Authors: Peter Straub
34
Rubbing his eyes, he came up into the dark living room. The sparrow weighed like a heavy suitcase in his right hand. Rose glimmered before him in the green dress: he realized that she had come barefoot all the way from the house. 'You must want to lie down too,' he said. 'Aren't there beds here? I just have to . . . I could take a nap.' His eyes were burning.
'Whose bed do you want,' Rose said. 'Thorn's or Snail's?'
'Oh, my God.' He could not sleep in those beds. 'But why the beach?'
She put her arm around him. 'It's so close, darling Tom. Just a few steps more.'
She took him out of the room and onto the porch. The moon made all bright with a magical silvery light which transformed all it touched. The world was a place of wonders. The edge of the sky before them burned a faint orange-red.
'I like that little beach,' Tom said. 'I used to look for you there sometimes. The week before I got sick.'
'I was always looking for you,' Rose told him. 'I was looking for you long before you came here.'
'Come back to Arizona with me. Could you do that, Rose?' She was leading him down the steps. The grass was that leaning ocean, breathed upon by moonlight, he had seen once before. 'Del wanted that. He said it to me. once. We could find you somewhere to live. I guess we could.'
'Of course we could,' she said.
'We could get married when I'm eighteen. I'll work. I could always work, Rose.'
'Of course you could,' she said.
They were walking down the overgrown roadway. Eachleaf on the trees about him shone with silvery light. The trunks were made of silver and pitchy onyx. 'So you'll marry me?' he said.
'In eternity we are married.'
'In eternity we're married now,' Tom said! That seemed overwhelmingly delightful and overwhelmingly true. 'It's just a little way now, isn't it?'
'Just a little way.'
They came through delicate brush onto the beach, also silvered by kindly moonlight. Across the water Shadowland gouted flame. The smoke pouring from the burning roof was darker than the sky. They stood on the sand a moment, watching it engulf itself. Tom saw flames moving behind the upper windows where Collins' temptations had been arrayed before him. 'The funny thing is, he was great,' Tom said. 'He was just what he said he was.'
'Lie down,' Rose said. 'I don't want to look at that anymore. You need to sleep.' She stretched out on the pewter sand. 'Please lie down next to me.'
'Hey . . . how do we get out? The wall. . . the barbed wire . . . we'll have to go back — '
'No, you won't. Follow a path behind the summer house. It leads to a wooden gate.'
'Clever Rose.' He lay down beside her on the sand, put the book beside him, and set the glass bird on top of it. Then he turned to Rose and took the perfect girl, the magic that seemed no magic but earthly bounty, in his arms.
35
They did not make love. Tom was content to hold her, to feel the petal skin of her shoulders, the curve of her skull beneath his hands. He could have sung like Del, in his friend's last moments, of the perfection of such things. Radiant moonlight, warm sand along his side, Rose's quiet breathing swinging him toward sleep.
In eternity they were married.
'Rose?' he muttered, and she made an interrogatorymmm?'He told me a story — he told a story he said was about you.'
'Shhh,' she breathed, and put her fingers on his mouth, and he swung all the way into oblivion.
36
Did she say anything before she left? We do not know. She would have spoken to him, I think, whispered a message into his sleeper's ear, but that message would have joined his bloodstream like Del's final song and would have been impossible to reconstruct into ordinary flawed human speech. And again like Del's song, which was an expression of completion and the end of change, it would have spoken of, would have hymned a further and necessary and unforeseen transformation: it is like saying that the message would have been the heartbeat of magic. In his sleep, he heard her go; and heard the rippling of the water.
When he awakened it was to warm cloudless day, the sun already high. He saw that she was gone, and called her name. He called it again.
Across the lake Shadowland, a smoking hole hi the landscape, fumed like an old pipe.
'Rose?' he called again, and finally looked at his watch. It was eleven in the morning. 'Rose! Come back!' He stood up, looked into the trees and did not see her, and for a moment was sick with the thought that she had returned to the house.
But that could not be: the house no longer existed. Rubble would have fallen into the entrance of the tunnel and blocked it off for good. A few boards jutted up, one chimney stood in a blackened column. Everything else was gone. Rose was freed from that.
As was he. For the first tune he looked at his hands in daylight and saw the round pads of scar tissue.
He sat down to wait for her. Even then, he knew that if he waited until his beard grew to his waist and mendanced on the moon and stars, she would never come back. He waited anyhow. He could not leave.
Tom waited for her all day. The minutes crawled — he was back, in common time, and no one could fold the hours together like a pack of cards. He watched the lake change color as the sun crossed, changing from deep blue to paler blue to light green and back to blue. In the late afternoon he gently moved the glass sparrow onto the sand and opened the leather-bound book. He read the first words:
These are the secret teachings of Jesus the son of God, as told by him to his twin, Judas Thomas.
He closed the book. He remembered what Rose had said to his frantic speculation that they might have to go back through the destroyed house.
No you won't.
Not: no we won't. She would not go down the path to the gate with him: she would not trek into the village, holding his hand, or stand at his side while they waited for a train.
Tom waited until the brightness drained from the air. Shadowland still smoldered, and a few sparks drifted down the bluff, falling toward a thin layer of ash the rain would take in the fall. When the falling sparks glowed like tiger's eyes, he stood up.
He walked toward the water, carrying the glass sparrow and the book. He went to his knees on the damp sand just before the edge of the water. He set down the sparrow and looked at it. At its center hung a deep blue light. He wanted to say something profound, but profundity was beyond him: he wanted to say something emotional, but the emotion itself held his tongue in a vise. 'Here you go,' was what came out of him. He gave the sparrow a push into the water. It glided an inch or so along the bottom, then a ripple passed over it on the surface of the lake and the sparrow seemed to move against the motion of the ripple, going deeper into the lake. The blue in the glass was identical to the blue of the water. Another unseen ripple took it with it, and the sparrow went — flew — so far ahead under the water he could not see it.
Tom stood up, pushed the book into his belt, and walked back across the beach. Soon he was parting the delicate brush.
The End of the Century
is in Sight
The end of the century is in sightand Tom Flanagan's story was about events more than twenty years back in time. I listened to it here and there about the world, and wondered what sort of story it was and how much of it was invention. I also constantly wondered about what Tom had been reading. His imagination had surely concocted those radical illusions — the speeding of time, the transformations and the sudden dislocations of space, also the people with animal faces, which were straight from the works of symbolist painters like Puvis de Chavannes — and I thought that he had been steeping himself in lurid and fantastic novels. He had wanted to give me good value.
The idea that Laker Broome had been a minor devil was a ripe example of this. It was true that I, like all the new boys, had assumed he had been at Carson for years. Yet Broome had been the Carson headmaster for ourfreshman year only — when we returned in September a capable man named Philip Hagen had his job, and we assumed that Broome's breakdown and his conduct during the fire had blessedly got him out of the way.
1wrote to the Association of Secondary School Headmasters, and found that they had no information about Laker Broome. He was not in their files. One night, still trying to find what had become him, I called up Fitz-Hallan and asked him if he remembered what had happened to Broome. Fitz-Hallan thought he had managed to get a post at . . . He named a school as obscure as Carson. When I wrote to the school, I got back a letter saying that they had had the same headmaster from 1955 to 1970, and that no one named Laker Broome had ever been on their staff. However, a penciled note at the bottom said that a Carl Broome had come to them in 1959 as a Latin teacher and had stayed only one year; might I have the wrong name? Why was Carl Broome released after a year? I wrote back on a long shot, but was informed that such matters 'are a part of the confidence which any school of repute must retain with respect to former employees.' This was very fishy — didn't they give recommendations? — but it was clear that they did not wish to tell me what I wanted to know; and anyhow, I was fairly certain that Laker was not Carl Broome, so there was no point in continuing. Lake the Snake had lost his job and disappeared. That was all I knew about him.
Tom's story had abandoned Steven Ridpath as he (presumably) crept out the front door and wriggled through the bars of the gate, and I imagined that a conversation with Ridpath would immediately tell me how much of Tom's story had been fiction. Here I had much more luck than with Laker Broome. Skeleton had gone to Clemson, and universities keep wonderful records. The Alumni Office told me that one Ridpath, Steven, had graduated near the bottom of his class in 1963. From there he had gone to a theological college in Kentucky.