It wasn’t long before Mug started to get on Minus’s nerves. That gray scarecrow of a form, plodding endlessly from one end of the lodge to the other, occasionally stopping by the back door to smoke a cigarette. Even through the night, he struggled around, never sleeping. They had few conversations. Once they talked about how cold the wind was, and another time, after Minus had broken into the whiskey, he tried to explain to Mug the difference between objective and subjective reality. It was like talking to slate. Mug simply walked away, returning to his pointless rounds.
Later, over a piece of cheese and more whiskey, Minus confided to Axis, “Mug’s a real pain in the ass.”
“The right weight from that wheel of Gouda you have stashed away will make Bill Mug disappear,” said the rat. “I’ll need to contract a sizeable army to bring him down.”
“No, no,” said Minus. “I mean, come on, I have to show some restraint.”
“As you wish,” said Axis, contemplating the wheel of cheese.
“I have other work for you,” whispered Minus.
The rat crawled closer across the white linen table cloth and sat on the edge of the cheese plate. He lifted an errant crumb, bit into it and said, “Tell me.”
“That town where they put us on trial. I’m going to do them a favor. You must return to that place with your mercenaries, and I want you to bite each of the human inhabitants just once. You must puncture the flesh so that the magic can drain out, and the delusion can seep into the atmosphere and become a harmless gas. I want them all to be facing cold hard reality before the first snow.”
“What will you pay?” asked Axis.
“The entire wheel of Gouda.”
“Deal,” said the rat and they shook on it, Minus using only his thumb and forefinger. Axis left that very evening to martial his forces for the raid. Also that very evening, Minus, unable to sleep for Mug’s pacing, noticed that the lights were flickering in unison with the howling of the wind. He went into a spare bedroom they weren’t using to look for an extra oil lamp should the electricity go out. He found one there and also a stack of board games and a small book shelf filled with mildewed paperbacks.
Minus scanned the titles, and the last book on the bottommost shelf was a novel, Night and Day by Martin Aswidth. He laughed as he pulled it off the shelf. The cover showed two faces side by side, very simply drawn. The eyes were open on one face and closed on the other. The awake face was rendered in white on a black background and the sleeping face in black on a white background. On the back cover there was a photo of Aswidth, his arms folded, his head held high, his eyes gazing into the distance. “This ought to be good,” said Minus and slipped it into his back pocket.
He poured himself a whiskey, lit a fire in the den, and sat down with the book in hand. As he opened to the first page and started reading, a chill came into the air. A moment later, Mug passed through like a sleepwalker. His monumental lack of purpose could not be ignored. Minus closed the book, stared into the flames, and wondered how to get rid of him. The fire told him to empty his glass.
Mug lurched by three times, and on the fourth pass, Minus stopped him in his tracks by saying, “Mug, I’ve got a job for you.”
“Now we’re talking,” grumbled Mug and approached his employer.
Minus held the copy of Night and Day out to Mug and said, “I want you to read this novel in the next three hours, and then I want you to take a rifle, and whatever other provisions you think you’ll need, and strike out into the world, hunting for the very spirit of this book. When you find it, I want you to shoot it and bring it to me.”
Mug stood still, staring.
“Do you get it?” yelled Minus, and in that shout he released a spell that reached into Mug and stole back the one drop of self-delusion he’d long afforded his employee.
Mug said, “Yeah, okay.” He took the book, and paced away, opening to the first page. The sorcerer lifted his glass, and looked at the fire through the last drop of Mug’s self-delusion. The fire told him to empty his glass, so he did.
By that night, Bill Mug had left on his quest. Good riddance, thought Minus and smiled when he noticed the air smelled like snow. He’d heard on the radio a blizzard was coming. It wasn’t until the next morning when he went to the pantry for eggs that the sorcerer realized his mistake. There was no food left and Mug had taken the car.
It came to him instantly that he should never have taken Mug’s last drop. He pictured his gray employee, devoid of self-delusion, in the yellow sports car: top down, speeding across the continent with one hand on the steering wheel and the rifle in the other. “God help the spirit of Night and Day,” said Minus. And that’s when it began to snow.
It snowed hard and constant, the drifts slowly burying the lodge, and Minus grew ravenously hungry.
Not until the dark afternoon of the second day did he remember the wheel of Gouda. He’d kept it separate from the other provisions, in a locked trunk in his room. Even as he feverishly dialed the lock’s combination, he pictured what might happen when Axis returned and demanded payment. He thought of the rats taking Aswidth’s maid out through the mouse hole and shuddered, but by then he’d already opened the trunk, taken the cheese from its burlap sack, and bitten through the outer wax of the wheel.
Surely the rat will understand, he thought each time he sliced the golden cheese. “Just a touch to keep body and soul together. Who could argue with it?” he’d say aloud and then listen long and hard to the howling of the wind. The snow rose, the days passed, the wheel, slice by slice, rolled into his stomach. All that Gouda and the loneliness and the dark days, the windows all covered by drifts, made Minus simple. He’d sit for hours before the fireplace, staring until it was dark and cold, his mind in an uproar from the effects of that indigestible drop of self-delusion.
He thought of Mrs. Aswidth, who’d hired him to relieve Martin of some of his “bullshit,” as she put it. She was a statuesque, dark haired woman with a small chin. She wore tremendously high heels and met him for lunch at an egg and waffle place in the low-rent district.
“Do you want him to see reality or your reality?" asked Minus.
“He couldn’t see reality if it sat on his face,” she said. “Just do him.”
Minus nodded. And woke later, shivering in the dark, wrapped in a blanket in the chair before the fireplace. His mind slipped and swirled into possible plots for Aswidth’s Night and Day. He saw space travel, a story of an alien world, a giant cave filled with cryogenic cocoons, and a dangerous creature at the mouth of that cave. He imagined deeply into this scenario — saw the star-studded black velvet of space, imagined a caretaker of the cocoons falling in love with one of the frozen sleepers, gazing on her face through an icy window — until Gouda cravings commanded him to rise.
On the day after he ate the last half sliver of cheese, he looked up and noticed he was standing in a beam of sunlight coming through the front window of the lodge. He saw trees and grass outside, and upon seeing them, the howling of the wind abruptly disappeared from between his ears. He opened the door and breathed deeply, a warm breeze powdered with the scent of blossoms. He went to his room and dressed in one of his best Skip Minus get-ups, checkered slacks and a mohair cardigan, with Oxford loafers. Later that afternoon, as he sipped the last of the whiskey, sitting before the fireplace, he heard what at first he believed to be a hard rain. He looked to the window but the sun still shone.