"Pud should have been packed and gone three weeks ago," Lon said. "But you never know." We went on along a row of lampposts and in the circles of light I could see the keyring turning 'round and over in his hands. He separated out a single nickel-plated key, then let it fall and searched through the ring again. "She leaves it a lot neater than I do. And uses more of it. Some rooms I never go into. Don't need the space, and anyway I always feel like they aren't mine to use. Funny how territory can get marked out, even when you hardly live in a place."

We passed an all-night movie house with all the bulbs burning in the marquee and the lobby lights brightening half the block. Lon waved at a redhead behind the ticketglass and she grinned and waved back. At the corner a squat newsstand sat closed up for the night, all sheathed in metal. "Where else did your family live?" I said.

The streetsigns meant nothing to me. Lon did not even look where he was going. We turned left, and the brilliance of the theater was snuffed out behind us. Out of the dark Lon said, "Hell, this was just the house. We were here maybe five months of the year all told. Weekends we went upcountry, summers we had a cabin my folks rented out on Sebago Lake. This was just the house."

One time on their last night in Maine, Lon and his sister Pud waited up till past midnight and then stole out onto the lake in a wooden rowboat with a picture of Krazy Kat painted on its side. She was eight; Lon had just turned seventeen. He rowed them out over the water until he couldn't see any land anywhere, not even as a black shape against the sky, and there he pulled in the oars and just let the boat drift where it would. Pud sat up in the bow in her nightgown with the tigers leaping on it, her solemn face turned up to the stars. Lon just stretched out with his feet under the seat and his butt getting a little wet from the water in the bottom. He hung his arms over the side so that his fingers trailed just under the moonspotted surface. Then he remembered that things lived in there, and he got up and looked out over the water, thinking about things gathering under the surface, under the drifting boat, and then it was time to go.

"Do we have to?" Pud said, not whining because Pud was no whiner, even at eight.

Lon dipped the oars, pulled and raised them dripping out over the water, swinging them back in a wide arc. He pointed the boat back towards the invisible bank. "Don't have to do anything," he said softly. "Just time to go, that's all."

All that summer Lon sort of worked in a tumbledown garage close by the lake; he said "sort of" because they never did pay him anything. Pud and Lon had discovered the place during an expedition through a patch of scrub woods just down the road from where they lived. Lon hadn't wanted to go; it was too hot for one thing, and for another he wanted to go fishing or at least swimming. But Pud was determined to ferret out the Hun basecamp. She wore a makeshift helmet made of vines, and, following along behind him, she stopped every once in a while to chop at the undergrowth with her "machete," which was a switch longer than Lon's arm. "Come on," Lon would say. "What's holding you up?" and behind him he would hear whack! whack! and Pud would say, "Brush is damned thick, sergeant, damned thick!"

After about five minutes in the jungle they came up on a long, low rock wall half-covered in rotting leaves. "So much for your uninhabited forest," Lon said, and stepped over.

"It's a, it's a fossil wall," Pud said, poking at it, "left over by a ancient jungle tribe. We'd better be careful, sergeant, there could be natives right around here, waiting to pounce!"

But Lon had already gone ahead to the wood's edge and was looking out into the back yard of a place that connected up with the main road out front. "Say, pal," he said. "C'mere and look at this."

Pud came scrambling over and peered through where Lon held the branches apart. It was a big old box-shaped thing with the look of a hunting lodge, all logs and vine and antlers, hidden in a thicket of scruffy bushes and grass that hadn't been cut since Spring. It would have seemed like a peaceful sort of place if it hadn't been for the awful racket of poundings and mechanical rattlings coming from inside. "That's it!" Pud said. "That's the Enemy camp! I bet the place is crawling with Germans."

"You're sure about that," Lon said, and Pud looked up at him with the gravest mixture of certainty and doubt, and said, "Uh-huh?"

"Well we'd better check it out then." For her sake he went forward crouched in the manner of an advancing soldier, motioning for her to stay put. That was like telling a bengal tiger not to eat steak; before he had gone a yard he heard at his back the soft rustle of her paper bag filled with pine cone "grenades".

They came up flush to the building and went creeping along until they found a dirty window below the eaves where the pounding was loudest. Lon wiped a corner of the pane clean and stretched his neck out as far as it would go. "Wow," he said at last. "Well what do you know?"

He continued straight along the wall, leaving Pud wondering what it was he had seen. She was too little to reach the window herself, and there were no rocks or logs or anything for her to stand on, and so all she could do was go after him. When she poked her head around under the low branches of a maple sheltering the front corner, she saw Lon standing right out in plain sight, smack in the middle of a broad driveway. The whole front of the building was nothing more than two giant doors standing open to the air. Lon's mouth was open and his hands were in his pockets. He had a stupid, kind of dazed, eager look on his face. "Hey, Pud," he said. "Come on 'n' look at this."

As she stepped out into the yard something awful began to roar and scream inside. She grabbed one of her grenades, bit off the pin and spat it out; but when she came up beside her brother it dropped out of her fingers and rolled away, forgotten, to the bottom of the drive. She squished her sack of pine cones up close in the crook of her arm and put her fingers in her ears. The two of them stood looking in, and didn't say a word.

Under a high row of greenshaded lamps three men in dirty overalls worked with their hands in the stomachs of antique machines. Their arms were black to the elbow; they had streaks of grease where they had scratched their noses or wiped their foreheads. One had a pair of black-lensed goggles pulled down over his eyes. At the end of his hands sparks jumped and sputtered and whirled.

Around them the building was all dark and clutter, tools hanging against the wall, roadsters half covered under oilspotted tarps. The floor was bare ground covered over with shavings. Slowly, bit by bit, Lon went in under the lip of the building with Pud one step to the side, one step behind, so she could see in and still use him as a shield, just in case. They went ahead until they spotted a thing far in the back that was not a car. Blue cloth hung from its wings like shreds of webbing. It looked like a giant blue moth. They were standing under its nose, looking up, when the man in the mask put up his torch and peeled the gloves off of his hands. He looked right at them with his invisible eyes. "Well, partners," he said. "What d'you think?"

After that, Lon went up there every day. He started getting up early in the morning to do the sweeping and the lawn work, and then after a quick breakfast with Pud and his parents in the cabin's yellow-papered kitchen he would set off along a path that ran through the brush beside the lake. He never got more than a few hundred yards before the rustle or snap came from behind. Sometimes a branch or fern leaf might be bobbing unnaturally when he looked back, but he never did manage to catch her. He'd make a noise like an owl hooting, and before long the sound would come back to him from around the bend or behind a canopy of leaves. Then Lon would put on a face like a man having a heart attack and cry out loud: "Injuns! Injuns!" and run like hell.

Half an hour later he'd be working on someone's runabout with Mr. Hardaway or Mr. Sharpsteen, or anyhow handing them tools and watching to see how they did it. "Any time now," Mr. Sharpsteen would say, and sure enough when Lon looked up over the radiator there would be Pud with her bag of pinecones and her Buster Keaton expression just peeking around the edge of the garage's big door. If he was under the car, changing its oil, all he would see of her would be the rolled-up ends of her pants, her socks falling down, her overlarge tennis shoes kicking up sawdust as she came straight in with the same purposeful walk that carried her past the spare tires, past the cars, past the clutter of rusted parts that grew uncontrolled in the middle of the shop, straight through to the back corner where Lon and the mechanics never went.

It was always perfectly still back there. The only light came from pinholes in the roof above. Silk rested smooth along the wings of the sleeping thing, or drooped in pale blue folds. At the end of legs almost as skinny as Pud's, two big wheels sat inch-deep in sawdust. She would stand there in silence, the bag pressed up against her side, sometimes for ten minutes or more. Then when she thought no one was looking, and sometimes when no one was, she would climb right under the old dropcloth and up into the concealed and all-concealing secret place that was the cockpit.

Lon said he never asked what she thought she was doing in there. They never peeled away the cloth to see. But he said he was pretty sure he could guess close enough, and he guessed she was sitting just quietly with her hands on the stick and a determined look on her face. The blue cloth would have made a perfect sky. And she had her pinecone bombs all ready, just waiting to be dropped on the unsuspecting Hun down below.

Now Lon struck a match and lifted it to his face. When he shook it out there was an orange glow floating about an inch and a half from his lips. Sparks flecked away and fell to the concrete; his voice was low and steady in the night air. "That went on for most of the summer," he said. "Till just before August. Then the owner started coming down more often than anyone liked, and one day he caught her at it. Made a heck of a stink. Said he could lose everything. Pud came down out of the 'plane and stuck her tongue out at him, and he said to me you get that kid sister of yours out of here and keep her out. That afternoon Pud went out and got herself a length of clothesline. She tied one end around a tree and the other end around the bumper of the owner's car, and after that I didn't work there anymore"

Just then we stepped out of the gloom of the sidestreet into a broad, well-lit square with a strip of parkland down the middle and a solid mass of brownstone houses all around. It had an effect like the start of a play, black curtain sweeping away from the face of the stage, the stage itself opening out into something huge and real yet somehow contained in the space between the fire wall and the proscenium. The park might have been cut out of black paper, all treetrunks and the shadows of leaves. On the far side Lon's house stood in the backlight, second from the corner, the smallest building in the row. It had four windows in front, each of them the size of a big man. We crossed over to a short flight of clean marble steps and stood under the overhang while Lon fumbled with his keyring one last time. "It wasn't so bad as it sounds," he said to the door. "I figure what he didn't pay me about covered the damage. Come on in."

The lock turned without making a sound. Lon put his shoulder to the door and pushed his way into the greater dark inside. "So this is Burden House," I said. "Your folks did all right for themselves." Lon said nothing. I heard him padding along a wooden floor; then a globe mounted on the wall above flared up, lighting the whole room. It was a medium sized entryhall with pale green walls and a border of painted leaves running along its edges, flaking in places down to the plaster underneath. Lon kicked off his shoes and arranged them below a cast iron coatrack. He set the keys down on a sideboard nearby. Hanging above it was an ancient, speckled mirror with a sheet of paper wedged between the glass and frame. It had Lon's name on it, written out in blue letters, in a woman's practiced hand.

Lon folded it away into his breast pocket without reading it. There was no need to ask, even if I had the nerve; there was no one else it could have been from. He shook his jacket off, draped it over his arm like a butler or a bellman, then put his hand out for mine. "Take off your shoes," he said. As I bent down to oblige, I saw him open a slanted door under the stairway and hang the old coats neatly inside.

We went stocking-footed up and around, past the second floor and on up to the third, Lon turning the wall lamps on ahead and turning them off behind so that we were encased in a bubble of light that moved with us through the solid dark. "That last night on the lake," he said from three steps above, "Pud and I heard the 'plane take off and bank out over the water. We'd turned the boat around and I was rowing back, not knowing where the hell I was going, and from the end of the lake we heard this chopping in the air, like a flapping sound above the engine noise. He was flying with his lights out. Passed right over us, close enough to kick up the water, close enough to shake us, and still we never saw a thing. Stupid Pud got right up in the bow. She sat up there on her knees gripping the rim of the boat and looked up at nothing, and I hung onto the oars and paddled for dear life. My end went up, slapped down hard, then hers went up. The 'plane went out over the far shore. After it had gone she scrambled over and gave my pants leg a good tug. 'Valkyries,' she said. 'A whole flock of them. Did you hear their wings? Like Pegasuses. A flock of Valkyries carrying all the dead Germans to War Heaven.' Can you beat that? Where the hell did she get that? Eight years old. didn't know what a Valkyrie was until I met Jones."

When we came up to the landing Lon set his overnight bag down beside the railing. "We sank up to our ankles in the mud," he said. "A fine night. Boy, we caught it." He opened a big brass-handled door at the head of the passage and stuck his hand inside. Pale light fell out onto the edge of a braided rug. "You can stay here for a couple of days. Until they find you someplace of your own. Then get out. I need my quiet."

It was a small blue-papered room behind one of those big front windows; inside it had a brass bed made up under a fancy quilted cover, a writing table beside the window, a dresser with three shelves hanging above, and a bloated old trunk with a round top resting at the foot of the bed. It did not have the musty smell of a room that has been closed up for a length of time; there was no dust, nothing was covered over. It looked as if someone could be back at any time.

Lon stood in the doorway with his face turned down and away, leaning ever so slightly toward the invisible end of the hall. He looked at the wood, the floor, the pale, papered walls. "Pud gets the place during the summer," he said, "and I use it winter-times. We never did agree on that, it's just the way things worked out. Works fine. She and her husband and the damn kids come down every July from New Bedford. They take over the whole house. But by then I'm long gone."

He went back to the rail, stooped and then rose with the overnight bag in one hand and his ashcolored eyes raised to mine for the first time. "Can't figure those kids," he said softly. "Miniature Puds, every one of them, at least to look at. But that bastard Weymon has hold of them. They're his kids, too. Spookiest thing I ever saw. They never speak. They look like she did, but they don't have the spark. Give them a sack of pinecones and they wouldn't know what to do with it. And Pud seems to approve."

Now the fatigue of the whole summer came down hard around his shoulders. A sound came out of him like a weather balloon slowly deflating. His bones seemed to turn into lead; his face lengthened and took on the color and texture of flour. He shook his head, turned away. The light passed out of his eyes. "Not a god-damned thing I can do about that," he said. "Good night."

He went off down the hall, and I stood a while just inside the little room, listening, before closing myself in at last. The door would not quite shut; a steady stream of cold air blew under from the hall. I opened my bags all in a muddle on the floor, and was half undressed before I realized he had given me Pud's room.

She was in the papers still spread across the desktop, the letters poking out of their envelopes. She was in the summer dresses hanging up in the closet, and now as I pulled back the bedcover I thought I could even smell her on the sheets. She was in the row of silver-framed pictures looking back at me from the shelf above the dressing table. She was not what Lon had described.

Prudence was her name. She had light brown hair with thick curls that licked at the sides of her face. She wore plain skirts and bulky, unattractive blouses, and very little make-up, except around her eyes. She looked as if she was forever being startled by the camera, a pleasant, smiling, slightly distracted woman who came into focus only in relation to the people she posed with: the three sullen daughters lined up before a fence; a rumpled old man in glasses that reflected too much light; a bland, fatfaced man in a business suit, standing with one arm curled awkwardly around her waist.

Where was Pud, then? Not in there; not inside that woman, not anywhere. Pud standing barefooted on a gravel road with a bucket in one hand and a fishing rod in the other, Pud on her knees in the Krazy Kat boat, under the stars; Pud on long walks all alone through the woods, venturing into clearings far back from the lake, where the stones spoke in whispers and the ragged ends of a thousand myths blurred and came together, just beyond reason; Pud peeling a back curtain of leaves from the face of a make-believe stage in the yard behind the cabin; Pud saving the free world from the back of a winged horse; always with the same intent straight face framed in the same severe haircut, the same overlarge eyes with the same non-expression of fierce gravity and calm and purpose like an indignant store mannequin with a go-to-hell attitude.

"Jones," I said aloud, and still I did not understand. How could I? It was two in the morning and I was standing thin and naked and cold in a stranger's room with all of unknown Philadelphia looming wonderful and black at the window. Lon would follow her anywhere, I thought, and I did not even know who I meant. Perhaps Pud and Prudence were the same after all; perhaps Pud just got washed away. Whatever, I thought. For Lon, she is someone else, now.

The bed was cold, well-pressed, crinkly. I turned out the light, slipped in under the freezing weight of the blankets, and turned away from the wall where the pictures looked out over me. It was darker inside than out.