The Gray House

SMOKER

OF BATS, DRAGONS, AND BASILISK EGGSHELLS

The dorm was rocking. Humpback and I were sitting on the bed. Noble, Tabaqui, and Blind were on the floor passing around bottles and jars, sniffing, sampling, and pouring the mysterious contents of some of them into others. Tubby, in pink pajamas, watched them from behind the bars of his portable playpen.

I was watching through the bars of the headboard.

Humpback was whittling something from a blackened knobby root with his pocket knife. He had on his outside coat, decorated with Nanette’s droppings, and his shaggy hair was full of shavings.

“The pine needles are past their prime, is all I’m saying,” Tabaqui was droning halfway inside a jar of something murky and brownish. “The bouquet is completely off.”

“Take the other one, then,” Noble said. He took the jar himself, sniffed, and put it aside. “This is last year’s vintage. And quit jolting it, you are disturbing the sediment.”

Blind licked the drops he’d shaken onto his hand from another bottle, scowled, and said, “What’s oil doing here? Is this salad dressing or something?”

“Hey!” Tabaqui yelped. “Where did you get that from? That’s a scorpion drowned in sunflower oil! It’s medicine! I always store it separately!”

Noble brought the bottle closer and peered at it.

“Could be. Yep, there it is, floating there. You dummy, why did you have to do it in an opaque bottle? You can hardly see the bugger.”

“I used what was available at close proximity,” Tabaqui said sulkily. “Your choices are somewhat limited when you are holding a live scorpion in your hand, you know. And I distinctly remember putting a warning label on it. Must have dropped off at some point.”

“What use would your label be to Blind? What if he drops off right here? We’d be leaderless on the eve of a military coup.”

At this, Noble broke into a smile. It was tender and wistful.

It immediately brought to mind Tabaqui’s saying: “Noble only smiles once a year, and that when someone breaks a leg.”

Or when someone takes a swig from the bottle with a scorpion in it, I added silently.

“Blind, tell me, do you know any spells against poisons?” Tabaqui inquired anxiously. “Or how about a guarding amulet?”

Blind was already busy with the next bottle. He threw the cork from it into Tubby’s playpen and coaxed a drop onto his finger. He definitely didn’t look like someone in deathly peril.

“On second thought, what’s a mere scorpion to him?” Tabaqui said, mostly to himself. “He’s eaten much worse stuff than that. Just the other day, and other days besides the other day.”

Tubby, happy as a lark, was playing with the cork. He tossed it into the air with his two-fingered pincers and then tried to catch it. The cork kept falling through his grasp, but that didn’t faze him. Then he stuffed it into his mouth and started gumming it like a pacifier.

I watched them for a bit more and then turned over on my back. Humpback’s whittling was spraying the shavings in all directions.

“Sorry,” he’d say every time some of it fell on me.

“It’s all right,” I’d answer.

Humpback’s eyes were like moist prunes, and his eyelashes were so long they looked glued on.

“By the way,” he said, interrupting our monotonous exchanges of pleasantries, “Shuffle says that Pompey is practicing knife throwing, imagine that. He’s rumored to hit the mark from ten paces three times out of five now.”

“Who were you talking to just now?” Tabaqui said from down on the floor.

“Everybody,” Humpback said.

I turned over on my stomach again and pushed apart the bags hanging on the headboard.

“Then stop doing it. Basically, everybody already had enough of that talk from Lary.”

Tabaqui extracted a half-decomposed chili pepper from the jar he was holding, shook off the liquid, and chomped on it.

“Now this one is pretty good,” he said and closed his eyes. “There’s only one thing that’s currently perturbing me. By the time Pompey achieves perfection in his quest for accurate knife throws, Lary will have eaten all of our brains out with a spoon. He’s already on edge. Attacking people left and right. Well, he won’t be attacking anyone anytime soon now, but still. He’s clearly not himself. I think we all need to do something about it.”

“Why isn’t he going to do it anytime soon?” I said.

Noble sent another one of his radiant smiles my way.

“Yesterday we convinced Lary that he had killed you.”

My next question got stuck in my throat.

“He was bawling his head off somewhere in the bowels of the House,” Noble continued, “bidding good-bye to his faithful Bandar-Logs. It’ll be some time before he lives that down.”

“And you’re just reveling in the agony of your fellow human being!” Tabaqui said indignantly. “Happy that he almost hanged himself! Gleefully recounting this whole disgusting matter!”

“I’m sure Sphinx would’ve taken him out of the noose before anything bad happened,” Noble said airily. “He’s very considerate like that . . . sometimes. And besides, I get this feeling that you already forgot it was your idea all along.”

I was looking at Noble and thinking that at the time Sphinx was wringing me out in the bathroom, he already knew what his packmates had done to Lary. And that what they had done was by far the best protection for me that could be imagined. But he never said anything. He was testing if I was capable of snitching, and then testing if I was ready to be considered a snitch in the mind of Lary, whom I did not particularly respect. And maybe a bunch of other things as well, I couldn’t even imagine what. So that’s why I felt like I was navigating through some sort of test. Because I actually was. I knew I wasn’t going to forgive him this for a long while. And I also knew that I’d never tell anyone about it.

Tabaqui continued to expound excitedly on Lary’s mental state, and it all boiled down to his conviction that Lary would be best helped by a nice cup of herbal tea. Noble countered that Lary would be best helped by Pompey’s untimely death. Listening to this made me realize that I’d been hearing rumors of some kind of coup for a while now, and that the nick of Pompey, Leader of the Sixth, was often mentioned in relation to it. When I had still been a Pheasant, this kind of talk never really concerned me, but now I was suddenly worried that there was some piece of common knowledge I didn’t have any idea about.

“So it’s Pompey who is behind this coup?” I said. “What does he want with it?”

Tabaqui, Noble, and Blind all raised their heads and stared at me. Or rather, Tabaqui and Noble did. Blind just raised his head. All three holding jars and spoons, all three in colorful bandanas to keep their hair out of the way, they hilariously resembled three witches busy with their potions. Tubby in his playpen could pass for a homunculus. Even the bottled scorpion fit. I giggled at the thought.

“What does he want with it?” The smallest weird sister, the one with the most hair, shrouded herself in cigarette smoke and went into a trance. “What-does-he—”

“One sentence!” the second one snapped. “And that’s an order.”

“What?” Jackal said indignantly, ruining the image. “Blind, have a heart, or Smoker shall forever remain unenlightened!”

This threat did not appear to have any effect on Blind.

“I see,” Tabaqui drawled menacingly. “So this is how you want to play. All right, so be it.”

He cleared out some space around him as if preparing for takeoff, sat up, and cleared his throat.

“Hear a tale then, O Smoker, and know that it is the true tale of Pompey, whom you might know a little about and who lately has been behaving in a not entirely satisfactory manner by taking things upon himself that he hadn’t before, even though ‘before’ is an imprecise notion in this context, seeing as there was a ‘before’ for some of us here where he did not figure at all, and so it is completely beyond our kenning what exactly his behavior was in the place where he found himself prior to the moment when he found himself with us, making it at best questionable that at that time he did behave more adequately, since this man has obviously traveled far from the spirit of true Tao by becoming thoroughly steeped in the effluvium of the Outsides and is therefore capable of earnestly imagining that he could be an adequate substitute for Blind in his demanding position, which delusion might, however, be more mundanely attributed to his being fed up with the constant overpopulation of the particular precinct entrusted in his care and thus yearning for your everyday peace and quiet, in which case the preferred course of action to alleviate this condition would have been to transport himself bodily within the confines of the Cage for a period of no less than three and no more than five days, undoubtedly resulting in deeper self-awareness and spiritual cleansing as well as development of a more public-minded level of conscience, or, not to put too fine a point on it, a more introspective state of being, but no, he needs something entirely more bombastic and earth shattering, he desires to conquer and to vanquish and to tickle his multitudinous ingrained insecurities, where the manifest insecurity of his person is easily apparent to anyone in sight of his cravats and sideburns, his manner of locomotion and body language, but especially the faces of the bats that he keeps adorning himself with, for those are the faces of creatures doomed to endless suffering, afflicted with all the infirmities, known and unknown, of their chiropterous kind at the same time, a regular Ozzy Osbourne he, except that, instead of mercifully biting off their heads, he condemns them to fester around his neck for months, take poor unfortunate Poppy, having shuffled off this mortal coil not quite last Wednesday, and lo! today Suzy is already in its place, considering that this is the best we can expect from someone completely ignorant of the science that is biology, who could not even be bothered to notice that Suzy is male, despite it flashing balls the size of walnuts, though it still isn’t going to make any significant contribution in the grand scheme of things since it, too, is not long for this world, this Suzy guy is, as Pompey buried quite half a dozen of its brothers already, making its demise a question only of time, besides it likely is a matter of indifference to a bat what name is attached to it as it breathes its last, while if I were representing the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals I’d be very interested to know the name of the scoundrel buying those wretches wholesale just to look cool, even though it’s highly debatable how much coolness can possibly be squeezed out of the bedraggled body of a bat, it’s not like it’s a coral snake, now that really would be something to write home about, whereas he who is not at home with the thought of his own death is quite unlikely to wrap said snake around his neck since that would require significant expenditure of time and effort to win its trust when instead one can so easily pave his way in this world with feeble bones of innocent leather-winged victims without even bothering to notice their gender, and it is quite likely that only the complete and utter impunity Pompey enjoys with respect to this specific question is what facilitates his mistaken belief that he is supposedly capable of trampling underfoot the bones of a considerably less innocuous creature without breaking stride, by which creature I of course mean Blind, but you must have already gathered that, my esteemed packmates, so this last clarification can be considered extraneous.”

Tabaqui paused and then nodded proudly at Blind.

“I trust that was within the rules. Even though limiting me in this fashion was really rotten of you.”

The room was totally quiet. Even the boombox had gone silent. Even Nanette stopped stirring. It was as though, all this time, Jackal had been chanting a monumental spell putting the whole world to sleep. Noble was cradling an open jar and swaying from side to side with his eyes closed. Blind had slumped against Tubby’s playpen. Humpback stared at the twisted root in his hands, evidently having no idea anymore about what he was doing with it. Their faces seemed drowsy and somehow unwell, bordering on sickly. Tubby was the only one immune to the spell. He was peacefully pulling on Blind’s hair and droning softly.

Once it became crystal clear that everyone else was completely bewitched, Humpback startled and translated, blinking sleepily.

“What Tabaqui is saying is that Pompey hankers after Blind’s job. I’m not sure this really came through, what with all those bats and other crap.”

“Objection!” Tabaqui said hotly. “I was acquitting myself quite eloquently, and, what’s more important, very vividly. To try and reduce this oration to a digest is criminal.”

“True,” Humpback said. “Except that Smoker might be a bit stunned, since it’s his first time, and so not really in a position to give it its due.”

Noble opened his eyes and peeked in astonishment into the jar he was hugging through all of this.

“Would it be possible,” he said, “to limit this monster next time to a certain number of words instead of sentences?”

“Of course not!” Blind said. He straightened up and snatched his hair out of Tubby’s grasp. “Just think of the many different ways one single word can be repeated.”

We all thought of it and groaned. Tabaqui inclined his head like a great actor acknowledging the applause of his audience.

At dinner I couldn’t eat properly. I was shaken up by the information about Pompey. The well-being of his bats was the last thing on my mind. I didn’t like the word coup, not one bit. I felt myself in the middle of events about which I had only a very hazy notion, or rather no notion at all, and I liked that even less.

How does the House change Leaders? Do they fight each other? Or is it pack against pack? And if so, why is the Fourth so unruffled in the face of the coming massacre? Because there was no other way that a fight between them and the Sixth could be described.

I guess that’s the end of the peaceful life, I thought. As if my life in the Fourth was ever peaceful.

The green peas were drying out on the plate, and the meat loaf was already caked with congealed fat. I was hungry, but I still couldn’t eat. The ceiling speakers were drenching us in marching music, so anyone in the canteen wanting to have a conversation had to shout in order to be heard.

The black-and-white Pheasant table. The quiet horror of the glances examining neighbors’ plates. Half of the Pheasants were on individual meal plans, each one different, so everyone’s plate contents were always a concern. There were calories to be counted.

Rats at the next table. The explosion of color and the tide of insanity.

Then Birds, in their nightmarish bibs over black.

The Sixth was all about camaraderie. Looking at them, it would seem that the group consisted exclusively of jovial practical jokers. I wouldn’t want to find myself on the receiving end of their jokes, and their bursts of loud merriment looked suspect, but so what. They were trying their best.

The Third, Fourth, and Sixth had it tough. Rats and Pheasants were the Naughty and the Nice. Both of them overdid it to such an extent that everyone else had to squeeze in between somewhere. Birds were a bit better at it, Hounds a bit worse, and the Fourth, in addition to having no designation, was just too sparsely populated to . . . to fully participate in the game.

Once I managed to say the word, I suddenly was free to realize that this “game” would have to include much more than just appearance. It was the right word, and, having caught it, I understood that I had been looking for it for a long time. For the word that would contain the key to everything happening in the House. All it took was the recognition of the fact that the Game encompassed everything around me.

It was too improbable that every single one of the pathetic, whining conformists would assemble in one group, while all the unhinged anarchists would go to the other. Which meant that someone somewhere must have designed this at some point. Why? Now that was a different question.

My own perspicacity was making me sweat. I wasn’t even hungry anymore.

So one day, my imagination churned, they became so frightfully bored that they compiled the script of the Game and vowed to never deviate from it under any circumstances. For everyone his role and everyone in his place. And that was the way it had gone since that time. Make-believe and following the script. Willingly for some, less so for others, but everywhere and always. And especially in the canteen, where the audience was always the biggest. No wonder some of them, Pheasants for example, eventually could allow the Game to overrule even basic human nature.

Within this structure everything started making sense, easily and beautifully. The scales had fallen from my eyes as I looked around.

Rats. Almost all of them underage, sixteen or less. Their acid-colored mullets masked teenagers in the throes of age-appropriate angst. Probably this was why they looked so natural playing at deranged instability.

Birds. Birds made me pause a little. All right. Black is just a color. Unpleasant faces, but I probably could make my own face look like that if needed. Vulture . . . the House monster. I looked at him through my newly opened eyes and tried to strip away the chaff. Mourning . . . rings . . . black polish on long manicured nails . . . long hair and eye shadow. Throw all of that out, forget even the fact that he made his bed in a coffin, erase every trace of his nasty habits—what would you have left? A gaunt, hook-nosed fellow. An unpleasant person, to be sure, but not a monster by any stretch.

This is where I switched off temporarily, because the unpleasant person suddenly turned around and stared at me. Must have felt himself being exposed. He looked at me with those sleepy yellow eyes of his and I lost the ability to function, skewered by that stare.

Assured that I had been neutralized and was ready to be served, Vulture smiled, showcasing the unnaturally long crooked teeth. It felt like someone forcefully dragging a blade over glass.

It took me a couple of minutes to get my composure back, and even then something kept nagging at me. Like when you watch an old black-and-white movie and this creep in a ton of makeup is constantly polishing his fingernails and looking around unblinkingly, and it suddenly freaks you out and the next moment makes you ashamed for falling for his cheap tricks.

All right. That meant only that he was a very good actor. He inhabited the character. If anyone was supposed to be a Game master, it was a House Leader. It must have been they who actually invented it.

To test my theory, I decided to expose Red.

Rat Leader proved to be not particularly amenable to exposure. If you took away the green shades occupying the whole upper half of his face and the bloodred buzz cut, supposedly his natural color, what were you left with? Nothing at all. A tailor’s dummy made up as a Rat would have done just as well.

That fairly took away my thunder. To cheer myself up again, I turned to Pompey.

He sort of looked a bit like Sphinx. I guess it was his height. And the bald head. Except Sphinx’s was real. And Pompey left a small lick on top. Jet black and greased to a shine. He was also fatter. That is, fleshier.

I stripped away the leather biker jacket, like the ones so beloved by Logs, and shook off the face powder. Then picked the poor bat off the collar, bearing in mind that its name was Suzy and that its days were numbered. What was left looked . . . ordinary. A handsome guy, but nothing special.

I couldn’t understand before why a guy like Pompey would pretend he was a walking corpse. Now I knew it was all in accordance with the rules of the Game. Leaders needed to be pale and ominous. Pompey was naturally swarthy, so he must have gone through a lot of face powder to maintain the standard. The image of Pompey with the puff in his hand, putting the last touches of deathly paleness on his face, made me swoon and giggle.

The script accounted for everything. Every detail. Which way the part in Pheasants’ hair went. How black was the underwear of a true Bird. What books were allowed for Hounds. Maybe Rats would have liked to skip the hair coloring once in a while, but they forced themselves, for those were the rules of the Game. It was even quite likely that Birds secretly loathed anything that grew, pots or no pots.

The final insight was a very simple one. I was leading up to it through all the preceding ones, deliberately, slowly, leaving it for last, so that in the end I could place it on top flamboyantly and be done with the whole thing.

The overthrow of Blind by Pompey—or rather, the widely advertised intention thereof—must have been a part of the Game as well. To always run the same tired script wasn’t much fun. From time to time the play needed some variety. The war declared by Pompey provided just such variety. Hound Leader scares the Logs, practices throwing knives, generally behaves “in a not entirely satisfactory manner,” to quote Jackal. The audience shivers, Log spies run between different camps with the latest dispatches. People have something to discuss. Everyone’s engaged and no one’s afraid. Except Lary, but Lary is a simpleton taking everything at face value.

I looked around the canteen again. It was all so obvious! And so stupid!

I wanted to laugh out loud and scream that I was onto all of them now. All of their bats, throwing knives, coups, face powders, and scorpions in oil.

It must have somehow manifested itself on my face, because Tabaqui suddenly threw down his fork and demanded to know why the hell was I looking so smug and stupid.

“This,” I said and stuck out my tongue at him. Just the tip. I immediately remembered how Jackal could not stand being mocked, but it was already too late.

He went livid faster than if someone had dumped boiling water on him. Coughed the half-chewed piece of food out on his plate and asked Noble to hold him as fast as he could.

“Did you see that? Did you see that feathered bastard disrespect my advanced age? Everyone see that? I’m going to see the color of his guts!”

He was saying all of this between coughing fits, but it sounded deadly serious.

Noble took the butter knife off Tabaqui and remarked that my guts being spread out on the floor of the canteen would put everybody off their food.

“He thinks that he’s received enlightenment!” Tabaqui continued through bouts of coughing, even turning slightly blue. “That he understands it now! Is there life after death, is there life on Mars, and is the Earth round! Look at him, sitting here all bloated!”

“He’s been kind of puffy ever since your speech,” Humpback said. “I guess he’s just not used to it all.”

“I’m not bloated!” I protested. “I’m not bloated, I’m not puffy, and I’d appreciate it if you all left me alone!”

“Hear, hear,” Black said from the other side of the table. “Tabaqui, why are you at his throat all of a sudden? Can’t a guy just think whatever it is he thinks in peace?”

“Peace!” Tabaqui shrieked. “Is that what you call peace now? When one of your packmates fills up with self-importance, turns into a complete bastard, and on top of that squints at you contentedly? And I’m supposed to just shut up about this? To live alongside this disgusting mug? Not likely! If he thinks he can walk around with that kind of face, he should get himself a veil. I personally am not going to let it slide!”

“Look, he’s just pissed off now,” Sphinx said. “See for yourself. And calm down, will you.”

But it took quite a while for Jackal to calm down. He would chew his food looking away and then suddenly turn around, throw me a wicked stare, and turn back. It was not at all funny, even though it seemed so to Noble.

I tried to look stone-faced while wheeling out of the canteen. I wasn’t mad at Tabaqui. Not even a bit angry. If anything, I was admiring his sharpness. Who would be happy if someone were to debunk their favorite game? Tabaqui’s reaction confirmed that I really was on to something. I just had to learn to keep it to myself.

Black patted me on the shoulder as he passed.

“Don’t let it get to you,” he said. “They’re all nuts, some more than others.”

“They’re not nuts,” I blurted out. “They’re players.”

Black gave me a surprised look.

I couldn’t understand what was more surprising to him: my words, which he didn’t understand, or my insightfulness.

They lived in filthy cages, and they ate raw eggs by sucking them out through cracked shells. Their ears were sharp and rough to the touch and their claws were like curved swords. No disease could ever befall them, except colds and scabies, from which they died . . .

. . . it shined its purple eye on me and I understood that it was her, the Great Hairy, the one who lives under the beds in the places where the dust collects, the one who turns the floorboards over in search of mold. I asked her to tell me my future, but she never did that. “There is nothing more horrible than knowing what awaits us tomorrow,” she said and gave me one of her fangs in consolation . . .

And within that castle dwelt a knight renowned throughout the land for his prowess. They called him Dragonslayer, for he had killed the last dragon, and that was no mean feat since it was very hard to find. Those who would speak ill of him maintained, however, that it wasn’t a dragon at all, just a large lizard from the Southern Realm . . .

It looks like a small black cylinder. It cannot be seen by sunlight, and it definitely cannot be seen in the dark. One can only bump into it by accident. Every night it hums softly as it steals time . . .

I was lying in the dark and listening. It was hot. My head was swimming from the cocktail, in which I could vaguely discern vodka, lemon juice, and something like pine-scented shampoo. The boombox, buried under the layers of blankets, was playing organ music. Everywhere around me were someone’s arms, legs, pillows, and bottles. It was the first time that I’d experienced the room with all the lights off. The stories kept coming. Some were interrupted just when they got going, others started instead, and then the earlier ones returned when I’d already lost the sequence of events, and the overlaying snippets wove themselves into fanciful patterns that were very hard to keep track of. I tried, though.

. . . it is the hour when the bighorns venture out on the glistening paths leading down to the water, and they bellow. Trees bend from their calls. And then the hour comes when all the fools are placed in boats and sent up the moon river. It is said that the Moon takes them. The water near the shore becomes sweet and remains sweet until sunrise. Those who catch this hour and manage to drink the water turn into fools themselves . . .

I laughed and spilled some wine on my shirt.

“Why would anyone want to drink it,” I whispered, “if it’s so dangerous?”

“There is none happier than a true fool,” the invisible storyteller said.

The voice sounded like Sphinx. But I didn’t think I was distinguishing the voices correctly. I’d drunk too much, I guessed. The glass kept refilling itself, and an empty bottle was sticking in my ribs on the right side. I couldn’t be bothered to push it away.

There aren’t too many basilisks left in the Black Forest. They have mostly gone to seed, and their gaze is rarely lethal. But if you trek farther in, where the moss covering the tree trunks glows purple, the ones you meet there are the real ones, since they’ve never seen light. That’s why no one goes there, and of those who do, few return, and of those who return, none had seen any basilisks. So how do we know that they still exist there?

Someone jostled me.

“Hey, your turn. Tell us something.”

I rubbed my face. My fingers were sticky. I licked them. The drowsy apathy was carrying me away, up the moon river. To where the bighorns were waiting.

“I can’t,” I said honestly. “I don’t know anything that’s like these stories. I’d just spoil everything.”

“Give me your glass, then.”

I thrust the glass in the direction of the voice.

“I’ll have the pine, please. But not too much. I’m already tipsy.”

I specified the pine because I saw Tabaqui splash some of the contents from the jar with the chili peppers into the other three bottles. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to survive a sampling of the resulting brew.

“There isn’t much left anyway. Don’t drop off, though. No sleeping on Fairy Tale Night. That would be bad manners.”

“Do these nights happen often?”

“Four times a year. There’s one every season. And also the Monologue Night, the Dream Night, and the Longest Night. Those are once per year. You’ve missed the first two.”

The glass returned.

“The Night of the Big Crash, when Humpback falls out of his aerie,” the voice continued to mumble indistinctly. “The Night of the Yellow Water, when Lary remembers his childhood . . . We should check in on him, by the way. He skipped two rounds already.”

Someone at the foot of the bed started checking in on Lary. Judging by the sighs and moans reaching me from over there, he was fast asleep.

“Hey you, sleepyhead. Wake up, you owe us a penalty story.”

Lary yawned broadly, like a tiger. There was a pause.

“There was this pretty girl who once got run over by a train . . . ,” a husky and desperate voice finally said.

“Right, shut up. Go back to sleep.”

Lary snorted contentedly, crashed back wherever it was they had just excavated him from, and began snoring immediately. I laughed. My shirt was clinging wetly where I’d spilled the liquor. The boombox stared at me with its red eye.

. . . when Hairy needs to hear something she makes a hole in the wall, and when she needs to see she sends her rats to see for her. She is born of the foundation, and she is alive while the house is still standing. The older the house, the bigger and wiser its Hairy. For those she likes, she makes her domain benevolent and gentle, and for the others—the other way around. In the ancient times, people used to call her spiritus familiaris and made offerings to her. They hoped she would protect them from dark influence and the evil eye . . .

I wondered whose story that was. I couldn’t make out the voice. I even suspected that they’d switched off the lights specifically to confuse me. And that they were now telling these tales in resonant, disguised voices for the very same reason.

. . . because ever since the time that the knight nailed the two-headed skull up in the Grand Hall, he was beset by the dragon’s curse. The eldest sons in his line were born two-headed. Some said differently. That it wasn’t the knight who came out victorious in that long-forgotten battle, but the dragon, and that it was the lizard who lived in the castle now in the guise of a human, and that for this very reason he never allowed anything bad to be spoken about his two-headed progeny, but instead loved them more than all others . . .

The cry of the midwife toad is terrible and can be heard from far away. If you didn’t know beforehand, it would be impossible to believe that it is just a toad crying. It buries its eggs in wet leaves and shovels earth on top of them. You can find them wherever it is the dampest, by the roots of the oldest trees. When the little basilisk is about to hatch, the shell starts to smolder. You should never pour water on it or otherwise try to extinguish the fire, as it’s a very bad omen. It must be allowed to extinguish itself. The black slivers that remain can bring luck if sewn into leather or suede and worn constantly . . .

“I wouldn’t mind getting some of that shell,” I said, trying to chase away sleep. “Anybody here got any? Are there any basilisk hunters around?”

Everyone laughed.

“Or a two-headed dragon skull for you, maybe?” Tabaqui said indignantly. “That little nipper doesn’t miss a beat!”

“No. No skull, I don’t want to fall prey to a curse,” I said.

“But a bit of free luck would not be amiss?” the mysterious basilisk expert said.

“It’s luck, how could it be?” I said.

“Have it, then. But remember: you carry a part of the Forest with you now. May your desires be pure.”

Someone’s hand brushed my hair. I lifted my head and a pouch on a string slid down my neck.

All around me people rumbled indignantly, disapproving of my sudden fortune.

“Outrageous!” Tabaqui shouted.

Something bumped against the back of my head. It was small but expertly tossed. A quarter of an apple, as it turned out.

“I’ve been living here for ages, constantly at everyone’s pleasure, entertaining day and night. I’ve become all frayed and withered, and not a single wretched creature in this place has ever offered me to try on a piece of basilisk eggshell! This is the gratitude for all my pains, for years and years of misery,” Tabaqui ranted.

“I don’t think you’ve ever asked,” the former owner of the amulet said gently.

The voice made me shiver slightly, and that’s how I knew it was Blind. Even though the voice was not entirely his.

“Horse pucky!” Tabaqui exploded. “Are you saying respect must be begged and wheedled now? Justice! Where’s justice, I ask you?”

He was either really very deeply upset, or he was playing it up brilliantly. Either way, I felt uneasy.

“Would you like to have it for a while?” I said and reached for the string.

“No way!” he squeaked. “An amulet belonging to someone else? You’re off your rocker, dearest! Better a cursed dragon tailbone!”

“Speaking of dragons,” Sphinx interjected. “We got distracted. So what about those, the two-headed ones?”

“Nothing.” A lighter clicked and I saw it was Noble lighting up. “I am the last son in the whole stupid lineage. One-headed, as you can see. We’re freaking extinct, and I’m certainly not complaining.”

The ending of this story caught me a little off guard. I laughed.

“Cool. So was this a curse or the dragon himself?” I said.

The burning cigarette end zigzagged in the air.

“I’ve no idea. I only know the tale, and that we have a two-headed lizard on our coat of arms, with a supremely idiotic expression on both of its mugs,” Noble said.

“You’ve got a coat of arms?” I said.

“It’s on every handkerchief and every sock,” Noble admitted with disgust. “I keep trying to lose them everywhere and they keep coming back. Would you like a sock or ten? I’ll throw in a free lighter as well. And let’s talk about something else, all right? Like what happens to those poor idiots floating in the river?”

“Who knows?” Sphinx said. “They float. Maybe they wash ashore somewhere. Or maybe the Moon really takes them. It’s not about them, it’s about the water in the river.”

“Moon River!” Tabaqui exclaimed. “I knew it! I knew this was about the dear old concoction!”

I recalled the beginning of that story: Those who manage to drink the water turn into fools. I was just about to ask how come Noble didn’t turn into one when I felt his hand squeezing my elbow as a mute warning. An impossible trick, to move so quickly over a bed full of people. I was curious if he managed to shut up Jackal as well. Or did Tabaqui decide on his own to shut up? I definitely wasn’t going to ask that.

“How about we open the windows?” someone suggested. “It’s getting stuffy.”

The other end of the bed developed some movement, there were yawns and cigarettes being lit.

“And some more water. We ran out.”

“Let Smoker go get some. He’s not speaking anyway.”

“He won’t make it.”

“I’ll go,” someone suggested, jumping off the bed. “Give me the bottles.”

I heard bottles clinking. I grappled for the one sticking in my side, passed it over, and felt that I could breathe freely again. Turned out it had been making me really miserable all this time.

“Humpback, sing the one about the purple ghost. That’s a beautiful song.”

“I’m not in the mood. I’ll sing the one about being caught in the act,” Humpback said.

Someone jostled me and made me spill the wine again.

Please don’t hurt me, I’m a little old rat,

just a little old rat, I swear!

Only this piece of old yellow cheese,

and that’s the full extent of my sins,

I swear to you, yes, I swear!

“Wicked,” someone whispered and giggled softly.

Only a burrow, two runs in it,

my bedroom is at the very end.

There are four of us hiding inside,

I’m the oldest, Death will come for me soon.

Please, please, don’t hurt me tonight,

let me return, return to my hole!

Doleful sighs in the dark.

I fingered the pouch on the string. It was soft, worn, and sewn shut. There was something sharp inside, and it crackled where I was probing. Maybe it really was a piece of shell. Or a corn chip. My own movements felt sluggish, and my thoughts chased each other around in my head. I tried to assemble them into something halfway coherent, but I only ended up with some fuzzy snippets. Rip the pouch open . . . to see . . . Check Noble’s socks. Ask him why he didn’t want anyone to know about Moon River. At the same time I was conscious of the fact that tomorrow I wouldn’t remember much of what I was thinking tonight. Or much of anything really.

Lary woke up and began telling a story about the abominable snowman. I recognized his voice easily, even when drunk. His snowman was really made of snow. He was quickly shushed. Apparently Lary had been telling this same story for years now, and everyone except me already knew it by heart. Lary said that they were just afraid. That it was the scariest tale in the world and that not many people were able to listen to it.

Then the water arrived. The glass disappeared somewhere, so I was waiting for the bottle making the rounds to get to me, but someone upended it on the way, spilling water on the bed. Everyone started yelling and jumping about. I got hit with a book, then another book, and a pillow. I scrambled out from under them and immediately dove right back, blinded by the bright light.

Once I came to and could open my eyes, I emerged again and right away found the glass. It was lolling in the folds of the blanket, quietly bleeding the last drops of pine. Blind’s hand was on the wall switch. He was the only one not screwing his eyes desperately as he gleefully waited for the groans to die down. In the other hand he held three dripping bottles, his impossibly long fingers interwoven around their necks, so I figured that he was the one who’d offered to go get the water. The chain of command sure manifested itself in mysterious ways in the Fourth.

Half of the pack had already migrated down. Humpback and Alexander opened the windows and tossed mattresses on the floor. I tried to climb off the bed as well, something I couldn’t reliably manage without help even when sober. Black caught me just in time, turned me the right way up, and deposited me on the mattress. I thanked him effusively, if not quite coherently. The boombox went back on, the lights went back out. Alexander threw a blanket over Noble and me, then another one over those who were lying next to us. Blind distributed the bottles.

I lay there wrapped up in my corner of the blanket. I was content. I became a part of something big, something of many arms and legs, something warm and chatty. I was probably its tail or paw, or maybe even a bone. Any movement made my head spin, but still I couldn’t remember the last time when I’d felt so comfortable. If, that morning, someone had told me that I was going to be spending the night like this, mellow and happy, drinking and listening to stories, would I have believed it? Probably not. Stories. Fairy tales. In the dark, complete with harmless dragons, basilisks, and stupid, stupid snowmen . . .

I almost cried from all the empathy for my packmates that was now flooding me, but managed to stop myself. Those would have been the wrong tears, drunken and maudlin.

“I’m beautiful,” said one of the ugly ones and started crying.

“And I’m ugly,” said the other and started laughing . . .

And the night went on.