likes honey,” he pronounced, setting the jar in front of Linette.
She giggled delightedly. “How did you know?”
“Yeah, how did you know?” echoed Haley, frowning a little. In Linette’s lap the kinkajou uncurled and yawned, and Linette dropped a spoonful of honey into its mouth. The old lady watched tight-lipped. Behind her glasses her eyes sought Haley’s, but the girl looked away, shy and uneasy.
“Just a feeling I had, just a lucky guess,” Lie Vagal sang. He took a steaming mug from the table, ignored his grandmother when she pointed meaningfully at the pill bottle beside it. “Now, would you girls like to tour the rest of the house?”
It was an amazing place. There were chairs of brass and ebony, chairs of antlers, chairs of neon tubes. Incense burners shaped like snakes and elephants sent up wisps of sweet smoke. From the living room wall gaped demonic masks, and a hideous stick figure that looked like something that Haley, shuddering, recalled from Uncle Wiggly. There was a glass ball that sent out runners of light when you touched it, and a jukebox that played a song about the Sandman.
And everywhere were the paintings. Not exactly what you would expect to find in a place like this: paintings that illustrated fairy tales. Puss in Boots and the Three Billy Goats Gruff. Aladdin and the Monkey King and the Moon saying goodnight. Famous paintings, some of them—Haley recognized scenes from books she’d loved as a child, and framed animation cells from Pinocchio and Snow White and Cinderella.
These were parceled out among the other wonders. A man-high tank seething with piranhas. A room filled with nothing but old record albums, thousands of them. A wall of gold and platinum records and framed clippings from Rolling Stone and NME and New York Rocker. And in the library a series of Andy Warhol silk-screens of a young man with very long hair, alternately colored green and blue, dated 1972.
Linette was entranced by the fairy-tale paintings. She walked right past the Warhol prints to peruse a watercolor of a tiny child and a sparrow, and dreamily traced the edge of its frame. Lie Vagal stared after her, curling a lock of his hair around one finger. Haley lingered in front of the Warhol prints and chewed her thumb thoughtfully.
After a long moment she turned to him and said, “I know who you are. You’re, like, this old rock star. Lie Vagal. You had some album that my babysitter liked when I was little.”
He smiled and turned from watching Linette. “Yeah, that’s me.”
Haley rubbed her lower lip, staring at the Warhol prints. “You must’ve been really famous, to get him to do those paintings. What was that album called? The Mountain King?”
“The Erl-King.” He stepped to an ornate ormolu desk adrift with papers. He shuffled through them, finally withdrew a glossy pamphlet. “Let’s see—”
He turned back to Haley and handed it to her. A CD catalog, opened to a page headed rock and roll archives and filled with reproductions of album cover art. He pointed to one, reduced like the others to the size of a postage stamp. The illustration was of a midnight landscape speared by lightning. In the foreground loomed a hooded figure, in the background tiny specks that might have been other figures or trees or merely errors in the printing process. The Erl-King, read the legend that ran beneath the picture.
“Huh,” said Haley. She glanced up to call Linette, but her friend had wandered into the adjoining room. She could glimpse her standing at the shadowed foot of a set of stairs winding up to the next story. “Awesome,” Haley murmured, turning toward Lie Vagal. When he said nothing she awkwardly dropped the catalog onto a chair.
“Let’s go upstairs,” he said, already heading after Linette. Haley shrugged and followed him, glancing back once at the faces staring from the library wall.
Up here it was more like someone had just moved in. Their footsteps sounded louder, and the air smelled of fresh paint. There were boxes and bags piled against the walls. Amplifiers and speakers and other sound equipment loomed from corners, trailing cables and coils of wire. Only the paintings had been attended to, neatly hung in the corridors and beside windows. Haley thought it was weird, the way they were beside all the windows: not where you usually hung pictures. There were mirrors like that too, beside or between windows, so that sometimes the darkness threw back the night, sometimes her own pale