Herbert's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Herbert had maybe one winter left, and no one to teach. His hands shook now. His breath rattled. The dark craft he had spent sixty years learning would die inside him unless he found a child brave enough to learn it. But no child came. No child ever came. His tower stood at the edge of town, black stone cracked from top to base. At its peak floated a burning eye, wide and red, watching everything below. Parents used it to scare their children quiet. Behave, or the old man in the tower will take you. So the children stayed away, and the door stayed shut, and Herbert grew older with every empty day. He stood at his window and watched a boy on the road below. The boy stared up at the fiery eye, then ran. Herbert's chest ached. Time was thin. He needed a different lure than knocking or calling. Both had failed for years. He went to the pit beneath the tower where he kept his made things. In the murky water floated a shark with five snarling heads, stitched from death and old magic. On the stone lay a green cactus with a mouth full of teeth, snapping at nothing. Herbert had built them all. He had never shown them to a soul. An idea took hold. Children did not fear what made them laugh. They feared only the eye and the story. So Herbert dragged the cactus into a wheeled cart. He carried it down the long stairs, resting twice, coughing hard. He set it in the sunlight outside his door, in full view of the road. He wound a small key in its base. The cactus opened its wide mouth and sang a croaking, silly tune. Its teeth clacked in time. It rocked side to side like a drunk man dancing. Herbert hid behind the door and waited. The first child stopped on the road. Then two more. They pointed. They laughed. One crept closer, then closer still, until she stood an arm's length from the singing cactus. She reached out and touched a tooth. "Did you make this?" she asked the shadow behind the door. Herbert stepped into the light. The girl did not run. She looked at his shaking hands, then back at the cactus. "Can you teach me?" she said. His heart pounded. For sixty years, no one had asked. "Yes," he said. "Come inside." But as the girl crossed his threshold, a scream rose from the road. A woman ran toward the tower, face white with terror. She had seen her daughter walk into the scary old man's door. She was already shouting for the others to come. Herbert had drawn a child close at last. Now the whole town was coming for him.