Innocents Aboard

by Gene Wolfe

  “Hang on!” Hogan shouted. At that moment lightning cut the dark bowl of the sky from one horizon to the other.

  I pointed indeed, but I pointed back toward Erris. I would have spoken if I could, but I did not need to. In two hours or less we were sitting comfortably in Hogan’s parlor, over whiskey toddies. The German tradition of the Christmas tree, which we Americans now count among American customs, has not taken much root in Ireland. But there was an Advent Calendar with all its postage-stamp-sized windows wide, and gifts done up in brightly colored papers. And the little crèche (we would call it a crib set) with its as-yet empty manger, cracked, ethereal Mary, and devoted Joseph, had more to say about Christmas than any tree I have ever seen.

  “Perhaps you’ll come back next year,” Hogan suggested after we had related our adventures, “an’ then we’ll have another go.”

  I shook my head.

  His wife looked up from her knitting, and with that single glance understood everything I had been at pains to hide. “What was it you saw?” she asked.

  I did not tell her, then or later. Nor am I certain that I can tell you. It was no ghost, or at least there was nothing of sheet or skull or ectoplasm, none of the conventional claptrap of movies and Halloween. In appearance, it was no more than the floating corpse of a rather small man with longish white hair. He was dressed in dark clothes, and his eyes—I saw them plainly as he rolled in the wave—were open. No doubt it was the motion of the water; but as I stared at him for half a second or so in the lightning’s glare, it appeared to me that he raised his arm and gestured, invitingly and with the utmost good will, in the direction of Inniskeen.

  I have never returned to Ireland, and never will. And yet I have no doubt at all that the time will soon come when I, too, shall attend his midnight mass in the ruined chapel. What will follow that service, I cannot guess.

  In Christ’s name, I implore mercy for my soul.

  Houston, 1943

  The voice woke Roddie in the middle of the night. Or rather, it did not wake him at first. It seeped into his sleep, so that he dreamed he was at his desk in Poe School reading “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”; and through the open windows with smeared gray panes (the smear was to keep their shattered glass from cutting Mrs. Butcher and her class when the first Nazi bombs fell on the playground outside), and above the rising, fading hum of the big electric fan that shook its head forever no, no, no (because the room was so hot, boiling with the merciless Gulf heat that would endure not for days or weeks but for almost a year, a heat that soaked everything and that no fan could blow away), he heard his father’s voice calling him.

  His father was gone, as always except on Friday nights, on Saturdays, and on Sundays until evening, gone selling “systems” to defense plants. Roddie sat up in bed.

  “Come.”

  He went to the window. His was a large bedroom in a small house that had only four rooms and a tiny bathroom; there were four windows at the side (facing Mrs. Smith’s) and three at the rear. It was to one of the rear windows that he went.

  A boy stood in the middle of the back yard, distinct in the moonlight. The boy was small and thin, almost frail; but his eyes caught the moonlight like a cat’s eyes, and the moon filled them with a colorless glow. He waved, gesturing for Roddie to join him, silently saying that they must go somewhere together. The window was already thrown wide; Roddie unhooked the screen and climbed out, dropping four feet into his mother’s fragrant bed of mint.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “Jim.” The strange boy’s voice was high and reedy, laced with an accent Roddie had never heard before. He had expected some neighborhood friend; this was a boy he did not know at all. The strange boy gripped him by the arm and pointed toward the crawlspace beneath the house. His grasp was cold and damp, as if he had been groping after something lost in water.

  “We’ll get dirty.”

  The boy pointed again. At the edge of the shadow of the fig tree there was something Roddie took for a tarantula. He had seen many tarantulas, big, hairy spiders found lurking under old boards or in firewood; this was the biggest ever, big enough to kill birds, something that only the largest did. It rose on five legs, ran swiftly to him, and climbed his pajama bottoms.

  He slapped at it just as it reached his waist. Although it was as hard as his cast-iron clown bank, it seemed to slip for a moment, to lose its hold.

  A moment more and it was climbing again, pinching the soft skin of his bare chest between sharp legs. He grasped it, felt its stiff hair and gouging nails, and knew he held a human hand. With all his strength, he flung it from him and heard it thump against the wall of the Jacobsons’ garage. In the shadow of the eaves, it fell softly to earth.

  “Foul weather,” Jim whispered. “‘E don’t like ’avin’ ’is ’awser crossed. Better cut it.”

  Roddie said, “I’m going back inside.”

  He returned to the window, and the thin boy, Jim, followed him, not trying to stop him. “Better cut,” Jim repeated.

  Roddie raised the screen and pushed his head under it, put a bare foot on the narrow white-painted finale that was the last board down the wall of the house.

  There was a boy, another boy, sleeping in his bed. Roddie scrambled through the window, ran to the switch, and turned on the light.

  The other boy did not wake up or even stir. Roddie thought vaguely of offering to share the bed if the other boy—like Jim, perhaps—needed a place to sleep. He shook the other boy by the shoulder; his eyes opened at once, and he screamed.

  Roddie heard his mother in the front bedroom, the click of the switch on her reading light, the patter of bare feet.

  The boy in the bed screamed again, his eyes huge, his face empty of everything save fear. A thin line of spit ran from one corner of his mouth and wet his chin.

  The door banged open. Roddie’s mother flew in, her hair in curl papers, her pale face a study in terror and anger. “It’s a dream, Roddie! Only a bad dream, see? Oh, that awful school! I’m right here. It’s all right, Roddie—everything’s all right.” She hugged the blank-faced boy, crushing him against her breasts, rocking back and forth as she held him.

  Icy fingers touched Roddie’s shoulder. “Best cut, we ‘ad. ’E’ll be in main soon, if we don’t. ‘E’ll be after ’e, but ’e might get ’er.”

  Baffled, Roddie backed away, out of the bedroom and into the little hallway. The phone rang as they passed; he jerked with fear, and at the sound of his mother’s steps he followed Jim into the twilight of the big room that was living room and dining room together.

  The phone rang again before his mother picked it up.

  “Hello?

  “Oh, good evening, Mrs. Smith. No, we’re fine. Roddie had a nightmare.

  “Really? In our yard?

  “What did he look like? Do you think I should call the police?”

  There were already past the hulking Crosley radio. “’E’ll be waitin’ at the back.”

  “I’m Roddie,” Roddie said. It sounded false even to him as he said it, as false as the lies he told at times to get out of trouble. “Where we going?”

  “Old man’s.”

  The streets were hot, dark, and silent. They saw a single car on Old Spanish Trail, a black de Soto that hummed past them meditating upon secrets.

  The old man’s house looked like dozens Roddie passed every time he rode his bike to the Y, a tiny clapboard cottage with a sagging roof.

  “’E’s ’ome,” Jim said. “Open the door.”

  Roddie asked, “Shouldn’t we knock?”

  Jim made no reply; when Roddie looked around for him he was gone, and Roddy stood alone on the crooked little porch beside a rickety rocking chair. Tentatively, mostly because it seemed so silly to come way out here without doing anything, he knocked at the peeling door.

  Someone inside laughed, a high, cracked cackling. “They hear. They hear. Sister, hear them!”

  Somebody else moaned softly.

  Roddie wai
ted. And at last, when no one opened the door, he knocked again. This time a bell jangled inside the cottage, giving him the crazy feeling that he had pushed a button somehow instead of knocking, though he knew that he had knocked. He tried the knob, and it turned in his hand. There was a rattle and squeak as the latch crept back. The door seemed strangely heavy but swung ponderously away from him.

  The interior of the cottage was a single room; even so it was smaller than his bedroom at home. A narrow cot stood in one corner, a commode with a broken seat in another.

  In the center of the room, in place of a carpet or a rug, was a spreading pool of blood. It came from a black chicken hanging by its feet from the light fixture. The chicken’s neck had been cut though its head was still attached. Its wings hung down as though to sweep up its own blood from the cracked boards of the floor.

  Because both were so still, a second or more passed before Roddie saw the people. There were two, a shriveled old man with a beard as white as cotton, and a slender girl who to Roddie’s unpracticed eyes appeared to be about nineteen. The old man was naked except for a long necklace of broken bones, the girl naked entirely. Designs had been traced upon their bodies in red and white—in places their sweat had made the designs run. The old man held a cracked leather strap with three brass bells sewn on it, and that and his beard made Roddie think of Santa Claus.

  Roddie stepped into the room. “I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  The thing that had climbed his pajama bottoms in the back yard dropped onto his shoulder. As he grabbed for it, he felt it turn around like a dog lying down; its fingers closed on his neck.

  He yelled; but the yell did not leave his lips as noise but as something else, a strong wild thing that he had never known he could make, as if the fingers around his throat had reshaped it, just as those of Miss Smith (who lived next door with her widowed mother and taught art) could reshape the witless wax of his broken Crayolas into rearing horses and roaring flames. The wild thing smashed the light bulb, casting tinkling shards all over the room, which at the same instant became pitch-dark. The strong wild thing vanished then, and something else dropped to the floor with a thud.

  “Now ‘ear me,” rasped a voice at Roddie’s ear. “Put down them ’ands, for they don’t answer. ’E stand to.”

  It was no longer merely a hand, Roddie felt certain. Now there was an arm behind the hand, and a big man at the other end of the arm. He could sense the man’s big body behind him and smell the big man’s foul breath.

  “Ask him, Doc!” It had to be the naked girl’s voice. It was answered by a terrified mumble: “Jes’, Mar’, Jos’f …” The girl’s voice again, clear and sweet: “Glory hand, you lead us! Petro man, you know the places, don’ do you no good. Show us, and whatever you want, that you shall receive. Anythin’. Doc an’ me swear to it.”

  The hand was gone, and the man with it. Roddie would have bolted like a jackrabbit, but he misjudged the position of the door and ran full tilt into the wall instead—the crash of his body a whisper like a weary sigh. Aerial salutes burst orange and blue somewhere behind his eyes; he fell half-stunned.

  “On thy feet! Stand to!”

  He tried, but somehow, fell again.

  “Take ’im, Jim lad. Make ’im look.”

  There was a flare of light and the smell of sulfur—a match framed by the girl’s disheveled hair. She held the match to the wick of a mishappen little candle, and it blazed and sputtered.

  “Go on with you,” Jim whispered. “You ’eard ’im.”

  “Okay,” he said, floundering forward toward the girl and the light.

  The hand lay on its back before her, darkly spattered with the chicken’s blood. She placed the candle on its forefinger, shaping the greasy tallow to hold it there, and lit another from it. The dead chicken sprawled in its own gore now, a black isle rising from a crimson sea. Roddie could smell the dust in its feathers over the sweet-salt tang of its blood.

  Though the hand was gone, the big man’s hand was on him, forcing him forward, forcing his head down.

  Weakly, Doc said, “You take care, Sheba. Don’ know what you got.”

  The fifth candle was burning. Sheba positioned it on the smallest finger and lifted the hand by the wrist. A new voice—the big man’s voice—boomed from the old man’s mouth. “Look, ’e slut! In the bloodpool. Mine! MINE!”

  Sheba peered down into the thicking blood. Roddie looked, too, and saw Sheba’s face reflected there, startled and eager beside his own.

  The cottage seemed to spin, though Roddie knew that it did not. He felt that a long time had passed—not minutes or hours, but months and years and something larger. Jim and the big man were gone. He was alone except for Sheba and Doc, and happy to be thus alone. Still holding the hand, Sheba was snuffing out its candles, one by one.

  “What you see, Sheba?”

  “Li’l boy’s face. White boy.”

  “That what he want, then. That one—got to be that special one.”

  As Roddie went through the doorway, he heard Sheba mutter, “He gone get him.”

  It was black night still, but not quite night long before he reached South Boulevard where he went to school. Doug, an older boy, was riding no-hands down the street, folding papers and throwing them as he went. Roddie waved to Doug, but Doug paid no attention to him. Doug seldom did.

  There were lights in the kitchen window already. The front door stood open, and the living-room-dining-room was full of the morning smells of coffee and bacon. The green enameled door to the kitchen swung both ways—but not for Roddie, not today. He shoved against it hard with his shoulder, but could move it barely an inch; the springs in its double hinges seemed to have stiffened like cast iron.

  “Mom!”

  She had the radio on in the kitchen, as she always did. It was “The Wide-Awake Hour” this early, drums and big brass horns that blew ta-dah, ta-dah! Roddie usually liked “The Wide-Awake Hour.”

  “Momma!”

  He could hear her moving around in the kitchen, the scrape of her spatula on the bottom of the frying pan. But there was no reply.

  Mysteriously, he felt that he was somehow in bed, bound in bed, only dreaming that he stood helpless at the kitchen door; and after a moment or two he went into his bedroom to see if he could find himself.

  And did. He lay on his back in the bed, covered with a sheet, eyes closed, forehead beaded with sweat, even his arms beneath the sheet.

  “Wake up,” he said. “Hey, wake up.”

  The sleeping self did not stir.

  Roddie knelt on the mattress beside it. He had never liked his face, with its chubby cheeks and insignificant mouth; but he had to admit that it was his face. He might have been looking into a mirror, except that his own mouth was closed, that of the sleeper slightly open. “Wake up!” he said again, and it seemed to him that the sleeper stirred.

  He grabbed the sleeper’s shoulders then and shook him. For an instant it seemed to him that his fingertips penetrated those shoulders ever so slightly. The sleeper opened his eyes and sat up, bumping him hard.

  The sleeper could see him. He knew it because the sleeper recoiled just as he himself would have if he had bumped someone, and when he slid off the bed, the sleeper followed him with his eyes.

  “Hello,” Roddie said. “I’m you.”

  The sleeper did not answer, or even seem to understand.

  “You’re—”

  His mother’s voice interrupted him. “Get out of bed now, Roddie. You’ll be late for school.”

  The sleeper only stared at her, and Roddie saw her face fall. “You’re really sick, aren’t you? Ever since last night.”

  Slowly, the sleeper nodded, his mouth still gaping.

  “That does it. No school today—you’re going to see Dr. Johnson. But first I’m going to take your temperature. Are you hungry?”

  There was no reply. Roddie tugged at his mother’s apron; but she only smoothed it absently as if it had been twitched by a breeze. H
er eyes had filled with tears, and he was glad when she went back to the kitchen.

  It was a long time before she returned with bacon, toast, and two fried eggs, all of them cold. Roddie took a strip of bacon while his mother fed the sleeper like an infant, but he found he could not chew it, and it made him gag. He did not have the heart to follow them when his mother led the sleeper to the bus stop.

  By then Boots had returned from her morning patrol of the neighborhood and lay, beautifully black-and-white, on the front porch, ever alert for strangers and food. In theory, Boots was Roddie’s dog; in actuality she was his father’s, and both he and Boots knew it. But Boots was generally tolerant and even protective of him, and when it was not too hot she sometimes consented to chase the sticks and balls he threw for her. She only rolled her soulful brown eyes now when Roddie spoke to her. When he patted her head, she snarled.

  There were plenty of books in his room, but he discovered that it required all of his strength just to pull one from the shelf, and he let it fall to the floor. It was Peter Pan with wonderful colored illustrations; but he had read it before and the story seemed dull and stupid now, so that even turning the page took effort; it was as if the pages had become sheets of lead, heavier than the foil that he was supposed to save from his parents’ cigarettes. After a time he realized that he was not thinking of the story at all, but only of himself lying on the rug and turning the pages, invisible to everyone but Boots and the sleeper. He recalled seeing pages turn themselves when he and the sleeper had been one boy. He wondered who had been reading them, or at least looking at the pictures. Possibly it had been Jim, reading his books.