It was quite plausible, the story. Yes, looking down from the hill at the town, you could credit this was the exact area which would gently unhook itself, like one piece of a jigsaw, from the rest, and slip quietly out on the tide.
Gregeris drank more water. He lit a cigarette, next arranged a chair by the window. Before he sat down, he put out his bedside lamp, so that he could see better what the town got up to.
This was, of course, preposterous, and he speculated if months in the future he would have the spirit to tell anyone, some business crony, his elderly mother, jokingly of course, how he had sat up to watch, keep sentinel over the roving town which sailed away on certain nights not always of the full moon, returning like a prowling cat with the dawn.
“A beggar told me. Quite a clever chap, rough, but with a vivid, arresting use of words.”
But why had Ercole told him anything? Just for money? Then I’ve done my part, he had said. Everything it can expect of me.
It? Who? The town? Why did the town want its secret told? To boast? Perhaps to warn.
Gregeris gazed down. There below, hidden by the lush curve of the many-gardened hill, the slum where she lived, Marthe. And the boy.
There they would be, sleeping in their fur. And the town, sailing out, would carry them sleeping with it.
Gregeris couldn’t deny he liked the idea of it, the notion of this penance of his carried far out to sea.
Well. He could watch, see if it was. Half amused at himself, yet he was strangely tingling, as if he felt the electricity in the air which had galvanized Ercole’s filthy palm, and, come to think of it, the boy’s, for when Gregeris had put the bank note into Kays’s fingers, there had been a flicker of it, too, though none on Marthe. Certainly I never felt more wide awake.
He would be sorry, no doubt, in the morning. Perhaps he could doze on the train, although he disliked doing that.
It was better than lying in bed, anyway, fretting at insomnia. Avidly Gregeris leaned forward, his chin on his hand.
* * *
—
The sound was terrible, how terrible it was. What in God’s name was it? Some memory, caught in the dream oh, yes, he remembered now, after that train crash in the mountains, and the street below his room full of people crying and calling, and women screaming, and the rumble of the ambulances—
Horrible. He must wake up, get away.
Gregeris opened his eyes and winced at the blinding light of early day, the sun exploding full in the window over a vast sea like smashed diamonds.
But the sound—it was still there—it was all round him. There must have been some awful calamity, some disaster—Gregeris jumped to his feet, knocking over as he did so the little table, the bottle and glass, which fell with a crash. Had a war been declared? There had been no likelihood of such a thing, surely.
Under Gregeris’s window, three storeys down (as in the comfortable hotel all about), voices rose in a wash of dread, and a woman was crying hysterically, “Jacob—Jacob—”
Then, standing up, he saw. That is, he no longer saw. For the sight he would see had vanished, while he slept, he that had determined to watch all night, the sight which had been there below. The view of the town.
The town was gone. All that lay beyond the base of the hill was a great curving bay of glittering, prancing, sun-dazzled sea. The town had sailed away. The town had not returned.
Gregeris stood there with his hands up over his mouth, as if to keep in his own rash cry. Marthe—Kays. The town had sailed away and they had been taken with it, for their slum below the hill was the last section of the jigsaw-piece, and they were now far off, who knew how far, or where, that place where those asleep slept on in the tombs of their houses (would they ever Wake? There was a chance of it now, one might think), and the air was sea, and fish swam through the trees and the creatures of the deeps, and the mermaid floated to the plinth, blue-white, white-blue-green, contemplative and black of eye—Someone knocked violently on the door. Then the door burst open. No less than the manager bounded into the room, incoherent and wild eyed.
“So sorry to disturb—ah, you’ve seen, an earthquake, they say—the police insist we must evacuate—the hill’s so near the edge—perhaps not safe—hurry, if you will—No! No time to throw on your coat—quickly! Oh my God, my God!”
* * *
—
Some big, ugly building accommodated the group in which Gregeris found himself. He thought it must be a school of some sort, once a grand house. It was cluttered with hard chairs, cracked windows, and cupboards full of textbooks. No one was allowed yet to leave. Everyone, it seemed, must give their name and address, even visitors such as Gregeris, and then be examined by a medical practitioner. But the examination was cursory—a light shined in the eyes, the tempo of the heart checked—and although three times different persons wrote down his details, still they refused to let him go. Soon, soon, they said. You must understand, we must be sure of who has survived, and if you are all quite well.
Several were not, of course. The fusty air of the school was thick with crying. So many of the people now crowded in there had “lost”—this being the very word they used—families, friends, lovers. Some had lost property, too.
“My little shop,” one man kept wailing, blundering here and there. “Five years I’ve had it—opened every day at eight—where is it, I ask you?”
None of them knew where any of it was. They had woken from serene sleep to find—nothing. An omission.
It was an earthquake. That area had fallen into the sea. An earthquake and tidal wave which had disturbed no one, not even the pigeons on the roofs.
Had any others had a “warning,” as Gregeris had? He pondered. Some of them, through their confusion and grief, looked almost shifty.
But his mind kept going away from this, the aftermath, to the beggar, Ercole. What had become of him, Awake, and sailing on and on? And those others, the girl called Jitka, the old couple from the hospital, and the rich soldier, and the ones Ercole hadn’t met or hadn’t recollected?
Was the town like one of those sea sprites in legend that seduced, giving magical favours and rides to its chosen victims, playing with them in the waves, until their trust was properly won. Then riding off deep into the sea and drowning them?
The thought came clearly. Don’t mislead yourself. It isn’t that. Nothing so mundane or simple.
God knew. Gregeris never would.
It was while he was walking about among the groups and huddles of people, trying to find an official who would finally pass him through the police in the grounds outside, that Gregeris received the worst shock of his life. Oh, decidedly the worst. Worse than that threat in his youth, or that financial fright seven years ago, worse than when Marthe had told him she was pregnant, or arrived in the birthday dinner door. Worse, much, much worse than this morning, standing up and seeing only ocean where the houses and the clock-tower and the square had been. For there, amid the clutter of mourning refugees from world’s edge, stood Kays.
But was it Kays? Yes, yes. No other. A pale, fleshless, dirty little boy, his face tracked now by tears like scars, and crying on and on.
Some woman touched Gregeris’s arm, making him start. “Poor mite. His mother’s gone with the rest. Do you know him? Look, I think he knows you. Do go and speak to him. None of us can help.”
And in the numbness of his shock, Gregeris found himself pushed mildly and inexorably on. A woman did, he thought, always manage to push you where she decided you must go. And now he and the boy stood face-to-face, looking up or down.
“How—are you here?” Gregeris heard himself blurt. And as he said it, knew. Fat Anna’s street, where the boy had been penned, was the other, the wrong side, of the hill. And Marthe, damn her, drunk and selfish to the last, hadn’t thought to fetch him back. Gregeris could just picture her, her self-justifying mumbles as she
slithered into her sty of a bed. He’ll be all right. I’m too upset tonight. I’ll go for him in the morning.
Good God, but the boy had known—his panic, for panic it had been, his rage and mutiny that he was too small to perpetrate against the overbearing adults. And that fat woman locking him up so he couldn’t escape, as normally he always did from Marthe…Ercole had said, “And there’s a little boy I see, now and then.”
“You were Awake,” Gregeris said.
They stood alone in the midst of the grey fog, the misery of strangers.
“I mean, you were Awake, those special Nights. Weren’t you, Kays?”
Sullen for a moment, unwilling. Then, “Yes,” he replied.
“And so you knew it was a Night, and you wanted to be able to go with the town, to see the fish and the mermaid—to get free.”
Kays didn’t say, How do you know? You, of all people, how can you know?
His face was so white it looked clean. It was clean, after all, clean of all the rubbish of life, through which somehow he had so courageously and savagely fought his way, and so reached the Wonder—only to lose it through the actions of a pair of selfish blind fools.
“Did you know—did you know this was the last chance, the last, Night?”
The boy had stopped crying for a minute. He said, “It could have been any Night. Any Night could have been the last chance.”
Oh God, when we dead awaken—the last trump sounded and the gate of Paradise was flung wide—and we kept him from it. Just because we, she and I, and all the rest, have always missed our chance, or not, seen it, or turned from it, despising. She slept like a stone, but he, my son, he Woke. And I’ve robbed him of it for ever.
“Kays…” Gregeris faltered.
The boy began to cry again, messily, excessively, but still staring up at Gregeris, as if through heavy rain.
He wasn’t crying for Marthe, how could he be? But for Paradise, lost.
“I’m so sorry,” said Gregeris. Such stupid words.
But the child, who saw Truth, his child, who was Awake, knew what Gregeris had actually said. He came to Gregeris and clung to him, ruining his coat, weeping, as if weeping for all the sleeping world, and Gregeris held him tight.
Joe Hill (1972– ) grew up in Maine and first gained notice with the collection 20th Century Ghosts (2005), which was originally released by PS Publishing in England and went on to win the British Fantasy Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the International Horror Guild Award; it was also nominated for the World Fantasy Award. His novella Voluntary Committal (2005) won the World Fantasy Award, and his first novel, Heart-Shaped Box (2007), won the Bram Stoker Award, as did his collection Strange Weather (2017). His novel NOS4A2 was adapted as a TV series for AMC in 2019. In addition to his fiction, he also writes graphic novels, winning the Eisner Award for his comic book series Locke & Key, now a series on Netflix. “Pop Art” was one of Hill’s first stories to be published, appearing in the 2001 anthology With Signs and Wonders edited by Daniel Jaffe, and was later released by Subterranean Press as a limited-edition chapbook with illustrations by Gahan Wilson and as a short film directed by Amanda Boyle. Hill has cited Bernard Malamud’s “The Jewbird” as an influence on the story’s approach to the fantastic, an approach that mixes elements of magic realism, fairy tale, and satire.
POP ART
Joe Hill
MY BEST FRIEND when I was twelve was inflatable. His name was Arthur Roth, which also made him an inflatable Hebrew, although in our now-and-then talks about the afterlife, I don’t remember that he took an especially Jewish perspective. Talk was mostly what we did—in his condition rough-house was out of the question—and the subject of death, and what might follow it, came up more than once. I think Arthur knew he would be lucky to survive high school. When I met him, he had already almost been killed a dozen times, once for every year he had been alive. The afterlife was always on his mind; also the possible lack of one.
When I tell you we talked, I mean only to say we communicated, argued, put each other down, built each other up. To stick to facts, I talked—Art couldn’t. He didn’t have a mouth. When he had something to say, he wrote it down. He wore a pad around his neck on a loop of twine, and carried crayons in his pocket. He turned in school papers in crayon, took tests in crayon. You can imagine the dangers a sharpened pencil would present to a four-ounce boy made of plastic and filled with air.
I think one of the reasons we were best friends was because he was such a great listener. I needed someone to listen. My mother was gone and my father I couldn’t talk to. My mother ran away when I was three, sent my dad a rambling and confused letter from Florida, about sunspots and gamma rays and the radiation that emanates from power lines, about how the birthmark on the back of her left hand had moved up her arm and onto her shoulder. After that, a couple postcards, then nothing.
As for my father, he suffered from migraines. In the afternoons, he sat in front of soaps in the darkened living room, wet-eyed and miserable. He hated to be bothered. You couldn’t tell him anything. It was a mistake even to try.
“Blah blah,” he would say, cutting me off in midsentence. “My head is splitting. You’re killing me here with blah blah this, blah blah that.”
But Art liked to listen, and in trade, I offered him protection. Kids were scared of me. I had a bad reputation. I owned a switchblade, and sometimes I brought it to school and let other kids see; it kept them in fear. The only thing I ever stuck it into, though, was the wall of my bedroom. I’d lie on my bed and flip it at the corkboard wall, so that it hit, blade-first, thunk!
One day when Art was visiting, he saw the pockmarks in my wall. I explained, one thing led to another, and before I knew it, he was begging to have a throw.
“What’s wrong with you?” I asked him. “Is your head completely empty? Forget it. No way.”
Out came a Crayola, burnt-sienna. He wrote:
So at least let me look.
I popped it open for him. He stared at it wide-eyed. Actually, he stared at everything wide- eyed. His eyes were made of glassy plastic, stuck to the surface of his face. He couldn’t blink or anything. But this was different than his usual bug-eyed stare. I could see he was really fixated.
He wrote:
I’ll be careful I totally promise please!
I handed it to him. He pushed the point of the blade into the floor so it snicked into the handle. Then he hit the button and it snicked back out. He shuddered, stared at it in his hand. Then, without giving any warning, he chucked it at the wall. Of course it didn’t hit tip-first; that takes practice, which he hadn’t had, and coordination, which, speaking honestly, he wasn’t ever going to have. It bounced, came flying back at him. He sprang into the air so quickly it was like I was watching his ghost jump out of his body. The knife landed where he had been and clattered away under my bed.
I yanked Art down off the ceiling. He wrote:
You were right, that was dumb. I’m a loser—a jerk.
“No question,” I said.
But he wasn’t a loser or a jerk. My dad is a loser. The kids at school were jerks. Art was different. He was all heart. He just wanted to be liked by someone.
Also, I can say truthfully, he was the most completely harmless person I’ve ever known. Not only would he not hurt a fly, he couldn’t hurt a fly. If he slapped one, and lifted his hand, it would buzz off undisturbed. He was like a holy person in a Bible story, someone who can heal the ripped and infected parts of you with a laying-on of hands. You know how Bible stories go. That kind of person, they’re never around long. Losers and jerks put nails in them and watch the air run out.
* * *
—
There was something special about Art, an invisible special something that just made other kids naturally want to kick his ass. He was new at our school. His parents had just moved to town. They
were normal, filled with blood not air. The condition Art suffered from is one of these genetic things that plays hopscotch with the generations, like Tay-Sachs (Art told me once that he had had a grand-uncle, also inflatable, who flopped one day into a pile of leaves and burst on the tine of a buried rake). On the first day of classes, Mrs. Gannon made Art stand at the front of the room, and told everyone all about him, while he hung his head out of shyness.
He was white. Not Caucasian, white, like a marshmallow, or Casper. A seam ran around his head and down his sides. There was a plastic nipple under one arm, where he could be pumped with air.
Mrs. Gannon told us we had to be extra careful not to run with scissors or pens. A puncture would probably kill him. He couldn’t talk; everyone had to try and be sensitive about that. His interests were astronauts, photography, and the novels of Bernard Malamud.
Before she nudged him toward his seat, she gave his shoulder an encouraging little squeeze and as she pressed her fingers into him, he whistled gently. That was the only way he ever made sound. By flexing his body he could emit little squeaks and whines. When other people squeezed him, he made a soft, musical hoot.
He bobbed down the room and took an empty seat beside me. Billy Spears, who sat directly behind him, bounced thumbtacks off his head all morning long. The first couple times Art pretended not to notice. Then, when Mrs. Gannon wasn’t looking, he wrote Billy a note. It said:
Please stop! I don’t want to say anything to Mrs. Gannon but it isn’t safe to throw thumbtacks at me. I’m not kidding.
Billy wrote back:
You make trouble, and there won’t be enough of you left to patch a tire. Think about it.
* * *
—
It didn’t get any easier for Art from there. In biology lab, Art was paired with Cassius Delamitri, who was in sixth grade for the second time. Cassius was a fat kid, with a pudgy, sulky face, and a disagreeable film of black hair above his unhappy pucker of a mouth.
The Big Book of Modern Fantasy Page 129
