T. Boyle - Water Music

But there it is, incontrovertible, the thin steady stream of smoke spinning from the chimney.

Ned goes down on his knees in the frozen muck and taps at the door, a tale of want and woe and sore distress on his lips, the story of how he and Boyles, on their way to their father’s funeral in Cambridge — a wealthy man, their father, porcelain merchant, worth nearly two hundred thousand pounds at his death — were set upon by highwaymen, stripped of everything they owned and forced at gunpoint to change clothes with the heartless blackguards, and how they’d been wandering ever since, penniless, near dead with the cold and hunger, determinedly making their way to that distant seat of learning where a fat dazzling fortune awaits them. .

As it turns out, there’s no need for pretty speeches. The door wrenches back at the first tap, and before he can utter a word a wild shriek cauterizes the air and a wizened old crone is ushering them in the door. “Eeeeeeeeeee! Travelers, is it? Cold and ‘ungry? Robbed on the road, no doubt? Well come on in and warm yerselfs round Mother’s fire, come on now, don’t be shy.”

She is hunched low to the ground with some progressive deformity of the spine, this old woman, her squamate hands twisted into claws, the eyes keen as talons in a face as ravaged as the dimmest memories of the past. Boyles nearly knocks her flat in his rush to get at the fire, but Ned hangs back, alarmed, until she reaches out a withered claw and pulls him through the doorway.

Inside, it’s a cave. Stone walls, earthen floor, a darkness meliorated only by the primeval Light of the fire. Ned nearly trips over a shadow stretched across the floor, his heart racing like a quick little animal in a cage, something wrong, something dead wrong, all his senses strung to a pitch and that burned-once, twice-cautious voice gibbering in his head, look out, look out. He jerks back and the shadow snorts, rises from the dirt and materializes into a drooping, flap-eared sow.

“ ‘Ere!” shrieks the old woman, her voice as cracked and mad as a tortured violin, “come and warm yer bones. Eeeeeeeeeee!” Suddenly she wheels around on Boyles. “You, flattop—’ow ‘bout a snootful o’ nippitatum, eh? Eh?”

She doesn’t have to ask twice. Boyles has the jug to his mouth before she can lift it from the shelf, smacking his lips and gasping, running on with some nonsense about elixir of the gods, his lank legs thrust into the fire, his face red as an innkeeper’s.

“And you, peachfuzz?”

Ned is backed up against the hearth, tense as a cat, half expecting to blink twice and discover a string of murdered children hanging from the ceiling or some nasty stinging thing coiled in the shadows. The sow shakes its ears and gives him a long slow look of utter disdain before collapsing in the corner, the scent of it hot in his nostrils, a fetor of decay and excrement about the place, a stink of life lived at the root and mired in every odious little event of the body. “No,” he says, rubbing his hands. “No, we’ve really got to be going. . just stopped to ask the way to Squire Trelawney’s place—”

“Ah,” the old woman breathes, “friends o’ the Squire’s, are ye?”

Ned makes the mistake of nodding yes.

“Eeeeeeeeeee!” she caterwauls. “Well that’s a good one, the divil and ‘is dam it is. I took ye to be no-account, disreputable, vagabond, derelict bums, I did. . but friends o’ the Squire’s, now that’s a different story, yes,” she cackles, “another story altogether.” And then she cups her hands to her mouth and shouts down the passageway in a voice as raw and poisonous as a dish of toadstools: “Boy! Hallo, boy! Get yer lazy arse out ‘ere and meet the fine gennelmens wot’s come a-callin’.”

“Really, we just—” Ned stammers.

“Honored, I’m sure,” the old woman shrieks, scraping the ground in an obscene parody of a curtsy. “ ‘Ere, ‘ave a seat and give us peasants a minute o’ yer precious time,” thrusting a stool at him and calling out impatiently into the darkened passageway. “Boy!”

There is a movement on the far side of the room, furtive and shy, the form of a child emerging from the low rictus of the sheeprun. A boy, four or five, his face a dim white spot in the gloom. He stands there, uncertain, hanging his head.

“Well, ye young toad, stop yer loiterin’ in the shadders and come over ‘ere to yer old Mother — or don’t ye ken the King’s English no more?” The old woman, cocked and watchful, has stationed herself in the center of the room, at the pulse of things, playing to her audience like a demented actress in her most ominous role. What next? Ned is thinking, when suddenly she spins round on him, a leer on her face, the old gums working. “ ‘Ee’s a littul pissant, that one, ain’t ‘ee? A reg’lar changeling. Why ye’d think ‘ee was afraid of ‘is own dear Mother the way ‘ee acts.”

Ned’s face is locked like a vault. There is something familiar here, something sinister, something he doesn’t want to know. And yet he looks on as if hypnotized, compelled despite himself, this grim inscrutable drama unfolding with a logic and momentum of its own. He looks on as the harridan writhes across the room and snatches the child to her breast like a greedy crow, her shriek of triumph like a razor drawn across a pane of glass. Looks on as she insinuates a withered hand under the boy’s chin and twists his face to the Light with a glittering malicious grin.

As the firelight falls across the boy’s pinched features, illuminating the greasy wisps of hair and smudged face, the open sores on the chin and the steady patient gaze of a penned animal, Ned feels a panic rising in him. Compelled, he stares at the boy as he might have stared at a bleeding statue or his own epitaph etched in a gravestone, stares as he’s never stared before, Boyles turned from the fire to gawk at him, the only sound in the room the hag’s fierce rattling insuck of breath. And then he’s up off the stool, groping like a blind man, his mouth working in shock and incomprehension. He is looking at himself. Below the stark leering challenge of the hag’s eyes, he is looking into his own, the years stripped back, suffering in ascendancy, the ragged orphan set loose on the streets. He is dreaming, dying, going mad.

The harridan’s shriek breaks the spell. “ ‘Andsome lad, wot?” she cackles. “Though ‘ee needs a bit of a cuff now and again, don’t ye, boy? Eh?” And as if to prove it, she spins him round and rakes his ear in a single practiced movement. “Now get back to yer perch, ye dirty littul beast,” she spits, and the child vanishes into the passageway like a mirage.

It couldn’t be, no, it couldn’t. Look out, the voice shouts in his head. “I—” Ned begins, but the noose is round his throat again, the hangman’s eyes like rare jewels glittering in their slits, and suddenly he has Boyles by the arm. “Get up, Billy, get up.”

Boyles has by this time turned his attention back to the jug, periodically shaking it and holding it to his ear like a watchmaker inspecting a faulty timepiece. He puts it aside momentarily and pokes the fire, happy as the day he was born. “Wot?” he gasps, an edge of genuine shock to his voice.

“Eeeeeeeeeee!” the old woman keens.

Ned jerks Boyles to his feet. “Forget the jug, Billy — we got to go now. Go now,” he shouts, as if Boyles were brain-damaged or hard of hearing.

“Awwww,” croaks the hag, picking at her ear. “So soon? But ye just got ‘ere. Mother ‘asn’t ‘ad time to get out the linen nor polish the silver, eeeeee!”

Boyles’ face is pained and confused. “I likes it here, Neddy,” he whines, but his companion is already pulling him toward the door in a desperate trembling grip that pinches his arm — even through the coat — with all the implacable urgency of a steel trap.