Steve Tem - Ubo

“Stop it! Don’t let him out!” Falstaff was at the end of the hall running toward them. “Get away from him!”

“He doesn’t belong in there! It’s not right!” Gandhi shouted back.

“You don’t know what you’re doing!” Falstaff slammed into them and all three went sprawling. The bar clattered to the floor. The werewolf’s throat made a painful huffing noise.

Lenin clambered to his feet and picked up the bar, swinging it about furiously.

“Stop it!” Daniel cried.

“He doesn’t get to make all our decisions! We’re going to get this man out of there!”

Falstaff was standing, bent over and breathless. “You… under… est… imate him. Henry… Henry come to the window.”

The werewolf’s face appeared, wide-eyed and panting. “Yes yes yes…”

“Would you hurt us if we let you out?”

The werewolf rolled his eyes. “Noooo… but I might eat you. You might taste good. If you tasted good I might not stop. Do you taste good? And that one?” He glanced in Gandhi’s direction. “Would he taste as good as a child?”

“We can’t, we can’t just leave him like this!” Gandhi cried.

“You can visit him, talk to him. As I do. You just can’t let him out. We won’t leave him alone, we’ll visit him more often, but we won’t let him out.”

The werewolf pushed his head as far into the opening as he could, his lips pressed and distorted under the metal rod. “I was alone at school, when they weren’t harassing me. My wife didn’t know me back then, or else I’m sure she never would have married me. She would never have been able to get that image out of her head. I was so pitiful, so humiliated. I knew I was a weakling, but sometimes I tried to pretend it wasn’t true. I tried to pretend I was a great warrior who hadn’t yet discovered the secret that would unlock his power.” Henry spoke weepily, a child caught with his hand where it should not have been. Daniel came up to the opening as three tears came out of the man’s right eye and streaked his dirty cheek as precisely and cleanly as a set of invisible claws. “I used to have dreams I destroyed the world on a whim, with no reason.” Then the voice changed, thickening into de Rais’ coarsely musical tongue, “But the power to transform a living man into a corpse.” He tilted his head back and sniffed the air with a scowl. “I can think of no greater léger de main. ”

THE GROUP LINGERED for some time around Henry’s cell. As unpleasant as his situation was, they felt guilty about leaving him, and Daniel could tell that both Gandhi and Lenin were as distrustful of Falstaff’s reassurances as he was. But eventually they moved on, promising Henry they would visit him regularly, and promising each other to refer to him as Henry, not as the werewolf. Daniel couldn’t tell if Henry understood anything they said to him, or if he even heard the words, but there was nothing more they could do.

Lenin had grown sullen over the encounter, and when he insisted they find a place to rest before going back upstairs to the barracks, they agreed. But it took some time to find a resting place he was satisfied with, until he discovered another room with a broken exterior wall providing an open view of the distant city. Lenin glanced once at that panoramic pre-dawn view, but then he turned his back on it and took them further into the space, around a corner into an empty room with no window. He plopped down against a wall and the rest of them joined him.

No one said anything for several minutes. Curious about the view they had passed, another glimpse onto an outside world they knew nothing about, Daniel stood and wandered out to the empty windows, keeping safely back in case there was more collapse. The first thing he noticed was that a number of fires were burning deepin the city’s interior. They flickered and changed, some appearing to wave, like things dying and attempting to get his attention. The farthest one looked huge, probably covering a number of blocks, a molten balloon rubbing against the black drop of sky. Again he heard distant shouts, perhaps, or screams, but no motor or vehicle sounds as far as he could tell. It all might be his imagination; he might be mistaking ordinary reflections, a distortion of distant noise, for some ongoing disaster, but he didn’t think so. Elsewhere in the darkened metropolis, tiny pockets of light flickered. He thought of candles or camp fires, or maybe some small intermittent source of power.

If he crept just a little closer and looked down at a sharp angle he caught a glimpse of another ruined part of their building. Several large holes in the outer walls, a giant ramp of rubble leading up to low windows, scattered signs of repair, and shining in the moonlight some sort of metal bracing spider webbing the raw edges of the worst areas of collapse. It was particularly thick around the lower foundations.

He couldn’t quite figure it out. There had been no attempt to do a legitimate repair—the walls hadn’t been restored, so the open holes allowed the weather or vegetation or anything else to invade the building’s interior. Certainly it made those rooms immediately adjacent to the holes unusable. The metal webbing—he’d just assumed it was metal but it very well could be something stronger—kept everything intact and probably stable. But anyone seeing the building from the outside might think it was going to collapse at any moment. As stable and as inhabited as it was, it would still look like an empty ruin from some distance away.

He looked back out at the fires, and listened to the distant sounds that might or might not have been a distorted chorus of panic. Whoever they are, he thought, they probably don’t even know we are here.

“I don’t always expect good sense from the others,” Falstaff said beside him. “But I would have thought you of all people would have awakened me before trying to come down here.” Falstaff could be a supercilious prick.

“Maybe if you weren’t so secretive, maybe if you’d taken us down here earlier and explained things, we wouldn’t have gone without you, and they wouldn’t have tried to let Henry out.”

There was a long pause before Falstaff spoke again. “Of course you have a point. I’ve been here longer—I suppose sometimes I don’t want to say too much. Life here… it’s hard enough. And it rarely changes.”

But Daniel didn’t want to hear it. “Have you seen the fires out there? Does that happen often?”

“I have. Someone is having a very bad day. We all know about bad days—in here we re-live some of the worst days in history.”

“That doesn’t sound very empathetic.”

Falstaff sighed. “It’s not that I don’t care. But we’re here, trapped in this building. They—whoever or whatever they might be—are out there. There’s nothing we can do for them.”

“That’s very reasonable.” Daniel peered down at the base of the building. The stones looked wet, even though it wasn’t raining. “But it’s too easy. Maybe it should be unbearable that those people are suffering. Maybe that’s what we need, to make more truths unbearable.” A small wave of water splashed over the stones. “Is it flooding down there?”

Falstaff stepped past him, and Daniel held his breath as the big man leaned over the broken window wall. He knows it won’t collapse, Daniel thought. Obviously the webbing did its job.

“I’ve seen it before. We’re not too far from the ocean, apparently, and sometimes at high tide there’s some flooding. Nothing to worry about, though.” He was still hiding something.