The Best of Gene Wolfe: A Definitive Retrospective of His Finest Short Fiction

by Gene Wolfe

  It was a most magnificent tree, as yellow and shiny as real gold, alive with lights and hung with ornaments that were like little toys, although Sherby was forbidden to play with them. Santa Clauses rode sleighs and airplanes and even spaceships, stepped into redbrick chimneys, swung gaily from the clappers of bells, and carried tiny trees of their own, mostly green. There were jumping jacks and jack-in-the-boxes, rag dolls and snowmen and tiny boys with drums, and lovely silver deer that might have been of almost any kind except reindeer. It smelled marvelous too; Sherby inhaled deeply.

  A dark-eyed, rather swarthy boy with curling black hair stepped out from behind the tree. “Hello, Sherby,” he said. “Were you looking for me?”

  Sherby nodded. “You know my name.”

  “I was at your christening.” The swarthy boy held out his hand. “I’m Yeshua bar-Yoseph. Welcome to my birthday party.”

  “This is my House.” Sherby wiped his nose on his sleeve.

  “I know,” Yeshua said. “Thanks for letting us celebrate it here, Sherby.”

  Behind him, his mother exclaimed, “Oh, you’ve found the Baby Jesus!” She knelt next to Sherby, lifting the skirt of her beautiful gown so as not to kneel on it, and reached for the little blond ceramic doll in the miniature manger under the tree. Sherby knew she wanted to pick it up but couldn’t because she was a holo and it was real.

  “Never mind her,” he told Yeshua.

  “Oh, it’s all right.” Yeshua grinned, his teeth flashing in his dark face.

  “Did you get real nice presents?” Sherby wanted to ask a favor, but he felt that it might be a good idea to talk a little more first and make friends.

  “Lots. I haven’t opened all of them yet.”

  Sherby nodded; he knew how that was. “What did you like the best?”

  “My favorite present?”

  Sherby nodded again.

  “I’ll tell you what mine was if you’ll promise to tell me what yours was, after.”

  “Okay,” Sherby said.

  “Mine was what I said—you and your mother and father giving me this party,” Yeshua told him. “It’s really great, something I’ll never forget. Now what was yours?”

  Sherby patted the little horse’s nose. “He is. I call him Smoky. I got a Distracto, and a copter that really flies and you can steer around, and a bunch of other stuff. But I like Smoky the best.” He took a deep breath. “Will you do me a favor?”

  “Sure.”

  “I want to go downstairs and open the big locker and . . . and—”

  “Just look at them for a while,” Yeshua supplemented.

  “Uh-huh. An’ I want you to come. I know you can’t help work the door or anything, but I’d like you to come anyway. Okay?”

  From no place and everyplace, all over the room, House said, “This is most unwise, Sherby.”

  Sherby ignored him. “Will you?”

  Yeshua nodded, and Father Eddi said, “I’ll go with you too, Sherby, if you don’t mind.”

  Remembering the tall man with the tall hat, Sherby said, “That’s good. Come on,” and turned and hurried away, walking right through several people who failed to notice him and get out of his way, the little horse trotting after him, his hoofs loud upon the carpeted floor.

  A wide door in the kitchen opened upon a flight of wooden steps. It was hard to persuade Smoky to go down them, but Sherby led to the best of his ability, saying, “Erchou!” half a dozen times, and praising Smoky each time he put a hoof onto a lower step. “Where’s Yeshua?” he asked Father Eddi.

  “Here with us.” Father Eddi had been walking up and down the steps energetically to show Smoky how easily it could be done, and was rather out of breath.

  “I don’t see him.”

  “What you saw—the hologram—isn’t here,” Father Eddi explained.

  “I’d like to see him.”

  “You don’t think much of them.” Father Eddi sat down on a step to wipe his forehead with the ragged hem of his brown habit. “So House did away with it. He’s here just the same.”

  “Well, I’d like to see.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have walked through the holograms upstairs, and should’ve wished your mother Merry Christmas.”

  “Are you a Christmas person? Like Knecht Rupprecht and Christmas Rose?” Sherby turned around to look back at Father Eddi, which surprised Smoky so much that he went down another step without urging.

  “I certainly am.”

  “What makes you one?”

  “One Christmas, I said a mass nobody came to except a donkey and an ox.”

  “Is that all?”

  “I’m afraid it is.” Father Eddi looked crestfallen. “I didn’t put myself forward to House as a Christmas person, you understand, my son. But donkeys have been my friends ever since that night, so when you said that Ali Baba could bring in Kawi I came too, remembering my midnight service for the Saxons and hoping that I might be of some use here.

  The altar-lamps were lighted,—

  An old marsh-donkey came,

  Bold as a guest invited,

  And stared at the guttering flame.

  “No doubt he forgot me and my service long ago, but I haven’t forgotten him, my son—no more than you’ve forgotten your father and mother in the frozen-food locker down here. How did you get their bodies down these steps, anyway? You can’t have carried them yourself.”

  “Mariah and Jeremy were here then. House had them do it. Erchou!” This last was for Smoky, who (gaining confidence as he neared the cellar floor) actually went down four more steps without further urging before he halted again.

  “Then they went away and left you here with House? That wasn’t very wise, I’m afraid.”

  “House made them,” Sherby explained. “He’s supposed to take care of me when there’s nobody else to do it, and Mariah and Jeremy weren’t supposed to take me anywhere unless my mom said it was okay. House wouldn’t let them open the door as long as I was with them. They said they’d send somebody.”

  “Somebody else will get here sooner, I’m afraid,” Father Eddi told him. “I will have some advice for you, if you can get the big stainless door open.”

  “You could ask House to open it for me. He can do that. You could pretend like you’re doing it. You could put your hand on the handle and House would pull it and open the door and you could go inside and tell me to come in.” It was a lot of talking for Sherby, and made him glad that Father Eddi was not much bigger than he was.

  “He won’t do it, my son,” Father Eddi said gently. “He doesn’t think it good for you to come down here and look at them. Neither do I. But if you get the freezer door open, I’ll have some advice to offer, as I told you.”

  “Erchou!” Sherby said, and Smoky clattered down the last two steps to stand beside him. “Watch me.”

  He untied the blue terry-cloth bathrobe belt, then tied its ends together in a new knot, pulling hard to make sure it would hold. That done, he looped it around the handle of the big freezer door, and put the other loop over Smoky’s head. Returning to the foot of the steps, he shouted, “Erchou!”

  Smoky eyed him nervously.

  “I think you’d better go back upstairs, my son,” Father Eddi said.

  “I was looking that time. That’s not the right way to do it.” Sherby started up the steps. “Erchou!”

  Smoky pulled the big handle forward by perhaps half an inch.

  “There’s another carrot up there,” Sherby said. “I know that’ll work, only I want to try something else first. Watch me!”

  He carried Mariah’s empty scrub bucket to Smoky’s side, inverted it, and mounted. “Now come on! Erchou!” Sherby kicked Smoky with his bare heels, and Smoky took a hesitant step or two forward.

  The big stainless-steel door swung open.

  “I’m going in to look at them,” Sherby told Father Eddi. “You don’t have to come in with me.”

  “I wish that I could.”

  Even to stand in front of the
door was to enter a second winter, colder even than the snow and the night wind on Lonely Mountain.

  Sherby stepped inside.

  Father Eddi called, “I can’t go any farther with you, my son. There are no hologram projectors in there.”

  “That’s all right,” Sherby told him. Sherby was looking at his mother. There was a fine powdering of ice crystals on her cheek, and one hand was lifted as if she had died gesturing. Telling his father not to eat what she had, Sherby decided. Only his father had meant to, and had done it anyway.

  “It might be a good thing for you to take Smoky in with you and shut the door, my son.”

  Sherby shook his head, shivering. He was still looking at his mother, and absentmindedly stroking Smoky’s nose.

  “You can’t be locked in. There’s a push bar on the inside that makes the door very easy to open.”

  “I’m coming out in a minute,” Sherby said. His father’s face was twisted. Because he knew what was happening, Sherby thought. It had been wrong, wrong of his father particularly, to go away and leave him alone with House.

  “You see, my son, Carker’s Army is looting and burning all the homes along East Mountain Road, and they’ve left the McKays’. They will probably burn this house as well. If they do, that freezer is the part of House most likely to survive. If you snuggle up with Smoky, you might stay alive until they leave.”

  “No,” Sherby said. He wanted his mother to pat his head the way she always had when she put him into bed, and thought of bending down and touching her hand with his head. He knew it would not be the same, but he did it anyway, then turned away, shivering worse than ever, and led Smoky out into the cellar again, where Father Eddi waited.

  “This is your best chance, my son. You know that House can open this door. He’ll open it for you when it’s safe.”

  Sherby did not bother to reply. He pushed hard against the big door, swinging it shut.

  “Are we going back upstairs? Santa Claus is about to appear. It will be the high point of the party.”

  “I don’t care about Santa,” Sherby declared.

  Smoky, who had been so reluctant to go down the stairs, trotted up them quite readily. “House!” Sherby called when they were back in the kitchen. “House, say something! Answer me!”

  “What is it, Sherby?” The big voice seemed to come from all around him, as it always had, but there was a tension in it that Sherby had never heard before.

  “I want to see out front. Is it okay to open the front door?”

  “No,” House told him. “There is a screen in the study—”

  “Not that. You let me open it before.”

  “They were not here then, Sherby. Now they are.”

  Sherby considered the problem. Behind him, Father Eddi said, “House would like to show you Santa Claus, and this may be the last chance you’ll ever have to see him with a child’s eyes. Won’t you please go into the family room and look?”

  House said, “I will make an agreement with you, Sherby. If you’ll see Santa, I’ll open the security shutter on one of the windows in the living room a little and let you look out there; I promise.”

  “All the way. And look for as long as I want.”

  House hesitated. Smoky stamped in the silence; faintly, Sherby could hear voices outside and the loud bangs of people pounding on things. At last House said, “All right.”

  There seemed to be fewer guests in the family room than Sherby remembered. Christmas Rose was talking to the tall, turbaned king and an older king with a long, white beard, but Knecht Rupprecht was nowhere to be seen. As Sherby and Smoky advanced toward the fireplace, in which the immense Yule log was blazing, Santa Claus stepped out of the fire, a fat little man no taller than Sherby himself, his red and white clothing all tarnished with soot and an enormous bundle of toys on his back.

  “Look, my son!” Father Eddi exclaimed from behind Sherby. “There’s Santa Claus! He came!”

  Sherby nodded. A sort of aisle had opened between Santa Claus and himself. His mother was standing on Santa Claus’s right, his father on his left, and an elf was peeping from between his father’s legs. As Sherby came nearer, leading Smoky, Santa Claus roared with laughter. “Here I am again, Sherby! Second time today!”

  “Are you really Santa Claus?” Sherby’s voice wanted to shake. It was as if he had been crying.

  “I certainly am!” Santa Claus laughed again, louder than ever: “Ho, ho, ho, ho!”

  “Then you’re nothing,” Sherby told him. Sherby could not talk as loud as Santa Claus did, but he talked as loud as he could. “You’re a big nothing, and I never, never want to see you anymore. House! Are you listening to me, House?”

  Sherby waited for House’s reply, and all the guests were silent too. His mother and his father looked at each other, but neither spoke. Smoky nuzzled his hand.

  “I’m the only one here, House! You’ve got to do what I tell you! You know you do!” Sherby looked for the butler in the crowd of guests, but could not find him. “Make them all go away. I mean it! No more promises. Make them all go away right now!”

  He and Smoky stood alone in the big, dark, empty family room; the fireplace that had blazed an instant before was cold and dark.

  Gradually the lights came up, so that by the time Sherby and Smoky had taken a few steps toward the door, the room was lit almost normally, though nowhere near as bright as it had been during the party.

  “House, I’m hungry. I’m going to the study now, to look out. When I’m finished I want a bowl of Froot Loops. Get out the stuff.”

  House’s big voice, coming from a dozen speakers in that part of the house, said, “There is no milk left, Sherby. I told you so at noon, remember?”

  “What is there?”

  House considered, and Sherby knew there was no point in interrupting.

  “There are sardines and two slices of bread. You could make a sardine sandwich?”

  “Peanut butter?”

  “Yes, a little.”

  “I’ll have toast and peanut butter,” Sherby decided. “Get out the peanut butter. Toast the bread and have it waiting for me when I’m through looking.”

  “I will, Sherby.”

  The hall was nearly dark, the study as black as pitch. House said, “If I turn on the lights, they will see you at once when I raise the security shutter, Sherby.”

  “Turn on the lights now so I can get over to the window,” Sherby instructed him. “Then turn them off again. Then pull up the shutter.”

  His father’s desk was still there, and the big computer console, its screen dark. Save for one large and equally dark window, books lined the walls—his grandfather’s law books, mostly; Sherby remembered his mother opening one for him to show him his grandfather’s bookplate.

  “I wish that you would go back to the frozen-food locker, Sherby. That would be the safest place for you and Smoky.”

  “What’s that banging the front door?”

  “A log.”

  The light above the desk dimmed, then winked out. Sherby flattened his nose against the chill, black thermopane of the window, and the security shutter glided smoothly up.

  There were too many people to count outside, some of them so close they were nearly touching the glass. Among them were policemen and firemen, but no one paid any attention to them; when he had been looking out for perhaps half a minute, Sherby recognized one of the firemen as the fox. A man holding a big iron bar ran right through the fox toward the window, but two women stopped him and pulled him out of the way.

  The window exploded inward.

  Sherby found himself on the floor. The light was bright and the shutter closed again, and he lay in a litter of broken glass; his right hand was bleeding, and his head bleeding from somewhere up in his hair. He cried then for what felt to him like a very long time, listening to the bang, bang, bang from the big front door.

  When he got up, he took off his pajama shirt, wiped the blood away with it, blew his nose in it, and let it fall t
o the floor. “Where’s Smoky?” he asked.

  “In the dining room, Sherby. He is all right.”

  “Is my toast ready?”

  “It will be by the time that you reach the kitchen. I would not try to catch Smoky again right now, Sherby. The shots frightened him very much. He might hurt you.”

  “Okay,” Sherby said.

  Kneeling on a kitchen chair, he spread the last of the peanut butter on his toast. He found that he was no longer hungry, but he ate one piece anyway. Somebody banged on the security shutter of one of the kitchen windows and went away. Climbing the stairs to get to his bedroom, Sherby thought that he had seen Yeshua on the landing. Yeshua had smiled, his white teeth flashing. Then he was gone, and it seemed he had never been there at all. “Don’t do that,” Sherby told House.

  House did not answer.

  In his bedroom, Sherby slipped out of his pajama bottoms and pulled on underwear and long stockings, jeans, and his red sweater. He was not skillful at tying shoes, but that morning there had been green Wellingtons under the tree. Now, for the first time ever, he tugged them on; they were only a little bit too large, and they did not have laces to tie. His green knit cap kept the blood from trickling into his eyes.

  “You are not to go out, Sherby.”

  “Yes, I am,” Sherby announced firmly. “I’m going to get on Smoky and go someplace else.” He paused, thinking. “Down the mountain.” Smoky had been very unwilling to go down the cellar stairs, but Sherby felt pretty sure he would run faster down Lonely Mountain than up.

  House said nothing more, but Sherby could hear people running and shouting downstairs. It sounded as if House was showing the party again, and Sherby told himself that if it sounded like the party it couldn’t really be as bad as House had been pretending.

  It was hard to decide which toys and books to take; in the end he settled on the yo-yo with the blinky lights in its side and the copter, telling himself that he could make the copter fly after him when he didn’t want to carry it. He put on his big puffy down-filled coat, buttoned the easy buttons, slipped the yo-yo into one side pocket and the copter control into the other, and went out onto the landing again.