people brought in from Stamford who cleaned the place before he moved in.
It was the windows, of course. They always came to the windows first.
The first time he’d seen them had been in Marrakech, nearly sixteen years ago. A window shaped like a downturned heart, looking out onto a sky so blue it seemed to drip; and outside, framed within the window’s heavy white curves, Lie saw the crouching figure of a young man, bent over some object that caught the sun and flared so that he’d had to look away. When he’d turned back the young man was staring up in amazement as reddish smoke like dust roiled from the shining object. As Lie watched, the smoke began to take the shape of an immense man. At that point the joint he held burned Lie’s fingers and he shouted, as much from panic as pain. When he looked out again the figures were gone.
Since then he’d seen them many times. Different figures, but always familiar, always fleeting, and brightly colored as the tiny people inside a marzipan egg. Sinbad and the Roc; the little mermaid and her sisters; a brave little figure carrying a belt engraved with the words seven at a blow. The steadfast tin soldier and a Christmas tree soon gone to cinders; dogs with eyes as big as teacups, as big as soup plates, as big as millstones. On tour in Paris, London, Munich, L.A., they were always there, as likely (or unlikely) to appear in a hotel room overlooking a dingy alley as within the crystal mullions of some heiress’s bedroom. He had never questioned their presence, not after that first shout of surprise. They were the people, his people; the only ones he could trust in what was fast becoming a harsh and bewildering world.
It was just a few weeks after the first vision in Marrakech that he went to that fateful party; and a few months after that came the staggering success of The Erl-King. And then The Crash, and all the rest of it. He had a confused memory of those years. Even now, when he recalled that time it was as a movie with too much crosscutting and no dialogue. An endless series of women (and men) rolling from his bed; dark glimpses of himself in the studio cutting Baba Yaga and The Singing Bone; a few overlit sequences with surging crowds screaming soundlessly beneath a narrow stage. During those years his visions of the people changed. At first his psychiatrist was very interested in hearing about them. And so for a few months that was all he’d talk about, until he could see her growing impatient. That was the last time he brought them up to anyone.
But he wished he’d been able to talk to someone about them; about how different they were since The Crash. In the beginning he’d always noticed only how beautiful they were, how like his memories of all those stories from his childhood. The little mermaid gazing adoringly up at her prince; the two children in the cottage made of gingerbread and gumdrops; the girl in her glass coffin awakened by a kiss. It was only after The Crash that he remembered the other parts of the tales, the parts that in childhood had made it impossible for him to sleep some nights and which now, perversely, returned to haunt his dreams. The witch shrieking inside the stove as she was burned to death. The wicked queen forced to dance in the red-hot iron shoes until she died. The little mermaid’s prince turning from her to marry another, and the mermaid changed to sea foam as punishment for his indifference.
But since he’d been at Kingdom Come these unnerving glimpses of the people had diminished. They were still there, but all was as it had been at the very first, the myriad lovely creatures flitting through the garden like moths at twilight. He thought that maybe it was going off his medication that did it; and so the full prescription bottles were hoarded in a box in his room, hidden from Gram’s eyes.
That was how he made sure the people remained at Kingdom Come. Just like in Marrakech: they were in the windows. Each one opened onto a different spectral scene, visual echoes of the fantastic paintings that graced the walls. The bathroom overlooked a twilit ballroom; the kitchen a black dwarf’s cave. The dining room’s high casements opened onto the Glass Hill. From a tiny