Waltiri."

Michael raised an eyebrow.

"His name was David Clarkham. He was a friend of Mr. Waltiri's, although I gather they had a falling out before I was born."

"Yes, dear, a year or two before you were born," Mrs. Dopso reiterated.

"My father met Mr. Clarkham several times and was very impressed by him. Mr. Clarkham was a connoisseur of wine. He tended to talk about unusual vintages. German wines mostly. Many of them my father had never heard of, and he was himself quite a connoisseur."

"But all this," said Mrs. Dopso portentously, "is neither here nor there."

"No. Father last drank one of these bottles fifteen years ago, and judged it quite good, if unusual."

"Do you remember what he said?" Mrs. Dopso asked.

"Yes, 'A bit otherworldly, with a most unusual finish.'"

They seemed to expect a reaction from Michael. "I found several bottles like that today," he said.

"Good! Then this isn't the last. Notice there's no clue as to what kind of wine it is. Red, obviously - but what variety of grapes?"

Michael shook his head.

"What we're leading up to is that we're curious about that house. We've lived next to it for a very long time."

"One morning, very early," Mrs. Dopso said, her face almost radiant in the candlelight, "I got out of bed and looked over the cinderblock wall. It was foggy, and I wasn't sure I saw things properly. My husband was on a business trip, so I called out Robert - poor, sleepy child - to confirm or deny."

"I confirmed," Robert said. "1 was eight."

"The house was absolutely covered with birds," Mrs. Dopso said breathlessly. "Large dark birds with red breasts and wing-tips. Blackbirds and robins the size of crows."

"She means, with the characteristics of blackbirds and robins, but crow-sized."

"And sparrows. And other birds I recognized. They blanketed the roof, and they lined up along the wall.

All silent."

"Hitchcock, you know," Robert said with a grin. "Scared the daylights out of me."

"And when the fog lifted, they were gone. But that's not all. Sometimes we'd see Mr. Waltiri and Golda - dear Golda - leave the house in their car, the predecessor of the one you drive now - funny-looking thing - and after they had gone, when the house must have been empty-"

"We'd hear somebody playing the piano," Robert said breathlessly, leaning forward.

"Playing it beautifully, just lovely music."

Robert uncorked the bottle and poured the wine into crystal glasses. Michael sipped the deep reddish-amber liquid. He had never tasted anything like it. It was totally outside his experience of wines, which * admittedly was not broad. The aftertaste was mellow and complex and lingered long moments after he had swallowed, succession upon succession of flavors discovering themselves on his tongue. The flavors stopped suddenly, leaving only a clean blankness. He took another sip. Mrs. Dopso closed her eyes and did the same.

"As wonderful as I remember it," she commented. "To my dear husband." They toasted the man whose name Michael did not know.

"I think perhaps the only person who was not aware that something was going on," Mrs. Dopso said, "was Golda. Arno protected her fiercely. Nothing would happen to dear Golda while he was around. But you know... after he departed, died, things became too much for her. A strain. She must have had some suspicions over the years. How could one not?" Mrs. Dopso sipped again and smiled beatifically. "We did not volunteer to tell her, because while we knew something was odd, we couldn't be sure... Other than the birds."

"Now that you're living there," Robert said, "what do you think?"

Michael stared into his glass and twirled the stem reflectively. "It seems pretty quiet now," he said.

"Do you play the piano?" Mrs. Dopso asked.

He shook his head.

" Somebody does," she said dramatically. "We've heard it after you've driven away. And the music is not quite so lovely now. It's angry, I would say. Robert?"

"Heavy-handed, skilled but... pounding," Robert said. "I'm not sure I'd call it angry. Powerful perhaps."

Despite himself, Michael shivered, and his arm-hairs stood on end. "I haven't heard music," he said, putting the glass down.

"It's so familiar to us," Mrs. Dopso said, "over all these years. We wondered if Mr. Waltiri - Arno - or perhaps even Golda - had a relative who stayed with them."

"An old hunchbacked cousin," Robert suggested with a hint of a grin.

"No," Michael said, smiling broadly. "I'm the only one living there." That much he could be sure of.

"Bring out the tape recorder, Robert," Mrs. Dopso instructed. Robert left the dining room and returned with an old Ampex reel-to-reel deck, the tape already looped and ready to play. He set it on an unused dining chair near the wall outlet and plugged it in. Then he turned it on and stood back.

Michael heard a piano playing. The sound was fuzzy and distant, but it was indeed powerful, pounding.

There was no melody, as such.

"When did you record this?" Michael asked.

"Yesterday," Robert said.

"We're very curious," Mrs. Dopso said. "It's something of a mystery, don't you agree?"

Michael nodded, the dinner suddenly heavy in his stomach. "I can't fell you what's happening, though. I just don't know."

"The house is haunted by a spirit that loves music," said Mrs. Dopso, her expression again beatific. "How very appropriate for Arno's house. I do not think you're in danger in that house, young man." She took a deep breath. "But if you should find out more, do let us know?"

She went to bed shortly thereafter. Robert explained, chuckling, that his mother "Rises with the birds.

Pardon our intruding."

"No intrusion," Michael said. "Has anybody else complained?"

"We aren't complaining; please don't think that. And no, nobody else has commented."

"If you hear it again, will you record it for me again?"

"Of course," Robert said. They shook hands at the door, but Robert escorted Michael to the sidewalk * anyway. Dusk was deep blue above the shuffling black outlines of the neighborhood trees. "Thanks for speaking with my mother."

"My pleasure."

Michael returned to the Waltiri house, where he stood by the silent piano, tapping the rich black surface of the lid. "Arno?" he asked softly, the name again raising the hairs on his neck and arms.

No answer.

He hadn't expected one. Not yet.

A shaft of late afternoon sunlight wanned the hardwood floor beneath his feet. He sat in Waltiri's music library, the old black phone in his lap, surrounded by tapes and records and books, and dialed Kristine Pendeers's home number. A man answered on the third ring, his voice deep and indistinct. Michael asked to speak to Kristine. "Who's this?" the man asked.

"My name is Michael. She'll know me."

"She isn't here right now... Wait. She's at the door. Hold on." In the background, Michael heard Kristine and the man talking. There seemed to be a disagreement between them. The man's hand made squelching noises over the mouthpiece. She finally came on the line, breathless.

"I've found what you're looking for," Michael said.

"I was just coming up the steps... to our house. Wait a minute. I'm winded. I heard the phone. You've found what...45?"

"I just opened a sealed basement door and found it among other papers below the house." He realized he didn't sound particularly happy about the discovery. Why was he calling at all? Perhaps to talk with her again, meet with her. Using the discovery as an excuse.

"That's wonderful, it really is. When can I take a look at it?"

He gingerly ran his fingers over the discolored, shimmering manuscript on Waltiri's desk. "It's not in very good shape. We'll need to copy it... maybe a copy machine will work, and maybe not."

"What's wrong with it?"

"You'll have to see it." Dangerous, dangerous! Simply staring at the manuscript was enough to bend a person's view of reality.

"Can you bring it here, or do I come over there?" She seemed to catch on that he was playing a game, and she didn't sound comfortable.

"I think you'd better come over here," Michael said. "Not tonight. I'll be busy. Tomorrow. In the morning, perhaps?"

"I'll have to be there early. About seven-thirty."

"Fine. I'll be expecting you."

"You sound strange, Michael."

"I just have a lot to do between now and then. We'll talk tomorrow."

"Okay." There was an awkward moment of termination and then simultaneous good-byes. He replaced the receiver and returned the phone to its niche on a bookcase. Then he held the manuscript up to his nose and smelled it. The sweet fragrance this time was fainter, like dried fruit.

Any world is just a song of addings and takings away... The difference between the Realm and your home, that's just the difference between one song and another... So Eleuth had informed him in the Realm.

Was it possible, then, to create a song - a piece of music - that actively contradicted the song of a world and subtly altered the world?

He wished he knew how to play the piano and was better at reading music. It was possible he had actually heard some of the music contained in the manuscript, when Clarkham's house and the replica of Kubla Khan's pleasure dome had collapsed in the Realm, but he coi.^Vt remember what it sounded like now.

The tune was elusive, and the orchestration had faded completely from memory * He slipped the manuscript into a manila envelope and placed it in Waltiri's safe. After memorizing the safe's combination, written in Golda's hand on a piece of masking tape attached to the door, he removed the tape, burned it in a metal cup on the desk and shut the door. Why the precautions were important, he wasn't sure.

(Perhaps it wasn't Arno - in any form - playing the piano when the house was empty...) He had a lot to do this evening. He would not be back until early the next morning.

Just at dusk, as the moon-colored streetlights were coming on and a slight breeze sighed through the green leaves on the maples, Michael stood before David Clarkham's house. He had not come to this place since his return from the Realm.

The deserted house was in even worse shape than when he had last seen it. The lawn had gone to seed, a definite contrast to the green, well-kept grounds on both sides. The hedges were unruly, aggressing onto the driveway of parallel concrete strips, reaching out for the cracked white stucco walls. A FOR SALE sign still leaned at an awkward angle on the front lawn; either the realtors handling the property were not pushing it or the buyers were not enthusiastic, or the sign was a sham. There was no phone number attached, and Michael had never heard of the firm before: Hamilton Realty.

He closed his eyes and found the region nestled between his thoughts that controlled evisa and casting a shadow. It was not difficult to find, and the act was as easy on Earth as it had been in the Realm.

He left an unmoving and slowly fading decoy of himself by the curb. Anybody watching would soon lose interest and turn away; and if they didn't turn away, then the image would smoothly disappear among the shadows of the trees, and they would be none the wiser.

Michael approached the front porch with pry bar in hand. Best to begin at the beginning.

In four minutes, he had the door open. The house radiated something unpleasant; it was more than just unkempt, it was distasteful, as if the part of the world it occupied had been illused and now brooded resentfully. Michael didn't like the sensation at all, and his dislike went beyond mere association with the last time he had entered Clarkham's house.

He switched on his flashlight and closed the door to a crack behind him. The hallway before the living room was dusty and quiet; the living room itself was empty and drained and faintly melancholy, the back wall illuminated by square samples of the streetlight across the way.

Despite the unpleasant sensations, there was nothing magical or supernatural about the place. Michael could feel no hidden power or lurking residue. He advanced down the hall and checked the ground floor rooms sequentially, shining his flashlight into each, seeing only dusty floors and emptiness. He returned to the middle hallway and played the beam up the flight of stairs to the second floor. The carpeted steps exuded thin puffs of dust at each footfall.

At the head of the stairs, a hallway led past the three second-floor rooms, ending at the bathroom door.

Clarkham's house in the pleasure dome had been laid out in just such a fashion; no surprise. Michael peered into the first bedroom. Nothing. The second bedroom was broad and empty, its windows draped with sun-tattered expanses of old cloth slung over bent curtain rods. Cupboards and drawers covered the far wall, reminding Michael of a morgue. "Nothing here," he said in a soft whisper. He was not afraid, he was not even particularly wary, but he knew that the preternatural sensibilities instilled in him by the Crane Women had brought him here for a reason and not just to satisfy old curiosities.

The final bedroom's floor was covered with a thin layer of dust, dulling the dark wood. So far, he had only taken two steps into the room. He played the beam back and forth across the dust.

Footprints interrupted the grayness in the middle of the floor. The prints led to the hallway and passed beneath his feet, where they were erased by his own shuffling. He knelt down and examined them more carefully. The dust around the footprints was undisturbed. Only one pair of feet - wearing moccasins or sandals, since the prints were unbroken by an arch - had made the prints, and the owner had moved * without hesitation, beginning his journey (his because the pattern of the feet was large and broad) in the middle of the room Michael knelt down and touched the nearest complete print. There was something odd about the amount of dust disturbed. He walked beside the prints, noticing that near the center of the room, where they began, they were quite clear. Toward the end of the trail, they became less distinct, disturbing the dust only slightly, as if the person had weighed much less.

He pointed the beam at the air above the floor where the prints began and saw nothing unusual. Felt nothing unusual. The house was otherwise undisturbed and normal. The sensation of earthly reality was seamless.

Still, Michael knew beyond any doubt that Clarkham's house had once again become a gate.

The Tippett Residential Hotel appeared regal and desolate and out-of-place against the ragtag architecture of the Strip. Its sad, sooted, broken windows and the trash chute attached to its face gave it a painful air, as if it were a victim of patchwork surgery, of half-hearted and ill-guided attempts to bring it back to life.

Through the chain link, Michael saw that the main entrance had been securely boarded off with big sheets of blue-painted plywood. Yet the former owner - if that was what the raggedy man was - had hinted that a few people still managed to get into the building, however foolishly. There had to be other entrances.

He had looped the short pry bar onto his belt, hanging it down inside his pants. A palm-sized flashlight rested in his jacket pocket.

On the building's west side, a broad patio and swimming pool were visible through the trees and shrubs pressing against the fence. Steps rose from the patio level to a terrace on the south side, overlooking the city. All this was dimly illuminated by streetlights along Sunset, and the general sky-glow reflected from the broken cumulus clouds above the city.

Michael glanced over his right shoulder at the lighted windows in the Hyatt across and down the street.

Two instances of breaking and entering in one night. Superstitiously, he thought that might make things twice as bad as they had been after the night of his first passage through Clarkham's house...

He couldn't enter from the front without risking discovery. He strolled east on Sunset until he reached a side street and then walked downhill and doubled back to approach from the rear.

An open-air asphalt parking area, still accessible from the street behind, abutted a blank concrete wall on the hotel's east side. Michael saw there was no easy entrance from that direction.

On the west side, a garage in the lower depths of the building offered spaces for forty or fifty tenants. The entrance was blocked by a run of chain-link and a securely padlocked swinging gate. The iron-barred gate that had once rolled along a track on rubber wheels was no longer in place. Within, one space was still occupied by an old rusted-out Buick.

The rear doors and service entrances were covered over by sheets of blue plywood. He looked up to the top of the building. More broken-out windows.