The Wilful Eye Read Free Page A

alight, reddish – at the far end of him, praise God. Oh, he was enormous! His tail twitched on the floor in front of me, and the sparse grey fur on it sprouted higher than my waist. He lifted his head – bigger than the whole house my family lived in, it was. He looked down at me over the scabby ridges of his rib-cage. Vermin hopped in the beams of his red eyes. His whole starveling face crinkled in a grin. With a gust of butchery breath he was up on his spindly shanks. He lowered his head to me full of lights and teeth, tightening the air with his growl.
    A farther dog woke with a bark, and a yet farther one. They set this one off, and I only just got the apron up in time, between me and the noise and the snapping teeth. That silenced him. His long claws skittered on the chamber’s stone floor. He paced, and turned and paced again, growling deep and constantly. His lip was caught high on his teeth; his red eyes glared and churned. The hackles stuck up like teeth along his back.
    Turning my face aside I forced myself and the apron forward at him. Oh, look – an archway there, just as the old woman said. White light from the next chamber jumped and swerved in it.
    The dog’s red eyes were as big as those discs the bosses carry their movies on. They looked blind, but he saw me, he saw me; I felt his gaze on me, the way you feel a sniper’s, in your spine – and his ill-will, only just held back. I pushed the cloth at his nostrils. Rotten-sour breath gusted underneath at me.
    But he shrank as the old woman had told me he would, nose and paws and the rest of him; his eyes shone brighter, narrowing to torch-beams. Now I was wrapping not much more than a pup, and a miserable wreck he was, hardly any fur, and his skin all sores and scratches.
    I picked him up and carried him to the white-flashing archway, kicking aside coins; they were scattered all over the floor, and heaped up against the red-lit walls. Among them lay bones of dog, bird, sheep, and some of person – old bones, well gnawed, and not a scrap of meat on any of them.
    I stepped under the archway and dropped the mangy dog back into his room. He exploded out of himself, into himself, horribly huge and sudden, hating me for what I’d done. But I was safe here; that old witch had known what she was talking about. I turned and pushed the apron at the next dog.
    He was a mess of white light, white teeth, snapping madly at the other opening. He smelled of clean hot metal. He shrank to almost an ordinary fighting dog, lean, smooth-haired, strong, with jaws that could break your leg-bone if he took you. His eyes were still magic, though, glaring blind, bulging white. His heavy paws, scrabbling, pushed paper-scraps forward; he cringed in the storm of paper he’d stirred up when he’d been a giant and flinging himself about. As I wrapped him, some of the papers settled near his head: American dollars. Big dollars, three-numbered. Oh these, these I could carry, these I could use.
    For now, though, I lifted the dog. Much heavier he was, than the starving one. I slipped and slid across the drifts of money to the next archway. Beyond it the third dog raged at me, a barking firestorm. I threw the white dog back behind me, then raised the apron and stepped up to the orange glare, shouting at the flame-dog to settle; I couldn’t even hear my own voice.
    He shrank in size, but not in power or strangeness. His coat seethed about him, thick with waving gold wires; his tongue was a sprout of fire and white-hot arrow-tips lined his jaws. His eyes, half-exploded from his head, were two ponds of lava, rimmed with the flame pouring from their sockets – clearly they could not see, but my bowels knew he was there behind them, waiting for his chance to cool his teeth in me, to set me alight.
    I wrapped my magic cloth around him, picked him up and shone his eye-light about. The scrabbles and shouting from the