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

by Gene Wolfe

  Knecht Rupprecht was there, standing at the head of the stairs—but a new Knecht Rupprecht, hideously transformed. Shreds of decaying flesh dangled from his skull face now, his eyes were spheres of fire, and he was taller than ever; in place of his bundle of switches he held a sword with a blade longer than Sherby and wider than Sherby’s whole body.

  People were clustered at the foot of the stairs staring up at him, arguing and urging each other forward. After a second or two, Sherby decided it might be better to go down the back stairs to the kitchen, but as he was about to turn away something very strange happened to Knecht Rupprecht: he vanished, reappeared, roared so wildly that Sherby took three steps backward, dimmed, and dropped his sword.

  The lights went out.

  Something knocked Sherby down, and something else stepped on his fingers.

  A flashlight beam danced on the ceiling before it too winked out.

  Sherby tried to crawl on his hands and knees. Somebody tripped over him and said, “Shit! Oh, shit!”

  Something was burning in the hall downstairs; from where he lay, Sherby could not see the flames, but he saw the red light of them and smelled smoke.

  Thick, soft, warm arms scooped him up. “Little boy,” the owner of the arms said in a voice like a girl’s. “Little cute boy. Don’t cry.”

  Outside the moon was up, and some of House’s security shutters were lying on the snow-covered flower beds. Behind them, their windows glowed with orange light. Thick black smoke was coming through the shutters over his mother’s and father’s bedroom windows.

  Smoky galloped through a milling crowd of people. One threw a bottle at him, and there were popping noises. Smoky stumbled and fell, tried to get up, and fell again. Someone hit him with a snowball, and someone else with a big stick.

  “You want to hit him, little boy?” the man holding Sherby asked. Sherby could feel the man’s whiskers scraping his ear. “You can hit him if you want to.”

  Sherby said nothing, but the man set him down anyway. “You can hit him if you want to,” the man said again in his girl’s voice. “Go ahead.”

  It would be better, Sherby thought, to do what they said. To be one. He got closer, not looking at the man behind him, stooped, and tried to scrape up enough of the trampled snow for a snowball. It stung his fingers and there wasn’t enough, so he found a rock and threw that instead.

  The fat man picked him up again. “I’m going to call you Chris,” he told Sherby, “ ’cause you’re my Christmas present. You can call me Corporal Charlie, Chris.” He was bigger than anybody Sherby had ever seen before, not as tall as Knecht Rupprecht but wider than Sherby’s bed. “You come along with me, Chris. We’ll go on back to my van. You got cut, didn’t you?”

  Sherby said, “Uh-huh.”

  “I’ll put a little splash of iodine on that when we get back home. We—”

  House’s roof fell in with a crash as he spoke. A great cloud of swirling sparks rose into the sky, and Sherby said, “Oooh!”

  “Yeah, that’s somethin’, ain’t it? I seen it before. All these soldiers here are meaning to do some more, but you and me are going home.” Corporal Charlie chuckled. “We’ll take off our clothes and have some fun, Chris. Then we’ll go to bed.”

  Corporal Charlie took up the whole front seat of the van, so Sherby rode in back with furniture and some dresses and a lot of other things. There was a thing there lying on some coats that Sherby recognized, and when he was sure that it was what he thought it was, he traded the copter control for it.

  That night at Corporal Charlie’s house, when Corporal Charlie was asleep and Sherby was supposed to be asleep on Corporal Charlie’s smelly old sofa, Sherby got the thing he had found in the van out again. “Merry Christmas, Mouse,” he said to the shiny round lens in front. “It’s me, Sherby.”

  But Mouse was quiet, still, and cold.

  Sherby put her under the sofa cushion.

  Christmas was funny, Sherby thought, snuggling underneath the coats. Christmas was happy and sad, green and red, real and fake, all mixed together. “I don’t like it,” he muttered to himself, but as soon as he had said it, he knew it was not true. He wished—somehow—that he had been nicer to Santa Claus, even if Santa Claus was not real.

  AFTERWORD

  Do you know how M. R. James came to write all those great old ghost stories? He wrote one a year, no less and no more, to read to his family at Christmas. We associate ghost stories with Halloween now—see Neil Gaiman’s marvelous “October in the Chair”—but ghosts at Christmas are far older. The three seen by Ebenezer Scrooge are not the beginning but almost the end of a lengthy tradition. If you were to return as a ghost, wouldn’t you rather revisit your family at Christmas?

  So I hope you noticed the ghosts, and that you noticed (as only a few readers do) that there is an anti-Santa, too. Poor Sherby rejects Santa Claus and gets someone much worse.

  BED AND BREAKFAST

  I

  know an old couple who live near Hell. They have a small farm, and to supplement the meager income it provides (and to use up its bounty of chickens, ducks, and geese, of beefsteak tomatoes, bull-nose peppers, and roastin’ ears) open their spare bedrooms to paying guests. From time to time, I am one of those guests.

  Dinner comes with the room if one arrives before five, and leftovers, of which there are generally enough to feed two or three more persons, will be cheerfully warmed up afterward—provided that one gets there before nine, at which hour the old woman goes to bed. After nine (and I arrived long after nine last week) guests are free to forage in the kitchen and prepare whatever they choose for themselves.

  My own choices were modest: coleslaw, cold chicken, fresh bread, country butter, and buttermilk. I was just sitting down to this light repast when I heard the doorbell ring. I got up, thinking to answer it and save the old man the trouble, and heard his limping gait in the hallway. There was a murmur of voices, the old man’s and someone else’s; the second sounded like a deep-voiced woman’s, so I remained standing.

  Their conversation lasted longer than I had expected, and although I could not distinguish a single word, it seemed to me that the old man was saying, “No, no, no,” and the woman proposing various alternatives.

  At length he showed her into the kitchen, tall and tawny haired, with a figure rather too voluptuous to be categorized as athletic, and one of those interesting faces that one calls beautiful only after at least half an hour of study; I guessed her age near thirty. The old man introduced us with rustic courtesy, told her to make herself at home, and went back to his book.

  “He’s very kind, isn’t he?” she said. Her name was Eira something.

  I concurred, calling him a very good soul indeed.

  “Are you going to eat all that?” She was looking hungrily at the chicken. I assured her I would have only a piece or two. (I never sleep well after a heavy meal.) She opened the refrigerator, found the milk, and poured herself a glass that she pressed against her cheek. “I haven’t any money. I might as well tell you.”

  That was not my affair, and I said so.

  “I don’t. I saw the sign, and I thought there must be a lot of work to do around such a big house, washing windows and making beds, and I’d offer to do it for food and a place to sleep.”

  “He agreed?” I was rather surprised.

  “No.” She sat down and drank half her milk, seeming to pour it down her throat with no need of swallowing. “He said I could eat and stay in the empty room—they’ve got an empty room tonight—if nobody else comes. But if somebody does, I’ll have to leave.” She found a drumstick and nipped it with strong white teeth. “I’ll pay them when I get the money, but naturally he didn’t believe me. I don’t blame him. How much is it?”

  I told her, and she said it was very cheap.

  “Yes,” I said, “but you have to consider the situation. They’re off the highway, with no way of letting people know they’re here. They get a few people on their way to Hell, and a few demons
going out on assignments or returning. Regulars, as they call them. Other than that”—I shrugged—“eccentrics like me and passersby like you.”

  “Did you say Hell?” She put down her chicken leg.

  “Yes. Certainly.”

  “Is there a town around here called Hell?”

  I shook my head. “It has been called a city, but it’s a region, actually. The Infernal Empire. Hades. Gehenna, where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched. You know.”

  She laughed, the delighted crow of a large, bored child who has been entertained at last.

  I buttered a second slice of bread. The bread is always very good, but this seemed better than usual.

  “ ‘Abandon hope, you who enter here.’ Isn’t that supposed to be the sign over the door?”

  “More or less,” I said. “Over the gate Dante used, at any rate. It wasn’t this one, so the inscription here may be quite different, if there’s an inscription at all.”

  “You haven’t been there.”

  I shook my head. “Not yet.”

  “But you’re going”—she laughed again, a deep, throaty, very feminine chuckle this time—“and it’s not very far.”

  “Three miles, I’m told, by the old county road. A little less, two perhaps, if you were to cut across the fields, which almost no one does.”

  “I’m not going,” she said.

  “Oh, but you are. So am I. Do you know what they do in Heaven?”

  “Fly around playing harps?”

  “There’s the Celestial Choir, which sings the praises of God throughout all eternity. Everyone else beholds His face.”

  “That’s it?” She was skeptical but amused.

  “That’s it. It’s fine for contemplative saints. They go there, and they love it. They’re the only people suited to it, and it suits them. The unbaptized go to Limbo. All the rest of us go to Hell; and for a few, this is the last stop before they arrive.”

  I waited for her reply, but she had a mouthful of chicken. “There are quite a number of entrances, as the ancients knew. Dodona, Ephyra, Acheron, Averno, and so forth. Dante went in through the crater of Vesuvius, or so rumor had it; to the best of my memory, he never specified the place in his poem.”

  “You said demons stay here.”

  I nodded. “If it weren’t for them, the old people would have to close, I imagine.”

  “But you’re not a demon and neither am I. Isn’t it pretty dangerous for us? You certainly don’t look . . . I don’t mean to be offensive—”

  “I don’t look courageous.” I sighed. “Nor am I. Let me concede that at once, because we need to establish it from the very beginning. I’m innately cautious, and have been accused of cowardice more than once. But don’t you understand that courage has nothing to do with appearances? You must watch a great deal of television; no one would say what you did who did not. Haven’t you ever seen a real hero on the news? Someone who had done something extraordinarily brave? The last one I saw looked very much like the black woman on the pancake mix used to, yet she’d run into a burning tenement to rescue three children. Not her own children, I should add.”

  Eira got up and poured herself a second glass of milk. “I said I didn’t want to hurt your feelings, and I meant it. Just to start with, I can’t afford to tick off anybody just now—I need help. I’m sorry. I really am.”

  “I’m not offended. I’m simply telling you the truth, that you cannot judge by appearances. One of the bravest men I’ve known was short and plump and inclined to be careless, not to say slovenly, about clothes and shaving and so on. A friend said that you couldn’t imagine anyone less military, and he was right. Yet that fat little man had served in combat with the navy and the marines, and with the Israeli Army.”

  “But isn’t it dangerous? You said you weren’t brave to come here.”

  “In the first place, one keeps one’s guard up here. There are precautions, and I take them. In the second, they’re not on duty, so to speak. If they were to commit murder or set the house on fire, the old people would realize immediately who had done it and shut down; so while they are here, they’re on their good behavior.”

  “I see.” She picked up another piece of chicken. “Nice demons.”

  “Not really. But the old man tells me that they usually overpay and are, well, businesslike in their dealings. Those are the best things about evil. It generally has ready money, and doesn’t expect to be trusted. There’s a third reason, as well. Do you want to hear it?”

  “Sure.”

  “Here one can discern them, and rather easily for the most part. When you’ve identified a demon, his ability to harm you is vastly reduced. But past this farm, identification is far more difficult; the demons vanish in the surging tide of mortal humanity that we have been taught by them to call life, and one tends to relax somewhat. Yet scarcely a week goes by in which one does not encounter a demon unaware.”

  “All right, what about the people on their way to Hell? They’re dead, aren’t they?”

  “Some are, and some aren’t.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Exactly what I said. Some are and some are not. It can be difficult to tell. They aren’t ghosts in the conventional sense, you understand, any more than they are corpses, but the people who have left the corpse and the ghost behind.”

  “Would you mind if I warmed up a couple of pieces of this, and toasted some of that bread? We could share it.”

  I shook my head. “Not in the least, but I’m practically finished.”

  She rose, and I wondered whether she realized just how graceful she was. “I’ve got a dead brother, my brother Eric.”

  I said that I was sorry to hear it.

  “It was a long time ago, when I was a kid. He was four, I think, and he fell off the balcony. Mother always said he was an angel now, an angel up in Heaven. Do dead people really get to be angels if they’re good?”

  “I don’t know; it’s an interesting question. There’s a suggestion in the Book of Tobit that the Archangel Raphael is actually an ancestor of Tobit’s. Angel means ‘messenger,’ as you probably know, so if God were to employ one of the blest as a messenger, he or she could be regarded as an angel, I’d think.”

  “Devils are fallen angels, aren’t they? I mean, if they exist.” She dropped three pieces of chicken into a frying pan, hesitated, and added a fourth. “So if good people really get recycled as angels, shouldn’t the bad ones get to be devils or demons?”

  I admitted that it seemed plausible.

  She lit the stove with a kitchen match, turning the burner higher than I would have. “You sound like you come here pretty often. You must talk to them at breakfast, or whenever. You ought to know.”

  “Since you don’t believe me, wouldn’t it be logical for you to believe my admission of ignorance?”

  “No way!” She turned to face me, a forefinger upraised. “You’ve got to be consistent, and coming here and talking to lots of demons, you’d know.”

  I protested that information provided by demons could not be relied upon.

  “But what do you think? What’s your best guess? See, I want to find out if there’s any hope for us. You said we’re going to Hell, both of us, and that dude, the Italian—”

  “Dante,” I supplied.

  “Dante says the sign over the door says don’t hope. I went to a school like that for a couple years, come to think of it.”

  “Were they merely strict, or actually sadistic?”

  “Mean. But the teachers lived better than we did—a lot better. If there’s a chance of getting to be one yourself, we could always hope for that.”

  At that moment, we heard a knock at the front door, and her shoulders sagged. “There goes my free room. I guess I’ve got to be going. It was fun talking to you; it really was.”

  I suggested she finish her chicken first.

  “Probably I should. I’ll have to find another place to stay, though, and I’d like to get going bef
ore they throw me out. It’s pretty late already.” She hesitated. “Would you buy my wedding ring? I’ve got it right here.” Her thumb and forefinger groped the watch pocket of her blue jeans.

  I took a final bite of coleslaw and pushed back my plate. “It doesn’t matter, actually, whether I want to buy your ring or not. I can’t afford to. Someone in town might, perhaps.”

  A booming voice in the hallway drowned out the old man’s; I knew that the new guest was a demon before I saw him or heard a single intelligible word.

  She held up her ring, a white-gold band set with two small diamonds. “I had a job, but he never let me keep anything from it and I finally caught on—if I kept waiting till I had some money or someplace to go, I’d never get away. So I split, just walked away with nothing but the clothes I had on.”

  “Today?” I inquired.

  “Yesterday. Last night I slept in a wrecked truck in a ditch. You probably don’t believe that, but it’s the truth. All night I was afraid somebody’d come to tow it away. There were furniture pads in the back, and I lay on a couple and pulled three more on top of me, and they were pretty warm.”

  “If you can sell your ring,” I said, “there’s a Holiday Inn in town. I should warn you that a great many demons stay there, just as you would expect.”

  The kitchen door opened. Following the old man was one of the largest I have ever seen, swag bellied and broad hipped; he must have stood at least six-foot-six.

  “This’s our kitchen,” the old man told him.

  “I know,” the demon boomed. “I stopped off last year. Naturally you don’t remember, Mr. Hopsack. But I remembered you and this wonderful place of yours. I’ll scrounge around and make out all right.”

  The old man gave Eira a significant look and jerked his head toward the door, at which she nodded almost imperceptibly. I said, “She’s going to stay with me, Len. There’s plenty of room in the bed. You don’t object, I trust?”

  He did, of course, though he was much too diffident to say so; at last he managed, “Double’s six dollars more.”