Seventh Son: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume I (6 page)

As soon as the door was closed, he forgot his fears of silent invisible Reds. Things were right quiet in the house, which was pretty suspicious to start with. The girls were never quiet till Papa shouted at them at least three times each night. So Alvin walked up real careful, looking before every step, checking over his shoulder so often he started getting a crick in his neck. By the time he was inside his room with the door closed he was so jittery that he almost hoped they’d do whatever they were planning to do and get it over with.

But they didn’t do it and they didn’t do it. He looked around the room by candlelight, turned down his bed, looked into every corner, but there was nothing there. Calvin was asleep with his thumb in his mouth, which meant that if they
had
prowled around his room, it had been a while ago. He began to wonder if maybe, just this once, the girls had decided to leave him be or even do their dirty tricks to the twins. It would be a whole new life for him, if the girls started being nice. Like as if an angel came down and lifted him right out of hell.

He stripped off his clothes quick as he could, folded them, and put them on the stool by his bed so they wouldn’t be full of roaches in the morning. He had kind of an agreement with the roaches. They could get into anything they wanted if it was on the floor, but they didn’t climb into Calvin’s bed or Alvin’s neither, and they didn’t climb onto his stool. In return, Alvin never stomped them. As a result Alvin’s room was pretty much the roach sanctuary of the house, but since they kept the treaty, he and Calvin were the only ones who never woke up screaming about roaches in the bed.

He took his nightgown off its peg and pulled it on over his head.

Something bit him under the arm. He cried out from the sharp pain. Something else bit him on the shoulder. Whatever it was, it was all over inside his nightgown, and as he yanked it off, it kept right on nipping him everywhere. Finally it was off, and he stood there stark naked slapping and brushing with his hands to try to get the bugs or whatever they were off him.

Then he reached down and carefully picked up his nightgown. He couldn’t see anything scurrying away from it, and even when he shook it and shook it, nary a bug fell off. Something else fell off. It glinted for a moment in the candlelight and made a tiny twinking sound when it hit the floor.

Only then did Alvin Junior notice the stifled giggling from the room next door. Oh, they got him, they got him sure. He sat on the edge of his bed, picking pins out of his nightgown and poking them into the bottom corner of his quilt. He never thought they’d be so mad they’d risk losing one of Mama’s precious steel pins, just to get even with him. But he should have known. Girls never did have any bounds of fair play, the way boys did. When a boy knocked you down in a wrestling match, why, he’d either jump on you or wait for you to get back up, and either way you’d be even—both up or both down. But Al knew from painful experience that girls’d kick you when you were down and gang up on you whenever they had the chance. When they fought, they fought in order to end the fight as quick as they could. Took all the fun out of it.

Just like tonight. It wasn’t a fair punishment, him poking her with his finger, and them getting him all jabbed up with pins. A couple of those places were bleeding, they stabbed so deep. And Alvin didn’t reckon Matilda had so much as a bruise, though he wished she did.

Alvin Junior wasn’t mean, no sir. But sitting there on the edge of the bed, taking pins out of his nightgown, he couldn’t help but notice the roaches going about their business in the cracks of the floor, and he couldn’t help imagining what it would be like if all those roaches just happened to go a-calling in a certain room full of giggles.

So he knelt down on the floor and set the candle right there, and he began whispering to the roaches, just the way he did the day he made his peace treaty with them. He started telling them all about nice smooth sheets and soft squishy skin they could scamper on, and most of all about Matilda’s satin pillowcase on her goosedown pillow. But they didn’t seem to care about that. Hungry, that’s all they are, thought Alvin. All they care about is food, food and fear. So he started telling them about food, the most perfectly delicious food they ever ate in their life. The roaches perked right up and came close to listen, though nary one of them climbed on him, which was right in keeping with the treaty. All the food you ever wanted, all over that soft pink skin. And it’s safe, too, not a speck of danger, nothing to worry about, you just go on in there and find the food on that soft pink squishy smooth skin.

Sure enough, a few of the roaches started skittering under Alvin’s door, and then more and more of them, and finally the whole troop went off in a single great cavalry charge under the door, through the wall, their bodies shiny and glowing in the candlelight, guided by their eternal insatiable hunger, fearless because Al had told them there wasn’t nothing to fear.

It wasn’t ten seconds before he heard the first whoop from the room next door. And within a minute the whole house was in such an uproar you’d’ve thought it was on fire. Girls screaming, boys shouting, and big old boots stomping as Papa rushed up the stairs and squashed roaches. Al was about as happy as a pig in mud.

Finally things started calming down in the next room. In a minute they’d come in to check on him and Calvin, so he blew out the candle, ducked under the covers, and whispered for the roaches to hide. Sure enough, here came Mama’s footsteps in the hall outside. Just at the last moment, Alvin Junior remembered that he wasn’t wearing his nightgown. He snaked out his hand, snatched the nightgown, and pulled it under the covers just as the door opened. Then he concentrated on breathing easy and regular.

Mama and Papa came in, holding up candles. He heard them pull down Calvin’s covers to check for roaches, and he feared they might pull down his as well. That would be such a shameful thing, to sleep like an animal without a stitch on. But the girls, who knew he couldn’t possibly be asleep so soon after getting stuck with so many pins, they were naturally afraid of what Alvin might tell Mama and Papa, so they made sure to hustle them out of the room before they could do more than shine a candle in Alvin’s face to make sure he was asleep. Alvin held his face absolutely still, not even twitching his eyelids. The candle went away, the door softly closed.

Still he waited, and sure enough, the door opened again. He could hear the padding of bare feet across the floor. Then he felt Anne’s breath against his face and heard her whisper in his ear. “We don’t know how you did it, Alvin Junior, but we know you set those roaches onto us.”

Alvin pretended not to hear anything. He even snored a little.

“You don’t fool me, Alvin Junior. You better not go to sleep tonight, because if you do, you’ll never wake up, you hear me?”

Outside the room, Papa was saying, “Where’s Anne got to?”

She’s in here, Papa, threatening to kill me, thought Alvin. But of course he didn’t say it out loud. Anyway, she was just trying to scare him.

“We’ll make it look like an accident,” said Anne. “You always have accidents, nobody will think it’s murder.”

Alvin was beginning to believe her, more and more.

“We’ll carry your body out and stuff it down the privy hole, and they’ll all think you went to relieve yourself and fell in.”

That would work, thought Alvin. Anne was just the one to think of something so devilish clever, since she was the very best at secretly pinching people and being a good ten feet away before they screamed. That was why she always kept her fingernails so long and sharp. Even now, Alvin could feel one of those sharp nails scraping along his cheek.

The door opened wider. “Anne,” whispered Mama, “you come out of there this instant.”

The fingernail quit scratching. “I was just making sure little Alvin was all right.” Her bare feet padded back out of the room.

Soon all the doors were closed, and he heard Papa’s and Mama’s shoes clattering down the stairs.

He knew that by rights he should still be scared to death by Anne’s threats, but it wasn’t so. He had won the battle. He pictured the roaches crawling all over the girls, and he started to laugh. Well, that wouldn’t do. He had to stifle that, breathe calm as could be. His whole body shook from trying to hold in the laughter.

There was somebody in the room.

He couldn’t hear anything, and when he opened his eyes he couldn’t see anybody. But he knew somebody was there. Hadn’t come in the door, so they must’ve come in the open window. That’s plain silly, Alvin told himself, there isn’t a soul in here. But he lay still, all laughter gone out of him, because he could
feel
it, somebody standing there. No, it’s a nightmare, that’s all, I’m still spooked from thinking about Reds watching me outside, or maybe from Anne’s threat, something like that, if I just lie here with my eyes closed it’ll go away.

The blackness inside Al’s eyelids turned pink. There was a light in his room. A light as bright as daylight. There wasn’t no candle in the world, no, not even a lantern that could burn so bright as that. Al opened his eyes, and all his dread turned into terror, for now he saw that what he feared was real.

There was a man standing at the foot of his bed, a man shining as if he was made of sunlight. The light in the room was coming from his skin, from his chest where his shirt was tore open, from his face, and from his hands. And in one of those hands, a knife, a sharp steel knife. I am going to die, thought Al. Just like Anne promised me, only there wasn’t no way his sisters could conjure up such an awful apparition as this one. This bright Shining Man had come on his own, that was sure, and planned to kill Alvin Junior for his own sins and not cause somebody else had set him on.

Then it was like as if the light from the man pushed right through Alvin’s skin and came inside him, and the fear just went right out of him. The Shining Man might have him a knife, and he might’ve snuck on into the room without so much as opening a door, but he didn’t mean no harm to Alvin. So Alvin relaxed a little and wriggled up in his bed till he was mostly sitting, leaning up against the wall, watching the Shining Man, waiting to see what all he’d do.

The Shining Man took his bright steel knife and brought the blade against his other palm—and cut. Alvin saw the gleaming crimson blood flow from the wound in the Shining Man’s hand, stream down his forearm, and drip from his elbow onto the floor. He hadn’t seen four drops, though, before he came to see a vision in his mind. He could see his sisters’ room, he knew the place, but it was different. The beds were up high, and his sisters were giants, so all he could see clear was big old feet and legs. Then he realized he was seeing a little creature’s view of the room. A roach’s view. In his vision he was scurrying, filled with hunger, absolutely fearless, knowing that if he could get up onto those feet, those legs, there’d be food, all the food he’d ever want. So he rushed, he climbed, he scurried, searching. But there wasn’t no food, not a speck of it, and now huge hands reached and swept him off, and then a great huge shadow loomed over him, and he felt the hard sharp crushing agony of death.

Not once, but many times, dozens of times, the hope of food, the confidence that no harm would come; then disappointment—nothing to eat, nothing at all—and after disappointment, terror and injury and death. Each small trusting life, betrayed, crushed, battered.

And then in his vision he was one who lived, one who got away from the looming, stomping boots, under the beds, into the cracks in the walls. He fled from the room of death, but not into the old place, not into the safe room, because now that was no longer safe. That was where the lies came from. That was the place of the betrayer, the liar, the killer who had sent them into this place to die. There were no words in this vision, of course. There could be no words, no clarity of thought in a roach’s brain. But Al had words and thoughts, and he knew more than any roach what the roaches had learned. They had been promised something about the world, they had been made
sure
of it, and then it was a lie. Death was a fearful thing, yes, flee that room; but in the other room, there was worse than death—there the world had gone crazy, it was a place where anything could happen, where nothing could be trusted, where nothing was certain. A terrible place. The worst place.

Then the vision ended. Alvin sat there, his hands pressed against his eyes, sobbing desperately. They suffered, he cried out silently, they suffered, and I did it to them, I betrayed them. That’s what the Shining Man came to show me. I made the roaches trust me, but then I cheated them and sent them to die. I’ve done murder.

No, not murder! Who ever heard of roach-killing being murder? Nobody in the whole world would call it that.

But it didn’t matter what other folks thought of it, Al knew that. The Shining Man had come to show him that murder was murder.

And now the Shining Man was gone. The light was gone from the room, and when Al opened his eyes, there was no one in the room but Cally, fast asleep. Too late even to beg forgiveness. In pure misery Al Junior closed his eyes and cried some more.

How long was it? A few seconds? Or did Alvin doze off and not notice the passage of a much longer time? Never mind how long—the light came back. Once again it came into him, not just through his eyes, but piercing clear to his heart, whispering to him, calming him. Again Alvin opened his eyes and looked at the face of the Shining Man, waiting for him to speak. When he said nothing, Alvin thought it was
his
turn, and so he stammered out the words, so weak compared to the feelings in his heart. “I’m sorry, I’ll never do it again, I’ll—”

He was babbling, he knew it, couldn’t even hear himself speak he was so upset. But the light grew brighter for a moment, and he felt a question in his mind. Not a word was spoke, mind you, but he knew that the Shining Man wanted him to say what it was he was sorry
for
.

And when he thought about it, Alvin wasn’t altogether sure what all was wrong. Sure it wasn’t the killing itself—you could starve to death if you didn’t slaughter a pig now and then, and it wasn’t hardly murder when a weasel killed himself a mouse, was it?