The Children(111)

Some other girl played Guinevere. A scrubbed British preteen, her American accent flat as a playing card. None of the movies were as good as they should have been.

Guin turned from the tiny cinema, rubbed raw, wishing to rest her eyes on a place that would evoke nothing. This wasn’t an installation, it was a battlefield, full of foxholes to swallow her, land mines to break her. What she saw next filled her chest with a rusty-nail ache.

Here stood Anne’s studio, its ghastly Graveyard twin. Rustic, ringed with windows meant to look out on trees. Years ago, Ennis dragged her away from it, but he had stopped protecting her long ago. Softly Guin moved closer. Closer. When she peered through the window, a face looked back.

Ennis.

She screamed. Her brother retreated as she did. Because—she bent over her knees, cursing in a whisper—it was a mirror. All the studio’s windows were fitted with mirrors.

A slow recognition began to surface. An incomplete fathoming of what Ennis was doing here. Before she knew the face was her own, what had it looked like to her? Furtive, unresolved. Evil, almost. Evil of an irresolute kind, like something out of Shakespeare.

You can do no good for the dead. She spoke to Anne anyway.

Thank you. I loved you. I wish you’d never met us.

There was nothing to do but go on. Submit to the place’s hidden logic, its onion layering. Then a skillet sound broke the quiet. A bacon-y hiss that fell apart into crackle. Up ahead, its source: on a low platform, beneath a ghost light, the open fold of a record player.

Guitar came in first, a minor key and a curious tuning. Then a voice, cold and clear as a spring rising from stone. Genderless, with a clarity that ran over Guin’s neck.

The folk singer from Virginia. That off-putting Appalachian Goth who was the first of Edith’s acolytes. The first houseguest who wouldn’t leave. Until she did, with a suddenness that was chilling in hindsight. Guin couldn’t even remember the singer’s name, only her outline. Dark bangs, sharp chin, shapeless clothes. The track coaxed the rest of her from the past.

Her eyes had been as pure and sorrowful as an animal’s. The pads of her fingers so callused she didn’t have to lick them to pinch out a candle flame. When she fingerpicked her hands looked like a weaver’s, making gold of the air. The needle lifted, the record stopped. The silence of the Graveyard was restored.

Guin began to run. A steady jog, eyes ahead, the flavor of mothball on her tongue.

There would be something here in remembrance of the waitress. That mean townie who wrote her dazzling poetry in ballpoint in the notebook she left behind. And something, too, for Arthur Borelli.

Unlike Llewellyn, unlike Anne, Arthur was not dead. For years Guin checked used bookshops and the memories of publishing acquaintances for any sign of The Wandering Country’s existence, without luck. Her intermittent googling eventually paid off in an article about student walkouts at an upstate prep school, including a bland quote from security officer Arthur Borelli. The attached photo confirmed it was him. He’d looked a transformed man: stooped and diffident, eyes not quite meeting the camera.

Guin kept running. She had no wish to witness any more dead dreams. When the end came, it happened so suddenly she nearly slammed into it: a wall of fresh plywood, and in it, a door.

A minute ago, she couldn’t have described this door. Standing before it, she knew its every detail. She was tall enough at last to read the words carved faithfully over the lintel.

The time we like the best of all

Is when the shadows creepy crawl



Here, at last, was the heart of the thing. Edith’s writing room. The Third-Floor Room, you might call it, if this were a horror story. The Room of the Seven Windows, if it were a fairy tale. Probably it was both. Ready or not, she thought, and opened the door.





Sixty




The room was exactly as she remembered it. Books on the floor, mugs on the windowsill. A fireplace she’d never seen lit. The chair. The desk.

If she’d thought about it, Guin would have assumed her mother’s desk would operate as so many childhood foes did, shrinking over the years to reveal itself as harmless. But the desk—this perfect reproduction—was worse than she remembered. Its polished wooden body teemed with miniature hands.

Briskly she crossed the room. To open its drawers, release any specters, get it over with. As she did, she glanced out one of the windows.

What she saw stilled her utterly. Made her move trancelike to the glass until she was pressed against it, forehead to thighs.

The Ninth City glittered below. Twilit, unmistakable, seen as if from a vantage point twenty stories high. There was the Pink Hotel, floodlit and barnacled with balconies. There, one of the carnivals forever springing up in the City’s parks and plazas. Farther, so far it was nearly out of sight, the rim of the Green Glass Sea, a vivid rope of aquamarine even at dusk.

Best of all was the Architect’s tree, looming over everything. Brawny as a redwood, awesome as a church. All the keys hanging from it glowed like metal Christmas lights.

Guin’s heart was a tender bruise. Whether this was video projection, optical illusion, hypnosis, or induced chemical dream, she didn’t care. She was a Ninth City kid, too. She was the Ninth City kid.

It lived in her. Its shaded colonnades and shining train cars, the brine-and-searose wind washing over the deck of the Salt Witch. And when she turned back to her mother’s desk, it was with the ridiculous hope that the City was real after all, and something inside might help her reach it.