It was a tall, white building, or a building that had once been white; it was covered with gloomy cast figures of every description. Two wings of it stuck out, forming a dank dark courtyard between them. Far above, at the top of the building, a course of masonry joined these two wings, making an arch absurdly high, an arch for a giant to pass under.
Sylvie glanced up at this monstrous fancy, and then quickly away. Tall buildings gave her the willies, she didn’t like looking up at them. She stepped into the courtyard, where puddles from the recent rain showed lurid rainbows of oil, but then had no idea how to find Room 001 as she must. An ancient porter’s lodge there by the entrance seemed to have been shuttered up tight for years and years, but she went to it anyway and pressed a rusted bell, if this thing works I’ll…
She didn’t get to complete her condition, for even as she pressed down the bell’s black nipple a small shutter flew open in the little lodge, and showed her the top half of a head, long nose, small eyes, bald dome. “Hi, can you tell me…” she began, but before she could ask further, the eyes crinkled up in a smile or a grimace, and a hand arose; with a long index finger, the hand indicated Left, then Down, and the shutter banged shut.
She laughed. What the hell do they pay him for? That? She followed his instructions, and found herself going in, not the central entrance with its steps and glass doors, but a wrought-iron grille or gate that led to stairs, which went down into an open areaway. Sun didn’t reach that narrow place, a sort of slot made by the rising towers. She went down, down, down to the echo-y, cavern-smelling bottom, where there was a small door, let into the wall. A
It opened on a narrow, low-ceilinged corridor. Down at the far small end, someone was standing before a door, doing something: painting the door? He had a brush, and a paint-pot. Super, or super’s helper. Sylvie thought she’d ask further instructions from him, but when she called “Hi,” he looked back at her in alarm, and vanished through the door he’d been working on. She marched up to it anyway, reaching it with surprising suddenness, the corridor was shorter than it seemed, or seemed longer than it was, whichever; and the door at its end was even smaller than the one she’d come in by. If this keeps up, she thought, I’ll be crawling next… On the door, in fresh white paint in an antique style, the number 001 was painted.
Laughing a little, a little nervously, uncertain now and not at all sure that an elaborate joke wasn’t being played on her, Sylvie knocked at the little door. “Winged Messenger,” she called.
The door opened a crack. A strange, outdoor, summergold light seemed to come through it from beyond. A very long, very knuckly hand was put around the door to open it further, and then a very widely grinning face looked out.
“Winged Messenger?” Sylvie said.
“Yes? What is it? What can we do for you?” He was the man she’d seen painting the number on the door, or someone just like him; or he was the man who’d directed her here. Or someone just like him.
“Package for you,” she said.
“Aha,” the little man said. His grin unabated, he opened the door wider so she could stoop to enter. “Do come in, then,”
“Are you sure,” she said, looking within, “that this is where I’m spose to be?”
“Oh, it certainly is.”
“Boy. It’s real little in here.”
“Oh, yes it is. Won’t you please step right on in.”
The Wild Wood
Out on the same May streets at evening, Auberon dawdling Farmwards through the brand-new spring thought of fame, and fortune, and love. He was returning from the offices of the production company that created and sustained “A World Elsewhere” and several other less successful ventures. He had there given into the manicured hands of a remarkably friendly but somewhat absent man of not much more than his own age two scripts for imaginary episodes of their famous soap. Coffee had been pressed on him, and the young man (who didn’t seem to have a lot of business on hand) had talked ramblingly about television, and writing, and production; huge figures of money were mentioned, and arcana of the business touched on—Auberon tried hard not to be astonished at the first and nodded sagely at the latter though he understood little enough of it; and then he’d been shown out, with invitations to drop around any time, by a secretary and a receptionist of near-legendary beauty.
Amazing and wonderful. Large vistas opened before Auberon on the crowded street. The scripts, his and Sylvie’s collaboration through long, hilarious and excited evenings, were shapely and thrilling, he thought, though not exquisite to look at, typed as they were on George’s old machine; no matter, no matter, his future was filled with expensive office equipment, and with long lunches, prize secretaries, hard work for great rewards. He would seize, from between the claws of the dragon who was denned in the heart of the Wild Wood, the golden treasure it guarded.
The Wild Wood: yes. There had been a time, he knew, say when Frederick Barbarossa was emperor of the West, a time when it had been beyond the log walls of tiny towns, beyond the edges of the harrowed land, that the forest began: the forest, where there lived wolves, and bears, witches in vanishing cottages, dragons, giants. Inside the town, all was reasonable and ordinary; there were safety, fellows, fire and food and all comforts. Dull, maybe, more sensible than thrilling, but safe. It was beyond, in the Wild Wood, that anything could happen, any adventure could be had; out there you took your life in your hands.
No more though. It was all upside down now. At Edgewood, upstate, night held no terrors; the woods there were tame, smiling, comfortable. He didn’t know if there were any locks that still worked on the many doors of Edgewood; certainly he’d never seen any of them locked. On hot nights, he’d often slept out on open porches, or in the woods themselves, listening to the sounds and the silence. No, it was on these streets that you saw wolves, real and imagined; here you barricaded your door against whatever fearful thing might be Out There, as once the doors of woodsmen’s huts were barred; horrid stories were told of what could happen here after the sun has set; here you had the adventures, won the prizes, lost your way and were swallowed up without a trace, learned to live with the fear in your throat and snatch the treasure: this, this was the Wild Wood now, and Auberon was a woodsman.
Yes! Greed for treasure bred daring in him, and daring made him strong; errant, armed, he strode through the crowd. Let the weak be gobbled up, he would not be. He thought of Sylvie, clever as a fox, woods-bred though born in the complacent safety of a jungle island. She knew this place; her greed was as great as his, greater, and her cunning matched it. What a team! And to think that not many weeks ago they two had seemed stuck in a deadfall, to have lost each other in trackless undergrowth, to be on the point of surrendering to it all, and parting. Parting. God, what chances she took! How narrow the odds were!
But he could believe, just now, this evening, that they would grow old together. The joy they took in each other, in abeyance all that cold bitter March, had flowered again bright and tough as clustered dandelions—that very morning, in fact, she had been late for work for a reason, a new reason; late, because a certain elaborate process had had to be successfully brought to conclusion—oh, God, the fabulous exertions they required of one another, and the rests those exertions required, a life could be spent in the one and then the other, he felt that his nearly had been so spent all in that morning. And yet unending: he felt it could be, saw no reason why it should not be. He drifted to a halt in the middle of an intersection, grinning, blind; his heartbeats seemed to be minted in gold as moment upon moment of that morning was relived within his breast. A truck blared at him, a truck desperate not to miss the light, its light, which Auberon was flouting. Auberon leapt from its path and the driver yelled something pointed but unintelligible at him. Struck down blinded by love, Auberon thought (laughing and safe on the far sidewalk), that’s how I’ll die, struck by a truck when I’m whelmed with lust and love and forget where I am.
He took up a quick City stride, still grinning but trying to be alert. Keep your wits about you. After all, he thought, but got no further in the thought, for there came at that moment, crashing down the avenue or swarming up the side-streets or descending from the balmy sky like a ton of shrieking laughter, a thing that was like a sound but wasn’t one: the bomb that had fallen once on him and Sylvie, but double that or greater. It rolled over him, it
