Little, Big

The first years after what Russell Eigenblick thought of as his accession were the hardest anyone then alive would live to see—so it would seem to them, looking back. Sudden snowstorms raged on the November day when against token opposition he was elected President, and seemed scarcely to abate thereafter. It could not have been always winter in those years, summer must have come around duly as ever, yet universally people remembered winters: the longest, coldest, deepest winters ever known; one continuous winter. Every hardship the Tyrant regretfully imposed or his opponents wilfully inflicted in their uprisings against him was made worse by winter, by months of frozen mud and sleety rain that continually mired every enterprise. Winter made ghastly and hopeless the movements of trucks, traffic, brown-clad troops; everywhere, deeply marking the memory, were the huddled clots and queues of refugees, rag-bound against the cold; the stalled trains, grounded planes; the new frontiers at which lines of slush-bound cars, tailpipes breathing cold clouds, waited to be examined by muffled guards; the shortages of everything, the awful struggle, the difficulties and uncertainties made more awful by the isolating endless cold. And the blood of martyrs and reactionaries frozen on the dirty snow of city squares.

At Edgewood, the old house submitted to indignities: antique plumbing froze; a whole floor was closed up, cold dust collecting in its disused rooms; glum black stoves were set to squat in front of marble fireplaces; and, worst, sheets of plastic for the first time were stapled up over dozens of windows, making every day a foggy day. One night, Smoky, hearing noises in the wilderness of the kitchen-garden, went out and surprised with his flashlight a starveling, an animal long, gray, red-eyed and slavering, mad with cold and hunger. A stray dog, the others said, or something; but only Smoky had seen it, and Smoky wondered.

Winters

There was a pan of water on the stove which sat in the old music room, to help keep the plaster of the ceiling from cracking further from the dryness. A big wooden box roughly carpentered by Smoky held logs to feed the stove, and the two together, stove and woodbox, gave a Klondike air to the pretty room. Rudy Flood had cut the logs, and been felled himself doing so; had pitched face forward, chain saw still gripped in his hands, dead before he struck the ground, which (so Robin said, who was much changed by witnessing it) shook when he met it. Sophie, whenever she rose from her place at the drum-table to feed the insatiable Moloch, had an unpleasant or at least odd sensation that it was pieces of Rudy and not of his woodlot that she thrust into its maw.

Fifty-Two

Work consumed men. It hadn’t been so in Sophie’s youth. Not only Robin, but Sonny Noon and many others who in the old expansive days might have given up the farms their parents had worked, now drew in, thinking that if they had not these acres, and this labor, they’d have nothing. Rudy had after all been an exception; the older generation’s experience had mostly been with endless possibility, sudden change for the better, vistas of freedom and ease. The younger saw things differently. Their motto was, perforce had to be, the old one about Use it up, wear it out and so on. That applied all around: doing his part, Smoky had decided that rents would be reduced or in abeyance indefinitely. And the house showed it: it was, or seemed to be, wearing out. Sophie, pulling her thick shawl more closely around her, looked up at the skeleton’s hand and arm drawn in cracks across the ceiling, and then returned to her cards.

Being used up, worn out, and not replaced. Could that be it? She looked at the fall she had made.

Nora Cloud had left Sophie not only her cards, but her sense that every fall made with them was Somehow contiguous with every other, that they made only one geography, or told only one story, though it could be read or viewed differently to different purposes, which made it seem discontinuous. Sophie, taking up Cloud’s view at the point where she had left it, had taken it further: if it were all one thing, then one question continually proposed to it should come eventually to have a whole answer, however lengthy and encyclopaedic; should come to have the whole thing for an answer. If only she could concentrate hard enough, continue to formulate the question properly and with the right variations and qualifications, and not be distracted by the shadow answers to unasked small questions which lurked within the falls—yes, Smoky’s angina will worsen, Lily’s baby will be a boy—then perhaps she could reach it.

The question she had was not exactly the one that Ariel Hawksquill had come to have answered, though that lady’s sudden appearance and importunity had jolted Sophie into beginning to try and ask it. Hawksquill had had no trouble locating in the cards the huge events that had lately been taking place in the world, and the reasons for them, and her own part in them too, cutting them from the trivia and puzzlements like a surgeon finding and excising a tumor. Sophie’s difficulty in doing such a thing had been that, ever since her search for Lilac, question and answer with these cards had seemed to her to be one; all answers seemed to her to be only questions about the question, every question only a form of the answer it sought. Hawksquill’s long training had allowed her to overcome this difficulty, and any Gypsy fortune-teller could have explained to Sophie how to ignore it or evade it: but perhaps if one had, Sophie wouldn’t have struggled so with the question, through years, through long winters, and would not now be as close as she felt herself to be to a sort of great dictionary or guidebook or almanac of answers to her (strictly speaking unaskable) single question.

Being used up, one by one, and not being replaced; dying, in fact, though they couldn’t die, or anyway Sophie had always supposed they couldn’t, she didn’t know why… Could it be so? Or was it just a winter thought in a time of hardship and shortage?

Cloud had said: it only seems as though the world is getting old and worn out, just as you are yourself. Its life is far too long for you to feel it age during your own. What you learn as you get older is that the world is old, and has been old for a long time.

Well: all right. But what Sophie felt to be aging wasn’t a world, but only its inhabitants: if there were such a thing as a world which they inhabited, distinct from them, which Sophie couldn’t imagine really—but anyway, suppose there was such a world, old or young didn’t matter, what Sophie knew for sure was that however densely populated those lands may have’ been in Dr. Bramble’s time or in Paracelsus’s, they weren’t populated at all any longer in any large sense, Sophie thought it would be possible eventually— soon!—if not to name at least to number all of them, and that the total number wouldn’t be a large one; two digits only, possibly, probably. Which (since everyone without exception quoted in the Architecture, and everyone else for that matter who had considered the question at all, supposed there to be uncounted milliards of them, one for every harebell and thorn-bush at least) might mean that Somehow lately they were being one by one consumed, like the split muscled logs Sophie fed into the fire, or worn down to ravelings by grief and care and age, and blown away.

Or reduced by war. War was what Ariel Hawksquill had determined to be the relation at work, the thing that had made the world or this Tale (if there was a difference) turn so sad and puzzling and uncertain. Like all wars, an unchosen thing, however inevitable, with awful losses on their side at least, Sophie couldn’t imagine what losses they might themselves have inflicted, or how… War: could it be then that all that remained of them was one last forlorn hope, a brave band caught in a desperate rearguard action and going down to the last man?

No! It was too awful to think of: dying. Dying out. Sophie knew (none better) that they had not ever thought of her with love, didn’t in any human sense care about her at all, or any being like her. They had stolen Lilac from her, and though that had not been for any intention of hurting Sophie, it hadn’t been for any love they bore Lilac either, presumably, but only for reasons of their own. No, Sophie had no reason to love them; but the thought of their passing away utterly was unbearable: like thinking of a winter with no end.

And yet she thought she could soon count out the few remaining.

She assembled her deck, and spread it all in a fan before her; then she drew out court cards one by one to represent the ones she already knew of, laying them in groups with low cards for their courts or children or agents, insofar as she could guess at them.

One for sleep, and four for seasons; three to tell fates, two to be Prince and Princess; one to go messages, no, two to go messages, one to go and one to come back again… It was a matter of discriminating between functions, and learning which were whose, and how many were needed for it. One to bring gifts; three to bear gifts away. Queen of Swords and King of Swords and Knight of Swords; Queen of Coins and King of Coins and ten low cards for their children…

Fifty-two?

Or was it only that at that number (with only the Least Trumps, the plot which they acted out, left uncounted) her deck ran out?

There was a sudden clanging noise above her head, and Sophie ducked; it sounded as though a full and heavy set of fire-irons had tumbled over in the attic. Smoky, at work in the orrery. She glanced up. The crack in the ceiling seemed to have lengthened, but she doubted that it really had.

Three for labor, two to make music, one to dream dreams…

She thrust her hands into her sleeves. Few, anyway; not hosts. The taut plastic over the window was a drumskin, tapped on by wind. It seemed—it was hard to tell—that it had begun to snow again. Sophie, abandoning the count (she still didn’t know enough; it was wrong, and more than wrong on an afternoon like this, to speculate when you knew so little) gathered up the cards and put them away in their bag in their box.

She sat for a while, listening to the taps of Smoky’s hammer, hesitant at first, then more insistent, then ringing as though he struck a gong. Then they fell silent, and the afternoon returned.

Carrying a Torch

“Summer,” Mrs. MacReynolds said, lifting her head slightly from the pillow, “is a myth.”

The nieces and nephews and children around her looked at each other in thoughtful doubt or doubtful thought.

“In winter,” the dying old woman went on, “summer is a myth; a report, a rumor, not to be believed…”

The others drew closer to her, watching her fine face, her fluttering blue lids. Her head lay so lightly on its pillow that her blue-rinsed coiffure was unmussed, but this was for sure her last gasp; her contract had run out, and would not be renewed.

“Never,” she said, and then paused a long time in limbo while Auberon thought further: never forget me? Never break faith, never say die, never never never? “Never long,” she said. “Only wait; only have patience. Longing is fatal. It will come.” They had begun to weep around her, though they hid it, for the old lady would have been impatient with tears. “Be happy,” she said, even more faintly. “For the things…” Yes. There she goes. Bye, Mrs. MacR. “The things, children—the things that make us happy—make us wise,”

One last look around. Lock glances with Frankie MacR., the black sheep: he won’t forget this, a new leaf turns for him. Music up. And dead. Auberon skipped two spaces and made three memorial asterisks across the page, and drew it out.

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay?” said Fred Savage. “Done?”

“Done,” Auberon said. He shuffled the twenty or so pages together, his hands clumsy in gloves from which the ends of the fingers had been cut off, and jammed them in an envelope. “G’ahead.”

Fred took the envelope, thrust it smartly beneath his arm, and with a mocking suggestion of salute, made to leave the Folding Bedroom. “ ’M I spose to wait?” he asked, hand on the door. “While they reads over this?”

“Ah, don’t bother,” Auberon said. “It’s too late now. They’ll have to just do it.”

“Oookay,” Fred said. “Later, m’man.”

Auberon built up the fire, pleased with himself. Mrs. MacReynolds was among the last of the characters whom he had inherited from the creators of “A World Elsewhere.” A young divorcée thirty years ago, she had tenaciously and cleverly held on to her part, through alcoholism, remarriage, religious conversion, grief, age and illness. Done now though. Contract terminated. Frankie was about to go off on a long trip, too; he would return—his contract had years to run, and he was the producer’s boyfriend as well—but he would return a changed man.

A missionary? well, yes, in a sense; perhaps a missionary…

More ought to happen, Sylvie had said once on a certain day to Fred Savage; and in the long interpenetration of Auberon’s vision of “A World Elsewhere” and the show as he had found it, a lot had. He couldn’t believe it at first to be so, but it seemed that the turgid, long-drawn-out pointlessness of its plot had been due simply to a lack of inventiveness on the writers’ parts. Auberon, in the beginning anyway, suffered from no such lack, and besides, there were all those tedious and unlikable people who had to be disposed of, whose passions and jealousies Auberon had a hard time understanding. The death rate had therefore been high for a while; the shriek of tires on rainy roads, the horrid crunch of steel on steel, the shout of sirens had been nearly continuous. One young woman, a drug-addicted Lesbian with an idiot child, he could not contractually eliminate; so he magicked her away in favor of her identical twin sister, long-lost and a very different character. That had taken a few weeks to accomplish.

The producers blanched at the speed with which crises came and passed in those days; the audience, they said, couldn’t bear such storms, they were used to tedium. But the audience seemed to disagree, and while eventually it came to he a somewhat different audience, it was no smaller, or not measurably so, and more fiercely devoted than ever. Besides, there were few enough writers who could produce the amounts of work Auberon could, at the new and sharply reduced salaries being offered, and so the producers, struggling for the first time in their profession with tight budgets, flirting with bankruptcy, counting assets and debits late into the night, gave Auberon his head.

So the actors spoke the lines which Fred Savage carried to them from Old Law Farm every day, meekly trying to infuse some reality and humanity into the strange hopes, intimations of high events, and secret expectancy (calm, sad, impatient, or resolved) which had come to infect characters they had played for years. There were not the many secure berths for actors that there had been in the days of the old affluence, and for every character released from the box of Auberon’s foreknowledge there were scores of applicants, even at fees that would have been scoffed at in the now-lost Golden Age. They were grateful to be embodying these peculiar lives, working toward or away from whatever huge thing it was which seemed always in preparation, yet never revealed, and which had kept their audience on gentle tenterhooks now for years.

Auberon laughed, staring into the fire and already fcrmulating new gins and defeats, embroglios and breakthroughs. What a form! Why hadn’t anyone before caught the secret of it? A simple plot was required, a single enterprise which concerned all the characters deeply, and which had a grand sweet simple single resolution: a resolution, however, that would never be reached. Always approached, keeping hopes high, making disappointments bitter, shaping lives and loves by its inexorable slow progress toward the present: but never, never reached.

In the good old days, when polls were as common as house-to-house searches were now, pollsters asked viewers why they liked the bizarre torments of the soap operas, what kept them watching. The commonest answer was that they liked soap operas because soap operas were like life.

Like life. Auberon thought “A World Elsewhere,” under his hands, was coming to be like a lot of things: like truth, like dreams; like childhood, his own anyway; like a deck of cards or an old album of pictures. He didn’t think it was like life—not anyway like his own. On “A World Elsewhere,” when a character’s greatest hopes were dashed, or his task all accomplished, or his children or friends saved by his sacrifice, he was free to die or at least to pass away; or he changed utterly, and reappeared with a new task, new troubles, new children. Except for those whose embodying actors were on vacation or ill, none simply came to a stop, all their important actions over, haunting the edges of the plot with their final scripts (so to speak) still in their hands.

That was like life, though: like Auberon’s.

Not like a plot, but like a fable, a story with a point, which had already been made. The fable was Sylvie; Sylvie was the sharply-pointed, unenigmatic yet brimful and undepletable allegory or tale that underlay his life. Sometimes he was conscious that this view robbed Sylvie of the intense and irreducible reality which she had had, and no doubt somewhere went on having, and when he saw that he felt a sudden shame and horror, as though he had been told or had told a shocking and defaming lie about her; but those times grew less frequent as the story, the fable, grew more perfect, took on other and more intricately refracting facets even as it grew shorter and more tellable; underlying, explaining, criticizing and defining his life even as it grew less something that had actually happened to him.

“Carrying a torch,” George Mouse called it, and Auberon, who had never heard the old phrase, thought it just, because he thought of the torch he carried not as a penitential or devotional one, but as Sylvie. He carried a torch: her. She flared brightly sometimes, sank low other times; he saw by her, though he had no path in particular he wanted to see. He lived in the Folding Bedroom, he helped out on the Farm; one year was not different from the next. Like a long-time cripple, he put aside the better part of the world, not always aware he did so, as not being for the use of such as he: he was not any longer someone to whom things happened.

He suffered from some odd disorders, living as he did in his most vigorous years. He couldn’t sleep much beyond dawn on any but the deepest of winter mornings. He grew able to see faces in the chance arrangements of his room’s fixtures and furnishings, or rather unable not to see them: faces wicked, wise or foolish, figures gesturing to him, weirdly distorted or wounded, able to express emotions that affected him without themselves having them, animated without being alive, which he found faintly disgusting. He pitied, against his will, the ceiling light fixture, two blank Phillips-head screws the eyes, and a light bulb stuck in its stupid, gaping ceramic mouth. The flowered curtains were a crowd a congress, or rather two: the flower people, and the people made of background, outlined by flowers, peering through flowers. When the whole room had become unrelievably populated, he actually visited a psychiatrist, though he told no one about it. The man said he suffered from man-in-the-moon syndrome, not uncommon, and suggested that he get out more; a cure, though, he said, would take years.

Years.

Get out more: George, a constant and a choosy philanderer, not much less successful now than he had been in youth, introduced him to many women, and the Seventh Saint provided others. But talk about ghosts. Now and then two of these real women rolled into one (when on occasion he could persuade them to be so rolled) gave him a rude bliss, if he concentrated, that was intense. But his imaginings, working on the sturdy though desperately fine stuff of memory, were of a different order of intensity altogether.

He would not have had it so; he honestly believed that. He even knew, in moments of great clarity, that it would not have been so had he not been who he was, that his disability didn’t lie in what had happened to him at all, but in his flawed nature, that not everyone, perhaps no one but he, would have ended up thus becalmed after being touched only by Sylvie as though in passing— what a stupid and antique disease that was, and one that had been all but eliminated from the modern world, he resented deeply at times that he should be, apparently, the last victim of it and thus excluded, as though by some rule of common hygiene, from the broad banquet that the City, even in decline, could still show. He wished, he wished he could do as Sylvie had done: say Fuck destiny, and escape. And so he could, too, he just wasn’t trying very hard; he knew that, too, but there it was: flawed. And it was no comfort to think that perhaps to have such a flaw, to be thus inadequate to the world, was just what it was to be in the Tale he could no longer deny that he was in: that perhaps the Tale was the flaw, that the flaw and the Tale were the same thing; that being in the Tale meant nothing more than being suited to your role in it and good for nothing else, like having a cast in your eye, by which you saw always something elsewhere, but which to everyone else (even most of the time to yourself) seemed only a disfigurement.

He rose, annoyed with his thoughts for having fallen into that old bag. There was work to do; that should be enough; most of the time it was, and he was grateful. The amount he accomplished, and the pittance he was paid, would have astonished the mild and affable man (dead now of an accidental overdose) to whom Auberon had first shown scripts. Life had been easy then… He poured himself a small whiskey (gin was verboten, but his adventure had left him with a persistent small habit, more like a sweet tooth than an addiction) and addressed himself to the mail which Fred had brought from uptown. Fred, his old guide, was his associate now, and so described to Auberon’s employers. He was farmhand as well, and memento mori or at least an object-lesson of some kind for Auberon; he could not now any longer get along without him, or so it seemed to him. He tore open an envelope.

“Tell Frankie he’s going to break his mother’s HEART carrying on like that. Doesn’t he see that, how can he be so BLIND. Why doesn’t he get a good woman and settle down.” Auberon never got used to the suspension of disbelief his viewers were capable of, it always gave him a guilty thrill. Sometimes he felt the MacReynolds’s were real, and it was the viewers, like this lady, who were imaginary; pale fictions hungering after the flesh-and-blood life Auberon created. He tossed the letter into the woodbox. Settle down, huh; a good woman. Not a chance. Lot of blood under the bridge before Frankie settles down.

He saved for the last a letter from Edgewood, some weeks in transit, a good long one from his mother, and settled to it like a squirrel to a large nut, hoping to find something within he could use for next month’s episodes.

Something He Could Steal

“You asked what happened to the Mr. Cloud that Great-aunt Cloud was married to,” she wrote. “Well, that’s really sort of a sad story. It happened a long time before I was horn. Momdy sort of remembers. His name was Harvey Cloud. His father was Henry Cloud, the inventor and astronomer. Henry used to spend his summers up here, he had that pretty little cottage where the Junipers later lived. I think he had a lot of patents he lived on. Old John had put some money into his inventions—engines, I think, or astronomical things, I guess; I don’t know what. One of his things though was the old orrery at the top of the house—you know. That was an invention of Henry’s—I mean not orreries in general, they were invented by a Lord Orrery believe it or not (Smoky told me that). But Henry died before it was finished (it cost a lot of money I think) and about that time Nora, Great-aunt Cloud, married Harvey. Harvey was working on it too. His father’s son. I saw a picture of him once that Auberon took, in his shirtsleeves and a stiff collar and tie (I guess he wore them even when he was working), looking very fierce and thoughtful, standing next to the engine of the orrery before they installed it. It was HUGE and complicated and took up most of the picture. And then when they were done installing it (John was long dead by then) there was an accident, and poor Harvey fell off the very tip-top of the house and was killed. I guess then everybody forgot about the orrery, or didn’t want to think about it. I know Cloud never talked about it. You used to hide out up there, I remember. Now, you know, Smoky’s up there all the time, trying to see if it will ever run, and studying books on machinery and clockwork—I don’t know how he’s doing.

“So he used to just live here, Harvey I mean, with Nora, in her room; and go up and work on the orrery; and then he fell off. So there you are.

“Sophie says to tell you to be careful of your throat because of bronchitis, in March.

“Lucy’s baby’s going to be a boy.

“Isn’t the winter dragging on!

“Your loving mother.”

Well. Still further dark or at least odd corners in his family’s life he hadn’t known about. He remembered saying once to Sylvie that nothing terrible had ever happened in his family. That was before he had learned much about the true and false Lilacs, of course; and here now was poor Harvey Cloud, a young husband, tumbling off the roof at the moment of his greatest triumph.

He could work that in. There was nothing, he had begun to think, that he couldn’t work in. He had a gift for such work: a real gift. Everybody said so.

But meanwhile, his scene switched back to the City. This was the easy part, a rest from the other, more complex scenes; it was all simple in the City—predation, chase, escape, triumph and defeat; the weak to the wall, and only the strong survive. He chose, from a long row of them which had replaced George’s anonymous paperbacks on the shelf, one of Doc’s old books. He had sent to Edgewood for them when he had become a writer, and they had proved very useful, as he had thought they might. The one he had was one of the Gray Wolf’s adventures; and, sipping his whiskey, he began to thumb through it, looking for some material he could steal.

Escapements

The moon was silver. The sun was gold, or at least goldplated. Mercury was a mirrored globe—mirrored with mercury, of course. Saturn was heavy enough to be lead. Smoky remembered something from the Architecture that associated various metals with various planets; but those weren’t these planets, they were the dream-planets of magic and astrology. The orrery, brass-bound and oak-cased, was one of those turn-of-the-century scientific instruments that couldn’t have been more solidly rational, material, engineered: a patented universe, made of rods and balls, meshing gears and electroplated springs.

Then why couldn’t Smoky understand it?

He stared hard again at the mechanism, a sort of detached escapement, which he was about to disassemble. If he disassembled it before he understood its function, though, he doubted whether he could put it back together. On the floor, on tables in the hall below, there were several such, all cleaned and wrapped in oily rags, and wrapped too in mystery; this escapement was the last. He supposed (not for the first time) that he should never have begun this. He looked again at the diagram in the Cyclopedia of Mechanics which most resembled the dusty, rusted thing before him.

“Let E be a four-leaved scape-wheel, the teeth of which as they come around rest against the bent pall GFL at G. The pall is prevented from flying too far back by a pin H and kept up to position by a very delicate spring K.” God it was cold in here. Very delicate spring: this thing? Why did it seem to be in here backwards? “The pall B engages the arm FL, liberating the scape-wheel, a tooth of which, M…” Oh dear. As soon as the letters got past the middle of the alphabet, Smoky began to feel helpless and bound, as though tangled in a net. He picked up a pliers, and put it down again.

The ingenuity of engineers was appalling. Smoky had come to understand the basic principle of clockwork, upon which all those ingenuities were based: that a motive force—a falling weight, a wound spring—was prevented by an escapement from expending all its energy at once, and made to pay it out in ticks and tocks, which moved hands or planets around evenly until the force was all expended. Then you wound it up. All the foliots, verges, pallets, stackfreeds and going-barrels were only ingenuities, to keep the motion regular. The difficulty, the maddening difficulty, about Edgewood’s orrery was that Smoky couldn’t discover a motive force that made it go around—or rather he had discovered where it was, in that huge circular case, as black and thick as an old-time safe, and he had examined it, but still couldn’t conceive how it was supposed to drive anything; it looked like something meant itself to be driven.

There was just no end to it. He sat back on his heels and clutched his knees. He was eye-level now to the plane of the solar system, looking at the sun from the position of a man on Saturn. No end to it: the thought stirred in him a mixture of itchy resentment and pure deep pleasure he had never felt before, except faintly, when as a boy he had been presented with the Latin language. The task of that language, when he had begun to grasp its immensity, had seemed likely to fill up his life and all the blank interstices of his anonymity; he had felt at once invaded and comforted. Well, he had abandoned it somewhere along in the middle of it, after having mostly licked off its magic, like icing; but now his old age would have this task: and it was a language too.

The screws, the balls, the rods, the springs were a syntax, not a picture. The orrery didn’t model the Solar System in any visual or spatial way, if it had the pretty green-and-blue enameled Earth would have been a crumb and the whole machine would have needed to be ten times the size it was at least. No, what was expressed here, as by the inflections and predicates of a tongue, was a set of relations: and while the dimensions were fictional, the relations obtained all through, very neatly: for the language was number, and it meshed here as it did in the heavens: exactly as.

It had taken him a long time to figure that out, being unmathematical as well as unmechanical, but he had its vocabulary now, and its grammar was coming clear to him. And he thought that, not soon perhaps but eventually, he would be able to read its huge brass and glass sentences with some comprehension, and that they would not he as Caesar’s and Cicero’s had turned out to be, mostly dull, hollow and without mystery, but that something would be revealed equal to the terrific encoding it had received, something he very much needed to know.

There were quick footsteps on the stairs outside the orrery door, and his grandson Bud put his red head in. “Grampa,” he said, looking over the mystery there, “Gramma sent you a sandwich.”

“Oh, great,” Smoky said. “Come on in.”

He entered slowly, with the sandwich and a mug of tea, his eyes on the machine, better and more splendid than any Christmas-window train set. “Is it done?” he asked.

“No,” Smoky said, eating.

“When will it be?” He touched one sphere, and then quickly drew his hand away when, with the smooth ease of heavy counterweighting, it moved.

“Oh,” Smoky said, “about the time the world ends.”

Bud looked at him in awe, and then laughed. “Aw come on.”

“Well, I don’t know,” Smoky said. “Because I don’t know yet what makes it go around.”

“That thing,” Bud said, pointing to the black case like a safe.

“Okay,” Smoky said, and went to it, cup in hand, “but then the question is what makes this go around?”

He pushed up the lever that opened the gasketed door (dust-proof, but why?) and swung the case open. Inside, cleaned and oiled and ready to go if it could, which it couldn’t, was the impossible heart of Harvey Cloud’s machine: the impossible heart, so Smoky sometimes thought, of Edgewood itself.

“A wheel,” Bud said. “A bent wheel. Wow.”

“I think,” Smoky said, “it’s supposed to go by electricity. Down under the floor, if you lift up that door, there’s a big old electric motor. Only—”

“What?”

“Well, it’s backwards. It’s in there backwards, and not by mistake.”

Bud looked over the arrangement, thinking hard. “Well,” he said, “maybe this makes this go around, and this makes this go around, and this makes that go around.”

“A good theory,” Smoky said, “only you’ve just come full circle. Everything’s making everything else go around. Taking in each other’s washing.”

“Well,” Bud said. “If it went fast enough. If it was smooth enough.”

Fast, and smooth, and heavy it certainly was. Smoky studied it, his mind crossing in paradox. If this made that go around, as it was obviously meant to do; and that made this go around, which wasn’t unreasonable; and this and that powered that and this… Almost he saw it, jointed and levered, its sentences reading backwards and forwards at once, and couldn’t just for a moment think why it was impossible, except that the world is as it is and not different…

“And if it ever slowed down,” Bud said, “you could come up once in a while and give it a push.”

Smoky laughed. “Should we make that your job?” he asked.

“Yours,” Bud said.

A push, Smoky thought, one constant small push from somewhere; but whosoever that push was, it couldn’t be Smoky’s, he had nothing like the strength, he would Somehow have to inveigle the whole universe to look away for a moment from the endless task of itself and reach out an enormous finger to touch these wheels and gears. And Smoky had no reason to think that such a special mercy would be his, or Harvey Cloud’s, or even Edgewood’s.

He said, “Well, anyway. Back to work.” He pushed gently on the leaden sphere of Saturn, and it moved, ticking a few degrees, and as it moved all the other parts, wheels, gears, rods, spheres, moved too.

Caravans

“But perhaps,” Ariel Hawksquill said, “perhaps there’s no war on at all.”

“What do you mean?” asked the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, after a moment’s startled thought.

“I mean,” Hawksquill said, “that perhaps what we think of as a war is in fact not one. I mean that perhaps there is no war on at all, after all; and perhaps there never was one.”

“Don’t be absurd,” the President said. “Of course there’sa war on. We’re winning.”

The Emperor sat sunk in a broad armchair, chin resting on his breast. Hawksquill was at the grand piano which took up much of the far end of the room. She had had this piano altered to make quarter-tones, and on it she liked to play plangent old hymn-tunes harmonized according to a system of her own devising, rendered oddly, sweetly discordant by the altered piano. They made the Tyrant sad. Outside, snow was falling.

“I don’t mean,” Hawksquill said, “that you have no enemies. Of course you have. I was speaking of the other, the long war: the Great War. Perhaps that’s not a war at all.”

The Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club, though exposed (their drawn cold faces and dark overcoats appearing in every newspaper) had not fallen easily, as Hawksquill had known they would not. Their resources were great; for whatever they were charged with they had countercharges, and they had the best legal counsel; but (they hadn’t listened when Hawksquill had warned them it might be so) their part in the story was over. Struggle only prolonged the end, it was never in doubt. Money gathered at junctures of the case and went off like bombs sometimes, causing temporary outlandish reversals of members’ fortunes, but these firebreaks never seemed to give the Club time to recoup. Petty, Smilodon & Ruth, after accruing enormous fees all around, withdrew from their defense amid mysterious circumstances and bitter recriminations; shortly thereafter, masses of paper came to light whose provenance couldn’t successfully be denied. Men once made of power and cold blood were seen on every television screen to weep tears of frustration and despair as they were led away to trial by the gloved hands of marshals and indifferent plainclothesmen. The end of the story was not widely known, for it was in the winter of its most shocking revelations that the universal grid of communications which had for a glorious seventy-five years or so lit up the nation like the strung lights of a Christmas tree was for the most part roughly cut: by Eigenblick himself, to forestall its takeover by his enemies; elsewhere, by his enemies, to forestall its takeover by the Tyrant.

That war—the war of the People against the Beast who had seized power and trodden on the institutions of democracy, and of the Emperor-President against the Interests on the people’s behalf—was real enough. The blood shed in it was real. The fractures that had run through the society when it had been struck thus hard were deep. But: “If,” Hawksquill said, “if those whom we have thought to be at war with men came here to this new world in the first place at about the same time the Europeans did—at about the time, that is, that your latter Empire began to be predicted; and if they came for the same reasons, freedom and space and scope; then they must have eventually been disappointed, just as the men were…”

“Yes,” said Barbarossa.

“The virgin forests where they hid themselves gradually logged, cities built on the river-banks and lake shores, the mountains mined, and with no old European regard for wood-sprites and kobolds either…”

“Yes.”

“And, if they are in fact as long-sighted as they seem to be, then they must have themselves seen this result, known about it, long ago.”

“Yes.”

“Before the migration even began. As long ago, in fact, as your Majesty’s first reign. And, since they could see it, they prepared for it: they begged your long sleep of him who keeps the years; they sharpened their own weapons; they waited…”

“Yes, yes,” Barbarossa said. “And now at last, though much reduced, having been patient for centuries, they strike! Issue from their old strongholds! The robbed dragon stirs in his sleep, and wakes!” He was on his feet; flimsy sheets of computer printout, strategies, plans, figures, slid from his lap to the floor.

“And the bargain made with you,” Hawksquill said. “Help them in this enterprise, distract the nation’s attention, reduce it to warring fragments (much like your old Empire, they counted on you to do that part well), and, when the old woods and bogs had crept back, when the traffic stopped, when they had recouped as much of their losses as would satisfy them, you could have the rest as your Empire.”

“Forever,” Eigenblick said, stirred. “That was the promise.”

“Fine,” Hawksquill said thoughtfully. “That’s fine.” She stroked the keys; something like Jerusalem came from beneath her ringed fingers. “Only none of it’s true,” she said.

“What?”

“None of it’s true; it’s false, a lie, not in fact the case.”

“What…”

“It’s not odd enough, for one thing.” She struck a twanging chord, grimaced, tried it again a different way. “No, I think something quite different is occurring, some motion, some general shift that is no one’s choice, no one’s…” She thought of the dome of the Terminus, its Zodiac reversed, and how she had at the time blamed that on the Emperor who stood before her. Foolish! And yet… “Something,” she said, “something like the shuffling together of two decks of cards.”

“Speaking of cards,” he said.

“Or one cut deck,” she said, ignoring him. “You know the way small children will sometimes, in trying to shuffle, get one-half the deck upside down? And then there they all are, shuffled together, inextricably mixed backs and faces.”

“I want my cards,” he said.

“I don’t have them.”

“You know where they are.”

“Yes. And if you were meant to have them, so would you.”

“I need their counsel! I need it!”

“Those who have the cards,” Hawksquill said, “prepared the way for all this, for your victory such as it is or will be, as well or better than you could have yourself. Long before you appeared, they were a fifth column for that army.” She struck a chord, sweet-sour, tart as lemonade. “I wonder,” she said, “if they regret that; if they feel bad, or traitorous to their own kind. Or if they ever knew they were taking sides against men.”

“I don’t know why you say there’s no war,” the President said, “and then talk like that.”

“Not a war,” Hawksquill said; “but something like a war.” Something like a storm, perhaps; yes, like the advancing front of a weather system, which alters the world from warm to cold, gray to blue, spring to winter. Or a collision: mysterium coniunctionis, but of what with what? “Or,” she said—the thought suddenly struck her— “something like two caravans, two caravans that meet at a single gate, coming from different far places, going toward different far places; mixing it up, jostling through that gate, for a time one caravan only, and then, on the far side, unwinding again toward their destinations, though perhaps with some few having changed places; a saddle bag or two stolen; a kiss exchanged…”

“What,” Barbarossa said, “are you talking about?”

She turned her stool to face him. “The question is,” she said, “just what kingdom it is you’ve come into,”

“My own.”

“Yes. The Chinese, you know, believe that deep within each of us, no larger than the ball of your thumb, is the garden of the immortals, the great valley where we are all king forever.”

He turned on her, suddenly angry. “Now listen,” he said.

“I know,” she said, smiling. “It would be a damned shame if you ended up ruling, not the Republic that fell in love with you, but some other place entirely.”

“No.”

“Someplace very small.”

“I want those cards,” he said.

“Can’t have ’em. Not mine to give.”

“You’ll get them for me.”

“Won’t.”

“How would you like it,” Barbarossa said, “if I got the secret out of you? I do have power, you know. Power.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“I could have you—I could have you killed. Secretly. No one would be the wiser.”

“No,” Hawksquill said calmly. “Killed you could not have me. Not that.”

The Tyrant laughed, his eyes catching lurid fire. “You think not?” he said. “Oh ho, you think not?”

“I know not,” Hawksquill said. “For a strange reason which you couldn’t guess. I’ve hidden my soul.”

“What?”

“Hidden my soul. An old trick, one which every village witch knows how to do. And is wise to do: you never know when those you serve may turn resentful, and fall on you.”

“Hidden? Where? How?”

“Hidden. Elsewhere. Exactly where, or in what, I won’t of course tell you; but you see that unless you knew, it would be useless trying to kill me.”

“Torture.” His eyes narrowed. “Torture.”

“Yes.” Hawksquill rose from her stool. Enough of this. “Yes, torture might work. I’ll say goodnight now. There’s much to do.”

She turned back, at the door, and saw him standing as though stuck in his threatening pose, glaring at her but not seeing her. Had he heard, or understood, anything she had tried to tell him? A thought took hold of her, a strange and fearful thought, and for a moment she only looked at him as he looked at her, as though they were both trying to remember where, or whether, they had ever met before; and then, alarmed, Hawksquill said, “Goodnight, your Majesty,” and left him.

New-Found-Land

Later that night, in the Capital, the episode of Mrs. MacReynolds’ death appeared on “A World Elsewhere.” In other places the time of its showing varied; it was no longer in many places a daytime drama, often it was a post-midnight one. But shown it was, broadcast or cabled or—where that wasn’t possible, where lines had been cut or transmission interdicted—smuggled into small local stations, or copied and carried overland by hand to hidden transmitters, the precious tapes beamed feebly to far small snowy towns. A walker on this night through such a town could pass along its single street and glimpse, in every living room, the bluish glow of it; might see, in one house, Mrs. MacReynolds carried to her bed, in the next, her children gathered, in the next, her parting words spoken; in the last house before the town ran out and the silent prairie began, her dead.

In the Capital, the Emperor-President watched too, his eagle-browed but soft brown eyes dimmed. Never long; longing is fatal. A cloud of pity, of self-pity, rose in him, and took (as clouds can do) a form: the form of Ariel Hawksquill’s aloof, amused and unyielding face.

Why me? he thought, raising his hands as though to exhibit shackles. What had he ever done that this awful bargain should have been struck with him? He had been earnest and hard-working, had written a few cutting letters to the Pope, had married his children well. Little else. Why not his grandson, Frederick II, now there was a leader; why not him? Had not the same story after all been told of him, that he was not dead but slept, and would awake to lead his people?

But that was legend only. No, he was here, it was his to suffer this, insufferable though it seemed.

A king in Fairyland: Arthur’s fate. Could it be true? A realm no larger than the ball of his thumb, his earthly kingdom nothing but wind, the wind of his passage from here to there, from sleep to sleep.

No! He drew himself up. If there had been no war so far, or only a phony war, well, that time was over. He would fight; he would extract from them every jot of the promises so long ago made to him. For eight hundred years he had slept, doing battle with dreams, laying siege to dreams, conquering dream Holy Lands, wearing dream crowns. He had hungered eight hundred years for the real world, the world he could just sense but not see beyond all the dissolving kingdoms of dream. Hawksquill might be right, that they had never intended him to have it. She might (might well, oh yes, it was all coming quite, quite clear to him) have been in league with them from the beginning to deprive him of it. He almost laughed, a dreadful laugh, to think that there had been a time when he had trusted her, leaned on her even. No more. He would fight. He would get those cards from her by whatever means, yes, though she unleashed her terrible powers on him, he would. Alone, helpless it might be, he would fight, fight for his great, dark, snow-burdened new-found-land.

“Only hope,” Mrs. MacReynolds said, dying; “only have patience.” The lone walker (refugee? salesman? police spy?) passed the last house on the outskirts, and stepped out along the empty highway. In the houses behind, one by one the bluish eyes of sets were closed; a news broadcast had begun, but there was no news any longer. They went to bed; the night was long; they dreamed of a life that wasn’t theirs, a life that could fill theirs, a family elsewhere and a house that could make the dark earth once again a world.

It was still snowing in the Capital. The snow whitened the night, obscuring the far monuments that could be seen through the President’s mullioned windows, piling up at the feet of heroes, choking the entrances to underground garages. Somewhere a stuck car was crying rhythmically and helplessly to escape a drift.

Barbarossa wept.

Just About Over

“What do you mean,” Smoky asked, “just about over?”

“I mean I think it’s just about over,” Alice said. “Not over, not yet; but just about.”

They had gone to bed early—they did that often nowadays, since their big bed with its high-piled quilts and comforters was the only place in the house they could be truly warm. Smoky wore a nightcap: draughts were draughts, and no one could see how foolish he looked. And they talked. A lot of old knots were untangled in those long nights: or at least shown to be for sure unentanglable, which Smoky supposed was more or less the same thing.

“But how can you say that?” Smoky said, rolling over toward her, lifting as on a big wave the cats who sailed the foot of the bed.

“Well, good heavens,” Alice said, “it’s been long enough, hasn’t it?”

He looked at her, her pale face and nearly white hair just distinguishable in the dark against the white pillowcase. How did she always come up with these un-answers, these remarks struck off with such an air of logical consequence, that meant nothing, or as good as nothing? It never ceased to amaze him. “That’s not what I meant, exactly. I guess I meant how do you know it’s just about over? Whatever it is.”

“I’m not sure,” she said, after a long pause. “Except that after all it’s happening to me, partly anyway; and I feel about over, some ways; and…”

“Don’t say that,” he said. “Don’t even joke about it.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t mean dying. Is that what you thought I meant?”

He had; he saw now that he didn’t understand at all, and rolled over again. “Well, hell,” he said. “It never really had anything to do with me anyway.”

“Aw,” she said, and moved closer to him, putting an arm around him. “Aw, Smoky, don’t be that way.” She placed her knees up behind his, so that they lay together like a double S.

“What way.”

She said nothing for a long time. Then: “It’s a Tale, is all,” she said; “and tales have beginnings and middles and ends. I don’t know when the beginning was, but I know the middle…”

“What was the middle?”

“You were in it! What was it? It was you!”

He drew her familiar hand around him closer. “What about the end?” he said.

“Well that’s what I mean,” she said. “The end.”

Quick, before a looming something he saw darkly huge in her words could steal over him, he said, “No no no no. Things don’t have ends like that, Alice. Any more than they have beginnings. Things are all middles in life. Like Auheron’s show. Like history. One damn thing after another, that’s all.”

“Tales have ends.”

“Well, so you say, so you say, but…”

“And the house,” she said.

“What about the house?”

“Couldn’t it have an end? It seems like it will, not long from now; if it did…”

“No. It’ll just get older.”

“Fall apart…”

He thought of its cracked walls, its vacant rooms, the seep of water in its basements; its paintless clapboards growing warped, masonry rotting; termites. “Well, it’s not its fault,” he said.

“No, sure.”

“It’s supposed to have electricity. Lots of it. That’s how it was made. Pumps. Hot water in the pipes, hot water in the heaters. Lights. Ventilators. Things freeze and crack, because there’s no heat, because there’s no electricity.”

“I know.”

“But that’s not its fault. Not our fault either. Things have gotten so bad. Russell Eigenblick. How can you get things fixed when there’s a war on? His domestic policy. Crazy. And so things run out, and there’s no electricity, and so…”

“And whose fault,” she said, “do you think Russell Eigenblick is?”

For a moment, just for a moment, Smoky allowed himself to feel the Tale closing around him, and around all of them; around everything that was. “Oh, come on,” he said, a charm to banish the idea, but it persisted. A Tale: a monstrous joke was more like it: the Tyrant installed, after God knows how many years’ preparation, amid bloodshed and division and vast suffering, just so that one old house could be deprived of what it needed to live on, so that the end of some convoluted history, which coincided with the house’s end, could be brought about, or maybe only hastened; and he inheriting that house, maybe lured there in the first place by love only so that eventually he could inherit it, and inheriting it only so that (though he struggled against it, tools were never far from his hapless hands, all to no good) he could preside over—maybe even, through some clumsiness or inadequacy he could easily imagine himself capable of, insure—its dissolution; and that dissolution in turn bringing about… “Well, what then?” he asked. “If we couldn’t live here any more.”

She didn’t answer, but her hand sought his and held it.

Diaspora. He could read it in her hand’s touch.

No! Maybe the rest of them could imagine such a thing (though how, when it had always been more their house than his?), maybe Alice could, or Sophie, or the girls; imagine some impossible imaginary destination, some place so far… But he could not. He remembered a cold night long ago, and a promise: the night they had first been in the same bed, he and Alice, bedclothes drawn up, lying together like a double S, when he saw that in order to go where she would go, and not be left behind, he would have to find within himself a child’s will to believe that had never been much exercised in him and was even then long in disuse; and he found himself no more ready to follow now than he had ever been. “Would you leave?” he asked.

“I think,” she said.

“When.”

“When I know where it is I’m supposed to go.” She drew even closer to him, as though in apology. “Whenever that is.” Silence. He felt her breath tickle his neck. “Not soon, maybe.” She rubbed her cheek against his shoulder. “And maybe not leave; I mean leave-leave; maybe not ever.”

But that was just to placate him, he knew. He had after all never been more than a minor character in that destiny, he had always expected to be left in some sense behind: but that fate had been for so long in abeyance, causing him no grief, that (without ever quite forgetting it) he had chosen to ignore it; had even sometimes allowed himself to believe that he had made it, by his goodness and acquiescence and fidelity, go away. But he had not. Here it was: and, as gently as she could consonant with there being no mistake about it, Alice was telling him so.

“Okay, okay,” he said. “Okay.” That was a code-word between them, meaning I don’t understand but I have come to the limit of my strength to try to understand, and I trust you to this point anyway, and let’s talk of something else. But—.

“Okay,” he said again, and this time meant a different thing by it: because he saw just then that there was one way, an impossible unfollowable way but the only way there was, for him to fight this—yes! Fight!—and that Somehow he would have to find it.

It was his damn house now, damn it, and he would have to keep it alive, that’s all. For if it lived, if it could, then the Tale couldn’t end, could it? No one would have to leave, maybe no one could leave (what did he know about it?) if the house held together, if there was some way to halt its decline, or reverse it. So he would have to do that. Strength alone wouldn’t be enough, not anyway his strength; cunning would be needed. Some huge thought would have to be thought (did he feel it, down deep, trying to be born, or was that just blind hope?) and nerve would be necessary, and application, and tenacity like grim death’s. But it was the way; the only way.

Access of energy and resolve spun him in the bed, the tassel of his nightcap flying. “Okay, Alice, okay,” he said again. He kissed her fiercely—his too!—and then again firmly; and she laughed, embracing him, not knowing (he thought) that he had just resolved to spend his substance subverting her; and she kissed him back.

How could it be, Daily Alice wondered as they kissed, that to say such things as she had said to the husband she loved, on this darkest night of the year, made her not sad but glad, filled in fact with happy expectation? The end: to have the Tale end meant to her to have it all forever, no part left out, complete and seamless at last—certainly Smoky couldn’t be left out, not as deeply woven into its stuff as he had become. It would be good, so good to have it all at last, start to finish, like some long, long piece of work that has been executed in dribs and dabs, in the hope and faith that the last nail, the last stitch, the last tug at the strings, will make it all suddenly make sense: what a relief! It didn’t, quite, not yet; but now in this winter Alice could at last believe, with no reservations, that it would: they were that close. “Or maybe,” she said to Smoky, who paused in his attentions to her, “maybe just beginning.” Smoky groaned, shaking his head, and she laughed and clasped him to her.

When there was no more talk from the bed, the girl who had for some time been watching the bedclothes heave and listening to their words turned to go. She had come in through the door (left open for the cats to go in and out) silently, on bare feet, and then stood in the shadows watching and listening, a small smile on her lips. Because a mountain-range of quilts and coverlets rose between their heads and the room, Smoky and Alice hadn’t seen her there, and the incurious cats, who had opened big eyes when she had entered, had returned to fitful sleep, only now and then regarding her through narrowed lids. She paused a moment now at the door, for the bed had begun to make noises again, but she couldn’t make anything of these, mere low sounds, not words, and she slipped through the door and into the hall.

There was no light there but a faint snowlight coming in through the casement at the haIl’s end, and slowly, like someone blind, she went with small silent steps, arms extended, past closed doors. She considered each dark blank door as she passed it, but shook her blond head at each in turn, thinking; until, rounding a corner, she came to an arched one, and smiled, and with her small hand turned its glass knob and pushed it open.

Sophie too had gone to bed early and not to sleep.

In her old figured bed-jacket, and a cardigan over that, she lay huddled close to the candle which stood on the bedside table, two of her fingers only allowed out from the bedclothes to hold open the pages of the second volume of an ancient three-volume novel. When the candle began to gutter, she reached into the table’s drawer, took out another, lit it from the first, pressed it down into the candlestick, sighed, and turned the page. She was far, far from the final weddings; only now had the will been secreted in the old cabinet; the bishop’s daughter thought of the ball. The door of Sophie’s room opened, and a child came in.

What a Surprise

She wore only a blue dress, without sleeves or a belt. She came a step through the door, her hand still on its knob, smiling the smile of a child who has a terrific secret, a secret which she’s not sure will amuse or annoy the grown-up she stands before; and for a time she only stood in the doorway, glowing faintly in the candlelight, her chin lowered and her eyes raised to Sophie turned to stone on the bed.

Then she said: “Hello, Sophie.”

She looked just as Sophie had imagined she would, at the age she would have been when Sophie had been unable to imagine her further. The candle-flame shivered in the draft from the open door, which cast strange shadows over the child, and Sophie grew for a moment as afraid and struck with strangeness as she had ever in her life been, but this was no ghost. Sophie could tell that by the way the child, having come in, turned to push the heavy door closed behind her. No ghost would have done that.

She came slowly toward the bed, hands clasped behind her, with her secret in her smile. She said to Sophie: “Can you guess my name?”

That she spoke was for some reason harder for Sophie to take in than that she stood there, and Sophie for the first time knew what it was not to believe her ears: they told her that the child had spoken, but Sophie didn’t believe it, and couldn’t imagine answering. It would have been like speaking to some part of herself, some part that had suddenly and inexplicably become detached from her and then turned to face her, and question her.

The child laughed a small laugh; she was enjoying this. “You don’t,” she said. “Do you want me to give you a hint?”

A hint! Not a ghost, and not a dream, for Sophie was awake; not her daughter, certainly, for her daughter had been taken from her over twenty-five years ago, and this was a child: yet for sure Sophie knew her name. She had raised her hands to her face, and between them now she said or whispered: “Lilac.”

Lilac looked a little disappointed. “Yes,” she said. “How did you know?”

Sophie laughed, or sobbed, or both at once. “Lilac,” she said.

Lilac laughed, and made to climb up on the bed with her mother, and Sophie perforce had to help her up: she took Lilac’s arm, wondering, afraid that perhaps she would herself feel her own touch, and if she did, then—then what? But Lilac was flesh, cool flesh, it was a child’s wrist her fingers circled; she drew up Lilac’s real solid weight with her strength, and Lilac’s knee pressed the bed and made it jounce, and every sense Sophie had was certain now that Lilac was here before her.

“Well,” Lilac said, brushing the golden hair from before her eyes with a quick gesture. “Aren’t you surprised?” She watched Sophie’s stricken face. “Don’t you say hello or kiss me or anything?”

“Lilac,” Sophie only said again; for there had been for many, many years one thought forbidden to Sophie, one unimaginable scene, this one, and she was unrehearsed; the moment and the child were just as she would have imagined them to be if she had allowed herself to imagine them at all, but she had not, and now she was unready and undone.

“You say,” Lilac said, indicating Sophie—it hadn’t been easy memorizing all this, and it should come out right—“you say, ‘Hello, Lilac, what a surprise,’ because you haven’t seen me since I was a baby; and then I say, ‘I came a long way, to tell you this and this,’ and you listen, but first before that part you say how much you missed me since I was stolen, and we hug.” She flung open her arms, her face pretending to radiant, poignant joy to cue Sophie; and there was nothing then for Sophie to do but to open her arms too, no matter how slowly and tentatively (not fearful now but only deeply shy before the impossibility of it) and take Lilac in them.

“You say, ‘What a surprise,’ ” Lilac reminded her, whispering close to her ear.

Lilac’s odor was of snow and self and earth. “What a surprise,” Sophie began to say, but couldn’t finish it, because tears of grief and wonderment flew up her throat behind the words, bringing with them all that Sophie had been denied and had denied herself all these years. She wept, and Lilac, surprised herself now, thought to draw away, but Sophie held her; and so Lilac patted her back gently to comfort her.

“Yes,” she said to her mother, “yes, I came back; I came a long way, a long long way.”

Walking From There

She may have come a long, long way; for sure she remembered that this was what she was to say. She remembered no long journey, though; either she had awakened only after most of it had been sleepwalked away, or in fact it had really been quite short…

“Sleepwalked?” Sophie asked.

“I’ve been asleep,” Lilac said. “For so long. I didn’t know I’d sleep so long. Longer than the bears even. Oh, I’ve been asleep ever since a day, since the day I woke you up. Do you remember?”

“No,” Sophie said.

“On a day,” Lilac said, “I stole your sleep. I shouted ‘Wake up!’ and pulled your hair.”

“Stole my sleep?”

“Because I needed it. I’m sorry,” she said gleefully.

“That day,” Sophie said, thinking How odd to be so old and full of things, and have your life inverted as a child’s can be… That day. And had she slept since then?

“Since then,” Lilac said. “Then I came here.”

“Here. From where?”

“From there. From sleep. Anyway…”

She awoke, anyway, out of the longest dream in the world, forgetting all of it or nearly all of it as she did so, to find herself stepping along a dark road at evening, silent fields of snow on either side and a still cold pink-and-blue sky all around, and a task she’d been prepared for before she slept, and which her long sleep had not forgotten, ahead of her to do. All that was clear enough, and Lilac didn’t wonder at it; often enough in her growing up she’d found herself suddenly in strange circumstances, emerging from one enchantment into another like a child carried sleeping from a bed to a celebration and waking, blinking, staring, but accepting it all because familiar hands hold him. So her feet fell one after the other, and she watched a crow, and climbed a hill, and saw the last spark of a red sun go out, and the pink of the sky deepen and the snow turn blue; and only then, as she descended, did she wonder where she was, and how much further she had to go.

There was a cottage at the bottom of the hill, amid dense small evergreens, from whose windows yellow lamplight shone out into the blue evening. When Lilac reached it she pushed open the little white gate in its picket fence—a bell tinkled within the house as she did so—and started up the path. The head of a gnome, his high hat doubled by a hat of snow, looked out over the drifted lawn, as he had been doing for years and years.

“The Junipers’,” Sophie said.

“What?”

“It was the Junipers’,” Sophie said. “Their cottage.”

There was an old, old woman there, the oldest (except for Mrs. Underhill and her daughters) Lilac had ever seen. She opened her door, held up a lamp, and said in a small old voice, “Friend or Foe? Oh, my,” for she saw then that a nearly naked child, barefoot and hatless, stood before her on the path.

Margaret Juniper did nothing foolish; she only opened the door so that Lilac could enter if she liked, and after a moment Lilac decided that she would, and went in and down the tiny hall across the scatter rug and past the knickknack shelf (long undusted, for Marge was afraid of breaking things with her old hands, and couldn’t any longer see the dust anyway) and through the arched doorway into the parlor, where a fire was lit in the stove. Marge followed with the lamp, but then at the doorway wasn’t sure she wanted to enter; she watched the child sit down in the maple chair with broad paddle arms that had been Jeff’s, and put her hands flat on the arms, as though they pleased or amused her. Then she looked up at Marge.

“Can you tell me,” she said, “am I on the right road for Edgewood?”

“Yes,” Marge said, Somehow not surprised to be asked this.

“Oh,” Lilac said. “I have to bring a message there.” She held up her hands and feet to the stove, but didn’t seem to be chilled through; and Marge didn’t wonder at that either. “How far is it?”

“Hours,” Marge said.

“Oh. How many.”

“I never walked there,” Marge said.

“Oh. Well, I’m a fast walker.” She jumped up then, and pointed inquiringly in a direction, and Marge shook her head No, and Lilac laughed and pointed in the opposite direction. Marge nodded Yes. She stood aside for the child to pass her again, and followed her to the door.

“Thank you,” Lilac said, her hand on the door. Marge chose, from a bowl by the door of mixed dollar bills and candy with which she paid the boys who shoveled her walk and split her wood, a large chocolate, and offered it to Lilac, who took it with a smile, and then rose on tiptoe and kissed Marge’s old cheek. Then she went out and down the path, and turned toward Edgewood without looking back.

Marge stood in the door watching her, filled with the odd sensation that it had been only for this tiny visit that she had lived her whole long life, that this cottage by the roadside and this lamp in her hand and the whole chain of events which had caused them to be had always and only had this visit for their point. And Lilac too, walking fast, remembered just then that of course she was to have visited that house, and said what she did say to the old woman there—it was the taste of the chocolate that reminded her—and that by next evening, an evening as still and blue as this one or stiller, everyone in the pentacle of five towns around Edgewood would know that Marge Juniper had had a visitor.

“But,” Sophie said, “You can’t have walked here since evening…”

“I walk fast,” Lilac said; “or maybe I took a shortcut.”

Whatever way she had taken had led her past a frozen lake and a lake island all glittering in starlight, where a little pillared gazebo stood up, or perhaps it was only snow-shapes that suggested such a place; and through woods, waking a chickadee; and past a place, a sort of castle iced with snow…

“The Summer House,” Sophie said.

… a place she’d seen before, from above, in another season long ago. She came toward it through what had been the flower beds that bordered its lawn, gone wild now and with only the tall dead stalks of hollyhock and mullein standing above the snow. There were the gray bones of a canvas sling-chair in the yard. She thought, seeing them: wasn’t there some message, or some comfort, she was to deliver here? She stood for a moment, looking at the derelict chair and the squat house where not a single footprint went through the snow up to the half-engulfed door, a summery screen door, and for the first time she shivered in the cold, but couldn’t remember what the message was or whom it had been for, if there really had been one at all; and so passed on.

“Auberon,” Sophie said.

“No,” Lilac said. “Not Auberon.”

She walked through the graveyard, not knowing it to be such; the plot of ground where John Drinkwater had first been buried and then others beside him or near him, some known to him and some not. Lilac wondered at the big carved stones placed at random here and there, like giant forgotten toys. She studied them a while, walking from one to another and brushing off their caps of snow to look at sad angels, and deep-incised letters, and granite finials, while beneath her feet, beneath the snow and black leaves and earth, stiff bones relaxed, and hollow chests would have sighed if they could have, and old attitudes of attention and expectancy undissolved by death were softened; and (as sleepers do when a troublesome dream passes or a bothering noise, the crying of a cat or a lost child, ceases) those asleep there rested more deeply and slept at last truly as Lilac walked above them.

“Violet,” Sophie said, her tears flowing freely and painlessly now, “and John; and Harvey Cloud, and Great-aunt Cloud. Daddy. And Violet’s father too, and Auberon. And Auberon.”

Yes: and Auberon: that Auberon. Standing above him, on the bosom of earth that lay on his bosom, Lilac felt clearer about her message, and her purpose. It was all getting clearer, as though she continued to wake further all the time after waking. “Oh, yes,” she said to herself; “oh, yes…” She turned to see, past black firs, the dark pile of the house with not a light showing, as snow-burdened as the firs, but unmistakable; and soon she found a path to there, and a door to go in by, and steps to go up, and glass-knobbed doors to choose from.

“And then, and now,” she said, kneeling on the bed before Sophie, “I have to tell you what.

“If I can remember it all.”

A Parliament

“I was right, then,” Sophie said. A third candle was burning down. Deep cold midnight was in the room. “Only a few.”

“Fifty-two,” Lilac said. “Counting them all.”

“So few.”

“It’s the War,” Lilac said. “They’ve all gone. And the ones left are old—so old. You can’t imagine.”

“But why?” Sophie said. “Why if they knew they must lose so many?”

Lilac shrugged, looking away. It didn’t seem part of her mission to explain, only to give news, and a summons; she couldn’t explain to Sophie either exactly what had become of her when she had been stolen, or how she had lived: when Sophie questioned her, she answered as all children do, with hasty references to strangers and events unknown to her hearer, expecting it all to be understood, to be as familiar to the grown-up as to the child: but Lilac was not as other children. “You know,” she only said, impatiently, when Sophie questioned her, and returned to the news she had come to bring: that the War was to end; that there was to be a peace conference, a Parliament, to which all who could come must come, to resolve this, and end the long sad time.

A Parliament, where all who came would meet face to face. Face to face: when Lilac said it to her, Sophie felt a hum in her head and a pause in her heartbeat, as though Lilac had announced to her her death, or something as final and unimagined.

“So you must come,” Lilac said. “You have to. Because they’re so few now, the War has to end. We have to make a Treaty, for everybody.”

“A Treaty.”

“Or they’ll all be lost,” Lilac said. “The winter might go on, and never end. They could do that, they could: the last thing they could do.”

“Oh,” Sophie said. “No. Oh, no.”

“It’s in your hands,” Lilac said, stately, minatory; and then, solemn message done, she threw her arms wide. “So all right?” she said happily. “You’ll come? All of you?”

Sophie put her cold knuckles to her lips. Lilac, smiling, alive and alight in the winter-dusty room: and this news. Sophie felt vacant, disappeared. If there were a ghost here, it was Sophie and not her daughter.

Her daughter!

“But how?” she said. “How are we to go there?”

Lilac looked at her in dismay. “You don’t know that?” she said.

“Once I did,” Sophie said, tears gathering again in her throat. “Once I thought I could find it, once… Oh, oh, why did you wait so long!” With a pang she saw, dead, buried within her, the possibilities that Lilac spoke of: dead because Sophie had crushed all possibility that Lilac could ever sit here and speak them. She had lived lông with terrible possibilities—Lilac dead, or utterly transformed—and had faced them; but Tacey and Lily’s ancient prediction (though she had counted years, and even studied the cards for a date) she had never allowed herself to believe. The effort had been huge, and had cost her terribly; she had lost, in her effort not to imagine this moment, all her childhood’s certainties, all those commonplace impossibilities; had lost, even, without quite noticing it, every vivid memory she had ever had of those daily impossibilities, of the sweet unreasonable air of wonder she had once lived in. Thus she had protected herself; this moment hadn’t been able to injure her— kill her, for it would have!—in her imagining it; and so she had at least been able to go on from day to day. But too many thin and shadowed years had gone by now, too many. “I can’t,” she said. “I don’t know. I don’t know the way.”

“You must,” Lilac said simply.

“I don’t,” Sophie said, shaking her head. “I don’t, and even if I did I’d be afraid.” Afraid! That was the worst: afraid to take steps away from this dark old house, as afraid as any ghost. “Too long,” she said, wiping her wet nose on the sleeve of her cardigan, “too long.”

“But the house is the door!” Lilac said. “Everybody knows that. It’s marked on all their maps.”

“It is?”

“Yes. So.”

“And from here?”

Lilac looked at her blankly. “Well,” she said.

“I’m sorry, Lilac,” Sophie said. “I’ve had a sad life, you see…”

“Oh? Oh, I know,” Lilac said, brightening. “Those cards! Where are they?”

“There,” Sophie said, pointing to where the box of different woods from the Crystal Palace lay on the night table. Lilac reached for them, and pulled open the box. “Why did you have a sad life?” she asked, extracting the cards.

“Why?” Sophie said. “Because you were stolen, partly, mostly…”

“Oh, that. Well, that doesn’t matter.”

“Doesn’t matter?” Sophie laughed, weeping.

“No, that was just the beginning.” She was shuffling the big cards awkwardly in her small hands. “Didn’t you know that?”

“No. No, I thought… I think I thought it was the end.”

“Oh, that’s silly. If I hadn’t been stolen, I couldn’t have had my Education, and if I hadn’t had my Education I couldn’t have brought this news now, that it’s really beginning; so that was all right, don’t you see?”

Sophie watched her shuffle the cards, dropping some and sticking them back in the deck, in a sort of parody of careful arrangement. She tried to imagine the life Lilac had led, and couldn’t. “Did you,” she asked, “ever miss me, Lilac?” Lilac shrugged one shoulder, busy.

“There,” she said, and gave the deck to Sophie. “Follow that.” Sophie slowly took the cards from her, and just for a moment Lilac seemed to see her—to see her truly, for the first time since she had entered. “Sophie,” she said. “Don’t be sad. It’s all so much larger than you think.” She put her hand over Sophie’s. “Oh, there’s a fountain there—or a waterfall, I forget—and you can wash there— oh it’s so clear and icy cold and—oh, it’s all, it’s all so much bigger than you think!”

She climbed down from the bed. “You sleep now,” she said. “I have to go.”

“Go where? I won’t sleep, Lilac.”

“You will,” Lilac said. “You can, now; because I’m awake.”

“Oh?” She lay back slowly on the pillows Lilac plumped up behind her.

“Because,” Lilac said, with the secret in her smile again, “because I stole your sleep; but now I’m awake, and you can sleep.”

Sophie, exhausted, clasped the cards. “Where,” she said, “will you go? It’s dark and cold.”

Lilac shuddered, but she only said, “You sleep.” She raised herself on tiptoe beside the tall bed and, brushing the pale curls from Sophie’s cheek, kissed her lightly. “Sleep.”

She stepped noiselessly across the floor, opened the door, and with a glance back at her mother, went out into the still, cold hall. She closed the door behind her.

Sophie lay staring at the blankness of the door. The third candle guttered out with a hiss and a pop. Still holding the cards, Sophie wiggled slowly down within the quilts and coverlets, thinking—or perhaps not thinking, not thinking at all but feeling certain—that Lilac had, in some regard, been lying to her; in some regard misleading her at least; but in what regard?

Sleep.

In what regard? She was thinking, like a mental breathing: in what regard? She was breathing this when she knew, with a gasp of delight in her soul that almost woke her, that she was asleep.

Not All Over

Auberon, yawning, glanced first through the mail that Fred Savage had brought the night before from uptown.

“Dear World Elsewhere,” a lady with peacockgreen ink wrote, “I am writing now to ask you a question I have long pondered. I would like to know, if at all possible, where is that house where the MacReynolds and the others live? I must say that it is very important to me personally to know this. Its exact location. I wouldn’t bother you by writing except that I find it impossible to imagine. When they used to live at Shady Acres (way back when!) well, I could imagine that easily enough, but I cannot imagine this other place they’ve ended up. Please give me some kind of hint. I can hardly think of anything else.” She signed herself his hopefully, and added a postscript: “I sincerely promise not to bother anybody.” Auberon glanced at the postmark—way out West—and tossed it in the woodbox.

Now what the hell, he wondered, was he doing awake so early? Not to read mail. He glanced at Doc’s old square-faced wristwatch on the mantelpiece. Oh, yes: milking. All this week. He roughly pulled the covers of the bed in place, put a hand under the footboard, said “Up we go,” and magicked it into a mirror-fronted old wardrobe. The click of its locking into upright place he always found satisfying.

He pulled on tall boots and a heavy sweater, looking out the window at a light snow falling. Yawning again (would George have coffee? Yours hopefully) he pushed his hat on his head and went out clumping, locking the Folding Bedroom’s doors behind him and making his way down the stairs, out the window, down the fire escape, into the hall, through the wall and out onto the stairs that led down to the Mouse kitchen.

At the bottom he came on George.

“You’re not going to believe this,” George said.

Auberon stopped. George said nothing more. He looked like he’d seen a ghost: Auberon at once recognized the look, though he’d never before seen anyone who’d seen a ghost. Or like a ghost himself, if ghosts can look stricken, overcome by conflicting emotions, and amazed out of their wits. “What?” he said.

“You are not. Gonna believe this.” He was in socks of great antiquity and a quilted boxer’s dressing gown. He took Auberon’s hand and began to lead him down the hall toward the door of the kitchen. “What,” Auberon said again. The back of George’s dressing gown said it belonged to the Yonkers A.C.

At the door—which stood ajar—George turned again to Auberon. “Now just for God’s sake,” he whispered urgently, “don’t say a word about, you know, that story. That story I told you, about—you know—” he glanced at the open door—“about Lilac,” he said, or rather did not say, he only moved his lips around the name silently, exaggeratedly, and winked a frightened warning wink. Then he pushed open the door.

“Look,” he said. “Look, look,” as though Auberon were capable of not looking. “My kid.”

The child sat on the edge of the table, swinging her crossed bare legs back and forth.

“Hello, Auheron,” she said. “You got big.”

Auberon, feeling a feeling like crossed eyes in his soul but looking steadily at the child, touched the place in his heart where his imaginary Lilac was kept. She was there.

Then this was—

“Lilac,” he said.

“My kid. Lilac,” George said.

“But how?”

“Don’t ask me how,” George said.

“It’s a long story,” Lilac said. “The longest story I know.”

“There’s this meeting on,” George said.

“A Parliament,” Lilac said. “I came to tell you.”

“She came to tell us.”

“A Parliament,” Auberon said. “What on earth.”

“Listen, man,” George said. “Don’t ask me. I came down to brew a little coffee, and there’s a knocking at the door…”

“But why,” Auberon asked, “is she so young?”

“You’re asking me? So I peeked out, and here’s this kid in the snow…”

“She should be a lot older.”

“She was asleep. Or some damn thing. What do I know. So I open the door…”

“This is all kind of hard to believe,” Auberon said.

Lilac had been looking from one to the other of them, hands clasped in her lap, smiling a smile of cheerful love for her father, and of sly complicity at Auberon. The two stopped talking then, and only looked at her. George came closer. The look he wore was an anxious, joyful wonderment, as though he’d just hatched Lilac himself. “Milk,” he said, snapping his fingers. “How about a glass of milk? Kids like milk, right?”

“I can’t,” Lilac said, laughing at his solicitude. “I can’t, here.”

But George was already bustling with a jelly jar and a canister of goats milk from the refrigerator. “Sure,” he said. “Milk.”

“Lilac,” Auheron said. “Where is it you want us to go?”

“To where the meeting is,” Lilac said. “The Parliament.”

“But where? Why? What…”

“Oh, Auberon,” Lilac said, impatient, “they’ll explain all that when you get there. You just have to come.”

“They?”

Lilac turned up her eyes in mock-stupefaction. “Oh, come on,” she said. “You just have to hurry, that’s all, so as not to be late…”

“Nobody’s going anywhere now,” George said, putting the milk in Lilac’s hands. She looked at it curiously, and put it down. “Now you’re hack, and that’s great, I don’t know from where or how, but you’re here and safe, and we’re staying here.”

‘Oh, but you must come,” Lilac said, taking the sleeve of his dressing gown. “You have to. Otherwise…”

“Otherwise?” George asked.

“It won’t come out right,” Lilac said softly. “The Tale,” she said, even more softly.

“Oho,” George said. “Oho, the Tale. Well.” He stood before her arms akimbo, nodding a skeptical nod but lost for an answer.

Auberon watched them, father and daughter, thinking: It’s not all over, then. That had been the thought he had begun to think as soon as he entered the old kitchen, or rather not to think but to know, to know by the rising of the hair on his nape and the weird swarm of feeling, the feeling that his eyes were crossing and yet seeing more clearly than before. Not all over: he had lived long in a small room, a folding bedroom, and had explored its every corner, had come to know it as he knew his own bowels, and had decided: this is all right, this will do, a sort of life can be lived here, here’s a chair by the fire and a bed to sleep in and a window to look out of; if it was constricted, that was made up for by how much simple sense it made. And now it was as though he had lowered the front of the mirrored wardrobe and found not a bed clothed in patched sheets and an old quilt but a portal, a ship in full sail raising anchor, a windy dawn and an avenue beneath tall trees disappearing far out of sight.

He shut it up, fearful. He’d had his adventure. He’d followed outlandish paths, and hadn’t for no good reason given them up. He got up, and clumped to the window in his rubber boots. Unmilked, the goats bewailed in their apartments.

“No,” he said. “I’m not going, Lilac.”

“But you haven’t even heard the reasons,” Lilac said.

“I don’t care.”

“The War! The Peace!” Lilac said.

“Don’t care.” He’d stick. He wouldn’t miss the whole world if it passed him by on the way there, and it probably would; or perhaps he would miss it, but he’d rather that than take his life in his teeth and pass into that sea again, that sea Desire, now that he’d escaped it, and found a shore. Never.

“Auberon,” Lilac said softly. “Sylvie will be there.”

Never. Never never never.

“Sylvie?” George said.

“Sylvie,” Lilac said.

When there had been no further word from either of them for some time, Lilac said, “She told me to tell you…”

“She didn’t!” Auberon said, turning on her. “She didn’t, it’s a lie! No! I don’t know why you want to fool us, I don’t know why or for what you came, but you’ll say anything, won’t you, won’t you? Anything but the truth! Just like all of them, because it doesn’t matter to you. No, no, you’re just as bad as they are, I know it, just as bad as that Lilac that George blew up, that fake one. No different.”

“Oh, great,” George said, casting his eyes upward. “That’s just great.”

“Blew up?” Lilac said, looking at George.

“It was not my fault,” George said, rifling a furious look at Auberon.

“So that’s what happened to it,” Lilac said thoughtfully. Then she laughed. “Oh, they were mad! When the ashes drifted down. It was hundreds of years old, and the last one they had.” She climbed down from the table, her blue skirt riding up. “I have to go now,” she said, and started toward the door.

“No,” Auberon said. “Wait.”

“Go! No,” George said, and took her arm.

“There’s so much to do,” Lilac said. “And this is all settled here, so… Oh,” she said. “I forgot. Your way is mostly in the forest, so it would be best if you had a guide. Somebody who knows the woods, and can help you along. Bring a coin, for the ferryman; dress warm. There are lots of doors, but some are quicker than others. Don’t be too long, or you’ll miss the banquet!” She was at the door, but rushed back to leap into George’s arms. She circled his neck in her thin golden arms, kissed his lean cheeks, and scrambled down again. “It’s going to be so much fun,” she said; she glanced once at them, smiling a smile of simple sweet wickedness and pleasure, and was gone. They heard the pat of her bare feet on the old linoleum outside, but didn’t hear the street door open, or shut.

George took from a leaning hatrack his overalls and coat, pulled them on, and then his boots; he went to the door, but when he reached it he seemed to forget what he was about, or why he hurried. He looked around himself, found no clue, and went to sit at the table.

Auberon slowly took the chair opposite him, and for a long time they sat silent, sometimes starting, but seeing nothing, while a certain light or meaning was subtracted from the room, returning it to ordinariness, turning it to a kitchen where porridge was made and goat’s milk drunk and two bachelors sat rubber-boot to rubber-boot at the table, with chores still to be done.

And a journey to go: that was left.

“Okay,” George said. “What?” He looked up, but Auberon hadn’t spoken.

“No,” Auberon said.

“She said,” George said, but then couldn’t exactly say what; couldn’t forget what she had said but (what with the goats bawling, what with the snow outside, what with his own heart emptying and filling) couldn’t remember it either.

“Sylvie,” Auberon said.

“A guide,” George said, snapping his fingers.

There were footsteps in the hall.

“A guide,” George said. “She said we’d need a guide.”

They both turned to look at the door, which just then opened.

Fred Savage came in, wearing his rubber boots, and ready for his breakfast.

“Guide?” he said. “Somebody goan someplace?”

Lady with the Alligator Purse

“Is it her?” Sophie asked. She pushed aside the window’s drape further to look.

“It must be,” Alice said.

Not often enough now did headlights turn in at the stone gateposts for it to be very likely anyone else. The long, low car, black in the twilight, swept the house with its brilliant eyes as it bounced up the rutty drive; it pulled around in front of the porch, its lights went out but its impatient burble went on for a while. Then it fell silent.

“George?” Sophie asked. “Auberon?”

“I don’t see them. No one but her.”

“Oh dear.”

“All right,” Alice said. “Her at least.” They turned away from the window to the expectant faces of those gathered in the double drawing room. “She’s here,” Alice said. “We’ll start soon.”

Ariel Hawksquill, after stilling the car’s motor, sat for a moment listening to the new silence. Then she worked her way out of the seat’s grasp. She took from the seat next to her an alligator shoulder bag, and stood in the slight drizzle that was falling; she breathed deeply of the evening air, and thought: Spring.

For the second time she had driven north to Edgewood, this time over the ruts and potholes of a degenerated road system, and passing this time checkpoints where passes and visas had to be shown, a thing that would have been unthinkable five years before when she had come here. She supposed that she had been followed, at least part way, but no tail could have kept up with her through the tangle of rainy roads that led from the highway to here. She came alone. The letter from Sophie had been odd but urgent: urgent enough, she hoped, to justify sending it (Hawksquill had insisted her cousins never write to her at the Capital, she knew her mail was scanned) and to justify a journey and a long absence from the Government at a critical time.

“Hello, Sophie,” she said, when the two tall sisters came out on the porch. There was no welcoming light lit there. “Hello, Alice.”

“Hello,” Alice said. “Where’s Auberon? Where’s George? We asked…”

Hawksquill mounted the steps. “I went to the address,” she said, “and knocked a long time. The place looked abandoned…”

“It always does,” Sophie said.

“… and no one answered. I thought I heard someone behind the door; I called their names. Someone, someone with an accent, called back that they had gone.”

“Gone?” Sophie said.

“Gone away. I asked where, for how long; but no one answered. I didn’t dare stay too long.”

“Didn’t dare?” Alice said.

“May we go in?” Hawksquill said. “It’s a lovely night, but damp.” Her cousins didn’t know, and, Hawksquill supposed, couldn’t really imagine the danger they might put themselves in by association with her. Deep desires reached out toward this house, not knowing of its existence, yet sniffing closer all the time. But there was no need (she hoped) to alarm them.

There was no light in the hall but a dull candle, making the place shadowy and vast; Hawksquill followed her cousins down, around, up through the impossible insides of the house into a set of two big rooms where a fire burned, lights were lit, and many faces looked up interested and expectant at her arrival.

“This is our cousin,” Daily Alice said to them. “Long-lost, sort of, her name is Ariel. This is the family,” she said to Ariel, “you know them; and some others.

“So, I guess everybody’s here,” she said. “Everybody who can come. I’ll go get Smoky.”

Sophie went to a drum-table where a brass, green-glassshaded lamp shone, and where the cards lay. Ariel Hawksquill felt her heart rise or sink to see them. Whatever other fates they held or did not hold, Hawksquill knew at that moment that hers was surely in them: was them.

“Hello,” she said, nodding briefly to the assembly. She took a straight-backed chair between a very, a remarkably old and bright-eyed lady and two twin children, boy and girl, who shared an armchair.

“And how,” said Marge Juniper to her, “do you come to be a cousin?”

“As nearly as I can tell,” Hawksquill said, “I’m not, really. The father of the Auberon who was Violet Drinkwater’s son was my grandfather by a later marriage.”

“Oh,” Marge said. “That side of the family.”

Hawksquill felt eyes on her, and gave a quick glance and a smile at the two children in the armchair, who were staring at her with uncertain curiosity. Rarely see strangers, Hawksquill supposed; but what Bud and Blossom were seeing, in the flesh, with wonder and a little trepidation, was that enigmatic and somewhat fearsome figure who in a song they often sang comes at the crux of the story: the Lady with the Alligator Purse.

Still Unstolen

Alice climbed quickly up through the house, negotiating dark stairways with the skill of a blind man.

“Smoky?” she called when she stood at the bottom of a narrow curl of steep stairs that led up into the orrery. No one answered, but a light burned up there.

“Smoky?”

She didn’t like to go up; the small stairs, the small arched door, the cramped cold cupola stuffed with machinery, gave her the willies, it wasn’t designed to amuse someone as big as she was.

“Everyone’s here,” she said. “We can start.”

She waited, hugging herself. The damp was palpable on this neglected floor; and brown stains spread over the wallpaper. Smoky said, “All right,” but she heard no movement.

“George and Auberon didn’t come,” she said. “They’re gone.” She waited more, and then—hearing neither noise of work nor preparations to come down—climbed up the stairs and put her head through the little door.

Smoky sat on a small stool, like a petitioner or penitent before his idol, staring at the mechanism inside the black steel case. Alice felt somewhat shy, or intrusive into a privacy, seeing him there and it exposed.

“Okay,” Smoky said again, but when he rose, it was only to take a steel ball the size of a croquet ball from a rack of them in the back of the case. This he placed in the cup or hand of one of the extended jointed arms of the wheel which the case contained and sheltered. He let go, and the weight of the ball spun the arm downward. As it moved, the other jointed arms moved too; another, clack-clack-clack, extended itself to receive the next ball.

“See how it works?” Smoky said, sadly.

“No,” Alice said.

“An overbalancing wheel,” Smoky said. “These jointed arms, see, are held out stiff on this side, because of the joints; but when they come around to this side, the joints fold up, and the arm lies along the wheel. So. This side of the wheel, where the arms stick out, will always be heavier, and will always fall down, that is, around; so when you put the ball in the cup, the wheel falls around, and that brings the next arm into place. And a ball falls into the cup of that arm, and bears it down and around, and so on.”

“Oh.” He was telling all this flatly, like an old, old story or a grammar lesson too often repeated. It occurred to Alice that he’d eaten no dinner.

“Then,” he went on, “the weight of the balls falling into the cups of the arms on this side carries the arms far enough up on this side so that they fold up, and the cup tips, and the ball rolls out”—he turned the wheel by hand to demonstrate—“and goes back into the rack, and rolls down and falls into the cup of the arm that just extended itself over on this side, and that carries that arm around, and so it goes on endlessly.” The slack arm did deposit its ball; the ball did roll into the arm that extended itself, clack-clack-clack, out from the wheel. The arm was borne down to the bottom of the wheel’s cycle. Then it stopped.

“Amazing,” Alice said mildly.

Smoky, hands behind his back, looked glumly at the unmoving wheel. “It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” he said.

“Oh.”

“This guy Cloud must have been just about the stupidest inventor or genius who ever…” He could think of no conclusion, and bowed his head. “It never worked, Alice; this thing couldn’t turn anything. It’s not going to work.”

She moved carefully among the tools and oily disassembled works and took his arm. “Smoky,” she said. “Everybody’s downstairs. Ariel Hawksquill came.”

He looked at her, and laughed, a frustrated laugh at a defeat absurdly complete; then he grimaced, and put his hand quickly to his chest.

“Oh,” Alice said. “You should have eaten.”

“It’s better when I don’t,” Smoky said. “I think.”

“Come on,” Alice said. “You’ll figure this out, I bet. Maybe you can ask Ariel.” She kissed his brow, and went before him out the arched door and then down the steps, feeling released.

“Alice,” Smoky said to her. “Is this it? Tonight, I mean. Is this it?”

“Is this what?”

“It is, isn’t it?” he said.

She said nothing while they went along the hall and down the stairs toward the second floor. She held Smoky’s arm, and thought of more than one thing to say; but at last (there wasn’t any point any longer in riddling, she knew too much, and so did he) she only said. “I guess. Close.”

Smoky’s hand, pressed to his chest beneath his breastbone, began to tingle, and he said “Oh-oh,” and stopped.

They were at the top of the stairs. Faintly, below, he could see the drawing-room lights, and hear voices. Then the voices went out in a hum of silence.

Close. If it were close, then he had lost; for he was far behind, he had work to do he could not even conceive of, much less begin. He had lost.

An enormous hollow seemed to open up in his chest, a hollow larger than himself. Pain gathered on its perimeter, and Smoky knew that after a moment, an endless moment, the pain would rush in and fill the hollow: but for that moment there was nothing, nothing but a terrible premonition, and an incipient revelation, both vacant, contesting in his empty heart. The premonition was black, and the incipient revelation would be white. He stopped stock still, trying not to panic because he couldn’t breathe; there was no air within the hollow for him to breathe; he could only experience the battle between Premonition and Revelation and listen to the long loud hum in his ears that seemed to be a voice saying Now you see, you didn’t ask to see and this is not the moment in which you would anyway have expected sight to come, here on this stair in this dark, but Now: and even then it was gone. His heart, with two slow awful thuds like blows, began to pound fiercely and steadily as though in rage, and pain, familiar and releasing, filled him up. The contest was over. He could breathe the pain. In a moment, he would breathe air.

“Oh,” he heard Alice saying, “oh, oh, a bad one”; he saw her pressing her own bosom in sympathy, and felt her grip on his left arm.

“Yeah, wow,” he said, finding voice. “Oh, boy.”

“Gone?”

“Almost.” Pain ran down the left arm she held, diminishing to a thread which continued down into his ring finger, on which there was no ring, but from which, it felt, a ring was being torn, pulled off, a ring worn so long that it couldn’t be removed without severing nerve and tendon. “Quit it, quit it,” he said, and it did quit, or diminish further anyway.

Okay, he said. Okay.

“Oh, Smoky,” Alice said. “Okay?”

“Gone,” he said. He took steps downward toward the lights of the drawing-room. Alice held him, supported him, but he wasn’t weak; he wasn’t even ill, Dr. Fish and Doc Drinkwater’s old medical books agreed that what he suffered from wasn’t a disease but a condition, compatible with long life, even with otherwise good health.

A condition, something to live with. Then why should it appear to be revelation, revelation that never quite came, and couldn’t be remembered afterwards? “Yes,” old Fish had said, “premonition of death, that’s a common feeling with angina, nothing to worry about.” But was it of death? Would that be what the revelation was, when it came, if it came?

“It hurt,” Alice said.

“Well,” Smoky said, laughing or panting, “I think I would have preferred it not to happen, yes.”

“Maybe that’s the last,” Alice said. She seemed to think of his attacks on the model of sneezes, one big last one might clear the system.

“Oh, I bet not,” Smoky said mildly. “I don’t think we want the last one. No.”

They went down the stairs, holding each other, and then into the drawing room where the others waited.

“Here we are,” said Alice. “Here’s Smoky.”

“Hi, hi,” he said. Sophie looked up from her table, and his daughters from their knitting, and he saw his pain reflected in their faces. His finger still tingled, but he was whole; his long-worn ring was for a time yet unstolen.

A condition: but like revelation. And did theirs, he wondered for the first time, hurt like his did?

“All right,” Sophie said. “We’ll start.” She looked around at the circle of faces which looked at her, Drinkwaters and Barnables, Birds, Flowers, Stones, and Weeds, her cousins, neighbors and relatives. The brightness of the brass lamp on the table made the rest of the room obscure to her, as though she sat by a campfire looking at the faces of animals in the surrounding dark, whom by her words she must charm into consciousness, and into purpose.

“Well,” she said. “I had a visitor.”

It had been easier than Sophie would have thought to assemble her relatives and neighbors here on this night, though it hadn’t been easy to decide to assemble them, or to decide what to tell them: for an old, old silence was being broken, a silence so old that they at Edgewood did not even remember that it had been sworn to, a silence at the heart of many stories, broken into like a locked chest to which the key is lost. That had taken up the last months of winter: that, and getting the word out then to mudbound farms and isolated cottages, to the Capital and the City, and setting a date convenient to all.

Is It Far?

They had almost all agreed, though, to come, oddly untaken-aback, when the word reached them; it had been almost as if they had long expected a summons like this. And so they had, though most of them didn’t realize it until it had come.

When Marge Juniper’s young visitor passed through the pentacle of five towns which, once upon a time, Jeff Juniper had connected with a five-pointed star to show Smoky Barnable the way to Edgewood, more than one of the sleeping householders had awakened, feeling someone or something go by, and a kind of expectant peace descend, a happy sense that all their lives would not end, as they had supposed, before an ancient promise was Somehow fulfilled, or some great thing anyway come to pass. Only spring, they told themselves in the morning; only spring coming: the world is as it is and not different, and contains no such surprises. But then Marge’s story went from house to house, gathering details as it went, and there were guesses and supposings about that; and then they were unsurprised—surprised to be unsurprised—when they were summoned here.

For it was with them, with all those families touched by August, taught by Auberon and then by Smoky, and visited by Sophie on her endless spinster’s rounds, just as Great-aunt Nora Cloud supposed it would come to be with Drinkwaters and Barnables. There had been, after all, a time, nearly a hundred years ago, when their ancestors had settled here because they knew a Tale, or its tellers; some had been students, disciples even. They had been, people like the Flowers had been or had felt themselves to be, in on a secret; and many had been wealthy enough to do little but ponder it, amid the buttercups and milkweed of the farms they bought and neglected. And though hard times had reduced their descendants, turning many of them into artisans, into odd-jobbers, pickup-truckers, hard-scrabble farmers, inextricably intermarried now with the dairymen and handymen whom their great-grandparents had hardly spoken to, still they had stories, stories told nowhere else in the world. They were in reduced circumstances, yes; and the world (they thought) had grown hard and old and desperately ordinary; but they were descended from a race of bards and heroes, and there had been once an age of gold, and the earth around them was all alive and densely populated, though the present times were too coarse to see it. They had all gone to sleep, as children, to those old stories; and later they courted with them; and told them to their own children. The big house had always been their gossip, they could have surprised its inhabitants by how much they knew of it and its history. At table and by their fires they mused on these things, having not much other entertainment in these dark days, and (though altering them in their musing into very different things) they did not forget them. And when Sophie’s summons came, surprised to be unsurprised, they put down their tools, and put off their aprons, they bundled up their children and kicked up their old engines; they came to Edgewood, and heard about a lost child returned, and an urgent plea, and a journey to go on.

“And so there’s a door,” Sophie said, touching one of the cards (the trump Multiplicity) which lay before her, “and that’s the house here. And,” touching the next, “there’s a dog who stands by the door.” The silence wasutter in the double drawing-room. “Further on,” she said, “there’s a river, or something like one…”

“Speak up, dear,” Momdy said, who sat almost next to her. “No one will hear.”

“There’s a river,” Sophie said again, almost shouted. She blushed. In the darkness of her bedroom, with Lilac’s certainty before her, it had all seemed—not easy, no, but clear at least; the end was still clear to her, but it was the means that had to be considered now, and they weren’t clear. “And a bridge to cross it by, or a ford or a ferry or anyway some way to cross it; and on the other side an old man to guide us, who knows the way.”

“The way where?” someone behind her ventured timidly; Sophie thought it was a Bird.

“There,” someone else said, “Aren’t you listening?”

“There where they are,” Sophie said, “There where the Parliament’s to be.”

“Oh,” said the first voice. “Oh. I thought this was the Parliament.”

“No,” Sophie said. “That’s there.”

“Oh.”

Silence returned, and Sophie tried to think what else she knew.

“Is it far, Sophie?” Marge Juniper asked. “Some of us can’t go far.”

“I don’t know,” Sophie said. “I don’t think it can be far; I remember sometimes it seemed far, and then sometimes near; but I don’t think it could be too far, I mean too far to get to; but I don’t know.”

They waited; Sophie looked down at her cards, and shifted them. What if it was too far?

Blossom said softly: “Is it beautiful? It must be beautiful.”

Bud beside her said, “No! Dangerous. And awful. With things to fight! It’s a war, isn’t that so, Aunt Sophie?”

Ariel Hawksquill glanced at the children, and at Sophie. “Is it, Sophie?” she asked. “Is it a war?”

Sophie looked up, and held out empty hands. “I don’t know,” she said. “I think it’s a war; that’s what Lilac said. It’s what you said,” she said to Ariel, a little reproachfully. “I don’t know, I don’t know!” She got up, turning around to see them all. “All I know is that we have to go, we have to, to help them. Because if we don’t, there won’t be any more of them. They’re dying, I know it! Or going away, going away so far, hiding so far that it’s like dying, and because of us! And think what that would be, if there weren’t any more.”

They thought of that, or tried to, each coming to a different conclusion, or a different vision, or to none at all.

“I don’t know where it is,” Sophie said, “or how it is we’re to go there, or what we can do to help, or why it is that it’s us that have to go; but I know we must, we have to try! I mean it doesn’t even matter if we want to or don’t want to, really, don’t you see, because we wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for them; I know that’s so. Not to go, now—that’s like, it’s like being born, and growing up, and marrying and having children, and then saying well, I’ve changed my mind, I’d rather not have—when there wouldn’t be a person there even to say he’d rather not have, unless he had already. Do you see? And it’s the same with them. We couldn’t refuse unless we were the ones who were meant to go, unless we were all going to go, in the first place.”

She looked around at them all, Drinkwaters and Barnables, Birds, Stones, Flowers, Weeds, and Wolfs; Charles Wayne and Cherry Lake, Bud and Blossom, Ariel Hawksquill and Marge Juniper; Sonny Moon, ancient Phil Flowers and Phil’s girls and boys, August’s grandchildren and great- and great-great-grandchildren. She missed her aunt Cloud very much, who could have said these things so simply and incontrovertibly. Daily Alice, chin in her hand, was only looking at her smiling; Alice’s daughters were sewing calmly, as though all that Sophie had said were just as clear as water, though it had seemed nonsense to Sophie even as she had said it. Her mother nodded sagely, but perhaps she hadn’t heard aright; and the faces of her cousins around her were wise and foolish, light and dark, changed or unchanged.

“I’ve told you all I can,” Sophie said helplessly. “All that Lilac said: that there are fifty-two, and that it’s to be Midsummer Day, and that this is the door, as it always was; and the cards are a map, and what they say, as far as I can tell, about the dog and the river and so on. So. Now we just have to think what next.”

They all did think, many of them not much used to the exercise; many, though their hands were to their brows or their fingertips together, drifted away into surmise, wild or common, or sank into memory; gathered wool, or knitted it; felt their pains, old or new, and thought what those might portend, this journey or a different one; or they simply ruminated, chewing and tasting their own familiar natures, or counting over old fears or old advice, or remembering love or comfort; or they did none of these things.

“It might be easy,” Sophie said wildly. “It could be. Just a step! Or it might be hard. Maybe,” she said, “yes, maybe it’s not one way, not the same way for all—but there is a way, there must be. You have to think of it, each of you, you have to imagine it.”

They tried that, shifting in their seats and crossing their legs differently; they thought of north, of south, east, west; they thought of how they had come to be here anyway, guessing that if a path there could be seen, then perhaps its continuation would be clear; and in the silence of their thinking they heard a sound none had heard yet this year: peepers, suddenly speaking their one’ word.

“Well,” Sophie said, and sat. She pushed the cards together as though their story were all told. “Anyway. We’ll go step by step. We’ve got all spring. Then we’ll just meet, and see. I can’t think what else.”

“But Sophie,” Tacey said, putting down her sewing, “if the house is the door…”

“And,” Lily said, putting down hers, “if we’re in it…”

“Then,” Lucy said, “aren’t we traveling anyway?”

Sophie looked at them. What they had said made perfect sense, common sense, the way they said it. “I don’t know,” she said.

“Sophie,” Smoky said from where he stood by the door. He hadn’t spoken since he’d come in and the meeting had started. “Can I ask something?”

“Sure,” Sophie said.

“How,” Smoky said, “do we get back?”

In her silence was his answer, the one he’d expected, the one thing everyone present had suspected about the place she spoke of. She bowed her head in the silence she had made, and no one broke it; they all heard her answer, and in it, hidden, the true question that was being put to them, which Sophie could not quite ask.

They were all family, anyway, Sophie thought; or if they came, they counted, and if they didn’t, they didn’t, that’s all. She opened her mouth to ask: Will you come? but their faces abashed her, so various, so familiar, and she couldn’t frame it. “Well,” she said; they had grown indistinct in the sparkling tears that came to her eyes. “That’s all, I guess.”

Blossom jumped from her chair. “I know,” she said. “We all have to take hands, in a circle, for strength, and all say ‘We will!’” She looked around her. “Okay?”

There was some laughter and some demurrers, and her mother drew her to her and said that maybe everyone didn’t want to do that, but Blossom, taking her brother’s hand, began to urge her cousins and aunts and uncles to come closer to take hands, avoiding only the Lady with the Alligator Purse; then she decided that perhaps the circle would be stronger if they all crossed arms and took hands with opposite hands, which necessitated an even smaller circle, and when she got this linked in one place it would break in another. “Nobody’s listening,” she complained to Sophie, who only gazed ather unhearing, thinking of what might become of her, of the brave ones, and unable to imagine; and just then Momdy stood up tottering, who hadn’t heard the plan Blossom had urged, and said, “Well. There’s coffee and tea, and other things, in the kitchen, and some sandwiches,” and that broke the circle further; there was a scraping of chairs, and a general movement; they went off kitchenwards, talking in low voices.

Only Pretending

“Coffee sounds good,” Hawksquill said to the ancient lady beside her.

“It does,” Marge Juniper said. “Only I’m not sure whether it’s worth the trouble of going for it. You know.”

“Will you allow me,” Hawksquill said, “to bring you a cup?”

“That’s very kind,” Marge said with relief. It had been quite a trouble to everyone getting her here, and she was glad to keep to the seat she’d been put in.

Good, Hawksquill said. She went after the others, but stopped at the table where Sophie, cheek in hand, stared down as in grief, or wonder, at the cards. “Sophie,” she said.

“What if it’s too far?” Sophie said. She looked up at Hawksquill, a sudden fear in her eyes. “What if I’m wrong about it all?”

“I don’t think you could be,” Hawksquill said, “in a way. As far as I understood what you meant, anyway. It’s very odd, I know; but that’s no reason to think it’s wrong.” She touched Sophie’s shoulder. “In fact,” she said, “I’d only say that perhaps it’s not yet odd enough.”

“Lilac,” Sophie said.

“That,” Hawksquill said, “was odd. Yes.”

“Ariel,” Sophie said, “won’t you look at them? Maybe you could see something, some first step…”

“No,” Hawksquill said, drawing back. “No, they’re not for me to touch. No.” In the figure Sophie had laid out, broken now, the Fool did not show. “They’re too great a thing now.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Sophie said, spreading them idly around. “I think—it seems to me I’ve about got to the end of them. Of what they have to tell. Maybe it’s only me. But there doesn’t seem to be any more in them.” She rose, and walked away from them. “Lilac said they were the guidebook,” she said. “But I don’t know. I think she was only pretending.”

“Pretending?” Hawksquill said, following her.

“Just to keep our interest up,” Sophie said. “Hope.”

Hawksquill glanced back at them. Like the circle Blossom had tried to make, they were linked strongly, even in disorder, by their opposite hands. The end of them… She looked quickly away, and signalled reassuringly to the old woman she had sat by, who didn’t seem to see.

In fact Marge Juniper didn’t see her, but it wasn’t fading eye-sight or failing attention that blinded her. She was only absorbed in thinking, as Sophie had abjured them, how she might walk to that place, and what she might take with her (a pressed flower, a shawl embroidered with the same kind of flowers, a locket containing a curl of black hair, an acrostic valentine on which the letters of her name headed sentiments faded now to sepia and insincerity) and how she might husband her strength until the day she should set out.

For she knew what place it was that Sophie spoke of. Lately Marge’s memory had grown weak, which is to say that it no longer contained the past time on deposit there, it was not strong enough to keep shut up the moments, the mornings and evenings, of her long life; its seals broke, and her memories ran together mingling, indistinguishable from the present. Her memory had grown incontinent with age; and she knew very well what place it was she was to go to. It was the place where, eighty-some years ago or yesterday, August Drinkwater had run off to; and the place also where she had remained when he had gone. It was the place all young hopes go when they have become old and we no longer feel them; the place where beginnings go when endings have come, and then themselves passed.

Midsummer Day, she thought, and made to count out the days and weeks remaining until them; but she forgot what season this was she counted from, and so gave it up.

Where Was She Headed?

In the dining room Hawksquill came upon Smoky, loitering in the corner, seeming lost in his own house and at loose ends.

“How,” she said to him, “do you understand all this, Mr. Barnable?”

“Hm?” He took a time to focus on her. “Oh. I don’t. I don’t understand it.” He shrugged, not as though in apology but as though it were a position he found himself taking, one side of a question, the other side had lots to be said for it too. He looked away.

“And how,” she said then, seeing she ought not to pursue that further, “is your orrery coming? Have you got it working?”

This too seemed to be the wrong question. He sighed. “Not working,” he said. “All ready to go. Only not working.”

“What’s the difficulty?”

He thrust his hands in his pockets. “The difficulty is,” he said, “that it’s circular…”

“Well, so are the Spheres,” Hawksquill said. “Or nearly.”

“I didn’t mean that,” Smdky said. “I mean that it depends on itself to go around. Depends on its going around to go around. You know. Perpetual Motion. It’s a perpetual motion machine, believe it or not.”

“So are the Spheres,” Hawksquill said. “Or nearly.”

“What I can’t understand,” Smoky said, growing more agitated as he contemplated this, and jingling the small objects he had in his pockets, screws, washers, coins, “is how someone like Henry Cloud, or Harvey either, could have come up with such a dumb idea. Perpetual motion. Everybody knows…” He looked at Hawksquill. “How does yours work,” he said, “by the way? What makes is go around?”

“Well,” Hawksquill said, setting down the two coffee cups she carried on a sideboard, “not, I think the way yours does. Mine shows a different heavens, after all. Simpler, in many ways…”

“Well, but how?” Smoky said. “Give me a hint.” He smiled, and Hawksquill thought, seeing him, that he had not often done so lately. She wondered how he had come among this family in the first place.

“I can tell you this,” she said. “Whatever makes mine go around now, I have the definite impression that it was designed to go around by itself.”

“By itself,” Smoky said doubtfully.

“It couldn’t, though,” Hawksquill said. “Perhaps because it’s the wrong heavens, because it models a heavens that never did go by themselves, but were always moved by will: by angels, by gods. Mine are the old heavens. But yours are the new, the Newtonian, self-propelling, once-wound-up-forever- ticking type of heavens. Perhaps it does move by itself.”

Smoky stared at her. “There’s a machine that looks like it’s supposed to drive it,” he said. “But it needs to be driven itself. It needs a push.”

“Well, “Hawksquill said, “once properly set… I mean if it had the star’s motions, they’d be irresistible, wouldn’t they? Forever.” A strange light was dawning in Smoky’s eyes, a light that looked like pain to Hawksquill. She should shut up. A little learning. If she hadn’t felt Smoky to be effectively outside the scheme the rest of her cousins were proposing, which Hawksquill had no intention of furthering, she would not have added: “You may well have it backwards, Mr. Barnable. Drive and driven. The stars have power to spare.”

She picked up her coffee cups, and when he reached out a hand to keep her, she showed them to him, nodded and escaped; his next question would be one she couldn’t answer without breaking old vows. But she wanted to have helped him. She felt, for some reason, the need of an ally here. Standing confused at a juncture of hallways (she had taken a wrong turning away from the dining room) she saw him hurrying away upstairs, and hoped she hadn’t set him on fruitlessly.

Now where was it she was headed? She looked around herself, turning this way and that, the coffee cooling in her hands. Somewhere there was a murmur of voices.

A turning, a juncture where many ways could be seen at once; a Vista. No memory mansion of her own was built more overlappingly, with more corridors, more places that were two places at once, more precise in its confusions, than this house. She felt it rise around her, John’s dream, Violet’s castle, tall and many-roomed. It took hold of her mind, as though it were in fact made of memory; she saw, and it swept her into a fearful clarity to see, that if this were her own mind’s house, all her conclusions would now be coming out quite differently; quite, quite differently.

She had sat this night smiling among them, listening politely, as though she were attending someone else’s religious service, mistaken for a member of the congregation, feeling at once embarrassed at their sincerity and aloof from emotions she was glad not to share, and perhaps just a little sad to be excluded, it looked like fun to understand things so simply. But the house had meanwhile been all around them as it was all around her now, great, grave, certain and impatient: the house said it was not so, not so at all. The house said (and Hawksquill knew how to hear houses speak, it was her chief skill and great art, she only wondered how she had been deaf to this huge voice so long), the house said that it was not they, not Drinkwaters and Barnables and the rest, who had understood things too simply. She had thought that the great cards they played with had come to them by chance, a Grail stashed amusingly with the daily drinking cups, an historical accident. But the house didn’t believe in accidents; the house said she had been mistaken, again, and this time for the last time. As though while sitting aloof in some humble church, among ordinary parishioners who sang corny hymns, she had witnessed some concrete and terrible miracle or grace, she trembled in denial and fear: she could not have been so horribly mistaken, reason couldn’t bear it, it would turn dream and shatter, and in its shattering she would awake into some world, some house so strange, so new…

She heard Daily Alice call to her, from an unexpected direction. She heard the coffee cups she still held rattling faintly in their saucers. She composed herself, took courage, and pulled herself out of the tangle of the imaginary drawing-room where she had got stuck.

“You’ll stay the night, won’t you, Ariel?” Alice said. “The imaginary bedroom’s made up, and…”

“No,” Hawksquill said. She delivered Marge’s coffee to her where she still sat. The old woman took it abstractedly, and it seemed to Hawksquill that she wept, or had been weeping, though perhaps it was only the watering of aged eyes. “No, it’s very kind of you, but I must leave. I have to meet a train north of here. I should be on it now, but I managed to get away to here first.”

“Well, couldn’t you…”

“No,” Hawksquill said. “It’s a Presidential train. Waiting on princes, you know. He’s taking one of his tours. I don’t know why he bothers. He’s either shot at, or ignored. Still.”

The guests were leaving, pulling on heavy coats and earflap hats. Many stopped to talk with Sophie; Hawksquill saw that one of these, an old man, wept too as he talked, and that Sophie embraced him.

“They’ll all go, then?” she asked Alice.

“I think,” Alice said. “Mostly. We’ll see, won’t we?”

Her eyes on Hawksquill, so clear and brown, so full of serene complicity, made Hawksquill look away, afraid that she too would stutter and weep. “My bag,” she said. “I’ll get it, then I must go. Must.”

The drawing-rooms where they had all met were empty now, except for the dim figure of the old woman, drinking her coffee in tiny sips like a clockwork figure. Hawksquill took up her purse. Then she saw that the cards still lay spread out beneath the lamp.

The end of their story. But not of hers; not if she could help it.

She glanced up quickly. She could hear Alice and Sophie, saying goodbye to guests at the front door. Marge’s eyes were closed. Almost without thinking she turned her back to Marge, snapped open the purse, and swept the cards into it. They burned the fingertips that touched them like ice. She snapped the purse shut and turned to leave. She saw Alice standing in the drawing-room door, looking at her.

“Goodbye, then,” Hawksquill said briskly, her icy heart thudding, feeling as helpless as a naughty child in a grown-up’s grip who’s yet unable to quit his tantrum.

“Goodbye,” Alice said, standing aside to let her pass. “Good luck with the President. We’ll see you soon.”

Hawksquill didn’t look at her, knowing that she would read her crime in Alice’s eyes, and more too that she wanted even less to see. There was an escape from this, there had to be; if wit couldn’t find it, power must make it. And it was too late now for her to think of anything but escape.

Too Simple to Say

Daily Alice and Sophie watched from the front door as Hawksquill climbed quickly, as though pursued, into her car, and gunned the motor. The car leapt forward like a steed, and arrowed out between the stone gateposts and into the night and fog.

“Late for her train,” Alice said.

“Do you think she’ll come, though?” Sophie said.

“Oh,” Alice said, “she will. She will.”

They turned away from the night, and shut the door. “But Auberon,” Sophie said. “Auberon, and George…”

“It’s okay, Sophie,” Alice said.

“But…”

“Sophie,” Alice said. “Will you come sit up with me a while? I’m not going to sleep.”

Alice’s face was calm, and she smiled, but Sophie heard an appeal, even something like a fear. She said, “Sure, Alice.”

“How about the library?” Alice said. “Nobody will go in there.”

“Okay.” She followed Alice into the great dark room; Alice lit a single lamp with a kitchen match and turned it low. Out the windows the fog seemed to contain dull lights, but nothing else could be seen. “Alice?” she said.

Alice seemed to wake from thought, and faced her sister.

“Alice, did you know all what I was going to say, tonight?”

“Oh; most of it, I guess.”

“Did you? How long ago?”

“I don’t know. In a way,” she said, sitting slowly on one end of the long leather chesterfield, “in a way I think I always knew it; and it just kept getting clearer. Except when…”

“When?”

“When it got darker. When—well, when things didn’t seem to be going as you thought they would, or even the opposite. Times when—when it all seemed taken away.”

Sophie turned away, though her sister had spoken only with a deep thoughtfulness, and in no way in reproach; she knew what times it was that Alice spoke of, and grieved that she had, even for a day, for an hour, deflected her certainties. And all so long ago!

“Afterwards, though,” Alice said, “when things seemed, you know, to make sense again, they made an even bigger sense. And it seemed funny that you could ever have thought it wasn’t all right, that you could have been fooled. Isn’t that right? Wasn’t it like that?”

“I don’t know,” Sophie said.

“Come sit,” Alice said. “Wasn’t it like that with you?”

“No.” She sat by Alice, and Alice pulled a multi-colored afghan, Tacey’s work, over the two of them; it was cold in the fireless room. “I think it just kept making less sense ever since I was little.” So hard to speak of it, after so many years of silence; once, years ago, they had chatted about it endlessly, not making sense and not caring to, mixing it with their dreams and with the games they played, knowing so surely how to understand it because they made no distinction between it and their desires, for comfort, for adventure, for wonder. Very suddenly she was visited with a memory, as vivid and as whole as though present, of her and Alice naked, and their uncle Auberon, at the place on the edge of the woods. For so long had her memories of those things come to be in effect replaced by Auberon’s photographs that recorded them, beautiful pale .and still, that to have one return in all its fullness took her breath away: heat, and certainty, and wonder, in the deep real summer of childhood. “Oh, why,” she said, “why couldn’t we have just gone then, when we knew? When it would have been so easy?”

Alice took her hand under the comforter. “We could have,” she said. “We could have gone any time. When we did go is the Tale.”

She added after a time: “But it won’t be easy.” Her words alerted Sophie, and she took her sister’s hand more tightly. “Sophie,” Alice said, “you said Mid-summer Day.”

“Yes.”

“But—all right,” Alice said. “Only. I have to go sooner.”

Sophie raised her head from the sofa, not relinquishing her sister’s hand, and afraid. “What?” she said.

“I,” Alice said, “have to go sooner.” She glanced at Sophie, and then away; a glance Sophie knew meant that Alice was telling her now a thing she had long known about and had kept a secret.

“When?” Sophie said, or whispered.

“Now,” Alice said.

“No,” Sophie said.

“Tonight,” Alice said, “or this morning. That’s why— that’s why I wanted you to sit with me, because…”

“But why?” Sophie said.

“I can’t say, Sophie.”

“No, Alice, no, but…”

“It’s okay, Soph,” Alice said, smiling at her sister’s bafflement. “We’re all to go, all of us; only I have to go sooner. That’s all.”

Sophie stared at her, a very strange thought invading her, invading her wide eyes and open mouth and hollowed heart: strange, because she had heard Lilac say it, and had read it in the cards, and then spoken of it to all her cousins, but had only now come to truly think it. “We are going, then,” she said.

Alice nodded, a tiny nod.

“It’s all true,” Sophie said. Her sister, calm or at least not shaken, ready or seeming to be, grew huge before Sophie’s eyes. “All true.”

“Yes.”

“Oh, Alice.” Alice, grown so great before her, frightened her. “Oh, but Alice, don’t. Wait. Don’t go now, not so soon…”

“I have to,” Alice said.

“But then I’ll be left, and… everybody…” She threw off the comforter and stood to plead. “No, don’t go without me, wait!”

“I have to, Sophie, because… Oh, I can’t say it, it’s too strange to say, or too simple. I have to go, because if I don’t, there won’t be any place to go to. For you, and everybody.”

“I don’t understand,” Sophie said.

Alice laughed, a small laugh like a sob. “I don’t either, yet. But. Soon.”

“But all alone,” Sophie said. “How can you?”

Alice said nothing to that, and Sophie bit her lip that she’d said it. Brave! A huge love, a love like deepest pity, filled her up, and she took Alice’s hand again; she sat again beside her. Somewhere in the house, a clock rang a small morning hour, and the bells stabbed one by one through Sophie. “Are you afraid?” she said, unable not to.

“Just sit with me awhile,” Alice said. “It’s not long till dawn.”

Far above them then there were footsteps, quick ones, heavy. They both looked up. The steps went overhead, down a hall, and then came rapidly and noisily down the stairs. Alice squeezed Sophie’s hand, in a way that Sophie understood, though what she understood Alice to be telling her by it shocked her more deeply than anything her sister had so far said.

Smoky opened the door of the library, and gave a start seeing the two women on the sofa.

“Hey, still up?” he said. His breath was labored. Sophie was sure he would read her stricken face, but he didn’t seem to; he went to the lamp, picked it up, and began going around the library, peering at the dark-burdened shelves.

“You wouldn’t happen to know,” he said, “whereabouts the ephemeris might be?”

“The what?” Alice said.

“Ephemeris,” he said, pulling out a book, pushing it back. “The big red book that gives the positions of the planets. For every date. You know.”

“You used to look at it when we were stargazing?”

“Right.” He turned to them. He was still faintly panting, and seemed in the grip of a fierce excitement. “No guesses?” He held aloft the lamp. “You’re not going to believe this,” he said. “I don’t, yet. But it’s the only thing that makes sense. The ohly thing crazy enough to make sense.”

He waited for them to question him, and at last Alice said, “What.”

“The orrery,” he said. “It’ll work.”

“Oh,” Alice said.

“Not only that, not only that,” he said in astonished triumph. “I think it’ll do work. I think it was meant to. It was so simple! I never thought of it. Can you imagine if that’s so? Alice, the house will be all right! If that thing will turn, it’ll turn belts! It’ll turn generators! Lights! Heat!”

The lamp he held showed them his face, transformed, and seeming so close to some dangerous limit that it made Sophie shrink. She supposed that he couldn’t see the two of them well; she glanced at Alice, who still tightly held her hand, and thought that Alice’s eyes might fill with tears, if they could, but that they could not; that Somehow they never would again.

“That’s nice,” Alice said.

“Nice,” Smoky said, resuming his search. “You think I’m crazy. I think I’m crazy. But I think just maybe Harvey Cloud wasn’t crazy. Maybe.” He pulled a thick book from under others, which fell noisily to the floor. “This is it, this is it, this is it,” he said, and without looking back at them, he made to leave.

“The lamp, Smoky,” Alice said.

“Oh. Sorry.” He had been carrying it off absently. He put it down On the table, and smiled at them, so infinitely pleased that they couldn’t not smile back. He left almost at a run, the thick book under his arm.

Another Country

The two women sat without speaking for some time after he had gone. Then Sophie said: “You won’t tell him?”

“No,” Alice said. She began to say something further, a reason perhaps, but then didn’t, and Sophie dared say nothing more. “Anyway,” Alice said, “I won’t be gone, not really. I mean I’ll be gone, but still I’ll be here. Always.” She thought that was true; she thought, looking up at the dark ceiling and the tall windows, at the house around her, that what called to her, calling from the very heart of things, called to her as much from here as from any other place; and that the feeling she felt was not loss, it was only that sometimes she mistook it for loss. “But Sophie,” she said, and her voice had grown rough, “Sophie, you have to take care of him. Watch out for him.”

“How, Alice.”

“I don’t know, but—well, you must. I mean it, Soph. Do that for me.”

“I will,” Sophie said. “But I’m not much good at that, you know, watching out, and taking care.”

“It won’t be long,” Alice said. That too she was sure of, or believed or hoped she was sure of; she tried, searching in herself, to find that certainty: to find the calm delight, the gratitude, the exhilaration she had felt when she had begun to understand what conclusion it was all to have, the half-scared, half-puissant sense that she had lived her whole life as a chick inside an egg, and then got too big for it, and then found a way to begin to break it, and then had broken it, and was now about to come forth into some huge, airy world she could have had no inkling of, yet bearing wings to live in it with that were still untried. She was sure that what she knew now, they would all come to know, and other things still more wonderful, and more wonderful yet; but in the cold old room at the dark end of night, she couldn’t quite feel it alive within her. She thought of Smoky. She was afraid; as afraid as if…

“Sophie,” she said softly. “Do you think it’s death?”

Sophie had fallen asleep, her head resting against Alice’s shoulder. “Hm?” she said.

“Do you think that dying is what it really is?”

“I don’t know,” Sophie said. She felt Alice trembling beside her. “I don’t think so. But I don’t know.”

“I don’t think so either,” Alice said.

Sophie said nothing.

“If it is, though,” Alice said, “it isn’t… what I thought.”

“You mean dying isn’t? Or that place?”

“Either.” She pulled the afghan more closely around them. “Smoky told me, once, about this place, in India or China, where ages ago when somebody got the death sentence, they used to give him this drug, like a sleeping drug, only it’s a poison, but very slow-acting; and the person falls asleep first, deep asleep, and has these very vivid dreams. He dreams a long time, he forgets he’s dreaming even; he dreams for days. He dreams that he’s on a journey, or that some such thing has happened to him. And then, somewhere along, the drug is so gentle and he’s so fast asleep that he never notices when, he dies. But he doesn’t know it. The dream changes, maybe; but he doesn’t even know it’s a dream, so. He just goes on. He only thinks it’s another country.”

“That’s spooky,” Sophie said.

“Smoky said he didn’t think it was so, though.”

“No,” Sophie said. “I bet not.”

“He said, if the drug was always supposed to be fatal in the end, how would anybody know that’s what its effect was?”

“Oh.”

“I was thinking,” Alice said, “that maybe this is like that.”

“Oh, Alice, how awful, no.”

But Alice had meant nothing awful; it seemed to her no dreadful issue, if you were condemned to death, to make out of death a country. That was the similarity she saw: for she had perceived, what none of the others had and Sophie only dimly and backwardly, that the place they had been invited to was no place. She had perceived in her own growing larger that there was no place there distinct from those who lived in it: the fewer of them, the smaller their country. And if there were now to be a migration to that land, each emigrant would have to make the place he traveled to, make it out of himself. It was what she, pioneer, would have to do: make out of her own death, or what just now seemed like her death, a land for the rest of them to travel to. She would have to grow large enough to contain the whole world, or the whole great world turn out to be small enough after all to fit within the compass of her bosom.

Smoky for sure wouldn’t believe in that either. He’d find it hard, anyway. She thought then that he had found the whole thing hard; that however patient he had grown, however well he had learned to live with it, he had never and would never find it easy. Would he come? More than anything else she wanted to be sure of that. Could he? She was sure of so many things, but not sure of that; long ago she had seen that the very thing that had earned Smoky for her might be the cause of her losing him, that is, her place in this Tale. And there it still was, the bargain held; she felt him even now to be at the end of a long and fragile cord, that might part if she tugged it, or slip from her fingers, or from his. And she would leave now without farewell lest it be for good.

Oh Smoky, she thought; oh death. And for a long time thought nothing else, only wishing, without making the wish, that this issue were not the issue it must have, the only issue it could have or ever had.

“You will watch out for him,” she whispered; “Sophie, you have to see that he comes. You have to.”

But Sophie was asleep again, the afghan drawn up to her chin. Alice looked around herself, as though waking; the windows were blue. Night was passing. Like someone coming to consciousness with the cessation of pain, she gathered around herself the world, the dawn, and her future. She stood then, easing herself away from her sleeping sister. Sophie dreamed that she did so, and partly woke to say, “I’m ready, I’ll come,” and then other words that made no sense. She sighed, and Alice tucked the afghan around her.

Above her, there were footsteps again, coming downward. Alice kissed her sister’s brow, and blew out the dim lamp; blue dawn filled the room when the yellow flame was gone. It was later than she had thought. She went out into the hall; Smoky came running down to the landing on the stairs above her.

“Alice!” he said.

“Yes, hush,” she said. “You’ll wake everybody.”

“Alice, it works.” He gripped the newel at the stair’s turning, as though he might fall. “It works, you have to come see.”

“Oh?” Alice said.

“Alice, Alice, come see! It’s all right now. It’s all right, it works, it goes around. Listen!” And he pointed upward. Far, far off, barely discernible amid the dawn noises of peepers and first birds, there was a steady metallic clacking, like the ticking of a vast clock, a clock inside which the house itself was contained.

“All right?” Alice said.

“It’s all right, we don’t have to leave!” He paused again to listen, rapt. “The house won’t fall apart. There’ll be light and heat. We don’t have to go anywhere!”

She only looked up, from the bottom of the stair.

“Isn’t that great?” he said.

“Great,” she said.

“Come see,” he said, already turning back up the stairs.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll come. In a minute.”

“Hurry,” he said, and started upwards.

“Smoky, don’t run,” she said.

She heard his climbing footsteps recede. She went to the hall-mirror, and from a peg beside it took her heavy cloak, and threw it around her. She glanced once at the figure in the mirror, who looked aged in the dawn light, and went to the great front door with its oval glass, and opened it.

The morning was huge, and went on in all directions before her, and blew coldly past her into the house. She stood a long time in the open doorway, thinking: one step. One step, which will seem to be a step away, but which will not be; one step into the rainbow, a step she had long ago taken, and which could not be untaken, every other step was only further. She took one step. Out on the lawn, amid the rags of mist, a little dog ran toward her, leaping and barking excitedly.

While Daily Alice thought and Sophie watched and slept, while Ariel Hawksquill flew along foggy country roads to meet a train at a northern station, Auberon and George Mouse sat close to a small fire, wondering what place it was that Fred Savage had led them to, and unable to remember in any clear way just how they had got there.

Storm of Difference

They’d started off some time ago, it seemed to them; they’d begun by making preparations, going through George’s old trunks and bureaus outfitting themselves, though since they had had not much idea at all of what dangers or difficulties they would meet, this had been haphazard; George found and tossed out sweaters, flaccid knapsacks, knitted caps, galoshes.

“Say,” Fred said, tugging a cap over his wild hair. “Long time since I wore one of these here.”

“What good is all this, though?” Auberon said, standing aside, hands in his pockets.

“Well, listen,” George said. Better safe than sorry. Forewarned is forearmed.”

“You’d about need to be four-armed,” said Fred, holding up an immense poncho, “for thisere to do you much good.”

“This is stupid,” Auberon said. “I mean…”

“Okay, okay,” George said angrily, flourishing a large pistol he had just then found in the trunk, “okay, you decide, Mr. Know-it-all. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.” He thrust the gun in his belt, then changed his mind and tossed it back. “Hey, how about this?” It was a twenty-bladed jackknife with a thousand uses. “God, I haven’t seen this in years.”

“Nice,” Fred said, levering out the corkscrew with a yellow thumbnail. “Ver’ nice. And handy.”

Auberon went on watching, hands in pockets, but made no further objection; after a moment he no longer watched. Ever since Lilac’s appearance at Old Law Farm he had had immense difficulty in remaining for any length of time in the world; he seemed only to enter and leave particular scenes, which had no connection with each other, like the rooms of a house whose plan he couldn’t fathom, or didn’t care to try to fathom. He supposed, sometimes, that he was going mad, but though the thought seemed reasonable enough and an explanation of sorts, it left him oddly unmoved. For sure an enormous difference had suddenly come over the nature of things, but just what that difference was he couldn’t put his finger on: or rather, any individual thing he did put his finger on (a street, an apple, any thought, any memory) seemed no different, seemed to be now just what it had always been, and yet the difference remained. “Same difference,” George often said, about two things that were more or less alike; but for Auberon the phrase had come to designate his sense of one thing, one thing that had Somehow become—and was probably now for good—more or less different.

Same difference.

Probably, though (he didn’t know, but it seemed likely) this difference hadn’t come about suddenly at all, it was only that he had suddenly come to notice it, to inhabit it. It had dawned on him, is all; it had grown clear to him, like breaking weather. And he foresaw a time (with only a faint shudder of apprehension) when he would no longer notice the difference, or remember that things had ever been, or rather not been, different; and after that a time when storms of difference would succeed one another as they liked, and he would never notice.

Already he found himself forgetting that something like an occluded front seemed to have swept over his memories of Sylvie, which he had thought as hard and changeless as anything he owned, but which when he touched them now seemed to have turned to autumn leaves like fairy gold, turned to wet earth, staghorn, snails’ shells, fauns’ feet.

“What?” he said.

“Put this on,” George said, and gave him a sheath knife on whose sheath, dimly printed in gold, were the words “Ausable Chasm,” which meant nothing to Auberon; but he looped it through his belt, not able to think just then why he might rather not.

Certainly this drifting in and out of what seemed to be chapters of fiction with blank pages in between had helped out with a hard task he had had to do: wrapping up (as he had thought he would never need to) the tale told on “A World Elsewhere.” To wrap up a tale whose wrapping-up was in the very nature of it not conceivable—hard! And yet he had only had to sit before the nearlyshot typewriter (so much had it suffered) for concluding chapters to begin to unfold as clearly, as cleverly, as impossibly as an endless chain of colored scarves from the empty fist of a magician. How does a tale end that was only a promise of no ending? In the same way as a difference comes to inhabit a world that is otherwise the same in all respects; in the same way that a picture which shows a complex urn alters, as you stare at it, to two faces contemplating each other.

He fulfilled the promise, that it wouldn’t end: and that was the end. That’s all.

Just how he had done it, just what scenes he stabbed out on the twenty-six alphabetical buttons and their associates, what words were said, what deaths came to pass, what births, he couldn’t remember afterwards; they were the dreams of a man who dreams he dreams, imaginary imagination, insubstantialities set up in a world itself gone insubstantial. Whether they would be produced at all, and what effect they would have Out There if they were, what spell they might cast or break, he couldn’t imagine. He only sent Fred off with the once-unimaginable last pages, and thought, laughing, of that schoolboy device he had once used, that last line that every schoolboy had once used to complete some wild self-indulgent fantasy otherwise uncompletable: then he woke up.

Then he woke up.

The phrases of his fugue with the world touched each other. The three of them, he, George, and Fred, stood booted and armed before the maw of a subway entrance: a cold spring day like a messy bed where the world still slept.

“Uptown? Downtown?” George asked.

Watch Your Step

Auberon had suggested other doors, or what had seemed to him might be doors: a pavilion in a locked park to which he had the key; an uptown building that had been Sylvie’s last destination as a Wingéd messenger; a barrel vault deep beneath the Terminus, nexus of four corridors. But Fred was leading this expedition.

“A ferry,” he said. “Now if we’s to take a ferry, we surely will cross a river. So now not countin’ the Bronx and the Harlem, not countin’ no Kills and no Spuyten Duyvil which is really th’ocean, not goan so far north as the Saw Mill, and settin’ aside the East and the Hudson which got bridges, you still got a mess more of rivers to consider, yunnastan, only, here’s the thang, they runnin’ underground now all unseen; covered up with streets and folks’ houses and plays-a-business; shootin’ through ser-pipes and pressed down to trickles and rivulets and like that; stopped up, drove down deep into the rock where they turn into seep and what you call your groundwater; stillthere though, y’see, y’see, so we gots to first find the river to cross, and then we gots to cross it next; and if the mose of ’em is underground, underground is where we gots to go.”

“Okay,” George said.

“Okay,” Auberon said.

“Watch your step,” Fred said.

They went down, stepping carefully as though in an unfamiliar place, though all of them were familiar with it, it was only The Train with its caves and dens, its mad signs pointing in contradictory directions, no help for the lost, and its seep of inky water and far-off borborygmic rumbles.

Auberon stopped, half-way down the stairs.

“Wait a sec,” he said. “Wait.”

“Wazza matter?” George said, looking quickly around.

“This is crazy,” Auberon said. “This can’t be right.” Fred had gone ahead, had rounded the corner, waving them on. George stood between, looking after Fred and up at Auberon.

“Let’s go, let’s go,” George said.

This would be hard, very hard, Auberon thought, following reluctantly; far harder to yield to than to the blank passages and discomfitures of his old drunkenness. And yet the skills he had learned in that long binge—how to yield up control, how to ignore shame and make a spectacle of himself, how not to question circumstances or at least not be surprised when no answers to questions could be found—those skills were all he had now, all the gear he could bring to this expedition. Even with them he doubted he would get to the end; without them, he thought, he would not have been able to start off.

“Okay, wait,” he said, turning after the others into deeper places. “Hold on.”

And what if he had been put through that awful time, basic training, only so that now (snow-blind, sun-struck) he could live through this storm of difference, make his way through this dark wood?

No. It was Sylvie who had set him on that path; or rather Sylvie’s absence.

Sylvie’s absence. And what if Sylvie’s absence, what if her presence in his life in the first place, God what if her very love and beauty had been plotted from the beginning, to make him a drunk, to teach him those skills, to train him in pathfinding, to immure him at Old Law Farm for years to wait for news without knowing he waited, to wait for Lilac to come with promises or lies to stir his heart’s ashes into flame again, and all for some purpose of their own, which had nothing to do with him, or with Sylvie either?

All right: supposing there was to be this Parliament, supposing that that wasn’t just lies as well and that he would come Somehow face to face with them, he had some questions to ask, and some good answers to get. Come to that, let him only find Sylvie, and he had some tough questions he could put to her about her part in all this, some damn tough questions; only let him find her. Only, only let him find her.

Even as he thought this he saw, leaping from the last stair of a rachitic escalator, down there, a blond girl in a blue dress, bright in the brown darkness.

She looked back once and (seeing that they saw her) turned around a stanchion where a notice was posted: HOLD ONTO YOUR HATS.

“I think this is the way,” George called. A train roared through just at that moment, as they were gathering to run downward; the wind of its passage snatched at their hats, but their hands were quicker. “Right?” George said, hand on his hat, shouting over the trains enfilade.

“Yup,” Fred said, holding his. “I was about to say.”

They went down. Auberon followed. Promises or lies, he had no choice, and for sure they had known that all along too, for had it not been they who had at first thus cursed him? He sensed with a terrible clarity all the circumstances of his life, not excepting this foul underground now and these stairs down, take hands in a chain one after another, not one left out; they linked up, they unmasked, they seized him by the throat, they shook him, shook him, shook him till he woke up.

Fred Savage was returning from the woods with a bundle of sticks to feed the fire.

“Mess o’ folks out there,” he said with satisfaction as he stuck sticks into the embers. “Mess o’ folks.”

“Oh yeah?” George said with some alarm. “Wild animals?”

“Could be,” Fred said. His white teeth shone. In watch cap and poncho he looked ancient, a shapeless hump, like a wise old stumpwater toad. George and Auheron hunched a little closer to the feeble flames, and pricked up their ears, and looked around them into the complex darkness.

A Family Thing

They had not come very far into this wood from the river’s edge, where the ferry had let them off, before darkness overtook them and Fred Savage called a halt. Even as the ancient, gray, knocking, creaking boat had slid downstream along its line they watched the red sun sinking behind the still-leafless great trees, bitten into crimson bits by undergrowth, and then swallowed. It had all looked fearsome and strange, yet George said:

“I think I’ve been here. Before.”

“Oh yeah?” Auberon said. They stood together in the bow. Fred, sitting astern, legs crossed, made remarks to the aged aged ferryman, who said nothing in response.

“Well, not been here,” George said. “But sort of.” Whose adventures here, in this boat, in those woods, had he known about, and how had he come to know about them? God, his memory had turned to a dry sponge lately. “I dunno,” he said, and looked curiously at Auberon. “I dunno. Only—” He looked back at the shore they had come from, and at the one they slid toward, holding his hat against the river breezes. “Only it seems—aren’t we going the wrong way?”

“I can’t imagine that,” Auberon said.

“No,” George said, “can’t be…” Yet the feeling persisted, that they travelled back-toward and not away-from. It must be, he thought, that same disorientation he sometimes experienced emerging from the subway into an unfamiliar neighborhood, where he got uptown and downtown reversed, and could not make the island turn around in his mind and lie right, not the street-signs nor even the sun’s position could dissuade him, as though he were caught in a mirror. “Well,” he said, and shrugged.

But he had jogged Auberon’s memory. He knew this ferry too: or at any rate he had heard of it. They were approaching the bank, and the ferryman laid up his long pole and came forward to tie up. Auberon looked down on his bald head and gray beard, but the ferryman didn’t look up. “Did you,” Auberon said, “did you once,” now how was he to put this, “was there a girl, a dark girl once, who, a time some time ago, well worked for you?”

The ferryman with long, strong arms hauled on the ferry’s line. He looked up at Auberon with eyes as blue and opaque as sky.

“Named Sylvie?” Auberon asked.

“Sylvie?” said the ferryman.

The boat, groaning against its stub of dock, came to rest. The ferryman held out his hand, and George put into it the shiny coin he had brought to pay him with.

“Sylvie,” George said by the fire. His arms were around his drawn-up knees. “Did you think,” he went on, “I mean I sort of thought, didn’t you, that this was sort of a family thing?”

“Family thing?”

“All this, I mean,” George said vaguely. “I thought it might only be the family that got into this, you know, from Violet.”

“I did think that,” Auberon said. “But then, Sylvie.”

“Yeah,” George said. “That’s what I mean.”

“But,” Auberon said, “it still might, I mean all that about Sylvie might be a lie. They’ll say anything. Anything.”

George stared into the fire a time, and then said: “Mm. Well, I think I have a confession to make. Sort of.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sylvie,” George said. “Maybe it is family.”

“I mean,” he went on, “that maybe she’s family. I’m not sure, but… Well, way back when, twenty-five years ago, oh more, there was this woman I knew. Puerto Rican. A real charmer. Bats, completely. But beautiful.” He laughed. “A spitfire, in fact. The only word. She was renting at the place, this was before the Farm, she was renting this little apartment. Well, to tell the truth she was renting the Folding Bedroom.”

“Oh. Oh,” Auberon said.

“Man, she was something. I came up once and she was doing the dishes, in a pair of high heels. Doing the dishes in red high heels. I dunno, something clicked.”

“Hm,” Auberon said.

“And, well.” George sighed. “She had a couple of kids somewhere. I got the idea that whenever she got pregnant she’d go nuts. In a quiet way, you know. So, hey, I was careful. But.”

“Jeez, George.”

“And she did sort of go off the deep end. I don’t know why, I mean she never told me. She just went—and went back to P.R. Never saw her again.”

“So,” Auberon said.

“So.” He cleared his throat. “So Sylvie did look a lot like her. And she did find the Farm. I mean she just showed up. And never told me how.”

“Good grief,” Auberon said, as the implications of this sank in. “Good grief, is this true?”

George held up an honest palm.

“But did she…”

“No. Said nothing. Name wasn’t the same, but then it wouldn’t have been. And her mother was off, she said, gone, I never met her.”

“But surely you, didn’t you…”

“To tell you the truth, man,” George said, “I never really inquired into it too closely.”

Auberon was silent a time, marveling. She had been plotted, then; if all their lives were, and she was one of them. He said: “I wonder what she… I mean I wonder what she thought.”

“Yeah.” George nodded. “Yeah, well, that’s a good question all around, isn’t it. A damn good question.”

“She used to say,” Auberon said, “that you were like a…”

“I know what she used to say.”

“God, George, then how could you have…”

“I wasn’t sure. How could I be sure? They all look sort of alike, that type.”

“Boy, you’re really given to that, aren’t you?” Auberon said in awe. “You really…”

“Gimme a break,” George said. “I wasn’t sure. I thought, hell, probably not.”

“Well.” The two cousins stared into the fire. “That does explain it, though,” Auberon said. “This. If it is family.”

“That’s what I thought,” George said.

“Yeah,” Auberon said.

“Yeah?” Fred Savage said. They looked up at him, startled. “Then what in hell ’m I doin’ here?”

He looked from one to the other, grinning, his dull, living eyes amused. “Y’see?” he said.

“Well,” George said.

“Well,” Auberon said.

“Y’see?” Fred said again. “What in hell ’m I doin here?” His yellow eyes closed and opened, and so did the many yellow eyes in the woods behind him. He shook his head as though at a puzzle, but he wasn’t really puzzled. He never seriously asked such a question, what was he doing where he was, except when it amused him to watch others consider it in consternation. Consternation, and considering, thought itself in fact, were mostly a spectacle to him; a man who had long since given up making any distinction between the place behind his closed black lids and the place before him when they were open, he was hard to confuse, and as for this place, Fred Savage didn’t really wonder; he didn’t bother himself supposing he had ever lived anyplace else.

“Teasin’,” he said softly and kindly to his two friends. “Teasin’.”

He kept vigil for a while, or slept, or both, or neither. Night passed. He saw a path. In the blue dawn, birds awaking, fire cold, he saw the same path, or another, there between trees. He woke George and Auberon, a huddled pile, and with his index brown and gnarled and dirt-clogged as a root, he pointed it out to them.

A Watch and a Pipe

George Mouse looked around himself, swept with uneasy wonder. He had been feeling, since the first steps they had taken on the path which Fred had found, that none of it was as strange as it ought to be, or as unknown to him. And here in this spot (no different otherwise, as thick with undergrowth, as overwhelmed with towering trees) the feeling had grown much stronger. His feet had stood in this place before. In fact they had rarely been far from it.

“Wait,” he said to Fred and Auberon, who were stumbling ahead, looking for the path’s continuation. “Wait a sec.”

They stopped, looking back.

George looked up, down, left, right. Right: there, he could sense more than see it, was a clearing. Air more gold and blue than the forest’s gray was beyond that row of guardian trees.

That row of guardian trees…

“You know,” he said, “I get the feeling we haven’t come all that far, after all.”

But the others were too far on to hear him. “Come on, George,” Auberon called.

George pulled himself from the spot, and followed. But he had taken only a few steps when he felt himself drawn back.

Damn. He stopped.

The forest was, it was hard to believe it of a mess of vegetation but it was so, the forest was like a huge suite of rooms, you stepped through doors continually out of one place into a very different place. Five steps were all it had taken him to leave the place where he had felt so familiar. He wanted to go back; he wanted very much to go back.

“Well, just wait a second,” he called out to his companions, but they didn’t turn back, they were already elsewhere. The calls of birds seemed louder than George’s own call. In a quandary, he took two steps in the direction they had gone, and then, drawn by a curiosity stronger than fear, returned to the place where the clearing could be glimpsed.

It didn’t seem far. There seemed even to be a path in that direction.

The path led him down, and almost at once the guardian trees and the patch of sunlight he had seen were gone. Very soon after that the path was gone too. And very soon after that George forgot completely what had caused him to take this way.

He walked on a bit, his boots sinking into soft earth, and his coat clawed at by harsh, marsh-living bushes. Where? For what? He stood stock still, but began to sink, and pulled himself forward. The forest sang all around him, blocking his ears to his own thoughts. George forgot who he was.

He stopped again. It was dark yet bright, the trees all in a moment seemed to have bloomed a chartreuse cloudiness, spring had come. And why was he here, afraid, in this place, when and where was this, what had become of him? Who was he? He began searching in his pockets, not knowing what he would find but hoping for a clue as to who this was here and what he was doing.

From one pocket he pulled out a blackened pipe, which meant nothing to him though he turned it and turned it in his hand; from the other he pulled out an old pocket watch.

The watch: yes. He couldn’t read its moustached face, which was grinning at him disconcertingly, but this was definitely a clue. A watch in his hand. Yes.

He had, no doubt (he could almost remember it) taken a pill. A new drug he was experimenting with, a drug of astonishing, of just unheard-of potency. That had been some time ago, yes, by the watch, and the pill had done this to him: had snatched away his memory, even his memory of having taken the pill, and set him to struggle in a wholly imaginary landscape, my God a pill so potent that it could build a forest complete with bilberries and birdsong inside his head for the homunculus of himself to wander in! But this imaginary woods was still interpenetrated, faintly, by the real: he had in his hand the watch, the watch by which he had intended to time the new drug’s working. He had had it in his hand the whole time, and had only now, because the pill’s effect was wearing off, imagined that he had taken it out of his pocket to consult it—had imagined that he had taken it out because with the pill’s wearing off he was coming to himself again, by slow stages, and the real watch was intruding into the unreal forest. In a moment, any moment, the terrible leaf-jewelled forest would fade and he would begin to see through it the room where he in fact sat with the watch in his hand: the library of his townhouse, on the third floor, on the couch. Yes! Where he had sat motionless for who knew how long, the pill made it seem a lifetime; and around him, waiting for his response, his description, would be his friends, who had watched with him. Any second now their faces would swim into reality, as the watch had: Franz and Smoky and Alice, coalescing in the dusty old library where they had so often sat, their faces anxious, gleeful, and expectant: what was it like, George? What was it like? And he would for a long time only shake his head and make inarticulate round noises, unable till firm reality reasserted itself to speak of it.

“Yes; yes,” George said, near to tears of relief that he remembered, “I remember, I remember;” and even as he was saying that, he slipped the watch back into his pocket, turning his head in the greening landscape. “I remember…” He pulled a boot from the mud, and the other boot, and no longer remembered.

A row of guardian trees, and a clearing where sunlight fell, and a suggestion of cultivation. On ahead. Ahead: only now he was stumbling downward over mossy rocks black with wetness, stumbling toward a ravine through which a cold stream ran rushing. He breathed its moist breath. There was a rude bridge there, much fallen, where floating branches caught and white water swirled; looks dangerous; and a hard climb beyond that; and as he put a cautious foot on the bridge, afraid and breathing hard, he forgot what it was he toiled toward, and at the next step (a loose crosspiece, he steadied himself) forgot who he was that toiled or why, and at the next step, the middle of the bridge, realized that he had forgotten.

Why did he find himself staring down into water? What was going on here anyway? He put his hands into his pockets hoping to find something that would give him a clue. He took out an old pocket watch, which meant nothing to him, and a blackened, small-bowled pipe.

He turned the pipe in his hands. A pipe: yes. “I remember,” he said vaguely. The pipe, the pipe. Yes. His basement. Down in the basement of a building on his block he had discovered an ancient cache, an amazing, a hilarious find. Amazing stuff! He had smoked some, in this pipe, that must be it: there in that blackened bowl. He could see bits of cindery consumed resin, it was all in him now, and this—this!—was the effect. Never, never had he known a rush so total, so involving! He had been swept away; he was no longer standing where he had been standing when he had put match to the pipe’s contents—on a bridge, yes, a stone bridge up in the Park, where he had gone to share a pipe with Sylvie—but in some weird woods, so real he could smell them, so swept away that he seemed to have been clambering forgetful of who he was in this woods for hours, forever, when in fact (he remembered, he remembered clearly) he had only at this moment lowered the pipe from his lips—here it still was in his hands, before his eyes. Yes: it had reappeared first, first sign of his alighting from a no doubt quite short but utterly ravishing rush; Sylvie’s face, in an old peau-de-soie black hat, would come next. He was even now about to turn to her (the hash-created woods discreating themselves and the littered brownish winter Park assembling itself around him) and say: “Hm, ha, strong stuff, watch it, STRONG stuff;” and she, laughing at his swept-away expression, would make some Sylvie remark as she took the pipe from him:

“I see, I remember,” he said, like a charm, but he had already a terrible percipience that this was not the first time he had remembered, no indeed, once before he had remembered it all but remembered it all differently. Once before? No, oh no, perhaps many times, oh no oh no: he stood frozen as the possibility of an endless series of remembrances, each one different but all made out of a small moment in the woods, occurred to him: an infinite series endlessly repeated, oh I remember, I remember, each one extending a lifetimewards out from one small, one very small moment (a turn of the head only, a step of the foot) in an absolutely inexplicable woods. George, seeing it so, felt he had been suddenly—but not suddenly, for a long, an immemorial time—condemned to hell.

“Help,” he said, or breathed. “Help, oh help.”

He took steps across the rickety bridge beneath which the forest stream foamed. There was a glassless picture framed in an old gilt frame on his kitchen wall (though George had forgotten just now that it was there) which showed just such a dangerous bridge as this, and two children, innocent, unafraid or perhaps unaware of their danger, crossing it hand in hand, a blond girl, a dark, brave boy, while above them, watching, ready to stretch out a hand to them if a loose crosspiece broke or a foot was placed wrong, was an angel: a white angel, crowned with a gold fillet, vapid-faced in gauzy draperies but strong, strong to save the children. Just such a power George felt behind him then (though he didn’t dare turn to see it) and, taking Lilac’s hand, or was it Sylvie’s, he stepped bravely across the creaking slats to reach the other side.

Then came a long, an endless because unremembered time; but at last George gained the top of the ravine, knees torn and hands weary. He came out between two rocks like upraised knees, and found himself—yes!—in a small glade spangled with flowers; and in the near distance, the row of guardian trees. Beyond them, it was clear now, was a fence of wattles, and a building or two, and a curl of smoke from a chimney. “Oh, yes,” George said, panting, “oh, yes.” Near him in the glade, a lamb stood; the noise George heard was not his own lost heart but its crying voice. It had got caught in some wicked trailfng briar, and was hurting itself to free its leg.

“There, there,” George said. “There, there.”

“Baa, baa,” said the lamb.

George freed its, fragile black leg; the lamb stumbled forward, still crying—it was just newborn, how had it strayed from its mother? George went to it, and picked it up by its legs, he had seen this done but he forgot where, and slung it over his neck, holding it by its feebly kicking feet. And with it turning its silly sad face to try and look into his, he went on up to the gate in the fence of wattles beyond the row of guardian trees. The gate stood open.

“Oh, yes,” George said, standing before it. “Oh, yes; I see. I see.”

For this was clear enough; there was the small ramshackle house with horn windows, there the byre, there the goat shed; there was the plot of new-planted vegetables, in which someone was digging, a small brown man who when he saw George approach threw down his tool and hurried away muttering. There was the wellhouse and the root cellar, there the woodpile, with its axe upright in the block. And there, the hungry sheep shouldered at their fences, looking up to be fed. And all around the little clearing, there was the Wild Wood looking down, indifferent and dark.

How he had come here he didn’t know, any more than he knew now where he had started from; but it was plain now where he was. He was home.

He set down the lamb within the fold, and it skipped to where its mother scolded it. George wished that he could remember, just a little; but what the hell, he’d spent a lifetime in one enchantment or another, or one enchantment in another, in another; he was too old now to worry when it changed. This was real enough.

“What the hell,” he said. “What the hell, it’s a living.” He turned to close his gate of palings, barring it and tying it closely in good husbandry against the dark Wild Wood and what lived there, and, brushing his hands together, went to his door.

Middle of Nowhere

A heaven, Ariel Hawksquill thought, deep within, a heaven no larger than the ball of one’s thumb. The island-garden of the Immortals, the valley where we are all kings forever. The rocking, clacking rhythm of the train drove the thought again and again around the track of her mind.

Hawksquill was not one of those who find the motion of trains soothing. Rather it prodded and grated on her hideously, and though a dull rainy dawn looked to be near breaking in the flat landscape beyond the window, she had not slept, though she had given out, on boarding, that she would—that was only to keep the President, for a time, away from her door. When the aged, kindly porter had come to make up her bed, she had sent him away, and then called him back, and asked that a bottle of brandy be brought her, and that no one disturb her.

“Sure you don’t want that bed made up, miz?”

“No. That’s all.” Where had the President’s staff found these gentle, bowed black men, who had been old and slow and few even in her own youth? Come to that, where did he find these grand old cars, and where tracks that could still be traveled on?

She poured brandy, grinding her teeth in nervous exhaustion, feeling that even her sturdiest memory mansions were being shaken to earth by this motion. Yet she needed, more than she had ever needed, to think clearly, fully, and not in circles. On the luggage rack above and opposite her was the alligator purse containing the cards.

A heaven deep within, the island-garden of the Immortals. Yes: if it were so, and if it were in fact heaven or someplace like it, then the one thing that could be said with certainty about it was that, whatever other delightful qualities it might have, it must be more spacious than the common world we leave to reach it.

More spacious: skies less limited, mountain peaks less reachable, seas deeper and less plumbable.

But there, the Immortals themselves must dream and ponder too, and take their spiritual exercises, and search for an even smaller heaven within that heaven. And that heaven, if it exist, must be yet more wide, less limited, higher, broader, deeper than the first. And so on… “And the vastest point, the center, the infinity—Faëry, where the gigantic heroes ride across endless landscapes and sail sea upon sea and there is no end to possibility—that circle is so tihy it has no doors at all.”

Yes, old Bramble might be right, only too simple—or rather too complex, with his fundibular other-worlds with doors attached. No, not two worlds; with Occam’s old razor she could slit the throat of that idea. One world only, but with different modes; what anyway was a “world?” The one she saw on television, “A World Elsewhere,” could fit without multiplication of entities into this one, it was molecule-thin but whole: it was only another mode, it was fiction.

And in a mode like fiction, like make-believe, existed the land to which her cousins said she was invited to—no, told she must!—joumey. Yes, journey; for if it was a land, the only way to get there was to travel.

All that was clear enough, but no help.

For Chinese heavens and make-believe lands had this in common, that however you reached them, it was your choice so to travel; in fact endless preparations were almost always required for such journeys, and a will or at least a dream of iron. And what had that to do with a mode which, against this world’s will, or without anyway asking its leave at all, invaded it piecemeal, siezing an architect’s fancy, a pentacle of five towns, a block of slum buildings, a Terminus ceiling—the Capital itself? Which fell on the citizens of this common mode and bore them away, or at least absorbed them willy-nilly in the advancing tide of its own being? The Holy Roman Empire, she had called it; she had been mistaken. The Emperor Frederick Barbarossa was only flotsam borne on this wave that moved the waters of Time, his sleep had been broken into as graves are broken into by the waters of a flood and the dead borne out, he was headed elsewhere.

Unless she, who had no intention of ending up in some place ruled by who knew what masters, masters who might well take her revolt against them very badly, could turn him. Turn him, as a secret agent is turned by the side he is spying on. For this she had stolen the cards. With them she might rule him, or at least make him see reason.

There was one great flaw in that scheme, however.

What a pickle, what a pickle. She glanced up at the purse over on the luggage rack. She felt that her shift against this storm was as hopeless as any, as any sad hopeless shift of those caught in the path of something, something uncaring and oncoming, and far huger than they had imagined. Eigenblick had said it in every speech, and he had been right, and she blind. To welcome it was as futile as to defy it, it would have you anyway if it wanted you, Hawksquill was very sorry she had been smug but still she must escape. Must.

Footsteps: she sorted their progress down the corridor toward her bedroom from the regular clatter of the train wheels’ turning.

No time to hide the cards, nowhere better anyway than in plain sight. This was all coming too rapidly to a head, she was after all only an old lady and no good at this, no good at all.

Do not, she counseled herself, do not look toward the alligator purse.

The door was flung open. Holding the jamb in his two hands to steady himself against the train’s motion, Russell Eigenblick stood before her. His somber tie was pulled awry, and sweat glistened on his forehead. He glared at Hawksquill.

“I can smell them,” he said.

There, there was the flaw in her scheme. She had glimpsed it first in the Oval Office on a certain snowy night. Now she was certain. The Emperor was mad: as mad as any hatter.

“Smell what, sir?” she asked mildly.

“I can smell them,” he said again.

“You’re up very early,” she said. “Too early for a glass of this?” She showed him the brandy bottle.

“Where are they?” he said, stumbling into the tiny chamber. “You have them, now, here somewhere.”

Do not look toward the alligator purse. “Them?”

“The cards,” he said. “You bitch.”

“There’s a matter I must speak to you about,” she said, getting up. “I’m sorry I was delayed boarding last night until late, but…”

He was lunging around the room, eyes shifting rapidly, nostrils flaring. “Where,” he said. “Where.”

“Sir,” she said, drawing up but feeling hopelessness swim up in her, “sir you must listen.”

“The cards.”

“You’re acting on the wrong side.” She blurted it out, unable to frame it cleverly, feeling horribly drawn to stare at the purse which he had not seen on the luggage rack. He was tapping the walls for hiding places. “You must listen. Those who made promises to you. They have no intention of keeping them. Even if they could. But I…”

“You!” he said, turning to her. “You!” He laughed hugely. “That’s rich!”

“I want to help you.”

He paused in his search. He looked at her, depths of sad reproach in his brown eyes. “Help,” he said. “You. Help. Me.”

It had been an unfortunate choice of words. He knew— she could see it in his face—that helping him had never been what Hawksquill had intended, nor was it her intention now. Mad he might be, but he wasn’t stupid. The betrayal in his face made her look away. It was apparent that nothing she could say would move him. All he wanted from her now was what was useless to him without her, though even that she couldn’t think how to explain.

She found herself staring at them, in their purse on the luggage rack. She could almost see them looking back at her.

She snatched her look away, but the Tyrant had seen her. He made to shove her aside, reaching up.

“Stop!” she said, flinging into the word powers she had once vowed never to use except at deepest need, and for good ends only. The Emperor stopped. He was still in mid-grasp; his bull’s strength struggled against Hawksquill’s command, but he couldn’t move. Hawksquill grabbed the alligator purse and fled from the room.

In the corridor, she nearly collided with the stooped and slow-moving porter. “Ready to sleep, now, miz?” he inquired gently.

“You sleep,” she said, and pushed past him. He slid down the wall, mouth open, eyes closed, asleep. Hawksquill, already crossing into the next car, heard Eigenblick roar out in rage and dismay. She shoved aside a heavy curtain that barred her way, and found herself in a sleeper, where at Eigenblick’s cry men had awakened and were now pulling aside the curtains on upper and lower berths and looking out, sleepy, alert, pale. They saw Hawksquill. She backed out through the curtain and into the car she had come from.

There, in a niche in the wall, she saw that cord which she had often studied in her train-going, the cord that when pulled in fun or malice set the puller up for a stiff fine. She had never really believed that these slim ropes could actually stop a train, but, hearing steps and clamor in the far car, she pulled it now, and stepped quickly to the door, and grasped its handle.

Within seconds the train came to a thrashing, crashing, jolting stop. Hawksquill, astonished at herself, wrenched open the door.

Rain struck her. They were in the middle of nowhere, amid rainy, dark woods where last hillocks of snow melted. It was fiercely cold. Hawksquill leapt to the ground with a fainting heart and a cry. She struggled up the embankment, hampered by her skirt, hurrying herself lest the impossibility of her doing this at all catch up with her.

Dawn was gray, almost in its paleness more opaque than night. At the top of the embankment, within the woods, panting, she looked back at the dark length of the stopped train. Lights were coming on inside. From the door she had left, a man jumped down, signalling behind him to another. Hawksquill, stumbling in snowobscured undergrowth, ran deeper in. She heard calls behind her. The hunt was up.

She turned behind a great tree and rested her back against it, sobbing painful cold breaths, listening. Twigs crackled, the woods were being beaten for her. A glance around showed her a dim figure, far off to the left, with something blunt, pointed and black in a gloved hand.

Done secretly to death. No one the wiser.

With trembling hands she opened the alligator purse. She clawed out from amid the loose cards a small morocco-leather envelope; Her breath condensing before her made it difficult to see, and her fingers shook uncontrollably. She pulled open the envelope and fumbled within it for the sliver of bone that it contained, one bone chosen from among the thousand-odd bones of a pure black cat. Where was the wretched thing. She felt it. She pinched it between two fingers. A crackle of brush that seemed close by startled her, she threw up her head, the tiny charm slipped from her fingers. She almost caught it as it fell catching along the stuff of her skirt, but her eager hand grasping for it brushed it away. It fell amid snow and black leaves. Hawksquill, crying a hopeless no, stepped unwittingly on the place where it had fallen.

The calling of those who followed her was soft, confident, coming closer. Hawksquill fled from her shelter, glimpsing as she did so the shade of another of Eigenblick’s soldiers, or the same one, anyway armed; and he saw her too.

She had never given much thought to what in fact might happen to her mortal body, its soul securely hidden, if fatal things were done to it; if projectiles were passed violently through it, if its blood were spilled. She couldn’t die, she was certain of that. But what, exactly? What? She turned, and saw him aim. A shot was fired, she turned to run again, unable to tell if she had been struck or only shocked by the noise.

Struck. She could distinguish the warm wetness of her blood from the cold wetness of the rain. Where was the pain? She ran on, plunging hopelessly out-of-kilter, one leg seemed not to be working. She fell against tall trees, hearing her pursuers guiding each other with brief words. They were quite near.

There were escapes from this, there were other exits she could find, she was sure of it. But just at the moment she could remember none of them.

Could not remember! All her arts were being taken from her. Well, that was just; for she had dishonored them, had lied, had stolen, had sought power with them in her height of pride; she had used powers she had forsworn, for ends of her own. It was quite just. She turned, at bay; she saw on all sides the dark shapes of her pursuers. They wanted to get quite close, no doubt, so as not to make a great fuss. One or two shots. But what would become of her? The pain she had thought not to feel was just now surging up her body, and was ghastly. Pointless to run any more; black mists were passing before her eyes. Yet she turned again to run.

There was a path.

There was a path, quite clear in the twilight. And there—well, she could go there, couldn’t she? To that little house in the clearing. A shot jolted her horribly, but as though a shaft of sunlight struck it, the house became clearer: a funny sort of house, indeed the oddest little house that she had ever seen. What house did it remind her of? Gingerbreaded and many-colored, with chimney-pots like comic hats, and cheerful firelight showing in the deep small windows, and a round green door. A welcoming, a friendly green door; a door that just then opened; a door from which a broadly grinning face looked out to welcome her.

Fifty-two Pickup

They shot her, in fact, several times, being superstitious themselves; and certainly she looked as dead as any dead person they had ever seen, the same doll-like, heedless appearance to the limbs, the same vacated face. She didn’t move. No cloud of breath condensed above her lips. Satisfied at last, one snatched up the alligator purse, and they returned to the train.

Weeping, shouting hoarse gouts of laughter, with the old cards (mixed backs and faces) pressed in a messy clutch against his bosom, at last, at last, Russell Eigenblick, the President, pulled at the cord which would start the train again. Blinded with fear and joy, he plunged through the cars of the train, almost knocked over when the train with a jolt started up again; the train plunged through his country, swept with rain, breathing clouds of steam. Between Sandusky and South Bend the rain turned unwillingly to snow and sleet and deepened to blizzard; the baffled engineer could see nothing. He cried out when there loomed up before him with great suddenness the mouth of a lightless tunnel, for he knew there could be no tunnel in this landscape, nor had ever been, but before he could take action (what action?) the train had roared into limitless darkness louder and darker even than Barbarossa’s triumph.

When it arrived, quite empty of passengers, at the following station (an Indian-named town where no train had stopped for years) the porter whom Ariel Hawksquill had shouldered aside in her haste awoke.

Now what on earth?

He arose, and, slow with forty years’ service, walked the train, as astonished at himself for having slept, and at the train for having stopped unscheduled, as at the absence of his passengers.

Midway through the silent cars, he met the white-faced engineer, and they consulted, but said little. There was no one else aboard; there had been no conductor; it was a special train, everyone aboard had known where they were going. So the porter said to the engineer. “They knew,” he said, “where they were going.”

The engineer returned to his cab, to use the radio, though he hadn’t yet decided what to say. The porter continued through the cars, feeling ghostly. In the bar car he found, amid empty glasses and crushed cigarettes, a deck of cards, old-fashioned cards, flung about as though in rage.

“Somebody playin’ fifty-two pickup,” he said.

He gathered them up—the figures on them, knights and kings and queens such as he had not seen before, seemed to plead with him from their scattered places to do so. The last one—a joker maybe, a character with a beard, falling from a horse into a stream—he found caught in the window’s edge, face outward, as though in the act of escaping. When he had assembled them all, and squared them up, he stood unmoving in the car with them in his hands, filled with a deep sense of the world, the whole world, and his place in it, somewhere near the center; and of the value which later ages would put on his standing here alone, at this moment, on this empty train, at this deserted station.

For the Tyrant, Russell Eigenblick, would not be forgotten. A long bad time lay ahead for his people, a bitter time when those who had contended against him would turn, in his absence, to contend with each other; and the fragile Republic would be broken and reshaped in several different ways. In that long contention, a new generation would forget the trials and hardships their parents had suffered under the Beast; they would look back with growing nostalgia, with deep pain of loss, to those years just beyond the horizon of living memory, to those years when, it would seem to them, the sun always shone. His work, they would say, had gone unfinished, his Revelation unmade; he had gone away, and left his people unransomed.

But not died. No; gone off, disappeared, one night between dawn and day slipped away: but not died. Whether in the Smokies or the Rockies, deep in a crater lake or far beneath the ruined Capital itself, he lay only asleep, with his executive assistants around him, his red beard growing longer; waiting for the day (foretold by a hundred signs) when his people’s great need should at last awake him again.

That the Dog predicted by Sophie which greeted Daily Alice at the door should turn out to be Spark didn’t surprise Alice much, but that the old man whom she found to guide her on the far side of the river should be her cousin George Mouse was unexpected.

“I don’t think of you as old, George,” she said. “Not old.”

“Hey,” George said, “older than you, and you’re no spring chicken, you know, kid.”

“How did you get here?” she asked.

“How did I get where?” he replied.

Her Blessing

They walked together through dark woods, talking of many things. They walked a long way; spring came on more fully; the woods deepened. Alice was glad of his company, although she had not been sure she needed a guide; the woods were unknown to her, and scary; George carried a thick stick, and knew the path. “Dense,” she said; and as she said it she remembered her wedding journey: she remembered Smoky asking, about a stand of trees over by Rudy Flood’s, whether those were the woods Edgewood was on the edge of. She remembered the night they had spent in the cave of moss. She remembered walking through the woods on the way to Amy and Chris’s house. “Dense,” he had said; “Protected,” she’d answered. As each of these memories and many others awoke in her, unfolding as vivid as life, Alice seemed to remember them for the last time, asthough they faded and dropped as soon as they blossomed; or rather that each memory she called up ceased, as soon as she called it up, to be a memory, and became instead, Somehow, a prediction: something that had not been but which Alice, with a deep sense of happy possibility, could imagine one day being.

“Well,” George said. “This is about as far as I go.”

They had approached the edge of the wood. Beyond, sunny glades went on like pools, sunlight falling in square shafts upon them through tall trees; and beyond that, a white, sunlit world, obscure to their eyes accustomed to the dimness.

“Goodbye, then,” Alice said. “You’ll come to the banquet?”

“Oh, sure,” George said. “How could I help it?”

They stood a moment in silence, and then George, a little embarrassed for he’d never done this before, asked her blessing; and she gave it gladly, on his flocks and on his produce, and on his old head; she bent and kissed him where he knelt, and went on.

So Big

The glades like pools, one after another, continued a long way. This part, Alice thought, was the best so far: these violets and these new moist ferns, those graylichened stones, these bars of benevolent sun. “So big,” she said. “So big.” A thousand creatures paused in their spring occupations to watch her pass; the hum of newborn insects was like a constant breath. “Dad would have liked this place,” she thought, and even as she thought it she knew how it was that he had come (or would come) to understand the voices of creatures, for she understood them herself, she needed only to listen.

Mute rabbits and noisy jays, gross belching frogs and chipmunks who made smart remarks—but what was that in the further glade, standing on one leg, lifting alternately one wing and then the other? A stork, wasn’t it?

“Don’t I know you?” Alice asked when she had entered there. The stork leapt away, startled and looking guilty and confused.

“Well, I’m not sure,” the stork said. It looked at Alice first with one eye, and then with both eyes down its long red beak, which gave it a look at once worried and censorious, as though it peered over the tops of pince-nez spectacles. “I’m not sure at all. I’m not sure of much at all, to tell you the truth.”

“I think I do,” Alice said. “Didn’t you once raise a family at Edgewood, on the roof?”

“I may have,” the stork said. It made to preen its feathers with its beak, and did it very clumsily, as though surprised to find it had feathers at all. “This,” Alice heard it say to itself, “is going to be just an enormous trial, I can see that.”

Alice helped her loose a primary that had got folded the wrong way, and the stork, after some uncomfortable fluffing, said, “I wonder—I wonder if you would mind my walking a ways with you?”

“Of course you may,” Alice said. “If you’re sure you wouldn’t rather fly.”

“Fly?” said the stork, alarmed. “Fly?”

“Well,” Alice said, “I’m not really sure where I’m going at all. I sort of just got here.”

“No matter,” the stork said. “I just got here myself, in a manner of speaking.”

They walked on together, the stork as storks do taking long, careful steps as though afraid to find something unpleasant underfoot.

“How,” Alice asked, since the stork said nothing more, “did you just get here?”

“Well,” the stork said.

“I’ll tell you my story,” Alice said, “if you’ll tell me yours.” For the stork seemed to want to speak, but to be unable to bring itself to do it.

“It depends,” the stork said at last, “on whose story it is you want to hear. Oh, very well. No more equivocation.

“Once,” it said, after a further pause, “I was a real stork. Or rather, a real stork was all I was, or she was. I’m telling this very badly, but at all events I was also, or we were also, a young woman: a very proud and very ambitious young woman, who had just learned, in another country, some very difficult tricks from masters far older and wiser than herself. There was no need, no need at all, for her to practice one of these tricks on an unwitting bird, but she was young and somewhat thoughtless, and the opportunity presented itself.

“She performed her trick or manipulation very well, and was thrilled at her new powers, though how the stork bore it—well, I’m afraid she, I, never gave much thought to that, or rather I, the stork, I thought about nothing else.

“I had been given consciousness, you see. I didn’t know that it was not my own but another’s, and only loaned to me, or rather given or hidden in me for safe-keeping. I, I the stork, thought—well, it’s very distressing to think of, but I thought that I was not a stork at all; I believed myself to be a human woman, who by the malice of someone, I didn’t know whom, had been transformed into a stork, or imprisoned in one. I had no memory of the human woman I had been, because of course she retained that life and its memories, and went gaily on living it. I was left to puzzle it out.

“Well, I flew far, and learned much; I passed through doors no stork before had ever passed through. I made a living; I raised young—yes, at Edgewood once—and I had other employments, well, no need to speak of them; storks, you know… Anyway, among the things I learned, or was told, was that a great King was returning, or re-awaking; and that after his liberation would come my own, and that then I would truly be a human woman.”

She paused in her tale, and stood staring; Alice, not knowing whether storks can weep or not, looked closely at her, and though no drop fell from her pinkish eye Alice thought that in some storkish sense she did weep.

“And so I am,” she said at length. “And so I am, now, that human woman. At last. And still only, and for always, the real stork I always and only was.” She lowered her head before Alice in sorrowful confession. “Alice, you do know me,” she said. “I am, or was, or we were, or will be, your cousin Ariel Hawksquill.”

Alice blinked. She had promised herself to be surprised by nothing here; and indeed, after she had contemplated the stork, or Hawksquill, for an astonished moment, it did seem that she had heard this tale before, or to have known that it would happen, or had happened. “But,” she said, “where, I mean how, where is…”

“Dead,” said the stork. “Dead, spoilt, ruined. Murdered. I really, she really, had no place else to go.” She opened her red beak, and clacked it shut again, a sort of sigh. “Well. No matter. Only it will take time to get used to. Her disappointment, the stork’s I mean. My new—body.” She raised a wing and looked at it. “Fly,” she said. “Well. Perhaps.”

“I’m sure,” Alice said, putting her hand on the stork’s soft shoulder. “And I should think you could share, I mean share it with Ariel, I mean share it with the stork. You can accommodate.” She smiled; it was like arbitrating a dispute between two of her children.

The stork stepped on in silence a time. Alice’s hand on her shoulder seemed to soothe her, she had stopped her irritable fluffing. “Perhaps,” she said at length. “Only—well. Forever and ever.” There was a catch in her throat; Alice could see the long apple move. “It does seem hard.”

“I know,” Alice said. “It never comes out like you think it will; or even like you thought they said it would, though maybe it does. You learn to live with it,” she said. “That’s all.”

“I’m sorry now,” Ariel Hawksquill said, “of course too late, that I didn’t accept your invitation of that night, to go with you. I should have.”

“Well,” Alice said.

“I thought I was separate from this fate. But I’ve been in this Tale all along, haven’t I? With all the rest.”

“I suppose,” Alice said. “I suppose you have, if here you are now. Tell me though,” she added, “whatever became of the cards?”

“Oh dear,” said Hawksquill, turning her red beak away in shame. “I do have a lot to make up for, don’t I?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Alice said. They were coming to the end of the forest glades; beyond lay a land of a different sort. Alice stopped. “I’m sure you can. Make up for it, I mean. For not coming and all.” She looked out over the land she must now travel. So big, so big. “You can be a help to me, I think. I hope.”

“I’m sure of it,” Hawksquill said with conviction. “Sure.”

“Because I’ll need help,” Alice said. There somewhere, beyond those hedges, over those green waves of earth where the new-risen grass-sea turned silver in the sunlight, Alice remembered or foresaw the knoll to be, on which there stood an oak tree and a thorn in deep embrace; and, if you knew the way, there was a small house there built underside, and a round door with a brass knocker; but there would be no need to knock, for the door would stand open, and the house would anyway be empty. And there would be knitting to take up, and duties, duties so large, so new… “I’ll need help,” she said again. “I will.”

“I’ll help,” said her cousin. “I can help.”

Somewhere there, beyond those blue hills, how far? An open door, and a small house big enough to hold all this spinning earth; a chair to rock away the years, and an old broom in the corner to sweep away winter.

“Come along,” the stork said. “We’ll get used to it. It’ll be all right.”

“Yes,” said Alice. There would be help, there must be; she couldn’t do it all alone. It would be all right. Still she didn’t take the first step beyond the woods’ edge; she stood a long time, feeling the asking breezes on her face, remembering or forgetting many things.

More, Much More

Smoky Barnable, in the warm glow of many electric lights, sat down in his library to turn over once again the pages of the last edition of the Architecture of Country Houses. All the windows had been opened, and a cool fresh May night came and went unhindered as he read. The last of winter had been swept away as by a new broom.

Far upstairs, as silently as the stars it modeled, the orrery turned, passing its tiny but unresistable motion through many oiled brass gears to give impetus to the twenty-four-handed fly-wheel, shut up once again in its black case but delivering its own force to generators, which in turn fed the house with light and power, and would go on doing so until all the jewelled bearings, all the best-quality nylon and leather belts, all the hardened-steel points themselves wore away: years and years, Smoky supposed. The house, his house, as though from the effects of a tonic, had perked up, refreshed and strengthened; its basements had dried, its attics were ventilated; the dust that had filled it had been sucked up by a potent and ancient whole-house vacuum-cleaner whose existence in the walls of the house Smoky had vaguely known about but which no one had thought would ever work again; even the crack in the music-room ceiling seemed on the way to healing, though why was a mystery to Smoky. The old stocks of hoarded light-bulbs were brought out, and Smoky’s house alone, the only one for miles, was lit up continuously, like a beacon or the entrance to a ballroom. Not out of pride, not really, though he had been very proud of his arrangements, but because he found it easier to expend the limitless energy than to store it (why store it, anyway?) or to disengage the machine.

And besides, lit up, the house might be easier to find: easier for someone lost, or gone off, who might be returning on a moonless night, to find in the darkness.

He turned a heavy page.

Here was a horrid idea of some vindictive spiritualist’s. There is, of course, no hell after death, only a progress through higher and higher Levels. No eternal suffering, though there might be a difficult, or at least lengthy, Re-education for recalcitrant or stupid souls. Generous: but this had apparently not been enough coals to heap on the heads of sceptics, so the idea was conceived that those who refuse to see the light in this life will refuse to see it, or be blind to it, in the next as well; they will stagger alone eternally in cold darkness, believing that this is all there is, while all around them unbeknown the happy bustle of the communion of saints goes on, fountains and flowers and whirling spheres and the striving souls of the great departed.

Alone.

It was clear that he could not go where all of them were summoned unless his desire were as strong as faith. But how could he desire another world than this one? He studied again and again the descriptions in the Architecture, but he found nowhere anything to convince him that There he would find a world anything like as rich, as deeply strange yet just as deeply familiar, as this one he lived in.

Always Spring there: but he wanted winter too, gray days and rain. He wanted it all, nothing left out; he wanted his fire, his long memories and what started them in his soul, his small comforts, his troubles even. He wanted the death he had often lately contemplated, and a place beside the others he had dug places for.

He looked up. Amid the constellation of the library’s lamps reflected in the windows the moon had risen. It was just crescent, fragile and white. When it was full, Midsummer Day, they would depart.

Paradise. A world elsewhere.

He didn’t really mind that there was a long Tale being told, didn’t even object any longer that he had been put to its uses; he only wanted it to continue, not to stop, to go on being muttered out endlessly by whatever powers they were who spun it, putting him to sleep with its half-heard anecdotes and going on still while he slept in his grave. He didn’t want it to snatch him up in this way, startle him with high, sad, harrowing conclusions he wasn’t equal to. He didn’t want it to have taken his wife from him.

He didn’t want to be marched off to another world he couldn’t imagine; a little world that couldn’t be as big as this one.

Yet it is, said the breezes that passed his ears.

It couldn’t contain all seasons in their fullness, all happinesses, all griefs. It couldn’t contain the history of his five senses and all that they had known.

But it does, said the breezes.

Not all of that, which was his world; and then more too.

Oh more, said the Breezes; more, much more.

Smoky looked up. The drapes at the window moved. “Alice?” he said.

He got up, pushing the heavy book to the floor. He went to the tall window and looked out. The walled garden was a dark vestibule; the door open in the wall led to moonlit turf and misty evening.

She’s far, she’s there, a Little Breeze said.

“Alice?”

She’s near, she’s here, said another; but whatever it was that seemed to proceed toward him through the windy darkness and the garden, he didn’t recognize it. He stood a long time looking into the night as into a face, as though it might converse with him, and explain many things: he thought it could, but all he heard it say, or himself say, was a name.

The moon rose out of sight above the house. Smoky climbed slowly up to his bed. About the time the moon set, pale horns indicating the place where the sleepy sun would soon rise, Smoky awoke, feeling he hadn’t been asleep for a moment, as imsomniacs do; he dressed himself in an old frayed dressing gown with braided edges around the cuffs and pockets, and climbed up to the top of the house, turning on as he went the hall-sconces that some thoughtless person had left off.

Lit by planetshine and daybreak, the sleepless system didn’t seem to move, any more than the morning star outside the round window seemed to: and yet it did move. Smoky watched it, thinking of the night when by lamplight he had read out from the Ephemeris the degrees, minutes and seconds of the stars’ ascensions, and felt, when he had set the last moon of Jupiter, the infinitesimal shudder of its quickening. And heard the first steel croquet-ball fall otherwise unaided into the waiting hand of the absurd overbalancing wheel. Saved. He remembered the feeling.

He put his hand on the wheel’s black case, feeling it tick over far more steadily than his own heart; and more patient too, and a hardier thing altogether. He pushed open the round window, letting in a glad rush of birdsong, and looked out over the tiled roofs. Another nice day. What is so rare. You could see a long way south from this height, he noticed; you could see the steeple at Meadowbrook, the roofs of Plainfield. Amid them the greening clumps of woods were misty; beyond the towns the woods thickened into the great Wild Wood on whose edge Edgewood stood, which went on growing always deeper and thicker toward the South far farther than the eye could see.

Only the Brave

They came to the heart of the forest, but it was a deserted kingdom. They had come no closer to any Parliament, or any closer either to her whom Auberon sought, whose name he had forgotten.

“How far can you go into the woods?” Fred asked.

Auberon knew the answer to that. “Halfway,” he said. “Then you start coming back out again.”

“Not this woods though,” Fred said. His steps had slowed; he plucked up moss and wormy earth with every footstep. He put his feet down.

“Which way?” Auberon said. But from here all ways were one.

He had seen her: he had seen her more than once: had seen her far off, moving brightly amid the forest’s dark dangers, seeming at home there; once standing alone pensive in the tigery shade (he was sure, almost sure, it had been she), once hurrying away, a crowd of small beings at her feet, she hadn’t turned to see him though one of those with her had, sharp ears, yellow eyes, a beast’s unmeaning smile. Always she seemed to be headed elsewhere, purposefully; and when he followed she wasn’t where he went.

He would have called to her, if he hadn’t been unable to remember her name. He had sorted through the alphabet to jog his memory, but it had turned to wet leaves, to staghorn, snails’ shells, fauns’ feet; it all seemed to spell her, but gave him no name. And then she had escaped, not having noticed him, and he was only deeper in than before.

Now he was at the center, and she wasn’t there either, whatever her name was.

Brown breasts? Brown something. Laurel, or cobweb, something like that; bramble, or something that began with a bee, or a sea.

“Annaway,” Fred said. “This looks like as far as I go.” His poncho was stiff and tattered, his pant-legs all fray; his toes protruded from the mouths of his ruined galoshes. He tried to raise one foot from the ground, but it wouldn’t rise. His toes gripped earth.

“Wait,” said Auberon.

“No help for it,” Fred said. “Nest of robins in my hair. Nice. Okay.”

“But come on,” Auberon said. “I can’t go on without you.”

“Oh, I’m comin’,” said Fred, budding. “Still comin’, still guidin’. Oney not walkin’.” Between his great rooting toes a crowd of brown mushrooms had sprung up. Auberon looked up, up, up at him. His knuckles doubled, tripled, turned to hundreds. “Hey m’man,” he said. “Lookin’ at God all day, yunnastan. Gots to catch some rays, scuse me,” and his face tilted back disappearing into bole as he reached up toward the treetops with a thousand greening fingers. Auberon gripped his trunk.

“No,” he said. “Damn it now, don’t.”

He sat down, helpless, at Fred’s foot. Now he was lost for sure. What stupid, stupid madness of desire had propelled him here, here where she was not, this princedom of nobody’s where she had never been, where he was unable to remember anything of her but his desire for her. He put his head in his hands, despairing.

“Hey,” said the tree, with a woody voice. “Hey, what’s that about. I got counsel. Listen up.”

Auberon raised his head.

“Oney the brave,” said Fred, “jes’ oney the brave deserve the fair.”

Auberon stood. Tears made rivulets in his dirty cheeks. “All right,” he said. He ran his hands through his hair, combing out dead leaves. He too had grown rank, as though he had lived years in the woods, mould in his cuffs, berry-juice in his beard, caterpillars in his pockets. A derelict.

He would have to start all over again, that’s all. Brave he was not, but he had arts. Had he learned nothing at all? He must get a grip on this, he must get power over this. If this were a deserted princedom, then he could install himself in its seat, if he could think how, and then he would be lost no more. How?

Only by reason. He must think. He must make order here where there was none. He must get bearings, make a list, number everything and arrange it all in ranks and orders. He must, first of all, erect in the heart of the forest a place where he knew where he was, and what was what; then he might remember who he was, he who was here at the seat and center; and then what he should do here thereupon. He would, Somehow, have to turn back and start again.

He looked around the place he was, trying to think which of the ways away from it would lead him back.

All would, or none would. Warily he peered down leafy flowered avenues. Whatever way looked most like leading him away would only turn in some subtle way and lead him back, he knew that much. There was an expectant, an ironic silence in the woods, a few brief questions from the birds.

He took a seat on a fallen log. Before him, in the center of the glade, amid the grasses and violets, he set up a little stone shed or pavilion, facing in four directions, north, south, east and west. On each of its faces he put a season: winter, summer, spring and fall. Radiating away from it were the curving, tricksome ways; he metalled them in gravel, and bordered them with white-painted stones, and led them toward or awsy from statues, an obelisk, a martenhouse on a pole, a little arched bridge, beds of tulips and day-lilies. Around it all he drew a great square of wrought-iron fence studded with arrow-headed posts, and four locked gates to go in and out of.

There. Traffic could be heard, though far off. Carefully he shifted his look: there beyond the fence was a classical courthouse, surmounted with statues of lawgivers. A hint of acrid smoke mixed in his nostrils with spring air. Now he needed only to go around the place he had made, to each of its parts in strict order, and demand from each the part of Sylvie he had put there.

The part of whom?

The park trembled in unreality, but he put it back. Don’t grasp, don’t hurry. The first place first, then the second place. If he didn’t do this properly, he would never find out how the story came out: whether he found her, and brought her back (back where?) or lost her for good, or whatever the end was, or would be, or had been. He began again: the first place, then the second place.

No, it was hopeless. How could he ever have thought to have contained her in this place, like a princess in a tower? She had fled, she had arts of her own. And what anyway did his ragbag of memories amount to? Her? No way. They had grown over time even more crushed, faded and tattered than he remembered them being when he had put them here. It was no use. He rose from his park bench, feeling in his pocket for the key that would let him out. The little girls who played jacks along the path looked up at him warily as he chose a gate to go out of.

Locks. That’s all this damn City is, he thought, inserting his key; locks upon locks. Rows, clusters, bouquets of locks knotted against the edges of doors, and the pocket weighed down as with sin by keys, to open them and lock them up again. He pushed open the heavy gate, swinging it aside like a jail door. On the rusticated red stone gatepost was a plaque: it said Mouse Drinkwater Stone 1900. And from the gate the street stretched out, townhouse-lined for a block, then marching into the brown uptown distance between vague castles, old in power, that scraped the sky, wreathed in smoke and noise.

He walked. People hurried past him, they had destinations, he was aimless and slower. And from a side street ahead of him, a package under her arm, booted feet quick, Sylvie turned on to the avenue and away uptown.

Small, alone but assured on the hectic street, her kingdom. And his. Her retreating back: she was still on her way away, and he was behind. But he was pointed now, at last, in the right direction. He opened his mouth, and her name came out. It had been on the tip of his tongue.

“Sylvie,” he called.

Quite Close

She heard that, and it seemed to be a name she knew; her feet slowed, and she partly turned but did not; it had been a name, a name she remembered from somewhere, somewhen. Had a bird called it, calling to its mate? She looked up into the sunshot leaves. Or a chipmunk, calling its friends and relations? She watched one scamper and freeze on the knobby knees of an oak, then turn to look at her. She walked on, small, alone but assured beneath the tall trees, her naked feet falling quick one after the other among the flowers.

She walked far, and fast; the wings she had grown were not wings, yet they bore her; she didn’t stop to amuse herself, though pleasures were shown her and many creatures implored her to stay. “Later, later,” she said to all, and hurried on, the path unfolding before her night by day as she went.

He’s coming, she thought, I know it, he’ll be there, he will; maybe he won’t remember me, but I’ll remind him, he’ll see. The present she had for him, chosen after long thought, she held tight under her arm and had let no one else carry, though many had offered.

And if he wasn’t there?

No, he would be; there could be no banquet for her if he wasn’t present, and a banquet had been promised; everybody would be there, and surely he was one. Yes! The best seat, the choicest morsels, she would feed him by hand just to watch his face, he’d be so surprised! Had he changed? He had, but she’d know him. She was sure.

Night sped her. The moon rose, waxing fat, and winked at her: party! Where was she now? She stopped, and listened to the forest speak. Near, near. She had never been here before, and that was a sign. She didn’t like to go further without sure bearings, and some word. Her invitation was clear, and she need defer to none, but. She climbed a tall tree to its tip-top, and looked out over the moon’s country.

She was on the forest’s edge. Night breezes browsed in the treetops, parting the leaves with their passage. Far off, or near, or both, anyway beyond the roofs of that town and that moonlit steeple, she saw a house: a house decked out in lights, every window bright. She was quite close.

Mrs. Underhill on that night looked one last time around her dark and tidy house, and saw that all was as it should be. She went out, and pulled the door shut; she looked up into the moon’s Face; she drew from her deep pocket the iron key, and locked the door, and put the key under the mat.

Give Way Give Way

Give way, give way, she thought; give way. It was all theirs, now. The banquet was set with all its places, and very pretty it was too, she almost wished she could be there. But now that the old king had come at last, and would sit on his high throne (whenever it was, she had never been exactly sure) there was nothing more for her to do.

The man known as Russell Eigenblick had had, when he alighted, only one question for her: “Why?”

“Why, for goodness’ sake,” Mrs. Underhill had said. “why, why. Why does the world need three sexes, when one of them doesn’t help out? Why are there twenty-four kinds of dreams and not twenty-five? Why is there always an even number of ladybugs in the world and not an odd, an odd number of stars visible and not an even? Doors had to be opened; cracks had to be forced; a wedge was needed, and you were it. A winter had to be made before spring could come; you were the winter. Why? Why is the world as it is and not different? If you had the answer to that, you wouldn’t be here now asking it. Now do calm yourself. Do you have your robe and crown? Is everything as you like it, or near enough? Rule wisely and well; I know you’ll rule long. Give my best to them all, when they come to make their obeisance, in the fall; and don’t, please don’t, ask them hard questions; they’ve had enough of those to answer these many years.”

And was that all? She looked around herself. She was all packed; her unimaginable trunks and baskets had been sent on ahead with those strong young ones who had gone first. Had she left the key? Yes, under the mat; she had just done that. Forgetful. And was that all?

Ah, she thought: one thing left to do.

Come or Stay

“We’re going,” she said, when near dawn she stood on the point of rock that jutted out over a pool in the woods into which a waterfall fell with a constant song.

Spears of moonlight were broken by the pool’s surface; new leaves and blossoms floated there, gathering in the eddies. A great white trout, pink-eyed, without speckle or belt, rose slowly at her words. “Going?” he said.

“You can come or stay,” said Mrs. Underhill. “You’ve been so long on this side of the story that it’s up to you by now.”

The trout said nothing, alarmed beyond words. At last Mrs. Underhill, growing impatient with his sad goggling, said sharply, “Well?”

“I’ll stay,” he said quickly.

“Very well,” Mrs. Underhill said, who would have been very surprised indeed if he had answered differently. “Soon,” she said, “soon there will come to this place a young girl (well, an old, old lady now, but no matter, a girl you knew) and she will look down into this pool; she will be the one you’ve so long waited for, and she won’t be fooled by your shape, she’ll look down and speak the words that will free you.”

“She will?” said Grandfather Trout.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“For love’s sake, you old fool,” Mrs. Underhill said; she struck the rock beneath her stick so hard it cracked; a dust of granite drifted onto the stirred surface of the pool. “Because the story’s over.”

“Oh,” said Grandfather Trout. “Over?”

“Yes. Over.”

“Couldn’t I,” said Grandfather Trout, “just stay as I am?”

She bent down, studying his dim silver shape in the pool. “As you are?” she said.

“Well,” said the fish. “I’ve got used to it. I don’t remember this girl, at all.”

“No,” said Mrs. Underhill, after some thought. “No, I don’t think you can. I can’t imagine that.” She straightened up. “A bargain’s a bargain,” she said, turning away. “Nothing to do with me.”

Grandfather Trout retreated into the weed-bearded hidey-holes of his pool, fear in his heart. Remembrance, against his will, was coming fast on him. She; but which she would it be? And how could he hide from her when she came, not with commands, not with questions, but with the words, the only words (he would have shut his eyes tight against the knowledge, if only he had had lids to shut) that would stir his cold heart? And yet he could not leave; summer had come, and with it a million bugs; the torrents of spring were done and his pool the old familiar mansion once again. He would not leave. He laved his fins in agitation, feeling things come and go along his thin skin he had not felt in decades; he worked himself deeper into his hole, hoping and doubting that it would be deep enough to hide him.

“Now,” Mrs. Underhill said, as dawn rose around her. “Now.”

“Now,” she heard her children say, those near and those far off too, in all their various voices. Those near gathered around her skirts; she put her hand to her brow and spied those already journeying, caravans down the valley toward dawn, dwindling to invisibility. Mr. Woods took her elbow.

“A long way,” he said. “A long, long way.”

Yes, it would be long; longer, she thought, though not so hard, as the way for those who followed her here, for at least she knew the way. And there would be fountains there to refresh her, and all of them; and there would be the broad lands she had dreamed of so often.

There was some trouble getting the old Prince helped onto his broken-winded charger, but when he was aloft he raised a feeble hand, and they all cheered; the war was over, more than over, forgotten, and they had won. Mrs. Underhill, leaning on her staff, took his reins, and they set out.

Not Going

It was the year’s longest day, Sophie knew, but why should it be called Midsummer when summer had just begun? Maybe only because it was the day, the first day, on which summer seemed endless; seemed to stretch out before and behind limitlessly, and every other season was out of mind and unimaginable. Even the stretch of the screen-door’s spring and the clack of its closing behind her as she went in, and the summer odor of the vestibule, seemed no longer new, and were as though they had always been.

And yet it might have been that this summer could not come at all. It was Daily Alice who had brought it, Sophie felt sure; by her bravery had saved it from never occurring, by going first had seen to it that this day was made. It should therefore seem fragile and conditional, and yet it didn’t; it was as real a summer day as Sophie had ever known, it might be the only real summer day she had known since childhood, and it vivified her and made her brave too. She hadn’t felt brave at all for some time: but now she thought she could feel brave, Alice all around, and she must. For today they set out.

Today they set out. Her heart rose and she clutched more tightly to her the knitted bag that was all the luggage she could think to bring. Planning and thinking and hoping and fearing had taken up most of her days since the meeting held at Edgewood, but only rarely did she feel what she was about; she forgot, so to speak, to feel it. But she felt it now.

“Smoky?” she called. The name echoed in the tall vestibule of the empty house. Everyone had gathered outdoors, in the walled garden and on the porches and out in the Park; they had been gathering since morning, bringing each whatever they could think of for the journey, and as ready for whatever journey they imagined as they could be. Now afternoon had begun to go, and they had looked to Sophie for some word or some direction, and she had gone to find Smoky, who at times like this was always behind-hand, for picnics and expeditions of every kind.

Of every kind. If she could go on thinking that it was a picnic or an expedition, a wedding or a funeral or a holiday, or any ordinary outing at all which of course she knew quite well how to manage, and just go on doing what needed to be done just as though she knew what that was, then—well, then she would have done all that she could, and she had to leave the rest to others. “Smoky?” she called again.

She found him in the library, though when at first she glanced in there she didn’t perceive him; the drapes were drawn, and he sat unmoving in a big armchair, hands clasped before him and a big book open, face down, on the floor by his feet.

“Smoky?” She came in, apprehensive. “Everybody’s ready, Smoky,” she said. “Are you all right?”

He looked up at her. “I’m not going,” he said.

She stood for a moment, unable to understand this. Then she put down her knitted bag—it contained an old album of pictures, and a cracked china figurine of a stork with an old woman and a naked child on its back, and one or two other things; it should have contained the cards, of course, but did not—and came to where he sat. “What, no,” she said. “No.”

“I’m not going, Sophie,” he said, mildly enough, as though he simply didn’t care to. And looked down at his clasped hands.

Sophie reached for him, and opened her mouth to expostulate, but then didn’t; she knelt by him and said gently, “What is it?”

“Oh, well,” Smoky said. He didn’t look at her. “Somebody ought to stay, shouldn’t they? Somebody ought to be here, to sort of take care of things. I mean in case—in case you wanted to come back, if you did, or in case of anything.

“It is my house,” he said, “after all.”

“Smoky,” Sophie said. She put her hand over his clasped ones. “Smoky, you have to come, you have to!”

“Don’t, Sophie.”

“Yes! You can’t not come, you can’t, what will we do without you?”

He looked at her, puzzled by her vehemence. It didn’t seem to Smoky to be a remark anyone could fitly make to him, what would they do without him, and he didn’t know how to answer. “Well,” he said. “I can’t.”

“Why?”

He sighed a long deep sigh. “It’s just, well.” He passed his hand over his brow; he said, “I don’t know—it’s just…”

Sophie waited through these preambles, which put her in mind of others, long ago, other small words eked out before a hard thing was said; she bit her lip, and said nothing.

“Well, it’s bad enough,” he said, “bad enough to have Alice go… See,” he said, stirring in his chair, “see, Sophie, I was never really part of this, you know; I can’t… I mean I have been so lucky, really. I never would have thought, I never really would have thought, back when I was a kid, back when I came to the City, that I could have had so much happiness. I just wasn’t made for it. But you—Alice—you—you took me in. It was like—it was like finding out you’d inherited a million dollars. I didn’t always understand that—or yes, yes I did, I did, sometimes I took it for granted maybe, but underneath I knew. I was grateful. I can’t even tell you.”

He pressed her hand. “Okay, okay. But now—with Alice gone. Well, I guess I always knew she had a thing like that to do, I knew it all along, but I never expected it. You know? And Sophie, I’m not suited for that, I’m not made for it. I wanted to try, I did. But all I could think was, it’s bad enough to have lost Alice. Now I have to lose all the rest, too. And I can’t, Sophie, I just can’t.”

Sophie saw that tears had started in his eyes, and overflowed the old pink cups of his lids, a thing she didn’t think she’d ever seen before, no, never, and she wanted with all her heart to tell him No, he wouldn’t lose anything, that he went away from nothing and toward everything, Alice most of all; but she didn’t dare, for however much she knew it was true for her, she couldn’t say it to Smoky, for if it wasn’t true for him, and she had no certainty that it was, then no terrible lie could be crueler; and yet she had promised Alice to bring him, no matter what; and couldn’t imagine leaving without him herself. And still she could say nothing.

“Anyway,” he said. He wiped his face with his hand. “Anyway.”

Sophie, at a loss, oppressed by the gloom, rose, unable to think. “But,” she said helplessly, “it’s too nice a day, it’s just such a nice day…” She went to the heavy drapes that made a twilight in the room, and tore them open. Sunlight blinded her, she saw many in the walled garden, around the stone table beneath the beech; some looked up; and a child outside tapped on the window to be let in.

Sophie undid the window. Smoky looked up from his chair. Lilac stepped over the sill, looked at Smoky arms akimbo, and said, “Now what’s the matter?”

“Oh, thank goodness,” Sophie said, weak with relief. “Oh, thank goodness.”

“Who’s that?” Smoky said, rising.

Sophie hesitated a moment, but only a moment. There were lies, and then there were lies. “It’s your daughter,” she said. “Your daughter Lilac.”

Land Called the Tale

“All right,” Smoky said, throwing up his hands like a man under arrest, “all right, all right.”

“Oh good,” Sophie said. “Oh Smoky.”

“It’ll be fun,” Lilac said. “You’ll see. You’ll be so surprised.”

Defeated in his last refusal, as he might have known he would be. He really had no arguments that could stand against them, not when they could bring long-lost daughters before him to plead, to remind him of old promises. He didn’t believe that Lilac needed his fathership, he thought she probably needed nothing and no one at all, but he couldn’t deny he’d promised to give it. “All right,” he said again, avoiding Sophie’s radiantly pleased face. He went around the library, turning on lights.

“But hurry,” Sophie said. “While it’s still day.”

“Hurry,” Lilac said, tugging at his arm.

“Now wait a minute,” Smoky said. “I’ve got to get a few things.”

“Oh, Smoky!” Sophie said, stamping her foot.

“Just hold on,” Smoky said. “Hold your horses.”

He went out into the hall, turning on lamps and wallsconces, and up the stairs, with Sophie at his heels. Upstairs, he went one by one through the bedrooms, turning on lights, looking around, moving just ahead of Sophie’s impatience. Once he looked out a window, and down on many gathered below; afternoon was waning. Lilac looked up, and waved.

“Okay, okay,” he muttered. “All right.”

In his and Alice’s room, when he had lit all the lights, he stood a time, angry and breathing hard. What the hell do you take? On such a trip?

“Smoky…” Sophie at the door said.

“Now, damn it, Sophie,” he said, and pulled open drawers. A clean shirt, anyway; a change of underwear. A poncho, for rain. Matches and a knife. A little onion-skin Ovid, from the bedside table. Metamorphoses. All right.

Now what to put them in? It occurred to him that it had been so many years since he had gone anywhere from this house that he owned no luggage whatever. Somewhere, in some attic or basement, lay the pack he had first carried to Edgewood, but just where he had no idea. He threw open closet doors, there were half a dozen deep cedar-lined closets around this room that all his and Alice’s clothes had never come close to filling. He tugged at the light-pulls, their phosphorescent tips like fireflies. He glimpsed his yellowed white wedding suit, Truman’s. Below it in a corner—well, maybe this would do, odd how old things pile up in the corners of closets, he hadn’t known this was in here: he pulled it out.

It was a carpetbag. An old, mouse-chewed Gladstone carpetbag with a cross-bones catch.

Smoky opened it, and looked with a strange foreboding or hindsight into its dark insides. It was empty. An odor arose from it, musty, the odor of leaf-mould or Queen-Anne’s-lace or the earth under an upturned stone. “This’ll do,” he said softly. “This’ll do, I guess.”

He put the few things in it. They seemed to disappear in its capacious insides.

What else should go in?

He thought, holding open the bag: a twine of creeper or a necklace, a hat heavy as a crown; chalk, and a pen; a shotgun, a flask of rum-tea, a snowflake. A book about houses; a book about stars; a ring. With the greatest vividness, a vividness that stabbed him deeply, he saw the road between Meadowbrook and Highland, and Daily Alice as she had looked on that day, the day of the wedding trip, the day he was lost in the woods; he heard her say Protected.

He closed the bag.

“All right,” he said. He took it up by its leather handles, and it was heavy, but an ease entered him with its weight, it seemed a thing he had always carried, a weight without which he would be unbalanced, and unable to walk.

“Ready?” Sophie said from the door.

“Ready,” he said. “I guess.”

They went down together. Smoky paused in the hall to push in the ivory buttons of the lights that lit the vestibule, the porches, the basement. Then they went out.

Aaaah, said everyone gathered there.

Lilac had drawn them all after her, from the Park, from the walled garden, from the porches and parterres where they had gathered, to this front of the house, the wooden porch that faced a weedy drive leading to stone gateposts topped with pitted balls like stone oranges.

“Hi, hi,” said Smoky.

His daughters came up to him smiling, Tacey, Lily and Lucy, and their children after them. Everyone rose, everyone looked at one another. Only Marge Juniper kept her seat on the porch stairs, unwilling to rise till she knew steps must be taken, for she didn’t have many. Sophie asked Lilac:

“Will you lead us?”

“Part way,” Lilac said. She stood in the center of the company, pleased, yet a little awed too, and not sure herself which of these would keep on till the end, and having not enough fingers to count. “Part way.”

“Is it that way?” Sophie asked, pointing to the stone gateposts. They all turned and looked that way. The first crickets’ voices began. Edgewood’s swifts cut the air, air blue and turning green. Exhalations of the cooling earth made the way beyond those gateposts obscure.

Had that been the moment, Smoky wondered; had it been that moment, when he had turned in at those stone gateposts for the first time, that the charm had fallen on him, not ever after that to release him? The arm and hand with which he held the carpetbag tingled like a warning bell, but Smoky didn’t hear it.

“How far, how far?” asked Bud and Blossom hand in hand.

On that day: the day he had first gone in at Edgewood’s door and then in some sense never again back out.

Perhaps: or it may have been before that, or after it, but it wasn’t a matter of figuring out when exactly the first charm had invaded his life, or when he had stumbled unwittingly into it, because another had come soon after, and another, they had succeeded one another by a logic of their own, each one occasioned by the last and none removable; even to try to disentangle them would only be the occasion for further charms, and anyway they had never been a causal chain but a series of removes, Chinese boxes one inside the other, the further in you went the bigger it got. And it didn’t end now: he was about to step into a new series, endless, infundibular, utter. Apalled by a prospect of endless variation, he was only glad that some things had remained constant: Alice’s love chief among them. It was toward that that he journeyed, the only thing that could draw him; and yet he felt that he left it behind; and still he carried it with him.

“A dog to meet us,” Sophie said, taking his hand. “A river to cross.”

Something began to open in Smoky’s heart as he stepped from the porch: a premonition, or the intimation of a revelation.

They had all begun to move, taking up their bags and belongings, talking in low voices, down the drive. But Smoky stopped, seeing he could not go out by that gate: could not go out by the gate through which he had come in. Too many charms had intervened. The gate wasn’t the same gate; he wasn’t the same either.

“A long way,” Lilac said, drawing her mother after her. “A long, long way.”

They passed him on either side, burdened and holding hands, but he had stopped: still willing, still journeying, only not walking.

On his wedding day, he and Daily Alice had gone among the guests seated on the grass, and many of them had given gifts, and all of them had said “Thank you.” Thank you: because Smoky was willing, willing to take on this task, to take exception to none of it, to live his life for the convenience of others in whom he had never even quite believed, and spend his substance bringing about the end of a Tale in which he did not figure. And so he had; and he was still willing: but there had never been a reason to thank him. Because whether they knew it or not, he knew that Alice would have stood beside him on that day and wed him whether they had chosen him for her or not, would have defied them to have him. He was sure of it.

He had fooled them. No matter what happened now, whether he reached the place they set out for or didn’t, whether he journeyed or stayed behind, he had his tale. He had it in his hand. Let it end: let it end: it couldn’t be taken from him. He couldn’t go where all of them were going, but it didn’t matter, for he’d been there all along.

And where was it, then, that all of them were going?

“Oh, I see,” he said, though no sound came from his lips. The something that had begun to open in his heart opened further; it let in great draughts of evening air, and swifts, and bees in the hollyhocks; it hurt beyond pain, and wouldn’t close. It admitted Sophie and his daughters, and his son Auberon too, and many dead. He knew how the Tale ended, and who would be there.

“Face to face,” Marge Juniper said, passing by him. “Face to face.” But Smoky heard nothing now but the wind of Revelation blowing in him; he would not, this time, escape it. He saw, in the blue midst of what entered him, Lilac, turning back and looking at him curiously; andby her face he knew that he was right.

The Tale was behind them. And it was to there they journeyed. One step would take them there; they were there already.

“Back there,” he tried to say, unable himself to turn in that direction, back there, he tried to tell them, back to where the house stood lit and waiting, the Park and the porches and the walled garden and the lane into the endless lands, the door into summer. If he could turn now (but he could not, it didn’t matter that he could not but he could not) he would find himself facing summer’s house; and on a balcony there, Daily Alice greeting him, dropping from her shoulders the old brown robe to show him her nakedness amid the shadows of leaves: Daily Alice, his bride, Dame Kind, goddess of that land behind them, on whose borders they stood, the land called the Tale. If he could reach those stone gateposts (but he never would) he would find himself only turning in at them, Midsummer Day, bees in the hollyhocks, and an old woman on the porch there turning over cards.

A Wake

Under an enormous moon full to bursting Sylvie traveled toward the house she had seen, which seemed to be further and further off the closer she came to it. There was a stone fence to climb, and a beech-wood to go through; there was finally a stream to cross, or an enormous river, rushing and gold-foamed in the moonlight. After long thought on its banks, Sylvie made a boat of bark, with a broad leaf for a sail, spider-web lines and an acorn-cup to bail with, and (though nearly swept into the mouth of a dark lake where the river poured underground) she reached the far bank; the flinty house, huge as a cathedral, looked down on her, its dark yews pointing in her direction, its stone-pillared porches warning her away. And Auberon always said it was a cheerful house!

Just as she was thinking that she never would quite reach it, or if she did would reach it as such an atomy that she would fall between the cracks of its paving-stones, she stopped and listened. Amid the sounds of beetles and nightjars, somewhere there was music, somber yet Somehow full of gladness; it drew Sylvie on, and she followed it. It grew, not louder but more full; she saw the lights of a procession gather around her in the furry darkness of the underwood, or saw anyway the fireflies and night-flowers as though in procession, a procession she was one of. Wondering, her heart filled with the music, she approached the place to which the lights tended; she passed through portals where many looked up to see her enter. She put her feet in the sleeping flowers of a lane, a lane that led to a glade where more were gathered, and more coming: where beneath a flowering tree the white-clothed table stood, many places set, and one in the center for her. Only it was not a banquet, as she had thought, or not only a banquet; it was a wake.

Shy, sad for those saddened by whosoever death it was they mourned, she stood a long time watching, her present for Auberon held tight under her arm, listening to the iow sounds of their voices. Then one turned at the end of the table, and his black hat tilted up, and his white teeth grinned to see her. He raised a cup to her, and waved her forward. Gladder than she could have imagined to see him, she made her way through the throng to him, many eyes turning toward her, and hugged him, tears in her throat. “Hey,” she said. “Heeeey.”

“Hey,” George said. “Now everybody’s here.”

Holding him, she looked around at the crowded table, dozens present, smiling or weeping or draining cups, some crowned, some furred or feathered (a stork or somebody like one dipped her beak in a tall cup, eying with misgivings a grinning fox beside her) but Somehow room for all. “Who are all these people?” she said.

“Family,” George said.

“Who died?” Sylvie whispered.

“His father,” George said, and pointed out a man who sat, bent-backed, a handkerchief over his face, and a leaf stuck in his hair. The man turned, sighing deeply; the three women with him, looking up and smiling at Sylvie as though they knew her, turned him further to face her.

“Auberon,” Sylvie said.

Everyone watched as they met. Sylvie could say nothing, the tears of Auberon’s grief were still on his face, and he had nothing that he could say to her, so they only took hands. Aaaah, said all the guests. The music altered; Sylvie smiled, and they cheered her smile. Someone crowned her with odorous white blooms, and Auberon likewise, taking chaplets of locust-flower from the locust-tree which overhung the feast-table. Cups were raised, and toasts shouted; there was laughter. The music pealed. With her brown ringed hand, Sylvie brushed the tears from her prince’s face.

The moon sailed toward morning; the banquet turned from wake to wedding, and grew riotous; the people stood up to dance, and sat down to eat and drink.

“I knew you’d be here,” Sylvie said. “I knew it.”

A Real Gift

In his certainty that she was here now, the fact that Auberon had himself not known at all that she would be here dissolved. “I was sure too,” he said. “Sure.

“But,” he said, “why, a while ago—” he had no sense of how long ago it had been, hours, ages “— when I called your name, why didn’t you stop, and turn around?”

“Did you?” she said. “Did you call my name?”

“Yes. I saw you. You were going away. I called ‘Sylvie!’ ”

“Sylvie?” She looked at him in cheerful puzzlement. “Oh!” she said at length. “Oh! Sylvie! Well, see, I forgot. Because it’s been so long. Because they never call me that here. They never did.”

“What do they call you?”

“Another name,” she said. “A nickname I had when I was a kid.”

“What name?” he said.

She told him.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh.”

She laughed to see his face. She poured foaming drink into his cup and offered it to him. He drank. “So listen,” she said. “I want to hear all your adventures. All of them. Don’t you want to hear mine?”

All of them, all of them, he thought, the honeyed liquor he drank washing away any sense he might have had of what they could be, it was as though they were all yet to happen, and he would be in them. A prince and a princess: the Wild Wood. Had she then been there, in that kingdom, their kingdom, all along? Had he? What anyway had his adventures been? They vanished, crumpling into broken nothings even as he thought of them, they became as dim and unreal as a gloomy future, even as the future opened before him like a storied past.

“I should have known,” he said laughing. “I should have known.”

“Yes,” she said. “Just beginning. You’ll see.”

Not one story, no, not one story with one ending but a thousand stories, and so far from over as hardly to have begun. She was swept away from him then by laughing dancers, and he watched her go, there were many hands importuning her, many creatures at her quick feet, and her smile was frank for all of them. He drank, inflamed, his feet itching to learn the antic-hay. And could she, he thought watching her, still cause him pain, too? He touched the gift which in their revels she had placed on his brow, two handsome, broad, ridged and exquisitely recurving horns, heavy and brave as a crown, and thought about them. Love wasn’t kind, not always; a corrosive thing, it burned away kindness as it burned away grief. They were infants now in power, he and she, but they would grow; their quarrels would darken the moon and scatter the frightened wild things like autumn gales, would do so, had long done so, it didn’t matter.

Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter. Her aunt was a witch, but his sisters were queens of air and darkness; their gifts had once aided him, and would again. He was heir to his father’s bafflements, but he could touch his mother for strength… As though turning the pages of an endless compendium of romances, all read long ago, he saw the thousands of her children, generations of them, most of them his, he would lose track of them, meet them as strangers, love them, lie with them, fight them, forget them. Yes! They would blunt the pens of a dozen chroniclers with their story and the stories their story generated, tedious, hilarious, or sad; their feasts, their balls, their masques and quarrels, the old curse laid on him and her kiss that mitigated it, their long partings, her vanishings and disguises (crone, castle, bird, he foresaw or remembered many but not all), their reunions and couplings tender or lewd: it would be a spectacle for all, an endless and-then. He laughed a huge laugh, seeing that it would be so: for he had a gift for that, after all; a real gift.

“Y’see?” said the black locust-tree that overhung the feast-table, the locust from which the flowers that decked Auberon’s horned head had been taken. “Y’see? Jes’ oney the brave deserve the fair.

She’s Here She’s Near

The dance whirled around the prince and princess, marking a wide circle in the dewy grass; the fireflies, toward dawn, turned in a great circle in obedience to the turning of Lilac’s finger, wheeling in the opulent darkness. Aaaah, said all the guests.

“Just the beginning,” Lilac said to her mother. “You see? Just like I told you.”

“Yes, but Lilac,” Sophie said. “You lied to me, you know. About the peace treaty. About meeting them face to face.”

Lilac, elbow on the littered table, rested her cheek in the cup of her hand, and smiled at her mother. “Did I?” she said, as though she couldn’t remember that.

“Face to face,” Sophie said, looking along the broad table. How many were the guests? She’d count them, but they moved around so, and diminished uncountably into the sparkling darkness; some were crashers, she thought, that fox, maybe that gloomy stork, certainly this clumsy stag-beetle that staggered amid the spilled cups flourishing its black antlers; anyway she didn’t need to count in order to know how many were here. Only—“Where’s Alice, though?” she said. “Alice should be here.”

She’s here, she’s near, said her Little Breezes, moving among the guests. Sophie trembled for Alice’s grief; the music altered once again, and a sadness and a stillness came over the company.

“Call for the robin-redbreast an’ the wren,” said the locust-tree, dropping white petals like tears on the feast-table. “Keep m’man Duke far hence that’s foe to man.”

The breezes rose to dawn winds, blowing away the music. “Our revels now are ended,” sighed the locust-tree. Alice’s white hand blotted out the grieving moon like clouds, and the sky grew blue. The stag-beetle fell off the edge of the table, the ladybug flew away home, the fireflies turned down their torches; the cups and dishes scattered like leaves before the coming day.

Come from his burial, none knew where but she, Daily Alice came among them like daybreak, her tears like day-odorous dew. They swallowed tears and wonder before her presence, and made to leave; but no one would say later that she hadn’t smiled for them, and made them glad with her blessing, as they parted. They sighed, some yawned, they took hands; they took themselves by twos and threes away to where she sent them, to rocks, fields, streams and woods, to the four corners of the earth, their kingdom new-made.

Then Alice walked alone there, by where the moist ground was marked with the dark circle of their dance, her skirts trailing damp in the sparkling grasses. She thought that if she could she might take away this summer day, this one day, for him; but he wouldn’t have liked her to do that and she could not do it anyway. So instead she would make it, which she could do, this her anniversary day, a day of such perfect brilliance, a morning so new, an afternoon so endless, that the whole world would remember it ever after.

Once Upon a Time

The lights of Edgewood which Smoky had left burning paled to nothing on that day; in the night that followed they shone again, and on every night thereafter. Rain and wind came in through the open windows, though, which they had forgotten to close; summer storms stained the drapes and the rugs, scattering papers, blowing shut the closet doors. Moths and bugs found holes in the screens, and died happily in union with the burning bulbs, or did not die but generated young in the rugs and tapestries. Autumn came, though it seemed impossible, a myth, a rumor not to be believed; fallen leaves piled up on the porches, blew in through the screen-door left unlatched, which beat helplessly against the wind and at last died on its hinges, no barrier any more. Mice discovered the kitchen; the cats had all left for more seemly circumstances, and the pantry was theirs, and the squirrels’ who came after and nested in the musty beds. Still the orrery turned, mindlessly, cheerfully whirling, and still the house was lit up like a beacon or the entrance to a ballroom. In winter it shone its lights on snow, an ice palace; snow drifted in its rooms, snow capped its cold chimneys. The light over the porch went out.

That there was such a house in the world, lit and open and empty, became a story in those days; there were other stories, people were in motion, stories were all they cared to hear, stories were all they believed in, life had got that hard. The story of the house all lit, the house of four floors, seven chimneys, three hundred and sixtyfive stairs, fifty-two doors, traveled far; they were all travelers then. It met another story, a story about a world elsewhere, and a family whose names many knew, whose house had been large and popuious with griefs and happinesses that had once seemed endless, but had ended, or had stopped; and to those many who still dreamed of that family as often as of their own, the two stories seemed one. The house could be found. In spring the basement lights went out, and one in the music-room.

People in motion; stories starting in a dream, and spoken by unwise actors into wanting ears, then ceasing; the story turning back to dream, and then haunting the day, told and retold. People knew there was a house made of time, and many set out to find it.

It could be found. There it was: at the end of a neglected drive, in a soft rain, not what had been expected at all and however long-sought always come upon unexpectedly, for all its lights; sagging porch steps to go up, and a door to go in by. Small animals who thought the place theirs, long in possession, sharing only with the wind and the weather. On the floor of the library, by a certain chair, face down at a certain page, a heavy book spine-broken and warped by dampness. And many other rooms, their windows filled with the rainy gardens, the Park, the aged trees indifferent and only growing older. And then many doors to choose from, a juncture of corridors, each one leading away, each ending in a door that could be gone out by; evening falling early, and a forgetfulness with it, which way was the way in, which now the way out?

Choose a door, take a step. Mushrooms have come out in the wetness, the walled garden is full of them. There are further lights, there in the twilit bottom of the garden; the door in the wall is open, and the silvery rain sifts over the Park that can just be seen through it. Whose dog is that?

One by one the bulbs burned out, like long lives come to their expected ends. Then there was a dark house made once of time, made now of weather, and harder to find; impossible to find and not even as easy to dream of as when it was alight. Stories last longer: but only by becoming only stories. It was anyway all a long time ago; the world, we know now, is as it is and not different; if there was ever a time when there were passages, doors, the borders open and many crossing, that time is not now. The world is older than it was. Even the weather isn’t as we remember it clearly once being; never lately does there come a summer day such as we remember, never clouds as white as that, never grass as odorous or shade as deep and full of promise as we remember they can be, as once upon a time they were.