familiar things, all of them, the constants of her life; yet it seemed, at the moment, that they hinted at a terrible impermanence. She turned away, busying herself with the washing, but her thoughts were on something else entirely, something madly out of place on so bright and fair a day: the image of a cold black sky and, beneath it, reddening the night for miles around, a pyramid of flame.
She heard a spoon scrape against the bowl. 'Come on, Jeremy,' she said, rousing herself. 'I want to see you finish up that pudding.'
'A real smart choice,' the man is saying. In the sunlight flooding through the open doorway, the smile lines around his mouth show as lines of fatigue. 'It's always a pleasure to deal with someone who knows what he wants.' He marks several spaces with an X and slides the forms across the battered desk. 'Now all I need from you is your John Hancock, there at the bottom of the page… Uh-huh, and there too. .. That's right, very good. Thanks a lot.' Gathering up the papers, he pushes back his chair and stands. 'Now if you'll just wait here a minute, Mr – uh, Rosebottom, I'll get these things taken care of for you right away.'
'You're very kind.'
Outside, in the lot, sunlight gleams from the silent rows of cars. A line of red plastic pennants flutters overhead. Seated by the doorway of the office, the old man hums a tuneless little song and watches the afternoon traffic speed obliviously past. He feels the building vibrate to the rumbling of the trucks and smells the gasoline fumes and the smoke from the exhausts. Here, on the outskirts of the city, the world lies locked in concrete, but bis thoughts are far away, where tiny shafts of green push through the soil and small houses sleep in the shadow of the woods.
Out there, among the farming people, the visitor will now be settled in: reading, or dozing, or engaged in some half-hearted exploration of his new surroundings. Perhaps he has already had his first discouraging taste of loneliness or boredom, unwilling as he might be to admit it. Another day should bring him around – just in time for his birthday and the delivery of the book. When the moment comes, he will be ready.
And as for the woman…
'She's all yours now, mister. Here's the ownership. Your keys are in the car.' The salesman has returned; together they start across the lot, past grill and chrome and windshields bearing scrawled white prices. On one of them the price has been erased. 'Well, here she is. You can drive her right out of here.' He pats the polished metal of the hood. 'She'll give you years of service.'
'Years?' The old man blinks distractedly.
'No question about it! G.M. built these things to last. You can't go wrong buying American.' The hood reverberates hollowly beneath his fist. 'Registration's in the glove compartment, along with your warranty. Like I said, any problems, you got all the coverage you need. It's good up to one year or ten thousand miles, whichever comes first.'
And what if neither comes? the old man wonders, but he is barely listening.
He is thinking of the farm, and of the woman who will visit it this weekend. Her position is much clearer than the man's, her motives quite transparent; her behavior can already be predicted – and provoked. Once a few small tasks are successfully behind her, her education can begin in earnest. She will make a willing pupil.
But there is still another visitor to come – though nobody will think of it as one. At least not till it stands revealed…
'And don't forget,' the salesman is saying, 'there's a free tank of gas waiting for you, right over there at the pump.' He holds open the door. 'Take it from me, mister, you got yourself a lot of car for your money. She'd make it clear around the world.'
The Old One smiles. 'Oh, she won't be going quite that far. Just to New Jersey and back.'
Book Three: The Call
12. CALLING IN THE DHOL.
Only the player holding the Book may call in the Dhol, and only at the designated time.
Instructions to the Dynnod
July Second
The heat in the little Chevy had grown oppressive, but rolling down the window meant she couldn't listen to the radio. No matter, she'd had her fill of Honda ads and reports of what a great weekend it was going to be. Silly to get your hopes up… But maybe it would be great. Carol turned her head from side to side as she let the gusts of wind from off the highway cool her scalp; once again she found herself thanking God she'd had her hair cut short. Did men feel this cleansed, this free, all the time? The Voorhis Library back there in the city seemed like a prison on the other side of the world.
She had lost track of the time, and with it her sense of direction. She knew only that she was extremely late. Despite her intentions of starting out at ten, she had put in too many hours last night over the week's work for Rosie – papers on a certain Ozark nursery rhyme, a fertility ritual in North Africa, and something called the Mao Game, though it wasn't Chinese but Welsh – and she'd overslept this morning despite the sunlight streaming through her blinds. Rochelle, who'd been supposed to wake her, had gone out – shopping for shoes, she'd said, returning just as Carol left – and obtaining the car from the uptown lot where Rosie kept it had taken the better part of an hour. It had been almost one by the time she'd left the city, and the last news report she'd heard had said one forty-five. Now the radio was drowned out by the wind.
On the seat beside her the reassuring bulk of Rochelle's red canvas tote bag, borrowed for the weekend, bobbed up and down with the motion of the car. Inside, pressed against her nightgown and a sweatshirt she probably wouldn't need, lay the wine Rosie had brought her – a home brew, white, in an unlabeled bottle – and a slim little package wrapped in white paper that he'd given her for Jeremy. It was a pack of cards, he'd said, 'an amusing variation on the old tarot deck.' Leave it to Rosie to think of everyone. Alongside them were the three books she was taking to the farm. Two were for herself, just in case she found the time: a dog-eared paperback of The Bell Jar and an early Teilhard de Chardin, copiously underlined by the fellow novitiate from whom she'd borrowed it long ago. The third book – the Machen – was for Jeremy, and bore special instructions from Rosie. 'Now for heaven's sake don't just hand it to him when you get there,' he had told her, old eyes twinkling. 'Save it for Saturday night. It's the sort of tale you've got to read at bedtime; otherwise it simply doesn't workV
One thing about Rosie, he sure took his literature seriously.
Freirs sat in a deck chair on the lawn outside his building, squinting in the glimmering sunlight and heat, attempting to concentrate on his book while brushing away two small flies that kept buzzing around his head. He would have been glad to move back inside to the cool shadows of his room, but he was hoping to work up a last- minute sun tan before Carol arrived. He wished that despite Deborah's good cooking he'd made more of an effort to diet during the past week, but at least he'd forced himself to take a few minutes' jog along the road this morning (followed by a long soak in the tub) and afterward had made a real attempt to brighten up his room; there were clean sheets on the bed, a poster of Resnais's Providence tacked to the wall, and a vase of fresh-cut roses from the bushes beside the house. His books and papers were in order. He had even trimmed the ivy vines that surrounded his windows.
The day was at its hottest now, the heat soporific, and, despite the persistence of the flies, it took some effort of will simply to remain awake. He was beginning to feel slightly guilty, sitting there reading, daydreaming, drowsing, shifting position only to unstick his perspiring skin from the back of the chair, all in plain sight of Sarr and Deborah laboring in the nearby field to the beat of some monotonous little chant. It was clearly hard work – a lot harder than turning the pages of a novel, and a hell of a lot more boring. But he made no move to help them, nor did he retreat inside. Whatever they may think of me, he told himself, I'm paying good money for this reading time and I'm damned well entitled to enjoy it.
He was, in fact, enjoying it. The Monk, the Gothic he was immersed in, was proving far more lively than the others he'd read -and, as he'd been pleased to discover, unrelievedly dirty-minded, even by modern standards. He could imagine the sensation it must have caused back in the eighteenth century.
But he was growing impatient and uneasy. Where was Carol? What could be keeping her? She had told him she'd be there by noon, and it was already a quarter past two. Maybe something had come up and she'd had to bow
