LITMIR.BIZ

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you’d love him!

      Ann said nothing.

      Tom moved quietly closer to put his hand on her cheek.

      “I’ve got a job a hundred miles from here. Will you miss me?”

      “Yes,” said Ann and Cecy.

      “May I kiss you goodbye?”

      “Yes,” said Cecy before anyone else could speak.

      He placed his lips to the strange mouth. He kissed the strange mouth and he was trembling.

      Ann sat like a white statue.

      Ann! said Cecy. Move! Hold him!

      Ann sat like a carved doll in the moonlight.

      Again he kissed her lips.

      “I do love you,” whispered Cecy. “I’m here, it’s me you see in her eyes, and I love you if she never will.”

      He moved away and seemed like a man who had run a long distance. “I don’t know what’s happening. For a moment there …”

      “Yes?”

      “For a moment I thought—” He put his hands to his eyes. “Never mind. Shall I take you home now?”

      “Please,” said Ann Leary.

      Tiredly he drove the car away. They rode in the thrum and motion of the moonlit car in the still early, only eleven o’clock summer-autumn night, with the shining meadows and empty fields gliding by.

      And Cecy, looking at the fields and meadows, thought, It would be worth it, it would be worth everything to be with him from this night on. And she heard her parents’ voices again, faintly, “Be careful. You wouldn’t want to be diminished, would you—married to a mere earth-bound creature?”

      Yes, yes, thought Cecy, even that I’d give up, here and now, if he would have me. I wouldn’t need to roam the lost nights then, I wouldn’t need to live in birds and dogs and cats and foxes, I’d need only to be with him. Only him.

      The road passed under, whispering.

      “Tom,” said Ann at last.

      “What?” He stared coldly at the road, the trees, the sky, the stars.

      “If you’re ever, in years to come, at any time, in Green Town, Illinois, a few miles from here, will you do me a favor?”

      “What?”

      “Will you do me the favor of stopping and seeing a friend of mine?” Ann Leary said this haltingly, awkwardly.

      “Why?”

      “She’s a good friend. I’ve told her of you. I’ll give you her address.” When the car stopped at her farm she drew forth a pencil and paper from her small purse and wrote in the moonlight, pressing the paper to her knee. “Can you read it?”

      He glanced at the paper and nodded bewilderedly.

      He read the words.

      “Will you visit her someday?” Ann’s mouth moved.

      “Someday.”

      “Promise?”

      “What has this to do with us?” he cried savagely. “What do I want with names and papers?” He crumpled the paper into a tight ball.

      “Oh, please promise!” begged Cecy.

      “… promise …” said Ann.

      “All right, all right, now let be!” he shouted.

      I’m tired, thought Cecy. I can’t stay. I must go home. I can only travel a few hours each night, moving, flying. But before I go …

      “… before I go,” said Ann.

      She kissed Tom on the lips.

      “This is me kissing you,” said Cecy.

      Tom held her off and looked at Ann Leary and looked deep, deep inside. He said nothing, but his face began to relax slowly, very slowly, and the lines vanished away, and his mouth softened from its hardness, and he looked deep again into the moonlit face held here before him.

      Then he lifted her out and without so much as good night drove quickly down the road.

      Cecy let go.

      Ann Leary, crying out, released from prison, it seemed, raced up the moonlit path to her house and slammed the door.

      Cecy lingered for only a little while. In the eyes of a cricket she saw the warm night world. In the eyes of a frog she sat for a lonely moment by a pool. In the eyes of a night bird she looked down from a tall, moon-haunted elm and saw the lights go out in two farmhouses, one here, one a mile away. She thought of herself and her Family, and her strange power, and the fact that no one in the Family could ever marry any one of the people in this vast world out here beyond the hills.

      Tom? Her weakening mind flew in a night bird under the trees and over deep fields of wild mustard. Have you still got the paper, Tom? Will you come by someday, some year, sometime, to see me? Will you know me then? Will you look in my face and remember where it was you saw me last and know that you love me as I love you, with all my heart for all time?

      She paused in the cool night air, a million miles from towns and people, above farms and continents and rivers and hills. Tom? Softly.

      Tom was asleep. It was deep night; his suit was hung on a chair. And in one silent, carefully upflung hand upon the white pillow, by his head, was a small piece of paper with writing on it. Slowly, slowly, a fraction of an inch at a time, his fingers closed down upon and held it tightly. And he did not even stir or notice when a blackbird, faintly, wondrously, beat softly for a moment against the clear moon crystals of the windowpane, then, fluttering quietly, stopped and flew away toward the east, over the sleeping earth.

      CHAPTER 6

      Whence Timothy?

      “And me, Grandmère?” said Timothy. “Did I come in through the High Attic window?”

      “You did not come, child. You were found. Left at the door in a basket with Shakespeare for footprop and Poe’s Usher as pillow. With a note pinned to your blouse: HISTORIAN. You were sent, child, to write us up, list us in lists, register our flights from the sun, our love of the moon. But the House, in a way, did call and your small fists hungered to write.”

      “What, Grandmère, what?”

      The ancient mouth lisped and murmured and murmured and lisped …

      “To start with, the House itself …”

      CHAPTER 7

      The House, the Spider, and the Child

      The House was a puzzle inside an enigma inside a mystery, for it encompassed silences, each one different, and beds, each a different size, some having lids. Some ceilings were high enough to allow flights with rests where shadows might hang upside down. The dining room nested thirteen chairs, each numbered thirteen so no one would feel left out of the distinctions such numbers implied. The chandeliers above were shaped from the tears of souls in torment at sea five hundred years lost, and the basement cellar kept five hundred vintage-year bins and strange names on the wine tucked therein and empty cubbies for future visitors who disliked beds or the high ceiling perches.

      A network of webways was used by the one and only spider dropping down from above and up from below so the entire House was a sounding spinneret tapestry played on by the ferociously swift Arach, seen one moment by the wine bins and the next in a plummeting rush to the storm-haunted garret, swift and soundless, shuttling the webs, repairing the strands.

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