Mischke’s face was stony, showing no emotion, but he couldn’t seem to finish the sentence. Finally he lifted both arms from the bed, bringing his hands near each other, as if cradling something. “When you see death, Dudek, when you see it and hold it, hold it as a thing in your hands, and you know it for what it is, something as solid and real as a stone, something that is black and terrible and is always there, always with us, eating out the insides of life …” He sighed and slowly lowered his trembling arms. “When a man sees that, Dudek, he does not pray any more.”
He lay very still then, so quiet and still that I found myself checking whether he was still breathing. His voice was soft when he spoke again. “But now I have seen something else, Dudek. Something alive, something alive that shouldn’t be alive. Something beautiful, and like nothing else in the world. It stands on two legs like a bird, but it’s not a bird. And always it looks at me, following me with its eyes. When I take the lid off the box it looks up at me with those eyes and … it sees me. It sees me as a fellow living being, and its eyes say to me, ‘I am alive, Mischke. I am alive like you, and you are alive like me.’ Do you understand, Dudek?” Again he raised one arm, reaching toward me, but he was too weak and his arm dropped, hanging off the side of the bed until I moved it back onto the mattress for him. A tear was making a slow trek down the left side of his face, following a deep crease that ran from the corner of his eye almost to his ear.
“What do you want me to do, Mischke?” I asked.
“Just feed it. Put some food through the holes in the box. Some bread, soft meat, maybe boiled egg. Just keep it fed! When I get down there again, I’ll take it out. Out of the caisson. I don’t know if it’s strong enough yet for the outside, but we have to take our chances, eh? It and me both, we’ll just have to see.”
On my next shift in the caisson I found Mischke’s box, pushed into a corner and apparently undisturbed. Mischke had written his name on the side of it with charcoal, the letters rough and almost illegible. The lid was still tied on with rope. I stood looking at it for a long time. In the dim light there was little hope of peering through the holes to see if anything was inside it, and I didn’t try. I could have untied the rope and taken the lid off, but I didn’t do that either. I just stood looking into the shadowy corner until the foreman yelled at me to get to work. At my lunch break I got down in a squat in front of the box with my back to the nearest group of men. Quickly and furtively I tore up half a sandwich and stuffed the pieces through the holes in the lid of the box. No sound came from inside, but I kept jamming in pieces of bread and meat as fast as I could and then walked away.
I repeated this ritual for three days, and on the fourth day the box was gone. I went to the man nearest me, and then another and another, asking each one if he knew anything about the box. Finally one answered with something other than a blank stare: “Sure, the big guy, Mickey, he had it under his arm when he locked out this morning. He was right there at the shift change—didn’t you see him?”
When my shift ended I went to the boarding house where Mischke lived. He wasn’t there, and the men he shared a room with said he had packed all his belongings and left that morning. I didn’t see him again until four years later.
It was one of the first warm days in the summer of 1876. Though the great bridge itself was still years from completion, the New York caisson was long finished. The vast space that Mischke and I and hundreds of others had toiled inside of was now filled up solid with concrete, and the huge tower of countless tons of stone had been built on top of it. But all of that was behind me. I worked at a bookbinder’s now, and I was walking in Central Park, on my way to a concert at the Naumburg bandstand. I had just passed a couple without really looking at them, only vaguely noticing that the woman was carrying a young child on her hip. But after I’d gone a few steps further I heard a gruff voice calling my name. I realized who it was before I’d even turned around.
“Mischke!”
“Young Dudek,” he answered, grinning at me.
For a moment, I could only stare dumbly at him. I knew it was Mischke I was looking at, but he was a man transformed. The rough, irregular features were still there, but his face was softer, cleanly shaven and pink. His hair was neatly trimmed and oiled, his clothes clean. Even his eyes seemed less mismatched, and far less imposing. I realized I was seeing Mischke as a happy man, and even as that thought occurred to me he was introducing me to the woman at his side as “My wife Rosalie.” The tenderness in his voice left no doubt about the source of his happiness. “And my little one, Anna!” he added, touching his hand to the cheek of the toddler in her mother’s arms. “Who could believe I would have such a beautiful family? Eh? Who could believe?” The pride glowed from him like heat from a fire.
For a few minutes we stood there among the trees and grass of the park, talking of our time in the caisson, the progress of the bridge, and about our lives now. Mischke told me he’d used his savings from his caisson wages to purchase half-ownership in a grocer’s shop, and had met Rosalie as one of his customers. “She kept telling me how to run the business,” he said, “so I told her she better marry me so she can run things herself!” He laughed, and his wife rolled her eyes with an expression that told me this was an old joke between them. Neither of us made any mention of Mischke’s last days in the caisson or of the box he took away from it.
As we talked, Mischke’s daughter began to squirm in her mother’s arms. She pointed down the path to one of the sausage-vendor carts that had recently begun appearing in Central Park. “Ma, Pa,” she said excitedly, “get sau’ge for J’zurkie? Get sau’ge for J’zurkie?”
Mischke smiled over at his daughter. “Jaszczurkie has plenty of other food, Anna,” he said. You can feed him when we get home, okay?”
“But sau’ges are his favorite!” Anna protested, but then her mother set her down on the gravel path, and after a few soft words took her hand and strolled out onto the grass with her.
I realized then that the word that was puzzling me was a diminutive of jaszczurka, the Polish for lizard. But already Mischke was continuing our conversation, asking me where I was living now and whether I’d met “a nice girl” yet. Distracted, I stammered out an answer. Mischke’s only acknowledgement of my befuddled, questioning expression was to give me the briefest of winks before turning to look at his wife and daughter walking hand in hand on the grass. Somehow I knew that was all the answer I would ever get.
We parted a short time later, and I walked on alone. The sun was warm on my face, and the breeze was sweet with the smell of life.
In the world of Seanan McGuire’s Incryptid series, the waheela hail from Canada’s Northwest Territories where the thaw never comes and the cold needs no name. They tend to lose their tempers and eat whatever happens to be vexing them. But Istas, like many young human women, has left her provincial family to live in New York City.
RED AS SNOW
SEANAN MCGUIRE
“Flesh is temporary; flesh will end. Ice is forever. Remember this, and choose your steps with caution.”
—Waheela proverb.
The Freakshow, a highly specialized nightclub somewhere in Manhattan Now