The Last Days of New Paris (4 page)

Thibaut was ready for manifs. He had his expertise, he could perform cathexis, or use a weapon itself manifested against them.

Humans, of course, could be killed with almost anything.

The partisans picked like wood-gatherers through copses of chimneys. Among the old bricks, dead crows, slates, and gutters, Thibaut saw pendulums and figures made of string. The detritus of the surreal, evanescent unconsciousnesses. There were doors at roofs' edges. Dim things walking too close, at which he would not look.

Then the faint sound of screaming. They approached warily. With the sky huge around them, the Main à plume reached the source of noise. They stared down into a warehouse's cracked skylight as if it were a scrying pool.

Far below, a man in robes spasmed suspended in the air above the chamber's dusty floor. He thrashed amid monsters.

A trumpet-nosed beast with fish eyes swung a cudgel in brutal percussion. A legless thing with bat wings thrashed him with its spiked and suckered tail. Rag doll animals chewed the man's fingers and gouged him with their horns.

“My God,” Virginie whispered. “Come on.” The resistance fighters grit their teeth in disgust and quickly readied weapons. A lizard-like doll-thing snarled, a hairy pig-faced assailant leered between assaults.

“Wait,” Thibaut managed to say. He held up his hand. “Look. Look at his clothes.”

“Get out of the way, Thib,” said Pierre, aiming through the glass.

“
Wait.
He moved just like that a moment ago,” Thibaut said. The man screamed again.
“Listen.”
Moments passed, and the distinct wavering cry repeated. “Look at the devils,” Thibaut said. “Look at
him.
”

The floating man's eyes were unfocused and as flat as concrete. There was a precision to his sand-colored robes, his beard. He wailed and writhed and his cries grew neither louder nor quieter and the blood pattered unendingly beneath him in a pool that did not spread.

“Those demons,” Thibaut said at last, “are too healthy. They're repeating like a scratched record. They aren't demons. And what they're torturing isn't a man.”

The changing streets of Paris echoed now with the slamming of Hell-hard feet. They had burst from sewers after the blast came, torn open trees like broken doors, hurtling out into the world as the manifs did, though they were not like them, nothing like them, though the explosion had palpably been not of their nature. As if the explosion was
not their birth but their excuse. They swam up into the light through pavements made lava, roaring up from a glimpsed painscape. Giants with cobwebs for faces, crab-headed generals encased in teeth. And so on. They wore armor and gold. They cast pestilential spells and yammered with abyssal gusto.

But the demons winced through their sneers. They rubbed their skins gingerly when they thought they weren't observed. When they killed and tormented it was in faintly needy fashion. They seemed anxious. They stank not only of sulfur but infection. Sometimes they wept with pain.

The devils of Paris would not shut up. They declaimed as they came, in a hundred languages, they hissed and howled descriptions of their hadal cities, and beat their claws on the sigils they wore, of the houses of the pit, and they shouted rather too often to those they hunted and killed that it was from
Hell
that they came, and so that everyone should be terrified.

They had come flank-by-side onto the streets with Nazis and their Vichy allies, patrolling with specialist witch-officers, launching joint attacks, with bullets and bombs and the spit and boiling blood of Hell. It was clear: whereas the manifs had no overseers, the Reich had
invoked
these other things to win the war. Their collaboration was not always successful. There were times when, even during onslaughts against their enemies, their bickering exploded into bad-tempered massacres, fiends and Nazis ripping each other open while their targets, their
own slaughter interrupted, listened bemused to screaming accusations on both sides.

Now they were here, to those who watched closely the devils were as cowed as their army handlers, as stranded in impossible Paris as everyone else. They came up but were not seen descending. Hide outside their lairs—as did the bravest or suicidal human spies—and you might sometimes hear them sobbing for a Gehenna from which by incompetent demonology it seemed they were permanently exiled.

You could learn to see that the living art of the city intimidated them. It sent them scurrying if outnumbered, or nervously on the attack if not.

“Those,” Thibaut said to his comrades that night on the roof, of the devil-like things below them, “are not demons. They're manifs.”

Living images.
Images
of demons, and of their victim. And not even sentient like most of the art come alive in New Paris, but looping.

“No!” said Pierre, bringing his rifle back up. “Fucking bullshit,” he said, and aimed again. But he did not fire, and his comrades watched the scene repeat, until Élise gently pushed his gun down.

Thibaut whispers to those gone.

It's night but he keeps walking. He wants cool air and
dark to draw its edges into white Paris stone like drafting ink. So he walks crumbling streets until the moon arrives, then closes his eyes and walks more, lets his unconscious pull him toward whichever moldering house it will, feeling for safety.
I'll sleep an hour,
he thinks.
Two, three hours, that's all.

When his fingers touch wood he looks again. He forces the door. His footsteps squelch on a swampy carpet. He walks with his gun up.

From a mantelpiece of a large front room
a dream mammal watches him with marmoset eyes. It cringes at him. Blood drips from sickle claws. In the puddles on the floor, a drowned woman lies facedown. Thibaut sees her mottled shoulder blades: he abruptly knows, with an inner flex of insight, that the animal is waiting for her to rot.

He should be quiet at night—especially on this, his last night—but he is full of the rage of a failed soldier. He aims at the carnivore bush-baby.

It hesitates, as manifs do before him. Thibaut surrenders his will and fires, Surrealist-style.

His bullets sway. They correct mid-flight, burst into the thing as it leaps, slam it against the wall where it thumps its limbs and dissolves like tar.

Thibaut waits. His weapon smokes. Nothing appears. He goes to turn the dead woman but stops, holds his face in his hands and wonders if he will cry. He cannot sleep now.

Two days after the Main à plume's abortive assault on the non-demons, as Thibaut ate his stale-bread breakfast, Virginie put a book on the table in front of him.

“What's this?” he said.

She flipped through engravings to a picture of a trumpeting thing, a spiked tail, a horde of little devils. He recognized them. They beset the same St. Anthony that they had seen a few streets away.

“It's by Schongauer,” she said.

“Where did you get this?”

“A library.”

Thibaut shook his head at her foolishness or bravery. To plunder a library! Books were not safe.

“Thing is,” she said. “That manif? Of this image? I don't think it just self-generated. It's not close enough. To the heart of the S-Blast.”

In the fecund shock waves of the explosion, it was not only the Surrealists' own dreams that had manifested. Born with them were figures from Symbolism and Decadence, imaginings of the Surrealists' ancestors and beloveds, ghosts from their proto-canon. Now Redon's
leering ten-legged spider hunted at one end of rue Jean Lantier, chattering its big teeth. A figure with Arcimboldo's coagulate fruit face stalked the boundaries of the Saint-Ouen market.

“If this was Dürer, maybe,” she said, “or Piranesi. Schongauer? He's important, but I don't think he's core enough to manifest spontaneously. I think someone invoked this deliberately.”

“Who?” Thibaut said. “Why?”

“The Nazis. Maybe they want devils that'll follow orders better. I think they want their own manifs,” Virginie said. “I think they're still trying.” They regarded each other. Pictured their enemies tugging at images from pages with whatever invocatory engines they could put together. “The Führer himself,” Virginie said heavily, “is an
artist,
after all.” Reproductions of his barely competent watercolors, his hesitant lines, his featureless faces, his vacuous, pretty, empty urban façades, had circulated as curios in occult Paris. Virginie and Thibaut shared a glance of contempt.