Winter's Tale Part 34

"Even though the playwright has already written them."

She nodded her head.

"Isn't that presumption?"

"The playwright understands."

"You go into sort of a trance, then."

"Yes."

"The play has been put down, but it is still new to you. When you say the lines, you are saying them for the first time. They are as much yours as they are his. How can you explain that?"

"I can't, but I can tell you that this is the quality that distinguishes the good actors from the bad."

"Now, let's say, " Harry Penn said, staring at the top of the tin box, "that you were out of sorts, and at the end of a long and complicated play you did forget your lines. What would you do?"

"I probably wouldn't have time to think it out, and I would say whatever occurred to me. The other lines would have been a gut, and I'd take the lines I'd improvise as a gift, too, though perhaps a gift from a different source."

There was a loud rapping on the door."That's Praeger, " announced Harry Penn.

"The mayor, " Jessica said proudly.

"It doesn't make the slightest bit of difference, " Harry Penn declared."He's a fine fellow. Open the door for him before he freeze to death. Some years before I was born, you know, the Cranberry Mayor froze to death in Newtown Creek."

When Jessica brought Praeger into her father's study, they sawHarry Penn standing in front of the fireplace, the lid of the cookie tin in his hand. He was crying.

"What is it?" Jessica asked.

"The Highland Fusilier, " he said."These boxes have been around I for years, and I've never looked closely at his face. Now I see."

"See what?" Praeger asked.

"Do you remember the derelict at Petipas?"

"Yes."

"This was his face, more or less, if he had been shaven and clean."

Praeger looked at the box."It's not clear to me, " he said."I don't remember well enough."

"That's because you hadn't ever seen him before."

"You had?"

"Yes."

"When?"

"When I was a boy." He put the Fusilier on the mantle, and stepped back. Turning to Praeger, the mayor of the city, Harry Penn commanded him to go to the stable and hitch the three best horses to the fastest sleigh."I want you to drive me north."

"To the Coheeries?" Jessica asked.

"Yes, " her father said, smiling."I have, at long last, found my place in this world."

Praeger went outside. As the stable light flicked on across the courtyard, Harry Penn turned to his daughter and told her that a I miracle had happened, and just in time.

"What miracle?" she asked.

"Peter Lake, " was the answer.

HARRY Penn was the only man in New York who could command the mayor to hitch up his sleigh, but he didn't think twice about it, since Praeger had worked for him and been his virtual son-in-law for more than ten years. Apart from that, a sound man of a hundred is ent.i.tled to the highest conventions of protocol, and need not defer to Presidents or kings, because presidents and kings have come so highthat, if they have any stuff, they think only of history, and a hundred year-old man is history.

The three horses that Praeger harnessed to the racing sleigh were aching to run, and almost before they knew it they were on Riverside Drive, flying to the north.

"Go down and get onto the river at One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, " Harry Penn directed the mayor.

"Will it be entirely frozen at Spuyten Duyvil?" Praeger asked apprehensively."The whirlpools themselves never freeze, and then there's the navigation channel."

"Sure it'll be frozen. In a winter like this, " Harry Penn stated, looking ahead, "there's always a strong ice bridge in between Spuyten Duyvil and the channel. It curves slightly to the west and then bends east again, and it rises a little, almost like a section of prairie. After that, there'll be empty ice all the way to the turn-off. We can go like h.e.l.l."

Praeger gave the reins an enormous snap, and the troika turned left and descended toward the river."How do you know that?"

"I've been making this trip for nearly a hundred years. If you know only a dozen winters, it looks completely chaotic. But after a hundred you begin to see where certain patterns surface and intersect. I always know the weather. That's easy. And I know the ice. That's easy, too."

"What about human relations?"

"Do you have a problem?"

"No, just curious."

There was a silence."Not so easy, but possible."

"What about history?"

"History is very difficult. A nearly infinite number of waves interact within an infinite number of conjunctions. As you might suspect, there has been of late a tendency for strong alignment, and many different waves are running together, in phase. I don't see, however, that they can be aligned by the year two thousand, which is only two weeks away, unless by some catastrophic event."

"And then what?" asked Praeger, for he, too, had his ideas about these things, and had imagined the city spinning head over heels in a heart-filling, noiseless, fall without end.

"Then we will see, " Harry Penn replied.

The sleigh hit the ice hard enough to crack it for half a mile. With clear running after Spuyten Duyvil, the troika sailed north so fast that watchmen in the towns along the river noted in their logs that something dark had pa.s.sed along the ice and disappeared before it could be identified. Praeger didn't know that the towns on the hills, like lanterns on the cliffs, were in a different time. And Harry Penn didn't tell him, because, when the immediate future promised to be so decisive, he didn't want Praeger to be seduced by the wonder of a living past. They pa.s.sed the towns and left the golden lantern light behind, rising north into the mountains that led to the Lake of the Coheeries.

They arrived at the lake on the evening of the next day. They were exhausted, and their throats were sore. Unlike the villages on the banks of the Hudson, those on the sh.o.r.es of the lake, including Lake of the Coheeries Town, were dark. Harry Penn stood up in the sleigh, looking up and down the sh.o.r.eline."They've never been dark, " he said."Something's wrong."

The road across the plateau that led to Lake of the Coheeries Town had not been traveled since the last snow. The village itself appeared in silhouette, totally dark, against the huge curtain of sky and stars behind it. They went in slowly, b.u.mping over what they thought was a log in the middle of the street. But it wasn't a log, it was Daythril Moobcot.

Bodies were all over. They were splayed from doorways, and they were bent and frozen over fences, like game drying in the sun. Rifles and shotguns lay next to the dead. There seemed to have been a terrible battle, and the streets were full of furniture and small objects that were evidence of the evisceration and looting of the buildings. The open doors of the houses swung back and forth in terror on the ebb and flow of the wind, or banged shut like pistol shots.

"I almost knew, " Harry Penn told Praeger."But I didn't think it would really happen." Praeger was speechless."But if it had to happen, then so be it. They're dead. It's over now. And it means that a hundred epochs have finally come to their end. Drive that Way."

They went past the gazebo and onto the lake, not so slowlynow, heading for the Penn house on an island lost amid the islands and promontories of the opposite sh.o.r.e."A bit left, " Harry Penn would say, his voice shaking, or, "A degree right, " to guide them Maneuvering around pine-rich rocky islands in places that had long ago been left to the loons, they came upon a huge house looming suddenly at the end of a smooth white turn. It was intact.

"At least this place was hidden, " Praeger said.

"That hardly matters, as you'll see. They wouldn't have taken the one important thing, and as for damage, well, damage will soon be of little moment."

First they went to the barn, where Harry Penn spilled a whole sack of oats onto the floor in front of the horses. He was extremely agitated, almost as if the battle in the town, long over, was still taking place."Bring those, " he ordered Praeger, pointing to two or three brooms that had been discarded because their straw was clotted with pitch.

After struggling through thigh-deep snow on the island, they reached the porch, a huge gallery more than a hundred feet long and twenty-five feet deep. The front door was its usual solid self.

"How would you get in?" Harry Penn asked, nodding at the door.

"With a key, " Praeger answered.

Harry Penn laughed."Look at the keyhole. It's solid, just a trompe l'oeil. My father was obsessed with burglars, and he played games with them. In those days, burglary was a more respectable profession than it is today. It was sort of like chess. My father spent a lot of time and money outwitting thieves. I suppose a modern burglar would just smash in one of the windows, but, then, there was a certain etiquette. Look." He put both hands on the doork.n.o.b and moved it like a gearshift, in a ten-part code, at the end of which the door was pulled open automatically by counterweights.

Praeger was delighted."Do you like it?" Harry Penn asked."I'm glad you saw it, because this is the last time that this particular piece of machinery will ever be worked." He disappeared into the' dark house, and Praeger followed.

Harry Penn took out a cigar lighter and pa.s.sed its pencil-shaped flame across the broomheads. They erupted into huge yellow fires.

Praeger commented that it was lucky that the ceilings were so high. Otherwise, he added, they would be likely to ignite. Harry Penn said nothing, and led the mayor of New York through the enormous ice-cold rooms.

With torches blazing, they stopped here and there, and lifted the fire into the air to illuminate paintings that stared down at them from the walls in immeasurable sadness. Though the portraits had been mostly of happy or contented faces, years and years of silence and stillness had given those who were portrayed the hurt expressions of abandoned ghosts. They seemed to resent that they had been forgotten, and were perhaps horrified that the wizened old man now walking among them with a torch had been at one time a young child in whom they had placed their hope. Emerging from the darkness for a second or two, the portraits seemed bitter and angry that they had been condemned to stillness forever and ever, and that, despite their sacrifice and concern for future generations, their house had been abandoned to the wind and night.

"These are the Penns, " the old man said."I could tell you thename of each one, and a lot more than that, too, because they were people I loved. They're all gone now. But even they may be surpriseda"when they awaken."

"Awaken?"

"Yes. I believe there is a distinct possibility of that, and I'll tell you why. There is an island in the middle of the lake where we are all buried, or will be. My sister, who died before the first great war, was put there. But she's not there now. She left rather quickly, it seems. And the explanation was that her grave was destroyed by a meteorite. Meteorite! No one seemed to care for the fact that meteors fall to earth, not from it.

"That the grave was completely obliterated, gone, fit her epitaph, which was: *Gone into the world of light.' I can't explain it, but I do believe that she did what she said she was going to do."

He stopped at an entrance to the cavernous living room, andturned to Praeger."She gave me instructions from her deathbed. I didn't understand them at the time. I thought she was delirious. She said to carry them out when I next saw Peter Lake, who was there with us. He left right after she died, and though we expected him to return at any moment, he never did, and I never saw him againa"until Petipas."

"How can you be sure?"

"I can't."

"Who was he anyway?"

"I'll show you." Harry Penn then led him into the room. The shadows had a rhythm as they rose and fell, and Praeger could smell the slight dampness of the carpets and the covered furniture. The air began to fill with pitch smoke which obscured the ceiling and made it seem as if they were in a roofless cave or under a November sky. Harry Penn walked a few steps to the hearth, and held up his torch until two paintings, one above the fireplace, and another facing it, were brightly illuminated."Beverly, " he said."My sister. And that was Peter Lake."

Though frail and weak, she was smiling and beautiful. He seemed puzzled and out of place."Even by the time these portraits were painted, " Harry Penn told Praeger, "he felt ill-at-ease with us. He thought that Beverly was too good for him, and that we didn't like him because of his origins, and because of what he did for a living."

"What did he do for a living?"

"He was a burglar, " Harry Penn said."And a good one, evidently. He had been a master mechanic, and had gotten himself into some kind of trouble. I was never told how or why.

"And now, a century later, he's somewhere in the city, and he hasn't aged a day. Look at the background: comets and stars. Look at their faces. These people are not dead.... I'm sure of it. Please take down the paintings for me."

As Praeger stepped back and lowered the paintings to the floor, he turned, and saw Harry Penn torching the curtains and the furniture.

"What are you doing?" Praeger screamed.

"Her instructions, " Harry Penn answered, his voice itself ablaze.

"What about the paintings?"

"They would have burned too, but I need them. Come on. Carry them with you."

They walked quickly through the halls and the galleries, andHarry Penn brushed the walls and furnishings with his torch. By the time they reached the front door, the house was brighter than a clear summer afternoon. Flames roared on the inside, remaking the rooms into hollow orange chambers and blinding fireb.a.l.l.s. Sawtoothed jets of flame roared up the stairs like a huge serpent that had come from the lake to search for the children. The house seemed to dance and turn, as if the fire were a fast play of all the events that had ever occurred inside, as if a hundred summers were burning under one lens, and a hundred winters were frozen stiff and brittle, and all the fires and dances and kisses and dreams that had once been within were liberated to turn about in pale hot whirlwinds and ignite the frail wood with their sudden rebellion. As if it were a rocket, the fire screamed upward and broke through the roof.

They put the paintings on the back of the sleigh. Praeger held the fretting horses while Harry Penn torched the barn. The entire green cove was gleaming as if in daylight. They made a turn around the house, and the horses started out in panic for the village across the lake. The wind stretched the flames of the torches like hair swept back from the brow, and sparks disappeared into the darkness. The horses whinnied as they rushed over the ice, because they didn't like the fire in such proximity, drawn closely after them on the sleigh, inescapable.

Both Harry Penn and Praeger burned the village. The houses caught quickly, and soon the streets were a grid of flame."They're all dead, " Harry Penn said as they left the town."I wonder if the past can be sealed off as Beverly wanted, or if her expectations will be confounded."

They reached the top of the hill and turned the sleigh so they could look over the town and the lake. Across the ice, the Penn house was still burning steadily, and the village was alight like something that had been soaked in paraffin.

There was little to say. Now the moon had risen and was very bright. Harry Penn threw the torches down on the snow, and Praeger turned the horses away from the Lake of the Coheeries and toward the mountains.

HARDESTY ran up the first flights of steps that led to the gla.s.s-enclosed galleries that led in turn, he presumed, to the back of the sky. As he rounded the landing at the beginning of the fourth flight, he was stopped suddenly by a blue plug of six policemen and a sergeant who completely blocked the way. They were drinking coffee from paper cups, and they dripped with guns and clubs."Where are you going?" the sergeant asked belligerently.

"The six-twenty to Cos Cob!" Hardesty screamed, to put them off his scent, since their job was to keep people out of the galleries.

"That way, " they said, and pointed. He ran down.

Back on the Vanderbilt balcony, he glanced up at the open s.p.a.ce in the sky and saw that the same face continued to stare down tranquilly. He had to see who it was. If necessary, he would attack the police. If he could take them by surprise, he might kill or wound four of them immediately. He could overcome the two who remained with the application of his superior knowledge of a.s.sault tactics, and his willingness to take wounds. But to do this he would need at least two pistols, which meant that he would have to overcome at least two other policemen. It seemed unreasonable that eight men would have to die just so he could walk up some stairs. Perhaps he could bribe them. But where would he get the money? Even were he to rob fifty people, the chances were not very good that he could raise the several thousand dollars that he would need. But he had to get up there.

The trapdoor closed, sealing the heavens.

"d.a.m.n it, " he said to himself. Then he decided to go around the police. He went over the balcony rail, and started to climb on the marble wall that intersected with the gla.s.s curtain in front of the catwalks. Long before, patient artisans had carved wreaths, eggs, and dentils into this corner. The ledges and holds that they provided were just big enough for Hardesty's fingers. For contrary pressure, he had to push against the gla.s.s.

Daring to climb up, but not to look down, he moved rapidly and with no security, managing to cling to the wall primarily because of his upward momentum. Had he stopped, he would havefallen after a terrifying second or two of clawing at the marble like a cat. Nothing here carried him effortlessly, as on the golden rope. There were, however, contradictions and paradoxes in the physics, and although he himself hadn't time to consider them, his fingers, muscles, and heart knew them perfectly well. If he hadn't the force to stay on the wall without moving, how could he have the force to move up? Was the balance so delicate that the original power of his first step from the ground could be carried with him as high as he could go, as long as his attachment was equal to the force that pulled him down? In that case, why could he not cling to the eggs, wreaths, and dentils in a purely neutral stance? There was at least a tiny bit of magic in reckless faithful climbing, which abrogated the laws of conservation, perhaps eventually to restore them. But now, with the blessing, amnesty, and encouragement that good climbers requisition from the thin air, he ascended a nearly sheer column in the interior of Grand Central Terminal.

When at last he reached a sooty ledge far above the floor, he put his right hand over it and breathed in relief. Though hanging at many times a killing height (four fingers kept him safe enough for his thumb to be unengaged), he felt as secure from falling as if he had been strapped p.r.o.ne to the ground. After a short rest, he pulled himself onto the ledge.

The police were many stories below, and probably could not have imagined that someone had pa.s.sed them by and was now almost as free as the swallows that were the masters of the airy upper levels. And even had the commuters looked up to see the stars (which they did not), they probably would not have seen the man running along a high unprotected ledge.

One of the lower panes of an arched window had been knocked out. Perhaps a bird had crashed into it, or it had been hit by a stray bullet. Hardesty crawled through the s.p.a.ce and found himself in a dimly lit hall. The floor was covered with thick dust which showed a single set of tracks leading to a set of spiral stairs at the far end of the corridor. Seven turns on the iron stairs, and he was in a little vaulted room that looked like a chapel, facing a small metal door that had been locked from the other side.

Hardesty, who knew pitifully little about breaking and entering, began to throw himself against it. It gradually started to loosen Peter Lake had been reclining on his bed in the iron beam reading a Police Gazette of November 1910. He was by now used to a good many strange things, and he had greeted not with wonder but with pleasure the images of sullen vandals and meditative crooks all of whom he didn't know that he had known. As he turned the pages he met again the likes of James Casey, Charles Mason, Dr. Long, * and Joseph Lewis. Although they seemed familiar, he was not sure where he himself fit in. Why was he so moved by an old photograph of William Johnson, pickpocket? Was it because of his bowler hat and Edwardian suit, both of which (now vaporized, as, undoubtedly was their owner) reminded him of a time in which neither nature nor man held sway, but had reached an accommodation allowing even the coa.r.s.est of men, by means of his culture and surroundings, to reflect upon his circ.u.mstances with remarkable results? How else could he explain their sad and knowing eyes? William Johnson (an alias, of course, one of a dozen), a pickpocket, showed in the sparkle of his eyes that he had seen through time and understood those who would come after him. When the dross of time had lifted, the pickpockets, confidence men, and thieves sometimes turned out to be the possessors of the gifted and magical faces that painters of the Renaissance used in portraying saints and angels.

Strangely moved by William Johnson's trusting and fatherly glance, Peter Lake was about to turn the page onto a large photograph... of himself, but was jolted from his comfortable bed by Hardesty Marratta ramming against the metal door. The Police Gazette flew out of his hands like a tossed chicken, and landed with the portrait of Peter Lake facedown in the dust. By pure coincidence, the expression of the burglar in the Rogues' Gallery and that of the steadily unperplexing master mechanic in the beams above the sky, were exactly the same.