No she's not. She's not doing that at all.

Then, for the first time, the thought came through with no soundproofing around it; it came through as loud and urgent as a firebell in the night: Bobbi's in trouble! Bobbi's in REAL TROUBLE!

This surety struck him with the force of a roundhouse slap, and suddenly the lightheadedness was gone. He fell back into himself with such a thud that he almost seemed to feel his teeth rattle. A sickening bolt of pain ripped through his head, but even that was welcome-if he felt pain, then he was back here, here, not drifting around someplace in the ozone.

And for one puzzling moment he saw a new picture, very brief, very clear, and very ominous: it was Bobbi in the cellar of the farmhouse she'd inherited from her uncle. She was hunkered down in front of some piece of machinery, working on it… or was she? It seemed so dark, and Bobbi wasn't much of a hand with mechanical stuff. But she sure was doing something, because ghostly blue fire leaped and flickered between her fingers as she fiddled with tangled wires inside… inside… but it was too dark to see what that dark, cylindrical shape was. It was familiar, something he had seen before, but

Then he could hear as well as see, although what he heard was even less comforting than that eldritch blue fire. It was Peter. Peter was howling. Bobbi took no notice, and that was utterly unlike her. She only went on fiddling with the wires, jiggering them so they would do something down there in the root-smelling dark of the cellar…

The vision broke apart on rising voices.

The faces which went with those voices were no longer white holes in the universe but the faces of real people; some were amused (but not many), a few more embarrassed, but most just seemed alarmed or worried. Most looked, in other words, the way he would have looked had his position been reversed with one of them. Had he been afraid of them? Had he? If so, why?

Only Patricia McCardle didn't fit. She was looking at him with a quiet, sure satisfaction that brought him all the way back.

Gardener suddenly spoke to the audience, surprised at how natural and pleasant his voice sounded. “I'm sorry. Please excuse me. I've got a batch of new poems here, and I went woolgathering among them, I'm afraid.” Pause. Smile. Now he could see some of the worried ones settling back, looking relieved. There was a little laughter, but it was sympathetic. He could, however, see a flush of anger rising in Patricia McCardle's cheeks, and it did his headache a world of good.

“Actually,” he went on, “even that's not the truth. Fact is, I was trying to decide whether or not to read some of this new stuff to you. After some furious sparring between those two thundering heavyweights, Pride of Authorship and Prudence, Prudence has won a split decision. Pride of Authorship vows to appeal the decision-”

More laughter, heartier. Now old Patty's cheeks looked like his kitchen stove through its little isinglass windows on a cold winter night. Her hands were locked together, the knuckles white. Her teeth weren't quite bared, but almost, friends and neighbors, almost.

“In the meantime, I'm going to finish with a dangerous act: I'm going to read a fairly long poem from my first book, Grimoire.”

He winked in Patricia McCardle's direction, then took them all into his humorous confidence. “But God hates a coward, right?”

Ron snorted laughter behind him and then they were all laughing, and for a moment he actually did see a glint of her pearly-whites behind those stretched, furious lips, and oh boy howdy, that was just about as good as you'd want, wasn't it?

Watch out for her, Gard. You think you've got your boot on her neck now, and maybe you even do, for the moment, but watch out for her. She won't forget.

Or forgive.

But that was for later. Now he opened the battered copy of his first book of poems. He didn't need to look for “Leighton Street'; the book fell open to it of its own accord. His eyes found the subscript. For Bobbi, who first smelled sage in New York.

“Leighton Street” had been written the year he met her, the Year Leighton Street was all she could talk about. It was, of course, the street in Utica where she had grown up, the street she'd needed to escape before she could even start being what she wanted to be-a simple writer of simple stories. She could do that; she could do that with flash and ease. Gard had known that almost at once. Later that year he had sensed that she might be able to do more: to surmount the careless, profligate ease with which she wrote and do, if not great work, brave work. But first she had to get away from Leighton Street. Not the real one, but the Leighton Street which she carried with her in her mind, a demon geography populated by haunted tenements and her sick, loved father, her weak, loved mother, and her defiant crone of a sister, who rode over them all like a demon of endless power.

Once, that year, she had fallen asleep in class-Freshman Comp, that had been. He had been gentle with her, because he already loved her a little and he had seen the huge circles under her eyes.

“I've had problems sleeping at night,” she said, when he held her after class for a moment. She had still been half-asleep, or she never would have gone on from there; that was how powerful Anne's hold-which was the hold of Leighton Street -had been over her. But she was like a person who has been drugged, and exists with one leg thrown over each side of the sleep's dark and stony wall. “I almost fall asleep and then I hear her.”

“Who?” he asked gently.

“Sissy… my sister Anne, that is. She grinds her teeth and it sounds like b-b-b-”

Bones, she wanted to say, but then she woke into a fit of hysterical weeping that had frightened him very badly.

Anne.

More than anything else, Anne was Leighton Street.

Anne had been

(knocking at the door)

the gag of Bobbi's needs and ambitions.

Okay, Gard thought. For you, Bobbi. Only for you. And began to read “Leighton Street” as smoothly as if he had spent the afternoon rehearsing it in his room.

“These streets begin where the cobbles

surface through tar like the heads

of children buried badly in their textures,”

Gardener read.

“What myth is this? we ask, but

the children who play stickball and

Johnny-Jump-My-Pony round here just laugh.

No myth they tell us no myth, just they say hey motherfucker aint nothing but Leighton Street here, aint nothing but all small houses aint only but back porches where our mothers wash there and they're and their.

Where days grow hot and on Leighton Street they listen to the radio while pterodactyls flow between the TV aerials on the roof and they say hey motherfucker they say Hey motherfucker!

No myth they tell us no myth, just they say hey motherfucker aint nothing but Leighton Street round here

This they say is how you be silent in your silence of days, Motherfucker.

When we turned our back on these upstate roads, warehouses with faces of blank brick, when you say “O, but I have reached the end of all I know and still hear her grinding, grinding in the night…

Because it had been so long since he had read the poem, even to himself, he did not just “perform” it (something, he had discovered, that was almost impossible not to do at the end of a tour such as this); he rediscovered it. Most of those who came to the reading at Northeastern that night-even those who witnessed the evening's sordid. creepy conclusion, agreed that Gardener's reading of “Leighton Street” had been the best of the night. A good many of them maintained it was the best they had ever heard.

Since it was the last reading Jim Gardener would ever give in his life, it was maybe not such a bad way to go out.