by Tanith Lee
That time Gregeris had considered having Marthe, and very likely the boy, murdered. Just as he had, for a split second, considered murdering her himself that day by the canal when she announced, “You’ve put me in the family way, Anton. Fixed me up, good and proper, and you’re the only one can set me right. Oh, not an abortion. I won’t have that. One of my friends died that way. No, I need you to look after me.”
And probably, thought Gregeris now, sipping the dying (really unborn) wine, only bourgeois politeness and the fear of a scene, that which had passed Marthe off to his mother as an ‘employee’, had also saved her neck.
“I’m sorry about the wine,” she fawned. “Of course, I could have asked you to bring some, but I didn’t like to,” (now fawning slipping seamlessly to accusation), “it would have been nicer than what I can afford, though, wouldn’t it? I can see you don’t like this one. It was better, cold. If you’d come sooner.”
Poor bitch, he thought. Can’t I even spare her a few hours, some decent food and drink? She’s got nothing, no resources, she can barely even read. And I need only do this, what? Once or twice a year... once or twice in all those days and nights. He glanced at her. She had washed and was not too badly dressed, her bleached hair at least well brushed. Somehow she had even got rid of the lipstick on her teeth.
“When the boy comes back, why don’t I take you to dinner, Marthe?”
Oh God. She flushed, like a schoolgirl. Poor bitch, poor little bitch.
“Oh yes, Anton, that would be such fun... But I can’t leave Kays—”
“Well, bring Kays. He can eat dinner too, I suppose?”
“Oh—no, no, I don’t think we should. He gets so restless. He’s so—awkward. He might embarrass you—”
Gregeris raised his brows. Then he saw she wanted to be alone with him. Perhaps she had some dream of reunion, or even of love-making. She would be disappointed.
At this moment the door to the flat opened, and his son walked in.
My son. The only son, so far as he knew, that he had. Kays.
“Good evening, Kays. You seem well. How are you going on? “
“All right.”
Marthe looked uncomfortable, but she didn’t reprove or encourage the monosyllabic, mannerless little oaf. Come to think of it, her own social graces weren’t so marvellous.
As usual at a loss with children, “How is your school?” Gregeris asked stiffly.
“Don’t go.”
“Don’t you? You should. Learn what you can while you have the chance—” The wry platitudes stuck in Gregeris’s throat. It was futile to bother. The boy looked now less sullen than—what was it? Patient. Bored, by God.
What was that quaint adjective Gregeris had thought of for the sea? Sulk-blue, that was it. The boy’s eyes were sulk-grey. Nearly colourless. Pale uneven skin, he would get spotty later no doubt, and perhaps never lose it, greasy tangled hair and unclean clothes that probably smelled. The child would smell, that unwashed-dog odour of unbathed children, redolent of slums everywhere. Like the beggar...
Take this child to dinner? I don’t think I will. The mother was bad enough, but in some gloomy ill-lit café it would be tolerable. But not the weedy, pasty, morose brat.
My son. Kays. How can he be mine? He looks nothing like me. Not even anything like Marthe.
(For a moment, Gregeris imagined the boy’s life, the woman leaning on him, making him do her errands, one minute playing with his dirty hair—as now—then pushing him off—as now. Always surprising him by her sudden over-sentimental affections and abrupt irrational attacks—perhaps not always verbal, there was a yellowish bruise on his cheek. And the school was doubtless hopeless and the teachers stupid and perhaps also sadistic.)
This was the problem with coming to see her, them. This, this thinking about her, and about Kays. The town by the sea should have taken them far enough away from Gregeris. It had required three hours for him to get here.
“Well, Kays.” Gregeris stood over him. The top of the child’s crown reached the man’s ribcage. The child’s head was bowed, and raised for nothing. “Here, would you like this? Another cheerful note. Too much, far too much—someone would think the boy had stolen it. “Your mother and I are going out for some air. A glass of wine.”
And she chirruped, “Yes, Kays, I’ll take you over to Fat Anna’s.”
After all the boy’s head snapped up. In his clutch the lurid money blazed, and in his eyes something else took pallid fire. “No.”
“Oh yes. You like Fat Anna’s.”
“Don’t want to.”
“Don’t be a baby, Kays. Fat Anna will give you pancakes . “
“No, she doesn’t. No, not now.”
Held aside in a globe of distaste, Gregeris watched the venomous serpent rise in Marthe and glare out from her eyes. “You’ll do as I say, d’you hear?” The voice lifted, thin and piercing as the doorbell. “Do as I say, or I’ll—” checking now, not to reveal herself as hard or spiteful, unfeminine, unpleasant, before the benefactor— “Be a good boy,” tardy wheedling, and then her hand gripping on the thin arm, working in another dark-then-fade-yellow bruise. “I don’t see your Uncle Anton, except now and then. He’s too busy—”
Kays was crying. Not very much, just a defeated dew of tears on the white cheeks. But he made no further protest, well lessoned in this school at least.
Later, in the restaurant, among the nearly clean tablecloths, the wax stains and smell of meat sauce, Marthe confessed, “Anna locks him in the small room, she has to, he runs away. But I have to have him protected, don’t I, when I’m not there—”
Gregeris, who had helped escort the prisoner to the woman’s tenement cave, (in one of the nastier streets, behind King Christen’s Hill), considered that perhaps Marthe was often out, often away, at night. Or, more likely, often had company in at night. (The boy shoved in the bedroom and warned not to leave it.) It had been a man’s shirt pushed under the sofa cushion. What a curious article to leave behind. Had Gregeris been meant to notice it?
He had intended to return that night to the city. But when he got free of Marthe it was almost ten, and Gregeris felt he was exhausted. The dinner, naturally, had been a mistake. They had parted, she with false sobs, and acrimony, Gregeris restrained, starchy, and feeling old.
What on earth had they said to each other? (Her excuse for demanding Gregeris’s presence had been some conceivably-invented concern over Kays, that he slept poorly or something like that. But presently she said that he often ran away, even at night. And then again she said that she thought Kays was insane—but this was after the second bottle was opened.)
Otherwise, the conversation had been a dreary complaining recital of her burdensome life, leaving out, as he now thought, her casual encounters with other men, her possible prostitution. When at last he had been able to pay the bill, and put her in a taxi-cab for the flat-house, her face was for an instant full of dangerous outrage. Yes, she had expected more. Was used to more.
After this, surely, he must keep away from her. During the meal, watching her scrawny throat swallowing, he had again wondered, with the fascination of the dreamer who could only ever fantasise, how much of a challenge it would be to his hands.
He found quite a good hotel, or his taxi found it for him, on the tree-massed upper slope of the hill. It nestled among the historic mansions, a mansion once itself, comfortable and accommodating for anyone who might afford it. Thank God for money and hypocrisy, and all those worthless things which provided the only safety in existence. He must never visit Marthe again. Or the. awful boy, who surely could now only grow up to be a thug, or the occupant of some grave.
Gregeris took a hot bath and drank the tisane the hotel’s housekeeper had personally made for him. He climbed into the comfortable, creaking bed. Sleep came at once. Thank God too for such sleep, obedient as any servant.
Gregeris woke with a start. He heard a clock striking, a narrow wire of notes. Was it midnight? Why should that matter to him
?
He sat up, wide awake, full of a sensation of anxiety, almost terror—and excitement. For a moment he couldn’t bring himself to switch on the lamp. But when he did so, his watch on the bedside table showed only eleven. He had slept for less than a quarter of an hour, yet it had seemed an eternity. The confounded clock in the square had woken him. How had he heard it, so far up here, so far away—sound had risen, he supposed.
In any case, it was the beggar, that scavenger Ercole, with his tales of midnight and the town and the sea, who had caused Gregeris’s frisson of nerves.
Gregeris drank some mineral water. Then he got up and walked over to the window, drawing back the curtains. The town lay below, there it was, stretching down away from the hill to the flat plain of the sea. There were fewer lights, all of them low and dim behind their blinds, only the street lamps burning white, greenish-white, as Ercole had said. The clock-tower, the square, were hidden behind other buildings.
When did the town, that part of the town beyond the hill, which went sailing, set off? Midnight, Gregeris deduced. That would be it. And so the motion would gradually wake those ones who did wake, by about a quarter past. After all, that hour, between midnight and one in the morning, was the rogue hour, the hour when time stopped and began again, namelessly, like a baby between its birth and its first birthday—not yet fully realised, or part of the concrete world.
It was quite plausible, the story. Yes, looking down from the hill at the town, you could credit this was the exact area which would gently unhook itself, like one piece of a jigsaw, from the rest, and slip quietly out on the tide.
Gregeris drank more water. He lit a cigarette, next arranged a chair by the window. Before he sat down, he put out his bedside lamp, so that he could see better what the town got up to.
This was, of course, preposterous, and he speculated if months in the future, he would have the spirit to tell anyone, some business crony, his elderly mother, jokingly of course, how he had sat up to watch, keep sentinel over the roving town, which sailed away on certain nights not always of the full moon, returning like a prowling cat with the dawn.
“A beggar told me. Quite a clever chap, rough, but with a vivid, arresting use of words.”
But why had Ercole told him anything? Just for money? Then I’ve done my part, he had said. Everything it can expect of me.
It? Who? The town? Why did the town want its secret told? To boast? Perhaps to warn.
Gregeris gazed down. There below, hidden by the lush curve of the many-gardened hill, the slum where she lived, Marthe. And the boy. There they would be, sleeping in their fug. And the town, sailing out, would carry them sleeping with it.
Gregeris couldn’t deny he liked the idea of it, the notion of this penance of his carried far out to sea.
Well. He could watch, see if it was. Half amused at himself, yet he was strangely tingling, as if he felt the electricity in the air, which had galvanized Ercole’s filthy palm, and, come to think of it, the boy’s, for when Gregeris had put the bank note into Kays’ fingers, there had been a flicker of it, too, though none on Marthe.
Certainly I never felt more wide awake.
He would be sorry, no doubt, in the morning. Perhaps he could doze on the train, although he disliked doing that.
It was better than lying in bed, anyway, fretting at insomnia.
Avidly Gregeris leaned forward, his chin on his hand.
The sound was terrible, how terrible it was. What in God’s name was it? Some memory, caught in the dream—oh, yes, he remembered now, after that train crash in the mountains, and the street below his room full of people crying and calling and women screaming, and the rumble of the ambulances—
Horrible. He must wake up, get away.
Gregeris opened his eyes and winced at the blinding light of early day, the sun exploding full in the window over a vast sea like smashed diamonds.
But the sound—it was still there—it was all round him. There must have been some awful calamity, some disaster—Gregeris jumped to his feet, knocking over as he did so the little table, the bottle and glass, which fell with a crash. Had a war been declared? There had been no likelihood of such a thing, surely.
Under Gregeris’s window, three storeys down, (as in the comfortable hotel all about), voices rose in a wash of dread, and a woman was crying hysterically, “Jacob—Jacob—”
Then, standing up, he saw. That was, he no longer saw. For the sight he would see had vanished, while he slept, he who had determined to watch all night, the sight which had been there below. The view of the town.
The town was gone. All that lay beyond the base of the hill was a great curving bay of glittering, prancing, sun- dazzled sea. The town had sailed away. The town had not returned.
Gregeris stood there with his hands up over his mouth, as if to keep in his own rash cry. Marthe—Kays— The town had sailed away and they had been taken with it, for their slum below the hill was the last section of the jigsaw-piece, and they were now far off, who knew how far, or where, that place where those asleep slept on in the tombs of their houses, (would they ever Wake? There was a chance of it now, one might think), and the air was sea, and fish swam through the trees and the creatures of the deeps, and the mermaid floated to the plinth, blue-white, white-blue-green, contemplative and black of eye—
Someone knocked violently on the door. Then the door burst open. No less than the manager bounded into the room, incoherent and wild eyed -
“So sorry to disturb—ah, you’ve seen—an earthquake they say—the police insist we must evacuate—the hill’s so near the edge—perhaps not safe—hurry, if you will— No! No time to dress, throw on your coat—quickly! Oh my God, my God!”
Some big ugly building accommodated the group in which Gregeris found himself. He thought it must be a school of some sort, once a grand house. It was cluttered with hard chairs, cracked windows, and cupboards full of text books. No one was allowed yet to leave. Everyone, it seemed, must given their name and address, even visitors such as Gregeris, and then be examined by a medical practitioner. But the examination was cursory—a light shone in the eyes, the tempo of the heart checked—and although three times different persons wrote down his details, still they refused to let him go. Soon, soon, they said. You must understand, we must be sure of who has survived, and if you are all quite well.
Several were not, of course. The fusty air of the school was thick with crying. So many of the people now crowded in there had ‘lost’—this being the very word they used—families, friends, lovers. Some had lost property, too. “My little shop,” one man kept wailing, blundering here and there. “Five years I’ve had it—opened every day at eight—where is it, I ask you?”
None of them knew where any of it was. They had woken from serene sleep to find—nothing. An omission.
It was an earthquake. That area had fallen into the sea. An earthquake and tidal wave which had disturbed no one, not even the pigeons on the roofs.
Had any others had a ‘warning’, as Gregeris had? He pondered. Some of them, through their confusion and grief, looked almost shifty.
But his mind kept going away from this, the aftermath, to the beggar, Ercole. What had become of him, Awake, and sailing on and on? And those others, the girl called Jitka, the old couple from the hospital, and the rich soldier, and the ones Ercole hadn’t met or hadn’t recollected?
Was the town like one of those sea sprites in legend, which seduced, giving magical favours and rides to its chosen victims, playing with them in the waves, until their trust was properly won. Then riding off deep into the sea and drowning them?
The thought came clearly. Don’t mislead yourself. It isn’t that. Nothing so mundane or simple.
God knew. Gregeris never would.
It was while he was walking about among the groups and huddles of people, trying to find an official who would finally pass him through the police in the grounds outside, that Gregeris received the worst shock of his life. Oh, decidedly the worst. W
orse than that threat in his youth, or that financial fright seven years ago, worse than when Marthe had told him she was pregnant, or arrived in the birthday dinner door. Worse, much, much worse than this morning, standing up and seeing only ocean where the houses and the clock-tower and the square had been. For there, amid the clutter of mourning refugees from world’s edge, stood Kays.
But was it Kays? Yes, yes. No other. A pale, fleshless, dirty little boy, his face tracked now by tears like scars, and crying on and on.
Some woman touched Gregeris’s arm, making him start. “Poor mite. His mother’s gone with the rest. Do you know him? Look, I think he knows you. Do go and speak to him. None, of us can help.”
And in the numbness of his shock, Gregeris found himself pushed mildly and inexorably on. A woman did, he thought, always manage to push you where she decided you must go. And now he and the boy stood face to face, looking up or down.
“How—are you here?” Gregeris heard himself blurt. And as he said it, knew. Fat Anna’s street, where the boy had been penned, was the other, the wrong side, of the hill. And Marthe, damn her, drunk and selfish to the last, hadn’t thought to fetch him back. Gregeris could just picture her, her self-justifying mumbles as she slithered into her sty of bed. He’ll be all right. I’m too upset tonight. I’ll go for him in the morning.
Good God, but the boy had known—his panic, for panic it had been, his rage and mutiny that he was too small to perpetrate against the overbearing adults. And that fat woman locking him up so he couldn’t escape, as normally he always did from Marthe—Ercole had said, “And there’s a little boy I see, now and then.”
“You were Awake,” Gregeris said.
They stood alone in the midst of the grey fog, the misery of strangers.
“I mean, you were Awake, those special Nights. Weren’t you, Kays?”
Sullen for a moment, unwilling. Then, “Yes,” he replied.