Table of Contents

SUPERNATURAL NOIR

ALSO EDITED BY ELLEN DATLOW

Title Page

Supernatural Noir Copyright © 2011

| CONTENTS |

| INTRODUCTION |

| THE DINGUS |

| THE GETAWAY |

| MORTAL BAIT |

| LITTLE SHIT |

| DITCH WITCH |

| THE LAST TRIANGLE |

| THE CARRION GODS IN THEIR HEAVEN |

| THE ROMANCE |

| DEAD SISTER |

| COMFORTABLE IN HER SKIN |

| BUT FOR SCARS |

| THE BLISTERS ON MY HEART |

| THE ABSENT EYE |

| THE MALTESE UNICORN |

| DREAMER OF THE DAY |

| IN PARIS, IN THE MOUTH OF KRONOS |

ELLEN DATLOW BIOGRAPHY

ALSO EDITED BY ELLEN DATLOW

—

Blood Is Not Enough

Alien Sex

A Whisper of Blood

Little Deaths

Off Limits

Twists of the Tale: Stories of Cat Horror

Lethal Kisses

Vanishing Acts

The Dark

Inferno

The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy

Poe: 19 New Tales Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe

Lovecraft Unbound

Tails of Wonder and Imagination

Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror

Digital Domains: A Decade of Science Fiction and Fantasy

Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

The Best Horror of the Year, Volumes One through Three

—

WITH TERRI WINDLING

Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

A Wolf at the Door and Other Retold Fairy Tales

The Green Man: Tales of the Mythic Forest

Swan Sister: Fairy Tales Retold

The Faery Reel: Tales from the Twilight Realm

Salon Fantastique

The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales

Troll’s Eye View: A Book of Villainous Tales

Teeth: Vampire Tales

The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror:

First through Sixteenth Annual Collections

—

THE ADULT FAIRY TALES SERIES

Snow White, Blood Red

Black Thorn, White Rose

Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears

Black Swan, White Raven

Silver Birch, Blood Moon

Black Heart, Ivory Bones

—

WITH KELLY LINK AND GAVIN J. GRANT

The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror:

Seventeenth through Twenty-First Annual Collections

—

WITH NICK MAMATAS

Haunted Legends

| EDITED BY ELLEN DATLOW |

—

—

—

Milwaukie

Supernatural Noir Copyright © 2011 by Ellen Datlow

Introduction © 2011 by Ellen Datlow. “The Dingus” © 2011 by Gregory Frost. “The Getaway” © 2011 by Paul G. Tremblay. “Mortal Bait” © 2011 by Richard Bowes. “Little Shit” © 2011 by Melanie Tem. “Ditch Witch” © 2011 by Lucius Shepard. “The Last Triangle” © 2011 by Jeffrey Ford. “The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven” © 2011 by Laird Barron. “The Romance” © 2011 by Elizabeth Bear. “Dead Sister” © 2011 by Joe R. Lansdale. “Comfortable in Her Skin” © 2011 by Lee Thomas. “But for Scars” © 2011 by Tom Piccirilli. “The Blisters on My Heart” © 2011 by Nate Southard. “The Absent Eye” © 2011 by Brian Evenson. “The Maltese Unicorn” © 2011 by Caitlín R. Kiernan. “Dreamer of the Day” © 2011 by Nick Mamatas. “In Paris, in the Mouth of Kronos” © 2011 by John Langan.

No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the express written permission of the copyright holders. Names, characters, places, and incidents featured in this publication either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events, institutions, or locales, without satiric intent, is coincidental. Dark Horse Books® and the Dark Horse logo are registered trademarks of Dark Horse Comics, Inc. All rights reserved.

Dark Horse Books

10956 SE Main Street, Milwaukie, OR 97222

DarkHorse.com

Cover design by Aimee Danielson-Germany

Book design by Krystal Hennes

Cover illustration by Greg Ruth

Assistant Editor: Jemiah Jefferson

Special thanks to Annie Gullion

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Supernatural noir / edited by Ellen Datlow. — 1st Dark Horse Books ed.

p. cm.

ISBN-13: 978-1-59582-546-9

ISBN-10: 1-59582-546-0

1. Noir fiction, American. 2. Supernatural—Fiction. 3. Detective and mystery stories, American. 4. American fiction—21st century. I. Datlow, Ellen.

PS648.N64S86 2010

813’.087208—dc22

2010051300

First Dark Horse Books Edition: June 2011

Printed by Lake Book, Inc., Melrose Park, IL, U.S.A.

ISBN ePub: 978-1-62115-333-7

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Mike Richardson President and Publisher, Neil Hankerson Executive Vice President, Tom Weddle Chief Financial Officer, Randy Stradley Vice President of Publishing, Michael Martens Vice President of Book Trade Sales, Anita Nelson Vice President of Business Affairs, Micha Hershman Vice President of Marketing, David Scroggy Vice President of Product Development, Dale LaFountain Vice President of Information Technology, Darlene Vogel Senior Director of Print, Design, and Production, Ken Lizzi General Counsel, Davey Estrada Editorial Director, Scott Allie Senior Managing Editor, Chris Warner Senior Books Editor, Diana Schutz Executive Editor, Cary Grazzini Director of Print and Development, Lia Ribacchi Art Director, Cara Niece Director of Scheduling

| CONTENTS |

—

Introduction — Ellen Datlow

The Dingus — Gregory Frost

The Getaway — Paul G. Tremblay

Mortal Bait — Richard Bowes

Little Shit — Melanie Tem

Ditch Witch — Lucius Shepard

The Last Triangle — Jeffrey Ford

The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven — Laird Barron

The Romance — Elizabeth Bear

Dead Sister — Joe R. Lansdale

Comfortable in Her Skin — Lee Thomas

But for Scars — Tom Piccirilli

The Blisters on My Heart — Nate Southard

The Absent Eye — Brian Evenson

The Maltese Unicorn — Caitlín R. Kiernan

Dreamer of the Day — Nick Mamatas

In Paris, in the Mouth of Kronos — John Langan

| INTRODUCTION |

Ellen Datlow

—

Noir is an attitude, a stance, a way of looking at the world. Paul Duncan, in his concise book Noir Fiction, defines it as a term “used to describe any work, usually involving crime—that is notably dark, brooding, cynical, complex, and pessimistic.”

Noir fiction has been popular since right after World War II and has maintained its popularity over the years. The world of noir is thick with criminality, rife with betrayal. But the main characters in noir are not necessarily detectives or criminals, hence the hard-living guy with a chip on his shoulder, a cold affect, and something painful (and tamped down) in his past, and the sexy dame with a middle name spelling “trouble” in capital letters.

The supernatural has taken a parallel path to the present but is an older form of literature, originally known as the gothic. There have been a lot of supernatural detective stories published, but relatively few supernatural noir stories. There are a few detectives of the supernatural in this anthology, but they’re not very traditional, and they don’t always succeed in their quest for the truth—for the facts—and those who do are sometimes very sorry.

The noir form of fiction and film has been one of my favorites my whole life, as has supernatural fiction. So it seemed perfectly appropriate for me to edit an anthology of stories combining two of the genres of literature I love.

I asked for smart, edgy, complex, harder-than-nails stories of the supernatural with at least a few of the trademarks of noir. Some of the stories within feature women as the main characters, and at least one oddity only becomes a tale of detection quite late in the game. But whatever changes the evolution of mores and sensibilities have wrought on traditional noir, I think you’ll recognize the characteristics of noir and be entertained by these sixteen writers’ interpretations of the genre.

| THE DINGUS |

Gregory Frost

—

All Meyers wanted to know was how Kid Willette, that he’d personally educated in the ring his last two years as a trainer, had ended up dead—and not just dead, but beaten, mangled, and dismembered dead. It didn’t make sense. It shouldn’t have been. Nobody could put a glove on Willette unless he wanted them to. Unless he’d been bought. That was the only time he’d ever gone down. Meyers knew that better than anybody.

So when he walked into the Sixth District station to find Detective Bulbitch, he just wanted a simple explanation: Kid had been doped; Kid had been drunk; Kid had been wounded. He thought he would hear an answer that would let him go home from his night shift in the taxi, hoist a farewell shot of bourbon in commemoration, and then go to sleep untroubled by impossibilities.

He found Bulbitch at his desk, sharpening a pencil with a pocketknife. The shavings were sprinkling down onto his belly. His pink skull, graced with all of seven remaining hairs, glistened as if the pencil was giving him a very hard time.

Meyers drew the folded Inquirer from his armpit, opened and tossed it in front of the detective. Bulbitch looked up. For an instant Meyers saw fear—the same fear he glimpsed in people all the time when they first got a look at him. Then Bulbitch’s face widened into amusement. “Well, if it ain’t my most favorite pugilist. How you been keepin’?” Meyers made a nod at the paper, where the front-page headline proclaimed, “Roadhouse Horror.” It was so big that even the national story following up on Truman’s kicking MacArthur out of command had been squeezed into a sidebar.

Bulbitch didn’t bother to look. “You still driving the cab?” he asked, and when Meyers persisted in saying nothing, he folded the knife and sat upright. He brushed the shavings like crumbs off his shirt and tie. “Yeah, all right,” he said. “Okay. I figured you’d hear about it. Expect the word’s out everywhere from Jack O’Brien’s to the Christian Street Y by now.”

And so the story unfolded.

Red’s Roadhouse out in Paoli was one of those two-story places slapped together with boards that had probably started life as a barn. The main hall had sawdust on the floor and a bar that was big enough for a catered wedding party to circle. On the second floor and in the back were the rented rooms, one of which they even had the chutzpah to call a “suite.” It was to this suite that Cody Aldred and his three enforcers had retreated for some R&R after a few weeks of breaking legs. The owner of the place, amazingly enough named Red, swore up and down that he didn’t know that Cody had brought in any working girls. How was he to know the women weren’t the men’s wives? It was a question that nobody answered as they were too busy laughing, seeing as how Red employed a half-dozen chippies of his own in the second-floor rooms.

So, a little past midnight the night before, in the main room, at least two dozen people had been lounging in various states of blur. Those who still remained in the aftermath—including ever-reliable Red—agreed that no one else had come in. Nobody at all had entered Cody’s suite.

And yet, in something like five minutes, according to everyone in the place, Cody and all three of his boys had been butchered. Torn to pieces. The three chippies were unharmed, and not one of them could explain what had happened.

There’d been noise, something that howled like a gale and rattled the brass knob and shook the door on its hinges. The screams, someone said, were the screams of men being slid quick into hell. Only when it was over—and silent—did Red work up the gumption to go look. He didn’t even reach the door before the three chippies in there started their own caterwauling. Red paused with his hand on the knob, and that was when he noticed that the sawdust under his feet was turning wine dark, the stain spreading outward. The shrieking went on and on, but Red backed all the way to the bar, where he grabbed some change and hurried to the pay phone on the outside wall. Nobody else went for the door in his absence, although maybe one or two sidled on out of the roadhouse.

“Tough guy, old Red,” said Bulbitch. “Uses himself a little baseball bat with a rebar center when somebody acts up in his establishment. But even he wasn’t gonna open that door. And, Meyers, you ought to leave it closed, too.”

Meyers kept his hands shoved deep in his pockets. He rocked like a punching bag, his mind sifting the details. Bulbitch grabbed a pack of Camels off his desk, jerked one cigarette out, and put his lips around it to draw it from the pack.

“So,” Meyers finally, casually said, “Kid was with Cynthia, huh.”

“Yeah.” Bulbitch’s fingers had just scissored on the cigarette, but stopped. He scowled with the realization that he’d been played, and he stared up at Meyers without lifting his head. “And you have now got all the information you’re getting, Mr. Meyers.” He rose up, his head even with Meyers’s neck. “You listen to me now. Leave it. This isn’t Montgomery versus Mouzon at Shibe Park. Ain’t any rules here. This is somebody did something so awful we’re gonna have to invent a new word to call it. And anyway, Kid Willette ruined you in the fight biz, so what in hell is it you think you owe his ghost?”

Meyers pulled the newspaper to himself. The picture on the front page was of a pile of trash beside what might have been a body under a sheet. “Nothing,” he said. “Not a goddamned thing. I was just curious, was all.” He took the paper and left.

——

The following night, whenever he had a fare that dropped anywhere close to Third and Race Streets, Meyers trolled over to the DR Bridge and drove the Crawl. He had no idea where Cynthia lived, but he knew where she worked when she hadn’t been hired for a night and hauled out to Paoli.

The third time through the Crawl that night, one of the working girls hailed him and told him to take her to Spruce and Twenty-Second. On the way he asked if she’d happened to see Cynthia.

She told him, “Not tonight, I ain’t, on account of her pimp dragged her over to South and Second till things settle down. And you didn’t hear that from me.”

After dropping her off, Meyers cut over to South and then drove straight down toward the Delaware; about the time he crossed Broad he remembered to turn off his light.

He parked the cab and got out, then strolled north along Second. This was the turf of old money, and a hooker had to blend a bit. He knew he might not find her—she might have scored a john already. But he got lucky.

Cynthia had a little dog on a string, a Pekinese, and she was walking it up and down the sidewalk between South and Lombard. Her platinum hair all but glowed under the streetlights. Meyers wondered what she did with the dog.

As he came nearer, she paused and made a show of taking out a cigarette. He shook his head in the darkness as he drew up. “You know, I still don’t smoke,” he told her.

Her pose relaxed, and she stared hard at him. “Oh, you. I mighta known.” She pulled out a lighter and torched her own smoke. Her hand might have been shaking. “You looking for a tumble tonight, Pants-on-Fire?”

“Not really.” He held out his hand as if inviting her to dance. Between two fingers was a folded ten-dollar bill. “I need to talk to you, Cyn.”

“You think so?” Her jaw clicked, and she shifted it from side to side. Cynthia had suffered at the hands of a boyfriend, a psychopathic fighter, back in the days Meyers had been training Willette. The boyfriend had dislocated her jaw, and whoever had fixed it hadn’t set it right, with the result that it clicked sometimes when she spoke. If it hurt, she never said. Meyers had been on hand the night the boyfriend had tried to murder his opponent in the ring, and the opponent’s trainer had taken a three-legged stool to him. One leg had driven right into his brain, almost immediately making the world a significantly better place. Somehow, Cynthia had ended up going home with Meyers that night. She’d stayed till morning. Mostly, they’d gotten drunk while she tried to figure out why she was crying her eyes out over “a rotten dead bastard,” and Meyers had insisted on paying her like any john. It was some strange matter of protocol and respect that made sense only to him. In the end, as a compromise, she’d charged him for an hour of her time. He still didn’t know what to call what had happened between them.

He said, “You gotta talk to me a little bit. You were with Kid.”

She flicked the cigarette away and lit another. “I didn’t think this was no social call.”

“Who did it, Cyn?”

“Jesus, Meyers.” She drew herself up, and for a moment he felt like she was bigger than he was. “Do you know, I got bounced to three different cells in three different station houses last night? Wasn’t allowed to sleep and damn near not to take a piss, and they just asked and asked and asked, but they got nothing for their trouble. Ten-dollar bill buys you the same as they got, but it’s your money, honey.” She snatched it from between his fingers.

“Well, at least tell me the way it happened. I know you liked Willette.”

She took a deep drag. The dog pulled her a couple of feet along the sidewalk so that he could sniff around a skinny tree. “Yeah, he was nice, for a handsome boy with a wad of bills and no sense.” The dog whimpered then, and she said, “Come on, Johnny, I gotta walk.”

They strolled side by side, like two old friends in no hurry to get anywhere. “What happened is, I don’t know what happened. They was three back rooms made up that suite—suite, like they’s a big luxury hotel and not a hole you could raise pigs in. I was, you know, doing Kid. And then all of a sudden, somebody’s screaming, and I mean screaming like their legs was being sawed off. It was Cody. Kid pushed me off him, snapped up his braces and charged right outten that room. No shirt, and he was stuffin’ himself back in his trousers with one hand and picking up his gun with the other.”

“He had a gun?”

“They all had guns, honey. Anyway, he charged out of that room like a bull, and the screaming, it stopped just for a second. Couple of doors slammed. And then it was back, but it was some other voice, and some shots, and then even more screaming. Kid that time. You got no idea how awful it was. I crawled under the bed with the cockroaches and the condoms and the mouse shit, and I stayed there.

“And then it just stopped, ya know? Everything went quiet. Some time passed. I got up and put on Kid’s jacket and snuck out to see. I woulda bolted, but Dottie come out of the next room. She’d been with both of Cody’s other guys, and I don’t know whose turn it was, so don’t ask. You probably know Dottie. She stayed home tonight like I shoulda.”

“What about the third girl?”

“Her.” She shook her head at some memory. “Cody had her with him already. She just got off the boat. Acted like she only spoke enough English to order a sandwich maybe.”

“Off the boat from where?”

“Estonia—is that a place?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, then.”

The dog wrapped himself around a light pole. Meyers asked, “What are you not saying here, Cyn?”

She pulled the dog backwards to untangle him. “Dunno what. You’d seen her, you’d understand. Big, shiny eyes. Crazy eyes. Course, we all had ’em right about then, didn’t we?” She met his gaze as if his calm perplexity could answer for everything. “Cody said her name was Yuliya, like Julia but with a Y. He was gonna hand her over to Mr. Drozdov later.”

“Cody pimping for the boss?”

She shrugged. “Hey, it’s a business, isn’t it? You get paid and go where you go, same as a cabbie.” He ignored that. “And maybe with Drozdov’s reputation, ya gotta go all the way to Estonia to find somebody who don’t know any better.”

He chewed on that. “So she was with Cody the whole time?”

“Me and Dottie found her sprawled in a chair, covered in blood. Didn’t have a stitch on.”

“Then she saw what happened.”

Cynthia waved one hand around in a little circle. “What she told the cops was, the two of them was playing, you know, the way Cody liked it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“He’d tied her to the chair. I been with him once or twice. It’s like he’s tryin’ it out ’cause the boss does it. Only nobody’s afraid of being tied up by Cody, ya know?”

Meyers knew. Drozdov had dipped into the fight game awhile, hadn’t he, and more people seemed to get hurt on those occasions. Somehow Drozdov and the mob accommodated each other, kept to their respective territories. He must have had connections they appreciated. There were stories about how Drozdov liked to inflict pain, in particular how he liked to play with a boys’ wood-burning set. He’d been arrested two years back after a couple of mutilated hookers had been fished out of the Delaware. They’d been tortured, burned and scarred with an iron of some kind, and somebody had fingered Drozdov, or maybe the cops had just heard the same stories as everybody else. Either nothing could be proven or he’d bought the right people to make the charges go away. Hookers and hired muscle—nobody cared about either one.

Meyers shook himself back to the present. “Okay, so Cody tied up this dame.”

“Said he blindfolded her and the second she tugged it off, she was hit in the face with blood like out of a fire hose—and that’s how it looked, all right. Feet was still tied to the chair. We seen her and we ran into the room before we knew what was … what all the lumps on the floor was.” Her chin trembled and she clamped her lips together and shot him an accusatory glance. After a minute she went on. “Dottie started screaming, and then this doll comes around, and she starts screaming, too.”

“You were in shock, all three of you.”

“Sure.” In the streetlight glow he watched her revisit the moment, watched her face pulled by awful currents of memory. “There was four bodies in there, John. The stink. And you couldn’t look anywhere at all. You just …”

He tried but could not fathom how it had happened. How could nobody have witnessed Kid Willette’s demise?

“I’m cold,” Cynthia said abruptly. “I think I’m sick, you know? Probably oughta go home, like Dottie. Stay in bed.”

“I’ll give you a lift,” he said. “On the house.”

“You let Snuffles in there, too?”

Meyers and the weepy-eyed dog considered each other. “So long as he’s done his business,” he said. They walked over to his cab.

Somewhere around Fifteenth and Walnut, Cynthia suddenly spoke out of the back. “I know where she is, you wanna talk with her.”

He glanced in the mirror, realizing what she was saying. “Where?”

“Cost you another ten.”

He laughed that she’d got her nerve back. “And here I am giving you and your mutt a free ride.”

“Fine, take it outta my fare. You got a pen?” she asked. “I’ll write it down for you.”

He took out the pocket notebook he used as a log and opened it to the back page, handed her a pencil.

While she wrote, she said, “Cops interviewed the three of us in the same room. She gave up an address. Might be phony, but it’s up in the Fairmount. Brown Street.”

In the mirror he watched her scribble in the notebook. “Why in the name of God did Kid go to work for him?” he asked.

She looked up at the gaze of his reflection, her eyes bright and wet. “If you don’t know, then nobody does, honey. Didn’t tell me nothin’.”

He focused on the street again. Yeah, he knew. A lot of dollars and no sense.

——

Fifteen minutes later, Meyers pulled the cab into a space on Aspen Street, then strode on up the hill to Brown at the top of the ridge. This woman lived within spitting distance of Eastern State, and he wondered if she had maybe some relationship to the prison. Or maybe it was just cheap rent.

Kennealy’s Bar stood on the corner of Twenty-Second and Brown, and as he rounded the corner, a couple of women came out of the ladies’ entrance at the back. They were babbling happily at each other in Polish. He’d worked with enough Polish fighters in his time to know the sound of it. He slowed his pace and strolled up beside them. “Evening, ladies,” he said. “How are you this fine night?”

The duo laughed a little nervously, and Meyers smiled. He chatted about nothing, and they kept walking. They soon passed the address Cynthia had given him. Without appearing to look, he noticed the glow of a cigarette in a doorway across the street.

Meyers walked another block with the women, then tipped his cap and turned away. He crossed the street. After a minute he started back the way he’d come, but at double the pace now, feet hitting the pavement with the sound of someone in a hurry. The doorway lay just ahead.

He barreled along and at the last instant as he was passing the door he pivoted on one foot and punched a short jab straight into a solar plexus. The man in the shadows didn’t even have time to raise his hands in defense. He folded around the fist, spitting the cigarette past Meyers, who swung his right into the man’s jaw so hard that the body bounced off the door and against the brick around it. Meyers was ready to hit him again if necessary, but he slid down onto the step and tipped onto his side. Meyers yanked him upright and pushed his legs back into the shadows. He patted the body down and reached into the coat. He drew out a wallet—and a badge.

This was not good.

He stuffed the possessions back inside the jacket. The cop groaned. Meyers turned and walked quickly across the street.

Beside the door was a panel with three buttons, no doubt one apartment for each floor of the row house. The first two had names beside them. The third-floor label was blank. He pressed the button. Even as he did, he realized how stupid it was. She had no reason to let him in, and if she was hiding from trouble, she wasn’t going to let anybody in at all. To his surprise, though, the door buzzed and clicked on its latch, and he pushed inside before she could change her mind. He took the stairs two at a time.

The door at the top hung ajar, and he hesitated then, feeling a little too much like a fly visiting a spider. He looked at the name Cynthia had written down. “Miss Luka … chova?” he called.

“Come,” she answered as if granting him an audience.

The apartment had a short, narrow foyer that opened on a living room, with a kitchen off to the right and another doorway, presumably the bedroom, at the back. One low-wattage wall sconce—a fake candle under a little paper shade—lit the room a diseased yellow.

The woman was sitting on a ragged love seat against the wall. Her legs were crossed at the knee. She had long black hair and wore a gray dress and a jacket that had an almost military cut to it. She was smoking a long, odd-shaped cigarette, and her large eyes glittered behind the stream of smoke. She leaned forward and tapped her ash against a glass ashtray on the small white coffee table in front of her. A scattering of tarnished coins or buttons lay strewn across the tabletop. They had an oily sheen. Meyers stayed in the doorway, his hands balled into fists in his pockets, but nothing else in the place seemed to be moving.

“Who are you?” she asked in a voice that sounded like it didn’t much care. “You are not from Drozdov.”

“You’re right on that score. My name’s John Meyers. I was a friend of Kid Willette’s.”

“Who?” She seemed genuinely perplexed. What she didn’t seem was frightened. Cynthia, out in the open, had been more edgy than this. The woman seemed tired, as if she’d run out of gas well back down the road.

“He was one of the boys who worked for Cody Aldred.”

“Cody, yes. He was blond man?”

“Yeah. He was a blond man.”

“Ah. I am sorry for your loss. I did not have opportunity to know him.”

“What happened, Miss Luka … What happened at the roadhouse?”

“You are not policeman?”

“No. I drive a cab. Willette used to be a boxer. I used to be a trainer.”

“Like father and son, no?”

Meyers leaned against the jamb. “Not really, no.”

She nodded solemnly. “But you feel you have duty to his memory.”

“Something like that, I suppose.”

“I understand. I even share your sentiment. If you would like a drink, I have vodka in icebox.”

He shook off her invitation. “How’d you end up at the roadhouse?” he wanted to know.

She hissed smoke. “Circumstance. I am wanting to meet a man I’ve heard of, but to do so I find I must first entertain this Cody.”

She didn’t look at him, but off across the room as she spoke. He decided Cynthia was right—something boiled just beneath this dame’s cold surface. She spoke more English than she’d pretended, too. “So you came all the way from Estonia to work for Drozdov?”

Her look stabbed him, but just as quickly she covered herself by leaning down and tapping her cigarette on the ashtray again. “Mr. Drozdov, he promises to help young women to escape Eastern bloc. Promises job. Promises life.”

“You know he’s selling you into prostitution, right?”

Her lips curled. “Oh, yes, I know. I have no illusions.” Again she stared at him. “None. My sister, however, she did not understand this.” This time when she leaned forward, she smashed the gray cigarette into a blob.

Hair prickled on the back of Meyers’s neck. All of a sudden, he knew she’d killed Cody Aldred. Killed all of them. She must have accomplices, must have let someone in—he couldn’t figure it any other way. He also had a pretty good idea what had happened to her sister. Glancing into the doorways again, he tried to figure how it was she’d been left by herself. Maybe her pals couldn’t get near her now. “You know the police are watching your house?”

“What? They mustn’t. They mustn’t interfere!” She got to her feet. She was tall as a coat rack.

Bingo, he thought. He replied, “Interfere with what?”

A buzzer went off beside the kitchen doorway. Meyers saw the metal switch plate on the wall, but the woman walked to it and pushed the black button on the plate before he had time to react. That would be the cops, and they would not be enthusiastic about his presence. In fact, chances were, he was in trouble. “Maybe I will have that vodka,” he said and pushed past her into the kitchen. A big tin icebox stood beside the doorway. He found the vodka on its side in a small compartment directly below the half-melted block of ice. He grabbed it by the neck, hefting it. Just in case.

Footsteps came up the stairs and into the apartment. Meyers leaned back against the kitchen wall, listening. The woman said something and then a man answered, but he wasn’t speaking English. His voice sounded pleasant, even friendly. Not cops, then. He had a pretty good idea who it was instead.

There was a back door to the apartment off the kitchen, and as the voice got louder, coming deeper into the apartment, Meyers crept around the icebox and very cautiously opened the door.

A man was standing there. He and Meyers looked at each other. The man’s hands were deep in his coat pockets, and he smiled as Meyers took this in, said, “How about we go back inside, pally. Nothing down in this alley but rats.”

Meyers nodded and closed the door. When he turned around, two other men stood in the kitchen doorway. He walked back to them, and set the vodka onto the counter next to the fridge.

In the other room a third man, with thick features and a large mustache, stood beside the woman. He beamed at Meyers. “Very nice work on that copper—you have excellent skills,” he said, his accent subtle. “All we had to do was tap him to keep him dreaming a little longer.”

“Sounds like it’s not his night.”

“Indeed. Now, you will please accompany us and Yuliya.”

“Why?” she said sharply. “He’s nobody to do with this. He is wanting to buy my time.”

The man glowered at her. “You know that is a lie, my dear. What casual john eliminates police officers for a trick? Mr. Drozdov will want to hear what he says, as do I, even now.” His eyes slid back to Meyers, who tipped his head as if to say that it was all fine with him. The mustached man held Yuliya Lukachova’s coat for her. Then two of the men led the way out and down the stairs with Meyers and her sandwiched in between.

——

The Packard drove into a loading bay in a warehouse on Front Street. The air reeked of sour refinery, so the wind must have been blowing in from the west. At least it masked the fish stink of the Delaware, which wasn’t more than a quarter mile away past the warehouses. They walked by shredded cardboard cartons, broken pallets, and piles of newspaper that were probably used as packing material. Meyers wondered what they manufactured and shipped out of here.

The first time he’d ever seen Pankrat Drozdov was the night he’d fought Mickey Darren at Convention Hall. It was one of Herman Taylor’s bouts, a clean fight. He’d KO’d Darren in the seventh. At the time he didn’t know he just had three fights left before his inner ear went. That night he had only the memory of a dark-haired man with the face of a shark and an entourage of six, which included a woman on each arm. Drozdov had stood out, as he intended.

The next time was after Kid had thrown his fight. Meyers knew the Russkie had been behind it—some kind of bet had been placed. He supposed he should have credited Drozdov for picking Kid up afterward and giving him the job with Cody. Except Drozdov was the reason Kid needed the job, and the job was the reason Kid was dead.

Drozdov had some gray at his temples now, but he was still lean and hatchet faced. This close to him, Meyers realized it was the eyes that made him like a shark. They were black and empty, eyes that calculated how you were going to taste.

He sat at the end of a large, scarred wooden table surrounded by oak chairs, the kind Meyers remembered from high school. The table had leather straps nailed to the side of it at all four corners. The men sat the woman down beside Drozdov. One of them walked off into the back. The other two flanked her. Meyers wasn’t offered a seat. A new man, nibbling a toothpick, sidled up out of the shadows and stood next to him.

“Well, well,” Drozdov said. “A long time it’s been since Darren went down. How have you been, Gospodin Meyers?”

“Well enough.”

“Vasily here tells me you’ve taken up our cause against the police.” Meyers shrugged. Drozdov leaned forward and took hold of Yuliya’s chin. His fingers closed on her jaw like a vise. “What is it you want with our lovely sister here?”

“Sister?”

Drozdov chuckled. “Oh, not my sister, Meyers.”

The look in her eyes wasn’t just from pain, but fearful recognition. Drozdov was letting her know that he knew everything. He drew his hand back. She reached up to rub her face.

“I was asking her about Kid,” Meyers said. “Because she was with Cody at the roadhouse.”

“You see?” Drozdov waved at Vasily. “A simple explanation. And it’s true. You can tell when someone’s telling the truth, you know?”

Vasily’s gaze shifted to Meyers noncommittally.

The man who’d walked into the back returned carrying a large wooden box. An electric trouble light hung off the side, the cord slithering along behind it. The flat blade of a large wood-burning iron also poked up above the side of the box, looking like the tip of an enormous screwdriver. Meyers tensed. He thought of the hookers fished out of the river.

“So,” Drozdov said, “I’m inclined to send you home. Unless you would like to stay. I hope to learn something about the fate of Cody and Kid Willette, myself.” His thug set two of the irons, one small like a pencil and the larger one the size of a leek, down on the table beside him.

Yuliya Lukachova implored Meyers with her eyes and shook her head. He read the look as a plea: She must be shaking her head no, that she didn’t want him to leave her here. He couldn’t see a way out for her, though, and much as he wanted to, he couldn’t walk away. Maybe he could help her, but maybe—and the thought unsettled him—he would hear finally what he wanted to know. “Yeah,” he said, “I’ll stick around.”

“No!” she barked. Everyone looked at her, but she stared at Meyers. “You leave here. Now.” Turning to Drozdov, she said, “Get rid of him and I tell you what you want.”

Drozdov casually picked up the smaller burner, touched it to the table. After a moment a tiny curl of smoke rose from the tip. “Not ready,” he said to no one and put it down. “Yuliya, believe me when I tell you, you’re going to give me everything anyway. I have found out some interesting facts about you since my dear friend Cody Aldred met you and his fate. And you know what I’m talking about.” He waited then, to see how she would answer.

Her eyes closed as if she’d dozed off. But then she drew a deep breath, and quietly said, “Liisu.”

“There. That’s what I like—when you tell me things.”

Still not looking at him, she replied flatly, “You killed her.”

Drozdov’s bonhomie peeled away like a mask; the face of the shark returned. “Actually, I didn’t.” He raised the large iron. “This did. Would you like to know where I applied it? Ah, you know, I think I won’t tell you. But I will let you find out.”

Meyers’s body was pumping adrenaline. Unable to act, he flexed his muscles, shifted his feet. The guy next to him eyed him sidelong, alert to the pent-up energy.

Yuliya Lukachova bowed her head, and her lips moved as in prayer. Drozdov frowned with disgust. Her breathy syllables grew slowly, steadily, into words, phrases, all of them alien to Meyers. Drozdov’s brow creased. The words perplexed him as well. He looked as if he had run out of patience with her, and his hand closed around the larger iron. She snarled strange words at him, and her hand came out of her pocket and flung blackness into his face. Small objects struck him and rained down onto the table, rolling, some of them, onto the floor. Meyers recognized the odd oily coins he’d seen in her apartment.

Drozdov began to laugh. One coin had stuck to his face, and he flicked it away.

The woman started to rise, and the goons behind her grabbed her by the arms. Drozdov sneered at her and picked up the iron.

The spill of coins didn’t settle. They jittered and rolled, off the table, across the floor as if downhill. In seconds they’d collected in a single spot and begun to spin in place. Only Meyers and his guard seemed to notice. Everyone else was watching the red-hot iron.

Drozdov plucked hairs from her head and touched them to the iron’s tip. They vanished in a puff of smoke. “She wants to be on the table now,” he told the men.

A breeze erupted through the huge space. From all around, loose objects started to skitter across the floor. They flew to where the black lump spun—broken splinters from the pallets, broken glass, papers, empty bottles, cardboard and tape, baling wire and small stones, mousetraps drawn out of corners, bricks that crumbled as they reached the spot. The box on the table flipped and the tools in it shot away from Drozdov. A trash container crashed. Its contents sailed across the floor. The air howled like something alive. The cage of the trouble light collapsed, and it whipped across the room. Drozdov reacted an instant too late, and the iron snapped from his grasp and flew behind it. The cord on the light whipped like a tail, and by the time the irons joined it, the thing had formed.

It stood like a man. For hands and fingers it had pliers, screwdrivers, nails, and the wood-burning irons that smoked and glowed. Black buttons punched the crumpled material of its face into eye sockets. The woman growled, “Nuku-surnud,” and the thing lunged at the table.

Vasily had his gun out. He fired repeatedly at the creature. It rammed the arm ending in the large iron straight into his skull. Flesh and brain sizzled. Its other arm buried in the chest of the second man holding Yuliya Lukachova, spinning, bursting out the back of him. It cut up and down, splitting him in half, and then went for Drozdov. He squealed and dodged aside. Meyers’s guard had run forward to help, and Drozdov grabbed him and threw him in the creature’s path, then barreled around the table.

The creature tore the man apart like it was opening an envelope.

Yuliya Lukachova screamed at Meyers. “Get out of here, idiot!” she yelled. “It won’t stop now. Run from here!” She stood proud, tall, as pitiless as stone.

Drozdov clawed at him and Meyers punched him, smashing his nose. Drozdov fell against the table. He lunged for Meyers again, but jerked back so fiercely that his neck cracked. The creature had caught his collar. It slammed him onto the table. The large iron swept once around his throat, and suddenly his head was flying back into the depths of the warehouse while the body kicked and spasmed.

Meyers ran.

He dodged past the car and down the ramp to the open lot. He hesitated for only a second before racing toward the river—long enough to glance back and see the thing wedge itself around the Packard. It left a wet smear on the car.

He bolted across the open lot. The thing lumbered after him undeterred.

Soon he was in the grass, up a gravel slope and over the rails of the tracks that ran past the warehouses. When he looked back next he could feel the creeping edge of vertigo from his ear injury. He listened instead of looking back then, sure that swinging his head once more would tip the world over on him, and for certain if he fell the dingus would catch him.

It crashed noisily through the brush behind him, and that propelled him ahead. He thundered out onto the disused loading dock made of old wooden ties as the creature crossed the tracks and descended the bed.

Reaching the edge, Meyers dove into the blackness of the Delaware. Ships had taken on cargo here. It had to be deep enough to dive. He was depending on it.

He hit the icy water and swam for his life. The current clutched at him but he kicked furiously out into the river, refusing to be dragged under. He thought of the girls Drozdov had tortured and dumped, their corpses down below. He swam harder.

The creation of wood and glass and paper and metal leaped in after him. He heard the splash, dared a look back as it vanished into the black water. It surged up once, thrashed like a crazed animal at the surface, and then sank. This time it did not reappear, but Meyers turned and kept going, driven by the fear that any second, monstrous hands would snag him from below and pull him to his death.

He didn’t stop until he’d crawled up on the rocky Camden side. He was shivering. His breath steamed. He made himself get to his feet and go on, up and into the weeds. He stumbled and shuffled and kept moving, and maybe half a mile up found a service station by the side of the highway that was open and pumping gas. He went inside, pulled out a sodden five-dollar bill and begged the most expensive cup of coffee he’d ever had. The attendant eyed him as if debating whether to call the cops, but Meyers told him to keep the bill, and that settled that.

He held the stained mug in both shaking hands as he drank. Two other men, truck drivers, stared at him as they might have stared at a raccoon that had wandered in for a pack of Luckies. Nobody asked him what had happened, as if they knew the answer would be impossible to reconcile.

He drank a second cup before he set down the mug and headed out. The Delaware River Bridge wasn’t far. He took the footpath up alongside the cars passing from New Jersey to Pennsylvania. Every few feet he was compelled to glance back to confirm that the dingus wasn’t pursuing him. Dingus. That’s right. He laughed at the word, making a joke of the horror, and the fact that he’d escaped it.

The events rolled around in his head like marbles. The woman had created it, called it into being somehow. He’d seen it with his own eyes. Some kind of witch. She would’ve done the same at the roadhouse. Those coins, buttons, whatever they were. How many did she throw at Cody? Why was he wondering this? It was crazy. Coins that brought trash to life.

He was cold and tired, and he’d just escaped from a goddamn dingus that nobody was ever going to believe in.

Back in Philly, he rode the Third Street Trolley to Fairmount Avenue and caught the Fairmount Trolley up past the prison. He sat away at the back of both by himself. It was coming up on seven in the morning. He smelled like the river; his clothes were damp; his hair was crazy. He looked like someone who’d gotten falling-down drunk in a fountain.

He was never so happy to see his cab as that morning. Tumbling into it, he spent a moment breathing in the stale, wonderful smell of Rosario’s cigars. A fit of laughter burst from him. He pounded the steering wheel and yelled and yelled until he’d worn out the terror. Then he started the cab, drove back to the depot and parked.

Rosie would be showing up any minute for the day shift, but Meyers didn’t wait. He walked the few blocks home, stripped out of the wet clothes, and then, in dry shorts and undershirt, he opened a tin of beans, heated them up on the stove, and ate ravenously out of the pan, mopping up the red sauce with a hunk of bread. He wanted a pot of coffee and a steak.

The night’s events were bending into some warped dream. Meyers furiously scratched his cheek. He kept turning it all over in his head. Had everyone been killed? He tried to remember, but he wasn’t sure. Maybe one of the goons had escaped into the warehouse. And the woman, the witch, she’d gotten away, oh, yeah.

Getting away seemed like a very good idea. If any of Drozdov’s guys were still loose, they’d come after him to find her. Or maybe think he was part of it, in with her from the beginning. Sure. He’d been out for revenge for Kid. They’d think that, wouldn’t they? And what about the cops? The one he’d punched. He couldn’t be sure he hadn’t been recognized. And Bulbitch—imagine trying to sell him this story: a dingus that killed four armed men? Twice? Bulbitch had warned him to stay out of it, and unless the cops could buy into witches and papier-mâché monsters conjured from coins and buttons and crap, they’d hang this on him. If he hadn’t been there, hadn’t seen it himself …

San Francisco sounded awfully good. Bound to be a morning bus—get him as far as Pittsburgh before anyone knew to look for him. Arnie Slocum had moved out to Frisco to train fighters two years ago. Arnie would hand him a job right away.

As he collected his whirling thoughts, he moved about the apartment, got out his suitcase, filled it with clothes. He needed a bath, but maybe not right now. Some clothes, some cash from the bank on the way. He grabbed his tip box out of the back of the closet and tossed two rolls of bills into the suitcase under the clothes. He’d call Rosie from the bus depot, tell him to hang onto the cab, he’d be in touch to work out the details later. Rosie’d find somebody to take the night shift for now.

Winter in California, that wasn’t such a bad fate. Let everything blow over and all the monsters wash out to sea.

That was the plan congealing as he hauled the suitcase into the foyer. He paused to pull on his pea jacket, then grabbed the door handle in the same moment he heard his feet splash and looked down to see dark dirty river water pooling as it trickled in over the threshold. Meyers thought of Red in his roadhouse reaching for a brass knob, blood soaking into the sawdust below him, as the door of the apartment came off the latch.

——

GREGORY FROST is a writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction who has been publishing steadily for more than two decades.

His latest work is the fantasy duology Shadowbridge and Lord Tophet, published by Del Rey Books. His earlier novels include Fitcher’s Brides, a World Fantasy Award and International Horror Guild Award finalist for Best Novel; Tain; Lyrec; and Nebula-nominated science-fiction work The Pure Cold Light. His short-story collection Attack of the Jazz Giants and Other Stories was called by Publishers Weekly “one of the best fantasy collections of the year.”

He is one of the Fiction Writing Workshop directors at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, and has thrice taught the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop.

His website is GregoryFrost.com; his blog, Frostbites, lurks at Frostokovich.LiveJournal.com.

| THE GETAWAY |

Paul G. Tremblay

—

There’s this thing about living in Wormtown that my older brother Joe doesn’t get, or he does get it and doesn’t want to admit it. We live in Worcester, stuck like a dart in the middle of Massachusetts. This isn’t Boston. No ocean, just a river. No quaint historical bullshit that attracts tourists. Just hills, colleges, hospitals, and churches, making the urban decay look a little prettier. It’s not a good place to be, right? But Joe and the rest of the local artsy types, so desperate for the recognition they’ll never get, they pump up and promote the nickname Wormtown like it means Worcester is some legit big city that people would actually choose to live in, like Worcester is somehow important or any less damaged than it is because of a fucking name change. They brand themselves Wormtowners like they aren’t as doomed as the rest of us. So I still use their fun little nickname, but only because it makes me bust a gut laughing.

It’s five a.m. I’m sitting in the driver’s seat of Henry’s rusty Ford Explorer, tucked behind Ace’s Pawn Shop, which is on the corner of Main and Wellington. Engine on, tailgate up, interior lights off. Sitting here waiting for what’s next.

Joe always says I never think ahead, that I only use my lizard brain. Right. He’s a thirty-year-old painter who doesn’t sell any paintings. But he’s really a busboy at some restaurant over by Clark U, a trendy place that just opened and will probably close within the year. He cleans tables and gets no tips from the rich college kids and their yuppie professors. Joe has two maxed-out credit cards and lives with a between-jobs girlfriend and her five-year-old kid in a one-bedroom apartment. So much for thinking ahead, Joe. I’m the one pointed somewhere with both hands on the goddamn steering wheel.

My window is down when it doesn’t need to be. There’s nothing that I can’t see from behind the glass. Mike asked me to do it. He said pretty please before leaving the SUV and going inside.

Goddamn, it’s cold out. Didn’t wear the right clothes for this. Just a brown flannel and some black jeans, steel-toed boots laced to the ankle. No jacket, and I left my black hoodie at the apartment. If that’s my only fuckup, we’ll be okay. Winter is coming early. The black gloves don’t keep my hands warm. I take my hands off the wheel and rub them together, then I slouch into the seat.

Gunshots. A quick burst of two. I think. Then a third, after a pause long enough to be uncomfortable for everyone. The shots are all muffled, coming from inside the pawnshop, but still, somehow, they sound like city-sized phonebooks hitting the floor after a big drop. There weren’t supposed to be any gunshots. Gunshots mean big trouble. There wasn’t supposed to be any big trouble.

I suddenly have to go to the bathroom even though I did what Henry said and skipped my morning coffee. I stop breathing so loud. I can’t see anything through the pawnshop’s cage-covered windows. Still alone in the SUV and in the empty lot, I shift from park to drive. My foot is heavy on the brake, and I put my hands back on the wheel where they’re supposed to be. Ten and two.

The back door flies open and they all come running out at once, a group of shadows, arms and legs everywhere. No one shouts; they’re not dumb enough to be human alarms, but they hiss and whisper orders at me, their humble driver, subtle shit like “Go, go, go,” and “Let’s get the fuck outta here.”

Yes, sirs. I calmly roll up my window and watch them in the rearview mirror, everything happening slow and fast at the same time. They’re circus clowns going backwards, getting into the car instead of jumping out. Mike sits his heavy ass in the seat behind me, shaking the car. Greg slides in on the other side and rips off his ski mask like it’s burning him, and he throws it on the car floor. He better remember to pick that up later and dump it. Greg isn’t exactly known for paying attention to the details, for paying attention to anything. He shouldn’t be on this job at all, never mind getting to go inside. Yeah, he grew up on the same street as us, but he’s loose with everything, you know? Christ, he was just fired from his bartending gig at Irish Times because he was caught skimming on back-to-back nights. Henry was nuts to use him, but you can’t tell Henry anything. It’s his show. And Henry, his ski mask is still pulled over his ham-sized face. He throws the duffle bag in the trunk, jumps in after it. I take my foot off the brake, start inching forward, still watching Henry, and he kind of flickers in the shadows. He pulls his little jerry-rigged rope and shuts the tailgate behind him.

I roll out of the pawnshop’s rear lot, and they’re all yelling at me. Mike actually says, “Step on it, Danny.” Christ. I turn around to say something smart-ass, something to calm everyone the fuck down, because the truth of it is, them all yelling go-go-go has got me on tilt. So scared I feel it in my fingers and toes and my tightening chest. Mike cuffs me in the ear with an open hand, turns me back around. My head rings and everything goes white for a second. Mike hitting me doesn’t make me feel any better, but I manage to turn left on Main Street without crashing.

They’re trying to talk over each other in the back. My ear burns, and I’m looking all over Main Street for blue and white lights, trying to stay focused, and trying to think ahead. I yell over my shoulder, and have to yell it twice, “You assholes gonna tell me what happened?”

Mike says, “Everything was going fine, got the cage open no problem, and then the tough guy over here decides to chuck the old man over the counter.” Mike pauses, daring Greg to say something different. Greg is smart enough to keep quiet.

I can see it happening even if I wasn’t there: The three of them jumped the old man at the back door, right? Henry knew the old guy was going to be there. This was Henry’s gig. They’re always his gigs. So they jumped him and went inside, persuaded the old man to open the front counter’s cage. Henry talked to him slowly, calmly, hypnotizing the old man into believing everything would be okay. That’s what Henry is good at. When we were kids, he’d talk us into stealing cigarettes and porn mags. So Henry was telling the old man that all was well, no one would get hurt, that he was going to go behind the counter with him, go to the register and then to the jewelry and watches kept in the lockboxes. It was then that maybe the old guy said something and Greg didn’t like it, or the guy gave Greg an odd look because Greg was always getting odd looks, with his too-small-for-his-face eyes and a mouth like a cut, or maybe Greg got some wild itch he had to scratch, or he was trying to prove how tough and crazy he was to Henry, and I won’t say it to Mike right now, but it’s still Henry’s fault for taking Greg, for not planning for what Greg might do, which is throw a semiretired old man over the register counter.

Mike says, “And when the old man got up, he was holding—”

Greg cuts Mike’s bedtime story short, and yells, “Hey! Hey!”

I’m looking through the small screen of the rearview mirror again and can’t see much, only Greg turned around, kneeling, hands on top of the back seats, and he’s looking into the trunk. He moves left, right, dancing around like a dog excited to go for a ride. Or maybe he just really has to go to the bathroom like I do.

Greg says, “Where the fuck is Henry?”

Great. The kid is bat-shit crazy. Why doesn’t Henry say something to him? Maybe Henry is waiting for Greg to stick his head over the seat so he can sucker-punch him, knock loose a few Chiclets.

Greg starts bitching at me about leaving Henry, about me fucking everything up, and he bounces off the car walls and seats like one of those superballs you can get for a quarter. Now I’m yelling too, saying, “What do you mean?” and telling him to shut up, telling Mike to shut him up. No one answers me. I wish they would. Mike turns around next, but he’s too big to turn completely around. Mostly he twists in his seat and cranes his melon-sized head toward the trunk.

Mike says, “He’s not in here.” He says it like it’s the last line in a movie.

More Greg: “You left him there? You fucking left without him?”

Mike repeats himself. “He’s not in here.”

“Wait, wait, wait.” I say bullshit to all that. “Henry? Henry, quit fucking around!” No answer. He’s still fucking around, right? Hiding in the trunk, the duffle bag on top of him. It’s something he’d do. He isn’t answering me, though.

“What did you do?”

I say, “I watched Henry throw the duffle bag in, and then he climbed into the trunk. I watched him. I swear to fucking God. He used the rope, pulled the tailgate shut behind him.”

Greg jams his head between the front seats and screams into my ear, the same one that got cuffed. The ear isn’t having a good time. “You didn’t see shit. He isn’t there.”

“Enough,” Mike says, and pulls Greg back and sticks him into his seat. “We need to think this through.”

Oh goody. I’d do anything for Mike, but he’s more of a brute-squad kind of guy, more of a cuff-you-in-the-ear kind of guy, not the thinker. Thinking just makes him more mad, more likely to start breaking shit.

“Turn around, Danny. We can’t just leave him behind,” says Greg.

Everything I got inside me drops into my shoes. Goddamn

Henry. Him really not being in the car with us sinks in. Henry isn’t here and it’s my fault. But we can’t turn around. “Yeah, brilliant idea, right? We’ll just swing by, pick him up on the corner, no problem.” Then I say to Mike, “No going back, but I’m pulling over.”

“Why?”

“I want to see what’s in the trunk.”

Greg says, “We can’t leave Henry, man.”

Mike is looking at me. Or the me in the rearview mirror. Maybe that me is different somehow. Mike says, “We’re not turning around. You’re not pulling over. We can’t stop, not yet. Keep driving.”

I nod. Maybe I’m wrong and Mike always was our thinker, not Henry. Mike’s right. About everything. But if Mike told me to turn around, I would. He’s known Henry as long as I have, and we both owe him everything.

We pass hotels, the local arena, and UMass medical center. Highway ramps all around us. I should probably take one, head out of Wormtown. I put on the interior lights instead. “Is the duffle bag there?”

Greg roots around the trunk. “The shotgun and the duffle are here.” He lifts the bag up, and it sounds like a pocketful of change. “There’s a ton of blood. Oh man, what the fuck?”

“Did Henry get hit?” Never did hear the end of the pawnshop story, what happened after the old man went over the counter, and then the three gunshots.

Mike says, “The old man got off a shot, some semiautomatic piece of shit, but I didn’t think he hit Henry. I was right next to him and he didn’t say nothing about getting hit.”

I don’t ask about the other shots I heard. I see now what I didn’t see before. I say, “All right. How did the tailgate get shut, then?”

“Huh?” Mike has his ski mask off. He rubs his shaved, bald head and the thick stubble around his goatee. His eyes closed, arms folded across his chest. Greg sits back down, holding his hands out. Showing off the wet paint. It’s red.

I say, “The tailgate. How’d it shut? While I was waiting for you guys, it was open. Like it was supposed to be. So I’m thinking I didn’t see what I thought I saw, right? Henry was hit, got in the trunk, but because of the blood loss he wasn’t strong enough to pull the tailgate closed behind him, and maybe I started moving before it was totally shut and he fell out onto the parking lot. But that doesn’t seem right. How’d the tailgate get shut? I mean, what, did Henry get up after he fell out and shut it for us, tap the back twice and wish us bon voyage?”

Greg says, “Oh fuck. Nah, that ain’t it. Henry ducked his ass out and he’s gonna turn us in, pin the robbery and shooting on us. That blood came off the duffle bag, man. He didn’t get hit. That bag was sitting in the old man’s blood after Henry took care of him, right, Mike?”

Mike says, “I don’t remember. I don’t know.”

Greg says, “That’s gotta be it. He dumped the duffle bag and his shotgun back there to pin the whole thing on us while he slinks away. That fucker.”

Mike turns to look at Greg, and looks at him like a kid staring at a real ugly bug about to get squished. “If he did, I don’t blame him. It all went to shit because of you.”

Greg doesn’t fire back. He’s scared of Mike. So am I. I drive into a residential neighborhood and early morning commuters are starting to fill the roads. Maybe that’s good. We can lose ourselves in the everyday traffic.

Greg says, “So what do we do now, boys? Where we gonna go?”

We’re supposed to drive across Wormtown, into Auburn, to Henry’s old girlfriend’s farmhouse. Seemed like a good plan at the time. Now I can see all the gaping cartoon mouse holes in everything. Maybe my brother Joe was right. I don’t think ahead.

Mike says, “We’re not going to her house. We’re gonna play it like Henry is ratting us out.”

“What if he isn’t?” I say. I mean it too. Because it doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t feel like Henry. Even with Greg blowing it all up like he did, Henry wouldn’t play us. Henry has always taken care of us. He’s fifteen years older than me, and he worked at the Mobil just a few blocks from where I grew up. Him and his early gray hair. He looked like someone’s dad. He saved us a couple of times when me and Mike were walking home from school and got jumped by these kids. The second time they jumped us, he busted their heads open with a bike chain. So Henry kept us safe, took us for rides around Worcester, would sit and watch as we bent car antennas and broke windows near the Holy Cross and Clark campuses. Henry would sell us weed, and eventually, we helped him sell to our friends. By we, I mean me and Mike. My brother Joe didn’t like or trust Henry, wouldn’t come out with us ever. I tried telling him that Henry was a good guy, that he was fun, that he was one of us, but Joe didn’t care, wouldn’t listen to me. He never listened to me. Stubborn ass would pull the oldest-in-the-family bullshit about knowing what was best. So I went out with Mike and Henry, and Joe, he just stayed home with Grandma and painted his goddamn pictures while she watched TV.

Mike says, “Even if he isn’t, we still can’t show up at that farmhouse without him.”

Greg starts swearing and crying into his hands. Like that’ll help. Then he gets back into his old tune. “Fuck. What if we left him? We can’t just leave him. Maybe he’s hiding in a dumpster or something, back near the pawnshop, waiting for us to come back. Someone call him. Mike, you call him.”

“We can’t. No calls.”

Mike is right again. Especially if we left a bloody Henry in the parking lot. Cops or an ambulance would definitely have him by now. We can’t be on any phone records today.

Then it hits me, suddenly. Where we can go. Good a place as any for a half-assed getaway, or some kind of last stand.

I say, “I know where we can go, boys.”

——

The trip is going to be longer than it has to be. Need to avoid the Mass Pike and its tollbooths and cameras. So we go north on 190, then we’ll hit Route 2 West, then 91 North, then over the river and through the woods to my grandma’s old lake house in Hinsdale, Vermont, a one-cow town just outside of Brattleboro. It’s not her place anymore, but it’s no one’s place anymore, either. My great-grandmother had the tiny two-bedroom bungalow built next to a private lake. I don’t even remember the lake’s name. Something long and with a lot of consonants.

It’s not Grandma’s place anymore because her family never really owned the land. They got the place on a ninety-year lease. Grandma died two years ago, and so did the lease. The state took the land back over, wouldn’t offer a new lease, and talked about using the house and lake for some electric-company outpost or some shit like that. I didn’t take that estate meeting well and left Joe to the room and the lawyers. Two years ago is the last time I was up there with Joe. The two of us and a dumpster. Didn’t save anything.

Far as I know, nothing has been done with the rundown place, and I can’t imagine anyone would use it, completely out in the boonies with only a five-mile-long, one-lane dirt road as access to the property. I guess we’ll find out.

We’ve been on 190 for almost half an hour. Finally turning onto Route 2. We’ve left our cell phones on in case Henry decides to call or text us. Nothing. Same kind of nothing on the radio, too.

I pull my cell out of my pocket and stare at the screen. I kinda want Joe to call, too. Not that I could answer his call or anything. Not that we’ve talked to each other in a month or so. Not after the last time I called him, and he bitched me out for having no real job and still hanging around Henry.

Greg can’t be quiet for too long, so he starts in on another of his cute little rants. Mike’s gonna pop Greg’s head off like he’s a dandelion if he keeps it up. Greg says, “This is a big mistake. Going to a place that we don’t even know we can go to. Great fucking plan.”

Mike says, “It’ll work out.”

Greg rubs his head and face. “I feel like shit, and you two idiots are making it worse.” He’s lathering himself up, breathing heavy, blinking like his eyelids are hummingbirds, in total freak-out mode. He says, “How about we pull over at a rest stop, dump the shotgun and bag, instead of carrying the shit around with us? Might as well be driving with ‘we did it’ painted on the windows.”

We should think about dumping that stuff. Mike won’t have any of it, would never admit that Greg was right about anything.

Mike says, “We ain’t stopping. We’ll dump the stuff when we get up there.”

Greg closes his eyes, holds a hand to his mouth almost like he’s going to puke. “Dump it at the lake house? That’s fucking retarded!”

I say, “Easy, Greg.”

“Even if we get there, which we won’t, and find the place empty, which we fucking won’t, we’re gonna do what? Set up a happy house and then dump the shit in the lake? At the same lake we’re staying at? Nice. They’d never find that shit, right?” Greg’s voice goes higher and louder, getting shrill, his face turning red.

I turn around because I want to actually see Mike punch him instead of watching it in the rearview mirror. And then Greg’s voice cuts out, mid-rant. He looks at us, mouth open, eyes wide, and his face crumbles, slides away, like something broke, and I turn back around fast, because, that look on his face, I can’t watch that, can’t, and whatever happens next will be better seen from the safety of my rearview mirror.

So now I’m looking in that glass and I’ve lost Greg. Can’t find him. Then he’s there again, and he flickers. In and out of the mirror. He’s not moving. He flickers like a goddamn light bulb.

I turn back around. Greg’s throat is gone. It’s all just red pulp. Blood leaks out of Greg’s eyes, nose, and ears, and his mouth is open and keeps opening, a silent scream, and how does his mouth keep going like that? And his eyes opening too, the whites gone all red, then worse than a scream, this horrible whisper from his ruined throat, a hiss, a leaking of air, and he winks out. No more flickering light. Blood mists the rear passenger window and Greg’s seat, but he’s not sitting in the back seat. He’s not there. He’s gone.

Mike screams Greg’s name and kicks and punches the back of my seat, the door, the ceiling. I turn back around and I’m doing ninety, didn’t realize it, and am about to plow into the back of a tractor-trailer. I brake and swerve onto the shoulder, rumble strip, then grass and dirt, and manage to stop the SUV. Mike is still screaming. I look at the dash, the speedometer reading zero, the road, but don’t really see anything other than Greg’s face, before … before he what?

I yell to Mike: “Before he what? Before he what?”

“I don’t know, Danny. Just go. Just keep driving.”

“What?”

“Keep fucking driving. Just keep driving, keep driving …” Mike repeats himself and keeps on repeating himself.

I want to dive out of the car and run away and keep running. But I don’t. I listen to Mike. I drive. Pull off the shoulder and onto the highway. I keep driving, and try not to look into the rearview.

——

Overcast. The clouds are low and getting lower. North on I-91 and Mike sits in the middle of the back seat, filling my rearview. He watches himself. Making sure he’s still there, maybe. I’m watching him too, him holding Henry’s sawed-off shotgun. Every few minutes his hands get to shaking. The gunmetal vibrates in his hands.

I’ve tried slowing down, pulling off the road or into seemingly empty rest areas, but Mike won’t have it. He threatens to shoot me in the head if I stop. Says that I have to keep driving. Keep going. I keep going, more because I’m scared, and don’t know what else to do. I know Mike won’t shoot me, would never shoot me. Still.

“Hey, Mike.”

“Still here.”

“Need to think about this. Back at the pawnshop. Did that old guy shoot Henry?”

“It happened so fast. He jumped up with that gun pointed at us and … I can’t remember, Danny.”

“Did he shoot Greg, too?”

Mike shakes his head, and it turns into a shrug of the shoulders, and that turns into his hands shaking all over again.

I don’t ask Mike if he thinks what happened to Greg happened to Henry. I don’t ask Mike about the three gunshots I heard. I don’t ask Mike if he thinks what happened to Greg will happen to him. I know Mike’s answer to the questions. And I know mine.

We cross the border, into Vermont. Things feel kind of funny in the car. The air all wrong. Too light. Or too heavy.

Mike says, “Remember that one summer your grandma let me come up to the lake house?”

“What? Yeah, of course I remember. Grandma never called to run it by your mom and you didn’t tell your mom you were going and by the time we got back the cops had put up posters on half the telephone poles in Wormtown.”

Mike breathes through his nose. Almost sounds like a laugh. He says, “That was the first time I’d ever been in Vermont. This is my second.” I watch Mike talking in the rearview mirror. Maybe if I focus hard enough on watching him, he won’t disappear.

“You need to get out more often.”

“Henry or Greg ever go up?”

“Fuck, no. Greg would’ve burnt the place down just trying to make toast. Just you, man. And Grandma didn’t know about Henry.”

“She knew. She told me we shouldn’t be spending time with a stranger in the neighborhood that much older than us. She told me it wasn’t right.”

“When did she tell you that?”

“At the lake house. It was the only time she talked to me the whole week up there.” Mike laughs for real this time. “I loved it up there, Danny. I really did. But man, it was really weird too. Your grandmother would cook us meals and make our beds, but I remember her not talking much at all and spending most of the week by herself, smoking her Lucky Strikes on the dock, going for walks by herself, leaving us alone.”

I say, “She did the same shit back home.” Grandma fed us but would kick me and Joe out of the apartment until it got dark out, and Joe would usually go off on his own, not let me come with him. If it was raining or something and we couldn’t go out, she’d stay in her room with a book or her little black-and-white TV. Away from us.

“I’m not feeling right, Danny.” Mike rubs a forearm across his forehead. Doesn’t let go of the gun. His voice sounds smaller, farther away, coming from another room.

“We’re almost there, Mike.” I say it without thinking. I don’t know what to do.

“I know your grandma ignored us all at your home. But it was different up there, all by ourselves, away from the city and everything. Up there, I really noticed it. I got up earlier than you and your brother a couple of mornings and spied on her. She’d just stare into the mountains or into nowhere, really. It was like we weren’t even there, Danny. I’m getting fucking worried; maybe we were never there. Oh shit, Danny, I don’t feel right.”

“I’m pulling over, Mike. You relax. Keep talking to me.” We’re only ten miles from the exit, not that it matters. I slowly pull over onto the shoulder and I want to believe that if we just get out of the car, then we’ll be okay; he’ll be okay. But there were three shots.

Mike’s eyes are closed and he’s concentrating hard on something. Brow folding in on itself, upper lip shaking like an earthquake. He says, “Don’t know how she could ignore you and Joe fighting the way you did. You fought over everything. Made me feel really, I don’t know, uncomfortable. That probably sounds messed up coming from me. But, I don’t know, man, it just didn’t feel right. Wanted to kick both your heads in by the end of the vacation.”

“Wish you were here, send us a postcard, right? Mike, listen, the car is stopped. We’re going to get out. Just walk around. Get some fresh air, all right?” I say, then I lie to him: “It’ll help.”

“What was the name of the card game you guys always played?”

“Cribbage. Joe always tried cheating me on the counts.”

“Nah, you were just too dumb to count the points right and Joe would call you on it and …” Mike stops talking and slow fades out.

I scream his name and he comes back. He looks like Greg did. Bleeding from everywhere. There’s a dime-sized hole in his forehead, and it’s growing. He opens his mouth but can’t speak.

I call his name, not that his name works anymore, right? I ask him if he’s still with me. I ask him to say something.

Mike whimpers like a goddamn dog that just had his leg stepped on, and he slides across the back seat, out the door and onto the shoulder of the highway, carrying the shotgun.

I get out, sprint around the front of the car, my own ears ringing, but not because of the cuff in the head he gave me forever ago. Mike stumbles, turns around aimlessly, his feet lost in a circle. His eyes are rolled back in his head. He puts the barrels of the sawed-off in his mouth. He pulls the trigger and disappears. He disappears and pulls the trigger. Which came first? Fuck if I know, but there’s nothing left of him but a fog of blood, and the shotgun drops to the pavement after hovering in the air for an impossible second.

——

Earlier, after telling Greg and Mike my getaway plan, I was more than a little worried that I wouldn’t remember how to get to the lake house. But I remember. Every turn.

I’m not feeling so great. Don’t know if it’s because I watched Greg and Mike (and goddamn Henry, I saw him flicker in the rearview, in the dark too, you betcha) and I only think I’m feeling what they were feeling. Joe always said I was nothing but a follower. Fucking Joe.

So there’s that, and now I’m thinking about the shots I heard. Did I hear three? Or was it four? The first two came in a quick burst, one right after the other, piggybacking. Then a pause. Then a third. But it could’ve been three shots in that quick burst. And how long was that pause? I really can’t remember now.

I drive down the long dirt road. I’m the only one out here. Within sight of both lake and house there’s a small chainlink fence across the road. I plow through it and park next to the house. The white shingles have gone green with mold. The roof is missing tiles and tar and is sunken in parts. The screened porch is missing its screens. If a house falls apart in the woods and nobody’s there, will anyone miss it?

This is where I spent so many quiet and solitary summer weeks with Grandma and Joe, but not really with them. Joe painted, and she smoked and walked. This place here, this is where I learned to hate them.

In Wormtown, it was different. I had Mike and Henry. I kept busy and didn’t have time to think about how fucked up it all was. I miss Mike. Really miss him already, like he’s been gone for years instead of minutes.

Now that I’m here, I’m afraid of the house. Like if I stare at the porch too long, I might see Grandma there, sitting in a chair, looking out over the lake, seeing whatever it was she saw, and smoking those Lucky Strikes. And what if now, right now, she finally turns to look at me, to see me?

I spin the car around, and park it so I’m facing the lake instead of the house. It doesn’t help. I feel the house and Grandma somewhere behind me.

Not sure if I’ll get reception out here, but I take my cell out and call Joe. It goes through. He picks up, says, “Hey.”

“Hey.”

We don’t say anything else. We sit and stew in the quiet. It feels, I don’t know, thick. Like it always has. I’m thinking Joe maybe feels it too. What’d Mike say? Being around me and Joe was uncomfortable. Sounds about right.

He says, “What do you want now, Danny? You want to borrow money that I don’t have? Bail you out of jail again? Go call Henry if that’s it.”

“Joe,” I say. “Hey, Joe. I got something to tell you. It’s important.”

I pause and imagine what Henry, Greg, and Mike felt after they were shot, and before they disappeared. “Hey, Joe,” I say again. “Listen carefully. I’m up in Vermont, at the old place.”

I roll down my window. Goddamn, it’s cold out. Like I said earlier, didn’t wear the right clothes for this. Just a brown flannel and some black jeans, steel-toed boots laced to the ankle. Still no jacket, and I left my black hoodie at the apartment. Too bad all that stuff I left behind won’t just disappear like they did. Like I might. Three shots or four.

Winter is coming early.

“What?”

“Yeah. I’m here, by myself, Joe. The place looks fucking terrible. Rotting away to nothing.”

“What are you doing up there?”

“I don’t know. Trying to get away, I guess. Can’t, though. Doesn’t matter. I’m here, and I decided to call you. Because I’m thinking I should’ve told you something a long time ago. You listening? Here it is: Fuck you, Joe.”

I drop the phone. It disappears somewhere below me. The black gloves I’m still wearing don’t keep my hands warm. I rub my hands together, and I slouch into the seat. I’m not feeling good at all. Things getting heavy. Lake getting blurry.

The shotgun is on the seat next to me. I might pick it up, and then fade away.

——

PAUL G. TREMBLAY is the author of the novels The Little Sleep and No Sleep till Wonderland, both of which feature narcoleptic private detective Mark Genevich; the short speculative-fiction collections In the Mean Time and Compositions for the Young and Old; and the novellas City Pier: Above and Below and The Harlequin and the Train. His stories have appeared in Weird Tales, The Last Pentacle of the Sun: Writings in Support of the West Memphis Three, and Best American Fantasy 3. He served as fiction editor of ChiZine and as coeditor of Fantasy Magazine. He is also the coeditor of the Fantasy, Bandersnatch, and Phantom anthologies with Sean Wallace, and of Creatures! with John Langan. Paul is currently an advisor for the Shirley Jackson Awards. He still has no uvula, but plugs along, somehow. More information can be found at PaulTremblay.net and TheLittleSleep.com.

| MORTAL BAIT |

Richard Bowes

—

When I think of death, what comes to mind is the feel of an ice-cold knife racing up my leg like I’m a letter being sliced open. When that happens in my nightmares I wake up. In real life, just before the blade of ice reached my heart, the medic got to me where I lay in that bloody field at Aisne-Marne, tied and tightened a tourniquet above my left knee and stopped the flow before all my blood ran onto the grass.

——

That memory of my war came out of nowhere as I sat in my little office in Greenwich Village on a sunny October afternoon. It felt like someone had riffled through my memories and pulled out that one. Beings that my Irish grandmother called the Gentry and the Fair Folk walk this world and can do things like that to mortals. A shiver ran through me.

My name’s Sam Grant and I’m a private investigator. Logic and deduction come into my line of work. So do memory and intuition. My grandmother always said a sudden shiver meant someone had just stepped on the spot where your grave would be.

I could have told myself it was that or a stray draft of cold air. But I’d felt this before and knew what it meant. Some elf or fairy had shuffled my memories like a card deck. And that wasn’t supposed to happen to me.

At that moment I was writing a letter to my contact, Bertrade le Claire. It was Bertrade who had worked a magic to shield me.

An intruder would see her image, her long dark hair, beautiful wide eyes—a face that seemed like something off a movie screen. She wore a jacket of red and gold and a look that said, “Step back!” She was a law officer in the Kingdom beneath the Hill.

The letter I was writing concerned new clients, the Beyers, a couple from Menlo Park, New Jersey. He worked for an insurance company; she taught Sunday school. In my office, she talked, he studied the photos I keep on my wall, and they both clung to hope and the arms of their chairs.

They were the parents of Hilda, a junior at Rutgers and currently a missing person. Hilda, who, according to her mother, was a sensitive girl who wrote poetry, was due to graduate in June of 1952 and become an English teacher. She’d had a few boyfriends over the years, but nothing serious as far as anyone knew. Not the kind of young lady to run off on a whim. But four months back, it seemed that she had.

While his wife talked, Mr. Beyer looked at the signed photo of Mayor La Guardia with His Honor mugging for the camera as he shook my hand and thanked me for civilian services to New York City during the Second War to End All Wars.

The one where I’m getting kissed by Marshal Foch, I leave in the drawer, because some guys in this neighborhood might get the wrong idea.

But I display Douglas MacArthur, executive officer of the Rainbow Division in 1918, pinning a Distinguished Service Cross on the tunic of a soldier on crutches. I’m not that easy to make out. But Colonel MacArthur, with his soft cap at a jaunty angle and a riding crop under his arm, you’d recognize anywhere. I figure it’s got to be worth something that I served under Dugout Doug and lived to tell about it.

Mrs. Beyer told me how the New Jersey cops couldn’t find a lead on Hilda. After other private eyes struck out, my name came up.

Mrs. Beyer paused, then said, “We have heard that she could have gone to another … ,” and trailed off.

“… realm,” I offered and she nodded. “It’s possible,” I said. Mr. Beyer’s eyes widened at hearing a man who’d been decorated by MacArthur say he believed in fairies.

After that we closed the deal quickly. My initial fee is $250. It’s stiff, but I think I’m worth it, especially since I wore my good suit and a fresh starched shirt for the occasion. I didn’t promise them their daughter back. I did promise I’d do everything I could to find her. On their way out, I shook hands with him. Put my left hand on hers for reassurance.

Playing baseball as a kid, I was a switch hitter, and I could field and throw with both my right and my left. I even learned to write with either hand. These days, the left’s the only thing about me that still works the way everything once did. And I tend to save it for special occasions.

In the Beyers’ presence I walked tall. But I still have metal fragments in my knee. With the clients gone I limped a bit on my way back to the desk.

I took a sheet of paper and a plain envelope out of the desk, stuck in a high-school-yearbook photo of Hilda, scribbled a few lines about the case, dated and signed it. Then I felt the intrusion and added the P.S.: “Some stray elf or fairy just got into my memories.” On the envelope I wrote Bertrade’s full name and her address in the Kingdom.

The phone rang and a woman said, “Sam,” and nothing more. She sounded tired, flat.

“Annie.” Anne Toomey is the wife of my buddy Jim. He and I were in France together. “How’s Jimmy?” Since she was calling I knew the answer. Knew what she was going to ask.

“Not feeling great, Sam. We wondered if you could handle the Culpepper case today.”

“We” meant that Anne was doing this on her own.

“Sure I’ll do it. Nothing changed from Jim’s report yesterday, right?”

“You’re a saint, Sam.”

I picked up the phone and dialed the Up to the Minute Answering Service. Gracie was on duty. Behind her I could hear half a dozen other girls at switchboards.

“Doll,” I said, “I’ll be out for most of the afternoon. Anyone wants me, I’ll be back after six.”

Under her operator voice, Gracie talks Brooklyn like the Queen speaks English. “Be careful, you,” she said. She gets her ideas of private detectives from paperback novels.

We’ve never met. Going down in the elevator, I thought of Gracie as being maybe in her midthirties—which seems young to me now. I imagined her as blond and nicely rounded, sitting at the switchboard in a revealing silk robe.

I imagined the other Up to the Minute ladies sitting around similarly dressed. This is the privilege of a divorced and decorated veteran who once got kissed by a French field marshal.

My office is on the fifth floor. With a couple of errands to do, I crossed the vestibule and stepped outside. They tore down the elevated line before World War II, but better than a decade later, Sixth Avenue still looked naked in the October afternoon sunlight.

Across the way, the women’s prison stood like a black tower as all around it, paddy wagons unloaded their cargo. Some parents find out their daughters have run off to Fairyland. Others discover them at the Women’s House of Detention.

They use the old Jefferson Market courthouse next door to the prison as the police academy now. Sergeant Danny Hogan was showing a couple of dozen cadets in their gray-and-green uniforms how to write out parking tickets. Hogan and I did foot patrol in the old Fourteenth Precinct back when we were both starting out. He spotted me and rolled his tired eyes.

As I headed towards the subway, I saw the headlines and front pages of the afternoon papers. My old pal MacArthur had landed at Inchon a couple of weeks before. Maps of the Korean Peninsula showed black arrows pointing in all directions.

On the subway stairs, I felt something like the opposite of forgetting. A stray sprite with nothing better to do had tried to probe me. The mental image of Bertrade appeared and whatever it was immediately broke contact. I continued down the stairs, stuck a dime in the slot, and got on the uptown A train.

Early in life I heard about fairies. My mother’s mother saw leprechauns in the coal cellar and elves under the bed. Mostly I ignored her once I turned into a hard guy at the age of eight.

My mother was born and raised in the Irish stretch of Greenwich Village. She learned stenography, got a job in an import-export office, and married late. Sam Grant Senior was part Irish and not very Catholic. He had been on the road as a salesman for many years before my mother forced him to settle down. I was the only kid.

I remember my old man a little sloshed one night, telling me about having been on the night train to Cincinnati with “the crack women’s-apparel salesman on that route.” This guy was very smashed and told the old man how he’d gone down the path to Fairyland when he was young, stayed there for a few years, learned a few tricks. My father told me, “He said some of the ones there could read your mind like a book.”

I heard about the Kingdom beneath the Hill a few more times over the years. As a legend, it was slightly more believable than Santa Claus and a bit less likely than the fabled speakeasy that only served imported booze.

Then almost ten years ago, an elf almost killed me, and a couple of fairies saved my life. One of them was Bertrade.

The two errands I had were within a few blocks of each other. I rode the A train up to Penn Station and used the exit on Thirty-Third and Eighth. First I went to the General Post Office. The place is like a mail cathedral. I climbed the wide stairs, and my knee complained.

Inside under the high vaulted ceilings were big posters commemorating the pilots who had died flying mail planes thirty years back. I walked past the window that said Overseas Mail to the small window that said nothing.

It was there that I always mailed my letters to the Kingdom. The man on duty had a slight crease on the left side of his head—a veteran of something, I thought. I’d spoken to him a couple of times, asked him questions, and never got more than a shrug or a shake or nod of the head.

He took the letter. Right then, another mind touched mine, saw the image of Bertrade that I flashed, and bounced away.

The clerk’s eyes widened. He’d caught some of it, too. I took back the letter, picked up a pen, and wrote, “Urgent—contact!” on the envelope. The clerk nodded, stuck on a stamp I’d never seen before—one with a falcon in flight on it—turned, and put it down a slot behind him.

“They’ll have it by midnight,” he said in an accent I couldn’t catch. “Keep your head down. Tall elves are questing today.” Then he stepped away from the window.

I waited for a minute for him to come back. When he didn’t, I turned and walked the length of the two-block-long lobby all the way to Thirty-First Street. Maybe it was just an elf, lost and a stranger in the big city, who kept trying to bust into my head, and I was overreacting. Maybe I was lonely and wanted to see Bertrade.

Going down the stairs was tougher on my knee than going up them. I walked two blocks south on my errand for Jim and Anne. Thinking it was good to have a simple assignment to occupy my mind, I bought a late edition of the Journal American. It was four thirty-five. Some people were already heading for the subway.

Just west of Sixth Avenue on the south side of Thirtieth Street stood the Van Neiman, a nondescript office building. Across the street was a luncheonette. The only other customer was hunched over his paper; the counterman and waitress were cleaning up.

I ordered coffee, which was old and tired at this time of day, and sat where I could await the appearance of Avery J. Culpepper, CPA. His wife, Sarah, a jealous lady out in Queens, was convinced that he was stepping out on her.

Private investigators in one-man offices, like Jim Toomey and me, need to form alliances with other guys in similar circumstances. For the two of us it went beyond that. In France I was the one who got to smell the mustard gas, take out the machine-gun nest, and get my leg chewed up. For me, the real war lasted about two weeks. I got decorated and never fired another shot for Uncle Sam.

Jimmy passed unharmed right up through Armistice Day, won few medals, got to see every horror there was to see. I was hard to deal with when I got back, and my marriage to the girl I’d left behind only lasted as long as it did because she was very Catholic.

But Jim still woke up at night screaming. It drove Anne crazy and it broke her heart, but she stuck with him. For a while things got better. Lately they seemed to have gotten worse.

I thought about that as Avery J. Culpepper, wearing a light-gray suit and a dark felt hat, carrying a briefcase, and looking just like the photos his wife had supplied, came through the revolving door of the Van Neiman Building. A punctual guy, Mr. Culpepper, in his late thirties and in better shape than your average philanderer.

This was the first time I’d tailed him. Twice before Jim Toomey had followed Culpepper and ended up riding the crowded F train all the way out to Forest Hills. When Jimmy talked to me about it on the phone, even that routine assignment had him ready to jump out of his skin.

The time with me was a little different. Mr. C. came out the door and headed west along Thirtieth Street. I followed him for a few blocks through the rush-hour crowds pouring out of offices and garment factories.

He turned south on Ninth Avenue then turned west again on Twenty-Ninth. These blocks had warehouses and garages, body shops, but also some rundown apartment houses. Here, the crowds heading east for the subways were longshoremen, workers from the import-export warehouses. I stayed on the other side of the street, kept an eye on him, and watched the sky, which was getting dark and cloudy.

Culpepper crossed Tenth Avenue. A long freight train rolled over the elevated bridge halfway down the block. On the north corner of the avenue was an apartment house that must once have been a bit ritzy when this was mostly residential but now looked rundown and out of place. That’s where he turned and went in.

I glanced over as I passed to make sure he wasn’t lingering in the entryway, waiting to pop out and give me the slip. As I did, a light went on, up on the third floor. I noted it and wondered if that’s where he was. Then I continued walking till I was under the train tracks. Already the streets and sidewalks were getting empty.

At the end of the next block, beyond Twelfth Avenue, was a pier with a tired-looking freighter moored, and beyond that, the river. A string of barges, each with its little captain’s shack, went by pulled by a tug.

It was growing dark and all the warmth had been in the sun. I paused and turned like I’d forgotten something. Culpepper had not come out of the apartment house.

I crossed the street then walked back to the building he’d gone in. I spotted no one watching me. The outer door was open. One side of the entry hall was lined with mailboxes, twenty-four of them. I took out my notebook and copied the names. Many times when the husband strays it’s with someone the wife already knows.

The third floor was where I’d seen a light go on. So I gave those mailboxes my special attention. Number fifteen in particular had a recently installed nameplate. Mimi White, it read. If that’s where Culpepper was, the name seemed too good to be true.

Somebody upstairs had the news on the radio. In the first floor back, the record of “If I Knew You Were Coming, I’d Have Baked a Cake” got played a few times.

As I finished copying the names, an old lady came in carrying an armload of groceries. Like the building itself, she looked like she’d seen better days. I held the door for her, said my name was Tracy, that I was from the National Insurance Company and was looking for a Mr. Jameson, who was listed as living at this address in apartment number fifteen.

She thought for a moment, then said number fifteen had been occupied for years by an Asian couple. They had moved out, and it had stayed empty for a while. A young lady had moved in just recently. I thanked her and noted that.

As she headed upstairs, I heard footsteps and voices coming down. I went outside, crossed the street, turned, and walked slowly back towards Tenth Avenue. I noticed the third-floor light was off.

When I paused on the corner, I saw the couple. Mr. Culpepper had left his briefcase upstairs. The lady he was with wore a short camel-hair coat, a nice black hat set on her blond hair, and high heels. She looked like her name could easily be Mimi and like you could take her places.

Culpepper glanced neither left nor right as they walked to the corner and he hailed a cab. In my experience, a guy stepping out with a good-looking woman usually wants to see who else notices. Culpepper apparently was made of sterner stuff.

Walking back across town, I was amazed at how easy this assignment was and wondered why that bothered me. I’d detected no presence of the Gentry in the last couple of hours. That probably meant the one or ones I’d felt earlier had found whoever they were looking for.

Or maybe they had discovered I was right where I was supposed to be and doing what they wanted me to. Being involved with the Fair Folk had always left me feeling like a dollar chip in a very big game.

I remembered a face, elongated and a little blurred, that I’d once seen. It was a tall elf with a smile that said, “How stupid these mortals are.”

On the A train downtown, I got a seat and thought over that first time I felt an alien presence and how close I came to dying from it.

In ’41 I did undercover work, none of it strictly official. My old regiment was the Sixty-Ninth, “The Fighting Irish,” and our colonel was Donovan—the one they called “Wild Bill.” Later he was the guy who started the OSS and became the US intelligence chief in World War II. But even before that war, he had connections in Washington and an interest in foreign espionage in New York City. He got to do something about it.

The colonel remembered me. I got called down to his office on Wall Street. Right then, my marriage was over and there was a limit to how long the wedding of the police department and me was going to last.

So I got seconded to Wild Bill along with half a dozen other chewed-up old vets on the force. Most of what we investigated turned out to be minor stuff: crazy little Krauts up in Yorkville who wore Kaiser Wilhelm helmets and sent out ham-radio reports about freighters leaving the port of New York; German bars out in New Hyde Park on Long Island where the neighbors reported the patrons said “Sieg Heil,” gave the Nazi salute, and had pictures of Hitler up above the bar.

Rumors and stories about mysterious strangers came in from all over the city. We went crazy trying to keep up with them. Then we stumbled on a sleeper operation out on the Brooklyn waterfront. They were accumulating operatives, waiting for the great day when we’d be at war and they could start blowing up bridges. We nabbed a couple of them. But the rest melted away.

Right after that, a call came in one night about activity on a pier in Red Hook. We were stretched thin. I had no backup. Maybe I was tired and that made me careless. Maybe part of me wanted to use up whatever leftover life I had. But I went out there without even a driver.

The one who’d made the call must have dreamed about someone like me showing up: a dumb asshole with plenty of information about Wild Bill and his band of veterans. The gate on the street was open. A long wooden shed stood on the pier. A dim light shone in a window. I knocked. Nothing. I tried the door and it swung open. A light shone somewhere at the end of an empty two-hundred-foot shed.

I took a step inside. Someone had me by the throat and started to choke me. I spun around. No one was behind me. I drew my .38. Something knocked me flat, and the gun fell on the floor. My arm might as well have gone with it. I couldn’t feel it, couldn’t make it move.

That long face with that amused smile flickered. It wasn’t a thing I saw with my eyes. It was inside my head. And I felt every bloody memory get sucked out of me: Colonel Donovan, the other cases I’d worked on, friends and family, the telephone number of a waitress I was seeing, my batting average when I played twilight baseball as a kid in 1914.

When the one that had me found all it wanted, my lungs stopped, my lights started going out. I wasn’t coming back and thought I was stupid enough that I probably deserved to die. But to go like this pissed me off royally.

A little later I came to and found myself in a movie. The light was dim and this woman and guy, tall and slim, who looked like the stars of this movie, crouched over me, elegant and seeming to flicker slightly around the edges.

As that came into my mind, they looked at each other and smiled. I realized they knew what I saw and thought. Her name was Bertrade and his was Darnel. I knew all that without being told. Still being mostly numb probably made everything easier to accept.

“You’ll be well,” she said. There was an accent I couldn’t place. “We have taken care of your friend.”

Bertrade turned her head, and somehow I had a glimpse of what she saw. The one who’d attacked me, a tall guy with his head shaved, sat on the floor, leaned against the wall, glassy eyed. I understood they had him under a kind of spell.

“An elf on a mission,” Darnel said, “and a mutual enemy.” I knew without them speaking that they were Fey, loyal subjects of the King beneath the Hill. They were lovers, tourists in the city. Even half in shock I knew that the first was true and the second was a cover. They were operatives.

Things weren’t good between their people and the King of Elfland. My city, my world, was a kind of buffer between the two countries. Elfland favored Germany in the war going on in Europe.

They’d been watching our elfin friend when I showed up and they nailed him as he smothered me. From thinking this was a movie, I gradually decided it was a dream, and a crazy one. I tried to push myself up.

As a kid I’d thought I was right handed. Then I broke some fingers when I was maybe twelve and learned I was better with my left. Now it was like the left arm was gone. I fell back and banged my head. “I’m useless,” I said.

They touched my memories of my short, bad war and long, lousy marriage. She frowned and shook her head at my misfortunes. “I’d want you to be in any unit where I served,” he said. First Darnel and then Bertrade touched my dead arm, quietly spoke words I didn’t understand. The two said goodbye and that we’d meet again. Then they were gone, and the elf with them.

Feeling came back, and my arm was better than new. I never told anyone else what had happened that night. Walking up Sixth Avenue to the Bigelow Building ten years later, it felt like a movie and a dream.

I let myself into my office, sat down, and called the answering service. It was night now and Gracie was off duty. The young lady who answered gave me a few messages. A call about a case that was going nowhere, one from somebody who wanted to sell me things, a couple of calls from people who wanted me to pay them: all calls that were going to wait.

Then there was a message from Anne Toomey asking me to call. I looked over my case notes, scribbled a few more details, and dialed the Toomeys’ number. I let it ring three times, and three more to be sure. They didn’t have an answering service, and I decided they could wait until tomorrow.

Instead I went out and had a bite to eat, and a drink or two, at McNulty’s, where the cops go. After that I spent some more of the Beyers’ fee at Moe’s on Third Street, where the cops and the hookers go. I finally settled in at the Cedar Tavern over on University Place, because Lacy Duveen, who tends bar there, would rather talk to me than listen to painters arguing.

Lacy got his nickname for working over Tiger Shaughnessy’s face with the laces of his gloves after Tiger hit him in the groin during a preliminary bout at the Garden. He and I go back to when we played pickup ball games on the East River as kids.

We talked about the time he was catching, and all the way from deep center I tossed out a skinny Italian guy at home plate. It was twilight baseball. The light was fading, and the other guy claimed I hadn’t thrown anything, and that Lacy had pulled a ball out of his pocket. In fact I’d thrown a perfect left-handed strike right over the plate. Naturally, it ended in a fight, which we won.

——

Next morning I woke up in my room with that throw on my mind. I’ve awakened in worse shape, and there was still a bit of the morning left. I’d had a dream of Bertrade that got away from me as I grabbed for it.

Out the window I saw it was a chilly, drizzling day on Cornelia Street. When I had washed and shaved and dressed, I put on my trench coat and wide-brimmed fedora.

When I came downstairs, Mrs. Palatino, the landlady, had her door on the first floor open and her television on as usual. She liked to show off that TV. Some guy in a chef’s hat was chopping celery and talking in a French accent.

Mrs. Palatino knew my late mother from church, and that’s why she rented to me, even though I’m not Italian. She sat on the couch in her robe and slippers and looked at me long and hard. This was a woman who thought the worst of everyone and never saw anything that made her doubt her judgment.

“You decided to dress like a detective today,” she said, like she couldn’t decide why this was wrong. I nodded and tipped my hat. Mr. Palatino had died. Some years ago. I pegged him as a coward who took the easy way out.

On the way to my office I thought about Bertrade and the dream and how in it she had told me some things I couldn’t quite remember.

For some years after that encounter in Red Hook in ’41, I didn’t see Bertrade. When she reappeared, she was still beautiful and young despite being a couple of decades older than me. But she looked maybe frayed, and Darnel wasn’t with her.

They had both served in something called the War of the Elf King’s Daughter—fairies versus elves. At one time, the idea would have made me laugh. But not after Bertrade let me see a bit of what she’d gone through.

Her war occurred at about the same time as World War II and looked in some ways just as bad. Spells and magic, getting tortured to the point of suicide by hideous nightmares, seeing friends—minds invaded by the enemy—tearing out their own throats. Darnel hadn’t come back. He wasn’t dead, because the Fair Folk never die. “Lost to this world,” was how she put it, and I knew it made her sad.

For other guys, maybe it was Garbo or Hayworth they thought about. For me, ever since that first encounter, it had been Bertrade. And whenever she came back here and wanted to be with me, it was like a daydream became real.

She knew more, had seen more, than anybody I’d ever met. Something she once showed me, which I thought about as I walked to work that day, was a whole unit of trolls, ordinary soldiers like I had been, if you ignored how they looked, caught by tall elves. Rifles fell from their hands as their minds were seized and twisted by the Gentry. They fell dead, wiped out without a sound made or a shot fired.

Weapons were beneath the Fair Folk, she told me. You could walk up to one, pull out a gun, and shoot him, provided you could somehow keep all thought of what you were about to do out of your mind.

At the Bigelow Building I went into the big pharmacy on the first floor, got a few black coffees to go, and took those upstairs, drinking one on the elevator. It was still just short of noon. My energy and purpose amazed me.

The mail had already been delivered: a couple of bills, a few fliers, and a report on the whereabouts of a bum who had skipped out on the alimony and child support he owed a client of mine. All but the last got tossed in the wastebasket. I’d had nothing from Bertrade except maybe that foggy dream.

I called Up to the Minute and got Gracie. “You have six calls, including four so far this morning from Anne Toomey.” She paused. “Mr. Grant, this is none of my business. But a couple of times a man—I think it was her husband—was yelling at her. It sounded bad.”

“Thanks.” This time Jim must really have jumped the rails.

I hung up and made the call. Anne answered halfway through the first ring. She spoke softly, like she didn’t want someone to overhear. “Sam, I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you.” She did sound very sorry. “And I’m going to have to ask if you’ll do it again today. I promise I’ll get—”

“I was going to volunteer. How’s Jim? The operator says he was shouting at you.”

“He’s quiet right now. Sam, this whole case is strange. I’ve tried half a dozen times to call Mrs. Culpepper, you know, while her husband’s at work. No answer. They’re not listed in the telephone book. Jim’s the only one she’s talked to. And he’s … not good. Last night he was talking, yelling at someone who wasn’t there. And he told me someone was in his head. He’s been saying that for the last couple of days. It’s never been this bad.”

“Was it more than just shouting at you, Anne?”

She said, “This is what I’ve been afraid of.”

“Anne, I’ll be out there as fast as I can. Is there some place you can go meanwhile?”

“My aunt’s a few blocks over.”

“Go there right now. Don’t talk to Jim. Just leave. Understand?”

Anne said she did. I doubted her.

Then I made a call to Police Chaplain Dineen. Young Private Kevin Dineen had served as an altar boy in France for the famous Father Duffy of the Sixty-Ninth. He came back home and found a vocation. It was said that Father Dineen spiked the sacramental wine with gin, and he was reputed to get a bit frisky with the widows he comforted. But it was Dineen who got called when O’Malley at the Ninth Precinct, a fellow vet, was at the Thanksgiving table eating mashed potatoes with the barrel of his loaded revolver while all his children looked on. Dineen got O’Malley to hand the weapon over and had the kids smiling at the game he and their daddy were playing.

When I explained as much of the situation as he needed to know, all Dineen asked was, “Do we need an ambulance or a squad car?”

“Both,” I said. Before going downstairs to meet the chaplain, I took my service .38 out of the locked drawer, cleaned and loaded the revolver, buckled on the holster. I remembered doing the same thing in my dream the night before.

I called Up to the Minute and told Gracie I wouldn’t be back until late and not to wait up. She laughed. As I adjusted my hat and went out the door, I remembered something from the dream: Bertrade, lying among pillows and bedclothes, had looked right at me and spoken about bait and traps.

Ten minutes later, Father Dineen and I were in his brand-new Oldsmobile four-door, headed through the drizzle for Windsor Terrace in Brooklyn. His car had a siren and a flashing light. We went through red lights; traffic cops waved us on at intersections. Dineen was on the radio to a squad car out in Park Slope as we crossed the bridge with a motorcycle escort, and he cursed because we weren’t going faster.

Anger was what I felt: anger at the one who had maybe screwed around with Toomey’s mind and caused Anne pain. They weren’t even the object of this operation. I probably wasn’t either. It struck me that they and I were just bait in some game the Gentry were playing.

When we arrived at Sixteenth Street, a crowd had gathered in the drizzle, and homicide was out in force. Anne Toomey must have tried one last time to talk to Jim. She was at the bottom of the stairs. Jim had stood halfway up and shot her twice in the face before pumping two shots into his open mouth.

For the young homicide detective who took my statement, this was open-and-shut murder-suicide. The second bullet in the shooter’s mouth was nothing more than a dying twitch, not a sign someone else was operating Jim’s hand. And this young man was confident his career was not going to end like Toomey’s or mine.

What I wanted to tell him was, “The creature that had James Toomey in its control used Toomey’s own hand to eliminate him and cover its tracks.” My actual statement stuck strictly to the facts, with nothing more than a brief mention of the Culpepper case.

——

Father Dineen drove like a cop, as if he owned the road. He knew something was up, but not even a couple of belts from the ecclesiastic flask made me talk. The image of Anne and Jimmy dead in their house was burning a hole in my brain.

It was very late afternoon when the chaplain dropped me off in front of the main post office and told me to go home and get some rest.

On the ride back from the Toomeys’ I’d thought about the dream and Bertrade. Usually dreams are vivid when you wake up, but as you try to grab them they turn to nothing and disappear. This one had started out vague but seemed to linger.

Climbing the post-office stairs, I remembered another fragment. Bertrade, lovely as I’ve ever seen her, had worn nothing but a silver moon on a chain around her neck and touched my arm. So slippery was the memory that I began to wonder if this dream might have been planted in my head by an enemy.

The little unmarked window was where I always picked up mail from the Kingdom beneath the Hill. And I wanted to talk to that clerk and find out what he knew. The window was shut, which had never happened before.

The guy at the overseas window didn’t know what I was talking about when I asked about the window next door. He said this wasn’t his regular assignment, and that I should try the next day.

Walking slowly across that lobby, I thought of the ice-cold knife racing up my leg like I was a letter being sliced open, and I felt real small and insignificant. But I started to put things into some kind of order.

The elves had set up Jim and Anne Toomey as bait for me. First they invented the Culpepper job and hired Jim, who needed the work. Then they made sure he couldn’t function, and put it in his head and Anne’s that they should ask me. And I was the bait to lure Bertrade.

Taking my seat in the coffee shop across from the Van Neiman Building, it occurred to me that maybe on our first encounter Bertrade and Darnel had used me as bait to catch the elf. Knowing the ways of the Gentry, that seemed quite possible.

The waitress and counterman didn’t notice that I was a repeat customer. I figured that the elves wouldn’t probe as long as I was doing what they wanted. They didn’t have to worry. I was coming after them.

That they were keeping me in play, letting me stay alive, could mean they’d made Bertrade aware that I was in danger. And it would also mean they weren’t sure where she was or what she was going to do. That Bertrade was avoiding direct contact with me was a sign that she relied on me to play my part, walk into the trap and ensnare the trapper. It would also mean she knew that the spell that shielded my thoughts could be broken by the enemy.

Just then, Culpepper, whoever he was, came through the doors of the Van Neiman Building with his briefcase. I got up and followed him. It went like before. He walked west, and I followed on the other side of the street. I wondered how much Culpepper knew. What promises and rewards had they made to him?

Seeing him go through this routine reminded me of how in France, just before we went into action, I saw a couple of German prisoners, starving, flea-bitten men, cramming army rations into their mouths while our guys stared like they were exhibits in a zoo. That sight took away all of the enemy’s mystery.

I stopped on the east side of Tenth Avenue, watched from a doorway when Culpepper crossed and went into the apartment building. As I waited, a light went on in the third-floor window.

A rhythmic pounding came from over on the river. It sounded like they were driving piles. The earlier drizzle had become rain. Workers headed home at a brisk pace. The streets were getting empty.

Stakeout work is fine, outdoor labor, good for the health and spirits. But I’d noticed a bar on the corner with a clear view of the apartment house.

It was a Wednesday night, with a moderate-sized crowd and a cowboy movie on the TV above the bar. The guys drinking spotted me for a cop and looked away when I stepped inside. I ordered a rye and water and kept my eye on the apartment house doorway.

I was pretty sure they wouldn’t leave without me. There was a good chance I’d be dead before long. But death hadn’t come yet, and I’d given it several very good chances.

In the dark, a long freight train ran south on the elevated tracks. When I looked further west beyond Twelfth Avenue, the pier at the end of the street seemed lit up.

About the time I began to wonder if I was crazy and Culpepper really was just a guy stepping out on his wife, I saw through someone else’s eyes. They were moving uptown along the river’s edge. I saw a pier and a big yacht all lit up. Suddenly that disappeared. Was this skirmishing between elves and fairies?

Like it was a signal, the one called Culpepper came out the door of the apartment house. He carried an umbrella and held it over Mimi White. The game was on. They headed west, and I followed them.

A good detective recognizes a pattern. Once more, I was heading onto a pier at night to encounter the Gentry.

As we crossed Eleventh Avenue, a big ocean liner sailed up the Hudson with every light onboard shining. It looked like a floating city block. The tugboats guiding it honked at each other. I saw the liner, and then, for an instant, I saw it again from the viewpoint of someone down at the river. The pile driving paused briefly, and all was as quiet as Manhattan ever gets.

Approaching Twelfth Avenue, I saw that the old freighter from the day before was gone. In its place was the oceangoing yacht with lights on deck that I’d seen through someone else’s eyes.

At certain moments, time gets fluid. At Aisne-Marne, the platoon was pinned by machine-gun fire. The gunners had waited until we were within a hundred yards. The lieutenant was dead. Someone was screaming. Later I found out the whole company was pinned; the battalion had gone to earth. The minutes we were down went by like hours.

The machine guns fired a short burst right over me; fired a burst to my left, another further along. I knew that it was ratlike little guys going through the motions. It would be a bit before they’d come back my way.

I pulled a pin with my right hand. I jumped up with the grenade in my left. The Krauts were firing from a gap in an embankment a hundred yards away. I’d hurled dummy grenades in practice, knew their weight. I judged the arc and tossed. “Get down,” someone yelled. The grenade hit the side of the gap, bounced in the air.

As I dove for cover, I was knocked flat, and a cold knife raced up my leg. A muffled bang sounded, a man screamed, another cried out, the machine-gun fire stopped, and my war was over.

Crossing Twelfth Avenue, walking into the trap, I told myself that all I needed was a few seconds of clarity, like I’d had thirty-two years before.

Maybe Bertrade had given me up. But I was going to deal out payment for Jim and Anne. All I needed was those few seconds.

Culpepper and Mimi stopped just inside the gates at the end of the pier. A couple of hundred feet beyond them, the yacht had lights on the gangplank, atop the cabins, shining through the portholes.

A figure, tall and thin, wavering slightly, stood on the deck leaning on the rail. He was faced away from me. But I could recognize one of the Fair Folk, whether elf or fairy. He was too far away to hit with a handgun. I wished I had a grenade.

A scream in the night came from downriver. At almost the same moment the pile driver started up out in the water. Distant sirens sounded, but they were on fire trucks and going the wrong way. The Fair Folk didn’t want any human interference.

A breeze blew the rain in my face as I crossed the avenue with my raincoat open. My arms were at my side. The .38 in my hand was hidden by the coat flapping.

The ones I knew as Culpepper and Mimi faced me as I approached. I was going to tell them to get out of my way before they got hurt.

But their eyes were blank. For an instant I saw myself from their viewpoint as I walked past them. Someone was looking out through them like they were TV cameras. Someone was in my head.

Figures moved in the darkness beyond the lights. Fair Folk were out there. For an instant I caught an image of long, thin figures on a small powerboat.

The lights on the yacht flickered for a moment. The tall elf on the deck looked my way. He seemed amused. Bertrade’s image telling intruders to stay out got knocked aside like it was cardboard. He was in my mind. My feet moved without my willing them and my body shambled forward to the foot of the gangplank.

I saw myself through his eyes, an old man stunned and confused in a trench coat and battered hat, staring up at him. He sent that image out in all directions. The elf knew I had the gun and knew I was in his power.

Then the lights flickered fast. Out in the dark amid the noise of the pile drivers there were cries and gunshots. Suddenly Bertrade was inside me: “My left-hand man!”

Under a spell my arm moved. The elf couldn’t stop it. That left arm was magic. He blocked my breath and sent a bolt of pain through my head, stopped my eyes from seeing. But the arm rose. I couldn’t see him, but I fired. Nothing. My head spun.

For an instant my sight cleared. I saw the elf. I squeezed the trigger as my sight went dark. Nothing happened.

Blind, I fired to the left and there was a scream. My breath came back. My sight returned. Up the gangplank, the elf grasped his shoulder. I felt him stop my heart, but I blew his jaw off and it started again. I shot him in the head before I passed out.

——

The morning was long gone and done when I came home. Mrs. Palatino had actually turned off her television, put on street clothes, and was headed out to Thursday-afternoon bingo at Our Lady of Pompeii Church. She gave me a look full of disapproval and shook her head.

I needed to go upstairs and change my clothes, stop around at the office. In my jacket pocket was a letter to the Beyers from Hilda, saying she was alive and well and thinking of them. Bertrade had brought that with her from the Kingdom beneath the Hill. Our business relationship was still intact.

We’d parted half an hour before. That night was spent at the Plaza: part of our reward for smashing the elf and his espionage crew. After he went down, three of his fellow Gentry had come out of the dark and surrendered to Bertrade and her friends. Culpepper and Mimi and a couple of other mortals the elves had recruited bore the body into the back of a panel truck.

That dream I’d half remembered had been sent by Bertrade. In the game of cat and mouse she and the big elf had played, some of his magic was stronger than hers.

“Askal is his name. We met in the Kingdom,” she said, “and he was able to read me enough to know how I felt about you. He wanted to use you to draw me. I wanted to use that magic arm Darnel and I gave you to do away with him.”

It seemed to me like the kind of game in which mortals were just breakable objects. Bertrade winced when I thought that.

Askal, of course, didn’t completely die. I heard him shrieking; saw his shadow moving around the pier after his corpse had been taken away in the truck.

It isn’t likely I’ll ever go back to that spot on the Hudson. And it isn’t likely I’ll ever completely trust Bertrade. What I feel for her may not be love. But I know that when I’m with her this mortal life of mine gets torn open by magic, and when she’s gone, that’s all I remember.

But when we parted outside the Plaza that morning and kissed, she told me she’d be back before long. And I look forward to it.

Tomorrow evening, Jim and Anne Toomey will be waked out in Brooklyn. Their connection with me is what killed them, and I’ll think of that.

My life may not run out of me into a big red puddle, but someday my life will run out. And before that happens in this world of bait and traps, I’ll see Bertrade again.

——

RICHARD BOWES has published five novels, two collections of short fiction, and fifty stories. He has won two World Fantasy Awards and the Lambda, International Horror Guild, and Million Writers Awards. Recent and forthcoming stories appear in Fantasy & Science Fiction and the anthologies Wilde Stories 2010, Nebula Awards Showcase 2011, The Beastly Bride, Blood and Other Cravings, Haunted Legends, Digital Domains, and Naked City. Several of these stories are chapters in his novel in progress, Dust Devil: My Life in Speculative Fiction.

His web page is RickBowes.com.

| LITTLE SHIT |

Melanie Tem

—

A bevy of girls pushed past her, giggling obscenities, claiming the sidewalk. They smelled of sex, weed, booze, musky perfume. She was down with all that, except musky perfume, which gave her a headache. Piercings glinted in headlights and flashing signs, and their shoulders and chests and midriffs and thighs and smalls of backs were all tatted up. She went in for body art herself, but even if she’d let hers show and left the eyebrow stud in tonight, these chicks were her “sisters” only in theory.

The tall one practically stuck her tight little ass in her face, shoving her off the curb. A red snake coiled out of the butt crack up the downy spine, fresh and still hurting. Almost without thinking, she made it hurt a little worse.

One of them sneered, “Get the fuck out of our way, bitch.” They all screeched evil laughter and then they had a hilarious contest calling her things like “retard” and “runt.”

She was losing sleep and risking life, limb, and STDs to make the world safer for asshole kids like these, who didn’t even have fully developed frontal lobes—and why? She knew why. Same reason she was in social-work school. To make a difference.

She indulged in a moment of revenge fantasy. It’d be no effort at all to wriggle inside their vapid little minds and jack their thoughts, give them false memories or repress real ones, make them understand crap they couldn’t possibly understand like research statistics, or forget stuff they knew and needed like cell numbers of friends-with-bennies.

But she wouldn’t let herself be mean just to be mean. Morality sucked. Not using all your talents also sucked. But doing mean stuff just because you could was part of what made the world such a hard place. That and stupidity.

She couldn’t even journal about it for her Social-Work Skills class. That’d blow all her various covers, and anyway the stories were so outrageous people’d think she was totally psycho.

She’d just do her job here and get back to the dorm in time to finish the Policy paper tonight, never mind that she’d be totally sleep deprived for the eight o’clock class that put her to sleep anyway. A normal starvation-wage work-study job would’ve been a lot simpler. Just once in a while she’d like to do something normal and simple.

The gaggle of girls flapped and honked across the park. Although she’d learned in Human Growth and Development why part of her longed to be one of them, it still hurt that she wasn’t.

She went and sat on a swing where it was darker. Her feet dangled. She pulled Pinkie out of her Hannah Montana backpack and snuggled him into her lap. Not five minutes later the chicken hawk made his move. Already she could tell she’d hardly earn her fee with this one.

He crooned, “Not safe out here all by yourself, honey.”

It had taken her a while to learn to tear up, but now it was second nature. Or third or fourth nature, whatever. When professors talked about “conscious use of self, the basic social-work tool,” she doubted fake decoy tears were what they had in mind.

She clutched her pink bear and looked up at the man, automatically noting his squared-off hairline, black or navy-blue hoodie, bad breath, worse thoughts. Thing for girls and boys with no body hair. She whimpered, “I want my mommy. Can you help me find my mommy, mister?” The “mister” was either a genius hook or over the top.

Genius. Something perked up in his fried brain. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”

Sweetly she lisped, “Little Shit.”

He gave a surprised laugh, then got threatening. “Cut the crap. What’s your real name?” Perps thought they had power over a little kid once they had your name.

Like she’d tell him. Like she even knew. “That is my real name, mister, honest. Little Shit.”

“I ain’t callin’ you that.”

“You can call me whatever you want to, mister.” How about Trouble? Ball-Buster? Bait?

He gave the swing a hard shove that pretended—not very well—to be playful. “Pretty little thing like you,” he rasped. “Somebody might take advantage.”

She shrieked and fell against him at an angle that would keep him from having contact with the dead giveaway of her boobs. He went for her crotch. These scum were so predictable. If he got his hand inside her pants it’d out her as an adult, but she wouldn’t let that happen. Barbie and some of the other hos on her advisory committee wore baby-doll dresses with no panties, but besides the chill and the strategic issues—social workers couldn’t talk without saying “issues”—she wasn’t about to let filthy fingers that had been who knew where come into actual contact with anything personal. She’d aced that Human Sexuality class.

She did have to get close enough for long enough that he’d do something incriminating, and so she could collect identifying information: his body-dirt-cigarettes-wine odor, a ridged scar on the inside of his left wrist, a smooth bald spot fringed by almost silky hair. Auditory info was easy—his voice, the way he breathed. Easiest to gather but hardest to convince anybody by was the thought pattern, in this case a jumbled buzz with stretches of spooky purplish clarity. You couldn’t put it in a report or say it on a witness stand. A lot of the most true stuff in life you had to be careful about admitting to.

When she faked losing her grip on the swing chains, he caught her, thinking something like, “All right!” and tried again to stick his hand between her legs. Clamping her thighs to trap his forearm in the act, she pressed the button on her bra strap.

The cops materialized, only two this time, and bored, distracted, Raul wishing he was home with his new baby, Dixie with a migraine coming on. It was better when there were a lot of them and they were into it and they invited her out partying afterward and bartenders who’d checked ID a million times carded her again, and people made rude cracks about her size and she made rude cracks about theirs, and it was all good. Tonight was just business.

This would-be perp was squealing about castrating bitches as Little Shit collected her fee from Raul. His “good job, kid” was like you’d talk to a two-year-old who’d gone potty in the toilet, but Little Shit decided to take it as camaraderie and reciprocated by putting in his mind the sweet, powdery smell of his baby’s head. Best she could do right now. Might help, might make things worse. You had to take risks. Not for the first time she wondered if people could sense her messing around in there. On her way out of the park, she fixed Dixie’s headache, not because they were homies or anything, just because she could.

Little Shit wasn’t what they knew her by at school. She’d made that name up, too, for her A and A+ papers and exams and her GREs that would get her into grad school. Also what Lourdes called her, off the “Pretty Names” list she kept for when there was a possible new friend or lover. She was a self-made woman, every time, and proud of it, never mind what she was learning about how most people’s identity and sense of self were formed. She’d never been most people. Might as well make something of that.

And she’d made quite a bit of it, actually, in her almost twenty-three years. She kept working on self-improvement, but overall she was down with how her life was going. Even before she got her degree she was making more of a diff than most people did in their whole entire lives.

Sometimes she felt sorry for the perps, though. Pitiful dudes, once in a while chicks, a lot of them looking for what they called love. Some people would call just about anything love. Others didn’t have “love” at all, even in what they believed was private vocabulary. She herself had no clue what love was, but most of the time it was fun trying to figure it out.

Like spring break with Lourdes. When they’d walked on the beach holding hands people’d probably thought they were mother and daughter. Like every other social worker, Lourdes talked a lot about “boundaries,” so holding hands was just about all they did in public. It’d be funny if somebody saw them doing other stuff and called the cops on Lourdes, but Lourdes didn’t see the humor. Lourdes didn’t see humor in much of anything, and she wouldn’t find it amusing or noble if she knew how Little Shit was putting her personal strengths to use working her way through school.

It was a syndrome, what fools called a birth defect. Fools like her egg and sperm donors. They could have at least put something on her birth certificate other than “Baby Girl.” Their loss. No way did the word “defect” have anything to do with her.

If she’d ever known the name of the syndrome, she didn’t now. Some people with it were normal height, but she was short enough to be almost but not quite an official “Little Person,” a cutesy label with not nearly the coolness of “Little Shit.” Tendency toward hip dysplasia. Crooked little fingers and toes that worked fine and curled like macaroni in lovers’ mouths, in Lourdes’s mouth. Streaked hair auburn and strawberry blond and almost black, which she used to dye all one color but now she made sure to brush it so all the colors showed, gleamed. Lourdes had a thing for long hair. She also had a thing for fuzzy shaved heads—actually, for fuzzy shaved anythings.

The ability to screw with other people’s thoughts was probably part of the syndrome, too. Lourdes didn’t know about that, and it wouldn’t be in her records even if she had any. That probably wasn’t why she’d been thrown away, either, unless she’d been seriously precocious; when she used to try to figure it out, she’d usually decided it was because of her weird little fingers and short legs.

In the days after the perp on the swing, she and Lourdes had one of their big dramatic fights and big dramatic reconciliations. Both would’ve been easier if she’d poked around to find out what Lourdes secretly wanted from her, but that would be cheating.

When she got an A- on her policy paper, though, she did a quick intervention. First she shifted a few things around in the teacher’s pathetic OCD mind, and let that sit for a day or two. Then she challenged the six lost points, and the teacher couldn’t quite remember why he’d deducted them. It was really sort of embarrassing to watch, so she conceded two points and the plus, but she won back four, which made it the A she deserved.

When Raul texted her JOB 4 U, she was working with her group on the case presentation and then they went for tamales and beers. She texted back LTR but it was almost nine before she could call him. “What up?”

“Where the hell you been?” The sound of the baby crying receded and she heard a door shut.

“Um? Studying?” She’d give him that much.

“Um? This is your job?”

“My bad.”

He wasn’t letting it go. “You don’t take six fucking hours to get back to me.”

“Hey,” she said, “dude. You could always find somebody else.” They both knew how valuable and rare her particular skill set was, and there were other cops and lawyers and PIs in this town who might have an interest in what she could do. Also that she needed the money and she loved the job.

For somebody in such a hurry he didn’t seem to mind wasting more time. During the pause she did dishes, banging as much as possible without breaking something.

Raul finally got over himself enough to tell her, “Looks like we got us a social-worker perp.” She could hear his smirk.

“You’re smokin’ crack!”

“Not today.”

He always said that when she said that. This time she didn’t laugh. “I meant, ‘really’?”

“Yeah, really. Hits on underage males and females she’s doing therapy on.”

“What do you mean, hits on?”

His voice got weird—husky, a little breathless, raggedy. She felt a stirring in her own groin. Normal, she knew; occupational hazard. Still, it bothered her, made her vigilant about her own motivations. She hoped Raul was watching his. “Gropes minors,” he explained. “Tells them bullshit like it’s part of the treatment so they’ll ‘learn to trust.’ ”

“This one’s mine.” In her minuscule kitchen space, balancing a plate in both hands to keep from dropping it, she held her breath and focused her mind.

“Thought you might say that.”

“Fer shizzle.”

“Come again?”

“Oh, sorry, old dude. Yeah, sure, you’re right.”

“Any reason you can’t speak English?”

“Gotta be hip, Raul, my man. Gotta be cool.”

“High on my list.”

“Who’s the slimeball? Hopefully nobody I know.”

“Name’s Lords something.”

She went very still and repeated it the way he’d said it. “Lords?”

Audibly shuffling papers, he spelled it. “Lourdes Malone. You know her?”

“No,” she said.

She made lists and flow charts and went through the steps in the social-work problem-solving process up to “implementation.” She did not think about Lourdes’s hands, Lourdes’s laugh, Lourdes’s tongue.

The first thing she had to do was pick a fight and stage another breakup. That wouldn’t take much. The hard part was that if Lourdes was doing this stuff, they’d never make up.

Having to take a semester off school would have sucked even worse, so she was totally relieved to find out about the online option for three of her four classes. Good thing they didn’t use video, or even audio, because if she could get her voice to change enough she’d have to keep it that way until this was done. She recorded herself using higher and lower pitches, various bogus accents, a lisp, a horror-movie whisper. The cartoon squeak would be the easiest to keep going but it was also the most obviously fake. Finally she found a website with audios of voices and accents, played around with the kids’ ones until she came up with one that sounded kind of real and that she could manage, talked aloud to herself in it for days, and was happy when Raul called and thought he had a wrong number and she had to say code before he was convinced it was her. He was both pissed and impressed. Cool beans.

She dug out the rose cologne and the ginger lip gloss. In real life she didn’t love all that girlie stuff, on principle, but the job gave her an excuse and it was kind of cool, like Halloween, like a kid playing dress up.

Next was the hair. Without looking in a mirror she whacked it off—scraggly would be in character—and then dyed it what the box called “Mahogany Brown” but came out Carrot-Top Red. She told her reflection, “You are uuuuuugly, girlfriend, you know that?” She looked so different that she tried messing with her own mind, and couldn’t really tell if it worked or not, if she even got in. Could there be such a thing as autotelepathy? Probably—so far in her life she hadn’t run into very many totally impossible things.

Voice, hair, posture, gait, tics, breathing patterns, gestures—by now she knew how to do all that. A few hours’ practice to get them down, a little more time and effort when this was over to get rid of whatever she decided not to keep as part of her ever-evolving self.

Okay, all five of the regular senses were covered: she looked, sounded, felt, tasted, smelled different. But this was not exactly regular. This was Lourdes.

What would happen if Lourdes recognized her? There’d been some rough stuff, all in play, definitely consensual. But if Lourdes was really a pedophile, or if she wasn’t and she went off about being set up, what would happen? It seriously bit that this reading and screwing around with thoughts thing didn’t work worth crap from a distance.

For a day and a night she considered how much she was willing and able to do. A lot, it turned out. In a weird way she owed it to Lourdes not to hold anything back, not to underestimate either of them.

But there wasn’t enough time to lose or gain more than a couple of pounds or get Botox in her lips or get the very cool snake tat removed—after all the money and pain it had cost her she’d have hated to lose it, and Sammy’s artistic integrity would have been offended, but she’d have done it if she could. Hopefully things wouldn’t go far enough for Lourdes to find it.

Marina Abramovic, mutilating herself for art on YouTube, was one out-there chick, but fresh wounds would be suspicious. Same problem with actual surgery. She had to settle, uneasily, for blue contacts, lashes thickened and curled, a yellowy tan from hours under a lamp, a vaguely spider-shaped birthmark colored on the inside of her thigh, shaving all body hair and shaving it again for maximum smoothness, and wrestling her boobs into submission with an Ace bandage wrapped tight as a girdle. That last one was a big risk; Raul and his team better get right in there if kid nipples were what floated Lourdes’s boat.

When she showed up at the DA’s office in a lavender baby-doll dress and, just to stay in character, no underwear, Raul had no idea who she was. Even though that’s what she was after, it kind of hurt her feelings, which was weird.

To the giraffelike assistant DA at the desk, she introduced herself as Madison Smith, the preppy name she and Raul had finally compromised on. Behind her she heard Raul come up out of his chair. She probably could have just stirred up his thoughts so he’d believe her, but it was more fun to watch him do it himself. “Shit,” he said.

“Yup,” she said in the voice.

“Fuck.”

“Nope.”

“How’d you do it?”

“Trade secrets.”

“You’re taller.”

“That’s just shoes, dummy.” She showed him, careful not to lift her foot too high and expose herself.

His hand went briefly to her shoulder. Like every other time they’d touched—accidentally in passing, comradely fist bumps, brush of the hands maybe or maybe not flirtatious—she stiffened. Then he nodded. “It is you.”

“Whatever that means.”

“I take it,” Giraffe said dryly, “we’ve established that the disguise is convincing. Can we move on?” First, though, Giraffe had to brag about other child sex-abuse cases she’d prosecuted. “Sixty-nine years to life is what I got,” she told them about one particularly nasty one. The passionate, joyous pride in her voice and in her heart was really pretty creepy.

“Very good,” said Raul. Little Shit was getting a contact high from all this moral certainty.

“I’m telling you, section 85.67 of the penal code is a wonderful tool. No judicial discretion to get in the way of justice. When I know in my gut, as a person, that somebody should get life, I pick the charges and I make it happen.”

“Enhancements,” Raul said to Little-Shit-as-Madison. “Gotta get those enhancements.”

“Enhance like what?”

“GBI’s always good.”

“Great bodily injury,” Giraffe supplied, and she and Raul laughed.

“Double my rate.”

“Mayhem works, too,” Raul allowed. “That’s just disfigurement. You already got some of that goin’ on. What’s a little more disfigurement for the cause?” She flipped him off.

“And/or torture,” added Giraffe.

On a roll now, they listed burglary during the crime, which wasn’t likely in this case, and multiple victims, which was. Felony priors would have been even better. Administering controlled substances during the crime had a certain appeal; Little Shit kept what she knew about Lourdes’s sources to herself. And there was kidnapping, which could just mean driving to more than one location or even moving from one room to another. Kidnapping was good.

“Whatever works,” she told them.

“You’re awesome.” Giraffe was doing something on her computer—researching, entering data—and she said it with no meaning, like you’d say, “Have a nice day.”

“I’m sayin’,” said Raul, meaning it.

“Innocent till proven guilty, though, right?”

Giraffe waved one long hand. “Right. Sure. Of course.”

“You going all social worky on me?”

She rolled her enhanced eyes at him, then moved to where she could see the computer screen. Giraffe was playing Scrabble and had just typed in a seven-letter word Little Shit had never heard of.

During the two and a half days it took to figure out the plan and get everything ready, she wouldn’t let herself obsess about the kids who might be getting hurt. She was in Raul’s office when he called Lourdes posing as a caseworker in a homeless shelter where somebody would confirm they had a staff person by the fake name he gave if she checked. He was able to make an appointment the very next morning for his consumer, Madison Smith. Little Shit grinned at his use of the PC word.

Lourdes called her a couple of times and then when she didn’t answer texted HOW R U? She texted back K, then ignored the MUSM although she did miss her, too.

Just for grins, she hauled out the book she’d paid a fortune for, for the class she now couldn’t take this semester, and poked around in it for a diagnosis for somebody who finally decided they loved the person they’d been with for almost a year only after they were part of an elaborate scheme to find out if that person was a serial sex offender. Depersonalization disorder and Dissociative Fugue and Sexual Deviance had possibilities. So did Reactive Attachment Disorder. “Attachment” was on the syllabus of one of the classes she’d be taking online. So much to learn, so little time.

The contacts were bothering her eyes, the boobie girdle was pinching and itching in addition to aching, and there was a burn blister on her shoulder from the tanning lamp. Eye drops, non-allergenic gauze and tape, and Solarcaine went onto her expense report with receipts attached along with the ones from the thrift stores, where she’d loaded up with outfits for a lot more days than this thing better take, including glittery capris like she’d been hunting for and a pair of purple Crocs that looked brand new, plus a ridiculous white jumper with a pleated skirt that would get recycled right back to a thrift store when this was over. There was a really short blue satin skirt she’d have looked stellar in, but Madison Smith was supposed to be eight years old. Being professional sucked.

When Raul-as-caseworker came to pick her up he had that intensely calm, focused-mind thing going on, like a gleaming tube. There was nothing in there about his baby or his wife or the Cornhuskers or the head cold coming on. Madison Smith was in there, and Lourdes Malone, and taking this thing step by step by step and bringing it on home.

He stared at her, circled her, felt her hair, told her to walk around, sniffed, told her to say something. If he’d tried to taste her, she’d have had to hurt him. It was messed up how proud she was when he pronounced, “Madison Smith.” Pride and happiness and all that crap could get in the way of doing what had to be done just like sorrow and rage could.

Madison Smith wasn’t glad to see Lourdes, hadn’t missed her, didn’t want to run into her arms. Madison Smith also didn’t want to put her behind bars for sixty-nine years to life. Madison Smith wasn’t real, but Little-Shit-as-Madison was, and she picked the chair in the dimmest corner of the dim therapy room. She’d been thinking Madison would be surly and smart-ass, like she herself had been when they tried to make her go to therapy, but now it occurred to her that if Lourdes had to win Madison over it would drag this thing out, so she went and got a baby doll from the toy box in the other room and curled up with it. This time finding tears wasn’t hard.

Raul-as-caseworker was so hip-casual when he introduced Madison Smith and Lourdes Malone that neither one of them could stand him, and the way he went through why Madison was here—sexual assault top on the list, naturally—made her feel dissed and dirty. But when he promised he’d be right outside in the waiting room she was relieved, and when he left the room she was actually kind of scared.

Lourdes had been watching her even when she hadn’t looked like she was. Now she asked if she wanted a Coke. Little Shit drank Pepsi. Madison said sure and thank you and held the can in both hands with the baby doll in her lap. Queasy from all this vulnerability, she vowed to jack something out of here today, one of the smaller toys supposed to get kids to drop their guard, the Mardi Gras beads maybe. If Lourdes turned out to be innocent, she could have them back. If not, plenty of kids on the street would like something cheap and pretty.

Lourdes settled back. Today her hair was a good color for her, yellow silk in the lamplight, and it would be nice to touch. Her hands were crossed in her lap, crisp white cuffs folded back. Little-Shit-as-Madison crossed her own fidgety hands the same way and tried to keep them still.

She’d never seen Lourdes professional like this, majorly conscious of herself and of her client. Being on the receiving end of all that was creepy and flattering and creepy because it was flattering. You didn’t have to have a syndrome to pick up on it.

“I’d like to tell you a bit about myself so you know who you’re dealing with.”

About half of what Lourdes told Madison, Little Shit was pretty sketched about because she’d never heard it before. Looking in her head to see what was true would pull her out of character, and it didn’t matter anyway.

When Lourdes asked if she had any questions, she didn’t. “Are you a checkers player, Madison?”

This must be in the Play Therapy class she hadn’t taken yet. She had Madison say, “Am I a what player?”

Lourdes showed her the checkerboard set up on a table, neat red and black squares, red and black discs like Pogs from when she was a kid. “Have you ever played?”

“Games are retarded.” Now that she got how insulting that was to the people you used as an insult, like “gyp” and “You run like a girl,” she didn’t like saying it, but Madison did.

“Sometimes it’s easier to talk when you’re doing something else besides just sitting and talking. I could teach you the basic rules.” This wasn’t working. Lourdes ought to give it up.

“I didn’t come here to play stupid games.”

Lourdes took the gift. “Why did you come here, Madison?”

“Because the judge said I had to or go to juvie,” she sneered.

“Why did the judge say that?”

“Because I’m a bad kid?” Hopefully that wasn’t overplaying it. Madison lifted her feet up on the chair and hugged her knees and buried her face, with the doll squished in the V between her thighs and stomach. This was pretty uncomfortable but it hid a lot of her and showed a lot else of her.

“You’re not a bad kid, Madison.” That was definitely in the therapist rule book. Little Shit wanted to roll her eyes and groan at how predictable it was, and Madison wanted to go sit in the nice lady’s lap.

“I do bad things.”

Lourdes didn’t say anything. That was use of silence to get the client uncomfortable enough to fill it. Little-Shit-as-Madison didn’t say anything, either.

Madison’s thoughts were babyish, full of holes and sharp broken pieces and mushy spots, mostly about fighting things off—fighting something off right now, something circling and poking and trying to get in—and about wanting somebody to love her and fighting off anything that looked like love and letting in stuff that wasn’t even close, not knowing the difference between love and danger. If there even was a difference. Little Shit knew this space.

Eventually Lourdes was the one who broke the silence and said a few more gentle, encouraging things. Little-Shit-as-Madison just sat there all curled up until her back started to hurt and she couldn’t stand the boobie girdle cutting into her anymore, and then she threw the doll on the floor and got up and left. The Mardi Gras beads in her pocket didn’t rattle or bulge.

Raul-as-caseworker was texting and she walked right past him and out the door of the office and she found the stairway and ran down three flights and was in the street before he caught up with her. “You got a problem with elevators? Jesus.”

When she got home she stripped, soaked in a bubble bath, listened to a Grizzly Bears CD really loud, put on clean pajamas. To sop up some of the longing to go out dancing with Lourdes, she read as many pages as she could stand in the social-work policy book.

The next day she went by herself. Whether Lourdes thought that made Madison more alone and vulnerable or not, Little Shit did. This time she sat on the couch so there’d be a space beside her. Pretty much the same thing went down. After a few minutes and a few words, Lourdes stopped talking.

Madison was antsy and went ahead and filled the silence but not too much, too soon. “I’m gonna be a social worker,” she said in the squeaky voice that would have been fake even if Madison had been real. “I’m gonna help kids.”

“Do you know a lot of kids who need help?”

“Well, yeah-uh.”

“Why do they need help?”

Don’t make this too easy, Little Shit warned Madison Smith. Let her think she’s God’s gift to screwed-up kids. “All kinds of stuff.”

“Like what?”

“My friend Kelsey? Her mom’s a crack ho.” Madison watched Lourdes to see if she was shocked. Little Shit knew she wouldn’t be.

“That’s hard.”

“And there’s this dude at the center? Doesn’t know if he’s gay or straight or bi or whatever. He says he’s queer.” She giggled. She had a whole list of sex-related issues to warm Lourdes up with.

“What do you need help with, Madison?”

Too fast, you idiot. I don’t trust you yet.

Madison cradled the baby doll against her almost-boobless chest and cooed to it, “It’s okay, little girl, I won’t hurt you, you’re safe with me.”

Lourdes took the hint. “It’s hard to find a safe place, isn’t it?”

Madison nodded. Little Shit let Madison nod.

Now Lourdes came to sit beside her on the couch. Madison wanted to run out of there and to snuggle. Little Shit wanted Lourdes to make a move. Make a move, come on, let’s get this over with.

Lourdes tucked one leg up under her, wedged herself against the pillows, leaned her elbow on the back of the couch, and propped her head on her fist. There was one of those silences. Madison got weirded out and threw the doll down and knocked the checkerboard off the table and left.

On her way out, Little Shit thought she’d just jump in and jump out of Lourdes’s head, not to change anything, not to give her the idea of assaulting young kids if it wasn’t already in there and not to take it away if it was, just to see what the hell was going on. She couldn’t get in at all. That had never happened before. Madison Smith might not be real, but she was really in the way.

This went on for over a week. The online classes started and she already had two papers. She had to keep shaving, and her crotch prickled and itched. Her boobs, shoulders, neck, back hurt all the time even when she unwrapped herself at home—she was going to need a serious massage when this was over, which would go right on her expense report. She wasn’t sleeping very much.

It turned out that the Madison Smith story had to spin out past where they’d planned it, and now she was making it up as she went, getting the poor kid more and more messed up, hoping she could keep it straight or if she got caught in a lie it would look like Madison’s pathology. Like a bug under a magnifying glass, she was about to burn to a crisp any second under Lourdes’s attention. And there was not a single sexual vibe.

“I think she’s innocent.”

“Nah.”

“What if she’s innocent?”

Raul was thinking. She was too tired and stressed out to see about what. She almost fell asleep. Finally he swiveled, tapped on his keyboard, sat back in his chair, leaned forward again to turn up the volume.

Voices of prepubescent girls and boys came up, seven or eight different ones, some of them hard to understand, some clear and close. Soft-spoken male and female interviewers asked carefully nonleading questions, just like in the role-play in Forensic Interviewing. At least one of the kids was crying. Another one kept making a barking sound like a goofy cartoon seal that was probably laughter. One of the interviewers had a cough.

Raul closed the audio file, peered into the coffee mug on his desk that had DADDY on it in puffy blue letters, sighed and got to his feet. “Coffee?”

She’d told him a million times that she took her caffeine cold. She said, “Uh. No.”

He missed the sarcasm or ignored it, which pissed her off more. She thought she might just get outta here while he was refilling his stupid mug, but she couldn’t quite.

When he came back she said, “Nothing was really disclosed on there.”

“Makes you wonder, though, all that disgusting stuff.”

“That wasn’t at the level of an outcry.” Using the intense word “outcry” in such a familiar way made her feel like a real social worker.

Raul patted her shoulder. “That’s why we got you.”

“Probable cause,” she said, like she knew what she was talking about.

“Something like that. So, you okay now?”

For a split second she thought he was asking if she felt okay, if she was upset, if she was sick. But he just meant was she okay to keep going with the job. She said, “I guess,” and that seemed to be enough for him. Whether it was enough for her they’d just have to see.

By about two thirty in the morning she really, really wanted to smoke a joint to help her sleep, but that would compromise her testimony if for some reason she had to pee in a cup in the next few hours. She did drink part of a beer and almost hurled.

The next morning, Little Shit had Madison sit in the chair where her feet didn’t quite touch the floor. Lourdes settled herself on the closest end of the couch. “How are you today?”

“You look terrible.”

“I didn’t sleep very well last night, but I’m fine. Thank you for noticing, Madison. That’s very nice of you.”

“You going to fall asleep?”

“No. I promise.”

“You going to die?”

“Oh, honey, don’t worry. I’m right here with you.” Lourdes reached over to pat her knee but got her thigh instead, the inside of her thigh.

“Oops,” Lourdes said softly. “Sorry.”

But the hand stayed there, very lightly, for a second or two, and something squirmed around the edges of Madison’s thoughts.

She did the clamping-the-legs-together and caught Lourdes’s hand where it was. The fingers spread, rubbed.

Then Lourdes gently pulled away and sat back. Gently she asked what Madison was doing. Madison didn’t know. Well, she sort of knew.

“Has somebody touched you there, Madison? On purpose? Not on accident like just happened?”

“Yeah.” Squeaky voice into the baby doll’s hair.

“Can you tell me about it?” A tiny shake of the head, though she could have told; she’d been practicing. “Can you tell the baby doll about it?”

“What’s her name?”

“What do you want her name to be?”

The technique to get buy-in worked. Madison smiled. “Pretty.”

“That’s a good name. Can you tell Pretty about it?”

Careful. Don’t be easy, don’t play too hard to get. There was a humming sensation at the base of her brain—the primal part, the reptilian part that took care of basic survival stuff.

“Is it too scary over there all by yourself, Madison? Do you and Pretty need to come sit by me?”

Madison did need to. This is it. Don’t blow it.

“Or on my lap?” Whoa. “Even a big girl like you needs somebody to hold her sometimes.” Hold sounded nice. Hold me.

“I don’t like it here.”

“You don’t like it here in the office?”

“This room’s ugly.”

Lourdes didn’t take offense or laugh. “Would you like to go into the other room where the toys are?”

Can you say kidnapping? Madison nodded. Lourdes led the way.

They sat on big, soft pillows on the floor. Pretty the doll went onto Lourdes’s lap first, a canary into a mine, into Lourdes’s lap, into the hollow there. Madison sat cross-legged on the floor, crotch open under the white jumper, pink flowered panties barely covered. Little Shit faced forward to fend off any gropes of her chest. Her boobs and crotch were throbbing, boobs painfully, crotch not so much. Hopefully the call button was still there inside the Ace girdle—the temptation to feel for it and give herself away was weirdly erotic, like the urge to step off a cliff that made you have to back away. Instead, she put her hand under her flared skirt and rubbed herself, and saw Lourdes smile.

“Why don’t you come over here by me?”

Madison really wanted to go and really wanted to stay right here, almost but not quite out of reach. It was like being licked in the inside folds of her brain.

What are you doing? Which of the three of them was saying that to which of the three of them?

Lourdes scooted close. She smelled like Lourdes, like somebody Madison didn’t quite remember. “Can you show me with Pretty what somebody did to you?”

Madison giggled and kissed Pretty with her mouth open, touched the plastic mouth with her tongue.

“Someone put his tongue in your mouth?”

“Her.”

“Someone put her tongue in your mouth?”

Madison nodded and licked the doll’s mouth again.

“A grown-up woman?” Madison nodded and the woman’s, the therapist’s voice got even more gentle. “Did she do anything else to you, honey? Touch you anywhere else?”

A heat was spreading in all their minds and bodies now. Madison squirmed. Little Shit tried not to. Lourdes put an arm around her. “Can you show me with Pretty?”

Madison put the doll against her crotch. Little shit really hoped she didn’t have to insert the sorry thing.

“She touched your vagina?” The word clanged like a bell. Lourdes was practically cooing. “Like this?”

It seemed to take long minutes before Lourdes’s fingers actually came into contact with the stretch of pink flowered panties. It seemed to be all one quick motion when the fingers wormed inside the elastic. The realization exploded in Lourdes’s awareness that the skin she was caressing wasn’t hairless but shaved at the same instant that Madison threw up and Little Shit went for the call button.

The Ace bandage unwound and her boobs deployed like airbags. You little shit. The call button wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Then she found it, and Raul and Dixie slammed into the room with guns drawn.

Lourdes just sat there. Madison was gone. Little Shit covered what body parts she could. When they pulled Lourdes to her feet and cuffed her, Thanks was in her mind, like a wave on a beach. Not the word, just the gratitude itself. Thank you then, and the name she’d given Lourdes to call her by. And, before she could get all the way out of Lourdes’s mind, something like I love you.

——

MELANIE TEM’S solo novels include her Bram Stoker Award–winning debut, Prodigal, and most recently Slain in the Spirit and The Deceiver. She has also collaborated with Nancy Holder on Making Love and Witch-Light, and with Steve Rasnic Tem on Daughters and The Man on the Ceiling. The earlier novella version of The Man on the Ceiling won the 2001 Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, and World Fantasy Awards. The Tems also collaborated on the award-winning multimedia CD-ROM Imagination Box.

Her short stories have been published in the collection The Ice Downstream; on E-Reads; in numerous magazines, including Colorado State Review, Black Maria, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and Cemetery Dance; and in anthologies, including Snow White Blood Red, Acquainted with the Night, Poe, Portals, Black Wings II, and Blood and Other Cravings. She has also published nonfiction articles and poetry.

Tem is also a playwright and an oral storyteller.

She lives in Denver with her husband, writer and editor Steve Rasnic Tem, where she works as an adoption social worker. They have four children and four granddaughters.

| DITCH WITCH |

Lucius Shepard

—

Late in the day, Michael kept passing little towns with deserted streets and winking caution signals, paper trash swirling in the gutters, places that reminded him of movies in which mankind had been destroyed and computers continued to operate stoplights and sprinklers and house pets feasted on the rotting flesh of their owners. Beyond them, sun-browned hills conveyed the interstate north toward Oregon. Traffic was sparse and he boosted his speed, letting the Cadillac drift wide on the turns, driving with his neck turtled and his shoulders hunched. He felt that he was burning with indefinable brilliance and menace, that he had inhabited some nihilistic fantasy and become its outlaw Jesus. Every half an hour or so the girl beside him, a skinny bottle blond in a tank top and cutoffs, would break into his baggie of coke, taking a few hits for herself, then loading the tip of her nail file and holding it beneath his nose, smiling and making meaningful eye contact as he sniffed and blinked. She had milky skin, nice legs, and sharp features that reminded him of photographs from Depression-era Appalachia and matched her hick accent. She might, he thought, remain pretty for three or four years before she began to look dried up and waspish, and that would most likely be fine with her. Three or four good years would be about what she expected.

He had picked her up in a rest area near Sacramento and she had jumped in, abubble with false conviviality, saying, Hi, I’m Tracy, where you heading? Seattle? Me, too! She talked a mile a minute about her travels in Europe, the ex-boyfriend who had become a rock star, an affair with an older man. If she had done half what she claimed, she would have been older than he was, and he figured her for seven or eight years younger. Seventeen, maybe. He had told similar lies during his days on the streets and knew her story was not designed to be believed; it was like a prostitute’s makeup, both a statement of availability and a cheap disguise. She was frightened, probably broke, hoping to hook up with somebody who would take care of her. He wondered if he would let himself be hooked. It would be the stupid thing to do, the careless, impractical thing. The allure might be too much to resist.

“I might not go all the way to Seattle,” he said after driving for an hour through the empty golden afternoon. “I might head east. Hell, I might even head back to LA.”

He thought about Charlie. One kiss, he said to himself. A pathetic little kiss, that’s all it had been. Charlie wasn’t trying to seduce you, he was just fucking up the same as he did with everything else. Punishing himself for playing in a different key. And it’s not as if you were cherry, un-uh, yet here you go running through the world, fuming with outrage and clutching your torn bodice like a goddamn nineteenth-century virgin.

“This car really yours?” the girl asked.

“You think I stole it? I’m not the kind of guy who can afford a Caddy?”

“Naw, I …”

“You got me. I stole it from this old fag I lived with in LA.”

A pause. “Yeah. Right.”

“No joke,” he said. “He was like my perv uncle, you know. My pretend daddy. Don’t sweat it. He’ll be too twisted up by me leaving to call the cops. Time he gets around to thinking about the car … The guy owns a dealership. He’ll find a way to put it on his insurance.”

She stared at him, horrified.

“I told you it’s cool,” he said.

Her voice quavered as though from strong emotion. “You’re gay?”

He restrained a laugh. “I like girls, but I’ve done a few tricks. You know how it is.”

He looked sharply at her, forcing her to acknowledge the comment—she lowered her head and responded with a frail-as-sugar noise. Satisfied, he swerved around a slow-moving piece of Jap trash and leaned on the horn.

He could still turn back, he thought. Things could be mended. Charlie would fall all over himself trying to apologize, and life at home might be better than ever.

Too realistic, he decided; too humiliating, too logical and kind.

The sky grayed, rinsing the girl’s hair of its sheen—it showed the old yellow of flat ginger ale. Her breasts looked tiny, juiceless. Mouse breasts. She caught his eye and flashed one of her Runaway Poster Child smiles, rife with daffy trust and precocious sexuality. He was offended by her presumption that he would be taken in by it.

“We going to drive straight through?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Might be better to stop somewhere, you know, than hitting Seattle all wore out.”

She said this with studied indifference, fishing in the glove compartment for the coke, making a production of unearthing the vial from among road maps and candy wrappers, as if that, and not the idea of cementing the relationship, were foremost on her mind.

He said, “I’ll see how the driving goes.”

“Well, if I got a vote it’d be great to catch a shower.”

As if in sympathy with her, his skin began to feel oily, itchy, in need of a wash.

She sat sulking, toying with the vial; after a mile or two she began to sing, a frail, wordless tune, something the Lady Ophelia might have essayed during the last stages of distraction. Suddenly vivacious, she waved the vial under his nose and said, “Want to hurt yourself?”

After they had done the coke, she fiddled with the radio, trying to bring in a rock station from the background static, and Michael settled back to enjoy the Cadillac feeling in his head, the Cadillac richness of the afternoon, the richness of a stolen car, cocaine, another man’s money in his pocket and a strange woman at his side.

“You look sick,” said the girl. “Want me to drive?”

“I’m okay.”

“Know what’s the best thing when you’re sick from coke? Milk. And not just milk. Cheese, ice cream. Dairy products, you know. Maybe you should stop somewheres and get some milk.” She crossed her legs, jiggled her foot. “I could go for an ice cream myself. I mean I ain’t sick, you know. I got a thing for ice cream is all. Especially the kind with the polar bears on the wrapper. Ever had one of them?”

“Oh, yeah! They’re terrific.” His grin tightened the packs of muscle at the corners of his mouth.

“I could eat ’em all night long,” she said with immense satisfaction. “Course I wouldn’t want to lose my shape.” She twisted about to face him. “I do a hunnerd sit-ups every morning and every night. I jog, too. You like to jog?”

“You bet.”

“I’m serious. You should take care of yourself.”

“Why?”

“You just should,” she said defensively.

“I’d need a better reason than that to waste my time.”

“It ain’t a waste. It makes good sense.”

“Why?”

“Because …” Flustered, she shifted away from him, plucked at the hem of her cutoffs. “You want to live a long time, don’tcha?”

“I’m fucking with you,” he said. “Okay?”

She tried another tack, working hard to establish what a fine traveling companion she’d make, but he tuned her out. Mount Shasta loomed against a twilight sky; the huge white cone with a single golden star sparkling off to the side had the graphic simplicity of a banner. In his mind he pushed ahead to Seattle, imagining whale worshipers and lumberjack sex cults, but those thoughts found no traction and he found himself thinking about LA. He was back on Sunset with the mutant carbon breathers and death’s-head bikers and tweaking whores and the little black kids with their little guns and little crack rocks, with the runaways he had lived among before Charlie took him in. Kids who came on with a mixture of paranoia and hard-boiled defiance, yet proved by their deaths to have been innocents with a few sly tricks. Most of them dead now, the rest just swallowed up. His memories of them were as oppressive as family memories, which was what they had been—a screwed-up family with no parents, no home, no future, no visible means of support, cooking stolen hamburger over oil-drum fires and selling bad dope and getting infections. He tried to escape the memories, to find a place in his head where they hadn’t established squatter’s rights, and wound up in a hotly lit, cluttered space that seemed familiar, but that he couldn’t identify. It must be, he thought, partly a real place and partly some pathological view he’d had of it … Oncoming headlights blinded him and he swerved into the left lane, angrily punching on his brights, leaving them on until the other driver dimmed his. He felt wrecked, wired. It had gotten dark and Shasta lay far behind.

The girl made a weak noise; for a second he was not sure how she had come to be there.

“Where are we?” he asked, and she said, “Wha … ,” and sat up straight, as if she were in a classroom, trying to give the impression that she had been paying attention.

“We in Oregon yet?” he asked.

“Uh … I don’t know. Maybe. There was a sign back a ways.”

He fingered a cigarette from a crumpled pack and lit up. The smoke tasted stale, but cleared his head. The radio, with its crackle of static and glowing green dial, seemed like an instrument for measuring background radiation.

“I remember now,” said the girl with sober assurance. “We been in Oregon a long time.”

Curls of mist trailed across the road, and towering into a starless sky, a group of neon signs ahead was haloed by a doubled ring of shining air. Apart from the rank grasses along the shoulder, Michael could see nothing of the land. A road sign shot past. One thirteen to Portland, twelve to Whidby Bay. On the left a pancake house with glaring picture windows looked as bright and isolated as an orbital station. The mist was thickening and it tired him to peer through it.

“Break out the coke,” he told the girl.

Dutifully, she fed his nose. His heart raced, the skin on his forehead tightened, but there was no sharpness, no shrugging off of fatigue. His skull was impacted with something that prevented all but the most rudimentary thought. He was exhausted, he stank, his fingernails were rimmed with black. At the last possible moment he swung off the interstate and sent the Cadillac squealing along the curving access road that led to Whidby Bay.

“Where we going?” the girl asked.

His mouth was so dry he could barely speak and, when he did, the word he spoke sounded guttural and unfamiliar, like troll language.

“Motel.”

——

Set at the end of the main street, capping off a row of muffin shops, gift shops, restaurants that resembled cabins and had cutesy names, and a closed-up Boron station, the Elfland Lodge appeared to be too much motel for a town the size of Whidby Bay, a three-story green-and-white structure with a wing at one end and no more than a half-dozen cars in a huge parking lot bordered by a chest-high hedge. Michael supposed that the town must have a booming tourist season, a time for macramé festivals and vegan-paloozas, and this was not that time—either that or someone was using the place to launder money. An electrified sign featuring a leprechaun-like figure in a green suit doing a jig was mounted on a pole out front. Stick-on letters applied to its facing promised free cable and welcomed the Whidby Bay HS Class of ’87 for their 25th Year Reunion—dates showed this glorious event was scheduled to begin and end the week previous.

The night man was a plump, thirtyish guy with frizzy hair and a beer gut, wearing Mother Goose glasses and a T-shirt that read ORYCON 26 and sported a cartoon of a chubby rocket put-putting through the void, propelled by little poots of smoke. He was kicked back in a swivel chair behind the reception desk when Michael entered, listening to an iPod, his head nodding as if to a sprightly rhythm. The lights in the office were dim, there was a strong scent of air freshener, and a stubbed-out roach lay in an ashtray back of the desk.

“One twenty … it’s out back,” the night man said, handing over a key card. Then as Michael was about to leave, he called, “Dude! Check out the elves.”

This roused a mild paranoia in Michael. “Elves?”

The night man adopted a fatuous air and a fruity tone of voice. “Those from which our establishment derives its name. The owner brought them back from the Black Forest. Believe me, they are not to be missed.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The Black Forest. In Germany, you know,” the night man said defensively. “Elves … little statues of elves.”

“Why the fuck should I care about some dumb-ass statues?”

“They’re artifacts. Relics. I guess some old Nazi guy owned them.”

Michael continued to glare at him, unsure whether or not he was being played in some way.

“Hey, forget it,” said the night man. “I simply thought you’d find them amusing.”

Michael parked in front of 120, a few slots away from a brown Dodge minivan, the only other vehicle on the seaward side of the motel. Heavy surf pounded close by. Salty air. Orange light bulbs ranging the breezeway illuminated a wide stretch of lawn bounded by a waist-high flagstone wall; beyond the wall, the darkness was absolute. He saw no elves.

There were, however, what looked to be a bunch of oddly shaped, painted rocks standing at the far end of the property. With the girl in tow, he strolled across the lawn toward the rocks and soon realized that these were the elves of which the night man had spoken. There were twenty of them, each about three, three and a half feet tall, carved from wood, disturbingly lifelike, and they had been arranged into groups of five, distinct within the larger grouping. They had dark brown faces, floppy caps like Santa hats but green, shirts with embroidered buttonholes and seven-league boots with sagging tops. Their laminated surfaces held a sticky-looking gloss.

“Lord help us,” said the girl. “Those things are wicked.”

Michael was inclined to agree. These were not the benign creatures of heroic fantasy, but the corrupt denizens of Grimms’ fairy tales. More like dwarves than elves. Their faces were those of long-chinned, hook-nosed, cadaverous old men with Mormon beards and hideous rouge spots dappling their cheeks. About half of them brandished axes and long knives and warty cudgels. Their gnarled hands and thick limbs gave the impression of unnatural strength. Some were hunched over, appearing to have been struck wooden and inanimate in the midst of a furious assault, while others leered at their companions as though anticipating a bloody result. In motion, Michael supposed, they would lurch and caper, tilt and wobble, but fast—they would be as fast as wolverines, clumsy yet facile, ripping bellies, slashing throats, then tripping over their victims’ bodies. He questioned the sensibilities of the man who had stationed them in such an untroubled spot.

The girl tried to drag him away. “I got to pee!”

“I’ll be in in a minute.” He handed her the key card.

“C’mon with me.”

She plucked at his arm and he shook her off, saying, “You need help to pee?”

Her lips thinned. “You stay out here, I can’t be responsible.”

He chuckled and shook out a cigarette from his pack. “I wasn’t counting on you being responsible.”

“They got evil in ’em. You’re just stirring ’em up, standing here and all. They’ll hurt you. Or maybe worse.”

“The elves?”

“Whatever you want to call ’em.”

“And you know this how? You have these amazing powers, right? Your mama’s a witch back in West Virginny and she passed them on to you.”

“Tennessee! I’m from Tennessee! And it don’t have nothing to do with my mama!”

“So you are a witch? You whup up potions out of possum guts and a pinch of geechee root? You cure warts and love troubles? How’d you get to be a witch if your mama didn’t teach you?”

She fixed him with a hateful stare.

“I bet I know.” He lit up and adopted a hick drawl. “You was standing on a corner over to Taterville one evening, waiting on the bus to Hog Jowl, when this here beam of light pierced down from heaven …”

She stalked off toward the motel.

“Or maybe you was in Hog Jowl! Waiting on the bus to Taterville!” he called after her. “I get them two places confused!”

She whirled about and said venomously, “You think you’re so damn smart! Well, go on! Stay there and see what happens!”

Startled by her defiance, he watched after her until she vanished inside the room. Little Missy, he thought, could serve up a side of mean. He returned his attention to the elves. He gave some of them names—Groper, Sleazy, Ratfuck, Spongehead—but became bored, distracted by the booming surf. Peering over the flagstone wall, he could see nothing, but it was apparent that the motel stood atop a cliff, a high cliff if his spider senses were reliable. The darkness beneath wanted him, drew him down, and he had a fleeting impulse to vault over the wall. Not a good sign. Almost as not-good as no longer being able to amuse oneself with one’s own wit.

Turning away from the drop, he could have sworn one of the elves had moved closer. Moved and stopped the moment he turned, once again counterfeiting the inanimate. The elf was weaponless, crouching, its swarthy, snarling face visible between upraised hands, poised to deliver a push.

“Wily little bastard,” he said. “You want some of me?”

The elf appeared to quiver with eagerness, the light trembling on its surfaces, glinting from its eyes.

“Fuck you!”

Michael flipped his cigarette at the elf, showering it with sparks. As he crossed the lawn he tried not to glance behind him, but he looked back twice.

——

Once inside 120, he stripped off his shirt, switched off the lights, and lay down, listening to the shower hissing, the shuddery hum of the air conditioner. Glare from the breezeway penetrated the drapes, spreading a sickly murk throughout the room. The blond production-line furniture and the mirror bolted above the writing desk wavered like fixtures in a mirage. He felt that he was floating off the bed. Nerves jumped in his cheek. Phosphenes drifted and flared in the dimness. Something was lumped up under his ass, and he remembered Charlie’s money. He sat up, pulled the wad from his hip pocket and counted it. Seven thousand dollars and change. The bills were cool and slick, like strange skins.

He wondered if he should give Charlie a call. It would be painful, but Charlie might feel better afterward. He would be guilty, morose. The first thing he’d say would be not to worry about the money or the car, and he hoped Michael could forgive him. He hadn’t meant it, the kiss. For four years he’d been straight with Michael, and he had fucked up once. It would never happen again. And then, he, Michael, would say … maybe nothing. Maybe he’d just hang on the phone, knowing that if he opened his mouth he would indict himself, because it had been his fuckup, too. Or maybe he’d get angry with Charlie for making him feel guilty and call him a spunk muncher, a pole smoker, an aging drag queen with a ring in his dick. But Charlie wouldn’t let him off so easily. If you’re determined to run, he’d say, all right, but don’t pretend it was casual, don’t pretend you’re not feeling anything. They’d trade back and forth like that for a while, and finally Michael would say he had to go, and Charlie would say, okay, but once you’ve had time to think things over, please, please, get in touch, and so what was the point in calling when he knew everything that would be said … And, hell, Charlie would know he was going through this process and wouldn’t expect a call, so what was the goddamn point?

“I am going to hell,” he said, anticipating a demonic chuckle in response.

The girl came out of the bathroom, toweling her hair, still wearing tank top and panties. He thought it was extremely demure of her to be clothed at this juncture—such restraint and modesty well might be considered a touch of class in their circle.

“It’s so cold in here!” she said.

“I like it cold.”

“Well.” She toweled briskly. “I guess it’s just my hair’s still wet.”

He let out a sigh and saw a shadow pour from his mouth; a sensation of calm stole over him, like the calm after the passing of a fever.

The girl pulled off the tank top; beneath a tan line, her pale breasts were luminous in the half-light, the nipples pink and childlike. She burrowed beneath the covers, drawing them up to her chin.

“You coming in?” she asked.

He skinned out of his jeans and shorts. The sheets were cold and once he had drawn them up, he could no longer feel anything below his waist. The girl’s thigh nudged his and he felt that—a patch of skin warming to life. Strands of damp hair tickled his shoulder.

“Hey,” she said softly. “You pretty whacked out, huh?”

“That’s me … whacked out.”

“You had a tiring day.” Her hand spidered across his abdomen. “All that driving and hardly ever stopping. You must be wore right down.”

He touched one of her breasts, let its weight nestle in his palm. It was a fine thing to hold, but he felt not even a glint of arousal. “I don’t think it’s going to work,” he said.

“All that coke’s numbing you out,” she whispered, her mouth brushing his ear, her fingers caressing, molding his limp cock. “You lie back now and let me take care of you.”

He became immersed in her fresh, soapy smell, in her breathy voice and the mastering cleverness of her hand.

“I wish it was just the two of us,” she said.

“Is somebody else here?”

“I mean, you know. Like even when you’re alone, how you can feel other people pressing in on you. People in the vicinity.”

“Uh-huh.”

She took to singing distractedly again, an aimless, wordless, off-key tune of the sort a child might sing while concentrating on a toy. She gripped him more tightly and increased her rhythm. “You ain’t still mad, are you?”

“Not so much.”

She gave a husky laugh, and it seemed there was a note of triumph in it. “You’re a funny fella. I don’t know why you strike me funny, but you sure do. Maybe it’s ’cause you like pretending you ain’t serious about nothing when you serious about ’most everything.”

“Seriously funny,” he said. “That’s me.”

“That don’t mean a blessed thing,” she said, making it sound seductive. “You can talk like that all you want, ’cause I’m onto you.”

The planes of her cheeks, her lidded eyes and half smile … They were so close to him, they no longer appeared to be elements of a face, but features on a map that he couldn’t read.

“Yeah? How’s that?”

“I been watching you all day. I can tell when you’re easy, when you’re worried. When you’re lying.” She peeled back the covers, checking to see what her hand had wrought. “Look at that! ’Pears it’s gonna work after all.”

She scooted lower in the bed, teased him with her lips, then slipped half his length into her mouth; he brushed the hair back from her face so he could watch her cheeks hollow. After a minute she wriggled back up beside him. Her tongue darted out, flirting with his, and her hand moved slowly, insistently.

“You keep that up, I’m going to come,” he said.

“Be all right with me,” she said. “I think that’d be kinda nice.”

He laughed, happy with her.

“Know what else I know about you?” she asked after a pause.

“What?”

“You know all about me … Least, more than you think you know. But you’re so busy being funny, you ain’t noticed.”

He felt a delicate shift in attitude that he hadn’t felt for a long time, that perhaps he had only told himself he could feel. The silky lengths of her wet hair gave her face a cunning sweetness like that of a nymph, a dryad, and he had the idea that her expression—rapt, yet with a trace of uncertainty—was a mirror image of his own.

“We’re the same people,” she said. “You might be older than me, and you think you’re smarter. But we been the same places, we had the same trouble. We understand each other.”

Though he had reached this conclusion on his own, he wanted to deny it now but could not—he recognized her from some foul adit of experience, a dead end, a still-life alley with full moon and heaped garbage bags glistening like fat black boulders, and while she gave a blow job to some middle-aged douche he would wait in the zebra-striped island of light and shadow beneath a fire escape, her agent, her mystic protector, counting the cash, watching her shade kneel and merge with the flaps of a raincoat, and afterward she would hurry over to him, wiping off her lips, and ask, “We got enough?” Enough for the joys of modern chemistry, enough to transform an abandoned house into the Beverly Hilton, cockroaches into glittering brown jewels, life into a death trip with pretty colors, hunger into a cool side effect, love into a blue movie with a warped soundtrack and junk food.

“Bet you don’t believe me,” she said.

“You might be wrong.”

As if saying this bridged some vital distance between them, he felt close to her, shrouded in a thick, honeyed sexuality, and believed he knew her completely.

“Am I?” she said.

“Can’t you tell? I thought you were onto me.”

“Quit teasing!”

“I’m not teasing,” he said. “Can’t you tell?”

He pulled her atop him, nuzzled her breasts. He thought he could taste her resilience, her fragility, the lesser hopelessness she might call hope, all braided together in the chewy plugs of her nipples.

“It’s me you want?” she asked, tremulous, a virgin asking for proof. “It’s really me and not just … things?”

“You,” he said with such a wealth of solemnity that his mood was broken, but then she pushed his hand between her legs, saying, “See … see how much I want you, see … ,” and he was with her again, nearly breathless, easing two fingers inside her. Her ass churned, her tongue was in his mouth and she moaned at the same time. They rolled and tossed, the dim mirror filling with their thrashing shadows, the walls billowing, fiery specks jiggling in midair, all locked into the rhythm of the tumbling bed. He had a feeling of liberation and unfamiliarity, as if this were something more powerful and involving than the sex he remembered, but when he sat up, braced on one hand, preparing to enter her, he froze, a cocaine freeze that left him dead and empty, like a machine whose current had been stopped. He felt isolated, embedded in miles of darkness, and he thought if he were to shift his head an inch, the wires holding it in place would snap. His elbow ached from the strain of supporting his weight, and his forearm began to tremble.

“What’s wrong?” she said, urgency burring her voice, trying to guide him between her legs.

Thoughts poured from his head like dirty water down a drain. He was poisoned, out of his element, unable to speak. His erection wilted. The girl took him in her mouth again and that did the trick that sent a jolt of current flowing through the dead machine. But when he entered her, when she lifted her legs, her heels digging into his calves, and she cried out, “Oh God, God … ahh God,” her speech had the rushed monotonous cadence and impersonal fervor of somebody calling a horse race, and he remained distant, never losing himself in the turns of her body, fucking her with mechanical ferocity and never once speaking her name.

——

Years before, a couple of years after he ran away from home, he and a girl named Chess had fled LA, planning to live as one in some lush, secret paradise, to produce children and art, and think the eloquent thoughts of the Awakened. Instead, they wandered around Mexico, stealing and fucking other people for drugs and food. He had believed he loved her and in a sense he had. The problem had been that they, too, were the same people and he had loved her with the same malignant intensity with which he loved himself. In the end he pimped her to a prosperous middle-aged German for a quantity of Mexican mud, and Chess and the German guy flew off together for what was supposed to be a week in Valparaiso, never to be heard from again.

He talked about Chess a great deal over the ensuing years; he told their story of squandered love to friends, to marks, to Charlie. The story became his big-ticket item, the heartbreakingly honest confessional he used to impress people with his depth, his soulfulness, convincing them to let him get close enough so he could take advantage of them in some way; but the more he talked, the less he remembered of what he had felt, as if each word was carrying off a fragment of experience, until he could no longer recall how it had actually been between them. He could summon up her face, but it was a dead face, a police sketch of a face, devoid of nuance, of energy.

This girl now, lying with her pale back to him, dozy from sex … no way he felt about her as he had about Chess. That is, if what he recalled wasn’t total bullshit. But this girl … What was her fucking name? Tammy, Trudy … something like that. Tracy. He couldn’t deny she had a certain appeal. Maybe it was her ignorance, the sheer doggedness of it—maybe that bespoke a measure of innocence. Innocence was a quality he could use to delude himself into believing there was more to the relationship. He ran a hand along the curve of her waist and hip, and she stirred to the touch. No, he decided. He didn’t need any complications.

“Hey, Tracy.”

He nudged her and she made a complaining noise. He flicked on the bedside lamp and said again, “Tracy!”

“Oh, Lord! I forgot.” She squinted up at him. “When I hitchhike I never use my real name. It makes me feel safer out there. I know it’s silly. I meant to tell you, but …” She flashed a lopsided grin. “We got a little busy.”

She scooted up to a sitting position and gave him a peck on the cheek and said, “Sorry.”

He caught a whiff of Elfland Hospitality Pak Shampoo.

“My name’s Carole,” she said. “Carole with e on the end.”

For some reason it seemed harder to dump a Carole than a Tracy, and he was tempted to relent. Then she began to prattle like she had in the car, wondering if there was a place open where they could get some food, probably not, it must be two o’clock already, and she couldn’t hardly wait to hit Seattle, she bet the seafood there was awesome …

“Listen, Carole,” he said. “I don’t think we should travel together.”

Uncomprehending, she gaped at him.

“I’ll give you money for the bus,” he said. “And enough so you can get situated in Seattle. But that’s it.”

She made a weak, half-completed gesture toward her brow. “What do you mean?” she asked. “I thought …”

“I don’t want to argue,” he said.

She seemed prettier than she had earlier, the sharpness of her face less evident. “But we were …”

“And don’t be telling me how wonderful it can be,” he went on. “If we stay together, all that’ll happen is one of us will rip the other off.”

She started to object and he said, “I’ll give you a thousand dollars,” seeing this as a stroke of moral genius, charity abolishing the sin of theft, saving himself grief and at the same time giving the girl a shot. He would still have six thousand left.

“I don’t give a damn about your money!” she said tearfully. “I want to be with you!”

“It’s not going to happen.”

She let out a thin cry and clasped her hands to the side of her head.

“It’s for the best,” he said. “If you stay calm and think about it, you’ll see that.”

She hugged her knees, rocking back and forth, doing her mad-girl impression, singing tunelessly, breathily, the song of a fly buzzing in an asylum window, drunk on sunlight.

“Stop that!” he said.

Her keening rose in pitch.

“What are you … fucking nuts? Talk to me.”

He expected her to start blubbering, but she didn’t leak a single tear and kept on with her broken-teakettle noise.

“That’s not going to get it,” he said. “Acting all crazy and shit. I’ve seen crazy, I know crazy. You can’t sell that shit here.”

Her eyelids drooped so that slits of white were visible beneath them.

Fed up with her, he pulled on his pants, shrugged into his shirt and stepped out into the breezeway, slamming the door behind him. The Dodge minivan he had parked beside was gone. He wished that he hadn’t left his car keys in the room. He could have booked. A thousand dollars? Christ, what was he thinking? She was likely used to selling her ass for fifty, a hundred tops. The cool air soothed him, tuned his anger lower. He dug the loose change from his pocket and went padding barefoot along the breezeway toward the vending machines next to the office. If he got her something to eat, that might placate her. It might be worth driving somewhere—that pancake house back on the interstate might still be serving. Once she was loaded with carbs and sugar he could talk her down from hysteria, open a dialogue, reason with her, and in the end they would share a hug, a semichaste kiss, alas, alack, adios, adieu, we’ll always have the Elfland.

He selected a bag of chips and a Snickers from the vending machines, and then noticed particles of glass on the sidewalk in front of the office—the door had been blown inward and glass shards strewn across the carpeting, as if something had struck it with explosive force. The lights were on, but the night man was nowhere in sight.

Michael stuck his head inside and called out. No reply. He picked his way across the carpet, walking on his toes, and peered behind the desk, half expecting to find the night man’s bullet-riddled corpse, but saw only an overturned office chair and what might have been a dusting of Doritos crumbs on the counter. Going back outside, he surveyed the parking lot, an acreage of blacktop divided by concrete islands and the occasional patch of shrubbery, slots demarked by diagonal white lines, luminous under the arc lights. His sense of unease spiked. There had been at least six or seven cars in the lot, not counting the minivan, and now there were none. What were the odds that their owners had all checked out between midnight and two a.m.? Not inconceivable, he told himself. The Elfland might be a no-tell motel. He scanned the façade of the building. Yellow lights sprayed from the open door of a second-floor room, silhouetting a short, squat figure no larger than a child. Whoever it was didn’t move a muscle. Michael waved, but the wave was not returned. The figure might have been stone … or wood. It looked to be wearing some sort of hat. Like a Santa hat.

Oh, no you don’t, he said to himself.

You’re not going there, you are definitely not buying into the Carole-induced premise that magical Nazi elves have taken over a motel in Bumfuck, Oregon.

“Hey!” he shouted at the motionless figure. “What’s going on?”

Silence.

“Somebody broke into the office! Did you see anything?”

A clattering sounded behind him—like someone running in wooden shoes.

He spun about. Something darted behind a shrub about fifty feet away. Something quick and approximately elf sized. He couldn’t be certain of it—he would have liked third-party corroboration. He was exhausted, coming down from a coke binge, and his eyes were playing tricks.

“Is anybody there?” he called in a shaky voice.

The shrub quivered, as if being shaken. He shot a glance toward the second-floor room. The figure in the doorway was gone.

Michael’s balls tightened. He eased toward the parking-lot exit, choosing a path that led well away from the suspicious shrub, intending to put some distance between himself and the motel, cross the road to the Boron station and take stock. Let his nerves settle and then head back to 120, because it had become clear he was under the influence of the coke and of that nut bag Carole-with-an-e-on-the-end, and he needed to gain perspective. That was all. He’d pull it together, return to the room, grab his keys, and drive. Thinking this made him feel steadier. He’d go as far as Portland and find a motel not named the Elfland, a Comfort Inn, a Travelodge or Best Western, a good old American franchise free of Black Forest statuary and street meat …

The lights went out.

Not just the lights of the motel and the parking lot, but also those of the Boron station, the shops, and the winking traffic signal. The darkness was unrelieved. It was as if a dense black cloud had lowered over the town, reducing visibility to almost zero. Power failure. He waited for the lights to come back. When they did not, he moved forward, groping, shuffling along, making for the exit, determined to follow through on his plan of taking stock, pulling it together.

He heard the clattering again. It was louder, closer, issuing from every direction—lots of diminutive wooden feet darting near. As he turned this way and that, tracking the noise, something snagged his shirttail and nearly succeeded in dragging him down. Panic put a charge in him and he ran blindly, his arms pumping. Pieces of gravel stuck in the soles of his feet. He ignored the discomfort and kept running until he crashed into the hedge bordering the lot. Twigs tore at his sides, dug into his chest. He fought to break through the hedge, tearing away handfuls of leaves, but it was impenetrable—he hung there, supported by the bushes. The clattering had stopped, and, but for the wheezing of his breath, the silence was absolute. No semis grinding on the interstate, no barking dogs, no ambient noise whatsoever. He pictured the town cut off from the universe of light and life, adrift on an infinite ocean of nothingness, monsters with mile-wide mouths rising toward the surface, lured by this tasty morsel, and panic took him a second time. He struggled free of the hedge, lost his balance, and fell backward, smacking his head on the asphalt. Splinters of white light lanced through his skull. Dazed, he rolled over onto his side, preparing to sit up.

Overhead, the Elfland’s sign switched on, humming, buzzing, painting on the asphalt a ragged island of illumination upon which he was marooned. The leprechaun on the sign mocked him with a knowing leer. Michael’s instincts prompted him to flee, but he was too enfeebled to do anything other than scrabble at the pavement. He waited for the leprechaun to leap down from the sign, for whatever form the next shock might take.

“Who’s there?” he shouted, and then: “Quit fucking with me!”

Darkness swallowed his words.

He remained lying there, alert for the least sound and hearing none. Moths came to whirl whitely like windblown snowflakes about the sign, and this emblem of normalcy helped restore his capacity for thought. No other lights showed, either in the motel or the town, and that did not make sense, that the sign was the sole source of radiance, unless he were to believe in a reality he wanted to reject … And yet he couldn’t reject it. The girl, Carole, she’d never denied being a witch. She must be orchestrating this somehow. That funky singing she did now and again, it could be part of a spell, a retarded Tennessee mantra that helped her focus. She was the only person who had reason to screw with him. Except for Charlie, maybe. Except for Chess. Except for damn near every fucking person he had ever met, everyone he had used and abused while working out his parental issues. Perhaps that’s what was happening here: karmic retribution.

He laughed off the possibility and then had the urge to cry out for help; but even if things were normal, if everyone was safe in their beds and the town was not the empty, abandoned-by-God place he envisioned, there was nobody within earshot. And if help arrived, what would he say then? This redneck bitch I picked up hitchhiking, goes about a hundred five, hundred ten pounds, IQ of a snail, she’s a freak, man, she’s tripping me out, animating the elf population of Whidby Bay. Sure, son, the cops would say. Let’s put you into the nice holding tank where you’ll be protected from her unnatural power. Hey, where’d you get the seven grand? You suppose this white powder might be an illegal substance? Got a pink slip for the Caddy?

At length he got to his feet, feeling stronger for the effort, and began walking toward the motel, its unlit façade melting up from the dark. He was in rotten shape, his head throbbing, vision fluttering, feet and torso bleeding, but bottom line, he had to get the keys. Arguments occurred to him as he went. Explanations. The Elfland’s sign must be on some weird separate circuit. The night man had blundered into the door, shattered the glass, and run away. Vandals had set the elf in the second-floor doorway, or else it was a kid wearing a funny hat. He had been unsteady on his feet and imagined the tug on his shirttail. The clattering … Well, he’d have to work on that one. None of this held water, but neither did any less-rational explanation, and he allowed it to satisfy a need for some logical ground, however flimsy, on which to stand.

On reaching the rear of the motel he was blind again, and virtually deaf. The breezeway lights had not come back on, and the crash of the surf drowned out lesser sounds. He moved out onto the grass, cool, dewy, and easier on his feet, and shuffled along, waving an arm before him to feel for obstructions. His instep came down on some hard, sharp thing. He yelped and sprawled on the ground, squeezing his foot to stifle the pain. Once the pain had subsided, he groped about in the grass and found a sprinkler head. He twisted the thing angrily, trying in vain to uproot it, and then clutched at his foot again, rubbing away the soreness. Suddenly weary, he hung his head and closed his eyes. He could have nodded off, no problem, but he remembered that this sort of sleepiness was a symptom of concussion and forced himself to stand. His thoughts narrowed to keys, car, drive.

He must have gotten turned around, because after a couple of steps he came up against the wall at the edge of the cliff. He clung to it for an instant, getting his bearings, and made a beeline for the breezeway—he estimated that no more than fifteen or twenty steps would carry him there. But he took twenty-five steps, then thirty, and still was walking on grass. Thinking he might have gone off on a diagonal, he altered his path by a few degrees and continued. He went another twenty steps. The lawn hadn’t been this extensive—he should have hit concrete by now. He decided to return to the wall, get his bearings again, and start over; but he walked until, by his reckoning, he was somewhere out over the Pacific and did not encounter the wall. He tamped down his anxiety, telling himself to stay calm … And then he saw that the character of the darkness had changed. Whereas before it had been dead black, now the air had acquired a distinct shine, a gloss that reminded him of obsidian or polished ebony, and appeared to be circulating around him, as if he were at the center of a slow whirlpool. Behind the currents of the whirlpool he could see the elves. Not clearly and not for long, but they were gathered around him, cutting off every avenue of escape, fading out and reappearing closer to hand and in different postures—like watching a streaming video with gaps in the continuity. Fear seeped into the corners of his mind, but did not flood and overflow it. It was fear tempered by doubt and disbelief, by a degree of acceptance, and by one thing more. He wanted the elves to be real. Death at their hands would be preferable to the ignominy of an overdose, hepatitis, any of the protracted stand-ins for suicide toward which he was inexorably bound. This would be death by punch line. Suicide by elf.

“Bring it, bitches,” he said, slurring the words.

On Sleazy, on Spongehead, on Ratfuck and Groper.

He gave an amused grunt. Now this was some funny shit. I mean, really. Elves. They were almost in striking distance, cudgels lifted, knives at ready, their scowling faces knotted in fury. In their original context, they might have been seen as brave and resolute, the defenders of a helpless village. Rambos among elves. Forest guerrillas. Hardy little fuckers. Here they could only be misunderstood.

At the last second fear eroded his intention to meet death head on, and he made a panic move, stumbling forward in an attempt to break through their defenses. Something cracked the top of his head, and he found himself gazing into the depths of the whirlpool, into a funnel of blackness at whose blacker-than-black bottom a convulsed flower revolved, a bloom with a thousand petals that rippled and undulated like those of some vast and complicated sea creature sucking him down into its nothing-colored maw.

——

An orange glow penetrated his lids and his first thought was that the breezeway lights had come back on, but on opening his eyes he realized it was the early sun. He lay at the base of the wall and everything ached, especially his head. His clothes were soaked with dew. Laboriously, he made it to his knees and saw over the top of the wall other cliffs, stratifications of reddish sediment towering above the ocean. Beneath the shadows of high cumulus the water was dark purple, and among the cloud shadows lay swatches of glittering orange. The soft crush of the surf was constant and serene. He touched the crown of his head and couldn’t tell whether he felt his scalp or the pads of his fingers.

“Thank goodness,” said the girl’s voice behind him. “I thought I was going to have to call nine-one-one. What happened?”

Her hand fell to his shoulder and in a reflex of fright he knocked it away and scrambled to his feet. She retreated, bewilderment plain on her face. At her rear, a couple of yards distant, stood the elves—an evil Walt Disney platoon prepared to follow their hillbilly Snow White ditsy queen into battle. He was fairly certain they were grouped and posed differently from when he had initially seen them. Dizzy, he sank down in the grass and leaned against the wall.

“You got blood all over you,” she said, and held out a packet of tissues. “I bought you some wipes.”

If she were a witch, if she had almost killed him and was gaming him now, she had a smooth fucking act.

“Did you know the office door’s busted out?” she said. “That have anything to do with how you got bloody?”

“You tell me.”

She took to running her mouth, saying there was so many criminals these days, why, even in a piddly place like her hometown, people were always breaking into Coulters, this big old department store, and robbing the Dairy Queen and all. His paranoia ebbed and, though with half his mind he believed that her asinine rap was designed to put him at ease, make him let down his guard, he permitted her to kneel beside him and dab at his injuries with the wipes. The astringent stung, but it felt better than it hurt. He kept an eye on the elves. Sunlight glistened on their caved-in faces, charged the tips of their weapons. Their scowls seemed diminished. They approved of this union between Magic Girl and Action Lad. What the fuck, Michael said to himself. If you believe what you think you believe, you should render her ass unconscious and beat it—but he wasn’t sure he could drive.

“You’re wrong to be doing this,” said the girl as she finished her cleanup.

“Doing what?”

“Breaking up with me.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, if you don’t think so, there’s nothing to say, ’cause when you go and think something you’re bound to believe it. I may not know much about you, but I know that.”

He rested his head on his knees. “I don’t want to talk.”

After a while the girl said, “I’m sorry.”

He cocked an eye toward her. “What for? Did you do something to me?”

“That wasn’t my meaning. I’m just sorry about everything.”

The wind gusted, flattening the grass; a thin tide of light raced across the lawn and from somewhere below the rim of the cliff came the crying of gulls. Michael felt weak and lazy in the sun.

“You really going to give me a thousand dollars?” she asked.

“I meant it when I said it.”

She plucked a handful of grass and let the wind take it from her palm. “I been trying to think how to convince you we’d be good together. I know what I was feeling last night. It was just a start—I understand that. But it was real, and if you can’t remember how it was, if it got knocked out of you or whatever, maybe you should hunt up what you felt and take a chance on it. ’Cause that’s all feelings are—things you catch and ride as far as they’ll take you. It’s sorta like hitchhiking.”

That Tennessee mountain homily, pure as moonshine trickling from a rock.

I hear you, Sonnet darling, but things got a tad too freaky for me.

“That’s not the point,” he said. “I …”

“Let me talk, all right? I ain’t asking for nothing.”

She tugged at the crotch of her cutoffs; her face was calm.

“When you said you’d give me a thousand dollars,” she went on, “I was angry. I thought you was treating me like a whore. Then I got to wondering why you’re giving me so much.”

Impatient with analysis, he said, “You don’t have to explain this shit.”

“It won’t take a minute.” She peered at him. “You feeling okay? You don’t look too good.”

The time has come for solicitude, he thought. After passion, after anger and despair, after the fear and the trembling, a little friendly concern: the cheese tray of the romantic supper.

“I’ll live,” he said.

Actually, lover, I’m in tiptop shape. I’m sitting here communing with my peeps, the Mojo Demon Elves, the Kamikaze Hellfighter Elves, while you and I discuss, among other subjects, Sexual Politics in the Theater of the Real.

“I told myself, he can’t be giving me all that money just to make hisself feel better,” she went on. “I guess that showed me you wasn’t trying to deny that something happened. And it made me see things your way. Like maybe you were right about us.”

“Uh-huh, yeah,” he said listlessly.

“I don’t understand why it’s okay to split up,” she said. “But I guess it is. I never thought I’d say that after last night. I suppose the money helps make it okay. I ain’t a total fool—I know that’s part of it. But I keep wanting to say for us to give it a try. And I keep thinking it’s me who’s right.”

She looked him straight in the eye, a strong look, something certain behind it. The wind strayed a few strands of hair across her cheek, touching the corner of her mouth—she didn’t bother to brush them aside.

“It’s funny how when you’re surest about things, at the same time you’re scaredest that you’re fooling yourself,” she said.

She poked a finger into the black dirt beneath the grass, digging up a clump. Michael was enthralled. There was a new tension in her delivery and he believed she was building toward something important, something that would punctuate or define.

“It may not make sense,” she said. “But the way I see it, maybe we’re both wrong.”

Disappointed, his thoughts shifted miles and hours ahead to Seattle in the rain, new night streets, new opportunities for failure, for fuckup.

“Know what I’m saying?” she asked.

“Yeah, well,” said Michael. “It’d be sort of hard not to know.”

——

The girl drove past the shattered office door and the empty parking lot, past the shops, none of them open, no one in the streets, not a stray cat or a loose dog. Sitting beside her, Michael was spooked but too wasted to react. They had seen only one person in Whidby Bay and now even he was gone. Someone should be up and about, putting out the trash, opening for business.

“I don’t see a hospital,” the girl said.

“I don’t want a hospital. Drive.”

“You should get yourself checked out!”

“There’d be too many questions. They might call the cops. All manner of shit could go wrong. Just drive. I’ll get myself checked out later.”

“You want me to drive anywhere special? Some other hospital?”

“Seattle.”

“That mean we’re sticking together?” she asked in a chirpy tone.

It might add some zest to his latest downward spiral to hang with a chick who possibly could animate elves or transform him into a lizard, and herself as well, and they’d go scampering along the ditches and make scaly, tail-lashing love underneath a yucca plant … Or she’d set a fire with her eyes in a trash alley and they’d lean out a window with a cardboard flap for a curtain and toast marshmallows, until one day she got super pissed and crushed underfoot the teensy spider into which she’d implanted his soul. Not knowing about her would be exhilarating. Inspiring. And how could this bizarre uncertainty be worse than what he’d been through already? Or worse than where he was ultimately headed. It was a tough call. Regular Death or Premium? Two blocks slid by before he said, “I don’t care.”

She slowed the car. “What do you mean, you don’t care? I don’t know what that means.”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s all good,” he said. “Just keep driving … And make sure I don’t go to sleep.”

She stepped on the gas and after another block she said, “How am I supposed to do that?”

“Talk. Engage me in conversation.”

She pulled out onto the interstate. It too was empty, devoid of traffic. “What you want I should talk about?”

“Fuck, I don’t know! Tell me why there’s no people around, no cars. Where the fuck are we? Limbo? You’re a goddamn motor mouth—it should be easy.”

“Limbo? That some place in Oregon?”

Naw, it’s over in Moontana, Suzi Belle.

“Well, is it? Say.”

“Never mind.”

She sang her tuneless tune and before long a car passed, traveling in the opposite direction.

“See,” she said. “There’s a car.”

“Yeah. Quite a coincidence.” He shifted in the seat, half-turned toward her. “What’s that singing thing about?”

She gave him a quizzical look, and he did a poor imitation of her.

“Oh, that!” she said. “It’s just something I do, you know, when I’m concentrating on stuff … or when I get emotional. ’Bout half the time I don’t know I’m doing it.” She punched him playfully on the shoulder. “But I don’t sound nothing like that. You make me sound awful!”

Gray clouds obscured the sun and the world grew increasingly gloomy as they drove. Traffic picked up, but he didn’t see people moving about in the food marts and gas stations along the highway. The sun was a tinny glare without apparent vitality or warmth that leached the evergreens and billboard images of color. The girl began to sing again and Michael noticed that she had an erratic, glowing silhouette—the light dimming and brightening around her ever so slightly with the rhythm of the tune. His vision still wasn’t right, flickering at the edges, but he chose to accept that what he’d noticed was not the product of a concussion. That’s my girl, he thought. My special Jesus groupie, my Mary Magdalene. He settled into the ride, stretching out his legs, unkinking his neck, and said, “This country’s deader than shit. I hope Seattle’s got some fucking people in it.”

The girl’s singing trailed off—she kept her eyes straight ahead and said, “It’s a big city, dummy. There’s bound to be people.” She hadn’t spoken to him this way before, flat and disaffected, like a woman disappointed in a man she had once held high hopes for. Then, with a lilt in her voice, a distinct hint of sly merriment, she added, “Course, you just can’t never predict what kind of people they’re going to be.”

——

LUCIUS SHEPARD’S short fiction has won the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, the International Horror Guild Award, the National Magazine Award, the Locus Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, and the World Fantasy Award.

His most recent books are a short-fiction collection, Viator Plus, and a short novel, The Taborin Scale. Forthcoming are another short-fiction collection, Five Autobiographies; two novels, tentatively titled The Piercefields and The End of Life as We Know It (the latter, young adult); and a short novel, The House of Everything and Nothing.

| THE LAST TRIANGLE |

Jeffrey Ford

—

I was on the street with nowhere to go, broke, with a habit. It was around Halloween, cold as a motherfucker in Fishmere—part suburb, part crumbling city that never happened. I was getting by, roaming the neighborhoods after dark, looking for unlocked cars to see what I could snatch. Sometimes I stole shit out of people’s yards and pawned it or sold it on the street. One night I didn’t have enough to cop, and I was in a bad way. There was nobody on the street to even beg from. It was freezing. Eventually I found this house on a corner and noticed an open garage out back. I got in there where it was warmer, lay down on the concrete, and went into withdrawal.

You can’t understand what that’s like unless you’ve done it. Remember that Twilight Zone where you make your own hell? Like that. I eventually passed out or fell asleep, and woke, shivering, to daylight, unable to get off the floor. Standing in the entrance to the garage was this little old woman with her arms folded, staring down through her bifocals at me. The second she saw I was awake, she turned and walked away. I felt like I’d frozen straight through to my spine during the night and couldn’t get up. A splitting headache, and the nausea was pretty intense too. My first thought was to take off, but too much of me just didn’t give a shit. The old woman reappeared, but now she was carrying a pistol in her left hand.

“What’s wrong with you?” she said.

I told her I was sick.

“I’ve seen you around town,” she said. “You’re an addict.” She didn’t seem freaked out by the situation, even though I was. I managed to get up on one elbow. I shrugged and said, “True.”

And then she left again, and a few minutes later came back, toting an electric space heater. She set it down next to me, stepped away and said, “You missed it last night, but there’s a cot in the back of the garage. Look,” she said, “I’m going to give you some money. Go buy clothes. You can stay here and I’ll feed you. If I know you’re using, though, I’ll call the police. I hope you realize that if you do anything I don’t like I’ll shoot you.” She said it like it was a foregone conclusion, and, yeah, I could actually picture her pulling the trigger.

What could I say? I took the money, and she went back into her house. My first reaction to the whole thing was to laugh. I could score. I struggled up all dizzy and bleary, smelling like the devil’s own shit, and stumbled away.

I didn’t cop that day, only a small bag of weed. Why? I’m not sure, but there was something about the way the old woman talked to me, her unafraid, straight-up approach. That, maybe, and I was so tired of the cycle of falling hard out of a drug dream onto the street and scrabbling like a three-legged dog for the next fix. By noon, I was pot high, downtown, still feeling shitty, when I passed this old clothing store. It was one of those places like you can’t fucking believe is still in operation. The mannequin in the window had on a tan leisure suit. Something about the way the sunlight hit that window display, though, made me remember the old woman’s voice, and I had this feeling like I was on an errand for my mother.

I got the clothes. I went back and lived in her garage. The jitters, the chills, the scratching my scalp and forearms were bad, but when I could finally get to sleep, that cot was as comfortable as a bed in a fairy tale. She brought food a couple times a day. She never said much to me, and the gun was always around. The big problem was going to the bathroom. When you get off the junk, your insides really open up. I knew if I went near the house, she’d shoot me. Let’s just say I marked the surrounding territory. About two weeks in, she wondered herself and asked me, “Where are you evacuating?”

At first I wasn’t sure what she was saying. “Evacuating?” Eventually, I caught on and told her, “Around.” She said that I could come in the house to use the downstairs bathroom. It was tough, ’cause every other second I wanted to just bop her on the head, take everything she had, and score like there was no tomorrow. I kept a tight lid on it till one day, when I was sure I was going to blow, a delivery truck pulled up to the side of the house and delivered, to the garage, a set of barbells and a bench. Later when she brought me out some food, she nodded to the weights and said, “Use them before you jump out of your skin. I insist.”

Ms. Berkley was her name. She never told me her first name, but I saw it on her mail, “Ifanel.” What kind of name is that? She had iron-gray hair, pulled back tight into a bun, and strong green eyes behind the big glasses. Baggy corduroy pants and a zip-up sweater was her wardrobe. There was a yellow one with flowers around the collar. She was a busy old woman. Quick and low to the ground.

Her house was beautiful inside. The floors were polished and covered with those Persian rugs. Wallpaper and stained-glass windows. But there was none of that goofy shit I remembered my grandmother going in for: suffering Christs, knitted hats on the toilet paper. Every room was in perfect order and there were books everywhere. Once she let me move in from the garage to the basement, I’d see her reading at night, sitting at her desk in what she called her “office.” All the lights were out except for this one brass lamp shining right over the book that lay on her desk. She moved her lips when she read. “Good night, Ms. Berkley,” I’d say to her and head for the basement door. From down the hall I’d hear her voice come like out of a dream, “Good night.” She told me she’d been a history teacher at a college. You could tell she was really smart. It didn’t exactly take a genius, but she saw straight through my bullshit.

One morning we were sitting at her kitchen table having coffee, and I asked her why she’d helped me out. I was feeling pretty good then. She said, “That’s what you’re supposed to do. Didn’t anyone ever teach you that?”

“Weren’t you afraid?”

“Of you?” she said. She took the pistol out of her bathrobe pocket and put it on the table between us. “There’s no bullets in it,” she told me. “I went with a fellow who died and he left that behind. I wouldn’t know how to load it.”

Normally I would have laughed, but her expression made me think she was trying to tell me something. “I’ll pay you back,” I said. “I’m gonna get a job this week and start paying you back.”

“No, I’ve got a way for you to pay me back,” she said and smiled for the first time. I was 99 percent sure she wasn’t going to tell me to fuck her, but, you know, it crossed my mind.

Instead, she asked me to take a walk with her downtown. By then it was winter, cold as a witch’s tit. Snow was coming. We must have been a sight on the street. Ms. Berkley, marching along in her puffy ski parka and wool hat, blue with gold stars and a tassel. I don’t think she was even five foot. I walked a couple of steps behind her. I’m six foot four inches, I hadn’t shaved or had a haircut in a long while, and I was wearing this brown suit jacket that she’d found in her closet. I couldn’t button it if you had a gun to my head and my arms stuck out the sleeves almost to the elbow. She told me, “It belonged to the dead man.”

Just past the library, we cut down an alley, crossed a vacant lot, snow still on the ground, and then hit a dirt road that led back to this abandoned factory. One story, white stucco, all the windows empty, glass on the ground, part of the roof caved in. She led me through a stand of trees around to the left side of the old building. From where we stood, I could see a lake through the woods. She pointed at the wall and said, “Do you see that symbol in red there?” I looked but all I saw was a couple of Fucks.

“I don’t see it,” I told her.

“Pay attention,” she said and took a step closer to the wall. Then I saw it. About the size of two fists. It was like a capital E tipped over on its three points, and sitting on its back, right in the middle, was an o. “Take a good look at it,” she told me. “I want you to remember it.”

I stared for a few seconds and told her, “Okay, I got it.”

“I walk to the lake almost every day,” she said. “This wasn’t here a couple of days ago.” She looked at me like that was supposed to mean something to me. I shrugged; she scowled. As we walked home, it started to snow.

Before I could even take off the dead man’s jacket, she called me into her office. She was sitting at her desk, still in her coat and hat, with a book open in front of her. I came over to the desk, and she pointed at the book. “What do you see there?” she asked. And there it was, the red, knocked-over E with the o on top.

I said, “Yeah, the thing from before. What is it?”

“The Last Triangle,” she said.

“Where’s the triangle come in?” I asked.

“The three points of the capital E stand for the three points of a triangle.”

“So what?”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Here’s what I want you to do. Tomorrow, after breakfast, I want you to take a pad and a pen, and I want you to walk all around the town, everywhere you can think of, and look to see if that symbol appears on any other walls. If you find one, write down the address for it—street and number. Look for places that are abandoned, rundown, burned out.”

I didn’t want to believe she was crazy, but …

I said to her, “Don’t you have any real work for me to do—heavy lifting, digging, painting, you know?”

“Just do what I ask you to do.”

Ms. Berkley gave me a few bucks and sent me on my way. First things first, I went downtown, scored a couple of joints, bought a forty of Colt. Then I did the grand tour. It was fucking freezing, of course. The sky was brown, and the dead man’s jacket wasn’t cutting it. I found the first of the symbols on the wall of a closed-down bar. The place had a pink plastic sign that said Here It Is, with a silhouette of a woman with an Afro sitting in a martini glass. The E was there in red on the plywood of a boarded front window. I had to walk a block each way to figure out the address, but I got it. After that I kept looking. I walked myself sober and then some and didn’t get back to the house till nightfall.

When I told Ms. Berkley that I’d found one, she smiled and clapped her hands together. She asked for the address, and I delivered. She set me up with spaghetti and meatballs at the kitchen table. I was tired, but seriously, I felt like a prince. She went down the hall to her office. A few minutes later, she came back with a piece of paper in her hand. As I pushed the plate away, she set the paper down in front of me and then took a seat.

“That’s a map of town,” she said. I looked it over. There were two dots in red pen and a straight line connecting them. “You see the dots?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“Those are two points of the Last Triangle.”

“Okay,” I said and thought, “Here we go …”

“The Last Triangle is an equilateral triangle; all the sides are equal,” she said.

I failed math every year in high school, so I just nodded.

“Since we know these two points, we know that the last point is in one of two places on the map, either east or west.” She reached across the table and slid the map toward her. With the red pen, she made two dots and then made two triangles sharing a line down the center. She pushed the map toward me again. “Tomorrow you have to look either here or here,” she said, pointing with the tip of the pen.

The next day I found the third one, to the east, just before it got dark. A tall old house, on the edge of an abandoned industrial park. It looked like there’d been a fire. There was an old rusted Chevy up on blocks in the driveway. The E-and-o thing was spray-painted on the trunk.

When I brought her that info, she gave me the lowdown on the triangle. “I read a lot of books about history,” she said, “and I have this ability to remember things I’ve seen or read. If I saw a phone number once, I’d remember it correctly. It’s not a photographic memory; it doesn’t work automatically or with everything. Maybe five years ago I read this book on ancient magic, The Spells of Abriel the Magus, and I remembered the symbol from that book when I saw it on the wall of the old factory last week. I came home, found the book, and reread the part about the Last Triangle. It’s also known as Abriel’s Escape or Abriel’s Prison.

“Abriel was a thirteenth-century magus … magician. He wandered around Europe and created six powerful spells. The triangle, once marked out, denotes a protective zone in which its creator cannot be harmed. There’s a limitation to the size it can be, each leg no more than a mile. At the same time that zone is a sanctuary, it’s a trap. The magus can’t leave its boundary, ever. To cross it is certain death. For this reason, the spell was used only once, by Abriel, in Dresden, to escape a number of people he’d harmed with his dark arts who had sent their own wizards to kill him. He lived out the rest of his life there, within the Last Triangle, and died at one hundred years of age.”

“That’s a doozy.”

“Pay attention,” she said. “For the Last Triangle to be activated, the creator of the triangle must take a life at its geographical center between the time of the three symbols being marked in the world and the next full moon. Legend has it, Abriel killed the baker Ellot Haber to induce the spell.”

It took me almost a minute and a half to grasp what she was saying. “You mean, someone’s gonna get iced?” I said.

“Maybe.”

“Come on, a kid just happened to make that symbol. Coincidence.”

“No, remember, a perfect equilateral triangle, each one of the symbols exactly where it should be.” She laughed, and, for a second, looked a lot younger.

“I don’t believe in magic,” I told her. “There’s no magic out there.”

“You don’t have to believe it,” she said. “But maybe someone out there does. Someone desperate for protection, willing to believe even in magic.”

“That’s pretty far fetched,” I said, “but if you think there’s a chance, call the cops. Just leave me out of it.”

“The cops,” she said and shook her head. “They’d lock me up with that story.”

“Glad we agree on that.”

“The center of the triangle on my map,” she said, “is the train-station parking lot. And in five nights there’ll be a full moon. No one’s gotten killed at the station yet, not that I’ve heard of.”

After breakfast she called a cab and went out, leaving me to fix the garbage disposal and wonder about the craziness. I tried to see it her way. She’d told me it was our civic duty to do something, but I wasn’t buying any of it. Later that afternoon, I saw her sitting at the computer in her office. Her glasses near the end of her nose, she was reading off the Internet and loading bullets into the magazine clip of the pistol. Eventually she looked up and saw me. “You can find just about anything on the Internet,” she said.

“What are you doing with that gun?”

“We’re going out tonight.”

“Not with that.”

She stopped loading. “Don’t tell me what to do,” she said.

After dinner, around dusk, we set out for the train station. Before we left, she handed me the gun. I made sure the safety was on and stuck it in the side pocket of the brown jacket. While she was out getting the bullets she’d bought two chairs that folded down and fit in small plastic tubes. I carried them. Ms. Berkley held a flashlight and in her ski parka had stashed a pint of blackberry brandy. The night was clear and cold, and a big waxing moon hung over town.

We turned off the main street into an alley next to the hardware store and followed it a long way before it came out on the south side of the train station. There was a rundown one-story building there in the corner of the parking lot. I ripped off the plywood planks that covered the door, and we went in. The place was empty but for some busted-up office furniture, and all the windows were shattered, letting the breeze in. We moved through the darkness, Ms. Berkley leading the way with the flashlight, to a back room with a view of the parking lot and station just beyond it. We set up the chairs and took our seats at the empty window. She killed the light.

“Tell me this is the strangest thing you’ve ever done,” I whispered to her.

She brought out the pint of brandy, unscrewed the top, and took a tug on it. “Life’s about doing what needs to get done,” she said. “The sooner you figure that out, the better for everyone.” She passed me the bottle.

After an hour and a half, my eyes had adjusted to the moonlight and I’d scanned every inch of that cracked, potholed parking lot. Two trains a half-hour apart rolled into the station’s elevated platform, and from what I could see, no one got on or off. Ms. Berkley was doing what needed to be done—namely, snoring. I took out a joint and lit up. I’d already polished off the brandy. I kept an eye on the old lady, ready to flick the joint out the window if I saw her eyelids flutter. The shivering breeze did a good job of clearing out the smoke.

At around three a.m., I’d just about nodded off, when the sound of a train pulling into the station brought me back. I sat up and leaned toward the window. It took me a second to clear my eyes and focus. When I did, I saw the silhouette of a person descending the stairs of the raised platform. The figure passed beneath the light at the front of the station, and I could see it was a young woman, carrying a briefcase. I wasn’t quite sure what the fuck I was supposed to be doing, so I tapped Ms. Berkley. She came awake with a splutter and looked a little sheepish for having corked off. I said, “There’s a woman heading to her car. Should I shoot her?”

“Very funny,” she said and got up to stand closer to the window.

I’d figured out which of the few cars in the parking lot belonged to the young woman. She looked like the white-Honda type. Sure enough, she made a beeline for it.

“There’s someone else,” said Ms. Berkley. “Coming out from under the trestle.”

“Where?”

“Left,” she said, and I saw him, a guy with a long coat and hat. He was moving fast, heading for the young woman. Ms. Berkley grabbed my arm and squeezed it. “Go,” she said. I lunged up out of the chair, took two steps, and got dizzy from having sat for so long. I fumbled in my pocket for the pistol as I groped my way out of the building. Once I hit the air, I was fine, and I took off running for the parking lot. Even as jumped up as I was, I thought, “I’m not gonna shoot anyone,” and left the gun’s safety on.

The young woman saw me coming before she noticed the guy behind her. I scared her, and she ran the last few yards to her car. I watched her messing around with her keys and didn’t notice the other guy was also on a flat-out run. As I passed the white Honda, the stranger met me and cracked me in the jaw like a pro. I went down hard but held onto the gun. As soon as I came to, I sat up. The guy—I couldn’t get a good look at his face—drew a blade from his left sleeve. By then the woman was in the car, though, and it screeched off across the parking lot.

He turned, brandishing the long knife, and started for me.

You better believe the safety came off then. That instant, I heard Ms. Berkley’s voice behind me. “What’s the meaning of this?” she said in a stern voice. The stranger looked up, and then turned and ran off, back into the shadows beneath the trestle.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” she said and helped me to my feet. “If that girl’s got any brains, she’ll call the cops.” Ms. Berkley could run pretty fast. We made it back to the building, got the chairs, the empty bottle, and as many cigarette butts as I could find, and split for home. We stayed off the main street and wound our way back through the residential blocks. We didn’t see a soul.

I couldn’t feel how cold I was till I got back in the house. Ms. Berkley made tea. Her hands shook a little. We sat at the kitchen table in silence for a long time.

Finally, I said, “Well, you were right.”

“The gun was a mistake, but if you didn’t have it, you’d be dead now,” she said.

“Not to muddy the waters here, but that’s closer to dead than I want to get. We’re gonna have to go to the police, but if we do, that’ll be it for me.”

“You tried to save her,” said Ms. Berkley. “Very valiant, by the way.”

I laughed. “Tell that to the judge when he’s looking over my record.”

She didn’t say anything else, but left and went to her office. I fell asleep on the cot in the basement with my clothes on. It was warm down there by the furnace. I had terrible dreams of the young woman getting her throat cut but was too tired to wake from them. Eventually, I came to with a hand on my shoulder and Ms. Berkley saying, “Thomas.” I sat up quickly, sure I’d forgotten to do something. She said, “Relax,” and rested her hand for a second on my chest. She sat on the edge of the cot with her hat and coat on.

“Did you sleep?” I asked.

“I went back to the parking lot after the sun came up. There were no police around. Under the trestle, where the man with the knife had come from, I found these.” She took a handful of cigarette butts out of her coat pocket and held them up.

“Anybody could have left them there at any time,” I said. “You read too many books.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” she said.

“He must have stood there waiting for quite a while, judging from how many butts you’ve got there.”

She nodded. “This is a serious man,” she said. “Say he’s not just a lunatic, but an actual magician?”

“Magician,” I said and snorted. “More like a creep who believes his own bullshit.”

“Watch the language,” she said.

“Do we go back to the parking lot tonight?” I asked.

“No, there’ll be police there tonight. I’m sure that girl reported the incident. I have something for you to do. These cigarettes are a Spanish brand, Ducados. I used to know someone who smoked them. The only store in town that sells them is over by the park. Do you know Maya’s Newsstand?”

I nodded.

“I think he buys his cigarettes there.”

“You want me to scope it? How am I supposed to know whether it’s him or not? I never got a good look at him.”

“Maybe by the imprint of your face on his knuckles?” she said.

I couldn’t believe she was breaking my balls, but when she laughed, I had to.

“Take my little camera with you,” she said.

“Why?

“I want to see what you see,” she said. She got up then and left the basement. I got dressed. While I ate, she showed me how to use the camera. It was a little electronic job, but amazing, with telephoto capability and a little window you could see your pictures in. I don’t think I’d held a camera in ten years.

I sat on a bench in the park, next to a giant pine tree, and watched the newsstand across the street. I had my forty in a brown paper bag and a five-dollar joint in my jacket. The day was clear and cold, and people came and went on the street, some of them stopping to buy a paper or cigs from Maya. One thing I noticed was that nobody came to the park, the one nice place in crumbling Fishmere.

All afternoon and nothing criminal, except for one girl’s miniskirt. She was my first photo—exhibit A. After that I took a break and went back into the park, where there was a gazebo looking out across a small lake. I fired up the joint and took another pic of some geese. Mostly I watched the sun on the water and wondered what I’d do once the Last Triangle hoodoo played itself out. Part of me wanted to stay with Ms. Berkley, and the other part knew it wouldn’t be right. I’d been on the scag for fifteen years, and now somebody’s making breakfast and dinner every day. Things like the camera, a revelation to me. She even had me reading a book, The Professor’s House by Willa Cather—slow as shit, but somehow I needed to know what happened next to old Godfrey St. Peter. The food, the weights, and staying off the hard stuff made me strong.

Late in the afternoon, he came to the newsstand. I’d been in such a daze, the sight of him there, like he just materialized, made me jump. My hands shook a little as I telephotoed in on him. He paid for two packs of cigs, and I snapped the picture. I wasn’t sure if I’d caught his mug. He was pretty well hidden by the long coat’s collar and the hat. There was no time to check the shot. As he moved away down the sidewalk, I stowed the camera in my pocket and followed him, hanging back fifty yards or so.

He didn’t seem suspicious. Never looked around or stopped, but just kept moving at the same brisk pace. Only when it came to me that he was walking us in a circle did I get that he was on to me. At that point, he made a quick left into an alley. I followed. The alley was a short one with a brick wall at the end. He’d vanished. I walked cautiously into the shadows and looked around behind the dumpsters. There was nothing there. A gust of wind lifted the old newspapers and litter into the air, and I’ll admit I was scared. On the way back to the house, I looked over my shoulder about a hundred times.

I handed Ms. Berkley the camera in her office. She took a wire out of her desk drawer and plugged one end into the camera and one into the computer. She typed some shit, and then the first picture appeared. It was the legs.

“Finding the focus with that shot?” she asked.

“Everyone’s a suspect,” I said.

“Foolishness,” she murmured. She liked the geese, said it was a nice composition. Then the one of the guy at the newsstand came up, and, yeah, I nailed it. A really clear profile of his face. Eyes like a hawk and a sharp nose. He had white hair and a thick white mustache.

“Not bad,” I said, but Ms. Berkley didn’t respond. She was staring hard at the picture and her mouth was slightly open. She reached out and touched the screen.

“You know him?” I asked.

“You’re wearing his jacket,” she said. Then she turned away, put her face in her hands.

I left her alone and went into the kitchen. I made spaghetti the way she’d showed me. While stirring the sauce, I said to my reflection in the stove hood, “Now the dead man’s back, and he’s the evil magician?” Man, I really wanted to laugh the whole thing off, but I couldn’t forget the guy’s disappearing act.

I put two plates of spaghetti down on the kitchen table and then went to fetch Ms. Berkley. She told me to go away. Instead I put my hands on her shoulders and said, “Come on, you should eat something.” Then, applying as little pressure as possible, I sort of lifted her as she stood. In the kitchen, I held her chair for her and gave her a cup of tea. My spaghetti was undercooked and the sauce was cold, but still, not bad. She used her napkin to dry her eyes.

“The dead man looks pretty good for a dead man,” I said.

“It was easier to explain by telling you he was dead. Who wants the embarrassment of saying someone left them?”

“I get it,” I said.

“I think most people would, but still …”

“This clears something up for me,” I told her. “I always thought it was pretty strange that two people in the same town would know about Abriel and the Last Triangle. I mean, what’s the chances?”

“The book is his,” she said. “Years after he left, it just became part of my library, and eventually I read it. Now that I think of it, he read a lot of books about the occult.”

“Who is he?”

“His name is Lionel Brund. I met him years ago, when I was in my thirties. I was already teaching at the college, and I owned this house. We both were at a party hosted by a colleague. He was just passing through and knew someone who knew someone at the party. We hit it off. He had great stories about his travels. He liked to laugh. It was fun just going to the grocery store with him. My first real romance. A very gentle man.”

The look on her face made me say, “But?”

She nodded. “But he owned a gun, and I had no idea what kind of work he did, although he always had plenty of money. Parts of his life were a secret. He’d go away for a week or two at a time on some ‘business’ trip. I didn’t mind that, because there were parts of my life I wanted to keep to myself as well. We were together, living in this house, for over two years, and then, one day, he was gone. I waited for him to come back for a long time and then moved on, made my own life.”

“Now you do what needs to get done,” I said.

She laughed. “Exactly.”

“Lionel knows we’re onto him. He played me this afternoon, took me in a circle and then was gone with the wind. It creeped me.”

“I want to see him,” she said. “I want to talk to him.”

“He’s out to kill somebody to protect himself,” I said.

“I don’t care,” she said.

“Forget it,” I told her and then asked for the gun. She pushed it across the table to me.

“He could come after us,” I said. “You’ve got to be careful.” She got up to go into her office, and I drew the butcher knife out of its wooden holder on the counter and handed it to her. I wanted her to get how serious things were. She took it but said nothing. I could tell she was lost in the past.

I put the gun, safety off, on the stand next to my cot and lay back with a head full of questions. I stayed awake for a long while before I eventually gave in. A little bit after I dozed off, I was half wakened by the sound of the phone ringing upstairs. I heard Ms. Berkley walk down the hall and pick up. Her voice was a distant mumble. Then I fell asleep for a few minutes, and the first thing I heard when I came to again was the sound of the back door closing. It took me a minute to put together that he’d called and she’d gone to meet him.

I got dressed in a flash, but put on three T-shirts instead of wearing Lionel’s jacket. I thought he might have the power to spook it since it belonged to him. It took me a couple of seconds to decide whether to leave the gun behind as well. But I was shit scared so I shoved it in the waist of my jeans and took off. I ran dead out to the train-station parking lot. Luckily there were no cops there, but there wasn’t anybody else either. I went in the station, searched beneath the trestles, and went back to the rundown building we’d sat in. Nothing.

As I walked back to the house, I tried to think of where he would have asked to meet her. I pictured all the places I’d been to in the past few weeks. An image of Ms. Berkley’s map came to mind, the one of town with the red dots and the triangles, east and west. I’d not found a triangle point to the west, and as I considered that, I recalled the point I had found in the east, the symbol spray-painted on the trunk of an old car up on blocks. It came to me—say that one didn’t count because it wasn’t on a building, connected to the ground. That was a fake. Maybe he knew somehow Ms. Berkley would notice the symbols and he wanted to throw her off.

Then it struck me: what if there was a third symbol in the west I just didn’t see? I tried to picture the map as the actual streets it represented and figure where the center of a western triangle would be. At first it seemed way too complicated, just a jumble of frustration, but I took a few deep breaths, and, recalling the streets I’d walked before, realized the spot must be somewhere in the park across the street from Maya’s Newsstand. It was a hike, and I knew I had to pace myself, but the fact that I’d figured out Lionel’s twists and turns gave me a burst of energy. What I really wanted was to tell Ms. Berkley how I’d thought it through. Then I realized she might already be dead.

Something instinctively drew me toward the gazebo. It was a perfect center for a magician’s prison. The moonlight was on the lake. I thought I heard them talking, saw their shadows sitting on the bench, smelled the smoke of Ducados, but when I took the steps and leaned over to catch my breath, I realized it was all in my mind. The place was empty and still. The geese called from out on the lake. I sat down on the bench and lit a cigarette. Only when I resigned myself to just returning to the house, it came to me I had one more option: to find the last point of the western triangle.

I knew it was a long shot at night, looking without a flashlight for something I couldn’t find during the day. My only consolation was that since Lionel hadn’t taken Ms. Berkley to the center of his triangle, he might not intend to use her as his victim.

I was exhausted, and although I set out from the gazebo jogging toward my best guess as to where the last point was, I was soon walking. The street map of town with the red triangles would flash momentarily in my memory and then disappear. I went up a street that was utterly dark, and the wind followed me. From there, I turned and passed a row of closed factory buildings. The symbol could have been anywhere, hiding in the dark. Finally, there was a cross street, and I walked down a block of row homes, some boarded, some with bars on the windows. That path led to an industrial park. Beneath a dim streetlight, I stopped and tried to picture the map, but it was no use. I was totally lost. I gave up and turned back in the direction I thought Ms. Berkley’s house would be.

One block outside the industrial park, I hit a street of old four-story apartment buildings. The doors were off the hinges, and the moonlight showed no reflection in the shattered windows. A neighborhood of vacant lots and dead brick giants. Halfway down the block, hoping to find a left turn, I just happened to look up and see an unbroken window, yellow lamplight streaming out. From where I stood, I could only see the ceiling of the room, but faint silhouettes moved across it. I took out the gun. There was no decent reason why I thought it was them, but I felt drawn to the place as if under a spell.

I took the stone steps of the building, and when I tried the door, it pushed open. I thought this was strange, but I figured he might have left it ajar for Ms. Berkley. Inside, the foyer was so dark and there was no light on the first landing. I found the first step by inching forward and feeling around with my foot. The last thing I needed was three flights of stairs. I tried to climb without a sound, but the planks creaked unmercifully. “If they don’t hear me coming,” I thought, “they’re both dead.”

As I reached the fourth floor, I could hear noises coming from the room. It sounded like two people were arguing and wrestling around. Then I distinctly heard Ms. Berkley cry out. I lunged at the door, cracked it on the first pounce and busted it in with the second. Splinters flew, and the chain lock ripped out with a pop. I stumbled into the room, the gun pointing forward, completely out of breath. It took me a second to see what was going on.

There they were, in a bed beneath the window in the opposite corner of the room, naked, frozen by my intrusion, her legs around his back. Ms. Berkley scooted up and quickly wrapped the blanket around herself, leaving old Lionel out in the cold. He jumped up quick, dick flopping, and got into his boxers.

“What the hell,” I whispered.

“Go home, Thomas,” she said.

“You’re coming with me,” I said.

“I can handle this,” she said.

“Who’s after you?” I said to Lionel. “For what?”

He took a deep breath. “Phantoms more cruel than you can imagine, my boy. I lived my young life recklessly, like you, and its mistakes have multiplied and hounded me ever since.”

“You’re a loser,” I said and it sounded so stupid. Especially when it struck me that Lionel might have been old, but he looked pretty strong.

“Sorry, son,” he said and drew that long knife from a scabbard on the nightstand next to the bed. “It’s time to sever ties.”

“Run,” said Ms. Berkley.

I thought, “Fuck this guy,” and pulled out the gun.

Ms. Berkley jumped on Lionel, but he shrugged her off with a sharp push that landed her back on the bed. “This one’s not running,” he said. “I can tell.”

I was stunned for a moment by Ms. Berkley’s nakedness. But as he advanced a step, I raised the gun and told him, “Drop the knife.”

He said, “Be careful; you’re hurting it.”

At first his words didn’t register, but then, in my hand, instead of a gun, I felt a frail wriggling thing with a heartbeat. I released my grasp, and a bat flew up to circle around the ceiling. In the same moment, I heard the gun hit the wooden floor and knew he’d tricked me with magic.

He came toward me slowly, and I whipped off two of my T-shirts and wrapped them around my right forearm. He sliced the air with the blade a few times as I crouched down and circled away from him. He lunged fast as a snake, and I got caught against a dresser. He cut me on the stomach and the right shoulder. The next time he came at me, I kicked a footstool in front of him and managed a punch to the side of his head. Lionel came back with a half dozen more slices, each marking me. The T-shirts on my arm were in shreds, as was the one I wore.

I kept watching that knife, and that’s how he got me, another punch to the jaw worse than the one in the station parking lot. I stumbled backward and he followed with the blade aimed at my throat. What saved me was that Ms. Berkley grabbed him from behind. He stopped to push her off again, and I caught my balance and took my best shot to the right side of his face. The punch scored, he fell backward into the wall, and the knife flew in the air. I tried to catch it as it fell but only managed to slice my fingers. I picked it up by the handle and when I looked, Lionel was steamrolling toward me again.

“Thomas,” yelled Ms. Berkley from where she’d landed. I was stunned, and automatically pushed the weapon forward into the bulk of the charging magician. He stopped in his tracks, teetered for a second, and fell back onto his ass. He sat there on the rug, legs splayed, with that big knife sticking out of his stomach. Blood seeped around the blade and puddled in front of him.

Ms. Berkley was next to me, leaning on my shoulder. “Pay attention,” she said.

I snapped out of it and looked down at Lionel. He was sighing more than breathing and staring at the floor.

“If he dies,” said Ms. Berkley, “you inherit the spell of the Last Triangle.”

“That’s right,” Lionel said. Blood came from his mouth with the words. “Wherever you are at dawn, that will be the center of your world.” He laughed. “For the rest of your life you will live in a triangle within the rancid town of Fishmere.”

Ms. Berkley found the gun and picked it up. She went to the bed and grabbed one of the pillows.

“Is that true?” I said and started to panic.

Lionel nodded, laughing. Ms. Berkley took up the gun again and then wrapped the pillow around it. She walked over next to Lionel, crouched down, and touched the pillow to the side of his head.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

Ms. Berkley squinted one eye and steadied her left arm with her right hand while keeping the pillow in place.

“What else?” said Lionel, spluttering blood bubbles. “What needs to be done.”

The pillow muffled the sound of the shot somewhat as feathers flew everywhere. Lionel dropped onto his side without magic, the hole in his head smoking. I wasn’t afraid anyone would hear. There wasn’t another soul for three blocks. Ms. Berkley checked his pulse. “The Last Triangle is mine now,” she said. “I have to get home by dawn.” She got dressed while I stood in the hallway.

I don’t remember leaving Lionel’s building, or passing the park or Maya’s Newsstand. We were running through the night, across town, as the sky lightened in the distance. Four blocks from home, Ms. Berkley gave out and started limping. I picked her up and, still running, carried her the rest of the way. We were in the kitchen, the tea whistle blowing, when the birds started to sing and the sun came up.

She poured the tea for us and said, “I thought I could talk Lionel out of his plan, but he wasn’t the same person anymore. I could see the magic’s like a drug; the more you use it, the more it pushes you out of yourself and takes over.”

“Was he out to kill me or you?” I asked.

“He was out to get himself killed. I’d promised to do the job for him before you showed up. He knew we were onto him and he tried to fool us with the train-station scam, but once he heard my voice that night, he said he knew he couldn’t go through with it. He just wanted to see me once more, and then I was supposed to cut his throat.”

“You would have killed him?” I said.

“I did.”

“You know, before I knifed him?”

“He told me the phantoms and fetches that were after him knew where he was, and it was only a matter of days before they caught up with him.”

“What was it exactly he did?”

“He wouldn’t say, but he implied that it had to do with loving me. And I really think he thought he did.”

“What do you think?” I asked.

Ms. Berkley interrupted me. “You’ve got to get out of town,” she said. “When they find Lionel’s body, you’ll be one of the usual suspects, what with your wandering around drinking beer and smoking pot in public.”

“Who told you that?” I said.

“Did I just fall off the turnip truck yesterday?”

Ms. Berkley went to her office and returned with a roll of cash for me. I didn’t even have time to think about leaving, to miss my cot and the weights, and the meals. The cab showed up and we left. She had her map of town with the triangles on it and had already drawn a new one—its center, her kitchen. We drove for a little ways and then she told the cab driver to pull over and wait. We were in front of a closed-down gas station on the edge of town. She got out and I followed her.

“I paid the driver to take you two towns over to Willmuth. There’s a bus station there. Get a ticket and disappear,” she said.

“What about you? You’re stuck in the triangle.”

“I’m bounded in a nutshell,” she said.

“Why’d you take the spell?”

“You don’t need it. You just woke up. I have every confidence that I’ll be able to figure a way out of it. It’s amazing what you can find on the Internet.”

“A magic spell?” I said.

“Understand this,” she said. “Spells are made to be broken.” She stepped closer and reached her hands to my shoulders. I leaned down. She kissed me on the forehead. “Not promises, though,” she said and turned away, heading home.

“Ms. Berkley,” I called after her.

“Stay clean,” she yelled without looking.

Back in the cab, I said, “Willmuth,” and leaned against the window. The driver started the car, and we sailed through an invisible boundary, into the world.

——

JEFFREY FORD is the author of the novels The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, and The Shadow Year. His short fiction has been published in three collections: The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, and The Drowned Life. His fiction has won the World Fantasy Award, the Nebula Award, the Edgar Allan Poe Award, and the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and two sons and teaches literature and writing at Brookdale Community College.

| THE CARRION GODS IN THEIR HEAVEN |

Laird Barron

—

The leaves were turning.

Lorna fueled the car at a mom-and-pop gas station in the town of Poger Rock, population 190. Poger Rock comprised a forgotten, moribund collection of buildings tucked into the base of a wooded valley a stone’s throw south of Olympia. The station’s marquee was badly peeled and she couldn’t decipher its title. A tavern called Mooney’s occupied a gravel island half a block down, across the two-lane street from the post office and the grange. Next to a dumpster, a pair of mongrel dogs were locked in coitus, patiently facing opposite directions, Dr. Doolittle’s Pushmi-pullyu for the twenty-first century. Other than vacant lots overrun by bushes and alder trees and a lone antiquated traffic light at the intersection that led out of town—either toward Olympia, or deeper into cow country—there wasn’t much else to look at. She hobbled in to pay and ended up grabbing a few extra supplies—canned peaches and fruit cocktail, as there wasn’t any refrigeration at the cabin. She snagged three bottles of bourbon gathering dust on a low shelf.

The clerk noticed her folding crutch and the soft cast on her left leg. She declined his offer to carry her bags. After she loaded the Subaru, she ventured into the tavern and ordered a couple rounds of tequila. The tavern was dim and smoky and possessed a frontier vibe, with antique flintlocks over the bar, and stuffed and mounted deer heads staring from the walls. A great black wolf snarled atop a dais near the entrance. The bartender watched her drain the shots raw. He poured her another on the house and said, “You’re staying at the Haugstad place, eh?”

She hesitated, the glass partially raised, then set the drink on the counter and limped away without answering. She assayed the long, treacherous drive up to the cabin, chewing over the man’s question, the morbid implication of his smirk. She got the drift. Horror movies and pulp novels made the conversational gambit infamous—life imitating art. Was she staying at the Haugstad place indeed. Like hell she’d take that bait. The townsfolk were strangers to her and she wondered how the bartender knew where she lived. Obviously, the hills had eyes.

Two weeks prior, Lorna had fled into the wilderness to an old hunting cabin, the so-called Haugstad place, with her lover Miranda. Miranda was the reason she’d discovered the courage to leave her husband Bruce, the reason he grabbed a fistful of Lorna’s hair and threw her down a flight of concrete stairs in the parking garage of Sea-Tac airport. That was the second time Lorna had tried to escape with their daughter Orillia. Sweet Orillia, eleven years old next month, was safe in Florida with relatives. Lorna missed her daughter, but slept better knowing she was far from Bruce’s reach. He wasn’t interested in going after the child; at least not as his first order of business.

Bruce was a vengeful man, and Lorna feared him the way she might fear a hurricane, a volcano, a flood. His rages overwhelmed and obliterated his impulse control. Bruce was a force of nature, all right, and capable of far worse than breaking her leg. He owned a gun and a collection of knives, had done time years ago for stabbing somebody during a fight over a gambling debt. He often got drunk and sat in his easy chair cleaning his pistol or sharpening a large, cruel-looking blade he called an Arkansas toothpick.

So, it came to this: Lorna and Miranda shacked up in the mountains while Lorna’s estranged husband, free on bail, awaited trial back in Seattle. Money wasn’t a problem—Bruce made plenty as a manager at a lumber company, and Lorna had helped herself to a healthy portion of it when she headed for the hills.

Both women were loners by necessity—or device, as the case might be—who’d met at a cocktail party thrown by one of Bruce’s colleagues and clicked on contact. Lorna hadn’t worked since her stint as a movie-theater clerk during college—Bruce had insisted she stay home and raise Orillia, and when Orillia grew older, he dropped his pretenses and punched Lorna in the jaw after she pressed the subject of getting a job, beginning a career. She’d dreamed of going to grad school for a degree in social work.

Miranda was a semiretired artist, acclaimed in certain quarters and much in demand for her wax sculptures. She cheerfully set up a mini studio in the spare bedroom, strictly to keep her hand in. Photography was her passion of late, and she’d brought along several complicated and expensive cameras. She was also the widow of a once-famous sculptor. Between her work and her husband’s royalties, she wasn’t exactly rich, but not exactly poor, either. They’d survive a couple of months “roughing it.” Miranda suggested they consider it a vacation, an advance celebration of “Brucifer’s” (her pet name for Lorna’s soon-to-be ex) impending stint as a guest of King County Jail.

She’d secured the cabin through a labyrinthine network of connections. Miranda’s second (or was it third?) cousin gave them a ring of keys and a map to find the property. It sat in the mountains, ten miles from civilization amid high timber and a tangle of abandoned logging roads. The driveway was cut into a steep hillside—a hundred-yard-long dirt track hidden by masses of brush and trees. The perfect bolthole.

Bruce wouldn’t find them here, in the catbird’s seat overlooking nowhere.

——

Lorna arrived home a few minutes before nightfall. Miranda came to the porch and waved. She was tall, her hair long and burnished auburn, her skin dusky and unblemished. Lorna thought her beautiful—lush and ripe, vaguely Rubenesque. A contrast to Lorna’s own paleness, her angular, sinewy build. She thought it amusing that their personalities reflected their physiognomies—Miranda tended to be placid and yielding and sweetly melancholy, while Lorna was all sharp edges.

Miranda helped bring in the groceries. She’d volunteered to drive into town and fetch them herself, but Lorna refused, and the reason why went unspoken, although it loomed large. A lot more than her leg needed healing. Bruce had done the shopping, paid the bills, made every decision for thirteen torturous years. Not all at once, but gradually, until he crushed her, smothered her, with his so-called love. That was over. A little more pain and suffering in the service of emancipation—figuratively and literally—following a lost decade seemed appropriate.

The Haugstad cabin was practically a fossil and possessed of a dark history that Miranda hinted at but coyly refused to disclose. It was in solid repair for a building constructed in the 1920s—on the cozy side, even: thick slab walls and a mossy shake roof. Two bedrooms, a pantry, a loft, a cramped toilet and bath, and a living room with a kitchenette tucked in the corner. The cellar’s trapdoor was concealed inside the pantry. She had no intention of going down there. She hated spiders and all the other creepy-crawlies sure to infest that wet and lightless space. Nor did she like the tattered bearskin rug before the fireplace, nor the oil painting of a hunter in buckskins stalking along a ridge beneath a twilit sky, nor a smaller portrait of a stag with jagged horns in menacing silhouette atop a cliff, also at sunset. Lorna detested the idea of hunting, preferred not to ponder where the chicken in chicken soup came from, much less the fate of cattle. These artifacts of minds and philosophies so divergent from her own were disquieting.

There were a few modern renovations. A portable generator provided electricity to power the plumbing and lights. No phone, however. Not that it mattered—her cell reception was passable despite the rugged terrain. The elevation and eastern exposure also enabled the transistor radio to capture a decent signal.

Miranda raised an eyebrow when she came across the bottles of Old Crow. She stuck them in a cabinet without comment. They made a simple pasta together with peaches on the side and a glass or three of wine for dessert. Later, they relaxed near the fire. Conversation lapsed into a comfortable silence until Lorna chuckled upon recalling the bartender’s portentous question, which seemed inane rather than sinister now that she was half-drunk and drowsing in her lover’s arms. Miranda asked what was so funny, and Lorna told her about the tavern incident.

“Man alive, I found something weird today,” Miranda said. She’d stiffened when Lorna described shooting tequila. Lorna’s drinking was a bone of contention. She’d hit the bottle when Orillia went into first grade, leaving her alone at the house for the majority of too many lonely days. At first it’d been innocent enough: A nip or two of cooking sherry, the occasional glass of wine during the soaps, then the occasional bottle of wine, then the occasional bottle of Maker’s Mark or Johnnie Walker, and finally, the bottle was open and in her hand five minutes after Orillia skipped to the bus and the cork didn’t go back in until five minutes before her little girl came home. Since she and Miranda became an item, she’d striven to restrict her boozing to social occasions, dinner, and the like. But sweet Jesus, fuck. At least she hadn’t broken down and started smoking again.

“Where’d you go?” Lorna said.

“That trail behind the woodshed. I wanted some photographs. Being cooped up in here is driving me a teensy bit bonkers.”

“So, how weird was it?”

“Maybe weird isn’t quite the word. Gross. Gross is more accurate.”

“You’re killing me.”

“That trail goes a long way. I think deer use it as a path because it’s really narrow but well beaten. We should hike to the end one of these days, see how far it goes. I’m curious where it ends.”

“Trails don’t end; they just peter out. We’ll get lost and spend the winter gnawing bark like the Donners.”

“You’re so morbid!” Miranda laughed and kissed Lorna’s ear. She described crossing a small clearing about a quarter mile along the trail. At the far end was a stand of Douglas fir, and she didn’t notice the tree house until she stopped to snap a few pictures. The tree house was probably as old as the cabin; its wooden planks were bone yellow where they peeked through moss and branches. The platform perched about fifteen feet off the ground, and a ladder was nailed to the backside of a tree …

“You didn’t climb the tree,” Lorna said.

Miranda flexed her scraped and bruised knuckles. “Yes, I climbed that tree, all right.” The ladder was very precarious and the platform itself so rotted, sections of it had fallen away. Apparently, for no stronger reason than boredom, she risked life and limb to clamber atop the platform and investigate.

“It’s not a tree house,” Lorna said. “You found a hunter’s blind. The hunter sits on the platform, camouflaged by the branches. Eventually, some poor, hapless critter comes by, and blammo! Sadly, I’ve learned a lot from Bruce’s favorite cable-television shows. What in the heck compelled you to scamper around in a deathtrap in the middle of the woods? You could’ve gotten yourself in a real fix.”

“That occurred to me. My foot went through in one spot and I almost crapped my pants. If I got stuck I could scream all day and nobody would hear me. The danger was worth it, though.”

“Well, what did you find? Some moonshine in mason jars? D. B. Cooper’s skeleton?”

“Time for the reveal!” Miranda extricated herself from Lorna and went and opened the door, letting in a rush of cold night air. She returned with what appeared to be a bundle of filthy rags and proceeded to unroll them.

Lorna realized her girlfriend was presenting an animal hide. The fur had been sewn into a crude cape or cloak, beaten and weathered from great age, and shriveled along the hem. The head was that of some indeterminate predator—possibly a wolf or coyote. Whatever the species, the creature was a prize specimen. Despite the cloak’s deteriorated condition, she could imagine it draped across the broad shoulders of a Viking berserker or an Indian warrior. She said, “You realize that you just introduced several colonies of fleas, ticks, and lice into our habitat with that wretched thing.”

“Way ahead of you, baby. I sprayed it with bleach. Cooties were crawling all over. Isn’t it neat?”

“It’s horrifying,” Lorna said. Yet she couldn’t look away as Miranda held it at arm’s length so the pelt gleamed dully in the firelight. What was it? Who’d worn it, and why? Was it a garment to provide mere warmth, or to blend with the surroundings? The painting of the hunter was obscured by shadows, but she thought of the man in buckskin sneaking along, looking for something to kill, a throat to slice. Her hand went to her throat.

“This was hanging from a peg. I’m kinda surprised it’s not completely ruined, what with the elements. Funky, huh? A Daniel Boone–era accessory.”

“Gives me the creeps.”

“The creeps? It’s just a fur.”

“I don’t dig fur. Fur is dead. Man.”

“You’re a riot. I wonder if it’s worth money.”

“I really doubt that. Who cares? It’s not ours.”

“Finders keepers,” Miranda said. She held the cloak against her bosom as if she were measuring a dress. “Rowr! I’m a wild woman. Better watch yourself tonight!” She’d drunk enough wine to be in the mood for theater. “Scandinavian legends say to wear the skin of a beast is to become the beast. Haugstad fled to America in 1910, cast out from his community. There was a series of unexplained murders back in the homeland, and other unsavory deeds, all of which pointed to his doorstep. People in his village swore he kept a bundle of hides in a storehouse, that he donned them and became something other than a man, that it was he who tore apart a family’s cattle, that it was he who slaughtered a couple of boys hunting rabbits in the field, that it was he who desecrated graves and ate of the flesh of the dead during lean times. So, he left just ahead of a pitchfork-wielding mob. He built this cabin and lived a hermit’s life. Alas, his dark past followed. Some of the locals in Poger Rock got wind of the old scandals. One of the town drunks claimed he saw the trapper turn into a wolf, and nobody laughed as hard as one might expect. Haugstad got blamed whenever a cow disappeared, when the milk went sour, you name it. Then, over the course of ten years or so a long string of loggers and ranchers vanished. The natives grew restless, and it was the scene in Norway all over again.”

“What happened to him?”

“He wandered into the mountains one winter and never returned. Distant kin took over this place, lived here off and on the last thirty or forty years. Folks still remember, though.” Miranda made an exaggerated face and waggled her fingers. “Booga-booga!”

Lorna smiled, but she was repulsed by the hide, and unsettled by Miranda’s flushed cheeks, her loopy grin. Her lover’s playfulness wasn’t amusing her as it might’ve on another night. She said, “Toss that wretched skin outside, would you? Let’s hit the sack. I’m exhausted.”

“Exhausted, eh? Now is my chance to take full advantage of you.” Miranda winked as she stroked the hide. Instead of heading for the front door, she took her prize to the spare bedroom and left it there. She came back and embraced Lorna. Her eyes were too bright. The wine was strong on her breath. “Told you it was cool. God knows what else we’ll find if we look sharp.”

——

They made fierce love. Miranda was much more aggressive than her custom. The pain in Lorna’s knee built from a small flame to a white blaze of agony and her orgasm only registered as spasms in her thighs and shortness of breath, pleasure eclipsed entirely by suffering. Miranda didn’t notice the tears on Lorna’s cheeks, the frantic nature of her moans. When it ended, she kissed Lorna on the mouth, tasting of musk and salt, and something indefinably bitter. She collapsed and was asleep within seconds.

Lorna lay propped by pillows, her hand tangled in Miranda’s hair. The faint yellow shine of a three-quarter moon peeked over the ridgeline across the valley and beamed through the window at the foot of the bed. She could tell it was cold because their breaths misted the glass. A wolf howled and she flinched, the cry arousing a flutter of primordial dread in her breast. She waited until Miranda’s breathing steadied, then crept away. She put on Miranda’s robe and grabbed a bottle of Old Crow and a glass and poured herself a dose, and sipped it before the main window in the living room.

Thin, fast-moving clouds occasionally crossed the face of the moon, and its light pulsed and shadows reached like claws across the silvery landscape of rocky hillocks and canyons and stands of firs and pine. The stars burned a finger width above the crowns of the adjacent peaks. The land fell away into deeper shadow, a rift of darkness uninterrupted by a solitary flicker of man-made light. She and Miranda weren’t welcome; the cabin and its former inhabitants hadn’t been, either, despite persisting like ticks bored into the flank of a dog. The immensity of the void intimidated her, and for a moment she almost missed Bruce and the comparative safety of her suburban home, the gilded cage, even the bondage. She blinked, angry at this lapse into the bad old way of thinking, and drank the whiskey. “I’m not a damned whipped dog.” She didn’t bother pouring but had another pull directly from the bottle.

The wolf howled again and another answered. The beasts sounded close, and she wondered if they were circling the cabin, wondered if they smelled her and Miranda, or whether their night vision was so acute they could see her in the window—half in the bag, a bottle dangling from her hand, favoring her left leg, weak and cut from the herd. She considered the cautionary tale of Sven Haugstad and drank some more. Her head spun. She waited for another howl, determined to answer with her own.

Miranda’s arms encircled her. She cupped Lorna’s breasts and licked her earlobe, nibbled her neck. Lorna cried out and grabbed Miranda’s wrist before she registered who it was and relaxed. “Holy crap, you almost gave me a heart attack!” The floor creaked horribly; they’d even played a game of chopsticks by rhythmically pressing alternating sections with their shoes, but she hadn’t heard her lover cross the room. Not a whisper.

——

Something metallic snicked and an orange flame reflected in the window, and sweet, sharp smoke filled Lorna’s nostrils. Miranda gently pressed a cigarette to Lorna’s lips. Miranda said, “I needed this earlier, except I was too damned lazy to leave the covers. Better late than never.”

“God, you read my mind.” Lorna took a drag, then exhaled contentedly. The nicotine mixed with the alcohol did its magic. Her fear of the night land and its creatures receded. “I guess I can forgive you for sneaking up on me since you’ve offered me the peace pipe. Ahhh, I’ve fallen off the wagon. You’re evil. Did you hear the wolves?”

“Those aren’t wolves,” Miranda said. She reclaimed the cigarette. She inhaled, and the cigarette’s cherry floated in the window as her face floated in the window, a blur over Lorna’s shoulder. “Those are coyotes.”

“No shit?”

“Is that why you’re so jumpy? You thought the wolves were gonna get you?”

“I’m not jumpy. Well, sheesh—an almost full moon, wolves howling on the moor—er, in the woods. Gotta admit it’s all kinda spooky.”

“Not wolves. Coyotes. Come to bed … It’s chilly.”

“Right. Coyotes,” Lorna said. “I’m embarrassed. That’s like peeing myself over dingoes or raccoons.”

Snug under a pile of blankets, Lorna was drifting off to sleep when Miranda said in a dreamy voice, “Actually, coyotes are much scarier than wolves. Sneaky, sneaky little suckers. Eat you up. Lick the blood all up.”

“What?” Lorna said. Miranda didn’t answer. She snored.

——

One morning, a woman who resembled Vivien Leigh at the flowering of her glory knocked on the door. She wore a green jacket and a green-and-yellow kerchief and yellow sunglasses. Her purse was shiny red plastic with a red plastic strap. Her gloves were white. Her skirt was black and her shoes were also black. She smiled when Lorna opened the door, and her lipstick was blood red like the leaves. “Oh, I’m very sorry to disturb you, ma’am. I seem to be a trifle lost.” The woman introduced herself as Beth. She’d gone for a drive in the hills, searching for the Muskrat Creek campground.

“Apparently, I zigged when I should’ve zagged,” she said, and laughed a laugh worthy of the stage. “Speaking of zigzags, do you mind?” She opened an enamel case and extracted a cigarette and inserted it into a silver holder and lighted up with a stick match. It was all very mesmerizing.

Lorna had nearly panicked upon hearing the knock, convinced Bruce had tracked her down. She invited the woman inside and gave her a cup of coffee. Miranda had gone on her morning walk, which left Lorna with the task of entertaining the stranger while deflecting any awkward questions. She unpacked the road map from her Subaru and spread it across the table. She used a pencil to mark the campgrounds, which were twenty-odd miles from the cabin. Beth had wandered far off course, indeed.

“Thank goodness I came across you. These roads go on forever.” Beth sipped her coffee and puffed on her fancy cigarette. She slipped her sunglasses into her purse and glanced around the cabin. Her gaze traveled slowly, weighing everything it crossed. “You are certainly off the beaten path.”

“We’re private people,” Lorna said. “Where’s your car?”

Beth gestured toward the road. “Parked around the corner. I didn’t know if I could turn around in here, so I walked. Silly me, I broke a heel.” She raised her calf to show that indeed, yes, the heel of her left pump was wobbly.

“Are you alone?”

“Yes. I was supposed to meet friends at the campgrounds, but I can’t reach anybody. No bars. I’m rather cross with them and their directions.”

Lorna blinked, taking a moment to realize the woman meant she couldn’t get proper phone reception. “Mine works fine. I’d be happy to let you place a call—”

“Thanks anyway, sweetie.” Beth had sketched directions inside a notebook. “It’ll be a cinch now that I’ve got my bearings.” She finished her coffee, said thanks and goodbye, waving jauntily as she picked her way down the rutted lane.

Lorna started the generator to get hot water for a quick shower. After the shower, she made toast and more coffee and sat at the table relaxing with a nice paperback romance, one of several she’d had the foresight to bring along. Out the window, she glimpsed movement among the trees, a low and heavy shape that she recognized as a large dog—no, not a dog, a wolf. The animal almost blended with the rotten leaves and wet brush, and it nosed the earth, moving disjointedly, as if crippled. When it reared on its hind legs, Lorna gasped. Miranda pulled back the cowl of the hide cloak and leaned against a tree. Her expression was strange; she did not quite appear to be herself. She shuddered in the manner of a person emerging from a trance and walked to where the driveway curved and left three paper plates pressed into the bank. She spaced the plates about three feet apart. Each bore a bull’s-eye drawn in magic marker.

Miranda came inside. She’d removed the hide. Her hair was messy and tangled with twigs and leaves. “Who was here?” Her voice rasped like she’d been shouting.

“Some woman looking for a campground.” Lorna recounted the brief visit, too unnerved to mention what she’d witnessed. Her heart raced and she was overcome by dizziness that turned the floor to a trampoline. Miranda didn’t say anything. She opened a duffel bag and brandished a revolver. She examined the pistol, snapping its cylinder open, then shut. Lorna wasn’t particularly conversant with guns, but she’d watched Bruce enough to know this one was loaded. “I thought we were going to discuss it before you bought one,” she said.

Miranda rattled a small box of shells and slipped them into the pocket of her vest. “I didn’t buy one. A friend gave it to me when I told him about Brucifer. An ex-cop. This sucker doesn’t have a serial number.”

“There’s no reason to be upset. She was lost. That’s all.”

“Of course she was.”

Lorna watched her put the gun in her other pocket. “What’s wrong?”

“You’ve only paid cash, right? No debit card, no credit card?”

“You mean in town?”

“I mean anywhere. Like we agreed. No credit cards.”

“Tell me what’s wrong. She was lost. People get lost. It’s not unheard of, you know. And it doesn’t matter. I didn’t tell her my name. I didn’t tell her anything. She was lost. What was I supposed to do? Not answer the door? Maybe stick that gun in her face and demand some ID?”

“The campgrounds are closed,” Miranda said. “I was outside the door while she gave you her shuck and jive. She came in a panel van. A guy with a beard and sunglasses was driving. Didn’t get a good look at him.”

Lorna covered her face. “I think I’m gonna be sick.”

Miranda’s boots made loud clomping sounds as she walked to the door. She hesitated for a few moments, then said, “It’s okay. You handled her fine. Bruce has got entirely too much money.”

Lorna nodded and wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “We’ll see how much money he has after my lawyer gets through with him.”

Miranda smiled. It was thin and pained, but a smile. She shut the door behind her. Lorna curled into a ball on the bed. The revolver fired, its report muffled by the thick walls of the cabin. She imagined the black holes in the white paper. She imagined black holes drilling through Bruce’s white face. Pop, pop, pop.

——

Miranda brought Lorna to a stand of trees on the edge of a clearing and showed her the hunting blind. The bloody sun fell into the earth and the only slightly less bloody moon swung, like a pendulum, to replace it in the lower black of the sky. “That is one big, bad yellow moon,” Miranda said.

“It’s beautiful,” Lorna said. “Like an iceberg sliding through space.” She thought the fullness of the moon, its astral radiance, presaged some kind of cosmic shift. Her blood sang and the hairs on her arms prickled. It was too dark to see the platform in the branches, but she felt it there, heard its timbers squeak in the breeze.

“Been having strange dreams,” Miranda said. “Most of them are blurry. Last one I remember was about the people who used to live around here, a long time ago. They weren’t gentle folks, that’s for sure.”

“Well, of course not,” Lorna said. “They stuck a deer head over the fireplace and skinned poor, hapless woodland critters and hung them in the trees.”

“Yeah,” Miranda said. She lighted a cigarette. “Want one?”

“No.”

Miranda smoked most of her cigarette before she spoke again. “In the latest dream it was winter, frost thick on the windows. I sat on the bearskin rug. Late at night, a big fire crackling away, and an old man, I mean, old as dirt, was kicked back in a rocker, talking to me, telling me stuff. I couldn’t see his face because he sat in the shadows. He wore old-timey clothes and a fur jacket, and a hat made out of an animal head. Coyote or wolf. He explained how to set a snare for rabbits, how to skin a deer. The dream changed and jumped around, like dreams do, and we were kneeling on the floor by the carcass of—I dunno what. A possum, I think. The meat was green and soft; it had been dead a while. The old man told me a survivor eats what’s around. Then he stuck his face into that mess of stinking meat and took a bite.”

“That’s a message,” Lorna said. “The great universal consciousness is trying to tell you—us—to adapt. Adapt or die.”

“Or it could be a dream, full stop.”

“Is that what you think?”

“I think it’s time to get our minds right. Face the inevitable.”

“The inevitable?”

“We’re never going to get away,” Miranda said.

“Well, that’s a hell of an attitude.”

“I saw that van again. Parked in that gravel pit just down the road. They’re watching us, Lorna.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“Don’t worry about those bastards. They’ll be dealt with.”

“Dealt with? Dealt with how?” Lorna’s mind flashed to the revolver. The notion of Miranda shooting anyone in cold blood was ridiculous. Yet, here in the dark beyond the reach of rule or reason, such far-fetched notions bore weight. “Don’t get any crazy ideas.”

“I mean, don’t worry yourself sick over the help. Nah, the bigger problem is your husband. How much time is Bruce going to get? A few months? A year? Talk about your lawyer. Bruce’s lawyer is slick. He might not get anything. Community service, a stern admonition from the judge to go forth and sin no more.”

Lorna winced. Stress caused her leg to throb. The cigarette smoke drove her mad with desire. She stifled a sharp response and regarded the moon instead. Her frustration dissolved in the presence of its cold, implacable majesty. She said, “I know. It’s the way of the world. People like Bruce always win.” She’d called Orillia earlier that evening, asked her how things were going at the new school. Orillia didn’t want to talk about school; she wanted to know when she could see Daddy again, worried that he was lonely. Lorna had tried to keep emotion from her voice when she answered that Mom and Dad were working through some issues and everything would soon be sorted. Bruce was careful not to hit Lorna in front of their daughter, and though Orillia witnessed the bruises and the breaks, the sobbing aftermath, she seemed to disassociate these from her father’s actions.

“There are other ways to win.” Miranda was a black shadow against the dead silver grass. “Like you said—adapt or die. The old man showed me. In the beginning you need a prop, but it gets easier when you realize it’s all in your head.”

It was a long walk back through the woods. Dry leaves crunched beneath their shoes. They locked themselves into the cabin and got ready for bed.

Lorna’s dreams had been strange as well, but she’d kept quiet. She wasn’t open about such things, not even with Miranda. The ghost of old man Haugstad didn’t speak to Lorna; instead, her dreams transported her to the barren slopes above the tree line of the valley. The moon fumed and boiled. She was a passenger in another’s body, a body that seethed with profound vitality. The moon’s yellow glow stirred her blood, and she raced down the slope and into the trees. She smelled the land, tasted it on her lolling tongue, drawing in the scent of every green deer spoor, every droplet of coyote musk, every spackling of piss on rock or shrub. She smelled fresh blood and meat-blacked bone. There were many, many bones scattered across the mountainside. Generational heaps of them—ribs, thighs, horns, skulls. These graveyards were secret places, scattered for miles across deep, hidden caches and among the high rocks.

Lorna stroked Miranda’s belly. Miranda’s excess had melted away in recent days. She was lean from daylong hikes and skipped meals, and her scent was different, almost gamy, her hair lank and coarse. She was restless and she whined in her sleep. She bit too hard when they made love.

Miranda took Lorna’s hand and said, “What is it?”

“I’m afraid you’re going to leave.”

“Oh, where the fuck is this coming from?”

“Something’s different. Something’s changed. You weren’t honest about where you found the coat. The skin.”

Miranda chuckled without humor. “Let sleeping dogs lie.”

“I’m not in the mood for cute,” Lorna said.

“My sweet one. I left out the part that might … frighten you. You’re skittish enough.”

“I’m also not in the mood for twenty questions. What did you mean earlier—the old man showed you?”

“Old man Haugstad told me where to look, what I needed to do.”

“In a dream.”

“Not in a dream. The day I discovered the blind, a coyote skulked out of the bushes and led me along the path. It was the size of a mastiff, blizzard white on the muzzle and crisscrossed with scars.”

“I don’t understand,” Lorna said, but was afraid she might.

“We’re here for a reason. Can’t you feel the power all around us? After I lost Jack, after I finally accepted he was gone, I pretty much decided to off myself. If I hadn’t met you at that party I probably would’ve died within a few days. I’d picked out the pills, the clothes I intended to wear, knew exactly where it was going to happen. When was the only question.”

Lorna began to cry.

“I won’t leave you. But it’s possible you might decide not to come with me.” Miranda rolled to her opposite side and said nothing more. Lorna slowly drifted to sleep. She woke later while it was still dark. Miranda’s side of the bed was a cold, blank space. Her clothes were still piled on the floor. In a moment of sublimely morbid intuition, Lorna clicked on a flashlight and checked the spare bedroom where Miranda had taken to hanging the fur cloak from a hook on the door. Of course the cloak was missing.

She gathered her robe tightly, sparing a moment to reflect upon her resemblance to the doomed heroines on any number of lurid gothic horror-novel covers, and went outdoors into the freezing night. Her teeth chattered and her fear became indistinguishable from the chill. She poked around the cabin, occasionally calling her lover’s name, although in a soft tone, afraid to attract the attention of the wolves, the coyotes, or whatever else might roam the forest at night.

Eventually she approached the woodshed and saw that the door was cracked open by several inches. She stepped inside. Miranda crouched on the dirt floor. The flashlight was weak, and its flickering cone only hinted and suggested. The pelt covered Miranda, concealed her so she was scarcely more than a lump. She whined and shuddered and took notice of the pallid light, and as she stirred, Lorna was convinced that the pelt was not a loose cloak, not an ill-fitted garment, but something else entirely for the manner in which it flexed with each twitch and shiver of Miranda’s musculature.

The flashlight glass cracked and imploded. The shed lay in utter darkness, except for a thin sliver of moonlight that burned yellow in Miranda’s eyes. Lorna’s mouth was dry. She said, “Sweetheart?”

Miranda said, in a voice rusty and drugged, “Why don’t you … go on to bed. I’ll be along. I’ll come see you real soon.” She stood, a ponderous yet lithe uncoiling motion, and her head scraped the low ceiling.

Lorna got out fast and stumbled toward the cabin. She didn’t look over her shoulder, even though she felt hot breath on the back of her neck.

——

They didn’t speak of the incident. For a couple of days they hardly spoke at all. Miranda drifted in and out of the cabin like a ghost, and Lorna dreaded to ask where she went in the dead of night, why she wore the hide and nothing else. Evening temperatures dipped below freezing, yet Miranda didn’t appear to suffer; on the contrary, she thrived. She hadn’t eaten a bite from their store of canned goods, hadn’t taken a meal all week. Lorna lay awake staring at the ceiling as the autumn rains rattled the windows.

One afternoon she sat alone at the kitchen table downing the last of the Old Crow. The previous evening she’d experienced two visceral and disturbing dreams. In the first she was serving drinks at a barbecue. There were dozens of guests. Bruce flipped burgers and hobnobbed with his office chums. Orillia darted through the crowd with a water pistol, zapping hapless adults before dashing away. The mystery woman, Beth, and a bearded man in a track suit she introduced as her husband came over and told her what a lovely party, what a lovely house, what a lovely family, and Lorna handed them drinks and smiled a big, dumb smile as Miranda stood to the side and winked, nodding toward a panel van parked nearby on the grass. The van rocked, and a coyote emerged from beneath the vehicle, growling and slobbering and snapping at the air. Grease slicked the animal’s fur black, made its yellow eyes bright as flames.

A moment later, Lorna was in the woods, chasing the bearded man from the party. His track suit flapped in shreds, stained with blood and dirt. The man tripped and fell over a cliff. He crashed in a sprawl of broken limbs, his mouth full of shattered teeth and black gore. He raised a mutilated hand toward her in supplication. She bounded down and mounted him, licked the blood from him, then chewed off his face. She’d awakened with a cry, bile in her throat.

Lorna set aside the empty bottle. She put on her coat and got the revolver from the dresser where Miranda had stashed it for safekeeping. Lorna hadn’t fired the gun, despite Miranda’s offer to practice. However, she’d seen her lover go through the routine—cock the hammer, pull the trigger, click, no real trick. She didn’t need the gun, wouldn’t use the gun, but somehow its weight in her pocket felt good. She walked down the driveway, moving gingerly to protect her bum knee, then followed the road to the gravel pit where the van was allegedly parked. The rain slackened to drizzle. Patches of mist swirled in the hollows and the canyons and crept along fern beds at the edges of the road. The valley lay hushed, a brooding giant.

The gravel pit was empty. A handful of charred wood and some squashed beer cans confirmed someone had definitely camped there in the not-so-distant past. She breathed heavily, partially from the incessant throb in her knee, partially from relief. What the hell would she have done if the assholes her husband sent were on the spot roasting wienies? Did she really think people like that would evaporate upon being subjected to harsh language? Did she really have the backbone to flash the gun and send them packing, John Wayne style?

She thought the first muffled cry was the screech of a bird, but the second shout got her attention. Her heart was pounding when she finally located the source, about a hundred yards farther along the road. Tire tracks veered from the narrow lane toward a forty-foot drop into a gulch of trees and boulders. The van had landed on its side. The rear doors were sprung, the glass busted. She wouldn’t have noticed it all the way down there, if not for the woman crying for help. Her voice sounded weak. But that made sense—Beth had been trapped in the wreck for several days, hadn’t she? One snip of the brake line and on these hills, it’d be all over but the crying. Miranda surely didn’t fuck around, did she? Lorna bit the palm of her hand to stifle a scream.

“Hey,” Miranda said. She’d come along as stealthily as the mist and lurked a few paces away near a thicket of brambles. She wore the mangy cloak with the predator’s skull covering her own, rendering her features inscrutable. Her feet were bare. She was naked beneath the pelt, her lovely flesh streaked with dirt and blood. Her mouth was stained wine dark. “Sorry, honey bunch. I really thought they’d have given up the ghost by now. Alas, alack. Don’t worry. It won’t be long. The birds are here.”

Crows hopped among the limbs and drifted in looping patterns above the ruined van. They squawked and squabbled. The woman yelled something unintelligible. She wailed and fell silent. Lorna’s lip trembled and her nose ran with snot. She swept her arm to indicate their surroundings. “Why did you bring me here?”

Miranda tilted her misshapen head and smiled a sad, cruel smile. “I want to save you, baby. You’re weak.”

Lorna stared into the gulch. The mist thickened and began to fill in the cracks and crevices and covered the van and its occupants. There was no way she could navigate the steep bank, not with her injury. Her cell was at the cabin on the table. She could almost hear the clockwork gears of the universe clicking into alignment, a great, dark spotlight shifting across the cosmic stage to center upon her at this moment in time. She said, “I don’t know how to do what you’ve done. To change. Unless that hide is built for two.”

Miranda took her hand and led her back to the cabin and tenderly undressed her. She smiled faintly when she retrieved the revolver and set it on the table. She kissed Lorna, and her breath was hot and foul. Then she stepped back and began to pull the hide away from her body, and as it lifted, so did the underlying skin, peeling like a scab. Blood poured down Miranda’s chest and belly and pattered on the floorboards. The muscles of her cheeks and jaw bunched and she hissed, eyes rolling, and then it was done and the dripping bundle was free of her red-slicked flesh. Lorna was paralyzed with horror and awe, but finally stirred and tried to resist what her lover proffered. Miranda cuffed her temple, stunning her. She said, “Hold still, baby. You’re gonna thank me,” and draped the cloak across Lorna’s shoulders and pulled the skullcap of the beast over Lorna’s eyes.

“You came here for this?” Lorna said as the slimy and overheated pelt cupped her and enclosed her. The room went in and out of focus.

“No, babe. I just followed the trail, and here we are. And it’s good. You’ll see how good it is, how it changes everything. We’ve been living in a cage, but that’s over now.”

“My God, I loved you.” Lorna blinked the blood from her eyes. She glanced over and saw the revolver on the table, blunt and deadly and glowing with the dwindling light, a beacon. She grabbed the weapon without thought and pressed it under Miranda’s chin, and thumbed the hammer just as she’d seen it done. Her entire body shook. “You thought I’d just leave my daughter behind and slink off to Never Never Land without a word? Are you out of your fucking mind?”

“Give it a minute,” Miranda said. The fingers of her left hand stroked the pelt. “One minute. Let it work its magic. You’ll see everything in a whole new way. Come on, sweetie.” She reached for the revolver, and it barked and twisted in Lorna’s hands.

Lorna didn’t weep. Her insides were stone. She dropped the gun and swayed in place, not focusing on anything. The light began to fade. She stumbled outside. She could smell everything, and strange thoughts rushed through her head.

There was a moment between twilight and darkness when she almost managed to tear free of the hide and begin making the calls that would return her to the world, her daughter, the apocalyptic showdown with the man who’d oppressed her for too long. The moment passed, was usurped by an older and much more powerful impulse. Her thoughts turned to the woods, the hills, a universe of dark, sweet scent. The hunt.

——

Two weeks later, a hiker spotted a murder of crows in a raucous celebration as they roosted around the wrecked van. He called emergency services. Men and dogs and choppers swarmed the mountainside. The case made all of the papers and ran on the local networks for days. Investigators found two corpses—an adult male and an adult female—in the van. The cause of death was blunt-force trauma and prolonged exposure to the elements. Further examination revealed that the brake lines of the van were sawed through, indicative of homicide. The homicide theory was supported by the discovery of a deceased adult female on the floor of a nearby cabin. She’d died of a single bullet wound to the head. A fourth individual who’d also lived on the premises remained missing and was later presumed dead. Tremendous scrutiny was directed at the missing woman’s estranged husband. He professed his innocence throughout the subsequent trial. That he’d hired the deceased couple to spy on his wife didn’t help his case.

Years later, a homicide detective wrote a bestseller detailing the investigation of the killings. Tucked away as a footnote, the author included a few esoteric quotes and bits of trivia; among these were comments by the chief medical examiner who’d overseen the autopsies. According to the ME, it was fortunate that picture ID was present on scene for the deceased. By the time the authorities arrived, animals had gotten to the bodies in the van. The examiner said she’d been tempted to note in her report that in thirty years she’d never seen anything so bizarre or savage as these particular bites, but wisely reconsidered.

——

LAIRD BARRON is the author of two collections: The Imago Sequence and Other Stories and Occultation, both from Night Shade Books. His work has appeared in places such as Fantasy & Science Fiction, Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, Lovecraft Unbound, Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror, Clockwork Phoenix, and The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy. It has also been reprinted in numerous year’s-best anthologies. Mr. Barron lives in Olympia, Washington.

| THE ROMANCE |

Elizabeth Bear

—

Last, the bullet blooms against steel. Still almost pristine until that moment, now its conical head flattens. Its copper jacket splinters into shrapnel needles, wire-fine, scattering. The core splashes, the force of impact so great that cold metal splatters like syrup, droplets blossoming in an elegant chrysanthemum. The butt of the casing flattens against the engine block for a split second before it peels away and falls.

But it’s already exited the girl, and the girl is falling.

——

January is baking brownies.

She watches water and butter boil together with a mass of green leaves, once dried and now rehydrating. These are grown-up brownies. Her kitchen reeks of burnt sugar and wet rope, complicated and musty as copal.

She makes sure the water doesn’t boil off. Too-high heat destroys the THC. Cooking is an applied form of chemistry.

She pours the slurry into a pottery bowl through a strainer draped with cheesecloth, then twists the cloth to get the last of the butter. The water and butter go in the fridge to cool. She cleans the tools and starts breaking apart squares of Ghirardelli unsweetened chocolate, which she will eventually combine with brown sugar and melt into the separated butter.

——

The bullet blasts a gaping exit wound in the girl’s body. It’s not the penetration of the bullet that does this; the bullet is quite small. Rather, it’s transferred energy—a shock wave—that knocks a plug of blood and muscle and skin out of her side, that vaporizes a portion of her body and splashes it over the massive open block of the carousel engine a moment before the bullet splashes, too.

That bullet has already passed through the girl when she reaches weak, estranged hands for the impact point and staggers one step back, then two, teetering among littered tussocks on high heels she never should have worn to the carnival.

——

January takes the brownies to the birthday party. The clamor of the Wurlitzer greets her as soon as she opens her car door, but the carousel is out of sight, turning and turning in its great wood-and-glass enclosure that glows like a Christmas ornament in the blue twilight. The sound of the one-machine band climbs against a clear October evening. The western sky’s still creamy gold, though a band of indigo shows to the east, stars prickling through. January’s breath mists, and oblong yellow leaves somersault across the grass, but once she’s inside she’ll be warm.

For now she tugs her scarf tight and balances the plate of brownies on one hand while locking the car doors with the other. She picks her way over uneven ground, watching another dark shape or two rattle keys, check doors, and drift through the gloaming like ghosts drawn to a séance. January follows a tall, slender woman in a plain gray dress, much younger than most of the crowd. Somebody’s daughter?

The carousel is housed in a circular structure like a train roundhouse—except smaller, and intricately decorated. The row of windows under the cedar-shake eaves are stained glass—this side, over the open double door, shows autumn scenes shading into winter.

January imagines the theme is carried all the way around. Around the curve of the building, the milk-glass snows probably melt out in lime green and gold.

The band organ almost blows her hair back as she passes inside. It thumps through the cold cement floor. The bass drum shudders in the empty spaces of her chest. The lofty space isn’t as warm as she’d hoped—cold air settles along the neckline of the pushed-back hood of her cardigan—but it’s bright and crowded and full of the smell of popcorn and the voices of crowds of people January knows sort of halfway well, or used to know well in college.

She waves with her free hand as she moves around the outskirts of the carousel, looking for the birthday boy, the snack table, or both. The crowd keeps her from getting a good look at the merry-go-round; apparently Martin can turn out enough friends for his fiftieth to make even a carousel housing seem crowded. But that’s okay; she can wait until she’s found Martin to go pet the wooden ponies.

As if her determination were a summoning, he materializes before her, one hand extended for the plate and the other to take her shoulder and kiss her quickly in hello. He’s got crow’s feet and spectacles now, and he’s thicker in the middle than when they were lovers. The hair slicked back into his ponytail is more silver than ginger.

He points to the brownies with the corner of his eyeglasses. “Adulterated table?”

“Would I let you down?”

He grins, a grin that pays for all their long and questionable history, and takes her arm. Progress to the refreshments is slow—the penalty for traveling with the guest of honor—but the inevitable interruptions allow January to gaze her fill upon the carousel.

Because she was curious, and because she has the research skills of any good children’s librarian, she knows that it was carved between 1911 and 1914 by Russian Jews who had immigrated to Ohio. She knows that their previous work was carving ladies’ hair ornaments, and she knows that the carousel stood in its original setting for fifty years before being shipped east to its new place of pride as the focal point of a municipal park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted—where you can rent it for birthday parties at night or in the off-season.

But that’s not the kind of knowledge that can prepare one for the glow of lights and the flash of mirrors, the chiaroscuro and the colors. The crashing of the Wurlitzer echoes until January can only make out what Martin is saying because she knows him so well, and eventually they find themselves by the snack tables.

The larger one has a white cloth, and is covered with casseroles and chips and desserts. A cooler must contain cans of soda. The smaller one has a tie-dyed cloth, and the cooler underneath contains beer.

Martin sets her plate in the center of the display, whisking off the plastic to reveal a stack of two-bite chocolate squares, each stuck with a toothpick with a paper cannabis leaf glued to the top—just in case there should be any misunderstandings. Before he turns away, he liberates a brownie. “You made these kind of small.”

“I made them kind of strong,” she answers. A responsible herbalist always tests the merchandise before turning it loose. “Anyway, there’s three-quarters of a pound of chocolate in those things.”

Judging by the blissful expression that crosses his face when he sniffs the brownie, that’s the right ratio. “Someday, these will be nearly legal again.”

“Nah,” January says. She takes Martin’s arm and leads him toward the carousel. “It’ll take generations to recover from the eighties. Come on. Let’s ride.”

Despite the crush of people, there’s no real line, and even if there were, clinging to the birthday boy’s arm has its benefits. Martin, licking brownie grease off his opposite thumb, hands January up onto the deck of the carousel, which—unlike the smaller merry-go-rounds she rode as a kid—doesn’t settle beneath her weight.

Martin releases her hand. The Wurlitzer hesitates.

The carousel has more than just horses. The closest animals, three abreast, are giraffes, vivid yellow and chocolate brown with caparisons of gold and red and blue. Their long necks look knotty; January can see the places where one piece of wood was joined to another to make up the length. The giraffes look awkward and their blown-glass eyes bulge unnaturally, catching the harsh glow and reflecting it back like raccoon eyes in headlights.

“Lasers fully charged.”

“I don’t think the carvers ever saw a live giraffe.” Martin’s a contractor now—four years of college and it turns out he’s that much happier with a hammer in his hands. It took him years of thrashing to figure it out, but the fun of being fifty is having done the figuring.

He ducks to inspect the hooves. “These don’t move. Do giraffes really have hooves? I’d have thought camel feet.”

“They really do.” She reaches way up to pat the nearest giraffe on the nose. “And the next row go up and down. It looks like just the circus animals don’t move.”

Martin stands as if the rising thunder of the Wurlitzer raised him. He leans around the giraffe to follow her gaze. The next row of three is horses, and if the giraffes are stiff, the horses are stunning. The Russian cousins were apparently better at familiar animals, because these breathe. They’re slightly caricatured, flaring nostrils and bulging eyes—glass again, too-round bubbles affixed to the insides of the hollow heads, so the carousel lights shine through them—but the cartoonishness expresses itself as heroism rather than ridiculousness. The carved necks arch, the carved teeth champ, the carved manes mount like breaking waves. The outside horse in each row is larger and braver than his brothers, the exterior side of each pony more brilliantly decorated than the one inside.

January touches a palomino ear and feels a thrill. She walks the length of the horse, letting her fingers trail down his neck and across the saddle. The saddlecloth sparkles with silver gilt, though the stirrup irons hanging from stretched leathers are worn. When her fingers reach the tail, she almost jerks back; there’s hide under the cream-colored locks. It’s a real horsetail.

“Better pick a pony,” Martin says. “The ride is filling up.”

She smiles and moves on. Past a lovers’ carriage—red and gold, and decorated with cherubs even more uncanny than the giraffes—and another row of standees—elephant, lion, and tiger. (“How come the giraffes get three representatives?” Martin wants to know, and under her breath January answers, “Quotas.”) The elephant is a little questionable, and the lion and tiger are not to scale—the lion is largest of the three—but the carving on the big cats is spectacular. Their eyes squint over frozen snarls. Pink tongues roll slickly behind curved yellow fangs. Small chips at the tops of each canine tooth must be from children shoving their hands into the big cats’ mouths. She shudders. Even in play, who would want to do that?

Behind them are grays—and January’s heart skips. The inside pony might be the plainest on the carousel—in fact, January wonders if she was borrowed from an older merry-go-round to make up a gap—and the stallion on the outside is a heavy-hoofed, broad-shouldered draught horse, his whiskery head so huge it looks like his neck is bowed under the weight of it. But the mare in the middle is perfect—medium sized, caught at the bottom of her leap for easy mounting, and with a gentle expression and crimson leaves braided into the toss of her mane.

“Her,” January says, and strokes the pale-pink wooden muzzle under the long, dappled wooden nose.

“Oh, not the middle one,” says Martin. “You can’t catch the brass ring if you’re on the middle one.”

“Brass ring?” January tucks her long, felted-wool skirt around her tights.

“Sure,” Martin says. “This carousel still has brass rings. Catch one, and you get a free ride.”

“But the rides are all free—”

He waves his hand in that airy manner that used to make her want to kiss him, dismissing all protests. “It’s the principle.”

She rolls her eyes and puts on her best I’m humoring Martin face. Recognizing it, he grins.

“Fine, but I’m riding Buttercup next time.”

“Buttercup? You’re not keeping her—”

He stands aside so she can mount the stallion, but it still looks uncomfortably wide, and she turns to the plain little filly on the inside. She’s stiffer than the others, more plainly made, her seams more apparent. Even her paint looks dull. The bulging glass eyes are more crudely fitted, and this pony has not only a tail of real horsehair, but a mane also, mingled strands of black and white and gray.

“Macabre,” January says, petting it, and swings up into the saddle.

It’s been a long time since she was on a real horse, and she’s never done it in heels—even low heels like these Mary Jane clogs. But once her feet are in the stirrups and she’s remembering how to use the leverage, she finds herself sitting comfortably, legs extended, one hand resting on the spiraling brass sleeve that covers the steel pole the horse hangs from. Her skirt drapes the saddle like a lady’s cloak in a tapestry.

“Brass ring,” she says to Martin, who is watching her from under furrowed brow.

“Brass ring.” He swings onto the stallion, which—at the top of its arc—makes him seem miles and miles taller.

Other riders fill in. The elephant immediately in front of January is occupied by Martin’s freshman-year roommate Andrew. His narrow height is distorted in the middle by a potbelly now, but his colorless hair still sticks out every which way, though there is less of it. He dangles himself over the back of the beast and extends one telescopic arm to pat the dragonfly ornament between the gray filly’s eyes. “You got the ugliest ride in the joint again.”

“But the elephant has the ugliest rider,” she answers, and watches him try to take it as a joke, the way people who camouflage their viciousness as humor generally have to. He manages, more or less, but while he’s arranging his face January rolls her eyes at Martin.

Martin rolls them right back. Andrew must catch the exchange, because he says, “Don’t tell me you two are back together?” in a prickly voice, which makes Martin laugh like he’ll never stop.

January grins at him, and the carousel starts.

——

Ripples of force spread across the girl’s flesh from the clean entry wound, small as a puncture. The impact and transfer of force cause cavitation: shock waves blow the path of the bullet as wide as if a fist were shoved into the injury. The wound collapses again.

Human skin and muscle are elastic; bone and liver are not.

——

January is getting the hang of this brass-ring thing. She’d expected they would be on hooks overhead, so you’d have to stand in the saddle to reach. In retrospect, that strikes her as a silly supposition—imagine the liability issues!—but how was she supposed to know? She’s never seen a carousel that still has them before.

The rings are in long-armed dispensers, one outside and one inside the deck of the carousel, between the inner edge and the brightly painted and bemirrored drum. They are easy to reach—January doesn’t have to lean far out of her saddle to hook her fingers through one—but they are mostly not shiny brass at all. All the ones she collects are sweat tarnished and dull brown, but there’s still something satisfying about the hook, the tug, the click, the release.

Andrew, with his long arms and quick fingers, is getting two or three rings at once. He can reach out ahead, swipe the first, and the dispenser has reloaded before he’s out of range. Martin is much more casual about it. He snags his rings as if lifting an hors d’oeuvre from a passing waiter’s tray. Martin is mugging for her, feet out of the stirrups, knees drawn up, sitting high in the saddle of the big carved Percheron as if he were a jockey in the Kentucky Derby. She wants to tell him not to fall and split his head open, but she’s also known him long enough to know better.

There are probably worse ways to die.

The painted ponies don’t just go up and down (sorry, Joni Mitchell)—they travel in geared circles, undulating forward as the carousel spins. The Wurlitzer booms and squeaks and plinks. Inside it, January imagines bellows and hammers and little plinky valves. The bars on the glockenspiel jump when struck, and the swell shutters on its gold-and-white face open and shut, controlling the volume.

“Dixie” is ending and January expects the carousel to slow, but apparently it’s two songs a ride, because the Wurlitzer hiccups and wheezes and swings into “Bicycle Built for Two” as she comes around again. Andrew snags a brown ring, two, and as he palms the second one January sees a gold-bright flash of brass when his hand comes down.

She’s not prepared for the jump of her heart, the surge of adrenaline, the way it feels, for a moment, as if the pony under her stretches warm, real flanks and surges forward. She leans into the stirrup, skirt furling in the wind of her passage, feeling the tension and strength up her leg, and lets her fingers grope forward—

But Andrew’s fingers flash again, there’s the rattle of the springs, and the brass ring is gone, replaced by one dull and lifeless. January settles into the stirrups, balanced again, the strain equalized through both legs. Whatever trick of perception made the gray filly seem to move like a real horse is gone, and she’s just a painted pony again.

After the ride, Andrew tries to give January the brass ring, but she decides she’d rather have a brownie.

——

Before the bullet strikes the girl, it is blown from the muzzle of the pistol at a velocity of some 830 feet per second, pushed before a cloud of hot, expanding gases. Those gases, the product of combustion, are created when the propellant in the bullet’s cartridge undergoes deflagration. Smokeless powder is a solid propellant, and it burns rather than detonating.

Rifling along the barrel of the pistol (a brand-new, innovative Colt 1911 model, all blued steel and the gin smell of gun oil) imparted a spin to the bullet, gyroscopically stabilizing its trajectory and improving its accuracy. In this instance, the rifling made no difference to the outcome. A bullet doesn’t wobble much at point-blank range.

——

January dangles a paper cup of hot cider by the rolled edges to avoid burning her fingers and listens to Martin talk to Jeff about mortgages and gardening. It’s a better conversation than you’d expect—Jeff is younger, in his thirties, a muscular African American with mobile, elegant hands. He’s a work friend of Martin’s from before Martin owned his own company, and he’s sharply witty and not too impressed with what one of January’s lesbian friends calls the Social Program.

In any case, Jeff is in the midst of an involved history of his attempts to use nonlethal force to keep what he refers to as the Yard Bunny from consuming his corn plants when the brownie takes hold of Martin. Because Martin blinks, holds up a hand to pause Jeff’s conversation, and says, in his best Tommy Chong, “Whooaaaa.”

Jeff switches gears effortlessly—“Colors?”—leaving January making a mental note to get the rest of the bunny story later. Somehow, she suspects that the beleaguered corn plants were not the final victors.

“Good brownies,” Martin says, with a grin. “Don’t eat two. For a minute there, I thought the ponies were moving.”

“It’s a carousel,” Jeff says. “They’re supposed to.”

Martin flips him off genially. “A lot of help you are.”

January feels the uncontrollable swell of her Internet research toward her vocal cords, and doesn’t even try to choke it down. “You know this carousel is supposed to be haunted?”

Jeff cocks his head; Martin stops with his glass already tilted toward his mouth. “Haunted? No kidding. What do they say?”

“Well …” She leans forward conspiratorially, to draw the anticipation out a little. “Supposedly it runs backward at night, and Martin, you’re not the first one to think he’s seen the horses moving. And there are the usual reports of cold spots, weird film exposures, shadows with nothing to cast them—”

“Runs backward?” Martin checks ostentatiously over each shoulder. “Hey, has anyone seen that nice Mr. Cooger?”

January tosses her head back and laughs. It feels good, easy, and that’s not just the influence of the brownie. “I dunno,” she says, “but some kid was looking for you. Do you think ghosts affect digital cameras?”

Jeff opens his hands, expressing something that could be bewilderment unless he’s simply making the universal gesture for the ineffable. “Yeah,” he says. “Supposedly you get the same kind of effects. Cameras pick up all sorts of things the human eye doesn’t.”

“Ghosts are kind of Jeff’s hobby,” Martin says.

“Nah, nah, now.” Jeff stretches out one hand with a finger extended, drawing it through the space between him and Martin. “Call it an interest. It’s kind of inevitable, given my work.”

Jeff specializes in renovating old houses. In this part of the world, old means eighteenth century, or the early part of the nineteenth. Not at all an old house by England’s standards, but then, in England they don’t generally build dwelling places out of wood.

January can’t resist. ’Tis the season, after all—Martin’s birthday is only a week before Halloween. “Have you ever seen a ghost?”

Jeff grins, flash of teeth stained slightly from too much coffee, and January suddenly finds him beautiful. Martin nudges her. He sees through her like a sheet of oiled paper. Try not to perv on the infants, you dirty old woman.

Jeff, thank God, seems oblivious. He’s busy gathering himself for whatever tall tale he’s about to tell, his attention somewhere off to the right while he figures out where to start. Just when January is starting to get antsy, he folds his fingers together and begins. “So you know contractors leave gifts inside houses, right?”

January doesn’t. “Gifts?”

Jeff’s head bobs emphatically, while Martin folds one arm over the other and lets his shoulders drop, his own cup of apple cider still hanging from his left hand. Either his cooled off faster than January’s, or his hands are impervious. “I like to leave a nice bottle of Scotch and a newspaper. Some guys do wine, photos, toys—it’s just kind of a message to the next guy to knock the wall down from the last one.”

“A gift,” January says, understanding. “Like when you sell a house, you leave toilet paper and paper towels for the people moving in.”

Jeff laughs, delighted. “Maybe not quite that practical. Anyway, I’ve found the damnedest things inside houses. Like, once a pair of suede slippers, new in box, except not such a great idea, because some kind of bugs had eaten them. Wine is common. Sometimes it’s vinegar. Scotch is a better idea.” He nods to Martin. “I like to leave books. Classics, nice editions. But you have to seal them up really well or they wind up like the slippers.”

“So what does this have to do with ghosts?” January rolls cider over her tongue. The taste is fruity, acid, complicated even before you consider the layers of sweet spices. She thinks there’s orange peel in there, star anise, allspice, cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, clove. And some unexpected things—black pepper, maybe. Bay leaf. It makes her want to suck air over it and rub her tongue against her palate to extract the subtleties.

“Well, so this one house had a china plate in the wall,” he says. “Willowware, sealed in a tiny little crate with wood shavings for packing material. Anyway, funny thing—as soon as I took that plate out, everything with the job started to go wrong.”

“It’s supposed to be a creepy doll,” Martin says, “that comes to life and starts trying to kill people until the final girl scorches its face off with a steam iron.”

Colored swirls follow the men’s movements. January knows they’re not real, but they are pretty.

“Now, when I say everything, I mean—drill bits snapping, nail guns jamming, the homeowner complaining of cold spots and feeling watched all the time. She was expecting a baby—we were renovating the nursery—and she eventually miscarried. So the husband took the plate and boxed it up, with styrofoam this time, instead of the wood shavings. And I opened the wall back up and tucked it inside, nice and careful.” He pauses, heavily, and raises one hand as if avowing, attesting, and swearing. “And that was the end of the troubles.”

Martin says, “It doesn’t sound as if anybody saw a ghost.”

“Cold spots.” January shivers dramatically. “Very good sign of a ghost infestation. If you have cold spots, look for ghosts.”

“If you have sawdust, look for termites.” Martin unfolds his arms and touches her. “Come on, I’m starving. You think there’s some food still left that isn’t laced?”

“Stoners,” Jeff says, following them back to the snack bar. “So predictable.”

——

Jeff and Martin start talking about repairing antique wood paneling in technical detail, and January decides that this is the opportune time to visit the snack tables. She pushes through the press of people and gets herself a small popcorn, more for the smell than the taste, and checks on the status of her brownies. Despite being cut small, they have already attrited by half. A small, round, white woman in a flowing skirt stops her, blue eyes peering through slipping strands of straight gray-brown hair that hang to her nominal waist. “You’re January, right?”

January nods, groping after a half-remembered name. “Mmm—Martha?”

“Marsha,” the woman says, with a winning smile and a negligent wave of her hand. “Don’t sweat it. I just wanted to say the brownies are really good. How do you get them not to be gritty?”

“Family secret,” January says. “It’s all about the butter. Pardon me.” She winks and turns away, as unenthralled suddenly with the technical details of infusing herb extracts into fats as she was with dadoing mahogany for tongue-and-groove construction. The line for the carousel has thinned as the evening has progressed, and since a group has just gone in, there is nobody standing at the gate. January presents herself just as the young Latina in gray coveralls who apparently came with the rental is closing the latch.

The carousel operator smiles apologetically. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Next ride?”

“I’m in no hurry,” January answers.

The woman nods and turns away to start the great machine revolving. She must have filled both hoppers with rings already, because as the music swells and the mounts begin to revolve she swings neatly up a stepladder and grabs a lever that extends both arms. The sound of wood on wood is almost buried under the Wurlitzer’s noise.

She comes back, dusting her hands, with a grin that makes January want to befriend her.

“Do you like your job?”

The woman looks down shyly. “I don’t mind it. Sometimes the kids’ birthday parties are a bit hairy, and sometimes it’s drunk college kids. We had a wedding in September. That was nice.”

“I work in a library.” January tosses her hair behind her shoulder. “I hear you about the kids.”

She extends her barely touched popcorn to the woman, who waves it off.

“Once you’ve worked here a month, you can’t get near the stuff anymore.” She wipes her hand on her trousers before she sticks it out and waits for January to clasp it. “I’m Maricela.”

“January,” January replies, giving her a little squeeze.

Maricela’s face softens with surprise—possibly even shock. “You’re pulling my leg.”

January is used to reactions, but this one seems a little over the top. “Fifty-one years,” she says. “Is there some reason it shouldn’t be?”

“No,” Maricela says, visibly gathering herself. “It’s just a little unusual, is all. A weird coincidence. Do you like carousels?”

“Love ’em,” January says. It isn’t as if she could have missed Maricela changing the subject. “More now than before. I read up on them when I found out Martin was throwing himself a kid party.”

“Everybody needs a kid party now and again,” Maricela says. “Especially people who don’t have kids. So you know about the horses having a romance side, the outside that’s all carved and pretty?”

“And a back side,” January says. “Which is so plain it doesn’t even get a pretty name.”

Maricela laughs, nodding.

Behind January, someone whoops, having caught the brass ring. It sounds like a child, but there are no kids at this party.

——

The combustion that propels the bullet—while not, properly speaking, an explosion in and of itself—is triggered by an explosion. A minuscule one: the detonation of the cartridge’s primer. That explosion is caused by the smack of the firing pin against the cartridge. It ignites the propellant, and the propellant pushes the bullet.

What causes the firing pin’s descent, of course, is the convulsive clenching of a human hand.

——

They’re not as young as they used to be: by midnight, the crowd has thinned. January’s still there, and so is Martin, and so is Jeff. In search of a place to sit, they’ve moved to the mostly empty carousel and claimed one of the carriages, really two ornately carved and gilded red-painted benches set facing each other. The boys sit together with January across, her feet tucked against the footboard and her knees between Jeff’s and Martin’s.

January’s coming down, and she’s pretty sure Martin is long grounded. It must be seriously cold outside; there was a frost warning, and the draft every time the doors open to let somebody else leave is bitter. She thinks she’ll be good to drive in another twenty minutes, anyway, and somewhere east of here her cats are probably picketing.

She’ll make her excuses after two more rounds on the carousel. The woman running it for the rental party is probably ready to go home to whomever she has, even if Martin has the place until one.

Besides, if January stays much longer, she’ll be stuck cleaning up.

The conversation has reached that point where they’re tidying up stray threads from earlier—like the end of a well-constructed movie—and Jeff has just finished telling them how the Yard Bunny defeated him as roundly as the Road Runner waxing Wile E. Coyote when she remembers something she was going to ask about earlier. Her research bump is itching: it’s a hazard of being a librarian.

“Did you ever find out what the backstory on the ghost plate was?” she asks.

“Backstory?” Jeff looks sleepy and contented, to the point where January is a little worried about him driving home. She doesn’t think he’s touched a drop of anything mood altering all night, however, which puts him on firmer ground than she and Martin, even if they’re both coming all the way back through sober and into a little cold and achy.

“You know.” She gropes dreamily after the right words. She has to raise her voice to be heard over the thump and blare of the band organ as they come around in the circle once more. They’ve been through its rolls—assuming they are rolls; the Internet tells her many band organs now run on MIDIs—so many times that she knows what order the songs come in now. She’ll be hearing them in her sleep.

One rank ahead of the red-painted chariot, the gray ponies—including the mismatched one—go up and down in little circles, riderless as horses in a funeral parade. “Provenance. History. Who put it there and where did it come from? That sort of thing.”

Jeff leans his head back, closes his eyes, and shrugs. “Houses are mysteries, and not all of those mysteries are nice things. Sometimes it’s best to not ask.”

Behind him, the brass ring glints in the dispenser, but January is so surprised to see it she doesn’t think to stand up and grab it until it has gone by. The carousel slows, song ending. She’d thought they were the only riders, but there must be somebody on the other side. Because when they come around again, the ring in the dispenser is just dull wire.

She’d swear the gray filly flicks its tail in annoyance, but of course it’s just a cold draft from the opening door. Somebody else is leaving the party for the long drive home.

——

Once the decision to fire the gun is made, the neural impulse to pull the trigger travels from brain to finger. Or possibly the action is reflexive. Possibly deep in the animal regions of the brain, electrical activity commences, leading the finger to convulse upon the trigger, the gun to discharge, and the mind—a few tremendously significant fractions of a second later—to justify the action to itself, believing it—I—has made a decision.

Or maybe those animal regions of the brain are part of its I, whether—culturally speaking—we are trained to regard them as such. Maybe those bits of ourselves that we alienate as subconscious impulses are as much I as the things Freud quantified as the ego and superego.

That I will provide reasons—motives, justifications, triggers. Jilted love or spurned advances. Money, sex, control. Any homicide cop can tell you those are the reasons people die.

In real life, it’s simple. The romance only happens in the movies.

——

All her best intentions of making a clean getaway evaporate, and January—of course—winds up staying behind to help clear. She and Martin and Jeff divide the spoils between them. Her share of the take includes a plate and a half of assorted cookies (unadulterated—January notes with a bit of pride that all of her brownies are gone), half of a tuna casserole, three deviled eggs, the heel of the saffron bread, and some shrimp dip. She won’t have to cook for a week.

She hopes none of the folks who left plates behind want them back, because she’s got no clue who brought what, or even who half the people in attendance were.

Behind her, the carousel sits empty and silent, even the Wurlitzer no longer breathing out its jangling tunes. The lanky Latina operator has been bagging trash and hauling it out to the dumpster. She seems overjoyed that some of the partygoers stayed behind to help tidy, and keeps shooting January shy thank-you smiles whenever their paths cross.

Actually, considering the crowd, the mess isn’t bad. January finds the brooms and dustpan behind the popcorn counter. While Martin starts cleaning out the popcorn machine, Jeff takes the big push broom, leaving January with the flat corn broom. She climbs onto the carousel platform and begins ferreting crumbs and paper wrappers from under chariots and between horses. She holds onto the pole that runs through a panda, leaning down to sweep between its paws, and the surreality of the moment strikes her.

The poles impaling the standing animals are the ones that support the platform. She can almost feel the weight of it, the tension, prickling her palm. If she’d thought about how the carousel was constructed, she realizes now, she must have thought the turntable rested on bearings, but really it’s cantilevered out on sweep arms, and those arms are supported by the poles that hang from above. The whole things turns around one central pillar.

She discards two dustpans’ worth of debris, starts on the third. Now she’s working around the lion and the tiger and the out-of-scale elephant, and in a moment she’ll be back to the gray ponies. That’s probably where she should dump; there will be another dustpanful at least in the rest of the carousel. As she passes, she can’t resist the urge to pet the ugly filly on the nose.

Velvet skin and hot breath tickle her fingers.

With a wheeze, the Wurlitzer shudders to life. The carousel begins to turn with a savage jolt that sets January teetering. Pain stabs her ankle. It stretches as her Mary Jane rolls sideways and the tendons give. The broom skitters from her hand as she windmills like Wile E. Coyote on the edge of a cliff. If she falls backward into the center of the carousel, the sweep arms will catch her and drag her over the concrete floor.

She flails, diaphragm tightening, fingertips splayed. Gravity pulls her down. But as the fall becomes inevitable her right hand slaps something rigid, closes on it, pulls hard. She remembers reading about panic strength, how in extreme peril your body discards the safety margins and does whatever it has to do, whatever it can, to get you out of harm’s way.

She’s never experienced it before.

When she comes back to herself, she’s breathing raggedly, in deep concentrated gasps that hurt her trachea and lungs. For a moment, those breaths are all she can think about, until a moment later the burn in her bicep and forearm makes its presence known.

The foreleg of the gray filly is clutched in her hand. It is no longer attached to the filly.

The thing protruding from the broken end is not a metal bar, but a snapped-off length of bone.

January knows she should scream, but apparently she’s not the screaming type. She stands there looking at the horse’s leg, at the place where the horse’s leg used to attach, at the two cleanly broken ends of bone. Human bone, she can’t help but think, but how would you know for sure? She’s read that even homicide cops have to send skeletal remains out for testing sometimes to be sure if they have uncovered the remains of a person or of an animal.

Like a child with a broken toy, she tries to slot the stiff wooden leg back onto the body of the filly. It fits, but of course it won’t stay. So January stands holding it, feeling foolish and terrified, her heart still churning residual adrenaline through her veins. In a minute, she will start to shake. She’d rather not do that while she’s still stuck on a malfunctioning carousel.

With a corpse, the helpful part of her brain volunteers.

They probably used horse skeletons as the form for the ponies. The ponies she’d been riding on. Like the real manes and tails, and she’d thought that was macabre.

Real horses aren’t this small. Real people are.

“Shut up,” she says. “We have to get off this thing.”

She can’t figure out what else to do with the filly’s leg, so she holds it in her hand as she moves to the center of the deck. The carousel is going faster than before. Inexorably, it’s accelerating. It seems as if the Wurlitzer is accelerating with it, though she can’t think of any reason why they would be geared together. The music has a hysterical edge.

Which, in fairness, January could be imagining.

Threading between horses, holding onto the brass sleeves surrounding the steel poles, January tries not to touch the glossy, brilliant paint where a few moments ago she lingered to stroke it. Is there something dead inside every one of them? Is it possible she’s tripping and none of this is real?

Holding onto the lion’s pole—easier than the gray stallion’s, because the lion does not go up and down—January leans as far out as feels safe. The carousel is whipping fast now, the wind slapping her hair to sting her cheeks and the corners of her eyes. Jeff, Martin, and the carousel operator stand in a tight huddle. Jeff gesticulates; the carousel operator shakes her head. January can’t hear a word over the Wurlitzer.

She draws a breath and shouts as she comes around. “Hey!”

Martin’s head jerks up and he’s about to shout something when she’s carried around the curve. When she comes back, he’s ready. “Sit tight! We have a plan!”

A good plan, she hopes. One that doesn’t involve damaging her or the carousel. Any more than she’s already damaged it, that is.

When she comes around again, Jeff is sprinting beside the rotating platform. Running hard, too, which gives her an idea of how fast she must be moving, because he’s losing ground. He reaches out as the lion gains on him and she steps back to make a landing zone. He jumps, arms swinging, and lands lightly beside her, one hand making contact with the lion’s support pole where hers had rested a moment before.

“Great,” January says. “Now you’re stranded too.”

He grins, flush with success. “The motor’s in the middle,” he says. “If I can reach—”

A thump cuts him off, a sharp wooden thud as the lion statue twists and lashes out with one gilt-clawed forepaw. January has a thousand years to watch Jeff’s expression of pained surprise as he topples backward off the carousel, a spray of blood scattering from his slashed thigh. January reaches for him instinctively, the broken leg of the gray filly falling to the deck, but all she feels is the brush of his warm, clutching fingertips against hers and then he’s gone. She almost throws herself after but something unyielding blocks her: the lion’s leg, extended like a crash barrier.

She withdraws, shuddering, into the second file. The tiger’s no better, objectively, but at least she has yet to see it move.

The next time the carousel brings her around she sees Martin hurtling the barrier, crouching beside Jeff. The time after that Jeff is up and hobbling, Martin supporting him, both of them holding a bandage made of Martin’s shirt over the gash on Jeff’s thigh.

“We’ll try something else!” Jeff shouts, but it sounds far away. Misty, if things can sound misty, exactly.

“Don’t!” January yells back, after one more revolution. “Call an ambulance.”

The carousel operator has her cell phone in her hand; it doesn’t look like she was waiting for instructions on that front. January blesses sensible women and looks left and right for the gray filly’s leg, but it’s not in sight anywhere. Maybe the same centrifugal force that wants to hurl her off the carousel when she leans too far out has sent it spinning over the side.

Because she doesn’t have any idea what else to do, she goes back to the gray filly. It feels like home base, and it’s farther from the lion. She has a hard time making herself touch it at first, but eventually stops snatching her fingers back as if she expected the lacquered wood to be hot and leans on the filly as she bobs up and down, trying to feel warm flesh and living bone under satin hide once more.

She didn’t imagine it. She didn’t imagine what the lion did to Jeff, the momentary glint of intelligence in its glass eye. She didn’t imagine the way the filly stretched under her petting.

The boom of the Wurlitzer hurts, now, so loud and so close. It’s almost impossible to think for the pounding of the base drum in her chest cavity. January imagines she can hear her brain ringing as it rattles from side to side against bone. She can’t think; she can’t jump; she can’t wait for rescue.

She has to do something.

Gingerly, teeth clenched, January leans on the sleeve and starts trying to fit her left foot into the iron of the undulating pony’s stirrup. She jams her clog in, her twisted ankle complaining, and takes a deep breath as the maimed filly’s ascent jerks her hip joint uncomfortably wide. As the pony comes down again, January jumps at the saddle, her skirt furling unevenly about her thighs. She’s grateful for the real horsehair tail now, because an arched carven one would have caught her hem and she would have fallen stupidly back to the deck and probably broken her leg. As it is, the skirt snags but tugs free, and she lands in the saddle only bruised on her inner thighs, clutching the pole and breathing hard through her nose.

You wouldn’t think something so simple could be so scary.

She passes beside the dispenser for the rings. A dull one sits in the socket at the end of the arm, though no one has filled the hopper. In the moment it takes for January to reclaim her composure, she cranes her head to see around the bigger horses rising and falling between her and the outside. She hopes for a glimpse of Martin or Jeff, but what she sees confounds her.

The carousel shelter is full of people once again. And not EMTs. These are people dressed as if they stepped out of the illustrations in a book on the sinking of the Titanic. The women wear tunics over long skirts, or shirtwaist blouses that give them a pigeon-breasted look. The men wear suits of gray and black woolen, cut curiously large. The children run in pinafores or short pants, the girls’ hair in ringlets and the boys’ parted razor straight and slicked. It looks like something out of a sepia-toned print.

The gray filly tosses her wire-slick mane and whinnies, harsh and loud as the scrape of the band organ. Her ears prick sharp as a carved horse’s, and January feels the crooked, staggering thud of hooves on the deck as her three-legged run struggles to keep up with the rise and fall of the pole. Her warm sides steam in the cold, muscles in her shoulder bunching and extending with each stride.

She tosses her head, fighting the bit. January finds herself rocking in time to the ragged gait, the muscle memory from long-ago riding lessons finding her balance and telling her to relax her arms and unclench her hands.

The filly calms, her ears flicked back as if listening. Alongside the carousel, a tall, rangy teenaged girl in a gray dress and high-heeled ankle boots runs skipping until January hears somebody call after her, chastising her as a hoyden and naming her—January.

“January?” January says, thinking suddenly, this is all a dream, I don’t care how detailed. But the filly’s ears flick, and the warm, grassy scent of her hide floats up as she shakes out her streaked silver mane. The filly bends her neck into an arc tight as a bow, lipping January’s knee, and January says the name again.

This time, the filly tosses her head yes.

“We’re namesakes.”

Another yes.

The animals all seem alive now. She can hear their noises, the trumpet of the elephant, the whinny of stallions, the lion’s deep cough—nothing like the sound children make to indicate lion. They seem to eye her balefully, so that she feels herself tucking her knees in tight and keeping her elbows close, as if by staying inside the footprint of the filly’s body she can protect herself from the malevolence of carved things.

The filly’s staggering fills her with remorse, though the truncated foreleg works as if it were really running and no blood oozes from the stump. As they come around again, the girl walks alongside, and January sees her face clearly. She’s plain, with mouse-colored hair and a tap-water complexion the gray dress does nothing for. When she tosses her head, January can see the filly in her.

A filly who does just that thing when they pass the dispenser again, snapping sideways with rolling eyes as if she means to grab the ring in her teeth. The pole restrains her, and she doesn’t come within three feet.

They pass the girl again, and this time January sees the man behind her. Hand in his pocket, fist clenched around something. The girl turns, a jerk of her head as startled as if somebody touched her shoulder, as if the pressure of his eyes hurt. She turns toward the doors, moving away, and like a viewer at a horror movie January wants to call after her—don’t go outside, don’t go through the door.

But the carousel carries her away again, and now she can’t make out the sound of the Wurlitzer at all. It’s lost under the cries of the animals, unless it’s become them.

The next time she comes around, she stands in the stirrups—wincing at her ankle, at the filly’s uneven gait—and reaches for the base-metal ring. Her fingers hook; she feels the tug; the ring pops free.

If she hoped it would be that simple, she is quickly disappointed. If anything, the carousel accelerates, a faster churning now. The neighs grow wilder. Something grazes her knee—a snap from the gray mare impaled beside her crippled filly. The filly snakes her head around and snaps back, and January leans as far to the outside as the stirrups allow.

Now there’s competition. Figures shimmer into the saddles of the elephant and the other ponies, but only on the inside ring. The carousel opposes her, her and the other January. Other fingers grope for rings, snap up one and then another, but they are all dull.

The cacophony persists. The carousel spins faster. The world wheels madly on.

From outside, she hears a single gunshot. Beneath her, the other January shies—but none of the people in the carousel shelter seem to hear.

She sets herself this time, leans out, her left foot solidly in the stirrup though her twisted ankle twinges. She braces with her right foot, aware that she’s reaching out too far and the mare might snap again. But there’s a brass ring in that dispenser somewhere, and if she doesn’t collect it, she doesn’t know how she’s getting off this carousel alive. The faces alongside are a blur now, the stained-glass seasons a colorful smear.

As they come up on the dispenser, she reaches over the filly’s neck. The cold ring brushes her fingertips. She snatches, sees bright metal, grabs again. Something sharp stabs up her right leg, pain like slamming it in a car door. It hauls, pulling her off balance, but she palms the ring she has already and her fingers hook the glittering circle of the next.

Momentum carries her forward, the ring snagged on her fingertips beginning to slide, the gray mare, teeth clenched in her calf muscle, hauling back.

January closes her hand before she loses the brass ring.

Silence falls, so sudden and hollow it makes her wonder briefly if she has been struck deaf. The carousel glides, slowing now.

——

Once the human element—motive, culpability, perception—enters the equation, it’s no longer so simple to trace a sequence of causality, to say—mechanistically, with confidence—here is the inciting event, and here is what caused that, and here is what caused that again.

We will never know why the finger pulls the trigger, even when it is our finger that tightens on yielding metal, our hand that jumps with the buck of the gun. We can speculate, but will never know.

It’s possible that her death was inevitable from the moment he followed her—tall and plain and smarting—from the shelter of the carousel, into the night where she died.

——

January limps away from the filly, the brass ring clutched in her palm. She has to twist and sidle to move between the animals, frozen now in contortions with reaching claws and gnashing teeth. Blood wells thick and artificial looking down her calf through the torn tights, skidding and squishing inside her Mary Jane.

Martin is waiting to catch her when she falls off the platform. The EMTs are there, gathered around Jeff, who is propped on his elbows telling jokes. The carousel operator sits beside him, head down, her hands pressed over her eyes.

Martin says to the EMTs, “I don’t know what happened. We were helping to clean up after the party, and the thing just turned itself on.”

January sits down gratefully on the plastic chair they bring. She extends her leg through the tear in her skirt. The EMT looks at it and clucks. “You’ll want to come to the ER.”

“Are the police on the way?”

The EMT nods, her blond ponytail bobbing. “They should be here in five minutes. Do you want to file a complaint?”

The carousel operator moans.

“No,” January says. “I want to report a murder. From about a hundred years ago.”

——

Firstly, he must have wanted to own her. Why else would he have found a way to keep her all this time?

As for what she wanted, what she dreamed as she rode (or ran) on the carousel that trapped her—to be seen, to be loved, to be free—as for what she wanted, no one ever asked her at all.

——

ELIZABETH BEAR was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, and very nearly named after Peregrin Took. She is a recipient of the John W. Campbell, Sturgeon, Locus, and Hugo Awards. She has been nominated multiple times for the British Science Fiction Association Awards, and is a Philip K. Dick Award nominee. She currently lives in southern New England with a famous cat. Her hobbies include murdering inoffensive potted plants, ruining dinner, and falling off rock faces.

Her most recent books are a space opera, Chill, from Bantam Spectra, and a fantasy, By the Mountain Bound, from Tor.

| DEAD SISTER |

Joe R. Lansdale

—

I had my office window open, and the October wind was making my hair ruffle. I was turned sideways and had my feet up, cooling my heels on the edge of my desk, noticing my socks. Once the pattern on the socks had been clocks; now the designs were so thin and colorless, I could damn near see my ankles through them.

I was looking out the window, watching the town square from where I sat, three floors up, which was as high as anything went in Mud Creek. It seemed pretty busy down there for a town of only eight thousand. Even a couple of dogs were looking industrious, as if they were in a hurry to get somewhere and do something important. Chase a cat, bite a mailman, or bury a bone.

Me, I wasn’t working right then, and hadn’t in a while. For me, 1958 had not been a banner year.

I was about to get a bottle of cheap whiskey out of my desk drawer, when there was a knock on the door. I could see my name spelled backward on the pebbled glass, and beyond that a shadow that had a nice overall shape.

I said, “Come on in, the water’s fine.”

A blond woman wearing a little blue pill hat came in. She was the kind of dame if she walked real fast, she might set the walls on fire. She sat down in the client chair and crossed her legs and let her cool blue dress slide up so I could see her knees. She was wearing stockings so sheer, she might as well have not had any on. She lifted her head and stared at me with eyes that would make a monk set fire to his bible.

She was carrying a cute little purse that might hold a compact, a couple of quarters, and a pencil. She let it rest on her lap, laid her hand on it like it was a pet cat.

“Mr. Taylor? I was wondering if you could check on something for me?” she said.

“If it’s on your person, no charge.”

She smiled at me. “I heard you thought you were funny.”

“Not really, but I try the stuff out anyway. See how this one works for you. I get fifty a day plus expenses.”

“You might have to do some rough stuff.”

“How rough?” I said.

“I don’t know. I really don’t know what’s going on at all, but I think it may be someone who’s not quite right.”

“Did you talk to the police?” I asked.

She nodded. “They checked, watched for three nights. But nobody showed. Soon as they quit, it started over again.”

“Where did they watch, and what did they watch?”

“The graveyard. They were watching a grave. I could swear someone was digging it up at night.”

“You saw this?”

“If I saw it, I’d be sure, wouldn’t I?”

“You got me there,” I said.

“My sister, Susan. She died of something unexpected. Eighteen. Beautiful. One morning she’s feeling ill, and then the night comes, and she’s feeling worse, and the next day she’s dead. Just like that. She was buried in the Sweet Pine Cemetery, and I go each morning on my way to work to bring flowers to her grave. The ground never settled. I got the impression it was being worked over at night. That someone was digging there. That they were digging up my sister, or trying to.”

“That’s an odd thing to think.”

“The dirt was always disturbed,” she said. “The flowers from the day before were buried under the dirt. It didn’t seem right.”

“So, you want me to check the place out, see if that’s what’s going on?”

“The police were so noisy and so obvious I doubt they got a true view of things. No one would try with them there. They thought I was crazy. What I need is someone who can be discreet. I would go myself, but I might need someone with some muscle.”

“Yeah, you’re too nice a piece of chicken to be wandering a graveyard. It would be asking for trouble. Your sister’s name is Susan. What’s yours?”

“Oh, I didn’t tell you, did I? It’s Cathy. Cathy Carter. Can you start right away?”

“Soon as the money hits my palm.”

——

I probably didn’t need a .38 revolver to handle a grave robber, but you never know. So I brought it with me.

My plan was if there was someone actually there, to put the gun on him and make him lie down, tie him up, and haul him to the police. If he was digging up somebody’s sister, the country cops downtown might not let him make it to trial. He might end up with a warning shot in the back of the head. That happened, I could probably get over it.

Course, it could be more than one. That’s why the .38.

My take, though, was it was all hooey. Not that Cathy Carter didn’t believe it. She did. But my guess was the whole business was nothing more than her grieving imagination, or a dog or an armadillo digging around at night.

I decided to go out there and look at the place during the day. See if I thought there was any kind of monkey business going on.

Sweet Pines isn’t a pauper graveyard on the whole, but a lot of paupers are buried there, on the low back end near Coats Creek—actually on the other side of the graveyard fence. Even in death, they couldn’t get inside with the regular people. Outsiders to the end.

There’ve been graves there since the Civil War. A recent flood washed away a lot of headstones and broke the ground open and pushed some rotten bones and broken coffins around. It was all covered up in a heap with a dozer after that: sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, grandmas and grandpas, massed together in one big ditch for their final rest.

The fresher graves on the higher ground, inside the cemetery fence, were fine. That’s where Susan was buried.

I parked at the gate, which was a black ornamental thing with fence tops like spearheads. The fence was six feet high and went all around the cemetery. The front was a large, open area with a horseshoe sign over it that read in metal curlicues Sweet Pine Cemetery.

That was just in case you thought the headstones were for show.

Inside, I went where Cathy told me Susan was buried and found her grave easy enough. There was a stone marker with her name on it, and the dates of birth and death. The ground did look fresh dug. I bent down and looked close. There were scratches in the dirt, but they didn’t look like shovel work. There were a bunch of cigarette butts heel mashed into the ground near the grave.

I went over to a huge shade tree nearby and leaned on it, pulled out a stick of gum and chewed. It was comfortable under the tree, with the day being cool to begin with and the shadow of the limbs lying on the ground like spilled night. I chewed the gum and looked at the grave for a long time. I looked around and decided if there was anything to what Cathy had said, then the cops wouldn’t have seen it, or rather they would have discouraged any kind of grave-bothering soul from entering the cemetery in the first place. Those cigarette butts were the tip-off. My guess was they belonged to the cops, and they had stood not six feet from the grave, smoking, watching. Probably, like me, figuring it was all a pipe dream. Only thing was, I planned to give Cathy her whole dollar.

I drove back to the office and sat around there for a few hours, and then I went home and changed into some old duds, left my hat, grabbed a burger at Dairy Queen, and hustled my car back over to the cemetery. I drove by it and parked my heap about a half mile from the graveyard under a hickory-nut tree well off the main road and hoped no one would bother it.

I walked back to the cemetery and stood under the tree near Susan’s grave and looked up at it. There was a low limb, and I got hold of that and pulled myself up, and then climbed higher. The oak had very few leaves, but the limbs were big, and I found a place where there was a naturally scooped-out spot in the wood and laid down on that. It wasn’t comfortable, but I lay there anyway and chewed some gum and waited for the sun to set. That wouldn’t be long this time of year. By five thirty or six, the sun was gone and the night was up.

Night came, and I lay on the limb until my chest hurt. I got up and climbed higher, found a place where I could stand on a limb and wedge my ass in a fork in the tree. From there, I had a good look at the grave.

The dark was gathered around me like a blanket. To see me, you’d have to be looking for me. I took the gum out of my mouth and stuck it to the tree, and leaned back so that I was nestled firmly in the narrow fork. It was almost like an easy chair.

I could see the lights of the town from there, and I watched those for a while, and watched the headlights of cars in the distance. It was kind of hypnotic. Then I watched lightning bugs. A few mosquitoes came to visit, but it was a little cool for them, so they weren’t too bad.

I touched my coat pocket to make sure my .38 was in place, and it was. I had five shots. I didn’t figure I would need to shoot anyone, and if I did, I doubted it would take more than five shots.

I added up the hours I had invested in the case, my expenses, which were lunch and a few packs of chewing gum. This wasn’t the big score I was looking for, and I was beginning to feel silly, sitting in a tree waiting on someone to come along and dig around a grave.

I wanted to check my watch, but I couldn’t see the hands well enough, and though I had a little flashlight in my pocket, I didn’t want any light to give me away.

I twisted around and looked behind me. The fork in the tree split in the direction of the creek. It was the only direction I couldn’t see easily, so I checked it out for grins. All that mattered was I could see the grave and anything that came to it.

I’ll admit it: I wasn’t much of a sentry. After a while, I dozed.

What woke me was a scratching sound. When I came awake, I nearly fell out of the tree, not knowing where I was. By the time I had it figured, the sound was really loud. It was coming from the direction of the grave.

——

When I looked down I saw an animal digging at the grave, and then I realized it wasn’t a dog at all. I had only thought it was. It was a man in a long black jacket. He was bent over the grave and he was digging with his hands like a dog. He wasn’t throwing the dirt far, just mounding it up. While I had napped like a squirrel in a nest, he had dug all the way down to the coffin.

I pulled the gun from my pocket and yelled, “Hey, you down there. Leave that grave alone.”

The man wheeled then and looked up, and when he did, I got a glimpse of his face in the moonlight. It wasn’t a good glimpse, but it was enough to nearly cause me to fall out of the tree. The face was as white as a nun’s ass, and the eyes were way too bright, even if he was looking up into the moonlight; those eyes looked the way coyote eyes look staring out of the woods.

He hissed at me and went back to his work, popping the lid off the coffin like it was a cardboard box. It snapped free, and he reached inside and pulled out the body of a girl. Her hair was undone, and it was long and blond and fell over the dirty white slip she was wearing. He pulled her out of there before I could get down from the tree with the gun. The air was full of the stink of death. Susan’s body, I guessed.

By the time I hit the ground, he had the body thrown over his shoulder, and he was running across the graveyard, between the stones, like a goddamn deer. I ran after him with my gun, yelling for him to stop. He was really moving. I saw him jump one of the tall upright grave stones like it was lying down and land so light he seemed like crepe paper floating down.

Now that he was running, not crouching and digging like a dog, I could tell more about his body type. He was a long, skinny guy with stringy white hair and the long black coat that spread out around him like the wings of a roach. The girl bounced across his shoulder as though she was nothing more than a bag of dry laundry.

I chased him to the back fence, puffing all the way, and then he did something that couldn’t be done. He sprang and leaped over that spear-tipped fence with Susan’s body thrown over his shoulder, hit the ground running and darted down to the creek, jumped it, and ran off between the trees and into the shadows and out of my sight.

That fence was easily six feet high.

——

I started to drive over to Cathy’s place. I had her address. But I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t go there and I didn’t go home, which was a dingy apartment. I went to the office, which was slightly better, and got the bottle out of the drawer, along with my glass, and poured myself a shot of my medicine. It wasn’t a cure, but it was better than nothing. I liked it so much I poured another.

I went to the window with my fresh-filled glass and looked out. The night looked like the night and the moon looked like the moon and the street looked like the street. I held my hand up in front of me. Nope. That was my hand, and it had a glass of cheap whiskey in it. I wasn’t dreaming, and to the best of my knowledge I wasn’t crazy.

I finished off the drink. I thought I should have taken a shot at him. But I hadn’t because of Susan’s body. She wouldn’t mind a bullet in the head, but I didn’t want to have to explain that to her sister if I accidentally hit her.

I laid down on the couch for a little while, and the whiskey helped me sleep, but when I came awake, and turned on the light and looked at my watch, it was just then midnight.

I got my hat and my gun and my car keys off the desk, went down to my car, and drove back to the cemetery.

——

I didn’t park down from the place this time. I drove through the horseshoe opening and drove down as close as I could get to the grave. I got out and looked around, hoping I wouldn’t see the man in the long coat, and hoping in another way I would.

I got my gun from my pocket and held it down by my side, and walked over to the grave. It was covered up, patted down. The air still held that stench from before. Less of it, but it still lingered, and I had this odd feeling it wasn’t the stink of Susan’s body after all. It was that man. It was his stink. I felt sure of it, but there was no reasoning as to why I thought that. Call it instinct. I looked down at the grave. It was closed up.

The hair on the back of my neck stood up like I had been shot with a quiverful of little arrows.

Looking every which way as I went, I made it back to the car and got inside and locked all the doors and started it up, and drove back to town and over to Cathy’s place.

——

We were in her little front room sitting on the couch. There was coffee in cups on saucers sitting on the coffee table. I sipped mine and tried to do it so my hand didn’t shake.

“So now you believe me,” she said.

“But I don’t know anyone else will. We tell the cops this, we’ll both be in the booby hatch.”

“He took her body?”

I nodded.

“Weren’t you supposed to stop him?”

“I actually didn’t think that was going to come up. But I couldn’t stop him. He didn’t look like much, but he was fast, and to leap like that, he had to be strong. He carried your sister’s body like it was nothing.”

“My heavens, what could he want with her?”

I had an idea, considering she only had on a slip. That meant he’d been there before, undressed her, and put her back without her burial clothes. But Cathy, she was on the same page.

“Now someone has her body,” she said, “and they’re doing who knows what to her … Oh, Jesus. This is like a nightmare. Listen, you’ve got to take me out there.”

“You don’t want to do that,” I said.

“Yes I do, Mr. Taylor. That’s exactly what I want to do. And if you won’t do it, I’ll go anyway.”

She started to cry and leaned into me. I held her. I figured part of it was real and part of it was like the way she showed me her legs; she’d had practice getting her way with men.

——

I drove her over there.

It was just about daybreak when we arrived. I drove through the gate and parked near the grave again. I saw that fellow, even if he was carrying two dead blonds on his shoulders, I was going to take a shot at him. Maybe two. That didn’t work, I was going to try and run over him with my car.

Cathy stood over the grave. There was still a faint aroma of the stink from before.

Cathy said, “So he came back and filled it in while you were at your office, doing—what did you say—having a drink?”

“Two, actually.”

“If you hadn’t done that, he would have come back and you would have seen him.”

“No reason for me to think he’d come back. I just came to look again to make sure I wasn’t crazy.”

As the sun came up, we walked across the cemetery, me tracing the path the man had taken as he ran. When I got to the fence, I looked to see if there was anything he could have jumped up on or used as a springboard to get over. There wasn’t.

We went back to the car and I drove us around on the right side near the back of the cemetery. I had to park well before we got to the creek. It was muddy back there where the creek rose, and there were boot prints in the mud from the flooding. The flood had made everything a bog.

I looked at the fence. Six feet tall, and he had landed some ten feet from the fence on this side. That wasn’t possible, but I had seen him do it, and now I was looking at what had to be his boot tracks.

I followed the prints down to the creek, where he had jumped across. It was all I could do to stay on my feet, as it was such a slick path to follow, but he had gone over it as sure-footedly as a goat.

Cathy came with me. I told her to go back, but she wouldn’t listen. We walked along the edge of the creek until we found a narrow spot, and I helped her cross over. The tracks played out when the mud played out. As we went up a little rise, the trees thickened even more and the land became drier. Finally we came to a nearly open clearing. There were a few trees growing there, and they were growing up close to an old sawmill. One side of it had fallen down, and there was an ancient pile of blackened sawdust mounded up on the other where it had been dumped from the mill and rotted by the weather.

We went inside. The floorboards creaked, and the whole place, large as it was, shifted as we walked.

“Come on,” I said. “Before we fall all the way to hell.”

On the way back, as we crossed the creek, I saw something snagged on a little limb. I bent over and looked at it. It stank of that smell I had smelled in the graveyard. I got out my handkerchief and folded the handkerchief around it and put it in my pocket.

Back in the car, driving to town, Cathy said, “It isn’t just some kook, is it?”

“Some kook couldn’t have jumped a fence like that, especially with a body thrown over its shoulder. It couldn’t have gone across that mud and over that creek like it did. It has to be something else.”

“What does ‘something else’ mean?” Cathy said.

“I don’t know,” I said.

We parked out near the edge of town, and I took the handkerchief out and unfolded it. The smell was intense.

“Throw it away,” Cathy said.

“I will, but first, you tell me what it is.”

She leaned over, wrinkled her pretty nose. “It’s a piece of cloth with meat on it.”

“Rotting flesh,” I said. “The cloth goes with the man’s jacket, the man I saw with Susan’s body. Nobody has flesh like this if they’re alive.”

“Could it be from Susan?” she asked.

“Anything is possible, but this is stuck to the inside of the cloth. I think it came off him.”

——

In town, I bought a shovel at the hardware store, and then we drove back to the cemetery. I parked so that I thought the car might block what I was doing a little, and I told Cathy to keep watch. It was broad daylight, and I hoped I looked like a gravedigger and not a grave robber.

She said, “You’re going to dig up the grave?”

“Dang tootin’,” I said, and I went at it.

Cathy didn’t like it much, but she didn’t stop me. She was as curious as I was. It didn’t take long because the dirt was soft, the digging was easy. I got down to the coffin, scraped the dirt off, and opened it with the tip of the shovel. It was a heavy lid, and it was hard to do. It made me think of how easily the man in the coat had lifted it.

Susan was in there. She looked very fresh and she didn’t smell. There was only that musty smell you get from slightly damp earth. She had on the slip, and the rest of her clothes were folded under her head. Her shoes were arranged at her feet.

“Jesus,” Cathy said. “She looks so alive. So fair. I understand why someone would dig her up, but why would they bring her back?”

“I’m not sure, but I think the best thing to do is go see my mother.”

——

My mother is the town librarian. She’s one of those that believe in astrology, ESP, little green men from Mars, ghosts, a balanced budget, you name it. And she knows about that stuff. I grew up with it, and it never appealed to me. Like my dad, I was a hardheaded realist. And at some point, my mother had been too much for him. They separated. He lives in Hoboken with a showgirl, far from East Texas. He’s been there so long he might as well be a Yankee himself.

The library was nearly empty, and as always, quiet as God’s own secrets. My mother ran a tight ship. She saw me when I came in and frowned. She’s no bigger than a minute, with overdyed hair and an expression on her face like she’s just eaten a sour persimmon.

I waved at her, and she waved me to follow her to the back, where her office was.

In the back, she made Cathy sit at a table near the religious literature.

“What am I supposed to do?” Cathy asked.

Mother looked around the room at all the books. “You do know how to read, don’t you, dear?”

Cathy gave Mother a hard look. “Until my lips get tired.”

“Know anything about the Hindu religion?”

“Yeah. They don’t eat cows.”

“There, you’re already off to a good start.”

“Here,” Mother said, and gave her a booklet on the Hindu religion, then guided me into her office, which was only a little larger than a janitor’s closet, and closed the door. She sat behind her cluttered desk, and I sat in front of it.

“So, you must need money,” she said.

“When have I asked you for any?”

“Never, but since I haven’t seen you in a month of Sundays, and you live across town, I figured it had to be money. If it’s for that floozy out there, to buy her something—forget it. She looks cheap.”

“I don’t even know her that well,” I said.

She gave me a narrow-eyed look.

“No. It’s not like that. She’s a client.”

“I bet she is.”

“Listen, Mom, I’m going to jump right in. I have a situation. It has to do with the kind of things you know about.”

“That would be a long list.”

I nodded. “But this one is a very specialized thing.” And then I told her the story.

She sat silent for a while, processing the information.

“Cauldwell Hogson,” she said.

“Beg pardon?”

“The old graveyard, behind the fence. The one they don’t use anymore. He was buried there. Fact is, he was hanged in the graveyard from a tree limb. About where the old sawmill is now.”

“There are graves there?” I asked.

“Well, there were. The flood washed up a bunch of them. Hogson was one of the ones buried there, in an unmarked grave. Here—it’s in one of the books about the growth of the city, written in 1940.”

She got up and pulled a dusty-looking book off one of her shelves. The walls were lined with them. These were her personal collection. She put the book on her desk, sat back down, and started thumbing through the volume, then paused.

“Oh, what the heck. I know it by heart.” She closed the book, sat back down in her chair, and said, “Cauldwell Hogson was a grave robber. He stole bodies.”

“To sell to science?”

“No. To have … well, you know.”

“No. I don’t know.”

“He had relations with the bodies.”

“That’s nasty,” I said.

“I’ll say. He would take them and put them in his house and pose them and sketch them. Young women. Old women. Just as long as they were women.”

“Why?”

“Before daybreak, he would put them back. It was a kind of ritual. But he got caught and he got hung, right there in the graveyard. Preacher cursed him. Later they found his notebooks in his house, and his drawings of the dead women. Mostly nudes.”

“But Mom, I think I saw him. Or someone like him.”

“It could be him,” she said.

“You really think so?”

“I do. You used to laugh at my knowledge, thought I was a fool. What do you think now?”

“I think I’m confused. How could he come out of his grave after all these many years and start doing the things he did before? Could it be someone else? Someone imitating him?”

“Unlikely.”

“But he’s dead.”

“What we’re talking about here, it’s a different kind of dead. He’s a ghoul. Not in the normal use of the term—he’s a real ghoul. Back when he was caught, and that would be during the Great Depression, no one questioned that sort of thing. This town was settled by people from the old lands. They knew about ghouls. Ghouls are mentioned as far back as The Thousand and One Nights. And that’s just their first known mention. They love the dead. They gain power from the dead.”

“How can you gain power from something that’s dead?”

“Some experts believe we die in stages, and that when we are dead to this world, the brain is still functioning on a plane somewhere between life and death. There’s a gradual release of the soul.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Books. Try them sometime. The brain dies slowly, and a ghoul takes that slow dying, that gradual release of soul, and feasts on it.”

“He eats their flesh?”

“There are different kinds of ghouls. Some eat flesh. Some only attack men, and some are like Hogson. The corpses of women are his prey.”

“But how did he become a ghoul?”

“Anyone who has an unholy interest in the dead—no matter what religion, no matter if they have no religion—if they are killed violently, they may well become a ghoul. Hogson was certainly a prime candidate. He stole women’s bodies and sketched them, and he did other things. We’re talking about, you know—”

“Sex?”

“If you can call it that, with dead bodies. By this method he thought he could gain their souls and their youth. Being an old man, he wanted to live forever. Course, there were some spells involved, and some horrible stuff he had to drink, made from herbs and body parts. Sex with the bodies causes the remains of their souls to rise to the surface, and he absorbs them through his own body. That’s why he keeps coming back to a body until it’s drained. It all came out when he was caught replacing the body of Mary Lawrence in her grave. I went to school with her, so I remember all this very well. Anyway, when they caught him, he told them everything, and then there were his notebooks and sketches. He was quite proud of what he had done.”

“But why put the bodies back? And Susan, she looked like she was just sleeping. She looked fresh.”

“He returned the bodies before morning because for the black magic to work, they must lie at night in the resting place made for them by their loved ones. Once a ghoul begins to take the soul from a body, it will stay fresh until he’s finished, as long as he returns it to its grave before morning. When he drains the last of its soul, the body decays. What he gets out of all this, besides immortality, are powers he didn’t have as a man.”

“Like being strong and able to jump a six-foot fence flat footed,” I said.

“Things like that, yes.”

“But they hung the old man,” I said. “How in hell could he be around now?”

“They did more than hang him. They buried him in a deep grave filled with wet cement and allowed it to dry. That was a mistake. They should have completely destroyed the body. Still, that would have held him, except the flood opened the graves, and a bulldozer was sent in to push the old bones away. In the process, it must have broken open the cement and let him out.”

“What’s to be done?” I said.

“You have to stop it.”

“Me?”

“I’m too old. The cops won’t believe this. So it’s up to you. You don’t stop him, another woman dies, he’ll take her body. It could be me. He doesn’t care I’m old.”

“How would I stop him?”

“That part might prove to be difficult. First, you’ll need an ax, and you’ll need some fire …”

——

With Cathy riding with me, we went by the hardware store and bought an ax and a file to sharpen it up good. I got a can of paint thinner and a new lighter and a can of lighter fluid. I went home and got my twelve-gauge double barrel. I got a handful of shotgun shells. I explained to Cathy what I had to do.

“According to Mom, the ghoul doesn’t feel pain much. But they can be destroyed if you chop their head off, and then you got to burn the head. If you don’t, it either grows a new head, or a body out of the head, or some such thing. She was a little vague. All I know is she says it’s a way to kill mummys, ghouls, vampires, and assorted monsters.”

“My guess is she hasn’t tried any of this,” Cathy said.

“No, she hasn’t. But she’s well schooled in these matters. I always thought she was full of it, but turns out she isn’t. Who knew?”

“And if it doesn’t work?”

“Look for my remains.”

“I’m going with you,” she said.

“No you’re not.”

“Do you really think you can stop me? It’s my sister. I hired you.”

“Then let me do my job.”

“I just have your word for all this.”

“There you are. I wouldn’t tromp around in the dark based on my word.”

“I’m going.”

“It could get ugly.”

“Once again, it’s my sister. You don’t get to choose for me.”

——

I parked my car across the road from the cemetery under a willow. As it grew dark, shadows would hide it reasonably well. This was where Cathy was to sit. I, on the other hand, would go around to the rear, where the ghoul would most likely come en route to Susan’s grave.

Sitting in my jalopy talking, the sun starting to drop, I said, “I’ll try and stop him before he gets to the grave. But if he comes from some other angle, another route, hit the horn and I’ll come running.”

“There’s the problem of the six-foot fence,” Cathy said.

“I may have to run around the graveyard fence, but I’ll still come. You can keep honking the horn and turn on the lights and drive through the cemetery gate. But whatever you do, don’t get out of the car.”

I handed her my shotgun.

“Ever shot one of these?” I said.

“Daddy was a bird hunter. So, yes.”

“Good. Just in case it comes to it.”

“Will it kill him?”

“Mom says no, but it beats harsh language.”

I grabbed my canvas shoulder bag and ax and got out of the car and started walking. I made it around the fence and to the rear of the graveyard, near the creek and the mud, about fifteen minutes before dark.

I got behind a wide pine and waited. I didn’t know if I was in the right place, but if his grave had been near the sawmill this seemed like a likely spot. I got a piece of chewing gum and went to work on it.

The sun was setting.

I hoisted the ax in my hand, to test the weight. Heavy. I’d have to swing it pretty good to manage decapitation. I thought about that. Decapitation. What if it was just some nut, and not a ghoul?

Well, what the hell. He was still creepy.

I put the ax head on the ground and leaned on the ax handle.

I guess about an hour passed before I heard something crack. I looked out toward the creek where I had seen him jump with Susan’s body. I didn’t see anything but dark. I felt my skin prick, and I had a sick feeling in my stomach.

I heard another crack.

It wasn’t near the creek.

It wasn’t in front of me at all.

It was behind me.

——

I wheeled, and then I saw the ghoul. He hadn’t actually seen me, but he was moving behind me at a run, and boy could he run. He was heading straight for the cemetery fence.

I started after him, but I was too far behind and too slow. I slipped on the mud and fell. When I looked up, it was just in time to see the ghoul make a leap. For a moment, he seemed pinned against the moon, like a curious brooch on a golden breast. His long white hair trailed behind him and his coat was flying wide. He had easily leaped ten feet high.

He came down in the cemetery as light as a feather. By the time I was off my ass and had my feet under me, he was running across the cemetery toward Susan’s grave.

I ran around the edge of the fence, carrying the ax, the bag slung over my shoulder. As I ran, I saw him, moving fast. He was leaping gravestones again.

Before I reached the end of the fence, I heard my horn go off and saw lights come on. The car was moving. As I turned the corner of the fence, I could see the lights had pinned the ghoul for a moment, and the car was coming fast. The ghoul threw up its arm and the car hit him and knocked him back about twenty feet.

The ghoul got up as if nothing had happened. Its movements were puppetlike, as if it were being pulled by invisible strings.

Cathy, ignoring everything I told her, got out of the car. She had the shotgun.

The ghoul ignored her, and ran toward Susan’s grave, and started digging as if Cathy wasn’t there. As I came through the cemetery opening and passed my car, Cathy cut down on the thing with the shotgun. Both barrels.

It was a hell of a roar, and dust and cloth and flesh flew up from the thing. The blast knocked it down. It popped up like a jack-in-the-box and hissed like a cornered possum. It lunged at Cathy. She swung the shotgun by the barrel, hit the ghoul upside the head.

I was at Cathy’s side now, and without thinking I dropped the ax and the bag fell off my shoulder. Before the ghoul could reach her, I tackled the thing.

It was easy. There was nothing to Cauldwell Hogson. It was like grabbing a hollow reed. But the reed was surprisingly strong. Next thing I knew, I was thrown into the windshield of my car, and then Cathy was thrown on top of me.

When I had enough of my senses back, I tried to sit up. My back hurt. The back of my head ached, but otherwise, I seemed to be all in one piece.

The ghoul was digging furiously at the grave with its hands, throwing dirt like a dog searching for a bone. He was already deep into the earth.

Still stunned, I jumped off the car and grabbed the canvas bag, and pulled the lighter fluid and the lighter out of it. I got as close as I dared and sprayed a stream of lighter fluid at the creature. It soaked the back of its head. Hogson wheeled to look at me. I sprayed the stuff in his eyes and on his chest, drenching him. He swatted at the fluid as I squeezed the can.

I dropped the can. I had the lighter, and I was going to pop the top and hit the thumb wheel, when the next thing I knew the ghoul leaped at me and grabbed me and threw me at the cemetery fence. I hit hard against it and lay there stunned.

When I looked up, the ghoul was dragging the coffin from the grave, and without bothering to open it this time, threw it over his shoulder and took off running.

I scrambled to my feet, found the lighter, stuffed it in the canvas bag, swung the bag over my shoulder, and picked up the ax. I yelled for Cathy to get in the car. She was still dazed, but managed to get in.

Sliding behind the wheel, I gave her the ax and the bag, turned the key, popped the clutch, and backed out of the cemetery. I whipped onto the road, jerked the gear into position, and tore down the road.

“He’s over there!” Cathy said. “See!”

I glimpsed the ghoul running toward the creek with the coffin.

“I see,” I said. “And I think I know where he’s going.”

——

The sawmill road was good for a short distance, but then the trees grew in close and the road was grown up with small brush. I had to stop the car. We started rushing along on foot. Cathy carried the canvas bag. I carried the ax.

“What’s in the bag,” she said.

“More lighter fluid.”

Trees dipped their limbs around us, and when an owl hooted, then fluttered through the pines, I nearly crapped my pants.

Eventually, the road played out, and there were only trees. We pushed through some limbs, scratching ourselves in the process, and finally broke out into a partial clearing. The sawmill was in the center of it, with its sagging roof and missing wall and trees growing up through and alongside it. The moonlight fell over it and colored it like thin yellow paint.

“You’re sure he’s here,” Cathy said.

“I’m not sure of much of anything anymore,” I said. “But his grave was near here. It’s about the only thing he can call home now.”

When we reached the sawmill, we took deep breaths, as if on cue, and went inside. The boards creaked under our feet. I looked toward a flight of open stairs and saw the ghoul moving up those, as swift and silent as a rat. The coffin was on his shoulder, held there as if it were nothing more than a shoebox.

I darted toward the stairs, and the minute my foot hit them, they creaked and swayed.

“Stay back,” I said, and Cathy actually listened to me. At least for a moment.

I climbed on up, and then there was a crack, and my foot went through. I felt a pain like an elephant had stepped on my leg. I nearly dropped the ax.

“Taylor,” Cathy yelled. “Are you all right?”

“Good as it gets,” I said.

Pulling my leg out, I limped up the rest of the steps with the ax, turned left at the top of the stairs—the direction I had seen it take. I guess I was probably thirty feet high by then.

I walked along the wooden walkway. To my right were walls and doorways without doors, and to my left was a sharp drop to the rotten floor below. I hobbled along for a few feet, glanced through one of the doorways. The floor on the other side was gone. Beyond that door was a long drop.

I looked down at Cathy.

She pointed at the door on the far end.

“He went in there,” she said.

Girding my loins, I came to the doorway and looked in. The roof of the room was broken open, and the floor was filled with moonlight. On the floor was the coffin, and the slip Susan had worn was on the edge of the coffin, along with the ghoul’s rotten black coat.

Cauldwell Hogson was in the coffin on top of her.

I rushed toward him just as his naked ass rose up, a bony thing that made him look like some sad concentration-camp survivor. As his butt came down, I brought the ax downward with all my might.

It caught him on the back of the neck, but the results were not as I expected. The ax cut a dry notch, but up he leaped, as if levitating, grabbed my ax handle, and would have had me, had his pants not been around his ankles. It caused him to fall. I staggered back through the doorway, and now he was out of his pants and on his feet, revealing that though he was emaciated, one part of him was not.

Backpedaling, I stumbled onto the landing. He sprang forward, grabbed my throat. His hands were like a combination of vise and ice tongs; they bit into my flesh and took my air. Up close, his breath was rancid as roadkill. His teeth were black and jagged, and the flesh hung from the bones of his face like cheap curtains. The way he had me, I couldn’t swing the ax and not hit myself.

In the next moment, the momentum of his rush carried us backward, along the little walkway, and then out into empty space.

——

Falling didn’t take any time. When I hit the ground my air was knocked out of me, and the boards of the floor sagged.

The ghoul was straddling me, choking me.

And then I heard a click, a snap. I looked. Cathy had gotten the lighter from the bag. She tossed it.

The lighter hit the ghoul, and the fluid I had soaked him with flared. His head flamed, and he jumped off of me and headed straight for Cathy.

I got up as quickly as I could, which was sort of like asking a dead hippo to roll over. On my feet, lumbering forward, finding that I still held the ax in my hand, I saw that the thing’s head was flaming like a match, and yet it had gripped Cathy by the throat and was lifting her off the ground.

I swung the ax from behind, caught its left leg just above the knee. The blade I had sharpened so severely did its work. It cut the ghoul off at the knee, and he dropped, letting go of Cathy. She moved back quickly, holding her throat, gasping for air.

The burning thing lay on its side. I brought the ax down on its neck. It took me two more chops before its rotten, burning head came loose. I chopped at the head, sending the wreckage of flaming skull in all directions.

I faltered a few steps, looked at Cathy, said, “You know, when you lit him up, I was under him.”

“Sorry.”

And then I saw her eyes go wide.

I turned.

The headless, one-legged corpse was crawling toward us, swift as a lizard. It grabbed my ankle.

I slammed the ax down, took off the hand at the wrist, then kicked it loose of my leg. That put me in a chopping frenzy. I brought the ax down time after time, snapping that dry stick of a creature into thousands of pieces.

By the time I finished that, I could hardly stand. I had to lean on the ax. Cathy took my arm, said, “Taylor.”

Looking up, I saw the fire from the ghoul had spread out in front of us, and the rotten lumber and old sawdust had caught like paper. The canvas bag with the lighter fluid in it caught too, and within a second, it blew, causing us to fall back.

The only way out was up the stairs, and in the long run, that would only prolong the roasting. Considering the alternative, however, we were both for prolonging our fiery death instead of embracing it.

Cathy helped me up the stairs, because by now my ankle had swollen up until it was only slightly smaller than a Civil War cannon. I used the ax like a cane. The fire licked the steps behind us, climbed up after us, as if playing tag.

When we made the upper landing, we went through the door where Susan’s body lay. I looked in the coffin. She was nude, looking a lot rougher than before. Perhaps the ghoul had gotten the last of her, or without him to keep her percolating with his magic, she had gone for the last roundup, passed on over into true, solid death. I hoped in the end her soul had been hers, and not that monster’s.

I let go of Cathy, and, using the ax for support, made it to the window. The dark sawdust was piled deep below.

Stumbling back to the coffin, I dropped the ax, got hold of the edge, and said, “Push.”

My thinking was maybe we could save Susan’s body for reburial. Keep it away from flames. I didn’t need to explain to Cathy. She got it right away. Together we shoved the coffin toward the window.

We pushed the coffin and Susan out the window. She fell free of the box and hit the sawdust. We jumped after her.

When we were on the pile, spitting sawdust, trying to work our way down the side of it, the sawmill wall started to fall. We rolled down the side of the piled sawdust and hit the ground.

The burning wall hit the sawdust. The mound was high enough we were protected from it. We crawled out from under it and managed to get about fifty feet away before we looked back.

The sawmill, the sawdust, and poor Susan’s body—which we had not been able to save—and whatever was left of Cauldwell Hogson was now nothing more than a raging mountain of sizzling, crackling flames.

——

JOE R. LANSDALE has been a freelance writer since 1973, and a full-time writer since 1981. He is the author of thirty novels and eighteen short-story collections, and has received the Edgar Award, seven Bram Stoker Awards, the British Fantasy Award, and Italy’s Grinzani Prize for Literature, among others.

“Bubba Ho-Tep,” his award-nominated novella, was filmed by Don Coscarelli and is now considered a cult classic, and his story “Incident On and Off a Mountain Road” was filmed for Showtime’s Masters of Horror.

He has written for film, television, and comics, and is the author of numerous essays and columns. His most recent works are a collection from the University of Texas Press, Sanctified and Chicken Fried; The Portable Lansdale; and Vanilla Ride, his latest in the Hap Collins–Leonard Pine series. The series has recently been released in paperback from Vintage Books.

| COMFORTABLE IN HER SKIN |

Lee Thomas

—

Sylvian Newman strolls along the boulevard. She is already late for her rendezvous with Louis Towne, but the delay is calculated. The nights she makes Louis wait are always the most exciting, so she takes her time, stopping at brightly lit shop windows along the street to peer in at the teasing displays. At Genevieve’s a glittering stream of diamonds pulls her to the glass like a magnet. The necklace is draped over a black velvet bust, and the clear gems twinkle like tiny stars. At their center is a perfect ruby the size of a postage stamp. Sylvia has never seen anything so beautiful in her life, and though Louis is rich, she knows he will never be diamonds-and-rubies generous with her. Besides, the shop owners in this part of town know Louis well. They also know his wife.

Leaving behind the beautiful gems, she continues to the corner. Sylvia spots Louis standing by his car under a street lamp across the intersection. His angry expression is emphasized by the shadows, and the sight of his frown sends a thrill through her. He will complain about being made to wait in a neighborhood where he is so well known. He’ll sulk over dinner and threaten to dump Sylvia on her ass for being such a pain in his, and when he fucks her, it will be brutal without a hint of tenderness, and Louis will think he’s punishing her. Sylvia is more than happy to allow him the illusion.

Louis stands up straight and throws his shoulders back when he sees her across the street. He is an odd-looking man, with chipmunk cheeks and a perpetual coffee-ground stubble covering them. His ears are abnormally small and stick away from his head. He is not repellent to look at, but nearly so. For Sylvia, the attributes that make him attractive—his power and his money—sufficiently offset his passing resemblance to a rodent. Besides, he is a natty dresser, always wearing crisp Italian suits perfectly tailored to his stout form, so he looks sharp, if not handsome.

When she reaches the corner, Sylvia lifts her hand to wave. Louis shoves his hands in the pocket of his slacks in a gesture meant to show his irritation.

Behind Louis, a tall, burly man, wearing a black woolen overcoat and a wide-brimmed hat pulled low to hide his face, appears on the sidewalk. His stride is purposeful. With his left hand he draws a handgun from the pocket of his coat and swings it up in a smooth arc. Sylvia’s heart and lungs turn to ice water, and she opens her mouth to call a warning.

The muzzle of the gun flares. Then, in unison with the crack of the pistol’s report, a hole appears in Louis’s face, producing a spray of brain and blood and teeth to shower the sidewalk before he collapses. The giant of a man leans down and puts another bullet in the head of Sylvia Newman’s lover.

Sylvia pivots on her toes and hurries back the way she came.

——

Sylvia did not attend Louis Towne’s funeral, but I did. Being Towne’s lawyer, I felt a professional obligation to say farewell to my client; the decision certainly had nothing to do with respect or affection for the man.

The service was held at St. Michael’s Cathedral, an institution to which Towne had donated considerably over the years. A bishop presided over the ceremony, standing behind the altar and speaking exalted words above a polished mahogany coffin that contained the earthly remains of a base and violent man—a man I had come to see as evil in every possible way. The irony that the church should so laud such a monster seemed lost on the other mourners. Members of the congregation wept and held each other for comfort. Hard faces, streaked with tears, looked heavenward for answers. “Why?” a woman sobbed in the pew ahead of mine.

I, too, asked why. Why had it taken so long for God to rid the world of this filth? At least they’d kept the coffin closed for the mass, so I didn’t have to lay my eyes on him again.

Louis Towne had come to me fifteen years ago to hire my services. Despite ample clues—unheeded because of my naiveté and a certain level of professional denial—it took me a year to discover the nature of my client’s business, and I’d almost dropped him on the spot once I did. But the truth was Towne paid well. He paid on time. And Towne scared me. Part of the fear was rational; he was a gun-toting thug, whose curriculum vitae included maiming and murder and a hundred lesser crimes. In this, he was not unique. More than likely, dozens of men who had acquired the same level of brutal experience occupied the cathedral’s pews, but Towne’s intimidation did not end with the obvious. There was another level to his threat, one which I could only call mystical. Even before he entered a room I would feel the air thicken, grow dense with his detestable presence. Sometimes, in the middle of a conversation, Towne’s eyes would harden and he’d begin speaking phrases in Latin. Occasionally a familiar word would emerge from the babble, and though I could never put together exactly what he was saying, hearing him quote this dead language soon had the power to shrivel my skin into goose flesh.

Ahead of me and to the left, a man with broad shoulders bowed his head, revealing a scarred nape. I wondered if he had carried his gun into the cathedral, and then I wondered how many murderers shared the room with me, and the mockery of God and His house settled in my gut like writhing worms.

I didn’t buy into the macho glamour of the mobs. I saw nothing honorable in the rackets, and the lifestyle they promoted—easy wealth carried over the bodies of the ignorant and unfortunate. They talked about respect and brotherhood and family, but it was all grease for the cogs, making sure the greed machine didn’t break down. Friends were as expendable as rivals if it cleared the path to a buck.

At the altar, the bishop began a prayer in Latin. I shuddered.

——

Sylvia carries a photograph of her father in her purse. He is tall and wiry, and his flat nose and lipless mouth call to mind the face of a python.

Sylvia is nine years old. She is on the floor watching television when she hears her father shouting. Her body tenses, and a web of ice-cold filaments locks to the back of her skull. Matt, her older brother, shouts, and a great crash follows. Her father bellows, his voice shaking the thin walls of the house like an approaching train.

This scene is familiar to Sylvia. Her father is at turns sweet and doting and cruel and violent. Alcohol flicks the switch. At least once a week her father beats her siblings, laying them flat like a scythe moving through wheat. He has never raised his hand to Sylvia, but that fact does nothing to alleviate her fear. Even so young she understands the indiscretion of blind rage.

Matt comes charging into the living room and barrels into the kitchen. He throws open the back door and vanishes into the night.

Sylvia’s father stumbles into the room, growling deep in his throat like an angry dog. He swings his head from side to side and then his eyes lock on Sylvia, causing the icy web at her skull to spread over her entire body. She crawls away from the man and climbs to her feet as her father stomps forward. Confused and frightened, she follows Matt’s path, but she stops in the kitchen. She doesn’t want to run from her father, shouldn’t have to run from him.

“You brats ruined my life,” he says. Spit foams at the corner of his mouth. His eyes are hard as glass and burn hate as if lit from within. “I could have gone places.”

Backed to the stove, Sylvia pulls a saucepan of boiling water off the burner. She ignores the too-hot handle, and splashes her father’s crotch with the contents, and when he bends over, howling in pain, she cracks the saucepan across his skull. He drops to his knees, and she hits him again.

——

Sylvia checks her hair in the reflection of the glass door before pulling it open. She enters Club Barlow like a movie star walking the red carpet, wearing the awkward smile of grief she has spent hours practicing in front of a mirror—makes a show of waving at familiar faces, some of which aren’t even looking her way. She walks through the room, her steps landing in perfect time to the bossa nova track pouring from the club’s speakers. She takes a small booth on the far side of the dance floor with a gilt mirror at her back, and when the waitress comes for her order, she says, “Martini. Dry.”

The dance floor is empty. Nobody dances anymore. Sylvia thinks that’s a shame.

As she sips her drink a series of men come to her table. They do not sit beside her. Instead, they lean in close and tell Sylvia they are sorry for her loss, and if she ever needs anything—anything at all—she should call them. She promises to do so, though she never will. Their definition of “needing anything” goes no further than her crotch. Louis’s murder has left her a pretty shell, vacant on the sand, and every fucking hermit crab on the beach is trying to wriggle its way in. Sylvia expects this. In fact, she knows it will work to her advantage, but not with these men. None of them has what Sylvia needs. They run their numbers and sell their smack and boost electronics from the backs of trucks. Graceless. Useless. Before her first drink is gone, she has already tucked five business cards into her handbag.

Across the room she sees Mickey Rossini, the man she was hoping to find. He is a large man, with thick salt-and-pepper hair brushed back from his brow in a lush wave. His suit is ash gray and cheap. With his arm around a bleach job half his age, he looks as happy as a bear with a mouth full of honey. His overly broad grin and hooded eyes show he’s devoted much of his night to drinking. He has a reputation among the ladies—gentle, sweet, affectionate. Sylvia thinks that’s a shame, though she can live with it until she gets what she needs. She stands from the booth and smoothes the sides of her dress before lifting her handbag and crossing to Rossini’s table.

The blond is the first to notice Sylvia. She looks up with a bright, wide-eyed smile, which quickly vanishes. The girl recognizes the threat and immediately scowls, knowing she will have to defend her territory from another predator. Sylvia is unfazed.

When Rossini’s eyes fall on Sylvia, a noticeable amount of the intoxication clears from them. He’s wanted Sylvia for years, but she has shot him down at every turn. Rossini is a thief; he jacked locks and cracked safes for Louis, making a fraction of a fraction of the money the things he stole were worth. She’d never needed him before.

“Hello, Mickey,” she says.

Rossini straightens himself in the booth, removing his palm from the bottle job’s thigh. He leans back in the booth and says, “Sylvia, it’s good to see you.”

“Is this your wife?” the blond asks. She is sulking because Rossini’s expression tells her that she has already been subtracted from this equation.

“No,” he says.

“Then who the fuck is she?” the blond wants to know.

“She’s a friend. Don’t worry about it.”

“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” Sylvia says, playing demure. She locks eyes with Rossini and dips her chin bashfully, knowing the effect it will have on the man. “I’ll let you back to your evening.”

“Wait. Wait.” He nudges the blond and says, “Why don’t you go powder your nose. I need to have a word with Sylvia here.”

“Mickey,” the girl whines.

“It’s business,” he tells her. “Be a sweetheart and give us a couple of minutes, okay?”

He gives her a sloppy peck on the lips and produces a fifty-dollar bill and hands it to the young woman, who quickly drops the note into her purse. She scoots her butt across the booth, and as she stands, she fixes a glare on Sylvia, who pretends to ignore the girl’s attitude, but decides in that second to put a serious fuck you in the little cunt’s night.

These amateur bitches, Sylvia thinks. They didn’t understand the game, and that’s why it ate them alive, leaving them shaking their tits in low-rent knocker shops by the docks to feed the bastard brats of sailors and warehouse men, waiting for some disease to slowly snuff their candles. Over the years, Sylvia had seen a hundred similar pieces of trash blown into the gutter, and she didn’t pity a single one of them.

“I really didn’t mean to interrupt,” Sylvia says, sliding into the booth next to Rossini. “It’s just that since … well, you know … I’ve been a little lost.”

“I know,” Rossini says, placing his hand on Sylvia’s knee in a salacious move he masks as mere comfort. “It’s gotta be tough. How are you holding up?”

“Fine,” she says. Already she has managed to work tears into her eyes. She sniffs lightly and retrieves a napkin from the table to dab her cheeks.

“Oh now, Sylvia,” says Rossini, scooting closer to her. He puts his arm around her shoulders and slides his hand higher on her thigh, re-creating the pose he’d assumed with the bottle job before Sylvia’s arrival. In a handful of moments, Sylvia has replaced the blond in the booth, in Rossini’s thoughts, and in the thief’s plans for the night.

Rossini is typical, a man led by his ego and his cock who believes himself the cure-all for a woman’s pain. His need to rescue her is an evolutionary blindfold, and though she finds his predictability unsatisfying, it serves her purpose.

——

Sylvia is twenty years old. For two years she has enjoyed an affair with Joe Tocci, a handsome and sophisticated man who will soon be named boss of his own crew. He is her lover and her employer, sending her on trips across the city, muling drugs and cash. Sylvia takes pride in her work, feeling she is paying her dues and earning respect within the rackets, unlike the other women who satisfy themselves in the roles of whore, wife, or victim.

One night she returns to the apartment Tocci has rented for her to find Joe and six of his friends three sheets to the completely fucked up, and before she can set down her handbag, a scrawny prick with buckteeth and the bumpy skin of a gourd by the name of Toady turns to Joe and says, “Mind if I take a ride?”

To her amusement, Joe replies, “I’d kinda like to see that.”

Sylvia believes her lover is joking, except that he isn’t.

Before she knows what is happening, the men approach her. They grab her arms painfully and hoist her from the floor. Then she is pinned to the dining-room table, men holding her arms and her legs while Toady rips away her clothes. Sylvia screams and Joe Tocci slaps her and tells her to keep her “whore mouth shut.” Toady climbs on her first and as he begins the rape, Sylvia spits in his face. Toady balls up his fist and punches her in the mouth. The violence so thrills him he hits her again and again. Dazed by concussion, Sylvia squeezes her eyes closed. She imagines herself in an ocean, except it is a sea of stones. She is batted this way and that by granite waves that stink of men. Opening her eyes, Sylvia sees a series of faces hovering above her, blurred and monstrous in their lust. One man kneels on the dining-room table and lifts her head by a fistful of hair before forcing his cock in her mouth, and the scents of urine and sweat fill her nose and she thinks she might drown in them. Hot spray lands on her face and thighs and belly, and they turn her over so that her burning cheek is momentarily soothed by the coolness of the polished wood, and then she is afloat again, tossed about like flotsam on fever-hot swells of stone. And later, so much later, as a dozen muffled aches throb across her body, she hears Tocci laughing. He says, “I guess I better get a new one. This one’s broken.”

Sylvia rarely thinks of this night. She tells herself the memories were scraped away with the brat one of those cocksuckers had put inside of her.

——

Morning light streams through thin curtains, bathing Sylvia’s face. She wipes her eyes and hears footsteps. Rossini enters the bedroom holding two mugs of coffee. He is naked and though he’s bulky, his added pounds are solid and intimidating, and she likes the way his body looks.

He hands her one of the mugs and sits on the edge of the bed beside her.

“So tell me what you’re doing here,” he says, taking her off guard.

She holds the mug in both hands, like a little girl sipping cocoa, and offers Rossini an innocent gaze, which makes him laugh like a mule. His reaction annoys her but she refuses to let the lie fall.

“Look, Syl,” Rossini says once his amusement is under control, “you think I’m a dumb wop fucker, but I’m not that dumb. I saw the way you twisted Louis around your finger. You drove him out of his fucking mind. I never saw anything like it. So while I can play along with some horseshit to get a roll, and maybe even believe you were lonely and needed a bit of hard to make it through the night, the fact you’re still here tells me you want more than my cock.”

“Maybe I like you,” Sylvia says over the lip of her coffee mug.

“And maybe I’ll sprout tits and be the happiest girl in the whole USA,” he says, still exhibiting great amusement at the game. “What do you think? You think I’m going to sprout tits?”

“Fine,” she says. She places her mug on the nightstand and leans back on the headboard. “I want you to help me with a job.”

“That’s more like it,” Rossini says. He drinks from his mug and looks out the window.

“Are you angry?”

“Relieved,” he says. “I like to know where I stand. What’s the job?”

She hesitates because Louis and Mickey had been close. She doesn’t know if the thief retains loyalty to his dead boss, but she cannot drop the subject now. If Rossini declines, she will find a way to convince him as she has convinced other men in the past.

“I want to hit Louis’s house,” she says.

——

The night after the funeral Mary Towne, Louis’s widow, called me to say she was in Miami with her two sons. I was sitting on the sofa with my arm around my wife, and we were watching an animated film about dogs, and when the phone rang I thought it might have been our daughter, who called frequently from her college dorm. To hear Mary Towne’s shrill voice instead of my daughter’s irritated the hell out of me.

“It’s those papers you gave me,” Mary said.

“About the estate?” I asked.

“Well, what other papers did you give me to sign?” Her voice was like a scalpel scraping bone.

Mary had insisted on reading Louis’s will the day after his murder. The fat widow had spent two hours in my office going over the details of Towne’s financial holdings, picking and pecking at the numbers like a starving bird, instead of staying home to comfort her children. At the funeral she’d put on a fine show of grief. Empty. Meaningless. I’d been appalled and wondered how a human being’s moral compass could waver so far from true north.

Not that Towne was a man who deserved authentic mourning from his wife. I’d told him a hundred times I had no interest in his sexual conquests, but Towne was a braggart and insisted I endure his tales of whoring and perversion. I’d always felt sorry for his cheated wife. And then I met her.

“What about the papers, Mary?”

“I signed them the way you said, but we were running late for our flight.”

“So you didn’t have them messengered to my office?”

“I told you, we were late for our flight. I didn’t have time. Just go by the house in the morning and pick them up.”

“Mary, that’s highly irregular.”

“Well, you’d better do something. I don’t want those papers sitting around for two weeks holding everything up. There’s a key in the planter on the back porch and the security code is Louis’s birthday—day and month. You can bill me for your precious time.”

Then she hung up, cutting off the protests climbing up my tongue.

——

Sylvia sits in the passenger seat of a stolen sedan. Rossini finishes a cigarette and grinds it out in the ashtray and turns in the seat to face her.

“He’s got no real security,” the thief says. “Obviously he’s not going to have cameras recording who comes and goes. He’s got a simple contact system that will take all of a minute to kill.”

“He wasn’t very cautious,” Sylvia says.

“He was scary enough that he didn’t have to be. No one was going to fuck Louis over—no one that wanted to stay alive, anyway. The guy was more than connected.”

“What does that mean?”

“You telling me you don’t know about Louis’s hobby?

“You mean his oogedy-boogedy mumbo jumbo?”

“It was a hell of a lot more than that,” Rossini says. “He put the fear of God, or the devil, or whatever he worshiped, into the whole crew. Guys that crossed Louis ended up dog food. You heard about Joe Tocci, right? Last year he disrespected Louis at a meeting and his men found Tocci shredded like barbecue pork in the john of his apartment. They said he wasn’t in there for more than a few minutes, and there was no other way into that crapper but the one door. Louis got to him anyway.”

“Tocci got what he deserved,” Sylvia mutters.

“We all get what we deserve,” Rossini says. “But the thing is, Louis Towne was not a made man. He was never going to be a made man because he didn’t have the blood, but Tocci was a made man. You hit a made man and you’re landfill, but no one retaliated on Tocci’s behalf. No one. Not his crew. Not the organization. They knew Louis did it, but they knew what Louis was capable of, so they let him alone.”

“Until someone put two in his head.”

“Over a year later,” Rossini says. “I’m just saying he didn’t have security because he knew he was scarier than anything that could get in his house.”

——

Sylvia follows the thief into the dining room and through an opulent living room. She feels anger, seeing the statuary and the silk-upholstered sofa and the crystal vases on marble tables. This should have been hers. She should have been sitting on that sofa with a glass of champagne, not prowling the house looking for scraps. She follows Rossini up the stairs and runs a hand along the ornately carved mahogany banister.

“His safe is in his study,” Rossini says.

After his words fade, Sylvia feels uneasy. The air grows thick and envelops her, and she believes she can feel it jostle, hitting her like ripples on the surface of a lake. Even the subtle movements of Rossini on the stairs ahead play over her skin, but there is another body at work, displacing the air. She remembers a similar sensation she had felt whenever Louis entered a room, a heaviness as if his presence curdled the atmosphere.

Uncertain, with her skin alit by anxiety, Sylvia follows the thief to the landing and down a black hallway. The sharp ray of a flashlight momentarily blinds her. Rossini offers a rapid apology and puts the cylinder in his mouth. At the center of the beam is a deadbolt lock. Rossini attacks it with his picks, and in a few moments he has the bolt retracted. Then he sets to work on the cheaper, less complicated lock recessed in the knob.

After opening the door, Rossini leaves Sylvia on the threshold and starts across the room, his silhouette playing against the bobbing disc of light from his lantern. She watches him open a closet door and is surprised to see a shining metal panel beyond, a panel with a combination dial and a three-pronged handle. Louis’s safe takes up an entire closet. Sylvia’s trepidation turns to excitement as she anticipates the sheer volume of wealth such a vault could hold.

“This is going to take some time,” he tells her. “I helped him pick this model, so I know what I’m up against. You might want to keep an eye on the window.”

Sylvia does. She pulls back the drapes and leans against the wall. The landscape beyond the window is carved of shadows. The only light comes from the far end of the drive, beyond the gate, where an arc lamp hangs over the street. Everything between this illumination and Sylvia is gloom. She looks into it and finds nothing. She looks back at Rossini and considers her choice of accomplice.

She decides he can’t be trusted. The thief is too eager. He hadn’t needed a bit of convincing to agree to this job, and as with all things that come too easy, Sylvia looks for an angle.

She slides her hand down the side of her jacket and is reassured when her fingers trace over the outline of the handgun in her pocket.

——

The shrill cry of Rossini’s drill startles her. Sylvia steps away from the window and crosses the den. Nervous, she lights a cigarette and stands by the door. She leans into the hall and is grateful to see the darkened corridor is empty.

Still, she cannot shake the feeling that she and the thief are not alone in the house. The air continues to move like an invisible beast, sidling past her. Drawing deeply on the cigarette, she holds the smoke in her lungs and then blows a cloud into the hall. Amid the whorls of smoke, she pictures Louis’s face and whispers, “Fuck you,” to the dissipating haze. He had lavished a fortune on his wife, had given her every damn thing she had ever whined about, including this house, and what had Sylvia seen for her time and effort?

Finishing the cigarette, she drops it on the carpet. She grinds the butt into the carved Berber and hopes an ember will smolder deep in the pile, causing a fire that levels the Towne mansion about five minutes after she and the thief have driven away with the contents of Louis’s safe.

She leaves the doorway and walks to where Mickey is kneeling. He wears goggles as he guides the barrel of a complicated drill rig. Sparks fly from the safe’s door, showering the carpet. The air around her shifts again, and Sylvia spins on her heels to check the room. Nothing. She hugs herself nervously and returns to the window.

Staring over the dark landscape, she rubs the back of her neck, trying to dislodge the feeling that something rests against it. She tries to convince herself that she’s being paranoid. If anyone else were in the house, they’d have shown themselves by now, or the drive would be thick with police cars, but logic does nothing to alleviate her fear. By the time the drill’s shriek dies, Sylvia is near panic with the certainty that someone prowls the house.

“That’s it,” Mickey says, throwing open the safe. He sets his drill rig on Louis’s desk and returns to the open closet door.

Sylvia races across the room to see the extent of the fortune Louis has locked away from the world and to begin its collection. She presses up against Rossini’s back and peers around him, only to find herself confused by the vault’s contents. She had expected to find stacks of hundred-dollar bills, stock certificates, a jewelry store’s inventory of gems, and though there is some cash—three small stacks on the third shelf of the safe—the bulk of the space is empty. The money sits on one shelf and another is devoted to a bizarre assortment of baubles.

The collection is comprised of six metallic statues. Each is no larger than Sylvia’s pinkie finger, and they are ugly like randomly shaped wads of iron with points and blobs.

“I don’t understand,” Sylvia whispers.

“Amazing,” Rossini replies.

“What is this shit?” Sylvia asks. She reaches around Rossini to retrieve one of the unattractive statues.

His hand shoots out and grabs her wrist painfully. “Don’t touch those,” he says. “You get the cash and the jewelry. That was the deal.”

“The cash? There’s only about ten grand there, and there isn’t any jewelry.”

Rossini squeezes her wrist until she feels the bones grinding. “That was the deal,” he repeats. “The icons are mine.”

A hot mask of rage falls over Sylvia’s face. The thief has played her, though she has yet to understand the extent or the intent of his game.

“Get away from there,” a rasping voice calls from the doorway.

Sylvia turns to the sound, her heart in her throat. A squat shadow stands at the threshold. The face is very pale, visible but ill defined. Mickey turns and knocks Sylvia aside. His flashlight falls squarely on the intruder, and he says, “Son of a bitch.” Sylvia only gets a glimpse of the man in the doorway, and, to her shock, he resembles Louis Towne. She recognizes chipmunk cheeks and small ears, but the view is momentary, and she is stumbling, so she doesn’t trust what she has seen.

Rossini lowers the flashlight so that the beam falls on the intruder’s feet. He then pulls a gun from his coat pocket and levels his left arm to aim the weapon.

Sylvia remembers the boulevard and the man who killed Louis, remembers his size and his posture and the way he held the gun, and she realizes it was Rossini. All along, she has underestimated the thief. His eagerness for the job, his satisfaction with the contents of the safe—this had been his plan all along. He’d only allowed Sylvia to believe it was hers.

Two muzzle flares light up the room. The reports are deafening. A body falls in the hallway and Rossini hisses, “Shit. Enough of this blackout crap.” He stomps to the door and turns on the light.

Awash in confusion, Sylvia looks around absently as if waking in a strange place with no understanding of how she’s gotten there. Rossini is in the doorway, kneeling beside a body on the floor. Sylvia approaches him and when she sees the face of the intruder, she gasps. It is Louis Towne.

His face is longer and misshapen. Tufts of hair stick out around his ears, but he is otherwise bald. Two ragged wounds show above his ear. He still wears the coffee-grounds stubble, but much of it has been torn away on the right side of his face, revealing a patch of darker skin beneath. His nose is longer, and his mouth is circled with odd ridges. His eyes are the worst. They stare at Sylvia, but they are the wrong color. Louis’s eyes were blue and these eyes are chocolate brown, and, even more unsettling, each eye is framed by two sets of eyelashes.

“What happened to him?” she asks.

“Mumbo jumbo,” Rossini says in a dry, earnest tone.

“His face …”

“Yeah,” the thief says.

Louis’s legs begin to kick and thrash on the carpet. Sylvia screams and leaps back, covering her mouth with a palm.

“Settle down,” Rossini says, rising to his feet. “It’s just a death dance. Muscle contractions.”

“How can you be so calm?” Sylvia wants to know.

“I got word that Louis’s body went missing from the funeral home. Considering the weird shit he was into, I kept my mind open. Now I think we need to get what we came for and get the hell out of here.”

“Is he really dead this time?”

“Don’t know and don’t care. I’ve got a full clip. That’ll keep him down long enough.”

“Are those little statues doing this?” Sylvia asks.

“Probably.” Rossini casts another glance at the corpse thrashing on the carpet in the hall. “Asshole there got drunk one night and started bragging about these things. He called them the Pellis Icons, and he’d spent about twenty years hunting them down. He said they helped him master the flesh, whatever the hell that means. I know he used them to tear apart Tocci, because I was sitting with him in this room when he did it. They do something, and I figure I’ve got plenty of time to figure out exactly what that is.”

“How much are they worth?”

Rossini laughs and shakes his head. “By your definition, not a damn thing. There isn’t a fence on the continent who would know what to do with them.”

He turns away from Sylvia to take another look at the thrashing man. Sylvia pulls her gun and shoots the thief in the shoulder, sending him sprawling against the wall. He drops his gun and slides to his knees and looks at Sylvia, an expression of pained surprise on his face.

“What the fuck, Syl?” he says. He grasps the wound on his shoulder. Blood spills between his fingers in thick rivulets.

She doesn’t reply. Instead she keeps the gun aimed on Rossini’s face as she crosses to him and retrieves his weapon from the floor. She slips it into her pocket and walks to the safe. On the floor is Rossini’s canvas bag. Sylvia retrieves it and waves the sack in the air until it’s opened. Without looking at the thief, she pulls the meager amount of cash into the bag and then scoops the Pellis Icons on top of the bills. The disappointing void of the safe still feels wrong to her, and she convinces herself that Louis must have kept more. She reaches in and presses against the back wall, expecting a panel to pop free. She does this on every shelf, but the back of the safe is solid and hides no additional treasures. She gives the empty shelves a final look and then turns to leave.

In the hall, the dead man’s convulsions have stopped, and she is grateful for this, but Rossini has crawled away. He no longer sits by the door. Sylvia approaches the hall cautiously, gun raised, fingers tensed and ready to fire. The weapon trembles in her hand. When she reaches the threshold, she is shocked to see the condition of the body in the hall.

It isn’t Louis at all. Sylvia recognizes the corpse’s face, and it belongs to a low-level bookie who went by the name of Tap. His cheeks are red as if deeply sunburned. The collar of his dress shirt is laid wide, and his tie has been torn away and lies across the expensive carpet like a crimson tongue. Blood continues to seep from the two well-placed holes Rossini shot in the man’s chest. Sylvia absorbs this oddity and wonders how she could have mistaken this insignificant creep for Louis Towne.

A crash in the hallway sends her back into the den. Glass shatters, and a great weight hits the floor. Sylvia puts the canvas sack and her purse down and holds the gun in both hands, trying unsuccessfully to steady the weapon, which suddenly feels as heavy as a block of lead. A quieter thump comes from the hallway, and Sylvia swallows a moan.

Movement in the doorway causes Sylvia to fire two shots in rapid succession, but the flashing motion is too brief, like a flag whipping in a sudden breeze. Her bullets punch through the wall.

Then a man steps into view. Sylvia cannot fire her weapon; the abomination in the doorway makes no sense and the sight of it puts a clamp on her mind, rendering her incapable of comprehension or action.

The body is Rossini’s. He is unstable, rocking from foot to foot. One broad hand clutches the door frame for support; the other slaps at a sheathed knife hooked to his belt. He wears Louis Towne’s face like a mask. The cheeks are shiny, stretched tightly over the thief’s features, with tiny ears jutting from the side of the massive head. The rest of Louis’s skin, a sheet of bloodless flesh the color of bacon fat, hangs from Rossini’s chin like an untied butcher’s apron and swings as the thief rocks from side to side. Bony thorns ring the dangling sheet of skin like teeth. The flesh billows and slaps against the thief’s body, attempting to gain greater purchase, but it seems unable to secure itself to the fabric. Sylvia takes in every detail of the unnatural union before her and then repeats the process in a futile attempt to understand it.

Louis’s lips move and a hoarse mumble escapes Rossini’s throat. The attempt is made again. “Put them back,” come the words, though Sylvia can’t be certain who has made the request.

The thief finally frees the knife from its sheath at his belt, and Sylvia waits breathlessly for him to carve through Louis’s flapping skin. Instead, the thief cocks back his arm and hurls the blade at Sylvia.

It strikes her high on the right breast, sending her stumbling back. The air is knocked from her body, and she nearly drops her gun, but the attack brings clarity, supersedes the paralyzing awe. Desperate to keep her footing, Sylvia regains her balance and assumes a firing stance with the gun clamped in her hands, and she squeezes the trigger. A hole punches in the flapping belly of Louis’s skin and passes through to rip its way into Rossini’s gut. She squeezes again and again, every shot hitting home. The thief stumbles back to the corridor wall and slides to the carpet. Sylvia continues firing, and her final bullet pierces Louis Towne’s forehead and that of the man who wears him.

She drops to her knees and sobs. Grasping the hilt of the knife, she pulls it from her chest, and it feels like she’s ripping a bone from her body. She nearly faints from the sight of so much blood following the blade from the wound, and though she manages to remain conscious, her head spins with sickening speed. She collapses to the side and grinds her teeth against the pain, and she closes her eyes and inhales shallowly because she needs oxygen but the jabbing pain cuts off her respiration in midbreath. Sweat slathers her brow, chilling it. Her body shivers from the cold. She thinks if she can just rest for a few minutes, she will conquer the pain and make her escape. People had survived worse. A moment to recover from the shock and then downstairs and out the door and into Rossini’s car. At the emergency room she will make up a story about muggers, and the doctor will tell her she’s lucky to be alive, and she’ll thank him before painkillers carry her into comfortable sleep.

But she is not at the hospital yet, and she doesn’t feel safe. Sylvia fights to open her eyes.

Louis Towne’s skin slides over the carpet toward her. His head is raised like the hood of a cobra and Sylvia sees Mickey Rossini’s bloodstained corpse through the bullet holes and the empty eye sockets of the face.

Sylvia cries out and a burst of adrenaline provides sufficient fuel for her to rise to her knees. The knife is within her reach and she snatches it up, as the mask of Louis’s face bears down on her. Sylvia strikes out. The blade slices into Louis’s cheek, and she guides the weapon down with all of her force, nailing the flesh to the floor, and refusing to allow Louis to escape again, Sylvia crawls forward and kneels on the spongy sheet. She yanks the blade free, sending bolts of agony across her chest, and begins to slash at the rippling tissues. Chunks of skin come free and wriggle about on the floor like worms dropped on an electrified plate, and Sylvia slices and stabs and tears until Louis Towne’s remains amount to nothing more than a confetti of jittering meat.

Sylvia drops the knife and looks around the room, alert for any new threat that might target her, and her gaze lands on the canvas sack, and she considers what Rossini has told her about the mastery of flesh, and then she looks to the trembling tissue about her for confirmation. She crawls to the bag and empties its contents. In desperation she gathers up the ugly iron icons and holds them tightly in her hands, clutches them to her breast. She lies down on the carpet and lets her eyes close, and falls unconscious. She dies twenty minutes later.

——

I met Sylvia Newman some hours after her death. Louis had told me about the woman—went on in some detail about their affair—but to the best of my knowledge, I’d never set eyes on her before.

Needled by annoyance, I went to his house that morning to pick up the documents his wife had failed to messenger me before leaving for Miami, and upon finding the alarm system deactivated, decided to search the house for signs of burglary. Upstairs, I was met by the sight of Mickey Rossini sitting upright with seven holes in his body. Manny “Tap” Tappert lay on his back with two holes in his chest and a startled expression on his face. But the worst sight awaited me in Louis’s den. In the center of the room was a shifting mass that resembled a loose congregation of mealworms writhing excitedly, and next to this grotesque display was a skinless corpse.

Even partially clad in a black jacket and slacks, it seemed too small, too delicate to have been the remains of an adult. Eyes whiter than paper lay nestled in a field of deep red. Here and there, ridges of white bone showed through the crimson tissue of muscle and ligament. My stomach clenched, wondering who could perform such an atrocity on another human being and wondering what a victim might do to deserve such a desecration.

While I was absorbed by the grotesquerie, what I thought was a hood dropped over my head, startling me back, but my reflexes were no match for Sylvia. She must have been waiting on the ceiling, descending upon me as I stood rapt by the repulsive scene. Her face stretched over mine, and the thorny teeth ringing her skin bit into the back of my head like fingernails working their way into an orange rind. As the skin pulled across my brow and chin and those thorns tore their way in, her memories began flooding me, drowning my own thoughts with scenes from this woman’s life:

Sylvia Newman strolls along the boulevard.

Sylvia believes her lover is joking, except that he isn’t.

Sylvia is dead but alive in her skin, which she feels ripping like fabric, peeling in a single sheet from her muscles and bones.

A thousand such scenes play simultaneously in my mind. Amid this torrent of information I was lost: I was Sylvia.

Overwhelmed, I ceased what little struggles I’d engaged in and resigned myself to this mental infestation, viewing the torments and triumphs and carnal excesses that had molded Sylvia Newman. The skin of her neck stretched tightly around my throat, restricting my breath, and the tiny bones punctured the nape of my neck and scraped across my spine, and more information flooded in, so dense it cascaded through my head like photographs printed on raindrops.

When this downpour ceased, I remained standing in Louis Towne’s study. My clothes had been removed and Sylvia busied herself, stretching and wrapping and securing her flesh over mine. Her skin buckled my knees, and we stumbled forward and I grasped the drape for support, but fell nonetheless. The curtain rod snapped under my weight, bringing the window treatment down in a wave. We scurried back on my hands and knees, and then, with great effort, we regained our footing and stood, only to be startled by the sight greeting us.

With night as a backdrop, the window had become a perfect mirror. Sylvia’s face, still thick with makeup, had fused to mine; her full red lips formed a grotesque O around my own mouth. Her breasts sagged emptily against the skin of her stomach, which shined from such tension it looked as though it might rip at any moment, and the tip of my penis showed through the labial lips between her legs. It was this last that so enthralled me. Sylvia must have sensed my fascination because the skin there began to ripple and pull, caressing the head of my cock until it began to grow, and soon a library of erotic images—Towne fucking her and Rossini fucking her and Tocci and a dozen others—crowded my awestruck mind.

The rippling and pulling intensified. The reflection of this unnatural intercourse filled my eyes as I watched her skin creep along my shaft and then drag backward revealing the entirety of my erection. Soon I became aware of another sensation—I felt what Sylvia felt, an intense tingling in the lips of skin that eagerly stroked my cock. She willed my hands to her nipples, forced them to squeeze and pinch, dragging the empty sacks of her breasts away from our body. Sparks of pleasure shot like dry lightning through a desert, alighting the tissues and skipping off to some equally sensitive destination. The act repulsed me, and it excited me. Climax burst on us so quickly I cried out, or she did.

After, we stood breathless, staring at ourselves in the window. She spoke to me, moving my lips and forcing air from my lungs through the vocal cords and over my tongue.

“We’re very good together,” she said. “We can accomplish so much.”

I asked her what it was she hoped to accomplish, and she showed me the face of a bucktoothed man named Toady. His expression was tense and hateful. He drew back his fist and punched us in the cheek, and Sylvia’s loathing of the cretin became mine.

“There are others,” she said. “So many others. All we need are the icons.”

“And each other,” I said.

“Of course.”

——

We stand at the window, observing the crude bumps and tightly stretched planes of skin, and we whisper back and forth—plans and dreams and longings so deep we have never spoken them aloud to another soul. The words spill quietly from my lips and I observe their formation in the pane, and in one heart-stopping moment we fall silent.

I find us so beautiful I can’t speak another word.

——

LEE THOMAS is the Lambda Literary Award– and Bram Stoker Award–winning author of the novels Stained, Damage, and The Dust of Wonderland, and the short-story collection In the Closet, under the Bed. In addition to numerous magazines, his short fiction has appeared in the anthologies Darkness on the Edge, Dead Set, Horror Library Volume 4, and Inferno, among others. Current and forthcoming titles include the novellas The Black Sun Set, Crisis, and Focus (cowritten with Nate Southard). His latest novel, The German, was released by Lethe Press in April 2011.

| BUT FOR SCARS |

Tom Piccirilli

—

I woke up at four a.m. to a whistling, icy draft and found a teenage girl downstairs feeding my goldfish, Cecil. She’d been at it for a while. The box of fish food was empty, Cecil was dead, and she was scratching at her temple with an S&W popgun .22.

October rain slid against the living-room windows and brown, wet leaves clung thickly to the bottom of the open front door. There was a rusted key in the lock and an overturned rock at the foot of the porch steps. I hadn’t known about the hiding spot. I shut the door.

Emily Wright didn’t glance up.

I knew who she was even though I hadn’t seen her in six years. The chubby little girl had turned a delicate sixteen, with the pale and inviting face of a freshly sculpted young woman. Her once-vibrant blue eyes had grown smoky and muted. Seams around her mouth added a kind of evocative maturity that was already provocative. Men would consider her sexy as hell until she hit maybe twenty-five, and then she’d be downgraded to bruised fruit. By the time she was thirty the neighbors would be saying she hadn’t aged well.

She looked a lot like her mother, without the cruel lips and shamelessness.

I shivered at the bottom of the staircase, barefoot and shirtless, wearing only baggy sweatpants. Wisps of my breath curled through the air. I checked the thermostat. Emily had turned off the heat. I snapped it back on.

She wore wet Sojourner State pajamas and the tatters of ward slippers. Her feet were mucked with grime. The hospital was eight miles out of town, and she looked like she’d walked the whole way here in the rain. She kept tapping the empty box of fish food against the side of the aquarium with her left hand. In her right she now held the .22 loosely in her lap.

Her lips moved but she made no sound. She nodded, shook her head, and even shrugged as if deep in conversation.

I’d seen a few unstable teens in my time. I’d been one myself. I’d hit a bad patch during puberty after my parents died, and skidded into the wall. I’d stolen cars and driven all over the state trying to escape myself. I’d climbed water towers out of my head and broke into houses just to page through photo albums and pretend I was a part of the family. They used to find me curled under the blankets, holding dolls, wasted on crank and muttering, “Mommy.”

I was shopped around from one foster family to the next until they finally packed me off to the juvie detention wing of Sojourner State Psychiatric Facility. I spent two years in hell fighting my way out of gang rapes and forced body modification with broken razor blades. You had to be on your toes to avoid hydrotherapy, where more than a few kids drowned. The orderlies used to stage ward matches between the paranoids, the firebugs, chronic masturbators, bipolars, claustrophobes, the disassociatives, the sociopaths, and depressives. The only reason I ever got my shit together was because I possessed an unholy amount of survival instinct that I never realized I had.

Cecil floated in a tight circle on his side. Emily had finally put down the empty box and was dangling her fingers in the water, making ripples that kept Cecil chugging along. The hand in her lap danced nervously, the .22 swaying left and right, angled at my chest. She didn’t seem to be aware that she was holding it.

“You’ve got scars,” she said.

“Yes,” I admitted.

“Where’d you get them?”

“Lots of places.”

“Like where?”

“In juvie detention, alley fights, poker games gone sour.”

“They’re cool.”

Mottled pink and white scars, some of them as thick as a finger, might be considered a lot of things, but I’d never found them to be cool. I felt self-conscious being half-naked in front of this kid. I was also freezing. I went to the closet and put on a sweatshirt. When I turned back to her the gun had quit prancing and the barrel was pointed in the direction of my belly.

I was worried, but not too much. I’d been shot with a .22 before. At this distance it stung like hell but not much more. Besides, Emily had no beef with me. I knew what was on her mind. If I’d been in her place, six years in the state bin with nothing but blood on my mind, I’d have done the same thing. Except I wouldn’t have stolen a .22. I’d have made sure to grab something with real firepower. I wondered where she’d gotten the pistol. I wondered if she’d hurt anyone yet.

“I’m Emily Wright,” she said.

I nodded. “Emily, you shouldn’t be here.”

“My parents were murdered in this house.”

“I know.”

“Why would you buy a house where people were murdered?”

I told the truth, at least a part of it. “Because it was cheap.”

No one else had wanted the place. Houses where two people had been butchered tend to be off-putting. They’d stabbed her father, Ronnie, eight times. Katy’s face had been beaten in so badly that she’d choked on her own broken teeth before being gutted. Ron had been a towering, powerful man, but his hamstrings had been cut, along with the tendons in his forearms and wrists, so that he’d been left crawling on his belly in his own filth until he and his wife had died down there in the dark in the root cellar together.

I hoped Emily didn’t know anything about that.

She glanced around the living room, made a sweeping gesture with the pistol. “It’s a hundred years old, with three floors and five bedrooms. There’s a pantry and a root cellar and a large yard. Three thousand square feet, not including the half-finished attic.”

She sounded like John Acton—Remember, Acton means action for your Home Buying Needs!—the realtor who’d sold me the place.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s a lot of house.”

She removed her hand from the aquarium, and Cecil slowly quit spinning. She wiped her fingers on my couch and I felt an odd flush of anger. “But you live here alone.”

“I was engaged when I bought the place.”

“But you never got married?” she asked.

“No.”

“Why?”

The muscles in the hinges of my jaw bunched. “She didn’t love me.”

“How do you know?”

“I found out.”

I knew that she’d been unfaithful to me. I knew that she’d been sleeping with a number of men in town. Including John Acton. While he was showing me the half-finished attic, scuffing the rat droppings aside while he shunted the flashlight beam across the wide, empty expanse, I thought about breaking his collarbone. But it wouldn’t have changed anything. She kept on stepping out, and Acton still worked the deal for me. Realtors, they never let anything get in the way of going to contract.

“Emily, you need to go back.”

“I’m home,” she said, and her voice lightened a bit. “Did you know my parents?”

“Yes. Everyone in town knew them.”

She nodded and smiled like she was remembering good times. I couldn’t imagine that she’d had many of them with Ron and Katy. “Did you work with them?”

“I was what was known as a ‘friend of the club.’ ”

“So you’re a criminal.”

Ronnie Wright had been the leader of the Brothers of Bedlam, the local motorcycle club. Mostly they’d controlled chop shops, run guns, and grown and distributed high-quality weed. That’s how it was at first. After the money started to pour in, so did trouble from the other clubs, crank dealers, syndicates, and greedy cops. More than a few of my scars had come from helping Ron out of jams.

Rain throbbed against the windows, sounding like small hands tapping at the glass, seeking attention. The breeze picked up and the timbers in the attic groaned and settled. The girl glanced at the ceiling like she thought her parents might be showering, getting ready to come down and sit with her.

She asked, “Tell me. Did you love or hate the brotherhood? Everybody in this town seems to have felt one way or the other.”

“I went back and forth.”

That got a giggle from her. It wasn’t a happy teenage-girl laugh but something that sounded like it was coming from an old woman getting ready for the inevitable lonely end. Emily’s chin came up, and she eyed me coolly. “Did you ever fuck my mother?”

I had. A lot. But most guys had. A lot.

I didn’t answer. I held my hand out. “Give me the gun.”

“I’m not going to shoot you.”

“Who are you going to shoot?”

“The person or people who murdered my parents.”

By implication that meant she figured I didn’t do it. I wasn’t sure how she’d come to that conclusion, but I was glad regardless.

“Where did you get the piece, Emily?”

She ignored the question. “It’s getting hot in here. It’s hard to breathe. I like it cold.”

“We have to get you back now.”

She met my eyes. The anguish I saw there was something I knew well. The house was still freezing but she was sweating. I knew feverish times like this, when your head is racing and you feel disconnected from the rest of the world. The windows clattered as branches gestured and drummed, and she shifted her gaze.

Sweat dripped from her upper lip. “She talks to me, you know. My mother. She lives under my bed at the hospital. She scratches at the springs. She crawls around in circles, saying my name.”

“Give me the gun, Emily.”

She checked the revolver and reared back like it was the first time she’d seen it in a very long time. “I can’t. I need it. I’ve got to use it. I think I’m going to kill someone.”

“Who?”

“I’m not sure.”

A scraping noise broke from the attic, followed by the skittering sounds of scampering feet, as if children were playing hide-and-seek.

“You’ve got rats in your walls,” she said.

“They’re squirrels,” I told her. “I got rid of the rats a long time ago.”

“If you say so.”

My cell phone was on my nightstand. “Emily, I’m going upstairs for a minute, okay? I just want to get my phone. We need to call the hospital.”

“I’ve been there for six years. I’ll be there the rest of my life if they have their way. They can’t help me. But my mother said you might be able to.”

Every time she mentioned her mother I flashed on Katy’s face: the dark burning-ember eyes, the arrogant grin. I was cold but a creeping warmth worked through my chest as I thought of her body. I heard her voice in my ear, telling me to be rougher, to leave marks. I would try to kiss her neck, and she’d huff in frustration and rake my chest and tear at my back. Two of my worst scars were from her gouges.

Emily was right about the doctors at Sojourner never being able to help her. Hospitals fed on the ill, making them sicker, draining their lives and will to leave. She’d grown up in the facility, had become a part of it, lived in its system like so much blood in its veins. If you couldn’t break out within a year or two, you never would.

The girl seemed lost in reflection, her eyes flitting from the root-cellar door to the staircase to the window. Her lips moved. I saw her mouth the word “Mommy.” It’s the word most of us would die with in our throats. I didn’t want to leave Emily alone down here in case she decided to run again, but I didn’t want to brace her and try to force her to give up the gun. I figured I could grab my phone, make the call, and return before she fully realized I’d been gone.

I moved to the staircase and took the steps three at a time. I turned into my bedroom and grabbed my cell and wondered who I should dial. Sending her back to Sojourner would be sending her back to hell. I started to tap out Dell’s number.

I turned and Emily was behind me, naked. I could see a trail of her clothes leading up the hall, the dirty slippers in the doorway. She was so cold that her skin was tinged with blue.

The curves were all in the right places, and she couldn’t help displaying herself for me. She stepped closer and her breasts jiggled. Her meaty thighs were soft but covered in muscle. Scars, bruises and scratches marbled her knees, belly, and back. Some marks appeared to be self-inflicted, others I couldn’t tell. I thought of the kind of self-hatred a ten-year-old girl must go through when her parents are torn from her and the natural, overwhelming grief that is somehow considered an insane thing.

She swept a hand through her hair and drew the damp bangs out of her eyes. The empowerment of her own sexuality was still a mostly unknown quality for her. She was trying to be seductive. She didn’t have to put so much effort into it.

“You can fuck me if you want,” she said. “It’s okay. I’m almost seventeen.”

“Don’t talk that way.”

“It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay.”

It got her grinning. It was her mother’s knowing smile. She put a hand on my belly and ran it up my chest. She tightened her fist in my chest hair and drew herself even closer. She ground against my groin and got the reaction she was after. She laughed. It was her father’s laugh. Heavy, low, and full of potential violence.

“Come on,” she said. “Take me to bed.”

I could have given her a sharp backhand and probably knocked her out, but her index finger was tight against the trigger and the gun still might fire. The time I’d been shot with a .22 had been from across a poker table. I’d been hit in the thigh, and it had barely bled. Gunrunners like the brotherhood laughed at pipsqueak weapons like this, but, up close, getting hit in the face or the chest would kill you just as dead as a magnum .44.

“You want me,” she said.

She was a kid, but she was a beautiful and alluring one, and she had the added draw of being her mother’s daughter. I heard a strange, moaning lament and realized it was coming from my throat. She laughed at me again. She kissed my throat and placed the gun under my ear. It made me groan louder. I had been helpless in the hands of her mother, and now it was happening all over again. Except this time instead of a crazed, adult carnal bitch I was being manipulated by a lonely, insecure girl. A part of me cared about the difference, and a part of me didn’t. I wasn’t a good man. I’d done a lot of things that I’d one day have to pay for, but I’d never done anything like this. I waited on the edge of the razor to see which half of myself would win.

She made the choice for me. She climbed into bed and laid across the sheets, trying to bewitch me, the laughter in her throat as ugly as her mother’s. I’d made love to Katy in this room, in her and Ronnie’s bed, wasted on coke and wine, with M-16s stacked in the closet. Katy had never brought a gun to bed with her, but she did like knives. She used to dig grooves and half-moon gashes along my ribs. Afterward the sheets would look like someone had been butchered.

Even as my erection grew my stomach tumbled. I laid beside her and pulled her to me. The pistol wavered between us. She kissed my chin and attempted some dirty talk, but I shushed her and held her, and kept holding her, until a wild sob welled inside her and finally broke free. She cried for twenty minutes straight while I rubbed her back. I took the gun away from her and put it in my nightstand drawer.

“Ghosts walk these rooms,” she said.

“That’s true of every house,” I said. “Not just this one.”

“But mine are here. They have been for years. They’re with us now. I can hear my mom.”

“Emily, you—”

“Can you hear her? She’s saying thank you. For helping me. She’s under your bed right now. She says you were always the nicest one of the guys she used to fuck.”

I gripped her by her shoulders and gave her one vicious shake. “Enough of that shit, all right?”

“I need to find who killed my parents,” she said.

It was generally believed that Dell Bishop, the number-two guy of the Brothers of Bedlam, had murdered Emily’s parents in order to take over the club. No one held it against him. Ron and Katy had been branching farther and farther out, making deals with the mob, the pushers, other clubs considered to be enemies of the brotherhood. The feds caught wind of the gunrunning. They were all over town for months, questioning the civilians, but they never found any hard evidence. The chop shops were raided and marijuana crops burned. There was no connection back to the brothers, but it stirred a lot of misery. The townsfolk, who’d once considered the club to be vigilantes protecting their borders, worried that even more problems were bound to come down on them.

A lot of people believed Dell had iced Katy and Ron to ensure the future of both the town and the MC, but I never did. Dell always proclaimed his innocence, even when we were alone and drunk. He’d been loyal, bound by deed and blood. He also said that he believed he was Emily’s biological dad, and I couldn’t see him killing Katy no matter how much trouble she brought the club. I thought he loved her, the way I had, the way we all had.

“Let that go, Emily,” I whispered. “You’ve wasted enough of your life to grief. Give it up. Do whatever the doctors at Sojourner tell you to do. Play the game. Pretend if you have to. But get out. I can help you with that. I did it myself. I can show you how.”

“I can’t go back there,” she said. “Not right now. Please.”

“Okay, okay,” I said, shushing her again. I hummed to her the way I thought I remembered my mother humming to me. I held her, but the way that a friend would. It had been a long time since I’d held anyone that way.

“Can I sleep here?” she asked. “I’m tired.”

“Yes, of course.”

I watched over her for a couple of hours. The sun started to come up. It bathed her face in a rosy golden light that washed away all the distress and anxiety. She curled up under my arm and I shut my eyes.

——

The dead have a way of waking up along with you. I listened to their hisses. The weight of nightmare was still on me. I couldn’t move yet. The whispering grew louder. It might’ve been Katy’s voice. She smiled at me with a mouth full of blood as she flicked open a switchblade. I was snoring. I made an effort to rear off the bed but I couldn’t. I tried to open my eyes but I wasn’t quite there yet. I heard scratching and the ringing chimes of the box spring. I was asleep and I knew it. I snorted and sipped air. Emily spoke to me.

I’m pregnant, she said.

My eyes snapped open.

I asked, “What? What did you say?”

I checked beside me. She wasn’t there. I touched the outline of her body in the blankets. There was no warmth.

“Emily?”

I got out of bed. Her clothes were still on the floor where she’d left them. The bathroom was empty. The pistol was in my nightstand drawer where I’d put it.

I sniffed and gagged. I raised the back of my hand to cover my nose. I knew the smell. It was coming from under my bed.

I crouched down and peered underneath and saw Emily wedged there with her eyes and mouth open. She’d cut her wrists with the pocketknife I kept in an ashtray on my dresser. It hadn’t been very sharp and she’d really had to saw into herself. I counted four vertical slashes on each wrist. She’d had to start over and over as the wounds crusted. Ron and Katy’s shitty shag carpet had soaked her blood up thirstily. She’d bled out beneath me while I’d slept and dreamed of her mother.

I disturbed the scene by reaching for Emily and touching her cheek. She was still warm. She’d been dead no more than an hour.

She’d said she was pregnant. But when had she told me? It felt like she’d woken me with those words. Her lips were drawn back, not so much into a grimace as a real, true smile. She looked much happier than she had while talking with me. She seemed more lively as well. Her eyes hadn’t turned dull and hard yet. Amusement played there.

It took me a minute to get my bearings and find my cell. I called 911. When I was asked for my name it took me three tries before I could say it. I told them what had happened, gave my address, and disconnected.

I threw water on my face and regained my footing. I found her PJs and the ragged slippers and went through it all. The only thing I found of note was a small plastic purple house that looked like it belonged to a board game. I tried to imagine what significance it held for her. Did it remind her of her childhood? Was it a symbol of a perfect family and home life?

I laid on the floor and stared at the suicided girl under my bed and wondered just how I could have failed her so miserably.

——

I told the story seven times from start to finish, beginning with Cecil’s fatal overfeeding and ending when I phoned 911. I left out Emily’s attempt at seduction and my near enticement. The cops tried to shake me and couldn’t. They didn’t bother starting off acting friendly. They went straight to threats and shouted in my face and tried to get me to drink coffee so they could withhold bathroom privileges. They said they knew I’d killed Emily. They knew I’d tried to hide her body under my own bed. They knew I’d knocked off her parents and was perverted enough to move into the house afterward. They said she’d probably seen me do it and that’s why, all these years later, I’d felt the sudden burning compulsion to murder the only eyewitness.

After four hours they phoned my boss at the garage, told him about my past as a car thief, and had me fired. They got a little rough but didn’t seem to know how to go about it. One detective smacked me with a sloppy open palm. His hand was soft and smelled of aloe. Afterward, he looked like he wanted to apologize. Another cop tried to work my kidneys but he couldn’t find them. I didn’t know whether to be grateful or disgusted.

After nine hours they cut me loose. It was eight p.m. and I hadn’t had anything to eat or drink in more than a day. I hadn’t even made it to the curb before I heard the roar of motorcycle engines heading up the street. I lit a cigarette and got in a nice, long drag before Dell and a half dozen of his men pulled up. He waved me over. If the brotherhood decided to play rough, they’d have no trouble working my kidneys. Their hands weren’t soft. I hesitated a moment and decided, fuck it, got on the back of his bike and held on as the pack moved as one back to the clubhouse.

——

They had warehouses all around town under false-front corporations and did most of their dirty dealings there, but they still had a nice security setup at the MC base. It was a converted barroom where they partied and schemed and got laid. It’s also where they got a little bloody when they had to. There was a back room with a stained concrete floor and a drain in the center. If it even looked like they were planning to corral me there, I was going to have to do something stupid and desperate.

Instead Dell led me to the bar while the other brothers went to shoot pool. On the far wall were photos of all the current members and all the ones who were in jail or dead. I was a little shocked to see that the dead now outnumbered the living.

Dell grabbed a bottle of Glenlivet off the top shelf and poured us each three fingers.

“Okay,” he said. “So tell me what happened.”

There was nothing inherently threatening in his attitude, but I knew better than to lie to him. I gave it to him pretty much the same way I gave it to the cops, except I also mentioned how she’d come on to me. I didn’t tell him I had nearly accepted the offer. I didn’t have to. I also didn’t tell him that I’d heard her say she was pregnant. That her voice had woken me—or Katy’s whispers had—an hour after the girl was dead.

I watched him closely. He went 220 of near-solid muscle, and his knuckles had been flattened from all the times he’d broken his hands in brawls. I couldn’t see any guns on him, but I knew he had to be packing at least two. There was no chance I’d get out alive if he decided this situation should go nuclear, but I wasn’t about to go down without a fight. I pulled the bottle closer to me and poured myself another two fingers. I kept the bottle within easy reach.

Dell said, “Thank you.”

It surprised me so much I asked, “For what?”

“For not kicking her out. For not calling the white wagon to come get her.”

A pause lengthened between us. I let it roll on and on until I felt it was time to ask, “Were you really her father?”

He shrugged his massive shoulders. “I don’t know. Probably not. It doesn’t make any difference.”

“It might have to her.”

“I kept in touch,” he said. “I visited her a couple times a year. Sent care packages. Cards on holidays, her birthday. It wasn’t much but it was something. I thought it was important.” He finished his drink and stared at himself in the mirror behind the bar for a minute. “Did she look in the root cellar?”

“No. At least I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure she didn’t know about that part of it.”

“That’s good.”

We kept drinking. The liquor was hitting me hard since I’d had no food for so long. I flashed on the idea that this might have been his intention all along, to catch me with my defenses down. Except he didn’t need me to have my defenses down. He had six men across the room who’d shotgun me to death if he gave the word.

“Where did she get the piece?” He wasn’t really asking me. “And what the hell was that about her parents under the bed?”

“She was a sick girl,” I said.

He pawed at his face and shook his head. “That image, it’s sticking with me. That she would dream that kind of stuff, man. She never told me anything like that. I can picture her trying to drop off, awake in the dark, thinking her parents were whispering under her bed. Jesus Christ, the poor kid. That fucking hospital. More than six years she was there, and this is the best they could do for her?”

The wind kicked up again. The bar rafters rasped and complained. The sound made me flinch. I finished another glass.

With my throat burning I said, “She needs me to find out who did it.”

As soon as it was out I knew I’d made a mistake. I spoke in the present tense. It was stupid. I sounded a little unhinged. The MC had more than enough crazy to go around; Dell didn’t need even more. But I couldn’t seem to stop. “I failed her. That’s going to hang with me unless I do something about it.”

“It’s not your burden.”

“I think it is.”

His heavy brow knit into a frown. “You’re not gonna find an answer. I’ve been trying for years and I haven’t found it. You think I haven’t looked into it? Just to clear my name?”

“Was that important to you?”

“It was to the brotherhood. I didn’t want any doubts. I couldn’t have my men thinking I would go rogue and kill our leader, even if it was for the good of the MC. It still crosses me up to this day. The original members, they forget what Ron and Katy were like at the time, the kind of trouble they hammered down on us. They just remember how much money he brought in and how good she could suck dick.”

He didn’t know about Emily being pregnant. He wouldn’t until the autopsy results came back. Then he’d understand why I was so adamant on trying to help her, and he’d be pissed at me for not telling him the whole truth. My gut clenched in expectation for a real beating, but that was for later.

“You’re not going to find an answer,” he repeated. “I don’t think there is one.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

The bottle was empty. Dell staggered to his feet, crossed behind the bar, and dug around on the shelf until he found a bottle of Glenfiddich. “You know the kind of life the brotherhood lives. Running guns, hijacking trucks, giving kickbacks to the cops, fighting the wops and the wetbacks and the Koreans and the skinheads. We have a lot of enemies. Ron brought most of that down on us before we managed to contain it. Katy, she had her own bad wiring. She screwed a lot of guys, right? There is no answer because it’s too small to see. It’s …” He had to steel himself to say the word properly.

“… inconsequential. Some greaser put out the call on them, or some cop who wanted more of a cut, or maybe some white-collar citizen blew his gasket.”

“Ron’s hamstrings were cut. Katy’s face was bashed to pieces. What average citizen is going to do that? Has the capacity for doing that?”

“Anyone,” Dell said, “is capable of anything, if they hate somebody enough. Ron was probably drunk, as usual, and couldn’t fight back. Katy zonked on crank. Anyone could have done it.” He lowered his voice. “Maybe one of the brothers had a beef. It’s been six years. You know how many of us are in the ground right along beside them now? More than a dozen. Whoever did it had their reasons, and we’ll never know what they were. There are questions we’ll never know the answer to.”

I thought he was right. I glanced at the photos of the brothers on the wall. A lot of them were on death row or dying of emphysema or cancer or failing livers or kidneys. Ron and Katy lived the MC life and died because of it. I knew I’d never find out who had murdered them. Not only had too much time passed, but the truth was that I really didn’t give a shit about them.

But I felt I owed Emily something. I had never said I would help her, and I should’ve. It might have made all the difference.

——

Dell let me take one of the MC’s drop cars home. It would have clean plates and a clean registration, but if they ever needed to abandon it for whatever reason, it couldn’t be traced back to the brotherhood. I drove to an all-night diner, wolfed down a couple of burgers and a jug of coffee, and stared out the plate-glass window up the highway in the direction of Sojourner.

The story of Emily’s escape and suicide hadn’t broken nationwide yet, but it would by morning. It would stir up all the bad news about Katy and Ron’s unsolved murder, and the cops would be buzzing like hornets while trying to dodge news crews. The hospital directors and chairpersons would be holed up in an all-night board meeting someplace. They’d be gearing up for reporters and potential lawsuits. They’d be plotting with attorneys for hours, shoring up their stories, preparing their pretexts. In another day or two nobody would be able to break through their line of defense. I had to go in now.

I drove over to Sojourner and parked off one of the back roads at the far side of the hospital, along a wide field bordered by the high safety fence. I walked along the fence until I came to a spot where the links had been cut low to the ground so it could be peeled up a few inches and someone could crawl through. No matter how many times they repaired it there’d always be a place like this somewhere along the perimeter. Orderlies brought in contraband this way. I was certain it was how Emily Wright had managed to escape the ward. I’d seen the scratches along her back from the loose fence wire.

I’d made a break from Sojourner this way myself many years ago. Standing here now, staring up at the building with its hundreds of cube windows, its harsh white lights burning across time and memory, knowing the kinds of things that went on in there, a sudden rush of rage surged through my chest. I crawled under the fencing and made my way to the employee exit.

I crept along the side of the building, just out of range of the bright security lights. I stood in the shadows and waited. Twenty minutes later an orderly stepped out the door, propped it open with a folding chair, leaned against the jamb, and lit a joint. You could see why they’d hired him. He was tall and massive, with thick arms and wrists covered in twisting black veins. I kept hoping he’d sit and relax, but he wouldn’t. He just smoked his J and stared out at the night looking mean.

Had he been the one? Had he been the one who had crept into bed with her one night and climbed on top of her while she stared over his shoulder and listened to her mother and father talking to her from the other end of hell?

I moved fast, came up on him from the left and hooked him twice under the heart. It was like punching welded steel plating. His breath exploded from his lungs and the sweet scent of marijuana blew into my face. He bounced off the jamb and recovered almost instantly. This wasn’t going to be easy. I worked his short ribs with rapid-fire jabs. He said, “The fuck … ?” and swept out one of those tremendous fists. I ducked and he tried again. I dodged and brought a roundhouse up from my knees directly onto the point of his chin. It rocked him. He threw his arms out like he was trying to keep balance on a high wire. It didn’t help. He fell over on his ass with a puzzled expression. He grunted a threat and tried to lumber to his feet. I kicked him once in the throat and twice in the face, and he was out.

I checked his belt and found his keys, then I stepped inside and shut the door.

The sound of the lock engaging put the shits up me. I walked along the empty halls, glancing into the community day room, the group-discussion room, the work room. I could smell the clay they were using to make ashtrays and potholders. The floorboards were thick with shreds of wicker from their weaving of baskets and mats. It’s really what they gave the lunatics to do in order to keep their hands busy.

I unlocked each security door I came to and slid through. Normally there would be three other orderlies on duty, a couple of night nurses, maybe a doctor. I suspected the staff would be light tonight. I eased up the hall and peered around the corner at the nurse’s station. I could hear the soft, fast padding of footsteps far up the corridor. Sounded like a young, heavy woman with an austere purpose. She’d be checking rooms and giving out midnight medication and sedatives to whoever needed it. I stepped toward the nurse’s station thinking maybe I’d get lucky and have time to check through their computer files. I was almost there when an orderly stepped out of the men’s room and turned towards me.

I didn’t give him time to react. I clutched the heavy key ring tightly in my fist and broke his nose. He doubled over, gagging on blood, and I swept his feet out from under him. He went down hard but not hard enough to quit struggling. I gripped him by his hair and banged his head twice on the tile floor until his eyes rolled back into his skull. I dragged him into the nurse’s station and stuffed him halfway behind a filing cabinet.

There were only five possibilities, so far as I could see, of who might have gotten Emily pregnant. A doctor, an orderly, some other staff member, a patient, or a visitor.

The computer system was simple. I did a search and came up with Emily’s file. I went through her list of visitors. There hadn’t been any in six months. Before that, on her birthday, Dell had signed in. He stayed for twenty minutes. I went back further. He’d done the same thing last year, and the year before.

I kept scrolling through the pages reading reports. It all seemed like the same thing. Emily would have moments of lucidity, then fall back into a dissociative state where she was delusional. She’d escaped once before, three months ago, and they put her on a suicide watch.

They tried some serious drugs on her. I thought of her frail frame with all those chemicals punching through her veins. I reached down and gripped the edge of the desk and tightened my hold, the impotent fury heavy in me.

The nurse stepped back in. She had a face like an iron frying pan and arms nearly as thick as mine. She rushed over to me with her hands up like she wanted to box. I jumped to my feet and got in her face. She didn’t intimidate easily and raised her chin to meet me.

“Who the hell are you?” she demanded.

I said, “Someone who spent some time here, which means you definitely shouldn’t fuck with me.”

“I’m calling security.”

I blocked her as she went for the phone. “The two orderlies covering the ward tonight are sleeping. Let’s leave them that way, right?”

Her eyes darted to the pair of feet jutting from behind the filing cabinet.

Even that didn’t spook her much. Everyone who worked at Sojourner was hard. “What do you want?”

“I want to know about Emily Wright.”

She crossed her arms over her chest. “I can’t give out any information. Leave now, or I’ll call the police.”

I looked at her. She held my gaze for thirty seconds and then turned aside. I chucked her under the chin and stared deep into her face. “You know she’s dead, don’t you? They told you that. A hurricane of shit is about to sweep through this place. I can either make it better or worse. Now, show me her room.”

She led me down the twining corridors, past the dwellings of the other patients. Some would be on the floor lying in shredded sheets like nests. Others managed to sleep standing up. I listened in and heard the same kind of nightly whines, whimpers, cries, chatter, and grousing that I’d listened to when I’d been locked up here.

“This is her room,” the nurse said.

It was smaller than a jail cell. I knew. I’d lived in both. This was worse. I went through her two-drawer dresser and checked her clothing. What they called “visitor’s-day wear.” You had to put on a show for the family or anybody else who came by. The rest of the time you walked around in loose-fitting garments, pajamas or sweats or scrubs or nighties. I didn’t find anything. I went through her personal effects. She didn’t have many. Some state-made jewelry, makeup, brushes, hair clips, toothbrush. I checked under her pillow and went through the blankets.

“Check under the bed,” I told the nurse.

“Why?”

I kept my voice steady. “Just do it, all right?”

“Why don’t you?”

I took a deep breath and squared my shoulders and got up close and braced her. “Remember what I said about not fucking with me, lady?”

She got on her hands and knees and peered under the bed. “There’s nothing here.”

When she stood again I showed her the tiny purple plastic house. “This looks like it goes to a board game. Any idea what?”

“No, I’ve never seen that before.”

“Was she close to any of the other patients?”

“No.”

I reared on her. “Think for a goddamn minute before you answer, right? Now, mull it over. Was she close to anyone?”

“I swear, she wasn’t.”

“Any sexual deviants in this wing? Masturbators? Rapists? Flashers, perverts, pedophiles?”

“No. No mental abnormalities or sexual proclivities of that sort. They’re kept in the C wing, where there’s more security. We don’t allow those patients to mix with the rest. Especially not with young girls like Emily.”

“Okay. Any escapees in the last few months?”

She hesitated. “No, not in years.”

“Before her, you mean. She cut out three months ago.”

“Yes, before her.”

“How’d she get out?”

“We don’t know. Maybe the same way you got in.”

I tightened one fist on the keys and the other on the little house. “Was there someone who could have had a sexual relationship with her? A staff member? One of these no-neck attendant fuckers?”

“She was only sixteen.”

“I know how old she was. Answer the question.”

“No. We have strict protocol. There are always several orderlies on hand, and nurses, and doctors. Tonight is—”

“Right, a special case.” I looked through the little cube window of Emily’s cell. You could barely see the glimmer of the moon. “She had a gun with her. Any idea where she could have gotten it?”

“No, none at all.”

“Who was her primary therapist?”

“Dr. Wilkins.”

I remembered that prick. He was old school. A sucker for hydrotherapy back in the day who used to keep the patients in lukewarm bathtubs with canvas covers to force us to stay down. He was the only psychiatrist still performing shock treatment anywhere in the country. I wondered if he was still at it. I wondered how many times Emily had had her pubescent brain singed.

“Is Wilkins here?”

“No.”

He didn’t know how lucky he was. The mood I was in, I wasn’t sure what I might do to him.

I sat on Emily’s bed and laid back and thought about what it might have been like for her to imagine her parents under her small bed, scratching and whispering. I could see Emily doing the same kind of thing that I had done in my time. Curling up in a ball and begging for Mommy.

I walked out past the nurse and let her go rushing back to her station where she’d hit the panic button and get the cops down here. Guards from other wards and wings would come running, but I’d be gone by the time anyone got close.

I walked the halls, unlocked the security doors as I came to them, and slipped out the back door past the orderly I’d knocked out. He was starting to come around. I stepped past him and stuck to the shadows. More lights flashed on across the grounds but I knew my way around them. I made my way back to Dell’s drop car, got in, and drove towards town.

I’d been stupid. I should’ve started with the thing that had caught my attention right at the beginning, a moment after I set eyes on Cecil’s corpse.

The popgun .22.

——

Dell had friends of the club inside the police department. He’d have the autopsy report and paperwork on the gun probably before the sheriff did. I showed up at the clubhouse for three days straight waiting for him to get the call.

When it came I was having a beer with him in the clubhouse, watching the Friday-night town girls playing strip nine-ball with a couple of the brothers.

Dell answered his cell. I watched his eyes darken and knew he was getting the word. His responses were terse. He disconnected. He said nothing for a long time.

“Was she pregnant?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “How’d you know? Did she tell you?”

“How far along?”

“Three months.”

It was time to tell him about my visit to the ward. “She had no visitors, not since the last time you showed up on her birthday. But she slipped out of Sojourner at least once that they knew about. Three months ago. She could have gotten out plenty of other times before she showed up at my place.”

I watched him. He sipped his beer and stared into the scarred wood of the bar top. His blunt features hardened and twitched through a few subtle expressions before his face became stony again.

“She did, didn’t she, Dell? She came to see you.”

He chuckled sadly but with some relief. He wanted to talk about it. “Kid walked here. Can you believe that? About a month ago. Shows up at two in the morning, barefoot and bleeding. She tried the same thing on me that she tried with you.” He gripped his beer mug so hard that he put a hairline crack in it.

“It’s why you thanked me,” I said. “You thanked me for not sending her back. Is it because you did?”

The crack grew larger and beer started to seep out of the side of the mug. “I was ashamed. She laid in the back like one of our weekend whores and tried to make me. And I watched her get undressed, man. Christ, she looked just like Katy. I watched her for longer than I should have before I finally told her no. And then I proved what a worthless piece of shit I am. I drove her back to the hospital. Some of those fucking orderlies buy crank from us, and I shelled out some cash and had her slipped inside again. I’ve heard stories of what goes on there, and I sent her right back to that asylum.”

I nodded and couldn’t seem to stop. It was like my neck muscles had been cut. My heart slammed at my ribs. This prick had always said he thought he was her father, but when she came to him for help he dodged his responsibility. He’d never know just what he’d done. Unless he’d been inside, he’d never realize.

“Did you give her the gun?” I asked.

“No.”

We continued to drink. I decided that Dell and I would have to throw down one of these nights.

“If she came to see us she might’ve gone to visit others,” I said. “She must’ve met with someone three months ago. Who?”

“Whoever he is,” Dell said, “he’s dead.”

I kept running names and faces of my neighbors through my head. Who would a disturbed teenage girl listening to the veil-choked whispers of her dead parents go to in order to find out who killed them? Who else would she think might help her? Who had fallen off the razor’s edge into bed with her?

“You think it might be one of yours?” I asked. “The .22?”

“Our friend in the sheriff’s department said the serial numbers were filed and burned out with acid. That probably makes it one of mine.”

“You sell any recently?”

“The last six months?” He scoffed. “Dozens. They’re not worth shit to us. They’re not worth shit to anybody. You know that. No firepower.”

I nodded. “Unless you were going to swallow the barrel. She probably stole it from him.”

“So did she get it from him three months ago? Could she have hidden it that long?”

“No,” I said.

I’d failed again. I was being stupid, again. I feared I’d never smarten up no matter what was on the line. I was still going at this all wrong.

“She got it from him right before she came to see me. She stopped at his place first.”

I held up the little plastic purple house that looked like it belonged to a board game. I showed it to Dell.

“You ever seen something like this before?”

He had. He had a lot of contacts. He was involved with a lot of crooked deals and a few legit ones. He told me he’d seen this in a shop window on Main Street. It went along with a raffle. You fill out the paperwork and your name goes into a box for a drawing. He couldn’t remember what you won and he couldn’t remember the name of the business.

It didn’t matter. I thought I knew. I drove up Main Street until I found the right storefront. I parked and walked around back to the separate apartment behind the shop. Two windows bordered the back door. One to the left and one to the right. The left was new, with a plastic-frame screen instead of wood like the others.

Emily hadn’t known about any secret key stashed under a rock in the family yard. She’d visited here three months ago and smashed a window in. She’d come back before seeing me and gotten the gun. This is where she’d gotten the little house. It’s where she found a small gun and thought its power might help her to discover the answer to the question that haunted and tainted her life. It’s where she fell into bed with a man and whispered in his ear that her dead mother was asking for his help. It’s where the father of her baby lived.

——

I’d never been much of a burglar but I didn’t have to be. The new window was open. I slid it open and climbed inside.

John Acton—Remember, Acton means action for your Home Buying Needs!—lay naked in his bathtub with an X-Acto blade pressed to his wrists. He glanced up at me as I entered but said nothing. Emily’s death had given him the idea. There were hesitation cuts all up and down his forearms. It looked like he’d been trying to slash his wrists for days, but he wasn’t nearly as strong or single-minded as she had been.

He let the blade slip from his fingers and started to cry.

I closed the toilet lid and sat and listened to him weep. I lit a cigarette and smoked and stared at him, noting the half-moon scars on his chest and back made by a fierce woman who liked to cause her men to bleed.

He bawled like a colicky newborn. I couldn’t take the sound anymore. I stood and walked around his apartment. It hadn’t been cleaned in months. Old takeout-food containers littered the kitchen table and counter. A sweat-stained pillow and some balled blankets at the foot of the couch showed me where he’d been sleeping. His soiled bed still bore the signs of feverish lovemaking from months ago.

I thought about what could have led Emily here. I wondered how she had known John Acton had been one of her mother’s lovers. It couldn’t have been difficult. The ward is full of men who mutter and hiss about the women who had destroyed them.

I wondered how many of Katy’s lovers stalked the white halls of Sojourner in their slippers, and hid themselves away in the corners of the work room fondling wet clay like they were still touching her body.

I stood in the bathroom doorway.

“What were you going to do with the .22, John? Kill yourself?”

He responded with a whisper.

I leaned in. “What?”

“I want to die,” he whimpered, “but she won’t let me. They’re under my bed—”

“Stop it.”

“—right now. All three of them. The whole family. Look if you don’t believe me. Go look!”

My pulse beat furiously in my wrists. My hands became fists. I wanted to wreck something. I wanted to hurt someone. An icy shiver worked through me and I had to cross my arms over my chest to keep from shuddering. “Did you do it, John? Did you murder Katy and Ron?”

His features shifted as if invisible thumbs were working themselves into the muscles of his face. His eyes widened as his cheeks sagged. “Christ, no! Don’t you understand? I loved her! I always loved her! I still love her! Nothing else works. No other woman means anything to me. Why do you think I’m still alone all these years later?” His eyes found mine. “You know, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I admitted.

“You know because you’re marked too.”

“Yes.”

“You know because you’re exactly the same way! You’re just like me!”

I didn’t know what to do with him. The cops could do a DNA test to discover he was the father, but there wasn’t enough evidence to lead them from there to here. I could kill him but there didn’t seem to be much point. He was either going to eventually dig into his wrists deep enough to do the job right or he’d wind up in Sojourner himself.

But I had to do something with my hands. I worked him over until his nose was broken and he was spitting teeth, but watching his blood pour off his chin onto the dirty tile floor did nothing to empty me of the rage, sorrow, and fear that continued to swell inside me.

Because he was right. I was just like him.

——

There was too much space under my bed. My fiancée forced me to buy a king size and never spent a night in it as my bride. She had screwed around, but it wasn’t her fault. I’d pushed her away because, deep where it counted, I hadn’t needed or wanted her as much as I’d once craved Katy Wright. Once you’ve enjoyed something so wild, vicious, and bitter, no one else could ever matter again. I’d been marked. I bore scars.

There was more than enough room for four or five or even more bodies beneath the bed. For them to lie there, contorted, swollen, black faced, and crawling over each other, mewling and brooding and conversing. I spent a lot of nights on the couch downstairs now, looking up the steps and listening to the noise of the squirrels in the attic, the wind in the trees, the soft whispers and sighs that might be angry voices or only the sound of my next anxious breath.

——

“God will not look you over for medals, degrees or diplomas, but for scars.” —Elbert Hubbard, Epigrams

——

TOM PICCIRILLI is the author of twenty novels, including Shadow Season, The Cold Spot, The Coldest Mile, and A Choir of Ill Children. He’s won two International Thriller Awards and four Bram Stoker Awards, as well as having been nominated for the Edgar, the World Fantasy Award, the Macavity, and the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire.

| THE BLISTERS ON MY HEART |

Nate Southard

—

Shelly keeps her eyes glued to the scorched two-lane as she reaches for the radio. With frantic fingers, she twists the dial, finds Jack and Squat with a whole mess of Not-a-Damn-Thing in between. It’s the quiet radio that scares me the most. Whoever said silence is golden was a goddamn liar. Silence is terrifying, and don’t ever let nobody tell you different.

Shelly whines a split second before she hits the only pothole for miles. I brace myself, but it’s too late. The Mercury jolts up and down, and the hole in my gut tears a little, ripping a barking scream out of me. When I look down, blood weeps between my fingers. That can’t be good, not that anything good is coming down the pike.

“You okay?” she asks.

“No.”

“What do you need?”

“A … bed. Just get me a bed.”

Her face pinches, and she shakes her head without once tearing her eyes from the road. “If we stop—”

“I know. Just get me a bed.”

She nods, biting her lip. We both know there’s no outrunning the thing behind us. Best we can do is get ahead of it for a little while. Sometimes the small victories are just so damn hollow.

After a moment of road noise, I spot a motel on the left, a squat, dirt-caked building that would probably be ringed with buzzing neon if it were night. I point with a bloody finger. Shelly gives me another one of those nods and eases onto the brakes.

“Careful entering the lot,” I say. “Please.”

We enter the lot at a speed that wouldn’t even count as a crawl, and still my gut burns liquid fire. I hiss out my pain as tears leak from Shelly’s eyes.

“I’m okay,” I tell her. “Just park … by the rooms.”

“But you’re bleeding!”

“Been bleeding a long time. Blisters must’ve popped.”

“Stop it.”

“Wish I could. Just … Just not that easy.”

The Mercury groans to a stop, splitting a pair of parking spaces. Shelly turns to me, her face lined with worry, black hair a tangle.

“What do we do?”

I almost grin at the question, but everything hurts too much. Instead, I nod toward the first motel room. “See if it’ll open.”

“But—”

“Just check, baby. Please.”

Her teeth work that lip again, her eyes shifting toward the motel room, and then she shoulders open her door and climbs out. As she walks toward the door, pale denim sheathing legs I know all too well, I grab the flask from the dash and swallow a belt. The bourbon rips down my throat and sends warmth through my insides, drowning some of the pain. Not nearly enough, but some.

Shelly reaches the door—a number three hanging crooked on it—and tries the handle. It jiggles but won’t turn. The door to room two gives her the same deal. When she turns back to the car, her face looks panicked for a second, but then it goes hard, and I can see the resolve deep in those brown eyes. She stalks back to the car, and I know what she’s coming to get even before she opens my door and reaches over my lap. Her eyes don’t so much as tick my way as she opens the glove compartment and snatches the .38 snub nose from inside. She pops the cylinder, and I see four bullets inside. With ruthless efficiency, she slaps the pistol shut again, and then she stomps away, leaving my door wide open.

My vision dims as I watch her walk to the office, her fingers tight around the pistol and her entire body tick-ticking back and forth with each step. The fire in my belly’s getting colder, and I know that’s not a good thing. How she can walk like that in her condition beats the hell out of me.

Maybe I can just slip away, just be cold by the time Shelly returns. Then she can keep running. Then she can—

Two cracking shots snap me out of my daze. I jump, and a new jolt of pure goddamn torture kicks another scream out of me. Flashbulbs pop in my eyes. They don’t clear until Shelly tosses the gun at my feet and puts a warm palm on my face.

“Look, baby,” she says. She jangles a room key.

I force a smile. The pain makes it hard, but the whiskey helps. “Did good, babe.” I try to ignore the flecks of blood on her cheek. They almost match her lipstick.

“I love you.”

“Come here.” She pushes toward me, and I grab the back of her head, mash her warm lips to mine.

“Let’s get you inside,” she says, and then she slips an arm under my shoulder and lifts.

The world goes electric hot as she gets me on my feet. I feel another rip and press hard against my gut. Don’t want anything slipping through and slapping the concrete. Shelly gets her weight under me. She feels so small, but she supports this idiot better than any crutch.

As she walks me toward the room, telling me to watch the curb, I lift my head and look west. The sky looms black. Most folks would say it looks like a bank of fat storm clouds, but I know better. It’s something much worse—even from here, I can see the fire inside it—and it’s my fault.

Least I did it for love.

——

“Babe, you’re gonna break my heart, you keep that up.”

Shelly chuckles a little—giggling doesn’t suit her—and leans her head back, sending black curls to break like angry waves against her pale shoulders. She wriggles on top of me, sending tiny jolts of pleasure from my lap through my entire body, and my hands find her hips, make her grind a little slower so I don’t explode then and there.

We sit in a darkened corner of the club, draped in shadows, out of reach of the black lights and televisions tuned to sports, like any guy in here is watching something other than the latest dancer to take the stage.

“That sounds funny?” I ask. I hope it sounds playful, but everything that comes out of my mouth sounds cold. Just the way it goes.

“A little.” Her voice makes me picture honey, pouring slow and smooth.

“Why’s that?”

She leans in close. Her breasts press against me, and her hot breath finds my ear. She smells like soap, not the cheap, stinging perfume all the other dancers use. Somehow, I manage not to shudder.

“Because hearts don’t break, baby,” she says. “They scrape against the inside of your chest until they blister. Then they pop and leak and blister all over again until they get tired and give up.” She arches her back and sets her hips going harder.

“Speaking of popping, better slow it down.”

A pout appears on her red lips. Then, it breaks into a wicked grin. “Don’t you want me to get you off?”

“Not my game.”

Shelly—she says that’s her real name, that she only goes by Ivy onstage—slides back until she’s sitting on my knee. She arches one smooth leg the color of milk and plants her foot dangerously close to my crotch. I’m trailing my eyes from her shin down to her ankle when both her hands close around me and squeeze.

“This feel like a game, baby?”

No, it doesn’t. It feels amazing, and my cock jumps in response. She slides her hands up, down, working me through my jeans, and my entire body feels alive. My eyes slip shut, and my breath comes in ragged bursts. If it’s a game, it’s the best one I’ve ever played.

Pressure builds. My vision crackles red. I hear Shelly chuckle again, and I grab her wrists in my hands, move them to my shoulders.

“Babe, I didn’t show up for a rub and tug.”

She jerks away, and the look on her face makes me think I really wounded her. I figure it’s a practiced expression. A woman like her can use a look like that better than guys back in the yard can use a shiv. You never see it coming; you’re just bleeding all of a sudden.

The wounded look goes razor hostile. Another good trick. “If you’re not worth my time—”

I grab her hips and pull her close, press her hard against the bulge in my lap. She squirms, her lips slipping from a firm line to a smile, and a sigh breezes out of her.

My eyes lock with hers. “Maybe I just want a little company.”

She presses her weight down on me. Her chest rises and falls, a black bra mashing her breasts into a shelf of flesh.

“If I’m worth your while or not is for you to decide, babe. I just know I ain’t paying for your hand.”

“You know how to use it?”

“Yeah.”

She climbs off of me and starts to walk away. I reach for my drink, sure she’s decided to move onto another worm she can hook, when she looks over her shoulder.

“C’mon.”

——

She drives a beat-up Mercury, but it looks real nice with her stretched across the hood behind the club. The night’s sticky hot, but Shelly doesn’t care. Everything’s given way to animal lust, me included. I try to be gentle, tender, but her eyes keep finding mine. She arches her back and digs her nails into my naked chest, and it’s like a whip across a thoroughbred’s flank. My groans become grunts. Her moans become screams.

When it’s done—when Shelly stretches her arms over her head and a smile fills her face—I button myself up and stand there with my hands in my pockets like some schoolkid. Shelly climbs off the hood and touches her hand to my face, kisses me.

“Amazing,” she says. “You better come back for me.”

I nod. She can tell I’m not lying. By now, she’s probably used to hooking guys like this. Give them the first one free, and then make them pay hand over fist. I know the game by heart, but her hand on my face feels so soft, so cool. I can almost feel the hook enter my skin, and I don’t think I care.

Maybe Shelly can see my thoughts tumbling around, because she pulls me close to her and plants a hard kiss on my mouth.

“You ain’t paying me a thing, baby. This is just you and me.”

My heart accelerates, and I can feel it start to scrape.

——

The days and nights blur, twist, and combine. Shelly burns everything down and builds it back up again. Her skin becomes my home, her touch the electric spark that keeps my pulse racing. Our time together is spent in a world of teeth and lips and sweat. Whiskey and cigarettes. Our eyes lock as our bodies buck against each other, only slipping shut when our passion explodes.

If it ain’t love, it’s the purest lust I’ve ever experienced.

——

Months pass blissfully, and then this guy, this total asshole, appears. Walks right into the club like he owns the joint. Maybe he does. Not like I know things like that. I just come to see Shelly, and I can feel her bristle the second he enters the place.

“You okay?”

“Fine,” she says, but her voice is flat, far away.

I fix my eyes on the guy and try to burn holes through him. He wears a leather jacket that shines in the dim light. Long, black hair is pulled back in a ponytail, and the only thing distracting from his deep, shadowed eyes is a scar that travels a jagged path from his hairline to his chin. When he jabs a cigar into his teeth and lights it, I see fire dance off a collection of silver rings. The musky smoke from his cigar fills the club, and it smells like money. The kind of cash that comes with a whole lot of power.

I feel Shelly’s hands tighten around my arm as I watch the man sit. A drink appears at his hand the instant his ass hits leather, a nervous-looking waitress giving him her best smile. He waves her off with two fingers and then knocks back the entire drink in a single swallow. The smile his eyes give me over the rim of the glass makes me want to crush his throat. One by one, my muscles harden.

“Don’t,” Shelly whispers in my ear, and for the first time I can remember, she sounds scared. “He’s dangerous.”

“Who is he?”

“His name’s Michael.”

“Who is he?”

“I’m not sure. Deals art or something. I just know he’s dangerous.”

“So am I, babe.”

“Not like he is.”

I shoot Shelly a glance, and I see her watching Michael, her eyes narrow and worried. Another blister rises, and I know I hate this man. This man I don’t even know, I despise him with everything I have.

A waitress I know as Liz approaches. She looks scared, like a child afraid to tell her parents about the awful thing she’s done. Shelly’s hands ratchet tighter on my arm.

“Michael wants to see you, Ivy,” Liz says.

“I’m with somebody,” Shelly replies.

“He wants to see you now.”

“She doesn’t want to see him,” I say, standing before I even realize I’m doing it. Shelly pulls at my arm, dragging me back to my seat.

“Don’t.” There’s a begging note in her voice, and one of the blisters deep inside my chest pops.

“Who the hell is that guy? He bad news? Has he hurt you or something?”

She shakes her head. “Just go home. I’ll call you later.”

I stare at her for what feels like forever. Really? Like I can’t handle it? I know what she does here. My brain twists and tumbles, and I try to sort out what the hell’s going on, but eventually all I can say is, “I’m staying. Do what you have to.”

“Baby …”

“Just do what you need,” I say, making sure to phrase it in a way that hurts. Petty, but I don’t really care. My leaking heart wants me to be a child for a moment.

“Okay.” Shelly nods, and the look on her face is more than a shiv. It’s a Christmas tree, a jagged, barbed hunk of metal that rips out your guts when a con yanks it out of you. Without another word, she kisses me on the cheek and then leaves, the sex absent from her walk. She looks defeated, lost. Looking past her, I catch Michael smiling at me.

“Let me grab you a beer,” Liz says. Then she’s gone, and I’m left to sit there and stew.

Michael kisses Shelly’s hand when she greets him, and I see the shiver run through her body. She’s sad and terrified, and he doesn’t even care. Another wave of his fingers, and a fresh drink appears at the table, along with a flute of champagne. Michael lets Shelly take a single, faltering sip, and then he makes a great show of reaching down and unzipping his pants.

Shelly shoots another look my way, an apology. I don’t give any sign that I’ve noticed. Instead, as Liz places a cold bottle on my table, I tell myself this is all part of the game. I’ve seen Shelly tug on men before. This is just another Joe, another dollar. He’s an asshole, but he doesn’t mean a damn thing to her. She loves me.

Then, Shelly’s head disappears under the table, and Michael leans his head back and gives me the biggest grin I’ve ever seen.

Rage flares inside me like a black fire. It surrounds my heart, helping it to blister faster, and I pour beer down my throat as though it might douse the flames.

Michael sees this, and somehow his grin widens. I want to walk over there and rip his face off with my nails, but the sight of Shelly’s head cresting the plane of the table and diving back down again reminds me I’m not the only person involved.

My eyes flick back to Michael’s face, to that grin. It’s still spreading, and I wonder if the guy’s face is made out of rubber. But then the skin splits at the corners of his mouth. It cracks and peels away like old leather or something, blood trickling past exposed teeth. His eyes don’t leave mine, and I sense a terrible glee in them, and still the guy’s mug is splitting in half, the bleeding ruptures in his skin almost back to his ears, the tendons of his jaw now visible. The club’s lights flicker. No, they vibrate, everything feeling like an earthquake for a few seconds. I can’t tell if anybody else notices. Shelly doesn’t stop, so maybe it’s just me. Right now, I’m not sure I care if anybody else feels it. Michael has my attention. Blood trickles from his ears; a tear of red leaves his eye and traces his scar down to the rip in his face.

Then, the world blinks, and he’s just Michael again. Sitting there. Smiling at me. My woman’s head in his lap.

Liz appears. “You okay?”

“You see any of that?”

“Any of what?”

“That shit with Michael.”

“Not … No, I didn’t.” Her voice is thick with terror.

“Somebody needs to shut that guy down.”

Her hand touches my shoulder. “You should go.”

The words finally pull my eyes away from Michael. “What? Like hell.”

“You’ll make things worse for her, if you stay. He likes to make examples.”

No shit.

“I’ll make sure she calls as soon as she can.”

“Fine.” I climb out of my seat and start walking, but I keep my eyes on Michael’s, letting him know I’m not backing down. I’ve told more obvious lies. Hell, I even believe this one right up until I hear the man’s laughter chase me out of the club.

——

Shelly doesn’t call. Instead, she comes by late, just after I put the sixth hole through my wall. Her eyes are red and wet, and she breaks into sobs when she sees the blood on my knuckles.

I wrap her in my arms and tell her it will be all right, even as I hope she can’t feel the hate inside me. As she weeps against my chest, I imagine my hands around Michael’s neck. I wonder if he’d smile as his face turned from red to purple.

“I’m so sorry,” she says.

“It’s okay.” I press my lips to hers and taste mouthwash alongside cigarettes. It makes me feel a little sick. Then she kisses me with more force, with a desperate hunger, and I’m hooked again. I want her and need her. She’s everything in the world to this big idiot.

Before I realize it, my own hunger’s kicked in, hard. My arms tighten around her, my hands roaming. Shelly moans. I slide my kisses down to her neck, and soon my fingers pull at her clothes.

Her moans stop. Her hands grab at mine. “No.”

“What?”

“Just … not now. Not for a few days.”

I stare at her for a moment, and shame clouds her eyes.

“What did he do?” I ask.

Instead of answering, she turns away, her hands rubbing at her arms.

“Michael, right? What did he do to you?”

“Leave it.”

“Tell me!”

She sobs again, and my heart scrapes hard against my ribs. Shelly doesn’t say anything, but instead peels off her clothes.

My breath catches in my throat like a cork in a dusty bottle.

Bruises cover her body, a canvas of browns and blues and blacks. Red welts serve as accents. I know who the artist is, and I can tell he’s a master. Looking at the damage, I’m amazed Shelly can even walk, let alone act like she’s okay. As she returns to my arms, however, she pulls the curtain aside and shows how much she’s hurting.

I realize I’m going to kill Michael.

“Does he always do this?” I ask.

“When he wants.”

“And the club allows it.”

“He throws enough money their way, it doesn’t matter.”

I take a deep breath, wondering if I’m willing to go back inside for this. Yeah, I am.

“Have you been to his house?”

——

I don’t know who Michael is, and Shelly doesn’t have much of an idea past him being rich, powerful, and mean to the core, but his house looks like it belongs to somebody important. Parked down the street from this thing that can only be called a mansion, I ask Shelly about security. I hate that she can tell me she’s never seen any. She speaks with the confidence of somebody who’s visited more than once or twice.

My fingers tighten around the tire iron in my lap. I picture my plans, how I plan to use the tool, and my body burns cold. Shelly must feel it, because she shivers behind the wheel.

“I’ll be back soon.”

“I have to come with you,” she says.

“No you don’t. You stay here, and I’ll be back when it’s over.”

Her eyes shift to razor focus. “I’m not helpless.”

“I know, babe.”

“And you don’t have to do this. Please. Michael’s dangerous. He’s scary.”

“I can be scary, too.”

And I climb out of the Mercury.

——

Getting over the fence ain’t so hard. I’ve pulled off tougher jobs, and getting across the prick’s giant, lit-up yard and finding an unlocked window is almost a walk in the goddamn park. Did a six-year stretch on a B&E once, but that was just one screwup compared to dozens of successful jobs. I know how to get into a house.

I ease the window open slowly, listening for dogs. Michael strikes me as the breed of rich bastard to keep a few dogs around. He has to feel so secure for some reason, and I haven’t spotted so much as a lick of security.

What I hear drifting from the window sure as hell ain’t dogs, though. Not unless Michael taught a pack to moan like a gaggle of pros. My teeth grind as I think about Shelly sitting in the car, bruised and marked, while this bastard entertains himself with even more women. I take a deep breath, steeling the last of my nerves, and then I climb through the window.

Something’s wrong. It doesn’t take a genius to figure that much.

I find myself in a study, thick books lining shelves made of dark wood. A leather sofa sits in the middle of the floor, facing two armchairs. It looks so normal, but the light’s all wrong. It vibrates, just like it did in the club. A new sound has sprung up to match the women. It’s a low, threatening moan. Somebody singing deep and full at the end of a long tunnel. Everything rushes right to my skull and throbs. Dizziness grabs me and almost sends me to my knees. The iron feels slick in my hand, and I realize I’m sweating tin pails.

Everything dims. I shove my fingers into my mouth and bite down, hard. Pain races up my arm to my brain, and suddenly I’m awake again. The light’s still weird, and that moan is still there, but they’ve backed off a little. I can function.

I leave the room cautiously, fingers on the door’s edge, feet heel-toeing it when I walk. As I leave the study, I take in the bastard’s impressive home. Everything’s marble, polished and white. If the lights would stop their fluttering, it would be perfect.

No. Nothing will ever be perfect here.

That low, moaning sound is more of a rumble, now. It lays underneath everything, threatening to break loose. I have to search to find which direction all that pleasure’s coming from, but it doesn’t take long. Michael really has the women with him singing. I wonder what he’s doing to them, and if Shelly had to make those noises when he was beating her five different shades of awful.

By the time I find the door I want, the one with all the moaning and screaming on the other side, the tire iron is almost a part of my hand. My fingers burn against the cool metal. My knuckles shine white.

I close my eyes and picture Michael’s smile. I see Shelly’s head bobbing up and down. Before Michael’s face begins to split, I open my eyes again. I’m ready for blood.

I kick open the door. Wood splinters and women scream. As I step into the room, iron cocked and ready to swing, I see naked flesh scatter. Half a dozen women run in half a dozen different directions. Some are bruised already. A redhead has a quartet of bleeding gashes in her neck.

There’s more white marble in here, only this is laced with blood. Red splatters draw my eyes downward. I spot more red at the back of the room and raise my eyes to see a curtain. Elsewhere, I see immaculate lounges and rotting wooden racks. Nothing matches, here. Everything is chaos.

Michael stands in the middle, an epicenter in black pants and nothing else. His hair is a wild tangle. A whip occupies one hand, and a bottle of whiskey fills the other. That grin sits just how I expected it, and I can already see myself knocking it in with the iron.

“White knight?” Michael asks. His voice is silky, that kind of smooth that has a layer of pure rot underneath.

The tire iron shakes in my fist. I want to say something, but my throat is full of anger. The lights are vibrating more, that rumble is starting to shake the floor. What on earth … ?

“Not exactly, huh?” He tosses the whip to the floor and takes a long pull of the bottle. His confidence is a living thing. He doesn’t even care that I’m here.

“Shelly said she had a fella. Told her I didn’t give a damn. She tell you to stay away?” As if putting a period on the end, his skin ripples, a quick wave that could almost be imagination.

I answer by taking a step forward. Can’t be scary just standing there.

“She never told you? Maybe she doesn’t know. Here.”

His flesh moves again as he walks away from me. I want to rush him, want to crack his skull wide open, but my feet refuse to move. As Michael reaches for a golden rope, I can only watch.

He pulls, and the curtain glides open.

I look at a storm in a large glass jar. A roiling mass of pure black fills the glass that’s almost waist high. Fire twists with the black clouds. Lightning traces patterns along its outer shape. Together, the three—I don’t know, are they elements?—move like a living thing. I try to think of another time I might have seen something so amazing, and all I can think of is Michael’s face-splitting grin.

“Pretty, ain’t it?” Michael asks. “That’s Hell for ya. Looks great until it busts loose. Lucky for you and Shelly and everybody else on this rock, I’m here.”

He steps to the jar and traces a finger along it. Lightning and fire follow his touch.

“See, white knight? I keep Hell right where it belongs. It’s not easy work, but I have my appetites to keep me sane.”

One of the girls whimpers. I’d almost forgotten about them.

“Sane?” Not the first word I’d planned on speaking.

“More or less.” His grin starts to split along the edges again. He walks back to the curtain, reaches behind it. My body tenses.

“How about you stop moving?”

He pulls off the bottle. There’s a shrug, so casual I barely notice it, and then his other arm appears, the snub nose tight in his fist.

I rush him. You run at a guy with a gun, he panics. His reaction time drops to nothing, and any shots will be wild ones.

Michael fires twice, but only the first misses. The second punches right into my belly. Everything becomes fire, but I keep moving. A growl scratches out of my throat as I reach Michael and swing.

The first strike drops him. I feel the crunch of his skull all the way up my arm. He doesn’t make a sound, just collapses to the marble floor. I hear more screams, followed by the sound of one of the women running for her life.

I raise the tire iron and bring it down again. It smashes through Michael’s face. Something tears in my gut, and then pain is almost blinding.

The rumbling becomes a roar. The lights strobe faster and faster.

I grab the snub nose and press it to Michael’s chest. Somehow, it continues to rise and fall. Not much, but enough that I have to be sure. When I jab the barrel against his sternum, something pushes back. Black veins travel across his flesh and then disappear.

I hold my breath and pull the trigger.

His body bucks hard beneath the blast and then lies still. I stagger backward, trying to figure my next move. Five women stare at me. This many witnesses can’t be good; I know that. Before I can make a decision, however, I hear glass cracking.

My eyes flash to the jar, to the fracture making its way from top to bottom. Tendrils of flame and blackness snake out from the crack, testing the air.

I drop the tire iron and push the hand to my bleeding gut. The women scream and scream, and I back toward the door, wanting to tell them to run, but unable to do a damn thing but hiss through bared teeth.

I make four stumbling steps toward the door before the jar shatters. Black clouds veined with fire and lightning roll forward, growing. The redhead with the gashes shrieks and hits her knees, and as I reach the door I can only watch as the cloud rears back like a snake and then strikes her, a tendril of black and red wrapping around her skull.

Her reaction is awful and instantaneous. Her body jitterbugs for a terrible, violent second, and then something flashes through her. When it’s done, she falls apart, ashes scattering across blood-spattered marble.

I run. More screams follow me, but they die one by one. Afraid of getting lost in Michael’s gigantic home, I return to the window and crawl out.

By the time I reach the Mercury, the snub nose still clenched in my fist and my lap slick with blood, the cloud has started billowing out of the mansion’s windows. Shelly tries to examine my wounds, but I yell at her to drive, just drive, goddamn it.

She speeds away from Michael’s home, and Hell follows.

——

Shelly walks me into the motel room—a flop worse than my place back in the city—and I sink onto the bed. I’m cold, freezing, and the only warm things in the room are Shelly’s hands against my face.

“It’ll be all right,” she tells me, and I’m happy she cares enough to lie.

“Maybe … for you.”

“Don’t say that.”

“I’ll say a lot more, babe.”

Her hands leave my face, and suddenly she’s busy ripping up sheets that have probably seen more sex than soap. “We just have to get you bandaged up,” she says.

“No!” The shout runs a spike of hot iron straight through me, and I scream.

Shelly freezes. “Baby?”

“You gotta go.”

Her lips tremble. I know what she wants to say.

“I can’t let … you die with me,” I tell her. “I’m not gonna make it, anyway. Besides, I … I did this so you could get free.”

Shelly stands there, tears running down her face, and I can tell she’s full of love. When she mashes her lips to mine, it’s the most welcome kiss I’ve ever received.

“I love you, baby.”

“I love you. Now go.”

She kisses me again and disappears out the door.

So that’s it. I listen for the Mercury’s engine, for the sound of tires peeling away over hot asphalt. When I hear it, when I know she’s safe, I close my eyes and listen for the other sound, that rumble that turns into a roar.

Soon, the light begins to flicker, only this time it’s nothing in the room. It’s the sun. Everything shudders.

As I wait for Hell to arrive, I think of Shelly, of her pale skin and dark curves. I think of what I’ve done for her, and I think of everything I’d do if I could, and the last blister on my heart breaks.

——

NATE SOUTHARD’S books include Red Sky, Just Like Hell, Broken Skin, He Stepped Through, This Little Light of Mine, and Focus, which was co-written with Lee Thomas. His short fiction has appeared in such venues as Cemetery Dance, Thuglit, and the Bruce Springsteen–inspired anthology Darkness on the Edge. Nate lives in Austin, Texas, with his girlfriend and numerous pets. He loves food, cigars, and muttering under his breath. Look him up at NateSouthard.com.

| THE ABSENT EYE |

Brian Evenson

—

I

I lost my eye back when I was a child, running through the forest as part of some game or other. At the time I was with two other children, a boy and a girl, a brother and a sister, neither of whom I knew, or, indeed, had even seen before. It was one of them, the skinny shoeless boy, who suggested the game. I cannot now remember much about it, only that when I lost the eye I had been giggling and chasing the girl, and was also being pursued by the boy. In my flight, a thin, barbed branch snapped back and lashed like a wire, slashing a deep scar across my nose and tearing the eye itself free of the socket to leave it unseeing and ruptured on my cheek.

I do not remember exactly how I got home. Perhaps the boy and girl took me, perhaps they carefully led me home and rang the bell before fleeing, but nobody had seen them do so and this was not, in any case, what I remembered. All I remembered was standing stunned in the forest, feeling what was left of my face, and then suddenly and without transition being home again, standing just before my front door.

There was, a doctor informed me, no choice but to remove the eye, which was, for all intents and purposes, already removed. At first they left my socket exposed—to allow the wound to heal, I suppose. The optic nerve, confused, continued to collect information, sending my brain random, broken flashes of light.

Later, I was issued a patch, a cheap cotton affair dyed black and affixed with an elastic band. If the patch got wet, its dye would bleed, staining a black circle around my eye and, when wet enough to seep through, within the socket itself. I wore this patch for several months, continuing to see flashes of light when I removed it. At times these cohered into something that gave the semblance of an image. Through my remaining eye I would see the real world around me—would see, for instance, the solitary and spare confines of my bedroom, the even line of the top of my dresser and, above it, the even line of the ceiling. But the optic nerve would impose upon this other, twisting shapes, initially incomprehensible in form and aspect but, as the weeks and months went on, slowly becoming more articulated.

When I told the doctor what I saw, he just shook his head at me as if I were a fool. And yet even as he did so, I could see a smoky and blurred figure congealing around him. A floating figure which, as I watched, resolved into clarity and revealed itself to be his bloated double. It looked not unlike the doctor, though its legs faded into the air as indistinct smoke. It floated there, for a moment clear, and then hard to discern, and then clear again. It had something like an arm wrapped tight around the doctor’s shoulder. Its other hand, I saw, was at his throat. As I watched, the hand tightened.

The doctor, unaware of the creature itself, touched his throat and coughed. I watched his double smile and let go. I threw up my hands in surprise, much to the doctor’s puzzlement, and that was when the creature clinging to him turned and stared. It saw me, and knew it was seen by me. Both of us remained motionless, waiting for what the other would do. And then, very slowly, I watched its blurred mouth stretch into a grin.

——

A few months later, my parents were surprised when I declined to have a false eye fitted into my empty socket. What I had understood, what they would never understand, was that there was still an eye of sorts there, one that saw exceedingly well, but just not in the fashion other eyes saw.

At first, I kept my socket blinkered, covered by the patch, hoping not to see the creature I had seen before. But one night, afflicted with curiosity, I lifted the patch.

I was alone in my room, one lamp burning fitfully in the corner, shadows dancing along the wall. I wanted to see if the shadows themselves were something more, thinking that if they were I would turn the lamp up and drive them away. There was nothing there. Or nothing in the shadows, rather. But when I looked down, I saw a thin, smoky, long arm grasping my waist. A face that was a parody of my own floated just inches away, staring into my empty socket.

I shuddered. A gleam came into the creature’s eye, but just as quickly faded, though it continued to regard me with what might be described as curiosity. It opened its mouth and I watched its lips and tongue, such as they were, operate in a semblance of speech.

I could not hear words, but I tried to follow the movements of its lips. “You can see me,” I believe it must have said, or else it was, “You can’t be me,” unless it was something else. I quickly lowered the patch so as to blot it out. There immediately followed a tightness in my throat that I tried to see as natural, that I tried to ignore, and then I found myself briefly choking. I ignored this until I felt a stabbing pain in my chest, and lifted the patch to find the creature had insinuated its hand beneath my ribs, had its fingers apparently wrapped around my heart. When it saw that I was looking, it let go and smiled.

“What is it?” I asked. “What do you want?”

It pointed languidly to its ear, then pointed to my own, then said something that I could not hear. When I did not respond, it did this again, and again, until finally, not knowing what else to do, I nodded as if I had understood. Its smile grew wider. Slowly it wriggled its way up my torso until its head was just beside my own. And then it stabbed its finger deep into my ear again and again until I screamed in pain and lost consciousness.

—

II

For fifteen years they kept me confined—for my own protection, they claimed. My parents, alerted by my screams, had climbed the stairs to find me writhing on the floor, blood leaking from one of my ears. Though they could not find the needle or pencil or other implement that I had used to pierce my own eardrum, they did not doubt that I had done this to myself. I only worsened matters by trying to be honest first with them and then with the medical profession, but after all I was young. At the time I hardly knew that the world does not operate through directness and honesty but by way of falsehood and deception. Thus I remained adamant and insistent about what had happened, describing the creature and what it had done to me, not realizing how I was tightening the noose around my own neck.

In the place of my ruined eardrum there grew another sort of ear, one that could hear that which could not, properly speaking, be heard. The creature that clung to me began to speak to me as well, its voice not a voice exactly, but a kind of whispery echo, not always easy to make out, more a suggestion of a voice than a voice itself.

At first I resisted the creature, tried to ignore it, tried to pay no attention as it squeezed my heart or upset my belly or bore down on my lungs. I would hold out as long as I dared, keeping the patch over my eye and stopping my ear with whatever came to hand—a scrap of wet fabric, chewed paper, bits and scraps of food—but it persisted. Eventually I could feel its fingers stroke the fibers of my brain, exciting them into a kind of panic that brought the orderlies running, and like as not got me straitjacketed or sedated. Once I was subdued, they cleaned me up, picked the bits out of my ear, and then the creature could speak to me while I, restrained, could do nothing to resist. What did it want of me? It could not hear me, but it knew I could hear it and seemed to have a need to communicate. You will be of use, friend, it most often said. “Of use how?” I asked, raising pained looks among the orderlies who saw this as nothing but a man speaking to himself. You must not fight, it said. You must give yourself over, friend. Listen and watch and wait, and later on you shall know.

With the additional confusion of the injections and shock treatments and straitjacketings, it took the creature and me years to settle into an uneasy sort of truce. For one thing I learned that though it could cause me pain, though it could excite me, it could not do much more, could not kill or damage me permanently without my permission, and as time went on I learned to control my responses to it. For another, I realized that when my ear was unplugged I could hear not only its whispers, but beneath them, lower and farther away, other sounds humans could not hear.

It was this that finally got me spending a few hours of the day with my patch rolled higher up on my forehead, peering through my empty socket. What I saw at first surprised me, though it should not have. I had long assumed that the smoky creature that had come to me had been the same creature I had seen torturing the doctor, that it was one of a kind, and that it had, by leaving the doctor and coming to me, begun to take on my own characteristics. But what I saw now was a similar creature clinging to each person around me, a whole world of trailing ghosts. They assumed all postures, some of them simply clinging loosely to the bodies of their hosts, others coiled murkily around them. With some of the mad, the creatures seemed malicious, their smiles unholy and their fingers wedged deep into their host’s brains. With others, the creatures seemed to be wailing and crying, trying as well as they could to extricate themselves from the person to whom they were attached. But as they worked one part of themselves free, another smoky strand would form and attach. The orderlies had them as well, though their creatures were generally calmer, though perhaps more inclined to enjoy violence when it did happen. The doctors had them too. Indeed, I began to realize, these creatures perhaps had no choice but to be with us. They were in some sense imprisoned. We were part of them and they were part of us.

This was a terrible thing to know and I fought it as long as I could. I finally got used to it because there was no other choice, at least not one that I could see. I was like everyone else, with one exception: I knew.

—

III

And then, late in my confinement, I found myself awoken by a slow, steady whispering. Friend, it said. Get up, friend. Friend, get up. It repeated the same words over and over again, and kept at it until, finally, I arose.

“What is it?” I asked, but in the dark my double could not read lips. And so I stood and switched on the light, then lifted my eye patch and repeated my question.

The creature curling around me seemed anxious, though I could not understand why. It regarded me as I spoke again and then nodded curtly. Out the door, it said. When I stood waiting, it repeated its command again, adding, in a more gentle whisper, Friend, I will lead you.

And indeed it did. The door, I was surprised to find, was unlocked. We went out the door, and then down the hall and past a sleeping orderly whose own creature had its fumid hands plunged deep within the man’s skull, and who nodded and broke into a saurian smile as we passed. Another turning and then another, and then to the door of another inmate’s room. This too, I was surprised to discover, was unlocked.

I went inside and closed the door behind me. Turn on the light, my creature said to me, and so I did. Sit in the chair, my creature said, and so I did, further drawing it close to the bed when he so commanded.

The man in the bed was an older inmate, a man who had been old even when I had first arrived. The little hair he had left was like a haze around his skull, the flesh liver-spotted and his forehead pale. Uncover him, my creature said, and I did, and saw that he lay there with his skin loose and unhealthy, looking all but dead. His creature was wound around him but losing shape, resembling him less and less. And when I leaned closer to the man his creature hissed, more like the double of a snake than that of a man.

I turned toward the creature wrapped around me, regarded it questioningly. Watch, it suggested. And so I turned back and watched.

With my physical eye alone I would have missed the transition. There was little to tell me physically when the man died. But with the other eye, the missing one, I could see his death happen. Not because of the man himself, but rather because of his creature, for as he approached death he grew smaller, less and less distinct, until he was little more than a shadow. And then, suddenly, he dropped out of existence altogether.

Where does he go? my creature wanted to know. Why does he leave? What becomes of him? I thought at first he meant the man himself, as I would have meant, but as he continued to speak on, whispering away in a susurrating language that seemed at once identical to and absolutely distinct from my own, I realized that it was the man’s creature he was asking about. To him the man meant nothing, but the disappearance of the creature meant everything, for in it he foresaw the disappearance of himself.

I tried to talk to my creature, tried to console it with the so-called wisdom we humans use when facing the knowledge of our own death. But my words were too complex for it to be able to read them well from my lips and the creature grew quickly frustrated and dissatisfied. So I took pencil and paper and began to write words out for it, but when I blinked my human eye I realized that what I saw as words the creature saw as much less, as hardly marks as all. Indeed, to make words it could understand, I had to trace the words over again and again, and flourish them. Only then, once the paper seemed to my good eye an inextricable maze of lines, did it read to my absent eye as words.

What the creature had gained from its proximity to my mind that allowed it to read my tongue I don’t know, but when I first started to trace, it became interested and I saw it startle with recognition when at last the words were revealed. Yet it took me long enough to do my trace work that by the time I finished, my purpose was no longer the same as when I had begun. Rather than telling the creature something along the lines of It is vain to shrink from what cannot be avoided or Take consolation in the fact that he lives on in your memory or Surely there is a life beyond this one, I found myself laboriously creating through my words—first over the course of hours, then over the course of days, and finally over the course of a lifetime—a lie that would allow me to lead a different sort of life.

—

IV

What did I write? It hardly matters now. I wrote what I had to write to convince my creature to aid me in shaking my way free of the institution, and then engraved my lie over and over again with stroke after stroke of the pencil until the creature too could read it.

What I wrote was in essence an offer of help. I did not know where the other creature had gone, I claimed, but if anyone could find out, I said, it was I, someone with a foot in both worlds. I was willing to search, willing to try to find out. I was, I lied, a sort of detective. If he would only agree to aid and assist me, he had my promise that I would dedicate my life to finding the answer to his questions, questions that I privately figured from the very beginning to be unanswerable.

And thus it was that we entered into a kind of compact in which, by pretending to be a detective, I in fact became one. We agreed that for me to be able to answer his questions, I would have to have a free hand, so to speak. Arrangements were made among the various creatures attached to those confined to the asylum, such that at the end of another month I found the right doors left open to me and a series of sleeping guards along my path. With the help of my creature, I walked unimpeded out of the sanitarium and never looked back.

In the years that followed I traveled the earth, looking, searching, for any sign of what might become of a creature when its host died. I have learned little, perhaps nothing. I have played the role of detective, and have gotten my hands dirty. I have stood among the tombs of the dead looking for wisps of smoke to arise or fall that might be the remnants of the creatures. I have lain on my back wrapped deep in furs, staring up at the northern lights and wondering if the glow might not be their unearthly remains. I have stood late at night in the wards of the comatose, watching drowsy figures swaying gently above motionless bodies. I have shot a man in order to witness the moment of his death. I have poisoned a man and attempted to capture the creature wound around him in a bottle before it could disappear. All to no avail.

But the majority of my life has not been spent nearly so romantically. These moments are the exceptions rather than the rule. What I most often do, day after day, is await the moment when my creature begins to direct my footsteps, leading me to a new corpse. Once there, I make notes of the scene and then interview, with the help of my creature, any others close enough to have seen the moment of death. Name? I used to begin, but came quickly to realize that this is not a word they understood. So instead it became, What happened? What did you see? Was there any hint of where he went? And so on. And then I search for clues, strangenesses in the scene of the crime, disturbances visible only to my missing eye. I write down the responses and record whatever clues I find or pretend to find all in the overlapped script that they can read, and then I take the pages and I leave them pinned to trees and pasted to walls, crumpled beneath bridges, secured in trash bins. What becomes of them then, I do not know.

The irony is through this process, unearthly though it is, I might learn enough to know if a man has been murdered, and even have some sense of who his killer is. I often acquire sufficient information to make a call to the police, give them a nudge or two in the right direction. I do not know how many crimes, in how many countries, have been solved by me, how many criminals brought to justice, but I suspect there have been many.

But as to the matter of where our creatures go upon our death, I find myself no closer to having an answer than I was when I first began. My investigation, admittedly, began as a ruse, but as time has gone on I find I cannot help but go from miming the detective to taking on this investigation in earnest. I grow older and more discouraged, but my creature remains hopeful, optimistic. It insists that I keep on, that I continue to drag my way across the earth, and no doubt it will so insist until I am dead, until all that remains of me are the words I have written here.

——

I am writing this not in the overlapped and baroque letters that have become second nature to me, but in the normal human way, as ordinary letters on an ordinary page. Mostly I feel there is no point writing this. Nothing will come of it, I know, and any who read it can only think me mad. But I do not know what else to do.

My creature curls in the air beside me, regarding me with curiosity but saying nothing, at least not yet. Soon it will demand to know what I have inscribed on the paper and why it cannot read it; I hope to have finished before then.

Soon I must move on. But until then, I will finish my account and then sit here, hand idly moving, pretending to write. Until I feel my creature’s hand tight on my throat and its words forming in my ear, and know that I must once again haul myself to my feet. And then I will continue my wandering, a lone and failed detective in the employ of someone not quite myself, but not quite other, either.

—

—for Michael Cisco

——

BRIAN EVENSON is the author of ten books of fiction, most recently the story collection Fugue State and the novel Last Days, which received the American Library Association’s Award for Best Horror Novel of 2009. His novel The Open Curtain was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an International Horror Guild Award and was among Time Out New York’s top books of 2006. Other books include The Wavering Knife (winner of the IHG Award for best story collection) and the tie-in novels Aliens: No Exit and Dead Space: Martyr. He has received an O. Henry Award, as well as an NEA fellowship. He lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, where he directs Brown University’s creative-writing program.

| THE MALTESE UNICORN |

Caitlín R. Kiernan

—

New York City (May 1935)

It wasn’t hard to find her. Sure, she had run. After Szabó let her walk like that, I knew Ellen would get wise that something was rotten, and she’d run like a scared rabbit with the dogs hot on its heels. She’d have it in her head to skip town, and she’d probably keep right on skipping until she was out of the country. Odds were pretty good she wouldn’t stop until she was altogether free and clear of this particular plane of existence. There are plenty enough fetid little hidey holes in the universe, if you don’t mind the heat and the smell and the company you keep. You only have to know how to find them, and the way I saw it, Ellen Andrews was good as Rand and McNally when it came to knowing her way around.

But first, she’d go back to that apartment of hers, the whole eleventh floor of the Colosseum, with its bleak westward view of the Hudson River and the New Jersey Palisades. I figured there would be those two or three little things she couldn’t leave the city without, even if it meant risking her skin to collect them. Only she hadn’t expected me to get there before her. Word on the street was Harpootlian still had me locked up tight, so Ellen hadn’t expected me to get there at all.

From the hall came the buzz of the elevator, then I heard her key in the lock, the front door, and her footsteps as she hurried through the foyer and the dining room. Then she came dashing into that French rococo nightmare of a library, and stopped cold in her tracks when she saw me sitting at the reading table with al-Jaldaki’s grimoire open in front of me.

For a second, she didn’t say anything. She just stood there, staring at me. Then she managed a forced sort of laugh and said, “I knew they’d send someone, Nat. I just didn’t think it’d be you.”

“After that gyp you pulled with the dingus, they didn’t really leave me much choice,” I told her, which was the truth, or all the truth I felt like sharing. “You shouldn’t have come back here. It’s the first place anyone would think to check.”

Ellen sat down in the armchair by the door. She looked beat, like whatever comes after exhausted, and I could tell Szabó’s gunsels had made sure all the fight was gone before they’d turned her loose. They weren’t taking any chances, and we were just going through the motions now, me and her. All our lines had been written.

“You played me for a sucker,” I said, and picked up the pistol that had been lying beside the grimoire. My hand was shaking, and I tried to steady it by bracing my elbow against the table. “You played me, then you tried to play Harpootlian and Szabó both. Then you got caught. It was a bonehead move all the way round, Ellen.”

“So, how’s it gonna be, Natalie? You gonna shoot me for being stupid?”

“No, I’m going to shoot you because it’s the only way I can square things with Auntie H., and the only thing that’s gonna keep Szabó from going on the warpath. And because you played me.”

“In my shoes, you’d have done the same thing,” she said. And the way she said it, I could tell she believed what she was saying. It’s the sort of self-righteous bushwa so many grifters hide behind. They might stab their own mothers in the back if they see an angle in it, but that’s jake, ’cause so would anyone else.

“Is that really all you have to say for yourself?” I asked, and pulled back the slide on the Colt, chambering the first round. She didn’t even flinch … But, wait … I’m getting ahead of myself. Maybe I ought to begin nearer the beginning.

——

As it happens, I didn’t go and name the place Yellow Dragon Books. It came with that moniker, and I just never saw any reason to change it. I’d only have had to pay for a new sign. Late in ’28— right after Arnie “The Brain” Rothstein was shot to death during a poker game at the Park Central Hotel—I accidentally found myself on the sunny side of the proprietress of one of Manhattan’s more infernal brothels. I say accidentally because I hadn’t even heard of Madam Yeksabet Harpootlian when I began trying to dig up a buyer for an antique manuscript, a collection of necromantic erotica purportedly written by John Dee and Edward Kelley sometime in the sixteenth century. Turns out, Harpootlian had been looking to get her mitts on it for decades.

Now, just how I came into possession of said manuscript, that’s another story entirely, one for some other time and place. One that, with luck, I’ll never get around to putting down on paper. Let’s just say a couple of years earlier, I’d been living in Paris. Truthfully, I’d been doing my best, in a sloppy, irresolute way, to die in Paris. I was holed up in a fleabag Montmartre boarding house, busy squandering the last of a dwindling inheritance. I had in mind how maybe I could drown myself in cheap wine, bad poetry, Pernod, and prostitutes before the money ran out. But somewhere along the way, I lost my nerve, failed at my slow suicide, and bought a ticket back to the States. And the manuscript in question was one of the many strange and unsavory things I brought back with me. I’ve always had a nose for the macabre, and had dabbled—on and off—in the black arts since college. At Radcliffe, I’d fallen in with a circle of lesbyterians who fancied themselves witches. Mostly, I was in it for the sex … But I’m digressing.

A friend of a friend heard I was busted, down and out and peddling a bunch of old books, schlepping them about Manhattan in search of a buyer. This same friend, he knew one of Harpootlian’s clients. One of her human clients, which was a pretty exclusive set (not that I knew that at the time). This friend of mine, he was the client’s lover, and said client brokered the sale for Harpootlian—for a fat ten percent finder’s fee, of course. I promptly sold the Dee and Kelley manuscript to this supposedly notorious madam who, near as I could tell, no one much had ever heard of. She paid me what I asked, no questions, no haggling—never mind it was a fairly exorbitant sum. And on top of that, Harpootlian was so impressed I’d gotten ahold of the damned thing, she staked me to the bookshop on Bowery, there in the shadow of the Third Avenue El, just a little ways south of Delancey Street. Only one catch: she had first dibs on everything I ferreted out, and sometimes I’d be asked to make deliveries. I should like to note that way back then, during that long, lost November of 1928, I had no idea whatsoever that her sobriquet, “the Demon Madam of the Lower East Side,” was anything more than colorful hyperbole.

Anyway, jump ahead to a rainy May afternoon, more than six years later, and that’s when I first laid eyes on Ellen Andrews. Well, that’s what she called herself, though later on I’d find out she’d borrowed the name from Claudette Colbert’s character in It Happened One Night. I was just back from an estate sale in Connecticut, and was busy unpacking a large crate when I heard the bell mounted above the shop door jingle. I looked up, and there she was, carelessly shaking rainwater from her orange umbrella before folding it closed. Droplets sprayed across the welcome mat and the floor and onto the spines of several nearby books.

“Hey, be careful,” I said, “unless you intend to pay for those.” I jabbed a thumb at the books she’d spattered. She promptly stopped shaking the umbrella and dropped it into the stand beside the door. That umbrella stand has always been one of my favorite things about the Yellow Dragon. It’s made from the taxidermied foot of a hippopotamus, and accommodates at least a dozen umbrellas, although I don’t think I’ve ever seen even half that many people in the shop at one time.

“Are you Natalie Beaumont?” she asked, looking down at her wet shoes. Her overcoat was dripping, and a small puddle was forming about her feet.

“Usually.”

“Usually,” she repeated. “How about right now?”

“Depends whether or not I owe you money,” I replied, and removed a battered copy of Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled from the crate. “Also, depends whether you happen to be employed by someone I owe money.”

“I see,” she said, as if that settled the matter, then proceeded to examine the complete twelve-volume set of The Golden Bough occupying a top shelf not far from the door. “Awful funny sort of neighborhood for a bookstore, if you ask me.”

“You don’t think bums and winos read?”

“You ask me, people down here,” she said, “they panhandle a few cents, I don’t imagine they spend it on books.”

“I don’t recall asking for your opinion,” I told her.

“No,” she said. “You didn’t. Still, queer sort of a shop to come across in this part of town.”

“If you must know,” I said, “the rent’s cheap,” then reached for my spectacles, which were dangling from their silver chain about my neck. I set them on the bridge of my nose, and watched while she feigned interest in Frazerian anthropology. It would be an understatement to say Ellen Andrews was a pretty girl. She was, in fact, a certified knockout, and I didn’t get too many beautiful women in the Yellow Dragon, even when the weather was good. She wouldn’t have looked out of place in Flo Ziegfeld’s follies; on the Bowery, she stuck out like a sore thumb.

“Looking for anything in particular?” I asked her, and she shrugged.

“Just you,” she said.

“Then I suppose you’re in luck.”

“I suppose I am,” she said, and turned toward me again. Her eyes glinted red, just for an instant, like the eyes of a Siamese cat. I figured it for a trick of the light. “I’m a friend of Auntie H. I run errands for her, now and then. She needs you to pick up a package and see it gets safely where it’s going.”

So, there it was. Madam Harpootlian, or Auntie H. to those few unfortunates she called her friends. And suddenly it made a lot more sense, this choice bit of calico walking into my place, strolling in off the street like maybe she did all her shopping down on Skid Row. I’d have to finish unpacking the crate later. I stood up and dusted my hands off on the seat of my slacks.

“Sorry about the confusion,” I said, even if I wasn’t actually sorry, even if I was actually kind of pissed the girl hadn’t told me who she was right up front. “When Auntie H. wants something done, she doesn’t usually bother sending her orders around in such an attractive envelope.”

The girl laughed, then said, “Yeah, Auntie H. warned me about you, Miss Beaumont.”

“Did she now. How so?”

“You know, your predilections. How you’re not like other women.”

“I’d say that depends on which other women we’re discussing, don’t you think?”

“Most other women,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at the rain pelting the shop windows. It sounded like frying meat out there, the sizzle of the rain against asphalt, and concrete, and the roofs of passing automobiles.

“And what about you?” I asked her. “Are you like most other women?”

She looked away from the window, back at me, and she smiled what must have been the faintest smile possible.

“Are you always this charming?”

“Not that I’m aware of,” I said. “Then again, I never took a poll.”

“The job, it’s nothing particularly complicated,” she said, changing the subject. “There’s a Chinese apothecary not too far from here.”

“That doesn’t exactly narrow it down,” I said, and lit a cigarette.

“Sixty-five Mott Street. The joint’s run by an elderly Cantonese fellow name of Fong.”

“Yeah, I know Jimmy Fong.”

“That’s good. Then maybe you won’t get lost. Mr. Fong will be expecting you, and he’ll have the package ready at five thirty this evening. He’s already been paid in full, so all you have to do is be there to receive it, right? And Miss Beaumont, please try to be on time. Auntie H. said you have a problem with punctuality.”

“You believe everything you hear?”

“Only if I’m hearing it from Auntie H.”

“Fair enough,” I told her, then offered her a Pall Mall, but she declined.

“I need to be getting back,” she said, reaching for the umbrella she’d only just deposited in the stuffed hippopotamus foot.

“What’s the rush? What’d you come after, anyway, a ball of fire?”

She rolled her eyes. “I got places to be. You’re not the only stop on my itinerary.”

“Fine. Wouldn’t want you getting in Dutch with Harpootlian on my account. Don’t suppose you’ve got a name?”

“I might,” she said.

“Don’t suppose you’d share?” I asked her, and took a long drag on my cigarette, wondering why in blue blazes Harpootlian had sent this smart-mouthed skirt instead of one of her usual flunkies. Of course, Auntie H. always did have a sadistic streak to put de Sade to shame, and likely as not this was her idea of a joke.

“Ellen,” the girl said. “Ellen Andrews.”

“So, Ellen Andrews, how is it we’ve never met? I mean, I’ve been making deliveries for your boss lady now going on seven years, and if I’d seen you, I’d remember. You’re not the sort I forget.”

“You got the moxie, don’t you?”

“I’m just good with faces is all.”

She chewed at a thumbnail, as if considering carefully what she should or shouldn’t divulge. Then she said, “I’m from out of town, mostly. Just passing through, and thought I’d lend a hand. That’s why you’ve never seen me before, Miss Beaumont. Now, I’ll let you get back to work. And remember, don’t be late.”

“I heard you the first time, sister.”

And then she left, and the brass bell above the door jingled again. I finished my cigarette and went back to unpacking the big crate of books from Connecticut. If I hurried, I could finish the job before heading for Chinatown.

——

She was right, of course. I did have a well-deserved reputation for not being on time. But I knew that Auntie H. was of the opinion that my acumen in antiquarian and occult matters more than compensated for my not-infrequent tardiness. I’ve never much cared for personal mottos, but if I had one it might be, You want it on time, or you want it done right? Still, I honestly tried to be on time for the meeting with Fong. And still, through no fault of my own, I was more than twenty minutes late. I was lucky enough to find a cab, despite the rain, but then got stuck behind some sort of brouhaha after turning onto Canal, so there you go. It’s not like old man Fong had any place more pressing to be, not like he was gonna get pissy and leave me high and dry.

When I got to 65 Mott, the Chinaman’s apothecary was locked up tight, all the lights were off, and the “Sorry, We’re Closed” sign was hung in the front window. No big surprise there. But then I went around back, to the alley, and found a door standing wide open and quite a lot of fresh blood on the cinderblock steps leading into the building. Now, maybe I was the only lady bookseller in Manhattan who carried a gun, and maybe I wasn’t. But times like that, I was glad to have the Colt tucked snugly inside its shoulder holster, and happier still that I knew how to use it. I took a deep breath, drew the pistol, flipped off the safety catch, and stepped inside.

The door opened onto a stockroom, and the tiny nook Jimmy Fong used as his office was a little farther in, over on my left. There was some light from a banker’s lamp, but not much of it. I lingered in the shadows a moment, waiting for my heart to stop pounding, for the adrenaline high to fade. The air was close, and stunk of angelica root and dust, ginger and frankincense and fuck only knows what else. Powdered rhino horn and the pickled gallbladders of panda bears. What the hell ever. I found the old man slumped over at his desk.

Whoever knifed him hadn’t bothered to pull the shiv out of his spine, and I wondered if the poor SOB had even seen it coming. It didn’t exactly add up, not after seeing all that blood drying on the steps, but I figured, hey, maybe the killer was the sort of klutz can’t spread butter without cutting himself. I had a quick look-see around the cluttered office, hoping I might turn up the package Ellen Andrews had sent me there to retrieve. But no dice, and then it occurred to me: maybe whoever had murdered Fong had come looking for the same thing I was looking for. Maybe they’d found it, too, only Fong knew better than to just hand it over, and that had gotten him killed. Anyway, nobody was paying me to play junior shamus; hence the hows, whys, and wherefores of the Chinaman’s death were not my problem. My problem would be showing up at Harpootlian’s cathouse empty handed.

I returned the gun to its holster, then I started rifling through everything in sight—the great disarray of papers heaped upon the desk, Fong’s accounting ledgers, sales invoices, catalogs, letters and postcards written in English, Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, French, Spanish, and Arabic. I still had my gloves on, so it’s not like I had to worry over fingerprints. A few of the desk drawers were unlocked, and I’d just started in on those, when the phone perched atop the filing cabinet rang. I froze, whatever I was looking at clutched forgotten in my hands, and stared at the phone.

Sure, it wasn’t every day I blundered into the immediate aftermath of this sort of foul play, but I was plenty savvy enough; I knew better than to answer that call. It didn’t much matter who was on the other end of the line. If I answered, I could be placed at the scene of a murder only minutes after it had gone down. The phone rang a second time, and a third, and I glanced at the dead man in the chair. The crimson halo surrounding the switchblade’s inlaid mother-of-pearl handle was still spreading, blossoming like some grim rose, and now there was blood dripping to the floor, as well. The phone rang a fourth time. A fifth. And then I was seized by an overwhelming compulsion to answer it, and answer it I did. I wasn’t the least bit thrown that the voice coming through the receiver was Ellen Andrews’s. All at once, the pieces were falling into place. You spend enough years doing the step-and-fetch-it routine for imps like Harpootlian, you find yourself ever more jaded at the inexplicable and the uncanny.

“Beaumont,” she said, “I didn’t think you were going to pick up.”

“I wasn’t. Funny thing how I did anyway.”

“Funny thing,” she said, and I heard her light a cigarette and realized my hands were shaking.

“See, I’m thinking maybe I had a little push,” I said. “That about the size of it?”

“Wouldn’t have been necessary if you’d have just answered the damn phone in the first place.”

“You already know Fong’s dead, don’t you?” And, I swear to fuck, nothing makes me feel like more of a jackass than asking questions I know the answers to.

“Don’t you worry about Fong. I’m sure he had all his ducks in a row and was right as rain with Buddha. I need you to pay attention—”

“Harpootlian had him killed, didn’t she? And you knew he’d be dead when I showed up.”

She didn’t reply straight away, and I thought I could hear a radio playing in the background. “You knew,” I said again, only this time it wasn’t a query.

“Listen,” she said. “You’re a courier. I was told you’re a courier we can trust, elsewise I never would have handed you this job.”

“You didn’t hand me the job. Your boss did.”

“You’re splitting hairs, Miss Beaumont.”

“Yeah, well, there’s a fucking dead celestial in the room with me. It’s giving me the fidgets.”

“So how about you shut up and listen, and I’ll have you out of there in a jiffy.” And that’s what I did—I shut up, either because I knew it was the path of least resistance, or because whatever spell she’d used to persuade me to answer the phone was still working.

“On Fong’s desk, there’s a funny little porcelain statue of a cat.”

“You mean the maneki neko?”

“If that’s what it’s called, that’s what I mean. Now, break it open. There’s a key inside.”

I tried not to, just to see if I was being played as badly as I suspected I was being played. I gritted my teeth, dug in my heels, and tried hard not to break that damned cat.

“You’re wasting time. Auntie H. didn’t mention you were such a crybaby.”

“Auntie H. and I have an agreement when it comes to free will. To my free will.”

“Break the goddamn cat,” Ellen Andrews growled, and that’s exactly what I did. In fact, I slammed it down directly on top of Fong’s head. Bits of brightly painted porcelain flew everywhere, and a rusty barrel key tumbled out and landed at my feet. “Now pick it up,” she said. “The key fits the bottom left-hand drawer of Fong’s desk. Open it.”

This time, I didn’t even try to resist her. I was getting a headache from the last futile attempt. I unlocked the drawer and pulled it open. Inside, there was nothing but the yellowed sheet of newspaper lining the drawer, three golf balls, a couple of old racing forms, and a finely carved wooden box lacquered almost the same shade of red as Jimmy Fong’s blood. I didn’t need to be told I’d been sent to retrieve the box—or, more specifically, whatever was inside the box.

“Yeah, I got it,” I told Ellen Andrews.

“Good girl. Now, you have maybe twelve minutes before the cops show. Go out the same way you came in.” Then she gave me a Riverside Drive address, and said there’d be a car waiting for me at the corner of Canal and Mulberry, a green Chevrolet coupe. “Just give the driver that address. He’ll see you get where you’re going.”

“Yeah,” I said, sliding the desk drawer shut again and locking it. I pocketed the key. “But, sister, you and me are gonna have a talk.”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world, Nat,” she said and hung up. I shut my eyes, wondering if I really had twelve minutes before the bulls arrived, and if they were even on their way, wondering what would happen if I endeavored not to make the rendezvous with the green coupe. I stood there, trying to decide whether Harpootlian would have gone back on her word and given this bitch permission to turn her hoodoo tricks on me, and if aspirin would do anything at all for the dull throb behind my eyes. Then I looked at Fong one last time, at the knife jutting out of his back, his thin gray hair powdered with porcelain dust from the shattered “lucky cat.” And then I stopped asking questions and did as I’d been told.

——

The car was there, just like she’d told me it would be. There was a young colored man behind the wheel, and when I climbed in the back, he asked me where we were headed.

“I’m guessing Hell,” I said, “sooner or later.”

“Got that right,” he laughed and winked at me from the rearview mirror. “But I was thinking more in terms of the immediate here and now.”

So I recited the address I’d been given over the phone, 435 Riverside.

“That’s the Colosseum,” he said.

“It is if you say so,” I replied. “Just get me there.”

The driver nodded and pulled away from the curb. As he navigated the slick, wet streets, I sat listening to the rain against the Chevy’s hardtop and the music coming from the Motorola. In particular, I can remember hearing the Dorsey Brothers, “Chasing Shadows.” I suppose you’d call that a harbinger, if you go in for that sort of thing. Me, I do my best not to. In this business, you start jumping at everything that might be an omen or a portent, you end up doing nothing else. Ironically, rubbing shoulders with the supernatural has made me a great believer in coincidence.

Anyway, the driver drove, the radio played, and I sat staring at the red lacquered box I’d stolen from a dead man’s locked desk drawer. I thought it might be mahogany, but it was impossible to be sure, what with all that cinnabar-tinted varnish. I know enough about Chinese mythology that I recognized the strange creature carved into the top—a qilin, a stout, antlered beast with cloven hooves, the scales of a dragon, and a long leonine tail. Much of its body was wreathed in flame, and its gaping jaws revealed teeth like daggers. For the Chinese, the qilin is a harbinger of good fortune, though it certainly hadn’t worked out that way for Jimmy Fong. The box was heavier than it looked, most likely because of whatever was stashed inside. There was no latch, and as I examined it more closely, I realized there was no sign whatsoever of hinges or even a seam to indicate it actually had a lid.

“Unless I got it backwards,” the driver said, “Miss Andrews didn’t say nothing about trying to open that box, now did she?”

I looked up, startled, feeling like the proverbial kid caught with her hand in the cookie jar. He glanced at me in the mirror, then his eyes drifted back to the road.

“She didn’t say one way or the other,” I told him.

“Then how about we err on the side of caution?”

“So you didn’t know where you’re taking me, but you know I shouldn’t open this box? How’s that work?”

“Ain’t the world just full of mysteries,” he said.

For a minute or so, I silently watched the headlights of the oncoming traffic and the metronomic sweep of the windshield wipers. Then I asked the driver how long he’d worked for Ellen Andrews.

“Not very,” he said. “Never laid eyes on the lady before this afternoon. Why you want to know?”

“No particular reason,” I said, looking back down at the box and the qilin etched in the wood. I decided I was better off not asking any more questions, better off getting this over and done with, and never mind what did and didn’t quite add up. “Just trying to make conversation; that’s all.”

Which got him to talking about the Chicago stockyards and Cleveland and how it was he’d eventually wound up in New York City. He never told me his name, and I didn’t ask. The trip uptown seemed to take forever, and the longer I sat with that box in my lap, the heavier it felt. I finally moved it, putting it down on the seat beside me. By the time we reached our destination, the rain had stopped and the setting sun was showing through the clouds, glittering off the dripping trees in Riverside Park and the waters of the wide gray Hudson. He pulled over, and I reached for my wallet.

“No, ma’am,” he said, shaking his head. “Miss Andrews, she’s already seen to your fare.”

“Then I hope you won’t mind if I see to your tip,” I said, and I gave him five dollars. He thanked me, and I took the wooden box and stepped out onto the wet sidewalk.

“She’s up on the eleventh,” he told me, nodding toward the apartments. Then he drove off, and I turned to face the imposing brick-and-limestone façade of the building the driver had called the Colosseum. I rarely find myself any farther north than the Upper West Side, so this was pretty much terra incognita for me.

The doorman gave me directions, after giving me and Fong’s box the hairy eyeball, and I quickly made my way to the elevators, hurrying through that ritzy marble sepulcher passing itself off as a lobby. When the operator asked which floor I needed, I told him the eleventh, and he shook his head and muttered something under his breath. I almost asked him to speak up, but thought better of it. Didn’t I already have plenty enough on my mind without entertaining the opinions of elevator boys? Sure, I did. I had a murdered Chinaman, a mysterious box, and this pushy little sorceress calling herself Ellen Andrews. I also had an especially disagreeable feeling about this job, and the sooner it was settled, the better. I kept my eyes on the brass needle as it haltingly swung from left to right, counting off the floors, and when the doors parted, she was there waiting for me. She slipped the boy a sawbuck, and he stuffed it into his jacket pocket and left us alone.

“So nice to see you again, Nat,” she said, but she was looking at the lacquered box, not me. “Would you like to come in and have a drink? Auntie H. says you have a weakness for rye whiskey.”

“Well, she’s right about that. But just now, I’d be more fond of an explanation.”

“How odd,” she said, glancing up at me, still smiling. “Auntie said one thing she liked about you was how you didn’t ask a lot of questions. Said you were real good at minding your own business.”

“Sometimes I make exceptions.”

“Let me get you that drink,” she said, and I followed her the short distance from the elevator to the door of her apartment. Turns out, she had the whole floor to herself, each level of the Colosseum being a single apartment. Pretty ritzy accommodations, I thought, for someone who was mostly from out of town. But then, I’ve spent the last few years living in that one-bedroom cracker box above the Yellow Dragon—hot and cold running cockroaches and so forth. She locked the door behind us, then led me through the foyer to a parlor. The whole place was done up gaudy period French, Louis Quinze and the like, all floral brocade and orientalia. The walls were decorated with damask hangings, mostly of ample-bosomed women reclining in pastoral scenes, dogs and sheep and what have you lying at their feet. Ellen told me to have a seat, so I parked myself on a récamier near a window.

“Harpootlian spring for this place?” I asked.

“No,” she replied. “It belonged to my mother.”

“So, you come from money.”

“Did I mention how you ask an awful lot of questions?”

“You might have,” I said, and she inquired as to whether I liked my whiskey neat or on the rocks. I told her neat, and set the red box down on the sofa next to me.

“If you’re not too thirsty, would you mind if I take a peek at that first,” she said, pointing at the box.

“Be my guest,” I said, and Ellen smiled again. She picked up the red lacquered box, then sat next to me. She cradled it in her lap, and there was this goofy expression on her face, a mix of awe, dread, and eager expectation.

“Must be something extra damn special,” I said, and she laughed. It was a nervous kind of a laugh.

I’ve already mentioned how I couldn’t discern any evidence the box had a lid, and I supposed there was some secret to getting it open, a gentle squeeze or nudge in just the right spot. Turns out, all it needed was someone to say the magic words.

“Pain had no sting, and pleasure’s wreath no flower,” she said, speaking slowly and all but whispering the words. There was a sharp click and the top of the box suddenly slid back with enough force that it tumbled over her knees and fell to the carpet.

“Keats,” I said.

“Keats,” she echoed, but added nothing more. She was too busy gazing at what lay inside the box, nestled in a bed of velvet the color of poppies. She started to touch it, then hesitated, her fingertips hovering an inch or so above the object.

“You’re fucking kidding me,” I said, once I saw what was inside.

“Don’t go jumping to conclusions, Nat.”

“It’s a dildo,” I said, probably sounding as incredulous as I felt. “Exactly which conclusions am I not supposed to jump to? Sure, I enjoy a good rub-off as much as the next girl, but … you’re telling me Harpootlian killed Fong over a dildo?”

“I never said Auntie H. killed Fong.”

“Then I suppose he stuck that knife there himself.”

And that’s when she told me to shut the hell up for five minutes, if I knew how. She reached into the box and lifted out the phallus, handling it as gingerly as somebody might handle a stick of dynamite. But whatever made the thing special, it wasn’t anything I could see.

“Le godemiché maudit,” she murmured, her voice so filled with reverence you’d have thought she was holding the devil’s own wang. Near as I could tell, it was cast from some sort of hard black ceramic. It glistened faintly in the light getting in through the drapes. “I’ll tell you about it,” she said, “if you really want to know. I don’t see the harm.”

“Just so long as you get to the part where it makes sense that Harpootlian bumped the Chinaman for this dingus of yours, then sure.”

She took her eyes off the thing long enough to scowl at me. “Auntie H. didn’t kill Fong. One of Szabó’s goons did that, then panicked and ran before he figured out where the box was hidden.”

(Now, as for Madam Magdalena Szabó, the biggest boil on Auntie H.’s fanny, we’ll get back to her by and by.)

“Ellen, how can you possibly fucking know that? Better yet, how could you’ve known Szabó’s man would have given up and cleared out by the time I arrived?”

“Why did you answer that phone, Nat?” she asked, and that shut me up, good and proper. “As for our prize here,” she continued, “it’s a long story, a long story with a lot of missing pieces. The dingus, as you put it, is usually called le godemiché maudit. Which doesn’t necessarily mean it’s actually cursed, mind you. Not literally. You do speak French, I assume?”

“Yeah,” I told her. “I do speak French.”

“That’s ducky, Nat. Now, here’s about as much as anyone could tell you. Though, frankly, I’d have thought a scholarly type like yourself would know all about it.”

“Never said I was a scholar,” I interrupted.

“But you went to college. Radcliffe, class of 1923, right? Graduated with honors.”

“Lots of people go to college. Doesn’t necessarily make them scholars. I just sell books.”

“My mistake,” she said, carefully returning the black dildo to its velvet case. “It won’t happen again.” Then she told me her tale, and I sat there on the récamier and listened to what she had to say. Yeah, it was long. There were certainly a whole lot of missing pieces. And as a wise man once said, this might not be schoolbook history, not Mr. Wells’s history, but, near as I’ve been able to discover since that evening at her apartment, it’s history, nevertheless. She asked me whether or not I’d ever heard of a fourteenth-century Persian alchemist named al-Jaldaki, Izz al-Din Aydamir al-Jaldaki, and I had, of course.

“He’s sort of a hobby of mine,” she said. “Came across his grimoire a few years back. Anyway, he’s not where it begins, but that’s where the written record starts. While studying in Anatolia, al-Jaldaki heard tales of a fabulous artifact that had been crafted from the horn of a unicorn at the behest of King Solomon.”

“From a unicorn,” I cut in. “So we believe in those now, do we?”

“Why not, Nat? I think it’s safe to assume you’ve seen some peculiar shit in your time, that you’ve pierced the veil, so to speak. Surely a unicorn must be small potatoes for a worldly woman like yourself.”

“So you’d think,” I said.

“Anyhow,” she went on, “the ivory horn was carved into the shape of a penis by the king’s most skilled artisans. Supposedly, the result was so revered it was even placed in Solomon’s temple, alongside the Ark of the Covenant and a slew of other sacred Hebrew relics. Records al-Jaldaki found in a mosque in the Taurus Mountains indicated that the horn had been removed from Solomon’s temple when it was sacked in 587 BC by the Babylonians, and that eventually it had gone to Medina. But it was taken from Medina during or shortly after the siege of 627, when the Meccans invaded. And it’s at this point that the horn is believed to have been given its ebony coating of porcelain enamel, possibly in an attempt to disguise it.”

“Or,” I said, “because someone in Medina preferred swarthy cock. You mind if I smoke?” I asked her, and she shook her head and pointed at an ashtray.

“A Medinan rabbi of the Banu Nadir tribe was entrusted with the horn’s safety. He escaped, making his way west across the desert to Yanbu’ al Bahr, then north along the al-Hejaz all the way to Jerusalem. But two years later, when the Sassanid army lost control of the city to the Byzantine emperor Heraclius, the horn was taken to a monastery in Malta, where it remained for centuries.”

“That’s quite a saga for a dildo. But you still haven’t answered my question. What makes it so special? What the hell’s it do?”

“Maybe you’ve heard enough,” she said, and this whole time she hadn’t taken her eyes off the thing in the box.

“Yeah, and maybe I haven’t,” I told her, tapping ash from my Pall Mall into the ashtray. “So, al-Jaldaki goes to Malta and finds the big black dingus.”

She scowled again. No, it was more than a scowl; she glowered, and she looked away from the box just long enough to glower at me. “Yes,” Ellen Andrews said. “At least, that’s what he wrote. Al-Jaldaki found it buried in the ruins of a monastery in Malta, and then carried the horn with him to Cairo. It seems to have been in his possession until his death in 1342. After that it disappeared, and there’s no word of it again until 1891.”

I did the math in my head. “Five hundred and forty-nine years,” I said. “So it must have gone to a good home. Must have lucked out and found itself a long-lived and appreciative keeper.”

“The Freemasons might have had it,” she went on, ignoring or oblivious to my sarcasm. “Maybe the Vatican. Doesn’t make much difference.”

“Okay. So what happened in 1891?”

“A party in Paris, in an old house not far from the Cimetière du Montparnasse. Not so much a party, really, as an out-and-out orgy, the way the story goes. This was back before Montparnasse became so fashionable with painters and poets and expatriate Americans. Verlaine was there, though. At the orgy, I mean. It’s not clear what happened precisely, but three women died, and afterward there were rumors of black magic and ritual sacrifice, and tales surfaced of a cult that worshiped some sort of demonic objet d’art that had made its way to France from Egypt. There was an official investigation, naturally, but someone saw to it that la préfecture de police came up with zilch.”

“Naturally,” I said. I glanced at the window. It was getting dark, and I wondered if my ride back to the Bowery had been arranged. “So, where’s Black Beauty here been for the past forty-four years?”

Ellen leaned forward, reaching for the lid to the red lacquered box. When she set it back in place, covering that brazen scrap of antiquity, I heard the click again as the lid melded seamlessly with the rest of the box. Now there was only the etching of the qilin, and I remembered that the beast had sometimes been referred to as the “Chinese unicorn.” It seemed odd I’d not thought of that before.

“I think we’ve probably had enough of a history lesson for now,” she said, and I didn’t disagree. Truth be told, the whole subject was beginning to bore me. It hardly mattered whether or not I believed in unicorns or enchanted dildos. I’d done my job, so there’d be no complaints from Harpootlian. I admit I felt kind of shitty about poor old Fong, who wasn’t such a bad sort. But when you’re an errand girl for the wicked folk, that shit comes with the territory. People get killed, and worse.

“It’s getting late,” I said, crushing out my cigarette in the ashtray. “I should dangle.”

“Wait. Please. I promised you a drink, Nat. Don’t want you telling Auntie H. I was a bad hostess, now do I?” And Ellen Andrews stood up, the red box tucked snugly beneath her left arm.

“No worries, kiddo,” I assured her. “If she ever asks, which I doubt, I’ll say you were a regular Emily Post.”

“I insist,” she replied. “I really, truly do,” and before I could say another word, she turned and rushed out of the parlor, leaving me alone with all that furniture and the buxom giantesses watching me from the walls. I wondered if there were any servants, or a live-in beau, or if possibly she had the place all to herself, that huge apartment overlooking the river. I pushed the drapes aside and stared out at twilight gathering in the park across the street. Then she was back (minus the red box) with a silver serving tray, two glasses, and a virgin bottle of Sazerac rye.

“Maybe just one,” I said, and she smiled. I went back to watching Riverside Park while she poured the whiskey. No harm in a shot or two. It’s not like I had some place to be, and there were still a couple of unanswered questions bugging me. Such as why Harpootlian had broken her promise, the one that was supposed to prevent her underlings from practicing their hocus-pocus on me. That is, assuming Ellen Andrews had even bothered to ask permission. Regardless, she didn’t need magic or a spell book for her next dirty trick. The Mickey Finn she slipped me did the job just fine.

——

So, I came to, four, perhaps five hours later—sometime before midnight. By then, as I’d soon learn, the shit had already hit the fan. I woke up sick as a dog and my head pounding like there was an ape with a kettledrum loose inside my skull. I opened my eyes, but it wasn’t Ellen Andrews’s Baroque clutter and chintz that greeted me, and I immediately shut them again. I smelled the hookahs and the smoldering bukhoor, the opium smoke and sandarac and, somewhere underneath it all, that pervasive brimstone stink that no amount of incense can mask. Besides, I’d seen the spiny ginger-skinned thing crouching not far from me, the eunuch, and I knew I was somewhere in the rat’s-maze labyrinth of Harpootlian’s bordello. I started to sit up, but then my stomach lurched and I thought better of it. At least there were soft cushions beneath me, and the silk was cool against my feverish skin.

“You know where you are?” the eunuch asked; it had a woman’s voice and a hint of a Russian accent, but I was pretty sure both were only affectations. First rule of demon brothels: Check your preconceptions of male and female at the door. Second rule: Appearances are fucking meant to be deceiving.

“Sure,” I moaned and tried not to think about vomiting. “I might have a notion or three.”

“Good. Then you lie still and take it easy, Miss Beaumont. We’ve got a few questions need answering.” Which made it mutual, but I kept my mouth shut on that account. The voice was beginning to sound not so much feminine as what you might hear if you scraped frozen pork back and forth across a cheese grater. “This afternoon, you were contacted by an associate of Madam Harpootlian’s, yes? She told you her name was Ellen Andrews. That’s not her true name, of course. Just something she heard in a motion picture—”

“Of course,” I replied. “You sort never bother with your real names. Anyway, what of it?”

“She asked you to go see Jimmy Fong and bring her something, yes? Something very precious. Something powerful and rare.”

“The dingus,” I said, rubbing at my aching head. “Right, but … hey … Fong was already dead when I got there, scout’s honor. Andrews told me one of Szabó’s people did him.”

“The Chinese gentleman’s fate is no concern of ours,” the eunuch said. “But we need to talk about Ellen Andrews. She has caused this house serious inconvenience. She’s troubled us, and troubles us still.”

“You and me both, bub,” I said. It was just starting to dawn on me how there were some sizable holes in my memory. I clearly recalled the taste of rye, and gazing down at the park, but then nothing. Nothing at all. I asked the ginger demon, “Where is she? And how’d I get here, anyway?”

“We seem to have many of the same questions,” it replied, dispassionate as a corpse. “You answer ours, maybe we shall find the answers to yours along the way.”

I knew damn well I didn’t have much say in the matter. After all, I’d been down this road before. When Auntie H. wants answers, she doesn’t usually bother with asking. Why waste your time wondering if someone’s feeding you a load of baloney when all you gotta do is reach inside his brain and help yourself to whatever you need?

“Fine,” I said, trying not to tense up, because tensing up only ever makes it worse. “How about let’s cut the chitchat and get this over with.”

“Very well, but you should know,” it said, “Madam regrets the necessity of this imposition.” And then there were the usual wet, squelching noises as the relevant appendages unfurled and slithered across the floor toward me.

“Sure, no problem. Ain’t no secret Madam’s got a heart of gold,” and maybe I shouldn’t have smarted off like that, because when the stingers hit me, they hit hard. Harder than I knew was necessary to make the connection. I might have screamed. I know I pissed myself. And then it was inside me, prowling about, roughly picking its way through my conscious and unconscious mind—through my soul, if that word suits you better. All the heady sounds and smells of the brothel faded away, along with my physical discomfort. For a while I drifted nowhere and nowhen in particular, and then, then I stopped drifting …

——

… Ellen asked me, “You ever think you’ve had enough? Of the life, I mean. Don’t you sometimes contemplate just up and blowing town, not even stopping long enough to look back? Doesn’t that ever cross your mind, Nat?”

I sipped my whiskey and watched her, undressing her with my eyes and not especially ashamed of myself for doing so. “Not too often,” I said. “I’ve had it worse. This gig’s not perfect, but I usually get a fair shake.”

“Yeah, usually,” she said, her words hardly more than a sigh. “Just, now and then, I feel like I’m missing out.”

I laughed, and she glared at me.

“You’d cut a swell figure in a breadline,” I said, and took another swallow of the rye.

“I hate when people laugh at me.”

“Then don’t say funny things,” I told her.

And that’s when she turned and took my glass. I thought she was about to tell me to get lost, and don’t let the door hit me in the ass on the way out. Instead, she set the drink down on the silver serving tray, and she kissed me. Her mouth tasted like peaches. Peaches and cinnamon. Then she pulled back, and her eyes flashed red, the way they had in the Yellow Dragon, only now I knew it wasn’t an illusion.

“You’re a demon,” I said, not all that surprised.

“Only a quarter. My grandmother … Well, I’d rather not get into that, if it’s all the same to you. Is it a problem?”

“No, it’s not a problem,” I replied, and she kissed me again. Right about here, I started to feel the first twinges of whatever she’d put into the Sazerac, but, frankly, I was too horny to heed the warning signs.

“I’ve got a plan,” she said, whispering, as if she were afraid someone was listening in. “I have it all worked out, but I wouldn’t mind some company on the road.”

“I have no … no idea … what you’re talking about,” and there was something else I wanted to say, but I’d begun slurring my words and decided against it. I put a hand on her left breast, and she didn’t stop me.

“We’ll talk about it later,” she said, kissing me again, and right about then, that’s when the curtain came crashing down, and the ginger-colored demon in my brain turned a page …

——

… I opened my eyes, and I was lying in a black room. I mean, a perfectly black room. Every wall had been painted matte black, and the ceiling, and the floor. If there were any windows, they’d also been painted over, or boarded up. I was cold, and a moment later I realized that was because I was naked. I was naked and lying at the center of a wide white pentagram that had been chalked onto that black floor. A white pentagram held within a white circle. There was a single white candle burning at each of the five points. I looked up, and Ellen Andrews was standing above me. Like me, she was naked. Except she was wearing that dingus from the lacquered box, fitted into a leather harness strapped about her hips. The phallus drooped obscenely and glimmered in the candlelight. There were dozens of runic and Enochian symbols painted on her skin in blood and shit and charcoal. Most of them I recognized. At her feet, there was a small iron cauldron, and a black-handled dagger, and something dead. It might have been a rabbit, or a small dog. I couldn’t be sure which, because she’d skinned it.

Ellen looked down, and saw me looking up at her. She frowned, and tilted her head to one side. For just a second, there was something undeniably predatory in that expression, something murderous. All spite and not a jot of mercy. For that second, I was face to face with the one quarter of her bloodline that changed all the rules, the ancestor she hadn’t wanted to talk about. But then that second passed, and she softly whispered, “I have a plan, Natalie Beaumont.”

“What are you doing?” I asked her. But my mouth was so dry and numb, my throat so parched, it felt like I took forever to cajole my tongue into shaping those four simple words.

“No one will know,” she said. “I promise. Not Harpootlian, not Szabó, not anyone. I’ve been over this a thousand times, worked all the angles.” And she went down on one knee then, leaning over me. “But you’re supposed to be asleep, Nat.”

“Ellen, you don’t cross Harpootlian,” I croaked.

“Trust me,” she said.

In that place, the two of us adrift on an island of light in an endless sea of blackness, she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. Her hair was down now, and I reached up, brushing it back from her face. When my fingers moved across her scalp, I found two stubby horns, but it wasn’t anything a girl couldn’t hide with the right hairdo and a hat.

“Ellen, what are you doing?”

“I’m about to give you a gift, Nat. The most exquisite gift in all creation. A gift that even the angels might covet. You wanted to know what the unicorn does. Well, I’m not going to tell you; I’m going to show you.”

She put a hand between my legs and found I was already wet.

I licked at my chapped lips, fumbling for words that wouldn’t come. Maybe I didn’t know what she was getting at, this gift, but I had a feeling I didn’t want any part of it, no matter how exquisite it might be. I knew these things, clear as day, but I was lost in the beauty of her, and whatever protests I might have uttered, they were about as sincere as ol’ Brer Rabbit begging Brer Fox not to throw him into that briar patch. I could say I was bewitched, but it would be a lie.

She mounted me then, and I didn’t argue.

“What happens now?” I asked.

“Now I fuck you,” she replied. “Then I’m going to talk to my grandmother.” And, with that, the world fell out from beneath me again. And the ginger-skinned eunuch moved along to the next tableau, that next set of memories I couldn’t recollect on my own …

——

… Stars were tumbling from the skies. Not a few stray shooting stars here and there. No, all the stars were falling. One by one, at first, and then the sky was raining pitchforks, only it wasn’t rain, see. It was light. The whole sorry world was being born or was dying, and I saw it didn’t much matter which. Go back far enough, or far enough forward, the past and future wind up holding hands, cozy as a couple of lovebirds. Ellen had thrown open a doorway, and she’d dragged me along for the ride. I was so cold. I couldn’t understand how there could be that much fire in the sky, and me still be freezing my tits off like that. I lay there shivering as the brittle vault of heaven collapsed. I could feel her inside me. I could feel it inside me, and same as I’d been lost in Ellen’s beauty, I was being smothered by that ecstasy. And then … then the eunuch showed me the gift, which I’d forgotten … and which I would immediately forget again.

How do you write about something, when all that remains of it is the faintest of impressions of glory? When all you can bring to mind is the empty place where a memory ought to be and isn’t, and only that conspicuous absence is there to remind you of what cannot ever be recalled? Strain as you might, all that effort hardly adds up to a trip for biscuits. So, how do you write it down? You don’t, that’s how. You do your damnedest to think about what came next, instead, knowing your sanity hangs in the balance.

So, here’s what came after the gift, since le godemiché maudit is a goddamn Indian giver if ever one was born. Here’s the curse that rides shotgun on the gift, as impossible to obliterate from reminiscence as the other is to awaken.

There were falling stars, and that unendurable cold … and then the empty, aching socket to mark the countermanded gift … and then I saw the unicorn. I don’t mean the dingus. I mean the living creature, standing in a glade of cedars, bathed in clean sunlight and radiating a light all its own. It didn’t look much like what you see in storybooks or those medieval tapestries they got hanging in the Cloisters. It also didn’t look much like the beast carved into the lid of Fong’s wooden box. But I knew what it was, all the same.

A naked girl stood before it, and the unicorn kneeled at her feet. She sat down, and it rested its head on her lap. She whispered reassurances I couldn’t hear, because they were spoken as softly as falling snow. And then she offered the unicorn one of her breasts, and I watched as it suckled. This scene of chastity and absolute peace lasted maybe a minute, maybe two, before the trap was sprung and the hunters stepped out from the shadows of the cedar boughs. They killed the unicorn, with cold iron lances and swords, but first the unicorn killed the virgin who’d betrayed it to its doom …

——

… And Harpootlian’s ginger eunuch turned another page (a ham-fisted analogy if ever there was one, but it works for me), and we were back in the black room. Ellen and me. Only two of the candles were still burning, two guttering, halfhearted counterpoints to all that darkness. The other three had been snuffed out by a sudden gust of wind that had smelled of rust, sulfur, and slaughterhouse floors. I could hear Ellen crying, weeping somewhere in the darkness beyond the candles and the periphery of her protective circle. I rolled over onto my right side, still shivering, still so cold I couldn’t imagine being warm ever again. I stared into the black, blinking and dimly amazed that my eyelids hadn’t frozen shut. Then something snapped into focus, and there she was, cowering on her hands and knees, a tattered rag of a woman lost in the gloom. I could see her stunted, twitching tail, hardly as long as my middle finger, and the thing from the box was still strapped to her crotch. Only now it had a twin, clutched tightly in her left hand.

I think I must have asked her what the hell she’d done, though I had a pretty good idea. She turned toward me, and her eyes … Well, you see that sort of pain, and you spend the rest of your life trying to forget you saw it.

“I didn’t understand,” she said, still sobbing. “I didn’t understand she’d take so much of me away.”

A bitter wave of conflicting, irreconcilable emotion surged and boiled about inside me. Yeah, I knew what she’d done to me, and I knew I’d been used for something unspeakable. I knew violation was too tame a word for it, and that I’d been marked forever by this gold-digging half-breed of a twist. And part of me was determined to drag her kicking and screaming to Harpootlian. Or fuck it, I could kill her myself, and take my own sweet doing so. I could kill her the way the hunters had murdered the unicorn. But—on the other hand—the woman I saw lying there before me was shattered almost beyond recognition. There’d been a steep price for her trespass, and she’d paid it and then some. Besides, I was learning fast that when you’ve been to Hades’s doorstep with someone, and the two of you make it back more or less alive, there’s a bond, whether you want it or not. So, there we were, a cheap, latter-day parody of Orpheus and Eurydice, and all I could think about was holding her, tight as I could, until she stopped crying and I was warm again.

“She took so much,” Ellen whispered. I didn’t ask what her grandmother had taken. Maybe it was a slice of her soul, or maybe a scrap of her humanity. Maybe it was the memory of the happiest day of her life, or the ability to taste her favorite food. It didn’t seem to matter. It was gone, and she’d never get it back. I reached for her, too cold and too sick to speak, but sharing her hurt and needing to offer my hollow consolation, stretching out to touch …

——

… And the eunuch said, “Madam wishes to speak with you now,” and that’s when I realized the parade down memory lane was over. I was back at Harpootlian’s, and there was a clock somewhere chiming down to three a.m., the dead hour. I could feel the nasty welt the stingers had left at the base of my skull and underneath my jaw, and I still hadn’t shaken off the hangover from that tainted shot of rye whiskey. But above and underneath and all about these mundane discomforts was a far more egregious pang, a portrait of that guileless white beast cut down and its blood spurting from gaping wounds. Still, I did manage to get myself upright without puking. Sure, I gagged once or twice, but I didn’t puke. I pride myself on that. I sat with my head cradled in my hands, waiting for the room to stop tilting and sliding around like I’d gone for a spin on the Coney Island Wonder Wheel.

“Soon, you’ll feel better, Miss Beaumont.”

“Says you,” I replied. “Anyway, give me a half a fucking minute, will you please? Surely your employer isn’t gonna cast a kitten if you let me get my bearings first, not after the work over you just gave me. Not after—”

“I will remind you, her patience is not infinite,” the ginger demon said firmly, and then it clicked its long claws together.

“Yeah?” I asked. “Well, who the hell’s is?” But I’d gotten the message, plain and clear. The gloves were off, and whatever forbearance Auntie H. might have granted me in the past, it was spent, and now I was living on the installment plan. I took a deep breath and struggled to my feet. At least the eunuch didn’t try to lend a hand.

——

I can’t say for certain when Yeksabet Harpootlian set up shop in Manhattan, but I have it on good faith that Magdalena Szabó was here first. And anyone who knows her onions knows the two of them have been at each other’s throats since the day Auntie H. decided to claim a slice of the action for herself. Now, you’d think there’d be plenty enough of the hellion cock-and-tail trade to go around, what with all the netherworlders who call the five boroughs their home away from home. And likely as not, you’d be right. Just don’t try telling that to Szabó or Auntie H. Sure, they’ve each got their elite stable of “girls and boys,” and they both have more customers than they know what to do with. Doesn’t stop them from spending every waking hour looking for a way to banish the other once and for all—or at least find the unholy grail of competitive advantages.

Now, by the time the ginger-skinned eunuch led me through the chaos of Auntie H.’s stately pleasure dome, far below the subways and sewers and tenements of the Lower East Side, I already had a pretty good idea the dingus from Jimmy Fong’s shiny box was meant to be Harpootlian’s trump card. Only, here was Ellen Andrews, this mutt of a courier, gumming up the works, playing fast and loose with the loving cup. And here was me, stuck smack in the middle, the unwilling stooge in her double-cross.

As I followed the eunuch down the winding corridor that ended in Auntie H.’s grand salon, we passed doorway after doorway, all of them opening onto scenes of inhuman passion and madness, the most odious of perversions, and tortures that make short work of merely mortal flesh. It would be disingenuous to say I looked away. After all, this wasn’t my first time. Here were the hinterlands of wanton physical delight and agony, where the two become indistinguishable in a rapturous Totentanzi. Here were spectacles to remind me how Doré and Hieronymus Bosch never even came close, and all of it laid bare for the eyes of any passing voyeur. You see, there are no locked doors to be found at Madam Harpootlian’s. There are no doors at all.

“It’s a busy night,” the eunuch said, though it looked like business as usual to me.

“Sure,” I muttered. “You’d think the Shriners were in town. You’d think Mayor La Guardia himself had come down off his high horse to raise a little hell.”

And then we reached the end of the hallway, and I was shown into the mirrored chamber where Auntie H. holds court. The eunuch told me to wait, then left me alone. I’d never seen the place so empty. There was no sign of the usual retinue of rogues, ghouls, and archfiends, only all those goddamn mirrors, because no one looks directly at Madam Harpootlian and lives to tell the tale. I chose a particularly fancy-looking glass, maybe ten feet high and held inside an elaborate gilded frame. When Harpootlian spoke up, the mirror rippled like it was only water, and my reflection rippled with it.

“Good evening, Natalie,” she said. “I trust you’ve been treated well?”

“You won’t hear any complaints outta me,” I replied. “I always say, the Waldorf-Astoria’s got nothing on you.”

She laughed then, or something that we’ll call laughter for the sake of convenience.

“A crying shame we’re not meeting under more amicable circumstances. Were it not for this unpleasantness with Miss Andrews, I’d offer you something—on the house, of course.”

“Maybe another time,” I said.

“So, you know why you’re here?”

“Sure,” I said. “The dingus I took off the dead Chinaman. The salami with the fancy French name.”

“It has many names, Natalie. Karkadann’s Brow, el consolador sangriento, the Horn of Malta—”

“Le godemiché maudit,” I said. “Ellen’s cock.”

Harpootlian grunted, and her reflection made an ugly, dismissive gesture. “It is nothing of Miss Andrews. It is mine, bought and paid for. With the sweat of my own brow did I track down the spoils of al-Jaldaki’s long search. It’s my investment, one purchased with so grievous a forfeiture this quadroon mongrel could not begin to appreciate the severity of her crime. But you, Natalie, you know, don’t you? You’ve been privy to the wonders of Solomon’s talisman, so I think, maybe, you are cognizant of my loss.”

“I can’t exactly say what I’m cognizant of,” I told her, doing my best to stand up straight and not flinch or look away. “I saw the murder of a creature I didn’t even believe in yesterday morning. That was sort of an eye opener, I’ll grant you. And then there’s the part I can’t seem to conjure up, even after golden boy did that swell Roto-Rooter number on my head.”

“Yes. Well, that’s the catch,” she said and smiled. There’s no shame in saying I looked away then. Even in a mirror, the smile of Yeksabet Harpootlian isn’t something you want to see straight on.

“Isn’t there always a catch?” I asked, and she chuckled.

“True, it’s a fleeting boon,” she purred. “The gift comes, and then it goes, and no one may ever remember it. But always, always they will long for it again, even hobbled by that ignorance.”

“You’ve lost me, Auntie,” I said, and she grunted again. That’s when I told her I wouldn’t take it as an insult to my intelligence or expertise if she laid her cards on the table and spelled it out plain and simple, like she was talking to a woman who didn’t regularly have tea and crumpets with the damned. She mumbled something to the effect that maybe she gave me too much credit, and I didn’t disagree.

“Consider,” she said, “what it is, a unicorn. It is the incarnation of purity, an avatar of innocence. And here is the power of the talisman, for that state of grace which soon passes from us, each and every one, is forever locked inside the horn—the horn become the phallus. And in the instant that it brought you, Natalie, to orgasm, you knew again that innocence, the bliss of a child before it suffers corruption.”

I didn’t interrupt her, but all at once I got the gist.

“Still, you are only a mortal woman, so what negligible, insignificant sins could you have possibly committed during your short life? Likewise, whatever calamities and wrongs have been visited upon your flesh or your soul, they are trifles. But if you survived the war in Paradise, if you refused the yoke and so are counted among the exiles, then you’ve persisted down all the long eons. You were already broken and despoiled billions of years before the coming of man. And your transgressions outnumber the stars.

“Now,” she asked, “what would you pay, were you so cursed, to know even one fleeting moment of that stainless former existence?”

Starting to feel sick to my stomach all over again, I said, “More to the point, if I always forgot it, immediately, but it left this emptiness I feel—”

“You would come back,” Auntie H. smirked. “You would come back again and again and again, because there would be no satiating that void, and always would you hope that maybe this time it would take and you might keep the memories of that immaculate condition.”

“Which makes it priceless, no matter what you paid.”

“Precisely. And now Miss Andrews has forged a copy—an identical copy, actually—meaning to sell one to me, and one to Magdalena Szabó. That’s where Miss Andrews is now.”

“Did you tell her she could hex me?”

“I would never do such a thing, Natalie. You’re much too valuable to me.”

“But you think I had something to do with Ellen’s mystical little counterfeit scheme.”

“Technically, you did. The ritual of division required a supplicant, someone to receive the gift granted by the unicorn, before the summoning of a succubus mighty enough to effect such a difficult twinning.”

“So maybe, instead of sitting here bumping gums with me, you should send one of your torpedoes after her. And, while we’re on the subject of how you pick your little henchmen, maybe—”

“Natalie,” snarled Auntie H. from someplace not far behind me. “Have I failed to make myself understood? Might it be I need to raise my voice?” The floor rumbled, and tiny hairline cracks began to crisscross the surface of the looking glass. I shut my eyes.

“No,” I told her. “I get it. It’s a grift, and you’re out for blood. But you know she used me. Your lackey, it had a good, long look around my upper story, right, and there’s no way you can think I was trying to con you.”

For a dozen or so heartbeats, she didn’t answer me, and the mirrored room was still and silent, save all the moans and screaming leaking in through the walls. I could smell my own sour sweat, and it was making me sick to my stomach.

“There are some gray areas,” she said finally. “Matters of sentiment and lust, a certain reluctant infatuation, even.”

I opened my eyes and forced myself to gaze directly into that mirror, at the abomination crouched on its writhing throne. And all at once, I’d had enough, enough of Ellen Andrews and her dingus, enough of the cloak-and-dagger bullshit, and definitely enough kowtowing to the monsters.

“For fuck’s sake,” I said, “I only just met the woman this afternoon. She drugs and rapes me, and you think that means she’s my sheba?”

“Like I told you, I think there are gray areas,” Auntie H. replied. She grinned, and I looked away again.

“Fine. You tell me what it’s gonna take to make this right with you, and I’ll do it.”

“Always so eager to please,” Auntie H. laughed, and the mirror in front of me rippled. “But, since you’ve asked, and as I do not doubt your present sincerity, I will tell you. I want her dead, Natalie. Kill her, and all will be … forgiven.”

“Sure,” I said, because what the hell else was I going to say. “But if she’s with Szabó—”

“I have spoken already with Magdalena Szabó, and we have agreed to set aside our differences long enough to deal with Miss Andrews. After all, she has attempted to cheat us both, in equal measure.”

“How do I find her?”

“You’re a resourceful young lady, Natalie,” she said. “I have faith in you. Now … if you will excuse me,” and, before I could get in another word, the mirrored room dissolved around me. There was a flash, not of light, but of the deepest abyssal darkness, and I found myself back at the Yellow Dragon, watching through the bookshop’s grimy windows as the sun rose over the Bowery.

——

There you go, the dope on just how it was I found myself holding a gun on Ellen Andrews, and just how it was she found herself wondering if I was angry enough or scared enough or desperate enough to pull the trigger. And like I said, I chambered a round, but she just stood there. She didn’t even flinch.

“I wanted to give you a gift, Nat,” she said.

“Even if I believed that—and I don’t—all I got to show for this gift of yours is a nagging yen for something I’m never going to get back. We lose our innocence, it stays lost. That’s the way it works. So, all I got from you, Ellen, is a thirst can’t ever be slaked. That and Harpootlian figuring me for a clip artist.”

She looked hard at the gun, then looked harder at me.

“So what? You thought I was gonna plead for my life? You thought maybe I was gonna get down on my knees for you and beg? Is that how you like it? Maybe you’re just steamed cause I was on top—”

“Shut up, Ellen. You don’t get to talk yourself out of this mess. It’s a done deal. You tried to give Auntie H. the high hat.”

“And you honestly think she’s on the level? You think you pop me and she lets you off the hook, like nothing happened?”

“I do,” I said. And maybe it wasn’t as simple as that, but I wasn’t exactly lying, either. I needed to believe Harpootlian, the same way old women need to believe in the infinite compassion of the little baby Jesus and Mother Mary. Same way poor kids need to believe in the inexplicable generosity of Popeye the Sailor and Santa Claus.

“It didn’t have to be this way,” she said.

“I didn’t dig your grave, Ellen. I’m just the sap left holding the shovel.”

And she smiled that smug smile of hers and said, “I get it now, what Auntie H. sees in you. And it’s not your knack for finding shit that doesn’t want to be found. It’s not that at all.”

“Is this a guessing game,” I asked, “or do you have something to say?”

“No, I think I’m finished,” she replied. “In fact, I think I’m done for. So let’s get this over with. By the way, how many women have you killed?”

“You played me,” I said again.

“Takes two to make a sucker, Nat,” she smiled.

Me, I don’t even remember pulling the trigger. Just the sound of the gunshot, louder than thunder.

——

CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN is the author of seven novels, including the award-winning Threshold and, most recently, Daughter of Hounds and The Red Tree. Her short fiction has been collected in Tales of Pain and Wonder; From Weird and Distant Shores; To Charles Fort, with Love; Alabaster; A Is for Alien; and, most recently, The Ammonite Violin & Others. Her erotica has been collected in two volumes, Frog Toes and Tentacles and Tales from the Woeful Platypus. She is currently beginning work on her eighth novel. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

| DREAMER OF THE DAY |

Nick Mamatas

—

Hallway, just narrow enough for two. Tin ceiling, haze in the air. It’s a railroad apartment, three floors up. A pile of old toys and junk—half a bicycle, plastic playhouse all stained and grimy Day-Glo, empty wrinkled cardboard boxes, coils of cable—blocks the back door. By the front door, a small table littered with envelopes. Bills, looks like. Cellophane windows and a name over and over, in all caps.

So you pick a bill, Paul says.

Any one? Lil asks.

That’s the fee. Pick a bill and pay it. This operator, he doesn’t leave the house, he’s not on anyone’s payroll. He puts his bills out here. You want to hire him, you pick out a bill and pay it. This is how he lives.

Yeah, but … She bites her lower lip. Licks it. She’s a real lip licker. So what if I take this one?

She taps a Verizon envelope. Her finger is fat on it, like crushing a bit.

Maybe it’s fifty bucks. Maybe he calls lots of 900 numbers, she says. Is that enough, though? If he’s as good as you say he is—

He’s the best.

It’ll look like an accident?

No.

The finger comes off the envelope. No?

It’ll be an accident, he says.

Eyes roll. Whatever, she says. How can he live like this? I mean, if people can pick any bill they like and pay it, why would anyone bother to pay his rent when they could pay some fifty-dollar phone bill? The West Village, I mean. Jesus.

Rent control. It’s not that bad. He’s been here for a long time, Paul says. Then he puts his hands to his mouth, cupping them. Woom woommm wommm he plays, like a sad trumpet. Then he sings two words. Twi-light time. You know it? Paul asks.

She looks at him.

Glenn Miller, Paul says. Plain as day.

A cheek inches up, dragging her lips into a smirk. Another lick.

“Stardust.” Google it or something. Glenn Miller vanished over the English Channel. He and his army band were flying into liberated Paris to play and … He lifts his palms in a shrug.

And they crashed and drowned?

No, just vanished. Not a trace of him, or the band, or the plane. That was his first hit, they say, Paul says. That’s how old this guy is.

I thought you said this guy makes his hits look like accidents, not like episodes of The X-Files, she says.

We can leave right now, if you like. If you’re not impressed. If you don’t want to pick up a bill and take it downstairs to the check-cashing place and pay his electricity or his cable or whatever the hell else, Paul says. If you don’t want to give him three hundred bucks for his rent this month. If you want to try somebody else who might cut your husband’s brakes or shoot him in the fucking face for twenty times the money. Yeah, that won’t be traced back to you. Have you even practiced crying in the mirror, Merry Widow?

Tears well up in her eyes. She stands up straight, then her spine wilts. Waterworks. The man makes to reach out for her, not thinking. All autonomic nerves, limbs jerking toward the brunette Lil like she needs saving.

All right, all right, you’re good, Paul says.

Lil reaches for an envelope, flashes that it’s addressed from Marolda Properties, and puts it in her purse. Now what, she says.

We wait.

How about we knock? She raises a tiny fist.

I wouldn’t.

Can we smoke?

No … but yes, he says. He reaches into his suit pocket and pulls out a silver-on-bronze case, flicking it open and offering her a cigarette.

From crimped lips: no light?

He produces a lighter, flicks it open too. Matches the case. The cherry blooms, and the door unlocks.

Put those nasty things out, the Dreamer of the Day says. You’ll kill us all. The Dreamer’s not a striking man. He couldn’t get a job standing on the lip of a grave on a soundstage, to stare down at the lens of a video camera. A little pudgy, skin like defrosting chicken. His undershirt is yellowed, his eyes an unremarkable brown. Hair a bundt cake around the back of his head. Lil didn’t have lunch today. She couldn’t eat.

The apartment is all newspapers, at first. Then she sees other things—boxes stuffed with green-and-white-striped printouts, old black-screened TVs, dusty Easter baskets, a pile of shoes. The Dreamer leads them like there’s a choice—the kitchen is piles up to the Dreamer’s eyebrows except for the path carved out from force of habit, and the living room is newspapers and magazines avalanching from sagging couches, and the bedroom is just piles of old-man clothes. Hats and green suit jackets and shirtsleeves sticking out like quake victims who didn’t quite pull themselves from fissures. The man has to stand sideways and sidle after the Dreamer. The woman fits, but barely, her elbows tight.

Lil doesn’t smell a thing except old man: lavender and urine.

The bedroom—magazines she’s never seen before, filing cabinets on their sides across a twin bed, a rain of hanging plants. A patch of mattress ticking, bald and empty—the Dreamer takes a seat there. Paul finds a little bench, sweeps it free of old coffee cans and pipe cleaners, and sits. There’s room for her but she stands. The Dreamer reaches and there’s an audible click. A big cabinet-sized television set, framed in trash. Knobs. Black and white, but a nest of cables snaking up from it to a hole punched through the tin ceiling. Her former show is on. The Cove of Love.

Is this some kind of setup? Lil asks. Is this some kind of joke?

The Dreamer says, I like this show. You were good on it.

I don’t watch it anymore, she says.

Paul pats the bench. She sits.

Sotto voce, Paul says, We really should wait for a commercial.

On the screen there’s a man. Old, with silver hair. In business wear, but he means business too. Sleeves rolled up. Suspenders, thick and brown. A pile of dirt, a shovel. The sky behind him is swirls of paint, normally bursting with red and purple (the woman knows that matte painting well), but on the Dreamer’s television screen it’s a sea of gray. The man picks up the shovel and begins to dig. A voice, tinny and distant, begs him to stop. It’s her voice.

That’s a clip from three years ago, she says. Paul hisses at her. She nudges him with her elbow. The bench wobbles under them.

Yes, the Dreamer says. When Savannah was in that old bomb shelter where the gang had her cornered, and they decided to lock her in. I remember those words, that tone. Tell me something.

Yes?

Do you have a lot of the same outfit?

Excuse me?

When you’re doing something like that. Does wardrobe take back whatever you’re wearing every day and clean it, then dirty it up again so it’ll match, and you wear that suit every day? Or is there a rack full of identical pantsuits, with identical tears and identical smudges and burn marks, and you wear a new one every day? You were in that bomb shelter for three months, ten minutes a day.

They have a few outfits. We have girls who take digital pictures and they try to match the amount of dishevelment, Lil says. I think we had three of that outfit for that story arc.

That’s why I like The Cove of Love. I can tell that the director really cares about the show, the Dreamer of the Day says. The other soaps don’t even try anymore.

A commercial for vegetable oil. A world where people in a room can look out the windows, where women stare off into space and hold up bottles and confide in the universe that some things are tastier than others.

Why’d you bring her here, Ron? the Dreamer asks.

I want my husband—the words stick in her throat.

Ron.

Ron opens his mouth. She is tired of being married to her husband.

The Dreamer turns to look at her, to look at Ron too.

Aren’t you a women’s libber?

Lil laughs at that. Who even says women’s libber anymore?

You can get a divorce.

Maybe he doesn’t deserve a divorce. You want the gory details? Paul told me you’re a no-questions-asked kind of guy.

Ron, the Dreamer says.

She looks at the man next to her.

Here, he says, I’m Ron.

Savannah—

Call me Lil, she says.

Savannah, the Dreamer repeats, I am a no-questions-asked kind of guy. I can’t say I like women’s libbers very much. I don’t care why you want your husband dead, but women like you, Savannah, you want to talk about it.

I’m not a woman like Savannah, she says. That was a character I played on the show.

And the show starts again. There’s a hospital. A man turns on his heel and walks off frame. A close-up of a woman’s face. All redheads and blonds look alike. The Dreamer tells them the character’s name is Trista and that she has something horrible inside her. Then two kids bouncing on a couch, too enthusiastic when the man who meant business walks in after burying Savannah alive. A restaurant scene is next, the rhubarbrhubarb of the crowd scene like the Dreamer’s labored breaths. Then a commercial for people who want to fill a bag with gold and mail it away.

The Dreamer says, Ron, go downstairs and get us some coffees. Ron gets up and squeezes past the rubbish into the next room.

Lil puts her hand in her hair, combing it with her fingers. I want my husband dead because he’s been cheating on me.

Bullshit. Pardon my French. I don’t get many female visitors. I’m sure that doesn’t surprise you. I know I haven’t kept up my apartment. I’m embarrassed. Ron should have told me you were coming. That you were coming. We could have met in the diner.

I thought you never leave.

Maybe I’d make an exception, the Dreamer says. He looks at Lil. His dentures are heavy like two rows of tombstones.

He is cheating on me. This is his third or fourth little whore.

That’s not why you want him dead. If you wanted him dead, you would have put out a hit two or three whores ago.

I used to have a career, something to occupy my own days. Now I’m home all day, or at the gym. I can feel her sweat on the sheets of my own bed when I lay down at night. It’s humiliating.

Humiliating, the Dreamer echoes.

I don’t know if I’ll ever get another role. I’m forty-one years old. I never crossed over to movies, not even to prime time.

You’re not the bitch-goddess type, the Dreamer says. Not the part for you.

I want to know that there’s something more to the world than what I’ve already lived through.

The Dreamer extends a finger and turns off the television set. A single pixel burns in the middle of the screen.

There’s a lot more. Worlds within worlds. You are having an affair with Ron.

The irony doesn’t escape me, Lil says.

You ain’t escapin’ it either, the Dreamer says.

What?

Ron told me that you were together. I feel for him. His wife, the big C. In her breasts, and now her brain. But it’s not just that—he loves you, more than he ever loved her.

He’s a good man, Lil says.

What’s your husband’s name?

Whatever happened to no questions asked?

The Dreamer smiles. I do have to ask one question. Not a personal one. Well, it’s about preferences, not information.

Answer mine first, Lil says.

Anything for you, Miss Savannah.

Why do they call you the Dreamer of the Day?

All men dream, but not equally, the Dreamer says. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes to make it possible.

That’s beautiful.

That’s T. E. Lawrence.

Who?

The Dreamer of the Day shivers, visibly disgusted. Finally, he lets … of Arabia extrude from his mouth like sludge. And you got two questions out of me, Savannah. More than anyone ever has. I have a weakness for you.

I apologize, Lil says. I’ll collect another envelope from the foyer on my way out. She says foyer like a Frenchwoman. What’s your question?

Kill him fast or kill him slow?

Kill him slow.

The Dreamer gets up and leaves the room. Lil hears some clatter in the kitchen and gets up. The Dreamer has cleared off the stove. He has a teakettle out. She almost trips over the junk on the floor.

Pau—uh, Ron. He’s getting coffees from the diner.

Ron’s not getting us any fucking coffee, the Dreamer says, gravel in his teeth. Paul’s not getting coffees. He puts his hands on the stove, a little electric number, squeezes his fingers in the gaps between counter and stovetop on either side, and gives it all a shake. A red light blinks to life.

No apologies for your French this time, monsieur?

This is how it’s gonna go, the Dreamer of the Day says. He looks up and off to the side, at some random piece of paper up atop a teetering pile in the living room. Ron’s down at the diner, see. He knows the one. It used to be Greek; it’s Russian now. Your husband’s fourth little whore is there. Blond, milkmaid type. Her upper lip curls when she smiles. He likes that kind of thing. You can do it too.

She can, yes. She does, Pavlovian. Close-ups, she says. You’ve seen the show.

Well, it just so happens that your husband is in the diner too, see? He likes to watch the girl lean over the Formica for tips. He likes to count the seconds other men keep their hands on her ass while she takes their orders. Then he likes to take her up to your home, up to Valhalla on the Metro North so he doesn’t have to drive, doesn’t have to keep his hands on the wheel.

Valhalla. That’s on my Wikipedia page. You probably have a computer around here somewhere.

The Dreamer starts rummaging through a cabinet for a cup. He finds one, waves it hooked around his finger, and then finds a second. This on your Wikipedia page? he asks. Your boyfriend Paul Osorio is connected. How you think he knows me? He’s packing. He sees your husband and is overcome. He pulls out his gun.

Paul doesn’t carry a gun. He’s a good man.

He knows the Dreamer of the Day. I don’t know any good men. I don’t meet them in my line of work. No good women either. What did he tell you? That he knew a guy who knew a guy who knew someone who could help you? He is a guy. He’d have done it himself, if you’d asked him, but why would you ask him? He’s a good man.

Mister, I think I’m going to meet Paul downstairs. I’ll get you some help—my sister is a social worker. You don’t have to live like this. There are nice places. You won’t be lonely either.

The teakettle screams. You don’t want to go down there, the Dreamer says. Paul’s already put a bullet in your husband. He aimed for the head but missed because the whore’s a sharpie. Paul got a faceful of hot coffee the second she saw the gun. Right in the eyes. He’s not going to see out of his left anymore. That face—second- and third-degree burns. St. Vincent’s isn’t that far away. Both of them will make it to the ER.

My husban—

The chest. Bullet just misses the heart. But you said you wanted it slow, so you get it. He bleeds, but he lives. You can go see him later tonight if you want. Take in a movie. Buy yourself a nice dinner. Nine p.m. Visiting hours will be over, but they’ll let you in. The night shift, they’re all fans. You’ll cry like you did in court when the government took your Chinese baby away.

That wasn’t me. That was a character.

They were your tears, the Dreamer of the Day says. That’ll get you in. Go see him. You’ll think the staph will have come from here. That you’re the carrier, that you infected him.

He pours two cups of tea. He hands one to Lil. She takes it but doesn’t drink.

This is the most disgusting place you’ve ever set foot in, he says matter-of-factly. So when your husband gets the MRSA, you’ll think it’s your fault. It’ll get in his blood nice and slow. It’ll take weeks for him to die. He’ll cry even better than you, demand that you visit him every day. Get a hotel room so you can spend all day by his side. He’ll forget the whore entirely, and she’ll be sent back to Moscow till the heat is off. You’ll sneak down to the burn ward to see Paul twice, three times. Then forget it. It won’t matter though.

Why won’t it? she asks. She passes the cup from hand to hand. There’s no place to put it down.

His face will be ruined, but so will your husband’s. The MRSA will do a number on his skin. Boils worthy of Job. Kill him slow. He’ll lose half his nose. Three weeks of rats in the veins.

Lil throws the content of her teacup at the Dreamer of the Day, but he’s ready. He swipes an old New York Post off the countertop and holds it up. The tea splatters all over another disgraced governor in black and white and red.

The Dreamer drops the paper, steps on it as he walks past Lil. Show’s over, he says. Go home. You’ll see.

She follows him back to the bedroom. You crazy old man, she says. What the hell? Did you put Paul up to this? Did he put you up to this? What kind of freak show are you two lunatics running here? Christ, talk about far fetched. I’ve met some real winners, some deranged fans, but you, you are a fucking fruitcake—

The Dreamer grabs a great handful of old suits and tosses them on the white tongue of the bed on which he’d sat. The back door of the railroad apartment. He opens it and walks out without a word. Where are you going! You can’t leave! she demands. The door slams shut. Lil rushes to the door, tries the knob. It’s unlocked, but she has to push, not pull. All the trash and boxes bar the way. She can’t squeeze her pinky through the crack of the door for the rubbish. Lil grabs her purse from the little bench, runs through the apartment on tiptoes, sideways along the narrow path through the piles of garbage, and hits the hallway through the front entrance.

No Dreamer. Lil looks down the well of the staircase. No Dreamer. He’s an old, slow man. He couldn’t have made it outside in time. She’s on the second floor; there are no first-floor apartments he could have ducked into. Lil stomps down the steps and walks outside to a dusk painted red and blue from the lights of ambulances and a black and white. A radio crackles. A shrieking, thrashing blond held inches over the sidewalk by a pair of cops gets shoved into the back seat of the cop car. Then, gurneys.

——

Lil can’t see her husband. He’s in emergency surgery. Paul she doesn’t dare ask after, not when she sees two men in tank-shaped suits in the waiting area very patiently not reading the newspapers open in their hands. She doesn’t want to go all the way up to Grand Central. She doesn’t want to say to the Metro North ticket clerk behind those bars of bronze, “One-way to Valhalla.” She takes in a movie. Cries through it. It’s about someone with cancer. A real tearjerker. She can taste the hospital onscreen. Lil orders a nice dinner in a little place down on Greenwich Street, where the grid of the city collapses against the shore of the Hudson River. Doesn’t eat it. Tips 50 percent for some privacy. Indigo skies go gray. Nine o’clock, she’s crying in the lobby of St. Vincent’s. Not for her husband. Not for Paul. But her husband, he’s the one she decides to see.

Lil washes her hands at the restaurant. Again in the ladies’ restroom. She takes her husband’s hand now because he’s unconscious, breathing hard as though deep in his still body he’s running from somebody. She pulls her hand back, but it’s too late.

——

NICK MAMATAS is the author of three novels—Move Under Ground, Under My Roof, and Sensation—and of over sixty short stories, many of which were collected in You Might Sleep … Nick’s fiction has been thrice nominated for the Bram Stoker Award, and as coeditor of Clarkesworld, he’s been nominated for the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards.

| IN PARIS, IN THE MOUTH OF KRONOS |

John Langan

—

I

“You know how much they want for a Coke?”

“How much?” Vasquez said.

“Five euros. Can you believe that?”

Vasquez shrugged. She knew the gesture would irritate Buchanan, who took an almost pathological delight in complaining about everything in Paris, from the lack of air conditioning on the train ride in from de Gaulle to their narrow hotel rooms, but they had an expense account, after all, and however modest it was, she was sure a five-euro Coke would not deplete it. She didn’t imagine the professionals sat around fretting over the cost of their sodas.

To her left, the broad Avenue de la Bourdonnais was surprisingly quiet; to her right, the interior of the restaurant was a din of languages: English, mainly, with German, Spanish, Italian, and even a little French mixed in. In front of and behind her, the rest of the sidewalk tables were occupied by an almost even balance of old men reading newspapers and youngish couples wearing sunglasses. Late-afternoon sunlight washed over her surroundings like a spill of white paint, lightening everything several shades, reducing the low buildings across the avenue to hazy rectangles. When their snack was done, she would have to return to one of the souvenir shops they had passed on the walk here and buy a pair of sunglasses. Another expense for Buchanan to complain about.

“M’sieu? Madame?” Their waiter, surprisingly middle aged, had returned. “Vous êtes—”

“You speak English,” Buchanan said.

“But of course,” the waiter said. “You are ready with your order?”

“I’ll have a cheeseburger,” Buchanan said. “Medium rare. And a Coke,” he added with a grimace.

“Very good,” the waiter said. “And for madame?”

“Je voudrais un crêpe au chocolat,” Vasquez said, “et un café au lait.”

The waiter’s expression did not change. “Très bien, madame. Merçi,” he said as Vasquez passed him their menus.

“A cheeseburger?” she said once he had returned inside the restaurant.

“What?” Buchanan said.

“Never mind.”

“I like cheeseburgers. What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing. It’s fine.”

“Just because I don’t want to eat some kind of French food—ooh, un crêpe, s’il vous plaît.”

“All this,” Vasquez nodded at their surroundings, “it’s lost on you, isn’t it?”

“We aren’t here for all this,” Buchanan said. “We’re here for Mr. White.”

Despite herself, Vasquez flinched. “Why don’t you speak a little louder? I’m not sure everyone inside the café heard.”

“You think they know what we’re talking about?”

“That’s not the point.”

“Oh? What is?”

“Operational integrity.”

“Wow. You pick that up from the Bourne movies?”

“One person overhears something they don’t like, opens their cell phone, and calls the cops—”

“And it’s all a big misunderstanding, officers, we were talking about movies, ha ha.”

“—and the time we lose smoothing things over with them completely fucks up Plowman’s schedule.”

“Stop worrying,” Buchanan said, but Vasquez was pleased to see his face blanch at the prospect of Plowman’s displeasure.

For a few moments, Vasquez leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes, the sun lighting the inside of her lids crimson. I’m here, she thought, the city’s presence a pressure at the base of her skull, not unlike what she’d felt patrolling the streets of Bagram, but less unpleasant. Buchanan said, “So you’ve been here before.”

“What?” Brightness overwhelmed her vision, simplified Buchanan to a dark silhouette in a baseball cap.

“You parlez the français pretty well. I figure you must’ve spent some time—what? In college? Some kind of study-abroad deal?”

“Nope,” Vasquez said.

“Nope, what?”

“I’ve never been to Paris. Hell, before I enlisted, the farthest I’d ever been from home was the class trip to Washington senior year.”

“You’re shittin’ me.”

“Uh-uh. Don’t get me wrong: I wanted to see Paris, London—everything. But the money—the money wasn’t there. The closest I came to all this were the movies in Madame Antosca’s French 4 class. It was one of the reasons I joined up: I figured I’d see the world and let the army pay for it.”

“How’d that work out for you?”

“We’re here, aren’t we?”

“Not because of the army.”

“No, precisely because of the army. Well,” she said, “them and the spooks.”

“You still think Mr.—oh, sorry—You-Know-Who was CIA?”

Frowning, Vasquez lowered her voice. “Who knows? I’m not even sure he was one of ours. That accent … He could’ve been working for the Brits, or the Aussies. He could’ve been Russian, back in town to settle a few scores. Wherever he picked up his pronunciation, dude was not regular military.”

“Be funny if he was on Stillwater’s payroll.”

“Hysterical,” Vasquez said. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“I assume this is your first trip to Paris.”

“And there’s where you would be wrong.”

“Now you’re shittin’ me.”

“Why, because I ordered a cheeseburger and a Coke?”

“Among other things, yeah.”

“My senior-class trip was a week in Paris and Amsterdam. In college, the end of my sophomore year, my parents took me to France for a month.” At what she knew must be the look on her face, Buchanan added, “It was an attempt at breaking up the relationship I was in at the time.”

“It’s not that. I’m trying to process the thought of you in college.”

“Wow, anyone ever tell you what a laugh riot you are?”

“Did it work—your parents’ plan?”

Buchanan shook his head. “The second I was back in the US, I knocked her up. We were married by the end of the summer.”

“How romantic.”

“Hey.” Buchanan shrugged.

“That why you enlisted, support your new family?”

“More or less. Heidi’s dad owned a bunch of McDonald’s; for the first six months of our marriage, I tried to assistant manage one of them.”

“With your people skills, that must have been a match made in heaven.”

The retort forming on Buchanan’s lips was cut short by the reappearance of their waiter, encumbered with their drinks and their food. He set their plates before them with a madame and m’sieu, then, as he was distributing their drinks, said, “Everything is okay? Ça va?”

“Oui,” Vasquez said. “C’est bon. Merçi.”

With the slightest of bows, the waiter left them to their food.

While Buchanan worked his hands around his cheeseburger, Vasquez said, “I don’t think I realized you were married.”

“Were,” Buchanan said. “She wasn’t happy about my deploying in the first place, and when the shit hit the fan …” He bit into the burger. Through a mouthful of bun and meat, he said, “The court-martial was the excuse she needed. Couldn’t handle the shame, she said. The humiliation of being married to one of the guards who’d tortured an innocent man to death. What kind of role model would I be for our son?

“I tried—I tried to tell her it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t that—you know what I’m talking about.”

Vasquez studied her neatly folded crêpe. “Yeah.” Mr. White had favored a flint knife for what he called the delicate work.

“If that’s what she wants, fine, fuck her. But she made it so I can’t see my son. The second she decided we were splitting up, there was her dad with money for a lawyer. I get a call from this asshole—this is right in the middle of the court-martial—and he tells me Heidi’s filing for divorce—no surprise—and they’re going to make it easy for me: no alimony, no child support, nothing. The only catch is, I have to sign away all my rights to Sam. If I don’t, they’re fully prepared to go to court, and how do I like my chances in front of a judge? What choice did I have?”

Vasquez tasted her coffee. She saw her mother, holding open the front door for her, unable to meet her eyes.

“Bad enough about that poor bastard who died—what was his name? If there’s one thing you’d think I’d know …”

“Mahbub Ali,” Vasquez said. What kind of a person are you? her father had shouted. What kind of person is part of such things?

“Mahbub Ali,” Buchanan said. “Bad enough what happened to him; I just wish I’d known what was happening to the rest of us, as well.”

They ate the rest of their meal in silence. When the waiter returned to ask if they wanted dessert, they declined.

—

II

Vasquez had compiled a list of reasons for crossing the avenue and walking to the Eiffel Tower, from It’s an open, crowded space—it’s a better place to review the plan’s details, to I want to see the fucking Eiffel Tower once before I die, okay? But Buchanan agreed to her proposal without argument; nor did he complain about the fifteen euros she spent on a pair of sunglasses on the walk there. Did she need to ask to know he was back in the concrete room they’d called the Closet, its air full of the stink of fear and piss?

Herself, she was doing her best not to think about the chamber under the prison’s subbasement Just-Call-Me-Bill had taken her to. This was maybe a week after the tall, portly man she knew for a fact was CIA had started spending every waking moment with Mr. White. Vasquez had followed Bill down poured-concrete stairs that led from the labyrinth of the basement and its handful of high-value captives in their scattered cells (not to mention the Closet, whose precise location she’d been unable to fix) to the subbasement, where he had clicked on the large yellow flashlight he was carrying. Its beam had ranged over brick walls, an assortment of junk (some of it Soviet-era aircraft parts, some of it tools to repair those parts, some of it more recent: stacks of toilet paper, boxes of plastic cutlery, a pair of hospital gurneys). They had made their way through that place to a low doorway that opened on carved stone steps whose curved surfaces testified to the passage of generations of feet. All the time, Just-Call-Me-Bill had been talking, lecturing, detailing the history of the prison, from its time as a repair center for the aircraft the Soviets flew in and out of here, until some KGB officer decided the building was perfect for housing prisoners, a change everyone who subsequently held possession of it had maintained. Vasquez had struggled to pay attention, especially as they had descended the last set of stairs and the air grew warm, moist, the rock to either side of her damp. Before, the CIA operative was saying. Oh, before. Did you know a detachment of Alexander the Great’s army stopped here? One man returned.

The stairs had ended in a wide, circular area. The roof was flat, low, the walls no more than shadowy suggestions. Just-Call-Me-Bill’s flashlight had roamed the floor, picked out a symbol incised in the rock at their feet: a rough circle, the diameter of a manhole cover, broken at about eight o’clock. Its circumference was stained black, its interior a map of dark brown splotches. Hold this, he had said, passing her the flashlight, which had occupied her for the two or three seconds it took him to remove a plastic baggie from one of the pockets of his safari vest. When Vasquez had directed the light at him, he was dumping the bag’s contents in his right hand, tugging at the plastic with his left to pull it away from the dull red wad. The stink of blood and meat on the turn had made her step back. Steady, specialist. The bag’s contents had landed inside the broken circle with a heavy, wet smack. Vasquez had done her best not to study it too closely.

A sound, the scrape of bare flesh dragging over stone, from behind and to her left, had spun Vasquez around, the flashlight held out to blind, her sidearm freed and following the light’s path. This section of the curving wall opened in a black arch like the top of an enormous throat. For a moment, that space had been full of a great, pale figure. Vasquez had had a confused impression of hands large as tires grasping either side of the arch, a boulder of a head, its mouth gaping amidst a frenzy of beard, its eyes vast, idiot. It was scrambling toward her; she didn’t know where to aim—

And then Mr. White had been standing in the archway, dressed in the white linen suit that somehow always seemed stained, even though no discoloration was visible on any of it. He had not blinked at the flashlight beam stabbing his face; nor had he appeared to judge Vasquez’s gun pointing at him of much concern. Muttering an apology, Vasquez had lowered gun and light immediately. Mr. White had ignored her, strolling across the round chamber to the foot of the stairs, which he had climbed quickly. Just-Call-Me-Bill had hurried after, a look on his bland face that Vasquez took for amusement. She had brought up the rear, sweeping the flashlight over the floor as she reached the lowest step. The broken circle had been empty, except for a red smear that shone in the light.

That she had momentarily hallucinated, Vasquez had not once doubted. Things with Mr. White already had raced past what even Just-Call-Me-Bill had shown them, and however effective his methods, Vasquez was afraid that she—that all of them had finally gone too far, crossed over into truly bad territory. Combined with a mild claustrophobia, it had caused her to fill the dark space with a nightmare. However reasonable that explanation, the shape with which her mind had replaced Mr. White had plagued her. Had she seen the devil stepping forward on his goat’s feet, one red hand using his pitchfork to balance himself, it would have made more sense than that giant form. It was as if her subconscious was telling her more about Mr. White than she understood. Prior to that trip, Vasquez had not been at ease around the man who never seemed to speak so much as to have spoken, so that you knew what he’d said even though you couldn’t remember hearing him saying it. After, she gave him a still-wider berth.

Ahead, the Eiffel Tower swept up into the sky. Vasquez had seen it from a distance, at different points along her and Buchanan’s journey from their hotel toward the Seine, but the closer she drew to it, the less real it seemed. It was as if the very solidity of the beams and girders weaving together were evidence of their falseness. I am seeing the Eiffel Tower, she told herself. I am actually looking at the goddamn Eiffel Tower.

“Here you are,” Buchanan said. “Happy?”

“Something like that.”

The great square under the tower was full of tourists—from the sound of it, the majority of them groups of Americans and Italians. Nervous men wearing untucked shirts over their jeans flitted from group to group—street vendors, Vasquez realized, each one carrying an oversized ring strung with metal replicas of the tower. A pair of gendarmes, their hands draped over the machine guns slung high on their chests, let their eyes roam the crowd while they carried on a conversation. In front of each of the tower’s legs, lines of people waiting for the chance to ascend it doubled and redoubled back on themselves, enormous fans misting water over them. Taking Buchanan’s arm, Vasquez steered them toward the nearest fan. Eyebrows raised, he tilted his head toward her.

“Ambient noise,” she said.

“Whatever.”

Once they were close enough to the fan’s propeller drone, Vasquez leaned into Buchanan. “Go with this,” she said.

“You’re the boss.” Buchanan gazed up, a man debating whether he wanted to climb that high.

“I’ve been thinking,” Vasquez said. “Plowman’s plan is shit.”

“Oh?” He pointed at the tower’s first level, three hundred feet above.

Nodding, Vasquez said, “We approach Mr. White, and he’s just going to agree to come with us to the elevator.”

Buchanan dropped his hand. “Well, we do have our … persuaders. How do you like that? Was it cryptic enough? Or should I have said guns?”

Vasquez smiled as if Buchanan had uttered an endearing remark. “You really think Mr. White is going to be impressed by a pair of .22s?”

“A bullet’s a bullet. Besides,” Buchanan returned her smile, “isn’t the plan for us not to have to use the guns? Aren’t we relying on him remembering us?”

“It’s not like we were BFFs. If it were me, and I wanted the guy, and I had access to Stillwater’s resources, I wouldn’t be wasting my time on a couple of convicted criminals. I’d put together a team and go get him. Besides, twenty grand apiece for catching up to someone outside his hotel room, passing a couple of words with him, then escorting him to an elevator: tell me that doesn’t sound too good to be true.”

“You know the way these big companies work: they’re all about throwing money around. Your problem is, you’re still thinking like a soldier.”

“Even so, why spend it on us?”

“Maybe Plowman feels bad about everything. Maybe this is his way of making it up to us.”

“Plowman? Seriously?”

Buchanan shook his head. “This isn’t that complicated.”

Vasquez closed her eyes. “Humor me.” She leaned her head against Buchanan’s chest.

“What have I been doing?”

“We’re a feint. While we’re distracting Mr. White, Plowman’s up to something else.”

“Like?”

“Maybe Mr. White has something in his room; maybe we’re occupying him while Plowman’s retrieving it.”

“You know there are easier ways for Plowman to steal something.”

“Maybe we’re keeping Mr. White in place so Plowman can pull a hit on him.”

“Again, there are simpler ways to do that that would have nothing to do with us. You knock on the guy’s door, he opens it, pow.”

“What if we’re supposed to get caught in the crossfire?”

“You bring us all the way here just to kill us?”

“Didn’t you say big companies like to spend money?”

“But why take us out in the first place?”

Vasquez raised her head and opened her eyes. “How many of the people who knew Mr. White are still in circulation?”

“There’s Just-Call-Me-Bill—”

“You think. He’s CIA. We don’t know what happened to him.”

“Okay. There’s you, me, Plowman—”

“Go on.”

Buchanan paused, reviewing, Vasquez knew, the fates of the three other guards who’d assisted Mr. White with his work in the Closet. Long before news had broken about Mahbub Ali’s death, Lavalle had sat on the edge of his bunk, placed his gun in his mouth, and squeezed the trigger. Then, when the shit storm had started, Maxwell, on patrol, had been stabbed in the neck by an insurgent who’d targeted only him. Finally, in the holding cell awaiting his court-martial, Ruiz had taken advantage of a lapse in his jailers’ attention to strip off his pants, twist them into a rope, and hang himself from the top bunk of his cell’s bunkbed. His guards had cut him down in time to save his life, but Ruiz had deprived his brain of oxygen for sufficient time to leave him a vegetable. When Buchanan spoke, he said, “Coincidence.”

“Or conspiracy.”

“Goddamn it.” Buchanan pulled free of Vasquez, and headed for the long, rectangular park that stretched behind the tower, speed walking. His legs were sufficiently long that she had to jog to catch up to him. Buchanan did not slacken his pace, continuing his straight line up the middle of the park, through the midst of bemused picnickers. “Jesus Christ,” Vasquez called, “will you slow down?”

He would not. Heedless of oncoming traffic, Buchanan led her across a pair of roads that traversed the park. Horns blaring, tires screaming, cars swerved around them. At this rate, Vasquez thought, Plowman’s motives won’t matter. Once they were safely on the grass again, she sped up until she was beside him, then reached high on the underside of Buchanan’s right arm, not far from the armpit, and pinched as hard as she could.

“Ow! Shit!” Yanking his arm up and away, Buchanan stopped. Rubbing his skin, he said, “What the hell, Vasquez?”

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Walking. What did it look like?”

“Running away.”

“Fuck you.”

“Fuck you, you candy-ass pussy.”

Buchanan’s eyes flared.

“I’m trying to work this shit out so we can stay alive. You’re so concerned about seeing your son, maybe you’d want to help me.”

“Why are you doing this?” Buchanan said. “Why are you fucking with my head? Why are you trying to fuck this up?”

“I’m—”

“There’s nothing to work out. We’ve got a job to do; we do it; we get the rest of our money. We do the job well, there’s a chance Stillwater’ll add us to their payroll. That happens—I’m making that kind of money—I hire myself a pit bull of a lawyer and sic him on fucking Heidi. You want to live in goddamn Paris, you can eat a croissant for breakfast every morning.”

“You honestly believe that.”

“Yes, I do.”

Vasquez held his gaze, but who was she kidding? She could count on one finger the number of stare downs she’d won. Her arms, legs, everything felt suddenly, incredibly heavy. She looked at her watch. “Come on,” she said, starting in the direction of the Avenue de la Bourdonnais. “We can catch a cab.”

—

III

Plowman had insisted they meet him at an airport café before they set foot outside de Gaulle. At the end of those ten minutes, which had consisted of Plowman asking details of their flight and instructing them how to take the RUR to the Metro to the stop nearest their hotel, he had passed Vasquez a card for a restaurant, where, he had said, the three of them would reconvene at 3:00 p.m. local time to review the evening’s plans. Vasquez had been relieved to see Plowman seated at a table outside the café. Despite the ten thousand dollars gathering interest in her checking account, the plane ticket that had been FedExed to her apartment, followed by the receipt for four nights’ stay at the Hôtel Resnais, she had been unable to shake the sense that none of this was as it appeared, that it was the setup to an elaborate joke whose punch line would come at her expense. Plowman’s solid form, dressed in a black suit whose tailored lines announced the upward shift in his pay grade, had confirmed that everything he had told her the afternoon he had sought her out at Andersen’s farm had been true.

Or true enough to quiet momentarily the misgivings that had whispered ever louder in her ears the last two weeks, to the point that she had held her cell open in her left hand, the piece of paper with Plowman’s number on it in her right, ready to call him and say she was out, he could have his money back, she hadn’t spent any of it. During the long, hot train ride from the airport to the Metro station, when Buchanan had complained about Plowman not letting them out of his sight, treating them like goddamn kids, Vasquez had found an explanation on her lips. It’s probably the first time he’s run an operation like this, she had said. He wants to be sure he dots all his i’s and crosses all his t’s. Buchanan had harrumphed, but it was true: Plowman obsessed over the minutiae; it was one of the reasons he’d been in charge of their detail at the prison. Until the shit had buried the fan, that attentiveness had seemed to forecast his steady climb up the chain of command. At his court-martial, however, his enthusiasm for exact strikes on prisoner nerve clusters, his precision in placing arm restraints so that a prisoner’s shoulders would not dislocate when he was hoisted off the floor by his bonds, and his speed in obtaining the various surgical and dental instruments Just-Call-Me-Bill requested had been counted liabilities rather than assets, and he had been the only one of their group to serve substantial time at Leavenworth—ten months.

Still, the Walther that Vasquez had requested had been waiting where Plowman had promised it would be, wrapped with an extra clip in a waterproof bag secured inside the tank of her hotel room’s toilet. A thorough inspection had reassured her that all was in order with the gun, its ammunition. If he were setting her up, would Plowman have wanted to arm her? Her proficiency at the target range had been well known, and while she hadn’t touched a gun since her discharge, she had no doubts of her ability. Tucked within the back of her jeans, draped by her blouse, the pistol was easily accessible.

That’s assuming, of course, that Plowman’s even there tonight. But the caution was a formality. Plowman being Plowman, there was no way he was not going to be at Mr. White’s hotel. Was there any need for him to have made the trip to West Virginia, to have tracked her to Andersen’s farm, to have sought her out in the far barns, where she’d been using a high-pressure hose to sluice pig shit into gutters? An e-mail, a phone call would have sufficed. Such methods, however, would have left too much outside Plowman’s immediate control, and since he appeared able to dunk his bucket into a well of cash deeper than any she’d known, he had decided to find Vasquez and speak to her directly. (He’d done the same with Buchanan, she’d learned on the flight over, tracking him to the suburb of Chicago where he’d been shift manager at Hardee’s.) If the man had gone to such lengths to persuade them to take the job, if he had been there to meet them at Charles de Gaulle and was waiting for them even now, as their taxi crossed the Seine and headed toward the Champs Élysées, was there any chance he wouldn’t be present later on?

Of course, he wouldn’t be alone. Plowman would have the reassurance of God only knew how many Stillwater employees—which was to say, mercenaries (no doubt, heavily armed and armored)—backing him up. Vasquez hadn’t had much to do with the company’s personnel; they tended to roost closer to the center of Kabul, where the high-value targets they guarded huddled. Iraq: that was where Stillwater’s boot print was the deepest. From what Vasquez had heard, the former soldiers riding the reinforced Lincoln Navigators through Baghdad not only made about five times what they had in the military; they followed rules of engagement that were, to put it mildly, less robust. While Paris was as far east as she was willing to travel, she had to admit, the prospect of that kind of money made Baghdad, if not appealing, at least less unappealing.

And what would Dad have to say to that? No matter that his eyes were failing, the center of his vision consumed by macular degeneration; her father had lost none of his passion for the news, employing a standing magnifier to aid him as he pored over the day’s New York Times and Washington Post, sitting in his favorite chair listening to All Things Considered on WVPN, even venturing online to the BBC using the computer whose monitor settings she had adjusted for him before she’d deployed. Her father would not have missed the reports of Stillwater’s involvement in several incidents in Iraq that were less shootouts than turkey shoots, not to mention the ongoing Congressional inquiry into their policing of certain districts of post–Katrina and Rita New Orleans, as well as an event in upstate New York last summer, when one of their employees had taken a camping trip that had left two of his three companions dead under what could best be described as suspicious circumstances. She could hear his words, heavy with the accent that had accreted as he’d aged: Was this why I suffered in the Villa Grimaldi? So my daughter could join the Caravana de la Muerte? The same question he’d asked her the first night she’d returned home.

All the same, it wasn’t as if his opinion of her was going to drop any further. If I’m damned, she thought, I might as well get paid for it.

That said, she was in no hurry to certify her ultimate destination, which returned her to the problem of Plowman and his plan. You would have expected the press of the .22 against the small of her back to have been reassuring, but instead, it only emphasized her sense of powerlessness, as if Plowman were so confident, so secure, he could allow her whatever firearm she wanted.

The cab turned onto the Champs Élysées. Ahead, the Arc de Triomphe squatted in the distance. Another monument to cross off the list.

—

IV

The restaurant whose card Plowman had handed her was located on one of the side streets about halfway to the arch; Vasquez and Buchanan departed their cab at the street’s corner and walked the hundred yards to a door flanked by man-sized plaster Chinese dragons. Buchanan brushed past the black-suited host and his welcome; smiling and murmuring, “Pardonnez, nous avons un rendez-vous içi,” Vasquez pursued him into the dim interior. Up a short flight of stairs, Buchanan strode across a floor that glowed with pale light—glass, Vasquez saw, thick squares suspended over shimmering aquamarine. A carp the size of her forearm darted underneath her, and she realized that she was standing on top of an enormous, shallow fish tank, brown and white and orange carp racing one another across its bottom, jostling the occasional slower turtle. With one exception, the tables supported by the glass were empty. Too late, Vasquez supposed, for lunch, and too early for dinner. Or maybe the food here wasn’t that good.

His back to the far wall, Plowman was seated at a table directly in front of her. Already, Buchanan was lowering himself into a chair opposite him. Stupid, Vasquez thought at the expanse of his unguarded back. Her boots clacked on the glass. She moved around the table to sit beside Plowman, who had exchanged the dark suit in which he’d greeted them at de Gaulle for a tan jacket over a cream shirt and slacks. His outfit caught the light filtering from below them and held it in as a dull sheen. A metal bowl filled with dumplings was centered on the table mat before him; to its right, a slice of lemon floated at the top of a glass of clear liquid. Plowman’s eyebrow raised as she settled beside him, but he did not comment on her choice; instead, he said, “You’re here.”

Vasquez’s yes was overridden by Buchanan’s “We are, and there are some things we need cleared up.”

Vasquez stared at him. Plowman said, “Oh?”

“That’s right,” Buchanan said. “We’ve been thinking, and this plan of yours doesn’t add up.”

“Really.” The tone of Plowman’s voice did not change.

“Really,” Buchanan nodded.

“Would you care to explain to me exactly how it doesn’t add up?”

“You expect Vasquez and me to believe you spent all this money so the two of us can have a five-minute conversation with Mr. White?”

Vasquez flinched.

“There’s a little bit more to it than that.”

“We’re supposed to persuade him to walk twenty feet with us to an elevator.”

“Actually, it’s seventy-four feet, three inches.”

“Whatever.” Buchanan glanced at Vasquez. She looked away. To the wall to her right, water chuckled down a series of small rock terraces and through an opening in the floor into the fish tank.

“No, not whatever, Buchanan. Seventy-four feet, three inches,” Plowman said. “This is why the biggest responsibility you confront each day is lifting the fry basket out of the hot oil when the buzzer tells you to. You don’t pay attention to the little things.”

The host was standing at Buchanan’s elbow, his hands clasped over a pair of long menus. Plowman nodded at him, and he passed the menus to Vasquez and Buchanan. Inclining toward them, the host said, “May I bring you drinks while you decide your order?”

His eyes on the menu, Buchanan said, “Water.”

“Moi aussi,” Vasquez said. “Merçi.”

“Nice accent,” Plowman said when the host had left.

“Thanks.”

“I don’t think I realized you speak French.”

Vasquez shrugged. “Wasn’t any call for it, was there?”

“Anything else?” Plowman said. “Spanish?”

“I understand more than I can speak.”

“Your folks were from—where, again?”

“Chile,” Vasquez said. “My dad. My mom’s American, but her parents were from Argentina.”

“That’s useful to know.”

“For when Stillwater hires her,” Buchanan said.

“Yes,” Plowman answered. “The company has projects underway in a number of places where fluency in French and Spanish would be an asset.”

“Such as?”

“One thing at a time,” Plowman said. “Let’s get through tonight, first, and then you can worry about your next assignment.”

“And what’s that going to be,” Buchanan said, “another twenty K to walk someone to an elevator?”

“I doubt it’ll be anything so mundane,” Plowman said. “I also doubt it’ll pay as little as twenty thousand.”

“Look,” Vasquez started to say, but the host had returned with their water. Once he deposited their glasses on the table, he withdrew a pad and pen from his jacket pocket and took Buchanan’s order of crispy duck and Vasquez’s of steamed dumplings. After he had retrieved the menus and gone, Plowman turned to Vasquez and said, “You were saying?”

“It’s just—what Buchanan’s trying to say is, it’s a lot, you know? If you’d offered us, I don’t know, say five hundred bucks apiece to come here and play escort, that still would’ve been a lot, but it wouldn’t—I mean, twenty thousand dollars, plus the airfare, the hotel, the expense account. It seems too much for what you’re asking us to do. Can you understand that?”

Plowman shook his head yes. “I can. I can understand how strange it might appear to offer this kind of money for this length of service, but …” He raised his drink to his lips. When he lowered his arm, the glass was half-drained. “Mr. White is … to say he’s high value doesn’t begin to cover it. The guy’s been around—he’s been around. Talk about a font of information: the stuff this guy’s forgotten would be enough for a dozen careers. What he remembers will give whoever can get him to share it with them permanent tactical advantage.”

“No such thing,” Buchanan said. “No matter how much the guy says he knows—”

“Yes, yes,” Plowman held up his hand like a traffic cop. “Trust me. He’s high value.”

“But won’t the spooks—what’s Just-Call-Me-Bill have to say about this?” Vasquez said.

“Bill’s dead.”

Simultaneously, Buchanan said, “Huh,” and Vasquez, “What? How?”

“I don’t know. When my bosses green-lighted me for this, Bill was the first person I thought of. I wasn’t sure if he was still with the agency, so I did some checking around. I couldn’t find out much—goddamn spooks keep their mouths shut—but I was able to determine that Bill was dead. It sounded like it might’ve been that chopper crash in Helmand, but that’s a guess. To answer your question, Vasquez, Bill didn’t have a whole lot to say.”

“Shit,” Buchanan said.

“Okay,” Vasquez exhaled. “Okay. Was he the only one who knew about Mr. White?”

“I find it hard to believe he was,” Plowman said, “but thus far, no one’s nibbled at any of the bait I’ve left out. I’m surprised; I’ll admit it. But it makes our job that much simpler, so I’m not complaining.”

“All right,” Vasquez said, “but the money—”

His eyes alight, Plowman leaned forward. “To get my hands on Mr. White, I would have paid each of you ten times as much. That’s how important this operation is. Whatever we have to shell out now is nothing compared to what we’re going to gain from this guy.”

“Now you tell us,” Buchanan said.

Plowman smiled and relaxed back. “Well, the bean counters do appreciate it when you can control costs.” He turned to Vasquez. “Well? Have your concerns been addressed?”

“Hey,” Buchanan said, “I was the one asking the questions.”

“Please,” Plowman said. “I was in charge of you, remember? Whatever your virtues, Buchanan, original thought is not among them.”

“What about Mr. White?” Vasquez said. “Suppose he doesn’t want to come with you?”

“I don’t imagine he will,” Plowman said. “Nor do I expect him to be terribly interested in assisting us once he is in our custody. That’s okay.” Plowman picked up one of the chopsticks alongside his plate, turned it in his hand, and jabbed it into a dumpling. He lifted the dumpling to his mouth; momentarily, Vasquez pictured a giant bringing its teeth together on a human head. While he chewed, Plowman said, “To be honest, I hope the son of a bitch is feeling especially stubborn. Because of him, I lost everything that was good in my life. Because of that fucker, I did time in prison—fucking prison.” Plowman swallowed, speared another dumpling. “Believe me when I say, Mr. White and I have a lot of quality time coming.”

Beneath them, a half-dozen carp that had been floating lazily scattered.

—

V

Buchanan was all for finding Mr. White’s hotel and parking themselves in its lobby. “What?” Vasquez said. “Behind a couple of newspapers?” Stuck in traffic on what should have been the short way to the Concorde Opéra, where Mr. White had the junior suite, their cab was full of the reek of exhaust, the low rumble of the cars surrounding them.

“Sure, yeah, that’d work.”

“Jesus—and I’m the one who’s seen too many movies?”

“What?” Buchanan said.

“Number one, at this rate, it’ll be at least six before we get there. How many people sit around reading the day’s paper at night? The whole point of the news is, it’s new.”

“Maybe we’re on vacation.”

“Doesn’t matter. We’ll still stick out. And number two, even if the lobby’s full of tourists holding newspapers up in front of their faces, Plowman’s plan doesn’t kick in until eleven. You telling me no one’s going to notice the same two people sitting there, doing the same thing, for five hours? For all we know, Mr. White’ll see us on his way out and coming back.”

“Once again, Vasquez, you’re overthinking this. People don’t see what they don’t expect to see. Mr. White isn’t expecting us in the lobby of his plush hotel; ergo, he won’t notice us there.”

“Are you kidding? This isn’t people. This is Mr. White.”

“Get a grip. He eats, shits, and sleeps, same as you and me.”

For the briefest of instants, the window over Buchanan’s shoulder was full of the enormous face Vasquez had glimpsed (hallucinated) in the caves under the prison. Not for the first time, she was struck by the crudeness of the features, as if a sculptor had hurriedly struck out the approximation of a human visage on a piece of rock already formed to suggest it.

Taking her silence as further disagreement, Buchanan sighed and said, “All right. Tell you what: a big, tony hotel, there’s gotta be all kinds of stores around it, right? Long as we don’t go too far, we’ll do some shopping.”

“Fine,” Vasquez said. When Buchanan had settled back in his seat, she said, “So. You satisfied with Plowman’s answers?”

“Aw, no, not this again …”

“I’m just asking a question.”

“No, what you’re asking is called a leading question, as in, leading me to think that Plowman didn’t really say anything to us, and we don’t know anything more now than we did before our meeting.”

“You learned something from that?”

Buchanan nodded. “You bet I did. I learned that Plowman has a hard-on for Mr. White the size of your fucking Eiffel Tower, from which I deduce that anyone who helps him satisfy himself stands to benefit enormously.” As the cab lurched forward, Buchanan said, “Am I wrong?”

“No,” Vasquez said. “It’s—”

“What? What is it, now?”

“I don’t know.” She looked out her window at the cars creeping along beside them.

“Well, that’s helpful.”

“Forget it.”

For once, Buchanan chose not to pursue the argument. Beyond the car to their right, Vasquez watched men and women walking past the windows of ground-level businesses, tech stores and clothing stores and a bookstore and an office whose purpose she could not identify. Over their wrought-iron balconies, the windows of the apartments above showed the late-afternoon sky, its blue deeper, as if hardened by a day of the sun’s baking. Because of him, I lost everything that was good in my life. Because of that fucker, I did time in prison—fucking prison. Plowman’s declaration sounded in her ears. Insofar as the passion on his face authenticated his words, and so the purpose of their mission, his brief monologue should have been reassuring. And yet, and yet …

In the moment before he drove his fist into a prisoner’s solar plexus, Plowman’s features, distorted and red from the last hour’s interrogation, would relax. The effect was startling, as if a layer of heavy makeup had melted off his skin. In the subsequent stillness of his face, Vasquez initially had read Plowman’s actual emotion, a clinical detachment from the pain he was preparing to inflict that was based in his utter contempt for the man standing in front of him. While his mouth would stretch with his screams to the prisoner to Get up! Get the fuck up! in the second after his blow had dropped the man to the concrete floor, and while his mouth and eyes would continue to express the violence his fists and boots were concentrating on the prisoner’s back, his balls, his throat, there would be other moments, impossible to predict, when, as he was shuffle-stepping away from a kick to the prisoner’s kidney, Plowman’s face would slip into that nonexpression, and Vasquez would think that she had seen through to the real man.

Then, the week after Plowman had brought Vasquez onboard what he had named the White Detail, she’d found herself sitting through a Steven Seagal double feature—not her first or even tenth choice for a way to pass three hours, but it beat lying on her bunk thinking, Why are you so shocked? You knew what Plowman was up to—everyone knows. An hour into The Patriot, the vague sensation that had been nagging at her from Seagal’s first scene crystallized into recognition: that the blank look with which the actor met every ebb and flow in the drama was the same as the one that Vasquez had caught on Plowman’s face—was, she understood, its original. For the remainder of that film and the duration of the next (Belly of the Beast), Vasquez had stared at the undersized screen in a kind of horrified fascination, unable to decide which was worse: to be serving under a man whose affect suggested a sociopath, or to be serving under a man who was playing the lead role in a private movie.

How many days after that had Just-Call-Me-Bill arrived? No more than two, she was reasonably sure. He had come, he told the White Detail, because their efforts with particularly recalcitrant prisoners had not gone unnoticed, and his superiors judged it would be beneficial for him to share his knowledge of enhanced interrogation techniques with them—and no doubt, they had some things to teach him. His back ramrod straight, his face alight, Plowman had barked his enthusiasm for their collaboration.

After that, it had been learning the restraints that would cause the prisoner maximum discomfort, expose him (or occasionally, her) to optimum harm. It was hoisting the prisoner off the ground first without dislocating his shoulders, then with. Waterboarding, yes, together with the repurposing of all manner of daily objects, from nail files to pliers to dental floss. Each case was different. Of course you couldn’t believe any of the things the prisoners said when they were turned over to you, their protestations of innocence. But even after it appeared you’d broken them, you couldn’t be sure they weren’t engaged in a more subtle deception, acting as if you’d succeeded in order to preserve the truly valuable information. For this reason, it was necessary to keep the interrogation open, to continue to revisit those prisoners who swore they’d told you everything they knew. These people are not like you and me, Just-Call-Me-Bill had said, confirming the impression that had dogged Vasquez when she’d walked patrol, past women draped in white or slate burqas, men whose pokool proclaimed their loyalty to the mujahideen. These are not a reasonable people, Bill went on. You cannot sit down and talk to them, come to an understanding with them. They would rather fly an airplane into a building full of innocent women and men. They would rather strap a bomb to their daughter and send her to give you a hug. They get their hands on a nuke, and there’ll be a mushroom cloud where Manhattan used to be. What they understand is pain. Enough suffering, and their tongues will loosen.

Vasquez could not pin down the exact moment Mr. White had joined their group. When he had shouldered his way past Lavalle and Maxwell, his left hand up to stop Plowman from tilting the prisoner backward, Just-Call-Me-Bill from pouring the water onto the man’s hooded face, she had thought, Who the hell? And, as quickly, Oh—Mr. White. He must have been with them for some time for Plowman to upright the prisoner, Bill to lower the bucket and step back. The flint knife in his right hand, its edge so fine you could feel it pressing against your bare skin, had not been unexpected. Nor had what had followed.

It was Mr. White who had suggested they transfer their operations to the Closet, a recommendation Just-Call-Me-Bill had been happy to embrace. Plowman, at first, had been noncommittal. Mr. White’s … call it his taking a more active hand in their interrogations … had led to him and Bill spending increased time together. Ruiz had asked the CIA man what he was doing with the man whose suit, while seemingly filthy, was never touched by any of the blood that slicked his knife, his hands. Education, Just-Call-Me-Bill had answered. Our friend is teaching me all manner of things.

As he was instructing the rest of them, albeit in more indirect fashion. Vasquez had learned that her father’s stories of the Villa Grimaldi, which he had withheld from her until she was fifteen, when over the course of the evening after her birthday she had been first incredulous, then horrified, then filled with righteous fury on his behalf, had little bearing on her duties in the Closet. Her father had been an innocent man, a poet, for God’s sake, picked up by Pinochet’s Caravana de la Muerte because they were engaged in a program of terrorizing their own populace. The men (and occasional women) at whose interrogations she assisted were terrorists themselves, spiritual kin to the officers who had scarred her father’s arms, his chest, his back, his thighs, who had scored his mind with nightmares from which he still fled screaming, decades later. They were not like you and me, and that difference authorized and legitimized whatever was required to start them talking.

By the time Mahbub Ali was hauled into the Closet, Vasquez had learned other things, too. She had learned that it was possible to concentrate pain on a single part of the body, to the point that the prisoner grew to hate that part of himself for the agony focused there. She had learned that it was preferable to work slowly, methodically—religiously, was how she thought of it, though this was no religion to which she’d ever been exposed. This was a faith rooted in the most fundamental truth Mr. White taught her, taught all of them—namely, that the flesh yearns for the knife, aches for the cut that will open it, relieve it of its quivering anticipation of harm. As junior member of the detail, she had not yet progressed to being allowed to work on the prisoners directly, but it didn’t matter. While she and Buchanan sliced away a prisoner’s clothes, exposed bare skin, what she saw there, a fragility, a vulnerability whose thick, salty taste filled her mouth, confirmed all of Mr. White’s lessons, every last one.

Nor was she his best student. That had been Plowman, the only one of them to whom Mr. White had entrusted his flint knife. With Just-Call-Me-Bill, Mr. White had maintained the air of a senior colleague; with the rest of them, he acted as if they were mannequins, placeholders. With Plowman, though, Mr. White was the mentor, the last practitioner of an otherwise-dead art passing his knowledge on to his chosen successor. It might have been the plot of a Steven Seagal film. And no Hollywood star could have played the eager apprentice with more enthusiasm than Plowman. While the official cause of Mahbub Ali’s death was sepsis resulting from improperly tended wounds, those missing pieces of the man had been parted from him on the edge of Mr. White’s stone blade, gripped in Plowman’s steady hand.

—

VI

Even with the clotted traffic, the cab drew up in front of the Concorde Opéra’s three sets of polished wooden doors with close to five hours to spare. While Vasquez settled with the driver, Buchanan stepped out of the cab, crossed the sidewalk, strode up three stairs, and passed through the center doors. The act distracted her enough that she forgot to ask for a receipt; by the time she remembered, the cab had accepted a trio of middle-aged women, their arms crowded with shopping bags, and pulled away. She considered chasing after it, before deciding that she could absorb the ten euros. She turned to the hotel to see the center doors open again, Buchanan standing in them next to a young man with a shaved head who was wearing navy pants and a cream tunic on whose upper left side a nametag flashed. The young man pointed across the street in front of the hotel and waved his hand back and forth, all the while talking to Buchanan, who nodded attentively. When the young man lowered his arm, Buchanan clapped him on the back, thanked him, and descended to Vasquez.

She said, “What was that about?”

“Shopping,” Buchanan said. “Come on.”

The next fifteen minutes consisted of them walking a route Vasquez wasn’t sure she could retrace, through clouds of slow-moving tourists stopping to admire some building or piece of public statuary; alongside briskly moving men and women whose ignoring those same sights marked them as locals as much as their chic haircuts, the rapid-fire French they delivered to their cell phones; past upscale boutiques and the gated entrances to equally upscale apartments. Buchanan’s route brought the two of them to a large corner building whose long windows displayed teddy bears, model planes, dollhouses. Vasquez said, “A toy store?”

“Not just a toy store,” Buchanan said. “This is the toy store. Supposed to have all kinds of stuff in it.”

“For your son.”

“Duh.”

Inside, a crowd of weary adults and overexcited children moved up and down the store’s aisles, past a mix of toys Vasquez recognized (Playmobil, groups of army vehicles, a typical assortment of stuffed animals) and others she’d never seen before (animal-headed figures she realized were Egyptian gods, replicas of round-faced cartoon characters she didn’t know, a box of a dozen figurines arranged around a cardboard mountain). Buchanan wandered up to her as she was considering this set, the box propped on her hip. “Cool,” he said, leaning forward. “What is it, like, the Greek gods?”

Vasquez resisted a sarcastic remark about the breadth of his knowledge; instead, she said, “Yeah. That’s Zeus and his crew at the top of the mountain. I’m not sure who those guys are climbing it …”

“Titans,” Buchanan said. “They were monsters who came before the gods, these kind of primal forces. Zeus defeated them, imprisoned them in the underworld. I used to know all their names: when I was a kid, I was really into myths and legends, heroes, all that shit.” He studied the toys positioned up the mountain’s sides. They were larger than the figures at its crown, overmuscled, one with an extra pair of arms, another with a snake’s head, a third with a single, glaring eye. Buchanan shook his head. “I can’t remember any of their names, now. Except for this guy,” he pointed at a figurine near the summit. “I’m pretty sure he’s Kronos.”

“Kronos?” The figure was approximately that of a man, although its arms, its legs, were slightly too long, its hands and feet oversized. Its head was surrounded by a corona of gray hair that descended into a jagged beard. The toy’s mouth had been sculpted with its mouth gaping, its eyes round, idiot. Vasquez smelled spoiled meat, felt the cardboard slipping from her grasp.

“Whoa.” Buchanan caught the box, replaced it on the shelf.

“Sorry,” Vasquez said. Mr. White had ignored her, strolling across the round chamber to the foot of the stairs, which he had climbed quickly.

“I don’t think that’s really Sam’s speed, anyway. Come on,” Buchanan said, moving down the aisle.

When they had stopped in front of a stack of remote-controlled cars, Vasquez said, “So who was Kronos?” Her voice was steady.

“What?” Buchanan said. “Oh—Kronos? He was Zeus’s father. Ate all his kids because he’d heard that one of them was going to replace him.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah. Somehow, Zeus avoided becoming dinner and overthrew the old man.”

“Did he—did Zeus kill him?”

“I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure Kronos wound up with the rest of the Titans, underground.”

“Underground? I thought you said they were in the underworld.”

“Same diff,” Buchanan said. “That’s where those guys thought the underworld was, someplace deep underground. You got to it through caves.”

“Oh.”

In the end, Buchanan decided on a large wooden castle that came with a host of knights, some on horseback, some on foot; a trio of princesses; a unicorn; and a dragon. The entire set cost two hundred and sixty euros, which struck Vasquez as wildly overpriced, but which Buchanan paid without a murmur of protest—the extravagance of the present, she understood, being the point. Buchanan refused the cashier’s offer to gift-wrap the box, and they left the store with him carrying it under his arm.

Once on the sidewalk, Vasquez said, “Not to be a bitch, but what are you planning to do with that?”

Buchanan shrugged. “I’ll think of something. Maybe the front desk’ll hold it.”

Vasquez said nothing. Although the sky still glowed blue, the light had begun to drain out of the spaces among the buildings, replaced by a darkness that was almost granular. The air was warm, soupy. As they stopped at the corner, Vasquez said, “You know, we never asked Plowman about Lavalle or Maxwell.”

“Yeah, so?”

“Just—I wish we had. He had an answer for everything else; I wouldn’t have minded hearing him explain that.”

“There’s nothing to explain,” Buchanan said.

“We’re the last ones alive—”

“Plowman’s living. So’s Mr. White.”

“Whatever—you know what I mean. Christ, even Just-Call-Me-Bill is dead. What the fuck’s up with that?”

In front of them, traffic stopped. The walk signal lighted its green man. They joined the surge across the street. “It’s a war, Vasquez,” Buchanan said. “People die in them.”

“Is that what you really believe?”

“It is.”

“What about your freak-out before, at the tower?”

“That’s exactly what it was—me freaking out.”

“Okay,” Vasquez said after a moment, “okay. Maybe Bill’s death was an accident—maybe Maxwell, too. What about Lavalle? What about Ruiz? You telling me it’s normal two guys from the same detail try to off themselves?”

“I don’t know.” Buchanan shook his head. “You know the army isn’t big on mental-health care. And let’s face it; that was some pretty fucked-up shit went on in the Closet. Not much of a surprise if Lavalle and Ruiz couldn’t handle it, is it?”

Vasquez waited another block before asking, “How do you deal with it—the Closet?”

Buchanan took one more block after that to answer: “I don’t think about it.”

“You don’t?”

“I’m not saying the thought of what we did over there never crosses my mind, but as a rule, I focus on the here and now.”

“What about the times the thought does cross your mind?”

“I tell myself it was a different place with different rules. You know what I’m talking about. You had to be there; if you weren’t, then shut the fuck up. Maybe what we did went over the line, but that’s for us to say, not some panel of officers don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground, and damn sure not some reporter never been closer to war than a goddamn showing of Platoon.” Buchanan glared. “You hear me?”

“Yeah.” How many times had she used the same arguments, or close enough, with her father? He had remained unconvinced. So only the criminals are fit to judge the crime? he had said. What a novel approach to justice. She said, “You know what I hate, though? It isn’t that people look at me funny—Oh, it’s her—it isn’t even the few who run up to me in the supermarket and tell me what a disgrace I am. It’s like you said: they weren’t there, so fuck ’em. What gets me are the ones who come up to you and tell you, ‘Good job, you fixed them Ay-rabs right,’ the crackers who wouldn’t have anything to do with someone like me, otherwise.”

“Even crackers can be right, sometimes,” Buchanan said.

—

VII

Mr. White’s room was on the sixth floor, at the end of a short corridor that lay around a sharp left turn. The door to the junior suite appeared unremarkable, but it was difficult to be sure, since both the bulbs in the wall sconces on either side of the corridor were out. Vasquez searched for a light switch and, when she could not find one, said, “Either they’re blown, or the switch is inside his room.”

Buchanan, who had been unsuccessful in convincing the woman at the front desk to watch his son’s present, was busy fitting it beneath one of the chairs to the right of the elevator door.

“Did you hear me?” Vasquez asked.

“Yeah.”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“I don’t like it. Our visibility’s fucked. He opens the door, the light’s behind him, in our faces. He turns on the hall lights, and we’re blind.”

“For, like, a second.”

“That’s more than enough time for Mr. White to do something.”

“Will you listen to yourself?”

“You saw what he could do with that knife.”

“All right,” Buchanan said, “how do you propose we deal with this?”

Vasquez paused. “You knock on the door. I’ll stand a couple of feet back with my gun in my pocket. If things go pear shaped, I’ll be in a position to take him out.”

“How come I have to knock on the door?”

“Because he liked you better.”

“Bullshit.”

“He did. He treated me like I wasn’t there.”

“That was the way Mr. White was with everyone.”

“Not you.”

Holding his hands up, Buchanan said, “Fine. Dude creeps you out so much, it’s probably better I’m the one talking to him.” He checked his watch. “Five minutes till showtime. Or should I say, ‘T minus five and counting,’ something like that?”

“Of all the things I’m going to miss about working with you, your sense of humor’s going to be at the top of the list.”

“No sign of Plowman, yet.” Buchanan checked the panel next to the elevator, which showed it on the third floor.

“He’ll be here at precisely eleven ten.”

“No doubt.”

“Well …” Vasquez turned away from Buchanan.

“Wait—where are you going? There’s still four minutes on the clock.”

“Good. It’ll give our eyes time to adjust.”

“I am so glad this is almost over,” Buchanan said, but he accompanied Vasquez to the near end of the corridor to Mr. White’s room. She could feel him vibrating with a surplus of smart-ass remarks, but he had enough sense to keep his mouth shut. The air was cool, floral scented with whatever they’d used to clean the carpet. Vasquez expected the minutes to drag by, for there to be ample opportunity for her to fit the various fragments of information in her possession into something like a coherent picture; however, it seemed that practically the next second after her eyes had adapted to the shadows leading up to Mr. White’s door, Buchanan was moving past her. There was time for her to slide the pistol out from under her blouse and slip it into the right front pocket of her slacks, and then Buchanan’s knuckles were rapping the door.

It opened so quickly, Vasquez almost believed Mr. White had been positioned there, waiting for them. The glow that framed him was soft, orange, an adjustable light dialed down to its lowest setting, or a candle. From what she could see of him, Mr. White was the same as ever, from his unruly hair, more gray than white, to his dirty white suit. Vasquez could not tell whether his hands were empty. In her pocket, her palm was slick on the pistol’s grip.

At the sight of Buchanan, Mr. White’s expression did not change. He stood in the doorway regarding the man, and Vasquez three feet behind him, until Buchanan cleared his throat and said, “Evening, Mr. White. Maybe you remember me from Bagram. I’m Buchanan; my associate is Vasquez. We were part of Sergeant Plowman’s crew; we assisted you with your work interrogating prisoners.”

Mr. White continued to stare at Buchanan. Vasquez felt panic gathering in the pit of her stomach. Buchanan went on, “We were hoping you would accompany us on a short walk. There are matters we’d like to discuss with you, and we’ve come a long way.”

Without speaking, Mr. White stepped into the corridor. The fear, the urge to sprint away from here as fast as her legs would take her, that had been churning in Vasquez’s gut, leapt up like a geyser. Buchanan said, “Thank you. This won’t take five minutes—ten, tops.”

Behind her, the floor creaked. She looked back, saw Plowman standing there, and in her confusion, did not register what he was holding in his hand. Someone coughed, and Buchanan collapsed. They coughed again, and it was as if a snowball packed with ice struck Vasquez’s back low and to the left.

All the strength left her legs. She sat down where she was, listing to her right until the wall stopped her. Plowman stepped over her. The gun in his right hand was lowered; in his left, he held a small box. He raised the box, pressed it, and the wall sconces erupted in deep purple-black light, by whose illumination Vasquez saw the walls, the ceiling, the carpet of the short corridor covered in symbols drawn in a medium that shone pale white. She couldn’t identify most of them. She thought she saw a scattering of Greek characters, but the rest were unfamiliar: circles bisected by straight lines traversed by short, wavy lines; a long, gradual curve like a smile; more intersecting lines. The only figure she knew for sure was a circle whose thick circumference was broken at about the eight o’clock point, inside which Mr. White was standing and Buchanan lying. Whatever Plowman had used to draw them made the symbols appear to float in front of the surfaces on which he’d marked them, strange constellations crammed into an undersized sky.

Plowman was speaking, the words he was uttering unlike any Vasquez had heard, thick ropes of sound that started deep in his throat and spilled into the air squirming, writhing over her eardrums. Now Mr. White’s face showed emotion: surprise, mixed with what might have been dismay, even anger. Plowman halted next to the broken circle and used his right foot to roll Buchanan onto his back. Buchanan’s eyes were open, unblinking, his lips parted. The exit wound in his throat shone darkly. His voice rising, Plowman completed what he was saying, gestured with both hands at the body, and retreated to Vasquez.

For an interval of time that lasted much too long, the space where Mr. White and Buchanan were was full of something too big, which had to double over to cram itself into the corridor. Eyes the size of dinner plates stared at Plowman, at Vasquez, with a lunacy that pressed on her like an animal scenting her with its sharp snout. Amidst a beard caked and clotted with offal, a mouth full of teeth cracked and stained black formed sounds Vasquez could not distinguish. Great, pale hands large as tires roamed the floor beneath the figure—Vasquez was reminded of a blind man investigating an unfamiliar surface. When the hands found Buchanan, they scooped him up like a doll and raised him to that enormous mouth.

Groaning, Vasquez tried to roll away from the sight of Buchanan’s head surrounded by teeth like broken flagstones. It wasn’t easy. For one thing, her right hand was still in her pants pocket, its fingers tight around the Walther, her wrist and arm bent in at awkward angles. (She supposed she should be grateful she hadn’t shot herself.) For another thing, the cold that had struck her back was gone, replaced by heat, by a sharp pain that grew sharper still as she twisted away from the snap and crunch of those teeth biting through Buchanan’s skull. God. She managed to move onto her back, exhaling sharply. To her right, the sounds of Buchanan’s consumption continued, bones snapping, flesh tearing, cloth ripping. Mr. White—what had been Mr. White, or what he truly was—that vast figure was grunting with pleasure, smacking its lips together like someone starved for food given a gourmet meal.

“For what it’s worth,” Plowman said, “I wasn’t completely dishonest with you.” One leg to either side of hers, he squatted over her, resting his elbows on his knees. “I do intend to bring Mr. White into my service; it’s just the methods necessary for me to do so are a little extreme.”

Vasquez tried to speak. “What … is he?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Plowman said. “He’s old—I mean, if I told you how old he is, you’d think …” He looked to his left, to the giant sucking the gore from its fingers. “Well, maybe not. He’s been around for a long time, and he knows a lot of things. We—what we were doing at Bagram, the interrogations, they woke him. I guess that’s the best way to put it; although you could say they called him forth. It took me a while to figure out everything, even after he revealed himself to me. But there’s nothing like prison to give you time for reflection. And research.

“That research says the best way to bind someone like Mr. White is—actually, it’s pretty complicated.” Plowman waved his pistol at the symbols shining around them. “The part that will be of most immediate interest to you is the sacrifice of a man and woman who are in my command. I apologize. I intended to put the two of you down before you knew what was happening; I mean, there’s no need to be cruel about this. With you, however, I’m afraid my aim was off. Don’t worry. I’ll finish what I started before I turn you over to Mr. White.”

Vasquez tilted her right hand up and squeezed the trigger of her gun. Four pops rushed one after the other, blowing open her pocket. Plowman leapt back, stumbled against the opposite wall. Blood bloomed across the inner thigh of his trousers, the belly of his shirt. Wiped clean by surprise, his face was blank. He swung his gun toward Vasquez, who angled her right hand down and squeezed the trigger again. The top of Plowman’s shirt puffed out; his right eye burst. His arm relaxed, his pistol thumped on the floor, and, a second later, he joined it.

The burn of suddenly hot metal through her pocket sent Vasquez scrambling up the wall behind her before the pain lodged in her back could catch her. In the process, she yanked out the Walther and pointed it at the door to the junior suite—

—in front of which Mr. White was standing, hands in his jacket pockets. A dark smear in front of him was all that was left of Buchanan. Jesus God … The air reeked of black powder and copper. Across from her, Plowman stared at nothing through his remaining eye. Mr. White regarded her with something like interest. If he moves, I’ll shoot, Vasquez thought, but Mr. White did not move, not the length of time it took her to back out of the corridor and retreat to the elevator, the muzzle of the pistol centered on Mr. White, then on where Mr. White would have been if he’d rounded the corner. Her back was a knot of fire. When she reached the elevator, she slapped the call button with her left hand while maintaining her aim with her right. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Buchanan’s gift for his son, all two hundred and sixty euros’ worth, wedged under its chair. She left it where it was. A faint glow shone from the near end of the corridor: Plowman’s black-lighted symbols. Was the glow changing, obscured by an enormous form crawling toward her? When the elevator dinged behind her, she stepped into it, the gun up in front of her until the doors had closed and the elevator had commenced its descent.

The back of her blouse was stuck to her skin; a trickle of blood tickled the small of her back. The interior of the elevator dimmed to the point of disappearing entirely. The Walther weighed a thousand pounds. Her legs wobbled madly. Vasquez lowered the gun, reached her left hand out to steady herself. When it touched not metal, but cool stone, she was not as surprised as she should have been. As her vision returned, she saw that she was in a wide, circular area, the roof flat, low, the walls no more than shadowy suggestions. The space was lit by a symbol incised on the rock at her feet: a rough circle, the diameter of a manhole cover, broken at about eight o’clock, whose perimeter was shining with cold light. Behind and to her left, the scrape of bare flesh dragging over stone turned her around. This section of the curving wall opened in a black arch like the top of an enormous throat. Deep in the darkness, she could detect movement, but was not yet able to distinguish it.

As she raised the pistol one more time, Vasquez was not amazed to find herself here, under the ground with things whose idiot hunger eclipsed the span of the oldest human civilizations, things she had helped summon. She was astounded to have thought she’d ever left.

—

For Fiona.

——

JOHN LANGAN is the author of the novel House of Windows and the collection of stories Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters. His stories have appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction and Poe: 19 New Tales Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe. He lives in upstate New York with his wife and son.

——

ELLEN DATLOW has been editing science fiction, fantasy, and horror short fiction for over twenty-five years. She was fiction editor of Omni and Sci Fiction and has edited more than fifty anthologies, including the horror half of the long-running The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, the current The Best Horror of the Year, Inferno, Poe: 19 New Tales Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, Lovecraft Unbound, Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror, Tails of Wonder and Imagination, Digital Domains: A Decade of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy, The Beastly Bride and Other Tales of the Animal People, Teeth: Vampire Tales (the latter two with Terri Windling), and Haunted Legends (with Nick Mamatas).

Forthcoming is Blood and Other Cravings and After (the last with Windling).

She has won multiple Locus Awards, Hugo Awards, Stoker Awards, International Horror Guild Awards, World Fantasy Awards, and Shirley Jackson Awards for her editing. She was named recipient of the 2007 Karl Edward Wagner Award, given at the British Fantasy Convention for “outstanding contribution to the genre.”

She lives in New York. More information can be found at Datlow.com or at her blog: Ellen-Datlow.LiveJournal.com.