The Thief of Always

XX

The Thieves Meet

Glimpsing the dusty truth masquerading as pie and ice cream was one thing, but scratching the veneer of deceits that the House had polished to such perfection was quite another. As Harvey climbed the stairs he kept hoping he'd find some little detail in the walls or the carpets that would allow him to get his mind's fingers beneath the lid of this illusion and lift it up to see what charmless thing lay inside. If Marr had been made of stale mud and spittle, and Jive of dust, what was the House itself made of? But it knew its business too well. However hard Harvey stared, he could not pierce its lies. It delighted his senses with warmth and color and the scents of summer; it cooed softly in his ear and played its gentle airs against his face.

Even when he reached the dark landing at the top of the final flight, the House continued to pretend that this was just another innocent game of hide-and-seek, like the countless games it had seen played in its shadow.

There were five doors ahead of him, everyone of them ajar a few inches, as if to say: There are no secrets here, not from a boy who wants the truth. Come look! Come see! If you dare.

He dared, but not in the way the House had planned. After spending a few moments examining the doors, he ignored all of them, and instead went back down a flight, chose a strong chair from one of the bedrooms, brought it back upstairs, climbed onto it and pushed open the trapdoor that let onto the attic.

It was hard work hauling himself up, but he knew, when he'd finished and lay panting on the attic floor, that his pursuit of Hood was almost at an end. The Vampire King was near. Who else but a master of illusions would live in a place so bereft of them? The attic was all the House was not: filthy, murky and cobwebbed.

"Where are you?" he said. It was no use thinking he could surprise the enemy. Hood had watched his ascent from the first stair. "Come out," he yelled, "I want to see what a thief looks like."

There was no reply at first, but then-from somewhere at the other end of the attic-Harvey heard a low, guttural growl. Not whiting for his eyes to become fully accustomed to the gloom he started toward the utterance, the boards creaking beneath his feet as he went.

Twice he stopped to look up, because a noise somewhere in the darkness overhead caught his attention. Was it a trapped bird, panicking as it flew blindly back and forth? Or roaches, perhaps, massed on the beams above him?

He told himself to put such imaginings out of his head and concentrate on finding Hood. There were enough real reasons to be fearful here without inventing more. Unlike the area around the trapdoor, this end of the attic served as some kind of storeroom, and his enemy was surely lurking in the maze of rotting pictures and mildewed furniture. In fact, wasn't that a fluttering motion he saw now out of the corner of his eye?

"Hood?" he said, squinting to try and make better sense of the shape in the shadows. "What are you doing hiding up here?"

He took another step forward, and as he did so he realized his error. This wasn't the mysterious Mr. Hood. He knew this shape, mangled though it was: the half-rotted wings; the tiny black eyes; the teeth, the endless teeth.

It was Carna!

The creature half rose from its squalid nest, snapping at Harvey as it did so. He made a stumbling retreat, and might have been seized after three steps had Carna not been so hobbled by its wounds and slowed by the chaos of its surroundings.

It struck out at the piles of detritus to the left and right of it, scattering chairs and overturning boxes; then hauled itself in pained pursuit of its prey. Harvey kept his eyes fixed upon the beast as he backed away, his mind buzzing with questions. Where was Hood? That was the main mystery. Mrs. Griffin had been certain he was up here somewhere, but Harvey had now wandered the attic from end to end, and its only occupant was the creature driving him back toward the exit.

He chanced several glances into the shadows as he retreated in case he'd missed some figure hiding there. It was not a human form his eyes alighted upon, however; it was a globe the size of a tennis ball, glowing as though filled with starlight. It appeared like a bubble from the boards and rose toward the roof. Momentarily forgetting his jeopardy, Harvey watched it as it ascended, joined by another, then a third and a fourth.

Astonished by the sight, he took too little care where he was walking. He stumbled, fell, and ended up sprawled on the hard boards, staring up at the roof through a red haze of pain.

And there above him was Hood, in all his glory.

His face was spread over the entire roof, his features horribly distorted. His eyes were dark pits gouged into the timbers; his nose was flared and flattened grotesquely, like the nose of an enormous bat; his mouth was a lipless slit that was surely ten feet wide, from which issued a voice that was like the creaking of doors and the howling of chimneys and the rattling of windows.

"Child!" he said. "You have brought pain into my paradise. Shame on you!"

"What pain?" Harvey shouted back. He was shuddering to his marrow, but he knew this was no time to show his fear. He would deal in illusion, the way the enemy did; pretending courage even if he didn't feel it. "I came to get what was mine, that's all," he said.

Hood sucked one of the gleaming spheres into his mouth. Its light went out instantly.

"Marr is dead,"he said. "Jive is dead. Gone to muck and dust because

of you!"

"They were never alive," Harvey said.

"Did you not hear their sobs and pleas?" Hood demanded, the knots in his brow tightening. "Did you not pity them?"

"No," Harvey said.

"Then I will not pity you," came the rasping reply. "I will watch my poor Carna devour you from sole to scalp, and take pleasure in it."

Harvey glanced in Carna's direction. The beast had stopped advancing, but was poised to strike, its dripping jaws inches from Harvey's feet. Now that the beast was still, he could clearly see how badly wounded it was, its body as ragged as a moldy rug, its huge head drooping as though every breath was a burden.

As Harvey stared at it he remembered something Mrs. Griffin had told him: "I would welcome Death now," she'd said, "like a friend I'd driven from my door."

Maybe it wasn't a journey to the stars that was awaiting Carna; maybe it was simply a return to the nothingness from which Hood had conjured it. But the creature wanted that gift nevertheless. It was weary and wounded, kept alive not by any will of its own but because Hood demanded its service.

"Such a pity..." the voice in the roof murmured.

"What is?" Harvey said, looking back at Hood, who had two more of the globes at his lips. "To lose you this way," he went on. "Can't I persuade you to think again? After all, I've done you no harm.

Why not come back and live here peacefully?"

"You stole thirty years of time with my mom and dad from me!" Harvey said. "If I stay here you'll steal a lot more."

"I only took the days you didn't want," Hood protested. "The rainy days. The gray days. The days you wished away. Where's the crime in that?"

"I didn't know what I was losing," Harvey protested.

"Ah," said Hood softly, "but isn't that always the way of it? Things slip from your fingers and when they 're gone you regret it. But gone is gone, Harvey Swick!"

"No!" Harvey said. "What you stole I can steal back."

At this, a gleam ignited in the twin pits of Hood's eyes.

"You burn bright, Harvey Swick!" he said. "I've never known a soul that burned as bright as yours." He frowned as if studying the boy below. "Now I understand," he said.

"Understand what?"

"Why it is you came back."

Harvey began to say: I came for what you took, but Hood was correcting him before he'd uttered two words.

"You came because you knew you'd find a home here," Hood said. "We're both thieves, Harvey Swick. I take time. You take lives. But in the end we're the same: both Thieves of Always."

Repulsive as it was to think of himself in any way similar to this monster, there was some comer of Harvey that feared this was true. The thought silenced him.

"Perhaps we needn't be enemies," Hood said. "Perhaps I should take you under my wing. My west wing." He laughed mirthlessly at his own joke: "I can nurture you. Help you better understand the Dark Paths."

"So I'll end up feeding on children, like you?" Harvey said. "No hanks"

"I think you'd like it, Harvey Swick," Hood said. "You've got a streak of the vampire in you already."

There was no denying this. The very word vampire reminded him of his Halloween flight; of soaring against a harvest moon with his eyes burning red and his teeth sharp as razors.

"I see you remember," Hood said, catching the flicker of pleasure on Harvey's face.

Harvey instantly put a scowl in its place. "I don't want to stay here," he said. "I just want to get what's mine and leave."

Hood sighed. "So sad," he said. "So very sad. But if you will have what's yours, have death. Carnal" The beast raised its pitiful head.

"Devour the boy!"

Before the wretched beast could shift itself Harvey scrambled to his feet. In the race to the trapdoor he knew he had little chance of outrunning Carna; but was there perhaps another way of laying the beast low? If he was a Thief of Always, as Hood had said, perhaps it was time to prove it. Not with dust, nor with stolen conjurings, but with the power in his own bones.

Carna took a threatening step toward him, but instead of retreating Harvey extended his hand in the creature's direction, as if to pat its decaying head. It hesitated, its expression mellowing into doubt.

"Devour him..." the Vampire King growled.

The beast lowered its head, in expectation of punishment from above. But it was Harvey who laid his hand upon it; a gentle touch that sent a shudder through its body. It raised its snout to press itself against Harvey's palm, and as it did so, let out a long, low moan.

There was neither pain in the sound nor complaint. In fact it was almost a moan of gratitude, that for once it not be met with blows or with howls of horror. It turned its eyes up to Harvey's face, and a shudder of pleasure passed through its body. It seemed to know that the motion would prove fatal, because the instant after, it retreated from its comforter and as it did so its shudders multiplied, and its body suddenly flew into a thousand pieces.

Its teeth, which had seemed so fearsome moments before, rolled away into the darkness; its massive skull shattered; its spine collapsed. In a matter of seconds it was no more than a heap of bone shards, so dry and so aged even the most desperate dog would have passed them by.

Harvey glanced up at the face in the roof. Hood's expression was one of utter perplexity. His mouth was agape, his eyes staring from their pits.

Harvey didn't wait for him to break his silence. He simply turned his back on Carna's remains and hurried toward the trapdoor, half expecting the creature in the roof to slam it shut. There was no response from Hood, however, until Harvey was lowering himself down onto the chair on the landing. Only then, as Harvey took one last look up at the attic, did Hood speak.

"Oh my little thief..." he murmured. "What shall me do with you now?"