Far Far Away (41 page)

“Hallå,”
he said to the clerk, “is it not a great day to be alive?”

He asked his question dully, without his usual exuberance.

The clerk seemed to notice this, for she said, “You okay, Sten?”

“Yes, yes.” He hesitated. “The truth is that I am sorry to see summer ending. I had such fond expectations for it, and now—” He made a vague wave with his hand.

The clerk tried to jolly him by saying, “Well, don’t forget autumn. We usually get two or three full hours of autumn before blowing full-tilt into winter.”

The baker chuckled politely, and the clerk weighed a cluster of bananas, then ran a few more items through and said, “So, Sten. What about it? When’re we going to get some more Prince Cakes? It’s been a while, or did I miss something?”

An odd expression crossed the baker’s face. He glanced around—there were no other customers nearby. “Well,” he said, “I will tell you a little secret. I have been thinking of giving up the Prince Cakes.” He sighed. “They take a certain toll. So I think I will give them up”—he smiled—“after one last batch.”

“What? Tell me it ain’t so!” the clerk joked. “But okay, then. If it’s the last batch, put me down for a double portion. I’ll freeze me some for a rainy day. When will you be doing them?”

The baker raised his shoulders in a shrug. “Soon, I think. The idea has taken hold, and that is always the first step.”

All the while, the clerk was pushing buttons on the cash register as she slid goods past—a carton of oatmeal, a half pound of bacon, a bag of walnuts, a red box of raisins, and then a small carton of rodent poison.

I had been in Sten Blix’s bakery, I had been in his storerooms, and I had been in his dungeon. I had never seen the smallest sign of rodents.

My foreboding grew as the baker drove home with his groceries, as he wearily stored his kitchen goods, as he set water for boiling, as he steeped and stirred his peppermint tea. Finally, he carried his cup and saucer to a dim, windowless room that was clearly his sleeping quarters. Hanging on the walls were several more of the woodcuts from
The Dance of Death
. A television sat perched on a metal shelf mounted near an upper conjunction of the walls.

The baker switched on this television, and, oh, it must be said: Not even my darkest fears could prepare me for what I saw. Instead of a normal show, the lighted screen displayed three panels, each showing different views of his dungeon—one of Frank Bailey’s side of the chamber, one of Jeremy’s and Ginger’s cells,
and one of the massive metal wall that separated the dungeon from the world.

So! The baker did not just listen to the prisoners. He observed them from the comfort of his bedroom.

The images were alarming. Ginger and Jeremy lay on their cots, turned toward the bars between them. Their hands lay close but did not touch. They both wore baggy black pants and shirts. They were both still. In his cell, Frank Bailey lay on his cot, tucked into a sickle-like curve. He, too, was still.

A fear of the most terrible kind took hold of me.

It seemed the baker felt it, too, for he drew close to study the screen.

A full minute passed, and none of the prisoners moved.

The baker set down his tea and approached one of the macabre woodcuts hanging in the room—one of a woman glancing lovingly at her husband as Death approached unbeknownst. At the baker’s hand, its hinged frame swung open to reveal a panel of buttons, one of which he pressed.

A sudden piercing human shriek could be heard from the television screen, and the heads of the prisoners jerked up almost as one. They stared starkly about, and then, when the shrieking stopped, their heads dropped back down.

Ginger could be heard to say, “What was that?” Even though her voice was weak and low, it could be heard clearly.

“Just one more memento from the past, my dear girl,” the baker whispered, then went to his closet and turned a valve on a water pipe.

On the television screen, the prisoners could again be seen raising their heads. Jeremy rose with difficulty and moved slowly
toward his small bathroom. On the screen, these movements looked like a series of detached images played in staccato, one stuttering into the next, an effect that made Jeremy look other than human.

When he came out of the bathroom, he said, “Water.”

The baker watched as Frank and Ginger pushed themselves up from their cots and moved toward their bathrooms, then he turned the television off.

He knelt at his chest of drawers and pulled out the lowest drawer. Neatly folded within it was an array of shirts of various styles and sizes. He began to sort through them, regarding each one, then setting it aside. His manner was almost tender. Then, a shock: he picked up the pink shirt that had been Ginger’s, the one with
As Is
written on it in glittery letters. And below that was Jeremy’s faded blue T-shirt and Frank’s formal white shirt, clean now and carefully folded. The baker set aside all these shirts, and a frightening number of others, too—each one, I feared, representing a lost life—until finally he came to a small shirt in dingy green. This was the shirt he wanted, for he placed all the others back into the drawer and carried the green shirt with him to the kitchen and laid it on the counter.

He sighed, looked around, and set to work. While a large pot of oatmeal boiled, he fried three thick strips of bacon. He slowly sliced apples and walnuts. He stirred the porridge and set down his wooden spoon. Then he took out a mortar and pestle, poured a liberal measure of blue pellets from the carton of rodent poison into the bowl, and began to grind the blue pellets into powder.

When they had been ground fine, he opened a small jar and tapped some of its granular contents into the bowl, and then he added three drops from a dark vial.

To himself, in a strangely dull voice, he said, “A pinch of this, a dash of that.”

When all these ingredients had been combined, he stirred them into the porridge.

Three bowlfuls were portioned out, each topped with apples, nuts, and brown sugar. The baker arranged the bowls along with strips of bacon and fresh pastries onto platters that he covered with polished silver domes. His movements were slow, almost laborious. He set the green shirt among the platters and carried the tray down the stairs to his serving cart, which he pushed to the third storeroom.

When he stepped forward and depressed the series of buttons that opened the moaning door, I rushed past him and was struck at once by the fetid stench of the dungeon. I flew to Jeremy and hovered at his ear.
Jeremy!
I cried.
Listen, if you will!

His eyes fluttered open. “You’re back,” he murmured, and the faintest smile appeared on his scabbed and swollen lips.

Yes. Yes, I am back
.

He allowed his eyes again to fall closed. “Does anybody know about us?”

The baker’s footsteps approached.

No. Not yet
. What could I say? I said,
But I have not given up
.

“I’m happy you’re here. I missed you. We’re so hungry.” His smile stretched ever so slightly and blood welled in one of the fissures of his cracked lips. “I’ve been having that dream-that’s-not-a-dream thing,” he whispered.

Yes?
I said.
The one in which I do not sing?

“Mmm. But I like being there. I like being the ghost trying to talk to you.”

Jeremy again in the role of the ghost? It was too terrible to
consider, but I could not speak—already the baker’s cart was rolling into the great chamber.

“Hallå!”
he said. When he asked if it was not a great day to be alive, he did not wait for an answer. He laid the small green shirt over his blue armchair, then raised the domed metal lids to display the food and release the savory aroma of bacon. “Porridge, bacon, and pastries.” He made a wry, tired smile. “Of course, it may be poisoned.”

It is poisoned!
I said.
It is poisoned! Do not eat it!

Jeremy stared intently at the food. So did Ginger and Frank Bailey. They looked as unalive as the living can look. Their eyes were swollen and their skin was stretched thin over their bones.

The porridge is poisoned!
I said again.

“My ghost says it’s poisoned,” Jeremy said in a cracked, dry voice.

Sten Blix’s laugh was hollow. “Your ghost. Well, I’m sure your ghost is right. And I’m sure he’ll bring you another meal you’ll like better, won’t he?”

He slid the poisoned food into the enclosures.

The bacon and pastries are fine
, I said.
But do not eat the porridge!

But there was only one rasher of bacon for each prisoner, and the baker had withheld the pastries.

Their hunger was too great.

They could not be stopped.

They ate the porridge—ate it greedily—until at last their wooden spoons clacked on their empty wooden bowls. The baker distributed the pastries, and they ate them, too. Only then did the baker settle himself in his rocking chair. He regarded the
small green shirt that he spread across his hands, then ran his gaze thoughtfully from prisoner to prisoner.

Jeremy stared back as fiercely as a weak and failing creature could stare. “My ghost,” he said in a stiff whisper, “will never forget and never give up.”

Ginger covered her eyes with her open hands and began moving her lips.

Frank Bailey, in a small, earnest voice, said, “You could just let us go, Mr. Blix. You could just let us go.”

The baker looked at them almost sorrowfully. It was as if this had been a hunt, but the predator had lost his appetite for hunting.

“One last story,” he said, and lighted his pipe.

“It is about a little boy in a town like our own, a mute boy who could hear but wouldn’t speak.”

“Possy,” Frank Bailey whispered. He sat slumped on his cot. His voice faded into almost nothing. “Possy vanished.”

“Yes,” the baker said. “Let’s call him Possy—because when someone talked to him, it was as if he were playing dead.” The baker drew in and then exhaled a great stream of smoke. “Possy was a strange little creature. He would wear only green. Most of the people in the town were amused by the way he wandered
about the streets in his green shirt and green corduroy pants, staring at people, shedding his clothes as the day grew warm, forgetting where he’d left them. The town’s baker, however, went to the sheriff to say there must be some law against four-year-old boys wandering the streets unattended, leaving their clothes here and there. The sheriff only laughed. ‘You mean Possy?’ he said. ‘Why, everybody knows Possy. Nobody’d cause Possy any harm.’ Everyone made a mascot of the wandering boy, even the sheriff. He could be seen driving about with Possy riding up front, grinning his idiot grin. One such day, the sheriff pulled alongside the town’s baker and said, ‘Possy and me are
on patrol!’
and then he turned to the pathetic child and said, ‘Ain’t we, Possy?’

“So what could the town’s baker do? He tried to reason with the child, tried to get him to speak, and to put his shirt and pants back on, but Possy paid him no mind. In fact, he found the baker’s attempts to help him comical. ‘Put your pants on, Possy,’ the baker would say, and the boy would laugh with delight—or perhaps derision.”

Ginger’s eyes were nearly closed.

Jeremy’s were clouded.

Frank Bailey stared blankly ahead.

The baker seemed so immune to this inattention that I wondered for whom he was telling the tale. Yet he pulled at his pipe and continued.

“The town’s baker was the only one on earth who heard the boy speak. That is right. The boy
could
speak. It surprised the baker, and it might have surprised the boy, too. One day, in exasperation, the baker said, ‘There’s something wrong inside you.’ And the boy laughed and laughed, and then he looked right back at the baker and said out loud, ‘There’s something wrong
inside you.’ Oh, it wasn’t perfectly clear. The words were thick and muddy, but it was clear to the baker what he said, and then the boy said it again, ‘There’s something wrong inside you.’ He laughed and began to repeat it, again and again, until the town’s baker had no choice but to offer the boy frosted cookies to get him off the street.”