He was born of stone, an earling’s bastard, just one of a dozen or so children the earl had gotten in a long series of brief, though passionate, affairs with his servants. He came into the world sideways, the cord wrapped around his neck, and stopped halfway out, so that the birthing women had to cut him from his mother’s body. By the time they had him fully out and uncoiled, the mother was dead, and they thought the boy was, too.

Jere’s first and only contact with his mother’s breast was brief. One of the birthing women dropped him unceremoniously upon his mother’s flaccid and rapidly cooling belly. They left him there, tiny fists clenched, to flop about upon the naked woman who had borne him, while the blood was cleaned from the flagstones.

The physician came at length to examine the child. He decided, somewhat reluctantly, that the child was alive and likely to continue in that state indefinitely. And so he told the women to cut the cord, pincer the end shut, wipe the fluids away, and put the infant somewhere out of the earl’s sight.

A girl, Betha, took him to foster, for Jere’s mother had once done her a kindness. Besides, none of the other women would have him: It was a bad sign when a child’s birth was the death of his dam. And all had noted that Jere did not cry. The boy looked out at the world with pale blue eyes, a wide mouth, and damp, dark hair. His breathing was light and even, as though he slept.

Betha cradled him against her breasts and took him away to another part of the castle, far from the earl’s quarters, where she and the other serving women lay on their cots at night.

Stone surrounded him, floors, walls and ceilings. Cold stone in the winter, freezingly cold, so that the girls hopped about from foot to foot and stood with their arms tightly clenched against their breasts. Cool stone in spring and autumn, damp with condensation, full of dark corners where rats ran and snakes slithered. Baking-hot stone in summer, when the sunlight beat down upon the castle like the siege engines of an enemy.

He found flagstones as long as a man is tall, arches with keystones heavier than a loaded wagon, and square-hewn slabs set in dark mortar to form the battlements. Jere took shape among them, dark-skinned and handsome like his sire, obdurate and silent like the walls. His eyes gradually darkened to an almond brown. His legs lengthened and his muscles hardened. His hands fluttered over anything he saw, as if touch were the only sense he trusted. The stones were solid under his fingers, unyielding and sure. He took them inside himself, into his strange and twilit soul.

There was not a passage, archway, rat-hole or cistern he had not explored. No dungeon was too dark, no spire too tall, that he would not find it, and in finding, touch, and in touching, know.

Yet of himself, Jere seemed oddly unaware. He would cry if not fed, or steal food if it were left out, but showed no other signs of noticing himself as discrete from his environment. Betha he learned to recognize early on, though as soon as he had the muscles to push her away, he did. He would obey her if she spoke sharply or struck him, but otherwise he ignored her and all other humans. Stone was in him, and he in it, and the castle was his whole world.

He touched everything with his long, sensitive fingertips, and he never quite broke the childhood habit of putting strange new objects into his mouth. The tongue is a marvelous instrument of touch, and the mouth an excellent and reliable source of sensory input. At the age of three, he ran about with a waddling gait, exploring anything that caught his eye, and still he had yet to say his first word.

He learned quickly to stay out of the way of the soldiers, and to avoid the crowds that sometimes gathered in the courtyards when the earl was feeling festive. He learned that if he cried hard enough and long enough, some of the women would feed him. He learned that if he lay on his stomach across a broad, warm flagstone, put his hands between his legs and squirmed his hips, an odd, tingly feeling would come and make him tremble in a delicious way. He learned that if he shouted when touched, others would leave him alone. And from those few who persisted he learned that frustration is akin to pain, and pain to irritation, so that the one could substitute for the other, and if he bit his hands or banged his head on the floor, he could drive the irritations away. Even Betha would withdraw when he snarled and bit himself. And if she tried to stop him from doing this, he would bite her. It wasn’t long before any irritation, any thwarted desire, or anything he couldn’t understand, would bring him to gnaw his own flesh. By the age of seven, his hands and forearms were covered with scars from his own teeth, and he still had not said a word.

They taught him, by the time he was almost eight, and only because they could no longer stand the stink, to piddle down the guarderobe as everyone else did, and not to soil himself at night. They taught him that there were some things he must do, whether he agreed or not, and that there were times when even biting himself would not ease the demands upon him. They did not manage to teach him patience, or to endure company. The stone was in him, and he responded to them like a stone; that is, not at all. They could not teach him to count coins, or to dress himself, or to eat only food. But by the time he was ten, he would smile when he was happy, scream to indicate when he was not, and run away whenever he could. He never ran far—just far enough to be alone—and he never spoke. Cry, yes; scream, certainly; he even made other noises at times, as an infant will, without purpose, without meaning. But he was usually silent, and there was usually something in his mouth, whether food, trinket, grass, pebble, or his own fingers.

Puberty came upon him all at once in his thirteenth year, and he lost the cute, babyish look that had served him so well among the kitchen drudges. He shot up in height, became lean and stringy, and the drudges stopped slipping him food, for they feared maturity in the body of one with a mind like Jere’s.

The earl would have nothing to do with the boy, for clearly Jere was mad, damaged at birth. But the boy’s eyes were bright and inquisitive, and his fingers were clever. He had sturdy legs and a firm chin. His skin was smooth and unblemished, and his features were pleasant to look upon. Indeed, he could have had his pick of the young castle wenches, were he interested in such things. Some few had approached him, thinking perhaps to entice him, or perhaps only with a mistaken motherly interest gone awry into prurience. But he would look at them and bite his hands, or scream at them, and they would flee, wanting nothing more to do with the mad boy. And then Jere would lie upon the flagstones and pump his hips up and down upon his hands, and no one knew the thoughts he had then.

When Betha died of a fever in his fifteenth year, he was down in one of the unused dungeons, playing with the tail he had torn off a rat. He sucked on the bloody end with an expressionless face, and flicked the free end with his fingertips repeatedly, so that it swung and flapped before his eyes. No one thought to tell Jere of Betha’s passing, for he would not have understood. Indeed, now that Betha was gone, no one even thought to look for him, and he spent years slipping from shadow to shadow among the stones, a boy no longer, but not truly a man.

He subsisted on what scraps he could steal, sufficient unto himself for company and amusement, and became very good at stealing into even the heart of the castle without being seen. The soldiers beat him the few times they caught him stealing food from the pantries. Eventually he learned enough to stay out of their way, but the cost was steep. Sustenance was scant, and he grew skeletal. His eyes lost their bright gleam, for he spent most of his time in the castle’s entrails, seeking out the places where none would venture. His skin became pale and clammy; his hair, once baby-soft and fine, now almost covered his shoulders in an unruly, filthy mop, lice-ridden and ragged. His clothes, long since tatters, now hung on him in strips of muddy cloth. He had neither the sense to replace it nor to go naked, so the ticks, fleas and lice made their homes with him. His feet had always been bare, for no one had ever been able to make him see the sense in shoes. The nails of his hands and feet were long, ragged and dirty.

At the age of eighteen, he contracted a cough that left him weak and fevered for months. He began to spit up blood and took to sitting, his back to a damp stone wall, for days on end. He would have died then, down among the stones, save that he wandered upon the nether end of a guarderobe that was blocked so that refuse, once tossed into the shaft, did not fall through into the subterranean river, but collected upon the cold stone floor. It was sheer chance that this shaft was beneath the earl’s own apartments, so that along with the excrement and urine that trickled down the stones, an occasional bone, or even a chunk of half-eaten bread would come sliding down to land with a soft plop beside the youth. In that place he made his abode, and by eating the earl’s excrement and table-droppings, managed to survive. Enough of Betha’s early training remained to make him arise and seek out another shaft to piddle, but he no longer remembered the reason for his habit, or even Betha. He was almost twenty when the cough came upon him again, and this time he was much weaker.

The earl knew the boy was down there, and thought it a rare, fine joke, that a boy should be eating his shit and drinking his piss to survive. On May Day, he purposely threw down the guarderobe a full shoulder of mutton, congratulating himself on his generosity.

But Jere was too weak to eat. Biting his hands did not ease the cough, or the pain in his chest which came and went in long, stabbing waves of agony. He did not think in these terms, but whether or not he understood the earl’s gesture, he knew that the very smell of the mutton made him throw up. He had long since given up screaming, for his throat was always raw and sore. When the coughing brought the blood again, he lay down and closed his eyes during each spasm, after which he was always the slower to rise. A time came when he could not rise at all. The guarderobe emptied upon his chest and legs, covering him in its filth.

When he felt his heart stop within his chest, he felt no emotion at all. There was a moment’s pain, all down his left arm like a spike driven through the flesh, and his mouth gaped open in a paroxysm of inarticulate agony. Then all sensation fled, and he lost consciousness. For some reason, though, his heart shuddered into motion again, forcing death to move off for a brief moment.

Jere awoke and instinctively, without thought, brought his grimed hand to his mouth. Pain was familiar; pain was an old friend. He understood then, in his own way without words, that he was dying. His only emotion was rage. His teeth met through the fleshy part of his palm, and the pain brought him into a new level of awareness for a brief instant. His mouth opened and he coughed, for he was choking upon the blood from his hand. Agony stretched his lips so wide that they split; soundlessly, he held his mouth open in a rictus of pain, and his teeth gleamed a dull red in the light of the guarderobe. Something stirred in his brain, within his heart; something changed; something connected; a bridge, born of stone and pain, sprang up across the impassable gulf for a moment, and he flew across it. A thought surged up from his chest, forced its way through his throat and splattered out across his tongue and teeth in what seemed to him like a roar, though it was no more than a tortured whisper.

“Help,” he said, and that was his first word, and his last. The temporary bridge failed, the fundament collapsed, and he was thrown back in upon himself again, locked into silence for eternity. Born of stone, he was buried in stone, but the whole world was his tomb.

Story Notes

I wrote this story in 1985, when I was working with autistic children in the social service industry. It is unlike most of my stories in that the main character doesn’t grow through his conflicts, doesn’t learn from his mistakes, and finds neither fulfillment nor surcease. It is not a hopeful story, nor is it a cautionary tale, or a metaphor for something else. It just is, as these children’s lives just are—bleak, sad, lonely, and pointless.