The Best of Subterranean

by William Schafer

  “They like you, too. They think you’re special.” Her hands tightened on the wheel. “I know why, too. I’m not a foolish old woman. I’m just as smart as you, boy. Especially when it comes to puzzles, and I’ve solved this one. I know where you came from.”

  He tried not to sigh, as the conversation swung back to dangerous territory. Perhaps he should be frightened, but after months of this, he was only tired.

  “Do they ask you about us?” she said. “When they take you off on your special walks? Do they ask after your family?”

  He nodded. “They ask if you are all well.”

  “And how we’re treating you?”

  He hesitated. It seemed an odd question, and he sensed the snare wire sneaking around his ankle again. After a moment, he shook his head. “They only ask if you’re well and how I’m doing. How I like school and that.”

  “They’re being careful,” she muttered under her breath. “But they still ask how he is. Checking up on him.”

  “Gran?”

  She tensed as he called her that. She always did these days and it was possible, just possible, that he used it more often because of that.

  “You understand what honesty is, don’t you, boy?”

  He nodded.

  “And respect for your elders.”

  It took him a half-second, but he nodded to this as well.

  “Then you know you have to tell the truth when an adult asks you a question. You need to be honest, even if it might get someone in trouble. Always remember that.”

  * * *

  While he liked all the elders in Cainsville, Mrs. Yates was his favorite, and he got the feeling he was hers, too. There had been a time when his grandmother had seemed almost jealous of her, when she would huff and sniff and say she thought Mrs. Yates was a very peculiar old woman. His parents had paid little attention—Gran had made it quite clear she thought everyone a little peculiar in Cainsville.

  “There are no churches,” she’d say. And his mother would sigh and explain—once again—that the town had started off too small for churches and by the time it was large enough, there was no place to put them, the settlement being nestled in the fork of a river, with marshy ground on the only open side. People still went to church. Just somewhere else. It was his mother whose family was from Cainsville. Gran only accompanied them because she didn’t like to be left out of family trips. She didn’t like the town and she certainly didn’t like Mrs. Yates. But that day, as she went off to visit his great-aunt, Gran sent him off with two dollars and a suggestion that he go see what Mrs. Yates was up to. Just be back by four so they could make it home in time for Sunday dinner.

  He went to the new diner first. That’s what everyone in Cainsville called it. The “new” diner, though it’d been there as long as he could remember. It still smelled new—the lemon-polished linoleum floors, the shiny red leather booths and even shinier chrome-plated chairs. The elders could often be found there, sipping tea by the windows as they watched the town go by. “Holding court,” his grandmother would sniff—watching for mischief and waiting for folks to come by and pay their respects, like they were lords and ladies. He didn’t see that at all. To him, they were simply there, in case anyone needed them.

  Today, he found Mrs. Yates in her usual place. He thought she’d be surprised to see him, but she only smiled, her old face lighting up as she motioned him over.

  “Mr. Shaw said he spotted your car coming into town,” she said. “But I scarce dared believe it. Did I hear the rest right, too? Your gran brought you?”

  He nodded.

  “Does she know you’re here?”

  “She said I could come talk to you if I wanted.”

  Then he got his look of surprise, a widening of her blue eyes. “Did she now?”

  He nodded again, and he expected her to be pleased, but while her eyes stayed kind, they narrowed too, as she surveyed him.

  “Is everything all right, Bobby?”

  He nodded without hesitation. Gran thought she was clever in her plan, that he would tattle on her to Mrs. Yates without realizing that’s exactly what she wanted. He had no idea what she hoped to gain, but if Gran wanted it, he wasn’t doing it.

  “Are you sure?” Mrs. Yates said, those bright eyes piercing his. “Nothing is amiss at home?”

  He shrugged. “My sister’s annoying, but that’s old news.”

  He thought she’d laugh, pat his arm and move on. That’s what other grown-ups would do. But Mrs. Yates was not like other grown-ups, which was probably why he liked her so much. She kept studying him until, finally, she squeezed his shoulder and said, “All right, Bobby. If that’s what you want. Now, do you have your list of gargoyles?”

  He pulled the tattered notebook from his back pocket. He’d been working on it since he was old enough to write. Cainsville had gargoyles. Lots of them. For protection, the old people would say with a wink. Every year, as part of the May Day festival, children could show the elders their lists of all the gargoyles they’d located, and the winner would take a prize. If you found all of them, you’d get an actual gargoyle modeled after you. That hardly ever happened—there were only a few in town. It sounded easy, finding them all, and it should be, except many hid. There were gargoyles you could only see in the day or at night or when the light hit a certain way or, sometimes, just by chance. He’d been compiling his list for almost four years and he only had half of them, but he’d still come in second place last year.

  “Let’s go gargoyle hunting.” Mrs. Yates got to her feet without groaning or pushing herself up, the way Gran and other old people did. She just stood, as easily as he would, and started for the door. “Now remember, I can’t point them out to you. That’s against the rules.” She leaned down and whispered, “But I might give you a hint for one. Just one.”

  Behind them, the other elders chuckled, and Bobby and Mrs. Yates headed out into town.

  * * *

  He found one more gargoyle to add to his list, and he didn’t even need Mrs. Yates’s hint, so she promised to keep it for next time. They were going back to the diner and the promise of milkshakes when Mrs. Yates glanced down the walkway leading behind the bank.

  “I think I hear the girls,” she said. “Why don’t you go play with them a while, and then bring them to the diner and we’ll all have milkshakes.” He hesitated.

  “You like Rose and Hannah, don’t you?”

  He nodded, and her smile broadened, telling him this was the right answer, so he added, “They’re nice,” to please her.

  “They’re very nice,” she said. “I like to see you playing with them, Bobby. It’s not easy for some children to find playmates. Some boys and girls are different, and other children don’t always like different. You’ll appreciate it more someday, when being different helps you stand out. But children don’t always want to stand out, do they?”

  He shook his head. She understood, as she always did. His parents lied and tried to pretend he wasn’t different. She acknowledged it and understood it and made him feel better about it.

  “Do you want to go play with the girls?”

  He nodded. He did like the girls—Hannah, at least. What bothered him was the prospect of sharing Mrs. Yates with them later. But it would make her happy, and he was still her special favorite, so he shouldn’t complain. “Off you go then. Come to the diner later and we’ll have those milkshakes.”

  * * *

  Mrs. Yates said Hannah and Rose were in the small park behind the bank. They were often there on the swings, and when he rounded the corner, that’s where he expected to see them. The swings were empty, though. He looked around the park, bordered by a fence topped with chimera heads. Walkways branched off in every compass direction. He heard Rose’s voice, coming from the one leading to Rowan Street.

  The girls crouched beside a toppled cardboard box. Hannah was reaching in and talking. He liked Hannah. Everyone liked Hannah. His mother said she reminded her of The Gnat, but she couldn’t be more wro
ng. Yes, Hannah was pretty, with brown curls and dark eyes and freckles across her nose. And, like The Gnat, she was always laughing, always bouncing around, chattering. But with Hannah, it was real. The Gnat only acted that way because it tricked people into liking her.

  Rose was different. Very different. She was a year younger than Bobby and Hannah, but she acted like a teenager, and she looked at you like she could see right through you and wasn’t sure she liked what she saw. She had black straight hair and weirdly cold blue eyes that blasted through him. She wasn’t pretty and she never giggled—she rarely even laughed, unless she was with Hannah.

  Rose saw him coming first, though it always felt like “saw” wasn’t the right word. Rose seemed to sense him coming. She stood and when she fixed those blue eyes on him, he quailed as he always did, falling back a step before reminding himself he had done nothing wrong. Rose only tilted her head, and when she spoke, her rough voice was kind.

  “Are you okay, Bobby?”

  “Sure.”

  Her lips pursed, as if calling him a liar, then she waved for him to join them. As he stepped up beside the girls, he was chagrined to realize that as much as he’d grown in the last few months, Rose had grown more. She might be only seven and a girl, but he barely came up to her eyebrows. She moved back to let him stand beside Hannah.

  “See what we found?” Hannah said.

  It was a cat, with four kittens, all tabbies like the momma, except the smallest, which was ink black.

  “Show him what you can do,” Rose said.

  Hannah glanced up, her forehead creasing with worry.

  “Go on,” Rose said. “Bobby can keep a secret. Show him.”

  He looked at Rose, and she nodded, giving him a small smile—a sympathetic smile, as if she knew what he was going through and wanted Hannah to share her secret to make him feel better. He bristled. He didn’t want her sympathy. Didn’t need it. But he did want the secret, so he let Rose cajole Hannah until she blurted it out.

  “I can talk to animals.” Hannah paused, face reddening. “No, that doesn’t sound right. It’s not like Dr. Dolittle. I don’t hear them talk. Animals don’t talk. But they do…” She turned to Rose. “What’s the word you used?”

  “Communicate.”

  Hannah nodded. “They communicate. I can understand them, and they can understand me.”

  He must have seemed skeptical, because her face went the color of apples in autumn.

  “See?” she hissed at Rose. “This is why I can’t tell anyone. They’ll think I’m crazy.”

  “I don’t think you’re crazy,” he said. “But you’re right—you probably shouldn’t tell anyone else.”

  Hannah’s gaze dropped, and he felt bad. Like maybe he should tell her about the dreams and how he admitted it to Gran, and what happened next.

  Did they know what happened? His grandmother always said Cainsville was a “backwater nowhere” town, where they lived like they weren’t sixty miles from one of the biggest cities in America. Gran said they were ignorant, and they liked it that way. They didn’t read newspapers, didn’t listen to the news or even watch it on television. That wasn’t true. He’d once told Mrs. Yates about going to the site of the World Fair, and she’d known all about it. She’d told him stories about the fair, the sights and sounds and even the smells. He’d gotten an A on his paper and his teacher said it was almost like he’d been there. He’d asked Mrs. Yates if she’d been there, and she’d laughed and said she wasn’t that old. No one was. So people in Cainsville weren’t ignorant, but he supposed that knowing about the 1893 World Fair wasn’t the same as knowing what his teacher called “current events.”

  “You shouldn’t tell everyone,” Rose said to Hannah. “Definitely not anyone outside Cainsville. But no one here will think you’re crazy.” She nudged Hannah with her sneaker. “Tell him about the black kitten.”

  Hannah took more prodding, but when Bobby expressed an interest, she finally stood and said, “He’s sick. Momma Cat is worried he’s going to die. He doesn’t get enough to eat because he’s smaller than the others.”

  “He’s not that much smaller.”

  “He’s different,” Rose said. “That’s why they won’t let him eat very much. I think he’s a matagot. That’s what we were talking about when you came up.”

  “A matagot?”

  “Magician’s cat,” Rose said, as matter-of-factly as if she’d said the cat was a Siamese. “It’s a spirit that’s taken the form of a black cat.”

  “They say that if you keep one and treat it well, it will reward you with a gold piece every day,” Hannah said.

  “Gold?” he said.

  Something in his tone made Rose tense—or maybe it was the way he looked at the black kitten. Hannah only giggled.

  “It’s not true, silly,” Hannah said. “Magic doesn’t work that way. Not real magic.”

  “What do you know about real magic?”

  She shrugged. “Enough. I know it can make gargoyles disappear in daylight and tomato plants grow straight and true. I know it can let some people read omens—like old Mrs. Carew—and some see the future, like Rose’s Nana Walsh.”

  He turned to Rose. “Your grandmother can see the future?”

  “Futures,” she said. “There’s more than one. It’s all about choices.”

  He didn’t understand that, but pushed on. “If I asked her to see my futures—”

  “You can’t,” Hannah cut in. “Not unless you can talk to ghosts. I’m not sure anyone can talk to ghosts. If there are ghosts.” She turned to Rose, as if she was the older, wiser girl.

  “There are,” Rose said. “Those with the sight sometimes say they see them. Others can, too. But most times when a person says they’re seeing ghosts it’s their imagination. Even if you can talk to them I’m not sure why you’d want to.”

  Hannah nodded, and his gaze shot from one girl to the other, unable to believe they were talking about such things seriously. Kids at school would call them babies for believing in magic. His parents would call it ungodly. His grandmother would probably call them changelings.

  “About the cat. The…matagot.” He stumbled over the foreign word.

  “We don’t know if it is one,” Rose said. “Hannah says his mother thinks he’s strange. She still loves him, though.”

  “As she should,” Hannah said. “There’s nothing wrong with strange.”

  Rose nodded. “But we’re worried.”

  “Very worried.” Hannah knelt beside the box where the mother cat was licking the black kitten’s head. “Momma Cat is even more worried. Aren’t you?”

  The cat mrrowed deep in its throat and looked up at Hannah. Then she nosed the kitten away from her side.

  “I think she’s going to drive it off,” Bobby said. “They do that sometimes. With the weak, the ones that are different.”

  Hannah shook her head, curls bouncing. “No, she’s asking me to take it.”

  “You should,” Rose said. “Your parents would let you.”

  “I know. I just hate taking a kitten from its mother.”

  The cat nosed the kitten again and meowed. Hannah nodded, said, “I understand,” and very gently lifted the little black ball in both hands. The cat meowed again, but it didn’t sound like protest. She gave the black kitten one last look, then shifted, letting its siblings fill the empty space against her belly.

  “You’ll need to feed it with a dropper,” Rose said. “We can get books at the library and talk to the vet when she comes back through town.”

  Hannah nodded. “I’ll take him home first and ask Mom to watch him.”

  They got to the end of the walkway before they seemed to realize he wasn’t following. They turned.

  “Do you want to come with us?” Hannah asked.

  He did, but he wanted the milkshake with Mrs. Yates too, and if the girls were busy, he’d get the old woman all to himself.

  “I told Mrs. Yates I’d meet her at the diner,” he said, not mentioning
the milkshakes.

  Rose nodded. “Then you should do that. We’ll see you later.”

  “Is your family coming for Samhain?” Hannah asked.

  “I think we are.”

  Hannah smiled. “I hope so.”

  “Make sure you do,” Rose said. “It’s more fun when you’re here.”

  He couldn’t tell if she meant it or was just being nice, but it felt good to hear her say it and even better when Hannah nodded enthusiastically. He said he’d be back for Samhain, and went to find Mrs. Yates.

  * * *

  On the way home, his grandmother asked about his visit with Mrs. Yates. She was trying to get him to admit that he’d tattled on her. Even if he had, he certainly wouldn’t admit it. His grandmother might say he was too smart for his age, but sometimes she acted as if he was dumber than The Gnat. Finally, she pulled off the highway, turned in her seat and said, “Did Mrs. Yates ask how things were at home?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what did you tell her?”

  “That they were fine.”

  She put her hand on his shoulder. It was the first time since he’d admitted to the dreams that she’d voluntarily touched him, except to pinch or slap.

  “You know it’s a sin to lie, Bobby.”

  “I do.”

  “Then tell me the truth. Did you say more?”

  He hesitated. Nibbled his lip. Then said, “I told her Natalie was being a pest.”

  Her mouth pressed into a thin line. “That’s not what I mean.”

  “But you asked—”

  “Did you say anything more?”

  “No.” He hid his smile. “Not a word.”

  * * *

  A month later, as Samhain drew near, he mentioned it over dinner. “We aren’t going,” his mother said quietly.

  “What?”

  “Gran feels Cainsville isn’t a good influence on you right now.” He shot a look at his grandmother, who returned a small, smug smile and ate another forkful of peas.

  “Remember what happened when you visited last month?” his father said. “You came home and you were quite a little terror.”

  That was a lie. His grandmother had punished him twice as much after they got back, making up twice as many stories about him misbehaving. He’d thought she was just angry because her plan—whatever it had been—failed. Gran’s smile widened, her false teeth shining as she watched him. “I don’t care,” the Gnat said. “I hate Cainsville. It’s boring.” His grandmother patted her head. “I agree.