end of night, she couldn’t quite feel it alive within her. She thought of Smoky. She was afraid; as afraid as if…
“Sophie,” she said softly. “Do you think it’s death?”
Sophie had fallen asleep, her head resting against Alice’s shoulder. “Hm?” she said.
“Do you think that dying is what it really is?”
“I don’t know,” Sophie said. She felt Alice trembling beside her. “I don’t think so. But I don’t know.”
“I don’t think so either,” Alice said.
Sophie said nothing.
“If it is, though,” Alice said, “it isn’t… what I thought.”
“You mean dying isn’t? Or that place?”
“Either.” She pulled the afghan more closely around them. “Smoky told me, once, about this place, in India or China, where ages ago when somebody got the death sentence, they used to give him this drug, like a sleeping drug, only it’s a poison, but very slow-acting; and the person falls asleep first, deep asleep, and has these very vivid dreams. He dreams a long time, he forgets he’s dreaming even; he dreams for days. He dreams that he’s on a journey, or that some such thing has happened to him. And then, somewhere along, the drug is so gentle and he’s so fast asleep that he never notices when, he dies. But he doesn’t know it. The dream changes, maybe; but he doesn’t even know it’s a dream, so. He just goes on. He only thinks it’s another country.”
“That’s spooky,” Sophie said.
“Smoky said he didn’t think it was so, though.”
“No,” Sophie said. “I bet not.”
“He said, if the drug was always supposed to be fatal in the end, how would anybody know that’s what its effect was?”
“Oh.”
“I was thinking,” Alice said, “that maybe this is like that.”
“Oh, Alice, how awful, no.”
But Alice had meant nothing awful; it seemed to her no dreadful issue, if you were condemned to death, to make out of death a country. That was the similarity she saw: for she had perceived, what none of the others had and Sophie only dimly and backwardly, that the place they had been invited to was no place. She had perceived in her own growing larger that there was no place there distinct from those who lived in it: the fewer of them, the smaller their country. And if there were now to be a migration to that land, each emigrant would have to make the place he traveled to, make it out of himself. It was what she, pioneer, would have to do: make out of her own death, or what just now seemed like her death, a land for the rest of them to travel to. She would have to grow large enough to contain the whole world, or the whole great world turn out to be small enough after all to fit within the compass of her bosom.
Smoky for sure wouldn’t believe in that either. He’d find it hard, anyway. She thought then that he had found the whole thing hard; that however patient he had grown, however well he had learned to live with it, he had never and would never find it easy. Would he come? More than anything else she wanted to be sure of that. Could he? She was sure of so many things, but not sure of that; long ago she had seen that the very thing that had earned Smoky for her might be the cause of her losing him, that is, her place in this Tale. And there it still was, the bargain held; she felt him even now to be at the end of a long and fragile cord, that might part if she tugged it, or slip from her fingers, or from his. And she would leave now without farewell lest it be for good.
Oh Smoky, she thought; oh death. And for a long time thought nothing else, only wishing, without making the wish, that this issue were not the issue it must have, the only issue it could have or ever had.
“You will watch out for him,” she whispered; “Sophie, you have to see that he comes. You have to.”
But Sophie was asleep again, the afghan drawn up to her chin. Alice looked around herself, as though waking; the windows were blue. Night was passing. Like someone coming to consciousness with the cessation of pain, she gathered around herself the world, the dawn, and her future. She stood then, easing herself away from her sleeping sister. Sophie dreamed that she did so, and partly woke to say, “I’m ready, I’ll come,” and then other words that made no sense. She sighed, and Alice tucked the afghan around her.
Above her, there were footsteps again, coming downward. Alice kissed her sister’s brow, and blew out the dim lamp; blue dawn filled the room when the yellow flame was gone. It was later than she had thought. She went out into the hall; Smoky came running down to the landing on the stairs above her.
“Alice!” he said.
“Yes, hush,” she said. “You’ll wake everybody.”
“Alice, it works.” He gripped the newel at the stair’s turning, as though he might fall. “It works, you have to come see.”
“Oh?” Alice said.
“Alice, Alice, come see! It’s all right now. It’s all right, it works, it goes around. Listen!” And he pointed upward. Far, far off, barely discernible amid the dawn noises of peepers and first birds, there was a steady metallic clacking, like the ticking of a vast clock, a clock inside which the house itself was contained.
“All right?” Alice said.
“It’s all right, we don’t have to leave!” He paused again to listen, rapt. “The house won’t fall apart. There’ll be light and heat. We don’t have to go anywhere!”
She only looked up, from the bottom of the stair.
“Isn’t that great?” he said.
“Great,” she said.
“Come see,” he said, already turning back up the stairs.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll come. In a minute.”
“Hurry,” he said, and started upwards.
“Smoky, don’t run,” she said.
She heard his climbing footsteps recede. She went to the hall-mirror, and from a peg beside it took her heavy cloak, and threw it around her. She glanced once at the figure in the mirror, who looked aged in the dawn light, and went to the great front door with its oval glass, and opened it.
The morning was huge, and went on in all directions before her, and blew coldly past her into the house. She stood a long time in the open doorway, thinking: one step. One step, which will seem to be a step away, but which will not be; one step into the rainbow, a step she had long ago taken, and which could not be untaken, every other step was only further. She took one step. Out on the lawn, amid the rags of mist, a little dog ran toward her, leaping and barking excitedly.
IV.
Itur in antiquam silvam, stabula alta ferrarum.
While Daily Alice thought and Sophie watched and slept, while Ariel Hawksquill flew along foggy country roads to meet a train at a northern station, Auberon and George Mouse sat close to a small fire, wondering what place it was that Fred Savage had led them to, and unable to remember in any clear way just how they had got there.
Storm of Difference
They’d started off some time ago, it seemed to them; they’d begun by making preparations, going through George’s old trunks and bureaus outfitting themselves, though since they had had not much idea at all of what
