The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 26 (Mammoth Books)

by Gardner Dozois

And when Mr. Hall said he didn’t know what Teddy was on about, Teddy told him how Mrs. Hall let a room to a stranger, and how she didn’t even know the bloke’s name, and how he was all done up with bandages over his face, and how tufts of black hair curled out of the man’s wrappings like the horns of the devil.

  He planted a seed in Mr. Hall right then, and when Mr. Hall come round the Coach and Horses a bit later, all totted up with whisky, he started giving Mrs. Hall a time of it. And when Mrs. Hall just kept on as if he weren’t even there, he started saying things like, “You women don’t know everything!” and that’s when Mrs. Hall turns round real slow, to give him a dark eye, and says, “You mind your own business, Hall, and I’ll mind mine!”

  I dare say I had a laugh about that one. Caught it in my hand, though, and slipped it in my pocket. She was always giving me a hot time of it, she was, but she’d take her tongue out and do Mr. Hall a bad turn whenever the feeling came on her. Couldn’t help but feel a bit bad for him, but also a bit like I weren’t the only one she didn’t see till she wanted to.

  It was the next day, though, that things really started to seem strange, if that’s possible. His luggage was brought over from the rail station, and it was all in large crates. Mr. Fearenside and Mr. Hall started to unload them from the cart outside the inn, and you could see how heavy the crates were by the strain in their faces, how red their cheeks turned, like roses in winter.

  The Invisible Man came through the pub where I was collecting plates for a table, and brushed right past me like a cold wind. He was wearing his greatcoat and was muffled in that hat and gloves and scarf, just like the day before. I went to the window and rubbed away the fog of my breath to watch him go clattering down the steps, shouting that Mr. Fearenside and Mr. Hall were taking too long, and why weren’t his things already unloaded. It were a bad idea for him to go down so quick and angry like that, though, cause Mr. Fearenside’s dog was under the wagon, see, and out it come, barking and yapping, and took a nip at the Invisible Man’s hand. Old goggle-eyes pulled back his leg and gave the dog a good kick, but that just stirred the thing even more, and the next thing it did was lunge at his leg and take away a piece of his trousers.

  Then—snap! snap! — Mr. Fearenside give his dog two licks of a whip, and the dog went yelping back under the wagon.

  Goggle-eyes come through the pub door directly, cursing under his breath. I take a glance at the place where the dog tore his trousers, expecting to see a leg in there, and thinking I might get a chance of seeing what ails his skin as to require all those wrappings. But there ain’t any leg I can see as that bit of his trouser opens and shuts like the flap of a carnival tent, giving glimpses of darkness behind it.

  Seemed nothing was in there at all. Just darkness. And I thought, How can that be? Man needs a leg to keep walking.

  He slammed his door when he reached his bedroom, and after a few minutes, Mr. Hall come in to see if the guest got hurt in a bad way. But Mr. Hall made the mistake — the second big mistake — of going in without knocking.

  There was a tussle of some sort up there. Anyone with ears in the house could hear it. First Mr. Hall made an awful sound, then the door slammed shut again. A minute later, Mr. Hall’s back in the pub, rubbing his head like someone’s given him a great clout upside it.

  “Are you all right, sir?” I asked, and he looked up, noticing me as if it’s the first he’s ever seen me. He didn’t say anything, though. Just tugged at his mustache and winced, shook his head like a dog wringing itself out, then went back out to help with the unloading.

  The crates were brought in then, one after another, once goggle-eyes came out of his room wearing a new pair of trousers. And what a spectacle, the things those crates carried! Towers of books. Glass tubes, glass bottles. And all kinds of powders and fluids of all sorts of colors. A burner and a balance. The Invisible Man put his things wherever he could find a bit of room. On the mantel. On the bookshelf. On the windowsill. On the floor, when he had no more room to speak of. Quite a sight it all was, too. Took the breath right from me when I peeked round the door to see inside. It appeared he was about to open a chemist’s shop right there in the Coach and Horses!

  He got right to work, too, for the rest of the day, with the door locked so Mr. and Mrs. Hall couldn’t come in whenever they wanted. Sometimes I’d take a journey up the stairs to get a dustbin or a set of bedding for another room, and would take my time to listen near his door. Bottles clinked. Fluids dripped. I could hear a pencil scratch across paper, and thought of him then, bent over one of those big books, all taken up by some idea or experiment that possessed him. And while I was lost in thought of him like that was when she came round the corner and gasped like I were burgling.

  “Millie!” she said, and I jumped back from his door, embarrassed at first, and then angry with her. Ain’t it her, after all, who’d been doing the same thing I’d been doing right then, and even more?

  The door opened on us then, and goggle-eyes looked back and forth between us. I shivered, being that close to him, seeing him look down at me through those blue spectacles of his. And his nose — what a shiny thing it was to see this close. Like a toy nose he might have purchased at a shop somewhere, it was. Mrs. Hall took the chance to look past him into the room right then, and before goggle-eyes could give us a bad time, she gasps and says, “My word, but it looks like a barn in here! All that straw, sir!”

  “Put it on my bill, if you must,” goggle-eyes muttered.

  Mrs. Hall didn’t stop there, though. No, she was in motion. Pushed right past him into the room and found her way to a golden stain he’d made on the floor with some of his chemicals, just like a hound, and said, “Sir, my floor!”

  And goggle-eyes just said, “The bill, put it on the bill, I told you!”

  I took the chance to slip away while they haggled over the price of his damages. Later, though, Mrs. Hall said to go in and sweep things up, the straw and all, and try to get that golden stain out.

  I did as told, but I never did tell anyone what happened later that day when I went up there. Not even that writer, Mr. Wells, when he came round months after, looking to collect the scraps of the story from us.

  This is what happened that day, the day I’ve never told a soul about.

  I show up at his door and knock gently, as Mrs. Hall said to, and when he doesn’t come to the door, I call through it, “Millie, sir. Here to sweep up, if you’ll let me.”

  But still no answer comes. I look over my shoulder, back down the stairwell. I can hear Mrs. Hall down in the kitchen making tea. Then I look back at his door, turn the knob, and odd but it ain’t locked as usual. And when I push in, the room’s empty. Not the straw or mess, of course. Him. Old goggle-eyes ain’t there. But I’ve not seen him come down and I’ve been working in the parlour all morning. And I’ve not seen him go out the pub way either, and I been working in there all afternoon. And as Mrs. Hall made it a thing for me to knock, like she expects him to be in there working on his experiments, I can’t imagine she seen him leave the Coach and Horses either.

  So I go in and think, Maybe this is better, not having to see him. Just doing my business of picking up after, and getting away without having to work around him. There are lots of things out of order in there, so I start first with the straw, since it’s most noticeable, and sweep it all up into a pile in the hall to pick up later. Then I start in on the stain, putting my elbow and shoulder into it. It ain’t coming out well, though I do manage to make it fade a little. I rub and rub and finally I sigh, sit up on my knees, and stretch my arms above me, letting my fingers flicker in the air, stretching them too.

  And that’s when I feel it. Something creeping under my arms, like spiders crawling on my skin. I put my arms down quick and the feeling goes away. I look both right and left, but no one’s in there. Just me. I bend over again, thinking I’ve got to get a day free if Mrs. Hall will allow it. I’ll tell her the spiders-on-my-arms story, I’m thinking, and that might help my case. A
nd while I’m rubbing at that golden stain on the floor, thinking about this, I feel the spiders go crawling down my spine.

  I sit up again and say, “Who’s there?”

  That’s when the spiders come walking over my right cheek, and I shiver. I open my mouth, ready to scream, and that’s when his hand goes over my mouth, catching my scream fore I can get it out of me.

  “Shh, shh, girl,” he says. “Shh, shh.” Like I’m a baby crying. So I stop making a fuss and he says, “I will release you if you promise to be quiet.” I nod once, and then his hand comes off my mouth.

  “Who?” I say. And then, “What are you?”

  He says, “Who I am is not important, Millie. What I am is invisible.”

  “Are you a ghost?” I say, looking round the room at nothing. I hear footsteps on the floor, creaking in a room where no one’s walking. I stand, ready to run.

  “Ah,” he says, chuckling. “A village girl, through and through. No, my young one, I am no ghost. I am a scientist, you see.”

  And I say, “I don’t see nothing.”

  He laughs at that. The room laughs at that. I say, “What’s so funny about the truth?”

  He says, “The truth? The truth is humorous more often than not, if you have the right perspective.”

  I don’t say anything to that. I’m too busy looking round the room, trying to hear where the footsteps come from. He’s circling me like wolves circle lambs cut off from the herd.

  Then the footsteps stop, and he says, “I have discovered something, Millie. A powerful thing. The secret of invisibility. A way for no one to ever see you.”

  I say, “Not many people care to see me as it is. What’s so powerful about that?”

  “Well, exactly,” he says, and his voice changes so it sounds like he’s latched on to something. “Exactly, Millie. You’re already an unseen, of sorts, aren’t you? And what good does it do you? If you were truly invisible, though, you could do what you can’t now. You could take a greater payment for the work you do. You could damage those who regularly abuse your services.”

  I wince, thinking I’m not understanding what I’m hearing. “Sir,” I say. “Are you talking about thieving?”

  “I’m talking about taking what you deserve,” he tells me. “Taking what you deserve and much, much more.” He says, “Millie, I can offer you a moment in history, if you should like to join me.”

  “History?” I say, blinking. “What good is a moment in history, sir?”

  “You will never die, Millie. Your name will live on forever if you join my ranks of the invisible. You will be remembered.”

  His fingers — I know that’s what they are this time round — caress my cheek again, a soft stroke. I notice that old goggle-eyes has his greatcoat hanging up in the corner now, and his hat on the table, and his gloves beside it. His trousers hang over the back of a chair. His shoes sit beside the legs of his chemistry table. “It’s you,” I say, “ain’t it? You ain’t wearing any clothes, are you?”

  He don’t answer me none, and I hear his steps move away from me. Then, from the table with all his tubes and bottles set up on it, a needle filled with blue fluid lifts into the air like a bottle fly, and starts drifting toward me.

  “Would you like to test my new serum, Millie?” he says. “Would you like to be powerful like I am?”

  I back up without saying anything. The needle follows. At the door, I take hold of the knob and say, “Sir, nothing’s happened here today. I want you to understand that. You can go about your business and I’ll go about mine. Not a word they’ll have from me, but I promise they’ll have it if you don’t leave me be.”

  I close the door without a word back from him. I turn to find the mound of straw in the hall behind me. I lean over then, pick up as much as I can carry, and take it downstairs. Mrs. Hall don’t see me take it out the kitchen door. She’s busy doing sums of some sort on the account book. Totting up what goggle-eyes owes her, surely.

  The rest of that day was taken up by thinking about what happened, and after a while my thoughts just kept spinning out like a spider web, and at some point in the spinning, I started thinking on my mother.

  I hadn’t thought about her for a while. It’d been four years since she died. I was twelve then, and working at the Coach and Horses kept me busy enough over the following years that I didn’t think much about anything but my duties. I can’t say when for sure I’d stopped fingering my memories of Ma, but surely it was sometime between washing the dishes and making up beds.

  My mother had been a good woman, even if she were sometimes hard on me. Like I said, she sometimes called me dull-headed, and would come home from the Coach and Horses and shoo me off cause she’d been caring after others all day, and there I was wanting a bit of her when she didn’t have a drop left. Usually, though, after she got her feet up and her wind back, she’d sit me on her lap and brush my hair. She’d tell me stories. In all her stories, I was the heroine. Millie who went to London on the back of a flying horse. Millie who found a cave where the fair folk live, and brought them home to help her poor mother cook and clean. Cause of Ma, I had many ideas of myself that I can’t say I’d thought of on my own. But they were none of them the me I was after she died, after I went to take her place at the Coach and Horses.

  I wonder sometimes, what sort of idea of herself did Ma have? She never put herself in her stories as a heroine, just me. And whenever I tried to include her, she’d say, “Aww, Millie, my love, your old mother’s not an adventurer like you are.”

  Quite an adventure it was, too, after she died. Going to live with the Halls, working there like my mother did. And then the funeral service, when some of her friends from the village came to pay their respects, that was shorter than I’d expected. I suppose I’d imagined something grander, rows of flowers, a violin playing somewhere, at least a piano, or a choir— even one melancholy singer, really — might have marked my mother’s passing. But, no, that was not to be. At least the vicar Mr. Bunting was nice about her, from what I remember. He mentioned the smile she had for anyone who entered the Coach and Horses. I remember thinking how odd that was, though, cause she weren’t ever smiling when she came home from there.

  She has a stone marker in the churchyard now, but her name ain’t on it. Sometimes, when I have a free day, I sit with her there, and trace my fingertip over the dirt on the stone. I spell her name. Rose. I trace the letters over and over, until it burns the tip of my finger.

  That’s what I kept coming back to after that incident in the Invisible Man’s room. How he said I could have a moment in history. My mother never had a moment in history. Her name ain’t even on that stone in the churchyard. All that’s left of her is that stone itself, and whatever I can recall of her.

  What would Ma have thought of the Invisible Man, I wonder? Would she have had a smile for him, like the vicar Mr. Bunting said she had for anyone? I certainly didn’t give goggle-eyes any smiles for the rest of the time he stayed at the Coach and Horses. Which was a long time, indeed. He came in on the last day of February and stayed all through March and April. Everyone in the village had something to say about him, too, they did. Even the people who’d never chanced to see him. Children made up songs and rhymes. They called him the Bogey Man, and sometimes you’d see a whole pack of them running down a lane, and someone would pull them up and ask where they were all going in a hurry, and they’d say, “John seen the Bogey Man walking this way! We’re going to see him!” And then they’d be off again, singing their Bogey Man songs.

  Teddy Henfrey stopped coming to the Coach and Horses after a while. Said it made him feel too uncomfortable, being there, hearing old goggle-eyes thrashing about in his room, doing his experiments. Mr. Hall complained he was driving business away. But I thought it was really Teddy Henfrey doing the driving, cause he was the one going round the village telling people how he won’t go back to the Coach and Horses for a pint until that Bogey Man is gone. Mrs. Hall told Mr. Hall, “Bills settled punctual is
bills settled punctual, whatever you’d like to say about it.” She said maybe she’d made a mistake, marrying a man who didn’t know the ways of an inn like her father had, and that they’d wait till summer to do anything about it. Mr. Hall went off muttering something fierce, and for the rest of that day everyone stayed away from him.

  I can’t say goggle-eyes went out much in the two months he come to stay here. Mostly he worked in the parlour he’d set up as a chemist’s shop, and spent his nights walking his bedroom floor. Even though Mrs. Hall spent time listening at his door, she couldn’t make heads or tails of anything she heard in there, but I never stopped to have a listen any longer. When it was time for sleep, I swept past his door fast as a mouse, and ran up the stairs to the attic, hoping he didn’t hear me.

  But everyone knew he was up in that room of his in the Coach and Horses, even if they didn’t see him but now and then, when he took walks round the village for fresh air, usually at twilight or late in the evenings. And so talk began to spread, wondering about what sort of work he did, or if he were a criminal all bandaged up like that to hide himself from the authorities. And when this kind of talk began to make its way back to the Coach and Horses, Mrs. Hall come right out to the center of the pub one night when we had a decent crowd, and called everyone’s attention to her.

  “I’ve heard all your nonsense talk,” she said in a firm voice, “and I’ll say this once and once only. He is an ex-peer-i-ment-al in-vest-i-ga-tor, is what he is! Now stop your tale telling.”

  “A scientist,” Mr. Hall muttered from behind the bar. And when Mrs. Hall shot him a look, he went back to pouring.

  “Yes, quite right,” said Mrs. Hall, turning back to her audience. “A scientist.” She seemed to think the folks at the pub would hear all that as an explanation, and go back to their business. Which I thought odd, since Mrs. Hall’s been living in Iping all her life, and surely she must know that everyone talking about anything different going on in the village is their exact business.