Thief of Always Read Free

Rictus would have been proud of, and hurried up the slope and into the shadow of the dream house.

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          III
    Pleasure and the Worry

          What a fine thing it would be, Harvey thought, to build a place like this. To drive its foundations deep into the earth; to lay its floors and hoist its walls; to say: Where there was nothing, I raised a house. That would be a very fine thing.
          It wasn't a puffed-up peacock of a place, either. There were no marble steps, no fluted columns. It was a proud house, certainly, but there was nothing wrong with that; it had much to be proud of. It stood four stories high, and boasted more windows than Harvey could readily count. Its porch was wide, as were the steps that led up to its carved front door; its slated roofs were steep and crowned with magnificent chimneys and lightning rods.
          Its highest point, however, was neither a chimney nor a lightning rod, but a large and elaborately wrought weathervane, which Harvey was peering up at when he heard the front door open and a voice say:
          "Harvey Swick, as I live and breathe."
          He looked down, the weathervane's white silhouette still behind his eyes, and there on the porch stood a woman who made his grandmother (the oldest person he knew) look young. She had a face like a rolled-up ball of cobwebs, from which her hair, which could also have been spiders' work, fell in wispy abundance. Her eyes were tiny, her mouth tight, her hands gnarled. Her voice, however, was melodious, and its words welcoming.
          "I thought maybe you'd decided not to come," she said, picking up a basket of freshly cut flowers she'd left on the step, "which would have been a pity. Come on in! There's food on the table. You must be famished."
          "I can't stays long," Harvey said.
          "You must do whatever you wish," came the reply. "I'm Mrs. Griffin, by the way."
          "Yes, Rictus mentioned you."
          "I hope he didn't bend your ear too much. He loves the sound of his own voice. That and his reflection."
          Harvey had climbed the porch steps by now, and stopped in front of the open door. This was a moment of decision, he knew, though he wasn't quite certain why.
          "Step inside," Mrs. Griffin said, brushing a spider-hair back from her furrowed brow.
          But Harvey still hesitated, and he might have turned around and never stepped inside the House except that he heard a boy's voice yelling:
          "I got ya! I got ya!" followed by uproarious laughter.
          "Wendell!" Mrs. Griffin said. "Are you chasing the cats again?"
          The sound of laughter grew even louder, and it was so full of good humor that Harvey stepped over the threshold and into the House just so that he could see the face of its owner.
          He only got a brief look. A goofy, bespectacled face appeared for a moment at the other end of the hallway. Then a piebald cat dashed between the boy's legs and he was off after it, yelling and laughing again.
          "He's such a crazy boy," Mrs. Griffin said, "but all the cats love him!"
          The House was more wonderful inside than out. Even on the short journey to the kitchen Harvey glimpsed enough to know that this was a place built for games, chases and adventures. It was a maze in which no two doors were alike. It was a treasurehouse where some notorious pirate had hidden his blood-stained booty. It was a resting place for carpets flown by djinns, and boxes sealed before the Flood, where the eggs of beasts that the earth had lost were wrapped and waiting for the sun's heat to hatch them.
          "It's perfect!" Harvey murmured to himself.
          Mrs. Griffin caught his words. "Nothing's perfect," she replied.
          "Why not?"
          "Because time passes," she went on, staring down at the flowers she'd cut. "And the beetle and the worm find their way into everything sooner or