While I was wrapping my head around this information, R One went to the stepladder and asked Black if he knew that to drive anything anywhere in the Outsides required a driver’s license. And that a bus full of underage hoodlums without a single piece of identification among them would be stopped in very short order.
Black said that he was aware of it.
Would he be aware, then, R One continued, that a stolen vehicle had most likely been reported as such to the police, and that even if it were to be repainted, someone would still be bound to recognize it.
Black said that he was aware of that also.
“Then what the hell are you trying to pull?” R One screamed. “Or do you think that the slammer is a nice place for getting acquainted with the Outsides?”
Needle hugged Mermaid and started to sniffle quietly. I couldn’t see in the dark who it was crowding R One, but apparently they were asking him to sit back down. Black said that he was just telling a tale.
R One said that he was tired of people screwing with his head.
Tabaqui again asked him to sit down and behave himself.
I couldn’t quite see if Ralph did sit down or remained standing.
“So . . . ,” Black said and paused, as if afraid he’d get interrupted again. “In the fairy tales it is customary to have fairies and things like that. My tale may not be very interesting and stuff, but it does have a fairy. Two of them, actually, and also two more . . . What do you call guy fairies? I mean, they all have driver’s licenses and they offered to help . . .”
Everyone applauded. I got to thinking who those four fairies were and why would they want to help Black, and the longer I thought about it the less I liked it. Because there wasn’t anywhere they could’ve appeared except from the Outsides, and I had it on good authority that even if selfless fairies had ever existed there, they’d long gone extinct.
I wanted to discuss this with Black, but it had to wait until the break. In the meantime Tabaqui mounted the stepladder for an announcement.
“Not everyone may be fully aware of the rules,” he shouted. “Which is why I would like to reiterate them, just in case. Anyone present is allowed to ask the narrator a question. One question! Preferably at the end, without interrupting the tale. Statements are also acceptable, but not encouraged. Speaking out of turn is completely prohibited! As is moving about! There will be breaks for that. Anyone found in violation of these rules will be henceforth shown the door, without regard to the laws of hospitality! Am I clear?”
As his monologue progressed, Tabaqui was screaming louder and louder, and swinging back and forth on the stepladder wider and wider, so at the end of it he barely managed to hold on. He was making much more noise than Ralph had, but no one thought of it as a violation of rules.
I couldn’t keep my thoughts away from the bus and how all those jokes about it turned out to not be jokes. And also about how furious R One was. He could easily get it into his head that I’d known the truth all along and purposely wrote gibberish in the diary to keep him guessing. I was so occupied by this that I missed the beginning of Noble’s tale.
It too was not a fairytale. Noble was telling us about living in some small town, what he did there and how he was trying to make some money. It was clear that he’d invented this out of whole cloth, but at the same time I had this gnawing feeling that he was in fact relating something that really happened. It was only the ending that did turn magical, and that suddenly and way over the top, as if Noble got tired of straining his imagination deciding how he was going to get his character out of the bind he’d put him into. There even was an appearance by Blind there, contrived and inappropriate, in my opinion.
Next was Shuffle’s turn. He played more than he talked, and his tale was along the same lines as Noble’s. There was also a small town and small gigs for money. It sounded quite a bit more lively, but that simply could be because he got to perform his entire catalogue. Spliced it into the narrative.
After Shuffle’s tale, Tabaqui finally declared a break. I thought that it would mean turning on the wall lamps, but no such luck. Everyone remained seated in the dark, so I didn’t dare leave the bed. Black moved somewhere, I couldn’t see him anymore from where I was. Tabaqui switched on the boombox. All around me people droned and whispered, discussing what they’d heard. We had a plate of sandwiches passed from below; I took one and passed it to Lary.
“Wicked. Just wicked,” Lary muttered. “Did you hear that, huh? I mean, I get it, but I mean, just straight out like that . . .”
I said I didn’t know about how straight that was, but I personally preferred the stories from the last Fairy Tale Night. They were more fairy.
“Exactly,” Lary mumbled, chomping on the sandwich. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about.”
“So how is tonight wicked, then?” I said.
“Right, that’s how. For this very reason.”
I decided not to waste any more time with him and asked Mermaid and Needle what they thought about all this.
“Nothing,” Needle squeaked. And in case I didn’t get it the first time, repeated: “Nothing, nothing, nothing . . .”
“I liked Noble’s tale,” Mermaid said dreamily. “So beautiful.”
I could not see the expression on her face, but I could imagine it in detail.
“Blackwood . . .”
“What was that?” I said.
“Blackwood. That was the name of the town. Did you forget already?”
It could be that Noble had mentioned it. Probably at the beginning, when I wasn’t paying attention. In any case, there wasn’t anything beautiful about the place the way he described it, apart from that name.
“Los Angeles would be even cooler!” Lary chimed in.
“How did you like Black’s tale?”
I did it on purpose, calling it a tale when it wasn’t that at all. I wanted one of them to say it. But Mermaid just sighed, Needle mumbled that it was very nice, and Lary got to chomping even louder.
“Nice? You call that nice?”
Needle snuggled up to Lary, and instead of an answer they started kissing, even though Lary’s mouth most likely was still full of sandwich.
“Don’t worry about it,” Mermaid whispered. “It’s not that bad, really.”
I tried to explain to her what it was I didn’t like in this whole bus business. Mermaid listened very attentively and nodded in the right places, but I got the impression she was doing it only to humor me.
Tabaqui declared the break to be over, and all the thoughts about the bus went right out of my head, because the next to speak was the woman from the tent camp.
She must have been really uncomfortable to be doing this. She was barely audible, and she remained where she was instead of climbing the stepladder. Her story couldn’t be called a fairy tale even by someone who’s never heard a single fairy tale ever.
She told us about herself—fifty-seven, not married, no kids, no bad habits. She was a veterinarian by trade, working with cattle. She also rattled off a list of her various ailments. I didn’t catch all the names. She looked stout and healthy, so it was strange that she had so many things wrong with her. Then she told us how she became a member of this sect that coalesced around the Angel, and how happy she was there, how she realized that she had finally found her place in life, and how the Angel, who had the appearance of a tender youth, had cured her of all infirmities “with a single touch of his heavenly palm.”
Then she started talking about their weekly prayer meetings and all the other great things they got to do, and here her story started to grate on me, because she was now talking in a sonorous, not-quite-human voice, preaching almost, and stuff like that makes me gag, to be honest.
There was also this Holy Elder who was supposedly taking care of the Angel, and also, as I understood, of divesting the “blessed devout” of their money. Then he croaked, and that was the end of the good life. The Angel had been taken away by some “evil people” who claimed to be
his parents, and the commune fell apart. But not completely, because some of them desired the continued communion so badly that they resolved to seek the Angel and free him from the evil clutches. It wasn’t easy. They were being persecuted, called “fanatics,” even arrested and involuntarily committed.
Her voice began trembling and gave out in some places, and I vividly imagined the man in fatigues clutching her shoulder, and her putting a hand over his and patting it comfortingly, like “it’s all right, I can handle it.” Sometimes my imagination runs out of control, but in this case I wasn’t even ashamed of it, they were so fake. It was as if they had invented themselves. Badly.
Long story short, they had found their Angel. Those who were the most fanatical. And as a reward for their fortitude and perseverance the two of them had been allowed to witness the Angel ascending to Heaven.
“Testify!” the man interrupted in a resonant baritone, making Mermaid startle.
“Wreathed in fire and light, the divine sword pierced the Heavens and returned as a falling star,” the woman explained. “Does this not prove that he was being sent to us, to those who followed him faithfully, so that he could lead us forth?”
She fell silent.
And everyone else kept silence too.
“Creepy,” Needle whispered.
I said nothing. Because it was. Creepy and scary. I finally put two and two together and got four. Understood who the angel was they were talking about. And why they’d pitched their camp against the fence of the House, and were now sitting on Alexander’s bed.
He worked as an Angel, and he got really fed up with it, Sphinx’s voice repeated in my head.
I realized that I was shaking. Because I’d been there, right there with him when he “ascended wreathed in fire and light.” If I’d known back then that this was the “divine sword piercing the Heavens,” I’d have probably shaved my head too and joined the Devout. I was pretty close to something like that anyway. It’s strange how quickly and easily this all had faded away from memory. Well, not really, just got hidden somewhere. Where normal people hide things they can’t explain, to try and preserve their sanity.
And one more thing I understood. That some people in here had it much harder than I. Because if it were me after whom the Devout came to make me lead them forth, I would’ve hanged myself straight off. Even if I were an angel.
I had a hard time getting into the next tales. I was listening, sure, but did not follow the plots. I tried. There was a lot hidden in those stories, they all had some kind of secret, even the most fantastic of them, I got that, but still I couldn’t listen to them with the same attention as the others did. It wasn’t just because of the shaved heads. I was too tired, and the darkness, stuffiness, and the smell of wax all combined to mold the tiredness into a kind of torpor. Some stories shared certain details, some involved the same characters, some seemed to happen in the same places. I guess it would have been exciting to trace all of those intricate connections, except for the drowsy lethargy that overtook me.
During the next break I decided to go sit somewhere else where it would be easier to breathe and harder to fall asleep, and made a stupid move—slipped down from the bed. Someone immediately squeezed into the space I had vacated, and I immediately regretted having done that. Crawling on the floor was impossibly difficult. In the places where no one was lying down someone would be sitting, and where no one was sitting there would be backpacks and more backpacks. The candles had burned down to almost nothing and gave out more smoke than light. I didn’t go two walker’s paces before landing in a plate of sandwiches, bumping my head into the bed leg, and bowling over Whitebelly, who was just climbing down from that same bed. Then someone stepped on me. I figured I’d better get up on the nearest bed before they trampled me, but there was no space on the nearest bed. It was occupied by Shuffle, his guitar, Owl (I think), and someone hiding behind a backpack.
That someone said, “Hey, what are you doing? It’s packed here.”
So I crawled on.
In the next three minutes I got stepped on about two dozen times, so by the time the break ended I was hurting all over. Thankfully, when Tabaqui declared the end of the break and everyone took their seats, someone lit the Chinese lantern. Just one, but that was enough to save me. I saw a place for me. It turned out that place was next to Vulture. No one ever chose to sit next to him, but I didn’t care anymore.
Angel told about an enchanted house that could move about. Ginger told another one about the same town Noble had been in, and about Noble himself in it.
Then for a while I wasn’t listening at all, because Noble squeezed in between me and Vulture and started whispering something in his ear, and then took off some bauble that was hanging around his neck and gave it to Vulture. And then Vulture, I wouldn’t have believed it if I didn’t see it with my own eyes, Vulture burst out crying. I mean, if it were only my eyes I wouldn’t have believed them anyway, but I was sitting so close to him, and he sobbed so hard, that there could be no mistake. I didn’t know where to put myself. Then it got even worse, because he suddenly hugged Noble, still crying. And he was crying as if he couldn’t breathe. It was painful to listen to. Noble hugged him too, and held tight until Vulture calmed down, and he looked like he didn’t give a damn what anyone would think about them, because there was only one thing they could think if they saw something like this. I didn’t think anything of the sort, of course, but it upset me greatly that others certainly would. Lizard, and everyone else sitting close enough. I think I was so upset because I realized right away that what had just happened between Noble and Vulture was important, sad and joyful at the same time, something that couldn’t be expressed in words, that you could only laugh or cry about. The way Vulture was crying.
RED’S TALE
In that world Death came to people wearing one of the two disguises, that of a young man or a young woman.
The woman was pale with black hair. The man’s hair was red. The woman was sad, the man merry. That’s how it’s always been in that world, since the beginning of time.
Some people were afraid of them. Others awaited them eagerly. They were mentioned in prayers, asked to postpone or hasten the end. Their images were on playing cards and old engravings. Very few thought about how many of them there were. It was agreed that Death was one, just in two different personifications. Night and day. Light and shadow.
In fact, there were many of them. They were almost godlike, possessing innumerable wondrous abilities, and unbearably lonely. Sometimes they would flee to other worlds, to meet their own deaths. Some of them would even be born in other worlds. They were always born dead there, coming to life only later. Those of them that could. These refugees from different worlds were no longer true emissaries of Death. Their abilities were not as sharp. In time they became almost harmless, and could only bring death in a dream.
Here is how you can tell them. They have beautiful voices, they dance well, and they know everyone’s secrets. They are also lazy, never losing themselves in the pursuit of a single goal. The women don’t know how to laugh, and the men don’t know how to cry. They hide their eyes, sleep a lot, and never eat eggs, because in their world they hatched from one.
TABAQUI’S TALE
Once upon a time and ever since then there lives a curious little old man. He lives in a secret place. This place is very hard to find, and to find the old man in it is even harder. He has many houses, or maybe it’s the same house that only looks different for anyone entering it. Sometimes it stands in the middle of an orchard, sometimes it is in an empty field, sometimes on the bank of a river, and it almost never looks the same, only very rarely. It could even be that there is no house at all, that the old man is holed up in a single room of a huge project. And there were times when he chose to live in the hollow of a dead tree.
That’s why finding him is so difficult. No one who visited him can describe his dwelling to anyone else, or point out the way and explain how to reach it. There are
many who would like to meet him, but only those who seek tirelessly and have the knowledge of invisible ways and passages, of secret signs and prophetic dreams, can ever hope to come to the right place. But even when they reach it they often have to leave empty-handed, because the old man is grumpy, obstinate, and does not like giving out presents.
The old man’s houses all look different from the outside, but very similar on the inside. They are crammed with things. Sometimes there are so many that the old man can barely find a place for himself among them. But this way everything he needs is always close to hand. It would be impossible to imagine something that he does not have.
He keeps music inside conchs, skulls of small animals, and fruit seeds. He puts smells in the bean pods and nutshells. Dreams, in empty gourds. Memories, in cabinets and perfume bottles. He also has hooks of every shape and ropes of every thickness, clay pots of any size, except large ones, and jugs, also small but very elaborate. Whistles, flutes and fifes, buttons and buckles, jack-in-the-boxes, precious jewels and stones that only he knows the value of, spices, seeds and roots, old maps marked with locations of sunken treasure, flasks, earrings, horseshoes, playing cards and tarot cards, figurines made out of wood, gold and ivory, crumbly pieces of meteorites, bird feathers, baubles, bangles and beads, bells, eggs being kept warm, insects encased in amber, and also some toys. And most of these objects are usually more than what they seem.
But those who come to the old man do not want spices, jewels, myrrh, or frankincense. They all want gears from busted watches. The old man loathes parting with those.
Some of the guests get snared by the inventive traps the old man keeps around the house. Others he lets through and refuses himself, for varying reasons. He has a list of questions, and if you do not answer each and every one of them you will not get your present, this he ensures firmly and gleefully.
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