“I hardly know what a fact is anymore," I said. "Neither one of us ever had much contact with facts. Only instead of H. P. Lovecraft, I had you."
His mouth tucked in at the corners, and his eyes shifted. Once again, I saw a remnant of Edward Rinehart momentarily surface in his face. "What was my mistake? Calling myself Earl Sawyer? I didn't think anyone would catch that."
“I almost missed it," I said.
Cordwainer moved the photographs closer to him. "You want me to talk about Wagon Road? I remember that girl staring at me from the rumble seat. I had no idea who she was. Then our windshield blew up, and everything went crazy. My father—my legal father— drove home as if nothing had happened."
"How did your father treat you?" I sorted through the pictures until I found a seven- or eight-year-old Howard posed in front of a seated, blazing-eyed Sylvan.
Cordwainer put it alongside the others. "When he wasn't lecturing me, he tuned me out. I depressed him. Of course, he had Cobden, the apple of his eye. Cobden could do no wrong, the little prig."
"And Cobden looked like him."
"This is so interesting." Cordwainer was still staring down at the photographs. “I'm not saying you're right, but it would explain a great deal about my childhood. Neither of my parents ever showed me much warmth, but they doted on my brother."
"Carpenter probably never really admitted the truth to himself. It would have been too disgraceful."
“I could almost believe it." He smiled down at the photographs. "You know, I think I do believe it. My mother must have been more adventurous than I ever imagined." He looked up. "And it would explain where my looks came from. I was always a handsome devil, like you. But the identity of my earthly parents . . . really, that's all the same to me."
"Howard Dunstan manipulated you. He led you into the woods and brought you to what was left of his house. Heshowed you things. He made sure you came across a certain book and primed you with fantasies about H. P. Lovecraft. All along, he was just amusing himself. It was a game."
Cordwainer glanced at the photographs again, then turned his poached eyes and lifeless face back to us. "All nature spoke. The Old Ones spoke."
"Haven't you ever had doubts? Weren't there times when you realized that everything you believed came from short stories written by a man who never pretended they were anything but fiction?"
“I have had my doubts." Cordwainer spoke with undeniable dignity, and, unlike Robert, I felt a spasm of pity. “I have known the Dark Night of the Soul."
"Now and then, even false Messiahs probably have their bad days."
“I am notfalse!"Cordwainer thundered.
"No, you're not," I said. "You're a real Dunstan. Everything your father made you believe was half true. Howard settled in to watch you try to eliminate me. He doesn't care how the game turns out."
"Evidently, my fathers have toyed with you," Cordwainer said. "They are merciless, I can testify to that."
"What happened to a Fortress Academy pledge named W. Wilson Fletcher?"
Cordwainer eyed us. "Busy little bee, aren't you?"
"You were startled that May Dunstan turned a man into a puddle of bile," I said.
I had guessed right: his face turned to lard.
"Maybe Fletcher showed you a certain book. Or maybe you saw him reading it one day. But something happened to you. You needed that book, didn't you?"
I pulledThe Dunwich Horror from my pocket. Cordwainer's eyes fastened on the cover. (Gothim, Robert said.Landed. Flopping on the deck. )
A bolt of feeling ran through his stolid face. "You stole that book from me, and I demand its return. You have no idea of its meaning."
“I'll give it back after we visit Howard Dunstan. He's been waiting for us." I set the book down. When Cordwainer lunged across the table, I wrapped my fingers around his wrist.
•119
•Resistlessly, we fell into the dense, darkly teeming world, half Hansel and Gretel and half unknowable mystery, of a forest at night. I hoped it was late evening, June 25, 1935.
Cordwainer seized our arm and yanked us to his side. “I don't recognize this. Where are we?"
"Johnson's Woods, about sixty years ago," I said. "On this night, you're a little boy asleep in a house on Manor Street."
“I rarely slept in those days," Cordwainer said. "Human life was a torment, and I preferred to bellow. I also wet the bed, deliberately. Compared to mine, your childhood was straight out of Mother Goose." In the darkness, his cannonball head loomed over his black coat, as if hanging in midair. "All right, make a fool of yourself. Where's the house?"
"Not far away," I said, without any idea of where in Johnson's Woods we were.
Cordwainer jerked us off balance, clamped an arm around our neck, and held us against his body. He was much stronger than I had expected. His arm tightened on our windpipe, and the twin stenches of mania and river-bottom invaded our nostrils. His mind probed at the perimeters of mine, like Aunt Nettie's before she had lifted me off her kitchen chair. I slammed my mental gates, and Cordwainer chuckled. His arm closed in and cut off our air. "Funny, I don't see a house. I don't see any lights."
As my eyes adjusted, the trees separated from the darkness and became a series of stationary columns daubed by moonlight. Before us stood a big maple I had seen before, though not in my waking life. I made a croaking sound, and Cordwainer eased the pressure on our neck. "You had something to say, little Robert?"
"The house is up ahead, about thirty yards to the right."
“I could almost believe you." A wave of river-bottom vapor floated from his pores, his bald head, his mouth. "How much longer are you going to keep up this pretense?"
Robert was seething. Robert had had enough, and he was ready to explode. My mouth opened, and Robert spoke through me: “Isthe fucking truce over, then?"
"Oh, no," Cordwainer said. “I haven't explained Reality yet. Are you admitting that you were lying? Are you ready to listen to the truth?"
"Let me ask you something in return," I said. "Are you afraid of what you might see?"
"That's ridiculous."
"All right, humor me. Take your arm off my neck and give me five more minutes." To which Robert added,"And if you don't, I'll finish what I started in the Cobden Building."
“I owe you for that, too," Cordwainer said. "Five minutes, that's what you get. Go on, continue the charade."
We crossed the open ground and entered the scattering of maples I remembered from my dream. Ahead, the massive oak reared through the canopy. Robert knew this terrain as well I did, although he, too, had never seen it while awake. It occurred to me that after a thousand repetitions we had changed places: now I was the shadow moving toward our destination.
“I reject the idea that you are capable of moving through time," Cordwainer said. “It was I who took us back to Wagon Road."
"Then who brought us here?" I asked.
“I have no doubt of your ability to move through space," Cordwainer said. "That, you inherited from me."
"Look to your right. In about ten seconds, you'll see a lighted window." We moved through the last of the oaks. Cordwainer chuckled at my attempts to hoodwink him. Two steps later, a yellow glow shone through the trees.
Cordwainer stopped moving. The triangular outline of a dormer rose above the cloudy heads of the trees. "Think I'll fall for that?" Cordwainer strode into the meadow. I heard the hissing of his breath. Cordwainer was staring at the portico, the facade slanting across the edge of the forest, the chimneys rearing against the sky.