The Land Across

by Gene Wolfe

  She shook her head. “Not all of them.”

  “Come on! We need to look at some more rooms.” I led the way without looking back to see if she was following me. “Is this something Volitain told you?”

  “They call to me.” She sounded like she had not moved an inch.

  “Magic mirrors?” It made me think about this book, which I had already been planning. “I’ll have to find out about them.”

  Martya said, “Do you not know mirrors call out to women?”

  I had thought the foyer was pretty big. The next room was three times its size, a lot bigger than Kleon’s whole house. A lot of furniture remained, dark and heavy tables, chairs, and cabinets. The floorboards had been torn up in places.

  The cabinets, I decided, were way too obvious to be worth searching. They would have been searched a long time ago. I opened one to see. It had originally been locked, but somebody had pried it open, busting the lock. There were a few dusty odds and ends left, like a long, bent screw and an empty ink bottle. In the angle between a shelf and the back …

  My fingernail pried it out: a chewed-up pencil.

  Martya was pulling a dustcover from the picture above the nearest mantel. The dustcover gone, it turned out to be no picture at all, but a big mirror. “Here is one,” she told me. “There is a dead woman buried behind it.”

  I did not believe her. “How do you know that?”

  She shrugged.

  “How? Did Volitain tell you?”

  “I saw her.” Martya paused, groping, probably because she was looking for the right German. “I look at it. It does not show me, but she.”

  “A dead woman.”

  “Yes.”

  I went to the mirror and, just as I expected, saw my own reflection. The mirror was in a heavy brass frame, and the frame fastened with big screws to the black wood over the mantel. “If I had tools, I’d take this down so you could see there’s no dead woman hiding back there.”

  “You would do that for me?”

  I shook my head. “We’re treasure hunting. This looks as if it hasn’t been disturbed in quite a while, so it’s at least possible the treasure’s back there, in a hole behind the mirror.”

  “Someone might have looked and put it back.”

  It seemed to me that a searcher would have had no reason to put back the mirror, which looked pretty heavy. But I was checking out the heads of the big brass screws and kept my yap shut. The slots would have showed bright scratches if the screws had been turned lately with a steel screwdriver. None did, but there was one missing.

  I picked up the cloth dustcover and covered the mirror.

  “Make many notes,” Martya told me. “We must have tools and a light.”

  I did.

  “Are we to go now?”

  “Soon,” I told her. “I want to look around a little more.”

  “Soon it will be night. I make the suggestion. We go through the house.” Martya gestured. “When we have reach the end there will be a door. This must be so. We go out this door of which I speak and so back to make Kleon let us in and give us supper.”

  I said I wanted to look things over a little more thoroughly.

  “If I wish to go, how do you prevent me?”

  “I wouldn’t stop you at all, except for arguing that it would be better if you were to stay.”

  “This we are doing. I will go. Will you find Kleon’s house again? It is not far.”

  I thought about it.

  “Answer! You could not.”

  “I could ask directions.”

  “They will tell you nothing. This you will most soon find, and know I am right. So! You will not find it. The police will shoot Kleon. For me this is good. I will have the house and sell him, and I go to the capital. You go to prison. For you it is most bad.”

  “All right,” I told her, “we’ll go through the house like you want. But first we ought to lock the front door. I’m sure we can lock it from inside.”

  “No one will wish to enter into such a place as this. You and Volitain solely.”

  “Let me lock it. It will only take a minute.”

  The large keyhole on the inside of the door was pretty obvious, but the lock seemed stiffer and rustier than ever. I got out my notebook again, and made a note about spray lubricant, underlining it. It worked magic. Just making the note seemed to fix the lock, which let my key turn almost easily. I shook the door.

  “It is locked! Let us go.”

  I nodded as I pocketed the key and followed her out of the reception hall. In the next room the tall windows had changed to smaller ones, square or round, some broken. The fireplaces were gone, and there was a big Dutch stove instead.

  “We do not need your swears,” Martya told me. “They are most vile. This your voice says. I do not understand them. This house either. We have come through the wrong door. It is no more than that.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. How about this? You go back to the reception hall and find the right door. I’ll keep on going toward the back from here. We’ll meet at the back and see who gets there first.”

  “You would leave me! Kleon will be shot, and you will go to prison. This I have said.”

  I shook my head. “You said nobody will give me directions. If you’re telling the truth—which I don’t believe, by the way—I’ll pay somebody to guide me.”

  “I will be at Kleon’s before you!”

  “When I get there I’ll tell you how smart you are.”

  “You think me afraid!”

  “Only you’re not? You can prove it pretty easily.” I gestured toward the door through which we had come into the room.

  “I am afraid—most afraid for you. You are like a foolish child. You think himself wise. I must protect you.”

  Since I did not really want us to be separated, I smiled at that, calling her Mother Martya. She laughed, and we crossed the room together, exiting through the door at the farther end.

  Here I would like to stop to tell you that I had never really sensed the sinister atmosphere of the Willows until Martya laughed. There was something in there that hated laughter, and her laugh woke it up. Woke it only in my own mind, you will say. But I had not been afraid before and was scared then. There is no arguing against that.

  The setting sun may have had something to do with it, too. I did not see it, but I may have sensed it in the changed quality of the light. In Australia I watched Ayers Rock change color at sunset. Of course the space-traveling stone does not really change. It just makes the change in the sunlight show up better. Did the Willows really change some way? I would rather write no, but I think maybe it did.

  Either the next room was windowless or its windows had been boarded up. It would have been as dark as the heart of an alderman if we had not left the door open. As it was, we walked slowly and carefully because I remembered the torn-up floorboards in the other room.

  We were halfway through when Martya yelled, “A thing run on my foot!”

  “Just a rat,” I said. “There’s bound to be rats in an old house like this.”

  “What is it they eat here? What is it their food?”

  I said I had no idea.

  “I will tell. They gnaw the bodies of the dead! We—” Martya paused. “That you heard. That you must hear. Tell me you hear.”

  “Hear what?”

  “Somebody laugh when I say that. Not you, I have hear you laugh at me too often. I could not mistake. You hear? Say you hear it, too.”

  “No. No, I didn’t.”

  “There is another here with us!”

  “It was probably the wind.”

  “What wind? I do not feel him.”

  “The next time we do this—,” I began.

  I was interrupted. “We do not next time. No! You do it, with none.”

  I would have closed her mouth with my hand, but she moved away. I had heard something, and hoped—scared half to death—to hear it again. As it was, all I could do was urge Martya, in whispers, to be quiet a
nd listen.

  Somebody was walking around upstairs. The noises were faint, but I felt sure I knew exactly what they were. He would walk toward the back of the house, and then toward the front again.

  A door slammed, and after that everything got quiet.

  “We must get out,” Martya was whispering.

  I nodded, hoping she could see it, turned, and steered her toward what I thought was the door we had come through.

  It showed us into another room, smaller than the one we had left and five or six sided, but a room with windows.

  Martya went to a broken one, felt along the bottom of the frame for broken glass, found some, and by what seemed like a real miracle got the window to open, swinging like the door of a cabinet in a rusty frame that creaked and squeaked.

  “I cannot climb over. You are strong. You must lift me over and drop me.”

  “I’m not strong,” I told her, “and you’re perfectly capable of climbing out by yourself. That can’t be more than a couple of feet high.”

  “I must have care for my hat.” She displayed the little cardboard hatbox. “Besides, lifting is more romantic.” Outside, a gust of wind brought in spattering rain.

  I climbed out. It was maybe three feet from the bottom of the window to the muddy ground underneath. The willows that had been so silent when we came to the house were muttering now, like a crowd getting set to riot.

  Martya leaned out the window. My hands nearly circled her waist as I lifted her out. She threw her arms around my neck, hatbox and all, and kissed me before I put her down.

  After that, there is nothing much to tell. We ran through the dripping willows all the way to the windswept street, running blindly and getting there mostly by good luck. As Martya had said, it was not far from the Willows to Kleon’s house—not far, anyhow, the way they figured in Puraustays.

  Pounding on the door brought Kleon from his bed, naked and mad as hell. He announced loudly (Martya interpreting for me) that he had no intention of making supper. Martya apparently told him to go back to bed, and told me that we would have soup.

  It was on the kitchen stove already, kept warm by a banked fire. She stirred up the fire, added fresh coal, cut thick slices of dark bread, and put on water for tea.

  I told her I was too tired to eat.

  She said I had to take off my wet clothes and hang them in the kitchen to dry. I did, except for my shorts.

  She took off her soaked dress and hung it up. “We will put these near the stove when we have go.”

  I suppose I nodded. I was listening to spring rain rattle against the window.

  “You have the bad day, I think. Did they beat you?”

  I said that they had not, only pushed me down a flight of stairs.

  “That is not so much, but you must eat my soup and sleep. It is morning, I see you again.”

  I agreed and said I hoped her new hat had not been ruined.

  “No, no! The box is for burn but the hat is fur. It will be most fine.” She laid aside the long spoon she had been stirring the soup with, tore open the wet box, and put on the hat. “You see? It is little water, but most soon will it be dry. Is pretty, no?”

  She posed, moving from one pose to the next like a dancer, in a fox-fur hat and a worn, wet cotton bra and panties. “It suits me?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It looks great on you.”

  “You are straighten up. That is good. I must get butter.”

  When she pulled a ring in the floor, a trapdoor almost at my feet swung up, showing rough steps that led down into darkness. She lit a candle from the stove and went down them, still wearing the fox-fur hat.

  I closed my eyes to rest them. When I opened them a minute later, there was butter on the kitchen table, and a bowl of steaming soup in front of me.

  “This is good. I think I must wake you. Eat! Dip first in the bread. Soup is most hot.”

  I did. The bread was the kind kids hate, but solid and nourishing. The soup was foreign and delicious. I asked what kind it was.

  “All kind.” Martya laughed. “What is good for soup, I put in. We have meat, there is here no dog. My soup get the bones.”

  I was eating soup and too busy to smart off.

  4

  THE MAN FROM THE MINISTRY

  I have no idea what time it was when I went to bed. After dark, of course. But we had walked quite a ways, trying to hurry while pushed around by rain and wind. There had been a squabble with Kleon, and so forth. Worst of all, I had nodded off when Martya went down into the cellar to get butter. How long had I slept then? Half an hour might be a pretty good guess.

  Certainly Martya woke me early the next morning. Gray light filled the sky, but the sun had not shown any part of his royal roundness. I can say all this because she shook my shoulder and made me look out the window.

  “He is Kleon. You see? He goes to his work.”

  I said, “I do now. I hadn’t noticed him before.”

  “You are rest, yes?”

  I said that I was still tired and wanted to stay in bed for another hour or so.

  “I, too.” She had been wrapped in a blanket that I had at first taken for a robe. As she spoke she let it drop, slipping into bed beside me. She was buck naked.

  “You do not wear nothing.” Her right hand had gone exploring.

  “I was soaked to the skin. I didn’t want to get into a dry bed wearing wet shorts.”

  “For me the same. I think Kleon will tire me most terribly, but he is asleep.” She giggled. “You must tire me now, or I don’t make nice breakfast.”

  It was certainly a nice breakfast by the standards of her country. There were savory sausages, little fried cakes of what seemed to be a mixture of some kind of meat ground up and oatmeal, two kinds of cheese, and the bread and butter we had the previous night. All this was washed down with strong, unsweetened tea. I was hungry, ate everything she put on the table, and promised to buy her more groceries as soon as we had finished.

  “You go market with me?”

  I nodded. “I want to buy tools—stuff we’ll need in that empty house. We can buy food, too.”

  “Twice we go. First for me, then for you. For me we bring here. We go back, buy for you the ladder and what else, and take these things to Willows. Is not so much to carry, or so far.”

  I said all right, and we set off as soon as she had washed the breakfast dishes. (I dried.) I asked if Kleon had eaten.

  She shrugged. “Bread and cheese. Water to drink. I would cook for him if he makes me. For himself is better. But he must hurry away or no more work. Always he sleeps late and must go most quick after.”

  “I see.”

  “I stay in the bed until he is gone.” She closed her eyes and pretended to sleep. “He does not bother me then. If he wishes to tire me, he must do it when I go to bed. At that time I do not fight him.”

  “You’ll never have to fight me,” I told her. “If you don’t want to, just say so.”

  “Ah! You will find another.”

  “I won’t,” I told her, “but another might find me.”

  The market was larger than I had expected and carried foodstuffs from the surrounding farms. There were eggs and cheeses, plenty of both, live fowls, and a ton of dried fruit, mostly apples, plums, and cherries. Fish were for sale too, although not a lot. Many things Americans would never consider eating were for sale. There was a guy there who had lined up the heads of a couple of dozen freshly decapitated pigs on board shelves. He sold one while I was watching.

  Martya bought a ham, eggs, brown flour so coarse it might almost be called meal, potatoes, and salt, all of which she haggled over and I paid for. I wanted to carry everything, to which she objected vociferously—the ladies of the neighborhood would see her carrying nothing and call her a lazy slut.

  I gave her the ham, the flour, and the potatoes. She did not like that either, saying she would be carrying more than I did. Both of us wanted to carry the eggs, since it seemed obvious that the person who carried
those could not carry much else for fear some would be broken. In the end, she carried the eggs and the salt, and I carried everything else. As we were leaving the market she saw some fresh, bright red cherries, which she said had come a long way on the train. I bought some, but only after she agreed to carry them.

  After that we trudged back to Kleon’s, Martya eating fresh cherries as she walked and spitting out the pits.

  It was not yet noon when we reached the house, but I laid down the law, saying we had to get lunch before we went out to buy tools—I said it because I wanted to sit down and take off my shoes. Martya wanted me to buy our lunches at a café she would show me. “Is really most good food there and most true to old city. This you must write in your book.” (I had explained that I was a travel writer and had come to collect materials.) After another argument like the one about carrying the groceries, we settled on a compromise. She would make tea for us both. I would get what was left of the cherries, with bread, butter, and cheese. When I had finished, we would walk to the café and I would buy our lunches. After that, we would shop for tools. Martya’s arguments confirmed what I had already begun to suspect: everyone here eats everything he or she can hold at every meal but walks so much that most people do not get fat.

  While I chewed dark bread and cheese and Martya drank tea, we talked about the Willows. I described the sort of ladder I wanted—an aluminum extension ladder light enough that Martya and I could carry it. She insisted that there were no such ladders here. I wanted a steel pry bar. She wanted two of them, so she could make a cross of them. And so on.

  The café fronted on the river. The fertilizer plants (if that is what they really were) were only too visible across the water, but they could have been any kind of building—castles, incinerators, prisons, public housing. You name it. Martya and I sat outside like a dozen other people, under a faded old umbrella that might have been red when it was new. European waiters despise tourists, but I was not one and felt pretty sure I did not look like one. I knew I was right when the waiter asked whether I had come to buy pork for Germany.

  I told him I had not, without explaining that I was an American and a prisoner. He thanked me and said exports were raising food prices beyond the reach of the poor.