The years best sf 30 20.., p.98
The Year's Best SF 30 # 2012, page 98
part #30 of Year's Best SF Series
He got right to work, too, for the rest of the day, with the door locked so Mr. and Mrs. Hall couldn’t come in whenever they wanted. Sometimes I’d take a journey up the stairs to get a dustbin or a set of bedding for another room, and would take my time to listen near his door. Bottles clinked. Fluids dripped. I could hear a pencil scratch across paper, and thought of him then, bent over one of those big books, all taken up by some idea or experiment that possessed him. And while I was lost in thought of him like that was when she came round the corner and gasped like I were burgling.
“Millie!” she said, and I jumped back from his door, embarrassed at first, and then angry with her. Ain’t it her, after all, who’d been doing the same thing I’d been doing right then, and even more?
The door opened on us then, and goggle-eyes looked back and forth between us. I shivered, being that close to him, seeing him look down at me through those blue spectacles of his. And his nose—what a shiny thing it was to see this close. Like a toy nose he might have purchased at a shop somewhere, it was. Mrs. Hall took the chance to look past him into the room right then, and before goggle-eyes could give us a bad time, she gasps and says, “My word, but it looks like a barn in here! All that straw, sir!”
“Put it on my bill, if you must,” goggle-eyes muttered.
Mrs. Hall didn’t stop there, though. No, she was in motion. Pushed right past him into the room and found her way to a golden stain he’d made on the floor with some of his chemicals, just like a hound, and said, “Sir, my floor!”
And goggle-eyes just said, “The bill, put it on the bill, I told you!”
I took the chance to slip away while they haggled over the price of his damages. Later, though, Mrs. Hall said to go in and sweep things up, the straw and all, and try to get that golden stain out.
I did as told, but I never did tell anyone what happened later that day when I went up there. Not even that writer, Mr. Wells, when he came round months after, looking to collect the scraps of the story from us.
* * *
This is what happened that day, the day I’ve never told a soul about.
I show up at his door and knock gently, as Mrs. Hall said to, and when he doesn’t come to the door, I call through it, “Millie, sir. Here to sweep up, if you’ll let me.”
But still no answer comes. I look over my shoulder, back down the stairwell. I can hear Mrs. Hall down in the kitchen making tea. Then I look back at his door, turn the knob, and odd but it ain’t locked as usual. And when I push in, the room’s empty. Not the straw or mess, of course. Him. Old goggle-eyes ain’t there. But I’ve not seen him come down and I’ve been working in the parlour all morning. And I’ve not seen him go out the pub way either, and I been working in there all afternoon. And as Mrs. Hall made it a thing for me to knock, like she expects him to be in there working on his experiments, I can’t imagine she seen him leave the Coach and Horses either.
So I go in and think, Maybe this is better, not having to see him. Just doing my business of picking up after, and getting away without having to work around him. There are lots of things out of order in there, so I start first with the straw, since it’s most noticeable, and sweep it all up into a pile in the hall to pick up later. Then I start in on the stain, putting my elbow and shoulder into it. It ain’t coming out well, though I do manage to make it fade a little. I rub and rub and finally I sigh, sit up on my knees, and stretch my arms above me, letting my fingers flicker in the air, stretching them too.
And that’s when I feel it. Something creeping under my arms, like spiders crawling on my skin. I put my arms down quick and the feeling goes away. I look both right and left, but no one’s in there. Just me. I bend over again, thinking I’ve got to get a day free if Mrs. Hall will allow it. I’ll tell her the spiders-on-my-arms story, I’m thinking, and that might help my case. And while I’m rubbing at that golden stain on the floor, thinking about this, I feel the spiders go crawling down my spine.
I sit up again and say, “Who’s there?”
That’s when the spiders come walking over my right cheek, and I shiver. I open my mouth, ready to scream, and that’s when his hand goes over my mouth, catching my scream fore I can get it out of me.
“Shh, shh, girl,” he says. “Shh, shh.” Like I’m a baby crying. So I stop making a fuss and he says, “I will release you if you promise to be quiet.” I nod once, and then his hand comes off my mouth.
“Who?” I say. And then, “What are you?”
He says, “Who I am is not important, Millie. What I am is invisible.”
“Are you a ghost?” I say, looking round the room at nothing. I hear footsteps on the floor, creaking in a room where no one’s walking. I stand, ready to run.
“Ah,” he says, chuckling. “A village girl, through and through. No, my young one, I am no ghost. I am a scientist, you see.”
And I say, “I don’t see nothing.”
He laughs at that. The room laughs at that. I say, “What’s so funny about the truth?”
He says, “The truth? The truth is humorous more often than not, if you have the right perspective.”
I don’t say anything to that. I’m too busy looking round the room, trying to hear where the footsteps come from. He’s circling me like wolves circle lambs cut off from the herd.
Then the footsteps stop, and he says, “I have discovered something, Millie. A powerful thing. The secret of invisibility. A way for no one to ever see you.”
I say, “Not many people care to see me as it is. What’s so powerful about that?”
“Well, exactly,” he says, and his voice changes so it sounds like he’s latched on to something. “Exactly, Millie. You’re already an unseen, of sorts, aren’t you? And what good does it do you? If you were truly invisible, though, you could do what you can’t now. You could take a greater payment for the work you do. You could damage those who regularly abuse your services.”
I wince, thinking I’m not understanding what I’m hearing. “Sir,” I say. “Are you talking about thieving?”
“I’m talking about taking what you deserve,” he tells me. “Taking what you deserve and much, much more.” He says, “Millie, I can offer you a moment in history, if you should like to join me.”
“History?” I say, blinking. “What good is a moment in history, sir?”
“You will never die, Millie. Your name will live on forever if you join my ranks of the invisible. You will be remembered.”
His fingers—I know that’s what they are this time round—caress my cheek again, a soft stroke. I notice that old goggle-eyes has his greatcoat hanging up in the corner now, and his hat on the table, and his gloves beside it. His trousers hang over the back of a chair. His shoes sit beside the legs of his chemistry table. “It’s you,” I say, “ain’t it? You ain’t wearing any clothes, are you?”
He don’t answer me none, and I hear his steps move away from me. Then, from the table with all his tubes and bottles set up on it, a needle filled with blue fluid lifts into the air like a bottle fly, and starts drifting toward me.
“Would you like to test my new serum, Millie?” he says. “Would you like to be powerful like I am?”
I back up without saying anything. The needle follows. At the door, I take hold of the knob and say, “Sir, nothing’s happened here today. I want you to understand that. You can go about your business and I’ll go about mine. Not a word they’ll have from me, but I promise they’ll have it if you don’t leave me be.”
I close the door without a word back from him. I turn to find the mound of straw in the hall behind me. I lean over then, pick up as much as I can carry, and take it downstairs. Mrs. Hall don’t see me take it out the kitchen door. She’s busy doing sums of some sort on the account book. Totting up what goggle-eyes owes her, surely.
* * *
The rest of that day was taken up by thinking about what happened, and after a while my thoughts just kept spinning out like a spider web, and at some point in the spinning, I started thinking on my mother.
I hadn’t thought about her for a while. It’d been four years since she died. I was twelve then, and working at the Coach and Horses kept me busy enough over the following years that I didn’t think much about anything but my duties. I can’t say when for sure I’d stopped fingering my memories of Ma, but surely it was sometime between washing the dishes and making up beds.
My mother had been a good woman, even if she were sometimes hard on me. Like I said, she sometimes called me dull-headed, and would come home from the Coach and Horses and shoo me off cause she’d been caring after others all day, and there I was wanting a bit of her when she didn’t have a drop left. Usually, though, after she got her feet up and her wind back, she’d sit me on her lap and brush my hair. She’d tell me stories. In all her stories, I was the heroine. Millie who went to London on the back of a flying horse. Millie who found a cave where the fair folk live, and brought them home to help her poor mother cook and clean. Cause of Ma, I had many ideas of myself that I can’t say I’d thought of on my own. But they were none of them the me I was after she died, after I went to take her place at the Coach and Horses.
I wonder sometimes, what sort of idea of herself did Ma have? She never put herself in her stories as a heroine, just me. And whenever I tried to include her, she’d say, “Aww, Millie, my love, your old mother’s not an adventurer like you are.”
Quite an adventure it was, too, after she died. Going to live with the Halls, working there like my mother did. And then the funeral service, when some of her friends from the village came to pay their respects, that was shorter than I’d expected. I suppose I’d imagined something grander, rows of flowers, a violin playing somewhere, at least a piano, or a choir—even one melancholy singer, really—might have marked my mother’s passing. But, no, that was not to be. At least the vicar Mr. Bunting was nice about her, from what I remember. He mentioned the smile she had for anyone who entered the Coach and Horses. I remember thinking how odd that was, though, cause she weren’t ever smiling when she came home from there.
She has a stone marker in the churchyard now, but her name ain’t on it. Sometimes, when I have a free day, I sit with her there, and trace my fingertip over the dirt on the stone. I spell her name. Rose. I trace the letters over and over, until it burns the tip of my finger.
That’s what I kept coming back to after that incident in the Invisible Man’s room. How he said I could have a moment in history. My mother never had a moment in history. Her name ain’t even on that stone in the churchyard. All that’s left of her is that stone itself, and whatever I can recall of her.
* * *
What would Ma have thought of the Invisible Man, I wonder? Would she have had a smile for him, like the vicar Mr. Bunting said she had for anyone? I certainly didn’t give goggle-eyes any smiles for the rest of the time he stayed at the Coach and Horses. Which was a long time, indeed. He came in on the last day of February and stayed all through March and April. Everyone in the village had something to say about him, too, they did. Even the people who’d never chanced to see him. Children made up songs and rhymes. They called him the Bogey Man, and sometimes you’d see a whole pack of them running down a lane, and someone would pull them up and ask where they were all going in a hurry, and they’d say, “John seen the Bogey Man walking this way! We’re going to see him!” And then they’d be off again, singing their Bogey Man songs.
Teddy Henfrey stopped coming to the Coach and Horses after a while. Said it made him feel too uncomfortable, being there, hearing old goggle-eyes thrashing about in his room, doing his experiments. Mr. Hall complained he was driving business away. But I thought it was really Teddy Henfrey doing the driving, cause he was the one going round the village telling people how he won’t go back to the Coach and Horses for a pint until that Bogey Man is gone. Mrs. Hall told Mr. Hall, “Bills settled punctual is bills settled punctual, whatever you’d like to say about it.” She said maybe she’d made a mistake, marrying a man who didn’t know the ways of an inn like her father had, and that they’d wait till summer to do anything about it. Mr. Hall went off muttering something fierce, and for the rest of that day everyone stayed away from him.
I can’t say goggle-eyes went out much in the two months he come to stay here. Mostly he worked in the parlour he’d set up as a chemist’s shop, and spent his nights walking his bedroom floor. Even though Mrs. Hall spent time listening at his door, she couldn’t make heads or tails of anything she heard in there, but I never stopped to have a listen any longer. When it was time for sleep, I swept past his door fast as a mouse, and ran up the stairs to the attic, hoping he didn’t hear me.
But everyone knew he was up in that room of his in the Coach and Horses, even if they didn’t see him but now and then, when he took walks round the village for fresh air, usually at twilight or late in the evenings. And so talk began to spread, wondering about what sort of work he did, or if he were a criminal all bandaged up like that to hide himself from the authorities. And when this kind of talk began to make its way back to the Coach and Horses, Mrs. Hall come right out to the center of the pub one night when we had a decent crowd, and called everyone’s attention to her.
“I’ve heard all your nonsense talk,” she said in a firm voice, “and I’ll say this once and once only. He is an ex-peer-i-ment-al in-vest-i-ga-tor, is what he is! Now stop your tale telling.”
“A scientist,” Mr. Hall muttered from behind the bar. And when Mrs. Hall shot him a look, he went back to pouring.
“Yes, quite right,” said Mrs. Hall, turning back to her audience. “A scientist.” She seemed to think the folks at the pub would hear all that as an explanation, and go back to their business. Which I thought odd, since Mrs. Hall’s been living in Iping all her life, and surely she must know that everyone talking about anything different going on in the village is their exact business.
“Here, Millie!” Mr. Fearenside said that same night, after most everyone had left and I was cleaning up the tables. “What do you make of old goggle-eyes? You have to live right here with him, after all. What’s your story?”
I looked up from the table I’d been wiping down and met Mr. Fearenside’s eyes for a moment, then looked toward the staircase that led up to the Invisible Man’s room. He could be standing there, on that bottom step, for all I knew. He could be watching me, waiting to see me break my word with him. I’d felt his eyes on me many a time over March and April, and I was worse than a cat all that time, jumping at no cause a time or two every day it might seem to anyone looking. I could feel him watching me, waiting for me to tell his secret. So when I turned back to Mr. Fearenside, I said, “I ain’t got no story, Mr. Fearenside. I don’t see nothing and nothing don’t see me. Simple as that.”
“Clever girl, Millie!” said Mr. Fearenside.
And Mrs. Hall appeared in the pub right then to say, “Brought her up right, I can see now.”
I didn’t say anything to that. Just went back to wiping and taking up glasses. But for the rest of the night I kept thinking, How? How could she say that? She didn’t bring me up. It were my mother’s hands that molded me.
And right then, as I thought that, I started to cry a little. Tried getting the tears out of my eyes fore anyone saw them, but it was no use. Mrs. Hall saw straightaway and said, “Now what, Millie? I swear, always crying about something, you are!”
* * *
What happened next, everyone knows by now. It’s been months gone by since they found and killed him over in Port Burdock, and even now there’s always something about the other invisible folks he made that keep going round the countryside, terrifying innocent people and stealing. What happened was, Mr. Cuss, the village doctor, turned up at the Coach and Horses at the end of April. Had a professional interest in our guest, he said, since old goggle-eyes were all wrapped up in bandages. Said others were worried he was sick with something that might go round. But Mrs. Hall told Mr. Cuss he don’t have a reason to see her guest if her guest ain’t asked to be seen. Mr. Cuss went right on by her, though, into goggle-eyes’ room, where they must have had some kind of conversation, because he didn’t come out again for at least ten minutes.
Whatever they talked about ended in a short cry of surprise from Mr. Cuss, and then we heard a chair flung to the side, and that sharp bark of a laugh that belonged to goggle-eyes. Then the quick patter of feet to the door where Mrs. Hall and I both stood listening with our ears turned. It opened, and there stood Mr. Cuss. His face was pale as whitewash, and he held his hat against his chest like he were going to give us bad news. He looked back and forth at us, but in the end he said nothing, not a whisper, just went past us and down the stairs as if the devil himself were on his heels, and then the pub door closed behind him.
The Invisible Man laughed softly in the room beyond, and Mrs. Hall, without peering in, asked if she could get him anything. “No,” he said. His voice sounded black as the blacking I’d put on the stove that morning. “There is nothing anyone can get me now, Mrs. Hall. It is over.”
Mrs. Hall stood there for a minute, twisting her hands in her apron, waiting to see if he might say more. Maybe she hoped he’d ask for something and make her useful, I can’t right say. But when she turned and saw me, she jumped back an inch, as if she’d forgotten I’d been at the door with her all that time. “Millie,” she said. “Kitchen.” Then she went down the hall to her own room, shut the door, and didn’t come out until the next day, when we heard that the vicar Mr. Bunting and his wife had been burgled. And on Whit Monday, no less.
* * *
The story made it round town like the plague everyone feared old goggle-eyes might carry underneath those bandages of his. Before noon everyone knew the vicar and his wife had woken in the small hours of the morning by the sound of coins rattling downstairs. And when they went to check on the noise, found a candle lit. And the door unbolted. But no one there. They swore they watched the door of their house open and close on its own like it had a spirit in it. And then, when they checked their cash drawer, it was empty.
