Gene Wolfe - The Fifth Head of Cerberus

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The Fifth Head of Cerberus

“A Story” by John V. Marsch

V. R. T.

The Fifth Head of Cerberus

When the ivy-tod is heavy with snow,

And the owlet whoops to the wolf below,

That eats the she-wolf’s young.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge—

“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

When I was a boy my brother David and I had to go to bed early whether we were

sleepy or not. In summer particularly, bedtime often came before sunset; and because

our dormitory was in the east wing of the house, with a broad window facing the

central courtyard and thus looking west, the hard, pinkish light sometimes streamed in

for hours while we lay staring out at my father’s crippled monkey perched on a

flaking parapet, or telling stories, one led to another, with soundless gestures.

Our dormitory was on the uppermost floor of the house, and our window had a

shutter of twisted iron which we were forbidden to open. I suppose the theory was

that a burglar might, on some rainy morning (this being the only time he could hope

to find the roof, which was fitted out as a sort of pleasure garden, deserted) let down a

rope and so enter our room unless the shutter was closed.

The object of this hypothetical and very courageous thief would not, of course, be

merely to steal us. Children, whether boys or girls, were extraordinarily cheap-in

Port-Mimizon; and indeed I was once told that my father who had formerly traded in

them no longer did so because of the poor market. Whether or not this was true,

everyone—or nearly everyone—knew of some professional who would furnish what

was wanted, within reason, at a low price. These men made the children of the poor

and the careless their study, and should you want, say, a brown-skinned, red-haired

little girl or one who was plump or who lisped, a blond boy like David or a pale,

brown-haired, brown-eyed boy such as I, they could provide one in a few hours.

Neither, in all probability, would the imaginary burglar seek to hold us for

ransom, though my father was thought in some quarters to be immensely rich. There

were several reasons for this. Those few people who knew that my brother and I

existed knew also, or at least had been led to believe, that my father cared nothing at

all for us. Whether this was true or not, I cannot say; certainly I believed it, and my

father never gave me the least reason to doubt it, though at the time the thought of

killing him had never occurred to me.

And if these reasons were not sufficiently convincing, anyone with an

understanding of the stratum in which he had become perhaps the most permanent

feature would realize that for him, who was already forced to give large bribes to the

secret police, to once disgorge money in that way would leave him open to a thousand

ruinous attacks; and this may have been—this and the fear in which he was held—the

real reason we were never stolen.

The iron shutter is (for I am writing now in my old dormitory room) hammered to

resemble in a stiff and oversymmetrical way the boughs of a willow. In my boyhood

it was overgrown by a silver trumpet vine (since dug up) which had scrambled up the

wall from the court below, and I used to wish that it would close the window entirely

and thus shut out the sun when we were trying to sleep; but David, whose bed was

under the window, was forever reaching up to snap off branches so that he could

whistle through the hollow stem, making a sort of panpipe of four or five. The piping,

of course, growing louder as David grew bolder, would in time attract the attention of

Mr Million, our tutor. Mr Million would enter the room in perfect silence, his wide

wheels gliding across the uneven floor while David pretended sleep. The panpipe

might by this time be concealed under his pillow, in the sheet, or even under the

mattress, but Mr Million would find it.

What he did with those little musical instruments after confiscating them from

David I had forgotten until yesterday; although in prison, when we were kept in by

storms or heavy snow, I often occupied myself by trying to recall it. To have broken

them, or dropped them through the shutter on to the patio below would have been

completely unlike him; Mr Million never broke anything intentionally, and never

wasted anything. I could visualize perfectly the half-sorrowing expression with which

he drew the tiny pipes out (the face which seemed to float behind his screen was

much like my father’s) and the way in which he turned and glided from the room. But

what became of them?

Yesterday, as I said (this is the sort of thing that gives me confidence), I

remembered. He had been talking to me here while I worked, and when he left it

seemed to me—as my glance idly followed his smooth motion through the

doorway—that something, a sort of flourish I recalled from my earliest days, was

missing. I closed my eyes and tried to remember what the appearance had been,

eliminating any skepticism, any attempt to guess in advance what I “must” have seen;

and I found that the missing element was a brief flash, the glint of metal, over Mr

Million’s head.

Once I had established this, I knew that it must have come from a swift upward

motion of his arm, like a salute, as he left our room. For an hour or more I could not

guess the reason for that gesture, and could only suppose it, whatever it had been, to

have been destroyed by time. I tried to recall if the corridor outside our dormitory

had, in that really not so distant past, held some object now vanished: a curtain or a

windowshade, an appliance to be activated, anything that might account for it There

was nothing

I went into the corridor and examined the floor minutely for marks indicating

furniture, I looked for hooks or nails driven into the walls, pushing aside the coarse

old tapestries. Craning my neck, I searched the ceiling. Then, after an hour, I looked

at the door itself and saw what I had not seen in the thousands of times I had passed

through it: that like all the doors in this house, which is very old, it had a massive

frame of wooden slabs, and that one of these, forming the lintel, protruded enough

from the wall to make a narrow shelf above the door.

I pushed my chair into the hall and stood on the seat. The shelf was thick with

dust in which lay forty-seven of my brother’s pipes and a wonderful miscellany of

other small objects. Objects many of which I recalled, but some of which still fail to

summon any flicker of response from the recesses of my mind . . .

The small blue egg of a songbird, speckled with brown. I suppose the bird must

have nested in the vine outside our window, and that David or I despoiled the nest

only to be robbed ourselves by Mr Million. But I do not recall the incident.

And there is a (broken) puzzle made of the bronzed viscera of some small

animals, and—wonderfully evocative—one of those large and fancifully decorated

keys, sold annually, which during the year of its currency will admit the possessor to

certain rooms of the city library after hours. Mr Million, I suppose, must have

confiscated it when, after expiration, he found it doing duty as a toy; but what

memories!

My father had his own library, now in my possession; but we were forbidden to

go there. I have a dim memory of standing—at how early an age I cannot say—before

that huge carved door. Of seeing it swing back, and the crippled monkey on my

father’s shoulder pressing itself against his hawk face, with the black scarf and scarlet

dressing gown beneath and the rows and rows of shabby books and notebooks behind

them, and the sick-sweet smell of formaldehyde coming from the laboratory beyond

the sliding mirror.

I do not remember what he said or whether it had been I or another who had

knocked, but I do recall that after the door had closed, a woman in pink whom I

thought very pretty, stooped to bring her face to the level of my own and assured me

that my father had written all the books I had just seen, and that I doubted it not at all.

•

My brother and I, as I have said, were forbidden this room; but when we were a little

older Mr Million used to take us, about twice a week, on expeditions to the city

library. These were very nearly the only times we were allowed to leave the house,

and since our tutor disliked curling the jointed length of his metal modules into a hire

cart, and no sedan chair would have withstood his weight or contained his bulk, these

forays were made on foot.

For a long time this route to the library was the only part of the city I knew.

Three blocks down Saltimbanque Street where our house stood, right at the Rue d

“Asticot to the slave market and a block beyond that to the library. A child, not

knowing what is extraordinary and what commonplace, usually lights midway

between the two, finds interest in incidents adults consider beneath notice and calmly

accepts the most improbable occurrences. My brother and I were fascinated by the

spurious antiques and bad bargains of the Rue d“Asticot, but often bored when Mr

Million insisted on stopping for an hour at the slave market.

It was not a large one, Port-Mimizon not being a center of the trade, and the

auctioneers and their merchandise were frequently on a most friendly basis—having

met several times previously as a succession of owners discovered the same fault. Mr

Million never bid, but watched the bidding, motionless, while we kicked our heels

and munched the fried bread he had bought at a stall for us. There were sedan

chairmen, their legs knotted with muscle, and simpering bath attendants; fighting

slaves in chains, with eyes dulled by drugs or blazing with imbecile ferocity; cooks,

house servants, a hundred others—yet David and I used to beg to be allowed to

proceed alone to the library.

This library was a wastefully large building which had held government offices

in the French-speaking days. The park in which it had once stood had died of petty

corruption, and the library now rose from a clutter of shops and tenements. A narrow

thoroughfare led to the main doors, and once we were inside, the squalor of the

neighbourhood vanished, replaced by a kind of peeling grandeur. The main desk was

directly beneath the dome, and this dome, drawing up with it a spiraling walkaway

lined with the library’s main collection, floated five hundred feet in the air: a stony

sicy whose least chip falling might kill one of the librarians on the spot.

While Mr Million browsed his way majestically up the helix, David and I raced

ahead until we were several full turns in advance and could do what we liked. When I

was still quite young it would often occur to me that, since my father had written (on

the testimony of the lady in pink) a roomful of books, some of them should be here;

and I would climb resolutely until I had almost reached the dome, and there rummage.

Because the librarians were very lax about reshelving, there seemed always a

possibility of finding what I had failed to find before. The shelves towered far above

my head, but when I felt myself unobserved I climbed them like ladders, stepping on

books when there was no room on the shelves themselves for the square toes of my

small brown shoes, and occasionally kicking books to the floor where they remained

until out next visit and beyond, evidence of the staff’s reluctance to climb that long,

coiled slope.

The upper shelves were, if anything, in worse disorder than those more,

conveniently located, and one glorious day when I attained the highest of all I found

occupying that lofty, dusty position (besides a misplaced astronautics text, The Mile-

Long Spaceship, by some German) only a lorn copy of Monday or Tuesday leaning

against a book about the assassination of Trotsky, and a crumbling volume of Vernor

Vinge’s short stories that owed its presence there, or so I suspect, to some long-dead

librarian’s mistaking the faded V. Vinge on the spine for “Winge”.

I never found any books of my father’s, but I did not regret the long climbs to the

top of the dome. If David had come with me, we raced up together, up and down the

sloping floor—or peered over the rail at Mr Million’s slow progress while we debated

the feasibility of putting an end to him with one cast of some ponderous work. If

David preferred to pursue interests of his own farther down I ascended to the very top

where the cap of the dome curved right over my head; and there, from a rusted iron

catwalk not much wider than one of the shelves I had been climbing (and I suspect

not nearly so strong), opened in turn each of a circle of tiny piercings—piercings in a

wall of iron, but so shallow a wall that when I had slid the corroded cover plates out

of the way I could thrust my head through and feel myself truly outside, with the wind

and the circling birds and the lime-spotted expanse of the dome curving away beneath

me.

To the west, since it was taller than the surrounding houses and marked by the

orange trees on the roof, I could make out our house. To the south, the masts of the

ships in the harbor, and in clear weather—if it was the right time of day—the

whitecaps of the tidal race Sainte Anne drew between the peninsulas called First

Finger and Thumb. (And once, as I very well recall, while looking south I saw the

great geyser of sunlit water when a star-crosser splashed down.) To east and north

spread the city proper, the citadel and the grand market and the forests and mountains

beyond.

But sooner or later, whether David had accompanied me or gone off on his own,

Mr Million summoned us. Then we were forced to go with him to one of the wings to

visit this or that science collection. This meant books for lessons. My father insisted

that we learn biology, anatomy, and chemistry thoroughly, and under Mr Million’s

tutelage, learn them we did—he never considering a subject mastered until we could

discuss every topic mentioned in every book catalogued under the heading. The life

sciences were my own favorites, but David preferred languages, literature, and law;

for we got a smattering of these as well as anthropology, cybernetics, and psychology.

When he had selected the books that would form our study for the next few days

and urged us to choose more for ourselves, Mr Million would retire with us to some

quiet corner of one of the science reading rooms, where there were chairs and a table

and room sufficient for him to curl the jointed length of his body or align it against a

wall or bookcase in a way that left the aisles clear. To designate the formal beginning

of our class he used to begin by calling roll, my own name always coming first.

I would say, “Here,” to show that he had my attention.

“And David.”

“Here.” (David has an illustrated Tales From the Odyssey open on his lap where

Mr Million cannot see it, but he looks at Mr Million with bright, feigned interest.

Sunshine slants down to the table from a high window, and shows the air as warm

with dust.)

“I wonder if either of you noticed the stone implements in the room through

which we passed a few moments ago?”

We nod, each hoping the other will speak.

“Were they made on Earth, or here on our own planet?”

This is a trick question, but an easy one. David says, “Neither one. They’re

plastic.” And we giggle.

Mr Million says patiently, “Yes, they’re plastic reproductions, but from where

did the originals come?” His face, so similar to my father’s, but which I thought of at

this time as belonging only to him, so that it seemed a frightening reversal of nature to

see it on a living man instead of his screen, was neither interested, nor angry, nor

bored; but coolly remote.

David answers, “From Sainte Anne.” Sainte Anne is the sister planet to our own,

revolving with us about a common center as we swing around the sun. “The sign said

so, and the aborigines made them—there weren’t any abos here.”

Mr Million nods, and turns his impalpable face toward me. “Do you feel these

stone implements occupied a central place in the lives of their makers? Say no.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

I think frantically, not helped by David, who is kicking my shins under the table.

A glimmering comes.

“Talk. Answer at once.”

“It’s obvious, isn’t it?” (Always a good thing to say when you’re not even sure

“it” is even possible.) “In the first place, they can’t have been very good tools, so why

would the abos have relied on them? You might say they needed those obsidian

arrowheads and bone fishhooks for getting food, but that’s not true. They could

poison the water with the juices of certain plants, and for primitive people the most

effective way to fish is probably with weirs, or with nets of rawhide or vegetable

fiber. Just the same way, trapping or driving animals with fire would be more

effective than hunting; and anyway stone tools wouldn’t be needed at all for gathering

berries and the shoots of edible plants and things like that, which were probably their

most important foods—those stone things got in the glass case here because the

snares and nets rotted away and they’re all that’s left, so the people that make their

living that way pretend they were important.”

“Good. David? Be original, please. Don’t repeat what you’ve just heard.”

David looks up from his book, his blue eyes scornful of both of us. “If you could

have asked them, they would have told you that their magic and their religion, the

songs they sang and the traditions of their people were what were important. They

killed their sacrificial animals with flails of seashells that cut like razors, and they

didn’t let their men father children until they had had stood enough fire to cripple

them for life. They mated with trees and drowned the children to honor their rivers.

That was what was important.”

With no neck, Mr Million’s face nodded. “Now we will debate the humanity of

those aborigines. David negative and first.”

(I kick him, but he has pulled his hard, freckled legs up beneath him, or hidden

them behind the legs of his chair, which is cheating.) “Humanity,” he says in his most

objectionable voice, “in the history of human thought implies descent from what we

may conveniently call Adam; that is, the original Terrestrial stock, and if the two of

you don’t see that, you’re idiots.”

I wait for him to continue, but he is finished. To give myself time to think, I say,

“Mr Million, it’s not fair to let him call me names in a debate. Tell him that’s not

debating, it’s fighting, isn’t it?”

Mr Million says, “No personalities, David.” (David is already peeking at

Polyphemus the Cyclops and Odysseus, hoping I’ll go on for a long time. I feel

challenged and decide to do so.)

I begin, “The argument which holds descent from Terrestrial stock pivotal is

neither valid nor conclusive. Not conclusive because it is distinctly possible that the

aborigines of Sainte Anne were descendants of some earlier wave of human

expansion—one, perhaps, even predating The Homeric Greeks.”

Mr Million says mildly, “I would confine myself to arguments of higher

probability if I were you.”

I nevertheless gloss upon the Etruscans, Atlantis, and the tenacity and

expansionist tendencies of a hypothetical technolological culture occupying

Gondwanaland. When I have finished Mr Million says, “Now reverse. David,

affirmative without repeating.”

My brother, of course, has been looking at his book instead of listening, and I

kick him with enthusiasm, expecting him to be stuck; but he says, “The abos are

human because they’re all dead.”

“Explain.”

“If they were alive it would be dangerous to let them be human because they’d

ask for things, but with them dead it makes it more interesting if they were, and the

settlers killed them all.”

And so it goes. The spot of sunlight travels across the black-streaked red of the

tabletop—traveled across it a hundred times. We would leave through one of the side

doors and walk through a neglected areaway between two wings. There would be

empty bottles there and wind-scattered papers of all kinds, and once a dead man in

bright rags over whose legs we boys skipped while Mr Million rolled silently around

him. As we left the areaway for a narrow street, the bugles of the garrison at the

citadel (sounding so far away) would call the troopers to their evening mess. In the

Rue d’Asticot the lamplighter would be at work, and the shops shut behind their iron

grilles. The sidewalks magically clear of old furniture would seem broad and bare.

Our own Saltimbanque Street would be very different, with the first revelers

arriving. White-haired, hearty men guiding very young men and boys, men and boys

handsome and muscular but a shade overfed; young men who made diffident jokes

and smiled with excellent teeth at them. These were always the early ones, and when I

was a little older I sometimes wondered if they were early only because the white-

haired men wished to have their pleasure and yet a good night’s sleep as well, or if it

were because they knew the young men they were introducing to my father’s

establishment would be drowsy and irritable after midnight, like children who have

been kept up too late.

Because Mr Million did not want us to use the alleys after dark we came in the

front entrance with the white-haired men and their nephews and sons. There was a

garden there, not much bigger than a small room and recessed into the windowless

front of the house. In it were beds of ferns the size of graves; a little fountain whose

water fell upon rods of glass to make a continual tinkling, and which had to be

protected from the street boys; and, with his feet firmly planted, indeed almost buried

in moss, an iron statue of a dog with three heads.

It was this statue, I suppose, that gave our house its popular name of Maison du

Chien, though there may have been a reference to our surname as well. The three

heads were sleekly powerful with pointed muzzles and ears. One was snarling and

one, the center head, regarded the world of garden and street with a look of tolerant

interest. The third, the one nearest the brick path that led to our door, was—there is no

other term for it—frankly grinning; and it was the custom for my father’s patrons to

pat this head between the ears as they came up the path. Their fingers had polished

the spot to the consistency of black glass.

•

This, then, was my world at seven of our world’s long years, and perhaps for half a

year beyond. Most of my days were spent in the little classroom over which Mr

Million presided, and my evenings in the dormitory where David and I played and

fought in total silence. They were varied by the trips to the library I have described or,

very rarely, .elsewhere. I pushed aside the leaves of the silver trumpet vine

occasionally to watch the girls and their benefactors in the court below, or heard their

talk drifting down from the roof garden, but the things they did and talked of were of

no great interest to me. I knew that the tall, hatchet-faced man who ruled our house

and was called “Maître” by the girls and servants was my father. I had known for as

long as I could remember that there was somewhere a fearsome woman—the servants

were in terror of her—called “Madame,” but that she was neither my mother nor

David’s, nor my father’s wife.

That life and my childhood, or at least my infancy, ended one evening after

David and I, worn out with wrestling and silent arguments, had gone to sleep.

Someone shook me by the shoulder and called me, and it was not Mr Million but one

of the servants, a hunched little man in a shabby red jacket. “He wants you,” this

summoner informed me. “Get up.”

I did, and he saw that I was wearing nightclothes. This I think had not been

covered in his instructions, and for a moment during which I stood and yawned, he

debated with himself. “Get dressed,” he said at last. “Comb your hair.”

I obeyed, putting on the black velvet trousers I had worn the day before, but

(guided by some instinct) a new clean shirt. The room to which he then conducted me

(through tortuous corridors now emptied of the last patrons; and others, musty, filthy

with the excrement of rats, to which patrons were never admitted) was my father’s

library—the room with the great carved door before which I had received the

whispered confidences of the woman in pink. I had never been inside it, but when my

guide rapped discreetly on the door it swung back, and I found myself within, almost

before I realized what had happened.

My father, who had opened the door, closed it behind me; and leaving me

standing where I was, walked to the most distant end of that long room and threw

himself down in a huge chair. He was wearing the red dressing gown and black scarf

in which I had most often seen him, and his long, sparse hair was brushed straight

back. He stared at me, and I remember that my lip trembled as I tried to keep from

breaking into sobs.

“Well,” he said, after we had looked at one another for a long time, “and there

you are. What am I going to call you?”

I told him my name, but he shook his head. “Not that. You must have another

name for me—a private name. You may choose it yourself if you like.”

I said nothing. It seemed to me quite impossible that I should have any name

other than the two words which were, in some mystic sense I only respected without

understanding, my name.

“I’ll choose for you then,” my father said. “You are Number Five. Come here,

Number Five.”

I came, and when I was standing in front of him, he told me, “Now we are going

to play a game. I am going to show you some pictures, do you understand? And all

the time you are watching them, you must talk. Talk about the pictures. If you talk

you win, but if you stop, even for just a second, I do. Understand?”

I said I did.

“Good. I know you’re a bright boy. As a matter of fact, Mr Million has sent me

all the examinations he has given you and the tapes he makes when he talks with you.

Did you know that? Did you ever wonder what he did with them?”

I said, “I thought he threw them away,” and my father, I noticed, leaned forward

as I spoke, a circumstance I found flattering at the time.

“No, I have them here.” He pressed a switch. “Now remember, you must not stop

talking.”

But for the first few moments I was much too interested to talk.

There had appeared in the room, as though by magic, a boy considerably younger

than I, and a painted wooden soldier almost as large as I was myself, which when I

reached out to touch them proved as insubstantial as air. “Say something,” my father

said. “What are you thinking about, Number Five?”

I was thinking about the soldier, of course, and so was the younger boy, who

appeared to be about three. He toddled through my arm like mist and attempted to

knock it over.

They were holographs—three-dimensional images formed by the interference of

two wave fronts of light—things which had seemed very dull when I had seen them

illustrated by flat pictures of chessmen in my physics book; but it was some time

before I connected those chessmen with the phantoms who walked in my father’s

library at night. All this time my father was saying, “Talk! Say something! What do

you think the little boy is feeling?”

“Well, the little boy likes the big soldier, but he wants to knock him down if he

can, because the soldier’s only a toy, really, but it’s bigger than he is . . .” And so I

talked, and for a long time, hours I suppose, continued. The scene changed and

changed again. The giant soldier was replaced by a pony, a rabbit, a meal of soup and

crackers. But the three-year-old boy remained the central figure. When the hunched

man in the shabby coat came again, yawning, to take me back to my bed, my voice

had worn to a husky whisper and my throat ached. In my dreams that night I saw the

little boy scampering from one activity to another, his personality in some way

confused with my own and my father’s so that I was both at once observer, observed,

and a third presence observing both.

The next night I fell asleep almost at the moment Mr Million sent us up to bed,

retaining consciousness only long enough to congratulate myself on doing so. I woke

when the hunched man entered the room, but it was not me whom he roused from the

sheets but David. Quietly, pretending I still slept (for it had occurred to me, and

seemed quite reasonable at the time, that if he were to see I was awake he might take

both of us), I watched as my brother dressed and struggled to impart some sort of

order to his tangle of fair hair. When he returned I was sound asleep, and had no

opportunity to question him until Mi Million left us alone, as he sometimes did, to eat

our breakfast. I had told him my own experiences as a matter of course, and what he

had to tell me was simply that he had had an evening very similar to mine. He had

seen holographic pictures, and apparently the same pictures: the wooden soldier, the

pony. He had been forced to talk constantly, as Mr Million had so often made us do in

debates and verbal examinations. The only way in which his interview with our father

had differed from mine, as nearly as I could determine, appeared when I asked him by

what name he had been called.

He looked at me blankly, a piece of toast half-raised to his mouth.

I asked again, “What name did he call you by when he talked to you?”

“He called me David. What did you think?”

With the beginning of these interviews the pattern of my life changed, the

adjustments I assumed to be temporary becoming imperceptibly permanent, settling

into a new shape of which neither David nor I were consciously aware. Our games

and stories after bedtime stopped, and David less and less often made his panpipes of

the silver trumpet vine. Mr Million allowed us to sleep later and we were in some

subtle way acknowledged to be more adult. At about this time too, he began to take us

to a park where there was.an archery range and provision for various games. This

little park, which was not far from our house, was bordered on one side by a canal.

And there, while David shot arrows at a goose stuffed with straw or played tennis, I

often sat staring at the quiet, only slightly dirty water; or waiting for one of the white

ships—great ships with bows as sharp as the scalpel-bills of kingfishers and four,

five, or even seven masts—which were, infrequently, towed up from the harbor by ten

or twelve spans of oxen.

•

In the summer of my eleventh or twelfth year—I think the twelfth—we were

permitted for the first time to stay after sundown in the park, sitting on the greasy,

sloped margin of the canal to watch a fireworks display. The first preliminary flight of

rockets had no sooner exhausted itself half a mile above the city than David became

ill. He rushed to the water and vomited, plunging his hands half up to the elbows in

muck while the red and white stars burned in glory above him. Mr Million took him

up in his arms, and when poor David had emptied himself we hurried home.

His disease proved not much more lasting than the tainted sandwich that had

occasioned it, but while our tutor was putting him to bed I decided not to be cheated

of the remainder of the display, parts of which I had glimpsed between the

intervening houses as we made our way home; I was forbidden the roof after dark, but

I knew very well where the nearest stair was. The thrill I felt in penetrating that

prohibited world of leaf and shadow while fireflowers of purple and gold and blazing

scarlet overtopped it affected me like the aftermath of a fever, leaving me short of

breath, shaking, and cold in the midst of summer.

There were a great many more people on the roof than I had anticipated, the men

without cloaks, hats or sticks (all of which they had left in my father’s checkrooms),

and the girls, my father’s employees, in costumes that displayed their rouged breasts

in enclosures of twisted wire like birdcages or gave them the appearance of great

height (dissolved only when someone stood very close to them), or gowns whose

skirts reflected their wearers’ faces and busts as still water does the trees standing

near it, so that they appeared, in the intermittent colored flashes, like the queens of

strange suits in a tarot deck.

I was seen, of course, since I was much too excited to conceal myself effectively;

but no one ordered me back, and I suppose they assumed I had been permitted to

come up to see the fireworks.

These continued for a long time. I remember one patron, a heavy, square-faced,

stupid-looking man who seemed to be someone of importance, who was so eager to

enjoy the company of his prot’g’e—who did not want to go inside until the display

was over—that, since he insisted on privacy, twenty or thirty bushes and small trees

had to be rearranged on the parterre to, make a little grove around them. I helped the

waiters carry some of the smaller tubs and pots, and managed to duck into the

structure as it was completed. Here I could still watch the exploding rockets and

“aerial bombs” through the branches, and at the same time the patron and his nymphe

du bois, who was watching them a good deal more intently than I.

My motive, as well as I can remember, was not prurience but simple curiosity. I

was at that age when we are passionately interested, but the passion is one of science.

Mine was nearly satisfied when I was grasped by the shirt by someone behind me and

drawn out of the shrubbery.

When I was clear of the leaves I was released, and I turned expecting to see Mr

Million, but it was not. My captor was a little gray-haired woman in a black dress

whose skirt, as I noticed even at the time, fell straight from her waist to the ground. I

suppose I bowed to her, since she was clearly no servant, but she returned no

salutation at all, staring intently into my face in a way that made me think she could

see as well in the intervals between the bursting glories as by their light. At last, in

what must have been the finale of the display, a great rocket rose screaming on a river

of flame, and for an instant she consented to look up. Then, when it had exploded in a

mauve orchid of unbelievable size and brilliance, this formidable little woman

grabbed me again and led me firmly toward the stairs.

While we were on the level stone pavement of the roof garden she did not, as

nearly as I could see, walk at all, but rather seemed to glide across the surface like an

onyx chessman on a polished board; and that, in spite of all that has happened since,

is the way I still remember her: as the Black Queen, a chess queen neither sinister nor

beneficient, and Black only as distinguished from some White Queen I was never

fated to encounter.

When we reached the stairs, however, this smooth gliding became a fluid

bobbing that brought two inches or more of the hem of her black skirt into contact

with each step, as if her torso were descending each as a small boat might a rapids—

now rushing, now pausing, now almost backing in the crosscurrents.

She steadied herself on these steps by holding on to me and grasping the arm of a

maid who had been waiting for us at the stairhead and assisted her from the other

side. I had supposed, while we were crossing the roof garden, that her gliding motion

had been the result, merely, of a marvelously controlled walk and good posture, but I

now understood her to be in some way handicapped; and I had the impression that

without the help the maid and I gave her she might have fallen headfirst.

Once we had reached the bottom of the steps her smooth progress was resumed.

She dismissed the maid with a nod and led me down the corridor in the direction

opposite to that in which our dormitory and classroom lay until we reached a stairwell

far toward the back of the house, a corkscrew, seldom-used flight, very steep, with

only a low iron banister between the steps and a six-story drop into the cellars. Here

she released me and told me crisply to go down. I went down several steps, then

turned to see if she was having any difficulty.

She was not, but neither was she using the stairs. With her long skirt hanging as

straight as a curtain she was floating suspended, watching me, in the center of the

stairwell. I was so startled I stopped, which made her jerk her head angrily, then

began to run. As I fled around and around the spiral she revolved with me, turning

toward me always a face extraordinarily like my father’s, one hand always on the

railing. When we had descended to the second floor she swooped down and caught

me as easily as a cat takes charge of an errant kitten, and led me through rooms and

passages where I had never been permitted to go until I was as confused as I might

have been in a strange building. At last we stopped before a door in no way different

from any other. She opened it with an old-fashioned brass key with an edge like a saw

and motioned for me to go in.

The room was brightly lit, and I was able to see clearly what I had only sensed on

thereof and in the corridors: that the hem of her skirt hung two inches above the floor

no matter how she moved, and that there was nothing between the hem and the floor

at all. She waved me to a little footstool covered with needlepoint and said, “Sit

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TheFifthHeadofCerberusTheFifthHeadofCerberus“AStory”byJohnV.MarschV.R.T.TheFifthHeadofCerberusWhentheivy-todisheavywithsnow,Andtheowletwhoopstothewolfbelow,Thateatstheshe-wolf’syoung.SamuelTaylorColeridge—“TheRimeoftheAncientMariner”WhenIwasaboymybrotherDavidandIhadtogotobedearlywhetherweweresleepyo...

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