Finch by Jeff VanderMeer Page 7

  “Where do you work?”

  “In the city.”

  “And what do you do?”

  “Answer questions. Apparently.”

  He'd known everything about his past girlfriends. But even in their lovemaking Sintra seemed to change from week to week.

  Exhausting. Exciting. Dangerous.

  Still missed the normalcy of the one time she'd stayed long enough to make breakfast. A surreal, sublime morning. They'd met at a black market party the night before. Taken off his detective's badge, gone as a civilian wanting some fun. Bumped into each other on the makeshift dance floor. In someone's basement. Everyone there expecting the gray caps to blast up through the tiles and send them to the work camps.

  “Your day wasn't as good, I can tell,” she said now. Bringing him back.

  “I have a difficult case.”

  “How difficult?”

  He sat on the chair and talked to me. The cat was as big as a pony and the lizard was as big as a cat. And me, I was as tiny as a reflection in Feral's eye. A perverse nursery rhyme.

  “Difficult enough. A gray cap cut in half. A dead man. In an apartment. But they seem to have fallen from the sky ...”

  Sintra sat up, looked at him. “Where were they found?”

  Finch stared back at her. Surprised by her sudden interest. Sometimes he shared details as an act of faith. But not on something that might pull her down with him.

  “Down by the bay,” he said. Waited.

  Sintra considered him as he'd considered her. Then changed the subject. “Is that why you were crying? Because of what the memory bulbs showed you?”

  “Yes.” Propped himself up on an elbow. Shuddered, winced. An aftershock? Pressure in his head. Like his brain had outgrown his skull.

  Sintra hugged him. Kissed him. He laid his head against her chest. She scared him sometimes. Both from her presence and her absence.

  “Maybe it was a bad reaction to a drug,” she said. “Maybe you inhaled a bad spore.”

  Back before the Rising, Sintra said she had been a doctor's aide.

  “Unlikely.” He and his fellow detectives got fed antidotes every few months. One perk of working for the gray caps. He stole extras for Sintra and Rathven. Sintra always took them with her. Never used them in the apartment.

  “But it's over now.”

  “Yes. It's over.”

  He broke off the embrace. Feral was cleaning himself in a shaft of light by the window. Sidle was motionless on the windowsill. Drunk on the new sun.

  Sintra wrapped the sheets around her and stood up, walked toward the window. Leaving Finch naked and exposed on the bed. Watching her as he put his underwear back on. Remembering the first time they had made love. How he'd checked the sheets, the pillows after she'd left. Wanting to breathe in more of the smell of her. How there had seemed to be no trace of their sex. Only his memory of the act. As if he had entered a ghost.

  She turned to stare at him, framed by the window.

  “I'll come back in a night or two,” Sintra said. “That's not long.”

  “No, it's not long,” Finch said. Thinking of the station. The other detectives. Work fatigue washed over him.

  Memory holes and Wyte and Heretic and wanting to scream, to just start shooting.

  “Maybe I'll even spend the night. If I can,” she said. A curious look on her face, like she was testing him. She held her hands behind her back, one leg slightly bent, her body bronzed and perfect to him. “What do you think of that?”

  Must have been obvious what he thought, because she couldn't take the weight of his gaze. Looked away. Leaned down to pick up her knapsack, retrieve her clothes.

  Not that he doubted she felt the same. He knew why she kept her distance. The same reason he did.

  Except, it's not working for me.

  A long kiss. A final hug.

  And she was gone.

  All he could feel was the ache in his thighs. The damp spot on the front of his underwear, colder now than before.

  Just once, Sintra left something behind. Finch keeps it hidden in a desk drawer. No reason for him to keep it. But no reason to get rid of it.

  Written in longhand, Sintra's concise notes are about mushrooms, which no longer come with any field guide. Ignorance can lead to death, even though since the Rising the gray caps have kept the streets clear. Personal curiosity? Something to do with the black market? Has she helped someone she shouldn't help? Given aid to some group the gray caps are hunting down?

  Does it make her a spy to have this information, or just pragmatic? Does it make him complicit to keep it, or just sentimental?

  This incomplete list doesn't include fungal weapons. These mushrooms all perform certain tasks or “work” within the city. If any have a secondary or tertiary purpose it is unknown at this time.

  (1) Tiny white mushrooms almost like star-shaped flowers found most often around surfaces where dead bodies have recently lain or where some conflict has occurred. Like the chalk outlines used by detectives pre-Rising to mark bodies? Warnings, or ... ?

  (2) Green “spear” mushrooms with sharp, narrow hoods and long, slender stems four or five will be found around a building targeted for transformation. Three days after the appearance of these green spear mushrooms, the building in question will begin to look moist or spongy, due to infiltration from below. By the fourth or fifth day, it will begin to crumble. By the sixth day, the building has blown away in the wind. On the seventh day, a new structure has usually blossomed, overnight. This new structure may take any of a number of forms, all fungal-based.

  (3) Red “tree” mushrooms with huge caps and strong, thick “trunks” or stems-these can grow up to eighty feet high and are much more resistant to storms and high winds than other kinds of mushrooms. They appear to have a filtration system that gives them stability by letting air pass through millions of “pores.” In a sense, they float. An examination of distribution patterns from any height reveals that they have been “planted” in regular patterns forming rough “spokes” radiating out from the bay, interrupted only by the HFZ and the Religious Quarter. They regularly expel from their gills a smaller, purple mushroom with a strong euphoric effect and high levels of digestible protein.

  (4) Purple “drug” mushrooms with ball caps and almost no stemsdispensed from the red “tree” mushrooms, these purple mushrooms are clearly meant to serve as “crowd control” by giving the people of the city sustenance and making them dependent. These mushrooms create a strong addiction by affecting the pleasure centers of the brain. They also create hallucinations intended to pacify, most drawn from happy memories.

  Definitely her handwriting. She's slipped more than one message under his door while he's out. Tells himself: I'll throw it away when I know more about her. But nine months have passed since he found the note. She hasn't told him anything more than what he knew before.

  Yet caution loses out when she walks through the door. Remembering how, on days when he's expecting her and she's late, the fear creeps aching into his muscles. Finds himself gulping air like water. Thick and heavy. Lost. Never lost.

  Finch by Jeff VanderMeer

  2

  fter Sintra had left, Finch fed the cat, grabbed a quick bite, and .cleaned off with a couple of pails of once-used bathwater. Fresh shirt, same pants, same jacket. Kicked Feral out to explore on his own while he went down the stairs to the courtyard, then the basement.

  Rath's pale, angular face peered out from behind the door. Evaluating him. Looking for something.

  She let Finch in without a word. Through a hallway brightened by walls painted light green. Probably to conceal rot. Then into a larger area with a few chairs, her strange library to either side. Beyond, where Finch had never gone: the start of entropy. The bruises of gray and blue stains spread across the ceiling. Disappeared into the darkness of a tunnel.

  “Nothing new, I see,” Finch said.

  Rath laughed. “Not that you'd notice.”

  Finch brushed
by her to sit in an armchair on a blue throw rug. Rising above him, water-damaged paperbacks and hardcovers had been stacked unevenly on warped shelves. The shelves perched on stilts to fend off any sudden rise in the water level. The weighted smell of moisture seemed both fresh and claustrophobic.

  “Coffee?” she asked. The usual.

  Hesitated, said, “No. Tea, please.” Didn't know why.

  Rath disappeared into the tunnel. Did she have a kitchen back there? Maybe a bedroom. Maybe more books. A whole troupe of clowns. The thought made him smile.

  Stray pages saved from long-drowned books caught his attention as he waited for her. Red eye peering from monstrous face. Lines of scrawl in an unknown language. Diagrams of buildings or plants or motored vehicles. A black-and-white photograph of a gaunt five-year-old girl in a ragged dress standing in the muddy track of a tank.

  Truff knew who had lived here before, collected the books originally. Or how long it had taken Rath to organize it all. Or how much she had added to it, scavenging across the city. The collection was an ever-changing scene of preservation and dissolution. So many things saved only to be destroyed by time. Always with the water gurgling its way along the floor. Sometimes fish would get trapped, their fins brushing against pipes or grillwork and making a sound like quills over skulls.

  She came out with a teapot and two cups on a tray. Set it down on the table between them. Poured him a cup.

  “You sure you want this?” she asked. Skeptical.

  “Yes.” Took the tea gladly. His head still hurt. The tea tasted different. Better. Drove out the lingering taste of the memory bulb.

  “I haven't looked at the lists,” she said, sitting opposite him in a low wooden chair with a green blanket atop it.

  “Didn't expect you to yet,” Finch replied. “What about the symbol?”

  “Now, that I did get around to,” she said. “If only because it was easy.”

  “I've seen it, I've just never known what it meant.”

  “You're not alone. We know more about what the symbol is associated with than what it means.”

  A broken version was scrawled by the gray caps as a warning, Rathven told him. At the beginning of the city's history, when the gray caps sent back the eyes of Ambergris's founder, the whaling captain John Manzikert, on the old altar now drowned by the bay. Manzikert, who had slaughtered so many gray caps and driven them underground.

  “It looked like this,” she said, drawing it for him:

  It had figured prominently in the recovered journals of the monk Samuel Tonsure, Manzikert's fellow traveler underground. Had appeared in unbroken forms at various times since, at crucial moments in history.

  “Give me an example,” Finch said.

  “The Silence,” Rathven said. “That symbol, according to the accounts I have, appeared everywhere, all across the city.”

  Finch gave her a sharp look. “I never heard that.” But an intense feeling overtook him, telling him that he had known. Just forgotten.

  Rathven shrugged. “I'm just telling you what's in the histories. Half the books down here mention the Silence, so it's not hard to track down.”

  The Silence. Seven hundred years ago, twenty-five thousand people had vanished from the city. The only survivors had been aboard the ruler's vast fleet of fishing ships, fifty miles downriver at the time. Many a horror story had been written about the Silence. It had shaped Ambergrisian life ever since. Especially attitudes toward the gray caps. Everyone had believed the gray caps had done it. When they'd Risen, some people said it was because of Manzikert's genocide against them, and because of something they hadn't finished during the Silence. Revenge, after waiting patiently for centuries. Of course, who could confirm that? The gray caps said less now that they were aboveground than when they'd been below.

  “A broken symbol means a broken pact, some believe,” Rathven said.

  “I found it on the back of a scrap of paper used to scribble a note. Torn from a book. It probably isn't connected to the case.” Wanted to move on for reasons he couldn't identify.

  “Probably.” In a tone that said, Why waste my time asking me to research it then?

  Took the photo out of his pocket. “I want you to have this while you research the list.”

  Rathven took it. Winced.

  “What?”

  “He's dead, Finch.”

  “Of course he's dead. It's the murder case. I need to know who he is. It's very strange. I can't get my head around it. I need your help.”

  And there's no one in the station I trust to thoroughly check out that list.

  “Are you sure you want to tell me more?” Rathven said.

  People came to Rathven who the gray caps would count as enemies. Seeking information from her library. Information from her. Finch turned a blind eye. But someday somebody was going to test Rath's neutrality, her ability to put it all in a locked box.

  A sound distracted him. A sudden retreat of water somewhere in the darkness behind him. He'd seen fish “walk” up out of that darkness. Watched them gasping as they tried to be something other than fish. Once, Finch had heard a splashing like oars, from deep in the tunnel. Had asked Rath, half-serious, “Is there something you want to tell me?” She'd ignored him.

  Finch put down his tea. Leaned back in the chair. Do I trust Rathven more or less than Sintra?

  “A dead man and a dead gray cap. In the same apartment. The gray cap is just a torso with arms and a head. No blood. True, it's a gray cap. But maybe they weren't even murdered. Maybe murdered, but not in the apartment. I didn't get much out of the memory bulbs.” Not much I can share.

  It felt good to talk. Drew the tension out of him. Got rid of a strange echo in his head.

  Rathven nodded, looking serious. “Didn't get much? So you got something.” She waited, expectant.

  “I haven't given you enough?” he asked with mock shock. “No. That's not all. They seem to have fallen from a great height. Maybe from the walls of a desert fortress. I have to file a report today.”

  Do I sound crazy?

  “What other clues?” Rathven asked.

  Suddenly irritable: “Jumbled memories. Including a conversation with the dead man. Must have imagined that.”

  “What?”

  “Just what I said! Are you deaf?” The man laughed again. Blindingly, unbelievably bright, a light like the sun shot through the window. The night sky torn apart by it.

  Realized he'd shouted at her. “Sorry.”

  Rath gave him a look he could not interpret. “You're not the same today,” she said.

  “Do you think I can do what I do and not be changed?” Spitting out the words. “Take memory bulbs? Work in the station?”

  “I don't care,” Rathven said. “If you change too much, I won't let you back in here.” An intensity behind her gaze. Seeing someone or something other than Finch. Couldn't even imagine ...

  “Sorry,” Finch said. The words took an effort. Gritted his teeth. Said it again. Fuck!

  Rathven looked down. Took a sip of tea. Said, “So the dead man was talking to you?”

  Fair enough. Move on. Realized that he needed to take more care with her. She's not one of the detectives at the station.

  “It must have been,” he said. “Imaginary, I mean.”

  “What else?”

  “Nothing else. Just the piece of paper that symbol was on the back of. Some words. Never Lost. And then bellum omnium contra omnes. Ever heard those words before?”

  “No,” she said. Still, Finch sensed interest.

  “You don't know what it means?”

  “How would I know what it means if I've never heard it before?”

  Couldn't bring himself to say “sorry” again, so he said nothing. “Maybe you're asking the wrong question. Bellum omnium contra omnes.” Rathven said it like an echo from another world. As if it had no meaning at all.

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean, does it matter what it means? Why did he have words on a s
crap of paper when he died? Pretend for a second that it's any word. Any word you know: city, cow, apartment, saucepan, book, paragraph.”

  “A code? A password?” Felt foolish for not seeing it before. “Might not mean anything at all.”

  She pointed at him. “And that's what makes it valuable.”

  “But why? Why have part of it in gibberish?”

  She shrugged, gave him an impish look. “I'm not the detective.”

  I'm not a detective either.

  “We should be detectives together.” Relaxing into their time-worn call and response.

  “They're here and then they're there, and sometimes they don't know the difference, and if you let them, they'll keep making that the whole point of everything they're doing to the city. They'll break you down by not telling you what you already know, should already know, because that's the way they operate. Knowledge is the lack they seek in us, and when they find it, they turn the key, open a window, and it's all back to where we started.”

  Finch endured the rant from the madman outside the hotel, then made his way back to the station.

  The suspect from yesterday wasn't in the cage. Instead, an old woman with light blue eyes staring from a face crisscrossed with wrinkles. As if from behind a fence of her own making. She could've been a thousand miles away for all the help Finch could give her. Ignored her as a casualty. Ignored Albin quietly feeding her questions like he was at a zoo. Continued on to his desk.

  More of the same from the detectives around him. Indifference, absence, fear, boredom. Blakely and Gustat as always inseparable, whether in agreement or argument. Skinner out on a call, about to tell a man his missing wife was probably dead. Dapple drawing something on a piece of paper. Lost in another world.

  Wyte had turned away from him for once and was hunched over as if Finch were trying to cheat from him on a test. He looked bulky, blotchy.

  Finch leaned over. “Don't let your pencil burn up.”

  Wyte grimaced, said, “I'm busy, Finchy. Really. I am.” And kept writing. It looked incomprehensible to Finch.

  “Last will and testament?” Wished he hadn't said it.