The Best of Gene Wolfe

Game in the Pope’s Head

Bev got up to water her plant. Edgar said, “You’re overwatering that. Look how yellow, the leaves are.”

They were indeed. The plant had extended its long, limp limbs over the pictures and the sofa, and out through the broken window, but the weeping flukes of these astonishing terminations were sallow and jaundiced.

“It needs water.” Bev dumped her glass into the flowerpot, got a fresh drink, and sat down again. “My play?” She turned up a card. “The next card is ‘What motion picture used the greatest number of living actors, animal or human?’ ”

Edgar said, “I think I know. Gandhi. Half a million or so.”

“Wrong. Debbie?”

“Hell, I don’t know. Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

“Wrong. Randy?”

It was a moment before he realized that she meant him. So that was his name: Randy. Yes, of course. He said, “Animal or human?”

“Right.”

“Then it’s animals, because they don’t get paid.” He tried to think of animal movies, Bert Lahr terrified of Toto, Lassie Come Home. “The Birds?”

“Close. It was The Swarm, and there were twenty-two million actors.”

Edgar said, “Mostly bees.”

“I suppose.”

There was a bee, or perhaps a wasp, on the plant, nearly invisible against a yellow leaf. It did not appear to him to be exploring the surface in the usual beeish or waspish way, but rather to be listening, head raised, to their conversation. The room was bugged. He wanted to say, This room is bugged, but before he could, Bev announced, “Your move, I think, Ed.”

Ed said, “Bishop’s pawn to the bishop’s four.”

Debbie threw the dice and counted eight squares along the edge of the board. “Oh, good! Park Place, and I’ll buy it.” She handed him her money, and he gave her the deed.

Bev said, “Your turn.”

He nodded, stuffed Debbie’s money into his pocket, shuffled the cards, and read the top one.

Randolph Carter nodded again and put the card down. Debbie handed him a small pewter figure, a young man in old-fashioned clothes.

Bev asked, “ ‘Where did the fictional American philosopher Thomas Olney teach?’ Ed?”

“A fictional philosopher? Harvard, I suppose. Is it John Updike?”

“Wrong. Debbie?”

“Pass.”

“Okay. Randy?”

“London.”

Outside, a cloud covered the sun. The room grew darker as the light from the broken windows diminished.

Edgar said, “Good shot. Is he right, Bev?”

The bee, or wasp, rose from its leaf and buzzed around Edgar’s bald head. He slapped at it, missing it by a fraction of an inch. “There’s a fly in here!”

“Not now. I think it went out the window.”

It had indeed been a fly, he saw, and not a bee or wasp at all—a bluebottle, no doubt gorged with carrion.

Bev said, “Kingsport, Massachusetts.”

With an ivory hand, Edgar moved an ivory chessman. “Knight to the king’s three.”

Debbie tossed her dice onto the board. “Chance.”

He picked up the card for her.

Debbie said, “I take the Enchanted Wood. That leaves you the sword, Randy.”

Bev handed it to him. It was a falchion, he decided, curved and single edged. After testing the edge with his finger, he laid it in his lap. It was not nearly as large as a real sword—less than sixteen inches long, he decided, including the hardwood handle.

“Your turn, Randy.”

He discovered that he disliked Bev nearly as much as Debbie, hated her bleached blond hair, her scrawny neck. Bev and her dying plant were twins, one vegetable, one inhuman. He had not known that before.

She said, “It’s the wheel of Fortune,” as though he were stupid. He flicked the spinner.

“Unlawful evil.”

Bev said, “Right,” and picked up a card. “ ‘What do the following have in common: Pogo the Clown, H. H. Holmes, and Saucy Jacky?’ ”

Edgar said, “That’s an easy one. They’re all pseudonyms of mass murderers.”

“Right. ‘For an extra point, name the murderers.’”

“Gacy, Mudgett, and . . . that’s not fair. No one knows who the Ripper was.”

But he did: just another guy, a guy like anybody else.

Debbie tossed her dice. “Whitechapel. I’ll buy it. Give me the card, honey.”

He picked up the deed and studied it. “Low rents.”

Edgar chuckled. “And seldom paid.”

“I know,” Debbie told them, “but I want it, with lots of houses.” He handed her the card, and she gave him the dice.

For a moment he rattled them in his hand, trying to imagine himself the little pewter man. It was no use; there was nothing of bright metal about him or his dark wool coat—only the edge of the knife. “Seven-come-eleven,” he said, and threw.

“You got it,” Debbie told him. “Seven. Shall I move it for you?”

“No,” he said. He picked up the little pewter figure and walked past Holborn, the Temple (cavern-temple of Nasht and Kaman-Thah), and Lincolns Inn Fields, along Cornhill and Leadenhall streets to Aldgate High Street, and so at last to Whitechapel.

Bev said, “You saw him coming, Deb,” but her voice was very far away, far above the the leaden (hall) clouds, filthy with coal smoke, that hung over the city. Wagons and hansom cabs rattled by. There was a public house at the corner of Brick Lane. He turned and went in.

The barmaid handed him his large gin. The barmaid had Debbie’s dark hair, Debbie’s dark good looks. When he had paid her, she left the bar and took a seat at one of the tables. Two others sat there already, and there were cards and dice, money and drinks, before them. “Sit down,” she said, and he sat.

The blonde turned over a card, the jack of spades. “What are the spades in a deck of cards?” she asked.

“Swords,” he said. “From the Spanish word for a sword, espada. The jack of spades is really the jack of swords.”

“Correct.”

The other man said, “Knight to the White Chapel.”

The door opened, letting in the evening with a wisp of fog, and the black knight. She was tall and slender and dressed like a cavalryman, in high boots and riding breeches. A pewter miniature of a knight’s shield was pinned to her dark shirt.

The barmaid rattled the dice and threw.

“You’re still alive,” the black knight said. She strode to their table. Sergeant’s chevrons had been sewn to the sleeves of the shirt. “This neighborhood is being evacuated, folks.”

“Not by us,” the other man said.

“By you now, sir. On my orders. As an officer of the law, I must order you to leave. There’s a tank car derailed, leaking some kind of gas.”

“That’s fog,” Randolph Carter told her. “Fog and smoke.”

“Not just fog. I’m sorry, sir, but I must ask all of you to go. How long have you been here?”

“Sixteen years,” the blond woman said. “The neighborhood was a lot nicer when we came.”

“It’s some sort of chemical weapon, like LSD.”

He asked, “Don’t you want to sit down?” He stood, offering her his chair.

“My shot must be wearing off. The shot was supposed to protect me. I’m Sergeant . . . Sergeant . . .”

The other man said, “Very few of us are protected by shots, Sergeant Chapman. Shots usually kill people, particularly soldiers.”

Randolph Carter looked at her shirt. The name chapman was engraved on a stiff plastic plate there, the plate held out like a little shelf by the thrust of her left breast.

“Sergeant Anne Chapman of the United States Army. We think it’s the plants, sir. All the psychoactive drugs we know about come from plants—opium, cocaine, heroin.”

“You’re the heroine,” he told her gently. “Coming here like this to get us out.”

“All of them chemicals the plants have stumbled across to protect us from insects, really. And now they’ve found something to protect the insects from us.” She paused, staring at him. “That isn’t right, is it?”

Again he asked, “Don’t you want to sit down?”

“Gases from the comet. The comet’s tail has wrapped all Earth in poisonous gases.”

The blonde murmured, “ ‘What is the meaning of this name given Satan: Beelzebub.’ ”

A tiny voice from the ceiling answered.

“You, sir,” the black knight said, “won’t you come with me? We’ve got to get out of here.”

“You can’t get out of here,” the other man told them.

Randolph Carter nodded to the knight. “I’ll come with you, if you’ll love me.” He rose, pushing the sword up his coat sleeve, point first.

“Then come on.” She took him by the arm and pulled him through the door.

A hansom cab rattled past.

“What is this place?” She put both hands to her forehead. “I’m dreaming, aren’t I? This is a nightmare.” There was a fly on her shoulder, a blowfly gorged with carrion. She brushed it off; it settled again, unwilling to fly through the night and the yellow fog. “No, I’m hallucinating.”

He said, “I’d better take you to your room.” The bricks were wet and slippery underfoot. As they turned a corner, and another, he told her what she could do for him when they reached her room. A dead bitch lay in the gutter. Despite the night and the chill of autumn, the corpse was crawling with flies.

Sickly yellow gaslight escaped from under a door. She tore herself from him and pushed it open. He came after her, his arms outstretched. “Is this where you live?”

The three players still sat at their table. They had been joined by a fourth, a new Randolph Carter. As the door flew wide the fourth player turned to look, but he had no face.

She whispered, “This is Hell, isn’t it? I’m in Hell, for what I did. Because of what we did. We’re all in Hell. I always thought it was just something the Church made up, something to keep you in line, you know what I mean, sir?”

She was not talking to him, but he nodded sympathetically.

“Just a game in the pope’s head. But it’s real, it’s here, and here we are.”

“I’d better take you to your room,” he said again.

She shuddered. “In Hell you can’t pray, isn’t that right? But I can—Listen! I can pray! Dear G—”

He had wanted to wait, wanted to let her finish, but the sword, Sacnoth, would not wait. It entered her throat, more eager even than he, and emerged spent and swimming in scarlet blood.

The faceless Randolph Carter rose from the table. “Your seat, young man,” he said through no mouth. “I’m merely the marker whom you have followed.”

There is a daydream, I believe, common to all of us who read mysteries. We are in a small group that is somehow isolated. A member of our group is murdered, and it is we who determine the identity of the killer.

In the course of a life that has now grown lengthy, I have known three people who have actually been murdered. In one case, an old schoolmate was shot by her third husband. In another, a wealthy young woman who often came into my father’s café was murdered. Her husband was tried, acquitted, and subsequently murdered himself. The third was so fantastic that were I to describe it you would feel sure I was lying. There is a book about it: Eros, Magic, and the Murder of Professor Culianu. You will find my friend Jennifer Stevenson’s name in the index; Jennifer introduced me to Ioan Culianu.

You see that I have excuses for my interest in murder, but if I had none I would be just as interested. At one time, I considered designing a board game based on serial murders; that game never really took shape, but this story came out of the idea.