haunted geography.

has she not noticed it yet? the sea of people seething and heaving towards us, with their black umbrellas and their long coats? clara, apparently i didn't warn you enough, or i warned you too well. i have spent long hours describing eskew-in-ruins, or my memories of it alone. i did not mention the fact that eskew once designed a scenario in the cabin of a plane to give me my escape, or trapped riyo in some place that i dared not ask about. the problem with this city is that it is malleable, that given enough time and material and rotten imagination, it can make anything.

because you are right, clara, in that i am dead and the people coming down the street are not quite people. you are closer to being alive than all of us, frozen as you are. and about those people -- have you looked behind you yet? because i can perceive the gauzelike film of their faces. i can see the slits where their mouths should be, and the dripping black holes of their sunken eyes, black liquid spreading out from the holes to stain the gauze. they are wearing masks, you see. if we are lucky they will merely push past us, unseeing. if we are unlucky, then, well --

oh, clara. i think i've made a terrible mistake.

i was trying to help rather than stand by. riyo would want me to help. but there lies the rub, don't you see? my help brings harm. i knew all this and i did it anyway.

eskew split open the world, and now i've brought you and your wonderful machine here. at least there is no sign of your friend, a woman who calls herself me as a matter of self-definition. she cannot be killed. do you know how much fun this city might have finding ways to take her apart? but you are just as much of a problem too. not the valeyard. i mean you, clara, because try as you might, and you were quite successful, there is a part of you that is curious about a place like this. all those tapes. my voice like a breadcrumb trail, me as hansel and you as gretel in the tangle of eskew. have i accidentally led you towards the warped puzzle-amalgamation of flesh called why and how, blue eye and brown blinking slowly above a set of two gums and teeth melded together, layered like the teeth of a shark? if i glance back, will i see that railway bridge too close suddenly, and the splash of bodies hurling themselves into it, drawn to drown?

i learned your story. through it, i've fallen into the trap again. i have, again and again, warned you, and by warning you, i have introduced you and eskew to each other as if handing you off like a lover in a ballroom dance only to watch you whirl away into a sea of people. much like the mob still making its way down the road towards us. slowly. steadily. as if they are in no hurry, and have nowhere to be. which is quite possible here, all things considered.

"maybe you're right," i say. "maybe i've just been wasting my time with all this, because i died months ago or years ago. i'm not even sure any more. i don't know how long it's been. but the fact that you want to stay here? i can't believe that. that i can't tear you away from this. because i know you think that maybe eskew can force change, like i told you. maybe eskew could even take you out of whatever state you're in. but it wouldn't, clara, because the one thing about this city that is universally true is that it likes to watch someone suffer. and i can tell you that once it understands how miserable you are, as you are? it will want to see you like this every day for the rest of time, even as the universe starts to crack apart under the strain."

i can imagine it. the way it would strip everything from you, clara, down to nothing at all. how it would hollow you out and then offer you what you wanted at the very end. a release of some kind. an escape.

change comes, but not because you want it to. it comes when you are most comfortable, finally. i loved allegra. i did. and i grew comfortable in that, ever so briefly, and that alone might be why eskew saw fit to warp her as it warped everything else, while leaving me much the same. it thinks it is giving you what you want. didn't it tell me it had finally given me purpose?

that's the dangerous thing. places were so often depicted as relatively mindless when they were living, a warped understanding of what its purpose as a location was. eskew is anything but. it knows exactly what you want, and that alone is what makes it more dangerous than any place any of us have ever seen. it acutely understands yearning.

it wanted me, once, and i said no.

so now this is a dead town. i almost thought about taking you to see the ruins of eskew instead, the tank with entrails pouring out of it, the ruined landscape, the sky turned grey as if about to rain but never relinquishing a drop. you've seen the end of the universe, or so you tell me, and i should've asked if you wanted to see another as proof of what i know. of what i know might happen. of what i know has happened, already, and is probably still happening across other spaces and other times. if i had showed you that, would you be more resistant now?

or would you have looked even more? maybe there was never a good way out for me.

"so come with me," i say. "before the mob reaches us. just -- just take my hand and we will start running until i find a way out."

it should be an easy question to answer. i’ve told it before. i told riyo about the tennis ball, about that point in the london night where i was running, and then walking, and i turned the corner and there was nothing but cobblestone. how totems can fail you. how i wanted nothing more than to disappear and somehow, eskew had heard me. maybe it had been hearing me my whole life. i used to imagine something like it, but i thought it was just a runaway imagination, nothing real. it couldn’t be real. but the certainty was what made me vulnerable to it when it was real.

can i even answer it well, in a way that makes sense? can i reassure someone that they aren’t vulnerable to eskew, when the city crawls in everywhere? that you should watch out for cobblestones, and for rain, and for the nebulous shapes of black umbrellas on the horizon?

here we are, at the locale of a missing persons incident, and i know where the person went. but i can’t begin to explain how to get there. i can’t begin to explain their experience because i don’t know if it was the same. allegra and i never truly talked about it. we had arrived and that was enough to keep us together, until she was no longer allegra and i was trying to claw my way out as much as possible.

“well,” i say, half-laughing just a little, “i went for a walk. i imagine your missing person did much the same, and now… this.”

i gesture near my side. where i’m sitting, the asphalt has turned to gleaming cobblestones at various points, stained dark and wet with rain. the stones swell up from the sidewalk and track down an alleyway which is plain and empty now, a dead end that goes nowhere. but it did, at one point, almost surely. i run a finger along the nearest stone and it comes back damp. “it’s all very difficult to explain,” i admit. it’s a weak explanation. but if gotham’s bat, the local vigilante, decides to try and hit me, he will find i am less than solid. touching me, apparently, feels almost like touching something even thinner than water. i waver, most days. on rare ones i’m something a little more there. “but i can tell you that if you care at all about this city and the people in it, then the smart thing to do would be to level this street. hell, level the whole block.”

i’m sure he can pick up on how tired i sound. i don’t try to hide it any more. the fight is never-ending, eskew spilling over into new dimension after new dimension. it has one goal and it is to replicate itself, over and over again, to spread and burrow and seek. to creep in. “it’s a matter of subsuming,” i say. “all the old architecture here — the spires, the concrete, the steel — and all this place’s palpable misery and poverty and strangeness? that, together is nothing but food for what sits on the other side of somewhere down there.” i point back at the alleyway behind me. “somewhere you can’t even see, i think.”

i can, just a little. there’s a feel to eskew, a heaviness in the air, a familiarity that i could slip into if i let myself. but i don’t. besides, i don’t think eskew wants me any more. it’s found its new fascination because of the building concern, because people can open doors and leave them open if they aren’t fully aware of what’s on the other side.

there is nothing good here. there is about to be something worse. i stand up after a moment, sighing. “but if you really want to know, tell me. i can give you some things that’ll help. but there are rules about how you should listen to them, and i’ll have to come get them back.” the tapes. my tapes. the recordings i made, because they might open the door, but the door is already open. there’s nothing to lose now. “about fifteen hours of audio by the end of it. so little, really, in terms of what happened.”