She told me about the battles she was having with her younger sister, who was stealing her makeup and perfume. Louise suspected that her sister was having sex with boys. Louise was a virgin. We both were.
We stood in the road outside her house, under the sodium-yellow streetlight, and we stared at each other’s black lips and pale yellow faces.
We grinned at each other.
Then we just walked, picking quiet roads and empty paths. In one of the new housing estates, a path led us into the woodland, and we followed it.
The path was straight and dark, but the lights of distant houses shone like stars on the ground, and the moon gave us enough light to see. Once we were scared, when something snuffled and snorted in front of us. We pressed close, saw it was a badger, laughed and hugged and kept on walking.
We talked quiet nonsense about what we dreamed and wanted and thought.
And all the time I wanted to kiss her and feel her breasts, and hold her, and be held by her.
Finally I saw my chance. There was an old brick bridge over the path, and we stopped beneath it. I pressed up against her. Her mouth opened against mine.
Then she went cold and stiff, and stopped moving.
“Hello,” said the troll.
I let go of Louise. It was dark beneath the bridge, but the shape of the troll filled the darkness.
“I froze her,” said the troll, “so we can talk. Now: I’m going to eat your life.”
My heart pounded, and I could feel myself trembling.
“No.”
“You said you’d come back to me. And you have. Did you learn to whistle?”
“Yes.”
“That’s good. I never could whistle.” It sniffed, and nodded. “I am pleased. You have grown in life and experience. More to eat. More for me.”
I grabbed Louise, a taut zombie, and pushed her forward. “Don’t take me. I don’t want to die. Take her. I bet she’s much tastier than me. And she’s two months older than I am. Why don’t you take her?”
The troll was silent.
It sniffed Louise from toe to head, snuffling at her feet and crotch and breasts and hair.
Then it looked at me.
“She’s an innocent,” it said. “You’re not. I don’t want her. I want you.”
I walked to the opening of the bridge and stared up at the stars in the night.
“But there’s so much I’ve never done,” I said, partly to myself. “I mean, I’ve never. Well, I’ve never had sex. And I’ve never been to America. I haven’t…” I paused. “I haven’t done anything. Not yet.”
The troll said nothing.
“I could come back to you. When I’m older.”
The troll said nothing.
“I will come back. Honest I will.”
“Come back to me?” said Louise. “Why? Where are you going?”
I turned around. The troll had gone, and the girl I had thought I loved was standing in the shadows beneath the bridge.
“We’re going home,” I told her. “Come on.”
We walked back, and never said anything.
She went out with the drummer in the punk band I started, and, much later, married someone else. We met once, on a train, after she was married, and she asked me if I remembered that night.
I said I did.
“I really liked you, that night, Jack,” she told me. “I thought you were going to kiss me. I thought you were going to ask me out. I would have said yes. If you had.”
“But I didn’t.”
“No,” she said. “You didn’t.” Her hair was cut very short. It didn’t suit her.
I never saw her again. The trim woman with the taut smile was not the girl I had loved, and talking to her made me feel uncomfortable.
I moved to London, and then, some years later, I moved back again, but the town I returned to was not the town I remembered: there were no fields, no farms, no little flint lanes; and I moved away as soon as I could, to a tiny village ten miles down the road.
I moved with my family—I was married by now, with a toddler—into an old house that had once, many years before, been a railway station. The tracks had been dug up, and the old couple who lived opposite us used the ground where the tracks had been to grow vegetables.
I was getting older. One day I found a gray hair; on another, I heard a recording of myself talking, and I realized I sounded just like my father.
I was working in London, doing A&R for one of the major record companies. I was commuting into London by train most days, coming back some evenings.
I had to keep a small flat in London; it’s hard to commute when the bands you’re checking out don’t even stagger onto the stage until midnight. It also meant that it was fairly easy to get laid, if I wanted to, which I did.
I thought that Eleanora—that was my wife’s name; I should have mentioned that before, I suppose—didn’t know about the other women; but I got back from a two-week jaunt to New York one winter’s day, and when I arrived at the house it was empty and cold.
She had left a letter, not a note. Fifteen pages, neatly typed, and every word of it was true. Including the PS, which read: You really don’t love me. And you never did.
I put on a heavy coat, and I left the house and just walked, stunned and slightly numb.
There was no snow on the ground, but there was a hard frost, and the leaves crunched under my feet as I walked. The trees were skeletal black against the harsh gray winter sky.
I walked down the side of the road. Cars passed me, traveling to and from London. Once I tripped on a branch, half hidden in a heap of brown leaves, ripping my trousers, cutting my leg.
I reached the next village. There was a river at right angles to the road, and a path I’d never seen before beside it, and I walked down the path, and stared at the partly frozen river. It gurgled and plashed and sang.
The path led off through fields; it was straight and grassy.
I found a rock, half buried, on one side of the path. I picked it up, brushed off the mud. It was a melted lump of purplish stuff, with a strange rainbow sheen to it. I put it into the pocket of my coat and held it in my hand as I walked, its presence warm and reassuring.
The river meandered away across the fields, and I walked on in silence.
I had walked for an hour before I saw houses—new and small and square—on the embankment above me.
And then I saw the bridge, and I knew where I was: I was on the old railway path, and I’d been coming down it from the other direction.
There were graffiti painted on the side of the bridge: BARRY LOVES SUSAN and the omnipresent NF of the National Front.
I stood beneath the bridge in the red brick arch, stood among the ice-cream wrappers, and the crisp packets, and watched my breath steam in the cold afternoon air.
The blood had dried into my trousers.
Cars passed over the bridge above me; I could hear a radio playing loudly in one of them.
“Hello?” I said quietly, feeling embarrassed, feeling foolish. “Hello?”
There was no answer. The wind rustled the crisp packets and the leaves.
“I came back. I said I would. And I did. Hello?”
Silence.
I began to cry then, stupidly, silently, sobbing under the bridge.
A hand touched my face, and I looked up.
“I didn’t think you’d come back,” said the troll.
He was my height now, but otherwise unchanged. His long gonk hair was unkempt and had leaves in it, and his eyes were wide and lonely.
I shrugged, then wiped my face with the sleeve of my coat. “I came back.”
Three kids passed above us on the bridge, shouting and running.
“I’m a troll,” whispered the troll in a small, scared voice. “Fol rol de ol rol.”
He was trembling.
I held out my hand and took his huge clawed paw in mine. I smiled at him. “It’s okay,” I told him. “Honestly. It’s okay.”
The trol
l nodded.
He pushed me to the ground, onto the leaves and the wrappers, and lowered himself on top of me. Then he raised his head, and opened his mouth, and ate my life with his strong sharp teeth.
When he was finished, the troll stood up and brushed himself down. He put his hand into the pocket of his coat and pulled out a bubbly, burnt lump of clinker rock.
He held it out to me.
“This is yours,” said the troll.
I looked at him: wearing my life comfortably, easily, as if he’d been wearing it for years. I took the clinker from his hand, and sniffed it. I could smell the train from which it had fallen, so long ago. I gripped it tightly in my hairy hand.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Good luck,” said the troll.
“Yeah. Well. You too.”
The troll grinned with my face.
It turned its back on me and began to walk back the way I had come, toward the village, back to the empty house I had left that morning; and it whistled as it walked.
I’ve been here ever since. Hiding. Waiting. Part of the bridge.
I watch from the shadows as the people pass: walking their dogs, or talking, or doing the things that people do. Sometimes people pause beneath my bridge, to stand, or piss, or make love. And I watch them, but say nothing; and they never see me.
Fol rol de ol rol.
I’m just going to stay here, in the darkness under the arch. I can hear you all out there, trip-trapping, trip-trapping over my bridge.
Oh yes, I can hear you.
But I’m not coming out.
Don’t Ask Jack
N OBODY KNEW WHERE THE toy had come from, which great-grandparent or distant aunt had owned it before it was given to the nursery.
It was a box, carved and painted in gold and red. It was undoubtedly attractive and, or so the grownups maintained, quite valuable—perhaps even an antique. The latch, unfortunately, was rusted shut, and the key had been lost, so the Jack could not be released from his box. Still, it was a remarkable box, heavy and carved and gilt.
The children did not play with it. It sat at the bottom of the huge old wooden toy box, which was the same size and age as a pirate’s treasure chest, or so the children thought. The Jack-in-the-Box was buried beneath dolls and trains, clowns and paper stars and old conjuring tricks, and crippled marionettes with their strings irrevocably tangled, with dressing-up clothes (here the tatters of a long-ago wedding dress, there a black silk hat crusted with age and time) and costume jewelry, broken hoops and tops and hobbyhorses. Under them all was Jack’s box.
The children did not play with it. They whispered among themselves, alone in the attic nursery. On gray days when the wind howled about the house and rain rattled the slates and pattered down the eaves they told each other stories about Jack, although they had never seen him. One claimed that Jack was an evil wizard, placed in the box as punishment for crimes too awful to describe; another (I am certain that it must have been one of the girls) maintained that Jack’s box was Pandora’s box, and he had been placed in the box as guardian to prevent the bad things inside it from coming out once more. They would not even touch the box, if they could help it, although when, as happened from time to time, an adult would comment on the absence of that sweet old Jack-in-the-Box, and retrieve it from the chest, and place it in a position of honor on the mantelpiece, then the children would pluck up their courage and, later, hide it away once more in the darkness.
The children did not play with the Jack-in-the-Box. And when they grew up and left the great house, the attic nursery was closed up and almost forgotten.
Almost, but not entirely. For each of the children, separately, remembered walking alone in the moon’s blue light, on his or her own bare feet, up to the nursery. It was almost like sleepwalking, feet soundless on the wood of the stairs, on the threadbare nursery carpet. Remembered opening the treasure chest, pawing through the dolls and the clothes and pulling out the box.
And then the child would touch the catch, and the lid would open, slow as a sunset, and the music would begin to play, and Jack came out. Not with a pop and a bounce: he was no spring-heeled Jack. But deliberately, intently, he would rise from the box and motion to the child to come closer, closer, and smile.
And there in the moonlight, he told them each things they could never quite remember, things they were never able entirely to forget.
The oldest boy died in the Great War. The youngest, after their parents died, inherited the house, although it was taken from him when he was found in the cellar one night with cloths and paraffin and matches, trying to burn the great house to the ground. They took him to the madhouse, and perhaps he is there still.
The other children, who had once been girls and now were women, declined, each and every one, to return to the house in which they had grown up; and the windows of the house were boarded up, and the doors were all locked with huge iron keys, and the sisters visited it as often as they visited their eldest brother’s grave, or the sad thing that had once been their younger brother, which is to say, never.
Years have passed, and the girls are old women, and owls and bats have made their homes in the old attic nursery; rats build their nests among the forgotten toys. The creatures gaze uncuriously at the faded prints on the wall, and stain the remnants of the carpet with their droppings.
And deep within the box within the box, Jack waits and smiles, holding his secrets. He is waiting for the children. He can wait forever.
How to Sell the Ponti Bridge
M Y FAVORITE ROGUES’ CLUB is the oldest and still the most exclusive in all the Seven Worlds. It was formed by a loose association of rogues, cheats, scoundrels, and confidence men almost seventy thousand years ago. It has been copied many times in many places (there was one started quite recently, within the last five hundred years at any rate, in the City of London), but none of the other clubs matches the original Rogues’ Club, in the city of Lost Carnadine, for atmosphere. No other club has quite so select a membership.
And the membership of the Lost Carnadine Rogues’ Club is particularly select. You will understand the kind of person who makes it to membership if I tell you that I myself have seen, walking or sitting or eating or talking, in its many rooms, such notables as Daraxius Lo (who sold the Kzem a frog-bat on a holy day), Prottle (who sold the palace of the King of Vandaria to the King of Vandaria), and the self-styled Lord Niff (who, I have heard it whispered, was the original inventor of the fox twist, the cheat that broke the bank at the Casino Grande). In addition, I have seen Rogues of interuniversal renown fail to gain admittance to even discuss their membership with the secretary—on one memorable day I passed a famous financier, in company with the head of the Hy-Brasail mafia and a preeminent prime minister on their way down the back stairs with the blackest of expressions upon their faces, having obviously been told not even to think about returning. No, the ones who make it into the Rogues’ Club are a high bunch. I am sure that you will have heard of each of them. Not under those names, of course, but the touch is distinctive, is it not?
I myself gained membership by means of a brilliant piece of creative scientific research, something that revolutionized the thinking of a whole generation. It was my disdain for regular methodology and, as I have said, creative research that gained me membership, and when I am in that part of the cosmos I make a point of stopping off for an evening, taking in some sparkling conversation, drinking the club’s fine wines, and basking in the presence of my moral equals.
It was late in the evening and the log fire was burning low in the grate, and a handful of us sat and drank one of the fine dark wines of Spidireen in an alcove in the great hall. “Of course,” one of my new friends was saying, “there are some scams that no self-respecting rogue would ever touch, they are so old and classless and tired. For example, selling a tourist the Ponti Bridge.”
“It’s the same with Nelson’s Column, or the Eiffel Tower, or the Brooklyn Bridge, back on my home-world,” I tol
d them. “Sad little con games, with as much class as a back-alley game of Find the Lady. But look on the good side: Nobody who sold the Ponti Bridge would ever get membership in a club like this.”
“No?” said a quiet voice from the corner of the room. “How strange. I do believe it was the time I sold the Ponti Bridge that gained me membership in this club.” A tall gentleman, quite bald and most exquisitely dressed, got up from the chair in which he had been sitting, and walked over to us. He was sipping the inside of an imported rhûm fruit, and smiling, I think at the effect that he had created. He walked over to us, pulled up a cushion, and sat down. “I don’t believe we’ve met,” he said.
My friends introduced themselves (the gray-haired deft woman, Gloathis; the short, quiet dodger Redcap) as did I.
He smiled wider. “Your fame precedes each of you. I am honored. You may call me Stoat.”
“Stoat?” said Gloathis. “The only Stoat I ever heard of was the man who pulled the Derana Kite job, but that was…what, over a hundred years ago. What am I thinking? You adopted the name as a tribute, I presume.”
“You are a wise woman,” said Stoat. “It would be impossible for me to be the same man.” He leaned forward on his cushion. “You were talking about the sale of the Ponti Bridge?”
“Indeed we were.”
“And you were all of the opinion that selling the Ponti Bridge is a measly scam, unworthy of a member of this club? And perhaps you are right. Let us examine the ingredients of a good scam.” He ticked off the points on the fingers of his left hand as he spoke. “Firstly, the scam must be credible. Secondly, it must be simple—the more complex the more chance of error. Thirdly, when the sucker is stung he must be stung in such a way as to prevent him from ever turning to the law. Fourthly, the main-spring of any elegant con is human greed and human vanity. Lastly, it must involve trust—confidence, if you will.”
“Surely,” said Gloathis.
“So you are telling me that the sale of the Ponti Bridge—or any other major landmark not yours to sell—cannot have these characteristics? Gentlemen. Lady. Let me tell you my story.