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 thou- sand 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. Slip- ping 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 weeds. To his right, a straggling burdock bush bore
traces of both red and yellow. And beyond the burdocks was a little pile of dis- carded
paint-cans. Glidden Spread Satin, the labels said.
That’s all it was. Just splatters of paint. Only with your head all messed up the way it was,
you thought you were seeing—
That was bullshit.
He knew what he had seen then, and what he was seeing now. “Camouflage,” he
whispered. “It was all right here. Everything was. And … it still is.”
Now that his head was clearing, he could again feel the steady, harmonic power that this
place held. The choir was still here, its voice just as musical, although now dim and distant.
He looked at a pile of bricks and old broken chunks of plaster and saw a barely discernible
face hiding within it. It was the face of a woman with a scar on her forehead.
“Allie?” Jake murmured. “Isn’t your name Allie?”
There was no answer. The face was gone. He was only looking at an unlovely pile of
bricks and plaster again.
He looked back at the rose. It was, he saw, not the dark red that lives at the heart of a
blazing furnace, but a dusty, mottled pink. It was very beautiful, but not perfect. Some of
the petals had curled back; the outer edges of these were brown and dead. It wasn’t the sort
of cultivated flower he had seen in florists’ shops; he supposed it was a wild rose.
“You’re very beautiful,” he said, and once more stretched his hand out to touch it.
Although there was no breeze, the rose nodded toward him. For just a moment the pads of
his fingers touched its surface, smooth and velvety and marvellously alive, and all around