He knocked his knuckles on the walls. Solid.
At first he was afraid he was trespassing, but then, after passing through dozens of rooms, still in absolute darkness, and aware that he was lost, there was nothing he could do but call out.
He heard his voice echoing, but the house only responded with subtle creaking, the way old houses do.
Hours seemed to pass and he was hungry and tired and scared. It was as if, in a dream, he had fallen into a deep pit, or a grave, and now he had awakened, not in his own bedroom, but in a strange place, still in the dream.
But he knew he was awake. Things were just too solid. He bruised himself painfully when he stumbled over a staircase in the dark. Feeling his way, crawling, he made his way to the top and rested there, sitting on the last step, leaning on the smooth floor above it, and he fell asleep — a dream within a dream within a dream, or maybe not — and it seemed to him that he had been carried off in the belly of a winged monster that only looked like a house when it was resting in the forest. It opened its eyes, and starlight flooded in. He saw two tall, arched windows (which had been eyes) and the night sky outside, and he watched the full moon rise, bright and huge and closer than he had ever seen it before, even though (through a recently developed interest in astronomy) he knew that the full moon was not due for another two weeks. (Thomas had a bit of his brother’s pedantic streak.)
Then someone put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Hello Thomas.”
He yelped, and jumped away from the window. This wasn’t a dream.
“Hello,” he said softly.
The other replied with the most unlikely announcement imaginable. “Welcome to Hell” or “You know you’re dead now, don’t you?” would have made sense, but, no, the other person merely said, “Come and get your breakfast. It’s ready.” He could only follow the other into the next room, where, indeed, a breakfast of bacon and eggs and juice had been laid out on a polished table. This room was dimly lit, by candles in holders along the walls.
He sat down at the table. He was able to see the person seated opposite him now, a man clad in a black robe, much younger and better groomed than the lunatic in the woods; but if they had been monks, they would have been of the same order. This one had jet black hair, as Thomas did, and a pointed beard, which of course Thomas did not.
“My name is Thomas also,” the other said. “Maybe you should call me Big Thomas to avoid confusion. You will be Small Thomas.” He smiled, but Small Thomas took little comfort in that.
“Am I being kidnapped?”
The other laughed softly. “You have a lot to learn. Eat your breakfast.”
He started eating, then paused again. “Then do I get to go home afterwards?”
Big Thomas did not answer. Instead he placed on the table one of the killing jars from Small Thomas’s knapsack. He held it up to the candlelight. Inside was a prize catch, which had been the highlight of the day before things got weird, a perfect specimen of a white underwing moth. The upper wings look exactly like white birch bark. The hind wings and underside, with their pattern of curving dark and light stripes, create a kaleidoscope effect to confuse predators. You only find these creatures in northern woods, in New England, and not in Philadelphia where Thomas was actually from.
He started to protest when Big Thomas opened the jar. Even from across the table there was a strong whiff of carbon tetrachloride, the killing agent, which the boys could get because their father was a chemist at DuPont. Big Thomas carefully removed the moth and held it in the palm of his hand. He didn’t breathe on the moth or say any magic words, but to Small Thomas’s amazement, it began to stir. Then it crawled to the tip of Big Thomas’s finger and vibrated its wings. He tossed it into the air, and the moth took off, soaring up, up among the dark rafters overhead.
“But, it was dead…” said Small Thomas.
The other held his hands about a foot apart. “Within a certain interval in time,” he said, “the moth was alive. Go before that interval”—he waved his left hand—“and it does not yet exist. After it”—he waved his right—“it is indeed dead. In between, it is alive. Move it back into that interval of living, and it is alive.”
“Was that…a miracle?”
“No, it is your lesson for today. Now finish your breakfast.”
III
And Little Thomas grew to be a man.
But it’s not so simple. I don’t want to give the impression that this is some goddamn fairy story about how a boy blundered into a realm of enchantment where he found a mysterious mentor and they became good buddies, master and student, father and stepson or something like that, and their lives were filled with wonder until the time came for the boy to go out on a quest and confront the Big Bad Big Bad and save the universe. It wasn’t like that. Thomas, Tommy Brooks, had read stories like that, but he knew that they were crap.
He never stopped being afraid. He was afraid when, right after breakfast, Big Thomas took him back to the twin windows through which he had observed the full moon, but now it was day, only the trees were bare of any leaves and there was snow on the ground.
“But it’s July,” he objected.
“It was July and will be again,” said Big Thomas, “but never the same July.”
That didn’t explain anything. Too many of the answers were like that. Like fortune-cookie fortunes, he decided. They sounded wise and profound but they didn’t say anything, not really.
He was afraid when he realized that he and Big Thomas were not alone in the house, that there were others. Once, in a room full of ticking clocks of all descriptions, he came face to face with a dark-haired, bearded man in a black robe who should have been Big Thomas and looked very much like him, but somehow wasn’t, and he turned and fled.
Once he looked out a window over a blasted landscape, where there was only mud and burning vapors, and the sky itself was red and seemed on fire. He could feel the heat of the burning as he touched the glass.
He had his lessons. There was a great deal of study. He would find Big Thomas seated at a table, with books open before him, and it would be time to begin or resume. First, languages. Now in the seventh grade, he’d had beginner’s Spanish, and was fairly good at it, but this was harder, a lot harder: Latin, Greek, and languages he hadn’t even known existed. But somehow they came to him, as if he’d already known them and was remembering. These enabled him to read at least a few passages from the strange books in the vast library that seemed to be everywhere and nowhere. Sometimes a shelf would seem empty, but Big Thomas would reach up and there would be the book he wanted. Or sometimes a book was just on the table before them. Sometimes Big Thomas would lead him into vast rooms filled with books, tier upon tier of galleries disappearing into the gloom above. Later, he wouldn’t be able to find such rooms by himself.
By candlelight, or by the light of an oil lamp, they would read together, and Big Thomas explained much to him, particularly about the nature of time, which he said flowed backwards and forwards at equal rates, so that the future could spill into the past or the past into the future, blending together, like paint mixing. The house itself, he said, was like a pendulum, swinging through thousands of centuries, back and forth, back and forth. Indeed, sometimes he took Small Thomas to the window and showed him a jungle filled with dinosaurs, where black stone cities rose in the distance. Another time, there was a bare, ashen landscape with the sun grown huge and red. Here a race of gigantic beetles rode across the world on machines like enormous spiders that spat out fire.
At times they were not alone with their studies, when others seemed to gather around them, black-robed figures emerging partially from the shadows, looking on expectantly.