The Gray House

“I’d hang there. And then fall down. Hang for a while and crash.”

“What if you were to be hung like that daily?”

It dawned on me a little.

“Are you saying I’d hang for a bit longer every day?”

“Good job! Smart boy.”

Black bit on the pencil again and went back to his notebook.

“But I’d only need to fall down once, and then there wouldn’t be anyone to hang anymore. I’m not a cat, after all.”

“That’s exactly what Noble thought. Once upon a time.”

Noble threw away the magazine and stared at Black. It was a withering stare.

“How about enough?” he said.

I realized with a shudder that the picture Black drew for me was, like trashy movies liked to point out in the credits, based on actual events.

“But that’s impossible,” I said. “That’s torture!”

“And that’s what Noble used to think too. He’s still touchy about the subject, as you can see.”

“I thought I asked you to shut the hell up.”

Noble’s look would have been quite enough for me to shut up immediately if I’d been in Black’s place. But I wasn’t him. He was him.

“Chill, will you,” he said to Noble. “Don’t ruin your complexion.”

What happened next almost made me believe half the tales told the night before.

Noble swept to the edge of the bed. From there he probably got to the floor, but I wasn’t sure. Black managed to sit up. And even to take off the glasses. But when he stood up he already had Noble hanging on his shoulders. Then he was trying to peel off Noble while Noble was trying to throttle his opponent. It was a grisly sight.

The snarling figure made up of two figures stumbled awkwardly around on the floor, bumped into furniture, upended the nightstand, and crashed on the bed, burying a screaming Jackal.

Then they rolled over to my side. I pressed farther into the bars of the headboard, petrified. Two faces, contorted . . . breathing heavily . . . saliva . . . so close. Too close. Tabaqui went on wailing. One more roll, I thought with resignation, and it’s good-bye Smoker. They’d break every bone in my body.

They didn’t roll. Black managed to shake off Noble and spring up on the bed. His boots shuffled on the covers under my nose, then he jumped off and I finally could breathe easier.

It was unclear who emerged victorious. Noble, curled up in a ball by the bars, looked lousy. Black, wiping blood off his face and neck with the bottom of his shirt, wasn’t much better. Judging by that last throw, he’d won. But judging by the speed of his retreat from the bed, he wasn’t quite sure that he had.

Not-quite-crushed Tabaqui fared best of all. He was sitting on two pillows and cursing so elaborately that it immediately put my mind at ease regarding him.

“You should be exterminated, you and your ilk,” Black said when Tabaqui paused for a moment. “Like rabid dogs.”

“Bastard!” Noble answered. “Pigface!”

Black spat out a broken tooth into his hand. Studied it for a while, dropped it, and made for the door.

A multitude of pill bottles had tumbled out of the overturned nightstand. Black slipped on one of them just as he was going out and almost fell. This slightly cheered up Noble. Very slightly.

When Sphinx, Alexander, and Blind came back, it was their turn to roll around on the pill bottles. Threading his way between them, Humpback deposited Tubby in his pen and said that we obviously hadn’t been bored.

“Bored?” Tabaqui exclaimed. “You guys completely missed the best thing ever! It was epic, if I say so myself! The battle of Hector and Achilles! I’ll be damned!”

Sphinx examined the trashed bed strewn with broken glass, then looked at Noble and said that he could definitely observe the battlefield and the body of Hector left on it, but couldn’t quite determine the whereabouts of Achilles.

“And that’s how it’s going to be for a while,” Tabaqui explained. “He’s somewhere out there. Quenching gushers of blood.”

“Got it,” Sphinx sighed. “We’ll keep that in mind.” He offloaded Nanette to the windowsill. “Good thing we hadn’t left the bird with you.”

The next hour I spent crawling under the beds, collecting the bottles and vials. Tabaqui pretended to help me. His fervor regarding the fight was wearing really thin. In my opinion, Noble and Black resembled animals more than heroes of antiquity. The whole deal was disgusting.

“Let me tell you, dearest, the heroes of antiquity were not much better,” Jackal said. “Worse, in fact,” he added thoughtfully, as if refreshing Homer in his mind.

I decided to crawl away before he started to quote his favorite passages from the Iliad. Because I had a sneaking suspicion about which ones would turn out to be among the favorites.

After we tidied up the room, Blind palpated Noble and declared that he had a cracked rib.

The Sepulcher was out of the question. Noble allowed himself to be swaddled in elastic bandages and sat hugging a pillow, pissed off as he could be. He informed us that the bandage was restricting his airflow, while the rib prevented him from lying down, and that he was now doomed to sleepless nights of oxygen deprivation.