering dusk. She has made her home high atop a weathered promontory, this charcoal peak of lava rock and tephra a vestige of the island's fiery origins. It is for this summit's unusual shape — not so unlike a human skull — that white men named the place. And it is here that she last saw the giant ape, before it left her to pursue the moving-picture man and Captain Englehorn, the first mate and the rest of the crew of the
