Solemnly, Tippy nodded.

  “You and your mother. She was looking back at the city and trying to show me where you live, and I got an idea she might be the one.”

  Tippy shook his head. “She doesn’t. I’m all alone in there.”

  “In the dollhouse.”

  Tippy nodded, and after a long, long time the pepper-mill man said, “Do you know why it’s happening?”

  “I was going to ask you.”

  “I don’t know.” Suddenly the pepper-mill man’s hand was holding Tippy’s arm very tightly. “It’s not a dream. I keep telling myself that it’s just a dream, but it isn’t.” He let out air with a big whoosh.

  “No,” Tippy agreed.

  “Did you see me last night? I saw you.”

  Tippy nodded. “That was the best I ever did. That was how I knew it was you when you were in your store.”

  “My job…” The pepper-mill man let the words trail off into the blue sky, and started over. “I live here all the time, Tippy. I sleep at night when the light’s on, mostly, because we’re closed then. But twice every night, at eleven and three, I’ve got to go up and inspect the light to make sure the gears are greased and everything’s working.”

  Tippy nodded to show he understood.

  “Usually I stay up until eleven watching TV. I make my eleven-o’clock inspection and go to bed, with my alarm clock set for two-forty-five. I get up then and make my second inspection. That’s when it happens, when I get to the top and step out here.”

  “It’s when I wake up way late at night,” Tippy confided. “Then I can look up at the windowsill and see you, only it isn’t a pepper mill anymore, it’s this—only little like me.”

  The pepper-mill man was silent for a long time. At last he said, “That’s your kitchen I see out there. The big white thing’s your refrigerator, isn’t it? It looks like one. And you don’t understand what’s been happening to us any better than I do.”

  “A little better, maybe.”

  “You know what I did last night? I stayed up all night. I’d been going back to bed after my three-o’clock inspection the way I always did, and in the morning I’d tell myself it had been a dream.”

  “It’s not,” Tippy said softly.

  “Last night, I waited right up here. I could go around on the other side and see your kitchen, and that’s what I did, mostly. But when I was on this side, I could see the ocean and the stars like always. Around four-thirty the sun came up, and your kitchen was just mist, all the solid things my light had been showing, the dollhouse and the stove and refrigerator. Everything. It was only mist, and then they were gone and the town was there just like always.”

  “It’s Cathy,” Tippy explained. When he saw that the pepper-mill man did not understand he added, “It’s her dollhouse.”

  “There’s a real dollhouse then.”

  Tippy nodded.

  “In your kitchen, on the kitchen table.”

  Tippy nodded again. “Mom won’t move it or let me touch it. By-and-by is what she says.”

  The pepper-mill man sighed. “Cathy was your sister, two years older. Your mother told me while we were waiting for you to come down. She talked about how hard it had been for you, and her, too, and I’m sure it must have been. How long ago was it?”

  Tippy lifted his small shoulders and let them fall. “Not very long.”

  “A week?”

  “Longer than that.”

  “A month?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I ought to ask you about Cathy, since you say she’s doing it.” The pepper-mill man released Tippy’s arm and wiped his hands on his faded jeans. “Where’s your father, Tippy? Does he know about this?”

  Tippy shook his head. “Mom made him go away. That’s what she says.” Then, unable to control himself, he blurted, “She likes you.”

  The pepper-mill man seemed not to have heard. “Was this before Cathy died?”

  “A long time before. Before Christmas.”

  When the pepper-mill man said nothing, Tippy returned to his previous topic. “Mom likes you.”

  The pepper-mill man shook his head. “I’m too old for her.”

  Offended by the necessity of making such things clear to a grown-up, Tippy explained very slowly, “You can’t be too old if she likes you.”

  “It wouldn’t work, young Jim.”

  “It would!”

  “Before long she’d make me go away, just like she did your dad. That’s if she ever let me into her house at all. I might not have the same things wrong with me your dad had, but to a woman, any woman, every man’s got one thing wrong with him.”

  “It wouldn’t be like that. You’re just pretending.”

  The pepper-mill man declined to argue with a child. “You think your dead sister’s doing it.”

  “She is. She thinks a whole lot about somebody being with Mom and me the way our dad used to be. And she likes you just like Mom does. You’re the one.”

  Less distinctly than they heard the crashing of the waves on the rocks below, they could hear Tippy’s mother calling to them from the solid, sheltered land on the far side of the light.

  “She didn’t want to come up here after you,” the pepper-mill man told Tippy. “She’s afraid of heights. She didn’t want me to, either, because of my leg. I said I climbed up twice every night, but she still didn’t want me to.”

  Tippy nodded solemnly. “I knew it would be like that. I wanted you and her to be by yourselves.”

  “We’ll, we were,” the pepper-mill man acknowledged. And when they had both looked out to the horizon and listened to the faint and lonely cries of the gulls, he added, “We talked a little bit, that’s all. We didn’t kiss or anything.”

  “That’s good,” Tippy told him.

  “Don’t you like mushy stuff, young Jim?”

  “I mean it’s good you talked. Was your leg really bit off by a whale?”

  The pepper-mill man shook his head. “A land mine. An antipersonnel mine.”

  Tippy nodded sympathetically.

  “I’ve got a nice prosthetic leg the VA gave me. That’s what I wear when I go into town. But out here I wear this and the sailor clothes, because that’s what our visitors want to see. It helps.”

  “Do you like living here?” Tippy asked.

  “Not really. Or anyhow not very much.” The pepper-mill man cocked his head to listen as Tippy’s mother called again. “You think she’ll come up after us in a minute?”

  Tippy ignored the question. “Then come live with us. We’ve got a nice house.”

  “It wouldn’t work, young Jim. You think she’ll come?”

  Tippy shook his head. “She might call the firemen or something.”

  The pepper-mill man grinned. “That ought to take a while.”

  “Tell more about your leg.”

  “There’s not much more to tell, young Jim. When I got out of the Army hospital, I went back to college and studied journalism—newspaper work. I had a job with a little paper down South for a while, and then with a magazine. But I didn’t like the work or the people, so I went into public relations.”

  “What’s that?” Tippy wanted to know.

  “Helping people or companies deal with the press and so on, mostly it’s with newspapers and the TV news departments. They’ll crucify you if you let them, especially if you don’t give them anything else to chew on.”

  Tippy nodded wisely. “Like, if somebody found a live dinosaur? A real one?”

  “You’ve got it.”

  Tippy’s mother called again, and the pepper-mill man prepared to stand up. “The agency I’d been with closed, and I got another job, but it only lasted a couple of months, so I applied to the Town Council here, and they gave me this. I was supposed to get a real public-relations job pretty soon, but I’ve been here about two years. I deal with the public, so that’s public relations, I guess, and sometimes some paper or magazine will do a story on the lighthouse”

  “You ought to come and live where we do,” Tippy insisted doggedly.

  “It wouldn’t work, young Jim, believe me.” The pepper-mill man got up. “I’m too old for her, and I’ve got this leg and no good job.”

  Tippy stood too. “Yes, it would. Cathy thinks so, and so do I.”

  “You let me go down those steps first. If you slip or something, I don’t want you falling down and off.”

  Tippy agreed disconsolately.

  “You’re sure it’s your dead sister?” the pepper-mill man asked as they walked a quarter of the way around the light to the opening that returned them to the iron stair. “A little girl?”

  “I see her sometimes,” Tippy declared. “Sometimes she looks in through the window, and then she’s real big. I’m afraid to go outside when she’s out there.”

  The pepper-mill man glanced at him over his shoulder as he started down. “I suppose I would be, too. But couldn’t somebody else be doing it? Maybe she’s just in it the same way we are.”

  “It’s how she played!” Tippy insisted; frustration was making him angry. “No other houses, because she didn’t have any more dollhouses to be them. There’s a doll in the bed for Mom, because she had that doll and that’s where she put it, in bed in her dollhouse. Only she doesn’t have any for me and you, so we get to be really us. Don’t you see?”

  The pepper-mill man looked around again. “In the morning the mama doll turns into your real mother?”

  “Yes!”

  From the bottom of the steps, Tippy’s real mother called, “You’re all right! I hear you!”

  The pepper-mill man called back, “He’s fine. We’ve been having a little talk.”

  “She’s real pretty,” Tippy reminded the pepper-mill man, sotto voce; impelled by his still-developing sense of honor, he added reluctantly, “She’s sort of crazy though.”

  “They all are, young Jim,” the pepper-mill man whispered back; there was a sorrow in his voice that Tippy did not understand, but after he had spoken they were too close to the ground and Tippy’s mother to talk.

  As the pepper-mill man took the last step down, holding on to the railing and groping for the floor with the leather-shod tip of his pirate leg as he always did, he said, “We had a talk up there about some things that have been bothering Tippy. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “That was very nice of you,” Tippy’s mother said, and her eyes shone.

  “I’d like to think so, and I’d like to think I’ve done some good. I tried to explain to Tippy that people don’t really die the way a flower does, or a fish, even if we use the same word for it. His sister’s body is dead like that, but her soul hasn’t died, and never will. It lives with God in Heaven.”

  Tippy understood that the explaining was really now. “She’s real strong up there, too,” he assured his mother. “Most dead people aren’t, but Cathy’s really, really strong. Catherine, I mean.”

  “Loving, too,” Tippy’s mother murmured, “she always had so much love for all of us.”

  “It may simply be that she wants something very badly,” the pepper-mill man told Tippy. When nobody was listening, Tippy said, I know what it is. But he said it to himself alone.

  The pepper-mill man walked them to their car; and when she was ready to get into it, Tippy’s mother offered him her hand. “Are you sure you won’t let me pay for Tippy’s book?”

  He shook his head. “It’s a birthday present from me to him, and if you paid that would spoil it.”

  “I want you to come for dinner sometime. If we have dinner at seven, you’ll have plenty of time to get back up here.”

  “Okay,” the pepper-mill man said, “that would be swell.”

  Tippy, listening from the car, felt certain that neither really meant it, so he knelt in the driver’s seat and stuck his head out. “If we needed you bad, would you come to help about the TV people like you said?”

  “Sure,” the pepper-mill man told him.

  “Like, if I find a real live dinosaur. There’ll be lots of people from TV to take pictures and everything.”

  Tippy’s mother laughed.

  “If you find a live dinosaur,” the pepper-mill man told Tippy, “I’ll be there inside an hour, and that’s a promise.”

  Tippy had to back away to let his mother get into the car. “I think I’m going to find one pretty soon, so don’t forget.”

  “I won’t!” the pepper-mill man called as they pulled away. He waved.

  “Well,” Tippy’s mother said to Tippy when they had turned back onto Windpoint Road, “that was nicer than I expected. Did you have a good time?”

  He nodded.

  “You don’t mind not having a party for your class this year?”

  “No,” Tippy said; and when the scary part of the road was over he added thoughtfully, “It was swell.”

  · · · ·

  It had seemed so easy when he had gone to bed. Now he snuggled his head under the covers and tried to pretend he was still asleep while Cathy moved outside in the kitchen darkness, peering through the windows of her dollhouse, dead and yet so very much still there.

  It would not work, he knew, and something terrible would happen instead, something awful beyond imagining—it could not work. Slowly, he pushed away sheet and blankets, put his bare feet over the side of his bed, and stood up, becoming by that act of will and courage a small boy so nearly grown that he was practically a man.

  Out in the light-brushed darkness beyond the kitchen door, toys (many of them his) littered the tabletop like tumbled monuments, the Red Power Ranger alone still upright. For a moment he stopped beside it, his hand caressing the smooth crimson plastic; but he came scarcely to its waist, and he knew that any attempt of his to lift and carry it would be futile.

  Beyond it sprawled Spider Man, and even more tempting, Luke Skywalker. Resolutely, Tippy passed them by.

  A Scottie as big as a mastiff lay nose-to-nose with a West Highland White, impelled by the magnets at their feet; although he thought he might have managed one such dog, they could not be separated, and in combination would constitute an impossible load. They had been Cathy’s, in any case. Cathy might object to his using her toys, he felt; but she could not reasonably resent his using his own.

  The stegosaurus was pink and mercifully small, one of a set whose members were mostly lost; its tail spikes made fine handles, and made it possible for him to drag it behind him without much difficulty. Once when he stopped to catch his breath and get a better grip, he scanned the pepper mill that was now a lighthouse, perched upon its distant windowsill; it would be nice if the pepper-mill man saw what he was doing, Tippy thought, and waved. But the time for the pepper-mill man’s inspection had not yet come, or had come and gone.

  The step before the kitchen door presented Tippy with a major difficulty, and the doorway itself with another nearly as great. It proved necessary to lift the stegosaurus onto its wide pink feet, and then for him to heave with all his might—grunting in unconscious imitation of his father—with hands clasped beneath the stegosaurus’s maddeningly smooth pink chin.

  And thus at last, taking many short backward steps and somewhat aided by the counterweight of the tail, position the front feet before the doorway. And then to climb between the double rows of great, flat backplates to the tail, and lift there (it was heavier, but much easier to hold), and grunting again to push the entire bulky pink saurian into the kitchen, knocking over the kitchen table.

  And last to run around to the front of the dollhouse and re-enter through the front door, and so upstairs and back to bed gasping.

  · · · ·

  When daylight through his window woke him it seemed a dream, exactly as the pepper-mill man had said. For a minute that was in fact ten or more, Tippy lay on his back with his hands behind his head, blinking up at the bright posters on his ceiling and thinking about it.

  To begin with, it hadn’t happened, probably.

  (Downstairs, something large and heavy moved in a small, slow way, so that the two-by-fours and four-by-fours, the plywood and Sheetrock of the house creaked briefly like the timbers of a ship. Then it was still again.)

  But if it had happened—Tippy had remembered that the pepper-mill man had seen Cathy’s dollhouse too—it wouldn’t work. A toy pink dinosaur in the kitchen would not and could not become a real dinosaur just because the Blue Velveteen Rabbit in that book had changed into a real rabbit. Real things could change into things in books, but book things could not, not ever, turn into really true things.

  Not unless somebody made them.

  (Tippy’s mother’s pink mules went clop-clop-clop down the stairs to fix breakfast. Soon—very soon—she would call him to come and eat, and she would expect him to be up and dressed. Today was Monday, a school day.)

  Of course—Tippy sighed and yawned, and sat up in bed rubbing his eyes—the pink stegosaurus had not been in a book, and perhaps that made a difference. It had been a real toy animal. No, he thought, it still is. It’s a real toy, and a stegosaurus. Was that the same as a stegosaur? Only not a real—

  Tippy’s mother screamed; and Tippy, hearing her, truly woke up and ran out of his room to tell her it was all right.

  And though his feet flew, his mind flew faster. Would Cathy stop playing with her dollhouse when the pepper-mill man came? She probably would, Tippy decided, but it seemed a shame. Batman and Robin waited under the bed, and there was a super-cool dragon in Walgreens. But a dinosaur—!

  Was it still pink? The dinosaurs in books were gray, mostly. Tippy’s mother was babbling into the telephone, so he went to look.

  The Ziggurat

  It had begun to snow about one-thirty. Emery Bainbridge stood on the front porch to watch it before going back into the cabin to record it in his journal.

  13:38. Snowing hard, quiet as owl feathers. Radio says stay off the roads unless you have four-wheel. Probably means no Brook.