The Best of Gene Wolfe

“Somebody else will get here sooner, I’m afraid,” Father Eddi told him. “I will have some advice for you, if you can get the big stainless door open.”

“You could ask House to open it for me. He can do that. You could pretend like you’re doing it. You could put your hand on the handle and House would pull it and open the door and you could go inside and tell me to come in.” It was a lot of talking for Sherby, and made him glad that Father Eddi was not much bigger than he was.

“He won’t do it, my son,” Father Eddi said gently. “He doesn’t think it good for you to come down here and look at them. Neither do I. But if you get the freezer door open, I’ll have some advice to offer, as I told you.”

“Erchou!” Sherby said, and Smoky clattered down the last two steps to stand beside him. “Watch me.”

He untied the blue terry-cloth bathrobe belt, then tied its ends together in a new knot, pulling hard to make sure it would hold. That done, he looped it around the handle of the big freezer door, and put the other loop over Smoky’s head. Returning to the foot of the steps, he shouted, “Erchou!”

Smoky eyed him nervously.

“I think you’d better go back upstairs, my son,” Father Eddi said.

“I was looking that time. That’s not the right way to do it.” Sherby started up the steps. “Erchou! ”

Smoky pulled the big handle forward by perhaps half an inch.

“There’s another carrot up there,” Sherby said. “I know that’ll work, only I want to try something else first. Watch me!”

He carried Mariah’s empty scrub bucket to Smoky’s side, inverted it, and mounted. “Now come on! Erchou!” Sherby kicked Smoky with his bare heels, and Smoky took a hesitant step or two forward.

The big stainless-steel door swung open.

“I’m going in to look at them,” Sherby told Father Eddi. “You don’t have to come in with me.”

“I wish that I could.”

Even to stand in front of the door was to enter a second winter, colder even than the snow and the night wind on Lonely Mountain.

Sherby stepped inside.

Father Eddi called, “I can’t go any farther with you, my son. There are no hologram projectors in there.”

“That’s all right,” Sherby told him. Sherby was looking at his mother. There was a fine powdering of ice crystals on her cheek, and one hand was lifted as if she had died gesturing. Telling his father not to eat what she had, Sherby decided. Only his father had meant to, and had done it anyway.

“It might be a good thing for you to take Smoky in with you and shut the door, my son.”

Sherby shook his head, shivering. He was still looking at his mother, and absentmindedly stroking Smoky’s nose.

“You can’t be locked in. There’s a push bar on the inside that makes the door very easy to open.”

“I’m coming out in a minute,” Sherby said. His father’s face was twisted. Because he knew what was happening, Sherby thought. It had been wrong, wrong of his father particularly, to go away and leave him alone with House.

“You see, my son, Carker’s Army is looting and burning all the homes along East Mountain Road, and they’ve left the McKays’. They will probably burn this house as well. If they do, that freezer is the part of House most likely to survive. If you snuggle up with Smoky, you might stay alive until they leave.”

“No,” Sherby said. He wanted his mother to pat his head the way she always had when she put him into bed, and thought of bending down and touching her hand with his head. He knew it would not be the same, but he did it anyway, then turned away, shivering worse than ever, and led Smoky out into the cellar again, where Father Eddi waited.

“This is your best chance, my son. You know that House can open this door. He’ll open it for you when it’s safe.”

Sherby did not bother to reply. He pushed hard against the big door, swinging it shut.

“Are we going back upstairs? Santa Claus is about to appear. It will be the high point of the party.”

“I don’t care about Santa,” Sherby declared.

Smoky, who had been so reluctant to go down the stairs, trotted up them quite readily. “House!” Sherby called when they were back in the kitchen. “House, say something! Answer me!”

“What is it, Sherby?” The big voice seemed to come from all around him, as it always had, but there was a tension in it that Sherby had never heard before.

“I want to see out front. Is it okay to open the front door?”

“No,” House told him. “There is a screen in the study—”

“Not that. You let me open it before.”

“They were not here then, Sherby. Now they are.”

Sherby considered the problem. Behind him, Father Eddi said, “House would like to show you Santa Claus, and this may be the last chance you’ll ever have to see him with a child’s eyes. Won’t you please go into the family room and look?”

House said, “I will make an agreement with you, Sherby. If you’ll see Santa, I’ll open the security shutter on