The rain had fallen away to a sort of drifting mist. The four of them scrambled down the tree and ran out of Grover’s yard, down the block, into and across a field among rain-flattened holidays of hay. Somewhere en route they picked up a fat basset hound named Pierre, who on sunny days slept in the middle of the state highway that briefly became Chickadee Street as it passed through Mingeborough. But rain did something to him, invigorated him. He romped around them like a puppy, yapping and trying, it looked like, to catch raindrops on his tongue.

The sun would set tonight without anyone’s seeing it—there was that kind of bleakness to the afternoon. You couldn’t see any mountains because the clouds trailed too low. Tim, Grover. Etienne, Carl and Pierre went flickering over the field like shadows, out to a dirt road whose ruts were filled with rain now. The road wound down a little ridge into King Yrjo’s woods, named after a European pretender who’d fled the eclipse then falling over Europe and his own hardly real shadow-state sometime back in the middle Thirties, trading a bucketful of jewels, which yarn went, for all this property. Why it had to be a bucketful, which sounded like an impractical way to carry jewels around, nobody ever explained. There were also supposed to have been three (some said four) wives, one official and the others morganatic, and a fiercely loyal aide, a cavalry officer seven feet tall with a lull beard, spurred boots, gold epaulets and a shotgun he always carried with him and would not hesitate to use on anybody, especially a kid, caught trespassing. It was he who haunted the grounds. He still lived there though his king had long gone—at least, everybody believed he did—though no one had ever seen him out right, only heard his heavy boots crashing after you through the dead leaves, among the tree trunks and briers, as you ran in panic. You always got away. The king’s exile, kids could sense, was something their parents were in on but was effectively cut off from the kids: There had been the falling dark, yes, and general flight, and a large war—all this without names and dates, pieced together out of talk overheard from parents, television documentaries, social-studies class if you happened to be listening, marines-in- action comics, but none of it that sharp, that specific; all of it in a kind of code, twilit, forever unexplained. King Yrjo’s estate was the only real connection the kids had with whatever the cataclysmic thing was that had happened, and it helped for the caretaker, the pursuer, to have been a soldier.

Yet he had not bothered the Inner Junta at all. Years ago, somehow, it had become clear to only them that he never would. They’d since been all over the place and had seen no definite trace of him, though plenty of ambiguous ones. Which didn’t disprove his existence, but did mean that they’d found the perfect place for a hideout. Real or make-believe, the giant cavalryman became their protector.

The road passed through a stand of pines, high in whose branches partridges whirred. Water dripped; shoes squished in the mud. After the trees came a sweep of what had once been smooth lawn, smooth as the back of a long wave out at sea, but now was full of weeds, rabbit holes, tall rye. According to Tim’s father, years ago peacocks had come running downhill across the great lawn whenever a carriage had entered this stretch of the road, spreading out their brilliant tails. “Oh, yeah,” Tim said, “like just before a program comes on in color. When are we getting a color TV, Dad?”

“Black and white’s good enough,” his father had said, and that was that. Tim had asked Carl once whether he had a color TV at home. “Why should I?” said Carl, and then almost immediately, “Oh! yeah.” And bust out laughing. Tim knew as well as Étienne, the professional comic, when your listener had guessed your next line, so he didn’t say anything else. He wondered why Carl laughed so hard. It wasn’t that funny and even had a kind of logic to it. He did think of Carl as not only “colored” himself, but somehow more deeply involved with all color. When Tim thought about Carl he always saw him against blazing reds and ochres of this early fall, only last month, when Carl had Just come to Mingeborough and they were still getting to be friends, and he thought that Carl must somehow carry around with him a perpetual Berkshire autumn, a Wonderful World of Color. Even in the grayness of this afternoon and this district they had entered (which, it seemed, was deprived of its just measure of light because part of it belonged to the past), Carl brought a kind of illumination, a brightening, a compensation for whatever it was about the light that was missing.

They left the road and plunged down through azalea bushes to the banks of an ornamental canal, part of a system of waterways and islands laid out toward the end of the last century, perhaps with some idea of a miniaturized or toy Venice for the New York candy magnate Ellsworth Baffy, who had caused this place to be built originally. Like many who put castles up among these inland hills, he was a contemporary of Jay Gould and his partner, the jolly Berkshire peddler Jubilee Jim Fisk. Once, right around this time of year, Baffy had held a masquerade ball in honor of the presidential candidate James G. Blaine, from which Blaine had been absent due to a storm and a mix-up in rail schedules. No one missed him. All the moneyed of Berkshire County congregated in the great ballroom of Baffy’s spun-sugar manor house; the party lasted three days and the countryside was visited by the drunken wanderings of Pierrots pale in the light of the moon, hideous Borneo apes toting jugs of the local white lightning, lush and cherry-lipped actresses imported from New York, in silk capes, red corsets, long hose, wild Indians. princes of the Renaissance, characters from Dickens, paisley bulls, bears with nosegays; allegorical, garlanded girls named Free Enterprise. Progress, Enlightenment; a giant Maine lobster that never got to extend its claw to the candidate. It snowed, and the last morning of the party a pretty ballet girl dressed as Columbine was found in a quarry nearly dead; the toes of one foot were frostbitten so bad they had to be amputated.

She never danced again, and in November Blaine lost the election and was also forgotten. After Baffy died the estate was bought by a retired train robber from Kansas and in 1932 was sold dirt cheap to a chain of hotels which couldn’t afford to convert the place and eventually decided that King Yrjo’s bucketful of jewels was better than paying the taxes on a white elephant. And now the King too was gone, and the house was empty again, except for the Junta, and one possible Calvary officer.

Hidden among reeds was a flat-bottomed boat they’d found, patched up, and christened the S.S. Leak. They piled aboard, and Tim and Etienne rowed. Pierre sat with his paws up on the front end, like a figurehead. Downstream a frog jumped, and falling rain stippled the dark surface of the water. They splashed along under phony-Venetian bridges, some without floorboards so that you could look up and see the gray sky through them; past little landings whose untarred pilings had rotted and collected green slime; an open summerhouse with screening rusted through, which swayed even in soft winds; corroded statues of straight-nosed, fig-leaved youths and maidens, holding horns of plenty, crossbows, impossible Panpipes and stringed instruments, pomegranates, curling scrolls, and one another. Soon, over the tops of leafless willows, the Big House appeared, growing taller the closer they came—more turrets, crenelations, flying buttresses coming into sight at each stroke of the oars. The outside was in fairly lousy shape; a lot of shingling was off, paint had peeled, roof slates lay broken in piles where they’d slid and fallen. Windows had been mostly busted after years of forays by nervous kids double-dared lo go in against the cavalry officer and his shotgun. And everywhere the smell of old—eighty-year-old—wood.

They tied the boat to an iron ring sunk in a kind of promenade, went ashore, and trooped around to a side entrance of the Big House. No matter how often they came lo the hideout there was a feeling of ceremony, more than any of trespass, about going into the house; It took an effort to step from outside to inside. The inside was full of a pressure, an odor, that resisted intrusions, that kept them conscious of itself until they left again. None of them would go so far as to call it by any name, but they all knew it was there. Part of the ceremony was to look at one another and grin, embarrassed, before pushing on into the twilight that waited for them.

They skirted the edges of the room they’d entered, because hung right in the middle of the ceiling was a cobwebbed. flint-glass chandelier with dust piled in thick stalagmites on its upper facets, and they knew what would happen if you walked under it. The house was full of such mute injunctions: blind places you could be jumped out at from, stretches of warped floor that might suddenly open downward into dungeons or simple darknesses with nothing nearby to grab onto; doors that would not stay open behind you but were balanced to close quietly, unless you watched them. These places it was better to stay away from. The route to the hideout was thus like the way into reefed and perilous harbor. If there had been more than four going in, there would have been no danger at all; it would have been just a mob of kids running through an old house, if there had been fewer, it would have been impossible to get beyond the first room.

Creaking, or echoing, or left as dark-ribbed sneaker-prints in a fine layer of damp, the footsteps of the Junta carried them on into King Yrjo’s, house, past pier glasses that gave them back their images dark and faded, as if some part were being kept as the price of admission; through doorways where old velvet hung whose pile was worn away into map like patterns, seas and land masses taught in no geography their schools knew; through the scullery, where they’d found a decades-old case of Moxie, of which there were still nine bottles left, Kim Dufay having busted one over the prow of the S.S. Leak at its christening, the other two drunk solemnly to celebrate last year’s more or less successful Spartacus maneuvers and recently Carl Barrington’s membership in the gang; then downstairs, between rows of empty wine racks, into empty utility rooms with empty workbenches and dead electric outlets dangling from overhead in the dark like armless spiders; at last to the house’s most secret core, the room behind the ancient coal furnace that they’d found and fixed up and Etienne had spent a week booby-trapping. This is where they met and drew up the timetables; this is where they kept the sodium under kerosene in a five gallon can; and the maps with the objectives marked on them, in an old roll-top desk they’d found empty; and the list of public enemies, which no one but Grover had access to.

So the afternoon got darker, the rain came and went in gusts, sometimes thickening to a downpour, then easing off to a drizzle, and deep in the house, in the dry, cold room, the Junta plotted. Their plot had been going on now for three years, and it reminded Tim sometimes of dreams you got when you were sick and feverish, where there was something you had been told to do—find somebody important in an endless strange city full of faces and clues; struggle down the long, inexhaustible network of some arithmetic problem where each step led to a dozen new ones. Nothing ever seemed to change; no “objectives” were taken that didn’t create a need to start thinking about new ones, so that soon the old ones were forgotten and let slip by default back into the hands of grownups or into a public no man’s land again, and you would be back where you’d started.