The Gray House

SMOKER

ON MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING BETWEEN BLACK SHEEP

Silence. And the smells of dust and mold. That’s what the Crossroads is at night. I was sitting beside the barrel where something raggedy and moribund was trying to grow, touching this skeleton of a plant and reading the messages. They covered the barrel from top to bottom. Boar, Poplar, Nail . . . All unfamiliar nicks. The darkened letters looked like old carvings, partially obliterated. But some things were still legible.

Crossroads was illuminated by two wall fixtures. One with a purple shade, in the corner with the TV set. The other, with a cracked blue glass cover, over the low, battered armchair by the opposite wall. The central space between them, containing the sofa, the withered plants, and myself, was shrouded in darkness. I almost had to read with my fingers, the way Blind did. Or sometimes with the help of a lighter. A rather pointless pursuit, but still better than nothing.

THE COELACANTHS ARE EXTINCT, BUT NOT REALLY, a message declared cryptically. Next to it, one Saurus intimated: FOLLOWING THE PATH OF THE COYOTE. Exactly where, he did not elaborate. To extinction, probably. Below it was a poem dedicated to a girl. AND TO YOUR LEGS, AND TO YOUR ARMS, AND RUMPTY-TUMPTY-TUMPTY-TUM . . . The poem was incredibly clunky, and obviously had in mind some specific girl. Otherwise the author wouldn’t have mentioned her “piebald curls.” I wasn’t sure what “piebald” meant exactly, but applied to hair it definitely wasn’t a color worthy of poetic praise.

We didn’t have much contact with the girls. None, as a matter of fact. Even though their wing was connected to ours by a common stairway. As far as I knew, no one ever used it to go up to them. They occupied the third floor; the second was taken up by the sick bay, and I had no idea what was there on the first. Probably that mysterious swimming pool with its eternal renovations. The only time we ran into them was on Saturdays, during movie nights. They sat separately and never joined in any of our conversations. In the yard they always kept to their own porch. I didn’t know where all those strict rules came from, but obviously not from the principal’s office. Or they would have been broken. Which they weren’t.

The other section of the poem related the story of some records being given to someone. And of a book THAT YOU HAVE SO GRACEFULLY DROPPED ON MY HEAD, WITH NARY A SHRUG OF YOUR SHOULDERS . . . The only place where one could drop a book on someone’s head would be in the library, standing on a stepladder. And girls never went to the common library.

The more I thought about this, the more intrigued I became. I remembered an episode that I’d witnessed in the yard once, in my very first month of being here.

Beauty, from the Third, and a wheeler girl, whose nick I didn’t know, were playing with a ball. This must have been the weirdest game I’d ever seen. The petite, dark-haired girl, with a little face as white as a china cup, threw a tennis ball down from the porch. Then, by miracle (with the role of the slightly clumsy miracle performed by Beauty), the ball would find itself back on the porch. Actually, Beauty missed more often than not. Then the girl had to wheel down and search for her toy in the bushes. In over half an hour, Beauty managed to throw it accurately, so it landed at her feet, only four times, and I’m not sure those weren’t just accidents. But each time she would smile. It certainly seemed that she was smiling at her own happy thoughts, because neither she nor Beauty ever looked at each other. Only at the ball. Watched it appear in front of them, time after time, as if from some other dimension. The girl was much better at it. Beauty kept losing his concentration and trying to trace the ball outside of his territory, but the girl . . . I could have shot a gorgeous short film starring her: The Girl and the Ball: Playing with Shadows. I was mesmerized by this spectacle. I didn’t realize that I was watching two lovers, and that this game was the closest they could allow themselves to be to each other. Back then I just figured that they didn’t know each other too well and were a bit embarrassed about it.

I was thinking about that time when Black appeared. Sleepy, surly, in a pajama top and untied sneakers. He’d put them on like slippers, flattening the backs. He approached, limping visibly, and inquired if I knew what time it was.

I didn’t. Like every other inhabitant of the Fourth I no longer had a watch. I mean, actually I did. Buried deep in the bottom of my bag.

“Quarter to midnight,” Black said. “The hallway lights are going to be out soon, and I doubt you thought to bring a flashlight along. You are going to get personally acquainted with every wall on your way back.”

“I was reading this poem,” I said, pointing at the barrel. “Very unusual. It’s about this girl. Can’t figure out who wrote it. Can you believe it, it says that she was dropping on him—that is, on the guy writing all this—some books, and also giving him records. Who could that possibly be? Do you know?”

Black glanced briefly at the barrel.

“It’s old stuff, from six years ago,” he said indifferently. “They graduated. Can’t you see, it’s all blackened and stuff.”

“Oh! I see! Boar, Poplar, Saurus—they’re all from the previous class.” I was a little disappointed in the mystery being resolved in such a mundane fashion. “So that’s why I couldn’t find a single familiar nick.”

“I think you managed to dig up just about the only place where their scribblings are still visible. Beats me how you found it,” Black grumbled, lowering himself onto the sofa. His face contorted as he did it, and he gingerly straightened his leg once seated.

“It was so quiet in the dorm. It felt . . . different. Alien, somehow. You were asleep, and anything I touched made an awful racket for some reason,” I said, trying to explain why I’d scrambled out of there.

“Yeah.” Black shrugged. “You think I don’t understand? I woke up and it’s, like, all dark and silent. Like I was in a coffin. I could hear my own heart beating. All I could do not to scream.”

I had a really tough time imagining Black screaming because he was scared. So I laughed.

“Really,” Black said. “You don’t believe me?”

He took a pack of Lucky Strikes out of his pocket and lit up. I was completely floored. I was sure he didn’t smoke.

“I don’t, usually,” Black said. “Only when the day is particularly shitty. Like today.”

He smoked in silence and with great concentration. Like everything he did: eating, drinking, reading . . . Every action he performed possessed this thoroughness, as if announcing to the world: “Now this is how it’s supposed to be done.” Probably that was why no one ever interrupted him while he was doing something. When he found himself in need of an ashtray, Black rummaged under the sofa with the same absorbed look on his face and hauled out a flat copper saucer in the shape of a maple leaf. The old-timers would do magic tricks like that sometimes, producing unexpected objects out of the most unlikely places.

“Listen,” he said, installing the leaf on the sofa’s arm, “I wanted to ask you something. How come you stayed? Why didn’t you go with them?”

I paused. It was not an easy thing to explain. In all honesty, I didn’t want to leave Black alone. After his conversation with Sphinx in the morning, when I saw the way they looked at him, or rather, avoided looking at him . . . It all had this horribly familiar feel. Familiar and unpleasant.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I guess I’m still too much of a Pheasant. I can’t even imagine how this could work—turning up at the hospital wing, at night, without permission, carrying supplies. For me that would be the same as, I don’t know, busting into Shark’s office and stealing his fire extinguisher. I thought I would be out of place there. And it’s not because I’m scared. I just don’t see the point.”

Black nodded.

“I get it. It’s the same with me. I wouldn’t have gone even if this whole thing with Noble hadn’t happened. In times like this someone has to stay back and secure the base.”

It seemed that, despite the approaching lights out, Black wasn’t in any hurry to leave. He was, if anything, open for a discussion. Or maybe it was just that his leg hurt and he was simply resting it. I decided to go for it and clear up some things that had been bothering me ever since that talk with Sphinx.

“I’m sorry if this is not a comfortable topic,” I said, “but why is it that Sphinx dislikes you so much?”

Black choked on the smoke.

“Sorry!” I repeated hurriedly. “It’s just that the impression I got—”

“It’s not an impression,” he interrupted. “And that’s a mild way of putting it. It’s not just that he doesn’t like me. He hates me. But generally that wouldn’t be any of your business, agreed?”

“Sorry,” I mumbled again. “Of course it isn’t.”

Black disgustedly crushed the cigarette stub against the ashtray.

“When Sphinx first got to the House, I did kick him around. It’s been nine years already, but he never forgot. Good memory, for that kind of thing. He’s so cool and tough now, but back then he was a spoiled mama’s darling. Crying into his pillow every night, tailing Blind’s every step. You know, everybody’s little pet. All of them fussing around him, wiping the snot off his nose.”

I remembered the photo out of the Moby-Dick. Where I couldn’t find Sphinx. Maybe he hadn’t arrived at the House yet. Or maybe he was somewhere else, crying into his pillow, as Black put it.

“So,” Black said, shoving the ashtray back under the sofa. He bumped into something there, pulled out a pink rubber bunny, and stared at it in apparent surprise. “What was I talking about? Oh, right. It’s a long story. Everything was fine until he came in. And then it all went screwy. First he wanted a separate room. Then he wanted separate friends. And whatever he wanted, he always got. Half of my pack defected into that damn room of his. All drawn in by his pretty smile.”

Black was fiddling with the rubber bunny, regarding it thoughtfully, as if he was in fact seeing something else there in front of him.

“And ever since that time we kind of can’t stand each other. Silly, I know. I bet you’re thinking right now, ‘This is nonsense, those grown-up guys still nursing their childish grudges.’ Well, these grudges keep getting reinforced. A lot of other things get added in. And they keep adding. Like this one, with Noble. Sphinx makes it look like I doomed him to something horrible. When in fact all I did was save him. But would anybody say it like it is? Of course not, how could they? There is only one truth, and Sphinx is the one telling it. He’s the smartest here, and we’re all like nothing before him.”

“He certainly has charm,” I offered carefully.

“You should have seen him when he was nine,” Black chortled. “The shining light of the House. One smile and swoons all around. It’s not the same now. He’s been cranky lately. But he’s still got it, no question. So I’m surprised you haven’t dashed off after him to the Sepulcher, trailing smoke. Usually that’s more or less the effect he has on people.”

It wasn’t a pleasant experience, listening to what Black was saying, but in some sense I’d brought it on myself. And maybe, just maybe, there was a grain of truth in all of this.

“Are they going to take Noble away now?” I asked, in a clumsy attempt to change the subject.

Black was wiping dust off the bunny and didn’t even look in my direction.

“Probably. I wouldn’t be so hung up about this. But for the guys in here, there’s nothing worse in the whole world. For them, there’s no life in the Outsides. As for me, I’m counting down the days until graduation. I guess I’m a black sheep in that regard.”

Being a seasoned and much-persecuted black sheep in my own right, I nodded understandingly. Now I knew what made Black different from the others.

“I understand,” I said. “That’s how it was with me too, the last half year.”

“And that’s why I find you easy to talk to,” Black said.

I nodded again. We were silent for a while. This mute understanding was growing between us, and we were afraid words might spook it. It’s not that I considered Black to be right about everything. But I had to admit that talking to him was indeed much easier than talking to Sphinx or Humpback.

“Noble is not well,” Black said suddenly, apparently trying to get everything that was bothering him out in the open. “Tried to kill himself a couple years ago. Once, twice . . . Sphinx got to him. With his drills, like a sergeant. Amazing how he’s crawling around now, right? Well, you should have seen the way Sphinx was driving him. Followed him one step behind, and as soon as Noble stopped he’d step on his legs. So Noble was in turns crawling and yelping. Crying and still crawling. A sickening sight. And Sphinx kept following and stepping on him.”

I had to close my eyes when I imagined what he was talking about.

“Black, stop it,” I said. “This is too much.”

“Sure,” Black said. “It’s better not to know. To continue thinking that Sphinx is this sweet guy. Very helpful, if you want to blend in.”

I let that pass. I was still trying to come to terms with the image of sadistic Sphinx trampling someone’s legs with a beatific smile on his face. I had a hard time even imagining this. But at the same time I realized that Black wasn’t lying, and this contradiction was driving me crazy.

“Black, I’m sorry,” I said finally. “I didn’t want to interrupt. I guess I am better off knowing things like that, at least to . . . to better understand what’s what. But I need some time to adjust. To absorb the information.”

“I’m fine with that,” Black replied. “I didn’t tell you all this so that you start avoiding Sphinx from now on. That’s not the point. The point is that Noble is nuts. He’s sick. Always has been. Even before Sphinx added to it. He needs treatment. So when Sphinx goes all righteous on me, telling me that I, wouldn’t you know, behaved despicably, I want to just laugh it off. But when six other people, who, by the way, all witnessed everything I’ve told you about, when those six all agree with him, that’s no longer funny. Make sense?”

“Yeah.”

Black took out another cigarette.

“Just wanted, you know, for at least one person in this damned zoo to understand. Just one.”

He lit up. I saw that his knuckles were scraped, and his hands trembled so much that he couldn’t quite connect the end of the cigarette with the lighter’s flame.

I was sitting there, stunned, torn between anger and pity. I understood him. I understood him all too well. But I didn’t want to. Because it meant becoming a black sheep again. Only this time there’d be two of us. And I so wished to become a full-fledged member of the pack. To be with them, to be one of them.

“I understand you. I do. I’m sorry if it doesn’t look that way from the outside.”

“No, I’m sorry. I guess I shouldn’t have dumped all of this on you.”

But he was obviously glad I’d said that. And I realized that this was it. There was no going back. I chose Black.

I was trying to convince myself that maybe this wasn’t quite the end of the world when Black finished his cigarette, tossed the butt over the back of the sofa, and got up, favoring his aching leg.

“Let’s roll,” he said. “Now we’re definitely not going to make it before it’s dark.”

He stuffed the pink bunny into his pocket.

We didn’t make it even as far as the Second when the lights went out. They blinked twice, and then it was dark. I’d been forewarned and prepared, but still I startled. Black was right: if I were to find myself alone in this inky blackness, I’d just be stuck wherever I was when it came. But Black did have a flashlight. Now I was holding it, and he was pushing the wheelchair.

I was still digesting our conversation and must have been doing a lousy job of lighting our way, because at some point Black stopped and told me to point the flashlight straight ahead. I apologized and raised it higher.

The murals on the walls looked different. They loomed out of the darkness in fragments, most of them unfamiliar, even those that I passed several times each day. And when faced with the White Bull I simply gasped in astonishment. Black understood and stopped, giving me the opportunity to fully illuminate the drawing.

The Bull was swaying forlornly on its slender stick legs, watching us with its human eyes and thinking about something sad. It was the most amazing bull in the whole world. It was drawn in an affectedly primitive, childish manner, and its expressiveness went straight for the heart.

“Look at it,” I whispered.

Black stepped forward and scraped the wall where it had started peeling, costing the bull half a horn.

“It’s coming off. Vulture tried putting clear varnish on top, that’s why it looks dull now.”

The image of Vulture as a custodian of wall art was such an incongruous one that I could only mutter something indistinct. The House was a strange place indeed, and every day brought me new evidence of this.

“Who painted this?”

Black looked at me funny.

“Leopard, who else? Oh yeah, I keep forgetting you haven’t been here that long. You can’t mistake his drawings for anyone else’s.” He thought for a while, then added, “Leopard was Leader of the Second. Some three years ago. Red’s third after him.”

He seemed to force that last bit out of himself, but I got the impression that the details would have been forthcoming if I started asking questions. It was strange but refreshing knowledge: that my every question would be answered concisely and exhaustively. With no equivocating, clowning around, references to Pheasants, or long discourses about the Ways of the House. I immediately decided not to abuse this, and to begin by not digging further into the topic of Leopard’s disappearance. Especially since Black’s tone of voice very strongly hinted at the answer.

“There are others,” Black continued as we went along. “Other drawings. They’re almost all around the Third now. There were even more near the Second, but those were all painted over. Still, Bull is the best. I took a couple of shots using a flash, but they didn’t work out that well. I should try again. There’s been this talk about repainting the walls for some time now. Then it’d be gone forever.”

At the door, Black fumbled in his pockets and produced a key. This was the first time I saw our dorm locked, and it sharply drove home the fact that Black and I were indeed alone. Black was fiddling with the balky lock and I was illuminating the door. All along the door’s edge the wall was covered with the repetition of the letter R. The pattern almost dissolved into a meaningless ornament, but it was still composed of that letter. I remembered that I’d seen it on the walls quite often.

“What does the letter R mean?” I asked.

“That’s our counselor,” Black said. “Ralph. He had both us and the Third.”

I’d never heard of a counselor named Ralph, so I assumed that he was no longer alive either. Like Leopard the wall painter. The House was filling up with corpses at an alarming rate in response to my every question. Even if it concerned something that might initially appear entirely innocent.

“Is he dead?” I said, expecting confirmation.

“No.”

Black pushed me in the door and clicked the wall switch, but the light in the anteroom did not come on. He swore, went a bit farther, and switched on the light inside the dorm. Coming back, he tripped over something and swore again.

“Filthy thing!” he was saying when I wheeled in, shielding my eyes from the bright light. “Slipped in, the dirty bitch!”

“What?”

“A rat, that’s what! Another one!” Black was peering under the common bed, in a demonstrably hopeless attempt to discern something there. “What do you think I tripped over just now?”

“Could be anything . . .”

“There are no anythings when your Leader’s blind.” Black straightened up, moaned, and rubbed his leg. “When was the last time you saw something thrown on the floor here? I can tell you that the last thing Blind ever tripped over was Lary’s boots. Ever since that time the boots spend each night with Lary, on his bunk.”

I giggled. Black shot me a disapproving look.

“You’re one weird guy,” he said. “This isn’t funny at all.”

He helped me climb on the bed and put the kettle on. I cleared up the strata left by Tabaqui—he seemed to regard the trip to the Sepulcher as kind of a night out, and the garments he had tried on and discarded were left covering the bed in an untidy mound. I then made myself more comfortable and asked Black where did Ralph the counselor go and why were his initials such a popular motif among the wall artists. In all honesty, I didn’t care much about all this, and was asking only to rinse out the unpleasant sediment that was brought up by the conversation concerning Sphinx. I was afraid Black might return back to that. But Black wasn’t in the mood to discuss counselors.

“He left,” he said tersely. “About six months ago. Packed his stuff one day and hightailed it out of here. I have no idea why they still write and paint his nick. Could be someone misses him.”

Black’s face showed quite clearly that if anyone did miss this mysterious R, it definitely wasn’t him.

“I see,” I mumbled thoughtfully.

Black sat down across from me and arranged the cups, the teapot, and a pack of cookies on the tray. I crawled closer. He passed me the cup and turned on the player. Good thing, too. Without music our tea party would have been too gloomy. Even with music it was pretty sad.

I had a strange dream that night. I saw myself in the second-floor hallway. It looked the same as it always did, except it was divided down the middle by this thick plate of glass, all the way from the floor to the ceiling. There were people on the other side. Indistinct figures floated there, like fish in a bowl, bumping into the glass and pressing their faces against it. I saw a pale guy wearing sunglasses, with hair as white as snow, a girl with very long braids, and an ugly, dark-faced creature flying around in a wheelchair. There were a lot of them, and all of them wanted to get in. Some had translucent wings. Their side also had light fixtures on the walls, but theirs looked somehow different: they glowed green, almost emerald, like giant fireflies. I was observing all this from the door to our dorm.

Then Noble pushed my wheelchair aside, walked out of the room, and threw a crystal ball at the wall. The ball hit the wall and bounced off, making a long crack in it, reaching all the way down. Noble walked into it, like between the folds of a transparent curtain, and the glass sealed itself behind him, becoming whole again. He waved to us and walked down the green firefly corridor. On his own legs. He wasn’t floating or swimming, he just walked, and the strange winged shadows darted around him and returned back to the glass, to look at us and to try and say something to us, something that we couldn’t hear.

There were whispers and commotion behind my back. Then Tabaqui and Blind hauled out this huge cauldron of boiling, bubbling liquid and splashed it at the glass. It made an ugly stain. The hissing, poisonous stain started spreading, growing in all directions, and shaped itself into a smeared letter R. The glass under it crackled, and all the creatures that were flying around on the other side crowded near it and started banging on the glass, while everyone on our side moved away from it, dragging me and my wheelchair with them, the crackling and hissing was becoming louder and louder . . .

I opened my eyes and immediately saw the reason for my waking up. The open window was flapping in the wind, and the glass in it rattled noisily. Black, who apparently woke up at the same time as I did, climbed up, slammed it shut, and secured the handle. The wind was so strong that the glass still vibrated, only more softly. Black went back to bed, and I related my dream to him quickly before I forgot. When I finished, I realized that there had been no rush to tell it—it was still before my eyes as vividly as the moment I awoke. Black said that my dream was bullshit. He said it in a very annoyed voice, and I regretted keeping him up.

The next time it was Sphinx who woke us. I guess it was about half past five.

He kicked open the door and yelled, “Behold, a pale rider on a pale horse! Comes the cloud of locusts, and the dead are rattling their bones! Just look at this!” He ran to the window. “The fog is gray like the backs of gray mice! Hordes of mice are advancing! There is going to be no ground left soon, only the fog, clad in gray garments. It started stealing upon you in the night. Look now, before there is nothing to look at!”

Is he drunk? I thought, burying my head in the pillow. Sphinx abandoned his fog quest, mounted the headboard, weaving his legs between the bars, and stared at me. With his crazy eyes in dark circles. I chirpily inquired how Noble was doing.

“He’s doing like Saint Francis’s favorite chipmunk,” Sphinx said and giggled.

“Sphinx. We are trying to sleep here,” Black murmured.

“Sure, while the fog is creeping ever closer!”

“It can do all the creeping it wants.”

“That what you think? All right. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Tabaqui unloaded himself on the bed, crawled over me, and commenced the construction of his nighttime nest. Humpback, with Nanette in tow, climbed up to his place. Alexander started the coffeemaker. Lary deposited Tubby in his pen, knocking over another bottle and bumping into the nightstand in the process.

“Oh god,” Black moaned, putting the pillow over his head.

“Do not invoke His name in vain, you despicable person.”

Sphinx stared at me for a while longer, shaking his head, then slid down on the bed and switched off, like a busted light. Tabaqui took special care to climb out of the nest and pull the blanket over him, then sniffed at him thoroughly and, apparently satisfied, crawled back into his pillows.

When the morning rituals began, two hours later, we weren’t able to rouse Sphinx. He never acknowledged the gentle patting or calling him by name, and when someone tried to shake him he snarled that this someone was going to have his head bitten off, so Humpback decided to leave him alone.

The morning turned out lousy. It was gray and wet all the way through, like a slippery cap of some mushroom in the forest. On days like this all the door handles resist harder than usual, all food scratches the mouth, the early birds are disgustingly perky and are not letting anyone lounge in bed, while the night owls are miserable and snap at every other word. Sphinx, usually the first among the disgusting early birds, was out of commission for the time being, and so his role in terrorizing the inhabitants was taken up by Humpback, who jetted around like crazy, imitated a rooster, rang a handbell, tooted on his flute, poked the sleepers with chair legs, and dumped clothes on them.

Lary, moaning and groaning, dangled his feet in tattered socks from his bunk. Tabaqui was already chomping on something that was dripping all over the blanket. Blind, in his acid-green shirt, was smoking in the open window. I dug deeper and deeper under the blanket, fully aware that I wouldn’t be allowed to continue sleeping.

The boombox wailed “Oh! Darling” by The Beatles. Tabaqui was singing along in a falsetto voice, right in my ear. He even lifted the blanket to make sure he aimed correctly. It was useless. I crawled out.

While turning the wheelchair around by the window, I looked out. The wires of the fence weren’t there. The houses and streets all had disappeared. It was completely quiet. Even Nanette’s kin had scrambled somewhere. Blind turned his sharp face toward me. The mist in his gray eyes very much resembled the one outside the window.

“Backs of mice?” he said.

“Rather big blobs of cotton wool,” I said. “Or maybe clouds.”

At this he nodded and turned away.

At breakfast we were given boiled water to drink. It was supposed to ward off colds. Another one of the administration’s pet ideas. There was no music after we came back, and no card playing. Everyone was catching up on more sleep. Now even the yard itself disappeared, and the gray clouds (or was it really backs of mice?) came up to the windows.

They brought Noble in after lunch.

“He’s coming,” Lary announced, bursting in with the clatter of a wild mustang. “And those . . . Shark and the others . . .”

The others turned out to be two livid-faced Cases and, surprisingly, Homer.

They wheeled Noble in, installed him on the bed, and clustered around. Noble was sleepy and grumpy, dressed in the hospital gown—one of those things that rob faces and bodies of individuality, making everyone look the same. Alexander took his clothes out of the closet. Noble was changing into them while the principal’s retinue stood there and gawked.

“You are his comrades, you could have helped,” Homer said.

“I can handle this,” Noble said curtly, sliding into his jeans.

“Such a nervous boy,” Homer said, aghast. “Nervous and abrupt.”

“If only that was the worst of it,” Shark replied, his eyes darting around the room, looking for traces of criminal behavior.

By some miracle we didn’t even have a single ashtray out, so all his efforts were wasted.

“You have thirty minutes to pack,” he said. “And none of your tricks. Leave nothing behind, you’re not coming back here.”

“Go fuck yourself,” Noble said.

Homer’s eyes rolled back in his head, and he seemingly stopped breathing. Tabaqui giggled. Shark swung around so fiercely that I shrunk back.

“One more peep out of any of you and you’ll regret the day you were born,” he hissed.

There were no more peeps out of anyone. Homer left, still unable to come to terms with the shock he’d just suffered, while Shark remained to observe Humpback and Alexander pack Noble’s stuff. It all fit in two bags. One of the Cases took them away. Noble climbed in his wheelchair and looked at us. He hadn’t uttered a single word during all of this, apart from what he’d said to Shark. And had he restrained himself, Shark might have given us the opportunity to say our good-byes in private. The other Case grabbed the handles of Noble’s wheelchair, and, for some reason, Alexander placed Humpback’s jacket on Noble’s knees. It was a heavy leather jacket, originally black but currently black and white, because it was first worn out until it became white and then blackened back with dirt and soot. This monster, bedecked in badges and touched up with paint here and there, was dubbed “dinosaur skin.” Tabaqui claimed that it was bulletproof. But Noble seemed delighted.

“Thanks,” he said, looking at Humpback.

This was where the levee broke. The Case had to jump out of the way.

When Noble was wheeled out, he resembled a scarecrow. He had on Alexander’s sweater, a veteran of many a general cleanup; Tabaqui’s craziest vest; Lary’s belt with the monkey-head buckle; Sphinx’s fingerless glove on his left hand; and Blind’s seashell on a string around his neck. Also there was Nanette’s feather behind his ear and Tubby’s bib in his pocket. I had nothing I could give him except cigarettes, so I gave him a pack, but then remembered about the amulet, the one allegedly containing basilisk eggshell, and handed it over to him as well.

No one went out to see Noble off.