by Matt Ruff
Shortly after draining the mug, Hobart’s head began to nod. His snore drowned out the sound of a thimble as it slipped from his grasp and fell into the gulf, striking the side of the drop-shaft twice before hitting bottom. Drifting into dream, he was filled with a pleasant expectation, thinking to see his wife Zee—who had met with a fatal accident some five years ago—or perhaps Jenny McGraw, shrunk down to sprite size through the magic of hallucination.
But this time, at first, there was no vision at all, only darkness, and the disembodied voice of his granddaughter Zephyr, asking: What's so bad about the Boneyard? What's in there?
His own voice, answering: Nightmares. Old nightmares.
Then the sounds of rain and thunder, a storm in full fury, and underneath a babble that was just barely intelligible. More voices, these from the distant past.
Rats! I see rats over behind those stones!
Get those crossbows reloaded! Mercutio, you others, start lowering the box!
Hobart! . . . Hobart, watch out, the seal is broken!
“No,” Hobart whispered. Now a scene was materializing around him. He stood in The Boneyard, his back up against a tombstone. It was dark, raining, but for all that he could clearly see the second stone off to his left, a plain white marble square carved with a single word:
PANDORA
“ ‘Fraid I got some bad news for you, Hobart,” said a long-deceased but well-remembered figure from Hobart’s youth, stepping out of the gloom. “Got a warning for you, too.”
“Julius,” Hobart said, recognizing him. Then he shook his head. “No. You can’t be here, Julius.”
“Why not?” the figure inquired. “I’m dead, ain’t I? Over a century now, longer than that Jenny McGraw, even. You wouldn’t have been surprised to see her, would you?”
“Not here,” insisted Hobart. “I don’t want to talk to you in this place.”
“This place. You just want to forget about the Boneyard, don’t you? Fine. Only you can’t, not yet. Maybe never.”
“The War’s ended, Julius. For a long time. There’s nothing here that concerns me.”
“So am I, ended,” Julius replied. “Long time. But a little magic drink, and voom: I’m back, even if it’s only in your head. Magic can bring back a lot of things, Hobart. Especially if they were never really gone to begin with.”
Shaking his head: “No. No.”
“We never killed him, Hobart.”
“No, Julius.”
“We put him in the ground, you and I and the others, but we never actually killed him.”
“The box, Julius,” Hobart hissed. “No air. No food. No water. After a century—”
“More than a century, Hobart. But the past doesn’t always bury so easy. He still had a lot of power when we put him down the hole.” Julius grinned in a way that made Hobart shiver. “I ought to know that better than anybody.”
“He can not still be alive. I won’t accept that.”
“Then how is it you keep warning your granddaughter away from here, eh? ‘Fraid a bad memory might get her?”
“There are rats . . .”
“Sure. But that ain’t what scares you, Hobart, and you know it.”
Hobart opened his mouth to protest, but at that moment the ground shook. There was a booming sound as if the earth had been struck from below. Heart skittering, hand drifting to his sword hilt, he turned and saw that the white square had tilted up some, the dirt beneath it bulging upward.
“He’s going to get out,” Julius continued. “He’s going to be let out, commissioned, by a higher Power than you or I. And he hasn’t forgotten you, Hobart.”
“I’m old!” Hobart protested, still clutching his sword. “Isn’t it enough that I faced him once when I was young? Why twice in one lifetime?”
“Why ask me?” Julius countered. “I never was one for answering the big questions, you know, and I surely never bent Fate’s ear. I didn’t even have the fortune to survive the first time around.”
A twinge of guilt: “Julius. Please . . .”
“Beware the Ides of March, Hobart,” said Julius, turning away. “And before. Even the Big People are going to suffer, this time.”
He disappeared, swallowed once more by the gloom.
“Wait! Julius, wait!”
Hobart broke into a run, but there was no catching him, and when at last the sprite gave up the chase and looked around he had gone nowhere. The white marble square was still just off to his left, levered up further. Any moment now, Hobart told himself, it will flip over entirely, and a silver-bound box will burst up out of the earth. And then the box will open. . . .
The vision was a long time fading.
RAGNAROK’S DREAM
I.
“How do I thank you?” Jinsei said later. They were on North Campus outside Low-Rise Eight, the International Living Center. Lenny Chiu, immensely shamed and unwilling to have himself checked out at Gannett Health Clinic, had already gone inside to clean up the blood.
“You don’t want to thank me,” Ragnarok told her. “What I did tonight doesn’t deserve thanks.”
“You saved Lenny from an even worse beating.”
“By beating the shit out of two other people and terrorizing a third. Great rescue.”
“But they deserved it,” Jinsei argued. “They—”
“They ought to have been arrested,” said Ragnarok. “All I did was give them a lesson in what real bullying is all about. Maybe in a way that’s rough justice, but I’ll tell you a secret: it wasn’t justice I was thinking about when I dropped Shelton. I was thinking about how good it felt to make the son of a bitch’s stomach cave in.”
“Maybe,” she suggested, “maybe it’s not so bad to enjoy hurting those kind of people.”
“Really? Except for the ‘maybe,’ I’ll bet that’s exactly what Bobby Shelton would say about what he did to your friend.”
Silence. Ragnarok gave a little nod, raised his foot to kick-start the bike.
She stopped him with another question: “What did that mean, about your father selling his soul to the Devil?”
Ragnarok stared at the ground for a long moment. “It means,” he replied, “that I’ve got no right to go feeling self-righteous about Jack Baron. Do you know what a Georgia bedsheet salesman is?”
Jinsei shook her head.
“It’s not important,” said Ragnarok, after another pause. “Listen, you want me to see you home?”
“This is home,” she replied, nodding at the Living Center.
“You’d better go in, then. Your friend could probably use some company.”
“I think Lenny wants to be alone. He must be really ashamed about what happened. You know . . . that someone else had to—”
Ragnarok nodded. “He’s not going to call the cops, is he?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Right,” said Ragnarok. “It doesn’t end then, you see? What I did to Jack and Shelton won’t mean a thing by this time tomorrow. They’re a hell of a lot more scared of being busted by the Inter-Fraternity Council than they are of me.”
“I’ll talk to Lenny about it,” Jinsei promised.
“You do that.”
He dropped his foot, kicked the engine to life; Jinsei touched his arm.
“Who cheers you up?” she asked him.
“What?” Ragnarok looked at her, and for the first time noticed that she was crying.
“You say Lenny could use some company,” she said. “But don’t tell me you don’t feel bad about what happened tonight.”
“I feel bad that I enjoyed it. But I wasn’t shocked by what the Rats pulled, if that’s what you mean; hell, don’t get thinking you’re safe from rednecks here just because they teach Marx over in the Government department.”
Crying more heavily now, Jinsei made no reply, only lowered her head. Without thinking, Ragnarok reached out to brush her cheek. He caught himself in the middle of the gesture, but then to his great surprise Jinsei abruptly leaned forward;
with Ragnarok sitting astride the motorcycle, his head was at the same level as hers, and his mouth.
“Hey—” Ragnarok said, as she drew in to him. Jinsei did not hesitate; her lips met his, and after a dazed moment he kissed back.
By the light of a scythe-blade moon, they embraced.
II.
He would not take her home with him.
When at last they disentangled from each other, Ragnarok insisted that Jinsei go back into the dorm, though she wanted badly to stay with him. He knew that she would not like the house he lived in—no one ever did—nor did he want to take her over to Risley, where he might have to face the Top or some other Bohemian who had heard about his run-in with the Rho Alphas. Besides which, he was unworthy of her company, or anyone else’s, tonight. Only later, when he realized he had fallen in love with her, did Ragnarok regret not bringing Jinsei along.
Riding home, he took the motorcycle up to seventy-five and kept it there. Twice he nearly lost control of the bike; once he avoided a head-on collision with a van by mere inches. Each of these near misses left him more numb than shaken, and he would not slow down until his house was in sight.
Ragnarok lived in a ready-to-be-condemned Saltine box on University Avenue, just below The Boneyard. Being entirely self-supporting he could not afford the dorms—not Risley, in any case—and slumlord Denman Halfast the Fourth had given him a rare bargain. This was not due to any latent generosity on Halfast’s part, but reflected the fact that in the past five years, no other student had been willing to rent the place, what with its lack of hot water, substandard wiring and insulation, and thriving roach colony. In addition to the low rent—and here lay the main attraction—Ragnarok had gotten Halfast to agree to let him redecorate the house in any fashion he desired.
And so the house was black: walls, ceilings, floors, the few sticks of furniture, even the ancient commode, which had been stained a dark jet. Thick ebony drapes—scrounged from the Salvation Army downtown—shut out all external light, and the interior lamps were of low wattage, specially shaded to cast a yellowish-brown glow. All together, these redecorations created a style that Preacher had dubbed Early American Funeral Parlor; but more to the point, they created an atmosphere in which the only white thing was Ragnarok himself. With even his sheets and underclothes dyed black, there need be no worry that he would start awake some night, bleary-eyed, and imagine a phantom in the room with him.
There was a small shed beside the house made of rotting wooden boards, splintered and brown, and it was here that Ragnarok parked the motorcycle on returning from North Campus. He padlocked the shed door, glancing up at the silent Boneyard as he always did, then went around to the front of the house.
The lock on the front door was broken. Halfast had promised several times to have it fixed, but as Ragnarok had never once pressed him on the matter, he was taking his time about calling a locksmith. The present method for opening the door was to jiggle the knob furiously until it popped; Ragnarok did so now, passing within and closing the door again behind him. He kept the lights off, finding his way through the living room—which was also the bedroom and study—by memory. He did not even turn on the overhead in the bathroom, where he went to splash cold water on his face. Since he had removed the mirror on the medicine cabinet there was nothing to see anyway, other than the roaches.
After washing up, he went back to the living room/bedroom and undressed. A light at this point would have revealed two scars on Ragnarok’s body: a thin line running all the way across his chest, and a more jagged indentation on his left shoulder. He stripped down quickly, then donned the dark, long-sleeved robe that served as his bedclothes. He lay down on the creaky bed, drawing covers like a swatch of starless midnight up to his chin.
People are going to think you’re a vampire, Rag, Myoko had told him, the one time she’d paid a visit; Fujiko had thought the house too creepy to even enter. Ragnarok did not care what people thought of his living quarters, or of him, so long as he could keep his nightmares to a minimum.
Tonight the dreams would not stay away, though. He closed his eyes
and he is back in North Carolina, a young boy named Charlie, a carpenter’s son living in the West End of Griffin’s Rest township. It is his birthday, he is six and stands alone in the living room while his father clears dinner. In his hands is his last unopened present, a long narrow box wrapped in brown paper. He holds it up to his ear and shakes it, hears nothing but a thump, and dreaming thinks: dead serpents, dead serpents.
An eyeblink and the box is open, paper strewn on the floor, Charlie studying himself in the tall standing mirror that graces one corner of the room. The costume which is his present makes him look like a small ghost, a ghost with a peaked hood and a red circle above his heart, a red circle enclosing a red flame. His father Drew is beside him, a larger ghost; Drew lays a hand on the back of his neck, a dream-hand made of lead.
“Don’t you go showing it to anybody unless I say it’s OK, partner,” his father warns him.
“All right, Daddy,” he says.
“I love you, Charlie.”
“I love you too, Daddy,” he says
and he is running across the highway that leads north out of town, running to catch the dark boy who is just now vaulting the cemetery fence. Charlie is older; his friends Scott Noble and James Earl join him in the chase. Together they are fast, faster than the dark; they enter the cemetery themselves barely twenty strides behind him.
Charlie is fastest of all. He races ahead, leaping over graves. All the tombstones bear his mother’s name. He runs, Scott and James Earl yell for him to slow down, wait, wait, but he is intent on the quarry and leaves them behind. Now it is a race of two instead of four.
The ground slopes down to a stream. The dark splashes halfway across and trips over a stone. Charlie cries his triumph: “Got you, partner, got you now!” He charges into the stream and the dark rises up, rises and turns, and Charlie ducks back easily to avoid the swinging fist. He laughs and sees the blade and victory turns to terror as he realizes it is not a swing, but a cut. Fire brands his chest
and he is in his father’s study, watching Drew Hyatt at his desk from an impossible angle, a dream-perspective. The desk is stacked with a mountain of books and pamphlets; muttering to himself, Drew tends a gin bottle with one hand and a well-thumbed tract with the other. RAGNAROK IS COMING, reads the title. Being a comparison of the Norse Apocalypse and the decline of the Aryan races in modem North America, by Dr. Hiram Venable.
“It’s here somewhere,” Drew says, clutching the tract. He sets down the bottle, makes a note with a hand that never quite stops shaking. The stack of notes is tall, almost as tall as the stack of pamphlets. The perspective swings around and it is possible to read what he has written on the top sheet, an endless repetition of one phrase: “Her only tears are dry tears.”
“It’s here somewhere,” Drew repeats
and now it is night, Charlie running again through a wide field, this time chasing not a dark boy but a girl with strawberry blond tresses. “Lisbeth,” he calls, and she laughs and keeps moving, but not so fast, she wants him to catch up. He smells the tobacco all around them, feels the wetness of the leaves as they brush against his legs. They have been hosed down just in case; you can’t trust a fire after all, you have to be careful of stray sparks.
“Lisbeth,” he calls again, and as she stops and turns to face him he also sees, on the periphery of his vision, the cross flare light. The Ghouls in their white robes gather around it in a circle, their outlines flickering and indistinct.
“Here I am, Charlie,” Lisbeth says, smiling. Her cotton blouse is unbuttoned at the top, a locket shines against her throat. Charlie reaches out to touch her
and razors cut his hands, the cross still burns on the horizon of his awareness but he is in the living room once more, the mirror stands shattered before him.
“You had it coming to you, partner.” His father’s voice, behind him. “You were asking for
it.”
Blood runs in his eye from another cut. His shoulder is the worst, though; a jagged shard of quicksilver has punched a hole in the muscle.
“You had it coming,” his father repeats. “Gordon-Small. A nigger lumber company. You shame me. You shame me.”
Charlie reaches up with his right hand, yanks the mirror shard from his shoulder. The pain is indescribable; little slivers remain in the wound, biting. Charlie stares at the shard in his hand, tiny reflecting dagger. Fury threatens to choke him, but still he speaks the words: “I love you, Daddy. I always loved you.”
“You shame me,” Drew Hyatt says.
The burning cross.
His father’s blood, hot on his fists.
STEPHEN GEORGE AND THE DRAGON
I.
Some three days later found George busy at his typewriter. He had a short story in the works, a story inspired by one of the tombstones he’d seen on that late August walk in The Boneyard, now nearly two months in the past. It was the tale of Harold Lazarus, a plumber who had died unrepentant. As punishment for his numerous sins, he had been transformed into the shape of a gargoyle and set to work fixing the leaky pipes in the darkest pits of Hell—a literally endless job, seeing as Hell was the sewage nexus of the universe. Lazarus’ one consolation was the absence of his wife, the nagging nexus of the universe. Yet her death approached, and Lazarus’ desperate attempts to scare her into accepting salvation—he tapped out warnings of the torments of Hell in Morse Code on the leaky pipes, which echoed all the way up to earth and the Lazarus family commode, and, incidentally, to billions of other commodes throughout creation—formed the basis of the story. The working title was Porcelain Messiah; George figured the Harvard Lampoon would take it, if no one else.