The Last Days of New Paris

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.