The Best of Gene Wolfe

The blind eyes had turned toward him when he began to speak, but they no longer watched him now. The face, which had been beautiful, was now entirely the face of a corpse. The cramped leg crept toward the floor as he watched, halted, began to creep downward again. Sighing, he lifted the dead woman off her feet, replaced her in the corner, and went down the creaking stairs to find the black-haired girl.

* * *

There has been quite a few to come after her,” her father said, “since we come into town. Quite a few.” He sat in the back of the bus, on the rearmost seat that went completely across the back like a sofa. “But you’re the first ever to find us here. The others, they hear about her, and leave a sign at the meetin’.”

Paul wanted to ask where it was such signs were left, but held his peace.

“You know there ain’t many folks at all anymore,” her father went on. “And not many of them is women. And damn few is young girls like my Janie. I had a fella here that wanted her two weeks back—he said he hadn’t had no real woman in two years; well, I didn’t like the way he said real, so I said what did he do, and he said he fooled around with what he killed, sometimes, before they got cold. You never did like that, did you?”

Paul said he had not.

“How’d you find this dump here?”

“Just look around.” He had searched the area in ever-widening circles, starting at the alley in which he had seen the girl and her father. They had one of the masters’ cold boxes to keep their ripe kills in (as he did himself), but there was the stink of clotted blood about the dump nonetheless. It was behind a high fence, closer to the park than he would have thought possible.

“When we come, there was a fella living here. Nice fella, a German. Name was Curtain—something like that. He went sweet on my Janie right off. Well, I wasn’t too taken with having a foreigner in the family, but he took us in and let us settle in the big station wagon. Told me he wanted to wed Janie, but I said no, she’s too young. Wait a year, I says, and take her with my blessing. She wasn’t but fourteen then. Well, one night the German fella went out and I guess they got him, because he never come back. We moved into this here bus then for the extra room.”

His daughter was sitting at his feet, and he reached a crooked-fingered hand down and buried it in her midnight hair. She looked up at him and smiled. “Got a pretty face, ain’t she?” he said.

Paul nodded.

“She’s a mite thin, you was going to say. Well, that’s true. I do my best to provide, but I’m feared, and not shamed to admit to it.”

“The ghost-houses,” Paul said.

“What’s that?”

“That’s what I’ve always called them. I don’t get to talk to many other people.”

“Where the doors shut on you—lock you in.”

“Yes.”

“That ain’t ghosts—now don’t you think I’m one of them fools don’t believe in them. I know better. But that ain’t ghosts. They’re always looking, don’t you see, for people they think ain’t right. That’s us. It’s electricity does it. You ever been caught like that?”

Paul nodded. He was watching the delicate swelling Janie’s breasts made in the fabric of her filthy shirt, and only half-listening to her father; but the memory penetrated the young desire that half-embarrassed him, bringing back fear. The windows of the bus had been set to black, and the light inside was dim—still it was possible some glimmer showed outside. There should be no lights in the dump. He listened, but heard only katydids singing in the rubbish.

“They thought I was a master—I dress like one,” he said. “That’s something you should do. They were going to test me. I turned the machine over and broke it, and jumped through a window.” He had been on the sixth floor, and had been saved by landing in the branches of a tree whose bruised twigs and torn leaves exuded an acrid incense that to him was the very breath of panic still; but it had not been the masters, or the instrument-filled examination room, or the jump from the window that had terrified him, but waiting in the ghost-room while the walls talked to one another in words he could sometimes, for a few seconds, nearly understand.

“It wouldn’t work for me—got too many things wrong with me. Lines in my face; even got a wart—they never do.”

“Janie could.”

The old man cleared his throat; it was a thick sound, like water in a downspout in a hard rain. “I been meaning to talk to you about her, about why those other fellas I told you about never took her—not that I’d of let some of them: Janie’s the only family I got left. But I ain’t so particular I don’t want to see her married at all—not a bit of it. Why, we wouldn’t of come here if it weren’t for Janie. When her monthly come, I said to myself, she’ll be wantin’ a man, and what’re you goin’ to do way out here? Though the country was gettin’ bad anyway, I must say. If they’d of had real dogs, I believe they would have got us several times.”

He paused, perhaps thinking of those times, the lights in the woods at night and the running, perhaps only trying to order his thoughts. Paul waited, scratching an ankle, and after a few seconds the old man said, “We didn’t want to do this, you know, us Pendeltons. That’s mine and Janie’s name—Pendelton. Janie’s Augusta Jane, and I’m Emmitt J.”

“Paul Gorou,” Paul said.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Gorou. When the time come, they took one whole side of the family. They were the Worthmore Pendeltons; that’s what we always called them, because most of them lived thereabouts. Cousins of mine they was, and second cousins. We was the Evershaw Pendeltons, and they didn’t take none of us. Bad blood, they said—too much wrong to be worth fixing, or too much that mightn’t get fixed right, and then show up again. My ma—she’s alive then—she always swore it was her sister Lillian’s boy that did it to us. The whole side of his head was pushed in. You know what I mean? They used to say a cow’d kicked him when he was small, but it wasn’t so—he’s just born like that. He could talk some—there’s those that set a high value on that—but the slobber’d run out of his mouth. My ma said if it wasn’t for him we’d have got in sure. The only other thing was my sister Clara that was born with a bad eye—blind, you know, and something wrong with the lid of it too. But she was just as sensible as anybody. Smart as a whip. So I would say it’s likely Ma was right. Same thing with your family, I