Starwater Strains

by Gene Wolfe

  And when he had insisted he would be fine on the couch, and eaten two pieces of cold chicken and drunk a glass of milk, and told her a careful mixture of truth and lies, he was able to get her to go up to bed, and opened the drapes.

  He waited after that, sitting silent in the dark room, staring out the picture window at the dark street outside and thinking until he had heard the water turned off in the upstairs bathroom and the shutting of their bedroom door. A dozen bruises complained when he stood up, but his right arm, which had begun to throb, throbbed no worse.

  “Daddy?”

  Rusty was at the top of the stairs in his pajamas, his hair tousled.

  “Was it really a bear, Daddy?”

  For a second or two he debated, telling himself with perfect truth that Rusty was only a little kid. “Come on down, sport. We don’t want to wake up Mom.”

  Rusty came down with alacrity.

  “There really was a bear,” his father told him. “But I’m not so sure it was a regular bear.” Bending stiffly, he picked up the blue plastic bag the hospital had given him, feeling the paw stir inside.

  “Mamma believed you about the car wreck.”

  He nodded, mostly to himself. “But not about the bear.”

  Rusty shook his head.

  “I didn’t tell her everything, either. Just a little bit. I tried to get her to believe it.”

  “Did you kill the bear, Dad?”

  “No.” He started for the family room, limping but trying not to. “There were a couple of times when I thought I had, but I didn’t. You know my big arrows?”

  “Sure.”

  “I shot it good with two of those, and I figured it was dead. It should’ve been.” He handed Rusty the blue bag and fished his keys from his left pants pocket with his left hand. “It broke one of those arrows and threw the halves away. The kind of thing a man might do, mad because he’d got hurt.”

  “Was it big?”

  He considered. “Yeah. Real big. Four or five hundred pounds, I guess. I took five arrows this morning, sport.”

  “Sure.”

  “There’s no use carrying more than you need, and the bow license only lets you take one deer. If I missed a couple of shots, I’d still have three. So after it got my bow, I was thinking it only had three, and it shot three at me. One got my arm.”

  He pointed to the sling, and Rusty nodded, eyes wide. “But there’s one more, the one I shot into it that it didn’t break. I don’t think it can use it now.” He opened his gun cabinet. “The rifle would be better,” he told Rusty, “but I can’t on account of my arm.”

  The Redhawk was in its holster, and the holster on his gun belt, hanging from a hook. “You’re going to have to help me get this thing on. Grab the other end.”

  Rusty did, and his father stepped into the belt, wrapping the buckle end around him, then turning until the tongue reached the buckle. “You know how these work. Think you can fasten it for me?”

  Rusty thrust the tongue into the buckle and pulled back on it. “Tighter,” his father said.

  When it was fastened to his satisfaction, he drew the Redhawk and pushed the cylinder catch. “Six,” he told Rusty. “Six forty-four magnums. I hope that’ll do it.”

  “Sure, Dad.”

  “I hit it with the van.” He snapped the cylinder back into the frame and reholstered the gun. “That was the second time I thought I’d got it. It dented in the right side of the van some and busted a headlight, but it wasn’t hurt so bad that it couldn’t grab on to something and ride along with me. I’m pretty sure that’s what it must have done, because when that car hit me it was right there. It can move pretty fast, if you ask me, but not that fast.”

  “Is that when you got hurt, Daddy? When the car hit you?”

  “Uh-huh. That and the arrow. The arrow first. But it got hurt, too. It went for me, and I was so scared I ran right out onto the highway without looking. You mustn’t ever do that, Rusty.”

  “All right.”

  “I guess it didn’t look, either. Anyway, a big truck hit it, an eighteen-wheeler. It messed it up pretty bad. Smashed the head flat. You ever see a cat or a squirrel that’s been run over and flattened out like that?”

  “Sure.”

  “That’s what it looked like, and I thought it was dead. I’d wanted the head, but the head was a mess, and I hadn’t killed it anyhow. What did you do with that bag I gave you?”

  “On the chair.” Rusty turned to get it. “It’s gone.”

  “Yeah, I thought I heard it slide off a minute ago. You look in the living room, I’ll look in the kitchen.”

  After half a minute Rusty joined him there, holding up the blue hospital bag in triumph. “Is it a snake? I can feel it moving around.”

  His father shook his head. “It’s one paw. I don’t even know which one.” He paused, considering. “The left front. I know it was a front paw, anyhow. I cut it off. Somebody that had a car phone stopped and said he’d called for an ambulance. Think you can untie that?”

  Rusty studied the knot in the top of the bag dubiously. “I’ll try.”

  “It’s pretty tight. I got a nurse to tie it for me, but then I held the end in my teeth and tightened it up as much as I could. Where was it when you found it?”

  “Over in front of the door. I don’t think it could get it open.”

  “After it tore through the bag, maybe. The man with the phone went over to see about the lady in the other car. She was hurt worse than I was, and while we were waiting for the ambulance I cut it off. I wanted something to show you and your mom.”

  Rusty’s small fingers were picking at the knot. “You didn’t, did you? Maybe she would’ve believed you.”

  “It had been wearing a sort of a belt over one shoulder. It was gray, and when I’d seen it before I thought it was a scar. I took it, but it was all messed up and I threw it away. Then I cut off that paw. It was real quiet till we got to the hospital. That was when I found out it was still alive and started to figure things out. They gave me that bag to put it in, and sewed up my arm and took care of some other stuff.”

  “I got it.” Rusty looked into the bag. “It smells like Clorox.”

  “Dump it out on the floor,” his father told him, and when Rusty hesitated, reached into the bag and took out the paw.

  “Three toes.” Rusty regarded the massively clawed digits with awe. “Don’t bears got four like a dog?”

  “Maybe it lost one in a trap.” His father tossed the paw onto the floor between them. “Watch it.”

  For a minute or more it lay motionless.

  “It was wiggling before,” Rusty said.

  “It’s scared. You hit it or drop it or anything, and it keeps quiet awhile. I think it’s hoping you’ll figure it’s dead.”

  “Can it hear us?” Rusty whispered.

  “I don’t think so.”

  As he spoke, one thick claw scrabbled the tiles and found a hold in the grout. The paw inched forward.

  “It’ll go a lot faster in a minute. It’s waiting to see if we saw it move.”

  Rusty knelt beside the paw.

  “Don’t touch it.”

  The paw inched forward again, this time with all three claws scrabbling for purchase. “It’s got my bow and that last arrow,” his father said. “I figure it must have broken the first one, then it got the idea of using them.”

  As he spoke, the paw raised itself, running on the tips of its claws like a crippled spider.

  They followed it to the living room, where he picked it up and returned it to the bag. “Tie this for me, will you, sport?”

  “Sure. It’s trying to get back to the bear, isn’t it, Daddy? Only the bear’s dead.”

  “I don’t know. I thought it was dead when I shot it, and then when I ran over it.” He sighed. “I was wrong both times, so this time I’m not going to count on anything. It can only fix itself so much, though. There’s limits to everything.”

  Rusty nodded, his fingers busy with the bag. />
  “We can fix ourselves too. My arm’ll heal, and I’ll be able to go back to work. But if you cut me up enough like that, if you did it over and over, I’d die.”

  “You said the head was all mashed up.”

  “Yeah. That’s going to take it a long time, this time, I think. That gave me time to get to the hospital and call Dean to come and get me there—all the things I did. It may not even start trying to put itself back together until the traffic on the highway lets up. That would be after one o’clock, I guess.”

  “Only the paw knows where it is?” Rusty put the blue bag down hurriedly. “It keeps trying to go there?”

  His father nodded. “That’s what I think, and it must know where the paw is, too. It’ll come and try and get it back, and I think try and kill me like it did before. If it isn’t till daylight, it won’t get very far. Somebody’ll see it and call the police. But if it does it at night, it might get all the way here. You go up to bed now.”

  Rusty gulped. “Daddy … ?”

  “I wasn’t going to tell you anything, and maybe I shouldn’t have. But maybe something like this will happen again after I’m gone, and it’ll be good if somebody knows. Don’t you forget.”

  “Are you going to shoot it?” Rusty ventured.

  His father nodded. “That’ll stop it awhile, I figure. A forty-four magnum does a whole lot of damage, and I’ve got six, and twelve more in the belt loops. I’ll cut it up then, and burn the pieces in the barbecue out back. If you hear shooting, don’t let Mom come downstairs. Tell her I said.”

  Rusty nodded solemnly.

  “Or call nine-one-one or anything. Now go to bed.”

  “Daddy—”

  “Go to bed, Rusty.” Rusty’s father pointed sternly with his good arm. “Go up to your room and get in bed. Go to sleep. I’ve got to make coffee.”

  When the coffee was on, he turned out the lights and sat down on the couch again. It might be better to meet it outside, he told himself; but it might be worse, too. After a while he would get up and go out and walk around the house. It would keep him awake, anyway.

  They’d want a kennel for Rusty’s bird dog, and he could decide where to put it.

  Thinking about bird dogs and kennels, and how kennels might be built, he stared out the picture window, waiting in his blind for a shambling figure that had not yet appeared.

  Game in the Pope’s Head

  “A sergeant was sent to the Pope’s Head to investigate the case.”

  —FROM THE LONDON TIMES’S COVERAGE OF THE MURDER OF ANNE CHAPMAN, SEPTEMBER 11, 1888.

  Bev got up to water her plant. Edgar said, “You’re overwatering that. Look how yellow the leaves are.” They were indeed. The plant had extended its long, limp limbs over the pictures and the sofa, and out through the broken window; but the weeping flukes of these astonishing terminations were sallow and jaundiced.

  “It needs water.” Bev dumped her glass into the flowerpot, got a fresh drink, and sat down again. “My play?” She turned up a card. “The next card is ‘What motion picture used the greatest number of living actors, animal or human?’”

  Edgar said, “I think I know. Gandhi. Half a million or so.”

  “Wrong. Debbie?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

  “Wrong. Randy?”

  It was a moment before he realized that she meant him. So that was his name: Randy. Yes, of course. He said, “Animal or human?”

  “Right.”

  “Then it’s animals, because they don’t get paid.” He tried to think of animal movies, Bert Lahr terrified of Toto, Lassie Come Home. “The Birds?”

  “Close. It was The Swarm, and there were twenty-two million actors.”

  Edgar said, “Mostly bees.”

  “I suppose.”

  There was a bee, or perhaps a wasp, on the plant, nearly invisible against a yellow leaf. It did not appear to him to be exploring the surface in the usual beeish or waspish way, but rather to be listening, head raised, to their conversation. The room was bugged. He wanted to say, This room is bugged; but before he could, Bev announced, “Your move, I think, Ed.”

  Ed said, “Bishop’s pawn to the bishop’s four.”

  Debbie threw the dice and counted eight squares along the edge of the board. “Oh, good! Park Place, and I’ll buy it.” She handed him her money, and he gave her the deed.

  Bev said, “Your turn.”

  He nodded, stuffed Debbie’s money into his pocket, shuffled the cards, and read the top one.

  You are Randolph Carter. Three times you have dreamed of the marvelous city, Randoph Carter, and three times you have been snatched away from the high terrace above it.

  Randolph Carter nodded again and put the card down. Debbie handed him a small pewter figure, a young man in old-fashioned clothes.

  Bev asked, “Where did the fictional American philosopher Thomas Olney teach? Ed?”

  “A fictional philosopher? Harvard, I suppose. Is it John Updike?”

  “Wrong. Debbie?”

  “Pass.”

  “Okay. Randy?”

  “London.”

  Outside, a cloud covered the sun. The room grew darker as the light from the broken windows diminished.

  Edgar said, “Good shot. Is he right, Bev?”

  The bee, or wasp, rose from its leaf and buzzed around Edgar’s bald head. He slapped at it, missing it by a fraction of an inch. “There’s a fly in here!”

  “Not now. I think it went out the window.”

  It had indeed been a fly, he saw, and not a bee or wasp at all—a bluebottle, no doubt gorged with carrion.

  Bev said, “Kingsport, Massachusetts.”

  With an ivory hand, Edgar moved an ivory chessman. “Knight to the king’s three.”

  Debbie tossed her dice onto the board. “Chance.”

  He picked up the card for her.

  You must descend the seven hundred steps to the Gate of Deeper Slumber. You may enter the Enchanted Wood or claim the sword Sacnoth. Which do you choose?

  Debbie said, “I take the Enchanted Wood. That leaves you the sword, Randy.”

  Bev handed it to him. It was a falchion, he decided, curved and single-edged. After testing the edge with his finger, he laid it in his lap. It was not nearly as large as a real sword—less than sixteen inches long, he decided, including the hardwood handle.

  “Your turn, Randy.”

  He discovered that he disliked Bev nearly as much as Debbie, hated her bleached blond hair, her scrawny neck. She and her dying plant were twins, one vegetable, one inhuman. He had not known that before.

  She said, “It’s the wheel of Fortune,” as though he were stupid. He flicked the spinner.

  “Unlawful evil.”

  Bev said, “Right,” and picked up a card. “What do the following have in common: Pogo the Clown, H. H. Holmes, and Saucy Jacky?”

  Edgar said, “That’s an easy one. They’re all pseudonyms of mass murderers.”

  “Right. For an extra point, name the murderers.”

  “Gacy, Mudgett, and … that’s not fair. No one knows who the Ripper was.”

  But he did: just another guy, a guy like anybody else.

  Debbie tossed her dice. “Whitechapel. I’ll buy it. Give me the card, honey.”

  He picked up the deed and studied it. “Low rents.”

  Edgar chuckled. “And seldom paid.”

  “I know,” Debbie told them, “but I want it, with lots of houses.” He handed her the card, and she gave him the dice.

  For a moment he rattled them in his hand, trying to imagine himself the little pewter man. It was no use; there was nothing of bright metal about him or his dark wool coat—only the edge of the knife. “Seven-come-eleven,” he said, and threw.

  “You got it,” Debbie told him. “Seven. Shall I move it for you?”

  “No,” he said. He picked up the little pewter figure and walked past Holborn, the Temple (cavern-temple of Nasht and Kaman-Thah), a
nd Lincolns Inn Fields, along Cornhill and Leadenhall Streets to Aldgate High Street, and so at last to Whitechapel.

  Bev said, “You saw him coming, Deb,” but her voice was very far away, far above the the leaden (hall) clouds, filthy with coal smoke, that hung over the city. Wagons and hansom cabs rattled by. There was a public house at the corner of Brick Lane. He turned and went in.

  The barmaid handed him his large gin. The barmaid had Debbie’s dark hair, Debbie’s dark good looks. When he had paid her, she left the bar and took a seat at one of the tables. Two others sat there already, and there were cards and dice, money and drinks before them. “Sit down,” she said, and he sat.

  The blonde turned over a card, the jack of spades. “What are the spades in a deck of cards?” she asked.

  “Swords,” he said. “From the Spanish word for a sword, espada. The jack . of spades is really the jack of swords.”

  “Correct.”

  The other man said, “Knight to the White Chapel.”

  The door opened, letting in the evening with a wisp of fog, and the black knight. She was tall and slender and dressed like a cavalryman, in high boots and riding breeches. A pewter miniature of a knight’s shield was pinned to her dark shirt.

  The barmaid rattled the dice and threw.

  “You’re still alive,” the black knight said. She strode to their table. Sergeant’s chevrons had been sewn to the sleeves of the shirt. “This neighborhood is being evacuated, folks.”

  “Not by us,” the other man said.

  “By you now, sir. On my orders. As an officer of the law, I must order you to leave. There’s a tank car derailed, leaking some kind of gas.”

  “That’s fog,” Randolph Carter told her. “Fog and smoke.”

  “Not just fog. I’m sorry, sir, but I must ask all of you to go. How long have you been here?”

  “Sixteen years,” the blond woman said. “The neighborhood was a lot nicer when we came.”

  “It’s some sort of chemical weapon, like LSD.”

  He asked, “Don’t you want to sit down?” He stood, offering her his chair.