by John Crowley
“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 no
t 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 un imagined.
“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 long 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 peacock-green 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 im
portant 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.
