Secret Dreams (37 page)

He bolted out of his office, running for the stairs. He had to see if his guess was right. He had all but forgotten her steamer trunk. Her damn trunk! Standing mutely outside her door for months, ignored like a dumb beast of burden. Once a week one of the maids wiped the dust off. Now he had to see if the trunk was still there. He almost tripped at the top of the stairs. Zeik stood like a soldier at attention, as if he'd been expecting Herr Doktor. The girl's steamer trunk had vanished from the hall. Had she dragged the monster through the doorway alone? No, impossible! The trunk was huge. He'd tried to lift it once. À gang of four orderlies had lugged it up. God! she must have really wanted the thing inside to drag it those few bitter feet into her room. She was right, of course. He hadn't known anything. At last he understood.

She was a bee in a huge beehive. She even knew what kind of bee — a worn-out worker drone, worked to death and hiding in her cell. She felt the living stone hive above her and below her and on every side. The many-celled Beehölzli … the Burghive. Swarming with other bees, busy bees going in and out of rooms and up and down stairs, humming all together.

But she had been broken and no longer worked. So they put her in a cell alone. And wrapped her like a budding larva and sealed the door with wax. Just before they sealed the cell, the nurse bees wrapped her in a healing gauze from the spit in their mouths. The gauze softened the armor of her exoskeleton, and while she slept the black and yellow markings of her thorax began to fade…. She became soft mush, now splitting in two, with wriggling legs that thrashed about, with bones inside and flesh and blood. Soon she was not a bee any longer.

How sad not being a bee … When she felt her warm limbs and not the hard insect armor, she wept and shrank down in the covers of the bed. The blankets were stiff from overuse, from rubbing her skin day in and day out and never washing. Down below she smelled herself, not sweet beeswax and honey, but sour and goaty. And even farther away, her feet were cold….

In the dark room a shaft of white light fell through the viewing slit, like a shaft into an underground chamber. How she hated the electric light. It burned night and day from great opaque white glass globes that hung from the hall ceiling by iron rods, casting a steady, blinding glare…. She shut her eyes against its emptiness.

Her skin itched where she picked a scab on her elbow. She kept picking and picking, sometimes not even letting it crust over before she went at it again. The picking of her elbow had become a private thing, her own, and she wasn't going to show the sore to anybody. Not even Herr Smarty Pants.

She also called him Herr Guten Morgen. And: Herr May I Come In? But his real name was Herr So Polite. Yet he certainly could be called Herr How Are You Fräulein. Or: Herr May Î Sit Down Fräulein, He had a lot of names. Though his latest and most recent name was Herr Smarty Pants, because he tried to be so smart all the time.

Herr Smarty Pants even thought he'd gotten her to talk. Wrong! Wrong! He hadn't Rotten her. She could have talked anytime. Anytime she wanted — even the first day if she wanted.

She laughed under the covers, dry, choking laughter, waking up the sick bee in the next room. Another worn-out worker drone lived there,- she always heard him whimpering and trembling. Sometimes he rocked back and forth so his whole bed creaked. His constant babbling sounded to her like gurgling water over flat stones, so she named him the Gurgler.

“Shut up, you!” she hissed at the wall, then slapped it with the flat of her palm. “Shut up, Turd Mouth!”

Sometimes she called him that — Turd Mouth. If she ever went into his room, she would surely strangle him, choke him to death to stop his gurgling forever. Her hand thudded against the wall, and she hissed louder: “Shut up, or I'll come in and eat your tongue!”

She laughed her dry, gagging laugh, challenging the Gurgling Turd to make one more tiny sound. Then strained hard … holding her breath, listening with all her might. But the whimpers faded to silent fear. Now nothing. Not a sob. Not a whimper.

Good. Let the Gurgler whimper to himself for a while. At last she could ignore the shaft of light from the hall, falling like a blinding weight through the viewing slit. Ignore everything: her own bed, the little room, the great stone Burghive outside…. Just rise above it all and float, float like a soap bubble in the air wafting in the darkness of the room, never touching, never landing, drifting and never breaking…

She had things to think about.

Such as: how long had she been there? Thirteen years at least in this same bed. Under these same sheets, smelling this same air. That would make her about six hundred years old when she first arrived.

No, six was very, very bad. Mustn't think six. Or eight or ten or any of it. Not thirteen either.

She'd been here a
week
, then. A long week, or maybe a month.

It was a secret.

A safe secret from the tall one, Nek-Nek, who stared at her blandly through the waxy viewing slit. When his face came into view, she closed her eyes and went away. And with her eyes closed she rose from the bed like a ghost, right through the door, through his body and down the hall. And when she opened her eyes again, she was elsewhere! Sometimes outside the window, hanging from a drainpipe like a spider. Sometimes in Herr Smarty Pants's office, watching him sleep at his desk. And very soon she was going to float into the Gurgler's room next door while he sniveled in bed, to strangle him with her own hands until his thrashing stopped and his gurgle was gone.

Nek-Nek's long, narrow face appeared in her viewing slit again and again. The deadskin face, she called it. And when it came she always closed her eyes. Floating away in the stale air of the room, drifting through him … Then waking up in some other part of the Burghöhzli, in some quiet place beyond the bee cell — with her back to the cool marble wall and her chilled feet on the cold, shiny floor. There she might stand like a statue of herself, blending into the surroundings as people passed by, never noticing, never sensing her presence, merely glancing briefly at the noble statue of the Queen and passing on.

Sometimes when Nek-Nek came in the dead of night, he trapped the safe bubble on the bed. Then she shrouded herself from sight, peeking through the folds of her covers, watching him stare down through the waxy slit of the bee cell. The deadskin face always stared a long, long time, and she always hid until the face was gone.

Then there were the books. At first she did not remember what the blockish things were supposed to be. They looked so familiar, so touchable, and she felt she ought to know all about them. Their in-sides and outsides, and what they did. For a moment, a name came to the tip of her tongue. Yes, it was … it was … A great vagueness lay upon her, a warm, wet fog that covered her and took away her brain…. She knew there were scratches and marks on the thing. And for a long time (twenty years?) she stared at it, stared at it right on the floor, waiting for it to speak. She pushed the dead block around with her foot, trying to get it to show itself, but for the longest time it stayed dead.

Then Smarty Pants gave it away, coming into the cell and saying, “I've brought you another
— “

Book?

Book … Not right at all. She tried it out several times to see how it sounded: book … book … book … until the feeling came over her of wanting to jump and shout and tear it apart. Then she closed her eyes and floated in the bubble through the winding tunnels of the Beehölzli. Up and down stairs, along the corridors and back into her cell again. When the bubble laid her gently down in bed, she opened her eyes and saw what made her vibrate so. It came into her mind as out of a clear blue sky, like Mother Mary in those stained-glass windows — the Book. Her Book. And she recalled the title …

The Exegesis of Aching Dottery

Her book from home, with green and blue marble swirls on the cover and gold paint along the edges of the pages. Even the binding was sewn with gold thread. Did Herr Smarty Pants have it sent?

The bubble came and took her away. She floated with her eyes closed. Ages and ages went by, during which the stars wheeled about and slowly went out blackly one by one at the rim of the universe. When at last the bubble let her down on the bed, she felt beaten and crushed. She knew the worst now. Herr Smarty Pants's book didn't come from home. It wasn't titled
The Exegesis of Aching Dottery
, Not at all. It was called …
Anatomy
.

But how long had it taken her to understand that?

Herr Smarty Pants talked and talked, droning on about the fibula and the tibia and the sternum and the coxae…. And all the while she had the deep feeling of tightness, a swollen stretching that was lovely and painful and expectant. An urgent thing was about to happen. She was becoming a big, round egg. Becoming all yellow yolk and clear albumen — and soon she was going to hatch.

But it was still not safe to be born. Not yet. Because she suddenly saw a wolf staring through the wax viewing slit. Snarling and slavering, saliva dripping from his fangs. Odd, she thought, what a striking resemblance he has to Herr Smarty Pants. Of course, Herr Pants had come to look in at her, dressed in a wolf's costume.

“Go away, please,” she said. Or did she scream it? And then, as if to oblige her, the wolf closed his wet jaws and went away. But then Nek-Nek's face came instead.

And it never did what she wanted it to. Watching her touch the book. He knew she touched it even before Smarty Pants. Long before. Because he came in the dead of night, his silent presence creeping like a smell as she cautiously touched the pages of…
Anatomy
. And she knew if she peeked through the folds, his face would have changed again, into the armor-plated helmet of a soldier bee, with its huge, domed prism eyes and horned, clicking jaws. There, behind the milky wax of the viewing slit, the armored face stared silently, occasionally jabbing its spiked head from side to side, examining her with huge, sad eyes. And when the soldier bee came to watch her, she always went back to being a bee herself….

Always listening for the roar of his wings beating the air in the hall — but there was never any sound. Only the soldier-bee face hovering silently. And she, deaf in a soundless world. She felt a pressure in the very air, so great her eardrums threatened to burst, pressure enough to crack her armor-plated thorax. Then little by little the fierce silence went away and Nek-Nek's deadskin face came back, sneering mildly at her with his heartless human smile.

She might have understood things better, except for the pretty floating bubble. Sometimes it saved her and sometimes it snatched her away. Sometimes it made her human and sometimes turned her into a bee…. Obeying rules of its own, rules she did not understand. Taking her off on endless journeys through the worm-crawls of the Burghive. Then setting her down on the bed once more, lonely and confused. If only she could remember how it had been at the very beginning …

The sound of laughter. Then angry shouts. The huge form of the Burghive loomed above her, like a painted stage set, seeming to fly up on the hinges of an immense trapdoor. And she saw that in fact it
was
a beehive, with thousands of bees hovering about and darting in and out among the windows. They dragged her into the great Beehölzli, to be stung alive by soldier bees' barbed stingers, crushed by their armor plating, swarmed over and suffocated. She closed her eyes, slipping into the warm, safe bubble …

And slept for a thousand years.

Someone somewhere was always screaming. The immense stage front of the Burghive loomed above for a moment and then swallowed her. Huge hands, strong as metal clamps, hoisted her and dragged her along. She floated over the floor, her feet barely touching. A long marble staircase glided by and then a set of glass doors that opened onto a sunny solarium. She saw it as a bright fishbowl, a glittering aquarium with people-fish inside, pressing their wet faces to the glass doors with big unblinking eyes to see her passing. Then came miles of twisting corridors and being hoisted up dingy stairwells, one flight after another —- and all the while, some abominable person was shrieking in her ear.

Last of all a door opened, and they threw her inside a room. No, not a room, but a sort of tube with five waxy sides, open at one end and then canting out in the shape of a pentagon. The walls smooth and translucent. A bee cell. Two man-sized worker bees hovered at the opening of the tube,- they danced delicately about the angles and edges, secreting wax from their horned jaws, sealing up the entrance. The wax came from a pulsing gland inside their beaks, flowing out in thick, warm streams that instantly adhered to the cooled portions. Before the new layer hardened, one of the workers deftly molded it into a smooth wall. Already the two worker bees had secreted half the opening shut. In a few moments they finished, and she lay alone inside her cell. Her body felt puffy, white, and uniform: she had become a white larva waiting to be born. A little brainless egg without a center. She went to sleep.

She woke and glanced about her, wondering vaguely at the change that had come over the cell. Now it looked like a person's room, with a bed and dresser and a window facing outside. The door had a glass slit in it: a shaft of ugly white light slanting down. She closed her eyes and stopped her ears to make the person room go away. At last she felt her separate human legs begin to fuse together, and she knew she was turning into a bee-egg again. Soon her human legs jelled and she was safe once more … just clean liquid inside a translucent larva case, And the five-sided tube snug all around, the walls waxy smooth, It was much, much better being a clear little egg without a center.

But the clean, waxy tube always returned to being a people room, dingy and cramped. Suddenly the door would fly open, but instead of people coming in, a wolf would burst through. A wolf in a suit and tie, its thick neck bulging out of a pressed white shirt. And sometimes she saw a large bee in a tight white nurse's uniform, who squeezed in and hovered over her bed, taking up all the space and leaving her no room to breathe. How she loathed seeing the wolf and the nurse-bee.