Little, Big (75 page)

"Sylvie," Auberon said.

"A guide," George said, snapping his fingers.

There were footsteps in the hall.

"A guide," George said. "She said we'd need a guide."

They both turned to look at the door, which just then opened.

Fred Savage came in, wearing
his
rubber boots, and ready for his breakfast.

"Guide?" he said. "Somebody goan someplace?"

"Is it her?" Sophie asked. She pushed aside the window's drape further to look.

"It must be," Alice said.

Not often enough now did headlights turn in at the stone gateposts for it to be very likely anyone else. The long, low car, black in the twilight, swept the house with its brilliant eyes as it bounced up the rutty drive; it pulled around in front of the porch, its lights went out but its impatient burble went on for a while. Then it fell silent.

"George?" Sophie asked. "Auberon?"

"I don't see them. No one but her."

"Oh dear."

"All right," Alice said. "Her at least." They turned away from the window to the expectant faces of those gathered in the double drawing room. "She's here," Alice said. "We'll start soon."

Ariel Hawksquill, after stilling the car's motor, sat for a moment listening to the new silence. Then she worked her way out of the seat's grasp. She took from the seat next to her an alligator shoulder bag, and stood in the slight drizzle that was falling; she breathed deeply of the evening air, and thought: Spring.

For the second time she had driven north to Edgewood, this time over the ruts and potholes of a degenerated road system, and passing this time checkpoints where passes and visas had to be shown, a thing that would have been unthinkable five years before when she had come here. She supposed that she had been followed, at least part way, but no tail could have kept up with her through the tangle of rainy roads that led from the highway to here. She came alone. The letter from Sophie had been odd but urgent: urgent enough, she hoped, to justify sending it (Hawksquill had insisted her cousins never write to her at the Capital, she knew her mail was scanned) and to justify a journey and a long absence from the Government at a critical time.

"Hello, Sophie," she said, when the two tall sisters came out on the porch. There was no welcoming light lit there. "Hello, Alice."

"Hello," Alice said. "Where's Auberon? Where's George? We asked . . ."

Hawksquill mounted the steps. "I went to the address," she said, "and knocked a long time. The place looked abandoned . . ."

"It always does," Sophie said.

". . . and no one answered. I thought I heard someone behind the door; I called their names. Someone, someone with an accent, called back that they had gone."

"Gone?" Sophie said.

"Gone away. I asked where, for how long; but no one answered. I didn't dare stay too long."

"Didn't dare?" Alice said.

"May we go in?" Hawksquill said. "It's a lovely night, but damp." Her cousins didn't know, and, Hawksquill supposed, couldn't really imagine the danger they might put themselves in by association with her. Deep desires reached out toward this house, not knowing of its existence, yet sniffing closer all the time. But there was no need (she hoped) to alarm them.

There was no light in the hall but a dull candle, making the place shadowy and vast; Hawksquill followed her cousins down, around, up through the impossible insides of the house into a set of two big rooms where a fire burned, lights were lit, and many faces looked up interested and expectant at her arrival.

"This is our cousin," Daily Alice said to them. "Long-lost, sort of, her name is Ariel. This is the family," she said to Ariel, "you know them; and some others.

"So, I guess everybody's here," she said. "Everybody who can come. I'll go get Smoky."

Sophie went to a drum-table where a brass, green-glassshaded lamp shone, and where the cards lay. Ariel Hawksquill felt her heart rise or sink to see them. Whatever other fates they held or did not hold, Hawksquill knew at that moment that hers was surely in them: was them.

"Hello," she said, nodding briefly to the assembly. She took a straight-backed chair between a very, a remarkably old and bright-eyed lady and two twin children, boy and girl, who shared an armchair.

"And how," said Marge Juniper to her, "do you come to be a cousin?"

"As nearly as I can tell," Hawksquill said, "I'm not, really. The father of the Auberon who was Violet Drinkwater's son was my grandfather by a later marriage."

"Oh," Marge said. "That side of the family."

Hawksquill felt eyes on her, and gave a quick glance and a smile at the two children in the armchair, who were staring at her with uncertain curiosity. Rarely see strangers, Hawksquill supposed; but what Bud and Blossom were seeing, in the flesh, with wonder and a little trepidation, was that enigmatic and somewhat fearsome figure who in a song they often sang comes at the crux of the story: the Lady with the Alligator Purse.

Alice climbed quickly up through the house, negotiating dark stairways with the skill of a blind man.

"Smoky?" she called when she stood at the bottom of a narrow curl of steep stairs that led up into the orrery. No one answered, but a light burned up there.

"Smoky?"

She didn't like to go up; the small stairs, the small arched door, the cramped cold cupola stuffed with machinery, gave her the willies, it wasn't designed to amuse someone as big as she was.

"Everyone's here," she said. "We can start."

She waited, hugging herself. The damp was palpable on this neglected floor; and brown stains spread over the wallpaper. Smoky said, "All right," but she heard no movement.

"George and Auberon didn't come," she said. "They're gone." She waited more, and then—hearing neither noise of work nor preparations to come down—climbed up the stairs and put her head through the little door.

Smoky sat on a small stool, like a petitioner or penitent before his idol, staring at the mechanism inside the black steel case. Alice felt somewhat shy, or intrusive into a privacy, seeing him there and it exposed.

"Okay," Smoky said again, but when he rose, it was only to take a steel ball the size of a croquet ball from a rack of them in the back of the case. This he placed in the cup or hand of one of the extended jointed arms of the wheel which the case contained and sheltered. He let go, and the weight of the ball spun the arm downward. As it moved, the other jointed arms moved too; another, clack-clack-clack, extended itself to receive the next ball.

"See how it works?" Smoky said, sadly.

"No," Alice said.

"An overbalancing wheel," Smoky said. "These jointed arms, see, are held out stiff on this side, because of the joints; but when they come around to this side, the joints fold up, and the arm lies along the wheel. So. This side of the wheel, where the arms stick out, will always be heavier, and will always fall down, that is, around; so when you put the ball in the cup, the wheel falls around, and that brings the next arm into place. And a ball falls into the cup of
that
arm, and bears it down and around, and so on."

"Oh." He was telling all this flatly, like an old, old story or a grammar lesson too often repeated. It occurred to Alice that he'd eaten no dinner.

"Then," he went on, "the weight of the balls falling into the cups of the arms on
this
side carries the arms far enough up on
this
side so that they fold up, and the cup tips, and the ball rolls out"—he turned the wheel by hand to demonstrate—"and goes back into the rack, and rolls down and falls into the cup of the arm that just extended itself over on
this
side, and that carries that arm around, and so it goes on endlessly." The slack arm did deposit its ball; the ball did roll into the arm that extended itself, clack-clack-clack, out from the wheel. The arm was borne down to the bottom of the wheel's cycle. Then it stopped.

"Amazing," Alice said mildly.

Smoky, hands behind his back, looked glumly at the unmoving wheel. "It's the stupidest thing I've ever seen in my life," he said.

"Oh."

"This guy Cloud must have been just about the stupidest inventor or genius who ever . . ." He could think of no conclusion, and bowed his head. "It never worked, Alice; this thing couldn't turn anything. It's not going to work."

She moved carefully among the tools and oily disassembled works and took his arm. "Smoky," she said. "Everybody's downstairs. Ariel Hawksquill came."

He looked at her, and laughed, a frustrated laugh at a defeat absurdly complete; then he grimaced, and put his hand quickly to his chest.

"Oh," Alice said. "You should have eaten."

"It's better when I don't," Smoky said. "I think."

"Come on," Alice said. "You'll figure this out, I bet. Maybe you can ask Ariel." She kissed his brow, and went before him out the arched door and then down the steps, feeling released.

"Alice," Smoky said to her. "Is this it? Tonight, I mean. Is this it?"

"Is this what?"

"It is, isn't it?" he said.

She said nothing while they went along the hall and down the stairs toward the second floor. She held Smoky's arm, and thought of more than one thing to say; but at last (there wasn't any point any longer in riddling, she knew too much, and so did he) she only said. "I guess. Close."

Smoky's hand, pressed to his chest beneath his breastbone, began to tingle, and he said "Oh-oh," and stopped.

They were at the top of the stairs. Faintly, below, he could see the drawing-room lights, and hear voices. Then the voices went out in a hum of silence.

Close. If it were close, then he had lost; for he was far behind, he had work to do he could not even conceive of, much less begin. He had lost.

An enormous hollow seemed to open up in his chest, a hollow larger than himself. Pain gathered on its perimeter, and Smoky knew that after a moment, an endless moment, the pain would rush in and fill the hollow: but for that moment there was nothing, nothing but a terrible premonition, and an incipient revelation, both vacant, contesting in his empty heart. The premonition was black, and the incipient revelation would be white. He stopped stock still, trying not to panic because he couldn't breathe; there was no air within the hollow for him to breathe; he could only experience the battle between Premonition and Revelation and listen to the long loud hum in his ears that seemed to be a voice saying Now you see, you didn't ask to see and this is not the moment in which you would anyway have expected sight to come, here on this stair in this dark, but Now: and even then it was gone. His heart, with two slow awful thuds like blows, began to pound fiercely and steadily as though in rage, and pain, familiar and releasing, filled him up. The contest was over. He could breathe the pain. In a moment, he would breathe air.

"Oh," he heard Alice saying, "oh, oh, a bad one"; he saw her pressing her own bosom in sympathy, and felt her grip on his left arm.

"Yeah, wow," he said, finding voice. "Oh, boy."

"Gone?"

"Almost." Pain ran down the left arm she held, diminishing to a thread which continued down into his ring finger, on which there was no ring, but from which, it felt, a ring was being torn, pulled off, a ring worn so long that it couldn't be removed without severing nerve and tendon. "Quit it, quit it," he said, and it did quit, or diminish further anyway.

Okay, he said. Okay.

"Oh, Smoky," Alice said. "Okay?"

"Gone," he said. He took steps downward toward the lights of the drawing-room. Alice held him, supported him, but he wasn't weak; he wasn't even ill, Dr. Fish and Doc Drinkwater's old medical books agreed that what he suffered from wasn't a disease but a condition, compatible with long life, even with otherwise good health.

A condition, something to live with. Then why should it appear to be revelation, revelation that never quite came, and couldn't be remembered afterwards? "Yes," old Fish had said, "premonition of death, that's a common feeling with angina, nothing to worry about." But was it of death? Would that be what the revelation was, when it came, if it came?

"It hurt," Alice said.

"Well," Smoky said, laughing or panting, "I think I would have preferred it not to happen, yes."

"Maybe that's the last," Alice said. She seemed to think of his attacks on the model of sneezes, one big last one might clear the system.

"Oh, I bet not," Smoky said mildly. "I don't think we want the last one. No."

They went down the stairs, holding each other, and then into the drawing room where the others waited.

"Here we are," said Alice. "Here's Smoky."

"Hi, hi," he said. Sophie looked up from her table, and his daughters from their knitting, and he saw his pain reflected in their faces. His finger still tingled, but he was whole; his long-worn ring was for a time yet unstolen.

A condition: but like revelation. And did theirs, he wondered for the first time, hurt like his did?

"All right," Sophie said. "We'll start." She looked around at the circle of faces which looked at her, Drinkwaters and Barnables, Birds, Flowers, Stones, and Weeds, her cousins, neighbors and relatives. The brightness of the brass lamp on the table made the rest of the room obscure to her, as though she sat by a campfire looking at the faces of animals in the surrounding dark, whom by her words she must charm into consciousness, and into purpose.

"Well," she said. "I had a visitor."

But how could you have expected

to travel that path in thought alone;

how expect to measure the moon by

the fish? No, my neighbors, never think

that path is a short one; you must

have lions' hearts to go by that way, it

is not short and its seas are deep;

you will walk it long in wonder. some-

times smiling, sometimes weeping.

—Attar
, Parliament of the Birds

It had been easier than Sophie would have thought to assemble her relatives and neighbors here on this night, though it hadn't been easy to decide to assemble them, or to decide what to tell them: for an old, old silence was being broken, a silence so old that they at Edgewood did not even remember that it had been sworn to, a silence at the heart of many stories, broken into like a locked chest to which the key is lost. That had taken up the last months of winter: that, and getting the word out then to mudbound farms and isolated cottages, to the Capital and the City, and setting a date convenient to all.