by Gene Wolfe
The gator’s charge knocked her down like a tenpin. With a sinuosity that seemed almost that of a python, it turned. Sheba screamed as its jaws closed on her body.
The rifle was leaning in a corner, and both Doc and Roddie scrambled for it. Roddie had fired a twenty-two in a shooting gallery once; he knew that rifles had safeties, buttons to keep them from working. Captain Hook’s curved iron hand pierced his cheek, knocking out a milk tooth—he was jerked backward like a hooked fish. The sleeper yelled, hands grabbing his empty face.
It seemed to Roddie that Sheba should be dead, and yet she screamed and struggled, clutching the edge of the doorway. Doc had the rifle at his shoulder. With two fast motions, he pulled its lever down and shoved it up again; klu-klux-klan, whispered the mechanism. He fired, the noise of the shot deafening in the little cabin.
“‘E bleedin’ bugger!” Something slammed against Roddie’s temple. The cabin seemed to spin around him, tossed upon wild seas as though it were really the cabin of a ship; he saw Doc’s necklace of bones and the mummified hand beside a kerosene lamp on a greasy table before Doc fired again and a sweep of the gator’s tail knocked the table to kindling. The lamp’s glass chimney shattered. Kerosene splashed the floor. For an instant it was only a spilled liquid, darkening the boards like so much water; but flames raced after it.
“‘Ere,” Jim shouted. “Take ’em quick.” He thrust the hand and the necklace at Roddie. An empty cartridge case flew before his face. At point-blank range, Doc fired at the gator’s head. Sheba still screamed, her long black hair blazing.
The hand wriggled dryly in Roddie’s grasp like a spider; instinctively, he flung it and the bones out of the closest window.
At once the hook vanished from his cheek. Faintly, as if an unseen artist had traced their pictures in the smoke, he saw Captain Hook and Jim back toward the flames. The captain’s hard face and Jim’s haunted eyes seemed far away—old, half-forgotten things lost in the reality of the present.
“Rest in peace,” Roddie told them. He had remembered that it was the thing you were supposed to say over dead people. He swallowed. “You’re sailors, and this’s the way they bury them, in the water.” He could see them still, see the fire licking at their legs. “In peace in the name of God and Jesus and the Holy Ghost and—and Mary [Mary was his mother’s name] and everybody.”
They were gone. Roddie put his hand to his cheek; it hurt, but he could feel no blood.
The sleeper was standing up, his blank eyes wild. Roddie ran at him, trying to drive himself back into the sleeper’s body by main force. The sleeper’s face changed, briefly, as though from a shadow cast by the flames. Roddie grabbed him, shouting and coughing, and pushed him toward the doorway, past Doc, over Sheba and the still-living gator, the sleeper stumbling on the gator’s moving, armored back, tumbling headlong down the steps and hitting the landing stage with a bang.
Roddie leaped after him, landed lightly and picked himself up, and turned to look back at the cabin. Doc had the barrel of his rifle between the gator’s jaws, prying, and Roddie thought that was the bravest thing he had even seen.
The whole cabin crackled a thousand times louder than wood in a barbecue; a moment afterward, its roof fell. There was a ball of flame and a great whoosh! followed by a cloud of sparks. Roddie pulled the sleeper away from the heat and forced him into the skiff. The black cat was crouched in the prow. It licked its side and stared at Roddie as he made the sleeper sit down and take the oars. “I understand all this now,” Roddie said as he cast off. “Row, won’t you?”
He was forced to guide the sleeper’s arms through the first three strokes; after that the sleeper rowed on without coaching, though even more slowly than Doc, and much more clumsily.
“It’s a bad dream I’m having,” Roddie told him as the skiff moved sluggishly away from the firelight and reentered the realm of night.
The sleeper did not speak.
“You know the cat in back of you? It’s in a story by Edgar Allan Poe. Jim was from one called Treasure Island, and Captain Hook and the alligator are from Peter Pan. This is a nightmare, that’s all.”
It seemed to Roddie that the sleeper shook his head, though in the flickering light it was hard to be sure. Roddie said, “I think that when we come back together, we’ll wake up.”
He waited for some reaction, but the sleeper rowed on; and whenever Roddie tried to return to him, his face became that of the dead boy whose blood Roddie had drunk.
This through an endless dark to which there came no day.
A Fish Story
I am always embarrassed by the truth. For one thing, I am a writer of fiction, and know that coming from me it will not be believed; nor does it lend itself to neat conclusions in which the hero and heroine discover the lost silver mine. So bear with me, or read something else. This is true—and because it is, not quite satisfactory.
We three were on a fishing trip along a certain river in Minnesota. We had put Bruce’s boat in the water that morning and made our way in a most dilatory fashion downstream, stopping for an hour or two at any spot we thought might have a muskie in it. That night we camped on shore. The next day we would make our way to the lake, where Bruce’s wife and mine would meet us about six. Rab, who had never married, would ride as far as Madison with my wife and me. We had not caught much, as I remember; but we had enough to make a decent meal, and were eating it when we saw the UFO.
I do not mean that we saw a saucer-shaped mother ship from a far-off galaxy full of cute green people with feelers. When I say it was a UFO, I mean merely what those three letters indicate—something in the air (lights, in our case) we could not identify. They hovered over us for a half minute, drifted off to the northeast, then receded very fast and vanished. That was all there was to it; in my opinion, we had witnessed a natural phenomenon of some sort, or seen some type of aircraft.
But of course we started talking about them, and Roswell, and all that; and after a while Bruce suggested we tell ghost stories. “We’ve all had some supernatural experience,” Bruce said.
And Rab said, “No.”
“Oh, of course you have.” Bruce winked at me.
“I didn’t mean that nothing like this has ever happened to me,” Rab said, “just that I don’t want to talk about it.”
I looked at him then. It was not easy to read his face in the firelight, but I thought he seemed frightened.
It took about half an hour to get the story out of him. Here it is. I make no comment because I have none to make; I do not know what it means, if it means anything.
“I’ve always hated ghosts and all that sort of thing,” Rab began, “because I had an aunt who was a spiritualist. She used to read tea leaves, and bring her Ouija board when she came to dinner, and hold seances, and so on and so forth. When I was a little boy it scared me silly. I had nightmares, really terrible nightmares, and used to wake up screaming. All that ended when I was thirteen or fourteen, and since then I’ve despised the whole stupid business. Pretty soon one of you is going to ask if I’ve ever seen a ghost, so I’ll answer that right now. No. Never.
“Well, you don’t want my life history. Let’s just say that I grew up, and after a while my mother and father weren’t around anymore, or married to each other either. My sister was living in England. She’s moved to Greece, but I still hear from her at Christmas.
“One day I got home from work, and there was a message from Dane County Hospital on my machine. Aunt Elspeth was dying, and if I wanted to see her one last time, I had better get over there. I didn’t want to. I had disliked her all my life, and I was pretty sure the feeling was mutual. But I thought of her alone in one of those high, narrow beds, dying and knowing that nobody cared that she was dying. So I went.
“It was the most miserable four or five hours I’ve ever spent. She looked like hell, and even though they had her in an oxygen tent, she couldn’t breathe. She kept taking these great gasping breaths … .”
Rab demonstrated.
“And in between breaths she talked. She talked about my grandparents’ house, which I’ve never seen, and how it had been there when she and Mom were kids. Not just about them and my grandparents, but the neighbors, the dogs and cats they’d owned, and everything. The furniture. The linoleum on the kitchen floor. Everything. After a while I realized that she was still talking even when she wasn’t talking. Do you know what I mean? She would be taking one of those horrible breaths, and I’d still hear her voice inside my head.
“It was getting pretty late, and I thought I’d better go. But there was something I wanted to say to her first—I told you how much I hate ghosts and all that kind of crazy talk. Anyway, I cut her off while she was telling about how she and my mother used to help my grandmother can tomatoes, and I said, ‘Aunt Elspeth, I’d like you to promise me something. I want your word of honor on it. Will you do that? Will you give it to me?’
“She didn’t say anything, but she nodded.
“‘I want you to promise me that when you’re gone, if there’s any possible way for you to speak to me, or send me a message—make any kind of signal of any sort—to say that there’s another life after the life we know here, another existence on the other side of the grave, you won’t do it. Will you give me your solemn promise about that, Aunt Elspeth? Please? And mean it?’
“She didn’t say anything more after that, just lay there and glared at me. I wanted to go, and I tried to a couple of times, but I couldn’t make myself do it. There she was, about the only person still left from my childhood, and she was dying—would probably die that night, they had said. So I sat there instead, and I wanted to take her hand but I couldn’t because of the oxygen tent, and she kept on glaring at me and making those horrible sounds trying to breathe, and neither of us said anything. It must have been for about an hour.
“I guess I shut my eyes—I know I didn’t want to look at her—and leaned back in the chair. And then, all of a sudden, the noises stopped. I leaned forward and turned on the little light at the head of her bed, and she wasn’t trying to breathe anymore. She was still glaring as if she wanted to run me through a grinder, but when I got up and took a step toward the door, her eyes didn’t move. So I knew she was dead, and I ought to call the nurse or something, but I didn’t.”
Rab fell silent at that point, and Bruce said, “What did you do?”
“I just went out. Out of the room, and out of the Intensive Care Wing, and out into the corridor. It was a pretty long corridor, and I had to walk, oh, maybe a hundred steps before I came to the waiting room. It was late by then, and there was only one person in it, and that one person was me.”
Rab gave us a chance to say something, but neither of us did.
“I don’t mean I went in. I didn’t. I just stood out in the corridor and looked inside. And there I was, sitting in there. I had on a black turtleneck and a whiskey-colored suede sports jacket. I remember that, because I’ve never owned those clothes. It was my face behind my glasses, though. It was even my haircut. He—I—was reading Reader’s Digest and didn’t see me. But I saw myself, and I must have stood there for five minutes just staring at him.
“Then a nurse pushed past me and said, ‘You can go in and see your aunt now, Mister Sammon.’ He put down his magazine and stood up and said, ‘Call me Rab.’ And she smiled and said, ‘You can see your Aunt Elspeth now, Rab.’
“I stepped out of the way and the nurse and I went past me and down the corridor toward the Intensive Care Wing. I watched till they had gone through the big double doors and I couldn’t see them anymore. Then I went into the waiting room and picked up that copy of the Reader’s Digest that I had laid down and slipped it into my pocket, and went home and went to bed. I still have it, but I’ve never gotten up the nerve to read it.”
Rab sighed. “That’s my story. I don’t imagine that yours will be true—I know both of you too well for that. But mine is.”
“When you woke up in the morning, was your aunt still dead?” Bruce wanted to know.
Rab said, “Yes, of course. The hospital called me at work.”
That bothered me, and I said, “When you started telling us about this, you said that there was a message from the hospital on your answering machine when you got home from the office. So the hospital didn’t have your number there, presumably at least.”
Rab nodded. “I suppose he gave it to them.”
Nobody said much after that, and pretty soon we undressed and got into our sleeping bags. When we had been asleep for two or three hours, Rab screamed.
It brought me bolt upright, and Bruce, too. I sat up just in time to see Rab scream again. Then he blinked and looked around and said, “Somebody yelled. Did you hear it?”
Bruce was a great deal wiser than I. He said, “It was an animal, Rab. Maybe an owl. Go back to sleep.”
Rab lay back down, and so did I; but I did not go back to sleep. I lay awake looking at the clouds, the moon, and the stars, and thinking about that midnight hospital waiting room in which the man who stood outside sat reading a magazine, and wondering just how much power the recently dead may have to twist our reality, and their own.
There actually was something shrieking up on the bluff, but I cannot say with any confidence what it was. A wildcat, perhaps, or a cougar.
Wolfer
She dropped the bar, she shot the bolt, she fed the fire anew,
For she heard a whimper under the sill and a great grey paw
came through.
Janet listened with attention and an eerie foreboding while the lecturer spoke forcefully and knowledgeably, talking about things he clearly knew well and had known for a long time.
“With only trifling exceptions, our surnames originated as notations on tax rolls. There were a great many Johns and Williams and so on, just as there are now. Some means had to be found to distinguish between them. Let us suppose that a certain man named John, living in England, had been born in Ireland. The tax collector would record his name, John …”
A haunting wail overpowered the calm and reasonable words—a sound no one but she could hear. Later, when she was walking through the snow to the bus stop, the howl would be louder and more insistent; but it was frightening even now.
“And so a notation appeared after John’s name, Ireland or perhaps Irish. Check the telephone directory in any big city and you will find those names, borne by John’s descendants to this day. Franz and Francis are familiar names of this type, both indicating that the bearer was originally French. Not long ago I read, with a certain amusement, about historians searching the archives of Liege, a city in Belgium, for mention of Jacques de Liege, the inventor of the jackknife. Anyone who knew anything about the history of surnames could have told them that the very last place to look for Monsieur de Liege was in Liege itself.” The lecturer paused, smiling as he glanced from face to face.
Kyoto howls like that sometimes, Janet thought. Kyoto was one of the Scotties she was caring for while Rachael and Andy were in Europe; but she knew Kyoto did not really sound like that, and that the howl was in her mind, not in the freezing February night outside the lecture hall. What would the dogs say when she told them about it?
“Physical peculiarities presented another fertile source of surnames. Thus we have John Short, John Stout, John Small, and even John Talman. John White had white or at least light-colored hair. John Black had a dark complexion in an area in which fair complexions were the rule.
“Trades were the exception at a time when most people farmed the land. John Hooper made barrels, while John Fletcher made arrows. I need not explain names like Smith and Taylor, I hope. Thus we know that Oliver Goldsmith’s ancestor made jewelry, and that Geoffrey Chaucer’s made shoes.”
Janet fidgeted, and tried to still the wild wailing in her mind. What a fool she had been to come!
“And now I’d like to learn your own surnames, each of which I will endeavor to explain as well as I can. I must warn you that those drawn from Slavic languages�
�Polish and Russian, for example—are liable to stump me.”
He studied the audience, and pointed. “How about you, sir? Are you willing to stand and tell us your name?”
A middle-aged man rose, straightening his heavy overcoat. “I don’t mind, but you will. I’m George Dembinski.”
The lecturer smiled again. “I said that some Slavic names might stump me, not that all of them would. Your ancestor lived in an oak wood, sir. If he had lived in England instead of Poland, your name would be Oakely, or something of the sort.
“Which brings us back to place names. In addition to such names as French and England, derived from nations, we find many names like Mister Dembinski’s. John Ford’s house was near the point at which you could wade the river, for example. Somewhat less obviously, John Clough lived in a clearing in the forest.”
He scanned his audience again. “Are you willing to stand up so I can explain your surname, madam?”
The gray-haired woman he had indicated stood, proving to be taller than Janet expected. “You’ll be talking about Bishop John,” she told him. “My name is Margaret Bishop.”
“Ah. That’s an interesting class, names taken from an employer’s position. Your ancestor—or your husband’s—was not the bishop but the bishop’s servant, probably an upper servant. The author Stephen King furnishes a good example of this type of name. His ancestor was John Who-serves-the-king.”
Another search. “What about you, sir?”
A man younger than Janet, in jeans and a leather jacket. “Bill Noble.”
“Another name of the same type. I came across a very clear example recently. The gentleman’s name was James M’Lady. Your ancestor, sir, was John Who-serves-the-noble-family, just as his was John Who-serves-my-lady. Most of you are probably familiar with the very interesting name of a chain of bookstores—Barnes and Noble. John Barnes may have been John Who-cares-for-barns or John Who-lives-near-barns. But the name Barnes is most often derived from the old Scottish word bairn, meaning a child and especially a younger son in a noble Scottish family. Mr. Barnes and his junior partner Mr. Noble, show how frequently these old relationships are continued or resumed when their thousand-year-old origins are utterly forgotten. Forgotten, I should say, except by me.