Tan-Tan ain’t like the sound of someone examining she soul, so she only say politely, “Thank you, Master Johncrow. Maybe I go do that.”
“All right then, child. Till later.” And Master Buzzard fly off to wait until he part of the plan commence.
Tan-Tan scoop up the water for the soup to carry back to she hut, feeling almost happy for the first time in weeks. On the way home, she fill up she carry sack with a big, nice halwa fruit, three handful of mushroom, some coco yam that she dig up, big so like she head, and all the ripe hog plum she could find on the ground. She go make Dry Bone eat till he foolish, oui?
When she reach back at the hut, she set about she cooking with a will. She boil up the soup thick and nice with mushroom and coco yam and cornmeal dumpling. She roast the halwa fruit in the coal pot, and she sprinkle nutmeg and brown sugar on top of it too besides, till the whole hut smell sweet with it scent. She wash the hog plum clean and put them in she best bowl. And all the time she work, she humming to sheself:
Corbeau say so, it must be so,
Corbeau say so, it must be so.
Dry Bone sprawl off on she bed and just a-watch she with him tiny jumbie-bead eye, red with a black center. “How you happy, so?”
Tan-Tan catch sheself. She mustn’t make Dry Bone hear Master Johncrow name. She make she mouth droop and she eyes sad, and she say, “Me not really happy, Dry Bone. Me only find when me sing, the work go a little faster.”
Dry Bone still suspicious though. “Then is what that you singing? Sing it louder so I could hear.”
“Is a song about making soup.” Tan-Tan sing for he:
Coco boil so, is so it go,
Coco boil so, is so it go.
“Cho! Stupid woman. Just cook the food fast, you hear?”
“Yes, Dry Bone.” She leave off singing. Fear form a lump of ice in she chest. Suppose Dry Bone find she out? Tan-Tan finish preparing the meal as fast as she can. She take it to Dry Bone right there on the bed.
By now, Dry Bone skin did draw thin like paper on he face. He eyes did disappear so far back into he head that Tan-Tan could scarce see them. She ain’t know what holding he arms and legs-them together, for it look as though all the flesh on them waste away. Only he belly still bulging big with all the food she been cooking for he. If Tan-Tan had buck up a thing like Dry Bone in the bush, she would have take it for a corpse, dead and rotting in the sun. Dry Bone, the skin-and-bone man. To pick he up was to pick up trouble, for true.
Dry Bone bare he teeth at Tan-Tan in a skull grin. “Like you cook plenty this time, almost enough for a snack. Give me the soup first.” He take the whole pot in he two hand, put it to he head, and drink it down hot-hot just so. He never even self stop to chew the coco yam and dumpling; he just swallow. When he put down the pot and belch, Tan-Tan see steam coming out of he mouth, the soup did so hot. He scoop out all the insides of the halwa fruit with he bare hand, and he chew up the hard seed-them like them was fig. Then he eat the thick rind. And so he belly getting bigger. He suck down the hog plum one by one, then he just let go Tan-Tan best bowl. She had was to catch it before it hit the ground and shatter.
Dry Bone lie back and sigh. “That was good. It cut me hunger little bit. In two-three hour, I go want more again.”
Time was, them words would have hit Tan-Tan like blow, but this time, she know what she have to do. “Dry Bone,” she say in a sweet voice, “you ain’t want to go out onto the veranda for a little sun while I cook your next meal?”
Dry Bone open he eyes up big-big. Tan-Tan could see she death in them cold eyes. “Woman, you crazy? Go outside? Like you want breeze blow me away, or what? I comfortable right here.” He close he eyes and settle back down in the bed.
She try a next thing. “I want to clean the house, Master. I need to make up the bed, put on clean sheets for you. Make me just cotch you on the veranda for two little minutes while I do that, nuh?”
“Don’t get me vex.” Tan-Tan feel he choking weight on she spirit squeeze harder. Only two-three sips of air making it past she throat.
The plan ain’t go work. Tan-Tan start to despair. Then she remember how she used to love to play masque Robber Queen when she was a girl-pickney, how she could roll pretty words round in she mouth like marble, and make up any kind of story. She had a talent for the Robber Queen patter. Nursie used to say she could make white think it was black. “But Dry Bone,” she wheeze, “look at how nice and strong I build me veranda, fit to sit a king. Look at how it shade off from the sun.” She gasp for a breath, just a little breath of air. “No glare to beware, no open sky to trouble you, only sweet breeze to dance over your face, to soothe you as you lie and daydream. Ain’t you would like me to carry you out there to lounge off in the wicker chair, and warm your bones little bit, just sit and contemplate your estate? It nice and warm outside today. You could hear the gully hens-them singing cocorico, and the guinea lizards-them just a-relax in the sun hot and drowse. It nice out there for true, like a day in heaven. Nothing to cause you danger. Nothing to cause you harm. I could carry you out there in my own two arm, and put you nice and comfortable in the wicker chair, with two pillow at your back for you to rest back on, a king on he own throne. Ain’t you would like that?”
Dry Bone smile. The tightness in she chest ease up little bit. “All right, Tan-Tan. You getting to know how to treat me good. Take me outside. But you have to watch out after me. No make no open sky catch me. Remember, when you pick me up, you pick up trouble! If you ain’t protect me, you go be sorry.”
“Yes, Dry Bone.” She pick he up. He heavy like a heart attack from all the food he done eat already. She carry he out onto the veranda and put he in the wicker chair with two pillow at he back.
Dry Bone lean he dead-looking self back in the chair with a peaceful smile on he face. “Yes, I like this. Maybe I go get you to bring me my food out here from now on.”
Tan-Tan give he some cool sorrel drink in a cup to tide he over till she finish cook, then she go back inside the hut to start cooking again. And as she cooking, she singing soft-soft,
Corbeau say so, it must be so,
Corbeau say so, it must be so.
And she only watching at the sky through the one little window in the hut. Suppose Master Johncrow ain’t come?
“Woman, the food ready yet?” Dry Bone call out.
“Nearly ready, Dry Bone.” Is a black shadow that she see in the sky? It moving? It flying their way? No. Just a leaf blowing in the wind. “The chicken done stew!” she call out to the veranda. “I making the dumpling now!” And she hum she tune, willing Master Johncrow to hear.
A-what that? Him come? No, only one baby rain cloud scudding by. “Dumpling done! I frying the banana!”
“What a way you taking long today,” grumble Dry Bone.
Yes. Coasting in quiet-quiet on wings the span of a big man Master Johncrow the corbeau-bird float through the sky. From her window Tan-Tan see him land on the banister rail right beside Dry Bone, so soft that the duppy man ain’t even self hear he. She heart start dancing in she chest, light and airy like a masque band flag. Tan-Tan tiptoe out to the front door to watch the drama.
Dry Bone still have he eyes closed. Master Johncrow stretch he long, picky-picky wattle neck and look right into Dry Bone face, tender as a lover. He black tongue snake out to lick one side of he pointy beak. “Ah, Dry Bone,” he say, and he voice was the wind in dry season, “so long I been waiting for this day.”
Dry Bone open up he eye. Him two eyes make four with Master Johncrow own. He scream and try to scramble out the chair, but he belly get too heavy for he skin-and-bone limbs. “Don’t touch me!” he shout. “When you pick me up, you pick up trouble! Tan-Tan, come and chase this buzzard away!” But Tan-Tan ain’t move.
Striking like a serpent, Master Johncrow trap one of Dry Bone arm in he beak. Tan-Tan hear the arm snap like twig, and Dry Bone scream ag
ain. “You can’t pick me up! You picking up trouble!” But Master Johncrow haul Dry Bone out into the yard by he break arm, then he fasten onto the nape of Dry Bone neck with he claws. He leap into the air, dragging Dry Bone up with him. The skin-and-bone man fall into the sky in truth.
As he flap away over the trees with he prize, Tan-Tan hear he chuckle. “Ah, Dry Bone, you dead thing, you! Trouble sweet to me like the yolk that did sustain me. Is trouble you swallow to make that belly so fat? Ripe like a watermelon. I want you to try to give me plenty, plenty trouble. I want you to make it last a long time.”
Tan-Tan sit down in the wicker chair on the veranda and watch them flying away till she couldn’t hear Dry Bone screaming no more and Master Johncrow was only a black speck in the sky. She whisper to sheself:
Corbeau say so, it must be so,
Please, Johncrow, take Dry Bone and go,
Tan-Tan say so,
Tan-Tan beg so.
Tan-Tan go inside and look at she little home. It wouldn’t be plenty trouble to make another window to let in more light. Nothing would be trouble after living with the trouble of Dry Bone. She go make the window tomorrow, and the day after that, she go recane the break-seat chair.
Tan-Tan pick up she kerosene lamp and go outside to look in the bush for some scraper grass to polish the rust off it. That would give she something to do while she think about what Master Johncrow had tell she. Maybe she would even go find this Papa Bois, oui?
* * *
—
Wire bend,
Story end.
Tanith Lee (1947–2015) was a British writer who published more than ninety novels and in excess of three hundred short stories. She won multiple World Fantasy Awards, a British Fantasy Society Derleth Award, the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement in Horror. Placing her alongside Jane Gaskell and Angela Carter, Roz Kaveny wrote that “Lee captured like few other modern writers a gothic, not to say goth, sensibility in which the relentless pursuit of personal autonomy and sensual fulfilment leads her characters to the brink of delirium, as well as to a fierce integrity that can co-habit with self-sacrificing empathy.” Lee is known for a lush prose style and for themes of death and mortality paired with explorations of the fluidity of gender, sexuality, and desire. “Where Does the Town Go at Night?” first appeared in Interzone in 1999 and was nominated for a 2000 British Fantasy Award.
WHERE DOES THE TOWN GO AT NIGHT?
Tanith Lee
“WHAT DID YOU SAY?”
Gregeris turned, but some sort of vagrant stood there, grinning at him out of a dirty, flapping overcoat. Gregeris supposed he wanted money. Otherwise the broad square was deserted in the pale grey afternoon, its clean lines undisturbed by the occasional wind-breath from the sea which hardly even moved the clipped oleanders behind their prison-railings or the ball-shaped evergreens on long bare stems (like lollipops) which flanked most of the municipal buildings.
“Perhaps this will help?” Gregeris handed the man, the supposed beggar, a bank note. It was a cheerful, highly coloured currency, and the man took it, but his smile lessened at once.
“I can’t show you. You’ll have to see for yourself.”
“Oh, that will be all right. Don’t trouble.”
Gregeris turned to walk on. He had only come to the square to kill a little time, to look at the clock-tower, a sturdy thing from the 1700s. But it was smaller and much less interesting than the guide-book promised.
“Don’t believe me, do you?”
Gregeris didn’t answer. He walked firmly, not too briskly. His heart sank as he heard the scuffy footsteps fall in with his. He could smell the man too, that odd fried smell of ever-unwashed mortal flesh, and the musty dead-rat odour of unchangeable clothes.
“Y’see,” said the beggar, in his low rough voice, “I’ve seen it happen. Not the only one, mind. But the only one remembers, or knows it isn’t a dream. I’ve seen proof. Her, then, sitting there, right there, where the plinth is for the old statue they carted away.”
There seemed nothing else for it. “The statue of King Christen, do you mean? Over there by the town hall?”
“The very one. The statue struck by lightning, and fell off.”
“So I believe.”
“But she was on the plinth. Much prettier than an old iron king.”
“I’m sure she was.”
The beggar laughed throatily “Still don’t believe what I’m saying, do you? Think I’m daft.”
A flash of irritation, quite out of place, went through Gregeris. It was for him an irritating time, this, all of it, and being here in this provincial nowhere. “I don’t know what you are saying, since you haven’t said.” And he turned to face the beggar with what Gregeris would himself only have described as insolence. Because facing up to one’s presumed inferiors was the most dangerous of all impertinences. Who knew what this bone-and-rag bag had once been? He might have been some great artist or actor, some aristocrat of the Creative Classes, or some purely good man, tumbled by fate to the gutter, someone worthy of respect and help, which Gregeris, his own annoying life to live, had no intention of offering.
And, “Ah,” said the beggar, squaring up to him.
Gregeris saw, he thought, nothing fine or stricken in the beggar. It was a greedy, cunning face, without an actor’s facial muscles. The eyes were small and sharp, the hands spatulate, lacking the noble scars of any trade, shipbuilding, writing, work of any sort.
“Well,” said Gregeris.
“Yes,” said the beggar. “But if you buy me a drink I’ll tell you.”
“You can buy yourself a drink and a meal with the money I just gave you.”
“So I can. But I’ll eat and drink alone. Your loss.”
“Why do you want my company?” demanded Gregeris, half angrily.
“Don’t want it. Want to tell someone. You’ll do. Bit of a look about you. Educated man. You’ll be more flexible to it, I expect.”
“Gullible, do you mean?” Gregeris saw the man had also been assessing him, and finding not much, apparently. Less than flattery, education, he sensed, in this case represented a silly adherence to books—clerkishness. Well, Gregeris had been a clerk, once. He had been many things. He felt himself glaring, but the beggar only grinned again. How to be rid of him?
Up in the sky, the fussy clock-tower sounded its clock. It was five, time to take an absinthe or cognac, or a cocktail even, if the town knew they had been invented. Why hadn’t the ridiculous tower been struck by lightning instead of a statue under a third its height?
“Where do you go to drink?”
Some abysmal lair, no doubt.
But the beggar straightened and looked along the square, out to where there was a glimpse of the sky—grey-rimmed, sulk-blue sea. Then he pivoted and nodded at a side street of shops, where an awning protected a little café from the hiding sun.
“Cocho’s.”
“Then take a drink with me at Cocho’s.”
“That’s very sportive of you,” said the beggar. Abruptly he thrust out his filthy, scarless, and ignoble hand. Gregeris would have to shake it, or there would, probably, be no further doings. Ignore the ignoble hand then, and escape.
Compelled by common politeness, the curse of the bourgeoisie, Gregeris gripped the hand. And when he did so, he changed his mind. The hand felt fat and strong and it was electric. Gregeris let go suddenly. His fingers tingled.
“Feel it, do you?”
“Static,” said Gregeris calmly. “It’s a stormy afternoon. I may have given you a bit of a shock. I do that sometimes, in this sort of weather.”
The beggar cackled, wide-mouthed. His teeth, even the back ones, were still good. Better, Gregeris resentfully thought, than my own. “Name’s Ercole,” said the beggar. (Hercules, wouldn’t you know it.) And th
en, surprisingly, or challengingly, “You don’t have to give me yours.”
“You can have my name. Anton Gregeris.”
“Well, Anton” (of course, the bloody man would use the Christian name at once), “we’ll go along to Cocho’s. We’ll drink, and I’ll tell you. Then I’ve done my part. Everything it can expect of me.”
* * *
—
This was all Marthe’s fault, Gregeris reflected, as he sipped the spiced brandy. Ercole had ordered a beer, which could be made to last, Gregeris ominously thought, until—more ominous still—he watched Ercole gulp half the contents of the glass at once.
It was because of Marthe that Gregeris had been obliged to come here, to the dull little town by the sea. His first impression, other than the dullness, had been how clean and tidy the town was. The streets swept, the buildings so bleached and scrubbed, all the brass-plates polished. Just what Marthe would like, she admired order and cleanliness so much, although she had never been much good at maintaining them herself. Her poky flat in the city, crammed with useless and ugly “objets d’art,” had stayed always undusted. Balls of fluff patrolled the carpets, the ashtrays spilled and the fireplace was normally full of the cold debris of some previous fire. He suspected she washed infrequently, too, when not expecting a visitor. The bathroom had that desolate air, the lavatory unwholesome, the bath green from the dripping tap. And the boy—the boy was the same, not like Marthe, but like the flat Marthe neglected.
“Thirsty,” mumbled Ercole, presumably to explain his empty glass.
“Let me buy you another.”
“That’s nice. Not kind, of course. Not kind, are you? Just feel you have to be generous.”
“That’s right.”
The waiter came. He didn’t seem unduly upset that Ercole was sitting at the café table, stinking and degenerate. Of course, Gregeris had selected one of the places outside, under the awning. And there were few other patrons, two fat men eating early plates of fish, a couple flirting over their white drinks.
The Big Book of Modern Fantasy Page 126
