“See the TURTLE of enormous girth!
On his shell he holds the earth
If you want to run and play,
Come along the BEAM today.”
Jake supposed the source of this strange little poem (if not its meaning) was clear enough. This part of Manhattan’s East Side was known, after all, as Turtle Bay. But that didn’t explain the gooseflesh which was now running up the center of his back in a rough stripe, or his clear sense that he had found another road-sign along some fabulous hidden highway.
Jake unbuttoned his shirt and stuck his two newly purchased books inside. Then he looked around, saw no one paying attention to him, and grabbed the top of the fence. He boosted himself up, swung a leg over, and dropped down on the other side. His left foot landed on a loose pile of bricks that promptly slid out from under him. His ankle buckled under his weight and bright pain lanced up his leg. He fell with a thud and cried out in mingled hurt and surprise as more bricks dug into his ribcage like thick, rude fists.
He simply lay where he was for a moment, waiting to get his breath back. He didn’t think he was badly hurt, but he’d twisted his ankle and it would probably swell. He’d be walking with a limp by the time he got home. He’d just have to grin and bear it, though; he sure didn’t have cab-fare.
You don’t really plan to go home, do you? They’ll eat you alive.
Well, maybe they would and maybe they wouldn’t. So far as he could see, he didn’t have much choice in the matter. And that was for later. Right now he was going to explore this lot which had drawn him as surely as a magnet draws steel shavings. That feeling of power was still all around him, he realized, and stronger than ever. He didn’t think this was just a vacant lot. Something was going on here, some-tiling big. He could feel it thrumming in the air, like loose volts escaping from the biggest power-plant in the world.
As he got up, Jake saw that he had actually fallen lucky. Close by was a nasty jumble of broken glass. If he’d fallen into that, he might have cut himself very badly.
That used to be the show window, Jake thought. When the deli was still here, you could stand on the sidewalk and look in at all the meats and cheeses. They used to hang them on strings. He didn’t know how he knew this, but he did-knew it beyond a shadow of a doubt.
He looked around thoughtfully and then walked a little farther into the lot. Near the middle, lying on the ground and half-buried in a lush growth of spring weeds, was another sign. Jake knelt beside it, pulled it upright, and brushed the dirt away. The letters were faded, but he could still make them out:
And below it, spray-painted in that same red-fading-to-pink, was this puzzling sentence: HE HOLDS US ALL WITHIN HIS MIND.
This is the place, Jake thought. Oh yes.
He let the sign fall back, stood up, and walked deeper into the lot, moving slowly, looking at everything. As he moved, that sensation of power grew. Everything he saw-the weeds, the broken glass, the clumps of bricks-seemed to stand forth with a kind of exclamatory force. Even the potato chip bags seemed beautiful, and the sun had turned a discarded beer-bottle into a cylinder of brown fire.
Jake was very aware of his own breathing, and of the sunlight falling upon everything like a weight of gold. He suddenly understood that he was standing on the edge of a great mystery, and he felt a shudder-half terror and half wonder-work through him.
It’s all here. Everything. Everything is still here.
The weeds brushed at his pants; burdocks stuck to his socks. The breeze blew a Ring-Ding wrapper in front of him; the sun reflected off it and for a moment the wrapper was filled with a beautiful, terrible inner glow.
“Everything is still here,” he repeated to himself, unaware that his face was filling with its own inner glow. “Everything.”
He was hearing a sound-had been hearing it ever since he entered the lot, in fact. It was a wonderful high humming, inexpressibly lonely and inexpressibly lovely. It might have been the sound of a high wind on a deserted plain, except it was alive. It was, he thought, the sound of a thousand voices singing some great open chord. He looked down and realized there were faces in the tangled weeds and low bushes and heaps of bricks. Faces.
“What are you?” Jake whispered. “Who are you?” There was no answer, but he seemed to hear, beneath the choir, the sound of hoof-beats on the dusty earth, and gunfire, and angels calling hosannahs from the shadows. The faces in the wreckage seemed to turn as he passed. They seemed to follow his progress, but no evil intent did they bear. He could see Forty-sixth Street, and the edge of the U.N. Building on the other side of First Avenue, but the buildings did not matter-New York did not matter. It had become as pale as window-glass.
The humming grew. Now it was not a thousand voices but a million, an open funnel of voices rising from the deepest well of the universe. He caught names in that group voice, but could not have said what they were. One might have been Marten. One might have been Cuthbert. Another might have been Roland-Roland of Gilead.
There were names; there was a babble of conversation that might have been ten thousand entwined stories; but above all was that gorgeous, swelling hum, a vibration that wanted to fill his head with bright white light. It was, Jake realized with a joy so overwhelming that it threatened to burst him to pieces, the voice of Yes; the voice of White; the voice of Always. It was a great chorus of affirmation, and it sang in the empty lot. It sang for him.
Then, lying in a cluster of scrubby burdock plants, Jake saw the key… and beyond that, the rose.
17
His LEGS BETRAYED HIM and he fell to his knees. He was vaguely aware that he was weeping, even more vaguely aware that he had wet his pants a little. He crawled forward on his knees and reached toward the key lying in the snarl of burdocks. Its simple shape was one he seemed to have seen in his dreams:
He thought: The little s-shape at the end-that’s the secret.
As he closed his hand around the key, the voices rose in a harmonic shout of triumph. Jake’s own cry was lost in the voice of that choir, lie saw the key flash white within his fingers, and felt a tremendous jolt of power run up his arm. It was as if he had grasped a live high-tension wire, but there was no pain.
He opened Charlie the Choo-Choo and put the key inside. Then his eyes fixed upon the rose again, and he realized that it was the real key- the key to everything. He crawled toward it, his face a flaming corona of light, his eyes blazing wells of blue fire.
The rose was growing from a clump of alien purple grass.
As Jake neared this clump of alien grass, the rose began to open before his eyes. It disclosed a dark scarlet furnace, petal upon secret petal, each burning with its own secret fury. He had never seen anything so intensely and utterly alive in his whole life.
And now, as he stretched one grimy hand out toward this wonder, the voices began to sing his own name… and deadly fear began to steal in toward the center of his heart. It was as cold as ice and as heavy as stone.
There was something wrong. He could feel a pulsing discord, like a deep and ugly scratch across some priceless work of art or a deadly fever smoldering beneath the chilly skin of an invalid’s brow.
It was something like a worm. An invading worm. And a shape. One which lurks just beyond the next turn of the road.