him with a brusque presentation of his calcium-stained tooth. The grotto and the passageways seemed to be much darker now. Why not turn on the marvelous lights? The humpback refused to be engaged on this or any point, and so the boy had to mind every step as they climbed back up to the cemetery. Once they were free of the tomb, the blindfold was reinstated and Lloyd was encouraged back into the dogcart. Their voyage was repeated in reverse without any words being exchanged, Lloyd’s head swirling with questions and worries—and hopes—until, lulled by the legato rhythm of the boat, he slipped into a hypnagogic drowse. When he came to himself again, the boat was docking back at the ferry landing and the air smelled very late—or very early. One of the powerful black men set him down on the pier, and Wolfgang Schelling removed the blindfold.
“All right, Lloyd,” he said. “Hurry home. I will see you in the afternoon. But be careful. Not everyone means you as well as we do.”
These words echoed in the boy’s mind as he raced back toward the stable, wondering if his parents would be awake and waiting for him—and what he was going to say if they were. The streets were dark but for the lights of a shuttered tavern. No one else appeared to be around. Still, there was a sinister sense of watchfulness about the lanes and it wasn’t until he was all the way back to the familiar smell of the glue renderer’s and the stable door that he felt calm again. Gratefully, his parents were both sound asleep—Hephaestus hog-breathing with drink, Rapture sighing low, sometimes saying something the boy could not understand (which was not that unusual at any time).
At the rear of the stable, Lloyd sneaked off with one of his father’s hoarded matches and scraped it hard to make enough light to examine the prize that Mother Tongue had entrusted him with. He expected gemstones plucked from some harvested diadem, but he gasped and almost dropped the match and set the rank-smelling barn on fire when he saw that what she had given him was two brilliant green glass eyes.
What did it mean?
Was the ancient woman really blind, or was this just some trick? After he recovered from his shock, Lloyd extinguished the match, but the two orbs seemed to continue glowing, as if his recognition had triggered some covert luminosity within them. Or is it in my mind? he wondered.
In either case, as he fondled them—and peered into them in the pale light of morning—they seemed to take on a deeper presence. One globe he imagined gazed back at the moments that had brought him and his family to this crossroads, each of the scenes and encounters since leaving their home suspended like prehistoric insects in amber. The other sphere was a lens that he fancied looked into the future, a lightning-lit horizon of messenger possibility and foreshadowings … frozen pictures melting alive … unknown faces beginning to form.
Cupping them in his palms, Lloyd sensed an occult quality of heat and energy about them. What if these really were Mother Tongue’s eyes? he pondered. Maybe she is blind—and yet through some arcane mechanism the spheres allowed her to see. A kind of sight, anyway, delivered by a spectral science he didn’t comprehend … but might … in time.
Something deep within him felt a magnetic summons toward these enigmas—via Mother Tongue and her minions or not. “The door of my destiny is opening,” he whispered to the slowly graying dawn.
CHAPTER 1
Rara Avis
AFTER HIS PERPLEXING MEETING WITH MOTHER TONGUE, LLOYD found it hard to rouse himself in the morning. Through a haze of threats and twisted images, his consciousness was brought back to St. Louis and the stable by the piggish noises of conjugal struggle. While the manufacture of the flying toys had brought his parents together in the matter of practical survival, their intimate life had not recovered since the Chicken Germain—root salve treatment, and Hephaestus’s libido had been bottled to bursting. Up to this point both parents had been discreet regarding Lloyd’s awareness of their lovemaking, but the urgency of the need and the systemic erosion of his dignity provoked Hephaestus to risk skin discomfort and to break with all decorum in a loud, and to Lloyd’s ears, exceedingly boorish way. Lloyd could not tell how much his mother resisted at first, but in the end she succumbed and seemed almost to enjoy it. Perhaps