The House was not nearly so fearsome by day -- just a featureless old box of a place that had been plunked down in the middle of nowhere and allowed to decay past recovery. On the east side, facing the road, were the flaked remains of a Coca-Cola sign, invisible at night. It would have been easy to find the door there, perhaps under the flaring tail of the big C. On the west side there wasn't any paint at all. I had to search for fifteen minutes, running my fingers over the broken boards, before I found what I was looking for.

For three days that was all I had thought about, in school or at home, that hidden door which would admit me into my first real job, the magical job of helping the head to speak. In my sleep I could hear its voice, an awful, cracked, distant sound, whispering the secrets of men's hearts, secrets that I could never manage to carry with me into wakefulness. It no longer mattered that the head was just a machine; it was a machine that had once learned words, and that was almost as good.

I came into a long empty hall flooded with light from the open office at the far end. The walls had been painted green, once. I picked my way down along its length, calling "Perfessor? Perfessor? It's me, like you asked. --Um, Perfessor?"

The office was not like one that I thought a professor should have. There were no books, no papers, no maps, only an old issue of Photoplay and some copies of The Black Mask spread out across his desk. On the floor in the near corner was an antique toolbox almost like a doctor's bag, lying open with the handle of a hacksaw sticking out at a strange angle. The ceiling, which had been solid the last time I saw it, now had a hole gaping from where a flight of stairs had been lowered. It fell so that the steps crossed just below the window. From the foot of them I could see up into an attic space filled with webs and clutter. A faint rustling came from somewhere in the back. "Perfessor," I said. "It's me"

"Catch this," he called from above. A hand in an oily sleeve appeared over the edge and tossed something, some metal contrivance, down at me. It was a pedal with a long piece of fencing wire hinged to it. "You like to drive?" the professor said. He came around the top of the stairs with his arms full of iron junk, some of which had leaked black soup onto the front of his coveralls. "Your pappy ever let you run a tractor? Now you will learn to run Oracles."

His hair might have been dressed with motor oil; tufts of it gripped his forehead or stuck straight up in the air. He had the look of a blissful archeologist who had been digging for too long and had come up with some great stuff. "You're just in time. I've got the answer, I have. It's just a matter of hooking it up." He stepped around me and then turned back, pulled a low stool out from under the desk with the end of his foot. "Bring that," he said, "and come on"

We went through the wall passages all the way to the Egypt room, where he had been working all morning, laying the guts of the sphinx machine out neatly across a dun-colored dropcloth. There were twisty bits of steel and clockwork that had all rusted solid; I watched and helped, handing in tools now and then, as he removed a dirty speaker from under the head and began wiring the pedal into its place. I supposed that he was wondering what use he could get out of the pieces, if they could be assembled into something good enough for his TechnoWonder Room, or if it would all just end up in the pile in the back yard. I knew that he wouldn't throw any of it away. Perhaps, if I did a very good job, he would give some of it to me.

"The important thing to remember is not to offer them too much," he said with his thin ropeveined arms pushed under the machinery, his face turned up and away as he groped for some unseen bolt. "They'll ask questions and you just try your best to answer them without really saying anything. Ehh. There. You won't be able to see them, so we'll have to figure on some code system for Connie to help you. She's good at that, she's got an eye for the different types of people. You'll know some of them, being a local boy; that's even better. Don't worry about embarrassing anyone."

"Where did you meet Connie?" I said.

The professor craned his head around and flashed his teeth at me. "One day I had enough change in my pockets to buy me some lunch. And there she was. Isis bussing tables, hey? Sounds kind of funny. But that's what it was. I came back here and right away knew what the show was missing. But it was more than month before I could get the courage to offer her a job."

I found an old piece of spring and pressed it between my hands, imagining the professor in his Professor Costume, all tailcoat and tophat and false moustaches in the corner booth of Weston's Diner, downtown. I imagined Constance whispering between the tables, nearly invisible in the blue uniform, ignoring him, marking the pad and pushing it back down into her ketchup-stained apron without ever looking up. I believed him about the month.

I was studying the little rusty circles that the spring had left on my palms when the professor at last finished his work inside of the machine. Very gently, as if he were trying not to wake anyone, he cleared away the pieces that he had removed and the nuts and bolts that had held them in place, until all that remained on the floor behind the pedestal was the foot pedal and two things like handles from a cellar door, all wired into the neck of the Sphinx. He set the stool a foot or so back from the gutted machine, sat me down on it, and disappeared around the front. "Don't do anything yet," he said. He bent this way and that; he craned his neck and walked around a bit and squinted. "Nope," he said when he had finished. "We'll have to set you back more, get you a curtain. I can still see you. Now pick up those hand controls and give them a squeeze. The left trigger operates the right eye and the right trigger operates the left eye. Foot pedal should operate the mouth. See what you can do."

The pedal worked quite easily; when I pressed the triggers in my hand I could hear an ominous scraping sound from deep inside the machine, and the leathery creak of the eyelids beginning to move. "That's good," the professor said. "Try making faces." And I hunkered my head down, squeezed the controls and said, "Nyaa nyaa nyaa"

The professor only laughed. "What should I do about my voice?" I said. "If I just talk like me they'll know who I am. How about if I talked like this?"

I made a voice like my father gargling, and another like my grandmother waking me in the morning. The professor smiled and shook his head. "Why don't we take our clue from this," he said. From a ledge on the front of the machine he lifted a small, covered box. Inside, wrapped loosely in tissue and straw, was the silver cylinder that had been mounted beneath a useless needle. "Careful, now," he said as he lowered it, box and all, into my waiting hands. "The mummy's voice, every word and whisper scratched into these grooves. I've got just the machine to play it on. Connie will want to hear it, too."

I never did get a chance to listen; there was no time, that day. When the professor and I went back down to his office I noticed the sun riding big and low along the edge of the sky, and knew that my parents would be wondering where I was. "Come back again tomorrow afternoon," the professor called as I ran out past the roadsign. "Connie will come in early. We'll work up a routine"

But I came back that same night, along the path I knew where the night flowers bloomed under the moon. I had a big handful of them by the time I came into the shadow of the building. Far above, I could hear the house complaining under the weight of the guests. The professor and Constance would still be caught up in presenting the first show; I hurried straight to the little office, placed my bunch of flowers at the end of the passage where Constance would come upon them, and hid in the narrow footspace underneath his desk.

I thought it would be a fearful wait, but it wasn't at all. I sat in the absolute dark with my knees pulled up close under my chin, wishing that I had brought along a flashlight and a comic book. There was no sound when Constance came bearing her lantern through the wall, just an angle of light cutting across the floor and a female shape rising up inside it until the room was held in a flickering blue glow. She set the light down just over my head, and gave a sigh in the empty room.

"I told you no more flowers," she said when the professor came in from the hall. It was the same emotionless monotone she had used in the night behind the house, the only other time I had heard her speak. "I thought we talked about that."

"I don't --" the professor said.

Connie cut him off, lowered her voice to a whisper. "I can't stay here if you're going to keep this up," she said.

"They're only flowers I don't --"

That was when I remembered the voice, and used it for the first time. It surprised and frightened me when it came out, a filthy sibilant push of dead air, breath with words:

from the boy

No one moved or spoke in that cramped room for nearly a minute. I waited under the desk with both hands clamped over my mouth. Then the professor turned on his heels so that his boots made a crunching sound in the grit and dust scattered over the floorboards. "Only one place," he said. His face came under the legspace and I held myself like a frightened animal until at last he smiled. "Well," he said. "Looks like you're ready after all"
...