“I’ll get it,” said the Rat. “This is my house, after all.”
I heard the Rat walk his regular path to the kitchen in total darkness and take an armful of beer out of the refrigerator, me opening and closing my eyes the whole while. The darkness of the room was only a bit different in hue from the darkness of my eyes shut.
The Rat returned with his beer, which he set on the table. I felt around for a can, removed the pull ring, and drank half.
“It hardly seems like beer if you can’t see it,” I said.
“You have to forgive me, but it has to be dark.”
We said nothing while we drank.
“Well then,” said the Rat, clearing his throat. I set my empty back on the table and kept still, wrapped in my blanket. I waited for him to start talking, but no words followed. All I could hear was the Rat shaking his can to check how much was left. Old habit of his.
“Well then,” said the Rat a second time. Then downing the last of his beer in one chug, he set the can back on the table with a dry clank. “First of all, let’s begin with why I came here. Is that all right?”
I didn’t answer. The Rat continued to speak.
“My father bought this place when I was five. Just why he went out of his way to buy property up here I don’t know. Probably he got a good deal through some American military route. As you can see, the place is terribly inconvenient to get to and, aside from summer, the road is useless once the snow sets in. The Occupation Forces had planned on improving the road and using the place for a radar station or something, but the time and expense involved apparently changed their mind. And with the town being so poor, they can’t afford to do anything about the road. It wouldn’t help them to upgrade the road either. Which all makes this property a losing proposition, long since forgotten.”
“How about the Sheep Professor? Wouldn’t he be thinking to come back home here?”
“The Sheep Professor is living in his memories. He’s got nowhere to go home to.”
“Maybe not.”
“Have some more beer,” said the Rat.
“Fine for now,” I said. With the heater off, I was nearly frozen through. The Rat opened another can and drank by himself.
“My father took a liking to this property, carried out some road improvements on his own, fixed up the house. He put a lot of money into it, I believe. Thanks to which, if you had a car, you could lead a fairly good life here, at least during the summer. Heat, flush toilet, shower, telephone, emergency electrical generator. How on earth the Sheep Professor lived here before that, I don’t know.”
The Rat made a noise that was neither belch nor sigh.
“Until I was fifteen, we came here every summer. My folks, my sister and me, and the maid who did the chores. When I think of it, those were probably the best years of my life. We leased the pasture to the town—still do, in fact—so when summer rolled around, the place was full of the town’s sheep. Sheep up to your ears. That’s why my memories of summer are always tied up with sheep.
“After that, the family almost never came up here. We got another vacation house closer to home for one thing, and my sister got married for another. I wasn’t counting myself in the family much anymore, my father’s company was going through hard times, and well, all sorts of things were going on. Whatever, the property was abandoned. The last time I came up here was eleven years ago. And that time I came alone. By myself for a month.”
The Rat lingered for a second, as if he were remembering.
“Were you lonely?” I asked.
“Me, lonely? You got to be kidding. If it was possible, I would have stayed on up here. But no way that could have happened. It’s my father’s house, after all. You wouldn’t have caught me doing my old man the service.”
“But what about now?”
“The same goes,” said the Rat. “I got to say that this was the last place I wanted to come back to. Yet when I came across the photograph of this place in the Dolphin Hotel, I wanted to see it one more time. For sentimental reasons. Even you get that way at times, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” I said. There was my shoreline that got filled in.
“That’s when I heard the Sheep Professor’s story. About the dream sheep with a star on its back. You know about that, I take it?”
“Indeed I do.”
“So to put it simply,” said the Rat, “I heard that story and hurried up here wanting to spend the whole winter. I couldn’t shake the urge. Father or not, it didn’t matter to me anymore. I pulled together my kit and came up. Like I was being drawn up here.”
“That’s when you ran into the sheep?”
“That’s right,” said the Rat.
“What happened after that is difficult to talk about,” said the Rat.
The Rat took his second empty can and squeezed a dent into it.
“Maybe you could ask me questions? You already know pretty much what there is to know, right?”
“Okay, but if it makes no difference to you, let’s not start at the beginning.”
“Fire away.”
“You’re already dead, aren’t you?”
I don’t know how long it took the Rat to reply. Could have been a few seconds, could have been … It was a long silence. My mouth was all dry inside.
“That’s right,” said the Rat finally. “I’m dead.”
The Rat Who Wound the Clock
“I hanged myself from a beam in the kitchen,” said the Rat. “The Sheep Man buried me next to the garage. Dying itself wasn’t all that painful, if you worry about that sort of thing. But really, that hardly matters.”
“When?”
“A week before you got here.”
“You wound the clock then, didn’t you?”
The Rat laughed. “Damn, if that’s not a mystery. I mean the very, very last thing I did in my thirty-year life was to wind a clock. Now why should anyone who’s about to die wind a clock? Makes no sense.”
The Rat stopped speaking, and everything was still, except for the ticking of the clock. The snow absorbed all other sound. We were like two castaways in outer space.
“What if …”
“Stop it,” the Rat cut me short. “There are no more ifs. You know that, right?”
I shook my head. No, I didn’t.
“If you had come here a week earlier, I still would have died. Maybe we could’ve met under warmer, brighter circumstances. But it’s all the same. I would have had to die. Otherwise things would have only gotten harder. And I guess I didn’t want to bear that kind of hardship.”
“So why did you have to die?”
There was the sound of his rubbing the palms of his hands together.
“I don’t want to talk too much about that. It would only turn into a self-acquittal. And there’s nothing more inappropriate than a dead man coming to his own defense, don’t you think?”
“But if you don’t tell me, I’ll never know.”
“Have some more beer.”
“I’m cold,” I said.
“It’s not that cold.”
With trembling hands, I opened another beer and drank a sip. And with the drink in me, it really didn’t seem
