The Gray House

SPHINX

THE LONGEST NIGHT

Tabaqui’s tale, take four.

Afternoon tea, take three.

Jackal is alert and perky. He’s already had time to doze off, wake up, provide additional details that he seems to have missed the first three times around, and start on the composition of a song worthy of the occasion. Lary and Humpback, in coats over pajamas, are crouching around the coffeemaker like trappers around a campfire.

“Some people have all the luck . . . Getting to see all that stuff,” Lary sighs—and launches another half hour of Tabaqui’s rapid-fire gibbering. Everyone’s sick of it by now, except for him and the Bandar-Log.

Blind returns, a pale emissary from the world of shadows. From head to toe, exhibit one for Jackal’s gruesome fantasies. The pack studies him and his stained sweater. Mostly the sweater. Naturally. It’s not often you see something like that.

Tabaqui even pauses for a while, preening himself proudly, as if to say “See what I mean? The night is full of horrors!” Like it was he who personally dunked Blind in blood and vomit. Sinister visions loom before the pack, and I suddenly notice that Smoker is nowhere to be seen. I wonder if he’s been drowned in the toilet. It’s been constant vigilance with him recently. He’s acquired this nasty habit of methodically getting on everyone’s nerves.

“What a dirty . . . oh-oh-oh . . . sweater you have,” Jackal’s syrupy voice is chanting. “Where, oh, where did you manage to get it that way?”

Pale One ignores Jackal’s entreaties and crashes down on the bed. Lary, shaking the remains of his sideburns, winks at Humpback. Humpback turns away.

“So,” Black says in a disgusting tone of voice. “Yet another Leader bites the dust?”

Who is he addressing, I wonder.

Tabaqui takes it to be him and immediately begins rehashing the gruesome narrative for the fifth time.

“We hear someone screaming. So I say, ‘Something happened.’ So we go looking, and you can’t believe what we see . . .”

Black walks out.

“It’s R One running from somewhere in the direction of the stairs,” Humpback finishes the sentence. “How about enough, Tabaqui? How many more times are you going to go over this?”

Tabaqui takes offense. The way babies usually do when someone takes away their favorite toy.

Noble, still wrapped in a blanket, looks at me bright eyed.

“Want to play some chess?”

Hasn’t had enough playing, obviously. Half the night spent over cards doesn’t count. Apparently no one needs sleep in this room except me. I don’t need it either, but it’s all I can do not to yell at them. Pack them away to bed, turn off the lights, and in the darkness wait for the morning to come, pretending to slumber peacefully. I don’t like this night. Or any of the other nights like this, starting from the very first. The morning after that first Longest was much, much worse than the night itself. I’m lucky not to remember almost any of it. With one exception. We all have our own well-worn nightmares. Mine is the white sail. Even now, when I can remember loads and loads of bad stuff to balance it, it still is without equal. It’s not that it simply keeps me up at night, no, it shakes me up and fills my throat with tears. I love Jackal dearly, but I can neither understand nor accept his fervent passion for the Longest. He did live through that first one with me. With all of us. How can he still manage to enjoy them so much? Is it possible that he doesn’t remember? I walk to the door, probing Tabaqui’s suspiciously selective memory for the umpteenth time. I have to find Smoker. I need to assemble them all here, in the dorm.

“And what do you know, it’s R One with Tubby. He tosses him over to us, bang! And those screams, screams everywhere . . .”

It’s dark in the anteroom, but the light is on in the bathroom, and voices are coming from over there. I lean against the doorframe and listen. I don’t have to see them to figure out who’s bullying whom.

“It was me, but not exactly me,” Smoker explains. “I was scared half to death, and at the same time it was kind of pleasant. I don’t know how that works . . . Knowing that you look like that and not dying right then and there.”

“What else did you expect, doing junk?”

I don’t see them, but I know that Black’s chin is suspended now over Smoker’s head like a hammer over an anvil. And when it strikes we’re going to see sparks.

“A cat, a kangaroo, a dinosaur . . . Whatever’s your heart’s desire, it can be arranged here. All you have to do is ask. Jeez! Crawling over to Vulture and guzzling crap in his hole! He hasn’t eaten anything but dope for the last hundred years! If you need to kick the bucket quickly, then sure, come for a visit and help yourself to his goodies. Just don’t whine afterward that something didn’t go quite the way you figured. You’re lucky to be alive. He was a cat, imagine that!”

“That’s not what I mean!”

Poor Smoker. He’s been boxed into a corner and tries to bite back, though timidly. He doesn’t know whom he’s dealing with.

“That’s not my point . . . I’m talking about how it made me feel. I liked it, you see?”

“Yes, I see,” Black echoes sourly. “Do you see where this is going, who it is you are trying to buddy up to?”

“But Tabaqui . . .”

“Don’t tell me about Tabaqui. Better yet, don’t say anything at all. Just think. Go back to the room, look at them all really hard, and think. What did Blind tell you?”

“Not to go out at night.”

“Ha!”

Black tries to cram his entire stock of irony into that one syllable.

“But that’s exactly what you’re saying!”

“Except I was in the room the whole time. While he was—who knows where? Have you seen him? The way he looks?”

The door squeaks. I interrupt my listening session and take a step back, hiding under the coat rack. It’s someone small and dark, tracking close to the wall.

“Who?” I call softly to the visitor.

“Me.”

Ginger’s voice.

“It’s me, Sphinx.” Her hand touches me and flees. “Are you hiding?”

“Not anymore.”

I come out into the sliver of light on the floor seeping from under the bathroom door. We continue the conversation in whispers.

“What’s wrong?”

“I have to know. Red. What’s happened to him? People say all kinds of things . . .”

The Sepulcher is sprouting out of her words. Three kids in a trashed room. Girl’s hair, bright as a flame. And the pillows flying from one bed to the other, spraying feathers.

“It’s all right. He’ll live. Just got cut a bit.”

I’m saying what I think is the truth, not what I learned from Jackal. If Jackal is to be believed, Red’s corpse is already cold.

“Thank you,” the girl whispers in the dark, and starts crying.

All right, Sphinx, where’s your shoulder? Come on, get it out. That’s about the only thing you’ve got.

She finds it herself, by touch. We’re standing there in the shadows, her face buried in my jacket. Water is rushing down in the bathroom, and Black’s voice continues tormenting Smoker, pouring poison in his ears. In the dorm Tabaqui is composing a song about the night’s events, and the one event he considers the most entertaining is that the guy that this girl crying into my shoulder thinks of as her brother got cut. A perfect subject for a nice song. I am fuming, even though I’m not sure who or what is more deserving of my anger. Probably this night that refuses to end.

“Let’s go,” I say to her. “We’ll have some tea.”

Now how to go about shutting up Jackal?

“No. I can’t. I only wanted to find out about Red. I knew you guys would know . . .”

Lucky she can’t hear either the song or Black’s mutterings.

“Come on,” I say. “You can spend the night with us. Tabaqui is going to tell you all about it. He was there, you know.”

“But . . .”

“What is it?”

She takes a hesitant step back toward the door.

“Noble is going to take it the wrong way. We had a talk. Today. He came to see me. So if I came to your place now . . . That would look like an answer.”

“Do you want to answer him?”

Silence. Of a more confused than an angry shade. At least that’s what I read into it. Maybe I’m just fooling myself.

“Do you or don’t you?”

She is still silent.

“Gingie?”

“Let’s go.” She grabs my sleeve. “I have no idea what I want now. But I know I don’t want to go back.”

We go together. Our arrival in the room cuts the song short and causes a state of general confusion in the pack. They come to relatively quickly.

Tabaqui delivers a welcome oration. Lary waves his hands invitingly from the cups to the coffeemaker and back. Humpback runs out, balancing a stack of ashtrays. Alexander steps into the saucer of milk for the cats and spills it all over. I lead Ginger to the quadruple bed. She sits next to Noble, and Goldenhead’s eyes light up with a possessive flame. He bashfully extinguishes it with his lashes.

“Ginger is asking after Red,” I explain.

It sounds like a bad pun.

“Oh, Red! What about Red?” Tabaqui switches gears, instantly reviving all of the corpses he has inventively piled up. “Nothing much happened to him, really. Ralph came in just in the nick of time and saved him. Here’s how it all went down . . .”