Part 17 (2/2)

The breathed on it in turns as they held it amidst them. Now and again one looked back at sleeping Lilac. They breathed till the thing amid them was a second Lilac.

”That'll do.”

”It's very like.”

”Now take the a”

”Wait again.” One looked closely at Lilac, drawing back ever so slightly the coverlet. ”Look here. She has her little hands tight wound up in her mother's hair.”

”Holding fast.”

”Take the child, we'll wake the mother.”

”These, then.” One had drawn out great scissors, which gleamed whitely in the night-light and opened with a faint snicker. ”As good as done.”

One holding the false Lilac (not asleep but with vacant eyes and unmoving; a night in its mother's arms would cure that) and one reaching ready to take away Sophie's Lilac, and the third with the shears, it was all quickly done; neither mother nor child awoke; they nestled what they had brought by Sophie's breast.

”Now to be gone.”

”Easily said. Not the way we came.”

”Down the stairs and out their way.”

”If we must.”

Moving as one and without sound (the old house seemed now and again to draw breath or groan at their pa.s.sing, but then it always did so, for reasons of its own) they gained the front door, and one reached up and opened it, and they were outside and going quickly with a favorable wind. Lilac never waked or made a sound (the wisps and locks of gold hair still held in her fists blew away in the quick wind of their pa.s.sage) and Sophie slept too, having felt nothing; except the long tale of her dream had altered, at a turning, and become sad and difficult in ways she hadn't known before.

In All Directions Smoky was wrenched awake by some internal motion; as soon as his eyes were wide open, he forgot whatever it was that had awakened him. But he was awake, as awake as if it were midday, irritating state, he wondered if it was something he ate. The hour was useless four o'clock in the morning. He shut his eyes resolutely for a while, unconvinced that sleep could have deserted him so completely. But it had; he could tell because the more he watched the eggs of color break and run on the screen of his eyelids the less soporific they became, the more pointless and uninteresting.

Very carefully he slipped out from under the high-piled covers, and felt in the darkness for his robe. There was only one cure he knew of for this state, and that was to get up and act awake until it was placated and went away. He stepped carefully over the floor, hoping he wouldn't step into shoes or other impedimenta, there was no reason to inflict this state on Daily Alice, and he gained the door, satisfied he hadn't disturbed her or the night at all. He'd just walk the halls, go downstairs and turn on some lights, that should do it. He closed the door carefully behind him, and at that Daily Alice awoke, not because of any noise he'd made but because the whole peace of her sleep had been subtly broken and invaded by his absence.

There was already a light burning in the kitchen when he opened the back-stairs door. Great-aunt Cloud made a low, shuddering sound of startled horror when she saw the door open, and then ”Oh,” she said, when only Smoky looked around it. She had a gla.s.s of warm milk before her, and her hair was down, long and fine and spreading, white as Hecate's; it had been uncut for years and years.

”You gave me a start,” she said.

They discussed sleeplessness in low voices, though there was no one their voices could disturb from here but the mice. Smoky, seeing she too wanted to bustle some to overcome wakefulness, allowed her to warm milk for him; to his he added a stiff measure of brandy.

”Listen to that wind,” said Cloud.

Above them, they heard the long gargle and whisper of a flushed toilet. ”What's up?” Cloud said. ”A sleepless night, and no moon.” She s.h.i.+vered. ”It feels like the night of a catastrophe, or a night big news comes, everybody awake. Well. Just chance.” She said it as another might say G.o.d help usa”with that same degree of rote unbelief.

Smoky, warmed now, rose and said ”Well,” in a resigned sort of way. Cloud had begun to leaf through a cookbook there. He hoped she wouldn't have to sit to watch bleak dawn come; he hoped he wouldn't himself.

At the top of the stairs he didn't turn toward his own bed where, he knew, sleep didn't yet await him. He turned toward Sophie's room, with no intention but to look at her a while. Her restfulness calmed him sometimes, as a cat's can, made him restful too. When he opened her door, he saw by the moon-pale night-light that someone sat on the edge of Sophie's bed.

”Hi,” he said.

”Hi,” said Daily Alice.

There was an odd smell in the air, a smell like leaf mold, or Queen Anne's-lace, or perhaps the earth under an upturned stone. ”What's up?” he asked softly. He came to sit on the other side of the bed.

”I don't know,” she said. ”Nothing. I woke up when you left. I felt like something happened to Sophie, so I came to see.”

There was no danger that their quiet talk would waken Sophie; people talking near her in her sleep only seemed to comfort her, to make her deep draughts of breath more regular.

”Everything's all right, though,” he said.

”Yes.”

Wind pressed on the house, beating it in fitful anger; the window boomed. He looked down at Sophie and Lilac. Lilac looked quite dead, but after three children Smoky knew that this scary appearance, especially in the dark, wasn't reason for alarm.

They sat silent on either side of Sophie. The wind spoke suddenly a single word in the chimney's throat. Smoky looked at Alice, who touched his arm and smiled quickly.

What smile did it remind him of?

”Everything's okay,” she said.

He remembered Great-aunt Cloud smiling at him as they sat troubled on the lawn of Auberon's summer house the day he was married: a smile meant to be comforting, but which was not. A smile against distance, that only seemed to increase distance. A signal of friends.h.i.+p sent out of infrangible foreignness; a hand waved far off, from across a border.

”Do you smell a funny smell?” he said.

”Yes. No. I did. It's gone now.”

It was. The room was full only of night air. The sea of wind outside raised small currents in it which now and again brushed his face; but it didn't seem to him as though this were Brother North-wind moving around them, but as though the many-angled house itself were under sail, making progress through the night, plowing steadily into the future in all directions.

Those who had the entree entered the private apartments by the mirror-door that gave onto the gallery and was kept shut. It was only opened when one scratched at it, and was closed again immediately.

a”Saint-Simon Twenty-five years pa.s.sed.

On a night late in the autumn, George Mouse stepped out the window of what had been the third-floor library of his townhouse and through a small covered bridge, which connected his window with the window of what had once been a kitchen in a tenement that adjoined his building. The ex-kitchen was dark and cold; George Mouse's breath was manifest in the light of his lantern. As he walked, rats or mice moved away from him and his light, he heard their scratches and rustlings but saw nothing. Without opening a door (there hadn't been a door for years) he went out into the hallway and started carefully down the stairs, carefully because the stairs were rotten and loose where they weren't missing altogether.

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