Rags & Bones Read online

  My love. By the time you receive this …

  He silenced her voice, flung the useless remains of her memory onto the floor, and raced from the room, into the elevator, onto the launch platform, into the hovercraft, across the darkening landscape, high above the petty mortal strife, his thought a single refrain, Hold still, hold still! He did not know where she was, but he knew where he must go.

  He leapt out of the craft onto the wet grass of Omniscient’s garden and tore down the path, between the undulated heads of a thousand flowers, toward the old cottage, where a crowd had already gathered, including members of the press and agents of the CRC. Courteous’s mother and Genuine, her favorite sister, were there too, and when they saw him they pushed the crowd aside, making a path for him to the front door that hung precariously upon a single hinge. He stepped inside, knowing what he would find.

  There is no meaning, no beauty, no love …

  He fell to his knees before her lifeless body and, forgetting himself in that moment, cried out, “Georgiana! Georgiana, do not leave me!”

  A hush fell over the onlookers, the witnesses she had arranged for her suicide to prove she was a Sibyl, to ensure her master file would be destroyed. Someone whispered, “He calls her Georgiana!” And another: “He’s mad with grief, poor thing.”

  “Like her,” a third said. “Didn’t you hear? Courteous left a note: she simply could not go on without her darling Georgiana!”

  “I saved you,” Beneficent wailed. “I gave you eternal life! Don’t go, Georgiana, don’t go!”

  But it was too late. She was gone. In truth, she had left him long ago. The moment he stole her mortality from her, his true love was gone.

  Courteous had told him that time had no power or meaning anymore, and he prayed she was wrong, that with the passage of enough of it, the pain might fade, the memory of Georgiana would recede after a few thousand years into a sepia-toned, bittersweet, infinitesimally small point in his endless life, a life that expanded like the universe until objects dropped over the cosmic horizon, forever too far away to see. A few thousand years did pass, during which he remarried—several times—fathered hundreds of more children, even rose into the Conduct Review Committee, where he sat at the right hand of Courteous’s father. Georgiana’s death had bound him to the family as no offspring ever could.

  Then a million years. And another. And another. Then a billion and a billion more on top of that. The sun ballooned in the sky, turned an angry red. Temperatures soared. The oceans began to evaporate. Their probes located another planet in a distant galaxy, nearly identical to Earth and much younger, a new home that would last a good six or seven billion years. The basecamp on one of Saturn’s moons was completed, their last refuge before the final launch into deep space.

  As he settled into his seat for the ferry ride to Titan, next to his new wife—they had been married only six hundred years—Beneficent looked out the window for his last view of Earth, a hellish landscape, lifeless, infused in crimson light, not a leaf or flower or stubborn weed left anywhere (the weeds were the last to die). He took his wife’s perfect hand and closed his perfect eyes and sorted through his cogbox until he found the message he had been saving since, it seemed to him, the dawn of time. A time when the world was green and wildflowers bloomed in summer gardens and eternal life had yet to mar the perfect mortal face of his beloved. My love. By the time you receive this …

  He had started to delete it innumerable times over the millennia. It wasn’t the words so much that he dreaded to hear—he was sure he knew the gist of them—but the sound of her voice. He wasn’t sure he could bear hearing it again. He had kept the message, though, because nothing else of her remained. Those seven billion billion billion atoms had diffused long ago across the vast surface of a dying world.

  It seemed fitting to hear her voice now, before that world was gone. So he played the message as the seat beneath him shuddered and he began to rise above the shattered Earth, her voice filling the darkness inside his head, the lightless abyss between his immortal ears:

  My love. By the time you receive this I will be gone. I will have taken back the precious thing that was taken from me. Do not grieve for me, beloved. And do not torture yourself with blame and guilt. Death is the yoke that frees me. From boredom and regret and envy, though the worst of these is envy. I am filled with it. I envy every living thing. I envy the trees. I envy the grass. I envy everything that grows or walks or crawls upon the face of the Earth. You would make me perfect by giving me eternal life, but, beloved, don’t you understand it was your love that made me immortal? Your love that perfected me? And that it was the very fact that I would one day die that made me precious to you? Now that I am gone, your love will come back to you. It will, I pray, sustain you until the end of time, until the never-ending ends and the last star dies.

  Beneficent dropped his reply into the void, where it fell for an eternity, unheard:

  Tell me it isn’t pointless. Tell me that it’s beautiful.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE …………………………………

  A brilliant and eccentric (read “mad”) scientist, aided by a physically grotesque assistant, takes it into his head to play God with dire consequences. Frankenstein? No. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birth-Mark,” a story published twenty years after Mary Shelley’s Gothic masterpiece.

  “The Birth-Mark” is certainly not the most famous Hawthorne story, and it doesn’t even come close to being one of the best. But it has always appealed to me, despite its painfully dated melodrama and—to our twenty-first-century sensibilities—naïve fear of progress (read “science”). But as a piece of speculative fiction, as an example of the nineteenth century’s fear and fascination with scientific progress, and as a tragic romance, I love it. The lead character, a stereotypical mad scientist type, is blinded not by ambition or pride, like many tragic figures—and in the end it isn’t science or progress that dooms him—but love.

  We look at scientists differently these days, but our fear of technology run amok lingers. It is, perhaps, even more pervasive now than in Hawthorne’s day. So I thought it might be fun to take the underlying themes of “The Birth-Mark” and place them squarely in the middle of that fear, in a possible future where that fear might be fully realized. For we suspect—well, deep in our hearts we’re pretty damn sure—that it isn’t the scientists who are mad … it’s science itself.

  Sirocco

  MARGARET STOHL

  I. L’Incidente (The Accident)

  If they had only found the body, Theo thought, so much of this unpleasantness could have been avoided.

  Corpses, though unattractive, were a matter of indisputable fact. And facts, especially on the set of a decidedly B horror movie like The Castle of Otranto, were hard to come by—as hard to come by as truth, maybe, or your own trailer. Both of which were the topics of the day, especially after all the trouble.

  The morning of the accident, now that Theo looked back on it, began like any other day. Or so he had told the polizia, when they had questioned him along with the rest of production. Theo had seen nothing, been nowhere near the set when it happened. In point of fact, he’d been sent home in disgrace only the night before, when he’d failed to produce the required twenty-four liters of fake blood for the severed hand shoot, and they’d had to wrap early.

  The shame!

  But that was last night. Today was a new day, and Theo had busied himself with due cappuccino, ordered at the same time and sprinkled with cocoa, alongside a flaky cornetto that only somewhat haphazardly contained pudding or not. These were carried outside, as usual, and eaten in hot silence, also as usual, at the small tables in front of the Jardinieri, the one café with an Internet point. Only the old woman had been there, the one with the still older hands and the ankles that looked like elephant legs, dry and cracking and firmly planted beneath her shapeless black shift. She nodded at Theo, he recalled, but didn’t meet his eyes.

  “Effing sirocco.” That’s what T
heo had said, he remembered saying it, though aside from the Elephant Woman, there was no one there to tell. He hadn’t had breakfast with anyone—not even with his father—since first coming on location to the small southeastern Italian town. The sirocco, the hot, gritty wind blown up from North Africa, had wrapped its fingers around Theo like a fist, carrying off the words the moment they left his mouth. Though he sat no more than fifty yards from the Adriatic Sea, there was no relief. Even the small medusas that lazed in the blue-lit waters had gone into hiding beneath the rocks. This particular wind’s hold on Theodore Gray was miserable and total, like so many other things in his life.

  What next?

  Theo remembered it like flashbacks, like one of the dream sequences his father, Jerome Gray, the American director, il regista americano, was so fond of using.

  Cue scene.

  A boy running through the archway of the Porta Terra, stumbling over the cobblestone path leading into the Old City of Otranto.

  Cue sound.

  Shouting, in two languages. Italian for the shopkeepers, and English for the americano.

  Cue crazy.

  Frantic gesturing, hands flapping in the air like wings. Theo finally understood the vague message—that something was really, truly wrong. That something had finally happened.

  The waitress finally tried to explain it to him, herself. “Gli americani ottusi! Gli idioti di Hollywood! Hanno gettato una casa in mare!”

  Theo understood “stupid Americans”—he’d heard it often enough—and something about Hollywood, probably and deservedly equally stupid.

  But that last part—tossing a house into the sea? Or a gelato into the house of sea? His Rosetta Stone Italian must be failing him.

  The Elephant Woman shook her head, finally pointing up the hill toward the center of the Old City. When she spoke, her ivory teeth—capped in gold but rotting black—took on the air of some sort of ancient, evil treasure. “Go, boy. Castello Aragonese. There is trouble. Americano trouble.” As if on cue, a gust of wind knocked a café table over, sending it rolling into the stone street, while a large black bird circled overhead, squawking. It was amazing, really, like a scene from a movie—possibly even the movie they had come to Otranto to shoot, themselves.

  A black feather came floating down from the sky, and the Elephant Woman crossed herself. “Il falco, un cattivo presagio.”

  “Il falco? The falcon?” Theo put down his cup.

  “Cattivo presagio,” she repeated. “You say, Inglese, dark—dark omen.” She kept speaking, but Theo couldn’t hear, as the bells of the cattedrale had begun to chime.

  Nine o’clock, on the hour.

  After the bells faded into silence, only the sound of screaming hung in the air.

  A woman.

  Theo flinched.

  Not just any woman.

  A woman so famous for that particular scream, she’d made a career spanning forty years out of it. Pippa Lords-Stewart, star of stage and screen. Eclipsed only by Her Majesty’s Own Sir Manfred Lords, Pippa’s former husband and present costar of their current project—the first time they’d shared the screen in the decade since their infamous marriage more infamously ended. All of which meant more paparazzi than Theo had ever seen on one of his father’s sets, which meant more coverage, which meant more money for the budget—or any money at all, as the case may be. Truthfully, Pippa and Sir Manny and their exquisitely rotten relationship—the sheer number of drinks either could toss at any given dinner went into the double digits—were the only reason Jerome Gray had managed to secure some slightly shady Bulgarian film financing at the last minute, once Germany had pulled out.

  Nobody hated each other as well—or as wealthily—as they did.

  But the woman could also scream like no one else, and that was Pippa screaming, Theo was sure of it. After the scene they’d shot on the roof of the Castello Aragonese last night—the one where Pippa, the lady of the castle, discovers the lifeless body of her son, who has been killed by a falling suit of armor—well, after seventeen takes, even a lowly production assistant like Theo would know that particular scream anywhere. A single close-up of the disembodied hand still wearing bloody armor had taken nearly an hour. “It’s a freaking haunted castle. Get me more blood,” his father had bellowed, between every take.

  Twenty-four liters.

  When it came to Jerome Gray and blood, there was never enough.

  The only problem was, they weren’t filming now—and yet Pippa was still screaming.

  That one deduction sent Theo running through the Porta Terra, stumbling over the cobblestones like the shouting boy had before him, like the wind. He wound his way up through the alleyways of the Old City, past the shops, past the walls of weathered leather sandals and dried herbs and Puglian wine and ceramic bowls painted with olives or sailboats—past the clay tarantulas, the sign of the tarantella still danced in Salento—past the cattedrale itself, with the tombs and the crypts and the frescoes and the mosaic floor that looked as if it were built by a mad, drunk priest—until the Castello came into sight.

  The Castello Aragonese, also known to production as the Castle of Otranto, and as thus the setting of his father’s film of the same name, was the reason they were here for the hottest summer of Theo’s seventeen years. His father had insisted a sound stage in Burbank wouldn’t do, and Pippa agreed on this location when she’d heard Helen Mirren had bought a masseria in Puglia—which sounded very glamorous to Pippa, until she realized the word only meant “farmhouse,” mosquitos and rocks and all.

  And then there was the small matter of the castle itself, in reality. In hot, dusty reality. Squat and stone, the color of a carved brown potato and about as glamorous looking, it was perhaps not so much Gothic as medieval, and not so much preserved as abandoned. As far as security measures, there was only one key to the place, and only one surly Italian fellow (in the same dirty black rocker T-shirt, with the words “Pink Floyd” embossed in gold) named Dante allowed to wield it. Dante showed up most mornings, after he’d had a good two or three small coffees, to unchain the front gate and twist open the ancient iron bars. Dante locked the Castello again when he left for lunch and sieste—and since his sieste could sometimes last all the way until dinner, Jerome Gray had decided early on that production had no choice but to let themselves be locked in along with the gate. It had been Theo’s job, then, to get the bar across the piazza to slide panini between the bars in the afternoons. Such was the glamour of life in the Castello.

  Then came the transformation. The crew had spent hours adding carved foam pieces to every dusty wall, gluing silk cobwebs and synthetic ivy to every naturally webby, overgrown corner. The very real cannonballs that were still lodged throughout the place were sprayed a gleaming black over their disappointingly tan stone color, only to be scrubbed tan again when the scene had been wrapped. Stone the color of stone. Dust the color of dust. Mold the color of mold—and none of it the kind you see in the movies—that was the Castello. Really, Theo found it hard to imagine a novel had ever been written about the place at all.

  A row of trailers had been set down in what once was the surrounding moat, now the home of wild fruit trees and tall grasses. The wind blew through them, rattling the grasses like maracas, sending the trailers shaking on their wheels. Still more trailers squatted along the sea wall behind the castle, where the battlements enclosing the town gave way to the rocky ocean itself. There was the props trailer, and the costume trailer. There was his father’s trailer, where he watched the dailies and came out shouting into his headset (or into his water bottle, which had held many liquids though never, apparently, water) for the rest of the afternoon. There was Pippa’s trailer, the one she shared with Sullen Matilda, her exceptionally dour assistant, who was only ever known to smile at Theo—a fact Theo found less not more encouraging. There was Sir Manny’s trailer, and next to it, the one belonging to his equally sullen on-screen son, Conrad James—that Conrad James, teen werewolf of the small screen and the oiled ch
est. (Oiled and shaved, as was pro forma for a twenty-six-year-old playing a teen wolf on a nonlupine “off” day.)

  Only—

  Theo stopped in his tracks, panting.

  Only there wasn’t Connie’s trailer. Not where it was supposed to be.

  There wasn’t anything, only a gap in the row and a patch of blue-green sea.

  And a line of production assistants as expendable as Theo himself, talking in clusters of tattoos and hipster bangs and cut-off jean shorts, smoking. “—what with the wind, you couldn’t hear a thing—”

  And Sir Manfred, wearing only half a head of hair extensions, screaming into a walkie-talkie, smoking. “—it could have been me—”

  And Jerome Gray, Theo’s father, talking to the polizia with both hands, smoking. “—wind insurance? Who the hell needs wind insurance—”

  And Sullen Matilda, texting and smoking. “—fofmfgf—”

  And Pippa, screaming and smoking. “Connie—Connie—”

  That scream.

  Conrad James.

  Where was Connie?

  By the time Theo reached the sea wall, he could see only the remnants of a white trailer, smashed upon the rocks a hundred feet below. A piece of white tin bobbed in the tides. A white door, with a red star upon it.

  Conrad’s trailer.

  When Theo looked closer, he could see it was dripping red, staining the water and rocks beneath, just like the severed hand in the scene at the Castello the night before.