AEgypt by John Crowley Read Free Book Online

painting. It would be a version of that old religious picture that used to be everywhere, Jesus sitting on a rock and around him all these sweet-faced kids of all nations with shining eyes. Only, in her painting, around the same Jesus (Beau in his caftan) would be real kids, kids today: sticky-fingered kids armed with TV weapons, kids in plastic diapers, kids in filthy T-shirts lettered with smart remarks, belly buttons showing, orange-popsicle drool on their chins, bandaids on their knees; kids lugging superhero dolls and frayed blankies and five-and-dimery of every kind, riding red and yellow plastic motorcycles, making rum-rum noises. She laughed aloud, seeing it clearly. The Easy Jesus Daycare Center. Suffer the little crumb-crushers. At the end of Maple Street she had to stop, unable to make the turn, laughing hard, too hard, tears standing in her eyes.
* * * *
    She returned the novel, a week overdue, to the library that stands on Bridges Street, one of those thick, gray Romanesque concoctions that Andrew Carnegie used to give away across America, pillared, arched, rusticated and domed, at once fantastic and dispiriting. The stone steps are worn like old salt licks, partly by Rosie's young feet in years gone by; and in the entranceway there hangs a slab of prehistoric mud, turned to stone fifty million years ago with the track of a dinosaur clearly pressed into it. When Rosie was a child, she would stand before that paw, thinking: fifty million years ago; and in after years she had often described it to others, the old library where there hung an immense footprint of a prehistoric monster. Immense: the print, when Rosie returned to the Faraways fully grown, had shrunk to the size of a monkey's paw, or a human hand signaling three : trivially, laughably small. Well, so had she been herself, back then, fifty million years ago. She passed into the dim inside.
    "And how was this one?” Phoebe asked her while she hunted up nickels for the fine. This was the same Phoebe to whom Rosie had once paid fines for The Secret Garden and The Borrowers Abroad, herself, too, grown a lot smaller.
    "Good,” said Rosie. “A good one."
    "I've never read him,” Phoebe said. “I suppose I should. Our local famous author."
    "Oh, it's good,” Rosie said. “You'd like it."
    "They were very popular once.” She turned Darkling Plain in her hands, regarding through the bottoms of her bifocals the edgeworn cover, a dim painting of armored men struggling together. “There's lots more."
    "More where that came from, huh,” Rosie said. She paid her fine and wandered into the stacks. Maybe she would try another. She was intending to save them for winter, when, if things turned out as she thought they would, she would be in need of long and easeful distractions, a place to go. But Darkling Plain had not satisfied, somehow; involving and colorful as it had been, it had seemed not a complete story; she wanted more. She ran her hand across the backs of them, unable to think how she might make a choice among them; she knew only the rudiments, if that, of the true histories they were based on (in fact she was hoping to learn a lot from them in the history line), and they all seemed more or less the same thing, each with its old-fashioned watercolor painting for a cover, overlaid with black script title, and each bearing at the bottom of the spine a little leaping wolfhound imprint. She drew one out: Under Saturn, a Novel of Wallenstein. More battles. Who was Wallenstein again? Another: this one's cover had a crowded Elizabethan scene, an inn-yard theater, orange-sellers, swells with swords, an apprentice or somebody who turned away from the scene and called out to the viewer, hand by his mouth, pointing to the players: Lots of fun here, let's go. Well, all right, this looked cheerful. It was called Bitten Apples.
    She checked it out, and with its solid, deckle-edged weight under her arm felt oddly safe. Only one or two things left on the list before