They found Linette at the end of the long hallway. There was a door there, closed, an ornate antique door that had obviously come from somewhere else. It was of dark wood, carved with hundreds of tiny figures, animals and people and trees, and inlaid with tiny mirrors and bits of glass. Linette stood staring at it, her back to them. From her tangled hair peeked the kinkajou, blinking sleepily as Haley came up behind her.
“Hey,” she began. Beside her Lie Vagal smiled and rubbed his forehead.
Without turning Linette asked, “Where does it go?”
“My bedroom,” said Lie as he slipped between them. “Would you like to come in?”
No, thought Haley.
“Sure,” said Linette. Lie Vagal nodded and opened the door. They followed him inside, blinking as they strove to see in the dimness.
“This is my inner sanctum.” He stood there grinning, his long hair falling into his face. “You’re the only people who’ve ever been in it, really, except for me. My grandmother won’t come inside.”
At first she thought the room was merely dark, and waited for him to switch a light on. But after a moment Haley realized there were lights on. And she understood why the grandmother didn’t like it. The entire room was painted black, a glossy black like marble. It wasn’t a very big room, surely not the one originally intended to be the master bedroom. There were no windows. An oriental carpet covered the floor with purple and blue and scarlet blooms. Against one wall a narrow bed was pushed—such a small bed, a child’s bed almost—and on the floor stood something like a tall brass lamp, with snaky tubes running from it.
“Wow,” breathed Linette. “A hookah.”
“A what?” demanded Haley; but no one paid any attention. Linette walked around, examining the hookah, the paintings on the walls, a bookshelf filled with volumes in old leather bindings. In a corner Lie Vagal rustled with something. After a moment the ceiling became spangled with lights, tiny white Christmas-tree lights strung from corner to corner like stars.
“There!” he said proudly. “Isn’t that nice?”
Linette looked up and laughed, then returned to poring over a very old book with a red cover. Haley sidled up beside her. She had to squint to see what Linette was looking at—a garishly tinted illustration in faded red and blue and yellow. The colors oozed from between the lines, and there was a crushed silverfish at the bottom of the page. The picture showed a little boy screaming while a long-legged man armed with a pair of enormous scissors snipped off his thumbs.
“Yuck!” Haley stared open-mouthed, then abruptly walked away. She drew up in front of a carved wooden statue of a troll, child-sized. Its wooden eyes were painted white, with neither pupil nor iris. “Man, this is kind of a creepy bedroom.”
From across the room Lie Vagal regarded her, amused. “That’s what Gram says.” He pointed at the volume in Linette’s hands. “I collect old children’s books. That’s Struwwelpeter. German. It means Slovenly Peter.”
Linette turned the page. “I love all these pictures and stuff. But isn’t it kind of dark in here?” She closed the book and wandered to the far end of the room where Haley stared at a large painting. “I mean, there’s no windows or anything.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. I like it like this.”
Linette crossed the room to stand beside Haley in front of the painting. It was a huge canvas, very old, in an elaborate gilt frame. Thousands of fine cracks ran through it. Haley was amazed it hadn’t fallen to pieces years ago. A lamp on top of the frame illuminated it, a little too well for Haley’s taste. It took her a moment to realize that she had seen it before.
“That’s the cover of your album—”
He had come up behind them and stood there, reaching to chuck the kinkajou under the chin. “That’s right,” he said softly. “The Erl-King.”
It scared her. The hooded figure in the foreground hunched towards a tiny form in the distance, its outstretched arms ending in hands like claws. There was a smear of white to indicate its face, and two dark smudges for eyes, as though someone had gouged the paint with his thumbs. In the background the smaller figure seemed to be fleeing on horseback. A bolt of lightning shot the whole scene with splinters of blue light, so that she could just barely make out that the rider held a smaller figure in his lap. Black clouds