Castleview

by Gene Wolfe

  Mercedes said, “I’m not wearing a belt.”

  “I had observed it, my lady; there remains a second method. Allow me.” The cat held out the elastic waist of her own jeans and thrust the sharp point of her sword through the denim. “You must think of yourselves as having steel tails,” he warned them. “Imagine yourselves cats, for example—the fancy may encourage you. But cats having steel tails. Should you turn quickly or thoughtlessly, your steel tails will clash against the stones of these walls, quite possibly summoning a gaoler or someone else whom we should not wish to meet. Is that understood?”

  “Too good,” Seth agreed vaguely. The tower had begun to rock, and Mercedes, leaning against the wall to steady it, did not risk a reply.

  “How’ll you manage the stick?” Seth asked the cat owlishly. “You don’t have any sword and you can’t stick that through your skin.”

  “As for a sword,” the cat slipped a paw beneath the fur of its chest and drew a large automatic pistol far enough for them to see it. “I have chosen the Browning Grand Pussance for this mission. It was my grandsire’s, and I am sentimentally attached to it.”

  Mercedes nodded understandingly.

  “I have, I concede, a Glock 17 beneath the other arm for emergencies. As to my badge of office, I shall manage it as I have so often managed it before. Now follow me!”

  The “steep stair” proved to be a ladder with rope sides and frighteningly slender wooden rungs. The cat slipped his foreleg through the gold cord that held the tassel and swarmed up this ladder like a monkey. Rather more circumspectly, Seth followed him; Mercedes, her right arm nearly useless in its plaster cast, brought up the rear more circumspectly still. After a score of rungs the swinging ladder climbed through a lightless shaft of smooth, chilly metal that might have been the casing of a well. Mercedes’s fingers told her at each new grip just how small the ropes were; she was very glad (or told herself she was) that she could not see them too.

  Through the narrow parting in her drapes, old Mrs. Cosgriff watched Sally Howard’s windows. Somebody was in there; a shadow moved against Sally’s curtains from time to time, first in one room, then in another. Mrs. Cosgriff itched to know who it was. Not poor Mr. Howard—he was dead and buried. Not the Howard boy—the Howard boy was missing and wanted by the sheriff, so Mrs. Cosgriff had heard. Not Sally herself, or that handsome doctor who was (perfectly disgracefully if you asked old Mrs. Cosgriff) staying with her—they had gallivanted off together in Sally’s big Oldsmobile, leaving poor, dead Mr. Howard’s Chrysler in the driveway.

  “It’s that little dark fellow,” Mrs. Cosgriff muttered to herself as a taxi pulled up in front of the Howard house. Mrs. Cosgriff had not seen the little dark fellow for some time, but she had always suspected a little, darkly, that the little dark fellow was still there whether she saw him or not.

  The front door opened, there was a wholly coincidental clap of thunder, and her dark little suspicions were amply confirmed. Dressed in a three-piece suit and carrying a leather briefcase, the little dark fellow emerged from the house, pranced down the porch steps, and sprinted along the front walk through the first big drops of the storm. Mrs. Cosgriff watched him get into the taxi and watched the taxi pull away.

  The question was who to call? Who was likely to be home, and to whom would she enjoy relating this most and discussing it afterwards? Old Mrs. Cosgriff was very close to settling on Annabelle Peters when a—a something—a whole lot of some things—came rampaging up the street. There was—she had—a confused impression of horses and dogs, of men and women whirled along by the wind, of lightnings shot like arrows and lightnings thrown like spears.

  One of the women was Sally Howard.

  Old Mrs. Cosgriff jerked her drapes shut, tottered over to her nice cowl-back chair, and sat. The telephone stood ready on the end table, but all of her speculations about the little dark fellow were flown. Old Mrs. Cosgriff imagined herself calling Annabelle Peters to say that she, old Mrs. Cosgriff herself with her very own eyes, had seen ghostly Indians on the warpath here on Pine Street in Castleview. Annabelle Peters would be certain she was both out of her right mind and stark, staring mad; but old Mrs. Cosgriff discovered that she did not much care as long as she could tell somebody, leaving out all that about Sally’s being in the wagon. That was, so old Mrs. Cosgriff judged from long experience, the touch too much, the straw that would break the camel’s back.

  Rain and hail rattled on her roof, on her porch.

  She would call Annabelle Peters soon. Call just as soon as she felt a little better.

  Fortunately, Phyllis Sun had worn her London Fog, and she kept a plastic babushka in the pocket. With the babushka drawn tightly over her sleek black hair and the coat buttoned to the neck, she struggled against the storm, lips set and eyes nearly shut. In China, she told herself, a thousand women were facing similar storms in raincoats of straw; she wondered whether they ever thought about her, decided that they did not, and attempted to suggest tactfully to whatever god might rule that those women would not be required to welcome and seat patrons at the finest Chinese restaurant in this part of the state when they got where they were going.

  If the Heavenly Emperor heard her, he rejected her implied suggestion, sending blasts of rain, wind, and hail that seemed more than sufficient to overturn any truck. Phyllis staggered backward two steps, bowed lower still to the wind, clenched her teeth, and struggled forward again, wishing wholeheartedly that she were back in jail.

  There, Hwan Lee—when eventually they had let her in to see him—had been extravagantly grateful. His little cell had been warm, clean, and dry, and she had sat on his bunk while he stood respectfully, his eyes aglow with thanks, and resolutely refused to make any sense at all. Phyllis reiterated her arguments to herself as she struggled along, both because she hoped to find some flaw that could be corrected on her next visit, and because it distracted her somewhat from her present misery. Pear Street—three and a quarter blocks to the Golden Dragon, and three and a quarter blocks under such nightmarish conditions as these were the equivalent of twenty miles on a fine day. No, more.

  “Hwan Lee, we’ve—”

  A taxi whizzed past, its tires raising plumes of rainwater. Phyllis waved frantically, shouting against the roar of the wind and flourishing her now-sodden best purse; but there was someone in the rear seat, the roof light was dark, and the taxi slowed not one whit. She would have resented the spray from its wheels if she had felt it; but it struck her no harder than the driving rain and was if anything less densely wet.

  “Hwan Lee,” she had told him, “we’re going to get you Len Turner, the best attorney in Castleview, and H. Richard Wang is coming out from Chicago.”

  “Thank you velly much!” Hwan had said, exactly as though he had just gotten a good tip.

  “H. Richard Wang is Bob Chen’s son-in-law, so we feel that we can trust him. But it’s better to have a local man, too; a Caucasian.”

  “Ah, wise!”

  Phyllis had found herself desperately wishing she knew more than a few hundred words of Chinese; it would do her little good now to urge Hwan to hurry up, or to warn him that he might shortly become a very crispy duck indeed. “But neither Mr. Turner nor Mr. Wang can help you at all unless you give them your complete cooperation.”

  Hwan had stared at her blankly. And she, assuming that he had not understood cooperation, had added, “Work with them, tell them what you know.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  She had hurried on. “It isn’t just a matter of attempted murder, Hwan Lee, although that would certainly be bad enough. Because they know you were trying to stab that man, and there isn’t any connection between the two of you that they can come up with, they think you may have stabbed other people—stabbed people at random. There are unsolved murders here; I suppose everyplace has some. Some were committed with knives. They’re going to try to blame you for those.”

  Hwan had said, “Okay, I tell. First time, no bull.” “That’s good. That’s ve
ry good! But why? Why did you do it?”

  There had been a lengthy pause, during which she had been forced to bite her lips to keep from repeating why?

  And at last Hwan had said, “They tell me.”

  “They did? Hwan, who are they?” She had asked it over and over again, threatening and pleading, rephrasing the question in every way she had been able to think of; but there it had ended. No words she had found would drag a name or any other indication of identity from Hwan. She had spoken of the difficulties that he was creating not only for her and for their family, but for all the other Chinese-Americans in Castle County, and at last in desperation of the fall-off of business at the restaurant. Hwan had received word of both with oriental stoicism.

  Next time her brothers could damned well go themselves.

  A hailstone struck her full in the mouth, and she wiped her lips and examined her hand in the light from a shopwindow to see whether she was bleeding. There seemed to be no blood, but it was possible the pounding rain had washed her hand at once; she probed the place with her tongue.

  The light from the window flickered, then kindled anew.

  Another two and a half blocks to the Golden Dragon. Phyllis fought her way forward in defiance of wind and rain, one hand grasping her purse, the other clutching the edge of the plastic babushka.

  All the lights flickered. For an instant the streetlights and all the lights in all the stores—stores implacably closed that nevertheless maintained illuminated displays calculated to engender an acquisitiveness they were unwilling to satisfy—were gone, and only the pandemonium of the storm remained.

  In a second or less they came back on, some of them, but with sadly diminished strength, yellowish and feeble, no longer uniting into a spurious day but as isolate as the fixed stars, guttering candles wrapped in twilight.

  Above even the howling of that raging storm, Phyllis heard the two-fold hoofbeats of Sleipnir, though for a moment more she did not know what it was she was hearing.

  Horns wildly blowing, they raced toward her; they were the soul of the storm. And for one burning instant before darkness fell, she glimpsed him astride the eight-legged stallion, beheld that wide-horned helm and the dwarf-forged spear, and worst and best of all, never to be forgotten, his single, blazing eye.

  I’ve seen it, she thought; this is the Savage Course. This was the Riding.

  The babushka was gone, her hair was sopping with rain, and her purse had fallen to the rain-scoured sidewalk. She had been going somewhere and she had been coming from someplace else, but none of that mattered any more. She had witnessed the Wild Hunt and lived.

  “You not Mr. Turner,” Hwan Lee said. “You Mr. Fee.”

  The gentleman thus addressed nodded. “Per’aps you’ve been wondering why you’re still alive.”

  Hwan said nothing. If he had been wondering anything at all, his features betrayed no trace of it.

  “You were warned that if you failed to take the life of the man we pointed out to you, your own would be forfeit. Had you wounded him, we might per’aps have forgiven you and offered you a second chance. You did not so much as draw blood, however.” Opening the lawyer-like briefcase on his lap, Mr. Fee took out a long-barreled target pistol.

  Hwan’s small stature, eager waiter’s manner, and ignorance of English combined to give an impression of simplicity and even timidity—this though no simple, timid man could have succeeded, as he had, in reaching Hong Kong from the People’s Republic, or in entering the U.S. from Hong Kong. In reality he was neither timid nor simple; he was both shrewd and complex, and when his reason indicated it necessary, the master of an almost infinite reserve of cool fortitude. The long barrel was in his left hand before it could be leveled at him. The heel of his right struck Fee sharply on the chin, and the back of Fee’s head struck the concrete wall of the cell more sharply still.

  As night vanishes with the raising of a blind, Mr. Fee was gone. His clothing remained, but in that clothing was a large-headed being with three pairs of eyes and pipe-stem limbs. It pressed its hands to its head and blinked its largest pair of eyes, night-black ovals the size of eggs. Mr. Fee reappeared, wavered, and vanished again.

  Hwan transferred the target pistol to his right hand. He had never handled a gun before, though guns had been pointed at him more than once. He found that having the gun in his own hand was a considerable improvement. “Be Mr. Fee,” he said. “You not Mr. Fee, I shoot.”

  The many-eyed being rolled its larger pairs as though to judge whether Hwan was serious, and Mr. Fee returned.

  “Call police, say unlock door, you go home.”

  Mr. Fee called, “Guard! You can let me out now.”

  The turnkey was more than a little surprised by Hwan’s gun; no one had broken out of the Castle County Jail in twenty years. Hwan locked him in the cell with Fee and trotted out of the jail into pouring rain, with Tom Howard’s target pistol tucked into his waistband and concealed by his shirt.

  35

  HITCHHIKERS

  FAR ABOVE Mercedes the cat called, “Here we are!” A tiny square of light appeared, winked out as he (presumably) stepped through it, and reappeared again.

  She climbed with renewed determination, and succeeded well enough to bump her head on Seth’s heels. For a minute at least—an actual minute by the clock—she feared that the bright door would close before they got to it, shutting them somehow in this dank tube of iron forever. Then Seth was through, and she heard him say, “Judy!” He had mentioned a Judy while they sat side by side sipping Coke in his mom’s car at the scenic view; Mercedes knew a brief pang of jealousy before she recalled that Judy was his cousin. A little cousin, she seemed to remember. A child?

  Four more slender rungs, and the door was hers as well—but the last snapped beneath her foot. She squealed and grabbed the side ropes. Swaying, the ladder thumped her against the rounded wall until her swordblade chimed like a bell; the tube seemed to spin around her, and she felt she was about to be sick.

  Desperately groping, her toes reclaimed the rung below the broken one. With one foot on that, she got the other onto the next sound rung and pulled herself up, keeping her feet well out toward the ends of both, away from their fragile centers.

  She nearly collapsed as she stumbled through the bright door. Seth caught her, and the feeling his arms brought was brand new, whispering of wonder.

  “Easy,” he said. “You okay?”

  “A step broke. I thought I was going to fall.”

  “Easy,” he said again, and squeezed her. His hand brushed her hips as he released her. She felt like backing into it to make it brush her harder. I’m not drunk any more, she thought. Maybe I’m in love, but I’m not drunk, and the cat’s still up on his hind legs, and he carries a cane.

  “This is my cousin Judy,” Seth told her. “Judy Youngberg. Judy, this is Mercedes.”

  “Hi.” The little girl nodded shyly. “This’s my cat, G. Gordon Kitty.”

  “I know,” Mercedes told her. “He brought us here. He’s a wonderful cat.”

  “He’s not always as wonderful as now,” Judy confessed, “but he’s always a really good cat.”

  The cat bowed. “Who urges you to fly this phantasmagoric palace. Here we stand in the very apartments of the sorcerous queen. She has departed upon some urgent errand but may return at any instant.”

  Judy nodded her agreement. “Only first we better shut that door ‘fore somebody down below sees it’s open—Queen Morgan said for me not to open it ’cause I might fall down. Then I have to show you the sword.”

  Mercedes closed the bright door, discovered that it could be bolted from their side, and bolted it.

  “I’ve got a sword already, Judy,” Seth objected. “So does Mercedes, and you’re too little.”

  “It’s real important. Look.” Judy trotted across the fey room to a tall cabinet, painted and coarsely carved, standing in a shallow recess. It seemed to Mercedes that she heard a faint, clear hum as the cabinet door swung back.r />
  For a moment the object within did not seem a sword at all, but such a cross as she had seen in pictures of ancient and holy objects hoarded in museums, its hilt and scabbard glowing with gems. She blinked and saw that there were none, and that there was little light in the cabinet for gems to catch. Instead both sword and scabbard were of some silvery metal greater than the silver she knew, a silver full of starlight, faceted, polished and pierced almost to filigree. Mercedes had breathed, “Oh, isn’t it beautiful!” before she realized the voice was hers.

  With some effort, Judy lifted it from the cabinet. The tip of the scabbard had rested on a shabby little leather book that fell to the floor as she took the sword out. Mercedes picked up the book, but had eyes only for the sword.

  “There was a battle a little while ago,” Judy explained, “and the wrong ones won. This is how you make it go the other way.”

  As each fresh vehicle approached, Hwan Lee turned to face the street and made the thumb-out gesture of begging a ride. Each drenched him with stinging spray that left him no wetter than he had been already.

  Yet it did no harm, Hwan reflected, to beg thus. Those who ask others many questions seldom question beggars, being anxious to escape their importunities. And who could say with certainty that no car would stop?

  He was trying to hold that thought for the thirteenth time when one did. It was a black Cadillac, nearly new; the driver who motioned for him to get inside was a big man with a coffee-light complexion and a wide black mustache. Smiling, grateful, and sodden, Hwan sank into the upholstered luxury of the front seat.

  “Leeve here?” the driver asked. “Know dees town?”

  Hwan tried to guess which answer was desired, decided on the affirmative, and nodded.

  “Meadow Grass—you take me to dat, okay?”

  First vaguely, then precisely, Hwan’s memory reproduced the conversation he had overheard while eavesdropping on Ann and Shields. “Ol’ Penton Load,” he stated confidently. “Know how get there?”