Shades of Grey

Rusty Hill

Dad and I climbed out of the car, and Fandango told us he would wait at the top of a nearby hill in case the Ford “proved difficult to start.” He wished us good luck, told us to signal when we wanted to be picked up and that he would ahoogah twice if he saw any swans. He then departed with almost unnatural haste in a cloud of white smoke.

Dad sat on a low wall and examined the town through his binoculars. Although unlikely this far west, it wasn’t unknown for Nomadic Riffraff to use abandoned settlements as homesteads, and neither Dad nor I had the slightest wish to bump into a grunge of well-established and dangerously territorial wildmen.

There were gruesome stories that related to well-hued men being kidnapped, with the threat of plum removal if ransom wasn’t paid. I knew of no one who wore their spot beyond the boundaries.

“Dad?”

“Yes?” he replied, still studying the deserted buildings.

“I learned something interesting this morning. Lucy Ochre’s been hitting the Lincoln pretty badly. She thinks her father was given the murder.”

I had thought Dad might reject the notion as quickly as I had, but he momentarily appeared ill at ease. He put down the binoculars and looked at me. “What’s given her that idea?”

I shrugged. “Not sure. Why, could he have been?”

“Technically, it’s possible. He could have been tied to the Departure Lounger and had his eyes taped open.”

“They would have seen evidence of that on the body.”

“Agreed. Here’s another scenario: Let’s say he was planning to Chase the Frog. He would have controlled the light coming into the room with the lever next to the Lounger. He’d rotate the shutters open to get the full effect of Sweetdream, then close them when he’d had enough, recover in the dark and creep out.”

“There’s another lever,” I said, understanding where he was going with this, “outside.”

“Right,” he said, “and they’re linked. Someone might have just held the lever in the open position.”

I shivered. “Is that likely?”

“No. All he’d have to do is close his eyes. Besides, what possible motive could there have been? He was a healer—and a very good one at that. Seven years without a single Mildew. I think it was just a tragic mistake in pursuit of the frog. But it would be interesting to see if Lucy has any more information. By the way,” he added, “deMauve bent my ear this morning.”

“Oh.”

“He said that if you ignored a Direct Order of a prefect again, he’d be down on both of us like a ton of bricks.”

“Right,” I said. “Sorry.”

He carried on studying the town.

“Dad?”

“What?”

“How likely is it that there are Mildew spores still kicking around?”

“Almost nil,” he replied. “A twenty-year quarantine is needlessly long, but those are the Rules.”

Satisfied that the town was empty, he placed the binoculars back in his bag, and we walked past the faded quarantine board and across the stone- arched bridge. The Perpetulite spalled at the center of the bridge, where the organoplastoid had been cut and bronze spikes driven in to stop self-repair. The method was crude but effective, and the roadway had sent off only a few dark grey tendrils before giving up. We stepped off the smooth roadway and trod the well-worn cobbles into the village. It was unnaturally quiet, and evidence of rapid abandonment was everywhere: Discarded possessions lay scattered in the street and the shops were still open, tattered curtains blowing from windows. Between the paving slabs, grass had once more gained a toehold. Occasionally we came across the remains of the departed, their bleached bones lying within weathered remnants of clothing. I’d been told eighteen hundred had been lost, and all in the space of forty-eight hours.

We stopped by the village color hydrant, which looked relatively new and not at all like the unit back home, which was a fir tree of multiple connections to all points of the village. This one was not connected to anything at all—the color feeds were simply four-inch pipes with threaded caps and a couple of pressure valves, with the stopcock wheels removed to prevent mischief. Grid color had reached Rusty Hill not long before the outbreak. The village must have worked and saved and sorted scrap color for years to obtain the spur line, but ultimately, for nothing.

“Stay on your toes, and meet me back here in twenty minutes.”

I nodded agreement, and we split up, he toward the Colorium, me toward the main square. It was only a hundred yards or so down the street and was equally desolate. The awnings in front of the shops were shabby and faded, and bones were strewn upon the floor tiles in the arcades, some even at the feet of the twice-lifesize bronze of Our Munsell. There was no color garden in the square, but there was a fountain, now choked with weeds, and I noted that the last vestiges of faded color could still be seen on the outside of the town hall. The doors were open, so I trod silently up the stone steps and looked inside.

The hall was perhaps even bigger than the one at East Carmine, but a good deal gloomier. The clockwork motors on the heliostats had long since run down, but by chance one was at rest in a vaguely correct position, and a slanting shaft of light was shining down onto a scene of such utter desolation that I felt my eyes moisten. The wooden parquet flooring was covered with dust, twigs, bird droppings, windblown detritus, scraps of clothing, wrist-watches, hairbands, shoes, jewelry, the odd spoon, coins, a buckle or two and, most of all, bones. Thousands of them, all human, all sorts and all sizes. Most had been scattered by animals, but some were still vaguely complete, and the musty smell of ancient decomposition lifted from the floor as I walked among the Mildew dead. There was no sign of panic, simply a sense of resignation. The residents of Rusty Hill had known they were doomed and had sought solace in the center of their world as they waited for the end. Scattered about among the bones were faded sheets of stretched canvas, which would have been hastily painted green and handed around among the residents to dull the pain.

I shivered and turned from the hall to finish my task so I could leave the town. It now felt oppressive, even though I knew from Munsell’s Quietus that death was just a natural part of the cycle of renewal, and that life should be seen not as a two-hundred-yard hurdle with a tape to reach before anyone else, but more like a relay race without end, and only one team.

But as I turned to leave I looked up and there, painted upon the curved plaster ceiling was a vast mural that told me in pictorial terms the story of Munsell’s Epiphany and the Founding of the Collective.

Although there was much that I didn’t understand, there were sections that were instantly recognizable, such as The Dispersal of the Treasures, The Expulsion of the Experts and The Closing of the Networks. I had never seen anything quite like it, but unlike the less complex version at home that had been been overpainted several times, this ceiling had never been completed. About a third of it was still uncolored, the many shaped blocks that made up the picture empty, the color reference numbers still easily visible. The village had made a start but were unable to finish it. Most of the mid-blues had been filled in, some of the red and nearly all the green. Most attractive of all were the folds of Munsell’s cloak, and the forty or so different shades of rich univisual violet made me feel a heightened sense of anticipation, as though something truly wonderful was just about to be revealed. I knew it was only a feeling brought forth by the combination of violets, but it wasn’t a feeling I’d ever felt from a color before. My mentor, Greg Scarlet, had explained that in the early days of the Collective a huge effort had been made to try to bypass the conscious mind and take emotions straight to the core—that the essence of a great novel, a rich symphony and a restful garden might all be combined to give one truly extraordinary sensation that was the abstract product of the mind alone. Although we still had the Green Room to show for it and Chromaticology, National Color had explained that further research into “direct feed” had been abandoned in favor of more pressing problems—such as maintaining the supply of hue and the National Colorization Project.

But looking up, I felt how the painting might have worked. The story of Munsell and his Epiphany was apparently a dramatic tale, full of great deeds and personal sacrifice. No one knew the full details, but it wasn’t important. A viewing of the ceiling would bring out that same emotional response—the joy, loss, defeat and eventual triumph—without ever having to know the story at all. I jumped, for a movement in the chamber had caught my eye. Beyond the tables still laid with the remnants of the last dinner was a woman, faded—she was insubstantial and little more than an impression that she was there, a glitter in the air. I blinked, but she didn’t leave, and although I should have been terrified at the appearance of a Pooka, I wasn’t. I was intrigued. I blinked again, then noticed something odd. She didn’t vanish with the close of my eyes; in fact, she was almost more substantial with my eyelids firmly shut. She wasn’t actually in the room at all— she was in my head.

I opened my eyes again to at least give her context and saw her diaphanous form move expertly among the detritus, staring at me all the time. Then she opened her mouth to speak and abruptly faded from view, and I was alone once more. I quickly departed the hall, thoroughly confused but not worryingly so; the known had been so long dwarfed by the unknown that confusion was an easy bedfellow. I returned to the square, keen to finish my task and leave. I took a left out of the main square and then a right, and soon found the house I was looking for; a large modern building of oak-framed construction. The front door was locked, so I climbed in a broken window and fumbled my way to the kitchen, found the stat-crank and gave it ten or twenty turns. I then dialed in the time, date and year to manually reset the mirror. There was a buzzing from the roof, and a moment later light burst upon the interior of the house. I could see then that this was the dwelling of a well-to-do merchant, although art custodianship wasn’t hue-dependent; you would be as likely to find a Caravaggio or a Williams in the home of a Grey as you would a Purple. I unbolted the front door to allow easy escape in case of a nesting swan or something, then walked into the kitchen.

I searched the drawers until I found some sugar tongs for Mrs. Blood, then climbed the stairs. Once on the top landing, I pulled the brass knob to swing the mirror across to illuminate the upper floors. I checked the front rooms first and found only bedrooms; one was occupied, one not. The last place to explore was at the end of a short corridor, and the door swung open when I touched the handle. The room was large and unfurnished aside from a single armchair and a plain oblong carpet on the oak floorboards. As in most galleries, a large oval skylight covered in linen filled the room with an agreeable soft light, perfectly tuned for viewing. On the wall opposite me hung the Caravaggio, and it was every bit as spectacular as the pictures I had seen. But those images had been monochrome, and here for the first time was something I had not suspected: The drapes above the scene of Frowny Girl Removing Beardy’s Head were in a most spectacular shade of crimson, which counterpointed the spurt of arterial blood, also a vivid red. I stared at the large canvas for a few minutes, breathless with the consummate skill of the painter, the fine subtlety of light and shade, and wishing that for just a few minutes I could see more than just red.

I wasn’t the only one staring at the painting, just the only one breathing. Sitting in the armchair was the previous custodian. Though the carpet below him had been stained black with the liquids of putrefaction, he hadn’t rotted to nothing in the closeness of the room, but still had dark skin stretched taut across his bones. His hands were resting on the arms of the chair, and even though his chin had fallen to his chest, I think he would have been looking at the painting as the Mildew overcame him. He was wearing a Red Spot and a prefect’s badge, and poking out from where his clothes had rotted away, a shiny spoon was clearly visible. It proved that no one had been here since the outbreak, and as he had no use for a spoon any longer, I slipped it out of his pocket and into mine.

Mindful of my father’s wish for me to be as quick as possible, and with the possibility of still-active Mildew spores, I quickly opened the climate case, released the painting from its heavy ornate frame and rested it on the floor. It was large—almost six feet by four—and I had to carry the stretched canvas very carefully to get it down the narrow stairs without bumping into anything.

I placed the painting against the wall outside and quickly consulted the street map, then set off. The address of the Purple wrongspot was three streets away, and this would be the only opportunity for me to investigate.

I walked down the main street, past more scattered detritus, empty shops and the remnants of a population who looked as though they had attempted to leave, then given up. Grasses and wildflowers had germinated in pockets of windblown soil, and brambles snaked and coiled without encumbrance. After a few minutes’ searching I found the last known address of the wrongspot. The front door looked shabby and unused, and the windows were boarded up. I was disappointed, but also hugely relieved. I had taken this issue as far as I could and now could quite happily let it go to concentrate on more socially responsible matters. I was about to hurry back to the Caravaggio, and thence to the bridge to meet my father, when I noticed that although appearing unused, the cobbles outside the door were clear of weeds. I paused, my heart beating fast, and without thinking, knocked politely. There was no answer, so I pushed open the door and was met by a sight of such extraordinary magnificence that it quite took my breath away.