Mr. Stitch (17 page)

“Enough, Valentine. I’m a grown-up. I can take care of myself. And I don’t recall very many people offering to help. If I have a friendship with Emilia…”

“I just think you should be careful, is all.”

“I’ll take it under advisement,” Skinner replied, coolly. “Now, I think you might want to find your seat. The show’s about to resume.”

“Yes. Right. Sorry.” He coughed and cleared his throat. “Look, I am sorry. I don’t mean to…to be a busybody, or anything. I just. Was concerned.”

“It’s all well to be concerned now,” Skinner snapped. There was something, something ludicrously vulnerable about Valentine’s voice that roused her temper. “It’s all very well to be concerned that someone has decided to help me. Where was your concern when I was down to my last six pennies? Where was your concern when I was being thrown out of my
house
?”

“I didn’t know, look, I’m sorry, I didn’t know about your house…”

“…where was your concern when the Moral Ministry took my job?”

“I’m sorry, I just, wait…”

“Nevermind. Forget about it, Valentine.” She took a deep breath. “I’m sorry I shouted at you, all right? Just go sit down, don’t worry about it.”

“I’m sorry,” Valentine muttered again. “Sorry.” He cleared his throat again. “That’s…uh. That’s a nice dress, by the way. The blue suits you.”

“I wouldn’t know. Emilia gave it to me.”

And with that last icy comment, she was gone. Valentine stood, blushing and sheepish, cursing himself, wishing he could go back in time and punch himself in the teeth before he had the chance to open his idiot mouth. Instead, he settled for returning to the critics’ box, where Roger was engaged in an animated discussion with another critic.

“I just think,” the man—a raw-boned fellow that Valentine thought wrote for the
Observer
—was saying, “that real tragic art should be transcendent of political circumstances. You can’t make a good play that’s too topical—”

“Shh, shh,” Roger interrupted. “It’s starting up again.” He tapped his cane imperiously on the balcony, the red-gold house lights dimmed, and the play resumed.

The second act of
Theocles
was a marvel; a piece of such blistering intensity that even Roger’s lively tongue was stilled. Valentine sat on the very edge of his seat and leaned as far on the railing as he possibly could. A lightheaded euphoria filled him as the raw passions of the actors seemed to dredge his soul up and tear it free from its moorings.

Partly, this was a purely mechanical effect. The new director of the Royal had perfected a way to use an array of lenses and phlogiston and incandescent lamps to produce a bright, narrow spotlight that could range in color from bright white to a pale, ghostly blue. Theocles stood in a circle of strange, denatured light, and his cheap theatrical armor was transmuted into something real, ragged and bloody. Pools of blue light illumined the bogeymen that the wicked king, in his desperation and his arrogance, returned to—their leather masks were made into vivid and leering faces that Valentine found uncomfortably familiar.

Theocles, pursued to the last battlements of his fortress, haunted by vengeful ghosts, was finally cut down by Arden Wyndham, who had lost his family to Theocles’ bloody ambition. When Wyndham returned the stage, now illumined by a wash of lurid color, bearing the head of his enemy on the tip of his sword, the audience roared—not approval, not anger, not exactly. It was a kind of pure, undifferentiated feeling, something more primal than fear or sadness or rage, something that had been building during the enforced stillness of the preceding scenes, something worked to a fever pitch and then finally freed itself.

Valentine was on his feet at once without even realizing it, applauding fiercely. Even Roger was lumbering to his feet, ruddy-faced and grinning like a madman, pounding his cane on the balcony floor. The fat old critic tried to shout something to his companion, but Valentine couldn’t hear him over the sound of the ovation.

“What?”

“….trouble…come…morrow…” Roger repeated, then turned back to the stage where the actors were taking a fifth curtain call. Valentine clapped harder, and for the first time in many years of attending the theater, did not wonder how long it was going to be until the actors stopped bowing.

The applause did eventually die down, though its echoes still thundered in Valentine’s ears. He was just about to take his leave of Roger Gorgon-Crabtree—the critic was unlikely to even notice, as he was embroiled in an uproarious, though good-natured, argument with another man—when a commotion amongst the floor seats caught his eye.

The coroner leaned over the edge of the balcony and peered out into the theater. The house lights had been lit again, but the cavernous space was still very dim. Among the audience members, pressing against each other as they began their disordered exit, there was a kind of ripple of anxiety. Valentine couldn’t precisely say what it was, but there was definitely a sense…a tension of palpable and growing intensity.

“What…”

“What?” Roger asked. “What is it?”

“Something…” Valentine replied, unhelpfully.

Voices were raised, tinged with the timbre of hysteria. Men and women began pushing at each other, struggling to get away from something, turning violent in a clear violation of the long tradition of goodwill that was supposed to pervade Armistice. They began moving faster, panicking…

“Something’s wrong. Shit, something’s wrong,” Valentine muttered. He missed his guns. Who carries guns during Armistice? The idea of carrying so much as a pocket-knife was anathema. “Your cane,” he said to Roger. “Give it to me, I…”

A woman screamed, and they both heard the sharp retort of a revolver, followed by a strange crackling echo, as if a hundred phantom revolvers had been discharged in response. There were more raised voices now, and the audience on the floor began to fight each other, crowding into the aisles, climbing over the seats. A green light glimmered near the stage.

“Now!” Valentine snapped, and snatched the cane from Roger’s slack hand. “Shit.”
How do I get down?
The stairs were too far…but the red curtains that hung down between the boxes.
Oh, all right. All right. I always wanted to try this
. He stuck the cane into his belt, reached out, and grabbed hold of the plush red fabric, and swung out over the seats…

…and hung there. He had, perhaps, expected that he would slide slowly down the length of curtain, or that it would give way at a reasonably slow rate, gently lowering him to the ground. But the curtain remained stubbornly affixed, and Valentine suddenly found himself wondering if he’d take his skin off trying to slide down it.

“Shit,” he muttered. “Okay. Just…okay.” He kicked out his foot, tried to hook it back over the railing, pull himself back to the balcony, when suddenly the curtain
did
give way, with a catastrophic ripping sound, and Valentine found himself dropping like a stone with two yards of heavy red fabric coming down on top of him. He landed with a teeth-jarring crash, and immediately began the laborious process of trying to free himself from lengths of cloth.

Finally free and on his feet, Valentine tried to make his way towards the stage, past a streaming, frightened crowd; theatergoers in their clean suits, women with their elaborate hats, terror printed on their faces. There was another gunshot, another peculiar web of echoes. More screams. Valentine stood on the arms of a seat, balanced precariously above the bobbing heads, trying to get his bearings. Two people had been shot—one gentleman in a fine suit, who had been hit in the chest. Red blood stained what had been a snow-white shirt front. He twitched feebly; Valentine could see that he would be dead soon.

A woman lay sprawled across some nearby seats, weeping. Blood stained her dress where she had taken a bullet in the arm. She kept trying to crawl away from the gunman, who now seemed to have completely lost interest in her.

The gunman…two men…three men at least were at the edge of the stage, dressed in identical, ragged blue trousers and shirts. They were waving revolvers around, and green light glimmered from their eyes. They shouted, furiously working to be heard over the noise of the crowd, gesticulating wildly, desperate to make themselves
understood
. One man was on the theater stage, shouting up into the flyspace, as though he were addressing an adversary hiding in the withdrawn curtains. A second man was kicking at the chairs in the near rows, turning his head this way and that, on a wild hunt for some unknowable prey. A third man clattered around the orchestra pit, knocking down instruments and music stands, his intentions indecipherable.

On each man’s face, glowing from somewhere in the depths of their skulls, was a sharp point of light—bright white at the center, fading to a surreal green at the edges. It made skin and muscle transparent, obscured eyes and features, so that each man appeared to have no face; only a leering skull surrounded by a halo of viridian light.
Daemonomaniacs
, Valentine thought. He tore the cane free from his belt and held it like a sword. “Out of the way!” He shouted. “Coroners!” All to little effect; the crowd ignored, though it was mercifully thinning.

One of the men fired his revolver off into the air; the other two responded. Yet a fourth sounded right nearby, nearly startling Valentine from his perch. The one who’d fired looked just the same as the others—the same ragged blue shirt, the same green glimmer across his face.

“Here!” The stranger shouted, “It’s going to start here. I’m going to stop it! Don’t you understand? I have to stop…to stop it!” His empty sockets turned towards Valentine, and the coroner could just make out the opaque, jade green sclera of his eyes. He leveled his revolver, and Valentine snapped the cane at his head, aiming right for that weird light on his face…

He felt the walking stick connect, and felt his arm draw back simultaneously, felt himself hesitate a second too long and take a bullet in his chest, felt himself crack the man’s skull before the gun could go off, felt a dozen possible past and future moments fracture in a spiderweb of disrupted causality…

And then the man was gone, and in his place was nothing but the absolute certainty that there had never been anyone there in the first place.

“Aw, nuts.”

The crowd was gone now, pressed to the far exits and finally squeezed outside. Valentine saw five men now with their guns, and two people—a man and a woman—lying across the chairs, bleeding from wounds in their chests. The green-glimmer men were casting about wildly, shouting incoherently about stopping…something.

Of course they were mad. Or, really,
he
was mad, Valentine realized, as some of the identical-looking men were really causal doppelgangers—a peculiar effect caused by the daemonomania. Four men were weird hallucinations, and their bullets were harmless. One man was real, and definitely deadly.
Which one?
The young coroner knew he didn’t have the means to tell them apart: though he couldn’t recall precisely, he had a vague and uncomfortable feeling that none of the doppelgangers really
were
doppelgangers until he actually tried to test one. It had something to do with actualizing lines of causality, and Valentine had actually dozed through much of that lecture when he was being trained.

“This moment is the end,” the men shouted—that, or some variation on it, each glimmering figures words colored by slight causal variations. “This is the last time. This is the edge of now. All past and future moments are echoes of this one!”

Nothing for it,
Valentine told himself, grimly.
I’ll just have to take them all.
He clutched the cane like a sabre and tensed, choosing as his first target the man kicking his way through the orchestra pit. He kept checking under things, as though he were looking for something.
Now, or never.