The Empire of Ice Cream

by Jeffrey Ford

  George easily kept pace with me as we made our way across the field and then down the slope of Sewer Pipe Hill. I chose the main path, thinking that if they did come after me, I’d get as far into the woods as possible before cutting into the trees and underbrush. At the last second I would head south toward that spit of woods that extended into the backyards of the Stuttons’ and Hossetters’. If I could make it that far, I could get back on to Pine close to my house and be home before they caught me. I stopped on the path to listen for them. The pounding in my ears was too loud at first, but then I heard Stinky give a battle cry. The sound of bikes breaking twigs, rolling over fallen leaves, followed.

  We were off again, down the trail, branches whipping my face, ruts stumbling me. I tried not to think about what would happen if they caught us. George would hold his own against them, but just picturing Hickey’s fists made me go weak inside.

  “He’s right in front of us,” Wunch yelled, and I knew they could see me. I left the path and cut into the trees. They continued behind me, but the underbrush and fallen logs slowed them down, and it sounded as if they had left their bikes behind. If you were a coward like I was, it was a good thing to be a fast runner, which I also was. I ran for another five minutes at top speed, and then I had to stop, not because I was winded, but the lake spread out in front of me. I’d trapped myself.

  I knew that if I had to turn either right or left they would easily catch me. The lake was still frozen from the cold snap, but a thin layer of water covered the top as it had begun to thaw. I put a foot out onto the slippery surface and slowly eased my weight down. It held me. George was uncertain of the ice and I had to drag him along behind. I took slow, careful steps forward. By the time they’d broken through the trees at the edge of the lake, I was about fifteen feet from shore. I didn’t look back, although they were calling my name and saying I was a “fairy” and a “scumbag” and a “piece of shit.” George didn’t like the situation at all and began to growl low in his throat.

  “Egg my house?” I heard Hickey scream, and then I saw a rock whiz past my head, hit the ice and slide three quarters of the way to the opposite shore.

  “Let’s go get him,” yelled Steinmacher, and they must have stepped onto the ice together, because I felt the entire surface of the lake undulate and make a growling sound like George just before he got down to business chewing a sneaker. Following that, there came from behind me a cracking noise, like a giant egg hatching, and a splash. I looked over my shoulder and saw Wunch standing three feet from shore, up to his waist in brown water. I kept going forward as they helped him out of his hole and retreated.

  Their extra weight on the ice must have made it unstable, because now with each step I took I could hear tiny splintering noises and see fissures grow like veins in the clear, frozen green beneath each sneaker. The wind was blowing fiercely out there in the middle of the open expanse, and my sense of victory that they had turned back suddenly vanished, replaced by the prospect that the lake might, at any moment, open up and swallow me. That’s when the rock hit me in the back of the head, and I went down hard on my chest and face. I heard a great fracturing sound and my mind went blank as much from fear as from the concussion.

  When I finally opened my eyes, I remained splayed out, listening. I heard the wind, dead leaves blowing through the woods, George quietly whimpering, and a very distant sound of laughter, moving away. Every now and then the ice would make a cracking noise. I was soaked from having fallen in the film of water atop the frozen surface, and it came to me slowly that I was shivering. With the slowest and most cautious of movements, I got to my knees. Once I achieved that position, I rested for a moment, my head still hurting and dizzy. My next goal was to stand, and I told myself I would count to thirty and then just stand up and get to shore.

  The moment I started counting, I thought of Mary. When I reached twenty-five, I happened to look down, and staring up at me through the green ice was a pair of eyes. At first I thought it was my reflection. I leaned down closer to the surface to see, and there, beneath the ice, was the pale, partially rotted face of Charlie Eddisson. His hair was fixed solid in a wild tangle, much of the whites of his eyes had gone brown, and they were big and round like fish eyes. His mouth was open in a silent scream. Next to his face was the palm of one hand, and I could barely see past his wrist as the forearm disappeared into the murk below. His glasses were missing and so was the flesh of his right cheek.

  When I screamed, I felt as though he was screaming through me. Dropping George’s leash, I scrabbled to my feet, and, slipping and sliding, ice cracking everywhere around me, I ran straightforward toward the shore, twenty yards away. In the midst of one step I felt the ice crack and give way beneath my heel, but I was already gone. The dog and I reached the shore at the same moment and we both jumped the last few feet over the thin ice at the edge.

  Chattering like mad and half-frozen, I came out of the woods through Hossetters’ backyard. My pant legs were stiff as was the front of my shirt. When I walked through the front door of our house, the warmth thawed my fear and I began to cry. My mother was cooking dinner in the kitchen, but she just called, “Hello,” and didn’t come in. I went upstairs to my room, pulled off the wet things, and got into bed. Until I was called to dinner, I lay under the covers, shivering.

  I never told anyone except Mary that I’d seen Charlie under the ice of the lake, and when I told her she’d been right the whole time, all she said was, “I know.” I told her to keep the secret and she just nodded, which with Mary was as good as a written contract. The reason I never spoke up about it was that I couldn’t bear the thought of Charlie’s mother seeing him the way he was. I thought she would die on the spot if she did, so I held him in my mind, the way the lake held him, and most times he lay at the dark bottom, but sometimes he’d surface.

  Two days later, Mr. Barzita’s next-door neighbor, Mrs. Blair, suddenly realized that she’d not seen him since the day before Halloween and went to his house to check up on him. The doors were locked from the inside, so she looked in all the windows. It was while kneeling on the ground, staring down into one of the window wells, the same way Jim had spied what we’d gotten for Christmas, that she saw his shadowy figure hanging, a rope around his neck, from the ceiling rafters of his cellar.

  I figured, after much thought, that the man in the white coat couldn’t collect Barzita’s soul unless he willingly committed suicide and that Charlie’d been killed because the old man had at first refused. I also realized the stranger had been after me next, the second weakest kid in town, but somehow Barzita had finally found the courage to pay up on the deal he’d made to avoid death in the mountains so long ago.

  If this all sounds crazy, consider the fact: In the spring, when Barzita’s son came to town to sell his father’s house, he had a yard sale of all the stuff he’d found in it. I saw, while passing by on my bike, my sweater lying on a table by the curb.

  That old white car was never seen again on Pine Avenue and the only smoke we smelled afterward was that of piles of leaves burning in subsequent autumns, not to mention the time Mrs. Kelty found out her husband was having an affair with Mrs. Graves and burned all of his belongings in a big blaze on the front lawn. The pale stranger’s face never again showed itself at our night windows, but even though he was gone, I could feel his presence had changed me in some way. Maybe it was because of what I knew and couldn’t tell but could only secretly write, which I did through the frozen, snowy days of winter; the antenna moaning above me.

  As for Botch Town, it’s still there, sitting in the cellar astride the sawhorses. Through the years, the clay citizens have carried on with their lives, and although the wizard’s dust is deep and the sun no longer shines, they still, from time to time, stare up into the darkness, half-hoping, half-dreading, they’ll see the eyes.

  Botch Town

  Story Notes

  As a way to commemorate the publication of their twenty-fifth book, Golden Gryphon Press publi
shed an anthology with stories by most of the authors they’d worked with up to that point in time. That book is The Silver Gryphon, and I had a story in it, “Present from the Past.” If you were kind enough to have read that story, you’d know that at the end the narrator finds a black-and-white-bound notebook he’d hidden beneath a tree many years earlier when he was a child. “Botch Town” is the contents of that notebook. It’s a story of another time and place, a homage of sorts to the town where I grew up and the people who lived there. Like any group of people from any time and place, they exhibited traits of courage and honesty and love and stupidity and selfishness and cruelty. In other words, they were all, in their own way, doing their best to live a life. They’ve stayed with me through the years and their acts and stories have fortified my own life, especially Jim and Mary and Dolores, for whom this piece is dedicated.

  A Man of Light

  As if arranged for a game of musical chairs, the furniture in the large parlor was all gathered in a tight oval at the center of the room where divan backs touched the backs of rockers. Between two chairs was a small table upon which the servant rested a tray of hors d’oeuvres and the sole guest his drink. Other than this clutch of seating and an opulent crystal chandelier of six lit candles and five hundred pendants hanging directly above it, the space was completely bare. The floor, consisting of cheap gray planks, the kind used to build fences against dunes near the seashore, was swept perfectly clean. The walls all around, interrupted only once by a small rectangular window that gave a view of the eastern side of the estate, reached to a height of fifteen feet and were devoid of paintings or bric-a-brac. Instead they were neatly covered, floor to ceiling, with a faux-velvet olive green paper.

  A lone cellist played in the room above the parlor, and the quiet, contemplative tune seemed to filter down through the center of the chandelier and disperse itself in droplets of light. The servant retreated to some other room of the enormous house, and the single guest, a young man by the name of August Fell, a reporter from the Gazette, sat in a straight-backed chair, reviewing the list of questions he’d jotted in his notebook. The peaceful nature of the music’s glow, the palliative effects of the wine, his awe at the prospect of having an audience with Larchcroft, caused him to whisper as he read aloud what he’d earlier written. If he managed to bring it off, this would be the only interview ever conducted with his host.

  Young August knew as much as the man on the street about Larchcroft, who carried the moniker “Man of Light” precisely because he’d shown the world what could be accomplished by manipulating that most elemental of substances. For working his alchemy of luminescence, turning the grim beautiful, the threadbare new, the physical spiritual, and the false true, the world had paid him handsomely. He’d come to the attention of the public while still in his twenties—not much older than August himself—by one night lighting, with five perfectly placed beacons, merely candlepower and large lenses, the local bank of his hometown so that the entire building, with its marble columns and decorative arch, appeared to float a good two feet off the ground. Since then he’d gained world renown as a visionary of illumination. Customers famous, infamous, and pedestrian patronized his services for a myriad of reasons. He utilized his expertise in all types of light imaginable, from sunlight to starlight, firefly to flame, to satisfy any and all requests.

  One simple example of Larchcroft’s magic was his personalized makeup regimen for discerning women. Of course this process didn’t achieve the same level of international notoriety as his famous feat of having lit a battlefield to appear like Heaven—the corpses transformed into heaps of sleeping angels; an overturned war wagon taking on the very countenance of God—but he had revealed the secrets of his cosmetics whereas those of his more flamboyant efforts had not. Patrons had written to him with the simple request that he use his art to make them appear younger.

  He produced a makeup that directed light to magically vanish extra chins, smooth wrinkles, negate crow’s feet, and offer up to the world the radiance of youth and health. The idea had come to him when his constant research led him to read that the old masters, in the production of their paints, ground substances to a certain coarseness or fineness with a mind toward how each would refract and reflect. These painters knew exactly what would happen to light when it came in contact with their homemade paint, and through well-wrought strategies of intersecting beams were able to make their images appear to glow from within.

  Larchcroft did the same with powder and rouge and eyeliner and for his efforts achieved even more remarkable results. Each patron’s features were assessed by his people and prescribed an idiosyncratic formulation of makeup and a special plan of application. Crones appeared coquettes, and the plain-faced were transformed into sultry temptresses, so that by the end of an evening of socializing many a man found himself smitten with someone’s grandmother. This rarely became an issue, for as many men purchased the same service, and since the process negated the ravages of age equally at all ages, the man finding a grandmother was more than likely someone’s grandfather.

  August, his notebook closed now, sipping port amidst the aural rain of light, could hardly believe his good fortune. All he’d done to arrange the meeting was write a letter to Larchcroft and request an interview. When he’d told his boss this, the older man laughed at him and shook his head. “You’re a fool, lad, to think this man will give you five minutes,” said his boss. For three weeks he was the laughingstock of the Gazette, until one day a letter arrived with Larchcroft’s name on the return address. When it was opened, the shiny material inside the flap of the envelope caught the ambient light from the gas lamps of the newspaper office and shone back so brightly into the room that all present were momentarily blinded.

  An hour passed in the vast parlor and August began to wonder if perhaps the famous recluse had changed his mind. Then the music abruptly ceased. A door opened at the very northern end of the parlor and a gentleman in evening wear, sporting a bow tie and a red carnation in his lapel, entered. He stood still for a moment as if having forgotten something, and then, leaving the door open halfway, slowly walked toward the center of the room.

  “Mr. Fell,” he said and waited, even though he’d already captured August’s attention. “Mr. Larchcroft will now speak to you.”

  There was a prolonged silence in anticipation of the great man’s entrance through the far door, but seconds gave way to minutes. The gentleman with the carnation in his lapel stood perfectly still in a half-bow. Finally, August asked quietly, “Sir, are you Mr. Larchcroft?”

  The gentleman sighed and said, “I am not. He is right over there.” He turned and pointed behind him at a spot near the entrance. August’s glance tracked the man’s direction, and a moment later, two sounds followed. The first was a gasp, and the second, coming quickly after, was that of a wine glass smashing upon the wooden floor. The sudden panic that seized the young reporter found its impetus in the fact that floating gracefully through the room, close to the right-hand wall, was a disembodied head, its chestnut hair streaked with gray and combed back in waves, gathered behind by a length of silver ribbon.

  August stood, took a step forward, and the head turned to take him in. The face wore a stern countenance, bearing a slight but by no means insignificant descent at the corners of the lips; a subtle arch of the brows. It was a generous head, with fleshy cheeks that sagged into jowls and a long nose—bridge arched outward, tip pointing at the floor. The eyes were dark, encircled in shadows cast by a prominent brow at the center of which was set a diamond-shaped, green jewel the size of a thumbnail.

  The head finally stopped moving and came around to face August straight on. Its strict gaze shifted back and forth, as if sizing him up, and the young man believed he’d been, by his appearance alone, found wanting. Before he could look away, though, the face of Larchcroft broke into a huge smile. His teeth gleamed in the soft light from the chandelier, and the entirety of his visage seemed to shine. “Thank you very kindly for
waiting,” he said. “I had an engagement in town earlier this evening that took me longer than I’d wished.” August smiled back and took another step.

  “Come closer,” said Larchcroft, “and mind that you watch the glass splinters.”

  August began to apologize, but the head of the great man said, “Nonsense. It’s not the first time that’s happened.” Then he laughed heartily. “Come closer, away from the glass, and take a seat on the floor.”

  Like a child at nursery school, the reporter sat on the floor but a few feet from the hovering visage, crossing his legs Indian-style. Larchcroft’s head descended two feet, as if his non-existent body was sitting in an invisible chair. He stared up for a moment at the chandelier and then spoke:

  “It’s a strange thing to set out to learn about a Man of Light at night when the world is dark. But all things begin in darkness and far too many end there.”

  August simply stared, unable to speak.

  “I believe you have questions?” said Larchcroft.

  The young man fumbled with his notebook, flipping through the pages so quickly a few were torn off at the corners. He licked his dry lips, and then repeated a question quietly to himself before voicing it. “Yes, sir,” said August, trembling. “Where were you born?”

  The head wagged slowly back and forth.

  “No?” said August.

  “No,” said Larchcroft. “Everyone knows already where I was born. They’ve seen photographs of my parents in the newspapers. They’ve declared the hovel I grew up in a historic landmark, they wept at the early demise of my first wife, etc., etc. Look, son, if you want to get anywhere in life, you have to ask the big questions.”