Absorbed in her quest, she did not hear the quiet footfalls behind her. She did not feel the dark eyes watching her. It was not until his hand reached around hers to lightly touch the number three that she realized he was there. With a gasp, she turned to face his wrath, and found him looking down at her. He said just one word. “Why?”
“I’m sorry,” she began, breathlessly. “I had to see it one last time. The door, I mean. I know you don’t like it. I’m sorry. It seems like magic to me—and you made it—and—I’ll go now. I won’t come again.” Hurriedly she gathered up her skirts, not daring to look at him.
“Wait,” he said in a low voice, his dark eyes shielded. “You were trying to find the latch, weren’t you?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “It seemed to me that the door would lead me into an enchanted world. I wanted to go there. I wanted to be safe.”
His lips twisted into a smile. “I don’t think you would find it safe. And it’s not exactly an enchanted world. However, I have given you your wish—I’ve opened the door. You will be my first visitor. May you find more pleasure there than I.” He extended his hand, and Holly felt the now-familiar current pass between their palms. Quickly he let go of her hand and pushed against the door. The face of time split in half, and Holly stepped through.
Holly touched the gleaming wood, tracing the carvings with her fingers.
Bursts of colored light met her eyes as she crossed the threshold. She drew in her breath sharply, for what she saw exceeded her wildest imaginings. The chamber was a carnival of light and movement, a whirling universe of toys that spun and danced across the floor, walls, and ceiling. Defying gravity and the known laws of physics were brilliantly painted galaxies and solar systems that revolved seemingly of their own accord. Winged chariots and tiny, wiggly creatures dove and plummeted among them, buzzing and whirring excitedly. A battalion of metallic beasts alternately flashed and honked across the floor. Lights twinkled and blazed from small boxes that spoke and sang in mechanical voices. Buttons gleamed upon bigger boxes that displayed moving images. Over and above the cheerful cacophony were fur-covered animals that marched, stood on their heads, and mooed, growled, or roared. Musical instruments played themselves, metal birds flew through the air, and above it all, a thousand electric stars shone radiantly.
Holly was amazed. It was all so bright and wild and—impossible. “But this is magic! How did you—? How could you—?” She did not even know where to begin.
He looked around him without much enthusiasm. “I’m an inventor.” He shrugged. “I made them.”
“But it’s a whole world! Look at your stars! Look at all the lights—and how on Earth does that box talk?” she said, pointing.
“I could explain it if you had a year to listen. Would you be satisfied if I said they are the toys of the next century? These are the things that children will be playing with fifty years from now.” He picked up a silver automaton that blazed blue light and then tossed it to the ground. “If they still play at all.”
Holly stared at him. “Aren’t you proud of it?” she asked tentatively. “You’ve invented all these marvelous, exciting toys, and yet, you seem—”
He looked into her eyes. “How do I seem? Rude? Impossible? Mad? All three have been suggested.”
The weight of his gaze was almost unbearable, but Holly returned it as steadily as she could. “You seem to be in despair,” she said finally.
Something melted in his face. He drew a long breath, never taking his eyes from her. “Who are you?” he asked incredulously, and then answered himself immediately, “No—don’t answer—I don’t want to hear that you’re from Maine or whatever it was that you told Isaac. Just be what you are”—he looked apprehensive—“as long as you are real.”
“Would you be satisfied if I said they are the toys of the next century?”
“I’m real,” Holly said.
His eyes clung to hers. “How is it, then, how is it that you know me so well? But no—I’m afraid that if I try to find out, you’ll leave. I don’t know how to keep you here, and I want you to stay. No one sees. No one knows. But you stand in the middle of my secret prison and read my mind. For this is a prison, and the worst of it is that I made it myself.” The words tumbled forth awkwardly and Holly felt certain that he had not spoken so much in years. “Perhaps you know that already? You don’t have to answer! Just come—come here, and I will show you the thing that has made me what I am.” Pressing a single knob on the wall, he silenced the whizzing toys and led her to a simple black box that rested on a large table. It was approximately the size of a suitcase and, aside from a door on one side, it was plain and bare.
“What is it?” asked Holly curiously.
He looked at the box with loathing. “It doesn’t have a name. It’s a monster. I made it years ago, using Mr. Edison’s telegraphic tubes and an incandescent screen. I thought I was creating a means of transferring photographic images over the telegraph, but what I got was something altogether different.” He fell silent.
Holly waited.
“Altogether different,” he repeated. “It doesn’t show photographs that record past events. It shows the future. It tortures me.” Holly glanced at him quickly “Oh yes, you’re quite right to think I’ve lost my mind. Even I thought I had lost my mind. And I may lose it yet. Because I can’t really explain how it works, though I have some ideas. And I don’t know if I can make another because I won’t. But one thing I do know is that what I see when I look inside is the world to come—that much I know because I have seen things come to pass—material things, events, even individual stories have played before my eyes and then happened in the real world.” He smiled. “Isn’t it funny? I still call this world the real one.”
Holly leaned toward the box, thinking of her telescope. “Do you control it? I mean, can you make it show you a certain date or place?”
He almost laughed. “What an extraordinary person you are! You don’t question my sanity at all! You simply ask, quite intelligently, whether I can direct it.” His face grew serious again. “But no, I cannot. I don’t know what year I’m looking at. Sometimes, from the dress and look of the people, I seem to be near our own time. Sometimes, it is altogether different than today.” He shivered slightly. “It gets worse and worse.”
“What do you mean?”
“That’s the torture, don’t you see? What’s going to happen is the abyss. I see people stumbling about mindlessly, their faces petrified in horror, both hopeless and terrified. I see the world without love or charity, people striving only to force one another into submission.” He paused, unable to meet her eyes. “The children, Miss Claus—the children are destroyed. They learn violence and teach it; there is no hope, or joy, or play, or laughter. They are stupefied with medicines or brutalized by harshness. The world that we know is gone. The dreams are gone. And I can only watch.”
“Let me see it,” said Holly.
“Miss Claus, I don’t think you could bear it.”
Her eyes darkened. “It’s amazing what you can bear,” she said. “Let me see.”
He looked at her gravely, and then opened the door of the box and drew up a chair. Holly sat. Inside the dark cube was a sheet of glass, and upon this sheet a series of moving pictures jerked along. As she became accustomed to the darkness, Holly made out a shadowy street thronged with people and lined with buildings whose tops scraped the sky and blocked out the sunlight. The pedestrians stumbled along with uniform movements, their shoulders hunched. They slung themselves forward, each foot placed on the spot that the foot ahead had vacated. They watched the ground, except for some of the children, who looked fearfully to the dripping white sky. A boy darted ahead to pull something from the sludge at the end of the street. As he knelt, one of the bypassers kicked at him; he fell and lay where he had fallen. Figures trudged by him.
“You see their faces? Blank—blank and empty. Like doll faces.”
“That’s why you hate dolls,” Holly murmured.
>
“I used to like them, but now they remind me of this.”
Holly turned back to the black box. In a way, she thought, it’s like a dark version of my telescope at home. It shows only the vicious things, the evil things, instead of the good things I witnessed. It has broken his heart. He cannot bear to think that it will all come to this. But will it? Something in her resisted the pictures she saw. She thought of her telescopic vision of the Empire City—how beautiful it had looked. The people smiled and the city gleamed with benevolence and prosperity. But the truth was otherwise. She remembered the children in the park, half-frozen and hungry, Jeremy’s tears in the carriage, and the pink-faced young man who had nearly whipped Bat. Those were truths her spyglass had never told. She glanced at the screen again—and she thought, This is not the truth. Or at least, not the whole truth. Like an echo, she heard Sofya’s wise voice in her ears. “There is not one certain future, that much I know. Each of our lives creates what is to come …” Holly lifted her eyes from the black box. It had been up in the turret, that day that she had learned of the curse, the day that Sofya told her that she would learn what she must do to become an immortal. “Every time you make a choice, you make the future,” she had said.
Holly looked up at Mr. Carroll with shining eyes. “No.”
“No? No what?” he asked.
“This isn’t the future. At least, it isn’t the only future, because there isn’t only one. A great and powerful woman once told me that the future doesn’t move in one single direction; instead it’s a maze, a puzzle that changes and grows each time one of the players chooses one path over another. Don’t you see? This thing”—she waved at the box—“shows you what might happen. But it’s a warning. It’s meant to teach you how to live so that this will not be the future. You see?” She looked searchingly at him. “You were able to make this machine because you have the power to make the future different. Every time you make a choice, you make the future.”
He looked skeptical. “How do you know you’re right?”
She thought and then said slowly, “I don’t know I’m right. We can’t ever know, but why would the elders give us souls if we had no power to use them? Listen, I grew up, far away, among people who had done good in the world. Each of them had the power to change the course of the future, sometimes just a little, sometimes a great deal. And they did. Each of them made the world different; each created a new world. The future changes all the time—I know it does, even if I can’t explain it!” Her mouth trembled. She wanted so much for him to believe her. His face remained closed as he listened, but she saw the trouble in his eyes lighten.
“On the contrary,” he said haltingly. “You explain it very well. I could almost believe you. I have lived so many years without hoping for anything except a way out of the world. But perhaps you are right—” He broke off. “If I could only be certain that what you say is true.”
“What else is faith for?” asked Holly.
His face softened further. “Yes. What else is faith for? Why should I have faith in you? You come from—from—Where is this place you come from?”
“Don’t ask me, for I can’t tell you. It’s not Maine.”
“All right,” he said, almost cheerfully. “You come from a mysterious place and you turn my misery upside down. Why should I believe in you?”
Holly said gently, “Because it lessens your despair. Because what I say makes sense to your heart.”
“When you say it, it does,” he murmured. “Don’t leave,” he said abruptly.
“How did you know?” said Holly, flustered. And then, “I must.”
“I heard you telling that vile man,” he said savagely. “Why did you go to the opera with him, anyway? He’s a scoundrel.”
Holly looked at him demurely. “He asked me.”
Mr. Carroll burst out laughing. “I should have asked you, shouldn’t I?”
“Since you were going anyway,” said Holly with a small smile.
“Did you see me? I looked for you everywhere.”
“But you left before the end.”
“Couldn’t bear it.”
Holly smiled luminously at him. He smiled back.
“Don’t leave,” he said softly, holding out his hand. She placed her palm in his, and they stared silently at their joined hands. “Strange,” he murmured. He bent his head down to hers. “Why did you say that this afternoon?”
“What did I say?” she asked, knowing what he meant.
“You said, ‘Why do you keep coming back?’ What did you mean by that?”
“I feel—as though I know you,” Holly said.
His lips were near her ear as he whispered, “I think you must.”
I don’t want to leave you, she thought. But what she said was, “Show me more of your toys.” Far away, in another world, the clock chimed two.
Mr. Carroll seemed to be shedding years with each passing minute. He smiled and said, “Do you want to see the ones I like the best? They’re much better than this silly stuff.” He kicked a flying machine.
“Yes, please.”
He approached a large cabinet and unlocked its door. “When I was a boy, I made my own toys, carvings mostly. Partly it was because my mother didn’t have money to spend on such things, but also because I loved to do it. The Christmas that I was ten, I made animals. The idea was that they would be our Christmas decorations, but there was something special about them. That was the Christmas after my father died, and—” He stopped and turned to look at Holly. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this. Here they are.” Tenderly, he placed four small wooden figures into her hands: a wolf, a fox, an owl, and a penguin. “Look, that one is rather like yours. That beast you call a dog.”
Holly stared in disbelief. It was Tundra, down to his tail. Lexy, with her sharply pointed face. Euphemia, looking as though she had lost something. And Empy, his eyes wide and adoring. Each well-loved little animal was a perfect replica of its subject. Holly held her breath.
“There was another wolf,” Carroll was saying. “But I lost her one day, not too long after I made her.” He frowned.
Tenderly, he placed four small wooden figures into her hands.
“What’s your name?” asked Holly urgently.
“Pardon me?”
“Your name, your given name?”
“Christopher. Christopher Winter Carroll. Why?” He smiled indulgently at her stunned face.
“How old are you?”
“You’re full of impertinent questions, miss. Twenty-eight. Almost twenty-nine.”
Holly’s voice dropped to almost a whisper. “Was there anything else about that Christmas? The year you were ten? Did you write a letter to Santa Claus?”
An odd look came over Mr. Carroll’s face. “Yes. My first. I didn’t know how to do it, and in any case I didn’t want anything. So I asked Santa Claus what he wished for Christmas.” His laugh was slightly forced. “He wrote me back, too. I remember.”
“He did?” Holly said breathlessly.
“Well, I’m sure it was my mother, really. The letter said that I had given him a gift he would treasure for eternity. And at the bottom of the letter, he wrote ‘Love Conquers Time.’ I remember thinking about that for—so long.” He looked at Holly intently. “My dear mother died soon after that, you see, and I used to wish that love could really stop time, and she would come back to me. I was only a boy,” he added to excuse himself.
“Do you still have it?”
“What—the letter?” Embarrassment tinged his voice. “Yes.”
“May I see it?”
He looked at her quizzically. “I suppose so.” He reached into a small compartment within the cabinet and pulled forth a gold watch and a faded letter.
Time collapsed. The handwriting on the worn envelope was her father’s. Holly could hear Nicholas’s rich voice unfurling the old tale: “There was a boy. A boy named Christopher, who lived in the Empire City and sent me a letter. In that letter he asked me a question t
hat I had never been asked before. He asked me if there was anything I wished for, anything I wanted and did not have. And do you know what I wished for? I wished for you, Holly I wished for you.”
“Are you all right? You look awfully pale.”
“I’m all right,” Holly said unsteadily. She gazed up into his gray eyes, her certainty growing with each moment. Her heart was pounding. That’s why she had seemed to know him. That’s why she had longed to see him. He was her beginning and he would be her eternity.
“Holly, come back.” He put his hands on her shoulders, a little anxiously.
She lifted her head and smiled radiantly. “I’m here.”
“Do you want to sit down? I have a chaise over here.” He gestured to a long chair covered in boxes and books. “It’s very comfortable. Or, well, it will be in just a minute.” Hastily he swept the assemblage to the floor. “Please, sit. You must be dreadfully tired. Don’t faint.”
A wave of exhaustion swept over Holly. The chair looked temptingly soft and comfortable. It will just be a minute. I’ll just sit down for a minute. “Thank you. I’ll rest for a moment and then go.”
With a sigh, she settled into the cool silk arms of the sofa. “Would you mind terribly opening a window?” she asked.
“Fresh air? Good idea.” He strode to the window and opened it, and a blast of icy wind entered. “Is that better?”
The Legend of Holly Claus Page 26
