by Joe Hill
He waited on spread blanket, with a bottle of the Don’s wine and some books and he smiled at the tinkling sound of my approach but stopped when I came into the light, a block of rough stone already in my free hand.
I killed him there.
I did not kill him out of family honor or jealousy, did not hit him with the stone because he had laid claim to Lithodora’s cool white body, which she would never offer me.
I hit him with the block of stone because I hated his black face.
After I stopped hitting him, I sat with him. I think I took his wrist to see if he had a pulse, but after I knew he was dead, I went on holding his hand listening to the hum of the crickets in the grass, as if he were a small child, my child, who had only drifted off after fighting sleep for a very long time.
What brought me out of my stupor was the sweet music of bells coming up the stairs toward us. I leapt up and ran but Dora was already there, coming through the doorway, and I nearly struck her on my way by. She reached out for me with one of her delicate white hands and said my name but I did not stop. I took the stairs three at a time, running without thought, but I was not fast enough and I heard her when she shouted his name, once and again.
I don’t know where I was running. Sulle Scale, maybe, though I knew they would look for me there first once Lithodora went down the steps and told them what I had done to the Arab. I did not slow down until I was gulping for air and my chest was filled with fire and then I leaned against a gate at the side of the path—you know what gate—and it swung open at first touch.
I went through the gate and started down the steep staircase beyond. I thought, no one will look for me here and I can hide a while and—
No.
I thought, these stairs will lead to the road and I will head north to Napoli and buy a ticket for a ship to the U.S. and take a new name, start a new—
No. Enough.
The truth: I believed the stairs led down into hell and hell was where I wanted to go.
The steps at first were of old white stone, but as I continued along they grew sooty and dark. Other staircases merged with them here and there, descending from other points on the mountain. I couldn’t see how that was possible. I thought I had walked all the flights of stairs in the hills, except for the steps I was on and I couldn’t think for the life of me where those other staircases might be coming from.
The forest around me had been purged by fire at some time in the not so far-off past, and I made my descent through stands of scorched, shattered pines, the hillside all blackened and charred. Only there had been no fire on that part of the hill, not for as long as I could remember. The breeze carried on it an unmistakable warmth. I began to feel unpleasantly overheated in my clothes.
I followed the staircase round a switchback and saw below me a boy sitting on a stone landing. He had a collection of curious wares spread on a blanket. There was a windup tin bird in a cage, a basket of white apples, a dented gold lighter. There was a jar and in the jar was light. This light would increase in brightness until the landing was lit as if by the rising sun, and then it would collapse into darkness, shrinking to a single point like some impossibly brilliant lightning bug.
He smiled to see me. He had golden hair and the most beautiful smile I have ever seen on a child’s face and I was afraid of him—even before he called out to me by name. I pretended I didn’t hear him, pretended he wasn’t there, that I didn’t see him, walked right past him. He laughed to see me hurrying by.
The farther I went the steeper it got. There seemed to be a light below, as if somewhere beyond a ledge, through the trees, there was a great city, on the scale of Roma, a bowl of lights like a bed of embers. I could smell food cooking on the breeze. If it was food—that hungry-making perfume of meat charring over flame.
Voices ahead of me: a man speaking wearily, perhaps to himself, a long and joyless discourse; someone else laughing, bad laughter, unhinged and angry. A third man was asking questions.
“Is a plum sweeter after it has been pushed in the mouth of a virgin to silence her as she is taken? And who will claim the baby child sleeping in the cradle made from the rotten carcass of the lamb that laid with the lion only to be eviscerated?” And so on.
At the next turn in the steps they finally came into sight. They lined the stairs: half a dozen men nailed to crosses of blackened pine. I couldn’t go on and for a time I couldn’t go back; it was the cats. One of the men had a wound in his side, a red seeping wound that made a puddle on the stairs, and kittens lapped at it as if it were cream and he was talking to them in his tired voice, telling all the good kitties to drink their fill.
I did not go close enough to see his face.
At last I returned the way I had come on shaky legs. The boy awaited me with his collection of oddities.
“Why not sit and rest your sore feet, Quirinus Calvino?” he asked me. And I sat down across from him, not because I wanted to but because that was where my legs gave out.
Neither of us spoke at first. He smiled across the blanket spread with his goods, and I pretended an interest in the stone wall that overhung the landing there. That light in the jar built and built until our shadows lunged against the rock like deformed giants, before the brightness winked out and plunged us back into our shared darkness. He offered me a skin of water but I knew better than to take anything from that child. Or thought I knew better. The light in the jar began to grow again, a single floating point of perfect whiteness, swelling like a balloon. I tried to look at it, but felt a pinch of pain in the back of my eyeballs and glanced away.
“What is that? It burns my eyes,” I asked.
“A little spark stolen from the sun. You can do all sorts of wonderful things with it. You could make a furnace with it, a giant furnace, powerful enough to warm a whole city, and light a thousand Edison lights. Look how bright it gets. You have to be careful, though. If you were to smash this jar and let the spark escape, that same city would disappear in a clap of brightness. You can have it if you want.”
“No, I don’t want it,” I said.
“No. Of course not. That isn’t your sort of thing. No matter. Someone will be along later for this. But take something. Anything you want,” he said.
“Are you Lucifer?” I asked in a rough voice.
“Lucifer is an awful old goat who has a pitchfork and hooves and makes people suffer. I hate suffering. I only want to help people. I give gifts. That’s why I’m here. Everyone who walks these stairs before their time gets a gift to welcome them. You look thirsty. Would you like an apple?” Holding up the basket of white apples as he spoke.
I was thirsty—my throat felt not just sore, but singed, as if I had inhaled smoke recently, and I began to reach for the offered fruit, almost reflexively, but then drew my hand back for I knew the lessons of at least one book. He grinned at me.
“Are those—” I asked.
“They’re from a very old and honorable tree,” he said. “You will never taste a sweeter fruit. And when you eat of it, you will be filled with ideas. Yes, even one such as you, Quirinus Calvino, who barely learned to read.”
“I don’t want it,” I said, when what I really wanted to tell him was not to call me by name. I could not bear that he knew my name.
He said, “Everyone will want it. They will eat and eat and be filled with understanding. Why, learning how to speak another language will be as simple as, oh, learning to build a bomb. Just one bite of the apple away. What about the lighter? You can light anything with this lighter. A cigarette. A pipe. A campfire. Imaginations. Revolutions. Books. Rivers. The sky. Another man’s soul. Even the human soul has a temperature at which it becomes flammable. The lighter has an enchantment on it, is tapped into the deepest wells of oil on the planet, and will set fire to things for as long as the oil lasts, which I am sure will be forever.”
“You have nothing I want,” I said.
“I have something for everyone,” he said.
I rose to my feet,
ready to leave, although I had nowhere to go. I couldn’t walk back down the stairs. The thought made me dizzy. Neither could I go back up. Lithodora would have returned to the village by now. They would be searching the stairs for me with torches. I was surprised I hadn’t heard them already.
The tin bird turned its head to look at me as I swayed on my heels, and blinked, the metal shutters of its eyes snapping closed, then popping open again. It let out a rusty cheep. So did I, startled by its sudden movement. I had thought it a toy, inanimate. It watched me steadily and I stared back. I had, as a child, always had an interest in ingenious mechanical objects, clockwork people who ran out of their hiding places at the stroke of noon, the woodcutter to chop wood, the maiden to dance a round. The boy followed my gaze, and smiled, then opened the cage and reached in for it. The bird leaped lightly onto his finger.
“It sings the most beautiful song,” he said. “It finds a master, a shoulder it likes to perch on, and it sings for this person all the rest of its days. The trick to making it sing for you is to tell a lie. The bigger the better. Feed it a lie, and it will sing you the most marvelous little tune. People love to hear its song. They love it so much, they don’t even care they’re being lied to. He’s yours if you want him.”
“I don’t want anything from you,” I said, but when I said it, the bird began to whistle: the sweetest, softest melody, as good a sound as the laughter of a pretty girl, or your mother calling you to dinner. The song sounded a bit like something played on a music box, and I imagined a studded cylinder turning inside it, banging the teeth of a silver comb. I shivered to hear it. In this place, on these stairs, I had never imagined I could hear something so right.
He laughed and waved his hand at me. The bird’s wings snapped from the side of its body, like knives leaping from sheaths, and it glided up and lit on my shoulder.
“You see,” said the boy on the stairs. “It likes you.”
“I can’t pay,” I said, my voice rough and strange.
“You’ve already paid,” said the boy.
Then he turned his head and looked down the stairs and seemed to listen. I heard a wind rising. It made a low, soughing moan as it came up through the channel of the staircase, a deep and lonely and restless cry. The boy looked back at me. “Now go. I hear my father coming. The awful old goat.”
I backed away and my heels struck the stair behind me. I was in such a hurry to get away I fell sprawling across the granite steps. The bird on my shoulder took off, rising in widening gyres through the air, but when I found my feet it glided down to where it had rested before on my shoulder and I began to run back up the way I had come.
I climbed in haste for a time but soon was tired again and had to slow to a walk. I began to think about what I would say when I reached the main staircase and was discovered. “I will confess everything and accept my punishment, whatever that is,” I said. The tin bird sang a gay and humorous ditty.
It fell silent though as I reached the gate, quieted by a different song not far off: a girl’s sobs. I listened, confused, and crept uncertainly back to where I had murdered Lithodora’s beloved. I heard no sound except for Dora’s cries. No men shouting, no feet running on the steps. I had been gone half the night, it seemed to me, but when I reached the ruins where I had left the Saracen and looked upon Dora it was as if only minutes had passed.
I came toward her and whispered to her, afraid almost to be heard. The second time I spoke her name she turned her head and looked at me with red-rimmed hating eyes and screamed to get away. I wanted to comfort her, to tell her I was sorry, but when I came close she sprang to her feet and ran at me, striking me and flaying at my face with her fingernails while she cursed my name.
I meant to put my hands on her shoulders to hold her still but when I reached for her they found her smooth white neck instead.
Her father and his fellows and my unemployed friends discovered me weeping over her. Running my fingers through the silk of her long black hair. Her father fell to his knees and took her in his arms and for a while the hills rang with her name repeated over and over again.
Another man, who held a rifle, asked me what had happened and I told him. I told him the Arab, that monkey from the desert, had lured her here and when he couldn’t force her innocence from her, he throttled her in the grass and I found them and we fought and I killed him with a block of stone.
And as I told it the tin bird began to whistle and sing, the most mournful and sweetest melody I had ever heard and the men listened until the sad song was sung complete.
I held Lithodora in my arms as we walked back down. And as we went on our way the bird began to sing again as I told them the Saracen had planned to take the sweetest and most beautiful girls and auction their white flesh in Araby—a more profitable line of trade than selling wine. The bird was by now whistling a marching song and the faces of the men who walked with me were rigid and dark.
Ahmed’s men burned along with the Arab’s ship, and sank in the harbor. His goods, stored in a warehouse by the quay, were seized and his money box fell to me as a reward for my heroism.
No one ever would’ve imagined when I was a boy that one day I would be the wealthiest trader on the whole Amalfi coast, or that I would come to own the prized vineyards of Don Carlotta, I who once worked like a mule for his coin.
No one would’ve guessed that one day I would be the beloved mayor of Sulle Scale, or a man of such renown that I would be invited to a personal audience with his holiness the pope himself, who thanked me for my many well-noted acts of generosity.
The springs inside the pretty tin bird wore down, in time, and it ceased to sing, but by then it did not matter if anyone believed my lies or not, such was my wealth and power and fame.
However. Several years before the tin bird fell silent, I woke one morning in my manor to find it had constructed a nest of wire on my windowsill, and filled it with fragile eggs made of bright silver foil. I regarded these eggs with unease but when I reached to touch them, their mechanical mother nipped at me with her needle-sharp beak and I did not after that time make any attempt to disturb them.
Months later the nest was filled with foil tatters. The young of this new species, creatures of a new age, had fluttered on their way.
I cannot tell you how many birds of tin and wire and electric current there are in the world now—but I have, this very month, heard speak our newest prime minister, Mr. Mussolini. When he sings of the greatness of the Italian people and our kinship with our German neighbors, I am quite sure I can hear a tin bird singing with him. Its tune plays especially well amplified over modern radio.
I don’t live in the hills anymore. It has been years since I saw Sulle Scale. I discovered, as I descended at last into my senior years, that I could no longer attempt the staircases. I told people it was my poor sore old knees.
But
in truth
I developed
a fear of heights.
Author’s note: The presentation of this story has been revised to suit your e-reader. In the print edition, most of the story is presented not in paragraphs, but in staircases . . . which, unfortunately, do not render properly on most digital readers. I’ve left the final line in the form of a staircase to give you a sense of how the narrative reads on the physical page. The content of the tale, however, is unchanged, and I think it still works in this more traditional format. — J. H.
Twittering from the Circus of the Dead
WHAT IS TWITTER?
“Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing? . . . Answers must be under 140 characters in length and can be sent via mobile texting, instant message, or the Web.”
—from twitter.com
TYME2WASTE I’m only trying this because I’m so bored I wish I was dead. Hi Twitter. Want to know what I’m doing? Screaming inside.
8:17 PM – 28 Feb from
Tweetie
TYME2WASTE My, didn’t that sound melodramatic.
8:19 PM – 28 Feb from Tweetie
TYME2WASTE Lets try this again. Hello Twitterverse. I am Blake and Blake is me. What am I doing? Counting seconds.
8:23 PM – 28 Feb from Tweetie
TYME2WASTE Only about 50,000 more until we pack up and finish what is hopefully the last family trip of my life.
8:25 PM – 28 Feb from Tweetie
TYME2WASTE It’s been all downhill since we got to Colorado. And I don’t mean on my snowboard.
8:27 PM – 28 Feb from Tweetie
TYME2WASTE We were supposed to spend the break boarding and skiing but it’s too cold and won’t stop snowing so we had to go to plan B.
8:29 PM – 28 Feb from Tweetie
TYME2WASTE Plan B is Mom and I face off in a contest to see who can make the other cry hot tears of rage and hate first.
8:33 PM – 28 Feb from Tweetie
TYME2WASTE I’m winning. All I have to do to make Mom leave the room at this point is walk into it. Wait, I’m walking into the room where she is now . . .
8:35 PM – 28 Feb from Tweetie
TYME2WASTE She’s such a mean bitch.
10:11 PM – 28 Feb from Tweetie
TYME2WASTE @caseinSD, @bevsez, @harmlesspervo yay my real friends! I miss San Diego. Home soon.
10:41 PM – 28 Feb from Tweetie
TYME2WASTE @caseinSD Hell no I’m not afraid Mom is going to read any of this. She’s never going to know about it.
10:46 PM – 28 Feb from Tweetie
TYME2WASTE After she made me take down my blog, it’s not like I’m ever going to tell her.
10:48 PM – 28 Feb from Tweetie
TYME2WASTE You know what bitchy thing she said to me a couple hours ago? She said the reason I don’t like Colorado is because I can’t blog about it.
10:53 PM – 28 Feb from Tweetie
