© 2009

Eclipse Three is, as always, more than just the product of one person: it's the creative output from a small village of people. Once again, Jeremy, Jason, and Ross at the Shade have stood tall and provided me with the support I needed to do the book that I wanted to do; something for which I'm incredibly grateful. I'd also like to thank all of the contributors to the book. This book evolved much more naturally than it's predecessors, with stories coming from unexpected places at unexpected times, so I'm very grateful to everyone who has sent me stories this time. I'd like to thank Peter Watts for his understanding, and the Richard Powers Estate for the fabulous cover.

A good book cover attracts the eye of a potential reader. It makes a book pleasing to behold, and makes you eager to pick it up and look further. A great book cover does more. It encapsulates the essence of the book and communicates that essence clearly and simply to anyone who might be interested.

When I first saw the cover for Eclipse One, the opening volume in this series, I could immediately see that it was a good cover, but I wasn't sure that it was a great one. It certainly had all of the right ingredients. Designer Michael Fusco had created a clean, simple series design that could be used with almost any piece of art. Multiple award-winning artist Michael Whelan's pre-existing art provided an appropriate air of ambiguity. What the cover didn't do, though, was "fit" the book that I felt I had in my mind's eye. It didn't have quite the same feel; represent the essence of the stories completely.

Now, creating a cover that fits an anthology is always difficult, and it is especially difficult when you are talking about a book such as Eclipse, which is unthemed and intended to be as varied as possible. Still that fit is something an art editor strives for, and that a designer works to achieve. It's also something that has become enormously important to me as an anthologist over the last year or two.

Increasingly I've felt that it's essential to create a total package that is, for want of a better word, "honest." I want the cover, the blurbs, the cover quotes, the introduction, and the stories to tell the same story, to deliver the same message to anyone who picks the book up so that they have a clear idea of what it is they're going to get. It's an ideal, but it's one that I think is worth working towards.

Because of that I was much more confident about the cover for Eclipse Two, which came out last year. I had decided, in consultation with my publisher, to make the second volume in the series a much more science fiction oriented book. I approached more science fiction writers than fantasy writers for the book. I chose stories that had robots and spaceships and vast empires. And art editor Jeremy Lassen provided a peach of a cover, taking a well-known piece of art by Hugo Award-winning artist Donato Giancola and nudging it into Michael Fusco's design in such a way that it was bright and shiny and new. I remember the excitement I felt when I opened the email that had the cover attached, and how I felt that it was just exactly right for the book. Even now, I think it's one of the best covers to appear on any of my books.

I was, however, frankly nervous about what kind of cover would be found for Eclipse Three. Like the first volume of the series, it's a varied volume featuring stories that range from straight fantasy to swords and sorcery to eloquent social science fiction. What could possibly, I wondered, honestly represent that variety? I needn't have worried.

When I first saw the cover art for Eclipse Three I knew immediately it was right. Following his own passion for great science fiction art, Jeremy Lassen had searched out and found something special: an unpublished piece of art by the late Richard Powers. Powers was possibly the greatest artist ever to work in the science fiction field, producing more than eight hundred science fiction paintings during a long and distinguished career that saw him produce iconic covers for Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and many, many more. Although when Powers started his career his work fit the conventional pulp paperback style of the day, he quickly evolved a Surrealist style that was influenced by the likes of Picasso and Yves Tanguy, but was highly personal and very much his own.

The painting was perfect for Eclipse because it was vibrant, rich, and evocative. It suggested something hip and cool, but it didn't prescribe anything. It spoke directly to the essence of what I thought an Eclipse volume should be-varied, engaging, and ever changing. It also had connections to the science fiction world that I couldn't resist. The first volume of Damon Knight's classic Orbit series of anthologies had a Powers cover, as did the first volume of Pohl's Star and one of Robert Silverberg's New Dimensions. He'd also done some classic covers for books that had meant an enormous amount to me, like R. A. Lafferty's Nine Hundred Grandmothers.

I was sufficiently thrilled by the cover that I wanted to know more. After all, how likely is it that unpublished Powers art of this caliber still existed? As it turns out the provenance of the art is as mysterious as the image Powers created. His agent Jane Frank told me that information on the work was severely limited. It is signed "Powers Laz/org," as he signed all of his commercial work, which suggests it was done for publication. But there's no information on it having been published. It has the hallmarks of a Powers book cover-layout, collage style, signature, etc.-but no other information. It is a mystery. And for me, that makes it perfect. A mysterious cover-bright and filled with energy-for a mysterious book. It's my hope that, when you've read the group of stories that make up this latest Eclipse you'll think it's perfect too.

Before I hand you over to the stories, though, a few thanks. Eclipse Three exists because of the generosity and dedication of Jeremy Lassen, Jason Williams, Ross Lockhart, and John Joseph Adams at "the Shade." Without them this book literally wouldn't and couldn't exist. I'd also like to thank the contributors to the book who have let me publish such wonderful work, and Jane Frank at the Powers Estate. As always, though, my greatest thanks goes to my wife Marianne, who has been there for every difficult moment I went through getting us here.

And last, thanks goes to you, the reader, for picking up this book and being willing to enter the worlds contained within it. Whether you were there for Eclipse One and Eclipse Two, or this is your first time under its darkling skies, welcome, and I hope to see you here again next year.

Jonathan Strahan

Perth, Western Australia

July 2009

For her birthday, Norah got a Pink cd from the twins, a book about vampires from her grown-up sister, High School Musical 2 from her grandma (which Norah might have liked if she'd been turning ten instead of fifteen) and an iPod shuffle plus an Ecko Red t-shirt and two hundred-dollar darkwash 7 jeans-the most expensive clothes Norah had ever owned-from her mother and father.

Not a week earlier, her mother had said it was a shame birthdays came whether you deserved them or not. She'd said she was dog-tired of Norah's disrespect, her ingratitude, her filthy language-as if fucking was just another word for very-fucking this and fucking that, fucking hot and fucking unfair and you have to be fucking kidding me.

And then there were a handful of nights when Norah didn't come home and turned off her phone so they all thought she was in the city in the apartment of some man she'd probably met on the internet and was probably dead.

And then there were the horrible things she'd written about both her mother and father on facebook.

And now they had to buy her presents?

I don't see that happening, Norah's mother had said.

So it was all a big surprise and there was even a party. Her parents didn't approve of Norah's friends (and mostly didn't know who they were) so the party was just family. Norah's big sister brought the new baby who yawned and hiccoughed and whose scalp was scaly with cradle-cap. There was barbecued chicken and ears of corn cooked in milk, an ice-cream cake with pralines and roses, and everyone, even Norah, was really careful and nice except for Norah's grandma who had a fight in the kitchen with Norah's mother that stopped the minute Norah entered. Her grandmother gave Norah a kiss, wished her a happy birthday, and left before the food was served.

The party went late and Norah's mother said they'd clean up in the morning. Everyone left or went to bed. Norah made a show of brushing her teeth, but she didn't undress, because Enoch and Kayla had said they'd come by, which they did, just before midnight. Enoch climbed through Norah's bedroom window and then he tiptoed downstairs to the front door to let Kayla in, because she was already too trashed for the window. "Your birthday's not over yet!" Enoch said, and he'd brought Norah some special birthday shrooms called hawk's eyes. Half an hour later, the whole bedroom took a little skip sideways and broke open like an egg. Blue light poured over everything and Norah's Care Bear Milo had a luminous blue aura, as if he were Yoda or something. Milo told Norah to tell Enoch she loved him, which made Enoch laugh.

They took more of the hawk's eyes so Norah was still tripping the next morning when a man and a woman came into her bedroom, pulled her from her bed and forced her onto her feet while her mother and father watched. The woman had a hooked nose and slightly protuberant eyeballs. Norah looked into her face just in time to see the fast retraction of a nictitating membrane. "Look at her eyes," she said, only the words came out of the woman's mouth instead of Norah's. "Look at her eyes," the woman said. "She's high as a kite."

Norah's mother collected clothes from the floor and the chair in the bedroom. "Put these on," she told Norah, but Norah couldn't find the sleeves so the men left the room while her mother dressed her. Then the man and woman took her down the stairs and out the front door to a car so clean and black that clouds rolled across the hood. Norah's father put a suitcase in the trunk and when he slammed it shut the noise Norah heard was the last note in a Sunday school choir; the men part of Amen, sung in many voices.

The music was calming. Her parents had been threatening to ship her off to boarding school for so long she'd stopped hearing it. Even now she thought that they were maybe all just trying to scare her, would drive her around for a bit and then bring her back, lesson learned, and this helped for a minute or two. Then she thought her mother wouldn't be crying in quite the way she was crying if it was all for show. Norah tried to grab her mother's arm, but missed. "Please," she started, "don't make me," but before she got the words out the man had leaned in to take them. "Don't make me hurt you," he said in a tiny whisper that echoed in her skull. He handcuffed Norah to the seatbelt because she was struggling. His mouth looked like something drawn onto his face with a charcoal pen.

"This is only because we love you," Norah's father said. "You were on a really dangerous path."

"This is the most difficult thing we've ever done," said Norah's mother. "Please be a good girl and then you can come right home."

The man with the charcoal mouth and woman with the nictitating eyelids drove Norah to an airport. They showed the woman at the ticket counter Norah's passport, and then they all got on a plane together, the woman in the window seat, the man the aisle, and Norah in the middle. Sometime during the flight Norah came down and the man beside her had an ordinary face and the woman had ordinary eyes, but Norah was still on a plane with nothing beneath her but ocean.

While this was happening, Norah's mother drove to the mall. She had cried all morning and now she was returning the iPod shuffle to the Apple store and the expensive clothes to Nordstrom's. She had all her receipts and everything still had the tags, plus she was sobbing intermittently, but uncontrollably, so there was no problem getting her money back.

Can I watch Howdy Doody when we get home?" Carolyn Sullivan asked. She pushed the cart down the canned foods aisle of the Shop-Rite while her mother added creamed corn and green beans to the basket.

"May I. And what's the magic word?"

"May I please watch Howdy Doody?"

"All right, if there's time after we make the beds. We have guests coming."

Carolyn sighed. The Institute for Advanced Study was holding a conference over the weekend, and they were expecting a visiting professor to arrive the next day. The house on Mercer Street had been in the family since the end of the Civil War. When Ensign William Sullivan's ship was torpedoed late in 1943, all hands lost, his widow transformed it into a guest house, to support herself and her baby daughter.

Einstein lived a block away.

Mrs. Sullivan wheeled the cart into a check-out line. "Would you like to play the register game?" she asked. "It'll be good practice. School starts next week."

Carolyn nodded. Her mother thought the game was a kind of homework-good for her-but she liked trying to add up all the groceries in her head as fast as the check-out girl could use the keys. She was the best in her class at arithmetic.

She put the cans of corn on the belt and watched as the white tabs jumped up at the back of the machine with a soft ka-ching, like ducks in a shooting gallery. Twelve cents, four times, which was easy. Then the beans. The first one was 13 cents, and she smiled, because there were four of them too, and that was 52 cents, which made the dollar rectangle in her head whole again. 48 + 52 = 100.

It made her happy when the numbers meshed together with nice, even edges.

The girl was fast, and Carolyn lost track, a little, when the roast went through-$2.37-because it was a big number and it ended with a seven. They were the hardest because they almost never made nice shapes. But when the girl hit TOTAL, Carolyn was only 68 cents off.

"Pretty good," her mother said as they loaded the bags into the back of the station wagon. She pulled a Tootsie Pop out of her purse. "I think that deserves a reward."

Carolyn made the candy last, sucking, not biting, and still had a tiny nub left when all the groceries had been put away. But by the time the last pillowcase had been fluffed and placed just-so, it was too late for Howdy Doody, so she went out to the backyard with her book. Newly cut grass clippings clung to her bare legs like jimmies on an ice cream cone, and her hair hung damp on the back of her neck in the August heat, but discomfort was the price of freedom. Next week it was back to plaid uniforms, memorizing and eagle-eyed nuns.

She sat against the stone wall that separated their yard from the woods, grateful for the shade of the elm. Four pages into Johnny Tremain, she heard the solid thwack of a bat hitting a baseball, and a second later a white missile whizzed over her head and landed in the underbrush beyond with a swishing of leaves and a soft thud.

Silence, for a moment, then a babble of boys' voices. She stood up and looked across the manicured lawn of the Taylors ' house next door. On the far side, she saw a trio of crew cut heads above the wooden fence. New kids, moved in last week.

"Do you have our baseball?" one of them yelled.

Carolyn cupped her hands around her mouth and called back. "It's in the woods."

"Okay."

He headed for the chain-link fence at the back of his own yard, and had one sneaker wedged a foot up before she could warn him, "You won't get through from there. Blackberry bushes. Big thorns."

She watched him shrug and leap the fence anyway.

"Ow! Shit!" came through loud and clear a moment later.

The urge to yell, "I told you so," was strong, but she hadn't met that boy yet. He swore, so he might try for payback. She watched him climb back into his yard, rubbing his knee, then made a bold decision.

"I'll get it."

Her mother always warned her about the woods. Besides the blackberries, it would be easy to get lost among the acres of trees. "You're all I have," she'd say. So Carolyn had never explored beyond the wall, mostly because, up until this summer, she hadn't been tall enough to climb over. But she was now.

She looked behind her to see if she was being watched, then scaled it and surveyed the ground on the other side. A soft verge of grass and dandelions grew at the base, and the blackberries seemed to peter out midway behind the Taylors '. She jumped down.

The ball had left a trail through the undergrowth, and she found it soon enough, too pale and too perfectly round to be part of the natural chaos. She recovered it from underneath a clump of damp leaves, disturbing a legion of rolly bugs and one fat salamander.

She'd planned to walk down the verge to the Wallers' house, on the corner, and return the ball from the sidewalk side. Then she saw three flat stones, piled one on the other, the topmost painted with a faded red crosshatch, like a tic-tac-toe game waiting to happen. That wasn't nature, either. She squatted down. The stones marked what looked like a path leading deeper into the trees. It might be nothing, and it might end in more blackberries, but, except for the market, she'd been cooped up inside all day. Chores and more chores. Everything had to be tidied up, "neat as a pin," when guests were coming.

Carolyn scuffed her feet in the leaves as she walked back to the stone wall, leaving her own trail, and threw the baseball as hard as she could across the Taylors ' yard, shouting, "Ball!" It landed next to the birdbath and knocked over a garden gnome. She headed away from the sudden clamor.

No one had used the path in a while. Saplings blocked her way and sprang back, hard, across her arms as she pushed through. Twigs snagged at her ankles, and her white socks were soon covered with a carpet of tiny green burrs that would take forever to pick out. But it was a path, and every hundred yards or so she found another pile of rocks. Some of them had tumbled over, but one stone always had the same mysterious crosshatch.

The woods were cool and shady. Carolyn could smell the earth, almost sweet from decomposing logs, with a bitter undertaste of autumn after autumn of fallen leaves. No breeze, and except for the sound of her feet crunching along, all she heard were birdcalls and the occasional rhythmic knock-knock-knock of an unseen woodpecker.

The path paralleled Stony Brook for a little while, then veered off to the left and ended at an old wooden fence with a narrow stile, its boards warped and moss-covered. Carolyn put one careful foot on the bottom step. It creaked, but held her weight, and she climbed up and sat at the top, looking into the ruins of what had once been a large and elaborate garden, not just a backyard.

Rosebushes taller than her surrounded stone benches and a sundial. The edges of a gravel walkway were blurred with weeds, and wildflowers grew knee-high. A dozen bees droned lazily in midair.

The walkway led to the back of an old barn. A huge maple tree, still thick-leafed with summer, blocked her view of all but one wing of the house-a single story with a bay window below a magnificent stained-glass peacock. She sat on the stile for a few minutes, savoring the discovery of a new place and debating about exploring further.

She had come this far, and didn't want to turn back now, but entering the garden wasn't just being in the woods. It was trespassing. If anyone still lived in the house-which didn't look too likely-she'd get caught. They'd call her mother and then she'd really be in trouble. She'd spend the last week of summer doing laundry and dishes and ironing. Inside.

After several go-rounds with herself, curiosity won and she clambered into the garden. Gravel skittered and the bees flew off to a safer distance, but nothing else happened.

The walkway continued around the barn. She turned the corner and barely stopped an out-loud gasp. The house on the other side of the wide drive was enormous, with gabled windows and a cupola, every inch covered in ornate Victorian gingerbread that needed painting.

She still thought the place was deserted-until she saw the round-fendered Buick, parked with its nose just inside the "barn," which turned out to be a four-car garage. The Buick had a Princeton sticker on its bumper, and New Jersey plates, 1952, just like her mother's car, all legal and up-to-date.

Carolyn stepped into the shadows and scrunched down. She eased around the corner of the house, planting each foot carefully so her Keds were almost silent. The wide porch held a line of peeling Adirondack chairs and wrapped all the way around to the front. That was even grander-stone pillars and more stained glass, green-limned copper letters over the entrance that said THE BRAMBLES.

It was a mansion, the biggest house she'd ever seen outside a magazine. But, except for the Buick, it would be easy to believe no one had been here for years.

"Hullo. Have you ever seen a giant turtle?"

Carolyn gave a little yelp and jumped back, whacking her elbow on a drainpipe. Cradling her arm, she looked around to see who had spoken.

It took her a moment to notice that the massive front door was open, just a crack, a foot in a leather oxford wedged into the gap.

"How giant?" she asked. Her brain was full of other questions, but that was the one that came out of her mouth.

The oxford moved and the door opened to reveal a boy about her age, sitting cross-legged on the floor. He made a circle with his arms, wider than his body. "Like this."

"Wow." Carolyn climbed the steps and stood on the porch.

"He's very old," the boy said. "Grandaddy sent him from China for my daddy's birthday. He's magic."

"Sure he is." Carolyn tried not to laugh, because the boy sounded serious, but she was a practical girl. She didn't believe in magic and fairy tales and all that baloney. Her family? Not so happily ever after.

The boy shook his head. "Not Daddy. Lotion."

"Lotion?" Was that what he'd said?

"My turtle."

"Funny name for a turtle." Even an imaginary one.

"He's Chinese." The boy stood up and pushed the door all the way open. He had short brown hair and was taller than Carolyn, by a couple of inches, but she could tell right away that there was something wrong with him. One side of his head was shaped funny, and his eyes didn't look straight at her, just a little beyond.

Real. Imaginary. Didn't look like it'd make much difference to him.

"Who're you?" he asked.

"I'm Carolyn. I live on Mercer Street, on the other side of the woods," she said, slowly, the way she talked to the little kids she babysat.

"I'm Bibber." He stopped and shook his head again. "No. The man from the bank says I'm too old. Now I have to be Robert." He looked from side to side, as if someone might be hiding on the porch, then whispered, "You can call me Bibber."

"How old are you?"

"Eleven. Last month."

"Oh. Me too. But not until December." She leaned against one of the pillars. "Do you live here?"

Bibber nodded.

"You must have a really big family."

"No. Just Higgins and Cook and Mrs. Addison, the housekeeper. But she's having a Day Off."

"How 'bout your mom and dad?"

"Mommy died having me and Daddy's in the war hospital. He's sleeping and he won't wake up."

"I'm sorry," Carolyn said. She wondered if it was Korea, or the last war.

"I know. That's why the bank man makes the rules for me." Bibber pointed at the doorway. "You wanna come in?"

"I guess so." He didn't look dangerous, and Carolyn felt sorry for him. Not just because he was-slow, but because she knew how it felt to have a war steal your father.

The inside of the house was cool and dark, darker than the woods. Heavy velvet curtains covered the windows, and massive furniture loomed around her. The walls were encrusted with big, gilt-framed paintings of dead birds and fruit.

"I don't play in here," Bibber said. "But Lotion sometimes hides under the sofa."

They walked through three rooms with high ceilings and fireplaces tall enough to stand up in. A long table with twelve chairs around it was bigger than her whole dining room at home; another eight chairs lined the walls. Twenty people could have dinner, she counted without really thinking.

The next room was one she didn't know a name for. Her house had a living room and a dining room, a kitchen and a utility porch, but this room was none of those. It had high-backed leather armchairs and small side tables and cabinets full of foreign-looking objects: curved knives, lacquered boxes, intricately carved figurines. On the walls were animal heads, stuffed and mounted, their glass eyes glinting in the dim light as she walked by.

"What did your grandfather do?" she asked.

"He went far away on boats. He bought things for museums." Bibber pointed to a cabinet. "He kept some of them."

"Yeah. I can see."

"I like this room," Bibber said, opening the double doors.

It was a library, floor-to-ceiling bookcases with rails that held two wooden ladders. At the far end, beneath the stained-glass window she had seen from the stile, was a bay window with a cushioned seat. The curtains were tied back, and in the sunlight, the leather spines of the books-brown, maroon, deep green-felt like an extension of the woods.

A table with two glass-shaded lamps sat in the center of the room, chairs on either side; a thick carpet with ornate dragons and flowers covered most of the parquet floor.

"I do too," Carolyn said. It was exactly the sort of room she had read about and always longed for, a place to sit and read for hours and hours. Cozy and enclosing, a world of its own, the perfect place to get lost in a story. "Have you read all these?" she asked. She looked around, wondering where she'd start, if it was hers.

Bibber didn't answer. He looked down at the carpet, staring at the head of a curled green dragon.

"Bibber?"

"I can't read by myself," he mumbled. "I know all my letters, but-"

"Oh." Carolyn couldn't imagine not being able to read. "Where do you go to school?"

"I don't. Nanny taught me lessons." Bibber sat down and wrapped his arms around his knees. "But she went away."

Carolyn hesitated, then sat down near him. "Well, I bet the bank man will get you another Nanny real soon."

"No." Bibber began to rock back and forth. "The bank man says I am too old. Mr. Winkle has hair now, and I have to go to Vineland."

"He can't send you there!" Carolyn blurted, before she could stop herself. Vineland was the state school for the feeble-minded. Going there was so bad that the nuns used it as their last-resort threat when someone didn't do their homework, or failed a test.

"He says I have to. And I can't take Lotion."

How could they forbid an imaginary animal? Carolyn traced a finger along the plush wool of the dragon's tail. "When do you go?"

"Next week," Bibber said. He wiped his eyes with the edge of his wrist. "I wanna stay here."

"I would too," said Carolyn.

They sat in silence for a few minutes before Bibber stood up. "Wanna see my picture book?"

"I guess."

He went over to a bookshelf, pulled out a pebbled black volume, opened it, shook his head, took out another. "There he is!" he said, suddenly sounding very happy.

Bibber laid the book on the long table and motioned for Carolyn to come see. When she stood up, she saw that it wasn't a real book, but a scrapbook, the pages filled with snapshots and postcards and ticket stubs. Someone had written names and dates and notes under each photo.

"That's my daddy, on his birthday." Bibber pointed to a photo of a boy kneeling with his hand on the edge of what really did look like a large turtle shell. The rest had been cut off by the camera. The caption underneath read: Bobby with a gift from Father, all the way from Nanking China! A card next to it said: A puzzler for you, son. Can you find the secret?

"Wanna see another one?"

"Sure."

Pinching the bottom corner between his fingers, Bibber carefully flipped the page to reveal a single, larger photo. Two boys in knickers sat cross-legged on either side of a huge tortoise, its shell painted with a complicated design, groups of connected dots.

"See. That's him and Lotion."

The caption read: Bobby and friend Bill admire the new addition.

Carolyn gasped, out loud this time.

The turtle was real.

And the other boy was her father.

For Allen Varney

I don't actually remember meeting Suzette. It's like we were heading in the same general direction and fell into step together. She knew everybody I knew and vice versa, but amazingly enough we had no ex-boyfriends in common. But we'd never have let a guy come between us. "No penis between us," Suzette used to say with her big old grin. Girlfriend had a great grin.

Suzette was about five-four, five-five, and proportioned like a dancer. I think she had trained as one once but she never said and I never asked. I've never asked a lot of questions; still don't. It's not that I don't care or I'm not interested. I've just always figured that if there's anything I need to know about anyone, they'll tell me, no need to interrogate. Not that I mind answering questions as I also figure if anyone wants to know something, they'll ask; no need to admit to anything prematurely.

Suzette was more forthcoming. She'd drop tantalizing little tidbits into a conversation in an offhand way-like, "Hey, I used to have shoes like those but someone stole them while I was getting defibrillated. I swear, you gotta keep an eye on your stuff every minute in Mongolian emergency rooms." Anyone else, it would have been showing off; Suzette just knew how to take things in stride. I like that in a person.

The only time I ever saw her ruffled was on this one occasion. At the time, she was an office manager for a real estate agency and coming in regularly to the coffee bar. By day I made soy lattés and iced half-caff mochaccinos with a twist, and I studied computer engineering at night school. About 11 o'clock on a Tuesday morning, she showed up looking like a woman who'd just been caught in a high wind-rumpled, dreadlocks practically standing on end, eyes too wide and too bright, and a little out of breath.

I said, "Jeez, what happened?"

"I just quit my job," she said.

"Oh. Well." I knew this couldn't be what had her all freaked. "Are congratulations in order?"

She flicked a glance to my right and I knew The Great Dick Tater had to be giving me the stink-eye because I said something to a customer that wasn't What can I get for you today? The GDT took his assistant manager responsibilities very seriously.

"I don't know what's in order. Everything's out of order." She glanced to my right again; the GDT must have been wearing a face that could sour milk. Soy milk.

"What can I get you today?" I said cheerfully.

Suzette's mouth opened but nothing came out.

"One medium American filter, mellow blend of the day, room for cow," I announced, repeating her order from yesterday. I rattled off the price while I double-cupped it to go, staring the GDT down with my back. Suzette paid and dropped a few coins in the tip jar. All the baristas split the tip jar, something you should keep in mind if you like your overpriced coffee without extras like employee saliva. Suzette was top of the no-spit list (posted conspicuously in the locker room, along with security camera photos to prevent episodes of mistaken identity), a policy that even the GDT respected.

Transaction done, Suzette went upstairs to sit. I gave it five minutes before announcing I was going on my break.

"Jeez, Pearl, what kept you?" Suzette said when I finally joined her.

That annoyed me; she knew damned well what the GDT was like. "Sorry," I said, taking off my apron and folding it up. "I couldn't just drop everything. Then I had to walk up the stairs because the teleporter's broken again."

Suzanne gave me a sharp look at that last.

"Kidding," I said; as she visibly unclenched, I added, "The teleporter's not really broken, I just needed the exercise."

Bam-she was white-knuckled all over her body again, which was a neat trick for someone with skin that dark. "Stop that," she growled. I felt a sudden seriously terrible pain in my upper arm; Suzette had me in a Death Grip of Doom.

"Ow." I thought I could hear bone start to crack within the pulp formerly known as my bicep. "What kind of day are you having?"

"Odd." Her grip loosened.

I pulled away fast before she changed her mind. "How odd?" I asked.

She took something out of her back pocket, unfolded it, put it on the table: a photograph. I winced; folding photographs goes against my personal code of fussy conduct. I'm no tight-ass-I'll tear the tags off pillows, jaywalk, even wear white after Labor Day. But fold a photograph? It's practically a physical pain.

"Look at that." Suzette tapped her finger on it hard. I winced again because touching the surface of a glossy-finish photograph is another of my fussy things.

"What is it?" I said.

"Rolling Stones, late 1960s."

"Really?" I almost forgot how fussy I was. It was an outdoor venue in sort of jungle-ish surroundings and the vantage point was onstage, far to the right. Only Keith Richards and Mick Jagger are in the photo. Keith Richards was still pretty rather than craggy, with the wide-eyed look of someone whose reality is exceeding his dreams, not the sneer of an old-timer who's seen it all. Mick Jagger was singing and pointing at a bunch of screaming girls. One had hoisted herself up on the others and seemed about to climb onto the stage in the hope of touching His Satanic Majesty.

"Where'd you get this?" I said. If it hadn't been for the folding and the fingerprints, the photo could have been taken the day before rather than forty-odd years ago. Heavy on the odd.

"My boss's desk," she said.

I was stunned. Suzette never stole from anyone, no matter how much they might have deserved it.

"He showed it around this morning. Said his uncle took the picture when he was a stringer for some music magazine back in the day."

I looked from the photo to her and back again, frowning. "And that made you, uh… kleptomaniacal?"

She tapped the photo hard again, her finger on the faces of the screaming girls. "See this woman? That's my Aunt Lillian. And the one trying to climb up on the stage?" She moved the photo so it was directly under one of the bright ceiling lights and pointed. "That's my mother."

"Are you sure?" I tried not to laugh and failed.

Suzette tossed her dreads, offended. "What, you think I don't know my own mother when I see her?"

"OK, so it's your mother. Why does that upset you?"

"Dammit, you're not looking!"

"Jeez, just tell me already." I drew back a little. "And then let me know if my head's still there or did you bite the whole thing off."

"Sorry," she said and managed to look it for all of a second. "But that's not my mother back in the day. That's her now."

"Oh?" I picked the photo up and angled it under the light. None of the people with her were very young. They were really cutting loose and that made them seem youthful but they hadn't been girls for some time.

"Or rather, it's how she would look now," she added.

I frowned, not understanding.

"She died when I was sixteen."

"Oh," I said. "Well, then, it can't be her."

"It is."

"OK, have it your way. It's her. Photoshopped. Do you know when your boss met your aunt? And did you know they were such tasteless practical jokers?"

Suzette grimaced impatiently. "I tried calling my Aunt Lillian. Some guy answered, said he's her house-sitter while she's on vacation. She's been gone two weeks and he's not sure exactly when she's coming back."

"Did he say where she went?"

Suzette's dark eyes seem to get even darker. "Where this picture was taken." Tap-tap-tap with her finger again. " Madagascar."

A tiger does not proclaim its tigritude. It pounces.

– Wole Soyinka

Sub-Saharan Africa 's first Nobel Laureate

Of course you notice the blind girl.

After you've packed up the merchandise table and started clearing the stage, she lingers, beached with small white hands wrapping the edges of her little café table like bits of seaweed dried there. She clings to scarred black wood as if something might sweep her adrift and drown her.

The crowd breaks and washes around her, flowing toward the door. The wrist loop of her white cane pokes over the back of her chair like a maritime signal flag, in case you somehow missed the opacity of her face-wrapping black shades in the near-dark of the club. And still she remains, a Calypso on her tiny island, while you coil patch cables and slide your warm mahogany fiddle into its case, while the café staff lift chairs onto tables and bring the house lights up glaringly bright, until you start to wonder if whoever she's waiting for is coming to assist her.

The tall redheaded bartender polishes glasses, her apron tossed over the Sam Adams Boston Lager draft handle. Up in the crude timber-built mezzanine, institutional stoneware makes flat clicking sounds and sticky food smells as someone piles it into a washtub. Your sweat's turned cold with the stage lights off, and your flat shoes reek of spilled beer. You're just packing the fiddle pickup into its hand-cut foam when you see Little Eddie the house manager (little to keep him straight from Big Eddie the redheaded bartender) come through the kitchen doors and notice the blind girl.

He starts forward, turning sideways to miss skinny dreadlocked Clara as she pauses with the washtub full of plates, but you set the pickup on the closed fiddle case and hop off the riser so you can get to the girl first. Nobody needs Little Eddie at the end of a bad night. You've had enough bad nights here to know.

He sees you coming and lets his steps go purposeless, turning to stack the glasses on the worst table in the joint-behind the pillar, next to the kitchen-so he can keep a hairy eyeball on you. You come over to the blind girl's table, careful to make some noise, and stop four feet from her.

"Miss, do you need some help?"

She doesn't lift her chin to seek your voice, which makes you think she's been blind since birth. She does tilt her head, however, a vertical crease appearing on her brow.

"You're the singer," she says. She sounds like the cold outside has gotten into her sinuses, her voice rough as if its nap caught on a sandpaper throat. "Has everyone gone home, then? I like to wait for the crowds to clear."

When she lets go of the table-edge, you can imagine you hear her flesh peel free of the wood. It wobbles as she releases it, rocking back and forth on crooked coaster feet for a moment before settling down with a little list to the left. House left. Her left. Your right.

"Everybody's gone," you say. "We're closing up. Do you have somebody to help you get home?"

"Oh," she says, "I can manage."

She's plain, with bland colorless hair to go with the transparent skin, but even stuffy and hoarse, her voice lifts the fine hairs on your nape like a breath.

Dubiously, you glance at the light jacket draping her chair, the summerweight, girl-cut t-shirt stretched over her bony shoulders. Even more dubiously, you glance at the door. Each time it opens, the cold washes into the café. Each time, it takes two seconds for the cold to cross the open floor and curdle on your skin.

Of course, she can't read your body language. So you clear your throat and say, "You know it's January out there."

"I know my way home." As if to prove her point, she stands and gathers her red-tipped cane and jacket. She starts working her way into the latter one sleeve at a time, but the cane gets in her way. You'd offer to take it, but there's no way to catch her eye.

"Sure," you say. "But I can drop you. I'm parked out back."

"You want me to get into a car with a stranger?"

You laugh. "What's going to happen?"

"Sometimes serial killers have women who find victims for them," she says, and you'd think she was totally sincere if the corner of her mouth wasn't turning upward just a little.

"You can call home before we leave and tell them I'm bringing you. And everybody here will see us leave together."

She's on the hook, but it's not set yet. She chews the inside of her cheek.

"I'll even warm the car up before I bring it around," you promise, and just like that she says, "Okay."

She moves toward you, cane swinging, and you stand aside. She taps expertly towards the door. You follow her from the music hall, thinking that it's weird that after all that she didn't give you a chance to go and fetch the car. She's still going to have to wait while you load your gear.

Señora?" The man standing at my screen door is travel-stained. Migrant, up from Mexico. The dogs haven't heard him come up but now they erupt in a frenzy of barking to make up for their oversight. I am sitting at the kitchen table, painting a doll, waiting for the timer to tell me to get doll parts curing in the oven in the workshed.

" Hudson, Abby!" I shout, but they don't pay any attention.

The man steps back. "Do you have work? I can, the weeds," he gestures. He is short-legged, long from waist to shoulder. He's probably headed for the Great Lakes area, the place in the U.S. with the best supply of fresh water and the most need of farm labor.

Behind him is my back plot, with the garden running up to the privacy fence. The sky is just starting to pink up with dawn. At this time of year I do a lot of my work before dawn and late in the evening, when it's not hot. That's probably when he has been traveling, too.

I show him the cistern, and set him to weeding. I show him where he can plug in his phone to recharge it. I have internet radio on, Elvis Presley died forty-five years ago today and they're playing "(You're So Square) Baby I Don't Care." I go inside and get him some bean soup.

Hobos used to mark code to tell other hobos where to stop and where to keep going. Teeth to signify a mean dog. A triangle with hands meant that the homeowner had a gun and might use it. A cat meant a nice lady. Today the men use websites and bulletin boards that they follow, when they can, with cheap smartphones. Somewhere I'm on a site as a "nice lady" or whatever they say today. The railroad runs east of here and it's sometimes a last spot where trains slow down before they get to the big yard in Belen. Men come up the Rio Grande hoping to hop the train.

I don't like it. I was happy to give someone a meal when I felt anonymous. Handing a bowl of soup to someone who may not have eaten for a few days was an easy way to feel good about myself. That didn't mean I wanted to open a migrant restaurant. I live by myself. Being an economic refugee doesn't make people kind and good and I feel as if having my place on some website makes me vulnerable. The dogs may bark like fools, but Hudson is some cross between Border collie and golden retriever, and Abby is mostly black Lab. They are sweet mutts, not good protection dogs, and it doesn't take a genius to figure that out.

I wake at night sometimes now, thinking someone is in my house. Abby sleeps on the other side of the bed, and Hudson sleeps on the floor. Where I live it is brutally dark at night, unless there's a moon-no one wastes power on lights at night. My house is small, two bedrooms, a kitchen and a family room. I lean over and shake Hudson on the floor, wake him up. "Who's here?" I whisper. Abby sits up, but neither of them hear anything. They pad down the hall with me into the dark front room and I peer through the window into the shadowy back lot. I wait for them to bark.

Many a night, I don't go back to sleep.

But the man at my door this morning weeds my garden, and accepts my bowl of soup and some flour tortillas. He thanks me gravely. He picks up his phone, charging off my system, and shows me a photo of a woman and a child. "My wife and baby," he says. I nod. I don't particularly want to know about his wife and baby but I can't be rude.

I finish assembling the doll I am working on. I've painted her, assembled all the parts and hand rooted all her hair. She is rather cuter than I like. Customers can mix and match parts off of my website-this face with the eye color of their choice, hands curled one way or another. A mix and match doll costs about what the migrant will make in two weeks. A few customers want custom dolls and send images to match. Add a zero to the cost.

I am dressing the doll when Abby leaps up, happily roo-rooing. I start, standing, and drop the doll dangling in my hand by one unshod foot.

It hits the floor head first with a thump and the man gasps in horror.

"It's a doll," I say.

I don't know if he understands, but he realizes. He covers his mouth with his hand and laughs, nervous.

I scoop the doll off the floor. I make reborns. Dolls that look like newborn infants. The point is to make them look almost, but not quite real. People prefer them a little cuter, a little more perfect than the real thing. I like them best when there is something a little strange, a little off about them. I like them as ugly as most actual newborns, with some aspect that suggests ontology recapitulating phylogeny; that a developing fetus starts as a single celled organism, and then develops to look like a tiny fish, before passing in stages into its final animal shape. The old theory of ontology recapitulating phylogeny, that the development of the human embryo follows the evolutionary path, is false, of course. But I prefer that my babies remind us that we are really animals. That they be ancient and a little grotesque. Tiny changelings in our house.

I am equally pleased to think of Thanksgiving turkeys as a kind of dinosaur gracing a holiday table. It is probably why I live alone.

"Que bonita," he says. How beautiful.

"Gracias," I say. He has brought me the empty bowl. I take it, and send him on his way.

His sword's grip was polished blood coral, its branches perfect doubles for the aorta. They fed into a guard that was a thin silver crown, beyond which lay the blade (the heart); slightly curved with the inscription of a spell in a language no one could read. He was a devotee of the art of the cut, and when he wielded this weapon, the blade exactly parallel to the direction of motion, the blood groove caught the breeze and whistled like a bird of night. He'd learned his art from a hermit in the mountains where he'd practiced on human cadavers.

That sword had a history before it fell to Ismet Toler. How it came to him, he swore he would never tell. Legend had it that the blade belonged first to the ancient hero who'd beheaded the Gorgon: a creature whose gaze turned men to smooth marble. After he'd slain her, he punctured her eyeballs with the tip of his blade and then bathed the cutting edge in their ichor. The character of the weapon seized the magic of the Gorgon's stare and, ever after, if a victim's flesh was sliced or punctured to any extent where blood was drawn, that unlucky soul would be turned instantly to coral.

The statuary of Toler's skill could be found throughout the realm. Three hardened headless bodies lay atop the Lowbry Hill, and on the slopes three hardened heads. A woman crouching at the entrance to the Funeral Gardens. A score of soldiers at the center of the market at Camiar. A child missing an arm, twisting away with fear forever, resting perfectly on one heel, in the southeastern corner of the Summer Square. All deepest red and gleaming with reflection. There were those who believed that only insanity could account for the vast battlefields of coral warriors frozen in the kill, but none was brave enough to speak it.

The Valator of Camiar once said of The Coral Heart, "He serves the good because it is a minority, leaving the majority to slay in the name of Truth." The Valator is now, himself, red coral, his head cleaved like a roasted sausage. Ismet dispatched evil with dedication and stunning haste. It was said that the fate of the sword was tied to that of the world. When enough of its victims had been turned to coral, their accumulated weight would affect the spin of the planet and it would fly out of orbit into darkness.

There are countless stories about The Coral Heart, and nearly all of them are the same story. Tales about a man who shares a name and a spirit with his weapon. They're always filled with fallen ranks of coral men. Some he kicks and shatters in the mêlée. There is always betrayal and treachery. A few of these stories involve the hermit master with whom he'd studied. Most all of them mention his servant, Garone, a tulpa or thought-form creation physically coalesced from his focused imagination. The descriptions of killing in these classical tales are painstaking and brutal, encrusted with predictable glory.

There are a handful of stories about The Coral Heart, though, that do not end on a battlefield. You don't hear them often. Most find the exploits of the weapon more enchanting than those of the man. Your average citizen enjoys a tale of slaughter. You, though, if I'm not mistaken, understand as well the deadly nature of the human heart and would rather decipher the swordsman's dreams than the magic spell engraved upon his blade.

And so… in the last days of summer, in The Year of the Thistle, after transforming the army of the Igridots, upon the dunes of Weilawan, into a petrified forest, Ismet Toler wandered north in search of nothing more than a cold day. He rode upon Nod, his red steed of a rare archaic stock-toes instead of hooves and short, spiral horns, jutting out from either side of its forelock. Walking beside Toler, appearing and disappearing like the moon behind wind-driven clouds, was Garone, his tulpa. The servant, when visible, drifted along, hands clasped at his waist, slightly hunched, the hood of his brown robe always obscuring any definitive view of his face. You might catch a glimpse of one of his yellow eyes, but never both at once.

As they followed a trail that wound beneath giant trees, leaves falling everywhere, Toler pulled the reins on Nod and was still. "Was that a breeze, Garone?"

The tulpa disappeared but was as quickly back. "I believe so," he said in a whisper only his master could hear.

Another, more perceptible gust came down the trail and washed over them. Toler sighed as it passed. "I'm weary of turning men to coral," he said.

"I hadn't noticed," said Garone.

The Coral Heart smiled and nodded slightly.

"Up ahead in these yellow woods, we will find a palace and you will fall in love," said the servant.

"There are times I wish you wouldn't tell me what you know."

"There are times I wish I didn't know it. If you command me to reveal my face to you, I will disappear forever."

"No," said Toler, "not yet. That day will come, though. I promise you."

"Perhaps sooner rather than later, master."

"Perhaps not," said Toler and nudged his mount in the ribs. Again moving along the trail, the swordsman recalled the frozen expressions of his victims at Weilawan, each countenance set with the same look of terrible surprise.

In late afternoon, the travelers came to a fork in the trail, and Garone said, "We must take the right-hand path to reach that palace."

"What lies to the left?" asked Toler.

"Tribulation and certain death," said the servant.

"To the right," said the swordsman. "You may rest now, Garone."

Garone became a rippling flame, clear as water, and then disappeared.

As twilight set in, Toler caught sight of two towers silhouetted against the orange sky. He coaxed Nod into a gallop, hoping to arrive at the palace gates before nightfall. As he flew from the forest and across barren fields, the cool of the coming night refreshing him, he thought, "I have never been in love." Every time he tried to picture the face of one of his amorous conquests, what came before him instead were the faces of his victims.

He arrived just as the palace guards were about to lift the moat bridge. The four men saw him approaching and drew their weapons.

"An appeal for lodging for the night," called Toler from a safe distance.

"Who are you?" one of the men shouted.

"A traveler," said the swordsman.

"Your name, fool," said the same man.

"Ismet Toler."

There was a moment of silence, and then a different one of the guards said, in a far less demanding tone, "The Coral Heart?"

"Yes."

The guard who had spoken harshly fell to his knees and begged forgiveness. Two others sheathed their swords and came forward to help the gentleman from his horse. The fourth ran ahead into the palace, announcing to all he passed that The Coral Heart was at the gate.

Toler dismounted and one of the men took Nod's reigns. The swordsman approached the guard who knelt on the ground, and said, "I'll not be killing anyone tonight. I'm too weary. We'll see what tomorrow brings." The man rose up, and then the three guards, with Toler's help, turned the huge wooden wheel that lifted the moat bridge.

Inside, the guards dispersed and left Toler standing at the head of a hall with vaulted ceiling, all fashioned from blue limestone. People came and went quietly, keeping their distance but stealing glances. Eventually, he was approached by a very old man, diminutive of stature, with the snout and mottled skin of a toad. When the little fellow spoke, he croaked, "A pleasure, sir," and offered his wet hand as a sign of welcome.

Toler took it with a shiver. "And you are?" he asked.

"Councilor Greppen. Follow me." The stranger led on down the vast hall, padding along at a weary pace on bare, flat feet. The slap of his soles echoed into the distance.

"May I ask what manner of creature you are?" said Toler.

"A man, of course," said the Councilor. "And you?"

"A man."

"No, no, from what I hear you are Death's own Angel and will one day turn the world to coral."

"What kind of Councilor can you be if you believe everything you hear?" said Toler.

Greppen puffed out his cheeks and laughed; a shrewd, wet sound. He shuffled toward the left and turned at another long hall, a line of magnificent fountains running down its center. "The Hall of Tears," he croaked and they passed through glistening mist.

As Toler followed from hall to hall, he gradually adopted the old man's pace. The journey was long, but Time suddenly had no bearing. The swordsman studied the people who passed, noticed the placement of the guard, marveled at the colors of the fish in the fountains, the birds that flew overhead, the distant glass ceiling through which the full moon stared in. As if suddenly awakened, he came to at the touch of the Councilor's damp hand on his arm.

"We have arrived," said Greppen.

Toler looked around. He was on a balcony that jutted off the side of the palace. The stars were bright and there was a cold breeze, just the kind he'd wished for when heading north from Weilawan. He took a seat on a simple divan near the edge of the balcony, and listened as Greppen's footfalls grew faint. He closed his eyes and wondered if this was his lodging for the night. The seat was wonderfully comfortable and he leaned back into it.

A moment passed, perhaps an hour, he wasn't sure, before he opened his eyes. When he did, he was surprised to see something floating toward the balcony. It was no bird. He blinked and it became clear in the resplendent starlight. It was a woman, dressed in fine golden robes, seated in a wooden chair, like a throne, floating toward him out of the night. When she reached the balcony and hovered above him, he stood to greet her.

"The Coral Heart," she said as her chair settled down across from the divan.

"You may be seated."

Toler bowed slightly before sitting.

"I am Lady Maltomass," she said.

The swordsman was intoxicated by the sudden scent of lemon blossoms, and then by the Lady's eyes-large and luminous. No matter how he scrutinized her gaze, he could not discern their color. At the corners of her lips there was the very slightest smile. Her light brown hair was braided and strung with beads of jade. There was a thin jade collar around her neck, and from there it was a quick descent to the path between her breasts and the intricately brocaded golden gown.

"Ismet Toler," he finally said.

"I grant you permission to stay this night in the palace," she said.

"Thank you," he said. There was an awkward pause and then he asked, "Who makes your furniture?"

She laughed. "The chair, yes. My father was a great scholar. By way of his research, he discovered it beneath the ruins of an Abbey at Cardeira-davu."

"I didn't think the religious dabbled in magic," said Toler.

"Who's to say it's not the work of God?"

The swordsman nodded. "And your Councilor, Greppen? Another miracle?"

"Noble Greppen," said the Lady.

"Pardon my saying, Lady Maltomass, but he appears green about the gills."

"There's no magic in it," she said. "His is a race of people who grew out of the swamp. They have a different history than we do, but the same humanity."

"And what is your story?" said Toler. " Are you magic or miracle?"

She smiled and looked away from him. "I'll ask the questions," she said. "Is that The Coral Heart at your side?"

"Yes," he said, and moved to draw the sword from its sheath.

"That won't be necessary," she said. "I see the coral from here."

"Most people prefer not to see the blade," he said.

"And pardon my asking, Ismet Toler, but how many have you slain with it?"

"Enough," he said.

"Is that a declaration of remorse?"

"Remorse was something I felt for the first thousand."

"You're a droll swordsman."

"Is that a compliment?" he asked.

"No," said Lady Maltomass. "I hear you have a tulpa."

"Yes, my man Garone."

To Toler's left, there was a disturbance in the air, which became a pillar of smoke that swirled and coalesced into the hooded servant.

"Garone, I present to you the Lady Maltomass," said Toler, and swept his arm in her direction. The tulpa bowed and then disappeared.

"Very interesting," she said.

"Not a flying chair, but I try," he said.

"Well, I also have a tulpa," said the Lady.

"No," said Toler.

"Mamresh," she said, and in an instant, there appeared, just to the right of the flying chair the presence of a woman. She was naked and powerfully built. A warrior, thought the swordsman. His only other impression, before she disappeared-the deep red color of her voluminous hair.

"You surprise me," he said to the Lady.

"If you'll stay tomorrow," she said, "I'll show you something I think you'll be interested in. Meet me among the willows in the garden after noon.

"I'm already there," he said.

She smiled as the chair rose slowly above the balcony. It turned in midair and then floated out past the railing. "Good night, Ismet Toler," she called over her shoulder.

As the chair disappeared into the dark, Greppen approached. He led the swordsman to a spacious room near the balcony. The Councilor said nothing but lit a number of candles and then called goodnight as he pushed the door closed behind him.

Toler undressed, weary from travel and the aftereffects of the drug that was Lady Maltomass. He lay down with a sigh, and then summoned his servant. The tulpa appeared at the foot of the bed.

"Garone, while the palace is sleeping I want you to search around and see what you can discover about the Lady. A mysterious woman. I want to know everything about her. Take caution, though, she also has a tulpa." Then he wrapped his right hand around the sheath of The Coral Heart, clasped the grip with his left and fell asleep to a dream of kissing Lady Maltomass beneath the willows.

Toler arrived early to the gardens the following day. The entrance led through a long grape arbor thick with vine and dangling fruit. This opened into an enormous area sectioned into symmetrical plots of ground, and, in each, stretching off into the distance, beds of colorful flowers and pungent herbs. Their aromas mixed in the atmosphere and the scent confused him for a brief time. Everywhere around him were bees and butterflies and members of Greppen's strange race, weeding, watering, fertilizing. The swordsman asked one where the willows were, and the toad man pointed down a narrow path into the far distance.

It was past noon when he arrived amid the stand of willows next to a pond with a fountain at its center. He discovered an ancient stone bench, partially green with mold, and sat upon it, peering through the mesh of whiplike branches at sunlight glistening on the water. There was a cool breeze and orange birds darted about, quietly chirping.

"Garone," said Toler, and his servant appeared before him. "What have you to report about the Lady?"

"I paced through every inch of the palace, down all its ostentatious halls, and found not a scrap of a secret about her. In the middle of the night I found her personal chambers, but could not enter. I couldn't pass through the walls nor even get close to them."

"Is there a spell around her?" asked the swordsman.

"Not a spell; it's her tulpa, Mamresh. She's too powerful for me. She's blocking me with her will from approaching the Lady's rooms. I summoned all my strength and exerted myself and she merely laughed at me."

Toler was about to speak, but just then heard his name being called from deeper in amidst the willows. Garone disappeared and the swordsman rose and set off in the direction of the voice. Brushing the tentacles of the trees aside, he pushed his way forward until coming upon a small clearing. At its center sat Lady Maltomass in her flying chair. Facing her was another of the ancient stone benches.

"I heard someone speaking off in the distance, and knew it must be you," she said. He walked over and sat down across from her.

"I hope you slept well," said the Lady.

"Indeed," said Toler. "I dreamt of you."

"In your dream, did I tell you I don't like foolishness?"

"Perhaps," he said, "but the only part of it I witnessed was when we kissed."

She shook her head. "Here's what I wanted to show you," she said, lifting a small book that appeared to be covered with a square of Greppen 's flesh.

"Is the cover made of toad?" he asked, leaning forward to get a better look at it.

"Not precisely," she said, "but it's not the cover I wanted to show you. She opened the book to a page inside, and then turned the volume around and handed it to him. "What do you see there?" She pointed at the left-hand page.

There was a design that was immediately familiar to him. He sat back away from her and drew his sword. Bringing the blade level with his eyes, he studied the design of the inscribed spell. He then looked back to the book. Three times he went from blade to book and back before she finally said, "I'll wager they are identical."

"How did you come upon this?" asked Toler, returning his sword to its sheath. "The blade has never left my side since it came to me."

"No, but the weapon is old, and it has passed through many men's hands. In fact, there was a people who had possession of it, two centuries past, who deemed it too dangerous to be at large in the world. They didn't destroy it but studied it. One of the things they were interested in was the spell. For all of their effort, though, they were only able to decipher two words of it. There might be as many as ten words in that madly looping script. My father, digging in the peat bogs north of the Gentious quarry, hauled two clay tablets out of a quivering hole in the ground. Those heavy ancient pages contained reference to the sword, to its legend, and the design of the blade's script. Also included was the translation of the two words."

"What were they?" he asked, wrapping his fingers again around the grip of the weapon.

"My father worked with what was given on the tablet and deciphered three more of the spell's words."

"What were they?"

"The words he was certain of were-Thanry, Meltmoss, Stilthery, Quasum, and Pik."

"All common herbs," said Toler

She nodded. "He believed that all the words constituted a kind of medicine, that if prepared and inserted into one of your victim's coral mouths, it would reverse the sword's power and return them to flesh. The blade's damage could, of course, have been a death blow, in which case there would be no chance of returning them to life, but those who succumbed to only a nick, a scratch, a cut would again be flesh and bone and draw breath."

"I've often wondered about the inscription," he said. "Your father was a wise man."

"I'm giving you the book," she said. "When I heard you'd turned up at the gate, I remembered my father telling me about his discoveries. The book should belong to the man who carries the weapon. I have no use for it."

"Why would the blade hold an antidote to the sword's effects, and yet be written in a language no one can understand?" asked Toler.

"That fact suggests a dozen possible motives, but I suppose the real one will remain a mystery." She held the book out toward him. As he leaned forward to take it from her, she also leaned forward, and as his fingers closed on the book, her lips met his. She kissed him eagerly, her mouth open. They parted and he moved closer to the edge of the stone bench. He put his hands on her shoulders and gently drew her toward him.

"Wait, is that Greppen, spying?" she said, bringing her arms up between them. Toler drew his sword as he stood and spun around, brandishing it in a defensive maneuver. He saw no sign of Greppen, heard no movement among the willow branches. What he heard instead was the laughter of Lady Maltomass. When he turned back to her, she was gone. He looked up to see the chair rising into the blue sky. As she floated away toward the tree line, he yelled, "When will I see you next?"

"Soon," she called back.

Two days passed without word from her, and in that time, all Toler could think of was their last meeting. He tried to stay busy within the walls of the palace, and the beauty of the place kept his attention for half a day, but, ultimately, in its ease and refinement, palace life seemed hollow to one who'd spent most of his life in combat.

On the evening of the second day, after dinner, he summoned Councilor Greppen, who was to see to his every need. They met in Toler's room, and the toad man had brought a bottle of brandy and two glasses. As he poured for himself and The Coral Heart, he said, "I can smell your frustration, Ismet Toler."

"You can, can you, Prince of Toads? Tell her I want to see her."

"She'll summon you when she's ready."

"She is in every way a perfect woman," said Toler, sipping his brandy.

"Perfection is in the eye of the beholder," said Greppen. "If you were to see my wife, considered quite a beauty among our people, you might not agree."

"I'm sure she's lovely," said the swordsman, "but I feel if I don't soon have a tryst with Lady Maltomass, I'm going to go mad and turn the world to coral."

Greppen laughed. "The beast with two backs? Your people are comical in their lust."

"I suppose," said Toler. "How do you do it? With a thought?" He sipped at the brandy.

"Very nearly," said Greppen, lifting the bottle to refill his companion's glass.

"Here's a question for you, Councilor," said Toler. "Does she ever leave the chair?"

"Only to go to bed," he said. "I would think of all people, you might understand best. She shares her spirit with it as you do The Coral Heart. She knows what the world looks like from above the clouds. She can fly."

Toler finished his second drink, and told Greppen he was turning in. On the way out the door the Councilor called back, "Patience." Once in bed, again he summoned Garone and sent him forth to discover any secrets he might. The swordsman then grasped the sheath and the grip and fell into a troubled sleep.

He tossed and turned, his desire for the Lady working its way into his dreams. Deep in the night, her face rose above the horizon bigger than the moon. He looked into her eyes to see if he could tell their color, but in them he saw instead the figures of Garone and Mamresh on the stone bench, beneath the willows, in the moonlight. His tulpa's robe was pulled up to his waist, and Mamresh sat upon his lap, facing away, her legs on either side of his. She was panting and moving quickly to and fro, and he was grunting. Then Garone tilted his head back and the hood began to slip off.

Toler woke suddenly to avoid seeing his servant's face. He was drenched in sweat and breathing heavily. I've got to get away from here," he said. Still, he stayed three more days. On the evening of the third day, he gave orders for the grooms to ready Nod for travel early in the morning. Before turning in, he went to the balcony and sat, staring out at the stars. "Garone, you were right," he said aloud. "I've fallen in love, but tribulation and certain death might have been preferable." He dozed off.

A few minutes later, he awoke to the sound of Greppen's footfalls receding into the distance. He sat up, and as he did he discovered a pale yellow envelope in his lap. For The Coral Heart was inscribed across the front. The back was affixed with wax, bearing, what he assumed, was the official seal of the House of Maltomass, ornate lettering surrounding the image of an owl with a snake writhing in its beak. He tore it open and read, "Come now to my chambers. Your Lady."

He sprang off the divan and summoned Garone to lead him. They moved quickly through the halls, the tulpa skimming along above the blue limestone floors like a ghost. In the Hall of Tears, they came upon a staircase and climbed up four flights. At the top of those steps was a sitting room, at the back of which was a large wooden door, opened only a sliver. Toler instructed Garone to stand guard and to alert him if anyone approached. He carefully opened the door and entered into a dark room that led into a hall at the end of which he saw a light. He put his left hand around the grip of the sword and proceeded.

Before reaching the lighted chamber he smelled the vague scent of orange oil and cinnamon. As he stepped out of the darkness of the hall, the first thing that caught his attention was Lady Maltomass, sitting up, supported by large silk pillows, in her canopied bed. The coverlet was drawn up to her stomach and she was naked. The sight of her breasts halted his advance.

"Come to practice your swordsmanship?" she said.

He swallowed hard and tried to say, "At your service."

She laughed at his consternation. "Come closer," she said, her voice softer now, "and dispense with those clothes."

He undressed before her, quickly removing every article of clothing. When he stood naked before her, though, he still had on his belt and the sheathed sword.

"One sword is useful here, the other not," she said.

"I never take it off," he said.

"Hurry now. Put it right here on my night table."

He reluctantly removed the sword. Then he sat on the edge of the bed and put his arms around her. They kissed more passionately than they had in the clearing. He ran his fingers through her hair as she clasped her hands behind his back and kissed his chest. He moved his hands down to her breasts and she reached for his prick. When their ardor was well inflamed, she pulled away from him, and then slowly leaning forward, whispered in his ear, "Do you want me?"

"Yes," he said.

"Then, come in," she said and, grabbing the corner of the blanket, threw it back for him.

For a moment, Ismet Toler wore the same look of terrible surprise fixed forever on the faces of his victims, for Lady Maltomass, was, from the waist down, blood coral. He glimpsed the frozen crease between her legs and cried out.

Garone appeared suddenly at his side, shouting, "Treachery." Toler turned toward his servant just as Mamresh, bearing a smile, appeared and pulled back the hood of his tulpa's robe. The swordsman glimpsed his own face with yellow eyes in the instant before the thought form went out like a candle. He buckled inside from the sudden loss of Garone. Then, from out of the dark, he was punched in the face.

Toler came to on the floor, gasping as if he'd been under water. Greppen was there, helping him off the floor. Once Toler had regained his footing and clarity, he turned back to the bed.

"Imagine," said Lady Maltomass, "your organ of desire transformed into a fossil."

Toler was speechless.

"Some years ago, my father took me to the market at Camiar. He'd been working on the translation of the spell upon your sword, and he'd heard that you frequented a seller there who dispensed drams of liquor. He wanted to present you with what he'd discovered from the ancients about the sword's script. Just as we arrived at the market, a fight broke out between five swordsmen and yourself. You defeated them, but in the melee you struck a young woman with an errant thrust and she was turned to coral."

"Impossible!" he shouted.

"You're an arrogant fool, Ismet Toler. The young woman was me. My father brought me back here a statue, and prepared the five herbs from his research into an elixir. He poured it down my hard throat, and because it was made of only half the ingredients of the cure, only half of me returned."

Greppen tapped Toler upon the hip and, when the swordsman looked down, handed him The Coral Heart.

"Now you face my tulpa," said the Lady.

Toler heard Mamresh approaching and drew the sword, dropping the sheath upon the bed. He ducked and sidled across the floor, the weapon constantly moving. He turned suddenly and was struck twice in the face and once in the chest. He stumbled, but didn't go down. She moved on him again, but this time he saw her vague outline and sliced at her torso. The blade passed right through her and she kicked him in the balls. He doubled over and went down again.

"Get up, snake," called Lady Maltomass from the bed.

"Please, rise, Ismet Toler," said Greppen, now standing before him.

He lifted himself off the floor and resumed a defensive crouch. He kept the blade in motion, but his hands were shaking. Mamresh attacked. Her hard knuckles seemed to be everywhere at once. No matter how many times Toler swung The Coral Heart, it made no difference.

After another pass, Mamresh had him staggered and reeling from side to side. Blood was running from his nose and mouth.

"I've just given her leave to beat you to death," said Lady Maltomass.

The vague outline of a muscled arm swept out of the air, and Toler slid beneath it, turned and made the most exquisite cut to the ghostly figure's spine. The blade didn't even slow in its arc.

She closed his left eye and splintered his shin with a kick. Toler was on the verge of panic when he saw Greppen standing in the corner, tiny fists raised in the air, urging Mamresh to the kill. The tulpa came from the left this time. The swordsman had learned the sound of her breathing. Before she could strike, he tucked his head in and rolled into the corner where Greppen stood. He could hear her right behind him.

He reached out with his free hand and grabbed the toad man by the ankle. Then, as Toler rose, he lifted the blade, and with unerring precision, gave a deft slice to the Councilor's neck. He turned quickly, and Greppen's blood sprayed forth in a great geyser. It washed over Mamresh, and she became visible to him as she threw a punch at his left eye. He moved gracefully to the side, tossing Greppen's now coral body at her. It passed through her face, briefly blocking her view of him. Toler calmly sought a spot where the blood revealed his assassin and then lunged, sending the blade there.

Mamresh gasped, and her visible face contorted in terror as she crackled into blood coral. He turned back to the bed, and the Lady was still. He now could ascertain the color of her eyes and they were a deep red. He'd made her mind coral in the act of defeating her tulpa. He dropped the sword and lay down beside her. Pulling her to him, he tried to kiss her, but her teeth were shut and a slow stream of drool issued from the corner of her mouth.

Toler discovered Nod gutted and decapitated in a heap upon the stable floor. After that, he spared no one, but worked his way down every hall and through the gardens, killing everything that moved. It was after midnight when he left the palace in the flying chair and disappeared into the western mountains.

People wondered what had happened to The Coral Heart. Some said he'd died of frostbite, some, of fever. Others believed he'd finally been careless and turned himself into a statue. Seven long years passed and the violence of the world had been diminished by half. Then, in the winter of The Year of Ice, a post rider galloped into Camiar and told the people that he'd seen a half-dozen bandits turned to coral on the road from Totenhas.

It began, as these things often do, at a bar-a long dark piece of mahogany along one wall of Seattle 's Queen City Grill polished by age and more than a few chins. The music was winding down. Richard and Cody (whose real name was Candice, though no one she had met since high school knew it) lived on different coasts, but tonight was the third time this year they had been drinking together. Cody was staring at the shadows gathering in the corners of the bar and trying not to think about her impersonal hotel room. She thought instead about the fact that in the last six months she had seen Richard more often than some of her friends in San Francisco, and that she would probably see him yet again in a few weeks when their respective companies bid on the Atlanta contract.

She said, "You ever wonder what it would be like to have, you know, a normal job where you get up on Monday and drive to work, and do the same thing Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday, every week, except when you take a vacation?"

"You forgot Friday."

"What?" They had started on mojitos, escalated through James Bonds, and were now on a tequila-shooter-with-draft-chaser glide path.

"I said, you forgot Friday. Monday, Tuesday-"

"Right," Cody said. "Right. Too many fucking details. But did you ever wonder? About a normal life?" An actual life, in one city, with actual friends.

Richard was silent long enough for Cody to lever herself around on the bar stool and look at him. He was playing with his empty glass. "I just took a job," he said. "A no-travel job."

"Ah, shit." She remembered how they met, just after the first dotcom crash, at a graduate conference on synergies of bio-mechanics and expert decision-making software architecture or some such crap, which didn't really make sense if you stopped to consider that he started out in cognitive psychology and she in applied mathematics. But computers were the alien glue that made all kinds of odd limbs stick together and work in ways never intended by nature. Like Frankenstein's monster, he had said when she mentioned it, and she had bought him a drink, because he got it. They ran into each other at a similar conference two months later, then again at some industry junket not long after they'd both joined social media startups. The pattern repeated itself, until, by the time they were both pitching venture capitalists at trade shows, they managed to get past the required cool, the distancing irony, and began to email each other beforehand to arrange dinners, drinks, tickets to the game. They were young, good-looking, and very, very smart. Even better, they had absolutely no romantic interest in each other.

Now when they met it was while traveling as representatives of their credit-starved companies to make increasingly desperate pitches to industry-leading Goliaths on why they needed the nimble expertise of hungry Davids.

Cody hadn't told Richard that lately her pitches had been more about why the Goliaths might find it cost-effective to absorb the getting-desperate David she worked for, along with all its innovative, motivated, bootstrapping employees whose stock options and 401(k)s were now worthless. But going back to the groves of academe was really admitting failure.

She sighed. "Where?"

" Chapel Hill. And it's not… Well, okay, it is sort of an academic job, but not really."

"Uh huh."

"No, really. It's with a new company, a joint venture between Wishtle.net and the University of North -"

"See."

"Just let me finish." Richard could get very didactic when he'd been drinking. "Think Google Labs, or Xerox PARC, but wackier. Lots of money to play with, lots of smart grad students to do what I tell them, lots of blue sky research, not just irritating Vice Presidents saying I've got six months to get the software on the market even if it is garbage."

"I hear you on that." Except that Vince, Cody's COO, had told her that if she landed the Atlanta contract she would be made a VP herself.

"It's cool stuff, Cody. All those things we've talked about in the last six, seven years? The cognitive patterning and behavior mod, the modulated resonance imaging software, the intuitive learning algorithms-"

"Yeah, yeah."

"-they want me to work on that. They want me to define new areas of interest. Very cool stuff."

Cody just shook her head. Cool. Cool didn't remember to feed the fish when you were out of town, again.

"Starts next month," he said.

Cody felt very tired. "You won't be in Atlanta."

"Nope."

" Atlanta in August. On my own. Jesus."

"On your own? Think of all those pretty girls in skimpy summer clothes."

The muscles in Cody's eyebrows felt tight. She rubbed them. "It's Boone I'm not looking forward to. And his sleazy strip club games."

"He's the customer."

"Your sympathy's killing me."

He shrugged. "I thought that lap-dancing hooker thing was your wet dream."

Her head ached. Now he was going to bring up Dallas.

"That's what you told us in-now where the hell was that?"

" Dallas." Might as well get it over with.

"You were really into it. Are you blushing?"

"No." Three years ago she had been twenty-eight with four million dollars in stock options and the belief that coding cowboy colleagues were her friends. Ha. And now probably half the geeks in the South had heard about her most intimate fantasy. Including Boone.

She swallowed the last of her tequila. Oily, ugly stuff once it got tepid. She picked up her jacket.

"I'm out of here. Unless you have any handy hints about landing that contract without playing Boone's slimeball games? Didn't think so." She pushed her shot glass away and stood.

"That Atlanta meeting's when? Eight, nine weeks?"

"About that." She dropped two twenties on the bar.

"I maybe could help."

"With Boone? Right." But Richard's usually cherubic face was quite stern.

He fished his phone from his pocket and put it on the bar. He said, "Just trust me for a minute," and tapped the screen. The memo icon winked red. "Whatever happens, I promise no one will ever hear what goes on this recording except you."

Cody slung on her jacket. "Cue ominous music."

"It's more an, um, an ethics thing."

"Jesus, Richard. You're such a drama queen." But she caught the bartender's eye, pointed to their glasses, and sat.

"I did my Atlanta research too," he said. "Like you, I'm pretty sure what will happen after you've made your presentations to Boone."

"The Golden Key," she said, nodding. Everyone said so. The sun rises, the government taxes, Boone listens to bids and takes everyone to the Golden Key.

"-but what I need to know from you is whether or not, to win this contract, you can authorize out-of-pocket expenses in the high five figures."

She snorted. "Five figures against a possible eight? What do you think?"

He pointed at the phone.

"Fine. Yes. I can approve that kind of expense."

He smiled, a very un-Richard-like sliding of muscle and bone, like a python disarticulating its jaw to swallow a pig. Cody nearly stood up, but the moment passed.

"You'll also have to authorize me to access your medical records," he said.

She had no idea where she was going. When she needed to sleep she stopped at the first motel; when the Buick's gas gauge dropped into the red zone she filled the tank, and sometimes bought a sandwich or orange juice at the attached convenience store. Now and then during one of these stops she spoke with someone who was neither a desk clerk nor a gas-station attendant, but she forgot all such conversations within minutes, as she forgot everything but the words of the young policeman who had come to her door on a pleasant Wednesday afternoon, weeks and worlds ago. Nothing had moved in her since that point except the memory of his shakily sympathetic voice, telling her that her husband and daughter were dead: ashes in a smoking, twisted, unrecognizable ruin, because, six blocks from their home, a drowsy adolescent had mistaken his accelerator for his brake pedal.

There had been a funeral-she was present, but not there-and more police, and some lawyer; and Alan's sister managing it all, as always, and for once she was truly grateful to the interfering bitch. But that was all far away too, both the gratitude and the old detestation, made nothing by the momentary droop of a boy's eyelids. The nothing got her snugly through the days after the funeral, dealing with each of the endless phone calls, sitting down to answer every condolence card and e-mail, informing Social Security and CREF of Alan's death, going with three of his graduate students to clean out his office, and attending the memorial on campus, which was very tasteful and genuinely moving, or so the nothing was told. She was glad to hear it.

The nothing served her well until the day Alan's daughter by his first marriage came to collect a few of his possessions as keepsakes. She was a perfectly nice girl, who had always been properly courteous in an interloper's presence, and her sympathy was undoubtedly as real as good manners could make it; but when she had gone, bearing a single brown paper grocery bag of photographs and books, the nothing stepped aside for the meltdown.

Her brother-in-law calmed her, spoke rationally, soothed her out of genuine kindness and concern. But that same night, speaking to no one, empty and methodical, she had watched herself pack a small suitcase and carry it out to Alan's big old Buick in the garage, then go back into the house to leave her cell phone and charger on Alan's desk, along with a four-word note for her sister-in-law that read Out for a drive. After that she had backed the Buick into the street and headed away without another look at the house where she used to live, once upon a time.

The only reason she went north was that the first freeway on-ramp she came to pointed her in that direction. After that she did not drive straight through, because there was no through to aim for. With no destination but away, without any conscious plan except to keep moving, she left and returned to the flat ribbon of the interstate at random intervals, sometimes wandering side roads and backroads for hours, detouring to nowhere. Aimless, mindless, not even much aware of pain-that too having become part of the nothing-she slogged onward. She fell asleep quickly when she stopped, but never for long, and was usually on her way in darkness, often with the moon still high. Now and then she whistled thinly between her teeth.

The weather was warm, though there was still snow in some of the higher passes she traversed. Although she had started near the coast, that was several states ago: now only the mountains were constant. The Buick fled lightly over them, gulping fuel with abandon but cornering like a deer, very nearly operating and guiding itself. This was necessary, since only a part of her was behind the wheel; the rest was away with Alan, watching their daughter building a sandcastle, prowling a bookshop with him, reaching for his hand on a strange street, knowing without turning her head that it would be there. At times she was so busy talking to him that she was slow to switch on the headlights, even long after sunset. But the car took care of her, as she knew it would. It was Alan's car, after all.

From time to time the Buick would show a disposition to wander toward the right shoulder of the road, or drift left into the oncoming lane, and she would observe the tendency with vague, detached interest. Once she asked aloud, "Is this what you want? I'm leaving it to you-are you taking me to Alan?" But somehow, whether under her guidance or its own, the old car always righted itself, and they went on together.

The latest road began to descend, and then to flatten out into farm and orchard country, passing the occasional township, most of them overgrown crossroads. She had driven for much of the previous night, and all of today, and knew with one distant part of herself that it would soon be necessary to stop. In early twilight, less than an hour later, she came to the next town. There was a river winding through it, gray and silver in the dusk, with bridges.

Parking and registering at the first motel with a Vacancy sign, she walked three blocks to the closest restaurant, which, from the street, looked like a bar with a 1950s-style diner attached. Inside, however, it proved larger than she had expected, with slightly less than half of the booths and tables occupied. Directly to the left of the Please Wait To Be Served sign hung a poster showing a photograph of a lean, hawk-nosed man in late middle age, with white hair and thick eyebrows, wearing evening dress: tailcoat, black bowtie, top hat. He was smiling slightly and fanning a deck of playing cards between long, neat fingers. There was no name under the picture; the caption read only DINNER MAGIC. She looked at it until the young waitress came to show her to her booth.

After ordering her meal-the first she had actually sat down to since leaving home-she asked the waitress about Dinner Magic. Her own voice sounded strange in her ears, and language itself came hard and hesitantly. The girl shrugged. "He's not fulltime-just comes in now and then, does a couple of nights and gone again. Started a couple of weeks ago. Haven't exchanged two words with him. Other than my boss, I don't know anybody who has."

Turning away toward the kitchen, she added over her shoulder, "He's good, though. Stay for the show, if you can."

In fact, the Dinner Magic performance began before most of the current customers had finished eating. There was no stage, no musical flourish or formal introduction: the man in evening dress simply walked out from the kitchen onto the floor, bowed briefly to the diners, then tossed a gauzy multicolored scarf into the air. He seized it again as it fluttered down, then held it up in front of himself, hiding him from silk hat to patent-leather shoes…

… and vanished, leaving his audience too stunned to respond. The applause began a moment later, when he strolled in through the restaurant's front door.

Facing the audience once more, the magician spoke for the first time. His voice was deep and clear, with a certain engaging roughness in the lower range. "Ladies, gentlemen, Dinner Magic means exactly what it sounds like. You are not required to pay attention to me for a moment, you are free to concentrate on your coffee and pie-which is excellent, by the way, especially the lemon meringue-or on your companion, which I recommend even more than the meringue. Think of me, if you will, as the old man next door who stays up all night practicing his silly magic tricks. Because that, under this low-rent monkey suit, is exactly what I am. Now then."

He was tall, and older than the photograph had suggested-how old, she could not tell, but there were lines on his cheeks and under his angled eyes that must have been removed from the picture; the sort of thing she had seen Alan do on the computer. From her booth, she watched, chin on her fist, never taking her eyes from the man as he ran through a succession of tricks that bordered on the miraculous even as his associated patter never transcended a lounge act. Without elephants or tigers, without a spangled, long-legged assistant, he worked the room. Using his slim black wand like a fishing rod he reeled laughing diners out of their seats. Holding it lightly between his fingertips, like a conductor's baton or a single knitting needle, he caused the napkins at every table to lift off in a whispering storm of thin cotton, whirl wildly around the room, and then settle docilely back where they belonged. He identified several members of his audience by name, address, profession, marital status, and, as an afterthought, by driver's license state and number. She was never one of these; indeed, the magician seemed to be consciously avoiding eye contact with her altogether. Nevertheless, she was more intrigued-more awakened-than she had meant to let herself be, and she ordered a second cup of coffee and sat quite still where she was.

Finishing at last with an offhanded gesture, a bit like an old-fashioned jump shot, which set all the silverware on all the tables chiming applause, the magician walked off without bowing, as abruptly as he had entered. The waitress brought her check, but she remained in her booth even after the busboy cleared away her dishes. Many of the other diners lingered as she did, chattering and marveling and calling for encores. But the man did not return.

The street was dark, and the restaurant no more than a quarter full, when she finally recollected both herself and her journey, and stepped out into the warm, humid night. For a moment she could not call to mind where she had parked her car; then she remembered the motel and started in that direction. She felt strangely refreshed, and was seriously considering the prospect of giving up her room and beginning to drive again. But after walking several blocks she decided that she must have somehow gone in the wrong direction, for there was no motel sign in sight, nor any landmark casually noted on her way to the restaurant. She turned and turned again, making tentative casts this way and that, even starting back the way she had come, but nothing looked at all familiar.

Puzzlement had given way to unease when she saw the magician ahead of her, under a corner streetlamp. There was no mistaking him, despite his having changed from evening clothes into ordinary dress. His leanness gave him the air of a shadow, rather than a man: a shadow with lined cheeks and long bright eyes. As she approached, he spoke her name. He said, "I have been waiting for you." He spoke more slowly than he had when performing, with a tinge of an accent that she had not noticed.

Anxiety fled on the instant, replaced by a curious stillness, as when Alan's car began to drift peacefully toward the guardrail or the shoulder and the trees. She said, "How do you know me? How did you know all about those other people?"

"I know nearly everything about nearly everyone. That's the curse of my position. But you I know better than most."

She stared at him. "I don't know you."

"Nevertheless, we have met before," the magician said. "Twice, actually, which I confess is somewhat unusual. The second time was long ago. You were quite small."

"That's ridiculous." She was surprised by the faint touch of scorn in her voice, barely there yet still sharp. "That doesn't make any sense."

"I suppose not. Since I know how the trick's done, and you don't, I'm afraid I have you at a disadvantage." He put one long finger to his lips and pursed them, considering, before he started again. "Let's try it as a riddle. I am not entirely what I appear, being old as time, vast as space, and endless as the future. My nature is known to all, but typically misunderstood. And I meet everyone and everything alive at least once. Indeed, the encounter is entirely unavoidable. Who am I?"

She felt a sudden twist in the nothing, and knew it for anger. "Show's over. I'm not eating dinner anymore."

The magician smiled and shook his head very slightly. "You are lost, yes?"

"My motel's lost, I'm not. I must have taken a wrong turn."

"I know the way," the magician said. "I will guide you."

Gracefully and courteously, he offered his arm, but she took a step backward. His smile widened as he let the arm fall to his side. "Come," he said, and turned without looking to see whether she followed. She caught up quickly, not touching the hand he left open, within easy reach.

"You say we've met before. Where?" she asked.

"The second time was in New York City. Central Park," the magician said. "There was a birthday party for your cousin Matthew."

She stopped walking. "Okay. I don't know who you are, or how you knew I grew up in New York City and have a cousin named Matthew. But you just blew it, Sherlock. When we were kids I hated stupid, nasty Matthew, and I absolutely never went to any of his birthday parties. My parents tried to make me, once, but I put up such a fuss they backed down. So you're wrong."

The magician reached down abruptly, and she felt a swift, cool whisper in her hair. He held up a small silver figure of a horse and asked with mock severity, "What are you doing, keeping a horse up in there? You shouldn't have a horse if you don't have a stable for it."

She froze for an instant, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, and then clutched at the silver horse as greedily as any child. "That's mine! Where did you get it?"

"I gave it to you." The magician's voice sounded as impossibly distant as her childhood, long gone on another coast.

And then came his command: "Remember."

The serfs and peasants of Castrwick said a star had fallen from Heaven. Or an angel. The night had gone bright as an instant of noon. The thunder of it left the church bells chiming as if they'd been struck. A plague-blinded baby regained her sight by being bathed in that divine light, so they said.

Now, only a light rain fell, dotting the heather with silver. A dozen local men, their caps in their hands, stood around the three nobles who had come from Westford Keep: Dafyd's mother, the newly widowed Dowager Duchess; his childhood friend Rosmund Colp, fourth son of Lord Andigent and now family priest of Westford; and Dafyd himself, once the youngest son of Westford, and now by grace of God its Duke.

"It might be miraculous," Rosmund said.

The wound in the land gaped wider than a man's height and three times as long. The stone itself rested on a rough pallet of cut saplings.

"Of course it is," Dafyd's mother said. "It fell from Heaven as a sign from God."

Rosmund looked at his knees, his wide brow taking on the furrows they always did when the Duchess started declaiming upon the Divine.

Dafyd dropped to the ground and walked closer. The village men, once his father's property and now his own, stepped aside to let him pass. Their gazes never rose above his knee and none of them spoke, but something in the way they held themselves crackled with excitement. Dafyd had seen boys no more than ten stand the same way just before a children's melee, but these were men. Gray-haired, some of them. It struck him again that he was the youngest person present.

Black as soot, the stone was shapeless as a blighted apple. The word of God made stone: twisted, diseased, ambiguous.

"It's good iron, that," one of the men behind him said.

Dafyd turned to him. A broad-shouldered man, missing his lower teeth, his hands were knobbed with muscle and his arms were both wider than the young man's thigh. He could have broken Dafyd over his knee like a twig, but instead he blushed under his gaze and looked ashamed for having spoken. Dafyd tried to recall the man's name. Herdlick, he thought. Or that might have been the smith at the next village on. His father would have known.

"If you please, sir," he said toward Dafyd's feet.

"We shall have a new blade forged," the Duchess said. Her eyes were bright as candles. "A new blade for a new age."

The subtle sound came, barely audible over the tapping of raindrops, of a dozen men taking in a breath at once. Nothing, Dafyd thought, suited his mother as well as theater, and the weight of her drama settled across his shoulders like a yoke. Anger crawled up his throat, and he spoke more sharply than he intended to.

"There isn't time. We leave for court in a fortnight."

"It will be done, my lord," the smith who might have been Herdlick said. His face was round as the moon and as bright. "I ain't a swordsmith by trade. That was Ableson, and him plague-took. But I know as much as anyone in the Duchy and, by my honor, my lord, if I have to kill myself and both my 'prentices doing it, it'll be in your hand when that day comes."

That day. The words nipped Dafyd's belly like bad meat.

"It is the will of God," his mother said. Dafyd stepped back to his horse, heaved himself up into the saddle, and pulled her head back toward the path more roughly than she deserved. He felt an instant stab of regret.

Rosmund and his slow nag caught up with Dafyd before the first turning. They rode for half a mile in silence. The rain grew harder, the low gray sky more nearly the color of steel.

"I'm not sure running off helps," Rosmund said.

"I'm not running," Dafyd said. "And a fat lot of good you were."

"What did you want me to say? That stones fall from the sky all the time?"

"You could have said that being odd doesn't make something holy. Or that it was an omen that I shouldn't be king," Dafyd said. "The best you could offer was it might be miraculous?"

"Well, it might."

"Or?"

Rosmund shrugged. The rain had plastered his hair to his skull. He looked like a drowned cat.

"Or it might not," he said. "But that's not the question. Is it?"

Alright, it isn't much of a dragon. I never said it was. More a lizard kind of thing. But if you lay down on your side and squint at it, you can see it's a dragon, as long as you're careful not to get too close.

Yeah-that's too close. Don't say I didn't warn you. That flame may be tiny but, like a match tip, it can really burn. I've got an ointment right here. Johnson's 470. I've tried others, but they all barely touch the pain. You should have seen what happened when I used the stuff in my kit. What a flare. Oh right. I do go on sometimes. Here it is. Just rub it in quickly. You'll hardly feel a thing by this afternoon.

You know, if I believed Jonathan Swift about the Lilliputians, I'd say that this is a dragon who could have terrorized them. Or the little people who stayed on the island in Mistress Masham's Repose. They'd surely have run screaming from it. Or it could have been the harrower of the Borrowers. Yeah-say that ten times fast. But those were in books, for God's sake. Not real. Not even faction. My girlfriend, Dana, the sometimes editor, who used to go to this college, did you ever meet her? Dana Woodbridge. Though of course being an English lit major, she probably never took a science course. Oh the point? Sure. I was getting to that. You know, Emily Dickinson wrote "Success in circuit lies." Dana likes to quote that when we have our long discussions. Well, about faction, Dana told me that it's truth crossed with fiction. You know-made-up memoirs and that sort of thing. It's hot now she says.

Well, not as hot as dragon's breath, whatever the size. And mustache hairs, when they singe, smell godawful. As you've just found out.

I suppose I could have stamped on it when I first saw it. The dragon, not the mustache hairs I mean. Hard to stamp on them without hurting someone. Hahahahahaha. Oh, sorry. That's my sense of humor. Dana doesn't think I'm good at it either. But I'm working on it. But if I'd stamped on it at once… the dragon, not… Right you got that. I'll move on.

Well, if I had, I'd have gotten rid of the problem in a second. I mean, it wasn't a lizard and couldn't scurry away. It could fly a bit, but I think that whole flying dragon stuff was made up by people who didn't know a thing about flight muscles, and lift and birds having hollow bones. By a bit I mean it had the floating ability of a hot-air balloon, except with nothing to use as ballast or to throw overboard when it wanted to descend. It just stopped holding its hot breath, blew it out, and down it came.

Yeah, well, I wouldn't believe me either. And not because I have a reputation as a jokester. That was in high school. College, I'm all serious student. Geology major, anthropology minor. It's how I came upon the little dragon, on a geology field trip to the Mideast last summer.

Be specific? Right. I was in Egypt. But not the Egypt you think of now, all web cafes and big German cars. What? You don't think of big German cars? You haven't been to Cairo lately then. Well, not the Egypt you think of either. The Great Pyramids have been dug up so many times they're more gaping hole than grave marker now. No, I was in real ancient Egypt, exploring caves that were old before the first stone was placed at Giza.

I was deep underground, spelunking alone through a narrow tunnel. I love that word. Spelunking. Spelunking. Spelunking… oh, sorry. I didn't mind the tight fit, though the rest of the crew thought I was crazy to go off on my own. But you know me, sir, always the loner. Except with Dana of course, though being a loner is different than being alone. Dana showed me that. Oh right, that has nothing to do with what I'm trying to tell you, but she got that from one of the romance novels she was editing and it really struck me. She quotes me stuff all the time, broadens me a lot. Did I mention that she does freelance…?

Right. The tunnel.

The tunnel had just opened up into a sizeable chamber when the battery in my headlamp died. Let me tell you, you don't know darkness until you've experienced underground darkness. Your eyes don't adjust. Your mind either. You spend more than a few minutes in darkness that total, you're liable to turn into a gibbering idiot. Well, yes, but I had a touch of that before. Hahahaha. Oh sorry, sense of humor. None. I'll tell Dana. I bet she'll find that one funny.

That's why I always carry a spare battery for my light. But before I could get the battery changed-I'd practiced the maneuver in the spelunking class at the Y a dozen times or more because Thorough is my middle name. Well, actually it's Hyatt, but you get the picture. No, not those Hyatts, otherwise I would probably have majored in restaurant management and never found the little dragon. Oh, the point? Right. Sometimes I do wander a bit. I saw the tiny gout of flame that your mustache has so recently become acquainted with. It was plenty obvious in the blackness, but I can't say for sure if I would have noticed it if my light hadn't gone out at that exact moment. I find that's often the way with Great Discoveries.

Yes, this is my first and only Great Discovery, so perhaps I am being premature in saying that. But I bet if you ask other Great Discoverers about their Great Discoveries, they'd say they were just in the right place at the right time. As opposed to the right place but the wrong time. Or the wrong place at the wrong time. I wonder if there's a right time to be in the wrong place?

No matter. I scooped him up and headed for the surface. A number of specimen bags got burned before I figured out that if you wrapped him up tight and covered his head he'd go right to sleep. Must be some bat or bird DNA in him somewhere. They do that don't they? Anyway, that's a study for some other grad student, biology probably, or anthropology-though that's the study of man so maybe not. Either way, I'll want my name on the paper, too. You've taught me well, sir.

And lucky for me, despite how metallic those scales look, they aren't metal at all and so didn't set off the metal detector at the airport. His bones, being hollow, didn't ring any bells either. Must have looked like a painting or something to the x-ray machine. I was all ready for the questions, ready to be taken aside at customs, too, declaring the dragon a museum delivery. Had the papers and all. It's not so hard to fake those, you know. I got mine from a little man who was as brown and wrinkled as a walnut and I found him in Khan el-Khalili in Cairo, that's the big market. Oh right, you'd know that one well.

Well, his name was Achmed. The man, not the market of course. No last names. We were careful about that. I told him to call me Joe. Still, we'd better just keep that between us, sir. Don't want to get Achmed in trouble. But I needed those papers. I didn't know whether the Egyptian government would consider him their property under the Antiquities Act. The dragon, I mean, not Achmed. I certainly considered him mine. The dragon that is. And I was bringing him home. You know, that's why Dana is the editor and not me. I prefer fiery dragons to pesky pronouns. No ointment for those. Hahahaha.

And of course I had to take the big chance bringing the dragon back. I mean-if I told my tale without this key bit of sulfurous proof, I knew no one would believe me. Especially not you, Dr. Puccini. And I'm real sorry about your mustache, but I did warn you. Really I did. You just had to get down so close to him. I didn't realize you were that nearsighted or I would have brought along a magnifying glass. Though a magnificent glass would have been more to the point. Yes, another joke. Well, maybe a little funny?

Now, to the business of my paper. You see, I can get down to the point when I have to. "The Mesopotamian Dragon: Fictions and Facts, A Transatlantic Case Study" and the D you gave me. You wrote in that green pen with the archaic flourishes: "We deal in truth in this class, or as near as we can come to it, Mr. Darnton, and not creatures out of myth."

I expect you understand your myth-stake now, sir. Hahahahaha. But seriously, my grade?

In April after the death of his wife-her death coming only weeks after the death of his son-Marie-Lucien stopped going out of his apartment. It had been his habit to go out every morning to buy a newspaper, five bronze centimes for Le Petit Journal; but as he stopped caring to read about assassinations and political scandals, or anything else occurring in the world, so he stopped going out to buy the paper. Then he stopped going to the butcher, the tea shop, the fish market, the bakery. Every Wednesday and Saturday his landlord M. Queval brought a few groceries and sundries to him from lists he scribbled on scraps of old newsprint. He and M. Queval exchanged perhaps a dozen words while standing on the landing, words about frostbit spinach or the freshness of the fish, but otherwise Marie-Lucien saw no one, spoke to no one. Friends who came to the house went away after a few words passed through the cracked-open door, or perhaps without sight of him at all; and after the first weeks they stopped bothering to inquire of his well-being.

He had taken his pension from the service more than a year earlier, a pension barely sufficient to pay the rent and the groceries, and he had been working mornings for a trinket vendor in order to eke out a decent living for himself and his family. Now he stopped going out to work, which meant the matter of money would eventually become acute; but he ate very little, spent nothing on clothes, and the weather in April was warm enough to put off the question of coal. He slept in his clothes. In the morning he warmed up yesterday's bad coffee and drank it while looking out at the traffic in the street. Then he undressed slowly and performed the necessary morning ablutions, before dressing again in the same shabby clothes. Most of the hours of his days were spent turning over a deck of cards in slow games of Patience.

Late in May, after Marie-Lucien had spent the better part of two months alone with no expectation or wish for this to change, someone knocked at his door. He would not have bothered to answer, but the knocking became continuous and insistent and finally he felt forced to rise from his chair. The apartment directly below his, and just above M. Queval's street-side metal foundry, was occupied by an artist, a painter of poor reputation who people in the neighborhood said was either a clever joker or slightly mad, a precocious senile. It was this painter who now stood on the landing, wearing a tranquil expression as though he had not for the past many minutes been pounding vigorously on the door in a demand to be let in. He held in one arm a skeletal and filthy brown tabby, and announced matter-of-factly that the cat had followed him back from his morning walk through Montsouris Park, and that he could not take it into his own apartment because "as you know, there are the other cats." The two men had seldom met, seldom exchanged more than a remark about the weather as they passed each other going in or out of their apartments; and in the past two months they had not met or spoken at all. Now, as if they had already discussed the matter and reached some sort of agreement, he delivered the little tabby into Marie-Lucien's hands. "She is starving, you realize, and her stomach must first be calmed with tiny portions of oatmeal before she will be able to keep down cream and fish and begin to put on weight."

Marie-Lucien, who was startled out of words, managed only, "I cannot… " and the painter, who had already begun to descend the stairs, replied cheerfully without turning, "Oh my dear, none of us can."

Marie-Lucien put the cat on the floor of the landing and shut the door, but her continuous piteous crying was difficult to listen to. He finally opened the door again, but only to put out scraps of a lunch he had not eaten, which she ate and then immediately vomited. He was forced to boil up some oatmeal and feed it to her slowly until her starving stomach became calm. And of course by the time she began to put on weight from being fed little tidbits of fish and sips of cream, she had made herself at home in his apartment.

The arrival of the cat did little to change Marie-Lucien's habits. He continued to sleep in his clothes and to spend his days playing solitary card games. But now that his attention had been drawn to it, he frequently heard the voice of the painter rising up from the apartment below him, particularly at night, muttering to himself or perhaps speaking to his paintings; sometimes declaiming lines of poetry; sometimes singing badly or playing a few fragile notes on a violin, the refrains of humorous and nostalgic songs Marie-Lucien remembered from his own childhood and from the nursery days of his son. When the painter thumped heavily against the walls or the floor and woke him in the night, he complained aloud to the cat: "Do you hear him? The damn painter? He is stumbling drunk again." Presumably these sounds had been coming up through the floor during the entire year the painter had lived in the apartment below, and Marie-Lucien had simply been oblivious of them until now-preoccupied with watching over the illness and death of his son, and then his wife.

In June, after a string of unreasonably cold and rainy days, there was again a banging on the door and the painter held out a squat black dog whose wiry coat was muddy and matted. "Abused and abandoned," he said, with a brief, commiserating smile.

"I cannot," Marie-Lucien said, and shut the door.

The painter began beating on the jamb, calling and repeating "M. Pichon, M. Pichon."

Finally Marie-Lucien opened the door again. "I am not M. Pichon," he said unhappily. "Please go and find this man Pichon, give him the dog and leave me alone."

The painter shook his head, still smiling. "Ha ha, I am famous, among other things, for getting wrong the names even of my friends." He bowed slightly. "M. Guyard, I apologize." This was not Marie-Lucien's name any more than Pichon, but it seemed pointless to say so. "He likes tomatoes," the painter said, "and chicken," and for a confused moment Marie-Lucien thought he was speaking of Pichon, or Guyard; but then the painter placed the dog in his arms and turned for the stairs.

Hurriedly Marie-Lucien started after him, holding out the animal, which smelled of mud and oak leaves and the sewer. "This is impossible!" he protested. "M. Rousseau, take him back." He intended to sound strict and authoritative but he had been speechless for so long that his voice came out hoarse and thin; and even to his own ears, his urgent insistence that he could not keep the dog seemed as querulous as an old woman's whining. He was forced to trail the painter down the stairs, calling out ridiculously that he could not afford chicken even for himself, and as he followed the painter right into his apartment, repeating again his refusal to keep the dog, he was startled to find himself suddenly in a jungle-huge umbels, fans, rockets, cascades of intense greens, spangled with the enormous cups and corollas of unimaginably bright magenta and yellow flowers.

"Oh!" he said, and staggered back.

They were paintings, of course, many of them quite large paintings, standing along all the walls of the rooms, and Marie-Lucien blushed and straightened up when he realized it. In fact, they were not even very good paintings, having no more than a child's sense of perspective, and drawn entirely without shadow or relief. The tiger, which had seemed so ready to spring at Marie-Lucien from among the leaves, he now saw was flat and simple and unconvincing as a picture postcard. He frowned, and said the first thing that came into his mouth, which was, "The flowers are too large, I have never seen flowers in life this large."

"Haven't you?" the painter said, and gazed about at his own work, entirely unpersuaded.

Many of these jungle scenes were of death and dismemberment-jaguars and tigers and lions variously attacking Negroes, a white horse, a hunch-shouldered Indian buffalo. Yet there was something oddly innocent in all the expressions, as if the creatures were only playing at a game, and in a moment would scramble to their feet, laughing, their wounds nothing more than circus greasepaint. Now that Marie-Lucien had regained his composure, the feeling this summoned in him was odd as well: odd, that paintings of such violence and bloodshed conjured for him an ingenuous child's world, a world in which the lion lies down with the lamb.

After several moments the little black dog in his arms squirmed to be released, and woke him from the brief dream state he must have slipped into.

"M. Rousseau, I cannot keep this dog," he said hoarsely, unequivocally, and let the dog down onto the floor. The little thing immediately ran out the door and up the stairs, where his claws could be heard scrabbling across the floor of Marie-Lucien's apartment. This was followed shortly by the cat's yowl and then the dog's tortured yelp.

The painter laughed: "A dog is the emblem of fidelity," he said, as if pronouncing from a pulpit. Then he began rustling through cupboards, apparently in search of glasses or a bottle, for he said brightly, "We should first have a glass of wine," though he did not say what he meant by "first."

"I must… " Marie-Lucien tried to say, but Rousseau waved a hand and said, "All the more reason not to." He poured a few drops of vin blanc, the last from a dusty green bottle, into two paint-smeared cups and held out one of the cups to Marie-Lucien. "Santé!" he said, and downed the bit of wine in a single swallow. Marie-Lucien, because he could not readily think of a reason not to, drank his also. The wine was vinegary and tasted of the dust of the bottle; or perhaps there had been dust in the cups.

The painter then clapped him on the shoulder and began steering him from painting to painting in the two rooms of the apartment, declaiming before each one as if he were a docent in a museum. Not all of his work was of the jungle. There were a few commissioned portraits of children whose parents, Rousseau cheerfully admitted, had refused payment on grounds the painting did not resemble their child. Two were small portraits of the artist, painted not from mirrors but from "the image of my handsome self I carry in my own mind, ha ha!" One was a very strange painting of a man resembling Rousseau standing over an infant apparently abandoned beside a country road, though neither the child nor the man appeared the least frightened or disturbed by their circumstances. There were, as well, scenes from the Parisian countryside and the suburbs, and of Laval, where the artist had spent his childhood. In them, cows grazed in stiff profile, completely without perspective; roads ran between hedges and fences without any sense at all of a third dimension. It was evident to Marie-Lucien that Rousseau was a second-rate amateur; but at the same time he felt himself helplessly drawn into the world of the paintings, a world beyond everyday life, beyond time, a strange and dreamlike world in which childhood's careless days had deepened without abandoning their purity.

"The colors… " he said at one point, without any notion of how to finish the thought.

"Yes, yes. But it's my blacks that Gauguin admires: the perfection of my blacks."

Marie-Lucien did not for a moment consider the painter's boast to be true-Gauguin, after all, being a somewhat notorious artist-but he was more alert than most people to the color of hearse cloth, having recently watched the undertaker's mutes carry off first his only son and then his wife. Now that his attention had been brought to it, he became aware of the depth, the rich inkiness of the blacks in all the paintings; and he realized what it was he should have said about the colors: that their bold frankness must come from offsetting them with so much black.

When they finished their tour of the "Imaginary Museum," as Rousseau laughingly called it, Marie-Lucien went back up to his apartment where the black dog and striped cat had come to an uneasy détente; and he resumed his sequestered life, though the conditions were somewhat moderated from the need to bring a dog down to the street twice a day to relieve himself. He and the painter did not speak to each other again for more than a fortnight, or only on the handful of occasions when they passed on the front stoop as Marie-Lucien carried the dog out to the gutter. But one evening late in June Rousseau came to his door well after dark, banging on the jamb and calling out, "M. Bernier, M. Bernier." Then, as if they were old comrades, he took Marie-Lucien's arm and said, "Jardin des Plantes! Best seen at night, you know, leaning through the fence," and pulled him toward the stairs.

"I am not Bernier," Marie-Lucien said, but without expecting to accomplish anything by it.

"No, no, of course not, I have known Bernier for years and he is a vast pig of a man, lacking completely in charm, you are much superior in every way to Bernier." The painter spoke consolingly, as if Marie-Lucien had confided a terrible dissatisfaction with himself.

They walked along the streets in silence, Rousseau's arm looped through Marie-Lucien's. He was not an old man, the painter, not even as old as Marie-Lucien who was not yet seventy, but he strolled along at an old man's pace, limping slightly and facing straight ahead when he walked, turning his entire body on the frequent occasions when he paused to peer into shop windows with a concentrated frown. Marie-Lucien waited while the painter carried out these examinations, waited without interest but also without impatience. It had been three months since he had traveled farther than the sidewalk directly in front of M. Queval's foundry; he was astonished to find himself out and about so late at night, interested to find he was not afraid of the streets largely emptied of all but the unsavory and the wretched.

At the gates of the Botanical Gardens the painter clasped the iron bars with both hands and thrust his head as far into the closed park as his shoulders would permit. "Such a strange and mysterious world," he said very quietly. Marie-Lucien, standing behind him, peered into the darkness without seeing anything he considered strange or mysterious. But he became gradually aware that, away from street lamps as they were here, the trees and bushes were wrapped in fantastic black shadows. He pushed his own head between the iron bars and leaned into the fence; and after several moments he began to make out amongst the shrubbery the vivid yellow blossoms of a rose, magnified hugely against the blackness.

In the nights that followed, Marie-Lucien and the painter, after sharing a bowl of soup at one apartment or the other, shut the aggrieved cat and dog in the upstairs apartment and strolled through the Luxembourg Gardens and Montsouris Park and leaned into the fences of various private gardens. They explored not only the parks and woodlands and brushy clearings but traversed the bridges and aqueducts and watched the late-night goings-on at the quais and along the banks of the rivers and canals. They spoke little, which suited Marie-Lucien: he found Rousseau to be a strange sort, just as people had said, possibly a confidence trickster or a candid idiot. Once, while they were studying the statue of a lion in the darkness of the Luxembourg Gardens, the painter said matter-of-factly that the "other cats" he had spoken of, the ones that occupied his apartment, were in fact lions and jaguars and tigers that wandered in from the jungles to visit him at night and sit for their portraits. It was impossible to know if he was speaking figuratively, or if he was genuinely hallucinatory, or if he merely enjoyed playing the part of an eccentric artist. But Marie-Lucien, walking with him at night, looking into the dark corners of the city-coming suddenly upon the black statue of a lion in the midst of clipped hedges and graveled paths-often felt as he had when he had first walked into the painter's apartment and gazed on his strange canvases: a vivid awareness of how beautiful and dangerous the world was, both tender and cruel. And this was the closest he had come, since the deaths of his wife and his son, to discovering any sort of meaning in the world.

One night while they were standing on a viaduct watching the body of some sad unfortunate being fished out of the water, the painter said thoughtfully, "I have run into ghosts everywhere. One of them tormented me for more than a year when I was a customs inspector."

Marie-Lucien did not believe in ghosts. Belief in ghosts would have required him to believe in something beyond death, a world of the spirit. He had been, as a young man, at the battle of Sedan where thousands had died; and he had watched his wife and his son on their death beds; and he had never had the least inkling that any scrap or glimpse of the people he loved remained anywhere in the universe. He had come to the unshakable conclusion that death was unremitting and permanent; death, he believed, was death. He said to the painter, to turn him aside from his ghosts, "You were a douanier?"

Rousseau smiled modestly. "Nothing so grand. A mere inspector." But he was not put off the track. He said, "Whenever I was on duty this ghost would stand ten paces away, annoying me, poking fun." He turned to Marie-Lucien with a somewhat amused grimace. "Letting out smelly farts just to nauseate me."

Marie-Lucien smiled slightly.

"I shot at him, but a phantom apparently cannot die again. Whenever I tried to grab him, he vanished into the ground and reappeared somewhere else."

Marie-Lucien asked him uninterestedly-mere politeness-"Was he someone you knew? An old acquaintance?"

"Not at all. He was not haunting me, but the post, which was at the Gate of Arcueil. When I left that post, I never saw him again. I suppose something must have happened there, perhaps something in the way he was killed, that caused his soul to attach itself to the gate, or to the person guarding the gate."

At the muddy edge of the canal several men were now standing in the glare of gas lamps, surrounding the naked body of a young woman, a woman only recently dead, her body still lovely, unblemished, not sufflated, her long brown hair from this distance seeming to hang in a neat braid across one shoulder and breast. The painter's expression, looking down at the scene, slowly softened into satisfaction. "I don't like to read the big tabloids that talk a lot of politics, what I read is the Magasin Pittoresque." He laughed. "The more drowned bodies in the river the greater my reading pleasure."

Marie-Lucien was taken aback. "That's a terrible thing to say."

"Is it?" Rousseau said, in a tone of complete sincerity, and might have been about to turn to Marie-Lucien to collect his answer, but suddenly swept his hand and his glance skyward. "There goes that poor woman's soul," he said, with surprised delight.

Marie-Lucien looked quickly where Rousseau had pointed but saw only the full moon hanging low and white on the night sky, as perfectly round as if it had been drawn with a compass. "What?" he said in frustration. He did not at all believe the painter had seen a drowned soul flying up to heaven but couldn't help his question, or its meaning: Not, What did you say? but What did you see?

"Ah, such peace!" the painter said quietly, which he may have meant as an answer.

In the early part of August, Rousseau came to Marie-Lucien's door unexpectedly-it was morning, and Marie-Lucien was still drinking his terrible coffee, still wearing the rumpled clothes he had slept in. The painter took hold of his arm and said, "Le Ménagerie! Best seen at night when the animals are at their most alert, but unfortunately open only in the daylight. Ten centimes and you're in." Marie-Lucien attempted to refuse. It was one thing, their nightly strolls, the two not-quite-old men leaning into fences, peering at trees and flowering shrubs in dark public parks and private gardens; but the daylight hours he intended still to keep for his own use, which was not grieving, as his friends had supposed, but a prolonged, expectant waiting for his own death.

Rousseau, of course, would not be put off. He had a long-established morning practice of strolling through one or another of his favorite amusement parks, and he had made up his mind to share that pleasure with Marie-Lucien. Shortly, they were out on the lively daytime streets, and Rousseau, brisk with morning energy, led the way to the Zoological Gardens, where he spent a good long while studying a mangy lion rocking restlessly in a space too small to accommodate pacing; and kinkajou monkeys and gibbon apes quietly pining in their cages. None of this was of much interest to Marie-Lucien, or only insofar as to strengthen his old opinion that he lived in a brutal, godless universe. He stood back from the animal pens, shifting his weight lionlike in anxious boredom.

When finally they left the zoo, Rousseau insisted they must visit the Palmarium, and the Orangerie, as well; and inside those hothouses, Marie-Lucien felt as if he had slipped once again into a dream. Confronted with a spectacle of perpetual novelty-huge Paulownia trees, tropical palms, mango and pineapple trees, thick-stalked grasses taller than any man-he seemed to recognize everything, to rediscover it all in his memories. It struck him suddenly that the foliage under the translucent glass vault was the most exalted green he had ever seen outside Rousseau's jungle canvases, and when he said this to the painter-a bit of mild praise coming rather late in their acquaintance-Rousseau replied offhandedly, "I don't seek and invent, my dear, I only find and discover."

"Well then, it seems to me, you find and discover strangeness above all," Marie-Lucien said, which the painter took as true praise and which provoked in him a pleased laugh.

In the weeks that followed, because Marie-Lucien had little interest in visiting the Zoo or the Monkey Palace again, they confined their morning walks to the Orangerie, the Palmarium and the Botanical Gardens, which Rousseau said was not an inconvenience. The animals in the menagerie were, after all, not suitable studies for his art-always either reclining or sitting in a torpor-and his genuine models (his expression guileless as a child's) were the wild ones who visited him at night.

One morning as the two men walked back through the streets from le Jardin des Plantes to the apartments, the painter wrapped an arm about Marie-Lucien's shoulders and said, "Come into the studio, M. Bernal, see what strangeness I've been about in recent days. The woman has been posing for me, the woman we met on the quai."

Marie-Lucien had no recollection of meeting a woman on the quai, but this did not surprise him, as the painter had a practice of striking up conversation with virtually anybody they passed, even prostitutes and obvious villains; and Marie-Lucien the practice of not joining in. "I am not Bernal," he said mildly, but only from habit.

The painting Rousseau wished him to see was of a nude reclining on a Bordeaux-red chaise inexplicably set down in the midst of a jungle lush with impossibly huge Egyptian lotus blossoms. The work was far from completed-the foliage flourishing before the woman-but Marie-Lucien could already see that she was no one he recognized; or, given the painter's awkward draftsmanship, perhaps he would not have recognized her even if she had been someone he knew well. It was a very strange painting, of course, very much in line with the greater part of his work, and the sort of thing that caused Marie-Lucien to lose his foothold in the world: In the trees were exotic birds and monkeys, in the sky a perfectly round bone-white moon, in the foliage a glimpse of an elephant, as well as lurking lions and serpents; and oddest of all, a Negro snake charmer holding a musette to his lips. Even half-finished as it was, the painting gave an impression of stiff, stark peace, of Dantesque silence.

Marie-Lucien's wife had died slowly of consumption; for years before her death she had been unable to engage him in sexual congress, and it had been years since he had bothered to abuse himself. At the intersection of circumstance and advancing age, he had become celibate without taking a decision, and was somewhat interested in the fact that paintings and photographs of naked women no longer aroused him. In any case, this particular painting of a nude was not, to his eye, erotic. Her ankles were chastely crossed, her pubis neatly hidden behind the flesh of her thighs. One thick arm outstretched on the back of the chaise seemed in gesture toward the snake charmer or the lions, but whether this was to beckon or fend off, was difficult to know. She was dark-haired, dark-eyed, two twisted strands of her hair falling across one of her perfectly globular breasts. It seemed to Marie-Lucien that this was a woman not ashamed to be naked-not living in the world he knew, but in some universe absent the Biblical tale of sin.

"She is a Pole," the painter said, standing back in admiration of his own work. "A pious Polish girl, though I've drawn her as she is now, not pious at all but an innocent, an angel, restored to Genesis."

This was not quite what Marie-Lucien had been thinking, but near enough that he murmured, "Eve in Paradise."

The painter corrected him, in a tone of surprise, "Yadwigha, after death. Do you not recall how we watched her soul float up to the clouds?"

Marie-Lucien grappled through memory until he remembered the young woman lying dead on the bank of the canal, naked under the stares of half a dozen men. "It was only you who saw… " he began to say, but the painter was already going on, gesturing toward a Louis-Philippe sofa that was evidently the model for the chaise in his painting. "She has been posing for me here, every night. Her spirit has attached itself to me, which I suppose is due to my catching sight of her as she departed her body. Poor girl drowned herself out of grief."

Marie-Lucien said, smiling very faintly, "So not as pious as all that, if she killed herself. God condemns the suicide."

The painter brushed this away with a gesture. "God condemns no one, it's the priests who are always in a mood to condemn." He gazed at his painting in silence. "The girl had suffered greatly, her husband and child dead in an overturned taxi. How can we condemn her for finding this world unbearable? I should have found it unbearable myself, years ago, and ten times over, if I weren't a bit of a spiritist." He turned to Marie-Lucien with a smile. "Art is the confession of its maker. You shall have to look at my art, to know why sadness has not grabbed hold of me in its teeth."

It was Rousseau's nonchalance that offended Marie-Lucien, and caused him to remember suddenly a remark the painter had made, a remark about the pleasure he took from reading about drowned bodies hauled from the river. At the time, he had been distracted from it; but now, recalling the tone and the words, Marie-Lucien said bitterly, "What do you know of unbearable? of grief? of great suffering? When you have lost your wife and your son, as I have, then speak to me of unbearable."

The painter gave him a startled look. "Oh my dear M. Derain, I am sorry to hear of it. Sorry to hear of it. Your poor heart." He draped his arm across Marie-Lucien Derain's shoulders and drew him close.

But this was the beginning of the end of their friendship. Marie-Lucien took work soon afterward with a neighborhood pork butcher, and seldom found time to join Rousseau on his morning visits to the pleasure gardens. They carried on their evening explorations for a short while, but ended them after an argument: When Marie-Lucien objected to hearing another tale of ghosts, the painter said to him that people who had never dreamed when fully awake were loathe to admit the realness of dream; and Marie-Lucien took this badly. Afterward he merely nodded when he passed Rousseau going in or out of the apartments, and if the painter spoke to him, he replied in as few words as possible.

In January during a spell of cold, bright weather, Marie-Lucien began working very late helping the butcher render fat, and one night climbing the stairs after midnight carrying scraps of meat for the cat and the dog, he passed the painter's open door and saw a naked woman posing on the Louis-Phillipe sofa, her arm outstretched and beckoning, her pallid body clothed in moonlight. The woman, who may have heard his steps on the landing, turned to him a face not beautiful at all but transparent and luminous, lit from within; and then she resumed her pose, fixing her gaze perhaps on the moon that he could not see but which he imagined must be visible through the apartment window. Her expression in profile was difficult to interpret, her mouth seeming at the verge of amusement but her thick brows intent and straight. One long brown braid fell across her shoulder and one breast. The painter, too, turned and stood very poised and erect, one thumb pushed through the hold of his palette, his brush held down in the other hand. The look he gave Marie-Lucien was a questioning frown of expectancy and joy; but they did not speak, and Marie-Lucien continued up the stairs, his heart thudding. When he sat down inside his own apartment the animals came immediately into his lap, and he rested his trembling hands in their fur.

In March, Marie-Lucien heard from his landlord that the painter had hung a new canvas at the Société des Peintres Indépendants: a painting of a naked woman dreaming on a Louis-Phillipe couch. Word later went around the neighborhood that this new painting had brought Rousseau a flurry of minor attention, and the admiration even of other artists. When the pork butcher took his wife to the salon to view it, Marie-Lucien stayed behind and kept the shop open.

Often, during that winter, he heard the painter's voice in conversation with himself or with his paintings, and from time to time the voice of this or that visitor. Twice, Rousseau gave parties to which Marie-Lucien was invited, but which he did not attend, parties at which the host played his violin very badly, and Marie-Lucien heard rising up through the floor the sounds of people applauding and laughing at the same time.

After the second party, the painter knocked on Marie-Lucien's door to plead poverty and beg twenty-five francs. "I imagine if you had saved all the money spent on parties, you would not need to beg from your friends and acquaintances," Marie-Lucien said to him, after he had given over the twenty-five francs. He had not wished to be the man's friend or to be invited to his entertainments, so could not quite account for the sound of bitterness in these words. The painter was not at all taken aback. He kissed Marie-Lucien on both cheeks and said fondly, "My dear, you are like a brother to me," which Marie-Lucien felt to be a grandiose figure of speech.

In the months afterward, he seldom saw the painter. Once, through his window, he watched Rousseau limping up the street to the apartments, appearing so sickly and pale that Marie-Lucien was struck with a moment of remorse; but then, to M. Queval who was standing on the front stoop, the painter complained in an aggrieved voice that he "suffered greatly" from a phlegmon in his leg. These were the same words he had used, speaking of the drowned woman, the very words that had begun their estrangement-that she had "suffered greatly"-and when he heard them, Marie-Lucien turned away from the window.

In September he opened his newspaper and was startled to read that the painter had died. Le Petit Journal was famous for the brevity of its reporting, and spent only a few lines to say that the minor artist H. Rousseau had died of a blood clot after surgery to remove a gangrenous leg; and that he had belonged to the Société des Peintres Indépendants, where an artist paid twenty-five francs a year for the privilege of hanging his canvases.

It had been many months since Marie-Lucien had visited the Palmarium or the Orangerie. On the day of the painter's burial he walked through the hothouses slowly; and then went into the menagerie, which he and Rousseau had visited only once together. A jaguar trudged in circles, dazed and ill, in a narrow box where he bumped into all the corners; the lion reclined in a stupor. As Marie-Lucien was going out again, he turned to see if it was his friend he had glimpsed going in one of the other gates, though of course it was only an old man with a thick mustache, a sickly complexion, a slight limp.

He stopped at a newsstand to buy a copy of Le Soleil for the obituaries, and read as he was walking back to the apartments that Rousseau was "a painter without any of the notions required by art;" and that his friends had spoken of him as a man of generosity, credulity and good humor. His living relations were a daughter Julia, and granddaughter Jeanne; he had been preceded in death by two wives and six of his seven children. In the painter's last days, Le Soleil reported, he had become delirious: had spoken of seeing angels, and of hearing their celestial music.

When Marie-Lucien, climbing the stairs, passed the open door of the painter's apartment he saw a woman standing inside, a woman he remembered having seen twice before. She was gazing at a new, unfinished painting, standing before it as unclad as the figure in the painting, which was herself, Yadwigha. In the painting her dead body lay beside a stream, watched over by the wide eyes of lions and monkeys. In the painter's apartment, her ghost turned to Marie-Lucien with an expression innocent as a child's; a look of expectancy and of joy. In a moment a woman came out from the second room of the apartment, a women Marie-Lucien had never met nor heard the painter speak of, a woman in black crepe, the painter's daughter Julia. And in the unfinished painting, death's bright angel ascended through the impossibly blue sky.

Come see my band, he'd say, and they pretty much always did. – Europe, huh? she asked languidly. They were lying in her bed, which was where he liked to be after the show, after they'd seen the band. Good sex, and the comfort of warm skin, and just enough talking to make it real.

– R &B goes over big there. And they love Todd's chops: authentic African-American. They don't need to know he went to Buckley with us and played lacrosse.

– Buckley, huh? She named some friends she said had gone there, and he knew one or two, but not well. A lot of those kids had gone away to boarding school after ninth grade, while he stayed in Manhattan with his family.

– So do you like it there, in Europe?

He stretched. -It's OK.

– So do you, like, spend a lot of time in any one city?

She wanted to know if he had a girlfriend there. Already she was trying to figure out if he was serious material. Oops, time to go. He kissed her, and she tasted very sweet. -Just here, he said, and kissed her again. – New York is home.

New York was home, but in New York the band was no big deal. So they played in a few bars here, and they had dinner with their families, and escorted a friend's sister to a fundraiser for art or literacy or wildlife, depending, and maybe took a niece or a cousin's kid to see "Nutcracker." Then the band went on the road again, the road across the sea, where playing the chords in tight jeans was enough, knowing home was always back here, waiting for him to take his place. His family was here, colorful and stable, in the stone castle with big windows on the Park. A window would always be open for him to fly back through, no matter how big he got, or how long he was away.

He fell asleep as soon as he'd come, and she didn't wake him, which was nice of her. His eyes snapped open at first light. It was an old East Village apartment with leaky venetian blinds. He was pulling on his jeans when he heard her say, Jet lag? and when he turned around she was spread out like a kid on the playground being an airplane, sleepily purring a sort of phlegmy Vroom, vroom, so he fell back onto her and improvised something about, Be my jet plane, baby, ba-dum, ba-dum, Gonna make your engine scream, so together they achieved one of those moments of intimacy that promise either a relationship's worth of in-jokes, or guaranteed embarrassment next time you meet.

He took her phone number, but he doubted he'd be back.

Daniel Abraham was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, earned a biology degree from the University of New Mexico, and spent ten years working in tech support. He sold his first short story in 1996, and followed it with six novels, including fantasy series "The Long Price Quartet," Hunter's Run (an SF novel written with George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois), dark fantasy Unclean Spirits (as M. L. N. Hanover), and more than twenty short stories, including International Horror Guild Award-winner "Flat Diane" and Hugo and World Fantasy award nominee "The Cambist and Lord Iron: a Fairytale of Economics." His most recent book is The Price of Spring.

Peter S. Beagle was born in Manhattan on the same night that Billie Holiday was recording "Strange Fruit" and "I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues," just a few blocks away. Raised in the Bronx, Peter originally proclaimed he would be a writer when he was ten years old. Today he is acknowledged as an American fantasy icon, and to the delight of his millions of fans around the world is now publishing more than ever. He is the author of the beloved classic The Last Unicorn, as well as the novels A Fine and Private Place, The Innkeeper's Song, and Tamsin. He has won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Mythopoeic awards. His most recent book is collection We Never Talk about My Brother. Upcoming are new novels I'm Afraid You've Got Dragons and Summerlong, and new collection Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle.

Elizabeth Bear was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. She lives in Manchester, Connecticut, with a presumptuous cat, a giant ridiculous dog, the best roommate ever, and a selection of struggling houseplants. Her first short fiction appeared in 1996, and was followed after a nearly decade-long gap by fifteen novels, two short story collections, and more than fifty short stories. Her most recent books are novels Chill, By The Mountain Bound, and novella Bone & Jewel Creatures. Bear's "Jenny Casey" trilogy won the Locus Award for Best First Novel, and she won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2005. Her short story "Tideline" won the Hugo and Sturgeon awards, and her novelette "Shoggoths in Bloom" was a Hugo nominee.

Pat Cadigan was born in Schenectady, New York, and grew up in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. She studied at the University of Massachusetts and University of Kansas, edited small press magazines Shayol and Chacal, and published her first story in 1980. One of the most important writers of the cyberpunk movement, she is the author of sixteen books, including debut novel Mindplayers, which was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award, and Arthur C. Clarke Award-winners Synners and Fools, as well as two nonfiction movie books on the making of The Mummy and Lost in Space, five media tie-ins, and one young adult novel, Avatars. Her short fiction is collected in Locus Award-winner Patterns, Dirty Work, Home by the Sea, and Letters from Home. She currently lives in London with her husband, the Original Chris Fowler.

Paul Di Filippo sold his first story in 1977. Since then he's had several hundred short stories published, the majority of them collected in his dozen short story collections. He has written nine novels, including Fuzzy Dice and Spondulix. His most recent books are novel Roadside Bodhisattva, collection Harsh Oases, and short illustrated novel Cosmocopia. He is currently working, at last (!), on A Princess of the Linear Jungle, a sequel to his multiple award-nominated novella A Year in the Linear City. He lives in his native state, Rhode Island, amidst eldritch Lovecraftian surroundings, with his mate of thirty years, Deborah Newton, a chocolate cocker spaniel named Brownie, and a three-colored cat named Penny Century.

Jeffrey Ford was born in West Islip, New York. He worked as a machinist and as a clammer before studying English with John Gardner at the State University of New York. He is the author of seven novels, including The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, and The Shadow Year. His short fiction collections are The Fantasy Writer's Assistant and Other Stories, The Empire of Ice Cream, and The Drowned Life. His fiction has won the World Fantasy Award, Nebula, Edgar Allan Poe Award, Fountain Award, Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire, and the Shirley Jackson Award. Ford lives in southern New Jersey where he teaches writing and literature at Brookdale Community College.

Karen Joy Fowler was born in Bloomington, Indiana and attended the University of California at Berkeley between 1968 and 1972, graduating with a BA in Political Science, and then earning an MA at UC Davis in 1974. She published her first science fiction story, "Praxis," in 1985 and has won the Nebula Award for stories "What I Didn't See" and "Always." Her short fiction has been collected in Artificial Things and World Fantasy Award-winner Black Glass. Fowler is also the author of five novels, including debut Sarah Canary (described by critic John Clute as one of the finest First Contact novels ever written), Sister Noon, The Sweetheart Season, and Wit's End. She is probably best known, though, for her novel The Jane Austen Book Club, which was adapted into a successful film. She lives in Santa Cruz, California, with husband Hugh Sterling Fowler II. They have two grown children.

Molly Gloss was born in Portland, Oregon, and studied at Portland State College (now University). She worked as a schoolteacher and a correspondence clerk for a freight company before becoming a full-time writer in 1980. In 1981, she took a course in science fiction writing from Ursula K. Le Guin at Portland State University. Her first short story, "The Doe," was published that same year, and was followed by a dozen more, including Hugo and Nebula Award-nominee "Lambing Season." Her first novel Outside the Gates appeared in 1986, and was followed by The Jump-Off Creek, The Dazzle of Day, Wild Life, and The Hearts of Horses. Wild Life was a James Tiptree Jr. Award-winner. In addition, she has won the 1990 Ken Kesey Award for the Novel, the 1996 Whiting Writers Award, as well as the PEN Center West Fiction Prize. Gloss has also written book reviews, essays, an appreciation of Ursula K. Le Guin, and an introduction to the memoir of a woman homesteader. Molly Gloss lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest.

Nicola Griffith is a native of Yorkshire, England, where she earned her beer money teaching women's self-defense, fronting a band, and arm-wrestling in bars, before discovering writing and moving to the U.S. Her immigration case was a fight and ended up making new law: the State Department declared it to be "in the National Interest" for her to live and work in this country. This didn't thrill the more conservative powerbrokers, and she ended up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, where her case was used as an example of the country's declining moral standards.

In 1993 a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis slowed her down a bit, and she concentrated on writing. Her novels are Ammonite (1993), Slow River (1995), The Blue Place, (1998), Stay (2002), and Always (2007). She is the co-editor of the Bending the Landscape series of original short fiction published by Overlook. Her non-fiction has appeared in a variety of print and web journals, including Out, Nature, and The Huffington Post. Her awards include the Tiptree Award, the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Lambda Literary Award (six times). Her latest book is a memoir, And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner Notes to a Writer's Early Life. She lives in Seattle with her partner, writer Kelley Eskridge, and takes enormous delight in everything.

Caitlín R. Kiernan was born in Dublin, Ireland, but grew up in rural Alabama. She studied vertebrate paleontology, geology, and biology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the University of Colorado at Boulder. She then taught evolutionary biology in Birmingham for about a year. Her first short story, "Persephone," appeared in 1995. Since then, her fiction has been collected in nine volumes, including Tales of Pain and Wonder; To Charles Fort, With Love; Alabaster; and, most recently, A Is for Alien. Her stories include International Horror Guild Award-winners "Onion" and " La Peau Verte," SF novella The Dry Salvages, and IHG finalists "The Road of Pins" and "Bainbridge." Kiernan's first novel, IHG Award winner and Stoker finalist Silk, was followed by Threshold, The Five of Cups, Low Red Moon, Murder of Angels, and Daughter of Hounds. Upcoming is major new novel The Red Tree and short story collection The Ammonite Violin & Others. Kiernan now lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Ellen Klages was born in Columbus, Ohio, and attended the University of California at Berkeley, but left in her sophomore year, spending time as a camp counselor and working at a book factory, then returned to college, graduating from the University of Michigan with a philosophy degree. She wrote for San Francisco science museum Exploratorium, collaborating with Pat Murphy and others on a series of science books for children, beginning with The Science Explorer. Klages's first story, "Time Gypsy," appeared in 1998 and was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula awards. It was followed by a dozen more, including Nebula nominee "Flying Over Water," and Nebula winner "Basement Magic" (2003), most of which were collected in World Fantasy Award-finalist Portable Childhoods. She was a finalist for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2000. Klages is the author of two novels, The Green Glass Sea, which won the Scott O'Dell Award for Best American Historical Fiction, and sequel, White Sands, Red Menace, which won the California Book Award for YA Fiction.

Ellen Kushner was born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. She attended Bryn Mawr College and graduated from Barnard College. After graduating, she found a job in publishing at Ace Books as a fantasy editor, and then went on to edit fiction at Pocket Books/Simon & Schuster. Her first novel, Swordspoint: A Melodrama of Manners, introduced the fantasy world Riverside, to which she has since returned in The Fall of the Kings (written with Delia Sherman), The Privilege of the Sword, and several short stories. Her second novel, Thomas the Rhymer, won the Mythopoeic Award and the World Fantasy Award. Kushner is also the editor of Basilisk and The Horns of Elfland (co-edited with Don Keller and Delia Sherman), and has taught writing at the Clarion and Odyssey workshops. Upcoming is an anthology of "Bordertown" stories co-edited with Holly Black. Kushner is perhaps best known in the U.S. as the host of the national public radio show Sound & Spirit, a musical exploration of world myth, spirituality and the human experience, and as the creator of The Golden Dreydl, which uses music from Pyotr Tchaikovsky's "The Nutcracker" to tell a Hanukkah story, in collaboration with the Shirim Klezmer Orchestra. Kushner lives in Manhattan, on Riverside Drive, with her partner, the author and editor Delia Sherman.

Maureen F. McHugh was born in Loveland, Ohio. She received a B.A. from Ohio University in 1981, where she took a creative writing course from Daniel Keyes in her senior year. After several years as a part-time college instructor, she spent a year teaching in Shijiazhuang, China. It was during this period she sold her first story, "All in a Day's Work," which appeared in Twilight Zone. She has written four novels, including Tiptree Award-winner and Hugo and Nebula Award nominee China Mountain Zhang, Half the Day Is Night, Mission Child, and Nekropolis. Her short fiction, including Hugo Award-winner "The Lincoln Train," was collected in Mothers and Other Monsters, which was a finalist for the Story Prize. She is currently a partner at No Mimes Media, an Alternate Reality Game company, and was a writer and/or managing editor for numerous projects, including Year Zero and I Love Bees.

Nnedi Okorafor was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. She earned a BA in rhetoric at the University of Illinois, C-U in 1996 and an MA in journalism from Michigan State University in 1999. She attended the University of Illinois in Chicago, getting her MA in English in 2002 and completing her PhD in 2007. She is the author of the novels The Shadow Speaker and Zahrah the Windseeker, winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa. Zahrah the Windseeker was also shortlisted for the 2005 Carl Brandon Parallax and Kindred awards and a finalist for the Garden State Teen Book Award and the Golden Duck Award. The Shadow Speaker was a Booksense Pick for Winter 2007/08, a Tiptree Honor Book, a finalist for the Essence Magazine Literary Award, the Andre Norton Award, and the Golden Duck Award and an NAACP Image Award nominee. Her children's book, Long Juju Man, won the 2007/08 Macmillan Writer's Prize for Africa. Forthcoming are her young adult novel Akata Witch and her adult fantasy Who Fears Death. She is a professor of creative writing at Chicago State University and lives with her family in Illinois.

Jane Yolen is the award-winning author of more than 300 books, mostly written for children. She is also a professional storyteller on the stage, has been an editor, and is the mother of three grown children, and the grandmother of six. Her best-known work, the critically acclaimed Owl Moon (illustrated by John Schoenherr) won the prestigious Caldecott Medal in 1988. Her fiction has won the Christopher Medal (twice) the Nebula (twice), World Fantasy Award, Society of Children's Book Writers (twice), Mythopoeic Society's Aslan (three times), Boys' Clubs of America Junior Book Award, and she had a National Book Award finalist. Six colleges have given her honorary doctorates. Her works for adults include the powerful holocaust fantasy Briar Rose, and the "Great Alta" trilogy. Some of her short fiction has been collected in Once upon a Time (She Said). She lives in Hatfield, Massachusetts, and St Andrews, Scotland.

Adam Stemple was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The son of Jane Yolen and her late husband David Stemple, he is a writer and professional musician. A member of Irish band Tim Malloys, he has written four novels, including Pay the Piper (written with Jane Yolen), and a number of short stories.

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