4
'The Box and the Key'
'A long, long time ago, in a northern country where snow fell eight months of the year, a boy lived alone with his mother in a little wooden house at the foot of a steep hill. There they lived a decent, purposeful, hardworking life. Chores always demanded to be done, provisions to be salted away, cords of wood to be cut and stacked. There was endless work, little of what boys today would call fun, but much joy. The boy's entire world was the snug wooden house with its wood fires and waxed floors, the animals he cared for, his work and his mother and the land they inhabited. The life made a perfect circle, a perfect orb, in which every action and every emotion was useful, in tune with itself and each other action and emotion.
'One day the boy's mother told him to go out and play in the snow while she did her baking. I imagine that she did not want him dodging around her skirts, pestering her for a taste of what she was mixing. She dressed him warmly, in heavy sweaters and thick socks and boots and a big blue coat and a woolen cap and said, 'Go out now and play for an hour.'
'The boy asked, 'May I climb the hill?'
' 'You may go all the way to the top if you like,' said his mother. 'But give me an hour to do my baking.'
'So out he went - he loved to climb the hill, though sometimes his mother decided that marauding animals made it dangerous. From the top he could see his little house, its chimney and windows, and the entire little valley where it sat, that cozy little house in a deep northern valley where dark firs grew straight out of the snow.
'It took him half an hour, but finally he had struggled up to the top of the hill. Looking one way, he could see hill after hill stretching away into a cold northern infinity. And when he looked the other direction, he saw right down into his own valley. There, now looking like a (tollhouse, was his home. Smoke puffed from its chimney, drifted and blew, and his mother crossed and recrossed the kitchen window, carrying mixing bowls and trays for the oven. It looked so warm, that little house with its busy woman and its drifting, blowing column of smoke.
'The boy alone on the snowy hill decided to dig. Perhaps he thought he would build a fort under the snow. He scooped out a handful of snow, then another, and all the - time he was conscious of what lay down in the valley - the warm house, his mother moving back and forth across the kitchen window.
'He dug for a time, looking back and forth from his hole in the snow to his house and his mother, and soon realized that he had little time left in which to play. He looked back down at his house and his mother in the window, and dug a few more cold wet handfuls out.
'It was time to begin going back. He watched a curl of smoke lift from the chimney.
'Then he heard a voice in his mind saying: Dig out another handful.
'He looked back at his warm house, and he put his hand deep into, the snow.
'His fingers touched something hard and smooth and colder than ice. He looked back at the house, where his mother was taking hot cakes from the tray with a long-handled baker's spatula; and then he looked back into the hole he had made, and dug quickly around, feeling for the sides and edges of whatever he had found.
'It was a box - a silver box, so cold it burned his hands right through his gloves. That voice in his mind, which was his own voice, said: Where there is a box, there is a key.
'So he looked back at the house and knew its warmth… saw the smoke lazing from the chimney… saw his mother glance toward the window. And he took one hand and just delicately scraped his fingers across the bottom of the hole.
'His fingers turned over a little silver key.
'Where there is a key, there is a lock, his own voice said within its head.
'He revolved the cold silver box in his hands and saw how the lock was set into a complicated pattern of scrollwork just before the lip of the top. He looked back once more at the warm house, his mother wiping her hands on her apron before the window. And he put the little key into the lock.
'The box clicked.
'Then for the last time he looked back at his warm house and his mother, at all he had known, and he raised the lid of the box.'
Coleman Collins lifted his hands, palms facing about a foot apart, and suddenly swooped them upward. 'Every story in the world, every story ever told, blew up out of the box. Princes and princesses, wizards, foxes and trolls and witches and wolves and woodsmen and kings and elves and dwarves and a beautiful girl in a red cape, and for a second the boy saw them all perfectly, spinning silently in the air. Then the wind caught them and sent them blowing away, some this way and some that.'
He put his hands back on the table, smiling; he looked drunk as an owl to Tom, but the resonant voice coiled in the sleepy spaces of his mind, echoing even when Collins was not talking. 'But I wonder if some of those stories might not have blown into other stories. Maybe the wind tumbled those stories all together, and switched the trolls with the kings and put foxes' heads on the princes and mixed up the witch with the beautiful girl in the red cape. I often wonder if that happened.'
He pushed himself away from the table and stood up. 'That was your bedtime story. Go up to your rooms and go to bed. I don't want you to leave your rooms until tomorrow morning. Run along.' He winked, and disappeared through the curtains, leaving them momentarily alone in the empty theater.
Then he poked his disembodied - looking head through the join of the curtains. 'I mean now. Upstairs. Lead the way, Mr. Nightingale.' The head jerked back through the curtains.
A moment later it reappeared, thrust forward like a jack-in-the-box. 'Wolves, and those who see them, are shot on sight. Unless it is a lupus in fabula, who appears when spoken of.' The head opened its mouth in a soundless laugh, showing two rows of slightly stained and irregular teeth, and popped back through the curtain.
'Lupus in fabula?' Del said, turning to Tom.
'Mr. Thorpe used to say it sometimes. The wolf in the story.'
'Who appears when… '
'Spoken of,' Tom said miserably. 'It doesn't mean real wolves, it means… Oh, forget it.'