Ghosts of Punktown (6 page)

     Every night, the skyline of Punktown dazzled with constellations of lights, a conflagration of neon, holograph and laser. It was beautiful, but removed as she was from it, Cynth did not see up close the sidewalks lit green as if with radiation, an absinthe green under which one’s skin was bleached cadaverous white, while red light leaked its way into alleys like the blood channels grooved into a sacrificial altar. Cynth did not see, from her bedroom window, the people who moved along those streets, some human and others not, nor would she understand the activities that so many of those restless souls pursued in the pulse and flicker of the city’s carnival lights.

     The flashing lights she watched now, though, were those of police and emergency vehicles, some floating high off the ground like fireflies while others hovered low, in the triangular park that filled the space between the Triplex’s towers. She did not know that if this were another, less affluent portion of the immense colony city, the response would not be this intense – if there were any response at all.

     In the lights from the vehicles, she could just make out small figures racing to the entrance of the building directly opposite, designated Tower 3. The colored lights flashed across the front of her own building, Tower 1, and through her window, alternating red and blue on the walls of her room.

     Distracted as she was by all this, Cynth realized belatedly that she had begun to whimper, and when she heard herself whimpering she began to cry. She flinched, startled, when a hand lightly stroked the back of her head. She whirled around, expecting to see her mother there, arrived home from work at last. Instead, she saw a glittering brassy arm that had unfolded from its track in the ceiling, like a large metal spider that had descended on a strand of its far-reaching web.

     “Don’t be afraid, Cynthia,” Mr. Moon said in his soothing tone.

     “Please...will you sing to me, Mr. Moon?” she sobbed.

     He started to sing to her, then, and his arm lowered further so that she could grip his hand. It was large, and enfolded her own like the claw of some imaginary, benevolent dragon.

     Cynth’s parents would not tell her, the next day, how two young men had found their way into Tower 3, and then into an apartment on the second floor, where an elderly couple lived. One of the men was a nephew of the couple, and the other was his friend, and both were addicted to a drug called purple vortex. When his uncle tried to evict the men, the nephew and his friend began beating them.

     As she sat there on her bed, with the police lights sweeping across her room and her body, and Mr. Moon holding her hand so gently as he sang
Blue Blues
to her, Cynth did not realize that just then in Tower 3 the police had discovered the elderly couple battered but alive on their living room sofa. They also found the two home invaders, suspended from the living room ceiling in the grip of eight metal hands, some of their parts no longer connected to the rest of their bodies.

2

     In the autumn of her twenty-eighth year, Cynth traveled to Punktown from the city of Miniosis a half dozen times for a number of job interviews, and to check on the progress of the condominium she had purchased. Her condominium was one unit of a three story structure that was to have a brick exterior and the look of a converted factory building, to complement its neighborhood of warehouses and places of industry that themselves had mostly been refurbished as apartment buildings or office suites. Over the past couple of decades, most of Punktown’s places of manufacture had shut down, leaving many people – better suited to manual labor than office drone work – jobless, and thus increasing dramatically Punktown’s already alarming crime rate. To Cynth, the building under construction looked as much like it was slowly being stripped down and razed.

     Because she had broken off with her fiancé, and because she couldn’t even bear being in the same city with him anymore, as if he were so integrated with that place that its very name concealed his own in code, she was in a dark mood that autumn and took to thinking of the condos-in-the-making as the Mansions of Despair. For a prolonged period the building’s construction had stalled, or at least in her impatience this was her impression. Whatever the case, for several of her visits she’d noted that the outside had been left surfaced in a tarry, charred-looking black material, which she imagined was insulation, except for a middle section that was weirdly yellow instead. When the gaping empty windows were viewed from an angle, the vertical metal supports for the interior walls looked like bars across them. There was to be a high security wall of brick-faced concrete around the condos, but in its incomplete state, with a bristling forest of iron rods jutting up like punji stakes, the wall’s foundation better called to mind a castle moat.

     The building was finally finished, however, and by winter not only had Cynth moved in but settled into a new job as well. Still, every morning it was her ritual to steel herself before venturing outside to embark for work. She would stand at her living room window, coffee in hand, to confront the city beyond. Her parents had kept her well insulated from Punktown as a child, but she was no longer that child and her parents themselves remained in Miniosis, where they had moved their family when Cynth was ten. These days, she was only too aware of what went on in the streets that wound like streams through gorges of towering stone. The Mansions of Despair were curious in being so humble in scale, in a city where it often appeared the buildings had rained down from the sky and heaped atop each other wherever they happened to land, in seemingly precarious stacks of palaces atop castles atop fortresses, with metal bridges connecting them or maybe just preventing them from toppling against each other, vines of cable and drooping loops of corrugated pipe slung from one chasm wall to the next, all of it casting the labyrinth of streets below in a perpetual gloom.

    
Mansions of Despair
, Cynth thought this morning as she gazed out upon Punktown once again, again sipped the coffee that had become a prop, an elixir of imagined strength.
It’s
all
the Mansions of Despair
.

     It was comfortable enough inside her condo, but during the first week staying there she’d had a disturbing dream. On her earliest visit to the site, all there had been to see of the project was a steel skeleton, and it had rained that day so the cavernous interior pinged with dripping sounds. In her dream, Cynth sat up in her bed to find it perched on the third floor of this metal skeleton, seeing only darkness around her aside from the glistening of steel supports, and listening to those echoing drips of water.

     She had awoken with her heart sprinting, and for some reason had almost called out for the lights to come on. But the lights in her condo were not voice activated. It was not an interactive structure in that way. As a child, she hadn’t appreciated that not everyone lived in such a building, and for months after they’d moved to Miniosis – into an apartment that was upscale but not interactive, either – it was difficult for her not to ask for the bath to fill itself, or for her bowl of morning luul to magically appear. When her parents were out and she caught herself talking aloud, it was only to herself. No one answered back.

*     *     *

    
“Synthia, will you please just call me? At least come to the apartment and get the things you forgot when you packed...”

     Synthia. It was what Simon had always called her, for no apparent reason except to be witty, subtly mocking for his own secret amusement. Cynth had discovered the text message from her ex-fiancé on her work computer that morning, and so she supposed she came across as stiff or distant to the man seated opposite her now.

     She was a client service representative for Jango Auctioneers and Appraisals, and among her duties she accepted consignments for auction after Jango’s evaluation and consideration people, more experienced than herself in the actual appraisal end of things, had had a look at the items. Cynth would then draw up the selling contract and reserve price, the terms of payment for seller and Jango both. The consignors paid Jango a selling commission that was deducted along with any agreed upon expenses from the so-called “hammer price.”

     But she also helped bidders register for a numbered paddle, which would be collected for use the day of the auction. The registration process was usually handled over the net, but this man had wanted to do so in person. He had introduced himself as Richard Colores, the curator for antiquities at Punktown’s Hill Way Galleries. He’d asked her to call him Chard. He was of Earth heritage, of course – though his family had likely lived in Punktown for several generations, as was usually the case – small, trim, neatly attractive, with dark hair and a dark suit of Ramon silk.

     “I haven’t seen you here before,” he said as he watched Cynth work at her terminal. “Are you new?”

     “Relatively. A couple of months. Do you bid at the auctions often?”

     “As often as my budget allows. Which isn’t enough, of course, to prevent me from wincing when I see the treasures that get snapped up by private collectors.”

     “Well, private collectors also sell off their collections, which helps museums like yours have a shot at acquiring them.” She glanced up at him between the holographic screens and displays that had unfolded and overlapped in the air between them. From the way the man was looking at her, it seemed that he was the one doing the appraising. “Is there a particular item from our next auction that you had an interest in bidding on?”

     “There is, and I was planning on having a look at it next. Would you accompany me, Cynthia? Maybe you can answer any questions I might have about it. The catalogs only give so much information.”

     She smiled politely. “Please call me Cynth.” It wasn’t that she was trying to become familiar with him, but no one had called her Cynthia for a long time.

*     *     *

     Jango not only held their auctions in the same building their offices were located in, but also provided an area in which the consignments were exhibited for one week prior to each auction. Like the auctions themselves, this pre-sale exhibition was open free to the public.

     Once this area had been someone’s apartment, but the walls had been torn out, replaced with occasional metal support beams with oversized rows of bolts. Jango would arrange tables, pedestals, showcases – often locked and weapon-proof – in which to display its current array of items. Cynth, smartly attired and a little taller than Colores, strolled with him between the displays, stopping often as he studied and remarked upon them. Was he really all that interested, or just stalling to spend more time in her company? A security guard in a bulky, rubbery black jacket and matching rubbery cap scowled at them both as if ready to shoot even Cynth should she lean too hard on a showcase.

     “Would you look at this,” Colores exclaimed, having come upon an article Cynth had found extremely repellant. It was a globular glass lamp filled with a red, gelatinous oil, in which was suspended a fetus of the gray-skinned Kalian race. It held a wick in one tiny fist, protruding through the surface of the gelatin.

     “Yes,” Cynth said, much less enthused than he. “Some Kalians preserve the bodies of children born to unwed mothers in these lamps, and burn them to ward off demons.”

     “I wouldn’t mind having that on my desk. Quite the conversation piece. Might ward off a couple of demons I work with, too.” They moved on to take in other rarities.

     Colores turned from his examination of a stone tablet carved with a tentacle-faced divinity of the Irezk Island Tribe, once native to Oasis but now extinct, and for the first time seemed to spot the object he had come for, though Cynth suspected he’d seen it from the first moment he’d entered the room. “Oh!” he remarked, going to it, with Cynth trailing a little behind.

     It would have been easy to spot right away. One might first assume the figure was merely a statue wearing an odd, flat-topped hat atop its lovingly carven hair, but the information sheet posted beside the sculpture identified it as a caryatid – a supporting column in the shape of a person. In this case, as the sheet explained, that person was Lupool, the wife of Raloom, a god worshiped by an ancient sect of Oasis’s native Choom people. Like her husband and the Choom themselves, Lupool might have passed for an Earth human were it not for her mouth, the corners of which ran back to her ears in a smile as serene as a dolphin’s.