The wind was a woe but not personal. Spiky black balls blew off the sycamores lining the street. Two of the “special” children sickened and died. At some point in high school Mary got contact lenses and stopped wearing glasses; Eddie was very tall now and slicked his hair back with a comb he carried in a shirt pocket located in the same place as the one the girl with golden hair had flown into years earlier. There was never any question that he and Mary would become sweethearts, but things never went back to being the way they’d been when they were young.
Even so, the look of Eddie — his obvious preoccupation with a secret he kept hidden from everyone, the way he glanced from under his lowered eyelids while counting something off on his fingers, one, two, three—excited Mary; she would sneak out of class to meet him in the last stall in the girls’ bathroom. Though he insisted he wasn’t any different from the way he’d always been, something about him felt completely different to her, almost like he was made of the same material as the horse they had to jump across in gym. Whenever she tried asking him where he’d gone that summer night so many years ago he looked at her like she was crazy. “Don’t be a jerk,” he’d say. “I never went anywhere.”
But she knew Eddie wasn’t telling her the truth. Ever since that night the world had been lit differently — everything had grown brighter, much too bright, really, facing west toward the world’s rim.
Of course he was her date for the prom.
The dress Mary wore was on loan from the robots — the master bedroom closet at number 37 contained many such treasures, though, sadly, the original Mrs. Andersen’s feet had been a lot smaller than hers. The dress, on the other hand, seemed like it had been made for her. “You have to come try it on after school,” Cindy told Mary, the idea being that they were supposed to behave like friends. As far as Mary knew, she was the first person invited inside number 37 since the robots moved to the neighborhood.
The house felt overpoweringly stuffy. The windows were never opened, the robots having no need of air, and the sofa cushions were lumpy and slick, the robots having no need of comfort either. At the time of Mary’s visit they were flying around and around the ceiling fixture, making a faint sound like hedge clippers — as soon as she was gone they planned to roost there and recharge. She could hear the sound they made but she didn’t know what was making it. She could also hear a muffled set of thumps, exactly like the sound a pair of feet might make coming down a flight of stairs, though she couldn’t see anyone. It seemed like the sound was coming from the other side of the wall in number 39, like the way Miss Vicks’s feet sounded to her coming down the stairs in number 49, only heavier. The people who lived in number 39 had moved out right after the robots moved in. A For Sale sign appeared on the front lawn, but it got taken down soon afterward.
Presently something came into the room and sat beside Mary on the sofa. Its physical presence was cold and large and animal-like yet not so heavy that it made a dent in the cushion; it had sour breath with a sweet edge as if it had just eaten those pellets the special children in room 12 fed their guinea pig. This must be Downie, Mary thought.
Before the robots moved into the house the Andersens had lived there. Mr. Andersen had been a famous scientist, Mrs. Andersen a housewife, Cindy and Carol their two lovely daughters. Eventually a third child joined the family. They called him Downie because of the extreme softness of his hair; for some reason his lanugo never fell out, leaving him covered with a beautiful coat of soft, grayish hair. Downie was a large, plump boy, sweet and tender like Mrs. Andersen had been, but he could do nothing for himself, which turned out to be a problem the Andersens didn’t know how to handle. At some point they must have moved him next door into number 39, though Mary couldn’t figure out how he’d managed to get into number 37 without her seeing.
“Mary,” Downie said. “You’re as pretty as Cindy said.”
“Cindy said I was pretty?”
In his lap she could see a bundle of pink fabric that she thought might be the prom dress.
Above her head the robots were going wild. Even though whatever was sitting beside her on the sofa had done nothing to hurt her they knew that if it wanted to it could crack her in two, suck out the meat and throw away the rest, like a person eating a lobster.
“Mary,” Downie said. “I can’t give this to you until we get a few things straight. No no no! Don’t look at me. You can look at me later. Look over there!”
A very old television, one of the ones with a small oval screen in a large wooden box, had come on across the room, but before it did Mary had caught a glimpse of a pair of large sad blue eyes, their blueness swimming around in a wide, open face. There wasn’t much to see in the way of programming, mostly a few ancient reruns. “Good work,” said a man wearing a white cowboy hat and a white shirt laced up the front like a shoe. This was Sky King and he was commending his niece for handing over to him the stolen ruby she had just found tied to a carrier pigeon’s leg. The actor who played the part would die in a car crash on his way to watch the launch of the space shuttle Challenger, later sparing him the sight of what became, for its day, a tragedy of epic proportion.
“Mary Mary Mary!”
Mary continued to stare at the TV but nodded her head to let Downie know she was listening.
“We’re pinning all our hopes on you,” Downie said.
“On me?”
“You’ve got a big job ahead,” Downie said. “You know that, don’t you?”
“A big job?”
The room had grown so still Mary could hear only the sound of something inside herself quietly pounding. The volume on the TV was turned all the way down and the robots were lying on the rug in the light cast by the TV screen, glinting like spilled pocket change.
“A lot of time is going to go by, or at least that’s what it’s going to seem like to you, and the timing is going to have to be just right. More than just right. It’s going to have to be perfect. Everything hinges on its being perfect, like the hinge on a door. If the hinge doesn’t work perfectly the door is useless. Plus you’re not going to get much in the way of advance warning, and by the time you get it you’re going to have forgotten we ever had this conversation. You’re going to have forgotten a lot of things, including what’s at stake. The most important thing to remember is that a duplex’s properties are stretchable but they aren’t infinite. One minute the opening will be right there in front of you, and the next minute you won’t even know where it went. I don’t have to tell you that, do I? You live in one yourself. You’ve heard the way Miss Vicks drops things, the way she bangs the drawers and doors and windows. You’ve had the contact dreams.”
“I’m not sure,” Mary said, thinking. It was true that sometimes while she slept all she saw were great shimmering panels of numbers, as sharply bright and beyond reckon as stars in the sky. Other times she felt something lowering itself into her. It would start pumping and it would be like water entering water through a hose, turning her sleek like a seal and without thoughts but a pulse, and when she woke she’d be drenched in sweat.
On the TV screen the little Cessna Sky King called the Songbird took off, carrying him and his niece home to their ranch in Arizona. Mary felt a hand reach for hers and when she looked, there was Cindy sitting on her other side in her cheerleader uniform. Outside the house Miss Vicks’s dachshund was barking the high-pitched excited barks that could only mean one thing — the sorcerer was in the neighborhood.