Fade by Robert Cormier
He was lucky the nuns found the Ma who brought him up even if her blood was different from his. She was small and sweet and told him stories and sang him songs in her soft lilt of a voice, songs about Ireland across the sea and green fields and the little people and the house where she was born. She crooned to him about the Pa that he could not remember, the one she had loved, and how happy they were when they took Ozzie home for the first time. That was his second Pa, not the fake and fraud and not the Pa of his blood, whoever he was. This second Pa, the one his Ma loved, was tall and handsome and could make miracles on paper, she said. He could draw a few lines and, lo, there would be a rabbit or a fawn or one of the little people. He was too good to go on living, she said. Too beautiful for this world. He had laughter on his lips and Christmas in his eyes. And it was Christmas when he died. People should not die at Christmastime but his good Pa did, a freak accident, they said, killed by falling wires in the fierce winter storm as he came home with presents for Ozzie in his arms. All night long they cried, Ozzie and his Ma, until Ozzie fell asleep as cold dawn touched the windows.
His Ma took sick after the good Pa died. She was frail to begin with, a whisper of a girl, hardly a woman at all. And that was when old man Slater came along. Not really old, maybe, but not young anymore. A woodworker when he worked, the smell of sawdust surrounding him, and it seemed he even had sawdust in his eyes, his pupils dark with specks in them like sawdust. He gave Ozzie his last name and made it legal and proper, Oscar Slater. Your name is Slater and be proud of it, the new Pa told him. And Ozzie tried to be proud until this Pa began to give him slappings and cuffs behind the ears and finally found his nose. What happened to turn the new Pa into a monster like that? Ozzie didn't know and would never find out. In fact, he could not, after a while, remember when this fraud of a Pa was not a monster, beating up on him and his Ma.
And then she died. In that house on Bowker Street.
She lay white and brief in the coffin and Ozzie knelt there in the night, the candles burning low, and he made an attempt to cry, wanted to cry, needed to cry for his mother, to weep for the terrible thing her life had been and he could not, could not cry. And hated the fraud of a Pa even more now, hated him worse than ever because the fraud had taken away his ability to cry, had forced him to stop crying and now he could not summon tears for his Ma, could not honor her with his tears. Sniveling instead, his nose leaking as he leaned his aching head against the coffin, he vowed his revenge.
I will kill you someday, you fraud and fake, Ozzie vowed, would kill him not only for the blows to the nose and the other beatings but most of all for what he did to Ma, for driving her finally out of the house to the terrible tenement on Bowker Street, the house the kids hooted at and pointed fingers at and threw stones against. Your Pa is poor and your Ma is a whore. Yes, he would kill the others too. One by one. Starting with the Bull and Miss Ball. Then, Dennis O'Shea with his orange hair and sharp tongue who made up the songs and chants. Clever Dennis O'Shea, who loved to trip kids walking up the aisle and then putting on his innocent face. The girls were no better. Fiona Finley, who walked in clouds of perfume, in her fancy dresses and shoes with heels and nylon stockings and who wrinkled her nose when he came near her as if she smelled something bad. And Alice Robillard, who invited everybody in the class to her birthday party, everybody except Ozzie, that is.
Living in the convent spared him the experience of the town. Where he always had to avoid people's eyes, duck down alleys, take shortcuts. He was ugly, of course, and mean. Kicked cats, chased dogs before they chased him. Swore at people who saw him as the son of a brute, with a terrible nose and a mother they said was a whore when she wasn't. He got back at them by spitting at them, stealing from them, sneaking stuff out of stores. After a while they wouldn't let him go into the stores unless he showed them his money first. Kelcey's Grocery and Dempsey's Drug Store and the five-and-ten banished him from their places forever. Before that, Kelcey hired him to sweep up and stock the shelves but always yelling at him to stop his sniveling. “It's not appetizing to the customers,” Kelcey said. That did it. I'll show you appetizing, he thought as he sneaked nine Baby Ruths, his favorite candy bar, into his jacket. Which was a foolish thing to do, of course, but the only way he could take his revenge at the moment, stealing from Kelcey and taking something that was good to eat. But the Baby Ruths bulged in his jacket and Kelcey grabbed him by the collar and the candy bars spilled to the floor in front of the customers— Calafano the barber and Mrs. Spritzer with her stuck-up airs because her husband was a selectman—and he stood there in his humiliation, caught and sniveling. Vowing revenge.
His only friend in town was old man Pinder, who drank too much and reeled down the sidewalk, bumping into things and falling down. Old man Pinder was the oldest person he knew. He kept busy doing odd jobs for the store owners, taking out the rubbish, sweeping sidewalks, sleeping sometimes in the alley in the back of the five-and-ten if he was too drunk or weary to make it home.
Home was the cellar of the rooming house where the whores lived, where his mother lived after she left the tenement, although she wasn't a whore. “Your mother, lad, was a real lady,” the old man told him one time. “She drank like a fish but she was a lady through and through.” Sometimes, late at night, before he went to live with the nuns in the convent and didn't want to risk going home and meeting the wrath of the fake and the fraud who was not his Pa, he would sleep next to old man Pinder in the alley, back to back, drawing a bit of warmth from him. The old man always wore several sweaters and jackets and at least two overcoats and he would drape one of the coats around Ozzie's shoulders and they would sleep cozy in the chill of the night until they awakened at dawn as Reap, the cop, kicked their feet while stray dogs barked at them. He and the old man would struggle up and away from the alley, all aches and shivers.
One night when he stole into town from the convent, he saw the old man, bleary-eyed from drink, leaning against a parking meter. “You're better off out there with the nuns,” the old man said, shaking with the drink and the cold, smelling terrible.
So he settled in the ways of the convent, sleeping on the cot in the small room no bigger than a closet off the kitchen. The nuns fed him their food from the table, plain stuff, tasteless, but he swallowed it to fill the emptiness in his stomach. He performed chores for them, scrubbed floors and walls. Sister Anunciata sang songs as she did her own chores and he liked the sound of her voice, although it wavered and cracked sometimes, making him chuckle. No one beat him up in the convent. He felt safe here away from school.
After his Ma died, the kids did not sing about her anymore but started in on his nose. His curse of a nose. His nose with the pimples and the broken veins under the skin so that it looked like a battered and bruised strawberry. When the unholy choir at school stopped chanting about his mother, they started on the nose. Faucet nose, faucet nose, always leaking like a hose. Dennis O'Shea and more of his clever words. But by that time he was expert at pretending he did not hear the voices. And the Bull had finally gotten tired of beating him up and let him alone, did not chase him anymore. He bided his time. Waiting.
Waiting for what?
He did not know.
But he knew that he was waiting for something to happen. Something incredible. Lying in his cot at night, he felt it in his bones, in his soul if he had a soul which Sister Anunciata insisted he had although he doubted it. Anyways, he knew deep inside of him that something was coming, something was about to happen.
Patient, marking time, enduring, he made up his lists. Just before falling to sleep at night, he made lists of those who would be the targets of his revenge when whatever he was waiting for came. That vicious fraud of a Pa was at the top of his list and then Bull Zimmer and the other kids at school, Dennis O'Shea and Alice Robillard. And something special for Miss Ball, who would finally know that he existed, all right. He entertained himself with images of blood and broken bones and screams of agony as he closed his eyes.
And, finally, it did.
e killed the old fraud first, of course, hammering the head of the Pa who was not his Pa and would certainly never be after that hammering was done with. Made like he was driving a spike home, hitting him square in the middle of the forehead again and again.
He killed the old fraud as he lay sleeping in the tenement where the three of them, his Ma and the fake who called himself his pa, had lived all those years. He'd heard that the fraud was back in town, back from where he didn't know and didn't care. First time the faker had shown his face in town since Ma had died. The return of the fraud and the faker had coincided with the incredible thing that had happened. Like an omen. What he had been waiting for all that time.
He had no name for it, the incredible thing. How could you name a thing like that? But then it did not require a name. It would require a name only if you spoke of it aloud. And he would never do that. Would never speak to anyone about it. How could he possibly speak about it?
* * *
It.
How it came.
Finally, after all his waiting.
He had awakened in the night, which was unusual because he always slept clear through until morning, without dreams, sleep being merely a blank period in his life, and he always woke up quickly at first light of day. That night, however, he had bolted from sleep in the middle of the night, in darkness.
His body felt strange, funny, light, chilled, a different kind of cold, an inside cold, as if a block of ice had melted in his stomach and was spreading through his body. He had a dim memory of pain quickly come and gone.
He snapped on the small lamp next to his bed.
And saw what he did not see.
He knew his arm had reached out to snap on the light. He also knew that his fingers had gripped the switch to turn it on. But as the light filled the room, making his eyes blink, he did not see his arm or his hand or his fingers. Crazy. He knew they were there, could feel them there, wiggled them, snapped two of them together and heard the sound of the snap. But he could not see his fingers.
He closed his eyes, lay back, reached out and turned off the light, listening to the small click of the switch. Lay in the dark, enduring the nightmare as he had endured so many things. He heard once that the real nightmare was the kind where you dreamed you were awake in your bed, in your room, lights on, believing it was real. And that's when the monsters came through the windows or the door.
Shivering, he reached out again and snapped on the light. Held his hand up but couldn't see his hand. Could see the room, the floor, the windows and the white curtain, the chair against the wall, but could not see himself. Threw back the covers with the hand he could not see, saw that the rest of him was not there either. His old faded pajamas that the nuns made him wear were gone too.
Disappeared.
Waved his arms and legs, thrashed around in the bed, saw the way the thin mattress sagged under his weight. Swung his legs over the side of the cot and sat up. At least, he figured he was sitting up, could only feel his feet kissing the cold boards of the floor. Shivered again with the cold but didn't mind the cold, really.
Panic filled him then. How do I get my body back? Was he doomed to stay this way forever?
Suddenly, he pressed forward, as if in answer to a force pulling him that way, like he was leaning against an invisible wall, the wall unseen, as his body was unseen. A sudden surge and the cold left him in a whoosh, his breath taken away, a sweep of pain and then he was back again, pain gone as fast as it came, his body, himself, visible again, hands and arms back, legs back, pajamas back, pajamas moist and clinging. He padded across the cold floor and looked in the mirror, saw that terrible strawberry of a nose, the small eyes, the pointed chin. He was here, all right. Never thought he would be glad to see that face again.
He waited in the room for a minute, now that the blood had stopped and the Pa who would never again be his Pa was still, more than still, had become a thing rather than a man. He waited, listened, straining his ears, heard nothing in the night. Looked at the bloody hammer dancing in the air, held by his gone right hand, the rest of him gone too.
“For you, Ma,” he whispered, wiping the hammer with the bedsheet. Then he tossed the hammer on the bed next to the legs of the thing who had been such a fraud and a fake.
The first one.
Smiled in the dark, smiled a smile no one could see, would never see. A smile filled with—what? Sweetness. More than that. Triumph, victory. It was the first time in his life as he swung the hammer and felt bone give under the blow, the first time he had known the power of revenge, the sweetness of giving back.
He wanted to linger here a while longer but dared not. He had been gone from the convent for almost an hour and must return again unseen, must slip through the corridors and the kitchen without making a noise, without making a sound because there was always someone awake there, all hours, and Sister Anunciata sometimes looked in on him.
“Good-bye, you bastard of a Pa that was never my Pa,” he said, looking at the bed again, letting the chuckle come out of him.
And then made off into the night.
As he cruised through the town, still gone, still disappeared, he laughed as he saw the damage.
Felt pride in the damage he saw. Nice, nice.
His creation, all of it.
They had boarded up the window of Kelcey's Grocery and he was waiting for Kelcey to replace it and then he would break it again as he had a week ago. That same night, he had also savaged the tires of three cars parked on Main Street, slashing with a butcher knife he had taken from the convent kitchen, getting a laugh out of that, a nun's knife doing damage that way. That first trip into town had been an experiment, to see what it was like to visit the place when he couldn't be seen.
The real test had been going to town in broad daylight when people were up and about, stores open, the cop Reap on the beat. By then he had practiced disappearing and coming back in the room at the convent. He had learned that practice does make perfect. He had made himself come and go, go and come, enduring that moment with no breath at all, then the brief stab of pain until he could do it all as easy as snapping his fingers. He never minded the cold. He had set off for downtown one day and made himself gone, unseen in the old alley. Then he ambled into Main Street, dodging between the people, heading for Kelcey's. The window still boarded up. Entered the store and walked down the aisles. Old Kelcey at the cash register, looking bossy as ever. He knocked over a display of canned corn chowder that had been all nice and neat in a pyramid the way Kelcey liked things done. Kelcey heard the racket and came running, put on the brakes when he saw the cans capsized and tumbling all over the floor. And while Kelcey was on his knees picking up the cans, Ozzie tipped over the island holding all the boxed cakes and other pastries in the next aisle. Bang, down they went, and he heard Kelcey call out: “What the hell …” Ozzie had to press his lips together to contain the laugh, the chuckle that threatened to escape. As Kelcey charged over to the spot where the island lay upended, surrounded by the spilled pastries, old John Stanton came in the door. He found a bewildered Kelcey standing there with hands on hips, looking at the damage, his face all puzzled. And there was Ozzie, not five feet away.
“What's going on, Kelcey?” Mr. Stanton asked. He was a retired fireman. Ozzie did not hate him as he hated other people. When Ozzie was just a tot, Mr. Stanton had let him sit on the seat of the big hook-and-ladder, lifted him high and put him there and told him to ring the big silver bell. Ozzie rang it, pulling the cord, he was maybe six or seven years old at the time. Mr. Stanton wore red suspenders over his blue shirt that day in the fire station and Ozzie's dream was to grow up and become a fireman like Mr. Stanton and wear red suspenders. Fat chance of that, though. As Mr. Stanton joined Kelcey looking at the boxes strewn all over the floor, Ozzie felt a rage gathering in him. Why a rage? He was having such a good time wrec
Next thing Ozzie knew, he was approaching Mr. Stanton and the old fireman looked up at the same moment, looked directly at Ozzie as if he could actually see him but couldn't, of course, his eyes opening up wide and his mouth opening too. And that's when Ozzie hit him. Didn't want to hit him, really, had no desire to hit him at all but struck him all the same. A short, swift blow to the back of the neck, at the base of the old fireman's skull, using his hand like an ax. And the old fireman bellowed with pain, fell forward and dropped to his knees among the topsy-turvy pastry boxes, one hand flattened on a box and sinking into a cake with pink frosting.
“What's the matter, John?” Kelcey asked, bending over the old fireman while Mr. Stanton moaned and groaned, on all fours now.
Ozzie's stomach churned. Vomit gathered in his stomach and rose to his throat. His veins grew hot, boiling as the blood shot through his body. Gotta get out of here, he thought. It was not fun anymore. He made for the door, left the men there in their befuddlement. He had not really wanted to hit the old fireman who had done him a kindness once. Why did he hit him, then? He had had no choice. And, truth to tell, the blow to the old guy's neck had been terrific. It was terrific to hit out like that and know that you are the boss, in charge, and no one to see you do it. And it was terrific to start wrecking the store. He would have to return someday and do it again, do a complete job, bring the whole goddamned store down around Kelcey's shoulders and bury Kelcey in the debris that he would cause.