Flossie sniffed at the base of a tree, checked that he was still there, and trotted on.
The worst part of the story was that he had allowed Linda to go into the child's room alone. Sitting at the de Peyser table, woozy, even more exhausted than he was now, he had sensed that the entire situation was somehow false, that he was unknowingly playing a part in a game. That was what he had not told Otto: that sense of wrongness which had come over him during dinner. Beneath the food's absence of taste had lain the faint taste of garbage, and in the same way beneath the superficial chatter of Florence de Peyser had lain something which had made him see himself as a marionette forced into dance. Feeling that, why had he continued to sit, to struggle to appear normal-why hadn't he taken Linda by the arm and hurried out?
Don too had said something about feeling like a player in a game.
Because they know you well enough to know what you will do. That is why you stayed. Because they knew you would.
The slight wind shifted; turned colder. The hound lifted its nose, sniffed and turned into the direction of the wind. She began to move more quickly.
"Flossie!" he yelled. The hound, already thirty yards ahead of him and visible only when he saw it coursing between the trees, emerged into an opening and glanced back at Lewis over its shoulder. Then she amazed Lewis by lowering her head and growling. The next second she flashed away.
Looking ahead, he saw only the bushy shapes of fir trees, interspersed with the bare skeletons of other trees, standing on ground mottled white. Melting snow moved sluggishly downhill. His feet were cold. Finally he heard the dog barking, and went toward the sound.
When he finally saw the dog, she began to whine. She was standing in a small glacial hollow, and Lewis was at the hollow's upper edge. Boulders like Easter Island statues, crusted with quartz, littered the bottom of the hollow. The dog glanced up at him, whined again, wriggled her body, and then flattened out alongside one of the boulders. "Come back, Flossie," he said. The dog pressed herself onto the ground, switching her tail.
"What is it?" he asked her.
He stepped into the hollow and slipped two yards down on cold mud. The dog barked once sharply, then turned in a tight circle and flattened herself out again on the ground. She was looking at a stand of fir trees growing up on the far side of the hollow. As Lewis slogged through the mud, Flossie crept forward toward the trees.
"Don't go in there," he said. The dog crept up to the first of the trees, whining; then it disappeared under the branches.
He tried to call it out. The hound would not return. No sound came from within the thick cluster of firs. Frustrated, Lewis looked up at the sky and saw heavy clouds scudding on the north wind. The two days' respite from snow was over.
"Flossie."
The dog did not reappear, but as he looked at the dense curtain of fir needles he saw an astonishing thing. Stitched into the pattern of needles and branches was the outline of a door. A dump of dark needles formed the handle. It was the most perfect optical illusion he had ever seen: even the hinges were represented.
Lewis took a step forward. He was at the spot where Flossie had flattened herself out on the ground. The illusion grew more perfect the closer to the trees he went. Now the needles seemed almost to be suggesting the grain of polished wood. It was the way they alternated colors and shades, darker green above lighter above darker, a random pattern solidifying into the whorls on a slab of monkeywood.
It was the door to his bedroom.
Lewis slowly went up the other side of the hollow toward the door. He went close enough to touch the smooth wood.
It wanted him to open it. Lewis stood in his wet boots in a cold, lifting breeze and knew that all the inexplicable occurrences of his life since that day in 1929 had led him to this: they put him in front of an impossible door to an unforseeable experience. If he had just been thinking that the story of Linda's death was-as Don said of the story of Alma Mobley-without point or ending, then there behind the door was its meaning. Even then Lewis knew that the door led not to one room but many.
Lewis could not refuse it. Otto, rubbing his hands before a twigfire, was only a part of an existence too trivial to insist on its worth-too trivial to hold to. For Lewis, who had already made his decision, his past, especially the latest years in Milburn, was dull lead, a long ache of boredom and uselessness from which he had been shown the way out.
Thus Lewis turned the brass knob and fell into his place in the puzzle.
He stepped, as he knew he would, into a bedroom. He recognized it immediately: the sunny bedroom, filled with Spanish flowers, of the ground-floor apartment he and Linda had kept in the hotel. A silky Chinese rug stretched beneath his feet to each of the room's corners; flowers in vases, still hungry for the sun, picked up the golds, reds and blues of the rug and shone them back. He turned around, saw the closing door, and smiled. Sun streamed through the twin windows. Looking out, he saw a green lawn, a railed precipice and the top of the steps down to the sea which glimmered below. Lewis went to the canopied bed. A dark blue velvet dressing gown lay folded across its foot. At peace, Lewis surveyed the entire lovely room.
Then the door to the lounge opened, and Lewis turned smiling to his wife. In the haze of his utter happiness, he moved forward, extending his arms. He stopped when he saw that she was crying.
"Darling, what's wrong? What happened?"
She raised her hands: across them lay the body of a short-haired dog. "One of the guests found her lying on the patio. Everybody was just coming out from lunch, and when I got there they were all standing around staring at the poor little thing. It was horrible, Lewis."
Lewis leaned over the body of the dog and kissed Linda's cheek. "I'll take care of it, Linda. But how the devil did it get there?"
"They said someone threw it out of a window… oh, Lewis, who in the world would do a thing like that?"
"I'll take care of it. Poor sweetie. Just sit down for a minute." He took the corpse of the dog from his wife's hands. "I'll straighten it out. Don't worry about it anymore."
"But what are you going to do with it?" she wailed.
"Bury it in the rose garden next to John, I guess."
"That's good. That's lovely."
Carrying the dog, he went toward the lounge door, then paused. "Lunch went all right otherwise?"
"Yes, fine. Florence de Peyser invited us to join her in the suite for dinner tonight. Will you feel like it after all that tennis? You're sixty-five, remember."
"No, I'm not." Lewis faced her with a puzzled expression. "I'm married to you, so I'm fifty. You're making me old before my time!"
"Absentminded me," Linda said. "Really, I could just kick myself."
"I'll be right back with a much better idea," Lewis said, and went through the door to the lounge.
The dog's weight slipped off his hands, and everything changed. His father was walking toward him across the floor of the parsonage living room. "Two more points, Lewis. Your mother deserves a little consideration, you know. You treat this house as though it were a hotel. You come in at all hours of the night." His father reached the armchair behind which Lewis stood, swerved off in the direction of the fireplace, and then marched back to the other side of the room, still talking. "Sometimes, I am told, you drink spirits. Now I am not a prudish man, but I will not tolerate that. I know you are sixty-five-"
"Seventeen," Lewis said.
"Seventeen, then. Don't interrupt. No doubt you think that is very grown up. But you will not drink spirits while you live under this roof, is that understood? And I want you to begin showing your age by helping your mother with the cleaning. This room is henceforth your responsibility. You must dust and clean it once a week. And see to the grate in the mornings. Is that clear?"