by Matt Ruff
“You make me feel safe,” he told her, standing up and tossing the dishrag into the sink. “It’s like writing a long novel, you know? Most people figure the really satisfying part is finishing the novel, getting a good piece of work done, but starting it can be just as fine, even better. When you start, you have an idea what the future’s going to be like, what you’re going to be doing; and you know it’s what you were meant to do. . . .”
She blushed a shade darker, and he touched her cheek, and she touched his, and she opened her mouth, no doubt to say something equally romantic in turn, and the romantic thing that came out was: “Hot dogs for breakfast, though? Do you want to vomit?”
“Why vomit? Hot dogs are God.”
“For breakfast?”
“Why not for breakfast?”
“You generally have bacon with pancakes. Or eggs. Or both.”
“Well, what’s bacon except meat? Hot dogs arc meat too, so you’re talking about the same concept, basically. And if you want to get picky they’ve got chicken franks now, too, which of course are disgusting, but if you want to talk technicalities instead of taste, what’s chicken except an egg that got left alone long enough? So there you are, same concept twice over.”
“You’re sick, George.”
“Naturally I’m sick. Why do you think your father gave us his blessing?”
The fruit basket was on the kitchen table, patient as a snake. Aurora first noticed it after George had kissed her and picked up the dishrag again; there was some coffee staining the side of the stove that he hadn’t gotten yet.
“And what’s this?” Aurora asked, giving the basket a closer look. Wicker, with a ribbon and card attached to the carry-handle.
“Found it on the porch when I got up. You don’t happen to know anyone who works on a cruise ship, do you?”
“‘Bon voyage,’” she read from the card. “‘From the Ferryman.’ Is this some kind of prank?”
“Search me, Lady. You understand, I’ve more or less given up trying to figure out mysterious packages; it’s not worth the effort. Have an apple.”
The apple, he might have said; there was only one. Nestled atop a cradle of spotty bananas and sour-looking grapes, its own skin polished, flawless, and red, it was by far the most appetizing piece of fruit of the lot. Aurora picked it up, felt it cold against her palm, and a dozen old fairy tales sprang to mind. She smiled.
“Of course it’s probably poisoned,” George warned her.
“Like the wine in the barn?”
“Yes, just like that.”
“Mmm . . . I could stand to be poisoned a second time that way.”
“Bite in, then,” George suggested. He discarded the dishrag once again and returned to the pancakes and franks. What happened next did not feel terribly dramatic, though perhaps it was supposed to.
George heard a crunch as Aurora took a bit of the apple; a moment later, a thud, as the fruit dropped from her hand.
“Oh my,” she said.
“Aurora?” George turned and found her tottering.
“Oh my,” Aurora repeated. For of course it was a Poisoned Apple. Yet it was also an Apple of Knowledge, and on the brink of collapse, Aurora’s eyes were filled with that knowing. “The Sleeping Princess. He just loves the Brothers Grimm.”
George caught her halfway to the floor.
III.
Two days later, the thirteenth, Ragnarok and Jinsei begged off from their morning classes and walked into Collegetown for a pair of sundaes at Cravings Ice Cream Shoppe. Since their race with the truck they had spent more time in each other’s company than out. Ragnarok had never been close friends with a woman before, and once might not have thought it possible; yet here were all the symptoms of intimate friendship, while his dwindling love interest, like a true Southern gent, seemed to be politely bowing out. It would be wrong to say that Jinsei had replaced Preacher for him—no one, man or woman, could have done that—but she certainly had come to occupy a similar place in his heart. Many nights they stayed up talking for long hours, helping each other, as good friends will, to grapple with old tragedies and more recent ones. They surely had a lot to talk about.
That Monday morning, Jinsei helped avert another tragedy by stopping a fight before it could begin.
“Well now, look who we have here!” Jack Baron, still reigning President of the ever-popular Rho Alpha Tau, stepped around his Porsche to confront Ragnarok and Jinsei as they left the ice cream shop. He was not alone: Bobby Shelton and Bill Chaney piled out of the passenger side of the car. “How’s life in Bohemia?” Jack asked cheerfully. “And the Orient?”
“Don’t,” said Jinsei, grabbing Ragnarok’s arm automatically. Two parking spaces down, lthacop Samuel Doubleday rested his not inconsiderable weight against the side of his cruiser; Nattie Hollister had ducked across the street for bagels and coffee. If Jinsei thought that Jack Baron hadn’t noticed the policeman, she was wrong. If she thought the policeman’s presence would act as a restraint to the Rat Brothers, she was wrong again.
“Seriously.” When Ragnarok made no reply, only glowered, Baron pressed right on. “Seriously, how have things been with you?” His lips curled up in a smile: “How’s old Preacher?”
“Oh, Jack!” Bobby Shelton’s expression collapsed in a perfect parody of shock. “Jack, you shouldn’t have asked that. Haven’t you heard the news?”
“Why no, Bobby.” Jack looked properly mystified. “What news?”
“About our old friend Preacher,” Bill Chaney put in. “The man succumbed.”
“Succumbed to what? Academic pressure?”
“Gravity,” Chaney answered, and then it was only by interposing her whole body that Jinsei was able to hold Ragnarok back. “NO!” she shouted at him, the same way one might shout at an attack dog, as he clenched both fists and tried to swing.
“That’s right,” Baron egged him on, not making a move to defend himself. “That’s right, belt me right in front of that cop, I swear to God I’ll have you crucified for assault. Come on!”
He almost did; Jinsei alone prevented him, more through force of will than physical strength. At last Ragnarok calmed down sufficiently that she did not have to hold him.
“That’s right,” Baron repeated, still needling. “You just take it easy, Bohemian. You just—”
Jinsei whirled on him.
“Fuck you,” she said. An ancient and far-too-often-used expression, but coming out of her mouth it stung like new Jack Baron was stunned into silence. Shelton, the football player, stepped in to retrieve the ball.
“Why don’t you watch your mouth?” he threatened. In height and weight he had her hopelessly overmatched, yet Jinsei was unintimidated. Once Shelton had frightened her, but that had been before the Rubbermaid.
“No,” she countered. “You watch it. One more insult, one more word and I’ll go for you myself. And if you have to have me arrested for assault, I’m telling the cops you threatened to rape me.”
“Rape you? Give me a break, who’s going to believe we tried to rape you in broad day—”
“Go ahead and take the chance if you want to,” Jinsei cut him off. “I know about your House; we’ll see who believes what about rape. But one thing’s sure, the best lawyer money can buy isn’t going to get the scars off your face.”
She hooked her fingers like claws: her nails were long, long enough, anyway. Shelton readied a snappy retort, but faltered, seeing something unexpected and dangerous in her expression. He stepped back.
“Don’t bother us again,” Jinsei warned them all. When it seemed even Baron took her seriously, she reached behind her for Ragnarok. Her hand closing around his was as gentle as she had been hard toward the Brothers. “Let’s go, Charlie.”
Ragnarok, every bit as stunned as the Rho Alphas, allowed himself to be led. The Brothers gave them room, but Bill Chaney was a bit slow about it; Jinsei shoved past him with such force that he lost his balance and went ass-down into the gutter.
“Hey
!” Bobby Shelton shouted in Doubleday’s direction. “Hey, did you see that?”
The patrolman, who was badly in need of a handkerchief, hurriedly took his finger out of his nose and glanced around in embarrassment. “Huh?” he sputtered.
“Never mind,” Jack Baron said. He watched the Grey Lady and Bohemian disappear down the street, hand in hand. “This isn’t over yet.”
IV.
The final mechanical test before the assembly of the Green Dragon took place late that night, in secret. The main workroom in the Foundry, a shed-like structure on the edge of Fall Creek Gorge opposite Risley Hall, had been cleared of flammable objects. Lookouts had been posted along the road outside, on the chance that Public Safety might happen by and decide that laws were being broken; within, a cadre of six Architects stood ready with fire extinguishers. Two of the six were Modine and Curlowski, the designers of the beast.
Larretta Stodges, the Mastermind, crouched beside the disembodied head of the Dragon (the rest of it was in ready-to-assemble sections across the street at Sibley Hall). The head was over a yard high and some five feet from the tip of the nose to the back of the neck. The lower jaw was hinged, the teeth sharp and menacing; cradled within was a properly diabolical device of tanks and jet hoses to which Larretta was even now making last adjustments. The whole head was fireproof, or so they hoped.
“All set,” Larretta told the others, wiping her palms. “Take your positions, and make sure you’re not anywhere near the line of fire.” She unhooked a second, not-quite-diabolical-but-still-ominous device from her belt—once it might have been a walkie-talkie, but it had been redesigned, painted bright green except for a single red (naturally) button on its side. “This is history in the making, gentlemen. Does anyone have a good quote?”
“Krakatoa or bust,” Curlowski suggested.
“Sydney or the bush!” cried Modine.
Grimacing, Larretta pressed the button.
The Dragon’s lower jaw dropped open.
Fire shot from the mouth in an eight-foot stream, blistering the far wall and nearly torching Modine, who of course had chosen the wrong place to stand despite the warning. He retaliated with his fire extinguisher, spraying CO2 everywhere. Larretta released the button and the fire-stream cut off, the Dragon’s jaw snapping shut again.
“Gentlemen,” she announced, as Modine’s extinguisher continued to spout, “I think we’re ready to roll.”
THE DARK RAIN
I.
March fourteenth, Eve of the Ides, the end of the Tale almost close enough to taste. Mr. Sunshine sat on the sill of his Window on the World, sipping retsina and watching yet another squadron of rainclouds gather over Ithaca as evening neared. Such depressing weather . . . but if Mr. Sunshine had been dead set against precipitation, he never would have bothered with The Hill in the first place.
His golden lyre, which he had not played in some time, sat on his knee; at his side was a tightly lidded pot. He had a last bid of Meddling to take care of before the big finish tomorrow. First, however, he indulged himself with a few melodies on the lyre, alternating, as was his habit, between improvisation and the faithful rendition of old themes. Throughout the playing he kept one eye on Ithica, laughing at the frantic antics of Stephen George, poor George with his apple-poisoned Princess lying in enchanted slumber in Tompkins County General.
“We’ll wrap up our business soon enough, George, don’t worry,” Mr. Sunshine said, when his music was done. “There’s only a few more things to be done. Just remember what a virtue patience is supposed to be.”
He set down the lyre, took another swig of retsina, a bite of feta. What he had in mind to do now was, in one sense, extreme overkill, using an artillery barrage for what a few sentences on a Typewriter would just as easily accomplish. But over long centuries as a Storyteller Mr. Sunshine had come to love mayhem even more than he loved the Brothers Grimm, and if a few innocent sparrows happened to drop dead on the sidelines—out of the way of his main Plot—well that just added to the fun, didn’t it?
And so, taking care not to breathe the escaping steam, he lifted the lid from the pot, revealing the noisome stew within: a soup of surplus nightmares, brewed from dark arrowheads Mr. Sunshine had clipped from the quiver of one of the Others, seasoned with still nastier things that he had scrounged from various corners of the Library. Open to the air it began to bubble furiously, and Mr. Sunshine fanned the resulting cloud, an angry black cumulus, out into the stratosphere, where it found itself a seat among the other rainmakers.
The World turned beneath it like a free-floating globe, targeting.
II.
There are many kinds of rains: cold spring rains, warm rains of summer, rains that bring flood, golden rains that turn into gods, rains of frogs or other odd objects that leave scientists puzzled. But the rain Mr. Sunshine had chosen to advance his Plot was none of these; it was a Dark Rain, the sort of rain that brings madness like the rays of a full moon.
It fell in a wide radius that included the whole of Ithaca and much of the surrounding county. In the main it was quite ordinary, but here and there a drop would fall that was something more. These drops landed on powerlines, causing overloads and fires; wet exposed machinery which then failed, often in some cataclysmic way; splashed into the open eyes or onto the tongues of individuals needing only a push to set them to violence.
On patrol, Nattie Hollister and Sam Doubleday cruised along Tioga Street, listening to a babble of emergency calls on the police band. Like snowflakes in a shaken glass globe, every lunatic in Tompkins County seemed to have picked today to go over the edge. Hollister and Doubleday were on the lookout for a red Ford pickup that had been plowing through mailboxes all over the downtown area. “We’re not sure if it’s got a driver or not,” the dispatcher had quipped; Doubleday, who had spent all of January with his arm in a sling, did not find that in any way funny. He’d read the official report on the “Hilltop Moto-Chase,” as some Dexter at the Journal had dubbed it, and several of the details were too familiar for comfort.
“And today,” he said now, while the dispatcher continued to jabber, “today is getting to be as wacked-out psychotic as—”
His sentence was interrupted by a brief explosion, off in the direction of The Commons.
“—as New Year’s,” he finished.
III.
It was raining steadily at twilight, when Ragnarok came home from an early dinner with Jinsei. He walked rather than rode because his motorcycle was still a week or so from being street-ready again. Forced by lack of funds to make his own repairs he had taken his time, enjoying, meanwhile, the leisure of traveling on foot, over dirt trails and through alleyways too narrow for any large vehicle to follow him.
Soaked but not unhappy about it, he came upon his house and jiggered the front door. The first hint of something wrong was the smell, though that was quickly followed by readily visible damage. A step inside the door Ragnarok could see, without turning on the lights, that someone had been redecorating with a pile-driver while he was out. Holes had been knocked in the walls, white plaster dust streaked the black paint. His few sticks of furniture had met a similar fate, and he guessed easily enough what the smell was.
The toilet. The son of a bitch must have taken the plumbing apart.
He didn’t look in the bathroom just yet, for another thought struck him—the shed . . . —and he stepped back outside, his temper surprisingly even, at least for the next few seconds.
He went to the parking shed where his motorcycle was convalescing. The shed’s padlock lay twisted and bent on the ground; the door hung ajar. Ragnarok reached out to swing it wide, and that was when the raindrop slipped under his shades and entered his eye, stinging, burning. The world went away for a minute and when it came back he was inside the shed, fists clenched, staring at the scrap metal that had once been his bike. It had been battered into its basic components and then battered some more, until only memory made it recognizable for what it once was.
Ragnarok shook with fury, wanting to lash out but impotent, as with the driverless truck, for lack of a target. He might simply have pounded the sides of the shed in anger, but then his gaze lighted on the one thing the vandal had missed: his mace, lying dark and unbroken beside a shattering of glass from the headlight.
It was his own weapon, not a tool or clue left behind carelessly, yet seeing it was like a revelation. All at once Ragnarok knew, he knew who had been there.
“Of course,” he said, bending down to trip the mace in a gloved fist. “Of course. Jack, partner, Jack Baron. I warned you not to cross me again.”
He extended his arm, spinning in place, once, twice, three times, swinging the mace. It connected with the wall of the shed, with a loud crack! sending a broken piece of siding spinning to the ground outside. Rain pattered down, wetting it.
“Here I come, Jack,” Ragnarok said.
IV.
“There you go,” Mr. Sunshine agreed, sitting back at his Desk to Watch.
“But not as fast as you think.” He sipped his retsina. “Patience, boys . . . patience.”
THE PAINFUL VIRTUE OF PATIENCE
I.
It would be wrong to say that Aurora’s descent into coma following her eating of the Apple had in any way broken George; his near freezing-to-death after Calliope’s exit had taught him his lesson, and he would not fall into the trap of despair again. Still, it would also be wrong to say that the loss of Aurora was anything less than hell.
The doctors at Tompkins County General could find nothing wrong with her, no physical reason for her slumber; under lab analysis the apple she had bitten proved to be quite ordinary, completely non-toxic. Despite this the Princess slept on, as Monday became Tuesday became Wednesday became the Eve of the March Ides, and if the physicians had no clue to the cause, they had even less notion of a cure.