Instead of Three Wishes (3 page)

“We thought,” began Wiglaff hesitantly, “that seeing as how you had so much experience with these giant roaches, maybe you could do something about all these little ones?”

“What do you think?” asked Per.

“Sure,” said Leroy, “I can handle it.”

 

So he asked for a package of food that would last him a week and some furs to sleep on. Wiglaff and Per gave him directions to the old lodge, and he started off the next morning with his bag of Roach Motels and boric acid under his arm. He crossed a shallow river, stepping carefully on the stones set out just for that purpose. He climbed a snow-covered hill and
found the lodge just on the other side.

Wiglaff's old lodge was significantly larger than his new one and quite a bit more impressive. The huge double doors at one end were covered with the carvings of forest animals and hunting parties. Leroy was afraid that they might be too heavy for him to move, but he pushed one, and it swung open easily. Inside, the fire pit in the central room looked large enough to roast several large reindeer at once. Leroy climbed down into the pit and built a fire using the flint and steel that Per had lent him. When the fire was burning brightly, he laid out more wood in a circle five feet across with an unburned space in the middle. In this space he put his food, knowing that it would be safe from roaches there.

Then he walked around the walls of the lodge, pouring out a thin trail of boric acid. Next he set the Roach Motels in strategic places around the main room, and finally he settled down to wait until the roaches came out. He'd seen them running away when he'd entered the gloomy lodge. Now that the fire lit the interior he could see them more clearly skittering around the walls. He waited until quite a few had moved to the center of the room, then jumped on them, howling at the top of his lungs and stamping over and over and over.

Wiglaff's villagers, passing by the lodge, heard his howls and reported them to Wiglaff. They heard
the same howls night and day for seven days as Leroy stamped and stamped, pausing only to eat, sleep a little, and empty out the Roach Motels. Finally, a week after he had entered the lodge, he opened the main doors. Outside he found Wiglaff and all his people waiting.

“All over but the cleaning up,” Leroy called.

The villagers cheered.

Wiglaff came forward, and Leroy led him into the lodge. He explained where he had kept his food and showed the king other ways to keep his food free of roaches. He also explained the purpose of the boric acid and told Wiglaff to see that it remained undisturbed. He gave Wiglaff the unopened bottles and replaced the empties in the paper bag.

“If you do these things,” Leroy instructed, “keep the food safe and leave the boric acid, then the roaches won't ever come back.”

“Never?” said Wiglaff, surprised.

“Never,” Leroy insisted.

“That's powerful magic,” said Per, who had followed his king into the lodge.

As they stepped to the double doors, Wiglaff commanded half his people to begin cleaning out the lodge and the other half to prepare a dinner fit for a hero. Turning to Leroy, he said, “What a feast we will have in your honor!”

Leroy waved to the villagers from the double doors and started down the stairs. Thinking of the feast to come, he missed his step, slid on
a patch of ice, and landed on his head in the snow at the bottom of the lodge steps.

 

Leroy was cold. Snow was melting inside his collar, and he could hear someone calling. He opened his eyes. The gray sky above him was blocked by Mrs. Hansen's anxious face. She had seen him from her window and hurried down the back stairs.

“Leroy, honey, are you all right?”

“Uh, yeah sure, Mrs. Hansen, I'm fine. I've been in prehistoric Sweden.” He started to tell her the whole story, but she cut him off.

“Honey, let's get you upstairs and get an ice pack on your head. We can call your mom, and you can tell her where you've been.”

So Leroy wobbled up the stairs, and Mrs. Hansen took him into her apartment and sat him on the sofa with a bag of ice. She called his mother at work, and she came home to see if Leroy needed X rays.

All the time his mama poked at his head and looked in his eyes, Leroy tried to explain that he'd been to Sweden and saved the lodge and that he was Leroy Roachbane.

His mama said, “Yes, Leroy,” and asked him to add six and nine. She finally decided that he probably hadn't killed himself, but he should spend the rest of the day in bed.

“But, Mama, the boric acid…” Leroy tried to explain.

“Don't worry about that, Leroy,” said his mother. “I'll go outside and get it after you're in bed.”

She did go downstairs and found the paper bag wet from the snow. Inside were the boric acid bottles. But they were all empty. There was no sign of the Roach Motels.

O
n his last night in the government-sponsored orphanage, John climbed to the top floor of the building to look out at the world. The city he lived in was huge. It stretched from horizon to horizon, and on an overcast night, like this one, the tallest buildings disappeared into the rain clouds that were swollen with the reflected orange of the streetlights below. Many blocks away, John could see the Gerwinks-Primary Factory, where he would begin work the next day. It was the largest of the factory buildings. It stretched for more than nine city blocks and was lit twenty-four hours a day by arc lights that were shocking white in contrast to the cheaper yellow streetlights that glowed on all sides. Work went on around the clock at Gerwinks-Primary. All employees were expected to be on call for emergency shifts. John watched what he could see of the bustling activity and wondered if he, too, would soon be hard at work in the middle of the nights. He wondered if there was any way to know,
from the inside of the building, if the sun was shining or not.

There was a subtle change in the night sky overhead. The view of the world, and Gerwinks-Primary, was cut off by sheets of rain rolling down the windowpane. John went to bed.

 

The next morning he and seven other potential employees were waiting in the factory yard for the shift foreman. When the foreman arrived, he waved them into a small office without trying to compete with the noise of men and machines. Once inside the office, with the door closed, he introduced himself and explained the conditions of employment at G-P.

“You all will be on probation until you test out. Psych profiles have placed you in these jobs, but psych profiles and the government computers aren't infallible. People who can't get along in their jobs can expect to be fired. In the meantime, the factory will assign you a sleeping cubicle, and a food schedule, and will supply one uniform appropriate to your employment. Each of you will be assigned to a senior employee to be trained. John, you'll be with me. I know as much about the high cranes as anybody. Let's get started.”

The foreman led them out onto the factory floor. One by one, he dropped employees at their workstations until only John was left. Then he led the way to a ladder that climbed up one wall until it disappeared into a catwalk near the roof. John craned
his head back to see what he could make of the machinery up there but didn't look long. It hurt his neck and made his stomach feel peculiar. He looked back down when the foreman began talking.

“I understand your psych profile says you enjoy working by yourself, and you're not afraid of heights. Normally you'd be trained by someone who works these cranes every day, but the last operator walked off the job without giving notice, and I can't spare one of the lower crane workers to break you in. Fortunately, I worked this crane and every other at Gerwinks. Used to be a high crane man before I was promoted. I'm pretty sure I remember the important stuff. We only use the big crane once or twice a day, so you should have plenty of time to figure out anything you need to know, and the rest of the shift will go easy on you for a bit. Any questions before we climb up?”

John had only one question. “That guy, the one that used to work the crane, he quit?” John had never heard of anyone quitting a job.

“Yeah, he said he got bored up there. Said he was lonely.” The foreman shrugged.

Someone behind one of the surrounding machines called out, “Why didn't he just admit he was afraid of ghosts?”

The foreman looked in the unidentified workman's direction. John didn't hear him say anything, but the man at the machine turned quickly back to his work.

The foreman turned back to John. “Let's get started,” he said, and began to climb the ladder.

 

The operation of the big crane was simple, but it responded slowly to instructions and so took some skill to operate. After the first few times up and down the ladder, the height ceased to bother John, and after the first week or so he was no longer winded and puffing when he finished his climb. This and one other thing seemed to prove the validity of his psych profile. John was entitled to one fifteen-minute coffee break every two hours, and a half-hour food break twice a day. But even after a month of building his muscles on the never-ending ladder, John couldn't get down from the crane and back up in less than eleven minutes. On coffee breaks, that left him four minutes to spend in the employee break room before he had to head back up to work. So he didn't climb down for his breaks and only rarely climbed down for the nineteen minutes he could grab at lunch. He didn't mind the lack of company, he preferred to be alone, but he missed the hot coffee. He went to the employee store to find a thermos. The shop girl was expecting him.

“Is it a thermos you're looking for?”

“Yes, it is, how did you know?”

“Well, I'd heard that there was a new man on the high crane, and every new man gets a thermos so he can take his breaks up top.”

“Every one? Have you seen many people in this job?”

“Oh, yeah, three or four. Nobody lasts long. They claim that they get lonely up there, but if they weren't loners, they wouldn't have gotten the job in the first place. It's the ghosts.” John wanted her to explain, but a look from her boss silenced her. John took his thermos and went back to work.

With a thermos and a boxed lunch, John was very happy. Once a week, he would check books out of the factory library and carry them in a pack up to the crane. During his fifteen-minute breaks, he would stretch out on the catwalk with a book and a cup of coffee, reading and sipping until a buzzer summoned him back to work. On the longer lunch breaks, he liked to climb to a particular alcove formed by crossing I beams and settle in for a longer read. So far above the factory floor, the noises of the individual machines and the shouts of the workers below were softened and provided a pleasant background. John felt he was in a world of his own.

For the first time, he had a little privacy to think his own thoughts. He didn't need to worry about what the Matron might discern from the expressions on his face. There was no one to bother him, no one to interrupt his reading as he paged through book after book.

“Excuse me. Excuse me.” The voice repeated itself several times before John realized that high above the rest of the world someone was talking to him. He looked up. Standing with her hands on her
hips and her head tilted forward was a girl with long dark hair. She was wearing a shapeless blue sweater and lighter blue pants. Her legs disappeared into the iron grille of the catwalk just above the ankles. John swallowed and gripped the covers of his book tightly. He continued staring at those feet, or anyway at the catwalk where the feet should be, until the girl said, “Excuse me,” again in an exasperated voice. John wasn't sure how many times she'd said it already, but he suspected quite a few.

“Yes?” He couldn't think of anything else to say.

“You're sitting on my book. Could you move for a moment?”

“Uh, sure.” John crabbed sideways about two feet. Away from the girl.

“Thank you,” she said, “I don't like to reach through people in order to get things.” She leaned forward and stuck out a hand. For just a second, John saw a book in that hand, and then she was gone.

 

That afternoon, John climbed down the ladder to eat his lunch in the employee break room. He looked around for a familiar face, and when he saw one he recognized, he went and sat down beside it. John had little experience in opening conversations, so he ate his lunch in silence. Only when he thought the other man might leave without saying anything at all did John begin.

“You, uh, you said something when I first started
work, didn't you? Something about the guy who worked before me being afraid of ghosts.”

“Oh,” the man replied. “Are you the new guy on the high crane?”

John nodded.

“Yeah, I saw the guy come down from the crane one day, white as a sheet. The next day he didn't show up for work. The factory said he got bored and quit, but we all figured he'd seen a ghost.”

A woman across the table heard the man and looked up. She smiled at John. “The factory does not believe in ghosts,” she said. “No one is supposed to mention them.” But she encouraged the man to tell the story. Other employees around them leaned closer. Ghost stories around the lunch table were too entertaining to be prevented by factory policy.

Many years before, the city had been smaller. At its outer fringes were green spaces, public parks, and private estates. As the city grew, the green spaces disappeared, the parks were rezoned, and the estates were absorbed in lieu of taxes owed to the government. Only one open space remained.

“Before this factory stood on this piece of land, there was a preserve here,” the machine operator began. “Owned by a family named Gerwinks. They had a big house on a hill in the middle of it and all around was trees and bushes and grass. There was a wall that kept the rest of the world out, and inside the wall there was supposed to be animals like rabbits and squirrels and things that hadn't been seen
in the city for years. One day a bunch of businessmen came to see Old Man Gerwinks and said they wanted to buy the land. He said no. They kept offering more money, and he kept saying no. Well, lo and behold, one day Old Man Gerwinks gets smooshed by a truck right outside his own front gates. Too bad, bad brakes on the truck. Such a tragic accident.

“The businessmen go to Mrs. Gerwinks. They say how sorry they are about her husband and would she like to sell the property? Mrs. Gerwinks was tougher than they expected. She says no, just like the old man. So the businessmen went to the government and said that the land was going to waste. It shouldn't be allowed. If the land had a factory on it, the factory would make money and provide jobs, jobs people needed. So the government changed some laws and told Mrs. Gerwinks to sell.

“The old widow went to court. She said the land was special. She thought that anyone who wanted should be able to walk through the park. But the court told her that people didn't need grass and trees—they needed more buildings. The court told her she had to move. But the businessmen assured her that everyone would remember her husband because they would call the new factory the Gerwinks building.

“The judge gave the widow and her family until the end of the week to move out. She told the judge she intended to live and die in that house and nothing he said had changed her mind. She would live
in it forever. She went home and locked the gates behind her.

“The bulldozers showed up on schedule Monday morning. Nobody had seen any sign that the family had moved out. The bulldozers rolled right through the gates and up the hill to the house, and that's where they found them.” The man paused again in his monologue and took a sip of coffee.

“Found them?” John prompted, though he could guess the end of the story.

“All of them,” the man said. “The whole family. The widow and her kids and her brother and his kids. She'd poisoned everybody who lived in the house, and they were all dead.”

There was silence at the table. For a moment the noise of other employees in the lunchroom seemed very far away.

“Then what happened?” John asked.

The machine operator looked at John in surprise. He lifted his coffee cup and waved it at the walls around him. “What do you think happened, son? They buried those people and tore down that house and flattened the trees and stuck up this big old factory, and that's why we all have jobs and make money and aren't living somewhere in a doorway.”

“But the ghosts come back,” another employee insisted. “Every time there's been an accident with the machines somebody says they saw the widow Gerwinks come back to check on her property.”

“My cousin works in the south factory, and she swears she saw two kids chasing a ball down an aisle,” said another. “A week later a water pipe broke and the works were flooded for three days.”

“But nobody admits to seeing the ghosts anymore,” someone warned John. “People who do lose their jobs.”

The machine operator put his coffee cup down and got to his feet. “Now,” he said, “it is time to go back to those jobs, before the foreman comes looking for us.”

Too late, John noticed the foreman sitting across the crowded room, looking at the cluster of employees. The group dissolved as each person hurried back to work, but the foreman's eyes remained on John. As John headed for the door, the foreman rose from his table and met him on the way.

“I'd like a word with you,” he said, and walked with John back to the base of the ladder to the high crane. When they reached the ladder, the foreman took his arm.

“The factory doesn't like to hear too much talk about things it doesn't believe in. Contrary to what you may have heard, the factory has never found a single problem caused by ghosts. So if you meet any ectoplasmic spirits up there in the high crane, I suggest you be polite and they'll probably be polite right back. You're up there alone for fourteen hours a day, and you might find it's nice to have someone to talk to.”

John started back up to work wondering if the foreman believed or didn't believe in the haunting. For the rest of the day and the rest of the week, John watched for another visitation, but as far as he could tell, he was alone above the factory floor. Each morning on his way in, the foreman picked him out of the rest of the shiftworkers and nodded a greeting.

 

It was ten days before John saw his ghost girl again. This time he saw her from the crane's cab as he floated by, ferrying a broken press to the repair shop. He couldn't stop, couldn't even slow down the crane. He just turned his head slowly and stared until she was hidden by the I beams of the alcove she haunted. She was floating eighteen inches above the catwalk, sitting with her feet stretched in front of her, reading a book. She never looked up.