“Well,” Agaard said, “good-night, Professor.”
I nodded, my head still adrift in mournful images. Then, rousing myself, I said, “Yes. Good-night.”
He left.
Knowing there was nothing I could do, no way to alter what I’d already done — much less what Agaard had done before me — no recourse or higher appeal for any of us — I undressed, folded my suit, shirt, socks, and underwear over the chair beside the bed, glanced one last time around the large, dusty room, turned off the light, and crawled under the covers. Still furious at Agaard and conscious of his fury at my failure to help, I closed my eyes. Almost immediately, the house creaked softly, weighed anchor, and began to drift.
WHAT IT WAS that wakened me I had no idea, but suddenly I found myself wide awake, listening. The room was freezing cold, my breath made steam. Moonlight fell over the bedroom door, slanting from corner to corner across the room from the window to my left — pale, living light, moving on the panelling as if projected through water flecked with fish. Perhaps snow was still falling — I couldn’t see from where I sat — but falling softly now, spiraling downward untouched by wind. I could hear it, that unearthly silence of a world deep in white. Every line on the wallpaper — gold and white flowers and birds on a field of blue, I believed, though at the moment everything was a dull, mystic gray — every line of the wallpaper, every crack and flame-image of grain on the door, every hint of a bruise on the glass-knobbed dresser, stood out distinctly. I reached for the chain on the bedside lamp and pulled it. Nothing happened. The lines were down, no doubt. It wasn’t surprising, but the fact that the lamp wouldn’t work made my fear leap more brightly. I pressed one fist to my chest and held my breath. It seemed not to help.
Still there was no sound. I sat rigid, breathing carefully in and out, waiting.
Then I did hear something, a kind of creaking or scraping noise, that might have risen from under the ground or inside me, a sound I strained to identify — the swing of a shutter on some window in the servants’ quarters, the sag of a beam under the weight of snow — anything and everything but what I knew it was: the sound of heavy, quiet footsteps. “Nonsense,” I whispered. I remembered how my father would look up smiling in the haylot when he saw me coming cautiously through the twilight with his supper — I was five or six — and how he’d cry out “Applejack!” his name for me then, then and later in fact: to the finish the old man never changed his mind about anything; and he’d open his arms to me, huge, thick farmer-arms, power itself. He’d been dead for ten years now. I heard another sound, the sigh of another floorboard as the giants foot weighed on it. It’s only Freddy, I thought, struggling to conjure life’s plainness back, the intoxicating rough-hewn serenity of childhood apple crates, cellar doors. But if the boy wasn’t dangerous, why was he coming now, in darkness and stealth, in the middle of the night?
It seemed to me that I was thinking as clearly as old Agaard when he plotted out a book, thinking both quickly and with masterful control and precision; I was intellect itself, weighing the possibility of blocking the door with the dresser and bed, surveying the room for weapons — the elegant old hat-rack, the slipper chairs. I had no inkling that my mind was adrift until I found myself whispering, “Concentrate! Wake up!” I could hear him outside the door now, breathing heavily and slowly.
The doorknob turned; the door cracked open a few inches and quietly swung wide. After a moment his head came down under the lintel, his eyes closed to slits, his cheeks as pale as alabaster, glistening. He was wearing vast, striped pajamas under the monkish robe I’d seen before. He struggled with the door, too low and narrow for him, and at last, silently, he bent down on one knee, and I made out that he was pushing something toward me through the moonlight, some inert gift or offering, the object wobbling in the frail, flecked light, moving in at me as far as his enormous arm would reach. He lowered the object and dropped it on the floor. It struck the carpet with a thump. Slowly, he drew back his hand. After that he rose, stood motionless a moment, then, without a sound, drew the door shut. I heard floorboards creak. He seemed to move more lightly now, as if it had been a great weight he’d carried, that gift he’d brought, the object lying there solemn in the moonlight, mysteriously still and sufficient on the dusty gray carpet — Freddy’s book.
II. FREDDY’S BOOK
PART ONE
I.
IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY, when Lappland was almost entirely unknown and Finland was civilization’s last outpost, there lived, in the then-insignificant country of Sweden, a knight who was afraid of nothing in the world except the Devil. The knight’s name was Lars-Goren.
This knight was not a fool or a superstitious oaf; on the contrary, he was a man of later middle-age, highly respected by everyone who knew him and a trusted advisor to his king, Gustavus I, of Sweden. He’d proved himself a brave fighter against the Muscovites and Danes, Gotlanders and Finns, and many another group about whom history has fallen silent, and he was equally well-known as a just ruler of the humble people who fell within his suzerain. If he had serious faults, neither those above him nor those below him could say what they were.
He was not a man people mocked on first acquaintance. Though everyone in Sweden was tall at that time, Lars-Goren was one of the tallest of the age. He stood eight feet high with his shoes off, and he was three feet wide at the shoulders. He had long, clumsy feet — though he was fine on a horse — and long, strong hands. He was also considered to be of great intelligence, for though he thought slowly, he thought clearly and soundly, so that again and again his opinions were found to be more valuable in the end than the opinions of men quicker and more dazzling. More than once when Lars-Goren had given his advice the king scratched his beard and said, “Why do I listen to these other fools when I could listen to my kinsman Lars-Goren?”
At that period the Devil showed himself in Sweden at least every other day. From time to time in the history of the world, there comes some great moment, sometimes a moment which will afterward be celebrated or mourned for centuries, at other times — perhaps more often — a moment that slides by unnoticed by most of humanity, like a jagged rock below the surface of the sea, unobserved by the ship that slips past it, missing it by inches. At the time of this story, the world was teetering on the rim of such a moment. Immense forces hung in almost perfect balance: the tap of a child’s finger might swing things either way. It was for this reason that the Devil made such frequent appearances. He was keeping a careful watch on how his work was progressing.
He had reason enough to be pleased with himself. Magellan had recently circled the globe, opening vast new avenues for greed and war. Europe had more mad kings than sane, and the Devil had both the One True Church and the infant Protestant Revolution in the palm of his hand. In Germany, the very ideas that had filled him with alarm, when they’d broken out in Wittenberg, were now the occasion of such dissension and slaughter that it was a mystery to the Devil that he hadn’t introduced them himself.