The Reasonable Ogre

by Mike Barnes

  “Let’s take them off. They don’t owe us anything,” Lars said, and pinched the slim band of wood encircling his wrist, as if to snap it off. But Elskelyn reached out and stopped him. “No,” she said firmly.

  For there was something else—a new kind of error in their dancing—which she had noticed before Lars, and which made her fear the willow bracelet, as a thing she could not correct because she did not understand it well enough. For the first time in their lives, she was jumping ahead of Lars. She was hearing the music ahead of him and hurrying to match it, while he was hearing a slower tempo and lagging behind. It wasn’t obvious, because they were used to a different kind of misstep, but when Elskelyn explained, and they tried an old and simple figure, Lars saw that she was right.

  They agreed to take the forest track and find the boy again.

  “It’s because we never paid him,” Lars declared.

  “Perhaps,” Elskelyn murmured, though privately she doubted it could be so simple.

  They left the town and found the thin forest track, much overgrown now, where they had met the boy. But after all these years, there was no sign of him or his fire, no sign even of the clearing where they had been. They kept walking, not knowing what else to do. Vines and whip-like branches twined in front of them, forming a dense screen they had to push through, though the path at their feet remained clear, if narrow. After many hours, however, the way suddenly opened up and they found themselves on a wide dirt trail, like a disused road, dotted here and there with large smooth stones. As they continued walking, the way became even wider and more rocky. Elskelyn kept to the left side, skirting the rocks jumbled in the middle, and Lars strayed to the right. He lagged behind, just as she used to, and she stopped periodically to let him catch up.

  Soon she began to see shallow pools beside some of the rocks, and damp earth between them. With excitement, and only a little foreboding, she realized they were following the course of a riverbed. She sensed that they would find the boy before long, that this was where he must live. She stopped and sighted Lars, well behind her now, meandering up the other side, sometimes making slow detours out into the watercourse, not seeming to care about the mud that would be clinging to his boots. Why was he dawdling so? She hurried on, too impatient to wait, knowing he would catch up with her eventually.

  By now, the water was a few inches deep—somewhere before the dry part there must be a hole it’s dropping into, thought Elskelyn—and up ahead she could see where it became deeper still. She called back to Lars that he should come across while he could, using the stepping stones still clearing the surface. But he was too far back to hear over the rushing water. She tried to say the same thing with signs, pointing at him and then at the stones in a sequence. But he only raised his hand in a slow wave. She saw by the flash of white that he was smiling.

  Lars saw Elskelyn gesturing at him from the other side of the dirt road they were walking along. He didn’t understand what she was getting at, but he returned her wave, figuring he’d find out soon enough. Everything was like a slow song to him now, a tune he recognized and bobbed his head to. The whole world was Elskelyn and they were dancing a barely moving waltz.

  He lost sight of her for a time. But then he came around a bend and saw a sight that made him skip a beat, like a bit of fast jazz dropped into the slow tempo of his walking. Up ahead, a waterfall dropped over a cliff into a dark pool. A squat shape, a small pudgy person, sat on the cliff to the left of the falls, his feet dangling over the edge. Halfway up to him, climbing on rocks slicked by spray, was Elskelyn. The sights seemed familiar, but brightly dangerous. He couldn’t place them in his slow-moving thoughts.

  “Elskelyn!” he called out, and willed himself to hurry. Despite his fear, though, something slowed him down as if the air were a sludge he was wading through.

  Elskelyn, her face rinsed with the intoxicating cold spray, kept climbing. She went faster than she knew she should, almost laughing when her foot or hand slipped on a greasy rock. She had no idea why she was climbing, or why she was climbing so fast; she only knew she had to reach the top.

  Lars stopped. He couldn’t reach her. His legs were lead. He looked up. She was climbing frantically now, slipping down and clambering back even faster, as heedless of the drops below her scrabbling feet as of the figure perched above. She became a blur, blending with and then disappearing behind the mist from the falling water.

  Panting on the rock face, forced by her stabbing lungs to pause for a moment, Elskelyn looked down and back. She saw Lars frozen still as a statue on the other side of the rushing river that now divided them. His mouth was open, as if he was calling something to her. His hand was at his wrist, as if he meant again to tear off his willow bracelet, perhaps to try to throw it across to her.

  Though why, she thought, when her own, next to her eye below a damp rock, was as fresh and gleaming as on the day it was cut?

  Grimus the Miser

  David, who was seven, woke up in the middle of the night. He was usually a good sleeper who didn’t stir until his mother called him in the morning for breakfast, but tonight his eyes popped open in the dark. He lay face down in his bed, his face turned to his wall of toys and stuffed animals. He felt the fluttery tingles in his stomach that he called the Christmas feeling, as if fireflies had escaped from a jar and were jittering about his insides, winking their lights on and off.

  Slowly, to prolong the moment (and so as not to appear greedy), he inched his hand up under his pillow. It was there. His fingertips touched an edge of metal. Once again, the miracle had happened. While he slept, the tooth fairy had taken the tooth he had wrapped in tissue and left behind a bright silver coin. He felt the cool flat smoothness with the pad of his finger, delaying the moment when he would bring it out and clutch it in his fist.

  Round. Cool. Flat at first—and then, through the nerves of your fingers, you felt the raised surfaces of the design. Low mounds and curves, the shape of an animal or queen. He felt them with his eyes closed, wondering what it would be like to be blind.

  Something was different this time, though. The coin was not cool. Not as cool as it should be, hiding in the dark under his pillow. It felt as if it had just come from a pocket or a hand. Touching it, he realized something was in the room with him.

  Don’t try to see the fairy, his parents had told him, wagging their fingers. If she catches you peeking, she won’t ever come back again. They wagged their fingers sternly, but their eyes looked like they were trying not to smile.

  David was an obedient boy, and brave—but of course not brave or obedient enough to ignore a creature from another world visiting his room. He turned his head, very slowly, to the right, where he sensed the fairy’s presence. He thought she would be small, and bright. A little, glowing pixie hovering in mid-air, or else perched with her wings folded on the edge of his desk or chair.

  What he saw made him feel as if he had swallowed a cold huge lump that he couldn’t begin to get down his throat.

  In the half-lit corner of his bedroom, between his bookcase and the curtained window, stood a huge, hairy creature, so tall that even stooping his head grazed the ceiling. He was great-eyed and shaggyhaired, and black, bristly hairs poked in clumps from his blubbery fat. Under his staring eyes, his mouth was pulpy and wet, gaping to reveal a few pointy teeth with black spaces between them. He was shivering. Shaking all over with a fine tremor.

  After the first shock, David felt no fear of the creature; only curiosity. Huge as it was, it looked too miserable to be dangerous. It stared back at David with huge, pleading eyes. Thinking of pictures he had seen in storybooks, David wanted to call it a troll, but it looked more frightened than frightening, and also too big. Creature was the only word he could think of.

  As he watched, sitting up in bed now with his own eyes wide, David saw the creature vanish. Not all at once, with a pop; and not fading like a ghost. No, the creature vanished in bits and pieces, patches of him shredding away, as if someone had drawn him and
was undoing their work with furious eraser rubbings. If vanishing could be painful, this looked painful. The creature’s big staring eyes and wet mouth were the last to go.

  Curiosity was what made David brave. And it sometimes got him hurt. It had broken his ankle when he wanted to find out what it felt like to jump into a leaf pile from the roof of the garage. Think. Think first, his parents told him. And David tried to. But usually he found himself thinking just after he had done something, not before.

  So, moments after the creature disappeared, David found himself standing where the creature had been. It was strange to see the rumpled bedclothes where he had been sleeping, low bumps and mounds like a flattened shell of himself. He smelled a dirty, sweaty smell, like the laundry hamper before his mother did the washing. It was not strong, and not unpleasant. On the wooden floor, something wet caught the light that came faintly through the parted curtain. It looked like a gob of drool that the creature had slobbered. David touched it with his big toe.

  Instantly, he found himself in another place. He was still in a shadowy corner, but he was looking out into a glowing white room with curving walls and a domed roof. It was like the inside of an igloo he had imagined, except that the walls were not smooth but pebbly, as if fitted with hundreds of tiny pointed tiles. The floor was bumpy too. And the light that made the white walls glow came from a bright lamp above a long table, like the bench in a laboratory. The bench and a stool in front of it were the only pieces of furniture in the room. But they were not the only things, or people, in the room.

  A very tall, exceptionally thin old man sat on the stool at the long table. Even sitting on the low stool he was much taller than David. He wore a long white coat, and the fingers and wrists emerging from it were so fleshless they looked like wires attached to gray sticks. But they did not look weak, not at all; they looked as strong as a crow’s talons. His head was perfectly bald, and glistened as if from a coating of oil. When he turned slightly to one side, David saw a long, sharp nose and a pointed chin. They, too, had a slimy appearance that made David think of Vaseline.

  To the thin man’s right was a bin heaped with small, white-and-red objects. To his left was an identical bin, also heaped, but with bright silver coins. The man reached for one of the objects from the right-hand bin, and set to work on it with a small metal instrument. David could hear him muttering as he worked: “One for you, one for me. Count one, two. Count two, three.” David was used to hearing adults mutter to themselves as they worked, but this muttering made him afraid. There was something of a nursery rhyme in it, like a skipping chant; but the thin man’s dry, raspy voice contained no hint of music.

  Now David felt a shifting in the shadows beside him and realized he was not alone. He had been so absorbed in watching the strange scene in front of him that he had not seen the creature standing a little distance away, in the shadow of another entranceway, one of many, to this room. The creature darted a glance at him and began making its way across to the workbench. He plodded slowly, as if his joints ached, which perhaps they did, but it was also clear that he was very afraid, and trying his best to make no sound despite his great bulk. Though the dome of the room glittered far above him, he hunched his shoulders, like a guilty thing expecting punishment. When he got close enough to the right-hand bin, he extended a great meaty arm and opened his hairy fist. Something tiny fell onto the pile with a little chink.

  At the sound, the man at the bench brought his foot up with amazing speed and kicked the creature viciously in the side. The creature grunted, a low yelp; though his side, like the rest of him, was well-padded with flab, already a red spot was brightening where the sharp-toed boot had struck him. He floundered away, with haste that was half-lumbering half-scuttling, through a doorway beyond the bin of coins.

  The oily-skinned thin man plucked with his tweezers the new offering from the pile and crouched low over his bench to examine it.

  My tooth, David thought. And then was back in his bedroom. With no way to return to the domed white room, no matter how long he stood in the creature’s vacated spot in the shadows.

  The next day, he behaved as he always had with the other children at school, all of whom were losing their teeth at different rates: showing them his silver coin; grinning to let them see the new space in his mouth, sticking the tip of his tongue through it, forcing air through it with a whistling hiss. But these games, which he had enjoyed only the day before, no longer interested him. (Though he pretended that they did, for nothing gives away a secret faster than a change in interests.) Now, his only interest in missing teeth was in how they might help him reach the trapped creature, whom he had determined to rescue, though he had no idea how.

  It was two weeks before his next tooth loosened. On each of those fourteen nights he tried standing in the shadowy corner, and in other spots in his bedroom; but, as he expected, without the tooth under his pillow, they were just ordinary spots in his room.

  Then a tooth began to loosen. It was a tooth about halfway back on the upper right side. He felt it shift while he was eating, then worked at it with his tongue and his finger, wiggling it back and forth to loosen it more. Hurried this way, the tooth came out with a little more blood than usual. It pulsed into a tissue for several minutes before it stopped. Easy, David, easy! said his mother. Think, David. Think, added his father.

  He tried to stay awake that night. And then he thought that might spoil everything, and tried to go to sleep. It was difficult to know what to do when you had no idea how things worked. Sometime in the night, he awoke with a start. He stuck his hand under the pillow and found the coin. Cold! He was too late.

  He jumped out of bed and went to the corner. There was no creature smell but he saw on the floor a small crust of drool, almost dry. He stuck his big toe on it and twisted it back and forth, like someone stubbing out a cigarette.

  He was in the white room. There was no sign of the creature. But the oily-headed thin man was bent over his place at his bench, his face down close to something held in his tweezers, and talking to himself—or to the thing in his hands—in a dry, low voice that was like a mechanical cooing. “You are old enough to understand the ways of exchange. Oh yes, you are. Count it out, and count it in. One for you, and one for me. To and fro, fro and to. One, two; two, three.”

  It made a kind of sense, and might almost have sounded reasonable, had the cold tick-tock of his voice not sounded completely insane.

  While the thin man was preoccupied, David slipped along the wall and through the doorway where the creature had slunk the last time. He found him cowering at the far end of the room. It was amazing how small such a lurking great beast could make himself seem. It was partly his fear, which had him trembling again, but also the fact that the ceiling in his room was very low, and he had to bend low and hunch his head between his shoulders. Standing on tiptoe, David came up almost to the creature’s chin.

  “Who are you?” David whispered, glancing over his shoulder at the room he had left.

  The creature shivered as if a freezer door had opened, and shook his head violently.

  “What’s your name?” David whispered again.

  With great moist eyes staring in fright, the creature tried to answer. It revolved its slobbery lips, and David saw behind them brown-black jagged stumps—not holes but rather broken teeth, bits of teeth, as if his mouth had been smashed in—and behind these, a raw meaty thing wagging back and forth. This, David realized with horror, was what remained of the creature’s tongue.

  After much effort, he made a sound, which David heard as no more than a wet grunt. But he tried again, and then again; and either he got better at making the sound, or David got better at hearing it, for finally he heard, thickly but clearly, “Grimus.”

  “Grimus? That’s you?”

  The creature trembled and shook his head again. With jerks of his shaggy head at the lighted room beyond David, he said, “Grimus. Grimus . . . come. Grimus . . . do.”

  And then David und
erstood that Grimus was the creature’s tormentor, the thin man bent over his bench between his bins. The creature delivered his coins for him, and brought back his teeth; and spent the rest of his time in fear, dodging kicks. David was more determined than ever to help the creature, though he still had no idea how.

  Go, go, the creature seemed to be saying now, with shooing motions of his paw-like hands; and David remembered that his time in this place was short, and would end abruptly.

  He tried to leave the creature with some comfort. “I’ll come back,” he whispered. But the creature was no longer listening. Shaking its head from side to side, it was making fast gurgling sounds, as if trying to explain something quickly. But David could make no sense of it, and had to go.

  He crept out of the creature’s shadowy lair. When he reached the doorway, he put his hand out to the wall, wanting to check that Grimus was busy before he stole across behind him. The wall felt pebbly, like a tile wall, but also sharp. Looking closely, he saw that it was made of rows and rows of tiny white teeth, points facing outward.

  The next thing he saw was his bed with its rumpled covers.

  A few days later, his next tooth loosened. He worked it free and stanched the blood. But a terrible thing happened. He fell into such a deep sleep that when he woke up, morning light was coming through the curtains and the coin under his pillow was stone cold. He felt ashamed at the thought of the creature standing in his corner waiting helplessly for him to follow. He stood in the corner for a long time, though he knew it was hopeless, and then he went down to breakfast with his parents.

  By the end of the long, boring day at school, he had worked out a plan.

  The only problem was, the plan needed a loose tooth, and he didn’t have one. Pressing hard against each of his remaining teeth, he couldn’t make one budge. He wasn’t sure he even had a baby tooth left. His mother thought he might be done with them. But he found a tooth on the lower left that, if not a baby tooth, was at least small, and began pressing on it from either side with his forefinger. He pressed as hard as he could stand, until tears came to his eyes. And then he took a little rest. And then he pressed again.