Far off, the old man smiled.

They approached each other, carefully.

“Is that you, Will? Grown an inch since this morning.” Charles Halloway shifted his gaze. “Jim? Eyes darker, cheeks paler; you burn yourself at both ends, Jim?”

“Heck,” said Jim.

“No such place as Heck. But hell’s right here under ‘A’ for Alighieri.”

“Allegory’s beyond me,” said Jim.

“How stupid of me,” Dad laughed. “I mean Dante. Look at this. Pictures by Mister Doré, showing all the aspects. Hell never looked better. Here’s souls sunk to their gills in slime. There’s someone upside down, wrong side out.”

“Boy howdy!” Jim eyed the pages two different ways and thumbed on. “Got any dinosaur pictures?”

Dad shook his head. “That’s over in the next aisle.” He strolled them around and reached out. “Here we are: Pterodactyl, Kite of Destruction! or what about Drums of Doom: The Saga of the Thunder Lizards! Pep you up, Jim?”

“I’m pepped!”

Dad winked at Will. Will winked back. They stood now, a boy with corn-colored hair and a man with moon-white hair, a boy with a summer-apple, a man with a winter-apple face. Dad, Dad, thought Will, why, why, he looks… like me in a smashed mirror!

And suddenly Will remembered nights rising at two in the morning to go to the bathroom and spying across town to see that one single light in the high library window and know Dad had lingered on late murmuring and reading alone under these green jungle lamps. It made Will sad and funny to see that light, to know the old man—he stopped to change the word—his father, was here in all this shadow.

“Will,” said the old man who was also a janitor who happened to be his father, “what about you?”