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Authors: Gene Wolfe

BOOK: Castleview
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As night vanishes with the raising of a blind, Mr. Fee was gone. His clothing remained, but in that clothing was a large-headed being with three pairs of eyes and pipe-stem limbs. It pressed its hands to its head and blinked its largest pair of eyes, night-black ovals the size of eggs. Mr. Fee reappeared, wavered, and vanished again.
Hwan transferred the target pistol to his right hand. He had never handled a gun before, though guns had been pointed at him more than once. He found that having the gun in his own hand was a considerable improvement. “Be Mr. Fee,” he said. “You not Mr. Fee, I shoot.”
The many-eyed being rolled its larger pairs as though to judge whether Hwan was serious, and Mr. Fee returned.
“Call police, say unlock door, you go home.”
Mr. Fee called, “Guard! You can let me out now.”
The turnkey was more than a little surprised by Hwan’s gun; no one had broken out of the Castle County Jail in twenty years. Hwan locked him in the cell with Fee and trotted out of the jail into pouring rain, with Tom Howard’s target pistol tucked into his waistband and concealed by his shirt.
HITCHHIKERS
FAR ABOVE Mercedes the cat called, “Here we are!” A tiny square of light appeared, winked out as he (presumably) stepped through it, and reappeared again.
She climbed with renewed determination, and succeeded well enough to bump her head on Seth’s heels. For a minute at least—an actual minute by the clock—she feared that the bright door would close before they got to it, shutting them somehow in this dank tube of iron forever. Then Seth was through, and she heard him say, “
Judy
!” He had mentioned a Judy while they sat side by side sipping Coke in his mom’s car at the scenic view; Mercedes knew a brief pang of jealousy before she recalled that Judy was his cousin. A little cousin, she seemed to remember. A child?
Four more slender rungs, and the door was hers as well—but the last snapped beneath her foot. She squealed and grabbed the side ropes. Swaying, the ladder thumped her against the rounded wall until her swordblade chimed like a bell; the tube seemed to spin around her, and she felt she was about to be sick.
Desperately groping, her toes reclaimed the rung below the broken one. With one foot on that, she got the other onto the next sound rung and pulled herself up, keeping her feet well out toward the ends of both, away from their fragile centers.
She nearly collapsed as she stumbled through the bright door. Seth caught her, and the feeling his arms brought was brand new, whispering of wonder.
“Easy,” he said. “You okay?”
“A step broke. I thought I was going to fall.”
“Easy,” he said again, and squeezed her. His hand brushed her hips as he released her. She felt like backing into it to make it brush her harder. I’m not drunk any more, she thought. Maybe I’m in love, but I’m not drunk, and the cat’s still up on his hind legs, and he carries a cane.
“This is my cousin Judy,” Seth told her. “Judy Youngberg. Judy, this is Mercedes.”
“Hi.” The little girl nodded shyly. “This’s my cat, G. Gordon Kitty.”
“I know,” Mercedes told her. “He brought us here. He’s a wonderful cat.”
“He’s not always as wonderful as now,” Judy confessed, “but he’s always a really good cat.”
The cat bowed. “Who urges you to fly this phantasmagoric palace. Here we stand in the very apartments of the sorcerous queen. She has departed upon some urgent errand but may return at any instant.”
Judy nodded her agreement. “Only first we better shut that door ‘fore somebody down below sees it’s open—Queen Morgan said for me not to open it ’cause I might fall down. Then I have to show you the sword.”
Mercedes closed the bright door, discovered that it could be bolted from their side, and bolted it.
“I’ve got a sword already, Judy,” Seth objected. “So does Mercedes, and you’re too little.”
“It’s real
important
. Look.” Judy trotted across the fey room to a tall cabinet, painted and coarsely carved, standing in a shallow recess. It seemed to Mercedes that she heard a faint, clear hum as the cabinet door swung back.
For a moment the object within did not seem a sword at all, but such a cross as she had seen in pictures of ancient and holy
objects hoarded in museums, its hilt and scabbard glowing with gems. She blinked and saw that there were none, and that there was little light in the cabinet for gems to catch. Instead both sword and scabbard were of some silvery metal greater than the silver she knew, a silver full of starlight, faceted, polished and pierced almost to filigree. Mercedes had breathed, “Oh, isn’t it
beautiful!
” before she realized the voice was hers.
With some effort, Judy lifted it from the cabinet. The tip of the scabbard had rested on a shabby little leather book that fell to the floor as she took the sword out. Mercedes picked up the book, but had eyes only for the sword.
“There was a battle a little while ago,” Judy explained, “and the wrong ones won. This is how you make it go the other way.”
 
As each fresh vehicle approached, Hwan Lee turned to face the street and made the thumb-out gesture of begging a ride. Each drenched him with stinging spray that left him no wetter than he had been already.
Yet it did no harm, Hwan reflected, to beg thus. Those who ask others many questions seldom question beggars, being anxious to escape their importunities. And who could say with certainty that no car would stop?
He was trying to hold that thought for the thirteenth time when one did. It was a black Cadillac, nearly new; the driver who motioned for him to get inside was a big man with a coffee-light complexion and a wide black mustache. Smiling, grateful, and sodden, Hwan sank into the upholstered luxury of the front seat.
“Leeve here?” the driver asked. “Know dees town?”
Hwan tried to guess which answer was desired, decided on the affirmative, and nodded.
“Meadow Grass—you take me to dat, okay?”
First vaguely, then precisely, Hwan’s memory reproduced the conversation he had overheard while eavesdropping on Ann and Shields. “Ol’ Penton Load,” he stated confidently. “Know how get there?”
The driver shook his head. He had taken a cigar from the breast pocket of his yellow suit; he offered it to Hwan, then lit it with the dash lighter.
“You go,” Hwan said. “I show. See light? There turn.”
The big car floated smoothly ahead, and for a second or two Hwan permitted himself to relax; he knew where Old Penton Road began, and they had only to follow it to find this Meadow Grass. Should they miss it and go too far, so much the better—he would get out when the driver turned back. “Two block more. Go that way, Sick’more Avenue. Sick’more get new name, be Ol’ Penton Load when get out of town.”
Rain blinded the windshield, drummed upon the steel top of the car. Puffing pungent smoke, the driver leaned forward and swung the car sharply around.
“That light,” Hwan told him. “Easy now. Leal soon Meadow Glass.”
“Somebody shoot
minha irma—my
seester.” Thinking Hwan had not understood, the driver made a pistol of his hand. “Beeng! I jus’ see my seester een ‘ospeetal,
compreendo?
She ver’ bad. I go see dees woman was dere.”
White clapboard houses were edging apart to make room for more trees. The flashing VACANCY of the Red Stove Inn appeared and drifted away through the rain.
“
Polica say ma’be they got heem, but I do’ know. We leeve Brazeel so ma‘be dey don’ care, eh? Ma’be we mus’ do someteeng, I teenk.”
Abruptly, the driver touched the brakes. A girl, pale and insubstantial-looking, had emerged from the woods that lined the road, her hands outstretched and imploring, her pale hair awash in rain. The driver glanced at Hwan, who understood that he was wishing Hwan were not there.
As it happened, it was a wish that Hwan himself heartily seconded. “I get out,” he suggested quickly.
The driver smiled. “Okay.”
Almost skidding, the Cadillac came to a stop. Hwan sprang
out into the pounding rain and held the door for the blond girl, who flashed him an appreciative smile. “Please get in back.”
He wanted to slam the door or to flee without slamming it—to run away into the rain, never stopping until he reached China once more.
“In back,” the girl whispered. “Immediately!”
Helpless, Hwan slid between the post and the back of the front seat. The door closed behind him, seemingly of its own volition.
The driver was grinning like a tiger beneath his big black mustache as he introduced himself.
“Meu nome é
José Alvarez Martim Basilio Bonifacio Balanco,
senhorita.
From Brazeel—before I say dat you guess already, no? Jose Alvarez Martim Basilio Bonifacio Balanco, hees
carro,
dey yours.”
The girl favored him with a heart-melting glance. “I am Viviane Morgan. And your friend?”
“I don’t know hees name. I fin’ heem een thees rain, like you,
Senhorita
Morgan.”
Morgan looked back at Hwan as though they had never met. He said hurriedly, “I Eddie Sun, please know you.” Eddie Sun had been the youngest and friendliest of the cooks at the Golden Dragon. Hwan made an effort to give his final sentences extra emphasis, always a difficult thing to do in a language foreign to one’s thoughts. “I do whatever you ask, lady. Anything you want, say me.”
“Oh, I hope you mean that! Thank you both—thank you very, very much.” Morgan’s regard returned to José. “Some—persons,” she hesitated and appeared to choke back a sob. “They are in my house, doing the most terrible things. I got away—that is why I was running through the rain.”
“Dey break een?” Jose’s scowl would have shaken Cochise.
Morgan nodded, her face a plea. “I have servants, but—but they are not strong like you. Could you help me, please? Force these persons to leave me alone?”
Jose grinned and patted her shoulder. “You wan’ da best een
da whole worl’? You got heem. Jus’ da good luck, you come out, stop da
carro,
an’ een it da best. Da angels, dey watch over you,
senhorita,
or ma’be you a angel yourself.”
“It is not far,” Morgan told him. “Right there, see? That little dirt road. I do hope your car will not become mired.”
After half a mile it did. José opened the trunk, removed his luggage, got out the jack, and showed Hwan how to raise the car with it. While Hwan was jacking up the car, Jose opened a suitcase and got out a huge knife with which he lopped branches from the evergreens beside the road. When the bottoms of the front tires were higher than the ruts they had made in the mud, he put the branches under them, and the Cadillac crawled forward once more. “Now we all wet,” he said, grinning.
“Tres amigos,
eh? Da tree drown meece.” He handed Hwan the knife. “Better we keep heem een here. Ma’be we need heem again.”
Morgan assured him that she was very, very sorry indeed and touched his hand. He kissed her fingers, saying
“Igualmente.”
Little by little the rain slackened; there was no more hail and no more thunder, until at last Jose was able to switch his wipers from the fastest speed to the intermittent setting. Once Hwan glimpsed an antlered buck standing under a large pine some distance from the road. Something that might have been a child or a bedraggled doll rode the buck’s back, and waved as though giving a signal as they passed. Hwan blinked and tried to tell himself he had been mistaken, although he knew he had not been. The gun he had taken from Fee gouged him painfully just below the ribs; as carefully as he could, he inched it toward a more comfortable position, hoping all the while that José could not see him in the rear-view mirror and keeping his shaking hands well away from the trigger.
Morgan said, “It’s been a weary way, going so slowly over the mud, but we are nearly there. My home is just around this next curve.”
“Muito obrigado, Senhor Deus.
”
The trees were larger here, and yet so thickly set that it
seemed that the land itself had once been larger, and had shrunk until no tree or stone had room to breathe. The trees had built domes and arches across the road long ago; now all the thousands of colonnaded spans bore so heavy a load of wood and rain that Hwan felt they must soon fall, crashing down upon the car under their centuries-long accumulation of squirrels’ nests and half-ruined birds’ nests, their innumerable rotten limbs and autumn-wearied leaves. A horned owl as large as the black firepot for
kur loo op
studied the car, half hidden behind dripping foliage on a low branch. As Hwan met its orange eyes, it pronounced his name distinctly:
“H-w-a-n L-e-e … .”
Neither Morgan nor Jose appeared to notice.
It had seemed to Hwan that the curve would go on forever, a coiling line that never closed, drawn through an endless forest. At last it halted so abruptly that their bumper nearly struck a gate of thick and rusted bars set in a dripping stone wall whose top was lost among the trees. A dull-eyed, exhausted horse and two empty cars—a battered Jeep Cherokee and a shiny Oldsmobile—waited there beside the road.
“Thees ees your house?” Jose looked at Morgan with new respect.
“Just a moment,” she told him. “I will open this, and you can drive on through.”
She got out but did not walk to the gate, merely standing beside the car before resuming her seat. From beyond the wall (or perhaps from within it) there came the grinding of iron on stone, the grate and clank of huge chains, and the slow hammer-taps of an immense pawl. The rusted bars shuddered, so that it appeared for a moment that the gate was somehow dying; then it began to crawl upward.
“
Amigo
, my machete, my beeg chopper—you got heem? Geeve heem to me. I teenk ma’be I need heem real soon.”
Hwan passed the three-foot knife up to José.
Beyond the gate of bars, beyond the wall, lay the wide and weedy court from which Sissy Stevenson had ridden with Long Jim. It was no longer entirely empty, though the very presence
of two disparate groups (as bizarre as the throngs half seen in dreams) made it appear more deserted still, as a cathedral or basilica intended for thousands is made to appear the more desolate by a handful of worshipers, votaries vastly outnumbered by saints in marble, limestone, and stained glass. Unseen ghosts of fear and fight, of oath, ordeal, and the eventual Judgment of God were evoked by the very presence of Wrangler and Lisa Solomon; Will E. Shields, Ann Schindler, and Mercedes Schindler-Shields; Sally Howard and her son, Seth; Sissy Stevenson, grim old Bob Roberts, the tough yet elegant G. Gordon Kitty, and little Judy Youngberg. They were fewer than a dozen all told, and the thronging ghosts made that very few indeed.

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