The Great Night

by Chris Adrian

  Henry knew what was going to happen before it happened. He saw what was coming, and chose not to stop it. Before he sat down on the bed on Molly’s left and Will sat down on her right, before Will looked at him and then lifted the crying girl’s chin with his hand, before he kissed her and then turned her face to Henry so he could kiss her too, he saw it all happen, and knew—or rather remembered—that it was the faerie wine and the faerie bed, in addition to whatever regular drunken horniness they might each contain, that was responsible, though how he remembered that about wine he’d never drunk before, and a bed he’d never snuck into before, he was still just barely choosing not to know. In a twirling flash of images the montage of fucking came and went, before anybody removed their clothes, or tasted skin, or pushed with their hips, or came. And yet it all happened just as he saw it, because of magic or because these two lovers were bound to his will or because of luck, but it was for a different reason that he knew how it would end, because he could feel the monster moving in time with his heart, getting ever closer though the sympathetic hill tried to thwart it with mazes and dead ends and chambers of carnivorous toads. So when they were done, and when they had all woken from a brief nap, it was no surprise but no less of a terror to see the black dog standing at the foot of the bed.

  “There you are,” it said, and leaped at them.

  The boy walked out of Buena Vista Park not knowing his name or where he was from or why he was crying. He didn’t know if he had forgotten this information or if he had simply never known it at all. Standing on the steps into the park, it felt like the first time he had thought about such things, and it was hard to keep such questions—Who am I? Where am I going?—in his head. His thoughts were crowded with the image of a weeping dog, a black Lab puppy with enormous brown eyes crying giant, perfectly formed tears. He knew dogs didn’t cry, just as he knew that a boy should know his name, yet what bothered him was not how strange it was that a dog should cry but that the dog was sad. Somebody ought to be cuddling it to make it feel better. Maybe that was why he was sad, he thought: because the dog was sad. But whose dog was it?

  He looked back at the park. A stiff wind was blowing down the hill, and as he thought of going in to look for the dog it gusted all of a sudden, strong enough to push him down a step and cold enough to draw his attention to the fact that he was wearing pajamas that were far too small for him. He thought of the dog, of the tears as round and rolly as marbles coursing down his snout, and turned away. It was a clear day: he could see the whole city laid out below, house after house all down the hill, and other parks in squares and circles here and there all the way to the bay. It occurred to him to go to one of those, since he suspected that he belonged in a park, and that he might find the dog in a park, even if the wind wouldn’t let him go back into this one.

  He started down the hill, noticing that his feet were bare as he placed them on the steeply slanting sidewalk. High up the hill, the streets were empty, but Castro Street was busy. He crossed against the light, not paying any attention to the cars, and barely missed getting run over by a large yellow Cadillac.

  When he reached the corner of Noe and Duboce he discovered a park, mostly treeless but covered in grass and full of dogs, who all ran over to circle him in prancing leaps that looked a lot like dancing. That made him laugh, but also brought to mind the sad puppy. It seemed there was every sort of dog in this park except a black Lab, and there were no puppies, and the absence of trees bothered him greatly—it was a wrongness much worse than not knowing one’s name, though not so great a wrongness as a weeping dog. Having walked only a few paces in, he went out again, briefly pursued by the dogs, whose owners could not see what they were so excited about.

  There were trees on Noe Street, an abundance of them shading the sidewalk, so that was the way he took. People kept running into him or nearly running into him, seeming to notice only at the last moment that he was there, and crying out “Oh!” as if he had appeared from thin air. As he approached the intersection of Noe and Market, he started to wonder if he had taken a wrong turn, and tried to ask a lady if he was headed toward the big park near the church. She didn’t reply but only swatted around her head, as if she were being harassed by a bee. He even shouted at her, but that only made her run away. He sighed, and sniffed the air, and thought he caught a rich hint of grass blowing from the other side of the street, so he crossed, nose up, again not giving a thought to the traffic. This time he surprised a woman in a long blue Volvo, who noticed him only when she’d nearly run him over. She turned aside sharply and ran into an oncoming streetcar.

  The boy stood in the middle of the street, suddenly afraid to move, and afraid of all the attention that the accident attracted. The woman in the car was looking all around for him, insisting that there had been a boy in the street, while the streetcar driver asked her loudly what she was smoking. The accident drew a crowd into the intersection, people who shook their heads over the wreck; none of them were looking at the boy, and no one had asked him if he was okay. But amid all the noise he heard someone shouting “Hey, you!” and “Hey, kid!” and looked across the street to see another boy, about his own age, who was plainly staring at him, along with a fat man with a big beard. They both were straddling bicycles, and wore identical blue T-shirts and caps.

  “Come over here,” the man commanded, “and watch out this time.” The boy crossed the rest of the way, still not looking where he was going, but the traffic was stopped. He stood before the man and the other boy, who looked him up and down. The other boy reached out to run a hand across his cheek, then held his fingers up to the sun.

  “He’s covered with it,” the other boy said.

  “What’s your name?” the man asked.

  “Henry,” said the boy, because to be asked his name was suddenly to remember it. In that moment he knew some of who he was, and some of where he was from, though he had no idea in the world where he was going, or what he was going to do, given what he had just lost. He wept with the dog, then, and heard it howling in his head, a terrible noise totally out of proportion with the form of a puppy.

  “Henry,” the man said, putting a hand on his shoulder and squeezing gently. “Henry, Henry, Henry. It won’t be all right, not exactly, not ever. But it will be a little better soon.”

  “Wash him good, boys,” the man said. “He’s covered in it!” His name was Mike, and the other boy’s name was Ryan. They had taken Henry to an enormous green house on Fourteenth Street, loading him on the back of Ryan’s bike for a quick, swerving ride through a treeless neighborhood, going by the park toward which Henry had been walking. Henry tried to jump off the bike as they passed it, a grassy hill punctuated here and there with palm trees, but Mike, pedaling alongside, reached out and grabbed his arm. “It’s just a park,” he said. “It’s not what you’re looking for—trust me!” The two bikes wobbled toward and then away from each other and then steadied. Henry didn’t try to get off again. “Be careful,” Mike called out to Ryan as he sped ahead. “With him on your bike, they won’t see you either!”

  “Nobody touches me!” Ryan shouted back. He darted through the traffic and swerved on and off the sidewalk, passing so close to some of the pedestrians that Henry brushed them with his shoulder. He hung on tight to Ryan’s waist and pushed his face into his back to keep his head steady, because his neck was starting to feel too long and his head too wobbly, and because he had started to pay more attention to the people they passed. They were all starting to look very strange—they looked wrong, even monstrous, though he wasn’t sure why, and he didn’t want to see them. And he liked holding on to Ryan. He liked the smell of his shirt and the way the round bones in his neck felt when he pressed his nose against them. It reminded him of something.

  They skidded to a stop outside the house. Henry might have fallen over if Mike hadn’t leaped off his bicycle, letting it clatter to the ground, to catch him. He set Henry on his feet and said, “Steady there. You’ve still got too much of their stuff
on you. You’ll feel better after your bath!” He walked behind Henry, steadying him with his hands on his shoulders, pushing him when he slowed and bearing him up when he stumbled. Instead of climbing the steps to the front door of the house, they passed through a silver gate set in the wall underneath and to the left of the door, down a dark, damp hallway. A set of stairs at the end of the hallway led up into a square courtyard garden surrounded by high porches on three sides and a high wall on the fourth.

  The porches were full of boys, all of them older than Henry, but none by more than a few years. More came out of the house as he watched, climbing out windows or jumping through doors. He looked from face to face to face, and they all started shouting down to him at once, but Mike cut them off.

  “There’ll be time enough for introductions, boys! Right now he needs his bath!” He marched Henry toward a gazebo in a far corner of the garden, covered in thick dead vines that nearly hid the hot tub inside. The boys poured down the porch steps—the ones on the lowest porch jumped—and crowded around him, hands reaching to grab at his too-small pajamas and pull them off. They pulled hard, and tore the fabric, but Henry didn’t protest. “Hey, boss,” Ryan said. “He’s got something in his hand.” He held up Henry’s left hand, which was clenched in a tight fist, for everyone to see. Henry hadn’t really been conscious of having his hand in a fist, and he didn’t know what might be in there. Ryan didn’t ask him to open his hand, but peeled his fingers up one by one to reveal a silver and brown acorn sitting in the middle of Henry’s palm. He had been holding it so tightly it left a deep round impression in his skin.

  The boys took a collective step away when they saw the acorn. “They don’t let nothing go,” said a boy with long blond hair. “How’d he get that?”

  “Time for questions later,” said Mike. He plucked the acorn from Henry’s hand and put it in his pocket, then took off his shirt before he picked Henry up and dropped him into the hot tub. The water was cold and very dirty, covered with leaves and a thick layer of brown scum. It stank like moss and mildew. When Henry stood up, Mike grabbed him with his big hairy hands. “Welcome to the real world!” he said, while Henry gasped at the cold. Ryan was holding up a hefty bar of white soap, which Mike seemed to pray over a moment before Ryan threw it in the water. Then Mike held Henry still while the boys, now all shirtless as well, leaned over and started to soap him up. “Don’t miss an inch, boys!” Mike said, and they didn’t. They stuck soapy fingers in his ears to wash there, and turned him on his head to wash his bottom, and they paid special attention to the spaces between his toes. They washed him four times before Mike pronounced him sufficiently clean.

  Mike dipped a finger in the water and tasted it. “Oh, that’s spicy!” he said. “How long were you under that hill, anyway?” Henry only stared at him. The bath had made him feel very strange, nervous and sleepy and hungry and nauseated, and the fact of his name weighed on him very heavily all of a sudden.

  “My name is Henry,” he said, as if saying it might lighten the load of it, and he started to cry.

  “Michael is my name,” said Mike, smiling but making no move to comfort him.

  “Ryan,” said Ryan.

  “Peaches,” said the boy with the long blond hair, and then the others said their names, striking their chests and smiling warmly, though still no one moved to touch him where he was shivering amid the piles of brown foam heaped up on the surface of the water. “Greg,” “Jeff,” “Miles,” “Jim,” “Mateo,” “Alan,” “Eric,” “Niall,” “Mark.”

  “Peaches?” Henry said, because somehow that funny name was the only thing that seemed curious or out of place just then. Peaches scowled. “Can we drink the water now?” he asked, pulling out a ladle from his pants.

  “Carefully, Bubba,” Mike said. “He’s made a potent brew.”

  “Wait!” said Ryan. “I have an idea.” He leaned over to Mike and whispered something to him that made him throw back his head and laugh. When Mike shared the idea with the rest of them, and they passed the acorn around from hand to hand, everyone but Peaches voted to do it.

  “But I want a drink,” Peaches said. “I want to get drunk. I want to fly!”

  “Then be a bird,” Mike said, flipping the acorn off his thumb and catching it in his mouth. He spat it into his palm. “But you can still have the dregs.” Some of the boys ran off to fetch buckets, while the others ran to the middle of the garden, where they fell on their knees and began to turn up the earth with their hands. Ryan cupped some water in his two hands, and Mike dropped the acorn into the water Ryan held, and then Ryan ran madly to the hole in the ground, launching himself the last few feet to reach it before the water ran out from between his fingers. He dropped the acorn in the hole, and they all cheered. The boys with the buckets started dipping water out of the tub and taking it to the hole, which shortly was covered over. Mike kicked off his shoes and stamped down on it.

  Still naked and shivering, Henry watched as they took the water, by bucket and glass, from the tub to the middle of the garden, which was getting to be more and more of a muddy mess. Only when the water had fallen below Henry’s ankles did Mike seem to remember him. He lifted Henry out and wrapped him in a thick, dirty towel that smelled worse than the water had and gave him a long hug. “It’s worse than you think, Bubba,” he said, wiping at Henry’s tears with the edge of the towel. Peaches slipped past them to get into the tub and started to lap and suck at the shallow remnant of water that was left. All the other boys were wrestling in the mud and laughing raucously.

  “Everyone falls asleep after their bath,” Mike said. “Why are you still awake? Is there something different about you, Bubba? Is that why they gave you a souvenir, while the rest of us only ever got dirty feet and a handful of dust?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Henry said, but the words brought an image to his head, the black puppy trotting up to him with the acorn held carefully between his oversize, unpuppyish teeth.

  “We’re going to have a party!” Mike said. “We always do, whenever my elbow itches in a special way and a new boy comes out from under the hill. Pity he can never attend, what with the sleepiness and all. But we lay him down, and dance around him, and wish him well, and we don’t talk about the bad news. The abundance of bad news! The bushels and bushels of bad news! That can wait till tomorrow. Are you feeling sleepy, Bubba?”

  “No,” Henry said, but really his lids felt very heavy. He didn’t want to close them—he was sure he was going to miss something terribly important if he did—but he couldn’t help it. Just before he did close his eyes he thought he saw Peaches float feet-first out of the hot tub. “Boss!” he said. “Look at me!” And Mike replied, “Flying like that is vulgar!” Henry fell forward into Mike’s arms. Turning his head as he fell, he was sure he saw muddy animals sporting where the boys had been before, dogs and cats and raccoons and a beaver and possibly an alligator. Then his face was pressed against Mike’s hairy chest, and Mike’s arms had closed around him, and all Henry could think about was how nice it was to get a hug.

  “It’s all right, Bubba,” Mike said. “Go to sleep now. You’re home.”

  “I have served my Lord one thousand years tonight,” the dog said, “and he has made me a gift of you. Come away with me.” It sounded like both a question and a command; Henry found himself sitting up in bed without quite having wanted to. Suddenly he knew he wasn’t dreaming, and he wasn’t scared, though he thought that he should be. He looked over at his parents, sound asleep on the other bed in their hotel room. They’ d come up from Carmel for a visit in the city.

  “Never mind them,” said the dog. “Already I love you more than they love you, and I will only love you more and more as the hours and days and weeks and months and years and decades and centuries pass and pass until I stop them.” He slapped his paw on the ground but smiled very gently. “Come away, my new friend. Come away.”

  “I’ ll get in trouble,” Henry said. His parents were both snorin
g soundly.

  “Come away with me, my puppy,” the dog said. “What’s here for you but trouble and grief? I’ll make you king of those. Come on. Take my collar. Come away.”

  Henry looked at his parents again. “Just for a little while,” he said.

  “Forever,” the dog said, but Henry went with him anyway.

  “You are a changeling,” Mike said to Henry. “They stole you from your parents, and kept you as a toy, and thrust you out when they tired of you. You’re supposed to forget about it. That’s what passes for mercy with them; they put you back into a world where you don’t belong anymore, because of what they did to you, because of what they showed you, and then they make it so you can’t remember why you don’t belong. Ha!”

  They were standing in the garden, on either side of the tiny silver sapling that had sprung up where the acorn had been planted the night before. Henry had woken in a giant bed full of muddy boys, some curled like dogs, others stretched out in any direction with their head or feet resting on or against Mike’s gigantic bulk. Henry had been the first to wake, but he stayed where he was, listening to Mike’s rumbling snores, until the boys began to stir, all at once, as if they were sharing the same troubling dream. Together they began to wake, one of them opening an eye on one side of the bed and then another opening one on the other side of the bed, until, eyes wide open, they all sat up at once and stared at Henry.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “The lesson of this house,” Mike said to him in front of the tree, “is that forgetting is perilous. We who live here never forget what happened under the hill, though we don’t entirely remember, either; nobody has the specifics, you see. But now look what you’ve brought us—a reminder!”