Yes, all right, they are real. I won’t be afraid, if you tell me not to be afraid.
I do tell you so. Now. Do you remember the day when you were tested? I want you to remember that day.
Tested?
The day, said Vivian, when I let you lie with me. Did you see the Sword on that day, Simon? I think you may have seen it.
He wanted to keep silent, but it was hopeless, his thoughts burst out. Oh, damn you, damn you, Vivian. All I’ve ever been able to remember is how you let me fumble at your body. All I’ve ever really wanted since then is to have you again. To have what you wouldn’t give me even then.
But what he wanted did not interest Vivian. I’m going to send you back to that day, Simon. I’m going to send you wherever I must, to find the Sword. We must discover where it is now.
Simon didn’t ask what Sword. He had seen it in one vision already.
You are going to walk what you call the secret passage. With my help it can take you to many places, many times. If we must, we will follow the Sword forward through the centuries from the day when it was forged. But first we’ll try that day just fifteen years ago. You can do it, for me. We must find where the Sword is now.
I’ll try, Vivian. Vivian.
You must do more than try. When you have found the Sword, Simon, then I will tell you my true name. And then I will give you the secret thing that you have always wanted. The secret thing, most precious and intense, that lies behind the door of sex.
Oh, I want you, Vivian. For a moment Simon saw only the vision that was always with him, that one day had been reality, Vivian as a young girl naked, inviting him, beckoning him on. He tried to reach for her.
Not yet, dear Simon. I want so much to love you, but not yet. First you must find the Sword. Magic that you must penetrate conceals it. No one, not even I, not even Falerin, can find things, see things, as well as you can. In that magic you have the potential to be supreme.
In a momentary flash of clear physical vision, Simon knew that he was standing again in the blasted doorway that led to the once-secret passage. His attempt at a performance had been used by Vivian to key the forces that had torn it open to the mundane world. And now Vivian was about to send him into it.
Find the Sword for me, Simon. Here begins your search, in your own past.
And he was drifting on the Sauk in the old rowboat, the almost paintless hulk that in all the childhood summers he could remember had been tied up at the old willow stump at Frenchman’s Bend. The boat wandered with the motion of an almost lifeless current between two jungled islands. Simon was alone, lying on his back in the bottom of the old boat, with a little sunwarmed leakage water flowing and ebbing gently around him. He was wearing the old remembered green swimming trunks and nothing else. His feet were up on the middle seat, and a clear warm summer sky was over him. Insects droned from the island shores, and there was an almost fleshy smell of mud.
When he was back in the city between vacations, going through the dull routine of school, Simon’s memories of Frenchman’s Bend drew in color and interest. But the glamour applied by his restless imagination tended to disappear quickly when he returned to the real place. The river had shrunken, every time he saw it again, turned muddier and dirtier than the Sauk he thought that he remembered. And most of the people appeared somehow shrunken too, even if months of growth had actually made the young ones physically larger. When reality seemed inadequate Simon’s imagination tended to come back into play.
He was letting it take over now, as he lay on his back in the heat of the sun with his eyes half closed. He was thinking, as he so often did, about Vivian. He was concentrating, as he usually did when he thought of her, on that day last summer when Simon and her little brother Saul had tried to talk her, dare her, into going into the river naked while they watched.
The effort had been a tantalizing near-success. Vivian had waded in in her bikini—watching her play around in that was maddening enough, for Simon at fourteen—and then, once up to her shoulders in the opaque brown water, she’d slipped quickly out of the suit, holding up the two pieces of it for them to see, and laughing that she’d won the bet. Simon had rowed his boat toward her, but before he could get very close the suit was somehow on again.
The whole business, of course, had really been Vivian’s idea from the start. No one ever talked or teased or bet her into doing anything but what she wanted to.
Simon sunning in the bottom of the boat at age fifteen couldn’t let this memory dwell on that scene for more than about two seconds without a physical reaction starting. That was okay. Pretty soon he’d pull down his trunks and do something about it. But there was no rush.
He’d closed his eyes now fully against the sun, and was letting his imagination work on the remembered image of Vivian laughing at him, shoulder-deep in water. It was coming clearer and clearer. She held up her suit, panties in one hand, bra in the other. Her smile in the image was becoming inviting, beckoning, not the taunting expression it had been in reality. And now she was starting to wade towards him.
Simon sometimes felt a little frightened at the things his imagination could do for him. He’d never, for example, seen a real live girl completely unclothed. But when in a hundred hot deliberate dreams since last summer he’d brought Vivian out of the water naked, every detail of uncharted anatomy was as clear as something from a motion picture frame. And Simon couldn’t resist doing it that way, usually, seeing more and more detail, even if it did tend to get a little scary.
Now he brought the image of Vivian wading into water only knee-deep, smiling at him, displaying herself. He hooked his thumbs in the waistband of his trunks, and then immediately worried that maybe he ought to row over to an island first, get among bushes where he could be absolutely sure of a few minutes’ privacy. Not that anyone was likely to see him where he was now, but—
A high-pitched voice shattered his daydream, calling from some distance away. “Yeeoh, Simon!”
Vivian vanished, reality returned with a rush. In confusion Simon sat up in the boat, tugging his trunks as straight as he could. A craft he recognized as Gregory’s white canoe was sixty yards or so downstream, being paddled up toward him by one person. In a moment Simon recognized Saul Littlewood.
She’s here, was Simon’s first thought. If Vivian’s little brother is here in Frenchman’s Bend today, then so is she.
Saul was waving a greeting. Simon waved back, then took up one of his oars. Using it like a paddle, he made slow headway to meet the canoe’s advance.
“Yo,” Simon called back, when the canoe with the younger boy in it was closer. “I didn’t know you guys were here.”
Now Saul with a delicate touch of paddle brought canoe sideways against boat; and Simon with his stronger hands gripped both gunwales, holding the two craft clamped together.
Saul was wearing cutoff jeans, and a new, expensive-looking T-shirt with an elaborate pattern. He was dark-haired, of average size and chunky build. As was to be expected for a twelve-year-old, he’d grown considerably in the nine months or so since Simon had seen him last.
“We ain’t gonna be here long,” Saul said now. “We’re driving home again tomorrow morning.”
“Oh.” Then I’ve got to see her today, before she leaves. Vivian and Saul lived most of the year with their parents in one of the far northern suburbs of Chicago, closer to Simon’s home in the city than either place was to Frenchman’s Bend. Yet Simon had never seen them anywhere but here. In fact he had never met them, had known only vaguely of their existence, until just last summer.
Saul, watching Simon closely, said: “So why don’t you come up to the castle now? Vivian’s there. She was saying to me she wished you were around.”