by Neil Gaiman
“I was wrong. William Harrow lived in a raised ranch set back about fifty yards from the road, at the top of a slight hill. Ten feet into his lawn, there was a cage, a wood frame walled and ceilinged with heavy wire mesh. It was maybe six feet high by twelve feet long by six feet deep. There was a large dog house at one end with a food and water dish beside it. The whole thing…everything was brand new. The serial numbers stenciled on the wood beams were dark and distinct; the mesh was bright; the dog house—the dog house was made out of some kind of heavy plastic, and it was shiny. Lying half-in the dog house was Bruce, who, when he heard us pull up, raised his head, then the rest of himself, and trotted over to the side of the cage, his tongue hanging out, his tail wagging.
“Heather and Matt were desperate to rush out of the car, but none of us could avoid the signs, also new, that lined the edge of the property: NO TRESPASSING, day-glo orange on a black background. Matt was all for ignoring them, a sentiment for which Heather had not a little sympathy. But—and I tried to explain this to the two of them—if we were going to have any hope of freeing Bruce, we had to be above reproach. If there were a record of Harrow having called the police on us, it would make our reporting him to the cops appear so much payback. Neither of them was happy, but they had to agree, what I was saying made sense.
“All the same, the second we were back home, Heather had the phone in her hand. The cop she talked to was pretty agreeable, although she cautioned Heather that as long as the dog wasn’t being obviously maltreated, there wasn’t anything that could be done. The cop agreed to drive along Farrell the next time she was on patrol, and Heather thanked her for the offer. When she hung up the phone, though, her face showed how satisfied she was with our local law enforcement.”
Beyond the house, the scene at the Empire State Plaza had faded to pale light. Finished checking the carrots and potatoes, Ransom crossed to the gate. The crab backed up to allow him to unlatch and swing it in. As the crab hurried out, he gave the garden a final look over, searching for anything he might have missed. Although he did not linger on the apple trees, they appeared quiet.
On the way back around the yard, the crab kept pace with him. Ransom said, “For the next month, Heather walked to Farrell Drive once a day, twice when she was well enough. During that time, Bruce did not leave his cage. Sometimes, she would find him racing around the place, growling. Other times, he would be leaping up against one wall of the pen and using it to flip himself over. As often as not, he would be lying half-in the doghouse, his head on his paws. That she could tell—and believe you me, she studied that dog, his cage, as if his life depended on it (which, as far as she was concerned, it did)—Harrow kept the pen tidy and Bruce’s dishes full. While she was careful not to set foot on the property, she stood beside it for half an hour, forty-five minutes, an hour. One afternoon, she left our house after lunch and did not return till dinner. When Bruce heard her footsteps, he would stop whatever he was doing, run to the nearest corner of the cage, and stand there wagging his tail. He would voice a series of low barks that Heather said sounded as if he were telling her something, updating the situation. No change. Still here.
“She saw Harrow only once. It was during the third-to-last visit she made to Bruce. After a few minutes of standing at the edge of the road, talking to the dog, she noticed a figure in the ranch’s doorway. She tensed, ready for him to storm out to her, but he remained where he was. So did Heather. If this guy thought he could scare her, he had another thing coming. Although she wasn’t feeling well, she maintained her post for an hour, as did Harrow. When she turned home, he didn’t move. The strange thing was, she said to me that night, that the look on his face—granted, he wasn’t exactly close to her, and she hadn’t wanted him to catch her staring at him, but she was pretty sure he’d looked profoundly unhappy.”
The crab scrambled up the stairs to the porch. His foot on the lowest step, Ransom paused. “Then Heather was back in the hospital, and Matt and I had other things on our minds beside Bruce. Afterwards…not long, actually, I think it was the day before the funeral, I drove by William Harrow’s house, and there was the cage, still there, and Bruce, still in it. For a second, I was as angry as I’d ever been; I wanted nothing more than to stomp the gas to the floor and crash into that thing, and if Bruce were killed in the process, so be it. Let Harrow emerge from his house, and I would give him the beating I should have that September morning.
“I didn’t, though. The emotion passed, and I kept on driving.”
Ransom climbed the rest of the stairs. At the top, he said, “Matt used to say to me, Who wants to stay in the shallows their whole life? It was his little dig at his mother and me, at the life we’d chosen. Most of the time, I left his question rhetorical, but when he asked it that afternoon, I answered him; I said, There are sharks in the shallows, too. He didn’t know what to make of that. Neither did I.” Ransom went to say something more, hesitated, decided against it. He opened the door to the house, let the crab run in, followed. The door shut behind them with a solid thunk.
At the top of the garden, dangling from the boughs of the apple trees there, the fruit that had ripened into a score, two, of red replicas of Matt’s face, his eyes squeezed shut, his mouth stretched in a scream of unbearable pain, swung in a sudden breeze.
For Fiona
∇
The Men from Porlock
Laird Barron
September, 1923
Darkness lay stone heavy as men roused, drawn from inner night by the tidal pull of blood, the weight of bones sagging outward through their flesh. Floorboards groaned beneath the men who shuffled and stamped like dray horses in the gloom of the bunkhouse. Star glow came through chinks in slat siding. Someone had lighted the stove and smoke drifted among the bunks, up to the rafters. It had rained during the night and the air was ghastly damp. Expelled breath gathered on the beams and dripped steadily; condensation oozing as from stalactites of a limestone cave. The hall reeked with the stench of a bunker: creosote and sweat, flatulence and rotten teeth and the bitter tang of ashes and singed tobacco.
Miller hunched nearly double at the long, rough-hewn pine table and ate lumpy dick and molasses for breakfast. He scooped it with a tin spoon from a tin pan blackened and scarred from a thousand fires and the abuses of a thousand spoons. When he’d done, he wiped his mustache on the sleeve of his long johns and drank black coffee from a tin cup, the last element of his rural dining set.
His hands were dirty and horned with calluses from Swede saw and felling axe. He’d broken them a few times over the years and his knuckles were swollen as walnuts. He couldn’t make a tight fist with the left hand; most mornings his fingers froze into a crab claw barely fit to manage his Willie, much less hook an axe handle. At least he was young—most of the old timers were missing fingers, or had been busted up in a hundred brutal ways—from accidents to fistfights to year after year of the slow, deadly attrition from each swing of mattock or axe. Olsen the Swede (first among the many Swedes west of the Rockies) got his leg shattered by a chain as a kid and hopped around the camp with his broadhead axe for a crutch. His archrival Sven the Norwegian (first among innumerable logger Norwegians south of Norway) lost his teeth and an ear while setting chokers back in the Old World—setting chokers was dog’s work no matter what country. Even Manfred the German, known and admired for his quick reflexes, had once been tagged by an errant branch; his skull was soft in places and hairless as if he’d survived a fire, and one eye drooped much lower than the other. Lately Manny had climbed the ladder to donkey puncher. A man wasn’t likely to be injured while running a donkey; if anything went wrong he’d be mangled, mutilated and killed with a minimum of suffering.
One of the Poles, a rangy, affable fellow named Kasper, frequently asked Miller if he planned to get out before he got his head lopped off, or his legs snapped, or was cut in half by a whip-cracking choker cable, or ended up with a knife stuck in his ribs during a saloon brawl. Perhaps Miller was as pigheaded as m
ost men his age and addicted to the security of quick money in a trade few wanted and fewer escaped?
As for himself, Kasper claimed to be cursed rather than stubborn—madness ran through his blood and yoked him to cruel labor, the wages of sin committed by an overweening ancestor in the dim prehistory of Eastern Europe. The Pole wrote poems and stories by lamplight, although his English translations were so poor it would’ve been difficult to know exactly how to rate his poetry. Miller wasn’t keen for the art of letters, although he possessed a grudging admiration for those who were clever with words. His own grandmother had studied overseas as a girl. After she shipped back to the U.S., she kept her diaries in Latin to confound nosy relatives. She showed them to Miller when he visited her home in Illinois—grandma filled up seventy-five of the slim, clothbound tomes, a minor library.
Today, Kasper sat on the long form far from Miller, another bleary shade among jostling elbows and grinding jaws. Miller was fine with that arrangement—all day yesterday the Pole worked with him on an eight-foot saw, a misery whip, to take down an old monster cedar. He knew, as did everyone else, Miller was among the loose contingent of veterans inhabiting Slango Camp.
The Pole confided: My oldest brother was shot by a sniper along the Rheine. He was killed with one of those fucking German “mousers”—the big rifles they shoot with. Our family lives in Warszawa and only found out what happened because one of my brother’s comrades was with him when it happened and relayed the bad news and mailed home his personal effects. The Legiony sent my brother home in a simple box. I guess there was some confusion at the train depot because so many plain wooden boxes filled up the freight cars and the boxes had serial numbers instead of names. The people in charge of these things mixed up the manifest lists, so my family and the other families had to pry apart the boxes to figure out who was inside each one. They didn’t send an official death notice until several weeks after the funeral, which I could not attend. I could not afford to travel home for a funeral. My little sister and cousin died last year. Cholera. It is very bad back home, the cholera. I couldn’t go to her funeral, either. They buried her in our village. My brother was buried in another village because that is where my father’s people come from. All the men in our family are buried there. Probably not me, that would be too expensive, but my other brothers, certainly. None of them are interested in coming to America. They are happy in Polska.
This monologue had come at Miller over the course of many hours and became intelligible to his ear only after the third or fourth cycle. He grunted nominal responses where necessary. Finally, after they toppled the tree and prepared to call it a day, he effectively ended the conversation by unplugging his canteen and dumping its contents over his head until steam lifted from him. He’d looked the Pole in the eye and said, At least they found enough of him to pack in a box. That’s a pretty good deal if you think about it.
Slango was small as camps went—two bunkhouses, the filing house, courtesy car, company store, a couple of storage sheds; no electricity, no indoor plumbing, nothing fancy. Bullhead & Co. played fast and loose, a shoestring operation one or two notches above a gyppo outfit. The owner and his partners ran the offices from distant Seattle and Olympia and rumor had it they’d eventually be swallowed up by Weyerhaeuser or another giant.
According to some, Bullhead himself visited once the prior year and stayed for several days in the Superintendent’s car on the company engine, John Henry. This surprised Miller; Slango Camp lay entrenched in the rugged foothills of Mystery Mountain, a heavily forested region of the Olympic Range. The camp was a good sixteen miles from the main rail line, and from there another eighteen miles from the landing at Bridgewater Junction. The spur to Slango Camp plunged through a temperate jungle of junk hemlock, poplar and skinny evergreens, peckerwood, so-called, and nearly impassable underbrush—seas of devil’s club, blackberry brambles, and alder. The loggers spanned the many gullies and ravines with hastily chopped junk trees to support rickety track. It seemed improbable anybody, much less a suit, would visit such a Godforsaken place unless they had no other choice.
Miller stowed his kit and dressed in his boots and suspenders and heavy jacket. The initial sullen mutters of exhausted men coalesced and solidified around him and evolved into crude, jocular banter fueled by food and coffee and the fierce comradery of doomed souls. He’d seen it in the trenches in France between thudding barrages of artillery, the intermittent assaults by German infantry who stormed in with their stick grenades and “mousers” as Kasper said, and finally, hand to hand, belly to belly in the sanguine mud of shoulder-width tunnel walls, their bayonets and knives. He seldom made sense of those days—the mortar roars, the fumaroles from incendiary starbursts boiling across the divide, eating the world; the frantic bleats of terrorized animals, and boys in their muddy uniforms, their blackened helmets like butcher’s pots upended to keep the brains in until the red, shearing moment came to let them out.
He went into the cold and wet. Light filtered through the trees. Mist seeped from the black earth and coiled in screens of brush and branches and hung in tatters like remnant vapors of dry ice. Men drifted, their chambray coats and wool sock hats dark blobs in the gathering white. Even as he shivered off that first clammy embrace of morning fog, mauls began to smash spikes and staples into the planed logs laid alongside the edges of the camp. Axes clanged from the depths of the forest, ringing from metal-tough bark. The bull gang paid cables from the iron bulk of the donkey engine. The boys shackled the cable to the harnesses of a six oxen team and drove them, yipping and hollering, into the mist that swallowed the skidder trail—a passage of corduroy spearing straight through the peckerwood and underbrush, steadily ascending the mountain flank where the big timber lay ripe for the slaughter.
“Miller!” McGrath the straw boss gestured to him from the lee of the company store. McGrath was one of the old boys who haunted logging camps everywhere—sinewy and grizzled and generally humorless; sharp-eyed as a blackbird and possessed of the false merriment of one as well. He was Superintendent Barrett’s foreman, the voice and the fist of his authority. Plug tobacco stained the corners of his mouth. Veins made ridges and valleys in his forehead and neck and the backs of his leathery hands. A lot of the men regarded him with antipathy, if not naked hatred. But that was the compact between peasants and overseers since the raising of the Pyramids.
Miller acknowledged the dynamic and accepted the state of things with equanimity. He actually felt a bit sorry for the boss, saw in the scarred and taciturn and blustering foreman the green youth who’d been ragged raw and harrowed by the elders of his day, exactly the same as every other wet-behind-the-ears kid, discerned that those scars had burrowed in deeper than most would ever know.
“Miller, boy!”
“Yes, sir.”
“Been here, what—two weeks?”
“I guess that’s right, sir.” Really it was closer to six weeks since he’d signed on in Bridgewater and road the train to Slango with a half dozen other new hands.
“Huh. Two whole weeks and we ain’t had us a jaw. I guess we jawin’ now. You a good shot, boy?”
“I dunno about that, sir.”
McGrath grinned to spit chaw and rubbed his mouth. “You was a rifleman in the Army, wasn’t you? A sniper? That’s what I hear. You a real keener.”
“Yes sir.” Miller looked at his feet. One of the men, probably Rex or Hagen, had talked. A group of them went hunting white tails a couple of Sundays back. They’d been skunked all day and taken to passing around one of the bottles of rotgut hooch Gordy Thompson kept stashed in his footlocker, and swapping lies about the battles they’d fought and the women they’d fucked and who was the lowest of the lowdown mutts in Slango, which boiled down to McGrath or Superintendent Barret, of course, and who wouldn’t like to toe the line if it meant a shot at one of those bastards.
The party was heading toward camp to beat darkness when Rex, the barrel-chested brute from Wenatchee, proffered a drunken wager
nobody could peg a stump he marked by a pinning it with an empty cigarette pack some two hundred yards from their position. Like an idiot, Miller casually opined he could nail a stump from at least twice that distance. Everybody was three sheets to the wind; rowdy wagers were laid. Dosed on whiskey or not, Miller’s hands remained steady. He fired five rounds from the British Enfield he’d carried home from the Front, rapidly jacking the bolt action to eject each shell and chamber the next bullet—eight of ten rounds in a pattern that obliterated the illustration of a horse and carriage. Floyd Hagen covered the wreckage with a silver dollar as the men murmured and whistled amongst themselves.
“Where you from?”
“Utah.”
“You live in the hills, then? You a Mormon?”
“No sir, I’m not a Mormon. My people are Catholic.”
“Yeah? I figure everybody in Utah for a Mormon. They run the regular folks out on rails is what I hear.”
“Well, I don’t know what they do in Salt Lake, sir. We were raised Catholic. The Mormons left us alone.”
“But your people lived in the hills, din’t they?”
