by Gene Wolfe
“Cape Rose.”
“I mean where at the Cape, Ms. McKane?”
“I really don’t think I should tell you that,” Ms. McKane answered primly. She had her doctorate now, and it irritated her that she could not use the title outside.
“Oh, I’m no spy.” The agent giggled, and Ms. McKane decided she was not as attractive as she had first thought. Celibacy is best, she told herself. It always has been.
“I’ve heard that up north there are sympathizers all over.”
“I really wouldn’t know.”
They swung off onto a new road. An old and battered tin sign announced WEST COCOA BEACH, pop 15,000. “Don’t pay any attention to that,” the agent said. “It isn’t right. More like twelve thousand.” (Even that was probably a lie, Ms. McKane thought.) “Do you have a car? You’ll need one. I have a friend in the business, and I’ll give you her card.”
“It’s being shipped down by rail,” Ms. McKane said. “I see a lot of these houses are for sale.” They were shabby bungalows for the most part, half strangled by their subtropical plantings.
“You can get three times the house for no more than they’re asking for these,” the agent assured her. “That’s what I’m taking you to see.”
The little car turned a corner and jolted to a halt. Ms. McKane looked out. The house was … stately. There was no other word for it. Two stories and dormer windows that indicated a finished attic. A lot twice as large as the others. The grass was high and wild now and the house needed a little paint, but just the same …
“Seventeen thousand five hundred,” the agent said. “With your job the bank won’t ask for a down payment, though you can give them one if you like.”
“I could never furnish this place,” Ms. McKane said as she climbed out of the car. “Never.”
“There’s furniture already—it goes with the house. Keep what you like and throw the rest out.”
“Really?” Ms. McKane turned to look at her, but she was already skipping up the steps.
“Really. Old furniture’s worth practically nothing today, you know. Not unless there are real antiques.”
A fat woman in a printed suit was watching them from the lawn of the house on the other side of the street. When Ms. McKane looked at her she shook her head and turned away.
“That’s another advantage. You’ll have neighbors on both sides and across. Handy in case you get sick or something. People here are neighborly.”
The front door squeaked open, and a blessed wave of coolness enveloped them. Ms. McKane stepped inside, looking at the fireplace and the graceful Queen Anne sofa. “It’s lovely, and so cool.”
“I mentioned at the office that I was going to show it,” the agent said. “Nora was going out this way, and she must have stopped in and turned on the air conditioning for us.”
In the kitchen Ms. McKane said, “It’s so big. I wonder if I can find someone to live here with me.”
Sale; the agent relaxed and smiled. “You should have yourself cloned. I mean, if you haven’t already—”
Ms. McKane shook her head.
“I mean, look at this woman. She hadn’t, and she drowned and had to give all this up. They just scrape some cells from inside your cheek, you know.”
“Unless I can find someone to share the house, there’d be no one to look after the baby.” Ms. McKane was practical.
A gum-chewing teenager delivered her car the next day, and Ms. McKane drove her back to the station. “It’s an old one, isn’t it?” the girl asked.
Ms. McKane nodded absently. The car’s hunched black sides, which had seemed so reassuringly strong in Boston, looked out of place in the brilliant sun. Were they aluminum? Ms. McKane could not be sure. “How far is the ocean?” she asked the girl. “In a direct line, that is.” The house’s old owner had drowned.
“Ten miles, I guess.”
This was foolishness; the Cape was right on the coast anyway, and her car would be parked there six days a week.
On the way to the house she bought groceries, staple foods—flour, sugar, coffee, and canned goods. Had there been pans? She could not remember and bought an inexpensive saucepan and a coffee pot. She had spent the night in a motel, nice but much too costly, even now in the off season. That’s over with, she thought. I’ll camp in the house until I find out what I need to make the place comfortable.
As it turned out, she needed very little. There was already a copious supply of linens, pots and casseroles, and spatulas and so on in abundance, and even some food. I could have stayed here, she said to herself, and saved the money. I’ll get a cat, and perhaps a dog too. Have them spayed—or maybe not.
She turned on the television, and it filled the lower floor with solemn sound while she put away her purchases. A newspaper lining a drawer announced PIG HUNTED. It was six months out of date, but she read it anyway. He was thought to be hiding in the Everglades; the article had a great deal to say about the difficulty of searching the Everglades, and very little to say about him. Where were they? Down south, she thought, a long way from here. She saw pictures of men so often on the news that she had trouble remembering the last she had seen in the flesh. She had been a child, surely.
That night she read the Journal of Mathematics, with the TV mumbling unattended in the background, and went to bed. She slept badly, then spent a fatiguing day at the Cape getting acquainted with her co-workers. On the following, she went to work in earnest. It was Sunday before she had time to poke around the house.
It was uncomfortable as a garment too large is uncomfortable by its very looseness. She had felt big and clumsy in her tiny Boston apartment. Now she herself was tiny, without force, without impact on this hulking structure. She made noise for the sake of noise and found herself wondering, while she did her laundry, if someone were not pounding her front door. Her heart thumped at the soughing of chill wind in the air-conditioning vents. She seemed to be eating too much and felt sure it was in a subconscious effort to grow larger.
The owner before her—Jane Something, it had been on the deed—had been an eccentric. Or perhaps, Ms. McKane thought, an eccentric is anyone who dies without the chance to clean up. She had saved empty seed packets from the little garden behind the house, and there were five pairs of very similar scissors in her sewing basket. Her clothes were mostly gone, or she had owned very few. There was an album of photos, with no way of telling which were of her. Possibly none were. The few remaining clothes testified that she had been tall and thin, a hairbrush sighed of pale brown hair before Ms. McKane threw it out. Jane rolling dead, naked in the surf.
The bookcase in the living room held standard authors: Austen, the Brontës, Willa Cather, Edna Ferber … George Sand, Frankenstein. Ms. McKane was about to turn away when she glimpsed something behind the books. Flannery O’Connor and Dorothy Parker tumbled to the floor so she could reach it. It proved to be another book, The Collected Short Fiction of Guy de Maupassant, bound in red buckram and read nearly to pieces. She pulled down the rest of the books and uncovered one other lurker in darkness—The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, its pages falling out.
The fat woman across the street invited her for tea, and she went gratefully. “Do you know, except for the people I work with, I don’t know a soul in Florida?”
“Better off not knowing most of them,” the fat woman said, and launched with gusto into an account of the misdeeds of her neighbors, women who had peculiar friends, were criminally careless with money, and failed to cut their grass.
Ms. McKane blushed. Her overgrown yard was still untouched. “I meant to do something about it this afternoon,” she lied, “but I can’t get the old mower to start. I suppose I’ll have to buy a new one.”
“Jane kept her place nice, I’ll say that for her.”
“She seems to have been an excellent citizen,” Ms. McKane admitted dutifully.
“Except she never—you know. I’ve had it done three times. Raised them all, but Pearl IV’s dead now.”
> Three copies of this; it was appalling.
“Her boat got flipped over, never found the body.”
Go to the old, gray window-maker, Ms. McKane thought. It wasn’t right—why wasn’t there a word for a mother whose child was dead? There should be. Aloud she said, “Was that what happened to the woman who owned my house? I was told she drowned.”
The fat woman muttered something that sounded like her sisters got her.
“Beg pardon?”
“I said the cistern got her. Fell down it head first.”
At home again, the lie became a truth—the mower would not start. Arm aching, Ms. McKane retreated to the coolness of the kitchen. That square of planks in the back yard surely marked the sinister spot. Just a concrete tank to catch rainwater from the roof for the garden, but she was not sure she would ever be able to lift the cover now. Who had found her? How long had it been? She wondered, yet preferred not to know.
There was someone—something—in the house. It moved things, if ever so little, while she was at the Cape. A box of dried fruit she had never touched after opening emptied itself day by day. On windy nights, something walked.
She invited everyone she knew even slightly to the housewarming and spent nearly three hundred dollars on food and liquor. It was a thundering success that left a physicist and two programmers passed out on her furniture, and it quieted “the ghost” for nearly two weeks.
Then it was back. She woke to hear it going down the stairs, and with more courage than she had known she possessed she went looking for it with a flashlight. “Who are you? I won’t hurt you.” If you don’t hurt me. Only later did she wonder what she would have done if she had found someone—she forced herself to visualize a black girl—filling a sack.
Next day she went to a sporting-goods store. Firearms repelled her, but she said some animal, perhaps a raccoon, was getting into her garbage. When she admitted she had never fired a gun the woman in the store suggested a trap instead, and she went away thinking about them.
What would be irresistible? Candy? She bought a box, counted the pieces, ate five, and left the box on the coffee table. Twenty-six. Twenty-six. Twenty-four. Twenty-four. Twenty-four. Twenty-three. That was a week, a work week, and a week seemed enough. She stopped counting and ate the rest herself, then bought a new box which she laced with rat poison. It remained untouched. She bought cookies, bread, jam, crackers, more dried fruit, fresh Indian River oranges, eggs, and canned oysters from Japan. In Boston she had had to struggle against chubbiness. Now she was becoming gaunt. One night she dreamed someone she could not see stood beside her bed voicing a complaint she could not hear, and the next day she brought home more food, delicacies chosen wildly.
An advertisement in Scientific American offered ornithologists an “electronic shotgun” capable of stunning birds as large as barn owls. She ordered one, giving her address at the Cape.
She put a bolt on her bedroom door, bought a hot plate, and had a telephone installed beside her bed. When a new woman reported to the department, she offered to share the house rent-free; but the new woman was attractive and had, it seemed, better offers.
One night she saw an eerie light in the street and went out onto the porch. A little girl had imprisoned fireflies in ajar and was touring the neighborhood with them. Ms. McKane watched her until she realized that women all up and down the street were doing likewise.
She dreamed that she was Jane, head-down in the cistern. One of the programmers mentioned, half laughing, that someone had “had fun” with her as she slept on the Queen Anne sofa. “Was it you, Daisy?”
“Who remembers?” Ms. McKane said. “I suppose it might have been.” They both laughed and later that week the programmer asked her to lunch, only to make it clear as they ate that she expected her to pick up the check. Ms. McKane thought, How is this better?, and resolved never to speak to the programmer again. “You make more than I do,” the programmer said as they left the cafeteria.
The electronic shotgun came, and she concealed it in her car. That evening, after pretending to leave the house, she returned through the rear door and searched everywhere, finding no one.
One morning she woke early without knowing why. As she lay in bed savoring the bygone luxury of sleep, she heard him descending the stairs. The sound was so devoid of stealth that as soon as it had died away she felt sure it had been a waking dream, a phantom of hearing. She got up, put on her robe, and went downstairs to start coffee.
He was in the kitchen eating toast with strawberry preserves. His face seemed heavily brutal to her, masked though it was with curling black hair. “It’s you,” she said before she had time to wonder if it would not have been to her advantage to appear surprised and outraged.
He nodded, watching her with unblinking eyes.
“You must have known I would find you here.”
He nodded again.
“I’m going to call the police.” Quite suddenly it came to her that she should not have told him, that he might seize her (she felt sure he would be stronger than she) and carry her outside. In imagination she could see him kicking aside the cistern cover, see the circular opening to Death. “I’ll scream if you touch me,” she said.
“I won’t touch you.” His voice was deeper than she had anticipated, harsh and flat with isolation.
“I’m going to call the police,” she said again. “You’d better go now. I won’t try to stop you.”
He spooned jam onto the second fragrant slice.
“They’ll kill you.”
He shook his head. “Not for a long time. First they’ll ask me who helped me, how I stayed alive so long. I’ll give your name first.”
“They won’t believe you.” Courage came welling up in her, welcome as forgotten money. “I am a doctor of science, a model citizen.”
“I’m here. I’m my own evidence. Do you think they’ll believe I could have lived with you all this time without your help?” He waved, and the gesture told of the large house and the well-stocked pantry shelves.
“You’re clever, aren’t you?” she said; and he answered almost humbly, “I have nothing to do but read and plan.”
As if by enchantment, the coffee pot was in her hand. She filled it at the sink and ladled in the coarse grains. “We may as well talk. I won’t hurt you if you won’t hurt me.”
“I won’t.”
“That’s right, you can’t.” Bitterly she added, “Who’d bring food for you?” then recalled Jane dead in the cistern and the laden shelves. He had only to wait until his next victim came. She saw him as a black and hairy spider, patient at the center of his web.
“I won’t,” he said again. “And as for your trying to hurt me, it’s the only thing you could do that would stop me from being afraid of you.”
“Why did you show yourself to me? Don’t tell me you wouldn’t be afraid if the police came after you.”
“Because it was too dangerous not to,” the man said. “I worried, every day, that you would ask them to search. They might have found me.”
Ms. McKane pulled out a chair and sat down, surprising herself and, she thought, him. “Where were you?”
“In various corners at various times.”
“You killed the other woman—the one before me.”
He nodded. “Indirectly and unintentionally, yes.”
She was not sure what he meant. “Will you kill me the same way?”
“Not.”
“There must be a good many of you—more than most of us think. I suppose that’s why the government fusses about you so. Do you ever get together?”
“By twos and threes at night.”
“And do all of you live the way you do? In houses, like this?”
He shook his head. The coffee was perking on the stove, filling the kitchen with its warm perfume.
“Perhaps we can strike some bargain. I get what I want and you get what you do.” She felt desperate. “All right? What I want is for you to leave and promise you won’t t
ell lies about me.”
“Or the truth,” he said. “That you sat down and talked to me, instead of screaming or running for the telephone.”
“Or the truth,” Ms. McKane admitted. “Now what is it you want?”
“To remain here as long as I wish. To be safe until I can reach some country where men still rule.”
She tried to smile. “It seems we’ve come to an impasse.”
Suddenly he smiled too. “Only in logic. From the books you brought, you’re a mathematician …”
She nodded.
“But the sphere of logic has never been the world of women and men. If we can manage to forget it, we can both be free, or at least as nearly free as we are capable of being.”
She got up and poured the coffee, waiting for him to continue. When he did not, she said, “I’m afraid I’m not the White Queen. I can’t believe in impossible things.”
“‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’” he quoted.
“‘Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’” Then, “I didn’t think you women still read male authors.”
“I don’t think we mathematicians will ever give up Carroll. Fortunately, we can mention the name without much danger. Do you know anything about math?”
He shook his head. “Only what I know about logic—that it should serve us, and not master us. Don’t you agree, for example, that if we both wanted the same thing, we could not both have it? Look, here’s a slice of bread, all nicely smeared with strawberry. We could divide it between us—evenly, or by some complicated formula you would work out. But if we both wanted the whole slice, could we both have it? Both eat it?”
“What are you getting at?”
“Only that because we want quite different things, there’s really no reason why each of us shouldn’t pick up what each wants and walk away. I won’t stop you if you don’t try to stop me.”
“You’re not making sense.”
He nodded seriously. “If I were to make sense, we’d both go to prison. Let me say it again: Take what you want, and I’ll take what I want. Say to yourself that I am gone, and I am gone. You’ll never see me again, never hear me.”