This page constitutes an extension of the copyright page.

“Silver Temand Gold” by Emma Bull. Copyright © 1992 by Emma Bull. First published in After the King edited by Martin H. Greenberg; Tor Books. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Tinker” by Jack Cady. Copyright © 1992 by Jack Cady. First published in Glimmer Train magazine. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Queequeg by Craig Curtis. Copyright © 1992 by Chicago Review. First published in Chicago Review Vol. 37, number 4. Reprinted by permission of Chicago Review.

“Anima” by M. John Harrison. Copyright © 1992 by Interzone. First published in Interzone, April 1992. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Skin” by Steve Rasnic Tem. Copyright © 1992 by Michael A. Arnzen. First published in Psychos edited by Michael A. Arnzen. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Homunculus: A Novel in One Chapter” by Reginald McKnight. Copyright © 1992 by Reginald McKnight. First appeared in The Colorado College Magazine. By permission of Little, Brown and Company.

The Annunciation by Cristina Peri Rossi. Copyright © 1992 by White Pine Press. First published in Secret Weavers: Stories of the Fantastic by Women Writers of Argentina and Chile edited by Marjorie Agosin. Reprinted by permission of White Pine Press.

“The Bone Woman” by Charles de Lint. Copyright © 1992 by Charles de Lint. First published as a chapbook by Triskell Press. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Story of the Eldest Princess” by A. S. Byatt. Copyright © 1992 by Christine Park and Caroline Heaton. First published in Caught in a Story: Contemporary Fairytales and Fables edited by Christine Park and Caroline Heaton; Vintage. Reprinted by permission of the Peters Fraser & Dunlop Group Ltd.

“Calcutta, Lord of Nerves” by Poppy Z. Brite. Copyright © 1992 by John Skipp and Craig Spector. First published in Still Dead edited by John Skipp and Craig Spector; Bantam Books. Reprinted by permission of the author.

In the Looking Glass, Life Is Death” by Jessica Amanda Salmonson. Copyright © 1992 by Jessica Amanda Salmonson. First published in Deathrealm #17, Fall, 1992. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Parakeet and the Cat” by Scott Bradfield. Copyright © 1992 by Scott Bradfield. First published in Conjunctions: 18 Bard College Literary Magazine. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

“Glory” by Nicholas Royle. Copyright © 1992 by Nicholas Royle. First published in Narrow Houses Vol. 1, edited by Peter Crowther; Little, Brown (U.K.) Ltd. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Murder Mysteries” by Neil Gaiman. Copyright © 1992 by Neil Caiman. First published in Midnight Graffiti edited by Jessica Horsting and James Van Hise; Warner Books. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Hungry” by Steve Rasnic Tem. Copyright © 1992 by Steve Rasnic Tem. First published in Borderlands 3 edited by Thomas Monteleone; Borderlands Press. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Playing With” by M. R. Scofidio. Copyright© 1992 by M. R. Scofidio. First published mThe Urbanite #2, The Party Issue. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Human Remains” by Edward Bryant. Copyright © 1992 by Edward Bryant. First published in Darker Passions, Roadkill Press. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“It Comes and Goes” by Robert Silverberg. Copyright © 1992 by Agberg, Ltd. First published in Playboy, January 1992. Reprinted by permission of the author and Agberg, Ltd.

“The Bewitched Burr” by Grozdana Olujic. English translation copyright © 1992 by Conjunctions. First published in Conjunctions: 18 Bard College Literary Magazine. Reprinted by permission of Jascha Kessler.

“Swimming Lesson” by Charlotte Watson Sherman. Copyright © 1992 by Charlotte Watson Sherman. First published in Killing Color, CALYX Books. Reprinted by permission of CALYX Books.

“Memories of the Flying Ball Bike Shop” by Garry Kilworth. Copyright © 1992 by Bantam Doubleday Dell Magazines. First published in Isaac Asimovs Science Fiction Magazine, June 1992 issue. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Bats” by Diane de Avalle-Arce. Copyright © 1992 by Bantam Doubleday Dell Magazines. First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, August 1992 issue. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Origami Mountain” by Nancy Farmer. Copyright © 1992 by Nancy Farmer. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 1992 issue. Reprinted by permission of the author and her agent, Virginia Kidd.

“Ruby Laughter, Tears of Pearl” by James Powell. Copyright © 1992 by James Powell. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Mid-December 1992 issue. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“I Sing of a Maiden” by Judith Tarr. Copyright © 1992 by Judith Tarr. First published in The Magic of Christmas: Holiday Stories of Fantasy and Science Fiction edited by John Silbersack and Christopher Schelling; Roc Books. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Jane Butler.

“Also Starring” by Cliff Burns. Copyright © 1992 by Cliff Burns. First published in Tesseracts IV edited by Lorna Toolis and Michael Skeet; Beach Holme Books. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“On Edge” by Christopher Fowler. Copyright © 1992 by Christopher Fowler. First published in Dark Voices 4 edited by David Sutton and Stephen Jones; Pan Books, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Martyrdom” by Joyce Carol Oates. Copyright © 1992 by The Ontario Review, Inc. First published in MetaHorror edited by Dennis Etchison; Dell Books. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, John Hawkins & Associates, Inc.

“The Second Bakery Attack” by Haruki Murakami. Copyright © 1993 by Haruki Murakami. From The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

“A Little Night Music” by Lucius Shepard. Copyright © 1992 by Lucius Shepard. First published in Omni magazine, March 1992 issue. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Tom and Jerry Visit England” by Jo Shapcott. Copyright © 1992 by Jo Shapcott. Reprinted from Phrase Book by Jo Shapcott (1992) by permission of Oxford University Press.

“The Sluice” by Stephen Gallagher. Copyright © 1992 by Stephen Gallagher. First published in Narrow Houses Vol. 1 edited by Peter Crowther; Little, Brown (U.K.) Ltd. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Ratbird” by Brian W. Aldiss. Copyright © 1992 by Brian W. Aldiss. First published in New Worlds 2 edited by David Garnett, consultant editor Michael Moorcock. Reprinted by permission of the author and his agent, Robin Straus Agency, Inc.

“The Sailor Who Sailed After the Sun” by Gene Wolfe. Copyright © 1992 by Gene Wolfe. First published in Grails, Quests, Visitations and Other Occurences edited by Richard Gilliam, Martin H. Greenberg and Edward D. Kramer; Unnameable Press. Reprinted by permission of the author and his agent, Virginia Kidd.

“On Death and the Deuce" by Rick Bowes. Copyright © 1992 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 1992 issue. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore” by Harlan Ellison. Copyright © 1991 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation. Reprinted by arrangement with, and permission of, the author and the author’s agent, Richard Curtis Associates, Inc., New York. All rights reserved.

“Graves” by Joe W. Haldeman. Copyright © 1992 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October/November 1992 issue. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Ugly File” by Ed Gorman. Copyright © 1992 by Ed Gorman. First published in Prisoners; CD Publications. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Elfhouses” by Midori Snyder. Copyright © 1992 by Peggy Omara. First published in Mothering Magazine # 64, Summer 1992 issue. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Candles on the Pond” by Sue Ellen Sloca. Copyright © 1992 by Sue Ellen Sloca. First published as Short Story Paperback # 59, Pulphouse Publishing. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Tree of Life, Book of Death” by Crania Davis. Copyright © 1992 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 1992 issue. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Puja” by D. R. McBride. Copyright © 1992 by D. R. McBride. First published in Grue Magazine #14. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Hermione and the Moon” by Clive Barker. Copyright © 1992 by Clive Barker. First published in The New York Times, October 30, 1992. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Absence of Beast by Graham Masterton. Copyright © 1992 by Graham Masterton. First published in Dark Voices 4 edited by David Sutton and Stephen Jones; Pan Books Ltd. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Rat Catcher” by Steve Rasnic Tem. Copyright © 1992 by Steve Rasnic Tem. First published in Dark at Heart edited by Karen and Joe R. Lansdale; Dark Harvest Books. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Will" by Jane Yolen. Copyright © 1992 by Jane Yolen. First published in The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, Spring 1992 Volume 3, Number 3. Reprinted by permission of the author and her agent, Curtis Brown, Ltd.

“The Question of the Grail” by Jane Yolen. Copyright © 1992 by Jane Yolen. First published in Grails, Quests, Visitations and Other Occurences edited by Richard Gilliam, Martin H. Greenberg and Edward D. Kramer; Unnameable Press. Reprinted by permission of the author and her agent, Curtis Brown, Ltd.

“In the Season of the Dressing of the Wells” by John Brunner. Copyright © 1992 by Brunner Fact & Fiction Ltd. First published in After the King edited by Martin H. Greenberg; Tor Books. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Blue Stone Emperor’s Thirty-three Wives” by Sara Gallardo. Copyright © 1992 by White Pine Press. First published in Secret Weavers: Stories of the Fantastic by Women Writers of Argentina and Chile edited by Marjorie Agosin. Reprinted by permission of White Pine Press.

“Alice in Prague, or The Curious Room” by Angela Carter. First published in The Village Voice Literary Supplement, March 1992. Reprinted by permission of the author’s agent, Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd.

“Replacements” by Lisa Tuttle. Copyright © 1992 by Lisa Tuttle. First published in MetaHorror edited by Dennis Etchison; Dell Books. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Ghost Village” by Peter Straub. Copyright © 1992 by Peter Straub. First published in MetaHorror edited by Dennis Etchison; Dell Books. Reprinted by permission of the author.

The packager would like to thank Nevenah Smith for her help in making this book possible.

Fantasy, for those new to the field of fantastic literature, is a trickster of a term. To publishers, bookstore managers, and all the salespeople in between whose job it is to get books from an author’s imagination into a reader’s hands, the term fantasy means one thing: a convenient label with which to classify and market a narrow group of “genre” books. To the reader, however, it means another: fantasy fiction permeates the whole field of literature, for works of fantasy can be found in every genre—including the category labeled “mainstream fiction”—and in every area of the arts.

The Years Best Fantasy and Horror annual anthology is intended for the readers, not the marketers, except wherein they be readers too. Thus, in these pages, our definition of fantasy is a reader’s definition. For our purposes, fantasy is a broad and inclusive range of classic and contemporary fictions with magical, fabulous, or surrealistic elements, from novels set in imaginary worlds with their roots in the oral traditions of folktale and mythology, to contemporary stories of Magic Realism in which fantasy elements are used as metaphoric devices to illuminate the world we know. You need never have read the works of J. R. R. Tolkien or his imitators to have read fantasy fiction, for the field also includes magical works as diverse as Shakespeare’s The Tempest, poetry by W. B. Yeats, tales by Oscar Wilde and James Thurber, modern novels by Joyce Carol Oates and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Because there is so much fantastic fiction published each year, both within the fantasy genre and without, it is the purpose of this anthology to seek out stories and poems from as many different sources as possible: newsstand magazines, literary journals, anthologies and collections, mainstream books, small-press books, children’s books, poetry journals, foreign works in translation, and any other publication in which a magical story might be found. The best of these are gathered together in this volume along with a brief overview of fantasy in the contemporary arts in 1992.

This anthology ranges, like the field of contemporary fantastic literature, from the dark magics of horror fiction to the luminous poetics of pure fairy tale. This range shows the many, many ways fabulous elements can be used in modern fiction to explore the shadows of the world we live in, or the shadows of the psyche, or of the human heart. We do not expect every story to be to every reader’s taste, but they all share one important trait: the assertion that an appetite for wonder and mystery is not irrelevant in our modern lives.

In the last several years, the works of the late folklore scholar Joseph Campbell (popularized by the Bill Moyers’ TV interview series The Power of Myth) have done more than even Jungian psychology or the efforts of fantasy fiction writers to bring our world heritage of myth and folklore back into modern consciousness. The mythopoetic men’s movement spawned by Robert Bly’s Iron John is another area in which myth and magical stories are used as metaphors to explore the complexities of modern society—and while one may agree or disagree with Bly’s particular ideas on the subject of gender relations, he has certainly tapped, like Campbell, into the late-twentieth-century hunger for the pan-cultural traditional stories that connect us to the centuries of men and women who have walked the earth before us.

In 1992, Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s mythopsychological study Women Who Run with the Wolves hit the best-seller lists. Touted by some as a woman’s answer to Iron }ohn, it is in fact a book written not only for women but for the men who live and work beside them, and for the feminine aspects within every man as well. In addition to her psychological credentials, Dr. Estes is an experienced oral storyteller, and the book is full of magical tales gathered from many cultures—including cultures native to our American continent. Written in the personal, poetic language of a traveling storyteller rather than a clinician, Women Who Run with the Wolves makes a compelling case for the importance of honoring Story, Myth, and Dream in daily life.

In The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell states: “A dream is a personal experience of that deep, dark ground that is the support of our conscious lives, and myth is the society’s dream. . . . Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are artists of one kind or another. The function of the artist is the mythologization of the environment and the world.”

Susan Cooper, in her essay “Fantasy in the Real World,” elaborates upon this idea:

It is interesting to note that in late-twentieth-century American society, the collective myths and symbols that are most pervasive in our culture are the dark ones: vampires, ghosts, demon children, supernatural serial killers, and ghouls risen from the grave. The steady popularity of the books of J. R. R. Tolkien and his successors is greatly overshadowed by the vast multimedia popularity of darker fantasies in the form of horror fiction, comics, and films.

In mass-market publishing, horror fiction is usually published under a separate imprint from fantasy fiction—yet much of the best work written in the last couple of years in the fantasy genre is dark fantasy, falling somewhere in that twilight realm that lies between the two fields. It is interesting that works with a dark, horrific edge are automatically considered by some critics to be more adult, more serious, more sophisticated than even the most poetic and well-written magical fantasy tale. Is it a product of human nature, or merely the times we live in, that as a society we are quicker to believe in and take interest in the portrayal of violence and evil? Or that these things are hip and sexy, while tales of wonder and the miraculous are pushed to the children’s shelves?

Fiction is a place where all things can be faced, all issues explored; dark fantasy and horror are important in this regard, and I mean no disrespect to the makers of those arts. But it is of interest to me how much more difficult it is to persuade the modern reader to “suspend disbelief” (to use Coleridge’s phrase) for the miraculous in life as well as for the horrific. And how difficult it is to write mythic or magical fantasy that is as complex and as vivid as the world around us.

Ursula K. Le Guin commented ten years ago (in a 1982 symposium talk titled “Facing It,” published in her 1989 collection of essays, Dancing at the Edge of the World):

The worst of the fantasy books published today are just such simplistic tales. Critics decry the endless series books published in the genre—yet dividing a story into several books is merely a form, a device, neither inherently good nor bad. It is what the author does with the form that counts. Unfortunately, what some writers choose to do is merely attempt to mimic Tolkien or some other favorite writer, rather than crafting stories out of their own experience, their own history and heart. As readers we should expect more—and support those attempts to offer us more. We sometimes forget that we are not the passive recipients of whatever the publishing industry chooses to send to us; we have vital input into the publishing process every time we put our money down for a well-written book rather than a shoddy one, or give a new and unfamiliar author a try.

It is a truism among genre editors that a bad fantasy story is one of the easiest things to write (as the stacks of unsolicited manuscripts in publishing offices can attest) and a good one is one of the hardest. Nonetheless there are many writers using the fantasy form to tell complex, thought-provoking, and thoroughly adult tales—although to find them you must sometimes stray beyond the genre shelves. The modern English-language Magic Realists (inspired by such foreign writers as Isabel Allende, Italo Calvino, Naquib Mahfouz, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who have never felt themselves constrained by a need for strict realism) are proliferating in the literary mainstream. Fantasy is flourishing outside of the genre; now, what does this mean for the genre?

The tools of Magic Realism have appeared within the genre as well, as writers like John Crowley, Gene Wolfe, Megan Lindholm, and Charles de Lint—to name but a few—use fantastical elements within a tale as a way of illuminating both the dark and the bright of modern life. In an interview on fantasy in Locus magazine (April 1992), Ellen Kushner commented:

Adult fantasy as a distinct publishing genre came into existence in the late sixties and early seventies with the republication of Tolkien’s Middle Earth opus, and the novels published under the Ballantine Sign of the Unicorn imprint. Without ignoring the fact that there are always new young writers and new young readers coming into the field, the genre as a whole is indeed coming into a more mature age in the 1990s. It is up to us—readers, writers, publishers, booksellers—to determine whether age means growth or decay, and to define the field in the years to come. My guess is that the best fantasy fiction will share the same qualities as the best of literature as a whole—for we are one branch on that tree, not a different or lesser tree altogether. As we move toward the changes the twenty-first century will bring, and the need for myth and fiction to address them, I suggest we keep in mind Annie Dillard’s reflections on The Writing Life:

Fantasy at its best is a dream from which we wake refreshed, enlightened, or transformed. It takes us away from the world we know only to return us to it again with a deeper understanding of its dark shadows, and a clearer vision for its wonders.

Nineteen ninety-two will be remembered in the horror field as the Year of the Vampire. The latest volume in Anne Rice’s vampire chronicles, The Tale of the Body Thief, made the national best-seller lists, and Francis Ford Coppola’s film version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula dominated the media for months, pre- and postrelease, even though the film itself failed to perform up to expectations (despite its operatic beauty). These two major works were just the most visible in yet another apparent resurgence of popularity for the vampire. Vampires and vampirism have continually retained a hold on the imaginations of readers and film-goers (particularly since Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat), but 1992 seems to be a peak as anthologies, novels, short stories, movies, and related nonfiction books combined to reach a new high.

For me, though, the most exciting event of the year in horror was the Academy Awards’ honoring Jonathan Demme’s film of Thomas Harris’s psychological horror novel The Silence of the Lambs with five Oscars: Screenplay, Actor and Actress, Direction and Best Picture. Another SF/horror film, Terminator 2: Judgment Day deservedly dominated the technical awards.

The first U.S. trade paperback edition of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses was published by “The Consortium, Inc.,” an anonymous collection of publishers, with the support of writers and rights groups. It appeared March 25, in a reported print run of 100,000, to initially lackluster sales. In the meantime, negotiations between British and Iranian officials about lifting the fatwa (death sentence) against Rushdie failed to make progress in May. Despite this, Rushdie made unannounced public appearances in Spain, and Boulder, Colorado.

And in the final year of the Bush administration, censorship got in its last licks, with the ban of certain “offensive” trading cards. In April, before Eclipse even issued their True Crime trading cards, The New York Post screamed “Pols Vow Crackdown on Cards of Killers” and ran a photograph of the mother of a murdered young woman under blow-ups of the Charles Manson, Richard Speck, and Jeffrey Dahmer trading cards. By June, Nassau County, New York, banned the sale of the cards to children under seventeen and legislatures around the United States were trying to do the same.

Former President Bush’s opinion to the contrary, the recession was still in full swing, causing a major upheaval at Bantam where new president and publisher Irwyn Applebaum cut the mass market list from thirty to twenty titles, cut the hardcover list by a third, streamlined the company by combining hardcover, trade paperback, and mass market responsibilities, and laid off between forty and fifty full-time and contract employees. This transpired only months after Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine (now called Asimov’s Science Fiction), Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, Ellery Queens Mystery Magazine, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, their inventory, plus subsidiary rights in published stories, were sold by Davis Publications to Dell Magazines, part of the Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group. The new publisher is Christopher Haas-Heye, president and publisher of Dell Magazines.

Pulphouse Publishing virtually collapsed, at least temporarily, as a major player in the fields of science fiction, fantasy, and horror by the end of 1992 with the departure of crucial members of the editorial and production staff for different parts of the country. Production has slowed to near-zero until a new crew is trained. Pulphouse magazine, which skipped its December issue, will continue to be published under the editorship of Jonathan Bond. All book production has been put on hold, with about ten short story paperbacks plus three Axolotl Press novellas planned for 1993. Pulphouse has also dropped production work for other publishers. Only time will tell whether or not the corporation will return to its former prominence.

The Abyss horror line edited by Jeanne Cavelos for Dell Books published its first hardcover in October under the Delacorte/Abyss imprint. It was Lost Souls, a first novel by Poppy Z. Brite about vampires.

Weird Tales decided to drop its oversize-digest format for a more conventional 8!/2-by-ll size and return to saddle-stitched covers. The new format will be much cheaper to produce and is preferred by advertisers and distributors; Space and Time, the long-standing small-press fiction magazine edited by Gordon Linzner, has been sold to Jonathan Post’s Emerald City Publishing. Linzner continues as editor, and the magazine, which publishes fantasy, science fiction, and horror, will maintain its twice-yearly schedule but switch to a 96-page perfect-bound format; John Pelan, founder and former publisher of Axolotl Press has announced the founding of a new company, Silver Salamander Press, issuing limited editions in variant states, following “the same editorial direction that made the first several Axolotl titles so successful.” Pelan plans to release “no more than three or four titles per year.”

Publishers Weekly ran a half-page ad from Zebra Books on June 15, announcing the withdrawal of two horror novels by a pseudonymous writing team, explaining that sections of each novel were found to be plagiarized from Dean R. Koontz’s 1983 novel Phantoms. Koontz took legal action after a fan alerted him to the copying in a letter giving specific instances of plagiarism and similarities to his novel. The ad was part of a legal settlement.

Usually I’m griping because most of what happens in the field of SF/fantasy/horror film is exceedingly conservative and predictable. The movies may be highly crafted, but so infrequently do they hit the screen with any sense of real adventure. That’s too often left to the vagaries of mainstream film and the marketing of same. Indeed, in 1992 Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game came nearly unheralded to U.S. screens; but then succeeded wildly because of an astonishing word-of-mouth campaign combined with a collective, consensual oath of silence taken by the mushrooming audience. This mainstream movie was a mixture of political thriller, contemporary romance, and something more. It wasn’t SF. Fantasy? Some in the audience thought so. Horror? Well, without violating the audience’s conspiracy, let me just say that at that particular point in the plot, the audience reaction almost invariably was shockier than any of the screams you ever heard in Psycho. There was probably no film in 1992 that galvanized more viewer self-examination of assumptions and triggered more post-theater discussion. All this from the director of A Company of Wolves, The Miracle, and—as looks more and more likely—the long-awaited Interview with a Vampire.

Anyhow, as I said, that was a high-water mark in the mainstream. I could rhapsodize about Unforgiven and a variety of other nonfantasy films as well, but, in this venue, I won’t. I just wanted to establish a high point or two for comparison.

So what was cool down here in the ghetto—especially allowing a few expansion seams in the walls of the genre? I want to start with Rain Without Thunder. This is a highly political, non-car-chase, no-special-effects, very talky science fiction drama. Talking heads, even? Yep, but I still found it more provocative, more involving, more entertaining, than, say, My Dinner with Andre. Director and writer Gary Bennett is also a lawyer, a background which makes itself readily apparent in his debut film. Rain Without Thunder (the title’s from a Frederick Douglass quote) takes place fifty years from now in what seems at first to be a kinder, gentler America. Prisons, for example, have been euphemized into the appearance of country clubs. But don’t be fooled. A mother and daughter (Betty Buckley and Ali Thomas), imprisoned for fetal murder, are serving as the test case for the Unborn Child Kidnapping Act. It seems the mom and mom-to-be went to Sweden for an abortion (“termination,” in future parlance), in a time set twenty years after abortion has been made illegal in the U.S.A. The film is structured as a futuristic documentary, setting up its story by intercutting interviews with a variety of interested parties. Jeff Daniels plays the women’s defense attorney; Linda Hunt is the head of the Atwood Society; Frederick Forrest plays the warden of a prison for convicted fetus-murderers; Graham Greene is a coldly bizarre cultural commentator; Sheila Pinkham effectively evokes an elderly twentieth-century feminist who, in her middle years, watched everything go down the tubes. What makes this film highly effective science fiction is the quality of its extrapolation. Gary Bennett’s take on the future is not simplistic, however sympathetic it is to women’s rights. Rain Without Thunder is a complex and balanced piece that offers empathy to all sides. The writer/director knows the cutting edge of change is a serrated blade. He fleshes out a future lxxii dangerously close right now to coming into existence. This is remarkable filmmaking that should be seen by everyone interested in issues, drama, or political vision. My screening pass said, “This film leans toward the pro-choice view which may be uncomfortable to some.” Ah, I thought. A can’t-miss-this-one. I was right. What about that lack of car chases? Go flip on Cinemax and watch Freejack ten or twenty times.

The funniest SF-horror flick I saw in the last year was Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s Delicatessen. This French post-apocalypse farce is as dark as the shadows a hundred yards from the deli/apartment house where the film is set, and as sharp as the shining cleaver the Butcher (Jean-Claude Dreyfus) uses to slice and dice a steady stream of new handymen hired by this bastion of civilization in a tired, depressed world. Then comes a new handyman (Dominique Pinon) who is brighter and more resourceful than his unlucky predecessors. He even falls in love with the Butcher’s cellist daughter (Marie-Laure Dougnac) and joins her on duets playing the saw. Many of you will have previously seen Pinon playing a killer in Diva. Working from a script credited to the directors plus Gilles Adrien, the filmmakers craft a deliciously gross comedic extravaganza in which weird intelligence is always in ample evidence. If this movie were a storyboard, the pictures would have to be by the Far Side’s Gary Larson. Or maybe John Callahan. There are endless wonderful touches, but for me the high point is the physical comedy of the gradually flooding bathroom scene. This is WC humor at its very best, and I’m not talking the Benny Hill variety.

Not quite as funny (or lucid, or, urn, tasteful) but even more manic, is Phallus in Wonderland, a one-hour music video SF/heavy metal parody by GWAR. GWAR is a bunch of Richmond rockers and art students who decided to put on the whole metal industry with outrageous costumes, over-the-edge lyrics, and consummately tasteless—but hilarious—stage shows. GWAR uses all the best conventions of pulp fiction, SF, and Lovecraftian horror to, er, mount their productions. The video incorporates much of the music from GWAR’s third album, America Must Be Destroyed. The plot deals with the final conflict between the alien GWARriors and the (presumably fundamentalist, tight-assed, ultraconservative) Morality Squad. There is a lengthy trial scene that’s not a whole lot like, say, the one in A Few Good Men. GWAR singer Oderus Urungus has his penis chain-sawed free by Morality Squad goon, Corporal Punishment. The penis, also known, among other things, as the Cuttlefish of Cthulhu, has its own cheerful identity and is put on trial for obscenity. Wrapping this all together is a truly astonishing amount of over-the-top violence, cheesy effects, and sublimely grotesque puppet work. I watched this with jaw occasionally agape, and frequent laughter bubbling up like dead rats surfacing in ichor. A lot of this is akin to Clive Barker meets Abbott and Costello. Great stuff. Phallus in Wonderland made it onto the final ballot for the Grammies in the long-form video category, but was beaten out by Annie Lennox’s Diva. Go figure.

While we’re on strange, I want to mention Joe Christ’s new short film, Crippled. This is rebel filmmaking. Not Profoundly Handicapped. Not Really Differently Enabled. But Crippled. It’s about a paralyzed woman who, after being subjected to an inattentive home-care person, goes and hires a really abusive one. I mention this amiably savage little movie because among the cast, Nanzi X. Regalia, Margaret  Petrov, and Joe Christ, there is a pseudonymous horror writer who would be instantly recognizable to you all, who’s making an interesting film debut.

Other strange ones. David Lynch’s Twin Peaks prequel, Fire Walk with Me, was a tragically mixed bag. The film depicts the sad last week of Laura Palmer, the character whose violent death catalyzed all the convoluted happenings of the surreal TV series. The best thing about this feature is that Sheryl Lee gets to play her character alive. She’s awfully good. But as for the rest of the movie, I think it would be acutely difficult to follow for anyone not familiar with the TV series. Something like watching A Few Good Men dubbed into Albanian.

Stranger and more rewarding was David Cronenberg’s bizarre tackling of William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. Working with producer Jeremy Thomas, Cronenberg adapts Burroughs in a hallucinatory take that isn’t so much a direct translation of the novel—were that even possible—as it is a separate-but-equal plumbing of the kinked-out depths of a writer’s soul. Peter Weller plays the writer. Roy Scheider does a nice turn as a not-nice doctor. For those who relish the grotesque, the picture’s full of bug-powder snorting, weird mugwump creatures, a dream Tangier and the even spacier Interzone, and typewriters that melt down into fleshy, insectile, talking goo. The key word to Naked Lunch is hallucinatory. But as weirded out as the film appears to be, ultimately it seems to make sense. Cronenberg did a good job.

There were two pictures that tried to capture the shadow-haunted social/political dreamscapes of deepest, darkest Europe. Steven Soderbergh followed up sex, lies, and videotape with Kafka. Essentially this is a fictional construction in which Kafka the Man and Kafka the Worldview are merged. In other words, this movie puts Franz Kafka into the literal world he reflected in his writings. Soderbergh gets some mileage out of the same sort of black-and-white to color and back to black-and-white sandwich that worked so well in The Wizard of Oz. Jeremy Irons as Kafka is, as one would expect, wonderful. But the film never quite makes it over the top, suffering, as it does, from a critical lack of obsessive conviction. I don’t think Woody Allen has that problem in Shadows and Fog. This is another foggy, nighttime, Germanic fantasy. Shot in black and white by Carlo Di Palma, it claustrophobically evokes a crumbling European city full of maze-like streets. There’s a killer loose in the fog and vigilantes are out to get him. And director/writer Woody Allen is in the middle. The music by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht effectively evokes the mood Allen wants. Part of the fun in this one is trying to spot the cameos by Madonna, Jodie Foster, and a variety of others. At the same time, Shadows and Fog, whether or not you suspiciously want to see it as a metaphor for Woody Allen’s own peculiar mind, is an effective evocation of strangeness. And no, it’s not as funny as his early movies. . .

Wim Wenders got in on the act with an odd science fiction film called Until the End of the World. It’s a near-future road picture in which William Hurt’s on the run in a landscape crumbling at the seams all the way from Europe to California to the Australian Outback. You do have to swallow the notion that an Indian nuclear-power satellite is about to go critical, and when it does, the EMP will do some pretty weird things. Everything works well until the ending. Blooie. Meltdown time. It’s sort of like no one was quite sure what it really was all supposed to mean.

The much-touted biggies for the year were Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula and Tim Burton’s Batman Returns. Naturally neither one could match the incredible density of rumor and hype surrounding each. Dracula is one of 1992’s most beautiful films; set design, art direction, and cinematography are all breathtaking. I had the opportunity to hear Francis Ford Coppola speaking in person about the making of the movie. He claimed that he had paid much attention both to researching the historical Dracula and to translating the Bram Stoker novel conscientiously. He should be given points on both counts. The only trouble is, the shoehorning of the historical Vlad theme sticks out of the whole movie like, well, a sore fang. It’s not fatally intrusive, but it does jar and distract. The worst problem is casting. Keanu Reeves plays Jonathan Harker as a refugee from Bill-and-Ted Land. That’s terrifying. Winona Ryder, whom I love dearly, can’t seem, as Mina, to generate all that much chemistry with Gary Oldman’s Dracula. And the wonderful Anthony Hopkins goes way over the top with Van Helsing. He eats so much scenery that Allan Rickman in Robin Hood, by comparison, seems the very soul of restraint. At the same time, to be fair, I have to grant a lot of credit to Tom Waits for his portrayal of Renfield. This year the ever-fertile field of vampire film was blessed with two first-rate Ren-fields (the other being Paul Reubens in Buffy the Vampire Slayer). But the distinguishing characteristic of Coppola’s treatment of Stoker was its operatic quality. Overblown and passionate, Dracula shared this approach with 1990’s Godfather III. With both films, audiences little accustomed to grand opera in the Italian manner got solid lessons in operatic structure. Not little tasty tidbits, mind you, but full seven-course, three-act feasts.

As sequels go, Batman Returns wasn’t too bad. At the same time, director Tim Burton didn’t exactly invest the big-budget production with a lot of soul, and Daniel Waters’s script could have used a bit of wit. Villains Danny De Vito (the Penguin) and Christopher Walken (developer Max Schreck) together didn’t generate as much heat as Jack Nicholson’s Joker did in the first film. The brighter note in Returns was Michelle Pfeiffer as Selina Kyle and her alter ego, Catwoman. And I did appreciate yet another askew Paul Reubens cameo as the Penguin’s father. All in all, the movie was interesting to watch for Burton’s trademark quirkiness and striking design, but it never was terribly involving. More actual passion seemed to be raised by the animal rights movement’s protest of Batman Returns for alleged cruelty to penguins. Much of the wind was taken out of those sails when Burton pointed out that the penguins wearing weaponry and rocket packs were aquatic seabird robots, and that the live bird-actors had not been kidnapped from Antarctica, but rather had been recruited from zoos just down the Pacific coast. . .

Then there was a big sequel that had an intensely difficult time finding its own identity. It seemed like Alien³ had taken forever to put together. Zillions of dollars in development money had been spent on director after director, script after script, before a millimeter of film was shot. Scripts came from both William Gibson and Eric Red, among others, and all were discarded. There was the famous premise of a handmade wooden planet inhabited by monks. . .  And then it evolved to the cheerless world of Fiorine, a prison planet inhabited by a colony of convicts-turned-fundamentalists. British rock video director David Fincher helmed, using a composite script from Larry Ferguson, Walter Hill, and David Giler. Initial critical and audience response was not terrific. People hated the initial disposing of all survivors of the previous films, save Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley. People didn’t like seeing good actors like Charles Dance getting lunched within ten or fifteen seconds of generating some audience interest and sympathy. Viewers especially seemed incensed by Ripley’s Terminator 2-ish departure from the whole depressing Alien saga. At least in T2, the viewer was allowed to feel a lump in the throat. . . . But as I said above, I think the problem was identity. Alien was the consummate tekkie nightmare of Gothic sexual violence. Aliens was a best-of-breed, rock ’em, sock ’em adventure. Both directors, Ridley Scott and James Cameron, had a coherent and compelling vision of what they were trying for. I’m not so sure David Fincher did. Alien^? was not, I really feel, the disaster so many claimed. But I can understand the disappointment of so many. Whatever territory Fincher and his screenwriters tried to carve out, it simply did not sufficiently engage the heart or the brain. It was indeed good to see Lance Henriksen get some on-screen time; but that didn’t make up for the plot’s clumsiness, Ripley’s thankless role, or the whole sour feel of the production. And it was probably a really bad idea to allow the aliens so much on-camera time in full view, in good light. But although Alien⁴ seems a doubtful project, there are ways. . . What if Ripley’s daughter didn’t really die, and grows to adulthood wondering whatever truly happened to her mom, and then goes against the wishes of the PR guys at the Company and picks up a gun and a credit chip and goes looking? And it turns out that Jonesy the cat has begat about ten generations of kittens, and one goes along with the woman who looks so uncannily like her own mother? Never mind.

For less pretentious big-screen science fiction, Geoff Murphy’s Freejack looked just the ticket. And indeed, it has its moments. Based very loosely on Robert Sheckley’s Immortality, Inc., this is lite adventure SF of the predictable variety. Emilio Estevez is a contemporary race driver who’s yanked away from the very moment of his death in a spectacular crash and transported to the year 2009. Kidnapping healthy bodies from the past seems to be the SOP for important honchos in the future—since there’s a means by which they can have their mentalities implanted in the new bodies. Estevez finds himself on the run from a very rich industrialist (Anthony Hopkins). The guy actually doing the pursuing is Mick Jagger, looking very much as if he’s genuinely getting a kick out of the role. It’s all fun, but it’s still pretty silly stuff.

For more silly stuff, I trust you saw Buffy the Vampire Slayer, directed by Fran Kuzui from Joss Whedon’s script. This was a reasonable B-movie approach to the burning question: What if the latest in an unbroken line of vampire slayers down through the ages should turn out to be a perky val-girl, a California blonde? Kristy Swanson certainly looked the part as Buffy. Rutger Hauer, however, didn’t get nearly enough screen time as the chief bloodsucking antagonist. Paul Reubens continued his comeback with a wonderful turn as a Renfield, and performed one of the all-time great death scenes. Unfortunately “silly” never quite evolved into either chilling or consistently funny. Lots of wasted opportunities here.

And for something even sillier . . . How about Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren in Universal Soldier? Roland Emerich’s slam-bam action B-movie concerned American soldiers killed in Vietnam, then resurrected as a bionic, superhuman, counter-terrorist force. But then programming goes screwy and a badass cyborg zombie (Lundgren) has to pursue-with-intent-to-kill a good cyborg zombie (Van Damme). It’s comic-book violence. Fun, but requires you to shift your higher functions into neutral.

Ditto, but without the violence, can be said for Encino Man. Les Mayfield’s comedy about a prehistoric dude (Brendan Fraser) unearthed in Southern California by a couple of high school guys (Sean Astin and Pauly Shore) has its moments when the jokes work, but still makes you nostalgic for Waynes World.

Speaking of which . . . Penelope Spheeris struck a three-bagger with her comedy vehicle for the Saturday Night Live team of Wayne and Garth (Mike Myers and Dana Carvey). The saga of these hapless suburban metal fans and underground TV stars is funny and even occasionally affecting. And, as everyone now knows, the “Bohemian Rhapsody” sequence brought immense new life to Queen’s album sales, though, sadly, not to Freddy Mercury.

While I’m talking about hits, Aladdin should definitely be mentioned. Disney released this one for Christmas. It’s top-quality, classic, Disney animation. It’s also one of the highest-grossing, fastest-breaking Disney animated features ever. Robin Williams gets a lot of the credit with a fantastic off-the-wall performance as the voice of the Genie. The Arab-American antidefamation organizations have protested the film for stereotyping Arabs, but they appear to be the only folks not buying tickets.

Robin Williams didn’t do nearly as well, either in his performance itself, or by carrying the day, in Barry Levinson’s Toys. This well-intentioned comedy about a former military officer taking over a toy factory, then determining to swing production from happy playthings to war toys, before being thwarted by Williams and his friends, just sagged to the ground and flopped around for a while. Maybe it was the lack of a backbone. Toys tried very hard, but it just couldn’t match laughs with all its good intentions.

A third Christmas holiday movie was The Muppets’ Christmas Carol. Directed by Jim Henson’s son and heir, Brian, this was a sincere and pretty accurate translation of the Dickens classic. Playing off against the likes of Kermit and Miss Piggy, Michael Caine did a fine job as Scrooge. This was successful enough; it’ll probably become a perennial Christmas classic on video.

So how would you like to see a combination of splatter and political consciousness? Talk about baking a cake and then eating it with a big knife . . . Polish director Richard Bugajski’s Clear Cut tackles that challenge, but not particularly well. Written by Rob Forsyth from M. T. Kelly’s novel A Dream Like Mine, the movie shows lots of great Canadian wilderness scenery. Ron Lea plays a liberal lawyer representing the interests of American Indians trying to keep a logging company from clear-cutting their pristine home. The good guys lose in court, and Lea finds himself trapped in the mysterious machinations of an enigmatic trickster-figure (Graham Greene). Greene’s character kidnaps the timber boss and takes him out into the boonies in company with the lawyer. The attorney has expressed a desire to see the white logger pay; Greene carries out the wish. Thus we get to see a graphic depiction of the timberman’s lower leg being flayed alive. The movie’s earnest, the scenery’s gorgeous, but the metaphysical depth is shallow and confused. Too bad.

You could see even more spiritual melodrama merged with an American Indian backdrop in Michael Apted’s Thunderheart. The cast is pretty fine in this tale of a young FBI agent (Val Kilmer) dispatched to a Sioux reservation to investigate a murder. Kilmer doesn’t even look like Kilmer for the first twenty minutes or so. He plays a repressed young quarter-Sioux man who is more than a little wary about getting in touch with the inner ancestor. The ubiquitous Graham Greene is present as a tribal cop, along with Sam Shepard as Kilmer’s FBI partner. Sheila Tousey does very, very well as a young teacher who adds tension to Kilmer’s life, but without the cliche of developing a relationship. The film’s heart is in the right place, though the New Age/spiritual touches aren’t always convincing. For frequent-flier travelers, the picture starts a touch confusingly when Kilmer is sent from Washington, D.C., to Denver, there presumably to catch a commuter plane to Rapid City. Thanks to the oblivious convenience of stock footage, he’s routed through LAX. Or maybe that’s just another Magic Realist touch.

Last year the so-called director’s cut of Blade Runner was selectively released. This year the version without Harrison Ford’s voice-over narration and the tacked-on happy ending got much wider distribution. Once again viewers could discover that Ridley Scott’s loose translation of Philip K. Dick was sadly underappreciated a decade ago. If you hadn’t seen it before, I hope you caught this re-release on the backswing. If you didn’t, catch this version on videotape and wish you had access to a huge wraparound screen and multitrack Dolby.

For a very-far-back-in-the-pack Blade Runner-inspired wannabe, you could try Split Second, directed by Tony Maylam from a Gary Scott Thompson script. This is a British low-budget production that looks swell and tries very hard to work. In those regards, it is reminiscent of last year’s Hardware: handsome and dumb. Split Second is set in the early twenty-first century in a grungy London being drowned slowly by global warming. There’s a serial killer wired into astrological patterns. Turns out the killer also is capable of incorporating the DNA patterns of its victims. The critter’s nemesis is a rebel cop played by a sadly chunky Rutger Hauer. Turns out as well that the killer and Hauer are somehow on a psychic wavelength. Kim Cattrall plays Hauer’s girlfriend; Neil Duncan does an amusing turn as Hauer’s latest partner (much as with Dirty Harry, being this sort of a cop’s partner is not a great career move); and Michael J. Pollard spritzes up the flooded London sewers as a rat catcher. The creature is eventually unveiled as something of an Alien with cool shades (Gargoyles, no doubt). That’s about it for revelations. This could have been a hell of a picture if only it eventually made sense.

There were two Clive Barker-associated films this past year. One, Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth, was so-so. The other, Candyman, was close to an unqualified triumph. The problem with Hell on Earth was that it veered completely off the track of the fascinating twisted curve established in its two predecessors. Gone is the gradual seduction and corruption of the Kirsty character (Ashley Laurence). Hell on Earth does fine with manic weirdness for its first half, but then degenerates into pretty standard monster schlock. In other words, it starts with a sweetly corrupt dish; then turns to hash smothered in tomato sauce. It does, I must mention, have one of the best, most accurate visions of a rock club ever committed to film; but perhaps that’s only praising with faint damns. I’m afraid director Tony Hickox and screenwriter Peter Atkins got off on a kick of adding lots more Cenobites, but in the process, lost track of the primal Barker vision.

Bernard Rose’s Candyman is much more interesting. One suspects Clive Barker had greater contact with this film, since he was the executive producer and Rose’s script was based on Barker’s own story, “The Forbidden.” Music video-director Rose previously distinguished himself with the horrific childhood fantasy, Pa-perhouse (1988). The film moves Barker’s decaying British urban blightscape to an even grungier Chicago and the Cabrini-Green wasteland. The landscape’s scary already; it gets worse when an urban folklorist (Virginia Madsen) gets on the trail of an urban myth come to life. The Candyman (Tony Todd) does multiple duty, lurking in darkness and springing out through mirrors. He’s the archetypal inner-city image of deep-voiced, smiling death, drugs in one hand, a razor in the other, oblivion always the final result. The tension is great in this movie; the nastiness, delicious. If it has a fault, it’s in the increased degree of plottiness the script adaptation adds to the original story. The addition rings a bit false. And the Philip Glass score is magnificent.

The year saw a trio of Stephen King pictures, more or less. He had nothing formally to do with Pet Sematary II, Mary Lambert’s follow-up to the mild hit scored by her first adaptation of King’s “Monkey’s Paw” homage. The filmmakers whack away at King’s vital theme—the parental fear of losing children—and do a creditable, if not entirely on-target, recap of the original Pet Sematary. Anthony Edwards and Edward Furlong do a decent job as father and son relocating in Maine (though shot in Georgia). It’s all watchable, has its moments, but doesn’t quite hit one out of the park.

King had even less to do with The Lawnmower Man, going so far as to litigate successfully to have his name removed from advertising for the film. One short scene depicting a guy getting mowed to death is about all that remains from King’s original short story. What the story mutated into has to do with what the producers think is virtual reality research. The released feature is damned close to incoherent. Rumor has it that the video release has another 20 minutes or so, and actually makes sense. I’d like to believe that.

Stephen King himself wrote the script for Mick Garris’s Sleepwalkers. This was another good B-movie entertainment with little pretention. I wanted to like it much more than I actually did, because of a few plot and character relationship problems. The story’s about an ancient family of murderous shape-shifters living among us since time immemorial. It seems that only cats are able to sense these creatures’ hidden identity. The cast is pretty good. Alice Krige (remember her in Ghost Story?) plays the mama shape-shifting demon. Madchen Amick plays the high school girl who finds herself attracted to the hunky young shape-shifting son. The cast’s real standout is Clovis, a big gray-striped tom, who gets the lion’s share of cat-lines. The picture also boasts cameo appearances by such as King and Clive Barker, and some great morphing, not only by the shape-shifters, but by automobiles as well. Cool stuff. And it’s nice to see the kitties on the side of all that’s good and virtuous.

Let’s look at a few loonies. Larry Drake gets to play one in the low-budgeted Dr. Giggles. A directing debut by Manny Coto, the movie shows some nice Portland area scenery. And star Drake gets to be a psychopathic doctor fixing family grudges against the community by icing a bunch of irritating teens in all the time-honored atrocious ways. Much of this is supposed to be funny; it sometimes reaches amusing. The movie won’t put you to sleep, but neither will it galvanize much paranoia about your next doctor’s appointment.

John Lithgow gets to go berserk—in more ways than one—in Brian De Palma’s  Raising Cain. As with so much of De Palma’s work, the plot can easily be deconstructed to sheer silliness. But the pace of De Palma’s own script and direction keeps this one going. In its unreeling of revelation after plot revelation about multiple-personality disorder, the filmmaker stuffs this one with endless visual nods to Alfred Hitchcock. But then, that’s nothing new with De Palma. I can’t say this is a magnificent film, but it is a hell of a lot of fun.

I think Stay Tuned was supposed to be extremely funny. I’m not so sure about the percentage of successful guffaws, but the picture is still amusing in an incredibly lightweight way. Peter Hyams directed from a script by Tom S. Parker and Jim Jennewein. John Ritter and Pam Dawber play a couple of parents who run afoul of a demonic plan to steal souls through a giant home theater setup lusted after by unwary consumers. Essentially what happens is that prospective victims get sucked through the set and into a sequence of Satanic virtual reality shows. Some of the set-pieces bite the big one; others are hilarious. But Dawber and Ritter are stereotypically suited for this sort of role.

Death Becomes Her was supposed to be the big-budget supernatural comedy, star-loaded and helmed by Robert Zemeckis. It was pretty good, but didn’t come across with all it promised. Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn play lifelong competitors coming to grips with worldly success, aging, and physical decrepitude. A major issue between them is the man Streep steals early on from Hawn (Bruce Willis). Willis does wonderfully well—he plays his role as a weak-willed plastic-surgeon-turned-Beverly-Hills-mortician in a way that never reminds you of, say, the hero of Die Hard. The fantasy element enters in the form of Isabella Rosselini, a mysterious woman offering the gift of both rejuvenation and physical immortality. The film’s satiric core is this dark grappling with the American desire for constant youth and physical attractiveness. All that’s fine so far as it goes. The script by Martin Donovan and David Koepp and the lavishly gross special effects work on the surface. But the movie just isn’t funny enough. You keep watching situations and listening to scenes that ought to make you laugh. But they don’t. Or at least, not enough. Somewhere along the way, the nervous tissue of this film has broken down. The funny bone and the head bone are no longer connected, alas.

But then things can always be worse. Honey, I Blew Up the Kid, for example. Rick Moranis and his wild and wacky family are back. This time a techno-booboo causes their infant son to grow to War of the Colossal Man-size in Las Vegas. I wanted to laugh. Really I wanted to.

For real laughter, let me sneak two associational pictures into the middle of this pop culture catalog. Jon Avnet’s Fried Green Tomatoes is pretty wonderful. Fannie Flagg and Carol Sobieski’s script gives Kathy Bates, Jessica Tandy, Mary Stuart Masterson, and Mary-Louise Parker an opportunity to shine in this low-budget comedic drama with some tense, some tear-jerking, some very funny moments. There are touches of Southern Gothic, too. I mean, Alive isn’t the only recent film to deal with cannibalism. . . . The other funny—however bitter the laughter— picture is Robert Altman’s The Player. Credit goes both to Altman and his writer, Michael Tolkin, adapting his own novel. This is a merciless insider’s view of the Hollywood process. The terrifying thing is that it’s not satiric exaggeration. Every shot taken, every point scored, is, if anything, an understatement of the madness that is Hollywood and the movie biz. The Player should be required viewing for any of you who wish to become a star on The Coast.

Now, continuing with the theme of human monsters and acute horror (what a segue), I enjoyed more than one of the year’s psychodramas. Things started off with a bang—and a slash, and a ka-clunk!—with Curtis Hanson’s The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, a low-budget melodrama about a mad nanny. Rebecca De Mornay is effective as a woman who believes she’s been hideously wronged and is determined to take out her ill feelings on a yuppie family. It’s not a terrifically suspenseful plot, but I did admire the makers for letting the villain die at the end and not letting her lurch back through four or five false climaxes jason-style.

Jonathan Kaplan’s Unlawful Entry is half of a really neat movie. The paranoid plot conceit is great: What better psycho to menace you and your family than a crazy cop (Ray Liotta) with “Preserve and Protect” on his car and a large-caliber pistol in his belt? Kurt Russell and Madeleine Stowe are a nice young couple who find themselves enmeshed in a decreasing spiral of violence with Liotta after their house is broken into. The first half plays quite well as the whole setup is put in place; then the second half loses its equilibrium and topples over into simplistic melodrama.

But my favorite—and for my money, the most dangerous—crazed killer epic of the year was Basic Instinct. Remember all the publicity, both pro and con? The bondage and the ice pick? The rough sex? The question of what the film had to say about lesbians and bisexuals? The interrogation-room scene? Ah, sweet nostalgia. Now we’ve got Bad Lieutenant to deal with. But back to Basic Instinct. You can argue whether Joe Eszterhas got paid too much for the script ($3 million). You can debate whether Eszterhas and director Paul Verhoeven ran the plot too long, and needlessly (and hopelessly) convoluted it. But none of that stops the movie from being hot, dynamic, and seductive. Michael Douglas plays something of a sleaze as the homicide detective. There are only two sympathetic characters in the primary cast. One is George Dzunda as Douglas’s aging urban cowboy partner. The other is Sharon Stone, the presumed killer. But wait, you say, how can she be sympathetic, being the twisted, maddened, stone-cold ice-pick killer she presumably is? Well, consider this: In a world portrayed as inhabited by guys who are dick-directed dufusses, Stone is an intelligent, self-possessed woman with a sense of humor and in control of her life. She understands, controls, and enjoys her own sexuality. She’s a strong and independent character. So, yes, she does have that one eensey-weensy little foible about sharp objects, but hey, no one’s perfect, right? In any case, I think the case can be made for Stone’s character being the one good role model in the movie. So there.

There were a couple of really good and solid low-budget noir flicks. The first is Carl Franklin’s One False Move. Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson’s script has a small-town Arkansas sheriff (Bill Paxton) joined by a couple of LAPD cops (Jim Metzler and Earl Billings) after a pair of stone killers (Thornton and Michael Beach) and Thornton’s girlfriend (Cynda Williams) have slaughtered a passel of Los Angelenos in a drug rip and are headed back south-by-east. The film’s wonderfully rich and tight. The violent episodes are leavened with tenderness and humor in other scenes. Best of all, the script writers rarely do anything we expect them to.

The movie is full of surprises as the layers of the characters’ personalities start to peel back. Everyone has secrets, it seems. In its dealing with changing attitudes about race and other issues, One False Move is not only a crackling, taut suspense film, it’s an adroitly and carefully textured portrait of the New South. It’s memorable.

Equally memorable is Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. You never actually find out in the film what the title means. But you get some ideas. This is another of those low-budget shockers that drove people out of screenings at film festivals. Just not what some people were expecting, I guess. Freshman director Tarantino keeps his focus tight and taut. After half a dozen men are recruited by a money guy to pull off a jewelry store heist, the robbery goes bad and the surviving crooks realize that one of their number is a traitor, a police informant. Much of the movie hinges on unstinting efforts to find out just who the mole is. There is a scene involving torture, mutilation, and a radio playing Stealers Wheel that will ensure you never hear “Stuck in the Middle with You” without thinking of this scene in Reservoir Dogs. It’s a classic case of imprinting. A large part of why the movie was made at all was due to Harvey Keitel’s clout. Keitel plays one of the gangsters, and is party to a surprising love story integral to the film’s plot and its outcome. Maybe it’s not as startling as The Crying Game, but it’s still a beautifully unexpected (but believable) quirk. Spare and incredibly noir, Reservoir Dogs suggests much good to come in Quentin Tarantino’s future.

Barbet Schroeder’s Single White Female is something of a brisker, more crowdpleasing version of what you might expect Roman Polanski to direct in this vein. Don Ross’s screenplay is drawn from John Lutz’s novel SWF Seeks Same. Bridget Fonda plays a young Manhattan career woman who splits from her boyfriend (Steven Weber) and needs a roommate. She interviews a whole series of young women and finally accepts Jennifer Jason Leigh. Leigh has been a remarkable young actor, whether in The Hitcher, Miami Blues, or any number of others. Here she plays a subtly disturbed, apparently vulnerable young woman who obsesses on her more glamorous, more accepted friend. Fonda finally notices that Leigh is looking more and more like her—hair style, clothing, attraction to the old boyfriend, everything. The film does dp a remarkable job of turning Leigh into a ringer for Fonda, other than the latter’s being about half a head taller than the former. This is a good, intelligent thriller, though the climax has some of the all too frequent usual problems in melodramas of this sort: Is the killer dead? I mean, is she really? Or is she only faking—urrrkkkgggh!

The Vast Wasteland Revisited: The SciFi Channel debuted at long last after nearly being stifled in its cradle. Being acquired by the USA Network gave the cable service the marketing clout it needed. Most of the programming is reruns of all your old favorites, or perhaps not-so-favorites. The service’s original SF dramas have been a disaster. But then the Harlan Ellison commentaries on the Buzz show have been wonderful. So all the returns aren’t in. The SciFi Channel just might make it.

“Quantum Leap” just keeps leaping along. “Beauty and the Beast” died and stayed dead. So did “Twin Peaks,” mercifully. “The Simpsons” are still the Simpsons, and not nearly so dysfunctional as the Bundys. Creator John Kricfalusi apparently got kicked off his own show, “Ren and Stimpy.” Not a good move on management’s part. “Northern Exposure” continued on, just fine (did you see the Thanksgiving episode in which we got to view a beautifully elaborate and highly unusual American Indian commemoration of the white man’s holiday?), and has been joined by another quirky series, “Picket Fences” (and the “Twin Peaks” episode in which their favorite Little Person, Michael Anderson, guest-starred with the liberated elephant?).

“Star Trek: The Next Generation” placidly motored along, and most of the country continued to be saturated with reruns of the original “Star Trek.” Then came the end of the year, the beginning of the next, and suddenly the national TV screen was ablaze with all sorts of new SF shows. “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” was to show us the grittier side of the Roddenberry universe. Less Star Fleet spit and polish. The cast is very solid, but the stories are pretty much the same. Nothing radical here. Since all three ST series are aired in most viewing areas, it’s sort of like picking six-packs off the soft-drink grocery shelf: Star Trek Classic, Star Trek Lite, and Star Trek Crystal.

“Space Rangers” appeared. And disappeared. It couldn’t decide whether it should be more serious, or more tongue-in-cheek. At least superficially like “Battlestar Galactica” in tone and characters, the series’ Linda Hunt thanklessly got to play the Lome Green role. As for “Time Trax,” well, why not have a weekly series of a cop from two hundred years in the future back here in the present trying to track down the nastiest crooks from his own epoch? It’s all lightweight, but occasionally has some nice touches: the cop taking in a prisoner and being jeered in the America of 2193. The mob screams, “Blanco, bianco/” It’s an America in which white folks are the distinct minority. And then came the long-awaited “Babylon 5,” J. Michael Straczynski’s creation for Warner Bros.’ new syndicated network. This is intended to be direct competition for “Star Trek.” The pilot looks absolutely wonderful. The effects are state of the art, though produced with high economy. The acting, however, comes out of a redwood forest.

As ever, the music scene varied enormously—and pleasingly—in terms of fantastic content. I don’t think any human being could keep up with the amount of death metal retropunk thrash grunge and still remain sufficiently lucid to get all the references to death, mutilation, blood-sucking, and chain-sawed passion down on paper. I won’t even try, but will, instead, suggest the span of weirdness in this past year’s tunes.

One way to gauge the spectrum is simply to mention the two best country songs about ghosts. Billy Ray Cyrus didn’t sing either of them. The narrator of Alan Jackson’s “Midnight in Montgomery” (Don’t Rock the Jukebox, Arista) runs into a familiar gent in a big hat (no, it’s not Garth Brooks) at, no kidding, midnight in Alabama’s capital city. It’ll be interesting to see if Hank Williams, Jr., covers it. The other, niftier, ghost tune is an upbeat spectral ballad by Concrete Blonde, “Ghost of a Texas Ladies’ Man” (Walking in London, I.R.S.). It’s a mutant rocker that has a country flavor, but isn’t really.

In terms of associational stuff, there was a variety of soundtrack albums of interest. Cool World (Warner Bros.) included David Bowie, Ministry, Electronic, The Cult, and others. Sadly, Ralph Bakshi’s movie was much better for listening than for watching. Until the End of the World (Warner Bros.) was a good deal sharper with the likes of Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Elvis Costello, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. But, of course, for real sensation (I mean, with a parental-advisory label for explicit lyrics) there was GWAR’s America Must Be Destroyed (Metal Blade). This was the album that supplied the music for Phallus in Wonderland. One lyric in The Morality Squad” says, “You’re even grosser than 2 Live Crew.” Indeed. There s something in these songs to offend just about everyone. But the album’s also very sharp and funny. Lighten up, morality squad!

My favorite associational album of the year was The Turtles—Featuring Flo & Eddie—Captured Live (Rhino). This is a mixture of some of the instant-recognition tunes the Turtles play at their nostalgia gigs (“Happy Together,” “She’d Rather Be with Me”) along with less familiar material. The associational part applies because the band includes horror collector Howard Kaylan (he’s one of the lead dudes— Eddie—along with Mark Volman—Flo) and drummer Joe Stefko, the publisher of specialty press Charnel House. This album is something eager fans can get autographed at horror conventions. Forget about massive King and Straub tomes—tapes and CDs are far more portable! And this one’s first-line fun.

My rock journalist buddy Mark Barsotti offered a few suggestions. In his album Burning Questions (Capitol), vintage British rocker Graham Parker shows he’s still got the touch. “Release Me” is about voodoo. There are sharper edges on “Short Memories” (war) and “Here It Comes Again” (the war on drugs). Jesus Jones’s Perverse (E.M.I.) features “Zeroes and Ones,” a nice tekkie rocker about cybernetics. Alice in Chains’s entire album Dirt (Columbia) is more than adequately dim and gloomy, perfect background for reading serial killer novels. Consolidated’s Play More Music (Network) is listenable, rappoid, high-density message music. “Info-modities,” for instance, is a kind of 1984-ish virtual reality nightmare. Lotsa words, but good ones. As a bonus on this album, you get “You Suck” by the Yeastie Girls, an ode to cunnilingus and a very funny, sharp, subversive anthem. Listen to this and you’ll wonder why you ever thought Dolly Parton’s “Romeo” was rad. . . .

Writer Gary Jonas came up with some suggestions I largely agree with. Warrant’s “April 2031” (Dog Eat Dog, Columbia) is one of those earnestly green cautionary songs. Saigon Kick’s “Peppermint Tribe” (The Lizard, Atlantic) is chock-full of sweet, tangy violence. “When Darkness Calls,” from Lynch Mob’s eponymous album (Elektra), is about just what the title suggests. Testament’s “Return to Serenity” (The Ritual, Atlantic) seems to be about redemption and death, but heavy on the death. Green Jello Suxx is a single. On it, Green Jello does the Three Little Pigs updated, along with “Obey the Cowgod.” Very funny stuff.

Saigon Kick’s “Chanel” is a romantic antiromance piece about a lover’s disillusionment and fantasies of burying his former beloved. Faster Pussycat’s “Body Thief’ (Whipped, Elektra) takes an even more frenzied gander at psychokillers, suggesting that even Ed Gein can sell out.

On Ugly Kid Joe’s America’s Least Wanted (Stardog/Mercury), check out such cuts as “Goddamn Devil,” “Come Tomorrow,” and “Madman,” a ’92 remix of the group’s old mass-murder ditty. Also note Jeff Healy’s “Evil and Here to Stay” (Feel This, Arista) and “Christmas with the Devil” on Spinal Tap’s Break Like the Wind (MCA). Then there’s Kiss’s “Unholy” on Revenge (Mercury). Note Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy” (Ten, Epic). It’s horror indeed, about an abused kid; the video’s a killer.

Okay. My personal favorite rock ’n’ roll death song was a pointed, if fairly traditional, rocker by Dave Alvin (late of the Blasters and then X, now in the Pleasure Barons) on his Blue Blvd (Hightone) album. “Haley’s Comet” is about the despairing and depressing death of Bill Haley in Harlingen, Texas. It’s an imagistic cautionary tale for anyone in the arts. I also have to admit a soft spot in my heart for Social Distortion’s “99 to Life” (Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell, Epic), a sweet, high-octane foot-stomper about the fatal consequences of a lovers’ quarrel gone wrong. Social Distortion’s a sort of garage-band wall-of-metal group with a pronounced country tinge. A favorable mutation.

Stealin Horses was originally a great Kentucky band with a debut album out from Arista. Then the band moved to Oklahoma and cut a second album with a very small label called Waldoxy. Now the band's defunct and lead singer Kiya Heartwood’s out on her own, getting ready to cut a solo album. I mention all this history not because Stealin Horses sings about ghosts and chain saws, but rather because Kiya Heartwood, if the cards fall her way, could become the Melissa Etheridge of country. She is fantastic. And Stealin Horses’s music has the kind of raw, elemental power that’s perfect for triggering the imagination and the writing process.

Aside from GWAR stage performances, perhaps the most extravagant live musical event impinging on the lives of fantasy fans came at the climax of the American Booksellers Association meeting on Monday night, May 25, 1992. This was the debut (but apparently not the last) appearance of the Rock Bottom Remainders, a literarily oriented supergroup formed for this occasion. The concert took place at the Cowboy Boogie, an Anaheim, California, C&W club. This was a charity gala with proceeds from the $10 tickets going to three worthy causes: pro-literacy, pro-homeless writers, and anticensorship efforts. The magnitude of the event was awesome, eventually requiring the volunteered services of scores of professionals, not just the musicians on stage, but also the men and women from the book trade who served as drum, guitar, and microphone techs, and as roadies in general. Project instigator Kathy Goldmark, founder of the primary Bay Area literary guide/ escort service, allowed on the phone as how the benefit concert “became a Frankenstein’s monster.”

Fortunately the monster was benign, and possessed a definite rough charm. The center-stage musical group consisted of humorist Dave Barry on lead guitar, novelist Stephen King on rhythm guitar, thriller writer Ridley Pearson on bass, Magic Realist Barbara Kingsolver playing keyboards, spiritual guru Robert Fulghum on mandocello, and a pair of terrific “ringer” session musicians on drums and sax. The band was bracketed by two vocal groups. The Critics’ Chorus included commentator Roy Blount, Jr., rock and culture writers Greil Marcus and Dave Marsh, cartoonist Matt Groening, and others. The Remainderettes, in gloves, lush tumbled curls, and sexy black dresses, consisted of Kathy Goldmark, AP correspondent and book author Tad Bartimus, and novelist Amy Tan. Tres slinkster cool.

Ah, but the music itself? No one had reason to be ashamed either to listen or to participate. There were two sets, each about an hour. The Remainders played rock covers, “Sea of Love,” “Last Date,” all that sort of thing, occasionally with mutant lyrics. The instrumental work was all first-rate and tight. The vocals varied quite a lot, but less, I think, from a lack of native talent than from the expectable flop-sweat. Nervous tension affected performers’ pipes, particularly in the first set. It’s only reasonable with a group of writers playing out a genuine rock ’n’ roll fantasy. If a prize were awarded for the best combination of stage presence and musical ability it would probably have gone to Amy Tan.

Enormous credit should be given to the musical director, A1 Kooper. Kooper, seminal sixties blues-rocker (The Blues Project, then Blood, Sweat, and Tears) and prominent producer, reportedly drove his charges hard for three days of concentrated rehearsal before the performance. Considering that brief a prep time, the results were something akin to miraculous.

It was not hard to discern at ABA that the concert’s great drawing card was Stephen King. Certainly he was, in more ways than one, the most visible of the participants. It was to his credit that he did not hog the mike or the limelight. The event came through as a true ensemble performance, both as a social cause and as an entertaining event. And it gave the audience a chance, for one brief manic evening, to forget the vicissitudes of publishing.

Later in the year, BMG (the record club folks) brought out a $20 video documentary on the concert. There’s a lot of interesting interview material presented through performer sound bites, but it’s intercut with bits and pieces of the performance itself. You get no songs complete. Too bad, since the music wasn’t that bad. So what you’re finally left with is a long series of interesting tastes, but no full meal.

Now. Maybe in 1993 we can have a battle of the bands with the Rock Bottom Remainders, Social Distortion, GWAR, and the Pleasure Barons. And maybe all four could collaborate on the score for Neil Jordan's Interview with a Vampire.

Dream on.

Each year marks the physical death of a number of those gifted people who create fantasy and horror in lierature and other media. In 1992 one of the most durable and important fantasists died. Fritz Leiber, 81, was a true giant of the field. It is difficult to gauge accurately the full scope of his influence upon other writers, but a list of his own writing, which would take up more space than we may devote to it, is impressive not only for its size, but also for the breadth of his range of styles and creative direction. He wrote fantasy and horror of many sorts, including his well-known Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories. These were typical of his work in that they can be read as exciting sword-and-sorcery, but Leiber’s trenchant wit and sure sense of both the absurd and the tragic make these readable on deeper levels than most sword and sorcery.

He won many awards in fantasy, horror, and science fiction, including seven Hugos and four Nebulas, and was honored as a Grand Master in Science Fiction and for Life Achievement in fantasy. He wrote numerous seminal works in all three fields, including Conjure Wife, a brilliant novel of modern witchcraft, Our Lady of Darkness, urban dark fantasy or horror, depending on your critical stance, The Big Time, science fiction that reads more like existential fantasy, The Wanderer, SF that really was a great “disaster” novel, and a number of other works, long and short, of lasting beauty and modern sensibility.

His story, The Girl with the Hungry Eyes,” is a classic vampirism story, well ahead of its time; this is just a single example among many pieces that explored themes and were innovative in style and technique. Perhaps a reason for the lack of greater critical acclaim for Leiber's work lies in the ease and natural storytelling manner of his fiction. While Leiber was certainly a conscious artist, he didn’t make the reader notice his craft, preferring to be unobtrusively artful, letting the story come through without drawing attention to the author.

Fritz Leiber was a cat person, and put cats into his fiction, perhaps most spectacularly in The Green Millennium (1952). That novel also contained more sexual excitement than did the works of virtually any other SF or fantasy writer of that time. Sex has caught up with the rest of the field long since, but Leiber was ahead of his time in this as well.

Leiber wasn’t as commercially successful as the best of his peers, but none of them was more brilliantly gifted or creative. Born into a theatrical family, he was at one time an actor himself, and until his death remained a formidable stage presence whenever called upon to read publicly. He will be missed, but as is true with those who create art, his legacy is a gift to all future generations.

William M. Gaines, 70, was publisher of Mad magazine. In 1947 he inherited the EC comics line and transformed it from Educational to Entertaining, breaking new ground in the graphic format, publishing a wide range of titles, from Tales from the Crypt to Weird Science Fiction. When in 1954 Dr. Frederic Wertham published his anticomics tract, Seduction of the Innocent, which asserted that comics like Gaines’s corrupted youth, turning kids into juvenile delinquents, Gaines, after a series of U.S. Senate hearings, was forced to drop virtually all of the comics. The one exception was the satire, Mad. He turned it into a magazine, and it quickly became nothing less than the most popular and culturally influential magazine for adolescents (and many adults as well), as it still is today. Nothing was or is safe from the wicked pens of Mad’s “usual gang of idiots” (their staff artists and writers). It remains an American institution.

Angela Carter, 51, was a writer whose sharp, graceful prose and keenly insightful writing infused her plays, poetry, and fiction with an uncommon edge. She was known for her sense of the unusual in life, and her fantasy works included The War of Dreams, The Passion of New Eve, the screenplay of The Company of Wolves, and other works.

Not a writer of fantasy, but certainly influential to a generation of writers of the fantastic was Isaac Asimov, 72, who wrote hundreds of books and was widely known because of his incredible range of subject matter from fiction to nonfiction in dozens of fields. His first love, however, was science fiction, in which he was a Grand Master and won many awards. He also was involved with the magazine that bears his name, Asimov’s Science Fiction. While there have been other magazines named for people, none is quite like this one. Until his death he continued to write the editorials, answer reader mail, and be actively involved. He was a writer completely obsessed with writing. He was famous for writing every single day, even on vacations. His Foundation trilogy was for many years the most popular SF series by far. When he wrote the fourth book, Foundation’s Edge, years later, it became an instant bestseller, taking mere months to outsell the previous three volumes, which had taken decades to reach their audience. After that, Asimov was a consistent best-seller on national lists, though his work had passed its peak. He remained one of the bestselling SF authors until his death. An unassuming man who never claimed to be a great writer, Asimov was a firm believer in the essential goodness of mankind, and his works, imbued with that belief, inspired and encouraged several generations of readers.

Hal Roach, 100, was a filmmaker who began in the silent era and continued to make a variety of films, mostly comedies, for at least four decades. His studio was the starting point for many gifted comic talents, and his work encompassed fantasy as well as realistic works. Certainly the Little Rascals were fantasy! Another filmmaker died, Jack Arnold, 75, a director who was known for a number of low-budget horror and science fiction films, including It Came from Outer Space, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and many others. Actor Robert Morley, 84, was known for his droll, witty performances in numerous films and on stage. Anthony Perkins, 60, didn’t deserve to be remembered only as the mad killer, Norman Bates, in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film, Psycho, but that success followed him for decades after he created the role. Before and after that film he was a character actor who played a variety of roles in dozens of films. Perhaps his other most memorable role was as major league baseball player Jim Piersall, in the biographical film, Fear Strikes Out.

Children’s book author and artist James Marshall, 49, whose inspired work included such hilarious and affirming works as The Stupids books and the Miss Viola Swamp books, among many others. He worked a lot with Harry Allard. He was a bright light of silliness in the juvenile universe. Mary Norton, 88, was a well-known and well-loved children’s book author. She wrote the “Borrowers” series, which became enormously popular as books and also as films. Another well-known work of hers was The Magic Bed-Knob, which was adapted for film as Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Alvin Schwartz, 64, was the author of many successful children’s books, including Ghosts, and his Scary Stories series.

R.(eginald) Bretnor, 80, was a writer of fantasy, science fiction, humor, essays— but perhaps best known for his short pieces, many published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, featuring Ferdinand Feghoot. These appeared under the pseudonym Grendel Briarton, and was absolutely, irredeemably punnish. His other series, the Schimmelhorn stories, was also quite charming. He also wrote several novels, but never became as famous as his skills would have suggested.

Rosemary Sutcliff, 71, was a highly regarded British historical novelist, and author of the acclaimed Arthurian classic Sword at Sunset.

Michael Talbot, 38, was a talented fantasy and horror writer who in his short career wrote some very effective and creepy novels, including The Delicate Dependency, The Bog, and Night Things.

A number of people connected with publishing died in 1992, including Samuel Walker, 65, the founder and publisher of Walker Publishing, which has published a fair number of good science fiction and fantasy works, despite never having a terribly large budget; Sidney Meredith, 73, the brother of literary agent Scott Meredith and the vice president and treasurer of their famous agency; antiquarian bookseller Eric Kramer, 58, who had an enormous number of hard-to-find books in his Manhattan-based Fantasy Archives; Jack Tannen, 84, who was a bookseller and later the publisher of Canaveral Press. He published, with the editorial directorship of Richard A. Lupofif, a number of Edgar Rice Burroughs works. He also published Lupoff s biography of Burroughs; and Roberta Bender Grossman, 46, co-founder and publisher of Zebra Books.

Many other writers died in 1992. Millea Kenin, 49, was a writer published in many anthologies and magazines, in addition to being a designer, poet, and editor; Barbara Comyns, 83, was the distinguished author of a number of Magic Realist novels, including The Vet’s Daughter and The Juniper Tree; Richard Bums, 33, was the author of the fantasy novel Khalindaine and its sequel Troubador, as well as other works in the mainstream; M. F. K. Fisher, 83, noted essayist and author of the fantasy novel Not Now, But Now; and Edouard Roditi, 81, essayist, poet, and translator associated with the surrealists.

Joe Schuster, 78, was the co-creator, along with Jerry Siegel, of Superman. Martin Goodman, 84, was the founder and longtime publisher of Marvel Comics. Dwight V. Swain, 76, was an early fantasy and science fiction writer who started out in the pulps. Many latter-day writers were influenced by his vigorous work.

Artist Joseph Magnaini, 79, was a great artist who did the classic covers of Ray Bradbury’s work for many years, among many other fine pieces. He was also a filmmaker. Francis Bacon, 82, was a controversial artist whose distorted, macabre images of the human body were inspiring to generations of fantasy and horror artists. Anton Furst, 47, a special effects and production designer whose most famous work was on the design of the film Batman; Robert Peak, 64, was a celebrated illustrator who was a giant in the field of movie-poster art. Among his best known fantasy posters was the one he painted for John Boorman’s Excalibur.

Many creative people connected with fantasy and horror in the media died in 1992. Actors who left the scene included Klaus Kinski, 65, who was known for his dark, effective portrayals in a number of fantastic films; he appeared with his daughter, actress Nastassia Kinski, in Cat People; Denholm Elliott, 70, was a versatile, distinguished stage and screen actor whose credits included television productions of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Dracula, as well as many other diverse roles; Paul Henreid, 84, was a fine actor of many films, including his memorable turn in Casablanca; Oesare Danova, 66, was a character actor in a number of productions over many years; Mae Clarke, 81, co-starred in Frankenstein with Boris Karloff, and appeared in many other films; Morris Carnov-sky, 94, was a stage actor and appeared in films, including Siren of Atlantis, before being blacklisted. He resumed his career in the 1970s; actor/director Ray Danton, 60, was a character actor in many films and television projects. He also directed a number of low-budget projects, including Psychic Killer; Dick York, 63, was best known as the co-star of the TV series Bewitched. He also acted in numerous other television shows; Cleavon Little, 53, was in a number of films and television shows, including the film Once Bitten. He’s best remembered for his memorable role in Blazing Saddles; Neville Brand, 71, was known as a bad guy in the movies. A much-decorated World War II hero, he was in dozens of films, mostly the target for the good guys’ fists; Jack Kelly, 65, was well known to television viewers. He also appeared in a number of films, including Forbidden Planet and Cult of the Cobra; Arletty, 94, was a French actress featured in, among other films, Les Enfants du Paradise; Malcolm Aterbury, 85, was in I Was A Teenage Werewolf, and many other films and television shows; British character actor Tutte Lemkow, 73, appeared in numerous films and television productions, including Raiders of the Lost Ark and Theatre of Blood; character actor Ian Wolfe, 95, appeared in numerous films, mostly in sinister roles, including ones in The Raven and The Return of Dr. X; Paul Maxwell, 70, was featured in many films, including Blood of Dracula. He also did much voice work; Barbara Morrison, 84, starred in Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and other films; Marshall Thompson, 66, starred in the classic chiller Fiend Without a Face, and appeared in many film and television productions for many years; Brian Oulton, 84, starred in the 1963 horror film Kiss of the Vampire, and appeared in many other productions; Georgia Brown, 56, a British singer and actress, was best known for her stage performance in Oliver! She appeared in the film A Study in Terror, and other films. John Anderson, 69, was a character actor for many years. He was in Psycho, and played parts in hundreds of television shows.

A number of screenwriters also died. Edmund Beloin, 82, wrote the screenplay for Visit to a Small Planet, based on the original play by Gore Vidal; Robert Kaufman, 60, was the screenwriter of, among other films, Love at First Bite; Frederic Rinaldo, 78, was a screenwriter who penned, among other films, Hold that Ghost.

Behind the camera, many others died this year. Satyajit Ray, 70, was best known for Pather Panchali. He was India's foremost filmmaker; Hans Koenkamp, 100, was a cameraman for Mack Sennett in the silent era, and became a special-effects man, working on The Wizard of Oz, among other films; producer George Edwards, 67, made Frogs and other low-budget fantasy-horror films; Puppeteer Richard Hunt, 40, was best known for his work on The Muppet Show; set designer Ruby Levitt, 84, created the Addams Family television series sets. She was an Academy Award nominee for some of her film work; film editor Arthur Milford, 89, won an Academy Award for editing Frank Capra’s production of Lost Horizon; Howard Christie, 79, was a prolific producer for Universal Studios in the 1950s. He was responsible for a number of Abbott and Costello films; Anna Johnstone, 79, a costume designer for stage and film productions for over forty years, created the costumes for the Broadway production of Bell, Book and Candle, and many other productions, including the film The Wtz; Disney animator Jack Kinney, 82, contributed to many of Disney’s classic cartoons; Albert Taveres, 39, was a stage and screen casting director, performing that duty for Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin. He also cast the original off-Broadway production of Little Shop of Horrors.

All these people contributed in their own ways to bring us the gift of entertainment and, in the case of many, edification. Their work lives on.

Moon Very Thin sat on the raised hearth—the only place in the center room out of the way—with her chin on her knuckles. She would have liked to be doing something more, but the things she thought of were futile, and most were undignified. She watched Alder Owl crisscross the slate floor and pop in and out of the stillroom and the pantry and the laundry. Alder Owl’s hands were full of things on every crossing: clean clothes, a cheese, dried yellow dock and feverfew, a tinderbox, a wool mantle. She was frowning faintly all over her round pink face, and Moon knew that she was reviewing lists in her head.

“You can’t pack all that,” said Moon.

“You couldn’t,” said Alder Owl. “But I’ve had fifty years more practice. Now remember to cure the squash before you bring them in, or there’ll be nothing to eat all winter but onions. And if the squirrels nest in the thatch again, there’s a charm—”

“You told me,” Moon sighed. She shifted a little to let the fire roast a slightly different part of her back. “If I forget it, I can look it up. It’s awfully silly for you to set out now. We could have snow next week.”

“If we did, then I’d walk through it. But we won’t. Not for another month.” Alder Owl wrapped three little stoneware jars in flannel and tucked them in her wicker pack.

Moon opened her mouth, and the thing she’d been busy not saying for three days hopped out. “He’s been missing since before Midsummer. Why do you have to go now? Why do you have to go at all?”

At that, Alder Owl straightened up and regarded her sternly. “I have responsibilities. You ought to know that.”

“But why should they have anything to do with him?”

“He is the prince of the Kingdom of Hark End.”

Moon stood up. She was taller than Alder Owl, but under that fierce gaze she felt rather stubby. She scowled to hide it. “And we live in Hark End. Hundreds— thousands of people do. A lot of them are even witches. They haven’t all gone tramping off like a pack of questing youngest sons. ”

Alder Owl had a great many wrinkles, which deepened all over her face when she was about to smile. They deepened now. “First, youngest sons have never been known to quest in packs. Second, all the witches worth their salt and stone have tried to find him, in whatever way suits them best. All of them but me. I held back because I wanted to be sure you could manage without me.”

Moon Very Thin stood still for a moment, taking that in. Then she sat back down with a thump and laced her fingers around her knees. “Oh,” she said, halfway between a gasp and a laugh. “Unfair, unfair. To get at me through my pride!” “Yes, my weed, and there’s such a lot of it. I have to go, you know. Don’t make it harder for me. ”

“I wish I could do something to help,” said Moon after a moment.

“I expect you to do all your work around here, and all of mine besides. Isn’t that enough?” Alder Owl smoothed the flap down over the pack and snugged the drawstring tight.

“You know it’s not. Couldn’t I go with you?”

Alder Owl pulled a stool from under the table with her foot and sat on it, her hands over her knees. “When I travel in my spirit,” she said, “to ask a favor of Grandmother, you can’t go with me.”

“Of course not. Then who’d play the drum, to guide you back?”

Alder Owl beamed. “Clever weed. Open that cupboard over the mantel-shelf and bring me what you find there.”

What Moon found was a drum. It was nothing like the broad, flat, cowhide journey-drum, whose speech echoed in her bones and was like a breathing heartbeat under her fingers, whose voice could be heard in the land where there was no voice. This drum was an upright cylinder no bigger than a quart jar. Its body was made of some white wood, and the skins of its two heads were fine-grained and tufted with soft white hair around the lashings. There was a loop of hide to hold it with, and a drumstick with a leather beater tucked through that.

Moon shook her head. “This wouldn’t be loud enough to bring you home from the pump, let alone from—where are you going?”

“Wherever I have to. Bring it to me.”

Moon brought her the drum, and Alder Owl held it up by the loop of hide and struck it, once. The sound it made was a sharp, ringing tok, like a woodpecker’s blow.

Alder Owl said, “The wood is from an ash tree planted at the hour of my birth. The skins are from a ewe born on the same day. I raised the ewe and watered the tree, and on my sixteenth birthday, I asked them for their lives, and they gave them gladly. No matter how far I go, the drum will reach me. When I cannot hear it, it will cease to sound.

“Tomorrow at dawn, 1 11 leave,” Alder Owl continued. “Tomorrow at sunset, as the last rind of the sun burns out behind the line of the Wantnot Hills, and at every sunset after, beat the drum once, as I just did.”

Moon was a little shaken by the solemnity of it all. But she gathered her wits at last and repeated, “At sunset each day. Once. I’ll remember.”

“Hmph. Well.” Alder Owl lifted her shoulders, as if solemnity was a shawl she could shrug away. “Tomorrow always comes early. Time to put the fire to bed.”

“I’ll get the garden things,” Moon said. She tossed her cloak on and went out the stillroom door into the night.

Her namesake was up, and waxing. Alder Owl would have good light, if she needed to travel by night. But it would be cold traveling; frost dusted the leaves and vines and flagstone paths like talcum. Moon shivered and sighed. “What’s the point of having an able-bodied young apprentice, if you’re not going to put all that ableness to use?” she muttered to the shifting air. The cold carried all her S’s off into the dark.

She pinched a bloom from the yellow chrysanthemum, and a stalk of merry-man’s wort from its sheltered bed. When she came back into the house she found that Alder Owl had already fed the fire and settled the logs with the poker, and fetched a bowl of water. Moon dropped the flowers into it.

“Comforter, guard against the winter dark,” Alder Owl said to the fire, as always, as if she were addressing an old friend. She stirred the water with her fingers as she spoke. “Helpmeet, nourisher of flesh and heart, bide and watch, and let no errant spark leap up until the sun should take thy part.”

Firelight brushed across the seamed landscape of Alder Owl’s face, flashed yellow in her sharp, dark eyes, turned the white in her hair to ivory. Tomorrow night, Moon thought, she wont be here. Just me. She could believe it only with the front of her mind, where all untested things were kept. The rest of her, mind and lungs and soles of feet, denied it.

Alder Owl flicked the water from her hand onto the hearth, and the line of drops steamed. Then she handed the bowl to Moon, and Moon fed the flowers to the fire.

After a respectful silence, Moon said, “It’s water. ” It was the continuation of an old argument. “And the logs were trees that grew out of the earth and fed on water, and the fire itself feeds on those and air. That’s all four elements. You can’t separate them.”

“It’s the hour for fire, and it’s fire that we honor. At the appropriate hours we honor the other three, and if you say things like that in public, no educated person in the village will speak to you.” Alder Owl took the bowl out of Moon’s hands and gathered her fingers in a strong, wet clasp. “My weed, my stalk of yarrow. You're not a child anymore. When I leave, you’ll be a grown woman, in others’ eyes if not your own. What people hear from a child’s mouth as foolishness becomes something else on the lips of a woman grown: sacrilege, or spite, or madness. Work the work as you see fit, but keep your mouth closed around your notions, and keep fire out of water and earth out of air. ”

“But—”

“Empty the bowl now, and get on to bed.”

Moon went into the garden again and flung the water out of the bowl—southward, because it was consecrated to fire. Then she stood a little while in the cold, with a terrible hard feeling in her chest that was beyond sadness, beyond tears. She drew in great breaths to freeze it, and exhaled hard to force the fragments out. But it was immune to cold or wind.

“I’d like to be a woman,” she whispered. “But I'd rather be a child with you here, than a woman with you gone.” The sound of the words, the knowledge that they were true, did what the cold couldn't. The terrible feeling cracked, melted, and poured out of her in painful tears. Slowly the comforting order around her, the beds and borders Alder Owl had made, stopped the flow of them, and the kind cold air wiped them off her face.

At dawn, when the light of sunrise lay tangled in the treetops, Alder Owl settled her pack on her back and went out by the front door. Moon went with her as far as the gate at the bottom of the yard. In the uncertain misty land of dawn, Alder Owl was a solid, certain figure, cloaked in shabby purple wool, her silver and black hair tucked under a drunken-brimmed green hat.

“I don't think you should wear the hat,” Moon said, past the tightness in her throat. “You look like an eggplant.”

“I like it. I'm an old woman. I can wear what I please.”

She was going. What did one say, except “Goodbye,” which wasn’t at all what Moon wanted? “When will you come back?”

“When I’ve found him. Or when I know he can’t be found.”

“You always tell me not to try to prove negatives.”

“There are ways, ” Alder Owl replied, with a sideways look, “to prove this one.”

Moon Very Thin shivered in the weak sun. Alder Owl squinted up at her, pinched her chin lightly. Then she closed the gate behind her and walked down the hill. Moon watched her—green and purple, silly and strong—until the trees hid her from sight.

She cured the squash before she put them in the cellar. She honored the elements, each at its own hour. She made cheese and wine, and put up the last of the herbs, and beat the rugs, and waxed all the floors against the coming winter muck. She mended the thatch and the fence, pruned the apple trees and turned the garden beds, taking comfort from maintaining the order that Alder Owl had established.

Moon took over other established things, too. By the time the first snow fell, her neighbors had begun to bring their aches and pains to her, to fetch her when a child was feverish, to call her in to set a dog’s broken leg or stitch up a horse’s gashed flank. They asked about the best day to sign a contract, and whether there was a charm to keep nightshade out of the hay field. In return, they brought her mistletoe and willow bark, a sack of rye flour, a tub of butter.

She didn’t mind the work. She’d been brought up for it; it seemed as natural as getting out of bed in the morning. But she found she minded the payment. When the nearest neighbor’s boy, Fell, trotted up to the gate on his donkey with the flour sack riding pillion, and thanked her, and gave it to her, she almost thrust it back at him. Alder Owl had given her the skill, and had left her there to serve them. The payment should be Alder Owl’s. But there was no saying which would appear first, Alder Owl or the bottom of the sack.

“You look funny,” Fell said.

“You look worse,” Moon replied, because she’d taught him to climb trees and to fish, and had thus earned the privilege. “Do you know those things made out of wood or bone, with a row of little spines set close together? They call them ‘combs.’ ”

“Hah, hah.” He pointed to the flour. “I hope you make it all into cakes and get fat.” He grinned and loped back down the path to the donkey. They kicked up snow as they climbed the hill, and he waved at the crest.

She felt better. Alder Owl would never have had that conversation.

Every evening at sunset, Moon took the little drum out of the cupboard over the mantel. She looked at it, and touched it, and thought of her teacher. She tried to imagine her well and warm and safe, with a hot meal before her and pleasant company near. At last, when the rim of the sun blinked out behind the far line of hills, she swung the beater against the fine skin head, and the drum sounded its woodpecker knock.

Each time Moon wondered: Could Alder Owl really hear it? And if she could, what if Moon were to beat it again? If she beat it three times, would Alder Owl think something was wrong, and return home?

Nothing was wrong. Moon put the drum away until the next sunset.

The Long Night came, and she visited all her neighbors, as they visited her. She brought them fir boughs tied with bittersweet, and honey candy, and said the blessing-charm on their doorsteps. She watched the landscape thaw and freeze, thaw and freeze. Candle-day came, and she went to the village, which was sopping and giddy with a spell of warmer weather, to watch the lighting of the new year’s lamps from the flame of the old. It could be, said the villagers, that no one would ever find the prince. It could be that the King of Stones had taken him beneath the earth, and that he would lie there without breath, in silence, forever. And had she had any word of Alder Owl, and hadn’t it been a long time that she’d been gone?

Yes, said Moon, it had been a long time.

The garden began to stir, almost invisibly, like a cat thinking of breakfast in its sleep. The sound of water running was everywhere, though the snow seemed undisturbed and the ice as thick as ever. Suddenly, as if nature had thrown wide a gate, it was spring, and Moon was run off her legs with work. Lambing set her to wearing muddy paths in the hills between the cottage and the farmsteads all around. The mares began to foal, too. She thanked wisdom that women and men, at least, had no season.

She had been with Tansy Broadwater’s bay thoroughbred since late morning. The foal had been turned in the womb and tied in his cord, and Moon was nearly paralyzed thinking of the worth of the two of them, and their lives in her hands. She was bloody to the elbows and hoarse with chanting, but at last she and Tansy regarded each other triumphantly across the withers of a nursing colt.

“Come up to the house for a pot of hot tea,” Tansy said as Moon rinsed soap off her hands and arms. “You won’t want to start out through the woods now until moonrise, anyway.”

Moon lifted her eyes, shocked, to the open barn door. The sun wore the Wantnot Hills like a girdle.

“I have to go,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’ll be all right.” She headed for the trail at a run.

Stones rolled under her boots, and half-thawed ice lay slick as butter in the shadows. It was nearly night already, under the trees. She plunged down the hill and up the next one, and down again, slithering, on all fours sometimes. She could feel her bones inside her brittle as fire-blasted wood, her ankles fragile and waiting for a wrench. She was afraid to look at the sun again.

The gate—the gate at the bottom of the path was under her hands. She sobbed in relief. So close . . . She raced up through the garden, the cold air like fire in her lungs. She struggled frantically with the front door, until she remembered it was barred inside, that she’d left through the stillroom. She banged through the stillroom door and made the contents of the shelves ring and rattle. To the hearth, and wrench the cupboard door open . . .

The drum was in her hands, and through the window the sun’s rind showed, thin as thread, on the hills. She was in time. As the horizon closed like a snake’s eyelid over the disk of the sun, Moon struck the drum.

There was no sound at all.

Moon stared at the drum, the beater, her two hands. She had missed, she must have. She brought the beater to the head again. She might as well have hit wool against wool. There was no woodpecker knock, no sharp clear call. She had felt skin and beater meet, she had seen them. What had she done wrong?

Slowly Alder Owl’s words came back to her. When I cannot hear it, it will cease to sound. Moon had always thought the drum would be hard to hear. But never silent. Tell me if you cant hear this, she thought wildly. Something else they’d said as she left, about proving negatives—that there were ways to prove the prince couldn’t be found.

If he were dead, for example. If he were only bones under the earth.

And Alder Owl, beyond the drum’s reach, might have followed him even to that, under the dominion of the King of Stones.

She thought about pounding the drum; she could see herself doing it in her mind, hammering at it until it sounded or broke. She imagined weeping, too; she could cry and scream and break things, and collapse at last exhausted and miserable.

What she did was to sit where she was at the table, the drum on her knees, watching the dark seep in and fill the room around her. Sorrow and despair rose and fell inside her in a slow rhythm, like the shortening and lengthening of days. When her misery peaked, she would almost weep, almost shriek, almost throw the drum from her. Then it would begin to wane, and she would think, No, I can bear it, until it turned to waxing once again.

She would do nothing, she resolved, until she could think of something useful to do. She would wait until the spiders spun her white with cobwebs, if she had to. But she would do something better than crying, better than breaking things.

The hide lashing of Alder Owl’s drum bit into her clenched fingers. In the weak light of the sinking fire, the wood and leather were only a pale mass in her lap. How could Alder Owl’s magic have dwindled away to this—a drum with no voice? What voice could reach her now?

And Moon answered herself, wonderingly: Grandmother.

She couldn’t. She had never gone to speak with Grandmother herself. And how could she travel there, with no one to beat the drum for her when she was gone? She might be lost forever, wandering through the tangled roots of Grandmother’s trees.

Yet she stood and walked, stiff-jointed, to the stillroom. She gathered up charcoal and dried myrtle and cedar. She poured apple wine into a wooden cup, and dropped in a seed from a sky’s-trumpet vine. It was a familiar set of motions. She had done them for Alder Owl. She took down the black-fleeced sheepskin from the wall by the front door, laid it out on the floor, and set the wine and incense by it, wine to the east, charcoal to the south. Another trip, to fetch salt and the little bone-handled knife—earth to the north, the little conical pile of salt, and the knife west, for air. (Salt came from the sea, too, said her rebellious mind, and the knife’s metal was mined from earth and tempered with fire and water. But she was afraid of heresy now, afraid to doubt the knowledge she must trust with the weight of lives. She did as she’d been taught.)

At last she took the big drum, the journey-drum, out of its wicker case and set it on the sheepskin. The drum would help her partway on her travels. But when she crossed the border, she would have to leave body, fingers, drum all at the crossing, and the drum would fall silent. She needed so little: just a tap, tap, tap. Well, her heart would have to do.

Moon dropped cross-legged on the sheepskin. Right-handed she took up the knife and drew lightly on the floor around herself as if she were a compass. She passed the knife to her left hand behind her back, smoothly, and the knife point never left the slate. That had been hard once, learning to take the knife as Alder Owl passed it to her. She drew the circle again with a pinch of salt dropped from each hand, and with cedar and myrtle smoking and snapping on their charcoal bed. Finally she drew the circle with wine shaken from her fingers, and drank off the rest. Then she took up the drum.

She tried to hear the rhythm of her breathing, of her heart, the rhythm that was always inside her. Only when she felt sure of it did she begin to let her fingers move with it, to tap the drum. It shuddered under her fingers, lowing out notes. When her hands were certain on the drum head, she closed her eyes.

A tree. That was the beginning of the journey, Moon knew; she was to begin at the end of a branch of the great tree. But what kind of tree? Was it night, or day? Should she imagine herself as a bird or a bug, or as herself? And how could she think of all that and play the drum, too?

Her neck was stiff, and one of her feet was going to sleep. You think too much, she scolded herself. Alder Owl had never had such trouble. Alder Owl had also never suggested that there was such a thing as too much thinking. More of it, she’d said, would fix most of the world’s problems.

Well, she’d feel free to think, then. She settled into the drumbeat, imagined it wrapped around her like a featherbed.

—A tree too big to ever see all at once, one of a forest of trees like it. A tree with a crown of leaves as wide as a clear night sky on a hilltop. Night time, then. It was an oak, she decided, but green out of season. She envisioned the silver-green leathery leaves around her, and the rough black bark, starry with dew in the moonlight. The light came from the end of the branch. Cradled in leaves there was a pared white-silver crescent, a new moon cut free from the shadow of the old. It gave her light to travel by.

The rough highroad of bark grew broader as she neared the trunk. She imagined birds stirring in their sleep and the quick, querulous chirk of a squirrel woken in its nest. The wind breathed in and out across the vault of leaves and made them twinkle. Moon heard her steps on the wood, even and measured: the voice of the drum.

Down the trunk, down toward the tangle of roots, the knotted mirror-image of the branches above. The trunks of other trees were all around her, and the twining branches shuttered the moonlight. It was harder going, shouldering against the life of the tree that always moved upward. Her heartbeat was a thin, regular bumping in her ears.

It was too dark to tell which way was down, too dark to tell anything. Moon didn’t know if she’d reached the roots or not. She wanted to cry out, to call for Grandmother, but she’d left her body behind, and her tongue in it.

A little light appeared before her, and grew slowly. There were patterns in it, colors, shapes—she could make out the gate at the bottom of the garden, and the path that led into the woods. On the path—was it the familiar one? It was bordered now with sage—she saw a figure made of the flutter of old black cloth and untidy streamers of white hair, walking away from her. A stranger, Moon thought; she tried to catch up, but didn’t seem to move at all. At the first fringes of the trees the figure turned, lifted one hand, and beckoned. Then it disappeared under the roof of the woods.

Moon’s spirit, like a startled bird, burst into motion, upward. Her eyes opened on the center room of the cottage. She was standing unsteadily on the sheepskin, the journey-drum at her feet. Her heart clattered under her ribs like a stick dragged across the pickets of a fence, and she felt sore and prickly and feverish. She took a step backward, overbalanced, and sat down.

“Well,” she said, and the sound of her voice made her jump. She licked her dry lips and added, “That’s not at all how it’s supposed to be done.”

Trembling, she picked up the tools and put them away, washed out the wooden bowl. She’d gathered up the sheepskin and had turned to hang it on the wall when her voice surprised her again. “But it worked,” she said. She stood very still, hugging the fleece against her. “It worked, didn’t it?” She’d traveled and asked, and been answered, and if neither had been in form as she understood them, still they were question and answer, and all that she needed. Moon hurried to put the sheepskin away. There were suddenly a lot of things to do.

The next morning she filled her pack with food and clothing, tinderbox and medicines, and put the little ash drum, Alder Owl’s drum, on top of it all. She put on her stoutest boots and her felted wool cloak. She smothered the fire on the hearth, fastened all the shutters, and left a note for Tansy Broadwater, asking her to look after the house.

At last she shouldered her pack and tramped down the path, through the gate, down the hill, and into the woods.

Moon had traveled before, with Alder Owl. She knew how to find her way, and how to build a good fire and cook over it; she’d slept in the open and stayed at inns and farmhouses. Those things were the same alone. She had no reason to feel strange, but she did. She felt like an impostor, and expected every chance-met traveler to ask if she was old enough to be on the road by herself.

She thought she’d been lonely at the cottage; she thought she’d learned the size and shape of loneliness. Now she knew she’d only explored a corner of it. Walking gave her room to think, and sights to see: fern shoots rolling up out of the mushy soil, yellow cups of wild crocuses caught by the sun, the courting of ravens. But it was no use pointing and crying, “Look!,” because the only eyes there had already seen. Her isolation made everything seem not quite real. It was harder each night to light a fire, and she had steadily less interest in food. But each night at sunset, she beat Alder Owl’s drum. Each night it was silent, and she sat in the aftermath of that silence, bereft all over again.

She walked for six days through villages and forest and farmland. The weather had stayed dry and clear and unspringlike for five of them, but on the sixth she tramped through a rising chill wind under a lowering sky. The road was wider now, and smooth, and she had more company on it: Carts and wagons, riders, other walkers went to and fro past her. At noon she stopped at an inn, larger and busier than any she’d yet seen.

The boy who set tea down in front of her had a mop of blond hair over a cheerful, harried face. “The cold pie’s good,” he said before she could ask. “It’s rabbit and mushroom. Otherwise, there’s squash soup. But don’t ask for ham—I think it’s off a boar that wasn’t cut right. It’s awful.”

Moon didn’t know whether to laugh or gape. “The pie, then, please. I don’t mean to sound like a fool, but where am I?”

“Little Hark,” he replied. “But don’t let that raise your hopes. Great Hark is a week away to the west, on foot. You bound for it?”

“I don’t know. I suppose I am. I’m looking for someone.”

“In Great Hark? Huh. Well, you can find an ant in an anthill, too, if you’re not particular which one.”

“It’s that big?” Moon asked.

He nodded sympathetically. “Unless you’re looking for the king or the queen.” “No. A woman—oldish, with hair a little more white than black, and a round pink face. Shorter than I am. Plump.” It was hard to describe Alder Owl; she was too familiar. “She would have had an eggplant-colored cloak. She’s a witch.”

The boy’s face changed slowly. “Is she the bossy-for-your-own-good sort? With a wicker pack? Treats spots on your face with witch hazel and horseradish?”

“That sounds like her . . . What else do you use for spots?”

“I don’t know, but the horseradish works pretty well. She stopped here, if that’s her. It was months ago, though.”

“Yes,” said Moon. “It was.”

“She was headed for Great Hark, so you’re on the right road. Good luck on it.” When he came back with the rabbit pie, he said, “You’ll come to Burnton High Plain next—that’s a two-day walk. After that you’ll be done with the grasslands pretty quick. Then you’ll be lucky if you see the sun ’til you’re within holler of Great Hark.”

Moon swallowed a little too much pie at once. “I will? Why?”

“Well, you’ll be in the Seawood, won’t you?”

“Will I?”

“You don’t know much geography,” he said sadly.

“I know I’ve never heard that the Seawood was so thick the sun wouldn’t shine in it. Have you ever been there?”

“No. But everyone who has says it’s true. And being here, I get to hear what travelers tell.”

Moon opened her mouth to say that she’d heard more nonsense told in the common rooms of inns than the wide world had space for, when a woman’s voice trumpeted from the kitchen. “Starling! Do you work here, or are you taking a room tonight?”

The blond boy grinned. “Good luck, anyway,” he said to Moon and loped back to the kitchen.

Moon ate her lunch and paid for it with a coin stamped with the prince’s face. She scowled at it when she set it on the table. It’s all your fault, she told it. Then she hoisted her pack and headed for the door.

“It’s started to drip,” the blond boy called after her. “It’ll be pouring rain on you in an hour.”

“I’ll get wet, then,” she said. “But thanks anyway.”

The trail was cold, but at least she was on it. The news drove her forward.

The boy was right about the weather. The rain was carried on gusts from every direction, which found their way under her cloak and inside her hood and in every seam of her boots. By the time she’d doggedly climbed the ridge above Little Hark, she was wet and cold all through, and dreaming of tight roofs, large fires, and clean, dry nightgowns. The view from the top of the trail scattered her visions.

She’d expected another valley. This was not a bowl, but a plate, full of long, sand-colored undulating grass, and she stood at the rim of it. Moon squinted through the rain ahead and to either side, looking for a far edge, but the grass went on out of sight, unbroken by anything but the small rises and falls of the land. She suspected that clear weather wouldn’t have shown her the end of it, either.

That evening she made camp in the midst of the ocean of grass, since there wasn’t anyplace else. There was no firewood. She’d thought of that before she walked down into the plain, but all the wood she could have gathered to take with her was soaked. So she propped up a lean-to of oiled canvas against the worst of the rain, gathered a pile of the shining-wet grass, and set to work. She kept an eye on the sun, as well; at the right moment she took up Alder Owl’s drum and played it, huddling under the canvas to keep it from the wet. It had nothing to say.

In half an hour she had a fat braided wreath of straw. She laid it in a circle of bare ground she’d cleared, and got from her pack her tinderbox and three apples, wrinkled and sweet with winter storage. They were the last food she had from home.

“All is taken from thee,” Moon said, setting the apples inside the straw wreath and laying more wet grass over them in a little cone. “I have taken, food and footing, breath and warming, balm for thirsting. This I will exchange thee, with my love and every honor, if thou’lt give again thy succor.” With that, she struck a spark in the cone of grass.

For a moment, she thought the exchange was not accepted. She’d asked all the elements, instead of only fire, and fire had taken offense. Then a little blue flame licked along a stalk, and a second. In a few minutes she was nursing a tiny, comforting blaze, contained by the wreath of straw and fueled all night with Alder Owl’s apples.

She sat for a long time, hunched under the oiled canvas lean-to, wrapped in her cloak with the little fire between her feet. She was going to Great Hark, because she thought that Alder Owl would have done so. But she might not have. Alder Owl might have gone south from here, into Cystegond. Or north, into the cold upthrust fangs of the Bones of Earth. She could have gone anywhere, and Moon wouldn’t know. She’d asked—but she hadn’t insisted she be told or taken along, hadn’t tried to follow. She’d only said goodbye. Now she would never find the way.

“What am I doing here?” Moon whispered. There was no answer except the constant rushing sound of the grass in the wind, saying hush, hush, hush. Eventually she was warm enough to sleep.

The next morning the sun came back, watery and tentative. By its light she got her first real look at the great ocean of golden-brown she was shouldering through. Behind her she saw the ridge beyond which Little Hark lay. Ahead of her there was nothing but grass.

It was a long day, with only that to look at. So she made herself look for more. She saw the new green shoots of grass at the feet of the old stalks, their leaves still rolled tight around one another like the embrace of lovers. A thistle spread its rosette of fierce leaves to claim the soil, but hadn’t yet grown tall. And she saw the prints of horses’ hooves, and dung, and once a wide, beaten-down swath across her path like the bed of a creek cut in grass, the earth muddy and chopped with hoofprints. As she walked, the sun climbed the sky and steamed the rain out of her cloak.

By evening she reached the town of Burnton High Plain. Yes, the landlord at the hostelry told her, another day’s walk would bring her under the branches of the Seawood. Then she should go carefully, because it was full of robbers and ghosts and wild animals.

“Well,” Moon said, “robbers wouldn’t take the trouble to stop me, and I don’t think I’ve any quarrel with the dead. So I’ll concentrate on the wild animals. But thank you very much for the warning. ”

“Not a good place, the Seawood,” the landlord added.

Moon thought that people who lived in the middle of an eternity of grass probably would be afraid of a forest. But she only said, “I’m searching for someone who might have passed this way months ago. Her name is Alder Owl, and she was going to look for the prince. ”

After Moon described her, the landlord pursed his lips. “That’s familiar. I think she might have come through, heading west. But as you say, it was months, and I don’t think I’ve seen her since.”

I’ve never heard so much discouraging encouragement, Moon thought drearily, and turned to her dinner.

The next afternoon she reached the Seawood. Everything changed: the smells, the color of the light, the temperature of the air. In spite of the landlord’s warning, Moon couldn’t quite deny the lift of her heart, the feeling of glad relief. The secretive scent of pine loam rose around her as she walked, and the dark boughs were full of the commotion of birds. She heard water nearby; she followed the sound to a running beck and the spring that fed it. The water was cold and crisply acidic from the pines; she filled her bottle at it and washed her face.

She stood a moment longer by the water. Then she hunched the pack off her back and dug inside it until she found the little linen bag that held her valuables. She shook out a silver shawl pin in the shape of a leaping frog. She’d worn it on festival days, with her green scarf. It was a present from Alder Owl—but then, everything was. She dropped it into the spring.

Was that right? Yes, the frog was water’s beast, never mind that it breathed air half the time. And silver was water’s metal, even though it was mined from the earth and shaped with fire, and turned black as quickly in water as in air. How could magic be based on understanding the true nature of things if it ignored so much?

A bubble rose to the surface and broke loudly, and Moon laughed. “You’re welcome, and same to you,” she said, and set off again.

The Seawood gave her a century’s worth of fallen needles, flat and dry, to bed down on, and plenty of dry wood for her fire. It was cold under its roof of boughs, but there were remedies for cold. She kept her fire well built up, for that, and against any meat-eaters too weak from winter to seek out the horses of Burnton High Plain.

Another day’s travel, and another. If she were to climb one of the tallest pines to its top, would the Seawood look like the plain of grass: undulating, almost endless? On the third day, when the few blades of sun that reached the forest floor were slanting and long, a wind rose. Moon listened to the old trunks above her creaking, the boughs swishing like brooms in angry hands, and decided to make camp.

In the Seawood the last edge of sunset was never visible. By then, beneath the trees, it was dark. So Moon built her fire and set water to boil before she took Alder Owl’s drum from her pack.

The trees roared above, but at their feet Moon felt only a furious breeze. She hunched her cloak around her and struck the drum.

It made no noise; but from above she heard a clap and thunder of sound, and felt a rush of air across her face. She leaped backward. The drum slid from her hands.

A pale shape sat on a low branch beyond her fire. The light fell irregularly on its huge yellow eyes, the high tufts that crowned its head, its pale breast. An owl.

“Oo,” it said, louder than the hammering wind. “Oo-whoot.”

Watching it all the while, Moon leaned forward, reaching for the drum.

The owl bated thunderously and stretched its beak wide. “Oo-wheed,” it cried at her. “Yarrooh. Yarrooh.”

Moon’s blood fell cold from under her face. The owl swooped off its branch quick and straight as a dropped stone. Its talons closed on the lashings of the drum. The great wings beat once, twice, and the bird was gone into the rushing dark.

Moon fell to her knees, gasping for breath. The voice of the owl was still caught in her ears, echoing, echoing another voice. Weed. Yarrow. Yarrow.

Tears poured burning down her face. “Oh, my weed, my stalk of yarrow,” she repeated, whispering. “Come back!” she screamed into the night. She got no answer but the wind. She pressed her empty hands to her face and cried herself to sleep.

With morning, the Seawood crowded around her as it had before, full of singing birds and softness, traitorous and unashamed. In one thing, at least, its spirit marched with hers. The light under the trees was gray, and she heard the patter of rain in the branches above. Moon stirred the cold ashes of her fire and waited for her heart to thaw. She would go on to Great Hark, and beyond if she had to. There might yet be some hope. And if there wasn’t, there might at least be a reckoning.

All day the path led downward, and she walked until her thighs burned and her stomach gnawed itself from hunger. The rain came down harder, showering her ignominiously when the wind shook the branches. She meant to leave the Seawood before she slept again, if it meant walking all night. But the trees began to thin around her late in the day, and shortly after she saw a bare rise ahead of her. She mounted it and looked down.

The valley was full of low mist, eddying slowly in the rain. Rising out of it was the largest town Moon had ever seen. It was walled in stone and gated with oak and iron, and roofed in prosperous slate and tile. Pennons flew from every wall tower, their colors darkened with rain and stolen away by the gray light. At the heart of the town was a tall, white, red-roofed building, cornered with round towers like the wall.

The boy was right about this, too. She could never find news of one person in such a place, unless that person was the king or the queen. Moon drooped under a fresh lashing of rain.

But why not? Alder Owl had set off to find the prince. Why wouldn’t she have gone to the palace and stated her business, and searched on from there? And why shouldn’t Moon do the same?

She flapped a sheet of water off her cloak and plunged down the trail. She had another hour’s walk before she would reach the gates, and she wanted to be inside by sundown.

The wall loomed over her at last, oppressively high, dark and shining with rain. She found the huge double gates open, and the press of wagons and horses and pedestrians in and out of them daunting. No one seemed to take any notice when she lomed the stream and passed through, and though she looked and looked she couldn't see anyone who appeared to be any more official than anyone else. Everyone, in fact, looked busy and important. So this is city life, Moon thought and stepped out of the flow of traffic for a better look around. ’

Without her bird’s-eye view, she knew she wouldn’t find the palace except by chance. So she asked directions of a woman and a man unloading a cart full of baled hay.

They looked at her and blinked, as if they were too weary to think; they were at east as wet as Moon was, and seemed to have less hope of finding what they were looking ton Their expressions of surprise were so similar that Moon wondered if they were blood relations, and indeed, their eyes were much alike, green-gray as sage. The man wore a dusty brown jacket worn through at one elbow; the woman had a long, tattered black shawl pulled up over her white hair.

“Round the wall that way ” said the man at last, “until you come to a broad street all laid with brick. Follow that uphill until you see it.”

“Thank you." Moon eyed the hay cart, which was nearly full. Work was ointment for the heart. Alder Owl had said so. “Would you like some help? I could get in the cart and throw bales down. ”

“Oh, no,” said the woman. “It’s all right.”

Moon shook her head. “You sound like my neighbors. With them, it would be fifteen minutes before we argued each other to a standstill. I’m going to start throwmg hay instead.” At that, she scrambled into the cart and hoisted a bale. When she turned to pass it to the man and woman, she found them looking at each other, before the man came to take the hay from her.

It was hot, wet, prickly work, but it didn’t take long. When the cart was empty, they exchanged thanks and Moon set off again for the palace. On the way, she watched the sun’s eye close behind the line of the hills.

The brick-paved street ran in long curves like an old riverbed. She couldn’t see the palace until she’d tramped up the last turning and found the high white walls before her, and another gate. This one was carved and painted with a flock of rising birds, and closed.

Two men stood at the gate, one on each side. They were young and tall and broad-shouldered, and Moon recognized them as being of a type that made village girls stammer. They stood very straight, and wore green capes and coats with what Moon thought was an excessive quantity of gold trim. She stepped up to the nearest.

“Pardon me,” she said, “I’d like to speak to the king and queen.”

The guard blinked even more thoroughly than the couple with the hay cart had. With good reason, Moon realized; now she was not only travel-stained and sodden, but dusted with hay as well. She sighed, which seemed to increase the young man’s confusion.

“I’ll start nearer the beginning,” she told him. “I came looking for my teacher, who set off at the end of last autumn to look for the prince. Do you remember a witch, named Alder Owl, from a village two weeks east of here? I think she might have come to the palace to see the king and queen about it.”

The guard smiled. Moon thought she wouldn’t feel too scornful of a girl who stammered in his presence. “I suppose I could have a message taken to Their Majesties,” he said at last. “Someone in the palace may have met your teacher. Hi, Rush!” he called to the guard on the other side of the gate. “This woman is looking for her teacher, a witch who set out to find the prince. Who would she ask, then?”

Rush sauntered over, his cape swinging. He raised his eyebrows at Moon. “Every witch in Hark End has gone hunting the prince at one time or another. How would anyone remember one out of the lot?”

Moon drew herself up very straight, and found she was nearly as tall as he was. She raised only one eyebrow, which she’d always found effective with Fell. “I’m sorry your memory isn’t all you might like it to be. Would it help if I pointed out that this witch remains unaccounted for?”

“There aren’t any of those. They all came back, cap in hand and dung on their shoes, saying, 'Beg pardon, Lord,’ and ‘Perishing sorry, Lady.' You could buy and sell the gaggle of them with the brass on my scabbard.”

“You,” Moon told him sternly, “are of very little use.”

“More use than anyone who’s sought him so far. If they’d only set my unit to it ...”

She looked into his hard young face. “You loved him, didn’t you?”

His mouth pinched closed, and the hurt in his eyes made him seem for a moment as young as Fell. It held a glass up to her own pain. “Everyone did. He was—is the land’s own heart.”

“My teacher is like that to me. Please, may I speak with someone?”

The polite guard was looking from one to the other of them, alarmed. Rush turned to him and frowned. “Take her to—merry heavens, I don’t know. Try the steward. He fancies he knows everything.”

And so the Gate of Birds opened to Moon Very Thin. She followed the polite guard across a paved courtyard held in the wide, high arms of the palace, colonnaded all around and carved with the likenesses of animals and flowers. On every column a torch burned in its iron bracket, hissing in the rain, and lit the courtyard like a stage. It was very beautiful, if a little grim.

The guard waved her through a small iron-clad door into a neat parlor. A fire was lit in the brick hearth and showed her the rugs and hangings, the paneled walls blackened with age. The guard tugged an embroidered pull near the door and turned to her.

“I should get back to the gate. Just tell the steward, Lord Leyan, what you know about your teacher. If there’s help for you here, he’ll see that you get it.”

When he'd gone, she gathered her damp cloak about her and wondered if she ought to sit. Then she heard footsteps, and a door she hadn’t noticed opened in the paneling.

A very tall, straight-backed man came through it. His hair was white and thick and brushed his shoulders, where it met a velvet coat faced in creweled satin. He didn’t seem to find the sight of her startling, which Moon took as a good sign. “How may I help you?” he asked.

“Lord Leyan?”

He nodded.

“My name is Moon Very Thin. I’ve come from the east in search of my teacher, the witch Alder Owl, who set out last autumn to find the prince. I think now . . . I won’t find her. But I have to try.” To her horror, she felt tears rising in her eyes.

Lord Leyan crossed the room in a long stride and grasped her hands. “My dear, don’t cry. I remember your teacher. She was an alarming woman, but that gave us all hope. She has not returned to you, either, then?”

Moon swallowed and shook her head.

“You’ve traveled a long way. You shall have a bath and a meal and a change of clothes, and I will see if anyone can tell you more about your teacher. ”

Before Moon was quite certain how it had been managed, she was standing in a handsome dark room with a velvet-hung bed and a fire bigger than the one in the parlor, and a woman with a red face and flyaway hair was pouring cans of water into a bathtub shaped and painted like a swan.

“That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever seen,” said Moon in wonder.

The red-faced woman grinned suddenly. “You know, it is. And it may be the lords and ladies think so, too, and are afraid to say.”

“One of them must have paid for it once.”

“That’s so. Well, no one’s born with taste. Have your bath, and I’ll bring you a change of clothes in a little.”

“You needn’t do that. I have clean ones in my pack.”

“Yes, but have they got lace on them, and a ’broidery flower for every seam? If not, you’d best let me bring these, for word is you eat with the King and Queen.” “I do?” Moon blurted, horrified. “Why?”

“Lord Leyan went to them, and they said send you in. Don’t pop your eyes at me, there’s no help for it.”

Moon scrubbed until she was pink all over, and smelling of violet soap. She washed her hair three times, and trimmed her short nails, and looked in despair at her reflection in the mirror. She didn’t think she’d put anyone off dinner, but there was no question that the only thing that stood there was Moon Very Thin, tall and brown and forthright.

“Here, now,” said the red-faced woman at the door. “I thought this would look nice, and you wouldn’t even quite feel a fool in it. What do you say?”

Draped over her arms she had a plain, high-necked dress of amber linen, and an overgown of russet velvet. The hem and deep collar were embroidered in gold with the platter-heads of yarrow flowers. Moon stared at that, and looked quickly up at the red-faced woman. There was nothing out of the way in her expression.

“It’s—it’s fine. It’s rather much, but ...”

“But it’s the least much that’s still enough for dining in the hall. Let’s get you dressed.”

The woman helped her into it, pulling swaths of lavender-scented fabric over her head. Then she combed out Moon’s hair, braided it, and fastened it with a gold pin.

“Good,” the red-faced woman said. “You look like you, but dressed up, which is as it should be. I’ll show you to the hall.”

Moon took a last look at her reflection. She didn’t think she looked at all like herself. Dazed, she followed her guide out of the room.

She knew when they’d almost reached their destination. A fragrance rolled out of the hall that reminded Moon she’d missed three meals. At the door, the redfaced woman stopped her.

“You’ll do, I think. Still—tell no lies, though you may be told them. Look anyone in the eye, though they might want it otherwise. And take everything offered you with your right hand. It can’t hurt.” With that the red-faced woman turned and disappeared down the maze of the corridor.

Moon straightened her shoulders and, her stomach pinched with hunger and nerves, stepped into the hall.

She gaped. She couldn’t help it, though she’d promised herself she wouldn’t. The hall was as high as two rooms, and long and broad as a field of wheat. It had two yawning fireplaces big enough to tether an ox in. Banners hung from every beam, sewn over with beasts and birds and things she couldn’t name. There weren’t enough candles in all Hark End to light it top to bottom, nor enough wood in the Seawood to heat it, so like the great courtyard it was beautiful and grim.

The tables were set in a U, the high table between the two arms. To her dazzled eye, it seemed every place was taken. It was bad enough to dine with the king and queen. Why hadn’t she realized that it would be the court, as well?

At the high table, the king rose smiling. “Our guest!” he called. “Come, there’s a place for you beside my lady and me.”

Moon felt her face burning as she walked to the high table. The court watched her go; but there were no whispers, no hands raised to shield moving lips. She was grateful, but it was odd.

Her chair was indeed set beside those of the king and queen. The king was whitehaired and broad-shouldered, with an open, smiling face and big hands. The queen’s hair was white and gold, and her eyes were wide and gray as storms. She smiled, too, but as if the gesture were a sorrow she was loath to share.

“Lord Leyan told us your story,” said the queen. “1 remember your teacher. Had you been with her long?”

“All my life,” Moon replied. Dishes came to roost before her, so she could serve herself: roast meat, salads, breads, compotes, vegetables, sauces, wedges of cheese. She could limit herself to a bite of everything, and still leave the hall achingly full. She kept her left hand clamped between her knees for fear of forgetting and taking something with it. Every dish was good, but not quite as good as she’d thought it looked.

“Then you are a witch as well?” the king asked.

“I don’t know. I’ve been taught by a witch, and learned witches’ knowledge. But she taught me gardening and carpentry, too.”

“You hope to find her?”

Moon looked at him, and weighed the question seriously for the first time since the Seawood. “I hope I may learn she’s been transformed, and that I can change her back. But I think I met her, last night in the wood, and I find it’s hard to hope.”

“But you want to go on?” the queen pressed her. “What will you do?”

“The only thing I can think of to do is what she set out for: I mean to find your son.”

Moon couldn’t think why the queen would pale at that.

“Oh, my dear, don’t,” the king said. “Our son is lost, your teacher is lost—what profit can there be in throwing yourself after them? Rest here, then go home and live. Our son is gone. ”

It was a fine, rich hall, and he was a fair, kingly man. But it was all dimmed, as if a layer of soot lay over the palace and its occupants.

“What did he look like, the prince?”

The king frowned. It was the queen who drew a locket out of the bodice of her gown, lifted its chain over her head and passed it to Moon. It held, not the costly miniature she’d expected, but a sketch in soft pencil, swiftly done. It was the first informal thing she could recall seeing in the palace.

“He wouldn’t sit still to be painted,” the queen said wistfully. “One of his friends likes to draw. He gave me that after . . . after my son was gone.”

He had been reading, perhaps, when his friend snatched that quiet moment to catch his likeness. The high forehead was propped on a long-fingered hand; the eyes were directed downward, and the eyelids hid them. The nose was straight, and the mouth was long and grave. The hair was barely suggested; light or dark, it fell unruly around the supporting hand. Even setting aside the kindly eye of friendship that had informed the pencil, Moon gave the village girls leave to be silly over this one. She closed the locket and gave it back.

You can t know what s happened to him. How can you let him go, without knowing?”

“There are many things in the world I will never know,” the king said sharply.

“I met a man at the gate who still mourns the prince. He called him the heart of the land. Nothing can live without its heart.”

The queen drew a breath and turned her face to her plate, but said nothing.

“Enough,” said the king. “If you must search, then you must. But I’ll have peace at my table. Here, child, will you pledge it with me?”

Over Moon’s right hand, lying on the white cloth, he laid his own, and held his wine cup out to her.

She sat frozen, staring at the chased silver and her own reflection in it. Then she raised her eyes to his and said, “No.”

There was a shattering quiet in the hall.

“You will not drink?”

“I will not . . . pledge you peace. There isn’t any here, however much anyone may try to hide it. I’m sorry.” That, she knew when she’d said it, was true. “Excuse me,” she added, and drew her hand out from under the king’s, which was large, but soft. “I’m going to bed. I mean to leave early tomorrow.”

She rose and walked back down the length of the room, lapped in a different kind of silence.

A servant found her in the corridor and led her to her chamber. There she found her old clothes clean and dry and folded, the fire tended, the bed turned down. The red-faced woman wasn’t there. She took off her finery, laid it out smooth on a chair, and put her old nightgown on. Then she went to the glass to unpin and brush her hair.

The pin was in her hand, and she was reaching to set it down, when she saw what it was. A little leaping frog. But now it was gold.

It was hers. The kicking legs and goggle eyes, every irregularity—it was her pin. She dashed to the door and flung it open. “Hello?” she called. “Oh, bother!” She stepped back into the room and searched, and finally found the bell pull disguised as a bit of tapestry.

After a few minutes, a girl with black hair and bright eyes came to the door. “Yes, ma’am?”

“The woman who helped me, who drew my bath and brought me clothes. Is she still here?”

The girl looked distressed. “I’m sorry, ma’am. I don’t know who waited on you. What did she look like?”

“About my height. With a red face and wild, wispy hair.”

The girl stared, and said, “Ma’am—are you sure? That doesn’t sound like anyone here.”

Moon dropped heavily into the nearest chair. “Why am I not surprised? Thank you very much. I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

The girl nodded and closed the door behind her. Moon put out the candles, climbed into bed, and lay awake for an uncommonly long time.

In a gray, wet dawn, she dressed and shouldered her pack and by the simple expedient of going down every time she came to a staircase, found a door that led outside. It was a little postern, opening on a kitchen garden and a wash yard fenced in stone. At the side of the path, a man squatted by a wooden hand cart, mending a wheel.

“Here, missy!” he called out, his voice like a spade thrust into gravel. “Hold this axle up, won’t you?”

Moon sighed. She wanted to go. She wanted to be moving, because moving would be almost like getting something done. And she wanted to be out of this beautiful place that had lost its heart. She stepped over a spreading clump of rhubarb, knelt, and hoisted the axle.

Whatever had damaged the wheel had made the axle split; the long splinter of wood bit into Moon’s right hand. She cried out and snatched that hand away. Blood ran out of the cut on her palm and fell among the rhubarb stems, a few drops. Then it ceased to flow.

Moon looked up, frightened, to the man with the wheel.

It was the man from the hay wagon, white-haired, his eyes as green and gray as sage. He had a ruddy, somber face. Red-faced, like the woman who’d—

The woman who’d helped her last night had been the one from the hay cart. Why hadn’t she seen it? But she remembered it now, and the woman’s green eyes, and even a fragment of hay caught in the wild hair. Moon sprang up.

The old man caught her hand. “Rhubarb purges, and rhubarb means advice. Turn you back around. Your business is in there.” He pointed a red, rough finger at the palace, at the top of the near corner tower. Then he stood, dusted off his trousers, strolled down the path and was gone.

Moon opened her mouth, which she hadn’t been able to do until then. She could still feel his hand, warm and callused. She looked down. In the palm he’d held was a sprig of hyssop and a wisp of broom, and a spiraling stem of convolvulus.

Moon bolted back through the postern door and up the first twisting flight of stairs she found, until she ran out of steps. Then she cast furiously about. Which way was that wretched tower? She got her bearings by looking out the corridor windows. It would be that door, she thought. She tried it; it resisted.

He could have kept his posy and given me a key, she thought furiously. Then: But he did.

She plucked up the convolvulus, poked it into the keyhole, and said, “Turn away, turn astray, backwards from the turn of day. What iron turned to lock away, herb will turn the other way.” Metal grated against metal, and the latch yielded under her hand.

A young man’s room, frozen in time. A jerkin of quilted, painted leather dropped on a chair; a case of books, their bindings standing in bright ranks; a wooden flute and a pair of leather gloves lying on an inlaid cedar chest; an unmade bed, the coverlet slid sideways and half pooled on the floor.

More, a room frozen in a tableau of atrocity and accusation. For Moon could feel it, the thing that had been done here, that was still being done because the room had sat undisturbed. Nightshade and thornapple, skullcap, henbane, and fern grown bleached and stunted under stone. Moon recognized their scents and their twisted strength around her, the power of the work they’d made and the shame that kept them secret.

There was a dust of crushed leaf and flower over the door lintel, on the sill of every window, lined like seams in the folds of the bed hangings. Her fingers clenched on the herbs in her hand as rage sprouted up in her and spread.

With broom and hyssop she dashed the dust from the lintel, the windows, the hangings. “Merry or doleful, the last or the first,” she chanted as she swung her weapons, spitting each word in fury, “fly and be hunted, or stay and be cursed!”

“What are you doing?" said a voice from the door, and Moon spun and raised her posy like a dagger.

The king stood there, his coat awry, his hair uncombed. His face was white as a corpse’s, and his eyes were wide as a man’s who sees the gallows, and knows the noose is his.

“You did this,” Moon breathed; and louder, “You gave him to the King of Stones with your own hand. ”

“I had to,” he whispered. “He made a beggar of me. My son was the forfeit.”

“You locked him under the earth. And let my teacher go to her ... to her death to pay your forfeit.”

“It was his life or mine!”

“Does your lady wife know what you did?”

“His lady wife helped him to do it,” said the queen, stepping forward from the shadows of the hall. She stood tall and her face was quiet, as if she welcomed the noose. “Because he was her love and the other, only her son. Because she feared to lose a queen’s power. Because she was a fool, and weak. Then she kept the secret, because her heart was black and broken, and she thought no worse could be done than had been done already. ”

Moon turned to the king. “Tell me,” she commanded.

“I was hunting alone,” said the king in a trembling voice. “I roused a boar. I . . . had a young man’s pride and an old man’s arm, and the boar was too much for me. I lay bleeding and in pain, and the sight nearly gone from my eyes, when I heard footsteps. I called out for help.

“ ‘You are dying,’ he told me, and I denied it, weeping. ‘I don’t want to die,’ I said, over and over. I promised him anything, if he would save my life.” The king’s voice failed, and stopped.

“Where?” said Moon. “Where did this happen?”

“In the wood under Elder Scarp. Near the waterfall that feeds the stream called the Laughing Girl.”

“Point me the way,” she ordered.

The sky was hazed white, and the air was hot and still. Moon dashed sweat from her forehead as she walked. She could have demanded a horse, but she had walked the rest of the journey, and this seemed such a little way compared to that. She hoped it would be cooler under the trees.

It wasn’t; and the gnats were worse around her face, and the biting flies. Moon swung at them steadily as she clambered over the stones. It seemed a long time before she heard the waterfall, then saw it. She cast about for the clearing, and wondered, were there many? Or only one, and it so small that she could walk past it and never know? The falling water thrummed steadily, like a drum, like a heartbeat.

In a shaft of sun, she saw a bit of creamy white—a flower head, round and flat as a platter, dwarfed with early blooming. She looked up and found that she stood on the edge of a clearing, and was not alone.

He wore armor, dull gray plates worked with fantastic embossing, trimmed in glossy black. He had a gray cloak fastened over that, thrown back off his shoulders, but with the hood up and pulled well forward. Moon could see nothing of his face.

“In the common way of things,” he said, in a quiet, carrying voice, “I seek out those I wish to see. I am not used to uninvited guests.”

The armor was made of slate and obsidian, because he was the King of Stones.

She couldn’t speak. She could command the king of Hark End, but this was a king whose rule did not light on him by an accident of blood or by the acclaim of any mortal thing. This was an embodied power, a still force of awe and terror.

“I’ve come for a man and his soul,” she whispered. “They were wrongly taken.” “I take nothing wrongly. Are you sure?”

She felt heat in her face, then cold at the thought of what she’d said: that she’d accused him. “No,” she admitted, the word cracking with her fear. “But that they were wrongly given, I know. He was not theirs to give.”

“You speak of the prince of Hark End. They were his parents. Would you let anyone say you could not give away what you had made?”

Moon’s lips parted on a word; then she stared in horror. Her mind churned over the logic, followed his question back to its root.

He spoke her thoughts aloud. “You have attended at the death of a child, stilled in the womb to save the mother’s life. How is this different?”

“It is different!” she cried. “He was a grown man, and what he was was shaped by what he did, what he chose. ”

“He had his mother’s laugh, his grandfather’s nose. His father taught him to ride. What part of him was not made by someone else? Tell me, and we will see if I should give that part back.”

Moon clutched her fingers over her lips, as if by that she could force herself to think it all through before she spoke. “His father taught him to ride,” she repeated. “If the horse refuses to cross a ford, what makes the father use his spurs, and the son dismount and lead it? He has his mother’s laugh—but what makes her laugh at one thing, and him at another?”

“What, indeed?” asked the King of Stones. “Well, for argument’s sake I’ll say his mind is in doubt, and his heart. What of his body?”

“Bodies grow with eating and exercise,” Moon replied. This was ground she felt sure of. “Do you think the king and the queen did those for him?”

The King of Stones threw back his cowled head and laughed, a cold ringing sound. It restored Moon to sensible terror. She stepped back, and found herself against a tree trunk.

“And his soul?” said the King of Stones at last.

“That didn’t belong to his mother and father,” Moon said, barely audible even to her own ears. “If it belonged to anyone but himself, I think you did not win it from Her.”

Silence lay for long moments in the clearing. Then he said, “I am well tutored. Yet there was a bargain made, and a work done, and both sides knew what they pledged and what it meant. Under law, the contract was kept.”

“That’s not true. Out of fear the king promised you anything, but he never meant the life of his son!”

“Then he could have refused me that, and died. He said ‘Anything,’ and meant it, unto the life of his son, his wife, and all his kingdom.”

He had fought her to a standstill with words. But, words used up and useless, she still felt a core of anger in her for what had been done, outrage against a thing she knew, beyond words, was wrong.

So she said aloud, “It’s wrong. It was a contract that was wrong to make, let alone to keep. I know it.”

“What is it,” said the King of Stones, “that says so?”

“My judgment says so. My head.” Moon swallowed. “My heart.”

“Ah. What do I know of your judgment? Is it good?”

She scrubbed her fingers over her face. He had spoken lightly, but Moon knew the question wasn’t light at all. She had to speak the truth; she had to decide what the truth was. “It’s not perfect,” she answered reluctantly. “But yes, I think it’s as good as most people’s.”

“Do you trust it enough to allow it to be tested?”

Moon lifted her head and stared at him in alarm. “What?”

“I will test your judgment. If I find it good, I will let you free the prince of Hark End. If not, I will keep him, and you will take your anger, your outrage, and the knowledge of your failure home to nurture like children all the rest of your life.” “Is that prophecy?” Moon asked hoarsely.

“You may prove it so, if you like. Will you take my test?”

She drew a great, trembling breath. “Yes.”

“Come closer, then.” With that, he pushed back his hood.

There was no stone helm beneath, or monster head. There was a white-skinned man’s face, all bone and sinew and no softness, and long black hair rucked from the hood. The sockets of his eyes were shadowed black, though the light that fell in the clearing should have lit all of his face. Moon looked at him and was more frightened than she would have been by any deformity, for she knew then that none of this—armor, face, eyes—had anything to do with his true shape.

“Before we begin,” he said in that soft, cool voice. “There is yet a life you have not asked me for, one I thought you’d beg of me first of all.”

Moon’s heart plunged, and she closed her eyes. “Alder Owl.”

“You cannot win her back. There was no treachery there. She, at least, I took fairly, for she greeted me by name and said I was well met.”

“No!” Moon cried.

“She was sick beyond curing, even when she left you. But she asked me to give her wings for one night, so that you would know. I granted it gladly.”

She thought she had cried all she could for Alder Owl. But this was the last death, the death of her little foolish hope, and she mourned that and Alder Owl at once with falling, silent tears.

“My test for you, then.” He stretched out his hands, his mailed fingers curled over whatever lay in each palm. “You have only to choose,” he said. He opened his fingers to reveal two rings, one silver, one gold.

She looked from the rings to his face again, and her expression must have told him something.

“You are a witch,” said the King of Stones, gently mocking. “You read symbols and make them, and craft them into nets to catch truth in. This is the meat of your training, to read the true nature of a thing. Here are symbols—choose between them. Pick the truer. Pick the better.”

He pressed forward first one hand, then the other. “Silver, or gold? Left or right? Night or day, moon”—she heard him mock her again—“or sun, water or fire, waning or waxing, female or male. Have I forgotten any?”

Moon wiped the tears from her cheeks and frowned down at the rings. They were plain, polished circles of metal, not really meant for finger rings at all. Circles, complete in themselves, unmarred by scratch or tarnish.

Silver, or gold. Mined from the earth, forged in fire, cooled in water, pierced with air. Gold was rarer, silver was harder, but both were pure metals. Should she choose rareness? Hardness? The lighter color? But the flash of either was bright. The color of the moon? But she’d seen the moon, low in the sky, yellow as a peach. And the light from the moon was reflected light from the sun, whose color was yellow although in the sky it was burning white, and whose metal was gold. There was nothing to choose between them.

The blood rushed into her face, and the gauntleted hands and their two rings swam in her vision. It was true. She’d always thought so.

Her eyes sprang up to the face of the King of Stones. “It’s a false choice. They’re equal.”

As she said the words, her heart gave a single terrified leap. She was wrong. She was defeated, and a fool. The King of Stones’ fingers closed again over the rings.

“Down that trail to a granite stone, and then between two hazel trees,” he said. “You’ll find him there.”

She was alone in the clearing.

Moon stumbled down the trail, dazed with relief and the release of tension. She found the stone, and the two young hazel trees, slender and leafed out in fragile green, and passed between them.

She plunged immediately into full sunlight and strangeness. Another clearing, carpeted with deep grass and the stars of spring flowers, surrounded by blossoming trees—but trees in blossom didn’t also stand heavy with fruit, like a vain child wearing all its trinkets at once. She saw apples, cherries, and pears under their drifts of pale blossom, ripe and without blemish. At the other side of the clearing there was a shelf of stone thrust up out of the grass. On it, as if sleeping, lay a young man, exquisitely dressed.

Golden hair, she thought. That’s why it was drawn in so lightly. Like amber, or honey. The fair face was very like the sketch she remembered, as was the scholar’s hand palm up on the stone beside it. She stepped forward.

Beside the stone, the black branches of a tree lifted, moved away from their neighbors, and the trunk—Not a tree. A stag stepped into the clearing, scattering the apple blossoms with the great span of his antlers. He was black as charcoal, and his antler points were shining black, twelve of them or more. His eyes were large and red.

He snorted and lowered his head, so that she saw him through a forest of polished black dagger points. He tore at the turf with one cloven foot.

I passed his testl she cried to herself. Hadn’t she won? Why this? You’ll find him there, the King of Stones had said. Then her anger sprang up as she remembered what else he’d said: I will let you free the prince of Hark End.

What under the wide sky was she supposed to do? Strike the stag dead with her bare hands? Frighten it away with a frown? Turn it into—

She gave a little cry at the thought, and the stag was startled into charging. She leaped behind the slender trunk of a cherry tree. Cloth tore as the stag yanked free of her cloak.

The figure on the shelf of stone hadn’t moved. She watched it, knowing her eyes ought to be on the stag, watching for the rise and fall of breath. “Oh, what a stupid trick!” she said to the air, and shouted at the stag, “Flower and leaf and stalk to thee, I conjure back what ought to be. Human frame and human mind banish those of hart or hind.” Which, when she thought about it, was a silly thing to say, since it certainly wasn't a hind.

He lay prone in the grass, naked, honey hair every which way. His eyes were closed, but his brows pinched together, as if he was fighting his way back from sleep. One sunbrowned long hand curled and straightened. His eyes snapped open, focused on nothing; the fingers curled again; and finally he looked at them, as if he had to force himself to do it, afraid of what he might see. Moon heard the sharp drawing of his breath. On the shelf of stone there was nothing at all.

A movement across the clearing caught Moon’s eye and she looked up. Among the trees stood the King of Stones in his gray armor. Sunshine glinted off it and into his unsmiling face, and pierced the shadows of his eye sockets. His eyes, she saw, were green as sage.

The prince had levered himself up onto his elbows. Moon saw the tremors in his arms and across his back. She swept her torn cloak from her shoulders and draped it over him. “Can you speak?” she asked him. She glanced up again. There was no one in the clearing but the two of them.

“I don’t—yes,” he said, like a whispering crow, and laughed thinly. He held out one spread and shaking hand. “Tell me. You don’t see a hoof, do you?”

“No, but you used to have four of them. You’re not nearly so impressive in this shape.”

He laughed again, from closer to his chest this time. “You haven’t seen me hung all over with satin and beads like a dancing elephant.”

“Well, thank goodness for that. Can you stand up? Lean on me if you want to, but we should be gone from here.”

He clutched her shoulder—the long scholar’s fingers were very strong—and struggled to his feet, then drew her cloak more tightly around himself. “Which way?”

Passage through the woods was hard for her, because she knew how hard it was for him, barefoot, disoriented, yanked out of place and time. After one especially hard stumble, he sagged against a tree. “I hope this passes. I can see flashes of this wood in my memory, but as if my eyes were off on either side of my head.” “Memory fades,” she said. “Don’t worry.”

He looked up at her quickly, pain in his face. “Does it?” He shook his head. “I’m sorry—did you tell me your name?”

“No. It’s Moon Very Thin.”

He asked gravely. “Are you waxing or waning?”

“It depends from moment to moment.”

“That makes sense. Will you call me Robin?”

“If you want me to.”

“I do, please. I find I’m awfully taken with having a name again.”

At last the trees opened out, and in a fold of the green hillside they found a farmstead. A man stood in the farmhouse door watching them come. When they were close enough to make out his balding head and wool coat, he stirred from the door; took three faltering steps into his garden; and shouted and ran toward them. A tall, round woman appeared at the door, twisting her apron. Then she, too, began to run.

The man stopped just short of them, open-mouthed, his face a study in hope, and fear that hope will be yanked away. “Your Highness?”

Robin nodded.

The round woman had come up beside the man. Tears coursed down her face. She said calmly, “Teazle, don’t keep ’em standing in the yard. Look like they’ve been dragged backwards through the blackthorn, both of them, and probably hungry as cats.” But she stepped forward and touched one tentative hand to the prince’s cheek. “You’re back,” she whispered.

“I’m back.”

They were fed hugely, and Robin was decently clothed in linen and leather belonging to Teazles eldest son. “We should be going,” the prince said at last, regretfully.

“Of course,” Teazle agreed. “Oh, they’ll be that glad to see you at the palace.” Moon saw the shadow of pain pass quickly over Robin’s face again.

They tramped through the new ferns, the setting sun at their backs. “I’d as soon ...” Robin faltered and began again. “I’d as soon not reach the palace tonight. Do you mind?”

Moon searched his face. “Would you rather be alone?”

“No! I’ve been alone for—how long? A year? That’s enough. Unless you don’t want to stay out overnight. ”

“It would be silly to stop now, just when I’m getting good at it,” Moon said cheerfully.

They made camp under the lee of a hill near a creek, as the sky darkened and the stars came out like frost. They didn’t need to cook, but Moon built a fire anyway. She was aware of his gaze; she knew when he was watching, and wondered that she felt it so. When it was full dark and Robin lay staring into the flames, Moon said, “You know, then?”

How I was . . . ? Yes. Just before . . . there was a moment when I knew what had been done, and whod done it. ” He laced his brown fingers over his mouth and was silent for a while; then he said, “Would it be better if I didn’t go back?” “You’d do that?”

“If it would be better. ”

“What would you do instead?”

He sighed. “Go off somewhere and grow apples.”

Well, it wouldn’t be better,” Moon said desperately. “You have to go back. I don t know what you 11 find when you get there, though. I called down curse and banishment on your mother and father, and I don’t really know what they’ll do about it.”

He looked up, the fire bright in his eyes. “You did that? To the king and queen of Hark End?”

“Do you think they didn’t deserve it?”

I wish they didn't deserve it.” He closed his eyes and dropped his chin onto his folded hands.

I think you are the heart of the land,” Moon said in surprise.

His eyes flew open again. “Who said that?”

A guard at the front palace gate. He’ll probably fall on his knees when he sees you.

“Great grief and ashes,” said the prince. “Maybe I can sneak in the back way.”

They parted the next day in sight of the walls of Great Hark. “You can’t leave me to do this alone,” Robin protested.

“How would I help? I know less about it than you do, even if you are a year out of date.”

“A lot happens in a year,” he said softly.

“And a lot doesn’t. You’ll be all right. Remember that everyone loves you and needs you. Think about them and you won’t worry about you.”

“Are you speaking from experience?”

“A little.” Moon swallowed the lump in her throat. “But I’m a country witch and my place is in the country. Two weeks to the east by foot, just across the Blacksmith River. If you ever make a King’s Progress, stop by for tea.”

She turned and strode away before he could say or do anything silly, or she could.

Moon wondered, in the next weeks, how the journey could have seemed so strange. If the Seawood was full of ghosts, none of them belonged to her. The plain of grass was impressive, but just grass, and hot work to cross. In Little Hark she stopped for the night, and the blond boy remembered her.

“Did you find your teacher?” he asked.

“No. She died. But I needed to know that. It wasn’t for nothing.”

He already knew the prince had come back; everyone knew it, as if the knowledge had blown across the kingdom like milkweed fluff. She didn’t mention it.

She came home and began to set things to rights. It didn’t take long. The garden wouldn’t be much this year, but it would be sufficient; it was full of volunteers from last year’s fallen seed. She threw herself into work; it was balm for the heart. She kept her mind on her neighbors’ needs, to keep it off her own. And now she knew that her theory was right, that earth and air and fire and water were all a part of each other, all connected, like silver and gold. Like joy and pain.

“You’re grown,” Tansy Broadwater said to her, but speculatively, as if she meant something other than height, that might not be an unalloyed joy.

The year climbed to Midsummer and sumptuous life. Moon went to the village for the Midsummer’s Eve dance and watched the horseplay for an hour before she found herself tramping back up the hill. She felt remarkably old. On Midsummer’s Day she put on her apron and went out to dig the weeds from between the flagstones.

She felt the rhythm in the earth before she heard it. Hoofbeats, coming up the hill. She got to her feet.

The horse was chestnut and the rider was honey-haired. He drew rein at the gate and slipped down from the saddle, and looked at her with a question in his eyes. She wasn’t quite sure what it was, but she knew it was a question.

She found her voice. “King’s Progress?”

“Not a bit.” He sounded just as she’d remembered, whenever she hadn’t had the sense to make enough noise to drown the memory out. “May I have some tea anyway?”

Her hands were cold, and knotted in her apron. “Mint?”

“That would be nice.” He tethered his horse to the fence and came in through the gate.

“How have things turned out?” She breathed deeply and cursed her mouth for being so dry.

Badly, in the part that couldn’t help but be. My parents chose exile. I miss them—or I miss them as they were once. Everything else is doing pretty well. It’s always been a nice, sensible kingdom.” Now that he was closer, Moon could see his throat move when he swallowed, see his thumb turn and turn at a ring on his middle finger.

“Moon,” he said suddenly, softly, as if it were the first word he’d spoken. He plucked something out of the inside of his doublet and held it out to her. “This is for you. He added quickly, in a lighter tone, “You’d be amazed how hard it is to find when you want it. I thought I’d better pick it while I could and give it to you pressed and dried, or I’d be here empty-handed after all.”

She stared at the straight green stem, the cluster of inky-blue flowers still full of color, the sweet ghost of vanilla scent. Her fingers closed hard on her apron. “It’s heliotrope,” she managed to say.

“Yes, I know.”

“Do ... do you know what it means?”

“Yes.”

“It means 'devotion.' ”

I know, Robin said. He looked into her eyes, as he had since he’d said her name, but something faltered slightly in his face. “A little pressed and dried, but yours, if you’ll have it.” ’

“I’m a country witch,” Moon said with more force than she’d planned. “I don’t mean to stop being one. ”

Robin smiled a little, an odd sad smile. “I didn’t say you ought to. But the flower is yours whether you want it or not. And I wish you’d take it, because my arm’s getting tired.”

Oh! Moon flung her hands out of her apron. “O/i! Isn’t there a plant in this whole wretched garden that means 'I love you, too’? Botherl”

She hurtled into his arms, and he closed them tight around her.

Once upon a time there ruled in the Kingdom of Hark End a king who was young and fair, good and wise, and responsible for the breeding of no fewer than six new varieties of apple. Once upon the same time there was a queen in Hark End who understood the riddle of the rings of silver and gold: that all things are joined together without beginning or end, and that there can be no understanding until all things divided are joined. They didn’t live happily ever after, for nothing lives forever; but they lived as long as was right, then passed together into the land where trees bear blossom and fruit both at once, and where the flowers of spring never fade. ^&

There were troubled Augusts once, back when our grandmothers were still alive, and when dog days panted slowly toward busy Septembers. Narrow roads overlaid old Indian trails, cutting through squared-off fields. The roads were white gravel. In midwest August dawns, the roads turned orange. Later in the day, they flowed like strips of light between green and yellow crops. Along these roads the tinker followed his trade.

We would see his wagon a mile off. Children began to holler. Women on the farm, mothers and grandmothers and cousins, exchanged glad looks behind the backs of any men who happened to be around. The tinker was a ladies’ man, but not in the usual sense.

This was the time of the Great Depression. Farms were flattened. People were broke. Gasoline was used only for the tractor, or, once a week, taking the Ford to town. In those days horses were not spoiled little darlings. They worked the same as everyone else. Our people lived on hope, religion, the kitchen garden, a few slaughtered swine; and chicken after chicken after chicken. Even now, fifty years later, I cannot look a roasting hen in the eye.

The tinker had a regular route through the county. We saw him twice a year. Most tinkers were older men, but this one was middling young. My mother claimed he was a gypsy, my grandmother claimed him Italian, and the menfolk claimed him an Indian/mulatto who was after someone’s white daughter. But, I’d best explain about tinkers. In today’s throw-away world they are extinct.

The tinker’s wagon was a repair shop on wheels. It resembled a cross-breed between farm wagon and Conestoga, but light enough for hauling by two horses. It carried torches for brazing, patches of sheet metal, patches of copper. It held soles for shoes, and grinders for knives and scissors. It was a-clank with cooking pans hanging along its sides. The tinker repaired worn pots, glued broken china so skillfully one could hardly find the crack, fixed stalled clocks; in fact, repaired anything that required a fine hand. This tinker also repaired worn dreams. That was the seat of his trouble. And ours.

I remember all this, not only through the eyes of a child, but through the eyes of a historian. I sit in my comfortable workroom where carpet is unstained, unstainable, and unremarkable. I look at it and remember wool rugs of a farm house. The rugs carried stains as coherent as a textbook: the darkness of blood when a younger cousin lost a finger in the pulley of a pump; a light space from spilled bleach; or unfaded bright spots beneath chairs—the signs of living, or (as the poet says) “all the appurtenances of home.” I type on an old, old typewriter that was made in the ’30s. At least that much respect can be shown the story.

When the tinker’s wagon appeared on the road it caused a temporary stop in the work. That August when the trouble arose was as tricky as all Augusts. In August the last cut of hay comes in. Farmers gauge the weather sign, cut quickly, watch the horizon for storm as the hay dries. The baler comes through, the men following the tractor and wagon. They buck the bales. In the August when I was nine, the tinker appeared along the dusty road. I was too small to buck hay, was thus driving the tractor.

“Jim,” my father said to me, “get the hell up to the house.” He stood beside the wagon, shirt sodden with sweat, and sweat darkening the band of his straw hat. My father was a big man with English-blue eyes. He could be kind when he was unworried, but, what with the depression, he had not been unworried for years. My uncle and a cousin stood beside him. My uncle was from my mother’s side. He was German, with eyes a thinner blue, and face a little starchy. Another cousin, my eldest, perched on top of the wagon where he stacked bales.

“I’d of thought,” my uncle said about the tinker, “that the bastard would have hit jail by now. Or made a little stop out there at the cemetery.”

“Bullshit,” my eldest cousin said from the top of the load. “He's working. He ain’t a tramp. ” This was a cousin from dad’s side. He was known for a smart mouth and radical notions.

“Bullshit back at you,” my other cousin said. “Best you can say about him is that he might be a dago.” This was a cousin from mom’s side, and he was defending his father, who didn’t need it.

I climbed from the tractor and headed across twenty acres to the house.

In the days before World War II a boy of nine was not a man, but he was treated as if he soon would be. He had responsibilities, and most boys that age took themselves seriously. If the tinker suddenly decided to rape and pillage there was not a whole lot I could do. That, however, was not the point. The point was that I represented a male presence.

Manhood comes in peculiar ways depending on where you grow. I recall walking across that field of hay stubble in bare feet. No town kid could have done it, although in the small towns boys shed their shoes with the last frost. By August their feet were as tough as mine. The difference was that they had no feel for the land. They did not know that land is supposed to hurt you a little. Weather the same. A farm is real, not pastoral.

An apparition stood at the edge of that twenty-acre hay field. Even today you occasionally see them in the midwest. Solitary black walnuts stand like intricately carved windmills. They spread against the sky, trees spared when the land was cleared. They grow slowly, and spare themselves. No other tree can root within their drip lines. Black walnuts spread poison through the soil.

This tree was a youngster when men and their families forged through the Cumberland Gap, or spread along rivers from a backwoods settlement called Chicago. Now it had a bole thirty feet in circumference. The first branches began at forty feet, and the total height was over a hundred. It ruled the fields, too majestic for human use. It would not serve for a children’s swing, or for a hanging tree. Before first snow, when the guns came out for hunting season, we always gathered walnuts beneath spectral branches.

The tinker’s wagon pulled into the lane as I passed the back door of the house. My grandmother saw me, looked toward the hayfield, and murmured to herself; probably a verse from Isaiah. At age nine I had small appreciation of women, did not understand that my grandmother was the most beautiful woman I would ever know. She was a storyteller, and she was tall in a time when most women were not. Her white hair fell below her waist when she brushed it. During the day she had it “done up.” Her worn housedresses were always pressed by flatirons. Her dresses fell to the tops of her shoes. My grandmother had been a young wife on the Oklahoma frontier when Indians roamed. The depression of the 1880s brought her back to Indiana.

The tinker’s horses were wide from summer’s roadside grass. One was bay, the other black. Color radiated from the wagon, red, white, and blue paint, green canvas, sun leaping from polished pans which clanked at every jolt in the rutted lane. Sun sparkled and danced against colors. My mother stepped from the house, my least cousin beside her, a girl of fifteen.

Did I understand what was going on? I doubt it, although I surely felt the men’s displeasure and the women’s pleasure. For my own part, the tinker’s visit was exciting. Days on the farm are long. We had a telephone party line, but we had neither radio nor electricity. Townfolk had both.

It was a shy welcome the tinker faced, although he was accustomed to it. Since he moved from farm to farm, he met such welcomes all the time. Families learned how to comfortably handle each other. They had little experience with strangers.

“Missus,” the tinker said to my grandmother, “I think of you last night and turn the horses this-a-way.” His smile was a generalization among the sun-flashing pans, but he tipped his hat exactly toward my grandmother. His face was dark from either summer or blood. His brown eyes might have been those of a young Mediterranean girl. His eyes held no guile, and his face was—no more, no less—permanently relaxed and happy. In memory he seems a man without needs, an enlightened monk.

Even before he climbed from the wagon my least cousin passed him a dipper of water. Her young breasts moved beneath her housedress, her bobbed hair (which scandalized my grandmother) shone almost golden in sunlight. She had a pretty but puckish face, and lips that sometimes tied themselves with confusion. Although I had little appreciation of women, I was fascinated with what was happening to my cousin. Her body seemed to change every day. No doubt she was self-conscious as she became a woman, but to me she moved with confusing mystery.

“There’s marriages all over,” the tinker said. “From here to the county line.” He drank, then climbed from the wagon. His horses stood placid as a puddle. The tinker not only repaired things, he also served as the county’s newspaper. “The Baptists over in Warren bought a bell for the church. You can never tell what a Baptist is going to do.” He said this last with a sort of wonder, but with no malice. He passed the dipper back to my least cousin and thanked her.

In the hayfield the men reached the end of a row. The tractor turned, headed back toward the house. I recall noting that another row would make a wagon load. The men would bring the load to the barn. Leaves of the black walnut looked ragged this late in August. The leaves carried no dust because the tree stood tall.

“It sounds like a busy winter,” my mother said, and smiled at my least cousin.

“She was raised better,” my grandmother said about my mother.

I had not the least notion what was meant. Now, of course, I understand that my mother spoke of the marriages.

“If this isn’t the prettiest place on earth, then the Lord is fooling me.” The tinker looked across fields toward the hardwood grove. Beyond the grove the river wound among rushes. At this time of year the river ran nearly clear. In spring, or after August storms, it ran brown with rich mud. The tinker looked toward our small farmhouse, then toward the barn. There was no hunger in his eyes, only happiness. He busied himself at repairing dreams.

The Great Depression, in spite of the softening that comes with years, was gray. We were an ambitious people, but ambitions were set aside as we struggled against hard times. Grayness arrived because hard times did not end. Women lost color and men lost creative fire.

The tinker owned only his wagon and team, yet he magically wished for nothing. Because of this he allowed us to see our lives with new eyes. That was at least part of his magic. He did not want what we had, but he showed us how to want it. Looking back, I almost understand the other part of his magic.

“There’s so much time for thinking,” he said to my grandmother. “I wonder after your quilt while I drive.” Copper-bottomed pans reflected sun, and the wagon seemed alight with the warmth of mighty candles. The black walnut stood indifferent as a tower. In mid-afternoon it threw a shadow shorter than itself. “Quilts take such a fine hand.” The tinker did not say that he also had a fine hand.

“Margaret is growing up,” my grandmother said about my least cousin. “She helps. Some day she’ll be teaching me.”

“She has a delicate way. That’s a sign.”

My cousin, strong enough to help with the heavy work of slaughtering, looked at her feet and blushed. In the everyday life of the farm my least cousin was no more delicate than a post, but that is not what the tinker meant. “Times are changing, but a lady will always show herself a lady.” He turned to my mother, who had just made that unladylike and licentious comment about marriages. “She is also musical?” he asked about my least cousin. At the turn of the century farms had gained a few luxuries. Many farmhouses had pianos, but in the whole county only my mother excelled at music. She had a warm touch better suited for blues than for church. However, in those days we knew nothing about the musical blues.

“It takes a while to learn,” my mother said. She did not say that my cousin took little interest. My mother actually blushed. Somehow she had been taken back into the fold of respectability, and the how of the matter seemed beyond explanation.

“There’s so much to learn,” the tinker said to my cousin. “Takes a year, anyway, to rightly do a quilt. ”

Looking back, I understand that the tinker’s magic truly was magic. At least it was magic in any terms we knew then, and certainly in any terms since.

I recall standing there, my bare feet as hard-soled as soil and callus could make them. I recall feeling that mysterious matters lived around me. The values of a farm are stern. I understood clean fence rows and upright dealing. I had been shown no other values. The word ‘grace’ had never entered my thought beyond its use in sermons.

The tinker’s magic was to restore mystery and value to farm-women. No small undertaking.

Imagine a Depression farm. People lived close. A tyranny of custom was our only defense against wide knowledge of each other. When we dressed beside the kitchen woodstove on cold mornings the women dressed first. Then the men entered and dressed while the women went to the parlor. In unheated bedrooms temperatures might fall below zero.

It takes time and privacy to be a lady. The farm offers only hog butchering, kitchen gardens, interminable days of canning, the tedious daily round of cooking and splitting wood and cleaning poultry sheds. Men’s work is brutally hard. Women’s work begins before dawn and ends with a nightly reading from the Bible.

“I saved back some mending,” my grandmother said. “It’s only a little.”

In those days pots and pans were continually pushed from the hot to the cool side of the stove. Pans wore thin through years. We did not throw away a leaky pan.

I watched the tinker apply the patch, while from the barn came sounds of work as the men began to unload hay. The three women surrounded the tinker. The tinker drilled a clean hole through the leak, snapped on the pan patch, and worked to flatten it on an upright anvil. Deft fingers smoothed that patch into the pan with the skill of a carpenter using a finely set plane. As he worked he spoke about a book of pictures from California. He tsked, then smiled. He mended a boot, and told about a new preacher. The preacher’s wife was winning over the congregation, not the preacher. My memory calls back sunlight and quiet, above all, courtesy—an old-fashioned word.

“The sewing machine needs tinkering,” my cousin said.

“I’ll be but a minute,” the tinker told his horses. He followed the three women toward the house. The horses stood almost as solidly as the black walnut. Shade spread dark beneath the wagon. My mother’s shoulders did not slump as she walked. My grandmother, always busy, now seemed to stroll. My least cousin, clumsy with her growing up, was lithe in her movement. My heart pounded like rifle shots. I stood knowing I should follow, yet was somehow daunted. Even at age nine I understood that privacy lived in this encounter. A loud curse came from the barn. I looked to see my German cousin leap from the hay wagon and stride toward me.

“Are you ever going to grow up, Jimmy boy?” My cousin passed me, not running, but striding. Over by the barn the other men hesitated, then decided my cousin could handle matters. They returned to work, could not admit the work was hopeless.

Jaws of depression gnawed. No matter how hard men struggled, failure and despair were triumphant. Some years we did not make seed money. The bill for land tax stood dark as that black tree.

The sewing machine sat in a corner of the invaded parlor, and the tinker knelt. He removed a worn sleeve from the treadle. He spoke of a neighbor’s daughter, studying at Ball State Teacher’s College.

My cousin stood in the doorway. I stood behind him, embarrassed to be there, unable to not be there. The three women watched the tinker. My mother laughed! My grandmother said that college would be good for that particular girl. My least cousin yearned after the tinker s words. To us, college was a grand and remote place. I fidgeted. My grandmother turned, saw us in the doorway.

“Ralph,” she said to my cousin, “this is not your place.”

I do not know how scorn and sadness can combine in such a low voice. The tinker knelt above his work, but for a moment he fumbled with his wrench. My mother turned. I had never seen such anger from my mother, never saw such anger afterwards. My least cousin blushed and stood silent. The man in the doorway stiffened. He stood rigid as a rifle.

“You’d take away what little joy there is,” my grandmother said. “Get about your business. She turned back. My mother looked at me, and I did not understand her quick sadness. Nor, probably, did she.

I sat in the kitchen with Ralph as the tinker finished his work. The man sat with fists closed. His blue eyes turned pale as his face. He fought shame with anger, and while his eyes remained pale his face gradually heated. “We’ll see,” he kept muttering. “We’ll see about this.”

That night with the tinker long departed—marked the crossroads of my growing up. A curious silence lived in kitchen and parlor. We were isolated hearts. My mother avoided speaking with my father. My grandmother murmured to my least cousin, had nothing to say to the men. My least cousin worked in complete silence. Darkness lay across the fields by eight o'clock. Exhausted and sullen men made thin excuses to get out of the house, then made no excuse. They piled in the Ford and left on the road to town. For the first time in memory, I went to bed without hearing my father read a passage from the Bible.

No one spoke because no one knew what to say. A stranger came among us. He wielded the power of appreciation, and the power of unneeding affection.

Night passed. Morning arrived with sullen silence. Haying continued, although on that day the men were dragged-out. We made slow progress. When we went to the house for dinner at noon, the women spoke indifferently. An awful resignation dwelt among the women, a permanent tiredness of spirit. I never again remember spontaneity in that house.

The telephone party line buzzed with news. The tinker’s wagon had burned. The tinker was intact. His horses had been unhitched and tied. They were also intact, but the wagon of red and white and blue and green was in ruins ....

I wish this story could end here. I would be compelled by its darkness, would feel such sorrow, but would not have to feel the rest. I sit in my comfortable workroom and type on this antique machine that was new when the world went spoiled. The tinker was not a man who would seek revenge. Perhaps he taught what old mystics knew, that wisdom arrives on the breath of inexplicable pain.

We got the hay in, and we had three days of storm. Sunday came with church and Sunday School. Cornfields stood bright, dust gone from leaves washed beneath August thunder. The land expressed grain, but lives turned dull as sermons. We left church and drove the graveled road which lay like a glowing path, but our way led back to the farm.

We were met by sparkles of light dancing among the tattered leaves of that spectral walnut. My mother gasped, remained silent. My grandmother chuckled. My least cousin was so confused she seemed about to weep.

“Get to the house,” my uncle said to the women. “I don’t want to hear a word.” He climbed from the car and stood staring at the walnut. “How in the hell did he do it?”

The tree was alight with polished pans. They hung far out on branches. Pans glowed silver and copper, iron and enamel. No one could climb that tree. Even if a man could, it would be impossible to inch far enough out on the branches.

“He must have nailed boards like steps, then took ’em back down,” my English cousin said. “He must of used a pole and hooked that stuff out there. The man is slick.” My English cousin, known for radical notions, was not about to defect from us. At the same time he could appreciate what he saw.

“Jim,” my father said, “go get the goddamn rifle.”

In a sense it was I who defected. Over the next two years I grew closer to my mother and grandmother. My least cousin turned seventeen. She married. The men became silent and critical, but we still worked. Trapped in questions, I became silent. We avoided our confusions.

At the end of two years we lost the farm to taxes. The world started talking about war, but even that most hideous of wars leaves no memory this enduring:

The tinker used piano wire. Bullets only glanced, causing the pans to dance. We shot at the handles, broke a few pans loose. Work called and we worked. The crops came in.

We fired, and fired, and fired; pings, rattles, the sound of bullets. Autumn departed into winter, and shotguns cleared the walnuts. We spoke of cutting the tree, but did not. We fired as new leaves budded in the spring. Guns tore away small branches, and until we lost the farm they tore at my understanding.

My uncle was tight-lipped when we left the farm. My father wept, but my mother did not. I remember the tractor standing silent in the fields, and a few straggling pans hanging in the walnut. I remember our farm truck loaded with household furnishings, and wish that this were all. It is not, however; for what I remember always, can never forget, are two years of wasted ammunition and the sounds of firing, the silhouettes of raised weapons, the rattle of bullets as men sought redemption; through all the seasons shooting guns into that tree.

No one liked him. You know how first judgments go. No one wanted to even look at him. He was brought in for dubious reasons. They like to hire on the outside. They like to bring in raw, new blood.

“Hello,” he said to me. I had my doubts whether it was English. His bracelets flashed at me. The dark stain of a tattoo hovering over his face had a deleterious effect on the staff—none of whom appreciated the gravity of this situation.

This was an atrocious decision; an insult, to all of us. Our business is products; and selling products. We know what we are doing. We don’t need outsiders coming in to spoil accepted patterns of success. We all do our jobs. We make money. But it was a fact now: this savage had been appointed general plant manager. I know the sales department, for one thing, didn’t like it. Salesmen are the first to bitch— about anything. This included our sales manager, who should have kept his mouth shut.

Our sales manager should have been the last to complain about a savage. Our sales manager, I should say, has a claw. Rather, a pincher. It’s yellow, bright yellow. When he displays it—at his desk—he rolls his sleeve back. He never shows it, with his coat on. He never reveals it to the president of our company—whom I’m convinced has no idea it exists. But it does. He doesn’t smoke with it. He lays it out on the desk, and when I walk by, or one of the other salesmen walks by, he lifts it and grabs hold of us. It hurts. It cuts clean through the white sleeve of my work shirt, and holds me fast. I dangle from it until he lets me go.

“That man’s a heathen,” he said that first day. Our sales manager doesn’t pull any punches.

As for the buffoon who sits across from me in sales—his name is Vince—he had one word for him: “Weird.” Vince is a great undoer. The salesman behind the two of us—separated by a half-hearted partition—likes to curl his phone line (all the ripples of it) like a snake. Vince uncoils it—daily. Now and then this salesman asks: “Is someone tampering?” He’s very naive. He’ll kiss anyone on the butt if he thinks it will get him anywhere. He said (and this was about Queequeg): “There must be some reason they brought him on board.” On board. As though this is a ship. It isn’t.

A week ago last Tuesday I dreamed all night of trying to find out what had happened to the woman I loved. She was a pianist and a writer. We had met in New York when she played a concert of American and British music. She had reminded me how I had once been able to dance. Now, some time later, she had come to Britain to find me. But she could no longer speak, only weep. How had she traveled here? Where did she live? What was she trying to say? It was a dream heavy with sadness and urgency. All avenues of inquiry were blocked. There were people who might know about her, but always some reason why they could not be asked, or would not tell. I walked up and down the streets, examining the goods on the market stalls, my only clue the reissue date of a once-banned medicine.

I never dreamed anything like this until I met Choe Ashton—

Many, many years ago there lived a young artist, who, the people said, was full of great potential and great talent. What kind of artist was he? you ask, knowing full well that in our present age almost anyone from a computer programmer to an oil twiller to a grocery boxer is called an artist. Well, my friend, this young man was skilled in many, many things. First of all, he was a marvelous poet. Some say his poetry was on a par with the finest, most well-known poets of that day, though the young man was barely into his twenties when his third book of poetry was published.

He was an adept fiction writer, too. His short stories and novels were the talk of the entire Realm. His saddest stories could squeeze the heart like a great fist. The funniest could rattle the ribs and stop the breath. He wrote with a spare style that somehow cast arabesque shadows in the mind, causing his reading audience to ponder the depths of the soul in all its turns and bends.

It is well known even in our present age that he could sculpt and paint in such a wide array of moods, styles, themes, and patterns that he held the entire art world breathlessly wondering in what untrodden ground he would next place his intrepid, daring feet.

It is also said that he could sing and play lyre, lute, kleetello, guitar, dulcimer, fiddle, cello, and vibraphone. His voice rang with such power and clarity that his audiences (particularly the females) were said to be held in a sort of speechless rapture for days and days after one of his concerts.

He was also very handsome, kind, modest, soft-spoken, gentle, and honest. He respected his elders, was generous to his peers, fatherly to the young. He gave alms to the poor, cheer to the sullen, wisdom to the foolish, attention to the marginal.

But he was not happy.

You ask, my friend, why this wonderful soul, this light of the world, this one, who, as our people say, so clearly showed the “thumbprint of the Old One” was not happy? No one knew. Not even the young artist himself really knew, or at least he was unwilling to say. Those of a spiritual inclination said that it was his karma. That he was born an artistic genius on a plane in which he could neither quite fully express himself nor be completely understood. Those of a more skeptical persuasion—there were a handful—said that it was because of a deeply embedded but well-hidden vanity, and a lust for absolute power. They said that all he created, either consciously or unconsciously, he created to subjugate the minds and hearts of his audience and ultimately to make them his slaves.

But others said—though none had ever heard him confess this—that it was because he could not have the love of one woman: Nohla, the beautiful daughter of the kindly, humble miller, Rafkhan. They said that the two were in love for only one year, though in secret (Rafkhan had great hopes that Nohla would one day become a surgeon, and he would sooner lose his right hand than see his child's future fuddled by love), but then, quite suddenly, Nohla, either because she saw something in the young artist that was akin to what his detractors, those few skeptics, saw, or because she became convinced her father was right, ended the affair. All that we can say is that she carried some deep, unfathomable discomfiture in her bosom that told her she could no longer be with this man, and so she shattered his young heart.

Whatever the reasons, the young man stopped creating and entertaining before the year was over. He seldom left his home after a while, but sat inside for weeks and months on end, brooding and pacing. He let his beard grow long, let his countenance sour, and ate little. It has been said that his servants heard him sing from time to time, but only to himself, almost in a whisper, in a cracked, atonal voice. He admitted very few friends: his brother, Rhoe the Mighty, still, statistically, the greatest treadleback in the history of our national sport, and his close friend and neighbor, Azzizan. Neither Rhoe nor Azzizan could bear to see their young loved one in such pain and grief. But when they would ask him, “What ails ye, brother?” “What grinds thee, friend?,” all that he is said to have answered was, “Me? I’m just thinking. Just thinking, that’s all.” Then one day, after an evening of putting mouth to ear and ear to mouth in an alehouse not far from the young artist’s house, Rhoe and Azzizan decided they should persuade the young man to take a journey. After several weeks they succeeded.

The young artist took only a fortnight preparing for the journey, traveling throughout the Greater Realm to say good-bye to all his friends and patrons. Then, at last, he set sail for what legend calls the Land of Light and Dark. He was at sea for some three months, and during the entire journey kept himself in his cabin in much the same way he had kept to himself in his home. It was a journey without incident, for the most part. The crew on the ship were of the usual rambunctious sort, and often kept the young man awake nights with their perpetual revelry, pranks, and boisterous, bold talk about what they would do once putting down in the Land of Light and Dark.

The Land, as you know, is no more. It was swallowed by our oceans uncountable years ago. Our archaeologists have recovered, what? a few buttons, a chalice or two, a bronze slingshot? We know so little of the physical place. All we have are these stories, and who knows precisely how true they are. The Land is now a place more of mystery and legend than of history and fact. In it, we are told, were five of the eight known mysteries of the Ur-Realm. It was known to be a land of both bloodfreezing violence and beauty so profound that it is said the Old One actually slept there. With its winged people with the skin of polished obsidian who spoke only in proverbs, its diamond white rivers that cut through soil so rich that the meanest, bitterest seed would sprout into waxy green leaves and pulpy fruit, with its dramatic waterfalls, its infinite canyons, its smoke blue mountains, its caverns of gold and jade, its many curiously constructed beasts, who, it is said, spoke the language of the winged people, the young artist told himself that no other land could bring out in him what had been so deeply buried.

The first several months in this strange land went well for the young artist. He made many friends, ate strange and delightful foods, swam the diamond waters, drank sweet teas that made him dream of Nohla. He shaved off his beard and dressed in the fine, bright clothing of the obsidian people. He learned some of their language, which inspired in him sage thought. He let them carry him aloft and show him the world as only birds could see it. Things went well for him. His heart grew big again. And one morning he awoke in a creative flame. He began to write!

It had been so long since he had written anything that he took the cautious road and began keeping a journal. In it he wrote of everything he was seeing and doing and feeling. He devoted just as much time to describing, in detail, all the strange fruits and vegetables there as he did to describing the people and the geography. He also wrote of the things in his heart, of his dissatisfaction with his past work, his weaknesses as a human being, and his great love for Nohla.

His writing, steady, furious, impassioned, came to take up more and more of his time. He seldom ventured outside his house, and he spent less and less time with his friends. And on three occasions his friend N’Tho, a good man, a tall, intelligent man who’d saved him from the grip of a waterfall he’d ventured too close to in his first week in the country, rapped on his door and asked him, would he not care for a slice of yellow sunshine, a bowl of friendship, and a cup of laughter. And each time the young artist would smile and thank him, but say no. “Your land has . . . has, uh, set me afire, and the smithy’s best work is at noon.” And N’Tho would turn and leave, saying, “Is it true that when the bird finishes its nest it no longer cares whether the grass grows?”

“No, no, good friend,” would be the reply, “but the, uh, whispers of the heart are greater than the screams of the flesh.” And one, two, three times did he close the door on the retreating back of N'Tho.

It wasn’t long before he was virtually friendless, before, as we say in the southern region, his kitchen grew quiet. But he never noticed. His work had reached such a feverish intensity that not even he realized for the longest time that his journal had become first a novel, then a poem, then a prayer, than a chant, then a one-act play, an opera—it actually made sound!—a painting, a sculpture—and then— wonder of wonders—the thing became flesh! A miniature version of himself!

Of course, finally he did notice himself, but it did take a while, for his work still compelled him, devoured him, you might say, and—quite naturally his mind was rather distracted. But one day as he scribbled and chiseled and stitched upon the . . . text... we shall call it, he began to notice that his fingers were clutching his own throat, in a manner of speaking, and his thumbs were shaping his own, well ... it wasn’t a sentence anymore, he had to admit to himself. It wasn t a canvas or clay, it was—“My chin!” he said aloud. “Blessed Old One, I—”

“ 'Bout time you noticed, homes.”

“You’re me—”

“Uh-huh—”

“A little version of—”

“ ’At’s right.”

“Oh my.”

He silently disrobed, put out his candle, and went to sleep. When he awoke the next morning, his mind felt clear, and he chuckled, thinking to himself that perhaps he had been working too hard. He decided to get up, wash, have a large breakfast, and spend the day visiting his friends. But as he reached for his robes he saw his little self sitting on the edge of his writing desk, eating a page of his journal. “What are you doing?” he demanded.

The homunculus shot his black beady gaze at his maker. “You mean what am I doing?” he said.

“Who are you? What are you? Where did you come—”

“What it look like I’m doing, fool?”

“That’s my journal! Stop that, you—”

“But I’ma tell you something, brother. You got to cut down on the salt. See, when you bending over your work, hacking away like you do, you be sweating all over these pages. But other than that they pretty good.” The young artist looked at the little creature, and he could not help but be torn between a number of emotions: anger, fear, astonishment, and, perhaps most discomforting of all, admiration, for the little man was perfect in every way that the eyes could discern. Black eyes and black hair, white teeth, sharp jawbones, powerful arms, long fingers, seamless skin, a spine as straight as a shaft of light. He was magnificent, and were it not for the little man’s crude language, and most especially, were it not for the fact that the little one was eating his journal by the fistful, the artist would have liked to sit the chap on his knee and study him. But the very fact that the homunculus was eating his journal kept all action at bay, impelled the cycle of these emotions.

Finally, however, as the little man reached for the third of the eight-hundred-eighty-eight-page manuscript, the young artist possessed himself enough to clutch the finger-sized arm of this literary gourmand. “Do you mind?” the young man said.

The homunculus looked him up and down. He arched an eyebrow. “Yes I do, man. Lemme go.”

“You’re making a mess of my journal.”

“Well I admit I ain’t got good table manners, but I’ma still eat this thing.” “Like Hatsax you will!” And the young artist grabbed the pitcher near his bed and smashed it down where the homunculus stood. But as you might guess, it was in vain, for the creature had disappeared.

The young artist spent the better part of the day overturning his rooms in search of the creature s hole or portal or whatever it might be the thing had come through. He ordered his servants to keep the place clean and to make sure that the doors remained shut and that the window screens were kept in place. Nevertheless, he found nothing. Exhausted, stiff with anger, he gathered himself enough to brew a cup of tea and sit down to write. He wanted to rewrite those first two pages of his journal. But this was a problem because the last several months of work had flown with such momentum that there had simply been no time for him to stop and reread what he d written. He’d no idea where to begin. “I remember something about fruits and vegetables . . . and people, yes, people with wings, and Nora, my love.” Nora? he thought. No, it was Noah, or Nova, or . . . Really he was not sure, and it occurred to him that he was too long out of touch with those things that had moved him, lo those months ago, to journey to this land and rediscover his creative embers. “Yes,” he said, “first thing tomorrow I will visit my old friends the What’s-Their-Names and that nice tall fellow whose life I saved when he ventured too close to the falls, and I’ll see those people and talk to them or something. Perhaps they can explain this nonsense.” He drank one last cup of tea and went to bed.

The Virgin Mary appeared while I was collecting stones from the water. I collect the big stones, not the little ones. She seemed to come from the sea, although I’m not really sure because the water is everywhere you look, and I was stooped over, my head down, collecting stones. I lift them out of the water, pick out the best, carry them in my arms and take them up to shore. At first I didn’t think it was the Virgin.

That morning it was gray and lead-colored like the sea.

I had seen her only once before, in church, when we took her out for a procession. I never thought I’d see her walking down the beach with those special colored eyes and that sadness over the death of her son. I couldn’t imagine it because I’m always alone and because she didn’t have her crown, that Virgin’s crown, but there she was, softly stamping down the sand under her feet. But then, I didn’t doubt it for an instant. There’s never anyone on this beach, hidden away as it is and somewhat far from the rest of the land. It’s so remote, isolated, and only has the sea for company. I’m always alone, collecting stones. At first my hands freeze and my fingers slip; my fingers that want to grab onto the stones and hunt them as if they were sea animals. Whale stones, mountains from the sea. Straight ahead, down below, and to both sides, all you see is water, green and blue water, yellowish water, and enormous rocks stuck there like boats run aground. I plunge my hands in, and my fingers slip from the wet surfaces of the stones. The color of the stones changes when you take them out of the water. Sometimes they are full of moss and lichens, full of seaweed tangled up with sea urchins. But when your hands get used to it, they move through the water like fish. Then I rest them on the dark surface of a stone, take it between my fingers, and bring it up. Once the stones are hoisted up, I carry them to shore.

We got here ten days ago, and since then we haven't seen anyone. Nobody has seen us.

The fishermen’s boats are tossed on the sand, abandoned. There are wildflowers growing up around the spongy boards of one of them, green stems and a white crown among the damp and splintered planks. It’s dying slowly. It’s dying, falling apart, lying there on the sand. A seagull flies overhead, its wings forming a cross, its chest dark, and it comes down lightly. It perches on the boat’s useless oar, which is stuck, shaft first, into the sand. It used to be that when the fishermen went out to sea, in each boat there was a big lamp up front like an eye that lit up underwater secrets, the private life of the water and its fish, a round eye without lids, with a powerful and serene gaze. The fishermen used to clean it, scrub it, adjust its light, watch over it. Now their lamps rest caked with rust and drip their menstrual blood on to the sand.

Just a little boy who plays in the water and collects stones.

Sometimes a ship goes by in the distance. The sand invades the shore and climbs over the empty boats. I collect stones and carry them away from the water so that when the waves lick up the shore they don’t find them. I work like this all morning. I often get tired of carting stones. My fingers are cold and cramping, the air is green, the trees roar with the wind, the waves howl, and I can tell there is some disturbance; the atmosphere, the elements are preparing something, something is developing in the sea’s womb. But when I look at the water and see so many stones beneath, I go back to my work right away without getting distracted, without stopping because there are so many more at the bottom. The water goes through my legs when I squat down, the water and some small fish, silvery, agile and uneasy. I don’t know if they see me. I’ve never known what or how fish see, nor where they are looking, with those big, staring eyes. I don’t know if they look through the water, if their glances are scattered among the stones and the seaweed at the bottom. I was never a fish. I didn’t have fins on my side, I wasn’t born in the sea, I didn’t eat seaweed.

In such a lonely place.

There are stones of many colors, I’d say of all the known colors and of some others that only come from the sea and from living in the sea among lichens and plants. She didn’t wear a crown; she was walking slowly, floating over the sand.

As if he weren't alone, as if the water, the stones, and the sound of the wind were his companions. Totally absorbed in his work and somehow understanding the harmony of the universe. He found his role, his function in this routine task, and he took it on with dignity and respect, with conviction. Only the gulls have been able to see us.

I collect stones every day, even if it rains or is windy. Sometimes the sea is calm when I go in, calm and still like an elephant lying on its side sleeping. The boats don’t move, and their masts look like crosses. The water then is very heavy, as if it were made of stone. It’s solid water, water made of cement. Nothing moves on its surface, nothing moves below. The sea’s activity stops; it becomes dense and all water looks the same: heavy. Motionless, it marks everything with its peace; even the birds seem to fly more slowly so as not to disturb it. Other times, the wind blows hard and the gulls can’t fly. They stay a long time hanging in the air, their wings tensed and open, unfolded, but unable to go forward. They cry and don’t move, as if a string kept them prisoners. And the sea is full of waves, waves that disappear in the misty atmosphere. Then the boats get nervous and try to flee from the storm and find refuge in the beach huts; there are some that are so eager to get away that they pull on their ropes until they cut loose, and once freed, get silly, like wanton and wild girls, going this way and that, losing their way, bumping up against each other and against the rocks, hitting their hips on the stones. The wind roars, the waves splash over the wall, the red buoys sink in this turbulent sea, and after an instant pop up again, keeping their heads up as if they were shipwrecked and trying with all their might to keep afloat until someone rescues them. The sea roars and everything seems like it’s just about to break: the gray and mauve sky into thunder and lightning, the gulls’ tense wings, the little stone and wooden pier, the boats’ ropes, the lanterns and masts that list from one side to another.

How has he ended up here? Who could have brought him?

There are white statues under the sea. I’ve seen them: sculptured images of women, sometimes missing an arm, sometimes a leg, others an entire head. They are not always there; they aren’t always visible. Sometimes the colors of the sea cover them up totally; at other times its the long string of seaweed and its inhabitants, the sea urchins, that hide their presence. Driven so deeply into the bottom of the sea, they could be mistaken for it, if the bottom were white, if it had a woman’s hips. They never come to the surface. No current lifts them up, places them on a water pedestal. No force from the bottom of the sea hoists them, raises them like a banner. They don’t come up to look at the sky or to lie down in the sand like bathers. There is nothing that makes them want to leave the water. They don’t dream about the air or touching land. Sunk into the bottom of the sea, sometimes they let a leg or white arm be seen, and they hide their figures, their delicate hands, their tilted necks. They hide their secrets, aloof, among the folds of their gowns, and the oblivious fish pass by, touching them lightly, nibbling their breasts, licking their white necks. They are totally different from the mutilated bodies that the sea sometimes brings up from the depths of war and throws on to shore, with their panic-stricken eyes and hair streaked with seaweed. Decent people, silently and without getting involved, gather them up—they don’t have teeth, ears, fingers, hands—and bury them up in the mountain. Unhappy people hide them in silence, studding the forest and fouling the land with their bodies.

How has he ended up here? Who could have brought him?

I was picking up a stone when I saw her coming from far away. Then I didn’t know who was coming. The morning was green and the sea was murky. I only saw a gray figure that was coming with the wind. The stone was heavy, and I had to hold it with both hands. I stole it from the bottom of the sea when it was still golden; the air immediately darkened it and the water had taken little bites out of its surface, like so many eyes that now looked at me. I put it on the sand, far away from the sea’s incessant drilling and layering, and I went back to shore, not without first looking at the gray figure that was coming with the wind and slowly getting closer.

“Who is the boy?”

“He comes and goes from the water as if the sea were his domain. As if only he reigned over the entire area. But humbly. Like a worker. Concentrating hard on his tasks. Without stopping, I think he never rests.

That morning everything was green, gray and green like under the water, like the color of the fish parading among the stones.

I couldn’t turn back then because he had seen me. Anyway he was very caught up in his work of carrying stones.

I went back and forth. Back and forth. There were a lot of stones on the bottom; the bottom is always full of stones and seaweed. She was slowly coming closer. Like the waves, like the wind, she was coming closer, crunching the sand under her feet. She walked slowly without moving her arms, and it seemed that her legs were barely moving. I don’t know if she came out of the water or where she came from because I was very busy with the stones, which were giving me a lot to do. I didn’t look anywhere but straight ahead. I didn’t look back or off to one side.

I was going to keep on my way, happy that I had not done anything to arouse his interest, when suddenly he looked straight at me, as if he recognized me, as if he had seen me before. He drove his eyes right into me and slowly, very slowly, as if he were identifying me feature by feature, as if his memory were bringing back marks, fingerprints, he straightened up right in front of me, now completely sure.

I was going to keep at my work; I was going to go back to the water and bend down to get another stone when I saw her. I looked at her from up close and I recognized her. I was fixed to the spot.

I hesitated a second.

He was in front of me.

I thought about running away. Fleeing.

It’s not every day you see the Virgin coming out of the water. It’s not every day she comes walking down the beach. She didn’t seem to be wet, and her clothes were completely dry. She had eyes the color of the sea just like I’d seen at church one time when they put her out in public and took her on a procession through the town. We children and the old people carried her around like a trophy from the sea, as if she were a gigantic exotic fish that was going to feed us all year long. We took her out of church and carried her through the town’s cobbled streets, and everyone came out to look at her. The windows were opened and women and children threw flowers at her, old people left their beds to see her, and men who were standing at the bar turned around, put their drinks aside, and respectfully doffed their hats to greet her. Throughout the entire procession, I was afraid that she’d fall off her pedestal—the streets were cobbled after all—and roll on the ground, and that her black mourning cape would get all dirty and she’d lose the beautiful handkerchief that she held in her hands for drying her eyes at the death of her son. I was on the edge the whole time, watching her step by step, out of fear that she’d stumble and fall and that her delicate porcelain hands would get broken and that she’d lose her crown, and that tears would flood her eyes.

One time when we caught a very big fish, there was a holiday and procession and everybody came out to look at it. At night they put candles all around it, and some people made bonfires on the beach. All night the whales snored on the high seas.

And instead of running away, I ran toward her and once I was close, I bowed. I bowed formally for a moment. She looked at me calmly; then I raised my head and saw that her eyes were the color of water. I remembered those eyes well from the day of the procession, sad and undefinably tender eyes, the eyes of a woman whose son has been killed and who feels so much pain that she doesn’t think about vengeance because her sadness is so great that it brings out more love than anger. That woman’s son had been killed—his body was probably still floating in the water and one of these days would appear on shore, his throat cut and an eye gouged out, full of seaweed and lichens, full of mud—and now she was walking down the beach. You could tell she was suffering from her eyes although she looked serene enough. I handed her a fishbone cup to hold the water from her eyes, in case she wanted to cry. It was really a bowl made from a very big fish, just the right size to hold sea water, fruit juices, women’s tears. It’s also useful to dig in the sand, to make holes. She looked at the cup and took it into her hands. Bone gets white with time, white and dry, with little black holes. She seemed to like her present, but she didn’t cry right away. She held it in her hands a long time, and she looked at herself in it as if it were a mirror. Right away, I set out to clean the sand so she could sit down. I picked a square space, sheltered from the sea and the wind, protected by some wild rush. The dunes there are as high as mountains, and they almost hide the woods. The mounds are so hard and compact that nothing can sweep them away, not a whipping wind, not even a drifting sea. I cleaned the space with wicker rods, taking off the ants, insects, pieces of wood, shells, and all the other things the sea had left behind. I swept the surface with great care and, stooped over, I smoothed it with my hands in order to have it flat and smooth, comfortable to sit on.

I was surprised and didn’t know what to do. He didn’t ask any questions. He didn’t say a word. Right away he brought me a bone cup, and he started to clean the sand behind a dune, taking off all its dirt and impurities. I looked right and left, looking for a way to disappear.

Then I invited her to sit down. I invited her to sit down with a gesture; I put out my right arm so she could hold on to it and slowly bend over, taking a seat on the throne of clean sand that was nearby. She looked tired and who knows where she came from, following the shoreline, suffering, suffering, following the shore. Along the way, she had lost her crown or they had taken it from her, just like they killed her son. She had also lost that handkerchief that she always used to have in her hands to dry her tears, and the little light dress that covered her body was clearly not enough to keep out the cold. I invited her to sit down because she seemed tired, and the wind was blowing. At any moment, the tide would begin to come in, but she would be protected there.

The enormous beach that we had all thought deserted lay as far as the eye could see. I wasn’t familiar with this mountain; I didn’t know where the sea ended. I could only turn back, exhausted and cold, turn back, but he would have seen me again in this vast empty space if I had decided to turn back. Then he probably would have asked me questions. I was vaguely unsettled as if waiting for a premonition. The gray and mauve sky suddenly opened up, making way for a round sun, the color of death and shining like metal. The outline of a distant forest, completely enveloped in mist, seemed to be suspended between the sea and the sky, as if it were ascending into the heavens. The air was damp, palpable, full of the tension of an upcoming storm. The sound of the water breaking and the wind blowing seemed to me like the death throes of some gigantic marine animal hidden among the waves. Everywhere there seemed to be a revelation in the making.

Once she sat down, I gestured for her to wait and I ran off to the mountain to look for pine boughs, wild flowers and poppies. I know the mountain well, but I was so nervous and excited that I lost time going around in circles, dead ends that didn’t take me anywhere. Like puppies that jump up into the air, turn about, and go back and forth like crazy when they see their master, I got lost among paths full of plants. I hurt my hands, grabbed flowers and boughs without thinking, pulled up roots, crushed stalks on account of my nerves, and squashed the ivy as I walked. My ears were attuned to the sound of the tide as it came in, they heard its ascent, its growth; I couldn’t see it, but I could hear it. Like two enemies that know each other well, I lay in wait, and it was ready to take advantage of my smallest slip.

I ran down the mountain with my arms full of pine boughs and wild flowers, so fast that I lost some on the way. She was there, sitting in the square of sand I made for her, protected from the sea, the wind, and from the ants, melancholy, looking without seeing, and the breeze shook her fragile dress as if it were a sail. One by one, I placed the aromatic boughs at her feet, in a circle, taking care that they didn’t touch her dress. There were gray boughs partly covered with lichen and with lighter covered bark; if you scratch them a little, right away the pine’s true skin would appear, green and resinous. There were dry sticks, crackling with pointed ends, that are used to build a fire in winter. I thought that this smell would maybe help her bear her sadness. She didn’t look at me; she looked far away, and the water in her eyes was as deep as a day of fog and storms. There were some little pine nuts, just come out, very tight on the bough, with a hard shell and bright color. And there were white starling nests among the pine boughs, soft and silky like cotton balls. They were lightly woven nests that the birds embroidered with care; I thought that their softness and smooth surface would provide her with some nice sensations, welcoming and warm. Surrounded by boughs and plants, wild flowers and rush, she looked like a mountain virgin who had come down to the beach to look at the sea for a moment.

Right away I went to look for the piece of wood in the shape of a wolf that the water had dragged up the day before. Sometimes the water does this: brings things then leaves them on the shore and goes away as if it had traveled so far, as if it had walked days and nights just to bring that one thing, just to nudge up onto the sand those things it has collected on its journey. They are the sea’s humble gifts; after thinking for hours and hours, after going back and forth from the depths to the surface, it hurls up a dead fish, a rotted piece of wood, a handful of seaweed or an open and empty shell. They are its wet, humble tributes. It had brought the piece of wood the day before; I found it not far from there, on the shore, wet from the waves, and I took it out of the water. That was hard because it had absorbed a lot of water and had become heavy. It was the shape and color of a sea wolf, so I grabbed it again by the head and dragged it over the beach to place it beside the Virgin. I left it next to her, but facing the sea so it wouldn’t miss the world from which it came, in which it had been born and lived. He lay down to rest, tame, but he kept his head erect, overseeing the coast and its dangers. Watched over by the sea wolf like this, her throne seemed less forsaken, her realm more guarded.

Surrounded by pine boughs, reeds, and flowers, having the stately figure of the wolf in front of her, she seemed more like the Virgin that I had seen that time in church, dressed in a black robe and carried around on a moveable pedestal. As I did then, I gave her lots of white flowers, yellow flowers, lilac and celestial blue flowers picked on the mountain. I hurried down the mountain and placed them, one by one, on her dress. Sometimes she looked back—her dead son—and her eyes were infinitely sad. With a gesture, I showed her that the mountain was full of flowers, that there were many more, but that I couldn’t bring them all; I had other things to do for her. The tide advanced, serious, step by step, and each time it got closer to us. It left its damp stain on the ground, a little bit of foam floated by and later left, innocently, as if it hadn’t moved forward, as if it wanted to hide its progress. I looked at the sea and then looked at her. There was considerable distance separating them, but I started to build a small sand wall anyway, to keep the odd stream of water from wetting her feet. I am very fast when I work, and I’m used to fighting the sea.

I quickly built a sand barrier, a moist sea wall a few centimeters high that would act as a fortress against the water’s penetration. I made it this size so she could look over it at the sea without having to get up or even raise her head.

On the other hand, the sea could see her only with great difficulty.

He brought me small gifts. Things from the sea and forest. I don’t know why he did it, but I thought I couldn’t stop him. Whatever it was that he imagined, I didn’t understand. His gestures were full of kindness and appreciation, and I was too tired to reject these gifts no matter how crazy they were. Although numb with cold, tired and without energy, I thought that I couldn’t spend much more time there. Clearly it was dangerous to stay out in the open, defenseless on the enormous beach, exposed. As dangerous was it to turn back, have the boy look for me and go around shouting to find me, alerting everyone to my presence. I stayed still, without knowing what to do, without deciding, letting myself be more tired than cautious. Meanwhile, he kept coming and going, bringing little presents with each trip.

I went to look for an old oar half buried in the sand. It had stayed sunken there, part of the remains of a fishing boat—eaten by the salt, dampness, and water— whose broken skeleton served some birds as a stronghold. I had sometimes played inside the boat, full of stagnant water. I had touched its wooden planks, its crossed masts, felt its surfaces, skimmed its hollows. And the oar was hidden in the sand, sticking out its widest end, useless and full of holes. I brandished it in the air like a sword, shaking off all the sand that had stuck on it and, whirling it above my head, I ran along the deserted beach until I came to the dune where the Virgin was resting. I was very happy when I offered it to her, showing her what to do with it. First, I made all the gestures necessary to row. Then with rapid movements, I showed her how it could be used, if necessary, as a defensive weapon. She didn’t pay much attention to my lessons. She was worried and looked behind her constantly. I left the oar at her side, like a queen’s sceptre. I remembered the hole in the rock where I was saving things that I rescued from the sea. I was happy to have been collecting things every day so that I could now go find them and give them to her. She didn’t say anything, but she waited. Just like a sailor who returns from each one of his trips loaded with presents and happy to be home; just as he affectionately and smugly displays his cloth from China, textiles from Holland, and jewels from Egypt; I too came and went, fervently, happy to go, happy to return. But her sad eyes looked backward, without seeing. The whole time I was afraid she would fall. They picked us, the old and the children, to carry her, to bring her through the crowds, to guide her through the town. It was my job to push the pedestal from one side. We left the church enveloped in a majestic silence, fitting for a procession. The old men and women went up ahead; we children followed.

We were hidden for ten days without anyone seeing us, without one of us being recognized. Only a little boy found one of us walking on the beach.

Stumbling, we pushed the cart, which was hitting against the cobbled street and shaking. She was in mourning, wearing a long black velvet robe that hung from her head to her feet because they had killed her son. And she was very sad, a great sorrow came through her wet eyes, the color of water. The robe was black and soft, a very deep black, very moving. I touched just the edge of her robe and trembled. Now she wasn’t dressed in mourning, surely because a lot of time had passed since her son’s death, but the sorrow didn’t change. Now she wasn’t dressed in black, but she suffered just the same. And her hands—the hands that showed were very slender and very white—under the black velvet robe held a lace handkerchief, surely to dry the tears when all the water she carried in her eyes overflowed at her son’s death. The robe had a golden border, a small design in thread that I couldn’t bring myself to touch. She still hadn’t cried because the handkerchief was dry, but her expression was that of someone who would start crying at any moment, not screaming like the women of the town when they cry, but sadly and gently because the weeping from discovering that they’ve killed her only son is not one of shouting; it’s one of deep sorrow. All the torches were lit when we set off from the church. And the old people’s faces were full of wrinkles that got deeper in the candlelight. I was afraid that she would fall walking through the cobbled streets.

“She can fall,” I said to one of the townsmen who was pushing along with me.

“If we walk carefully, she won’t fall,” he replied, but I didn’t feel reassured.

If one of the others, for instance, were just a little less careful, she could fall to the ground instantly and hurt herself and dirty her robe and lose her beautiful handkerchief and scratch her hands. It was easier for us to protect her from the soldiers (from those soldiers who had killed her son) than to keep her from falling.

“Someone might be careless,” I told him, nervously.

“She won’t fall,” he answered. “All of us together will support her.”

I had saved many things in the hole: old rusty fish hooks that still kept their sharp points, menacing creatures; parts of line that had fallen off fishing rods; pieces of net that used to trap fishes and had become moldy; huge shells to hear the sea when you’re far away and can’t see it; a gigantic fishbone whitened by the sun; a burro’s jaw; many pieces of sea glass, multicolored and polished by the water; tree bark with lichens still clinging to them; ropes from the boats; sailor’s knots; big twisted nails; and a dark wooden box that floated in from a sunken ship. I stuck my hand into the hole and took out everything, one by one. I ran with my hands full to where she was—looking backwards—and I kept putting things in her lap. The tide kept coming in, each time a little bit closer, licking the edge of the sand wall. I drove the fishbone into the top of the wall-like watch tower, a silent warning beacon, a light in the night that tells the traveller of a nearby danger: a sandbank or a sunken ship. I spread the piece of net at her feet, a majestic carpet for her to walk on; it was a smooth and delicate net, and with it, I outlined a map of the country where we would have liked to live, before the war. I planted the sea glass all around her like towers, like so many bishops and pawns, a purple horse head, a steel sword, a golden lantern, a mistletoe cathedral, an emerald fish eye. I placed the knots next to her hair so that it would not blow away, to fasten it to the sand if it wanted to run, if it wanted to go away to cry out its grief somewhere else. And I fastened the ropes around her waist, to tie her up like the boats are tied to the pier against the wind and the swaying tide. Surrounded by so many trophies, she seemed to be a water virgin, a marine statue, the figurehead of a ship I had seen once in a Maritime Museum. I had made a crown out of a long tendril of vines and placed it on her head; it was dark with very green leaves growing out of each side of a supple stem. Slowly, ceremoniously, I put it on her head. Now she seemed just right, finished and perfect, like the Virgin in church. Some bright wet seaweed on her dress became her robe.

He came and went, from the sea to shore, from shore to me, but always distant, never coming too close to me. A bird flew over, and he threw a stone at it. Harsh, he frightened away the ants and the mollusks. Cautious, he watched over the advancing tide and was always moving, very busy, bringing things.

Then I heard a noise. A different noise that didn't come from the sea or the sand.

I know beach noises well, the noises of the birds, of rough sea, of underground currents. I know the noise of the faraway wind and of clouds charged with electricity.

I heard a noise, and I got up immediately. I looked from one side of the beach to the other. The tide, coming up, was licking the edge of the sand wall that I had made. The fishbone, erect as a lighthouse, was aiming at the gruff sky. The tide, going back, was leaving seaweed on the shore. And the sea wolf, lying down with its head raised, was watching, expectantly, close to us.

I had to make a decision. Speak to him or flee, return to the place I had come from, even at the risk of his following me, even at the risk of his starting out on my same path.

The noise came from the mountain, and neither the trees nor the wind made it, neither the birds nor the branches caused it; it was much more muffled and metallic sounding, it was a human noise. I got to my feet and on guard; she kept sitting, looking backward.

“Where are the men who killed her son?” I had asked when we took the Virgin from the church.

“I don’t know,” my friend answered. “Pay attention to pushing the cart.”

Most likely now they are looking for her. All this time I had been playing without realizing that they were probably closing in. I know the sounds of the sea and the mountain well. I know when it sounds like a storm is brewing, when the wind is coming up and when the fish are snoring. They crucified him, after making him drag a heavy cross for the entire way, they made fun of his pain. And they wouldn’t hesitate to do it again if they found her. And now the tide was climbing up the wall, licking the fishbone.

Then I heard a noise: Not just one, but one that lasted a long time and was followed by others. A noise that filled me with fear and anxiety. I am not familiar with the noises of the mountain or of the sea. I always lived in the city.

They were advancing, without doubt. They were advancing through the mountain, and they had the resolute steps of men who are armed and ready for anything.

The steps of Roman soldiers, with their heavy swords, and their crowns of thorns and their summary judgments, and their slow crucifixions.

The gulls were crying, and the sea was getting higher. So too the wind blowing among the pines was making the branches rattle and I heard sounds of something breaking. I heard wood groaning and stones hammering.

I ran to the top of the mountain and saw them coming. They had pistols and guns.

Then I decided and started to run back in the direction I came from. I started to run, and I stepped on the flowers. I heard the crackling of the shells, and a piece of glass stuck into my foot. I started to run without looking behind me, suspicious of the sound of the sea, the sound of the wind, and the shrieking of the birds.

They had pistols and guns, dogs, knives, and lanterns. From the top of the mountain, I saw them coming. There were many Roman soldiers and their officials, their hirelings, their vassels and servants.

I ran without thinking, I ran without knowing, I ran between the water, the birds, and the wind. Then I saw him. He was holding some big wooden oars which he spun around his head to frighten the soldiers. He probably took them by surprise, protected by the afternoon shadows. He knocked down two or three in this way, running with the oars in his hands and spinning them around in a circle, like a windmill’s vanes. At first he probably caused confusion. It was dark, and he was very agile; he moved around very quickly from one place to another, without letting go of the oars.

I ran without thinking, I ran without knowing, I ran between the water, the birds, and the wind to stop them.

But then I didn’t see anything more. I had to turn around to keep running. Until I recognized the sound of shots. The only sound you hear in the city.

No one really stops to think of Ellie Spink, and why should they?

She’s no one.

She has nothing.

Homely as a child, all that the passing of years did was add to her unattractiveness. Face like a horse, jaw long and square, forehead broad; limpid eyes set bird-wide on either side of a gargantuan nose; hair a nondescript brown, greasy and matted, stuffed up under a woolen toque lined with a patchwork of metal foil scavenged from discarded cigarette packages. The angularity of her slight frame doesn’t get its volume from her meager diet, but from the multiple layers of clothing she wears.

Raised in foster homes, she’s been used, but she’s never experienced a kiss. Institutionalized for most of her adult life, she’s been medicated, but never treated. Pass her on the street and your gaze slides right on by, never pausing to register the difference between the old woman huddled in the doorway and a bag of garbage.

Old woman? Though she doesn’t know it, Monday, two weeks past, was her thirty-seventh birthday. She looks twice her age.

There’s no point in trying to talk to her. Usually no one’s home. When there is, the words spill out in a disjointed mumble, a rambling, one-sided dialogue itemizing a litany of misperceived conspiracies and ills that soon leave you feeling as confused as she herself must be.

Normal conversation is impossible and not many bother to try it. The exceptions are few: The odd pitying passerby. A concerned social worker, fresh out of college and new to the streets. Maybe one of the other street people who happens to stumble into her particular haunts.

They talk and she listens or she doesn't—she never makes any sort of a relevant response, so who can tell? Few push the matter. Fewer still, however well-intentioned, have the stamina to make the attempt to do so more than once or twice. It’s easier to just walk away; to bury your guilt, or laugh off her confused ranting as the excessive rhetoric it can only be.

I’ve done it myself.

I used to try to talk to her when I first started seeing her around, but I didn’t get far. Angel told me a little about her, but even knowing her name and some of her history didn’t help.

“Hey, Elbe. How’re you doing?”

Pale eyes, almost translucent, turn towards me, set so far apart it’s as though she can only see me with one eye at a time.

“They should test for aliens,” she tells me. “You know, like in the Olympics.”

“Aliens?”

“I mean, who cares who killed Kennedy? Dead’s dead, right?”

“What’s Kennedy got to do with aliens?”

“I don’t even know why they took down the Berlin wall. What about the one in China? Shouldn’t they have worked on that one first?”

It’s like trying to have a conversation with a game of Trivial Pursuit that specializes in information garnered from supermarket tabloids. After awhile I’d just pack an extra sandwich whenever I was busking in her neighbourhood. I’d sit beside her, share my lunch and let her talk if she wanted to, but I wouldn’t say all that much myself.

That all changed the day I saw her with the Bone Woman.

Once upon a time, in a kingdom between the sea and the mountains, between the forest and the desert, there lived a King and Queen with three daughters. The eldest daughter was pale and quiet, the second daughter was brown and active, and the third was one of those Sabbath daughters who are bonny and bright and good and gay, of whom everything and nothing was expected.

When the eldest Princess was born, the sky was a speedwell blue, covered with very large, lazy, sheep-curly white clouds. When the second Princess was born, there were grey and creamy mares’ tails streaming at great speed across the blue. And when the third Princess was born, the sky was a perfectly clear plane of sky-blue, with not a cloud to be seen, so that you might think the blue was spangled with sun-gold, though this was an illusion.

By the time they were young women, things had changed greatly. When they were infants, there were a series of stormy sunsets tinged with sea-green, and seaweed-green. Later there were, as well as the sunsets, dawns, where the sky was mackerel-puckered and underwater-dappled with lime-green and bottle-green and other greens too, malachite and jade. And when they were moody girls the green colors flecked and streaked the blue and the grey all day long, ranging from bronze-greens through emerald to palest opal-greens, with hints of fire. In the early days the people stood in the streets and fields with their mouths open, and said oh, and ah, in tones of admiration and wonder. Then one day a small girl said to her mother that there had been no blue at all for three days now, and she wanted to see blue again. And her mother told her to be sensible and patient and it would blow over, and in about a month the sky was blue, or mostly blue, but only for a few days, and streaked, ominously, the people now felt, with aquamarine. And the blue days were further and further apart, and the greens were more and more varied, until a time when it became quite clear that the fundamental color of the sky was no longer what they still called sky-blue, but a new sky-green, a pale flat green somewhere between the colors which had once been apple and grass and fern. But of course apple and grass and fern looked very different against this new light, and something very odd and dimming happened to lemons and oranges, and something more savage and hectic to poppies and pomegranates and ripe chillies.

The people, who had at first been entranced, became restive, and, as people will, blamed the King and the Queen for the disappearance of the blue sky. They sent deputations to ask for its return, and they met and muttered in angry knots in the Palace Square. The royal couple consulted each other, and assured each other that they were blameless of greening, but they were uneasy, as it is deep in human nature to suppose human beings, oneself or others, to be responsible for whatever happens. So they consulted the chief ministers, the priests, and a representative sample of generals, witches and wizards. The ministers said nothing could be done, though a contingency-fund might usefully be set up for when a course of action became clear. The priests counseled patience and self-denial, as a general sanative measure, abstention from lentils, and the consumption of more lettuce. The generals supposed it might help to attack their neighbors to the East, since it was useful to have someone else to blame, and the marches and battles would distract the people.

The witches and wizards on the whole favored a Quest. One rather powerful and generally taciturn wizard, who had interfered very little, but always successfully, in affairs of State, came out of his cavern, and said that someone must be sent along the Road through the Forest across the Desert and into the Mountains, to fetch back the single silver bird and her nest of ash-branches. The bird, he added, was kept in the walled garden of the Old Man of the Mountains, where she sipped from the crystal fountain of life, and was guarded by a thicket of thorns—poisonous thorns—and an interlaced ring of venomous fiery snakes. He believed that advice could be sought along the way about how to elude their vigilance, but the only advice he could give was to keep to the Road, and stray neither in the Forest, nor in the Desert, nor in the rocky paths, and always to be courteous. Then he went back to his cavern.

The King and Queen called together the Council of State, which consisted of themselves, their daughters, the chief minister and an old duchess, to decide what to do. The Minister advised the Quest, since that was a positive action, which would please the people, and not disrupt the state. The second Princess said she would go of course, and the old duchess went to sleep. The King said he thought it should be done in an orderly manner, and he rather believed that the eldest Princess should go, since she was the first, and could best remember the blue sky. Quite why that mattered so much, no one knew, but it seemed to, and the eldest Princess said she was quite happy to set out that day, if that was what the council believed was the right thing to do.

So she set out. They gave her a sword, and an inexhaustible water-bottle someone had brought back from another Quest, and a package of bread and quails’ eggs and lettuce and pomegranates, which did not last very long. They all gathered at the city gate to wish her well, and a trumpeter blew a clear, silver sound into the emptiness ahead, and a minister produced a map of the Road, with one or two sketchy patches, especially in the Desert, where its undeviating track tended to be swallowed by sandstorms.

The eldest Princess traveled quickly enough along the Road. Once or twice she thought she saw an old woman ahead of her, but this figure vanished at certain bends and slopes of the path, and did not reappear for some time, and then only briefly, so that it was never clear to the Princess whether there was one, or a succession of old women. In any case, if they were indeed, or she was indeed, an old woman, or old women, she, or they were always very far ahead, and traveling extremely fast.

The Forest stretched along the Road. Pale green glades along its edges, deeper rides, and dark tangled patches beyond these. The Princess could hear but not see, birds calling and clattering and croaking in the trees. And occasional butterflies sailed briefly out of the glades towards the Road, busy small scarlet ones, lazily swooping midnight blue ones, and once, a hand-sized transparent one, a shimmering film of wings with two golden eyes in the center of the lower wing. This creature hovered over the Road, and seemed to follow the Princess for several minutes, but without ever crossing some invisible barrier between Forest and Road. When it dipped and turned back into the dappled light of the trees the Princess wanted to go after it, to walk on the grass and moss, and knew she must not. She felt a little hungry by now, although she had the inexhaustible water-bottle.

She began to think. She was by nature a reading, not a traveling princess. This meant both that she enjoyed her new striding solitude in the fresh air, and that she had read a great many stories in her spare time, including several stories about princes and princesses who set out on Quests. What they all had in common, she thought to herself, was a pattern in which the two elder sisters, or brothers, set out very confidently, failed in one way or another, and were turned to stone, or imprisoned in vaults, or cast into magic sleep, until rescued by the third royal person, who did everything well, restored the first and the second, and fulfilled the Quest.

She thought she would not like to waste seven years of her brief life as a statue or prisoner if it could be avoided.

She thought that of course she could be very vigilant, and very courteous to all passers-by—most eldest princess’s failings were failings of courtesy or overconfidence.

There was nobody on the Road to whom she could be courteous, except the old woman, or women, bundling along from time to time a long way ahead.

She thought, I am in a pattern I know, and I suspect I have no power to break it, and I am going to meet a test and fail it, and spend seven years as a stone.

This distressed her so much that she sat down on a convenient large stone at the side of the road and began to weep.

The stone seemed to speak to her in a thin, creaking, dry sort of voice. “Let me out,” it said. “I cannot get out.” It sounded irritable and angry.

The Princess jumped up. “Who are you?” she cried. “Where are you?”

“I am trapped under this stone,” buzzed the voice. “I cannot get out. Roll away the stone.”

The Princess put her hands gingerly to the stone and pushed. Pinned underneath it in a hollow of the ground was a very large and dusty scorpion, waving angry pincers, and somewhat crushed in the tail.

“Did you speak?”

“Indeed I did. I was screaming. It took you an age to hear me. Your predecessor on this Road sat down just here rather heavily when I was cooling myself in this good crack, and pinched my tail, as you see.”

“I am glad to have been able to help,” said the Princess, keeping a safe distance.

The Scorpion did not answer, as it was trying to raise itself and move forwards. It seemed to move with pain, arching its body and collapsing again, buzzing crossly to itself.

“Can I help?” asked the Princess.

“I do not suppose you are skilled in healing wounds such as mine. You could lift me to the edge of the Forest where I might be in the path of someone who can heal me, if she ever passes this way again. I suppose you are tearing blindly along the Road, like all the rest.”

“I am on a Quest, to find the single silver bird in her nest of ash-branches.”

“You could put me on a large dock-leaf, and get on your way, then. I expect you are in a hurry.”

The Princess looked about for a dock-leaf, wondering whether this irascible creature was her first test, which she was about to fail. She wiped up another tear, and plucked a particularly tough leaf, that was growing conveniently in reach of the Road.

“Good,” said the fierce little beast, rearing up and waving its legs. “Quick now, I dislike this hole extremely. Why have you been crying?”

“Because I am not the princess who succeeds, but one of the two who fail and I don’t see any way out. You won’t force me to be discourteous to you, though I have remarked that your own manners are far from perfect, in that you have yet to thank me for moving the stone, and you order me here and there without saying “please,” or considering that humans don’t like picking up scorpions.”

She pushed the leaf towards it as she spoke, and assisted it onto it with a twig, as delicately as she could, though it wriggled and snapped furiously as she did. She put it down in the grass at the edge of the Forest.

“Most scorpions,” it observed, “have better things to do than sting at random. If creatures like you stamp on us, then of course we retaliate. Also, if we find ourselves boxed in and afraid. But mostly we have better things to do.” It appeared to reflect for a moment. “If our tails are not crushed,” it added on a dejected note.

“Who is it,” the Princess enquired courteously, “who you think can help you?”

“Oh, she is a very wise woman, who lives at the other side of the Forest. She would know what to do, but she rarely leaves home and why should she? She has everything she might want, where she is. If you were going that way, of course, you could carry me a little, until I am recovered. But you are rushing headlong along the Road. Good-bye.”

The Princess was rushing nowhere; she was standing very still and thinking. She said:

“I know that story too. I carry you, and ask you, but will you not sting me? And you say, no, it is not in my interest to sting you. And when we are going along, you sting me, although we shall both suffer. And I ask, why did you do that? And you answer—it is my nature."

“You are a very learned young woman, and if we were traveling together you could no doubt tell me many instructive stories. I might also point out that I cannot sting you—my sting is disabled by the accident to my tail. You may still find me repugnant. Your species usually does. And in any case, you are going along this road, deviating neither to right nor left. Good-bye.”

The Princess looked at the Scorpion. Under the dust it was a glistening blue-black, with long arms, fine legs and complex segments like a jet necklace. Its claws made a crescent before its head. It was not possible to meet its eye, which was disconcerting.

“I think you are very handsome. ”

“Of course I am. I am quick and elegant and versatile and delightfully intricate.

I am surprised, however, that you can see it.”

The Princess listened only distractedly to this last remark. She was thinking hard. She said, mostly to herself:

“I could just walk out of this inconvenient story and go my own way. I could just leave the Road and look for my own adventures in the Forest. It would make no difference to the Quest. I should have failed if I left the Road and then the next could set off. Unless of course I got turned into stone for leaving the Road.”

“I shouldn’t think so,” said the Scorpion. “And you could be very helpful to me, if you chose, and I know quite a few stories too, and helping other creatures is always a good idea, according to them.”

The Princess looked into the Forest. Under the green sky its green branches swayed and rustled in a beckoning way. Its mossy floor was soft and tempting after the dust and grit of the Road. The Princess bent down and lifted up the Scorpion on its leaf and put it carefully into the basket which had contained her food. Then, with a little rebellious skip and jump, she left the Road, and set out into the trees. The Scorpion said she should go south-west, and that if she was hungry it knew where there was a thicket of brambles with early blackberries and a tree-trunk with some mushrooms, so they went in search of those, and the Princess made her mouth black without quite assuaging her hunger.

They traveled on, and they traveled on, in a green-arched shade, with the butterflies crowding round the Princess’s head and resting on her hair and shoulders. Then they came to a shady clearing, full of grassy stumps and old dry roots, beneath one of which the Princess’s keen eye detected a kind of struggling and turbulence in the sand. She stopped to see what it was, and heard a little throaty voice huskily repeating:

“Water. Oh, please, water, if you can hear me, water.”

Something encrusted with sand was crawling and flopping over the wiry roots, four helpless legs and a fat little belly. The Princess got down on her knees, ignoring the angry hissing of the Scorpion. Two liquid black eyes peered at her out of the sandy knobs, and a wide mouth opened tremulously and croaked “Water” at her. The Princess brought out her inexhaustible water-bottle and dropped drops into the mouth and washed away the crust of sand, revealing a large and warty green and golden toad, with an unusual fleshy crest on its head. It puffed out its throat and held up its little fingers and toes to the stream of water. As the sand flowed away, it could be seen that there was a large bloody gash on the toad’s head.

“Oh, you are hurt,” cried the Princess.

“I was caught,” said the Toad, “by a Man who had been told that I carry a jewel of great value in my head. So he decided to cut it out. But that is only a story, of course, a human story told by creatures who like sticking colored stones on their heads and skins, and all I am is flesh and blood. Fortunately for me, my skin is mildly poisonous to Men, so his fingers began to itch and puff up, and I was able to wriggle so hard that he dropped and lost me. But I do not think that I have the strength to make my way back to the person who could heal me.”

“We are traveling in her direction,” said the Scorpion. “You may travel with us if you care to. You could travel in this Princess’s luncheon-basket, which is empty.” “I will come gladly,” said the Toad. “But she must not suppose I shall turn into a handsome Prince, or any such nonsense. I am a handsome Toad, or would be, if I had not been hacked at. A handsome Toad is what I shall remain.”

The Princess helped it, with a stick, to hop into her lunch-basket, and continued on through the Forest, in the direction indicated by the Scorpion. They went deeper and darker into the trees, and began to lose sense of there being paths leading anywhere. The Princess was a little tired, but the creatures kept urging her on, to go on as far as possible before night fell. In the growing gloom she almost put her foot on what looked like a ball of thread, blowing out in the roots of some thorny bushes.

The Princess stopped and bent down. Something was hopelessly entangled in fine black cotton, dragging itself and the knots that trapped it along in the dust. She knelt on the Forest floor and peered, and saw that it was a giant insect, with its legs and its wing-cases and its belly pulled apart by the snarled threads. The Princess, palace-bred, had never seen such a beast.

“It is a Cockroach,” observed the Scorpion. “I thought cockroaches were too clever and tough to get into this sort of mess.”

“Those threads are a trap set by the Fowler for singing birds,” observed the Toad. “But he has only caught a giant Cockroach.”

The Princess disentangled some of the trailing ends, but some of the knots cut into the very substance of the creature, and she feared to damage it further. It settled stoically in the dust and let her move it. It did not speak. The Princess said:

“You had better come with us. We appear to be traveling towards someone who can heal you.”

The Cockroach gave a little shudder. The Princess picked it up, and placed it in the basket with the Scorpion and the Toad, who moved away from it fastidiously. It sat, inert, in its cocoon of black thread and said nothing.

They traveled in this way for several days, deeper into the Forest. The creatures told the Princess where to find a variety of nuts, and herbs, and berries, and wild mushrooms she would never have found for herself. Once, a long way off, they heard what seemed to be a merry human whistling, mixed with bird cries. The Princess was disposed to turn in its direction, but the Scorpion said that the whistler was the Fowler, and his calls were designed to entice unwary birds to fly into his invisible nets and to choke there. The Princess, although she was not a bird, was filled with unreasoning fear at this picture, and followed the Scorpion’s instructions to creep away, deeper into the thornbushes. On another occasion, again at a distance, she heard the high, throaty sound of a horn, which reminded her of the hunting-parties in the Royal Parks, when the young courtiers would bring down deer and hares and flying fowl with their arrows, and the pretty maidens would clap their hands and exclaim. Again she thought of turning in the direction of the sound, and again, the creatures dissuaded her. For the poor Toad, when he heard the note of the horn, went sludge-grey with fear, and began to quake in the basket.

“That is the Hunter,” he said, “who cut at my crest with his hunting-knife, who travels through the wood with cold corpses of birds and beasts strung together and cast over his shoulder, who will aim at a bright eye in a bush for pure fun, and quench it in blood. You must keep away from him.” So the Princess plunged deeper still into the thornbushes, though they were tugging at her hair and ripping her dress and scratching her pretty arms and neck.

And one day at noon the Princess heard a loud, clear voice, singing in a clearing, and, peering through a thornbush, saw a tall, brown-skinned man, naked to the waist, with black curly hair, leaning on a long axe, and singing:

The Princess was about to come out of hiding—he had such a cheery smile, and such handsome shoulders—when a dry little voice in her basket, a voice like curling wood-shavings rustling, added these lines:

“Did you speak?” the Princess asked the Cockroach in a whisper. And it rustled back:

“I have lived in his house, which is a filthy place and full of empty beer-casks and broken bottles. He has five young wives buried in the garden, whom he attacked in his drunken rage. He doesn’t kill them, he weeps drunken tears for them, but they lose their will to live. Keep away from the Woodcutter, if you value your life.” The Princess found this hard to believe of the Woodcutter, who seemed so lively and wholesome. She even thought that it was in the creatures’ interest to prevent her from lingering with other humans, but nevertheless their warning spoke to something in her that wanted to travel onwards, so she crept quietly away again, and the Woodcutter never knew she had heard his song, or seen him standing there, looking so handsome, leaning on his axe.

They went on, and they went on, deeper into the Forest, and the Princess began to hunger most terribly for bread and butter, touched perhaps by the Woodcutter’s Song. The berries she ate tasted more and more watery and were harder and harder to find as the Forest grew denser. The Cockroach seemed inanimate, perhaps exhausted by its effort at speech. The Princess felt bound to hurry, in case its life was in danger, and the other creatures complained from time to time of her clumsiness. Then, one evening, at the moment when the sky was taking on its deepest version of the pine-green that had succeeded dark indigo, the Scorpion begged her to stop and settle down for the night, for its tail ached intolerably. And the Toad added its croaking voice, and begged for more water to be poured over it. The Princess stopped and washed the Toad, and arranged a new leaf for the Scorpion, and said:

“Sometimes I think we shall wander like this, apparently going somewhere, in fact going nowhere, for the rest of our days.”

“In which case,” rasped the Scorpion, “mine will not be very long, I fear.”

“I have tried to help,” said the Princess. “But perhaps I should never have left the Road.”

And then the flaky voice was heard again.

“If you go on, and turn left, and turn left again, you will see. If you go on now.” So the Princess took up the basket, and put her sandals back on her swollen feet, and went on, and left, and left again. And she saw, through the bushes, a dancing light, very yellow, very warm. And she went on, and saw, at a great distance, at the end of a path knotted with roots and spattered with sharp stones, a window between branches, in which a candle burned steadily. And although she had never in her cossetted life traveled far in the dark, she knew she was seeing, with a huge sense of hope, and warmth and relief, and a minor frisson of fear, what countless benighted travelers had seen before her—though against midnight blue, not midnight-green  and she felt at one with all those lost homecomers and shelter-seekers.

“It is not the Woodcutter’s cottage?” she asked the Cockroach. And it answered, sighing, “No, no, it is the Last House, it is where we are going.”

And the Princess went on, running, and stumbling, and hopping, and scurrying, and by and by reached the little house, which was made of mossy stone, with a slate roof over low eaves and a solid wooden door above a white step. There was a good crisp smell of woodsmoke from the chimney. The Princess was suddenly afraid—she had got used to solitude and contriving and going on—but she knocked quickly, and waited.

The door was opened by an old woman, dressed in a serviceable grey dress, with a sharp face covered with intricate fine lines like a spider’s web woven of her history, which was both resolute, thoughtful, and smiling. She had sharp green eyes under hooded, purple lids, and a plaited crown of wonderful shining hair, iron-grey, silver and bright white woven together. When she opened the door the Princess almost fainted for the wonderful smell of baking bread that came out, mingled with other delicious smells, baked apples with cinnamon, strawberry tart, just-burned sugar.

“We have been waiting for you,” said the Old Woman. “We put the candle in the window for you every night for the last week. ”

She took the Princess s basket, and led her in. There was a good log fire in the chimney, with a bed of scarlet ash, and there was a long white wooden table, and there were chairs painted in dark bright colors, and everywhere there were eyes, catching the light, blinking and shining. Eyes on the mantelpiece, in the clock, behind the plates on the shelves, jet-black eyes, glass-green eyes, huge yellow eyes, amber eyes, even rose-pink eyes. And what the Princess had taken to be an intricate colored carpet rustled and moved and shone with eyes, and revealed itself to be a mass of shifting creatures, snakes and grasshoppers, beetles and bumblebees, mice and voles and owlets and bats, a weasel and a few praying mantises. There were larger creatures too—cats and rats and badgers and kittens and a white goat. There was a low, peaceful, lively squeaking and scratching of tiny voices, welcoming and exclaiming. In one corner was a spindle and in another was a loom, and the old lady had just put aside a complicated shawl she was crocheting from a rainbow-colored basket of scraps of wool.

“One of you needs food,” said the Old Woman, “and three of you need healing.” So the Princess sat down to good soup, and fresh bread, and fruit tart with clotted cream and a mug of sharp cider, and the Old Woman put the creatures on the table, and healed them in her way. Her way was to make them tell the story of their hurts, and as they told, she applied ointments and drops with tiny feathery brushes and little bone pins, uncurling and splinting the Scorpion’s tail as it rasped out the tale of its injuries, swabbing and stitching the Toad’s wounded head with what looked like cobweb threads, and unknotting the threads that entwined the Cockroach with almost invisible hooks and tweezers. Then she asked the Princess for her story, which the Princess told as best she could, living again the moment when she realized she was doomed to fail, imitating the Scorpion’s rasp, and the Toad’s croaking glup, and the husky whisper of the Cockroach. She brought the dangers of the Forest into the warm fireside, and all the creatures shuddered at the thought of the Hunter’s arrow, the Fowler’s snare and the Woodman’s axe. And the Princess, telling the story, felt pure pleasure in getting it right, making it just so, finding the right word, and even—she went so far—the right gesture to throw shadow-branches and shadow-figures across the flickering firelight and the yellow pool of candlelight on the wall. And when she had finished there was all kinds of applause, harmonious wing-scraping, and claw-tapping, and rustling and chirruping.

“You are a born storyteller,” said the old lady. “You had the sense to see you were caught in a story, and the sense to see that you could change it to another one. And the special wisdom to recognize that you are under a curse—which is also a blessing—which makes the story more interesting to you than the things that make it up. There are young women who would never have listened to the creatures’ tales about the Woodman, but insisted on finding out for themselves. And maybe they would have been wise and maybe they would have been foolish: that is their story. But you listened to the Cockroach and stepped aside and came here, where we collect stories and spin stories and mend what we can and investigate what we can’t, and live quietly without striving to change the world. We have no story of our own here, we are free, as old women are free, who don’t have to worry about princes or kingdoms, but dance alone and take an interest in the creatures.”

“But—” said the Princess, and stopped.

“But?”

“But the sky is still green and I have failed, and I told the story to suit myself.” “The green is a very beautiful color, or a very beautiful range of colors, I think,” said the old lady. “Here, it gives us pleasure. We write songs about greenness and make tapestries with skies of every possible green. It adds to the beauty of the newt and the lizard. The Cockroach finds it restful. Why should things be as they always were?”

The Princess did not know, but felt unhappy. And the creatures crowded round to console her, and persuade her to live quietly in the little house, which was what she wanted to do, for she felt she had come home to where she was free. But she was worried about the sky and the other princesses. Then the Cockroach chirped to the old lady:

“Tell us the rest of the story, tell us the end of the story, of the story the Princess left.”

He was feeling decidedly better already, his segments were eased, and he could bend almost voluptuously.

“Well,” said the old lady, “this is the story of the eldest Princess. But, as you percipiently observe, you can’t have the story of the eldest, without the stories of the next two, so I will tell you those stories, or possible stories, for many things may and do happen, stories change themselves, and these stories are not histories and have not happened. So you may believe my brief stories about the middle one and the youngest or not, as you choose.”

“I always believe stories whilst they are being told,” said the Cockroach.

“You are a wise creature,” said the Old Woman. “That is what stories are for. And after, we shall see what we shall see. ” So she told

When the second Princess realized that the first was not returning, she too set out, and met identical problems and pleasures, and sat down on the same stone, and realized that she was caught in the same story. But being a determined young woman she decided to outwit the story, and went on, and after many adventures was able to snatch the single silver bird in her nest of branches and return in triumph to her father’s palace. And the old wizard told her that she must light the branches and burn the bird, and although she felt very uneasy about this she was determined to do as she should, so she lit the fire. And the nest and the bird were consumed, and a new glorious bird flew up from the conflagration, and swept the sky with its flaming tail, and everything was blue, as it had once been. And the Princess became Queen when her parents died, and ruled the people wisely, although they grumbled incessantly because they missed the variety of soft and sharp greens they had once been able to see.

As for the third Princess, when the bird flamed across the sky, she went into the orchard and thought, I have no need to go on a Quest. I have nothing I must do, I can do what I like. I have no story. And she felt giddy with the empty space around her, a not entirely pleasant feeling. And a frisky little wind got up and ruffled her hair and her petticoats and blew bits of blossom all over the blue sky. And the Princess had the idea that she was tossed and blown like the petals of the cherry-trees. Then she saw an old woman, with a basket, at the gate of the orchard. So she walked towards her and when she got there, the Old Woman told her, straight out, You are unhappy because you have nothing to do.”

So the Princess saw that this was a wise old woman, and answered politely that this was indeed the case.

I might help, said the Old Woman. Or I might not. You may look in my basket. ”

In the basket were a magic glass which would show the Princess her true love, wherever he was, whatever he was doing, and a magic loom, that made tapestries that would live on the walls of the palace chambers as though they were thickets of singing birds, and Forest rides leading to the edge of vision.

“Or I could give you a thread,” said the Old Woman, as the Princess hesitated, for she did not want to see her true love, not yet, not just yet, he was the end of stories not begun, and she did not want to make magic Forests, she wanted to see real ones. So she watched the old lady pick up from the grass the end of what appeared to be one of those long, trailing gossamer threads left by baby spiders traveling on the air in the early dawn. But it was as strong as linen thread, and as fine as silk, and when the Old Woman gave it a little tug it tugged tight and could be seen to run away, out of the orchard, over the meadow, into the woods and out of sight.

“You gather it in,” said the Old Woman, “and see where it takes you.”

The thread glittered and twisted, and the Princess began to roll it neatly in, and took a few steps along it, and gathered it, and rolled it into a ball, and followed it, out of the orchard, across the meadow, and into the woods, and . . . but that is another story.

“Tell me one thing,” said the eldest Princess to the Old Woman, when they had all applauded her story. The moon shone in an emerald sky, and all the creatures drowsed and rustled. “Tell me one thing. Was that you, ahead of me in the road, in such a hurry?”

“There is always an old woman ahead of you on a journey, and there is always an old woman behind you too, and they are not always the same, they may be fearful or kindly, dangerous or delightful, as the road shifts, and you speed along it. Certainly I was ahead of you, and behind you too, but not only I, and not only as I am now.”

“I am happy to be here with you as you are now.”

“Then that is a good place to go to sleep, and stop telling stories until the morning, which will bring its own changes.”

So they went to bed, and slept until the sun streaked the apple-green horizon with grassy-golden light.

I was born in a North Calcutta hospital in the heart of an Indian midnight just before the beginning of the monsoon season. The air hung heavy as wet velvet over the Hooghly River, offshoot of the holy Ganga, and the stumps of banyan trees on the Upper Chitpur Road were flecked with dots of phosphorus like the ghosts of flames. I was as dark as the new moon in the sky, and I cried very little. I feel as if I remember this, because this is the way it must have been.

My mother died in labor, and later that night the hospital burned to the ground. (I have no reason to connect the two incidents; then again, I have no reason not to. Perhaps a desire to live burned on in my mother’s heart. Perhaps the flames were fanned by her hatred for me, the insignificant mewling infant that had killed her.) A nurse carried me out of the roaring husk of the building and laid me in my father’s arms. He cradled me, numb with grief.

My father was American. He had come to Calcutta five years earlier, on business. There he had fallen in love with my mother and, like a man who will not pluck a flower from its garden, he could not bear to see her removed from the hot, lush, squalid city that had spawned her. It was part of her exotica. So my father stayed in Calcutta. Now his flower was gone. He pressed his thin chapped lips to the satin of my hair. I remember opening my eyes—they felt tight and shiny, parched by the flames—and looking up at the column of smoke that roiled into the sky, a night sky blasted cloudy pink like a sky full of blood and milk.

There would be no milk for me, only chemical-tasting drops of formula from a plastic nipple. The morgue was in the basement of the hospital and did not burn. My mother lay on a metal table, a hospital gown stiff with her dying sweat pulled up over her red-smeared crotch and thighs. Her eyes stared up through the blackened skeleton of the hospital, up to the milky bloody sky, and ash filtered down to mask her pupils.

My father and I left for America before the monsoon came. Without my mother Calcutta was a pestilential hell-hole, a vast cremation grounds, or so my father thought. In America he could send me to school and movies, ball games and Boy Scouts, secure in the knowledge that someone else would take care of me or I would take care of myself. There were no thuggees to rob me and cut my throat, no goondas who would snatch me and sell my bones for fertilizer. There were no cows to infect the streets with their steaming sacred piss. My father could give me over to the comparative wholesomeness of American life, leaving himself free to sit in his darkened bedroom and drink whiskey until his long sensitive nose floated hazily in front of his face and the sabre edge of his grief began to dull. He was the sort of man who has only one love in his lifetime, and knows with the sick fervor of a fatalist that this love will be taken from him someday, and is hardly surprised when it happens.

When he was drunk he would talk about Calcutta. My little American mind rejected the place—I was in love with air-conditioning, hamburgers and pizza, the free and undiscriminating love that was lavished upon me every time I twisted the TV dial—but somewhere in my Indian heart I longed for it. When I turned eighteen and my father finally failed to wake up from one of his drunken stupors, I returned to the city of my bloody birth as soon as I had the plane fare in my hand.

Calcutta, you will say. What a place to have been when the dead began to walk.

And I reply, what better place to be? What better place than a city where five million people look as if they are already dead—might as well be dead—and another five million wish they were?

I have a friend named Devi, a prostitute who began her work at the age of fifteen from a tarpaper shack on Sudder Street. Sudder is the Bourbon Street of Calcutta, but there is far less of the carnival there, and no one wears a mask on Sudder Street because disguises are useless when shame is irrelevant. Devi works the big hotels now, selling American tourists or British expatriates or German businessmen a taste of exotic Bengal spice. She is gaunt and beautiful and hard as nails. Devi says the world is a whore, too, and Calcutta is the pussy of the world. The world squats and spreads its legs, and Calcutta is the dank sex you see revealed there, wet and fragrant with a thousand odors both delicious and foul. A source of lushest pleasure, a breeding ground for every conceivable disease.

The pussy of the world. It is all right with me. I like pussy, and I love my squalid city.

The dead like pussy too. If they are able to catch a woman and disable her enough so that she cannot resist, you will see the lucky ones burrowing in between her legs as happily as the most avid lover. They do not have to come up for air. I have seen them eat all the way up into the body cavity. The internal female organs seem to be a great delicacy, and why not? They are the caviar of the human body. It is a sobering thing to come across a woman sprawled in the gutter with her intestines sliding from the shredded ruin of her womb, but you do not react. You do not distract the dead from their repast. They are slow and stupid, but that is all the more reason for you to be smart and quick and quiet. They will do the same thing to a man—chew off the soft penis and scrotal sac like choice morsels of squid, leaving only a red raw hole. But you can sidle by while they are feeding and they will not notice you. I do not try to hide from them. I walk the streets and look; that is all I do anymore. I am fascinated. This is not horror, this is simply more of Calcutta.

First I would sleep late, through the sultry morning into the heat of the afternoon. I had a room in one of the decrepit marble palaces of the old city. Devi visited me here often, but on a typical morning I woke alone, clad only in twisted bedsheets and a luxurious patina of sweat. Sun came through the window and fell in bright bars across the floor. I felt safe in my second-story room as long as I kept the door locked. The dead were seldom able to navigate stairs, and they could not manage the sustained cooperative effort to break down a locked door. They were no threat to me. They fed upon those who had given up, those too traumatized to keep running: the senile, abandoned old, the catatonic young women who sat in gutters cradling babies that had died during the night. These were easy prey.

The walls of my room were painted a bright coral and the sills and door were aqua. The colors caught the sun and made the day seem cheerful despite the heat that shimmered outside. I went downstairs, crossed the empty courtyard with its dry marble fountain, and went out into the street. This area was barren in the heat, painfully bright, with parched weeds lining the road and an occasional smear of cow dung decorating the gutter. By nightfall both weeds and dung might be gone. Children collected cow shit and patted it into cakes held together with straw, which could be sold as fuel for cooking fires.

I headed toward Chowringhee Road, the broad main thoroughfare of the city. Halfway up my street, hunched under the awning of a mattress factory, I saw one of the catatonic young mothers. The dead had found her too. They had already taken the baby from her arms and eaten through the soft part at the top of the skull. Vacuous bloody faces rose and dipped. Curds of tender brain fell from slack mouths. The mother sat on the curb nearby, her arms cradling nothing. She wore a filthy green sari that was ripped across the chest. The woman’s breasts protruded heavily, swollen with milk. When the dead finished with her baby they would start on her, and she would make no resistance. I had seen it before. I knew how the milk would spurt and then gush as they tore into her breasts. I knew how hungrily they would lap up the twin rivers of blood and milk.

Above their bobbing heads, the tin awning dripped long ropy strands of cotton. Cotton hung from the roof in dirty clumps, caught in the corners of the doorway like spiderweb. Someone’s radio blared faintly in another part of the building, tuned to an English-language Christian broadcast. A gospel hymn assured Calcutta that its dead in Christ would rise. I moved on toward Chowringhee.

Most of the streets in the city are positively cluttered with buildings. Buildings are packed in cheek-by-jowl, helter-skelter, like books of different sizes jammed into a rickety bookcase. Buildings even sag over the street so that all you see overhead is a narrow strip of sky crisscrossed by miles of clotheslines. The flapping silks and cottons are very bright against the sodden, dirty sky. But there are certain vantage points where the city opens up and all at once you have a panoramic view of Calcutta. You see a long muddy hillside that has become home to a bustee, thousands and thousands of slum dwellings where tiny fires are tended through the night. The dead come often to these slums of tin and cardboard, but the people do not leave the bustee—where would they go? Or you see a wasteland of disused factories, empty warehouses, blackened smokestacks jutting into a rust-colored sky. Or a flash of the Hooghly River, steel-gray in its shroud of mist, spanned by the intricate girder-and-wirescape of the Howrah Bridge.

Just now I was walking opposite the river. The waterfront was not considered a safe place because of the danger from drowning victims. Thousands each year took the long plunge off the bridge, and thousands more simply waded into the water. It is easy to commit suicide at a riverfront because despair collects in the water vapor. This is part of the reason for the tangible cloud of despair that hangs over Calcutta along with its veil of humidity.

Now the suicides and the drowned street children were coming out of the river. At any moment the water might regurgitate one, and you would hear him scrabbling up the bank. If he had been in the water long enough he might tear himself to spongy gobbets on the stones and broken bricks that littered the waterfront; all that remained would be a trace of foul brown odor, like the smell of mud from the deep part of the river.

Police—especially the Sikhs, who are said to be more violent than Hindus—had been taking the dead up on the bridge to shoot them. Even from far away I could see spray-patterns of red on the drab girders. Alternately they set the dead alight with gasoline and threw them over the railing into the river. At night it was not uncommon to see several writhing shapes caught in the downstream current, the fiery symmetry of their heads and arms and legs making them into five-pointed human stars.

I stopped at a spice vendor’s stand to buy a bunch of red chrysanthemums and a handful of saffron. The saffron I had him wrap in a twist of scarlet silk. “It is a beautiful day,” I said to him in Bengali. He stared at me, half amused, half appalled. “A beautiful day for what?”

True Hindu faith calls upon the believer to view all things as equally sacred. There is nothing profane—no dirty dog picking through the ash bin at a cremation ground, no stinking gangrenous stump thrust into your face by a beggar who seems to hold you personally responsible for all his woes. These things are as sacred as feasting day at the holiest temple. But even for the most devout Hindus it has been difficult to see these walking dead as sacred. They are empty humans. That is the truly horrifying thing about them, more than their vacuous hunger for living flesh, more than the blood caked under their nails or the shreds of flesh caught between their teeth. They are soulless; there is nothing in their eyes; the sounds they make— their farts, their grunts and mewls of hunger—are purely reflexive. The Hindu, who has been taught to believe in the soul of everything, has a particular horror of these drained human vessels. But in Calcutta life goes on. The shops are still open. The confusion of traffic still inches its way up Chowringhee. No one sees any alternatives.

Soon I arrived at what was almost invariably my day's first stop. I would often walk twenty or thirty miles in a day—I had strong shoes and nothing to occupy my time except walking and looking. But I always began at the Kalighat, temple of the Goddess.

There are a million names for her, a million vivid descriptions: Kali the Terrible, Kali the Ferocious, skull-necklace, destroyer of men, eater of souls. But to me she was Mother Kali, the only one of the vast and colorful pantheon of Hindu gods that stirred my imagination and lifted my heart. She was the Destroyer, but all final refuge was found in her. She was the goddess of the age. She could bleed and burn and still rise again, very awake, beautifully terrible.

I ducked under the garlands of marigolds and strands of temple bells strung across the door, and I entered the temple of Kali. After the constant clamor of the street, the silence inside the temple was deafening. I fancied I could hear the small noises of my body echoing back to me from the ceiling far above. The sweet opium glaze of incense curled around my head. I approached the idol of Kali, the jagrata. Her gimlet eyes watched me as I came closer.

She was tall, gaunter and more brazenly naked than my friend Devi even at her best moments. Her breasts were tipped with blood—at least I always imagined them so—and her two sharp fangs and the long streamer of a tongue that uncurled from her open mouth were the color of blood too. Her hair whipped about her head and her eyes were wild, but the third crescent eye in the center of her forehead was merciful; it saw and accepted all. The necklace of skulls circled the graceful stem of her neck, adorned the sculpted hollow of her throat. Her four arms were so sinuous that if you looked away even for an instant, they seemed to sway. In her four hands she held a noose of rope, a skull-staff, a shining sword, and a gaping, very dead-looking severed head. A silver bowl sat at the foot of the statue just beneath the head, where the blood from the neck would drip. Sometimes this was filled with goat’s or sheep’s blood as an offering. The bowl was full today. In these times the blood might well be human, though there was no putrid smell to indicate it had come from one of the dead.

I laid my chrysanthemums and saffron at Kali’s feet. Among the other offerings, mostly sweets and bundles of spice, I saw a few strange objects. A fingerbone. A shrivelled mushroom of flesh that turned out upon closer inspection to be an ear. These were offerings for special protection, mostly wrested from the dead. But who was to say that a few devotees had not lopped off their own ears or finger joints to coax a boon from Kali? Sometimes when I had forgotten to bring an offering, I cut my wrist with a razor blade and let a few drops of my blood fall at the idol’s feet.

I heard a shout from outside and turned my head for a moment. When I looked back, the four arms seemed to have woven themselves into a new pattern, the long tongue seemed to loll farther from the scarlet mouth. And—this was a frequent fantasy of mine—the wide hips now seemed to tilt forward, affording me a glimpse of the sweet and terrible petalled cleft between the thighs of the goddess.

I smiled up at the lovely sly face. “If only I had a tongue as long as yours, Mother,” I murmured, “I would kneel before you and lick the folds of your holy pussy until you screamed with joy.” The toothy grin seemed to grow wider, more lascivious. I imagined much in the presence of Kali.

Outside in the temple yard I saw the source of the shout I had heard. There is a stone block upon which the animals brought to Kali, mostly baby goats, are beheaded by the priests. A gang of roughly dressed men had captured a dead girl and were bashing her head in on the sacrificial block. Their arms rose and fell, ropy muscles flexing. They clutched sharp stones and bits of brick in their scrawny hands. The girl’s half-pulped head still lashed back and forth. The lower jaw still snapped, though the teeth and bone were splintered. Foul thin blood coursed down and mingled with the rich animal blood in the earth beneath the block. The girl was nude, filthy with her own gore and waste. The flaccid breasts hung as if sucked dry of meat. The belly was burst open with gases. One of the men thrust a stick into the ruined gouge between the girl's legs and leaned on it with all his weight.

Only in extensive stages of decay can the dead be told from the lepers. The dead are greater in number now, and even the lepers look human when compared to the dead. But that is only if you get close enough to look into the eyes. The faces in various stages of wet and dry rot, the raw ends of bones rubbing through skin like moldy cheesecloth, the cancerous domes of the skulls are the same. After a certain point lepers could no longer stay alive begging in the streets, for most people would now flee in terror at the sight of a rotting face. As a result the lepers were dying, then coming back, and the two races mingled like some obscene parody of incest. Perhaps they actually could breed. The dead could obviously eat and digest, and seemed to excrete at random like everyone else in Calcutta, but I supposed no one knew whether they could ejaculate or conceive.

A stupid idea, really. A dead womb would rot to pieces around a fetus before it could come hallway to term; a dead scrotal sac would be far too cold a cradle for living seed. But no one seemed to know anything about the biology of the dead. The newspapers were hysterical, printing picture upon picture of random slaughter by dead and living alike. Radio stations had either gone off the air or were broadcasting endless religious exhortations that ran together in one long keening whine, the edges of Muslim, Hindu, Christian doctrine beginning to fray and blur.

No one in India could say for sure what made the dead walk. The latest theory I had heard was something about a genetically engineered microbe that had been designed to feed on plastic: a microbe that would save the world from its own waste. But the microbe had mutated and was now eating and “replicating” human cells, causing basic bodily functions to reactivate. It did not much matter whether this was true. Calcutta was a city relatively unsurprised to see its dead rise and walk and feed upon it. It had seen them doing so for a hundred years.

All the rest of the lengthening day I walked through the city. I saw no more dead except a cluster far away at the end of a blocked street, in the last rags of bloody light, fighting each other over the bloated carcass of a sacred cow.

My favorite place at sunset is by the river where I can see the Howrah Bridge. The Hooghly is painfully beautiful in the light of the setting sun. The last rays melt onto the water like hot ghee, turning the river from steel to khaki to nearly golden, a blazing ribbon of light. The bridge rises black and skeletal into the fading orange sky. Tonight an occasional skirl of bright flowers and still-glowing greasy embers floated by, the last earthly traces of bodies cremated farther up the river. Above the bridge were the burning ghats where families lined up to incinerate their dead and cast the ashes into the holy river. Cremation is done more efficiently these days, or at least more hurriedly. People can reconcile in their hearts their fear of strangers’ dead, but they do not want to see their own dead rise.

I walked along the river for a while. The wind off the water carried the scent of burning meat. When I was well away from the bridge, I wandered back into the maze of narrow streets and alleyways that lead toward the docks in the far southern end of the city. People were already beginning to settle in for the night, though here a bedroom might mean your own packing crate or your own square of sidewalk. Fires glowed in nooks and corners. A warm breeze still blew off the river and sighed its way through the winding streets. It seemed very late now. As I made my way from corner to corner, through intermittent pools of light and much longer patches of darkness, I heard small bells jingling to the rhythm of my footsteps. The brass bells of rickshaw men, ringing to tell me they were there in case I wished for a ride. But I could see none of the men. The effect was eerie, as if I were walking alone down an empty nighttime street being serenaded by ghostly bells. The feeling soon passed. You are never truly alone in Calcutta.

A thin hand slid out of the darkness as I passed. Looking into the doorway it came from, I could barely make out five gaunt faces, five forms huddled against the night. I dropped several coins into the hand and it slid out of sight again. I am seldom begged from. I look neither rich nor poor, but I have a talent for making myself all but invisible. People look past me, sometimes right through me. I don’t mind; I see more things that way. But when I am begged from I always give. With my handful of coins, all five of them might have a bowl of rice and lentils tomorrow.

A bowl of rice and lentils in the morning, a drink of water from a broken standpipe at night.

It seemed to me that the dead were among the best-fed citizens of Calcutta.

Now I crossed a series of narrow streets and was surprised to find myself coming up behind the Kalighat. The side streets are so haphazardly arranged that you are constantly finding yourself in places you had no idea you were even near. I had been to the Kalighat hundreds of times, but I had never approached it from this direction. The temple was dark and still. I had not been here at this hour before, did not even know whether the priests were still here or if one could enter so late. But as I walked closer I saw a little door standing open at the back. The entrance used by the priests, perhaps. Something flickered from within: a candle, a tiny mirror sewn on a robe, the smoldering end of a stick of incense.

I slipped around the side of the temple and stood at the door for a moment. A flight of stone steps led up into the darkness of the temple. The Kalighat at night, deserted, might have been an unpleasant prospect to some. The thought of facing the fierce idol alone in the gloom might have made some turn away from those steps. I began to climb them.

The smell reached me before I ascended halfway. To spend a day walking through Calcutta is to be assailed by thousands of odors both pleasant and foul: the savor of spices frying in ghee, the stink of shit and urine and garbage, the sick-sweet scent of the little white flowers called mogra that are sold in garlands and that make me think of the gardenia perfume American undertakers use to mask the smell of their corpses.

Almost everyone in Calcutta is scrupulously clean in person, even the very poor. They will leave their trash and their spit everywhere, but many of them wash their bodies twice a day. Still, everyone sweats under the sodden veil of heat, and at midday any public place will be redolent with the smell of human perspiration, a delicate tang like the mingled juices of lemons and onions. But lingering in the stairwell was an odor stronger and more foul than any I had encountered today. It was deep and brown and moist; it curled at the edges like a mushroom beginning to dry. It was the perfume of mortal corruption. It was the smell of rotting flesh.

Then I came up into the temple, and I saw them.

The large central room was lit only with candles that flickered in a restless draft, first this way, then that. In the dimness the worshippers looked no different from any other supplicants at the feet of Kali. But as my eyes grew accustomed to the candlelight, details resolved themselves. The withered hands, the ruined faces. The burst body cavities where ropy organs could be seen trailing down behind the cagework of ribs.

The offerings they had brought.

By day Kali grinned down upon an array of blossoms and sweetmeats lovingly arranged at the foot of her pedestal. The array spread there now seemed more suited to the goddess. I saw human heads balanced on raw stumps of necks, eyes turned up to crescents of silver-white. I saw gobbets of meat that might have been torn from a belly or a thigh. I saw severed hands like pale lotus flowers, the fingers like petals opening silently in the night.

Most of all, piled on every side of the altar, I saw bones. Bones picked so clean that they gleamed in the candlelight. Bones with smears of meat and long snotty runners of fat still attached. Skinny arm-bones, clubby leg-bones, the pretzel of a pelvis, the beadwork of a spine. The delicate bones of children. The crumbling ivory bones of the old. The bones of those who could not run.

These things the dead brought to their goddess. She had been their goddess all along, and they her acolytes.

Kali’s smile was hungrier than ever. The tongue lolled like a wet red streamer from the open mouth. The eyes were blazing black holes in the gaunt and terrible face. If she had stepped down from her pedestal and approached me now, if she had reached for me with those sinuous arms, I might not have been able to fall to my knees before her. I might have run. There are beauties too terrible to be borne.

Slowly the dead began to turn toward me. Their faces lifted and the rotting cavities of their nostrils caught my scent. Their eyes shone iridescent. Faint starry light shimmered in the empty spaces of their bodies. They were like cutouts in the fabric of reality, like conduits to 3 blank universe. The void where Kali ruled and the only comfort was in death.

They did not approach me. They stood holding their precious offerings and they looked at me—those of them that still had eyes—or they looked through me. At that moment I felt more than invisible. I felt empty enough to belong among these human shells.

A ripple seemed to pass through them. Then—in the uncertain candlelight, in the light that shimmered from the bodies of the dead—Kali did move.

The twitch of a finger, the deft turn of a wrist—at first it was so slight as to be nearly imperceptible. But then her lips split into an impossibly wide, toothy grin and the tip of her long tongue curled. She rotated her hips and swung her left leg high into the air. The foot that had trod on millions of corpses made a pointe as delicate as a prima ballerina’s. The movement spread her sex wide open.

But it was not the petalled mandala-like cleft I had imagined kissing earlier. The pussy of the goddess was an enormous deep red hole that seemed to lead down to the center of the world. It was a gash in the universe, it was rimmed in blood and ash. Two of her four hands beckoned toward it, inviting me in. I could have thrust my head into it, then my shoulders. I could have crawled all the way into that wet crimson eternity, and kept crawling forever.

Then I did run. Before I had even decided to flee I found myself falling down the stone staircase, cracking my head and my knee on the risers. At the bottom I was up and running before I could register the pain. I told myself that I thought the dead would come after me. I do not know what I truly feared was at my back. At times I thought I was running not away from something, but toward it.

I ran all night. When my legs grew too tired to carry me I would board a bus. Once I crossed the bridge and found myself in Howrah, the even poorer suburb on the other side of the Hooghly. I stumbled through desolate streets for an hour or more before doubling back and crossing over into Calcutta again. Once I stopped to ask for a drink of water from a man who carried two cans of it slung on a long stick across his shoulders. He would not let me drink from his tin cup, but poured a little water into my cupped hands. In his face I saw the mingled pity and disgust with which one might look upon a drunk or a beggar. I was a well-dressed beggar, to be sure, but he saw the fear in my eyes.

In the last hour of the night I found myself wandering through a wasteland of factories and warehouses, of smokestacks and rusty corrugated tin gates, of broken windows. There seemed to be thousands of broken windows. After a while I realized I was on the Upper Chitpur Road. I walked for a while in the watery light that fills the sky before dawn. Eventually I left the road and staggered through the wasteland. Not until I saw its girders rising around me like the charred bones of a prehistoric animal did I realize I was in the ruins of the hospital where I had been born.

The hole of the basement had filled up with broken glass and crumbling metal, twenty years’ worth of cinders and weeds, all washed innocent in the light of the breaking dawn. Where the building had stood there was only a vast depression in the ground, five or six feet deep. I slid down the shallow embankment, rolled, and came to rest in the ashes. They were infinitely soft; they cradled me. I felt as safe as an embryo. I let the sunrise bathe me. Perhaps I had climbed into the gory chasm between Kali’s legs after all, and found my way out again.

Calcutta is cleansed each morning by the dawn. If only the sun rose a thousand times a day, the city would always be clean.

Ashes drifted over me, smudged my hands gray, flecked my lips. I lay safe in the womb of my city, called by its poets Lord of Nerves, city of joy, the pussy of the world. I felt as if I lay among the dead. I was that safe from them: I knew their goddess, I shared their many homes. As the sun came up over the mud and glory of Calcutta, the sky was so full of smoky clouds and pale pink light that it seemed, to my eyes, to burn.

Being yourself is never a very easy row to hoe,” Sid said, nibbling sourly at a bit of unidentifiable root or mulch. “Being the only stray parakeet in a drab world filled with cackling hive-minded pigeons, sparrows, black crows and pheromone-splashed finches can be a pretty dismal experience indeed. Especially if you’re all alone. Especially if you re at all like me, and inclined to be pretty morose at the drop of a hat anyway.”

Without a doubt, winter was the hardest season. In winter, even the leaves abandoned you, while all the anxious birds you were just getting to know on the high wires departed precipitously for warm, ancestral climes—places with mythic, irreproachable names like Capistrano, Szechwan, Sao Paulo, Bengal. Other birds never told you where they were going, how long it took to get there, or even invited you along for the ride. They seemed to think that if they had a perfectly nice location picked out for the off-season, every body did.

“It’s sort of like being all dressed up with no place to go,” Sid told the ducks at his local pond. “I mean, my hormones have shifted into superdrive. My blood’s beating with procreation and heat. And not only can’t I find any girl parakeets, I can’t even find the goddamn continent of Australia.” The ducks were an addled, pudgy lot, filled with ambitionless quacks and broad steamy flatulence, fattened by white breads and popcorn dispensed by local children and senior citizens. They sat and jiggled their rumps in sparse blue patches of the partially frozen pond. Snow was everywhere. Winter was pretty indisputable now.

“Goddamn it’s cold,” the ducks honked and chattered. “Jesus fucking Christ it’s cold cold cold. We’re freezing our collective little butts off out here.”

Ducks might be self-involved, Sid thought, but they were still a lot better than no company at all. If you kept close to ducks, you might pick up stray bits of cracker or information now and again, or be alerted by the emergency squawks that proclaimed wolf-peer or weasel-crouch. The winter world was a hazardous and forlorn place, and you could use all the friends you could get. Buses and planes and whirling frisbees and crackling power cables, children with rocks and slingshots and BB guns and pocketknives. The wide world was filled with angular objects that were always rushing toward you without any regard for personal space or decorum. Not to mention the ruder angularities of solitude and exile. Not to mention hunger, sadness, constitutional ennui or even just the bloody weather.

The photographs are supposed to be ready within the hour, but when I go to get them the man says there was a fault with the machine and I should come back at five.

As I leave work and walk towards the booth in the tube station I think about what happened at the wedding and what the photos will show. Will they show “a” or “b”? Quickening my step I worry that if I choose “a,” “b” might happen. I can't be sure, though. Nor can I be confident that “a” will happen if I choose “b.” It's just as well that on this occasion I don’t have to choose.

I wait in the bottleneck at the entrance to Green Park tube, part of a large crowd of commuters and tourists. If I could be one of them I wouldn't have to worry about the photos, nor about what I saw at the wedding. Or thought I saw. Thinking about it now twenty-four hours later it seems fantastic. Maybe I shouldn’t have had that third pint certainly not with me having to drive back. The photos will prove I was just seeing things.

But the screams seemed so real.

Mama?

Vivian Sparks took her hands out of the soapy water and stared into the frosted kitchen window. There was a face in the ice and fog, but she wasn’t sure which of her dead children it was. Amy or Henry, maybe—they’d had the smallest heads, like early potatoes, and about that same color. Those hadn’t been their real names, of course. Ray always felt it was wrong to name a stillborn, so they didn’t get a name writ down on paper, but still she had named every one of them in her heart: Amy, Henry, Becky, Sue Ann, and Patricia, after her mother. Patricia had been the smallest, not even full-made really, like part of her had been left behind in the dark somewhere. Ray had wanted Patricia took right away and buried on the back hill, he’d been so mad about the way she came out. But the midwife had helped Vivian bathe the poor little thing and wrap her up, and she’d looked so much like a dead kitten or a calf that it made it a whole lot worse than the others, so dark and wet and wrinkled that Vivian almost regretted not letting Ray do what he’d wanted.

Mama . . .

But it wasn’t the dead ones, not this time. A mother knows the voice of her child, and Vivian Sparks felt ashamed to have denied it. It felt bad, always hearing the dead ones and never expecting the one she’d have given up anything for, no matter what Ray said. Ray wouldn’t have let her adopt him, if it hadn’t been for those stillborns, but she would have done it on her own if she had to, even if she’d had ten other children to care for. It was her own darling Jimmie Lee out there in the cold foggy morning. It had to be.

Vivian opened the back door and looked out onto the bare dirt yard that led uphill to the lopsided gray barn. Ray’s lantern flickered in there where he was checking on the cows. She couldn’t see much else because of the dark, and the fog. It was still trying real hard to be Spring here in late March—she’d caught a whiff of lilac breeze yesterday afternoon—but it worried her that the hard frost was going to put an end to that early flowering before she’d see any blossoms. That was always a bad sign when the lilacs came out too soon and the ice killed the hope of them.

“Mama, it’s me.”

Vivian reached up and touched her throat, trying to help a good swallow along. Suddenly her throat felt as if it were full of food, and she just couldn’t get it all down. Ray said it was because of Jimmie Lee, her problem with eating, said it had been like that for her ever since Jimmie Lee came into their lives. “You don’t eat right no more. I guess you can’t,” he said over and over, the way he repeated something to death when he had a mad feeling about it. “Can’t say that I even blame you—it’s understandable. Watchin’ him go at it, it’d put anybody off their food. That’s why I never watched.”

She guessed there was truth in what he said, but she didn’t like to think about it that way. What she liked to think was that it was all her feelings for Jimmie Lee coming up into her throat when she’d looked at him, or now when she thought about him, all the sadness and the love that made it hard for her to breathe, much less eat. And the memory of him touching her on her throat, gazing at her mouth the night before he left home to join that awful show. That was another reason for her to be touching her throat now, in that same place.

“Mama, I come back to visit.”

Vivian could hardly speak. Maybe the love in her throat was so big it was closing up her windpipe. “Come on, come . . . on, honey. Been a long time.”

Past the east fence she could see the darkness gray a little and move away. She started to walk over but a simple yet awful sound—a young man clearing his throat—stopped her. She clutched the huge lump in her throat. It was warm, as if it might burn her fingers.

“Mama, I ate something off the road a while back. I just gotta get rid of it, then I’ll come up where you can see me. ”

She turned her back to him even though it would have been much too dark to see what he was about to do. But after watching him a thousand times when he was little she felt like he was a grown boy now, and deserved some show of respect, and she wasn’t sure but maybe this was one way to do it. At the same time she knew her turning away wasn’t at all being the good mama, either. She didn’t want to see it anymore. She didn’t feel like she should have to.

Back in the darkness there was a sound like damp skin stretching, splitting, some awful coughs and gurglings like her son’s throat was turning itself inside out (dear God it’s got worse!) and then a loud, mushy thump.

A few minutes later she could hear him walking up behind her. “I’m sorry, Mama.” His voice was hoarse, like he’d been crying. He used to cry all the time when he was little, complaining all the time about being so hungry, and never getting full no matter how much she fed him, how much Ray let her feed him, or how ever much Jimmie Lee ate on his own to try to fill that awful hunger. His nose would run and his eyes would look all raw and scraped and he’d stop trying to keep himself clean. Vivian took a handkerchief out of her front apron pocket now and turned around to give it to him.

“Thanks, Mama. I’ll get good and clean for you, just for you.” The young man standing in front of her, saying just what he used to say to her when he was a little boy and had made himself such an awful mess, was taller, surely, and had little scraggly patches of beard here and there where once had been unnaturally pink skin, but other than that he still seemed the pale, skinny little boy who had left her years ago. His chin was covered with thick, soupy slobber which he wiped off with the handkerchief. She didn’t mind—that had always been her job, to provide the handkerchiefs, the towels, waiting patiently while he cleaned himself up, directing him now and then to a missed spot or two. Ray had never been able to stand even that little bit of clean up; he’d always just left the room.

“My goodness!” She made herself sound impressed, although what she was really feeling was relieved, and desperate to hug him to her. “My handsome older son.”

Jimmie Lee grinned then, showing teeth even worse than she remembered. She could see that at least he’d been able to get some dental work done, but it looked like the fillings and braces had been filed, points added here and there to make him look more like a silly machine, some big city kitchen gadget of some kind. She wondered if it really helped him get the food down or if it was all just for some sideshow or movie work he’d been doing. He’d written her once about one of the movies—“Flesh Eaters From Beyond Mars,” or some such silliness. He’d said in the letter that the movie people liked him because he saved them money on special effects, but she’d never really understood what any of that was about.

Other than the metal in his mouth her sweet boy hadn’t changed much. Certainly he couldn’t weigh much more now than when he’d left her: his body straight up and down like a sleeve with no hips or shoulders to speak of, but his neck about twice as wide as it should be, and faintly ringed, like a snake’s belly. Set atop that stout neck was the largest jaw she’d ever seen—it hung out like the bird bath on top the pedestal she had out in the front flower bed. His mouth was wider than normal, she guessed, but had never seemed as big as it should be for that size jaw. His lips were almost blue, and cracked, and there were a bunch more splits in the skin at the corners of his mouth. Because of all the stretching his skin had to do there hair growth had always been spotty. She’d tried to get him to use lotions and oils, but like most children he just forgot all the time. So she’d always rub some into his face every night, being especially careful around the mouth and chin. She wondered if he knew somebody now who cared enough to do that for him.

His eyes were the wide eyes of a lost child’s, but then they always had been. Jimmie Lee now was just a larger version of the poor baby that had been born in a backwoods barn and just left there eighteen years before. No one else had wanted the funny-looking child but Vivian had known from the very first moment she saw him that this was her son, and would be forever. Even Ray, for all his puffin’ and embarrassment about the boy, had resented it when one of the neighbors suggested that maybe they shouldn’t keep him. This was his son, even though sometimes he sorely couldn’t stand being around him.

And then Jimmie Lee had gone out into the world, maybe to find his “real” mother, or maybe to find whatever it was he was hungry for. She didn’t know, and was afraid then, and was afraid now, to ask. All she’d had to remember him by was this awful swelling in her throat every time she thought of him, and every time she struggled to eat or drink something. But nobody’d ever told her that life was fair to mothers.

“Did you ever find her, son?”

“Who, Mama?”

“Why, the one who gave birth to you. The one who just left you here all them years ago.” She tried to keep the bitterness out of her voice, but the vein went too wide and deep to hide.

His throat gurgled and a raw smell escaped. She started to turn away, but he held out his hand to stop her. “It’s okay, mama. I still got it under control. I’m a lot more careful about how and when I eat now. Something I learned on the road, having to be around other people. ” He looked at her. She waited. “I never found her, Mama. Guess I didn’t try much after the beginning. 1 guess 1 was a little afraid of what she’d look like. ”

“You stayin’ long?”

“I can’t. I finally figured out it’s best I be around folks who don’t know me so well. But I just had to see you again, and smell you, and listen to you talk. I had to.

Her throat filled and she had to force it back down so that she could speak again. “You best get inside now, have something to . . .” She looked away from his nervous, hungry face, to where he’d come from in the dark beyond the fence, now turning gray so fast she could see a little bit of what he’d left there: great big mounds of meat still steaming in the cold, their hides partly dissolved away, large hunks of their manes missing, the meat turned to something like jelly, their teeth protruding from lipless mouths. A couple of Winn Gibson’s prize mares, she suspected. Well, she guessed Ray was just going to have to deal with Winnie on that one, like he had all those times before. She sighed. “Guess you’d best just get inside ...”

The evening had begun to sour when Vi demanded they play a party game.

The soap actor spoke through a half-chewed bit of cocktail sausage. “Oh, Christ, whatever for? Aren’t you all bored to death as it is? Come out to the garden with me, darling, I’ll show you a party game you won’t forget for a while.”

Scots bastard, Hugh thought, sulking over a canned Club cocktail. He’d just about managed one hand up Tamsin’s black silk pencil skirt when Vi had come storming into the dining room, scrounging for a cigarette. The rest of the party soon followed, in the time-honored tradition of parties. Go looking for attention, everyone ignores you; wander off for a bit of reflection on your own, or to watch the submarine races, and the whole damn world wanders off after you. This room had quickly grown just as smoky as the kitchen and sitting room were, and even noisier. The hostess probably would have preferred her guests stay out of her expensively furnished dining room, but wasn’t there to protest. Rumor had it she was nicely occupied in one of the upstairs bedrooms.

The actor threw Tamsin a stage wink. Hugh couldn’t believe her falling for it; she smiled as though the big fake had presented her with the most precious of jewels. He suffered the death of his erection, but not much, for Hugh was drunker than he’d realized and besides, it was only a small erection.

A man dressed for the evening in a pink, turquoise and black polyester track suit asked his companion if she had seen Jenny in her new beer commercial. The woman, whose upper head was shaved, the lower strands of hair having been tortured into several spikes hung with tiny paper replicas of flags of the world, replied, No, but it seemed that since Jenny had acquired a very minor role in a Beeb One comedy, her personality traits were rapidly progressing from merely annoying to positively insufferable.

“Why must you share your predilection for lung cancer with me?” Hugh asked no one in particular, not really expecting an answer in the din of people all talking just to hear the sound of their own voices.

Vi said very loudly, “All I really wanted, Tam, dear, was a bit of privacy so we could talk. Who are all these fucking people?”

Tamsin giggled as the actor poured wine in her glass.

“I know how to get rid of everybody. Let’s play party games!”

Hugh tried to maneuver himself over to the fridge wherein lay canned cocktails stacked to heaven, this without touching his ex-wife.

“That sounds marvelous. What kind of party games?”

“You would say that, you tart. When I’m trying to get rid of everybody.” “Don’t listen to a word Vi’s saying. She’s out of her mind on drink and pills, has been for years. ” This from a tall man in a wrinkled brown suit, whose beard grew in several different directions and colors.

“What time is it? Are we too late for the pub?”

Hugh was well aware Vi wasn’t at all interested in having Tamsin to herself for a chat. The buddy-buddy thing was an act. She had just figured out that Hugh wanted Tamsin, and how she could cock it up for him; appearing in the dining room looking for cigarettes, that greased-back Edinburgh hambone in tow. Since their divorce last spring, Vi managed to put all her energies into finding ways of thwarting his desires, ruining his uncertain attempts at starting new relationships, reminding him during late-night phone calls of his inability to get himself off the dole and into a job again. He hated answering the phone at night but he hated the new silence in the house even more. He was very weak, he knew, but all he could do was wish things were different, and mere wishing never worked on anything. How often he had sincerely wished Vivien dead. She still held his three piece suit firmly in her grasping little hand, if no longer for pleasure. This she reminded him of now with a malevolent little smile she threw at him, over her shoulder.

“Yes, a party game is definitely in order. See, now it’s working! The room’s only half as full as it was.”

“Because this is the most boring party anyone’s been to in London all year,” said the actor, blowing kisses towards Tamsin’s breasts. “What party game are we going to play?”

Hugh snapped the ring off of a fresh canned cocktail with a great and deliberate violence. “Why not Charades, or Go Piss Up A Rope?”

“Don’t bother to say anything if you’re just having a go, Hugh,” said Vi. “I want real suggestions. Nothing obscure or American. You remember Hugh’s from California,” she announced to the room at large, as if it were a disease.

“Look,” said a very slight man in spectacles and a Harley-Davidson motorcycle jacket, “this whole area is supposed to be built over plague sites. Why don’t we have a seance?”

“Bril-liant,” said Vi.

“And you could write a story about it, Nigel.”

“I don’t write ghost stories, I write splatterpunk fantasy. ”

“Well, anyway, we can’t have a seance because no one here knows how,” said the man with the beard. “It’s supposed to be quite dangerous unless you have an experienced medium running things.”

“Rot,” said Nigel. He reminded Hugh of a worm inside a big shiny black apple skin, with studs on it. “All you need is a round table, and a candle, and some people to form a circle. Really, John.”

“Would our hostess mind?”

“Who cares?” The actress named Jenny cradled a marble lighter in fluid hands. A tiny blue flame clicked up, illuminating her features and the angle of the cigarette as her mouth twisted its tip down into the fire, reflecting tiny dots of fire in her darkened eyes.

“Jenny, you’ve become insufferable since you’ve started working again.”

“You just wish you were, Nigel. Working, that is. At anything.”

Wrong thing to say to a writer, Hugh thought, watching Nigel’s shoulders stiffen.

“I don’t know if any spirits would want to come to our seance, with all this carping going on,” said Tamsin softly. Hugh tried to catch her eye again, without success. Earlier, she’d been eager enough to run off with him, talking quietly and then later ardently returning his kiss in a darkened hallway, tongue swiff and teasing, tender breasts arching into his hands. Now she seemed to not want to know. It was a shame, for they were so much alike, sensitive, interested in the same things, art and wildlife and jazz.

He was beginning to get used to it, this far-reaching influence of his ex-wife on his existence. In Wood Green Shopping City, at parties given by mutual friends, even going to the sweet shop up the street to buy an Evening Standard—she always seemed to be there, with her crude jokes and painfully loud voice, like a curse. So here he was still wishing there were something he could do to be rid of her, but not having the least idea what. Except to maybe blot her out of his thoughts with alcohol. And to go on wishing, wishing healthy Vi would just turn around and drop dead.

“Right. Everybody around the table. Who’s going to find us a candle?”

“There must be candles, probably in that cupboard. Hugh, you have a look, go on now, there’s a lovely man.”

Why don’t you do it yourself, he said. But only in his head. He found himself mechanically moving toward the shelves of china and crystal. The sound of trembling valuables shimmered on the air as he jiggled the drawers out, one by one. God how he hated that woman he had married.

“Are there any rules to this?”

“Of course there’re rules, you idiot. Haven’t you ever watched a horror movie in your life?” Vi’s laughter prevented her remark from becoming an insult. “You have to have a medium; you have to have all the lights turned off—and you have to not break the circle you’ve made with your hands before the spirits have finished speaking. ”

“What a load of old wank. ”

“What if we need to use the loo?”

“Go pee now. I don’t want you spoiling my game.”

Hugh sat back in his chair, looking at Vi through narrowed eyes. In the soft light of the candle flame he could see reminders of why he had fallen in love with her: her gleaming dark helmet of hair, the grace of her movements, her sexual exuberance. He opened his eyes wide. He made himself look at the pouches of fat beginning to lodge around her jaw and chin, fleshing out her cheeks where the skin had started to roughen and pock; he saw how her hair had dulled, and her eyes had faded, lacking focus now even though she was sober. Her cigarette jutted from her frown, stray ash skittering across the polished surface of their hostess’ mahogany table.

They ringed themselves around it, clasping hands. Hugh found himself opposite Tamsin. The actor’s hand came from behind her neck to settle comfortably in the nest of her fingers. Vi appointed herself medium. She raised her arms dramatically, the hands she gripped following into the air, perhaps against their will—but everyone was taking Vi’s dictum quite seriously and would not break the circle, even though the only spirits present now swirled over the bottom of Hugh’s cocktail can.

“Eenie-meenie, chilly-beanie, the spirits are about to speak!”

“Very funny, Hugh. Do you mind?”

“What happens next, Vi?”

“We close our eyes, and wait.”

For the first time Hugh noticed the grandfather clock next to the dish cupboard, and that it ticked, for in the ensuing silence its ticking was monstrously loud. He was having a hard time sitting straight in his chair, and now that they were all holding hands there was a niggling but insistent itch plaguing his nose, and he badly wanted a cigarette.

“Aren’t we supposed to ask questions?”

“Shhhhh.”

“No, I mean really. I mean, how are we supposed to raise any ghosts of whatever unless we ask them is anybody there, that sort of thing?”

“Raise spirits. Oi! That’s a laugh. Old Vi can barely raise herself out of bed in the morning.”

There was a skitter of laughter around the table. Then Tamsin spoke, very softly. “I don’t like this much. Maybe we should stop.”

“IS ANYBODY THERE?” Vi bellowed, ignoring her. “Is. . .there. . .anybody ... in the room?”

“Best not to wake the dead,” intoned Nigel, in his very best Hammer voice.

Vi snapped, “We must know if anybody is there!”

There was someone’s sharp intake of breath as the candle flame shot straight up, then wavered, elongating itself, a slender pillar of fire rising slowly towards the ceiling. Hugh had just opened his eyes preparatory to standing up to leave but then he saw Vi’s shut eyes through the flame, her mouth working soundlessly, and he sat back in his chair, fascinated. Now there was a voice that seemed to come from somewhere under the table, weak and thin and high, she’s very good at this and I never even knew, but the voice began to grow stronger as the flame rose higher; and faintly, as though very far away, there was the steady insistent ringing of a bell. The hand on his right dug its nails into his skin, almost causing him to yelp. Now there were words. One word. He thought it was bum, said over over and over again, a mumbled sobbing chant. Then the voice broke, falling, distorting like the voice does on a record stopped mid-revolution with a clumsy finger, its tones dropping to an unnatural deepness and Hugh had known Vi sixteen years and he knew she was not capable of this and his hair stood straight up on his head as the voice cried, Burnt in the streets, burnt, the whole pile, you cannot breathe clean air for the ashes of the dead floating in it. Shall London ever smell sweet again? Ay burn burn burn.”

Hugh saw the candle flame bend and stream towards Vi, entering her open mouth. She sat motionless as fire illuminated her face from within, tiny spurts of yellow sparking her nostrils, red flushing her skin like blood rising inside her skull; fire twisted out of her ears, encircling her neck, sheeting her entire body so that she sat motionless in the flame’s burning heart.

Jenny began to whimper. Hugh hushed her sharply. “Not now.”

Everyone stared as Vi s mouth opened; her tongue, yellow and unburnt, licked red teeth. Burn burn burn,’ said the voice, its bass music intertwined with the faint ringing of the bell. The medium’s lips did not move.

Stop it, someone said. “Stop it, Vi, please. Someone stop her.”

“It’s not Vi.”

No it s not, thought Hugh, and we mustn't break the circle. Vi sat with her eyes closed, a human torch, the inhuman voice issuing, horrible and thin, from her open mouth. He never knew what he was doing until he was already out of his chair and the force of his movement had freed his hands from the others’ with a sweaty, smacking sound as he cried out, “We must know: is there anybody there?” He saw the people on either side of him as though they were something he was dreaming; he saw their hands fall back onto the polished round surface of the table, and he staggered back when Vi’s eyes snapped open and looked straight, accusingly at him. But the look lasted only for the briefest of moments. She burst into real flame before anything else could happen. He felt heat blazing on his face and his ex-wife’s screams were nearly intolerable as she burnt alive in front of all of them, unable to move herself as though she had been tied to that chair, and though they tried they couldn’t put the fire out. It burnt with a bright and steady glow until there was nothing left but a few blackened bones, and a terrible reeking smell that the hostess was never again able to get out of her house.

Vicky first thought a little girl had lost the doll in the women’s room just off the main lobby of the West Denver Inn. It was a Barbie, just like she remembered from years before. The doll was straight and pink and impossibly proportioned. It lay on the dull white tile beneath the tampon machine. Vicky had heard the clatter as she passed on her way to the sink. Perhaps she had brushed it off, somehow, with an unwary elbow.

Something wasn’t right. The doll did not look at all as she remembered.

Vicky set her black patent-leather purse on the faux marble counter by the sinks, switched the soft leather briefcase to her left hand, and knelt. She saw that the doll was tightly bound with monofilament. Tough, nearly transparent fishing line wound around the doll, binding the ankles, the arms at the waist, the chest, the shoulders, the throat, even around the head, taut across the parted lips. The line wound so tight, plastic bulged slightly around the loops. The bindings actually cut into the doll’s unreal skin.

She gingerly extended the fingers of her right hand and touched Barbie’s shoulder. Cold. Had a little girl lost this here? Vicky forced herself to pick up the doll. Had one of the other women out in the restaurant bar left this? She brought the doll close to her face. Was that a glisten of something red at the corner of Barbie’s lips? The fishing line caught and reflected the harsh overhead light. No, there was no blood. It was only a trick of the light.

Vicky wondered at the obvious strength of the line. If it could do this to the durable synthetics of the doll, what would it do to a caught fish? She had a feeling it would take superhuman—super . . . what was the word for fish?—strength to break these bonds.

Caught would be caught.

She saw no knots where the line ends connected. And maybe there was no need to find them. No point. Trapped. Caught for good. Vicky wound her fingers around the Barbie and turned toward the restroom door. Suddenly she wanted to leave the sharp light and the harsh, astringent odor of disinfectant.

She noticed nothing now save the doll’s seeming to become warmer. Lose heat, gain heat. Barbie was taking heat from Vicky’s grip, her skin, her body, her living, pumping blood.

As she swung the door inward with her left hand, Vicky thrust the doll into her briefcase. Now she had a secret. It was a long time since she had had a new secret.

This weekend, she had a sudden feeling, it was important to keep a secret or two ready and waiting. Something chilling and exciting rippled through her.

The house comes and goes, comes and goes, and no one seems to know or to care. It’s that kind of neighborhood. You keep your head down; you take notice only of the things relevant to your personal welfare; you screen out everything else as irrelevant or meaningless or potentially threatening.

It’s a very ordinary house, 30 or 40 years old, a cheap, one-story white-stucco job on a corner lot, maybe six rooms: green shutters on the windows, a scruffy lawn, a narrow, badly paved path running from the street to the front steps. There’s a screen door in front of the regular one. To the right and left of the doorway is some unkempt shrubbery, with odds and ends of rusting junk scattered around it—a garbage can, an old barbecue outfit, stuff like that.

All the houses around here look much the same; there isn’t a lot of architectural variety in this neighborhood. Just rows of ordinary little houses, adding up to an ordinary kind of place, neither a slum nor anything desirable; aging houses inhabited by stranded people who can’t move up and who are settled enough so that they’ve stopped slipping down. Even the street names are stereotyped small-town standards, instantly forgettable: Maple, Oak, Spruce, Pine. It’s hard to tell one street from another, and usually, there’s no reason you should. You’re able to recognize your own, and the others—except for Walnut, where the shops are—are just for filler.

I know how to get from my place to the white house with the screen door—turn right, down to the corner and right again, diagonal left across the street—but even now, I couldn’t tell you whether it’s on Spruce corner of Oak or Pine corner of Maple. I just know how to get there.

The house will stay here for five or six days at a time and then, one morning, I’ll come out and the lot will be vacant, and so it remains for ten days or two weeks. And then there it is again. You’d think people would notice that, you’d think they’d talk; but they’re all keeping their heads down, I guess. I keep my head down, too, but I can’t help noticing things. In that sense, I don’t belong in this part of town. In most other senses, I guess I do, because, after all, this is where I am.

When the deviltries of Devilkin finally got to be too much for even his own mother, the High Council decreed that he must be sent away to bedevil folk in the Upper World. They said, “Let him make them miserable until he grows a bit older and quieter—he’s already raised enough hell here in Hell!”

But Devilkin wasn’t willing to forsake the fun he was having with his good old friends. Whatever could there be for him to do on Earth, for heaven’s sake! Men would know what he was as soon as they laid eyes on his horns and his curly little tail. They’d skin him alive and pack him off back home. Let them send someone else to the Upper World. The little one tucked his tail in and hid himself away in the darkest corner of Hell. But who can conceal himself from the Boss Devil?

“Come out of there, or I’ll pull your ears off!” thundered the Head of the Underworld, the oldest and dingiest devil of all. “Look at this brave critter—some hero he is, running away!” the old devil laughed, his belly bouncing.

Devilkin went stiff as stone as the Head Devil patted his cheek and said, “'Lake this burr with you. Anyone you touch with it will instantly grow a tail and horns, for this burr is bewitched. Soon there’ll be so many horned and tailed people that nobody will even notice you. Skip along now!” The Boss Devil placed the bewitched burr on Devilkin’s palm and warned him to watch out: If the burr touched someone who cared for another’s good more than his own, it would turn into a rose. All horns and tails would vanish, and Devilkin would have to run for it as fast as he could, or they’d surely flay him right there. But, not to worry, chortled the Boss Devil, “One’s own skin is nearest and dearest to men and devils alike!” and waved his hand. Before you could even wink, Devilkin popped out on the busiest street in the city.

Right away he threw the burr at the first man passing by, and a huge tail adorned him. Another got a tail, and horns too. Oh, oh, oh! People hooted with laughter. “Hoo ha ha! Look at your horns!” one fellow yelled at his friend. “What great big horns you have! Oh, hee hee hee . . . !”

“You’d better take a look at your own fat tail!” sneered the second, slapping his friend’s face, as he grabbed at his horns. Slap, smack! Biff, bam! And they began to fight, while a bunch of idlers gathered around them. “Hit him! What are you waiting for!” they guffawed, and egged them on.

“The Boss was right!” thought Devilkin. “These Upper Worlders are no better than we are!”

“Bing! Bang! Bing!” Devilkin hurled his burr here and there. Oh my, how the town quaked. Neighbor assaulted neighbor, son struck father, husband beat wife. “Me oh my,” sighed Devilkin with pleasure, “if my folks could only get an eyeful of this!”

No one went to work. Instead, people were setting fire to their neighbors’ homes. Quicker than you could clap your hands, the first house exploded in flames. Then the first street was burning. Fires crackled and roared everywhere. The Mayor was horrified: What was to be done? If this went on, there soon would be no city left!

The Council of Sages convened. Nothing came of that. “Maybe old Tataga could tell us what to do,” someone said, remembering the oldest citizen of them all, who’d outlived six kings and seven wars—or was it six wars and seven kings? “She knows the language of the birds and the grass. ”

The old woman only shook her head. “For this you need another tongue altogether!”

Wilder and wilder, the strange dance whirled on. Devilkin would toss the burr, and people would shove each other at it, giggling with glee. “Watch this!” shouted a horned fellow going by while madly riding a tailed man, as the tailed fellow twisted his tormentor's horns and yelled, “Who do you think you are to snigger at me!” The tailed man punched out the horned man, and got pummeled right back.

“The Boss sure was telling it true,” Devilkin grinned: “Everyone’s own skin is nearest and dearest of all!” People tore at one another: they broke each other’s noses and cracked each other’s heads. Hospitals overflowed with the injured. Yet they went right on fighting.

“This is some sort of plague!” an old woman muttered, as the burr flashed about the city like wildfire. No wonder neighbor gave neighbor a wide berth. Yet the toll of wounded grew ever greater. What could anyone do? Finally, it occurred to some that their troubles were all the fault of that flying burr. But no one was bold enough to try catching it, and certainly they all were much too cowardly to try to scotch it. People ran about helter-skelter, all the while telling themselves, “Maybe it won’t hit me!”

Like a great golden bee, the burr buzzed around town. Whiz! it flew. Zing! it hit. Housewives stopped cooking and washing. Teachers shut their schools up tight—but they sprouted horns anyway. Bakers refused to bake bread. Hunger and filth spread like autumn fog. Who paid any attention to Old Tataga when she warned that dirt would bring disease? Who cared anything for tomorrow? Garbage lay heaped knee-high. But no one would lend a hand to cart it away.

Horns? Tails? Nonsense! Travelers hearing the tale from far off laughed. But as soon as some of them saw the miserable city, they began to avoid it. Tataga was right. Even the wild geese had no chance to fly away south: the town was caught by the plague. Streets and boroughs were dying out. Hatred alone lived there. Horns and tails abominated each other. But they loathed those without tails and horns even more. Their eyes would glint with glee as they caught and pushed new wretches at the burr.

Devilkin jumped for joy. If only his brothers could see this! Whee! Heigh ho! How happy they’d be! Hip, hop, hip! hopped Devilkin, as the town emptied. Here and there an occasional homeless person waded through refuse, hunting for something to eat. “Boy, the Old One sure had it wrong when he told me someone might spoil the magic!” Devilkin thought.

Just then a little girl carrying her baby brother stepped from a dilapidated shack. Devilkin took one look at her and burst out laughing so hard the tears streamed down his cheeks. The little girl was lame, and a hunchback to boot. Devilkin stared at her and thought, “I’ll bet she’s stepped out to find a scrap of food.”

Limping comically, the little girl struggled through the garbage, hugging her baby brother to her. Zing! the burr went whizzing at her. The little girl stood stock still, frozen with fear. “Oh Mamma,” she cried, “now I’ll have horns too!” Instantly the idea came into her head: she could avoid the burr by holding the baby out in front of her! But she was even more appalled by that thought. For the lovely baby was so innocent. “I’m the one who ought to catch the plague!” the little girl sighed, and thrust her little brother behind her. The burr flew right at her chest.

“Can this be?” Devilkin could not believe his eyes when he saw the burr bump into the hunchback girl . . . and turn into a golden rose. “Oh my!”

Before you could have clapped your hands, the hump had dwindled away, the twisted legs grown straight. “What is this? Am I dreaming?” Devilkin rubbed his eyes. Instead of a crippled little hunchback creature, before him stood a lovely girl holding a rose in her hand. She lifted it to her face and then held it out to the first person who came along for him to smell.

Devilkin groaned, “What the devil! Where’s his tail?”

The news of this magic blew through the town faster than the wind. One after another, horned and tailed citizens marched into the tumbledown shack—and stepped out again with neither horns nor a tail.

What more is left to tell you?

When twilight came, there was but one little person with horns and a tail standing in the middle of the town square. Then he vanished into thin air. The rose disappeared too. Except that the perfume of the rose lingered around the girl for a little while longer. Then it too faded away.

I like to sit on this big old mossy pillow and lay my head back on one of them twisted red oak roots that look like arms comin up outta the ground, arms that feel like the satin of Aunt Leatha’s skin when she stoops down to gather me up and swing me round, and I lay in the roots like I’m layin in my mama’s lap, listenin to her hum them old old songs, sound like folks bottled up with sorrow so sweet it turn to sugar.

This tree’s right next to the old black pond where sometimes we get out in the water that covers our skinny arms with sparklin oil and we splash and kick and laugh.

I member the day somebody got the crazy idea to throw Neethie in the water and try to make her swim, and we all knew it was the wrong thing to do and didn’t think bout what grown folks always say bout if you know better do better. We didn’t think bout that when we was way out in all that green by the black water neath that big old red sun, but we shoulda, like I told everybody what would listen later. But nobody listened, not Egghead Sammy Ray Yarbrough, not even C.C. Beauregard whose daddy runs the funeral parlor and everybody is scairt of him cause he might get mad and get his daddy to come for ya in the middle of the night and put ya in that old hearse look like a big fat shiny beetle and take ya to the funeral parlor and put ya in a casket. So nobody, not me, not Elmo, not Ruby, not nobody said a word when Egghead Sammy Ray Yarbrough and C.C. Beauregard decided they was gonna make Neethie swim.

Now, anybody got half a piece of sense know Neethie can’t swim, don’t like the water, can’t even walk right on land on accounta one leg bein shorter than the other and don’t nobody usually say nothin bout it one way or nuther cause that just the way she come into the world, lookin kinda like a crookedy upsidedown wishbone. But some folks be laughin bout that big-sole shoe she gotta wear on her short leg so she don’t walk lopsided. But she still limp a little even with that big shoe on. I like Neethie even though she do live in the Bible most of the time.

Mama always say ain’t nothin wrong with Neethie livin in the Bible and wrinkle up her face and tell me I need to live in it too and ask me don’t I want to enter the Golden Gates of Righteousness? I say I only wanna enter the golden arches of that shiny new hamburger stand they got there in Jackson and she won’t even let me do that.

But we probably wouldn’ta thought to put Neethie in the water if Ruby hadn’ta been talkin bout how Jesus could walk on water. C.C. Beauregard said: No he can’t, can’t nobody walk on water. But I told em what my playuncle Eaton told me bout the slaves in the old days who left beatins and hoein and cotton and cleanin and set out cross the fields and headed north where they thought they could be free, and how some of em come to that yellow river that flow not too far from here and thought they had come to the end of they journey cause they couldn’t swim and didn’t know what all was in that water. Then they’d stoop at the edge and wet they faces and start moanin pieces of words they member from when we was all free, sound like: hmmhmm o-o-o-o-o-o mlongo. And the wind would start to blow and the trees on the edge of the riverbank would start to sway and the air would feel like how my mama say it feel sometime when Reverend Samuel hit a high note in the middle of his preachin, and the women start to tremble and the deacons start to shake and everybody’s eyes start to water with tears rollin down. That’s how my playuncle Eaton say it feel when the runaways bent down at the edge of the yellow river thinkin bout freedom and how they couldn’t swim and hummin: mlongo mlongo hmmhmmhmmhmm o-o. They knew they couldn’t turn back so they kept on hummin that song and then they feet sank in the red mud at the edge of the river and come up covered with green sprouts climbin on they ankles and circlin round and tiny wings grew from each ankle and started flappin back and forth and back and forth, gentle at first and then faster and faster. And they could feel the cold of them chains deep in the wet earth and the wings beatin harder and then they took a step into the yellow water but they first foot didn’t go down. It stayed right on top of the waves, and they put they other foot in the water and the same thing happened, it didn’t go down, and they look over they shoulder for they last look at the land that tried to turn em into mules. They know they wouldn’t never turn back, so they kept on walkin and the tiny wings kept beatin and they glided on cross the yellow river and only got the bottom of they pants and dresses wet.

But then Sammy Ray Yarbrough, whose head’s big as a jug of water, broke in with his silly self and said, “Can’t no slaves or nobody else walk cross no water, not even with wings on they back,” and he don’t believe Jesus did it neither. Ruby said she’s gone tell his mama he said that, so he said o.k., if Neethie can walk on water, then anybody can cause Neethie was the closest thing to Jesus any of us knew bout. C.C. Beauregard said he’d go and get Neethie and bring her to the pond.

Now me and Ruby and Elmo tried to shift round and act like we wasn’t scairt, but I knew we all musta been thinkin bout the whuppin we was gonna get when our mamas found out we’d pushed Neethie in tBe water, specially since she had a short leg and had to wear that big old shoe. I wasn’t sure but it sound to me like this was cruelty and mama always say cruelty’s one of the worst things in the world. Anyway, after a little while here come C.C. Beauregard holding Neethie by the hand and pullin her through bushes the color of bloodstone.

Soon as they got up to where we was standin near the edge of the pond Elmo started cryin, but didn’t nobody pay him no mind cause Elmo always start cryin whenever somethin’s bout to happen, good or bad. Mama say that boy just like to cry.

But when C.C. Beauregard brought Neethie to the edge of the pond I could feel tears wellin up in my own eyes, cause I knew it was gonna be one of them whuppins what hurts for a long, long time, probably one with a switch, cause Neethie was dressed up in a white ruffly dress that looked like it was for Sunday school, had her hair curled all over her head and had on some black patent leather buckle up shoes that was shinin like a mirror. I could see the trees and the sun when I looked down in them shoes.

Now Neethie’s eyes was full of all of that kindness from livin in the Bible. And folks never made much over her short leg in front of her. She looked like some kind of brown angel standin there by the pond holdin C.C. Beauregard’s hand.

“See, I told you I’d tell you what I brought you to the pond for, didn’t I?” C.C. Beauregard asked.

“Uh huh,” said Neethie.

Nobody else said a mumblin word. It was pretty quiet cept for the crickets whistlin and a few birds talkin in the trees and frogs croakin. We wasn’t gonna say nothin and I was hopin Neethie have sense enough to turn round and go on back home, but C.C. Beauregard told her he was gonna teach her how to swim so she could come out and play with us at the pond every day steada goin and sittin up with the Bible and all them old folks all the time. Then he asked her wouldn’t she like that?

“Uh huh,” Neethie said.

So then C.C. Beauregard told her the onliest way for him to teach her how to swim was for him to see if her body was heavy in the water and the only way he could tell that was if she stepped out on that log and walked clear back to us. Egghead Sammy Ray Yarbrough’d found a short log and pushed it up to the edge of the pond where it lay in the water lookin like a big fat link sausage.

Neethie said, “You want me to walk out on that log and walk back on the water like Jesus?”

And C.C. Beauregard said, “Yeah, I want you to walk back just like Jesus.”

Well, what he go and say that for? I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry so I just started hummin that sound my playuncle Eaton told me was magic: mlongo mlongo hmmhmmhmm o-o.

Neethie started to get out on the log and Elmo started to holler. Ruby started cryin real soft-like where you almost couldn’t hear her, what with Elmo’s screamin and the wind whistlin in the trees.

C. C. Beauregard said, “Neethie, you think you better take that big shoe off?”

Neethie didn’t say nothin, just looked kinda sweet and pitiful with her big black eyes lookin out on the water.

Now we all knew she couldn’t swim a lick so if she fell in, there was gonna be hell to pay as my daddy say when I’m in double trouble. My legs started to itch and I could already feel that switch, but I just kept on singin: hmmhmmhmm o-o mlongo. When Neethie was at the end of the log, she dropped her head back and looked up into the sky and said, “I believe.” That was it. Just “I believe,” and me and Ruby and Elmo with his cryin self all held hands and stood in a kinda circle at the end of the log, and C.C. Beauregard and Egghead Sammy Ray Yarbrough started movin back to the trees slow and easy. And then Neethie turned round and looked at C.C. Beauregard and asked, “You ready?” And that crazy boy just looked at Neethie with his eyes poppin out and didn’t say nothin. So me and Ruby started singin them old magic words and Elmo was so scairt he stopped cryin and started singin em too: mlongo mlongo hmmhmmhmm o-o. The words that was old magic went deep inside Neethie, deep inside, and Neethie stepped off the log into the air and put her foot down on that black water and she stayed up even with that big shoe on. Me and Ruby and Elmo squeezed our hands tighter and pressed our eyes shut, and sang the words louder and louder: mlongo mlongo hmmhmmhmm o-o. And the words pulled Neethie on cross the water and when we opened our eyes, Neethie was standin right there with us, her smile big as Egghead Sammy Ray Yarbrough’s head, cept he wasn’t there to see it.

Well, I thought that woulda fixed C.C. Beauregard and Egghead Sammy Ray Yarbrough good, but they didn’t even get to see Neethie walk on water cause they slipped through the trees and run off soon as she stepped off the log.

We told Neethie it was good they was gone, cause they probably wouldn’ta knowed what they was lookin at anyway.

Then Ruby said, “Let’s go over to the Sunflower Ice Cream Shop and get us some sodas to celebrate.”

“Celebrate what?” Neethie asked.

“Us all not gettin the whuppin of our lives,” I said, and naturally Elmo started cryin.

The old Chinese gentleman was sitting cross-legged in the shadow of an alley. He was smoking a long bamboo pipe, which he cradled in the crook of his elbow. I had noticed him as we climbed the temple steps, and the image stayed with me as we wandered through the Buddhist-Tao shrine to Wong Tai Sin, a shepherd boy who had seen visions.

It was so hot the flagstones pulsed beneath our feet, but despite that David was impressed with the temple. We waded through the red-and-gold litter which covered the forecourt, the dead joss sticks cracking underfoot. Cantonese worshippers were present in their hundreds, murmuring orisons, rattling their cans of fortune sticks. Wong Tai Sin is no showcase for tourists, but a working temple in the middle of a high rise public housing estate. Bamboo poles covered in freshly washed clothes overhung the ornate roof, and dripped upon its emerald tiles.

The air was heavy with incense, dense enough to drug the crickets into silence. We ambled up and down stone staircases, admiring carvings the significance of which was lost in generations of western nescience, and gazed self-consciously at the worshippers on their knees as they shook their fortune sticks and prayed for lucky numbers to fall to the flagstones.

We left the temple with our ignorance almost intact.

The old man was still there, incongruous amongst the other clean-shaven Hong Kong men, with their carefully acquired sophistication, hurrying by his squatting form.

He had a wispy Manchu beard, long grey locks, and dark eyes set in a pomelo-skin face. A sleeveless vest hung from bony shoulders, and canvas trousers covered legs that terminated in an enormous pair of bare feet. The bamboo pipe he was smoking was about fifty centimeters long, three centimeters in diameter, with a large watercooled bowl at one end, and a stem the size of a drinking straw at the other. He had the stem in his lipless mouth, inhaling the smoke.

There was a fruit stall owner, a man I had spoken to on occasion, on the pavement nearby. I told David to wait by the taxi stand and went over to the vendor. We usually spoke to each other in a mixture of Cantonese and English, neither of us being fluent in the foreign language. He was fascinated by my red hair, inherited from my Scottish Highland ancestors.

“Jo san,” I said, greeting him, “leung goh ping gwoh, m’goi.”

I had to shout to make myself heard above the incredibly loud clattering coming from behind him, where sat three thin men and a stout lady, slamming down mah jong tiles as if trying to drive them through the formica table top.

He nodded, wrapped two apples in a piece of newspaper, and asked me for two dollars.

Paying him, I said, “That man, smoking. Opium?”

He looked where I was pointing, smiled, and shook his head vigorously.

“Not smoke opium. No, no. Sik yin enemy.”

I stared at the old gentleman, puffing earnestly away, seeming to suck down the shadows of the alley along with the smoke.

“Sik yin dik yan-aa?” I said, wanting to make sure I had heard him properly. “Smoke enemy?”

“Hai. Magic smoke-pipe,” he grinned. “Magic, you know? Very old sik yin-pipe.”

Gradually I learned that the aged smoker had written down the name of a man he hated, on “dragon” paper, had torn it to shreds, and was inhaling it with his tobacco. Once he had smoked the name of his enemy, had the hated foe inside him, he would come to know the man.

The idea was of course, that when you knew the hated enemy—and by know, the Chinese mean to understand completely—you could predict any moves he might make against you. You would have a psychological advantage over him, be able to forestall his attacks, form countermoves against him. His strategy, his tactics, would be yours to thwart. He would be able to do nothing which you would not foresee.

“I think . . . ” I began to say, but David interrupted me with a shout of, “I’ve got a taxi, come on!”, so I bid the stall owner a hasty good-bye, and ran for the waiting vehicle. We leapt out into the fierce flow of Hong Kong traffic, and I put the incident aside until I had more time to think about it.

It was the old and cruel custom of the shoeshine boys of Guanajuato, when they had no pressing matters on hand, to catch a bat and make it smoke. You nail the bat to a board fence, by each wing, and put a lit cigarette in the mouth as it opens in a soundless shriek. The tip of the cigarette glows and smoke curls out of the bat’s nostrils, as though it were enjoying a gringo’s rubio tobacco.

This is no longer done, by order of Manuel Aceves, chief among the shoeshine boys of the barrio of San Martin. Rose, the lady who wore white gloves, had something to do with it, and so (though he never made the connection) did Dr. Murphy, a prominent physician in the American colony. Rufina, who keeps the Bar Zotzil on top of La Valenciana, might claim some credit, but she and the grey cat have enough to do without concerning themselves about such things.

It was and is the custom for the gringos to emerge from their pink villas on the outskirts of Guanajuato just before sundown, and drive up to La Valenciana for their evening drink. They admire the view and complain about the laundress and the lack of parts for their cars. This being the hour when the hand is more willing to reach into the pocket and extend a bill, not waiting for change, Manuel Aceves with his shoeshine kit was accustomed to climb the stone steps zig-zagging up the hill to the mine, cutting the loops of the road between nopales and yucca.

The evening of his revelation, he was late; it was nearly dark, and the ground was cold in the shadow of the hill, although the sun behind the mountain gilded the twin towers of the church of La Valenciana. Manuel usually pretended he was the Emperor Moctezuma climbing the Great Temple of the Sun—though he is all four quarterings Chichimeca of Guanajuato and proud of it—but this evening he forgot the Emperor Moctezuma, watching the bats leaving the church.

They came out in a thin spiral, like smoke rising from a small fire, then in a twisted column, a pillar growing upward, larger at the top like a funnel, spinning faster and faster. The funnel danced back and forth as the wind pushed it, until the bats streamed out eastward in a cloud, passing over his head. He heard the hissing of hundreds of thousands of little wings, making a downdraft of warm ammoniac air around him. Still the bats poured out, the long cloud like the plumed serpent Quetzalcoatl, while the sky behind the mountain turned from gold to red to the clear cold green that precedes the deep indigo of night.

Already the church looked a horned bulky animal asleep, and the Cafe Zotzil crouched at its foot like a smaller animal with open glowing eyes, when Manuel Aceves humped his shoeshine box into the bar. The place was almost full, with only Rufina to run back and forth with drinks, while the grey cat minded the bar under the grinning mask of Zotzil the Bat God.

Manuel ordered a Coca-Cola, and Rufina threw a dishrag at him and said she hoped that Zotzil would eat him.

“Come, Rufina,” he said, “the old gods are dead. The Spaniards killed them. Then we Chichimecas killed the Spaniards, until we got tired of it, and when we wish, we will kill the gringos, too.”

“Throw yourself in the well,” responded Rufina, loading her tray.

The Bar Zotzil was the old well-house of La Valenciana mine, when the mine had produced silver enough to build and decorate a hundred churches a year. Those times were long gone. The mine was sealed and the church empty, but the well was still there: a hole five meters wide in the floor, with a railing. Green water rushed past the hole, over a pale sand bottom. There were no fish, but the grey cat watched the water just in case, and the gringos threw cigarette butts in it.

Manuel shrugged and made a face at Rufina’s back, then composed his smooth copper mask for business. Dr. Murphy first. Grey laceless shoes with tassels on them, grey pants and jacket, grey hair, grey face with purple veins. Dr. Murphy drank whiskey in the Bar Zotzil from sundown until the bar closed, although he slept much of the time. Manuel flashed his smile and said, “Shine? Shine?” Without waiting for the answer, he went to work with his rags.

Before he’d finished, la señora Carol sat down at the table. A pink lady, hair like a cornfield in stubble. Manuel had once thought of charging her extra because her feet were so long. Her shoes were pink lizards, which gave him pause for thought. Rummaging through his box, he listened to the conversation; Manuel understood more English than he let on.

They talked about the restoration of the church, which la señora Carol said was a project close to her heart. Manuel did not think gringos had hearts, not like people had. Restoring the church was not close to Manuel’s heart, but if more tourists came to the area because of it, he wanted their business. On the other hand, if the Minister of Culture came to declare the church a Historical Monument, beggars and shoeshine boys and women selling lace tablecloths from baskets would be banished. So he listened carefully. La señora Carol wanted Dr. Murphy to contribute to the fund for illuminating the church.

“To shine like a good deed in a naughty world?" said Dr. Murphy. “It’s a robber baron’s bad conscience construed in masonry. That’s all it amounts to. Leave it to the bats. ”

“Ugh,” said the lady, fanning herself with a paper napkin. “I can’t bear bats. The illumination should get rid of them if it does nothing else. Do you think the Board of Health would bear part of the cost?”

“Why?” said Dr. Murphy. He finished his whiskey. “If they ask me, I’ll tell ’em more people die in a year of church-picnic potato-salad than of bat-related disease in a century.”

“You can’t be serious. What about vampire bats, which I hope those aren’t? Don’t the cattle ranchers—”

“If the cow had the choice of providing you with a steak dinner, or a bat with an ounce of blood, she'd choose to accommodate the bat! Rufina! Another of these. Why, the bat’s saliva is an anti-coagulant with antibiotic properties, she’d be none the worse. Whereas the steak—”

“Phillip, you do have the oddest take on things! I hope you’re not going to set yourself up against the whole North American community just when we’re doing something that will really make a difference!”

Manuel finished the shoes with his brightest smile and held out his dirty hand, which la senora Carol pretended not to see. Dr. Murphy gave him a five-hundred-peso bill and said to keep the change, which would have been better if it were not a one-hundred-peso bill with false corners pasted on it. Manuel sincerely hoped he gave money like that to la señora Carol for her restoration fund.

He looked around for more customers, but it was a bad evening for shoes; in dry weather, the dust of the brown hills does not cling to the mirror-surface of shoes shined by Manuel the previous evening. Helping himself to a Coke behind Rufina’s back, he settled on his heels in a corner.

“ ‘Oh, fat white woman whom nobody loves, why do you walk through the fields in gloves?’ ” said Dr. Murphy through his teeth in a funny way.

Rose—the gringa round like a squash or a real person, instead of chili-shaped like the other gringos—came in like a cow with staggers and dropped into a chair. She was as red as her namesake, and pressed both her gloved hands against her breastbone; slowly, she turned white as trout-bellies.

The other gringos didn’t like Rose because she lived in the town, over the shop that sells silver and turquoise birds, and gave pesos to street children and told them to go to school.

“Have a glass of water—where are your pills, for God’s sake?”

Rose shook her head. She took a fish head out of a plastic bag and put it under her chair for the grey cat. “I can’t, I told you—I can’t take the pills. If I take them, I can’t sleep.”

“Your blood pressure is literally killing you,” Dr. Murphy snapped. The grey hand trembled with the glass. “I can’t understand how you’ve survived this long.”

La señora Carol changed the subject, because gringos don’t believe in death. They never take food to the Animas for the Day of the Dead, never. Manuel knew.

“Do you know you’ve come just in time to see the illumination of La Valenciana? Any minute now they’ll turn on the lights!”

Rose looked even sicker. “Tonight?” she said in a thread of a voice. “I thought it was next month?”

“Oh, the mayor and the American consul, and just possibly the Minister of Culture, will come next month, for the dedication of the plaque crediting the American colony. But the outside illumination is ready. It’ll be wonderful, just you wait and see.”

But Rose was up and blundering into the rail of the well. She grasped it and looked around. Manuel, with an eye to opportunity, was at her elbow in a moment.

She flinched, then leaned on the hard dirty little arm. “You’re Manuel, aren’t you? I have a job for you, if you won’t be afraid.”

“I, afraid? Manuel Aceves is pure Chichimeca, and the meanest shoeshine boy in barrio San Martin!”

“I thought so,” said Rose.

Rufina appeared. “Does the señora wish to lie down?”

“No,” said Rose. “Manuel and I are going to the church now.”

“It will be locked, señora. The workmen are all gone.”

“That’s all right,” said Rose, taking a big iron key out of her bag.

Manuel, piloting the lady out of the Bar Zotzil, was not surprised that she had a key to the church. If you pay enough, you can have the key to anything you want. But why? There was nothing of value in La Valenciana. Or was there? Did the gringa know of hidden treasure under the altar? Who knew what the old Spaniards might have hidden in the church, under tons of bat guano in the belfries? Manuel’s step quickened.

Outside the yellow fan of light from the doorway, it was dark as Rufina’s braid, although the stars blazed long trails overhead.

“The side door,” said Rose. “This one.”

Inside the church, it was dark as a mine. Only the high altar glinted gold from the windows, a blind naked cherub with yellow curls here, the halo of a saint there. But Rose seemed to know her way, unsteady but determined, and Manuel half-followed and half-supported her up a winding stair behind the stone baptistry. They went up and up, and Manuel realized they must be climbing the west tower.

At the top there was a door, unlocked, and Rose pushed it open. Her breathing was shallow and rapid, but Manuel held his breath, looking for the treasure. There would be gold, and silver, and emeralds, and rubies, and pearls! He would take it and buy the whole city of Guanajuato, like a plate of glazed salt-clay food for the Day of the Dead: the Market and the Fort with the Mummies; the streets full of businessmen in suits the color of flour; the taxis and buses and the cars of the gringos; the policemen and their carbines; schools and banks and bars, and houses where the women wore paint and laughed so loud you could hear them all over the barrio.

But he could see nothing in the tower but the grey rectangle of the louvers, though he knew they must be under the bell-mouths, huge and black. He smelled cold bronze, and dust, ammonia, the plastic coverings of new electrical wires. Rose tripped on something and her full weight on his shoulder made him stagger. She rummaged in her bag.

“Thank you, Manuel. You can go now. Here’s a hundred pesos.” She snapped on a little flashlight with a cloth tied over the glass. Huge flickering shadows sprang up on the walls, two figures drawn up to dizzy height, crossed by black bars of beams, blurry with cobwebs and inches of dust. There were footprints in the dust on the floor as if it were sand, workmen’s boots, Rose’s shoes with heels, Manuel’s bare feet, rat-paws, and some marks that were none of these.

Rose sat down cross-legged, with a gasp. “Can’t you find your way out, Manuel? I don’t need any more help now. ”

“I want to stay, señora, truly.” For Manuel was Chichimeca of Guanajuato, and any treasure there might be was his as much as anyone’s.

“All right, if you won’t be frightened.”

Manuel, frightened? Never since he could remember.

Rose was speaking in a low voice, he did not know whether to herself or to him, making no move toward where treasure might be hidden. He could see no sign of it.

“The lights,” she said. “They’ve put floodlights all over, and opened the louvers. It will be light day and night. You won’t stay here, Jimmy; you can’t. This will be the last time. Jimmy?”

Manuel, squatting on his heels, watching, wondered if she might be wandering in her wits, for she had drunk no whisky nor even beer at the Bar Zotzil. She took off her gloves and pushed up the yellow sleeve of her blouse. She stretched out the left arm, trembling, with the back of the hand resting on the floor. And such an arm: pale as melon, mottled with red and violet, the blue veins twisting the bone from which the flesh hung slack.

She whistled. It was a high thin sound, as to a very small dog. Manuel followed her eyes and saw a bat, not hanging but right side up, crouched in the angle of a rafter. The flashlight beam showed its pug-dog face with ears pricked, wings like an umbrella half-unfolded. The mouth opened candy-pink, but what struck Manuel most was the unblinking black eyes that didn’t reflect like an animal’s at night.

“Here, Jimmy,” whispered Rose, and the bat dropped to the floor in a brief flutter of membrane-wings as wide as Manuel’s forearm was long.

He almost thought he heard it answer, like a feather in his ear. He was so afraid he crossed himself, as he had not done since his mother died, but it was no good, a bat that lived in the bells of a church must have no fear of anything.

The bat hitched itself along the floor on its rat-feet, helping with the long wing-thumbs. Manuel did not move, and every detail printed itself on his memory, like a painting on glass. The bat looked at him, looked into his eyes as no animal could do, nor any rich person in a cafe, and saw him, Manuel Aceves as he was, and opened its mouth. It had tiny sharp teeth, like thorns.

“Hold still,” whispered Rose. “He’s nervous of you.”

And Manuel held still as though a spell were on him, because here was the Bat God Zotzil in the tower of the church of La Valenciana, and he had never believed in either of them.

The bat came with its humping gait, and climbed onto Rose’s fingers. The hand lay quiet but the blue veins quivered and rolled over each other. The bat nuzzled her wrist, here and there, and held to it. Rose breathed, low and steady, many times, as it sucked the vein.

At last she put out her other hand, and, with her finger, stroked the bat, like Rufina stroking her cat when she was in a good mood. The bat arched its head back, and Manuel saw a mark like ink on Rose’s wrist. It didn’t bleed.

“This is Jimmy,” she said. “Several of them will come, but he’s the only one I can pet. See if he’ll let you. ”

And then Manuel proved he was who he was. He stretched out his own dark paw and touched the bat, like warm silk, like the finest glove leather, and felt its heart beating, and heard Rose’s harsh breathing and his own in the moment before the floodlights went on, brighter than day.

No one noticed their return to the Cafe Zotzil but Rufina, because all the gringos were admiring the illuminated facade of La Valenciana—except Dr. Murphy, who was asleep in his chair with his head on the table. Manuel removed some hundreds of thousands of pesos from his pocket and from the handbag of la senora Carol, under the indifferent gaze of the grey cat, and slipped down the hill in the darkness.

When Jiro Tanaka did not come home from work, his wife, Miya, assumed he was at a nightclub. Even when he did not arrive by midnight, she sighed and went around their mansion in Pacific Heights. She checked the windows, the burglar alarm, and the children’s bedrooms. Then she lay in bed and listened for the sound of his feet on the floor.

The Tanaka house had been built with wooden floors that squeaked when anything larger than a mouse ran over them. They were called nightingale floors, a feature of old Japanese castles, where it was a matter of life and death to know when someone was creeping up on you. Dr. Tanaka had imported an architect from Japan to build them.

Miya wondered which nightclub he was in. He would be surrounded by his favorite employees. They would laugh at all his jokes and get drunk before he did. At the end of the night, Jiro would be left alone with his helpless and stupefied workers. The more disgusting they were, the more powerful he would feel, which was how it should be: he was the boss.

Or perhaps he was at an obscene movie. He liked pornography, especially the kind where the women were tied up and tortured. It wasn’t enjoyable for him to bring home a video because Miya didn’t react. She sat, stony-faced, showing neither pleasure nor distress. It was better to take a fresh-faced employee who would trip over his shoelaces if a woman smiled at him. Like Jimmy.

Miya felt sorry for Jimmy. He was as close to a farm boy as you could find in someone with a Ph.D. in physics. Jimmy came from Okinawa, a mark against him because Jiro was prejudiced against people from Okinawa. They had big heads, he said, big hands and curly hair. They were like oxen. Jimmy had a wide, innocent face and freckles, as well as a friendly, open attitude. Jiro did not trust spontaneously friendly people.

He would have taken Jimmy to an obscene movie, and perhaps others to watch the fun. Miya felt sorry for him, but there was nothing she could do about it. She couldn’t even protect herself.

When Jiro had not appeared by breakfast, another possibility occurred to her: he had a mistress. This did not upset her. She hoped he had, because he would spend all his time with her. No doubt he’d gone straight from his assignation to the office. Miya woke the children up, bathed and fed them. They spent a pleasant day in Origami Park, and when they got home, Jiro wasn’t there.

With one thing and another, a week passed before Miya thought to report it to the police.

“A whole week!” yelled Homer, slamming down the receiver. “The head of one of the biggest companies in San Francisco goes missing a week before anyone reports it.”

His partner, Stewart, opened a new file on the Mac and entered Jiro Tanaka’s name. “Anybody miss him at work?”

“Yeah, they knew he was gone,” said Homer. “The work went on without him. Japanese factories are like that. Someone drops dead, and the next person in line takes his place.”

“What do they make?” Stewart spun the cylinder in his revolver, a habit that intrigued Homer. He thought of it as the policeman’s prayer wheel.

“What don’t they make?” he said. “Every kind of chemical, but they’re best known for Yum Powder.”

Stewart whistled. “Didn't they get the pants sued off them for that?”

“Still in court. And likely to stay there for the next hundred years. Can’t prove a thing.”

“Except that one hundred thousand babies dropped about twenty I.Q. points eating it,” said Stewart.

“Babies Cry for Yum Powder,” said Homer. “How can you prove a twenty-point I.Q. drop? Anyhow, our problem is to find this benefactor of mankind and return him to his grieving employees.”

“Haven’t we got more important things to do?”

“Would you rather be breaking into a crack house in Oakland?”

“No,” admitted Stewart.

“Besides, the chief says to give this case our best. Tanaka donated about a million to certain city officials.”

“Ah,” said Stewart.

They made a strange-looking pair. Stewart was a barrel-chested white man of about two hundred pounds. In a swim suit, he looked as though he were wearing a fur coat, but even in uniform the hair crept down the back of his hands and up his neck. He had short, bandy legs, but he could move like an express train when he had to.

Homer, on the other hand, was just over the minimum height and weight limit for a police officer. He looked like a black business executive. His shoes were always polished, and the cuticles trimmed from his nails. But if you asked a crook which policeman he would rather be left alone with, he always chose the bigger man.

They stood outside the hulking mansion in Pacific Heights. “Look at the security,” said Stewart. Cameras scanned them from a high wall; floodlights pointed in at the garden. He rang the bell.

“Please show I.D.,” said a voice from behind the gate. The officers held their wallets up to the camera. The bolts drew back, and a gardener peered at them. “Down!” he shouted. For an instant the policemen thought he meant them, but snarls erupted as the man dragged a pair of pit bulls from the path and clicked chains on their collars. Stewart’s hand strayed to his can of Mace. Homer looked bland, as he always did when most dangerous.

“Very sorry,” the gardener apologized. “I should have locked them up before you arrived.”

They followed him to the house, where a small, middle-aged woman waited. “Mrs. Tanaka?” said Homer.

“Thank you for coming,” she said. She took them on a tour of the house as she talked about her husband. Homer and Stewart followed in the hope of uncovering a lead.

“These floors need an oil job,” remarked Stewart as squeaks rippled through the wood.

Mrs. Tanaka giggled, and explained about nightingale floors.

“Did your husband have a lot of enemies?” said Homer. Mrs. Tanaka giggled again, a sound, he thought, that could get irritating. She didn’t answer the question, however. They came to the master bedroom, and Homer halted abruptly at the door. Stewart swallowed hard. There, on a shelf, was a row of the most grotesque Black Sambo dolls Homer had ever seen. There were at least ten, with goggly eyes and fat, rubbery lips.

Mrs. Tanaka noticed Homer’s stare. “Aren’t they cute?” she said. “Jiro buys them in Japan. One of them even talks. Would you like to hear it?”

“No,” said Homer in a strangled voice. They went on, with the woman chattering about Jiro’s habits, but in fact saying nothing about where he might be. They came to a recreation room, and she clapped her hands at two children, a boy and a girl, who were jumping on an expensive sofa in front of a TV.

They thrust power gloves at the screen and shrieked with excitement. “Please get down,” Mrs. Tanaka said. The children slid to the floor and sat there, quivering like a pair of cats in a room full of mice.

“Can we go to Origami Park?” said the boy. “We’re bored.”

“After the officers have gone,” said Mrs. Tanaka.

“Are you cops?” said the boy. Homer nodded. “Oh boy, have you killed anyone? Let me see the guns.”

“We’re Peace Officers,” explained Stewart. “We don’t kill people. You may not see the guns.”

“They’re phonies,” the boy told his sister, and they went back to Nintendo.

The policemen found out nothing from Mrs. Tanaka or the gardener. Stewart drove to the factory. “Nice dolls,” he said, while having a mano-a-mano with a cable car on one of San Francisco’s steepest streets.

“Remind me to show you my collection of honkie dolls. Don’t play chicken with cable cars. They always win.” Homer slid down in the seat so he would not have to see the inflamed face of the cable car driver as they shot past. “I don’t think Jiro Tanaka ran away. He has everything he could want right here.”

“Maybe it was the lawsuit over Yum Powder,” grunted Stewart, bumping across the trolley tracks on Market Street. “What exactly did it do?”

“Made everything taste wonderful. It was a super brain stimulant. ”

“Like monosodium glutamate?”

“Much better. The food didn’t even have to be good to begin with. Manufacturers could use it on dog shit, and probably did.”

“How did it get past the Food and Drug people?” Stewart rolled into the wasted streets of the Mission District. Suddenly it was as though they weren’t in the same town. They found themselves in a sinkhole so depressing, you’d have to kick in a window to keep from thinking about suicide.

“It passed the tests,” said Homer. “This is one armpit of a neighborhood.” He rolled up his window. “The additive was too expensive to produce, though, so Tanaka used a genetically altered bacterium to make huge quantities of it. There was a contaminant. Jesus, is that the factory?”

They came around a corner to a dead-end street. Ahead was the Jigoku Chemical Works. Gray and windowless, it sat like a giant turd on a concrete serving dish.

“Holy Moly, I thought Japanese were fanatics about beauty,” said Stewart.

“Doesn’t look like it,” said Homer. The men were silent as they drove to the iron doors. More cameras, more clanking of chains. The air smelled—Homer wasn’t sure what it smelled like, but it made the skin on his neck creep. The gate went up, and they drove in. The bottom level was a parking lot. A guard led them to an elevator. At each floor the elevator paused, and they looked out on industrial scenes that came out of Dante.

Huge pipes snaked around boilers; vats bubbled, steam hissed, and the noise was constant, shrill, and deafening. And behind it all was the strange smell, like hot, raw meat, or maybe the mouth of a predatory beast.

“You like working here?” Homer asked the guard.

“Of course! Jigoku is the greatest company in the world. Biggest per capita production, lowest overhead. We Jigoku employees take pride in bringing better living to people everywhere.”

“Just thought I’d ask,” said Homer. He thought he was going to vomit if he didn’t get fresh air soon, but fortunately, the top floor was offices, and the smell was weaker. They were ushered into a small room.

“Air’s better,” sighed Homer. “How do they get a flower to survive here?” He nodded at a flower arrangement on a low table.

“Fake,” said Stewart, feeling the petals.

“By the time the day’s over, I’m not gonna have any illusions left. Do you think they have plastic-flower-arranging classes?”

“And tea-bag ceremonies,” said Stewart.

Their hysterical laughter was interrupted by a young man in a lab coat. “So happy you like our factory,” he said. Homer did a double take. Yes, the man had freckles.

“Jimmy Tsuga,” he said, extending a hand. Homer had the impression that, not long ago, Jimmy Tsuga had been up to his ankles in cow shit. All he needed to complete the hayseed image was a sprig of buckwheat between his front teeth.

“Have you found anything out about our director?” said Jimmy.

“We’re making inquiries,” Homer said. “Can you tell me why no one reported his absence for a week?”

“We thought he was taking a vacation.”

“Does the director always take vacations without telling anyone?”

Jimmy ducked his head and giggled, exactly like Mrs. Tanaka. Homer was fascinated. “There’s a film festival in town,” the scientist managed to say.

“Film festival?” said Stewart, genuinely puzzled.

Jimmy’s embarrassment deepened. “Erotic film festival.” The two policeman stared at him, but he didn’t elaborate.

“This goes on all day?” said Homer gently.

“All night. During the day”—Jimmy paused to gather his inner resources—“he rests up.”

“Where does he rest up?”

“Various places,” said Jimmy vaguely.

“Dr. Tsuga,” said Homer in a calm voice that made Stewart, who knew him, tense up. “A very important man is missing. He is a multimillionaire. He has great political influence. He is the kingpin of a worldwide chemical industry, but nobody seems to miss him for an entire week. Nobody has any idea of his habits or where he might be. You know what this smells like to me, Dr. Tsuga? It smells like murder, and one of the first things an investigator looks for is who benefits from it. Who gets to inherit the directorship of Jigoku Chemical Works if Jiro Tanaka is dead?”

“Me,” said Jimmy.

“I thought so. Now, for all I know, Jiro Tanaka has been cooked up in one of those boilers we passed on the way up here. The smell is bad enough, but before we get into the ins and outs of dismantling this place to look for bone fragments, do you have any idea where Dr. Tanaka might be resting up from his midnight beaver shows?”

The effect of this statement was extraordinary. Jimmy turned so pale, the freckles stood out like inkblots. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out. For a moment, Homer thought he was going to confess, but such things happened only to Perry Mason. After a few moments, Jimmy said, “Origami Park.”

“That’s the second time I’ve heard that mentioned today. Is it reasonable for a man to spend a whole week in a park? Or is it something like Disneyland?”

“You could spend a lifetime in Origami,” said Jimmy. “But it’s not a theme park. It’s—” He struggled to find the words. “You see, most of our employees come from Japan. We have an arrangement with other companies to rotate their workers here. It gives them a chance to learn English and to see another country. ”

“It also means you don’t have to pay them much," said Homer.

“That’s true,” admitted Jimmy. “The point I’m making is, quite often they’re disappointed. Housing is difficult, customs are strange, and the workplace is not . . . attractive.”

“You could say that,” said Stewart.

“We Japanese need beauty,” went on Jimmy in a rush, as though he were afraid he would lose his nerve if he paused. “Everywhere, even in the poorest house, there’s a scroll or a flower, something a person can look at to feel uplifted. But here”—he swept out his arm to include the whole factory—“it’s like Hell. Noise, ugliness, stench. It drives people crazy. They commit suicide. You have no idea how many people we lost when this place first opened. The factories in Japan complained, and I argued with Dr. Tanaka to please, please put in a garden and control the noise, but he said this was the most efficient factory in the world. We weren’t allowed to change a single bolt or put up a picture—” He stopped, breathing heavily. Homer and Stewart didn’t say a word. They knew they would get better results by waiting.

“Finally, ” said Jimmy after he had calmed down, “the companies in Japan refused to send more workers, so he built Origami Park.”

“Which is beautiful,” said Homer softly.

“Yes! It’s like a piece of Japan. No matter what terrible things happen, you can go there and be healed.”

“You’re homesick, aren’t you?” said Homer.

Jimmy said nothing, but stared at the plastic flower arrangement. Suddenly he ripped it out and threw it on the floor. “I’ll give you a pass to Origami Park. You can’t get in otherwise.”

He led them down the stairs rather than using the elevator, so they could get a better look at the factory. “What is that smell?” said Stewart.

“Yum Powder.”

“Yum Powder?”

“Dr. Tanaka thought we should keep making it.”

“But it’s banned. ”

“Not in Africa. Anyhow, we aren’t making it anymore. I’m having the vats cleaned, which is why there’s still a slight smell. You should have been here last week.” He waved them out. Homer and Stewart paused to let a van ease onto the concrete wasteland surrounding Jigoku Chemical Works.

“Go ahead,” said Homer.

“Wait.” Stewart pointed at a group of men working on the far side of the wasteland. The sound of jackhammers floated back to them. “They’re taking up the concrete.”

“That was a nursery truck that just went up there,” said Homer.

They watched as small trees were unloaded. The workers stopped drilling and went over to admire them. “They seem pretty sure Dr. Tanaka isn’t coming back,” said Stewart at last.

“Yes,” said Homer. They drove on in silence while Homer rustled a newspaper until he found what he was looking for. "Kingdom of Snuff Film Festival,” he read.

Midnight shows. Just like the real thing: See beautiful, bosomy women beg for their lives. Scenes of medieval torture. Screams of agony. No mercy shown. Just like the real thing. Jesus, is this legal?”

“You’re the cop,” said Stewart.

“What kind of rock did this Tanaka crawl out from under?”

“You’re still mad about the Sambo dolls.”

“Shit, no. We’re talking major evil here: a factory so terrible, people kill themselves rather than work in it; baby poison shipped to Third World countries. No wonder someone oflfed him.”

“We don’t know that,” said Stewart.

“Well, I can tell you, if he isn’t dead, I’m gonna off him.”

“Way to go, Peace Officer,” said Stewart. They crossed the Bay Bridge and worked their way through the Berkeley Hills. On the other side lay a park. You needed a pass to enter it. It was so secret, Homer bet not even the neighbors knew it was there. It certainly wasn’t on the map. They drove up one of those long, golden California hills and parked in front of a high wall.

“Pretty well hidden,” said Stewart. “How big would you say this place is?”

“Five acres? Ten? I don’t know. I’m not a farm boy.” Homer went to the gate, but it opened before he could ring the bell.

“Dr. Tsuga told me to expect you,” said an old man in a gray kimono. He looked about eighty years old, but he moved with surprising briskness. The policemen followed him in. And then stopped.

And stared.

They looked for a long time, unable to speak. The scene that stretched out before them seemed to go on forever. There were hills and lakes, pines and maples, among which small houses were hidden. They were made of ribs of dark wood and paper panels: Japanese houses. The trees were Japanese, and so were the rocks. Probably the smell was, too. Homer couldn’t identify it, but it was nice. The ground below was covered with a rolling mat of thick and springy green.

“Moss,” said the old man. “We have four hundred varieties of moss in here, imported from Kyoto. Some people come just to look at that.”

They followed him in a dream. Each corner revealed more corners; each path branched off to others. Bridges crossed noisy streams; strange birds called from the trees, threading their cries among the hollow rattle of bamboo wind chimes. And there was a wind, although the air outside had been perfectly still.

But the thing that drew their eyes, and as quickly dropped them by the sheer size and impossibility of it, was the mountain.

It rose in a graceful arc high above the groves of maple and pine. The lower slopes were dark basalt, but the top—Homer had to rub his eyes —was snow-tipped. There was only one kind of mountain that had such perfect, classical lines: a volcano.

“Origami Mountain,” said the old gardener in a quiet voice.

“How—,” began Homer, but he couldn’t go on. There was no logical explanation. How could a five-acre park have a whole mountain in it, as well as forests, lakes, and houses?

“Gardening is a very old art in Japan,” said the old man in answer to his unspoken question. “We are a small island and have many people, yet everyone wants to experience nature. It was absolutely necessary to develop Origami gardening.”

He led them to an inn, where a pretty young girl ducked her head and brought them tea and cakes. “Originally, Westerners thought origami applied to paper folding. You take a large sheet of paper—” He signaled to the girl, and she brought him some. “You fold it here, here, and here, and suddenly you have a crane.” He held it up. “Or a basket or a flower. But all the while, it is really a large piece of paper. Origami gardening goes the other way. A very small piece of land is unfolded until it contains all the natural beauty in the world. There aren’t many men who know how to do this. We were lucky to get Mr. Fukuda.”

Homer found his voice at last. “Mr. Fukuda did this?”

“Yes.” The old man bit into what looked like a lump of Play-Doh. “You sip the tea, which is bitter, and taste the sweetened rice cake,” he explained. “It’s supposed to show you the inherent bitterness and sweetness of life.”

“Where is Mr. Fukuda?” said Homer, refusing to get sidetracked.

“He’s working on another park.”

Homer sighed. “Have you seen Dr. Tanaka in the past week?”

“Of course.”

The two policemen straightened up. Here at last was something to work on. They waited. “Would you care to tell us about it?” said Stewart.

“He came a week ago,” said the gardener. “About dusk, which is when most people visit. He walked up there.” He pointed at the serene, snow-tipped mountain. “Was anyone with him?”

“Many people. Origami Mountain is very popular. Dr. Tanaka was with his factory workers. They started about dusk and came back after the moon rose. It’s very nice to watch the moon rise from up there, and we provide paper lanterns at the top so visitors can find their way down.”

“When they returned,” said Homer patiently, “was Dr. Tanaka with them?” “No,” said the gardener.

“Well, what happened to him?” Homer was having difficulty keeping his voice down.

“Stayed up there, I imagine.” The old man sipped his tea tranquilly, as though he hadn’t dropped a bombshell on the two policemen.

“I think we have to look. Thank you for the tea,” said Homer.

“Don’t mention it,” said the old gardener.

They followed the trail, curving around, but slowly working their way up. “It’s five miles up this fucking mountain,” puffed Stewart. “How the hell did they fit it in here?”

“Don’t ask me. I can’t even figure out my mileage,” said Homer, equally tired. But he was fueled with a kind of anger. Damn these Japanese with their boxes within boxes. He felt as though they were playing with him, deliberately leaving clues for their own ends. Well, he would follow them out. He’d get to the center of their goddamn maze and find out what their game was.

They came around a boulder and almost fell into the crater. “Jesus H. Christ,” said Stewart, swaying and hanging on to the boulder. They looked down into a pit of bubbling lava. Heat painted their faces with sweat. The reek of sulfur made them gasp.

“He came up with his faithful employees, but he didn’t come down,” said Homer. “God,” said Stewart, turning away from the searing heat.

They went down in silence. By the time they were at the bottom, it was dusk. People had come into the garden, many people: the workers of Jigoku Chemical Works. Families walked in quiet groups. Father, mother, and dull-eyed children. They weren’t at all like the children of Jiro Tanaka.

“He gave Yum Powder to his employees,” said Jimmy Tsuga, making the policemen jump. He was seated on a rock by the entrance. “They were his guinea pigs.” The old gardener sat next to him, a lump in the dusk not unlike one of the craggy rocks. “You should have stayed up there,” he said. “Moonrise is late, but starlight is also very nice.”

“Where is Mr. Fukuda?” said Homer.

“Making another park. We got a bargain this time, a whole square mile.” Homer paused cautiously. “Where?”

“Near Detroit. The land was going cheap.”

The policemen looked at the two Japanese, sitting peacefully in the shadows. Behind him a breeze stirred, laden with the scent of unknown flowers and a hint of ice. “You could fit a whole country in that,” he said at last.

“You could,” said Jimmy Tsuga, and smiling, he opened the gate and showed the officers out.

On the day Princess Nicolodia was born the King ordered his brother-in-law to stand in the town square, blowing his bugle and handing out slices of bread and butter to the population. The King regretted that he couldn’t do more but his was a poor kingdom. In fact, his subjects were slightly better off than he was. At least they could till their fields or tend their shops. But the King was expected to do nothing all day except practice good posture and solemnity. On top of that, he had to live in a drafty palace with a thatched roof and supply his own throne. The King often thought of throwing the whole thing over. But small and poor though the Kingdom was, it had been in his family for a long time. So he stayed, rather hoping the people liked it that way. And they rather did. It was nice having a king of their own, particularly one who never taxed them or sent them off to war. Besides, they knew that if this king went away another people’s king would come and rule over them.

The people turned out for Princess Nicolodia’s christening party armed with covered dishes, for they took pride in the fact that they never put the King out of pocket for ruling over them. For his part, the King smiled proudly at the baby, kissed his wife, the Queen, drank his share of cider, and danced in his wooden way with any woman who asked him. But all the while he kept an eye peeled for the fairy godmother who serviced the royal families locally. She liked to make her entrance in a flash of blue light, gift in hand. The King prayed it would be a silver christening mug that he could sell on the sly and have indoor plumbing installed in the palace. He feared it would be matching luggage.

But when the last of the fireworks had echoed from the hills, the fairy godmother still hadn’t appeared. Hiding his disappointment, the King shook hands with the departing guests. Then he and his wife finished off what remained of the desserts and retired. Sometime after midnight they were awakened by a flash of blue light. There stood the fairy godmother, her pointed hat and the hoops of her hoopskirt askew, waving a leather, three-ring pocket organizer. “I had you people down for next week,” she admitted sheepishly. “To make amends I guess I’ll have to give Nicolodia the Biggie.”

The King nodded, as if that was the most natural thing in the world. The Queen asked, “What’s the Biggie?”

“You’ll find out come her twelfth birthday,” replied the fairy godmother. “Let’s just say it’s a gift so precious we only get one to give away.” She waved the pocket organizer over the baby’s crib. “There,” she sighed. “Now I’m a lame-duck fairy godmother. When word gets out people will be taking their business elsewhere in droves. ”

“Suppose we just keep this our little secret?” suggested the King.

The fairy godmother flashed him a grateful smile, waved the pocket organizer again, and disappeared.

Quiet.

A cold that not quite touched the bone.

Light soft through the fretwork of stone so old and so worn with the touch of hand and body and the moving air that they seemed as fragile as carvings in snow. Stars on the vaulting within the chapel, in a sky faded to dusk from midnight, but the gilding bright still, each star in its ring of fallow gold, close enough, almost, for one to touch; almost to hold in the hand.

Somewhere a child was singing, high and impossibly sweet.

I sat just out of the, light, listening. I was alone, but not lonely. I had myself for company, and a pad on which I had been sketching the pillars that surrounded the chapel: each different, each with its own character, but all together holding up the enormous weight of the cathedral. It was solid over me. Comforting.

The thread of singing faded. The quiet was deeper after, so deep that I heard my own heart beating. My feet were cold. I was hungry. Elizabeth would have tea when I came back, scones and jam and cream and chatter. She never understood what I saw in quiet, least of all in the Undercroft—the crypt, she called it, with a shudder for effect.

Not that it was quiet I loved, so much as timelessness. If I could be alone, and feet and voices and clatter and trampling shut away above, I could just be, and be out of time. No questions. No histories. I had enough of both, where I came from. Here I wanted to be still.

One of the shadows moved. I frowned at it. This was hardly my place, let alone my cathedral, but I had been happy with my solitude.

It was only one of the priests. I was on nodding terms with most of them, but this one I hadn’t seen before. He seemed startled to see me. I nodded, a bit frostily. He didn’t nod back. I looked pointedly down at my sketchpad. When I looked up he was gone.

He had spoiled my mood. I gathered my things together and braced to face the world above, and Elizabeth.

At precisely 11:00 a.m. (PDT) a man who looked like Harry Dean Stanton entered a Savings and Loan on Wilshire, waved a pistol at a cashier and demanded money, as much as she could stuff in the brown paper bag he gave her. Once this was done he backed toward the door, saluted jauntily to the closed-circuit cameras mounted overhead and made his escape.

The staff film buff immediately identified him. The cops who responded to the alarm were skeptical. Still, they did some checking and learned that the actor was on location, costarring in the new David Lynch film which was wrapping up six weeks of shooting in Gainesville, Florida. The plot of the movie was not immediately known but when pressed the publicist admitted that Stanton played the role of a depraved armed robber. All agreed that it was an interesting coincidence.

Less than a week later a Wilford Brimley look-alike held up a jewelry store. It was strictly a smash and grab job but it was carried out with homespun perfection. Someone recognized him from his cereal commercials. The actor was briefly detained but his manager and a photographer provided convincing alibis.

It was clear that a pattern was developing. A man impersonating fine character actors was on a crime spree. A team of detectives was assigned to the case which was given top priority by their superiors. A spokesperson promised quick results.

The police gained the complete cooperation of the Screen Actors’ Guild and its counterparts. They investigated dozens of disgruntled actors, professional makeup people and wannabees. Acting on a tip, they staked out Paramount Pictures.

Two days later Maureen Stapleton knocked over a 7-Eleven.

The city was in an uproar. Edward Herrmann and Joe Pesci were accosted on Cliff Burns the street. Both had to be hospitalized for their injuries. It was reported that Michael J. Pollard had gone into hiding for his own protection.

The major studios hired extra security personnel. New copyright laws were enacted which made the impersonation of famous figures punishable by hefty fines and jail terms. Several distraught drag queens committed suicide. Rich Little declared personal bankruptcy.

Then, a break.

A man reportedly a dead ringer for Ned Beatty was seen loitering outside an exclusive men’s clothing store in Bel Air. A swarm of police officers converged on the scene, cordoned off several city blocks. The real Mr. Beatty was located in San Francisco.

The imposter somehow became alerted to the presence of police, dashed across the street and disappeared into a throng of curious onlookers. Unfortunately he emerged as Charlotte Rampling, accent and all. He was ordered to halt and was shot several times while attempting to remove something—later identified as a compact—from a small, stylish purse.

As the imposter lay dying, ringed by police and bystanders, there were no clever parting words, no glib one-liners like “top of the world, ma!” or even “the horror, the horror.”

Many marveled at how he stayed in character to the very end, batting those lovely lashes, pursing those thin, sensuous lips and expiring with grace and aplomb.

Like Charlotte would have.

A brazil nut, thought Thurlow, of all the damned things. That’ll teach me. He leaned back tentatively in the plastic chair and studied the posters which had been taped to the walls around him.

He thought; no wonder people avoid coming here. Sitting in the waiting room gave you a chance to consider your fate at leisure. He checked his watch, then listened. From behind a distant door came the whine of an electric drill. Determined to blot the sound from his brain, he checked through the magazines on the table before him. Inevitably there were two battered copies of The Tattler, some ancient issues of Punch and a magazine called British Interiors. With the drill howling faintly at the back of his brain, he flicked idly through the lifestyle magazine. A pied-a-terre in Kensington decorated in onyx and gold. A Berkshire retreat with a marble bas-relief in the kitchen depicting scenes from The Aeneid. The people who lived in these places were presumably drug barons. Surely their children occasionally knocked over the bundles of artfully arranged dried flowers, or vanished into priest’s holes to be lost within the walls?

As he threw the magazine down in disgust the drill squealed at a higher pitch, suggesting that greater force had been used to penetrate some resistant obstacle.

A damned brazil nut. Next time he’d use the crackers instead of his teeth. God, it hurt! The entire molar had split in half. Torn skin, blood all over the place. He was sure there was still a piece of nutshell lodged between the gum and the tooth, somewhere deep near the nerve. The pain speared through his jaw like a white-hot knife every time he moved his head.

The receptionist—her name was something common that he never quite caught—had sighed when she saw him approach. She had studied her appointment book with a doubtful shake of her head. He had been forced to point out that, as a private patient, his needs surely took precedence over others. After all, what else was the system for? He had been coming here regularly for many years. Or to put it more accurately, he had arranged appointments in this manner whenever there was a problem with his teeth. Apparently Dr. Samuelson was away on a seminar in Florida, so he’d be seeing someone new, and he might have to wait a while. With the pain in his tooth driving him crazy, Thurlow didn’t mind waiting at all.

There were two other people in the room. He could tell the private patient at a glance. The woman opposite, foreign-looking, too-black hair, too much gold, obviously had money. The skinny teenaged girl in jeans and a T-shirt had Council House written all over her. Thurlow sniffed, and the knife rocketed up into his skull, causing him to clutch at his head. When the pain had subsided once more to a persistent dull throb, he examined his watch again. He’d been sitting here for nearly forty minutes! This was ridiculous! He rose from his seat and opened the door which led to the reception desk. Finding no one there, he turned into the white tiled corridor beyond. Somebody would have to see him if he kicked up a fuss.

In the first room he reached, an overweight woman was pinned on her back with her legs thrown either side of the couch while the dentist hunched over her, reaching into her mouth like a man attempting to retrieve keys from a drain. In the second room he discovered the source of the drilling. Here, an exhausted teenaged man gripped the armrests of the chair with bony white knuckles while his dentist checked the end of the drill and drove it back into his mouth, metal grinding into enamel with the wincing squeal of a fork on a dry plate.

“You’re not supposed to be back here, you know.”

Thurlow turned around and found a lean young man in a white coat looking crossly at him.

“I’ve been waiting for nearly an hour,” said Thurlow, feeling he had earned the exaggeration.

“And you are . . . ?”

“Mr. Thurlow. Broken tooth. I was eating a brazil nut ...”

“Let’s not discuss it in the corridor. You’d better come in.”

Thurlow would have been annoyed by the brusqueness of the dentist’s manner had he not heard the upper class inflections in his voice, and noted the smart knot of his university tie. At least this way he would be dealt with by a professional.

Thurlow entered the room, removed his jacket, then waited by the red plastic couch while the dentist made an entry in his computer.

“I normally have Dr. Samuelson,” he explained, looking about.

“Well, he’s not here, he’s ...”

“I know. Florida. All right for some. You’re new, I suppose. You’re very young.”

“Everyone looks young when you start getting older, Mr. Thurlow. I’m Dr. Matthews.” He continued tapping the keyboard, then raised his eyes to the screen. “You haven’t had a check-up for well over a year.”

“Not for a check-up, no,” said Thurlow, climbing onto the couch.

“I had a thing, a lump. ” He waggled his fingers at his cheek. “I thought it was a cyst.”

“When was the appointment?” Matthews was clearly unable to find the reference on his screen.

“I didn’t have one. Anyway, it wasn’t a cyst. It was a spot. ”

“And the time before that?”

“I lost a filling. Ginger nuts. Same thing the year before that. Peppermints.”

“So you haven’t seen the hygienist for a while?”

“And I don’t need to see one now,” said Thurlow. “They always try to fob you off with dental floss and sticks with rubber prongs on. What is this anyway, going on about the check-ups? Are you on commission?”

Dr. Matthews ignored his remark and approached the couch. As Thurlow made himself comfortable, the dentist slipped a paper bib around his neck and fastened it.

“Don’t you have an assistant?”

“I used to have one, but she didn’t like my methods so I murdered her,” said Matthews. “Ha ha.” He adjusted the chair from a control pad by his foot, then switched on the water-rinse pump.

“I always like to make jokes. It takes the edge off. Mouth open, please.” He swung a tray of dental tools over Thurlow’s chest. Thurlow opened wide, and the light from the dentist’s pencil torch filled his vision. He watched as the hooked probe went in, tapping along the left side of his molars, and glimpsed the little circular mirror at the corner of his vision. Saliva quickly began to build in his mouth. The tapping continued. He knew he would have to swallow soon. Quickly sensing his unease, Matthews placed a spit-pump in the corner of his mouth. It made a loud draining sound, like water going down a sink.

Suddenly Thurlow felt the sharp point of the probe touch down on the bare nerve in his split tooth. It was as if an electric current had been passed through his head. If it had remained in contact for a second longer he would have screamed and bit the tool clean in half. Matthews observed the sudden twitch of his patient’s body and quickly withdrew the instrument.

“I think we can safely say that we’ve located the problem area,” he said dryly, shining the torch around, then lowering the large overhead light. “That’s pretty nasty. Wouldn’t be so bad if it was an incisor. It’s split all the way from the crown to the root. The gum is starting to swell and redden, so I imagine it’s infected. I’ll have to cut part of it away.”

Thurlow pulled the spit-pump from his mouth. “I don’t want to hear the details,” he said,^vit’s making me sick.” He replaced the pump and lay back, closing his eyes.

“Fine. I’ll give you a jab and we’ll get started.” Matthews prepared a syringe, removed the plastic cap from the tip and cleared the air from the needle. Then he inserted it into the fleshy lower part of Thurlow’s left gum. There was a tiny pop of flesh as the skin surface was broken and the cool metal slipped into his jaw, centimeter by centimeter. Thurlow felt the numbing fluid flood through his mouth, slowly removing all sensation from his infected tooth.

“As you’re squeamish, I’ll give you an additional Valium shot. Then I can work on without upsetting you.” He rolled back Thurlow’s shirt sleeve and inserted a second syringe, emptying it slowly. “It’s funny when you think of it,” he said, watching the calibrations on the side of the tube. “Considering all the food that has to be cut and crushed by your deciduous and permanent canines, incisors and molars, it’s a miracle there’s anything left in your mouth at all. Of course, humans have comparatively tiny teeth. It’s a sign of our superiority over the animals.”

Thurlow finally began to relax. Was it the drug that was making him feel so safe and comfortable in Matthews’s hands, or merely the dentist’s air of confident authority? He hummed softly as he worked, laying out instruments in familiar order while he waited for the drugs to take effect. A feeling of well-being crept over Thurlow. His arms and legs had grown too heavy for him to move. His heart was beating more slowly in his chest. The lower half of his face was completely numb. Suspended between sleep and wakefulness, he tried to identify the tune that Matthew was humming, but concentration slipped away.

The dentist had placed two other metal instruments in his mouth; when did he do that? One was definitely there to hold his jaws apart. Although the overhead light was back-reflected and diffuse, it shone through Thurlow’s eyelids with a warm red glow. There was a metallic clatter on the tray.

“I’m going to cut away part of the damaged gum tissue now,” said Matthews. Hadn’t he demanded to be spared the details? The long-nosed scissors glinted against the light, then vanished into his mouth, to clip through flesh and gristle. His mind drifted, trying not to think of the excavation progressing below.

“I don’t think there’ll be enough left to cap,” said Matthews. “The one next to it is cracked pretty badly, too. What the hell was in that nut?”

When the drill started, Thurlow opened his eyes once more. Time seemed to have lapsed, for now there seemed to be several more instruments in his mouth. The drill howled on, the acrid smell of burning bone filling his nostrils. However, thanks to the effect of the Valium dose, he remained unconcerned. The drill was removed, and Matthews’s fingers probed the spot. There was a sharp crack, and he held up the offending tooth for Thurlow to see, first one half, then the other.

“You want this as a souvenir? I thought not. Now, to do this properly I should really clear out your root canal and drive a metal post into the gum,” he said. “But that’s a long, painful process. Let’s see what how we can work around it without tearing your entire jaw off. Ha ha.”

The drill started up again and entered his mouth. Thurlow could not tell which of his teeth it was touching, but by the familiar burning smell he guessed it was drilling deep into the enamel of a molar.

“That’s better,” said Matthews. “I can see daylight through the hole. Now that we have room to maneuver, let’s bring in the big guns.” He produced a large semicircular metal clip and attached it to the side of Thurlow’s lower lip. A new instrument appeared before the light, a large curved razor blade with a serrated tip, like a cheese grater with teeth. The dentist placed it in his mouth and began drawing it across the stump of the damaged molar. The rasping vibrated through Thurlow’s head, back and forth, back and forth, until he began to wonder if it would ever stop.

“This is no good, no good at all.” He withdrew the instrument, checked the blunted tip and tossed it onto the tray in disgust. “I need something else. Something modern, something—technological.” He vanished from view, and Thurlow heard him thumping around at the side of the room. “One day,” he called, “all dentistry will be performed by laser. Just think of the fun we’ll have then!” He returned with a large piece of electrical equipment that boasted a red flashing LED on top. Matthews’s grinning face suddenly filled his vision.

“You’re a very lucky man,” he said. “Not many people get to have this baby in their mouths.” He patted the side of the machine, from which extended a ribbed metal tube with a tiny rotating steel saw. When he flicked it on, the noise was so great that he had to shout. “You see, the main part of the tooth is made of a substance called dentine, but below the gumline it becomes bonelike cement, which is softer ...”

He missed the next part as the saw entered his mouth and connected with tooth enamel. One of the pipes wedged between his lower incisors was spraying water onto the operating zone while another was noisily sucking up saliva. His mouth had become a hardhat area. Suddenly something wet and warm began to pour down his throat. Matthews turned off the saw and hastily withdrew it.

“Darn,” he said loudly, “that’s my fault, not watching what I’m doing. I’ve been a little tense lately.”

He reached behind him and grabbed up a wad of tissue, which he stuffed into Thurlow’s mouth and padded at the operation site, only to withdraw it red, filled and dripping. “Sorry about that, I was busy thinking about something else. Good job I’m not a crane driver, I’d be dropping girders all over the place.”

Now there seemed to be something lodged in Thurlow’s esophagus. Through the anesthetic he began to experience a stinging sensation. Bile rose in his throat as he started to gag.

“Wait, wait, I know what that is.” Matthews reached in his gloved hand and withdrew something, throwing it onto the tray. “You’ve been a brave boy. A hundred years ago this would have been a horribly painful experience, performed without an anesthetic, but thanks to modern techniques I’ll have you finished in just a few more hours. Ha ha. Just kidding.”

He reached back to the tray and produced another steel frame, this one constructed like the filament wire in a light bulb. Carefully unscrewing it, he arranged the contraption at the side of his patient’s mouth. Thurlow was starting to feel less calm. Perhaps the Valium was wearing off. Suppose his sensations returned in the middle of the drilling? Yes, he could definitely feel his jaw now. A dull pain had begun to throb at the base of his nose. The dentist was stirring something in a small plastic dish when he saw Thurlow shifting in his chair.

“Looks like I didn’t give you a large enough dose,” he said, concerned. He removed the plastic cap from another syringe and jabbed it into Thurlow’s arm.

“There,” he said, cheerfully depressing the plunger. “Drug cocktail happy hour! You want a little umbrella in this one?”

Thurlow stared back at him with narrowed eyes, unamused. Matthews grew serious. “Don’t worry, when you wake up I’ll have finished. I think you’ve been through enough for one day, so I'm giving you a temporary filling for now, and we’ll do that root canal on your next appointment.”

As he began to spoon the cement into Thurlow’s mouth on the end of a rubber spatula, Thurlow felt himself drifting off into an ethereal state of semiwakefulness.

While he floated in this hazy dream-state, his imagination unfettered itself, strange visions uncoiling before him in rolling prisms of light. The humming of the dentist became a distant litany, a warm and familiar soundtrack, like the worksong of a seamstress. Colors blended into one another, bitter scents of jasmine and disinfectant. He was home and safe, a child again. Then these half-formed memories were replaced by the growing clarity of the present, and he realized that he was surfacing back to reality.

“Oh, good,” said Matthews as his eyes flickered open. “Back in the land of the living. For a minute I thought I’d overdosed you. Ha ha. We’re just waiting for the last part to dry.” He reached into Thurlow’s mouth and probed around with a steel scraper, scratching away the last of the filler. Thurlow suddenly became aware of the restraining strap fixed across his lap, holding him in place. How long had that been there?

“You know, we had a nasty case of ‘tooth squeeze’ in here last week, ever hear of that? Of course, you can’t answer with all this junk in your mouth, can you? He was an airline pilot. His plane depressurized, and it turned out he had an air bubble trapped beneath a filling. When the cabin atmosphere decreased, the air expanded. His tooth literally blew up in his mouth. Bits were embedded in his tongue. What a mess.” Matthews peered into his mouth, one eye screwed tight. “It happens to deep sea divers, too, only their teeth implode. And I’ve seen worse. There was one patient, a kid who rollerskated into a drinking fountain . . .” As he checked his handiwork he mercifully lost his train of thought. “Well, that last batch seems to have done the trick.” The sensation was slowly returning to Thurlow’s face. Something was very sore, very sore indeed. He raised his hands, hoping to see if he could locate the source of the pain, but Matthews swatted them down. “Don’t touch anything for a while. You must give it a chance to set. I still have some finishing off to do.”

The pain was increasing with every passing second. It was starting to hurt very badly, far worse than when he had arrived for treatment. Something had gone wrong, he was sure of it. He could only breathe through his nose, and then with difficulty. He tried to speak, but no sound came out. When he tried to pull himself upright, Matthews’s arm came around the chair and pushed him back down. Now the dentist stepped fully into his view. Thurlow gasped.

It looked as if someone had exploded a blood transfusion bag in front of him. He was dripping crimson from head to foot. It was splashed across his chest and stomach, draining from his plastic apron to form a spreading pool between his feet. The white tiled floor was slick with blood. Streaks marred the walls in sweeping arcs, like rampant nosebleeds. Thurlow’s head reeled back against the rest. What in God’s name had happened? Pain and panic overwhelmed him as his hands clawed the air and he fought to stand, chromatic sparkles scattering before his eyes. The soporific drugs were still in his system, affecting his vision. “You shouldn’t be up and about yet,” said Matthews. “I’ve not finished.”

“You’re no dentist,” Thurlow tried to say, the white-hot knives shrieking through his brain, but his words came out as a series of hysterical rasps.

The dentist seemed to understand him. “You’re right, you’re right, I’m no dentist.” He shrugged, his hands held out. So sue me. “I always wanted to be one but I couldn’t get my certificate. I just can’t pass exams. I get angry too easily. Still, it’s a vocation with me, a calling. I know what I’m doing is right. I’m simply ahead of my time. Let’s finish up here.”

He thrust his hand into his patient’s mouth and made a tightening motion. A starburst of pain detonated between Thurlow’s eyes. The dentist held his head back against the rest while he pulled at something. There was a ting of metal, and he extracted a twisted spring. On one end a small silver screw was embedded in a bloody scrap of bright red gum.

“You don’t need this bit,” said Matthews jovially. He picked up a Phillips screwdriver and inserted it in Thurlow’s mouth, ratcheting away happily, as if he was fixing a car. “I like to think of this as homeopathic medicine,” he explained, “except that I’m more of an artist. I went to art school but I didn’t pass the exam because—you guessed it—” he nodded his head dumbly, silly old me, “I got angry again. They took me out of circulation for a while.” He removed the screwdriver and wiped it on his apron, then peered inside Thurlow’s aching mouth with a benign smile. “Still, every once in a while I like to try out a few of my ideas. I choose a town and I search through the Yellow Pages, then I visit all the private dentists that are listed. Sometimes I find one with a vacant operating room, and then I just wait for custom. I carry the part, you see, white coat, smart tie, good speaking voice. Biros in the top pocket. ” He pointed to his jacket. “And I keep the door locked while I work. No one ever tries to stop me, and nothing would ever come out in the papers if they did, because private dentists are too scared of losing their customers. You’d never think it could be that simple, would you?”

He went to the desk beside the operating chair and detached a large circular mirror. “Let’s face it, when was the last time you asked to see a dentist’s credentials? It’s not like the police. Now, let’s see how you turned out.”

Thurlow could barely breathe through the ever-increasing pain, but as the dentist tilted the mirror in his direction, the next sight that met his eyes almost threw him into a faint.

“Good, isn’t it?” said Matthews. “Art in dentistry.”

Thurlow’s face was unrecognizable. His lips had been cut and peeled back in fleshy strips, then pinned to his cheeks with steel pins. Most of his teeth had been filed into angular shapes, some pointed, others merely slanting. His upper gums had been opened to expose the pale bone beneath. A number of screws had been driven into his flayed jaw, and were attached by cables. The last two inches of his tongue—the lump he had felt in his throat—were missing completely. He watched as the leaking stump jerked obscenely back and forth like a severed snake. Around his mouth a contraption of polished steel had been fitted to function as an insane brace, a complex network of wires and springs, cogs and filaments. The skin beneath his eyes had turned black with the pummeling his mouth had taken.

“I know what you’re thinking,” whispered Matthews. “It’s special, but not spectacular. You haven’t seen the best bit yet. This isn’t merely art, it’s—kinetic dental futurism. Watch.”

Matthews reached up and turned a tiny silver handle on the left of Thurlow’s jaw. The springs and wires pulled taut. The cogs turned. Thurlow’s mouth grimaced and winked, the flaps of his lips contorting back and forth as his face was twisted into a series of wide-mouthed grins and tight, sour frowns. On a separate spring, the end of his tongue flickered in and out of his own ear. The pain was unbearable. Fresh wounds tore in his gums and cheeks as the mechanism yanked his mouth into an absurd rictus of a laugh. Matthews released his grip on the silver handle and smiled, pleased with himself.

“Is there somebody in there?” The receptionist was calling through the door.

“This stuff won’t catch on for years yet,” said the dentist, ignoring the rattling doorknob behind him. He tilted the mirror from side to side before Thurlow’s horrified face. Finally, he set the mirror down and released the restraining strap from the operating couch. Blinkered by the heavy steel contraption that had been screwed into his jaw, Thurlow was barely able to stand. As he tipped his head forward the weight pulled him further, and blood began to pour from his mouth. He wanted to scream, but he knew it would hurt too much to pull open his jaws without the help of the contraption. The receptionist began to bang on the door.

“Don’t worry,” said the dentist with a reassuring smile. “It’ll seem strange at first, but you’ll gradually get used to it. I’m sure all my patients do eventually.” He turned around and looked out of the window. “That’s the beauty of these old buildings; there’s always a fire escape.”

He unclipped the security catch on the casement and pushed it open, raising his legs and sliding them through the gap. Blood smeared from his saturated trousers onto the white sill. “I nearly forgot,” he called back as Thurlow blundered blindly into the door, spraying it with his blood. “Whatever you do—for God’s sake—don’t forget to floss. ”

His laughter echoed hard in Thurlow’s ears as a descending crimson mist replaced his tortured sight.

A sleek tiny baby he was, palpitating with life and appetite as he emerged out of his mother’s birth canal, and perfectly formed: twenty miniature pink toes intact, and the near-microscopic nails already sharp; pink-whorled tiny ears; the tiny nose quivering, already vigilant against danger. The eyes were relatively weak, in the service of detecting motion rather than figures, textures, or subtleties of color. (In fact, he may have been color blind. And since this deficiency was never to be pointed out to him, he was arguably “blind” in a secondary, metaphysical sense.) His baby’s jaws, lower and upper, were hinged with muscle, and unexpectedly strong. And the miniature teeth set in those jaws—needle-sharp, and perfectly formed. (More of these teeth, soon.) And the quizzical curve of the tail, pink, hairless, thin as a mere thread. And the whiskers, no more than a tenth of an inch long, yet quivering, and stiff too, like the bristles of a tiny tiny brush.

What a beautiful baby she was, Babygirl the loving parents called her, conceived in the heat of the most tender yet the most erotic love, fated to be smothered with love, devoured with love, an American Babygirl placed with reverent fingers in her incubator. Periwinkle blue eyes, fair silk-soft blond hair, perfect rosebud lips, tiny pug nose, uniform smoothness of the Caucasian skin. A call went out to nursing mothers in ghetto neighborhoods requesting milk from their sweet heavy balloon-breasts, mother’s milk for pay, since Babygirl’s own mother failed to provide milk of the required richness. Her incubator filtered our contaminated air and pumped pure oxygen into her lungs. She had no reason to wail like other infants, whose sorrow is so audible and distracting. In her incubator air humid and warm as a tropical rain forest Babygirl thrived, glowed, prospered, grew.

And how he grew, though nameless even to his mother! How he doubled, trebled, quadrupled his weight, within days! Amid a swarm of siblings he fended his way, shrewd and driven, ravenous with hunger. Whether he was in the habit of gnawing ceaselessly during his waking hours, not only edible materials but such seemingly inedible materials as paper, wood, bone, metal of certain types and degrees of thinness, etc., because he was ravenously hungry or because he simply liked to gnaw, who can say? It is a fact that his incisors grew at the rate of between four and five inches a year, so he had to grind them down to prevent their pushing up into his brain and killing him. Granted the higher cognitive powers generated by the cerebral cortex, he might have speculated upon his generic predicament: is such behavior voluntary, or involuntary; where survival is an issue, what is compulsion; under the spell of Nature, who can behave unnaturally?

Babygirl never tormented herself with such questions. In her glass-topped incubator she grew ounce by ounce, pound by pound, feeding, dozing, feeding, dozing—no time at all before her dimpled knees pressed against the glass, her breath misted the glass opaque. Her parents were beginning to be troubled by her rapid growth, yet proud too of her rosy female beauty, small pointed breasts, curving hips, dimpled belly and buttocks and crisp cinnamon-colored pubic hair, lovely thick-lashed eyes with no pupil. Babygirl had a bad habit of sucking her thumb so they painted her thumb with a foul-tasting fluorescent-orange iodine mixture and observed with satisfaction how she spat, and gagged, and writhed in misery, tasting it. One mild April day, a winey-red trail of clotted blood was detected in the incubator, issuing from between Babygirl’s plump thighs, we were all quite astonished and disapproving but what’s to be done? Babygirl’s father said, Nature cannot be overcome, nor even postponed.

So many brothers and sisters he had, an alley awash with their wriggling bodies, a warehouse cellar writhing and squeaking with them, he sensed himself multiplied endlessly in the world, thus not likely to die out. For of all creaturely fears it is believed the greatest is the fear of, not merely dying, but dying out. Hundreds of thousands of brothers and sisters related to him by blood which was a solace, yes but also a source of infinite anxiety for all were ravenous with hunger, the squeak! squeak! squeak! of hunger multiplied beyond accounting. He learned, on his frantic clicking toenails, to scramble up sheer verticals, to run to the limits of his endurance, to tear out the throats of his enemies, to leap, to fly—to throw himself, for instance, as far as eleven feet into space, from one city rooftop to an adjacent rooftop—thus thwarting his pursuers. He learned to devour, when necessary, the living palpitating flesh of prey while on the run. The snap! of bones radiated pleasure through his jaws, his small brain thrummed with happiness. He never slept. His heartbeat was fever-rapid at all times. He knew not to back himself into a corner, nor to hide in any space from which there was no way out. He was going to live forever!—then one day his enemies set a trap for him, the crudest sort of trap, and sniffing and squeaking and quivering with hunger he lunged for the moldy bread-bait and a spring was triggered and a bar slammed down across the nape of his neck snapping the delicate vertebrae and near severing his poor astonished head.

They lied to her, telling her it was just a birthday party—for the family. First came the ritual bath, then the anointing of the flesh, the shaving and plucking of certain undesirable hairs, the curling and crimping of certain desirable hairs, she fasted for forty-eight hours, she was made to gorge herself for forty-eight hours, they scrubbed her tender flesh with a wire brush, they rubbed pungent herbs into the wounds, the little clitoris was sliced off and tossed to the clucking hens in the yard, the now-shaven labia were sewed shut, the gushing blood was collected in a golden chalice, her buckteeth were forcibly straightened with a pliers, her big hooked nose was broken by a quick skilled blow from the palm of a hand, the bone and cartilage grew back into more desirable contours, then came the girdle-brassiere to cinch in Babygirl’s pudgy twenty-eight-inch waist to a more desirable seventeen-inch-waist, so her creamy hips and thighs billowed out, so her gorgeous balloon-breasts billowed out, her innards were squeezed up into her chest cavity, she had difficulty breathing at first, and moist pink-tinted bubbles issued from her lips, then she got the knack of it, reveling in her classic “hour-glass” figure and new-found power over men’s inflammable imaginations. Her dress was something fetching and antique, unless it was something sly and silky-slinky, a provocative bustline, a snug-fitting skirt, she was charmingly hobbled as she walked her dimpled knees chafing together and her slender ankles quivering with the strain, she wore a black lace garter belt holding up her gossamer-transparent silk stockings with straight black seams, in her spike-heeled pointed-toed white satin shoes she winced a bit initially until she got the knack and very soon she got the knack, the shameless slut. Giggling and brushing and making little fluttery motions with her hands, wriggling her fat ass, her nipples hard and erect as peanuts inside the sequined bosom of her dress, her eyes glistened like doll’s eyes of the kind that shut when the doll’s head is thrust back, the periwinkle-blue had no pupils to distract, Babygirl was not one of those bitches always thinking plotting calculating how to take advantage of some poor jerk, she came from finer stock, you could check her pedigree, there were numerals tattooed into her flesh (the inside of the left thigh), she could be neither lost nor mislaid, nor could the cunt run away, and lose herself in America the way so many have done, you read about it all the time. They misted her in the most exquisite perfume—one whiff of it, if you were a man, a normal man, there’s a fever in your blood only one act can satisfy, they passed out copies of the examining physician’s report, she was clean of all disease venereal or otherwise, she was a virgin, no doubt of that though tripping in her high heels and grinning and blushing peering through her fingers at her suitors she sometimes gave the wrong impression, poor Babygirl: those lush crimson lips of such fleshy contours they suggested, even to the most gentlemanly and austere among us, the fleshy vaginal labia.

Filthy vermin! obscene little beast! they were furious at him for being as if, incarnated thus, he’d chosen his species, and took a cruel pleasure in carrying the seeds of typhus in his guts, bubonic plague virus in his saliva, poisons of all kinds in his excrement. They wanted him dead, they wanted all of his kind extinct, nothing less would satisfy them firing idle shots at the town dump as, squeaking in terror, he darted from one hiding place to another, reeking garbage exploding beside him as the bullets struck, they blamed him for the snap! of poultry bones in predators’ jaws, they had no evidence but they blamed him for a litter of piglets devoured alive, and what happened to that baby in the ground-floor apartment on Eleventh Street left unattended for twenty minutes when its mother slipped out to buy cigarettes and milk at the 7-Eleven store a block away—Oh my God! Oh oh oh don’t tell me, I don’t want to know—and a fire that started and blazed out of control in the middle of a frigid January night because insulation around some electrical wires had been gnawed through, but how was that his fault, how his, where was the proof amidst hundreds of thousands of his siblings, each possessed by a voracious hunger and a ceaseless need to gnaw? Pursuing him with rocks, a gang of children, whooping and yodeling across the rooftops injuring him as in desperation he scrambled up the side of a brick wall, yes but he managed to escape even as his toenails failed him and he slipped, fell—fell sickeningly into space—down an air-shaft—five storeys—to the ground below—high-pitched squeaky shrieks as he fell—plummeted downward thrashing and spiraling in midair, red eyes alight in terror for such creatures know terror though they do not know the word “terror,” they embody terror, that’s to say embody it, though every cell in his body strained to live, every luminous particle of his being craved immortality, even as you and me. (Of the suffering of living things through the millennia, it is wisest not to think, Darwin advises.) So he fell off the edge of the roof, down the airshaft, the equivalent of approximately one hundred seventy times his size measured from nose to rump (but excluding his tail which, uncurled, straight and stiff, is longer than his length— eight inches!) so we were watching smiling in the knowledge that the dirty little bugger would be squashed flat, thus imagine our indignation and outrage to see him land on his feet! a tiny bit shaken, but uninjured! untouched! a fall that would have broken every bone in our goddam bodies and he shakes his whiskers and furls up his tail and scampers away! And the rancid night parted like black water to shield him.

It was the National Guard Armory, rented for the night at discount price, a slow season, and in the cavernous smoke-filled gallery fresh-groomed men sat attentive in rows of seats, their faces indistinct as dream-faces, their eyes vague and soft as molluscs focussed on Babygirl, fingers fat as cigars poking in their crotches, genitalia heavy as giant purplish-ripe figs straining at the fabric of their trousers. Yes but these are carefully screened and selected gentlemen. Yes but these are serious fellows. Most of them pointedly ignore the vendors hawking their wares in the Armory, now’s hardly the time for beer, Coke, hotdogs, caramel corn, the men’s eyes are hotly fixed on Babygirl my God get a load of that. To find a worthy wife in today’s world is no simple task. An old-fashioned girl is the object of our yearning, the girl that married old dead dad is our ideal, but where is she to be found?—in today s debased world. So Babygirl tossed her shimmering cinnamon curls and prettily pouted, revealed her dazzling white smile, in a breathy singsong she recited the sweet iambic verse she had composed for this very occasion. So Babygirl twirled her gem-studded baton. Flung her baton spinning up into the rafters of the Armory where at the apogee of its flight it seemed for a magic instant to pause, then tumbled back down into Babygirl’s outstretched fingers—the rows of staring seats burst into spontaneous applause. So Babygirl curtsied, blushed, ducked her head, paused to straighten the seams of her stockings, adjusted an earring, adjusted her girdle that cut so deeply into the flesh of her thighs there would be angry red indentations there for days, Babygirl giggled and blew kisses, her lovely skin all aglow, as the auctioneer strutted about hamming it up with his hand-held microphone, Georgie Bick's his name, cocky and paunchy in his tux with the red cummerbund. Hey whooee do I hear 5,000, do I hear 8,000, gimme 10-, 10-, 10,000, in a weird high-pitched incantatory voice so mesmerizing that bidding begins at once, a Japanese gentleman signaling a bid by touching his left earlobe, a swarthy turbaned gentleman signaling with a movement of his dark-glittering eyes, Hey whooee do I hear 15,000, do I hear 20,000, do I hear 25—, 25—, 25,000, thus a handsome moustached Teutonic gentleman cannot resist Yes, a Mediterranean gentleman, a gentleman with a shaved blunt head, a gentleman from Texas, a heavyset perspiring gentleman rubbing at the tip of his flushed pug nose, Do I hear 30,000, do I hear 35,000, do I hear 50,000, winking and nudging Babygirl, urging her to the edge of the platform, C mon sweetie now s not the time for shyness, c’mon honey we all know why you’re here tonight don’t be coy you cunt, clumsy cow-cunt, gentlemen observe those dugs, those udders, and there’s udder attractions too, hardee-har-har! And from up in the balcony, unobserved till now, a handsome white-haired gentleman signals with his white-gloved hand Yes.

He was battle-weary, covered in scabs, maggot-festering little wounds stippling his body, his once-proud tail was gangrenous, the tip rotted away, yet he remained stoic and uncomplaining gnawing through wood, through paper, through insulation, through thin sheets of metal, eating with his old appetite, the ecstasy of jaws, teeth, intestines, anus, if the time allotted to him were infinite as his hunger it’s certain he would gnaw his way through the entire world and excrete it behind him in piles of moist dark dense little turds. But Nature prescribes otherwise: the species into which he was born grants on the average only twelve months of survival—if things go well. And this May morning things are decidedly not going well here on the fourth floor of the partly empty ancient brick building on Sullivan Street housing on its first floor the Metropole Bakery, most acclaimed of local bakeries, “Wedding Cakes Our Specialty Since 1949,” he has nested in a nook in a wall, he has been nibbling nervously on a piece of something theoretically edible (the hardened flattened remains of a sibling struck by a vehicle in the street, pounded into two dimensions by subsequent vehicles) sniffing and blinking in an agony of appetite: on the fourth floor, with his many thousands of fellows, since, it’s one of Nature’s quiddities, when BROWN and BLACK species occupy a single premise, BROWN (being larger and more aggressive) inhabit the lower levels while BLACK (shier, more philosophical) are relegated to the upper levels where food foraging is more difficult. So he’s eating, or trying to eat, when there’s a sound as of silk being torn, and a furry body comes flying at him, snarling, incisors longer and more deadly than his own, claws, hind legs pummeling like rotor blades, every flea and tick on his terror-struck little body is alert, every cell of his being cries out to be spared, but Sheba with her furry moon face has no mercy, she’s a beautiful silver tabby much adored by her owners for her warm affectionate purring ways but here on this May morning in the ancient brick building housing the Metropole Bakery she is in a frenzy to kill, to tear with her jaws, to eat, the two of them locked in the most intimate of embraces, yowling, shrieking, he’d go for her jugular vein but, shrewd Sheba, she has already gone for his jugular vein, they are rolling crazily together in the filth, not just Sheba’s terrible teeth but her maniac hind legs are killing him; yes but he’s putting up a damned good fight yes he has ripped a triangular patch of flesh out of her ear, yes but it’s too late, yes you can see that Sheba’s greater weight will win the day, even as he squeaks and bites in self-defense Sheba has torn out his throat, she has in fact disemboweled him, his hapless guts in slimy ribbons now tangled in her feet, what a din! what a yowling! you’d think somebody was being killed! and he’s dying, and she begins to devour him, warm-gushing blood is best, twitchy striated muscle is best, pretty Sheba shuts her jaws on his knobby little head and crushes his skull, his brains inside his skull, and he goes out. Just goes out. And the greedy tabby (who isn’t even hungry: her owners keep her sleek and well fed, of course) eats him where they’ve landed, snaps his bones, chews his gristle, swallows his scaly tail in sections, his dainty pink-whorled ears, his rheumy eyes, his bristly whiskers, as well as his luscious meat. And afterward washes herself, to rid herself of his very memory.

Except: wakened rudely from her post-prandial nap by a sickish stirring in her guts, poor Sheba is suddenly wracked by vomiting, finds herself reeling ungracefully and puking on the stairs, descending to the rear of the Metropole Bakery, mewing plaintively but no one hears as, teetering on a rafter above one of the giant vats of vanilla cake batter, poor Sheba heaves out her guts, that’s to say him, the numerous fragments and shreds of him: a convulsive gagging and choking that concludes with the puking-up of his whiskers, which are now broken into half- and quarter-inch pieces. Poor puss!—runs home meek and plaintive and her adoring mistress picks her up, cuddles, scolds, Sheba where have you been! And Sheba's supper comes early that evening.

Madly in love, Mr. X is the most devoted of suitors. And then the most besotted of bridegrooms. Covering Babygirl’s pink-flushed face with kisses, hugging her so tight she cries Oh! and all of the wedding company, her own daddy in particular, laugh in delight. Mr. X is a dignified handsome older gentleman. He’s the salt of the earth. He leads Babygirl out onto the polished dance floor as the band plays “I Love You Truly” and how elegantly he dances, how masterfully he leads his bride, blood-red carnation in his lapel, chips of dry ice in his eyes, wide fixed grinning-white dentures, how graceful the couple’s dips and bends, Babygirl in a breathtakingly beautiful antique wedding gown worn by her mother, her grandmother, and her great-grandmother in their times, an heirloom wedding ring as well, lilies of the valley braided in the bride’s cinnamon curls, Babygirl laughs showing the cherry-pink interior of her mouth, she squeals Oh! as her new husband draws her to his bosom, kisses her full on the lips. His big strong fingers stroke her shoulders, breasts, rump. There are champagne toasts, there are gay drunken speeches lasting well into the evening. The Archbishop himself intones a blessing. Babygirl on Mr. X’s knee being fed strawberries and wedding cake by her bridegroom, and feeding her bridegroom strawberries and wedding cake in turn, each sucking the other’s fingers, amid kisses and laughter. Chewing her wedding cake Babygirl is disconcerted to discover something tough, sinewy, bristly in it, like gristle, or fragments of bone, or tiny bits of wire, but she is too well-bred and embarrassed to spit the foreign substance, if it is a foreign substance, out: discreetly pushes it with her tongue to the side of her mouth, behind her molars, for safe-keeping. For his part, Mr. X, a gentleman, washes his mouthfuls of wedding cake down with champagne, swallows everything without blinking an eye. This is the happiest day of my life he whispers into Babygirl’s pink-whorled ear.

It was an experiment in behavioral psychology, in the phenomenon of conditioning, to be published in Scientific American, and there to cause quite a stir, but naturally he wasn’t informed, poor miserable bugger, nor did he give consent. Semi-starved in his wire mesh cage, compulsively gnawing on his own hind legs, he quickly learned to react to the slightest gesture on the part of his torturers, his monitored heartbeat raced in panic, his jaundiced eyeballs careened in their sockets, a metaphysical malaise permeated his soul like sulphur dioxide, after only a few hours. Yet his torturers persisted for there were dozens of graphs and charts to be filled out; dozens of young assistants involved in the experiment. In the gauging of “terror” in dumb beasts of his species they shocked him with increasing severity until virtual puffs of smoke issued from the top of his head, they singed his fur with burning needles, poked burning needles into his tender anus, lowered his cage over a Bunsen burner, wiped their eyes laughing at his antics, shaking and rattling his cage, spinning his cage at a velocity of ninety miles an hour, they marveled at how he was conditioned to respond not just to their gestures but to their words as if he could understand them and then, most amazing of all,—this would be the crux of the controversial article in Scientific American—after forty-eight hours he began to react unerringly to the mere thought that the torture would be resumed. (Provided the experimentors consciously thought ’ their thoughts inside the laboratory, not outside.) A remarkable scientific discovery!—unfortunately, after his death, never once to be duplicated. Thus utterly worthless as science and a bit of a joke in experimental psychology circles.

How Mr. X adored his Babygirl!—lovingly bathing her in her fragrant bubble bath, brushing and combing her long wavy-curly cinnamon hair that fell to her hips, cooing to her, poking his tongue in her, bringing her breakfast in bed after a fevered night of marital love, insisting upon shaving, with his own straight razor, the peachy-fuzzy down that covered her lovely body, and the stiff “unsightly” hairs of underarms, legs, and crotch. Weeks, months. Until one night his penis failed him and he realized he was frankly bored with Babygirl’s dimpled buttocks and navel, her wide-open periwinkle-blue eyes, the flattering Oh! of her pursed rosebud lips! He realized that her flat nasal voice grated against his sensitive nerves, her habits disgusted him, several times he caught her scratching her fat behind when she believed herself unobserved, she was not so fastidious as to refrain from picking her nose, frequently the bathroom stank of flatulence and excrement after she emerged from it, her menstrual blood stained the white linen heirloom sheets, her kinky hairs collected in drains, her early-morning breath was rancid as the inside of his own oldest shoes, she gazed at him with big mournful questioning cow-eyes, Oh what is wrong dearest, oh! don’t you love me any longer? What did I do! lowering her bulk onto his knees, sliding her pudgy arms around his neck, exhaling her meaty breath in his face, so, cruelly, he parted his knees and Babygirl fell with a graceless thud to the floor. As she stared at him speechless in astonishment and hurt he struck her with the backside of his hand, bloodying her nose, Oh you will, bitch, will you! he grunted, will you! Eh!

Mating, and mating. Mating. A frenzy of mating. In the prime of his maleness he fathered dozens, hundreds, thousands of offspring, now they’re scurrying and squeaking everywhere, little buggers everywhere underfoot, nudging him aside as he feeds, ganging up on him, yes a veritable gang of them, how quickly babies grow up, it’s amazing how quickly babies grow up, one day an inch long, the next day two inches long, the next day four inches long, those tiny perfect toes, claws, ears, whiskers, graceful curved tails, incisors, ravenous appetite And the horror of it washed over me suddenly: I cannot die, I am multiplied to infinity. It was not his fault! His enemies are even now setting out dollops of powdery-pasty poison, to rid the neighborhood of him and his offspring, but it was not his fault! A fever overtook him, him and certain of his sisters, almost daily it seemed, yes daily, maybe hourly, no time to rest, no time for contemplation, a two-inch thing, a sort of a knob of flesh, a rod, hot and stiff with blood, piston-quick, tireless, unfurling itself out of the soft sac between his hind legs, yes and he was powerless to resist, it was more urgent even than gnawing, more excruciatingly pleasurable, he was but an appendage! thus innocent! But his enemies, plotting against him, don’t give a damn, they’re cruel and cold-blooded setting out dollops of this most delicious poison, sugary, pasty, bread-moldy, delicious beyond reckoning, he should know better (shouldn’t he?) but he’s unable to resist, pushing his way into the sea of squeaking quivering young ones, seething sea, dark waves, wave upon wave eating in a delirium of appetite, a single feeding organism you might think, it’s a diabolical poison however that doesn’t kill these poor buggers on the premises but induces violent thirst in them thus shortly after feeding he and his thousands of sons and daughters are rushing out of the building, in a panic to find water, to drink water, to alleviate this terrible thirst, they’re drawn to the dockside, to the river, there are screams as people see them emerge, the dark wave of them, glittering eyes, whiskers, pink near-hairless tails, they take no notice of anyone or anything in their need to get to water, there in the river a number of them drown, others drink and drink and drink until, as planned, their poor bodies bloat, and swell, and burst. And city sanitation workers wearing gas masks complain bitterly as they shovel the corpses, small mountains of corpses, into a procession of dumpster trucks, then they hose down the sidewalks, streets, docks. At a fertilizer plant he and his progeny will be mashed down, ground to gritty powder and sold for commercial/residential use. No mention of the poison of course.

Grown increasingly and mysteriously insensitive to his wife’s feelings, Mr. X, within their first year of marriage, began to bring home “business associates” (as he called them) to ogle Babygirl, to peek at her in her bath, to whisper licentious remarks in her ears, to touch, fondle, molest—as Mr. X, often smoking a cigar, calmly watched! At first Babygirl was too astonished to comprehend, then she burst into tears of indignation and hurt, then she pleaded with the brute to be spared, then she flew into a tantrum tossing silky garments and such into a suitcase, then she was lying in a puddle on the bathroom floor, nights and days passed in a delirium, her keeper fed her grudgingly and at irregular intervals, there were promises of sunshine, greenery, Christmas gifts, promises made and withheld, then one day a masked figure appeared in the doorway, in leather military regalia, gloved hands on his hips, brass-studded belt, holster and pistol riding his hip, gleaming black leather boots the toes of which Babygirl eagerly kissed, groveling before him, twining her long curly-cinnamon hair around his ankles. Begging, Have mercy! don’t hurt me! I am yours! in sickness and in health as I gave my vow to God! And assuming the masked man was in fact Mr. X (for wasn’t this a reasonable assumption, in these circumstances?) Babygirl willingly accompanied him to the master bedroom, to the antique brass four-postered bed, and did not resist his wheezing, straining, protracted and painful lovemaking, if such an act can be called lovemaking, the insult of it! the pain of it! and not till the end, when the masked figure triumphantly removed his mask, did Babygirl discover that he was a stranger—and that Mr. X himself was standing at the foot of the bed, smoking a cigar, calmly observing. In the confusion of all that followed, weeks, months, there came a succession of “business associates,” never the same man twice, as Mr. X grew systematically cruder, hardly a gentleman any longer, forcing upon his wife as she lay trussed and helpless in their marriage bed a man with fingernails filed razor-sharp who lacerated her tender flesh, a man with a glittering scaly skin, a man with a turkey’s wattles, a man with an ear partly missing, a man with a stark-bald head and cadaverous smile, a man with infected draining sores like exotic tattoos stippling his body, and poor Babygirl was whipped for disobedience, Babygirl was burnt with cigars, Babygirl was slapped, kicked, pummelled, near-suffocated and near-strangled and near-drowned, she screamed into her saliva-soaked gag, she thrashed, convulsed, bled in sticky skeins most distasteful to Mr. X who then punished her additionally, as a husband will do, by withholding his affection.

So light-headed with hunger was he, hiding in terror from his enemies beneath a pile of bricks, he began to gnaw at his own tail—timidly at first, then more avidly, with appetite, unable to stop, his poor skinny tail, his twenty pink toes and pads, his hind legs, choice loins and chops and giblets and breast and pancreas and brains and all, at last his bones are picked clean, the startling symmetry and beauty of the skeleton revealed, now he’s sleepy, contented and sleepy, washes himself with fastidious little scrubbing motions of his paws then curls up in the warm September sun to nap. A sigh ripples through him: exquisite peace.

Except: two gangling neighborhood boys creep up on him dozing atop his favorite brick, capture him in a net and toss him squeaking in terror into a cardboard box, slam down the lid that’s pocked with air holes, he’s delivered by bicycle to a gentleman with neatly combed white hair and a cultivated voice who pays the boys $5 each for him, observes him crouched in a corner of the box rubbing his hands delightedly together chuckling softly, Well! you’re a rough-looking fella aren’t you! To his considerable surprise, the white-haired gentleman feeds him; holds him up, though not unkindly, by the scruff of his neck, to examine him, the sleek perfectly-formed parts of him, the rakish incisors most particularly. Breathing audibly, murmuring, with excited satisfaction. Yes. I believe you will do, old boy.

No longer allowed out of the house, often confined to the bedroom suite on the second floor, poor Babygirl nonetheless managed to adjust to the altered circumstances of her life with commendable fortitude and good humor. Spending most of her days lying languorously in bed, doing her nails, devouring gourmet chocolates brought her by one or another of Mr. X’s business associates, sometimes, in a romantic mood, by the unpredictable Mr. X himself, she watched television (the evangelical preachers were her favorites), complained to herself in the way of housewives in America, tended to her wounds, clipped recipes from magazines, gossiped over the telephone with her female friends, shopped by catalogue, read her Bible, grew heavier, sullen, apprehensive of the future, plucked her eyebrows, rubbed fragrant creams into her skin, kept an optimistic attitude, made an effort. Of the disturbing direction in which her marriage was moving she tried not to think for Babygirl was not the kind of wife to whine, whimper, nag, not Babygirl so imagine her surprise and horror when, one night, Mr. X arrived home and ran upstairs to the bedroom in which, that day, she’d been confined, tied to the four brass posts of the marital bed by white silken cords, and in triumph threw open his camel’s hair coat, See what I’ve brought for you, my dear! unzipping his trousers with trembling fingers and as Babygirl stared incredulous out he leapt—squeaking, red-eyed, teeth bared and glistening with froth, stiff curved tail erect. Babygirl’s screams were heartrending.

Mr. X and his (male) companions observed with scientific detachment the relationship between Babygirl and He (as, in codified shorthand, they referred to him): how, initially, the pair resisted each other most strenuously, even hysterically, Babygirl shrieking even through the gag stuffed in her mouth as He was netted in the bed with her, such a struggle, such acrobatics, He squeaking in animal panic edged with indignant rage, biting, clawing, fighting as if for His very life, and Babygirl, despite her flaccid muscles and her seemingly indolent ways, putting up a fight as if for her very life! And this went on for hours, for an entire night, and the night following, and the night following that. And there was never anything so remarkable on Burlingame Way, the attractive residential street where Mr. X made his home.

He did not want this, no certainly he did not want this, resisting with all the strength of his furry little being, as, with gloved hands, Mr. X forced him there—poor Babygirl spread-eagled and helpless bleeding from a thousand welts and lacerations made by his claws and teeth and why was he being forced snout-first, and then head-first, then his shoulders, his sleek muscular length, why there—in there—so he choked, near-suffocated, used his teeth to tear a way free for himself yet even as he did so Mr. X with hands trembling in excitement, as his companions, gathered round the bed, watched in awe pushed him in farther, and then farther—into the blood-hot pulsing toughly elastic tunnel between poor Babygirl’s fatty thighs—and still farther until only the sleek-furry end of his rump and his trailing hind legs and, of course, the eight-inch pink tail were visible. His panicked gnawing of the fleshy walls that so tightly confined him released small geysers of blood that nearly drowned him, and the involuntary spasms of clenching of poor Babygirl’s pelvic muscles nearly crushed him, thus how the struggle would have ended, if both he and Babygirl had not lost consciousness at the same instant, is problematic. Even Mr. X and his companions, virtually beside themselves in unholy arousal, were relieved that, for that night, the agon had ceased.

As, at her martyrdom, at the stake in Rouen, as the flames licked mindlessly ever higher and higher to consume her, to turn her to ashes, Jeanne d’Arc is reported to have cried out “Jesu! Jesu! Jesu!” in a voice of rapture.

And who would clean up the mess. And who, with a migraine, sanitary pad soaked between her chafed thighs, she’s fearful of seeing her swollen jaw, blackened eye in any mirrored surface weeping quietly to herself, padding gingerly about in her bedroom slippers, mock-Japanese quilted housecoat. The only consolation is at least there’s a t.v. in most of the rooms so, even when the vacuum is roaring, she isn’t alone: there’s Reverend Tim, there’s Brother Jessie, there’s Sweet Alabam’ MacGowan. A consolation at least. For, not only did Babygirl suffer such insult and ignominy at the hands of the very man who, of all the world, was most responsible for her emotional well-being, not only was she groggy in the aftermath of only dimly remembered physical trauma, running the risk, as she sensed, of infection, sterility, and a recrudescence of her old female maladies,—not only this but she was obliged to clean up the mess next morning, who else. Laundering the sheets, blood-stained sheets are no joke. On her hands and knees trying (with minimal success) to remove the stains from the carpet. Vacuum the carpet. And the dirt-bag is full and there’s a problem putting in a new dirt-bag, there always is. Faint-headed, wracked several times with white-hot bolts of pain so she had to sit, catch her breath. And the pad between her legs soaked hard in blackish blood like blood-sausage. And the steel wool disintegrating in her fingers as gamely she tries to scour the casserole dish clean, dissolves in tears, Oh! where has love gone! so one evening he surprises her, in that melancholy repose, the children are in on it too, what’s today but Babygirl’s birthday and she’d tormented herself thinking no one would remember but as they sweep into the restaurant, the Gondola that’s one of the few good Italian restaurants in the city where you can order pizza too, the staff is waiting, Happy Birthday! balloons, half-chiding there’s a chorus, Did you think we’d forgotten? and Babygirl orders a sloe gin fizz which goes straight to her head and she giggles and suppresses a tiny belch patting her fingers to her mouth, later her husband is scolding one of the boys but she’s going to steer clear of the conflict, goes to the powder room, checks her makeup in the rose-lit flattering mirrors seeing yes, thank God the bruise under her left eye is fading, then she takes care to affix squares of toilet paper to the toilet seat to prevent picking up an infectious disease, since AIDS Babygirl is even more methodical, then she’s sitting on the toilet her mind for a moment blissful and empty until, turning her head, just happening to turn her head, though probably she sensed its presence, she sees, not six inches away, on the slightly grimy sill of a frosted-glass window, the red-blinking eyes of a large rodent, oh dear God is it a rat, these eyes fixed upon hers, her heart gives a violent kick and nearly stops. Poor Babygirl’s screams penetrate every wall of the building.

I’m still not sure I made the right choice when I told my wife about the bakery attack. But then, it might not have been a question of right and wrong. Which is to say that wrong choices can produce right results, and vice versa. I myself have adopted the position that, in fact, we never choose anything at all. Things happen. Or not.

If you look at it this way, it just so happens that I told my wife about the bakery attack. I hadn’t been planning to bring it up—I had forgotten all about it—but it wasn’t one of those now-that-you-mention-it kind of things, either.

What reminded me of the bakery attack was an unbearable hunger. It hit just before two o’clock in the morning. We ate a light supper at six, crawled into bed at nine-thirty and went to sleep. For some reason, we woke up at exactly the same moment. A few minutes later, the pangs struck with the force of the tornado in The Wizard of Oz. These were tremendous, overpowering hunger pangs.

Our refrigerator contained not a single item that could be technically categorized as food. We had a bottle of French dressing, six cans of beer, two shriveled onions, a stick of butter and a box of refrigerator deodorizers. With only two weeks of married life behind us, we had yet to establish a precise conjugal understanding with regard to the rules of dietary behavior. Let alone anything else.

I had a job in a law firm at the time, and she was doing secretarial work at a design school. I was either 28 or 29—why can’t I remember the exact year we married?—and she was two years and eight months younger. Groceries were the last things on our minds.

We both felt too hungry to go back to sleep, but it hurt just to lie there. On the other hand, we were also too hungry to do anything useful. We got out of bed and drifted into the kitchen, ending up across the table from each other. What could have caused such violent hunger pangs?

We took turns opening the refrigerator door and hoping, but no matter how many times we looked inside, the contents never changed. Beer and onions and butter and dressing and deodorizer. It might have been possible to saute the onions in the butter, but there was no chance those two shriveled onions could fill our empty stomachs. Onions are meant to be eaten with other things. They’re not the kind of food you use to satisfy an appetite.

“Would madame care for French dressing sauteed in deodorizer?"

I expected her to ignore my attempt at humor, and she did. “Let s get in the car and look for an all-night restaurant,” I said. “There must be one on the highway.” She rejected that suggestion. “We can’t. You’re not supposed to go out to eat after midnight.” She was old-fashioned that way.

I breathed once and said, “I guess not.”

Whenever my wife expressed such an opinion (or thesis) back then, it reverberated in my ears with the authority of a revelation. Maybe that’s what happens with newlyweds, I don’t know. But when she said this to me, I began to think that this was a special hunger, not one that could be satisfied through the mere expedient of taking it to an all-night restaurant on the highway.

A special kind of hunger. And what might that be? I can present it here m the form of a cinematic image. . .

One, I am in a little boat, floating on a quiet sea. Two, I look down and, in the water, I see the peak of a volcano thrusting up from the ocean floor. Three, the peak seems pretty close to the water’s surface, but just how close, I cannot tell. Four, this is because the hypertransparency of the water interferes with the perception of distance.

This is a fairly accurate description of the image that arose in my mind between the time my wife said she refused to go to an all-night restaurant and I agreed with my “I guess not.” Not being Sigmund Freud, I was, of course, unable to analyze with any precision what this image signified, but I knew intuitively that it was a revelation. Which is why—the almost grotesque intensity of my hunger notwithstanding—I all but automatically agreed with her thesis (or declaration).

We did the only thing we could do: opened the beer. It was a lot better than eating those onions. She didn’t like beer much, so we divided the cans, two for her, four for me. While I was drinking the first one, she searched the kitchen shelves like a squirrel in November. Eventually, she turned up four butter cookies. They were leftovers, soft and soggy, but we each ate two, savoring every morsel.

It was no use. Upon this hunger of ours, as vast and boundless as the Sinai Peninsula, the butter cookies and beer left not a mark.

Time oozed through the dark like a lead weight in a fish’s gut. I read the print on the aluminum beer cans. I stared at my watch. I looked at the refrigerator door.

I turned the pages of yesterday's paper. I used the edge of a postcard to scrape together the cookie crumbs on the table top.

“I’ve never been this hungry in my whole life,” she said. “I wonder if it has anything to do with being married.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe not.”

While she hunted for more fragments of food, I leaned over the edge of my boat and looked down at the peak of the underwater volcano. The clarity of the ocean water all around the boat gave me an unsettled feeling, as if a hollow had opened somewhere behind my solar plexus—a hermetically sealed cavern that had neither entrance nor exit. Something about this weird sense of absence—this sense of the existential reality of nonexistence—resembled the paralyzing fear you might feel when you climb to the top of a steeple. This connection between hunger and acrophobia was a discovery for me.

Which is when it occurred to me that I had once before had this same kind of experience. My stomach had been just as empty then. . . . When? . . . Oh, sure, that was—

“The time of the bakery attack,” I heard myself saying.

“The bakery attack? What are you talking about?”

And so it started.

Dead men can’t play jazz.

That’s the truth I learned last night at the world premiere performance of the quartet known as Afterlife at Manhattan’s Village Vanguard.

Whether or not they can play, period, that’s another matter, but it wasn’t jazz I heard at the Vanguard, it was something bluer and colder, something with notes made from centuries-old Arctic ice and stones that never saw the light of day, something uncoiling after a long black sleep and tasting dirt in its mouth, something that wasn’t the product of creative impulse but of need.

But the bottom line is, it was worth hearing.

As to the morality involved, well, I’ll leave that up to you, because that’s the real bottom line, isn’t it, music lovers? Do you like it enough and will you pay enough to keep the question of morality a hot topic on the Donahue show and out of the courts? Those of you who listened to the simulcast over WBAI have probably already formulated an opinion. The rest of you will have to wait for the CD.

I won’t waste your time by talking about the technology. If you don’t understand it by now, after all the television specials and the (ohmygod-pleasenotanother) in-depth discussions between your local blow-dried news creep and their pet science fiction hack, you must not want to understand it. Nor am I going to wax profound and speculate on just how much of a man is left after reanimation. The only ones who know that aren’t able to tell us, because it seems the speech center just doesn’t thrive on narcosis. Nor does any fraction of sensibility that cares to communicate itself. In fact, very little seems to thrive on narcosis aside from the desire . . . no, like I said, the need to play music.

And for reasons that God or someone only knows, the ability to play music where none existed before.

That may be hard to swallow, I realize, but I’m here to tell you, no matter how weird it sounds, it appears to be true.

For the first time in memory, there was a curtain across the Vanguard’s stage. I suppose there’s some awkwardness involved in bringing the musicians out. Before the curtain was opened, William Dexter, the genius behind this whole deal, a little bald man with a hearing aid in each ear and the affable, simple face of someone who kids call by his first name, came out and said a few words about the need for drastic solutions to the problems of war and pollution, for a redefinition of our goals and values. Things could not go on as they had been. The words seemed somewhat out of context, though they’re always nice to hear. Finally he introduced the quartet. As introductions go, this was a telegram.

“The music you’re about to hear,” William Dexter said flatly, without the least hint of hype or hyperventilation, “is going to change your lives.”

And there they were.

Right on the same stage where Coltrane turned a love supreme into a song, where Miles singed us with the hateful beauty of needles and knives and Watts on fire, where Mingus went crazy in 7/4 time, where Ornette made Kansas City R&B into the art of noise, and a thousand lesser geniuses dreamed and almost died and were changed before our eyes from men into moments so powerful that guys like me can make a living writing about them for people like you who just want to hear that what they felt when they were listening was real.

Two white men, one black, one Hispanic, the racial quota of an allAmerican TV show, marooned on a radiant island painted by a blue-white spot. All wearing sunglasses.

Ray-Bans, I think.

Wonder if they’ll get a commercial.

The piano player was young and skinny, just a kid, with the long brown hair of a rock star and sunglasses that held gleams as shiny and cold as the black surface of his Baldwin. The Hispanic guy on bass couldn’t have been more than eighteen, and the horn player, the black man, he was about twenty-five, the oldest. The drummer, a shadow with a crew cut and a pale brow, I couldn’t see him clearly but I could tell he was young, too.

Too young, you’d think, to have much to say.

But then maybe time goes by more slowly and wisdom accretes with every measure ... in the afterlife.

No apparent signal passed between them, yet as one they began to play.

Goodrick reached for his tape recorder, thinking he should listen to the set again before getting into the music, but then he realized that another listen was unnecessary—he could still hear every blessed note. The ocean of dark chords on the piano opening over a snaky, slithering hiss of cymbals and a cluttered rumble plucked from the double bass, and then that sinuous alto line, like snake-charmer music rising out of a storm of thunderheads and scuttling claws, all fusing into a signature as plaintive and familiar and elusive as a muezzin’s call. Christ, it stuck with you like a jingle for Burger King . . . though nothing about it was simple. It seemed to have the freedom of jazz, yet at the same time it had the feel of heavy, ritual music.

Weird shit.

And it sure as hell stuck with you.

He got up from the desk, grabbed his drink and walked over to the window. The nearby buildings ordered the black sky, ranks of tombstones inscribed with a writing of rectangular stars, geometric constellations, and linear rivers of light below, flowing along consecutive chasms through the high country of Manhattan. Usually the view soothed him and turned his thoughts to pleasurable agendas, as if height itself were a form of assurance, an emblematic potency that freed you from anxiety. But tonight he remained unaffected. The sky and the city seemed to have lost their scope and grandeur, to have become merely an adjunct to his living room.

He cast about the apartment, looking for the clock. Couldn’t locate it for a second among a chaos of sticks of gleaming chrome, shining black floors, framed prints, and the black plush coffins of the sofas. He’d never put it together before, but the place looked like a cross between a Nautilus gym and a goddamn mortuary. Rachel’s taste could use a little modification.

Two-thirty a.m. . . . Damn!

Where the hell was she?

She usually gave him time alone after a show to write his column. Went and had a drink with friends.

Three hours, though.

Maybe she’d found a special friend. Maybe that was the reason she had missed the show tonight. If that was the case, she’d been with the bastard for . . . what? Almost seven hours now. Screwing her brains out in some midtown hotel.

Bitch! He’d settle her hash when she got home.

Whoa, big fella, he said to himself. Get real. Rachel would be much cooler than that . . . make that, had been much cooler. Her affairs were state of the art, so quietly and elegantly handled that he had been able to perfect denial. This wasn’t her style. And even if she were to throw it in his face, he wouldn’t do a thing to her. Oh, he’d want to, he’d want to bash her goddamned head in. But he would just sit there and smile and buy her bullshit explanation.

Love, he guessed you’d call it, the kind of love that will accept any insult, any injury . . . though it might be more accurate to call it pussywhipped. There were times he didn’t think he could take it anymore. Times like now when his head felt full of lightning, on the verge of exploding and setting everything around him on fire. But he always managed to contain his anger and swallow his pride, to grin and bear it, to settle for the specious currency of her lovemaking, the price she paid to live high and do what she wanted.

Jesus, he felt strange. Too many pops at the Vanguard, that was likely the problem. But maybe he was coming down with something.

He laughed.

Like maybe middle age? Like the married-to-a-chick-fifteen-years-younger-paranoid flu?

Still, he had felt better in his time. No real symptoms, just out of sorts, sluggish, dulled, some trouble concentrating.

Finish the column, he said to himself, just finish the damn thing, take two aspirin and fall out. Deal with Rachel in the morning.

Right.

Deal with her.

Bring her breakfast in bed, ask how she was feeling, and what was she doing later?

God, he loved her!

Loves her not. Loves. Loves her not.

He tore off a last mental petal and tossed the stem away. Then he returned to the desk and typed a few lines about the music onto the computer and sat considering the screen. After a moment he began to type again.

Plenty of blind men have played the Vanguard, and plenty of men have played there who’ve had other reasons to hide their eyes, working behind some miracle of modern chemistry that made them sensitive to light. I’ve never wanted to see their eyes—the fact that they were hidden told me all I need to know about them. But tonight I wanted to see. I wanted to know what the quartet was seeing, what lay behind those sunglasses starred from the white spot. Shadows, it’s said. But what sort of shadows? Shades of gray, like dogs see? Are we shadows to them, or do they see shadows where we see none? I thought if I could look into their eyes, I’d understand what caused the alto to sound like a reedy alarm being given against a crawl of background radiation, why one moment it conjured images of static red flashes amid black mountains moving, and the next brought to mind a livid blue streak pulsing in a serene darkness, a mineral moon in a granite sky.

Despite the compelling quality of the music, I couldn’t set aside my curiosity and simply listen. What was I listening to, after all? A clever parlor trick? Sleight of hand on a metaphysical level? Were these guys really playing Death’s Top Forty, or had Mr. William Dexter managed to chump the whole world and program four stiffs to make certain muscular reactions to subliminal stimuli?

The funny thing was, Goodrick thought, now he couldn’t stop listening to the damn music. In fact, certain phrases were becoming so insistent, circling round and round inside his head, he was having difficulty thinking rationally. He switched the radio on, wanting to hear something else, to get a perspective on the column.

No chance.

Afterlife was playing on the radio, too.

He was stunned, imagining some bizarre Twilight Zone circumstance, but then realized that the radio was tuned to WBAI. They must be replaying the simulcast. Pretty unusual for them to devote so much air to one story. Still, it wasn’t everyday the dead came back to life and played song stylings for your listening pleasure.

He recognized the passage.

They must have just have started the replay. Shit, the boys hadn’t even gotten warmed up yet.

Heh, heh.

He followed the serpentine track of the alto cutting across the rumble and clutter of the chords and fills behind it, a bright ribbon of sound etched through thunder and power and darkness.

A moment later he looked at the clock and was startled to discover that the moment had lasted twenty minutes.

Well, so he was a little spaced, so what? He was entitled. He’d had a hard wife . . . life. Wife. The knifing word he’d wed, the dull flesh, the syrupy blood, the pouty breasts, the painted face he’d thought was pretty. The dead music woman, the woman whose voice caused cancer, whose kisses left damp mildewed stains, whose . . .

His heart beat flabbily, his hands were cramped, his fingertips were numb, and his thoughts were a whining, glowing crack opening in a smoky sky like slow lightning. Feeling a dark red emotion too contemplative to be anger, he typed a single paragraph and then stopped to read what he had written.

The thing about this music is, it just feels right. It’s not art, it’s not beauty, it’s a meter reading on the state of the soul, of the world. It’s the bottom line of all time. A registering of creepy fundamentals, the rendering into music of the crummiest truth, the statement of some meager final tolerance, a universal alpha wave, God’s EKG, the least possible music, the absolute minimum of sound, all that’s left to say, to be, for them, for us . . . maybe that’s why it feels so damn right. It creates an option to suicide, a place where there is no great trouble, only a trickle of blood through stony flesh and the crackle of a base electric message across the brain.

Well, he thought, now there’s a waste of a paragraph. Put that into the column, and he’d be looking for work with a weekly shopping guide. Hey, who knows, it might not be so bad, writing about fabric bargains and turkey raffles and swap meets. Might put him back in touch with his roots.

He essayed a laugh and produced a gulping noise.

Damn, he felt lousy.

Not lousy, really, just . . . just sort of nothing. Like there was nothing in his head except the music. Music and black dead air. Dead life.

Dead love.

He typed a few more lines.

Maybe Dexter was right, maybe this music will change your life. It sure as hell seems to have changed mine. I feel like shit, my lady’s out with some dirtball lowlife and all I can muster by way of a reaction is mild pique. That’s a goddamn change, sure enough. I mean, maybe the effect of Afterlife’s music is to reduce the emotional volatility of our kind, to diminish us to the level of the stiffs who play it. That might explain Dexter’s peace-and-love rap, put it into a cautionary context. People who feel like I do wouldn’t have the energy for war, for polluting, for much of anything. They’d probably sit around most of the time, trying to think something, hoping for food to walk in the door . . .

Jesus, what if the music actually did buzz you like that? Tripped some chemical switch and slowly shut you down, brain cell by brain cell, until you were about three degrees below normal and as lively as a hibernating bear. What if that were true, and right this second it was being broadcast all over hell on WBAI?

This is crazy, man, he told himself, this is truly whacko.

But what if Dexter’s hearing aids had been ear plugs, what if the son of a bitch hadn’t listened to the music himself? Maybe that speech of his had been more than cautionary. What if he knew how the music would affect the audience, what if he was after turning half of everybody into zombies all in the name of a better world?

And what would be so wrong with that?

Not a thing.

Cleaner air, less war, more food to go around . . . just stack the dim bulbs in warehouses and let them vegetate, while everyone else cleaned up the mess.

Not a thing wrong with it... as long as you weren’t in the half that had listened to the music.

The light was beginning to hurt his eyes. He switched off the lamp and sat in the darkness, staring at the glowing screen. He glanced out the window. Since last he’d looked, it appeared that about three-quarters of the lights in the adjoining buildings had been darkened, making it appear that the remaining lights were some sort of weird code, spelling out a message of golden squares against a black page. He had a crawly feeling along his spine, imagining thousands of other Manhattan nighthawks growing slow and cold and sensitive to light, sitting in their dark rooms, while a whining alto serpent stung them in the brain.

The idea was ludicrous—Dexter had just been shooting off his mouth, firing off more white liberal bullshit. He was no mad scientist, no deviant little monster with a master plan.

Still, Goodrick didn’t feel much like laughing.

Maybe, he thought, he should call the police . . . call someone.

But then he’d have to get up, dial the phone, talk, and it was so much more pleasant just to sit here and listen to the background static of the universe, to the sad song of a next-to-nothing life.

He remembered how peaceful Afterlife had been, the piano man’s pale hands flowing over the keys, like white animals gliding, making a rippling track, and the horn man’s eyes rolled up, showing all white under the sunglasses, turned inward toward some pacific vision, and the bass man, fingers blurring on the strings, but his head fallen back, gaping, his eyes on the ceiling, as if keeping track of the stars.

This was really happening, he thought, he believed it was happening, he knew it, and yet he couldn’t rouse himself to panic. His hands flexed on the arms of the chair, and he swallowed, and he listened. More lights were switched off in the adjoining towers. This was really fucking happening . . . and he wasn’t afraid. As a matter of fact, he was beginning to enjoy the feeling. Like a little vacation. Just turn down the volume and response, sit back and let the ol’ brain start to mellow like aging cheese.

Wonder what Rachel would have to say?

Why, she’d be delighted! She hadn’t heard the music, after all, and she’d be happy as a goddamn clam to be one of the quick, to have him sit there and fester while she brought over strangers and let them pork her on the living room carpet.

I mean, he wouldn’t have any objection, right? Maybe dead guys liked to watch. Maybe . . . His hands started itching, smudged with city dirt. He decided that he had to wash them. It would be a chore, but he figured he’d have to move sometime. Couldn’t just sit there and shit himself.

With a mighty effort, feeling like he weighed five hundred pounds, he heaved up to his feet and shuffled toward the bathroom. It took him what seemed a couple of minutes to reach it, to fumble for the wall switch and flick it on. The light almost blinded him, and he reeled back against the wall, shading his eyes. Glints and gleams shattering off porcelain, chrome fixtures, and tiles, a shrapnel of light blowing toward his retinas. “Aw, Jesus, ” he said. “Jesus!” Then he caught sight of himself in the mirror. Pasty skin, liverish, too-red lips, bruised-looking circles around his eyes. Mr. Zombie, he said to himself, is attired in a charcoal gray suit with Mediterranean lapels by Calvin Swine, his silk rep tie is by Necktie Party, his coral shirt is made of silk and pigeon blood, his shoes are actually layers of filthy dead skin wrinkled into an alligator pattern, and his accessories are by Mr. Mort U. Ary.

At last he managed to look away.

He turned on the faucet. Music ran out along with the bright water, and when he stuck his hands under the flow, he couldn’t feel the cold water, just the gloomy notation spidering across his skin.

He jerked his hands back and stared at them, watched them dripping glittering bits of alto and drum, bass and piano. After a moment he switched off the light and stood in the cool, blessed dark, listening to the alto playing in the distance, luring his thoughts down and down into a golden crooked tunnel leading nowhere.

One thing he had to admit, having your vitality turned down to the bottom notch gave you perspective on the whole vital world. Take Rachel, now. She’d come in any minute, all bright and smiling, switching her ass, she’d toss her purse and coat somewhere, give him a perky kiss, ask how the column was going . . . and all the while her sexual engine would be cooling, ticking away the last degrees of heat like how a car engine ticks in the silence of a garage, some vile juice leaking from her. He could see it clearly, the entire spectrum of her deceit, see it without feeling either helpless rage or frustration, but rather registering it as an untenable state of affairs. Something would have to be done. That was obvious. It was surprising he’d never come to that conclusion before ... or maybe not so surprising. He’d been too agitated, too emotional. Now . . . now change was possible. He would have to talk to Rachel, to work things out differently.

Actually, he thought, a talk wouldn’t be necessary.

Just a little listening experience, and she’d get with the program.

He hated to leave the soothing darkness of the bathroom, but he felt he should finish the column . . . just to tie up loose ends. He went back into the living room and sat in front of the computer. WBAI had finished replaying the simulcast. He must have been in the john a long time. He switched off the radio so he could hear the music in his head.

I’m sitting here listening to a little night music, a reedy little whisper of melody leaking out a crack in death’s door, and you know, even though I can’t hear or think of much of anything except that shivery sliver of sound, it’s become more a virtue than a hindrance, it’s beginning to order the world in an entirely new way. I don’t have to explain it to those of you who are hearing it with me, but for the rest of you, let me shed some light on the experience. One sees . . . clearly, I suppose, is the word, yet that doesn’t cover it. One is freed from the tangles of inhibition, volatile emotion, and thus can perceive how easy it is to change one’s life, and finally, one understands that with a very few changes one can achieve a state of calm perfection. A snip here, a tuck taken there, another snip-snip, and suddenly it becomes apparent that there is nothing left to do, absolutely nothing, and one has achieved utter harmony with one’s environment.

The screen was glowing too brightly to look at. Goodrick dimmed it. Even the darkness, he realized, had its own peculiar radiance. B-zarre. He drew a deep breath ... or rather tried to, but his chest didn’t move. Cool, he thought, very cool. No moving parts. Just solid calm, white, white calm in a black, black shell, and a little bit of fixing up remaining to do. He was almost there.

Wherever there was.

A cool alto trickle of pleasure through the rumble of nights.

I cannot recommend the experience too highly. After all, there’s almost no overhead, no troublesome desires, no ugly moods, no loathesome habits .. .

A click—the front door opening, a sound that seemed to increase the brightness in the room. Footsteps, and then Rachel’s voice.

“Wade?”

He could feel her. Hot, sticky, soft. He could feel the suety weights of her breasts, the torsion of her hips, the flexing of live sinews, like music of a kind, a lewd concerto of vitality and deceit.

“There you are!” she said brightly, a streak of hot sound, and came up behind him. She leaned down, hands on his shoulders, and kissed his cheek, a serpent of brown hair coiling across his neck and onto his chest. He could hardly smell her perfume, just a hint of it. Perfect. She drenched herself in the stuff, and usually he had big trouble breathing around her, choking on the flowery reek.

“How’s the column going?” she asked, moving away.

He cut his eyes toward her. That teardrop ass sheathed in silk, that mind like a sewer running with black bile, that heart like a pound of red raw poisoned hamburger. Those cute little puppies bounding along in front.

He remembered how she’d used to wear her hair up, wear aprons, just like ol’ Wilma Flintstone, how he’d come home and pretend to be an adulterous Barney Rubble.

How they’d laughed.

Yabba dabba doo.

And now the fevered temperature of her soiled flesh brightened everything. Even the air was shining. The shadows were black glares.

“Fine,” he said. “Almost finished.”

. . . only infinite slow minutes, slow thoughts like curls of smoke, only time, only a flicker of presence, only perfect music that does not exist like smoke . . .

“So how was the Vanguard?”

He chuckled. “Didn’t you catch it on the radio?”

A pause. “No, I was busy. ”

Busy, uh-huh.

Hips thrusting up from a rumpled sheet, sleek with sweat, mouth full of tongue, breasts rolling fatly, big ass flattening.

“It was good for me,” he said.

A nervous giggle.

“Very good,” he said. “The best ever.”

He examined his feelings. All in order, all under control . . . what there was of them. A few splinters of despair, a fragment of anger, some shards of love. Not enough to matter, not enough to impair judgment.

“Are you okay? You sound funny.”

“I’m fine,” he said, feeling a creepy, secretive tingle of delight. “Want to hear the Vanguard set? I taped it.”

“Sure . . . but aren’t you sleepy? I can hear it tomorrow.”

“I’m fine.”

He switched on the recorder. The computer screen was blazing like a white sun.

. . . the crackling of a black storm, the red thread of a fire on a distant ridge, the whole world irradiated by a mystic vibration, the quickened inches of the flesh becoming cool and easy, the White Nile of the calmed mind flowing everywhere . . .

“Like it?” he asked.

She had walked over to the window and was standing facing it, gazing out at the city.

“It’s . . . curious,” she said. “I don’t know if I like it, but it’s effective.”

Was that a hint of entranced dullness in her voice? Or was it merely distraction? Open those ears wide, baby, and let that ol’ black magic take over.

. . . just listen, just let it flow in, let it fill the empty spaces in your brain with muttering, cluttering bassy blunders and a crooked wire of brassy red snake fluid, let it cozy around and coil up inside your skull, because it’s all you know, America, and all you fucking need to know, Keatsian beauty and truth wrapped up in a freaky little melody . . .

The column just couldn’t hold his interest. Who the hell was going to read it, anyway? His place was with Rachel, helping her through the rough spots of the transition, the confusion, the unsettled feelings. With difficulty, he got to his feet and walked over to Rachel. Put his hands on her hips. She tensed, then relaxed against him. Then she tensed again. He looked out over the top of her head at Manhattan. Only a few lights showing. The message growing simpler and simpler. Dot, dot, dot. Stop. Dot, dot. Stop.

Stop.

“Can we talk, Wade?”

“Listen to the music, baby.”

“No . . . really. We have to talk!”

She tried to pull away from him, but he held her, his fingers hooked on her hipbones.

“It’ll keep ’til morning,” he said.

“I don’t think so.” She turned to face him, fixed him with her intricate green eyes. “I’ve been putting this off too long already.” Her mouth opened, as if she were going to speak, but then she looked away. “I’m so sorry,” she said after a considerable pause.

He knew what was coming, and he didn’t want to hear it. Couldn’t she just wait? In a few minutes she’d begin to understand, to know what he knew. Christ, couldn’t she wait?

“Listen,” he said. “Okay? Listen to the music and then we’ll talk.”

“God, Wade! What is it with you and this dumb music?”

She started to flounce off, but he caught her by the arm.

“If you give it a chance, you’ll see what I mean,” he said. “But it takes a while. You have to give it time.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The music . . . it’s really something. It does something. ”

“Oh, God, Wade! This is important!”

She fought against his grip.

“I know,” he said, “I know it is. But just do this first. Do it for me.”

“All right, all right! If it’ll make you happy.” She heaved a sigh, made a visible effort at focusing on the music, her head tipped to the side . . . but only for a couple of seconds.

“I can’t listen,” she said. “There’s too much on my mind.”

“You’re not trying.”

“Oh, Wade,” she said, her chin quivering, a catch in her voice. “I’ve been trying, I really have. You don’t know. Please! Let’s just sit down and ...” She let out another sigh. “Please. I need to talk with you.”

He had to calm her, to let his calm generate and flow inside her. He put a hand on the back of her neck, forced her head down onto his shoulder. She struggled, but he kept up a firm pressure.

“Let me go, damn it!” she said, her voice muffled. “Let me go!” Then, after a moment: “You’re smothering me.”

He let her lift her head.

“What’s wrong with you, Wade?”

There was confusion and fright in her face, and he wanted to soothe her, to take away all her anxieties.

“Nothing’s wrong,” he said with the sedated piety of a priest. “I just want you to listen. Tomorrow morning we . . .”

“I don’t want to listen. Can’t you understand that? I don’t. Want. To listen. Now let me go. ”

“I’m doing this for you, baby. ”

“For me? Are you nuts? Let me go!”

“I can’t, baby. I just can’t.”

She tried to twist free again, but he refused to release her.

“All right, all right! I was trying to avoid a scene, but if that’s how you want it!” She tossed back her hair, glared at him defiantly. “I’m leaving ...”

He couldn’t let her say it and spoil the evening, he couldn’t let her disrupt the healing process. Without anger, without bitterness, but rather with the precision and control of someone trimming a hedge, he backhanded her, nailed her flush on the jaw with all his strength, snapping her head about. She went hard against the thick window glass, the back of her skull impacting with a sharp crack, and then she slumped to the floor, her head twisted at an improbable angle.

Snip, snip.

He stood waiting for grief and fear to flood in, but he felt only a wave of serenity as palpable as a stream of cool water, as a cool golden passage on a distant horn.

Snip.

The shape of his life was perfected.

Rachel’s, too.

Lying there, pale, lips parted, face rapt and slack, drained of lust and emotions, she was beautiful. A trickle of blood eeled from her hairline, and Goodrick realized that the pattern it made echoed the alto line exactly, that the music was leaking from her, signalling the minimal continuance of her life. She wasn’t dead, she had merely suffered a necessary reduction. He sensed the edgy crackle of her thoughts, like the intermittent popping of a fire gone to embers.

“It’s okay, baby. It’s okay.” He put an arm under her back and lifted her, supporting her about the waist. Then he hauled her over to the sofa. He helped her to sit, and sat beside her, an arm about her shoulders. Her head lolled heavily against his, the softness of her breast pressed into his arm. He could hear the music coming from her, along with the electric wrack and tumble of her thoughts. They had never been closer than they were right now, he thought. Like a couple of high school kids on a couch date. Leaning together, hearing the same music, hearts still, minds tuned to the same wavelength.

He wanted to say something, to tell her how much he loved her, but found that he could no longer speak, his throat muscles slack and useless.

Well, that was okay.

Rachel knew how he felt, anyway.

But if he could speak, he’d tell her that he’d always known they could work things out, that though they’d had their problems, they were made for each other . . .

Hey, Wilma, he’d say, yabba dabba doo.

And then they would begin to explore this new and calmer life, this purity of music and brightness.

A little too much brightness, if you asked him.

The light was growing incandescent, as if having your life ultimately simplified admitted you to a dimension of blazing whiteness. It was streaming up from everything, from the radio, the television, from Rachel’s parted lips, from every surface, whitening the air, the night, whiting out hope, truth, beauty, sadness, joy, leaving room for nothing except the music, which was swelling in volume, stifling thought, becoming a kind of thirsting presence inside him. It was sort of too bad, he said to himself, that things had to be like this, that they couldn’t have made it in the usual way, but then he guessed it was all for the best, that this way at least there was no chance of screwing anything up.

Jesus, the goddamn light was killing his eyes!

Might have known, he thought, there’d be some fly in the ointment, that perfection didn’t measure up to its rep.

He held onto Rachel tightly, whispering endearments, saying, “Baby, it’ll be okay in a minute, just lie back, just take it easy,” trying to reassure her, to help her through this part of things. He could tell the light was bothering her as well by the way she buried her face in the crook of his neck.

If this shit kept up, he thought, he was going to have to buy them both some sunglasses.

It was a sunny if none-too-warm Saturday afternoon in spring; not a bad day for a trip out, compared to some I’ve handled. The party consisted of six of our residents along with two volunteer student workers, with me along to drive the minibus and hold the spending money. We all had a song on the way down. Well, you might call it a song, but Michael kept messing it up by hooting like a seal.

Attendance wasn’t exactly heavy when we got there, and we parked with no problem. Every year the local arts center would hold its Third World Fair in aid of overseas charities, and every year almost nobody came. From our point of view it made for an ideal outing—no crowds, no pressure, none of the opposition that we’d experienced from some of the store managers in the middle of town—and for the couple of hours of pleasure that it gave, it was well worth the trouble of keeping everybody rounded up and together.

“Come on,” I said as everybody fussed and clambered their way out of the bus. “Xanadu beckons.”

What the arts center people had done was to set out stalls and tables in the grounds of their converted church in the manner of an old-fashioned village fete, except that instead of cakes and knitwear it was all banana bread and handmade leather goods. The day’s raffle prizes were . . . well, I stared at some of them for nearly ten minutes, on and off, and I still couldn’t tell you what they were. All I know is that they were handcrafted in some village somewhere and they had straw sticking out of them. I was letting the volunteers do most of the running around; they’d already started to work out who to watch and who they’d be most likely to lose. Sarah and Rosalie and Martin were never any problem, they followed when you called them and stayed put when told. David, on the other hand, had a tendency to lag behind and involve shopkeepers or stallholders in an intense and one-sided conversation. His torrent of words never had any coherence to it at all; there wasn’t an ounce of harm in him, but it could worry some people.

“How’s it going so far?” I said to Lambert, one of the student volunteers who’d been with us for less than a week. Lambert was his first name. I know, I thought the same thing the first time I heard it.

“I was thinking I’d need a chair and a whip to keep this bunch in order,” he said, ushering David along to catch up with the rest of the party over at the tombola stall. “But I reckon I’d have more use for a sheepdog and a whistle. ”

I went along with them and handed out spending money for tombola tickets and the like, and while all of that was going on I checked out some of the nearby stalls for second-hand books. All I saw was the usual kind of thing, girls’ pony annuals side-by-side with the Wireless Operator’s Handbook for 1954; so when everybody had bought and checked their tickets and nobody had won anything, I rejoined the party and announced that it was time for tea and cake inside. The two student helpers looked relieved at the prospect, which only showed how much they had to learn.

“Okay, Big Nurse,” Michael said, tugging his forelock. “You’re all right by me.” They all moved off toward the church building and left me standing there with the woman who was in charge of the stall. She was young and pale and smiling in spite of an obvious bad cold which gave a red tip to her nose. She wore a big overcoat and a woolen beret. She sniffled into a tissue and then said, “How many’s in the party? Is it seven?”

“Six,” I said.

“Where are they all from?”

“The Whittington Hospital. All long-stay residents.”

“Is that place still open? I’d heard they were closing it down.”

“They’re working on it,” I said. “But there’s still a few of us left.”

She was rummaging in one of the cardboard boxes behind the table. She said, “Are you sure it’s not seven?”

“You’re counting Lambert,” I said. “He’s one of the helpers.”

“Here, then,” she said, bringing a polythene packet out of the box. “Tell them these are consolation prizes. One each.”

‘ Thanks,” I said, studying the packet for a few moments before asking, as tactfully as I could, “Uh . . . what are they?”

“Guatemalan Worry Dolls,” she said. “They come in packets of six. They’re supposed to have special properties, I don’t know what they are. But there’s a leaflet inside explaining what to do with them.”

I thanked her again, and then went on into the old church. The tearoom was set in a corner of what had once been the nave. Everybody around the table was shouting their order at Sue, the other student volunteer, and then promptly changing his or her mind on hearing what someone else was having. Except for Michael, who was saying that he wanted a pint of lager.

“Now listen here, Michael,” I said, squeezing my way through to the table. “We’re on holy ground now. And you know that God frowns on lager louts.”

We got them all sorted out with hot tea and Cokes and cherry cake, and then I produced the little Worry Dolls and had Sue hand them out while I read the printed leaflet aloud. Then I saw that Sue had one doll left over and I looked to see who was missing; it was Martin, who’d been taken to the toilet by Lambert and who was only now returning.

“Here you go, Martin,” I said. “There’s one for you, too. It’s kind of ugly, I’m sorry. But they’re all pretty much the same.”

He took it and held it in his big fist, and he looked at it with a pleased kind of wonder like King Kong getting his first close-up squint at Fay Wray. Except that this doll was nothing much to get excited about. Barely more than the size of one joint of my little finger, it was unfinished-looking and bald on one side. It had stumpy little drawn-on fingers, no feet, and tiny nailheads for its eyes. Its clothing was a shapeless scrap of material tied around it with cotton.

“It doesn’t matter,” Martin said. “It’s the one I wanted anyway.”

I have this persistent sleep disorder that makes life difficult for me, but still I want to keep it. Boy, do I want to keep it. It goes back twenty years, to Vietnam. To Graves.

Dead bodies turn from bad to worse real fast in the jungle. You’ve got a few hours before rigor mortis makes them hard to handle, hard to stuff in a bag. By that time, they start to turn greenish, if they started out white or yellow, where you can see the skin. It’s mostly bugs by then, usually ants. Then they go to black and start to smell.

They swell up and burst.

You'd think the ants and roaches and beetles and millipedes would make short work of them after that, but they don’t. Just when they get to looking and smelling the worst, the bugs sort of lose interest, get fastidious, send out for pizza. Except for the flies. Laying eggs.

The funny thing is, unless some big animal got to it and tore it up, even after a week or so, you’ve still got something more than a skeleton, even a sort of a face. No eyes, though. Every now and then, we’d get one like that. Not too often, since soldiers usually don’t die alone and sit there for that long, but sometimes. We called them “dry ones.” Still damp underneath, of course, and inside, but kind of like a sunburned mummy otherwise.

You tell people what you do at Graves Registration, “Graves,” and it sounds like about the worst job the army has to offer. It isn’t. You just stand there all day and open body bags, figure out which parts maybe belong to which dog tag—not that it’s usually that important—sew them up more or less with a big needle, account for all the wallets and jewelry, steal the dope out of their pockets, box them up, seal the casket, do the paperwork. When you have enough boxes, you truck them out to the airfield. The first week maybe is pretty bad. But after a hundred or so, after you get used to the smell and the god-awful feel of them, you get to thinking that opening a body bag is a lot better than ending up inside one. They put Graves in safe places.

Since I’d had a couple of years of college, premed, I got some of the more interesting jobs. Captain French, who was the pathologist actually in charge of the outfit, always took me with him out into the field when he had to examine a corpse in situ, which happened only maybe once a month. I got to wear a .45 in a shoulder holster, tough guy. Never fired it, never got shot at, except the one time.

That was a hell of a time. It’s funny what gets to you, stays with you.

Usually when we had an in situ, it was a forensic matter, like an officer they suspected had been fragged or otherwise terminated by his own men. We’d take pictures and interview some people, and then Frenchy would bring the stiff back for autopsy, see whether the bullets were American or Vietnamese. (Not that that would be conclusive either way. The Vietcong stole our weapons, and our guys used the North Vietnamese AK-47s, when we could get our hands on them. More reliable than the M-16, and a better cartridge for killing. Both sides proved that over and over.) Usually Frenchy would send a report up to Division, and that would be it. Once he had to testify at a court-martial. The kid was guilty, but just got life. The officer was a real prick.

Anyhow, we got the call to come look at this in situ corpse about five in the afternoon. Frenchy tried to put it off until the next day, since if it got dark, we’d have to spend the night. The guy he was talking to was a major, though, and obviously proud of it, so it was no use arguing. I threw some C’s and beer and a couple canteens into two rucksacks that already had blankets and air mattresses tied on the bottom. Box of .45 ammo and a couple hand grenades. Went and got a jeep while Frenchy got his stuff together and made sure Doc Carter was sober enough to count the stiffs as they came in. (Doc Carter was the one supposed to be in charge, but he didn’t much care for the work.)

Drove us out to the pad, and lo and behold, there was a chopper waiting, blades idling. Should’ve started to smell a rat then. We don’t get real high priority, and it’s not easy to get a chopper to go anywhere so close to sundown. They even helped us stow our gear. Up, up and away.

I never flew enough in helicopters to make it routine. Kontum looked almost pretty in the low sun, golden red. I had to sit between two flamethrowers, though, which didn’t make me feel too secure. The door gunner was smoking. The flamethrower tanks were stenciled NO SMOKING.

We went fast and low out toward the mountains to the west. I was hoping we’d wind up at one of the big fire bases up there, figuring I’d sleep better with a few hundred men around. But no such luck. When the chopper started to slow down, the blades’ whir deepening to a whuck-whuck-whuck, there was no clearing as far as the eye could see. Thick jungle canopy everywhere. Then a wisp of purple smoke showed us a helicopter-sized hole in the leaves. The pilot brought us down an inch at a time, nicking twigs. I was very much aware of the flamethrowers. If he clipped a large branch, we’d be so much pot roast.

When we touched down, four guys in a big hurry unloaded our gear and the flamethrowers and a couple cases of ammo. They put two wounded guys and one client on board and shooed the helicopter away. Yeah, it would sort of broadcast your position. One of them told us to wait; he’d go get the major.

“I don’t like this at all,” Frenchy said.

“Me neither,” I said. “Let’s go home.”

“Any outfit that’s got a major and two flamethrowers is planning to fight a real war.” He pulled his .45 out and looked at it as if he’d never seen one before. “Which end of this do you think the bullets come out of?”

“Shit,” I advised, and rummaged through the rucksack for a beer. I gave Frenchy one, and he put it in his side pocket.

A machine gun opened up off to our right. Frenchy and I grabbed the dirt. Three grenade blasts. Somebody yelled for them to cut that out. Guy yelled back he thought he saw something. Machine gun started up again. We tried to get a little lower.

Up walks this old guy, thirties, looking annoyed. The major.

“You men get up. What’s wrong with you?” He was playin’ games.

Frenchy got up, dusting himself off. We had the only clean fatigues in twenty miles. “Captain French, Graves Registration.”

“Oh,” he said, not visibly impressed. “Secure your gear and follow me.” He drifted off like a mighty ship of the jungle. Frenchy rolled his eyes, and we hoisted our rucksacks and followed him. I wasn’t sure whether “secure your gear” meant bring your stuff or leave it behind, but Budweiser could get to be a real collector’s item in the boonies, and there were a lot of collectors out here.

We walked too far. I mean a couple hundred yards. That meant they were really spread out thin. I didn’t look forward to spending the night. The goddamned machine gun started up again. The major looked annoyed and shouted, “Sergeant, will you please control your men?”, and the sergeant told the machine gunner to shut the fuck up, and the machine gunner told the sergeant there was a fuckin’ gook out there, and then somebody popped a big one, like a Claymore, and then everybody was shooting every which way. Frenchy and I got real horizontal. I heard a bullet whip by over my head. The major was leaning against a tree, looking bored, shouting, “Cease firing, cease firing!” The shooting dwindled down like popcorn getting done. The major looked over at us and said, “Come on. While there’s still light.” He led us into a small clearing, elephant grass pretty well trampled down. I guess everybody had had his turn to look at the corpse.

It wasn’t a real gruesome body, as bodies go, but it was odd-looking, even for a dry one. Moldy, like someone had dusted flour over it. Naked and probably male, though incomplete: all the soft parts were gone. Tall; one of our Montagnard allies rather than an ethnic Vietnamese. Emaciated, dry skin taut over ribs. Probably old, though it doesn’t take long for these people to get old. Lying on its back, mouth wide open, a familiar posture. Empty eye sockets staring skyward. Arms flung out in supplication, loosely, long past rigor mortis.

Teeth chipped and filed to points, probably some Montagnard tribal custom. I’d never seen it before, but we didn’t “do” many natives.

Frenchy knelt down and reached for it, then stopped. “Checked for booby traps?” “No,” the major said. “Figure that’s your job.” Frenchy looked at me with an expression that said it was my job.

Both officers stood back a respectful distance while I felt under the corpse. Sometimes they pull the pin on a hand grenade and slip it under the body so that the body’s weight keeps the arming lever in place. You turn it over, and Tomato Surprise!

I always worry less about a hand grenade than about the various weird serpents and bugs that might enjoy living underneath a decomposing corpse. Vietnam has its share of snakes and scorpions and megapedes.

I was lucky this time; nothing but maggots. I flicked them off my hand and watched the major turn a little green. People are funny. What does he think is going to happen to him when he dies? Everything has to eat. And he was sure as hell going to die if he didn’t start keeping his head down. I remember that thought, but didn’t think of it then as a prophecy.

They came over. “What do you make of it, Doctor?”

“I don’t think we can cure him.” Frenchy was getting annoyed at this cherry bomb. “What else do you want to know?”

“Isn’t it a little . . . odd to find something like this in the middle of nowhere?” “Naw. Country’s full of corpses.” He knelt down and studied the face, wiggling the head by its chin. “We keep it up, you’ll be able to walk from the Mekong to the DMZ without stepping on anything but corpses. ”

“But he’s been castrated!”

“Birds. ” He toed the body over, busy white crawlers running from the light. “Just some old geezer who walked out into the woods naked and fell over dead. Could happen back in the World. Old people do funny things.”

“I thought maybe he’d been tortured by the VC or something.”

“God knows. It could happen.” The body eased back into its original position with a creepy creaking sound, like leather. Its mouth had closed halfway. “If you want to put ‘evidence of VC torture’ in your report, your body count, I’ll initial it.” “What do you mean by that, Captain?”

“Exactly what I said.” He kept staring at the major while he flipped a cigarette into his mouth and fired it up. Nonfilter Camels; you’d think a guy who worked with corpses all day long would be less anxious to turn into one. “I’m just trying to get along.”

“You believe I want you to falsify—”

Now, “falsify” is a strange word for a last word. The enemy had set up a heavy machine gun on the other side of the clearing, and we were the closest targets. A round struck the major in the small of his back, we found on later examination. At the time, it was just an explosion of blood and guts, and he went down with his legs flopping every which way, barfing, then loud death rattle. Frenchy was on the ground in a ball, holding his left hand, going, “Shit shit shit.” He’d lost the last joint of his little finger. Painful, but not serious enough, as it turned out, to get him back to the World.

I myself was horizontal and aspiring to be subterranean. I managed to get my pistol out and cocked, but realized I didn’t want to do anything that might draw attention to us. The machine gun was spraying back and forth over us at about knee height. Maybe they couldn’t see us; maybe they thought we were dead. I was scared shitless.

“Frenchy,” I stage-whispered, “we’ve got to get outa here.” He was trying to wrap his finger up in a standard first-aid-pack gauze bandage, much too large. “Get back to the trees.”

“After you, asshole. We wouldn’t get halfway.” He worked his pistol out of the holster, but couldn’t cock it, his left hand clamping the bandage and slippery with blood. I armed it for him and handed it back. “These are going to do a hell of a lot of good. How are you with grenades?”

“Shit. How you think I wound up in Graves?” In basic training, they’d put me on KP whenever they went out for live grenade practice. In school, I was always the last person when they chose up sides for baseball, for the same reason—though, to my knowledge, a baseball wouldn’t kill you if you couldn’t throw far enough. “I couldn’t get one halfway there. ” The tree line was about sixty yards away.

“Neither could I, with this hand.” He was a lefty.

Behind us came the “poink” sound of a sixty-millimeter mortar, and in a couple of seconds, there was a gray-smoke explosion between us and the tree line. The machine gun stopped, and somebody behind us yelled, “Add twenty!”

At the tree line, we could hear some shouting in Vietnamese, and a clanking of metal. “They’re gonna bug out,” Frenchy said. “Let’s di-di.”

We got up and ran, and somebody did fire a couple of bursts at us, probably an AK-47, but he missed, and then there were a series of poinks and a series of explosions pretty close to where the gun had been.

We rushed back to the LZ and found the command group, about the time the firing started up again. There was a first lieutenant in charge, and when things slowed down enough for us to tell him what had happened to the major, he expressed neither surprise nor grief, The man had been an observer from Battalion, and had assumed command when their captain was killed that morning. He’d take our word for it that the guy was dead—that was one thing we were trained observers in—and not send a squad out for him until the fighting had died down and it was light again.

We inherited the major’s hole, which was nice and deep, and in his rucksack found a dozen cans and jars of real food and a flask of scotch. So, as the battle raged through the night, we munched pate on Ritz crackers, pickled herring in sour-cream sauce, little Polish sausages on party rye with real French mustard. We drank all the scotch and saved the beer for breakfast.

For hours the lieutenant called in for artillery and air support, but to no avail. Later we found out that the enemy had launched coordinated attacks on all the local airfields and Special Forces camps, and every camp that held POWs. We were much lower priority.

Then, about three in the morning, Snoopy came over. Snoopy was a big C-130 cargo plane that carried nothing but ammunition and Gatling guns; they said it could fly over a football field and put a round into every square inch. Anyhow, it saturated the perimeter with fire, and the enemy stopped shooting. Frenchy and I went to sleep.

At first light, we went out to help round up the KIAs. There were only four dead, counting the major, but the major was an astounding sight, at least in context.

He looked sort of like a cadaver left over from a teaching autopsy. His shirt had been opened and his pants pulled down to his thighs, and the entire thoracic and abdominal cavities had been ripped open and emptied of everything soft, everything from esophagus to testicles, rib cage like blood-streaked fingers sticking rigid out of sagging skin, and there wasn’t a sign of any of the guts anywhere, just a lot of dried blood.

Nobody had heard anything. There was a machine-gun position not twenty yards away, and they’d been straining their ears all night. All they’d heard was flies.

Maybe an animal feeding very quietly. The body hadn’t been opened with a scalpel or a knife; the skin had been torn by teeth or claws—but seemingly systematically, throat to balls.

And the dry one was gone. Him with the pointed teeth.

There is one rational explanation. Modern warfare is partly mindfuck, and we aren’t the only ones who do it, dropping unlucky cards, invoking magic and superstition. The Vietnamese knew how squeamish Americans were, and would mutilate bodies in clever ways. They could also move very quietly. The dry one? They might have spirited him away just to fuck with us. Show what they could do under our noses.

And as for the dry one’s odd mummified appearance, the mold, there might be an explanation. I found out that the Montagnards in that area don’t bury their dead; they put them in a coffin made from a hollowed-out log and leave them aboveground. So maybe he was just the victim of a grave robber. I thought the nearest village was miles away, like twenty miles, but I could have been wrong. Or the body could have been carried that distance for some obscure purpose—maybe the VC set it out on the trail to make the Americans stop in a good place to be ambushed.

That’s probably it. But for twenty years now, several nights a week, I wake up sweating with a terrible image in my mind. I’ve gone out with a flashlight, and there it is, the dry one, scooping steaming entrails from the major’s body, tearing them with its sharp teeth, staring into my light with black empty sockets, unconcerned. I reach for my pistol, and it’s never there. The creature stands up, shiny with blood, and takes a step toward me—for a year or so, that was it; I would wake up. Then it was two steps, and then three. After twenty years it has covered half the distance and its dripping hands are raising from its sides.

The doctor gives me tranquilizers. I don’t take them. They might help me stay asleep.

The cold rain didn’t improve the looks of the housing development, one of those sprawling valleys of pastel-colored tract houses that had sprung from the loins of greedy contractors right at the end of WWII, fresh as flowers during that exultant time but now dead and faded.

I spent fifteen minutes trying to find the right address. Houses and streets formed a blinding maze of sameness.

I got lucky by taking what I feared was a wrong turn. A few minutes later I pulled my new station wagon up to the curb, got out, tugged my hat and raincoat on snugly, and then started unloading.

Usually Merle, my assistant, is on most shoots. He unloads and sets up all the lighting, unloads and sets up all the photographic umbrellas, and unloads and sets up all the electric sensors that trip the strobe lights. But Merle went on this kind of shoot once before and he said never again, “not even if you fire my ass.” He was too good an assistant to give up, so now I did these particular jobs alone.

My name is Roy Hubbard. I picked up my profession of photography in Nam, where I was on the staff of a captain whose greatest thrill was taking photos of bloody and dismembered bodies. He didn’t care if the bodies belonged to us or them just as long as they had been somehow disfigured or dismembered.

In an odd way, I suppose, being the captain’s assistant prepared me for the client I was working for today, and had been working for, on and off, for the past two months. The best-paying client I’ve ever had, I should mention here. I don’t want you to think that I take any special pleasure, or get any special kick, out of gigs like this. I don’t. But when you’ve got a family to feed, and you live in a city with as many competing photography firms as this one has, you pretty much take what’s offered you.

The air smelled of wet dark earth turning from winter to spring. Another four or five weeks and you’d see cardinals and jays sitting on the blooming green branches of trees.

The house was shabby even by the standards of the neighborhood, the brown grass littered with bright cheap forgotten plastic toys and empty Diet Pepsi cans and wild rain-sodden scraps of newspaper inserts. The small picture window to the right of the front door was taped lengthwise from some long ago crack, and the white siding ran with rust from the drain spouts. The front door was missing its top glass panel.

I knocked, ducking beneath the slight overhang of the roof to escape the rain.

The woman who answered was probably no older than twenty-five but her eyes and the sag of her shoulders said that her age should not be measured by calendar years alone.

“Mrs. Cunningham?”

“Hi,” she said, and her tiny white hands fluttered about like doves. “I didn’t get to clean the place up very good.”

“That’s fine.”

“And the two oldest kids have the flu so they’re still in their pajamas and—”

“Everything’ll be fine, Mrs. Cunningham.” When you’re a photographer who deals a lot with mothers and children, you have to learn a certain calm, doctorly manner.

She opened the door and I went inside.

The living room, and what I could see of the dining room, was basically a continuation of the front yard—a mine field of cheap toys everywhere and inexpensive furniture, of the sort you buy by the room instead of the piece, strewn with magazines and pieces of the newspaper and the odd piece of children’s clothing.

Over all was a sour smell, one part the rainsodden wood of the exterior house, one part the lunch she had just fixed, one part the house cleaning this place hadn’t had in a good long while.

The two kids with the flu, boy and girl respectively, were parked in a corner of the long, stained couch. Even from here I knew that one of them had diapers in need of changing. They showed no interest in me or my equipment. Out of dirty faces and dead blue eyes they watched one cartoon character beat another with a hammer on a TV whose sound dial was turned very near the top.

“Cindy’s in her room,” Mrs. Cunningham explained.

Her dark hair was in a pert little pony tail. The rest of her chunky self was packed into a faded blue sweat shirt and sweat pants. In high school she had probably been nice and trim. But high school was an eternity behind her now.

I carried my gear and followed her down a short hallway. We passed two messy bedrooms and a bathroom and finally we came to a door that was closed.

“Have you ever seen anybody like Cindy before?”

“I guess not, Mrs. Cunningham.”

“Well, it’s kind of shocking. Some people can’t really look at her at all. They just sort of glance at her and look away real quick. You know?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“I mean, it doesn’t offend me when people don’t want to look at her. If she wasn’t my daughter, I probably wouldn’t want to look at her, either. Being perfectly honest.

I mean.”

“I’m ready, Mrs. Cunningham.”

She watched me a moment and said, “You have kids?”

“Two little girls.”

“And they’re both fine?”

“We were lucky.”

For a moment, I thought she might cry. “You don’t know how lucky, Mr. Cunningham.”

She opened the door and we went into the bedroom.

It was a small room, painted a fresh, lively pink. The furnishings in here—the bassinet, the bureau, the rocking horse in the corner—were more expensive than the stuff in the rest of the house. And the smell was better. Johnson’s Baby Oil and Johnson’s Baby Powder are always pleasant on the nose. There was a reverence in the appointments of this room, as if the Cunninghams had consciously decided to let the yard and the rest of the house go to hell. But this room—

Mrs. Cunningham led me over to the bassinet and then said, “Are you ready?” “I’ll be fine, Mrs. Cunningham. Really.”

“Well,” she said, “here you are then.”

I went over and peered into the bassinet. The first look is always rough. But I didn’t want to upset the lady so I smiled down at her baby as if Cindy looked just like every other baby girl I’d ever seen.

I even put my finger to the baby’s belly and tickled her a little. “Hi, Cindy.” After I had finished my first three or four assignments for this particular client, I went to the library one day and spent an hour or so reading about birth defects. The ones most of us are familiar with are clubfoots and cleft palates and harelips and things like that. The treatable problems, that is. From there you work up to spina bifida and cretinism. And from there—

What I didn’t know until that day in the library is that there are literally hundreds of ways in which infants can be deformed, right up to and including the genetic curse of The Elephant Man. As soon as I started running into words such as achondroplastic dwarfism and supernumerary chromosomes, I quit reading. I had no idea what those words meant.

Nor did I have any idea of what exactly you would call Cindy’s malformation. She had only one tiny arm and that was so short that her three fingers did not quite reach her rib cage. It put me in mind of a flipper on an otter. She had two legs but only one foot and only three digits on that. But her face was the most terrible part of it all, a tiny little slit of a mouth and virtually no nose and only one good eye. The other was almond-shaped and in the right position but the eyeball itself was the deep, startling color of blood.

“We been tryin’ to keep her at home here,” Mrs. Cunningham said, “but she can be a lot of trouble. The other two kids make fun of her all the time and my husband can’t sleep right because he keeps havin’ these dreams of her smotherin’ because she don’t have much of a nose. And the neighbor kids are always tryin’ to sneak in and get a look at her.”

All the time she talked, 1 kept staring down at poor Cindy. My reaction was always the same when I saw these children. I wanted to find out who was in charge of a universe that would permit something like this and then tear his fucking throat out.

“You ready to start now?”

“Ready,” I said.

She was nice enough to help me get my equipment set up. The pictures went quickly. I shot Cindy from several angles, including several straight-on. For some reason, that’s the one the client seems to like best. Straight-on. So you can see everything.

I used VPS large format professional film and a Pentax camera because what I was doing here was essentially making many portraits of Cindy, just the way I do when I make a portrait of an important community leader.

Half an hour later, I was packed up and moving through Mrs. Cunningham’s front door.

“You tell that man—that Mr. Byerly who called—that we sure do appreciate that $2000 check he sent.”

“I’ll be sure to tell him,” I said, walking out into the rain.

“You’re gonna get wet.”

“I’ll be fine. Goodbye, Mrs. Cunningham.”

When I was five, I learned the answer to the riddle of the Pond.