Castleview

by Gene Wolfe

  The driver shook his head. He had taken a cigar from the breast pocket of his yellow suit; he offered it to Hwan, then lit it with the dash lighter.

  “You go,” Hwan said. “I show. See light? There turn.”

  The big car floated smoothly ahead, and for a second or two Hwan permitted himself to relax; he knew where Old Penton Road began, and they had only to follow it to find this Meadow Grass. Should they miss it and go too far, so much the better—he would get out when the driver turned back. “Two block more. Go that way, Sick’more Avenue. Sick’more get new name, be Ol’ Penton Load when get out of town.”

  Rain blinded the windshield, drummed upon the steel top of the car. Puffing pungent smoke, the driver leaned forward and swung the car sharply around.

  “That light,” Hwan told him. “Easy now. Leal soon Meadow Glass.”

  “Somebody shoot minha irma—my seester.” Thinking Hwan had not understood, the driver made a pistol of his hand. “Beeng! I jus’ see my seester een ‘ospeetal, compreendo? She ver’ bad. I go see dees woman was dere.”

  White clapboard houses were edging apart to make room for more trees. The flashing VACANCY of the Red Stove Inn appeared and drifted away through the rain.

  “Polica say ma’be they got heem, but I do’ know. We leeve Brazeel so ma‘be dey don’ care, eh? Ma’be we mus’ do someteeng, I teenk.”

  Abruptly, the driver touched the brakes. A girl, pale and insubstantial-looking, had emerged from the woods that lined the road, her hands outstretched and imploring, her pale hair awash in rain. The driver glanced at Hwan, who understood that he was wishing Hwan were not there.

  As it happened, it was a wish that Hwan himself heartily seconded. “I get out,” he suggested quickly.

  The driver smiled. “Okay.”

  Almost skidding, the Cadillac came to a stop. Hwan sprang out into the pounding rain and held the door for the blond girl, who flashed him an appreciative smile. “Please get in back.”

  He wanted to slam the door or to flee without slamming it—to run away into the rain, never stopping until he reached China once more.

  “In back,” the girl whispered. “Immediately!”

  Helpless, Hwan slid between the post and the back of the front seat. The door closed behind him, seemingly of its own volition.

  The driver was grinning like a tiger beneath his big black mustache as he introduced himself. “Meu nome é José Alvarez Martim Basilio Bonifacio Balanco, senhorita. From Brazeel—before I say dat you guess already, no? Jose Alvarez Martim Basilio Bonifacio Balanco, hees carro, dey yours.”

  The girl favored him with a heart-melting glance. “I am Viviane Morgan. And your friend?”

  “I don’t know hees name. I fin’ heem een thees rain, like you, Senhorita Morgan.”

  Morgan looked back at Hwan as though they had never met. He said hurriedly, “I Eddie Sun, please know you.” Eddie Sun had been the youngest and friendliest of the cooks at the Golden Dragon. Hwan made an effort to give his final sentences extra emphasis, always a difficult thing to do in a language foreign to one’s thoughts. “I do whatever you ask, lady. Anything you want, say me.”

  “Oh, I hope you mean that! Thank you both—thank you very, very much.” Morgan’s regard returned to José. “Some—persons,” she hesitated and appeared to choke back a sob. “They are in my house, doing the most terrible things. I got away—that is why I was running through the rain.”

  “Dey break een?” Jose’s scowl would have shaken Cochise.

  Morgan nodded, her face a plea. “I have servants, but—but they are not strong like you. Could you help me, please? Force these persons to leave me alone?”

  Jose grinned and patted her shoulder. “You wan’ da best een da whole worl’? You got heem. Jus’ da good luck, you come out, stop da carro, an’ een it da best. Da angels, dey watch over you, senhorita, or ma’be you a angel yourself.”

  “It is not far,” Morgan told him. “Right there, see? That little dirt road. I do hope your car will not become mired.”

  After half a mile it did. José opened the trunk, removed his luggage, got out the jack, and showed Hwan how to raise the car with it. While Hwan was jacking up the car, Jose opened a suitcase and got out a huge knife with which he lopped branches from the evergreens beside the road. When the bottoms of the front tires were higher than the ruts they had made in the mud, he put the branches under them, and the Cadillac crawled forward once more. “Now we all wet,” he said, grinning. “Tres amigos, eh? Da tree drown meece.” He handed Hwan the knife. “Better we keep heem een here. Ma’be we need heem again.”

  Morgan assured him that she was very, very sorry indeed and touched his hand. He kissed her fingers, saying “Igualmente.”

  Little by little the rain slackened; there was no more hail and no more thunder, until at last Jose was able to switch his wipers from the fastest speed to the intermittent setting. Once Hwan glimpsed an antlered buck standing under a large pine some distance from the road. Something that might have been a child or a bedraggled doll rode the buck’s back, and waved as though giving a signal as they passed. Hwan blinked and tried to tell himself he had been mistaken, although he knew he had not been. The gun he had taken from Fee gouged him painfully just below the ribs; as carefully as he could, he inched it toward a more comfortable position, hoping all the while that José could not see him in the rear-view mirror and keeping his shaking hands well away from the trigger.

  Morgan said, “It’s been a weary way, going so slowly over the mud, but we are nearly there. My home is just around this next curve.”

  “Muito obrigado, Senhor Deus.”

  The trees were larger here, and yet so thickly set that it seemed that the land itself had once been larger, and had shrunk until no tree or stone had room to breathe. The trees had built domes and arches across the road long ago; now all the thousands of colonnaded spans bore so heavy a load of wood and rain that Hwan felt they must soon fall, crashing down upon the car under their centuries-long accumulation of squirrels’ nests and half-ruined birds’ nests, their innumerable rotten limbs and autumn-wearied leaves. A horned owl as large as the black firepot for kur loo op studied the car, half hidden behind dripping foliage on a low branch. As Hwan met its orange eyes, it pronounced his name distinctly: “H-w-a-n L-e-e … .” Neither Morgan nor Jose appeared to notice.

  It had seemed to Hwan that the curve would go on forever, a coiling line that never closed, drawn through an endless forest. At last it halted so abruptly that their bumper nearly struck a gate of thick and rusted bars set in a dripping stone wall whose top was lost among the trees. A dull-eyed, exhausted horse and two empty cars—a battered Jeep Cherokee and a shiny Oldsmobile—waited there beside the road.

  “Thees ees your house?” Jose looked at Morgan with new respect.

  “Just a moment,” she told him. “I will open this, and you can drive on through.”

  She got out but did not walk to the gate, merely standing beside the car before resuming her seat. From beyond the wall (or perhaps from within it) there came the grinding of iron on stone, the grate and clank of huge chains, and the slow hammer-taps of an immense pawl. The rusted bars shuddered, so that it appeared for a moment that the gate was somehow dying; then it began to crawl upward.

  “Amigo, my machete, my beeg chopper—you got heem? Geeve heem to me. I teenk ma’be I need heem real soon.”

  Hwan passed the three-foot knife up to José.

  Beyond the gate of bars, beyond the wall, lay the wide and weedy court from which Sissy Stevenson had ridden with Long Jim. It was no longer entirely empty, though the very presence of two disparate groups (as bizarre as the throngs half seen in dreams) made it appear more deserted still, as a cathedral or basilica intended for thousands is made to appear the more desolate by a handful of worshipers, votaries vastly outnumbered by saints in marble, limestone, and stained glass. Unseen ghosts of fear and fight, of oath, ordeal, and the eventual Judgment of God were evoked by the very pres
ence of Wrangler and Lisa Solomon; Will E. Shields, Ann Schindler, and Mercedes Schindler-Shields; Sally Howard and her son, Seth; Sissy Stevenson, grim old Bob Roberts, the tough yet elegant G. Gordon Kitty, and little Judy Youngberg. They were fewer than a dozen all told, and the thronging ghosts made that very few indeed.

  The group that faced them was only somewhat more numerous, and many among it appeared spectral themselves, whether called ghosts or goblins, ogres or elves—this though von Madadh, with his red-gold beard and cigar, might have dominated a convention of the American Medical Association, and the erect and nearly human apes who flanked him were as solid as gorillas in a zoo.

  “Stop here,” Morgan instructed Jose; she touched his hand, and the Cadillac halted abruptly, as though its brake pedal were beneath her feet. “Follow me, both of you.”

  She got out, and Jose opened the door on the driver’s side and joined her; together they strode toward the spectral cluster headed by von Madadh.

  Hwan left the big car more slowly, and for a moment stood staring from one group to the other.

  Ann exclaimed, “Mr. Hwan!”

  He turned to look at her, and after a second or two walked toward her. Morgan glanced back and whistled to him as if to a dog, but he did not appear to hear it. “Now war?” he asked Ann.

  “I’m afraid so. We were chasing a man on a horse—shooting at him, even. Then we found out he was chasing that woman who whistled—she was the one who got Mercedes into so much trouble, we think, so we started chasing her. Then we found this—”

  Wild and clear as the sea-wind across the waves, Morgan’s voice silenced her. “My brothers! We have summoned you, your lemen, your knights and ladies to battle, for we will take you fairly if we can. Choose your champion. Who is the bravest you breed? The strongest and most skilled?”

  G. Gordon Kitty bowed. “Though modesty—”

  But the time was already past. It seemed to Shields that he himself did not advance; rather, Ann, Mercedes, and the rest fell ever farther behind him while Morgan and her fay henchmen drew nearer without taking a step. There was a centaur in armor there; a squat brute with six hands held a long knife in each.

  Shields leveled the rifle that von Madadh had given him, and pushed off its safety.

  36

  THE LAND OF APPLES

  HWAN HEARD the sharp report of Shields’s rifle echo and re-echo between the beetling walls and the slanting, unearthly towers until it seemed it must shake the sky. The brown-haired lady gasped; but if the bullet struck von Madadh, he gave no sign of it, grinning like a wolf. “What’s this, Will? Would you shoot an unarmed man?”

  “It’s a whole lot safer that way,” Shields told him. “But I’ve a feeling you’re not unarmed, and you’re certainly not a man.” He fired again as spoke. Before he could get off a third shot, von Madadh was at his throat. As Hwan drew Tom Howard’s pistol from beneath his shirt, they fell to the lichen-gnawed stones together.

  The boy with the bandaged face shouted, “Here!” and tossed a flashing silver sword to the pale little man (he was scarcely taller than Hwan himself) whom Hwan had once been ordered to kill. The boy produced a second sword as he ran.

  The cat-man dashed after him, a pistol in either hand. The pale man raised his shining sword, and his big revolver boomed. An ape dropped as though clubbed; the second charged him.

  Others were charging as well, nightmare shapes dashing from Morgan’s side to join the fight. Though he did not understand its sights, Hwan trained his pistol on Jose like a sensible man and pulled the trigger.

  “The king is dead!” Von Madadh sprang up, his once-golden beard red with blood. “The king is dead—and the world lives! The end is not yet!” Morgan’s high, uncanny voice joined his: “ … will live again!”

  Their echo did not die away, but swelled to the rattle of iron-shod hooves. His green cloak billowing, a huge rider on an eight-legged horse thundered into the courtyard, followed by a wild-eyed, riderless hunter who looked small only by comparison. Phantom and specter scattered like bats before them, so that for a moment Hwan supposed the battle won.

  Yet there was a single, stooped figure that did not flee. Slowly, it straightened until its snowy beard hung no farther than its knees; and Hwan saw that it was crowned, and what he had first thought a staff or crutch was in fact a long straight sword. King Geimhreadh’s cracked voice was nearly lost in the immensity of the courtyard. “You are come at last.”

  “Blood-bought, I am here to die,” the green-cloaked giant acknowledged; he pointed to Shields. “To die, so that you and many another may live.” Throwing his great horned helm to the cobbles, he leaped from his eight-legged horse to kneel before the old king. “Strike me, as in time I shall smite you.”

  The long sword rose and flashed down. Green-faced beneath —then above—its olive hair, the giant’s head tumbled over the stones to rest beside his helm. It had not yet ceased to roll when the first snowflakes fell.

  “What happened to the Chinaman?” Roberts asked. He was driving his daughter’s Oldsmobile; she sat beside him.

  From the rear seat Seth muttered, “He shot the guy with the big jungle knife, the man who came with him and Ms. Morgan—just shot him down.”

  Sally said, “He’s a murderer, then, like whoever it was who killed Tom. He wouldn’t have taken a ride back to town.”

  Roberts asked, “You think it was von Madadh?”

  From her place beside Seth, Judy said, “It was the man that wanted your house. Morgan told me.”

  Her aunt nodded. “Mr. Fee? Yes, I suppose it was. It would be just like him.”

  Seth felt very tired, and the deep glass-cuts in his cheeks and scalp loosed yellow waves of pain across his mind; still he asked, “Where’s your cat, Judy? He saved us. Did he go in the Cherokee with Merc?”

  Judy shook her head. “He’ll come back by and by. He always does.”

  “I’ll bet. Won’t he be just an ordinary cat, though?”

  “He’s my cat,” Judy said. “He never is.”

  Sally sighed. “That’s the part I don’t understand. How could Judy’s cat talk? How could he help Seth get away from them?” When her father did not reply, she added, “I saw it, too, when they were going to fight us. It walked on its hind legs like a man.”

  Roberts gunned the engine as the car slowed on a hill that seemed as steep as many stairways. “Things aren’t the same in fairyland. When you and Katie were little, I used to read you stories about it. Remember ‘Puss in Boots’? You used to love it.”

  Sally shook her head. “It was Kate that liked it so much, Dad. But fairyland? You don’t mean that. There isn’t any.”

  “A lot of people have believed in fairies. That’s where those stories came from to begin with.”

  “That’s the sort of thing Dr. von Madadh used to say.”

  “Right. And maybe he was trying to tell us something. You ever think of that? He was the best of ’em.”

  “He was the worst! He was the one who killed Mr. Shields.”

  “I know.” Something dark bounded across the road. Roberts blinked, then decided it was only a rabbit. “Sally, he was the one they sent out to fight for them. They asked us to pick out a champion, remember? The best we had. So we sent Mr. Shields. That cowboy’s still pretty weak; so’s Seth, and Seth’s too young anyhow. I’ve got too darned old now, and I didn’t see none of you women comin’ forward. But he did. The cat would have gone in a minute or two, but Mr. Shields, he stepped forward as soon as they said it. You don’t send the worst at a time like that, Sally. You pick out your best, and von Madadh was the one they picked. Recollect how I was in Germany for a while right after the war?”

  “Sure, Dad. You’ve told us about it.”

  Seth was half asleep, but Judy said, “Not me. You never told me, Grandpa.”

  “That’s right, I guess I haven’t. Well, Judy, all my life I’d heard about this place called Germany, and I knew as well as a man can know anything where it was and that th
e people who lived there were the Germans. We’d been fighting them for four years. I’d seen dead Germans and German prisoners, and I’d seen German planes fly over a few times. But when I got there, I found out it wasn’t Germany at all. They called it Deutschland, and they were Deutsch. Germany wasn’t any real place. It was just like fairyland.”

  A strip of black asphalt speckled with snow appeared in the headlights. Roberts had to wait for a pickup that left ghostly, serpentine tracks before he could pull the Oldsmobile out onto the road.

  In the Cherokee, Sissy said, “I sure hope she makes it.”

  Wrangler, who was driving, nodded solemnly.

  “Boomer’s Lisa’s horse, and if anybody can get him out, she can, I guess. I tried to tell her how it is there—to watch out for Sancha, and so on.”

  Mercedes glanced at her mother. “I thought you said that Sancha was in the hospital. Didn’t you and Dad take her?”

  “Back home, she’s in the hospital,” Ann told her wearily. “Here I don’t know. Neither do you.” Dry-eyed and grim, Ann stared straight ahead at the back of Wrangler’s head.

  Mercedes swallowed to summon courage, and at last said, “We should’ve taken Dad’s body.”

  “They wouldn’t let us have it.”

  “We could’ve fought them for it.” Mercedes spoke with an intensity that surprised even herself. “I’ve got this sword. Some of you have guns.”

  Sissy slid around in the front seat. “So did they, or some of them. Long Jim had a gun.”

  Ann told Mercedes, “We could have fought them for it, and more people would have died—more and more, until there weren’t enough left to carry all the dead away. You might have died, Mercedes, and you’re all I’ve got left.”

  For a half mile no one said anything more; then Mercedes began to sing, hesitantly at first. “’Twas just about a year ago, I went to see the queen …”

  Louder and stronger then, until her vibrant young voice filled the car and spilled from the open window through which Wrangler thrust his elbow.