Someone with the same case of bad nerves as me has destroyed the master bell, probably figuring that it is not needed for ringing the classes anymore, and people wouldn’t miss meals. In that he was mistaken. Many do. They come late, or early. Breakfasts are the hardest hit. In the morning it’s almost exclusively Pheasants in the canteen, chomping on their grass, that is, salads. A sorry sight. I’ve never much cared about that bell—I don’t like any indicators of time passing. But while it was working it at least made the atmosphere in the canteen a bit more lively.
I drive up to the table and put on the napkin.
Smoker, across from me, is sipping his tea like it’s a cup of hemlock. Lary, next to him, is busy mangling a roll with a dull knife. That’s it. Four at the Rats’ table, three for the Birds, a solitary Hound shoveling food into a backpack. Only Pheasants are all duly present and accounted for, and the crunch of their morning carrots can be clearly heard across the room.
I make myself a sandwich to demonstrate to Lary how it’s done, but he doesn’t even look in my direction. Huffing and puffing and torturing the bread.
After my second sandwich Alexander comes running, wheeling Tubby in before him. Tubby’s miserable look tells me he’s not exactly thrilled with being here. Alexander parks the wheelchair at the table and starts loading food into the poor guy. Tubby’s suffering, and Alexander, usually so very attentive, seems not to notice. If the bell were still operational it would have been ringing by now, but it isn’t, so what’s the rush? I take a camp pot out of the backpack and roll it over to Alexander.
“Dump it all in there, leave the kid alone.”
Alexander is just in time to catch the pot, but drops the spoon.
“See,” I say. “You’re asleep on your feet, you shouldn’t be feeding people. And, by the way, he’s already helped himself to a roll this morning. I wouldn’t put it past him to choke now, what with this treatment. People croak left and right from that, you know.”
Tubby slurps mayo off his chin and hiccups softly, as if in support of my speech. Alexander turns the pot this way and that, apparently amazed at its capaciousness. He clearly wants to drop everything and run back under the shower. He’s spent the last three days in there. Hoping to wash the Alexanderness off himself?
“Move it,” I say. “Time’s a-wasting.”
Lary grumbles something to the effect that there’s too much noise coming from me. That I generally produce too much noise, and in the mornings especially.
“Put that in your notebook,” I tell Smoker. “He was always boisterous, and in the mornings especially.”
I observe Alexander filling up the pot, fold my napkin, and drive off. These boring breakfasts you can keep.
I’m barely out into the hallway when I realize that I do indeed produce too much noise. And the reason for that is the removal of a fairly bulky item, namely the camp pot, from the backpack. Something has shifted inside and clanks insistently now, something that it was safely pressing against. And besides, old Mustang also started creaking, unpleasantly resembling the phantom cart that always passes by the House around dawn, closer to the night that’s just ended than to the morning that’s about to start.
I’m at my wits’ end with that cart. Could be a hobo returning with the nightly haul of empties. Could be a wheeler risen from the grave where his wheelchair had been buried alongside him and is now rusted to hell from being underground for so long. Or maybe it’s a runaway wheelchair all by its lonesome, passing by the House like the Flying Dutchman, rattling the decaying bones of its former master.
Establishing which of these theories best describes the reality is impossible. In this narrow slot between night and morning the dreams are too sweet for me to climb out of bed, and even if I were to climb out I still wouldn’t see anything, because it drives by when it’s still dark. I decided to make a recording of the mysterious squeaking object and then listen to it when I’m awake. But no matter how many times I’ve left the recorder in the open window, I’ve never caught that obnoxious noise. The cassettes with the failed attempts I’ve stashed in a box and secreted in the pile of no one’s things.
And now it’s me who’s squeaking like that elusive object, be it a cart, the ghost of a wheeler, or the wheelchair sans ghost. And this means that Mustang is due for an oil change and a check of the fasteners. A tedious, dreary, wearisome business.
Anything interesting that’s happening in the House sooner or later gravitates either to the Crossroads or to the Coffeepot. If you’re not looking for something specific, the best strategy is to sit there and wait until whatever you need finds you. I’m not the only one to set up such ambushes. During the hours of the hunt, the territory of the Coffeepot is strictly divided among the people tracking this and that. We try not to infringe on each other’s turf, but stuff happens, so we’re mostly aware of what everyone else is collecting. From time to time the Coffeepot suffers from the plague of girls in search of confrontation, and then we have to depart swiftly lest we become the trophies.
We stake out the corner table by the wall, Mermaid and I, and wait. The banner on the Mustang is acid-yellow and smells of decaying sparrows. I have on the T-shirt emblazoned with pirates, as a warning, and I’m wearing sunglasses. They’re helping me cope with the sunny weather. Mermaid’s hair ensconces her and her chair in a kind of tent, cascading down to within a couple of inches of the floor. It mingles with ribbons, cords, and chains of tiny bells, and in the gaps of her vest I can see question marks. Only question marks, two dozen Whys all in a row. She is waiting too, patiently and silently, her hair drips beads of silver, and the question marks seem to flow like upturned droplets.
I very much wish myself luck now, while Mermaid is here. For her sake, not mine. My own good fortune has abandoned me lately, not surprisingly, since I’ve already caught a lot of things. It’s possible that every lucky day brought me closer to some kind of limit and now I’m bumping against it. This makes me nervous, and to calm myself down I take out the ream of paper and launch into the sixty-fifth variation on the theme of “A la recherche du Crazy Benefactor.” After the first dozen or so I stopped using the form letter, because I didn’t need to anymore, but also because something that’s been copied out is always less sincere, even when it’s exactly identical to something that’s been transcribed from memory.
Mermaid drinks her coffee and watches the door. As I fold my missive, she frowns suspiciously.
“Do you really believe something’s going to come out of this?”
“Well, to be completely honest,” I say as I put the file back into the backpack and take out an envelope, “no, not really. Things like that only happen once, if at all. The probability of history repeating itself is vanishingly small. But even the tiniest probability should not be ignored.”
“You mean it already has happened? When?”
I sigh. No one seems to be aware of the history of their own abode. And no one seems to care that they aren’t. It’s all moldy rubbish to them, they can’t spare a single minute to take a good sniff at it. Truly, not a single one among them has the capacity of becoming an archeologist, of deriving pleasure from digging and of rejoicing at the results.
“Once upon a time there lived a man,” I say. “And he was extremely rich and extremely ugly. Or maybe not exactly ugly, but afflicted with a disfiguring disease. We’ll never know now because he never posed for any pictures, and if somebody took one of him in secret he immediately would drag them into court. He lived holed up in his house, assembled a collection of antique musical instruments, and didn’t give a damn about anyone. He did write articles and send them to various magazines, signing them with the pen name ‘Tarantula,’ but they were almost never printed, because in them he mainly vented at the government and all the institutions and organizations he ever had to deal with, or, as he himself put it, ‘spit venom.’ And who’d want to print that, right? I think in ten years he only had one article accepted, and that about the antique musical instruments. A
ll of his relatives couldn’t wait for him to croak to finally get their hands on his money. He knew that, of course, and that’s why he dug up this orphanage that was about to be shuttered because the building it was occupying was falling apart. He bought that building, financed the repairs, and endowed a trust that was supposed to maintain the orphanage after his death.”
I make a pause and with the end of my spoon trace an invisible spider on the tablecloth. As I was telling the story our table had acquired several more listeners. I don’t mind, anyone can listen if they wish.
“And he compiled a list of rules and regulations for those who were going to live in his house and receive his money. Except that it happened so long ago that many of those rules aren’t being observed anymore.”
“What were the rules?” Mermaid says impatiently. “Come on, you have to know. Tell us!”
“Well, there was one about having the building repaired at least every three years. And also cripples having a priority in admission; that started with him. They didn’t admit anyone who was unfit mentally, because he designed the program of studies himself, and it was very hard, you had to be smart to follow it. He even ran into some opposition there, they accused him of throwing such a lot of money at one crumbling orphanage, when he could have used it to build twenty more like it, and then barring the entrance to it for those who were the most disadvantaged.”
“Tabaqui!” Lizard says hotly. “How could you know stuff like that, and in such detail? You invented all this, admit it!”
“I admit. I was sitting here and inventing. Because I had nothing better to do than exercise my imagination.”
Lizard grabs my cup and unceremoniously takes a big swig.
“It’s too romantic,” he grumbles. “It never happens like this in real life. Even if there was something, you still wrapped all kinds of fluff around it.”
“But at least I’ve managed to touch you. See, you’re even gulping other people’s coffee, you’re so touched.”
Lizard returns the cup, looking at me accusingly.
“So it was all bullshit?”
He’s got incredibly bushy eyebrows, his forehead is hidden behind thick growth, and even his ears sport big tufts of coarse hair. He resembles a minor folkloric demon. You can almost spot the little horns. Angel, ever the effete pervert, keeps rolling his eyes behind Lizard’s back at his every word. Another chair has been occupied by Guppy, he of the interminably leaky nose and big ears, the biggest in the whole House, after mine, of course. I think it would have done old man Tarantula good to see all of us here.
“It must be the truth,” Mermaid says earnestly. “When Tabaqui’s making up something he always defends it to the last. He’d never confess that he’s invented something.”
Lizard turns his shaggy head this way and that.
“So what am I supposed to think now? He says he’s made it all up, you say he hasn’t.”
“Archives are for reading, children,” I say. “And history is for knowing, to the extent possible.”
Lizard frowns and falls silent. As do the rest of them. Pensive Mermaid drips question marks, they slide off one after the other and dissolve in the floorboards. My cup is empty, so I surreptitiously pull Mermaid’s closer, even though she never adds enough sugar.
Angel repositions the eyes that he kept rolled all the way up.
“I propose we install a totem pole at the Crossroads in honor of our patron saint,” he intones in his crystal-clear little voice. “Shame on us that the memory of the person to whom we owe so much is languishing forgotten.”
“You’d be honoring everyone all day and all night if you get the chance,” Lizard snarls, still looking suspiciously in my direction. “No archives could possibly have told him all the crap he just fed us.”
“But it did happen!” Angel exclaims. “And you have to agree, the cult of the spider is well established in the House since times immemorial. Take, for example, these widely known lines . . .”
Lizard’s irate howls drown out the widely known lines. Mermaid sticks fingers in her ears, and Guppy closes his eyes for some reason. I guess because two fingers are nowhere near enough to plug his ears. I follow his example and close mine too. When I open them again I’m looking at Horse.
He seems to be saying something, but I can’t hear a single word until Lizard stops howling and drives away from our table.
“. . . and he was kind to birds and beasts!” Angel finishes lovingly.
“. . . he said you were into useless trash.” Horse places a string of something indeterminate on the table before me. “You think you might need this?”
I snatch it, and there it is, the miracle. Rat skulls attached to a thin, bridle-like strap. I sweep off the shades to better see the long-awaited prize.
“Horse. Whose is it?”
“Heck if I know,” he says. “I found it in the shoe locker. I went there for the shoe polish, and it was right there, so I thought, what’s that crap?”
My hands are shaking as I untangle the strap. The skulls are seven, and only one of them has a fang broken, otherwise they’re in mint condition. The strap is decorated with dull copper studs and spikes, it’s rather beautiful even by itself. If this is not a magical object, I don’t know what is.
“What a monstrosity!” Angel exclaims. “What poor creatures had to suffer for this?”
“They’re rat skulls,” I grumble. “What were you doing in biology class, that’s what I’d like to know?”
Horse beams.
“So, if you need this, it’s yours. I’ve got no use for it.”
“Disgusting,” Angel whines. “So many rats dead, and for what? Ooh, could it be someone casting a hex on the Second?”
“Hey!” Horse crosses his fingers and looks around suspiciously. “Angel, you’d better, you know, watch it. I found this in our box, you know. So you mean it was us casting the hex, that what you saying?”
I bang my hand on the table, slightly splashing Mermaid’s coffee.
“Enough! Out, all of you. I need some time alone with the loot. Horse, thank you, I’m in your debt. Angel, thank you too. For keeping company.”
Angel, deeply offended, rolls his eyes so hard they’re pointing at the back of his head. Horse smirks, salutes me, and rolls the wheelchair with Angel, temporarily blinded, to the far side of the Coffeepot. Guppy stays in place, frozen, desperately hoping we’re going to forget he’s there.
I take out the box with the scale models of my collection and position them on the table. Mermaid drags her chair closer and we proceed to shift the models this way and that, trying to incorporate the rat skulls. It takes us a while. Guppy gets tired of the show and dozes off.
“No,” Mermaid says finally. “Doesn’t work. We need to figure out what it is first.”
I drape the strap over my neck. Then wrap it around my head. Then sling it around my waist.
“Definitely not around the neck. And not as a belt. And it’s supposed to latch to something right here, see this spot?”
“What if it really is a hex?” Mermaid says. “Then it’s not no one’s, but the owner is never going to admit it’s theirs.”
“Wherever did you see a hex like this? They’re not pierced, they’re not cracked, they’re perfectly whole little skulls in great condition!”
“How would I know what a proper hex is supposed to look like? I’ve never used them on anybody.”
“Then listen to those who do know, and you’ll never go wrong.”
Mermaid puts her head on her hands and stares at the models scattered across the table.
“There’s only one thing I’d like to know. Where do they come from, these experts on all things? Those who know everything about everything.”
“Not everything,” I say modestly. “‘A lot’ would be more correct. And they are in fact forged in the crucible of experience.”
“I see,” Mermaid says, nodding. “Except to acquire this much experience it would be necessary to live for a hundred
years and make some pretty impossible acquaintances. So that’s what I’m trying to find out, where does it grow, this experience?”
“You’ll know when you’re older. Or not. Depending on your luck.”
“That’s the song I’ve been hearing all my life from all sides,” she scowls. “And surprisingly, the ones singing it to me are uniformly way older than I am. Not.”
I gather the cardboard toys and return them to the backpack.
“Let’s go. Nothing more is happening here. Lightning never strikes twice in one day. We can go check how it fits with the rest.”
Mermaid collects the cups and takes them to the counter. I fiddle with the ties on the backpack.
Time doesn’t flow the same way in the House as in the Outsides. This isn’t talked about, but there are those who manage to live to a ripe old age twice in what for others would feel like one measly month. The more often you fall through timeless holes the more you’ve lived, but only those who’ve lived here for a while know how to do that. That’s why the difference in age between old-timers and newbies is so drastic here. It doesn’t take a great feat of perceptiveness to see that. The greediest can Jump several times a month, and then trail several versions of their past after them. There probably isn’t anyone in the whole House greedier than I am, which means there’s no one here who’s lived through more loops than I have. It’s not something to be proud of, but still I’m proud. Greed this extraordinary is an accomplishment of sorts.
Mermaid returns and looks at me expectantly. I say that I’m ready, and we depart the Coffeepot leaving Guppy snoozing at the now-empty table.
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