The Huntsman ~ A Classic Russian (translated into English) Short Story by Anton Chekhov
A SULTRY, stifling midday. Not a cloudlet in the sky. . . . The sun-baked grass had a disconsolate, hopeless look: even if there were rain it could never be green again. . . . The forest stood silent, motionless, as though it were looking at something with its tree-tops or expecting something.
At the edge of the clearing a tall, narrow-shouldered man of forty in a red shirt, in patched trousers that had been a gentleman’s, and in high boots, was slouching along with a lazy, shambling step. He was sauntering along the road. On the right was the green of the clearing, on the left a golden sea of ripe rye stretched to the very horizon. He was red and perspiring, a white cap with a straight jockey peak, evidently a gift from some open-handed young gentleman, perched jauntily on his handsome flaxen head. Across his shoulder hung a game-bag with a blackcock lying in it. The man held a double-barrelled gun cocked in his hand, and screwed up his eyes in the direction of his lean old dog who was running on ahead sniffing the bushes. There was stillness all round, not a sound . . . everything living was hiding away from the heat.
“Yegor Vlassitch!” the huntsman suddenly heard a soft voice.
He started and, looking round, scowled. Beside him, as though she had sprung out of the earth, stood a pale-faced woman of thirty with a sickle in her hand. She was trying to look into his face, and was smiling diffidently.
“Oh, it is you, Pelagea!” said the huntsman, stopping and deliberately uncocking the gun. “H’m! . . . How have you come here?”
“The women from our village are working here, so I have come with them. . . . As a labourer, Yegor Vlassitch.”
“Oh . . .” growled Yegor Vlassitch, and slowly walked on.
Pelagea followed him. They walked in silence for twenty paces.
“I have not seen you for a long time, Yegor Vlassitch . . .” said Pelagea looking tenderly at the huntsman’s moving shoulders. “I have not seen you since you came into our hut at Easter for a drink of water . . . you came in at Easter for a minute and then God knows how . . . drunk . . . you scolded and beat me and went away . . . I have been waiting and waiting . . . I’ve tired my eyes out looking for you. Ah, Yegor Vlassitch, Yegor Vlassitch! you might look in just once!”
“What is there for me to do there?”
“Of course there is nothing for you to do . . . though to be sure . . . there is the place to look after. . . . To see how things are going. . . . You are the master. . . . I say, you have shot a blackcock, Yegor Vlassitch! You ought to sit down and rest!”
As she said all this Pelagea laughed like a silly girl and looked up at Yegor’s face. Her face was simply radiant with happiness.
“Sit down? If you like . . .” said Yegor in a tone of indifference, and he chose a spot between two fir-trees. “Why are you standing? You sit down too.”
Pelagea sat a little way off in the sun and, ashamed of her joy, put her hand over her smiling mouth. Two minutes passed in silence.
“You might come for once,” said Pelagea.
“What for?” sighed Yegor, taking off his cap and wiping his red forehead with his hand. “There is no object in my coming. To go for an hour or two is only waste of time, it’s simply upsetting you, and to live continually in the village my soul could not endure. . . . You know yourself I am a pampered man. . . . I want a bed to sleep in, good tea to drink, and refined conversation. . . . I want all the niceties, while you live in poverty and dirt in the village. . . . I couldn’t stand it for a day. Suppose there were an edict that I must live with you, I should either set fire to the hut or lay hands on myself. From a boy I’ve had this love for ease; there is no help for it.”
“Where are you living now?”
“With the gentleman here, Dmitry Ivanitch, as a huntsman. I furnish his table with game, but he keeps me . . . more for his pleasure than anything.”
“That’s not proper work you’re doing, Yegor Vlassitch. . . . For other people it’s a pastime, but with you it’s like a trade . . . like real work.”
“You don’t understand, you silly,” said Yegor, gazing gloomily at the sky. “You have never understood, and as long as you live you will never understand what sort of man I am. . . . You think of me as a foolish man, gone to the bad, but to anyone who understands I am the best shot there is in the whole district. The gentry feel that, and they have even printed things about me in a magazine. There isn’t a man to be compared with me as a sportsman. . . . And it is not because I am pampered and proud that I look down upon your village work. From my childhood, you know, I have never had any calling apart from guns and dogs. If they took away my gun, I used to go out with the fishing-hook, if they took the hook I caught things with my hands. And I went in for horse-dealing too, I used to go to the fairs when I had the money, and you know that if a peasant goes in for being a sportsman, or a horse-dealer, it’s good-bye to the plough. Once the spirit of freedom has taken a man you will never root it out of him. In the same way, if a gentleman goes in for being an actor or for any other art, he will never make an official or a landowner. You are a woman, and you do not understand, but one must understand that.”
“I understand, Yegor Vlassitch.”
“You don’t understand if you are going to cry. . . .”
“I . . . I’m not crying,” said Pelagea, turning away. “It’s a sin, Yegor Vlassitch! You might stay a day with luckless me, anyway. It’s twelve years since I was married to you, and . . . and . . . there has never once been love between us! . . . I . . . I am not crying.”
“Love . . .” muttered Yegor, scratching his hand. “There can’t be any love. It’s only in name we are husband and wife; we aren’t really. In your eyes I am a wild man, and in mine you are a simple peasant woman with no understanding. Are we well matched? I am a free, pampered, profligate man, while you are a working woman, going in bark shoes and never straightening your back. The way I think of myself is that I am the foremost man in every kind of sport, and you look at me with pity. . . . Is that being well matched?”
“But we are married, you know, Yegor Vlassitch,” sobbed Pelagea.
“Not married of our free will. . . . Have you forgotten? You have to thank Count Sergey Paylovitch and yourself. Out of envy, because I shot better than he did, the Count kept giving me wine for a whole month, and when a man’s drunk you could make him change his religion, let alone getting married. To pay me out he married me to you when I was drunk. . . . A huntsman to a herd-girl! You saw I was drunk, why did you marry me? You were not a serf, you know; you could have resisted. Of course it was a bit of luck for a herd-girl to marry a huntsman, but you ought to have thought about it. Well, now be miserable, cry. It’s a joke for the Count, but a crying matter for you. . . . Beat yourself against the wall.”
A silence followed. Three wild ducks flew over the clearing. Yegor followed them with his eyes till, transformed into three scarcely visible dots, they sank down far beyond the forest.
“How do you live?” he asked, moving his eyes from the ducks to Pelagea.
“Now I am going out to work, and in the winter I take a child from the Foundling Hospital and bring it up on the bottle. They give me a rouble and a half a month.”
“Oh. . . .”
Again a silence. From the strip that had been reaped floated a soft song which broke off at the very beginning. It was too hot to sing.
“They say you have put up a new hut for Akulina,” said Pelagea.
Yegor did not speak.
“So she is dear to you. . . .”
“It’s your luck, it’s fate!” said the huntsman, stretching. “You must put up with it, poor thing. But good-bye, I’ve been chattering long enough. . . . I must be at Boltovo by the evening.”
Yegor rose, stretched himself, and slung his gun over his shoulder; Pelagea got up.
“And when are you coming to the village?” she asked softly.
“I have no reason to, I shall never come sober, and you have little to gain from me drunk; I am spiteful when I am drunk. Good-bye!”
“Good-bye, Yegor Vlassitch.”
Yegor put his cap on the back of his head and, clicking to his dog, went on his way. Pelagea stood still looking after him. . . . She saw his moving shoulder-blades, his jaunty cap, his lazy, careless step, and her eyes were full of sadness and tender affection. . . . Her gaze flitted over her husband’s tall, lean figure and caressed and fondled it. . . . He, as though he felt that gaze, stopped and looked round. . . . He did not speak, but from his face, from his shrugged shoulders, Pelagea could see that he wanted to say something to her. She went up to him timidly and looked at him with imploring eyes.
“Take it,” he said, turning round.
He gave her a crumpled rouble note and walked quickly away.
“Good-bye, Yegor Vlassitch,” she said, mechanically taking the rouble.
He walked by a long road, straight as a taut strap. She, pale and motionless as a statue, stood, her eyes seizing every step he took. But the red of his shirt melted into the dark colour of his trousers, his step could not be seen, and the dog could not be distinguished from the boots. Nothing could be seen but the cap, and . . . suddenly Yegor turned off sharply into the clearing and the cap vanished in the greenness.
“Good-bye, Yegor Vlassitch,” whispered Pelagea, and she stood on tiptoe to see the white cap once more.
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge ~ A Classic American Short Story by Ambrose Bierce
A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below. The man’s hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord. A rope closely encircled his neck. It was attached to a stout cross-timber above his head and the slack fell to the level of his knees. Some loose boards laid upon the sleepers supporting the metals of the railway supplied a footing for him and his executioners–two private soldiers of the Federal army, directed by a sergeant who in civil life may have been a deputy sheriff. At a short remove upon the same temporary platform was an officer in the uniform of his rank, armed. He was a captain. A sentinel at each end of the bridge stood with his rifle in the position known as “support,” that is to say, vertical in front of the left shoulder, the hammer resting on the forearm thrown straight across the chest–a formal and unnatural position, enforcing an erect carriage of the body. It did not appear to be the duty of these two men to know what was occurring at the center of the bridge; they merely blockaded the two ends of the foot planking that traversed it.
Beyond one of the sentinels nobody was in sight; the railroad ran straight away into a forest for a hundred yards, then, curving, was lost to view. Doubtless there was an outpost farther along. The other bank of the stream was open ground–a gentle acclivity topped with a stockade of vertical tree trunks, loopholed for rifles, with a single embrasure through which protruded the muzzle of a brass cannon commanding the bridge. Midway of the slope between the bridge and fort were the spectators–a single company of infantry in line, at “parade rest,” the butts of the rifles on the ground, the barrels inclining slightly backward against the right shoulder, the hands crossed upon the stock. A lieu tenant stood at the right of the line, the point of his sword upon the ground, his left hand resting upon his right. Excepting the group of four at the center of the bridge, not a man moved. The company faced the bridge, staring stonily, motionless. The sentinels, facing the banks of the stream, might have been statues to adorn the bridge. The captain stood with folded arms, silent, observing the work of his subordinates, but making no sign. Death is a dignitary who when he comes announced is to be received with formal manifestations of respect, even by those most familiar with him. In the code of military etiquette silence and fixity are forms of deference.
The man who was engaged in being hanged was apparently about thirty-five years of age. He was a civilian, if one might judge from his habit, which was that of a planter. His features were good–a straight nose, firm mouth, broad forehead, from which his long, dark hair was combed straight back, falling behind his ears to the collar of his well-fitting frock coat. He wore a mustache and pointed beard, but no whiskers; his eyes were large and dark gray, and had a kindly expression which one would hardly have expected in one whose neck was in the hemp. Evidently this was no vulgar assassin. The liberal military code makes provision for hanging many kinds of persons, and gentlemen are not excluded.
The preparations being complete, the two private soldiers stepped aside and each drew away the plank upon which he had been standing. The sergeant turned to the captain, saluted and placed himself immediately behind that officer, who in turn moved apart one pace. These movements left the condemned man and the sergeant standing on the two ends of the same plank, which spanned three of the cross-ties of the bridge. The end upon which the civilian stood almost, but not quite, reached a fourth. This plank had been held in place by the weight of the captain; it was now held by that of the sergeant. At a signal from the former the latter would step aside, the plank would tilt and the condemned man go down between two ties. The arrangement commended itself to his judgment as simple and effective. His face had not been covered nor his eyes bandaged. He looked a moment at his “unsteadfast footing,” then let his gaze wander to the swirling water of the stream racing madly beneath his feet. A piece of dancing driftwood caught his attention and his eyes followed it down the current. How slowly it appeared to move, What a sluggish stream!
He closed his eyes in order to fix his last thoughts upon his wife and children. The water, touched to gold by the early sun, the brooding mists under the banks at some distance down the stream, the fort, the soldiers, the piece of drift–all had distracted him. And now he became conscious of a new disturbance. Striking through the thought of his dear ones was a sound which he could neither ignore nor understand, a sharp, distinct, metallic percussion like the stroke of a blacksmith’s hammer upon the anvil; it had the same ringing quality. He wondered what it was, and whether immeasurably distant or near by–it seemed both. Its recurrence was regular, but as slow as the tolling of a death knell. He awaited each stroke with impatience and–he knew not why–apprehension. The intervals of silence grew progressively longer, the delays became maddening. With their greater infrequency the sounds increased in strength and sharpness. They hurt his ear like the thrust of a knife; he feared he would shriek. What he heard was the ticking of his watch.
He unclosed his eyes and saw again the water below him. “If I could free my hands,” he thought, “I might throw off the noose and spring into the stream. By diving I could evade the bullets and, swimming vigorously, reach the bank, take to the woods and get away home. My home, thank God, is as yet outside their lines; my wife and little ones are still beyond the invader’s farthest advance.”
As these thoughts, which have here to be set down in words, were flashed into the doomed man’s brain rather than evolved from it the captain nodded to the sergeant. The sergeant stepped aside.
II
Peyton Farquhar was a well-to-do planter, of an old and highly respected Alabama family. Being a slave owner and like other slave owners a politician he was naturally an original secessionist and ardently devoted to the Southern cause. Circumstances of an imperious nature, which it is unnecessary to relate here, had prevented him from taking service with the gallant army that had fought the disastrous campaigns ending with the fall of Corinth, and he chafed under the inglorious restraint, longing for the release of his energies, the larger life of the soldier, the opportunity for distinction. That opportunity, he felt, would come, as it comes to all in war time. Meanwhile he did what he could. No service was too humble for him to perform in aid of the South, no adventure too perilous for him to undertake if consistent with the character of a civilian who was at heart a soldier, and who in good faith and without too much qualification assented to at least a part of the frankly villainous dictum that all is fair in love and war.
One evening while Farquhar and his wife were sitting on a rustic bench near the entrance to his grounds, a gray-clad soldier rode up to the gate and asked for a drink of water. Mrs. Farquhar was only toe, happy to serve him with her own white hands. While she was fetching the water her husband approached the dusty horseman and inquired eagerly for news from the front.
“The Yanks are repairing the railroads,” said the man, “and are getting ready for another advance. They have reached the Owl Creek bridge, put it in order and built a stockade on the north bank. The commandant has issued an order, which is posted everywhere, declaring that any civilian caught interfering with the railroad, its bridges, tunnels or trains will be summarily hanged. I saw the order.”
“How far is it to the Owl Creek bridge?” Farquhar asked.
“About thirty miles.”
“Is there no force on this side the creek?”
“Only a picket post half a mile out, on the railroad, and a single sentinel at this end of the bridge.”
“Suppose a man–a civilian and student of hanging–should elude the picket post and perhaps get the better of the sentinel,” said Farquhar, smiling, “what could he accomplish?”
The soldier reflected. “I was there a month ago,” he replied. “I observed that the flood of last winter had lodged a great quantity of driftwood against the wooden pier at this end of the bridge. It is now dry and would burn like tow.”
The lady had now brought the water, which the soldier drank. He thanked her ceremoniously, bowed to her husband and rode away. An hour later, after nightfall, he repassed the plantation, going northward in the direction from which he had come. He was a Federal scout.
III
As Peyton Farquhar fell straight downward through the bridge he lost consciousness and was as one already dead. From this state he was awakened–ages later, it seemed to him–by the pain of a sharp pressure upon his throat, followed by a sense of suffocation. Keen, poignant agonies seemed to shoot from his neck downward through every fiber of his body and limbs. These pains appeared to flash along well-defined lines of ramification and to beat with an inconceivably rapid periodicity. They seemed like streams of pulsating fire heating him to an intolerable temperature. As to his head, he was conscious of nothing but a feeling of fulness–of congestion. These sensations were unaccompanied by thought. The intellectual part of his nature was already effaced; he had power only to feel, and feeling was torment. He was conscious of motion. Encompassed in a luminous cloud, of which he was now merely the fiery heart, without material substance, he swung through unthinkable arcs of oscillation, like a vast pendulum. Then all at once, with terrible suddenness, the light about him shot upward with the noise of a loud splash; a frightful roaring was in his ears, and all was cold and dark. The power of thought was restored; he knew that the rope had broken and he had fallen into the stream. There was no additional strangulation; the noose about his neck was already suffocating him and kept the water from his lungs. To die of hanging at the bottom of a river!–the idea seemed to him ludicrous. He opened his eyes in the darkness and saw above him a gleam of light, but how distant, how inaccessible! He was still sinking, for the light became fainter and fainter until it was a mere glimmer. Then it began to grow and brighten, and he knew that he was rising toward the surface–knew it with reluctance, for he was now very comfortable. “To be hanged and drowned,” he thought? “that is not so bad; but I do not wish to be shot. No; I will not be shot; that is not fair.”
He was not conscious of an effort, but a sharp pain in his wrist apprised him that he was trying to free his hands. He gave the struggle his attention, as an idler might observe the feat of a juggler, without interest in the outcome. What splendid effort!–what magnificent, what superhuman strength! Ah, that was a fine endeavor! Bravo! The cord fell away; his arms parted and floated upward, the hands dimly seen on each side in the growing light. He watched them with a new interest as first one and then the other pounced upon the noose at his neck. They tore it away and thrust it fiercely aside, its undulations resembling those of a water snake. “Put it back, put it back!” He thought he shouted these words to his hands, for the undoing of the noose had been succeeded by the direst pang that he had yet experienced. His neck ached horribly; his brain was on fire; his heart, which had been fluttering faintly, gave a great leap, trying to force itself out at his mouth. His whole body was racked and wrenched with an insupportable anguish! But his disobedient hands gave no heed to the command. They beat the water vigorously with quick, downward strokes, forcing him to the surface. He felt his head emerge; his eyes were blinded by the sunlight; his chest expanded convulsively, and with a supreme and crowning agony his lungs engulfed a great draught of air, which instantly he expelled in a shriek!
He was now in full possession of his physical senses. They were, indeed, preternaturally keen and alert. Something in the awful disturbance of his organic system had so exalted and refined them that they made record of things never before perceived. He felt the ripples upon his face and heard their separate sounds as they struck. He looked at the forest on the bank of the stream, saw the individual trees, the leaves and the veining of each leaf–saw the very insects upon them: the locusts, the brilliant-bodied flies, the grey spiders stretching their webs from twig to twig. He noted the prismatic colors in all the dewdrops upon a million blades of grass. The humming of the gnats that danced above the eddies of the stream, the beating of the dragon flies’ wings, the strokes of the water-spiders’ legs, like oars which had lifted their boat–all these made audible music. A fish slid along beneath his eyes and he heard the rush of its body parting the water.
He had come to the surface facing down the stream; in a moment the visible world seemed to wheel slowly round, himself the pivotal point, and he saw the bridge, the fort, the soldiers upon the bridge, the captain, the sergeant, the two privates, his executioners. They were in silhouette against the blue sky. They shouted and gesticulated, pointing at him. The captain had drawn his pistol, but did not fire; the others were unarmed. Their movements were grotesque and horrible, their forms gigantic.
Suddenly he heard a sharp report and something struck the water smartly within a few inches of his head, spattering his face with spray. He heard a second report, and saw one of the sentinels with his rifle at his shoulder, a light cloud of blue smoke rising from the muzzle. The man in the water saw the eye of the man on the bridge gazing into his own through the sights of the rifle. He observed that it was a grey eye and remembered having read that grey eyes were keenest, and that all famous marksmen had them. Nevertheless, this one had missed.
A counter-swirl had caught Farquhar and turned him half round; he was again looking into the forest on the bank opposite the fort. The sound of a clear, high voice in a monotonous singsong now rang out behind him and came across the water with a distinctness that pierced and subdued all other sounds, even the beating of the ripples in his ears. Although no soldier, he had frequented camps enough to know the dread significance of that deliberate, drawling, aspirated chant; the lieu. tenant on shore was taking a part in the morning’s work. How coldly and pitilessly–with what an even, calm intonation, presaging, and enforcing tranquillity in the men–with what accurately measured inter vals fell those cruel words:
Farquhar dived–dived as deeply as he could. The water roared in his ears like the voice of Niagara, yet he heard the dulled thunder of the volley and, rising again toward the surface, met shining bits of metal, singularly flattened, oscillating slowly downward. Some of them touched him on the face and hands, then fell away, continuing their descent. One lodged between his collar and neck; it was uncomfortably warm and he snatched it out.
As he rose to the surface, gasping for breath, he saw that he had been a long time under water; he was perceptibly farther down stream nearer to safety. The soldiers had almost finished reloading; the metal ramrods flashed all at once in the sunshine as they were drawn from the barrels, turned in the air, and thrust into their sockets. The two sentinels fired again, independently and ineffectually.
The hunted man saw all this over his shoulder; he was now swimming vigorously with the current. His brain was as energetic as his arms and legs; he thought with the rapidity of lightning.
The officer,” he reasoned, “will not make that martinet’s error a second time. It is as easy to dodge a volley as a single shot. He has probably already given the command to fire at will. God help me, I cannot dodge them all!”
An appalling plash within two yards of him was followed by a loud, rushing sound, diminuendo, which seemed to travel back through the air to the fort and died in an explosion which stirred the very river to its deeps!
A rising sheet of water curved over him, fell down upon him, blinded him, strangled him! The cannon had taken a hand in the game. As he shook his head free from the commotion of the smitten water he heard the deflected shot humming through the air ahead, and in an instant it was cracking and smashing the branches in the forest beyond.
“They will not do that again,” he thought; “the next time they will use a charge of grape. I must keep my eye upon the gun; the smoke will apprise me–the report arrives too late; it lags behind the missile. That is a good gun.”
Suddenly he felt himself whirled round and round–spinning like a top. The water, the banks, the forests, the now distant bridge, fort and men–all were commingled and blurred. Objects were represented by their colors only; circular horizontal streaks of color–that was all he saw. He had been caught in a vortex and was being whirled on with a velocity of advance and gyration that made him giddy and sick. In a few moments he was flung upon the gravel at the foot of the left bank of the stream–the southern bank–and behind a projecting point which concealed him from his enemies. The sudden arrest of his motion, the abrasion of one of his hands on the gravel, restored him, and he wept with delight. He dug his fingers into the sand, threw it over himself in handfuls and audibly blessed it. It looked like diamonds, rubies, emeralds; he could think of nothing beautiful which it did not resemble. The trees upon the bank were giant garden plants; he noted a definite order in their arrangement, inhaled the fragrance of their blooms. A strange, roseate light shone through the spaces among their trunks and the wind made in their branches the music of Æolian harps. He had no wish to perfect his escape–was content to remain in that enchanting spot until retaken.
A whiz and rattle of grapeshot among the branches high above his head roused him from his dream. The baffled cannoneer had fired him a random farewell. He sprang to his feet, rushed up the sloping bank, and plunged into the forest.
All that day he traveled, laying his course by the rounding sun. The forest seemed interminable; nowhere did he discover a break in it, not even a woodman’s road. He had not known that he lived in so wild a region. There was something uncanny in the revelation.
By nightfall he was fatigued, footsore, famishing. The thought of his wife and children urged him on. At last he found a road which led him in what he knew to be the right direction. It was as wide and straight as a city street, yet it seemed untraveled. No fields bordered it, no dwelling anywhere. Not so much as the barking of a dog suggested human habitation. The black bodies of the trees formed a straight wall on both sides, terminating on the horizon in a point, like a diagram in a lesson in perspective. Overhead, as he looked up through this rift in the wood, shone great garden stars looking unfamiliar and grouped in strange constellations. He was sure they were arranged in some order which had a secret and malign significance. The wood on either side was full of singular noises, among which–once, twice, and again–he distinctly heard whispers in an unknown tongue.
His neck was in pain and lifting his hand to it found it horribly swollen. He knew that it had a circle of black where the rope had bruised it. His eyes felt congested; he could no longer close them. His tongue was swollen with thirst; he relieved its fever by thrusting it forward from between his teeth into the cold air. How softly the turf had carpeted the untraveled avenue–he could no longer feel the roadway beneath his feet!
Doubtless, despite his suffering, he had fallen asleep while walking, for now he sees another scene–perhaps he has merely recovered from a delirium. He stands at the gate of his own home. All is as he left it, and all bright and beautiful in the morning sunshine. He must have traveled the entire night. As he pushes open the gate and passes up the wide white walk, he sees a flutter of female garments; his wife, looking fresh and cool and sweet, steps down from the veranda to meet him. At the bottom of the steps she stands waiting, with a smile of ineffable joy, an attitude of matchless grace and dignity. Ah, how beautiful she is! He springs forward with extended arms. As he is about to clasp her he feels a stunning blow upon the back of the neck; a blinding white light blazes all about him with a sound like the shock of a cannon–then all is darkness and silence!
Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge.
The Midnight Hideaway ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp
The phone rang several rings before Tully was awake. He had been dreaming about when he was seven years old and saw a fat woman in a blue flowered dress having an epileptic seizure on the street; she lay on her back and twitched and moaned like a ghost but the thing that scared him the most was the foaming at the mouth. He was still having nightmares.
He picked up the receiver without turning on the light and almost dropped it. He could still see the woman’s face, the twitching. “Hello,” he said. “Tully here.”
“Tully, is that you?” a man’s voice said.
“I just said it was,” he said. He managed to look at the clock and see that it was nearly two in the morning.
“Got a job for you.”
“Who is this?”
“Wellington.”
“Couldn’t it have waited until morning?”
“Manners says it’s urgent. You know how he is.”
“Don’t you ever sleep like a normal person?”
“Yeah, I sleep sometimes.”
“Well, what is it then? I want to go back to sleep and see how my nightmare turns out.“
“You’re not going to like this job, I’m afraid. It’s the sort of thing you hate.”
“Just tell me what it is without the editorial comment.”
“They want you to kill a guy.”
He felt a contraction in his chest. “I’m listening,” he said.
“His name is Sidney Keen. He’s twenty-three years old. I’m going to send you over a couple of pictures.”
“Anything else I need to know?”
“He works at the Paradise movie theatre downtown and gets off work around midnight. He sometimes goes to a bar on his way home and stays there a couple of hours. Should be easy for you to pick off.”
“Who wants him dead and why?”
“You know we’re not supposed to ask.”
“When am I supposed to do this dirty deed?”
“Tomorrow night. You know the drill.”
“Okay.”
“Call me when it’s finished. And no slip-ups this time!”
Tully was still awake a couple of hours later when the runner slipped the envelope under his door. He got out of bed, turned on the light, opened the envelope and studied the pictures of the person he was supposed to kill. The first was of a young man in a tuxedo with a blonde in a black dress on his arm, all smiles, off to the country club dance. The other picture was of the same young man dressed in a baseball uniform with a big smile, standing at home plate swinging a bat; obviously just a pose because the uniform was too clean to be real and the young man’s hair too perfectly combed. He was a kid like a million others, not ugly and not pretty. No distinguishing characteristics but a good face with a strong chin and a straight nose.
Tully had killed anonymously before, but not often, and he hated doing it. Each time he had to tell himself there was nothing personal in it; he hoped somehow to convey that sentiment in the last few seconds, without words, to the person he was killing.
He stayed at home all day the next day; went out about seven o’clock in the evening and bought a newspaper. After checking the time of the last show at the Paradise theatre, he had a steak at his favorite restaurant and after that still had plenty of time to go to a hotel bar not far from the theatre and have a couple drinks to give him courage.
Ten minutes before the last show started, he walked to the Paradise and stood in line and bought a ticket. As soon as he entered the theatre lobby, he saw Sidney Keen, smiling at people as he took their tickets. There could be no mistake it was him: the same face as the one in the pictures, the same lock of dark hair falling forward on the forehead.
“Good evening, sir,” Sidney said to Tully as he tore his ticket in half.
“Show any good tonight?” Tully asked just to have something to say.
“Everybody’s crazy about it,” Sidney said. “I’ve seen it three times myself.”
“Must be good, then,” Tully said as he moved on.
About half the seats were filled; a fairly large crowd for the late show. Tully took a seat on the aisle in the shadows close to the back and took off his hat and rested it on his knee.
The picture was about a group of misfits pulling off a jewelry heist. They were naïve enough, or dumb enough, to believe they were going to succeed. The main character, who was the head of the gang, was going to go straight after he made the one final haul that would allow him to get away from all the things in the world he hated, such as women who wear too much lipstick and people who mistreat animals.
When the picture was over, Tully stood up, put on his hat and filed out with the others. He stood out in front of the theatre and smoked a cigarette and waited. In a few minutes the marquee went dark and the ushers and other people who worked in the theatre came out and, saying their good nights, went their separate ways.
Sidney separated himself from the others, took a few steps and stopped to light a cigarette. Then he walked briskly off into the night, trailing a stream of smoke. Tully waited until Sidney was about fifty yards away and then began following him.
The street after midnight was deserted, so Tully could have popped Sidney in the back right then and there without being seen, gone home and gone to bed and reported the next morning that all went well. It was too easy, though—he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. Killing an unarmed, unsuspecting man that way just seemed too dishonorable. There had to be a better way, one that would let him sleep nights and live the rest of his days in relative peace.
Sidney came to a small bar about three blocks from the theatre called The Midnight Hideaway and went inside. Tully waited about five minutes and then went in himself.
The place was smoky and dark, lit by blue lights that barely allowed people to see where they were going. There were a few drunks sitting at the bar, some couples sitting at tables. Canned jazz music played softly in the background, punctuated by low conversation and drunken female laughter.
Sidney had taken a seat at the bar. Tully sat in the seat two over from Sidney and lit a cigarette. When the bartender asked him what he wanted, he ordered a scotch and soda.
“You were following me from the theatre, weren’t you?” Sidney said, turning to his left to face Tully.
“What’s that?” Tully said. Playing innocent was easy.
“I said you were following me from the theatre.”
“No, not at all.” He downed his drink and the bartender served him again.
“Then why are you here?”
“Everybody’s got to be someplace.”
“How did you like the picture?”
“I was a little disappointed in the ending. I’m always hoping the crooks get away with it and live happily ever after.”
“They can’t do that. Have stories turn out that way, I mean. It’s against the code of morals and ethics. People who commit crimes have to be punished.”
“You seem to know a lot about it.”
“I’ve been in the motion picture business now for two years, first behind the candy counter and then as an usher.”
“Sounds like you’ve got a real career going for you.”
“No, I’m going to quit soon. I don’t have to work if I don’t want to. I’ve only been doing it this long to have someplace to go in the evenings to get out of the house.”
“Independently wealthy?”
“My father is in the final stages of heart disease. I’m the principal beneficiary of his will.”
“Why are you telling all this to a complete stranger?”
“I’m not sure. I think I felt some kind of connection with you the minute I first saw you in the lobby of the theatre. You were looking at me in a way I’ve never been looked at before.”
“Don’t get the wrong idea. I’m not that sort.”
“What sort is that?”
“If you don’t know, I’m not going to explain it to you.”
“No, it’s nothing like that. It’s on a higher plane than that.”
“I don’t know anything about planes. But I do you know you should be careful who you spill your guts to. The enemy is everywhere.”
“That’s an odd thing to say.”
“I’m an odd sort of a fellow, I guess.”
“I have this stepmother, though. She’d like to see me dead.”
“Why do you say that?”
“My father’s will stipulates that I get the bulk of his estate. I think it has something to do with guilt over the way he treated my mother. There’s this other woman, though, that he’s has been married to for about five years, my darling stepmother. While she’s mentioned in his will, she’s not sitting as pretty as I am. The only way she can get the whole caboodle is if I die.”
“If something happened to you, wouldn’t the stepmother be the first to be suspected?”
“Well, yes, but she’d make sure there was never a shred of evidence connecting her to my death. People could suspect all they wanted to, but it would never go any farther than that. If she could arrange it, she’d make it appear that I was killed randomly by a crazed escapee from an insane asylum or in an accident. A runaway bus that just happened to run up onto the sidewalk where I was walking and flattened me would be the answer to her prayers.”
“Maybe she’s not as bad as you think.”
“She’s ten times worse. She’s Satan’s doxy. She’d sell her own young to the highest bidder.”
“Why did your father marry her?”
“He was afraid of being alone. She was available.”
A drunk fell noisily to the floor, pulling a chair over with him. Everybody turned to see what the disturbance was. Sidney took advantage of the lull in conversation to stand up in preparation for leaving.
“It was a pleasure talking to you,” he said. “I hope I didn’t bore you too much with my problems.”
“No, it’s all right,” Tully said. “I wasn’t bored.”
“Could I give you a lift somewhere? I have my car.”
“No, thanks. I’ll get a cab.”
“You won’t be able to find a cab this late, I’m afraid.”
“All right. You can drop me off downtown.”
When they left the bar, Sidney told Tully to wait for him on the street corner while he went to get the car. Tully waited so long he believed Sidney wasn’t coming back, but finally he pulled up at the curb and stopped for Tully to get in.
Tully, sitting on the seat two feet away from Sidney, fingered the gun in his pocket. He thought about how easy it would be to shoot Sidney in the head and be done with it. He thought about the freshly laundered sheets on his bed and how good it would feel to get between them and shut out the world, to have his work behind him and have nothing to think about.
“Now, maybe you can tell me who you really are and why you were following me,” Sidney said.
“I already said I wasn’t following you.”
“What’s your racket?”
“I don’t have a racket.”
“Did she send you to kill me?”
“Of course not.”
“I knew you weren’t there to see the show. All we get for the late show are smooching couples and giggling adolescents. People like you have better things to do than come to a third-rate theatre late at night to see a second-rate feature. What’s your story?”
“I don’t have one.”
Sidney surprised him by pulling a gun out of his clothing and pointing it at him.
“Put the gun away,” Tully said with a little laugh. “You don’t need it.”
“I started carrying a gun when I realized my life was in danger.”
“Why don’t you go someplace far away where nobody knows you? Change your name if you have to. Then when your daddy dies you can collect your inheritance and give the evil stepmother the boot.”
“It’s not that easy. I need to stay around and keep an eye on things.”
“Why don’t you go to the police and tell them your stepmother is trying to have you killed?”
“I don’t have any proof. They would just say I’m imagining things.”
“Look, just drop me downtown and I’ll forget you threatened to shoot me.”
“You still haven’t told me who you are.”
“I’m nobody.”
“What brings a nobody like you to this part of the city this late at night?”
“I have trouble sleeping. I’m a roamer. I like to roam around and go places I’ve never been before. I stop at a bar I’ve never been to before and have a couple of drinks and then I go back home and go to sleep.”
“I don’t believe you. Why were you at the theatre tonight?”
“People usually go to a theatre to see a show.”
“That’s not why you were there. I could see it on your face. When you saw me, you recognized me. Have we met someplace before?”
“No.”
“Are you a friend of my stepmother’s?”
“Of course not.”
“If you don’t tell me, I’m going to shoot you in the leg.”
“Why don’t you just stop the car right here? I’ll get out and we’ll forget we ever had this conversation.”
“And then you’ll come back tomorrow night and finish the job?”
“You’ve been seeing too many movies, sonny.”
To Tully’s surprise, Sidney shot him in the thigh. Tully pulled his gun out from where he had it hidden against his chest and pointed it at Sidney.
“You little bastard!” he said. “I’m going to blow your head off!”
“I’m driving fifty miles an hour. If you shoot me, and, if you survive the crash, don’t you think you’d have some explaining to do?”
“Just pull over and I’ll kill you properly, the way I should have done when I had the chance.”
“Now we’re getting down to cases. You are a hired killer, aren’t you?”
“I’m an operative. I do what I’m told.”
“And that involves killing people you don’t know?”
“It beats working in a factory. I’m going to bleed to death if you don’t stop the car and let me out so I can see a doctor.”
“It’s a flesh wound. I could have shot you in the knee and you would have walked with a limp for the rest of your life.”
“What makes you so tough?”
“It’s a rotten, stinking world. You’re either tough or you’re dead.”
“You’re just a kid. That’s why I didn’t kill you as soon as you left the theatre. I felt bad about killing somebody who looks so young.”
“How much did my stepmother pay you to kill me?”
“I don’t know anything about that, or even if it was your stepmother. It could have been somebody else, maybe your boss at the theatre or a girl friend you’ve wronged. The higher-ups make the arrangements and then give the assignments to the operatives to carry out.”
“If you don’t kill me, they’ll send somebody else?”
“There’s always somebody else.”
“Just go ahead and kill me, then, but not in the car or on the street. I’ll get a room in a cheap hotel and lie down on the bed and you can plug me in the head and leave quietly afterwards. Just make it quick.”
Tully put his gun away. “Drop me off at the hospital. My leg hurts like hell and I’m bleeding all over your upholstery.”
“And you’ll come back tomorrow night and kill me?”
“I won’t but somebody will. If you want to go on living, you’ll take my advice. Don’t go back to the theatre or the bar. Go into hiding for the time being. Hire a couple of body guards. Somebody paid ten thousand dollars to have you killed. That’s all I can tell you. When that much money is involved, there’s determination to get the job done.”
“And what about you?”
“I’ll be fine after I get the bleeding stopped.”
After Tully had his leg wound treated, it was seven o’clock. He stopped by a diner and had breakfast and then went home. He hadn’t been home more than a few minutes when the expected call came.
“Everything go all right?” Wellington asked.
“Couldn’t have been easier,” Tully said.
“The subject was dispatched as we discussed?”
“You have nothing to worry about.”
“I’ll let Manners know.”
He figured he had at least a day or two before they discovered the truth. When they came looking for him, he would be so far away it would be as if he never existed.
The Hunger Games ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp
The new movie The Hunger Games is set in a post-apocalyptic, far-distant future America that is now called Panem. Each of the twelve districts of Panem is required, once a year, to select, by lottery, one teenage boy and one teenage girl to travel to the Capitol and participate as contestants in the Hunger Games. These games are like the gladiatorial contests of ancient Rome in which the participants—through cunning, skill, and endurance—kill each other: Twenty-three will die; only one will survive. Everyone is required to watch the games on TV. It’s sort of a national yearly celebration that everybody seems to enjoy tremendously, except, of course, those who will die like hunted animals.
When the movie begins, participants are being selected in District 12 for the 74th Annual Hunger Games. When a young girl named Primrose Everdeen is selected to represent her district as the female contestant, her older sister, Katniss (played by Jennifer Lawrence), volunteers to take her place. She doesn’t want to be a contestant anymore than anybody else does, but she sacrifices herself to save her sister. Katniss wants to win so she can return home to her mother and sister, and she just might have the “fire” and the will to live that it takes to survive the Hunger Games. Whether she wins or not, we can see she’s going to make her mark.
The male contestant from District 12 is Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson). He and Katniss know each other but don’t seem to like each other very much. They are taken in hand to prepare for the games by the very odd Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks) and a gone-to-seed previous winner of the games, Haymitch Abernathy (Woody Harrelson). Haymitch would rather get drunk than anything else, but he makes sure Katniss and Peeta benefit from his experience so they might have a real chance of winning—and surviving.
The games themselves take place in the wild, or in a virtual wild that the people back at the command center have complete control of. They can create a forest fire for the contestants to deal with, poison berries, a nest of deadly hornets, vicious animals, or any number of other obstacles. Every move the contestants make while in the “wild” is being eagerly watched on TV by the entire country. Within the first eight hours, eleven of the twenty-four contestants are killed. When a contestant falls, a cannon booms.
The Hunger Games is a lot of fun, even though the ending is going to seem kind of predictable to a lot of people, with enough of a twist, though, to make it interesting and believable. The games themselves seem to go on a bit too long; the movie seems to sag about three-quarters of the way through but revives for the conclusion.
My favorite part of The Hunger Games is when the action shifts to the Capitol. It is in complete contrast to the place where Katniss and Peeta come from. It’s interesting to see how movie makers portray a city of the far-distant future. The fashionable people of the Capitol are a spectacle that must be seen. The hairdos and makeup seem to have a decidedly 17th century influence. The unctuous TV host of the games (Stanley Tucci) has a blue hairdo that defies description. It must be seen to be appreciated.
Wet Saturday ~ A Classic British Short Story by John Collier
It was July. In the sprawling house they were imprisoned by the swish and the gurgle and all the hundred sounds of rain. They were in the drawing room, behind four tall and weeping windows, in a lake of damp and faded chintz.
This house, ill-kept and unprepossessing, was necessary to Mr. Princey, who detested his wife, his daughter, and his hulking son. His life was to walk through the village, touching his hat, not smiling. His cold pleasure was to recapture snapshot memories of the infinitely remote summers of this childhood — coming into the orangery and finding his lost wooden horse, the tunnel in the box hedge and the square light at the end of it. But now all this was threatened — his pride of position in the village, his passionate attachment to the house — and all because Millicent, his cloddish daughter Millicent, had done this shocking and incredibly stupid thing. Mr. Princey turned from her in revulsion and spoke to his wife.
“They’d send her to the lunatic asylum,” he said. “A criminal-lunatic asylum. We should have to move. It would be impossible.”
His daughter began to shake again. “I’ll kill myself,” she said.
“Be quiet,” said Mr. Princey. “We have very little time. No time for nonsense. I intend to deal with this.” He called to his son, who stood looking out the window. “George, come here. Listen, how far did you get with your medicine before they threw you out as hopeless?”
“You know as well as I do,” said George.
“Do you know enough — did they drive enough into your head for you to be able to guess what a competent doctor could tell about such a wound?”
“Well, it’s a — it’s a knock or blow.”
“If a tile fell from the roof? Or a piece of the coping?”
“Well, guv’nor, you see, it’s like this –“
“Is it possible?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Oh, because she hit him several times.”
“I can’t stand it,” said Mrs. Princey.
“You have got to stand it, my dear,” said her husband. “And keep that hysterical note out of your voice. It might be overheard. We are talking about the weather. If he fell down the well, George, striking his head several times?”
“I really don’t know, guv’nor.”
“He’d have to had to hit the sides several times in thirty or forty feet, and at the correct angles. No. I’m afraid not. We must go over it all again. Millicent.”
“No! No!”
“Millicent, we must go over it all again. Perhaps you have forgotten something. One tiny irrelevant detail may save or ruin us. Particularly you, Millicent. You don’t want to be put in an asylum, do you? Or be hanged? They might hang you, Millicent. You must stop that shaking. You must keep your voice quiet. We are talking of the weather. Now.”
“I can’t. I… I…”
“Be quiet, child. Be quiet.” He put his long, cold face very near to his daughter’s. He found himself horribly revolted by her. Her features were thick, her jaw heavy, her whole figure repellently powerful. “Answer me,” he said. “You were in the stable?”
“Yes.”
“One moment, though. Who knew you were in love with this wretched curate?”
“No one. I’ve never said a–“
“Don’t worry,” said George. “The whole god-damned village knows. They’ve been sniggering about it in the Plough for three years past.”
“Likely enough,” said Mr. Princey. “Likely enough. What filth! He made as if to wipe something off the backs of his hands. “Well, now, we continue. You were in the stable?”
“Yes.”
“You were putting the croquet set into its box?”
“Yes.”
“You hear someone crossing the yard?”
“Yes.”
“It was Withers?”
“Yes.”
“So you called him?”
“Yes.”
“Loudly? Did you call him loudly? Could anyone have heard?”
“No, Father. I’m sure not. I didn’t call him. He saw me as I went to the door. He just waved his hand and came over.”
“How can I find out from you whether there was anyone about? Whether he could have been seen?”
“I’m sure not, Father. I’m quite sure.”
“So you both went into the stable?”
“Yes. It was raining quite hard.”
“What did he say?”
“He said ‘Hullo, Milly.’ And to excuse him coming in the back way, but he’d set out to walk over to Lyston.”
“Yes.”
“And he said, passing the park, he’d seen the house and suddenly thought of me, and he thought he’d just look in for a minute, just to tell me something. He said he was so happy, he wanted me to share it. He’d heard from the Bishop he was to have the vicarage. And it wasn’t only that. It meant he could marry. And he began to stutter. And I thought me meant me.”
“Don’t tell me what you thought. Exactly what he said. Nothing else.”
“Well … Oh dear!”
“Don’t cry. It is a luxury you cannot afford. Tell me.”
“He said no. He said it wasn’t me. It’s Ella Brangwyn-Davies. And he was sorry. And all that. Then he went to go.”
“And then?”
“I went mad. He turned his back. I had the winning post of the croquet set in my hand –“
“Did you shout or scream? I mean, as you hit him?”
“No. I’m sure I didn’t.”
“Did he? Come on. Tell me.”
“No, Father.”
“And then?”
“I threw it down. I came straight into the house. That’s all. I wish I were dead.”
“And you met none of the servants. No one will go into the stable. You see, George, he probably told people he was going to Lyston. Certainly no one knows he came here. He might have been attacked in the woods. We must consider every detail . . . A curate, with his head battered in –“
“Don’t, Father!” cried Millicent.
“Do you want to be hanged? A curate, with his head battered in, found in the woods. Who’d want to kill Withers?”
There was a tap on the door, which opened immediately. It was little Captain Smollett, who never stood on ceremony. “Who’d kill Withers?” said he. “I would, with pleasure. How d’you do, Mrs. Princey. I walked right in.”
“He heard you, Father,” moaned Millicent.
“My dear, we can have our little joke,” said her father. “Don’t pretend to be shocked. A little theoretical curate-killing, Smollett. In these days we talk nothing but thrillers.”
“Parsonicide,” said Captain Smollett. “Justifiable parsonicide. Have you heard about Ella Brangwyn-Davies? I shall be laughed at.”
“Why?” said Mr. Princey. “Why should you be laughed at?”
“Had a shot in that direction myself,” said Smollett, with careful sang-froid. “She’d have said yes, too. Hadn’t you heard? She told most people. Now it’ll look as if I got turned down for a white rat in a dog collar.”
“Too bad!” said Mr. Princey.
“Fortune of war,” said the little Captain.
“Sit down,” said Mr. Princey. “Mother, Millicent, console Captain Smollett with your best light conversation. George and I have something to look to. We shall be back in a minute or two, Smollett. Come, George.”
It was actually five minutes before Mr. Princey and his son returned.
“Smollett,” said Mr. Princey, “will you come round to the stable for a moment? There’s something I want to show you.”
They went into the stable yard. The buildings were now unused except as odd sheds. No one ever went there. Captain Smollett entered, George followed him, Mr. Princey came last. As he closed the door he took up a gun which stood behind it. “Smollett,” said he, “we have come out to shoot a rat which George heard squeaking under that tub. Now, you must listen to me very carefully or you will be show by accident. I mean that.”
Smollett looked at him. “Very well,” said he. “Go on.”
“A very tragic happening has taken place this afternoon,” said Mr. Princey. “It will be even more tragic unless it is smoothed over.”
“Oh?” said Smollett.
“You head me ask,” said Mr. Princey, “who would kill Withers. You heard Millicent make a comment, an unguarded comment.”
“Well?” said Smollett. “What of it?”
“Very little,” said Mr. Princey. “Unless you heard that Withers had met a violent end this very afternoon. And that, my dear Smollett, is what you are going to hear.”
“Have you killed hiim?” cried Smollett.
“Millicent has,” said Mr. Princey.
“Hell!” said Smollett.
“It is hell,” said Mr. Princey. “You would have remembered–and guessed.”
“Maybe,” said Smollett. “Yes. I suppose I should.”
“Therefore,” said Mr. Princey, “you constitute a problem.”
“Why did she kill him?” said Smollett.
“It is one of these disgusting things,” said Mr. Princey. “Pitiable, too. She deluded herself that he was in love with her.”
“Oh, of course,” said Smollett.
“And he told her about the Brangwyn-Davies girl.”
“I see,” said Smollett.
“I have no wish,” said Mr. Princey, “that she should be proved either a lunatic or a murderess. I could hardly live here after that.”
“I suppose not,” said Smollett.
“On the other hand,” said Mr. Princey,” you know about it.”
“Yes,” said Smollett. “I am wondering if I could keep my mouth shut. If I promised you–“
“I am wondering if I could believe you,” said Mr. Princey.
“If I promised,” said Smollett.
“If things went smoothly,” said Mr. Princey. “But not if there was any sort of suspicion, any questioning. You would be afraid of being an accessory.”
“I don’t know,” said Smollett.
“I do,” said Mr. Princey. “What are we going to do?”
“I can’t see anything else,” said Smollett. “You’d never be fool enough to do me in. You can’t get rid of two corpses.”
“I regard it,” said Mr. Princey, “as a better risk than the other. It could be an accident. Or you and Withers could both disappear. There are possibilities in that.”
“Listen,” said Smollett, “You can’t–“
“Listen,” said Mr. Princey. “There may be a way out. There is a way out, Smollett. You gave me the idea yourself.”
“Did I?” said Smollett. “What?”
“You said you would kill Withers,” said Mr. Princey. “You have a motive.”
“I was joking,” said Smollett.
“You are always joking,” said Mr. Princey. “People think there must be something behind it. Listen, Smollett, I can’t trust you, you must trust me. Or I will kill you now, in the next minute. I mean that. You can choose between dying and living.”
“Go on,” said Smollett.
“There is a sewer here,” said Mr. Princey, speaking fast and forcefully. “That is where I am going to put Withers. No outsider knows he has come up here this afternoon. No one will ever look there for him unless you tell them. You must give me evidence that you have murdered Withers.”
“Why?” said Smollett.
“So that I shall be dead sure that you will never open your lips on the matter,” said Mr. Princey.
“What evidence?” said Smollett.
“George,” said Mr. Princey, “hit him in the face, hard.”
“Good God!” said Smollett.
“Again,” said Mr. Princey. “Don’t bruise your knuckles.”
“Oh!” said Smollett.
“I’m sorry,” said Mr. Princey. “There must be traces of a struggle between you and Withers. Then it will not be altogether safe for you to go to the police.”
“Why won’t you take my word?” said Smollett.
“I will when we’ve finished,” said Mr. Princey. “George, get that croquet post. Take your handkerchief to it. As I told you. Smollett, you’ll just grasp the end of this croquet post. I shall shoot you if you don’t.”
“Oh, hell,” said Smollett. “All right.”
“Pull two hairs out of his head, George,” said Mr. Princey, “and remember what I told you to do with them. Now, Smollett, you take that bar and raise the big flagstone with the ring in it. Withers is in the next stall. You’ve got to drag him through and dump him in.”
“I won’t touch him,” said Smollett.
“Stand back, George,” said Mr. Princey, raising the gun.
“Wait a minute,” cried Smollett. “Wait a minute.” He did as he was told.
Mr. Princey wiped his brow. “Look here,” said he. “Everything is perfectly safe. Remember, no one knows that Withers came here. Everyone thinks he walked over to Lyston. That’s five miles of country to search. They’ll never look in our sewer. Do you see how safe it is?”
“I suppose it is,” said Smollett.
“Now come into the house,” said Mr. Princey. “We shall never get that rat.”
They went into the house. The maid was bringing tea into the drawing room. “See, my dear,” said Mr. Princey to his wife, “we went to the stable to shoot a rat and we found Captain Smollett. Don’t be offended, my dear fellow.”
“You must have walked up the back drive,” said Mrs. Princey.
“Yes. Yes. That was it,” said Smollett in some confusion.
“You’ve cut your lip,” said George, handing him a cup of tea.
“I … I just knocked it.”
“Shall I tell Bridget to bring some iodine?” said Mrs. Princey. The maid looked up, waiting.
“Don’t trouble, please,” said Smollett. “It’s nothing.”
“Very well, Bridget,” said Mrs. Princey. “That’s all.”
“Smollett is very kind,” said Mr. Princey. “He knows all our trouble. We can rely on him. We have his word.”
“Oh, have we, Captain Smollett?” cried Mrs. Princey. “You are good.”
“Don’t worry, old fellow,” Mr. Princey said. “They’ll never find anything.”
Pretty soon Smollett took his leave. Mrs. Princey pressed his hand very hard. Tears came into her eyes. All three of them watched him go down the drive. Then Mr. Princey spoke very earnestly to his wife for a few minutes and the two of them went upstairs and spoke still more earnestly to Millicent. Soon after, the rain having ceased, Mr. Princey took a stroll round the stable yard.
He came back and went to the telephone. “Put me through to Lyston police station,” said he. “Quickly … Hullo, is that the police station? This is Mr. Princey, of Abbott’s Laxton. I’m afraid something rather terrible has happened up here. Can you send someone at once?”
When we started for our drive the sun was shining brightly on Munich, and the air was full of the joyousness of early summer. Just as we were about to depart, Herr Delbruck (the maitre d’hotel of the Quatre Saisons, where I was staying) came down bareheaded to the carriage and, after wishing me a pleasant drive, said to the coachman, still holding his hand on the handle of the carriage door, “Remember you are back by nightfall. The sky looks bright but there is a shiver in the north wind that says there may be a sudden storm. But I am sure you will not be late.” Here he smiled and added, “for you know what night it is.”
Johann answered with an emphatic, “Ja, mein Herr,” and, touching his hat, drove off quickly. When we had cleared the town, I said, after signalling to him to stop:
“Tell me, Johann, what is tonight?”
He crossed himself, as he answered laconically: “Walpurgis nacht.” Then he took out his watch, a great, old-fashioned German silver thing as big as a turnip and looked at it, with his eyebrows gathered together and a little impatient shrug of his shoulders. I realized that this was his way of respectfully protesting against the unnecessary delay and sank back in the carriage, merely motioning him to proceed. He started off rapidly, as if to make up for lost time. Every now and then the horses seemed to throw up their heads and sniff the air suspiciously. On such occasions I often looked round in alarm. The road was pretty bleak, for we were traversing a sort of high windswept plateau. As we drove, I saw a road that looked but little used and which seemed to dip through a little winding valley. It looked so inviting that, even at the risk of offending him, I called Johann to stop—and when he had pulled up, I told him I would like to drive down that road. He made all sorts of excuses and frequently crossed himself as he spoke. This somewhat piqued my curiosity, so I asked him various questions. He answered fencingly and repeatedly looked at his watch in protest.
Finally I said, “Well, Johann, I want to go down this road. I shall not ask you to come unless you like; but tell me why you do not like to go, that is all I ask.” For answer he seemed to throw himself off the box, so quickly did he reach the ground. Then he stretched out his hands appealingly to me and implored me not to go. There was just enough of English mixed with the German for me to understand the drift of his talk. He seemed always just about to tell me something – the very idea of which evidently frightened him; but each time he pulled himself up saying, “Walpurgis nacht!”
I tried to argue with him, but it was difficult to argue with a man when I did not know his language. The advantage certainly rested with him, for although he began to speak in English, of a very crude and broken kind, he always got excited and broke into his native tongue – and every time he did so, he looked at his watch. Then the horses became restless and sniffed the air. At this he grew very pale, and, looking around in a frightened way, he suddenly jumped forward, took them by the bridles, and led them on some twenty feet. I followed and asked why he had done this. For an answer he crossed himself, pointed to the spot we had left, and drew his carriage in the direction of the other road, indicating a cross, and said, first in German, then in English, “Buried him – him what killed themselves.”
I remembered the old custom of burying suicides at cross roads: “Ah! I see, a suicide. How interesting!” But for the life of me I could not make out why the horses were frightened.
Whilst we were talking, we heard a sort of sound between a yelp and a bark. It was far away; but the horses got very restless, and it took Johann all his time to quiet them. He was pale and said, “It sounds like a wolf—but yet there are no wolves here now.”
“No?” I said, questioning him. “Isn’t it long since the wolves were so near the city?”
“Long, long,” he answered, “in the spring and summer; but with the snow the wolves have been here not so long.”
Whilst he was petting the horses and trying to quiet them, dark clouds drifted rapidly across the sky. The sunshine passed away, and a breath of cold wind seemed to drift over us. It was only a breath, however, and more of a warning than a fact, for the sun came out brightly again.
Johann looked under his lifted hand at the horizon and said, “The storm of snow, he comes before long time.” Then he looked at his watch again, and, straightway holding his reins firmly—for the horses were still pawing the ground restlessly and shaking their heads—he climbed to his box as though the time had come for proceeding on our journey.
I felt a little obstinate and did not at once get into the carriage. “Tell me,” I said, “about this place where the road leads,” and I pointed down.
Again he crossed himself and mumbled a prayer before he answered, “It is unholy.”
“What is unholy?” I enquired.
“The village.”
“Then there is a village?”
“No, no. No one lives there hundreds of years.”
My curiosity was piqued, “But you said there was a village.”
“There was.”
“Where is it now?”
Whereupon he burst out into a long story in German and English, so mixed up that I could not quite understand exactly what he said. Roughly I gathered that long ago, hundreds of years, men had died there and been buried in their graves; but sounds were heard under the clay, and when the graves were opened, men and women were found rosy with life and their mouths red with blood. And so, in haste to save their lives (aye, and their souls!—and here he crossed himself) those who were left fled away to other places, where the living lived and the dead were dead and not—not something. He was evidently afraid to speak the last words. As he proceeded with his narration, he grew more and more excited. It seemed as if his imagination had got hold of him, and he ended in a perfect paroxysm of fear – white-faced, perspiring, trembling, and looking round him as if expecting that some dreadful presence would manifest itself there in the bright sunshine on the open plain.
Finally, in an agony of desperation, he cried, “Walpurgis nacht!” and pointed to the carriage for me to get in.
All my English blood rose at this, and standing back I said, “You are afraid, Johann—you are afraid. Go home, I shall return alone, the walk will do me good.” The carriage door was open. I took from the seat my oak walking stick—which I always carry on my holiday excursions—and closed the door, pointing back to Munich, and said, “Go home, Johann—Walpurgis nacht doesn’t concern Englishmen.”
The horses were now more restive than ever, and Johann was trying to hold them in, while excitedly imploring me not to do anything so foolish. I pitied the poor fellow, he was so deeply in earnest; but all the same I could not help laughing. His English was quite gone now. In his anxiety he had forgot ten that his only means of making me understand was to talk my language, so he jabbered away in his native German. It began to be a little tedious. After giving the direction, “Home!” I turned to go down the cross road into the valley.
With a despairing gesture, Johann turned his horses towards Munich. I leaned on my stick and looked after him. He went slowly along the road for a while, then there came over the crest of the hill a man tall and thin. I could see so much in the distance. When he drew near the horses, they began to jump and kick about, then to scream with terror. Johann could not hold them in; they bolted down the road, running away madly. I watched them out of sight, then looked for the stranger; but I found that he, too, was gone.
With a light heart I turned down the side road through the deepening valley to which Johann had objected. There was not the slightest reason, that I could see, for his objection; and I daresay I tramped for a couple of hours without thinking of time or distance and certainly without seeing a person or a house. So far as the place was concerned, it was desolation itself. But I did not notice this particularly till, on turning a bend in the road, I came upon a scattered fringe of wood; then I recognized that I had been impressed unconsciously by the desolation of the region through which I had passed.
I sat down to rest myself and began to look around. It struck me that it was considerably colder than it had been at the commencement of my walk—a sort of sighing sound seemed to be around me with, now and then, high overhead, a sort of muffled roar. Looking upwards I noticed that great thick clouds were drafting rapidly across the sky from north to south at a great height. There were signs of a coming storm in some lofty stratum of the air. I was a little chilly, and, thinking that it was the sitting still after the exercise of walking, I resumed my journey.
The ground I passed over was now much more picturesque. There were no striking objects that the eye might single out, but in all there was a charm of beauty. I took little heed of time, and it was only when the deepening twilight forced it self upon me that I began to think of how I should find my way home. The air was cold, and the drifting of clouds high overhead was more marked. They were accompanied by a sort of far away rushing sound, through which seemed to come at intervals that mysterious cry which the driver had said came from a wolf. For a while I hesitated. I had said I would see the deserted village, so on I went and presently came on a wide stretch of open country, shut in by hills all around. Their sides were covered with trees which spread down to the plain, dotting in clumps the gentler slopes and hollows which showed here and there. I followed with my eye the winding of the road and saw that it curved close to one of the densest of these clumps and was lost behind it.
As I looked there came a cold shiver in the air, and the snow began to fall. I thought of the miles and miles of bleak country I had passed, and then hurried on to seek shelter of the wood in front. Darker and darker grew the sky, and faster and heavier fell the snow, till the earth before and around me was a glistening white carpet the further edge of which was lost in misty vagueness. The road was here but crude, and when on the level its boundaries were not so marked as when it passed through the cuttings; and in a little while I found that I must have strayed from it, for I missed underfoot the hard surface, and my feet sank deeper in the grass and moss. Then the wind grew stronger and blew with ever increasing force, till I was fain to run before it. The air became icy- cold, and in spite of my exercise I began to suffer. The snow was now falling so thickly and whirling around me in such rapid eddies that I could hardly keep my eyes open. Every now and then the heavens were torn asunder by vivid lightning, and in the flashes I could see ahead of me a great mass of trees, chiefly yew and cypress all heavily coated with snow.
I was soon amongst the shelter of the trees, and there in comparative silence I could hear the rush of the wind high overhead. Presently the blackness of the storm had become merged in the darkness of the night. By-and-by the storm seemed to be passing away, it now only came in fierce puffs or blasts. At such moments the weird sound of the wolf appeared to be echoed by many similar sounds around me.
Now and again, through the black mass of drifting cloud, came a straggling ray of moonlight which lit up the expanse and showed me that I was at the edge of a dense mass of cypress and yew trees. As the snow had ceased to fall, I walked out from the shelter and began to investigate more closely. It appeared to me that, amongst so many old foundations as I had passed, there might be still standing a house in which, though in ruins, I could find some sort of shelter for a while. As I skirted the edge of the copse, I found that a low wall encircled it, and following this I presently found an opening. Here the cypresses formed an alley leading up to a square mass of some kind of building. Just as I caught sight of this, however, the drifting clouds obscured the moon, and I passed up the path in darkness. The wind must have grown colder, for I felt myself shiver as I walked; but there was hope of shelter, and I groped my way blindly on.
I stopped, for there was a sudden stillness. The storm had passed; and, perhaps in sympathy with nature’s silence, my heart seemed to cease to beat. But this was only momentarily; for suddenly the moonlight broke through the clouds showing me that I was in a graveyard and that the square object before me was a great massive tomb of marble, as white as the snow that lay on and all around it. With the moonlight there came a fierce sigh of the storm which appeared to resume its course with a long, low howl, as of many dogs or wolves. I was awed and shocked, and I felt the cold perceptibly grow upon me till it seemed to grip me by the heart. Then while the flood of moonlight still fell on the marble tomb, the storm gave further evidence of renewing, as though it were returning on its track. Impelled by some sort of fascination, I approached the sepulchre to see what it was and why such a thing stood alone in such a place. I walked around it and read, over the Doric door, in German –
COUNTESS DOLINGEN OF GRATZ
IN STYRIA
SOUGHT AND FOUND DEATH
1801
On the top of the tomb, seemingly driven through the solid marble–for the structure was composed of a few vast blocks of stone–was a great iron spike or stake. On going to the back I saw, graven in great Russian letters:
“The dead travel fast.”
There was something so weird and uncanny about the whole thing that it gave me a turn and made me feel quite faint. I began to wish, for the first time, that I had taken Johann’s advice. Here a thought struck me, which came under almost mysterious circumstances and with a terrible shock. This was Walpurgis Night!
Walpurgis Night was when, according to the belief of mill ions of people, the devil was abroad – when the graves were opened and the dead came forth and walked. When all evil things of earth and air and water held revel. This very place the driver had specially shunned. This was the depopulated village of centuries ago. This was where the suicide lay; and this was the place where I was alone–unmanned, shivering with cold in a shroud of snow with a wild storm gathering again up on me! It took all my philosophy, all the religion I had been taught, all my courage, not to collapse in a paroxysm of fright.
And now a perfect tornado burst upon me. The ground shook as though thousands of horses thundered across it; and this time the storm bore on its icy wings, not snow, but great hailstones which drove with such violence that they might have come from the thongs of Balearic slingers – hailstones that beat down leaf and branch and made the shelter of the cypresses of no more avail than though their stems were standing corn. At the first I had rushed to the nearest tree; but I was soon fain to leave it and seek the only spot that seemed to afford refuge, the deep Doric doorway of the marble tomb. There, crouching against the massive bronze door, I gained a certain amount of protection from the beating of the hail stones, for now they only drove against me as they ricocheted from the ground and the side of the marble.
As I leaned against the door, it moved slightly and opened inwards. The shelter of even a tomb was welcome in that pitiless tempest and I was about to enter it when there came a flash of forked lightning that lit up the whole expanse of the heavens. In the instant, as I am a living man, I saw, as my eyes turned into the darkness of the tomb, a beautiful woman with rounded cheeks and red lips, seemingly sleeping on a bier. As the thunder broke overhead, I was grasped as by the hand of a giant and hurled out into the storm. The whole thing was so sudden that, before I could realize the shock, moral as well as physical, I found the hailstones beating me down. At the same time I had a strange, dominating feeling that I was not alone. I looked towards the tomb. Just then there came another blinding flash which seemed to strike the iron stake that surmounted the tomb and to pour through to the earth, blasting and crumbling the marble, as in a burst of flame. The dead woman rose for a moment of agony while she was lapped in the flame, and her bitter scream of pain was drowned in the thundercrash. The last thing I heard was this mingling of dreadful sound, as again I was seized in the giant grasp and dragged away, while the hailstones beat on me and the air around seemed reverberant with the howling of wolves. The last sight that I remembered was a vague, white, moving mass, as if all the graves around me had sent out the phantoms of their sheeted dead, and that they were closing in on me through the white cloudiness of the driving hail.
Gradually there came a sort of vague beginning of consciousness, then a sense of weariness that was dreadful. For a time I remembered nothing, but slowly my senses returned. My feet seemed positively racked with pain, yet I could not move them. They seemed to be numbed. There was an icy feeling at the back of my neck and all down my spine, and my ears, like my feet, were dead yet in torment; but there was in my breast a sense of warmth which was by comparison delicious. It was as a nightmare—a physical nightmare, if one may use such an expression; for some heavy weight on my chest made it difficult for me to breathe.
This period of semi-lethargy seemed to remain a long time, and as it faded away I must have slept or swooned. Then came a sort of loathing, like the first stage of seasickness, and a wild desire to be free of something—I knew not what. A vast stillness enveloped me, as though all the world were asleep or dead—only broken by the low panting as of some animal close to me. I felt a warm rasping at my throat, then came a consciousness of the awful truth which chilled me to the heart and sent the blood surging up through my brain. Some great animal was lying on me and now licking my throat. I feared to stir, for some instinct of prudence bade me lie still; but the brute seemed to realize that there was now some change in me, for it raised its head. Through my eyelashes I saw above me the two great flaming eyes of a gigantic wolf. Its sharp white teeth gleamed in the gaping red mouth, and I could feel its hot breath fierce and acrid upon me.
For another spell of time I remembered no more. Then I be came conscious of a low growl, followed by a yelp, renewed again and again. Then seemingly very far away, I heard a “Holloa! holloa!” as of many voices calling in unison. Cautiously I raised my head and looked in the direction whence the sound came, but the cemetery blocked my view. The wolf still continued to yelp in a strange way, and a red glare began to move round the grove of cypresses, as though following the sound. As the voices drew closer, the wolf yelped faster and louder. I feared to make either sound or motion. Nearer came the red glow over the white pall which stretched into the darkness a round me. Then all at once from beyond the trees there came at a trot a troop of horsemen bearing torches. The wolf rose from my breast and made for the cemetery. I saw one of the horsemen (soldiers by their caps and their long military cloaks) raise his carbine and take aim. A companion knocked up his arm, and I heard the ball whiz over my head. He had evidently taken my body for that of the wolf. Another sighted the animal as it slunk away, and a shot followed. Then, at a gallop, the troop rode forward—some towards me, others following the wolf as it disappeared amongst the snow-clad cypresses.
As they drew nearer I tried to move but was powerless, although I could see and hear all that went on around me. Two or three of the soldiers jumped from their horses and knelt beside me. One of them raised my head and placed his hand over my heart.
“Good news, comrades!” he cried. “His heart still beats!”
Then some brandy was poured down my throat; it put vigor into me, and I was able to open my eyes fully and look around. Lights and shadows were moving among the trees, and I heard men call to one another. They drew together, uttering frightened exclamations; and the lights flashed as the others came pouring out of the cemetery pell-mell, like men possessed. When the further ones came close to us, those who were around me asked them eagerly, “Well, have you found him?”
The reply rang out hurriedly, “No! no! Come away quick—quick! This is no place to stay, and on this of all nights!”
“What was it?” was the question, asked in all manner of keys. The answer came variously and all indefinitely as though the men were moved by some common impulse to speak yet were restrained by some common fear from giving their thoughts.
“It – it – indeed!” gibbered one, whose wits had plainly given out for the moment.
“A wolf—and yet not a wolf!” another put in shudderingly.
“No use trying for him without the sacred bullet,” a third remarked in a more ordinary manner.
“Serve us right for coming out on this night! Truly we have earned our thousand marks!” were the ejaculations of a fourth.
“There was blood on the broken marble,” another said after a pause, “the lightning never brought that there. And for him—is he safe? Look at his throat! See comrades, the wolf has been lying on him and keeping his blood warm.”
The officer looked at my throat and replied, “He is all right, the skin is not pierced. What does it all mean? We should never have found him but for the yelping of the wolf.”
“What became of it?” asked the man who was holding up my head and who seemed the least panic-stricken of the party, for his hands were steady and without tremor. On his sleeve was the chevron of a petty officer.
“It went home,” answered the man, whose long face was pallid and who actually shook with terror as he glanced around him fearfully. “There are graves enough there in which it may lie. Come, comrades—come quickly! Let us leave this cursed spot.”
The officer raised me to a sitting posture, as he uttered a word of command; then several men placed me upon a horse. He sprang to the saddle behind me, took me in his arms, gave the word to advance; and, turning our faces away from the cypresses, we rode away in swift military order.
As yet my tongue refused its office, and I was perforce silent. I must have fallen asleep; for the next thing I remembered was finding myself standing up, supported by a soldier on each side of me. It was almost broad daylight, and to the north a red streak of sunlight was reflected like a path of blood over the waste of snow. The officer was telling the men to say nothing of what they had seen, except that they found an English stranger, guarded by a large dog.
“Dog! that was no dog,” cut in the man who had exhibited such fear. “I think I know a wolf when I see one.”
The young officer answered calmly, “I said a dog.”
“Dog!” reiterated the other ironically. It was evident that his courage was rising with the sun; and, pointing to me, he said, “Look at his throat. Is that the work of a dog, master?”
Instinctively I raised my hand to my throat, and as I touched it I cried out in pain. The men crowded round to look, some stooping down from their saddles; and again there came the calm voice of the young officer, “A dog, as I said. If aught else were said we should only be laughed at.”
I was then mounted behind a trooper, and we rode on into the suburbs of Munich. Here we came across a stray carriage into which I was lifted, and it was driven off to the Quatre Saisons—the young officer accompanying me, whilst a trooper followed with his horse, and the others rode off to their barracks.
When we arrived, Herr Delbruck rushed so quickly down the steps to meet me, that it was apparent he had been watching within. Taking me by both hands he solicitously led me in. The officer saluted me and was turning to withdraw, when I recognized his purpose and insisted that he should come to my rooms. Over a glass of wine I warmly thanked him and his brave comrades for saving me. He replied simply that he was more than glad, and that Herr Delbruck had at the first taken steps to make all the searching party pleased; at which ambiguous utterance the maitre d’hotel smiled, while the officer plead duty and withdrew.
“But Herr Delbruck,” I enquired, “how and why was it that the soldiers searched for me?”
He shrugged his shoulders, as if in depreciation of his own deed, as he replied, “I was so fortunate as to obtain leave from the commander of the regiment in which I serve, to ask for volunteers.”
“But how did you know I was lost?” I asked.
“The driver came hither with the remains of his carriage, which had been upset when the horses ran away.”
“But surely you would not send a search party of soldiers merely on this account?”
“Oh, no!” he answered, “but even before the coachman arrived, I had this telegram from the Boyar whose guest you are,” and he took from his pocket a telegram which he handed to me, and I read:
Be careful of my guest – his safety is most precious to me. Should aught happen to him, or if he be missed, spare nothing to find him and ensure his safety. He is English and therefore adventurous. There are often dangers from snow and wolves and night. Lose not a moment if you suspect harm to him. I answer your zeal with my fortune.
– Dracula.
As I held the telegram in my hand, the room seemed to whirl around me, and if the attentive maitre d’hotel had not caught me, I think I should have fallen. There was something so strange in all this, something so weird and impossible to imagine, that there grew on me a sense of my being in some way the sport of opposite forces—the mere vague idea of which seemed in a way to paralyze me. I was certainly under some form of mysterious protection. From a distant country had come, in the very nick of time, a message that took me out of the danger of the snow sleep and the jaws of the wolf.
The Kid by Sapphire ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp
We first met the character Precious Jones in the novel Push by Sapphire. It was made into an excellent movie in 2009 with the title Precious. (It seems that Push had already been used as a title for a different movie.) In the novel and the movie, Precious Jones is black, overweight and illiterate at the age of sixteen. She has a foul-mouthed, welfare-recipient mother who regularly heaps abuse on her head and a father who routinely rapes her. By the age of sixteen, she has given birth to two children by her father, the first of which was a girl with Down’s syndrome called Mongo.
The second baby Precious gives birth to is a boy that she names Abdul. The novel The Kid begins when Abdul is nine. His mother, Precious Jones, has died at age twenty-seven of AIDS that she contracted from her own father. Abdul has no known family, so he becomes an orphan, a ward of the state. He is put into a foster home with an indifferent foster mother, where he is beaten and sexually assaulted by an older boy. After he recovers from his injuries, he is placed in St. Ailanthus, a Catholic boys’ school.
Abdul comes to regard St. Ailanthus as his home, even though he is sexually assaulted regularly by the “brothers” who run the home (it seems this is something he must tolerate just to get along). In spite of all that, though, there are benefits to living in the home: it’s clean and there’s plenty of food to eat; also there’s an education to be had for those willing to take advantage of it.
It’s while Abdul is at St. Ailanthus that he is exposed by accident one day to African dance. After that, becoming a dancer is the one driving force in his life. He intends to overcome all the obstacles put in his way to get the education and training he needs to become a professional dancer. His path is about to become more difficult, however: He is accused of sexually assaulting a younger boy at St. Ailanthus and is expelled. He believes he is being falsely accused so the brothers in charge of the home can somehow use him as a scapegoat to sidestep their own culpability.
After he leaves St. Ailanthus, he is sent to live with a great-grandmother that he didn’t even know he had. She lives in a filthy, roach-infested apartment and seems to not be in full possession of her faculties. She hasn’t seen Abdul since he was a baby. Abdul refuses to admit he is related to her.
Through all the ups and downs of his young life, Abdul never stops wanting to be a dancer. He lives for a while with an older, effeminate dance instructor. He finds himself in a dance troupe (of sorts) with an Asian girlfriend who calls herself My Lai; his feelings toward her seem to be ambiguous at best, especially after he finds out what she wants him to do for her.
The Kid is a fast, almost effortless reading experience. Those readers who read and liked the novel Push or saw the movie Precious will probably be interested in this story of young Abdul Jones’ troubled life. Although it held my interest throughout its 373 pages, I was a little disappointed in the rather unsatisfying ending. The book seems to just stop, rather than end, with Abdul at age twenty in another terrible jam that he may or may not be able to overcome. It seems another book is needed to tell us what happens to him from there on. Does he overcome all the bad stuff and become a successful dancer? Does he find someone who appreciates him for what he is without using him? These questions are yet to be answered.
It was late fall, getting close to Thanksgiving. I was eleven and in the sixth grade. I came down with a terrible cold that settled in my chest. I had a rattling cough and a fever. My chest hurt and my swallowing mechanism wasn’t right. My mother had taken a sliding fall on the street and was in the hospital with a brain concussion. She was out of commission until further notice. Daddy, who ordinarily didn’t like being bothered with kid problems, was in charge in my mother’s absence. He never understood me, even at the best of times. He thought I was faking it even when I wasn’t. I was too young to stay at home by myself all day long, the thinking went, so my cold was ignored (by him, anyway) and I was sent packing off to school.
Miss Smalls noticed right away there was something wrong with me. I couldn’t stop coughing. I could hardly hold my head up. She held her hand to my forehead and then walked me up to the nurse’s office.
Miss Millie Deal, the school nurse, looked in my eyes and ears and down my throat. She put a thermometer under my tongue and then unbuttoned my shirt and listened to my heart. “You’ve got a lot of congestion in the lungs,” she said. (No fooling.) “You should have stayed at home today and rested.”
“There’s nobody there,” I said around the little glass tube in my mouth.
“Are you afraid to stay by yourself?”
“No. It wasn’t my idea.”
She took the thermometer out of my mouth and turned toward the window to get a better look. “A hundred and two,” she said. “If left untreated, your condition could be dangerous.”
“What?”
“I think you might have the start of pneumonia. You feel rotten, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Any vomiting or cramps?”
“No.”
“You’re not coughing up blood, are you?”
“No,” I said anxiously. “Will I?”
There was a small, metal hospital bed—more like a cot, really—against the wall. It looked like it might have been used in World War I or before. She pulled down the covers and told me to take off my shoes and get into the bed. After I had done so, she took my glasses from me and covered me up.
“Just stay there,” she said, “until I tell you to get up.”
The sheets smelled liked peppermint. The pillow was soft and fit my head perfectly. I turned my face to the wall and covered up my head. By the time Miss Deal came back from telling Miss Smalls she was keeping me in her office “for observation,” I was sound asleep.
I slept all morning and through lunch. When the lunch-is-over bell rang, I woke up briefly and then went back to sleep. When school was over for the day, Miss Deal woke me up and told me it was time to go home. Before I left she handed me a note she had written for me to give to daddy: Your son needs to see a doctor before he returns to school.
Daddy wasn’t happy about the note, but he didn’t do more than the usual amount of crabbing. After a dinner (that I didn’t want) of fish sticks and macaroni and cheese, he made me go straight to bed without any TV. A little shit as sick as I was, he said, needed to be in bed.
In the morning he took me to Dr. Vermilion’s office on his way to work. He sat there beside me silently, looking at a magazine, while I waited my turn to see the doctor. When my name was called, he didn’t go in with me, as my mother would have.
I had been going to Dr. Vermilion all my life and I wasn’t too scared of him. He was old but he knew how to laugh and joke around. The thing I hated most about going to the doctor was having to take off my clothes. This time he let me keep on my undershirt and my pants while he examined me, so already I felt better.
He used a tongue depressor to look as far down my throat as he could; listened to me front and back with the stethoscope. My temperature was still about a hundred and two.
“What girls have you been kissing?” he asked.
“None!” I said emphatically.
“I think you’ve picked up a germ somewhere.”
“It wasn’t from any girl.”
“How do you know that?”
I was trying to think of an answer but he laughed then, so I knew he was just playing with me.
He gave me a shot, a bottle of pills, and cherry cough syrup. He said I was to stay home from school for the rest of the week and stay in bed as much of the time as I could. Drink plenty of fluids, stay warm and dry, avoid chills. If I wasn’t better in four or five days, he would do an x-ray of my lungs. The part I liked best was staying home from school.
When I told daddy what the doctor had said, he grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me out to the car before I had a chance to put on my coat. I had already screwed up his entire morning, he said, but, by god, he had no intention of letting the entire day go to waste.
He drove me to grandma’s house and dropped me off and sped away in the car. I wasn’t sure if grandma was even at home, but when I rang the bell she opened the door with a smile. I told her what had happened, that I had been to see the doctor, but she already knew somehow.
She put me to bed in her big front bedroom that was only used for overnight company. She put her portable TV at the foot of the bed and turned it on for me. Then she went into another part of the house and told me to just give her a holler if I needed anything.
I wasn’t used to being able to watch anything I wanted on TV with no grownups around, especially during the day. I watched cartoons, game shows, and a soap opera that I thought was stupid. Then it was time for lunch. Grandma fixed me a hamburger and I went into the kitchen and sat at the table and ate it. After lunch I went back to bed and took a two-hour nap and then I watched TV some more. The life of the invalid suited me fine.
When it was just starting to get dark outside, grandma came into the bedroom and woke me up. I started to get up, figuring daddy had come to pick me up to take me home, but she told me to stay put. She would call me when it was time for dinner.
I learned later that daddy had had an accident at work. He was hurrying to get something done and fell off a ladder and broke his leg in two places. They had operated on him and were going to keep him in the hospital for a few days. I would be staying at grandma’s for the time being. I told her I was old enough to stay by myself, but she swatted me playfully with the newspaper and told me not to even think such a thing. If anything happened to me in that house alone, she would never be able to forgive herself.
Bad luck always comes in threes, she said. She had seen it happen too many times. After my mother’s brain concussion, daddy’s broken leg was bad luck number two. Number three was just waiting to happen and when it happened it would be sure to happen to me.
All day long he had nothing to do. His legs didn’t work so well anymore; neither did his eyes or his ears. He slept at night and got up in the morning and there was somebody always there, sometimes a stranger he had never seen before, to help him get himself into the bathroom and dressed and downstairs to breakfast, where he sat with thirty or forty others just like him, making a mess of his oatmeal and eggs and not saying anything. After breakfast somebody always sat him down in a comfortable spot in the solarium or the TV room and he just sat there, usually all day, until they came and got him for the next meal. After that it was time to get into bed and sleep again and wake up again and get dressed and go down for breakfast and do the same thing all over again; again and again as if that was what he was put on the earth for: a lot of nothing that seemed to have no end. Whoever said life was short?
He wondered what happened to the people he used to know. Didn’t he have a wife and a couple of children? Didn’t he have at one time some grandparents, uncles and aunts, a mother and father, a sister and a couple of brothers? What happened to all of them? Did he just dream them up? Oh, yes, that’s right: one after the other they all died. He came to see life as a kind of lottery: the winners went on ahead and the losers had no other choice but to stay behind. In the end there would be one loser left, and he was it. When they were children and they played tag or kick-the-can or hide-and-seek, somebody always had to be “it.” He didn’t like being “it” then, and he didn’t like it now.
Since he had no current life to speak of, he dwelt mostly in the past. Once, when he was eight years old, he and his whole family—including grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins—went on a camping trip to a river. The men went fishing while the women went in swimming. He had never fished and wasn’t interested in learning, so he stayed with the women. His mother told him he didn’t need to be embarrassed about staying with the women, but somebody always teased him about it and it hurt him enough that he thought he should probably learn to fish so it wouldn’t happen again. His mother took his swimming trunks out of her suitcase and gave them to him and told him to go into the tent and take everything off and put on the trunks and come back out as soon as he could because they were all waiting to go in swimming.
After he put on the trunks, he was ashamed of the way he looked. His arms and legs were a pale yellow color and as thin as sticks. His chest was ugly and not at all manly. His stomach stuck out farther than he would have liked. He imagined that he looked like a monkey without any hair, a shaved monkey. He couldn’t let anybody see him almost naked with just a strip of red cloth around his middle. He stayed in the tent until his mother came and pulled him out, looking plenty silly herself in her green swimsuit and matching bathing cap that wrinkled the skin on her forehead. When he insisted that he had to stay in the tent because he felt sick, she slapped at him and told him she was in no mood for any of his nonsense. He slapped her back on the arm, which later he regretted. He could tell that she wasn’t quite herself; her tongue seemed thick in her mouth and her movements were jerky; she had been drinking. She dragged him out into the sunlight and held him to her hip as if she thought he might get away if she let him go.
Nobody looked at him in his silly red swimming trunks so he started to relax. He went into the water up to his elbows and then got back out and sat on a towel in the shade on the bank. The women were splashing around in the middle of the river, talking and laughing. The older kids were playing in a spot farther off, screaming and trying to hold each other under. He wanted no part of any of them.
He realized after a while that he couldn’t just sit there all day while everybody else was having fun, so he went back to the water. He waded in slowly until he was up to his chest and then, taking a quick look over his shoulder, began walking downriver. He walked until he was out of sight and hearing of the others.
He went farther and farther, staying in the middle of the river. The farther he went the deeper the water became. It was up to his breastbone and then past his shoulders to his neck. When he looked down all he saw was green-black murkiness; he could no longer see his feet, but still he kept going.
Every couple of feet he advanced, the water came closer to swallowing him up. It was up to his chin and then to just beneath his mouth. If he stepped off a drop-off that he couldn’t see, he would go under. He knew the drop-off was there, up ahead, waiting for him; he could see it without seeing it. All he had to do was keep going and he would find it. He would drown because he had never learned to swim. And even if he had had a chance to yell before he drowned, nobody would hear him because they were all too far away. He knew, even at his young age, that he was flirting with death.
As he stood in the water up to his mouth—unable to swim if he should go under—he looked over at the river bank; at the sky and the wild foliage that began on the other side of the trees. He was watching some birds doing acrobatic loops in the air when he noticed a smell in the air, a smell that he realized had been hanging over him all day. It seemed to him to be the smell of death. He thought for a moment that it was his own death he had been smelling, but as he turned around and began walking back upriver he knew it was somebody else’s.
When he got back to camp, everybody who had been in the water earlier was now out. His mother, as he was soon to find out, had had an argument with her younger sister and swam off by herself to another part of the river. Everybody expected her to come back in a few minutes, after she cooled off, but more than an hour had gone by and nobody had seen her. They were starting to get a little worried.
After another hour or two, they were certain something bad had happened, or she would have come back on her own. Somebody drove to the nearest phone and called for help. The police came in due time and, after they had asked their myriads of questions, conducted a search of the river. They found her body near some bluffs where it had been swept by the current and become lodged against some rocks. The green bathing cap was what they saw that led them to her.
His mother’s drowning was the terrible event of his life, the one event by which all other events were measured; the event that changed everything. It was his primer in death—the death that prepared him for all the others, including his own.
Not a day—and barely a waking hour—had gone by in his life that he didn’t think of her. She was and always would be the unknowable thirty-three-year-old wife and mother of four and he, the frightened eight-year-old boy clinging to her memory. He had—and always would have—unanswered questions that only she could answer.
After dinner he had a sinking spell; he blacked out on the way to his room and fell in the hallway. The nurses got him to his room and into bed and called his doctor.
He had been dozing in the darkened room when he opened his eyes and saw a nurse he had never seen before standing beside his bed. He smiled at her and she smiled back.
“I knew you would come,” he said.
“Of course I came.”
“Where’s the green bathing cap?”
“This is my day not to wear it.”
“You don’t look a day older.”
“That’s the way it is. You look much older.”
“Isn’t it awful?”
“Don’t talk now. The doctor is on his way.”
She straightened the blanket around his shoulders and went to the window and pulled back the curtain and looked out. “It’s starting to rain,” she said.
I’m not allowed any visitors. I said my goodbyes to my parents a week ago on my eighteenth birthday. My mother cried and my father was without emotion. They were told I was to be made one with the essence of the Nonpareil, which means I’ll be gassed and my body placed in a thick block of cement that will be used in one of the public works projects. Maybe someday the cement containing my body will crumble and my bones or whatever is left of me will again be exposed to the light of day.
I’m in a little room somewhere but I’m not sure where I am. I have nothing to do but wait for the end. A utility robot brings me food three times a day but I don’t eat much. Since I have no future, I try not to think about anything and try not to feel anything. I have a little window up high and I spend most of the daylight hours looking at the blue sky, at the tops of the trees off in the distance and at the birds flying from tree to tree. Occasionally I see an airship moving ponderously across the sky and wish I was on it. At night I love looking at the stars and sometimes I catch a glimpse of the moon.
How I came to be here is a long story. I was the only child of my parents and a disappointment to them. From the very first, I did not take well to the teachings of the Nonpareil. I was rebellious and moody and I refused to march in lock-step with other children my age. I was in constant trouble at school until my father was told to make some other arrangement for my education. I was placed in another school and then a succession of schools after that.
My parents were determined to find out what was wrong with me. They took me to a series of doctors who subjected me to every physical and psychological test known to man. After a period of time, the doctors found that I had no mental or physical impairments that would keep me from conforming the way I was supposed to conform. I was a healthy boy and there was no reason I couldn’t be like the other boys my age: a wholesome example of obedience and loyalty to the Nonpareil and all he espoused. There was no reason I wouldn’t live to pass on my seed of obedience to the next generation. The doctors advised more rigorous mind control and an aggressive drug regimen to be administered by the state.
My father knew that, in spite of everything that could be done to change me, I would never be what he wanted me to be. When I was ten years old, I overheard a conversation he had with my mother late at night in which he stated that he had given up on me and was ready to see me made one with the essence of the Nonpareil before I caused him further trouble and heartache. My mother pleaded with him and begged him to give me another chance. It was only after she threatened to leave him, disgracing him, that he agreed.
It was when I was fifteen years old that my rebellion took shape and developed a purpose. I was introduced at that time to one of the underground “secret societies” that detested mind control and conformity and advocated the overthrow of the Nonpareil and a return to a free and democratic society and form of government. The secret society was a place of free thought and free speech where the forbidden ways of the Old Time were revered. I knew finally what it was I had always longed for.
I discovered a whole new world in the secret society. I was made to feel welcome, for the first time in my life, with a group of people who thought as I thought. I was surprised at the many people of all ages and backgrounds who belonged. We studied the ways of the Old Time and longed for the day when we would be free. Many of us believed the overthrow of the Nonpareil was only an airy dream that would never happen, while others were sure the day of deliverance was close at hand.
Membership in the secret society was, of course, a serious offense to the Nonpareil and was strictly prohibited. Cells of secret societies were constantly being flushed out (many times from the tips of anonymous paid spies) and members gassed (or, made one with the essence of the Nonpareil). These events were always highly publicized to make examples of the members and to discourage other miscreants from wanting to join.
Over the years I had accumulated some books and texts on the ways of the Old Time. I had traded them with other members of the secret society and had in some cases bought them on the black market that operated on the fringes of the law. I kept them locked in a foot locker under my bed. When I was alone in my room at night, I would take them out and read them and study the pictures and dream about what life in the Old Time was like—and what life might someday be like again. My mother discovered these books—not by accident but by prying open the foot locker with a crowbar—and that’s when things went really bad for me. She informed my father that I was in possession of forbidden materials; he called the police and I was arrested that night. I was incarcerated in a correctional facility where I was forced to submit to electroshock therapy that was supposed to “reorder” my thinking.
I was kept locked in a tiny white cell (white was thought to be purifying and cleansing) for over a year. During that time, I saw only utility robots and had no contact with anyone. My mother was allowed to speak to me on the picture phone for a few minutes once a month, during which time she cried and attempted to get me to reform, to confess to all my wrongdoings and apologize for all the trouble I had caused. My father refused to expend further effort on my behalf.
During all this time, of course, no one had been able to “break me.” I remained true to what I had always been and that was the only thing I had. No matter what they did to me or in what way they threatened me, I was not going to change and become the boy they wanted me to be. Not now. Not ever.
After I still showed no signs of “improvement,” my father requested (he had the legal right to do so) that I be made one with the essence of the Nonpareil, and the court, after reviewing my case, complied with his request. So, I was brought here to wait for the end of my life. My parents were told I would be here for three or four days—a week at the most—but that I would be treated well and fed regularly (like an animal locked in a cage), no matter how long it took.
I’ve been here now for a week and two days. I have no calendar and no clock, but I’m still able to keep track of how many days have gone by. Not that it matters much. Every day I think will be my last. Every time I hear the door being opened, I think it will be them coming to get me. I’ve been told it will be easier for me if I don’t resist. When the time comes, I’m going to be cool and calm; I’m going to show them I don’t feel anything at all. They can kill me but they can’t hurt me. I’ve rehearsed it in my mind a thousand times.
On my ninth night in the little room—it must have been two in the morning—I woke up to the moonlight streaming through the window. I was surprised at how bright the moonlight was but I thought no more about it and turned over to go back to sleep. That’s when I realized it was not the moonlight that woke me up—but a sound—and someone was coming quietly into the room.
I propped myself on my elbows in the bed, thinking my time had come. I saw a dark figure coming toward me and when I started to get out of the bed he held up his hand.
“Don’t make a sound,” he said.
“What is it?” I asked sleepily. “Who are you?”
“Get out of the bed and put these on,” he said, handing me a small bundle of clothing.
I did as I was told and discovered that what he handed me was a black tunic, a pair of soft black trousers and a pair of black leather boots.
“What is this about?” I asked.
“Don’t ask questions,” he said. “Just do as I tell you if you want to live past tonight.”
After I was dressed, I could see his face better in the dim light. I had never seen him before.
“Who are you?” I asked again.
“It’s better if you don’t know who I am,” he said. “And anyway, it doesn’t matter. I’m an interested party who knows what is about to happen to you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Tonight is your last night. They would have come for you in about an hour or so. I’m offering you a chance to escape if you just take it.”
“Why would you want me to escape? Who are you?”
“Be quiet and just listen to what I’m going to say.”
I sat down on the bed and laced the boots while he continued to stand.
“I’ve sent the two guards on a small errand that will take them five minutes or less,” he said. “That’s all the time you have to escape.”
“You’re letting me escape?” I asked.
“I’m going to walk away from this room without re-locking the door. One minute after I’ve left, you may go out the door and to your left down the hallway to a flight of stairs. Go down the stairs and at the bottom of the stairs go to your right down the long hallway. At the end of the hallway is a door. You may leave by that door.”
“What then?”
“Walk away from the building for about a quarter of a mile until you come to a gravel road. Turn left on that road and stay on it until you come to a paved road called the Hyphen Road. Start walking on it toward the east.”
“How do I know this is not a trick?”
“You don’t, but it’s your only chance. Stay on the Hyphen Road east for five miles, at which time you will see an airship docked at a small airfield. The airship will leave exactly at dawn and it won’t wait for you if you’re not there.”
“Why would anybody take me on board? An escaped miscreant?”
“Tell them your name is Lloyd David and that Mr. Thackeray sent you. Can you remember that?”
“Yes.”
“Can you walk five miles without stopping?”
“I haven’t ever tried.”
He gave me an identification tag to show in case I was stopped along the way, and then, without speaking another word, he was gone.
I waited for what seemed a minute and then I went out the door and down the hallway to the left as he had said. I walked calmly—not fast and not slow—as if I belonged there. I went down the stairs and down the long hallway to the door at the end. In less than a minute I was outside the building, breathing in the night air.
I crouched down in the shadow of the building for a minute or two to make sure there was nobody around who might spot me, and then I began walking away from the building. I found the gravel road and stayed on it until I came to the paved road, the Hyphen Road, and began walking on it toward the east. I knew that five miles was a long way to walk without stopping, but I was moving forward almost without effort. My legs seemed almost to be working independently of my body.
I had to admit that it felt good to be someplace other than locked in a small room. The night, with its smells and sounds, was delightful. Only once did I encounter other people: I saw two men walking toward me—they apparently didn’t see me—and crouched down in the tall grass beside the road until they had passed.
I first saw the docked airship from about a half-mile away. It seemed enormous, like a huge sleeping animal. I felt my heart beat faster as I came closer to the airship. I was happy that the thing hadn’t left without me but also apprehensive with the feeling that anything might happen. I still believed my “escape” might be something other than what it appeared to be.
I was surprised to see no one around the airship, no workmen or crew preparing for flight. One lone man was standing at the bottom of the steps that went up into the airship. As I approached, I could see that he was a strikingly handsome boy a year or two older than me with pale skin and tousled brown hair. When he looked at me and smiled, I saw from his slightly luminous eyes that he was a robot. For a moment I couldn’t believe what I was seeing because he was by far the most lifelike robot I had ever seen, a welcome change from the utility ‘bots I had become accustomed to for the last couple of years.
“I’m Lloyd David,” I said. “Mr. Thackeray sent me.” My own voice sounded to me like somebody else’s voice.
He gave me a salute and stood aside and gestured for me to board the airship. I went up the ladder on shaky legs, with him right behind me, and when we were both inside he gestured for me to follow him. He took me down a small flight of stairs through a passageway and down a corridor to a door. He opened the door and stepped aside for me to enter and when I had gone inside he closed the door again and was gone.
I found myself in a small but comfortable cabin. There was a cot, a small table and two chairs and not much else. I could see through the one porthole in the cabin that it was starting to get light outside. I sat down and was taking off my boots when the robot opened the door again and came back into the room.
“We’ll be taking off in a few minutes,” he said.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“My name is Phiz,” he said.
“Where are we going?”
“It’s going to be a long flight, so just make yourself comfortable.” He closed the partition over the porthole, blocking out the light, and then he was gone again.
I lay down on the cot and fell into a deep sleep, during which I dreamt of the room I slept in at home when I was a child; the room was high up in the house where we lived and I used to pretend it was a cabin on an airship bound for exotic ports.
I don’t know how long I had been asleep when I awoke with a start. Phiz, the robot, was standing at the foot of the cot looking at me. He had a strange way of seeming to come alive when I looked at him; he was at other times, I suppose, in a dormant state to conserve his energy supply.
“Where are we?” I asked. “Have we landed?”
“Still airborne,” he said, raising the partition over the porthole.
“When will we land?”
“Not for a long time yet. Would you like some food?”
“Yes, and something to drink.”
He was gone no longer than five minutes and when he came back he was carrying a tray with a covered plate on it. When he put the tray on the table and removed the cover, I could see the plate held some kind of roasted fowl surrounded by vegetables. I sat down at the table and began eating. He left again and in a moment came back carrying a bottle of wine and a glass. He opened the bottle and poured the glass full and handed it to me. The wine was light and delicious, unlike any I had ever tasted before.
He sat down across from me at the little table. “Would you like me to sing to you while you eat?” he asked.
“I’d rather talk,” I said.
“Of course. What would you like to talk about?”
“Why haven’t I seen any other people on this airship since I came aboard?”
“You and I are the only ones here,” he said.
“Somebody has to be steering,” I said. “Somebody has to be navigating. The thing just doesn’t fly itself.”
“If you must know, I’m steering and I’m navigating.”
“Oh, I see. And who cooked this food?”
“I did.”
“You do everything?”
“Yes.”
“I’d like to see the captain,” I said. “I want to know where we’re going.”
He looked at me as I stood up from the table and went out the door of the cabin. I had been in airships before and I knew where the control room was. I ran to the front of the airship and up a stairway to where I believed the captain and navigator
would be. I opened a hatch and stepped into a large empty space. There were no steering device, no navigating instruments, and no crew.
I ran back to my cabin and looked out the porthole. I hoped to see a mountain, river, or city—some feature that might tell me where we were. Clouds were all I saw; we were in a thick cloudbank.
“I know all about you,” Phiz said, “from the day you were born.”
I turned and looked at him. “Who are you?” I asked.
“Don’t you know?”
“No.”
“I’m the Nonpareil.”
I let out a little snort of laughter. “The Nonpareil is a robot named Phiz?” I asked.
“The Nonpareil is different things to different people.”
“I want you to turn this ship around and take me back to where we were.”
“That isn’t possible. We’ve passed through the portal. There’s no going back.”
“What portal?”
“The portal from one plane of existence to another.”
I sat down heavily on the bed. “So this is what it’s like to be dead,” I said.
“Do you feel any less alive than you did?”
“I want to go back.”
“I just told you. You can’t go back. And, believe me, where you are now is better than where you were.”
“I’ll figure out how this thing operates and turn it around.”
“You would be wasting your time to even try.”
“I’ll open the door and jump out.”
“You would drift forever in purgatory. It’s a horrible existence.”
He sat down beside me on the bed. I could hear the slight whir coming from inside his chest, the robot equivalent of a heartbeat.
“I don’t want to be here,” I said, “with a robot. I’ll figure out a way to bring this thing down, even if it kills both of us.”
He smiled sympathetically. “You’re not making sense,” he said.
“Where are we going and when will we land?” I asked. “I want to know!”
He gripped the back of my neck gently in his hand and, in spite of myself, I leaned into him and put my head on his shoulder. If I had had a knife, I would have ripped his beautiful face apart and done him some real damage.
“This is what you always dreamed about, isn’t it?” he asked. “Just drifting among the clouds, without a care in the world?” He began making little cooing noises, which I found strange in a robot, and pretty soon I began feeling drowsy. The next time I woke up it was dark but I could see his luminous eyes looking right at me.
