and then it would collapse into darkness, shrinking to a single point like some impossibly brilliant lightning bug.
He smiled to see me. He had golden hair and the most beautiful smile I have ever seen on a child’s face and I was afraid of him—even before he called out to me by name. I pretended I didn’t hear him, pretended he wasn’t there, that I didn’t see him, walked right past him. He laughed to see me hurrying by.
The farther I went the steeper it got. There seemed to be a light below, as if somewhere beyond a ledge, through the trees, there was a great city, on the scale of Roma, a bowl of lights like a bed of embers. I could smell food cooking on the breeze. If it was food—that hungry-making perfume of meat charring over flame.
Voices ahead of me: a man speaking wearily, perhaps to himself, a long and joyless discourse; someone else laughing, bad laughter, unhinged and angry. A third man was asking questions.
“Is a plum sweeter after it has been pushed in the mouth of a virgin to silence her as she is taken? And who will claim the baby child sleeping in the cradle made from the rotten carcass of the lamb that laid with the lion only to be eviscerated?” And so on.
At the next turn in the steps they finally came into sight. They lined the stairs: half a dozen men nailed to crosses of blackened pine. I couldn’t go on and for a time I couldn’t go back; it was the cats. One of the men had a wound in his side, a red seeping wound that made a puddle on the stairs, and kittens lapped at it as if it were cream and he was talking to them in his tired voice, telling all the good kitties to drink their fill.
I did not go close enough to see his face.
At last I returned the way I had come on shaky legs. The boy awaited me with his collection of oddities.
“Why not sit and rest your sore feet, Quirinus Calvino?” he asked me. And I sat down across from him, not because I wanted to but because that was where my legs gave out.
Neither of us spoke at first. He smiled across the blanket spread with his goods, and I pretended an interest in the stone wall that overhung the landing there. That light in the jar built and built until our shadows lunged against the rock like deformed giants, before the brightness winked out and plunged us back into our shared darkness. He offered me a skin of water but I knew better than to take anything from that child. Or thought I knew better. The light in the jar began to grow again, a single floating point of perfect whiteness, swelling like a balloon. I tried to look at it, but felt a pinch of pain in the back of my eyeballs and glanced away.
“What is that? It burns my eyes,” I asked.
“A little spark stolen from the sun. You can do all sorts of wonderful things with it. You could make a furnace with it, a giant furnace, powerful enough to warm a whole city, and light a thousand Edison lights. Look how bright it gets. You have to be careful, though. If you were to smash this jar and let the spark escape, that same city would disappear in a clap of brightness. You can have it if you want.”
“No, I don’t want it,” I said.
“No. Of course not. That isn’t your sort of thing. No matter. Someone will be along later for this. But take something. Anything you want,” he said.
“Are you Lucifer?” I asked in a rough voice.
“Lucifer is an awful old goat who has a pitchfork and hooves and makes people suffer. I hate suffering. I only want to help people. I give gifts. That’s why I’m here. Everyone who walks these stairs before their time gets a gift to welcome them. You look thirsty. Would you like an apple?” Holding up the basket of white apples as he spoke.
I was thirsty—my throat felt not just sore, but singed, as if I had inhaled smoke recently, and I began to reach for the offered fruit, almost reflexively, but then drew my hand back for I knew the lessons of at least one book. He grinned at me.
“Are those—” I asked.
“They’re from a very old and honorable tree,” he said. “You will never taste