The Dog Said Bow-Wow (28 page)

She limped forward and with every step the stench lessened, the room brightened, and the repulsiveness of her aspect faded. Halfway to him, the limp was gone and her body was convincingly human. Her hair was long and greasy but it no longer covered her body. She still smelled gamy, but Ned had known girls who smelled worse after a double shift at the factory.

“You like me better now, don’t you?” The goat-woman cocked her head and smiled flirtatiously. “I can see that you do.”

Ned nodded wordlessly.

Smiling, she put aside her gown, which was rags no longer, to reveal a body as young and pleasant as any other woman’s. Slowly, seductively, she lay back on the bed and spread her legs. To Ned’s horror, a mouse squirmed its way out of her quaint. It ran down her leg and into the darkness.

With a cry of disgust, he stumbled back from her.

“A forfeit! A forfeit!” cried the Mother of Goats. “If you deny me what I came for, you must give me something of equal or greater value.” Her broad yellow teeth gleamed. “Those are the house rules.”

It was so. Though Ned had never heard such a thing spoken of before, he knew the truth of her words the instant they were spoken. Knew, too, that having come here penniless and without treasure of any kind, and lacking anything else the fey folk valued, he would be expected to cede something better. Such knowledge had been woven into the web and woof of the World at the time of its creation, and none who dwelled therein could avoid it.

He knew that the forfeit she wanted was his soul.

Yet all was not lost. For she would have to accept gold, if he were to offer it, and there was a bag of the stuff hidden under the floorboards of this very room.

The goat-woman’s screams of rage still echoed in the air when Ned confronted Gilbrig.

Rather than shrinking from his wrath, however, the imp climbed up on the reception desk and thrust his face almost into Ned’s. “The green door, the
green
one, you daft and fucking fool!” he shouted. “How hard is that to understand? How the fuck could you go through the black door?
Dati go fukne konj
, damn you! I’ll spread your ass for the horse myself.”

“She
knew
me.” Ned could barely contain himself. “She said she came from my future!”

“Big fucking whoop. The black door leads forward. All that means is that you’ll want her when the time comes. Maybe a decade, two at the outside. Quite possibly less.”

“Never!”

“Sooner than you think, Missy. You’re coming along nicely. You’re not so far from felching Our Lady of Filth as you’d like to believe. We’ll have you groveling at her feet, trout in hand, before you know it.”

“Not without my cooperation, you won’t! I told you I wouldn’t put up with this kind of crap and I meant it. I’m done here, done for good, and you can just piss up a rope for all I care, because I’m never returning.”

“Go, then! You’ll be back! Once you get a taste for fairy flesh, you can never return to human meat. You’re my stump-broke
cow!
When I tell you I want cream, you’re going to haul out your hose and say, ‘How many quarts?’”

With a roar, Ned grabbed Gilbrig by the neck. Maddened with rage, he choked and choked and choked the imp until the grotesque creature’s face turned first red and then blue. When he stopped struggling, Ned convulsively released him.

Gilbrig’s body fell to the floor, dead.

Horrified, Ned staggered back from the small corpse. All six of its eyes were blank and staring. He felt behind him for the door, seized the handle, and pulled it open. But when he turned to leave, Gilbrig laughed behind him.

“Oh, you don’t get off as easy as
that
, Neddikins!” the dead imp cried. “You’re one of my girls, now and forever. You’ll return! If not this week, then next. If not then, the week after.” The voice followed him as he fled down the dark and wind-swept path away from the World. “Three weeks! Three weeks, tops, and you’re mine forever.”

A week went by, then two. Every day Ned fought down the urge to cross over the river into Faerie. Every night it rose up again, stronger than before. Until eventually he was certain that sooner or later he must inevitably give in to it. But even then he resisted. Not yet, he thought. Not today. Just one more day.

Soon.

Not now.

The lads on the factory floor told each other that Ned was “elf-shot,” that he’d gotten a taste for fairy snatch and it was only a matter of time before he disappeared across the river forever. It was an open secret that they’d formed abetting pool around the exact date that happened. He was passed up for a promotion to tool-maker’s assistant, though he was apt with his hands, and he couldn’t bring himself to care.

Such was his condition on the day of Barrington Turbine’s annual picnic. It was held on the commons, with tables of food and wine and a small band for dancing on the green, on the theory that it was good for morale. Which it was, though only briefly, for it made the lives of the company’s workers more pleasant for a day and no more.

Afterwards, he learned that the young women had been talking about him. “Elf-shot and fairy-whipped,” said one, “and limp and useless to boot.”

“He’s a cold fish for certain,” said a second. “Imagine kissing Ned. Ugh!”

But the third — Red Molly — said, “
I
can bring corpse-boy there back to life. Watch and see if I don’t.” And, seizing a half-emptied bottle of wine from a tub of melting ice, she walked firm of purpose toward Ned Wilkins.

All this he was to learn later. Now he happened to look up from the ground and saw a buxom red-haired woman walking straight toward him. Her breasts were lovely, though there were only two of them and they decently covered. Her skin glowed, though it did not shine of its own light. Her eyes were the green-or-gray color of the Northern oceans.

“Would you like a drink of wine?” she asked, a mischievous diabolus dimpling in her cheek.

But when Ned nodded and reached for the bottle, she held it away from him. Then, lifting her chin in a way that made her chest follow and her breasts rise to his attention, she put bottle to lips and hoisted it high, filling her mouth with wine. After which, she grabbed him by the back of his hair and yanked, forcing his head back and his mouth open.

Her mouth descended to his, and she squirted it full of wine. In astonishment, he swallowed and blinked, and realized that she was already walking away from him. “Wait!” he cried, and ran after her. “Would you… I mean, I’d… Could we dance?”

To his absolute confusion, all of Molly’s girlfriends simultaneously broke into laughter.

Thus were Ned’s eyes opened again to the beauty of human women. For a long season, he chased after Red Molly. And though he never came close to catching her, somehow in the course of trying, he took to seeing other women and discovered that, to differing degrees and with the occasional exception, they were all desirable and worthy of his respect as well.

Nor was that the only change in Ned’s life. Not long after the company picnic, he took a deep breath and went up to his supervisor and said, “Mr. Murcheson? That opening for a machinist’s mate — I want it.”

Murcheson looked at him in surprise and said, “Do you think you’re steady enough for the work?”

“Aye.”

For a long still moment, the supervisor studied him shrewdly. “Then it’s yours.”

So Ned Wilkins got his promotion and, some years after that, became a machinist and then head of his entire division. By slow degrees he became known as a reliable man and the day came when only his oldest cronies remembered there had ever been a time he had slipped the traces and almost been lost to a certain place across the river. Meanwhile, he’d fallen in love with, wooed, and won his own dear Marion.

The borders of Faerie are not constant. They ebb and flow like the tides, though no man can chart them. As he grew older, Ned found that Faerie receded further and further from him, while at the same time his love for his wife grew more and more comfortable, until they were as fit for one another as a pair of old shoes. By which time, he could have walked around the world and never once caught a glimpse of those fey lands. Nor did he care. He and Marion reared five children and were content.

And when his sons came of a certain age, they all hared off to Faerie, as young men inevitably will. But what his daughters did, he never knew.

HE IS MET
at the airport by an over-tall grad student with bad skin. The grad student is nervous. He’s working toward a degree in Elvis Studies and is convinced that he is the worst possible choice for the job. He’ll bungle it. He’ll say all the wrong things. He won’t be able to identify the man among the crush of travelers when he gets off the plane.

But the geek is unmistakable. A short, plump man with ginger hair, he has a sad, pink, ageless face. He could be thirty-seven. He could be seventy-three. He wears a sports jacket with no tie and matching white belt and shoes. Though the airport is thronged, he stands apart. He is in the crowd, but not of it.

“Sir!” The grad student jabs a graceless hand in his direction. He turns slowly, the way movie stars do, and unfolds the sweetest of smiles beneath the kindliest of wisdom-crinkled eyes. His speech is melodious. Somehow they are in the car. Somehow everything is all right.

There is a fruit basket waiting for the geek in his hotel room. Pristine in cellophane, it contains, in addition to the astonishing apples and oranges and pears, two small bottles of spring water, three foil-wrapped wedges of cheese, and a narrow box of gourmet crackers.

With the unthinking reflexes of the constant traveler, he snaps on the television set and immediately tunes it out. He hangs up his jacket in the bathroom and turns on the shower at its hottest setting so the room will fill up with steam and gentle out the wrinkles. Then he unpacks his bag, neatly filling the bureau drawers, shirt by shirt and shorts by shorts.

He takes off his shoes, but leaves his socks on.

Finally he removes the flask from its elastic pocket in the suitcase and carries it and an apple out onto the balcony. The night is warm and a strange city lies glittering at his feet. Behind him, the television laughs and screams, a familiar presence, the nomad’s home and family.

There is a chair on the balcony. He sits in it, and puts his stockinged feet up on the rail. He unscrews the top of the flask. He takes a sip. Jack Daniel’s.

He stares off into the night and thinks thoughts that are his and his alone.

He is eating a modest breakfast from the buffet in the lobby restaurant when the grad student reappears in the slipstream of a woman who pushes eagerly past the other diners. She is an academic, and dresses as one, but with a pashmina scarf thrown loosely over her shoulders and angular silver earrings to assert her individuality. She has a sharp and lively face. White teeth put a crisp bite into her smile when he rises to greet her. She glides into a chair at his table with the assurance of a woman who belongs there.

She is Professor Djuna Bloom and she is the head of the Department of Southern Culture at the university that has paid to bring him here. It’s an honor to meet him at last and there are just a few details to go over about his appearance today so that everything goes smoothly. The words tumble out one after another, but so briskly and clearly enunciated that they do not seem rushed.

He nods at everything she says. “Foah the sun,” he says when she comments on the Panama hat that rests on an empty chair alongside him. “As you can see, I have fair skin.”

The department head is charmed.

Now she touches the back of his hand. She’s actually
flirting
with him. The grad student (still there!) recalls first the legendarily easy way carnies have had with women and then old departmental gossip about Professor Bloom and a certain married faculty couple. To his intense embarrassment, he finds himself scowling and blushing.

After a tour of the campus, the geek is feted at a luncheon in the chancellor’s mansion. The chancellor has a cook, but not a very good one. The food is dreadfully ordinary. Vegetables are boiled until they’re limp, a roast cooked until it’s brown. But the plates and silver are genuinely old, and the dining room is Victorian in the very best sense. It’s a pleasure merely sitting in it.

“It must be wonderful,” says Professor Martelli of Social Sciences, “to have a budget robust enough to fly in guest speakers.” It is her longstanding opinion that Southern Culture is a subdivision of anthropology, and as such properly belongs within her department.

“I
think
, Rebecca,” says Professor Bloom testily, “that you’ll find…” Voices lift from every corner, objecting, pleading, calling for reconciliation. The chancellor half-rises from his chair.

A sudden chiming of spoon on crystal cuts through the voices and silences them. They turn to see their guest smiling gently at them.

“Watch this.” He breathes upon the spoon, polishes it with his napkin, breathes upon it again. He places the bowl upon his nose, slides it downward, releases the handle.

As if by magic, the spoon hangs from the tip of his nose.

Delighted laughter fills the room. Even the chancellor laughs. Even Rebecca Martelli laughs.

He nods, removes the spoon from his nose, and returns to his food.

After the meal, the geek goes back to his hotel for a nap. Then the long-suffering grad student ferries him back to campus for an informal chat with the Senior Honors Seminar for the department’s most promising undergrads.

“It’s a dying profession,” he tells them. “I mean that quite literally. I’ve lost so many dear friends to death. Now I’m the last practitioner of my…peculiar profession,” he pauses while they chuckle, “and when I’m gone, it won’t be revived, any more than you’re ever going to see Minoan bull-leapers again. I am a revenant of a vanished way of life.”

Because this is a closed seminar, he is free to tell them things that will not be touched on in his public presentation tonight. He talks about the kootch dancers and what they did with boiled eggs. He discusses the folk cures for syphilis that were still being practiced in his youth, and their appalling effects. Then he tells a story about the tattooed lady and what she charged amorous suitors twenty dollars to see that is so raw it makes Dr. Petri, the seminar leader, laugh like a horse.