"Cold iron and steel, oh, yes, fool, that would be a great help to us! Do you want to fall through completely? No? Then sit still!" The wind had fingered some of her hair free of her shawl and the black strands whipped across her face, veiling her brown eyes and high cheeks. Stepovich stared at the snap of command in her voice. He had heard it before. It was the obey-me-or-die voice of a commander in a life or death situation. Something in him bowed to it instinctively.
"Where are we going?" he whispered.
"I don't know. Back. Following the threads, back to before. She was hiding him."
"Who?" he asked helplessly.
"The worm. Hush. If She hears us. She'll cut the thread, and there'll be no following it forward nor back. There'll only be the mist and the Coachman."
"Trust me," said the Coachman, the first word she'd spoken, and folktales and violins shimmered in his voice, and Stepovich did. But Madam Moria laughed, the laugh of a skeptical old woman. "Trust you? Trust you right down the neck of a bottle!" Stepovich glanced at her blind but focused eyes and then away, clenching his fists. Good Christ, what the hell was happening to him?
He leaned forward to the window again. Mist and fog and clammy air, no more than that. Or was that glimpsed bit of facade, bared by the mist for only an instant, the decorated cornice of the old Masonic temple? If so, he knew where he was; but just as suddenly as it had come, his brief sense of orientation was swept away. They'd torn down the old Masonic temple six years back. The gooseneck street lamps that he could glimpse now had been gone since he was twenty-three. He remembered coming home from one of his attempts at a college education to find them gone.
Understanding broke over him like a cold wave and he refused it, clinging instead to his own reality. "Almost there, mistress," said the Coachman, and he leaned stiffly down and peered in to speak to them.He them.Hetop hat now, and a black wool greatcoat,but his face had not changed, not one line or hair of difference, except that now he smiled at Stepovich and his teeth were very white. Somehow that was the worst of all, and Stepovich felt his reasoning throwback its head and howl at the moon. Instead he turned back to his window and gripped the edge of it like a drowning man clutches at flotsam.
The mist was thinning around them, tattering away like cobwebs. Warmth suddenly filled the air and the sun broke through like a woman's smile; trees lined the suburban street of turn-of-the-century Victorian-style houses, children played and laughed, but Stepovich felt as if he saw it all through a dirty plateglass window. There was an echo of distance to the bark of the terrier chasing the ball a small boy threw,and neither child nor dog turned their heads to watch the horse-drawn coach pass. Big elms lined the street.Tstreet.The hadn't seen elms that size since the Dutch elm epidemic of '63 had left the suburbs near treelesstreeless. Then wasn't bothering with the street,either, hell, he wasn't even on the sidewalk; he was taking it across the lawns, through sprinklers that didn't wet them, down to an empty lot, overgrown with deep grass, littered with pop cans that weren't aluminum, and presided over by a live oak.
A ramshackle treehouse perched in its branches, a genuine kid's treehouse, all impossible angles and salvaged scrap, and a lively battle was going on for possession of it. Two boys in jeans and plain white tee shirts were in the upper level, energetically shaking a knotted rope that a smaller boy clung to. The smaller boy was dressed in clean pale blue corduroys and a button-up-the-front short-sleeved cotton shirt that matched the color of his pants exactly. His belt was white and his sneakers were black and low, like girl's sneakers, and new looking, not like the battered black hi-tops that Stepovich could glimpse on the other two boys. Everything about him screamed Mama's Little Precious, and Stepovich wasn't surprised to hear one of the older boys tease, "Go home to Mommy, little Timmy. She's calling you. She wants to wipe your nosey."
Timmy? Timothy DeCruz? No, they hadn't gone that far back.
"Naw, Josh, she wants to wipe his little baby butt!"jeered the other, and together they gave the rope one final shake that ripped it out of Timmy's hands. He fell awkwardly, not like a kid, but like a frightened old man, and landed badly, on his back in the dirt.Thedirt. Theoys snaked the ladder up quickly while little Timmy lay on his back, trying to wheeze back the air that had been knocked out of him.
"Lookit, little baby Timmy's gonna cry now!" one boy sneered, the same one who had made the remark about his butt. Stepovich thought the other boy looked mildly worried. He himself, powerless to intervene, stared at Timmy, feeling a sick sort of sympathy for him, one that was tempered with an innate understanding of how the older boys felt. Spray a sparrow with paint, and the other sparrows will peck him to death.
Timmy got up, his narrow shoulders still shaking with tears. No. Not tears. An unchildlike rage convulsed his round little face. "I'll get you sonsabitches," he vowed, his voice breaking on the words.
"Oh, he's gonna get us, oh. Josh, hold my hand,I'm so scared," mocked one of the treehouse boys,and he was laughing wildly, mouth open, when the rock hit him.
It was well aimed and flung with fury and it struck right between the boy's eyes. Stepovich saw his eyes roll up a fraction of a second before he fell from the treehouse. The boy landed with a force that made him bounce, his arms and legs flopping like a straw man."You killed him!" wailed Josh, and came snaking down the ladder to kneel by his friend. For an instant Stepovich feared it might be true, but then the boy on the ground stirred, and then began crying, the terrible sound of a child who thinks he is too old to cry but is hurt too badly not to. Little Timmy seemed to devour the sound, staring with his pale eyes round,his hateful little mouth drawn up in a bow of pleasure. "I gotcha, I gotcha!" he screeched gleefully, but the two older boys were too deep in shock to heed him. Josh tottered his friend off toward home, and the instant they were clear of the treehouse, Timmy was at the rope, doggedly and clumsily shinnying his way up the knotted length. Once up in the tree house,he pulled up the rope. He leaned out of it, his small face bright with hate and triumph. "I gotcha, and the treehouse is all mine now!" he shrieked after them.
Stepovich was willing to bet he was right. There was something in that boy's face that no sane kid would cross twice.
There was a thing then, a creature of flames and animal parts-goose leg, horse arm-coming at them,burning over the ground like a range fire. The Coachman cracked his whip at it, but it made Stepovich suddenly realize that none of this was real-that something very bad had been done to his head and he was probably even now in an ambulance, if Durand had it together at all. He wondered if the bullet was in his skull this time, and if the dream would stop when the doctors pulled it out. Madam Moria was shaking her fist at the creature and yelling what were probably curses, but the Coachman was shaking the reins and leaning forward, and suddenly he split the whole world, wide and black, with a piercing whistle.
ELEVEN
How the Owl and the Raven Sang
He said, "You can go back home
And never face the dangers,
Or continue toward a life
You will live among strangers…"
"RAVEN, OWL, AND I"
Daniel waited for the Coachman until he couldn't wait any longer-almost ten minutes. The Coachman's words about each city having its own rhythms had stayed with him, and now he wanted to taste this city's. He took his fiddle and went out to meet the fog in the air and the snow on the ground. He hardly noticed the cold; he'd been living in a place where winter was colder and lasted longer.