I reached inside and turned on the headlights. That would help. But I started digging again, too.
Ten minutes later I finished the other wheel track. They still hadn't come for me. I climbed into the pickup, put it in forward, and let out the clutch, but it didn't budge.
Back outside with the shovel, this time digging the snow out from underneath. It took another fifteen minutes. When I tried it again the truck moved a little, and I rocked it back and forth until it started rolling, then drove on up the road as fast as I could. Something wasn't right.
Dave had left his landing light on. As soon as I came up over the edge of the valley I saw it, shining straight at our overturned car. I could see a figure standing beside it, but I couldn't tell if it was Dave or Jody.
The road curved the wrong way. Cursing my luck, I gunned the pickup and swerved off the road, bouncing over rocks and sagebrush and trying to steer whenever the wheels touched ground. The tires spun and the flywheel motor screeched in protest, but I kept the throttle all the way to the floor and held on while the pickup bounced toward the two air cars. As I drew closer I could see that it was Dave standing in the light, and Jody was lying flat on the ground in front of him. She wasn't moving.
I popped open the glove box just as the truck hit a hard bump, scattering wrenches all over the seat and floor. I snatched one of the bigger ones in my right hand as I skidded to a stop beside Dave's car, leaped out with it upraised, and shouted, "What have you done to her?"
He didn't even try to defend himself. He just stood there with a beatific smile on his face and said, "Go ahead. It won't matter. I'll even tell God it was justified."
"God ain't the guy you'll be talking with," I said. I raised the wrench to cave in his head, but with him just standing there I found that I couldn't do it. Not even with Jody lying before us on the ground.
He'd taken off her coat and gloves. Her face and hands were white as the snow, and no breath rose from her open mouth.
"We should have realized right away that one of us would have to go get Him for the rest of us," Dave told me as I bent down to feel her neck for a pulse. "I would have gone myself once I figured it out, but Jody was already so close I figured she might as well be the one. It really doesn't matter."
I didn't see any wounds other than the one on her forehead. She must have been unconscious when he arrived, or he'd stunned her somehow. I couldn't find a pulse, but my fingers were so cold from digging snow that I probably couldn't have found my own. I bent down and felt for breath against my cheek, but there was none. Not knowing what else to do, I covered her mouth with mine and blew a breath into her lungs.
Dave grabbed me by the collar. "No, I can't allow that. You can't bring her back until we're sure she's done the job."
In one quick motion I stood up and smacked him in the left temple with the flat of the wrench. His head jerked sideways, and he fell over backwards with a thump that swirled snow up around him. I bent back down to Jody.
Five compressions of the chest, breath, five compressions of the chest, breath, over and over again. Sometime between forever and an eternity later, she shuddered, gasped a breath on her own, and moaned.
I whooped with joy, lifted her up in my arms, and carried her over to Dave's car, where I set her in the passenger seat and turned the heater up all the way.
I ran around to the other side and climbed in. She woke with a scream when I slammed the door, then she saw it was me and slumped back in the seat. "Christ you scared me," she said. "I had a hell of a crazy dre—wait a minute." She looked around at the car, a much bigger one than what we'd been flying.
"This is Dave's car," she said after a moment. "He did come."
"That's right, and he dragged you outside to die, too." I looked out to make sure he was still lying where he'd dropped. I had just enough time to realize he wasn't when the door beside me popped open and he stood there with my wrench in his hand.
I lunged for the lift controls, but he reached across me and rapped my hand with the wrench before the car even began to move. "No you don't," he said. "Get out. We're going to finish this experiment one way or another."
I cradled my suddenly numb right hand in my left, wondering if I could clench it into a fist, and whether I could do any good with it if I could.
Jody leaned over so he could see her. "It's already finished," she said.
"What do you mean? It can't be. You're still alive."
She laughed. "I'm alive again, idiot. I was dead. I was there. I saw your precious gates to Heaven, and they're slammed tight."
"You did?" I asked.
"They are?" asked Dave.
"Yup." Jody's eyes held a spark of elemental fire as she looked at him.
Dave let the wrench drop to the ground. In a subdued voice, he said, "Let me in. It's cold out here."
I thought about it a moment, much preferring the idea of leaving him outside a while longer, but Jody said, "Go ahead, I've got something I want to tell him," so I tilted my seat forward and let him climb in back. The moment he sat down I pulled on the lift control and took us straight up a hundred meters or so.
"Where are you going?" he asked.
"High enough to make you think twice about trying something cute," I replied.
"He won't try anything," Jody said. "Not now or ever again."
"What makes you so sure?" I asked.
She grinned like a whole pack of wolves surrounding a deer. "Because if he does, he might get hurt, and if you think it's lonely on this side of the great divide, wait 'til you see what's waiting for us over there."
"What?" Dave asked, leaning forward between the seats. "What did you find?"
She got a faraway look in her eyes. "I found the place where Heaven used to be. At the end of a long tunnel of light. There weren't gates really; it was more of a . . .a place. It's hard to describe physically. But I could tell that was where I was supposed to go, and I could tell it was closed."
"Permanently?" Dave asked.
"It felt that way. There was just the memory of a doorway, no promise of one to come. So I turned around to come back, but I couldn't find the way at first. I wandered around quite a while before I stumbled across it. If Gregor hadn't kept my body going, I don't think I would have found it."
"Wandered around where?" Dave demanded. "What was it like?"
"Like fog," Jody said. Her voice picked up a tremor as she added, "I was just a viewpoint in a formless, shapeless, gray fog. There wasn't any sound, any smell; I didn't even have a body to hear or smell or feel with. I don't even know if I was actually seeing anything. There was nothing there to see."
"Then how did you know where your body was?"
"How do you know where your chin is? It was just there." Jody turned away from him and leaned back in her seat. "Look, I'm tired and my head hurts and I've been dead once too often today. I just want to get some rest. I'll tell you all about it tomorrow."
I took the hint and flew us away in search of a hospital.
Later, after we'd bandaged her head and made sure she had no other injuries, we took the bridal suite at the top of the Fort Collins Hilton. Dave was in one of the rooms down below. I'd wanted to put him in the city jail, but Jody wouldn't let me.
"His teeth are pulled," she told me as we lay in the enormous bed, a dozen blankets pulled over us for warmth and as many candles providing light. "He'll believe anything I tell him now. Besides, we need him. The best thing we can do is treat him like a recovering alcoholic or something and just integrate him back into our lives as fast as we can."
"Integrate him back into our lives?" I asked incredulously. "After what he did to you? He murdered you. You were dead!"
She giggled. "Well, I'm not so sure about that."
"Huh? What about the tunnel of light, and the gates to Heaven and all that?"
She lowered her voice to a whisper. "That was all total vacuum. I told him what he wanted to hear. Well, what I wanted him to hear, anyway."
I stared at
her in the flickering candlelight, dumbfounded.
She shrugged. "I don't remember a thing from the moment Dave knocked me out until the moment I woke up with you next to me."
"You don't?"
"No."
"You're one hell of an actress, then."
"Good, because I want him convinced."
I thought about that. "Even if we aren't?" I asked after a while.
"What?"
"You want Dave convinced, but we're still in the same shape we were before. We don't know anything at all about what's waiting for us after we die."
She giggled again and snuggled up closer to me under the covers. "Then God is just, if He exists," she said. "After all, I'm agnostic. I wouldn't have it any other way."
Mute
by Gene Wolfe
Gene Wolfe—who is perhaps best known for his multi-volume epic, The Book of the New Sun—is the author of more than 200 short stories and thirty novels, is a two-time winner of both the Nebula and World Fantasy Award, and was once praised as "the greatest writer in the English Language alive today" by author Michael Swanwick. His most recent novels are The Wizard Knight, Soldier of Sidon, and Pirate Freedom.
This story is about two children who return home, find an empty house, and are forced to grow up in a hurry. It first appeared in the program book for the 2002 World Horror Convention, where Wolfe was guest of honor.
In that same program book, Neil Gaiman offered up some advice on how to read Gene Wolfe. The first two points of his essay were:
(1) Trust the text implicitly. The answers are in there.
(2) Do not trust the text farther than you can throw it, if that far. It's tricksy and desperate stuff, and it may go off in your hand at any time.
Keep that in mind when you're reading this story. And when you're done, you might want to heed Gaiman's third point as well: "Reread. It's better the second time."
Jill was not certain it was a bus at all, although it was shaped like a bus and of a bus-like color. To begin with (she said to herself) Jimmy and I are the only people. If it's a school bus, why aren't there other kids? And if it's a pay-when-you-get-on bus, why doesn't anybody get on? Besides there was a sign that said bus stop, and it didn't.
The road was narrow, cracked and broken; the bus negotiated it slowly. Trees closed above it to shut out the sun, relented for a moment or two, then closed again.
As it seemed, forever.
There were no cars on the road, no trucks or SUVs, and no other buses. They passed a rusty sign with a picture of a girl on a horse, but there were no girls and no horses. A deer with wide, innocent eyes stood beside a sign showing a leaping buck and watched their bus (if it really was a bus) rumble past. It reminded Jill of a picture in a book: a little girl with long blond hair with her arm around the neck of just such a deer. That girl was always meeting bad animals and horrible, ugly people; and it seemed to Jill that the artist had been nice to give her this respite. Jill looked at the other pictures with horrified fascination, then turned to this one with a sense of relief. There were bad things, but there were good things too.
"Do you remember the knight falling off his horse?" she whispered to her brother.
"You never saw a knight, Jelly. Me neither."
"In my book. Most of the people that girl met were awful, but she liked the knight and he liked—"
The driver's voice cut through hers. "Right over yonder's where your ma's buried." He pointed, coughing. Jill tried to see it, and saw only trees.
After that she tried to remember Mother. No clear image would come, no tone of voice or remembered words. There had been a mother. Their mother. Her mother. She had loved her mother, and Mother had loved her. She would hold on to that, she promised herself. They could not bury that.
Trees gave way to a stone wall pierced by a wide gate of twisted bars, a gate flanked by stone pillars on which stone lions crouched and glared. An iron sign on the iron bars read poplar hill.
Gate, sign, pillars, and lions were gone almost before she could draw breath. The stone wall ran on and on, with trees in front of it and more trees behind it. Alders in front, she decided, and maples and birches in back. No poplars.
"Did I ever read your storybook?"
She shook her head.
"I didn't think so. I was always going to, but I never got around to it. Was it good?"
Seeing her expression, he put his arm around her. "It's not gone forever, Jelly. Okay? Maybe they'll send it."
When she had dried her eyes, the bus had left the road and was creeping up a narrow winding drive between trees. It slowed for a curve, slowed more. Turned again. Through the windshield she glimpsed a big house. A man in a tweed jacket stood in what seemed to be its back doorway, smoking a pipe.
The driver coughed and spat. "This here's your papa's place," he announced. "He'll be around somewhere, and glad to see you. You be good kids so he's not sorry he was glad, you hear?"
Jill nodded.
The bus coasted to a stop and its door opened. "This's where you get out. Don't you forget them bags."
She would not have forgotten hers without the reminder. It held all the worldly goods she had been allowed to take, and she picked it up without difficulty. Her brother preceded her out of the bus carrying his own bag, and the door shut behind them.
She stared at the back door of the house. It was closed. "Dad was here," she said. "I saw him."
"I didn't," her brother said.
"He was standing in the door waiting for us."
Her brother shrugged. "Maybe the phone rang."
Behind them the bus backed up, pulled forward, backed a second time, and started down the drive. Jill waved. "Wait! Wait a minute!"
If its driver heard her, there was no sign of it.
"We ought to go in the house." Her brother strode away. "He might be in there waiting for us."
"Maybe it's locked." Reluctantly, Jill followed him.
It was not, and was not even closed enough to latch. There were leaves on the floor of the big kitchen, as though the door had stood open for hours while the wind blew. Jill pushed it solidly shut behind her.
"He might be" (her brother's voice cracked) "in front."
"If he was talking on the phone, we'd hear him."
"Not if the other person was talking." Her brother had already seen enough of the kitchen. "Come on."
She did not. There was an electric stove whose burners glowed crimson then fiery scarlet, a refrigerator containing a pound of cheese and two bottles of beer, and a pantry full of cans. There were dishes, pots, pans, knives, spoons, and forks in plenty.
Her brother returned. "The TV's on in the front room, but there's nobody there."
"Dad has to be around somewhere," Jill said. "I saw him."
"I didn't."
"Well, I did."
She followed her brother down a wide hall with high, dark windows on one side, past the big door to a big dining room where no one sat eating, and into a living room in which half a dozen drivers might have parked half a dozen buses, full of sunshine. "A man did this," she said, looking around.
"Did what?"
"In here. A man picked out this furniture, the rugs, and everything."
Her brother pointed. "Have a look over there. There's a chair made out of horns. I think that's hot."
She nodded. "So do I. Only I wouldn't have bought it. A room is—it's a frame, and the people in it are the pictures."
"You're crazy."
"No, I'm not." She shook her head in self-defense.
"You're saying Dad got this stuff to make him look good."
"To make him look right. You can't make people look good. If they don't, they don't. That's all there is to it. But you can make them look right and that's more important. Everybody looks right in the right place. If you had a picture of Dad—"
"I don't."
"If you did. And you were going to get a frame for it. The man in the frame store says take any of these you want. Would you
take a pretty black one with silver flowers?"
"Heck no!"
"There you are. But I'd like a picture of me in a frame like that."
Her brother smiled. "I'll do it someday, Jelly. Did you notice the TV?"
She nodded. "I saw it as soon as we came in. Only you can't hear what that man's saying, because it's on mute."
"So he could talk on the phone, maybe."
"In another room?" The telephone was on an end table near the television; she lifted the receiver and held it to her ear.
"What's wrong? Could you hear him?"
"No." Gently, she returned the receiver to its cradle. "There's no noise at all. It's not hooked up."
"He's not on a phone in another room, then."
It was not logical, but she felt too drained to argue.
"I don't think he's here at all," her brother said.
"The TV is on." She sat down in a chair, bare waxed wood and brown-and-orange cushions. "Did you turn on these lights?"
Her brother shook his head.
"Besides, I saw him. He was standing in the door."
"Okay." Her brother was silent for a moment. He was tall and blond, like Dad, with a face that was already beginning to discover that it had been made for seriousness. "I'd have heard the car if he went away. I've been listening for something like that."
"So have I." She sensed, although she did not say, that there was a presence in this empty house that made you listen. Listen, listen. All the time.
mute, said the screen, and made no sound.
"I'd like to know what that man on the TV's saying," she told her brother.
"It's on mute, and I can't find the remote. I looked."
She said nothing, snuggling back against the brown-and-orange cushion and staring at the screen. The chair made her feel that she was enclosed by some defense, however small.
"Want me to change the channel?"
"You said you couldn't find the changer."
"There's buttons." He swung back a hinged panel at the side of the screen. "On and off. Channel up and channel down, volume up and volume down. Only no Mute button."
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