Off in the distance, in some other room, Michael could hear the pounding of tiny knees on the carpet, the thunder of the old men trying to catch them.
Michael made his way down to the cellars via a door in the wall on the north side of the back porch. That door led him to a descending staircase, and the cellars. The main part of these cellars consisted of the kitchen, laundry, furnace and supply rooms, and various rooms used by the gardeners and janitors. But hidden on one end, seldom-used, were the storage cellars.
In the cellars had been stored a treasure of miscellaneous household appurtenances: some of the most ornate andirons Michael had ever seen, with dogs and lions and elephants worked into their designs; shuttlecocks and beakers; finely painted bellows and ancient bottles and all manner of brass ware (ladles, skimmers, colanders, kettles, candlesticks and the like); twenty-two elaborately stenciled tin canisters and a chafing dish in the shape of a deer (necessary to keep the colonials’ freshly slain venison suitably warm); dozens of rolls of carpet which had been ill-preserved and fell into rotted clumps when he tried to examine them; a half-dozen crocks, several filled with such odd hardware as teardrop handles, bat’s-wing and willow mounts, rosette knobs and wrought-iron hinges, and the largest with an assortment of wall and furniture stencils; another half-dozen pieces of Delft ware from Holland (also called “counterfeit china”); a dripping pan and a dredging box; a variety of flesh hooks and graters and latten ware and patty pans, all artifacts from earlier versions of the SeaHarp’s grand kitchen; a jack for removing some long-dead gentleman’s boots; a finely-made milk keeler and several old jack mangles for smoothing the hotel’s linen; a rotting bag full of crumbling pillow cases (sorting through these Michael liked to imagine all the young maids’ hands which had smoothed them and fluffed their pillows—they would have been calling them “pillow bears” back then); skewers and skillets; trays and trenchers; and a great wealth of wooden ware, no doubt used by some past manager in an attempt to hold down costs.
He could spend a full week cataloguing it all, which wasn’t really what he wanted to do during his time at the hotel. After seeing just these more common, day-to-day, bits and pieces, he was more anxious than ever to go through the other rooms. But he could tell from his finds in the cellars that there was quite a bit of antique wealth here. If the sales were handled properly they could bring the Montgomerys a fair amount of money. And the beauty of it, of course, was that these relics were now of little use in the actual running of the hotel.
That evening Michael began his inventories of the guest rooms themselves. Most could be handled very quickly as there was little of value or interest. The only thing that slowed him was a continuation of the vague sense of disorientation he’d felt since awakening that morning. Things—most recognizably the faceless cupid statues he’d encountered his first night—hovered at the periphery of his vision, and then disappeared, much like the after-effects of some drug-induced alertness. He began to wonder if there had been something wrong with his Thanksgiving dinner—perhaps it had been the wine the old waiter had delivered so freely—and he became very careful of the things he ate, examining each glass of beverage or piece of bread or meat minutely—for consistency, pattern, tool-marks, style—before consumption.
“A tea-table with cabriole legs and slipper feet tapering finely to the toe. Like some stylish grandmother dancing. Perhaps my own, undiscovered, grandmother dancing. Second quarter of the eighteenth century, probably from Philadelphia.”
The orphans squealed with delight, their tiny knees raw and bleeding from carpet burns.
“This kettledrum base desk is obviously pregnant. A portrait of my mother bearing me? Its sides swell out greatly at the bottom. A block front.”
In two rooms he found painted Pennsylvania Dutch rocking chairs. The pale yellow children rocked them so vigorously he thought they might take off, fueled by their infant dreams.
When it finally came time to retire, Michael of course had his choice of many beds. But many of the beds were of the modern type and therefore of little interest to him. Where there were antique beds they were usually Jenny Linds with simple spool-turned posts or the occasional Belter bed with its huge headboard carved with leaves and tendrils.
Michael finally settled for a bed with straps, so many straps it was like sleeping in a cage. But he felt secure, accepted. He began a dream about a forest full of children, tying one another to the trees. The crackling noises in the walls of his bedroom jarred his nerves, but eventually he was able to fall asleep. That night, as always, he had a boy’s dreams. No business or marital worries informed them.
It was only upon waking that Michael discovered this room had a stenciled wall. This was of course a surprise in a structure from the 1850s, with the number of manufactured wallpapers available, but he supposed it might have been done—no doubt using old stencils—for uniqueness, to preserve some individual effect. Michael was surprised to find that it had survived the many small repaintings and remodellings that had occurred over the years. Usually a later owner would find the slight imperfections normal to a stencilled wall irritating, and the patterns crude, as certainly they often were.
But Michael liked them; there was a lot to be said for the note of individuality they added to a room. He suspected the only reason this particular wall had been saved, however, was because the guests hadn’t the opportunity to see it. Looking around the walls—at their shabbiness, and the crude nature of the furniture—he felt sure this room was not normally rented. So an owner would not be embarrassed.
The pattern was an unusual one. The border was standard enough: leaves and vines and pineapples, quite similar to the work of Moses Eaton, Jr. Some of the wall stencils Michael had found in the cellar matched these shapes. Within these borders, however, was a grove of trees. Most of them were large stencils of weeping willows, but still fairly standard, again derived from Eaton’s work. But here and there among the willows was another sort of tree: an oak, perhaps, but he wasn’t sure, tied or bound by a large rope, or maybe it was a snake wrapping around the trunk and through the branches. Bound was the proper description, because the branches seemed pulled down or otherwise diverted from their natural direction by the rope or snake, and the trunk twisted from the upright—a dramatic violation of the classical symmetry one usually found in wall designs.
The design of this particular tree was obviously too intricate to have been done with a single stencil. There had to have been several, overlapping. But the color was too faded and worn to make out much of the detail, as if some past cleaning woman had tried to remove the bound trees, though not the willows, with an abrasive.
He got down on his hands and knees. The baseboard was covered with scratches, the signatures of dozens of different children. He could hear a distant thundering in the hall outside, hundreds of orphan limbs, pounding out a protest that grew slowly in its articulateness. Choose me. Me me me. He began to doubt that Victor Montgomery had ever been away to school, that he had ever left this hotel, and his father’s watchful eye, at all. The voices in the hall seemed strangely distorted. Distorted embryos. As if under water. The scratches in the baseboard tore at his fingertips.
Michael crawled out the door and down several flights of stairs. The faceless children all crowded him, jostled him, and yet he still kept his knees moving. He maneuvered through a mass of legs, odd items of furniture stacked and jammed wall-to-wall, all eager to grab him with their straps and wooden arms and bend him to their shape. He cried when their sharp legs kicked him, and covered his face when hurricanes swept through the woods and shouted like old men.
He stopped at the front windows and floated up to the glass. A crowd of people watched him, pointed, tapped the glass. Sweat drenched him and fogged the glass wall. His eyes grew bigger than his mouth. And yet no matter how hard he peered at the ones outside, he could find no face that resembled his own.
GAHAN WILSON
Mister Ice Cold
GAHAN WILSON is best known
as one of America’s most popular cartoonists, his macabre work appearing regularly in The New Yorker, Playboy, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, National Lampoon, Punch and Paris Match, amongst others. He illustrated Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven and Other Poems for the first issue of the new Classics Illustrated comics, and contributed all the artwork to Weird Tales No. 300, a special Robert Bloch issue.
His short fiction has recently appeared in such diverse outlets as Omni and the Lovecraft’s Legacy anthology, among his own books are Gahan Wilson’s Graveside Manner, Is Nothing Sacred?, Nuts, Eddy Deco’s Last Caper, Everybody’s Favourite Duck and several children’s volumes, including a series on Harry, The Fat Bear Spy.
Wilson reveals that he was officially declared born dead by the attending physician in Evanston, Illinois. Rescued by another medico who dipped him alternately in bowls of hot and cold water, he survived to become the first student at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago to admit he was going there to learn how to become a cartoonist.
He is well known for his wicked and perverse sense of humour, both of which you will find aplenty in the poignant little tale that follows . . .
LISTEN, CHILDREN! Hear the music? Hear its bright and cheerful chiming coming down the street? Hear it playing its pretty little tune—dingy di-ding, dingy di-ding—as it sings softly through the green trees, through the blue sky overhead, as it sings through the thick, still, sultry summer heat? It’s Mister Ice Cold coming in his truck! Mister Ice Cold and his nice ice cream! Fat, round, cool balls of it plopped into cones! Thick, juicy slabs of it covered in frozen chocolate frosting and stuck on sticks! Soft, pink, chilly twirls of it oozed into cups!
The music’s coming closer through the heat—dingy di-ding, dingy di-ding—and excitement starts stirring where all was lazy and drowsy just a sweaty blink before! Bobby Martin’s no longer lying flat on the grass, staring up at a slow-moving summer cloud without seeing it at all; he’s scrambled to his feet and is running over the thick summer grass to ask his mother—nodding on the porch over a limp magazine almost slipped from her fingers—if he can have enough money to buy a frozen lime frog. And Suzy Brenner’s left off dreamily trying to tie her doll’s bonnet over her cat’s head (much to the cat’s relief) and is desperately digging into her plastic, polka-dot purse to see if there’s enough change in there to buy her a cup of banana ice cream with chocolate sprinkles. Oh, she can taste the sweetness of it! Oh, her throat can feel its coolness going down! And you, you’ve forgotten all about blowing through a leaf to see if you can make it squeak the way you saw Arnold Carter’s older brother do it; now you’re clawing feverishly with your small hands in both pockets, feeling your way past that sandy shell you found yesterday on the beach, and that little ball chewed bounceless by your dog, and that funny rock you came across in the vacant lot which may, with luck, be full of uranium and highly radioactive, and so far you have come up with two pennies and a quarter and you think you’ve just touched a nickel. Meantime Mister Ice Cold’s truck is rolling closer—dingy di-ding, dingy di-ding—and Martin Walpole, always a show-off, wipes his brow, points, and calls out proudly, “I see it! There it is!”
And sure enough, there it is, rolling smoothly around the corner of Main and Lincoln, and you can see the shiny, fat fullness of its white roof gleaming in the bright sun through the thick, juicy-green foliage of the trees, which have, in the peak of their summer swelling, achieved a tropical density and richness more appropriate to some Amazonian jungle than to midwestern Lakeside, and you push aside one last, forgotten tangle of knotted string in your pocket and your heart swells for joy because you’ve come across another quarter and that means you’ve got enough for an orange icicle on a stick which will freeze your fillings and chill your gut and stain your tongue that gorgeous, glowing copper color which never fails to terrify your sister!
Now Mister Ice Cold’s truck has swept into full view, and its dingy di-ding sounds out loud and clear and sprightly enough, even in this steaming, muggy air, to startle a sparrow and make it swerve in its flight.
Rusty Taylor’s dog barks for a signal, and all of you come running quick as you can from every direction, coins clutched in your sweaty fingers and squeezed tightly as possible in your damp, small palms, and every one of you is licking your lips and staring at the bright blue lettering painted in frozen ice cubes that spells out MISTER ICE COLD over the truck’s sides and front and back, and Mister Ice Cold himself gives a sweeping wave of his big, pale hand to everyone from behind his wheel and brings his vehicle and all the wonders it contains to a slow, majestic halt with the skill and style of a commodore docking an ocean liner.
“A strawberry rocket!” cries fat Harold Smith, who has got there way ahead of everyone else as usual, and Mister Ice Cold flips open one of the six small doors set into the left side of the truck with a click and plucks out Harold’s rocket and gives it to him and takes the change, and before you know it he has glided to the right top door of the four doors at the truck’s back and opened it, click, and Mandy Carter’s holding her frozen maple tree and licking it and handing her money over all at the same time, and now Mister Ice Cold is opening one of the six small doors on the right side of the truck, click, and Eddy Morse has bitten the point off the top of his bright red cinnamon crunchy munch and is completely happy.
Then your heart’s desire is plucked with a neat click from the top middle drawer on the truck’s right side, which has always been its place for as long as you can remember, and you’ve put your money into Mister Ice Cold’s large, pale, always-cool palm, and as you step back to lick your orange icicle and to feel its coolness trickle down your throat, once again you find yourself admiring the sheer smoothness of Mister Ice Cold’s movements as he glides and dips, spins and turns, bows and rises, going from one small door, click, to another, click, with never a stumble, click, never a pause, click, his huge body leaving a coolness in the wake of his passing, and you wish you moved that smoothly when you run over the gravel of the playground with your hands stretched up, hoping for a catch, but you know you don’t.
Everything’s so familiar and comforting: the slow quieting of the other children getting what they want, your tongue growing more and more chill as you reduce yet another orange icicle, lick by lick, down to its flat stick, and the heavy, hot summer air pressing down on top of it all.
But this time it’s just a little different than it ever was before because, without meaning to, without having the slightest intention of doing it, you’ve noticed something you never noticed before. Mister Ice Cold never opens the bottom right door in the back of the truck.
He opens all the rest of them, absolutely every one, and you see him doing it now as new children arrive and call out what they want. Click, click, click, he opens them one after the other, producing frozen banana bars and cherry twirls and all the other special favorites, each one always from its particular, predictable door.
But his big, cool hand always glides past that one door set into the truck’s back, the one on the bottom row, the one to the far right. And you realize now, with a funny little thrill, that you have never—not in all the years since your big brother Fred first took you by the hand and gave Mister Ice Cold the money for your orange icicle because you were so small you couldn’t even count—you have never ever seen that door open.
And now you’ve licked the whole orange icicle away, and your tongue’s moving over and over the rough wood of the stick without feeling it at all, and you can’t stop staring at that door, and you know, deep in the pit of your stomach, that you have to open it.
You watch Mister Ice Cold carefully now, counting out to yourself how long it takes him to move from the doors farthest forward back to the rear of the truck, and because your mind is racing very, very quickly, you soon see that two orders in a row will keep him up front just long enough for you to open the door which is never opened, the door which you are now standing close enough to touch, just enough time to take a quick peek and close
it shut before he knows.
Then Betty Deane calls out for a snow maiden right on top of Mike Howard’s asking for a pecan pot, and you know those are both far up front on the right-hand side.
Mister Ice Cold glides by you close enough for the cool breeze coming from his passing to raise little goose bumps on your arms. Without pausing, without giving yourself a chance for any more thought, you reach out.
Click! Your heart freezes hard as anything inside the truck. There, inside the square opening, cold and bleached and glistening, are two tidy stacks of small hands, small as yours, their fingertips reaching out toward you and the sunlight; their thin, dead young arms reaching out behind them, back into the darkness. Poking over the top two hands, growing out of something round and shiny and far back and horribly still, are two stiff golden braids of hair with pretty frozen bows tied onto their ends. But you have stared too long in horror and the door is closed, click, and almost entirely covered by Mister Ice Cold’s hand, which seems enormous, and he’s bent down over you with his huge, smiling face so near to yours you can feel the coolness of it in the summer heat.
“Not that door,” he says, very softly, and his small, neat, even teeth shine like chips from an iceberg, and because of his closeness now you know that even his breath is icy cold. “Those in there are not for you. Those in there are for me.”
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