Blind snuffed Pompey. Everyone saw.
Back in the Fourth, Tabaqui takes careful aim, drops the backpack on the sleeping cat, waits out a short pause, and then screams at those who jumped up on the beds.
“You can’t even imagine what just happened! Unbelievable!”
His shouting wakes up everyone who managed to sleep through the yowl of the cat.
Blind’s clothes stink of outhouse, of Butterfly’s sickness, of Red’s blood and fear. He treads slowly. His face is untroubled, like that of someone sleeping peacefully. His fingers run ahead and then return when he remembers the way. Now is the time of the crack between the worlds. Between the House and the Forest. He prefers to cross it in his sleep. When he’s inside it his memory stumbles over familiar obstacles, and the body stumbles with it. When he’s inside it he doesn’t have command over his hearing. He doesn’t hear things that are there, or hears the ones that aren’t. When in the crack he doubts whether he would be able to find those he’s seeking, and then forgets whom he was seeking. He could enter the Forest and become a part of it—then he’d be able to find anyone. But the Forest twice in one night is dangerous, even more dangerous than the crack that consumes his memory and hearing. Blind moves slowly. His hands move faster. They dart through the holes in the sweater’s sleeves—the sleeves were too long for him so he slit them with a knife all the way down from the elbows. His bare heels, black as soot, stick to the floorboards.
A beam of light hits him in the face. He walks right through it, oblivious. A hand catches his shoulder. Blind stops, surprised that he hasn’t heard any steps.
“Come with me. We need to talk.”
Blind recognizes the voice and submits to it. Ralph’s hand doesn’t let go of his shoulder until they are at the door.
The office is like the jaws of a trap for him. Blind hates it. The whole of the House is his domain, but the offices fall outside of it, those snare-rooms smelling of iron. Everything else he owns, but in them he doesn’t even own himself. In the offices there are only voices and doors. He enters and hears the click. The trap has sprung. He’s in a void now, alone with the counselor’s breathing. There’s no memory here at all. Only the hearing. He hears the window and the wind oozing through it. Also rustling, the way paper rustles. The paper in the three-fingered hand of Ralph.
“You were there. When Red was cut. I saw you.”
“Yes,” Blind says carefully. “I was there.”
“You heard those who did it. You recognized them, obviously.”
Ralph’s voice, sharp as a knife’s edge, floats back and forth, now near, now far. Battling the wind. There really is wind. It rings in Blind’s ears, touches his hair. Something strange is happening to him. It’s not supposed to be like that here. He hears the Forest in the stuffy office.
It’s right outside.
It creeps closer.
It scratches at the door and groans with its roots.
It waits. It calls.
Run away, over the wet moors, under the white moon. Find . . . Who? Someone . . .
“What’s going on? Did you hear me?”
“Yes.” Blind tries to blot out all sounds except the voice. “Yes, I hear.”
“You are going to leave them alone. Understand? We already got Red, and that’s enough. Yes, I know the Law. Three against one and all that. But I don’t care. This time the Law will have to be set aside. By you.”
Blind listens. To this strange person who lives in the House and doesn’t know what the House is. Doesn’t know about the night and its own laws.
“The night brought them to me,” Blind says. He feels like he’s talking to a child too small to understand. “The night woke me up and made me hear. Hear the three hunting the one. Why? I don’t know. No one knows.”
“You are not to touch them. I forbid it. If anything happens to them you are going to be sorry.”
Blind listens patiently. It’s the only thing that’s left. Listen when you can’t explain. Thorns are springing up on the road to the Forest. The internal clock had chimed morning long ago. But the night doesn’t end. Because it is the Longest Night, the one happening but once a year. And this conversation doesn’t end. They both have their own truths, him and three-fingered Ralph.
“Do you hear?”
He does. He hears streams disappearing underground. Birds and frogs vanishing in the air. Trees walking away. The sadness of it.
“Not a single hair on their heads. Or you’ll be out of the House before you can count to one. Got it? I’ll make it my personal business.”
Blind smiles. Ralph doesn’t understand that there is nothing except the House. How is it possible to be out of it, then?
“I know you killed Pompey. The principal could find out, too.”
So that must be what’s on the paper that R One is clutching in his hand. The crumpled whisper of a snitch? Red’s scream that chased away his sleep . . . The smell of blood and the broken door. He suddenly remembers who it was he was supposed to find. Tubby. The crack closes. The wind is storming the House, it’s cold outside, and it’s snowing.
“Stop smirking!”
Ralph’s hands jostle him unexpectedly roughly. There must have been some words he was supposed to say. But he doesn’t have them.
“I don’t have the words you want, R One,” Blind says. “Not tonight.”
The breath of danger becomes closer. He can’t explain anything. He follows the Law. He lives the way the House wants him to, divining its wishes. He hears what others can’t. The way it was with Pompey.
“You’re barking up the wrong tree, Ralph,” he says. “It will be exactly the way it must be.”
“You little brat!”
The air suddenly grows solid, becomes blobs of cotton wool. Blind’s stomach fills up with glass. The glass breaks with a crash and stings him from inside.
“Shhh,” Sphinx hisses at himself when he stumbles over a loose floorboard.
Humpback hurriedly aims the flashlight down. They are looking for Tubby, even though Blind actually promised to find him. That’s according to Tabaqui, who woke them all up to relate the saga of his adventures. Sphinx is reasonably sure he knows where Tubby might be located, and pities him.
It’s time for the morning to arrive, but the House doesn’t know that, or doesn’t care to know. The floorboards squeak disgustingly. A dog howls somewhere in the Outsides. It’s noisy behind the doors of the dorms, and the pipes sing in the bathrooms.
“Not many are asleep,” Humpback notes. “Practically no one.”
“It’s not every night that Leaders are being deposed,” Sphinx says. “Each pack probably had its own prodigal Jackal.”
They pass the teachers’ bathroom. It stares at them menacingly, as befits a crime scene. They spook two shadows who shrink from the light, whispering.
“First tourists,” Humpback sighs. “By morning it’s going to get crowded here.”
Sphinx is silent.
“Could it be that Blind has found him already?”
Humpback would like to keep the conversation going. It’s soothing to him. He doesn’t like being out at night.
“If he had, he’d have brought him. Half an hour is enough for him to find anyone, wherever they might be. More than enough,” Sphinx says.
“Why isn’t he back, then?”
“Ask another. I’m here with you, not there with him.”
It stinks of cigarette smoke on the stairs. On the landing below them, someone sneezes sleepily. Someone who’s listening to a portable radio.
“Going up?” Humpback says, surprised.
“There’s one thing I want to check,” Sphinx says. “I have a hunch.”
Tubby is asleep, leaning against the door to the third floor. Shapeless and miserable. He sighs heavily and mutters in his sleep. Humpback lifts him up, revealing a half-dried puddle and two chewed-up guitar picks. Tubbs was probably using them to try and pry open the lock. Humpback, naturally attuned to the suffering of the Inse
nsible, is almost in tears as he wraps Tubby in his coat, narrowly avoiding getting tangled in his own hair. Sphinx waits, banging his heel against the railing. The stairway drafts nip at his bare ankles. Tubbs grumbles and sniffles but doesn’t wake up. The walk back takes longer. Humpback struggles to light their way because of bundled Tubby in his arms, and Sphinx can do nothing to help him without the prosthetics. The pocket-radioed someone sneezes again. The sky in the Crossroads windows is still pitch-black.
“Give me the flashlight,” Noble says, rolling at them out of the darkness.
Humpback, startled, barely manages to hold on to Tubby but passes the flashlight over gratefully.
“What are you doing here?”
“Taking the air,” Noble snaps. “What do you think?”
Two more, Sphinx says to himself, keeping count. Now there’s only Blind.
Vulture, limping, hauls something bulky in the direction of the Nest. It trails behind him on the floor. He stops and greets them in his usual immaculately polite fashion.
“Nice weather,” he says. “I hope you are faring well. Noble I already had the pleasure of encountering.”
“What about Blind?” Sphinx says.
“Alas, no such luck,” Vulture admits, visibly crestfallen. “Pity, I’m sure.”
The five of them proceed together. Vulture doesn’t let out a single word about Red. He talks exclusively of weather, and even when his flashlight illuminates Blind near the Third, he informs him only that “Oh, the weather outside is delightful.” Blind’s response is barely intelligible. Vulture bids them good-bye and disappears behind the door, carrying in front of him the bunched canvas of the tent and the poles crisscrossed with straps. The beam of Noble’s flashlight jumps and shakes.
“Where’ve you been?” Sphinx says to Blind.
The anteroom meets them with bright lights, falling mops, and shaggy heads in the doorframe. Humpback brings sleeping Tubby inside.
“There he is, our dear tubbylicious maniac!” Tabaqui’s voice enthuses. “Our beloved adventurer . . .”
Blind takes a detour into the bathroom. Sphinx follows him.
“Whose blood is that?”
Blind doesn’t answer. But Sphinx isn’t expecting him to. He lowers himself down on the edge of the low sink and observes. Blind, his face in the other sink, waits out a bout of nausea.
“The night has been going on for too long. Too long even for the Longest,” Sphinx says, mostly to himself. “I don’t like them in general, and this one in particular. I think that if everyone went to bed it would end sooner. So, whose blood?”
“Red’s,” Blind says darkly. “Later, OK? I feel really sick now. Our old friend Ralph just kicked the dinner out of me.”
Sphinx sways impatiently on the edge of the sink, licking a bleeding spot on his lip.
“Because of Red? Was it you who cut him?”
Blind turns his face, with two red sores in place of eyelids, in Sphinx’s direction.
“Don’t be absurd. Because of Pompey. If I understood him correctly. He knows. Somebody snitched. He was rustling a scrap of paper all that time.”
“Why now? I mean, tonight? Has he gone mad?”
“Could be. Certainly a possibility, if you listen to his blabbering.” Blind bends down to the sink again. “Or if he hasn’t cracked yet, he’s going to soon. Bet you he’s shaking all his watches right now, one by one, and changing the batteries in them. Trying to figure out who’s punking him. Who bit the morning off and gobbled it up.”
“Don’t laugh, or you’ll throw up again.”
“I can’t. He ordered me not to touch them. Bleeping Solomon and Squib along with Don. Couldn’t see them himself, but considers it his duty to intervene. ‘I know your Laws,’ he says. I don’t know our Laws. I don’t, and he does. I should’ve asked what he meant when he said that.”
Sphinx sighs.
“Now, correct me if I’m wrong. Solomon, Squib, and Don cut Red, and Ralph hit you because you wouldn’t promise to leave them alone? Why do I get the impression there’s more to it than that?”
“He punched me because he thinks I don’t talk politely enough,” Blind says, straightening up.
“Do you?”
“Depends.” Blind adjusts the sweater drooping off his shoulder. “Damn, I’m going to fall out of this thing. Is this what they call cleavage?”
“It’s what they call a sweater that’s three sizes too big. So was it because of Solomon, or because of Pompey?”
“Because of nerves. He got cut too. So of course he’s jumpy. And now those snitches . . . He made me wipe it all off before letting me go.”
Blind frowns and goes silent. Sphinx doesn’t like the expression on his face. He climbs down from the sink and comes closer.
“Something else?”
Blind shrugs. “I’m not sure. Maybe he didn’t notice. I mean . . . people don’t usually pay too much attention to the exact composition of someone else’s vomit, do they? What do you think?”
“They usually don’t. Why? Was there something to pay attention to?”
“Well . . . Honestly? The mice didn’t have enough time to get digested. And there wasn’t much in there besides. That could disguise them, I mean.”
“Blind. Enough,” Sphinx says, wincing. “Spare me the details. Let’s just say I hope with all my heart that Ralph wasn’t looking too closely at how you redecorated his office.”
“Me too. But the silence that followed was a bit strange. I’d even say stunned.”
“How is a stunned silence different from a regular one?”
“Different shade.”
“I see,” Sphinx says. “Well, if it’s the shade, we’re all screwed. It means he saw. And what his thoughts on that are we’ll never know. Which is for the best.”
Blind grins.
“He that increaseth knowledge?”
“Something like that,” Sphinx says.
“This Ralph fellow sure is meddlesome. Gadding about at night . . . sticking his nose in other people’s business. Bugging them with idiotic demands afterward. Irritating.”
Blind takes a step away from the sink, jerks the towel off the hook, and wipes his face. Sphinx studies the footprints on the tiles. Bloodred.
“Your feet could do with a washing too. Where did you manage to cut them?”
Blind runs his hand over the soles.
“I did, huh. I don’t remember where. That dump on the way, probably.” He adjusts the sweater again. “Look, I’m really tired right now.”
“Why do you always put on those rags?”
Sphinx is almost shouting. Blind doesn’t answer.
“Why do you walk over glass barefoot?”
No answer. Sphinx’s voice drops down to a whisper.
“And why the hell don’t you even feel that you’re bleeding until someone tells you!”
Blind is silent.
Sphinx sighs again and walks out quietly.
The light is still on in the dorm. Noble is smoking, wrapped in the blanket on the edge of the bed. Smoker, in a hushed whisper, recounts to Lary and Humpback the horrors of finding himself inside a cat’s skin. Tabaqui, his face still bearing traces of total bliss, is asleep, clutching the backpack turned inside out.
SPHINX
THE LONGEST NIGHT
Tabaqui’s tale, take four.
Afternoon tea, take three.
Jackal is alert and perky. He’s already had time to doze off, wake up, provide additional details that he seems to have missed the first three times around, and start on the composition of a song worthy of the occasion. Lary and Humpback, in coats over pajamas, are crouching around the coffeemaker like trappers around a campfire.
“Some people have all the luck . . . Getting to see all that stuff,” Lary sighs—and launches another half hour of Tabaqui’s rapid-fire gibbering. Everyone’s sick of it by now, except for him and the Bandar-Log.
Blind returns, a pale emissary from the world of shadows. From head to t
oe, exhibit one for Jackal’s gruesome fantasies. The pack studies him and his stained sweater. Mostly the sweater. Naturally. It’s not often you see something like that.
Tabaqui even pauses for a while, preening himself proudly, as if to say “See what I mean? The night is full of horrors!” Like it was he who personally dunked Blind in blood and vomit. Sinister visions loom before the pack, and I suddenly notice that Smoker is nowhere to be seen. I wonder if he’s been drowned in the toilet. It’s been constant vigilance with him recently. He’s acquired this nasty habit of methodically getting on everyone’s nerves.
“What a dirty . . . oh-oh-oh . . . sweater you have,” Jackal’s syrupy voice is chanting. “Where, oh, where did you manage to get it that way?”
Pale One ignores Jackal’s entreaties and crashes down on the bed. Lary, shaking the remains of his sideburns, winks at Humpback. Humpback turns away.
“So,” Black says in a disgusting tone of voice. “Yet another Leader bites the dust?”
Who is he addressing, I wonder.
Tabaqui takes it to be him and immediately begins rehashing the gruesome narrative for the fifth time.
“We hear someone screaming. So I say, ‘Something happened.’ So we go looking, and you can’t believe what we see . . .”
Black walks out.
“It’s R One running from somewhere in the direction of the stairs,” Humpback finishes the sentence. “How about enough, Tabaqui? How many more times are you going to go over this?”
Tabaqui takes offense. The way babies usually do when someone takes away their favorite toy.
Noble, still wrapped in a blanket, looks at me bright eyed.
“Want to play some chess?”
Hasn’t had enough playing, obviously. Half the night spent over cards doesn’t count. Apparently no one needs sleep in this room except me. I don’t need it either, but it’s all I can do not to yell at them. Pack them away to bed, turn off the lights, and in the darkness wait for the morning to come, pretending to slumber peacefully. I don’t like this night. Or any of the other nights like this, starting from the very first. The morning after that first Longest was much, much worse than the night itself. I’m lucky not to remember almost any of it. With one exception. We all have our own well-worn nightmares. Mine is the white sail. Even now, when I can remember loads and loads of bad stuff to balance it, it still is without equal. It’s not that it simply keeps me up at night, no, it shakes me up and fills my throat with tears. I love Jackal dearly, but I can neither understand nor accept his fervent passion for the Longest. He did live through that first one with me. With all of us. How can he still manage to enjoy them so much? Is it possible that he doesn’t remember? I walk to the door, probing Tabaqui’s suspiciously selective memory for the umpteenth time. I have to find Smoker. I need to assemble them all here, in the dorm.
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