Whitened by the moonlight, her face altered and the tears stopped. She wiped her eyes. 'Of course. Of course myself too.'
'But we have something in common, don't we?'
Rose turned away from him and began to go back toward the hall.
'Why did he say you couldn't leave?'
Rose looked over his shoulder at him, slipped into the blackness beyond the doorway.
'Why does it. . . ?' Why does it hurt you so to walk? He gingerly put his right hand a few inches into his pocket and touched one of the sections of the broken shepherdess. He tweezed it out. The top half of a girl.
The top half of a girl.
Like . . .
Tom went toward the door and out into the corridor, following her. 'Rose?' He threw the broken thing aside.
A thunderous noise from outside — WHAMP! WHAMP! — as if, yes, just as if a gigantic bird, a bird larger than the house, were battering it down with its wings.
'Rose!'
'and now, ladies and gentlemen, the famous window of flame!'
A blast of heat rocked him backward, and he shouted her name again. A second later, the point at which the corridor entered the other wing of the house flared into bright flame. Rose was running back toward him, covering her face with her hands. Inside the solid flame, something was writhing and turning, twisting into itself like a hundred snakes.
Rose ran until she careered into him, and then she put her arms around his chest. Black stains spread along the ceiling; the glass on one. of the framed posters shattered with a loud cracking noise.
'It is snakes,' Tom said, watching the writhing forms within the solid flame.
'No. It's me,' Rose said into his shirt.
He saw. Vines curled and twisted, the heads of roses flailed, impaling themselves on the thorns, stabbing themselves so they bled . . . the glass over another poster exploded.
BANG! Another gigantic wing beat from outside. Inside Tom's shirt, Del quivered and tried to flatten himself into nothing.
The blood was petals, dropping away and being consumed. But the whole flowers would not be consumed, they would twist in agony until the flowers died or disappeared.
'and the window of ice!'
As the heat had preceded fire, an intense chill poured through the corridor a moment before the fire froze into place, turned gray-white and monumental.
The orange light disappeared with the fire, and a single white spot glowed down from the ceiling on a version of Coleman Collins. He was leaning against the glacial wall in an open-collared chambray shirt. 'You could have gone that way, you know, but that would have been too easy — especially since you escaped your drink in the living room. I rather expected you to work your way out of that one, you know. Congratulations!'
'Change Del back,' Tom said.
'For that, you'll have to speak to the original,' the shadow said) 'He's still waiting. He wants to see the end of the performance, too. It's been a long time, you know. Over thirty years.' The shadow smiled. 'In the meantime, did you enjoy the picture of little Rose's plight?'
Behind him, the impaled and twisted blossoms hung half-visible in the ice.
'The rose that wounds itself,' the shadow mused. 'Poignant, isn't it? But not half so poignant if you know she wanted it. Prayed for it. Begged for it. Perhaps not unlike how your old friend Mr. Ridpath begged to be fitted into that contraption.' He nodded at the collapsed and singed Collector, which lay heaped against the wall.
Another gigantic wingbeat pounded at the house, and this one was followed by the unmistakable noise of the glass doors in the living room shattering beneath the blow.
'We are all getting impatient with you, Mr. Flanagan,' the shadow said. 'Why don't you locate the old king and settle the issue?'
'I'm trying to do that,' Tom said. 'Damn you.'
The shadow clapped his hands, and the wall of ice slid out of existence, becoming so transparent that the frozen roses blazed out a moment before they too faded into transparency. 'Your friend should be able to help you distinguish the real from the false. Or don't you remember your old stories?'
Then he too was gone, leaving behind him the impression of a smile and the smells of singed carpet and blistered paint.
'What old stories, Rose?' He turned on her. 'Tell me. What stories did he mean? If you knew all along . . . '
She stepped backward, alarmed. 'Not me,' she said. 'He didn't mean me. He couldn't have.'
Tom could have screamed with frustration. 'There isn't anyone else. He did mean you.'
'I think he meant Del,' Rose said.
26
'Think,' Rose said. 'You know, and he knows you know. Remember it, Tom.'
'Del?' It was an almost fantastically cruel joke. 'It can't be.' He fumbled with two shirt buttons, working them with thumb and index finger until the flat white disks found the holes. Del flopped out onto his palm; the wings feebly stretched. 'Oh, my God. Oh, Del.'
'Think about what he said,' Rose pleaded.
Another pane of the glass door exploded into the living room.
'We read stories in English class,' Tom said, frantically trying to remember . . . a sparrow? 'We read 'The Goose Girl.' We read 'Brother and Sister.' We read . . . shit. It's no use. 'The Fisherman and His Wife.' 'The Two Brothers.' It's no good.' What he remembered was how birds had plagued him: how a robin on the lawn had looked in through a window and drilled him with its eyes; a starling in a Quantum Heights tree quizzing him as the world revolved and witches filled the sky.
'It's no good,' Tom said. 'Our teacher said . . . ah, in 'Cinderella,' he said a bird was the messenger of the spirit. A bird gave her pretty clothes. Another bird took out the stepsisters' eyes. Oh, wait. Wait. It's 'Cinderella.'' He held Del out from his body. 'Birds tell the prince that the stepsisters are not to be his bride. They make him find Cinderella. The birds make him find the right bride.' ,
In the darkness Rose was looking up at him with gleaming eyes. Del stirred on his bandaged palm.
'Find him,' Tom whispered, feeling half-exalted, half-sick with the impossibility of both his task and Del's. 'Find him.'
Del's head lifted; his wings unfurled. And Tom's heart loosened too, and overflowed. On his bloody, aching hands the bird opened its wings and beat them down. Once. Twice. Go, little bird. Go, Del. A third time the wings opened and beat down, and the sparrow lifted off Tom's hands.
The messenger of spirit swooped into the air. Find him. For us, for you. Find him.
The messenger circled in the dark air above them, then settled once on Tom's shoulder — a gesture like a pat on the head, a gesture of love — and took off down the corridor.
27
They followed it, stumbling past the abandoned Collector in the dark, past the entrance to the forbidden room, past the door to the Little Theater. Del flew in rapid, excited circles before the Grand Theatre des Illusions, darting again and again at the door.
Rose reached the door before Tom.
Another gigantic wingbeat rattled the entire back of the house. Tom heard the case in the living room toppling over, breaking the glass doors and splintering the wood. Inside it, the porcelain figures would be smashed and crumbled into each other.
'What is that outside?' Rose asked.
'An owl. Another messenger.'
'It's not him?'
'No. It means someone is going to die,' Tom said. 'It means someone should have died already. The performance was supposed to end a little while after they . . . ' He almost swooned, remembering precisely how Collins had held the glowing nails and used them to rape his hands. 'Stay out here,' he said.