In the night room Page 0,61
hippies, only her head and trunk were visible. April had made another trip back through the rabbit hole or the mirror, but her gaze lacked the ferocious urgency of her most recent appearance on Grand Street and the silent clamor of her first. He wondered what she had come to tell him. Undoubtedly, it had something to do with Cyrax’s gr8 moment, and his utter ignorance of whatever that might be made him stand for a moment in openmouthed foolish silence at the microphone. The words Alice in Wonderland were still decaying in the atmosphere about him.
He had to say something, so he said, “You’re absolutely right. I really must be getting senile. Thank you for correcting me—the truth is, I’ve had Alice in Wonderland on my mind lately.”
In the little ripple of response, he glanced again at the chink of space between the curly-headed hippies, and was relieved to find April Underhill still keeping her watchful eye upon him.
“Let’s carry on as if nothing had happened. We’ll all feel better, especially me. Like you-know-who in The Wizard of Oz, not the heroine of Alice in Wonderland, let’s all click our heels together three times and say, ‘More warm weather. More warm weather. More warm weather.’ ”
Sweetly, almost all of the people in the audience did exactly what they were told, and most of them were smiling. Three times each, thirty to forty pairs of heels clicked together and made a staccato blur. A ragged chorus repeated the three words three times, leaving those who had spoken them with the mysterious satisfaction of people who have participated in a communal rite.
Instantly, glowing tracers of lightning sizzled across the night sky, igniting an enormous rumble of thunder that worked its way toward an end-of-the-world explosion. When a wall of rain smashed against the window, the lightning turned fat and gauzy and hung in the air.
“Wow,” Underhill said. Everybody in the room was staring at the window. “Can I take it back?”
Another gigantic fork made of lightning noisily divided the sky.
Even before he looked back at the last row, Tim Underhill knew that his sister had departed. The new-wave hippies stared at the window like everybody else, but no one occupied the chair behind them.
“I guess I’d better stop talking and start reading,” Underhill said. Some quiet laughter, caused more by alarm than humor, rippled flamelike here and there, and came to an end the moment he picked up his book.
Twenty-five minutes later, he thought he had managed to give a pretty good reading, despite the Götterdämmerung beginning and the typhoonlike rain that had never ceased to batter the big windows on Broadway. Happy to be indoors, his audience responded as though they were huddled around a campfire.
The last section Underhill read described the entrance—into the book and into the life of its adolescent hero—of a young woman who may or may not have existed but offered the teenaged hero an imaginative way out of the grave dug for him by loathsome Ronnie Lloyd-Jones. This young woman, who called herself Lucy Cleveland, was in fact Joseph Kalendar’s daughter, Lily. According to Cyrax, Tim’s assumptions about Lily had brought down upon him all the bizarre and threatening troubles of the past week. In his book, however, although after having been both sexually abused and murdered by her father Lily was in fact indisputably dead, she nonetheless had something like a beautiful life, forever in love, forever loved, forever in flight. The circle around Underhill’s campfire had seemed to be moved, and if not moved then intrigued, by the series of paragraphs that ended with the words A slight figure slipped into the room.
“Wherever that is, that’s where we are,” Underhill said. “Thank you for listening.”
After the applause and the invitation for questions, a couple of arms rose up like tulips, shyly, and for the first time since the onset of the storm, he permitted himself to look back at the place where April had been. The hippies smiled at him, bestowing the gift of infantile hippie love. Between them, in the last row, Underhill glimpsed a young person of indeterminate gender who appeared to be soaked through, staring at him with disconcerting intensity. He or she was halfheartedly wiping his or her arms with a wad of paper towels from the restroom. Obviously, this person had run into the bookstore to get out of the rain and camped here at the edge of his reading to try to dry off.
“You, sir,” he said,