Gene Wolfe - The Land Across

The cabinets, I decided, were way too obvious to be worth searching. They would have been searched a long time ago. I opened one to see. It had originally been locked, but somebody had pried it open, busting the lock. There were a few dusty odds and ends left, like a long, bent screw and an empty ink bottle. In the angle between a shelf and the back …

My fingernail pried it out: a chewed-up pencil.

Martya was pulling a dustcover from the picture above the nearest mantel. The dustcover gone, it turned out to be no picture at all, but a big mirror. “Here is one,” she told me. “There is a dead woman buried behind it.”

I did not believe her. “How do you know that?”

She shrugged.

“How? Did Volitain tell you?”

“I saw her.” Martya paused, groping, probably because she was looking for the right German. “I look at it. It does not show me, but she.”

“A dead woman.”

“Yes.”

I went to the mirror and, just as I expected, saw my own reflection. The mirror was in a heavy brass frame, and the frame fastened with big screws to the black wood over the mantel. “If I had tools, I’d take this down so you could see there’s no dead woman hiding back there.”

“You would do that for me?”

I shook my head. “We’re treasure hunting. This looks as if it hasn’t been disturbed in quite a while, so it’s at least possible the treasure’s back there, in a hole behind the mirror.”

“Someone might have looked and put it back.”

It seemed to me that a searcher would have had no reason to put back the mirror, which looked pretty heavy. But I was checking out the heads of the big brass screws and kept my yap shut. The slots would have showed bright scratches if the screws had been turned lately with a steel screwdriver. None did, but there was one missing.

I picked up the cloth dustcover and covered the mirror.

“Make many notes,” Martya told me. “We must have tools and a light.”

I did.

“Are we to go now?”

“Soon,” I told her. “I want to look around a little more.”

“Soon it will be night. I make the suggestion. We go through the house.” Martya gestured. “When we have reach the end there will be a door. This must be so. We go out this door of which I speak and so back to make Kleon let us in and give us supper.”

I said I wanted to look things over a little more thoroughly.

“If I wish to go, how do you prevent me?”

“I wouldn’t stop you at all, except for arguing that it would be better if you were to stay.”

“This we are doing. I will go. Will you find Kleon’s house again? It is not far.”

I thought about it.

“Answer! You could not.”

“I could ask directions.”

“They will tell you nothing. This you will most soon find, and know I am right. So! You will not find it. The police will shoot Kleon. For me this is good. I will have the house and sell him, and I go to the capital. You go to prison. For you it is most bad.”

“All right,” I told her, “we’ll go through the house like you want. But first we ought to lock the front door. I’m sure we can lock it from inside.”

“No one will wish to enter into such a place as this. You and Volitain solely.”

“Let me lock it. It will only take a minute.”

The large keyhole on the inside of the door was pretty obvious, but the lock seemed stiffer and rustier than ever. I got out my notebook again, and made a note about spray lubricant, underlining it. It worked magic. Just making the note seemed to fix the lock, which let my key turn almost easily. I shook the door.

“It is locked! Let us go.”

I nodded as I pocketed the key and followed her out of the reception hall. In the next room the tall windows had changed to smaller ones, square or round, some broken. The fireplaces were gone, and there was a big Dutch stove instead.

“We do not need your swears,” Martya told me. “They are most vile. This your voice says. I do not understand them. This house either. We have come through the wrong door. It is no more than that.”

“Yeah, you’re right. How about this? You go back to the reception hall and find the right door. I’ll keep on going toward the back from here. We’ll meet at the back and see who gets there first.”

“You would leave me! Kleon will be shot, and you will go to prison. This I have said.”

I shook my head. “You said nobody will give me directions. If you’re telling the truth—which I don’t believe, by the way—I’ll pay somebody to guide me.”

“I will be at Kleon’s before you!”

“When I get there I’ll tell you how smart you are.”

“You think me afraid!”

“Only you’re not? You can prove it pretty easily.” I gestured toward the door through which we had come into the room.

“I am afraid—most afraid for you. You are like a foolish child. You think himself wise. I must protect you.”

Since I did not really want us to be separated, I smiled at that, calling her Mother Martya. She laughed, and we crossed the room together, exiting through the door at the farther end.

Here I would like to stop to tell you that I had never really sensed the sinister atmosphere of the Willows until Martya laughed. There was something in there that hated laughter, and her laugh woke it up. Woke it only in my own mind, you will say. But I had not been afraid before and was scared then. There is no arguing against that.

The setting sun may have had something to do with it, too. I did not see it, but I may have sensed it in the changed quality of the light. In Australia I watched Ayers Rock change color at sunset. Of course the space-traveling stone does not really change. It just makes the change in the sunlight show up better. Did the Willows really change some way? I would rather write no, but I think maybe it did.

Either the next room was windowless or its windows had been boarded up. It would have been as dark as the heart of an alderman if we had not left the door open. As it was, we walked slowly and carefully because I remembered the torn-up floorboards in the other room.

We were halfway through when Martya yelled, “A thing run on my foot!”

“Just a rat,” I said. “There’s bound to be rats in an old house like this.”

“What is it they eat here? What is it their food?”

I said I had no idea.

“I will tell. They gnaw the bodies of the dead! We—” Martya paused. “That you heard. That you must hear. Tell me you hear.”

“Hear what?”

“Somebody laugh when I say that. Not you, I have hear you laugh at me too often. I could not mistake. You hear? Say you hear it, too.”

“No. No, I didn’t.”

“There is another here with us!”

“It was probably the wind.”

“What wind? I do not feel him.”

“The next time we do this—,” I began.

I was interrupted. “We do not next time. No! You do it, with none.”

I would have closed her mouth with my hand, but she moved away. I had heard something, and hoped—scared half to death—to hear it again. As it was, all I could do was urge Martya, in whispers, to be quiet and listen.

Somebody was walking around upstairs. The noises were faint, but I felt sure I knew exactly what they were. He would walk toward the back of the house, and then toward the front again.

A door slammed, and after that everything got quiet.

“We must get out,” Martya was whispering.

I nodded, hoping she could see it, turned, and steered her toward what I thought was the door we had come through.

It showed us into another room, smaller than the one we had left and five or six sided, but a room with windows.

Martya went to a broken one, felt along the bottom of the frame for broken glass, found some, and by what seemed like a real miracle got the window to open, swinging like the door of a cabinet in a rusty frame that creaked and squeaked.