"He lied," I said.
Gripping the torch like a lance, Cordwainer ran to the edge of the meadow and circled away, circled back. Because I did not understand that he was looking for something, I thought he had passed into pure animal craziness. On his second circuit, he fell to his knees and unearthed a long, flat, dirt-encrusted rock. He picked up the torch with his left hand and plunged back to the building. The rock sailed like a discus toward the window and smashed through it in a glittering shower of broken glass. With another wide swing, he lobbed the torch through the broken window.
Cordwainer whirled around, uttering squeals of excitement and agony. All he saw of me were the torches he ripped from my hands before he took off for the front of the house.
The portico light switched on. A bolt slid into its catch with a tremendous metallic clank, and the front door swung open on an empty hallway leading to a room where flames mounted between piles of books.
Cordwainer screamed,"Where is he?"
Through the lighted front windows, I saw Howard's white-haired figure slipping into a doorway at the far end of the room in which Cordwainer had received his tutorials in lunacy. From the back of the house, feeble light appeared in the window above the portico. I heard, or imagined I heard, batlike squeals. Streamers of fire moved across the floor of the study, fattened on the night air, and billowed into the hallway. "He's going to the attic," I said.
Cordwainer turned a furious glare upon me.
"Where the others are. You must have heard Carpenter and Ellie whispering about them."
Cordwainer's strangled voice said,"A octopus, centipede, spider kind o'thing."
We stepped back and looked upward. The attic windows turned soft yellow.
What Cordwainer did next, when I was expecting him to fulfill his own prophecy and run into the burning house, astounded me—he uttered a scarcely human sound that expressed condescension and mirth by wrapping them in lunacy. I needed a second to realize that he was giggling.
"Robert! It's a shame you didn't have the wit, the courtesy to read my stories before destroying them. Had you done so, you would comprehend our position. All is written! We brought each other to this place."
I tried to find Robert, but Robert had departed. "Written?" I said, now really playing for time. "How?"
"By grace . . ." An ecstatic smile widened across his face. "By grace, I am delighted to say, of my genius. What a fool I was. I rejected my masterpiece." Cordwainer started laughing in high-pitched, ecstatic scoops of sound.
This evidence that his humiliation had ascended nearly without transition into euphoria scared me more than anything that had happened earlier, and I moved away, furious with Robert for having abandoned me again. "Are you saying you wrote about Howard Dunstan?"
“I wrote of an Other, whose name I knew not. He betrayed me, Robert—you were absolutely, wonderfully right!"
"So join him," I said. “If that's what you wrote, get in there before it's too late."
"How is it possible you don't comprehend?" Cordwainer shouted. "Both of us are meant to join him."
In a repetition of the worst moments from my childhood, a force like a giant hand lifted me off my feet and muscled me in the direction of the open door. Exalted, his feet inches above the ground, Cordwainer sped toward me. I flew back at least ten feet, the fire seeming to stretch out its arms behind me, before I summoned the strength to resist him. It was as though—looking back, I remember, it seemed as though—I managed to draw upon some lingering portion of Robert's being. When I slammed to a halt at the edge of the portico, the heat curled against my back like a huge animal and threatened to ignite my clothes through sheer proximity. Cordwainer stopped, too. From a couple of yards away, he blasted out the same dictatorial energy that once had held me helplessly in thrall, and I found I could stand fast. Hairs crisped in my nose. I didn't move.
Cordwainer howled in frustration.
We faced each other, locked in a stalemate that would endure until one of us weakened. Without Robert, I felt handicapped, doomed. Then a secret door opened in my mind, and from the great, dark, unknown space beyond it Star Dunstan said,Like hearing the whole world open up in front of me. With a sense of yielding to that which all my life I had most feared and distrusted, I passed through the door—I can't put it any other way. In terrified, necessary surrender, I moved into an elemental darkness, Ipassed through. Forces and powers I had never known I possessed and never wanted to command streamed out from the center of my being and went prowling through Cordwainer's psychic hurricane.
"You must go inside!" Cordwainer bellowed. "Don't you understand? Move!"
“It was your story, not mine," I said, took a step away from the portico, and wrapped him in the terrible glamours I had inherited from Howard Dunstan. My old enemy, Edward Rinehart, Mr. X,
Cordwainer Hatch, opened his month and screamed like a rabbit that had just felt the trap bite into its leg. I felt like screaming, too. Instead, I propelled him howling past me and into our blazing ancestral house.
Somewhere within, timbers crashed down. The attic windows flickered red, then an incandescent blue. I moved back from the conflagration and softly, stupidly, spoke Robert's name. The fire drowned my voice. Another beam thundered toward the basement. Flames erupting through the roof vanished into the sheet of darkness welling behind them, and I sent myself back to the Brazen Head.
•121
•My body shook from the inside out, and the smell of smoke clung to my clothes. I flattened my hands on the table. When they stopped trembling, I tugged Cordwainer Hatch's bible out of my pocket. Like my clothes, it stank of destruction. I opened it at random and read the first sentence to meet my eye:
". . .It was a octopus, centipede, spider kind o' thing, but they was a haff-shaped man's face on top of it, and ..."
I threw the book on the table.
Feeble lamplight shone on the fountain in Veal Yard. Perhaps two hours of my time had brought me into the ordinary world's night. I scrubbed my hands and face, shoved the photographs into their folders, and went down to the lobby.
The night clerk pretended not to smirk at my jacket. "Message for you, Mr. Dunstan. I was about to send it up this very second."
"Read it to me," I said.
Raising his eyebrows, he reached under the desk and unfolded a slip of paper. " 'Happy Birthday. I called Nettie to see if you were there, and she spilled the beans. Want a nice present? Come to my house. Laurie.' " The clerk managed to make every word sound obscene. He refolded the paper and offered it to me with elaborately ironic courtesy. "Would you care to keep this lovely memento, sir?"
•Stewart Hatch's 500SL slanted over the edge of Laurie's driveway with its front wheels on the lawn. I swung around it, trotted to the front door, and let myself in.
Posy Fairbrother was holding Cobbie in her arms at the bottom of the staircase. He looked as rigid as a flagpole. Stewart shouted in the kitchen, but I could not make out his words. Cobbie reached for me, and I pulled him to my chest. I could feel his heart beating.
"Should I call 911?" Posy whispered.
A plate smashed against the kitchen wall. Stewart let out a drunken bellow. Another plate exploded. Cobbie began to cry. “I'll take care of it," I said. "Cobbie, can you go back to Posy?" His head nodded against my neck. "Here we go." Posy folded him into an embrace and moved up the stairs.