City At The End Of Time (4 page)

During Max’s last stint as a batbreak, his then-master lapsed into the croaking and squeaking of a paretic. Max was instructed by a private nurse how to fit the master’s ruined face with wax and tin parts, to fill fissures and replace lost bits while the syphilitic grotesque whistled his stinking breath through vacant nose holes.

Soon Glaucous found himself once more at liberty, the master’s house boarded, the last drib of wealth wasted on quack nostrums. Nothing left, nothing gained. And yet…

Glaucous was becoming aware that he might possess an unusual talent. He hardly believed in it; rarely used it. Yet within a week of being ousted, on the streets again, freshly charged by hunger, he had no other option. He honed his gift, and in the close-knit world of the Fancy, quickly acquired a reputation—a dangerous one. At the heel of one of the “ton,” an ability such as his was tolerated, but on his own, Glaucous was of no use to anyone but himself, and so, no use whatsoever. A gentleman of noble blood, his ancestry within hailing distance of Westminster, caught Glaucous

“cheating” at cards. The gentleman’s toughs corralled the remorseful, ugly young man. The gentleman ordered him transported to his country estate, caged like a dog.

There, Glaucous was confined to a series of basement rooms, heavily padlocked, each larger and a little brighter than the last. The housekeeper eventually assigned him to a plump, foppish man named Shank, either to punish for the gentleman’s amusement or to discover and refine whatever genuine talent this rough lad might have. And so it was done.

In time, Shank informed the young tough that there was a name for his crude ability. Glaucous was a natural-born Chancer. “Else a pug like you would been crushed in the streets and died ere now,” he explained. “Some call it luck, others fortune. We know it here as Chancing, which is great
Will
, consistently applied to random circumstance to guide favor—for your gentleman and for him alone, of course.”

Under Shank’s guidance, Glaucous made coins land as desired, reordered cards without touch, directed the plunk of a silver ball on a spinning roulette wheel and the tumble of wooden spheres in a rolling cage. Their handsome and noble master was not himself a gambler, but recognized that many of that persuasion would extend favor and even cash for the company of such a lad in the clubs of the day. And so Maxwell Glaucous’s lot improved, while the company he kept declined in character, if not dress and station.

Glaucous picked up a copy of
The Stranger
and lucked it open to the classifieds. There it was…the ad, but not
his
ad. He dropped the paper on the table and took the hotel stairs with silent footsteps.

On the second floor, he sniffed and reached out his hand, searching for retrograde fluxes. Two more flights to go. On the fourth, Glaucous paused by a fire door, tested its hinges for squeaks, then pushed. Beyond lay six rooms, three on each side of the hallway, and at the end a milky window reinforced by steel wire. The light from the window quivered. Light resented Chancers, and now there were two in close proximity.

Glaucous brushed the knob of the first door on his left. Harsh music competed with the grating voices of overgrown children—
television
. Quiet as a cat, he crossed the hall and felt the opposite door. Room empty but not silent—not to his questing fingers. Someone had allowed himself to be murdered. The knots of bad luck still vibrated with a singing whine.

Glaucous slid down the hall. Behind the next door, he found what he was after: soft, steady breathing, comparative youth—the Chandler was less than a fifth his age—and strength, but profligate and poorly managed.

Again his nostrils quivered—this time at a smell like candle smoke. This had to be the Chandler’s partner—a veiled woman, very dangerous. Glaucous leaned in and heard the flip of a coin—a Morgan silver dollar, judging by the muted ring as it bounced off the room’s thin carpet. The Chandler was practicing. The dollar landed heads. Anyone could do such a trick, but he was not counting the coin’s spins. He was drawing down the coin’s lines. From different heights—including a ricochet from the ceiling and another from a wall—the dollar always landed heads.

Glaucous matched his breath to the man’s. He also matched other rhythms: pump of blood, drip of lymph and bile. He made himself a shadow.

Squatted back to the wall, eyes shut.

Waited.

Shortly after his last visit to Hounslow, at the height of his employment as a gambler’s companion—his fame beginning to spoil prospects—the noble gentleman had informed him it was time to move on. Glaucous’s gambling days were over, in London at any rate, and probably across Europe.

“You should try Macao, young friend,” Shank suggested, but then added, in a low voice and with eyes averted, that a special appointment might be arranged—if he desired, at long last, a secure and permanent position.

Glaucous had long since grown leery of the streets.

As if in a dream, he went where Shank directed—down a pinched and filthy road near the market in Whitechapel—and at the end of a blind alley, met an odd, twisted man, small, pale as death, and musty as a wet mop. The mop-dwarf fumbled him a card embossed with a single word or name: WHITLOW. On the other side, an appointment had been scrawled in pencil—and the warning:
This time, forever. Our Livid Mistress expects her due.

Glaucous had heard incomplete and confused reports of this personality in his travels. Reputedly the leader of a small cadre of men with exceptionally dubious reputations, she was whispered about, but seldom if ever witnessed. She had many names: our Livid Mistress, the Chalk Princess, the Queen in White. No one knew her true business, but it seemed a singular ill fortune invariably found the creatures sought by the men and women in her employ—ill fortune, and something referred to as “the Gape,” to be avoided at all cost.

Now at liberty for the first time in a decade, and suffering from a perverse curiosity, Glaucous took the train and then walked to Borehamwood, and there was met by a young-looking fellow with a club foot and waxy smooth skin, narrow nose, wispy ghost-blond hair, and deep blue eyes. He wore a tight black suit and gave his name, last name only.

This was Whitlow.

Whitlow carried a silver-tipped black lacquered cane and a small gray box with a curious design on the lid. “This is not for you,” he told Glaucous. “I have a meeting with another later this day. Let’s move on.”

Out of Glaucous’s memories of that meeting—a palette reduced to dim grays and browns—he recalled unsteady nerves and embarrassment at his ill-fitting wool suit. (Shank had insisted he return all his master’s fine clothes. “What monkey owns his livery, I ask you?”)

Whitlow shared a tot of brandy from a silver flask, then escorted him up the hedgerow drive to the main house, a mouse’s holiday of neglect, one wing caved, rooms filled with roosting pigeons. Whitlow gained entry using a huge old key, then, with quiet humor, pushed Glaucous down a hall littered with broken furniture and the bones of mice and cats, arranged in rings and whorls, toward a special sort of room where, Whitlow said, none had lived or visited for several hundred years. Such rooms—difficult to find these days—best suited the closest servants of their Lady, who—he explained in a whisper, opening an inner door—ultimately paid their bills.

Whitlow locked the door behind Glaucous.

After a time of stuffy silence—long enough to feel pangs of hunger—Glaucous was joined, through no door he could detect, by an insubstantial being—a gentleman, judging by his soft voice and odor or lack of same. This nebulous figure, wrapped in a deeper cloak of shadows, never assumed definite form or size. Judging by the tapping of his hands around Glaucous’s face and shoulders—fingers like batting flies—the gentleman might have been blind. “I never go anywhere,” he whispered. “I am here always.
Here
moves where I need to be. I am called the Moth. I transport and recruit for our Mistress.”

He spoke for what seemed a long time, his voice suggestive, modulated, indistinct. He spoke of books and words and permutations, and of a great war—greater than any dreary combat between imagined heavens and hells. “
Our
hells are real enough,” he said. “And our Mistress controls them all.” This Lady, he said, sought
Shifters
and
dreamers
. Chancers, properly instructed, were ideal hunters and collectors. The Moth handed him a crust of bread, dusty with mold, then tapped Glaucous’s temple with a flitting finger. “If you serve well, you will never lack work,” came his muffled words. Apparently, having come this far, no refusal was permitted. “We pay in more than coin. Time no object. Different birds, different cages, Mr. Glaucous. Listen close, and I will pipe you all the songs you need ever sing.”

After some hours, the door opened, spearing the room with a broken shaft of sun. Glaucous blinked like a mole. Whitlow reappeared to usher him out. Behind, the room keened a wretched, pain-filled sound like none he had ever heard, and reclaimed its emptiness: spent.

Back on the hedgerow drive, dazed and exhausted, Glaucous asked, “Will I meet ever the Mistress?”

“Don’t be a fool,” Whitlow admonished. “We never hope for that. The Moth is bad enough, and he’s less than the tip of her pinky.”

For the next hundred twenty years Glaucous traveled from city to city across the United Kingdom, and then the United States…working as a diversion in carnival pitches, card parlors, side shows…always seeking, keeping a low profile, and wherever he went, posting ads in newspapers, ads that never varied except for an address, or later, a phone number—

Always asking the same question:

Do you dream of a City at the end of Time?

Glaucous kept deathly still. He could feel any vibration along the boards and beams. All was quiet. There would be no visitors for the next few minutes.

The collector behind the door—endlessly tossing his silver dollar—had failed in certain courtesies. He had not alerted Glaucous to his presence, nor had he shared information. He was poaching. Glaucous rapped a callused knuckle on the door, then fluted his voice, young and uneasy, the same voice he had used on the phone to answer the Chandler’s ad. “Hello? It’s Howard. Howard Grass.”