the canvas chair damp with dew.
He had always imagined, without of course ever believing it, that he would know this moment. He imagined that it would come at their time, unphotographable twilight; and that years after he had surrendered it all, grown hopeless, bitter even, in that twilight one would come to him, stepping through the gloaming without sound and without causing the sleeping flowers to nod. A child, it would seem to be, discarnate flesh glowing as in an antique platinum print, whose silver hair would be as though on fire, lit by the sun which had just set or perhaps hadn't yet risen. He wouldn't speak to it, unable to, stone dead already it may be; but it would speak to him. It would say: "Yes, you knew us. Yes, you alone came close to the whole secret. Without you, none of the others could have come near us. Without your blindness, they couldn't have seen us; without your loneliness, they couldn't have loved each other, or engendered their young. Without your disbelief, they couldn't have believed. I know it's hard for you to think the world could work in this strange way, but there it is."
In the Woods
By noon next day, clouds had gathered, fitting themselves together resolutely and without haste, seeming when they had put out all the sky to be almost low enough to touch.
The road they walked between Meadowbrook and Highland wound up and down amid an aged forest. The well-grown trees stood close together, their roots it must be all interlaced below; above the road, their branches met and grappled together, so it seemed the oaks grew maple leaves and the hickories oak leaves. They suffered great choking garments of ivy, especially the riddled and fibrous trunks of the dead, propped against their old neighbors, unable to fall.
"Dense," Smoky said.
"Protected," Daily Alice said.
"How do you mean?"
She held out a hand, to see whether the rain had begun, and her palm was struck once, then again. "Well, it's never been logged. Not anyway in a hundred years."
The rain came on steadily, without haste, as the clouds had; this wasn't to be some fickle shower, but a well-prepared day's rain. "Damn," she said. She pulled a crumpled yellow hat from her pack and put it on, but it was apparent they were in for a wetting.
"How far is it?"
"To the Woods' house? Not too far. Wait a minute though." She stopped, and looked back the way they had come, then the way they were going. Smoky's bare head began to itch from the drops. "There's a shortcut," Alice said. "A path you can take, instead of going all the way around by the road. It ought to be right around here, if I can find it."
They walked back and forth along the apparently impassable margin. "Maybe they've stopped keeping it up," she said as they searched. "They're kind of strange. Solitary. Just live out here all by themselves and almost never see anybody." She stopped before an ambiguous hole in the undergrowth and said: "Here it is," without confidence, Smoky thought. They started in. The rain ticked in the leaves steadily, the sound growing less discontinuous and more a single voice, surprisingly loud, drowning out the sounds their own progress made. It was dark as night beneath the trees beneath the clouds, and not lightened by the silver shimmer of the rain.
"Alice?"
He stood still. All he could hear was the rain. So intent on making his way along this supposed path that now he'd lost her. And surely he had lost the path too, if there had ever been one. He called out again, a confident, no-nonsense call, no reason to get excited. He got no reply, but just then saw between two trees a true path, quite patent, an easy winding way. She must have found it and just got quickly on ahead while he floundered in the creepers. He took the path and went along, pretty well wet now. Alice should any moment appear before him, but she didn't. The path led him deeper and deeper beneath the crackling forest; it seemed to unroll before his feet, he couldn't see where it led, but it was always there to follow. It brought him eventually (long or short time he couldn't tell, what with the rain and all) to the edge of a wide, grassy glade all ringed with forest giants slick and black with wet.
Down in the glade, seeming insubstantial in the dripping