Ghosts of Punktown Read online

  “Look,” Cynth said in a soothing tone, “on the day of the auction, you’ll have your chance to bid on this statue, and it may well end up in your hands.”

  “Our budget doesn’t compare to Hill Way’s.”

  “You said yourself, their budget might not permit it at this point.”

  “Even if it didn’t,” Mendeni sulked, “some other rich monster like Darik Stuul will snatch her up.”

  Maybe it was the guilt, but Cynth actually felt herself sympathizing with the man. His emotion was real, and barely in check. “I was just on my way to lunch, Mr. Mendeni. Would you like to accompany me? While we eat I can register you for a bidder’s paddle, if you haven’t done so on the net already.” She tapped her wrist comp to show him how this could be accomplished.

  Mendeni’s wide mouth spread a little wider in an apologetic smile. “Look, I’m sorry I’m so excitable.”

  “We’ll call it passionate.”

  “I didn’t get your name, I’m afraid.”

  She told him, and he shook her hand. “Nice to know you, Cynthia.”

  She was about to ask him to call her Cynth instead, when something occurred to her. Cynthia, Simon had called her in today’s message.

  “You abandoned me, Cynthia. I am empty without you.”

  But Simon only ever called her Synthia.

  * * *

  Walking from Tower 3's parking lot to the building’s front entrance the next morning, Cynth again noted the verdigris tint of Tower 1, that made it look covered in lichen. Like the building that housed Jango Auctioneers and Appraisals, Tower 2 retained its polished brass exterior, only somewhat tarnished by the years. She stopped for a few moments to look between Towers 1 and 3, and recalled again the night the emergency vehicles had descended on the building she now worked in. She turned her face up toward the rows of windows in the building she had once lived in, at this angle black and staring down at her like myriad empty skull sockets. She felt the impulse to cut across the triangular park between the three buildings and enter Tower 3's front lobby, where she had often sat to read magazines...

  The beeping of her wrist comp jostled her out of her reverie, and she lifted her arm to study it. The call was from her supervisor, Mr. Rosetta.

  He was the first to inform her that item twenty-eight had been stolen from the exhibition room.

  * * *

  There were two of those security guards now, identical in their rubbery black attire and surly scowls, plus city law enforcers in uniform and street clothes. Cynth hung back a bit until Mr. Rosetta was free for her to approach him.

  “Nothing else was taken,” he told her.

  “Thank Raloom,” Cynth said, more to herself. “There was no guard on duty at the time?”

  “Only during the hours the room is open to the public, between ten and five. After that, it’s locked.”

  “What about cameras?”

  “They were down! We don’t have anything after five-thirty.”

  “Oh my. So someone disabled them?”

  “So it would seem, but they appear to be operating correctly again now.”

  Cynth excused herself at the earliest opportunity and hurried to her office, where she went into her files for the personal contact numbers for Mendeni and Chard Colores. As she waited for Mendeni to answer, her eyes lifted to the blank white panels of the ceiling, identical to those that covered the ceiling in the expanded exhibition area. She wondered if the brass insect arms she remembered, folded into their grooves in every ceiling of the three buildings of the Triplex, had been removed or simply covered over under new dropped ceilings. She was certain that those nimble limbs were not administering to the needs of the low income families, mutants and junkies who appeared to be the inhabitants of Tower 3 now.

  At last, Mendeni materialized on one of her floating screens. “Cynthia, hello! I was meaning to call you today and tell you how much I enjoyed our lunch yesterday. Any chance –”

  Cynth cut him off. “The statue of Lupool was stolen last night, Mendeni.”

  “What?” he screeched. “Stolen by who?”

  “You tell me.”

  “What do you mean, you tell me? Are you accusing me of this?”

  “Sorry; I only meant, your guess is as good as mine.”

  “Is that what you meant? And so that’s why you called me?”

  “I thought you’d be interested to know.”

  “I’m sure Richard Colores would be interested to know, too – have you called him? Or is it only me you think is a criminal?”

  “I am not calling you a criminal, and yes, I was going to call Colores next. Don’t worry, I didn’t mention to the forcers or even my boss about you two coming to view the piece, and how intensely you both want it.”

  “So what if I want it intensely? That doesn’t make me so lacking in intelligence or sanity to do something like this!”

  But you are lacking in cash, Cynth thought. “Well, whoever did this would be as intensely interested in the piece as you two are. Look, calm down, I just wanted you to know. Maybe you’ll hear of something, someone else who might have wanted the statue enough to do this. In the meantime, like I say, I need to tell Colores, too.”

  “Yeah, you do that,” Mendeni said, apparently as shaken by Cynth’s not-so-subtle accusations as he was by news of the theft itself. “Keep me informed.” Then he signed off.

  Colores, when she called him next, was clearly stunned but maintained his composure. If he was aware of Cynth’s suspicions, he didn’t mention it or appear defensive or resentful. “This is terrible, just terrible – and so perplexing! Why only that item? I wonder if it could be a Raloom cult; there are still a few of them here and there on Oasis, you know. But I also know of a young man named Mendeni, at P.U., who very much wants that figure, too. And I happen to know his family were Raloom worshipers going way back. You might want to –”

  “I know Mr. Mendeni,” Cynth broke in.

  “Ahh. Well, if you know him, then I need say no more. But I hope you mentioned him to the authorities, so they might talk to him.”

  Cynth didn’t say whether she had or hadn’t. All she would say was, “I’ll let you know if I hear anything. Please do the same, Mr. Colores.”

  “Yes, yes,” he said, so preoccupied with worry now that he forgot to remind her to call him Chard.

  * * *

  Cynth wouldn’t have answered the call from Simon were it not for what he said. He seemed shocked to see her face come on his own screen. “What are you saying, Simon?”

  “Well, so it speaks at last.”

  “I asked you what you’re saying.”

  “And I ask you, what was the idea of having me come to Punktown? You can’t really be living in that dump. I should have known from the outside before I even went in, which was stupid of me – I could have been mugged or killed. But maybe that was your intention, huh?”

  “Will you please tell me what the hell you’re going on about, Simon?”

  “About the text message you sent me, damn it! Asking me to bring your stuff to your new apartment.” He gave the address. He even gave the apartment number: 933.

  “Oh my God,” Cynth said under her breath. She fumbled with her thoughts. “You didn’t go in? Inside 933?”

  “I rode up the elevator, looked into the hallway, and turned right around again. That is, I tried to ride back down, but the elevator wouldn’t even work again. It almost caught my arm in the doors! It was a joke, you sending me there, wasn’t it? A cruel joke?”

  “It was a prank, sort of, but not by me.”

  “Who, then? Do you have a new boyfriend? Someone trying to do me harm?”

  “Someone who thinks they’re looking out for me,” she muttered. “Are you still in Punktown now?”

  “Yes!”

  “Don’t go back to that apartment again. You’re right – it isn’t safe there.”

  * * *

  Riding down in one of Tower 3's elevators, Cynth thought back now over thing
s she had only half noticed since beginning work for Jango. The odd gurgling of what she figured was a water pipe behind one wall of her office. The way the office was hot as a sauna one day, icy cold the next. She had even complained of this, and maintenance people had looked into the problem; it hadn’t recurred so she’d assumed it had been resolved.

  The elevator took her down past the second floor, where the two home invaders had broken in all those years before. It didn’t stop there, but continued on toward the lobby. After speaking with Simon, though, Cynth had this fear that when she arrived, the doors wouldn’t open, that the elevator would keep her as a prisoner inside.

  It didn’t, however, and she left Tower 3 to cut across the triangular park, along a path through the snow that one of the service robots had plowed.

  Walking toward Tower 1, which loomed over her as if it might topple, cold in its giant’s shadow, Cynth remembered the last day her family had been inside the structure, inside apartment 933, before they’d left for Miniosis. Alone in her room, emptied of all her belongings except for the bed she had outgrown, ten-year-old Cynth had spoken softly to the air, as if partaking in a séance. “Good-bye, Mr. Moon.” She had been brave, had held back her tears. Barely. “I’ll miss you.”

  For the first time ever, Mr. Moon did not reply to her. At the time, she hadn’t been sure if – because they were leaving – the computer mind felt it was no longer imperative for it to attend to its former masters. Or was it, instead, that Mr. Moon was at a loss for words?

  She entered the spacious lobby of Tower 1 and found it not much warmer inside than it was outside. The carpet was worn, tracked with mud. The interior metal of the walls and ceiling were not the green verdigris of the exterior, but were still tarnished almost black. A man lay mumbling to himself in uneasy sleep on one sofa, and on the other side of a low table strewn with old newspapers and ragged magazines, an elderly Choom woman slouched deeply in a once plush but now fungus-like chair. She and the sleeping man had gray hair and skin that looked leeched of color, or even life force. Glancing at the woman again, Cynth couldn’t tell if she were not so much elderly as very unwell, but the gray woman’s eyes followed Cynth with a bright curiosity as she made her way across the lobby to the elevator. Cynth had called for the lift, and it was taking an extra long time to arrive, when a voice rasped behind her, “Don’t you go down to the basement, now.”

  Cynth turned to see the faded, wrinkled woman smiling a huge Choom grin over the back of her chair, like the disembodied head of a mummified Cheshire cat. “Excuse me? What’s wrong with the basement?”

  “A terrible old man lives down there. I think he’s a ghost.”

  The elevator door hissed open behind Cynth, startling her.

  * * *

  When she entered the hallway, it was to find half its ornate crystal lights extinguished, so that it looked like an endless tunnel carpeted in moss. She walked between its riveted walls and somber dark doors until she came to one labeled 933.

  She was about to command the door to open when she felt a gaze upon her, and looked around to find a man watching her from the doorway of another apartment. In the gloom, his face appeared oddly distorted but she couldn’t be sure if he were a mutant. She called over to him, “Do you know if anyone lives in here now? In 933?”

  “No,” he said, very brusquely. “Who would want to live in there?” And then he withdrew into his flat and shut the door after him.

  Cynth faced the door again, and this time decided to test it first herself. Unlocked, it opened at her touch. She stepped inside, closed the door behind her with a stealthy click.

  “Lights,” she whispered. No lamps came on, but a weak gray sunlight entered through drawn, translucent curtains. There was only one source of light in the living room, already on, but it was wan and flickered. It was the greenish glow of a circular plate set into the wall, bearing the features of a benevolent, smiling moon rendered in an antique style, such as one might see in a fairytale illustration.

  Cynth stood where she was for several moments, watching that fluttering light, as if she expected the fixed eyes to shift in her direction. Then, having steeled herself, she crossed the living room floor, quietly as if afraid to rouse a sleeper. As she came further into the apartment, she noticed an unpleasant smell and followed it. It reminded her of algae growing on the surface of stagnant water.

  She poked her head into the bathroom, and in the dimness saw that the water filling the tub looked very dark. But it was not red with blood, as she had imagined it before entering. Chard Colores – lured here as Simon had almost been – did not lie in the tub, as she had for some reason pictured him, drowned in the redness like the baby in the Kalian lamp, with metal arms pinning him down in the water after having burst through the lower, secondary ceiling. The ceiling was water stained but unbroken. A thought occurred to Cynth, and she stepped into the bathroom to touch the surface of the water. It was scummed in black slime from long unused pipes, but the water was almost hot, as if someone had filled the tub for a bath only minutes earlier.

  Cynth turned back into the hallway, and continued on to her old bedroom. She found its door open, inviting her, and she passed across its threshold.

  Again, for some reason she had expected – had dreaded – to find Mendeni here ahead of her, after having received a message supposedly from herself. He was not. But there was another figure standing before her in the gloom of gray light.

  It was the naked figure of a woman, who stood before the closed curtains of the window as if she longed to gaze at the city beyond but could not open the drapes with her own hands. Instead, the statue’s rigid arms had been raised above her head in an open, beseeching gesture.

  Cynth’s heart beat wildly. At first, because she had thought it was a person, and then because she recognized it – even with its arms forced into a new position – as the likeness of Lupool, wife of the god Raloom. And thirdly, because in an intuitive way, the way one can anticipate the behaviors of a friend or loved one however ailing or aged or distressed, because she knew the caryatid was not so much meant to depict Lupool anymore, as herself.

  She dropped her eyes to a bowl containing a steaming substance, set on top of her old built-in desk unit. She knew it was supposed to be the sweet Choom porridge called luul, but there was something off about the smell. Still, it lay there like an offering left to a stone idol.

  She drifted further into the room, watching the back of the stone idol as if fearing that its head would creak around to look back at her with its now open glass eyes. In this murk she couldn’t tell whether the human-shaped column were any the worse for wear after one of the Triplex’s service robots had transported it here.

  And why was it here? To cheat the two men of this treasure, the men who had coveted it so avidly? Had he mistaken their passion as lust for her, the treasure’s temporary keeper, instead? Not that Cynth hadn’t been able to tell that both Colores and Mendeni found her alluring. Mr. Moon had sensed it, too. Of course he had. He was a ghost haunting not one but three buildings, omnipotent like a god himself.

  Or was it an offering to her, secreted in this shrine they both had preserved? Or even a gift to himself – a replacement for her, a clockwork effigy better suited for his longing, synthetic heart?

  “Synthia,” Cynth said softly to herself.

  She moved to the nearest wall, and flattened her hand against its tarnished surface. It didn’t matter in what particular spot she placed her hand; his essence was everywhere in apartment 933. The metal was cool, not warm.

  “Mr. Moon,” she said aloud. “A long time ago I had to leave here, but the decision wasn’t mine. I loved living here. I was sorry to go.” She stopped to swallow heavily. “I’m sorry...”

  She continued, making her voice louder, firmer, but still soothing. “You never said good-bye to me that day when I left. Mr. Moon – it’s time for you to say good-bye to me now.” She waited in silence for nearly a minute. “Please, Mr. Moon. It’s time for
us both to go.”

  From no discernible source she detected a small, rasping sound. A drawn out little croaking, like some badly distorted and slowed down recording of a song.

  She didn’t tell it to stop. She let it play itself out until it dwindled away, and went silent, on its own.

  3

  It was Mendeni who, of the two of them, seemed a bit uneasy with their relationship at first. She would tease him that on some level he harbored resentment for the race that had colonized his world, buried one of the Choom’s own cities under what was to become Punktown, so that only the barest remnants of that earlier city could now be distinguished. He told her it was just that he was more comfortable, at times, with things than with people, with the past than the here-and-now. She had to concede that she had often felt that way herself.