Stories: All-New Tales

inert body again and again. I was outraged by the visions he’d shown me. I wanted him to take them back.

“He’s dead, man!” Lester cried and he managed to pull me back.

I was weakened by the wounds and loss of blood, but the rage still filled me.

The knife pulsed in my grip and I turned away.

“Juvenal,” Lester called.

“Not now, man,” I said. “Not now.”

I STAGGERED AWAY DOWN tunnel after tunnel, having no idea where I was going. The iron knife thrummed in my hand. It felt good. It felt diseased. It felt alive and angry, like a bumblebee clenched in your fist.

I came across an abandoned campsite in a recess in a wall. There I pulled out a soiled trench coat. I put it on to hide my bloody wounds and held the blade up in the sleeve of the coat.

I climbed up into the subway and made it to the Twenty-Eighth Street stop. I climbed out and staggered into the gathering dawn.

“Mr. Nyx,” a gruff voice, which maybe shouldn’t have spoken in words at all, called.

It was Mahey’s piggish chauffeur standing next to the cherry red limo.

He held the back door open and I didn’t have the strength to refuse.

“Hello, Mr. Nyx,” Mahey said when I fell into the seat beside her.

I didn’t respond.

“Did you find Reynard?”

“Yeah. You didn’t say what you wanted me to do, so I killed him.”

“Just so. Do you have the knife?”

It was throbbing against my forearm. I didn’t want to give it up. But those green lights would not be denied. I pulled out the blade and handed it to her. She took a plastic sheet from her skin purse and took the thing without actually touching it.

She placed the knife in the bag and gave me a smile that was supposed to be friendly. Then she produced a wad of cash and handed it to me.

“Where can I drop you, Mr. Nyx?”

I SLEPT ON MY office floor for more than sixty hours.

My small suite of offices has a bathroom with a change of clothes hanging in the closet. After two and a half days of comatose sleep, I washed off at the sink and dressed. Then I went to sit in a chair at the window and thanked the night that I was still alive.

My physical wounds were almost healed, but the memories still pained me. Reynard and I had something in common. He was a creature like me. His howls carried knowledge and his stench spoke of an alternate history to the evolutionary blunderings of known life.

And Mahey also was part of my hidden lineage. I was sure of this. And what was that black blade that she wouldn’t touch? And that eye which I imagined but am also sure of its existence?

There came a knock on the door.

I wondered for a moment if it was Tarver with his gun or maybe Mahey, or one of her henchmen, with a pulsating black knife.

A creature like Reynard would not knock.

“Who is it?”

“Eerie,” she said.

I opened the door and the woman I loved all the way down to the molecular level stood there before me dressed in yellow and white.

She looked me in the eye and I looked back.

“We have to talk,” she said.

I ushered her in.

Perched in chairs across from each other, it was the first time in months that we’d come together without a kiss.

“Yes?” I said.

“Tarver’s in a mental ward, out of his head and with his right arm completely paralyzed.”

“Uh-huh?”

“He goes in and out, but at one point he said that you did this to him.”

“Oh. Well, you see-”

“What’s going on?” Iridia asked.

“Tarver came here with a pistol,” I said.

“What?”

“He came up to me and pulled it out, but before he could shoot, the woman I was with, a client, blocked his arm. He screamed and ran away, but as far as I could see she didn’t cut him or anything.”

“But then how did he get paralyzed and crazy?”

I hesitated. Up until that moment, my identity, my abilities were secret. Secrets are like the night: they hide from sight that which we suspect and fear. But I no longer wanted to live in darkness. Iridia, the love of my being, was not someone I wanted to hide from. And even if the truth made me lose her, at least she would know me, if only for a while.

“I want to tell a story about a woman named Julia,” I said. “She named me Juvenal Nyx and made me a child of the night.”

Richard Adams. THE KNIFE

ALL THAT IS NARRATED IN THIS STORY took place in 1938.

It was not until Philip actually saw the knife lying in the bushes that his life changed its nature, as it were, from a fantasy to a frightening possibility. He stopped, turned his head for a glance and then took a couple of steps back, stared and remained staring, as though he needed to make sure that the knife was real.

Yes, it was real all right. It was the only thing for some time that had been able to break through the palisade of his dismal, all-absorbing dread.

Before that, his thoughts had been dominated by his horrible apprehension, the prospect of severe physical pain, inescapable and coming soon. It was as though his mind had been running a tape again and again. For its starting point it had Stafford’s final words to him yesterday. “So I shall see you in the library after prayers tomorrow night, and you’ve got no one to thank but yourself.” Next came Stafford’s turning away and his own imprisonment, as it were, within those words, surrounding him like the bars of a cage. And then the intervening time; and so back to Stafford’s words.

Ever since the beginning of this term and Stafford’s appointment as head prefect of the house, he had become-not only in his own eyes, but in everyone else’s-Stafford’s principal victim. “Stafford doesn’t like you, does he?” Jones had said. “And can you blame him?” added Brown, at which both of them had roared with laughter.

All through the term his offences had accumulated, earning themselves on the way a whole series of petty punishments, which had climaxed last week in his being beaten by Stafford in the house library. The pain had been severe-the worst he had ever undergone-and now it was apparently going to be repeated.

Last night he had hardly slept. He couldn’t eat breakfast and could hardly eat lunch. Jones and Brown were the only people he had told.

And now here he was, trudging though the wet woods alone on a half-holiday afternoon. And now, here was the knife. It burst in upon his thoughts, which surrendered and came to a stop.

It was very like the knives he had seen on television, the knives which scores of people had handed in to the police as the result of a public appeal.

He stooped and picked it up. It was a good foot long in its fancy sheath and it had a very sharp point. And now, straight on cue, came the fantasy.

The knife had been sent to him by a mysterious Power, and he was under orders to use it. He was always entertaining fantasies. There was no end to them: revenge fantasies, sexual fantasies, supreme-power fantasies.