Gob fell to his knees before the engine, threw out his arms, and gazed into the light, crying out what seemed to Will to be the only appropriate magic words. “Come back!” he shouted, again and again, till he was hoarse from it. “Come back, Tomo. Come back and be alive.” Will thought he saw something rising from the bowl, a shadow that grew in the middle of the light. It got bigger and bigger — it was definitely the shape of a boy, who raised his hands up to press against a negative, and in doing so, cracked it. The light went out suddenly, shattering like a rocket’s burst into tiny sparks that dwindled and were gone. Cables fell out from their sockets and wove like cobras, throwing sparks and hissing before they fell dead to the floor. Then it was utterly dark in the room.
The noise of the bowl hung a moment longer in the air and then it, too, was gone. Finally, the bowl fell from the top of the machine, and something landed in front of Gob with a huff. The bowl rolled away in the darkness and rang once when it hit a battery. Will held his breath and heard the noise of another person — it was certainly not Gob — breathing in the dark. He groped in front of him, but felt nothing except the glass battery jars. They were so cold they burned his skin.
“Hello?” Will said tentatively.
“Happy birthday,” came the voice, lilting and lisping, the voice of a child.
Will scrambled back to the wall and turned up the gaselier. There was a boy on the floor before Gob. He looked to be about five years old, had long curly brown hair and shining black eyes, and he was covered in blood, great smears of it against very pale flesh that striped him like a barber’s pole. The boy stood up, shading his eyes from the light, and stared defiantly at Gob, who stared back incredulously and said, “You are not my brother.”
“My name is Pickie Beecher,” the boy said. “I come before.”
It fell to Will to clothe and feed the boy. Gob, in the first few days after the birth, had retreated to his room, where he sat on his haunches in the stone circle and rocked back and forth, humming. He wouldn’t speak to Will, or to the boy. Spirits clustered around him, looking concerned, and around the boy, on whom they doted silently. Pickie Beecher mostly ignored them, though sometimes he might seem to follow one in particular with his eyes.
Will wasn’t sure what to do with the boy, who ran around the workshop, naked and bloody, looking at the machine and aping Gob’s words. “It is not my brother,” he said over and over. Will took him to the kitchen, because it seemed sensible to feed him. Pickie Beecher was not interested in vegetables, or even in cakes or pies. He liked red meat. Gob kept his larder very well stocked, though he generally did not eat very much or very often. There were steaks in the icebox. When Pickie Beecher saw them, he grabbed them up and rubbed them like kittens against his cheek. Then he ran under a table and ate them up in gobbling bites. “Do you like that?” Will said.
“My name is Pickie Beecher,” was the reply. “I come before.”
Pickie wanted jewels. “For my brother,” he said. Will brought him to Stewart’s to get outfitted for clothes. The pear-shaped clerk tried to be helpful, but seemed to have difficulty remembering that Pickie Beecher was there. “I wish to purchase clothing for the boy,” Will told him.
“Very well,” said the clerk. “For which boy?”
“This one,” Will said, pointing squarely at Pickie Beecher.
“Of course!” The clerk took a little step back, and quivered a little, as if suppressing an urge to flee. Will developed a theory: people sensed in Pickie Beecher something so unnatural and abominable that they were inclined to pretend he was not there at all, and once, reluctantly, they did notice him, he activated an instinct to run away. Will learned that Pickie Beecher could veil that horrible quality, but he let it shine forth when he was irritated.
The clerk was very gracious. He apologized profusely whenever he could not find the boy who was standing directly next to him, and he brought out all sorts of adorable costumes — Zouave jackets and Garibaldis and knickerbockers — each one more heavily bedecked with pom-pom or froufrou than the last, as if he thought the innocence of the outfit could smother the unease generated by its wearer.
Pickie Beecher was patient. He did not squirm while he was being measured, or cry with boredom, as another child might have. He only repeated his calm request for jewels, for his brother.
“You haven’t got a brother,” Will told him. “You are unique.”
“I come before,” said Pickie Beecher. “My brother comes after. But he must have jewels for his person.” He spoke very softly, and watched intently the omnipresent cash boys ferrying money from the clerks to the cashiers.
“Would you like to play with those boys?” Will asked.
“No,” said Pickie Beecher. The clerk returned with another silly ready-made outfit, a pilot’s suit with a matching cap.
“That’ll do,” Will said, because he was desperate to find something for the boy to wear besides the suit of Gob’s he’d cut down very crudely to fit him. The pilot’s suit was of dark blue wool, with shining black buttons that looked very much like Pickie Beecher’s eyes. Will told him he looked handsome. Pickie Beecher held his cap upside down in his hands and stared into it, but said nothing. Will turned away from him to order a wardrobe from the clerk, a dozen suits of the sort he and Gob wore, sack coats and pants of black wool, with gray vests, stiff white cotton shirts, and three dozen shirt collars, because he was certain that the neck of any boy, even one born out of a silver bowl, would be perpetually filthy. He would go through collars like water. Except Pickie Beecher did not care for water. When Will had tried to bathe him, Pickie Beecher leaped out of the tub and sat down on the floor, where he cleaned himself with his own tongue. When Will tried to cut his hair, the boy had leaped away with a shriek, and blood had oozed from the cut strands.
Socks and underthings, three pairs of black shoes, fifteen undersized handkerchiefs, and a series of hats of varying heights, from stovepipe to porkpie, completed his order. They were all very good quality, better than Will’s clothes. It was Gob’s money he was spending. The clerk swore to have it all delivered to the house within the week.
“Do you hear, Pickie?” Will said. “You won’t have to wear that for too long.” He turned back to where he had left the boy staring into his cap, but he wasn’t there. “Pickie?” he said. It occurred to him then that he could flee from the store, and possibly escape forever from the boy. It was useless to deny that he felt revulsion towards the little fellow, that he did not understand him, that he was frightened by him. But he also felt, already, a peculiar affection for him.