The Midnight Circus, стр. 37
Forthe first time Dog Boy could actually feel the leash’s power. Perhapshe felt it because he didn’t want to go where it willed him, where hisfather willed him. Always before he’d been eager to go outside, tosmell the city scents, to do what his father would have him do. Whenhe’d been little, he thought that the leash was only to keep him safe.He’d been proud the day he was old enough to go outside with Red Capleashless. He believed he and his father had forged a team: twohunters, leaning on one another. He had the nose, his father kept himsafe. Equals. He’d reveled in that.
Butnow he understood the truth. The leash was not just a piece of leatherto keep him from getting lost, to keep him out of harm’s way. There wassomething else aboutit. Something that glimmered on the inside. Something fierce.Something old that he was powerless to resist.
Red Cap pulled on theleash and it drew Dog Boy relentlesslytoward the door.
“Iwant my fiddle and pipe.” His voice was high, but not pleading. Hewould not make his mother’s mistake. Pleading just gave his father somekind of strange pleasure.
“You’llnot need it where we’re going.”
“Where is that?”
“Underthe Hill.”
Fora moment he thought his father meant underground. It was somethinghe’d watched on a TV show: a family on the run from the mafia had to gounderground to escape certain death. Perhaps, he thought, his fathermeant the child they killed was the son of a mafia chieftain, ormaybe the child of a policeman. Or the FBI.
Underground.They’d be on the run. Together.
Butthen he remembered the smile, the dipped hat, the blood, the obviouspleasure that his father had taken in the stalking, the killing of aninnocent child. And he remembered something else. His father—for allthat he was a bloodthirsty, vicious murderer—never lied. They weregoing Under the Hill, whatever that meant.
Lookingback at his mother’s body on the sofa, wrapped in the red and greencoverlet, at the silver pipe on the table, at the fiddle in its caseresting against the wall, Dog Boy told himself: Someday I will kill himfor this. Once more the murdered boy was all but forgotten. By this,he meant his mother’s suicide.
WhenI am old enough and big enough and strong enough, hewill pay for this. Then I will take the red cap and dip it in his blood.
Hewondered if this was just a boy’s wish or whether it was a promise.
“Apledge,” he whispered.
Like his father, he did not lie.
TheFisherman’s Wife
JOHN MERTON was a fisherman. He brought up eels and elvers, little finnycreatures and great sharptoothed monsters from the waves. He soldtheir flesh at marketsand made necklaces of their teeth for the fairs.
Ifyou asked him, he would say that what he loved about the ocean was itsvast silence, and wasn’t that why he had married him a wife the same.Deaf she was, and mute too, but she could talk with her hands, aflowing syncopation. He would tell you that, and it would be no lie.But there were times when he would go mad with her silences, as the seacan drive men mad, and he would leave the house to seek the babble ofthe marketplace. As meaningful as were her finger fantasies, theybrought his ear no respite from the quiet.
Therewas one time, though, that he left too soon, and it happened this way.It was a cold and gray morning, and he slammed the door on his wife,thinking she would not knowit, forgetting there are other ways to hear. And as he walked along theshore, singing loudly to himself—so as to prime his ears—and swingingthe basket of fish pies he had for the fair, he heard only the sound ofhis own voice. The hush of the waves might have told him something.The silence of the sea birds wheeling overhead.
“Buymy pies,” he sang out in practice, his boots cutting great gasheslike exclamation marks in the sand.
Thenhe saw something washed up on the beach ahead. Now fishermen often findthings left along the shore. The sea gives and it takes and as oftengives back again. There is sometimes a profit to be turned on the giftsof the sea. But every fisherman knows that when you have dealings withthe deep you leave something of yourself behind.
Itwas no flotsam lying on the sand. It was a sea-queen, beached andgasping. John Merton stood over her, and his feet were as large as herhead. Her body had a palegreenish cast to it. The scales of herfishlike tail ran up past her waist, and some small scales lay alongher sides, sprinkled like shiny gray-green freckles on the paler skin.Her breasts were as smooth and golden as shells. Her supple shouldersand arms looked almost boneless. The green-brown hair that flowed fromher head was the color and texture of wrackweed. There was nothinglovely about her at all, he thought, though she exerted an alienfascination. She struggled for breath and, finding it, blew it outagain in clusters of large, luminescent bubbles that made a sound as ofwaves against the shore.
Andwhen John Merton bent down to look at her more closelystill, it was as if he had dived into her eyes. They were ocean eyes,blue-green, and with golden flecks in the iris like minnows dartingabout. He could not stop staring. She seemed to call to him withthose eyes, a calling louder than any sound could be in the air. Hethought he heard his name, and yet he knew that she could not havespoken it. And he could not ask the mermaid about it, for how could shetell him? All fishermen know that mermaids cannot speak. They have notongues.
Hebent down and picked her up and her tail wrapped around his waist,quick as an eel. He unwound it slowly, reluctantly, from his body andthen, with a convulsive shudder, threw her from him back into the sea.She flipped her tail once, sang out in a