front of a row of bookshelves, holding forth on some subject, delighting them with his stories. In the dream, Mr. Mordred doesn’t have a horsefly birthmark on his left temple. His entire head is that of a giant horsefly.
Dream leads to dream, to dream, until he is awakened by a sound. A swishing-scraping noise.
The clock reads 12:01 A.M.
So weary that he can’t fully sit up, Crispin lifts his head from the pillow just far enough to survey the room for the source of the noise.
The bed tray stands on the cart, where he last put it. On the tray, the thermos of chicken soup wobbles around and around on its base, as if something inside is turning, spinning, impatient for Crispin to unscrew the cap and pour it out.
He must be delirious again.
Lowering his head to the pillow, closing his eyes, he thinks of her slender hand upon his chest, and soon he sleeps.
In the morning when he wakes, the cart is gone and the tray with it. He hopes that a maid removed it and that Nanny Sayo will not have to know that he failed to eat her soup.
He never wants to disappoint her.
Crispin loves his nanny.
In two days, he regains his health.
When he is well again, after showering, he stands naked in the bathroom, studying himself in a full-length mirror, searching for the detailed silhouette of a horsefly. He can’t find one.
For reasons he is unable to put into words, he believes that he has narrowly escaped something worse than a birthmark.
His embarrassment and worry do not last. Soon he lapses back into the relaxed and carefree rhythms of Theron Hall.
Crispin, Harley, and Mirabell eat only what they like. Chef Faunus and Cook Merripen cater to their every desire.
They go to bed only when they wish.
Each rises to his or her own clock.
Mr. Mordred entertains. Nanny Sayo attends the children’s needs.
The world beyond the great house has been fading from Crispin’s mind. Sometimes, passing a window, he is surprised to see the city, the Pendleton looming across the street.
Shortly before midnight on July 25, having been in bed less than two hours, Crispin swims up from a troubled sleep. Half awake, he sees two shadowy figures in his room, the place brightened only by the hallway light that seeps in through the door, which is ajar no more than two inches.
The visitors are talking softly to each other. One voice is that of Giles, whom the children now call Father. The other belongs to Jardena, Giles’s mother.
Jardena looks old enough to be her son’s great-grandmother. She keeps almost entirely to her suite of rooms on the third floor. She is withered, her face as drawn as a sun-dried apple, but her eyes as lustrous and purple as wet grapes. She’s seldom seen, almost always at a distance, at the farther junction of hallways, floating by in one of her long dark dresses.
Crispin hears little of what they say, though it seems that tomorrow is some kind of memorial or feast day. Before he slides away into sleep once more, the boy hears the names Saint Anne and Saint Joachim.
When he wakes in the morning, Crispin is not sure that the visitors to his room were real. More likely, they were part of his otherwise unremembered dream.
In the coming night, something happens to Mirabell.
5
Halloween, three years and three months later …
The leash jerks from the boy’s hand, and he falls.
The previously gentle dog, never having growled, does not growl now, but bites. He nips at the ankle of the male marionette in the white suit, who cries out and lets go of Crispin’s jacket.
The boy sprints after the dog, away from the nightclub called Narcissus. They plunge into the street, dodging cars as brakes shriek and horns blare.
From the comparative safety of the next sidewalk, Crispin looks back across the street and sees the man on one knee, examining his bitten ankle. The woman in white is talking on a cell phone.
Crispin snatches up the dropped leash, and the dog sets off with purpose. He and Harley weave between the pedestrians, half of whom are costumed for Halloween, half not.
When the hunters are hot on the scent, some places are safer than others. Certain churches, not all, seem to foil these particular pursuers. Sanctuary can be found in that kind of church — whether Baptist or otherwise — in which, on Sundays, rollicking gospel songs are sung with gusto and booming piano. Churches in which Latin is sometimes spoken, candles are lit for the intention of the dead, incense is sometimes burned, and fonts of holy water stand at the entrances — those are also secure. Synagogues are good refuges, too.
Right now, he and Harley are a few dangerous blocks from any such a safe haven.
Reverend Eddie Nordlaw, who founded the Crusade for Happiness and who appears Sundays on his TV show,
But Crispin has learned the hard way that the Rapture Temple offers no more protection against these enemies than does a shopping mall. Or a police station.
On the day of his mother’s wedding, when he watched from a high window, one of the honored guests whom he saw arriving was the chief of police.
Pedestrians admonish and curse Crispin as he pounds pell-mell after the bolting dog, holding fast to the leash and trying not to be jerked off his feet.
Water in motion can also screen Crispin from Giles Gregorio and everyone like him. A rushing stream, if it is wide enough, thwarts them. Even if the boy stands on the farther bank from them, in plain sight, they seem unable to see him and eventually give up the search.
In Statler Park, a man-made waterfall tumbles into a fake-rock pond. A narrow pathway allows you to walk behind the falls, where there is a grotto. In that sequestered hollow, you can look out toward the park, through the cascades. The hunters must know of that retreat; but Crispin has several times been safe there while they stalked him through the rest of the grounds.
Rushing torrents seem not only to deny them his scent but also to confuse their senses, as though the swish and burble of the water is not merely sound but also a language, as if Nature is speaking a dispensation to spare him from their homicidal fury.
He and the dog are at this moment far from Statler Park and no nearer any rushing stream. Their best hope is Memorial Plaza, two acres of granite cobblestones, raised planters full of flowers, and benches on which people sit to read the morning paper, to have a bite of lunch, to feed the pigeons, and even to contemplate the sacrifices made by soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines who have died to keep them free.
Harley knows the city as well as Crispin does. Soon cobblestones are underfoot. At this hour, the lamplit plaza is deserted because, for everyone except Crispin and his dog, such places are dangerous after dark in this part of town.
At the center of Memorial Plaza, on a granite plinth twelve feet in diameter, stand three larger-than-lifesize bronze figures: marines in battle gear, one of them wounded and leaning on another, the third carrying Old Glory as if defiantly announcing their location to an adversary they do not fear.
These days, the city is operating with such an enormous budget deficit that the plaza lamps and the spotlights on the statuary are extinguished at nine o’clock to save electricity. All is dark but for the lunar lamp.
The sounds of celebrations ring in from surrounding streets.
