by Gene Wolfe
Maria said, “She told us a story today.”
Mark added: “Before you came home. About this witch—”
Maria said, “—that brings the presents to children. Her name is La Befana, the Christmas Witch.”
Zozz drew his lips back from his double canines and jiggled his head. “I like stories.”
“She says it’s almost Christmas and on Christmas three wise men went looking for the Baby and they stopped at the old witch’s door and they asked which way it was and she told them and they said come with us.”
The door to the other room opened, and Teresa and Bananas’ mother came out. Bananas’ mother was holding a teakettle. She edged around Zozz to put it on the hook and swing it out over the fire.
“And she was sweeping and she wouldn’t come,” Maria resumed.
Mark added, “Said she’d come when she had finished. She was a real old, real ugly woman. Watch, I’ll show you how she walked.” He jumped up and began to hobble around the room.
Bananas looked at his wife and indicated the wall. “What’s this?”
“Some woman. I told you.”
“In there?”
“The charity place—they said she could stay there. She couldn’t stay in the house because all the rooms are full of men.”
Maria was saying, “So when she was all done, she went looking for Him only she couldn’t find Him and she never did.”
“She’s sick?”
“She’s knocked up, Johnny, that’s all. Don’t worry about her. She’s got some guy in there with her.”
Mark asked, “Do you know about the Baby Jesus, Uncle Zozz?”
Zozz groped for words.
“Johnny, my son—”
“Yes, mama.”
“Your friend—Do they have the faith here, Johnny?”
Apropos of nothing Teresa said, “They’re Jews, next door.”
Zozz told Mark, “You see, the Baby Jesus has never come to my world.”
Maria said, “And so she goes all over every place looking for Him with her presents and she leaves some with every kid she finds, but she says it’s not because she thinks they might be Him like some people think but just a substitute. She can’t never die. She has to do it forever, doesn’t she, Grandma?”
The bent old woman said, “Not forever, dearest. Only until tomorrow night.”
THE HERO AS WERWOLF
Feet in the jungle that leave no mark!
Eyes that can see in the dark—the dark!
Tongue—give tongue to it! Hark! O Hark!
Once, twice and again!
—KIPLINC,
“Hunting Song of the Seeonee Pack”
An owl shrieked, and Paul flinched. Fear, pavement, flesh, death, stone, dark, loneliness and blood made up Paul’s world; the blood was all much the same, but the fear took several forms, and he had hardly seen another human being in the four years since his mother’s death. At a night meeting in the park he was the red-cheeked young man at the end of the last row, with his knees together and his scrupulously clean hands (Paul was particularly careful about his nails) in his lap.
The speaker was fluent and amusing; he was clearly conversant with his subject—whatever it was—and he pleased his audience. Paul, the listener and watcher, knew many of the words he used; yet he had understood nothing in the past hour and a half, and sat wrapped in his stolen cloak and his own thoughts, seeming to listen, watching the crowd and the park—this, at least, was no ghost-house, no trap; the moon was up, nightblooming flowers scented the park air, and the trees lining the paths glowed with self-generated blue light; in the city, beyond the last hedge, the great buildings new and old were mountains lit from within.
Neither human nor master, a policemen strolled about the fringes of the audience, his eyes bright with stupidity. Paul could have killed him in less than a second, and was enjoying a dream of the policeman’s death in some remote corner of his mind even while he concentrated on seeming to be one of them. A passenger rocket passed just under the stars, trailing luminous banners.
The meeting was over and he wondered if the rocket had in some way been the signal to end it. The masters did not use time, at least not as he did, as he had been taught by the thin woman who had been his mother in the little home she had made for them in the turret of a house that was once (she said) the Gorous’—now only a house to old to be destroyed. Neither did they use money, of which he like other old-style Homo sapiens still retained some racial memory, as of a forgotten god—a magic once potent that had lost all force.
The masters were rising, and there were tears and laughter and that third emotional tone that was neither amusement nor sorrow—the silken sound humans did not possess, but that Paul thought might express content, as the purring of a cat does, or community, like the cooing of doves. The policeman bobbed his hairy head, grinning, basking in the recognition, the approval, of those who had raised him from animality. See (said the motions of his hands, the writhings of his body) the clothing you have given me. How nice! I take good care of my things because they are yours. See my weapon. I perform a useful function—if you did not have me, you would have to do it yourselves.
If the policeman saw Paul, it would be over. He was too stupid, too silly, to be deceived by appearances as his masters were. He would never dare, thinking him a master, to meet Paul’s eye, but he would look into his face seeking approval, and would see not what he was supposed to see but what was there. Paul ducked into the crowd, avoiding a beautiful woman with eyes the color of pearls, preferring to walk in the shadow of her fat escort where the policeman would not see him. The fat man took dust from a box shaped like the moon and rubbed it between his hands, releasing the smell of raspberries. It froze, and he sifted the tiny crystals of crimson ice over his shirt-front, grunting with satisfaction; then offered the box to the woman, who refused at first, only (three steps later) to accept when he pressed it on her.
They were past the policeman now. Paul dropped a few paces behind the couple, wondering if they were the ones tonight—if there would be meat tonight at all. For some, vehicles would be waiting. If the pair he had selected were among these, he would have to find others quickly.
They were not. They had entered the canyons between the buildings; he dropped farther behind, then turned aside.
Three minutes later he was in an alley a hundred meters ahead of them, waiting for them to pass the mouth. (The old trick was to cry like an infant, and he could do it well; but he had a new trick—a better trick, because too many had learned not to come down an alley when an infant cried. The new trick was a silver bell he had found in the house, small and very old. He took it from his pocket and removed the rag he had packed around the clapper. His dark cloak concealed him now, its hood pulled up to hide the pale gleam of his skin. He stood in a narrow doorway only a few meters away from the alley’s mouth.)
They came. He heard the man’s thick laughter, the woman’s silken sound. She was a trifle silly from the dust the man had given her, and would be holding his arm as they walked, rubbing his thighs with hers. The man’s blackshod foot and big belly thrust past the stonework of the building—there was a muffled moan.
The fat man turned, looking down the alley. Paul could see fear growing in the woman’s face, cutting, too slowly, through the odor of raspberries. Another moan, and the man strode forward, fumbling in his pocket for an illuminator. The woman followed hesitantly (her skirt was of flowering vines the color of love, and white skin flashed in the interstices; a serpent of gold supported her breasts).
Someone was behind him. Pressed back against the metal door, he watched the couple as they passed. The fat man had gotten his illuminator out and held it over his head as he walked, looking into corners and doorways.
They came at them from both sides, a girl and an old, grey-bearded man. The fat man, the master, his genetic heritage revised for intellection and peace, had hardly time to turn before his mouth gushed blood. The woman whirled and ran, the v
ines of her skirt withering at her thought to give her leg room, the serpent dropping from her breasts to strike with fangless jaws at the flying-haired girl who pursued her, then winding itself about the girl’s ankles. The girl fell; but as the pearl-eyed woman passed, Paul broke her neck. For a moment he was too startled at the sight of other human beings to speak. Then he said, “These are mine.”
The old man, still bent over the fat man’s body, snapped: “Ours. We’ve been here an hour and more.” His voice was the creaking of steel hinges, and Paul thought of ghost-houses again.
“I followed them from the park.” The girl, black-haired, grey-eyed when the light from the alley-mouth struck her face, was taking the serpent from around her legs—it was once more a lifeless thing of soft metal mesh. Paul picked up the woman’s corpse and wrapped it in his cloak. “You gave me no warning,” he said. “You must have seen me when I passed you.”
The girl looked toward the old man. Her eyes said she would back him if he fought, and Paul decided he would throw the woman’s body at her.
“Somebody’ll come soon,” the old man said. “And I’ll need Janie’s help to carry this one. We each take what we got ourselves—that’s fair. Or we whip you. My girl’s worth a man in a fight, and you’ll find I’m still worth a man myself, old as I be.”
“Give me the picking of his body. This one has nothing.”
The girl’s bright lips drew back from strong white teeth. From somewhere under the tattered shirt she wore, she had produced a long knife, and sudden light from a window high above the alley ran along the edge of the stained blade; the girl might be a dangerous opponent, as the old man claimed, but Paul could sense the femaleness, the woman-rut from where he stood. “No,” her father said. “You got good clothes. I need these.” He looked up at the window fearfully, fumbling with buttons.
“His cloak will hang on you like a blanket.”
“We’ll fight. Take the woman and go away, or we’ll fight.”
He could not carry both, and the fat man’s meat would be tainted by the testicles. When Paul was young and there had been no one but his mother to do the killing, they had sometimes eaten old males; he never did so now. He slung the pearl-eyed woman across his shoulders and trotted away.
Outside the alley the streets were well lit, and a few passers-by stared at him and the dark burden he carried. Fewer still, he knew, would suspect him of being what he was—he had learned the trick of dressing as the masters did, even of wearing their expressions. He wondered how the black-haired girl and the old man would fare in their ragged clothes. They must live very near.
His own place was that in which his mother had borne him, a place high in a house built when humans were the masters. Every door was nailed tight and boarded up; but on one side a small garden lay between two wings, and in a corner of this garden, behind a bush where the shadows were thick even at noon, the bricks had fallen away. The lower floors were full of rotting furniture and the smell of rats and mold, but high in his wooden turret the walls were still dry and the sun came in by day at eight windows. He carried his burden there and dropped her in a corner. It was important that his clothes be kept as clean as the masters kept theirs, though he lacked their facilities. He pulled his cloak from the body and brushed it vigorously.
“What are you going to do with me?” the dead woman said behind him.
“Eat,” he told her. “What did you think I was going to do?”
“I didn’t know.” And then: “I’ve read of you creatures, but I didn’t think you really existed.”
“We were the masters once,” he said. He was not sure he still believed it, but it was what his mother had taught him. “This house was built in those days—that’s why you won’t wreck it: you’re afraid.” He had finished with the cloak; he hung it up and turned to face her, sitting on the bed. “You’re afraid of waking the old times,” he said. She lay slumped in the corner, and though her mouth moved, her eyes were only half open, looking at nothing.
“We tore a lot of them down,” she said.
“If you’re going to talk, you might as well sit up straight.” He lifted her by the shoulders and propped her in the corner. A nail protruded from the wall there; he twisted a lock of her hair on it so her head would not loll; her hair was the rose shade of a little girl’s dress, and soft but slightly sticky.
“I’m dead, you know.”
“No, you’re not.” They always said this (except, sometimes, for the children) and his mother had always denied it. He felt that he was keeping up a family tradition.
“Dead,” the pearl-eyed woman said. “Never, never, never. Another year, and everything would have been all right. I want to cry, but I can’t breathe to.”
“Your kind lives a long time with a broken neck,” he told her. “But you’ll die eventually.”
“I am dead now.”
He was not listening. There were other humans in the city; he had always known that, but only now, with the sight of the old man and the girl, had their existence seemed real to him.
“I thought you were all gone,” the pearl-eyed dead woman said thinly. “All gone long ago, like a bad dream.”
Happy with his new discovery, he said: “Why do you set traps for us, then? Maybe there are more of us than you think.”
“There can’t be many of you. How many people do you kill in a year?” Her mind was lifting the sheet from his bed, hoping to smother him with it; but he had seen that trick many times.
“Twenty or thirty.” (He was boasting.)
“So many.”
“When you don’t get much besides meat, you need a lot of it. And then I only eat the best parts—why not? I kill twice a month or more except when it’s cold, and I could kill enough for two or three if I had to.” (The girl had had a knife. Knives were bad, except for cutting up afterward. But knives left blood behind. He would kill for her—she could stay here and take care of his clothes, prepare their food. He thought of himself walking home under a new moon, and seeing her face in the window of the turret.) To the dead woman he said: “You saw that girl? With the black hair? She and the old man killed your husband, and I’m going to bring her here to live.” He stood and began to walk up and down the small room, soothing himself with the sound of his own footsteps.
“He wasn’t my husband.” The sheet dropped limply now that he was no longer on the bed. “Why didn’t you change? When the rest changed their genes?”
“I wasn’t alive then.”
“You must have received some tradition.”
“We didn’t want to. We are the human beings.”
“Everyone wanted to. Your old breed had worn out the planet; even with much better technology we’re still starved for energy and raw materials because of what you did.”
“There hadn’t been enough to eat before,” he said, “but when so many changed there was a lot. So why should more change?”
It was a long time before she answered, and he knew the body was stiffening. That was bad, because as long as she lived in it the flesh would stay sweet; when the life was gone, he would have to cut it up quickly before the stuff in her lower intestine tainted the rest.
“Strange evolution,” she said at last. “Man become food for men.”
“I don’t understand the second word. Talk so I know what you’re saying.” He kicked her in the chest to emphasize his point, and knocked her over; he heard a rib snap … . She did not reply, and he lay down on the bed. His mother had told him there was a meeting place in the city where men gathered on certain special nights—but he had forgotten (if he had ever known) what those nights were.
“That isn’t even metalanguage,” the dead woman said, “only children’s talk.”
“Shut up.”
After a moment he said: “I’m going out. If you can make your body stand, and get out of here, and get down to the ground floor, and find the way out, then you may be able to tell someone about me and have the police waiting when I come back.” He went o
ut and closed the door, then stood patiently outside for five minutes.
When he opened it again, the corpse stood erect with her hands on his table, her tremors upsetting the painted metal circus-figures he had had since he was a child—the girl acrobat, the clown with his hoop and trained pig. One of her legs would not straighten. “Listen,” he said, “you’re not going to do it. I told you all that because I knew you’d think of it yourself. They always do, and they never make it. The farthest I’ve ever had anyone get was out the door and to the top of the steps. She fell down them, and I found her at the bottom when I came back. You’re dead. Go to sleep.”
The blind eyes had turned toward him when he began to speak, but they no longer watched him now. The face, which had been beautiful, was now entirely the face of a corpse. The cramped leg crept toward the floor as he watched, halted, began to creep downward again. Sighing, he lifted the dead woman off her feet, replaced her in the corner, and went down the creaking stairs to find the black-haired girl.
“There has been quite a few to come after her,” her father said, “since we come into town. Quite a few.” He sat in the back of the bus, on the rearmost seat that went completely across the back like a sofa. “But you’re the first ever to find us here. The others, they hear about her, and leave a sign at the meetin’.”
Paul wanted to ask where it was such signs were left, but held his peace.
“You know there ain’t many folks at all anymore,” her father went on. “And not many of them is women. And damn few is young girls like my Janie. I had a fella here that wanted her two weeks back—he said he hadn’t had no real woman in two years; well, I didn’t like the way he said real, so I said what did he do, and he said he fooled around with what he killed, sometimes, before they got cold. You never did like that, did you?”
Paul said he had not.
“How’d you find this dump here?”
“Just look around.” He had searched the area in ever-widening circles, starting at the alley in which he had seen the girl and her father. They had one of the masters’ cold boxes to keep their ripe kills in (as he did himself), but there was the stink of clotted blood about the dump nonetheless. It was behind a high fence, closer to the park than he would have thought possible.