The Shadow Sire

Chapter 11: Wind Chime

The smell came at him in three parts.

Shit first. Then sweat gone sour. Then, under both of those, something sweet with rot in it, the way fruit goes at the bottom of a bag.

He went in.

The men's dorm was long and low, concrete floor, one strip of the yard's white light coming through the bars at the back. There were bunks down one wall with the blankets folded square on them and nobody in any of them. Rook didn't count them and didn't ask.

Somebody had dragged a lounger into the barred opening at the back, where the dorm looked out on the yard, and left it there. The vinyl on the seat had split end to end and the stuffing was coming out in tufts, and the man in it had his back to the room.

Rook walked the length of the dorm and came up on him from behind.

Big through the shoulders still. The hair was gone in patches. The gray shift had gone stiff in places, and Rook was most of the way around the chair before he worked out that the marks on it weren't a pattern.

Where the man's weight had been sitting, the skin had gone. Flies had found it; maggots worked in and out of it, in no hurry, while the man looked at the bars. Below that, he had messed himself and it had dried.

Three smells. None of them a surprise. The sweet one only ever meant the one thing.

Charles had said it already. Charles had been right.

Rook set the bowl down on the concrete in front of the chair. He took the plastic spoon out of it and turned it over and pushed it back in handle first, so it stood up out of the kibble. Then he bowed, once, from the waist.

Nobody had taught him that.

The man in the chair didn't look at the food. He didn't look at Rook. He looked at the bars.

After a while, Rook went and stood where the man was looking.

Through the bars, at the corner of the yard, hung on the outside of the iron on a hook somebody had twisted out of wire, there was a basket. It was small, the size of two hands, and it was woven out of grass rope the way a bird's nest would be if a bird had taken its time. Inside were little figures, six or seven of them, twisted out of the same rope with arms and legs and round heads on them, and flowers folded out of paper that had print on it and had gone soft from being out in the air.

Behind him, the man's mouth moved.

Rook came back and leaned in. The breath off him was bad and the smell came up off the chair in a wave, and Rook stayed in it and listened.

"Wind chime," the man said. "Chime. Chime."

It came out slack and slow with a lot of room in it, and it did not sound like a man saying a word so much as water going out of a drain.

Wind chime.

Rook looked at the basket a while. There was no chime in it. No bell, nothing to knock against anything, nothing with a tongue in it. Flowers and rope dolls and a hook made out of wire.

He reached up through the bars to take it down and have a look.

A hand came down across his wrist and knocked his arm out of the air.

The Countess was there, the broom in one hand. She had come around the corner of the dorm without a sound, or he had been somewhere else for a while, which also happened.

She had a can in her other hand.

"Go eat somewhere else," she said, and put the can into his chest so he had to get both hands up. "Touch that again and I'll kill you."

She was already turning. She went back the way she had come, fast, and the bad leg made it uneven, and she didn't look back.

Rook looked down at the can. The lid was off. Not bent back — off, and gone. The meat inside had been turned through with the fat until it was all one color, and gone over with a spoon.

He stood there with it. Opened, and stirred, and put into his hands.

A head came around the corner of the dorm, upside down, and then the rest of her came with it.

"Rook!"

She arrived in a smell of milk and got both hands on his arm and hung off it, and pulled him down to sit against the warm concrete with her. He got the can set down between his feet before he went down, and she put her chin on his shoulder.

"What did you do?" she said. "I heard it from the feeder. It was so loud."

He pointed at the basket.

The smile went out of her face.

"Oh," she said. "You miss Biscuit too."

Biscuit.

His mouth flooded. There was a whole loaf somewhere in the world with his name on it — a crust that gave when you pressed it, butter going soft in the middle of the slice, no bowl, no spoon, no machine telling him a number. His stomach said it out loud for him.

Pearl didn't notice. She had her cheek on his shoulder and her eyes on the basket.

He swallowed. He got himself back.

Biscuit was a name. He turned it over twice, and then he said it slow, drawing it out, giving himself room to be stupid.

"Bis—cuit?"

Nobody in the yard answered. There were thirty-odd women out there and a dozen kids and not one head turned.

Except the Countess, ten feet off with her back to them and the broom in her hands. The broom stopped. It stopped for the length of one stroke, and then it went on, and she kept her back to them.

Pearl didn't see it. Pearl was looking up at him.

"You're forgetting her," she said. "Silly Rook. You're forgetting everybody. She came out of a matron too, same as me. She was my best friend."

She sat up a bit.

"Biscuit made the basket," she said. "She made it in nine days. She made the dolls and the flowers both. She was the best berry in this pen. She just had too much brain."

She said it the way she would have said a girl had too much hair.

"That's what brain cancer is," she said. "Too much brain in your head. The broadcast says. If you get too much brain it kills you."

She was quiet a second. Then she said it low, hardly moving her mouth, the way you say a thing you have been told to say.

"Sing more. Talk less. Never ask. Sing more. Talk less—"

She stopped herself.

Rook looked down at the top of her head. The hair grew in two directions up there and made a small whorl, and there was a piece of lint caught in it.

Then he looked at the basket.

He wasn't calling it. It didn't come when it was called. It came when it wanted, and it didn't care what a man was in the middle of.

His left eye went cold and quiet, and the yard went with it.

A girl came out of the basket and stood in the yard.

She was short and round and soft all over, like something that had risen and not been punched back down. Small round face. And her eyes were the Countess's eyes. Not similar. The same.

After that it was one night, all at once, the way it always was, and inside it there was time enough to do everything slowly.

By the light of it, it was late. The lamps had gone down to the blue setting and the yard was all one blue, and the only other light was the strip under the women's dorm door.

She came out of that door alone, dragging a rope. Five or six lengths of grass rope twisted up together, as thick as her wrist. It was heavier than she was and it kept getting under her feet.

She took it to the iron at the corner of the yard and tied it off. She was not good at knots. She got one made and looked at it and pulled it apart with both hands and did it again, and the second one held. She brought a low stool over and set it down under the rope, then moved it about a foot to the left, then got up on it. She had to duck her head to get the loop over, and she did that with both hands, carefully.

There were other people in this one.

The yard wasn't empty. There were two men in it and both of them were awake. One sat on the concrete with his back against the dorm wall and his hands loose in his lap. The other had his face up in the window bars with both hands on the iron, and the light behind him, so his face was only a shape.

One of them was Rook, and he knew which one.

Neither of them moved. Neither of them said a word.

She kicked the stool away.

Her body swung into the iron and the iron made a sound, a long creak that went up at the end of it, and her hands came up to the rope, and her feet found the rail and pushed, and then didn't.

The women's dorm door banged. The Countess came out of it and across the yard with the bad leg dragging her sideways, and she got her arms around the girl and lifted, and the girl's whole weight came down on her and took them both into the iron, and she held on. She went down on one knee and got up again with the girl on her and stayed up.

The two men watched all of it, one sitting with his hands in his lap and one standing at the bars with his face in the light, and neither of them moved or made a sound the whole time, not when the door banged, not when she went down.

Then, once, up at the window, a light came and went. The man at the bars — the big one — his eyes came up bright for about as long as it takes to strike a match, and went out.

His mouth moved. It looked like: wind chime.

Then there was the blue, and the Countess on the ground with the girl, and that was all of it.

He came back all at once, in the middle of a word, and Pearl was still talking.

"—and she used to let me have the end of her bed," Pearl was saying, "when the lamps went down. Every night. She said any night I wanted."

He sat with his hands on his knees and held his face still, the way he had in the yard, and didn't let anything onto it.

Biscuit had died of brain cancer. That was the name for it. A girl goes out in the night and does that to herself, and what gets written down is brain cancer, and the whole pen chants it back at breakfast.

Pearl's hand was on his sleeve, warm through the cloth, the fingers going in and out of the cuff.

"Are you listening?" she said. "Rook. Are you listening to me?"

"I'm listening," he said.

"Then what did she make the flowers out of?"

He looked at the basket.

"Paper," he said.

"That's right." She sat back, pleased. "Come on. You have to eat."

She got up and got both hands around his wrist and pulled, and he came up off the concrete, and bent and picked the can up from between his feet where he had set it.

"Why aren't you talking?" she said.

"Nothing," he said. "I was thinking about the can."

She kept her hand hooked through his sleeve, and they went.