When the hippie cowboy was gone, Callahan ran his hand across the splintery boards of the fence, and a tattered poster advertising War of the Zombies . What he wanted more than anything was to climb over and see the rose…possibly to fall on his knees and adore it. But the sidewalks were packed with people, and already he had attracted too many curious looks, some no doubt from people who, like the hippie cowboy, knew a bit about the power of this place. He would best serve the great and singing force behind this fence (was it a rose? could it be no more than that?) by protecting it. And that meant protecting Calvin Tower from whoever had burned down his store.

Still trailing his hand along the rough boards, he turned onto Forty-sixth Street. Down at the end on this side was the glassy-green bulk of the U.N. Plaza Hotel. Calla, Callahan, he thought, and then: Calla, Callahan, Calvin. And then: Calla-come-four, there’s a rose behind the door, Calla-come-Callahan, Calvin’s one more!

He reached the end of the fence. At first he saw nothing, and his heart sank. Then he looked down, and there it was, at knee height: five numbers written in black. Callahan reached into his pocket for the stub of pencil he always kept there, then pulled off a corner of a poster for an off-Broadway play called Dungeon Plunger, A Revue . On this he scribbled five numbers.

He didn’t want to leave, but knew he had to; clear thinking this close to the rose was impossible.

I’ll be back,he told it, and to his delighted amazement, a thought came back, clear and true: Yes, Father, anytime. Come-commala.

On the corner of Second and Forty-sixth, he looked behind him. The door to the cave was still there, the bottom floating about three inches off the sidewalk. A middle-aged couple, tourists judging by the guide-books in their hands, came walking up from the direction of the hotel. Chatting to each other, they reached the door and swerved around it. They don’t see it, but they feel it, Callahan thought. And if the sidewalk had been crowded and swerving had been impossible? He thought in that case they would have walked right through the place where it hung and shimmered, perhaps feeling nothing but a momentary coldness and sense of vertigo. Perhaps hearing, faintly, the sour tang of chimes and catching a whiff of something like burnt onions or seared meat. And that night, perhaps, they’d have transient dreams of places far stranger than Fun City.