by Robert Reed
The door swung toward him.
And for the second time in his life, Diamond stood inside the larger world.
Barely more than whispering, he called for his mother.
Silence.
He walked to the end of the first hallway. A little louder this time, he said, “Mother?”
The silence held for a few moments. Then came a sharp click from somewhere close, and after a pause, two more clicks.
Diamond entered the second hallway and stopped. He stopped and looked back into his room, seeing Mister Mister sitting on the floor, waiting for him. He wanted to go back again and grab him up, and he might have done that. But a small quick shape burst out of another room or chamber, running out into the hallway, and seeing the boy standing a few steps away, the shape let out a bright musical yelp.
Diamond jumped backward.
The animal leaped straight up, dropping whatever was in its hand.
“What are you?” asked Diamond.
No bigger than his biggest stuffed toy, the animal was covered with dense short fur that was orange on the face and scalp and almost black on the body. The feet were like hands, and it stood on all four hands, showing the human a set of fearless yellow teeth.
On the floor between them lay a big ripe luscious. The purple skin had been pierced, revealing sweet cool white flesh. Diamond glanced at the fruit. The animal snarled and ran forward, grabbing up the treasure with its front hands, sticking the luscious into its mouth before backing down the hallway, finding that perfect distance where it could sit on its haunches, enjoying its meal while keeping close watch over its competitor.
“What are you?”
The creature was a surprise. Diamond couldn’t guess its name or where it fit among the animals of the world, much less how it got inside the house. He supposed that it could have always lived here, but wouldn’t there have been clues? His parents would have mentioned the creature, and he definitely would have heard anything so noisy. Yet in little ways, the face and body were familiar. Some of his stuffed animals were similar. That long face and the little hands had human flavors. Diamond watched the animal consume the luscious. Then he took one small step forward, and the animal noticed, lowering its front hands while the orange fur lifted, making its face appear bigger than before.
“Where’s my mother?”
Diamond expected a response. He deserved an answer, and the animal seemed to understand him. Every time he spoke, it reacted, sneering at him, yellow teeth and bluster proving that it was in a very foul mood.
“Have you seen my mother?”
It snarled.
“Are you a monster?”
Maybe it was. But Diamond’s imaginary monsters were enormous. Bulk and strength made them terrors, and this little beast was nothing compared to the dreams that made him afraid.
Green daylight was behind him. Diamond had come into the hallway ready to look outside. But he stepped away from the window, one stride and another, and reading his mind, the animal shoved the half-eaten fruit into its mouth before scampering away on all of its hands.
Diamond chased.
The animal leaped right at the first door, vanishing.
Loudly this time, the boy called out, “Mother.”
No one answered, and he turned where the animal turned.
The room was long and narrow with a second entrance at the far end. There was a high ceiling and multiple lights, but nothing about this space was large. Dead wood had been cut and fitted to make cabinets and shelves. There were dishes and old metal pots and every kind of utensil and bowl and plate. Broad metal boxes stood against opposite walls. One box had handles. The other was topped with iron grates, and above that box was an enormous tube painted black on the inside. Diamond smelled food. He smelled old fires and ashes and the stinking beginnings of rot. He assumed the animal had run out the far door, but a tiny noise came from overhead. That very small monster was on the highest shelf, perched on a space too small for its bulk and its energy. One misstep and it would tumble, yet it seemed utterly comfortable in that predicament.
Whatever the animal was, it had to know something about Mother. Diamond couldn’t think any other way. And if he could trap it and talk to it, maybe he could learn what was happening. That’s why the boy picked up a cooking pot by its handle, ready to threaten the animal with it, but the pot was filled with a cold sticky liquid that spilled over his arm and shirt. Diamond cried out in surprise, and seeing its chance, his opponent dropped to the counter beside him, ready to flee, the last of the fruit clamped in its greedy mouth.
Diamond swung the half-filled pot, smacking the animal in the head.
The luscious was dislodged, and the animal shrieked, and Diamond swung the pot again. But the animal was very quick. Jaws strong enough to shatter nuts pushed the long incisors into his hand, all the way to the bone, and Diamond yelled, in surprise and then pain. He dropped the pot. Standing on the counter, the animal opened its mouth and gave a hard long snarl. Diamond reached out. He had some idea about grabbing and shaking that furry head. But his enemy grabbed the boy’s right wrist with its front hands and expertly pulled the smallest finger into its mouth, sharp teeth cutting through the first joint.
A piece of finger was gone.
Diamond jumped back, gazing at the damage.
The animal spat out the fingertip, and it cackled in a wild, careless fashion, letting the world know that it was a monster indeed.
Pulling his injured hand close, Diamond began to cry.
The animal retrieved the original prize. The luscious was mostly eaten and the meat had turned gray, but it would always be something worth savoring. Squatting on the counter, the animal took slow tiny bites, enjoying the wet sounds and the sweetness as it watched the boy bleeding. Its mouth didn’t smile, but the black eyes did. Then nothing was left but the hard flesh around the pit, and the animal sucked on one end and then the other before tossing the pit to the floor, licking sticky lips and its own ten fingertips before those smiling eyes looked at Diamond, and it said, “Good.”
“What?”
“Good,” it repeated. Then it jumped to the floor and grabbed the handle on one metal box, opening a little door and reaching inside, and with an expert’s precision it selected another delicious meal.
The fingertip was pale and dead to the eye.
Diamond knelt and picked it up. The skin was loose and sloppy between the fingers of his left hand, and the dead fingernail was long, and he could feel the little bit of bone in its center. For a few moments he stared at the glossy and slick and beautifully white joint. The living piece of his finger had stopped bleeding. A warm sensation was building, and he flexed his hand, feeling something that wasn’t pain but wasn’t pleasant either. Then because it seemed right and smart, he touched the severed fingertip to the stump, and within twenty breaths some kind of seal had joined him to what used to be him, and after twenty more breaths the fingertip was part of him again.
The monster ignored the marvel. A bowl of pickled cling-onions needed to be eaten, each with the same two-bite relish. When Diamond moved again, the monster looked up and lifted its fur, just enough for the warning to be understood. Then it belched and went back to its feast, and Diamond passed the rest of the way through the kitchen, moving into the next hallway.
For almost a thousand days he had listened to the voices inside this house, to the sounds people made as they moved. Every sound had been a clue, revealing shapes and proportions. Noise let a boy imagine the shape of this place. In that sense, Diamond already knew the general layout of the rooms and hallways. Yet he knew nothing. Nothing looked exactly or even close to what he expected, and nothing smelled right, and no place was as clean and pretty as he had imagined it to be.
Diamond walked slowly, calling to his mother. He watched for windows. He watched for the same window that he had seen before, making himself ready to give the world a long look. But the hallway insisted on taking him past nothing but tiny rooms and miniscule
closets, plus one space that might have been inhabited once but was now jammed with young wood, golden and sticky to the touch.
His finger had healed. No mark showed on the smooth new skin, and the tip’s feeling was fully restored. He might have been astonished, except nothing about the experience seemed extraordinary. Putting the finger to his tongue, he tasted tree sap. And then he called out again. “Father?” he said this time. “Papa? Are you home yet?”
In the kitchen, something substantial fell from a high shelf, and then the animal threw another high-pitched shriek at the world.
Diamond walked on.
Rooms had furnishings, closets did not. Most rooms wore doors that opened with the first push, while closets were hidden behind fabric curtains full of lines and color. No other door wore a lock, and the furnishings looked newer than his chairs and bed. Walls and ceilings were stained white, making the spaces bright. Yet every room was very crowded with belongings. A large bed nearly filled one space. Stepping inside, Diamond smelled his parents. A wide room was down the hall, perhaps half as large as his room but full of long chairs and tables hanging from the ceiling by ropes. There was room for ten or twelve adults to sit close together. When had his parents ever had so many visitors?
“Mother?” he asked the room.
Stepping back into the hallway, he called out, “Father?”
The air had grown brighter. Diamond followed the hallway around a sharp right turn, and then it straightened. Waiting on his right was a very large closet. He looked inside and gasped at the human bodies hanging high in the air. There were at least six bodies, none with feet or hands or heads. He took a full step back before realizing that these were only clothes—his father’s special gray work uniforms—dangling from the ceiling, waiting to be needed. One massive shelf was filled with armored helmets and goggles and gloves, and on the floor was a row of reinforced boots battered by hard long use.
Just the idea of hanging bodies unnerved the boy. He didn’t call for anybody now. He backed slowly out of the closet. Waiting farther down the hallway was a large window full of light. It was the same window he had seen that one day with his mother. When he thought about Mother, there was no space in his head for anyone else. He was focused and worried about her and distracted about everything else. One more door remained to be looked behind, and for no reason but hope, Diamond decided that she was waiting for him there.
The last door had a lock, but it had been left unlatched and partway open. Unlike other doors, it swung into the hallway. He stepped around it. A brief tunnel stood before him, cut through a different kind of wood—a dark dry fibrous wood—and at the tunnel’s end was a glimmer of light and a heavy curtain with some kind of face embroidered into the fabric, staring at him.
Diamond walked forward and pushed at the curtain, a deluge of brilliant green light pouring up his arm and across his astonished face.
Then he pushed again, and that was how the boy finally stepped outdoors.
THREE
A flat solid surface lay under his feet. The world before him was built from motion and shifting mysterious sounds along with fixed shapes that could be anything. Daylight blinded. What he saw was blazing and relentless, every detail washed away by the fierce glare that had no source, no destination. Eyes squinted down to slits and still the light slashed into his skull, filling his head with scorching green-white fire. The boy sobbed—a sad little sound washed away by raucous noise rushing down on top of him. A million mouths were shouting, none human: rattling barks and wild long passionate hoots, melodies and brilliant shrieks. Then something overhead let loose a string of bright rhythmic chirps. He shouted, “Hello.” The chirps stopped. Then he took his first breath, tasting water. But the rain was finished, why was the air wet? One blind step led to another. The floor beneath gave a patient creak, and he stopped. Beyond the voices, filling some distant space, was a rumbling roar. He heard it and felt it in his bones, and tipping his head to gauge its source, Diamond turned his nearly closed eyes toward the heart of the great sound, seeing nothing that made even the barest sense.
Fixing his hands beside his eyes helped stifle the glare. The flat smooth face of the landing reached out several more steps before ending with a high railing and open space, and slicing through the air beyond was a column of silver light, brighter than anything else in this baffling, wondrous place.
Diamond took another step.
“I know, I know,” a voice called out.
He stopped walking.
From above, a girl shouted, “But I’m looking for my bracelet.”
Then someone else spoke, a stern voice falling from a greater height, the sense of it drained by distance.
“I can’t hear you,” the girl shouted.
Diamond tipped his head, listening.
“Hey you. Do you see my bracelet?”
Her voice had grown louder.
“It’s copper, with a face and blue shells,” she said. “I dropped it last night. Look around. Maybe it hit your landing.”
“A bracelet,” Diamond said.
“Kid,” she said. “I’m screaming at you. Do you see my bracelet?”
“I can’t see anything,” he said, dropping to his knees, eyes closed before he rubbed them with his knuckles.
The girl said something else, something quiet.
For several moments, nothing happened.
Then the curtain to his house moved. Diamond smelled the little monster. Stepping up beside him, the animal gave a hearty belch, and from someplace close, the girl asked, “Who’s your ugly friend?”
Diamond opened his left eye, then his right. Pupils and the light-starved retinas were adapting to the piercing morning light. This time he could make out the wood slats of the landing and his hands and his feet. Wood railings stood on three sides, and behind him the same stranger’s face that rode the other side of the curtain. The well-fed monster was near enough to touch, giving him a stern glare before looking up where the girl’s voice had fallen from.
Diamond did the same.
The girl was floating in the air, bare feet and one arm dangling. Her other hand held a golden rope fixed to the wet brown bark. Nothing else kept her from falling. The rope stretched high overhead, vanishing into a milky mist. She might have been hanging there forever, judging by how easily she in the emptiness. She looked at Diamond and smiled. Then she looked up, shouting into the mist.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m coming straight home.”
And then she looked down, giddy, effervescent laughter bubbling out of her wide mouth.
Diamond stood.
“Who are you?” she asked.
He didn’t like her laugh. It was silly and loud and made him uneasy. But he started to answer anyway, ready to offer his name.
But the girl interrupted. “You’re that boy,” she said as her expression turned serious, chocolate eyes big and impressed. “You’re the sick kid, aren’t you?”
Once again, he tried to say, “Diamond.”
She didn’t hear him. Kicking the tree with both feet, she let go of the rope and he watched her fall, and she watched Diamond while she fell, hitting the landing with her legs bent and a smooth little pop at the end, jumping once before stopping beside him.
The little monster grunted and backed up.
“Go away,” she told it.
Orange fur rose, trying to menace.
The girl made biting noises, pulling her long black hair over her head, mimicking the monster’s gestures.
The animal retreated, leaping up on the railing before snarling at its tormentor.
She laughed at it. “Silly monkey.”
Diamond watched both of them.
“How do you know him?” she asked.
“I don’t know him.”
“Well, he knows you.” She stared at Diamond, fascinated. “He thinks you’re going to protect him.”
“We fought,” Diamond confessed.
“When? Today?”
“He w
as inside my house. “
“You lost the battle, didn’t you?”
He preferred not to say. “He was eating our food.”
“You can’t let monkeys indoors. Wasn’t your house locked?”
“I guess not.”
The girl was shorter than Diamond, but she had a longer body carrying strong arms and shoulders. Her mouth was wide but with little lips, and she had a fabulous long nose, and something about the spacing of her eyes and the shape of her cheekbones was pretty. Diamond watched her face and grew even more nervous.
Lifting the big curtain, she looked at the door. “It’s open now.”
“Yes.”
She studied his eyes, his mouth. “You do live here, right?”
He nodded.
“Diamond?”
“Yes.”
“That’s your name. I remember. I’ve heard about you.”
He felt shy and strange. Self-conscious about his tiny hands, he put them behind his back.
“Why are you outside?”
“I’m looking for someone.”
“But you can get sick outside.” Her voice became even quicker. “You were born weak. People say. What are you doing outside? You could catch some bug and die.”
“I don’t think I will,” he said, halfway confident.
She didn’t talk.
When he looked at her eyes, she said, “Elata.”
“What?”
“My name is Elata.”
He repeated that name.
“I like your voice, Diamond.”
He didn’t respond.
“Looking for who?”
“What?”
She didn’t repeat the question. Putting her face closer, she said, “Everything about you. Those eyes, your whole body . . . it’s all just a little different.”
“Is it?”
“Don’t you know?” Her hand jumped. As if it had its own mind, it grabbed him at the elbow, and he flinched and she let go again. “Shouldn’t I? Was that bad?” Guilt and worry came bubbling out, but her curiosity remained undimmed. “Does that bother you, me touching you?”