The Best of Gene Wolfe

“I certainly am!” Santa Claus laughed again, louder than ever: “Ho, ho, ho, ho!”

“Then you’re nothing,” Sherby told him. Sherby could not talk as loud as Santa Claus did, but he talked as loud as he could. “You’re a big nothing, and I never, never want to see you anymore. House! Are you listening to me, House?”

Sherby waited for House’s reply, and all the guests were silent too. His mother and his father looked at each other, but neither spoke. Smoky nuzzled his hand.

“I’m the only one here, House! You’ve got to do what I tell you! You know you do!” Sherby looked for the butler in the crowd of guests, but could not find him. “Make them all go away. I mean it! No more promises. Make them all go away right now!”

He and Smoky stood alone in the big, dark, empty family room; the fireplace that had blazed an instant before was cold and dark.

Gradually the lights came up, so that by the time Sherby and Smoky had taken a few steps toward the door, the room was lit almost normally, though nowhere near as bright as it had been during the party.

“House, I’m hungry. I’m going to the study now, to look out. When I’m finished I want a bowl of Froot Loops. Get out the stuff.”

House’s big voice, coming from a dozen speakers in that part of the house, said, “There is no milk left, Sherby. I told you so at noon, remember?”

“What is there?”

House considered, and Sherby knew there was no point in interrupting.

“There are sardines and two slices of bread. You could make a sardine sandwich?”

“Peanut butter?”

“Yes, a little.”

“I’ll have toast and peanut butter,” Sherby decided. “Get out the peanut butter. Toast the bread and have it waiting for me when I’m through looking.”

“I will, Sherby.”

The hall was nearly dark, the study as black as pitch. House said, “If I turn on the lights, they will see you at once when I raise the security shutter, Sherby.”

“Turn on the lights now so I can get over to the window,” Sherby instructed him. “Then turn them off again. Then pull up the shutter.”

His father’s desk was still there, and the big computer console, its screen dark. Save for one large and equally dark window, books lined the walls—his grandfather’s law books, mostly; Sherby remembered his mother opening one for him to show him his grandfather’s bookplate.

“I wish that you would go back to the frozen-food locker, Sherby. That would be the safest place for you and Smoky.”

“What’s that banging the front door?”

“A log.”

The light above the desk dimmed, then winked out. Sherby flattened his nose against the chill, black thermopane of the window, and the security shutter glided smoothly up.

There were too many people to count outside, some of them so close they were nearly touching the glass. Among them were policemen and firemen, but no one paid any attention to them; when he had been looking out for perhaps half a minute, Sherby recognized one of the firemen as the fox. A man holding a big iron bar ran right through the fox toward the window, but two women stopped him and pulled him out of the way.

The window exploded inward.

Sherby found himself on the floor. The light was bright and the shutter closed again, and he lay in a litter of broken glass; his right hand was bleeding, and his head bleeding from somewhere up in his hair. He cried then for what felt to him like a very long time, listening to the bang, bang, bang from the big front door.

When he got up, he took off his pajama shirt, wiped the blood away with it, blew his nose in it, and let it fall to the floor. “Where’s Smoky?” he asked.

“In the dining room, Sherby. He is all right.”

“Is my toast ready?”

“It will be by the time that you reach the kitchen. I would not try to catch Smoky again right now, Sherby. The shots frightened him very much. He might hurt you.”

“Okay,” Sherby said.

Kneeling on a kitchen chair, he spread the last of the peanut butter on his toast. He found that he was no longer hungry, but he ate one piece anyway. Somebody banged on the security shutter of one of the kitchen windows and went away. Climbing the stairs to get to his bedroom, Sherby thought that he had seen Yeshua on the landing. Yeshua had smiled, his white teeth flashing. Then he was gone, and it seemed he had never been there at all. “Don’t do that,” Sherby told House.

House did not answer.

In his bedroom, Sherby slipped out of his pajama bottoms and pulled on underwear and long stockings, jeans, and his red sweater. He was not skillful at tying shoes, but that morning there had been green Wellingtons under the tree. Now, for the first time ever, he tugged them on; they were only a little bit too large, and they did not have laces to tie. His green knit cap kept the blood from trickling into his eyes.

“You are not to go out, Sherby.”