Chris Adrian - The Great Night

“How are we different?” Mike asked. He was seated at the head of the long table in the dining room. Henry was staring at the hole in the floor. A fireman’s pole dropped through two bedrooms upstairs and a downstairs parlor before it stopped in the basement. The former owners, Ryan explained again, when Henry asked. He had slid down it already, over and over until it was boring, and now he wanted to slide down it as something other than a boy. But no one could leave the table before Mike excused them, and changing wasn’t allowed during dinner anyway.

“How are we different?” Mike asked again. His eyes met Henry’s eyes, and Henry worried that he was supposed to answer the question. He blushed, and didn’t know what he would say, but Mike looked away, down the table to where Peaches sat at the other end. That seat was a rotating place of honor, but Henry didn’t know how it was earned. The table was heaped with food and heaped with loot, which they would sort after they ate, cash and jewelry and small electronics and here and there wallets standing up on their edges so they looked like tents and in the center of these a bird in a golden cage, brought back by Peaches from a mansion on Russian Hill. He said it was a macaw.

“We’re smarter than anybody,” Peaches said. Mike gave him a thumb-up, then pointed with his other hand at Mateo, seated on Peaches’s right.

“We’ve seen magic and we can do magic,” he said.

“One man, one reason, Bubba. But you’re right to suggest a difference between the lesser magic we do and the greater magic we’ve seen. If that’s what you were doing.” He pointed at Eli next, and the answers proceeded clockwise around the table. Henry wasn’t sure if they were bragging to one another or saying grace, but it turned out that Mike required a moment of serious collective reflection every night before dinner. “At least he didn’t make us all hold hands tonight,” Ryan said later. Henry tried hard to think of a reason of his own, but Mateo had taken the obvious one, and then every other reason he could think of— we are fast or we are a team or we watch each other’s backs— got used up as his turn came closer and closer. He thought about the beach, of running on all fours in the surf with Ryan and sitting on a rock with him with waves pounding all around them. There was no way to describe what he felt, but it had to do with the way Ryan teased him about the necklace, and snatched it from his neck, then stood up with it shining in his fist, the heaving waves around his feet making it look like he was standing on the water. He threw the necklace into the ocean. Henry almost dove after it, but Ryan caught him with a hand on his arm and an arm around his bare chest. “There are a hundred more where that came from!” he shouted. “And we can take them whenever we want!”

“Bubba?” Mike said. He was staring at Henry, but he only blushed again and shook his head.

“It’s all right, Bubba. First one’s free. I’ll do it for you. But you’re going to have to learn to pull your weight.” He cleared his throat and folded his hands in front of his chest and raised his eyes to the ceiling like a choirboy looking to heaven. Pitching his voice high, he said, “We all belong someplace else.”

“Master,” said the dog, “I have fetched myself a gift, just as you permitted. Here he is, a dear friend for me for life.” He bowed and, still bent at the waist, pulled with his mouth at Henry’s shirt to make him bow too. They were in a long hall before a set of stone chairs in which a terribly fancy-looking couple was seated. Stone columns, thick at their tops and bottoms but tapered pencil-thin in the middle, lined the hall, and creatures that were not people were gathered in all the spaces between them, bouncing on their haunches or standing on their hands or clinging to the stone with their claws or hovering in the air. Henry was able to pay them very little mind, not because they weren’t the strangest and most interesting things he had ever seen in his life, besides a talking dog, but because his attention was commanded by the extraordinary majesty of the man and woman on the chairs. Sitting down, they looked about the same size as his parents, but he suspected that when they stood up their heads would scrape the top of the cavernous chamber. When he straightened up they were both staring at him intensely, which made him blush, and he danced from foot to foot because his feet were suddenly itchy.

“Hmm,” said the man. “There’s something wrong with it.”

“It’s mortal,” said the woman.

“More deeply than usual, I mean,” said the man. “There is a deeper sort of darkness in it.” He looked at the dog, who had straightened up as well and was beaming proudly next to Henry. “Old one,” he said, “you chose unwisely.”

“Oh, no,” said the dog. “I chose well! A friend for the ages. There is a sameness in us!”

“It’s rather overripe,” said the woman, and she leaned forward to poke Henry in the belly with a long finger. That gave him a funny feeling, as if he had to pee and poop and laugh all at once. He smiled at her; she frowned back. “I think it will be rotten in a day or two,” she said. “Why didn’t you choose something fresher?”

“Yes,” said the man. “Take it back. Go choose another.”

“A promise is a promise,” said the dog. “I chose my choice, and you must let it stand.”

The man gave him a hard stare, and the dog stared back, and Henry had the sense that the man and the dog were both holding places for other things entirely, things that wouldn’t just stand to the ceiling but would fill up the whole chamber. The man smiled, then the dog grinned, and they were diminished.

“So it is,” said the man. He sighed and stood up and wasn’t any taller, after all, than Henry’s father. The lady followed him, and all the other creatures in the hall flipped off their hands, or rose higher on their haunches, or drifted down to the floor. The man turned to Henry and stared down at him, kind and stern and a little sad. Henry noticed for the first time that his beard was full of flowers. “Human child,” he said, “do you forsake your mortal life, and your mortal cares, your mortal loves, your mortal family, and do you swear to live by our laws, which are few, and obey your Lady and your Lord, and cater to their whims, which are diverse, and not to be comprehended by your like? Do you swear?”

“The answer is yes,” the dog said, when Henry didn’t answer right away. He wanted to say no or to say, Tell me more about what it means to agree to all this, but the man’s face was not a face to which he could say either of these things.

“Yes,” Henry said.

“And do you swear to be my friend,” the dog said, “forever and ever and ever?” He wagged his tail and took Henry’s hand in his mouth.

“The answer is yes,” the man said, shaking his head sadly.

“Yes,” Henry said. The dog was squeezing his hand much too tightly. “You’re hurting me,” he said to the dog.

“Nonsense,” said the dog. “Friends don’t hurt each other.”

“Kayd Meela Falchaa!” said the lady, and raised her hands to the assemblage.

“Kayd Meelah Falchaa!” they said. “Welcome, child of man, no longer a child of man! Welcome! Welcome!” The woman yawned hugely and walked away, and a dozen of the creatures followed after her, worrying at her train and her hair and sweeping the ground before her with their furry, feathery bodies.

“Old enemy,” said the man, “you must only promise me one thing: Do not teach this one any magic.”