“I don’t know. I think my mother used to say it to me when I was small.”
“Then your mother was a weirdy woman. Never say it again, it’s an ill rhyme.”
Down the dank and dripping corridor of Deep Maleen, Dommy began to cough. And cough. And cough.
7
Two or three days later—guessing here; dungeon-time was no-time—Pursey came in to serve us breakfast, and this time it really was breakfast: sausage links tossed through the bars in fat strings. Nine or ten to a string. I grabbed mine on the fly. Hamey let his lie on the dirty floor, then picked it up and listlessly brushed at the dirt on the links. He looked at it for awhile, then dropped it again. There was a terrible similarity to the way Radar had behaved when she was old and dying. He went back to his pallet, drew his knees up to his chest, and turned to the wall. Across from us, Eye was squatting by the bars of his cell, eating his string from the middle, going back and forth like he was gobbling an ear of corn. His beard gleamed with grease around his mouth.
“Come on, Hamey,” I said. “Try to eat just one.”
“If he won’t, fling it in here,” said Stooks.
“We’ll take care of it double-quick,” said Fremmy.
Hamey rolled over, sat up, and pulled his string of sausages into his lap. He looked at me. “Do I have to?”
“You better, Useless,” Eye said. He was already down to two sausages, the ones at either end. “You know what it means when we get these.”
Any residual heat the sausages might have had was gone and the centers were raw. I thought of a story I’d read on the Internet about a guy who’d gone to the hospital complaining of belly pains. The X-ray showed he had a huge tapeworm in his intestines. From eating undercooked meat, the article said. I tried to forget that （not really possible） and started eating. I had a good idea what breakfast sausages meant: playtime, dead ahead.
Pursey reversed back up the corridor. I thanked him again. He stopped and beckoned me with one melted hand. I went to the bars. In a hoarse whisper from the teardrop that was now his mouth, he said, “Ont osher air.”
I shook my head. “I don’t underst—”
“Ont osher air!”
Then he backed out, pulling his empty cart after him. The door shut. The bolts slammed. I turned to Hamey. He’d managed one of the sausages, bit into a second, gagged, and spit it into his hand. He got up and tossed it into our waste hole.
“I don’t know what he was trying to tell me,” I said.
Hamey got our tin drinking cup and rubbed it on the remains of his shirt like a man polishing an apple. Then he sat down on his pallet. “Come over here.” He patted the blanket. I sat down next to him. “Now hold still.”
He looked around. Fremmy and Stooks had retreated to the far side of their crappy little apartment. Iota was absorbed in his final sausage, making it last. From other cells came sounds of chewing, burping, and smacking. Apparently deciding we were unobserved, Hamey spread his fingers—which he could do, being a whole person with hands instead of flippers—and ran them into my hair. I recoiled.
“Nah, nah, Charlie. Hold still.”
He dug at my scalp and yanked at my hair. Clouds of dirt showered down. I wasn’t embarrassed, exactly （spend a few days in a cell, shitting and pissing in a hole in the floor, and you kind of lose the finer feelings）， but it was still appalling to realize how filthy I was. I felt like Charlie Brown’s friend Pig-Pen.
Hamey held up the tin cup so I could look at a blurry reflection of myself. Like a barber showing you your new haircut, only the cup was dented as well as curved, so it was a little like looking into a funhouse mirror. One part of my face was big, the other small.
“Do you see?”
“See what?”
He tilted the cup and I realized that my hair in front, where Hamey had scrubbed away the dirt, was no longer brown. It had turned blond. Down here, even with no sun to bleach it, it had turned blond. I grabbed the cup and held it close to my face. It was hard to tell for sure, but it looked like my eyes had also changed. Instead of the deep brown they’d always been, they seemed to have gone hazel.
Hamey cupped the back of my neck and pulled me close to his mouth. “Pursey said: ‘Don’t wash your hair.’？”
I pulled back. Hamey stared at me, his own eyes—as brown as mine used to be—wide. Then he pulled me close again.
“Are you the true prince? The one come to save us?”
8
Before I could answer, the door bolts were thrown back. This time it wasn’t Pursey. It was four night soldiers, armed with limber sticks. Two walked ahead, arms outstretched, the cell doors squalling open on either side. “Time to play!” one of them yelled in its buzzing, insectile voice. “All kiddies come out to play!”