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“We’re wasting time,” said Peter.
“Let’s greet the young lady,” said Jack.
“Aye!” said the Mormon Tabernacle Choir from a single throat. Grandpère was yanked to his feet by unseen wires.
“Let me be!” he cried, and vised his eyes, his skull, his ribs, an incredible strange bed that sank to smother the cousins. “There! Stop!”
The cousins ricocheted in the dark.
“Help! Light! Cecy!”
“Here,” said Cecy.
The old one felt himself twitched, tickled, behind his ears, his spine. His lungs filled with feathers, his nose sneezed soot.
“Will, his left leg, move! Peter, the right, step! Philip, right arm. Jack, the left. Fling!”
“Double-time. Run!”
Grandpère lurched.
But he didn’t lurch at the fine girl; he swayed and half collapsed away.
“Wait!” cried the Greek chorus. “She’s back there! Someone trip him. Who has his legs? Will? Peter?”
Grandpère flung the vestibule door wide, fell out on the windy platform and was about to hurl himself full into a meadow of swiftly flashing sunflowers when:
“Statues!” said the chorus stuffed in his mouth.
And statue he became on the backside of the swiftly vanishing train.
Spun about, Grandpère found himself back inside. As the train rocketed a curve, he sat on a young lady’s hands.
“Excuse!” Grandpère leaped up.
“Excused.” She rearranged her hands.
“No trouble, no, no!” The old, old creature collapsed on the seat across from her. “Hell! Bats, back in the belfry! Damn!”
The cousins melted the wax in his ears.
“Remember,” he hissed behind his teeth, “while you’re acting young in there, I’m Tut, fresh from the tomb out here.”
“But—” The chamber quartet fiddled his lids. “We’ll make you young!”
They lit a fuse in his belly, a bomb in his chest.
“No!”
Grandpère yanked a cord. A trapdoor gaped. The cousins fell down into an endless maze of blazing remembrance: three-dimensional shapes as rich and warm as the girl across the aisle. The cousins fell.
“Watch out!”
“I’m lost!”
“Peter?”
“I’m somewhere in Wisconsin. How’d I get here?”
