by Gene Wolfe
“Like that, huh?”
Candy nodded.
“Which one is it?”
Candy peered into the narrow room, trying to imagine what sort of coat a nurse might wear. “I don’t see it,” she said. “It’s dark blue and, you know, big.”
The weary woman nodded. “I think I remember it. You’ve been here a while, huh?”
“I guess so. There was the blackout and everything. He’s really very nice, except when he has too much to drink.”
“And you don’t have a hell of a lot of choice. Honey, I know how it is. Wait a minute.”
There was a bowl for tips at one side of the counter. While the weary woman’s back was turned, Candy took three dollars.
“Here you go. This’s it, right? Pretty lining in the hood.”
Candy nodded. “Thanks so much.” The coat looked large and warm, a silky blend of wool with some softer fiber.
“You got bus fare?”
She was afraid the weary woman would take it from the tip bowl and shook her head. “I’m fine. I’ll go home in a cab.”
“Yeah, that would be better—on the bus, some creep might take advantage of you.”
“I’m all right,” Candy told her. “I just shouldn’t have had that last one.”
“You talk pretty good, but I keep thinking you’re going to fall down. Maybe you ought to go out in the lobby and sit for a while.”
“Okay, I’ll do that.” As she left the coat room, however, she was gripped by the conviction that she would forget the stolen coat when she got up, and struggled to get her arms into the sleeves before dropping into a providentially empty chair.
She thought she recalled Sweet’s face, but it was nowhere in sight. After a minute or two, she decided he might be screened from her by one of the rectangular imitationmarble-sheathed pillars. She tried to stand up; but when she should have been on her feet, she discovered she was still in the chair. Something wasn’t working, she decided. She would rest a bit and try again.
An elevator door opened, and the tall brunette who had been with Ozzie Barnes came out, followed by Barnes himself and Little Ozzie. Barnes went over to the registration desk and knocked down a tall man in a check suit. That’s done it, Candy thought, I’ve got the DT’s. She put her hands to her face to see if she could feel crawly things. It reminded her that her makeup must surely be gone. A crowd of people surrounded Ozzie and the tall man; faintly above the hubbub she could hear the solid crack of punches, but the liquor had erected its diaphanous, nearly impermeable curtain between her and reality: she was warm, languorous, and happy.
The crowd vanished and Ozzie with it, though she had never noticed its going. As though she had known all along they would be there, she took a compact and a lipstick from the right pocket of the blue coat. She had powdered and rouged her face and was applying the first dab of lipstick when Sweet sat down beside her.
“Well, hello,” she said. “It’s wonderful to see you!” To herself she sounded like Mae West in an old, old, late, late, late-night TV movie, and she giggled.
He misunderstood. “I know it took me a while. I wanted to freshen up, change clothes.”
“Me too, only I didn’t. John, am I getting this on straight?”
He looked at her judiciously. “Fairly straight.”
“I might as well tell you, because you’ll guess pretty soon if you haven’t already. I’m a little tippy.” Fearing he did not understand her, she added, “A little in the bag.”
“When you were on the phone, I thought you might be two or three ahead of me.” He smiled.
“You’re sweet.” She kissed him, then realizing what she had said, giggled again.
“Want to give me a chance to catch up at dinner?”
“Do I ever! I don’t think I’ve had a bite since you gave me that candy in the cab. I’m just absolutely, utterly, fabulously starved. I could eat a billy goat stuffed with soldier buttons.”
“You shouldn’t drink on an empty stomach.”
“I’m finding that out. Don’t you want to hear my adventures today?” She was still not sure she could stand up.
“Sure, and I want to tell you mine, but let’s do it over dinner. I’ve had them bring my car around.”
He stood, and she held out her hands to him. “I didn’t—urmp!—think you had a car.” A belch caught her unaware.
“I rented one. They’ve got an office here in the hotel.” With his hands to draw her up and steady her, she came out of the chair more easily than she had expected. “You didn’t tell me you were a nurse.”
“I guess I didn’t.” She and Stubb had made up some story, she knew, but it was lost in the warm, amber fog. “You didn’t tell me you were so strong, either,” she said. It seemed the right thing to say.
“I used to play football, believe it or not. Iowa State. Over this way.”
He had her firmly by the arm, and she was grateful for it, leaning on him with an uncontrollable heaviness. “I’ll be okay when I walk a little.”
“I’m sure you will. Did they call you back? To the hospital where you work?”
“That’s right. It wasn’t really an emergency—did I say that okay? Emergency. Well, it was, but we didn’t think so at first. So I went. I went back in a cab just almost right away after I left you.” She decided to lie. “I’ll tell you the truth, with us just meeting and then breaking up like that, John, I didn’t really feel like going on the trip. All the holiday feeling went out of it. I’ve been feeling down since Christmas, for God’s sake. You really did like me, didn’t you, even if I’m so heavy?” She had forgotten it was a lie.
“Very much.”
“So anyway, I went to the hospital. And there was a lot of trouble there and I had a big talk with one of the doctors about it. And then the lights went out, and I stayed because of that, but after a while I left, and there was this man there—a visitor, you know—that I know and I’ve met him several times and he’s really pretty nice even if sometimes he can be pretty mean. It was dark and we couldn’t get a cab. I was so tired and awfully cold.”
“Certainly.”
“You don’t have a cigarette, do you? I’ve been out forever.”
“Right here.” He lit it for her on the dashboard lighter. They were in the front seat of a big car, though she had no notion how they got there. She toked the cigarette like a joint, drawing in the smoke and holding it with a sort of rapture.
Then letting it out with a gasp, “And there were rioters all around. This man is nice, but he’s pretty small and I was scared. Do you know what I kept thinking? I kept thinking about those old Westerns where the Indians try to kill all the people on the wagon train. It’s no different for us, except the Indians are inside with us now, so it doesn’t do any good to pull the wagons in a circle. That’s funny, huh?”
“That’s why we require a strong government,” Sweet said. “The savages all throughout society are only waiting for the lights to go out.”
Candy nodded. “Then things got complicated, and I found this woman somebody had bashed in the head. Her daughter-in-law was with her. I fixed her up as good as I could there in the dark, stopped the bleeding, tried to keep her warm and all that stuff. I’m afraid I probably got a little blood on my uniform.”
“That’s too bad,” Sweet said.
“And then the lights came back on, and I felt like the U.S. Cavalry was there. We got an ambulance for the woman, and this man and me—we were back together by then—went to a bar and had three or four drinks to unwind. Then I went back to the hotel and had a nightcap. Anyway, I thought it was a nightcap. And then I went out in the lobby and the bellhop was calling my name. That was the best part of the whole damn night, which I guess isn’t saying a whole lot, but it was.” She snuggled against him. “It was just awfully God-damned nice, and it still is.”
Sweet nodded. “I’m glad we shared that cab.”
“I’m glad you couldn’t catch your plane. Or me either. You’re married, I bet?”
“My wife and I are separated.”
“Uh huh.”
“Well, practically separated.”
Candy sighed. “That’s good.”
“That we’re almost ready to break up?”
“That you’re still married. I mean, after all these years …”
“Twenty-two.”
“See? I’m a girl—” Her stomach jumped. “Oh, my God, I hope I’m not getting hiccups. I’m a girl who has kind of had it rough sometimes, if you know what I mean.”
Sweet nodded.
“And one thing I’ve *hic!* noticed *hic!* Oh, my God! Is that when guys get to be over about thirty, it’s *hic!* better if they’re married. You see, John,” she laid a hand on his arm, “guys that aren’t usually aren’t because they’re just so God-damned selfish. *Hic!* Excuse me. Will you excuse it, please?”
“Certainly.”
“It’s all take and no give with them. They don’t know how to treat a girl *hic!* and that’s why they haven’t got one. Like you’re taking me out to dinner tonight. A guy who wasn’t married wouldn’t do that, or he’d just take me to some cheap place. This *hic!* isn’t just some cheap place we’re going to now, is it, John? I’m starved. I could *hic!* eat a—eat a …”
“It’s probably the best restaurant in the world,” Sweet told her.
“Won’ful.” She snuggled harder, one big breast pushing at the side of his right arm, her belly almost in his lap. “Now tell *hic!* me all about it or tell me about your wife or something. I want to hold my breath.”
Egyptian Darkness
They might, perhaps, have been a princess and a magician hunted by the white trolls of deadly winter; and indeed the ancient Packard, lumbering and high-wheeled, seemed rather an enchanted carriage—perhaps a funeral carriage—than a car, as it trundled between banks of snow, leaving the hunched, white, black-windowed masses of the city’s buildings behind.
The largest of them seemed also the slowest in pursuit, their towering forms now hardly to be glimpsed against the night sky. Smaller structures still clawed at the Packard’s sides with signs half defaced with snow. Ahead lay empty fields where only a few farmhouses kept watch over the road. Ahead too, a 747 droned out of the low clouds, its landing lights blazing like fireworks.
Illingworth appeared to watch it with satisfaction, nodding to himself. “They are flying,” he said. “I had feared they would not be. The snow and so on.”
“Is that where we’re going?” the witch asked. “To the airport?” She had a lap robe over her legs, and she was smoking one of his cigarettes.
He nodded.
“I had thought from what you said that these were local people.”
“You must learn above all—do you wish me to call you Madame Serpentina? Your King called you Marie.”
“The former.”
“As you wish. I was saying, Madame Serpentina, that you must learn above all not to ask questions. One looks. One listens. One observes. Perhaps on rare occasions one asks some favor. But one does not question, ever.”
“I know that. I asked you, not them.”
A chain-link fence had appeared on their right, seeming to guard miles of mere empty ground.
“But it is a habit that must be broken,” Illingworth told her. “Who can say what is near, or what is far? Perhaps we will fly—perhaps only you—perhaps neither of us. Watch. Observe and learn. Leave questions to the owl, that wise bird of Minerva, who asks the only important one.”
“Very well, I do not ask. I merely comment. If the airport is our destination, we might have reached it more swiftly on the Interstate Highway.”
“Indeed we might.” Illingworth chuckled. “You are wise, at least, in the ways of the city, Mademoiselle. But is the shortest path thereby the best? Especially when it is also the plainest? I ask only as a matter of information.”
The witch said nothing, grinding out her cigarette in the Packard’s rusty, narrow ashtray. A gate appeared in the fence, flanked by a small metal sign:
MILITARY AREA
KEEP OUT
Illingworth heaved at the Packard’s wheel. Skidding a bit, the big car turned up the gateway and creaked to a halt.
“I should do this, Mademoiselle, and not you. But perhaps you will indulge an old man?” He held out a complicatedlooking key.
The witch took it and stepped onto the running board, and from there to the ground. Illingworth had switched off the Packard’s headlights, but the trifles of moonlight that leaked through the clouds were reflected by the snow that lay everywhere. The phrase darkness made visible floated into her consciousness from some source she could not identify.
She drew her coat more tightly about her, wishing she had put on her gloves. The snow creaked beneath her high-heeled boots, but they did not sink into it—it had been packed, then, by other visitors since it had fallen earlier that day. The military of the sign? Those who were said to hold Ben Free? There seemed no way of knowing.
The gates were closed with a heavy chain. Pulling the lock toward her, she found herself outside herself, viewing everything (the old-fashioned car, the high gate with its sinister crest of barbed wire, the endless snow, the lowering structures she could now see beyond the fence, and her own dark figure) as an Edward Gorey drawing. The people in those drawings seemed always bent upon dismal errands toward bad ends. Was that her own fate? To seek Truth not in a well but down a black tunnel that wound on forever?
The key turned easily, or perhaps she had only twisted it with more force than she realized. The lock and the heavy chain were bitterly cold. She let them drop and pushed one side of the gate back; as she did so, a faint blue light kindled far behind one of the dark windows of one of the dark buildings. It should have cheered her, but it did not.
Illingworth’s old Packard crept forward with snow breaking like rabbit bones under the wheels. The car had seemed cold to the witch when she had ridden in it; now in memory it was a haven of warmth and comfort, possibly even of safety. She wanted to get back in at once, but she knew the entrance to such a place could not be left open. Laboriously she closed the gate and snapped the icy lock. When she looked for the blue light again, it was gone.
Despite the size of the Packard, the high front seat was cramped. Illingworth leaned across it easily to throw wide the door for her, then held out an age-spotted, enormously long hand. “Thank you, Mademoiselle,” he said.
She was seized by a desire to retain the key, but she gave it to him as though no such wish had entered her mind, carefully noting the pocket—the right outer pocket of his overcoat—into which he put it.
His sharp knee came up, then subsided as he pushed down the long clutch pedal. The hand that had taken the key settled on the cracked bone knob of the vertical gear-shift and pulled it back with a solid chunk! “Like a tractor,” she said, surprising herself. She had spoken too softly for him to hear, or he was too intent on steering the big car into the narrow space between two of the dark buildings. He should have been a farmer, she thought. That is a farmer’s face, those are farmer’s hands. He would have sons by now and grandsons, red cattle upon wide green fields, plantations of yellow corn. Something went wrong, many years ago, for him.
Then she recalled that she had entertained similar thoughts about Ben Free, an old man so clearly rural confined to a rotting house in a city slum. She tried to recall just how Free had looked on that rainy evening when they had sat staring at his flickering TV, but the face that rose in her mind was not Free’s but the King’s. She realized for the first time that something had gone wrong many years ago for him too, and for all his dark, singing, swindling people.
The Packard ground to a stop. “Wait a moment, Mademoiselle, before you get out,” Illingworth said. “I have given you very little advice on our drive, if only because I have so little to give. I know,” he hesitated for a long moment. “I know hardly more of what you face tonight than you do yourself.”
“You have advised me not to ask questions,�
� she reminded him.
“I have, yes, and it was good advice; I stand by it still. Do not question—observe. Accept what you see and try to learn from it. You are aware, I hope, that there were races upon this earth before our own.”
“Certainly.”
“Good, though in the light of so much physical evidence—However suppressed, and in my opinion, as I have said so very many times in the pages of Hidden Science and Natural Supernaturalism, it cannot remain suppressed much longer, if only because of our Government’s drive to increase coal production. You are aware, I hope, that a vast amount of evidence has been found in Devonian coal, the very best souvenir—you know French?—we have of the Carboniferous Period? Where was I?”
“You were speaking of physical evidence.”
“Of course I was. Nails, knives, jewelry, all sorts of things we are prone to assume can be created only by human beings—folly, all of it. The world is so much older than we suppose, and since the Elder Days certain Powers have striven with the most admirable patience to enlighten our race, our little band—I will not say band of brothers save as Cain and Abel were brothers, but of cunning apes.”
The witch nodded. She felt almost certain the old man’s sudden loquacity was intended to give those within the dark buildings time to prepare, and she listened with less than half her attention.
“They have appeared to us in many forms; if there has been one constant among them, it is that we have most often thought them cruel. If Moloch demanded the immolation of children, yet Jehovah was a God of Wrath. The rites of Isis were called unspeakable, and perhaps not only because they were not to be spoken of. Yet they offer us everything—wealth, power, life prolonged. Most of all healing and serenity of mind. It may be that they are terrible only because they are good.”
“I know all this, Mr. Illingworth,” the witch said. “In fact, I could deliver your lecture myself; but the powers you speak of are not here. I would sense them if they were. These can be no more than the acolytes of the acolytes. If they hold Free, they are nevertheless a great deal further from the truth, from the center of Authority, than he is.”