"What are you?" Jake whispered. "Who are you?" There was no answer, but he seemed to hear, beneath the choir, the sound of hoofbeats on the dusty earth, and gunfire, and angels calling hosannahs from the shadows. The faces in the wreckage seemed to turn as he passed. They seemed to follow his progress, but no evil intent did they bear. He could see Forty-sixth Street, and the edge of the U.N. Building on the other side of First Avenue, but the buildings did not matter--New York did not matter. It had become as pale as window-glass.
The humming grew. Now it was not a thousand voices but a million, an open funnel of voices rising from the deepest well of the universe. He caught names in that group voice, but could not have said what they were. One might have been Marten. One might have been Cuthbert. Another might have been Roland--Roland of Gilead.
There were names; there was a babble of conversation that might have been ten thousand entwined stories; but above all was that gorgeous, swelling hum, a vibration that wanted to fill his head with bright white light. It was, Jake realized with a joy so overwhelming that it threatened to burst him to pieces, the voice of Yes; the voice of White; the voice of Always. It was a great chorus of affirmation, and it sang in the empty lot. It sang for him.
Then, lying in a cluster of scrubby burdock plants, Jake saw the key . . . and beyond that, the rose.
17
HIS LEGS BETRAYED HIM and he fell to his knees. He was vaguely aware that he was weeping, even more vaguely aware that he had wet his pants a little. He crawled forward on his knees and reached toward the key lying in the snarl of burdocks. Its simple shape was one he seemed to have seen in his dreams:
He thought: The little s-shape at the end--that's the secret.
As he closed his hand around the key, the voices rose in a harmonic shout of triumph. Jake's own cry was lost in the voice of that choir. He saw the key flash white within his fingers, and felt a tremendous jolt of power run up his arm. It was as if he had grasped a live high-tension wire, but there was no pain.
He opened Charlie the Choo-Choo and put the key inside. Then his eyes fixed upon the rose again, and he realized that it was the real key--the key to everything. He crawled toward it, his face a flaming corona of light, his eyes blazing wells of blue fire.
The rose was growing from a clump of alien purple grass.
As Jake neared this clump of alien grass, the rose began to open before his eyes. It disclosed a dark scarlet furnace, petal upon secret petal, each burning with its own secret fury. He had never seen anything so intensely and utterly alive in his whole life.
And now, as he stretched one grimy hand out toward this wonder, the voices began to sing his own name . . . and deadly fear began to steal in toward the center of his heart. It was as cold as ice and as heavy as stone.
There was something wrong. He could feel a pulsing discord, like a deep and ugly scratch across some priceless work of art or a deadly fever smouldering beneath the chilly skin of an invalid's brow.
It was something like a worm. An invading worm. And a shape. One which lurks just beyond the next turn of the road.
Then the heart of the rose opened for him, exposing a yellow dazzle of light, and all thought was swept away on a wave of wonder. Jake thought for a moment that what he was seeing was only pollen which had been invested with the supernatural glow which lived at the heart of every object in this deserted clearing--he thought it even though he had never heard of pollen within a rose. He leaned closer and saw that the concentrated circle of blazing yellow was not pollen at all. It was a sun: a vast forge burning at the center of this rose growing in the purple grass.
The fear returned, only now it had become outright terror. It's right, he thought, everything here is right, but it could go wrong--has started going wrong already, I think. I'm being allowed to feel as much of that wrongness as I can bear . . . but what is it? And what can I do?
It was something like a worm.
He could feel it beating like a sick and dirty heart, warring with the serene beauty of the rose, screaming harsh profanities against the choir of voices which had so soothed and lifted him.
He leaned closer to the rose and saw that its core was not just one sun but many . . . perhaps all suns contained within a ferocious yet fragile shell.
But it's wrong. It's all in danger.
Knowing it would almost surely mean his death to touch that glowing microcosm but helpless to stop himself, Jake reached forward. There was no curiosity or terror in this gesture; only a great, inarticulate need to protect the rose.
18
WHEN HE CAME BACK to himself, he was at first only aware that a great deal of time had passed and his head hurt like hell.
What happened? Was I mugged?
He rolled over and sat up. Another blast of pain went through his head. He raised a hand to his left temple, and his fingers came away sticky with blood. He looked down and saw a brick poking out of the weeds. Its rounded corner was too red.
If it had been sharp, I'd probably be dead or in a coma.
He looked at his wrist and was surprised to find he was still wearing his watch. It was a Seiko, not terribly expensive, but in this city you didn't snooze in vacant lots without losing your stuff. Expensive or not, someone would be more than happy to relieve you of it. This time he had been lucky, it seemed.
It was quarter past four in the afternoon. He had been lying here, dead to the world, for at least five hours. His father probably had the cops out looking for him by now, but that didn't seem to matter much. It seemed to Jake that he had walked out of Piper School about a thousand years ago.
Jake walked half the distance to the fence between the vacant lot and the Second Avenue sidewalk, then stopped.
What exactly had happened to him?
Little by little, the memories came back. Hopping the fence. Slipping and twisting his ankle. He reached down, touched it, and winced. Yes--that much had happened, all right. Then what?
Something magical.
He groped for that something like an old man groping his way across a shadowy room. Everything had been full of its own light. Everything--even the empty wrappers and discarded beer-bottles. There had been voices--they had been singing and telling thousands of overlapping stories.
"And faces," he muttered. This memory made him look around apprehensively. He saw no faces. The piles of bricks were just piles of bricks, and the tangles of weeds were just tangles of weeds. There were no faces, but--
--but they were here. It wasn't your imagination.
He believed that. He couldn't capture the essence of the memory, its quality of beauty and transcendence, but it seemed perfectly real. It was just that his memory of those moments before he had passed out seemed like photographs taken on the best day of your life. You can remember what that day was like--sort of, anyway--but the pictures are flat and almost powerless.
Jake looked around the desolate lot, now filling up with the violet shadows of late afternoon, and thought: I want you back. God, I want you back the way you were.
Then he saw the rose, growing in its clump of purple grass, very close to the place where he had fallen. His heart leaped into his throat. Jake blundered back toward it, unmindful of the beats of pain each step sent up from his ankle. He dropped to his knees in front of it like a worshipper at an altar. He leaned forward, eyes wide.
It's just a rose. Just a rose after all. And the grass--
The grass wasn't purple after all, he saw. There were splatters of purple on the blades, yes, but the color beneath was a perfectly normal green. He looked a little further and saw splashes of blue on another clump of weeds. To his right, a straggling burdock bush bore traces of both red and yellow. And beyond the burdocks was a little pile of discarded paint-cans. Glidden Spread Satin, the labels said.
That's all it was. Just splatters of paint. Only with your head all messed up the way it was, you thought you were seeing--
That was bullshit.
He knew what he had seen then, and what he
was seeing now. "Camouflage," he whispered. "It was all right here. Everything was. And . . . it still is."
Now that his head was clearing, he could again feel the steady, harmonic power that this place held. The choir was still here, its voice just as musical, although now dim and distant. He looked at a pile of bricks and old broken chunks of plaster and saw a barely discernible face hiding within it. It was the face of a woman with a scar on her forehead.
"Allie?" Jake murmured. "Isn't your name Allie?"
There was no answer. The face was gone. He was only looking at an unlovely pile of bricks and plaster again.
He looked back at the rose. It was, he saw, not the dark red that lives at the heart of a blazing furnace, but a dusty, mottled pink. It was very beautiful, but not perfect. Some of the petals had curled back; the outer edges of these were brown and dead. It wasn't the sort of cultivated flower he had seen in florists' shops; he supposed it was a wild rose.
"You're very beautiful," he said, and once more stretched his hand out to touch it.
Although there was no breeze, the rose nodded toward him. For just a moment the pads of his fingers touched its surface, smooth and velvety and marvellously alive, and all around him the voice of the choir seemed to swell.
"Are you sick, rose?"
There was no answer, of course. When his fingers left the faded pink bowl of the flower, it nodded back to its original position, growing out of the paint-splattered weeds in its quiet, forgotten splendor.
Do roses bloom at this time of year? Jake wondered. Wild ones? Why would a wild rose grow in a vacant lot, anyway? And if there's one, how come there aren't more?
He remained on his hands and knees a little longer, then realized he could stay here looking at the rose for the rest of the afternoon (or maybe the rest of his life) and not come any closer to solving its mystery. He had seen it plain for a moment, as he had seen everything else in this forgotten, trash-littered corner of the city; he had seen it with its mask off and its camouflage tossed aside. He wanted to see that again, but wanting would not make it so.
It was time to go home.
He saw the two books he'd bought at The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind lying nearby. As he picked them up, a bright silver object slipped from the pages of Charlie the Choo-Choo and fell into a scruffy patch of weeds. Jake bent, favoring his hurt ankle, and picked it up. As he did so, the choir seemed to sigh and swell, then fell back to its almost inaudible hum.
"So that part was real, too," he murmured. He ran the ball of his thumb over the blunt protruding points of the key and into those primitive V-shaped notches. He sent it skating over the mild s-curves at the end of the third notch. Then he tucked it deep into the right front pocket of his pants and began to limp back toward the fence.
He had reached it and was preparing to scramble over the top when a terrible thought suddenly seized his mind.
The rose! What if somebody comes in here and picks it?
A little moan of horror escaped him. He turned back and after a moment his eyes picked it out, although it was deep in the shadow of a neighboring building now--a tiny pink shape in the dimness, vulnerable, beautiful, and alone.
I can't leave it--I have to guard it!
But a voice spoke up in his mind, a voice that was surely that of the man he had met at the way station in that strange other life. No one will pick it. Nor will any vandal crush it beneath his heel because his dull eyes cannot abide the sight of its beauty. That is not the danger. It can protect itself from such things as those.
A sense of deep relief swept through Jake.
Can I come here again and look at it? he asked the phantom voice. When I'm low, or if the voices come back and start their argument again? Can I come back and look at it and have some peace?
The voice did not answer, and after a few moments of listening, Jake decided it was gone. He tucked Charlie the Choo-Choo and Riddle-De-Dum! into the waistband of his pants--which, he saw, were streaked with dirt and dotted with clinging burdocks--and then grabbed the board fence. He boosted himself up, swung over the top, and dropped onto the sidewalk of Second Avenue again, being careful to land on his good foot.
Traffic on the Avenue--both pedestrian and vehicular--was much heavier now as people made their way home for the night. A few passersby looked at the dirty boy in the torn blazer and untucked, flapping shirt as he jumped awkwardly down from the fence, but not many. New Yorkers are used to the sight of people doing peculiar things.
He stood there a moment, feeling a sense of loss and realizing something else, as well--the arguing voices were still absent. That, at least, was something.
He glanced at the board fence; and the verse of spray-painted doggerel seemed to leap out at him, perhaps because the paint was the same color as the rose.
"See the TURTLE of enormous girth" Jake muttered. "On his shell he holds the earth." He shivered. "What a day! Boy!"
He turned and began to limp slowly in the direction of home.
19
THE DOORMAN MUST HAVE buzzed up as soon as Jake entered the lobby, because his father was standing outside the elevator when it opened on the fifth floor. Elmer Chambers was wearing faded jeans and cowboy boots that improved his five-ten to a rootin, tootin six feet. His black, crewcut hair bolted up from his head; for as long as Jake could remember, his father had looked like a man who had just suffered some tremendous, galvanizing shock. As soon as Jake stepped out of the elevator, Chambers seized him by the arm.
"Look at you!" His father's eyes flicked up and down, taking in Jake's dirty face and hands, the blood drying on his cheek and temple, the dusty pants, the torn blazer, and the burdock that clung to his tie like some peculiar clip. "Get in here! Where the hell have you been? Your mother's just about off her fucking gourd!"
Without giving Jake a chance to answer, he dragged him through the apartment door. Jake saw Greta Shaw standing in the archway between the dining room and the kitchen. She gave him a look of guarded sympathy, then disappeared before the eyes of "the mister" could chance upon her.
Jake's mother was sitting in her rocker. She got to her feet when she saw Jake, but she did not leap to her feet; neither did she pelt across to the foyer so she could cover him with kisses and invective. As she came toward him, Jake assessed her eyes and guessed she'd had at least three Valium since noon. Maybe four. Both of his parents were firm believers in better living through chemistry.
"You're bleeding! Where have you been?" She made this inquiry in her cultured Vassar voice, pronouncing been so it rhymed with seen. She might have been greeting an acquaintance who had been involved in a minor traffic accident.
"Out," he said.
His father gave him a rough shake. Jake wasn't prepared for it. He stumbled and came down on his bad ankle. The pain flared again, and he was suddenly furious. Jake didn't think his father was pissed because he had disappeared from school, leaving only his mad composition behind; his father was pissed because Jake had had the temerity to fuck up his own precious schedule.
To this point in his life, Jake had been aware of only three feelings about his father: puzzlement, fear, and a species of weak, confused love. Now a fourth and fifth surfaced. One was anger; the other was disgust. Mixed in with these unpleasant feelings was that sense of homesickness. It was the largest thing inside him right now, weaving through everything else like smoke. He looked at his father's flushed cheeks and screaming haircut and wished he was back in the vacant lot, looking at the rose and listening to the choir. This is not my place, he thought. Not anymore. I have work to do. If only I knew what it was.
"Let go of me," he said.
"What did you say to me?" His father's blue eyes widened. They were very bloodshot tonight. Jake guessed he had been dipping heavily into his supply of magic powder, and that probably made this a bad time to cross him, but Jake realized he intended to cross him just the same. He would not be shaken like a mouse in the jaws of a sadistic tomcat. Not tonight. Maybe not ever again. He s
uddenly realized that a large part of his anger stemmed from one simple fact: he could not talk to them about what had happened--what was still happening. They had closed all the doors.
But I have a key, he thought, and touched its shape through the fabric of his pants. And the rest of that strange verse occurred to him: If you want to run and play,/Come along the BEAM today.
"I said let go of me," he repeated. "I've got a sprained ankle and you're hurting it."
"I'll hurt more than your ankle if you don't--" Sudden strength seemed to flow into Jake. He seized the hand clamped on his arm just below the shoulder and shoved it violently away. His father's mouth dropped open.
"I don't work for you," Jake said. "I'm your son, remember? If you forgot, check the picture on your desk."
His father's upper lip pulled back from his perfectly capped teeth in a snarl that was two parts surprise and one part fury. "Don't you talk to me like that, mister--where in the hell is your respect?"
"I don't know. Maybe I lost it on the way home."
"You spend the whole goddamn day absent without leave and then you stand there running your fat, disrespectful mouth--"
"Stop it! Stop it, both of you!" Jake's mother cried. She sounded near tears in spite of the tranquilizers perking through her system.
Jake's father reached for Jake's arm again, then changed his mind. The surprising force with which his son had torn his hand away a moment ago might have had something to do with it. Or perhaps it was only the look in Jake's eyes. "I want to know where you've been. "
"Out. I told you that. And that's all I'm going to tell you."
"Fuck that! Your headmaster called, your French teacher actually came here, and they both had beaucoup questions for you! So do I, and I want some answers!"
"Your clothes are dirty," his mother observed, and then added timidly: "Were you mugged, Johnny? Did you play hookey and get mugged?"
"Of course he wasn't mugged," Elmer Chambers snarled. "Still wearing his watch, isn't he?"
"But there's blood on his head."
"It's okay, Mom. I just bumped it."
"But--"