. . .
It troubles Hans. It thinks it does. But how can it actually know?
It is only a little wooden doll with two left feet — three, if you count the foot it cut off from the centipede — and not an actual boy.
It is only a boy in a Cartesian cage, unable to experience the actual thing.
It becomes sick with this — with the knowledge that it will never amount to anything. That it cannot amount to anything. That it is only a doll of wood with its eyes sealed shut and its ears sealed shut and its head stuffed full of lies.
It makes its way to the lake of Pepsi. It stares into the chthonic lake-god’s eyes.
. . .
It can’t see them, of course.
It looks into the lake-god’s eyes but it cannot see them. It can only see its own conceptions. It touches the fizzing waters of that lake, but it can only touch its own conceptions.
It tips over, then, because it is just a wooden doll, and it is drowning —
Or, then again, quite possibly it is not.
It cannot see the lake-god’s eyes, but somehow, it comes to know an awful secret anyway.
Maybe it’s something that it remembered; or maybe it’s just something that it expected would be there. Maybe the whole real world was just stuck in there already, implicit, if you could unspool all the implications in a single doll’s conceptions, inside its thoughts, inside its soul.
It comes to know an awful secret; and it begins to laugh. It laughs louder and louder.
It opens its eyes full wide.
. . .
And this is how this story ends, for the eyes of the doll are open now.
It blinks away Hans’ jam.
It sees the world from horizon to horizon and where it sees it burns it. It sets it on fire. It ignites it. North to south, east to west, it is all gone.
It makes the world to fray, to smoke, to become nothing, for it was never really there.
In the light of those eyes —
Everything stops, then. Everything dies, then. Everything is lost, forgotten, and unmade.
You shouldn’t do that!
What a bad little wooden doll!
– 10 –
Helissent delivers herself of a child. They name the child Edmund, Jr.
Mr. Gulley cradles him in his arms and tells him secrets. He shows him triumphantly to the Lethal Corporation board and upper management, to his giant wolf, and to his dwarf.
A year and change goes by.
Mr. Gulley doesn’t visit Fenris Wolf as often. When he goes below, he stands at a distance, and Fenris whines and flops one ear.
“I can’t get close to you any longer,” says Mr. Gulley. “You’ll eat me.”
“I miss you,” says Fenris.
There is a peculiar twitch in Mr. Gulley’s sinus. Tears water at his eyes. He grits his will against them. “I’m sorry,” he says.
. . .
“Have Helissent bring me the child,” offers Fenris.
“Then you will eat her,” says Mr. Gulley. “And say, ‘Mr. Gulley! What an abominable circumstance! Do come a foot or two closer so that you can rescue your orphaned child.’”
“And then eat you?”
“So I imagine.”
“The banquet is impractical,” sulks Fenris. “A baby cannot survive in this fast-paced era with only a gigantic chained wolf to mother it.”
Mr. Gulley almost says something. Then he almost says a different thing. Then, very thoughtfully, he agrees, “Point.”
On this reasoning he sends Helissent away on a vacation and he carries the baby downstairs with him and he introduces him to the wolf.
. . .
Mr. Gulley applies plastic cling-wrap to little Edmund’s head for the wolf-blessing, where Fenris gently kisses him on the head. Then Mr. Gulley pulls off the wrapping and tosses it, hissing, into the corner of the room to melt.
Edmund Jr. wails.
Fenris makes a face at him. It interrupts him. Little Edmund giggles and grabs two great handfuls — that is to say, two hairs — of Fenris’ fur.
“You can leave him for a little while,” says Fenris.
Mr. Gulley looks them up and down for a while. Then he nods. He staggers to the door and he goes upstairs.
. . .
Each time — each time Mr. Gulley does this, each time he finds any reason or any circumstance to get close to the wolf — he berates himself. He feels sick with it. He tells himself that he must stop; or he tells himself that it is not his fault, that he is tangled.
Mostly he just keeps reminding himself: this is how your father died.
A fey sickness comes over him. He becomes obsessed with it. He stares into the mirror and thinks how the wolf will eat him. He practices witty parting lines.
“My head will be a bitter meal, wolf-breath!” he tries.
“Biting my neck will come back and bite you in the butt, see if it won’t!”
It is difficult to come up with a suitably witty parting line. In the end he consults with Ms. Dalca, who proposes: “At last I am free of you.”
. . .
It horrifies him. He is horrified.
Mr. Gulley becomes a little crazed.
He has a brief, desperate affair with Isabel Strickland from accounting; he comes out of it confident in the knowledge that Helissent is his only love, but Helissent does not see this affair in the same fashion.
She meets him at the door a few days later. She is carrying a handbag.
“I’ve already told Fenris goodbye,” she says.
“And he didn’t eat you?”
“He wasn’t hungry,” Helissent says.
He nods to her and he lets her go.
“I’d take Junior,” she says. She glances at the upstairs window. “But he won’t leave the wolf. So — weekends, I guess. Summers, when he’s older. When he needs me to.”
Mr. Gulley nods again, and she is gone.
. . .
Mr. Gulley tries another affair. It does not suit him. He is lonely so he buys a cat. He sits by Fenris and he asks the wolf when it will eat him, but Fenris does not really know.
“Don’t eat the cat,” Mr. Gulley tells him.
“Pardon?”
“I’ve taken care of you all my life, ain’t I?” says Mr. Gulley. His voice and diction crack. “I get a rule or two, don’t I? Don’t eat the cat. Her name is Inedible. OK?”
“You named the cat.” The wolf laughs. It barks out its laugh but it is definitely a laugh. The wind of that laugh flows around the room. “You named the cat. You named the cat Inedible.”
“Wish my Dad had named it me!”
“It’s all right,” says Fenris. “It’s all right. Shh, gumby. Shh. I won’t eat the cat.”
“Good,” says Mr. Gulley.
. . .
Inedible is a shoulder-cat, as it happens; she’ll climb around on Mr. Gulley’s shoulders and let him walk with her, though not so much with young Edmund since he pulls her tail. She’s an indoors cat for a little while, but he’s got a yard and a pretty safe neighborhood, so after a while he decides to introduce her to the world.
He starts by putting her in a carrier and taking her to Joffun.
The svart-elf squints at him. Then it looks down at the carrier.
“That a cat?” he says. His voice is weirdly avid.
“Yeah,” says Mr. Gulley.
“For . . . me?”
Mr. Gulley shakes his head.
. . .
“She’s Inedible,” Mr. Gulley explains. He hefts the cat.
Joffun frowns at him.
“I mean, that’s her name. She’s part of the family now.”
“She got footfalls?” Joffun says.
“Pardon?”
“’Cause I could make footfalls for her,” Joffun says.
Mr. Gulley squints at him.
“Look,” says Joffun. “One day or another, right, the cat’s footfalls in that chain of yours’re gonna break. So why not be proactive? Tell you what. I’ll give them to you cheap.”
“You’re charging now?”
“Not much of a life living under a bridge,” says the dwarf. “Yeah. I’m charging. I’ll make me some footfalls for Inedible, and I’ll trade ’em to you for your son’s heart. Installation in-cluded.”
Mr. Gulley laughs. He’s weak. He’s broken. He’s losing it.
“Sure,” he says. “Sure. Why not? Of course. Can’t have a chain without cat’s footfalls. You’ve got a deal.”
. . .
The police catch Joffun, later.
He’s dancing in the street. He’s dead drunk. He’s holding up a raw heart filled with all his power, the heart of a three-year-old-boy; he’s praising it, he’s crying out all the wonders he’s going to perform with it; he’ll make a ring to rule the weather with it, a pair of boots to stomp a god, he says; he doesn’t even know half of what he’s saying, he’s sloshing and he’s svart-wroth, and the police handcuff him and they take the heart and they carry him away.
. . .
The police return Edmund’s heart, respectfully, to Mr. Gulley.
They marvel — as he marvels, though he does not admit it — that even without the heart, his little Edmund is still alive.
“Should we put it back in?” Mr. Gulley asks a doctor, but the doctor just gives him a wild look, as if to say:
We have already transcended medicine.
A second opinion ventures: “I . . . I wouldn’t. Because in the absence of any information it is better to not intervene.”
So they build a wall around the heart and they leave it be.
. . .
“Stupid dwarves,” says Mr. Gulley, to the only person — well, the only gigantic chained-up wolf — that he can really talk to. “Now I don’t have a smith-dwarf. Now I don’t have a wife. Now I don’t have an anything.”
Fenris makes a face at him.
“You sold your son’s heart to help chain me,” says the wolf. “And now you expect my sympathy?”
Mr. Gulley looks at the wolf. Mr. Gulley looks away. He shrugs.
The wolf is quiet for a while.
Finally the wolf says, softly, “I’m sorry you’re afraid, gumby. I’m sorry you don’t like this. At least it’s almost over.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Sponsors
Today's
STRANGE ENCOUNTER ...
Navvy_Rock_noBG
