On Friday nights I would crawl out of my window and walk along the empty road to the edge of town, where a small weatherbeaten building crouched against the evening sky. From a distance the house always looked dark and empty; if you came around often enough, as often as I did, you learned that it was because the windows had all been covered over with black cloth. It was to give the place a more sinister look, as if it was not sinister enough all by itself with no grass and no trees nearby, only dirt all around and a single iron post out front with a lantern that cast just enough light to read the sign:

On the far side of the house was a secret door that led into a storage room lined with black curtains

where sometimes the professor would pull open the skylight with a handworn boathook he kept for the purpose; there with the moon shining down on a decaying row of old mannequins, down on pulleys, tools, mechanical gadgets, lightning rods, cogs, he would work alone with the exhibits that had yet to be perfected: the jars filled with celluloid things that did not quite pass as the embalmed lizards, the dinosaur fetuses or extinct birds that they were supposed to represent; the electric mule, resting lifeless in an out of the way corner, waiting to receive the charge that would fill it with fire, and send it bucking and jumping with its eyes wild, to kick the dust off of its back in the center of the room; the super-dynamo, all wire and ancient generator parts mounted close around a bulky metal drum, that looked convincing but worked only in my imagination, where nightly it coruscated with living power drawn deep from its brightly painted nucleus.

It was something wonderful to come in that way, with the room starlit and motionless, the house so still that it seemed for that short time as if I was the only person inside. But I didn't know any of that until later. At first for the longest time I waited on the path with the other rubes, country men with their dates plastered to their sides, a few teenagers, a stranger or two from the next county. They came to check out the latest exhibit, or to fulfill the conditions of a dare, or just because they knew that the town council was trying to close the place down. They laughed and smoked and sometimes drank from pocket flasks until at last the bar across the door lifted itself, allowing us through into the dark unadorned hall beyond. In one wall a curtained window opened into a small booth, where a woman named Constance always sat, nearly invisible in the green glow on the other side of the bars. She would take your fifty cents or a dollar (the price depending on age, and whether or not there was a special new exhibit) and give you back the ripped corner of a yellow ticket, without ever speaking or looking up, no matter who tried to get her attention or what they said.

When the hall had filled as far as it was going to, the curtain would close without the girl ever moving to touch it. Then a soft voice would say from behind us: Good evening, and we would turn to see a tall man of no apparent age, standing alone in an old dark suit and a top hat: the professor himself. He had grey eyebrows that didn't match the color of his hair; I learned later that neither were false. His manner was almost gentle, with none of the greasy overplay of the carnival huckster, yet his first words to us were always a warning as to the horrors, the dark mysteries that were to follow, and a disavowal of any responsibility for heart attacks, fainting spells, fits or seizures. Laughter inevitably followed on that little speech, though he didn't seem to mean it as a joke. The tour could not begin until the last echo of it had died away; then it was off through one twisting corridor after another, from room to room to absorb the sights that waited, moth-eaten and grey, for our perusal and our judgement.

In every room Constance would be waiting. It was never clear how she managed it; there were no doors other than the ones we used, and she was never seen in the halls. Together, Constance and the professor conspired to unfold the House of Marvels for a nervous and tittering crowd, offering up the cheap, the sordid, the decayed and the sensational as if they were the secrets of Time and the Universe, as if they were enlightenment itself. Behold, he whispered so softly, and beware, while beyond the silken cord that separated us, Constance alone could approach the displays. Silent, somehow protected, she was the one who appeared to have the real knowledge where the professor could only guess: it was she who ran her fingers down the row of jars, or fed the hideous, snakelike monster that writhed under the floorboards

My favorite was the Egyptian Room. Inscriptions and arcane paintings adorned its walls, telling tales of Gods, cataclysms, palace intrigues, and predicting more to follow: the hopeful, shrouded future that was in turn our own past. In the shadow of a stuffed crocodile hanging from the rafters were glass-enclosed shelves lined with row after row of mummified things: cats, bats, severed hands, frogs, salamanders, exotic plants that had never been seen in our town or anyplace near, all dried and shriveled as if groping for long-lost life.

When Constance appeared in the Egyptian Room she was not Constance at all, but Isis herself, made real in mist and ectoplasm, as dreamlike in her amber gown and jeweled tiara as an image projected on smoke. She showed us water, REAL water from the Nile itself, the lifeblood of Egypt, its gift from the blessed Moon. She showed us a black alter laden with scrolls bearing all of the arcane knowledge at Egypt's command. She showed us the tools of the high priest's trade, a silver-handled dagger, a crook and flail, a golden scarab and an ankh made from stone. She showed us an empty casket from the tombs of the pharaohs, with the face of Rama painted onto the lid. And last of all, best of all, she showed us the thing at the end of the room, mounted on a narrow pedestal and encased in glass.

It was the head of a Sphinx. Its skin was the texture of pulp paper, as brown as the sunburned dirt behind the House. Its withered lips were slightly parted; the nose rotted half away, the lashes like ancient thread a quarter of an inch long, the eyes always closed but somehow alive with the hint of a movement that was never really there. We were told that she, it, was not dead but merely sleeping, that it had not moved in hundreds of years except in the right balance of the stars, to shiver at the cold of Eternity or to whisper some half-audible secret or question from the depths of its slumber. At some future time, so the legend foretold, if ever a person of pure innocence were to come into its presence, then its eyes would flutter open once again and flood the penitent with clear light. Perhaps, if the stars ordained, tonight

But whenever I visited the House of Marvels the stars failed to align themselves properly, or else some member of our group made too much noise, or believed too little. The head of the sphinx never so much as twitched behind the panel of glass, never whispered, never winked. It didn't matter much, not to a boy who was as willing to believe as I. In silence, it was somehow more convincing to me than any display, more dreadful in the distance of sleep, if only because it was impossible to be certain, or because I wished it so much

One night, when the head had failed once again to come alive, I held myself back as the professor began to herd us along to the next exhibit. The flow of the rubes passed and closed around me. Left almost alone in the sacred room, I turned back, and there, for the first time, I spoke to Isis.

It was perhaps my fifteenth or twentieth visit; it took that long for me to get up the nerve. I don't know why I chose her instead of the professor, for she frightened me more, the goddess of a forgotten time in the body of a beautiful, tired-looking woman. I said to her: "Please let me stay. I'll be quiet."

She looked down at me. Her lips moved just lightly, and her eyes (of the palest blue) widened with a mixture of surprise and interest and laughter. She was trying hard not to smile. She said nothing.

That was for the professor. He came around the crowd and nudged me gently back into their midst where I could not escape again. "I'm glad you believe," he said, kneeling so that his eyes were almost level with mine. "But there are too many grown-ups."

The people all laughed, and the professor rose and took us off to see the lightning machine. He kept an eye on me all through the rest of the tour. It was not necessary, I would not have tried to sneak back. I had done so on three separate occasions, and knew that the door to the Egyptian Room would be locked from the inside.

The professor ended every show by ushering us into a narrow cul-de-sac in the back of the building, from which he would promptly vanish. The door at our backs that led from the body of the house would be closed by unseen hands, and another one in front of us would open. Beyond this there was only the starry night, and a broad path of beaten dirt leading down to a gravel parking lot below the house. That night was no different. One by one the visitors went down to their cars, climbed in, and either drove away or sat for a while revving their engines, spilling light over the tall grass. It was past eleven o'clock. I started out on my shortcut across the fields, my head ringing with the echo of dusty wonders.

I had just come out of the shadow of the house when I heard a footstep in the weeds behind me. "Little boy," said a faint, exhausted voice that seemed to come over the wind from the next county. When I turned, I saw Constance standing alone against the grey shingles. It was the first time that I had ever seen her out of costume, out of make-up, though in the moonlight it seemed that she was still in character, still playing the ancient. She came from the side of the building and loomed over me, so pale that she did not seem quite solid. She was wearing slacks and a long coat that she held closed in front with both hands. I could see only the left half of her face. "Would you like to come in and see the real head of the sphinx?" she said.

It took me a while to make out her words. I was too busy looking at her, wondering whether or not I should run. She had to repeat herself three times. When at last I understood, the only answer I could give was to take a step closer.

"Good," she said with the hint of what might have been a wistful smile. "Come on." Then she pulled a lever that had been disguised as a knot in the siding, and the wall began to open up.

I found the professor making shadow figures on the walls of his cramped, yellow office. His top hat was crushed flat on the desktop at his elbow, his moustaches were gone. He looked up as I came in, and for a moment I thought that his gaze had somehow passed around me. "Has Constance gone?" he said softly. "She didn't even say good night."

Then I missed her for the first time: she had not been beside me in the halls, she had not even come back inside. I said, "I guess so. I mean I guess not," and his face took on the strangest, most mournful look, one that even I was not too young to understand.

"It's no wonder," he said into his hands. "She has two little boys just about your age. She waits tables in town during the afternoon, does two long shows here at night. Assuming the mantle of Isis is the least of her problems."

He rose from behind the desk and blew out the lamp. Now the only light in the building was a distant blue glow that filtered from a narrow corridor I had never seen before. "Come on," he said to me from out of the dark. "I'll show you the secret."

We went up through a slanting hall that was no more than three feet wide. At times it twisted and doubled back upon itself; it ran up stairs and around the edge of the little house, through patches of total darkness where lines of red light cut through the inside wall. "What's your name?" he said at last.

"Winston," I said.

We stopped just above one of the cracks of light. There was a number stencilled on the plaster in chipping, luminescent paint. Under the professor's hand it split into two equal halves. The first thing that I saw was a closed and bolted door on the far side of the room beyond, then the silken dividing cord, then the alter, covered over with a dirty sheet, then the mummy case, the displays, and the Sphinx's head, facing away. It was the Egyptian Room.

The professor led me along behind the exhibits. We went carefully past shelves laden with dusty jars, sidestepped around urns and braziers, until at last we stood at the case with the head inside. I had never been so close to the thing. From there, it was clear that the face was not golden at all, but carved wood covered with a layer of gold leaf that had already begun to flake away. The eyes had been repainted recently; it was a poor job. They were hinged at the corner with nearly invisible wires. The lids were made of canvas.

There was a catch on the back of the pedestal, below the case. The professor opened a panel there that I could never have known about; no moths flew out, there was no gust of ancient air. Instead, the interior was lined with a thick cast-iron casing, housing a complicated arrangement of rotten belts and rustcovered crankshafts, with a brittle cylinder set in under the business end of a needle, all wired to a battery that had long since corroded beyond any usefulness. "That's all it is," he said. "Flywheels. An infernal machine. I bought it twenty years ago from a man who used it in a traveling sideshow. It hasn't worked since he sold it to me. I've tinkered with it over the years, but I never have been able to figure it out. Some of it doesn't make any sense at all. See that capstan, there? I don't know what it does. Perhaps it's the key. I'll never know. I've given up."

"Is everything fake?" I said.

The man who called himself Vitae looked young and pale and sick in the fire-colored light. "Oh, no," he said. "Many of them are real. Even this is real in its own way." And I remembered the strange irritation I had sometimes seen on him, the disappointment that crossed his features when the head refused to waken. I thought, he believed in a story, too. It was just a different one.

Then the professor began to shrink. His long coat gathered itself into a little black puddle, until at last he sat back on his heels, took hold of his lapels, and began to look, even without his moustache, like the strange man who guided us all through the house. "You see it is all head," he whispered to me. "It has no heart, at least not one that works. But, if you would ask your parents' permission, perhaps you could come to work for me. Not every day, but two or three afternoons a week. If we worked together, maybe we could learn what she has to say. The cosmos in their proper alignment, yes?"

I remember how he stressed asking my parents, and I remember knowing that I would pretend to forget. "Yeah!" I said. "Can we?"

The professor raised one finger and pointed at me like Uncle Sam. "You and I," he said, "will make it come alive..."