Seventh Son Page 0,56

him. "What you saw now, if it wasn't a vision - well, what was it?"

"It was nothing." It was a true answer, but he also knew it was no answer at all. But he didn't want to answer. Whenever he told people, they just scoffed at him for being such a baby about nothing.

But Taleswapper wouldn't let him slough off his question. "I've been longing for a true vision all my life, Al Junior, and you saw one, here in broad daylight, with your eyes wide open, you saw something so terrible it made you stop breathing, now tell me what it was."

"I told you! It was nothing!" Then, quieter: "It's nothing, but I can see it. Like the air gets wobbly wherever it goes."

"It's nothing, but not invisible?"

"It gets into everything. It gets into all the smallest cracks and shakes everything apart. Just shivers and shivers until there's nothing left but dust, and then it shivers the dust, and I try to keep it out, but it gets bigger and bigger, it rolls over everything, till it like to fills the whole sky and the whole earth." Alvin couldn't help himself. He was shaking with cold, even though he was bundled up thick as a bear.

"How many times have you seen this before?"

"Ever since I can remember. Just now and then it'll come on me. Most times I just think about other things and it stays back."

"Where?"

"Back. Out of sight." Alvin knelt down and then sat down, exhausted. Sat right in the damp grass with his Sunday pants, but he didn't hardly notice. "When you talked about words spreading and spreading, it made me see it again."

"A dream that comes again and again is trying to tell you the truth," said Taleswapper.

The old man was so plainly eager about the whole thing that Alvin wondered if he really understood how frightening it was. "This ain't one of your stories, Taleswapper."

"It will be," said Taleswapper, "as soon as I understand it."

Taleswapper sat beside him and thought in silence for the longest time. Alvin just sat there, twisting grass in his fingers. After a while he got impatient. "Maybe you can't understand everything," he said. "Maybe it's just a craziness in me. Maybe I get lunatic spells."

"Here," said Taleswapper, taking no notice that Alvin had even spoke. "I've thought of a meaning. Let me say it, and see if we believe it."

Alvin didn't like being ignored. "Or maybe you get lunatic spells, you ever think of that, Taleswapper?"

Taleswapper brushed aside Alvin's doubt. "All the universe is just a dream in God's mind, and as long as he's asleep, he believes in it, and things stay real. What you see is God waking up, gradually waking up, and his wakefulness sweeps through the dream, undoes the universe, until finally he sits up, rubs his eyes, and says, 'My, what a dream, I wish I could remember what it was,' and in that moment we'll all be gone." He looked eagerly at Alvin. "How was that?"

"If you believe that, Taleswapper, then you're a blamed fool, just like Armor-of-God says."

"Oh, he says that, does he?" Taleswapper suddenly snaked out his hand and took Alvin by the wrist. Alvin was so surprised he dropped what he was holding. "No! Pick it up! Look what you were doing!"

"I was just fiddling, for pete's sake."

Taleswapper reached down and picked up what Alvin had dropped. It was a tiny basket, not an inch across, made from autumn grasses. "You made this, just now."

"I reckon so," said Alvin.

"Why did you make it?"

"Just made it."

"You weren't even thinking about it?"

"It ain't much of a basket, you know. I used to make them for Cally. He called them bug baskets when he was little. They just fall apart pretty soon."

"You saw a vision of nothing, and then you had to make something. "

Alvin looked at the basket. "Reckon so."

"Do you always do that?"

Alvin thought back to other times he'd seen the shivering air. "I'm always making things," he said. "Don't mean much."

"But you don't feel right again until you've made something. After you see the vision of nothing, you aren't at peace until you put something together."

"Maybe I've just got to work it off."

"Not just work, though, is it, lad? Chopping wood doesn't do the job for you. Gathering eggs, toting water, cutting hay, that doesn't ease you."

Now Alvin began to see the pattern Taleswapper had found. It was true, near as he could remember. He'd wake up after such