by Neil Gaiman
“I am going to give you a question to ask her, Topaz. Wait for her answer. And then ask her again. Then you will know. It may not be as simple as the puzzle, but I believe that the little girl who I have seen in Sunday school; who is so sweet that she loves to talk about her hamster—Cocoa Malt?—is that your hamster’s name?”
“Cocoa Puff” Topaz says, astounded. He knows her hamster! He knows her, then, better than most, better than most anyone outside the family.
“Cocoa Puff. A sweet girl that loves little Cocoa Puff that much, a hamster, will do what she can to save the life of an innocent man. Ask her, your sister, this question, ask again, and then you will know.”
One blue eye open, the other sealed shut. She feels so sorry for him. She thinks of Aslan, in the Lion and the Witch and the Wardrobe, tied up by the White Witch and tortured. She doesn’t want to help the White Witch. Except that a lion could eat her in one snap! with his jaws and she would be like the mouse in the trap.
“Ask her how she knew,” he says “How she knew what?” “Ask her how she knew that it was me. That I did the terrible things you and she have accused me of. Killing…children. Ask her how she knows that. Let her tell you, and then repeat back what she said and ask her if its true. She will say no. And that is how you will know she is a liar.”
Topaz’ brain feels very fuzzy all of the sudden. She is very cold. She can see blood on the edge of Brother Johnson’s lips as he starts to cough again. She thinks of Cocoa Puff in the trap. She feels like she might vomit.
“Then again,” he says, a smile cracking his lips again, “maybe you already know, Topaz. Maybe you already know who is the Liar and who is the Truth-teller. You have seen me in Sunday School, you have sat on my lap and I have told you stories from the Bible. Have I ever been anything but good? And your sister, has she ever been anything but bad?”
She stares at him. “Sweet little Topaz, untie me.”
She inches closer to him. “I almost have this one behind my hands- if you can just- use those little fingers to un-do this knot—just help me to loosen it.”
She is closer—she can smell him, she can smell Ruby, she can see he is breathing faster now, his belly up and down. And she is frightened—very frightened, the blood on his mouth, she thinks of the fairy tale and big mouth “The better to eat you with, my dear!”
She hears it in her head like a call ringing and ringing in her head, an alarm clock to wake up now, wake up, she is hypnotized like Aurora but the alarm says, “the bloodier the mouth—the better to eat you!”
“Come closer,” he says. “Help me.” Instead she turns and runs.
It is dark now. They are in bed and there is school tomorrow. Ruby is not asleep. But Topaz is supposed to be. But Ruby knows she is not. It is so quiet. It is so dark.
“I went down there while you were asleep,” Topaz says. She is glad to finally tell her. Ruby always knows everything anyway, she might as well tell her before she went down and the beast said.
“Hmm,” says Ruby, like it is nothing. “I hope you didn’t get too close. I took the tape off his mouth last night. He doesn’t have many teeth left, but he can still bite.”
“He said you were a liar.” Topaz feels brave now. Topaz is going to be clever. Ruby snorts. “Of course he said that. What else would he say? Do you think he would admit to you all those things he’s done? When he wants to do it to you, too?”
Topaz swallows. “How do you know it is him?” “What?” “How do you know that he is the one, that he is the one who killed the children?” Topaz can see Ruby’s face lit in the moonlight—half of it—the other half in shadow, her eyes shining like those of a cat.
“I know…because…I know. That’s all.” “Tell me how.”
Ruby makes a sound like a half-laugh. “Okay, baby. I’ll tell you how.”
She tells: “I know there is a darkness in people who pretend to be light. I know there is blood behind the smiles. I know there is evil cloaked in good. I know that people think I am bad, and perhaps I am. But perhaps they prefer to think me bad and to call me that, than to see that I am a mirror of their hypocrisy. They call me a liar, but they are the liars. I want them to know that I see that they are liars. I want them to see that I SEE their evil with my own.” It was like a whip and a spit, her voice, and it finishes sharp. “I want them to hurt.”
Ruby clears her throat. And then Ruby begins to speak with a voice Topaz has never heard. It is clear and sweet like a bell, it sounds like she was testifying in Church—which Ruby had never done. It is a pretty sound, and Topaz is taken by it, away with it.
“And hurting they are. For the children are being taken. I know that children were being taken, and it seemed to me so strange in a place that pretends to be a place of God, to have an evil so strong lurking and taking what is sweetest and best. And my heart was heavy with sorrow, and my eyes were laden with tears. And I was down the hill, walking in that patch of trees like I sometimes do, and like the Prophet, I had a vision. You know the story of the Prophet and his first vision, right?”
Topaz nods, though in her bed in the dark, she knows Ruby can’t see. “I had a vision, too. Only the Prophet knelt to pray and asked which church was true, and I knelt to pray and asked how could God let something like this happen? How can He let bad pass as good, and good pass as bad? How can Heavenly Father be so cruel as to let children suffer at the hands of illusion and have their throats torn open by Beasts that masquerade as Brothers? And then I saw a vision. An Angel. An angel with white wings appeared before me and said that God had bestowed me with the power to see—for God did not allow this to happen, but it was the work of the Devil—and I was to be an agent of God, and to find this creature, and slay him. And then the Angel said that he would take me to see where the Beast, which paraded as a man, kept his lair. And the Angel led me, through the woods—and there—I saw the Beast, with the bones of the children. And I knew, then, what I must do.”
Topaz knows the story of the Prophet was true. That the Prophet had had a vision, and seen an angel, that people saw angels sometimes—and yes—it made sense that God would want to have this beast slain. But why would Heavenly Father have Ruby do it? Topaz tries to collect her thoughts and keep them straight and put them in order, but they keep wriggling around and becoming slippery and airy. Ice water steam. All the same things in different forms. Which is true? She tries to remember what she was supposed to ask. She tries to remember what she was supposed to do.
“So, you know that he is the Beast because the Angel told you,” Topaz says. She is prepared to believe. One must believe when angels appear.
Ruby starts to laugh. Then more laughter. It is mean laughter, not the kind that made Topaz think she had actually said something funny. This made her feel small and tight inside.
“Oh, you stupid, stupid baby,” Ruby says. Then she is out of her bed, and she is in Topaz’ bed, still with the laughter. She hugs Topaz as she laughs. “You can’t believe all that crap that the Church tells you. There aren’t any angels.”
“But then…how?” “How what?” “How do you know?” “I know because I know.” “How?” “How?” Ruby is incredulous that Topaz is pressing her on this, or any point. Ruby releases her from the hug and sits up. But Topaz is more than Topaz ever has been before, and she knows it. Topaz is brave now, and she is figuring things out. She is clever and she is a sweet girl, and she can do what is good and right. She has to keep asking.
“Yes, if not the Angel, if the Angel is a lie…” and as Topaz says it, she knows. Ruby has just told her that she is a liar. Ruby is the liar! And of course, Topaz has always known that. And perhaps a liar can only lie. Topaz must turn away now, and try and figure out what she could do.
But Ruby surprises her. Ruby puts her arms around Topaz again and holds her close. And Ruby is crying.
Topaz holds her, in return.
Maybe Ruby will let him go, after all.
Ruby whispers in her ear. “I know because he did it to me
.” “What?” “He did to me. Years ago. He did it to me.”
Ruby holds her even closer now. And cries and cries. Topaz wants to just let her cry, but she can’t because it doesn’t fit. “But,” says Topaz, into Ruby’s cries.
Ruby doesn’t hear so Topaz says again, louder, “But Ruby…”
“What?” Ruby sobs. “Well, you’re alive and the person they are looking for…doesn’t he kill? Isn’t it that he kills children? He kills them.”
Ruby pulls back and looks at Topaz. She wipes her eyes. “Do you think I’m telling you the truth, little Topaz? Do you think I’m lying? Or do you think he is lying?”
Topaz thinks Ruby is lying. But should she say? There is something in Ruby’s voice that is a threat, now. Should she say? She shouldn’t.
“No. Yes. I mean, yes. No.” She can’t remember the order. She needs to lie for herself, for Cocoa Puff, for…
“Which is it?” Ruby asks.
Topaz can’t remember the order. She should say, “Yes,” she is telling the truth, “No,” she is not lying, but which came when? And she doesn’t have time with Ruby.
“I don’t know,” Topaz says. “No, you don’t. And you just better pray to Heavenly Father that you never do.” Ruby leaves Topaz’s bed. She blows her nose. She starts moving around like she is going to leave the room.
“Are you going to kill him?” Topaz asks.
Ruby doesn’t answer. It is quiet for so long Topaz thinks Ruby might have gone to sleep. But then Ruby leaps over like a panther in the darkness and is next to her, crouched low. Topaz bites her tongue to keep from screaming. Ruby’s eyes are shiny and wild in the moonlight. “Do you want me to let him go?”
Topaz stares at her sister. Ruby’s mouth is slightly ajar and her teeth are bared. Like she may just bite her face off.
“You say the word, and I’ll let him go. Right now. Tonight. I will set him free. I will let him go. You think I am lying? You think he is an okay guy? It is you he is after, now. It is you he will hurt, now, not me. You want me to let him go?”
Topaz doesn’t know what to say. She is biting her tongue. She is not going to say because she doesn’t know. What if Ruby lets him go—and Ruby is telling the truth? What if he came and found her then, and hurt her? She saw his bloody mouth—the better to eat her with—that bloody blue eye. He kills children—her mother cries—the last one was five. Is it him? Did he do it?
Ruby’s hands are suddenly around Topaz’s face, squeezing her cheeks hard. “Baby, baby, baby. I can kill him or I can let him go. YOU decide. You.”
Topaz says nothing, and Ruby keeps squeezing her baby sister’s face in together, pressing in on her jaw. Topaz’s teeth in her tongue, Ruby’s hands printing into her face.
It hurts—it hurts—it hurts—but she knows that it is nothing compared to the Beast—to Brother Johnson—to what Ruby had done to him. Or what the Beast could do to her, to them both, if he were that. If he were the man that did such things.
“You say ‘yes,’ I let him go. You say, ‘no,’ he dies tonight. You decide, baby. You. All that power. Life or death. You.”
It hurts. It hurts. It hurts. Pressing in. Blood in her mouth now as she bites down on her tongue, fingers hard like claws into her face.
“Yes or no, baby. Yes or no. One or the other. You say, right now.” It hurts.
It hurts.
It hurts.
The Paperhanger
BY WILLIAM GAY
There are few things more shattering than an unsolved crime. There’s no closure. No rest. No way to get free of the ghosts, or the hope. Until you go all the way.
William Gay’s harsh, ultrarealist, entirely unsentimental Southern Gothic style has allowed critics to invoke both William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor without looking silly. To me, Jim Thompson’s work also comes to mind, in its working-class post-Dust Bowl scar-tissue bleakness.
Let’s just call it great, and leave it at that.
The vanishing of the doctor’s wife’s child in broad daylight was an event so cataclysmic that it forever divided time into the then and the now, the before and the after. In later years, fortified with a pitcher of silica-dry vodka martinis, she had cause to replay the events preceding the disappearance. They were tawdry and banal but in retrospect freighted with menace, a foreshadowing of what was to come, like a footman or a fool preceding a king into a room.
She had been quarreling with the paperhanger. Her four-year-old daughter, Zeineb, was standing directly behind the paperhanger where he knelt smoothing air bubbles out with a wide plastic trowel. Zeineb had her fingers in the paper-hanger’s hair. The paperhanger’s hair was shoulder length and the color of flax and the child was delighted with it. The paperhanger was accustomed to her doing this and he did not even turn around. He just went on with his work. His arms were smooth and brown and corded with muscle and in the light that fell upon the paperhanger through stained-glass panels the doctor’s wife could see that they were lightly downed with fine golden hair. She studied these arms bemusedly while she formulated her thoughts.
You tell me so much a roll, she said. The doctor’s wife was from Pakistan and her speech was still heavily accented. I do not know single-bolt rolls and double-bolt rolls. You tell me double-bolt price but you are installing single-bolt rolls. My friend has told me. It is cost me perhaps twice as much.
The paperhanger, still on his knees, turned. He smiled up at her. He had pale blue eyes. I did tell you so much a roll, he said. You bought the rolls.
The child, not yet vanished, was watching the paperhanger’s eyes. She was a scaled-down clone of the mother, the mother viewed through the wrong end of a telescope, and the paperhanger suspected that as she grew, neither her features nor her expression would alter, she would just grow larger, like something being aired up with a hand pump.
And you are leave lumps, the doctor’s wife said, gesturing at the wall.
I do not leave lumps, the paperhanger said. You’ve seen my work before. These are not lumps. The paper is wet. The paste is wet. Everything will shrink down and flatten out. He smiled again. He had clean even teeth. And besides, he said, I gave you my special cockteaser rate. I don’t know what you’re complaining about.
Her mouth worked convulsively. She looked for a moment as if he’d slapped her. When words did come they came in a fine spray of spit. You are trash, she said. You are scum.
Hands on knees, he was pushing erect, the girl’s dark fingers trailing out of his hair. Don’t call me trash, he said, as if it were perfectly all right to call him scum, but he was already talking to her back. She had whirled on her heels and went twisting her hips through an arched doorway into the cathedraled living room. The paperhanger looked down at the child. Her face glowed with a strange constrained glee, as if she and the paperhanger shared some secret the rest of the world hadn’t caught on to yet.
In the living room the builder was supervising the installation of a chandelier that depended from the vaulted ceiling by a long golden chain. The builder was a short bearded man dancing about, showing her the features of the chandelier, smiling obsequiously. She gave him a flat angry look. She waved a dismissive hand toward the ceiling. Whatever, she said.
She went out the front door onto the porch and down a makeshift walkway of two-by-tens into the front yard where her car was parked. The car was a silver-gray Mercedes her husband had given her for their anniversary. When she cranked the engine its idle was scarcely perceptible.
She powered down the window. Zeineb, she called. Across the razed earth of the unlandscaped yard a man in a grease-stained T-shirt was booming down the chains securing a backhoe to a lowboy hooked to a gravel truck. The sun was low in the west and bloodred behind this tableau and man and tractor looked flat and dimensionless as something decorative stamped from tin. She blew the horn. The man turned, raised an arm as if she’d signaled him.
Zeineb, she called again.
She got out of the car and started impatiently up the walkway.
Behind her the gravel truck started, and truck and backhoe pulled out of the drive and down toward the road.
The paperhanger was stowing away his T square and trowels in his wooden toolbox. Where is Zeineb? the doctor’s wife asked. She followed you out, the paperhanger told her. He glanced about, as if the girl might be hiding somewhere. There was nowhere to hide.
Where is my child? she asked the builder. The electrician climbed down from the ladder. The paperhanger came out of the bathroom with his tools. The builder was looking all around. His elfin features were touched with chagrin, as if this missing child were just something else he was going to be held accountable for.
Likely she’s hiding in a closet, the paperhanger said. Playing a trick on you. Zeineb does not play tricks, the doctor’s wife said. Her eyes kept darting about the huge room, the shadows that lurked in corners. There was already an under-current of panic in her voice and all her poise and self-confidence seemed to have vanished with the child.
The paperhanger set down his toolbox and went through the house, opening and closing doors. It was a huge house and there were a lot of closets. There was no child in any of them.
The electrician was searching upstairs. The builder had gone through the French doors that opened onto the unfinished veranda and was peering into the backyard. The backyard was a maze of convoluted ditch excavated for the septic tank field line and beyond that there was just woods. She’s playing in that ditch, the builder said, going down the flagstone steps.
She wasn’t, though. She wasn’t anywhere. They searched the house and grounds. They moved with jerky haste. They kept glancing toward the woods where the day was waning first. The builder kept shaking his head. She’s got to be somewhere, he said.
Call someone, the doctor’s wife said. Call the police.
It’s a little early for the police, the builder said. She’s got to be here.
You call them anyway. I have a phone in my car. I will call my husband. While she called, the paperhanger and the electrician continued to search. They had looked everywhere and were forced to search places they’d already looked. If this ain’t the goddamnedest thing I ever saw, the electrician said.