from the deepest well of the universe. He caught names in that group voice, but could not have said what they were. One might have been Marten. One might have been Cuthbert. Another might have been Roland—Roland of Gilead.
There were names; there was a babble of conversation that might have been ten thousand entwined stories; but above all was that gorgeous, swelling hum, a vibration that wanted to fill his head with bright white light. It was, Jake realized with a joy so overwhelming that it threatened to burst him to pieces, the voice of Yes; the voice of White; the voice of Always. It was a great chorus of affirmation, and it sang in the empty lot. It sang for him.
Then, lying in a cluster of scrubby burdock plants, Jake saw the key . . . and beyond that, the rose.
17
His LEGS BETRAYED HIM and he fell to his knees. He was vaguely aware that he was weeping, even more vaguely aware that he had wet his pants a little. He crawled forward on his knees and reached toward the key lying in the snarl of burdocks. Its simple shape was one he seemed to have seen in his dreams:
He thought: The little s-shape at the end—that's the secret.
As he closed his hand around the key, the voices rose in a harmonic shout of triumph. Jake's own cry was lost in the voice of that choir, lie saw the key flash white within his fingers, and felt a tremendous jolt of power run up his arm. It was as if he had grasped a live high-tension wire, but there was no pain.
He opened Charlie the Choo-Choo and put the key inside. Then his eyes fixed upon the rose again, and he realized that it was the real key— the key to everything. He crawled toward it, his face a flaming corona of light, his eyes blazing wells of blue fire.
The rose was growing from a clump of alien purple grass.
As Jake neared this clump of alien grass, the rose began to open before his eyes. It disclosed a dark scarlet furnace, petal upon secret petal, each burning with its own secret fury. He had never seen anything so intensely and utterly alive in his whole life.
And now, as he stretched one grimy hand out toward this wonder, the voices began to sing his own name . . . and deadly fear began to steal in toward the center of his heart. It was as cold as ice and as heavy as stone.
There was something wrong. He could feel a pulsing discord, like a deep and ugly scratch across some priceless work of art or a deadly fever smoldering beneath the chilly skin of an invalid's brow.
It was something like a worm. An invading worm. And a shape. One which lurks just beyond the next turn of the road.
Then the heart of the rose opened for him, exposing a yellow dazzle of light, and all thought was swept away on a wave of wonder. Jake thought for a moment that what he was seeing was only pollen which had been invested with the supernatural glow which lived at the heart of every object in this deserted clearing—he thought it even though he had never heard of pollen within a rose. He leaned closer and saw that the concentrated circle of blazing yellow was not pollen at all. It was a sun: a vast forge burning at the center of this rose growing in the purple grass.
The fear returned, only now it had become outright terror. It's right, he thought, everything here is right, but it could go wrong—has started going wrong already, I think. I'm being allowed to feel as much of that wrongness as I can bear . . . but what is it? And what can I do?
It was something like a worm.
He could feel it beating like a sick and dirty heart, warring with the serene beauty of the rose, screaming harsh profanities against the choir of voices which had so soothed and lifted him.
He leaned closer to the rose and saw that its core was not just one sun but many . . . perhaps all suns contained within a ferocious yet fragile shell.
But it's wrong. It's all in danger.
Knowing it would almost surely mean his death to touch that glowing microcosm Init helpless to stop himself, Jake reached forward. There was no curiosity or terror in this gesture; only a great, inarticulate need to protect the rose.
18
WHEN HE CAME BACK to himself, he was at first only aware that a great deal of time had passed and his head hurt like hell.
What happened? Was I mugged?
He rolled over and sat up. Another blast of pain went through his head. He raised a hand to his left temple, and his fingers came away sticky with blood. He looked down and saw a brick poking out of the weeds. Its rounded comer was too red.
If it had been sharp, I'd probably be dead or in a coma.
He looked at his wrist and was surprised to find he was still wearing his watch. It was a Seiko, not terribly expensive, but in this city you didn't snooze in vacant lots without losing your stuff. Expensive or not, someone would be more than happy to relieve you of it. This time he had been lucky, it seemed.
It was quarter past four in the afternoon. He had been lying here, dead to the world, for at least five hours. His father probably had the cops out looking for him by now, but that didn't seem to matter much. It seemed to Jake that he had walked out of Piper School about a thousand years ago.
Jake walked half the distance to the fence between the vacant lot and the Second Avenue sidewalk, then stopped.
What exactly had happened to him?
Little by little, the memories came back. Hopping the fence. Slipping and twisting his ankle. He reached down, touched it, and winced. Yes—that much had happened, all right. Then what?
Something magical.
He groped for that something like an old man groping his way across a shadowy room. Everything had been full of its own light. Everything— even the empty wrappers and discarded beer-bottles. There had been voices—they had been singing and telling thousands of overlapping stories.
'And faces,' he muttered. This memory made him look around apprehensively. He saw no faces. The piles of bricks were just piles of bricks, and the tangles of weeds were just tangles of weeds. There were no faces, but—
—but they were here. It wasn't your imagination.
He believed that. He couldn't capture the essence of the memory, its quality of beauty and transcendence, but it seemed perfectly real. It was just that his memory of those moments before he had passed out seemed like photographs taken on the best day of your life. You can remember what that day was like—sort of, anyway—but the pictures are flat and almost powerless.
Jake looked around the desolate lot, now filling up with the violet shadows of late afternoon, and thought: / want you back. God, I want you back the way you were.
Then he saw the rose, growing in its clump of purple grass, very close to the place where he had fallen. His heart leaped into his throat. Jake blundered back toward it, unmindful of the beats of pain each step sent up from his ankle. He dropped to his knees in front of it like a worshipper at an altar. He leaned forward, eyes wide.
It's just a rose. Just a rose after all. And the grass—
The grass wasn't purple after all, he saw. There were splatters of purple on the blades, yes, but the color beneath was a perfectly normal green. He looked a little further and saw splashes of blue on another clump of
