The purpose to which any of this obscure arrangement might have been put escaped Candy entirely.
Then she recalled what Mischief had said, when she'd remarked that she couldn't even see a lamp up at the top of the tower. What was it exactly? He'd said something aboutlight being the oldest game in the world? Perhaps this odd creation represented some kind of game, she thought. The problem was that she had no idea how to play it.
And now, as if matters weren't bad enough, she heard the din of Shape beating down the lighthouse door; smashing it to smithereens in his fury. The noise reached a chaotic climax, followed by a few seconds of silence.
Then came the limping footfall of the monster himself, as he climbed the lighthouse stairs to find her.
7. LIGHT AND WATER
"WHERE ARE YOU, CHILD?" Shape growled as he ascended.
The sound of his voice, and the thump and drag of his limping step, froze Candy for a moment. This was like something from a nightmare: being hunted down by some hellish beast; some vile creature that wanted to eat her alive, limb by limb, finger by finger.
No!
She shook herself from her trance of terror. She wasn't going to let this abomination take her!
She looked around the room for a door that led out onto the narrow balcony that encircled the room. The door in question was directly behind her. She went over to it and turned the handle. It was locked, but that presented no problem to her, not in her present panicked state. She put her shoulder to the rotted wood and forced it open quite easily. Then she stepped out onto the balcony. The boards had been more exposed to the extremes of Minnesota's summers and winters than the interior floors—and they instantly gave way beneath her weight. She threw herself forward and grabbed hold of the rusted iron railing. Her speed probably saved her life, because two heartbeats later the whole patch of floorboards beneath her right foot crumbled away. Had she not had the support of the railing, she would have surely fallen through the hole and probably dropped to her death.
Very gingerly, she hauled her foot out of the hole and sought out a more reliable place to stand. She could still hear Shape in the tower behind her, calling out singsong threats to her as he climbed. It was some horrible little nursery song he was singing. The kind only a monster like Shape would have had sung to him in his cradle.
"O little one, My little one, Come with me, Your life is done. Forget the future, Forget the past. Life is over: Breathe your last."
Doing her best to blot out the sound of Shape's obscene little lullaby, she scanned the landscape around the lighthouse.
"Mischief!" she yelled. "Where did you go?"
She only had to call once. Then he was there, racing toward the tower through the grass. There was blood on his hands, she saw. Had he wounded Shape? She dared hope so.
"Lady Candy? Are you all right?"
"I can't find any light up here, Mischief! I'm sorry."
"He's coming, lady!"
"I know, Mischief. Believe me: I know.But there's no light —"
"There should be a cup and ball up there. Isn't there a cup and ball?"
"What?"
"The oldest game, Candy.Light is the oldest game —"
Candy glanced back inside. Yes, there was a cup, of sorts, sitting on top of the inverted pyramid.
"Yes! There's a cup!" she yelled back down to the brothers.
"Put the ball in it!" Mischief replied.
"What ball? There isn't any ball."
"There should be a ball." ;
"Well there isn't one!"
"Solook!" yelled John Serpent.
Candy didn't waste time telling Serpent to be more polite. She had only seconds to spare before Shape made an entrance into the round room, she knew. So she stopped talking and did as Mischief suggested, stepping over the hole she'd made in the platform and returning to look for the ball.
She listened as she scoured the room. To judge by the sound of his feet, Shape was close to the top of the stairs. Then—just as she was certain he was about to open the door—she heard the welcome sound of splintering timber, and her pursuer loosed a shout of alarm. His weight had apparently been too much for the staircase. She heard a series of crashes as broken portions of the steps fell away into the stairwell. A moment of silence followed, when she dared hope that perhaps Shape had fallen down the stairwell along with the broken stairs and was lying at the bottom of the flight. But instead of the distant moans she'd hoped to hear, there came an outburst of words in a language she had never heard before. She didn't need a translator to recognize them as curses.
She crossed to the door and glanced down, just to see what had happened. A large portion of the staircase—five or six stairs—had indeed collapsed under Mendelson Shape's weight. But he had somehow managed to avoid the full fall by jumping back down the stairs before they had collapsed beneath him. This left a sizeable gap for him to get across before he could continue his ascent. She was disappointed that he wasn't dead or comatose at the bottom, but this was better than nothing.
Looking up at her, he made horns of his forefinger and smallest finger, which he jabbed threateningly in Candy's direction. No doubt had he possessed the power to strike her dead on the spot, dead she would have been. But all he could do was curse and point, so she left him to it and went back to search for the missing ball.
As she did so, she heard Mischief yelling up at her from outside. Obviously he'd heard the din.
"I'm coming in, Lady Candy!"
She went to the outer door and called down to him.
" No! Stay where you are. You can't get up here anyway. The stairs have collapsed!"
She saw him looking through the holes in the tower wall to confirm what she'd told him. He was aghast.
"How will you get down?" he said, apparently more concerned with her safety now than with the oldest game in the world.
"I'll find a way when the time comes," Candy said. "First I'm going to find this stupid ball."
"We're coming in!" he said again.
"Wait!" she told him. "You just stay there.Please!'
Without waiting for an answer, she went down on her haunches and started a systematic search of the floor, looking for the missing part of this bizarre puzzle. It was not immediately visible, but there were several places where the boards had rotted completely, leaving holes in the floor. She went to each one, pulling up the worm-eaten boards to get a better look at what lay beneath. They came away easily, in showers of splinters, dust and dried beetle corpses.
The first hole revealed nothing. The second, the same. But the third was the charm.
There it was: rolled away under the boards. A small turquoise-and-silver ball. She had to tear away a little more of the rotted boards before she could fish it out between her fingers. When she finally succeeded, she discovered that it was surprisingly heavy for its size. It wasn't wood or plastic; it was metal. And elegantly engraved on its blue-green surface was a design she knew! There it was, etched into the metal: the doodle she'd drawn so obsessively in her workbook.
She didn't have any time to wonder at this. Behind her she heard a series of fierce grunts from the stairwell, followed by another crash. She knew in an instant what was going on. In his ambition to get to her, Shape had dared to try and jump the gap in the stairs.
She glanced up at the door, which stood open a few inches. Through it she could see Shape. He had succeeded in leaping over the gap, and he was coming up the remaining stairs two at a time, his razor claws making a horrid squeal on the timbers that lined the stairwell.
Candy looked at the small, simple cup that sat on the pyramid. Mischief's words echoed in her head.
Light's the oldest game in the world —
Shape was at the door, staring with one pinprick pupil through the crack at Candy, his jaws wide, dripping foam like the maw of a mad dog. He started to sing his lullaby, again, but more softly now, more liltingly.
"Forget the future
Forget the past,
Life is over:
Breathe jour last."
As he sang he pushed the door, slowly, as though this was some game.
Candy didn't have time to cross to the pyramid and put the ball in the cup. If she wasted those three or four seconds then Shape would be through the door and tearing out her throat, no doubt of it.
She had no choice: she had to play the game.
She took a deep breath and threw the ball. It wasn't a good throw. The ball hit the edge of the cup instead of landing in it, and for several seconds it circled the rim, threatening to topple out.
" Please," she willed it quietly, staring at the ball like a gambler watching a roulette wheel, knowing she had this throw and only this throw; there would be no second chance.
And still the ball rolled around the rim of the cup, undecided where to fall.
" Go on," she murmured, trying to ignore the creak of the door behind her.
The ball made one last, lazy circle of the rim, and then rocked back and forth for a moment and toppled into the cup, rattling around for a few seconds, before finally settling.
Shape let out a sound that was as far from human as any throat that was fashioned like his could make: a profound din that rose from a hiss to the noise of a creature tormented to the edge of madness. As he loosed this unearthly sound, he pushed open the door, threw Candy aside and reached for the ball so as to snatch it out of the cup.
But the tower was having none of that. Some process beyond Candy's comprehension had begun with that simple throw of hers. An invisible force was in the air, and it pitched Shape back, its power sufficient to carry him out through the door.
Outside, Candy heard Mischief and his brothers whooping like a pack of ecstatic dogs. Though they couldn't possibly see what she'd done, they knew she'd succeeded. Nor was it hard for Candy to understandhowthey knew. There was a wave of pure energy emanating from the pyramid. She felt the fine hairs at the base of her skull starting to prickle, and behind her eyes the design of the ball burned blue and green and gold.
She retreated a step, then another, her eyes fixed on the ball, cup, and pyramid.
And then, to her astonishment, the pyramid began tomoveon its pinpoint axis. It quickly gathered speed, and as it did so a fire seemed to be ignited in its heart, and a silvery luminescence—flickering tentatively at first but quickly becoming solid and strong—flowed out through the designs on the sides of the device.
It was just before noon in Minnesota; even with a thin cloud layer covering the sun, the day was still bright. But the light that now began to spill through the hieroglyphics on the spinning pyramid was brighter still. They were brilliant streams, pouring out in all directions.
She heard a soft, almost mournful, noise from Mendelson Shape. She glanced over at him. He was staring at the device with all the malice, all the intent to do harm, drained from his face. He was apparently resigned to whatever happened next. He could do nothing about the phenomenon except watch it.
"Now look what you've done," he said, very, very softly.
"What exactlyhaveI done?" she said.
"See for yourself," he replied, and for a moment he unhooked his gaze from the spinning pyramid so as to nod out at the world, beyond the lighthouse.
She didn't have any fear of turning her back on him now. At least until this miraculous process was over, it seemed, he was pacified.
She went to the door and stepped out, over the hole she'd made, to stand on the platform and see what she, and the game of ball and cup, had brought into being.
The first thing she noticed was the blossom-cloud. It was no longer moving slowly, responding to the gentle dictates of the wind. It was moving speedily overhead, like an immense golden wheel with the tower in which she stood as its axis.
She stood and admired the sight for a few moments, amazed at it. Then she looked down at the John brothers, who had turned their faces from the tower and were all looking out across the wide expanse of open prairie.What were they looking at? she wondered. She knew there was nothing out there for many miles, not so much as a house. For some reason, though the suburbs of Chickentown had spread in every other direction from the heart of the town, they had never spread northwest beyond Widow White's house. This was empty land; unused, unwanted.
And yet, there was something out there that John Mischief and his siblings wanted to see. Mischief was cupping his hands over his eyes as he stared into the faraway.
Candy could feel the light from the pyramid like a physical presence, pressing against her back. It wasn't an unpleasant sensation. In fact, it was quite pleasurable. She imagined that she could sense the power of the light passing through her body, lending her its strength. She seemed to feel it being carried through her veins, spilling out of her pores and out on her breath. It was just a trick her mind was playing, she suspected. But then, perhaps not. Today she couldn't be certain of anything.
Behind her, Mendelson Shape let out a plaintive moan, and a moment later, eight throats loosed a chorus of shouts from below.