The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 26 (Mammoth Books)

by Gardner Dozois

  “Here, Millie!” Mr. Fearenside said that same night, after most everyone had left and I was cleaning up the tables. “What do you make of old goggle-eyes? You have to live right here with him, after all. What’s your story?”

  I looked up from the table I’d been wiping down and met Mr. Fearenside’s eyes for a moment, then looked toward the staircase that led up to the Invisible Man’s room. He could be standing there, on that bottom step, for all I knew. He could be watching me, waiting to see me break my word with him. I’d felt his eyes on me many a time over March and April, and I was worse than a cat all that time, jumping at no cause a time or two every day it might seem to anyone looking. I could feel him watching me, waiting for me to tell his secret. So when I turned back to Mr. Fearenside, I said, “I ain’t got no story, Mr. Fearenside. I don’t see nothing and nothing don’t see me. Simple as that.”

  “Clever girl, Millie!” said Mr. Fearenside.

  And Mrs. Hall appeared in the pub right then to say, “Brought her up right, I can see now.”

  I didn’t say anything to that. Just went back to wiping and taking up glasses. But for the rest of the night I kept thinking, How? How could she say that? She didn’t bring me up. It were my mother’s hands that molded me.

  And right then, as I thought that, I started to cry a little. Tried getting the tears out of my eyes fore anyone saw them, but it was no use. Mrs. Hall saw straightaway and said, “Now what, Millie? I swear, always crying about something, you are!”

  What happened next, everyone knows by now. It’s been months gone by since they found and killed him over in Port Burdock, and even now there’s always something about the other invisible folks he made that keep going round the countryside, terrifying innocent people and stealing. What happened was, Mr. Cuss, the village doctor, turned up at the Coach and Horses at the end of April. Had a professional interest in our guest, he said, since old goggle-eyes were all wrapped up in bandages. Said others were worried he was sick with something that might go round. But Mrs. Hall told Mr. Cuss he don’t have a reason to see her guest if her guest ain’t asked to be seen. Mr. Cuss went right on by her, though, into goggle-eyes’ room, where they must have had some kind of conversation, because he didn’t come out again for at least ten minutes.

  Whatever they talked about ended in a short cry of surprise from Mr. Cuss, and then we heard a chair flung to the side, and that sharp bark of a laugh that belonged to goggle-eyes. Then the quick patter of feet to the door where Mrs. Hall and I both stood listening with our ears turned. It opened, and there stood Mr. Cuss. His face was pale as whitewash, and he held his hat against his chest like he were going to give us bad news. He looked back and forth at us, but in the end he said nothing, not a whisper, just went past us and down the stairs as if the devil himself were on his heels, and then the pub door closed behind him.

  The Invisible Man laughed softly in the room beyond, and Mrs. Hall, without peering in, asked if she could get him anything. “No,” he said. His voice sounded black as the blacking I’d put on the stove that morning. “There is nothing anyone can get me now, Mrs. Hall. It is over.”

  Mrs. Hall stood there for a minute, twisting her hands in her apron, waiting to see if he might say more. Maybe she hoped he’d ask for something and make her useful, I can’t right say. But when she turned and saw me, she jumped back an inch, as if she’d forgotten I’d been at the door with her all that time. “Millie,” she said. “Kitchen.” Then she went down the hall to her own room, shut the door, and didn’t come out until the next day, when we heard that the vicar Mr. Bunting and his wife had been burgled. And on Whit Monday, no less.

  The story made it round town like the plague everyone feared old goggle-eyes might carry underneath those bandages of his. Before noon everyone knew the vicar and his wife had woken in the small hours of the morning by the sound of coins rattling downstairs. And when they went to check on the noise, found a candle lit. And the door unbolted. But no one there. They swore they watched the door of their house open and close on its own like it had a spirit in it. And then, when they checked their cash drawer, it was empty.

  That same afternoon, while I was making a soup in the kitchen, a great racket happened up in old goggle-eyes’ room. I heard Mrs. Hall screaming like her head must have come right off and started flying round the rooms on its own, and then it come down the steps and found me like that, making soup in the kitchen. I looked up, dropped my knife, and went up directly.

  I found Mr. Hall holding her up in the hallway. Old goggle-eyes’ door was closed up behind them. She slouched in Mr. Hall’s arms like she might faint at any time, so I got my arm under her other side and together Mr. Hall and I brought her down to the pub and I poured her a cup of rum to calm her. She and Mr. Hall took turns then, telling me what had happened.

  Seems they went up because old goggle-eyes’ door was open, but he weren’t in there, and his clothes were all laid out, and his bed cold, which meant he’d been gone all morning, but without clothes, and all of his bandages left behind too. Mrs. Hall said he’d put spirits into her furniture, cause didn’t her mother’s own chair lift up and chase her right out of the room? I didn’t stop her to say it weren’t any spirits in that chair, but old goggle-eyes himself lifting it and chasing her out the door with it. How could I? If the Halls knew I’d known our guest had been invisible all this time and didn’t tell, I’m not sure what would happen. They might take me out the door directly, and leave me to find my own way. So I kept my mouth shut and kept nodding as Mrs. Hall brought the story round to when I’d come up the stairs after hearing her screaming.

  “Out,” she told Mr. Hall now, after she’d finished the story. “Lock the doors on him! I don’t want him here any longer! All of those bottles and powders! I knew there wasn’t something right with him. No one should have that many bottles!”

  I held her hand while she sipped her drink, and didn’t say what came to my mind right then. Ain’t it her who defended him some weeks ago? Ain’t it her who said he was an ex-peer-i-men-tal in-vest-i-ga-tor, like that were something above the rest of us? I figure she’d had a bad enough time already. When she finished her rum, I poured another to help her get along a little further.

  She asked me to go across the way to get Mr. Wadgers, the blacksmith, to come and have a look at that furniture. She admired Mr. Wadgers, she said. She said she wanted his opinion on the strange occurrences at the Coach and Horses. So I ran over and brought Mr. Wadgers back, telling him very little, as I didn’t want to put an idea into his mind before he had a chance to think for himself.

  “Thank you, Millie,” said Mrs. Hall when we returned. She sighed and began telling Mr. Wadgers about our morning, and I thought the madness had surely passed, that old goggle-eyes had had a good time of giving her a fright, and now he’d go back to his experiments. But soon as Mrs. Hall’s sigh escaped her lips, wouldn’t you know, the door upstairs creaks open, and down the stairs he comes, dressed in his bandages and hat and coat and muffler, just like when he first appeared in the late February entrance to the Coach and Horses. “I didn’t see him come in,” said Mrs. Hall as he walked past, as though none of us were there for the seeing, and went to his chemistry parlour, where he shut the door.

  Mr. Hall got up and followed after Mr. Wadgers told him he should do so. He knocked at the door, opened it a sliver, and demanded an explanation for old goggle-eyes’ sudden appearance. But the only thing old goggle-eyes had to say was, “Go to the devil! And shut that door behind you!”

  And for the rest of that morning all we could hear was him in there clinking his bottles and tubes together, tossing about all those chemicals.

  It was later, after we’d all gone back to our regular ways, that Mrs. Hall brought the thing to an end. It was her, I’d say, that had the courage to do so. She gave me instructions not to feed old goggle-eyes a crumb, and to not heed his calls. Instead, we went about our business, and ignored him as he threw bottles into his fireplace and cursed the gods
. I cringed whenever I heard him shouting in there, but Mrs. Hall said, “Be a rock, Millie,” and so I was still as the stone that marks my mother’s grave in the churchyard.

  At midday, though, he opened his door and demanded Mrs. Hall attend to him. His shouts filled up the Coach and Horses. Mrs. Hall hitched up her skirts and went right to him, her fright from the morning having passed her by, and said, “Is it your bill you’re wanting, sir?”

  “Why have I not received my breakfast?” he asked.

  And Mrs. Hall said, “Why isn’t my bill paid? That’s what I’d like to know.”

  I put my hand over my mouth, knowing that I could shut myself up and hold my voice inside me, even if Mrs. Hall had no way of doing so for her own sake.

  He told her he had the money he owed, but Mrs. Hall wasn’t backing down. She said, “Yes, but I wonder where you found it. The vicar and his wife been burgled this very morning, and yesterday you had none.” Then she began demanding he tell her what he’d done to her chairs — had he put spirits in them? And she demanded to know what he was on to in there with all those bottles and fluids. She demanded to know how his room was empty that morning and how he got in and out with none of us seeing. She demanded to know his name. “Who are you?” she said.

  An endless list of demands, it was, and when Mrs. Hall reached the end of it, old goggle-eyes stamped his foot like the hoof of the devil and said, “By Heaven! I will show you!”

  Mind you, I was in the kitchen when all this was happening. I could hear Mrs. Hall’s voice going up and up, though, and stopped washing the dishes for a moment to listen harder. And just as I took my hands out of the water, Mrs. Hall screamed. And the scream was something louder and more frightening than anything she’d made when the chair flew at her earlier that morning.

  I had my hands in my apron, drying them off, when I come out the kitchen into the pub, and there, right in front of me, his back to me, was old goggle-eyes. But he’d taken the bandages off his head, and his goggles and hat. He was a headless man standing there, and even though I’d already been in a room with him when he was invisible, I couldn’t help but catch Mrs. Hall’s screams and join her in sending one up to our Lord in Heaven.

  It was a bad thing to do, though, it was. For it only called his attention. Old goggle-eyes turned round when he heard me, and though I couldn’t see his face, I knew he was going to kill me. He’d blame me, I knew, for his discovery. Even if it were Mrs. Hall who’d forced him to reveal himself. To reveal that there weren’t a self underneath all those bandages.

  I turned and ran back into the kitchen then, and he came after, calling, “Millie, Millie!” But I kept on going. I took the stairs up to the next floor, and then the stairs up to my room in the attic. I locked the door, then opened my window, flung my head out and saw people running not only out of the pub beneath me, squealing and screaming, but also up and down the street people were abandoning the Whit Monday festivities to see what was happening down at the Coach and Horses.

  Gypsies and sweets sellers, the swing man, wenches and dandies — they all came running down to the inn, and soon I could hear their voices burbling up from below like the soup I’d left on the stove. It was like how the vicar Mr. Bunting talked to us one Sunday about the tower of Babel, and all the many voices, and how no sense could be made of anything. I didn’t move from my seat on the ledge of my dormer window, only looked over my shoulder every now and then to see if my door were still closed. I had the key in the palm of my hand, sweaty and hot. And later, when Mrs. Hall come up to say through the door that all was fine again, that the Invisible Man were gone now, they’d chased him off after a struggle, and won’t you come out Millie, I opened that hand and saw how I’d held the key so tight it had cut into my skin and raised my blood.

  What did he want from me, I wonder sometimes, when he ran after me into the kitchen, calling my name out? I was afraid then, and didn’t stop to ask. But when I look back now, I sometimes think I can see round that fear to hear his voice again. To understand that he weren’t angry at me, like I thought. He’d sounded frightened as I was. The same way I sometimes come into a room and see a mouse, and both of us jump at the sight of each other. What did he want from me? Someone told me that, after I ran away, the constable came and found him sitting at the kitchen table eating a crust of bread and some cheese. Was that all he’d wanted? Really? Had he just been hungry?

  I can’t right know the answer to that question. After that day, he only came back to Iping once more, with a tramp he forced to help him steal his books out of the room where he stayed here at the Coach and Horses. When he had those books again, they say he went on to other places and grew madder and madder, and stole more and more, and even involved himself in murder before a mob in Port Burdock hunted him down and killed him. It took a few weeks before the various stories told by various people in the various nearby ports and villages he terrorized were brought out and put together, so that a bigger story could be seen. And that was mostly cause of the writer, Mr. Wells, who came round after everything seemed to be over, drawing us all out to speak with him. Everyone, that is, except me.

  He was a curious man, Mr. Wells, with eyes that pierced through me in a way that made me feel too seen. So much so that, when it was my turn for an interview, I said, “I don’t have anything I can tell you, sir. I’m sorry.”

  “And why is that, Millie?” he asked as I sat at a table in the pub with him, rubbing my fingertips over the palm of my hand where the key had cut into me. “I hear, after all, that you were here almost all the time, and that he chased you into the kitchen on the day he revealed himself.”

  “I don’t see nothing, sir,” I told him. “And nothing sees me.”

  Mr. Wells waited for me to look up from my fidgeting before he spoke again. And when I did, he said, “I don’t believe that for an instant, Millie.”

  But he let me alone, he did, and I was grateful.

  It was clear that the Invisible Man had given the same offer he’d made me to others. Mrs. Hall read the news to me every morning in the months that followed his reign of terror. One day she said, “Look here, Millie! Not two months after he’s been killed in Port Burdock and there are others like him taking on his filthy business. Thieving and firing houses! What a world we live in! If I had it my way, I’d see them all out of the country!”

  “Would you now, miss?” I said. “And how would you see to it, them being invisible and all?”

  She gave me a sour face and said, “Millie, you know what I mean.”

  I met her eyes when she said that, instead of looking down at the floor like I used to when she scolded. I never say what I think aloud, of course, but there are words that eyes can say just as well as any mouth can. And what my eyes said that morning when they met hers was, “You was wrong about him all along, weren’t you?” An experimental investigator, indeed.

  I think about the description of his death Mrs. Hall read from Mr. Wells’ report some months later, usually when I’m alone and can use my time to imagine what happened after he was finished with us here at the Coach and Horses. She said that the people of Port Burdock welcomed him with fists and knees and boots when they finally cornered him. She said that they welcomed him with the flash of their teeth and a spade to the head, swung heavily. She said that, when he no longer moved and they began to back away, he started to appear within the circle they’d made round him.

  First, an old woman saw a hand. Just the nerves and veins and arteries and bones could be seen beneath the invisible flesh. But then there were his feet as well. And then, slowly, his skin began to appear, moving inward from his toes and fingers toward the center of his body, like waves returning to the sea. He was all bashed up and bloody. His skin was white, his eyes red like a rabbit’s. Nearly an albino, he’d been.

  Mrs. Hall says he’d been a working boy who grew up and went to university somehow. Said his teachers ignored him. Said he stole from his own father to pay for his experiments, and that his fathe
r killed himself when he found the money gone, for he needed it to pay a debt.

  I shake my head and say, “It’s a bad business, it is.”

  And Mrs. Hall says, “I don’t know who these scientists think they are. Playing as if they were our Lord in Heaven.”

  I don’t say, “I meant his teachers ignoring him, miss.”

  Mrs. Hall says, “They’ll get these other ones, too. You wait and see.”

  I say, “Indeed, miss.”

  Sundays, when I go round to Ma’s grave after church, I think on the scene when they killed him, and wonder if the other people he injected with the serum he offered me were there when it happened, watching, invisible, protected if they did not speak and make themselves known. Did his anger at the world that didn’t see him get into them as well? Surely it must have, as they’ve continued his terrible ways after his passing. That is what he leaves behind. Now, no one will forget him.

  And then I wonder about his offer. A moment in history. Sometimes, when I’m looking at my mother’s stone, tracing the letters of her name into the dirt that covers it, I wonder if I should have taken him up on it. For what good is life without the howls of anger in a world that thinks so highly of itself, even when there is great wrongness in it?

  To be seen, to be known. It seems, when I look out at the faces of the people in the village, that’s what most want. But we live in a world where not everyone can possibly be seen. We put too much on seeing to know one another, and the eye is a friend who often lies. At least this is something I’ve noticed in my time pouring drinks and making beds at the Coach and Horses. It might be better, I sometimes think, if we were all blind.

  Proof of my time here. That is my desire. But there’s little most can do to have this. The choices for our memorials are few, like Ma’s unmarked stone here. I trace her name again, and again. We must take what we are given, then, like the vicar Mr. Bunting is always reminding us, and be happy. We must be happy, I think, with our anger, with our outraged mobs, with our eagerness to tear at the world that binds us. We must be content with what we have.