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  When he got to the top again, he could see that there were two lights, not just one, and they were much nearer now. Only a few dozen yards through the bushes and trees—easy passages, mostly—and he was on the edge of a clearing.

  The two lights were like old-fashioned lanterns. Glass-sided, with ornate metal lining the panes.

  Unlike a lantern, though, there was neither base nor roof to the lights, just glass all the way around.

  Nor were there stands holding them up, or wires holding them suspended from above. They simply hung in the air, flickering.

  There was no bulb inside, giving light. Nor a wick of any kind, nor a source of fuel. Just a dazzling point of light drifting around inside each lantern, bumping against the glass and changing direction again.

  Mack was going to step out into the clearing and look more closely at the lights, but that was when he heard a growl, and saw that a panther, black as night, slunk from shadow to shadow around the forest verge. Its eyes were bright yellow in the lantern light, and at moments Mack thought he could see a red glow even deeper inside the eyes.

  The panther growled and bounded suddenly to the middle, directly between the two lights.

  Mack took just one more step, not because he was so brave that he did not fear the panther, but because it would have been unbearable not to get a closer look at what the panther's front paws rested on.

  It was a corpse, flyblown and rotted. The man had been wearing trousers and a longish shirt, though the shirt had been torn by claws. And instead of a man's head, on his shoulders was the head of a donkey, its eyesockets empty, its fur patchy. Mack had seen squirrels in this condition before; he knew that under the collapsing rib cage there would be nothing, the worms and bacteria having done their work.

  This panther must have been here a long time, if it was what killed the donkey-headed man, and the clawing the man's clothes had received suggested that it was.

  Whatever the two lanterns were, it was clear enough that the panther did not intend to let anyone near them.

  And that was fine with Mack. He was curious, but never so curious that he'd die for an answer.

  Let the globes of light keep their secret, and let the panther go hungry for another while.

  Having seen the sources of the light he saw from the path, there was no reason for him to remain here. He started back.

  The moment he left the clearing, though, he was plunged into darkness. If it had been twilight before, now it was night, and without the bobbing lantern light ahead of him to guide him, he had to feel his way through the dark like a blind man.

  Somewhere ahead of him was a ravine, its sides so steep that he had clung to vines and roots in order to climb. And at the bottom, a torrent that could sweep him away if he misjudged in the darkness and failed to jump all the way across.

  "I'm not getting home tonight," Mack said out loud.

  Behind him, he heard the deep rumble of a big cat, purring.

  He stopped, held still.

  A warm sleek-furred body pressed close against him as it slid past, then turned and rubbed itself again on his legs.

  A tongue lapped at his hand.

  He didn't think this was the way that cats treated their prey.

  Mack took another step toward the ravine. Suddenly the cat was in front of him, blocking his way. And instead of a purr, there was a fierce, short growl.

  I'm in Narnia, thought Mack. Only it's a black boy's Narnia, so instead of a golden lion there's a black panther. And instead of entering through the back of a wardrobe in England, I got here through the back door and patio of an invisible house on a street in Baldwin Hills.

  So what was the deal here? Guys like C. S. Lewis and what's-his-name who wrote Alice in Wonderland, were they reporting things they really experienced? Or things they dreamed? Or were they imagining it, but it happened that in the real world the things they imagined really did come true?

  Or is all this happening because I read their books and so my own mind is finding ways to make their fantasy stories turn real? Or am I crazy and cold dreams are nothing but the ugly nightmares of a wacked out bastard boy whose mind was broken as he lay covered with ants in a grocery bag by a drainpipe at the bottom of Hahn Park?

  Either this panther was a black Aslan or a black White Rabbit or... or something. Whatever. The main thing was, it only growled when Mack walked in this direction. Or when Mack tried to walk toward the lanterns. And it was dark. Night. Mack had eaten supper, such as it was. The leftover chili. So it's not like he had a compelling reason to go home, except that Miz Smitcher would worry about him, and there was nothing he could do about that, she'd worry a lot worse and a lot longer and to less effect if he pissed off this panther and ended up lying in the woods with claw marks on his clothing and maggots eating his dead flesh.

  So he lay down where he was standing. The ground was soft and yielding. He could hear the breathing of the panther near him. He could see nothing at all. Not even the lights in the clearing, now that he was down below the level of the underbrush. If there were snakes or other fearsome beasts near him, he'd never know it; the rustlings and stirrings he heard were bound to be small creatures of the night, but they were none of his business and he hoped they'd feel the same about him.

  Lying there, in the minutes before sleep overtook him, Mack thought about Mr. Christmas and all he'd said. He knew Mack's mother. Could that be true? A woman somewhere nearby. In the neighborhood. Was it possible? She gave birth, and everybody forgot she had even been pregnant? If that was so, then Mack really was home here. Or rather, there in Baldwin Hills, since right now "here" was a dark magical wood with a panther lurking nearby.

  And what was that business with the hockey stick and the puck that appeared in midair and fell to the floor in the kitchen of Mr. Christmas's Skinny House?

  It was the house, answering his question about Mr. Christmas's identity, just as he had asked.

  Puck. There was a character named Puck. Mack had heard the name, or read it somewhere.

  Vaguely the memory came to him: It was a character in Shakespeare. Mack had never read Shakespeare, but somewhere in his schooling, somebody had told or read him the story of someone named Puck. A fairy named Puck. Mr. Christmas was a fairy, like he said, only not what guys meant when they called an effeminate kid a fairy. More like an elf. A tall black old elf with a rasta do. Only when Mack had walked into the woods and looked back at him, he had turned back into something more like himself, and what Mack had seen was the fairy, tall and lithe, his hair a halo around his head, his clothes clingy and... green. They had been green.

  It was a play, now he remembered. A group of college students came to their elementary school and put on a play that started with the queen of the fairies falling in love with a guy with a donkey head, and then a bunch of stupid guys acting out a play about a boy and girl who fall in love and then kill themselves because one of them was torn by a lion or... or something.

  That's all this is. I'm asleep somewhere and dreaming that play they put on for us when I was in fifth grade.

  Only he knew that he wasn't dreaming, that he was very much awake.

  Until, a moment later, he wasn't.

  Chapter 9

  CAPTIVE QUEEN

  Mack awoke in the first light of morning, cold and covered with dew, but not uncomfortable, not even shivering except one quick spasm when he first bounded to his feet.

  Only when he was standing did he realize that the panther had slept close to him all night, and from the sudden chill of evaporating sweat he knew that the beast had been pressed up close to his back. Now it lazily rose up and stretched and padded away from him, back toward the clearing where two lanterns hung suspended in the air.

  Mack wasn't interested in going back there now. Miz Smitcher would worry and he didn't want her to be unhappy or worried, though truth to tell she probably wasn't, since she was bound to assume he had spent the night in somebody's house.

  Alone now—for the panther
felt to him like more than an animal—Mack did as his body required, stepping right out of his pants in order to empty his bladder and then squat down to hold on to a sapling trunk while he emptied his bowels. It had been a long time since he'd done it outdoors, but his body was so healthy and worked so naturally that his turd came out dry and he didn't even need to wipe himself, though he scooped up some old leaves and made a pass at his butt just to be sure.

  Then he stood up and took a step and then snatched back at the sapling, because his foot didn't find the ground, it hung out in the air, and he realized that the trees and saplings here leaned out over the ravine or grew up from inside it. He had slept on the edge of a cliff last night, the cat between him and death, and the turd he laid had fallen down into nothing.

  It knocked the breath out of him, but not the sense—he knew as he slid down toward the water that he had to stop himself or he'd be caught up in the current and battered to death against the banks and stony bottom of the stream, if he didn't drown first.

  He caught a tough root growing right at the water's edge, as his legs went into the water. It was so cold, right up to his waist, that it knocked the breath out of him all over again—not that he'd had even a moment to catch it after the fall—and the shock was so great he almost lost his grip.

  But he held on, and even though the water tore at him and held him out almost horizontal in the water, he was able to get a leg up into the roots of another tree and then climb up out of the water.

  He sat on the bank, still without his trousers, trembling with the cold of the water and the pain and bruises of the fall and the fear of having come so near death.

  Far above him, he knew, were his pants. And his shoes? He couldn't remember if he had been barefoot yesterday when he went to take a look at the strange spot between Chandresses' and Snipes'. He wore shoes more and more these days, and he might have been wearing them, but he couldn't remember taking them off last night when he went to sleep. Main thing was, he was naked from the waist down, and somehow he had to get home, only a block or so but that was a long way when your butt was naked and the neighbors all knew where you lived and how to call and tell Miz Smitcher.

  Should he climb back up and get those pants?

  The ravine was a lot less steep on the other side. And Mr. Christmas—or Puck, if that was really his name, and why would the house lie to him?—might have something he could wear. At least a towel he could wrap around himself as if he was coming back from somebody's swimming pool.

  So he rested a little more, then jumped the stream and climbed up the other side. Then he just walked, trusting that he'd run across the path and know it when he saw it. And sure enough, he did.

  It was still that faint light of earliest morning when he saw the back of the Skinny House. Mr.

  Christmas was no longer standing at the door, of course, as Mack lightly ran along the mossy path until his feet touched brick. And in a few steps the house was itself again, and the patio was concrete with the rusty barbecue and the umbrella clothesline stand and the old screen door that stood just the tiniest bit ajar.

  Mack opened it, and turned the knob and the door into the kitchen opened, and there was Mr.

  Christmas, looking like himself again—or not like himself, depending on which version was really him.

  The dirty dreads, anyway, and the clothes he was wearing, and he sat at the kitchen table sipping something that wasn't coffee but Mack didn't know what.

  "Forget something out there?" asked Mr. Christmas.

  "Somebody steal your pants or you give them to a beggar? Or have you decided to go au naturel today?"

  So he wasn't going to answer, and Mack wasn't interested enough to keep pushing. "I need something to wear."

  "As I was saying."

  "Got anything that would fit me?" asked Mack. He looked at Puck's thickish body and said, "Or something that won't fit me unless I tighten a belt really tight and roll up the pantlegs?"

  "I got nothing that fits me, if you haven't noticed," said Puck. "But you're welcome to look in the closet and see what I got. Seeing how this house responds to you a lot better than it does to me."

  Mack walked into a bedroom that didn't look like anybody had ever slept in it, considering that there weren't even sheets or blankets or a pillow on the bed, and the bed was just a bare mattress on the floor.

  He went to the closet and slid the cheap sliding door open and there were six pairs of pants hanging there on hooks, each one identical to the pants he had left behind on the wrong side of the ravine. Four of them were clean, but one was damp and muddy, and another was torn as if by savage claws and covered in half-dried blood.

  "Guess things might have turned out a few different ways," said Puck.

  "But they turned out this way," said Mack. He took one of the clean pairs of pants out of the closet and put them on.

  "You know how these pants would have gotten so wet and muddy?"

  "I almost fell into the stream at the bottom of a canyon," said Mack.

  "So these torn and bloody ones..."

  "The panther," said Mack.

  "Panther?"

  "The one guarding the lamps."

  "Ah," said Puck. "Lamps."

  "They just hanging there in the air."

  "Oh, they got something holding them up," said Puck.

  "Duh," said Mack. "Magic, of course."

  "So if you come close, this panther..."

  "You never gone there?" said Mack. "You never saw that dead man? With a donkey head?"

  Puck chuckled and shook his head. "Once she loves you, you never forget, you never give up."

  "He ain't trying no more," said Mack. "Whatever it is he was trying to do."

  "He was trying to set her free."

  "Set who free?"

  "The queen."

  "I don't know what you talking about. I got to go home now."

  "Why you pretending you don't want to know?"

  "Cause whatever I ask, you don't tell me nothing. But when I don't ask, you full of information."

  "She's the most beautiful woman who ever lived," said Puck. "But her soul's been captured and locked in a glass cage."

  "The queen."

  "The Queen of the Fairies," said Puck.

  "And the dead guy with the donkey head, he was in love with her."

  "Shakespeare, that asshole, he never understood anything. About love or magic. Always had to

  'improve' the story." Puck winked. "He couldn't take a joke."

  "You don't like Shakespeare?" asked Mack.

  "Nobody likes Shakespeare. They just pretend they do so they look smart."

  "I like Shakespeare," said Mack.

  "You never read Shakespeare in your life."

  "Some college students, they put on a play for us. I liked it."

  "Yeah, yeah, cause they told you to like it. And cause they didn't put on Othello with some white dude with his face painted black."

  "So it was Shakespeare locked a queen's soul in a lantern in the woods?"

  "No," said Puck scornfully. "Shakespeare wouldn't have the power to pick his own nose, he come up against the queen."

  "Himself," said Puck. "If you think I saying his name in this place, you crazy."

  "What about the queen. What's her name?"

  "She has so many. Mab, some call her, and that's closer to her true name. But also Titania.

  Shakespeare knew those names but he didn't think she was the same person."

  "So why don't you go out into the woods and set her free? Guy can make a whole house disappear from the street, you got to be more powerful than a panther."

  "How far off the ground was that lantern?" asked Puck.

  Mack held his hand out, about shoulder high.

  Puck laughed bitterly. "So he didn't shrink you."

  "Shrink me?"

  "I step off the bricks into the woods, I shrink down to fairy size. Small enough to ride a butterfly.

  Only they's no flying across that ravi
ne. You think you had a hard time climbing down and up again?

  Crossing that water? How hard you think it be, you this high." He held up his hand, his thumb and fingers about four inches apart.

  "You? That tall?"

  "In those woods."

  "And you can't do anything about it?"

  "That my natural size," said Puck. "When I'm home."

  "Is that home for you, in there?"

  "It's part of home. A corner of home."

  "So what's it called?"

  "Faerie," said Puck. "Fairyland."

  "Not Middle-earth, then," said Mack. "Not Narnia?"

  "Made-up bullshit, that stuff," said Puck. "There's no lion in that place, making people be good.

  There's just power, and those who got more of it and those who got less."

  "And in that place, you're little." get me if I try to fly. I can't get in to set her free."

  "But I could," said Mack. "I'm tall enough."

  "But you scared of that panther."

  "Only a little," said Mack. "What I'm scared of is dying."

  "Same thing."

  "Don't care how," said Mack. "Just don't want to do it. Panther no worse than any other way."

  "What did she look like?"

  "If it was her, and you not just shitting me, then she was this little bit of light bouncing around inside the glass. Bright, though."

  "Couldn't look right at her, could you."

  "Burned a spot in my eye, didn't wear off till morning. Saw her in my sleep."

  "Ah," said Puck. "You had her dream?"

  Mack shook his head. "Not like that. I just dreamed about that point of light."

  "Ah," said Puck, clearly disappointed.

  "So who's the other one?" asked Mack.

  "Other one?"

  "Two lanterns, two lights. One of them might be this queen, but who's the other?"

  "A prisoner of love," said Puck, and then he started singing it.

  When grownups started singing old rock songs, the conversation was over. Mack had his pants on, and he better get home.

  "You going to set her free?" asked Puck.