From Word To Word

I had intended this seventh chapter of the Lindy novel to be a kind of Christmas gift to those who are following the story, but I find myself a little behind my intentions as I always do, so I offer it instead for New Year’s.  Comments and criticisms are welcome as always, even if it is a gift, and those who are new to the story can find the beginning at Chapter One.

Chapter Seven:
In Which Some Mysteries Are Explained

Lindy sat for a moment, trying to understand everything that Alisdair had just said, but she was soon startled to hear noises behind her. She turned to see that the room was now full of tables and that there were people going here and there among them, arranging flowers or setting glasses or placing chairs. She never actually saw anyone come up the stairs, and there were no other doors to the hall that she could find, but people kept coming and going somehow, appearing and disappearing, mingling around the tables, walking and talking in small groups.

Other than Moe and Clinton, who were bringing covered platters to the tables, Lindy recognized only Cleanna, the bird-woman who had flown into the kitchen when Lindy had first arrived. The others were a bewildering mixture of the common and the strange. There were those who looked like average people, even if they turned out to be quite different after all, people like Moe and Clinton and Cleanna, but there were also those who looked unlike anything that Lindy had ever seen. She could guess about some of them from her storybooks, like the centaur and the dryad, but there were many that she had never found in any book. There was a tall woman with the head of a white leopard, and a bear-like animal with a body all of fire, and a huge man with golden eyes and skin like polished ebony, and countless others. Wherever she turned, someone or something new kept appearing or changing or disappearing, and Lindy began to wonder whether anything in the house ever stayed the same for a minute at a time.

Just then somebody put a case of small forks in her hands, and Lindy found herself helping to set the tables, joining the chaos of preparations that seemed to be directed by everyone in general and nobody in particular but that was still managing somehow to get things accomplished. It was only a moment or two before the tables had all been set and the food had all been brought and the seats had all been filled. Lindy had only just found her own seat, which Alisdair had kept beside him especially for her, when everyone began to sing a kind of prayer together. It had many melodies and words in many different languages, but there was still something familiar about it, and by the time it was ending Lindy was almost but not quite singing along with a melody of her own.

The lights dimmed as everyone began to eat, and even the fire in the great hearth burned lower, but the softer light was filled with many voices, mingling and joining, rising and receding, like the sound of leaves when the wind is gusting. It seemed as though everyone there had known each other from years before but had not seen each other for a long time, and so they were all trying to catch up with everyone else all at once. It was a little overwhelming at first, but the talking was so happy and so mixed with laughter that Lindy soon felt quite at home, as if she was sitting with her family for Christmas dinner or Easter breakfast at her Grandfather’s house.

The food was all good and simple stuff, and there was so much of it that Lindy knew right away that she would not be able even to try it all. She had some broccoli soup with a thick slice of fresh bread, and then some roast chicken, and mashed potatoes mixed with garlic and chives, and carrots in maple syrup, and green beans with toasted almonds, and then a slice of cake that tasted like orange and nutmeg and cloves.

As she finished her cake, Lindy thought that she was fuller and more contented than she had ever been, and the conversations around her began to sound contended too, becoming slower and and softer as the coffee and the tea were served. Someone brought her a hot chocolate without her even asking.  It was very strong and bitter, with the taste of chili peppers in the cocoa, but somehow just what she wanted. She laid her head on her arm and closed her eyes and knew that everything was as it should be. The whole house felt like it had eaten its fill for the first time in many years and was now leaning back in its chair to have a chat with an old friend. Everyone, she thought, was satisfied and happy and ready for a little nap.

Just as Lindy was about to fall asleep altogether, there was a sudden hush, and the lights began to burn more brightly, and she opened her eyes to see Alisdair standing at the head of the great table with all its empty seats. He bowed to the hall, then sat in his chair and placed his crown on the table before him. There was a moment or so of silence, and the whole hall seemed to be waiting together, and then, one by one, people began to stand and greet the assembly. There did not seem to be any pattern to the speakers that Lindy could see.  There was nobody to introduce them. They just stood in their own time, and then they would take on their true forms, and the walls behind them would be filled with the most marvelous sights.

The first speaker was a little old lady with the smoothest hands that Lindy had ever seen, and she became a hummingbird as she spoke, and behind her there appeared plants that seemed to float on the air like lily pads on the water, and tiny birds flitted among them from nest to nest. Lindy could not hear the songs that they were singing, but she knew that the air would be filled with the beating of a thousand small wings, and that the beating of the wings would make a kind of music unlike any that mere throats could make.

The next was a young man, as tall as Moe but broad and stern, and when he stood he became larger still, until his head was among the rafters, and his voice came from every corner of the room. Behind his vast body, vaster mountains appeared, their peaks worked into towers that reached even further skyward, massive and solid and unmovable.

A long-limbed and long haired man spoke next, his face at once both worn and youthful, and he changed into a  centaur, shaggy-hoofed and broadly muscled, as imposing in his way as the giant. The walls behind him became endless forests and plains, one leading to another beneath stars that shone as brightly as lamps in the sky.

One by one, all the guests rose, hundreds in all, and they took their true forms, and they spoke in their true languages, and they showed their true homes. Lindy could not understand their words, but she could understand their meaning, and she was surprised at what they said. She thought that they would speak of Khurshid and of the problem of the arch, but they spoke only greetings, one after the other as the night drew ever closer to day, greetings on behalf of their peoples and on behalf of their worlds, and to Lindy’s surprise, she never grew tired of them. They were like a kind of song, soloist after soloist, each taking up the music where the last had left it. The music was not just in the words, though the words were very beautiful. It was also in the people and in their homes and in their greetings of one another, like loved ones long separated and joyfully reunited.

At last, as the first rays of sunshine were glinting off the highest windows, the last speaker finished his greeting, and a silence fell over the hall. What would they do now, Lindy wondered? If they had spent this long just greeting each other, how long would it take them to make a decision about something as serious as Khurshid and the arch? Would they be here for days?

Then Alisdair stood, and he placed his crown back on his head, and he opened his arms as if inviting the whole of the hall into his embrace. “You are all well greeted,” he said, “and I am strengthened by our common will. Tomorrow, I will pass through the arch to earth to undo the work of Khurshid’s servants. May the God of heaven and the gods of all the worlds add their blessings to yours.”

Lindy could not see how any decision had been made, but everyone else seemed satisfied, and the gathering began departing as mysteriously as it had gathered. Alisdair came and took Lindy by the hand, leading her toward the fireplace, and then, as suddenly and as unexpectedly as everything else seemed to happen in that house, they were in the little hallway that led to her room. Lindy was startled, and she was a bit angry at being startled, and she was a bit more angry because it was only one more thing that she could not seem to understand.

She dropped Alisdair’s hand. “I want to know what’s going on,” she demanded, looking up at him but avoiding his eyes. “Those people just said ‘hello’ all night long, and suddenly you’re going somewhere, and you’re taking me back to my room, but I can’t even find my way to the kitchen from there, or even a bathroom, and I don’t even know what day it is anymore.”

Alisdair looked confused for a moment, as though he had been thinking about something very different, and then he laughed softly. “I’m very sorry,” he said. “I keep forgetting that you don’t yet know this place.” He took her hand again. “This house doesn’t work like other houses. If you need to get somewhere, you don’t have to know the way.  You only have to think about being where you want to go, and you’ll be there, around the next corner or through the next door.  Let me show you.”

He opened the door to her room, revealing the kitchen, just as she had seen it first, then closed it again. When he opened it a second time, it led only onto the bedroom that she remembered.

“As for what day it is, I think I’ve already told you that we are between times here, but a great feast has its own kind of time, so that people from all the worlds can come together at the same moment. In the time of this place, it’s really only late evening on the first day that you arrived. You came. Then you napped for an hour or so. Then you spoke with me. Then everything paused for the great feast. And now, you’re going to bed, so that you can be rested to see me off tomorrow morning.  Does that make a little mores sense of things?”

“But when,” said Lindy, feeling a little foolish now for her outburst, “did everyone agree that you should go? Nobody said anything about Khurshid or the arch or anything else.”

Alisdair smiled. “They didn’t need to say anything.  All they had to say was that they would support each other and support me, whatever it was that I decided, and that’s what they said with their greetings. Some of them might have preferred another plan, but it wasn’t their decision to make. It was mine. Their only decision was either to be with me or not.”

“But what if you made the wrong decision?”

“Then I’ll have made the wrong decision. But any decision might be the wrong one, and no amount of arguing or discussion tonight would have changed that. It fell to me to make the decision, and after I asked the advise of those whose opinions I trust, I made it, right or wrong. The people gathered tonight to say that they would be with me, even though they didn’t yet know what decision I would make.”

Lindy wanted to ask more, but she was suddenly very tired. “Sleep,” said Alisdair. “Perhaps what happens tomorrow will explain some things, and you must be awake in time to see it.”

Previous Chapter

After a much longer wait than I expected, here is the sixth chapter of Lindy.   I have recently had some very extended conversations about how I might improve the earlier sections, and while I will not go back and substantially alter what has been posted, I do plan on making some larger revisions once the novel is complete in a first draft, so please do offer any suggestions or criticisms that you might have.  They can only improve the final product, and I am almost incapable of taking offense, so feel free to be candid.  Those who are new to the story may want to begin at Chapter One.

Also, this Chapter has been modified since it was first posted in order to make some names consistent with later Chapters.

Chapter Six:
In Which Some Mysteries Are Explained

As you might imagine, Lindy was more than a little embarrassed by her fall. She had wanted to meet Mister Hat for so long, and when she finally got the chance, she had tripped and made a fool of herself. She felt sure that Mister Hat would laugh at her or maybe even be angry, but when she was finally brave enough to look up, he still had the same kingly but gentle look on his face, and he helped her to her feet as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened at all.

“You probably need to have a seat,” he said, taking her hand and leading her to a chair near the head of the table. “I know how long those stairs are. I don’t walk them myself anymore, of course,” he added, bending a little and tapping his knee, “because my joints feel so much older than the rest of me, but I remember them all too well,” and he smiled a smile that made Lindy feel a little better.

The chair was large enough for Lindy to curl her legs up, and it was warm from the fire too, so it felt quite cozy, even in such a big room. “Thank you… um… Mister Owen,” she said, remembering just in time to call Mister Hat by his real name, and then she remembered that he was actually some kind of king, so she said, “I mean, thank you, your majesty,” but she was not sure that this was quite right either, and she began to feel embarrassed all over again.

“You’re very welcome,” said Mister Hat, “but only Clinton worries about the formalities around here, so just plain Alisdair will be fine. No mister, and no sir, and no your majesty, even if I am a king of sorts.” He stopped and smiled at her again. “And certainly no bowing or kneeling,” he added. Lindy blushed, remembering her fall, but there was something about his smile and his voice that made his teasing gentle.

Mister Hat, or Alisdair, as she guessed she should call him now, sat himself next to Lindy in the big chair where she had first found him. “Besides,” he said,” Mister Owen isn’t really my name any more than Mister Hat is, not here in The Weald.” Here my name is Alisdair Bridgebane, and everyone just calls me Alisdair.”

He settled himself and crossed his legs at the knee. “Would you like some tea?” he asked. “You must be hungry by now.”

Lindy was not exactly sure when now was anymore, but she certainly was hungry, so she nodded, and Mister Hat rang a little golden bell. It made such a quiet chime that Lindy could not imagine how anyone else would hear it, but only a moment later it rang again all by itself, and Mister Hat said, “That’s Penates letting us know the food will be up in just a minute. He’s probably been waiting for us to ring for ages now.”

As he said this, Lindy remembered that her mother would probably also be waiting with dinner and would be very worried after all this time. “My Mom,” she started to say, then realized that Mister Hat was still saying something and remembered that it was rude to interrupt, so she stopped, and then thought that she should apologize, and then realized that she would be interrupting again, so she ended up saying only, “I’m… um… ah…”.

“Oh, yes, your mother,” said Mister Hat. “I’m very sorry. I should have told you right away that you don’t need to worry. Things are a little different here. I don’t know the why of it, but there’s no time in The Weald, not like you think of it. It’s not that time has stopped exactly, or even slowed down. It’s more like everything is between one time and another. You’re mother will never know you’ve gone, no matter how long you stay.”

Just then Moe came lumbering up the stairs with a tray of food. He looked like Moe the man now rather than Moe the monster, and he smiled his gentle smile as he laid the tea on the table, complete with buttermilk biscuits and butter and what looked like homemade currant jam. The food reminded Lindy of how hungry she really was, and she had to make herself wait politely for Alisdair to pour the tea before she buttered herself one of the still-warm biscuits.

“This house isn’t the same as the one next to yours,” Alisdair continued, passing his hand absently back and forth through the steam of his tea. “It’s in the same place, in a way, and it’s been there for a very long time, so parts of it have started to look the same, but it’s far different from any other house you’ll ever see.”

He took a sip from his mug. “The house next to yours is actually the house I grew up in. It’s called Owen House, because it was built by my family, and it was surrounded by forest then, but you’d have to be as old as I am to remember those days.” He looked away to his left, through the wall. “There was forest for miles in that direction,” he said. “I used to walk in it almost every day, sometimes right through the place where your yard is now, but that was before the loggers came and before all the houses were built.”

The walls of the room seemed to disappear as he talked, and Lindy found herself looking out across her own neighbourhood, with its houses and roads, and the park and the school, and the shops at the corner and the church with the steeple, but it was as if time was running backwards. First the newest houses down the street disappeared, then the streetlights, then the paved roads, and then the older houses, including Lindy’s. Where they had been, there were now only farm fields and the railroad track and a narrow dirt road, and then, all at once, even the fields were gone, and trees were growing thickly in every direction.

“This house, the one we’re sitting in now,” continued Alisdair, “is in The Weald, which is a little world all to itself, and it has been here much longer than I or anyone else can remember.” The forest outside changed a little, become wilder and deeper, and a river appeared where the railroad track and the road had been a moment before. On one side there also appeared the little stone cottages that Lindy had seen when she first came through the arch.

“It was built when this world first came to be,” said Alisdair, “though some say that it just grew here, which may be true.  It’s called The Crofts, which means The Farms or The Cottages, and it was once the home of Khurshid, who was the caretaker of The Weald until he betrayed it.”

“Betrayed?” asked Lindy.

“The story is too long to tell properly right now,” said Alisdair, “but, yes, Khurshid betrayed The Weald. He began to use the arch for his own purposes, so the peoples of all the worlds imprisoned him behind The Weald’s great river, and they set twenty-four caretakers to rule in his place.” The view through the wall began to widen as he spoke, so that Lindy could now see the whole of the house in the midst of a forest that stretched in every direction, with the river running through the trees from east to west. There was only a single bridge across the river, and Lindy thought that she could see on the far side of it a man who was shining from within, and it seemed to her that he was singing something beautiful and sad and terrible, though she could not hear anything of the song itself.

Alisadir spoke more slowly now, and Lindy heard in his voice the same sadness that she had felt when she was wandering through the empty stone cottages. “The twenty-four of us filled the chairs around this table once, and the house was full of their families and of the people who came to live and work here, but Khurshid has one by one destroyed us or lured us to him, and I am now the last caretaker of Aubade’s Seat.”

He took the crown from his head and held it in his lap. “So long us one of us remains to wear a caretaker’s crown, Khurshid cannot cross the river, but all the other crowns are his now, and when I die, as everyone must eventually die, he will be free again to claim The Weald and the arch and to do evil in all the worlds where the arch leads.”

Alisdair paused, looking down at the crown in his lap. Lindy felt as though she should say something, but she was not sure that she knew what to say, and she did not want to embarrass herself again, so she just sipped her tea and waited. The view through the walls gradually began to fade, until all Lindy could see was the inside of the room and the last rays of the sun glancing off of the highest windows. The room seemed very quiet and very still, and she was afraid to disturb it, even to get another of the biscuits on the tray.

The light from the fire reflected on the gold and green of Alisdair’s face, and Lindy was suddenly a little afraid of him again. Though he had been so kind to her, she saw again how kingly and grave he was, and she saw also the sadness that was a part of him and part of the house as well. She was not afraid that he would try to hurt her, but she was afraid of his sadness and of the one who had caused it.

“Couldn’t you give the crown to someone else before you die?”she heard herself ask, a little startled at her own voice.

Alisdair looked up suddenly, and his golden eyes met Lindy’s brown ones, and there was something like laughter them. “Yes,” he said, “I could. And I will, if I can find the right person.” He straightened in his chair and placed the crown back on his head, looking a little younger and a little stronger again. “You’re right to remind me of hope. Who knows? You might well be the one who takes my crown when I can’t wear it any longer.” He winked at her. “I’ve seen much stranger things.”

Though Lindy was not really a prideful girl, she was flattered. She imagined herself wearing Alisdair’s crown and sitting at the head of the long table, and she wondered for a moment what being a queen would really be like, but Alisdair did not let her daydream for long.

“Come,” he said. “We’ve already taken too long with our tea. There’s work to be done to prepare for the meeting tonight, and I still haven’t told you what you need to know most. You’re here because Khurshid has found a way to tamper with the arch, and the peoples of the worlds are gathering here tonight to decide what should be done. It’ll be an evening like this house hasn’t seen in a hundred years, and we have much to do.”

Previous Chapter < > Next Chapter

This is the next instalment of the Lindy novel.  Those who are new to the story may want to begin with Chapter One.  Also, I am aware that there are some who like to follow the Lindy story but are not really interested in the rest of what I write, so I maintain an email list to alert these readers when I post a new chapter of the novel.  Anyone who would like to be added to this list should free to email me at jeremylukehill@gmail.com.

Chapter Five:
In Which Lindy Finds a Very Long Stairway

When Lindy woke, the house was calm once more, though it still felt watchful, like the rabbits in the park when they are keeping an eye out. Light was coming through a little window above her, but it was too high for her to see through, and it was hard to tell if it the light was from a late afternoon or an early morning sun. She wondered if she had slept straight through the night, though her stomach did not really feel empty enough for that.

Her room was quite small, with only a single bed and a dresser for furniture, both carved with leaves. There was also a mirror above the dresser and a painting of a tree above the bed, but once she had looked in the mirror to make sure that she was presentable and had looked at the painting for a while, there was nothing much for her to do, and she began to feel a little bored. Now, she was not one of those children who must be entertained all the time and who cannot live a moment that is not filled by television or video games, but she was all alone in that little room, so she can hardly be blamed if she began to wonder whether it might be alright for her to look around the house a little. She could not remember anyone telling her otherwise, and the house seemed not to object when she tried to ask it, so she opened her door and peeked out into the hallway. Everything was deserted, and she was beginning to feel a little hungry again, so she decided to see if she could find the kitchen and ask Penates whether there was anything for her to eat.

She set off in what she thought was the right direction, but she had to turn one way or another at the end of the hallway, and then to turn again almost immediately afterward, and then again at the next room, and she was soon very lost indeed. There seemed to be more hallways and stairways than rooms, and the hallways were all a little narrow, and there were not really enough lights, so everything seemed a bit cramped and a bit dark and bit mysterious, and Lindy found herself wondering whether she would ever be able to find her way to the kitchen at all.

She was just considering calling for someone to help her, when she came into a very wide hallway that was lined with six doors on each side. The doors all had plaques above them with writing in strange black letters that Lindy could not read, but the nearest of the doors was half-open, so she could see that it held a little fieldstone fireplace , and a big oak desk, and a leather chair that was quite worn around its brass nailheads. The whole rest of the room was filled with books. It was not a large room, but its walls were entirely covered with shelves, and there were other shelves standing in the middle of it, and Lindy was quite sure that she had never seen so many books in one room before, not even at the public library. She walked into the room and went slowly along the shelves, running her fingers along the spines. Some of them were very old, with their leather bindings all cracked and broken, but others were almost new, with crisp cloth or paper bindings. Many of the titles were in other languages, and most of the English titles were complicated things like, On the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection, or Certain Considerations Touching the Better Pacification and Edification of the Church of England, or Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions and Death’s Duel, but there were a few books that Lindy could understand. There was one about Charlemagne, who was a knight in some of the stories that she had read, and there was one about birds, which were her favourite animals, and there was one about Shakespeare, who was the writer of a play that she had read in school. The books did not seem to be in any order that she could see. They were not listed by their authors, or by their titles, or even by their subjects, but she still made sure to put them back exactly where she found them, just in case.

Lindy left the door partly open on her way out, just as it had been when she had gone in. The next door along the hallway was closed, but she opened it a little and peeked inside. It was almost exactly like the one she had just left, filled with countless books, only it had no fireplace or chair, just a long table against one wall, like a counter. She did not go into this room, but closed it again, and went on to the next and the next. Each one was filled just the same with books, though the furniture was always a bit different from room to room.

Lindy had always loved books. They were easier than people. They were never too loud, and they never asked her for anything, and they always stayed where she put them. She was proud of her own little library of books that people had given her for birthdays and Christmases or that she had bought from garage sales with her allowance, but she had never imagined that someone could own so many books. They made the cozy little rooms feel very safe to Lindy, and she wondered what it would be like to curl up in that old leather chair in front of the fieldstone fireplace and just read forever. If only she could find the way from the library to the kitchen and back, she thought, she would even have someone to feed her, but the thought of food reminded her that she was hungry and that she still had no idea where the kitchen actually was, so she closed the last of the library doors and turned once more to finding her way through the house.

The door at end of the library corridor opened onto a landing with one stairway that led up into the floors above and another that led down below. She was fairly certain that the kitchen was downstairs, and besides, every fairytale that she had ever read had something strange and mysterious living in an attic or an old tower, so she thought it would probably be best to follow the stairs downward, but the house seemed to be calling her upward instead. Before she had even decided which way to go, she realized that her foot was already on the lowest upward step, and when she had finished wondering how this had happened exactly, she found that she had gone a few steps higher, so she gave up trying to decide anything and allowed the house to lead her up the stairs. After all, Lindy thought, it only made sense that the house would know best about where she was and about how to get her where she needed to go.

The stairs wound continuously upwards, but not in any regular way. Sometimes they went straight for a while, and sometimes they curved, and sometimes they turned sharply at landings that had windows overlooking the garden or doors that led onto hallways and rooms. Lindy stopped at each of the doors, and opened them, and looked into them, but she did not ever go through them, though they sometimes looked very interesting. One opened into the balcony of a theatre with a stage and rows of chairs. Another led onto a long windowed hallway that ran along the peak of a roof toward a large dome. Another was mostly windows, and it had a long table shaped like a horseshoe that went all around its edges. Another had a glass ceiling like a green house and was filled with plants and birds and a pond with fish.

Lindy soon realized that none of these rooms were really possible. Mister Hat’s house was certainly very large, especially in comparison to her own, but it was not nearly tall enough for such a long staircase, and it was not nearly wide enough to hold such big rooms. She also knew that Mister Hat’s house did not have a hallway of windows along any of its roof peaks, or a tower in the middle of it, or a big dome, or any of the other things she now saw. The house she was in was clearly not the same house that she had seen so often from her attic window.

Just as she was thinking this, she turned another corner and saw that the stairway suddenly ended at a small door. She stopped for a moment, but then opened the door and peered through it, just as she had with all the others. Instead of a room or a hallway, this last door opened onto another set of stairs, much narrower and much steeper than the ones that she had just climbed. The new staircase, besides being steeper and narrower, was also more regular. Each flight looked to be about the same length, and each turned exactly to the right at the landings, until Lindy could at last see that they ended above her, not at a regular door in the wall, but at a kind of door in the floor, like the trapdoor to an attic, only there did not seem to be any door.

The stairs had been so dim and so plain and so narrow that Lindy was sure she would find an attic with a low ceiling, full of boxes and chests, something like her own. Instead, when she finally reached the top, she found a room that was the biggest and most beautiful that she had seen in the whole house. It was wider and higher even than the theatre, stretching up like the peak of a church to the stained glass windows that ran around the top of the walls and covered the ceiling. The wood of the paneling and the floors was stained in beautiful patterns and perfectly polished. Huge chandeliers hung from the ceiling, already lit, though the sun was only just now beginning to set.

Despite its great size, however, the room was almost empty. There was a very long fireplace against one wall where a fire was burning low, as if it had been lit several hours before. In front of the fire, though not too close to it, there was also a long wooden table, with carvings on its legs and edges. It stood on a carpet woven of deep blues and bright golds, and it had twelve chairs on either side, with one more chair at the end closest to the fire. This chair was turned away from the table toward the fire, and its back was taller than the other chairs, so it took Lindy a moment before she noticed that there was a hand laid on the armrest and a person sitting in the chair.

“Hello Lindy,” said a voice from the chair, a stern and a quiet and a gentle voice. “I am glad that I could return in time to meet you here tonight. Things might have been quite different if you had found this room without me.”

As the voice was speaking, the person in the chair rose and turned toward Lindy. She knew at once that it was Mister Hat, but it was a different Mister Hat altogether from the one she had followed down the street so often. He was younger and stronger, and he was wearing a long robe of green worked with gold embroidery, and he had a crown of golden leaves in his hair. He was, Lindy recognized, the golden king that she had first seen coming through the arch, and she knew right away that he had always been this king, even when he had walked past her house each day. She suddenly felt a strange kind of wondering fear, and she tried to bow like she had seen people do on television, and she stumbled a little, and she fell on her knees right there on the hard floor.

Previous Chapter < > Next Chapter

This is the fourth chapter of the Lindy novel.  I know that it has been some time since the previous instalment, but it is gardening season after all.  If you want to start from the beginning, you can find it at Chapter One.

Chapter Four:
In Which There Are Still More Surprises

Lindy remembered almost nothing about the walk to the house, but she did remember coming through the side door into a room that was just big enough to have a coat closet and a wooden shoe rack and an old hot water radiator. It was dim, but the door to the next room was ajar, and there was a light escaping warmly from around it, and with the light there came the sound of a ladle stirring and the smell of bread baking. It was all very familiar somehow. It was as though she had walked with Clinton and Morris through that little room a thousand times but was only just now remembering it, and she knew at once that whatever lay behind the door was something good and safe. The house itself seemed to tell her so.

This is why she was not surprised when Clinton wiped his feet very carefully on the mat, or when he opened the door without really touching it, or even when he began to look very unlike the Clinton that she had just met. She already knew somehow that the light from the open door would seem to burn away his very clean clothes and his very white skin and his very bald head. She already knew that the light would leave him full with a kind of glowing, as if every colour had come together to make him into something that was brighter than white and darker than black. The house whispered all these things to her, and it whispered also that there was no need for her to be afraid.

Clinton turned back to Lindy and motioned for her to follow him. His face still looked much as she remembered it, but it was different now too. It reminded her of pictures of her grandfather as a boy, where the face of the boy in the picture and the face of her grandfather looked the same and different at the same time. The new Clinton and the old one were just like that. They were the same person, but their faces were from different times and places.

Lindy started to follow the new Clinton through the door, but she suddenly remembered that Morris was behind her. Though she knew what she would find even as she turned, the sight of the new Morris was still frightening. His leather clothes had become a heavy and sagging skin that draped over his lean body, while his hands and his feet and his head had grown even larger than they had been before, as if they were meant for a taller and broader body. His face was wider too, like a frog’s, but it had a few strands of hair and a mouth filled with teeth that made him look much more fearsome than any frog. Even though Lindy knew that he was the same Morris who had been so friendly to her, she still felt a little scared.

Morris slowly reached out his huge hand, with its long nails and webbed fingers, and patted her shoulder. His new mouth widened into a smile. “It’s alright, Miss Lindy,” he said, “I wouldn’t blame you for having a good scream, ugly thing like me following behind you. Should’ve warned you, of course. Only we’re all so used to each other that we forget.”

“It’s okay,” said Lindy, though she was not quite sure that this was true. “I know you wouldn’t hurt me. The house told me so.”

“Well,” said Morris, “talking houses are a new one on me, but it’s true there’s nothing to be scared of, not here in the house. Plenty that’ll make you shake your head the first time you see it, of course, but nothing that’ll do you harm. Just don’t trust the look of things. That’s my advice. Nothing is ever what it seems to be here, not for long.”

Lindy nodded, and Morris smiled his smile. He shuffled toward the doorway where Clinton was still waiting, and Lindy followed them through the door and down a few steps into a room that she already knew would be the kitchen. It was bigger than any kitchen that she had ever seen, probably bigger than her whole house, and it was set low into the ground so that its doors were halfway up the walls with little stairways leading to them, and its windows were all very high, almost like skylights. There was a huge fireplace with a fire burning, and there were big stone ovens where the bread was baking, and there were gas stoves with pots boiling on them too, so the kitchen felt very warm indeed, but it was the comforting kind of warmth that kitchens have after a cold walk, and Lindy felt right away that she was welcome and at home. Besides the fireplace and the ovens and the stoves, there seemed to be cupboards and counters everywhere, and in the middle of everything there was a huge wooden table surrounded by mismatched chairs and benches.

The house was whispering even more clearly now that Lindy was in the kitchen, though its whispers were more like pictures than words. The pictures were of the kitchen, with its copper pots and its hanging vegetables and its steaming pots, but it was full of people too, so many people that they were often in the same places at the same times, as if she was seeing all the people who had ever been in the kitchen all together at the same moment. They were eating at the table and cooking at the stoves and working at the counters, and they all blended together, and they came and went, and their faces changed from one to another, but the kitchen stayed the same, and Lindy knew that she was in the heart of the house, where it was strongest and warmest and deepest.

Now, I have not really been describing the kitchen in the same way as Lindy saw it, because I have so far left out the one thing that she could not help but see first, even as the house was whispering to her so strongly. In the midst of that warm and fragrant kitchen, taking bread from the stone oven with a long wooden paddle, was a most singular cook. Stripped to the waist except for an apron, with thick hair curling over his back and arms, he was both very wide and very short, and Lindy would have called him a dwarf, except the house told her that he was not.

“Hello Penates,” said Morris. “Here’s our visitor. Her name’s Lindy.”

“Hello Lindy,” said the cook, though he did not stop even long enough to glance at her. He kept moving from one thing to the next, dusting the fresh bread with flour, stirring something in the big pot on the hearth, cutting vegetables on the long wooden counter, and he talked as quickly as he worked. “Are you hungry? Supper’s not for a bit. Soup’s ready, though. May as well try the bread too. Never taste better than it will right now.”

Now that Penates had mentioned it, Lindy did feel a little hungry, so she said that she would love some soup and bread if that was okay, and Penates said that it would be no trouble at all. He did not seem to interrupt the flow of his work, but he quickly brought a bowl of soup and a slab of bread that were far too large for her eat by herself, and Lindy was soon relishing the tastes of thick homemade butter and warm brown bread and dark onion broth.

“Has Alaisdair returned?” asked Clinton. “It would be best if he were to take charge of our visitor himself.”

“No,” replied Penates, dicing some carrots very small. “I can’t feel him in the house. But these things can take some time. Depending what the problem is.” He turned to stir something simmering on the stove. “Morris,” he called, “get another goose from the cooler, will you? Can’t underfeed the company.”

Morris grinned and looked at Lindy. “Only come to the kitchen if you want work,” he told her. “Penates won’t let you sit around for long.”

“If you’re not eating, you should be cooking,” said Penates as he diced, and he looked up long enough to wink at Lindy, who was working her way through the soup much faster than she had expected.

“Yes, well,” said Clinton, “in any case, I will go prepare your room, Miss Lindy. Morris can escort you there when you are finished your meal. And I do apologize for bringing you in through the kitchen entrance. Things are not quite as usual around the house, and we thought it best to bring you in by the shortest way. We certainly intended no offense.”

Lindy was not actually sure why she should be offended, but she assured Clinton that she accepted his apology, and he had already left the kitchen before she realized what he meant about preparing her room. She was about to tell Morris that she did not really need to stay the night, but just then the sunlight from the high windows was shadowed, and Lindy looked up to see a flock of birds flying into the kitchen. They looked like little brown songbirds, like wrens or sparrows, but Lindy knew as soon as she saw them that there were people in the heart of them. She could already see how they would become taller and more human as they landed, with feathers for hair and with the delicate movements of birds, but with human faces and voices.

Even before they had landed, however, Lindy knew that things were not as they should be. Their flight was frantic, and their agitation became still clearer when they fluttered to the ground in a cluster around the table.

“Penates!” cried one of them, as she rushed toward the cook, “shut the house as soon as may be. Danger comes!”

“Cleanna?” the cook asked, dropping his knife in alarm, “has Alasdair sent you?”

“Yes!” the bird woman replied, still urgent. “He comes as quickly as he can, but the danger comes before. Waste not a moment.”

Penates turned, and he looked much less like a cook now and much more like a hero from one of Lindy’s storybooks, sterner and firmer. “Morris,” he said, “take Miss Lindy to her room right away. And send Clinton to me if you see him. Quickly now.” His voice was very calm, but for the first time since she had entered the house, Lindy was afraid. She did not know what there was to fear exactly, but it was enough for her that Penates and Morris and the house itself seemed suddenly alarmed. Everything was watchful now and careful, and Lindy was frightened to think that something had been able to disquiet the house so quickly. Then she found herself being picked up in Morris’ massive hands and rushed along corridors and through doorways, up staircases and across landings, but she could not see any of these things clearly. The house whispered nothing to her now, but she could sense its concern, and her own fear became more and more unbearable.

At last they arrived in a small room, somewhere deep in the house, and Morris laid her on the bed. He turned to go, assuring her that he would return as soon as he could. A sudden terror went through Lindy at the thought of being left alone in the strange vastness of the house, and she started to cry out for Morris to stay with her, but she suddenly found that she could not remember what it was that she wanted to say. Her eyes closed, quite against her will, and she slept.

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This is the third chapter of what I am still just calling “the Lindy novel”.  I appreciated the suggestions that people made for a potential title, but nothing has yet struck me as being quite right.  Any new suggestions for a title are welcome, of course, as are other comments, particularly with respect to the dialogue, which is not exactly a strength for me.  If you are new to the story and want to catch yourself up, you can begin at Chapter One.

Chapter Three:
In Which Lindy Meets Some People She Does Not Expect

Afterward, Lindy was never sure if she actually stepped through the archway at all. In her memory it always seemed that the archway came and passed over her, or that the panes of glass disappeared and let the smoke envelope her. The gold flecks grew and shone more brightly, and a whole sky of stars spun around her, all trailing great wisps and ribbons of silver mist. She could still see bits of the trees and the grass here and there, but they were just patches of green whirling through the gold and the blue and the grey.

After a time that seemed very long and very short all at the same time, the little spots of green became larger, and the stars became smaller and more distant, and the swirling smoke became more still. Then, all at once, the mist passed away from her, and she stood once more beneath the arch, its shell-pink stone stretching over her, and the trees swaying around her.

For a moment she thought that perhaps nothing had changed at all. The trees were all in their places, and Mister Hat’s house was still where it had been just a few moments earlier, but she soon realized that some other things had changed very much indeed. She was no longer standing in the overgrown grass of the garden. Instead, she and the arch were both in the centre of a broad circle of stone. It looked a little like the low stage of the bandstand in the park, but it was the same colour as the arch, and it was more suited for a palace than for a park or a garden.

There were also, she now noticed, a cluster of stone cottages that had sprung up in the orchard behind Mister Hat’s house. They were nestled closely together, filling the whole back of the yard, and they mingled with the fruit trees as naturally as the grass and the flowers. Cobblestone pathways joined the gates of their low garden walls, weaving between the trees and climbing the small hills with flights of stairs. Everything was so intermingled that it was difficult to tell where one yard ended and another began. It was as if the houses had seeded and sprouted there, growing slowly out of the landscape over the years.

Lindy felt drawn to the cottages as soon as she saw them. They were like a place that she had always dreamed but had just now remembered for the first time. Without knowing quite what she was doing, she walked across the stone platform and along the cobble path that ran toward the little houses, until she was looking over the walls into their gardens and peering as closely through the windows as she dared. She found an old well in the open place in the middle of the cottages, and a big stone oven beside the path that ran away from them toward the house, and a long low barn on the further side of them. All the while, she felt more and more that the cottages had just grown there with the trees, and that she was somehow a part of the growing.

It was all very beautiful to Lindy, but there was a kind of sadness about the garden now too, a kind of emptiness. The cottages were tended. The roofs were in good repair, and the paint on the doors and the shutters looked fresh, but there were no faces in the windows, no gardeners in the gardens, and no walkers on the pathways. Everything was still. Even Mister Hat’s house seemed emptier than it had before. The whole garden seemed to be remembering when there had been people living in it and to be waiting for others to come and live in it again. The feeling of sadness was in the stillness and the remembering and the waiting.

As she grew used to these things, Lindy also began to notice a deeper kind of change that was more difficult for her to describe. “Everything,” she tried to tell me later, “was just somehow more perfect, even though it looked exactly the same as it did before.”

“So,” I suggested, “for example, the trees were taller and straighter?”

“No, no,” she said, “That’s not it at all. The short things and the crooked things were still short and crooked. There’s nothing wrong with something being short or crooked. It just has to be properly short and crooked, and these trees were proper trees. They were properly tall and short and leafy and bare and straight and crooked and, well, they were properly trees, you know?”

I was not sure that I did see, but maybe you will, so I have tried as much as I can to describe things exactly as she did. According to Lindy, most of the garden looked much like it had before. It was as wild and as overgrown as it had ever been, but everything now seemed exactly where it was meant to be. It was as if Lindy could now see what Mister Hat’s garden had really been all the time, as if she could now understand the reason why each tree and flower was growing where it was.

Lindy had been wandering for some time, surrounded by this strange and beautiful new garden, when she was startled by the sound of a door opening at the side of Mister Hat’s house. Her first thought was that something else extraordinary was about to happen, and she turned toward the house almost certain that she would find a giant or a centaur or something equally fantastic walking across the lawn. The two men who came through the door, however, were not particularly extraordinary. True, one was a little taller and thinner than the average person, but he was certainly no giant, and the other was the most regular sort of man that there could be.

Even so, Lindy was a little frightened. She had only been expecting to meet Mister Hat when she had jumped into the garden, and everything had felt so empty after she had gone through the arch that she had not expected to meet anyone at all. Now there were two strangers approaching her, and she began to wonder whether they would take her to the police for trespassing. With all this going through her mind, I think you will understand why she considered trying to run, and she did consider it very seriously for a moment, but she knew that the wall was too high for her to climb and that the men would probably catch her before she could even try, so she decided to be as cooperative as she could and to see if they would let her go with just a warning.

As they drew nearer, she could see them more clearly, and she began to think that perhaps they were not so ordinary after all. The taller man was really quite tall, and he was dressed in heavy leather clothes that looked as if they had been handmade by someone who had no idea how to sew. They made him look like a castaway from a desert island, and he would have been quite frightening indeed if he had not been smiling in quite so friendly a way and if he had not given Lindy a little wave as he grew closer.

The smaller man was also not the regular sort of man that she had first thought him to be. He was very bald, and he wore a fancy suit with long tails at the back, and white gloves, and shiny black shoes, like a magician without the top hat. He was walking very carefully through the grass, keeping his shoes and pants clean, hardly even looking in Lindy’s direction, but when he did look up, he did not smile at all, though he did not exactly frown either. He looked like maybe he had forgotten how to smile or frown altogether, and he did not at all seem the sort of man who let people off with warnings, but it was too late to run, so she just waited and hoped.

When the two men approached her, the shorter man in the fancy clothes bowed very deeply, cleared his throat, and said, “Miss Lindy, if I may presume to address you before the proper introductions have been made, Mister Alaisdair Bridgebane has instructed me…”

“Actually,” the taller man interrupted, still smiling,“Alaisdair only asked, really. He isn’t the sort of guy who orders people around much.” He looked even taller now that he was close, and he was looking over the shorter man’s shoulder from a rather alarming height.

The shorter man stopped in the middle of his sentence and looked up at his companion for a moment before turning back to Lindy. “I hope,” he continued, “that Miss Lindy will forgive Osborne’s appalling manners. Despite my very best efforts during my tenure as Butler in Mister Bridgebane’s service, the staff are still undisciplined, inappropriate, and even, in some cases,” he paused for emphasis, “insubordinate.”

Osborne chuckled in a low and friendly way. “Don’t worry,” he said, “Eddie always talks like that. Big words make him happy.”

The shorter man ignored him. “As I was saying, Mister Alaisdair Bridgebane has instructed me,” he paused and looked back at Osborne once more, “to inform you that he is saddened to be unable to receive you personally, though it would have been his very great pleasure. Unfortunately, matters of great importance have required his immediate attention. He has instructed,” and the shorter man emphasized this word just slightly more than was necessary, “that I am to make every effort to arrange for your comfortable stay.” He bowed again. “Have you any personal effects with which Osborne might assist you?”

He gestured to Osborne at the end of this speech, and the larger man bent forward in an overly elaborate bow, his hand fluttering as low as he could reach, near his knee somewhere. “At your service Miss,” he said in his pleasant way, “especially since you don’t seem to need it.” He stood upright again. “That’s the easiest sort of service to offer, you know, the kind that won’t be accepted anyway.”

The smaller man managed to look annoyed without actually changing his expression.

“Osborne is really my family name,” the tall man continued. “My first name is Morris. Everyone calls me Moe, except old Eddie here.”

“My name,” the smaller man said, in a tone that managed to be both emotionless and offended all at once, “is Clinton Edward Beale. If you have need of my services, you should address me as Clinton.”

“I would have let him introduce himself,” Moe said, “only he thinks it’s rude.”

“It is rude, in fact” said Clinton, sounding as if he was explaining something for the hundredth time, “especially in the case of one’s social superiors.”

Moe seemed not to hear him. Instead, he offered Lindy his large and surprisingly gentle hand. Lindy took it, then offered her own to Clinton in turn. He hesitated for a moment and then shook her hand, once, briskly.

Lindy had not yet had a chance to say anything through all of this, and she felt a bit confused by everything that was happening to her. It seemed that Moe and Clinton were not taking her to the police after all, and they seemed nice enough, but she had no idea who this Mister Bridgebane was or why he would send people to find her. Still, she did manage to say, “Good to meet you both,” without any difficulty, so she felt that she had not behaved too badly. Unfortunately, both Moe and Clinton seemed to be expecting something more from her.

“You will need,” said Clinton at last, “to accept formally the hospitality of the house. However things are done where you come from, around here the formalities must be observed.”

“Oh,” said Lindy. “What exactly do I say to, um, accept your hospitality, or whatever you said?”

Clinton looked as if he was trying very hard to be patient. “You need only say something to the effect that you do indeed accept the hospitality of our house.”

“Oh,” said Lindy again, though she did not normally talk in this silly way. “I do then. Accept your hospitality, I mean.”

“Very good,” said Clinton. “Follow me if you please,” and he began leading the way toward the house of Mister Hat.

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This is the second chapter of the Lindy novel. Those who missed the first chapter can find it posted at Lindy: Chapter One. Also, the novel still lacks a proper title, so those who have suggestions should feel free to offer them.

Chapter Two:
In Which There is an Odd Incident Involving Mister Hat

It was one of those days very early in the summer when it is warm enough for shorts in the sun but cool enough for a jacket in the shade. There were already leaves on the trees that grew along Mister Hat’s wall, but they were still a light sort of green and still delicate enough that Lindy could see sunlight through them as she looked into Mister Hat’s garden.

Right beneath her there was a wild looking patch of garden, filled mostly with overgrown rose bushes, and different kinds of ivy, and some tall plants that had yellow leaves that looked like flowers, and other sorts of bushes all grown together in a tangle. Just beyond the bushes there was a path of little stones that were almost covered in moss, and there was also a stone bench that needed very badly to be cleaned before anyone could sit on it. On the other side of the path the plants were shorter, almost like grass, and there were little flowers, blue and yellow and white, shooting through the leaves here and there.

All this Lindy could see very easily, but the rest of the garden was mostly hidden by the branches around her, and she could only see further when a particularly strong breeze blew the leaves far enough aside. When the breeze did blow strongly, which happened every few minutes or so, she could also see a stone archway standing in the middle of the grass and flowers, looking like an old church doorway but without the church. The stone of the arch was white and pink, like the colour on the inside of some seashells, and it was taller even than the wall, tall enough for two people to go through, one standing on top of the other.

Behind the arch there was another row of trees, but it was the arch that Lindy liked to see best, or rather, she liked to see the trees too, but mostly because she could see them through the archway. She liked to think that the arch was a kind of picture frame, only its picture was real and moving and alive, full of waving trees and falling sunlight and sometimes animals. She looked each time the wind blew to see how the picture had changed from her last look and from the look before it.

On this particular Saturday, Lindy had been sitting on her wall for most of the morning, leaning against the trunk of the tree, sometimes reading a book, when she heard the breeze begin to rustle the leaves once again. She looked out to see what picture the archway would make, but instead of the trees and flowers that she expected, she saw in the archway what looked like a silvery window or a cloudy mirror, and through the window, she saw the face of a man.

Actually, she could see the whole of the man from head to foot, but it was only his face that she could see clearly, since all the rest of his body was dark somehow, while his face was bright like sunlight. She could not have told you exactly what his face looked like, though she could remember it to herself ever after. She could only say that its colour was like the green of new leaves mixed with the gold of the sun, and that it looked stern in the way that kings are stern in old pictures, not angry, but strong and proud. Indeed, Lindy thought that he might be a king, for there was a sort of crown on his head made from ivy and white flowers that made him look very solemn and kingly and made Lindy feel a little frightened. Then the breeze stopped, and the leaves blocked her view of the archway once more.

Now, I hope that you can forgive Lindy for being frightened at seeing this man standing suddenly in the archway. After all, it is only natural to be frightened by things that are out of the ordinary, and you must admit that it is not at all ordinary for kings to appear without warning in peoples’ gardens, shining and green-gold and wearing crowns of flowers. Neither is it ordinary for doors, even tall stone arches that lead nowhere in particular, to turn suddenly into windows or mirrors or anything else for that matter. Truthfully, I would have been a bit frightened myself, and you probably would have been too if you had been in her place.

To Lindy’s credit, though, she was really only frightened for a minute before she started to feel better again. This was not because she was very brave, though she was certainly one of the braver people I have known. It was because she was very smart, and she quickly came to the reasonable conclusion that her eyes were playing tricks on her and that there really was no silvery window or stern looking king, just the light making the trees look strange or something equally ordinary. So, instead of climbing down the tree and going back to her house, which would have ended our story before it really had a chance to begin, she sat up a little and began crawling along the wall to a place where she could get a better view.

Of course, when she could see the arch again, it was just as she suspected: it looked normal once more, and the picture it held was only the trees behind it waving gently in the breeze, and there also was Mister Hat, pushing a wheelbarrow of dirt toward the path. The mystery, she thought, was explained. There had been no golden king coming through a mirror, only Mister Hat coming through the arch with his wheelbarrow. Her mind must have imagined all the rest.

Mister Hat did not look up to where Lindy was sitting, and she stayed there for a moment, feeling some relief, but also a little disappointment. However frightening it may have been to see a king suddenly appear in Mister Hat’s garden, it was also a little disappointing to discover that she had been right all along, that there really was no silvery mirror or golden king, and that this morning was as plain and ordinary as any other had been or was likely to be.

As Lindy was thinking these things, Mister Hat dumped the dirt from his wheelbarrow along the far side of the path and turned back toward the arch and the house beyond it, as if he was finished his work for the morning and was going home for his lunch. Then, just as Lindy was thinking that she should probably be heading inside too, Mister Hat did something that made the morning very much less plain and ordinary once more. As he stepped through the arch, it turned silvery again, and there was a moment when his head seemed to be golden and crowned with vines, and then he simply disappeared.

Maybe it was the surprise of seeing someone she knew disappear in the middle of his own garden, or maybe it was the shock of having been proven wrong in all her very reasonable conclusions, but Lindy could not afterward say exactly why she did what she did. She did not go home, which would perhaps have been the safer thing to do. Instead, she jumped down into Mister Hat’s garden, right in the middle of the overgrown ivies and rosebushes that grew along the wall. She did not think about being frightened, and she certainly did not think about getting her clothes dirty, because the drop was a big one, and she landed in bushes and thorns and dirt, so that she was soon scratched and muddy all over. In fact, she could never remember thinking anything at all, which is probably why she could do something as brave and silly as jump from such a height into a thicket of thorns and brambles in someone else’s yard.

From where she had landed, there were still several yards of bushes between her and the stone path, so she had gathered a good many more scratches and even some tears in her clothes by the time she was free of them and stood beside the stone bench, seeing the archway from a much nearer distance than she had ever seen it before. Now that she was this close, however, she did have some time to think, and she began to realize how silly a thing it was for her to go any further, especially if someone really had just disappeared not far away. On the other hand, she was curious, and she could not bring herself to go home just yet either, so there she stood, afraid to go further but unwilling to go back.

If you had asked Lindy just then about what exactly she was planning to do, she might have said something like, “I guess I’m waiting for Mister Hat to come back,” but of course you were not there to ask her any such thing, so she never really thought about what it was she was doing, and she just kept standing by the bench, looking into the archway where Mister Hat had disappeared. She waited for what seemed to her a very long time, but Mister Hat did not return, and Lindy began to think that perhaps she had imagined everything after all, though she did not really believe this. Instead, without realizing exactly what she was doing, she found herself walking to the archway and laying her hands on one of its white and pink pillars. As soon as her fingers touched the stone, there was a kind of humming, low and soft, and the arch was suddenly filled again with silver and grey.

When Lindy had watched Mister Hat from the wall, the archway had looked like a cloudy mirror or a silvered window, but now that she was closer, it looked more like thick smoke, blue and grey, swirling about between two panes of glass, and in the smoke there were little flecks of gold that looked like tiny stars, shining out for a moment, then hidden in the smoke, then shining once again.

She felt suddenly as though she had always known about the arch, with its silvery smoke and swirling lights, as if she had always known that she would pass through it some day. It seemed to her that she was remembering all these things from long ago, and just when she thought this, she was drawn forward through the smoke and into something else altogether.

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This is the first chapter of a children’s novel that I am writing. I have several chapters completed already, but I will post them only as I get far enough in advance of them to know that they will not require any more revisions for plot continuity and character development. Any comments or suggestions are welcome.

Chapter One:
In Which Some Introductions are Made

Once there was a town that had been small for a very long time but was getting bigger and had just become that comfortable size that is the greatest time in the history of any town. It had some little shops, and a skating rink, and a town hall, and some lovely old churches, and several schools for children of different ages, and a small university for the oldest children. It did not have a loud highway running through it, or big factories, or superstores, but it did very well without these things, and no one felt the need for them.

Near the edge of this little town, there was a street called Devonshire. It followed a stretch of railway track that made its way from the main line toward the town’s old train station. It was mostly an ordinary street except that it had been built on both sides of the track rather than just on one side or the other. This meant that the trains ran down the middle, and the cars drove on either side, so the children sometimes had to wait a long time for the street to be clear enough to visit their friends across the way.

Though the street was a little different, most of the houses on Devonshire were of a regular sort. They were small, square, and brick, and they had become a bit shabby over the years. Their windows and doors needed paint, and their roofs looked leaky in places, and their fences leaned one way or the other as they chose. Because they were small and in bad repair, they were also inexpensive, and so the people who lived in them tended to be of two sorts: those who were down on their luck but were working very hard to make the best of things, and those who were down on their luck and were giving up hope that things would ever get better. The houses of the first sort seemed a little neater, even if the roofs still leaked, but the houses of the second sort had trash on the lawn, or burnt out porch lights, or broken bicycles in the driveway that no one bothered to fix.

There was one house on the street, however, that was not at all small and not at all shabby, even though it was very old. It had been the farmhouse when the whole street and everything around it had been farmland, and it had gradually been closed in, first by the railway that was laid along the road, then by the station that was built for the nearby town, and then, all of a sudden, by all the little houses that were built as the town tried to become a city.

The farmhouse was made all of grey stone, and there had been additions made to it several times, so that it had an irregular sort of shape, some parts having two stories, and others parts having three, and the little part at the back having only one. Its windows were also of different shapes and sizes, and the roof was at different angles depending on the place, so the house looked like it had been thrown together over the years without any thought as to how it might look, which was very likely the case.

Not only was the farmhouse the biggest house on the street, but it also had the biggest lot, which was big enough for five or six houses. Everything was surrounded by a stone wall that kept all but the tallest of people from seeing over it, so the house always seemed a bit mysterious, especially to the children of the street, who made up all sorts of stories about it.

What made these stories seem true was the man who lived in the house, who looked strange enough for any story the children might think to tell. He was a little older than middle age, and he had long, grey hair, which was normal enough, but he wore shabby, old-fashioned clothes that looked like they came from someone’s attic, and no matter what the season, no matter what the weather, he always had on a black, three-cornered hat, like the pirates in stories wear, all battered and worn around the edges.

Because he always wore this hat, the children called him Mister Hat, even though they knew that his name was really Mister Owen. They did not know whether to be afraid of him or not. They had all been told by their parents that they were not to speak to strangers, which is a very good rule, and Mister Hat was quite strange indeed, and he lived in a mysterious house besides, but he also smiled at everyone when he passed them on the street, and he would touch his hat with a little bow to them, even to the smallest of the children.

If they had asked their parents about him, the children might have learned that Mister Hat was even stranger than they thought. Even the adults who had lived on that street the longest, and some had lived there for many years, could not remember a time when Mister Owen had not lived in the old farmhouse. It seemed as though he had always lived there, and it seemed as though he had always been old, or, at least, that he had always been as old as he was, which, as I said, was a little past middle age.

When the adults bothered to think about Mister Owen at all, they would always say how odd it was that he never seemed to get any older, but nobody really gave it too much thought. Mister Owen kept mostly to himself, and the adults mostly forgot that they even had such an odd neighbour. The children, however, never forgot how odd their neighbour really was. They loved his peculiar clothes, his slow and royal walks, and the way that he would touch his hat to them as if they were not children at all. When he walked through the neighbourhood, they would run ahead of him and wait in line for the little bow he always gave them, so that it looked as if Mister Owen was a general reviewing some motley regiment of toy soldiers, or perhaps a giant of a king making a parade among his tiny subjects. He seemed to enjoy their attention, saying a grave “Good day” to them now and again, and most often taking his walk in the afternoon, just after school was finished for the day, so that he could be sure of meeting the children as they came home.

One girl in particular, whose name was Lindy, loved to watch for Mister Hat. She lived just to the right of his house, close enough that she could hear the creaking of the big iron gates at the end of his driveway whenever he opened them. Whether she was playing in her backyard or doing schoolwork or helping around the house, Lindy always listened for the creak of those gates, and when she heard them, she would race to the end of her driveway so that Mister Hat could give his little bow and perhaps wish her a good day. Even though he dressed strangely, there was something about Mister Hat that made Lindy feel happier whenever she saw him, and she was quite sure that he was not as crazy as people said he was. When he passed her on the street and they exchanged their little greeting, she would be cheerful for the rest of the day, doing her chores without complaining and singing to herself as she did her schoolwork, but if she heard that she had missed one of Mister Hat’s walks, she would be so disappointed that she might forget her chores or her homework altogether, so that her mother would sometimes ask what had gotten into her.

Some days, if Mister Hat took his walk early enough in the afternoon, and if there was a long while until supper, Lindy would follow him a little, making sure to stay out of sight. She would often follow right to the end of the block, across the one-way street, and through the little park with the band stand and the fountain, until Mister Hat crossed the main road, where Lindy’s mother did not allow her to go. It was not that Mister Hat did anything so very interesting that made Lindy follow him. He would just walk along with his slow, firm steps, very tall and grand, sometimes twirling his silver-headed walking stick, and sometimes smoking on the pipe that he kept in his jacket pocket. He never stopped to do anything at all and never said anything more than “Good day.” Still, Lindy felt that there was something mysterious about him, as if he might suddenly turn into a bird and fly away or disappear into thin air, if only she watched him long enough. Of course, he never did either of these things, but Lindy liked to think that he might all the same.

Now, just because Lindy imagined these sorts of fantastic things about Mister Hat, I would not want you to think that she was the kind of girl who spent all her time daydreaming, for she was quite the opposite. She was on the whole a very responsible girl, especially considering that she was only twelve years old at the time of our story. She was usually very good about doing her homework and helping around the house, and she had even begun babysitting for some of her neighbours, who would tell Lindy’s mother how lucky she was to have such a dependable daughter.

Indeed, Lindy’s mother, whose name was Missus Merton, often had to remind Lindy that she did not need to be quite so serious all the time. She would see Lindy reading in the livingroom or practising on the old piano, and she would tell Lindy to go and play with her friends. So, Lindy would go, just to make her mother happy, even though she would much rather have played by herself.

Rather than play with friends, Lindy preferred to climb the steep stairway to the attic, through the boxes of summer clothes and Christmas decorations, to the dormer window that faced the house where Mister Hat lived. It was not what some of you might think a very nice place. It smelled musty, especially in warmer weather, and it was a little dark, even with a reading lamp, and it had more than a few spiders. It was also cold in the winter, so that Lindy had to wear a sweater and wrap herself in blankets just to stay warm, but despite all of these things, she loved the dormer. She loved it because it was quiet and because it was dark, but most of all because she could just be by herself.

She also loved it because she could look out across Mister Hat’s garden, which was quite beautiful, especially in the spring and fall, even though Mister Hat did not keep it very tidy. It had almost a forest of trees all along the stone wall, more trees around the house, and an apple orchard at the back, which Lindy could hardly see from her window. It also had some broad, open spaces that looked like they had once been better tended, with flagstone walkways, and benches, and statues, and a big stone arch that had ivy growing up it. Everything was overgrown with bushes and plants, but it was still beautiful in a wild sort of way, and Lindy liked the view from her dormer window very much.

In the summer, however, the attic would eventually become so hot that Lindy had to go out to the backyard elm tree when she wanted time alone. The elm grew very close to Mister Hat’s wall, so she could climb to the top of the wall and sit on it, dangling her feet over the side as she watched the squirrels and the rabbits in the garden. Because of the trees in Mister Hat’s yard, she was well hidden from view, and she spent much of her summer holidays reading in this very spot, which perhaps accounts for the fact that she just happened to be there one day when a most peculiar thing happened.

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