In this reimagined confrontation, I appeared twenty-six, not a boy any longer, although the hobo looked exactly as he had been in life, flinging aside his burning hat and fleeing into the night. Pursuing him were not two delinquents but a pair of marionettes as large as men, one of them the puppet from the toy shop and the other a representation of Ryan Telford, the curator from the library and the murderer of Gwyneth’s father. Their joints were crudely hinged and, though freed from the puppeteer’s strings, they didn’t walk but instead approached in a grotesque dance. They were nonetheless quick and not easily escaped, and both carried butane torches. When they cornered me, they spoke, their wooden jaws clacking. Ryan Telford reported what I had glimpsed in the newspaper earlier, “Plague in China,” and the nameless marionette with the painted face and the scarlet-striated black eyes said, “War in the Middle East,” in a low voice thick with menace. Instead of thrusting their swords of fire at me, they knocked me aside and to the bricks, both screaming wordlessly in rage, clattering past me in pursuit of someone else. When I scrambled to my feet and turned to discover the object of their hatred, it proved to be Gwyneth. She was already gripped in the teeth of fire, and when I rushed toward her, desperate to save her and to take the biting flames unto myself, I woke in a sweat and got up from the armchair.
I had slept away the latter part of the morning, through lunch, into the afternoon. My watch read 2:55.
More than four hours remained before I would see Gwyneth again, but in the first minutes after waking, I felt that the dream must be premonitory, a warning that she was in danger now.
I had no phone to call her. I had never before needed a phone. Nor did I have a number at which she could be reached.
Pacing restlessly, trying to quell the shakes with which the nightmare had left me, I knew that going to her right now involved intolerable risk. Sundown didn’t come for about another two hours. I had never gone aboveground into the teeming streets in daylight.
During the twelve years that I had been blessed with Father’s companionship, he schooled me continuously and well in matters of secrecy and survival. We of the hidden are so hated that we can’t afford a single mistake, and most potentially fatal errors are made when you think that some new circumstance requires a relaxation of the rules of conduct that have thus far kept you safe.
As little use as I might be to Gwyneth in a moment of crisis, I would be of no use at all if I were dead.
Gradually Father’s training and wisdom trumped the panic induced by the dream.
After pouring peach-flavored tea into a mug and heating it in the microwave, I soaked in the old claw-foot tub in the bathroom and drank the tea. I counseled myself to be patient. I assured myself that, in spite of her social phobia, the girl had more street smarts than I could ever hope to acquire. She knew how to protect herself. Besides, the trusts established by her wealthy father would insulate her from much that was wrong with the world.
By the time I toweled dry and dressed, I regretted missing lunch. I prepared a sandwich and another mug of tea.
When I was nearly finished with the meal, I realized something that seemed peculiar at first blush and that seemed more strange the longer that I thought about it. Gwyneth’s large diamonds of black makeup and her highly unusual eyes at the center of those dramatic shapes were uncannily like those of the toy-store marionette, yet I had not mentioned the puppet to her. Neither had I allowed myself to wonder much about those curious similarities.
Minutes later, as I washed my plate and mug in the bathroom, at my one sink, still thinking about the marionette, I was reminded of something that had happened that long-ago October night, after the windows shattered and the two young hoodlums fled with their butane torches.
MY FIRST NIGHT IN THE CITY, AND EVERYWHERE glass underfoot …
Because my tormentors sprinted south, I ran north but got only a few feet before I collided with the man who moved to intercept me. From concealment, he had witnessed my encounter with the hobo and his pursuers. He had thrown the rocks that shattered the windows and triggered the alarms, for he meant to rescue me, though I didn’t at first understand his intent.
He was tall and strong, and I was little, but though resistance might have been futile, I struggled to break free of his grip. He wore a long black raincoat that looked almost like a cape. Holding fast to me with his right hand, he used his left to pull back the hood of his coat, revealing his face. When I saw that he was like me, I ceased struggling and stood gasping for breath, gazing up at him in astonishment.
Until that moment, I had assumed that I must be the only one of my kind, the freak that the midwife and her daughter had called me, a monster to the world, condemned to solitude, until someone killed me. Now I was one of two, and if there were two, there could be more. I had not expected to survive childhood, but here stood one like me, twenty-something and in possession of all his limbs.
“Are you alone?” he asked.
In my shock, I hadn’t the wit to answer.
He spoke above the clanging alarms. “Are you alone, son?”
“Yes. Yes, sir.”
“Where do you hide?”
“The woods.”
“No woods in the city.”
“I had to leave there.”
“How did you make it here?”
“Under a tarp. On a truck.”
“Why come to the city?”
“I didn’t know.”
“What didn’t you know?”
“Where the truck would bring me.”
“It brought you to me, so you might live. Let’s go. Quickly now.”
Hoods up, glass crunching and clinking underfoot, we hurried along the promenade, past the smoking remnants of the burnt hat. When we passed the toy store, where the window was broken, the items in the display were arranged as before, except that the marionette was missing. I almost stopped to confirm its disappearance. But sometimes I knew things with my heart that my mind could not explain, and right then my heart insisted I should keep moving and not look back, and never ask where the marionette had gone because my question might be answered.
By the time we heard the sirens, we were two blocks from the mall, in a cobbled backstreet as dark as a deer path in the woods under a half-moon. A sudden wind broomed away the stillness of the night as the man whom I would eventually call Father hooked the disc of iron, lifted it, and set it aside. Piping across the hole where the iron had been, the wind played an oboe note, and I went down into that sound and into a world that I could never have imagined, where I would make a better life for myself.
Three years would pass before I mentioned the marionette to my father, on the night when he warned me about the music box that was surely more than it appeared to be.
WITH SOME EFFORT, I REASONED MYSELF INTO waiting to return to Gwyneth’s place until the agreed-upon time. After all, I had known her for less than a day. Although our relationship had developed with almost miraculous ease, if I showed up unannounced at first dark, two hours before expected, regardless of my excuse, I would seem to be disrespecting her wishes. Worse, a girl so afflicted with social phobia that she couldn’t bear to be touched would find my eagerness off-putting.
I