Dead Boys Read online

  “That’s gross,” said Remington with approval. “What’s a body-mold?”

  “A carving that replicates the musculature. A fake body, if you will, that fits inside the skin. A tall order, since I wanted to fit his tiny bones inside the wood just as they’d have sat in the muscles. If bones were indeed the engine that drove Japheth’s motion, I’d have to leave them in place if I wanted him to be able to move.

  “While I carved, Japheth’s skeleton waited patiently, holding together all the while, even scuttling around at a surprisingly rapid clip. When I finished, I snapped the body mold into place and sewed up his skin, which by then was as dry as a little rug, enabling him to walk proudly, looking as hearty as a sewer-rat in its prime. After that, I was able to swap him for three years’ credit, with which I purchased my first set of tools. And that,” said Jacob, snipping the thread on the crow’s second wing, “is how I developed the Jacob Campbell Preservative Treatment.”

  “Preservative Treatment,” Remington pronounced, jabbing a finger perilously close to Jacob’s cheek. “Is that what’s wrong with your face?”

  “What’s—wrong? Whatever do you mean?” Grasping the crow in one hand, Jacob dipped the other into his knapsack, retrieving a cracked compact mirror and rapidly inspecting himself. All was well, he found to his relief: his yellowed teeth still shone through grimacing lips; his milky eyes remained firmly ensconced in their sockets; his kinky hair yet clung to his scalp; and, most importantly, his skin let no bone show through. To achieve this effect at his level of decay, he’d had to patch himself with a dark brown leather that matched his natural hue, then buff the new hide with shoe polish. “My dear boy, this is intentional. More, this is the best that any corpse could hope for!”

  Remington nodded. “It’s freaky.”

  Jacob stowed his mirror, considering that Ma Kicks’ pronounced decomposition was the boy’s only basis for comparison. He tried to calm himself. “I can assure you, Remington, that this is a top-notch preservation. Not quite the Campbell Treatment, I admit, as I’ve made notable progress in the industry since I first worked, with hand-mirror and scalpel, on my own fresh body. But it’s still stylish, effective, and envied by all but the wealthiest of my clients. At any rate!” he chirped, handing over the crow. “Your feathered friend should come around in awhile, and we’ll see if his wings have recovered.”

  “Thanks, Jake!” cried Remington, nuzzling its beak with his button nose, an act of intimacy that caused both Jacob and Ma Kicks to turn away in disgust.

  Jacob stood, slipping the knapsack over his arms. Ma Kicks crooked a finger at him, starting down the path. As they departed, Remington began humming tunelessly to his pet, stroking its wings against its body as if he hoped to cuddle it back to health.

  “I see the little one isn’t your only charge,” Jacob ventured. “That boy you’ve adopted is cheerful enough, even if he suffers from a surplus of enthusiasm.”

  “Please,” said Ma Kicks, both hands on her back. “I had enough to deal with before he came. Another loudmouth in the cave? No thank you.” She hobbled into her chamber and sat heavily on the floor, moaning as if the motion caused her pain. “You got a way with him, Patches. First time he’s been quietly occupied since his mortis. Sit.” She parted her shawl like a curtain and gently dipped her hands into her belly, resting her baby’s feet against their palms as she let out a long, rattling sigh. “Now. Something about the Tunnels, was it? Let’s get this over with.”

  “Gladly,” said Jacob, settling in as best he could in those cramped quarters. “I’m tremendously excited to have the opportunity to speak to you about this matter at last. I can’t tell you how long the path was that led to your door! But after a diligent search, I found an old acquaintance of yours who let me in on a little secret. Ah, but where are my manners? You should have your tribute.”

  He pulled a package wrapped in brown paper from the depths of his knapsack and handed it over, bowing his head. Ma Kicks tore it open without ceremony. It was an unblemished picture-book he’d come by at great expense, with an illustration of a girl crawling into a mirror embossed on its cover. She held it briefly in front of her stomach, muttering, “Book,” then tossed it into a splintered trunk. The gift elicited a series of kicks from within her womb, which Jacob hoped were demonstrative of excitement, not annoyance.

  “In any case,” he continued, “I rather doubt anyone else has made this connection. Tell me, Clarissa—”

  “Call me Ma.” Her body had fallen still again, her voice fallen back to a whisper.

  “As you wish. Ma, is it true that you once knew that adventurer known to Dead City as the Living Man?”

  No answer came. She didn’t budge, but her child began to twitch—unless Jacob’s eyes were deceiving him, almost rhythmically.

  “Most would call his story a folktale,” Jacob said. “But I believe—I know better. And my source has told me that you have first-hand experience.”

  “Ain’t a topic I care to discuss,” she whispered.

  Her silence stung. Jacob felt like a fool for assuming that Ma Kicks would receive him with soft surprise, then joyfully help him when he told her of his intentions.

  No matter. She’d hear of his adventures with the Living Man one day. For now, he’d fib a bit. An oblique approach would serve him better than showing his hand. “What bothers me, you know, is how misunderstood he is in the culture of the city. To think that such a remarkable explorer could cheat the laws of life and death, only to end up the object of ridicule—why, it positively pains me.” Not a grunt from Ma Kicks. Jacob leaned forward. “Help me tell his story truly. Let’s set it to rights. Let us not allow that brave soul to remain a punchline.” The baby’s kicks seemed to be getting faster. Was that a good sign or a bad one? Jacob, at a loss and possessing no solid information, went out on a limb. “Let us tell the truth at last about—about what happened to him.”

  Her hand drifted toward a pile of blankets. “Who you been talking to?”

  “My informant would give no name. He said only that he knew you long ago. Beneath the city.”

  “Barnabas is a liar. Always was.”

  “I don’t know anyone by that—”

  “I got nothing to tell. I’m sorry. It’s time for you to go.”

  “Please,” said Jacob, clasping his palms. “I beg of you. Tell me where you saw him last. Is he still in the Tunnels?”

  “Don’t you drag me down into that muck.” With her free hand, she tugged her shawl over her belly, but the baby’s skeletal feet kicked it free. “I don’t want to remember. I don’t want to go down there again. Not even in memory. Now I’m going to ask you one more time. Leave us be.”

  Ridiculous as it seemed, Jacob had never contemplated the possibility of failure. “I will not,” he said. “If it’s quiet you so desire, I’ll stay for months. I’ll tell you stories. I’ll—I’ll play that recorder. I’ll sing! Off-key! I’ll do anything it takes, Clarissa, to find my way to—”

  The shotgun was leveled at his head before he’d even seen her move. “I told you,” she snarled, a quilt sliding from her arm, “to call me Ma.”

  That must have been the weapon that ended Remington’s life, Jacob thought. Though he was beyond pain, Jacob had no desire to learn what the obliteration of his head would mean.

  “Now I hate to turn away a paying customer. But this is not a topic I will discuss with anyone, for any reason. So you take your picture-book, Patches, and you get your rotten bones out that door before I count to five, or God help me—”

  But the shotgun’s barrels drifted to the floor. Ma Kicks was staring down at her belly, where the baby’s feet were thrashing in a definite, syncopated rhythm, too forceful to ignore.

  “Oh, no, baby,” she whispered, buckling her arms around her gut. “Don’t do that.”

  Jacob peered at the tantrum. What strength those tiny feet had! They’d have punctured her belly had it not already been broken.

  “You just calm down, now,”
she begged, jouncing. “You just give your poor Momma a break, would you? Just one time, baby, just let me be.” But the feet flew up to find her ribs, making a drum of her abdomen. “I said that’s enough, damn it! Hell you want me to do, go back in time?”

  For a moment the child fell still. When it resumed, it was kicking harder.

  “Aw, Momma’s sorry, now,” she moaned. “Momma shouldn’t have yelled. We’ll read the man’s fortune. Just you quiet down!”

  She glared at Jacob. “Looks like the little one’s taken a shine to you, which is more than I can say. Guess you’ll get a reading out of this after all. So we can have some peace around here.” Cursing under her breath, she scooped up a leather cup and rattled its contents over her open womb. “Two shakes for baby. One for me.” She dumped it out on the floor between them, and five tiny dice, carved out of bone, clattered oddly across the curved metal, rolling on when they ought, by rights, to have stopped. When they did, Ma Kicks huffed, scooped them up and rolled again.

  She and Jacob could only stare. The dice had fallen just the same the second time, with every pip in precisely the same place.

  “Oh, come on now. Be fair.”

  But the child inside her started thrashing again, and Ma Kicks turned away from Jacob, falling silent for a long while. “All right, Patches. You want to find the Living Man?” she said at last, her voice cracking. “I’m supposed to tell you where to find him. The bones are clear on that. But I’ve got two conditions.”

  Back turned, she wrenched with all her strength. There was a snap, and her whole body shuddered.

  “First, you take this,” she muttered, “and you keep it close. Hear me? Never let it out of your sight. It’ll—it’ll keep you on the path.”

  She held her fist over his open hand. Jacob gaped as she let the object fall: there, plopping into the mottled leather of his palm, was the index finger of her left hand.

  Shocked at her sacrifice, horrified by the contact, Jacob whispered, “But why? What—what is it for?”

  “The dice don’t lie. But you ask too many questions, and they’ll make you pay. I learned that the hard way. Now, they said it plain, two times in a row. You’re taking that with you, and you’re gonna take the boy, too.”

  “The boy?” cried Jacob, hearing a crack as he squeezed the finger tighter than he’d meant to. “What, you mean—Remington? Come with me? Impossible! It will be terribly dangerous, and he’s a fool, a simpleton, a whirlwind, a—”

  “Hey, check it out!” cried Remington, bursting into the room. “The crow’s got a new place.” Turning his head to one side, he showed Jacob its nest: three squawks sounded from the exit wound, and then the crow poked its head through the jagged bone, clacking its beak in the air, its tail-feathers nestled in his throat.

  “That’s how it is,” Ma Kicks said. “You want to know where to find the Living Man, you take him as your ward. He’s too grown to keep himself satisfied on Southheap much longer. And you need someone to rein you in.”

  Jacob ground his teeth. The last thing he wanted on his journey was a complicating dependent like Remington, but he hadn’t spent his fortune following rumors through the Parleyfields only to end his quest before it had begun. “Very well,” he said. “I’ll bring him along, and do my best to keep him out of trouble.”

  “Good luck on that front. Kid, it’s been real, but you’re heading out with Patches now. He’s going to take you on some damn-fool trip that’ll probably knock that empty head of yours clean off. Sound good?”

  “Sounds great!” said Remington. “When do we leave?”

  “As soon as she tells us where,” said Jacob, tucking her twitching finger into the leather pouch where he kept his account-stones, then tying it tightly to his left wrist, where he slipped it under the black cuff of his sleeve. “Where is the Living Man, Ma? Where can I find him?”

  The seer was rocking her ruined body like a cradle, singing softly to the child inside. “You got to go deep,” she murmured when her song was done, lifting up the brown paper that had wrapped Jacob’s gift. “Deep down to the middle of the Tunnels.” She’d found a stub of charcoal and was scrawling a map. “Go where there’s no light left, Patches. Find a place called the Bottomless Vat. You’ll find him nearby. Right here.” With two final strokes, she made an X, then pressed her palms against the baby’s unquiet feet. “And keep in mind, brother: time’s got a way of making folks odd. Making them do things. Things they never thought they could. Everybody’s got a way to cope with eternity, what’s passed and what’s still to come. I don’t judge people for how they choose to get by. Not any more.

  “Let’s hope, for your sake, that the Living Man’s done the same.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  City of the Dead

  They walked through hours that bled into days, illuminated by the desultory, sepia light that fell through the skies, without variation, forever. Jacob’s mind worried ceaselessly at the X on his map—where it was, how he’d find it, whether he had enough time banked to get there—but he was regularly torn from obsession by Remington’s steady patter of questions, which only ceased as the pair came around the curve of Southheap, uncovering a panoramic view of Dead City.

  As Remington gave way to wonder, gasping and exclaiming, the crow launched itself from his skull. Wheeling lazily between Remington’s eyes and the cityscape, the bird drew his gaze over the metropolis, a heap in its own right, built of monstrous fragments of buildings from all nations and eras, extending as far as he could see.

  “Look!” he cried as the crow’s wings swept over a parking garage ramp spiraling around a sky-blue onion dome; “Look!” as its tailfeathers fluttered over a minaret bursting through the rooftop of a factory; “Jacob, look!” he said, again and again, as the crow flapped over the arches, churches, courtyards, tenements, trailers, shanties, apartments, shacks, bodegas, castles, and mansions that were slumped, mashed, and mangled in a grand confusion around the wide curve of the River Lethe. In the distance, the jagged edge of the mountain range called the Wall of the World cut off the knowable from the unknowable.

  Taking it all in, the boy fell into a surprisingly long-lasting reverie. Jacob had been chastising him through the many hours of their descent to take greater care with his motions; now Remington chose his steps with deep attentiveness, and stopped when he needed to consider his next move. Most unexpected was his newfound silence, which persisted until they were near enough to the streets of Rottening Green to hear the barked complaints of its inhabitants and feel the hourly ringing of its bell tower vibrate in their bones.

  The path Jacob chose did not end so much as it spewed Southheap into the street. “Let’s hurry to my flat,” said Jacob as they clambered down. “I hate to deprive you of a proper tour, but I’ve spent years in preparation for this moment, and I’ll need to pack before we depart. So: to the Preservative District we go!”

  “To the Preservative District!” cried Remington, careening down several blind alleys before Jacob convinced him to follow.

  The word “street,” in these neighborhoods, was a euphemism: Jacob and Remington clambered over the mud-packed roofs, walls, and corners of underground buildings, some of which offered views into their inhabitants’ conversations through open windows. “There are people down there!” cried Remington, leaning down and calling his greetings into a buried flat where three bone-bags cursed him extensively in an ancient dialect, the burlap sacks that covered their bodies rustling with disgruntlement.

  “Wherever a body can fit, you’re bound to find two,” said Jacob, “and there are plenty of nooks and crannies in this chaos. The city buries itself once or twice each generation, when the floods add new buildings to the pile. The deepest levels are rumored to contain corpses who haven’t seen daylight since the days of Tutankhamen.”

  It was hard to imagine that corpses any older than the ones walking by could still be standing. Although Remington saw, here and there, a body whose bloom was still passing, the streets were overwh
elmed by those whose decrepitude was only matched by the ends they employed to cover it up. There were corpses dressed in plastic from head to toe, others sewn into patchwork body-bags, and some who coated themselves in river clay to keep the bones from showing.

  Though the Preservative District was architecturally indistinguishable from any other heap of ruins in the area, it was clearly demarcated by the rickety stalls that thronged its streets, stalls whose owners were hawking everything from embalming to plastination.

  “What they call embalming is nothing more than a chemical bath that softens you up for tears and abrasions, and as for plastination, it’s the biggest scam in the business,” Jacob explained to Remington. “Any preservationist worth his salt has a proper flat, but few can afford our services, so they flock to these stalls for stopgap measures.”

  They passed a crumpled hot-dog stand whose sign had been daubed with muddy letters reading “HIDE YR BONES.” Its proprietor, who glared at Jacob as they passed, was stuffing shreds of newspaper into the ruptured skin of a client whose face was buried in his hands, hidden from the disapproval of passersby.

  “As for your own preservation, Remington, while I’d love to offer you the full Campbell Treatment, I’m afraid we’ll have to be quick about it. I’ll harden your skin and replace your elbows, knees, armpits, and so forth with a supple material, one of the more recent artificial leathers, perhaps. Then I’ll pack the necessary materials to replace your innards when they liquefy, so that as we travel—”

  “I’m fine the way I am, Jake.”

  Jacob glanced up and down the street to ensure that no one he knew had overheard. Stopping beside a brick-walled elementary school wounded on one side by a wrecking ball, beside which a pair of headless corpses leaned against each other for support, Jacob whispered, “If you’re worried about owing me, Remy, rest assured: there will be ample opportunity for you to assist me on our journey. You’ll never be in debt to me. Think of the treatment as a gift! After all, the ward of Dead City’s preeminent preservationist should be suitably natty, don’t you agree?”