“Jeez, George.”
“And she did sort of go off the deep end. I don’t know why, I mean she never told me. She just went—and went back to P.R. Never saw her again.”
“So,” Auberon said.
“So.” He cleared his throat. “So Sylvie did look a lot like her. And she did find the Farm. I mean she just showed up. And never told me how.”
“Good grief,” Auberon said, as the implications of this sank in. “Good grief, is this true?”
George held up an honest palm.
“But did she…”
“No. Said nothing. Name wasn’t the same, but then it wouldn’t have been. And her mother was off, she said, gone, I never met her.”
“But surely you, didn’t you…”
“To tell you the truth, man,” George said, “I never really inquired into it too closely.”
Auberon was silent a time, marveling. She had been plotted, then; if all their lives were, and she was one of them. He said: “I wonder what she… I mean I wonder what she thought.”
“Yeah.” George nodded. “Yeah, well, that’s a good question all around, isn’t it. A damn good question.”
“She used to say,” Auberon said, “that you were like a…”
“I know what she used to say.”
“God, George, then how could you have…”
“I wasn’t sure. How could I be sure? They all look sort of alike, that type.”
“Boy, you’re really given to that, aren’t you?” Auberon said in awe. “You really…”
“Gimme a break,” George said. “I wasn’t sure. I thought, hell, probably not.”
“Well.” The two cousins stared into the fire. “That does explain it, though,” Auberon said. “This. If it is family.”
“That’s what I thought,” George said.
“Yeah,” Auberon said.
“Yeah?” Fred Savage said. They looked up at him, startled. “Then what in hell ’m I doin’ here?”
He looked from one to the other, grinning, his dull, living eyes amused. “Y’see?” he said.
“Well,” George said.
“Well,” Auberon said.
“Y’see?” Fred said again. “What in hell ’m I doin here?” His yellow eyes closed and opened, and so did the many yellow eyes in the woods behind him. He shook his head as though at a puzzle, but he wasn’t really puzzled. He never seriously asked such a question, what was he doing where he was, except when it amused him to watch others consider it in consternation. Consternation, and considering, thought itself in fact, were mostly a spectacle to him; a man who had long since given up making any distinction between the place behind his closed black lids and the place before him when they were open, he was hard to confuse, and as for this place, Fred Savage didn’t really wonder; he didn’t bother himself supposing he had ever lived anyplace else.
“Teasin’,” he said softly and kindly to his two friends. “Teasin’.”
He kept vigil for a while, or slept, or both, or neither. Night passed. He saw a path. In the blue dawn, birds awaking, fire cold, he saw the same path, or another, there between trees. He woke George and Auberon, a huddled pile, and with his index brown and gnarled and dirt-clogged as a root, he pointed it out to them.
A Watch and a Pipe
George Mouse looked around himself, swept with uneasy wonder. He had been feeling, since the first steps they had taken on the path which Fred had found, that none of it was as strange as it ought to be, or as unknown to him. And here in this spot (no different otherwise, as thick with undergrowth, as overwhelmed with towering trees) the feeling had grown much stronger. His feet had stood in this place before. In fact they had rarely been far from it.
“Wait,” he said to Fred and Auberon, who were stumbling ahead, looking for the path’s continuation. “Wait a sec.”
They stopped, looking back.
George looked up, down, left, right. Right: there, he could sense more than see it, was a clearing. Air more gold and blue than the forest’s gray was beyond that row of guardian trees.
That row of guardian trees…
“You know,” he said, “I get the feeling we haven’t come all that far, after all.”
But the others were too far on to hear him. “Come on, George,” Auberon called.
George pulled himself from the spot, and followed. But he had taken only a few steps when he felt himself drawn back.
Damn. He stopped.
The forest was, it was hard to believe it of a mess of vegetation but it was so, the forest was like a huge suite of rooms, you stepped through doors continually out of one place into a very different place. Five steps were all it had taken him to leave the place where he had felt so familiar. He wanted to go back; he wanted very much to go back.
“Well, just wait a second,” he called out to his companions, but they didn’t turn back, they were already elsewhere. The calls of birds seemed louder than George’s own call. In a quandary, he took two steps in the direction they had gone, and then, drawn by a curiosity stronger than fear, returned to the place where the clearing could be glimpsed.
It didn’t seem far. There seemed even to be a path in that direction.
The path led him down, and almost at once the guardian trees and the patch of sunlight he had seen were gone. Very soon after that the path was gone too. And very soon after that George forgot completely what had caused him to take this way.
He walked on a bit, his boots sinking into soft earth, and his coat clawed at by harsh, marsh-living bushes. Where? For what? He stood stock still, but began to sink, and pulled himself forward. The forest sang all around him, blocking his ears to his own thoughts. George forgot who he was.
He stopped again. It was dark yet bright, the trees all in a moment seemed to have bloomed a chartreuse cloudiness, spring had come. And why was he here, afraid, in this place, when and where was this, what had become of him? Who was he? He began searching in his pockets, not knowing what he would find but hoping for a clue as to who this was here and what he was doing.
From one pocket he pulled out a blackened pipe, which meant nothing to him though he turned it and turned it in his hand; from the other he pulled out an old pocket watch.
The watch: yes. He couldn’t read its moustached face, which was grinning at him disconcertingly, but this was definitely a clue. A watch in his hand. Yes.
He had, no doubt (he could almost remember it) taken a pill. A new drug he was experimenting with, a drug of astonishing, of just unheard-of potency. That had been some time ago, yes, by the watch, and the pill had done this to him: had snatched away his memory, even his memory of having taken the pill, and set him to struggle in a wholly imaginary landscape, my God a pill so potent that it could build a forest complete with bilberries and birdsong inside his head for the homunculus of himself to wander in! But this imaginary woods was still interpenetrated, faintly, by the reaclass="underline" he had in his hand the watch, the watch by which he had intended to time the new drug’s working. He had had it in his hand the whole time, and had only now, because the pill’s effect was wearing off, imagined that he had taken it out of his pocket to consult it—had imagined that he had taken it out because with the pill’s wearing off he was coming to himself again, by slow stages, and the real watch was intruding into the unreal forest. In a moment, any moment, the terrible leaf-jewelled forest would fade and he would begin to see through it the room where he in fact sat with the watch in his hand: the library of his townhouse, on the third floor, on the couch. Yes! Where he had sat motionless for who knew how long, the pill made it seem a lifetime; and around him, waiting for his response, his description, would be his friends, who had watched with him. Any second now their faces would swim into reality, as the watch had: Franz and Smoky and Alice, coalescing in the dusty old library where they had so often sat, their faces anxious, gleeful, and expectant: what was it like, George? What was it like? And he would for a long time only shake his head and make inarticulate round noises, unable till firm reality reasserted itself to speak of it.