The Best of Gene Wolfe

It was a long time before she answered, and he knew the body was stiffening. That was bad, because as long as she lived in it the flesh would stay sweet; when the life was gone, he would have to cut it up quickly before the stuff in her lower intestine tainted the rest.

“Strange evolution,” she said at last. “Man become food for men.”

“I don’t understand the second word. Talk so I know what you’re saying.” He kicked her in the chest to emphasize his point, and knocked her over; he heard a rib snap. . . . She did not reply, and he lay down on the bed. His mother had told him there was a meeting place in the city where men gathered on certain special nights—but he had forgotten (if he had ever known) what those nights were.

“That isn’t even metalanguage,” the dead woman said, “only children’s talk.”

“Shut up.”

After a moment he said, “I’m going out. If you can make your body stand, and get out of here, and get down to the ground floor, and find the way out, then you may be able to tell someone about me and have the police waiting when I come back.” He went out and closed the door, then stood patiently outside for five minutes.

When he opened it again, the corpse stood erect with her hands on his table, her tremors upsetting the painted metal circus figures he had had since he was a child—the girl acrobat, the clown with his hoop and trained pig. One of her legs would not straighten. “Listen,” he said. “You’re not going to do it. I told you all that because I knew you’d think of it yourself. They always do, and they never make it. The farthest I’ve ever had anyone get was out the door and to the top of the steps. She fell down them, and I found her at the bottom when I came back. You’re dead. Go to sleep.”

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.

 T

here 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.”