Little, Big (80 page)

"Well." The two cousins stared into the fire. "That does explain it, though," Auberon said. "This. If it is family."

"That's what I thought," George said.

"Yeah," Auberon said.

"Yeah?" Fred Savage said. They looked up at him, startled. "Then what in hell 'm I doin' here?"

He looked from one to the other, grinning, his dull, living eyes amused. "Y'see?" he said.

"Well," George said.

"Well," Auberon said.

"Y'see?" Fred said again. "What in hell 'm
I
doin here?" His yellow eyes closed and opened, and so did the many yellow eyes in the woods behind him. He shook his head as though at a puzzle, but he wasn't really puzzled. He never seriously asked such a question, what was he doing where he was, except when it amused him to watch others consider it in consternation. Consternation, and considering, thought itself in fact, were mostly a spectacle to him; a man who had long since given up making any distinction between the place behind his closed black lids and the place before him when they were open, he was hard to confuse, and as for this place, Fred Savage didn't really wonder; he didn't bother himself supposing he had ever lived anyplace else.

"Teasin'," he said softly and kindly to his two friends. "Teasin'."

He kept vigil for a while, or slept, or both, or neither. Night passed. He saw a path. In the blue dawn, birds awaking, fire cold, he saw the same path, or another, there between trees. He woke George and Auberon, a huddled pile, and with his index brown and gnarled and dirt-clogged as a root, he pointed it out to them.

George Mouse looked around himself, swept with uneasy wonder. He had been feeling, since the first steps they had taken on the path which Fred had found, that none of it was as strange as it ought to be, or as unknown to him. And here in this spot (no different otherwise, as thick with undergrowth, as overwhelmed with towering trees) the feeling had grown much stronger. His feet had stood in this place before. In fact they had rarely been far from it.

"Wait," he said to Fred and Auberon, who were stumbling ahead, looking for the path's continuation. "Wait a sec."

They stopped, looking back.

George looked up, down, left, right. Right: there, he could sense more than see it, was a clearing. Air more gold and blue than the forest's gray was beyond that row of guardian trees.

That row of guardian trees . . .

"You know," he said, "I get the feeling we haven't come all that far, after all."

But the others were too far on to hear him. "Come on, George," Auberon called.

George pulled himself from the spot, and followed. But he had taken only a few steps when he felt himself drawn back.

Damn. He stopped.

The forest was, it was hard to believe it of a mess of vegetation but it was so, the forest was like a huge suite of rooms, you stepped through doors continually out of one place into a very different place. Five steps were all it had taken him to leave the place where he had felt so familiar. He wanted to go back; he wanted very much to go back.

"Well, just
wait
a second," he called out to his companions, but they didn't turn back, they were already elsewhere. The calls of birds seemed louder than George's own call. In a quandary, he took two steps in the direction they had gone, and then, drawn by a curiosity stronger than fear, returned to the place where the clearing could be glimpsed.

It didn't seem far. There seemed even to be a path in that direction.

The path led him down, and almost at once the guardian trees and the patch of sunlight he had seen were gone. Very soon after that the path was gone too. And very soon after that George forgot completely what had caused him to take this way.

He walked on a bit, his boots sinking into soft earth, and his coat clawed at by harsh, marsh-living bushes. Where? For what? He stood stock still, but began to sink, and pulled himself forward. The forest sang all around him, blocking his ears to his own thoughts. George forgot who he was.

He stopped again. It was dark yet bright, the trees all in a moment seemed to have bloomed a chartreuse cloudiness, spring had come. And why was he here, afraid, in this place, when and where was this, what had become of him? Who was he? He began searching in his pockets, not knowing what he would find but hoping for a clue as to who this was here and what he was doing.

From one pocket he pulled out a blackened pipe, which meant nothing to him though he turned it and turned it in his hand; from the other he pulled out an old pocket watch.

The watch: yes. He couldn't read its moustached face, which was grinning at him disconcertingly, but this was definitely a clue. A watch in his hand. Yes.

He had, no doubt (he could almost remember it) taken a pill. A new drug he was experimenting with, a drug of astonishing, of just unheard-of potency. That had been some time ago, yes, by the watch, and the pill had done this to him: had snatched away his memory, even his memory of having taken the pill, and set him to struggle in a wholly imaginary landscape, my God a pill so potent that it could build a forest complete with bilberries and birdsong inside his head for the homunculus of himself to wander in! But this imaginary woods was still interpenetrated, faintly, by the real: he had in his hand the watch, the watch by which he had intended to time the new drug's working. He had had it in his hand the whole time, and had only now, because the pill's effect was wearing off, imagined that he had taken it out of his pocket to consult it—had imagined that he had taken it out because with the pill's wearing off he was coming to himself again, by slow stages, and the real watch was intruding into the unreal forest. In a moment, any moment, the terrible leaf-jewelled forest would fade and he would begin to see through it the room where he in fact sat with the watch in his hand: the library of his townhouse, on the third floor, on the couch. Yes! Where he had sat motionless for who knew how long, the pill made it seem a lifetime; and around him, waiting for his response, his description, would be his friends, who had watched with him. Any second now their faces would swim into reality, as the watch had: Franz and Smoky and Alice, coalescing in the dusty old library where they had so often sat, their faces anxious, gleeful, and expectant: what was it like, George? What was it like? And he would for a long time only shake his head and make inarticulate round noises, unable till firm reality reasserted itself to speak of it.

"Yes; yes," George said, near to tears of relief that he remembered, "
I
remember,
I
remember;" and even as he was saying that, he slipped the watch back into his pocket, turning his head in the greening landscape. "I remember . . ." He pulled a boot from the mud, and the other boot, and no longer remembered.

A row of guardian trees, and a clearing where sunlight fell, and a suggestion of cultivation. On ahead. Ahead: only now he was stumbling downward over mossy rocks black with wetness, stumbling toward a ravine through which a cold stream ran rushing. He breathed its moist breath. There was a rude bridge there, much fallen, where floating branches caught and white water swirled; looks dangerous; and a hard climb beyond that; and as he put a cautious foot on the bridge, afraid and breathing hard, he forgot what it was he toiled toward, and at the next step (a loose crosspiece, he steadied himself) forgot who he was that toiled or why, and at the next step, the middle of the bridge, realized that he had forgotten.

Why did he find himself staring down into water? What was going on here anyway? He put his hands into his pockets hoping to find something that would give him a clue. He took out an old pocket watch, which meant nothing to him, and a blackened, small-bowled pipe.

He turned the pipe in his hands. A pipe: yes. "I remember," he said vaguely. The pipe, the pipe. Yes. His basement. Down in the basement of a building on his block he had discovered an ancient cache, an amazing, a hilarious find. Amazing stuff! He had smoked some, in this pipe, that must be it: there in that blackened bowl. He could see bits of cindery consumed resin, it was all in him now, and this—
this!
—was the effect. Never, never had he known a rush so total, so involving! He had been swept away; he was no longer standing where he had been standing when he had put match to the pipe's contents—on a bridge, yes, a stone bridge up in the Park, where he had gone to share a pipe with Sylvie—but in some weird woods, so real he could smell them, so swept away that he seemed to have been clambering forgetful of who he was in this woods for hours, forever, when in fact (he remembered, he remembered clearly) he had only at this moment lowered the pipe from his lips—here it still was in his hands, before his eyes. Yes: it had reappeared first, first sign of his alighting from a no doubt quite short but utterly ravishing rush; Sylvie's face, in an old peau-de-soie black hat, would come next. He was even now about to turn to her (the hash-created woods discreating themselves and the littered brownish winter Park assembling itself around him) and say: "Hm, ha, strong stuff, watch it, STRONG stuff;" and she, laughing at his swept-away expression, would make some Sylvie remark as she took the pipe from him:

"I see, I remember," he said, like a charm, but he had already a terrible percipience that this was not the first time he had remembered, no indeed, once before he had remembered it all but remembered it all differently. Once before? No, oh no, perhaps many times, oh no oh no: he stood frozen as the possibility of an endless series of remembrances, each one different but all made out of a small moment in the woods, occurred to him: an infinite series endlessly repeated, oh
I
remember,
I
remember, each one extending a lifetimewards out from one small, one
very
small moment (a turn of the head only, a step of the foot) in an absolutely inexplicable woods. George, seeing it so, felt he had been suddenly—but not suddenly, for a long, an immemorial time—condemned to hell.

"Help," he said, or breathed. "Help, oh help."

He took steps across the rickety bridge beneath which the forest stream foamed. There was a glassless picture framed in an old gilt frame on his kitchen wall (though George had forgotten just now that it was there) which showed just such a dangerous bridge as this, and two children, innocent, unafraid or perhaps unaware of their danger, crossing it hand in hand, a blond girl, a dark, brave boy, while above them, watching, ready to stretch out a hand to them if a loose crosspiece broke or a foot was placed wrong, was an angel: a white angel, crowned with a gold fillet, vapid-faced in gauzy draperies but strong, strong to save the children. Just such a power George felt behind him then (though he didn't dare turn to see it) and, taking Lilac's hand, or was it Sylvie's, he stepped bravely across the creaking slats to reach the other side.

Then came a long, an endless because unremembered time; but at last George gained the top of the ravine, knees torn and hands weary. He came out between two rocks like upraised knees, and found himself—yes!—in a small glade spangled with flowers; and in the near distance, the row of guardian trees. Beyond them, it was clear now, was a fence of wattles, and a building or two, and a curl of smoke from a chimney. "Oh, yes," George said, panting, "oh, yes." Near him in the glade, a lamb stood; the noise George heard was not his own lost heart but its crying voice. It had got caught in some wicked trailfng briar, and was hurting itself to free its leg.

"There, there," George said. "There, there."

"Baa, baa," said the lamb.

George freed its, fragile black leg; the lamb stumbled forward, still crying—it was just newborn, how had it strayed from its mother? George went to it, and picked it up by its legs, he had seen this done but he forgot where, and slung it over his neck, holding it by its feebly kicking feet. And with it turning its silly sad face to try and look into his, he went on up to the gate in the fence of wattles beyond the row of guardian trees. The gate stood open.

"Oh, yes," George said, standing before it. "Oh, yes; I see. I see."

For this was clear enough; there was the small ramshackle house with horn windows, there the byre, there the goat shed; there was the plot of new-planted vegetables, in which someone was digging, a small brown man who when he saw George approach threw down his tool and hurried away muttering. There was the wellhouse and the root cellar, there the woodpile, with its axe upright in the block. And there, the hungry sheep shouldered at their fences, looking up to be fed. And all around the little clearing, there was the Wild Wood looking down, indifferent and dark.

How he had come here he didn't know, any more than he knew now where he had started from; but it was plain now where he was. He was home.

He set down the lamb within the fold, and it skipped to where its mother scolded it. George wished that he could remember, just a little; but what the hell, he'd spent a lifetime in one enchantment or another, or one enchantment in another, in another; he was too old now to worry when it changed. This was real enough.

"What the hell," he said. "What the hell, it's a living." He turned to close his gate of palings, barring it and tying it closely in good husbandry against the dark Wild Wood and what lived there, and, brushing his hands together, went to his door.

A heaven, Ariel Hawksquill thought, deep within, a heaven no larger than the ball of one's thumb. The island-garden of the Immortals, the valley where we are all kings forever. The rocking, clacking rhythm of the train drove the thought again and again around the track of her mind.

Hawksquill was not one of those who find the motion of trains soothing. Rather it prodded and grated on her hideously, and though a dull rainy dawn looked to be near breaking in the flat landscape beyond the window, she had not slept, though she had given out, on boarding, that she would—that was only to keep the President, for a time, away from her door. When the aged, kindly porter had come to make up her bed, she had sent him away, and then called him back, and asked that a bottle of brandy be brought her, and that no one disturb her.