McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales

by Michael Chabon

  I make a little outdoor oven so I can smoke fish for them. I chop more wood. There’s already dried kinnikinnick here. In the evenings I carve myself a pipe to smoke it. Loo and I together repair her wooly petticoats. I start to make her a bigger better doll but she says she just wants the old small one with my underwear for a dress, so I strengthen the arms and legs with fishing line. I carve a little goat. I make Loo guess what it’s going to be as I go along. I wear the men’s clothes that were hanging behind the door. I sit by the stove of an evening smoking or sewing more dresses for the doll. I still sleep under the table. I keep the fire burning all night. The stovepipe curls through to the other room so they stay warm. All my life since I was nine, I have awakened every morning in a rage, renewing my promises. All my life I have distrusted people, but not now.

  Loo is teaching me how to be a child. Or perhaps we’re teaching each other. I make the doll dance, and then she does it. Suppertimes, I wave a tidbit . . . a dried crawdad or some such, in front of her and let her snap at it. I throw a walnut up and catch it in my mouth. She tries but she can’t do it. I make pancakes and flip them almost to the ceiling when I turn them. I remember the peasant dances my men used to do and, though I’ve never tried to do one, I try now. I take Loo’s hand and make her dance with me. I growl out a song. We even make Grandma smile. We even make her sing.

  They’re both getting fatter. I’ll leave in the spring. In the spring Loo can gather all sorts of sprouts, fiddlehead ferns, mushrooms. . . . She’s gotten good at fishing. I’ll cross the pass and go home—if I can find it—if anything remains. I haven’t thought of home for a long time. I hadn’t thought I had one, nor did I want one. Perhaps I should look for the remains of my army. Though . . . I’d like to be finished with that sort of life. Perhaps I’ll live the rest of my life home, if it still exists. Or here.

  A group of our people hoping for the reward found him on the trail. (They thought the reward was still operative. All the better then, if people do.) Or perhaps he found them. It might have been him, but could he grow that much hair and that much beard in this length of time? There might be other fugitives on the mountain. However that may be, this man jumped them at the perfect spot and pushed them over, all three. None died but all slid down and were found at the bottom, scratched and bruised. Harassing us is just the sort of thing he would do. We had thought he was much higher up by now. Perhaps even over on the other side. But then again, we aren’t sure this man was him. Perhaps it wasn’t the General at all but some other man with something else against us. How many wild men roam the mountains looking for their chances at us? The mountains could be full of them. We’ll not waste any more time on him—or them.

  But then Loo wakes me in the middle of the night. Grandma is trying to talk but can’t. The whole right side of her face is lopsided. I recognize right away she’s had a stroke. I’ll need to get help. No, they’ll arrest me before I have a chance to bring up a doctor. I’ll have to get her down to town. It will be the quickest anyway. I’ve already made a skid for hauling logs. I wrap Grandma in all our quilts and blankets and tie her to it. There’s still quite a bit of snow here on the upper slopes; that’ll make the first part easier. I feed Loo cold smoked fish and goat’s milk, grab whatever food is handy to bring along, wrap Loo up in scarves, and start out. I see to it she doesn’t forget her doll and she sees to it I don’t forget my pipe. (At the last minute I throw in Grandma’s scissors and Loo’s father’s razor.) Though it’s still hardly dawn, I grab the rope and we start out. I won’t be careful this time; I’ll just be fast.

  The farther down we get the warmer it’ll be. We’ll hit true spring in a day.

  We spend the first night in an empty cabin. We burn their wood, not worried who sees the smoke. We use their barley to make gruel. There’s a small mirror. I shave my beard and I have Loo help me shave my head. I don’t tell her why and she doesn’t ask. (Afterward she says she liked me better hairy.) Until the time comes, I’ll keep my cap on.

  Farther down there are no more snowy patches so it’s harder. At one point the skid gets going down a scree slope. I get a bump on my head trying to stop it. That fits with my plans.

  After we leave Grandma at the clinic, I tell Loo, “Tie me up and lead me to the prison. There’s a big reward for my capture. Turn me in and request it. Make them set up the money in a bank account for Grandma, to dole out little by little. It’s a lot of money.” (I still don’t dare tell her how much even though I’m sure she’d not be able to understand it anyway.)

  But even as I speak I realize they won’t do it for a child. Perhaps I should turn myself in for my own reward. Have an account in my own and Grandma’s name. Will they let me do that? What if Grandma dies or never recovers her senses? Loo’s name then. They won’t, but they might. It would change their life. I may as well try.

  I show Loo how to tie me up.

  “The bruise on my head . . . tell them you did that.”

  She starts to cry. “I won’t.”

  “You’ll see. You’ll be a hero. Everything will be better this way.”

  “It won’t be.”

  “I’ll be fine. I have my chants and I can think about you.”

  She tries to give me her doll.

  “They’ll not let me keep anything. You keep the pipe, too. I can only take unreal things like remembering.”

  But we’re too late. There’s been no reward since winter. I can’t believe it. I’m no longer of any importance. At first I feel a great relief. My stomach lurches. I almost throw up. It’s over. This is better than any reward no matter how large. Loo and I can walk away.

  But they grab me anyway. I struggle though I know it’s useless. In half a minute I’m shackled again. I yell at Loo to go to the clinic, but when I look back, they’ve got her, too. I can’t think why. I suppose she’s guilty of helping me. I never should have let them help. I wonder what they’ll do to Grandma. They know I have loved ones now. I wonder if Loo has the sense to chant.

  We put up new posters: THE GENERAL IS IN OUR CUSTODY. Finding him and capturing him was difficult but we prevailed. Congratulations to all our Search and Capture teams. They will be rewarded. Prepare your flags and trumpets; tomorrow there will be another day of celebrating.

  Closing Time

  By NEIL GAIMAN

  It was in the nature of boys to get into trouble.

  But sometimes you had to knock.

  There are still clubs in London. Old ones, and mock-old, with elderly sofas and crackling fireplaces, newspapers, and traditions of speech or of silence, and new clubs, the Groucho and its many knockoffs, where actors and journalists go to be seen, to drink, to enjoy their glowering solitude, or even to talk. I have friends in both kinds of club, but am not myself a member of any club in London, not anymore.

  Years ago, half a lifetime, when I was a young journalist, I joined a club. It existed solely to take advantage of the licensing laws of the day, which forced all pubs to stop serving drinks at eleven PM, closing time. This club, the Diogenes, was a one-room affair located above a record shop in a narrow alley just off the Tottenham Court Road. It was owned by a cheerful, chubby, alcohol-fueled woman called Nora, who would tell anyone who asked and even if they didn’t that she’d called the club the Diogenes, darling, because she was still looking for an honest man. Up a narrow flight of steps, and, at Nora’s whim, the door to the club would be open, or not. It kept irregular hours.

  It was a place to go once the pubs closed, that was all it ever was, and despite Nora’s doomed attempts to serve food or even to send out a cheery monthly newsletter to all her club’s members reminding them that the club now served food, that was all it would ever be. I was saddened several years ago when I heard that Nora had died; and I was struck, to my surprise, with a real sense of desolation last month when, on a visit to England, walking down that alley, I tried to figure out where the Diogenes Club had been, and looked first in the wrong place, then saw the faded green cloth awnings shading the wi
ndows of a tapas restaurant above a mobile phone shop, and, painted on them, a stylized man in a barrel. It seemed almost indecent, and it set me remembering.

  There were no fireplaces in the Diogenes Club, and no armchairs either, but still, stories were told there.

  Most of the people drinking there were men, although women passed through from time to time, and Nora had recently acquired a glamorous permanent fixture in the shape of a deputy, a blonde Polish émigré who called everybody “darlink” and who helped herself to drinks whenever she got behind the bar. When she got drunk, she would tell us that she was by rights a countess, back in Poland, and swear us all to secrecy.

  There were actors and writers, of course. Film editors, broadcasters, police inspectors, and drunks. People who did not keep fixed hours. People who stayed out too late, or who did not want to go home. Some nights there might be a dozen people there, or more. Other nights I’d wander in and I’d be the only person there—on those occasions I’d buy myself a single drink, drink it down, and then leave.

  That night, it was raining, and there were four of us in the club after midnight.

  Nora and her deputy were sitting up at the bar, working on their sitcom. It was about a chubby-but-cheerful woman who owned a drinking club, and her scatty deputy, an aristocratic foreign blonde who made amusing English mistakes. It would be like Cheers, Nora used to tell people. She named the comical Jewish landlord after me. Sometimes they would ask me to read a script.

  The rest of us were sitting over by the window: an actor named Paul (commonly known as Paul-the-actor, to stop people confusing him with Paul-the-police-inspector or Paul-the-struck-off-plastic-surgeon, who were also regulars), a computer gaming magazine editor named Martyn, and me. We knew each other vaguely, and the three of us sat at a table by the window and watched the rain come down, misting and blurring the lights of the alley.

  There was another man there, older by far than any of the three of us. He was cadaverous, and gray-haired and painfully thin, and he sat alone in the corner and nursed a single whiskey. The elbows of his tweed jacket were patched with brown leather, I remember that quite vividly. He did not talk to us, or read, or do anything. He just sat, looking out at the rain and the alley beneath, and, sometimes, he sipped his whisky without any visible pleasure.

  It was almost midnight, and Paul and Martyn and I had started telling ghost stories. I had just finished telling them a sworn-true ghostly account from my school days: the tale of the Green Hand. It had been an article of faith at my prep school that there was a disembodied, luminous hand that was seen, from time to time, by unfortunate schoolboys. If you saw the Green Hand you would die soon after. Fortunately, none of us were ever unlucky enough to encounter it, but there were sad tales of boys there before our time, boys who saw the Green Hand and whose thirteen-year-old hair had turned white overnight. According to school legend they were taken to the sanatorium, where they would expire after a week or so without ever being able to utter another word.

  “Hang on,” said Paul-the-actor. “If they never uttered another word, how did anyone know they’d seen the Green Hand? I mean, they could have seen anything.”

  As a boy, being told the stories, I had not thought to ask this, and now that it was pointed out to me it did seem somewhat problematic.

  “Perhaps they wrote something down,” I suggested, a bit lamely.

  We batted it about for a while, and agreed that the Green Hand was a most unsatisfactory sort of ghost. Then Paul told us a true story about a friend of his who had picked up a hitchhiker, and dropped her off at a place she said was her house, and when he went back the next morning, it turned out to be a cemetery. I mentioned that exactly the same thing had happened to a friend of mine as well. Martyn said that it had not only happened to a friend of his, but, because the hitchhiking girl looked so cold, the friend had lent her his coat, and the next morning, in the cemetery, he found his coat all neatly folded on her grave.

  Martyn went and got another round of drinks, and we wondered why all these ghost-women were zooming around the country all night and hitchhiking home, and Martyn said that probably living hitchhikers these days were the exception, not the rule.

  And then one of us said, “I’ll tell you a true story, if you like. It’s a story I’ve never told a living soul. It’s true—it happened to me, not to a friend of mine—but I don’t know if it’s a ghost story. It probably isn’t.”

  This was over twenty years ago. I have forgotten so many things, but I have not forgotten that night, nor how it ended.

  This is the story that was told that night, in the Diogenes Club.

  I was nine years old, or thereabouts, in the late 1960s, and I was attending a small private school not far from my home. I was only at that school less than a year—long enough to take a dislike to the school’s owner, who had bought the school in order to close it, and to sell the prime land on which it stood to property developers, which, shortly after I left, she did.

  For a long time—a year or more—after the school closed the building stood empty before it was finally demolished and replaced by offices. Being a boy, I was also a burglar of sorts, and one day before it was knocked down, curious, I went back there. I wriggled through a half-opened window and walked through empty classrooms that still smelled of chalk dust. I took only one thing from my visit, a painting I had done in Art of a little house with a red door-knocker like a devil or an imp. It had my name on it, and it was up on a wall. I took it home.

  When the school was still open I walked home each day, through the town, then down a dark road cut through sandstone hills and all grown over with trees, and past an abandoned gatehouse. Then there would be light, and the road would go past fields, and finally I would be home.

  Back then there were so many old houses and estates, Victorian relics that stood in an empty half-life awaiting the bulldozers that would transform them and their ramshackle grounds into blandly identical landscapes of desirable modern residences, every house neatly arranged side by side around roads that went nowhere.

  The other children I encountered on my way home were, in my memory, always boys. We did not know each other, but, like guerrillas in occupied territory, we would exchange information. We were scared of adults, not each other. We did not have to know each other to run in twos or threes or in packs.

  The day that I’m thinking of, I was walking home from school, and I met three boys in the road where it was at its darkest. They were looking for something in the ditches and the hedges and the weed-choked place in front of the abandoned gatehouse. They were older than me.

  “What are you looking for?”

  The tallest of them, a beanpole of a boy, with dark hair and a sharp face, said, “Look!” He held up several ripped-in-half pages from what must have been a very, very old pornographic magazine. The girls were all in black and white, and their hairstyles looked like the ones my great-aunts had in old photographs. The magazine had been ripped up, and fragments of it had blown all over the road and into the abandoned gatehouse front garden.

  I joined in the paper chase. Together, the three of us retrieved almost a whole copy of The Gentleman’s Relish from that dark place. Then we climbed over a wall, into a deserted apple orchard, and looked at it. Naked women from a long time ago. There is a smell, of fresh apples, and of rotten apples moldering down into cider, which even today brings back the idea of the forbidden to me.

  The smaller boys, who were still bigger than I was, were called Simon and Douglas, and the tall one, who might have been as old as fifteen, was called Jamie. I wondered if they were brothers. I did not ask.

  When we had all looked at the magazine, they said, “We’re going to hide this in our special place. Do you want to come along? You mustn’t tell, if you do. You mustn’t tell anyone.”

  They made me spit on my palm, and they spat on theirs, and we pressed our hands together.

  Their special place was an abandoned metal water tower, in a field by the entranc
e to the lane near to where I lived. We climbed a high ladder. The tower was painted a dull green on the outside, and inside it was orange with rust that covered the floor and the walls. There was a wallet on the floor with no money in it, only some cigarette cards. Jamie showed them to me: each card held a painting of a cricketer from a long time ago. They put the pages of the magazine down on the floor of the water tower, and the wallet on top of it.

  Then Douglas said, “I say we go back to the Swallows next.”

  My house was not far from the Swallows, a sprawling manor house set back from the road. It had been owned, my father had told me once, by the Earl of Tenterden, but when he had died his son, the new earl, had simply closed the place up. I had wandered to the edges of the grounds, but had not gone farther in. It did not feel abandoned. The gardens were too well cared for, and where there were gardens there were gardeners. Somewhere there had to be an adult.

  I told them this.

  Jamie said, “Bet there’s not. Probably just someone who comes in and cuts the grass once a month or something. You’re not scared, are you? We’ve been there hundreds of times. Thousands.”

  Of course I was scared, and of course I said that I was not. We went up the main drive, until we reached the main gates. They were closed, and we squeezed beneath the bars to get in.

  Rhododendron bushes lined the drive. Before we got to the house there was what I took to be a groundskeeper’s cottage, and beside it on the grass were some rusting metal cages, big enough to hold a hunting dog, or a boy. We walked past them, up to a horseshoeshaped drive and right up to the front door of the Swallows. We peered inside, looking in the windows, but seeing nothing. It was too dark inside.

  We slipped around the house, into a rhododendron thicket and out again, into some kind of fairyland. It was a magical grotto, all rocks and delicate ferns and odd, exotic plants I’d never seen before: plants with purple leaves, and leaves like fronds, and small half-hidden flowers like jewels. A tiny stream wound through it, a rill of water running from rock to rock.