"Handyman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brown Corey)

The cleanup underway, Will and his father found a bathroom a few hundred yards away where they could shower and shave. There was no one else in the room with them, and the sounds of splashing water and the clink of razors on the porcelain sinks echoed back from the barren tile walls. Will and his Dad stood at sinks side by side, scraping the white foam from their faces and waving the razors in the murky water before them.

"You did a good job fixing that sink," Dad said.

"Thanks," Will said. He pulled the razor from the back of his throat to his chin, carefully. He was relatively new to shaving-twice a week was all he did-and still cut himself occasionally. "Leaks are easy. I've done plenty of those before."

Dad brushed lightly at the dab of shaving cream under his nose. "You've done lots of things lately, and pretty well, too. Plumbing, woodworking, appliances, electrical-I don't think I learned it as fast as you have."

Will felt his ears growing red.

"I guess what I'm trying to say is that you're going to be a pretty good Handyman." Tink, tink, tink, went Dad's razor on the sink. "Your mother and I are very proud of the young man you've become."

Will began to feel distinctly warm in the little bathroom; he wasn't used to hearing his stern old Handyman father talk so. It was embarrassing; Will had a sudden wish to be back with Mom and the twins, anywhere but where he was.

"This is the last night we'll be together." Dad coughed self-consciously. "I've never been one for long speeches, and I'm not going to make one now. I just wanted to make sure I didn't miss the opportunity to let you know how much your mother and I love you."

The last words hung in the air like the report of a cannon shot. Will felt his heart pounding, and all over his body a weird, buzzing kind of numbness had taken hold. Never, never, never had he heard his father say that before. It was like hearing someone else's voice come out of his father's mouth.

And yet, somewhere deep down, a tiny voice was telling him that this was one of the most important moments of his life. He knew what he was supposed to say. I love you too, Dad. But those words wouldn't come.

"I've tried real hard," was all he could manage.

They shaved in silence for a while; Will beat his brain for something right to say. He berated himself for not having the courage to say the few little words he thought his father wanted to hear, and still he could not make himself speak. At last Dad was drying his face with one of the white bathroom towels, and Will realized half his own face was still unshaven.

"Well, I'm getting hungry," Dad said, his voice as matter-of-fact as if he were discussing pipe threads. "Come on to dinner as soon as you get done."

"Okay," Will said.

"Can you think of any questions you need to ask me before you leave tomorrow? Anything about wiring, plumbing, first aid... women?"

"Dad!"

"Well, you're not married yet, and odds are you'll run into some nice girl on the stairs or in a parlor somewhere, and then... you'll need to know some things."

"I think we had that conversation, remember?"

"Okay, okay." Dad pulled his shirt from the rack and tossed it on. Will watched him in the mirror.

"Dad?"

Dad turned, still buttoning his shirt. "Yes, Will?"

"Where does the water in the pipes come from?"

Dad buttoned two more buttons before he replied. "I thought we discussed that, too."

"When I was four."

Dad shrugged. "Nothing new to say now."

"Come on, Dad, you must know something. Handymen know everything about the House."

"The House is infinite, Will. It goes on forever."

"That's what they tell all the little kids. But Mom always said nothing lasts forever."

Dad grimaced. "Will, I think you'd be happier in the long run if you didn't worry yourself with things like that. Life's hard enough without fretting over questions that can't be answered. If there's one piece of advice I could give you before you start down, that'd be it. Okay?"

No, Will wanted to say. I can't just turn off the questions in my head like I'm turning off a leak. But for the second time, the right words failed him. "Okay."

Dad smiled. "You're going to be a great Handyman. Those Farmers down there are going to make twice as much food with you keeping up the machines." And with that he was gone.

So Will finished shaving alone. When he was done, he leaned over the sink and watched the water swirl away, till all that was left was tiny drips down into the long black pipe.

The girl's name was Ryan; she was the daughter of a Handyman who traveled by elevator. After thirty minutes of exchanging glances over the crowded dinner table, she and Will took their plates out on the balcony to eat, leaning on the railing and watching dust balls dance in convection currents from a thousand floors below.

Will speared a piece of blueberry pie and felt a twinge in his stomach as he swallowed it down. Vertigo was a real problem here in the House. Will had seen people fall. Most of the time they hit the stairway after a few floors and stopped, but sometimes, if they fell just right, they could go twenty or thirty flights. In a Grand Mezzanine-twenty meters square, Will estimated-you could fall a long way. Even till you reached-

-what?

Will knew what the old people said. The House is all, the House is what is. To ask what lay below the next floor, that was easy, but to ask what lay below the bottom floor-that was an irrelevant question. Will had learned not to ask it a long time ago.

"But no one can stop me from thinking it," he told Ryan.

Will knew what was supposed to happen when single men and women of the same guild met at night, at least had heard it as a child from older boys in the bathroom. It had even happened to him, once or twice. But that night, with his Turnaround looming, his thoughts were too confused to lose himself in a one night stand. Ryan seemed to understand without a word of it passing between them.

"So your dad wouldn't tell you, huh?"

Will shook his head. "I really don't think he knows. Maybe nobody knows."

Ryan rested her chin in the palm of her hand. "What do you think is up there? Or down, for that matter."

"More rooms, probably. I guess the House might really be infinite. It just seems weird that no one ever tried to find out."

"Twenty-five lashes to anyone that abandons his duty."

"I know." Will fingered the thick belt around his waist. "Handymen give them, after all."

Ryan glanced around, and finding no one there, whispered to Will: "Show you something?"

"What?"

Ryan pulled a small book from the pocket of her work pants and handed it to Will. "We found this in a room we stayed in, a couple thousand floors ago. My dad says it must have come from some room far away. I've never seen any floors like this."

Will paged through the little booklet. There were pictures, paintings it seemed, of bizarre rooms where the walls were either transparent or too far away to be seen. Sticking up from the flooring-which was uneven and broken, as though water had warped it-were stalks of some brown plant, bearing some resemblance to the broccoli Will's mother had always forced on him as a child

"I've never seen anything like it either," Will said, handing the booklet back to Ryan. "We've seen some strange floors in the House, but these don't even look like rooms."

She gazed at the booklet for a moment before putting it away. "There must be some beautiful floors somewhere out there."

"I guess. This one sure seems pretty dumpy."

"It's never going to look any different if we stay here." Ryan's blue eyes flashed. "Want to take a look around?"

"Sure," he said, catching her hand.

They found a parlor a half-kilometer down the hallway, and joined in a poker game. They played for the ancient plastic chits one could trade in for candy or new walking shoes. It was a good thing Will had just gotten a new pair of boots; Ryan took him for thirty chits.

Another room nearby was filled with people watching a Play-box. Will had seen these devices before-squat, boxy contraptions with a glass screen in front and a row of circular dials. Sometimes, if one twisted the knobs right, weird blobs of color would form on the screen, smearing and reforming like fingerpaints. Will had even seen a picture of a person pop onto the screen for a moment or two, and a voice break through the usual background hiss. But, though many people watched and waited for hours on end, such moments were rare. He and Ryan stayed only a moment before moving on.

They roamed the corridors for hours, passing mezzanines, leaning over balconies, running down hallways that extended for kilometers. There was the squeak of flooring, the shadows collecting in corners, the rusty smell of mildew and dust. The two spoke in whispers; the silence of the House at night was heavy.

By the time they returned to the kitchen, the lights had been dimmed for the evening, casting the corridor into shadow. Will and Ryan stood close, facing each other. Neither spoke for an awkward moment, and both of them laughed.

"You've got a little pie on your lip," Will said.

"Where? Here...?" Ryan touched a finger to the corner of her mouth.

"No. Right... here." He kissed the speck away, letting his lips linger on her warm skin.

They pulled tight against each other then, kissing for the first time. Will's hands wrapped round Ryan's back, while hers locked behind his neck, pulling him down-

"Will! Will, is that you?"

Will pulled away at the sound of his mother's voice. Several figures-shadows, in the poor lighting-were approaching from far away. "What-what do you want?" Will shouted, shielding Ryan from view with his body.

"We're finding a room for the night. Come on, or you'll get lost."

Will squinted; were those the twins he saw beside his mother? "I'd better go," he told Ryan.

"See you tomorrow?" she asked, grabbing his hand.

"Eight o'clock-on this landing." With a quick squeeze of her hand, he hurried away.

Will hoped the others had not noticed his companion, but Mom was smiling when he arrived. "What's her name?" she asked.

Will sighed. Why did the twins have to be there? "Ryan Marcone," he said.

"Ooh, Ryan," Katie said.

"That's a boy's name," Karl said, wrinkling his nose.

"Shut up! It is not."

"That's enough, you two," Mom said, taking Will's side in an argument for once. She laid a hand on his shoulder, and managed to quash almost all the shaking in her voice when she said, "Ready for your last night with your family?"

Will shrugged, and managed a smile. "I guess so," he said, wondering if she could feel the way his heart was pounding.

The landing was already booming with the steps of passers-by when Will arrived the next morning. He had scurried back from breakfast and left his family packing in their room. Ryan was on the landing, as he had hoped-but with her family. Her father leaned against the railing nearby, smiling faintly with a golden elevator key, a key Ryan stood to inherit someday, dangling from his fingertips. Ryan's little sister hid shyly behind his leg.

"Hi, Will," Ryan said.

"Hi." All the pretty words he'd rehearsed the night before evaporated under the scrutiny of Ryan's father. It was different dealing with elevator people.

Ryan nodded her head toward her father. "We're getting sort of an earlier start this morning. I told my dad I had to wait around to at least say goodbye."

"Sorry we have to be rushing, Will," her father said. "There's a blown fuse I'm committed to a few hundred floors ahead."

"So take care of yourself," Ryan said. She leaned forward to hug Will, and whispered in his ear:

"He says they're called trees."

"What?" His eyes searched her face. "What does it mean?"

She glanced over his shoulder. "Your family's coming. Looks like your dad has something for you." When he turned to look, she kissed him quickly on the cheek. "Bye, Will. Maybe I'll see you again one day."

In a twinkling they were in the elevator and gone.

"Trees? What are trees?" Will shouted, but there was no answer save the echo from the stairwell.

Will's family formed a half-circle around him, smiling with the sheepish-happy expressions of birthday parties and weddings. It was the twins who finally broke the silence.

"Bye-bye, Will," Katie said, wrapping her arms around his leg.

"Bye-bye," Karl echoed, and for a moment Will had a seven-year old wrapped around each of his legs.

"Goodbye, son," Mom said, dabbing at her eye with a handkerchief. She walked forward, holding herself proud and high despite her weight and her pain, as she always did. She sniffled as she hugged him, propping her chin on his shoulder. "Remember us."

Dad held out a tool belt, shiny new leather in contrast to the crinkled, dull article he wore. New tools-real grown-up ones, not the junior size articles in Will's toolbox-dangled from its pockets and sleeves. "For you."

It was not a surprise to Will; this gift was a tradition among the Handyman families. Even so, the expectation did not prevent a lump from rising in his throat.

"You've earned this," his father said. "You're a Handyman now."

"Thanks, Dad," Will said. He slid the belt on and adjusted its fit, finding the right notch in the waist. "Perfect fit."

"Goodbye, Will," Dad said. "Be happy."

"Goodbye," Will said, and started down.

He went ten floors before he stopped.

He darted off the landing into a dim alcove just off the staircase, where he stood panting, clutching his suitcase to his chest. He looked out to the stairway; no one seemed to be watching him. He slid out from the alcove and began to run.

The corridor he was in was lined in simple white paneling, with grainy black-and-white photos of people long dead and gone to the Disposers' furnaces. At last he found another staircase, a sparsely populated, creaking and groaning spiral too narrow for more than two people to pass abreast.

But it was good enough for Will to start climbing up.

He moved fitfully at first, trying not to travel too quickly. Every now and again he made himself get off the staircase and travel laterally, putting horizontal distance between himself and his family.

He passed three Handymen that first day, each one of which was obligated to lash him with their thick leather belts should they discover what he had done. But, terrified as he was, the other Handymen only showed him the mutual sign of respect, the clenched fist turning clockwise, and passed on.

He covered four hundred floors that day, four hundred thirty the next, and nearly five hundred the day after that; it was easy without the twins and his mother's problems slowing him down. For the first time in his life he traveled at night, when the hallway lights dimmed and no one could see his face.

He was in a dusty part of the House far from the Grand Mezzanines. The stairways were narrow here, the hallways mere boxes with peeling wallpaper and battered doors from behind which came strange noises, crying and angry shouts and sometimes the crash of breaking glass. Will had not locked his door at night since becoming old enough to have his own room, but he did now, and held his pillow over his head to shut out the noise.

Sometimes he wished he had not gone back up.

He grew tired one night during a long climb-floors could be hundreds of meters apart here-and sat down on a darkened landing to rest, leaning against the wall. He had no intention of falling asleep-not in this part of the House-but an hour after he sat down his groggy mind was shaken to consciousness by the sound of heavy footfalls approaching from below. Will froze, holding his breath.

Someone tripped over his legs, cursed. Will's heart skipped a beat. The voice. Did he know it?

"Damn winos," the voice said, and the blood in Will's veins froze to ice water.

His father was there.

Will thought it over the next day during an unsatisfying meal in one of the few open kitchens he'd been able to find. The food in this part of the House was different. The meat was tough and full of fat, the vegetables limp and tasteless. There were no apple pies for dessert. Sometimes there were no Cooks, which meant one fended for oneself in the gritty, roach-infested cabinets. Sometimes the Cook made one wish the kitchen was unattended.

Will spooned ravioli out of a can and decided his choice was clear. Even though his father was probably above him now, having continued on after the midnight encounter, he had to keep going. A day or two of hard climbing, and he would blow past his father for certain. After all, Dad couldn't keep up such a pace, could he?

Though how the old man had managed to catch him by this time was a mystery that made Will's ravioli sit uneasily in his stomach.

He covered two hundred floors by noon, another hundred in the early afternoon. He was sweating now, but none of the stragglers on the staircase looked like they cared.

He arrived at a long balcony and found a gate blocking his path, an iron grillwork across the stairway. The lock was sturdy and resisted all of Will's attempts to pick it. Will resorted to attacking the bolts holding the grill together, shaking the metal and cursing as his wrench slipped from the bolt and slashed his knuckles.

"Use your socket set," someone said.

Will looked up to see his father standing not ten meters away.

He looked tired. His hair was wild, and a scraggly beard spotted his face. There were only a few tools in his belt. He had been traveling light.

"We met the Marcones a couple of weeks after you left," Dad said, walking forward. "Ryan's little sister started blabbing about how they'd seen you on a stairway headed up while the father was changing out a set of door locks. Mr. Marcone shut her up quick and apologized, said she probably just saw someone that looked like you. I said sure, that you were probably already cranking out chickens and green beans." Dad puffed out his cheeks. "But I had a hunch you'd make me a liar, Will."

Will began to wrestle with the lock again, desperately feeling for the tumblers while keeping his gaze on his advancing father. "I'm going up, Dad. And I'm not going to stop."

"That's where you're wrong. I'm here to make sure you do your duty and go back down again. One, as your father. And two, as a Handyman. I know you haven't already forgotten that duty."

"You don't understand, Dad. This has nothing to do with being a Handyman."

Dad was close now. "Come away from there," he said. "You don't know how to pick a lock."

"You showed me, once," Will said. "I was only a little-"

His father lunged from two meters away. Will leapt aside a split second before his father's hands crashed into the grill.

Though Will could easily outdistance his father down the long corridors, Dad called out for help, invoking the name of Handyman to implore passersby to block Will's path. A fleet-footed Messenger in fire-red coveralls caught up from behind, but Will fought free from the slender man's grasp and tore off into a side passageway. Footsteps rang out behind him.

Will ducked left and right, opened doors and ducked through suites of rooms occupied by surprised tenants. Once he passed a stairwell, heard the thunder of steps, looked up to see his father only a meter away. Dad reached out for him; Will ducked away. He felt fingertips brush his side, but they did not grab hold. One of his wrenches clattered to the floor.

Will ran full-out for minutes on end, and his strength began to wane. The corridors echoed more and more with the shouts of those trying to track him down.

He ducked into a narrow passageway, gasping for air. Beside him was a service elevator, the kind the wealthy often used to transport their belongings from one floor to the next.

As Will stood with his hands on his knees, a motor began to whir somewhere, and relays clacked. The elevator was moving.

He tried activating the door control-no response. In a twinkling, the cover plate was off, and he was twisting wires the way he had seen his father do. Someone ran by-had they seen him? Will forced himself to keep working.

The door whispered up, letting a cold blast of air in from the shaft. Will peered in with a flashlight from his belt. A mass of silver cables like tentacles writhed inside. One close by was traveling up. Flash held in his mouth, Will slithered through the opening and grabbed the cable, holding tight against its greasy coating.

He kicked the door shut with his foot. His flashlight slipped from his teeth, and for a split second he saw a dizzying drop below him. He closed his eyes, but he never heard the flashlight hit bottom.

And so he was whisked upward through the pitch black, like a tiny insect in the towering shaft.

Will fashioned a foot brace which could be lashed to the cable to take the strain off his hands, and traveled by elevator for many thousands of floors after that. He got off only to eat and sleep. His clothes were greasy and he was dirty as well, but he did not stop to wash.

After a month or so, the House began to change. Not to another style or to more Spartan quarters, but dustier, emptier. More frequent were the unattended kitchens, in which Will was obliged to pull old cans of vegetables or meat off the shelves and pry the tops open with his utility knife. Sometimes what was inside the can was black and stinking, and sometimes there was no electricity with which to cook. He went hungry a great deal.

Other people were few and far between. More than one sat slumped against the wall, spotted hands clutching bottles in brown paper bags, watching Will go past with empty eyes.

There were signs of a higher level of habitation. Many of the rooms Will passed, even those far from staircases, had obviously been lived in once. Beds were unmade, toiletries were scattered in the bathrooms. Strange children's toys with glowing glass eyes and wires sticking from inside littered the floor. There were Play-boxes in the common rooms, but of a different model than the ones Will had seen. Some had rows of square buttons arranged underneath, with a letter of the alphabet printed on each one. There was a tank in one room, inside which danced the garishly colored image of a young ballerina. "Like a ghost," Will said, shuddering as he passed his hand through the image.

Finally the people disappeared completely. Will's footsteps alone broke the silence, tracking through centimeter-thick dust.

At the last well-stocked kitchen, Will emptied the clothes from his suitcase and filled it with food. When that ran out, he knew, he would have to turn back.

The tiny food rations made him weak, light-headed. He leaned against the wall to rest one morning, and felt his head strike something.

There was a picture on the wall. Will brushed the dust from the glass with his hand and squinted in the dim light.

It was, in a way, much like the pictures Ryan had shown him. There were great fields of the broccoli-stalks as before, but beyond those great peaks of some gray material rose, streaked here and there with white. Above the peaks was a field of an electric blue color, a color Will had never seen in the House.

"This must be Heaven," Will said.

"I have been to the mountaintop," said a voice from nearby. Will turned to see an old man with gray hair down to his waist, dressed in a robe stitched together from the remains of old sheets and shirts. He was filthy, with fingernails like wood files.

"I have breathed in the air that girdles the world," the man said. "I have taken in the scent of a thousand pines and held it in my mechanical lungs."

"What are you talking about?" Will said, backing away a step. "Who are you?"

"I have walked to the horizon," the man said. "I walked to the edge of the world and gazed over into Hell. But when I fell, it was up. Up, don't you see?"

"I don't know what you're talking about. Stay away from me."

"I fell!" The man leapt forward with catlike quickness for a body so decrepit, and shook Will by the shoulders. "I fell from the edge of the world into the bowl of the sky, and swam among the stars, where my chest ached for air, and the sun's light put out my eyes."

Will cried out as the man's long fingernails bit into his flesh. "I don't know what any of this means. Get away from me!" He tore at the man's hands, and for an instant saw, through a ragged break in the leathery skin, wires, silver wires wrapped around bones of dull steel. He screamed, broke free and ran blindly.

"But I am afraid of the grass!" the man cried, pursuing. "I am afraid of the grass that thinks, and the trees that feel, and the beasts of three heads that prowl for flesh! Help me! Help me! Help me!

"I want to go home!"

Will ran for a long time before the footsteps disappeared. He moved up another three floors, and came to a door.

It was at the top of a flight of stairs at the end of a long, high room, empty save for a few broken boards scattered on the floor. Around its edges poured a brilliant light, not sickly yellow like the lights in the House, but pure white. Will, accustomed to the dimness of burned-out bulbs, was obliged to shade his eyes with his hand.

It was cool in the room, like the inside of a refrigerator. Will had never known an entire room to be anything other than twenty degrees, and shivered a little.

A noise came from the door, and curls of dust blew up around its base. Will stopped for a moment, suspicious. In a moment, though, a wave of air hit him, and he realized that the air in the room was moving, under what strange force he could not guess.

He trudged forward. Though the dust was thick here, there were tracks to be seen. Most led toward the door-only one or two sets pointed away.

He climbed the stairs, stood looking at the door. After all the doors he had seen, he still could not say he had ever encountered one quite like this. It was wooden, with strange whorls and illegible graffiti gouged into its flaking green paint. A shade covered the upper portion of the door, with a little ring hanging from a string at the bottom end. Behind the shade glowed the same brilliant light that poured in around the jamb. Whatever room lay beyond, Will decided, it was well lit.

He knelt to take a pinch of the dust and rub it between thumb and forefinger. It was not dust at all, he saw, but a coarser, thicker grain, one that was rough to his skin. This, too, was coming from outside.

The doorknob was steel, blackened with age. Will rose to his feet, reached out to it with a trembling hand.

Locked.

Will reached for the small pick on his belt. As he did so, he heard footsteps behind him again. "Damn," he whispered. The crazy man had found him. Will attacked the lock, but the mechanisms were old and coated with grit.

The steps came on steadily. They reached the room, stopped, came inside. Will shut his eyes but did not turn around, not wanting to face those wild gray eyes peering out from behind the shaggy beard.

"Will," his father said.

Will turned around then. His father had shaved since the last time they'd met, and somewhere had managed to find a clean shirt. The old man's hair was different, too. It had gone stark white.

"How?" Will breathed. "How did you keep up with me?"

Dad held up a sliver of metal; there was a glint of gold in the bright white light.

"A key," Will said. "Forging an elevator key is thirty lashes."

"Come back, Will," Dad said. "We can forget about this whole thing if you'll just come back. No one else needs to know."

"What's out there, Dad?" Will said, motioning toward the door with his head.

"I-I don't know."

Will nodded. "I believe you."

"Don't do this to yourself, Will." Dad began walking forward, kicking up curlicues of dust with his boots. "You could have a good life, an easy life, if you'd just come back with me."

Will's hands flurried at the lock. "I know."

"Your mother worked so hard at raising you. She could have been a Rester, with her problem, and lived easy, but she wanted her children to have a mother."

"You won't make me feel guilty," Will said. He felt one tumbler slip into place, then another. "Did you think this was something I just thought of the night before my Turnaround?"

Dad was at the bottom of the steps now. "Come down, Will." A sad smile crossed his lips. "You know you don't know how to pick a lock." He lifted his foot to the first step, and at that moment a loud click came from the door.

Both men froze.

Without taking his eyes from his father's face, Will twisted the knob. The door whispered open a centimeter. A streak of light blazed on his father's face, lighting the wrinkles and crow's feet and fading hair.

"Don't do this, Will. You'll die out there! No one could survive beyond the House."

"You just said you didn't know what was out there." Will opened the door wide, yet still did not turn around; what if the sight beyond was enough to put doubt in his heart? The light fell full upon his father now, making the old man's horror all the more plain.

"I love you, Will," Dad said. "Do you hear what I'm saying to you? I love you."

The cleanup underway, Will and his father found a bathroom a few hundred yards away where they could shower and shave. There was no one else in the room with them, and the sounds of splashing water and the clink of razors on the porcelain sinks echoed back from the barren tile walls. Will and his Dad stood at sinks side by side, scraping the white foam from their faces and waving the razors in the murky water before them.

"You did a good job fixing that sink," Dad said.

"Thanks," Will said. He pulled the razor from the back of his throat to his chin, carefully. He was relatively new to shaving-twice a week was all he did-and still cut himself occasionally. "Leaks are easy. I've done plenty of those before."

Dad brushed lightly at the dab of shaving cream under his nose. "You've done lots of things lately, and pretty well, too. Plumbing, woodworking, appliances, electrical-I don't think I learned it as fast as you have."

Will felt his ears growing red.

"I guess what I'm trying to say is that you're going to be a pretty good Handyman." Tink, tink, tink, went Dad's razor on the sink. "Your mother and I are very proud of the young man you've become."

Will began to feel distinctly warm in the little bathroom; he wasn't used to hearing his stern old Handyman father talk so. It was embarrassing; Will had a sudden wish to be back with Mom and the twins, anywhere but where he was.

"This is the last night we'll be together." Dad coughed self-consciously. "I've never been one for long speeches, and I'm not going to make one now. I just wanted to make sure I didn't miss the opportunity to let you know how much your mother and I love you."

The last words hung in the air like the report of a cannon shot. Will felt his heart pounding, and all over his body a weird, buzzing kind of numbness had taken hold. Never, never, never had he heard his father say that before. It was like hearing someone else's voice come out of his father's mouth.

And yet, somewhere deep down, a tiny voice was telling him that this was one of the most important moments of his life. He knew what he was supposed to say. I love you too, Dad. But those words wouldn't come.

"I've tried real hard," was all he could manage.

They shaved in silence for a while; Will beat his brain for something right to say. He berated himself for not having the courage to say the few little words he thought his father wanted to hear, and still he could not make himself speak. At last Dad was drying his face with one of the white bathroom towels, and Will realized half his own face was still unshaven.

"Well, I'm getting hungry," Dad said, his voice as matter-of-fact as if he were discussing pipe threads. "Come on to dinner as soon as you get done."

"Okay," Will said.

"Can you think of any questions you need to ask me before you leave tomorrow? Anything about wiring, plumbing, first aid... women?"

"Dad!"

"Well, you're not married yet, and odds are you'll run into some nice girl on the stairs or in a parlor somewhere, and then... you'll need to know some things."

"I think we had that conversation, remember?"

"Okay, okay." Dad pulled his shirt from the rack and tossed it on. Will watched him in the mirror.

"Dad?"

Dad turned, still buttoning his shirt. "Yes, Will?"

"Where does the water in the pipes come from?"

Dad buttoned two more buttons before he replied. "I thought we discussed that, too."

"When I was four."

Dad shrugged. "Nothing new to say now."

"Come on, Dad, you must know something. Handymen know everything about the House."

"The House is infinite, Will. It goes on forever."

"That's what they tell all the little kids. But Mom always said nothing lasts forever."

Dad grimaced. "Will, I think you'd be happier in the long run if you didn't worry yourself with things like that. Life's hard enough without fretting over questions that can't be answered. If there's one piece of advice I could give you before you start down, that'd be it. Okay?"

No, Will wanted to say. I can't just turn off the questions in my head like I'm turning off a leak. But for the second time, the right words failed him. "Okay."

Dad smiled. "You're going to be a great Handyman. Those Farmers down there are going to make twice as much food with you keeping up the machines." And with that he was gone.

So Will finished shaving alone. When he was done, he leaned over the sink and watched the water swirl away, till all that was left was tiny drips down into the long black pipe.

The girl's name was Ryan; she was the daughter of a Handyman who traveled by elevator. After thirty minutes of exchanging glances over the crowded dinner table, she and Will took their plates out on the balcony to eat, leaning on the railing and watching dust balls dance in convection currents from a thousand floors below.

Will speared a piece of blueberry pie and felt a twinge in his stomach as he swallowed it down. Vertigo was a real problem here in the House. Will had seen people fall. Most of the time they hit the stairway after a few floors and stopped, but sometimes, if they fell just right, they could go twenty or thirty flights. In a Grand Mezzanine-twenty meters square, Will estimated-you could fall a long way. Even till you reached-

-what?

Will knew what the old people said. The House is all, the House is what is. To ask what lay below the next floor, that was easy, but to ask what lay below the bottom floor-that was an irrelevant question. Will had learned not to ask it a long time ago.

"But no one can stop me from thinking it," he told Ryan.

Will knew what was supposed to happen when single men and women of the same guild met at night, at least had heard it as a child from older boys in the bathroom. It had even happened to him, once or twice. But that night, with his Turnaround looming, his thoughts were too confused to lose himself in a one night stand. Ryan seemed to understand without a word of it passing between them.

"So your dad wouldn't tell you, huh?"

Will shook his head. "I really don't think he knows. Maybe nobody knows."

Ryan rested her chin in the palm of her hand. "What do you think is up there? Or down, for that matter."

"More rooms, probably. I guess the House might really be infinite. It just seems weird that no one ever tried to find out."

"Twenty-five lashes to anyone that abandons his duty."

"I know." Will fingered the thick belt around his waist. "Handymen give them, after all."

Ryan glanced around, and finding no one there, whispered to Will: "Show you something?"

"What?"

Ryan pulled a small book from the pocket of her work pants and handed it to Will. "We found this in a room we stayed in, a couple thousand floors ago. My dad says it must have come from some room far away. I've never seen any floors like this."

Will paged through the little booklet. There were pictures, paintings it seemed, of bizarre rooms where the walls were either transparent or too far away to be seen. Sticking up from the flooring-which was uneven and broken, as though water had warped it-were stalks of some brown plant, bearing some resemblance to the broccoli Will's mother had always forced on him as a child

"I've never seen anything like it either," Will said, handing the booklet back to Ryan. "We've seen some strange floors in the House, but these don't even look like rooms."

She gazed at the booklet for a moment before putting it away. "There must be some beautiful floors somewhere out there."

"I guess. This one sure seems pretty dumpy."

"It's never going to look any different if we stay here." Ryan's blue eyes flashed. "Want to take a look around?"

"Sure," he said, catching her hand.

They found a parlor a half-kilometer down the hallway, and joined in a poker game. They played for the ancient plastic chits one could trade in for candy or new walking shoes. It was a good thing Will had just gotten a new pair of boots; Ryan took him for thirty chits.

Another room nearby was filled with people watching a Play-box. Will had seen these devices before-squat, boxy contraptions with a glass screen in front and a row of circular dials. Sometimes, if one twisted the knobs right, weird blobs of color would form on the screen, smearing and reforming like fingerpaints. Will had even seen a picture of a person pop onto the screen for a moment or two, and a voice break through the usual background hiss. But, though many people watched and waited for hours on end, such moments were rare. He and Ryan stayed only a moment before moving on.

They roamed the corridors for hours, passing mezzanines, leaning over balconies, running down hallways that extended for kilometers. There was the squeak of flooring, the shadows collecting in corners, the rusty smell of mildew and dust. The two spoke in whispers; the silence of the House at night was heavy.

By the time they returned to the kitchen, the lights had been dimmed for the evening, casting the corridor into shadow. Will and Ryan stood close, facing each other. Neither spoke for an awkward moment, and both of them laughed.

"You've got a little pie on your lip," Will said.

"Where? Here...?" Ryan touched a finger to the corner of her mouth.

"No. Right... here." He kissed the speck away, letting his lips linger on her warm skin.

They pulled tight against each other then, kissing for the first time. Will's hands wrapped round Ryan's back, while hers locked behind his neck, pulling him down-

"Will! Will, is that you?"

Will pulled away at the sound of his mother's voice. Several figures-shadows, in the poor lighting-were approaching from far away. "What-what do you want?" Will shouted, shielding Ryan from view with his body.

"We're finding a room for the night. Come on, or you'll get lost."

Will squinted; were those the twins he saw beside his mother? "I'd better go," he told Ryan.

"See you tomorrow?" she asked, grabbing his hand.

"Eight o'clock-on this landing." With a quick squeeze of her hand, he hurried away.

Will hoped the others had not noticed his companion, but Mom was smiling when he arrived. "What's her name?" she asked.

Will sighed. Why did the twins have to be there? "Ryan Marcone," he said.

"Ooh, Ryan," Katie said.

"That's a boy's name," Karl said, wrinkling his nose.

"Shut up! It is not."

"That's enough, you two," Mom said, taking Will's side in an argument for once. She laid a hand on his shoulder, and managed to quash almost all the shaking in her voice when she said, "Ready for your last night with your family?"

Will shrugged, and managed a smile. "I guess so," he said, wondering if she could feel the way his heart was pounding.

The landing was already booming with the steps of passers-by when Will arrived the next morning. He had scurried back from breakfast and left his family packing in their room. Ryan was on the landing, as he had hoped-but with her family. Her father leaned against the railing nearby, smiling faintly with a golden elevator key, a key Ryan stood to inherit someday, dangling from his fingertips. Ryan's little sister hid shyly behind his leg.

"Hi, Will," Ryan said.

"Hi." All the pretty words he'd rehearsed the night before evaporated under the scrutiny of Ryan's father. It was different dealing with elevator people.

Ryan nodded her head toward her father. "We're getting sort of an earlier start this morning. I told my dad I had to wait around to at least say goodbye."

"Sorry we have to be rushing, Will," her father said. "There's a blown fuse I'm committed to a few hundred floors ahead."

"So take care of yourself," Ryan said. She leaned forward to hug Will, and whispered in his ear:

"He says they're called trees."

"What?" His eyes searched her face. "What does it mean?"

She glanced over his shoulder. "Your family's coming. Looks like your dad has something for you." When he turned to look, she kissed him quickly on the cheek. "Bye, Will. Maybe I'll see you again one day."

In a twinkling they were in the elevator and gone.

"Trees? What are trees?" Will shouted, but there was no answer save the echo from the stairwell.

Will's family formed a half-circle around him, smiling with the sheepish-happy expressions of birthday parties and weddings. It was the twins who finally broke the silence.

"Bye-bye, Will," Katie said, wrapping her arms around his leg.

"Bye-bye," Karl echoed, and for a moment Will had a seven-year old wrapped around each of his legs.

"Goodbye, son," Mom said, dabbing at her eye with a handkerchief. She walked forward, holding herself proud and high despite her weight and her pain, as she always did. She sniffled as she hugged him, propping her chin on his shoulder. "Remember us."

Dad held out a tool belt, shiny new leather in contrast to the crinkled, dull article he wore. New tools-real grown-up ones, not the junior size articles in Will's toolbox-dangled from its pockets and sleeves. "For you."

It was not a surprise to Will; this gift was a tradition among the Handyman families. Even so, the expectation did not prevent a lump from rising in his throat.

"You've earned this," his father said. "You're a Handyman now."

"Thanks, Dad," Will said. He slid the belt on and adjusted its fit, finding the right notch in the waist. "Perfect fit."

"Goodbye, Will," Dad said. "Be happy."

"Goodbye," Will said, and started down.

He went ten floors before he stopped.

He darted off the landing into a dim alcove just off the staircase, where he stood panting, clutching his suitcase to his chest. He looked out to the stairway; no one seemed to be watching him. He slid out from the alcove and began to run.

The corridor he was in was lined in simple white paneling, with grainy black-and-white photos of people long dead and gone to the Disposers' furnaces. At last he found another staircase, a sparsely populated, creaking and groaning spiral too narrow for more than two people to pass abreast.

But it was good enough for Will to start climbing up.

He moved fitfully at first, trying not to travel too quickly. Every now and again he made himself get off the staircase and travel laterally, putting horizontal distance between himself and his family.

He passed three Handymen that first day, each one of which was obligated to lash him with their thick leather belts should they discover what he had done. But, terrified as he was, the other Handymen only showed him the mutual sign of respect, the clenched fist turning clockwise, and passed on.

He covered four hundred floors that day, four hundred thirty the next, and nearly five hundred the day after that; it was easy without the twins and his mother's problems slowing him down. For the first time in his life he traveled at night, when the hallway lights dimmed and no one could see his face.

He was in a dusty part of the House far from the Grand Mezzanines. The stairways were narrow here, the hallways mere boxes with peeling wallpaper and battered doors from behind which came strange noises, crying and angry shouts and sometimes the crash of breaking glass. Will had not locked his door at night since becoming old enough to have his own room, but he did now, and held his pillow over his head to shut out the noise.

Sometimes he wished he had not gone back up.

He grew tired one night during a long climb-floors could be hundreds of meters apart here-and sat down on a darkened landing to rest, leaning against the wall. He had no intention of falling asleep-not in this part of the House-but an hour after he sat down his groggy mind was shaken to consciousness by the sound of heavy footfalls approaching from below. Will froze, holding his breath.

Someone tripped over his legs, cursed. Will's heart skipped a beat. The voice. Did he know it?

"Damn winos," the voice said, and the blood in Will's veins froze to ice water.

His father was there.

Will thought it over the next day during an unsatisfying meal in one of the few open kitchens he'd been able to find. The food in this part of the House was different. The meat was tough and full of fat, the vegetables limp and tasteless. There were no apple pies for dessert. Sometimes there were no Cooks, which meant one fended for oneself in the gritty, roach-infested cabinets. Sometimes the Cook made one wish the kitchen was unattended.

Will spooned ravioli out of a can and decided his choice was clear. Even though his father was probably above him now, having continued on after the midnight encounter, he had to keep going. A day or two of hard climbing, and he would blow past his father for certain. After all, Dad couldn't keep up such a pace, could he?

Though how the old man had managed to catch him by this time was a mystery that made Will's ravioli sit uneasily in his stomach.

He covered two hundred floors by noon, another hundred in the early afternoon. He was sweating now, but none of the stragglers on the staircase looked like they cared.

He arrived at a long balcony and found a gate blocking his path, an iron grillwork across the stairway. The lock was sturdy and resisted all of Will's attempts to pick it. Will resorted to attacking the bolts holding the grill together, shaking the metal and cursing as his wrench slipped from the bolt and slashed his knuckles.

"Use your socket set," someone said.

Will looked up to see his father standing not ten meters away.

He looked tired. His hair was wild, and a scraggly beard spotted his face. There were only a few tools in his belt. He had been traveling light.

"We met the Marcones a couple of weeks after you left," Dad said, walking forward. "Ryan's little sister started blabbing about how they'd seen you on a stairway headed up while the father was changing out a set of door locks. Mr. Marcone shut her up quick and apologized, said she probably just saw someone that looked like you. I said sure, that you were probably already cranking out chickens and green beans." Dad puffed out his cheeks. "But I had a hunch you'd make me a liar, Will."

Will began to wrestle with the lock again, desperately feeling for the tumblers while keeping his gaze on his advancing father. "I'm going up, Dad. And I'm not going to stop."

"That's where you're wrong. I'm here to make sure you do your duty and go back down again. One, as your father. And two, as a Handyman. I know you haven't already forgotten that duty."

"You don't understand, Dad. This has nothing to do with being a Handyman."

Dad was close now. "Come away from there," he said. "You don't know how to pick a lock."

"You showed me, once," Will said. "I was only a little-"

His father lunged from two meters away. Will leapt aside a split second before his father's hands crashed into the grill.

Though Will could easily outdistance his father down the long corridors, Dad called out for help, invoking the name of Handyman to implore passersby to block Will's path. A fleet-footed Messenger in fire-red coveralls caught up from behind, but Will fought free from the slender man's grasp and tore off into a side passageway. Footsteps rang out behind him.

Will ducked left and right, opened doors and ducked through suites of rooms occupied by surprised tenants. Once he passed a stairwell, heard the thunder of steps, looked up to see his father only a meter away. Dad reached out for him; Will ducked away. He felt fingertips brush his side, but they did not grab hold. One of his wrenches clattered to the floor.

Will ran full-out for minutes on end, and his strength began to wane. The corridors echoed more and more with the shouts of those trying to track him down.

He ducked into a narrow passageway, gasping for air. Beside him was a service elevator, the kind the wealthy often used to transport their belongings from one floor to the next.

As Will stood with his hands on his knees, a motor began to whir somewhere, and relays clacked. The elevator was moving.

He tried activating the door control-no response. In a twinkling, the cover plate was off, and he was twisting wires the way he had seen his father do. Someone ran by-had they seen him? Will forced himself to keep working.

The door whispered up, letting a cold blast of air in from the shaft. Will peered in with a flashlight from his belt. A mass of silver cables like tentacles writhed inside. One close by was traveling up. Flash held in his mouth, Will slithered through the opening and grabbed the cable, holding tight against its greasy coating.

He kicked the door shut with his foot. His flashlight slipped from his teeth, and for a split second he saw a dizzying drop below him. He closed his eyes, but he never heard the flashlight hit bottom.

And so he was whisked upward through the pitch black, like a tiny insect in the towering shaft.

Will fashioned a foot brace which could be lashed to the cable to take the strain off his hands, and traveled by elevator for many thousands of floors after that. He got off only to eat and sleep. His clothes were greasy and he was dirty as well, but he did not stop to wash.

After a month or so, the House began to change. Not to another style or to more Spartan quarters, but dustier, emptier. More frequent were the unattended kitchens, in which Will was obliged to pull old cans of vegetables or meat off the shelves and pry the tops open with his utility knife. Sometimes what was inside the can was black and stinking, and sometimes there was no electricity with which to cook. He went hungry a great deal.

Other people were few and far between. More than one sat slumped against the wall, spotted hands clutching bottles in brown paper bags, watching Will go past with empty eyes.

There were signs of a higher level of habitation. Many of the rooms Will passed, even those far from staircases, had obviously been lived in once. Beds were unmade, toiletries were scattered in the bathrooms. Strange children's toys with glowing glass eyes and wires sticking from inside littered the floor. There were Play-boxes in the common rooms, but of a different model than the ones Will had seen. Some had rows of square buttons arranged underneath, with a letter of the alphabet printed on each one. There was a tank in one room, inside which danced the garishly colored image of a young ballerina. "Like a ghost," Will said, shuddering as he passed his hand through the image.

Finally the people disappeared completely. Will's footsteps alone broke the silence, tracking through centimeter-thick dust.

At the last well-stocked kitchen, Will emptied the clothes from his suitcase and filled it with food. When that ran out, he knew, he would have to turn back.

The tiny food rations made him weak, light-headed. He leaned against the wall to rest one morning, and felt his head strike something.

There was a picture on the wall. Will brushed the dust from the glass with his hand and squinted in the dim light.

It was, in a way, much like the pictures Ryan had shown him. There were great fields of the broccoli-stalks as before, but beyond those great peaks of some gray material rose, streaked here and there with white. Above the peaks was a field of an electric blue color, a color Will had never seen in the House.

"This must be Heaven," Will said.

"I have been to the mountaintop," said a voice from nearby. Will turned to see an old man with gray hair down to his waist, dressed in a robe stitched together from the remains of old sheets and shirts. He was filthy, with fingernails like wood files.

"I have breathed in the air that girdles the world," the man said. "I have taken in the scent of a thousand pines and held it in my mechanical lungs."

"What are you talking about?" Will said, backing away a step. "Who are you?"

"I have walked to the horizon," the man said. "I walked to the edge of the world and gazed over into Hell. But when I fell, it was up. Up, don't you see?"

"I don't know what you're talking about. Stay away from me."

"I fell!" The man leapt forward with catlike quickness for a body so decrepit, and shook Will by the shoulders. "I fell from the edge of the world into the bowl of the sky, and swam among the stars, where my chest ached for air, and the sun's light put out my eyes."

Will cried out as the man's long fingernails bit into his flesh. "I don't know what any of this means. Get away from me!" He tore at the man's hands, and for an instant saw, through a ragged break in the leathery skin, wires, silver wires wrapped around bones of dull steel. He screamed, broke free and ran blindly.

"But I am afraid of the grass!" the man cried, pursuing. "I am afraid of the grass that thinks, and the trees that feel, and the beasts of three heads that prowl for flesh! Help me! Help me! Help me!

"I want to go home!"

Will ran for a long time before the footsteps disappeared. He moved up another three floors, and came to a door.

It was at the top of a flight of stairs at the end of a long, high room, empty save for a few broken boards scattered on the floor. Around its edges poured a brilliant light, not sickly yellow like the lights in the House, but pure white. Will, accustomed to the dimness of burned-out bulbs, was obliged to shade his eyes with his hand.

It was cool in the room, like the inside of a refrigerator. Will had never known an entire room to be anything other than twenty degrees, and shivered a little.

A noise came from the door, and curls of dust blew up around its base. Will stopped for a moment, suspicious. In a moment, though, a wave of air hit him, and he realized that the air in the room was moving, under what strange force he could not guess.

He trudged forward. Though the dust was thick here, there were tracks to be seen. Most led toward the door-only one or two sets pointed away.

He climbed the stairs, stood looking at the door. After all the doors he had seen, he still could not say he had ever encountered one quite like this. It was wooden, with strange whorls and illegible graffiti gouged into its flaking green paint. A shade covered the upper portion of the door, with a little ring hanging from a string at the bottom end. Behind the shade glowed the same brilliant light that poured in around the jamb. Whatever room lay beyond, Will decided, it was well lit.

He knelt to take a pinch of the dust and rub it between thumb and forefinger. It was not dust at all, he saw, but a coarser, thicker grain, one that was rough to his skin. This, too, was coming from outside.

The doorknob was steel, blackened with age. Will rose to his feet, reached out to it with a trembling hand.

Locked.

Will reached for the small pick on his belt. As he did so, he heard footsteps behind him again. "Damn," he whispered. The crazy man had found him. Will attacked the lock, but the mechanisms were old and coated with grit.

The steps came on steadily. They reached the room, stopped, came inside. Will shut his eyes but did not turn around, not wanting to face those wild gray eyes peering out from behind the shaggy beard.

"Will," his father said.

Will turned around then. His father had shaved since the last time they'd met, and somewhere had managed to find a clean shirt. The old man's hair was different, too. It had gone stark white.

"How?" Will breathed. "How did you keep up with me?"

Dad held up a sliver of metal; there was a glint of gold in the bright white light.

"A key," Will said. "Forging an elevator key is thirty lashes."

"Come back, Will," Dad said. "We can forget about this whole thing if you'll just come back. No one else needs to know."

"What's out there, Dad?" Will said, motioning toward the door with his head.

"I-I don't know."

Will nodded. "I believe you."

"Don't do this to yourself, Will." Dad began walking forward, kicking up curlicues of dust with his boots. "You could have a good life, an easy life, if you'd just come back with me."

Will's hands flurried at the lock. "I know."

"Your mother worked so hard at raising you. She could have been a Rester, with her problem, and lived easy, but she wanted her children to have a mother."

"You won't make me feel guilty," Will said. He felt one tumbler slip into place, then another. "Did you think this was something I just thought of the night before my Turnaround?"

Dad was at the bottom of the steps now. "Come down, Will." A sad smile crossed his lips. "You know you don't know how to pick a lock." He lifted his foot to the first step, and at that moment a loud click came from the door.

Both men froze.

Without taking his eyes from his father's face, Will twisted the knob. The door whispered open a centimeter. A streak of light blazed on his father's face, lighting the wrinkles and crow's feet and fading hair.

"Don't do this, Will. You'll die out there! No one could survive beyond the House."

"You just said you didn't know what was out there." Will opened the door wide, yet still did not turn around; what if the sight beyond was enough to put doubt in his heart? The light fell full upon his father now, making the old man's horror all the more plain.

"I love you, Will," Dad said. "Do you hear what I'm saying to you? I love you."