“You’re aching for a concussion today, aren’t you?” she said. “You sounded like a herd of wildebeests. I thought you were going to brain yourself.”
“I wanted to ask you something,” he said. “I wanted to know what you meant by ‘small world.’”
“That’s a complicated answer.”
“Let me buy you a cup of coffee.” Once the phrase passed his lips, the room seemed suddenly airless. He was not the kind of man to ask strange women out for coffee. He was, in fact, not the kind of man to ask out women at all — not for lack of interest, but for lack of confidence. Assuming rejection, he found it easier to save everyone the trouble. So when she said —
“Sure. Coffee sounds good.”
— he exhaled an audible sigh of relief.
Her name was Erin, her secret unexpected (to say the least).
Coincidence, Charles called it. Coincidence that he had plucked down that book in his grandfather’s library (she dismissed it all as chance). Coincidence that he had gone on to seek a Ph.D. in English. Coincidence that on a late night in the library with snow slanting out of the black February sky, he should run (literally) into the great-great-exponentially-great-something-or-other of Caedmon Hollow himself, who might have influenced, in subtle ways, Charles’s pathway to this place.
Fate, he thought. The Worm Ouroboros. The snake biting its own tail. He had come full circle. And for a moment Charles glimpsed a vast, secret world, intersecting lines of power running just beyond the limits of human perception — a great story in which they were all of them embedded, moving toward some unimaginable conclusion.
As secrets go, it wasn’t much of one, Erin confided. The branch of the family that had immigrated to America had generations ago fallen out of touch with the family that remained behind in England — there might have been some kind of conflict, a formal break. She didn’t know, or much care. But Caedmon Hollow had remained with them, as a legend if nothing more: an eccentric figure out of the distant past, who’d squandered much of his abbreviated life in drinking and debauchery, squandering as well the talent that had enabled him to eke out but a single volume of fiction.
“Everyone in the family reads it at some time or other. It’s like a ritual,” she said. “It’s not really a story for children, is it? It’s hardly a story at all, more like the ravings of a man half mad from drinking.”
“I suppose it is,” he said, recalling the strangely vivid nightmares his own reading had produced. “But it has a kind of power, doesn’t it?”
“I guess so. I haven’t forgotten it, anyway.”
“Is there more, do you think? Unpublished?”
“Methinks I hear your grad-student heart beat harder,” she said. “On the hunt for a dissertation topic, are we?” And when he blushed — he could feel the heat creeping up his face — she touched his hand, and he flushed still harder. “Teasing,” she said. “You can have my crazy old great-great-whatever. It hardly matters to me.”
So it began, their introduction to the fuel that love feeds upon: stories.
That night they shared their stories — the beginning of them, anyway, as they understood them then. They started at the surface as the best stories do. So they talked about their graduate studies (their gradual studies, he said, venturing a rare joke). They talked about their crummy apartments and their crummier cars. He talked about the pressure to publish. She talked about the Law Review.
And then, as the best stories do, they deepened.
They talked. She was an orphan, alone in the world. Her parents had died in a car accident three years ago. In a way, Charles was an orphan, too. Kit had hardly been a mother to him, and in his freshman year of college she’d moved to a commune in Nova Scotia. He hadn’t seen her since.
Dreams and aspirations, two cups of coffee, then three. They were both too wired to sleep, so they repaired to her apartment to talk some more. She checked his head to make sure he hadn’t injured himself when they’d collided, his lips brushed hers, and one thing led to another, as these things will.
Everything important that had ever happened to him had happened in libraries, Charles thought, drawing her down to him on the bed. Then he stopped thinking at all. They married six months later.
They lived happily ever after.
At midnight, by myriad ways and strange, through trees parted before her to direct her path, Laura crept down to look into the Mere of Souls, whence the Sylph had dispatched her. Of a time you could see things in the water, or so Laura had learned in the Sylph’s Tale, and she went to her knees, enamored of these mysteries. But no matter how she tilted her head or squinted her eyes, she could see nothing but clots of leaves rotting in the depths below.
Then the waters began to boil and the Genii of the Pool thrust his head above the surface. Weedy hair coiled around his face. His eyes were narrow and blue and cold. “What brings you to this place?” he said in tones thick with the thunder of distant waters.
Laura gathered up her courage and spoke, her voice quavering. “I was told in a Story once upon a time,” she said, “that you could see your Fate in the Pool if only you believed hard enough. And I believe very hard.”
“Some things are better left unseen,” the Genii rumbled, “and the Mere of Souls may lie.”
— CAEDMON HOLLOW, IN THE NIGHT WOOD
They hadn’t spoken for almost an hour — not since Harrogate, where he’d had some trouble with a roundabout and the solicitor’s car had vanished, eclipsed by traffic — when Charles Hayden caught his first glimpse of the Eorl Wood.
In the days prior to their departure from their home in Ransom, North Carolina, with its attendant griefs and sorrows, Charles had fooled himself into thinking that maybe, just maybe, things would be okay after all — that the quiet stranger who shared his home was the outward face of a new Erin, a sadder, wiser Erin, tempered, but no longer paralyzed, by knowledge of the myriad ways the world could betray you. He had fooled himself into believing that with enough time and effort, with enough patience, he might yet reach the core of warmth inside her. He had supposed that the core of warmth was still there.
Last night over dinner at the hotel, this pleasant illusion had crumbled around Charles. And over breakfast this morning with the solicitor — her name was Merrow, Ann Merrow — Erin had been pensive and morose. During the chaos at the roundabout, as Charles had whizzed around the circle in futility for the second time, Erin had roused herself long enough to point at one of the branching exits.
“I think it’s that one,” she’d said, and Charles had whipped the car across three lanes of traffic. He caught a flash of the sign mounted high above. Ripon and North Yorks, it read. Then a lorry blew by with an aggrieved blast of the horn, and he’d yanked his attention