Rebecca snuggled into his embrace and turned toward him. Her eyes looked almost normal during the day. Flecks of phosphorescence shot lazily across the pupils.
“Did you sleep well?” she asked. “You came home so late.”
“I slept. I’m sorry I was late. It was a difficult job this time.”
“Profitable?” Her elbow nudged him as she turned the eggs over with the spatula.
“Not very.”
“Really? Why not?”
He stiffened. Would Rebecca have realized the mansion had become a deathtrap? Would she have smelled the blood, tasted the fear? He served as her eyes, her contact with the world of images, but would he truly deprive her by not describing its horrors to her in every detail?
“Well… ” he began. He shut his eyes. The sick gaze of the solicitor flickering over the scene of his own death washed over him. Even as he held Rebecca, he could feel a distance opening up between them.
“You don’t need to shut your eyes to see,” she said, pulling out of his embrace.
“How did you know?” he said, although he knew.
“I heard you close them.” She smiled with grim satisfaction.
“It was just sad,” he said, si ing down at the kitchen table. “Nothing horrible. Just sad. The wife had lost her husband and had to sell the estate. She had a boy with her who kept holding on to a li le suitcase.”
The remnants of the solicitor floating to the ground, curling up like confe i. The boy’s gaze flu ering between him and the cage.
“I felt sorry for them. They had some nice heirlooms, but most of it was already promised toSla ery. I didn’t get much. They had a nice rug from Morrow, from before the Silence. Nice detail of Morrow cavalry coming to our rescue. I would have liked to have bought it.”
She carefully slid the eggs and bacon onto a plate and brought it to the table.
“Thank you,” he said. She had burned the bacon. The eggs were too dry. He never complained. She needed these li le sleights of hand, these illusions of illumination. It was edible.
“Mrs. Bloodgood took me down to theMorhaimMuseum yesterday,” she said. “Many of their artifacts are on open display. The textures were amazing. And the flower vendor visited, as you may have guessed.”
Rebecca’s father, Paul, was the curator for a small museum inStockton. Paul liked to joke that Hoegbotton was just the temporary caretaker for items that would eventually find their way to him.
Hoegbo on had always thought museums just hoarded that which should be available on the open market. Rebecca had been her father’s assistant until the disease stole her sight. Now Hoegbo on sometimes took her down to the store to help him sort and catalog new acquisitions.
“I noticed the flowers,” he said. “I’m glad the museum was nice.”
For some reason, his hand shook as he ate his eggs. He put his fork down.
“Isn’t it good?” she asked.
“It’s very good,” he said. “I just need water.”
He got up and walked to the sink. The faucet had been put in five weeks ago, a er a two-year wait.
Before, they had go en jugs of water from a well down in the valley. He watched with satisfaction as the faucet splu ered and his glass gradually filled up.
“It’s a nice bird or whatever,” she said from behind him.
“Bird.” A vague fear shot through him. “Bird?” The glass clinked against the edge of the sink as he momentarily lost his grip on it.
“Or lizard. Or whatever it is. What is it?”
He turned, leaned against the sink. “What are you talking about?”
“That cage you brought home with you.”
The vague fear crept up his spine. “There’s nothing in the cage. It’s empty.” Was she joking?
Rebecca laughed: a pleasant, liquid sound. “That’s fu ny, because your empty cage was ra ling earlier.
At first, it scared me. Something was rustling around in there. I couldn’t tell if it was a bird or a lizard or I would have reached through the bars and touched it.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No.”
“There’s nothing in the cage.”
Her face underwent a subtle change and he knew she thought he doubted her on something at which she was expert: the interpretation of sound. On a calm day, she had told him, she could hear a boy skipping stones down by the docks.
For a moment, he said nothing. He couldn’t stay quiet for long. She couldn’t read his face without touching it, but he suspected she knew the difference between types of silence.
He laughed. “I’m joking. It’s a lizard — but it bites. So you were wise not to touch it.”
Suspicion tightened her features. Then she relaxed and smiled at him. She reached out, felt for his plate with her le hand, and stole a piece of his bacon. “I knew it was a lizard!”
He longed to go into the living room where the cage stood atop the table. But he couldn’t, not just yet.
“It’s quiet in here,” he said so ly, already expecting the reply.
“No it’s not. It’s not quiet at all. It’s loud.”
The le corner of his mouth curled up as he replied by rote: “What do you hear, my love?”
Her smile widened. “Well, first, there’s your voice, my love — a nice, deep baritone. Then there’s Hobson downstairs, playing a phonograph as low as he can to avoid disturbing the Potaks, who are at this moment in an argument about something so petty I will not give you the details, while to the side, just below them”— her eyes narrowed—”I believe the Smythes are also making bacon. Above us, old man Clox is pacing and pacing with his cane, mu ering about money. On his balcony, there’s a sparrow chirping, which makes me realize now that the animal in your cage must be a lizard, because it sounds like something clicking and clucking, not chirping — unless you’ve got a chicken in there?”
“No, no — it’s a lizard.”
“What kind of lizard?”
“It’s a Saphant Click-Spi ing Fire Lizard from the Southern Isles,” he said. “It only ever grows in cages, which it makes itself by chewing up dirt, changing it into metal, and regurgitating it. It can only eat animals that can’t see it.”
She laughed in appreciation and got up and hugged him. Her scent made him forget his fear. “It’s a good story, but I don’t believe you. I do know this, though — you are going to be late to work.”
Once on the ground floor, where he did not think it would make a difference if Rebecca heard, Hoegbo on set down the cage. The awkwardness of carrying it, uneven and swaying, down the spiral staircase had unnerved him. He was sweating under his rain coat. His breath came hard and fast. The musty quality of the lobby, the traces of tiny rust mushrooms that had spread along the floor like mouse tracks, the mo led green-orange mold on the windows in the front door, did not put him at ease.
Someone had le a worn umbrella leaning against the front door. He grabbed it and turned back to stare at the cage. Was this the moment that Ungdom andSla ery’s ill wishes caught up with him? He drove the umbrella tip between the bars. The cover gave a li le, creasing, and then regained its former shape as he withdrew the umbrella. Nothing came leaping out at him. He tried again. No response.
“Is something in there?” he asked the cage. The cage did not reply.
Umbrella held like a sword in front of him, Hoegbo on pulled the cover aside — and leapt back.
The cage was still empty. The perch swung back and forth madly from the violence with which he had pulled aside the cover. The woman had said, “The cage was always open.” The boy had said, “We never had a cage.” The solicitor had never offered an opinion. The swinging perch, the emptiness of the cage, depressed him. He could not say why. He drew the cover back across the cage.