The Very Best of F & SF v1 (56 page)

I visited that
spot within the yellow blossomed forsythias once a day to check up on my man’s
progress. All that was necessary was that I sit quietly for a time until in a
state of near-nap and then close my eyes and fly my brain around the corner,
past the school, over the treetops, then down into the cool green shadow of the
woods. Many times I saw him just standing, as if stunned by life, and many
times traipsing through some unknown quadrant of his Eden. With each viewing
came a confused emotion of wonder and dread, like on the beautiful windy day at
the beginning of August when I saw him sitting beside the pond, holding the
catechism book upside down, a twig finger of one hand pointing to each word on
the page, while the other hand covered all but one red eye of his face.

I was there when
he came across the blackened patch of earth and scattered beers from one of the
Lenon gang’s nights in the woods. He lifted a partially crushed can with
backwash still sloshing in the bottom and drank it down. The bark around his
usually indistinct hole of a mouth magically widened into a smile. It was when
he uncovered a half a pack of Camels and a book of matches that I realized he
must have been spying on the revels of Lenon, Cho-cho, Mike Stone, and Jake
Harwood from the safety of the night trees. He lit up and the smoke swirled out
the back of his head. In a voice like the creaking of a rotted branch, he
pronounced, “Fuck.”

And most
remarkable of all was the time he came to the edge of the woods, to the hole in
the chain link fence. There, in the playground across the field, he saw Amy
Lash, gliding up and back on the swing, her red gingham dress billowing, her
bright hair full of motion. He trembled as if planted in earthquake earth, and
squeaked the way the sparrows did. For a long time, he crouched in that portal
to the outside world and watched. Then, gathering his courage, he stepped onto
the field. The instant he was out of the woods, Amy must have felt his
presence, and she looked up and saw him approaching. She screamed, jumped off
the swing, and ran out of the playground. Cavanaugh, frightened by her scream,
retreated to the woods, and did not stop running until he reached the tree
struck by lightning.

My religious
instruction book finally arrived from above, summer ended and school began, but
still I went every day to my hideout and watched him for a little while as he
fished gold coins from the creek or tracked, from the ground, something moving
through the treetops. I know it was close to Halloween, because I sat in my
hideout loosening my teeth on one of Mrs. Grimm’s candy apples when I realized
that my secret seeing place was no longer a secret. The forsythias had long
since dropped their flowers. As I sat there in the skeletal blind, I could feel
the cold creeping into me. “Winter is coming,” I said in a puff of steam and
had one fleeting vision of Cavanaugh, his leaves gone flame red, his fern hair
drooping brown, discovering the temple of dead squirrels. I saw him gently
touch the fur of a stretched-out corpse hung on the wall. His birch legs bent
to nearly breaking as he fell to his knees and let out a wail that drilled into
me and lived there.

It was late
night, a few weeks later, but that cry still echoed through me and I could not
sleep. I heard, above the sound of the dreaming house, my father come in from
his second job. I don’t know what made me think I could tell him, but I had to
tell someone. If I kept to myself what I had done any longer, I thought I would
have to run away. Crawling out of bed, I crept down the darkened hallway past
my sister’s room and heard her breathing. I found my father sitting in the
dining room, eating a cold dinner and reading the paper by only the light
coming through from the kitchen. All he had to do was look up at me and I
started crying. Next thing I knew, he had his arm around me and I was enveloped
in the familiar aroma of machine oil. I thought he might laugh, I thought he
might yell, but I told him everything all at once. What he did was pull out the
chair next to his. I sat down, drying my eyes.

“What can we do?”
he asked.

“I just need to
tell him something,” I said.

“Okay,” he said.
“This Saturday, we’ll go to the woods and see if we can find him.” Then he had
me describe Cavanaugh, and when I was done he said, “Sounds like a sturdy
fellow.”

We moved into
the living room and sat on the couch in the dark. He lit a cigarette and told
me about the woods when he was a boy; how vast they were, how he trapped mink,
saw eagles, how he and his brother lived for a week by their wits alone out in
nature. I eventually dozed off and only half woke when he carried me to my bed.

The week passed
and I went to sleep Friday night, hoping he wouldn’t forget his promise and go
to the track instead. But the next morning, he woke me early from a dream of
Amy Lash by tapping my shoulder and saying, “Move your laggardly ass.” He made
bacon and eggs, the only two things he knew how to make, and let me drink
coffee. Then we put on our coats and were off. It was the second week in
November and the day was cold and overcast. “Brisk,” he said as we rounded the
corner toward the school, and that was all he said until we were well in
beneath the trees.

I showed him
around the woods like a tour guide, pointing out the creek, the spot where I
had created my man, the temple of dead squirrels. “Interesting,” he said to
each of these, and once in a while mentioned the name of some bush or tree.
Waves of leaves blew amidst the trunks in the cold wind, and with stronger
gusts, showers of them fell around us. He could really walk and we walked for
what seemed ten miles, out of the morning and into the afternoon, way past any
place I had ever dreamed of going. We discovered a spot where an enormous tree
had fallen, exposing the gnarled brainwork of its roots, and another two acres
where there were no trees but only smooth sand hills. All the time, I was alert
to even the slightest sound, a cracking twig, the caw of a crow, hoping I might
hear the whisper.

As it grew
later, the sky darkened and what was cold before became colder still.

“Listen,” my
father said, “I have a feeling like the one when we used to track deer. He’s
nearby, somewhere. We’ll have to outsmart him.”

I nodded.

“I’m going to
stay here and wait,” he said. “You keep going along the path here for a while,
but, for Christ’s sake, be quiet. Maybe if he sees you, he’ll double back to
get away, and I’ll be here to catch him.”

I wasn’t sure
this plan made sense, but I knew we needed to do something. It was getting
late. “Be careful,” I said, “he’s big and he has a stick.”

My father
smiled. “Don’t worry,” he said and lifted his foot to indicate the size ten.

This made me
laugh, and I turned and started down the path, taking careful steps. “Go on for
about ten minutes or so and see if you see anything,” he called to me before I
rounded a bend.

Once I was by
myself, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to find my man. Because of the overcast sky
the woods were dark and lonely. As I walked I pictured my father and Cavanaugh
wrestling each other and wondered who would win. When I had gone far enough to
want to stop and run back, I forced myself around one more turn. Just this
little more, I thought. He’s probably already fallen apart anyway, dismantled
by winter. But then I saw it up ahead, treetops at eye level, and I knew I had
found the valley where the deer went to die.

Cautiously, I
inched up to the rim, and peered down the steep dirt wall overgrown with roots
and stickers, into the trees and the shadowed undergrowth beneath them. The
valley was a large hole as if a meteor had struck there long ago. I thought of
the treasure trove of antlers and bones that lay hidden in the leaves at its
base. Standing there, staring, I felt I almost understood the secret life and
age of the woods. I had to show this to my father, but before I could move
away, I saw something, heard something moving below. Squinting to see more
clearly through the darkness down there, I could just about make out a shadowed
figure standing, half hidden by the trunk of a tall pine.

“Cavanaugh?” I
called. “Is that you?”

In the silence,
I heard acorns dropping.

“Are you there?”
I asked.

There was a
reply, an eerie sound that was part voice, part wind. It was very quiet but I
distinctly heard it ask, “Why?”

“Are you okay?”
I asked.

“Why?” came the
same question.

I didn’t know
why, and wished I had read him the book’s answers instead of the questions the
day of his birth. I stood for a long time and watched as snow began to fall
around me.

His question
came again, weaker this time, and I was on the verge of tears, ashamed of what
I had done. Suddenly, I had a strange memory flash of the endless beer in Mrs.
Grimm’s basement. At least it was something. I leaned out over the edge and,
almost certain I was lying, yelled, “I had too much love.”

Then, so I could
barely make it out, I heard him whisper, “Thank you.”

After that,
there came from below the thud of branches hitting together, hitting the
ground, and I knew he had come undone. When I squinted again, the figure was
gone.

I found my
father sitting on a fallen tree trunk back along the trail, smoking a
cigarette. “Hey,” he said when he saw me coming, “did you find anything?”

“No,” I said, “let’s
go home.”

He must have
seen something in my eyes, because he asked, “Are you sure?

“I’m sure,” I
said.

The snow fell
during our journey home and seemed to continue falling all winter long.

Now, twenty-one
years married with two crewcut boys of my own, I went back to the old
neighborhood last week. The woods and even the school have been obliterated,
replaced by new developments with streets named for the things they
banished—Crow Lane, Deer Street, Gold Creek Road. My father still lives in the
same house by himself. My mother passed away some years back. My baby sister is
married with two boys of her own and lives upstate.

The old man has
something growing on his kidney, and he has lost far too much weight, his once
huge arms having shrunk to the width of branches. He sat at the kitchen table,
the racing form in front of him. I tried to convince him to quit working, but
he shook his head and said, “Boring.”

“How long do you
think you can keep going to the shop?” I asked him.

“How about until
the last second,” he said.

“How’s the
health?” I asked.

“Soon I’ll be
food for the worms,” he said, laughing.

“How do you
really feel about that?” I asked.

He shrugged. “All
part of the game,” he said. “I thought when things got bad enough I would build
a coffin and sleep in it. That way, when I die, you can just nail the lid on
and bury me in the backyard.”

Later, when we
were watching the Giants on TV and I had had a few beers, I asked him if he
remembered that time in the woods.

He closed his
eyes and lit a cigarette as though it would help his memory. “Oh, yeah, I think
I remember that,” he said.

I had never
asked him before. “Was that you down there in those trees?”

He took a drag
and slowly turned his head and stared hard, without a smile, directly into my
eyes. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” he said and exhaled a
long, blue-gray stream of life.

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Neil Gaiman is one of the most popular
artists nowadays in a variety of media—from his
Sandman
graphic novels to his movie scripts to his novels (including
Anansi Boys, Coraline, Neverwhere,
and
American Gods),
his ability to stir the
imaginations and reach the hearts of different audiences reminds me of no one
so much as Ray Bradbury. Here he delivers a fresh take on a classic theme.

“Time is fluid here
,”
said the demon.

He knew it was a
demon the moment he saw it. He knew it, just as he knew the place was Hell.
There was nothing else that either of them could have been.

The room was
long, and the demon waited by a smoking brazier at the far end. A multitude of
objects hung on the rock-gray walls, of-the kind that it would not have been
wise or reassuring to inspect too closely. The ceiling was low, the floor oddly
insubstantial.

“Come close,” said
the demon, and he did.

The demon was
rake-thin, and naked. It was deeply scarred, and it appeared to have been
flayed at some time in the distant past. It had no ears, no sex. Its lips were
thin and ascetic, and its eyes were a demon’s eyes: they had seen too much and
gone too far, and under their gaze he felt less important than a fly.

“What happens
now?” he asked.

“Now,” said the
demon, in a voice that carried with it no sorrow, no relish, only a dreadful
flat resignation, “you will be tortured.”

“For how long?”

But the demon
shook its head and made no reply. It walked slowly along the wall, eyeing first
one of the devices that hung there, then another. At the far end of the wall,
by the closed door, was a cat-o’-nine-tails made of frayed wire. The demon took
it down with one three-fingered hand and walked back, carrying it reverently.
It placed the wire tines onto the brazier, and stared at them as they began to
heat up.

“That’s inhuman.”

“Yes.”

The tips of the
cat’s tails were glowing a dead orange.

As the demon
raised his arm to deliver the first blow, it said, “In time you will remember
even this moment with fondness.”

“You are a liar.”

“No,” said the
demon. “The next part,” it explained, in the moment before it brought down the
cat, “is worse.”

Then the tines
of the cat landed on the man’s back with a crack and a hiss, tearing through
the expensive clothes, burning and rending and shredding as they struck and,
not for the last time in that place, he screamed.

There were two
hundred and eleven implements on the walls of that room, and in time he was to
experience each of them.

When, finally,
the Lazarene’s Daughter, which he had grown to know intimately, had been
cleaned and replaced on the wall in the two-hundred-and-eleventh position,
then, through wrecked lips, he gasped, “Now what?”

“Now,” said the
demon, “the true pain begins.” It did.

Everything he
had ever done that had been better left undone. Every lie he had told—told to
himself, or told to others. Every little hurt, and all the great hurts. Each
one was pulled out of him, detail by detail, inch by inch. The demon stripped
away the cover of forgetfulness, stripped everything down to truth, and it hurt
more than anything.

“Tell me what
you thought as she walked out the door,” said the demon.

“I thought my
heart was broken.”

“No,” said the
demon, without hate, “you didn’t.” It stared at him with expressionless eyes,
and he was forced to look away.

“I thought, now
she’ll never know I’ve been sleeping with her sister.”

The demon took
apart his life, moment by moment, instant to awful instant. It lasted a hundred
years, perhaps, or a thousand—they had all the time there ever was, in that
gray room—and toward the end he realized that the demon had been right. The
physical torture had been kinder.

And it ended.

And once it had
ended, it began again. There was a self-knowledge there he had not had the
first time, which somehow made everything worse.

Now, as he
spoke, he hated himself. There were no lies, no evasions, no room for anything
except the pain and the anger.

He spoke. He no
longer wept. And when he finished, a thousand years later, he prayed that now
the demon would go to the wall, and bring down the skinning knife, or the
choke-pear, or the screws.

“Again,” said
the demon.

He began to
scream. He screamed for a long time.

“Again,” said
the demon, when he was done, as if nothing had been said.

It was like
peeling an onion. This time through his life he learned about consequences. He
learned the results of things he had done; things he had been blind to as he
did them; the ways he had hurt the world; the damage he had done to people he
had never known, or met, or encountered. It was the hardest lesson yet.

“Again,” said
the demon, a thousand years later.

He crouched on
the floor, beside the brazier, rocking gently, his eyes closed, and he told the
story of his life, re-experiencing it as he told it, from birth to death,
changing nothing, leaving nothing out, facing everything. He opened his heart.

When he was
done, he sat there, eyes closed, waiting for the voice to say, “Again,” but
nothing was said. He opened his eyes.

Slowly, he stood
up. He was alone.

At the far end
of the room there was a door, and, as he watched, it opened.

A man stepped
through the door. There was terror in the man’s face, and arrogance, and pride.
The man, who wore expensive clothes, took several hesitant steps into the room,
and then stopped.

When he saw the
man, he understood.

“Time is fluid
here,” he told the new arrival.

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