Looking up at her, he made horns of his forefinger and smallest finger, which he jabbed threateningly in Candy’s direction. No doubt had he possessed the power to strike her dead on the spot, dead she would have been. But all he could do was curse and point, so she left him to it and went back to search for the missing ball.
As she did so, she heard Mischief yelling up at her from outside. Obviously he’d heard the din.
“I’m coming in, Lady Candy!”
She went to the outer door and called down to him.
“No! Stay where you are. You can’t get up here anyway. The stairs have collapsed!”
She saw him looking through the holes in the tower wall to confirm what she’d told him. He was aghast.
“How will you get down?” he said, apparently more concerned with her safety now than with the oldest game in the world.
“I’ll find a way when the time comes,” Candy said. “First I’m going to find this stupid ball.”
“We’re coming in!” he said again.
“Wait!” she told him. “You just stay there. Please!’
Without waiting for an answer, she went down on her haunches and started a systematic search of the floor, looking for the missing part of this bizarre puzzle. It was not immediately visible, but there were several places where the boards had rotted completely, leaving holes in the floor. She went to each one, pulling up the worm-eaten boards to get a better look at what lay beneath. They came away easily, in showers of splinters, dust and dried beetle corpses.
The first hole revealed nothing. The second, the same. But the third was the charm. There it was: rolled away under the boards. A small turquoise-and-silver ball. She had to tear away a little more of the rotted boards before she could fish it out between her fingers. When she finally succeeded, she discovered that it was surprisingly heavy for its size. It wasn’t wood or plastic; it was metal. And elegantly engraved on its blue-green surface was a design she knew! There it was, etched into the metaclass="underline" the doodle she’d drawn so obsessively in her workbook.
She didn’t have any time to wonder at this. Behind her she heard a series of fierce grunts from the stairwell, followed by another crash. She knew in an instant what was going on. In his ambition to get to her, Shape had dared to try and jump the gap in the stairs.
She glanced up at the door, which stood open a few inches. Through it she could see Shape. He had succeeded in leaping over the gap, and he was coming up the remaining stairs two at a time, his razor claws making a horrid squeal on the timbers that lined the stairwell.
Candy looked at the small, simple cup that sat on the pyramid. Mischief’s words echoed in her head.
Light’s the oldest game in the world—
Shape was at the door, staring with one pinprick pupil through the crack at Candy, his jaws wide, dripping foam like the maw of a mad dog. He started to sing his lullaby, again, but more softly now, more liltingly.
As he sang he pushed the door, slowly, as though this was some game.
Candy didn’t have time to cross to the pyramid and put the ball in the cup. If she wasted those three or four seconds then Shape would be through the door and tearing out her throat, no doubt of it.
She had no choice: she had to play the game.
She took a deep breath and threw the ball. It wasn’t a good throw. The ball hit the edge of the cup instead of landing in it, and for several seconds it circled the rim, threatening to topple out.
“Please,” she willed it quietly, staring at the ball like a gambler watching a roulette wheel, knowing she had this throw and only this throw; there would be no second chance.
And still the ball rolled around the rim of the cup, undecided where to fall.
“Go on,” she murmured, trying to ignore the creak of the door behind her.
The ball made one last, lazy circle of the rim, and then rocked back and forth for a moment and toppled into the cup, rattling around for a few seconds, before finally settling.
Shape let out a sound that was as far from human as any throat that was fashioned like his could make: a profound din that rose from a hiss to the noise of a creature tormented to the edge of madness. As he loosed this unearthly sound, he pushed open the door, threw Candy aside and reached for the ball so as to snatch it out of the cup.
But the tower was having none of that. Some process beyond Candy’s comprehension had begun with that simple throw of hers. An invisible force was in the air, and it pitched Shape back, its power sufficient to carry him out through the door.
Outside, Candy heard Mischief and his brothers whooping like a pack of ecstatic dogs. Though they couldn’t possibly see what she’d done, they knew she’d succeeded. Nor was it hard for Candy to understand how they knew. There was a wave of pure energy emanating from the pyramid. She felt the fine hairs at the base of her skull starting to prickle, and behind her eyes the design of the ball burned blue and green and gold.
She retreated a step, then another, her eyes fixed on the ball, cup, and pyramid.
And then, to her astonishment, the pyramid began to move on its pinpoint axis. It quickly gathered speed, and as it did so a fire seemed to be ignited in its heart, and a silvery luminescence—flickering tentatively at first but quickly becoming solid and strong—flowed out through the designs on the sides of the device.
It was just before noon in Minnesota; even with a thin cloud layer covering the sun, the day was still bright. But the light that now began to spill through the hieroglyphics on the spinning pyramid was brighter still. They were brilliant streams, pouring out in all directions.
She heard a soft, almost mournful, noise from Mendelson Shape. She glanced over at him. He was staring at the device with all the malice, all the intent to do harm, drained from his face. He was apparently resigned to whatever happened next. He could do nothing about the phenomenon except watch it.
“Now look what you’ve done,” he said, very, very softly.
“What exactly have I done?” she said.
“See for yourself,” he replied, and for a moment he unhooked his gaze from the spinning pyramid so as to nod out at the world, beyond the lighthouse.
She didn’t have any fear of turning her back on him now. At least until this miraculous process was over, it seemed, he was pacified.
She went to the door and stepped out, over the hole she’d made, to stand on the platform and see what she, and the game of ball and cup, had brought into being.
The first thing she noticed was the blossom-cloud. It was no longer moving slowly, responding to the gentle dictates of the wind. It was moving speedily overhead, like an immense golden wheel with the tower in which she stood as its axis.
She stood and admired the sight for a few moments, amazed at it. Then she looked down at the John brothers, who had turned their faces from the tower and were all looking out across the wide expanse of open prairie. What were they looking at? she wondered. She knew there was nothing out there for many miles, not so much as a house. For some reason, though the suburbs of Chickentown had spread in every other direction from the heart of the town, they had never spread northwest beyond Widow White’s house. This was empty land; unused, unwanted.
And yet, there was something out there that John Mischief and his siblings wanted to see. Mischief was cupping his hands over his eyes as he stared into the faraway.
Candy could feel the light from the pyramid like a physical presence, pressing against her back. It wasn’t an unpleasant sensation. In fact, it was quite pleasurable. She imagined that she could sense the power of the light passing through her body, lending her its strength. She seemed to feel it being carried through her veins, spilling out of her pores and out on her breath. It was just a trick her mind was playing, she suspected. But then, perhaps not. Today she couldn’t be certain of anything.