Did she say anything before she left? We do not know. She would have spoken to him, I think, whispered a message into his sleeper's ear, but that message would have joined his bloodstream like Del's final song and would have been impossible to reconstruct into ordinary flawed human speech. And again like Del's song, which was an expression of completion and the end of change, it would have spoken of, would have hymned a further and necessary and unforeseen transformation: it is like saying that the message would have been the heartbeat of magic. In his sleep, he heard her go; and heard the rippling of the water.
When he awakened it was to warm cloudless day, the sun already high. He saw that she was gone, and called her name. He called it again.
Across the lake Shadowland, a smoking hole hi the landscape, fumed like an old pipe.
'Rose?' he called again, and finally looked at his watch. It was eleven in the morning. 'Rose! Come back!' He stood up, looked into the trees and did not see her, and for a moment was sick with the thought that she had returned to the house.
But that could not be: the house no longer existed. Rubble would have fallen into the entrance of the tunnel and blocked it off for good. A few boards jutted up, one chimney stood in a blackened column. Everything else was gone. Rose was freed from that.
As was he. For the first tune he looked at his hands in daylight and saw the round pads of scar tissue.
He sat down to wait for her. Even then, he knew that if he waited until his beard grew to his waist and men danced on the moon and stars, she would never come back. He waited anyhow. He could not leave.
Tom waited for her all day. The minutes crawled - he was back, in common time, and no one could fold the hours together like a pack of cards. He watched the lake change color as the sun crossed, changing from deep blue to paler blue to light green and back to blue. In the late afternoon he gently moved the glass sparrow onto the sand and opened the leather-bound book. He read the first words: These are the secret teachings of Jesus the son of God, as told by him to his twin, Judas Thomas. He closed the book. He remembered what Rose had said to his frantic speculation that they might have to go back through the destroyed house. No you won't. Not: no we won't. She would not go down the path to the gate with him: she would not trek into the village, holding his hand, or stand at his side while they waited for a train.
Tom waited until the brightness drained from the air. Shadowland still smoldered, and a few sparks drifted down the bluff, falling toward a thin layer of ash the rain would take in the fall. When the falling sparks glowed like tiger's eyes, he stood up.
He walked toward the water, carrying the glass sparrow and the book. He went to his knees on the damp sand just before the edge of the water. He set down the sparrow and looked at it. At its center hung a deep blue light. He wanted to say something profound, but profundity was beyond him: he wanted to say something emotional, but the emotion itself held his tongue in a vise. 'Here you go,' was what came out of him. He gave the sparrow a push into the water. It glided an inch or so along the bottom, then a ripple passed over it on the surface of the lake and the sparrow seemed to move against the motion of the ripple, going deeper into the lake. The blue in the glass was identical to the blue of the water. Another unseen ripple took it with it, and the sparrow went - flew - so far ahead under the water he could not see it.
Tom stood up, pushed the book into his belt, and walked back across the beach. Soon he was parting the delicate brush.