Rose looked at him with cautious but ahnost maternal curiosity.
'There's something in this room,' he remembered. 'Rose, I can't leave until I find it.'
'There's nothing here,' she said. And that seemed true.
'Something he said he was going to leave here for me — when he thought I might stay with him. I have to find it.'
'We don't have any time.'
'I don't think it'll take any time.'
He woozily looked over the silvery gray walls. There had been a moment, the day after his 'welcome,' when he had paused at the door and sensed the presence in here of some invisible scene: Shadowland had wanted him to read the Book.
'Hurry!' Rose said. The noises of the fire were advancing down the hall.
'It's here,' he said dreamily. He turned about, still amazed that he could stand. He was looking at the wall opposite the door. Tom walked past the entrance to the tunnels and ran his hands over the wall. It was already warm. He gently moved his hand over the silvery paint.
A panel swung open onto a little recess. The Book lay on a wooden stand, opened in the middle and surrounded by plush. If he had perverted the Book, Collins had at least kept it reverentially. Tom reached in and took the leather-bound volume off the stand. He reached behind his back and slid it under his belt where he had kept the old pistol. 'All right,' he said. 'I'm ready now.'
Rose led the way down into the tunnel.
33
The way back, as it always is, was easier than the way forward. Tom heard no voices, no Twenties Nick sang 'Sweet Sue' and wafted himself another pull of prewar gin; the only noise they heard, and it followed them for half an hour, was the whooshing of the fire that consumed Shadowland: as if that were all Twenties Nick needed to hear before he could go back to his long sleep. The owl had been fed.
'I'm so tired,' Tom said. Rose moved steadily on before him, playing the flashlight on the wooden supports and flaking walls.
Soon he saw then' sleeping bags unrolled in the vaulted cavern. 'Please. I'm going to fall down.'
'The house is only about ten minutes away,' Rose said. 'I have a better idea. You can sleep on the beach. In fresh air.' He followed her back to the summer house.
34
Rubbing his eyes, he came up into the dark living room. The sparrow weighed like a heavy suitcase in his right hand. Rose glimmered before him in the green dress: he realized that she had come barefoot all the way from the house. 'You must want to lie down too,' he said. 'Aren't there beds here? I just have to . . . I could take a nap.' His eyes were burning.
'Whose bed do you want,' Rose said. 'Thorn's or Snail's?'
'Oh, my God.' He could not sleep in those beds. 'But why the beach?'
She put her arm around him. 'It's so close, darling Tom. Just a few steps more.'
She took him out of the room and onto the porch. The moon made all bright with a magical silvery light which transformed all it touched. The world was a place of wonders. The edge of the sky before them burned a faint orange-red.
'I like that little beach,' Tom said. 'I used to look for you there sometimes. The week before I got sick.'
'I was always looking for you,' Rose told him. 'I was looking for you long before you came here.'
'Come back to Arizona with me. Could you do that, Rose?' She was leading him down the steps. The grass was that leaning ocean, breathed upon by moonlight, he had seen once before. 'Del wanted that. He said it to me. once. We could find you somewhere to live. I guess we could.'
'Of course we could,' she said.
'We could get married when I'm eighteen. I'll work. I could always work, Rose.'
'Of course you could,' she said.
They were walking down the overgrown roadway. Each leaf on the trees about him shone with silvery light. The trunks were made of silver and pitchy onyx. 'So you'll marry me?' he said.
'In eternity we are married.'
'In eternity we're married now,' Tom said! That seemed overwhelmingly delightful and overwhelmingly true. 'It's just a little way now, isn't it?'
'Just a little way.'
They came through delicate brush onto the beach, also silvered by kindly moonlight. Across the water Shadowland gouted flame. The smoke pouring from the burning roof was darker than the sky. They stood on the sand a moment, watching it engulf itself. Tom saw flames moving behind the upper windows where Collins' temptations had been arrayed before him. 'The funny thing is, he was great,' Tom said. 'He was just what he said he was.'
'Lie down,' Rose said. 'I don't want to look at that anymore. You need to sleep.' She stretched out on the pewter sand. 'Please lie down next to me.'
'Hey . . . how do we get out? The wall. . . the barbed wire . . . we'll have to go back — '
'No, you won't. Follow a path behind the summer house. It leads to a wooden gate.'
'Clever Rose.' He lay down beside her on the sand, put the book beside him, and set the glass bird on top of it. Then he turned to Rose and took the perfect girl, the magic that seemed no magic but earthly bounty, in his arms.
35
They did not make love. Tom was content to hold her, to feel the petal skin of her shoulders, the curve of her skull beneath his hands. He could have sung like Del, in his friend's last moments, of the perfection of such things. Radiant moonlight, warm sand along his side, Rose's quiet breathing swinging him toward sleep.
In eternity they were married.
'Rose?' he muttered, and she made an interrogatory mmm? 'He told me a story — he told a story he said was about you.'
'Shhh,' she breathed, and put her fingers on his mouth, and he swung all the way into oblivion.
36
Did she say anything before she left? We do not know. She would have spoken to him, I think, whispered a message into his sleeper's ear, but that message would have joined his bloodstream like Del's final song and would have been impossible to reconstruct into ordinary flawed human speech. And again like Del's song, which was an expression of completion and the end of change, it would have spoken of, would have hymned a further and necessary and unforeseen transformation: it is like saying that the message would have been the heartbeat of magic. In his sleep, he heard her go; and heard the rippling of the water.
When he awakened it was to warm cloudless day, the sun already high. He saw that she was gone, and called her name. He called it again.
Across the lake Shadowland, a smoking hole hi the landscape, fumed like an old pipe.
'Rose?' he called again, and finally looked at his watch. It was eleven in the morning. 'Rose! Come back!' He stood up, looked into the trees and did not see her, and for a moment was sick with the thought that she had returned to the house.
But that could not be: the house no longer existed. Rubble would have fallen into the entrance of the tunnel and blocked it off for good. A few boards jutted up, one chimney stood in a blackened column. Everything else was gone. Rose was freed from that.
As was he. For the first tune he looked at his hands in daylight and saw the round pads of scar tissue.
He sat down to wait for her. Even then, he knew that if he waited until his beard grew to his waist and men danced on the moon and stars, she would never come back. He waited anyhow. He could not leave.
Tom waited for her all day. The minutes crawled — he was back, in common time, and no one could fold the hours together like a pack of cards. He watched the lake change color as the sun crossed, changing from deep blue to paler blue to light green and back to blue. In the late afternoon he gently moved the glass sparrow onto the sand and opened the leather-bound book. He read the first words: These are the secret teachings of Jesus the son of God, as told by him to his twin, Judas Thomas. He closed the book. He remembered what Rose had said to his frantic speculation that they might have to go back through the destroyed house. No you won't. Not: no we won't. She would not go down the path to the gate with him: she would not trek into the village, holding his hand, or stand at his side while they waited for a train.