The Ferryman

by Christopher Golden

  She gazed across the river, squinted to see the land from which the Ferryman had come, but she could see nothing.

  The slim, dreadful figure held out its right hand, palm up. It gazed down upon her and it made its single demand in a voice that seemed to ripple with the flow of the river.

  “The coins.”

  Janine shook her head. Any hesitation was gone. “No,” she said, barely a whisper at first but then more powerfully. “No.”

  The Ferryman narrowed its gaze, the burning rims of fire around the black centers of its eyes disappearing now to leave only wells of darkness there.

  “The coins.” More insistent.

  Nausea roiled in Janine’s gut and bile rose in her throat. She choked it down and took a step backward ... and did not slip deeper into the river. Another step, and she knew she was moving closer to the shore, though she dared not turn her back on the Ferryman.

  “The coins?” A question now, accompanied by an expression that might have been amusement.

  Janine snaked a hand into the sodden pocket of her skirt and withdrew three silver coins. With a powerful snap of her arm, she tossed them out across the river as though she were skipping stones. But they did not skip. They sliced the water’s surface and then sank quickly below.

  The Ferryman’s expression changed instantly. Fury rippled across his white-stone features and his eyes went wide, revealing the twin suns behind the eclipsed irises.They flared and seemed about to burn her.

  She ran.With great effort she surged up out of the water onto the muddy banks of the river.

  A tug from behind, and Janine turned one final time.

  The Ferryman had not moved. He only stood in the prow of the ship, glaring at her. In one arm he held a squalling bundle wrapped in white cloth close against his slender form.

  Janine tripped. She went down facefirst into the sucking mire and it covered her face, pushed up her nostrils and into her mouth, and she found she could not breathe. Nor could she see. The mist and the filth that covered her eyes had made her effectively blind. She tore at her mouth, struggling to take a breath.

  Her chest burned with the need for air, and her lungs felt as if they were about to explode.

  I’m going to die, she thought.

  Then, simply, no.

  Janine gasped. Air. Sweet Jesus, air.

  Her eyes fluttered open.

  Doctors, nurses, machines, sterile whiteness, and you’re going to be all right, Miss Hartschorn. Just relax now, you’re going to be all right.

  The baby? What about the baby? That was her voice, her rasping, rawthroated voice.

  The sad faces of the nurses.

  The doctor glances away.

  We did everything we could.

  CHAPTER 1

  David Bairstow was at war.

  A warm breeze blew in through the open windows, but the smell of chalk lingered defiantly in the air. The clock ticked off the seconds with an almost petulant persistence, but David did his best to keep from even glancing at it. It was a bad precedent to set, but worse, it might be seen as a form of surrender.

  He stood at the head of the classroom, his back to the blackboard, and faced his students. His hands were thrust casually into his pockets and he stood with his head cocked at a devil-may-care angle, eyebrows raised.

  “Anyone?” he prodded.

  The response was less than overwhelming. David sighed and straightened the tie he wore only because he felt it would not be fair to go without one when the boys of St. Matthew’s did not have the option. He scanned the forty-two faces before him, hoping to stumble across one—only one—that seemed alert and interested.

  Nothing.

  David Bairstow was at war.

  But his students were not the enemy. Rather, he faced a disembodied creature known by various names: Senior Slump, Spring Fever, Senior Slide. It was late April. They had already applied to colleges and been accepted or wait-listed. Whatever they did in these last two months of school would not change the fate each of these seniors had waiting for them in the fall. The result, whatever cute name one wanted to put on it, was nothing short of apathy.

  David smiled thinly. “You guys are unbelievable,” he told them, abandoning the pretense that nothing had changed in their demeanor.

  After all, this was an Advanced Placement English class. The kids in here were the brightest St. Matthew’s had to offer. But they all had a swagger now, the smart ones even more so, that said they cared not a whit about anything but gliding toward graduation on whatever little updraft would carry them the rest of the way.

  The thing was, that was not good enough for David. His job was not to get them into college; it was to teach them. Though some of his colleagues would have joined in the slide, David simply was not built that way. He loved to teach. One of the reasons he had worked so hard at getting the AP classes was that he wanted students who actually had a desire to learn. But every spring . . . he had to take drastic measures.

  “All right, listen up, folks,” David said, his voice growing louder.

  A number of students snapped out of the malaise that had set in. Christi McCann even had the decency to look embarrassed at the way her eyelids had been drooping, though David noticed that Brad Flecca’s did not so much as flinch. The kid was slumped in his seat, eyes closed, a bit of drool at the corner of his mouth.

  David wanted to toss him out the window. On the other hand, he could remember his own senior year at St. Matthew’s, could recall with startling clarity how it felt to walk the corridors in those last few weeks, feeling on top of the world, and bored by anything that might kill that buzz.

  So ... no killing the students. At least not this time.

  “One last time,” he announced. “Can anyone ... and I do mean anyone ... tell me about the dichotomy between language and structure in the presentation of the roles of protagonist and antagonist in Moby Dick?”

  They were paying attention now. All except for Brad Flecca, of course. But still no answer was forthcoming.

  “Did anyone actually read Moby Dick?”

  So quickly he was literally startled, all but half a dozen or so hands shot up. David shook his head and laughed, which seemed to take several of his students aback.

  “What’s funny, Mr. Bairstow?” Christi asked.

  “Ah, they speak!” David replied.

  He studied the girl, trying not to be aware of how sweet she looked in her St. Matt’s uniform. It was a constant struggle, teaching seniors, particularly the brighter ones. But he was thirty-three, and knew full well the difference between admiration and perversion.

  “Give me that show of hands again,” he asked.

  The hands shot up. Again he shook his head.

  “I just want to thank you all,” David told them. “I mean, here you are cruising toward graduation. I’m heartened to see you have enough respect for me to give me the courtesy of lying.”

  Dry chuckles all around, though very few students would meet his gaze. For her part, Christi looked miffed at the mere suggestion, as did Gordon Libertini, who was likely to be valedictorian of the class when all was said and done.

  “Cards-on-the-table time,” David went on. “Melville was a semi-great writer. Moby Dick, though, is dense and excruciatingly boring. Do you think my brain is wired so differently from all of yours that I don’t know that? So, listen, who really read the book?”

  Christi. Gordon. Half a dozen others.

  “Bravo to you,” he told those faithful few. Then he glanced around the class at the others. “For the rest of you ... nothing I can say will make you read the book. So what I’m going to do instead is answer my own question. I’m going to tell you what fascinates me the most about Moby Dick from the point of view of story and structure.”

  He glanced at Gordon. “Who is the protagonist of the novel?”

  Christi’s hand shot up, but it was clear the question was for Gordon, who replied in a tone that suggested it was an insultingly simple question.
>
  “Ahab.”

  David nodded slowly. “And who is the hero?”

  In the back of the class, Ashley Garbarino shot up her hand and spoke without being called on. “Aren’t they the same thing?”

  “Are they?” the teacher replied.

  “I get it!” Christi said quickly.

  With a soft, proud smile, David nodded toward her. “Christi? Go ahead.”

  “The way the story is structured, Ahab is the protagonist and the whale is the antagonist. But what you said before? About language? Melville always describes Ahab as this, like, dark devil, storming around the deck, terrifying his men. And the whale is this pure, white, innocent creature. Almost, like, angelic or something. So even though they function like that—”

  “In those traditional roles,” David prompted.

  “Exactly,” the girl said quickly. “Even though they function in those traditional roles, the language is telling you it isn’t true, that Ahab is the villain, and Moby Dick is the hero.”

  David smiled broadly. “Bravo,” he said, and offered her a little golf clap.

  Though he was pleased both with himself and with Christi’s intuitiveness, he could see that the class was slipping away from him again. And who could blame them? They were supposed to be discussing a literary classic whose density and archaic language were a chore for all but the most devoted literary scholars.

  He clapped his hands together loudly. “All right. Everyone clear on what Christi was just saying about Moby Dick? It’s going to be on the final.”

  Groans all around.

  David walked around behind his desk and grabbed the cart upon which sat the TV and VCR he had retrieved from the audio-visual department.

  “However, there’s more to it than that.You are all, at the very least, going to skim Moby Dick for its essence, and for its structure. But it gets better. I am also going to introduce you to a modern example of the very point Christi just so eloquently expressed. We’ll spend our next few class meetings viewing a film in which the traditional protagonist/ antagonist structure and relationships exist, but in which you will also find that the director and cinematographer have purposely used the language of film—music, camera angles, lighting, et cetera—to undermine those traditional roles and give us a very different idea about who is the hero and who the villain.”

  David turned to face the class. Even Brad Flecca was awake now, and staring at him with an expression of surprise that was almost absurd in its childlike honesty.

  During that single school year, David had blazed through Greek and Roman mythology, Poe, Shakespeare, Robert Frost, James Bald-win, Raymond Chandler, and John Irving, all to teach them about the nature of stories. But this was the first time he had brought in another storytelling medium.

  Olivia Costa raised her hand.

  “Yes, Olivia?”

  “What’s the movie?”

  David smiled, savoring the question. “It’s called Blade Runner.”

  In the teachers’ lounge, Lydia Beal scraped the last spoonful out of her plastic yogurt container and shook her head in amazement. “I swear to God, David, I do not know how you get away with it every year.”

  They sat together at a small round table, one of several in the room where the teachers congregated during free periods and in shifts at lunchtime. Much like the old granite school itself, the room was a featureless, rectangular box. There were three windows on one side and Catholic school-themed posters on the one opposite, a television and VCR, a microwave oven, a coffeemaker, and a refrigerator.

  The microwave oven timer dinged loudly and he rose to retrieve the popcorn he had made. The smell of it filled the room, rich with butter and salt. Half the pleasure of the stuff was the scent, as far as he was concerned.

  “Get away with what?” he asked as he returned to the table.

  “That movie,” Lydia replied, narrowing her eyes. “Every year.”

  “Hey. Blade Runner is a classic.” David popped a few pieces of microwave popcorn into his mouth to cover his grin.

  Lydia rolled her eyes.

  The only other person in the room was Ralph Weiss, an enormous, fiftyish man with thinning hair, thick glasses, and a mountainous gut. Weiss was an officious man of intimidating size who lectured his students and thought that was the same thing as teaching.

  Weiss had been perusing a magazine on American military history—probably for things to read aloud in class—but perked up at Lydia’s remarks. It would have been impossible for him not to have overheard the conversation, and it was just as impossible for him to keep his opinion to himself. He settled his reading glasses on top of his head, where his graying rust-colored hair had receded like the lowest of low tides, and he scratched thoughtfully at his beard.

  “Miss Beal is correct, Mr. Bairstow,” Weiss intoned. “You have a responsibility to teach those children until such time as they have graduated.”

  “I am teaching them, Ralph,” David replied curtly.

  Weiss flinched. He was an old-fashioned sort of man, but only when it suited him. One of his eccentricities was that he insisted upon addressing nearly everyone—and certainly everyone younger than he—in formal fashion. He always seemed to put particular emphasis on this quirk with David, who imagined it had to do with the fact that Weiss had taught him world history so many years before.

  Though the last thing David wanted to do was ruffle feathers, he could not bear the older man’s condescension. Yet he was forced to fight back in small ways. Calling him Ralph, for instance. Drove the big man absolutely crazy.

  “What you are doing, Mr. Bairstow, is wasting valuable class time by letting these children sit and watch a science-fiction movie that has nothing to do with teaching English. In addition, the film contains violence and nudity, not to mention profanity. I have no idea why Sister Mary allows it, but I suspect if the archdiocese were aware of it, they would be scandalized.”

  At David’s side, Lydia Beal inhaled sharply, her teeth whistling a tiny bit. “Mr.Weiss, maybe you should take that up with—”

  “No, Lydia. It’s fine,” David interrupted.

  He glanced at her, saw the worry in her eyes, and knew she feared that he would overreact. A tiny smile lifted the edges of his mouth. Those who knew him well would have realized there was no humor in it, nor even a trace of amusement. David Bairstow prided himself on being a good guy, but part of that included not backing down from a fight. Not ever.

  “Y’know, Ralph,” he began, “maybe you’re right. Maybe I should go in there every morning and do them the favor of reading Moby Dick to them like they’re still in grade school.”

  Angry lines appeared on Weiss’s forehead along with a few drops of sweat as he bristled at David’s words. In almost surreal fashion, David noticed that one of the drops of sweat was magnified by the thick reading glasses propped on the enormous man’s head.

  “Mr. Bairstow,” he began, with the same reproachful tone he had used when David was in the tenth grade.

  “Mis-ter Weiss,” David replied pleasantly. His smile twitched ever so slightly.“I don’t tell you how to teach history—though God knows someone should—so I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t try to tell me how to teach English.”

  Practically spitting in rage, Weiss stood up. His chair scraped the floor and nearly tipped over; only by some miracle did it remain upright. He grabbed his books and the magazine he had been reading from his table, folded his glasses and slid them into his pocket, then crossed the space between them in two strides.

  The door to the teachers’lounge opened and Annette Muscari came in with several other teachers.The group were chatting happily amongst themselves and did not at first notice the tension in the room. David glanced at them only once, but he knew the very moment they realized something was going on, for their voices trailed off almost instantly.

  “You, sir,” Weiss began, towering over him and glowering dangerously. “You, Mr. Bairstow, are a blemish on the face of Catholic education
. An embarrassment to this school and to the archdiocese.”

  David nodded slowly. “That may be so, Ralph. But if so, we’ve got a lot more in common than I ever realized.”

  Weiss opened his mouth, perhaps about to attempt a sharp retort, but all that came out was his dragon breath, which stank as though he had been eating putrefying meat. He pursed his lips, his face growing redder, a few more beads of sweat popping out on his forehead.

  Then he simply groaned, turned on his heel, and left the room. He banged the door shut behind him like a petulant teenager.

  “Holy shit,” Lydia muttered under her breath.

  David snickered. “You’re in a Catholic school, Lyd.”

  She laughed and buried her head in her arms on the table. Annette came over immediately, eyes wide with fascination.The other teachers, including Clark Weaver, a meek, bespectacled man who had been at St. Matthew’s even longer than Weiss, kept to themselves. They spoke in cautious tones; David imagined they were speculating about what had happened, but none of them were friendly enough with him just to ask.

  Except Annette, of course. The two of them had started the same year and become fast friends. She was a lesbian, cute and waifish and just a little butch, but she and the school administration had established their own Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, so despite the archdiocese’s position on homosexuality, it had never been a problem. Sister Mary did not necessarily see eye-to-eye with the cardinal.

  Thank God, David thought.

  “What was that all about?” Annette asked cattily as she pulled up a chair. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen Ralphie that pissed off.”

  “You didn’t have him as a teacher,” David reminded her.

  “True,” she admitted. Her green eyes sparkled beautifully, her blond bob giving her an almost elfish countenance.

  David stuck a hand into the bag of microwave popcorn, which had cooled enough now that the so-called butter on it was a thin layer of grease. Not that that would stop him from eating it.