Robert smiled. "At the right moment, you always say 'Yes.' "
This unexpected allusion to my recurring dream gave me the beginning of an idea. "You must have paid a visit to New Providence Road."
I had taken him unawares. "Where?"
"Howard Dunstan's old house. The one Sylvan reconstructed with the original stones from Providence."
"That place is bad luck. It's like black magic, it'll eat you alive."
“It's where you always wanted me to go," I said.
Robert gathered himself before once more regarding me with what appeared to be absolute sincerity. "You're talking about the dreams you used to have. They weredreams. I wasn't in charge. You were. That's how dreams work—you're saying something toyourself."
"How do you know what my dreams were about?"
"We were supposed to be the same person," he said. “It's not surprising that we should have the same dreams now and then."
I wondered what would have happened if Robert and I had been born into the same body and felt a disorienting rush of emotions, a kind of swoon made equally of attraction and repulsion. I heard Howard Dunstan say,We flew from the crack in the golden howl. We are smoke from the cannon's mouth. We had flown through the flaw in the bowl and been ripped from the pockets of fallen soldiers—it was as good as any other explanation for the joy, equal to but more powerful than the fear that accompanied it, flooding through me.
"Whatever you are, you're my brother," I said. “It's even more than that. You're half of me."
“I fought this." Robert shivered in his chair. "You have no idea." He turned his head away before looking back with a quantity of feeling that equaled mine. “I despised you. You can't imagine my resentment. I hardlyknew our mother. You got tolive with her, at least off and on, and when you couldn't, she visited you. She sent you birthday cards. I didn't have any of that. Robert was stuck away in the shadows. Star had to protect her little Ned. We only met once."
A recognition with the force of a locomotive moved into me.
"Yes?" Robert said.
“It was our ninth birthday. Something happened. I got sick the day before."
"No kidding," Robert said.
“I didn't get there in time. Wherever it was."
"You almost got me killed," Robert said.
“I had a fever, and I couldn't get out of bed. Star came into our room. I thought I was safe, because my seizures usually hit me in the middle of the afternoon. She was standing next to my cot. . . . Where were you? Where did I go?"
"That year, it was the Anscombes," Robert said. "Or so they called themselves. They took me in because their own kid died."
"Oh, my God," I said. "You were in Boulder."
"Until then, I could always feel him sniffing me out in time to get away. That year, you picked the wrong day to get sick, and I didn't feel anything."
Inside my head, Frank Sinatra sang the wordFight at the top of a beat and hung back for a long, stretched-out moment before coming in with:
fight,
fight it with aaall of your might...
and on the downward curve of the phrase, everything I had chosen to forget came flooding back to me. “I was you," I said.
•79
•By 10:00 P.M. of their mutual birthday in 1967, Ned Dunstan and the boy known as "Bobby Anscombe" imagined themselves safe from the annual trial. Ned had spent the previous day and most of this one in a fever that spun him between dehydrated exhaustion and episodes of cinematic delirium. The fever had peaked before sundown, leaving him soaked in sweat, thirsty, and rational enough to think that he had deflected his annual seizure. "Bobby Anscombe" had received none of the signals—a sense of electricity in the air, an intermittent tingle running along both of his arms, sudden glimpses of a scatter of bright blue dots floating at the corners of his vision—that came to him two or three days before his birthday and announced that it was time to surrender again, until his next release into the human world and the care of a couple who would take him in because they would recognize him as family, to the formless void in which most of his ravenous childhood had been spent. "Bobby" was kneeling on the attic floor, wondering how much money would not be missed if he removed it from the leather trunk he had discovered behind an unfinished wall. Another cache of bills was secreted in the kitchen, but "Michael Anscombe" kept his eye on that one. Ned Dunstan lay on Star's bed, the sweaty sheet thrust aside, while his mother stroked his forehead.
•In the bedroom on Cherry Street, Ned felt a great pressure settling down upon his body, as if the air had doubled in weight. A buzzing sensation he knew too well moved into his chest and traveled along his nerves. When his mother leaned over him, the deep green of her blouse and the black at the center of her eyes blazed and shimmered.
•Something had happened within the house, Robert could not tell what. An unexpected noise, a shift in the air currents, an opened door, a footstep on the attic stairs? If "Mike Anscombe" had checked his bedroom, he would have to invent an excuse for his disobedience, fast. "Mike Anscombe" had no tolerance for disobedience. Robert scuttled toward the attic door, and blue flames shot through the gaps in the floorboards.
•Ned's body stiffened, twitched upward, and slammed back down on themattress. Before be plummeted away, he saw Star's stricken face glide toward him.
Through walls of blue fire, he was rushing behind Mr. X up an asphalt driveway toa suburban house with a conspicuous new addition on its left side. A bicycle leaned on its kickstand. A flat-faced moon glared down from above a row of mountain peaks unreal as a backdrop. Fir trees scented the chill night air.
Theatrically, Mr. X pressed the bell. When the door opened, he rammed a knife into the belly of the man before him and walked him backward. The invisible pressure that had blown Ned up the asphalt drive pushed him into the room. From speakers on either side of the fireplace, the voice of Frank Sinatra unrolled a long phrase about an immovable object and an old, irresistible force.
•Robert stood listening at the attic door.
•“Mr. Anscombe, I presume," said Mr. X.
The man gaped at the purple ropes sliding out of his body. In an unexpected atmospheric shift that returned to him the odd memory of a stuffed fox lifting its paw within a glass bell, Ned took advantage of Mr. X's pleasure in his task and stepped backward until he struck the door. Veils of blue fire drifted over the walls, and Frank Sinatra insisted that someone had to be kissed.
Gleeful Mr. X opened "Michael Anscombe's" throat.
Ned glanced to his left and through an intervening wall caught a snapshot-like vision of a heavy woman with tangled blond hair lying in bed readingGoodnight Moon. With the vision came certain unhappy information: the woman on the bed had given birth to a dead child who had been horribly, appallinglywrong.
Ned raced into a brief hallway ending at a closed door. Before him, uncarpeted stairs led to another, narrower doorway.
•Robert pressed his hands against the wood and focused on what was going on beneath him. Transparent blue flames licked in past his feet and traveled in bright, ambitious lines across the attic floor. The faint sounds from below told Robert that "Michael Anscombe" had been slit open by a joyous being finally within reach of its quarry. Robert's life depended upon his capacity to evade this predatory being's annual descents into this strange, transitory existence.