"Maybe tomorrow," he said. "It'll be back tomorrow, won't it?"
"Of course," Wendell yelled. "And the night after, and the night after..."
Harvey went back inside to look at the Christmas tree. Its branches were hung with strings of popcorn and cranberries, with colored lights and baubles and soldiers in gleaming silver uniforms.
"There's something under there for you," Mrs. Griffin said, standing at the living room door. "I hope it's what you want, sweet."
Harvey knelt down and pulled a parcel with his name on it out from under the tree. His pulse quickened before he even opened it, because he knew from its shape, and from the way it rattled, that his wish had been answered. He pulled at the string, remembering as he did so how much littler his hands had been the first time he'd held this gift. The paper tore and fell away, and there, shiny and new, was a painted wooden ark.
It was a perfect copy of the one his father had made. The same yellow hull, the same orange prow, the same wheel-house with holes in its red roof for the giraffes to put their heads through. The same lead animals, all in pairs, snug in the hold or peering through the portholes: two dogs, two elephants, two camels, two doves; all these and a dozen more. And finally, the same little Noah with his square white beard, and his fat wife, complete with apron.
"How did he know?" Harvey murmured.
He hadn't intended the question to be heard, much less answered, but Mrs. Griffin. said: "Mr. Hood knows every dream in your head."
"But this is perfect," Harvey said in amazement. "Look, my dad ran out of blue paint when he was finishing the elephants, so one of them has blue eyes and the other one has green eyes. It's the same. It's exactly the same."
"Does it please you then?" Mrs. Griffin asked.
Harvey said it did, but that wasn't entirely the truth. It was eerie to have the ark back in his hands when he knew the real one had been lost; as though time had been turned on its heels, and he was a little kid again.
He heard Wendell stamping the snow off his feet at the front door, and was suddenly embarrassed to have such a childish present in his hands. He gathered it up in its wrapping and hurried away upstairs, intending to head back down for some supper.
But his bed looked too welcoming to be refused, and his stomach quite full enough for one night, so instead he closed the curtains on the gusty night and laid his head down on his pillow.
The Christmas bells were still ringing in some distant steeple, and their repetition lulled him into sleep. He dreamed that he was standing on the steps of his house, looking through the open door into its warm heart. Then the wind caught hold of him, turning him from the threshold, and carrying him away into a dreamless sleep.
VII
Hungry Waters
That first day in the Holiday House, with all its seasons and its spectacles, set the pattern for the many that were to follow.
When Harvey woke the following morning, the sun was once again pouring through a crack in the curtains, but this time it lay in a warm pool on the pillow beside him. He sat up with a shout and a smile, and either one or the other (and sometimes both) remained on his lips for the rest of the day.
There was plenty to do. Work on the tree house in the spring morning, followed by food, and the laying of plans for the afternoon. Games and lazy hours in the heat of summer-sometimes with Wendell, sometimes with Lulu-then adventures by the light of a harvest moon. And finally, when the winter wind had blown out the flames in the pumpkin heads, and carpeted the grounds with snow, chilly fun for them all out in the frosty air, and a warm Christmas welcome when they were done.
It was a day of holidays, the third as fine as the second, and the fourth as fine as the third, and very soon Harvey began to forget that there was a dull world out beyond the wall, where the great beast February was still sleeping its tedious sleep.
His only real reminder of the life he'd left-besides a second telephone call he'd made to his mom and dad just to tell them all was well-was the present he'd wished for, and received, that first Christmas: his ark. He'd thought several times of trying it out on the lake, to see if it would float, but it wasn't until the afternoon of the seventh day that he got around to doing so.
Wendell had made a real glutton of himself at lunch, and had declared that it was far too hot to play, so Harvey wandered down to the lake on his own, with the ark tucked under his arm. He half expected-hoped, in fact to find Lulu down there to keep him company, but the banks of the lake were empty.
Once he laid eyes on the gloomy waters he almost gave upon the idea of a launching, but that meant admitting something to himself that he didn't wish to admit, so he headed on down to the shore, found a rock to perch on that looked less precarious than the others, and set his ark on the water.
It floated well, he was pleased to see. He pushed it to and fro for a little while, then lifted it out and peered inside to see if it was leaking. It was quite watertight, however, so he set it back on the lake and pushed it out again.
As he did so, he caught sight of a fish rising from the bottom of the lake, its mouth wide open, as if it intended to swallow his little vessel whole. He reached out to snatch the ark from the water before it was either sunk or devoured, but in his haste he lost his footing on the slime-slickened rock, and with a cry he fell into the lake.
The water was icy cold, and eager. It quickly closed over his head. He flailed wildly, trying not to imagine the dark depths beneath him, or the vast maw of the fish that had been rising from those depths. Turning his face up toward the surface, he started to swim.
He could see his ark floating above him, capsized by his fall. Its lead passengers were already sinking. He didn't try and save them, but surfaced-gasping for breath-and paddled toward the shore. It wasn't much of a distance. In less than a minute he was hauling himself up onto the rocks and scrambling away from the bank, water pouring from his sleeves and trousers and shoes. Only when his feet were well clear of the lake, and no hungry fish could snap at his toes, did he drop down onto the ground.
Though it was midsummer, and the sun was blazing somewhere overhead, the air around the lake was cold, and he soon began to shiver. Before he made his way out into the sun, however, he looked for some sign of his ark. The spot where it had sunk was marked by a forlorn flotilla of wreckage, all of which would soon join the rest of the ark at the bottom.
Of the fish that had seemed so eager to devour him there was no sign. Perhaps it had swum down into the depths to chew on the drowned menagerie. If so, Harvey hoped it choked on its dinner.
He'd lost plenty of toys before. He'd had a brand new bicycle-his prize possession!-stolen from the step of his house two birthdays ago. But this loss upset him as much; more, in fact. The idea that the lake now had something that he'd owned was somehow worse than a thief running off with his bike. A thief was warm flesh and blood; the lake was not. His possessions had gone into a nightmare place, full of monstrous things, and he felt as though a little part of himself had gone with it, down into the dark.
He walked away from the lake without looking back, but the breeze that came to warm his face when he broke through the thicket, and the sound of birds that pleased his ear, could not keep from his mind the thought he'd tried to ignore when he'd gone down to the water. Despite all entertainments that the Holiday House supplied so eagerly, it was a haunted place, and however hard he had tried to ignore his doubts and suppress his questions, they could be ignored and suppressed no longer. Whoever, or whatever, that haunter was, Harvey could not be content now until he'd seen its face and knew its nature.