by Neil Gaiman
The lettuces weren’t ready to pick, nor were the cabbages or broccoli. A few tomatoes, however, were sufficiently red to merit plucking from the plants and dropping into the canvas bag. The crab was roaming the top of the garden, where they’d planted Dan’s apple trees. Ransom glanced over the last of the tomatoes, checked the frames. “That collar,” he said. “It was the first thing I noticed about the dog. Okay, maybe not the first, but it wasn’t too long before it caught my eye. This was after Matt had met me in the driveway with the news that we had a guest. The look on his face…he had always been a moody kid—Heather and I used to ask one another, How’s the weather in Mattsville?—and adolescence, its spiking hormones, had not improved his temperament. In all fairness, Heather being sick didn’t help matters, any. This night, though, he was positively beaming, vibrating with nervous energy. When I saw him running up to the car, my heart jumped. I couldn’t conceive any reason for him to rush out the side door that wasn’t bad: at the very best, an argument with his mother over some school-related issue; at the very worst, another ambulance ride to the hospital for Heather.”
A blue centipede the size of his hand trundled across the dirt in front of him. He considered spearing it, couldn’t remember if it controlled any of the other species in the garden. Better to err on the side of caution—even now. He stepped over it, moved on to the beans. He said, “Matt refused to answer any of my questions; all he would say was, You’ll see. It had been a long day at work; my patience was frayed to a couple of threads and they weren’t looking any too strong. I was on the verge of snapping at him, telling him to cut the crap, grow up, but something, that grin, maybe, made me hold my tongue. And once I was inside, there was Heather sitting on the couch, the dog sprawled out beside her, his head in her lap. He didn’t so much as open an eye to me.
“For the life of me, I could not figure out how Heather had gotten him. I assumed she had been to the pound, but we owned only the one car, which I’d had at work all day. She took the longest time telling me where the dog had come from. I had to keep guessing, and didn’t Matt think that was the funniest thing ever? It was kind of funny…my explanations grew increasingly bizarre, fanciful. Someone had delivered the dog in a steamer trunk. Heather had discovered him living in one of the trees out front. He’d been packed away in the attic. I think she and Matt wanted to hear my next story.”
Ransom had forgotten the name of the beans they had planted. Not green beans: these grew in dark purple; although Dan had assured him that they turned green once you cooked them. The beans had come in big, which Dan had predicted: each was easily six, seven inches long. Of the twenty-five or thirty that were ready to pick, however, four had split at the bottom, burst by gelid, inky coils that hung down as long again as the bean. The ends of the coils raised towards him, unfolding petals lined with tiny teeth.
“Shit.” He stepped back, lowering the spear. The coils swayed from side to side, their petals opening further. He studied their stalks. All four sprang from the same plant. He swept the blade of the spear through the beans dangling from the plants to either side of the affected one. They dinged faintly on the metal. The rest of the crop appeared untouched; that was something. He adjusted the canvas bag onto his shoulder. Taking the spear in both hands, he set the edge of the blade against the middle plant’s stem. His first cut drew viscous green liquid and the smell of spoiled eggs. While he sawed, the coils whipped this way and that, and another three beans shook frantically. The stem severed, he used the spear to loosen the plant from its wire supports, then to carry it to the compost pile at the top of the garden, in the corner opposite the apple trees. There was lighter fluid left in the bottle beside the fence; the dark coils continued to writhe as he sprayed them with it. The plant was too green to burn well, but Ransom reckoned the application of fire to it, however briefly, couldn’t hurt. He reached in his shirt pocket for the matches. The lighter fluid flared with a satisfying whump.
The crab was circling the apple trees. Eyes on the leaves curling in the flames, Ransom said, “By the time Heather finally told me how Bruce had arrived at the house, I’d been won over. Honestly, within a couple of minutes of watching her sitting there with the dog, I was ready for him to move in. Not because I was such a great dog person—I’d grown up with cats, and if I’d been inclined to adopt a pet, a kitten would have been my first choice. Heather was the one who’d been raised with a houseful of dogs. No, what decided me in Bruce’s favor was Heather, her…demeanor, I suppose. You could see it in the way she was seated. She didn’t look as if she were holding herself as still as possible, as if someone were pressing a knife against the small of her back. She wasn’t relaxed—that would be an overstatement—but she was calmer.
“The change in Matt didn’t hurt, either.” Ransom squeezed another jet of lighter fluid onto the fire, which leapt up in response. The gelid coils thrashed as if trying to tear themselves free of the plant. “How long had that boy wanted a dog…By now, we’d settled into a routine with Heather’s meds, her doctors’ visits—it had settled onto us, more like. I think we knew…I wouldn’t say we had given up hope; Heather’s latest tests had returned better than expected results. But we—the three of us were in a place we had been in for a long time and didn’t know when we were going to get out of. A dog was refreshing, new.”
With liquid pops, the four coils burst one after the other. The trio of suspect beans followed close behind. “That collar, though…” Bringing the lighter fluid with him, Ransom left the fire for the spot where the affected plant had been rooted. Emerald fluid thick as honey topped the stump, slid down its sides in slow fingers. He should dig it out, he knew, and probably the plants to either side of it, for good measure, but without the protection of a pair of gloves, he was reluctant to expose his bare skin to it. He reversed the spear and drove its point into the stump. Leaving the blade in, he twisted the handle around to widen the cut, then poured lighter fluid into and around it. He wasn’t about to risk dropping a match over here, but he guessed the accelerant should, at a minimum, prove sufficiently toxic to hinder the plant from regrowing until he could return suitably protected and with a shovel.
There was still the question of whether to harvest the plants to either side. Fresh vegetables would be nice, but prudence was the rule of the day. Before they’d set out for the polar city with Matt, his neighbors had moved their various stores to his basement, for safe keeping; it wasn’t as if he were going to run out of canned food anytime soon. Ransom withdrew the spear and returned to the compost, where the fire had not yet subsided. Its business with the apple trees completed, the crab crouched at a safe remove from the flames. Ransom said, “It was a new collar, this blue, fibrous stuff, and there was a round metal tag hanging from it. The tag was incised with a name, ‘Noble,’ and a number to call in case this dog was found. It was a Wiltwyck number. I said, What about the owner? Shouldn’t we call them?
“Heather must have been preparing her answer all day, from the moment she read the tag. Do you see the condition this animal is in? she said. Either his owner is dead, or they don’t deserve him. As far as Heather was concerned, that was that. I didn’t argue, but shortly thereafter, I unbuckled the collar and threw it in a drawer in the laundry room. Given Bruce’s state, I didn’t imagine his owner would be sorry to find him gone, but you never know.
“For five days, Bruce lived with us. We took turns walking him. Matt actually woke up half an hour early to take him out for his morning stroll, then Heather gave him a shorter walk around lunchtime, then I took him for another long wander before bed. The dog tolerated me well enough, but he loved Matt, who couldn’t spend enough time with him. And Heather…except for his walks, he couldn’t bear to be away from her; even when we had passed a slow half-hour making our way up Main Street, Bruce diligently investigating the borders of the lawns on the way, there would come a moment he would decide it was time to return to Heather, and he would leave whatever he’d had his nose in and turn home, tugging
me along behind him. Once we were inside and I had his leash off, he would bolt for wherever Heather was—usually in bed, asleep—and settle next to her.”
He snapped the lighter fluid’s cap shut and replaced it beside the fence. The crab sidled away along the rows of carrots and potatoes on the other side of the beans and tomatoes. Ransom watched it examine the feathery green tops of the carrots, prod the potato blossoms. It would be another couple of weeks until they were ready to unearth; though after what had happened to the beans, a quick check was in order. “On the morning of the sixth day, Bruce’s owner arrived, came walking up the street the same way his dog had. William Harrow: that was the way he introduced himself. It was a Saturday. I was cooking brunch; Matt was watching TV; Heather was sitting on the front porch, reading. Of course, Bruce was with her. September was a couple of weeks old, but summer was slow in leaving. The sky was clear, the air was warm, and I was thinking that maybe I’d load the four of us into the car and drive up to the Reservoir for an afternoon out.”
On the far side of the house, the near curtain of light, on which he had watched the sunken island rise for the twentieth, the thirtieth time, settled, dimmed. With the slow spiral of food coloring dropped into water, dark pink and burnt orange spread across its upper reaches, a gaudy sunset display that was as close as the actual sky came to night, anymore. A broad concrete rectangle took up the image’s lower half. At its other end, the plane was bordered by four giant steel and glass boxes, each one open at the top. To the right, a single skyscraper was crowned by an enormous shape whose margins hung over and partway down its upper storeys. Something about the form, a handful of scattered details, suggested an impossibly large toad.
The first time Ransom had viewed this particular scene, a couple of weeks after Matt and their neighbors had embarked north, a couple of days after he had awakened to the greater part of Main Street and its houses gone, scoured to gray rock, he had not recognized its location. The polar city? Only once it was over and he was seated on the couch, unable to process what he had been shown, did he think, That was Albany. The Empire State Plaza. Those weren’t boxes: they were the bases of the office buildings that stood there. Fifty miles. That’s as far as they got.
He was close enough to the house for its silhouette to block most of the three figures who ran onto the bottom of the screen, one to collapse onto his hands and knees, another to drop his shotgun and tug a revolver out of his belt, the third to use his good hand to drag the blade of his hatchet against his jeans’ leg. The crab paid no more attention to the aurora’s display than it ever did; it was occupied withdrawing one of the red slugs from a beer trap. Ransom cleared his throat. “Heather said she never noticed William Harrow until his work boots were clomping on the front stairs. She looked up from her book, and there was this guy climbing to meet her. He must have been around our age, which is to say, late thirties. Tall, thin, not especially remarkable looking one way or the other. Beard, mustache…when I saw the guy, he struck me as guarded; to be fair, that could have been because he and Heather were already pretty far into a heated exchange. At the sound of the guy’s feet on the stairs, Bruce had stood; by the time I joined the conversation, the dog was trembling.
“The first words out of Harrow’s mouth were, That’s my dog. Maybe things would have proceeded along a different course…maybe we could have reached, I don’t know, some kind of agreement with the guy, if Heather hadn’t said, Oh? Prove it. Because he did; he said, Noble, sit, and Bruce did exactly that. There you go, Harrow said. I might have argued that that didn’t prove anything, that we had trained the dog to sit, ourselves, and it was the command he was responding to, not the name, but Heather saw no point in ducking the issue. She said, Do you know what shape this animal was in when we found him? Were you responsible for that? and the mercury plummeted.
“Matt came for me in the kitchen. He said, Mom’s arguing with some guy. I think he might be Bruce’s owner.
“All right, I said, hold on. I turned off the burners under the scrambled eggs and home fries. As I was untying my apron, Matt said, Is he gonna take Bruce with him?
“Of course not, I said.
“But I could see…as soon as I understood the situation, I knew Bruce’s time with us was over, felt the same lightness high in the chest I’d known sitting in the doctor’s office with Heather a year and half before, that seems to be my body’s reaction to bad news. It was…when Matt—when I…”
From either end of the plaza, from between two of the truncated buildings on its far side, what might have been torrents of black water rushed onto and over the concrete. There was no way for the streams to have been water: each would have required a hose the width of a train, pumps the size of houses, a score of workers to operate it, but the way they surged towards the trio occluded by the house suggested a river set loose from its banks and given free rein to speed across the land. The color of spent motor oil, they moved so fast that the objects studding their lengths were almost impossible to distinguish; after his initial viewing, it took Ransom another two before he realized that they were eyes, that each black tumult was the setting for a host of eyes, eyes of all sizes, shapes, and colors, eyes defining strange constellations. He had no similar trouble identifying the mouths into which the streams opened, tunnels gated by great cracked and jagged teeth.
Ransom said, “Heather’s approach…you might say that she combined shame with the threat of legal action. Harrow was impervious to both. As far as he was concerned, the dog looked fine, and he was the registered owner, so there was nothing to be worried about. Of course he looks good, Heather said, he’s been getting fed!
“If the dog had been in such awful shape, Harrow wanted to know, then how had he come all the way from his home up here? That didn’t sound like a trip an animal as severely-abused as Heather was claiming could make.
“He was trying to get as far away as he could, she said. Had he been in better condition, he probably wouldn’t have stopped here.
“This was getting us nowhere—had gotten us nowhere. Look, I said. Mr. Harrow. My family and I have become awfully attached to this dog. I understand that you’ve probably spent quite a bit on him. I would be willing to reimburse you for that, in addition to whatever you think is fair for the dog. Here I was, pretty much offering the guy a blank check. Money, right? It may be the root of all evil, but it’s solved more than a few problems.
“William Harrow, though…he refused my offer straight away. Maybe he thought I was patronizing him. Maybe he was trying to prove a point. I didn’t know what else to do. We could have stood our ground, insisted we were keeping Bruce, but if he had the law on his side, then we would only be delaying the inevitable. He could call the cops on us, the prospect of which made me queasy. As for escalating the situation, trying to get tough with him, intimidate him…that wasn’t me. I mean, really.”
With the house in the way, Ransom didn’t have to watch as the trio of dark torrents converged on the trio of men. He didn’t have to see the man who had not risen from his hands and knees scooped into a mouth that did not close so much as constrict. He didn’t have to see the man with the pistol empty it into the teeth that bit him in half. And he did not have to watch again as the third figure—he should call him a man; he had earned it—sidestepped the bite aimed at him and slashed a groove in the rubbery skin that caused the behemoth to veer away from him. He did not have to see the hatchet, raised for a second strike, spin off into the air, along with the hand that gripped it and most of the accompanying arm, as the mouth that had taken the man with the pistol sliced away the rest of the third man. Ransom did not have to see any of it.
(At the last moment, even though Ransom had sworn to himself he wouldn’t, he had pleaded with Matt not to leave. You could help me with the garden, he had said. You’ll manage, Matt had answered. Who will I talk to? Ransom had asked. Who will I tell things to? Write it all down, Matt had said, for when we get back. His throat tight with dread, Ransom had said, You don�
�t know what they’ll do to you. Matt had not argued with him.)
Its rounds of the garden completed, the crab was waiting at the gate. Ransom prodded the top of a carrot with the blunt end of the spear. “I want to say,” he said, “that, had Heather been in better health, she would have gone toe-to-toe with Harrow herself… weak as she was, she was ready to take a swing at him. To be on the safe side, I stepped between them. All right, I said. If that’s what you want to do, then I guess there isn’t any more to say. I gestured at Bruce, who had returned to his feet. From his jeans pocket, Harrow withdrew another blue collar and a short lead. Bruce saw them, and it was like he understood what had happened. The holiday was over; it was back to the place he’d tried to escape. Head lowered, he crossed the porch to Harrow.
“I don’t know if Harrow intended to say anything else, but Heather did. Before he started down the stairs with Bruce, Heather said, Just remember, William Harrow: I know your name. It won’t be any difficulty finding out where you live, where you’re taking that dog. I’m making it my duty to watch you—I’m going to watch you like a hawk, and the first hint I see that you aren’t treating that dog right, I am going to bring the cops down on you like a hammer. You look at me and tell me I’m lying.
“He did look at her. His lip trembled; I was sure he was going to speak, answer her threat with one of his own…warn her that he shot trespassers, something like that, but he left without another word.
“Of course Heather went inside to track down his address right away. He lived off Main Street, on Farrell Drive, a cul-de-sac about a quarter of a mile that way.” Ransom nodded towards the stone expanse. “Heather was all for walking up there after him, as was Matt, who had eavesdropped on our confrontation with Harrow from inside the front door. The expression on his face…It was all I could do to persuade the two of them that chasing Harrow would only antagonize him, which wouldn’t be good for Bruce, would it? They agreed to wait a day, during which time neither spoke to me more than was absolutely necessary. As it turned out, though, Heather was feeling worse the next day, and then the day after that was Monday and I had work and Matt had school, so it wasn’t until Monday evening that we were able to visit Farrell Drive. To be honest, I didn’t think there’d be anything for us to see.