Cassandra Khaw begins her story “Don’t Turn Out the Lights”:

That sentiment has been expressed in various ways by others, and some have also added the rest of the truth about it. Anna Quindlen completed it well: “Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had.”

And that is what makes the speculative fiction—dark or not—being written today especially exciting. Once, not all that long ago, readers found the vast majority of published fiction was written by white heterosexual men who were primarily from the United States or the United Kingdom. Sure, each individual “brought themselves” to it, but the worlds, characters, and stories they created tended to reflect Western European culture from a male viewpoint. It is a valid way to tell a story. It’s just not the only way, and it shouldn’t be the predominate way.

Things, thank goodness, have changed. Now, even with all our stories written in English, a book like this is chock full of tales told by all sorts of people from a multitude of backgrounds, races, sexualities, and ethnicities, with different views of the world and unique voices.

When you are looking for the “best” you don’t have to go out of your way to find this diversity. It is easily found.

Well, maybe not yet as easily as it should be or ultimately will be, but the point I am making is that it has become impossible to deny the “best” is vibrantly diverse. And the best of the “pale male” writers are no longer so monocultural or confined by their own gender. There’s no excuse to fill a book with the same old stories told in the same old ways.

This is the ninth volume in this series. I’m grateful for the chance, every year—despite the grousing I grumble, the blood, sweat, and maybe a few teardrops I shed—to be able to read so many fine tales crafted in so many ways, to choose from them, and present to you here. The fact the stories can be so different while still resonating with us in a common human way gives me some faith that we may yet be able to keep reality from being overtaken with darkness.

Birds are tricksters. Being small necessitates all kinds of wiles to survive but Corvidae, in all their glory as the raven, rook, jay, magpie, jackdaw, and crow, have greater ambitions than that.

They have a plan.

After she was taken, Sarai lived two years with a cloth bound over her eyes, learning scent and touch and taste, never once seeing the island that was her prison. When the day came for the blindfold to be removed, she thought at first her eyes must have failed. Home was a world of blue waters and red-bark trees, of jewel fruits and opal-bellied songbirds. Even the sand shone honey-gold and glittered where it clung to creases in the rock, tucked there by a warm south wind. Here on Felas, isle of the essence-eaters, there was only gray. Gray stone and gray water, gray robes and gray faces.

Jarad laughed when she asked what was wrong with her and turned her by her shoulders toward the sea. He stretched out one finger, the tattoo that marked his Mastery stark against his skin. “See that? The crimson at the peak of the ocean’s curve. That is the isle of Verakis, seat of our beloved queen and her court of misers. They hoard gold and joy in equal measure, and do nothing of value with either. That’s where all the color’s gone, little seabird. There’s nothing wrong with you, only with this place.”

She squinted, but her eyes were weak. She couldn’t see and couldn’t ’sense that far. Still she stared. That far and farther, on and on past Verakis, over a gray sea and then a blue one, far beyond where the eye could reach, there waited red-bark trees and opal-bellied songbirds; there waited her sisters and her brothers, her mother and her father. “I want to go home,” she said. “I will go home.” Defiant. A fool, but what child wasn’t?

A croaked laugh from Jarad brought her chin up. She looked to the structure behind her, the once-fortress, now-prison that dominated the island. Even blind, she had known it was the largest building she had ever encountered. With her sight returned, she could scarcely bear to look at it: half carved from the island’s rook-black rock, the rest a lighter stone stacked high enough that not even the narrowest spit of shore on the island escaped its shadow.

“Don’t tell me this is my home now. It isn’t. I won’t stay here.”

This only made Jarad shake his head. “This rock is no one’s home, girl. But only the best of the poison-tamers can leave it, and only to go to Verakis and live in a prettier cage. The rest of us—scent-makers, stone-tellers, all—we must get used to the gray, for we’ll never go home.”

“Then I will be a poison-tamer,” she said. She would go south, and then farther south, however she could. Over the gray sea to the blue.

“Verakis is no home either,” he said. “And you are no poison-tamer. It is not your talent. Take this.” He pressed a sachet into her hand, tapped it. “What do you ’sense?”

“Vanilla,” she said instantly, scent and ‘sense telling her true. She could feel the faint tug of it below her ribs, almost imperceptible—a gentle essence, not a powerful one. “A Nariguan strain.”

“And what do you smell?”

She lifted the sachet to her nose, inhaled. “Vanilla,” she said again, not understanding the lesson.

“For me it is home. It is the cook-fires in the field at harvest, it is the lines in my father’s face. Take this.” He took the sachet from her, gave her another.

“Red bark,” she said, and lifted it to her nose without prompting. Closed her eyes. She saw her mother’s hands, stained from working the bark. Heard her auntie’s laughter and the rumble of her father’s voice. Felt the slanting sun on her skin as she ran, ran, over the dry earth of the forest toward the beach, toward the shore. “Home,” she whispered.

“The scent has power to you because of your memories,” Jarad said. “Poison strikes us all the same, but scent is individual. A scent-maker must know the moments of their client’s life, must know what scents define them. And then they can summon any emotion, evoke any memory. That is where our power lies.”

“Scents are for a rich man’s fancy,” she said, echoing the scorn she’d heard from the other essence-eaters on the island. “There’s no power in them at all.”

She held out the sachet. He shook his head.

“Keep it,” he said. “Your true training begins tomorrow.” He left her on the southern cliff above the colorless, crashing waves, the red-bark sachet clutched in her palm as she tried to pick out a spot of crimson against empty sky. If she could get that far, she could find a way to go farther. To get that far, she would need to be a poison-tamer; she would need to be the best. And so she would.

The wind snatched at the blindfold in her hand. She let it go. The wind flung it back toward the island and crushed it against the rocks.

Barron St. John must have been nearing his seventies by that point. The pictures I’d copied from magazine covers and newspapers charted his rise from a rake-thin tower of a man, nearly six-three, clad in a badly fitting white wool jacket with a thick crop of black hair cut like a bowl around his ears to his older self: hair grey but still as thick as it had ever been, fine laugh lines etching the curve of that grinning, maniac mouth. In his heyday people had taken him to calling him the King of Horror, a real scaremeister—that term always made me laugh—but the man I saw in those later pictures had the look of a grandfather, which I suppose he was, one who could spin a yarn, sure, but not the kid who’d posed with a shotgun for his university paper under the headline “Vote dammit!”

My university had given me a small grant for my research project into St. John’s career. I had planned to stay in Hotel 31, the cheapest place Luca and I had agreed we could afford. He had wanted me in midtown so I could walk most places. He was a worrier, had never been to New York and the idea of me riding the subway right then made him uneasy.

“It’ll be fine,” I told him, “nothing will happen. It isn’t like that anymore. It hasn’t been since the ’90s.” We both knew that wasn’t exactly true. The situation was different now, but scarier in other ways. There were journalists being stopped at the borders, asked invasive questions. Not everyone was allowed in. And Luca, for all his woolly sweetness and soft English manners, had a serious stubborn streak. He was protective, I knew, and didn’t like the idea of me traveling on my own, not after I’d reacted so badly to the procedure, and certainly not “abroad” as he called it in that charmingly old-fashioned way of his.

But “abroad” was what I had wanted. Even if it wasn’t home for me, which lay four-hundred miles north across the border in Toronto where my sister lived, New York still felt more familiar than the still-drizzly streets of London in the summer. Besides, I suppose there was a part of me that wanted to see how bad things had got.

And St. John was a new obsession of mine, one I’d taken up in my recovery. Luca had been reading his pulpy looking paperbacks for years but I’d never touched them. They were too scary, I’d thought, too low brow. I remembered the garish paperbacks though, the ones that showed off his last name in huge embossed letters. They’d been ubiquitous when I was a kid. Each had a plain black cover with a silhouette cutaway so you had to turn the page to get the full effect. Rosie was the first I ever saw, his debut, the starting point for his surprising upward trajectory. It featured a small New Hampshire town—eerily similar to the one where I’d grown up, what had once been a small farming community until the petroleum processing plants transformed it. The town was engulfed in a crackling lightning storm. Gory and horrifying, read the cover, you can’t put it down!!!

St. John didn’t live in New York, but his former editor did: Lily Argo.

I’d found her email address online. Like St. John she must have been in her seventies, but was still working freelance. There were no pictures. The best I could find was a black and white shot of her and St. John at the signing of his fourth book, What Is Mine, the last they worked on together. Lily Argo was an inch of two taller than St. John, glorious, an Allison Janney look-alike, which meant the two of them towered over the line of moist-lipped teenage girls who were clustered around the table. That was back in ’79.

When I first approached one of my friends—an anthology editor named Dylan Bone (real name or not, I never knew)—about the possibility of an article on the publication of Rosie, he told me Argo had died. Dylan had even written up her obituary for Locus—but in retrospect he couldn’t remember how he’d first found out. She’d been one of the few female editors at Doubleday back then, mostly due to her lucky discovery of St. John. When I mentioned I’d been in contact with her, that she’d agreed to meet me, Dylan had stared at me thoughtfully.

“Just be careful,” he said.

“About what?”

He’d just waved his hand. “You know,” he said before lurching off to the bar to fetch another round.

Once in a while a memory of Max will pop into her head, and she won’t quite know what to do with it. Totally unbidden, and triggered by nothing in particular, and sometimes she won’t mind, she’ll let the memory play out like a little movie. That time, one Christmas, when they’d given Max his first bike—it had taken Tom ages to wrap it up, and once it was done it was just so obvious, the wrapping paper did nothing to disguise what was underneath at all; “We’ll have to do it again,” she’d said, “but this time we’ll put lumps and bumps in,” and Tom hadn’t minded, they’d done it again, together, and in the end the present for Max under the tree looked like nothing on earth, and certainly nothing like a bicycle; that Christmas morning they told him to save that present for last though he was itching to open it, and he wasn’t disappointed. Oh, she still remembers that exquisite look of joy and surprise on his face when he realized Santa had brought him the bike he wanted after all. Or—there was that memory of when they were on holiday, where was it, Cornwall? It was warm, anyway. And they were all sitting out in the beer garden, Max had a lemonade. There was a wasp. It landed on Max. They shooed it off, and the wasp went onto the table, and Tom upturned his empty pint glass and put it on top. And Max was crying, and she was suddenly so frightened—had he been stung? Where was he stung? Would he have an allergic reaction? But he wasn’t stung at all—“The poor buzzie,” he kept saying, “the poor buzzie.” The poor buzzie was trapped, flying around its beery prison looking for some way out, bashing its body against the sides of the glass. Max was howling now, he said, “Please let the buzzie out, it’s so scared,” and Tom took the glass away, and the wasp didn’t sting anyone, it flew off, and Max laughed, all tears forgotten, and went back to his lemonade.

Or, of course—there was that memory, the first memory. The doctor putting Max into her arms. And her realizing that it was really all over, the whole giving birth thing, and it hadn’t been quite as difficult or painful as she’d feared. And Tom was grinning. And she’d spend so long privately worrying about this very moment—but when I’m actually there with it, with my own child, what happens if I don’t like it? Don’t want it? Can feel nothing for it? Max crying, and she crying herself with relief, that this tiny human being in her arms that had come from inside her and was a part of her was something she loved with all her heart, and she would love it forever, until the day she died.

Sometimes she’s so moved by the memories that it takes her a little while to realize that nothing is wrong, nothing is lost—that it’s Tom who’s moved out, and Max is still there, and alive, and well, and probably playing computer games in his bedroom. And it would only take a moment to go and see him, and look at him, and give him a hug. And she might even do this. And she might not.

Max is in trouble at school again. It isn’t his fault. (Oh, it is never his fault.) She shouldn’t be too concerned, but would she mind coming in some time and having a little chat with the head of year? This Tuesday? Wonderful.

The head of year, a decidedly ugly woman called Mrs. Trent, invites her to sit down, and asks her if she’d like a cup of tea.

Max is being bullied. Yes, that little spate of bullying that had taken place in the spring term had been dealt with; this was a different spate of bullying altogether. Mrs. Trent is just wondering if something at home is the matter. She knows there’s been problems, Max isn’t very forthcoming, but… Would she like some sugar? Here, she’ll pass the sugar. There you are.

“He still sees his father every other weekend,” she says. “That’s quite a lot. That’s more than some kids get when their fathers live at home.”

“How long has it been since you and your husband separated?” asks Mrs. Trent. She tells her. “And was it amicable?” Are they ever amicable, really?

“We just worry,” says Mrs. Trent. “Because Max is a good boy. But we just think. That with the amount of bullying he gets. We just wonder. Is he in some way inviting it?”

Of course he’s inviting it, she thinks. He’s weak. He’s weak, just like his father is. He’s one of life’s fuckups. You can see it written all over his face. Like his father, he’s never going to be anyone, or achieve anything. It’s like he’s got a sign on his back saying “Kick Hard Here.” What she says is, “What do you mean?”

Mrs. Trent gives a cautious smile. “Max doesn’t seem to have any friends. Not a single friend at all. Does he have friends at home?”

She thinks, I want the bullies to go after him. I want them to hurt him. Maybe it’ll knock some sense into him, make him grow up a bit. Is it wrong that I take the side of the bullies over my own child? Of course it is. This is the position he puts me in. He makes me into a bad mother. He makes me into a bad person. The little shit. She says, “He has friends. He has me.”

Mrs. Trent doesn’t seem very convinced by that. That cautious smile looks even more watery. She wonders if Mrs. Trent has children of her own. She guesses that she doesn’t.

What they agree is, they’ll both monitor Max more carefully from now on. In the classroom, and at home. Because maybe there’s nothing to be worried about. But no one wants this to become a situation anyone has to worry about. It all feels rather inconclusive, and she supposes Mrs. Trent thinks the same, and she realizes that Mrs. Trent probably only called this meeting because it was part of her job, she doesn’t really care what happens to her weak little son either. They shake hands.

Max is waiting for his mother on a bench in the corridor outside. He gets up when he sees her. “Well then,” she says. She knows she’ll have to come up with something better than that eventually. But right now it’s the best that she’s got.

“Are you cross with me?” he asks.

“No.”

To prove she’s not cross, on the way home she takes him to MacDonald’s as a treat. She watches him as he joylessly dips French fries into a little tub of barbeque sauce, the sauce drips onto the table. “Any good?” she says, and he nods. Then she takes him home.

“Is there something you want to talk about?” she asks, and it’s right before his bedtime, and she supposes she ought to have asked earlier, but she’s asking him now, isn’t she? He shrugs, and it’s such an ugly little gesture. Then he drags his heels upstairs to his bedroom and closes the door. And she thinks: remember the bike. Remember the wasp. Remember when he came out of you, shiny and brand new.

Simon had nowhere to live until his cousin offered him a house in a run-down development on the outer edge of town. All he had to do was stay there to discourage vandalism. The development was almost empty, scheduled to be torn down.

“You’re not suicidal are you?” Will asked as he handed him the key.

“Angela left me years ago. I haven’t been successful in years. Why would I kill myself now?”

Will, pretending to shuffle papers, didn’t look up. “I know it’s been rough, and you’re not getting any younger. It’s just that a few of the families that are left have kids, teenagers. I’d hate for them to find…”

“Old fellows like me, we don’t have the energy to kill ourselves. We usually just fade away.”

Will stared at him. “I see. Do you need directions?”

“I lived in the neighborhood when I was a kid, in one of those old Victorians before they built this awful thing. Now here it’s a wreck as well.”

“I’ve read about that. There was some trouble wasn’t there? Overcrowding, and some violence? Something about a fire?”

“What didn’t burn they bulldozed. Everybody scattered, went their ways. Now here I am with nowhere else to go.”

“I’ve arranged for someone to drop off a sleeping bag and supplies. I’m working on a bed.”

“I’m deeply grateful,” Simon replied. And he was. He’d just never understood who decided what goes, what stays, and where people got to live.

“By the way, we’ve had a problem with cats. Feral cats, running all over the place. Best not let one of them scratch you.”

Simon examined the keys as if reconsidering. “I hate cats,” he said.

On moving day he rushed to finish his final shift at the corner store and get his belongings—everything stuffed into a cardboard suitcase and a patched laundry bag—from behind the counter to the bus stop. Most of the shelves were empty. As ordered, he kept rearranging what remained from the “Going out of Business” sale for more appeal, while restlessly waiting for his replacement to arrive. Julie, always out on a date with no consideration for anyone. By now he’d lost everything of importance, but at least Simon held on to his manners.

A pack of twittering girls burst through the door and raced each other for the drink machine. He used to tell the teens to slow down but the way even the young ones would turn on you these days he no longer dared. Further evidence of how the new world was eating the old. “The girls are worse than the boys,” someone he worked with once said. The sexism embarrassed him, but he worried it might be true. All he needed was a broken arm, or a deep scratch from a dirty fingernail.

He watched as they poked their phones, took pictures, and mixed different sodas at random into a single cup. Apparently they would share. They all appeared to have too many fingers, different colors on too many nails. The new world was raising them strange. Perhaps if he had a child of his own… but Angela always feared he would drop or lose it.

One caught him staring and flashed her tiny tit. The others screamed madly. He blushed and turned away, looking down at his things. He prayed the gigglers would be gone before he tried to haul it all to the bus stop. He hated when he had to pretend to ignore their catcalls.

His possible future caretakers ran out the door without paying. He was relieved not to have to ring them up. Julie came in after, smiling knowingly and smelling of booze. Simon gathered up his life and stumbled for the door.

The bus contained a few more broken types like him, an older woman in a nice dress, and a figure bundled in its oversized coat. Its head, wrapped in a scarf and topped with a watchman’s cap, appeared too small for its torso. Its eyes were buried. The bus sped down the block passing the girls with their surplus of fingers, their writhing clump of shadow hungry and hideous on the greasy brick wall.

The bus struggled up the hill past bars spilling their last patrons, who hailed and cursed the driver who was too wise to stop. At the peak where the lanes grew wider he sped past abandoned storefronts, lots jammed with ancient equipment, the iron skeletons of dead buildings, the rows of silent warehouses with rusted doors flush to the road. There was the rare bus stop, the random passenger standing with one arm waving, but the driver never slowed. Simon believed this part of the city need never exist.

The route would not take Simon all the way to the development. The bus dropped him at a darkened stop to stand beside a crumbling, heavily graffitied bench. Some words were almost recognizable, but lay obscured beneath mindless exhortation. The ground rose steeply before him, and somewhere beyond that rise of shadow the aging development began. Smoky grayness drifted down from the low clouds and seeped out from the overgrown embankment. The hill’s silhouette was deceptive, suggesting primeval forest more than cultivated landscape.

Instead of taking the road around, he pulled the flashlight from his laundry bag and sought a shorter path. He followed a trail of broken, grass-invaded sidewalk through the unkempt greenbelt and up the hill. He had to struggle through tall-weeded fields, ignoring unidentifiable animal sounds in the underbrush, the occasional glimmer of a red or yellow eye. Man-shaped spaces opened up in the dark vegetation a few feet away, but no one approached. He tried to remember what, if any, of these features had been here when he was a boy. It had been wilderness then, too, although even less controlled. He and his friends would venture there after sunset. He vaguely remembered the darkness, and the dreadful confusion of echo, but nothing else.

He was nerve-exhausted by the time he entered the murky blocks of identical one story ranch houses and sodden lanes of the development. The neighborhood of his youth had been a crowded slum but at least it had some grandeur in its height and architecture. A sea of bright holes identifying downtown shimmered in the distance behind him. Ahead were the squat rectangles of unlit homes, and houses with few lights on, and houses half-gone into ruin, a handful of dried-up gardens and trashed-out back yards, their wire fences plastered in random trash.

In an abandoned playground a shattered teeter-totter sprawled like a sacrifice across its steel pipe center. The swing framework still stood erect but rusted, its seats and slide gone without a trace. So where did the remaining children play, or were they too old for something so innocent? One was crying now, he thought, although it might have been one of those stray cats.

Simon had no way to determine which houses were actually empty, and which were occupied by people who just wanted to keep to themselves. Without knocking on doors, perhaps peeking through windows, which he wasn’t about to do.

In the old days, in that other neighborhood of taller and less uniform homes, he heard a great many things: the voices of friends he hadn’t seen in decades, music playing from a record player in a neighbor’s upstairs window, misunderstood whispers from lovers hiding themselves in the shadowed strips near walls. All of that had been torn down and bull-dozed, the old neighborhood beheaded. It occurred to Simon he now had more memories than life. It was an uncomfortable way to travel.

Several houses had yellow police tape stretched across their front doors and around their near-identical porches. He assumed the police actions had something to do with drugs; in the news it always had something to do with drugs. That and gang activity. A lot of these poorer teens fell into gangs.

When Simon was young a bike ride to and from this neighborhood had been nothing. He’d fly down the steep curl of road and although the trip back up was a challenge he accomplished it without too much difficulty, feeling like a star athlete afterwards. Not anymore. He should have kept in better shape. Once here, he didn’t expect to leave often. He supposed that was how older people became trapped.

He found the house Will was providing—low and dark and indistinguishable from the others. The newish lock looked inexpertly installed, the hasp mounted crookedly, and rattled as he fiddled with the key. Simon slipped inside and slapped the switch, lighting up the messy interior. He gasped involuntarily from the stench: human waste and aromas both sweet and sour underneath. He reminded himself that his cousin was allowing him to stay here for nothing.

Houses weren’t built to last anymore, nor did it make sense to. Technological expectation changed so quickly it didn’t pay to invest in building for the long term. People moved on, although not necessarily up.

When he first glimpsed the living room walls he imagined a crowd of onlookers, but the arrangement of shadows proved to be stains. Studs and nail head patterns were clearly visible beneath the thin paper.

Cleansers and chemicals and various old tools were stored in a closet with random junk. He couldn’t tell how old any of it was, or how dangerous, but he did what he could, sweeping the foulness out the back door and dumping chemicals on the hardwood floors where they’d been deeply stained, windows open to the cold air to get rid of the smell. He just needed to get his situation clean enough so that he wouldn’t mind sleeping on the floor. The revealed boards were scarred as if from games or ritual. Or maybe from cats. Cats can do a lot of damage if locked inside by themselves.

On several walls sprays of relatively fresh graffiti obscured older layers of scribbling, and here and there certain words and symbols were emphasized by means of deep cuts. He could make no sense of it, although the patterns of marks created an emotional effect not unlike music, so he wondered if some of these marks referred to songs. Over the days to come he painted over the graffiti, but with no confidence it wouldn’t return.

Long threads of dust floated through the rooms. The remnants of his old life were hardly more substantial than these. With most of the people he’d ever known gone, the fabric of day to day reality seemed thin.

That old house where he’d grown up had probably been less than a hundred yards from here. It had a screened back porch where on late nights the adults filled their drink cups and the children consumed their allotted portions of sugar and ran mindlessly around the yard. This house and the ones around it had no back porch and he wondered when those had gone out of fashion. No doubt around the same time as gatherings with the neighbors.

He remembered games of hide and seek that lasted for hours and covered every lot in the neighborhood. He remembered childhood crushes on young girls whose names he no longer remembered. He remembered he would not take a bath when a certain babysitter was on duty, the one who always wanted to help.

In one corner of the living room a sleeping bag, some toiletries, and food had been left for him. When he thought he’d cleaned sufficiently for a relatively untroubled night’s sleep he crawled into the bag and succumbed almost immediately.

The morning came quickly. He had dreamed and sweated, and now the sleeping bag stank. He wondered who might have used it before. He crawled out and walked barefoot into the kitchen, splashed his face with water tinged a muddy rust color. He’d let it run until it cleared. He went to the back door and opened it for air and sun.

He was surprised not to see the sun, or even the sky. A few feet in front of him a tall brick wall with curtained casement windows blocked his view, awash in smoky gray shadow, part of a larger house that rose three stories. Looking straight up he glimpsed the old-fashioned soffits and Victorian roof. It looked somewhat like the house he’d grown up in, except larger. Turning his head he saw similar large houses out to both sides, an entire neighborhood of slummy Victorians in ill repair. He could also hear creaky music, children’s voices, a cat’s howl, the soft explosive echo of a distant barking dog. But he couldn’t make out any of the finer details of his surroundings, not even this close.

Simon went to get his flashlight for a more detailed look. But when he came back there was the sky, and the sun just over the treetops illuminating a vista of dull one story homes. The filth he’d scraped from the house the night before still lay piled around the bottom step. Sometime during the day he would have to bury it.

He took a breath. He hadn’t been fully awake. It happened sometimes, even several minutes after walking around, a piece of dream still lodged in your brain changes the world. There were the sounds of children squealing like the damned in a nearby yard, but was that still part of the dream? The excited screams of children at play often fooled you into thinking there had been some grave tragedy.

Simon worked several hours in the bathroom and kitchen—scrubbing and throwing out the useless and the unsalvageable—not bad for an out of shape old man, he thought. He felt uncomfortably heated and propped open the back door. The outside temperature had dropped precipitously. He’d tried the thermostat but the furnace wouldn’t come on. Another problem to ask Will about. Whatever sounds he heard—the whistle of a speeding car, the broken explosions as a plane pushed through the air overhead—were very far away. Whoever lived nearby was impressively quiet. “Safe as houses,” as his mother used to say, but it never reassured. Some houses weren’t safe at all.

Cooking smells drifted in from outside—some sort of richly spiced meat, perhaps a stew. Someone in the neighborhood knew how to cook.

He thought he heard a school bus pull up and children piling out, but the sounds faded quickly, swallowed by the increasing rush and push of the wind. It would be a breezy time for a walk, but he’d only have light for a couple more hours, and Simon wanted to see the neighborhood and some of its residents in the light of day.

The wind hitting the house made a constant groan. Simon wondered if the poorly built structure could bear it—he imagined minute fracturing exacerbating decay, perhaps even some sort of collapse. A sick apprehension heightened his need to get out.

Outside in his coat he walked toward the broken playground. He kept his eyes open for people, but after a few blocks there was nothing, not even any toys left outside or laundry on a line. He listened carefully for conversation or music—he was sure he’d heard some before—but all he heard now was the wind battering the shoddy roofs, and a whistling down the lanes between the structures.

There should have been teenagers out, even if the adults had the sense to stay inside. Teenagers were the adventurers and the hasty ones, those always said to be “at risk.”

A sudden clamor from several houses over made him pick up the pace. But it was just a piece of roof blown off into a side yard. He wondered if his own roof was sound. He stared hard at the twisted bit of wreckage, the curly shadows trapped beneath. Then a mass of the curly shadows unfurled and escaped around the edge of the house on its too many legs. A cat with insulation tangled into its fur, he presumed, living in the house’s attic. Poor thing. That’s when it started to rain.

He liked the smell, like damp earth everywhere, moist dirt in the air he breathed, like a memory of his future, as if the rain had released something from the dirt of the aging neighborhood. The air grayed around him, fading everything it touched. Or was it his eyes failing? He hadn’t been to an optometrist in years, afraid of what he might be told. Complete failure took a long time to occur, it seemed, but the process was relentless.

The rain was light, so he continued walking for several blocks around the complex. He saw no one, no signs that children had recently played, no signs that any of these houses were occupied at all. There were lights on in a few, but with the lack of residents he guessed they might simply be on for security. And yet he couldn’t believe his cousin had lied to him—what would be the point?

“Hello! I say hello! Is anyone else here?” His voice bounced and echoed against the brick.

As if in reply a distant truck horn sounded like a large animal in distress. Simon was reminded that you couldn’t always trust your senses to tell you the truth. He turned the corner and walked in a different direction, hoping for a new perspective. He peered over fences and gleaned a few new details—mud-encrusted junk, old foundations exposed between patches of unmown grass, an abandoned barbecue lying on its side like a felled animal. But nothing recent, nothing indicating current occupation.

He became gradually aware of the faint stench of invisible smoke, like the memory of an old barbecue, or when his grandmother used to lie about her smoking habit and snuck off behind the house for a drag or two before the cancer eventually took her.

He came to a wide circle in the lane with a bent and dead streetlight poised over it like some kind of giant predatory insect. When he was a boy the neighborhood kids used to gather beneath the streetlights and ride their bikes at night. He stooped down—there were warm cigarette butts beneath the crippled lamp post. He looked around, saw nothing, and the charcoal sky split open from the weight of water, beating him momentarily to the ground.

He looked up, saw the dark twisted shapes lingering nearby like a collection of corroded statues, their rude fingers pointing as they plotted their harassment. All around him the blurred outlines of the houses had added a story or two, with high roofs swaying precariously overhead. Cats encased in their wet and wiry fur took swipes at his face. Simon ran to find shelter, pushing himself against a greasy brick wall. He thought he recognized the house—someone’s aunt had lived there when he was a child. But that was impossible. He looked up to find the window where she used to watch for her husband, and found slanted yellowed eyes staring at him through the rain—he thought maybe some feline’s eyes, or child’s. The pale face that suddenly appeared around the eyes was much like a skinny child’s face, surrounded by a matted cloud of ashen hair. But he was greatly fatigued, and this was the only face he’d seen in a couple of days, and he found it increasingly difficult to see in this dimness. This is what getting old is like, he thought. A long fade into evening.

The rain began to ease and so Simon headed toward home. With each step the force of the rain lessened and the clouds of moisture dissipated, and no house was over a story again, the houses beaten down, until he reached his own house where everything was remarkably dry. Something escaped out of his back yard—a tangle of broken or too-many-segmented legs. A truck was parked out front and two squat men were unloading the bed his cousin promised.

I pried apart the corpse’s lips, their slackness telling me she’d been dead more than two days, and worked the tip of my finger inside her mouth. It opened enough for me to wedge the funnel in, its tip clinking on her teeth. I tipped my porcelain-lined hip flask—metal was a no-no—to spill the tea into her mouth. She didn’t have to swallow; enough would make its way down for the magic to work. I leaned back from the shallow hole she lay in, my aged joints protesting something fierce, then recapped the hip flask before hiding it away with the funnel inside my stocking. Wasn’t nobody looking up these skirts.

Tonight was kind. The temperature along Charleston harbor had dropped, creating a soupy fog the moon couldn’t quite cut through. Enough light to see my way home, but too little to give busybodies a clear view. My ear was always open to the rustle of feet or the clop of hooves approaching, except I wouldn’t have to worry about avoiding carriages tonight—those horses’ eyes weren’t good in the dark no way. Even so, I looked around me as I crouched on the pile of fresh turned dirt next to her, waiting.

She stirred. A brief jolt like she’d been run through with a tease of lightning. When her eyes opened—the first thing they all did was open their eyes—they were just starting to turn milky. I took her hand and helped her rise from the pit she’d been thrown in.

“Come on, honey. Maybe in your next life, you’ll learn to pick better men.”

Her dress was ripped, exposing one small breast; her hem was stained stiff with blood and fluids. Did the best I could with arranging the little coils of her hair to cover the angry rope burns around her neck and the hole in her skull, ’cause tea don’t fix everything. I wrapped my cape around her narrow shoulders and leaned her back against a tree while I filled in the hole. Then we started walking, her with an awkward bow-legged hobble and me not much better.

Chilled wind blew in, clearing the dense blanket of fog, and I hurried our steps. A hurricane lantern burned in the back window of one of the little shotgun houses off Maple Street and we headed toward it, avoiding the backyards because of the dogs yowling, torn between the need to protect their territory and their fear of the dead. I tapped on the closed screened door with a ragtime rhythm and after some scrabbling and heated whispers, it opened.

“Oh, thank you, Jesus.” The woman inside, young-looking with old eyes, sagged against the uneven doorframe when she saw the pair of us. Her man stood behind, large and silent and watchful.

“You got a place for her to be?” I asked. The effect of the tea wouldn’t last forever and having a dead body lying around wasn’t good for no one, especially not Colored folk.

“Baby?” the woman asked.

The girl turned toward the voice. “I’m so sorry, Mama.” The words came out thickened and slow, pushed past the decaying tongue. The girl’s mama broke down, sobs wrenching from her throat as she pulled and tore at the scarf covering her head.

Her man came to her, took the woman and her daughter each by an arm and led them to a sturdy, homemade table. He set a kettle on the stove to boil, then slid my cape off the girl’s shoulders, folded it, then returned it to me. As he pressed coins into my hand, he said, “Reb Fielding got a special little place for her to rest in the St. Matthew graveyard now that she home.” His eyes skitted away from mine. “How long we got?”

I reared back to look at the sky. The moon hadn’t reached its high point yet, still a ways to go before sunrise. “Till day clean. ’Round five or six hours.”

“Thankee now.”

I nodded and headed off home. Cold was creeping in on the evening, and I pulled my cape tighter. Time for my own cup of tea.

That winter I started buying old vinyl records from the junkie who lived downstairs from me. He was selling all of his possessions in order to keep the lights burning, some food in his belly and his habit alive. His name was Colin. I couldn’t tell you how old he was but he must have been pushing sixty at least. He looked like he’d been drawn by Robert Crumb. Slow moving, heavy limbed, lugubrious. Long hair the color of cigarette ash, Brylcreemed into an unlikely, gravity-defying wave that washed away from his forehead. It put me in mind of a painting that I had to Google to place: The Great Wave off Kanagawa. Seriously. Every time I set eyes on him—that painting. His eyes were quick but utterly unfocused, as if he were charting the movement of an invisible cartoon mouse around the room. But they were a strange piercing blue, those eyes. Paul Newman blue.

We never talked about the smack. I didn’t partake in the hard stuff. But that November his vinyl collection was my gateway drug of choice. It took me away from myself. I bought a high-end turntable, an amplifier and speakers that sat on an IKEA table in a room that was otherwise empty. I traveled light. But we didn’t talk about that either.

It started with a mint Mono copy of Pink Floyd’s Saucerful of Secrets. Colin offered it me while we sat outside on the garden wall one morning, watching the sea crash over the promenade across the street.

“How much?” I asked, inspecting the sleeve and then the vinyl itself, cigarette gripped between my teeth. It seemed like a question hardly worth asking.

“Forty,” he said after some hemming and hawing.

“Quid?”

“Forty quid and it’s yours. Take it or leave it.”

I studied him for a moment, looking for treachery in his eyes, but he was in many ways, utterly guileless. For a junkie. I opened my wallet and then counted the cash into his hand. He gave me the record and said, “Don’t play it too loud, I’m planning on an afternoon nap.” Then he stood, saluted me and went back inside, leaving me with a record worth ten times what I’d paid.

You maintain a menu of a half dozen Experiences on your digital blackboard, but Vision Quest is the one the Tourists choose the most. That certainly makes your workday easy. All a Vision Quest requires is a dash of mystical shaman, a spirit animal (wolf usually, but birds of prey are on the upswing this year), and the approximation of a peyote experience. Tourists always come out of the Experience feeling spiritually transformed. (You’ve never actually tried peyote, but you did smoke your share of weed during that one year at Arizona State, and who’s going to call you on the difference?) It’s all 101 stuff, really, these Quests. But no other Indian working at Sedona Sweats can do it better. Your sales numbers are tops.

Your wife Theresa doesn’t approve of the gig. Oh, she likes you working, especially after that dismal stretch of unemployment the year before last when she almost left you, but she thinks the job itself is demeaning.

“Our last name’s not Trueblood,” she complains when you tell her about your nom de rêve.

“Nobody wants to buy a Vision Quest from a Jesse Turnblatt,” you explain. “I need to sound more Indian.”

“You are Indian,” she says. “Turnblatt’s Indian-sounding enough because you’re already Indian.”

“We’re not the right kind of Indian,” you counter. “I mean, we’re Catholic, for Christ’s sake.”

What Theresa doesn’t understand is that Tourists don’t want a real Indian experience. They want what they see in the movies, and who can blame them? Movie Indians are terrific! So you watch the same movies the Tourists do, until John Dunbar becomes your spirit animal and Stands with Fists your best girl. You memorize Johnny Depp’s lines from The Lone Ranger and hang a picture of Iron Eyes Cody in your work locker. For a while you are really into Dustin Hoffman’s Little Big Man.

It’s Little Big Man that does you in.

For a week in June, you convince your boss to offer a Custer’s Last Stand special, thinking there might be a Tourist or two who want to live out a Crazy Horse Experience. You even memorize some quotes attributed to the venerable Sioux chief that you find on the internet. You plan to make it real authentic.

But you don’t get a single taker. Your numbers nosedive.

Management in Phoenix notices, and Boss drops it from the blackboard by Fourth of July weekend. He yells at you to stop screwing around, accuses you of trying to be an artiste or whatnot.

“Tourists don’t come to Sedona Sweats to live out a goddamn battle,” Boss says in the break room over lunch one day, “especially if the white guy loses. They come here to find themselves.” Boss waves his hand in the air in an approximation of something vaguely prayer-like. “It’s a spiritual experience we’re offering. Top quality. The fucking best.”

DarAnne, your Navajo co-worker with the pretty smile and the perfect teeth, snorts loudly. She takes a bite of her sandwich, mutton by the looks of it. Her jaw works, her sharp teeth flash white. She waits until she’s finished chewing to say, “Nothing spiritual about Squaw Fantasy.”

Squaw Fantasy is Boss’s latest idea, his way to get the numbers up and impress Management. DarAnne and a few others have complained about the use of the ugly slur, the inclusion of a sexual fantasy as an Experience at all. But Boss is unmoved, especially when the first week’s numbers roll in. Biggest seller yet.

Boss looks over at you. “What do you think?”

Boss is Pima, with a bushy mustache and a thick head of still-dark hair. You admire that about him. Virility. Boss makes being a man look easy. Makes everything look easy. Real authentic-like.

DarAnne tilts her head, long beaded earrings swinging, and waits. Her painted nails click impatiently against the Formica lunch table. You can smell the onion in her sandwich.

Your mouth is dry like the red rock desert you can see outside your window. If you say Squaw Fantasy is demeaning, Boss will mock you, call you a pussy, or worse. If you say you think it’s okay, DarAnne and her crew will put you on the guys-who-are-assholes list and you’ll deserve it.

You sip your bottled water, stalling. Decide that in the wake of the Crazy Horse debacle that Boss’s approval means more than DarAnne’s, and venture, “I mean, if the Tourists like it…”

Boss slaps the table, triumphant. DarAnne’s face twists in disgust. “What does Theresa think of that, eh, Jesse?” she spits at you. “You tell her Boss is thinking of adding Savage Braves to the menu next? He’s gonna have you in a loincloth and hair down to your ass, see how you like it.”

Your face heats up, embarrassed. You push away from the table, too quickly, and the flimsy top teeters. You can hear Boss’s shouts of protest as his vending machine lemonade tilts dangerously, and DarAnne’s mocking laugh, but it all comes to your ears through a shroud of thick cotton. You mumble something about getting back to work. The sound of arguing trails you down the hall.

I begin at three o’clock in the morning. There’s a glaze over tonight’s rind of the moon. Sometimes—this being a club-dense part of the East Village—I jump out of my skin at the sound of breaking glass, a quarrel; I almost cry out for Alicia. I assemble the adorable, tiny pots of lemon curd and mango jam and the comfits that my customers steal. I use a butter-cutter pastry tool on the best butter for the pumpkin scones. A New York Times food editor asked for my secret ingredient in the crystallized-ginger muffins, but I demurred, not because it is exotic but because it’s frightfully simple: I add coconut extract. My walk-in freezer is packed to its gills, but everything is precisely labeled. Grief can do this: There’s a ferocious desire to control and align the world, as if that stops or reverses the time. Mini-quiches, miniature tortilla molds for lentil salad. I fix roulade sandwiches with Russian dressing, turkey, and Cotswold cheddar. Does a person ever conquer an eating disorder? Everything screams, Eat Me, Drink Me. As a young wife and mother, I blew up two sizes, melted down three, over and over. Now I survive on practically nothing, toast and rose-hip infusions. My Wonderland Tea Shop and its kitchen are downstairs, and I perch in small quarters above. After one day’s prep, service, and clean-up, it’s always time to start over again.

What is the “bargaining” stage of grief? Since I’ve never figured that out, I fear I’m trapped in whatever “it” is. If I hold my temper when a customer spills clotted cream on the floor, will Alicia reappear? If I smile as a woman changes her order from white tea to rooibos to the Zen Mix, will my child’s ghost appear? If I throw out the news clippings about the two young madmen who tormented and murdered Alicia, will I get un-stuck in Time? (Is that even something I want?) My ex-husband, Bill, lives with a new wife and son (already a schoolboy!) in Phoenix, and we chat on occasion; we have lunch (I watch him eat while I can’t finish my soup) when he returns for the parole hearings. I’m glad for him. He blamed me for Alicia, but I blame myself. At an arts-and-crafts emporium in Chelsea, while gathering holly and garlands for Christmas, I turned my back, and the earth swallowed her.

Above the shop, my rented rooms are so minute it’s as if I live in the cutaway of a whelk shell. Painted on the face of the ticking tabletop clock is a girl on a swing, her Mary Janes frozen toward heaven. There’s never wine on hand, because I’d drink it and then there’d be no wine anyway. Occasionally I resort to pills for sleep and glide in technicolor dreams, flowers talking, flamingoes playing a game with me as the baseball. I maintain, intact, the pint-sized tea table that Alicia loved arranging for Mr. Bun, her stuffed rabbit, and Mabel the mouse, and Jackie the toucan. At each setting are plastic wands filled with water, glitter, and tiny keys. Bill joined the little parties we threw for her animals, mint in sugar-water and vanilla wafers; he was a warm father and husband.

I used to teach poetry at a small college on Staten Island, but those eager faces, even the ones ravaged by wild partying, blazed their hopeful innocence in my direction, nearly burning me alive. Bill was an accountant. We lived modestly, us three, in Murray Hill. We sold our apartment and shared the profits after the two boys—rich, with a lawyer passionately loud about the burden of their privileges—were sentenced to only twelve years. Alicia died at age six. Eight years ago. It was yesterday.

Of course Kumiko Mori is the first employee to show up, clear-eyed, cheerful, with a red streak feathering her hair and her signature thick belt accenting a cinched waist her boyfriend likely spans with his hands. “Morning, Mrs. Dias.”

I’ve told her to call me Dorrie. Or Doreen. Old-school, she resists. I should return to my maiden name, Lewis—I’m a custard of Welsh, English, and Finnish—but then I wouldn’t have Alicia’s final name anymore. Bill Dias is of Brazilian and Irish stock.

Kumiko picks up the sign-up sheet at the counter to see how many people want to try a tea ceremony. Zero. Her grandfather is at the ready, should we enlist enough takers. Chanoyu. Sweets served to balance tea’s bitterness. Everything spotless, arranged with flowers. Tranquility, the meaningfulness of nothing-meaning-much: Who in modernity can bear submitting to a breakdown and examination of every action and minute?

I joke about how many entertainments vie for our attention nowadays, and tea ceremonies of painstaking slowness are a tough sell.

Kumiko grins and unwinds the eternity scarf from her neck. It’s autumn; our décor is purple and gilt. She hangs her scarf and coat on the hook in the kitchen as she takes the teapots from the shelf, and she says, “I need to tell you something, Mrs. Dias.”

Why does my heart skip a beat? All the servers eventually leave, but I hate giving her up. Her beauty, grace, and hard work. The faint promise of a ceremony of tea.

“Kumiko?”

But then in barrels Jason, sleepy, mild, a decent waitperson, good with card tricks at the tables while the tea brews. He wants to be an actor. The older man he lives with might be cheating on him. He’s pleasant. Less so is Alex, dragging himself in, a lean practitioner of the faint sneer, eager to convey that he’s primed for better things when he graduates from Columbia. His financial-world parents—he lives with them—encourage his refusal to abase himself with a mice-filled, starter studio apartment. I should fire him, but he keeps his disdain subdued, and it’s hard to find help.

Kumiko unlocks the front door, and hordes on their way to work pour in for cinnamon rolls and croissants to go, and the mothers-at-ease trundle in their squalling children, babies wrinkled as piglets. I feed off the tumult of children, though Alicia was quiet. Why didn’t she bellow and scream when those boys abducted her?

A girl in a fairy princess outfit tugs my apron and says, “I like apricots!”

I kneel to meet her eyes with mine, delighted. “Guess what? I made apricot tarts last night.” All true! I treasure these unexpected little connections as victories.

The mother, a natural beauty in a ponytail, a child herself, says, “Wonderful.”

Then laughs. Because wonderful and wonder belong in wonderland.

I never remember that Alicia would be fourteen now. I live for these girls who come with their mothers, a special treat. They’re joyful in this make-believe realm I’ve made. Throwback to gracious times. Tea, gen-til-i-ty. Bite-sized salmon sandwiches. The pots warmed British-style, loose leaves if you have more time, an extra spoon for the pot. I’m not raking in a fortune, but I’ve kept my nose above water.

Kumiko carries a tray of Earl Grey. More customers sweep in. Morning rush. The walls offer murals of white and red roses, white rabbits. Fish-footmen. A queen, a chorus of humans as playing cards. A caterpillar on a mushroom, hookah in mouth; the college kids flock near that one.

I wave at Kumiko over the tables, the sea of speeding New Yorkers. She does a funny mock-dance of panic. Her red-and-white Wonderland apron is spotless. Crash! A child has dropped her fragile cup; an accident. Kumiko comforts her and sweeps it up. Alex checks his phone until he sees me glaring. Jason’s sleeves are already stained with jam.

My child once found a songbird, egg-yolk yellow, with a head wound, during a walk with us in Central Park. She fed it with an eyedropper at home. Bill and I warned it wouldn’t make it. She insisted that it would, or at least it wouldn’t die alone. She was all of five, one year left to live. She named the birdie “Dodo.” I’ll never know why. Came the dawn that the bird flapped around her room, and Alicia opened the window and chanted, “Go now, go away. Fly! Go on,” though she was in tears.

One night, as a prank, Alicia put crayons in Bill’s and my bed. Her reason was that we seemed so drained she was afraid we were dreaming in black-and-white.

Jen bought a 1982 Plymouth Horizon for four hundred dollars just before they graduated high school, so if she and Petra wanted to get into town for the Bino’s—open twenty-four hours—to eat fries and pale, oily gravy, or drink the bitter black coffee of three a.m., it was Jen who drove. Petra rode shotgun, watching the highway unfold, and refold, and unfold again as it wound through clear-cuts. Sometimes they had a place to be, a pit party, or a dozen people meeting up at a doughnut shop on the highway. A lot of the time, though, it was just the two of them, driving four hours to an empty beach on the Pacific coast of the island, arriving in darkness so absolute they couldn’t see the waves, only hear their roar at low tide, sitting under the starless, overcast sky until the sun rose.

Mostly they took Highway 18 into town, running from the island’s coastal valley to its interior mountains. Everyone else did, too, as though at one end or the other something might happen, and if you missed it you would miss the only thing that had ever happened or would ever happen on the island.

Anyway, after Jen bought the Plymouth they often found themselves in town, driving through well-lit and desolate streets to the 7-Eleven, where they would buy Orange Crush and gummy sours. Their only company a few kids squatting in the parking lot under lights that turned their acne scars purple and glazed the concrete a brassy gold, all these kids with blue freezie-stained mouths.

Petra often thought about Highway 18, and about how it spilled from the empty stretches, unlit, into the parking lot, the kids, the Bino’s. While Jen chatted with another long-haired boy, Petra walked through the cars to the highway and watched the trucks full of logs so enormous it was hard to believe they grew that way as they barreled through town like it wasn’t a place, just an interruption on the long peregrinations lumber takes from hillsides to sawmills and freighters and then out across the Pacific.

The kids in the 7-Eleven parking lot knew everything that happened from one end of the highway to the other. They knew, for example, about the last girl who’d been found—the one in the ditch beside the Petro-Can.

“Be careful, man,” he said, a kid Petra had known in tenth grade, “you know how ghosts like highways. Watch out for hitchhikers.”

“Ghostly hitchhikers?” she asked, watching Jen and her Jesus-haired boy.

“Yeah, man! They’re all over. I talked to a truck driver and he told me about this girl he picked up north of Port Alice, and she told him shit. I won’t even fucking repeat it. She told him what’s going to go down in like the year 2000. And when they got to the bus station in Nanaimo, he pulled over and she was gone. Like bam. Gone.”

“Have you ever seen her?”

“Maybe? Like. I thought I did once, but I didn’t pick her up. But if I get a chance again, I’ll pick her up and ask her all sorts of shit about what’s coming.”

“Go on. It’ll hurt for a while. For your whole life, really, but there’s always a cost, isn’t there? Go. Go on, up to the surface. Up, up, up, you silly flighty little thing. To the beach, when the sun hits you… well, you’ll see soon enough. Off you go.”

I watch as the girl hesitates, looks at the pretty amber bottle clutched tightly in her webbed fingers, face caught between gleeful longing and uncertainty. She opens her mouth to say something, ask a question she should have asked earlier, but all that issues is a wet puff of blood that dissolves in the water around her. Ah. My suturing needs work.

But it’s a small thing, I tell her, part of the bargain. I don’t say, but perhaps I should, that the price for something you want desperately, but should not have, is always red “Go on now, away with you.”

And, voiceless, she goes.

They find the bottle in the barn. There are a lot of things there, whole piles of things: tractor-part things, tire things, cutting things and bolting things, all tired things, slowly fading toward the same color of rusty brown. The inside of the barn smells of stale hay and beer. Misty picks the bottle that is the least broken and William holds it between two fingers and lets the water drain from its open mouth onto the packed-earth floor. The base of the bottle has a deep crack running through it that snakes along the length, almost all the way through. The crack raises up a little, just enough to tear their skin if they aren’t careful.

They sit so their bodies form a triangle, William and his best friend Misty and her sister Penny. They sit in the corner of the barn, there among puddles of something that might be water. This way, no one can see them from the road. It’s William’s idea. The whole game is William’s idea.

The bottle spins and spins and they kiss what they are given. Wooden beams. Metal pipes. Once, for William, a grasshopper. The bottle seems to find only the gaps between them, the space that separates their knees from other knees. It doesn’t land on a Body, not the whole time they are playing, even though William moves them three times, convinced that it’s the ground or the shadows or the moisture from the puddles that is warping the bottle’s path, but nothing changes.

They decide there will be one last spin, and William reaches out, and William is sure this will be the spin that changes the game, when a car pulls into the driveway and a voice calls, “Penny! Misty!”

The girls are gone before William can ask them to stay. Only Misty pauses in the doorway to wave, and William waves back. He listens to their mother’s voice, to the rustle of grocery bags, the slam of a trailer door. He waits until he can hear the water in the creek near his house. Then he spins the bottle one last time. The glass clinks and grinds over the dirt, kicking up breaths of dust so small that you have to squint to see them. The bottle stops with the mouth pointing at William’s knee.

18.02.19 (Clinic: BAR55, 14.02.19)

Consultant: Dr. Barriga

Ophthalmology—Direct Line: 020 5489 9000/ Fax: 020 5487 5291

Minard Surgery Group, Minard Road, SE6 5UX

You know how this story goes: the girl was kissed in the womb by the devil. When she emerged into the too-bright world, she was missing half her face where his teeth tore it off. The doctors did their best; they grafted skin over the left side, added collagen in her cheeks. “Smile,” they said, tickling her feet. But she could not smile, and so no one smiled at her.

A girl is supposed to be beautiful. A girl is supposed to have rosy red cheeks and a laugh that makes men wilt to think of her bright future. A beautiful girl will have a beautiful life. An ugly girl slips unseen through secret doors.

The girl was always good at finding secrets. She was better at keeping them.

An ugly girl does what she can to get by. She is thrown into the world of zits and water bras and miniskirts, but none of that matters when she wears a face like flattened roadkill. When she is caught staring at the other faces in the locker rooms—eager to linger long on that which she doesn’t have—her interest is misnamed in a world obsessed with naming things. But this girl already has many names: Erica, at first, then ghost, a name given her for the ghastly pallor of her grafted skin.

A ghost girl cries for her first year of middle school, listening to an old Patti Smith song—“Pissing in a River”—and hoping someone might wrap their arms around her and carry her to a home where she is wanted, where there are hundreds of ghost girls like her. When she realizes that no one is coming, she stares into the mirror so long her face distorts into a thing of beauty. She is changed. She tears her eyes away. She must change.

She seeks out secrets like shadows seek their objects, until she finds the shadows’ secrets, until she knows how to be shadow when she needs to be.

The world of first cars and first fucks and first drinks is different than the awkward world of first kisses. All anyone wants is to be seen. But to be seen is to give away your power. To be hidden is to be known. Her first day of school, the ghost girl disappears, a shadow fleeing from the light. Everyone talks about her for a week, until she becomes a secret. Until she becomes so infamous, she is given credit for secrets she doesn’t spill, for wrongs she doesn’t commit. The football player’s jockey cup is filled with ketchup, and her name is signed to the note: Ghost Girl. The capital letters their own new rank. The English teacher’s book is shredded in her chair. Ghost Girl. Every tire in the parking lot is slashed. Ghost Girl.

Though that one was her. It hurts to laugh, so she moans as she watches her classmates fail to flee the school in the rain.

They say she creeps through the ceiling. They say she gets a report card, the same as anyone, and that the teachers are too scared to give her anything but A’s. They say she and the gym coach are having an affair; they meet beneath the bleachers every morning. Sometimes, late at night, they hear a voice belting a song only one girl recognizes from her parents’ record collection: “Pissing in a River.”

But the ghost girl is all alone, for one, two, three years of school. The ghost girl won’t earn a high school degree. The ghost girl doesn’t creep through the rafters. She prefers the home she has built beneath the theater stage, in the drained pool where the swim team used to practice, before the school’s swim budget was slashed. Her favorite season: the spring musical, when she falls asleep in the daylight dark to the struggling pitches of budding singers, most of whom will never sing after their high school tenure. The teacher favors the girl with the highest voice, the one who leaves your ears ringing: Aimee. The ghost girl plugs her ears when Aimee sings. Her world beneath the stage is too dark for such shrillness. The ghost girl knows the limit of her own talent. Though she could out-sing every one of these girls, she cannot stand in front of an audience, cannot let that much of her outside her body. She waits and listens, but does not hear anything that makes her shiver the way that Patti Smith record does.

Then, a new girl sings. Her name, she speaks softly into the mic, is Chrissie. When Chrissie sings, the ghost girl’s chest throbs with a particular empty ache. From the rafters, the ghost girl watches her: Chrissie with her short dark curls, her beautiful face bereft of makeup, her bright yellow smiley-face shirt and torn jeans. She is kind, the ghost girl notices, to everyone.

The ghost girl follows Chrissie to class, moving in shadows the other students don’t see. She has become good at seeing shadows, at inhabiting them. The ghost girl doesn’t slash Chrissie’s tires when she pulls the prank a second time. When Chrissie is called into the principal, blamed, the ghost girl slips an alibi into Chrissie’s files: a psychiatrist’s appointment in another city, for a condition Chrissie doesn’t like to talk about. The ghost girl has done her homework; the condition is the same one that Chrissie was treated for as a little girl. Though she was pronounced healed, the school buys the excuse.

The ghost girl tracks Chrissie’s every move.

A new girl finds it hard to make friends. A new girl eats lunch alone in a bathroom stall. It is there that the ghost girl comes to her, hiding in the walls and speaking in her ghostly secret keeper voice.

“Chrissie,” calls the ghost girl, singing her own song. She has had years with little to do but practice. “I am your angel of music.”

The ghost girl has been thorough. From Chrissie’s files, she found two facts that will make it easier to be a friend. 1. Chrissie’s mother died when Chrissie was a little girl. 2. After her death, Chrissie heard voices. These voices? Chrissie called them her angel of music. A ghost girl can be an angel of music; the name seems to fit her better than all the names she has ever clutched in her palms. The Devil, after all, was an angel fallen.

At first Chrissie says nothing in response. Then: “No,” she says. “Please, not again.”

“I’m not in your head. I am here, with you.”

The ghost girl presses her hand against the wall until the wall turns cold beneath her skin.

“Do you feel me, Chrissie?”

Chrissie shivers and runs her hands up and down her arms. “You’re really here?” she says. “Has it been you all along?”

“I’m here, your angel of music.”

“My AoM. Your voice is beautiful,” Chrissie says. “Where did you learn to sing?”

The ghost girl has never heard a compliment as sweet as this. “I have listened,” she says. Her belly warms with pride. “I can teach you.”

“Would you?”

“I would love nothing more,” the ghost girl says.

Their lessons begin. Every lunch hour, Chrissie hides in her bathroom stall while the ghost girl gives her lessons in strengthening her voice. Chrissie is a good singer. With the ghost girl’s help, she is great. When Chrissie sings, the ghost girl hears her own inflections, her own tones. When Chrissie surpasses the ghost girl, it’s time for Chrissie to play the lead.

The theater auditions The Secret Lives of Fairytale Princesses, a play written by the theater teacher. Chrissie auditions for the lead of Sleeping Beauty, but is given the supporting role of Snow White. The ghost girl fumes in her underground lair, where she paces back and forth until her feet bleed. She misses the next day’s lessons with Chrissie. Chrissie cries in the bathroom, thinking she has disappointed her AoM. The ghost girl hears her tears, but cannot go to her, so badly injured are her feet, her ego.

She hears, instead, a young boy enter the bathroom, crying for himself.

“What are you doing in here?” Chrissie asks.

“Oh please,” says the boy. “Look at me. I can’t use the men’s. If anyone has the right to cry in the girl’s bathroom, it’s me.”

The boy’s voice is familiar: the theater teacher’s second favorite, Trevor.

“What happened to you?” Chrissie asks.

“That role was supposed to be mine,” the boy says. “I’m the best. But I don’t ‘look the part.’ You know what she means by that? She means I’m too gay for it. Stupid fucking hick town.” The boy kicks the trash can; the ring of boot on meal reverberates into the ghost girl’s walls. It is a dissonant sound, not altogether unappealing. The ghost girl scribbles some notes on her sheet music.

“And you know the only reason you didn’t get Sleeping Beauty is because you have short hair. Mrs. Logan isn’t very imaginative. If she can’t see the exact look she had in mind, then forget it. I’ve been sucking up to her for, what, two years now? That part should’ve been mine.”

“It was just because of my hair?” Chrissie asks.

“You better believe it.” Trevor laughs. “If you think for a second you’re not the most talented in the class, you’re in extreme need of a wake-up call.”

“I’m taking lessons,” Chrissie says. “From a great teacher.”

“Well, you must give me her number.”

“It’s complicated,” Chrissie says. “She doesn’t take new clients? She’s a friend of the family.”

“Shit,” Trevor says. “Well, drop a good word for me? Now let’s clean ourselves up and get back out there and make the most of this utmost shitty situation.”

Chrissie laughs. The ghost girl’s stomach roils; no one is supposed to make Chrissie laugh but her.

If the ghost girl can’t make Chrissie laugh, she will make her smile. The ghost girl gathers her secrets. She snatches Aimee’s phone from her locker. She snaps photos of her out by the tennis courts sneaking cigarettes. She sends the photo to her family, her friends, to Mrs. Logan.

Aimee is grounded, forbidden from the play, given a talking-to by a certain disappointed theater instructor.

“Don’t you know what those things do to your voice?” Mrs. Logan says. “I thought you were a serious student. I see now I made a mistake.”

Mrs. Logan pulls Chrissie aside. “I had the wrong idea about the lead,” she says. “I found the picture you put on my desk. What confidence, to do such a thing! With your nice wig, you could easily be my Sleeping Beauty.”

“My wig?” Chrissie says.

Mrs. Logan waves the picture at her; it’s a picture of Chrissie sleeping, blond hair spread across her pillow. Chrissie shivers but thanks her teacher. She and Trevor celebrate with cappuccinos at the local Holy Coffee! shop.

“You’re late,” says the ghost girl at their next lunch.

“Sorry,” Chrissie says, pulling her sandwich out of her bag. “I was talking with Trevor.”

“You haven’t eaten yet?”

“I didn’t have time.”

The ghost girl huffs behind her wall.

“What about you? You didn’t even show up last time! I said I was sorry.” Chrissie takes little bites.

 The ghost girl waits, then waits no longer. “Enough,” she booms. “You know who gave you that role? I can take it back. This is it, Chrissie, your shot at being something here, your chance to show them that you’re not one of them. Do you want me to go?”

“No, please,” Chrissie shoves her sandwich back into her bag. “I can’t do it without you.”

“Then you must do as I say. To be great takes great focus. That’s what you have over all the other girls. Over Trevor with his boyfriend, his endless distractions. You can do this. But you need to make some changes.”

“What changes?”

“We’re going to have to set some rules.”

“Anything.” Chrissie presses her hand against the wall; it warms the ghost girl’s skin. “Anything as long as you don’t leave me.”

The ghost girl lays out five rules: Chrissie will practice every day for two hours outside of their lesson. Chrissie will not go out after school or on weekends. Chrissie will not speak to anyone but her. Chrissie will not tell anyone about her Angel of Music. “These are the rules you need to follow if you want to be something. If you want to be the best.”

“I do want to be the best,” Chrissie says. “I want to make you proud of me.”

That evening the ghost girl stares at herself in the mirror. She eats snack cakes from the dumpster. She fingers the scars of her face beneath her mask and pulls at the skin around her belly. She sings to a crowd of no one.

Chrissie follows the ghost girl’s rules until opening night, when Trevor pulls her into his car and takes her out for a pre-show dinner at the burger place down the street. The ghost girl follows them, moving as shadow through sewers and gas lines and an old buried military complex the town keeps secret. She presses her shadow body against the ceiling tiles and watches through a crack as the two scarf meat and laugh nervously like madmen.

“So what’s going on with you?” Trevor asks, dabbing his greasy fingers on his napkin. “Oh my god, are you pregnant?”

“No,” Chrissie says. She doesn’t smile.

“Honey, I was just kidding. That’s not it, is it?” He clamps his hand upon hers. The ghost girl’s stomach heaves. “You can tell me.”

“It’s her,” Chrissie whispers. “It’s my teacher. My Angel of Music? She’s very strict. I have to do what she says, or else I won’t be good enough.”

“But you’re good enough already. There’s no one as good as you.”

“But I can be better. I mean, I totally fucked up the second chorus in “Bring on the Sleep.”

Trevor rolls his eyes. “The music you’re singing sucks, first thing. Second thing, you’re seventeen. You don’t need to be a pro right now. You need to be a teenager. Chrissie, have you even kissed a boy? Have you even had a friend before?”

“I’ve had friends.” Chrissie shrugs. “I had to leave them all back where I came from. And my AoM. She talked to me when no one else would. She’s been there for me, from the beginning.”

 Trevor sighs and leans across the table, tucks a strand of her hair behind her ear. “I’m your friend. Don’t you forget that. If you want me, I’m here.”

Chrissie untucks the strand. “You shouldn’t touch me,” she says. She presses her palm to the wall, checking for the chill. “It’s not entirely safe.”

The performance is everything the ghost girl ever hoped it would be. Chrissie hits the high notes as though her voice were breaking out of its shell: revelation over shrill insistence. The ghost girl watches from the back row, the shadow of a seat. The theater is half-empty. The male lead, Chrissie’s Prince Charming, is unworthy but beautiful with his beach boy hair and thick lips.

“It’s nearly a shame to wake such a sleeping beauty,” he sings, “but if her brains are as big as her bonnet, I’ll have made the right decision.”

The ghost girl ignores the words. She makes up her own: lonely girls rule the lonely world. Bossy girls rule the bossy world. A ghost girl writes the story she wants to read across the blank slate of her burnt skin.

Everyone claps. Chrissie bows. Prince Charming holds her hand a little too tightly. The ghost girl disappears back underground, where she belongs.

Chrissie goes home that first night, and the second, and the third. On their penultimate night, when Trevor demands she join them at the after-party, Chrissie glances around the room as though checking for the AoM she knows will not be there. She smiles. “Why the hell not?” she says. “If my teacher’s mad about it, I’ll just quit!”

“That’s the rebel I want to know.” Trevor links his arm in hers. “Your Prince Charming will be there. Let’s see which one of us he likes more.”

The ghost girl races along the walls to follow them out, but they go too far from the school, out past where she can follow them underground, along long country roads with no shadows to seep into. She seethes in the abandoned theater, stomping her feet until they ache all the way up to her knees. She wanders the halls, ripping the BOOZE IS BAD posters from the walls. DEATH TO THEATER, she scrawls over the front doors. Downstairs, she sets her traps. Chrissie won’t go again where she can’t follow. She is so lost in her fury, her planning, that she doesn’t hear Chrissie and her friends sneak back in through the loading door to the theater. Finally, their drunken giggling breaks through.

The ghost girl makes her way to the theater. They are so busy laughing on the stage in the dark—Chrissie, Trevor, and the Prince Charming—that they don’t hear her enter, though, in her anger, she keeps only a tenuous hold on staying shadow, moving in and out of skin, of bone. She watches them as she would watch a show—and what a performance! The ghost girl studies each mess of hormones. They hold wine coolers in their hands; the ghost girl can smell the cheap sugary stuff from the front row. Neither Trevor nor Chrissie is the obvious winner of Prince Charming’s affections. They sit on either side of him and talk about their families: hard lives for soft children. They weren’t granted the power of invisibility. Their scars are hidden beneath more than masks.

“I don’t think my father loves me,” Chrissie says.

“My parents love me two inches in,” Trevor says. “They don’t care that I’m gay, but if I don’t end up married with babies, I’m useless to them.”

“Mine love me too much,” Prince Charming says. “If I’m a step out of line—”

Who can say who is hurt the deepest? It’s a game to compare horror. The stories the ghost girl could tell, if she had people with which to share stories.

“Enough pity party,” Trevor says, pulling out his iPhone. He plays music with no lyrics, incomprehensibly simple beats. They dance and laugh and finish their wine coolers, leaving the empty bottles in the wings. The ghost girl picks them up and smells them, careful not to make a sound. The smell makes her stomach ache with want: fake fruit and the kind of sugar that leaves your teeth grainy. Calmed by their useless bickering, the ghost girl allows herself entrance into their shadows. She moves around their feet, around their mouths. The human body is full of dark spaces, shadows in their own right. She slips, soundlessly, into Prince Charming’s warm mouth. She gleans all his secrets. When Chrissie kisses him, the ghost girl is a shadow that passes from his lips to hers.

From inside Chrissie, the ghost girl speaks. “You disobeyed your Angel of Music,” she says. Chrissie shrinks back into the dark, a headache taking hold.

“Leave me the fuck alone,” Chrissie says. If pressed, she might chalk her newfound courage up to 3% ABV, but the ghost girl scans her chemistry, her biology. Though she’d never tasted it for herself, she has read of the effect weak booze might have on a girl like Chrissie. It isn’t enough to change her kindness into cruelty. There is only one explanation, then: Chrissie was never who she pretended to be. She is an actress to her core.

“Chrissie, who are you talking to?” Trevor kneels beside her and places his hand on her knee.

“Can’t you hear her?”

“I don’t hear anything,” Trevor says. “Chrissie, have you been taking your pills?”

“What pills?” Chrissie says. “I haven’t taken those since I was little.”

Trevor blushes. “That’s not what everyone else says. Chrissie, you can tell me anything.”

Prince Charming stands back behind them. “What’s going on?” he asks. “What’s wrong with her?”

“Not now,” Trevor says.

“Don’t listen to them,” the ghost girl says. “I’m real as you are. Realer, in fact, because I’m not a liar like you. I’m not a pretender.”

“What’s she saying to you?” Trevor says.

“Tell him to stop interfering,” the ghost girl says. She spreads her arms through Chrissie’s arms and stretches the shadow inside her until the skin hurts like it’s burning, like it’s soon-to-break.

“Stop,” Chrissie screams. Her voice echoes the way only a performer’s can. “Both of you, stop.”

“I’m not doing anything,” Prince Charming says.

Chrissie stands, knocking a wine cooler over. The blue spreads across the stage like a burst vein bruise. “I’ll go with you, I will,” she says to the ghost girl. She pushes past Trevor, past Prince Charming. The ghost girl leads her only friend into the darkness underground.

Underground, the ghost girl has faked two prescription bottles full of the pills Chrissie took when she was a little girl, dated for the present. The clothes scattered throughout the ghost girl’s lair are inscribed with Chrissie’s name, black ink on every tag. The ghost girl has been thorough. She’s been cunning. She is an actress too. If she can convince Chrissie that they’re one, then they’ll be one. She whispers untrue secrets: Chrissie never moved to a new town, never met a new friend. The ghost girl has been here, inside Chrissie, all along. A ghost girl is part of you always. She stretches to fit the new body. She sings through the new voice. Her mouth moves in a face that she will never have to hide again.

Girls without friends make ghosts all the time, the ghost girl says. It’s not the worst you could have done.

A ghost girl keeps her own secrets best of all.

I was twelve the first time I saw my dead father cross from the kitchen doorway to the hall that led back to the utility room.

It was 2:49 in the morning, as near as I could reconstruct.

I was standing alongside the dusty curtain pulled across the front window of the living room. I wasn’t standing there on purpose. I was in only my underwear. No lights were on.

My best guess is that, moments before, I’d been looking out the front window, into all the scrub and nothing spread out in front of our house. The reason for thinking that was I had the taste of dust in the back of my throat, and the window had a fine coat of that dust on it. Probably. I’d breathed it in through my nose, because sleepwalkers are goal oriented, not concerned with details or consequences.

If sleepwalkers cared about that kind of stuff, I’d have at least had my gym shorts on, and, if I was in fact trying to see something outside, then my glasses, too.

To sleepwalk is to be inhabited, yes, but not by something else, so much. What you’re inhabited by, what’s kicking one foot in front of the other, it’s yourself. It doesn’t make sense, but I don’t think it’s under any real compulsion to, finally. If anything, being inhabited by yourself like that, what it tells you is that there’s a real you squirming down inside you, trying all through the day to pull up to the surface, look out. But it can only get that done when your defenses are down. When you’re sleeping.

The following morning—this was my usual procedure, after a night of shuffling around dead to the world—would find me out in the sun, poring over the stunted grass and packed dirt for eighty or a hundred feet past the front window. Mom would be at work, and my little brother, Dino, would be glued to one of his cartoons, so there would be nobody there to call out from the porch, ask me what was I doing.

If I’d had to answer, I’d have said I was looking for whatever it was I’d been looking for last night. My hope was that my waking self had cued on some regularity to the packed dirt’s contour, or registered a dull old pull tab that was actually the lifting ring for a dry old plywood door that opened onto… what? I didn’t care. Just something. Anything. An old stash of fireworks, a buried body, a capped-off well; it didn’t matter.

The day I found something, that would mean that my nighttime ramblings, they had purpose.

Otherwise, I was just broken, right? Otherwise, I was just a toy waking up in the night, bumping into walls.

That next morning, though, my probing fingers turned up nothing of any consequence. Just the usual trash—little glass bottles, a few bolts with nuts and washers rusted to the thread, part of a dog collar, either the half-buried wheel of a car long gone or the still-attached wheel of a car now buried upside down.

I wanted the latter, of course, but, to allow that possibility, I had to resist digging around the edges of that wheel.

When I looked back to the front window of our modular house, I half-expected to see the shape of my dead father again, standing in the window. Watching me.

The window was just the window, the curtain drawn like Mom said, to keep the heat out.

Still, I watched it.

How I’d know it was him from a house length out, it wasn’t that I would recognize his face or his build. He’d died when I was four and nearly dying from pneumonia myself, when Dino was one and staying with an aunt so he couldn’t catch pneumonia, when Mom was still working just one shift. All I had to go on as far as how he looked, it was pretty much just snapshots and a blurry memory or two.

No, the way I’d recognized him the night before, when he was walking from the kitchen doorway back to the utility room, it was his silhouette. There were spikes coming out from his lower back, and the tops of his calves bulged out in an unnatural way, and his head was top-heavy and kind of undulating, so he was going to have to duck to make it into the utility room.

But—for all he was wearing, he was absolutely silent. Zero rustling, like you can usually hear with a fancydancer, when they’re all set to go, or have just finished.

Thing was? My father never danced. He didn’t go to the pow-wows to compete for cash. One of the few things I remember about him, it’s that he didn’t call the traditionals down at the town pump or the IGA “throwbacks,” like I’d heard. His words always got scrambled in his mouth—Dino’s got that too—so that what he came out with, it was “fallback.”

My father was neither a throwback nor a fallback. He didn’t speak the language, didn’t know the stories, and didn’t care that he didn’t. Once or twice a year, he’d sign on to fight whatever fire was happening, but it wasn’t to protect any ancestral land. It was because when you signed on, they issued you these green wool pants. He’d sell those to the hunters, come fall. Once a year, Mom told me, he’d usually walk home in his boxers, with a twenty folded small in his hand so none of the reservation dogs would nose it away.

That’s my dad, as I know him.

But in the year or two after he either drowned or was drowned—there’s stories both ways, and they each make sense—when we were still on the reservation, when his sisters would still watch us some days, they’d tell us about Dad when he was our age and his eyes were still big with dreams.

He’d been really into bows and arrows and headbands, they said, the toy ones from the trading post. I imagine that when you grow up in a cowboy place, then you’re all into saddles and boots and ropes. When you grow up in Indian country, the TV tells you how to be Indian. And it starts with bows and arrows and headbands. They’re the exciting part of your heritage. They’re also the thing you can always find at the gift shop.

Back then, Dad would always be in the stands at the pow-wows, his sisters told me—well, me and Dino, but Dino was one and two, so I think the stories just skidded right past him, pretty much.

As for me, I really keyed on that, on my dad watching those dancers with every last bit of his attention, his headband strapped tight over his hair. Like he was trying to soak all this in, so it could fill him up. So he could be that.

Who wouldn’t want to step into a fancydancer outfit? It would be the obvious next step.

The bustles, the armbands, the beadwork, the cool knee-high moccasins—and the facepaint. It makes you look like the assassin-aliens in space movies. With your face black and white like that, you automatically slit your eyes like a gunfighter, like you’re staring America down across the centuries.

I can see my dad slitting his eyes in the bleachers like that all those years ago. What he’s doing, it’s pretending. What he’s doing, it’s waiting.

“He was going to be the best dancer of us all, once he straightened back up again,” one of his sisters had told me. She wasn’t a dancer herself, but, playing it again in my head, I think she was talking about all the Indians on the whole reservation, maybe even on the whole pow-wow circuit. I think she was saying that if my dad would have just applied the same energy and forethought to his regalia and his routine as he did to what trouble there was to get in once the sun came down, there would have been no stopping him.

That’s how you talk about dead people, though, especially dead Indians. It’s all about squandered potential, not actual accomplishments.

My father, my dad, he could have been the best fancydancer of us all.

And that’s how I recognized him that first night, crossing from the living room through the kitchen.

His boots, his bustle. His fancydancer outline.

In death, he had become what he never could in life.

And now he was back.

Or, he had been for a few steps.

My heart pounded in my chest with what I wanted to call fear but what I know now was actually hope.

The South Dakota summer sky is a broken china teacup, and I have the distinct impression that when I finally stop the car and step outside and dare to let go of the handle on the door, I will fall straight up into that broken china sky. And I will not stop falling until the world below me is so small that I can make a circle of my thumb and forefinger and catch it all inside. And hanging there, I will freeze like a rose dripped in liquid nitrogen or my blood will boil, but I’ll have captured the world’s disc in one hand. There’s country music on the radio, George Jones and Tammy Wynette singing “Golden Ring,” and I turn the volume up just a little louder, to help take my mind off the smell. On either side of this seemingly eternal highway, there’s shortgrass prairie and patches of bare earth pressed flat beneath that brutal, hungry blue broken cup, and I rush past a comical sort of billboard, an old prospector and his cartoon mule, and the mule is luxuriating in a horse trough, and the billboard promises Refreshing! Free Ice Water! at the Wall Drug Store if I just keep going straight ahead twenty more miles. The kid in the passenger seat is still sleeping. I picked him up last night just outside Sioux Falls, just after I’d traded 1-29 North for I-90 West and the kid said he’d blow me for a ride to Rapid City. And I said shit get it and I have an empty seat don’t I? You don’t have to blow me, if you don’t mind that I smoke, and if you don’t mind the music. The kid said he’d blow me, anyway, because he didn’t like taking anything for free. Yeah, okay, I said, and so we found a truck stop, and he did it in the stall, and I tangled my fingers in his blond hair while he sucked my cock and fondled my balls and, for no extra charge, slipped a pinkie finger up my asshole. I bought him a burger and fries and told him don’t worry, it wasn’t for free, he could blow me again later on, so we’d be even. But I had to feed the kid. He looked like a stray dog hadn’t been fed in a month. And then I drove, and for a while the kid talked about his boyfriend in Rapid City, and I played the radio, and he finally fell asleep. In his sleep, he looked more like a girl than a boy. I pulled over near Murdo, just before four a.m., and I slept a little myself. I dreamed of the White Sundays. “You ever been to Rapid City?” I ask him, and he says no. I ask how it is his boyfriend is in Rapid City when he’s never been there himself, and he tells me they met on the internet. “You’ve never met him face to face?” I ask, and the kid wants to know what difference that makes. “Does he know you’re coming?” I ask him, and the kid just shrugs. “That means he doesn’t, right?” I ask. “He’ll be glad to see me,” says the kid, and I let it go at that. “What kind of drugs?” he asks me, and I’ve already forgotten the lie. It takes me a second to figure out what he’s talking about. “What kind of drugs got you fired from the college?” he prompts, and now he stops watching the prairie and stares at me, instead. “Heroin,” I tell him. “Heroin and pills. And a little coke, just to sweeten the deal.” And he says, “So you’re a junkie. I gave a junkie professor a blow job. What if you gave me AIDS back there? I didn’t know you were a junkie.” I tell him I don’t have AIDS, and he frowns and sighs and wants to know if he’s just supposed to take my word for that? Don’t I have some sort of papers to prove that I’m clean, and when I say no, I don’t have any fucking papers saying I don’t have AIDS, he turns off the radio and goes back to staring out the window. “Your car smells like road kill,” he says, and I say yeah, I hit a dead skunk back at the state line, just as I was leaving Nebraska. “I pulled over at a truck stop and washed off the tires and underneath the car with one of those high-pressure jet nozzles, but I guess I didn’t get it all. “It doesn’t smell like skunk,” he says. “It just smells like road kill. It just smells like rot.” So I ask him if he wants me to pull over and let him walk, and he doesn’t answer. I turn the radio back on. Hank Williams is crooning “You’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive.” “You catch shit from your parents?” I ask him, and he says, “I caught shit from everyone, okay? I caught shit from the whole fucking town,” and I say fair enough and that I wasn’t trying to pry. “It would be just my luck you gave me AIDS back there,” he mutters. “People back home would say I got what I deserve.” I ask him if he’s got any open sores inside his mouth or any bad teeth or anything like that, and he says no (and looks sort of offended at the suggestion), and I tell him fine, then he can stop worrying about catching AIDS from giving someone a blow job. We pass a rusting red Ford pickup truck stranded in the black-eyed Susans at the side of the highway. The front windshield is busted in and all four tires are flat. “Lucas has a red pickup truck,” says the kid, and when I ask if Lucas is his boyfriend in Rapid City, the kid nods and reaches for his pack on the floorboard between his feet. I told him he could toss it in the backseat, but he said no, he’d rather keep it with him. He’d rather keep it close. I didn’t argue. The kid lifts it onto his lap, black polyester bulging at the seams with whatever the kid holds sacred enough that he’s brought it along on his sojourn west. He unzips the pack, digs about for a moment, then takes out a little snub-nosed .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. The sun through the windshield glints dully off stainless steel. My heart does a little dance in my chest, a surprise tarantella, and my mouth goes dry. “That thing loaded?” I ask, trying to sound cool, trying to keep my voice steady, like it’s nothing to me if the kid’s carrying] a gun. I tell myself, shit, if I were hitching in this day and in this age, I’d be carrying a gun, too. “Wouldn’t be much point in my having it if it weren’t loaded, now would there?” And I say no, no I guess there wouldn’t be much point in that at all. He opens up the cylinder to show me there’s a round in all five chambers, and then he snaps it shut again. He aims the pistol out his open window. “You any good with it?” I ask, and the kid shrugs. “I’m good enough,” he replies. “My brother, he was in the Army, over in Iraq or someplace like that. He came back and taught me how to shoot. And then he killed himself.” I glance at myself in the rearview mirror, and then I glance at the kid again, and then I keep my eyes on the road. “Sorry to hear that,” I say, and the kid says, “No, you’re not. You don’t have to pretend you are. I’m sick to death of people pretending shit they don’t really feel.” We pass another billboard for Wall Drug Store, and the kid pantomimes taking a shot at it. Bang, bang, bang, like he’s seven years old, playing cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, with the neighborhood brats. “Baghdad,” says the kid. “That’s in Iraq, ain’t it?” I nod, and I tell him, yeah, that Baghdad is the capital of Iraq. “Then Iraq is where they sent my brother,” the kid tells me. “He saw a buddy of his get blown up by a landmine. He saw another buddy of his kill a woman because just maybe she was carrying a bomb. Something like that. He said everyone was afraid all the time, no matter how many guns they carried, and he came back still scared. He had to take pills to sleep. I guess he just eventually got tired of being fucking scared all the time. I know I would. He couldn’t get into college, so he got into the Army, instead.” I repress that reflexive urge to say I’m sorry again. Instead, I say, “We’re gonna be stopping just a couple of miles up ahead, so you better put that thing away until we’re back on the road again. You never know when there’s gonna be a state trooper or something.” The kid fires off another imaginary shot or three, and then he says, “Dude, South Dakota’s open carry. What the fuck is it to me whether there’s police around.” And I say fine, whatever, suit yourself, kid. He asks, “Does it make you nervous?” And I admit that it does. “Just a little,” I say. “I’ve never much cared for guns. I didn’t grow up around them, that’s all.” And now I’m thinking about three nights ago at a motel outside Lincoln, sitting on the hood of the car in a motel parking lot, and I’m thinking about the oddly comforting smell of cooling asphalt and about staring up at an ivory-white moon only one night past full. I crane my neck and look up through the dirty, bug-specked windshield and wish there were a few clouds this morning to break the tyranny of that broken china blue sky pressing down on me. Or if not to break it—because that would be asking an awful lot of a few clouds—at least to pose a challenge, at least to stand as a counterpoint. The kid opens his backpack again, and he puts the .38 away. I allow myself to relax a little, quietly sighing the proverbial sigh of relief. “This is the farthest west I’ve ever been,” says the kid, and then he asks, “What’s in Wall?” and he sets the backpack down on the floor between his feet. “Not much at all,” I reply. “Less than a thousand people. There’s a deactivated Minuteman missile launch control facility, just outside town.

In fact, just a few miles north of where we are right now.” I take my right hand off the steering wheel and point north. “You mean nuclear bombs?” he wants to know, and I say, yeah, I mean nuclear bombs. “But the site was deactivated in 1991, after Bush and Gorbachev signed the START treaty. So, there aren’t any bombs there anymore.” The kid, he just sorta gazes off into the distance, off the way I’ve pointed, out across the prairie. “Jesus,” he says, and then he laughs a nervous, hard laugh, a brittle laugh that would seem more natural coming from someone much older than however old he is, and the kid runs his fingers through his dirty blond hair. “I wasn’t even born yet. There could’a been a war, and those missiles could’a been fired, and I never would have been born. Jesus.” And then, to take his mind off an apocalypse that never happened, I say, “There’s also a dinosaur in Wall.” He stops staring at the prairie and stares at me, instead. “What do you mean? Like a dinosaur skeleton?” he asks, and I say no, not a skeleton. “You’ll see,” I tell him and I manage a smile, just to spite that sky. There’s only an hour left until noon and the day’s getting hot, so I tell him to roll up the window and I’ll turn on the air conditioning. He does, and I do. We pass a billboard that proclaims in crimson letters ten feet tall that abortion is murder. We pass another broken down truck, this one missing all four of its tires. We pass the turnoff for Philip. A few hundred yards to the north, there’s a deeply gullied ridge now, running parallel with the interstate, weathered beds claystone and silt-stone and mudstone laid down thirty million years ago, beds of volcanic ash and layers of sandstone from ancient Oligocene streambeds, a preview of the vast badlands farther south. I recall my dream from the night before, of titanotheres and lumbering tortoises. In the bright sunlight, the rocks are a dazzling shade of gray that’s very nearly white. The kid says he needs to piss. I point at the windshield, and I say, “There it is.” He asks, ‘What? There’s what?’ But then he sees it, the queerly majestic silhouette of the Wall Drug Dinosaur stark against the sky. The kid says, “Wow,” like he really means it, like he’s someone who can still be amazed by an eighty-foot-long concrete dinosaur, even after all he’s been through. That catches me off my guard almost as much as the sight of the Smith & Wesson did. The sun glistens wetly off the brontosaur’s painted Kelly green hide, off its sinuous neck and tiny head. I tell the kid how at night the eyes light up, how at night the eyes glow red, and he says he wishes he could see that. I take Exit 110 off the interstate, rushing past the dinosaur, turning right onto Glenn Street. “Last time I was here,” I say, “I was still in college. That was back in 1985, when there were still missiles in those silos, aimed at China and the Soviet Union.” The kid doesn’t take his eyes off the dinosaur, but he asks me what’s the Soviet Union. “Russia,” I say. “It’s what we used to call Russia.” The kid frowns and says, “I swear to fuck, dude, sometimes I think people change the names of shit just to make the next generation feel stupid.” And I tell him, yeah, that’s exactly why we do it. “I’ll tell you something else that’s changed,” I say. “Last time I was here, all this crap hadn’t been built yet.” And I mean the Day’s Inn and the Exxon station, the Conoco and all the convenience stores and a Motel 6, a Subway and a Dairy Queen, something called the Cactus Cafe and Lounge that promises home cooking and “western hospitality.” I’d meant to head straight for the venerable Wall Drug Store, the time-honored crown jewel of this exit, a gaudy oasis to mark the dead center of nowhere, but suddenly I’m no longer in the mood for tourist traps. Suddenly, I feel ill and lightheaded, and I pull into the Conoco’s parking lot, instead. The kid says, “Hey, ain’t we going to see the dinosaur?” I wipe perspiration off my forehead, because now I’m sweating despite the AC vents blowing in my face, and I reply, “I thought you had to piss.” And he says, “I can piss after,” and I tell him, “You can piss first. That dinosaur’s been there since 1967. It weighs eighty tons, and it isn’t going to run off anytime soon.” There’s an enormous convenience store attached to the Conoco station, the Wall Auto Livery, and isn’t that smart, isn’t that clever. I pull into an empty space between two other cars, one with Oregon plates, the other from Kansas, and I shift into park and cut the engine. I know now that I’m going to be sick, and I know that I’m going to be sick very soon. I taste hot bile in the back of my throat “You get whatever you want,” I say to the kid. “Go on and get whatever you need.” Then I’m out of the car, and Jesus it’s hot beneath that heavy, heavy sky, and for just a second or two I think maybe I’m gonna wind up on my knees, mired in the soft asphalt like a La Brea mastodon, praying for the mercy of vultures and slow suffocation. But then the door jingles and I’m swallowed by a blast of icy, impossibly cold air, and I realize that I’m inside the store. There are people moving and talking all around me, but I don’t make the mistake of looking anyone in the eye. I don’t care if maybe they’re staring. I just keep walking, past long aisles of snack food and coolers filled with row after row of soft drinks and energy drinks, bottled water and fruit juice. I’m lucky, and there’s no one in the restroom. I lock the door behind me and vomit into the toilet, revisiting my breakfast. I sit down with my back pressed against cool ceramic tiles and try not to think how dirty the floor must be. I can smell urine even over the pungent, antiseptic stink of pink deodorant cakes, even over the stink of my own puke. I shut my eyes for a moment, fighting another wave of nausea. I’ve always hated vomiting, and I don’t want to do it again. What the fuck is happening? I ask myself. What the fuck is wrong with you? Get it together, man. Get up off this filthy fucking floor and get it together before some nosy SOB starts asking questions. I’m trying hard not to think about the weight of the sky endeavoring even now to flatten me, even though I can no longer see it I’m trying harder still not to think about the way the car smells. But you know how that goes, the white bear problem, ironic process theory, fucking Dostoevsky. “Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.” So, I puke again. And then someone knocks at the door. I look at my watch and wonder how long I’ve been in the restroom, and then I get up and straighten my clothes. I brush off the seat of my jeans, and I go to the sink and wash my hands with mint-green powdered soap from a dispenser. I wash my hands three times. I rinse my mouth with water from the faucet. Again, the knock at the door, and I say, “Yeah, okay. Just give me a second.” I splash water on my face, then realize that I didn’t flush the toilet, so I walk back over to the stall and flush. I jiggle the handle a few times, out of force of habit, because my toilet at home runs if you don’t jiggle the handle. I unlock the bathroom door, only to find there’s no one waiting. I spot the kid perusing at a display of beef jerky, and then I go over to one of the coolers and take out four cans of Coca-Cola. I get a bag of ice for the Coleman chest wedged into the floorboard behind the driver’s seat. The kid walks over to me, and he asks if I’m okay. “I’m fine,” I tell him, because what’s one more lie when all is said and done. “You don’t look fine,” he says. “You got what you need?” I ask him, and I wipe at my lips; my face is rough against the back of my hand. How long has it been since I last shaved? The kid says yeah, he’s got what he needs, but he tells me again how he doesn’t like taking charity. I tell him to shut up, and we walk together to the cashier and wait in line until it’s our turn at the register. The kid has a pack of Starburst fruit chews, a bag of Skittles, some teriyaki-flavored beef jerky, a can of Red Bull. I ask the cashier for a pack of Marlboro Reds, and the girl behind the counter asks to see my license. She’s wearing a tiny gold cross around her neck. “You don’t look so fine,” the kid says to me again, while the cashier stares at my driver’s license like she’s never actually seen one before. “I might have gotten a bad sausage or something at breakfast,” I tell him. “How about you? You feeling all right?” He says, “Yeah, sure. I’m feeling fine,” and I can tell he’s not buying the food poisoning story. “You don’t get car sick, do you?” the kid asks, and the question strikes me as so absurd that I almost laugh. Somehow, I manage only to smile, instead. Finally, the cashier figures out that I’m forty-eight years old, so it’s legal to sell me cigarettes, and she rings us up. I tell her to add a bag of ice. I pay for everything with my Visa card, because that one’s still good, and I tell her I don’t need the receipt. She bags the candy and beef jerky, the drinks and my smokes, and I ask the kid, wait, didn’t he need to take a leak. “I used the women’s room,” he tells me. The cashier sort of glares at him. He glares back at her twice as hard. The name printed on her name tag is Brooklyn, and I wonder who the fuck in Wall, South Dakota goes and names her daughter Brooklyn? I tell the kid to grab the ice, and then I go back outside into the broiling day and stand by the dented left front fender of my car, staring westward, back towards the highway. Towards Rapid City and the Black Hills and the Rocky Mountains, towards the goddamn Pacific Ocean, and I wonder how I’ve gotten this far. The kid comes back with ten pounds of ice, and I see that there’s a polar bear wearing a toboggan cap printed on the plastic bag. I think again about Dostoevsky. I contemplate synchronicity and meaningful coincidence. “I was thinking, maybe I’ll get a room,” I say to the kid, and he sets the bag of ice down on the hood of the car. “I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in a couple of days now. It would do me good to sleep in an actual bed. You’re welcome to join me, if you want” The kid stares at the bag of ice, and he shrugs. “You still going all the way to Rapid City, or should I start looking for another ride?” I ask myself how far I’m gonna go this time, if I’m in for a penny, in for a pound, or if I should let this one walk. “Sure,” I say. “I just need to catch a few hours shuteye, that’s all. If you want to hang around, we can get dinner tonight, and then you can see the eyes of the dinosaur.” I fish out my keys and open the back door on the driver’s side. The cooler is a third full with chilly water, and I pour that out onto the hot asphalt. It pools beneath the car with Oregon plates. “Yeah,” he says, “I don’t know. Maybe I should keep moving. I’m late, as it is.” He hands me the bag of ice, and I slam it on the blacktop a couple of times to break it up, and then I rip open the plastic bag and fill the cooler halfway. I dump the rest out on the pavement, and it begins to melt instantly. I put the cans of Coke into the cooler, and I tell the kid, “Whichever. No pressure. I just thought I’d offer. I don’t want you to feel like I’m going back on my word. I just gotta get some sleep.” He asks if I really think I have food poisoning, and I tell him maybe, I don’t either,” I say. “Two beds?” he wants to know. “Sure,” reply. “Of course. Two beds.” The kid sighs and gets back in the car, so it’s decided. Just like that. I drive back across Glenn Street to the Day’s Inn and get a room with twin beds. The clerk looks at me, and then she looks past me out the sheets of dusty plate-glass fronting the lobby. The kid is waiting in the car, sipping a Red Bull. “Is he your son?” she wants to know, and I can hear the suspicion in her voice, coiled like a rattlesnake, waiting to strike if I give the wrong answer, waiting to say, sorry Mister, but turns out there’s no room at the inn, but maybe next door at the Motel 6 they have a vacancy. It’s just down the way, and they don’t ask so many questions. “No,” I say, too tired and hot and queasy to lie. “I picked him up yesterday, hitchhiking. We’re both headed the same way, and, you know, there are bad people on the road. Homos and perverts looking to take advantage of unsuspecting innocents. You know how it is.” I’m wondering if maybe I laid it on too thick with the bit about perverts and homos, but apparently not, because then she asks, “How old is he?” I reply, “I honestly haven’t asked. But he said something about graduating high school back in May, so I’m guessing he’s not a minor. Look, I really don’t want to cause you any grief. If you’re not comfortable with this, that’s okay. That’s totally understandable. I just couldn’t keep driving when I saw him. It’s not safe out on the road, hitching.” The clerk stares out at the kid just a little while longer, and then she says, “Nah, it’s fine.” She apologizes for being a snoop. That’s the way she put it; her words, not mine. I tell her no problem. These days, the way things are, it pays to be on the alert. See something, say something, right? She gives me a keycard for a room on the first floor. She asks if I mind that it faces the interstate, and I say no, not at all. The sound of traffic helps me sleep. “Almost as good as train tracks,” I say, and I smile, and she smiles back at me. She’s missing a front tooth, a lower incisor. She asks me for the kid’s name, and I tell her his first name’s Lucas, but I don’t know his last name. She tells me when she was a kid she had an uncle named Lucas, died in the Gulf War, and I say how that’s a shame. Then I walk back out into the heat and find a place to park, and me and the kid retire to Room 107. It’s dingy and smells of pine-scented disinfectant and stale tobacco smoke. But the beds are clean and the bathroom’s clean. The kid brings in the cooler, puts his remaining Red Bull in with my four cans of Coke, and then he switches on the television set. He waits until after it’s already on and tuned to ESPN to ask if I mind, if the noise is going to annoy me. I say no, just keep the volume down, please. There’s a baseball game, the Yankees against the Detroit Tigers in Yankee Stadium. I pull the drapes closed, drink one of the Cokes, and watch the game for a few minutes. I unbutton my shirt and lay down on the bed nearest to the door, not bothering to turn down the comforter or the sheets. I’d like to brush my teeth, maybe even have a shower, but it can wait. I don’t feel like going back out to the car for my suitcase, and speaking of luggage, the kid’s backpack is sitting across from me on the other bed. I think about the loaded .38 revolver, about the kid aiming out the car window, firing pretend bullets at invisible targets. I wonder if he’s ever killed anything, and I wonder if he has the nerve. I ask myself, if I got up and opened the bag and took the gun, would he try to stop me. Would he dare? Then I tell him, “I’m just gonna nod off, okay?” The kid says, yeah, okay, fine, and he tears open the bag of beef jerky. The salty-sweet odor of teriyaki seasoning immediately fills the room, and my stomach rolls. “So, you know all about dinosaurs and stuff?” the kid asks around a mouthful of dehydrated meat. “Yeah,” I answer, and I close my eyes. On TV, there’s the sharp crack of a baseball bat making contact, and the crowd cheers. “Is that what you do, dig up dinosaur bones?” he asks. “Not exactly,” I say, then open my eyes again and stare at the cottage cheese ceiling. There’s a dark stain above the bed, and I figure that’s where the mildew smell’s coming from. “I study animals that lived at the same time as dinosaurs.” He wants to know what sorts of animals, and I sit up again. I reach for my cigarettes, open the fresh pack, light a Marlboro, and belatedly wonder about smoke detectors. I stare at the TV and explain about plesiosaurs and mosasaurs and extinct species of sea turtles, about marine reptiles and secondarily aquatic tetrapods, animals that have given up on land and gone back to the sea. I tell him about my work in the Niobrara Chalk of Kansas, the Pierre Shale of Wyoming, and the Mooreville Chalk of Alabama. “Were you telling the truth about getting fired over drugs?” he asks, and I say yeah, but I’m clean now. Well, mostly clean. He asks where it is I’m headed, and I tell him I’m headed nowhere in particular, that after a stint in rehab I just needed to get out on the road and clear my head, figure out my next move. “I thought I’d take a road trip, visit some places out West that I’ve never actually seen or haven’t seen since I was in college.” The sort of places that are of interest to geologists and paleontologists, the South Dakota Badlands, Dinosaur National Monument, the Florrisant Fossil Beds in Colorado and Como Bluff in Wyoming, a bunch of quarries and museums, and so on and so forth. I tap ash into the palm of my hand. No smoke alarms have gone off, so I guess I’m in the clear. The kid asks, “What’s there in Rapid City you want to see,” and I tell him about the museum at the School of Mines. “You’re gay?” he asks. “Yeah,” I reply, and he sort of grins and says how he could tell right off, how he wouldn’t have offered me the blowjob if he hadn’t been sure. He tells me he’ll be nineteen the week before Christmas. I didn’t ask. He volunteered as though it were the next most natural thing to say. “Lucas,” says the kid, “he’s a lot older than me, too. Maybe I just have a thing for older men.” And I reply, “Maybe so, but you should be careful about that. There are people who will take advantage of that predilection in a young man. Out in the big wide world, out on the road, there are men whose appetites get the better of the better angels of their nature.” He says I talk like a college professor, like someone who’s read a lot of books, and then he goes back to watching the ballgame. I return to staring at the water stain on the cottage cheese ceiling. I lie there thinking about wolves and Red Riding Hood, the road of needles and the road of pins, about foolhardy children straying from the paths set out before them, about Lincoln, Nebraska, and before that, the inky shadows beneath a highway overpass just outside Sioux City, Iowa. And then I drift off to sleep, and I dream of a sky above the prairie that isn’t any sort of sky at all, a sky that is, in fact, the waters of an inland sea, and I drive and I drive and I drive. Gigantic white worms have plowed the winding, switchback trails that I follow, and I anxiously check the rearview mirror, again and again, to be sure that I haven’t been followed. I roll along between cathedrals that once were the skeletons of leviathans, bare ribs for flying buttresses, an arching line of vertebrae to support the vaulted dome of Heaven. Monstrous reptiles and fish and sharks the size of whales swim and fly and sail the mesopelagic liquid sky laid out above my car, and their shadows move silent across the land, sirens leading me on. Behind the wheel, I recite a protective zoological mantra, Greek and Latin binomena for an infidel’s blasphemous benediction, an atheist’s string of prehistoric saints and petrified rosary beads—Tylosaurus, Archelon, Dolichorhynchops, Xiphactinus, Thalassomedon, Cretoxyrhina mantelli, Good Lord deliver us. I take a wrong turn and stop at a deserted gas station, but all the pumps are out of order. The flyblown windows of the gas station are filled with jackalopes and pyramids made of empty oil cans. A sign nailed to the door reads “We’re Open!” but all the doors have been locked against me. I peer inside, and there’s an antique Bell & Howell 8 mm. home projector throwing images on a sheetrock wall. Angry men on horseback riding the hills of a rough and wooded country, hunting a wolf, a ruthless murderer of lambs and babes in cribs and travelers caught unawares. The flanks of the horses are encrusted with barnacles. The wolf turns out to be something else altogether, not a proper wolf at all. And then, on the way back to my car, passing the useless, broken down pumps, I watch a solar eclipse that is really only the circumference of an enormous ammonite’s shell passing between me and the sun shining down on the ocean. Placenticeras, Hoploscaphites, Oxybeloceras, Sphenodiscus pleurisepta, Our Father who art forsaken, hossannah, amen, amen. I get back in the car, wishing that I could stop smelling that terrible, terrible stench, wishing it were only from having hit a dead skunk, wishing it were only the funk of road—though, in a sense, is it not? I drive, wandering out to where the deeps get deeper, and the sky grows darker, and the roof of the car begins to groan and buckle from the weight of all that water pushing down on me. And then the kid is shaking me awake, and he says that I was talking in my sleep. “Sounded like you were having one hell of a nightmare,” he says. I say it wasn’t as bad as all that, but sure, I have bad dreams. He’s opened the drapes, and I see that the sun is down. The kid sits down on his bed, which doesn’t look as if it’s been slept in. I glance at the clock on the table between the beds and see it’s almost midnight. The TV’s been switched off, and the only light is coming from the open bathroom door. I smell soap and shampoo and steam, and I ask the kid if he had a shower. He says yeah, he took a shower, and then, he says, he found my keys and went outside and looked in the trunk. His hair’s still wet I sit up and rub my eyes, and now I see that he’s holding the revolver from his backpack. Quel courage. I see that it’s aimed at me. “What I want to know,” he says, “I mean, what I most wanna know, is whether or not you’re afraid of dying, whether you’re afraid of going to Hell for what you’ve done?” And I reply, “Or maybe just for being a faggot? That would be transgression enough, right?” And I ask him if I can get one of the Cokes from the cooler, and if he minds if I light a cigarette. Isn’t that how it works? The condemned man is at least accorded a final cigarette? He tells me to sit still, and he goes to the Coleman icebox and takes out one of the cans of Coca-Cola and drops it on the bed beside me. He lights one of the Marlboros, and passes it to me, and I sit smoking and trying to wake up. But the dream still feels more real and less improbable than sitting in a motel room in Wall, South Dakota, staring at the muzzle of the kid’s dead brother’s gun. I take a long drag on the cigarette, and then I answer his question. “Yeah,” I say, “I’m scared of dying. I probably would have stopped a long time ago, if I weren’t afraid to just lie down and fucking die.” He asks, “You were gonna do for me what you done for them?” and he nods towards the door to Room 107 and towards the car outside and towards the broken things he found in the trunk. “I hadn’t yet decided,” I tell him, and that’s the truth, for whatever the truth might be worth. “Did you fuck them?” he wants to know. “Did you fuck them, and if you did, was it before or after they were dead?” I ask, “Are you going to ask me questions all night long? Is that how this is gonna go? You sitting there, holding that gun on me, satisfying your morbid curiosity.” And he tells me, “Yeah, Mister, maybe that’s how it’s gonna go. Or maybe I already called the cops. Or maybe I’ll take the gun and the car and be on my way. Maybe I’ll even leave you alive.” I laugh and smoke my Marlboro. “Well,” I say, “that’s an awful lot of choices. How are you ever going to decide which it’s going to be?” He says, “You don’t sound scared.” I shake my head or I shrug or something of the sort. “Kid, I’ve been afraid so long I don’t know anything else. I’ve been afraid so long I got tired, and I got sloppy, and I’m starting to think it was all on purpose. Maybe you’ve been sent by the gods to hand down my sentence and be my salvation, both at the selfsame time, doom and deliverance wielding a suicide’s revolver. “ The kid looks a little taken aback, either by so many words or by the sentiment I open the Coke and take a drink, then set the can down beside the clock on the table between the beds. “I’m not afraid of you,” he says, and he only almost sounds as if he means it “Fear isn’t anything to be ashamed of,” I tell the kid. “Fear isn’t cowardice. Fear isn’t weakness. Maybe you’ll figure that out one day, a little farther down the road.” And then I ask him if he really has a boyfriend in Rapid City or if Lucas is nothing more than a useful fiction, a convenient lie. “That ain’t really none of your business,” he replies, and I agree, but he’s not the only one with questions. “Why do you do it?” he asks, and I tell him I don’t know. “That’s a lie,” he says, and I suggest that if he’d called the cops, they’d be here by now. And he tells me that he doesn’t believe I was ever really a college professor, and I say fair enough, you believe what you want to believe. “But it’s getting late,” I say. “And you’re holding all the cards.” I imagine that I can hear the hooves of the horses from my nightmare, the horses bearing Wild West wolf slayers charged with a holy task of vengeance and retribution. “How do I know, if I leave you alive, if I leave you free, how do I know you won’t come after me? How do I know you won’t follow me?” I taste tinfoil and copper and a dozen poisons hiding in the cigarette smoke. Then I glance past him at the window, at the night waiting out there, at the headlights and taillights of cars and trucks racing by out on the interstate. “Kid, you don’t know shit, and however I were to answer that question, you still wouldn’t know shit. Whatever course you choose,” I say, “it’s a gamble. Just do me a favor and don’t take all goddamn night about it.” And he sits there watching me, and the clock strikes twelve midnight without making a sound. I think about the concrete Wall Drug dinosaur gazing out across the plains with its incandescent scarlet eyes, standing guard just as surely as any gargoyle, a sentinel watching for the evil that sometimes comes rolling along on steel belts, padding up to the off-ramp on four rubber paws, inevitable as rain and taxes and death. Then the kid asks me if next time I’ll let him tag along and let him watch, if maybe that’s one of the choices laid out before him. “If I don’t call the cops,” he says. “If I don’t pull the trigger. If we could come to some sort of understanding.” I have to admit, he catches me entirely off my guard. I don’t answer right away. I tell the kid with broken china-blue eyes and dirty blond hair how I have to think on it a little while, that it’s no simple proposition he making. And he says that’s fine by him, that he figures neither of us is in a hurry, that neither of us has anywhere else to be. Then he lights a cigarette for himself, and he waits for whatever I’m going to decide, and the indifferent, all-powerful, unknowing clock starts counting down another day.

The first that Mrs. Jacobs knew of the Gray Ladies were the ashen footprints she found on the front step. She blamed the chimney sweep, furious that he had come to her front door dirty like that, or at all. She sent her husband to the Chimney Master, wanting a name, wanting that child to come and clean up his own mess, but her husband returned to say no sweep had come knocking and if he had, two shillings sixpence were owed.

“Awful man,” her husband said, and she got him settled by the fire before he bored her with the usual talk. “Should have been drowned at birth, most of them, and I mean that kindly.”

“Of course you do, dear,” Mrs. Jacobs murmured, but in her mind’s eye she pictured the baby rats he’d drowned in a bucket last week. Dropped them in then forgot about them, and she was the one who had to scoop them out and bury them.

He was asleep within minutes and she could settle to her busy work.

In the morning she swept the ashen footprints away.

She had just put the broom away when she saw the chimney sweep through the front window. A tiny, filthy boy and she lifted her broom to shoo him away.

He’d left more footprints, she saw that, but when she raised her broom and saw him shrink away, her heart melted.

“Boy!” she said, “What are you doing here?” Her cheeks were pink from exertion and she had her mum’s old patchwork apron on.

“It looks so warm inside. The ladies showed me.”

“What ladies, dear? Your aunties?”

He shook his head. “I’ve got none of those, nor a mother, neither. It was the gray ladies showed me.” He tucked his shoulders down, cold in himself. He stared inside. “You’re nicer than them, though.”

Her husband was at the office and the street was quiet so she took him inside.

“Bath first,” she said, but his stomach rumbled loudly and he seemed weak, so instead she sat him in the laundry and fed him porridge.

There was a knock on the door.

“The gray ladies!” he said. He seemed frightened.

“I thought you liked them.”

“Only they look at me as if I’m real,” he said. “But I don’t like them.”

Mrs. Jacobs opened the laundry door, wondering as she did so how the door was reached being, as it was, behind their high brick surrounding walls.

“Yes?” Mrs. Jacobs said, then drew a sharp breath.

Three gray ladies stood on her step. She could see the agapanthus through them, and they floated above the ground. They were tall and skeletally thin. Their skin was gray, flaccid, hanging off their cheeks in folds. They didn’t look at her, only at the boy.

One lifted her hand and Mrs. Jacobs recoiled at the sight of long, sharp fingernails. They were silent as they turned, glided to the back wall and disappeared through it.

Mrs. Jacobs stood staring, knowing she couldn’t tell her husband what she’d seen (Imagination is the indication of an unsteady mind, he liked to say). The boy shook.

“You better be off. My husband will be home soon for his lunch. Come back in two hours when he returns to work and I’ll make you a plate.” She put the hob on to make bubble and squeak and took out the bread knife ready to cut a slab to go with it.

He didn’t want to move so she physically picked him up. He weighed as little as one of Mr. Butcher’s chickens, no more. The morning had passed too quickly, though, because there was Mr. Jacobs at the front door, staring at her as if she was a beggar on the streets.

“Why are you carrying vermin?”

“Oh, Alfred. He’s a poor motherless boy, that’s all. Let me just bathe him. He can spend one night here, when he’s clean, then he’ll go after breakfast. We can’t send him out in the night.”

“It isn’t even close to night, woman.”

Mr. Jacobs had no patience for children. Never had done. If they’d been blessed, perhaps he would have changed his mind.

“Just the bath then and I’ll send him away.” She had the boy help her heat the water in the cellar and carry it to the laundry sink. The boy stared at the water as if mesmerized. The afternoon was gray and they needed what light they could but still Mrs. Jacobs pulled down the shutter. It was surely only shadow, but out there she thought she saw the three gray ladies, watching.

“You have a good scrub. I’m going down to clear up the lunch,” she told the boy. He stared at her. His eyes were ash gray and his skin had a gray pallor she hadn’t noticed before. His lips were drained of color and she saw streaks of ash in his hair.

“You take your time. Get yourself nice and clean. Go on.”

She tugged at his shirt, trying to help, but he shied away, so she called her, asking him to convince the boy he needed to remove his clothes for the bath and she left them to it.

Mr. Jacobs came back down and settled by the fire a few minutes later.

“How is he?” she called out.

“You mean the vermin? He’s as he should be.”

“He’s not vermin, he’s unfortunate,” but something in her husband’s tone made her run down the hall and throw open the laundry door. He spoke like that when he’d bested an opponent and was pleased with himself.

At first she thought the boy must have climbed out, the water was so gray and murky. Then one hand floated to the surface and she plunged both hands in to pull him out.

What she thought was ash was not at all but his own gray color.

She lifted him easily (was he lighter now? It seemed so) and she cradled him in her arms, holding him as if she could bring life back to him. She began dry him tenderly.

She heard a rustle, a hiss behind her and turned, still holding the boy, to see the three gray ladies standing there.

One bent forward and reached out as if to stroke the boy, but instead she worked her fingers between his ribs as if trying to pry something loose. One did stroke his hair gently, but the last knelt down and began lapping at him, as if drinking something spilled.

Mrs. Jacobs held the boy closer, trying to keep their fingers from him, but they reached through her, chilling her to the bone, and all she saw was gray.

“How did you know?” she whispered. “How did you know my husband would be capable of that?”

She rocked back and forth. Their eyes followed her while they kept still, then she saw their faces change as they aped her sorrow. They rubbed their hands together as if cleaning them, then went back to work on the boy, separating soul from body with long, sharp fingernails.

Did they gain color? Glow?

She wasn’t sure.

Back in the day, in the Pine Barrens of South Jersey, from October 31 to November 2, All Souls’ Day, people who lived in the woods or close to them would pin to their coats, their blouses, the lapels of their jackets, a flowering sprig of witch hazel. It’s a shrub that grows naturally in the barrens and blossoms right around Halloween. The flower looks like a creature from a deep-sea trench, yellow tentacles instead of petals radiating from a dark brown center that holds a single seed.

The name of the plant could have something to do with real witches and witching but not necessarily. The word “witch” is derived from Middle English wicche, and all it means is “pliable” or “bendable.” It’s a reference to the use of the branches of the witch hazel shrub in the art of dowsing by early homesteaders to the barrens. Dowsing is the practice of locating things underground with and through the vibrations of a Y-shaped tree branch. One thing’s for sure, the “hazel” part of the word comes from the fact that in England the branches from the hazel tree supposedly made the best dowsing rods. That tree didn’t grow in the barrens, though, and so the settlers found a substitute that was equally pliant—a shrub with crazy flowers that blossoms in the season of Jack-o’-lanterns.

The practice was fairly prevalent until well after World War II, but most of those who still don witch hazel for the holiday don’t know its symbolism, and only do so because they remember a parent or grandparent wearing it. In this manner the tradition might limp a little further into the future before completely disappearing. There’s a tale, though, that is now rarely repeated save around the kitchen tables and fireplaces of real old-timers. It begins in the year 1853, in the barrens village of Cadalbog, a place that presently exists as only one crumbling chimney and the foundation of a vanished glass factory lost among the pines. The loose-knit community of glassmakers, blueberry harvesters, colliers, and moss rakers, had been there since 1845. By 1857, the village was deserted.

A reminiscence of the place that has survived in the diary of one Fate Shaw, the wife of the factory owner, describes Cadalbog as “an idyllic place of silence and sugar sand as soft and white as a cloud. The local cedar ponds are the color of strong tea, and along lower Sleepy Creek there always seems to be a breeze shifting through the pines, even in the heart of August.” Supposedly Mrs. Shaw did everything within her power to provide for her husband’s workers and their families. She was well liked and well respected, as was Mr. Shaw. One of the events she put on every year was a Halloween celebration.

Unlike the citizenry of most of the other settlements of the barrens, either Swedish or Puritans from Long Island, Cadalbog was founded by Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famine back home. Their Halloween antics were brought with them from the Old World. There was disguise, not as monsters or ghouls, but people would dress up and pretend to be dead relatives. Turnips were carved instead of pumpkins. There was always a huge bonfire, dancing, fiddle and tin whistle music. Out in the middle of a million and a quarter acres of pine forest, in the spooky autumn night, it didn’t seem so outlandish that those who’d passed on might return to beg for prayers to shorten their stays in purgatory. In that setting, even these pragmatic people, who’d survived much, could believe for a few nights that spirits were afoot.

In 1853, Halloween fell on a Monday, and the celebration could not be held on the night of a workday. Likewise, Sunday was out of the question, as it was given over to the lord. So it was Friday, October 29 that the incident occurred. There was a cold breeze out of the north. A roaring bonfire licked the three-quarter moon with a snapping flame, and the music reeled. A strong fermented brew called heignith, concocted from crab apples, wild blueberries, cranberries, and raw honey, among other ingredients (its full recipe is lost), was consumed by the barrelful.

Attending the celebration that night was Miss Mavis Kane and her sister, Gillany. These two women, identical twins, were well-known even though they lived on the outskirts of the village. Gillany had been married at one time, but her husband, Peter, a Quaker collier who’d been born in those woods, succumbed to a rattlesnake bite, leaving the sisters to fend for themselves. By the account of Fate Shaw, they managed quite well. To quote from her diary, “The Kane sisters are a stoic pair—dour and pale and of few words. They move silently like ghosts around their property, chopping wood, repairing the steps to the front door, throwing a stick for that black dog of theirs, Brogan.”

As reported by Fate, their sole uniforms were ankle-length black dresses of a sateen weave. Even in summer, out in the forest, hunting the yellow shelf fungus that grows on the sides of trees (they made a good profit drying it, crumbling it up, and curing it with honey to make a kind of sweet brittle), they wore light corsets and high collars. Their long black hair was gathered into one large knot and left to lay upon the spine. To the Halloween celebration they brought a basket of Kane’s Crumbs, as the local treat had come to be known. The sisters, though both handsome women, weren’t asked to dance. They didn’t drink or eat but sat and simply stared at the fire and the goings-on. Their fixed expressions were the only masks they needed.

Sometime after the drunken singing had turned to whispered laughter a small meat cleaver appeared, as if from nowhere, in Gillany’s left hand. Its blade glistened in the glow of the dying fire as it sliced the air, struck, and split the backbone of Ray Walton, the foreman at the glass factory. As he screamed, blood immediately issuing from his mouth, Mavis put a knife through the throat of the Ahearn girl, who folded to the ground like a paper doll. They each went on hacking out their own private trails of horror: fingers flying, blood and bowels falling, eyes skewered, ribs cracked, wrists hacked. A storm of screams broke the stillness of the barrens.

It took some time for a group of factory laborers—male and female—to subdue the sisters. The Kanes fought, it seemed, without awareness—as if they were under a spell. By the time the two murderers were tied up and being led away, there were six dead and twenty wounded. That’s a lot of people to dispatch in a relatively short time with only sharp kitchen utensils. The Burlington County sheriff in Mount Holly was sent for, and the twins were incarcerated in separate store rooms in the glass factory. Old Dr. Boyle, once of Atsion and since run away to the woods after accusations of malpractice, was already on hand, drunk, pronouncing death and treating the wounded. He agreed with Mr. Shaw’s assessment that the attack was too random and mindless to have carried an intention of murder. Most everyone who witnessed it firsthand agreed.

When his duty to those injured at the celebration was finished, Boyle went to the factory to inspect the Kanes. By then the sun was coming up, and the breeze dropped yellow oak leaves in his path. The smoke from the bonfire pervaded the air, bottles lay strewn about the clearing behind the factory and down the path into the deep pines. He entered the brick structure and was greeted by Shaw, who showed him down a back hallway to a small door hidden by shadow. Boyle, a careful man, put his ear to the door and listened. The factory was empty and unusually silent.

“Who can tell the difference, but I think someone who would know said this was Gillany,” said Shaw.

“Is she tied up?” asked Boyle.

“Oh, yes, quite securely.”

“Did she say anything when you got her in here?”

“Nothing. She foamed at the mouth and spit. Growled some.”

“Okay,” said Boyle, and nodded.

Shaw moved forward and inserted a long iron key into the door’s lock. He turned it, there was a vicious squeal from the hinges, and they entered. The room was small, with a low ceiling and one window at eye level looking out across an expanse of reed grass toward the pond. The only light in the dim room came from that source. Boyle felt claustrophobic. He set down his bag, took off his hat and coat, and hung them on the back of a chair. The only sound was that of the woman’s breathing, steady and strong. She was asleep on the floor, her hands bound behind her back, feet tied. Her black hair was unknotted and covered her face. Blood soaked the sleeves and skirt of her dress.

The doctor had Shaw fetch him a lantern, and by that, he examined her. When he rolled her onto her back, he discovered her eyes were wide open as she slept. “Most unusual,” he said, bringing the light closer and closer to them, unable to make the dilated pupils constrict. As he wrote in his personal report of the case (held, along with surviving files of his other cases, at the Joseph Truncer Memorial Library at Batsto Village), “There were a number of odd signs upon the first of the Kane women I examined, not the least of which was a high fever. The eyes were like saucers, the skin around the sites of her lymph nodes had gone a vague green, her eyelashes had fallen out, and there was a silvery substance dribbling from her left ear. All of these struck me as potent signs of disease. When I inspected her lower body, I found her legs covered with insect bites, which I knew were chiggers from that feel of sand when I brushed my open palm against her shins.”

According to the story, it’s then that Shaw, standing by for support along with his wife, who had since joined him and Boyle in the store room, took a small jump backward and gave a grunt, pointing at something white wriggling out from beneath Gillany Kane’s undergarments. Boyle swung the lantern to give a better view. There wasn’t just one bloodless worm inching down her legs, but it was clear there were a dozen or more. Fate Shaw put her hand to her mouth and gagged. The doctor got to his feet and moved away as fast as a man of seventy-five with a bad liver and bad knees could. He went to his bag, hands shaking, and removed his tools to extract a blood sample. As he leaned over the body again, he called over his shoulder for Shaw and his wife to get out. “No one is to enter this room or the one in which the sister is being kept until I return. Make sure to lock them both as soon as I’m gone.”

Back in his home halfway between Cadalbog and Harrisville, Boyle brewed himself a pot of coffee and brought out the brass microscope a wealthy Dutch patient of his had gifted him early in his career for saving a favorite son. Still not having slept from the previous night’s festivities and mayhem, he peered bleary eyed into the tube of the mechanism at a slide holding Gillany’s blood. What he wrote in response to what he witnessed through the eyepiece was only this—“A strange pathogen, blossoming, from the woman’s blood cells—many armed, like the wild witch-hazel flower. I’ve never seen the like.” He stood from his table on which the microscope rested and stumbled to bed. There he slept for a brief interval before heading back to Cadalbog.

He arrived at the factory in late afternoon to find a commotion. It seems that the woman who was hot with fever and in a trance, sleeping with eyes open, somehow revived enough to smash through the small window that looked out upon the cedar pond. As Fate Shaw put it, “We were novices as prison guards. No one ever suspected she’d break out. It was beyond possibility to us. A search party has been sent out after her.”

Boyle told the Shaws and a few of the workers not home grieving for murdered loved ones or caring for those wounded, “Gillany’s got a disease I’ve not ever heard of or seen before. Something that has crawled out of the dark heart of the barrens, no doubt centuries old. She’s got the telltale signs of a bad chigger infestation on her legs. I believe she spends a good deal of time in the woods? She and her sister are mushroom gatherers, if I’m not mistaken.”

Fate Shaw nodded.

“I’m guessing the chiggers carry the bacterium. She’s infected. We’ve got to find her and treat her, or if she’s discovered already dead, burn her.”

“Not to mention, she’s diabolical with a meat cleaver,” said Fate.

“Whatever it is, it’s like typhus, a parasite that affects the brain.”

“What about her sister?” asked Shaw.

“Take me to her,” said the doctor.

The factory owner handed Boyle a rusty Colt revolver. “In case she becomes murderous. It’s loaded.”

“You hold on to that. I’ll end up shooting myself in the foot,” he said.

On the opposite side of the factory, they came to another door cast in shadow. This one opened into a storeroom with no window, but larger than the first. In the middle of it, surrounded by shelves holding various bottles and tools, was Mavis Kane, bound to a straight-backed chair with her arms joined behind her. Boyle noticed immediately that she was awake and alert. She too had blood on her black dress, but her hair was still in a single knot. He found another chair in the corner of the room and moved it around so he could sit facing her. He found the resemblance to her sister distracting. As he set his bag on the floor, he said, “Miss Kane, how are you feeling?” She was placid, expressionless. She stared straight through him. Her lips moved, though, and she answered.

“I’ve a fever,” she said. “An infernal itching down below.”

“Your sister is also ill. When did she begin not feeling well?”

“After we met the woman out by the salt marshes.”

“Who would that be?”

“An old woman, Mother Ignod, the color of oak leaves in spring. She wore rags and told us she was a witch who had been put to death by settlers almost a century before because she spoke to the deer and they listened. She found magical power in the lonesome, remote nature of the barrens.”

“How did they dispatch her?”

“Drowned her in a bog.”

“And now she’s back?”

“‘For revenge,’ she told us.”

“Upon whom?”

Mavis remained silent.

“Do you recall your sister being afflicted by a bad case of chiggers?”

“Yes.”

“What about you? Did you also have them on your legs?”

“Yes.”

Boyle retrieved from his bag at his feet a blue bottle with a cork in the top. “I’m going to give you something to drink. It’s going to cure you,” he told her.

Mavis didn’t say a word, didn’t look at him when he stood from his chair and came toward her, pulling the stopper from the blue bottle. “Drink this,” he said, and handed it to her. He was a little surprised when she took it, put it to her lips, and did as he commanded without a question, without spilling a drop, without grimacing at the bitter taste. What he’d given her was a tea made from the witch-hazel blossom, toadleaf, and ghost sedge. She drank till her mouth filled and overflowed and dribbled down her bloody dress. He let her finish the entire bottle. She handed it back to him; he put the cork in it and returned it to his bag. As he sat in his chair, he reached back into the bag and took out a different bottle, this one brown. Black Dirt Bourbon, Boyle’s self-prescribed cure-all. He sipped and mused while he waited for his elixir to work.

In his notes on the case, the doctor stated that he believed the invading parasite had caused swelling of the women’s brains, which caused their psychotic behavior. The witch hazel was an anti-inflammatory, and the other two ingredients had what today would be called antibiotic properties. Although he’d been trained at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school, a few years living in the barrens and he’d combined his formal knowledge with the teachings of folk medicine. He writes, “The two of them must have been under the influence of the disease for weeks as it slowly grew within them. Gillany was further along for some reason, and I had lost hope for her—feverish, catatonic, birthing worms, wandering through a labyrinthine wilderness.”

Shaw woke Boyle from a sound sleep. Though there was no window in the room, immediately the doctor could tell it was night. The factory owner held a lantern. Mavis was sleeping peacefully, her eyes closed, her bosom heaving slowly up and down at regular intervals. Boyle got out of his chair and walked across to her. Lightly slapping her face, he spoke her name, rousing her. Before long her eyelids fluttered, and she made a soft moaning noise.

“She looks better,” he said to Shaw.

“Remarkable.”

“Her sister?”

“The search party just returned without her. They combed the woods, twenty men and Chandra O’Neal, the tracker, and not a trace of her.”

“Even if you could find her, and I could administer my cure, she’s no doubt too far gone,” said Boyle.

Shaw was about to admit defeat as well when Mavis opened her eyes and murmured something. Boyle put his ear down to her lips. “What was that?” he asked. She mumbled some more, and Shaw asked, “Is she speaking?” The doctor nodded.

Boyle went back to his bag and pulled out another blue bottle full of the witch-hazel elixir. He slipped it into the pocket of his coat.

“What did she say?” asked Shaw.

“She said to get the dog, Brogan. The dog will track Gillany if you speak her name to him.”

Heading out into the Pine Barrens at night, even with a torch and a gun, was daunting. People who knew how unpredictable the wilderness could be usually stayed close to home at night. Still, the doctor, the factory owner, Fate, and three other workers most loyal to the Shaws headed out with guns loaded. There were two shotguns and two pistols among the party. Fate carried an over-under, double-barreled pistol, and the doctor went armed only with his elixir.

The night was cold as the world moved toward winter. There was a strong breeze, and the leaves from scarlet and blackjack oak to maple and tupelo showered down around them. The moon was a sight brighter than on Halloween, and in the clearings it reflected off the sugar sand, glowing against the dark. They found the black dog, Brogan, a powerful beast with a thick neck and broad chest, chained up next to the outhouse beside the sisters’ home. He was happy to see them, having gone unfed since the morning of the day prior. Fate thought to bring a cut of salted venison from her kitchen for the beast. This made her and the dog fast friends. Shaw undid the collar from Brogan’s neck while he devoured the meat.

“Find Gillany,” said Fate in her most soothing voice. “Find Gillany.”

The dog looked from one member of the party gathered around him to another. Mrs. Shaw repeated her order one more time. Brogan barked twice and padded down the path into the pines.

“Stick together,” said Boyle, and they were off at a slow jog trying to keep up with the dog. The torches crackled and threw light but also made it difficult to see anything near the intensity of the flame. They passed down a sandy trail all of them were familiar with and then the dog dove into the brush and all followed him winding among the pitch pine and cedar. Luckily, there were no chiggers or mosquitos still active. The doctor heaved for breath as they moved quickly along, wishing he’d brought another bottle of bourbon. An owl called far off to the west. He knew from the direction they were heading that the dog was leading them toward the marsh.

It wasn’t long before the doctor found himself alone in a meadow of marsh fern gone red with the season. He’d lost the others a good twenty minutes earlier but could hear the dog barking not too far ahead. The ground was soggy, and he moved slowly, knowing that in a moment he could be in water up to his neck. At first, he intended to call out, but on second thought he realized that Gillany might be somewhere close by with a sharp weapon of some kind. He thought silence a better strategy. It’s then that he heard the dog yelp and whimper in a manner that could crack ice. A gun went off. There was a human scream followed hard by a splash.

A brief moment of silence and then more screaming, more shots. The din of the commotion sparked Boyle’s adrenaline, and he so wanted to run away. Finally, he called out, “Shaw!” at the top of his voice, and then stood still, listening to the night over the pounding of his heart. He shivered in the breeze for a long while, and then he heard the crack of brittle twigs and the crunch of dry leaves. “Shaw? Is that you?” he called. But it wasn’t Shaw. A pale figure staggered through the marsh ferns toward him. He backed up into a clearing of sand, wanting to flee but was unable, as fear robbed his energy.

She came toward him in the moonlight, her hair loose in the wind like the tail of a black comet. She wore nothing but carried a hatchet stained with blood. He swept the torch in front of him as a means of warding her off. As she approached, he could see a gunshot wound to the hip, the bloody hole writhing with white worms. “That’s it,” said Boyle. He turned and ran as best he could, which wasn’t all that good. With no idea which direction he was headed, he stumbled forward through the marsh ferns toward where the moonlight showed him a tree line. Not even a hundred yards, and he’d slowed to a hobble, out of breath and caught in the grip of a coughing fit.

It was work to get control of his breathing, but he finally managed. Behind him he heard or thought he heard, even above the sound of the wind, the tread of Gillany. He turned and saw her only yards away. Her breathing was like a whistle, and she limped stiffly. She lifted the weapon when she saw him looking, and he groaned, knowing there’d be no more running. His heart was pounding. She came for him and he crouched away from her. She lifted the hatchet, and from above his head, he saw an arm descend from behind him. At the end of that arm there was a hand aiming a derringer. The finger pulled the trigger just as Gillany was upon him. The pistol exploded with a dull thud, smoke and sparks, and the two balls of shot ripped off her face. There was blood and flesh, and just below the skin there was a tangled layer of worms. She fell on him and he screamed.

Fate Shaw and the doctor made it back to the village at daybreak. Once there, she turned doctor and prescribed a bottle of bourbon for Boyle. When he was comfortable, she called the village together by ringing the bell outside the factory. She told those who gathered how they’d tracked Gillany Kane into the marshes and how she’d attacked Mr. Shaw and the others. A dozen men volunteered to go and search for survivors in the daylight. Fate decided to accompany them as did two of the wives whose husbands had been part of the posse. They uncovered the remains of Brogan’s mangled body, but no sign of any of the men. They searched every day for the better part of a week. Nothing. They followed the creeks and streams in case the bodies had been deposited in the water and swept along with the tranquil current. Nothing.

Finally, the sheriff from Mount Holly arrived and was told the tale just as it happened. Fate and Boyle gave much of the testimony, and the other half was supplied by Mavis, who had made a full recovery from the disease that gripped her sister. She referred to the illness as the suspicions, for the paranoia it engendered with a fury that took over the mind. The sheriff couldn’t make heads nor tails of it and eventually slunk back to Mount Holly to file five missing persons reports. Somewhere in the middle of that very harsh winter, Mavis Kane disappeared. No one was sure exactly when it happened, but everyone was certain it was after the snow came and before it left. She could have slipped away from Cadalbog, but there were also many who weren’t willing to forgive her part of the Halloween mayhem. Maybe the barrens took her, but after that most forgot, leaving only Fate and Boyle to wonder what actually had happened.

Three years later, in spring, Fate Shaw reported in her diary on the passing of Dr. Boyle. “I’d go to see him out there at his place on the way to Harrisville. He’d drink and talk, and I’d listen. He was the one individual who didn’t mind hashing over the enigma of the Kane sisters’ disease. He was convinced it was a matter of biology and chemistry, the psychosis of a fevered mind. I, on the other hand, knew better, because I was privy to the end of the story. The helper I’d hired to look after the doctor reported to me that the day the old man died he’d had a visitor, an old woman in tattered clothes with a strange green-tinged complexion. She was accompanied by a black dog. The helper didn’t know how long the old woman had been there, but when he returned the next morning to make a fire and cook breakfast for the doctor, he found Boyle in a chair, head flung back and white worms crawling from his nose and ears, squirming out through his tear ducts.

“The last thing he told me on my final visit to him was, as he put it, ‘His confession.’ It so happened that the reason he’d come to the Pine Barrens in the first place was due to a botched delivery. It was a breech birth, and he was pie-eyed drunk. ‘Twin sisters with the cord wrapped round their necks,’ he said. ‘As they struggled for their freedom, they strangled each other. I was passed out on the floor. Unsettling that the tragedy occurred on All Souls’ Day. The parents wanted to put me in jail, and I fled like a thief in the night.’ I didn’t have the heart to wonder aloud about the twin connection and neither did he. The strangeness we’d been part of was already too complicated.

Before I left him that day, he gave me, written out in a shaky hand, the recipe for his elixir against the suspicion. ‘Sooner or later, it’ll be back,’ he told me. Twenty years have passed since then, and I’ve long ago misplaced that scrap of paper. But every year at Halloween, I wear a blossom of the witch hazel in honor of Boyle, and oddly enough, it’s beginning to catch on.”

Three generations are buried on Wheeler land, starting with Great-Grandaddy Winston, the only one to live up to the surname. A far-traveler, he was. Crossed seven county lines to reach Napanee, carting a new wife, her faith in the old gods, and a wagonload of beehives along with him. Winston named his first and only child Queenie, back when he still held high hopes for honey riches, but slipped into the habit of calling her Teenie when she grew no bigger than his bank account.

After planting her Pops in the first mound out back, Teenie took root on the homestead, settling it and the household accounts. Had such a knack for numbers, in fact, she saved up for a pesticide rig that kept the larder well-stocked, the fields bug-free and her son in a job for life. In her seventy-odd years, she never took no man’s name, nor his hand in wedlock. But, on one occasion at least, she invited him into her bed—and kicked him back out again long, long before she birthed that plane-loving heir of hers.

Nowadays, Queenie surveys her property upwards from the wormside of mound number two, while her boy most often sees it from the clouds. When Buddy Wheeler brings that Piper Cub of his in for a landing, stinking of diesel and creosote, his own daughter Bets teases him something merciless. Poking and prodding, she checks him for extra limbs, sudden chemical-spawned tentacles, or indiglo skin. If he minds, he sure doesn’t show it: Bets’ daddy knows how to take a joke. He’s open-minded. He gets the bigger picture. Always has.

Winging hither and yon in that biplane of his, Buddy’s seen far beyond the confines of this hand-me-down property, this cornbread county. Way farther than Bets or her Mamma ever did.

Once upon a time, before Queenie had wheeled groundwards, Buddy used to haw on the harmonica between harvests. Even gathered a decent following—or so he says—at honkytonks here, there, and everywhere, thanks to the unique style of bluegrass he played. Tunes whined extra soulful against that ugly set of metal teeth he wore, temporary inserts he kept in permanent on account of the sharp glint they gave off, the steel shine they lent his smile.

“These chompers of mine’s worth their weight in twenties,” Bets’ daddy used to say, especially when whiskey-soaked, too numb to fly anywheres much less lift a blues-harp to his lips. Thick-tongued, he’d toy with the bridge, running the blunt tip along silver valleys and peaks. “They’s the brightest map outta here, understand? The trustiest, most valuable map…”

Mesmerized, baby-girl Bets had watched the thing wiggle in and out of his mouth. She’d read about touch-maps them Artick injuns used, little sculptures that looked every bit like her daddy’s teeth, except they were whittled hunks of wood. Those carvings’ dips and whorls, Bets later learned, were landscapes shrunk small, coastlines and mountain ranges tucked in pockets or carried inside seal-fur mitts. Portable 3D worlds, in other words, and more reliable than paper or memory. At high noon or moon-dark, travelers could run fingers over them cracks and bumps to get their bearings, certain they’d never be led astray.

Now standing on the back porch her Nanna Teenie built, Bets hefts a shovel and looks out on the hummocked land Great-Grandaddy Winston claimed. Releasing a pent breath, she pats her back pocket for the hundredth time that morning, feels the folded paper’s reassuring crinkle. Guts all a-flutter, she sends a silent prayer to the gods. Thanking any and all of them for blurring Daddy’s sights with clouds and moonshine, filling his mouth with them precious silver directions. Asking—not begging, she’s too reasonable for that—any and all of them to look kindly on her venture, to reward her for putting herself out there, putting on a brave show. Gods favor the bold, she tells herself, hoping their invisible eyes have already turned her way. Hoping they’ll approve. Hoping they won’t leave her stranded.

“Have you brought her?” Sir Henry eyed the heavy burlap sack that Kane held in his right hand and impatiently tapped the steel tip of his ebony gentleman’s cane against the polished marble tiles of his summer house floor. It was dusk—the time he always preferred to meet with Kane—and the sun was setting over his vast estate and over the crashing, ever-encroaching sea. But neither the beauty of the sunset nor the sound of the waves against the ragged cliffs were what made his pulse quicken. His heart was set upon much more sublime treasures.

“Yes, sir. Of course, sir.” Kane half-bowed as he removed his cap, exposing thick, unkempt black hair threaded with gray. Sir Henry grimaced with distaste. He despised Kane’s overt show of obsequiousness. It was a sham, and they both knew it. Yet it was as much a part of their twenty-year business interactions as the fat velvet purses which Sir Henry regularly handed over and which Kane inevitably stashed into his seemingly bottomless pockets. Sir Henry pointed at Kane’s boots with the spiked tip of his cane. Graveyard mud still clung to his soles and heels in heavy clumps. In fact, he’d left a trail of dirt across the polished floor.

“Come now, man. You could have at least wiped your feet. Especially in the presence of a lady.”

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.” Kane walked dutifully to the doormat and wiped his shoes. There was something comical in his earnestness as he scuffed his soles back and forth, back and forth across the coarse fibers. “She was ever so hard to dig up,” he said. “Buried in clay, she was. And ever so deep. No coffin, neither. Had to dig the clay out of her eyes.”

With characteristic impatience, Sir Henry motioned for Kane to hand over the sack. But Kane tutted. “She cleaned up ever so well,” he said. “But I had to do the work myself. Bought special detergent and all.”

“You’ll be remunerated, as you always are.” Sir Henry held out his hand again, but Kane still did not budge. Instead, he stared at Sir Henry placidly.

“The field gate-guard, he had a gun. I risked my life, sir, to get this one for you. Though I must say, she’s a beauty.”

It was torture now, and Kane knew it. Sir Henry thought he would burst if he did not feel the sensuous weight of the sack in his hands. “Come, man. There will be an extra guinea for your trouble.”

“Six.”

“Excuse me?”

“Six guineas, sir. With regret.”

Sir Henry rolled his eyes. The man was a pickpocket as well as a grave robber, but Sir Henry raised his hand and clicked his fingers. The manservant who had been standing by the door, quiet as a shadow, slipped out of the room. He returned a few moments later with a velvet purse, even fatter than usual.

“Your money,” Sir Henry said as he held out the purse with one hand and held out his other for the sack.

“I would appreciate it if you counted it for me, sir, so that I can see it. It’s not that I don’t trust you, sir, but it’s the guild’s rules, as you know.”

Sir Henry gave an exasperated sigh. That damnable guild. Thieves, pickpockets, drug dealers, grave robbers. Sir Henry felt demeaned by the need to work with them, but how else would he procure his darlings? He would have had an assassin kill Kane long ago if he could have found a more amenable lackey to cater to his needs, but none was available. In the sordid graveyard circles he trod, Kane was the best. Besides, do in Kane and one of his brethren would come in the night and slit the throats of everyone in the household. Or perhaps they would choose exposure or blackmail. He was certain the guild had a file on him heavier than this velvet purse.

“Forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty. That’s fifty pounds, man.” Kane did not reply, but waited patiently as Sir Henry counted out the final six shillings of his bonus. “…Five-and-ten, five-and-eleven, six shillings.” Scowling, Sir Henry held out the purse. “For some men, Kane, that’s a year’s wages.”

“And for some,” Kane retorted, “it’s less than pocket money.” Covered in graveyard dirt as he was, Kane flashed a grin as false as a three-bob bit, then took the purse and stashed it in his coat’s deep inner pocket. As he did so, the light caught the skull-and-crossbones insignia of his damnable guild, tattooed on the web between left thumb and forefinger. Sir Henry grimaced in distaste.

“Kane,” Sir Henry said as the man turned to go. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

Grin wider than ever, Kane placed the voluptuously rounded sack in Sir Henry’s hand—a hand that trembled with barely contained excitement.

“Thank you,” Sir Henry said. “You are dismissed.”

Kane bowed. “You know how to reach me should you need me,” he said, and then stepped out of the French doors and into the shadows of the night.

Listening to the crashing of the sea against the cliffs’ sheer drop only yards from the summer house’s large glass doors, Sir Henry waited until Kane disappeared. Then, his hands shaking, he reached into the rough burlap sack and withdrew his prize.

His heart skipped a beat. Even in the jaundiced light of the gas lamp, she was exquisite. The very foundation of beauty lay in his hands. No flesh or sinew or muscle to mar the gorgeous symmetry, the perfection of the skull. Large, round eye sockets, gently curved orbital bones, delicate nasal cavity, slightly pointed chin, brow ridge both smooth and understated. She was the very essence of feminine charm. Scoundrel that he was, Kane had outdone himself. Hands still shaking, Sir Henry returned his prize to the grubby burlap sack. Blowing out the lamp, he exited the summer house, carefully locking it behind him.

As he walked toward the château’s west wing, Sir Henry inhaled the scent of flowering gorse. To his left was the steep drop of the black cliffs, and beyond them the whispering sea where so many ancient sailors had drowned, mourned now only by the cries of gulls. The waters here were notoriously dangerous, as were the old gods who haunted them. Mara, queen of the hungry deep, keeper of the waters’ secrets and of fishermen’s nightmares. Sir Henry smiled grimly. She, too, loved to collect bones.

They went on a long bike ride under a punishing midday sun. Much of it was along well-trodden pathways through scrubby brush. Large swathes of deep sand meant there was little traction; you had to get off and push. Graham was sweating hard by the time they reached Cabo Sardao. He was grateful for the rest; glad too that he’d had to bring up the rear because Felix, his six-year-old son, was struggling more than most. The rest of the group stood around watching their arrival. One of them started a slow handclap that was taken up by the others. He gritted his teeth against the urge to offer a rebuke. Watch your temper, he warned himself. It was something Cherry was often remarking upon.

You ’re getting worse as you grow older… you need to just kick back and not let things irritate you so much… there’s a heart attack up ahead, you know, just waiting for you. Remember that time…

Ricardo, their guide, was talking now in his halting but charming English, about the spits of rock reaching out over the bay. Steep cliffs fell away on either side. Earlier they had watched as intrepid bathers carrying towels inched down the sheer drop, aided only by old ropes left behind by thoughtful climbers. It seemed a big risk to take, no matter that the rewards were your own private beach.

“You walk slowly and carefully if you want to see stork’s nest,” said Ricardo. “If he trips and falls he has wings. You don’t, I think.”

“Do you want to see the nest, Felix?” Graham asked.

“Yeah! Is it storks with the big legs? Or is that herods?”

“Herons. They both have big legs. And so does Sheila over there.”

No need for that, Graham. You’re on holiday. Be friendly.

He thought of Cherry back at the apartment, gorging herself on pastéis de nata and drinking Super Bock by the pool. She had booked them the mountain bike activity as a surprise. Bonding time for you and the ankle-biter, she’d called it. When he asked her why she couldn’t come along too, she grew defensive. You know I can’t deal with heights. I’d hold everybody up.

The other members of the group began moving forward along the narrowing path. Graham took Felix’s hand and followed. He watched Sheila’s backside as she picked her way through the thigh-high grasses. Keep that in your sights and you can’t go wrong, he told himself, then had to stifle laughter. He was thinking of Star Wars for some reason, and of Luke Skywalker guiding his X-wing down to do battle against the Death Star. That’s no moon.

“What are you laughing at, Dad?” Felix asked.

“Nothing. Just mind your step, okay? And keep hold of my hand.”

Graham was envious of those who paid little heed to the precipice. Heat haze smeared the sea-chewed promontories further south. If he squinted he could just make out the car park where they had begun their tour. His boy’s hand loosened in his grip; he reinforced it, and told Felix not to mess around.

Once he could see the nest—an arrestingly large aggregation of criss-crossed sticks that lipped over the edge of the cliff, as if the stork was cocking a snook at its precarious

situation—Graham felt no compunction to get any closer. He didn’t want a photograph; there were no chicks, the stork was not in residence… it resembled little more than an abandoned game of Jack Straws.

“Come on, Felix,” he said. “Let’s get back to our bikes.” He felt his relief grow with every step nearer the trail. So far, this holiday had involved too many of the things he preferred to avoid in everyday life: heights, blistering heat, exertion. He wished he was back at the hotel with Cherry. Felix loved the pool; they could bond themselves silly in there without the worry of punctures, or falling to their deaths, or storks attacking.

Or Sheila’s backside.

Our cruisers can’t repel firepower of that magnitude.

“Are you being okay?” Ricardo asked.

“Fine,” Graham choked, turning around to see the rest of the group queuing up behind them as they inched back along the path. “I must have just breathed in some pollen or something. I’ll be okay in a minute.”

“Take a five,” Ricardo said. “There’s something anyway I want you to look at.”

The group stared at Graham: bovine, sweaty, ill-dressed for the weather and the activity. He could already feel the rough canvas hems of his shorts abrading his skin; there’d be blisters later, or at the very least an ugly red chafing. What happens when middle-aged people get off their arses for a week. Short-sleeved shirts striped with back sweat. Red temples. A sluggishness; a lethargy. He remembered being Felix’s age: football and tag in the back garden for as long as it was light enough to see. Drinks and snacks on the lam. When did you lose that playfulness, that drive? When did you go from let’s play out to let’s lie in?

Ricardo was on his knees in shrubbery that looked as if it had come from a science-fiction film set. The ground was carpeted with stunted plants with thick leaves and fat clustered flowers the color of mustard.

“See this?” he said, pulling one of the flowers clear of its receptacle. An aperture in the ovule wept clear fluid over Ricardo’s fingers. He licked it clear.

“Hideous,” spat Sheila, her voice cracking with amused disgust.

“Not at all,” Ricardo insisted. He took hold of the ovule with both hands and teased it open. There was a clearly audible suck. “This plant she is known as ‘Mothers Tears’,” he said. “Because, look, she is so crying all the time.”

He pulled up a few more of the plump hearts and passed them around. Everyone regarded each other blankly. Graham was reminded of the kids in his class when he handed out musical instruments for the first time.

“Now, you are watching,” Ricardo continued. He lifted the parted ovule and sank his mouth into it. Sheila dropped the plant she was holding and turned her back on their guide. Her face was pale and pinched.

Ricardo wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Like all tears of the mother, she is sweet.” He looked straight at Graham. “Now you must try.”

It wasn’t a request. Graham had to persuade himself that he would have looked directly at whoever was standing the closest to him. He realized now that Ricardo, though young and lean, was in fact taller and broader than him. He felt a prickle of nervousness—the same loathsome fear that came calling when he had been a child—at the idiotic thought of what the Portuguese man might do if he did not partake of the plant, which now, he recognized, possessed a musky, earthy odor. An animal smell. A human smell, even.

“I don’t—” he began, but Ricardo only smiled—revealing white teeth interleaved with pale grey fragments from the ovule—and pressed Graham’s hand towards his mouth. He saw the others turning away, surreptitiously ditching the plants they had been given, wiping their hands on their shorts and heading back to the bikes.

He took a bite of the flesh and felt his stomach rise to meet it.

“It’s good, yes?”

Graham said nothing, but swallowed the mouthful. It was sweet, but there was a disagreeable taste too, of earth, of rust. But that was nothing next to the texture, which reminded him of the slither of tripe, eaten when he was a child, with onions. Never again.

“If you are in the hot place, and no potable water, this is saving lives.”

They went back to their bikes and Graham concentrated on keeping his breakfast where he’d put it. He was irked that Felix had not watched him swallow the plant. At least Ricardo seemed to hold him in higher regard. He told Graham to hold back, that the three of them would bring up the rear.

“Your wife,” Ricardo said, once they’d struggled through the remaining sandpits and found a more agreeable rhythm. “She no like the bike?”

Graham balked, convinced the man had just likened his wife to a bicycle. But then he factored in Ricardo’s struggle with the language, and saw how the ambiguity had snared him. “She’s not much of a cyclist, no,” he said.

“You like her ass? It’s nice and round, no? Perhaps too much heft.”

“My wife…”

But Ricardo was staring at Sheila’s backside as she struggled with the incline. Graham looked around at Felix, who was concentrating on his pedaling, and watching the butterflies flirt in the hedgerows.

“It’s a little inappropriate, don’t you—”

“Me, I like a big ass. I like the curvy. I’m skinny as rakes but my girlfriend? She’s built like the fucking tank. Your wife. She is the nice shape. Plenty to grab on to when she take you for a big ride.”

Ricardo was close enough now for Graham to be able to see his teeth again. They were small and gray, packed tightly into a mouth that seemed far too capacious for them. His lips sagged, the color of the strawberry daiquiris Cherry ordered before dinner. Juice from the plant had dried to a glaze on his chin. Shock had shrunk Graham’s windpipe straw narrow; he could produce no noise from it.

“You watch your child,” Ricardo said.

Graham hauled on the brakes and slid to a stop; Felix almost collided with his back wheel. He pulled up a few feet ahead, and stared back at his dad, concern pulling all of his features into the center of his face.

Ricardo seemed genuinely nonplussed. “What is it that went wrong? Your bike, it is old and unresponsive?”

Now he read a very definite slight in their guide’s words. Ricardo knew the language better than he was letting on. Graham’s arms and legs were shaking with anger. He felt weak and febrile, as if he were suffering from low blood sugar. “What do you mean, ‘watch my child’?”

“It is in all the news in the Alentejo region. You have heard of O Sedento?”

“No.” Graham shook his head. His breath was as empty as the dry, pallid drift of seedpods collected at the side of the path. “What is it?”

“Not it. A him. A person. O Sedento. Meaning the English, it is the thirsty.”

“The thirsty?”

“This is the correct.”

“Thirsty for what?”

Ricardo licked his lips and his tongue was like an undercooked steak, far too big for his mouth. He winked. “O Sedento de Sangue. The thirsty of—”

“The bloodthirsty,” Graham corrected him.

“It is like the Draculas coming out of Pennsylvania shadows, no?”

Any other time, Graham would have found Ricardo’s abject malapropisms funny; endearing even. Now they gave him the creeps. He pressed on against the pedals, trying to put some distance between him and the guide. His stomach churned.

They completed their bicycle ride at a car park where a minibus was waiting to take them back to their hotel. While the others stood around admiring the view, Graham told Felix to stand with Sheila while he paid a visit to the toilet. Once there, he urinated lustily, but was appalled to see his stream of urine was the color of rust. Hadn’t he drunk a good liter of water that morning, in preparation for this arduous task? Then it must be the plant’s fault. Yes, there was the same mealy smell; it had gone through him like the odor of asparagus. No more bush tucker. He was looking forward to the evening. Steak all the way. And a carafe of wine.

He left the cubicle and washed his hands; he felt his heart perform a little tumble in his chest.

Remember that time…

Stop it. The one thing he hated about Cherry was the way she was constantly harking back. She never seemed to look forward. Forget that he had lost forty pounds over the last six months. Forget that his cholesterol levels were the lowest they’d ever been, or that he treated his body to a mainly Mediterranean diet these days. No. He imagined her at the table tonight casting disgusted looks at his red meat and chips. You’ll not be needing the dessert menu after all that?

Remember that time…

He didn’t need the reminders. It hadn’t even been a proper cardiac arrest. If anything, it was a shot across the bows. He’d been at school, patrolling the playground with his usual cup of tea (milk, two sugars) when the first signs arrived. He’d been annoyed because he’d been asked by the Head to attend a meeting that evening in his stead, and there was also a problem with Felix who was either being bullied or bullying others depending on the rumors knocking around. Also, that morning he and Cherry had somehow got into an argument during sex, and she had pushed him away. There was an ache in his jaw and a pressure growing—like indigestion—around his breastbone. Later he felt breathless climbing the stairs to the gym after work. He’d decided then, feeling mild palpitations, that exercise was not something he should be doing. A visit to the doctor the following morning led to his GP calling for an ambulance.

A cardiologist conducted an ECG and gave him the all-clear, but there were lifestyle choices to make. He made them. Now his mid-morning tea was sugarless and, invariably, green. He cut down on calories and stepped up the exercise. Butter became olive oil. Battered cod became grilled salmon. He ate salad and brown rice. The pints turned into occasional glasses of red wine. The weight fled from him. But Cherry was unimpressed. Maybe it was jealousy; as they both approached middle age, it was she slowly being overcome by avoirdupois.

Remember that time…

He wondered now, as they filed back into the minibus, whether the juice of the plant had carried some kind of poison that was deleterious to the heart. Felix sat next to him, his head against his shoulder, as he thought of his parents (long dead, both heart attacks) and their love of gardening. His father had only ever referred to a plant using its Latin name, just one of the many ways he had tried to trump his only son’s greater academic achievements.

Now he thought of monkshood and belladonna, of sweetshrub and Christmas rose. Oleander and foxglove. As a child he had loved apricots and rhubarb, but his father had wagged a finger, telling him that he was a step away from a horrible death. Rhubarb leaves contained oxalates that could cause kidneys to fail; cyanide lurked within apricot stones, and would put you in a coma from which you would not revive. He often wondered if his weight gain had come from such nightmare threats: bread and cake, as far as he was aware, could be consumed without any danger of toxicity.

He was nudged awake by Ricardo. They had arrived back at the hotel. The sun was low in the sky, but its heat seemed undimmed. It struck Graham that the juice on the guide’s chin was the color of the vernix that had coated Felix’s body at birth. Stiffly he climbed out of the back of the minibus, trying to combat the beats of nausea. Felix was ahead of him, already trotting down the path to the apartments. He could hear splashing and gales of infant laughter from the pool area. Beyond that was a tennis court, and the soft thwock of volleys. There was no sign of Cherry in their rooms, and no note to explain where she might be. Graham chased Felix into a hot shower and they dressed for dinner. He brushed his teeth but the taste of the plant remained, an oily film on the back of his incisors.

“Let’s find Mummy,” he said.

Cherry wasn’t at the poolside, though a lounger was adorned with proof of her occupancy: a novel by her beloved Patricia Cornwell; a drained glass carrying her plum-colored lip imprint; the silk scarf with which she tied back her hair. He found her at the bar, another strawberry daiquiri before her, laughing too loudly at the things a much younger bartender was saying.

“We made it,” he said, and sat alongside her. One split second. But he noticed it: the expression falling; her flirting over.

Cherry fussed over Felix for a while, telling him what a big boy he was for cycling so far, and for looking after Daddy. They agreed that he could have twenty minutes in the pool before dinner. Cherry took her drink to the poolside table and Graham joined her after ordering a martini for himself. “Productive afternoon?” he asked, as he sat down.

“No need to be snippy.”

“I’m not being snippy,” he said. He shifted in his seat and felt the efforts of the day leap in his muscles. His thighs sang, but it was an agreeable pain, a righteous pain. Tomorrow morning might be a different matter though.

“Did you overdo it today?” Cherry asked.

“Define ‘overdo.’ You booked the exertion… sorry, excursion. Maybe you were hoping it would be too much for me and I wouldn’t make it back. Then you could laugh at shit bartender jokes to your heart’s content.”

“I do worry about you, no matter what you might think.” Graham took a deep swallow of his drink. Ice cold. And what was it they used to say back during his student days, he and the others in the cocktail club? Drier than the dust from a druid’s drill-stick. The guy might have been trying it on with his wife, but he was an excellent barman. The martini suffused him with good will, not least because it helped to mask the flavor of the plant. He gazed at his wife, at the expression on her face, that will we, won’t we look. She seemed ready for a scrap. Was there ever a dinner eaten that benefited from a fug of bad domestic air?

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It was a good day. I had fun. Felix had fun. We missed you, that’s all.”

“It sounds like it,” she said, but it was mock admonishment, tinged with triumph at having eked out the first apology. She smiled and touched the back of his hand. “Ten minutes more, though, and I’d have been in with that bartender.”

They finished their drinks and lured Felix from the pool with promises of chocolate ice cream. Dinner was good, and Cherry did not comment on the amount of wine he pointedly consumed.

Graham carried Felix—who had been nodding off into his dessert—back to their apartment. His mood was souring again; he could still taste the mother’s tears plant, despite the slick of pepper sauce that had accompanied his steak.

Cherry was already in her sleeping attire, and it was the kind she wore to signal to him that she was not receptive to any kind of night maneuvers. Plain Jane knickers in beige. An unflattering sleep bra underneath one of her skintight yoga tops that was accessible only if you had access to a variety of chisels and pliers. He left her to her nocturnal rituals of cleansers, toners, and moisturizers and returned to the bar.

He was pleased to see that Cherry’s barman was off duty and had been replaced by a woman. He thought of turning on the old charm, but realized he was too tired and agitated. And he just did not feel like flirting. Pain lanced his sides, like the colic he had suffered from greatly as a child. He should have just gone to bed and tried to sleep it off, but the churning of his insides had made him jittery. Some late night fresh air—and fresh it was; cliffs of cloud were rising out to sea, signaling a storm’s approach—might do his efforts to relax later the world of good.

He ordered a glass of tonic water in the hope that the quinine’s analgesic effects would counter his symptoms. He took the drink into a far corner of the dining room where a TV was showing grainy repeats of the evening’s football match. He couldn’t tell who was playing, or what the venue was, let alone what they were playing for. But it was something to focus on while his guts seethed and the wind tested the strength of the building with growing muscle.

“Tastes good.”

Graham jerked in his seat; he was not alone. What he thought was a nest of shadow turned out to be a man leaning against the wall, arms folded. He too was watching the game and Graham had sat directly in his line of sight.

“I’m sorry,” Graham said, meaning it as an apology for blocking his view, but the man took it as a request to clarify his statement.

“The taste. It is good.”

“I’d prefer there was some gin to go with it, but yes, it’s a refreshing drink.”

“Not your glass. The juice in the body. The meal of it.”

Now Graham saw that the man held a newspaper in one fist. He brandished it. Graham couldn’t translate the headline, but he recognized some of the words he had already heard today.

O Sedento.

“Ricardo?”

The guide offered a loose salute in return.

“You sound as if you admire him,” Graham said.

“Who said it was him?”

“A woman then. Whoever it is.”

“Who said woman?”

“Then what? A witch? A curse? A bad dream?” Graham wished he’d go away. He wanted to watch grainy football on a shit TV, drink his tonic water and go to bed.

“I don’t know,” Ricardo said. “Maybe all of those things. Maybe none. Maybe O Sedento is the appetite we all carry. The best of us keep it hidden, no?” He folded his newspaper and slotted it into his back pocket. He touched a finger to his forehead. “I sorry. I don’t mean to annoy. Have a good night. Do not go to bed thirsty, yes?”

Any other day and Graham—who hated confrontation, hated the feeling he might have slighted someone in some vague, infuriatingly British way—would have offered some sop in reply, bought the guide a drink, invited him to stay.

But he was glad to see the back of him. The door banged shut and through the window he saw Ricardo’s hair leap in the wind before the shadows consumed him.

Graham finished his drink and headed back to the apartment. Rain was in the air now, a fine mist that the wind seemingly would not allow to settle anywhere. It seethed around him. He was soaked by the time he reached the door.

He toweled himself dry and sat in the chair. Sleep came on like a rehearsal of death. He had not felt like climbing the stairs to bed; the meat from his dinner sat heavily in his stomach as if his teeth had not macerated it first. His hands gripping the arms of the chair, looking too much like the bleached white carapaces of dead crabs they’d seen in the harbor earlier that week. His sweat was dry glue on his skin. His gut rumbled; it was as if the plant had spoiled him for any sort of nourishment.

For some reason he was thinking of the first time he had seen Cherry, on a quadrangle in the university where they had both studied. He was coming to the end of his first year of some Mickey Mouse degree that would prepare him for no job at all; she was cramming for her finals, with a placement at a City bank already secured… but that was knowledge for the future. All that he knew at that moment was the back of her neck and that she was curled on the grass and the pile of textbooks by her side. The sweep of her neck, unusually long, the way her hair was up, stray strands teased by the breeze, the dimples either side of her spine…

He stared at those dimples until he was sure she could feel the weight of his scrutiny; she sat up, her head twitching. She planted a hand in the grass and pivoted on it. Insane dream logic showed him Felix within the circle of her arms, though he was seven years away from being born.

Everything around them shivered, as if he was watching it on a TV screen with a bad reception. And then the mown grass was gone, and he was alone with his family, on the nearby beach where an ancient ship was rusting into the shingle. She dragged Felix away, the both of them casting fearful glances back over their shoulders. They disappeared inside a giant rent on the ship’s port side. He followed, but every time he called their names, the juices in his throat caused him to gag.

He pressed his hands to his eyes and pushed until he saw shoals of color sweeping across that inner dark and when he opened his eyes again he was alone in the room and it was full night, and the storm had matured, was battering the coast and their door was flapping open in the wind.

Alien flavors rose in his craw.

“Cherry?” he called out.

There was no answer. He thought she might have drunk a little too much and decided to reignite the flame he’d seen hopping between her eyes and those of the young bartender. Or maybe she’d decided to go for a midnight dip in the pool. Or maybe she’d just conked out after her long day of leisure.

He closed the door and clattered up to the bedrooms. Empty. Felix’s bed was a mess of blankets, as if he’d suffered restless dreams. Or, his mind mauled itself, he’d struggled with an assailant as he was snatched from his bed.

He checked the bathroom in the insane hope that they’d decided to have a late shower together, but every room was empty. He returned to the lower level, almost tripping on the spiral staircase, and flew into the rain. He called out but his voice was spirited away by the thrashing wind. Shutters all across the complex were rattling in their frames, or, where they had not been secured properly, were crashing rhythmically like stoked metal hearts. The trees seemed aghast. The pool area was empty. All the loungers had been tied down but some of the large cushions had been blown free and floated in the water.

Steel blades flashed behind gray cloaks lifting on the horizon. He heard the police helicopter moments after it blatted overhead and watched it, momentarily distracted, amazed that the pilot had braved the violent winds tonight. A spotlight on the choppers belly created a beam busy with rain. It picked out the fevered tops of trees, the roofs, the edges of the cliffs. Had someone been found out there? A body on the crags? His gorge rose again and he tried to let it come: he wanted his stomach to rid itself of the textures and tastes of the plant. But its coagulated syrup was not ready to leave him just yet.

He ran through the hotel grounds to the tennis courts at the rear. In one corner was a gate, which led on to a sandy path to the beach. He was there in minutes, and could see the foam-topped combers on the sea as if they were lit from within. The helicopter was hovering as best it could above the hillside that sloped down to the cliff edge. Figures were arranged upon it, like toy soldiers on a blanket. There were half a dozen black shadows and a single figure in an acid white T-shirt. Even at this distance, Graham could see that it was Ricardo: the wavy hair, the limp posture. He held something in his hands. The uncertain spotlight flashed around and over it, but would not settle. Was it… no, Christ, no. Was it Felix’s jumper?

Ricardo turned to look at him. And then raised his hand as if to wave. And then he dropped, as if he had been instantly deboned. A moment later and the sound of gunfire reached him. The light shifted on the hill; he could no longer see what was happening. The police helicopter was returning along the coast. It passed directly overhead and its light picked out the rusting remains of the ship from his dream.

Was that a figure, slipping back into one of the fissures in the hull? He was torn between going to the hill to confirm what he thought he had seen, and continuing his search for his family. If it was Felix’s jumper, then so what? Maybe Felix had taken it off that morning because he was too hot. Perhaps Ricardo had simply been trying to return it. His mind could not cope with the narratives he was forcing upon everything; he had to cling to the positives. The alternative was too hideous to contemplate.

Graham stumbled back along the rocky outcrop, conscious that the ground fell away from him to needles of rock some thirty feet below. The rain slashed almost horizontally across the path, stinging his face. Here was the channel leading down to the beach where the rusted ship was incrementally disintegrating into the shingle. He passed into a zone of relative calm. Now the wind was negated he could hear the rattle of rain on the decaying hull, the crisp attack of the waves upon the stones.

Lightning jagged around the inlet. The aperture in the bulkhead where the figure had sought shelter was ink black. Iron ribs edged it, splayed inward: presumably this had been where the ship was fatally breached. He approached, conscious that the flowers Ricardo had entreated him to suck were arranged around the failing metal hull as if they were somehow taking nourishment from the oil sweating from the sumps, the soot in the stack, the endless, psoriatic rust.

At the hole he paused. Another level of quiet accumulated. There was a high stench of iron and diesel and rotting marine life. He could hear his breath, ragged in his throat, echoing in the cavernous chamber, unless it was that of another he could not yet see. He bit that thought off at the root and spat it away. He called his wife’s name and it fell dead at his feet, as if poisoned by this air.

He was about to move into the ship and beggar the dangers when lightning arced once more across the night. It lit up the inside of the hull for a millisecond, but that was enough for him to be able to see what looked like the limp remains of a body hanging from a metal spar thrusting down from the ceiling. He was put in mind of filled coat hooks in winter bars. Though darkness had rushed back into the space, it remained imprinted on his retina. Emptied… drained… Or maybe just a coat after all, he hoped. But no: there were crimson-tipped knuckles, where something had been chewing. He imagined the grind of tiny metacarpals in pistoning jaws. A sound like bar snacks being munched.

He staggered backwards and slipped on one of the plant leaves. He fell into a nest of swollen stems. The smell of mother’s tears rose like a terrible seduction. His mouth flooded with juices, all red and raw. To deny them, he tore up a fistful of flowers and sank his teeth into their centers. That sweet, brackish slime burst across his tongue and he drank it down. Now his stomach railed against the stew of textures mingling in his gut and he felt his back arch violently as he regurgitated his meal. Before darkness became absolute, he was able to gaze upon his mess and discern, within the half-digested lumps and granules, the wet gleam of a wedding band upon what was left of a finger.

Of course what took place back then wouldn’t have seemed so disturbing had I not encountered her again just over two decades later. At that earlier time, you must realize, there was more of the farcical than the horrible in what transpired, or so I supposed.

I was only twenty-four, and when I think of myself as I was then, I realize how much of a stranger that younger man appears to me now. The memory of his hopes, his dreams, his view of life, all fill me with contempt. He would hate this future self, and regard me as a usurper.

But there are worse fates than regret.

And I believe I discovered one of them.

After a handful of jobs, none of which I particularly enjoyed and each lasting less than a year, I found myself employed at a small publishing house in Fitzrovia, close to its local landmark, the British Telecom Tower. The business specialized in what are termed “acting editions,” which are stage plays that are designed for the use of actors rather than the general reader. The only real difference is that these editions usually contain the likes of a furniture and property list, a lighting plot, and an effects plot, all printed after the play text itself and which are there to assist the director and the stage crew. My activities at this firm were in the department that licensed performance rights to companies who wished to mount productions of our titles, and for some reason (the job had little interest for me), I stayed on.

Perhaps I remained because the other staff were invariably interesting, coming from a theatrical background, and there was a high turnover of them. Aside from the board of directors, who had been there for decades, almost everyone else came and went within a few months. As you might imagine, a large proportion were “resting” actors, and as soon as a new role came up they handed in their notice and disappeared. Some returned and then left again, some didn’t, though I have to confess that only one or two out of the multitude ever achieved anything close to prominence in the theatrical world.

One of these “resting” actors employed by the publishers was a young woman whom I shall call “Celia Waters.” It is not her real name, naturally, but that detail is of no consequence.

We struck up an acquaintance of sorts. It was easy to do so, since the business was quite generous in subsidizing its staff to see performances of new plays that might be suitable for its publishing list. Often too, of course, free tickets were provided to the firm by the playwright’s agents. It was regarded as a staff perk I suppose, since their wages weren’t exactly generous. I accompanied Celia Waters on two or three occasions to shows playing in London, sometimes just the two of us, sometimes with other staff members.

One time, after a long evening (a play I have forgotten and post-performance drinks at a pub I can’t recall) I even ended up spending the night back at her flat in Shepherd’s Bush. We didn’t sleep together. I am not sure that either found the other sexually desirable. She was attractive in her own way, slim, petite, with long black hair and by no means without personal charm, but there was no chemistry between us.

And over breakfast at a nearby cafe the next morning she told me she was going to be leaving the publishing firm in a month to take up a part in a brief run of a new play being staged down in Cornwall.

She said it was being put on by a new repertory company rim by a wealthy theatrical auteur.

I can’t say that any of this was of great interest to me, and I asked in the spirit of polite enquiry, though I was genuinely curious, as to where it was going to be staged. There aren’t exactly a large number of playhouses in Cornwall and the most likely venue had already suggested itself to me. I had a Cornish cousin with a cottage down in Sennen Cove whom I visited once or twice a year, located only a mile or so from Porthcumo, the site of the Minack Theatre. Moreover, I was due to visit him when Celia Waters would also be in the area.

“Is it the Minack Theatre?” I asked her.

“Why, yes it I,” she replied. “Do you know it?”

This coincidence of our being in more or less exactly the same place at the same time gave an outside impetus to our continued association. Frankly, when she first told me she was leaving the publishing company I assumed our brief, unconsummated relationship would dissipate of its own accord, as they often tend to do with two people in their early to mid-twenties, neither of whom wants commitment.

I promised that I would come and see her in the play while I was down there, and she was keen for me to do so, presumably with a view to the idea of its being reported on favorably and published by the firm. I didn’t think there was much chance of that, since the business only really took on plays that benefited from a higher profile, but I didn’t voice the thought.

Still, I asked her to tell me about it.

“Well,” she said, “it’s all rather a mystery really at this point. We have had some formulaic rehearsals for the last couple of weeks here in a space above a pub. It’s all very ritualistic. But definitely cutting-edge and experimental.”

It sounded awful. Like something a group of students obsessed by Berkoff would try and put on.

The beast in the folds of Harry’s gut had no heart and it did not need one for his was strong enough to keep them both alive. It had neither heart nor mind nor eyes to see; it was only lips and teeth and fingers like needles that slipped inside his tongue and his bowels and even those places he did not know he had. Those unfilled hollows made its gums throb with an emptiness that might have been desire.

It was a large, magnificent room with intricate patterns of ivy branches on the tiles, and a large mirror above a marble fireplace, the mantlepiece crammed with curios from delicate silver bowls to Chinese blue-and-white porcelain figures: a clear statement of casual power, to leave so many riches where everyone could grab them.

Or rather, it would have been, if the porcelain hadn’t been cut-rate—the same bad quality the Chinese had foisted on the Indochinese court in Annam—the mirror tarnished, with mold growing in one corner, spread down far enough that it blurred features, and the tiling cracked and chipped in numerous places—repaired, but not well enough that Thuan couldn’t feel the imperfections under his feet, each one of them a little spike in the khi currents of magic around the room.

Not that Thuan was likely to be much impressed by the mansions of Fallen angels, no matter how much of Paris they might claim to rule. He snorted disdainfully, an expression cut short when Kim Cuc elbowed him in the ribs. “Behave,” she said.

“You’re not my mother.” She was his ex-lover, as a matter of fact; and older than him, and never let him forget that.

“Next best thing,” Kim Cuc said, cheerfully. “I can always elbow further down, if you insist.”

Thuan bit down the angry retort. The third person in the room—a dusky-skinned, young girl of Maghrebi descent, who’d introduced herself as Leila—was looking at them with fear in her eyes. “We’re serious,” he said, composing his face again. “We’re not going to ruin your chances to enter House Hawthorn, promise.”

They were a team: that was what they’d been told, as the House dependents separated the crowd before the House in small groups; that their performance would be viewed as a whole, and their chance to enter the House weighed accordingly. Though no rules had been given, and nothing more said, either, as dependents led them to this room and locked them in. At least he was still with Kim Cuc, or he’d have been hopelessly lost.

For people like Leila—for the Houseless, the desperate—it was their one chance to escape the streets, to receive food and shelter and the other tangible benefits of a House’s protection.

For Thuan and Kim Cuc, though… the problem was rather different. Their fate, too, would be rather different, if anyone found out who they really were. No House in Paris liked spies, and Hawthorn was not known for its leniency.

“You’re relatives?” Leila asked.

“In a manner of speaking.” Kim Cuc was cheerful again, which meant she was about to reproach him once more. “He’s the disagreeable one. We work in the factories.” They’d agreed on this as the most plausible cover story: they had altered their human shapes, slightly, to make their hands thinner and more scarred. They didn’t need to fake the gaunt faces and brittle hair: in the days after the war that had devastated the city, magical pollution affected everyone.

“The factories. The ones behind the stations?”

Kim Cuc nodded. She looked at her lap, thoughtfully. “Yes. Only decent jobs there are, for Annamites in this city.”

“That’s—” Leila started. The House factories by the ruined train stations employed a host of seamstresses and embroiderers, turning them blind and crooked-handed in a short span. “People don’t last long in there.”

Kim Cuc looked at her lap as if embarrassed. “It sucks the life out of you, but it pays well. Well, decent considering it’s not for House dependents.” She fingered her bracelet. It and its matching twin on the other side looked like cheap, gilded stuff, the kind of wedding gifts the Annamite community gave each other, but they were infused with a wealth of Fallen magic. If found out and pressed, she’d say they were savings for an upcoming operation—not an uncommon thing in devastated Paris, where the air corroded lungs and caused strange fungi to bloom within bones and muscle. “What about you?”

Leila’s face froze as she exhaled. “Gang,” she said, shortly. “The Deep Underground Dreamers, before they got beaten by the Red Mambas.”

“Ah,” Kim Cuc said. “And the Red Mambas didn’t want you?”

Leila’s gaze was answer enough: haunted and taut, and more adult than it should have been. Beneath her hemp shirt and patched-up skirt, her body was thin, and no doubt bruised. Thuan felt obscurely ashamed. He and Kim Cuc were only playing at being Houseless. The dragon kingdom under the waters of the Seine might be weakened, its harvests twisted out of shape by Fallen magic, but they still had enough to eat and drink, and beds to sleep in they didn’t need to fight or trade favors for. “Sorry,” he said.

“Don’t be,” Leila said. And, when the silence got too awkward, “So what are we supposed to do?”

“Damned if I know.” Thuan got up, and picked up one of the figurines from the mantlepiece. It was a shepherdess with a rather improbable waistline, carrying a small and perfectly fashioned lamb in her arms. One of her eyes was slightly larger than the other, an odd effect that most mortals wouldn’t have picked up on.

There is one day of the year when House Hawthorn takes in the Houseless, and trains them as servants or potential dependents. One of you needs to get in.

Hawthorn was the kingdom’s closest and most uncomfortable neighbor, and they were getting more and more pressing. Till recently, they had shown no interest in the Seine or its underwater cities. But now they were encroaching on dragon territory, and no one at the imperial court had any idea of why or what the stakes were.

We need an agent in the House.

Kim Cuc was fascinated by Fallen magic and by the Houses. Thuan—a dragon, but a minor son of a minor branch of the imperial family—just happened to be the definition of convenient and expendable.

He’d have cursed, if he hadn’t been absolutely sure that Kim Cuc would elbow him again. Or worse, continue the small talk with Leila, picking up on all of Thuan’s imperfections as if he weren’t there. Trust her to share secrets with someone who wasn’t even a dragon, or a relative.

The door opened. Thuan, startled, put the shepherdess back on the mantlepiece, and straightened up, feeling for all the world as though he’d been caught stealing dumplings from the kitchens by one of his aunts.

The newcomer was a Fallen, with a round, plump face, and the same slight radiance to her skin as all former angels, a reminder of the magic swirling through them. She turned to look at all of them in turn, her brown eyes lingering longer on Thuan, as if she knew exactly what he’d been doing when he entered the room. “My name is Sare,” she said. “I’m the alchemist of the House, and in charge of these tests.”

The one in charge of making all their magical artifacts, and turning Fallen corpses into magic for dependents. She definitely reminded Thuan of Third or Fourth Aunt, except that his aunts wouldn’t kill him for stealing or snooping where he wasn’t meant to—no, they’d come up with something far worse.

Sare waited for them to introduce themselves, which they did, awkwardly and in a growing silence. Leila’s eyes were wide. Kim Cuc, by the looks of her, was unimpressed and trying not to show it.

“So you want to enter Hawthorn,” Sare said. She didn’t wait, this time. “Let me tell you a little about how it works. I’ll pick a few people from everyone who showed up today: the ones who show the most resourcefulness. The House will take you in, feed you, clothe you and teach you. If not…” She shrugged. “The streets are full of the Houseless. Any questions?”

“Dividing us into teams…” Thuan said, slowly.

“Because a House stands together,” Sare said. The look she gave him could have frozen lava. “Intrigues are allowed, but nothing that threatens our unity. Am I clear?”

She wasn’t, but Thuan nodded all the same.

“What are we supposed to do?” Kim Cuc asked.

“To start with?” Sare gestured, gracefully, towards the large table in the center of the room. “You’ll find supplies in the cupboard on the right, and other materials in the room on the left. You have an hour to come up with something that impresses me.”

“Something—?” Thuan asked.

Sare shook her head. “Resourcefulness. I look forward to seeing what you make.”

He shouldn’t have, but he raised his gaze to meet hers. Brown eyes, with light roiling throughout the irises, flecks of luminescence that looked like scattered stars. “I’m sure you won’t be disappointed,” he said.

Something creaked in the corridor outside the room, and Sare looked away for a moment, startled. When she came back to Thuan, something had changed in her gaze, a barely perceptible thing, but Thuan was observant.

“Cocky,” Sare said. “I’m not too sure I like that, Thuan. But we’ll see, won’t we?”

And then she was gone, and it was just the three of them, staring at each other.

Kim Cuc was the first to move, towards the cupboard Sare had shown them. She opened it, and stared at its contents. Thuan heard her suck in a deep breath. “Well, that should be interesting.”

Thuan wasn’t sure what he’d expected—some kind of dark and twisted secrets, weapons or knives or something, but of course that was nothing more than fancies born of nightmares. Inside the cupboard were metal bowls and plates, and a series of little packets of powder.

“Is that—” Leila asked.

“Yes,” Kim Cuc said. “Flour, sugar and salt.” Her face was carefully composed again, mostly so she didn’t laugh. She looked, again, at the table in the center of the room, a fragile contraption with the curved legs characteristic of the Louis XV style, except that they’d been broken once already, and that the white marble surface was soot-encrusted. “I’m assuming we should make our best effort not to break that.”

Servants. Kitchen hands. Of course.

Leila pushed open the door of the other room, came back. “There’s a sink and a small stove in there.” Her face was closed again, pinched and colorless. “I can’t cook. We never saw all of this, outside—” On the streets of Paris, flour was grit-filled and grey, butter thin and watered-down, and sugar never seen. As tests went, it was actually quite a good one: how would you handle cooking with so much more wealth than you’d ever seen in your life?

Clever, Thuan thought, and then he remembered that he wasn’t supposed to admire the House that was his enemy.

Kim Cuc was gazing at him, levelly. “You’re in luck,” she said to Leila. “Because I can’t cook either. But Thuan was paying way too much attention to old recipes, back when he was trying to seduce the family cook.”

“It did work,” Thuan said, stung. Not for long, true. It had soured when Thuan was called to the innermost chambers of the court, and last he’d heard, the cook had found himself another lover. He’d have been bitter if he could have afforded to, but that wasn’t the way to survive in the intrigues of the imperial court.

“It always works,” Kim Cuc said. “Until it doesn’t.” She stopped, then, as if aware she was on the cusp of going too far.

“You said you weren’t keeping score,” Thuan said.

Kim Cuc shrugged. “Do you want me to?”

“No.” They’d parted on good terms and she wasn’t jealous or regretful, but she did have way too much fun teasing him.

“Fine,” Kim Cuc said. “What can we do in one hour?”

Thuan knelt, to stare at the contents of the cupboard. “An hour is short. Most recipes will want more than that. And…” The supplies were haphazard, bits and scraps scavenged from the kitchens, he assumed. He had to come up with something that wasn’t missing an ingredient, and that could be significantly sped up by three people working on it at the same time. And that was a little more impressive than buttered toast.

“Chocolate éclairs,” he said, finally. “Leila and I on the dough, Kim Cuc on the cream. We’ll sort out the chocolate icing while the dough cools down.” Time was going to be tight and the recipe wasn’t exactly the easiest one he had, but the cake—pâte à choux filled with melted pastry cream and iced with chocolate—was an impressive sight, and probably a better thing than the other teams would come up with. Assuming, of course, that everyone had been assigned a cooking challenge, which might not be the case.

The downside was that, unless they were very fast, they’d leave the place a mess. One hour definitely didn’t include time for clean-up. Better, however, to be ambitious and fail, rather than come back with a pristine room and nothing achieved.

But, all the while, as he directed Leila to beat eggs and sugar together—as he attempted to prevent Kim Cuc from commenting on his strings of previous lovers and their performances as she boiled butter and water together—he remembered Sare’s eyes, the way she’d moved when the floor in the corridor creaked.

It had been fear and worry in her gaze, something far beyond the annoyance of having to deal with the Houseless in the course of a routine exam she must have been used to supervising every year. And, for a moment, as she’d turned, the magic within her had surged, layer after layer of protective spells coming to life in Thuan’s second sight, spells far too complex and sturdy to be wasted on the likes of them.

“Something is wrong,” he said, to Kim Cuc, in Viet. They couldn’t keep that conversation up for long, or Leila would get suspicious.

Kim Cuc’s eyes narrowed. “I know. The khi currents in the wing are weird. I’ve noticed it when we stepped in.”

“Weird how?”

“They should be almost spent,” Kim Cuc said. “Devastated like the rest of Paris. But they’re like a nest of hornets. Something’s got them stirred up.”

“Something?”

“Someone. Someone is casting a spell, and it’s a large one.” Her voice was thoughtful. “Keep an eye out, will you?” Fortunately, questions in Viet sounded like any other sentence to foreigners, marked only by a keyword that was no different from the usual singsong rhythm.

“Of course.” Whatever it was, they were locked in a room somewhere near the epicenter of it.

Great. What ancestor had he offended lately, to get such a string of bad luck?

Thuan was down to making an improvised piping bag with baking parchment when Kim Cuc said, sharply, “Younger uncle.”

“Is anything wrong—” he started, and then stopped, because the khi currents had shifted. Water had given way to an odd mixture of water and wood, something with sharp undertones Thuan had never felt before.

The key turned in the lock again: it was Sare, her smooth, perfect face expressionless, but with the light of magic roiling beneath her skin, so strongly it deepened the shadows around the room. “Out,” she said. Her voice was terse and unfriendly.

Leila, startled, looked up with her hands full of congealed chocolate. Kim Cuc merely flowed into a defensive stance, gathering the rare strands of khi water in the room to herself. Thuan just waited, not sure of what was happening. Except that the ground beneath his feet felt… prickly, as if a thousand spikes had erupted from it and he was walking on a carpet of broken glass. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Enough,” Sare said. She looked at Thuan and Kim Cuc for a moment, her gaze suspicious—surely she couldn’t have found out what they were, surely dragon magic was as alien to Fallen as the sky was to fish? But then she shook her head, as if a bothersome thought had intruded. “We’re evacuating the wing, and you’re coming with us.”

“Caring about the Houseless?” Kim Cuc’s voice was mildly sarcastic, the remark Thuan had clamped down on as being too provocative.

“Corpses are a mess to clean.” Sare’s gaze was still hard. “I see both of you are equally cocky. Don’t give me a hard time, please.”

Kim Cuc grabbed him, as they came out. “It’s over the entire wing,” she said, in Viet.

“Not the House?”

She shook her head. “Don’t think so.” Her hands moved, smoothly, teasing out a pattern of khi water out of the troubled atmosphere. “This smooths out the khi currents. Got it?”

Thuan’s talent for magic was indifferent, but his memory for details was excellent. “Yes.”

“Good. Now hold on tight. This could get messy.”

In the corridor, a crowd of other Houseless mingled, waiting in a hubbub of whispers, until Sare clapped her hands together and silence spread like a thrown cloth. “We’re going into the gardens. Follow the dependents—the grey-and-silver uniforms. And don’t dawdle.”

And still no mention of whatever was causing the evacuation—no one who’d dared ask, either. Thuan fell in line behind two gaunt men in white bourgeons and blue aprons, Leila and Kim Cuc following a little behind. His neighbor was one of the House’s dependents, a middle-aged woman with a lean, harsh face who didn’t seem inclined to make conversation. She held a magical artefact in her clenched hand, but by the faint translucency of her skin she’d already inhaled its contents. Bad enough for everyone to be prepared for magic, then.

He still felt, under him, the spikes. They were moving, slowly weaving a pattern like snakes as he stepped over them, pushing upwards to trap his ankles. Their hold easily snapped as he stepped away, but it kept getting stronger and stronger. How far away were the gardens, how much time did they have? And what would happen, if he faltered and stopped? Something was trying to invade this part of the House, was trying to find a weakness, but he couldn’t see anything or anyone.

He glanced behind him. A small, skeleton-thin girl in a torn hempen dress had stumbled, and one of the dependents, cursing under her breath, was trying to help the girl up. Magic surged through her chest and arms, a light that threw the girl’s cheekbones into sharp relief. “Get up,” the dependent said, and the girl stumbled on.

So he wasn’t the only one, then. And it wasn’t only people with magic, Fallen or dragon who were feeling this.

Something moved, at the back. For a moment Thuan thought it was a child who’d gotten left behind, but it was too small and agile, and its joints didn’t seem to flex in the right way. Its eyes glittered in the growing shadows. And then, as swiftly as it had appeared, it vanished.

A child. The shape of a child. And—Thuan’s memory was unfortunately excellent on details like this—not something made of flesh and muscles and bones, but a construct of parquet wood, prickling with the thorns of brambles.

Of hawthorns, he thought, suddenly chilled.

When he turned to look again, the shadows had lengthened, and there were more of them, trailing the group, here one moment and gone the next, flickering in and out of existence like lights wavering in the wind. He scanned the crowd. Most Houseless appeared oblivious; but, here and there, people stared with growing fear. The House dependents didn’t appear to see the children of thorns at all.

That wasn’t good.

But, as they moved forward—always driven, always following the elusive light of Sare’s magic, following a corridor that twisted and turned and seemed to have no end—Thuan couldn’t help looking back again. Every time he looked, the children of thorns were more solid, more sharply defined. And not flickering in and out of existence, but more and more there.

The shadows at their back lengthened, until the light of the dependents’ magic seemed the only safety in the entire world. And the spikes—the branches, weren’t they?—grabbed his ankles and slowed him down, and more and more people stumbled, and they weren’t making good enough time, they were going to slow down and fall…

Someone grabbed Thuan’s hand. And it was definitely not human, or Fallen, or dragon—a dry, prickling touch like kindling wood. Thuan fought the urge to grab his hand away. “What are you?” he asked, and—where its breath should have been coming from—there was only the loud creak of floorboards.

It whispered something that might have been a name, that might have been a curse, but didn’t let go. “Stay,” it whispered. “Or the House will fail you as it failed its children.”

Thuan’s feet felt as though he was stuck to the parquet floor. With his free hand he called up khi water—it came slowly, agonizingly slowly—and wove it into the pattern Kim Cuc had shown him, throwing it over the spikes like a blanket. The currents smoothed themselves out. He lifted his feet, trying to stamp some circulation back into them, but he couldn’t get rid of the hand in his.

“Enough,” Sare said. She turned, ahead of them, to face the group. Light streamed from her face, from her arms beneath the grey and silver dress she wore—a radiance that grew steadily blinding, a faint suggestion of wings at her back, a halo around her fair hair.

By Thuan’s side, there was a sharp, wounded sound like wood snapping, and the hand withdrew from his as if scalded. He didn’t wait to see if it would come back, and neither did his companions. They ran, slowly at first and then picking up speed—not looking back, one should never look back—leaving the darkness behind and heading for the end of the corridor, door after door passing them, dust-encrusted rooms, rotten paneling, broken sofas and torn carpets and burnt wallpaper—and finally emerged, gasping and struggling to breathe, in the grey light of the gardens.

They stared at each other. Leila was disheveled and pale, breathing heavily. Thuan was still trying to shake the weird feeling from his hand. When he raised it to the light he saw a dozen pinpricks, already closing. He’d never been so happy for dragons’ healing powers.

Sare stood on the steps of the wing, eyes shaded to look at the rest of the House. “Just this wing,” she said, half to herself. She gestured to one of the dependents. “Get a message to Lord Asmodeus.”

“He said—” the dependent started, with fear in her voice.

“I know what he said,” Sare said. She sounded annoyed. “He’s grieving and doesn’t want to be disturbed. But this is an emergency.” She breathed in, a little more calmly. “No, you’re right. Iaris. Get Iaris. She’ll sort this mess out.”

Thuan showed no sign he’d understood what was going on. From his briefings he knew that Iaris was the House’s chief doctor, and Asmodeus’s right hand, seconding him in his work of ruling the House.

Sare turned back to Thuan and the others, huddled on the steps, struggling to catch their breath. “We’ll find you some food until this gets sorted out.”

Of course. They weren’t going to be allowed to leave, were they? Just in case one of them turned out to be responsible for whatever had happened.

Leila withdrew something from her pocket: it was soggy and broken in half, and left trails of chocolate in her hand. “They’d have tasted great,” she said, forlornly.

“We can always do them later,” Thuan said. And then he stopped, as his brain finally caught up with him. “Where’s Kim Cuc?”

She. She wasn’t there. He hadn’t seen her since the hand had grabbed him in the corridor. A fist of ice was squeezing his innards into mush. Where. Where was she?

He moved, half-running across the steps, gently shoving people out of his way—a gaunt girl with the round belly of starvation, an older man from the factories, his clothes slick and stained from machine oil—no Kim Cuc, no other Annamite, not anywhere. “Older aunt!”

She wasn’t there. She wasn’t anywhere. She… he stopped at last, staring at the Houseless on the steps, at the grey, overcast sky, so unlike the rippling blue one of the dragon kingdom under the Seine. Gone. Stuck inside. With the children of thorns and the floorboards and whatever else was going on inside.

Stay.

No.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Sare, towering over him, with the remnants of the magic she’d used to extricate them from the wing, a dark, suffocating presence far too close for comfort. Within him, the khi water rose, itching for a fight, for anything to take his mind off the reality. But he couldn’t. Even if he’d been the most powerful among the dragon kingdom, he couldn’t take on a Fallen within her House.

“My friend,” Thuan said.

Sare was quick on the uptake. Her gaze moved, scanned the crowd. “Not here. All right. Is anyone else missing?” she called out.

It should have been chaos, but fear of what Sare would do kept them all in check. At length, after some hurried, whispered talks among themselves, the other Houseless established that, if anyone had gone missing, it was someone who’d come alone, and whom they hadn’t noticed.

Great.

Thuan looked at the wing they’d just come out of. The doors were a classic: a lower half of faded wooden panels, once a shade of purple but now just flaking off to reveal pale, moldy wood underneath, and broken window panes on the top half.

But, around the handles… faint and translucent, and barely visible in the autumn light, was the imprint of thorn branches. Thuan sucked in a deep, burning breath. “What’s going on?” he asked Sare.

Her face was hard. He thought she’d brush him off, put him in his place with the other Houseless, but he must have caught her at an unguarded moment. “I don’t know. This wing has been odd since Lord Asmodeus came home from House Silverspires. Since…” she stopped herself, then.

Grieving. Thuan thought back to his mission briefing. Asmodeus’s long-time lover, Samariel, had died in House Silverspires. He wouldn’t have thought the head of House Hawthorn was the type to mourn, but clearly he’d been wrong. He opened his mouth, closed it, and then chose his words a little more carefully. “They say he lost his lover, in House Silverspires.”

“Yes.” Sare was still in that oddly contemplative mood.

“Does this have anything to do with it?”

Sare’s face closed. “Perhaps. Perhaps not.” She looked at him; seeing him, not as a Houseless, not as a candidate to join the House, but as a person—a scrutiny he might not be able to afford, no matter how good his disguise was. “Cocky and curious. Who are you, Thuan?”

The only thing that came out of him was the truth. “I’m the one whose friend is stuck inside the wing. Assuming she’s even there anymore.” Assuming she was even alive anymore. Assuming…

“Don’t do anything you’ll regret later.” Sare gestured to the other Houseless, who’d fanned out on the steps. Someone had found a deck of cards, and a raucous game of tarot had started, cheered on by half the crowd, though the atmosphere was still subdued. “Now go wait, will you? Iaris has got a lot of experience at cleaning messes.” She looked as though she’d roll her eyes upwards, but stopped just short of actual disrespect. “You’ll be just fine.”

It was gently phrased, but it was an order. Thuan walked back to the group, and found Leila a little way from the doors, leaning on the railing. The éclair had vanished. He guessed she’d eaten it. Good on her, this wasn’t a time to waste food.

“Thuan. Did she—”

Thuan shook his head. “They don’t know what’s happening.” And neither did he. He eased, cautiously, into his second sight, trying to see what was happening with the khi currents. Wood and water, curling around the door; but weakened, just an after-effect of what was happening within the wing. And those same little spikes everywhere, like a field of thistles underfoot, but nothing that made sense.

“I’m sorry,” Leila said.

“It’s all right,” Thuan said. It wasn’t. He should have paid more attention to Kim Cuc, but of course he’d assumed she’d take care of herself, because it was what Kim Cuc always did. He squeezed her hand, briefly. “Why don’t you watch the tarot game?”

Leila made a face. “Not interested.” She slid down the railing, her eyes on Sare. “I’d rather know what they will do.”

“The House?” Thuan shrugged. He didn’t expect much from the House. They weren’t its dependents, and Sare had hardly seemed heartbroken to lose someone.

A tall, auburn-haired magician with an elegant dress in the House’s colors had arrived. She was huddled in conversation with Sare, a frown on her wrinkled face, fingering a filigreed pendant around her neck as if debating whether she should inhale the magic contained within. Leila watched them, fascinated.

Thuan turned his gaze, instead, on the wing they’d just come out of.

Kim Cuc would have joked about his inability to see further. She’d have teased him, infuriating as always, and told him to keep his head down, to not make waves. Better to remain hidden and safe, as the kingdom was hidden from Fallen.

Except, of course, that the kingdom wasn’t safe anymore, and that Houses Silverspires and Hawthorn had both encroached on its territory. Except that, like the Houses, they were ruined and decaying, and so desperate they had no choice but to send Thuan and Kim Cuc on a dangerous mission to infiltrate a House.

Stay safe. Stay hidden. As if that’d ever worked.

He crept closer to the handles. Sare was still in conversation with the magician, who was tracing a circle in the dust-choked earth of the gardens, while Sare was interjecting suggestions that the magician didn’t appear to approve of. Leila had crept closer to them, her gaze still full of that enraptured fascination.

Thuan’s hand closed, gently, on the left handle. The spikes of khi wood shifted, lay parallel to his fingers. His palm prickled, where the hand had held him, but nothing bled again, more like the memory of a wound than a real one.

He looked, again, at the steps. The Houseless were engrossed in the tarot game or in their own private thoughts, and Sare was still arguing with the magician. He could imagine what Kim Cuc would have said if she’d seen him. She’d have known exactly what he was thinking, and would have told him, in so many words, exactly how foolish it all was.

But, then again, if their situations were reversed, she’d still charge in.

Thuan turned the handle, slowly. Greased, it barely creaked as he pushed the door open and slipped, invisible and forgotten, into the wing they’d just evacuated.

Inside, it was dark. Not merely the gloom of dust-encrusted rooms, but shadows, lengthening as he walked, and his own footsteps, echoing in the silence. Doors opened, on either side, on splendid and desolate rooms, with fungus spreading on chairs upholstered with red velvet, and a pervading smell of humidity, as if everything hadn’t been aired properly after a rainy day.

And, as he walked, he became aware he wasn’t alone.

It was only one presence at first, but soon there were dozens of them, easily keeping pace with him: the same lanky, dislocated shapes of children made of thorns, their eyes glittering like gems in the darkness. They didn’t speak. They didn’t need to. It was creepy enough. Thuan could feel the spikes beneath his feet, dormant. Of course, he wasn’t trying to escape the wing. He was headed back into it.

He didn’t even want to think of all the sarcastic words Kim Cuc was going to come up with, after this one.

“Where is she?” he asked, aloud.

They seemed… made of khi wood and khi water, of old things and memories, cobbled together by someone with only a rudimentary idea of what was human. The khi currents didn’t pool around their feet, but went straight through them, as if they were extensions of the floor, and the only noise they made as they walked was the creaking of wood. “You’re not human,” he said, slowly, carefully, and again, there was no answer. It was a stupid thing to say, in any case. Sare wasn’t human, and neither was Thuan, and they were vastly different beings.

What there was, instead, was a bright, blinding light, coming from behind him. And loud footsteps, from someone brash enough to think discretion didn’t matter. The children scattered—no, not quite, they merely stepped back into the shadows, flowing back into them like smaller pools of ink rejoining a bigger one. Thuan mentally added that to his growing list of worries. Though so far, they didn’t seem aggressive. It was going to be rather different when they tried to leave.

“I told you not to do anything you’d regret,” a familiar voice said, behind Thuan.

Sare was alone, but, with so much magic flowing through her, she didn’t need to be accompanied. A pendant swung over the collar of her dress, shining in Thuan’s vision: an alchemical container she’d emptied for its preserved power. As she moved, the faint outline of wings followed her—an inverted afterimage, all that would remain after staring too long at blinding radiance.

He was in the middle of a wing invaded by magic, unsure of whether he’d ever be able to escape it, looking for Kim Cuc and with no leads whatsoever. He no longer had any room for fear of Sare. He didn’t even have room to worry about whether she’d choose him for Hawthorn. “Regret. You mean rescuing my friend? I think I won’t regret that on my deathbed.”

“That’s assuming you get a deathbed and not a violent death.” Sare shook her head, as if amused by the antics of a child. The sort of thing that might be borne by mortals, who were younger than she was and in awe of her. But Thuan was immortal and over three hundred years old, and running out of patience, fast.

“I thought you were waiting for Iaris,” Thuan said.

“I was,” Sare shrugged. “She might be a while, though. She’s currently entertaining the envoys of another House, and she needs to extricate herself gracefully.”

“Why are you here?”

“Curiosity. Also…” she shook her head. “We take turns administering the tests, every year. And because this year I’m the one in charge, I am responsible for whatever you get up to.”

“You don’t care about the Houseless.” Thuan was annoyed. Normally he wouldn’t have let the words get past his lips.

“No, but I do take my responsibilities seriously. And Iaris wouldn’t see it kindly if I were to lose two of you, not to mention an entire wing of the House.”

“The magician—”

“Albane? She’s preparing a spell, don’t worry. Now, you seemed to know where you were going.”

“No,” Thuan said. “They knew.”

“Who?” Sare turned, to look at the corridor. There was nothing but motes of dust in the dim light.

So she still couldn’t see them. And Thuan could. Which wasn’t good. A heartbeat, perhaps less, passed, and then Sare said, with a frown, “You’re not a magician.”

“No,” Thuan said, with perfect honesty. He had no need of angel breath or other adjuncts to perform magic, and he drew on khi water, a power Sare couldn’t see and wouldn’t be able to make sense of. But it wasn’t the khi currents that made him able to see the children, because the Houseless had also seen them.

But the House dependents hadn’t. Because of their magic?

Sare’s gaze held him, for a while. She couldn’t see through him. She couldn’t even begin to guess what he was. He was in human shape, with not a hint of scales showing on his dark skin, not a hint of antlers on his head or pearl beneath his chin.

At last, after what felt like an eternity, Sare asked, “What did you see?”

“Thorns,” Thuan said. “Beings of thorns.”

“Thorns don’t—” Sare started, then stopped. “You mean trees that moved.”

“No,” Thuan said. “Children. They were children. They said… they said the House would fail me as it had failed its children.”

Sare said nothing. Thuan considered asking her whether it meant anything to her, decided against it. He would gain nothing, and only make her suspicious. “Let’s have a look,” she said, carefully.

Room after room, deserted reception rooms with conversation chairs draped in moldy coverings, closed pianos that looked as though they wouldn’t even play a note, and harps with strings as fragile as spun silk, rooms with moth-eaten four-poster beds, bathrooms with cracked tiles and yellowed tubs…

As they turned into the servants’ part of the wing—narrower rooms with shabbier sloped ceilings, all with that air of decayed grandeur—Thuan spoke up. “What’s this wing?” he asked.

Sare’s eyes narrowed. “You mean why here?”

“Yes.”

Her gaze held him, for a while. Beneath him, he could feel the spikes, quiescent. Waiting. Like the children, in the shadows, the ones he couldn’t see.

“I don’t know,” Sare said. “It’s the water wing—the one with the spring and the pump room—but it’s not the only one.”

The spring. He could feel it, distantly—khi water, far, far underground, all reserved for the House’s use, a trove of power that would never be his. But Sare was right: there were other springs, too, that he could feel on the edges of his thoughts, other currents of khi water being funneled into the House.

“Then that can’t be it.”

Sare’s gaze was hard. “You want everything to make sense, don’t you.”

Thuan fingered dust on a marble table, followed it down the curve of verdigried legs. “I want to understand.”

“Then this is what I want to understand,” Sare said, closing the door behind her. “How come only your friend vanished, Thuan? What made her so special?”

She was clever. But then, he’d expected nothing less of her. She hadn’t gotten where she was—head of the alchemy laboratory, in charge of Hawthorn’s vast troves of stored magic—by being a fool.

“I don’t know,” he said, thoughtfully. It couldn’t be that she was a dragon, or Thuan would have vanished, too. He wasn’t stronger than she was. “They tried to hold us all.”

“Yes,” Sare said. “But they gave up when we proved no easy prey. Except they did snatch your friend, who presumably fought back, same as everyone. Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re the only Annamites.”

“Yes,” Thuan said, startled. This wasn’t where he’d wanted the conversation to go. The immediate threat of the thorn children had receded, but Sare’s grilling almost made him regret the creepy escort. “But not the only colonials. And I didn’t vanish.”

“No,” Sare said. “But perhaps you’re stronger than her.”

Thuan snorted. “No. If anything, I’m weaker than she is.” He hesitated, then said, “She’s been the one always looking out for me.”

“Like a mother?” Sare’s gaze was sharp.

Children of thorns. No. Thuan shook his head. “She wasn’t the only motherly figure in that crowd, was she? That’s a rather facile explanation.”

“That children want mothers? It seems to me rather natural,” Sare said, with the ease of someone who’d never actually have any children. All Fallen were sterile.

Mothers, perhaps not. He thought, again, of the bracelets on Kim Cuc’s arms, of the wealth of Fallen magic stored there, something most Houseless would never see. In Paris, the Houses had hoarded nearly all the magic, and the rare artefacts went on the black market for a fortune. But no, that couldn’t be it. Otherwise Sare and the other dependents would have been the first to vanish. “Why children? They can’t possibly be the only dependents the House has failed.”

He thought Sare was going to berate him, but instead she walked a little further down the corridor, and stared at the darkness in front of her. “You’re here, aren’t you?” she called, magic streaming out of her like light. “I can feel you.”

Again, that odd feeling in his feet, as if the floor itself were twisting and disgorging something; and two children, stepping out of the darkness to gaze levelly back at her. Their arms were branches woven together, their hands three-fingered, and their bodies merely frames on which hung flowers the color of rot. And, in the gauntness of their faces, they had no eyes, just pinpoints of light.

“Stay,” the one on the left said.

“Where is she?” Sare asked. The light that came out of her was subdued, but Thuan could still feel the power; could still feel it pushing against the children, compelling them to answer.

She might as well have been pushing on thin air.

“Where we all go,” the rightmost one said. “Into darkness, into earth.”

Thuan opened his mouth to ask why they’d taken her, and then closed it, because it wasn’t what mattered.

“Show me,” Sare said.

A slow ponderous nod from both of them, perfectly synchronized, and two hands extending towards her.

“Sare, wait—”

But she was already moving—before Thuan could grab her away, or even finish his warning—extending both arms to clasp them.

There was a sound like cloth ripping, and then only shadows, extending to cover the corridor where Sare had been.

Thuan gave up, and used all the colorful curses Second Aunt forbade him to utter in her presence. It seemed more than appropriate.

He didn’t know how long he remained there, staring at the darkness, which stubbornly refused to coalesce again into anything meaningful. But, gradually, some order swam out of the morass of his thoughts, a sense that he had to do something rather than succumb to despair. He was—no matter how utterly laughably inappropriate this might seem—their best chance at a rescue.

Where we all go.

Into darkness, into earth.

Sare was right: there were other wings with a spring, and a water room. But this was also the wing where the House received the Houseless. Which meant the expendable one. And—if he was to hazard a guess—the one least protected by the wards.

And Asmodeus, the head of the House and its major protector, was shut in his rooms, grieving and not paying attention to what was going on within the House. An opening, for something that had lain in wait for years? An attempt to seize a weak and unprotected part of the House, or to weaken Hawthorn?

Demons take them all. He didn’t want to help the House, didn’t want to involve himself in its politics. But, if he didn’t, Kim Cuc wouldn’t come back.

Thuan closed his eyes, and sought out the spring again. It was muzzled, bound by layer after layer of Fallen magic—wards that would singe him, if he so much as thought of touching them. It flowed, steadily, into the House, giving it everything it had, the diseased, polluted waters of the Parisian underground, sewage no one would have thought of drinking before the war and its devastation.

The House will fail you as it failed its children.

The only thing Thuan wanted the House to do for him was to forget he existed, and not look too closely. He hardly expected any protection, or wanted to pledge it any allegiance. Not that Second Aunt would let him, mind you. She’d carve out chunks of his hide before she allowed this to happen.

A comforting thought: there were things scarier than unknown children of thorns with shadowy agendas.

Thuan walked downwards, towards the spring.

There were two children waiting for him outside the corrugated doors of the water room. They didn’t appear, or fade: they were just there, like guards standing at attention. By their size, the human children they were mimicking couldn’t have been more than five or six.

“What are you?” he asked, again.

He hadn’t expected an answer, but they both bowed to him, perfectly synchronized. “The Court,” they said.

“The Court.” Thuan’s voice was flat.

“The Court of Birth.”

Thuan was abysmal at a number of things, but his memory for details was excellent, and he’d been briefed on the history of the House before being sent there. Before he became head of the House, Asmodeus had been leader of the Court of Birth.

Children. The Court of Birth was in charge of the education of children and young Fallen. In charge of their protection. “There is a Court of Birth,” he said, slowly. “In the House.” Not here, in this deserted wing filled with thorns and shadows.

There was no answer. Thuan grabbed the doors, and pushed.

He didn’t know what he’d expected. It was a low room with several rusted pumps, their steady hum a background to his own breath. The air was saturated with humidity, the tiles on the walls broken in numerous places—repaired so many times they looked like jigsaws, with yellowed grouting running at odd angles through the painted windmills and horse-drawn carts.

In a corner of the room, Sare was fighting children of thorns—small, agile shapes who dodged, effortlessly, the spells she threw at them. The pipes lit up with magic, showing, at intervals, the flow of water going upwards through the pumps.

And, in the center of the room…

Thuan walked faster, his heart in his throat.

It was an empty octagonal basin of water, the khi currents within it all but extinguished, except where Kim Cuc was. She wasn’t looking at him, but kneeling, her hands flat on old, cracked mosaics. The khi water within her, the currents running in her veins and major organs, was slowly spreading to cover the entire surface of the mosaics. Her green bracelets were fused to the floor, the light from them spreading across the mosaics. She—

She was taking root in the basin.

This wasn’t good.

“Big sis—” Thuan started. He didn’t get to finish his sentence, because someone else spoke up first.

“So you’re her friend.”

Thuan turned around, sharply, hands full of khi water—or rather, they would have been, if all the water within the room hadn’t been either extinguished or claimed. There was nothing in his palms but a faint, pathetic tug, as if he held a dog on a distant leash.

The being of thorn who stood in front of him was tall; taller than Thuan, and rake-thin. When it bowed, the gesture wasn’t like that of the others, smooth and synchronized and in no way human. This was elegant and slow, with a hint of mockery, as if the being couldn’t quite disguise amusement. It reminded Thuan of…

In fact, it reminded Thuan of nothing so much as Sare’s demeanor. “You don’t have wings,” he said—a stab in the dark, but given where he was it could hardly get worse.

“No.” The being straightened from its bow, stared at Thuan. The face wasn’t just branches arranged to have eyes and nose. This was someone’s face, carefully sculpted in wood and thorns: plump cheeks, and a round shape, someone who must have been pleasantly baby-faced and young, except that now not a single muscle moved as it spoke, and the eyes were nothing but pits of darkness, like the orbits of a skull. “We don’t keep them, when we Fall. As you well know.”

“I don’t know,” Thuan said. He pulled on khi water, and found barely anything that would answer him. Not good at all. “You were alive once, weren’t you?”

The being cocked his head, watching him like a curiosity. “You ask the wrong questions,” it said, at last.

“Fine,” Thuan said, exhaling. “Then why are we here? Because the House failed you?”

He thought the other was going to make him some mocking answer about following his friend in harm’s way, but it merely shook its head. “The House didn’t fail me.”

“You make no sense.” Thuan said.

The being was still watching him. It made no move to seize or stop him. “She was willing.”

Thuan took in a deep, burning breath. Willing to do what, and what questions had it asked, before binding Kim Cuc to the basin’s floor? Words had power here, which was good, because they seemed to be all he had to bargain with.

He hesitated—every instinct he had telling him not to do such a stupid thing—but then turned his back on the being, to look at the basin. Kim Cuc’s eyes were closed, her breathing slow, even. “Big sis. Big sis.”

He wanted to shake her, but he wasn’t a complete idiot. She’d put her hands in the basin, on the mosaics, and it had seized her. She didn’t need Thuan caught in the spell, either.

She shouldn’t have needed Thuan at all, demons take her. She should have been in charge; fighting, like Sare, trying to figure out the riddle that had Thuan stumped.

“We asked her to help,” the being said, behind him. He’d still made no move to take Thuan. And though Sare was fighting, she wasn’t harmed, either.

Magic. Fallen magic. That was why they seemed summarily uninterested in Thuan, or in any of the other Houseless: Thuan’s magic was invisible to them. But they hadn’t taken Sare, or the other House dependents. He’d thought it was something dark, something the House couldn’t keep at bay, but…

But when Sare had pushed against the children of thorns, Thuan had seen nothing, in the khi currents.

And none of the House dependents had seen them, or been threatened by them.

He breathed in, slowly. It was as if they were part of the House, weren’t they. Ghosts or spirits or constructs that hadn’t been made by any magicians. And they hadn’t taken Sare or the other House dependents, because theirs was a power already bound to the House. As Kim Cuc wasn’t.

“You’re the House,” he said.

“A small part of it.” Its smile would have been dazzling, if it hadn’t been made of branches and twigs.

“Willing. You asked her if she wanted to be part of the House,” Thuan said, slowly. “That’s why she’s here.”

The voice that answered him was mocking. “Was there any need to ask? She was there, taking the tests.”

In order to enter the House, not to become subsumed within its foundations. But he doubted the being would know, or care about the difference. “She’s not House,” he said, carefully. A glance upwards: Sare had dispatched one of the two children, but it was already reforming.

What did he have, to bargain with? Not the kingdom: even if he’d been willing to expose and sell it, it’d have no value to a House of Fallen and magicians. Not his magic, for the same reasons. Sare, possibly, but how did you bargain with something the other already owned? “You don’t need her,” he said, slowly.

“In ordinary circumstances, no.”

“Because Asmodeus is grieving for Samariel? All grief passes, in time.”

“The grief of Fallen?” The being’s voice was mocking again. “That could last an eternity.” Thuan found a word—a name—on the tip of his tongue, forced himself not to utter it. The being wasn’t Samariel any more than any of the children of thorns had been flesh and bones, or real children. They were all just masks the House wore as a convenience. “And meanwhile, our protections weaken.”

“He’s head of the House,” Thuan said. “He won’t leave you undefended.”

It was going nowhere. He couldn’t negotiate from a position of weakness, and he couldn’t share his only strengths for fear of being caught out. “If you start taking people, they’ll tear the wing apart stone by stone.”

“Would they? They’re Houseless,” the being said. “Not likely to be much missed, in the scheme of things.”

Spoken as only a House-bound could.

“What you take, they could give freely.”

A low, rumbling noise mingling with that from the pumps. Thuan realized it was laughter. “No one ever gives freely. There’s always an expectation of being paid, in one currency or another.”

“You’re…” Thuan fought a rising sense of frustration. “You’re the House. All you do is take!” He pointed to Sare, flowing in and out of combat with unearthly grace, her pale skin lit up with the radiance of magic, the white shape of bones delineated under her taut skin. “Do you think she’d be as useful, if you shut her in the foundations of the wing?”

A silence, then, “One day, when she’s spent almost all the magic she was given when she Fell, that might be her only use.” A low, amused chuckle. “But this isn’t how dependents are rewarded.”

He’d had lessons of diplomacy in the dragon kingdom. He should have paid more attention to them, instead of trying to come up with plans to impress his cousins. He… he’d always thought Kim Cuc would be there, and of course she was the one in need of rescue, and he couldn’t come up with a single idea that would make sense. He couldn’t fight off a House, or even a part of a House, all by himself—and especially not with both hands tied down, and no access to his magic lest he reveal himself.

No.

He was looking at it from the wrong way around. Because fighting or threatening wasn’t what he needed to do, if he wanted to use his magic. He needed… a distraction.

Which meant Sare.

He didn’t trust Sare. He couldn’t even be sure she was going to follow his lead: for all he knew, she’d be happy to leave Kim Cuc there forever, if it was for the good of the House.

But.

But she’d come back for both of them, and it was the only chance he’d get. “You don’t want Kim Cuc,” Thuan said, slowly. There wasn’t much khi water in the room, but he could gather it to him, slowly and methodically. He could fashion it into razor-thin blades, held within his palms. “You want Asmodeus.”

A silence. “You’re Houseless. You can’t possibly promise me anything that involves him.”

No, and neither would Thuan ever consider getting involved with the head of House Hawthorn. The last thing he needed was attention from that quarter. But it didn’t matter, because all he needed to do was lie smoothly enough.

“I’m not House. But she is.” He pointed to Sare but finished his gesture with a wide flourish, which enabled him to throw the blades of khi water in his hands towards Kim Cuc’s wrists. They connected with an audible crunch.

Water was stillness and decay and death. Thuan breathed in, slowly, moving his fingers as though he were playing the zither, weaving the pattern Kim Cuc had shown him earlier. The blades slowly moved in response, digging into the green stone, their edges turning it to dust, a thin, spreading line across its surface—so agonizingly slowly it was all he could do to breathe. “Ask her,” he said.

A silence, broken only by the slurping sound of the pumps. Then the being moving as gracefully as water flowing down, and the two children facing Sare vanished. She turned to Thuan, snarling, her face no longer in the semblance of anything human; and then saw the being of thorns, and sucked in a deep, audible breath.

Her mouth opened, closed. “It’s a bit of the House,” Thuan said, quickly. “Not…”

Sare’s face was unreadable again. “Is it?” She bowed, very low. “Tell me,” she said to Thuan.

Thuan gathered thoughts from where they’d fled, and put as many of them as he dared into words. “It wants Lord Asmodeus.”

Sare’s gaze moved to the basin, and then back to Thuan. “And, failing that, it will take the Houseless?” She showed no emotion. But then why would she have cared about Kim Cuc? Thuan waited for her to speak, to tell the being it was welcome to Kim Cuc and whatever else it saw fit to take. But Sare didn’t say anything.

“We need to be strong,” the being said. Thuan watched Kim Cuc’s bracelets; watched the thin line that was spreading across the stone, a widening crack. He would only get one chance to seize her and run, and he couldn’t even be sure that Sare would follow them. “Not distracted.”

“Distracted.” Sare’s face was hard again. “Grief is allowed.”

The being said nothing. Of course it wouldn’t understand.

Thuan shifted, moving closer to Kim Cuc, both arms outstretched to grab her.

“Lord Asmodeus isn’t available,” Sare said. “And we work on the principle that people are safe inside the House, regardless of whether they’re dependents or not.”

A hiss, from the being.

“Sare,” Thuan said.

She looked at him, startled, as if she’d forgotten he was there, or that he would speak.

“Be ready.”

The bracelets split with an audible crunch. Thuan reached out, lightning fast; grabbed Kim Cuc and pulled—she came light and unbearably fragile, a doll he could have snapped with a careless gesture—threw her over his shoulder, and ran.

He didn’t look back.

The spikes under his feet tensed, but didn’t surge—behind him, a blinding light, that filled the pump room until he could hardly see. He ran for the open doors, and the maze of corridors leading back to safety.

He’d expected to have to fight the children at the entrance, but they’d vanished in the wash of light. He could still see their silhouettes in the midst of the radiance, shock-still. Stunned, but recovering. He didn’t have much time.

Which way had he come? The corridors all looked alike, all with that same faded flower wallpaper, and the stains of blackened mold spreading from the carvings on the ceiling. The light behind him was dying down, the spikes at his feet quiescent. Waiting.

“You’re fast,” Sare commented, as she caught up to him.

“You—” Thuan was breathing hard. He’d slowed down to see where he was going. He expected, at any time, to see the spikes reforming, children of thorns waiting for them in the darkness.

“I hit him hard.” Sare sounded cheerful. “It was easier, knowing what I was dealing with.”

“You—” Thuan found a breath, finally. “You didn’t have to do this.” It was the House. It was the wards that kept all their dependents safe. She only had to look the other way.

Sare raised an eyebrow. “As I said, I’m responsible for the safety of the Houseless during those tests. And there are some choices that I won’t make. We’re not monsters, Thuan.”

Thuan clamped his mouth on the obvious response. “The Court of Birth,” he said, instead.

“This way,” Sare said, pointing to a corridor that seemed like the others, cracked parquet and faded wallpaper with an alignment of the same doors, all painted with stylized flowers. And, in the growing silence, “Children died, because Lord Uphir wouldn’t protect them. Before Lord Asmodeus took the House from him. It remembers.”

And Asmodeus protected children? Thuan didn’t voice this question, either, but Sare answered it regardless.

“The House keeps faith with its own. Lord Asmodeus understands this,” Sare said.

“Fine,” Thuan said. He wasn’t about to argue with her. “Any plans?”

“Yes.” For someone who’d been through Hell and back, Sare was still inordinately cheerful. “My turn. Be ready to run. It’s straight ahead, and left at the first intersection, the one with the two chairs and the pedestal table with the Chinese vase.”

“I don’t understand—” Thuan started, but she was looking past him, at what was coming up.

He turned, slightly—Kim Cuc a growing dead weight on his shoulder—and saw the maw of darkness, rising from the bottom of the wing—flowing like ink, like polluted oil, glittering with the shadows of thorns.

They couldn’t possibly outrun this.

By his side, Sare was leaning against a wall—the light coming out of her pale and weakened, the artefact around her neck open, with no hint of magic left within. The shadows flowed around her, not touching her—House, she was still House, and it didn’t care for her, didn’t want to hurt her, just in case she turned out to be useful one day. Under Thuan, the floor seemed to have become broken glass. And, as the shadows came forward and extinguished the light, they pooled—becoming the shape of children, the shape of a Fallen.

They didn’t speak, anymore: just a thin thread of sound that might have been the creaks of floorboards, the trickle of water. Stay. Stay.

Thuan backed away, until he stood in the center of the corridor, with threads of magic stretching, trying to bind him to the floor, to make him part of the House as they’d tried to do with Kim Cuc. He could barely hold on to his human shape. Any moment now, he was going to lose it, and Sare was going to see antlers sprouting from his temples, scales scattered across his cheeks.

Stay. Stay.

Never.

“I told you.” Sare’s voice was conversational, her face utterly emotionless, as if she was merely shepherding Houseless through tests. “We guaranteed their safety. It’s not an idle promise.”

The being that looked like Samariel was stretching past her already, making for Thuan. Sare was leaning against the wall, winded and exhausted; but her gaze found Thuan’s, held it.

Be ready to run.

There was no blinding light, no rising magic. Instead, the floor under Thuan changed—as if someone had smoothed out the broken glass, stroked raised spines until they lay flat again. The threads under his feet snapped.

He ran.

The darkness would follow him, but he couldn’t do anything about that. His lungs were burning, his legs trembling. Kim Cuc wasn’t heavy, but he couldn’t keep carrying her forever. She kept sliding off his shoulder, head lolling against his chest.

Turn left at the next intersection. Two chairs, a pedestal table with one of those horrible Chinese porcelain vases on it. He almost tripped over one of the chairs, had to force himself to change course, calves burning.

On either side of him, the wallpapers were turning black again, the painted flowers and birds merging with the growing shadows, and he could see the shape of children, pooling from the paneling like ink, thorns and branches and a House he couldn’t fight, a power that was slowly choking the dragon kingdom.

Demons take them. Demons take them. He couldn’t possibly—

At the end of the corridor was the door to the garden, so close, so impossibly far. Whatever Sare had done was nothing more than a sop, a few moments’ safety gained. He was never going to make it. He was going to freeze there, within sight of the exit…

He’d started to shoulder off Kim Cuc’s weight, ready to stand over her and defend her—when the magic hit.

It came, not from behind him, but from the door. And it wasn’t harsh, blinding light, but something smoother and softer; the voices of children, laughing and teasing each other; an echo of a lullaby, sung over and over; a smell of fried onions and warm bread, and a hint of unfamiliar spices.

In front of Thuan, the being of thorns formed, stared at the light, empty eye-sockets shining in the darkness. Khi water pooled around its feet, circled its shape on the parquet. It didn’t move. It stood, entranced, as if listening, its head cocked.

Thuan would have run, but he had no energy left. Instead, he straightened out Kim Cuc on his shoulder, and hobbled towards the light.

An eternity of walking, with Kim Cuc growing heavier; and the spell—whatever it was—spreading around him, a warm embrace, a promise of small, ordinary things; of fire in the hearth, water and wine in crystal glasses, the smoothness of cotton sheets at the end of the day—never mind that the bed was moldy and broken, the wine sour, the hearth cracked, it was still home.

But not his home. Never.

When Thuan stepped outside, the light blinded him for a moment. Then he saw the magician—Albane?—kneeling in the middle of a circle traced in the mud. Light streamed, highlighted the words she’d written, as fluid and as deliberate as a master’s calligraphy. Leila was kneeling by the side of the circle, both hands plunged deep into the earth, the light coming up to her wrists, making her swarthy skin seem pale and colorless.

Thuan kept walking—he wasn’t sure he could stop. His feet carried him down the stairs, by the side of the circle: Albane looked up at him and nodded once, grimly. Leila withdrew her hands from it and grabbed him. “Thuan!”

Thuan stopped, at a loss for words. He laid Kim Cuc on the grass, blinking once, twice, as he knelt by her side, looking for a pulse—feeling it, slow and strong. “Come on, come on,” he muttered.

“She’s alive,” Sare said.

She must have come out of the wing straight in his wake, but he hadn’t heard her. Everything felt… unbearably real, unbearably distant, and he couldn’t seem to process thoughts. Magic flowed from Sare into Kim Cuc. She convulsed, the bruises on her wrists becoming darker. “You—” Thuan said, struggling to speak.

Kim Cuc’s eyes opened. “Thuan? What—what happened?”

“It’s all right. You’re safe.” He could have wept.

“I would advise you not to bring Fallen magic into the House,” Sare said. Her face was smooth once again, emotionless. “Not unless you’re strong enough to use it.”

Thuan looked up. The wing was quiescent once again, the thorns a fading smear of darkness against the door handles. “Sare—”

She wasn’t listening to him: she’d moved, coming to meet an older woman with the same kind of smooth face, wearing a doctor’s white gown over the colors of the House. “Iaris.”

Iaris nodded. “Apologies for the delay. I needed to figure out how to keep this contained.”

“And—?”

“A slip-up,” Iaris said. “My mistake. We hadn’t checked the wards on this wing for a while. It won’t happen again. I’ve set magicians to reinforcing them. We can’t have the House seeking out magic to maintain itself.”

As if they’d care.

“I saw.” Sare closed her eyes. “I saw him. Samariel.”

Iaris’s face tightened. “Samariel is dead. You’d do well to remember this. And whatever you saw is dormant now. Contained, and it will remain so for centuries, God willing.”

“Let’s hope so,” Sare said.

“You all right?” Leila asked Thuan.

Thuan still held Kim Cuc’s hand. She’d fallen back into unconsciousness, looking older than she should, weak and vulnerable and fragile. Any time now, she was going to open her eyes, and make some flippant, sarcastic remark. Any time.

But she didn’t.

“I’m not sure,” he said, finally, to Leila. “I didn’t know you could use magic.”

“You learn things, in the gangs.” Leila squeezed his hand, briefly. “Besides… we’re a team.”

Thuan stifled a bitter laugh. “For the tests? I don’t think these turned out very well.”

“Oh, I don’t know. The éclairs tasted nice, even though they were a bit wet in the middle. I gave mine to Sare, before she entered the wing.”

“You—” Sare hadn’t mentioned this, but why would she? “What did she say?” He didn’t even know what it’d have tasted like, half-made and with the pastry filling falling out of it.

“Nothing,” Leila said. She shrugged. “I know it looked horrible, but we might as well not waste our work.” Her face grew serious again. “This isn’t about tests.”

He stared at her, for a while; thinking of the streets and how lonely they could be. “We are a team,” he said. “Thank you.” He couldn’t give her everything that he wanted, but friendship? The dragon kingdom would surely let him spare that.

Except, of course, that he wouldn’t be able to tell her the truth about who he was, or Kim Cuc would box his ears out. Some friend.

One problem at a time.

Beside them, Iaris and Sare were still talking. “The Court of Birth.” Iaris snorted. “As if that’d have impressed Lord Asmodeus.”

Sare didn’t answer. She was opening and closing the clasp of her pendant. “It might have. Dredging up the past.”

“We’re looking to the future,” Iaris said. “He has plans, believe me.” Her gaze rested, for a moment, on Thuan, moved away. “The mourning period is over.”

“I see.” Sare closed the pendant with an audible click. “Plans. That will be good.”

Plans. Thuan’s ears prickled. But neither Iaris nor Sare appeared ready to discuss further. Of course. Not in front of outsiders.

“Do you want to debrief them, or shall I?” Sare said.

“You can do it,” Iaris said. “Report to me afterwards, will you?”

“Yes,” Sare said. “I will.” Thuan held Kim Cuc’s hand, and said nothing. Sare hadn’t seen anything. He’d barely used any magic, and he’d smooth it over. He’d have been worried in other circumstances: but if she wanted him dead, he’d already be.

“And once the wing is shored up, we’ll have to reschedule the tests.” Iaris sounded annoyed.

“Oh, I don’t think so.” Sare turned, briefly, to look at them. “I know exactly who passed.”

Iaris raised an eyebrow. “That’s… unusual.”

“You have objections?”

“None. It’s your own business, Sare.”

“My responsibility. Yes, I know.”

“So these three?”

Sare shook her head. “Two.”

Two. Leila and him. Thuan looked at Kim Cuc. “Sare—” he said.

“I told you,” Sare said. “Resourcefulness. And strength. I appreciate your loyalty to your friend, but—”

But, from Sare’s point of view, she’d been nothing but trouble.

He needed Kim Cuc. He couldn’t possibly take on the House by himself, couldn’t make it far without her support. He needed her jokes at his expense, her reminders of his failures in bed and elsewhere—and, more importantly, he needed to not be alone in Hawthorn. Leila, for all that he liked her, wasn’t from the kingdom, and could never fill that role.

He…

He’d gone through this all, without her help—and now he’d have to do much, much more. The breath in his lungs burnt, as bitter as ashes and smoke. “I see,” he said. “Thank you.”

“Good,” Sare said, briskly. “Welcome to the House, Thuan.” She smiled mirthlessly. “I’m assigning you to the kitchens to start with. Your pastries were too soggy, but not that bad, considering. Never fear, you’ll have plenty of classes to learn better cooking skills.”

Thuan forced a smile he didn’t feel. He remembered darkness flowing to fill his entire world, that feeling he would never escape the corridors.

“I’m glad I passed,” he said, smoothly, slowly. He stared, in silence, at the looming shape of the House before him, at the fading imprint of thorns on the handles, and wondered how many secrets it still held—how many things waiting to bite and grasp, and never let go.

The dreamer, born bleak, invents an existence elsewhere. He tosses in his sleep, his hair tangled. His hands grasp at nothing, and his nightclothes oppress him. He roams a land of chill seas and stony cliffs, and when at last he arrives at a kingdom, he passes through its gate cautiously, seeking a fire, but finding only silvery surfaces surrounded by cliffs. It is a frozen place, no metal, no wood. It is a place where even the knives are made of ice.

There is a tower before him. The dreamer enters the tower and climbs the staircase.

In the tower there is a creature, and in the creature there is a heart made of lost love. The heart takes flight from the creature’s breast, and a raven rises against the frozen gray sky, over a coastline bordered in coffins, a world of women with bound hands and blindfolded eyes.

As the heart departs, the dreamer wakes a poet.

He stumbles to his desk and opens a pot of ink. He dips the raven’s feather in it and begins to write, sleep still half upon him, his mind full of creatures that fade as he commits them to paper, caging them line by line, his pen drawing their prison.

He wrings the night into dawn. He covers pages with calligraphed serpents, a poem twisting into a story filled with another story, a novel pushing against the edges of the paper. As he writes, his kingdom comes into being, and he breathes life into it, his fingers leaving prints on the pages, his companion beginning to take shape, an appetite made of points of light, a creature made of the hours of an insomniac.

If a man makes a monster, he wonders, is he responsible for it? If one is the master of the monster, what happens when the monster is left alone? Does it wander in wrath? Does it rage? The poet does not consider his monster’s future. He makes it and sets it free in his kingdom.

The poet is a young man when he begins to build the kingdom called Thule, and he builds for years.

He dreams alongside his dreamers, and in the waking world, he wanders, writing roads alongside his own, sometimes crossing them. A dream within a dream, he thinks. Thule and its king with his dark heart and longing for love, Thule and its ruler, its forests, its floods of ghosts. Dream-land, he thinks, embroidering the edges of a realm stitched in silver.

Into the drawer of the desk the poet puts his Thule, locked and keyed, while he goes into his own life, a marriage, a misery, years of scrimping and sickness, a beach, a bride, a breaking.

Thule continues about its business without its god, and when the poet returns to it and publishes a map of its boundaries, the companion he invented as a young man has been roaming the earth for years.

There has been a dead wife washed up on the shores of Thule, her name Annabel or Lenore, or…

Call this body Virginia. Call this, that was a girl, a ghost with violet eyes and black hair, dead at the age of twenty-four, consumed.

The poet opens his drawer, and finds his kingdom of grim comforts. He looks into the distance, seeking the raven-shaped heart, the starry skin, the sharp teeth, but the creature is nowhere to be found.

The poet remembers a ship left sailing into the line of the horizon, but he can’t recall the direction, not with a compass, not with the sun. Dim, the land he made as a boy, and darkness abutting the edges. But out of that land, in the brightness of the world, there is something he made, and he must capture it.

He writes a trap for the monster, a story filled with dreamers. A woman, a demon, a journey, a town by the water and something floating out in the harbor. He writes a tale for himself to inhabit, a dream within a dream.

This tale.

There are certain stories, any reader knows, that recur in towns boundaried by water. A captain’s wife stares into a gale, and suddenly her husband’s face appears in that green-gray miasma, a vision of his wrack and ruin. Ghostly sailors struggle from the waves, only to fall back again. Ships are found adrift, crews missing. Messages in bottles are discovered ten years after their sender’s drowning, inscribed with predictions of futures unlived.

I need not remind the reader, gentle or no, that these tales are fictions made of desire, that the act of missing a beloved may conjure miracles. For myself, I never held with such. I held with hope, and so I came to Providence for a worldly version of Salvation, in the year eighteen hundred and forty-eight, carrying an umbrella and wearing a long dress, my hem draggling in the mud.

No one turned head to look at me when I emerged from my carriage. I was no longer a girl, but a woman of nearly thirty-five. I’d had money, and then I had none, or at least none in hand. A cutpurse I never saw, and that was gone, though in the hem of my skirt I’d sewn enough to carry me. I was no innocent. By all accounts I was a lost cause and a fallen woman.

The mistress of the inn was slender, with bones that ridged through her skin in distinct knobs.

“I am Mrs. MacFarlane,” I informed her, with as much dignity as I could. “My husband is delayed on the road.”

She looked into my eyes and offered a tight smile. I felt certain that my ruse had not been accepted.

“And every husband is delayed on the road,” she said. “And every road leads to hell.”

It was not as though I had better options. The accommodations were homely but the linens were of a fine hand. The food was good and plain.

I’d come to Providence to make a portrait, a particular rendition of my own visage, and the man I meant to meet had no notion I was coming. It was a wild afternoon in November, and my arrival was veiled by weather. I had no wish to be recognized, and so the rain bothered me not at all, though when I ascended to my room, I hung my dress to dry and returned to the dining room in another gown, this one charcoal hatched with violet stripes, a changeable taffeta petticoat in rose and canary.

In the daguerreotype I planned, I’d look like a woman dressed in dark, but in truth, I was as a nightbird’s wing, flashing my colors. There was a whimsy in that, and though I had suffered, I still had enough humor to see the wit of a woman garbed in silk peacockery, appearing, when drained of color, to be a widow in mourning. I wanted levity in the daguerreotype, if indeed I would be carrying it with me for the rest of my life.

I sat at a small table with a plate of boiled meat, and the innkeeper kept my tea hot. There were curtains hanging all about me, toile printed with scenes of exploration in some unknown country, a legacy of a former life. They were of French manufacture, I believed, though this town was on the eastern coast of America. I ate quietly, contemplating my mission, considering the streets with their cobblestones, the daguerreotypist’s parlor, the items in my valise upstairs.

Eventually the innkeeper emerged again. She’d taken down her hair and drawn a muted paisley shawl about her shoulders. Her hair was an unlikely platinum, near enough to white that I’d thought her older than she was, and it was loose now, in waves down from her pins. It was beautiful, though she was not. It seemed to me that this mattered, though I’d known beautiful women dead in the same circumstances as those whose faces had less grace. Beauty, it seemed to me, was a lie told to girls, a fairytale of prospects and princes, and as my own face had aged, I’d come to wonder whether anything of it was truth at all. Whatever beauty I possessed had only brought me trouble.

“A sip for a storm,” the innkeeper said. I looked at her, feeling weary, though the fire blazed up, and it was warm enough in the room. I’d left New York scarcely recovered from the last fever, and from the ghastliness thereafter. This portrait and photographer were my only hope.

She sat opposite me. I could smell her perfume, a mixture of salts and camphor.

She poured sherry, her hand steady, and I could see her smile, though her head was bowed. It was a smile that said she knew my history. Some jilting, some man turned marauder, or perhaps wed to another lovelier than I. Perhaps she thought I’d promised myself to a sailor, and now waited in vain for his bones to walk out from the bay.

I saw her glance at my waistline, but there was nothing there to betray me. No, what inhabited me hid more efficiently than that.

Beneath my dress, I wore a strand of beads made of amber, the better to absorb the energy of the thing I carried. Sometimes at night I woke, chilled and sweating, gasping, unable to swallow, but I was here, was I not? I’d managed the journey. It had been a question, my body racked with spasms, curled against the hard leather seat.

I’d twisted my wedding ring seven times around my finger, and then taken it off and put it on a chain about my neck for fear of losing it. My father was certain I’d acquired it of a tinker, roadside shine bought as an additive to my delusions of a paramour. He understood nothing.

I’d reduced in weight during in the sixmonth I’d spent an invalid, plagued by visions and panics, surrounded by delicate pieces of dark. This in spite of the midnight meals I’d consumed—no, nothing to speak on, nothing to think on. They had not fed me.

Now I was here. This was a cure, or so a medium in New York had told me.

“Go to this daguerreotypist,” said the woman met in a district otherwise filled with stables and snorting animals, passing me a card with an address. She was in the upper quarters, a gown of dark pink embroidery, a face like a crystallized fig, all folds and sugary creases, poisonously edible. “Hire him to take your portrait.”

A photographer of ghosts. There was a fashion toward such things at that time, but this studio, that of Masury & Hartshorn, was particular. Both of the main photographers there were of unusual lineage, she told me. Messr. Hartshorn was a stag turned man by a jealous god two thousand years before, and Messr. Masury was the son of a ghoul, but, by all accounts, tremendously polite. They ran a specialist studio. There was a photographer there, this medium swore, who might use the camera to save my soul, if anything remained of it. His name was whispered in these circles, though it was not one the studio advertised.

That was why I had come here, at considerable peril, and this was my aim. A session that would save me. A portrait that would free me from the burden I carried.

The man I was to meet was called Edwin Manchester, an apprentice who had come to photography from the spiritual movement. He was well known in the circles I’d come to rely upon, and had, according to the medium, purged one Miss Valpareille of a demon that had taken up residence inside the chambers of her heart. His method of photography extracted whatever creature had nestled within the person being photographed.

If there was a stowaway inside my body, this portrait would snatch it out. The portrait, then, would depart with me, and though it was necessary I keep it under lock and key, the stowaway would be trapped inside it for as long as the portrait existed. So I hoped and so I prayed. I could not spend my nights the way I’d spent them of late.

The mistress leaned back in her chair. I noticed a woven bracelet around her wrist, the same platinum as her own tresses, twisted into a complicated pattern, a mourning bracelet, but for the large gemstone at the center, wreathed in hair. A star sapphire. The star gleamed in the same way her eyes did. It was not from here. A sailor for her too, it seemed, someone who’d raided a faraway treasure, or traded with a woman for her jewels.

“Best to close the curtains,” the innkeeper said, calmly as though she were telling me she’d prepared hot milk to better my sleep. “Men may come out from the water at night, and you would rather they not see you, though if you desire you may look out from behind the drape.”

“Men?” I asked. “What men? The men from the town? From a ship?”

She spoke as though what she said was nothing strange, nothing the least unusual, and in truth, my recent history had convinced me there was nothing impossible in the world, that anything might happen, and to anyone.

“There is a ship anchored in the bay. Out of it come explorers, drenched and walking inland toward the light of the town. They carry lanterns, and come bearing maps, but the maps do not depict any place the barmen have heard tell of, nor do they reveal any mark in their topographical lines to remind one of anything near here. Drear, the men are, dressed in creamy silk waistcoats, and long black tails. With the dawn they walk back into the water.”

“I had not realized I was to hear of ghosts,” I commented, mildly enough, but the story, I worried at like a knot. I’d heard stories before, and some of them were true. I lived in the center of a narrative that no reasonable person would perceive as plausible. This one, that of a ship of the dead, chilled me. I had known other stories about ships.

I peered out into the street and saw all sorts of men with all sorts of countenances, all in their dark and drear, all with their eager eyes and long mustaches, but none of them came out of the bay.

“One always hears of ghosts at this time of the year,” she said, and shrugged. “The season is turning dark and the storms are upon us. The living walk beside things that would be stricken by sunlight. Now it is time for your tale, Mrs. MacFarlane, for it is clear you have one.”

I flinched, my sherry sloshing in my glass. The bones of my corset oppressed me and I felt as though I’d been caged inside a skeleton not mine own. Perhaps it was that of a whale, and I was a Jonah, adrift and punished by God. I put the glass to my lips and drank the balance.

“Tell me why you’ve come here, to this town on the water. The wind is cold, and the streets full of trouble, and no one comes without a reason. Will you sell your soul as a stowaway? Will you go to Thule?”

“Thule?” I asked, my heart racing with that word. “What do you know of Thule?”

She tilted her head, appraising me with the attention of a jeweler looking through a loupe.

“Tell me your tale, and I shall tell you.”

I had never spoken of Thule, nor had I heard tell of it from anyone but the notorious one who haunted me, the minder of my misery.

The innkeeper tilted the decanter, and sherry filled my glass again. I looked at her slender figure, her strangely ageless countenance, and though I had kept mine own counsel for twenty years, her mention of Thule persuaded me. I found myself confessing my sorrow to her.

“I will not sell my soul, no, for it is not mine to sell at present. To Thule, though, I may be bound.”

I had never told this tale to anyone, or no one beside the medium, and she only in the utmost desperation, my skin heaving and quivering, my burden boiling my blood. I would begin.

“This is my soul, then, and this the history of my trouble, the history of the Thule I know too well. My second cousin was twenty-five years my senior, and his announcement at my birth that I was to be his wife, and that he would devote himself to the welfare of the family, stirred my parents. On my fourteenth birthday, a carriage arrived at our house, and my mother stood on the roof of our building looking down as my cousin’s manservant settled me into the cushions, my small trousseau, my books and belongings.

I went to my bedchamber in his house uptown, dined with him twice, and then he was gone to his business, traveling by ship to the far North for the next year.”

Thus far, my story was nothing strange to the innkeeper, a trouble known to women, perhaps not terribly different from her own.

“He was lost at sea?” she prompted.

“Not in the usual fashion. My husband returned to me a hard shadow of his former self, mustache white, though it had been black when he left New York. He came into the house, and I came down the front stairs to meet him. I was there when he opened his trunk. Something unfolded out of it, stood in the center of our foyer, and looked at me with burning eyes.

“I am dreadfully sorry, dear Cousin Annabel,” said my husband to me, and there was no emotion in his voice. “But on my voyage, I have made the acquaintance of a new master.”

I looked at my husband, and at the thing standing beside him. It was tall and slender, with an excess of fingers, dressed in a long black coat, which I remembered as having belonged to my husband. There was the pale blue monogram I had embroidered, on the collar. Beneath the hem of the coat I could see hooves, and a lashing tail, somewhat feline, somewhat… else.

Had my husband met the devil at sea? I did not love my husband. I scarcely knew him. He was an old man and I was only a girl. This, though, was nothing I desired for him, nor for myself.

“What, praytell, is the name of your companion?” I managed to ask. “Will your friend be staying here long? Shall I tell the servants to prepare a room?”

“My companion’s name is Night,” my husband said, as though I ought to know already.

The thing looked at me, and it glittered like a sky full of stars, but it was a lacunae in the center of the darkness, a place where a star had died, and beyond the edge of the dark there was something much worse, a roiling red planet, hidden behind a thin black veil.

“And where did you meet?” I asked, my voice that of a polite hostess. I had in my hands a tray of cordial, and I could hear the glasses rattling, but I held myself as steady as I could.

“Thule,” said the thing, its voice a hiss containing an unlikely mellifluence. I felt myself sway at its sweetness. “Thule was my kingdom, but I am banished by a mortal dreamer. I was the ruler of Thule, and now I shall bide a time with you while I seek for the dreamer who dares injure me.”

“I found my friend on the ship,” said my husband seemingly oblivious to the creature’s foulness. “A stowaway, fled from the land of dreams. And oh, that such a one could be hidden amongst coiled ropes.” He turned to look at the creature, and on his face there was nothing but worship.

I turned and walked back up the stair, feeling eyes on my spine. I went directly to my own chamber, and locked the door behind me, pressing my back to the wood, gasping.

I was the ruler of Thule. The creature said again in my mind, and the words resonated terribly inside me, over and over.”

I looked at the innkeeper, and her eyes were on mine, steady. She nodded.

“Thule,” she repeated. “I thought as much.”

I continued.

“From that night forward, I listened to the sound of whispers, but I never knew what they discussed. My husband took to drink, and the stowaway took to meat. The butcher brought us wrapped packets, tied tightly with red string, and in these late days, whenever I saw any red fabric, I thought of this, the way that string had unspooled down our front staircase, twisting like intestines on the white marble of the floor.

It was not long before my husband was dead. I looked into his open grave on a snowy day in February and saw something at the bottom of it, dozens of long and tangled arms embracing the coffin. Inside it, his frozen body bore the marks of hooves. In the official version, he died of drink.

My woe continued with my husband’s death, for though he left me his fortune, he also left me the stowaway. I spent my evenings sitting in the dark, opposite a pair of glowing eyes. And so went my misery, nearly twenty years of it.

The creature was neither husband nor companion. We shared the house, but that was all. The stowaway did not visit my bed, nor did it seem eager to woo me to any unsavory realm. It went about its own business, sometimes leaving a trail of blood or of thick, black fluid. In the night, I’d wake to sounds I couldn’t parse, shrills and moans, a music like a piano being dragged down a flight of metal stairs, the scuttlings of animals both small and large, but the stowaway did not speak to me with its honeyed voice, nor did it touch me with its burning fingertips.

It did not, that is, until one fateful night six months prior to this evening. That night is the reason I am here now.”

I looked to my audience. She had leaned forward in her chair, drawing her shawl more tightly about her shoulders.

“Go on,” she said eagerly, but I could not. The knowledge of the thing I carried had overwhelmed me, and it was necessary I retreat to my chamber. It was too dark. Night had fallen, and I no longer trusted myself to remain among humans.

“I have heard many tales,” the innkeeper said. “It may be that I can assist you, whatever it is.”

“Tomorrow,” I told her. “I will tell you the rest of my woe, and you will counsel me, if indeed you can. For tomorrow, I may be liberated from the misery that has haunted me.”

“A sleeping draught,” she said, offering me a hot cup, though sleep was beyond me. I could not allow myself true unconsciousness, not with my burden.

In my bedchamber, a brick at my feet, I sat up in my wrapper, a feeling of possibility in my chest. I was feverish, yes, and my skin was damp with it, but tomorrow there would be a portrait, and the portrait would save me. The portrait would free me.

At last, fearing dreams and the consequences of same, I removed certain items from my case: chains, locks, a key. I twined the chains about the posts of the bed, and around my ankles, and locked myself into place. The key, I threw to the cushion across the room, out of my reach, and thus secured, I allowed my eyes to close. There could be no more dawns like the ones of the past sixmonth, waking to find myself alongside the river, the pale gray light, my hands clutching at small mementoes, but nothing more to tell what I had done. I could not allow that to happen here. There would be no wandering along the bay, no waking choking in an alleyway, my mouth wet and my clothing torn, not from the outside, but from within, the seams stretched and the bones bent.

In dreams I walked, and in dreams I stalked, and in dreams I did things I would never do in the waking world.

Inside my heart, the stowaway whispered endlessly in verse, a sad lament and a hunger for words. Inside my skin, the monster languished, longing and lonely, but nothing of its loneliness was kind. It sent me dreams of ghosts and of ladies walking into the ocean. It sent me dreams of death.

The monster is invented on a whim, a ruler for a kingdom of woe. Night, sitting enthroned in a dark city, looking out over stones and water, decreeing all those who wake to wander blind within Thule.

Now, Night walks with ice inside it, seeking heat. Night moves between dreams and not, through the corners of gazes, out the edges of windows. There is no place a shadow can’t bide, and it hides in lockets and scent bottles, in barrels full of salted fish. The monster is resourceful. It flattens itself between folds of an overcoat, and when the coat is donned, the monster latches on, its mouth full of teeth, enough to consume a man in moments. A long night can make an explorer lost, and this night is long. This is an Arctic evening, twenty hours of darkness, and with each hour, the night devours ships, crews, husbands, captains.

Night is disappointed, consuming wishes and letters, consuming last words, but none of them the words of its maker. It hungers for even a faint lantern lit on deck during a storm. Night was king in Thule, and then its maker fell in love, only to wreck on a shoal far from the northern clouds.

Look at that beach made of broken bones, look at that sea made of ink, look at the way Thule can expand and shrink again, the unknown country vaster than any other. Look at this country of ghosts. They are all ghosts here, all but Night, who lives on fire and blood. Night is the loneliest ruler, on a black throne, and up the throne’s sides rise dark water.

At last, Night flees, killing ghosts and leaving them in their white shrouds, seeking another ending to the story. There is no joy in Thule, not written, not lived, and in Thule the monster is in misery.

The monster slips into a ship leaving Thule for the world. Dream trade and export, slaves imported in again. There are those in the waking world who never wake, shanghaied onto ships of sleepers, corpses crimped.

Night stows itself in a crow’s nest and pretends to be a raven, perched on the basket to look out over the sea, and when the crew ascends, they see only a bird. Night hides in black feathers. The Thule ruler revises itself, a secret hid amongst coils of rope.

It finds a man who looks like its maker, and wraps around him, hidden in the lining of his coat, and when it discovers the man is no poet but only an invention of a poet, it presses the man down in the darkness of the drive and drinks his dreams.

Night inhabits a house, hidden in closets and beneath beds, and when the world is in shadow, it wanders the streets, seeking its god and his pen. It finds only the young wife, an invention herself, her skin pale and her hair black, her eyes violet. It binds itself to her body.

Annabel, Night hisses, or Lenore, or Virginia. It calls her every version of the names its creator has called his loves. It hides in her hair, plaited among flowers, and in her skin it anchors, a ship full of the lost souls of Thule. It makes its way into the world with Annabel, this creature, and to a city it finds familiar. It feeds on poets, amputating sentences, lyrics, love letters, but none of them are the right ones.

And then.

The poet writes in a frenzy, in an attic room in a city by the sea. There is sun, but he denies it. The world he belongs in is a world of rain, and the only climate is one of mist and dim. He writes a ship in a harbor, and on the ship a crew of sleepers. He writes a sail made of paper, and written on it is a poem about a kingdom burning. He writes himself, swimming in water made of something that can catch fire. He closes his eyes, dreaming the dream within the dream, and in it, he dives, the water filled with nothing but hunger, the sea below him ice and skeletons. He swims to shore in evening dress, shivering, shuddering, chasing the raven that fled his companion, chilling and killing the poet by the sea, dreaming and drafting a story of a stowaway captured.

He thinks of years spent following love, and of years spent losing it. Shaking at the desk in the dark now, the dreamer watches snow falling into the world he’s made. He spins a net of words and weaves sentences into rope.

Now he is in a hotel in Providence. His mind has moved him from city to city, along the rails and to this place. He has built and sold imaginary kingdoms and now, at the end of his life, he is responsible for monsters.

All this he writes over the head of the innkeeper, a woman living between worlds, her hair pale and about her neck a gemstone mined in a pretender’s place.

Poe is broken with drink and disaster, and something has bitten him in a street, a rangy dog with blood in its eyes and foam at its jaw. He doesn’t mind it. Things have bitten him all his life. He is a man born of dreams, and in dreams he remains, the child of actors, and all his life a play.

He wanders as he writes, pacing the room in Providence, here to no end but his own. The world of his dream and the world of his story are entwined now, and he walks real streets in imaginary places.

Somewhere out there is his companion, invented as a cure for pain. Somewhere is a beast made of morphia, a soothing icy hand on the forehead, something that will cure his pangs and fevers, something that will walk with him when he walks toward the land of the dead. Though it is a monster, it is his monster.

He writes it into this hotel, and places it in hiding in a woman he’s made of words. He writes himself into the sea, and feels it rising in his rooms, the water green and salty, the cuffs of his trousers drenched, his belt sopping, his shirt transparent and floating, his white ascot tightly tied about his throat.

Edgar Allan Poe swims in a sea of ink.

Sometime in that night at the inn, I saw movement outside my window.

Phosphorescence, I thought at first, a ripple cresting a hidden shoal, but then it was more, a man in a cream-colored waistcoat and black string tie, emerging from the water, drenched and heaving. He crawled up, and I sat up in bed, drawing my wrapper more tightly about myself. A long black mustache and long black hair, his eyes desolate and his face forlorn. I dared not move. He looked rather like my former husband, and he shared with that man a visible despair. I wondered how long it would be before he was dead, if he were not already.

He stood beneath my window looking up at me, and his gaze did the opposite of burn. I did not open the window, but I found my fingers stretching toward the sash. Only the chains kept me from reaching it.

Wake, he whispered, but I did not know how.

I must have fallen into sleep, for an insistent bell woke me at dawn, and the innkeeper entered with a tray. There were no burning eyes in my memory, nor was my body tender. I did not feel pains in my body that might suggest a night walk, nor did my mouth taste of metal. Within my body though, I felt the telltale motions of the stowaway, swimming in a tight circle.

“What is this?” asked the innkeeper, looking at my chains.

I looked at her with as much dignity as I could muster, and I said, “Might you release me? The key is on the pillow, just there.”

She placed the tray on the bed and fetched the key.

“How am I to know if freedom suits you?” she asked.

“My agonies occur only at night,” I told her, for the stowaway took no notice of the innkeeper. It did not wish for women, nor did it care for daylight. It slept within me when the sun was high.

“Will you continue your tale?” the innkeeper asked, unlocking my chains with less caution than I might have imagined she’d use. She poured a cup of coffee and delivered it into my shaking hands.

I indicated that I would, and the innkeeper withdrew long enough that I might tidy myself. Back then, to that sitting room downstairs, with its view of the silvery bay, a pot of coffee rather than tea, to increase my strength for the day ahead.

The innkeeper sat opposite me. “The night six months past,” she said, prompting me back to my tale.

I ate a spoonful of porridge and sipped my coffee, feeling the heat in my body, a healthy heat, not that of the stowaway. For a moment I felt hopeful.

“Though the stowaway’s presence prohibited guests to my house, I was at liberty to leave it. The stowaway seemed to see me as a gentle pet, a cat who might play about in the garden while its owner remained in the house. Thus were my days spent, with concerts and the usual occupations of a lady. It was not, despite the trouble in my house, a terrible life.

On the evening in question, I sat at the piano, picking out a song, and as I did, I noticed a stirring in the wall. I withdrew my fingers from the keys, fearing a mouse or moths, never imagining—”

I looked around the sitting room, fearing eyes and ears in the walls, but there was nothing visible here.

“A man emerged from the wallpaper, hair silken as fur, eyes like seaglass. Out of the floral pattern he came, his suit patterned with falling leaves, and I knew I could not trust a man who arrived that way, but there was no help for it. He stepped into the room, hung his coat on the tree, and walked across the carpet making no sound at all. I looked down at his feet, and they did not touch the ground.

He nodded at me, implying that I continue to play. I did, though my playing was nothing to be proud of, neglected in my duties as the keeper of a dead man’s house. When, at last, I stopped, the man looked steadily at me.

“Who are you?” I whispered. “Have you come to deliver me from my stowaway?”

He looked at me, and said “I am a dreamer come to save you from darkness, Annabel MacFarlane, if you will be saved.”

Why should I not allow the haunting, I thought. Why should I not give myself over to a dream? I had been alone for a very long time, and it seemed no harm to invite air into the house.

The dream gave me a ring, bent of a length of gold wire. He ran icy fingers over my skin—”

I hesitated.

“—and my nights became other than they’d been for nearly twenty years. For weeks, the stowaway stayed to its own side of the house. I heard the usual sounds of animals, of wind, of whispers, but nothing came through my chamber door. I thought the man in my house was, if not my secret, a guest the stowaway had no objection to. Indeed, I sometimes believed that he was an illusion, and that my joy was only something manufactured by waking dreams. I did not ask the dream who had sent him, and indeed, I did not dare to, for what if he came from the same realm as the stowaway? I did not wish to know.

The white marble of our staircase was sometimes marred with red footprints, and the rail as well, the marks of hands attempting to cling to the bannister. I had known of the stowaway’s habits these long years, but though I read the papers, I saw no sign that the stowaway preyed upon the unlucky of our region. It may seem cold, my failure to investigate the nature of the victims, but I was as frightened of the stowaway as any prisoner of a jailor, and I did not. I wished only that the beast be fed, and not by myself.

One night, though, there was a thunderous sound and down the hall outside my rooms ran a thousand hooves. Boar? Horses? I could not say. There was a wrenching creak, and a roar from no animal I’d ever imagined.

“Go!” I whispered to the man beside me, but he did not. The stowaway stood in my doorway, eyes flicking over the chamber. I stayed still in the bed, coverlet drawn close about my throat. The stowaway inhaled deeply, and then dropped to the floor, undulating until it reached the wall through which my husband had arrived.

Up the wall the stowaway seeped, leaving an ichorous ooze, and the leaves and flowers on the paper, previously verdant, began to wither. Night began to fall over the green kingdom from which my dream had entered, and slowly I saw stars beginning to reveal themselves, cruel points of light in a sky that had been day.

The stowaway looked at me briefly, eyes glowing red, and the printed plants withered and blackened.

“Come,” the stowaway said, and took a step toward me.

It was only then that my dream revealed himself, emerging from beneath the bedsheets. In his hand he held a pistol, and he aimed it at the stowaway, shouting.

“I am a hunter of Thule, and you will return to your prison!”

The stowaway’s eyes glowed brighter, and it growled the growl of a lion over an antelope. Its entire flesh was stars now, and its tail whipped as it leapt at the man who had been my own true love, and covered him as though the skin of the sky had slid down and over the land.

“I am stronger than I was,” the stowaway hissed. “You will not take me.”

The man I’d chosen as a husband was gone, hidden by pulsating dark.

The stowaway flowed over the carpet toward me, bringing cold, but also bringing fire. I felt my edges crackle.

“Annabel,” said the stowaway, its voice still the honey it had always been. “You have betrayed me. You might have spent your life dreaming, but you’ve made yourself hostess of a nightmare. Now you are mine, and I am yours. You will hide me in your skin, and together, we shall seek for my creator.”

It took my hand and pressed its lips to my flesh. I felt the points of its teeth like lightning striking, and the stars of its skin glowed brighter. With a rush, the entirety of the creature was absorbed into me.

The stowaway is no longer visible to the world, but I can feel it. The physician I visited in the city told me I carried nothing at all, but I know him to be wrong.

“Hysteria,” my father insisted, and the diagnosis was that. There was a movement from the men in my family to send me to a sanatorium, and though I resisted, I knew it was only a matter of time before they overpowered me. Hence my flight.

“This story explains my presence here, in your inn,” I concluded at last. “To no one’s satisfaction, not my own, nor yours. Yet am I here, and here I will remain until the stowaway is gone.”

The innkeeper looked steadily at me, seemingly aware that I’d omitted certain terrible facts, certain shameful aspects of the possession. I could not speak them. I would not. My mouth watered, even still, and my ribs ached. One morning I’d awakened with claw marks rending my garments, and traveling up and down my torso, and another I’d woken in the river itself, drenched and half-frozen, clutching a bloody fingerbone. In the papers, I began to see notices of disappearances, men of letters, men with dark dreams. Their bodies were not found.

I knew where they were.

“Guests come here to die, some of them. Perhaps you are one of them?” she asked.

“I mean to be saved,” I said. “I mean to save myself from this creature. I will not offer it harbor. It is a criminal fled from the land of dreamers, and it is a nightmare.”

“Thule,” she said. “That is the origin of the ship in the bay, in and out of our waters these twenty years,” she said. “There have been men from aboard it here. Those curtains came from a Thule trader, once, long ago, and this sapphire as well. There are beautiful things to be had in the land of dreams, as well as horrid ones. The ship is a ship of explorers, hunting something fled here years ago. I believe you may know all too well what it is they seek.”

I looked at her. Her skin glowed pale and her eyes shone, and I wondered when she had lost her own ghosts, or whether she boarded them here in hope of being transported one day to their realm.

I glanced at the curtains. I’d not examined the toile the night before, and today I saw the pattern was quite other than I’d imagined. Explorers, yes, their spears raised and pressing into the flesh of something without edges, a blot in the fabric speckled with stars. Another scene of the darkness taking them, dead men in the snow. Another of ships filled with vague forms, their faces stricken, and beneath them, the water itself made of night.

I shivered. What was it I contained? Would I be free of it?

“What shall I do?” I asked her.

“If it emerges,” she said, “you must wrest it back into the land of dreams. Only then will you be free.”

I went out into the city, trying to calm myself for the portrait. It was a silly thing, to attempt beauty in a portrait such as this one. It did not matter, or so the medium said. All that mattered was the method.

Half to the studio, worrying that perhaps my fever had returned—the stowaway heated my body to an uncomfortable degree—I felt a presence behind me.

I spun on my boot heel, but saw no one. It was full daylight, and there was no reason to suspect another thief, but I walked on, shifting toward a busier street, listening for steps behind me. I knew better than to rove alone, even at this time of morning, a time not unreasonable for any lady to be unaccompanied. I wouldn’t be mistaken for any of those nightingales who’d be swaying toward their rooming houses at this hour, rather than away from them, but something possessed me to keep on my own path, to pass quickly by any carriages for hire. I had a horror that if I looked to the drivers I’d see a series of monsters leaning forward over the reins.

How many could there be of the creature that plagued me? Where had my first husband found the stowaway? I’d scanned map after map, but on none of them could I find the country called Thule. No, all that was on those maps was a vague area of nothingness with that label. Had it come aboard as cargo, hidden in a barrel of sugar, a secret folded in the silk? Had it pretended to be rope? My husband had been an importer of trade goods, but what had he gone to dreamland to acquire? He had filled his hold with a devil, and now the devil held me.

There were no steps in the street behind me, but only the sound of a cane, tapping, tapping, each cobblestone scratching beneath it, and the sound of splashing as well, as whatever wraith it was moved over the stones. I readied myself to scream, to run, but there was no need.

“Lady,” a weak voice whispered. “Lady, will you hear me? I am a broken man, and not long for this world. The mistress of the inn sent me after you.”

I turned and saw him for the second time: the man who’d walked out of the bay, still drenched, his waistcoat dripping, his black suit hanging on him as though he was a cadaver. He was correct in his assertion. Blue shadows bruised his eyes, and his cheeks were gaunt. He looked as though he’d climbed from out of a tomb.

“Where have you come from, Sir?” I asked him. The Sir was an afterthought. He was not demon, not ghost, but not whole either.

“A ship,” he said, and I knew him to be deranged, but who was to say that I was not? He was a kindred spirit in that fashion, and so I let him speak. “I swam from a ship that floats there still—on the border of Dream-land—”

He extended a trembling finger toward the horizon, as though I would see his ship. There was nothing to be seen. “—and up again into the light.”

“And what is your name?”

“Edgar,” he said, and swayed, leaning heavily on his cane.

I felt the stowaway twist inside me, and I flinched, bending at the waist. My corset was laced particularly tight, some vain hope of caging the creature and keeping it still. It did not wish to be still.

“Are you well?” he asked.

“I am not,” I said.

“Nor I,” he said, and gave me a look of profound sympathy. “Not since the death of my wife.”

I was reminded of my ghost husband. There were no men made of anything more than trouble in my history, and this one was no different.

“My name is Mrs. MacFarlane,” I said.

“What is your Christian name?” he asked. He was no threat, his body wizened like that of an ancient, though he could not be much older than I.

“Annabel,” I told him. Recognition flickered on his face for a moment.

“Ah, then it is true,” he murmured. “Annabel. I have heard your name in passing, yes, in passing through the night. I have heard it whispered in a dream I had.”

“Are we acquainted?” I asked. He was oddly familiar to me, it was true, more so than just the vision of him staggering up from the sea.

“No, no. We have never met in the waking world,” he said, and the alert look he’d had was gone again. I smelt the alcohol on him, and more than that. He smelled of the sea, of salt, of blood. “I am a dreamer destined only for sorrow, Annabel, and there is one more thing I must do before I end my days.”

Was I entranced by his suffering, so akin to my own? Or his handsome face, his history of loss. Some part of my heart, one I had not noticed in some time, felt enticed to compassion for one so miserable.

“I thought that I was destined for death as well,” I told him recklessly, “but I refuse to accept it. I am to the portraitist. Will you accompany me, sir? I dislike undertaking the journey alone.”

Quite unexpectedly, he smiled.

“You would take me to a photographer?” he asked. “This broken poet? Four days ago, I attempted suicide on a train. When I woke, it was on a ship in this bay, and I knew the crew of tattered men, and I knew the captain. He hunts the night for a beast he cannot find, a thing from his own sleeping kingdom which has fled to this one. He has sent me into the town to seek on his behalf, Annabel, to seek the beast. Have you seen it?”

He stood, his hands hanging, a pleading expression on his face. And here was I, containing the beast he sought. Here was I, an unwilling case for a spirit I’d never invited in.

“I have not,” I told him. I could not trust him yet. I’d met handsome men before. I’d met a handsome ghost, a betrayer of my body.  “I do not even know your full name,” I said.

The man before me winced.

“Edgar Poe,” he said. “I am a writer of horrors. It is only reasonable that I should end in horror myself. I have spent my life a dreamer, and now my dreams haunt me in daylight.” He lifted his shoulders and his expression was that of profound regret. “It was a dream I made, long ago, and I worked at it, night after night, inventing its appetites. The dream made itself flesh and escaped the boundary of the land I’d made for it. After that, I know not where it went, though I am told there have been tales of its takings. I did not imagine I would be held here to reckon with my imagination, unable to die unless I captured it.”

I felt faint, but still more resolved. The lacings of my corset bowed behind my back, and I gasped, pulling my own flesh in as the stowaway pressed against it. I felt the bones bend, and the silk threads, in the claws of something horrid.

“A dreamer,” I said, thinking of my own miserable, missing nights. “That does not matter. What one does in the dark is not a thing one must own in the light.”

“If that were the truth of things, then murders might be done at midnight and never a murderer jailed for them,” Poe said.

I thought of fingerbones, of a ribcage, of a man’s wedding ring I’d found in the bosom of my dress. I thought of pocket watches and ink pens, of men I’d never met, of a black silk tie undone and knotted again about my wrist. I thought of a carved ivory cane I’d found beside my bed, the knob carved into the shape of a skull. All these things could have belonged to a man like the man before me, and too, he resembled a man I’d known once, long ago, a man who had been my husband.

I thought of the true reason I’d fled, a sudden waking in the darkest hours, finding myself far from home. I thought of the man I’d found before me, on his back, a man who looked enough like this one to be a twin to him. This one was not dead, no, but moaning on the platform of a train, swearing up and down that he was not waking but dreaming, insisting that he was doomed. It was too early in the morning for a crowd, and I leaned over his face and heard my own hiss, my own voice honeyed and covetous. I felt my body hum at proximity to the man and to his mind, but he was drugged and nearly insensible, and the lights in the station were beginning to be lit. I fled. My body was nothing human at all. I had torn his papers from his case, and rifled through them, hunting I know not what. What did the stowaway want? A maker? A parent? The man who had created it? What did it want with me, but a vessel? I’d been too long a vessel for this monster. I’d been too long hungry for meals I did not wish to consume.

“Take it away from me,” I said to the poet. “Can you do that?”

“Perhaps,” the poet said. “That is my aim.”

I felt the stowaway longing for something, but what I knew not. It did not want me, though it accompanied me. It had never wanted me. It wanted a man, or a friend, or a companion other than I. Where had it come from? The country beyond the wall? The ship anchored in the bay? The place where night slept when the sun was in the sky?

If I could not be rid of my monster, I would go to Thule myself. If it was death I courted, so be it. I glanced up at the angle of the sun. Still enough time in the day for safety. The stowaway slept.

“Accompany me,” I said, and the poet looked at me. The stowaway clasped and unclasped my fingers, stretched itself inside the borders of my body. It had been days since I’d fed on the meal the stowaway wished for, and I knew I had only hours before it would overcome me.

Poe took my arm and I felt him trembling. Together, we walked to Winchester Street, three beings, each breathing and longing, each desirous of its own story.

And now the story of the poet and the story of the lady and the story of the stowaway converge into one line, fiction and fact pressed too closely together to tell one from the other. The waking world and the sleeping one are the same, each engineered by dreamers of one kind or another. The poet writes an obituary for himself. The poet writes a tale of grief, his wife lost, his love dead. The poet is in a pit, and above him a pendulum. He will not marry again. He will be denied, and with that denial will come the rest of his life, the last year on earth. He writes on, the monster beside him, and the lady he’s made of all the ladies he’s lost. He writes himself down Winchester street, walking with a companion who may or may not be visible to anyone else in Providence. There will be no record of anyone named MacFarlane, nor of anyone met at a hotel. There will be nothing but this poet walking through the streets and to a portraitist, in the worst week of his life.

Is he raving? He is raving. Is he drunk and damaged? He is. Has he been bitten by a dog and does he wish to drink the ocean itself? Does he wish to transport himself to Thule by sipping the boundary between the imagined and the real, drinking it down until all that lies between his words and his life is a tender desert?

He does.

Annabel Lee is a child and he is a child (he is not a child) and Lenore is nevermore. Virginia is coughing and singing at a piano, blood spattering the keys, and then she is drunk on charity wine, and then she is dead, her cheeks flushed a color that cannot appear in Thule. Made of ice and gray is the heart of the poet, and in his kingdom, on his dark throne, he sits, as all of it melts into a bath of silver nitrate and acid ink.

He wishes himself extinguished.

The studio of Masury & Hartshorn was on the second floor, and we made our way up the stairs, my companion half-collapsing as he climbed. Inside my body, I felt the sleeping stowaway dreaming of meat. I would not feed it. I would resist. The stairwell smelled of chlorine and chemicals, a bracing scent that revived me to the task at hand. I had a body that was my own still, despite its inhabitant, nostrils that could burn and a throat that could close. I glanced at the man beside me, and wondered. Could I deliver him? Could I deliver us both?

We entered through glass doors into a room suffused in blue light, a sort of greenhouse with an intricate mechanism of shades and shadows. The walls were papered in cobalt, and the ceiling was a skylight with reflecting mirrors set at an angle beneath it. There, we found a young man polishing a silver plate with a soft cloth. He looked up at us through thick glasses, and raised his eyebrows at the spectacle before him. It was little wonder. A woman in a gaudy dress accompanied by a man on the brink of death. I could see the photographer considering us as subject.

“Messr. Masury?” I asked. I brought out the card the medium had given me in New York.

“No. I am Edwin Manchester,” he said. I could not believe my luck.

“You, then, are the man I am seeking,” I said, and passed the card to him. He read its contents, and looked more closely at me. He took my hand and weighed it in his own, and then pinched my wrist between two fingers. My flesh was denser than it ought to be, I well knew. I felt as though I contained sand, and indeed, I did. The night was made of sand and stars, and all of it was too heavy for a human body to bear.

“I see,” he said. “And your companion?”

“This is Mr. Poe,” I said.

The photographer’s eyebrow raised higher. “It is an honor,” he said. “A man of your stature in the spirit world.”

“He suffers a similar malady,” I said. “I believe it is related to the kingdom from whence my trouble came.”

The photographer looked closely at Poe.

“He has suffered a loss rather than a weight,” he said. “You have more than you require, and he has less.”

“I have enough in my purse to pay for both portraits, if you might assist him as well as I.”

“I will need no payment for his image,” Manchester said. “It will be displayed in this shop as advertisement of our services.”

“I am not possessed,” Poe said. “I am in debt. I have left something aboard a ship as collateral.”

“I see as much,” said Manchester. “You are missing your soul rather than carrying another within your body. I can assist in this as well.”

The daguerreotypist took off his apron, placing the silver plate on a table. I looked into it and was startled by the mirror it presented, my hair in disarray, and for a moment, my eyes glowing the way the stowaway’s eyes glowed, my skin a sea of stars.

I glanced at the portraits on display in the studio, the way their subjects seemed to float, each in their own transparent darkness, their faces made of gilded dust. Did some of those portraits contain demons and ghosts? Were some of them exorcisms, or were they only portraits of the wealthy? I could not say.

“You will be first,” Manchester said. “Mr. Poe after. The sun is bright enough today.”

Poe nodded. I felt his fingers clench my arm more tightly, but he did not waver. Inside my skin, the stowaway extended sleeping fingers to touch those of Poe, but I did not acknowledge it.

Manchester gestured me onto a staircase, a platform with a small chair at its center, and I ascended, feeling my skirts draping down the stairs. Was I climbing to heaven?

“Stare into the sun,” Manchester told me, positioning me in a brace, my head supported by a stand, my skirts spread so that I seemed to be airborne. “I will remove this burden from you, but you must stay perfectly still for sixty seconds.”

I looked down at the poet, whose face was hopeful, though the evidence of years of despair was written on it, a cloth pleated by pain.

My spine convulsed where the stowaway wrapped about it, and I saw Poe glance at me, his face concerned, as Manchester aimed the camera at the tableau vivant he’d arranged.

A dark cloud passed over the sun, and a raindrop splattered on the glass panes above me. The monster moved.

Ten seconds. Twenty. My heart quivered in my breast and the stowaway stretched. Thunder outside, and the building rattled. Darker still.

Thirty seconds, and something began to shift inside my skin. I began to feel night falling over my body, stars appearing on the tips of my fingers, coming into light all over my flesh, beneath my dress and up and down my arms, brilliant points of pain and fire, and myself an indigo woman curtained in silk and satin. I heard my own voice cry out as the stowaway began to emerge.

“Stay still!” Manchester shouted. “Do not let it move you!”

I resisted the urge to let my body fall down the stairs and upon him. Not only upon him, but upon the innocent Poe. Their blood and bones, their organs like bright ink on a page made of snow. I would write the story of Thule with their flesh, I would—

Darkness slithered over my eyes, and I held them wide, trying to keep from doing what Night wanted me to do. I tasted metal where I’d bitten my tongue, and I heard myself hiss. A sound a dreamer might make whilst wandering a long passage, the way a scream might transform, in the voice of that sleeper, into a song. All these nights of invisibility, a wandering swath of stars falling upon the unlucky, all these nights, a woman made of nothingness.

There was a crashing sound, and there, before me, was Poe, his face pale as the moon, his eyes no longer anguished, but purposeful.

“TO ME,” he roared, and lurched up the staircase, his hands reaching for mine. He spun to face the camera as the shutter closed, his ungloved hand still clasping my own.

I felt the stowaway leave my body and rush out, into the air, into the camera, away.

The thunderclouds fled the sun, and the sky brightened. Night receded. I drew in a ragged breath.

The daguerreotypist withdrew the plate from the camera and darted to the developing room, donning a set of India rubber gauntlets as he went, but I could only look at Poe. He would not meet my gaze. What had he done?

Manchester emerged from the developing room.

“View it,” he said, and gestured us into the room. “It is not as you imagined it would be, and yet.”

A gleaming tray of mercury, held over a spirit lamp, and fumes that felt golden upon inhaling. The plate rested above the heated mercury, an image emerging in salt on its face, delicate as dust on a butterfly’s wing.

I watched it, praying that I’d see what ought to be in the daguerreotype and not something else. Hoping to see my image containing the stowaway, and all of it trapped within this plate of glass.

But as it emerged, I did not see the creature, nor did I see my own face. It was dark shadows appearing and then shifting through red and blue to black again, the eyes first and then the rest.

I saw Edgar Allan Poe, and within him, all around him, Night. The image was of the poet, suspended in the darkness of the background, and I could see myself in ghostly silhouette behind him, my face covered in stars, my eyes glittering, my fingers laced in his own.

The poet looked at me, and reached into his jacket. He removed a pot of ink, looked at me tenderly, and opened it. I watched him, uncertain, and then, suddenly, he flung it over me.

“Thank you,” he said.

Darkness. A blotting out, a removal from view.

The original Poe portrait, taken in desolate circumstances in the year eighteen forty-eight, the year before the poet’s death, is, over the years, lost and found, discovered in the possession of a traveling hypnotist, fallen from a drawing room wall, set on fire. It lives in legend, copied and etched, discussed, tattooed, made the subject of academic texts.

After the image was taken, the subject wandered the streets, visiting the home of a woman he had proposed to, and raving that he was doomed, that he was done for good. He screamed for his soul.

The daguerreotype depicts a man in a half-buttoned black dinner jacket, a rumpled white shirt, an ascot tied and wrapped tightly enough to suggest that it is keeping his head from tumbling off. He has a high white forehead, a dark mustache, tousled hair, and eyes sunk deep in a face lined with grief. He is a year from dying, but in the Ultima Thule portrait, he appears to have emerged from his tomb, and indeed, the image depicts the poet four days after his failed suicide by laudanum.

If one looks closely, with the proper knowledge, it is possible to see the figure behind him, a spectral form, a radiance draping over one of the man’s shoulders, an image of the missing, left in dust on a silver plate. Perhaps it is a woman, or perhaps it is something else entirely.

The business of portraiture is one of silver and gold by the ton, and the miserable face of the poet is immortalized in precious metal. The presence behind him is a stain rendered in darkness, silver nitrate, an abyss that reflects light.

This is a saint’s icon, Edgar Allan Poe’s image pressed like a kiss to a ground glass windowpane, and the form holding him is a glittering ghost, mutable as frost over a view of a city at night. Does it hold him as a lover or as a captive?

What is left inside this portrait?

That is one way to look at a photo of a ghost. Another way is to look at both figures, this portrait, this imaginary kingdom and its creator flickering in and out of the light, and see it as a record of more than one event, the moment when a poet’s soul was removed, the moment when a man counted down the seconds remaining in his life.

He counts them in syllables. He counts them in sentences. He counts them in stories. All that we see or seem, he writes. Is but a dream, within a dream.

Open the glass panes that house the portrait and blow, a single breath, and the image is only imagined again. Press a finger to the face of this ghost and watch him become thin air.

I felt myself disappearing, but I remained scored into the world, my skin a page with lines on it, my hair streaked with silver, my dress still as bright as it had been, but now obliterated.

The photographer faded as I faded, and the studio as well, whether they had been there or no. An imaginary Providence or a true one, I could not say. The blue wallpaper was night, and I was part of it now, and the mercury bath was stars, and I was part of that as well.

Thule was before me then, a white landscape of cliffs and women shrouded, a body—was it my body?—washing up on a coastline made of bones. I was the sea and I was a ship, and I was a city of ghosts.

I did not disappear from the world, though it seemed I might. I stayed, and this kingdom by the sea stayed. I climbed the stairs in a tower, I in my black dress, its lining like the inside of a redbird’s wing, my magpie-feathered stripes, my bosom spattered in ink. There was a throne there, and then there was myself seated in it, reigning over the great and frozen unknown.

I ruled over a kingdom I had not made, but would not surrender, and out there, in the mist, there was no ship and there was no sinner. There was no poet with his quill, writing my world.

Here in Dream-land would I love and live forever. Here would I contain the soul of the poet, transferred to me in silver and in ink, even as I traded to him the creature I’d harbored.

I was Annabel Lenore Virginia MacFarlane, and no one would ever find me again.

Stories are mongrels. It don’t matter whether they were lightning-cut into stone or whispered over the crackle of a dying flame; no story in the world has pedigree. They’ve all been told and retold so many times that not God himself could tell you which one came first. Yes, every story in creation.

Including this one.

Especially this one.

You might have heard it before. There was a girl once. Her name was Sally. It could have been any other name, really. But let’s go with Sally. It’s solid. Round-hipped and stout, the kind of Midwestern name that can walk for hours and don’t mind it much when the sun burns its skin red.

Anyway.

Sally was, maybe, about eighteen or nineteen, some freshman at a local college. And like every teenager, she sometimes got behind on her school work.

So one night, she took all her books and went down to her dormitory’s basement, telling herself she’d study till the dawn brindled the sky in gold and claret.

Halfway through, she realized she’d forgotten a book. And back up she went, feet making no sound at all on the old carpet. (Was it thick? Yes. Lush like nothing else. It had to be, or what happened next would make no sense.) Silent, she padded along until she reached her room and opened the door.

Click.

It was black inside. No lights at all. The curtains were drawn. You couldn’t see the glow of the distant town. But that was okay. Sally knew the room like the map of her palms. Slowly, she felt her way along the walls to her bed. Slowly, she realized—

There was a smell in the air: pennies and salt.

There was a sound in the air too: breathing, rasped and ragged, heavier than anything she’s heard. Sally knew the beat of her roommate’s breath. This wasn’t it.

And maybe, she might have said something if it wasn’t for the itching under her skin, something that whispered, “This isn’t all right.”

So, Sally didn’t. It was late and she was tired and it was probably just her imagination. Thus decided, she got what she needed and clicked the door shut behind her as she left, just as something began to drip, drip, drip.

“Damn faucet,” she mumbled as she swayed back down to the basement.

The next day, Sally went for her exams. How did she do? Truthfully, it didn’t plain matter. She took her examinations and then she went home, feet crunching across dried autumn leaves and cobbled stones.

Into the dormitory, she went up the spiral staircase, unease laving its way down her spine. There were far too many people out and about, their faces bright and afraid, but that wasn’t Sally’s problem, no sir. Someone else could go worry about that. All she wanted was to sleep.

Sleep wasn’t in the cards, though. Hell, I don’t know if she ever slept again. I know I wouldn’t be able to. Because when Sally finally walked all the way to her room, pushing past co-eds in their flower-printed pajamas, she found police tape and policemen.

And a smell in the air: pennies, salt, a stink of dried urine and shit.

And a sound in the air: a drip drip dripping, oozing between the noise of the walkie-talkies.

And a sight like nothing anyone should see: her roommate, cut up like beef, words scrawled on the wall above her head:

“Aren’t you glad you didn’t turn on the lights?”

The Strangos come all year, identifiable by the clothes they wear, the giggling behind open hands, the wide-eyed pretense of innocence; like belled cats they give their trespass away. I ignore them—for the most part—though recently the baristas have begun giving directions to Laurels tree. They think this is funny, apparently, even if they never witness the punch line. Strangos standing in the middle of Wenkel’s cornfield clutching their little purses. Strangos in the Piggly Wiggly parking lot next to the dumpsters, noses squinched against the stench. Strangos in front of my house—not funny at all—so close to each other the heels of their black shoes touch. I found them early on Christmas morning, standing beneath the streetlamp, upturned faces dotted with flakes of snow, matching pea coats frosted with ice, knees trembling above soggy ankle socks and black shoes.

They arrive all year, undeterred by the season. July and August bring a few carrying guidebooks and taking selfies (which no legitimate Strango would ever do) things get more serious in September, but October is Strango high season. In October the scent of wood smoke mingles with the beeswax candles perfuming my home with honey. Give me that and a blood moon casting everything in a mortal glow. Give me that and the ghost the Strangos seek, though I am not one of them, but an original.

She was buried, they say, in an unmarked grave at her mother’s request. It was generally understood this was done in the usual manner, but after that movie came out with its silly premise that Laurel’s weary ghost haunts the mysterious location of her body’s interment, the Strangos arrived with their earnest obsession. I, myself, seeking answers, once stood on Laurels porch until her mother threatened me with a kettle of boiled water.

“Forgive me?” the Strangos murmur as they pass. It’s just coincidence. The Strangos murmur their forgiveness request because in the movie that’s how it’s done. I stand in white ankle socks and black shoes, clutching the little purse with the clasp that clicks open and shut. Laurel stands beside me, dressed to match; though it’s not really us, of course, but actresses portraying me and her ghost. When I whisper, “forgive me?” she doesn’t say anything. The camera pulls back until we are in a circle of light surrounded by black; then a dot, then nothing at all.

I resisted watching for quite some time until one dreary night, while clicking mindlessly through cooking shows, women-buying-wedding-dresses shows, and fertile-family shows I stopped, stunned, as though experiencing a sudden change in altitude. There she was—Laurel—in her black shoes and white socks, wearing a dress I’d never seen; spinning beneath a bright arc of autumn leaves.

That particular scene comes quite close to the end—as you may know—but it was one of those stations that plays the same movie repeatedly. I can truthfully say that by the third viewing I was eating popcorn again; less enchanted by the Laurel look-alike and more annoyed by what they got wrong, which was almost everything.

Though accused and found not guilty, my innocence was never restored. The Strangos (and the screenplay writer) are convinced I am a murderer but the truth is so much more benign. Ask the Strangos and they will whisper, in sibilant tones, “forgive me?” over and over again until the reporter, either irritated by their petulance, or thrilled to have gotten a good clip for the weird news story gives up trying for more while the photographer waits for that moment when the Strangos open and close their purses making a sound like click beetles.

I am disinclined towards empathy with Strangos, but must confess I understand. Reporters are so annoyingly persistent in asking the wrong questions (as are parents, detectives, attorneys, and everyone) that sometimes a person can find no response more perfect than the defiant sound of purse latch. I did not do it to be annoying or frightening though the movie portrays me as both. I was a child then, accused of murder. I was terrified, not terrifying.

The tree isn’t hard to find, if one knows where to look as, of course, I do. And, while I hate to attribute anything of value to that movie, I must admit after watching it several times I, too, became obsessed with the old oak as a potential location for Laurels ghost. I did not, to be clear, think her mother would have her buried there. I believe she was cremated; her ashes now in Florida.

But her ghost? It seemed possible the tree would make a perfect host. (Like the Caribbean Lagarou tree where people have reported seeing, from a distance, flickering orbs of lights in its branches which, I know, is meant to sound ominous but I find reassuring.) Thus began my October quest through the backyards of my youth to that small hidden field we discovered all those years ago.

When the seasons turned to Halloween we, best friends forever, chose to be twins. The movie would have you believe we dressed alike for years, but in truth it was only a single month, and not even all of that.

When October comes I close the windows, happy to sever any tie with murmuring Strangos. I take out the old photographs: Laurel and me in our bathing suits (not matching) eating popsicles (and in the left corner, beneath the azalea bush the toes of my father’s shoes. He used to like to play that game of spying on us.) Laurel and me on her swing set (there was a time when I was a welcomed guest). Laurel and me in sleeping bags, wide awake, Laurel giving the finger, and me frozen in shock by her bold gesture. I remember how my brother ran to report what she had done and how my mother (still innocent in her own way then) laughed. The last photograph has been widely duplicated—I’m sure you’ve seen it in some fashion or other—Laurel and me in the matching cotton dresses that Mrs. Sheer made in a single weekend. She had extra time on her hands, my mother said, since Laurel was an only child. We are standing in front of my house in those dresses, ankle socks, and white Keds spray-painted black. I can’t remember why we did that. Sometimes too much is made of the casual choices of the young.

My mother found the purses at the dime store and splurged, buying both. I think she felt a little competitive with Mrs. Sheer, though this is pure speculation on my part and, as one who has suffered by what people assume, I try not to guess the motivation of others. My mother bought the purses. They were red. Matching white hairbands completed the look.

I suspect that arranging photographs of Laurel on the mantel might seem macabre to others. I can’t be sure about what “normal” people think; they got everything so wrong with me that I have never adjusted to their ways. Halloween has, by necessity, evolved over the years into my own manner of celebration. Not for me the freedom of cheap costumes and pillowcases full of candy. That was lost with Laurel’s death; first to my grief, then to my shame, and finally to my compromised life. While others were content with false ghosts, I hoped for the real thing. To be forgiven. Not for a murder I never committed, but for leaving her where she was later found with dirt and skin beneath her fingernails.

It is true that, as they said, the skin was mine. So much was made of this! We had a fight. About what, I can’t remember. There was dirt on my dress and shoes and socks. We ran through backyards and fields to get to our tree. Dirt is not blood, or criminal in any way, but try telling that to folks set on vengeance, or any of the Strangos who think they know so much.

When October comes I decorate with photographs of the dead: Laurel and me as already mentioned, my parents, and my bother whose suicide is not a part of this story. Also my cats, Batman and Robin, each found with strings around their necks and, I believe, victims of my notoriety. I arrange the photographs in a display of fake autumn leaves ever since trying to use real ones which brought bugs into the house, an infestation I do not want to repeat, appropriate as it may be to the occasion.

Sadly, no one begs treats from me; a pattern I ignored for years, stocking up on candy bars, popcorn balls, and fairly expensive caramel apples which I ate throughout winter, solidifying the caramel flavor of loneliness, the apple bite of regret. While others dress as someone else, I dress as myself (or the girl I once was) in yellow gingham, white socks, black shoes, headband; waiting until dark before I sneak through the backyards, everyone so distracted I make an easy passage to the tree where I wait. The first time I did this I panicked when I realized how, without awareness, I had so thoroughly become Laurels last moments, or what we know of them, before she was murdered, but no one came to reenact the crime. I just sat shivering, in the dark.

We had gone trick or treating with strict instructions to return home by ten but, if you haven’t picked up on this by now, Laurel was cheeky and I, her happy co-conspirator.

“Heyo,” she said, (using our twin language) “Let’s go-o to our-o tree-o.”

Why? Oh, I don’t remember though I suspect it seemed just enough of a transgression to deliver a delicious thrill, running through moonlight on that night inhabited by the occult. It was meant to be fun! We giggled and whispered, lugging pillowcases heavy with loot.

The paper reported candy wrappers littered amongst the leaves. I suppose this is right. We probably delighted in our feast, drunk on sugar. We fought. About what, I don’t remember. She scratched me and I ran home, though to this day I can hear her cries. “Come-o back-o,” she called. “Im-o afraid-o of the Strangos.” A false laugh, and then, “Don’t go-o-o.”

Later, the policeman handed me a cider doughnut and said, “I often think what I would say if I had one more day with my friend who died. Heck, I bet you know what that’s like, don’t you?”

Click-click.

“Go ahead. Close your eyes. Picture Laurel.”

Click.

“Say it.”

“Forgive me.”

In medias res part II:

After a hard chase and all-too brief struggle, the Bird Woman of the Adirondacks loomed over me; demonic silhouette, blackest outspread wings tipped in iron; gore-crested and flint-beaked. Her thumbnail-talon poised to spike me through the left eye.

“To know itself, the universe must drink the blood of its children.” Her voice cracked like an ice shelf collapsing; it roared across an improbable expanse of inches.

The talon pressed against my iris. It went in and in.

“Hello,” answered some whiteman. “Good morning! Could I speak with—?” He mispronounced her last name and didn’t abbreviate her first, as nobody who knew her would do.

“Who dis?” she repeated. “And what you calling about?”

“Young lady,” he said. “Can you please tell me whether Miss Jean-Louis is there or not. Will you just do that for me?” His tone all floured with whitepeople siddity, pan-fried in condescension.

But she could sit here and act dumb too. “Mmm… it’s hard to say. She be in and out, you know? Tell me who calling and what for and I’ll go check.”

Apparently, the man was Mr Blah D. Blah from the city agency that cleaned out Section 8 apartments when the leaseholder dropped dead. Guess whose evil Aunt Esther had died of a heart attack last Thursday on the B15 bus? And guess who was the last living Jean-Louis anywhere?

“But how you calling me—it’s almost noon—to say I got ’til five, before your dudes come throw all her stuff in the dumpster?”

“Oh good,” exclaimed Blah D. “I was worried we weren’t communicating clearly.”

“She live out by Jamaica Bay! It’d take me two hours just to get there.”

“Miss Jean-Louis,” he said. (Public servants nearing retirement, who never got promoted high enough not to deal with poor people anymore, black people anymore, have this tone of voice, you ever notice? A certain tone.) “There’s no requirement for you to go. This is merely a courtesy our office extends to the next of kin. The keys will be available to you until five.” Blah hung up.

“Fuck you!” She was dressed for the house, a tank top and leggings, and so went to her room for some sneakers and a hoodie.

Mama was scared of Esther, said she was a witch. Both times they had went out there, Mama left her downstairs, waiting in the streets, rather than bring her baby up to that apartment. Now, she didn’t believe in that black magic bullshit, of course, but she also wasn’t trying to go way the hell out there by herself. Mama, though, wouldn’t want no parts of Esther, dead sister of the dead man who’d walked out on her some fifteen years ago. Naw, better leave Mama alone at work and call her later.

She’d get Anhell to go. They were suppose to had been broke up with each other at least till this weekend coming, but whatever. She could switch him back to “man” from “ex” a couple days early. Wouldn’t be the first time. I’m a be over there in twenty, she texted.

She put a scarf on her head and leff out.

Damnit. Forgot the keys to his place back in her other purse! She texted again from the street, and then hit the buzzer downstairs for his apartment. That nigga was definitely up there parked on the couch, blazed out and playing videogames. She knew it, and leaned on the button, steady.

“Yo! What?! Who is this?”

“I leff Mama’s without the keys. Lemme up.”

“ ’Nisha?”

“Yeah! Ain’t you get my texts? Buzz me in, nigga.”

“I was, uh…  I been busy. Could you, like, uh, wait down there real fast for me, baby? Just one minute.”

With her thoughts on buried treasure in the far east of Brooklyn, not on boyfriends who step out the minute you turn your back, she wasn’t ready for the panicked fluttering that seized her heart and bowels, the icy flashes that turned sweaty hot—the anger, pure and simple.

Chick or dude. What would it be this time?

Dude. Not too long, and Anhell’s piece got off the elevator and crossed the vestibule toward the outer doors. Dude looked regular black, but was obviously Dominican from the loafers and tourniquet-tight clothes. He lived, you could tell, at the gym. Titties bigger than hers, a nasty V-neck putting his whole tattooed chest out on front street. Mas Líbranos Del Mal. Heading out, he politely held the door so she could go in. No words, they kept it moving.

The problem was, if you liked pretty boys, and she did like pretty boys, then Anhell was it. You couldn’t do no better. She looked okay—damn good, when she got all dressed up, her hair and makeup tight. But Anhell was pure Spanish butterscotch. Lightskin, gray eyes, cornrow hangtime to the middle of his back. He answered the door in a towel, naked and wet from a quick shower. Hickies on him she ain’t put there.

There’s rules to whooping your man’s ass. He tries to catch and hold your fists, dodge your knees and elbows and kicks, but accepts in his heart that every lick you land he deserves. You don’t go grabbing a knife, or yanking at his hair, either, as the electric fear or pain those inspire will make him lash out with blind total force, turning this rough game real in a way nobody wants. Stay in bounds, babygirl, and you can whale on him till you’re so tired you ain’t mad no more, and his cheating bitch ass is all bruised up and crying. But fuckit. She wasn’t really feeling it today. After getting in a few solid hits, she let Anhell catch her wrists. They were on the floor by then and he hugged her in close and tight, starting up with them same old tears and kisses, same old promises and lies.

“’Nisha, what can I do? Whatever you need, just tell me what I can do. I’ll do it.”

Stop laying with them hoes! With them faggots! But this was just the little sin, the one convenient to throw back in his face. She might not even give a shit anymore, if she ever bothered to check. What couldn’t be fixed was his big sin. The one they’d cried about, fucked and fought about all the time with fists and screams, but not once ever just said the words out loud, plain and clear. Now that a couple years had slipped by it was obvious they were never going to say the words at all.

You know what you did, she said. You know what you did. And Anhell did know, and so for once shut up with all the bullshit. They lay for a while just breathing, just embraced, their exhausted resignation like a mysterious disease presenting the exact same way as tenderness. “My aunt died and left me all her shit.”

“¿La bruja?”

“Yeah. I need you to come out to Brooklyn with me, see if there’s anything worth something.”

“My case worker coming by tomorrow.” Anhell felt good, smelled good, left arm holding her, right hand stroking her shoulder, back and ass in a loop that made everywhere he touched gain value, feel loved. “You know I gotta be here.”

“We just going out there,” she said, “look around, and then come straight back. It ain’t no all-night kinda thing.”

“Well, lemme get dressed and we’ll head out.” He let her go and sat up.

“Wait,” she said. “Hol’ up.” She hooked her thumbs under her panties and leggings. “Eat me out a little fowego?” She rolled em to her knees.

It’s gotta be hard, right, when they keep asking for what you can’t give, but so good, when they want exactly the thing you do best? Anhell grinned. “I got you, mami.” He pulled her leggings down further, rolled her knees out wide. “Lemme get in there right…”

Somebody suicide-jumped at Grand Central, so the 5 train was all fucked up. They were more than three hours getting out there.

Block after block of projects like brick canyons, a little city in the City, home to thousands and thousands and not one whiteface, except for cops from Long Island or Staten Island doubled up in cruisers or walking in posses. It was warm as late summer, the October rain falling hard enough to where you’d open your umbrella, but so soft you felt silly doing it. Anhell walked just behind, holding it over her, the four-dollar wingspan too paltry to share. Drop by drop his tight braids roughened.

Aunt Esther’s building was over a few blocks from the subway. Not one of the citysized ones, but big enough. The kind, you know, with the liquor store-style security booth at the entrance, somebody watching who comes and goes.

“Excuse me,” called the man behind the plastic. “Hey, yo, Braids—and you, Miss? Visitors gotta sign in.” Behind the partition, he held up the clipboard.

They went over to the window and scribbled their names. Though basketball-player-tall, up close you could see he wasn’t grown. Just some teenage dropout on his hood brand cell, Youtubing bootleg rappers.

She tapped the plastic. “It should be some keys in there, waiting for me,” she said. “So I can get into my aunt’s apartment.”

“Nobody tole me nuffen about that.”

“What’s that right there?” she said, pointing to the desk beside the boy’s elbow, where an envelope lay with her name written across it.

He gave this revelation several blinks and turned back. “Well, you gotta show some ID, then.”

She got out her EBT and pressed it to the partition. Squinting, the boy leaned forward and mouthed the name off the card, Tanisha Marie Jean-Louis, and then, slower than your slow cousin, compared this to what was written on the envelope, Tanisha M. Jean-Louis.

Although allowing, at last, that these two variations fell within tolerance, the boy still shook his head. “Naw, though… I on’t think I can give you this. You suppose to show a driver’s license.”

His stupidity flung her forward bodily against the partition. She smacked her palms on the plastic to lend the necessary words their due emphasis. “Nigga, this New York. Ain’t nobody out here got no fucking driver’s license. You better hand me that envelope!”

To the left of the elevator the hall continued around the corner, but 6L, Aunt Esther’s apartment, was in the cul-de-sac to the right.

Stink rushed out as the front door swung in. Week-old kitchen trash. Years of cigarettes. Old ladies who piss theyself. Ole Esther had caught her heart attack on the bus, so at least there wasn’t that, not the funk of some bloated mice-nibbled corpse leaking slime.

On a corner table inside the door was a huge, nasty religious mess. Ugly dolls, rat bones, weird trash. If all Satan’s blue-black devils had wifed all God’s blue-blond saints, then a gaudy likeness of their brats was painted on the clutter of seven-day glass candles. She went over to take a look. Breathing through some open window the moment after Anhell followed her in, a breeze slammed the front door shut. The sudden breathless dark had him slapping at the walls desperately until he found the lights. She sneered. “Come peep this. She was on some real hoodoo shit.”

“No, mami.” He came over reluctantly. “This ain’t Voodoo or Santería, ni nada parecido. Your Auntie ain’t bought nunna this at no botánica. Look at that.”

“Yeah? A cross—so what?”

“You don’t see nothing weird about it?”

Though fancy and heavy-looking as real silver, it was just cheap ass plastic junk when she thumped a finger against it. Rather than about-to-die, the face of Jesus looked more like a man nutting, but apart from the crucifix being upside down she couldn’t see what had Anhell all freaked out. She shrugged.

Anhell was superstitious. His grandma had wanted him to go to Miami for some expensive Catholic thing, accepting his saint or some shit like that. But his trifling ass had just bought tracksuits, Jordans, and smoked up all the money she’d left him. Now, he touched the bare skin of his neck as if there should’ve been beads hanging there, some guardian angel to call on today of all days. Her pretty babyboy, so full of regret! She saw how she could fuck with him.

There was a Poland Spring, label ripped off, in the middle of all that voodoo mess. She picked it up.

“You can’t drink that, ’Nisha!”

“It ain’t even been open yet.” She cracked the seal, untwisting the cap to show him. To fuck with him. “It’s clean.”

“It’s blessed water,” Anhell said. “Cursed—blessed, I don’t know what! But I swear to God, don’t drink it, ’Nisha.”

“Mmm,” she sighed, after gulping down half the bottle. “I was sooo thirsty, though…!”

He got quiet, but she could read these signs from being hugged up with him on the couch so many nights. Forcing him to watch the kind of movies she laughed at, but turned him into a motherless six-year-old, afraid of the dark. While she rummaged the apartment, pulling out drawers and dumping worthless old lady trash onto the floor, Anhell followed close, brushing up against her as if onna’ccident. He was scared as shit and wishing she’d change the channel. But, no, nigga. This is the show. This is what we’re watching.

Not under the mattress, not in the dresser, she didn’t find a fat stash of benjis anywhere. Ratty old bras, holey socks, musty dresses. She sorted highspeed through a folder labeled “important papers,” dropping a blizzard to the ground as her audit turned up nothing but Social Security and Con Ed stubs, obituaries clipped from newspapers, yellowing funeral programs. Her father’s. But the treasure had to be buried in here somewhere. Anhell came to sit by her on the edge of the coffee table. He jumped to his feet when it teetered up like a seesaw. There!

“Get that end,” she said.

They dumped over the coffee table top, its old school Ebonys and dish of peppermints scattering. Underneath was a trunk, a real pirate ass looking trunk. Now we’re talking!

No hinges or latches were visible on it, but when Anhell tried to pry up the lid, he fell back on his butt, saying, “Shit’s locked up tight.”

She said, “No, it ain’t,” and effortlessly lifted the lid herself. Folded up inside was a tall, tall man or woman, long-dead and withered black and dry as stale raisins, their longest bones broken to fit fetus-style in the confines of the chest. Anhell screamed all girly and jumped back onto the couch. She rolled her eyes at him. “Dead. And how many times I told you what dead means?” she said. “Can’t do nothing to you, Anhell. Nothing to worry about!” He started whining but she ignored him.

There were two things in there with the body (its skin cheap-feeling, just leatherish, like a hundred-dollar sofa from the ghetto furniture store, and the body weightless and unresisting as piled laundry). One was a shotgun that could have come from the Civil War, half made of wood. She set it aside. The other was her baby, a knife equal in length and width to her own arm, its handle protruding from a rawhide sheath.

You-know-who sidles up and offers… what? Change. Not for the better, not for the worse, just a change. But one so huge that you can’t even dream it from the miserable little spot, miserable little moment you’re at now. And don’t go expecting wishes granted, or that kind of boring shit, because transformation belongs to a whole ’nother category. But, oh, babygirl, this could be a wild hot ride. Are you down?

Anhell had slipped off the couch and knelt beside her. He was reaching toward the shotgun, but hesitating too… up until she did it. Until she pulled out the long knife, no, machète, from the leather sheath that flaked apart in her hands like ancient pages from an ancient book. Anhell picked up the gun.

Oh, fuck yeah!

It felt like being at the club, three, fo’ drinks in, every chick in the place hating, every nigga tryna holler—and then your song come on. The beat drop. She felt loose as a motherfucker. “Ooo, Anhell.” Groaning, she wedged the heel of a hand down between her thighs. “You feel that, too?”

Yeah, the nigga was feeling it! She oughta know that look on his face by now, about to bust a really good one.

She tested the machète’s edge with a fingertip and found it all the way dull, however sharp it looked. Even pressing down hard against the edge hardly dented the pad of her thumb.

Anhell, too, reached out wanting to test the edge of that weird machète. But then he sort of thought twice, stopped short, and shied his hand right on back again. Just like that, she got it. Understood all the possibilities for black magic murder. “Come on, papi,” she purred, cat-malicious. “Don’t you wanna see what kinda edge it got?” She nudged the machète out toward him—very recklessly. Woulda cut his ass, too, if he hadna jumped back so quick. “You ain’t skurt, is you?”

She was getting her hands all wet in somebody’s blood today. That was for damn sure.

“Whoa, ’Nisha! Why you playing, though? Back up with that!”

Keys rattled in the lock and the front door swung open.

Two dudes in Dickies and T-shirts came in talking whatever they do over there in Czechoslovakia or Ukraine. The workers were the right color to come to New York and get fat business loans or good union jobs right off the boat, buying a house on a tree-lined street, and all set up for the good life, before their kids even graduated high school. Perhaps for supernatural reasons they didn’t notice the shotgun and machète. For natural ones, she and Anhell weren’t invisible exactly, but seemed to the workers’ eyes only two vague black and brown shapes where they didn’t belong.

“You, Miss Jean-Louis? Boss said you gotta be outta here by five o’clock.” The law on his side, one of the Serbians held up some important piece of paper, typed, with signatures, etc. “Or we call the cops.”

It was instinct. It was thirst. Pivoting, she swung like a Cuban phenom at bat who’d better hit that fucking ball or take his damn ass back to the island. Best believe she hit. A red-hot knife would’ve had more trouble with butter, the Polack’s astonished trunk separated from his bottom two-thirds so easily. Blood and viscera went splashing by the bucketful but none, impossibly, hit the ground.

A thousand frog-tongues lashing out to snatch as many bugs from the air, every glob of gore vanished in the twinkling of an eye, slurped up by the thirsty machète. How long had this poor baby lain in that awful, awful chest?

Though drinking to the last drop was neither delicious nor easy as that first perfect pull, she kept going and swallowed the man down.

The Russian in two pieces desiccated, turning to a spoonful’s worth of blown dust between one breath and the next. What, maybe twenty seconds had passed since the door opened? Russkie number two, quick on the uptake and fast on his feet, had spun around and was booking up the hall.

She looked at Anhell and jerked her chin toward the runaway. “Pop ’im.”

“I ain’t never even shot a gun before.”

“Just pull the trigger, dumb ass.”

Hoisting it up to his shoulder, he aimed. “But what if it ain’t loaded?”

It was, though. The discharge, noiseless on earth, made no flash, either, resounding instead throughout hell. All the souls screaming in their lakes were startled into a moment of silence, so loud was that report, so bright. A burst watermelon of gore blew out the white back of the running man’s t-shirt. He was snatched forward—off his feet and several yards through the air—by the impact of the demonbullet, which smashed him facedown into the checkered tiles with such goofy, slapstick violence, she and Anhell turned open-mouthed to each other, dead. They died laughing, grabbing at one another and collapsing to the floor, it was that funny how dude had thought he was getting away, but psych!

“Okay, okay,” she said finally. “Let’s get serious.” She pointed to the problematic scene in the hallway. “Get out there and clean that shit up, fore somebody come out they apartment.”

Unlike firing a gun for the first time, she didn’t need to break it down for Anhell how the devil got his due. He walked up the hall, she with him, and put the thirsty muzzle of the gun down into that sucking wet wound.

In no time the juicy corpse was all bled out, the borschty color of a freshly dead whiteman depinking into gray. Anhell lifted the gun from the dry pit of torn lavender flesh, shattered pale bone. “I don’t want no more,” he whined, screwing up his face. “The sweet part’s gone.”

“Shut the fuck up,” she said, in zero mood for his finicky complaints. “Finish it.”

Anhell pooched his bottom lip like a four-year-old with just the broccoli left on his plate, but he put the muzzle back down in.

Soon he was gagging, and not faking, either. “All right, all right,” she conceded. “Carry the rest back to the apartment.” There was no splatter on the floor or walls, no more mess, only a shrunken dry thing like the historical Christ, if those skinny bones were pulled from a tomb in Sinai today. She stomped the old body down into the chest and it burst and crumpled like papier mâché, till there was room for Anhell to roll the new one on top. Fingerprints, wipe shit down, tidy up? Nah, fuck that. The devil got you. He looks after his own.

They bounced, Anhell following her out to the elevator.

“So we just kinda slide into the fires sideways, not far, and from there nobody can really see…”

“I get it,” Anhell said. “You always think I’m so stupid, ’Nisha, but I got it all the same time you did!”

“Well, don’t fuck it up, nigga. Cause we carrying this machète and shotgun right through the streets, onto the MT fucking A.”

Just newly knighted to this darkest order, they hardly dared more than a step into hell, and so their half-assed little cantrip that first night wouldn’t have worked at all, except in a place like New York, where everybody was already trying so hard not to notice strangers.

Night had come to Brooklyn, but you could still see a half inch of daylight glowing behind Manhattan’s fallen constellations. They didn’t slink from the building like street dogs after grubbing through some alley trash, their heads down, eyes slewing nervously left and right—oh no! They loped like winter wolves, thin yet, but bellies hanging full of fresh kill, and future tooth and scenting nose toward all these little lambs gamboling on every side. Nay, sweeter than lambs! For creatures even so gentle can yet scent the beast that would eat them, while men and women and children walking home under soft rain don’t know to fear the slavering jaws, the click of claws on concrete.

Shadow and flame licking in the corners of their eyes, machète and gun in hand, they strutted through the evening rush. When they descended to the subway, nine-to-fivers were trudging up and teenagers, just out of basketball practice, leaping stairs two at a time. Down in the station, patrolmen to bust fare-jumpers and dudes selling swipes, and more patrolmen posted at the terrorist table, didn’t even blink when two murderers fresh off the deed, weapons naked in hand, rolled past. Busker on the sax, “You’ve Changed.” Nobody tried to bogart, nobody jostled them on the crowded way back uptown. Where you woulda swore there was none, space opened up on the packed train. Coupla seats came free.

You can pray all day, babygirl, but God won’t answer. He ain’t thinking bout you. Now that other guy, though? Will treat you like a fucking rockstar. VIP. Perks.

Anhell crawled across the bed, over her, flipped on the lights, crashed around the studio. He gathered up and threw out all the bottles, flushed the roaches and ashes, hid the tray, opened the windows and turned the fan on high. He came to the bed whispering. “You don’t wanna put on some clothes, mami?” Sleepy and cold from the fan, she just groaned and pulled the covers over her, his pillow over her head. His caseworker buzzed at 8:45, as always, as bimonthly, this middle-aged African bitch who hated her and thought she was the biggest slut on earth, but loved Anhell, no doubt to the point of hand-on-the-Bible swearing his shit smelled like patchouli and roses. Um, hello…? That nigga gave it to me.

Mrs. Okorie asked Anhell the same stupid social worker questions that had you like duh…! the answers to which not only hadn’t changed since last time but couldn’t. Spotting in the heaped up blankets on the bed signs pointing to the presence of a certain fast ass American black girl, Mrs. Okorie reminded Anhell that it was against the rules for “company to cohabitate.” There was, in fact, this scholarship program which Mrs. Okorie thought Anhell (who wasn’t no fucking college material, not unless y’all got a PhD in PS4) could apply to, even earn his associate’s degree, if not for the influence of a certain fast ass American black girl.

Special for people who controlled his benefits, Anhell had this soft sweet voice, this lightskin innocent voice. Saying things like “just visiting” and “a couple days,” he almost had Mrs. Okorie calmed down when she got up booty-nekkid from bed, crossed to the bathroom and, just half-closing the door, pissed loud for a mad ass long time, like some loose bitch who’d been up till four in the morning drinking with her man. Anhell had to work them gray eyes, that good hair, hard to get Mrs. Okorie calmed down again.

They napped and woke up at noon. They fucked but that wasn’t it. Neither was a puff or two off Anhell’s first blunt of the day, nor coffee light and sweet, bagel egg and cheese from the corner. And, no, TV wasn’t it, and not a nap, and not fooling around again later in bed. Nor staring out the window while Anhell played his videogames. He that giveth thee all shall too expect somewhat in return.

O gluttons of murder, wherefore do ye fast? Bring down the red rain, for in hell we are greatly thirsting…!

Below, crossing the courtyard, were a Spanish girl, her nigga, and their little baby in a stroller. Smiling church ladies, fat and overdressed, stood by the intersection passing out tracts. On the benches, every cell phone out, a girl clique was holding conference. Boys on bikes, on scooters, on skateboards. She didn’t want the blood of these people, her people, but somebody had to die and pretty fucking soon. A whole lot of somebodies, and day in and day out. How to be evil without doing bad? There’s a problem for you, huh?

Around seven they ate take-out tins of chicken, yellow rice and beans from the joint around the corner, sharing a Corona 24 oz. between them—plenty of food and drink, you would’ve thought, except this fare only made them hungrier, thirstier, for another repast richer by far than this shit. She kept having to move the machète from here to there. Whether propped against the wall, or laid on the floor, table, or bed, its metal seemed to pick up some vibration and whine slightly, a rattle and hum that was setting her teeth on edge. Anhell said he couldn’t hear it, but then she couldn’t hear the weird crackling noise he said the old wood of the shotgun kept making. He stuffed it in the back of the closet, under laundry, but said that didn’t really help. He was on his cell a lot, restless. In and out the bathroom, texting hoes. In and out that closet.

“And where you call yourself going?”

“Nowhere,” Anhell said, giving his lips a little lick. “Just about to grab a couple phillies at the deli.”

“I see you got that gun.”

“It’s mine, ain’t it.”

“What, you just gon’ head up the block, pop whoever you see first. That’s ya plan?”

“Naw! I just, uh…”

“Leave it here, Anhell. Tomorrow, me and you will go fuck shit up real good, okay?” She knew what he was feeling, because she was fiending just as bad. But first she needed to figure this thing out, the how and who and all that. Cause the way you start is how you go on. “Us, together. At least one sweet kill each, I promise.”

“Look, I just need to step out real fast, baby.” Nigga wasn’t even trying to run game! Where was the smoothness at, the slick lies? “Just for a minute. I be right back.”

He turned his back on her like he was gonna just walk out that door still holding the shotgun. Right now she could care less about him fucking around, but she was the boss of murder up in this bitch, and it wasn’t gon’ be no extracurriculars on that front.

She threw a Timb at his head with intent to kill. Anhell’s ducking and dodging was some next level shit, so it missed. “You heard? I said, leave it here gotdamnit! Or I will chop yo ass up fast as I did that whitenigga yesterday. Try me.” She thought she’d left it across the room, under the bed, but no, the machète was right here in her hand, eager to make good the lady’s word.

There was a moment where you could see him wondering whether females with just a knife should really be coming out the side of they neck at niggas holding guns. She laughed and flicked beckoning fingers. “Play yourself, then. Come on. I wish to fuck you would.”

They fought a lot and they were both tired, both sick of it. Anhell’s litebrite eyes took on a glint far more sharp and steel-like than diamond-pretty.

“Oh yeah, daddy,” she moaned, as if muvver were wet from all the foreplay and good to go now. “You only gotta act like you wanna raise that gun at me, and I will pay you back every motherfucking thing. Let’s do this.” The gun trembled in his hand, his eyes hard, and the odds that his arm would come up went up—thirty, forty, fifty percent. Satan had her hype as fuck. “Do it, you bitch ass faggot ass PUNK!”

Mumbling under his breath, making faces with his eyes down, Anhell propped it with the umbrellas beside the door and leff out. She went and got the gun, laid it on the table in front of her.

Madison, Tiphanie, Arelys, and nem sent a group text right then, tryna get the crew together to go to this new Harlem club, and at first… but then she thought of the narcotic bass, the tight-packed bodies writhing together to the music, and her just swinging the machète through all the niggas and her girls like some reaper in the corn…

Nah, she texted back. I’m in for the night. Sorry. One of em called. “Yo, put ya nigga on, girl. I’m bout to tell Anhell we just going out dancing. Ladies’ night. Fuckit, he can come too. Ain’t nobody seen you in a minute—’Nisha! What is it…?”

She was sobbing and she never cried. “He said, he said…” Anhell had muttered I hate you when going out the door, and it had hurt her feelings bad. You just don’t say shit like that!

“Oh my God, Anhell said that? Well, what led up to it?” Madison said. “Tell me everything that happen, exactly.”

She sketched a version of events that, mmm, skimmed the details of the Brooklyn adventure and double homicide, swearing fealty to infernal powers, and the carnivorous griping of demonic weapons. Perhaps not every fact concerning her own foul-mouthed instigation made it into the story, either.

They talked a long time, until the girls were all in the taxi together on their way to the club. And because Madison was that ride-or-die friend, always one hundred percent team ’Nisha, she felt a lot better when they hung up.

It was very late, but Mama would still be winding down from the hospital, nodding on the couch in front of some documentary. She called.

“Oh, hey, baby.” Soft voice, sleepy. TV muttering in the background. “I guess you went back over there, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“You know you ain’t gotta stay with him, right? You could definitely get into nursing school. Girl, you smart, and that boy—”

“Let’s not do this tonight, Mommy, please. Okay?” Mama talked a tough game when Anhell wasn’t up in her face, but them gray eyes worked on her, too, getting her all oh-you-want-a-plate-baby? and tee-hee-hee in person. “I don’t feel like talking bout him. And is that gunshots I hear on your TV? I thought you hated them cop shows. What you watching?”

“Turn on channel thirteen,” Mama murmured. “Just for today, PBS is showing that new film DuVernay won Sundance with, BLM.”

“Oh, word?” She reached for the remote, but kept the TV muted, her eyes on her Sudoku book. “What’s it about?” She penciled in numbers while Mama sleepily ran on and on and on.

… of us gunned down six days out of every week by the police. Hoping that cell phone camera and video technology… to disrupt the historical impunity of police brutality and extrajudicial murder…

“Yeah?” she said, paying attention only to the cadences. Mama’s voice soothing, lovely, there since the beginning. 6. “Huh.”

…reinstituting Jim Crow and slavery through the carceral state and prison labor… felons, afterwards, barred from the franchise, employment, or even basic welfare benefits.

“That’s awful, dang.” 6.

…electing Trump… a direct consequence of Pence, for example, sending state police troopers to close down African-American voter registration in Indiana.

“Wow, I ain’t even know that.” 6.

Mama fell asleep, so she hung up.

Anhell came in, eyes all droopy and red from smoking in the street. Mostly she just felt, as usual, glad to see his fine yellow ass home again, though she fronted like whatever, who cares? Smelling very clean, of coconut lime bodywash that wasn’t in the bathroom here, Anhell leaned in to kiss her. Ew!

Nice of him to take a shower, but his breath was giving funky receipts for all his recent activities.

She caught his face in the palm of a hand and pushed him off. “The way yo bref kicking, you just been down on some bad pussy for real, for real.”

He ran for the Listerine and then crept back, looking at her with dog’s eyes—a very bad dog. So handsome, though, so hot, he blessed the room just by being in it. And girl you know this dopey bloodshot gaze is full of the purest love you’ll ever get. She sighed, reached out a hand, ran fingers down his scalp between frizzy cornrows. “Ya head’s looking pretty rough. Hand me that comb and sit here. I’ma take these out.” Anhell sat on the floor between her knees. She turned up the volume a little, just to a friendly mutter. He pulled the table closer to pinch open a phillie and roll up his late-night .5 grams.

Ready for Iraq in combat armor, whitepolice in Missouri and Louisiana held machine guns, rode tanks. Natural hair sisters holding poster board signs. Baltimore niggas wilding like the cops won’t shoot. Close-up of a brother, his face fades out. Baby mama crying. Close-up of another brother, that face fades out. His muvver crying. Another face, another wife. Face, mother. Wife, mother. Faces. Crying.

“Know what I wanna see?” Anhell, with each word, scrawled cursives of smoke on the air. “Some crying whitebitches on this TV.”

Normally she had better things to do than ponder the reefer ramblings of a nigga fly as hell, yes, but oh so simple. Now, for whatever reason, her hands paused in the springtime flood of his hair. Fascinated, she said, “Yeah?”

“Yeah!” Anhell said, throwing out a preacherly hand at the TV. “Why’s it always us gotta have the sad story? Let me see some bad ass niggas who get away with nothing but stone cold murder. Then let me see whitemamas, whitewives, cameras all up in they face, weeping and wailing outside the church. Now that would be some funny shit!” His laughter caught on hooks of smoke, broke into helpless phlegmy barking.

The hair stood up on her neck, goosebumps chilling her arms. She slapped on his back, inspired to her soul. It came to her with a bright ten-story-high clarity, like the LED billboards at Times Square. True vocation. God’s work and the devil’s!

4.1 police massacre, October

4.2 state funeral, November

The sky at one a.m. hung low above the city, orange clouds damn near bright as day. Gypsies bumped the horn when slowing and sped back up. Draped in colored Christmas lights, almost, the curbside mountains of garbage bags, all beaded by spitting rain, winked under headlights, brake lights, sodium and neon. The piped corridors of all the scaffolding over the sidewalks, all the doorways, and all the stairwells going down breathed back at them parfum de piss. It was unseasonably warm in the Bronx, and a lovely night for an atrocity. There was the precinct house just ahead. Time to make the bacon, Mr, Pig.

A sextet of cops were smoking on the precinct stairs. Three cigarette cherries flaring with the draw, three redder and dim hanging hipside. Who knows but that qualms might not have stirred the hearts of dark gods, who then might have brought down the storm elsewhere, on some other night, if all those cops out front hadn’t been white? But police have their own little clicks, too. Spanish tight with Spanish, black with black, whitecops keeping to their own kind.

Anhell laid down an enfilade that had him doing numbers before half a minute was out. The devil, if it ain’t been said, saw to questions of ammo and aim, chambering embers di l’Inferno just faster than Anhell could squeeze the trigger. Hellfire tracers went streaking through the dark and one, two, three, four, five whitecops turned explosively to redmeat. Number six, before losing the lungs to do so, gave a shout. She and Anhell ran—not away, toward the trouble. Just vibing on the slaughter at first, thrilled how babyboy had put em down like that, now she felt eager for a taste of her own. A bitch gotta post up, right—get her hands dirty, too?

Some cavalry came pouring out the precinct front doors to see about that shout, and chop, chop, chop were three who had been whole made all in twain. The machète went in and through without effort, but still she felt, somehow, a slow buttery drag across the blade, as if demonic steel were stiff meat belonging to her own body and sinking deep into a lover all wet, hot and open for her. No need, as it turned out, to drink down whole gallons from any one body when this much blood was flowing. The first cupful’s sweetest, anyway. Naw, a spoonful will do, given this abundance.

Stepping over the bestrewment, they went in.

Simon Avery’s fiction has been published in a variety of magazines and anthologies including Black Static, Crimewave, The Third Alternative, The Best British Mysteries IV, Beneath the Ground, The Black Room Manuscripts: Volume 4, Birmingham Noir, Terror Tales of Yorkshire, Something Remains, and Occult Detective Quarterly. A novella, The Teardrop Method, was published in 2017. He lives and works in Birmingham, UK.

Laird Barron, an expat Alaskan, is the author of several books—including The Imago Sequence and Other Stories, Swift to Chase, and Blood Standard—and many short stories some of which have been reprinted in numerous year’s best anthologies and nominated for multiple awards. He is a three-time winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. Currently, Barron lives in the Rondout Valley of New York State and is at work on tales about the evil that men do.

Ashley Blooms was born and raised in Cutshin, Kentucky. She received her MFA as a John and Renee Grisham Fellow at the University of Mississippi. She’s been awarded scholarships from the Clarion Writer’s Workshop and Appalachian Writer’s Workshop, served as fiction editor for the Yalobusha Review, and worked as an editorial intern and first reader for Tor.com. Her stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and Shimmer, among others. Her nonfiction has appeared in the Oxford American. She currently lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with her husband and their dog, Alfie.

Aliette de Bodard lives (with her husband and children) and works (as a System Engineer) in Paris. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Obsidian and Blood trilogy of Aztec noir fantasies, as well as numerous short stories, which garnered her two Nebula Awards, a Locus Award, and two British Science Fiction Association Awards. Her space opera books include The Tea Master and the Detective. Recent works include the Dominion of the Fallen series, set in a turn-of-the-century Paris devastated by a magical war, which comprises the British Science Fiction Association Award-winning The House of Shattered Wings and its standalone sequel, The House of Binding Thorns.

Rebecca Campbell is a Canadian writer and an academic with a PhD in English (specifically Canadian literature) from the University of Western Ontario. Her speculative fiction has been published in Shimmer, Beneath Ceasless Skies, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Tor.com, and other venues. Her story “The Glad Hosts,” published by Lackington’s, was nominated for a Sunburst Award. The Paradise Engine, her first novel, was published in 2013.

Jeffrey Ford lives in central Ohio and teaches at Ohio Wesleyan University. He has contributed over 130 short stories to numerous magazines and anthologies including The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, Conjunctions, Puerto Del Sol, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, MAD Magazine, Weird Tales, Clarkesworld, Tor.com, Lightspeed, Subterranean, Fantasy, New Jersey Noir, Stories, The Living Dead,The Faery Reel, After, The Dark, The Doll Collection, many “year’s best” venues, and more. He is the recipient of four World Fantasy Awards and two Shirley Jackson Awards as well as the Nebula, Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire, and Edgar Allan Poe Awards.

Robin Furth’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in numerous magazines and journals including The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Cemetery Dance, Gramarye, Orbis, The Beloit Poetry Journal, and Interpreter’s House. Her book, Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: The Complete Concordance (originally created for King’s personal use), has been translated into five languages. Furth is the co-author of Marvel’s bestselling Dark Tower comic book series and has contributed to numerous other Marvel publications.

Lisa L. Hannett has had over seventy short stories appear in venues including Clarkesworld, Fantasy, Weird Tales, Apex, The Dark, and “year’s best” anthologies in Australia, Canada, and the U.S. She has won four Aurealis Awards, including Best Collection for her first book, Bluegrass Symphony, which was also nominated for a World Fantasy Award. Her first novel, Lament for the Afterlife, won the Australian National Science Fiction (“Ditmar”) Award for Best Novel. A new collection of short stories, Little Digs, is coming out in 2019.

Maria Dahvana Headley is the New York Times-bestselling author of the novels Aerie, Magonia (one of PW’s Best Books of 2015), Queen of Kings, and the memoir The Year of Yes. With Kat Howard she is the author of The End of the Sentence, one of NPR’s Best Books of 2014, and with Neil Gaiman, she is co-editor of Unnatural Creatures. Her short stories have been included in many “year’s best anthologies” and have been finalists for the Nebula and Shirley Jackson Awards. Her highly acclaimed novel The Mere Wife, which adapts Beowulf to modern-day New York, was published earlier this year.

Carole Johnstone is a British Fantasy Award-winning Scottish writer, currently living in Essex, England. Her fiction has appeared in numerous venues including Black Static, New Fears, Horror Library, Interzone, Terror Tales of the Scottish Highlands, Dark Minds, and Sherlock Holmes and the School of Detection. Her work has been reprinted in “best of” anthologies in the U.S. and UK. Her novella, Cold Turkey, and debut short story collection, The Bright Day is Done were both shortlisted for a British Fantasy Award.

Stephen Graham Jones is the author of sixteen novels, six story collections, more than two hundred and fifty stories, and has some comic books in the works. His latest novel is Mongrels. He’s been the recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Fiction, the Texas Institute of Letters Jesse H. Jones Award for Best Work of Fiction, the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction, the Bram Stoker Award, and three This Is Horror Awards. Jones teaches in the MFA programs at University of Colorado at Boulder and University of California Riverside-Palm Desert. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Hailed by the New York Times as “One of our essential writers of dark fiction,” Caitlín R. Kiernan has published twelve novels, including The Red Tree and The Drowning. She is the recipient of the Barnes and Noble Maiden Voyage, Bram Stoker, IHG, James Tiptree, Jr., Locus, and World Fantasy Awards. Kiernan studied geology and paleontology at the University of Alabama and the University of Colorado and has published in several scientific journals, including the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. A prolific short fiction writer, her most recent collection is Houses Under the Sea: Mythos Tales. Two more, one from Subterranean Press and The Very Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan from Tachyon Publications, are forthcoming.

After receiving a PhD from Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, Helen Marshall completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford. She was recently appointed Senior Lecturer of Creative Writing and Publishing at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England and is the general director of the Centre for Science Fiction and Fantasy. Her first collection of fiction, Hair Side, Flesh Side, won the Sydney J Bounds Award. Her second collection, Gifts for the One Who Comes After, won the World Fantasy Award and the Shirley Jackson Award, and was shortlisted for the British Fantasy Award, Bram Stoker Award, and the Aurora Award from the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association.

Kate Marshall is the author of the Young Adult novel I Am Still Alive. Her science fiction and fantasy fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Crossed Genres, and elsewhere. She writes historical romance as Kathleen Kimmel and works in the video game industry as a writer and occasional designer. Her love of books runs through every aspect of her career; she serves as both a developmental editor and a cover designer for fellow authors. She lives outside of Seattle with her husband, a dog, a cat, and a baby.

Ian Muneshwar is a writer and teacher currently based in Raleigh, North Carolina. His short fiction appears in venues such as Clarkesworld, Gamut, Liminal Stories, and The Dark. In both his writing and course design, he is concerned with queer subjectivities, cultural memory, and the ways in which queerbrown identities are shaped by diaspora. Muneshwar holds a BA from Vassar College and is a graduate of both the Clarion West and Odyssey workshops. He is currently pursuing an MFA in fiction at North Carolina State University.

Before earning her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, M. Rickert worked as kindergarten teacher, coffee shop barista, balloon vendor at Disneyland, and in the personnel department of Sequoia National Park where she spent her time off hiking the wilderness. She now lives in Cedarburg, Wisconsin, a small city of candy shops and beautiful gardens. She has published numerous short stories and two collections: Map of Dreams and Holiday. Her first novel, The Memory Garden, was published in 2014, and won the Locus Award for Best First Novel. Her first collection, Map of Dreams, was honored with both the World Fantasy and Crawford Awards. Her latest collection, You Have Never Been Here, was published in 2015.

Rebecca Roanhorse is an Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo/African-American writer and a VONA workshop alum. She is also a lawyer and Yale grad. She lives in northern New Mexico with her daughter, husband, and pug. Her debut novel, Trail of Lightning, was published earlier this year. Her children’s book Race to the Sun is coming in 2019 from Rick Riordan Presents. Her recent nonfiction can be found in Invisible 3: Essays and Poems on Representation in SF/F, Strange Horizons, Uncanny, and How I Resist: Activism and Hope for a New Generation.

Eden Royce describes herself as “Freshwater Geechee. Charleston girl living in the Garden of England” who grew up around rootworkers and hoodoo practitioners. A Speculative Literature Foundation’s Diverse Worlds grant recipient, her short stories appear in over a dozen anthologies and magazines. She’s voiced podcasts, been a reptile handler, bridal consultant, and stockbroker, but is now a full-time writer. She enjoys roller-skating, reading, cooking, traveling, and listening to thunderstorms.

Mark Samuels is a British writer of weird and fantastic fiction in the tradition of Arthur Machen and H. P. Lovecraft (although his story here was published with a nod to Reggie Oliver). Born in deepest Clapham, South London, his short stories often focus on detailing a shadowy world in which his protagonists gradually discover terrifying and rapturous vistas lurking behind modernity. Samuels work has been highly praised by the likes of Thomas Ligotti and Ramsey Campbell and has appeared in prestigious anthologies of horror and weird fiction on both sides of the Atlantic.

Priya Sharma is a medical doctor who lives in the UK. Her fiction has appeared in periodicals such as Albedo One, Interzone, Black Static, and Tor.com and anthologies including Once Upon a Time, Black Feathers, Mad Hatters and March Hairs. She’s been anthologized in several “year’s best” anthologies in the U.S. and UK. Her work has appeared on the Locus Recommended Reading List. Sharma’s story, “Fabulous Beasts” was a Shirley Jackson Award finalist and won a British Fantasy Award for Short Fiction. Her first collection, All the Fabulous Beasts, was published earlier this year.

Robert Shearman has worked as writer for television, radio, and the stage. He is probably best known for being one of the writers for the BAFTA Award-winning revived Doctor Who series starring Christopher Eccleston. (His episode “Dalek,” was nominated for a Hugo Award.) Shearman’s first collection of short stories, Tiny Deaths, won the World Fantasy Award, and was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize and nominated for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize. His second collection, Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical won the Shirley Jackson Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the Edge Hill Short Story Reader’s Prize. His third collection, Everyone’s Just So So Special, won the British Fantasy Award

Shearman’s first collection published in North America, Remember Why You Fear Me, was shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson and British Fantasy Awards.

Angela Slatter is the author of the urban fantasy novels Vigil, Corpselight, and Restoration as well as eight short story collections, including The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales, Sourdough and Other Stories, The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings, and A Feast of Sorrows: Stories. She has won a World Fantasy Award, a British Fantasy Award, a Ditmar, an Australian Shadows Award, and six Aurealis Awards. She has an MA and a PhD in Creative Writing, is a graduate of Clarion South and the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, and was awarded one of the inaugural Queensland Writers Fellowships. Slatter served as the Established Writer-in-Residence at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre in Perth. She has been awarded career development funding by Arts Queensland, the Copyright Agency and, in 2017/18, an Australia Council for the Arts grant.

Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam’s fiction and poetry has appeared in over forty magazines and anthologies such as Black Static, The Toast, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Hobart, Interzone, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Fairy Tale Review. She and her partner collaborated on the recently released audio fiction-jazz collaborative album Strange Monsters. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program and created and coordinates the annual Art & Words Collaborative Show in Fort Worth, Texas.

Steve Rasnic Tem’s collaborative novella with his late wife Melanie Tem, The Man On The Ceiling, won the World Fantasy, Bram Stoker, and International Horror Guild Awards. He has also won the Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, and British Fantasy Awards for his solo work. His recent novel UBO won the Bram Stoker Award. His previous novels are Deadfall Hotel, The Man On The Ceiling (written with Melanie Tem as an expansion of their novella), The Book of Days, Daughters (also written with Melanie Tem), and Excavation. Tem has published over four hundred short stories. His ten story collections include City Fishing, Celestial Inventories, Twember, Here With The Shadows, and the giant seventy-two-story treasury, Out of the Dark: A Storybook of Horrors. A transplanted Southerner Virginia, Steve is a long-time resident of Colorado. He has a BA in English Education from VPI and a MA in Creative Writing from Colorado State.

Katherine Vaz is the author of two novels, Saudade and Mariana, as well as two short story collections, Fado & Other Stories and Our Lady of the Artichokes & Other Portuguese-American Stories. Her work has appeared in six languages and has received numerous accolades, including the Library of Congress’ Top Thirty International Books of 1998, the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, and the Prairie Schooner Book Award. The recipient of fellowships at Harvard University, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the Harman Fellowship, Vaz has lectured internationally about Portuguese and Luso-American literature and is the first Portuguese-American to have her work recorded for the archives of the Library of Congress (Hispanic Division). A native Californian, she lives in New York City and East Hampton with her husband.

Kaaron Warren has published over seventy short stories, some of which are collected in The Gate Theory, Through Splintered Walls, The Grinding House, and Dead Sea Fruit. Her short fiction has won Australian Shadows, Ditmar, and Aurealis Awards. Her four novels are Slights, Walking the Tree, Mistification, and The Grief Hole. An Australian, she’s lived in Melbourne, Sydney, and Canberra, with a three year stint in Fiji. She currently lives in Canberra with her family, two cats and, possibly, rats in the roof.

Conrad Williams is the author of nine novels (Head Injuries, London Revenant, The Unblemished, One, Decay Inevitable, Loss of Separation, Dust and Desire, Sonata of the Dead, and Hell is Empty), four novellas (Nearly People, Game, The Scalding Rooms, and Rain) and three collections of short stories (Use Once Then Destroy, Born with Teeth, and I Will Surround You). One was the winner of the August Derleth Award for Best Novel, while The Unblemished won the International Horror Guild Award for Best Novel. He also received a British Fantasy Award for his novella The Scalding Rooms. He is an associate lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University and lives in Manchester, UK, with his wife and three sons.

“Sunflower Junction” © 2017 Simon Avery. First Publication: Black Static #57.

“Swift to Chase” © 2017 Laird Barron. First Publication: Adam’s Ladder, eds. Michael Bailey & Darren Speegle.

“Fallow” © 2017 Ashley Blooms. First Publication: Shimmer #37.

“Children of Thorns, Children of Water” © 2017 Aliette de Bodard. Exclusive for The House of Binding Thorns preorders/Uncanny #17.

“On Highway 18” © 2017 Rebecca Campbell. First Publication: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September-October 2017.

“Witch Hazel” © 2017 Jeffrey Ford. First Publication: Haunted Nights, eds. Ellen Datlow & Lisa Morton.

“The Bride in Sea-Green Velvet” © 2017 Robin Furth. First Publication: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July/August 2017).

“Little Digs” © 2017 Lisa L. Hannett. First Publication: The Dark #20.

“The Thule Stowaway” © 2017 Maria Dahvana Headley. First Publication: Uncanny #14.

“The Eyes Are White and Quiet” © 2017 Carole Johnstone. First Publication: New Fears, ed. Mark Morris.

“Mapping the Interior” © 2017 Stephen Graham Jones. First Publication: Mapping the Interior (Tor.com Books/Tom Doherty Associates).

“Don’t Turn on The Lights” © 2017 Cassandra Khaw. First Publication: Nightmare #61.

“The Dinosaur Tourist” © 2017 Caitlín R. Kiernan. First Publication: Sirenia Digest #139.

“Survival Strategies” © 2017 Helen Marshall. First Publication: Black Static #60.

“Red Bark and Ambergris” © 2017 Kate Marshalk. First Publication: Beneath Ceaseless Skies #232.

“Skins Smooth as Plantain, Hearts Soft as Mango” © Ian Muneshwar.First Publication: The Dark #27.

“Everything Beautiful is Terrifying” © 2017 M. Rickert. First Publication: Shadows and Tall Trees 7, ed. Michael Kelly.

“Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™” © 2017 Rebecca Roanhorse. First Publication: Apex #99.

“Graverobbing Negress Seeks Employment” © Eden Royce. First Publication: The “Spilling Tea” issue (#2) of Fiyah Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction.

“Moon Blood-Red, Tide Turning” © 2017 Mark Samuels. First Publication: Terror Tales of Cornwall, ed. Paul Finch.

“The Crow Palace” © 2017 Priya Sharma. First Publication: Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales, ed. Ellen Datlow.

“The Swimming Pool Party” © 2017 Robert Shearman. First Publication: Shadows & Tall Trees 7, ed. Michael Kelly.

“The Little Mermaid, in Passing” © 2017 Angela Slatter. First Publication: Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 22 Issue 1.

“Secret Keeper” © 2017 Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam. First Publication: Nightmare #57.

“The Long Fade into Evening” © 2017 Steve Rasnic Tem. First Publication: Darker Companions, eds. Scott David Aniolowski & Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.

“Moon, and Memory, and Muchness” © 2017 Katherine Vaz. First Publication: Mad Hatters and March Hares: All-New Stories from the World of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, ed. Ellen Datlow.

“Exceeding Bitter” © 2017 Kaaron Warren. First Publication: Evil Is a Matter of Perspective: An Anthology of Antagonists, eds. Adrian Collins & Mike Myers.

“Succulents” © 2017 Conrad Williams. First Publication: New Fears, ed. Mark Morris.

“The Lamentation of Their Women” © 2017 Kai Ashante Wilson. First Publication: Tor.com, 24 August 2017.

Paula Guran is an editor, reviewer, and typesetter. In an earlier life she produced weekly email newsletter DarkEcho (winning two Stokers, an IHG award, and a World Fantasy Award nomination), edited magazine Horror Garage (earning another IHG and a second World Fantasy nomination), and has contributed reviews, interviews, and articles to numerous professional publications

This is, if she’s counted correctly, the forty-fifth anthology Guran has edited. Instead of what had become the usual multiple titles per calendar year, it is the only anthology that will appear from her in 2018. That’s probably a refreshing break for most people. She’s got mixed feelings about it herself. After more than a decade of full-time editing, she’s now freelancing. Guran enjoys the variety but regrets the lack of a monthly paycheck.

She has four fabulous grandchildren she would be happy to tell you about.

Guran still lives in Akron, Ohio, but has moved from the crumbling family manse into a condominium apartment. Even though she got rid of a great many books, she still has far too many.

Copyright © 2018 by Paula Guran.

Cover design by Stephen H. Segal.

Cover art by Fernando Cortés.

Ebook design by Neil Clarke.

All stories are copyrighted to their respective authors, and used here with their permission.

ISBN: 978-1-60701-530-7 (ebook)

ISBN: 978-1-60701-528-4 (trade paperback)

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