“Yes!”
“Stubb, this isn’t going to work.”
“Who’s that? Ozzie?”
“Yes.”
“Here!” Little Ozzie called.
“Hey, a kid!”
“I’m Ozzie Barnes.”
“Little Ozzie, come over here,” Barnes said. “It’s Daddy.”
“Over here, Ozzie!”
“Right here, Ozzie!”
“Ozzie, you got him?” Candy asked.
“No!”
“No!”
“Right,” Barnes told her. “Everything’s okay.”
“Little boy, is that your dad?”
“I think so.”
“It’s a wise child that knows his own father.”
“Who was that?”
“Page of Wands, I think,” Sandy said. “Mr. Stubb, this isn’t going to work. We’ve got too many liars.”
“That’s right.”
“I’ll say.”
“Besides, Mr. Stubb, supposing that each of us was known to all the rest, by whatever label the world has fastened to each, of what good would that be?”
“Madame Serpentina?”
“No,” the witch said.
“Sure you are. I’d know your voice anyplace.”
“I am the person you have been accustomed to call Madame Serpentina, though that is not my name. There are others here who call me by another—which is not mine either. In the dark? Who can say?”
“What shall we call you?”
“Why need you call me anything?”
“Well, you’re here, anyway. Did you get the Gypsies loose?”
(A moment of silence.)
“She’s gone.”
“We are free—if to be free is to be free as you are. But a Gypsy cannot be free under a roof.”
“Hey, that’s profound! By God, I knew somebody’d say something profound if we kept at it long enough.”
“A wife is a woman who has only been wrong about one thing in her whole life.”
“That’s profound too.”
“Death is to life what potatoes are to breakfast.”
“Going broke would be like going crazy, if you could push your purse in a sow’s ear.”
“Knock it off, people!” Stubb ordered.
“What for? You got a better idea?”
“Philosophy is where you go when every other mind is closed.”
“You won’t ever get these crazies to talk sense, Stubb. And anyway, what could you do with them if you did?”
“We already said that. That was sensible, no?”
“Christ, I wonder how long this thing’s going to last. The lights must have been off for half an hour already.”
“There’s a clock over the nurse’s desk. If somebody has a watch, he could compare it with that. If he could see it.”
“What’s it like outside, you think?”
“Cold.”
“I mean, are they busting the windows on the TV stores? That stuff?”
