by Gene Wolfe
That’s all right, Roddie thought. I don’t care if you read them, just as long as you don’t tear them up.
Jim had been able to see him, but where was Jim? He was not even sure he wanted to find Jim.
But Jim had not been the only one. The naked girl, Sheba, had seen his reflection. Then Sheba and Doc had said they were going to get him for the big man; but that was wrong, because the big man had been right there and could have taken him for himself if he had wanted to. Roddie poked among his toys, then lay down on his bed, feeling very tired.
The front door opened and closed, and Roddie went out to look. It was his father, carrying his suitcase as he always did, sweating as he always did in his navy-blue business suit. Boots frisked around on the living room carpet, her stump of a tail wagging frantically. His father tossed his hat onto the floor lamp and did not see Roddie either.
It was boiling outside. It had seemed hot already in the house, but outside the sun struck like a blow, a heavy, burning weight that had to be carried like a sack of meal. Squinting up at the sun, Roddie decided it was already afternoon. Today was Friday, because that was the day his father came home. But his father never came home before noon—even on Friday—and anyway the sun was over the house at the end of the block. Or at least: it looked that way.
A stinking orange diesel bus roared by on Mandell. There was a squeal of air brakes as it halted at the stop on the next corner. Roddie waited, then watched his mother and the sleeper walk slowly along Vassar and go up on the porch. His mother was wearing her best gray dress, the sleeper Roddie’s own jeans and red-and-white striped pullover. Roddie was glad to see that his mother was no longer crying, although her face was grim as she went into the house, towing the sleeper behind her. Through the screen door, he heard his father say, “Oh. There you are.”
Roddie went back onto the porch to listen. His mother was telling about taking the sleeper (whom to his disgust she called Roddie) to the doctor. The doctor had made an appointment for Roddie to see a specialist.
“I’lll call him up,” Roddie’s father said. “I want to hear what he has to say about this.” Like just about everybody, the doctor was a friend of his.
“Do you think we could go to the beach tonight?” his mother asked. “Do you have enough gas? I think the cool air might do Roddie good.”
“Sure,” his father answered. “Why not?” Because he was a salesman, his father had a “C” card.
Roddie left the porch, and in leaving it discovered that he could not hear his own footsteps. He stopped, stamped hard, and shuffled his feet; but there was no sound. He could make noise, though, he remembered—he had knocked on the peeling white door. He knocked on a fender of his father’s black Plymouth and heard his knock crisp and clear.
That encouraged him so much that he skipped awhile despite the heat, though he knew that he would be tired and hot before he reached Old Spanish Trail. Whenever he could, he stopped in air-conditioned stores; the clerks could not see him either, or at least did not chase him out. That was good, he told himself; yet he would have given everything he owned to be chased out, to be seen and yelled at again.
The sun was under the phone wires when he found the cottage, so that he was afraid he would have to look for it in the dark. Yet instinct led him to it, and he knew at once that it was the only place he wanted to be. Sheba would look into a mirror, he thought. Girls were always looking at the mirror, always fixing their hair, as if anybody cared. Sheba would look, he would put his face close by hers, and then she would see him. That would be sufficient, he felt. If Sheba saw him, he knew that he would feel better; then he would think of some way she could help him, and some way in which he could tell her to.
“Ah,” Jim’s voice said. “‘Ere ’e are.”
Jim was at his elbow, seeming to have come from no place, a thin, ragged boy with hair the color of sawdust and a bruise on one cheek.
“I have to go in there,” Roddie told him. “I have to see Sheba.” It was not until he had said it that he realized it was really the other way around.
“Course ’e do.” Jim grinned and nodded.
“Are you coming, too?”
“Course I am.”
Roddie pushed the door. It swung back even more slowly, even more heavily, than before; but it swung, and he and Jim slipped inside.
The small room was crowded. Besides Doc and Sheba (Roddie had been afraid she would not be there, and sighed with relief to see that she was), there was a stiff old man with tobacco-stained whiskers, a thin woman who seemed almost like a shadow, another boy, and Captain Hook. Roddie recognized Captain Hook from his picture in Peter Pan, even though he was handsome there and had nicer clothes. They do that for the pictures they put in books, Roddie thought. They make everybody look nicer. The shadowy woman stroked him. “Aren’t you pretty.”
Roddie shook his head violently. “No, I’m not!”
She laughed, a faint, thin sound Roddie remembered having heard at night. “Well, I think so. Do you know what they’re going to do here tonight? Do you go to church?”
Roddie shook his head again.
“That’s a pity—it’s so useful. Anyway, they are honoring us. It’s a religious ceremony. ‘Where two are gathered in my name—’”
The old man spat tobacco juice toward the toilet with the broken seat. Jim said, “You was drawn, same as us, same as ‘er and ’im. They got the wrong ’un, but we was drawn all the same, and we’ll ’ave slum out o’ it.”
The other boy had been lying naked on the narrow cot. Doc lifted him and laid him on the little red-covered table that now stood in the center of the crowded room. Slowly, muttering as if to himself, Doc placed various objects around him. They were mostly pieces of dead people and animals, Roddie decided. From time to time Sheba spoke in response to Doc’s muttered prayers: “Oh, yes. Yes, yes. You know. Arrivez!”
The boy’s feet were not tied, and Roddie wondered why he did not get up off the table when he saw the old butcher knife in Doc’s hand, and the bright, new edge on its big blade. He tried to help the boy, but Captain Hook elbowed him out of the way.
Sheba had lit the candles of the hand again. She spread the boy’s legs and placed it between them, then switched off the light. Other candles burned with blue flames near the walls of the room, though Roddie had not seen them until the light went out, big homemade candles with curling wicks.
“We’ll get to ’e,” Captain Hook growled. “Stand to.”
Doc whispered a name Roddie did not know and raised the old knife above his head. It trembled with the thin hands that held it, so that blue candlelight danced along its edge; Roddie heard the faint rattle of Doc’s necklace of bones.
“No!” Roddie shouted. The shadowy woman smoothed his hair as his mother sometimes did, and laughed at him.
Doc did not even hear them; Captain Hook’s hand held his, and the old man’s hands closed upon all three; the knife came down, splitting the boy’s unprotected chest like a watermelon. Roddie turned away, retching, but Jim held him by the collar. “‘Ere. ’E’ll want it, if there’s somat left for us.”
And he did.
He knew it instantly, and had known it even before Jim told him. So it had been when his father had killed his pet duck—it had been awful to watch Donald die, his wings flapping uselessly and his white feathers dyed with his own blood. But once Donald was truly dead it had seemed to Roddie that there was no harm in eating him, though Roddie’s parents could hardly touch a bite.
The shadowy woman whispered, “He was drugged, my darling. Believe me, he didn’t feel a thing.”
Roddie nodded absently. He was watching Captain Hook and the old man. For an instant the two big men stood eye to eye. When Captain Hook turned away, his face was twisted with rage. But turn away he did, and the old man smiled and bent over the dying boy.
“Pig,” the shadowy woman whispered.
For half a minute, the cottage was silent. Roddie could hear the hum of a mosquito roused
by Doc from its post on the pull-string of the light. The candles filled the room with a smell like burning garbage.
Inch by inch, the scarlet hue of life vanished from the dying boy’s clotting blood as the old man drank, leaving it a rusty brown; as more blood welled forth, he drank more. The shadowy woman made a tiny gesture of impatience, and there was black death in Captain Hook’s eyes.
At last the old man straightened up, wiped his discolored beard on his sleeve and sauntered out of the cottage. At once Captain Hook took his place, drinking, it seemed to Roddie, even more greedily.
Sheba asked Doc, “Is he comin’?”
Doc shook his head and shrugged. Roddie whispered, “Look at a mirror!” but Sheba did not hear him.
“This a murder,” Sheba murmured, “do they find out. You go to Huntsville, won’t never see the outside again. You know?”
Captain Hook rose.
Instantly, Jim sprang toward the dying boy, but the shadowy woman tripped him expertly. He fell with a slight creak of the floorboards, and she bent over the blood as Captain Hook had.
All this Roddie saw only from a corner of his eye. He was watching Doc, suddenly metamorphosed, his back straight and his shoulders squared, his face somehow longer. With one hand he seized Sheba’s throat and slammed her to the wall with a crash that threatened to bring it down. “’E slut! ’E stupid slut!” Sheba’s mouth gaped wide. Her tongue protruded farther than Roddie would have believed possible, and her eyes seemed about to leap from their sockets. Doc shook her and dropped her to the floor.
“That was very nice.” The shadowy woman—no longer quite so shadowy as she had been—patted her lips. “I haven’t had such a nice drink in a long time.”
Jim was drinking eagerly now, though the new, bright blood had nearly ceased to flow.
“Stand to,” Doc told Sheba, “I’ll show ’e the lad we wants. On with thy slops.” He had snatched a pair of old trousers from the foot of the cot and was thrusting his legs into them as he spoke.
Roddie put his mouth to Jim’s ear. “That’s the captain, isn’t it? That’s him. How did he do that?” Jim only pushed him away.
Sheba staggered to her feet, staring at Doc with fear-crazed eyes.
“There’s a wench. I never minded drinkin’ from the tar bucket.” Doc tossed her a purple dress spotted with yellow flowers.
Jim wiped his lips on his forearm. “Course that’s ‘im. The blood let ’im, woter e thinks?”
“Would it let me … ?” Roddie could not find words for the thing he wanted to say.
“Jury-rig ‘im ’e left behind ’e? Might, and there’s any left.”
Doc glanced toward Roddie. “Do it, lad. ’Andsomely, now.”
“You can see me!” Roddie exclaimed.
Sheba was backing away, holding her purple dress in front of her. Her cheeks were streaked with tears, and Roddie felt sorry for her.
Jim said, “We ’ave to cut. Drink up.”
Roddie still hesitated. “Where are we going?”
“Takin’ ’e ’ome. We’ve need o’ a lad, ‘im and me do. But we ’ave to ’ave the other ’alf, twig?”
Doc took off his necklace of bones and held it out. “See ’em, lad?”
Roddie nodded.
“Know ’ose they be?”
“No, sir.” Roddie shook his head.
“Mine, lad. Jim’s and mine. ‘E seen the ’and.” Doc bent over Roddie exactly as if Roddie were a real person, and that made Roddie feel wonderful. “‘Ose ’and do it be, do ’e think?”
“Yours, sir.”
“A likely lad! Oh, Jim, ‘e’s a promising ’un!”
Jim nodded. “’E’s that.”
Doc crouched until his eyes were at Roddie’s level. “They ‘anged me in chains, lad. Now do ’e know what ‘tis to ’ang in chains?”
“No, sir,” Roddie admitted.
“After ’e’ve ’anged, they tars thy remains, same as to tar the bottom of a boat.”
Roddie nodded to show that he understood.
“And they wraps the ole in chains for to keep it together. They hangs the ‘ole wear it may do the most good. So I ’ung—and a long time it seemed to me. Me ’and was taken then, and various.”
Roddie asked, “Did they hang Jim, too?”
“Oh, aye.”
Jim said, “We want a Christian grave, we do, and ’e must give it to us. One for both.”
“I will, honest,” Roddie promised. “If you’ll put me back together.”
“Me own thought, lad.” Doc smiled with satisfaction, then whirled to face Sheba. “And ’e, ’e wants treasure, wench, don’t ’e?”
Sheba shook her head.
“Wot!” Doc laughed; it sounded almost as though two voices were laughing together, one shrill, one roaring.
“You let me go—” Sheba swallowed, edging toward the back door.
“Ah there, lass.” Doc tossed the string of bones rattling onto the cot; with one swift stride he was before her, a hand against the door. “No rubies, lass, great as pigeon eggs? No gold? No em’ralds cut square, full o’ green fire?”
Sheba shook her head. “I don’t want them.”
Doc laughed again. (Roddie wondered what the people next door thought, hearing that laugh.) “But we want ‘e, lass. We must ’ave the lad, and ’e to ’elp us get ’im. Now drink, lad. No more nonsense, ’ear? Drink up!”
Roddie bent over the dying boy. For the first time, he truly noticed the boy’s face; it was a little like his own, he decided, but not very much. “Drink”
Roddie discovered that he wanted to, that he was hungry and thirsty. Very thirsty. He tried to remember the last time that he had eaten, the last time he had drunk.
Jim said, “‘E don’t like ’avin’ ’is ’awser crossed. Best be at it.”
Roddie nodded, studying the blood. For a moment it seemed that all life had already been drawn from it, leaving it as dry and unappealing as so much dust. No: one single, shining drop remained, far down in the deep wound. He would have to put his lips against the edges of that wound, as if he were kissing it.
The dying boy’s eyes opened, wandered vaguely, fastened on his. For a moment Roddie saw the dying boy and the boy saw him.
“DRINK!”
Roddie lowered his head until he felt his lips smeared with the dead blood, extended his tongue; the dying boy’s eyes rolled upward, no longer together, one drifting aside. Roddie shut his own, sought with his tongue for the drop and found it.
His father had given him a scrap of raw steak once. Though he had been so strongly attracted to the blood, he had supposed it would be like that—cold, wet, and nearly flavorless. It was hot instead; not hot like the sun, or his room by night, but hot like music sometimes, or like nothing else that he could think of, energizing and delightful.
“Main good, ‘tis.” Doc’s hand dropped heavily on Roddie’s shoulder, bigger and stronger than he would have imagined Doc’s hand could be. “Now I wants ’e to do somat for me, ‘ear? See ’em bones on the bunk? ‘E’re not asceered o’ ’em?”
Roddie shook his head.
“There’s a lad! Go lift ’em up.”
Roddie did as he had been told, and Doc filled the little room with his strange laughter.
“Which way?” Sheba looked at Doc, and Doc at Roddie.
Roddie shrugged helplessly. “Just the beach, that’s all. I can’t drive.”
“Wears the beach, lass?”
“They got two.” Sheba was resentful, now that she was no longer terrified. “East Beach and West Beach.” After a moment she added, “An’ Stewart Beach.”
“The closest ’un.”
Another driver blew his horn behind them. Sheba punched down the long clutch pedal and shoved the old Ford into gear.
West Beach was practically deserted at this time of night, though a few diehard fishermen still cast into the surf. The wind was rising, shaving grains of sand from the crests of dark dunes to carry across the road. To feel it, Roddie
thrust his head from the rear window, just as Boots did whenever she rode on his mother’s lap. Almost at once, he saw his father’s black Plymouth coupe. “There they are!”
“Stop ‘ere,” Doc told Sheba. “Now, lad, ’ear me wile I gives ‘e thy orders, and say ’em back after.”
When he was finished, Roddie asked, “But will they see me?”
“Oh, aye. ’Tis ’ard, but ‘e can do it, ’avin’ drunk. By night, mind. By day, ’e’d be sailin’ into the wind, do ’e twig? Up anchor now.”
Though Roddie tugged at the handle of the Ford’s rear door, he could not move it; and at last, at Jim’s urging, he slipped out through the window. They separated as soon as they had left the car, he going to his father’s, Jim into the waves. As he had been directed, he climbed into the rumble seat.
He did not think that his parents would have seen him even if they could see him; they were staring at the horizon, at the faint orange glow there that was—as his father had told him on a previous occasion—a burning tanker. But the sleeper had seen him; the sleeper cared less for torpedoed ships even than Roddie himself. The sleeper stared vacantly at this and that, and now and then at Roddie. It seemed a long time before Jim called.
Or perhaps neither Roddie nor the sleeper had heard Jim at first. Jim’s call was so faint, so much a part (it seemed) of the sighing of the night wind and the sobbing of the waves that it hardly seemed a voice at all.
Yet the sleeper heard it. He rose from his place between Roddie’s mother and his father and walked down the sloping sand toward Jim. Roddie’s mother stood, too, but his father said, “He just wants to splash around a little. Let him alone.” After a moment’s hesitation, she sat down again.
Boots ran after the sleeper, then back to Roddie’s father, a study in canine concern. “Keep an eye on him,” his father said, and patted her head.
The sleeper hesitated at the edge of the water. Jim called to him; for a moment, as he listened to Jim’s call, it seemed to Roddie that he saw a second vessel in the night, nearer than the burning tanker: a dark ship with raked masts and ragged sails.