The Best of Gene Wolfe

Game in the Pope’s Head

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

—From the London Times’ coverage of the murder of Annie 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, Randolph 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.”