Also Edited by Ellen Datlow

After (with Terri Windling)

Alien Sex

The Beastly Bride: Tales of the Animal People (with Terri Windling)

The Best Horror of the Year Volumes One through Eight

Black Heart, Ivory Bones (with Terri Windling)

Black Swan, White Raven (with Terri Windling)

Black Thorn, White Rose (with Terri Windling)

Blood and Other Cravings

Blood Is Not Enough: 17 Stories of Vampirism

The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales (with Terri Windling)

The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen

The Dark: New Ghost Stories

Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror

Digital Domains: A Decade of Science Fiction and Fantasy

The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy

The Doll Collection

The Faery Reel: Tales from the Twilight Realm

Fearful Symmetries

The Green Man: Tales from the Mythic Forest (with Terri Windling)

Haunted Legends (with Nick Mamatas)

Hauntings

Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural

Lethal Kisses

Little Deaths

Lovecraft’s Monsters

Lovecraft Unbound

The Monstrous

Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

Nebula Awards Showcase 2009

Nightmare Carnival

Off Limits: Tales of Alien Sex

Omni Best Science Fiction Volumes One through Three

Omni Book of Science Fiction Volumes One through Seven

OmniVisions One and Two

Poe: 19 New Tales Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe

Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells (with Terri Windling)

Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears (with Terri Windling)

Salon Fantastique: Fifteen Original Tales of Fantasy (with Terri Windling)

Silver Birch, Blood Moon (with Terri Windling)

Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers (with Terri Windling)

Snow White, Blood Red (with Terri Windling)

Supernatural Noir

Swan Sister (with Terri Windling)

Tails of Wonder and Imagination: Cat Stories

Teeth: Vampire Tales (with Terri Windling)

Telling Tales: The Clarion West 30th Anniversary Anthology

Troll’s Eye View: A Book of Villainous Tales (with Terri Windling)

Twists of the Tale

Vanishing Acts

A Whisper of Blood

A Wolf at the Door (with Terri Windling)

The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror Volumes One through Twenty-One (with Terri Windling, Gavin J. Grant, and Kelly Link)

Introduction © 2016 by Ellen Datlow. “Nesters” by Siobhan Carroll. Copyright © 2016 by Siobhan Carroll. “Little Ease” by Gemma Files. Copyright © 2016 by Gemma Files. “Eternal Troutland” by Stephen Graham Jones. Copyright © 2016 by Stephen Graham Jones. “The Supplement” by John Langan. Copyright © 2016 by John Langan. “Mortensen’s Muse” by Orrin Grey. Copyright © 2016 by Orrin Grey. “Oblivion Mode” by Laird Barron. Copyright © 2016 by Laird Barron. “Mr. Doornail” by Maria Dahvana Headley. Copyright © 2016 by Maria Dahvana Headley. “The Secrets of Insects” by Richard Kadrey. Copyright © 2016 by Richard Kadrey. “Excerpts for An Eschatology Quadrille” by Caitlín R. Kiernan. Copyright © 2016 by Caitlín R. Kiernan. “Jules and Richard” by David Nickle. Copyright © 2016 by David Nickle. “Glasses” by Brian Evenson. Copyright © 2016 by Brian Evenson. “When the Stitches Come Undone” by A. C. Wise. Copyright © 2016 by A. C. Wise. “On These Blackened Shores of Time” by Brian Hodge. Copyright © 2016 by Brian Hodge. “Bright Crown of Joy” by Livia Llewellyn. Copyright © 2016 by Livia Llewellyn.

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

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Cover illustration by Mike Mignola with Dave Stewart

Cover and book design by Ethan Kimberling

Special thanks to Daniel Chabon, Cardner Clark, Rachel Miller, and Annie Gullion

ISBN 978-1-50670-004-5

First Dark Horse Books edition: August 2016

Printed in the United States of America

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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  Matt Parkinson, Vice President of Marketing  David Scroggy, Vice President of Product DevelopmentDale LaFountain, Vice President of Information Technology  Cara Niece, Vice President of Production and Scheduling Nick McWhorter, Vice President of Media Licensing  Ken Lizzi, General Counsel Dave Marshall, Editor in Chief Davey Estrada, Editorial Director  Scott Allie, Executive Senior Editor  Chris Warner, Senior Books Editor  Cary Grazzini, Director of Specialty Projects  Lia Ribacchi, Art Director  Vanessa Todd, Director of Print Purchasing  Matt Dryer, Director of Digital Art and Prepress Mark Bernardi, Director of Digital Publishing  Sarah Robertson, Director of Product Sales Michael Gombos, Director of International Publishing and Licensing

INTRODUCTION

This is my third Lovecraftian anthology. I and other members of the genre are often asked about the persistence of H. P. Lovecraft’s influence on our field. What makes Lovecraft still relevant today and even more popular than back in his day?

Lovecraft’s influence on the field of horror has been enormous. During his lifetime and soon after, a whole subgenre developed of what today we would call fan fiction. Writers among his circle of friends and acquaintances used his mythos to emulate and/or expand upon his work. Some of the resulting pieces of fiction were pastiches; some were more ambitious, more artful.

In 1981 Chaosium Press released the roleplaying game Call of Cthulhu, and the original game, its playbook, and its offshoots and anthologies are still being published.

Scholars have been dissecting his work and his personal life for decades and I think their obsessions have helped keep his work alive.

One does not have to love the man to appreciate and give credit to his work. For me, it’s the sheer inventiveness of his mythos. The new generation of writers “playing” in his playground are doing very different things. The best have removed many of the trappings, bringing a freshness to the core elements of Mythos fiction.

But the why of it? More difficult to analyze: perhaps because his vision of cosmic horror and of the existence of or return of Elder Gods that control human destiny is creepy and effective and has always been so, even though his prose was often clumsy and overblown. I’ve never enjoyed pastiches of his work because they take the worst of it (his use of language), rehashing his plots and characters without adding anything new. This is exactly why when I edit an anthology of Lovecraftian stories, I encourage my contributors to create stories using the best of Lovecraft (the terror of the cosmic unknown, and his vision) to explore new themes, new horrors. In this volume are fourteen original stories and novelettes by writers who have done just that.

NESTERS

Siobhan Carroll

They killed the last calf that morning. Ma wanted to hold off, give the poor thing a chance, but Pa said it were cruel to let a body live like that. He cracked the hammer on its head—a sick, sad sound. Later he slit the calf open and showed Sally the animal’s stomach, choked with dust. “Suffocated from the inside,” he said.

Sally cried, or would have cried, but her face was too caked with dirt. The Vaseline in her nostrils couldn’t keep it out. She wondered how much dirt was in her stomach and whether her body was already full of it, like the calf, her tears and blood just rivers of dust. But when she asked, Ma said, “Jaisus, quit nattering and help the bairn.” So Sally did, even though her baby brother was curled up like the calf had been, under a skin of dust that never went away no matter how they cleaned.

Sally followed Ma round the dugout, stuffing rags into the cracks where the dust had trickled through. Alice toddled after her. Ben watched from the bed, his feverish eyes glistening. At fourteen, he was taller than Sally and better at reaching the upper cracks. But what could be done? The dust-lung had him. If Ben were to move, Ma said it would be to her sister’s place in Topeka, away from the land that was killing him. Better still, Ma said, would be to head out to California, where there was still work to be had. But Pa had heard about the cities. Many who went there came home poorer than before. They told tales of Hoover camps, the shame of being spat on by city-dwellers. At least here they suffered together. At least here they had the land.

To lose your land was to lose yourself, her father had warned her and Ben. This was in the early years, when folks still thought next year would bring the rains back.

“This here’s the first thing our family’s ever owned in this country,” he’d said, showing Sally the dark soil between his fingers. “Mackay land.” His eyes had shone with the wonder of it.

Now the earth was hard and brown and dusters turned the sky the same color, choking and fierce. “Still,” said Pa, “we have the land. We lost it once to the English. We won’t lose it to the wind.”

Two strangers were at the gate. Sally could see right off they weren’t farmers. Too pale. Too well fed.

The taller man leaned forward, dangling his hands into the yard in a way Sally didn’t like. “Your father at home, sweetheart?”

Sally looked the stranger up and down, the starving chickens pecking at her feet. “You from Washington?” There was talk of Mr. Roosevelt sending folk to tell the Nesters how to run their farms. This man, with his clean suit, seemed like he could be one of them.

A glance from the leaning man to his companion. “What d’ya think, Bill? Are we from Washington?”

The older man looked like a schoolteacher, one of the impatient ones who rapped kids’ knuckles. “We’re on official business,” he said. “We’re looking for the man of the house.”

Sally knew Ma would scold her if she let a government man pass by, even rude ones. There might be a dime in it, and a dime could buy bread.

“I’ll fetch him then,” she said. “Best come out of the blow.”

At the dugout’s entrance, Ma’s face already showed the strain of a smile. Sally knew Ma was thinking of rusted cans of water instead of tea, the assistance bread gone hard by week’s end. At least they had some milk to offer, thanks to the dead calf. Still, it was as much her mother’s smile as the need to fetch her father that made her run so quickly.

She found Pa fixing up the old John Deere D, trying to get work done while the air was clear.

“Government men come.”

Pa nodded and wiped his hands, reluctant to leave a task half done. “You take over here.”

Sally took Pa’s place as he strode off. She checked the front tires for cuts, wiping off a grease splatter with a gasoline-damped rag. Everything on the farm depended on the tractor. If it broke, they’d be beat.

Sally thought instead about the government men. Maybe they brought work with them. Maybe it’d be a good day after all.

Stepping inside the dugout, Sally realized something was wrong. Ma stood stiffly in a corner. Pa sat beside the older man, his shoulders squared. The younger government man looked at Sally as she entered, then back at Pa.

The older man spoke, an edge to his voice. “Did no one go out to the farm to look for him?”

Pa’s face was closed. He shook his head.

“Why not?”

Pa glanced at Ma, who folded her arms tightly against her chest. Reluctantly, Pa said, “They say the Dubort place’s cursed.” Pa shrugged as if to remind them he didn’t hold with superstitions.

The Dubort place! Sally watched the strangers with new interest. The abandoned farm was the only site for miles with greenery to spare. Tom Hatchett said if you passed too close to the Devil’s Garden—what the kids called it—one of the monsters living there’d gobble you up. Tom Hatchett was a liar, but still.

The man flipped through his notebook. If he was trying to frighten Pa with that flapping paper, he didn’t know nothing. “Stories of strange vegetation? Odd lights and noises? Animals disappearing? That kind of thing?”

Pa’s gaze was stony. He shrugged again.

“And all this happened after the meteor fell?”

“I don’t know nothing about no meteor,” Pa said. “One of Dubort’s fields caught fire. We went to fight it, like good neighbors. Some folk said a falling star started it. Don’t know more than that.”

“Good neighbors,” the government man said. “But nobody went looking when Frank Dubort disappeared?”

Pa blinked. Looked away. “Place got a bad reputation,” he said. “No one wanted to borrow trouble. It was a wrong thing,” he admitted, quietly, to himself.

Rage blossomed in Sally. Couldn’t these men see how tired Pa was? He had enough to deal with, without these men asking him to feel bad for a stranger, a weekend farmer who couldn’t take the hard times.

But Sally remembered that day at Ted Howser’s farm, the man scuttling out of the barn on his back, like an upside-down beetle. Mr. Howser had put his hand over his mouth. Sally’s Pa had stared like he hoped what he saw wasn’t true. Sally thought the scrabbler looked like Howser’s neighbor, Mr. Dubort—or like some hobo wearing one of Mr. Dubort’s famous blue-checked shirts, all stained and tore up. But Pa stood in front of her, blocking her view.

Pa told her and Ben to go home. He’d stayed behind to talk to Mr. Howser about what needed to be done. What had they done? Pa had refused to speak of it. He’d said it was settled, and to ask no questions.

Dread crept through Sally. She wondered what had happened to bring these government men here.

“We’d like to go out there, Mr. Mackay,” the government man said, “to have a look around. Your name was mentioned as one who could take us there.”

Sally wanted to know who’d given them Pa’s name. She suspected Pa did too. But the less said to these folk, the better.

“There’s money in it.” The younger man pronounced the words carefully, as though he knew the effect they’d have in this dusty, coughing dugout. “Fifteen dollars, for a guided trip, there and back.” He smiled at their astonishment. “We’re . . . scientific men, Mr. Mackay,” he said reassuringly. “We need to see this site close up.”

Sally thought the older man might be angry with his companion for offering money straight off, but he seemed to be taking Pa’s measure.

“If we find Frank, that’ll put this thing to rest,” the young man added, slyly. “It’s the right thing to do.”

Pa’s face was tight. His gaze slid over to Ma. But Ma didn’t know what to do either, Sally saw. She was caught between fear and worry and the promise of fifteen dollars.

“Alright then,” Pa said. “But you pay up front.”

The older man got up from the table. “Five now, the rest later.”

“Ten.” There was a determined glitter in Pa’s eyes. The government man flicked a bill onto the table. Ten whole dollars.

“We appreciate your help.” The younger man smirked, like he’d known how this was going to go all along.

Sally hated him, she decided. She hated them both. She itched to give the nearest one a kick on his shins as he passed. It was the sort of thing she’d have done last year, never mind the manners. But she thought of Ma and the remaining five dollars. She let the men go.

Pa glanced down at Sally as he put his hat on. “Take care of your Ma.” He patted her head, messing up Sally’s hair. Sally smoothed it back as she watched Pa leave.

It was a funny thing to say, she thought. Ma was the one who took care of everyone else. The strangeness of this kept her standing there, while the men got in the car and drove off.

The duster rolled in a few hours later. Sally crouched into the grating wind and kept one hand on the guide rope, the other over her eyes as she traced her path back from the chicken coop. She struggled along blindly, feeling her bare skin scraped raw. She tried not to think of Pa out in this duster, guiding strangers on someone else’s land.

In the dugout, they huddled together with cloths over their faces. There was no point in burning the kerosene lamp. No light would get through. They sat silently, trying not to breathe in too much of the dust, while the wind raged outside.

The duster lasted the rest of the day. When its blackness cleared, the night was there to take over, and the cold. They lit the lamp and looked at each other, her and Ben and Alice and Ma.

Ma said, “Let’s clean up,” and so they did. Sally tried not to wonder about Pa. He’d have to see the government men back to town. He’d probably stayed there.

But in the morning, Pa still wasn’t back. Sally forced the door open and trudged to the chicken coop to count the survivors. There were two dead, dust-choked. She took the bodies out, feeling the lightness of their scrawny bodies. They needed more food.

It was Sunday and Sunday meant church. Pa wouldn’t miss church, Sally was sure. She put on her “nice” dress—still made out of feed sacks, but cleaner than the others—while Ma got Alice ready.

Ben’s eyes opened when Ma put a hand on his forehead. “Keep an eye on the bairn. And if you see Pa, make sure you tell him to stay put till we get back.” Ben closed his eyes. Sally wasn’t sure if he’d heard them.

But Pa wasn’t at church. Sally kept turning around, scanning the pews. Ma pinched her arm to make her stop, but Ma kept glancing backward too, every time they had to stand up.

The service was one of the usual ones, about the end times and how the dusters were the Nesters’ fault for ignoring the Lord’s will. Inwardly Sally was having none of it. It was a pretty poor God who visited misery on folk for drinking too much and taking his name in vain now and then. Maybe it was true what the ranch hands said, that they’d done wrong by taking the grassland from the Injuns and turning it to the plow. But even so, where was the good in little kids dying? If that was God’s will, then she hated him, Sally thought, and felt a flash of fear.

After the service Ma caught Ted Howser by the arm. “I need to talk to you about Pat.”

Sally wanted to hear the rest of it, but Ma told her to mind Alice didn’t hurt herself. Sure enough, Alice took a spill. The dust cushioned her so she wasn’t even crying when she looked up. Well, that’s one thing it’s good for, Sally thought, offering the toddler her fingers to grab.

She looked back. Ma was at the center of a ring of old ranch hands and farm wives, their faces grave.

“Come on,” she said, tugging at Alice’s hand. “Back this way.”

“Paddy’s a good man and I’d walk to hell for him,” Jake Hardy was saying, “but if the wind stirred something up, we’d best not get too close.”

Someone else snorted. “Walk to hell but wouldn’t go in it, would you?”

“Facts are,” Mr. Howser said, “the Dubort place is off-limits. Pat knew that when he headed out there.” He looked round the circle. “You saw what it did to Frank. We can’t go there. Can’t let anyone go there,” he said, looking back at Sally’s Ma. “Who knows where it’d end?”

“He’s probably holed up at another farm,” Dan Giss said. “Roads are tough. Duster’s closed a lot of ’em. He’s probably holed up with Schmitt, minding those damn fool government men.”

Sally’s Ma seemed to sway on her feet. Sally let go of Alice to run toward her.

Margie Fisher, the schoolteacher, reached Ma first. She put an arm around the younger woman.

“There now,” she said, glaring at Ted Howser. “We need to organize a search party. Knock on every door. Chances are, Pat’s not the only one who could use a hand.”

Sally heard a wail behind her. She turned to see the abandoned Alice sitting in the dust, blood running down her forehead. Somehow the toddler had found the only uncovered rock in the yard and fallen smack into it. Of course she had. And it was Sally’s fault for leaving her.

“Shush,” Sally pleaded, stroking the toddler’s sweat-damp hair. “It’ll be okay.” But it wouldn’t be, Sally knew, the dread rising in her. It wouldn’t be.

Ma and Mrs. Fisher would search along the road; Mr. Howser would take a horse up Fincher’s lot. Jake and Dan would go to the Dubort place. Everyone was worried about this plan, but Jake and Dan swore they’d leave right quick if they felt they were stirring things up.

Stirring things up, Sally thought, remembering the giant vegetables Mr. Dubort had brought to town. Turnip skins so bright they hurt your eyes, apples that glistened like they’d been dipped in water, and huge! One turnip was as big as Ben’s head—he’d put it on the table so Sally could measure before Pa had slapped them away.

“Don’t you do that,” Pa had said, angrier than Sally had ever seen him. “Don’t you touch those things, no matter what.”

Sure enough, when Mr. Dubort sliced the turnip open, dark gray powder crumbled out.

“Must be some kind of blight,” Mr. Dubort had said, pushing his hat back on his head. He was a city man, unused to farming. “Have you seen anything like this before?”

The Nesters said nothing. Their silence hung around them like a sky empty of rain, waiting for the dust to roll through.

Now Sally walked behind Alice as the toddler clung to Mrs. Fisher’s furniture. Mrs. Fisher had a proper house, with tablecloths and everything. Sally noted the dirty film on Mrs. Fisher’s table with satisfaction. She reckoned it must take a lot of sweeping to get dust out of a place this size.

The tick-tocks of Mrs. Fisher’s clock reverberated through the house. Each one felt like a burning pin pushed into Sally’s flesh. Why couldn’t someone else watch the babies? If Ben were here, she reckoned they’d let him go.

She imagined herself wandering across the dust-dunes, finding Pa in a place no one had thought to look. Not hurt, of course. Her mind shied away from that. No, Pa would be fine but helping one of the government men, who’d gotten his fool self hurt. The younger one, Sally decided, viciously. She imagined Pa’s grin when she clambered up the dune that hid them from the road. “I knew I could trust you to figure it out,” he’d say. And the government men would pay them thirty whole dollars for the trouble they’d caused. And—

There was a noise outside.

“Stay there,” Sally told Alice. She didn’t want to pull away the sheets the Fishers had nailed over the windows, so she headed to the door instead.

There was a scramble of people in the yard. Jake was trying to hold a flailing man by the shoulders. “Don’t let him go!” Mr. Fisher, the mortician, grabbed the man’s other arm.

It took Sally a moment to recognize the flailing figure, all covered in dust. It was the older government man. He lips were pulled back from his teeth, his eyes rolled to the sky. As Sally watched he arched his back and howled, a long hard sound that raised all the hairs on her scalp. A string of gibberish babbled out of him: grah’n h’mglw’nafh fhthagn-ngah . . .

She shut the door, closing out the sight. It was as though God had heard Sally’s foolish dream of finding Pa and had sent the government man back to punish her vanity. Please, please, she thought frantically, hushing Alice, please let them have found Pa, please let him be all right—

When Ma came back her face was strange. “Make sure you thank Mrs. Fisher for letting you stay here.”

Sally obediently repeated the words, even though Mrs. Fisher was standing right there. Ma and Mrs. Fisher stared at each other like they were having a silent conversation above Sally’s head. Normally Sally would hate that. Now it made her more scared than ever, because something was really wrong if nobody was talking about Pa.

Ma’s silence carried them back to the dugout. It filled the air there when Ben tried to gasp out a question.

“Others are seeing to that,” Ma said shortly. And, “Jaisus, get the broom, will you?”

Sally got the broom and swept the dust about the place, while Ben wheezed and the babies coughed and Ma tried not to cry. If only the dust would leave the place, they’d be all right, Sally thought wildly, knowing it wasn’t true.

Next morning, Sally was up before cockcrow. Her head was buzzing as she cast the hard, dried-up corn into her bucket and went out to face the chickens.

“I’m going to school,” she told Ma at the door. Ma hesitated, then nodded. Ma was always on Sally and Ben to keep up their lessons. In truth, Sally doubted there’d be any kids in the school. The morning had that hard-light look to it that threatened dusters, and there was too much work to do just to get some food through the door.

But today Sally had other things on her mind. If there was a duster coming, she needed to move fast and early.

She packed her water and the scrap of hard-bread that Ma had set aside for her. She’d also take the shovel from the back of the tumbledown barn, in case she needed to dig her way out. That’s what Pa would do.

Ben watched her tie the strings up on the rucksack, his eyes angry. He knew what she was doing.

“Just . . . don’t say nothing. Unless I’m not back by sundown,” Sally whispered. Then she threw the rucksack on and left, before Ben could muster the air to call her back, before anyone changed her mind about what needed to be done.

The sky above her was blue, blue, blue, dotted with the occasional cloud. No point trying the local road over to Dubort—that would be drifted over. She’d cut across land, avoiding the big drifts except when it came time to climb the fences.

It was hard going. Sally’s feet sank into the sand, her boots filling with grit. Mackay land, she thought, turned against us. The spade was heavy on her shoulder.

About halfway to the Dubort place she started to feel she’d made a mistake. The sun was fully up now. In its glare she could see the green strip of land away in the distance. The Devil’s Garden, some called it. It’d been so long since there’d been green in these parts, Sally couldn’t tell if it was the drought or whether there was actually something wrong with the color.

The animal sounds dropped away as she approached the Dubort place. You’d think the jackrabbits and birds would flock here, given that no one hunted at the farm. But the air out here was stiller than the desert.

Sally walked along the side of the giant dune that had piled up over the Duborts’ old fence. She saw the white bones of some animal poking through. Probably a starved cow, tangled in wire and Russian thistle. Beyond the bones was a place where the dune dipped a little. As good as any spot for a crossing, she thought, and waded up.

It was strange being surrounded by green again. Sally remembered the color from the old days, but here it was everywhere. The Duborts’ fruit trees had grown large and tangled. Between them, vines draped and alien flowers gaped at the sky. A nearby bush dangled huge, glossy fruit. They looked like they would quench the thirst that was beginning to rasp her throat. Sally looked away, remembering the powdery vegetables.

The lurid greenery stretched everywhere on the Dubort side. There was nothing for it. “Pa!” she shouted. “Pa!”

Silence. Sally took a swig from her bottle and kept walking.

The Dubort house stood on the northern part of the property, close to Mr. Daverson’s fence. Surely, if Pa was in trouble—if a duster was bearing down on them—that’s where he’d head. For shelter. And he hadn’t had the shovel that now ground into her skinny shoulder. They could be stuck in there, underneath the grit.

At a certain point the trees thinned and she saw a hard-pack section where nothing grew, a burned-looking hole at its center. She figured that must be where the rock had hit. There was something blue standing by the crater—a human color.

Sally didn’t want to walk into the clearing—it seemed strange to her somehow—but she figured if she were looking for Pa, she had to check out every clue. So she walked quietly over to the blue thing. A couple cans of gasoline and a man’s hat, filmed with dust.

Sally tested the weight on the gas cans. They were full. The young man had been wearing a hat.

A screeching sound jerked her head up. It was probably some kind of buzzard, she told herself, walking quickly back to the dune line. She had the uncomfortable feeling something was watching her, its gaze focused just between her shoulder blades. It was a relief when she left that clearing behind her.

She knew she should yell for Pa again, but after the screech she couldn’t work up the nerve. Pa had to be at the house. The sooner she got there, the better everything would be.

When she finally reached the Duborts’ house, her stomach sank. It didn’t look like a house at all these days—more like a sandy hill, with a strange gray vine growing up its side. As with the clearing, the forest that had claimed the rest of the property seemed to have left this part alone.

Sally circled the house, afraid of what she’d do if it was empty. She saw a dark square opening in the leeward wall. The black square of a window, or door. Someone had recently been inside.

Sally lowered the shovel. “Pa?” She tried the word out, scared of speaking too loudly. “You there?” The air itself seemed to be listening to her.

Sally closed her eyes, thinking of Pa and his tobacco smell and his graceful fingers as he patched up a gunny sack. She had to see.

She walked slowly up to the dark square and peered inside.

The first thing that hit Sally was the smell. It was horrible, and faintly familiar, as though she’d encountered it many years before. It was the smell of rot, the kind of thing you might find in a wet place, not here on the plains.

She stared hard at the darkness, trying to make it form shapes. She had matches in her pocket, swiped from the old kerosene lamp. She struck one, but a faint stir of wind guttered it out too quickly. She needed to do better than that.

She slung her leg over the windowsill, gulping what clean air she could. The wooden sill moved beneath her hands. You’re doing a dumb thing, she thought, and slipped inside.

The ground was soft sand. Grimacing, she put her hand up against the wall. She’d follow the wall around, in the dark. Figure out how far she could go.

But she hadn’t gone very far at all when she heard the breathing.

Sally froze. She wanted to believe she was imagining things. She held her breath, to prove it. A wheeze in. A wheeze out. Too regular to be the wind.

Fear pressed on her. She didn’t want to call for her father. If he hadn’t heard her earlier, he wouldn’t hear her now. And if it was something else there breathing, she didn’t want to know.

Don’t try to solve all the problems at once, Pa always said. Break them up. Deal with each one in order.

So Sally groped her way back to the window, with its bright patch of light. She was glad, now, to see the lurid green outside. She fumbled the matches out, holding them in the light. Ten left. I am going to do this, she thought, I am.

She struck the match.

At first she could see nothing in the orange circle of light. She cupped the flame and extended her arms. There was one shadow that was stranger than all the others, taller than any man should be. Something was there.

Sally moved forward. She had to get the circle of light closer before the match went out. The soles of her feet crunched onto uneven sand piles, miniature dunes that hissed out of place as she stepped on them.

Yes, there was definitely something there, in the jumping flame. A line of vine, of leaves, a reassuringly normal shape. The vines fed into the bulky mass growing out of the wall, a

—gaping incomprehension of seeds and veins and flesh and

interiors that were exteriors yawning backward into dark

[consumed] the dirt the air the vine the stone the bird the man the

the—

It had her father’s face.

It used that face as a hand, reaching for her, sensing maybe the kinship between them. It reached for her with its

—fused body that bulked vegetable animal

a cufflink from the other agent still on its cuff oh god the—

Sally ran. Quick as sight, she was out the window, her disconnected self not feeling the stones that slammed and cut her knees and saved her life because the father-thing stopped to drink her blood, the jeweled red pools that clustered in the stone—

Sally ran, feeling her body again when the evil not-vegetation tried to clutch her legs her arms but she was an arrow loosed from a bow. She thought of those crusts of bread her mother had saved eat this you must stay strong, and here was why, this flight, this stumble toward sand, the sand would save her. Even the gnaiih-thing behind her could not grow in the dust; the choking otherness would slow it down while she, a Nester, fleet, could reach the fence, could stagger ch’it while h’followed her on what kind of legs? Dear god h’ah’olna’ftaghu—

She was over the fence, running across the dust to the end of the horizon.

When her legs gave out, Sally forced herself to look back toward the house. This was maybe the bravest thing she’d done, because she knew if [it] was coming for her, there was nothing she could do but watch her death walk up. Not death, no: [it] was worse than that, her father’s face absorbed into some amalgamation of life and used as a tool to probe the world. At least [it] didn’t look human, because if [it] did—

But [it] didn’t. She hoped [it] never did. She hoped that along with those pieces of her father and the government man, [it] had not taken their memories: the pattern of her mother’s dress, the creak of the old well, the words the government man had used to get her father, oh, her father, to come trudging out here to die.

Except he wasn’t dead.

Sally understood now what the screaming government man had tried to tell them,

—the exterior turned interior the reaching dark the—

and knew also there was no words to contain [it]. She had to force her mind back, to here, to the soil on her hands and the gleam of life that was Sally because

—the howling light a rage of knowing—

if she didn’t, she would become like one of those wizened stock, tangled in the wire. No. She was a Nester. She would not die like that.

But her Pa.

If she told, they would come out here. If she lied and said she’d found nothing, they might come anyway.

She’d lost the shovel, dropped it somewhere. That wouldn’t do. A fire. She remembered the red can of gasoline by the crater.

I’ve cracked, she thought, brushing her face. But that was all right.

When her legs started working again, she got up and went back to the clearing.

Sally struggled over the dunes, the sun high in the sky. No birds, no clouds, only infinity staring her down.

When she was actually at the Duborts’ fence, seeing again the drift, the body of the cow ominously absent, she felt fear thrill through her. It was that fear that finally brought her back to herself, no longer one with the sky and the—

—down in the dark, in the deep

—but back in her shaking, dry-throated body.

She didn’t want to die. She was sure the calf hadn’t wanted to die either, no matter how its stomach hurt or how short its life would be. It had struggled even as the hammer came down, with Sally’s fear reflected in its eyes.

It’s like riding a horse, she thought. Like riding a horse somewhere it doesn’t want to go. With that in mind she coaxed a foot forward. Then another one. And another.

She watched her feet. If this was all she saw, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.

But it was bad. The hideous green jangled her mind. The wind breathed wrong, whispering things. Why had she come, after all? Why had she come?

There was a stubbornness in Sally that went down through the soil and past that, through the rock and its layers of time. She was a Nester, wasn’t she? She belonged here, or at least—(remembering the Comanche, remembering the English with their guns)—at least she was here, and she would not easily be moved.

It was a long, hot way. She had to keep switching the gas can from one arm to another when the pull got too much. As she walked she became more and more herself, these tired muscles lugging a sloshing burden through an ugly glare of green. She should have brought Ben. If Ben could walk, he would have helped her. But then he would see the thing and she did not want anyone else in her family to see [it]. That would be too much.

At last the house swam into the tunnel of her vision. She expected her legs to balk again, but they didn’t. It was as though, having crossed the fence, all of her options were gone.

She did not bother wasting a match outside this time. She slung her leg over, and stepped inside.

When she lit the match, she saw only awful greenery. The father-thing had vanished.

[It] couldn’t have gone far, she thought. Of course she wasn’t sure if that was true or not. Maybe the thing was faster than it seemed. Maybe [it] was already advancing through the township, swallowing stray passersby into its madness.

No. The thing was here. Somewhere.

Perhaps [it] was deeper in the house.

The hairs on the nape of her neck rose. Of course the house had more rooms. It was a wealthy house. Now that the outgrowth on the wall had torn itself away, she could even see the gap where the door had been. Might not that be a sign, then? That something had gone through?

Between her and the door was a mess of tangled growth. It was dangerous to step through, and not just because of the smell of rot that arose with every step. She had the notion that the vines and [it] were all connected. She was like an ant walking on [its] arm letting [it] know where she was.

If [it] found her, she could kill it faster, she reminded herself. She walked through the door.

The air inside this room was moist and sweet smelling. The rot-stench was thick here, and something else, something indescribable, and bitter edged.

She struck a match. There was a dark square in the floor. A rusted ladder curled out.

Sally peered into the black hole and thought about dropping the match. But what would happen if the flame lit on part of [it]? The thing would know what she intended.

So she blew out the match. In darkness she found the creaking, terrifyingly mobile rungs of the cellar ladder. She climbed down.

At last Sally had come to the end. She knew that even before she opened her eyes, before she struck the second match. She could hear the breathing around her. Synchronized, from many points. A sucking in and out.

She stepped down. Fumbled the cap off the gasoline can.

A puff of air on her leg. She carefully pulled that leg away, trying to stand close to the ladder. They were all around her.

And they were.

The jumping orange light revealed twisted bodies—humans, cows, birds, plants, all merged together. Bird wings fanned air around the room. Human faces twisted on vine stems. A flower opened around an eye. She placed the match carefully on the ladder, letting it burn.

The antennae/vines/fingers quested forward. She looked for her father’s face. That was the only one that mattered. The prickle down her leg told her that one of the vines had caught her, was latching on.

Then she saw Pa. It helped that he didn’t look like her father anymore, but like a sack that had been stretched over a different shape. Something appeared to be growing under his eyelids.

She hurled the gasoline at him. It missed, soaking a good portion of the vine-wall instead. Heart clutching, she felt the slight slosh of some remaining gasoline. Nothing to do but this. She strode forward and poured, the awful, wonderful smell of gasoline filling her nostrils.

She could feel the latch of the vines on her arms and hands, could feel them burrowing into her skin. But what mattered, what truly mattered, was that she get the other match free, and out, and—stepping back, despite the tearing pain at her legs—struck.

The whoosh of flame knocked her backward. Now there was heat to get away from and the screams of [it] as flowers, vines, hands stretched up in pain and terror. She stumbled away from the father-thing, crawling with flame. Her hand found the cold rungs of the ladder. Up.

Eyes streaming, Sally stumbled toward the thin light of the window—a different window this time; she’d come out wrong. The house was filling with smoke and blackness, like a duster. She didn’t want to die like this. She tore vines away from the old window frame, pushed her way through the rotten wood. She fell outside, into the sunshine and the merciful air.

Sally choked on the ground. There was not enough air in the whole world for her. The sun dazzled overhead, a hot stare, and black trekked above her in a column of smoke. Behind her, the vines were screaming.

Let them scream. Sally rolled on her side, scrabbled blindly away from the noise, going somewhere else.

They found her on the road. Her mother grabbed Sally, a relief of human skin pressing against hers. “Sally what happened to you, your face—my God—”

All of these words were tiresome. Sally leaned her smarting face against her mother’s shoulder, breathing in the smell of flour. One of the adult men was shouting but Sally ignored him. “It’s okay Ma,” she tried to say. The words came out as a croak.

“Hold on, Sally,” Ma said. “You hold on.” And Sally lowered her head as though Ma’s words would keep her safe.

Later, when the doctors finally let Sally come home, she helped Ma look for dimes. The funeral had come and gone when Sally was in her fever. About it, all Ma said was, “Your Pa was a good man.” She added, staring at the pile of bills, “He would have wanted us to stay here.”

Sally knew Ma was talking about the hardware men who were calling in their debts, and who Ma refused to look at when they were in town. It wasn’t fair of Ma, really, Sally thought. What choice did the hardware men have about eating? They needed the money.

But something seemed to have changed for Ma, since the day Sally had come stumbling back to them on the road. She didn’t care so much about politeness now. That part of Ma seemed to have been lost somewhere. Sally missed it.

Ben, on the bed, was trying to do his part. He held up the coin he’d found—or hidden, Sally thought, a long time ago.

“Found one,” he gasped. He looked away from them. Ma added it to the small pile on the table. Sally remembered the ten dollar bill sitting there and turned her head away. That money was long spent.

“Are we going to be okay, Ma?” Ben couldn’t see the coins from where he lay. He didn’t know how few there were.

Baby Alasdair snuffled in his box, his breathing low and ragged. Ma adjusted his blanket, then scooped up Alice, who was getting underfoot as always. She went over to Ben and sat on the bed beside him, motioning Sally to join her. Sally sat gingerly on the end of the bed. Sometimes she thought she could still feel the vines squirming under her skin, and then she was afraid to let folk touch her.

“Now you listen, all of you,” her mother said. “This is Mackay land. We’ve worked for it and we’re going to keep working for it.” She squeezed Ben’s hand and threw a hard, half-hug around Alice and Sally. Sally found herself returning the painful embrace, as though she were hanging on to her family as they slid off the face of the world.

“We won’t be moved,” her mother repeated into Alice’s hair, like it was true.

From the nick of her eye, Sally could see the future coming for them: baby Alasdair dead from dust pneumonia by year’s end, the land foreclosed, her mother half mad at losing another loved one in a land not even good for graves any more. They’d be moved, all right, the way you had to move, when the only other choice was to die.

Sally felt that future and it terrified her more than the thing she’d seen at the Duborts’. But she said nothing. Instead, she reached out and took hold of Ben’s arm, like it really could work, like they really could make it.

Head bowed, she told the lie that was asked of her.

“We’ll hold on, Ma,” she agreed. “You’ll see.”

LITTLE EASE

Gemma Files

It came out of the dark, and into the dark it has gone again.

—E. F. Benson

My name is Ginevra Cochrane, and five years ago I was roughly eighteen months into a gig as a freelance exterminator, doing unregulated pest-control jobs for a private contractor who moved me from placement to placement, always keeping stuff off the books. It was shit work, basically—sometimes literally, always figuratively—and I’m not exaggerating when I say I took it on for lack of anything better.

You’re probably thinking, “I’ll bet she must’ve been on drugs, or drunk, or both.” Well, you’d be right. Shorter version of an already short story, without all the boring explication: car accident, dead best friend, botched recovery, painkillers and alcohol plus the side effects thereof, a truncated education, infractions to misdemeanors to a felony charge plea followed by a shortish stint in jail, crapped-out credit, and an ex-con stamp on my résumé. In the end, it took the events I’m about to recount to finally break me out of that overall downward spiral, for which I should be grateful, in retrospect.

My last foster mother, Zillah, used to claim people eventually find the job they’re most suited for, as though employment were some kind of moral refining process you’d really have to put your back into fucking up. She believed that to allow yourself to work simply for money, swap time for cash in order to walk away at the end of shift, and spend the rest of the weekend thinking about anything other than Monday morning, was like you were cheating yourself on some cosmic level—that not giving a fuck about work was an insult to the universe, so you couldn’t claim to be surprised when the karma incurred through that sort of deliberate perversity came back to bite you in the ass.

I got my exterminator work through a woman I’d met in prison, whom I’ll call Leonora. She was a high school equivalency instructor, later admitting she used our test results to figure out which of us short-termers might be worth recruiting for her little side business. She once told me I had the highest scores of anybody she’d ever passed, but I’m pretty sure that was glad-handling BS; pest control isn’t exactly full of geniuses—it’s something any moron can learn to do, and I do mean that literally, given how consistently dumb everybody I worked with in that area turned out to be. I’m talking people who never read anything longer than the back of a cereal box or couldn’t calculate fifteen percent for tips, people who thought being a Muslim should be made illegal, people who called their pets “fur babies.” They were good enough to go out with for drinks on occasion, when the loneliness got too hard to handle, but that was about it.

Personally, I’ve always had a hard time not thinking about things, even when I know damn well I’d be better off if I didn’t.

Dreaming can be a kind of drug, especially when you can’t afford anything better. Throughout my life, whenever things got really bad, I’ve felt this overwhelming urge to lie down and open myself up, abandon myself to whatever might present itself—just turn off the light, shut my eyes, and let my own subconscious boil up from inside until it presses back down upon me, rendering me slack, heavy, irresponsible: guiltless in the face of my own choices, or lack thereof.

Let it all wash over me, would be my last thought, before submerging; let me sink down, like a rock in the river. And lie there untouched, till the morning I don’t come up again.

Around the same time the events of this story took place, I started having a series of seemingly infinitely nested dreams that started one night only to cross over into the next, sometimes spilling into naps or reveries. Each new episode of the overarching narrative appeared to emerge from elsewhere, entirely outside myself; I’d wake with my sense of personal reality bruised and aching, actively questioning whether or not I’d actually experienced any of the things I devoutly felt I had.

Though these dreams varied widely in content, they always involved me finding a door somewhere no door existed, opening it, and going through. Once it was in the corner of my bedroom, lurking beneath the wallpaper; I only noticed it because the outline of its edges disrupted the pattern ever so slightly, a glitch in the design. Another time I got out of bed, crossed toward the bathroom, and heard something squeak beneath me—when I glanced down, I caught the glint of hinges, realizing only then that someone had cut a trapdoor in the floor without me knowing, leaving it waiting for me to stumble into. And once the door manifested itself inside my hall closet; I pulled aside the coats to reach for something deeper, paused, then saw the shadow between them was a hidden portal, barely cracked onto a deep expanse of black.

Doors, doors, everywhere. Wrestling through them before crawling on, unable to go back, afraid to go forward. After which I would wake from darkness into darkness and lie there sweat covered, pressing my hand down so hard it hurt over a hammering heart.

Pest control is a quotidian venture, at best; you can cull the overflow, but there’s always more, lurking inside the walls. Everybody assumes—correctly—that the bugs are there, but nobody really cares, so long as they don’t have to see them. And when you do see them that’s when you know you’ve got an infestation.

Similarly, the type of site you get sent to as an exterminator is usually determined by whether or not you’re okay working with rats, as opposed to whether or not you’re okay working with bugs. For myself, I find rats ten thousand times more disgusting than insects, mainly because they’re far more unpredictable. Didn’t help I’d once come across a nest full of newborn ratlings, all pink and squirming, blind eyes visible through their slightly transparent eyelids; really didn’t help I’d found it the same moment a bunch of male adult rats were chowing down on what might have been their own kids, while the mothers were off scavenging for dinner. After that, I was totally an insect person. I think most of us are, in context—almost nobody I’ve ever met has a problem with killing bugs.

Another thing I learned is that each site has its own peculiar ecology, which means that knocking out one insect type only replaces it with another—so that’s what you aim to do: maintain a careful natural balance that renders the inherent process of predator and prey invisible once more, without eliminating it entirely. Like managing climate change (supposedly), but restricted to one particular neighborhood, one block, one apartment building.

The sites I got sent to had a lot more in common than insect infestations, however. Inevitably, they were owned by one of a small, tight knot of local slumlords, while the buildings themselves ran the gamut from mildly rundown to outright decrepit. We’re talking exposed wiring, cold-water plumbing, bucket toilets, broken everything. Garbage piled up in the corners, sometimes rotting—the easiest fix, so long as I could find somebody English-fluent to translate my suggestions about better hygiene equaling fewer bugs. The residents I interacted with tended to be nomads and refugees, seasonal workers, people too old, broken, or poor to move, the illegal and the indigent: a constantly exploited floating class of paperless, voteless, voiceless drones who the city’s legitimate social infrastructure probably wouldn’t piss on if they were on fire.

I tried to tell myself I was doing something positive for these people, at least indirectly. That by ridding these places of pests, I was playing intercessor between these unfortunate residents and the system trying to game them, not just greasing the machine’s wheels in mid-crush.

Leonora had deals with a bunch of different pesticide companies, buying expired products in bulk at a discount to keep her overhead down, and handing them out to us like they were brightly colored poison candy. One night, after being dumb enough to casually Google the names of the various sprays and powders I routinely handled, I discovered that almost all contact insecticides are literally nerve agents, organophosphates specifically designed to interfere with the enzymes that enable bugs’ systemic impulses. Even the most benign have more in common with sarin gas than anything else, and multiple exposures only amplify their toxicity, creating a cumulative effect that can denude a whole area.

Our on-site safety protocols were put-on-rubber-gloves-and-hold-your-nose-type shaky. If we wanted masks, we paid for them ourselves, so most people went with the molded cotton kind plasterers use. I combed through military surplus stores till I came up with a chemical warfare rig from Desert Storm, but soon found out nobody made filters for it anymore. So I just cobbled my own together out of reconstituted, cut-down sanitary pads, and hoped I wasn’t breathing in anything too permanently damaging.

Because it felt like I had no other choice, I sucked it up; played through the grime and the itchiness, the sore spots and intermittent waves of queasiness, the head-to-toe stink that never quite went away. I refused to chart symptoms, convinced stress was just as likely to cause everything I was experiencing, even as my shower’s drain clogged up with hair and my face took on a hectic rosacea-patterned glow, flaky-flushed across the forehead, the thin-skinned arch between eyebrow and lid. Like I’d been trying to tan using a microwave.

Thirteen weeks in, however, I hit the wall hard, forced to admit what I really should have known all along: I was hip-deep in toxins and risking my health for a pittance, stuck fast, with no immediate way I could figure out to extricate myself.

“C’mon in here, Ginnie,” Leonora told me one Monday, when I came in to load my car up with whatever awful shit they were handing out that week. “Need to talk to ya about the job you’re on . . . Dancy Street again, right?” I nodded. “Yeah, okay; won’t take a minute. And shut the door, will ya?”

Inside Leonora’s office sat a tall woman she introduced as the “Dancy Street Project’s” general manager, whose name I recognized from all my previous paychecks, but who I’d never before seen in person. She wore a suit and a little too much perfume, both probably expensive.

“Nice to meet you, Miss Cochrane,” she said, smiling wide. “Leonora tells me you’re a pretty smart cookie.”

“I like to think so,” I agreed, already wary. People say women are more empathetic than men, which is why we socialize quicker and get along better. But most of us only learn to fake that empathy to deal with men’s egos, rather than each other’s; some of the worst jobs I’ve ever worked had all-female crews, especially when you got somebody ambitious enough to want credit but too shameless to put in any effort, yet duplicitous and clever enough—as Suit-chick already struck me—to shove any blame for the ensuing eff-up onto ground-level cannon fodder like me.

She nodded. “You’ve been onsite how long now?”

“At Thirty-Three? Well, I started last Tuesday—”

“—But Ginnie’s been our point gal on a number of jobs in the area over the past few weeks,” Leonora chimed in. “So she’s more than familiar with the current state of the project.”

I moved my head, noncommittally, while Suit-chick just kept on smiling. “Mmmm,” she said. “And what’ve they got down there, in your opinion?”

“Basic infestation,” I replied. “I’d guess roaches, by the damage.”

I waited for her to ask if I’d seen them myself, but she didn’t, which struck me as weird, even then. As it happens, I’d seen everything but: black pepper–flake feces with a musty, pungent odor, plus oothecae—oblong casings like a caterpillar’s cocoon, housing fifty eggs each. I’d found them all over Thirty-Three, fresh-popped and ready to go, either glued up under counters, clustered round the groins of pipes, or in the dusty corners of ceilings where nobody thought to check, especially people too frail to crane their necks that high.

“Looks like they came out of the walls,” I continued. “I’ve been laying down poison, but I’m still not seeing carcasses. What I really need to do is knock a few holes and look around inside, get a handle on what they’re doing back there. I put in a request.”

“Yes, we saw that.”

“Um, okay, great. So . . . can I?”

Her smile didn’t change, at all. “We’d actually prefer that you didn’t.”

The Dancy Street area—Project—was a weird little cul-de-sac jammed between a slow-dying semi-industrial area and pre-gentrification’s encroaching decay. Their nearest neighbor had once been the Winnick Brothers Camp-out Cookery plant, home to a defunct brand of easy-heat tinned stew; “pet food for people,” a guy I once dated used to call it. But they’d been gone since the short-fall crash, leaving nothing behind but a few crumbling buildings, a bunch of equipment too heavy to move and too obsolete to sell, plus a ground-in smell of dead flesh that emerged whenever the heat climbed too high, strong enough to make a hyena gag.

Number Thirty-Three was an apartment building dating back to the 1920s, a moldering gray-brown brick box put up for the Cookery’s live-in staff housing, then given some shoddy build-on action and sold as a combination halfway house and backpackers’ drop-in. Now it was a crapped-out three-story inhabited by maybe fifteen extraordinarily old people, all of whom I’d run into in the halls, by this point. I’d see them stringing laundry up between the bottom balconies inside the all-concrete courtyard as I came out of the basement, shoes crunching slightly over its cracked and broken areas; they’d smile, or seem to, and I’d try to smile back.

Most I couldn’t have described if you’d paid me extra, not even to tell the (presumably) men from the (presumably) women—just a bunch of hunched little figures at the corner of my vision, all with the same sort of wispy gray hair, gray teeth, gray faces.

The sole exception was a lady I called Great-Aunt Chatty, if only in my head. She’d sidled up behind me my second day onsite, taken a long, squinty gander over my shoulder, then asked, “Are you sure you should be using that indoors, dear?”

“That” was Leonora’s latest load of whatever-the-hell, a vile pink paste I was currently spooning out of a bucket and smearing along the baseboards on either side of the cellar door. “Just doing what it says to on the label, ma’am,” I lied, without looking up.

“Miss,” she corrected, gently. “Are you from the property office?”

“Um . . . sure.”

“Then you’d be able to pass along a message for me, if I asked.”

This, however, was further than I felt comfortable going, in terms of polite bushwah. “Not really,” I replied, forcing myself back to a standing position, so I could seem slightly more official. “I’m just here to deal with the bugs. You’ll need to talk to the superintendent about anything else.”

“Oh, truly?” I nodded. “Because none of us have seen that particular gentleman in quite some time now, you know; three months, perhaps even six.”

“I can’t help you with that, ma’am—miss.”

“What a pity.” Adding, after a pause, “I wasn’t aware we had insects.”

“Seriously?” She raised one surprisingly well-kept brow. “Well, my boss wouldn’t’ve sent me out here if you didn’t.”

“I suppose not, no.” Indicating the paste: “Will that help?”

“Hopefully.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

I sighed. “We switch to something else.” Half to change the topic, I turned to face her and saw she fit the pattern of an Orthodox spinster, Jewish or otherwise: no makeup, long hair in wound-up braids, collared shirt and a dark skirt to the ankles, her once-good black shoes gone dusty and cracked with age. “Miss, no offense, but what’s someone like you still doing . . . here?”

“Someone like me? I’m not quite sure I know what you mean, dear.”

“It’s just . . . you seem—” Sane? Human? “—like you might have options.”

“Ah, well. I’ve spent the last few years working on a private concern, a very particular line of inquiry; a scholarship, one might say. And despite its difficulties, this is the single best location for it I’ve found, as yet.”

Sounds legit, I thought. But at that same moment, it was like a scrim dropped down over my eyes, like the hallway itself gave a single, slow, rippling blink. Two thoughts at the same time, superimposed: an image from my dreams sharpening quick into focus, darkening the daylight. The idea of crawling farther and farther in through successively smaller spaces, tunnel narrowing till it touched your skin, only to find you no longer had room to turn round, even if you wanted to: just stuck there, hot and close, jacketed in your own flesh like a ready-made coffin. Neither here nor there, forever.

“Oh, yeah,” I heard myself answer, from far away. “I know how that goes. Like when you get so far into a thing, dig in so deep, you just, you can’t . . . get back out again.”

“Something like that, yes.”

“Like—an enthusiasm. Or an obsession.”

“More a vocation, but yes, dear, yes. How perceptive.”

Standing there smiling, studying me, her dim eyes vaguely satisfied, oddly proud. And then I was back to myself once more, world realigned with a sort of shrug—gloved hands poison-smeared, wavering slightly next to Great-Aunt Chatty in the world’s shittiest excuse for a hallway. Who reached over to pat my arm, announcing—

“Much as I appreciate your concern for my welfare, I certainly couldn’t abandon this work just yet. So I’ll leave you to yours, shall I? But if you should get a chance to speak to the management, do let them know that assigning a new superintendent wouldn’t go amiss.”

And with a raised eyebrow, as though letting me in on the joke, she walked on past, slow but upright.

We’d crossed paths a few times since, she always pausing to gift me a nod, no matter what else she might be in the middle of—shepherding someone even older to the elevator, or scribbling vigorously in a flip-top notebook she’d quickly tuck away, like she thought I might grab it. I didn’t even know which unit she belonged to; I had no reason to wonder, let alone ask.

The last time was a few days before, at the top of Thirty-Three’s basement steps, while I trudged up them with a load of empty roach traps. “No progress yet, hm?”

“Yeah, no. I just don’t get it.”

“Oh, evidence of things unseen is always difficult to compile, I’m afraid. As I know, from personal experience.”

For all she said it lightly, the words rang true, flat, cold. Maybe that was what prompted me to throw a glance over her shoulder, as I reached it; the notebook was out again, and this time she wasn’t quite fast enough. I glimpsed heavy black calligraphy that filled every page top to bottom, all thick curves and jagged angles—neither English nor Cyrillic, kanji or ideographs. Here and there I thought I saw numbers: algebra? Some even higher mathematical form?

“Do you mind?” Chatty asked, flipping it shut.

“Sorry,” I replied, automatically. “Your project?”

“Elements from it,” she snapped back—then gentled her tone. “I’m sure they wouldn’t interest you, dear.”

Try me, I thought, but held off. And after a moment, she sighed, admitting: “These aren’t mine, exactly. I transcribed them from papers belonging to an historical figure relevant to the overall subject of my investigation, a fairly obscure gentleman, by most standards. Have you ever heard of Dr. John Dee? An alchemist and natural philosopher, at the court of Queen Elizabeth the First . . . you’ve heard her name before, surely.” I nodded. “He had a theory about language, you see. About the very first iteration of all primordial speech, the Ur type; that if you stripped every other language away, raised a child never teaching them even the rudiments of human speech, then if they finally spoke, that would be what came out. Whatever language Adam and Eve might have used in Eden, when they had no one to talk with but animals on the one hand, angels the other.”

“And what—that’s it, there? That tangle?”

“No, no. This is a cypher cobbled from something a seer he knew named Edward Kelley claimed was Enochian, the dialect of all Heavenly Choirs, Powers, Thrones, Dominions, et cetera. No one knows how to pronounce it, though many have tried.”

“What would be the point of that, exactly?”

Chatty rocked back a bit, smiling slightly again. “The point, dear, is that whoever speaks Enochian with all its proper emphases intact—like a native—might, in theory, be able to parlay directly with those it was designed for, with no sadly outdated religious relics necessary. No prayers, no supplication . . . no clerical intervention, at all.”

“Talk to angels.”

“Oh, yes. Their names are Enochian, after all. And as Adam would have known, to name something—the way God Himself once commanded him to do, with every beast that creeps and crawls—is to take possession of it. To own it.”

I looked at her, but she didn’t look back. She was definitely somewhere else now, deep inside, contemplating her own mind’s slow-etched wallpaper, whose pattern—I could only speculate—probably looked a lot like black mold at this point, incipient aneurysm’s dull red craquelure.

“So how’re we supposed to do it?” I’d already asked, out loud, before I could catch myself.

“We aren’t,” Chatty replied, briskly. “Not since Eve’s mistake, the apple, the Fall. Not since original sin entered into every one of us, born or unborn, binding death fast to our DNA.”

. . . Okay.

This was getting a little weird, as she seemed to know, dialing things down from Slightly Scary Stranger to Mildly Eccentric Distant Relation almost immediately. “But, as I said, Dee had a theory. And it’s that theory from which my work proceeds, more or less.”

“Which was . . . ?”

The smile slanted, twisting to show just a peep of teeth. “Ah. Well, that would be telling.”

I used to wonder what my dreams of squeezing through tiny doors into ever more tiny rooms were about, forever worming my way through cracks and crevices, face-first into the dark. But then I remembered that back in England, at the Tower of London, they used to have this punishment cell they called “Little Ease.” I’m not sure where I first heard about it, but it’s stayed with me ever since: an airless, windowless space, four feet square, within which prisoners could neither entirely stand up nor entirely sit down. Instead, they’d do their time crouched over in ever-increasing agony, suffocating on their own breath until finally released, often by death.

Little Ease no longer exists, supposedly. It was torn down, or maybe bricked in; became an entirely liminal space, rendered conceptual by history’s tricks, retroactively denied: it is not so, nor was it so, and God forbid that it should be so. But it was, so it still is, continuously—like penal system, Little Ease will endure as long as any living person remembers it, even if they never experienced its horrors directly.

For anybody who’s ever been in jail, these things become just a tiny bit more immediate, I suppose. Which, now I think about it, probably has some bearing on what happened next.

So now we were back in Leonora’s office, me still contemplating Suit-chick in the wake of her announcement, uncertain how I was allowed to react. I glanced at Leonora, eyebrow hiking; she shrugged. Utterly unhelpful. But then again, it’s not like anything needed to be outlined in neon for me to see what Suit-chick was getting at—job title aside, her own bosses didn’t want her to manage the property around Winnick Brothers Cookery’s dead shell at all, but to force a mass exodus so they could knock everything down and get to the far more profitable land it stood on. And to attain that goal, she’d gladly screw over what few residents might remain stranded onsite right in their saggy old butts, Chatty included.

Not that I felt sorry for her, exactly, the crazy old bitch—except for how I suddenly did, so much I almost wanted to cry. Like I’d already be doing so, if my eyes weren’t so damn dry.

This job, I thought, straining not to frown even with that rash between my brows rubbed raw, and all my mucous membranes tightening at once. It’s gonna kill me for sure, this fucking job. But only if I let it.

“All right,” I said, finally, prompting Suit-chick to nod, like I’d successfully jumped through some hoop. Then she leaned forward a bit, voice lowering confidentially—never a good sign—and explained.

“Truth is,” she began, “we’ve been trying to clear Number Thirty-Three for quite some time now, using all the regular methods. But the people who live there . . . well, let’s just say they don’t respond to the carrot or the stick, and leave it at that.”

“What is it you do want me to do, then?”

Now it was Suit-chick’s turn to look Leonora’s way. “Obviously,” she said, “I can’t order you to make the infestation at Thirty-Three worse—”

“Obviously,” Leonora repeated.

“—but if you can just hold off on sealing the deal, shall we say? Clock your time, draw your pay; do what you have to, or rather, don’t. Let nature . . . take its course.”

“For how long?”

“You tell me.”

I swallowed, considering my options. “Well,” I replied, at last, “if I only could get inside those walls, there might be ways to accelerate the process: put down food, raise populations . . . ,” I trailed away, then added: “If that sounds like something you’d find useful, I mean.”

Leonora gave me a narrow look over Suit-chick’s shoulder, half assessing, half impressed: nice bullshit you’re shoveling there, Ginnie. But the lady in charge must have felt willing to cut me some slack in the plausibility department, because the next thing I know she’s shaking my hand and smiling, grip soft skinned yet unrelenting in its pressure.

“Well, that’d be just great,” she told me. “Pull that off, you can certainly write your own ticket, from now on.” One last, slightly harder shake. “Or not.”

In other words: don’t screw things up, especially after claiming you can un-screw them, or suffer the consequences. I didn’t hugely want to think about what those consequences might be, since nobody felt like elaborating.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, willing myself not to look away. And waited for her to let go first.

That night, when the tiny door in my dreams opened and I crawled inside, I found myself stranded, surrounded. The papery rustle of wings was everywhere, a general creep and rattle—some sort of hum, some sort of whirr, a big machine starting up in the distance, reduced to mere resonance. A vibration felt right against the eardrum, like something tongueless trying to talk.

I lay down on my dream room’s floor, in the dark, and waited for whatever it was to swarm over me in a chittering, clicking wave, its many mouths open. Didn’t even close my eyes. Let it come, I remember thinking, incoherently. Let it come.

I spent most of that morning packing up my apartment, which was easier than I’d anticipated—just clothes, food, my computer, and I.D., with everything else left behind. Didn’t seem reasonable the Dancy Street Project would bother tracking down one lowly ex-con exterminator, but given I was just about to scuttle the fuck out of their little entomological warfare campaign, I also planned to dump my company phone right after. Before disappearing between the cracks, that is, like the metaphorical insect I was.

Because that was what I’d been thinking, of course, listening to Suit-chick’s spiel: how since I wasn’t on parole, there was literally nothing tying me to this job, no earthly reason I had to keep it. I mean, yes, the fees were good, and money is always better than no money (another Zillahism). But every under-the-counter disposal was one more stream of revenue I had no receipts for, one more potential audit—and predictable as my work could be, job satisfaction was an issue, increasingly, seeing how nothing I did was ever really, truly done. Always more vermin, lurking; some fresh deposit, just breeding and waiting, right where you could never get permission to get at it. Who would you ask, after all? God? The—

(angels?)

So instead, I was going to do the exact opposite of what I’d promised: my job, the right way, then walk away—fast—and reinvent myself somewhere else, somewhere they probably wouldn’t think to look, free and clear. One last suspect act of kindness, weaponized into a double middle finger on my way out the back door.

By the time I got onsite, it was already afternoon. I drove into the Cookery parking lot, parked kitty-corner to Number Thirty-Three, and suited up, hauling out a tub of Leonora’s latest kill-’em-all mix. Glancing up slantwise, I caught a few residents peeping down on me from the building’s upper areas: just backlit heads and shoulders mainly, with an occasional whitish-gray oval shoved so close against the glass it sprouted a mild suggestion of features. None of them seemed to be Chatty, but I wasn’t at all sure I could tell, at this distance.

God knows what they thought I was doing, especially when I got out the sledgehammer.

I stuck the tub on my hip, haphazardly, and humped toward the building like Quasimodo. I’d already scouted out a place to start knocking in walls earlier that week, trying to determine what I was working with, the extent of the damage. I needed to know where the things leaving shit and egg-casings were actually coming from, not to mention scurrying back to, so I could reckon how many of them I’d need to kill in order to keep Thirty-Three livable a tiny bit longer.

One way or the other, getting inside those walls would be the breakpoint, and whatever I saw there would determine exactly where things went next.

I began at what I assumed was the base of the garbage chute, a dumping channel running vertically down through all three floors to the basement garbage room. Thirty-Three was old enough there were no assigned city garbage skips outside, mainly because the alley was far too narrow. Instead, once the garbage room was sufficiently full, the onsite superintendent—had he existed—would have carried bags full of the crap up a small, side-access stair opening directly into the same alley. I’d been down there a couple of times already to lay poison, only to find it surprisingly empty; maybe old folks just didn’t generate much waste, or hoarded most of it, which probably went a ways toward explaining the insect situation in general.

The shaft was any colony’s most easily accessible food source, so it made sense to start there. Since I’d still never seen any bugs during my earlier forays, however, I decided it might be more a matter of looking around, rather than into. Which is why I took a two-handed grip on the sledgehammer, swung it back as far as my biceps would allow, and proceeded to knock a me-sized hole in the corner just outside that deepish groin where the wall containing the garbage room door opened out from the next wall over.

Plaster flew, wood cracked. After ten to fifteen good hits, enough to open a hole big enough for head and shoulders, I thumped hard against concrete, shivering what I took to be a support; I pulled out my flashlight, stuck it between my teeth, and squirmed in. I wasn’t expecting much more than enough room to fit my head, a narrow cavity perhaps floored with nests and eggs where the insulation had shrunk back after drying out. But the beam of the flashlight plunged startlingly far into the blackness on either side, and the air had the thin, dank chill of old stonework. I looked around, realizing this was no accidental architectural gap but a deliberately constructed passage: three feet wide at most, running inside the wall separating garbage room from storage room.

Holy shit, I remember thinking. No wonder these walls looked so thick on the plans.

It’s due diligence to review blueprints for every urban site you service, but I think I might have been the only one left still doing it on Leonora’s crew. That said, there was no way I’d expected something like this.

Before I knew what I was doing, I’d already crawled entirely inside.

There wasn’t quite room to stand, so I had to move carefully, neck at an angle. I followed the passage farther in, but was startled to find it debouched even farther into another cross-passage, this one clearly running the length of the building’s outer wall. Transferring flashlight to fist, I ran its light down the floor left and right, yet could not find the end.

Concrete on the inside, brick on the out. Pipes running overhead, occasionally T-junctioning out through the walls; plumbing, electrical, something. Cobwebs festooned everywhere, dusty as the walls themselves. They hung down like crusted lichen from the floorboards above, feathering gritty-stickily across my shoulders, my arms, the top of my head—till I thought I felt something tickle the nape of my neck as if it was trying to squirm between the hot plastic mask and my cheek beneath, and I pulled my hoodie up high with a grunt of disgust.

Halfway in, I stopped and listened, breathing quietly, then nodded to myself: the sounds of insects rattled up and down the passage, getting closer. So I half turned back to the hole, thinking to trade my hammer for the insecticide tub and slap whatever emerged with it, like I was poison-painting a fence . . .

Which is exactly when something finally did scramble right into my flashlight’s beam and freeze: grayish-brown mottled, protective coloration almost exactly matching the wooden “roof,” both sorts of walls, the dust. And big—shit. Like rhino beetle big, a hissing cockroach crossed with a damn praying mantis. Big enough you’d need your whole hand to scoop it up and crush it.

The same way I wanted to, basically, the very second I spotted it.

It was primal, revulsion boiling up over me, making me gulp and shiver. The thing just looked wrong to me, in every possible way—how it moved, how it was. The way some malign and alien brain had apparently slapped its various parts together, so haphazard as to seem cruel, then dropped it to let it creep away into other people’s nightmares.

Beneath a carapace brow like a crab’s, multiple eyes glinted, bulging. I stared at it, not moving. It stared back.

Then it reared up erect on its hind four legs, wings flared out like filthy cellophane, to give a distant, grinding trill. On its belly I glimpsed what almost looked like markings, far too fast to fully register, let alone read—but I saw them, somehow; I knew them. Recognized them, in a way that made my brain wrench.

The speech of angels, Chatty’s voice murmured, soft, in my inner ear. And I felt my arm whip out again, up and back, one-handed; felt the hammer already coming down, heavy enough to wrench my shoulder till it screamed.

The bug whipped away, feet audibly clicking, zigzagging across the tunnel floor. I grabbed the hammer back up out of the cracked mess it’d made, spraying chips, and blundered after—came down wham! against the bottom of one wall, then wham! halfway up the other, catching one wing on the upswing. Squashed it so flat it stuck to the brick as that thing, sad parody of a real insect, gave a squeal and pulled free, leaving a trail of grume. Next thing I knew, I was round the corner and falling headlong forward with the hammer still death-gripped, right onto the place where that disgusting creature’s top half met its ass-end.

Chitin cracked loud, and I felt the bug’s guts squish in a far too satisfying way. Which is probably why I hit it again, and again, and again . . . till on the fifth or so hit, striking so hard my forearms rang like tubular bells, the whole floor beneath me simply collapsed.

Cypher: not a word I’d actually encountered much before, in its proper context. I looked it up, night after Chatty told me about her work: Something of no value or importance, was one definition; a person of no influence, a nonentity. But the one she’d obviously meant to use—a secret method of writing, as by transposition or substitution of letters, specially formed symbols, or the like—wasn’t much more reassuring. It felt furtive, somehow; covert, malignant, the act of a spy or a thief. Something all too easily lost in translation.

Think about those Bible verse host sites—BibleGateway.com, and the like—where you can run a vaguely remembered phrase through the search function and get upwards of fifty different versions of the same basic text: King James, Wycliffe, New International, Orthodox Jewish, the Voice, God’s Word, Amplified, Douay-Rheims. Rewrite any words long enough and the original phrasing, whatever it was that attracted you in the first place, falls away like spackle on a treated wall. Leaving behind—

(—what? The brickwork, the frames? A rough arrangement of individual molecules?)

Or something far deeper, especially if you were transliterating between a human tongue and . . . something else. Because if you didn’t really know what you were doing, just went on ahead and kept on going anyhow—if you were already in the process of making a mistake so fundamental, so subtle, you couldn’t ever see it to correct it—

Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth. Show me Your ways.

For behold, I shall show you a great mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.

I went down headfirst, drawn by my tool’s weight, dust spraying high as rotten wood tore at me from every angle. I know I breathed it in, like a miasma. I know I shut my eyes.

When I opened them again, I lay somewhere gray and close, so sore all over I could barely move. I’d landed on top of the hammer, driving the hammer’s head deep into my own side; what felt like an open wound was actually the worst bruise of my life, affecting a section of my colon plus the lowest lobe of my liver, and may eventually have led to me having to get my gallbladder removed. Somehow I’d managed to avoid breaking a rib outright, though the head ended up tucked under the left-hand two’s edges in a way that strained both bones almost to cracking.

For a moment I lay there fighting for breath, drooling what felt like blood. Then I swallowed, coughed, and almost screamed out loud.

The dark, like the pain, eased its grip slowly—I couldn’t tell if my eyes were adapting, or if there was some sort of dim fungal light seeping in. Eventually, I thought I could begin to make out shapes: outlines, silhouettes. Blunt spikes thrust upward out of rough mounds, scattered without pattern; a ceiling supported by pillars far thinner than I liked the look of, plaster-plank mix seething with shadows. And almost right in front of me, a step-sided pyramid—a ziggurat—made of bricks salvaged from the defunct factory outside. It seemed big down here on the floor, but shrank as I rolled, gained my hands and knees, using the hammer to lever myself up by agonized degrees: even bent over, the top was roughly level with my jaw, so maybe five feet high or five and a half, at most . . .

As another wave of queasiness broke over me, I grabbed hold of the side, hearing ill-set mortar grind slightly; mask already knocked askew, I felt like I was suffocating, so I ripped it off and threw it into a corner, where it bounced against the wall. And I don’t know how long I stood there, wavering, before I realized I wasn’t the only one I could hear breathing.

I gulped again, dipped my head, and pawed around as bile sloshed into my throat, clumsy as a drunk with a dropped bottle. Finally, however, I got my hands on my lost flashlight and found it unbroken, a tiny miracle—clicked it on, straight up into my own eyes, then slapped a hand across my face until I adapted again. Hammer still held tight in my other hand, I played the beam up and down the ziggurat, listening close.

Examined more closely, the ziggurat wasn’t completely solid: the bricks had been laid to leave spaces, mortar clumsily applied only to top and bottom, so every level was pierced by a thousand black perforations too small to see through, like arrow slits in a fortress, or air holes in an insect jar. As I moved the flashlight around, meanwhile, I saw a constellation of light flicker on the dusty air behind it, the beam spilling . . . well, not straight through, but close enough.

This structure was hollow. Which meant the breathing I heard came from inside it.

I bent farther, ignoring the nausea. There, at my feet, a much longer slit in the ziggurat’s base had been left open, large enough to slide a plate through. From this issued a terrible stink of ammonia and a spill of something pale, laid down in almost archaeological strata—the mulch of long captivity, shit marinated in piss then stamped flat, kicked back out along with desiccated scraps of food, small bones, a flood of surplus flies. As I moved forward, whatever lived in there recoiled, scraping itself on the inside of the ziggurat and drawing a soft, bit-back moan.

“ChristAlmighty,” I gasped, whole thing coming out stuck together; wanted to yell, but it was like my voice had crawled down my throat and died, self-strangled. Hammer and flashlight held tight, I braced them against the ziggurat’s brick and let it take as much of my weight as felt safe, as I hissed through one of the slots: “Hey! You in there, are you okay?” Stupid, stupid. How could they be? “I’m—I have a hammer, I could get you—can I try to get you out? Please?”

No reply, save . . . after long moments . . . a sort of muffled whimpering. Like whatever—whoever—had their hands over their mouth.

How bad would things have to be, I wondered, and for how long, that you’d have to teach yourself not to cry?

Slowly but steadily, still hunched, still dizzy, I realized what I wanted most right at that moment was to find the person responsible, and kill them. And luckily—

“Please do keep it down, dear,” a familiar voice said, from behind me, tone mild as ever. “It’s . . . rather important.”

A glance confirmed it: Great-Aunt Chatty, slipping so deftly between the pillars the dust barely touched her. Obviously, she was well familiar with this place, its hidden prisoner—a point proved when, recognizing her tone, said captive’s breath rate sped up as though slapped, became rapid, hitching. A groan of pure hunger followed, underscored by the drag of a dented tin plate that came pushing out quick through the slot, so fast it clunked against the brick sides like a crushed bell.

No real words mixed up in any of it, Enochian or otherwise, just the pant and whine of Pavlov’s dog: a truncated life, bonsai-sized and literally starved, raised in Little Ease. If “thrown food at intermittently, but mainly left alone in the dark to rot” counts as anything like raising, and it doesn’t, does it? It just doesn’t.

Chatty just kept on watching, not even bothering to fake anything that looked like shame, let alone guilt. I’d thought her eccentric, innocent; enough so to wreck my life over, at least in principle. Whoever’d done this, though, was anything but. And—

Oh, God, the rage, the rage. I can still taste it.

“This,” I made myself begin, pointing. “Is this, your . . . work?”

“My great work, yes.”

“Making somebody who can talk to angels.”

She shrugged. “That’s the thesis.”

“Dr. Dee’s, right? Stick a human fucking being in a kiln, a fucking person, then feed ’em whatever shit comes to hand, don’t talk to ’em for, like—fucking ever . . .”

“Some might argue a child isn’t quite a person,” Chatty put in here, deceptively gentle—same way she did everything else, however evil: research, code-breaking, forcible confinement, paring someone down to the bare roots from which goddamn angel speech would supposedly grow. “Not yet.”

I shook my head, violently. “Any kid’s still human, lady, no matter what. Don’t fool yourself.”

“A baby, really, when I first put her in there. That’s six years back, now—almost seven. Of all the ones thus far, she’s lasted longest; such a strong, strong girl. My single best subject.”

“You put a baby—”

“Please do lower your voice, dear, as I asked before. It’s rather essential she not . . . ”

“. . . hear anything that could interfere with the angels talking?”

“So you do understand.”

“How you’re seriously nuts? Yeah, got that. Slower than I should’ve, granted, but now? Got it in one, you evil old bitch.” She gave me a look then, slightly sad, like she might be thinking: You’re not as smart as I’d hoped, after all. But I skipped right over that, mind racing straight to the next question. “Wait a minute, though. How’d you even get hold of a baby, round here?”

“Oh, money’s a great help on that count, as in all things. Beside which, look around you, and think—this is hardly the only building. The other Dancy Street sites are full of greed, desperation, and good breeding stock, just as this one harbors elderly tenants with an innate willingness to look the other way, to ignore . . .” She smiled once more, this time a bit more sharply. “Why do you think I’ve stayed here, pursuing my inquiries? This area is practically perfect for them.”

You have money? I might have blurted back, had I been able. Instead, I felt that same sudden churn, that splash of disgust, hot and viscid. It lit me up, pumped my veins full of bile; I couldn’t speak, couldn’t think. So I acted, instead, without doing either.

Staggering back to gain room, I dropped the flashlight, heard it crunch and pop. I swung the hammer up again, almost sideways; there was no room to go high, and I didn’t want to risk knocking out a pillar, but I needed speed, aim, impact. The head landed, crunching down, rocking the whole ziggurat side to side; I saw the place where two bricks intersected start to crumble, break right across, then grinned cheek-hurtingly wide as I did it again, again, again. Chatty gave an indrawn hiss between her teeth, hands flying to her mouth in a gasp of horror, as if I were the one committing the atrocity—

“Get back, kid!” I heard myself roar, as I reared back for yet one more fresh hit, with no idea if she could even understand me. “Get back, I’m coming in, I’m coming! I swear, I’m gonna—”

On the very last try, however, something caught my wrist in a terrible, tearing vice, biting down hard. I felt the bones grind together as I spun to look, found Chatty literally hanging off my arm face-first, hands knit above and below with her nails popping my skin as she worried at me, shook her head back and forth like a dog. I yelled at her, but she just held on tight, too busy to yell back—blood was gouting out around her mouth’s seal, wrinkled lips gone red. I felt her brittle teeth move in my flesh.

Again without thinking, I slammed her head down against the ziggurat’s crushed-in side at full punch, bashing her skull on the bricks. Her scalp tore, spraying red; something snapped, audibly. She let go and I let go of the hammer, dropping it this close to my own foot, grabbing what was left of my wrist before I could bleed out on the floor. I knew I needed to tourniquet it, fast, but what with—my sleeve, one of my gloves? A shoelace?

Then, from the floor, I heard something impossible—a wet, muffled noise, choking broken up with vowels. Chatty, trying to talk.

I didn’t want to look, but I did. Her hair went one way, her jaw the other, seeming to hang almost free. Red teeth glinted up at me, whole mouth crushed in around them, stroke-drooping. Was that a lip, or only the meat where it had been?

“Don’t,” I snarled at her. “Just . . . just don’t. Stay down.”

She rattled, blood bubbling. Spat a load of wet enamel at my shoes, mostly in pieces. Then managed, somehow, as though she hadn’t even heard—

“Yuhoooo . . . yooo. Duhnt. Y’duhnt . . . knoooh.”

Oh, God, just shut up and die! Snapping, out loud: “I don’t want to know.”

“Bbbuhhhh . . .” The word trailed away, almost to silence, before she started over. “Buhhhh, buhhhh . . . ttttt . . .”

(but)

More noise cut her off, this time from inside the ziggurat: a shifting, a cracking. Bricks and parts of bricks falling together, sharp as a one-person avalanche. Which is when they came, that very moment, as though called—right as the badly laid triangle behind me split open like a cocoon, a dusty stone seed-pod blooming.

With Chatty still quietly choking at my feet, hacking up blood and phlegm, the chittering started low and swept up high, a skin-puckering susurration issuing from no particular direction, or all of them. Around me, the walls and pylons seemed to blur, to froth up, the head on a beer spilling over; above, the roof’s darkness kept on seething but sharpened focus, each dark point suddenly revealed as an insect, sister to the one I’d crushed. Skittering on asymmetric legs, leaping on warped and membranous wings, they came in their thousands, their tens of thousands. Chatty and I were surrounded, islets in a rising tide.

Since my arms were essentially glued together, swollen and numb, I had no hope of grabbing up a weapon, at least not one I could swing . . . but I scrabbled at my belt anyway, looking for something, anything, till the fingers of my wounded hand closed on the one can of pesticide that had survived the fall intact. Clumsily, I flicked it open and turned in a circle, yellowish-white powder scattering thickly around me in a ring, like salt to ward off demons. As the chemical reek rose, the swarm recoiled, skittering over each other to clear me a path. Since I hadn’t bothered to extend it around Chatty—hadn’t even considered the possibility—she was nothing now but a low, faintly moving shape under a writhing bug-carpet; good, I thought, suddenly too exhausted to care. Only right and proper.

I shuffled farther, shaking and stomping even as my knees slowly gave way beneath me, unconvinced I could reach whatever entrance Chatty’d come in by before I ran out of poison but determined to try. As I got to the far wall, though, the ziggurat’s ruin gave yet another heave, bricks shedding like skin; I couldn’t help but turn, blinking, to watch the girl inside clamber slowly free, not so much levering herself up as squirming, naked, bloody, and bruised.

Her limbs were sticks, all bone and sinew; I could count every rib, even in this half light. Worse yet, her ass and thighs were a mass of never-treated sores—runneled, seeping scabs on top of scabs that detached as she straightened, ripping away stickily. Her never-cut hair was a woolen rat’s nest, one huge, colorless Polish plait matted beyond any hope of combing that’d have to be shaved or carded, picked apart like oakum. Her eyes were huge, and flat, and dead.

This was what somebody born innocent looked like, seven years on, after being denied everything they needed to be human. She’d never seen the light outside, never walked upright; hell, given the way she flailed, I wasn’t sure she knew how to. Never been touched, or spoken to. Never smelled anything but garbage, her own detritus. She was a void in the shape of a body, trembling with pain so ingrained she barely seemed to feel it—nameless, loveless, unaware. Soulless.

I don’t know at what point I realized I was weeping, but I’d been doing it a while by the time I did. To try and touch her in comfort would be ridiculous, the very definition of far too little, too late—but better yet, or worse, I didn’t dare. Every part of me recoiled from her, instinctively, as though the sheer horror of her existence formed an event horizon impossible to cross back from, once breached.

As if she’d heard my thoughts, the girl’s head suddenly popped up, numb gaze darting, pupils blown. Trembling all over, she seemed to levitate herself upward; before I knew it she was half squatting on top, broken bricks digging into her kneecaps, arms thrown wide. She opened her mouth, disclosing a surprisingly full set of teeth: carious, broken, brown. Then she drew one shuddery breath, sunken chest heaving—

—and began to sing.

It was that same drone, a scratchy buzz shading abruptly high and sweet, the insects’ creepy trill. As it burst from her throat, the entire swarm exploded, throwing it back a million-fold; their call rose and never fell, louder than bombs, a rooftop-ripping hurricane wind. A choir of terrible angels. I shrieked too, my own voice lost in all that noise, good hand and bad stuck fast over one ear, head turned in a futile attempt to block it out. Because dire as the sound was, I could just hear an intimation, the merest ripple, of something else hidden underneath: soft, distant. Rising.

The floor, walls, and ceiling erupted around me, around her, a living vortex. They lighted onto that stunted little muse-queen of theirs en masse, taking hold to roost all along her shoulders, back, and hair in rows, like Hitchcock’s birds. After which they reared back, characters of Chatty’s bastard angel-jargon flickering across their bellies, and drummed their many wings all at once, an inhuman storm.

No matter their numbers, there was no way those bugs could lift even the smallest person; the physics simply wouldn’t reckon. Yet I know I saw that girl rise into the air, however slowly—feet dangling, a puppet exiting stage up. I know she glanced my way as it happened, with those empty eyes, and when her gaze met mine, I know I couldn’t look away.

Impossible.

Her lips moved, or seemed to: words, or symbols? Was it Edward Kelly’s cypher? Was her pronunciation correct?

Go, I thought I heard, clearly, inside my skull. Go now, and stay away. Don’t look back, or come back, ever . . .

. . . but thank you, too. Yes. Thank you.

(so go)

And all at once there was a split in the maelstrom, a way through, only big enough for one. I took it, gladly.

(go)

I remember exiting a door in Thirty-Three’s storage room, hidden behind a false locker, and taking the stairwell steps two at a time, almost slipping as I ran down. I remember kicking the exit door open as the whole building started to shake, and lunging outside, air thick on my skin, ears still whirring. And then I remember the entire gray-brown brick box collapsing in on itself with a boom, dust cloud like some vast, shapeless creature leaping up and out, filling the sky.

I sat in my car as police cars and ambulances rolled in, sirens wailing, and treated my wounds by the fire trucks’ flashing lights. Since nobody seemed to notice I was there, however, I just tied up my wounds and drove away—made it out of town in an hour and a half, holding fierce to consciousness, my knuckles white on the steering wheel. I went, and kept on going.

Though I checked the Web each day after that for a month, Dancy Street’s collapse was only mentioned once, and blamed on structural fatigue. The city council called for an inquiry, naming a certain consortium of slumlords as “people of interest,” though nothing really came of it. No mention of an emaciated girl’s body being found anywhere in the rubble, either, not that I’d really thought there would be.

Eventually, I reached somewhere I felt safe enough to stop and lie down in the dark of a locked motel room, bracing myself. But the nightmares didn’t come, for once—not that night, or any other. They were gone too, like everything else.

Do you know the definition of mystery? It’s not just an unsolved problem, but a ritual, a secret rite or method of worship—something lost and found against all odds, all good advice, repulsive in its very fascination. Or perhaps part of something much larger, a fragment glimpsed sidelong through bubbled, wavy glass of the sort left over from another time—not designed to let in anything but light, and not enough of that to truly illuminate anything.

Because there’s only ever enough light to show just how much darkness there is, everywhere, and that’s the sad, hard truth. So much darkness, and so damn little of everything else.

But as Great-Aunt Chatty should surely have known, even the most arcane history will teach us nothing, unless we let it. Which is why all mysteries, no matter how profound, truly demand solution, just as all secrets eventually demand telling—but only to the right person, you understand: a co-conspirator, an heir, a repository. A literal secret sharer. And that’s because mysteries are meant to be passed on, like diseases, because contagion via strictly defined transmission vectors is the only way they’re guaranteed survival.

Maybe Chatty’s mystery died with her; I’d like to think so, anyhow. I really would. Except for the fact that she had to’ve learned what she knew from someone, somewhere . . . and if you can’t find the source, it doesn’t matter if you burn the whole colony to ash and soak the site with poison, because all your work’s been for nothing.

No matter how you try to convince yourself otherwise, the infestation will come back.

What’s the Bible say—the wicked flee when no man pursueth? Well, that’s been me, all this time: always running and running, never knowing exactly from what; always bending my ear to the wind while expecting to hear the sound of wings, far away, but getting closer. Always waiting for the dreams to return, a thousand times smaller, deeper, darker.

And all because I know, just like you know too, now: how the world’s walls are hollow, full of hidden things, and far more fragile than you think.

That’s why I wrote it down here, so I never have to say it right out loud, or think of it again—so I can close my eyes, trust you to read on and act if the truth scares you that much, to be the works without which faith is hollow. Yet with these last few words, I still feel memory’s mouth seize and gnaw at me once more, masticate me alive and spit me back out half chewed, to pray in vain that the next time I’m swallowed might be my last.

That sound, meanwhile—what is that sound, inescapable even when inaudible, underneath it all? Some universal mechanism’s whine, through whose mighty gears we scuttle, scuffle, breed? An angel’s awful trill?

Such cruel things we are, damned soul-deep or soulless, not that it matters much, either way. Pest killers turned pests, clogging the cosmos’s workings: we think ourselves unseen, but are we? Can we be? Or are there just so many of us we can’t help spilling out into plain sight, inviting our own extermination?

Are we culled already, intermittently and efficiently, without even knowing it?

One day, I’ll wake in darkness hearing something speak my name, and I know I will be changed. Wings will break straight out of my back, painful as any birth—maybe two or four, maybe six, or more. And then I’ll fly: upward, downward, outward. Into darkness or light, not that it matters, either way.

Just away, from here. From me.

From everything.

For now, I sleep on in my Little Ease, still and close as the dead. Hoping—no doubt in vain—to be changed before I wake.

ETERNAL TROUTLAND

Stephen Graham Jones

Day 1

I don’t think I’m going to tell Dr. Robertson about this part of my recovery. This stage. She worries enough as it is. I mean, so did my mom when I was kid, so did Laura when we married, and so do Amanda and Tad whenever they call for money.

None of this is for any of them, though.

None of them would understand. Well—Mom, maybe. In that she would know what I’m talking about. She was there, after all, when I was nine and it was all happening.

But Dr. Robertson, I try to confine her worry for me to an hour before lunch each Tuesday. I don’t like to think about her thinking about me when I’m not there. It makes me feel like I’m walking through a long tunnel of x-ray machines, where I know I’m supposed to walk normally; I know I’m not supposed to exhibit any aberrant behavior, but if that’s ever worked in the history of ever, it’s news to me.

The less material I give her to form questions with, the more I can keep to myself, squeezed in a lead fist.

Like Roger.

That’s not a name I’m telling her any time soon.

Roger is a Great Dane from my childhood neighborhood. He’s been dead ever since before I even went to fifth grade. End of story.

Except.

The other night—okay, Dr. Robertson, last night—I’m feeling my way back to bed after a visit to the bathroom. My room up here at the cabin, it’s dark, of course, what Amanda used to call “mountain dark” when she was a girl. What that meant to her was that it was a darkness where you could still see shapes, what she called the ghosts of things, because their real selves were out dreaming. She was five. What she meant was that the stars and the moonlight, they gave trees and boulders and cars and couches a different kind of outline. There wasn’t any star- or moonlight bleeding into my bedroom last night, though. Just the wavering blue digits of my digital alarm clock.

It was 2:12.

I know because I was fixed on the individual lines of those square-edged numbers, the flickery little liquid-crystal lines that make them up, like they’re wearing their bones on the outside.

If you’re practiced like I am, if you know the seven segments that can display any number between zero and nine, you can count them in a glance.

The number 2 takes five bones—two vertical (upper right, lower left) and three on their sides, like top-middle-bottom stages—and the 1 takes two, stacked end to end on top of each other, leaning over to the right like italics but never falling.

Punctuation doesn’t count, obviously; the little colon, it glows the same as the numbers, but it never switches out with anything. Whenever you look at it, it’s going to be the same colon as it ever was. So you don’t even need to see it.

The numbers, though.

The trick is, you have to count their total before they flip, or else—bad luck—you have to stand there and total them again in the next sixty seconds, which is approximately fifty-eight seconds of pure boredom.

“2:12” comes out to twelve: two vertical bones per digit, for six, then three horizontals for each 2. It’s one of those rarely elegant combinations, where the word of it, “twelve,” matches up with the numerals of it. It’ll send a little thrill through you, I mean. Like you’re seeing through into the secret architecture of reality, the fizzy code that accounts for every last action, the metaphysical underpinning of what Tad might call the broad, vast universe—Tad the undergraduate astrophysicist.

Anyway, that’s why I remember what time it was: I’d already totaled it up, had my hand out for the shadowy certainty of the pillar in the middle of the room. Once my hand found it, I knew it was just a swing and pivot and there would be my bed again, and four more hours of bliss.

Used to, when my bladder was young and elastic, I wouldn’t have known my bedroom this intimately, this in-the-darkly.

You can’t dwell on the past, though.

This straight from the mouth of Dr. Robertson. She likes to use the eraser on her yellow pencil to provide periods in the air for her important statements. Periods and underlines both. She’d never admit it, but I’m pretty sure it’s a form of post-hypnotic suggestion. Just, there hasn’t been any official hypnosis session. The cadence of her words, though, that steady rise and fall, how she never uses italics out loud but still manages to emphasize—I think it trances me out enough for her pencil eraser to jam her words-to-live-by into my mind without my permission.

She’s not so much talking me better as she’s brainwashing me, I mean.

If it works, though, right?

I was in a bad place when I first walked into her office. No suicide attempts or substance abuse—I’ve never been extravagant—but, left alone as I suddenly was at forty-one years old, alone for the first time in twenty years, the demons that had been whispering to me since forever, they started to be all I could hear. No “voices” like a dog telling you to murder your neighbors or anything. More like an urgency to stay in a room a few breaths after everyone’s left, so I can get the lines in the paneling counted once and for all, and keep the world from imploding on itself.

That can snowball in your head into all kinds of nonproductive behavior.

None of which I exhibit anymore.

Still, Laura worries, and the kids’ calls seem to be regular enough that I suspect I could back-generate a schedule of sorts, or a series of handoffs at least. It’s your turn. No, I just called Wednesday. What about Mom?

Providing scripts for people not in your immediate vicinity, though, blah blah blah: Dr. Robertson.

Does she ever think that, when I rehear the so-called advice she’s Pavlov’d into my head, that that’s just another line in my transcript of remote people? That she’s just another voice in the make-believe chorus, now?

Her response, probably: it’s a one-person play, Chuck. And you’re the only one in the audience.

We’re never not in dialogue, her and me. Maybe that’s how this works. Maybe her voice in my head, it’s more trustworthy than my own.

Not that I exactly trust my eyes either. After last night.

There I am, a satisfying total of “twelve” lodged in my head, my hand just coming into contact with the rough pillar that holds the roof of the cabin up, when I see it over past the foot of the bed, by the electric socket with the scorch marks from when Amanda was still stuffing pennies into the world.

What I see there is the rump of a large, pale dog, just lying there asleep.

His name was Roger.

Mom would remember.

It was the summer between my fourth and fifth grade.

Because Mom was a vet tech, I got to sweep up the animal hospital twice a week, for dollars I probably could have gotten out of her anyway.

I wasn’t doing it for the money, though.

I liked to move silently past the animals in their cages. Mostly cats and dogs, but sometimes there would be an exotic—a parrot, an iguana. Once a prairie dog someone had tried to raise, until it got bitey.

You’d think a fascination like this would land me in veterinarian school after graduation, but Mom successfully warned me away. She assured me that, while I would be good at the nice parts of the job, I wasn’t cut out for the other parts, the ones they didn’t let the owners stay in the room for.

That other part: it was what Roger was staying overnight for.

The reason we all knew his name was that he was famous. Great Danes are big and lanky, but he was bigger and lankier than that, even. When he stood up on his hind legs, he could hook his forelegs over the shoulder of my dad, easily. Without even really trying.

He’d been in newspapers and magazines and even on one dog-food bag.

Being big, though, it comes at a price. Roger’s hips started going bad years before he was really old enough for them to.

When I saw him through the left-open door back in the examination rooms, he was there for his fourth surgery.

To cut him open clean like they needed to, my Mom had had to shave his rump with a disposable razor like my dad used for his face. She’d had to shave Roger’s whole back end, really, from right under his ribs all the way to the base of his tail.

It left him kind of gray-pink, with dark mottles like Great Danes have.

I stopped sweeping when I saw him through the door.

I stopped sweeping and just stared.

At first I thought that maybe here was a grossly overweight leopard seal. That was also albino. Or it could be a sick, baby hippopotamus, one that’s been bleached in the belly of a whale. Then spit up in Doc Brand’s office. For an autopsy? Then I came to the conclusion that this couldn’t be an animal at all, could it? This was the cap of some prehistoric mushroom, only it was dying now that it had been cut from its stalk, or trunk, or however mushrooms are.

What I didn’t think at first was “dog.” That’s what I’m saying.

It was thrilling. I probably smiled from just the newness of it, the prickly surprise of it. At least until Mom grabbed me by the back of my left arm, up high like she could, and dragged me over to the registration desk.

I didn’t stop looking, though. It let me see why, when she scolded me, she was hissing, whispering.

Doc Brand, he was sitting in that room as well. Not on his black spinny stool, but in one of the pet-owner chairs. His tie was loose, and there was a glass of something balanced on his thigh, steadied by his fingers.

He wasn’t crying, but he had been.

“Because he knows,” Mom hissed, her eyes hot and sad at the same time—not for Roger, I could tell, but for Doc Brand.

What Doc Brand knew, what all his medical school and his five years of experience had told him, was that there’s only so much a dog can take. Even one as large as Roger. Even a dog as famous as Roger. Being in newspapers and magazines, it might immortalize you, but it doesn’t make you deathproof.

This—Doc Brand, crying in a room alone with a giant dog—was why Mom didn’t want me to try to be a veterinarian.

Like I said, she worried.

She would worry more now, if she knew Roger was back.

That night in my bedroom at the cabin, I did what anybody in my sleepy position would do, seeing the hind end of a giant, dead dog in their room with no preamble: I closed my eyes, reconsidered.

What I didn’t do was let my hand slip from the pillar. I can’t brag, though; that’s just instinct. You hold on when you’re scared.

What I saw, or what I remembered when I closed my eyes—what had been there for years, I guess, without me ever having to think about it—it was the morning after Roger’s observation night. The morning after Doc Brand’s lonely vigil.

Roger’s surgery had been scheduled for nine o’clock. The nightlong observation was to steady his vitals, to make sure his stomach was empty, to get him comfortable.

At seven fifteen, when I was just pouring milk over my cereal, the first of the sirens screamed past.

There would be more. There would be all of them. Days of them.

After the third set, Mom made eyes to Dad, then walked her usual path down to the animal hospital, where everyone was gathering.

What had happened, as we learned along with everyone else tuning in to the news stations, it had happened to Doc Brand. And maybe to Roger as well. He wasn’t there anyway. He wasn’t a suspect either, if a dog can even be a suspect.

To have left Doc Brand’s after-hours, Roger would have had to have used Doc Brand’s keys on either the front door or the back door. Neither had crash bars that an overgrown Great Dane could lean against, or push his snout into. And there were no kennels with yard access he could have crawled through.

And what had been done to Doc Brand—it wasn’t a teeth-and-claws thing. There wasn’t exactly much left of Doc Brand, but what there was, it was mostly smeared onto the wall. By a hand. Not smeared in any random way, either. It was some sort of design, like a letter, just to an alphabet nobody knew.

In all the unsolved mysteries books out there, the Doghouse Murder, as it came to be called—it usually ranks pretty high.

Not because of the body count, “one,” but because of the other peculiarities. The first of those is that Roger the famously large dog was missing. The obvious question at the time, and forever after, was, was Roger led out on a leash, or was he carried out?

Some people supposed that he had been stolen, so as to be mounted in some private collection. There stands a big, big dog. Roger would be a good curiosity, for the right after-dinner crowd. Through a haze of cigar smoke, and after three or four drinks, and with the light winking in his glass eyes, he might even look alive, right?

However, it was Mom who pointed out to us that that was bunk. Roger wouldn’t have made a good mount. Not shaved like he was.

“What if they shaved the rest of his body, to match?” Dad had offered with a smile, because none of this was exactly breaking his heart; he’d always harbored a certain jealousy regarding anything “Doc Brand.” According to Mom, it was because Doc Brand outranked him professionally—“Dr.” beats “Produce Manager.” It didn’t help that Mom would sometimes quote Doc Brand on matters around the house. It undermined Dad’s authority, made him not so much the man of the house as just the man who was there right then.

All these years later, and taking into account Laura’s behavior late in our marriage, I of course have to wonder about the late hours Mom often worked for Doc Brand. And just what that work might and might not have entailed. If his cot in the storeroom could or could not support the weight of two people, in motion.

And I wonder if Dad wondered that same thing. Or if he had to wonder. When they divorced my sophomore year in high school, I did once hear Doc Brand’s name yelled behind a closed door—yelled in a way that the fight stopped that instant—but that’s neither here nor there.

The other peculiarity about the Doghouse Murder was that unreadable letter smeared on the tall white wall of observation room 2, which was exactly mirrored on the back side of that wall, in observation room 1.

That’s the part no one was ever able to explain.

The books and tabloids, they claimed to have evidence that what had happened was that the blood had gone through the wall. Usually for these “forensic” write-ups there would be insulation stripped from electrical wires supposedly pulled from the guilty wall during renovation. White wire, now stained with blood, as that great dark-red letter made its journey from one wall to the other, either pushed or pulled by forces it was impossible to guess at.

The other option was that Doc Brand’s killer had simply walked red-handed from observation room 2 over to observation room 1, and smeared the unreadable letter on the wall him- or herself. Just this time, exactly backwards. And, not only exactly backwards, but exactly corresponding, measurement for measurement, with the letter’s placement and proportions in observation room 2.

Achieving that, so the armchair detectives say, would be akin to sitting down and drawing a perfect circle first-try, freehand, while blindfolded.

Mom had no explanation.

So, this is what I mean when I say I saw Roger’s rump at the foot of my bed in the darkness.

The other part I’m not going to tell Dr. Robertson, is that, as large as Roger was, for him to be lying on the floor like that, it would mean his forequarters and his head, they would have been bisected by the thick outer wall of the cabin.

Roger would have been lying on the floor of my cabin, his belly warm on the rug Laura had put there our first year together, but his face would have been out in the night. Looking at what, I can’t imagine.

The part I don’t even tell myself is that, when I finally completed my motion, using the pillar to pull myself onto the safety of the bed, I of course took a mental snapshot of the digital clock, just to be sure I wasn’t going to have to run another total.

It was 2:11.

Day 11

I know now it wasn’t Dr. Robertson.

Probably.

I was standing in the kitchen over a cooking pan of noodles when the door knocked. No: when someone knocked on the door. Dr. Robertson, the one I know to be Dr. Robertson, she’s showed me how constructions like “the door knocked” can indicate a certain, revealing distrust in the world as everyone else knows it—it accepts that there’s a knocking, but, because there’s as yet no visual confirmation of a knocker, it hedges its verbal bets.

I guess she’s right?

The bag the noodles I was cooking came in said they were Japanese, but I’d been planning to put hot sauce on them. This isn’t a sign or symptom of anything. It’s just how I like my noodles. The kids used to gag when I would cook them, and gag more watching me eat them. But then they grew up, into astrophysics and, as of the second semester of this freshman year, marketing.

Leaving their actuary father to assess all the risk the world has to offer.

When the knock didn’t come a second time, as would make sense were someone out there, I narrowed my eyes at the door, and finally guided the pan of noodles away from the gas burner, careful to twist the burner off, then check to make sure.

The knock didn’t come again.

Still, I answered.

Dr. Robertson wasn’t standing there, regarding me in her therapist way, her punctuation-pencil already waggly in her right hand. Instead, she was standing just inside the tree line, maybe twenty yards across the tall grass.

She was in a white lab coat I’d never known her to wear.

Her hands were in her pockets, so she couldn’t wave back when I nodded once to her. The invitation was obvious, though, even at this distance: she couldn’t come to me. I was going to have to go out there to her.

I considered this, trying to match it up with any therapeutic practice I’d read about online, then comparing it with a list I didn’t even realize I’d been generating all along, a list titled Things Doctors Normally Do.

Do they pick their way up switchback mountain roads to remote cabins on weekends, to visit patients who haven’t even missed their last appointment?

They might, I reasoned. They might, if that patient’s ex-wife had been calling them, sick with worry. Not so much about her ex, but about her children, who didn’t need to lose their father.

An ungenerous characterization, I’m sure.

That’s what I would say were anyone to catch me thinking that about Laura, I mean.

One thing about all this healthy isolation: you learn to talk to yourself. Whole conversations. Dialogues that run the course of the day.

The knock on the door? It had been a welcome reprieve.

I had just been telling myself I hadn’t seen anything. That that pale, mottled Roger-skin hadn’t been there through the window over the sink. That there hadn’t been a—there’s no other way to say it—a translucent, beanbag-sized blob of it out past where some other family had once planted a swing set. Mushroom cap indeed. Sending its tendrils down into what, though?

Me?

When I finally agreed with myself about that, that I hadn’t seen anything out there, what I came back with was that of course it hadn’t been out there. It hadn’t been out there because it had been a reflection, stupid. It wasn’t forty feet out; it was over your shoulder behind you.

That possibility had been making my hand shake on the long fork I’d been stirring the noodles with. Not visibly tremble, but that kind of unsteadiness in the muscles that are close to the bone, like you know you can’t trust that hand for a little bit, here.

My objection to that bit about it being over my shoulder, it had to do with pupillary reactions to differing levels of light, and to heated soap suds probably hazing the air over the sink, and to that unguessable way the wind was brushing the tall grass back and forth. Simply put, I was seeing spots. And then my brain was tracing a form around them, to contain them.

Simple, you idiot. Use your brain. If you don’t, your brain’s going to end up using you.

I don’t think Dr. Robertson ever said that.

“Just a—” I called across to her, holding one finger up to complete my sentence, then I stepped back inside, out of my house slippers, into my dad’s old rubber boots I still wear for outside chores.

At that moment, I wasn’t even considering the possibility that this wasn’t her. Of course Laura had been in touch with her. There was no other explanation.

It didn’t hurt that the crossed uprights of the buck-and-rail fencing between her and myself came out to a favorable number, either—9, a digit that, alone in electric blue on my clock, would get me a total of five, which, when added to the “four” that made up 9’s looking-backward head, got me right back to 9 again, like it was all meant to be.

I stepped out onto the welcome mat and pulled the door shut behind me, twisting the knob once to be sure I hadn’t locked myself out.

Halfway to her, I heard a man whooping down at the river.

Dr. Robertson’s head turned that way, as if she listened with her face. As if she didn’t yet understand how sound worked, and where and how it entered the head.

The whooping came to nothing. Probably a fourteen-incher, or whatever’s good for a trout.

When I was within the range of her voice, she said, “Charles.”

“Dr. Robertson,” I said, and heard in my delivery how respectful it was, how apologetic, that I felt like I was in trouble. I was talking like I was talking to a priest.

My pace slowed, but I was already being drawn in, through the tree line. Like it was a membrane at the end of the downslope of a great wet throat.

“The sun,” Dr. Robertson explained, about why she was back here, not at the cabin.

“Of course,” I said.

Her lab coat, it was halogen white, had been bleached to within an inch of its life, but there were parts of it, where stains had been, that were almost transparent. Like when you drip water onto a paper towel.

Oil, I decided. She had gotten oil on her jacket, and it had changed the material.

“Laura called,” Dr. Robertson said.

I nodded that I knew, yes. That this, between us, could not be considered news.

“I don’t usually make house calls, you understand,” Dr. Robertson added, in what I would call her severe voice.

I shrugged, looked back at the cabin, was suddenly afraid of seeing myself in the loft window, parting the curtains, looking down at myself standing just inside the line of trees.

It gave me a feeling inside like I was falling.

I reached out, steadied myself with an aspen branch. Or a birch branch.

Trees aren’t my thing. Give me an actuarial table.

“Tell me about Roger,” Dr. Robertson said, and I flashed my eyes up at her in fear.

“I didn’t—” I started, but Dr. Robertson was already holding her hand up to stop me.

“Laura told me,” she said.

I squinted into the past, trying to decide if I’d ever shared Roger with Laura. If any version of me ever would have. Or: had it been my mom, talking privately with Laura? Was the story of Roger supposed to explain something to Laura, about me? Was he a mote of corruption that had lodged in me long ago, that I’d been secretly trying to lick into a pearl ever since?

“Roger didn’t do it,” I said, obviously.

Dr. Robertson watched me. Listened to me with her face.

“How many spokes were in the letter on the wall that morning?” she asked then, just all at once, dispensing with all the lead-up.

“Four,” I said, not even having to think about it.

Were she a detective, this would indict me, probably; all photographs of the crime scene have been corrupted, according to the unsolved mysteries books and the tabloids.

It adds to the mystery, I guess.

The only reason I could say “four” with such confidence was that, after the cleanup crew had cleaned up what was left of Doc Brand, including the blood on the wall, Mom had tasked me with feeding the animals for a couple of nights, until they could be transferred. Because I was a spooky kid, she’d gone with me, always staying within earshot. While I fed, she cleaned out her desk, asking me inane, keep-busy questions about math and teachers and girls at school, and then she shuffled around in Doc Brand’s office as well—about which I was only suspicious very late in my marriage.

Whatever evidence she smuggled out that night, I never saw it, never even thought about it. What I did see, I saw while carrying a jumbo-sized scoop of dry cat food down the hall.

To help the paint dry, the door to observation room 1 had been chocked open with a chair. There was a fan in there.

The paint was white and glossy. There was no trace of any foul play. Until the fluorescent lights flickered, like they were always doing.

In that flicker, I saw the unreadable letter still there under the paint.

It had four uneven spokes—uneven in a . . . I wouldn’t say a symmetrical way, quite. More like there was a certain harmony there. A balance that came from deeper than mere symmetry.

“Good,” Dr. Robertson said, for some reason satisfied with my count. As if it confirmed something for her. Or made me viable for a task or exercise she had planned. “But, four what?” Dr. Robertson added then, just an afterthought, so her eventual notes could be more precise.

“Bo—” I started, meaning to say “spokes.” But she was too good a doctor for me to try to get this past her. “Bones,” I said, in defeat.

As in, this was where it all started with me, yes. This was the kernel that just needed the isolation and fatherlessness of my teen years to germinate, then the dissolution of my marriage to finally bloom.

I’m textbook, I know.

“It’s not your fault,” Dr. Robertson said. “You were in a charged situation. All your nerves were alive in a new way, they were open and reaching, just waiting to get encoded. When you saw what you most feared seeing, instead of letting it push you back in fear, you developed a ward against it on the spot. You counted it into submission.”

“I’m not a wrestler,” I said, trying to form my mouth into some estimation of a grin.

“You were fighting above your weight,” Dr. Robertson said back. “You were nine, Charles. It was the scene of a violent murder. That you were able to come up with any defenses at all, it only speaks to your intelligence, and your resilience. I’m only sorry you had to wait thirty-plus years for the fallout to catch up with you. But coping mechanisms, they always break down at some point, and force you to finally face the initial horror they were meant to tamp down. We shouldn’t even call them that, ‘coping.’ A more accurate term would be ‘delay tactics.’”

I digested this, cast around on instinct for something with lines, to count. There were just trees, though, and trees aren’t regular enough in spacing to matter.

This left me just staring down. At nothing, I thought, but then at something: Dr. Robertson was barefoot. Yet there were no pine needles stuck to her feet. There was no mud grimed onto her skin.

“My noodles,” I heard myself saying to her.

She just listened to me with her face again.

“You know the way back?” I asked, already turning to leave, to keep this lie of “noodles” alive.

“I’m always going back,” she said, and I told myself to remember this for later, to study on it, to crack it open, get to the runny yolk of it.

I didn’t start running halfway back to the cabin, either.

My will, it’s stronger than that. Just barely.

This morning, then, Amanda’s call came.

I hadn’t not been anticipating one of them on the line.

Me: It’s going well, you know.

What she was asking about was what we were calling my vacation. My time off.

Her: Mom said she tried calling?

Some people can ask a question without using any question words in the sentence.

Yes, Mom had been ringing my phone, I didn’t say to Amanda.

Evidently the new man in her new life—well, “new” depending on whom you asked—he was asking a plumbing question about the guest bathroom. I’d had to splice together two PVC pipes there once upon a Christmas, the second pipe a quarter inch bigger than the first. It would be obvious, except I’d dummied it up with a stray coupler, then cemented it in place over the junction. Not specifically to mess with this new man, but as a joke on whoever bought the house after we were done with it.

Now the plumbing, it was my secret.

If he would just cut the whole section out, he could rebuild it however he wanted. Had I actually been going to call Laura back about this, that’s what I would have had ready in my mouth.

So, me to Amanda: Really? She’s been calling? The service up here . . .

It was why the teenage version of herself had always dreaded coming to the cabin: a thready cell signal, at best.

She used to have a name for the whole area, even. Eternal Troutland. It was because everyone we saw down at the creek, they would be in waders, and have these languid neon-green lines winding and snapping above their heads, and the look on their faces—it was like they were dulled out with joy. This was their heaven.

I don’t fish. Laura doesn’t fish, so far as I know. Amanda and Tad don’t even eat fish. It made it feel like we were getting away with something, being up here in a thousand sportsmen’s trout-fishing afterlife.

Her, ever the little sister: He won’t tell you, but he’s got a new girlfriend.

Me: Tad?

Her: Who else? But you didn’t hear this from me.

I shrugged as if she had binoculars on me.

Me: I’m seeing someone too.

Her: . . .

Me: Her name is Dr. Robertson. She’s always asking how I feel about that. Sometimes she puts the emphasis on the “I,” like how do I feel about that. But sometimes it’s more like how do I feel about that?

Muffled laughter from Amanda’s end.

Good.

Her laugh, it’s one of the good things the world has produced.

Amanda: How do you feel about that?

And then, while I’ve got the phone held away from my face so my appreciative chuckle won’t be too loud for her, she hears.

Her, when I’m back: Is that a dog, Dad? Did you get a dog?

I look around behind me, then. To the rest of the cabin. To Eternal Troutland.

Me, ever-so-innocently: A dog?

To throw her off, then, I tell her I have good signal right now, right this very instant. That I should maybe use it to call Mom, you think? Maybe it’s important, right? About the final papers?

Kids are easy. Their first impulse, it’s always to believe.

I hang up, hold the phone there like it’s going to try to move out from under my hand.

“Did you get a dog?” Amanda had asked.

It’s a complicated question, really.

One answer that wouldn’t be wrong is yes.

Another answer that might be more right is no.

No, I didn’t get a dog, Amanda.

More like the dog found me.

Unless of course Roger had been a mushroom all along.

Let me explain.

The way I figured it out was with numbers.

It took all night, two pencils, and some seemingly ungrounded assumptions—what Tad would call a thought experiment, probably, but what I would more likely call a what-if. As in, what if this were accurate? What if it actually corresponded with reality? Where would that leave us? What could we extend it to, taking just one careful step at a time?

It’s a scattershot way of generating a theory, no doubt, as “what if” is bound, pretty much, by nothing at all. But neither was what I was needing an explanation for.

What I needed was a theory or principle or model that would result in the transparent, translucent rump of a dog I’d once known—or the cap of a giant mushroom—wavering in and out of my field of vision. And sometimes making a sound like a deep, booming bark.

Understand that there are no intervening medications or, as near as I know, any injuries or trauma. Aside from a divorce. But that’s legal, not physical.

Anyway, if what I was experiencing wasn’t real, that would be Dr. Robertson’s area, come Tuesday. If I decided to share it with her. If I decided that, in fact, it was her.

No, for purposes of the branching, thoroughly annotated table I worked up at the kitchen table last night, I had to assume that I was really seeing a thing or phenomenon that was in fact there.

That was the first what-if, I suppose: Roger, or something that reminded me of Roger, was trying to gain purchase of some sort up here in Eternal Troutland.

On a separate page of my notebook paper, I sketched what of Roger’s face I could remember. It mostly involved the weight of the skin on his face. It was heavy enough on his skull that it pulled down under his eyes, showing the veiny red there, like he’d been wearing a dog mask the whole time, through photo shoot after photo shoot.

This was just to remind myself. To warm my mind up.

I couldn’t get the shading realistic enough on his always-dripping saliva, so I erased it, then cupped the eraser shavings over to the sink and drained them away.

Then I hit this problem head-on, as I’d always done at the firm. Head-on until it cried uncle, as it were. Me or it or die, another “Chuck Saracen Deathmatch,” as they used to call it in the office, when I was locked in struggle with a particularly thorny, variable-laden assessment—one that needed to come out a certain way.

High in the corner of the sheet of paper I wrote what I knew for sure: that my digital clock had gone backward by a single, all-important minute. That “Dr. Robertson”—I put her name in quotation marks to indicate to myself that I was already doubting it had been her at all, in spite of the clinical insight she (“she”) displayed—that she had said, suggestively, that she was always going “back.” That . . . Roger was here. Or whatever it was that was, to someone with my previous experiences and predilections, visually congruent with Roger.

Perhaps an experimental scientist would have erased himself from the theory.

My instinct steered me back to myself, though. Not because of any inherent importance I held, but because it was me who hadn’t thought “dog” upon seeing what I saw, but “Roger.”

It was me and no one else—so far as I knew.

That had to mean something.

And that “Roger” was real, not just a symptom; that had been confirmed by Amanda. Unless of course I’d somehow thrown my voice—my bark, as it would have had to have been.

Since I don’t have that ability, that meant this phenomenon was actually happening.

Now, just to explain it.

“Backward” was the key, I had to assume. Otherwise why would I have encountered it twice in so short a time?

No, there was a certain providence here, ushering me toward . . . toward something.

And, if I took into account that this providence had been ongoing, that it wasn’t simply local to my vacation, then that meant I had to factor in everything, right? From Laura’s new boyfriend—isn’t that a term for high schoolers?—to . . . to the next-most frequent aspect of my former life: the kids.

After that, it was simple.

Many was the night I’d sat up late with Tad, his senior year. Discussing science-fiction principles with him. Tracking down the great what-ifs, so as to help his exobiology team place in the competition.

The task they and the other teams had been given was to design an alien, but taking into account a world that only resembled ours in that it could be generally spherical, as that seemed to be the most common form for interstellar matter to accrete into. So, different gravities and atmospheres and solar radiation and rates of rotation and proximity to ongoing stellar events—and everything.

Tad’s proposition was the wildest alien he could come up with: a peculiar species that grew not forward in time, but backward.

Just like “Dr. Robertson” had suggested.

Though his team had ultimately gone a more conservative direction—a direction that finally didn’t let them place in the competition—I now had to wonder if that had been a dead end at all.

Had the universe already been whispering to me even then? Grooming me for what I would eventually see at the foot of my bed, in a peculiar space of time where the seconds had to have been flowing in reverse?

“For the sake of argument,” I said aloud to myself, and bore down with my pencil.

Tad’s call his morning was, as was his fashion, more direct than Amanda’s.

Me, kind of bleary in the head: I don’t know what she heard.

This in answer to his question about a “dog” Amanda told him I’d got.

He of course cued in that my answer was neither a denial nor a confirmation.

Me again, before he could press: Had he done any coursework in ontology yet?

Him: Yet?

Me: Ever?

Him: Philosophy, Dad?

I told him it wasn’t important.

The creature he and his exobiology team had eventually dismissed as untenable, the one that grew backward in time instead of forward, the first hurdle they had to clear was the second rule of thermodynamics—that heat seeks to disperse along a timeline, not coalesce, not remain constant. At least, without a Maxwell’s Demon to help matters along.

“A god, you mean?” I’d asked Tad back then. I was in devil’s-advocate mode.

“There’s no other way,” Tad had said back, his tone defeated, as divine intervention wasn’t the kind of cosmic fudging the judges allowed.

At the time I’d had to agree: without a god to shepherd these creatures along, they had no chance.

Now, though.

Me, ambushing him all these years later: Do you remember the Tange?

We’d come up with a provisional name for these backwards-in-time creatures: the Intangible. That’s simply what they would be to any sentient species moving forward in time on that same imaginary planet. And then, following the lead of science-fiction convention, we’d corrupted the name down to suggest eons of usage, to show how embedded it was in this world—the Tange, which Tad was always careful to write with the line over the letter A, to show how the pronunciation actually rhymed with “range,” which is what this species did, up and down the timeline.

Tad now, after a beat or two in which he was definitely whispering to someone right beside him: The Tange were impossible, Dad.

He still pronounced them right, though. I had to grin.

Me, leaning forward into the phone: But we were thinking about them like great iridescent salamanders or something, weren’t we?

Him, so bored to be traversing this high-school-level terrain again: Low to the ground and quadrupedal is best for a high-gravity world like—

Me: I know, I know. Forget that. We were thinking of them like animals, I mean.

Him: Well, that was the prompt, Dad.

Me, having successfully set him up for this: But we’re animals too. What if the Tange had been sentient, right? What if they could have been their own Maxwell’s Demons, through biology, technology, accidents of birth, random mutation, whatever?

Tad, again whispering to some other party then coming back to me: So you’re saying this would be a species that started out like us, then reached some zenith of development, the end of time, whatever you want to call it, so they start yo-yoing back, going the wrong way?

At first I couldn’t answer.

What I didn’t tell him was that I hadn’t considered this like that, no. A creature doing this voluntarily? For—for exploration? Curiosity? Or, in a retreat of sorts? When you’ve experienced the end of days, do you run the other way down the timeline, forever, trying to hide your face in the past so as not to have to face what’s coming?

Or—or, assuming they were in fact animals, do you come backward through time in order to feed?

The image I had in my mind, that I could never draw, was of a pearlescent globule of sorts, straining to throw a portion of itself back in time, a piece connected by the most tenuous, gossamer string. If that piece stuck in the past—a chameleon’s tongue, that’s what I would draw to explain this, if I could—then the pearlescent globule would pull itself along the string, and come to form in that past, bit by bit.

The effort would wear it thin, too. Would wear it thin in patches. Leave it looking piebald, mottled. Wavery.

Like the cap of a titanic, exhausted mushroom. Like the rump of a giant, dying dog.

Tad: Dad?

Me, being Dad: You need to go, Son?

Calling him that, “son,” it’s code for a whole host of so-called manly things. It’s a reminder that I, being also of that sex and gender, completely understand: he’s got a girl there with him in his apartment.

However, I can’t deny that my tone was a challenge. For him to participate in this conversation with me.

Tad, his mouth closer to the phone now: I’m good.

Me, picturing him stiff-arming his new and giggling girlfriend away: What would they eat, you think? The Tange?

Him: Manda said she heard a dog, Dad.

Me: It was a fisherman. He’s gone already.

Him, listening for the lie: . . .

Me: Would they be omnivores, or specialists? I mean, it doesn’t cost nothing to swim upstream. There’s got to be some fuel. Some cost.

Him: Her name’s Olivia.

He was trying to ground this conversation. Bring it back to earth.

I’m not sure he’s going to make it in astrophysics. As an astrophysician.

I laughed without meaning to.

Tad: Dad?

Me: I’m sure she’s great, son. Ophelia.

Him: Olivia.

Then, because I’m a weak, weak person: She’s not like your mom, is she?

This time there weren’t even any dots for me to cue into. Tad was just sitting across our thousand dinner tables, glaring a hole in my face.

I looked away sheepishly.

Tad: They would probably eat us, Dad. Think about it. Statistically, we would only encounter them, only have legends of them, if they were drawn to us. Otherwise they’d just pop in, eat a tree or a car, then slither back to last century. But, if we know about them, then that means we’ve encountered them, and if we’ve encountered them, that means that being encountered by us was worth the risk. The risk of what? is the next question. The risk of starving. The risk of being stuck in one moment.

There was the Tad I knew.

Me, quieter, finally hearing it: Olivia. It started with the same O as “ontology.” It uses six bones to make itself, to draw a square-cornered circle around that emptiness at its center.

I have to assume “O” would be the same.

Tad: I’ve got to go. We’re cooking.

What I didn’t ask: You called with things on the stove?

Me, instead: Sure, sure.

Then, because I am who I am: Noodles?

A tolerant chuckle from Tad, then, his tone obvious like I should have been able to smell it through the cellular signal: Mushroom Matar.

A coldness spread out from chest, up my neck.

In it, through it, I knew my heart had to be beating. But I couldn’t feel it.

Day 14

We’re not sure if jellyfish are plants or animals, exactly.

The Tange would belong to that phylum.

They drift and pulse just below the surface of what we call reality, an order of life appearing to us at irregular intervals, each point of contact coming before the next one, so that we can never build any kind of evidence for their existence.

This is how gods happen, isn’t it? We use myth and legend and superstition to explain what’s otherwise inexplicable. From traces, we tell a story to ourselves.

As I’m doing now, I know.

But what I have, it’s my clock running backward for that one important instant—my clock that wasn’t malfunctioning, Dr. Robertson. Sometimes the rational is just an excuse. Were my digital clock actually to short-circuit, it wouldn’t result in time appearing to run backward; I checked the manual, then folded it under the clock, should anyone else need to know.

My clock is working fine. It’s the universe’s clock that’s been called into question.

There are creatures out there we can’t even guess at.

It fills my chest with a sense of wonder I haven’t known since . . . I was going to say childhood, but, if I’m honest, then it’s also the same feeling as when Laura accepted my marriage proposal, in that restaurant.

Just because our future went bad, it doesn’t mean our past was.

And, anyway, the way I’m figuring, had Laura not betrayed me, then I never would have had to recuperate up here at the cabin. And me being up here, it’s turned out to be essential for this life-form to keep moving.

My working theory, it’s that the Tange, this Tange, it needs an anchor to pull itself back in time. To be specific, it needed two things in the same unlikely instant. First it needed someone to actually see it trying to waver into existence in this timeline. Someone to clock it in their peripheral vision, and then not dismiss it, as we do most things that don’t fit. What I’m saying, it’s that that piece of itself the Tange shoots back in time, it didn’t just appear here in Eternal Troutland. It more than likely blipped into the visual field of a quarter of the world’s population—I’m assuming half were sleeping and half were, as bad luck would have it, blinking.

That was the first thing: me actually seeing it. As did a certain sliver of that quarter of the eyes-open crowd of humanity.

The next part, though, that’s the part that must decrease the Tange’s incidence of success drastically. For it to stick the landing, as it were, I had to not only see that piece of itself, but, instead of dismissing it, I had to actively co-opt it into this reality. I’m talking about Heisenberg, here. His principle that observation actually impacts the thing being observed.

I observed. And it changed everything.

When I immediately, by a kind of sleep default, thought “Roger” in response to this mottled-pale amorphous plant-animal, it allowed that amorphous plant-animal just enough purchase to hold on in this moment. My awareness of it allowed it to linger. I accepted it into this moment.

And I can’t tell this to Tad or Amanda, though they would, I think, both listen attentively for as long as it took me to explain. And perhaps they would even, by finding holes in my thinking, strengthen the theory.

All of which is to say: for the last three or four minutes, there’s been a weak scratching about halfway up the outside of the front door. There’s been a snuffling at the crack between the bottom of the door and the threshold.

I can’t remember the last time I ate.

Though there’s a wall between my bedroom and where I stand now, in the kitchen, I can’t help but suspect the glowing blue bones of my digital clock are trembling in their assigned spaces, aware they’re supposed to follow their programming, and advance, but at the same time being pulled back into a chasm opening behind them.

If I open the door, welcome Roger in, invite him in, then that’s the last step, I think. This Tange will have pulled itself completely into this moment.

At which point it will need to feed.

When the phone rings, I flinch so hard into that wall that I dislodge the whole four-hook coat rack. It’s empty so it just clatters down, giving me away in here.

I dive for the phone. Just to quiet it.

At first I think it’s Laura, and my heart, the traitor, it wells up into my throat.

It’s Dr. Robertson. Her voice, anyway.

“You have some questions,” she says in what I hear now is more of an inhuman monotone. “This is natural.”

The scratching at the door is stopped now. I’m holding my breath.

“There’s a reason you never told me about your mother’s affair with her employer before,” she says.

“Doc Brand?” I ask.

I’ve been flushed.

“Is it because you think that would be precedence for what happened in your own marriage? Would that give Laura’s deceit the foothold it needs to be real and actual—something you might have to face?”

“I know it happened,” I manage to get out.

“But have you accepted it?” Dr. Robertson says, in a way that I think I can hear her eyes narrowing. “Accepting it will plant it in the landscape, let you start to move past, put it behind you.”

Is this really her?

If it’s—if it’s some aspect of the Tange calling me from its void-space, from its immateriality, then why would it concern itself with me like this, in a therapeutic capacity? Is it playing with its food? But, if this is Dr. Robertson, then why is she breaking protocol now of all times, and not before?

Either way, that trademark clinical insight, it’s as true as ever.

Maybe that’s what counts, finally. Help is help, right?

“It doesn’t give Laura an excuse,” I say into the phone.

I can tell from Dr. Robertson’s extended silence that this is acceptable. This is growth. This is healthy.

To “Dr. Robertson,” though, and because I’m scared, I say, whispering it like a secret, my lips brushing the phone: I don’t want to die.

Her silence this time tells me she’s looking away from that phone. That I’m a disappointment. That she’s worried.

I part the curtain to see if her white lab coat will show me where she is in the trees.

There’s just trees.

I close my eyes, tell whichever one of her is there that there exists this species, which I’m calling the Tange, for lack of a better term. That, for reasons obscured to us, they’re moving backward in time, incrementally, in the same way—

“In chameleons,” Dr. Robertson says, already bored with my attempt, pinching it off before it can get going, “it’s called ballistic tongue movement.”

Instead of pausing to consider if I’ve said this to her or not, about chameleons, I lean forward, excited, to tell her I saw the impact of that tongue when it hit, when it bulged into the shape of a mushroom cap. Into the shape of a dog I’d once known.

And now, what I’m afraid of now, is that if I don’t help this Tange along into the past—by sacrificing myself to its hunger?—if I don’t, then it will stay too long in this moment, and this moment will collapse from the new weight, and take me with it anyway.

I nod in answer to Dr. Robertson’s reply: So you think the continuance of the world depends on you?

I pinch the bridge of my nose between my thumb and forefinger.

She said this at our first session, too. It was in regard to what she was calling compulsive behavior. It was in regard to standing in a room moments after the meeting’s over, to finally get the slats of that mini-blind counted once and for all.

Me, in reply to her unasked question: It’s not narcissism. This is real.

Her: People cope in a variety of ways, Charles.

Me: You told me coping was really delaying.

Her: And you’re telling me about time travel. About transporting the pain of an event or situation intact to a completely different moment. Tell me we’re not saying the same thing?

My chest collapses a little bit. My eyes are heating up. My hand is trembling around the phone. I know because I can see it. It’s in my palm. It’s not on.

It doesn’t matter.

“I can prove it,” I say, standing with resolve. The same way suicides step onto the last bridge of their life. The same way alcoholics walk through the doors of the liquor store.

When I open the door, if there’s a great lanky dog from the past there, then I’m right.

If I’m alone up here in Eternal Troutland, well. That’ll mean something different, won’t it?

Walking to the door, I realize I’m wading through dominoes. I can almost hear them tapping into each other.

It’s how we used to explain college to the kids, when they were still in high school: you push over one domino—Advanced World History II instead of just World History II, say—and the next one that falls, it’s at the door of the college admissions office, and on to the horizon, right? Second star to the right, all that.

But dominoes, they’re everywhere.

I’m not up here at the cabin alone by accident. Not at all.

If Laura doesn’t see her old high school flame at the gym. If my sister, in the inheritance, elects to take the cabin instead of the cash. If Hainish at the firm tells me I can just have two weeks, not this whole six. If a scoop of cat food I’m balancing down a hallway is dripping kibble, so I’m having to look only at it, not into any open doors. If I cross my legs under the covers, convince myself it’s cold out in the bedroom, that I can hold it a little longer.

If if if.

The last domino will be my hand crashing into the doorknob, and holding on in spite of itself.

There’s a polite knocking across the living room, now. What I would almost call a timid knocking.

No more Roger-form, then.

This Tange has cued in that that was the wrong approach. That it was unsettling me at a fundamental level, that it was making me live in two times at once. Seeing that dog mask slip from the skull was only serving to remind me of the violence of that morning, long ago.

What’s happening now is that Dr. Robertson—“Dr. Robertson”—has stepped up through the tree line herself (itself), into what must be a brutal sun for her gossamer form. Now, standing on my welcome mat (Laura’s welcome mat), her bare feet will be dirtied. There might be a pine needle adhered in its way to the pale skin above the toes.

The reason she doesn’t wear shoes?

It’s that, for our Tuesday sessions, she’s always been seated from the moment I walk in until the moment I rise to leave. I’ve never seen her feet, have had to just assume that they were basically human, and matched the skin tone of the rest of her.

The Tange has been mining my head for its visuals. For the proper voice patterns.

I should thank it. Had “Dr. Robertson” creaked its words out like a parrot, like words weren’t words to it, then I surely would have run, thus stranding this Tange in this moment without sustenance, such that it would have to start eating this moment of time completely, the moments for centuries or eons either way collapsing this direction. Like dominoes.

Gods indeed, right? What else could so fundamentally disturb reality?

We’ve always had legends, we humans. I’d always figured they were representative of our need to believe in a larger reality, and our possible place in it. Now I know that some of these religions, they were based on observation. Just, those stories could never quite make sense, because the development and causality were working always in reverse. They never stacked up into evidence, but myth, especially taking into account the various Dr. Robertsons the Tange would have used back through history, to try to commune with us, to try to feel us out.

Surely it could eat us with or without our compliance if it wanted, but . . . is it manners? Is it a fundamental fatigue with the blind violence? It can’t be morals, anyway. In a timeline where effect precedes cause, I have to suspect that issues of right and wrong play out in ways I can’t begin to conceptualize.

It fills me with a sort of calmness, knowing I’m part of something so eternal, so mysterious, so grand.

As if in response to this realization—my acceptance, my willingness, my knowledge that the kids will grieve but then accept my absence, move past it—the door knocks again, like punctuation. Like validation. Like reminding me.

I set the phone down on the table, walk stiff legged down the x-ray tunnel of my life, to the door that’s always been waiting for me.

That I step out of my slippers, that’s just basic manners, when your guest will also be barefoot.

“Okay,” I say, and pull the door in.

At first I think it’s Laura, which would mean this is my own personal hell, not some fisherman’s heaven I’ve stumbled and sneaked into, but the flipturn hair, the line of piercings in the left ear, the scarf she’s been affecting since Christmas—

“Manda,” I say, my smile coming unbidden, from a place inside I thought carved out months ago.

“Where is he?” she says, tippy-toeing to see past me, into the cabin.

The dog she heard. The puppy she wants to run down, tackle-hug.

“It was a fisherman’s,” I tell her. The lie comes so easily. The more you say a thing, the more natural it gets.

The hope on her face collapses the slightest bit.

Enough that the skin under her left eye, it sags the slightest bit.

Just for a flash, I can see the veiny-red membrane there.

A chill courses through my chest. When I try to breathe, it comes in hitches that make my eyes water.

Of course.

If Roger and then “Dr. Robertson” were unsettling me, then present a form I instinctively trust, right?

“Let’s—” I say, nodding out to the tree line, where she’ll surely be more comfortable, away from the harsh sun of our world, and I step into my right boot, then my left boot.

I take her hand in mine, lead her without looking at her again. Because there are some cruelties you have to spare yourself.

The idea is that, out in the trees, when the Tange consumes me, the raccoons and coyotes will clean up most of the mess. The real Amanda and the real Tad won’t have to walk up onto it two, three days from now, when I still haven’t answered the phone.

He imploded from grief, they’ll say.

His sorrows formed a gravity well, dragged him down into it.

If I could fix it all, I would, a hundred times over. If I could go back, select a different gym for us to be members at.

That’s all it would take.

I’ve been thinking about it.

I close my eyes and pull the nervous-but-not-really-resisting Tange through the membrane of the tree line, into the cool darkness beyond, and, probably because of the form it’s taken, I’m reminded of what Amanda said, once upon a summer break spent up here: that today, it’s the heaven of the past, isn’t it?

I’d always remembered it because of the child’s logic that allowed her to say that, like she was figuring something important out.

This can be the heaven of the past, though. Just squint, and don’t take anything else into account.

I do, I squint, ready for some great maw to grind into my back and shoulders, but what I hear instead of jaws slavering open, it’s a short squeak. Of fear. Of surprise.

Neither of which this Tange should be experiencing.

Does that mean—does this mean it was really Amanda?

I turn, her hand slipping from mine, and I have the sudden, unwanted certainty that I’m in a tunnel of sorts. That there are eyes all around me.

Cats.

I’m supposed to be feeding the cats, I know. It’s a thought that’s just receding, but I can still feel the shape it held, can still taste the intent.

This is the animal hospital. At night.

That tang in the air of urine. That same breathing darkness.

I swallow, wait for my eyes to adjust.

When they do, I cue in to the spill of light. From observation room 2.

Someone’s singing down there. A lilty, sad tune, no words. Drunken words.

I shake my head no, please.

In my adult right hand is the aluminum scoop for the dry cat food, and in my heart is a fierce knowledge. The man down there singing to a great dying dog, he’s—he shouldn’t have gone to the gym that day. He shouldn’t have ruined everything. He shouldn’t have taken her away.

I’ll show him where the junction for that pipe is.

It’s buried in his chest.

Just, he needs someone like me to dig it out.

When it’s done and the singing is over, the floor chunky red, I look across observation room 2, to the mottled, shaved, piebald rump of a dog so large, all the newspapers and magazines had to come see him.

He’s dead. That’s why Doc Brand had been singing.

Some hearts are so big, they just burst.

Mine is beating hard against the white plate of my sternum. I know it’s white because Doc Brand’s was. But it can splinter. It will splinter, with the right application of force.

Because there’s gore all over me, from forehead on down, I strip, walk my clothes down to the incinerator Mom used to let me use, with supervision.

All by myself, and without supervision, I burn my clothes, take one of Doc Brand’s white lab coats from the hook.

He won’t be needing it.

Soon enough, this building will be cut into three different places: a tanning salon, a short-lived antique store, and an audio installation place—the kennels will be the bay where the techs install stereos. Or, the kennels, they were the bay.

When I pad barefoot back into observation room 2, the examination table is shiny and bare.

In the hall, though, I hear Roger padding away on the unpainted concrete, his claws clicking, the swing of his tail wide enough to brush one wall, then the other.

I smile.

The Tange, they’re real.

At the end of that hall Roger’s walking down is yesterday, an infinite well of yesterdays.

Because I’m not like him, I walk the other way down that same hall, into the future.

I’m going home.

On the way past the cat room, I stuff the aluminum scoop handle-deep into the dry kibble.

Three days later, there with Mom when I’m ten, I’ll pull that scoop out, and the food will be scabbed to it.

Using the side of my finger, I’ll break it free, push it all back into the bin, then wash the scoop in the utility sink until it shines in its striated way.

I remember this. Had never even considered its import until now.

And then, just like when I ducked through the tree line, I close my eyes again, let the membrane mucous up in front me, for me to birth myself back through.

What I imagine it’s like is the veiny tightness under the eye. Behind the mask.

“Manda,” I say then, remembering that she’s not even born yet, that Eternal Troutland is, for the moment, for this now, just someone else’s cabin.

But we’re coming, the Saracens.

We’ll be there soon.

I push through.

What I want to see when I step back onto the moldering leaf litter, always misted wet this close to the creek, what I want to see, is Amanda from ten, twelve years ago, Amanda at five, squatted down, parting the tall grass to showcase this impossible mushroom she’s found, that at first she thought was a bird egg, but that was so much better, so much more perfect.

What I’d settle for is my marketing-major Amanda, looking down at a pelt of mushrooms that have grown up here in the shadow, to mark a certain passage.

What I get is a letter I now know how to read: the Tange, they do need one of us. Not me, like I thought, like I wanted, but the one I hand-delivered out to them. To it.

Instead of pushing through like I did, into the past, Amanda was spread out against the membrane like jelly. That was the squeak of surprise I heard.

For however long I’ve been gone—thirty-odd years? two seconds?—this great red letter’s been hanging in the air, against the membrane, and, because of forces I’m not meant to understand, it’s not even sloughed down to the ground yet.

There’s a balance in its form that’s deeper than symmetry.

And there’s bones in the chunkier parts.

I don’t need to race into the cabin to know what digits on my clock are shuddering into place: 2:10.

It totals up to thirteen, which may not seem elegant on the surface, but when you take into account that two plus ten is twelve, which is just a breath away from turning into thirteen, like that corrupt number has been inside it all along—it’s not quite the mask of the universe slipping.

But it’s something.

I’ll take it.

By dark the red letter hanging in the air has slid to the ground. With no wall to dry to, this must be the way it usually happens.

It’s not a magic rune or secret key. It’s just—it’s like when you drop a pebble into a pond. If the water froze right after that instant, right after the splash, there would be a design of sorts there, wouldn’t there? Just because of the way the water falls back together, and probably a hundred other tiny physics things going on, the math burrowing smaller and smaller, guiding each drop.

When the Tange step back through time, the physics that are ripped open for that passage, they knit together the same way each time.

The same moment the Tange used my daughter as fuel to go back into my past, which is also the world’s past, it was also rising from a stainless steel table as a dog, and it was also forty years deeper, using another man or woman’s accumulated weakness and baseless hope, to trick him or her into bringing it a meal.

I want to cry, or scream, but I’m just cold.

This has all been happening so long. Was there any way I could have even pretended to resist it? Was it any accident that Amanda, she was, for all intents—at first glance on the porch—Laura?

I think that was supposed to make this all easier for me.

All that’s left now is the evidence.

After making sure the creek is empty of fishermen, I drive Amanda’s secondhand Toyota—“a good car for college,” I’d convinced her—down to the water’s edge, right at the deep pool I know is there.

The car noses in, leans forward, burbles down, these big oily bubbles billowing out through the windows I already rolled down.

To help the car along, I step out onto its trunk, give my weight to it, and slowly we sink up to my chin. Already I’m seeing generations of oversized trout drifting through the cab, past the rearview mirror they’ll never see their reflections in.

Since the fishermen up here are all pure, their tiny, deadly hooks will only ever kiss the surface, will never find a Toyota down below. They’ll step on it, of course, but it’ll be moss slick by next season, just another boulder.

In this way, a daughter can disappear.

That night, lying in the blue glow of my digital clock, my head full of numbers trying to stand up into a skeleton, my mouth full of assurances, that neither of the kids have been up here, no—my phone rings on the nightstand, buzzing against the laminate wood like a locust fallen from a tree onto its back.

I pluck it up, hold it to my ear.

It’s Dr. Robertson.

“Your mother is going to collect them, don’t worry,” she says, such that I can see her lips. How prim they are for this delivery. She’s standing at the reception desk of an animal hospital from thirty-three years ago. “The boots,” she fills in, when I still haven’t said anything.

The rubber boots I wore back, forgot to put back on.

As far as the cops probably knew, they were Doc Brand’s.

Except Mom, three days after the Doghouse Murder, she recognized them as her husband’s. My dad’s. The boots I would inherit.

I chuckle.

“She was wrong,” I say, not exactly sure if I’m awake or asleep anymore.

“She?” Dr. Robertson asks, in that way she has that means time, our session, it’s actually up. But she’ll humor me one more question. “You’re talking about your daughter, I presume?”

“Manda,” I say, my voice cracking for the first time, my eyes running. “She—she said that this, now, it was the heaven of the past. But she was . . . she was just a kid. She didn’t understand.”“Understand what, Charles?”

I laugh because it’s so obvious. “The reason she couldn’t be right, it’s that that would mean that, if this is heaven, then the past, it’s today’s hell.”

Dr. Robertson considers this, I can tell.

Finally, “What you’re assuming here, it’s that both vantage points, then and now, aren’t valid at the same time.”

Valid, I repeat in my head.

That’s not exactly the right word. Not the way I understand time.

“But they’re all real,” Dr. Robertson says. “Each moment of your past, it’s still there, inside you. It always will be. Exerting its influence. Changing who you are in each moment. One moment’s hell is a deeper moment’s heaven. This heaven is tomorrow’s hell.”

That’s about right.

“Laura?” I say then, my eyes closed. In hope.

Dr. Robertson doesn’t say anything. Perhaps this is embarrassing for her. For it.

It doesn’t stop me. Alone in your bedroom at night, talking to either your therapist or to a sluggish, dull creature that might be God, there’s no shame.

I switch the phone to my other ear, and I tell my wife what I never told her before, what I’d always kept inside like a guilty secret, something I wasn’t ready to share.

But I can now.

There was this giant dog in my childhood, see. “You probably saw him,” I tell her. “He was on all the dog-food bags back then. You wouldn’t believe him, he was like this impossible giant, I don’t know how he even—”

“What was his name?” Dr. Robertson says, so exactly in Laura’s voice.

“Roger,” I say, smiling.

He was a good dog, so far as anybody knew.

And, weaker, almost a whisper, I say, “Do you remember when Amanda was a little girl?”

It’s still inside me, Laura. All of it, every single smile, every single day we spent up here in Eternal Troutland.

Come see me some weekend, if you want.

We can remember old times.

Maybe we can even go there.

THE SUPPLEMENT

John Langan

I hadn’t seen Minerva Baker for six months, since she’d taken an early retirement that left the rest of the library’s senior staff several shades of green. At the time of her departure from SUNY Huguenot’s Harriet Jacobs Library, our head librarian had been a tall, heavyset woman whose brown hair, regularly dyed and styled, and fine, caramel features, carefully made up, gave the impression she had only recently crossed the threshold into middle age, rather than advanced almost to its other side. The illusion was strengthened by the manner of her dress, current while avoiding the trendy, and the matter of her conversation, serious and informed by her morning’s read of the New York Times. That there had been tragedy in her life was an open secret: an only child, a daughter, dead at fifteen of a heroin overdose in the bathroom of Huguenot High, and a husband who had left the following year, for the therapist they had been meeting. Minerva didn’t speak of any of it to us, however, so neither did we to her. In the month before her departure, she softened slightly, sharing with us her intention to spend her looming free time first on a trip to the Jersey shore, then on catching up with some reading. Her farewell dinner was a bland, pleasant hour and a half, where those of us who had worked beside and under her stood to offer generic tributes and toasts to her.

And that was that, until I saw her in the produce section of the local Shop-Rite, fumbling over a display of plums, lifting one for inspection with a trembling hand. Immediately, I knew who she was, even as I was thinking, There’s no way. Had twenty, thirty years elapsed since our last contact, I might have believed the woman hunched in front of me was the same one who had been my boss for the better part of five years. Wrinkled, liver spotted, the skin hung loose on her arms, about her neck. Beneath a dingy Mets cap, her hair was white, wild. A pair of thick reading glasses balanced on the end of her nose. Her lower jaw jutted forward, pushing her lips up and out in a way that reminded me of my grandfather, in the latter stages of his dementia. Everything about her suggested a collapse of catastrophic dimensions, Alzheimer’s of terrifyingly fast onset, or a major stroke, or a devastating injury. Gone were her fashionable clothes, replaced by a sleeveless blue dress speckled with the remnants of recent meals. A clear plastic bag looped around her left wrist contained a wallet and a set of keys. As she was struggling to hold, and dropping, the plum, the urge to flee, to separate myself from this person and whatever calamity had enfolded her, seized me. I might have succumbed to it, had one of the supermarket’s employees not coughed and said, “Excuse me,” at my back, so that he could push a cart stacked with yogurt past me. I stepped aside, recovered myself, and walked over to my former boss and said, “Uh, Minerva?”

At the sound of her name, she turned her head toward me. The grooves in her skin seemed to cut all the way to the bone. Her right cheek was a forest of skin tags. The whites of her eyes were yellowed, the pupils cloudy. Her jaw worked, and I wondered if her affliction had taken her identity from her, too, if she was here as part of a group from one of the local care facilities. In a voice that had aged as much as the rest of her, she said, “Sam.”

The pleased surprise with which she pronounced my name made it clear that she recognized me. Her follow-up questions, “How have you been? How are things at the library? How’s Hideki doing? Is he running you ragged?” confirmed that her mind remained intact.

“Good,” I said. “I’m good. We’re good. Hideki’s . . . coming along.”

She laughed. “Ever the diplomat.”

“What about you?” I said. “How have you been?”

“You mean, What the hell happened to you, don’t you?”

“Have you been sick? I meant to keep in touch, but . . .”

“It isn’t as if we were all that close to begin with,” Minerva said. “It’s fine. I have not been sick, not really. What I have been is busy.”

“That’s good.”

“Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t. What I’ve been engaged in has taken its toll on me, to the extent that, frankly, I’m surprised you knew who I was.”

“You don’t look that different.”

“Yes I do. It’s kind of you to say, but I can still see myself in the mirror.”

“Okay,” I said, “so what the hell have you been busy with?”

“A book.”

“A book? What—like, restoring one?”

She shook her head. “If you can hang around for a couple of minutes while I pick up a few things, then run me back to my apartment, I’ll show you what I’ve been up to.”

My wife was teaching her graduate class, which meant there was no need for me to rush home. Not to mention, my curiosity had been raised, as well as pity at the image of Minerva in her diminished state, alone in her apartment. “Sure,” I said.

I trailed after her as she filled her basket with the scant necessities of her daily life. Our talk continued, though it focused on me. Yes, Alexa was well. Yes, we had talked about trying for a baby a second time. No, we hadn’t done anything about it. “Yet,” I added.

“Give it time,” Minerva said. “You’re young.”

Her shopping concluded, mine forgotten, I drove Minerva to the other side of Huguenot, to her modest apartment in the Riverview Arms. While she stored her groceries, I inspected the photographs on her living room walls. Here were Minerva’s graduation portraits from high school, college, and graduate school, each surrounded by smaller photos of her, in her robes, flanked by an older man and woman I assumed were her parents, and assorted other people I took for aunts, uncles, cousins. There were pictures of her in a number of foreign cities, London, Paris, and Prague, and seaside shots that could have been taken anywhere. There were more photos of her at work than I would have expected, including a couple in which I identified myself. I was not surprised to find no pictures of her wedding, but I was struck by the lack of any photos of her daughter. Perhaps the memory was too painful, or perhaps she kept those pictures in a more private place, her bedroom or study.

“All right,” Minerva said from the kitchen doorway. “I would offer you a beer, but I haven’t got any. Would you like a Coke?”

“I’m fine, thanks,” I said. “Don’t let that stop you.”

“It won’t.” She returned to the kitchen. I heard a cupboard door squeak open, the clink of glass, the pock of a bottle being unstoppered. She reappeared holding a tumbler a little less than half full of a dark, honey-tinted liquid. She deposited the glass on an end table beside a recliner. “Make yourself comfortable,” she said, waving her hand at the short couch. “I’ll be right back.” She exited the room down a corridor that led, I presumed, to the bath- and bedrooms. A doorknob clicked, hinges squealed. A moment later, she shuffled back into the living room.

As she did so, some trick of the light made it appear as if there were momentarily two of her, as if her reflection had escaped the mirror and was walking beside her. I shut my eyes, shook my head. When I looked again, I saw one Minerva, carrying a large, framed photograph in one hand and a slender, leather-bound book in the other. She crossed to me and held out the picture, which I took. “My Yvonne,” she said. She made her way to the easy chair, into which she lowered herself carefully. Safely seated, she placed the book in her lap and reached for the tumbler.

The photo she’d handed me was a portrait of a teenage girl, the head-and-shoulder shot offered every fall by most schools. Its background, blurry, showed trees in autumn yellow, orange, and red. Yvonne Baker smiled ruefully at the camera, her teeth fenced by braces, her eyes shrunk by a pair of thick, round glasses. A rash of pimples spread across her forehead. Her hair, black, curly, was cut in a bob whose lower ends flared out and away from her chin. She was wearing a blouse whose broad, white and peach stripes made it appear wider than it was. I thought of my own, equally disastrous high school pictures, the look of long-suffering regret I’d worn for them. “She’s lovely,” I said, rising to pass the portrait back to Minerva.

“Thank you,” she said. She placed it face-up on her end table. “She didn’t think so—said she was hideous, a freak. I never took her seriously. That’s what every fifteen-year-old girl says, right?”

“And boy.”

Minerva nodded. “I trotted out the same clichés my mom had used on me. Ugly ducklings turn into beautiful swans, I said. Just you wait. Anyway, it’s what’s on the inside that counts. None of that had worked for me; I don’t know why I imagined it would for her. We offer these platitudes because we’re afraid of admitting the truth. This is a horrible time. People will be more cruel to you now than they ever have been before or are likely to be again. There’s little you can do except endure. All I can offer is my love, which I’m afraid isn’t enough.”

She sighed. “I’m not sure how she got into heroin. I assume the why was to fit in, and for the relief it offered. I don’t know who introduced her to it, when she started using, how she afforded it. I didn’t pick up on any of the warning signs. How is any of that possible, right? That was what my ex-husband kept saying. ‘How could you not have known?’ You, not we. She was found in the girls’ bathroom, the week before Valentine’s Day, unresponsive. The ambulance was called; they rushed her across the river, to Penrose. She was put on life support, but there was no brain activity. We waited a couple of days, and then we—I made the decision to let her go.”

“I’m very sorry,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said. “After that, everything fell apart. My marriage broke up, and most of our friends went with my ex. His cutthroat lawyer was better than my cutthroat lawyer, so when the house was sold, our assets divvied up, he came out ahead. I’d like to say I didn’t care, but I did. I was angry at the way he had made Yvonne’s death my fault, her and him collateral damage from my professional ambitions. Can you believe that? When he and his lawyer outmaneuvered me and my lawyer, it was—I knew he would present it as proof that his version of events was true, a kind of updated trial-by-combat. Which was ridiculous, of course, except that the majority of our friends took it that way, too. I guess I did, a little. Or—I was nervous it was true.

“I did not want to be one of those people who are defined by their tragedies. I didn’t want the first thing anyone said about me to be, ‘Oh, Minerva Baker, she lost her daughter to drugs,’ or, ‘Her husband ran off with a younger woman.’ I threw myself into my work. I lobbied for more funding for the library, expanded the science catalogue, upgraded the film and video holdings. I convinced Veronica Croydon to donate her late husband’s collection of Victorian books and artifacts to us. I scheduled lectures, book groups, film screenings. At the risk of sounding immodest, I made the Jacobs Library the premiere university library in the Mid-Hudson Valley.”

“Yes, you did,” I said.

“It wasn’t enough, though. In the end, no matter how much I accomplished during my time in charge of the library, it was a case of the Herbert Coleman room.”

“The what-room?”

“Herbert Coleman. It’s in the old library building, over by Old Main. Last time I checked, Photography was using it as a darkroom. Herbert Coleman was provost of the college when it was still a teachers’ school. After he died, at the age of 104, the room was dedicated to his memory. I had noticed the nameplate beside the door, so I researched it, even found a copy of the dedication speech. The room, it said, would serve as a reminder of the provost’s relationship to the school. Every time students saw Coleman’s name, they would think on him, and his memory would endure.

“Except it didn’t. Nor is he unique. The Huguenot campus is littered with plaques dedicating this tree, that bench, this room, that building, to the memory of former students, faculty, administrators. The only name anyone can tell you anything about is Harriet Jacobs, and that’s because she was a writer. The others . . . you understand they meant something to somebody, but that’s about it. Only the sentiment survives. A tree might be planted for me, a classroom designated the Minerva Baker room, but in the end, I would suffer the same fate as the former provost.

“Had Yvonne been alive, I doubt any of this would have mattered as much, if at all. The adage about your child being a kind of immortality is true enough. But she wasn’t alive. What remained of my daughter was her death, the space she’d left in the world.”

Minerva lifted the tumbler and tasted its contents. “Well,” she said, “I guess that was a bit more than you were expecting.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“A bit more, and a bit less.” She drank from her glass a second time. “None of this explains the reason I look the way I do; although you might call it the context. The immediate cause of my decline lies in here,” she said, and patted the book in her lap. Beyond noticing that it was oversized, the dimensions of a magazine rather than a hardcover, and bound in leather the soft color of butter, I hadn’t paid much attention to it. When the palm of Minerva’s hand touched the cover, for the slightest of instants, I would have sworn she vanished, that instead of her seated in the chair, there was a blank within her silhouette. So quickly was she there again, however, that I discounted what I had seen as a perceptual glitch. She said, “The fellow who told me about it called it the Supplement.”

“What is it?”

“He wasn’t the one who gave it to me. No, that was somebody else—George Farange was his name. You wouldn’t have known it to look at him, but he was old. Much older than I am—than I’ve become. He wore his years easily, as comfortably as the navy suit he had on when he showed up at the door to my office. This was maybe six weeks before I retired. This man appeared at the front desk asking to view a manuscript from the Croydon collection. Lucille sent him to talk to me. He was a pencil sketch of a fellow, the lines of his cheeks, his jaw, his forehead, somehow faint, as if he weren’t all the way there. The only part of him that was present were his eyes. They were pale, almost no real color to speak of, but they burned in the sockets. If he was a sketch, then the eyes were holes poked in the paper, a blowtorch shining through them. Everything else—the expensive suit and shoes, the neatly trimmed Vandyke, the hair slicked back against his skull—was decoration.

“He had come, George Farange said, because news had reached his ears—that was how he talked, Word has reached my ears—that the late Professor Croydon had succeeded in obtaining a letter that the writer, Wilkie Collins, had written to his friend, the writer, Charles Dickens, about a visit to the Parisian catacombs. I couldn’t imagine how this man had come by his information. Most of the Croydon collection was still in boxes in one of the conference rooms, awaiting cataloging. Had Mr. Farange known Roger Croydon? I asked.

“The pleasure had been denied him, he said. He had not learned of the letter’s location until after the professor’s untimely end, which was a shame, because he would have relished the opportunity to call on the man in his fascinating home. (Roger Croydon lived in that big place on Founders, the Belvedere House.)

“I still wasn’t clear how the man knew about this document. Nor was I sure why it mattered. Assuming I agreed to search for the letter, and assuming I found it and allowed him to look at it, I wasn’t about to let him walk out of the library with it. If he tried to take it from me, I outweighed him by at least fifty pounds. Thin—insubstantial as he was, I figured one punch and he’d vanish in a puff of dust. I had a pretty good idea where the piece was, and it wasn’t as if I had much else to do: Hideki had already assumed most of my day-to-day duties. I couldn’t promise anything, I said, but I would have a look. Farange thanked me.

“As I’d thought it would be, the letter was in the second of four boxes of rare manuscripts and correspondence. It was toward the front: six sheets of paper held in a clear plastic sleeve. There was handwriting on eleven of the twelve sides, tall, careful script, easy to read. I eased the pages from their cover and spread them on one of the room’s tables. I was pretty pleased with myself. I returned to my office, and fetched George Farange.

“The sight of the pages impressed him far less than I would have predicted. Hands in his trouser pockets, he strolled over to the table as if he were browsing a display of old flyers. He didn’t lean closer to inspect the letter, the way a scholar (or a collector) might. To be honest, he didn’t look as if he was paying much attention to them at all. When he turned around, he had a book in his right hand, this book,” Minerva nodded at the volume on her lap. “I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles he hadn’t carried it into the room with him. He said, ‘I wonder if I might impose on you to examine this for me.’

“Right away, I was certain I’d understood his game. When I opened the book, I would find a stack of bills tucked inside the front cover. I would say something like, ‘I’ll need to examine this in my office,’ step out of the room, and return to find the table empty. I’d give the book back to Farange, he would leave, and that would be that. Maybe we would do this again, should he learn of another rarity in the library’s possession.

“Of course I wasn’t going to accept his bribe. I was curious, though, to learn what the going rate was. I took the book. Already, I was looking forward to the expression on his face when I rejected his offer. Holding the book in my left hand, I used my right index finger to turn the cover,” she mimed the action, “to heighten the drama.

“There was no money. In fact, there wasn’t anything in the book: its pages were blank. I would have said it was no different from the journals you can buy at any bookstore or stationery shop, except that it had the feel of a much older volume. The cover was smooth with age. The pages were soft, almost oily; I thought they might be vellum. As I turned them, little clouds of cedary dust rose into the air. I went through every last page, but the book was empty. I looked at George Farange and said, ‘I don’t understand. What is it I’m supposed to be examining?’ I held the volume out to him.

“‘Would you mind having another look at it?’ he asked. It was his experience that, as a reader might need to accustom himself to a particular text, so a particular text might need to accustom itself to a reader.

“Had I missed something? I didn’t suppose Farange would try bribing me via personal check, but I was new to this world. I opened the book. I lingered on each page, making sure that it wasn’t stuck to the next one. Whatever material they were, it was softer, spongier than vellum. At the end, though, the book still contained neither text nor money. I was starting to wonder if George Farange and his blank book were a prank, some manner of farewell-tomfoolery cooked up by Hideki; although the point of it was lost on me. As far as strippers went, this fellow was about the last man you would have chosen for the job. I raised my eyes from the book—

“—and Yvonne was standing in front of me, just as real and alive as you are to me and I to you. She was wearing an oversized tie-dyed T-shirt and a pair of new jeans—one of the outfits, I realized, her father and I had bought her when she completed her stay in rehab. Yes, rehab. Instead of overdosing, the girl before me had walked into her guidance counselor’s office, dumped the contents of her purse on that woman’s desk, and declared herself in need of help. I give Ms. Bowen credit. She didn’t panic, didn’t rush to call either the school’s resource officer or me and Yvonne’s father. She left the mess on her desk untouched. She spent the next three hours talking with Yvonne, until my daughter felt ready to phone me and her dad. I remembered that call, remembered the shock that had poured through me like cold water, the crumpling sensation in my middle, as if my insides were made of tin foil and an enormous hand was crushing them. When I went to back my car out of its spot, I put it in drive and leapt the barrier, scraped the undercarriage. I met Yvonne’s father at the school entrance, and he was that furious way he got when he was truly afraid. We joined hands, and entered the school for a meeting with Yvonne and the guidance counselor that ended with her father and I driving her across the river to Penrose, to check her into their residential rehab unit. The next month was full of meetings for Yvonne’s father and me: with the case worker supervising her treatment, with a support group for family members of addicts, with Yvonne’s guidance counselor, and with my daughter, herself, with and without her case worker. The meetings continued after we took her home; in fact, that was what she and I were talking about, changing the time of her next therapy appointment to allow her to try out for spring track.

“Not only was my daughter talking to me, she was doing so in the kitchen of the house her father and I had sold as part of our divorce. I loved that house. It had big rooms with high ceilings, which made it a pain to heat, but I didn’t care. The kitchen ran the back of the house, and ended in a window nook where Yvonne used to sit and read when she was younger. The house was one of a pair that had been built, side by side, after the Civil War by a man who made his fortune in the railroad. He lived in our house, and his twin brother lived in the house next door, until they had a falling out, and never spoke again. I could tell you all sorts of thing about that place. Once a researcher, always a researcher, I suppose. The point is, there we were, in the kitchen with its long counters, and there was Yvonne’s father, too, at the stove, sautéing a pan of onions and spices for the chili he threw together every couple of weeks. The sight of him in his sweater and jeans and the DON’T MAKE ME POISON YOUR FOOD apron he wore was almost as much a surprise as seeing Yvonne. But it made sense: she hadn’t died, so none of the awful consequences of that most awful event had occurred. We were still a family, living in our home.

“I was stunned. I was about to cry with joy. I was horrified. Yes, horrified. After someone dies—after someone that close to you, that much a part of you, dies, it takes years to accept their death, to adjust to their absence. Is it Freud who talks about the work of mourning? It is work, a process whereby you move your loved one from the land of the living to the land of the dead, from is to was. To have them back after all that time, all that effort, wrenches you. Not to mention, you’re immediately terrified you’re going to lose them again.

“Which I did, when I dropped the book. It thumped on the carpet, and I was back in the conference room. Everything grew dark; I was afraid I was going to faint. I reached out my right hand to the table, to steady myself, and saw its surface bare, the letter gone. As was George Farange. I took a seat. The book lay open on the floor. I leaned down for it. I glanced at the pages, still blank. How had he—

“—and there was Yvonne in her tie-dyed T-shirt and jeans, in the kitchen of the old house, her father pouring the first can of beans into the frying pan. Well, she wanted to know, what did I think about rescheduling her appointment?

“This time, I slapped the book shut, and was in the library. I started to shiver, in that uncontrollable way you do when the flu is coming over you. Had Farange slipped me some kind of drug? I recalled the dust that had lifted from the book’s pages as I turned them. Could it have been a hallucinogen? The idea seemed ridiculous, but considering what I’d just experienced—twice—maybe not. Thing was, I’d dabbled with magic mushrooms during my student days, and while time had dimmed the memory somewhat, my encounter with Yvonne had been substantially different from tripping . . . more definite, the edges sharper.

“But no matter what Farange had done to me, Wilkie Collins’s letter was missing, a not-insignificant part of a legacy for whose integrity I was ultimately responsible, even if I was behind in cataloging its contents—which I had planned to complete my last couple of weeks before retirement, a pleasant way to pass my final hours at work. In fact, I had yet to record any of the contents of the box which had held the letter.

“Like that, the solution to my dilemma presented itself. Yes, Veronica Croydon had included printed lists of the contents of each box of her husband’s papers, but we could only be accountable for what was there when we composed our official record. If a document she listed wasn’t present, well, maybe she’d made a mistake. It was entirely possible: there were a lot of materials in those boxes. The likelihood of her poring over the library’s breakdown of her husband’s effects was slim to none. After all, if she’d been that concerned about them in the first place, the woman wouldn’t have donated Roger Croydon’s papers to us, would she?

“Yes, I known how all this sounds. I could have gone to the dean and explained to her what had happened, and her first question would have been, Was I all right? After which, she would have called the campus police, told them I had been the victim of a possible assault, during which important documents had been stolen. No doubt the local papers would find out. That prospect, of my being a victim—a dupe—was not one I welcomed. I did not want my remaining time at the job at which I had excelled to be shadowed by failure, as if by a sign that my departure from the position was happening in the nick of time, if not slightly past it. Vanity, yes, to which, I suppose I would have told you, I was entitled.

“What I really wanted, though, was the chance to spend more time with George Farange’s blank book. By the time I had finished putting away the Croydon boxes, it was late enough in the day for me to leave without raising any eyebrows. I drove straight home, made a quick bite to eat, and settled down to find out if the book retained its strange power.

“It did. I turned a couple of its pages, and there was my daughter, right hand on her hip, head tilted to the left, a look on her face like she’d just tasted a piece of fruit that was slightly rotten. It was her, ‘Mother, I’m waiting,’ pose. Here—wherever this was, this past that hadn’t been—Yvonne was listening for my answer to her spring track question. Her father was stirring the beans he’d added to the frying pan. I opened my mouth and said, ‘I think we can manage that. What does your father have to say?’

“‘He said to ask you,’ Yvonne said, which made me think, Typical, but which also made my heart jump. I had talked to my daughter, and she had responded. However small it was, we had had an interaction. While Yvonne’s father continued to add more kinds of beans and a can of tomatoes to his chili, my conversation with her continued. Did she have any idea what events she might want to try out for? Sprints? Distance running? The hurdles? Long jump? Sprinting, she said, she was the fastest in her gym class. Yvonne had never been what you would call competitive. Was she prepared to race against girls from another school and try to beat them? ‘Geez, Mom,’ she said, ‘when did you become one of those sports parents?’ ‘Yeah,’ her father called, ‘if she wants to run, let her run.’ I wasn’t stopping her from running, I said, I simply wanted to be sure she understood what the coaches would be expecting of her, that was all.

“It’s funny. After someone is gone, you think, ‘If only I could speak to them one last time, I would say all the things I never said, never said enough, while they were here.’ I had a litany of such statements, from the big, ‘I love you,’ to the small, ‘On my desk at work, there’s a picture of you in the waves at Myrtle Beach. You were five, wearing that green bathing suit with the orange fish on it that you said made you a fish princess. Every time I look at that photo, no matter how bad a day I’m having, I smile.’ Yet here I was, granted that extra conversation, or something close enough to it, and already, I had fallen into the habits of a decade and a half gone by. Throughout our exchange, I had not ceased feeling George Farange’s book, resting on my lap. I closed it, and brought myself back to my apartment.

“I had to locate Farange and speak to him, maybe pay him a visit. I spent the next day sequestered in my office, tracking him down. It took some doing, but I found him on the High Street in Edinburgh, in Scotland. That ruled out a face-to-face encounter, but his phone number was listed. I wrote it down and then . . . nothing. I didn’t touch the book, which I placed on the desk in the guest room, and I didn’t call George Farange. I took no action, but it was one of those cases where not acting is a deliberate choice. What I was waiting for, I’m not certain; although it may have been my last day at the library. Were I to open the book again, I knew I would find it more difficult to shut, and I didn’t want that to interfere with my job. Actually, it was more that I didn’t want work to interfere with the experience of the book.

“The night my retirement began, after a celebratory dinner at Pesce, I went into the guest room and retrieved the blank book. I lay down on my bed with it, and did not leave either bed or book for the next several hours. During that time, I sat with Yvonne on the living room couch in my old house and watched the second half of The Aristocats on TV. She loved that movie, had ever since she was a little thing. We watched the cats outsmart the baddies, while the air filled with the smell of Yvonne’s father’s chili, cumin and garlic and tomato, and when the credits were rolling, we went into the kitchen and ate chili and cornbread for dinner. Between bites, Yvonne said that the film always made her want to visit Paris. Well, her father said, maybe we should, and suddenly, we were planning a vacation to France for the following summer.

“It was all so ordinary. We could have been one of a million different families, going through their nightly routine. No muss, no fuss. Only, once all that has been lost to you, the mundane becomes fantastical, a kind of lost oasis of happiness and tranquility. Throughout the evening, I struggled not to burst into tears at the sheer quietness of everything. Yvonne did her homework, went up to bed. Her father retired not long after. I sat up to watch the late news and one of the late-night talk shows. Once the talk show was over, I climbed the stairs to Yvonne’s room. Her door was open. I peered inside. She was asleep, snoring softly. I tiptoed into her room, slid the chair out from her desk, and lowered myself onto it. Much the way I had when she was a baby, I watched her breathe, as sleep crept over me.

“I came to with a start, unsure where I was. My room, the bedroom I’d laid my head down in for the last twelve years, looked strange, unfamiliar, as if I’d emerged into a dream. I sat up, and noticed the book sprawled on the floor, where it had landed when it slipped from my lap. The sight of it brought me back to . . . my senses, I suppose. My head was splitting, and I was exhausted to the point of nausea. I fetched a glass of water and a couple of ibuprofen, and climbed back into bed.

“The next morning, I didn’t feel much better. It figures, I thought. First day of my retirement, and I come down with the flu. However, being sick gave me an excuse to spend more time with George Farange’s book, if I needed one. I breakfasted on weak tea and dry toast, and returned to those empty pages. I won’t bore you with a recitation of that session’s events; suffice it to say, they were incredibly unexciting. As were those of the next day’s session, and the one after that, and so on, until a week had slipped by and I hadn’t stirred from my bed any more than was absolutely necessary. Despite the extensive bed rest, my sickness hadn’t improved; although I wasn’t especially concerned. A good flu can knock you down for ten days, two weeks, even. What concerned me was glancing into the bathroom mirror that seventh morning and seeing the streak of white in my hair. This wasn’t the color treatment I used starting to lose its hold; this was my hair bleached white. You might have said it lent me a stylish appearance. But the texture was wrong, fibrous, the way I remembered my grandmother’s hair feeling. It could have been some fluke of the last product I’d used, but I knew in my gut that it was a direct consequence of the last week with the book. I had a strong suspicion my illness was connected to it, too.

“I didn’t waste any time. I located George Farange’s number and placed the call to the UK.

“A different man answered the phone. He sounded younger, substantially. He spoke with an American accent, from somewhere in our neck of the woods, I’d guess. No, he said, Mr. Farange wasn’t in. He was away on business; the young man couldn’t say when he would return. Perhaps he could be of assistance. What was I calling in regard to?

“A book, I said. Mr. Farange had given me a book to examine, and I wanted to speak to him about it.

“What kind of book?

“It was about the size of a magazine, I told him. Bound in leather. Thirty sheets of what I thought was vellum. I estimated it as late eighteenth century, but wasn’t certain. That I could detect, the cover, the pages, were devoid of any text.

“He drew in a breath, said something like, So you’re the one. Then he said, ‘What has it done to you?’

“From the tone of his voice, I knew what he was asking. I said I’d been sick, with what I’d assumed was the flu. Now my hair was going white.

“The book was called the Supplement, the young man said. It was also known as Odin’s Eye.

“What is it? I said.

“For an answer, he told a story. There is a city, he said, that stands on the shore of a black ocean. It is old, and it has many neighborhoods. In one of these, there is a church. It’s not much to look at; a long, low building whose walls are cracked and whose front door doesn’t lock the way it should. Anything of value inside, sculptures by famous artists, sacred vessels fashioned of gold, relics of saints long-dead, has long since been moved to a more secure location, or stolen. If you walk up the center aisle to the altar, however, and circle it to the right, you will find a doorway in the rear wall. It’s barred by a heavy gate whose lock is in perfect working order. Should you happen to have in your possession the key to that lock, and should you also know a certain sequence of words to utter while fitting and turning the key, you will find yourself at the top of a flight of stone stairs. They descend a considerable distance. At their foot, you will enter a corridor that leads to a large, heavy door, also locked. If you have come this far, then it’s likely you’ll have the key to this lock, too, and know the proper words to speak as you insert and twist the key. When you open the door, you will confront what appears to be a wall of white material, plaster, perhaps. Touch it, though, and you will feel it soft, warm, almost oily. It glows with a white radiance that overwhelms whatever light you have employed thus far. It is alive—or rather, it’s part of something alive. Call it an eye, but such an eye as never was. Do you know the myth of Odin’s right eye? He plucked it from the socket in order to gain a draught from the well of Mimir the wise. After Mimir took it, he dropped the eye into the waters of his well. Imagine the eye of a god, floating in dark water. Imagine an eye vast as a cathedral, an organ that can take in the reaches of the galaxy, of galaxies far beyond. Imagine an eye that can view what was, what is, and what will be, as well as what was not, is not, and will not be, that can apprehend all contingencies simultaneously.

“Now, the young man said, suppose you have brought to this aperture a knife of surpassing sharpness. With such a blade, you might shave from the surface of this great eye the thinnest of sheets. Who knows how many you could peel away? Later, after you have returned to your chambers, you might assemble these sheets into a book, bind them between leather covers. This book would allow its reader to participate in what the eye surveys; though to the reader, unaccustomed to the eye’s perspective, it would seem as if they were living within that vision. Some might seek the answers to exotic mysteries. Some might venture through time and space. Some might pursue more modest goals, might search out lives in which they had been spared certain tragedies, the untimely death of a loved one, a missed opportunity in love. Rare indeed would be the man or woman who could turn the pages of such a volume and not be drawn out of themselves, into another vista.

“But why the sickness? I asked. Why the white hair?

“Divorced from their host, the young man said, the book’s pages required another source of power.

“Me, I said.

“If I were to put the volume aside, never open its cover again, then the likelihood was that I would recover in short order. The white patch in my hair would grow out. If I returned to the Supplement, however, I could expect my condition to worsen. The young man had not heard of anyone lasting more than a year with the book, and if he was to be candid, most were consumed by it in half, a quarter that time.

“Why had George Farange given it to me? What had I done to him or his?

“A trade, the young man said. He assumed Mr. Farange took something from me.

“There was a letter he was interested in . . . But what the hell kind of trade was that? I had no idea what I was taking from him.

“He wasn’t saying it was a fair trade, the young man said. Anyway, would I have believed Farange if he had told me what the book was and what it did?

“It was a fair enough point. I asked what was supposed to happen next.

“Nothing, he said. I had the Supplement. I was free to do with it as I chose.

“He and his friend didn’t want it back?

“They would have the book in due time, he said.”

Minerva raised her glass and finished its contents. “As you can see, I returned to the book—to Yvonne, to the life we hadn’t lived. I would like to make it out as a dramatic choice, but it was more something I fell back into. Oh, I steered clear of it for a good couple of weeks, took that trip to Cape May I’d promised myself, sat on the beach and caught up on my reading, ate at some very nice restaurants. And all the time, I kept thinking, I wish Yvonne were here: she’d love this. It wasn’t exactly a new thought, but my experience with the Supplement lent it a weight it hadn’t had for years. I’ve always loved the ocean, always found sitting beside it restorative. Watching the waves roll onto the shore by myself, though, hurt. After I returned here, I decided to open the book for a few minutes, just long enough to check on my daughter. Already, I was wondering if I could maybe look at it every now and again, once a month, or once a week. That wouldn’t be so bad, would it? Spread out its effects over years, decades, even.

“What was supposed to be a quick visit turned into a much longer stay, almost two days. Something strange happened to the passage of time in the other place: almost a full week went by. There, we had rescheduled Yvonne’s therapy appointment to allow her to try out for spring track. She made the team. Her father and I took her out for a celebratory dinner at the Plaza Diner.

“When I emerged from this session, it was to more white hair on my reflection, some serious lines on my forehead, alongside my mouth. The flu feeling was back, bad as ever. I can’t say my appearance didn’t make me jump, but the surprise didn’t last long. I cleaned up, ate a good meal, and went back to the Supplement, to what I had started thinking of as my real life.

“I watched my daughter win races. I helped her select a prom dress. I saw her receive her varsity letter. We took our family trip to France. I helped with her college applications. She decided on Penrose, where she majored in Economics. She graduated, moved to the city to work for a nonprofit. She left that place to work at the UN. She met a boy from Kenya. Her father liked him well enough; I was never able to talk much with him. He made Yvonne happy, though, so when she called to say they were engaged, I screamed and played the ecstatic mother. I was afraid they would move to Nairobi, where his people were. They didn’t, and settled in Westchester. They had two children: a girl, Tonya; and a boy, Reuben. The three and then the four of them visited holidays, and Yvonne’s father and I drove down to them as often as they could tolerate us.

“Don’t I sound like someone’s grandmother?” Minerva said. “I could talk about that life all day. This life . . . well, it’s been less pleasant. The changes to my appearance are obvious: people I worked beside twenty years don’t recognize me. Most of the last six months, I’ve been in pain. First, it was arthritis, lighting my hips and shoulders on fire. Aspirin helped for a time, then I had to schedule an appointment with my doctor. I’ve been in her office a lot; it seems that, if I’m not with Yvonne, I’m with Dr. Citera. She wrote me a prescription for something to dampen the joint pain, as well as a calcium supplement for the osteoporosis she picked up on. My bones had turned to kindling. Not long after that, my kidneys started acting up, and my blood sugar went on a roller-coaster ride. More pills helped with all of that, but there wasn’t much they could do about the wasting of my muscles, the weight melting off me. My doctor’s convinced I’m suffering from an underlying condition that’s the root cause of everything else, one of those rare diseases that spurs rapid aging. When my liver numbers came back bad, she wanted to send me up to Albany Med to consult a specialist. I appreciated her concern; to tell the truth, I felt bad not being able to tell her that she was right, my maladies did share a common source. What good would it have done, though, to have explained that my physical decline was the result of continued contact with a book whose pages had been razored from an unimaginable eye? She would have added dementia to my list of symptoms. As kindly as I could, I declined the trip to Albany Med, uttered the old-lady cliché about it being my time to go when it was my time to go that I’d heard my grandmother use in her final months. The doctor wasn’t happy, but she respected my decision.

“Now . . . now, it’s a question of how much more time I can manage with my daughter before my body gives out. I’m hoping to see my granddaughter graduate high school. If not . . .” She shrugged. “Pain has become a constant, to the extent that it follows me into the other life. Yvonne’s noticed me grimacing, had me consult a doctor over there. He’s running tests for cancer. I can’t tell him the truth, either. Or Yvonne, for that matter: the last thing I want is for my time with her to be spent with her worrying I’ve lost my mind.

“It occurs to me,” Minerva said, “here at the end, that there were other routes my life might have traveled, other possibilities the book might have shown me. Maybe if I’d known how to use it properly, I could have lived some of them, too. You know, when I was in high school, there was a time I thought I was going to be an Olympic fencer? I competed nationally, won more than I lost. Could I have witnessed that life? Or was the time I missed with Yvonne always going to be what I saw?

“Bit late to worry about it now, I suppose.”

Whatever the expression on my face was, it caused Minerva to laugh. I blushed, looked down. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not so far gone I don’t know how all of this sounds. I appreciate you listening to me. I think I needed to hear myself tell the story to someone before—while I still could.”

“Do you—”

“There’s nothing for you to do—nothing you could do. Even if I never open this book again, my days have reached their limit. I’d just as soon spend them with my daughter.”

“But—”

“You can let yourself out. Give my best to your wife.”

Already, her gaze was drifting to the book in her lap. I stood, said, “I’ll see you,” and walked toward the apartment door on legs stiff from sitting so long. My skull felt tight, full past the brim with Minerva’s delusion. Fascination at the scenario she’d constructed competed with raw sadness at the crumbling of a fine mind. Hand on the doorknob, I paused, overcome with guilt at leaving someone in such a state on their own. I turned and hurried back to the living room, an apology forming on my lips.

The sight of Minerva dried my words. She was holding the book in both hands, tilted upright, her neck inclined toward it. From my position, I could see that the pages open before her were indeed blank. They trembled, as if composed of a substance less solid than paper. From the page to Minerva’s right, a slender white tube extended to her right eye, plunging into it. From the page to her left, another such tube rose to the base of her throat, piercing the skin there. While I watched, Minerva faded, growing steadily less distinct, and the white tubes, the pages of the book, filled with pale light. Through her silhouette, I saw at a distance a space like a garden, its myriad of paths branching one from the other, forming a design too vast and complex to take in, each path trod by a version of Minerva Baker.

I stumbled backward. I had to do something, had to save Minerva from this impossible fate But this imperative sat somewhere high above, divorced from the rest of me, and when I acted, it was to run to the door, throw it open, and rush out without closing it behind me.

Two weeks later, Minerva Baker died. At her request, her wake was closed casket. Her funeral was held at the Huguenot Reformed Church on Founders’ Street. I attended her wake, but not the funeral. I had not returned to her apartment since fleeing it, my heart pounding.

A week and a half after that, the mail carrier delivered a large, padded envelope addressed to me in Minerva’s spiky script. I knew its contents before I sliced open one end and peered inside. Without removing the Supplement, I set Minerva’s last communication to me on the kitchen table and walked into the living room. Alexa wasn’t home, wouldn’t be home till later this evening. The past months—the past year, really—she hadn’t been spending a lot of time at the house. To be fair, when we were together, our conversation didn’t go much past what we were having for dinner, what bills were due, occasional gossip about work. She had miscarried at five months, and while we had clung together desperately in the immediate aftermath of our loss, the further we went from it, the further we went from one another, too.

I wandered from the living room down the hallway to the door of what was supposed to have been the nursery. Antonia: that was the name we’d picked. Antonia Rose. I opened the door and stepped into the room. We’d talked about doing something else with the space—it was one of the few discussions we still had—but our plans had remained that.

The gliding rocker we’d bought was in its place beside the empty crib. I sat in it. I considered the crib, the stenciled animals decorating the walls. I thought about Minerva’s book, safe in its padded case, about what it could show me. I thought about the child whose cries, never voiced, I’d never stopped hearing.

For Fiona

MORTENSEN’S MUSE

Orrin Grey

Now, at the end of my life, everyone finally wants to know about me and Ronald. Lucky for you, it’s a story I’ve been waiting forty years to tell.

I knew Ronald Mortensen better than anyone, even though it was my sister Fiona who was his fiancée. You won’t hear about any of this in the articles that they’re writing about him now that people have rediscovered him, or in any of his books that are coming back into print. He kept my name out of it, just as he promised he would after Mother threatened to sue him if he “continued to defame” me. She always did have a way with words.

Irony of ironies, it was Mother who first brought Ronald home, back when we were all still living in Salt Lake City. He was working as a portrait photographer and teaching at the university. Mother hired him to take a portrait of Fiona—back then she was the one Mother thought would become a model or an actress—and after that he started coming around to our house for dinner, and within a month they were engaged.

Ronald looked then as he would look for as long as I knew him—lean, with a movie-star face and these piercing, insistent blue eyes. I always liked him, and he got on better with me than he ever did with Fiona. If I hadn’t been just fourteen at the time, it might have been me with the ring on my finger, not her. Even back then, he called me his muse.

If you believe his books, he already owned that famous motorcycle and sidecar of his, and used it to ferry his “seductive young Mormon” students out to the countryside, where he photographed them in nothing but a “yard of crêpe de Chine.” It made for a good story later, but honestly, if he’d been kicked out of school for that, as he wrote, would Mother ever have sent me halfway across the country with him? He didn’t even buy that silly motorcycle until we got to Hollywood.

Even in those days he was starting to formulate the theories for which he would become famous—or infamous. I remember standing in the back of a lecture hall and hearing him tell his students, “The job of a photographer is not to document what is there. Anyone with a camera can do that. A photographer’s job is to dominate the eye; to tell the audience where to look and what to see.”

I don’t know the real reason Ronald left Salt Lake, but I suspect he was just bored. He was always interested in what polite people called “esoteric subjects.” It wasn’t so odd back then; there hadn’t yet been any Satanic Panic like we have today, Charlie Manson hadn’t happened, and the spiritist movement was still going strong in a lot of places. It wasn’t that the university kicked him out for his occult leanings, I don’t think, as much as that there just wasn’t any support for them there. No easy access to books, nothing more he could learn.

So he left for Hollywood and took me with him. Ostensibly, it was because of my health. I’d been sick a lot when I was a girl, and Mother said the California climate would be good for my constitution, but what she actually wanted was for me to become an actress. I guess she got her wish, though I doubt she ever would have admitted to Ronald’s role in it. Fiona stayed behind, in Salt Lake, which probably says as much about their engagement as anything else I could add to the subject.

Ronald got a job right away, doing still photography for the movie studios. He got me my first role, as an extra in a crowd scene in The Giaour, where he also painted backdrops and made masks. He introduced me to Merian Cooper, and I don’t have to tell you how that worked out for me down the road.

One thing the books and articles get right: I was a small-town girl originally, and Salt Lake wasn’t exactly a place to instill me with worldliness. Plus, I was pretty back then—I got to be famous for it, after all—but Ronald was good to me early on; he kept me safe, which made Mother’s overreacting later all the more ridiculous. He made sure I was boarded in places where I would be insulated from the predations of older men, of which there would no doubt have been plenty. And honestly, I might have welcomed them. I was naïve, certainly, but I was also eager, and I had what I now know was a girlish crush on Ronald.

There were nights when I lay in bed and imagined him coming into my room unbidden, as I know that Mother later came to believe he did, but my imagination was the only place where anything improper ever happened between us. Ronald never treated me like anything other than a little sister. When he photographed me in that infamous crêpe de Chine, I sent the pictures to Mother and I think that I wanted her to believe that we were having an affair, because I rather wanted it to be true.

I know that the books and articles that are being published now paint me as a girl so backward as to not even know what sex was, but while I may have been a bit ignorant of the particulars in those days, I certainly knew better than to believe that it only amounted to sleeping in the same room, as one of these hacks has claimed. I was the one who instigated those pictures, not Ronald. He only went along because he understood the power and the appeal of a lovely young body—the younger the better—under a thin layer of translucent cloth.

He talked about it in abstract terms: Beauty and Sex with capital letters. “Ideas can’t change the world,” he would say, “but their arrangements can.” With a picture, he could make a person look where he wanted them to look, think what he wanted them to think, feel what he wanted them to feel. And I guess he wasn’t wrong, because those pictures certainly made Mother feel some things, though I don’t know if they were what Ronald intended.

Mother really did smash all of Ronald’s plates, right there in front of him, just as they say she did, and I really did turn my face away, because I knew what his pictures meant to him, and how much it must hurt to have them destroyed, and how it was my fault. Mother was apoplectic, that was the word she would have used. Her face was red and damp, her eyes tiny black beads in her face as she shouted and raged.

When it was over, Ronald’s engagement with Fiona was broken off, of course, and he and I were forbidden ever to see each other again. He took the broken engagement in stride, and Fiona was scandalized and all too happy to see it end. Neither of them had ever been really in love anyway, in my opinion; an engagement had simply been convenient and not too unpleasant a prospect. His separation from me would have been harder on him, I think—as it would have been on me—had it ever really happened.

Here’s what you’ve probably been waiting for, if you bothered to read this far: the place where my story starts to deviate from the one that you’ve read in the magazines or in whatever books about Ronald’s work they’re putting out these days. What’s the official story now? That our last time together was that apocalyptic moment in Ronald’s studio, when Mother smashed the plates? Or maybe some tearful encounter across the floor of a courtroom that never happened because there was never any actual suit; Ronald going along with all of Mother’s demands so no legal action was ever necessary?

The fact is, by the time Mother and Fiona moved to Hollywood to keep an eye on me and keep me away from Ronald, I was already sixteen and well on my way to becoming a star. It was what Mother had always wanted for me, and in spite of her concerns about Ronald, she was too pleased to see it come to fruition to worry too much about the hows and the whys.

So in spite of Mother and Fiona, Ronald and I saw a lot of each other in the years to come. We were both still working in the movies, and the movies, at least back then, were too small a world for us to be kept completely apart.

For Midnight in the Wax Museum he designed the makeup that Lionel wore under his wax mask in the final scene, and of course, the masks that the natives wore in A Mountain Walks were the same ones he’d created for Rivers of Zanzibar a few years earlier. Ronald was always fascinated with masks, and when he wasn’t taking his photographs, he was making masks, sometimes for the movies, and other times just to hang on the wall of his studio.

I suppose you’ll be expecting me to write something about A Mountain Walks now. It’s the movie that really made me a star, after all, and it made boatloads of money for Merian and RKO, though I never saw a dime beyond my contracted price. That’s the way it was in those days. It’s the only movie anyone ever wants to hear about, even now, though I made more than a hundred in my time. I’ve talked myself hoarser than I ever screamed about that movie down through the years, but if only to keep you reading until I get to the good part, here’s something:

I was only in half a dozen horror movies out of that hundred, and yet I somehow became the first “scream queen,” whatever that is. As near as I can tell from watching movies today, it’s an actress who takes her top off a lot. Which, honestly, I’d probably have been happy to do, if that was something you did to get ahead in movies back then. It’s not so much different from that soaking-wet, shredded dress they had me wearing for half of Mountain, is it? Why Mother approved of that and not Ronald’s crêpe de Chine, I’ll never know.

Anyway, that movie has nothing to do with the rest of my story, except that it hit big enough to make me a bona fide star. That gave me both more freedom, and less. I started working on bigger movies than the ones Ronald was doing, and shortly after that he stopped working in movies altogether. He said it was because of the talkies, that Hollywood was becoming too much of a business, that he wanted the freedom to work on his own projects. He was already developing his reputation by then, his famous process.

He probably could have retired right then and never taken another photograph. He’d written four of his books already, including Dominating the Eye and Gorgons and Goddesses, both of which had gone into I-don’t-know-how-many printings, so he had plenty of money. But instead he moved down to Laguna Beach and bought the odd corner building that would become as inextricably linked with his legend as that silly motorcycle, and opened his school.

I remember when he first moved in, he sent me the address and I had my driver take me down to see it. Mother had passed away by then; we buried her back in Salt Lake, in a service that had to be guarded by police to keep the crowds and reporters out, because they knew I was there.

You know what Ronald’s studio looked like, so I don’t need to describe it. That three-sided front corner done up to look like an old English village; the back part just stucco that extended down the back side of the hill. I could see why it would be perfect for him. It gave him plenty of light, and he lived in an apartment on the second floor, but I took an immediate dislike to that building before I ever went inside. If you’ve looked at the photos of it, go and look at them again, and see if you can spot it. Something uncomfortable about the front of it, not like a face or anything, just like it’s about to bend or collapse. It gave me a headache, looking at it from the street, and that was before I had seen the basement.

It’s the real reason he bought the building, at least so he told me that day. “Not many buildings in California have basements,” he said as he took me down the wooden stairs.

The basement walls were stacked stone, joined with clumsily applied mortar. The floor was swept dirt. The place had an odd feeling, damp and hot, and a smell that made me think of animal houses at the zoo. In the center of the room was a long antique table, set as for a feast, though the plates and dishes were piled with bones and turtle shells, rather than food. All around were lights and baffles and cameras on stands. That was the room where Ronald took most of the pictures that you’re probably familiar with; the ones that would later come to be called his “grotesques.” You can see the roughly masoned walls in the background of some of the surviving ones.

I know what you’re thinking right now, and the answer is yes, Ronald did photograph me again, sometimes in costume, sometimes in what we used to call “the altogether.” I even posed for a few of his grotesques, though I never cared for them much. I remember in one I was some kind of nymph, crawling out of a fake tree in his studio, his camera trickery causing my skin to turn slowly to bark. As far as I know, none of those pictures survived what came later, and only one of them was ever taken in the basement. I had what I then considered an irrational dislike for that room from the moment I stepped inside it.

Something that most people don’t know about Ronald is that, though they’re what he became famous for, and he was always very proud of them, his grotesques were a constant source of frustration for him, too. He never explained why to me, not then, but whenever he developed a plate, I’d see him look at the result for a moment as if he was expecting to see something else, and then I’d see a flicker of disappointment cross his face when it wasn’t there.

After he bought the studio in Laguna Beach, he started attracting what he called his “odd ducks.” He wrote about them in some of his books; midgets and acromegalic giants, fat ladies and dog-faced boys. Hollywood had put most of the country’s freak shows out of business by then, and Ronald’s photographic predilections gave many of their performers new work.

He claimed that he kept them around for their “pictorial possibilities,” but that doesn’t explain why he also spent so much time with would-be warlocks and charlatan priests of obscure cults. Ronald’s studio sometimes housed meetings of a group called the Society of the Silver Key, something like Freemasons but for Hollywood types.

I met one guy in particular, a hanger-on with a phony French name like DuPlante, who was good at spouting the sort of pseudomystical mumbo jumbo that groups like that eat up. He said that Ronald’s Dominating the Eye was more than a photography guide; that it contained secrets and formulae that could be used in actual magic. I remembered that, because it sounded so much like some of the things that Ronald himself had said to me over the years.

“Why do warlocks and witch doctors use pentagrams and candles?” I remember him asking me once. “The trappings have power—not in themselves, but in their arrangements. It isn’t the pentacle qua symbol that conjures or binds; it’s the composition, the geometry. If composition can control the eye, the heart, the mind, why couldn’t it control much more?”

Though Ronald and I saw each other more than we had prior to Mother’s death, we never again developed the rapport we had shared when I was a girl, and I never spent much time in his studio. When we met it was usually to go out to dinner at some Laguna Beach haunt, with me in a hat and glasses and a wig from Ronald’s supplies to keep from being recognized. Of all of his odd friends, there was only one I ever really got along with, a Jewish composer whose last name had been something German-sounding when he was born, but when he moved to Hollywood he changed it to Temple and dropped the h from the end of Erich.

It went on like that for a while. My first marriage fell apart, and I started appearing on TV more and in movies less because, let’s face it, my looks were beginning to go. What was the line, from that picture I would have starred in if I hadn’t been doing The Hunter and the Prey with Merian at the time? “Fine stuff, but it’ll rot.”

Ronald and I saw each other a few times a month, and we stayed close enough that when he called me on the phone one night, his voice breathless yet also composed somehow, the way a man’s voice is when he has something to say that can only be said to you, I went to him. I didn’t wake my driver; I just took the car and drove down to Laguna Beach.

Ronald met me at the door, and ushered me right away into the basement. The arrangement had been changed from the first time I was there, the tables cleared away, and now only a high-backed chair sat in one corner. The lights, cameras, and baffles were all still in place, and on the floor there was some design cut into the dirt and poured full of chalk and salt. I’m sure you’re wondering if it was a pentagram, and the sad fact is that I can’t remember. Just circles within circles, with a many-angled figure inside of that, and writing in some language that I didn’t recognize and couldn’t understand.

I don’t remember exactly what we said, but I know that when I asked for explanations he just shook his head, as if explanations were beyond him. He asked me to pose for a photograph, and I know that I must have been exasperated, and I doubt that I hid it well, but he said that he trusted me as he trusted no one else, and there was something about him, something about his manner, that made me go along.

He had me stand outside the circle he had drawn on the floor, stripped to the waist and wearing a long black skirt, my arms raised, at once conjuring something forth from the ether, and at the same time recoiling from whatever I had summoned. He was very particular about where I stood, my pose, the bend of my arms, the angle of my gaze. It seemed to take forever for him to finish nudging me into place, to get everything just where he wanted it. Then he snapped the picture and that was it.

I waited for him upstairs while he developed the photograph, standing and looking out of the big front windows at Coast Boulevard, watching the occasional car pass by. When Ronald came out with the photo, he was beaming, like a man presenting me with his newborn son. I don’t think I had ever seen him so happy, and he handed me the picture, and I looked down at it, and I don’t remember now what exactly it was that I expected to see, but ultimately just a photograph, just an image of the tableaux he had staged below.

And there I was, standing topless, Ronald’s photographic artistry making my skin look more flawless than it actually was, one arm twisted around as if caught between drawing something close and pushing it away, a ridiculous look on my face like in a publicity still. And there was the design, scrawled on the floor, part of it obscured now, for there was also . . . something else.

I have trouble describing it now, all these years later, trouble even calling it to mind. It was hairy and squat, with arms longer than its legs. Something like a monkey, but also not like one. Leathery, as well as hairy, like a mummy, and also like a skeleton, its angles wrong, as though it had been carved out of wood, instead of born from flesh. Like an ape, like a marionette, like a skull. Its face full of bulging eyes, reminding me of one of Ronald’s masks.

I stumbled away, almost slapped the picture from his hand. I felt the cold glass of the window against my back, and I think that’s what stopped me from turning and running into the night, or screaming, or fainting, like a character from one of the horror movies I made when I was a girl.

Certainly, he could have faked it. The thing resembled a puppet, after all, and its likeness to the masks that Ronald had made over the years was uncanny. He could have taken another photograph, one of something that he had carved, then layered them over one another somehow. Though I spent a lot of time with him, I never got the hang of his photographic development process, so I would have been easy to fool. But I don’t believe he faked it. I don’t believe it now, for reasons that will become obvious, and I didn’t believe it then. Partly because he was too proud to fake it, too proud of what he could actually do to pretend to something he couldn’t. Oh, not that he was above embellishing the truth. He’d lie like a rug if it suited his purpose, but he wouldn’t lie about his process, not to me.

More than that, though, I didn’t believe he’d faked it because it was like a tumbler that fell into place, making so many of the things he’d said over the years make sense. His thesis about the job of the photographer to dominate the eye, the heart, the mind, and maybe more. How he was always telling his students to look and then once they had looked, to see.

No, he had taken a picture of something that wasn’t there. Or rather, something that was there, but that I hadn’t been able to see. “Is it real?” I remember asking him, my voice desperate for him to reassure me to the contrary.

“It was,” he said, “for the moment that the picture was taken. Conjured into being by the composition of the shot, by the necessity of its presence in that composition, and then gone again when the composition was broken, when it was no longer needed.”

I don’t remember the rest of the night, not clearly. What words were said, how I tried to make him understand how wrong this felt to me, his incredulousness that I could be anything short of ecstatic at what he had accomplished. I remember that I was so shaken, so overawed, that I stumbled out to my car and drove only a few blocks and then sat by the side of the road, the engine running, the windows rolled up, trying not to glance at the seat beside me, to imagine what might be crouching there in the dark.

What upset me most was not the chill his photograph sent through me, but the feeling of disorientation that it caused as I looked back across the years I had known him. Every photograph he took, every word he said or wrote about his philosophy and his process, every time he looked at one of his compositions and saw less than he had expected, it was all suddenly cast into a new light. If I closed my eyes, I saw myself as a girl, draped in the crêpe de Chine, surrounded by leering devils.

I wish that I could say I went back the next day, even the next week. Not only would it make for a better story, it would make me a better friend. I didn’t go back, though, not on my own. I couldn’t. I tried to put it out of my mind, but I know that I didn’t succeed, that it distracted me, haunted me, though I never told anyone what was wrong. I can’t even remember how long it was between that night at Ronald’s and the evening that I got the call from Eric Temple.

It was another late-night call, also breathless, though this time it was the breathlessness of a man who has been running up a steep hill. “I’m sorry to bother you,” Eric said, which made me smile a little, even as I realized that the situation must be dire, “but Ronnie gave me your number, and I didn’t know who else to call.” Again I got in the car and drove out to Laguna Beach.

When I pulled up in front of the studio all the lights were on, spilling blazing gold out onto the sidewalk. The front door hung open, but there was no one upstairs. I wanted to go up the steps, to check Ronald’s apartment, but I knew that I would be wasting my time, that whatever there was to find would be found in the basement.

If I had visited Ronald again in the weeks that had passed, the transition of the basement might have been less shocking. As it was, when I set foot on the top of the wooden steps, it was like tumbling into a movie from before the talkies. Ronald had been busy, hastily assembling handmade additions and renovations. Boards nailed together at odd angles, painted sharply in black and white. Sometimes shadows were painted on them, as on a photographic backdrop, but they were shadows that bent in ways that didn’t make sense, that conformed to no light source that was possible in that space. So thickly had these additions been cobbled together that the once-open basement was now a funhouse maze, one I had to duck and wriggle to squeeze through.

When I was able to pass the obstacle course to reach the bottom of the steps, I found that the whole of the basement had been subjected to similar treatment, converted into a series of corners and cul-de-sacs. What’s more, the once modestly sized room seemed somehow bigger, even though I could only see one tiny piece of it at a time, and I got the hysterical impression that I could wander those blind alleys for days without ever finding my way.

It didn’t help that the whole place had a feeling of being tilted or shifted, as if the surface were pitched at some precarious angle, even as I walked on the solidly packed dirt of the basement floor. I couldn’t see more than a turn ahead of me, though the basement was brightly illuminated, with lights bouncing off the painted white boards to nearly blind me, but I heard sounds of scratching and scuffling, like rats in the walls. After a couple of turns, I stumbled over the body.

It was badly mangled, and most of its face was missing, but I knew from the clothes that it was Eric. From somewhere ahead I heard Ronald’s voice. He sounded hoarse, and maybe like he was crying, though I had never heard Ronald cry. “No, no, get away,” he was trying to shout, but his voice was going, so it came out like a croak. Over and over. “The composition is finished. Get away.” And then I heard a crash, and a sound like what I imagine a flower would sound like if you could hear it blooming. I rounded the corner to a wall of flames, the broken remnants of an oil lamp at my feet.

Ronald cowered in the corner at the far end of a hastily constructed hallway, one whose angles seemed to bend in on him in menace. The flames had already climbed too high for me to step over and reach him, and even if they hadn’t, there was something else between us. Something dark and wrong-shaped, hairy and skeletal and carved of strange angles.

It moved like a filmstrip from which frames had been removed, and as it crossed the distance between itself and Ronald, I saw it flicker and change. Ronald’s arms were held up in front of his face, unwilling, in his last moments, to do what he had always bid his students do and look. The thing grabbed him by the wrist with too many fingers, or maybe not enough, and then the composition was changed, the geometry altered, and they were both just gone.

I made it upstairs, woke a neighbor, called the fire department, but Ronald’s studio burned down that night. I stood outside and watched the flames shoot up. I don’t remember what I told the police when they arrived, but they could see that I was shaken up, and they knew who I was, so they didn’t ask too many questions. It didn’t seem that unusual to them anyway. After all, it was just a fire. Fires happened all the time. They never even found a body, not Eric’s and not Ronald’s. After a few weeks, they were both listed as missing, and everyone just assumed that they went south, to Mexico. I think a story circulated that they were lovers, though I don’t know that it ever really took hold. Maybe that’s what you’ll read in the books and articles that they’re writing now.

The building has been rebuilt since, restored to look almost exactly like it looked then, and some tours even point it out as Ronald’s old studio. They tell me that it’s a Starbucks now, but I’ve never gone to visit, and I never will.

I don’t remember what I told the police inspector that night, but I’ll never forget what he told me, when I asked him if they’d checked the basement. “Nothing to check,” he said. “Buildings in California don’t have basements, ma’am.”

OBLIVION MODE

Laird Barron

Somewhere in the Headsman Mountains

A music box played the up-tempo notes of a murder ballad.

Far from welcoming lands, the company built a campfire and watched it burn low. A young woman in antique scale armor, two old men (one in mismatched leathers, the other in buckskins), a grizzled dog, and an equally grizzled horse. The animals were massive and their eyes expressed extraordinary intelligence. Both would have preferred retirement on a farm. The girl in the antique armor had shortchanged the animals on that count—shanghaied them with sweet talk and an appeal to their bellicose nature.

Night birds drifted, crying, through the mists in the valley. Wolves harmonized upon a hidden ridge. The charger stamped his hooves, unhappy because the howls were not wolf howls but rather the howls of bestial men in wolf skins. Shadows from the pine forest tattooed a boulder here, a swath of wildflowers there. Fistfuls of cold-salt stars hung upon the immortal darkness. The breeze tasted faintly of snow and strongly of green needles and dirt and the smoke of the fire.

“Devil moon came on Thor’s Day.” The vagrant plunked a Stradivarius guitar in accompaniment to the woman’s music box. He’d acquired the guitar from a king for services rendered. His blanket was patched with peace signs and anarchy symbols that would’ve seen him drawn and quartered under the reign of the previous monarchy. “First night in a century for one to rise on Thor’s Day . . . I slept through its ascent in the unfinished basement of a mill. Saw it anyway, in a dream. A blazing white coin streaked with a bloody fingerprint. You and I didn’t know each other then.”

To the vagrant’s left, the lanky, gray-bearded man in buckskins sharpened a tomahawk. He glanced where the waning gibbous moon fumed behind a peak long-gone tribes called Old Woman’s Nose. He scowled.

Lochinvar shut the small music box, sealing away the crystal shrike perched in the branches of a crystal thorn tree. On Thor’s Day, she too had hidden from the waxing blood moon, yet seen it nonetheless. She’d covered her face with both gauntleted hands while the wind moaned outside her burrow in the base of a dead tree. Her three-body blade, Rebuke, absorbed the hell light. The sword had glimmered like a shorn tusk where it lay across her bedroll while the music box had played an eerie dirge of its own accord.

Mantooth had protectively curled his furry bulk against her. Flint, war-tempered stallion, remained placid, eyes shielded by a burlap sack. Bats had skated across the moon’s grinning skull. Flint merely swished his tail at the distant ululating skreeee. Several nights gone by and still ruddy, Luna burned frightful as the glare of a murderous drunk, but possessed no power to fully corrupt the minds of men or animals.

Too soon a thought.

Mantooth growled. The canopy rustled. A dense shadow swayed upside down from a pine branch. The branch sagged dangerously.

“Hullo, kids,” the giant vampire bat lisped through his fangs. His disproportionately tiny red eyes twinkled. Like Mantooth the war dog and Flint the charger, the bat descended from an Ur bloodline. He comprehended the tongues of men and could speak them when he wished. Sages claimed Fleetwood was youngest of a coven led by the infamous Leonora and Ennis Shriek. Neither of these worthies had shown hide or hair since the winter of ’22. Naturalists and garrison commanders speculated Fleetwood was the last of that cruel and violent lineage.

“Good evening, Fleetwood,” Lochinvar said. “Flap on over by the fire. I might have an apple in my rucksack.” She stretched and laid her hand on Rebuke. The hilt was wrapped in cured human skin; the pommel an agate shaped by earth’s own grinding pressure into a lumpen death’s head. Each kill was said to widen the grin ever so slightly.

“An apple?” Fleetwood said. “Wrong species, babe. I ain’t here for a snack. Takin’ stock, takin’ names.”

“Bloodsucking spy.” Mantooth’s voice rumbled from his thick chest as if he’d swallowed gravel for dinner. The dog grinned jaggedly. His long fur gleamed silver at the tips. Scarred, arthritic, and closer to the grave than not, in that moment he was almost his erstwhile dire self again—killer of knights, slayer of horses, fucker of every bitch in the kennel. “I bite you, bloodsucker. I snap and tear.”

Flint nickered. “I stamp your skull.” He pawed a divot into the earth with an iron-shod hoof.

Fleetwood peered through a fold of his wing. “Who have I spied trespassin’ in the Master’s domain? Damned Karl Lochinvar and a ragtag posse. Mantooth, alpha among yappin’ curs. Then we have the broke-down nag, Flint. They woulda put you to stud except for the unfortunate detail you don’t have much lead in the pencil, hey? Mr. Bowie, sorry to see you mixed up in this business—guidin’ the tinhorns, I expect. Been a while and Karl must’ve forgotten the way. Besotted hobo, I don’t know you, although your reek will be difficult to forget . . .”

“Marion Hand, at yer service, vermin,” the vagrant tipped back the brim of his floppy hat and struck a discordant twang on his guitar.

“Marion Hand, ex–Royal Dragoon of the disgraced Ninth Regiment?”

“Aye.” Plunk!

“Marion Hand, ex-mancatcher for the corrupt and discredited Continental Agency?”

Plunk! Plunk!

“Marion Hand, asshole buddy of Jon Foot, the Emperor’s warlock in exile?”

Plunk! Plunk! Twang!

“Ah. Pleasure to make your acquaintance after these many years, Mr. Hand. The low life suits you.”

Lochinvar said to Fleetwood, “We are on our way over the pass. You’ve no cause to plague us.”

“The Northern Waste lies yonder. None civilized or sane go there.”

Hand laughed. “Civilized? Sane? This company is oh for two in those departments, if you hadn’t already noticed.”

“Oh, my deceitful friends, the world has moved on and erased the villages from these hills. There is only the Master’s abode within many leagues. Come to him if you dare, sweetmeats. I’ll laugh as he carves your guts—”

Bowie flung his tomahawk. It whickered end over end and thudded into Fleetwood. The bat shrieked and hurtled upward and was gone with a thrashing of sundered branches.

“Well cast,” Hand said. He strummed a merry riff, basically in tune.

“Gods damn it,” Bowie said. “That was my grandmother’s favorite axe.”

The Melancholies of Baron Need

Gazed through tinted lenses, the sunset is a livid stripe around a bloody puncture. Shapes of the human and animal kingdoms are yours to assume since you have none of your own. Tomes chock-full of woodcut images of horrors from folklore delight you. Your preferred form is an exaggerated and more vivid iteration of a long-gone noble whom everyone hated and feared. If his enemies could only see him now. You stand tall as a rearing cave bear. Rib-bone white, robed in regal tatters, your aspect is a stained-glass etching of Satan. Your icepick smile causes peasant lasses to drop their knickers. Your snarl sends maddened songbirds murmuring in search of eyes to peck. Yet you are merely a mote. A hologram lent human substance to mask the inhuman truth. You are . . .

. . . a long tooth that sinks into a jugular.

. . . a talon that plucks away the skin and lays bare frailty and woe.

. . . a sucking tendril that twines around a fearful heart. Lub-a-dub, bud-a-bul.

. . . a siphon that draws blood and carries it into darkness.

You lap and lap with a rough tongue. You gulp a river and let it drain into the pit at your center. Black pit, black Niagara Falls. You drink, and drink. The river pours through you and spills into an estuary on the dagger edge of nothingness. It’s never enough, all that hot blood. The something larger that you are a part of is insatiable and would love to lick out the sun. Someday it might.

Little Lochinvar

Karla Lochinvar (known as Karl since she was knee-high to a . . . et cetera) determined herself a pessimist at the age of eight, the winter before she first met Smirking Jaye. Experience seldom failed to validate her lack of optimism. An only child like Mom before her. Mom remarked that replicating once with a slight variation was sufficient. A little brother would have been nice. Later, as an adult, Karl Lochinvar reminded herself the kid would likely be dead too, or would have suffered a fate worse than, so better to have never been born.

Dad was a hunter in an age of scarcity. He also played flute with a traveling troupe (which is how he met and knocked Mom up). Mom kept the home fires burning. She taught Lochinvar letters (and some folks, namely enemies, warrant this was a tragic mistake) and let her read from the histories, philosophical treatises, and romances she’d inherited from Grandmother on Dad’s side. Grandmother, albeit merely a handmaiden to a duchess, had been a learned woman and a great influence upon young Karl.

Her parents got on well enough despite Dad’s rambling, whoring ways. When he returned to burrow in for the winter everybody was happy. Mom and Dad were happy, anyhow. Their daughter’s disposition proved complicated.

Assiduously cheerful of comport, Lochinvar possessed secret melancholy depths. She waxed nihilistic in her diary. The fix is in, obviously. We chase the mechanical coney around and around the track until we fall, one by one. A man in a tweed cap and a tweed jacket strolls by with a blunderbuss and puts a Hornady ball through our brains. The man in the tweed cap occasionally wears an immaculate white anorak, or an immaculate black robe with a cowl, or a cassock. His eyes are the eyes of your father or your mother, or a grandparent you are desperate to impress. He is Death and a friend.

Ad infinitum. Whence her bitterness? She came by it honestly, in fact. Osmosis.

Work is the curse of the drinking man, Dad said as he pulled his boots on at sunrise. Black boots. Hard as antlers. Come late winter and the deep snows, he switched to mukluks. You can easily sneak up on hapless prey if you wear mukluks. He was full of received wisdom and rotgut. Sooner war, sooner peace. Once begun is half done. Take the bull by the horns. Don’t let your alligator mouth overrun your canary ass.

Dad brawled at the tavern (and usually won despite his lack of brawn). He also frequently tangled with the bureaucracy. In days gone by he’d belonged to the wrong political guilds. Latter days brought new problems. Something about a ring of poachers operating near the Baron’s forest reserve. Warden Snidely swung by the house once a week and had tea with him in the den. The cop smelled of heavy musk. He wore pastel shirts under his parka—sometimes yellow, sometimes salmon—wool pants, and fancy, fur-trimmed boots. A homespun ensemble, and Lochinvar fantasized about the warden’s wife and the kind of woman she might be.

Warden Snidely shone soft as dusk. His dark hair gleamed in ringlets. Lochinvar couldn’t figure the man’s exact age. His demeanor betrayed no clues. He scratched notes in a ferret-skin notebook while he talked to Dad and sipped the tea Mom brought. Mom gave him the cheap leaves. Lochinvar harbored the suspicion she’d screwed him. A loyal woman would do anything to keep her man out of Shank’s Hostel.

The Lochinvar household plastered on smiles and made nice when Johnny Law came around, until one day he arrived with another man in tow.

Mom gripped Dad’s arm and whispered, “That’s Smirking Jaye. Maybe we shouldn’t let ’em in.” Dad had to let them inside, and he did with a big friendly grin. He tucked a jawbone knife into his belt, though.

Lochinvar knew of this Smirking Jaye fellow who served the Baron as major-domo. The Baron exhibited a penchant for nubile girls and often sent his servant to collect them, or so went the fearful gossip among every milkmaid within thirty leagues. Hair shorn in a tonsure, Smirking Jaye was round faced and thick, though not quite fat. He didn’t smirk; point of fact, he was expressionless as a death mask. He wore a mink coat and lederhosen. His gloves were fancy and so were his codpiece and boots. A talisman of the Broken Ouroboros done in black iron swung from his neck. It was difficult to expect anything other than evil from such a man. The Lochinvar family dog, Orlando, a mighty bastard of a wolfhound, didn’t favor Smirking Jaye one teeny bit. Orlando snarled and foamed at the muzzle until Dad locked the brute in his kennel.

Tea in the den, as usual. Karl Lochinvar witnessed the conference from a cubby concealed behind a moth-eaten wall hanging.

Most of the conversation eluded her comprehension except for mention of poaching and veiled references to the vulnerability of children. An argument escalated. Voices were raised. Smirking Jaye removed his left glove with theatrical leisure and unveiled a skeletal hand. The hand of a drowned sailor, chipped free of some ancient reef—slimy and sharp as an eel tooth. He wagged his bony fingers menacingly. Dad drew his knife and busted a move (and gods, he was fast), but Smirking Jaye ignored repeated stabs as he seized Mr. Lochinvar’s throat and twisted. Dad’s head popped free in a spray of blood like a stubborn bush uprooted. Warden Snidely’s horrified expression suggested even he hadn’t seen that coming.

Mom dropped a plate of cookies. She screamed. And what a scream: grief, rage, and fear in an unholy combination. Shutters blasted from windows and the hearth imploded and took away most of the roof. Warden Snidely and Smirking Jaye disappeared. They left human-shaped cutouts blasted through the wall. Karl Lochinvar took a blow from flying debris and had a long nap. She dreamed of romping the fields with Orlando in the spring. The hound dug into the rubble and licked her face until she came back to the awful reality of her new world.

Mom collected Dad and burned his corpse atop the splintered timbers of their cabin. She stood in the heart of the conflagration. Her clothes were eaten by flames. The flesh of her right shoulder and thigh curled and blackened. Blood dripped and sizzled. Strips of silvery mesh peeked through. Her blue eye popped. The socket wept a dull orange glare.

She regarded her daughter and said in a metallic voice, “There are things you do not know about your father. He contained multitudes. We have kept much from you, my girl. I wonder if it is too late to rectify the matter . . .”

The whole scene felt familiar; a living echo of a dream Karl Lochinvar had as a toddler. The echo reverberated back farther and farther until the terror of it caused the child to avert her gaze.

After the fires banked, Mrs. Lochinvar dressed her sobbing daughter in furs and a hat and tucked a sack of vittles and a knife into her belt. There was nothing else left after that. “Go away from here.” She wiped snot from the girl’s chin and pressed a scrap of vellum into her pocket. “Follow this map. Dig beneath the third standing stone, east of the wave-a-bit tree. My initials are carved near the top of the stone. Dig and dig, my sweet girl—deep as a grave, maybe a bit more. Your legacy awaits.”

“What’s my legacy, Mama?”

“A legacy is an inheritance.”

“Yes, Mama. What’s mine?”

“Oh. You have a couple of choices, sweetie. Get married, milk goats, knead dough, and give birth to eleven kids. Or, get paid to ride around the countryside cleaving bad men from asshole to appetite with a sword.”

“Okay, Mama.”

Mrs. Lochinvar, naked as Lady Godiva, dragged Smirking Jaye by the ankle up the mountain toward Castle Blood. Smirking Jaye’s arms flopped and his head bounced against the rocks. Faithful Orlando scouted ahead. Mom, standing taller and more powerful than her wont, glanced back and winked. Her disfigured face shone radiant with terrible joy.

A good thing that pessimist philosophy had metastasized as a steely nugget of pragmatism at the core of Lochinvar’s emotional spectrum. She resisted competing urges to follow her mother or curl next to the fire. Either were certain death. Her remaining option represented slightly less than certain death. She lowered her head and trudged into the wilderness.

Wolves from the Black Forest shadowed her. Ravens from the Black Forest circled overhead. Every rock and tree stump suggested a lurking Peloki raider or Malet outrider. She quickly drank her meager supply of water and devoured the dried meat. Each night she curled in her furs and sobbed until nightmares swept her into their evil embrace.

While the journey wasn’t exactly a picnic, she’d hunted with Dad plenty and his tutelage lent her the grit to persist. On the fourth morning she came upon a wind-scoured hill that overlooked a frozen, nameless river. A scary tree guarded the summit of the hill. This tree was ringed by majestic standing stones Malet tribes had set in place millennia prior. Ice and snow kept wave-a-bit trees dormant. Its blisters oozed red sap that steamed and glaciated between exposed roots. The murderous tree barely rustled a vine as Lochinvar approached her X-marks-the-spot. She gave it a rude arm gesture of defiance anyway.

Per her mother’s instructions, she knelt in the shadow of the third stone east of the tree. The stone’s petroglyphs had worn to the impression of a closed eye incised at a downward angle. She fashioned a spade from a shard of flint. She dug into the cold, dead earth until the edge thunked against something even harder and less yielding than rock. Her hands bled where the flint sliced through her fox-hide mittens, yet she continued to excavate until a swath of metal spread before her.

The carved eye in the monolith reacted to her efforts. It spiraled open and gazed upon Lochinvar with a beam of orange light. She cried out and scrambled backward. A mouth dissolved through the stone and issued a cloud of black, stinging gnats. The gnats hummed a song of small violence as they burrowed into her ears and eyes. She inhaled and the rest found their way inside.

A voice that sounded much like Mom’s strange metallic voice said, Genetic match verified. Omega protocol initiated. Dematerialization imminent. The earth crumbled and Lochinvar plunged into a pit. She watched the patch of sky shrink and vanish, leaving her to fall and fall as the gnats rearranged her from the inside. Her body dissolved, her thoughts scattered, and her various particles went down a funnel that elongated into the frigid depths of galactic space and unto the precarious verge of the Great Dark.

It got a lot worse before it got better. It never got better, not really.

Baron Need and the Soul Grinder

In some parts of the world, your kind are referred to as vampires. This is because humans prefer to sugarcoat bad news. Vampirism is an acceptable horror, romanticized as a metaphor for sexual repression. As usual, the truth is worse. Elsewhere, learned men whisper, Nosferatu. South, it’s Lamia or Vorvolakas. Tropical cultures fear the Penanggalan, and with justification—once that barbed tongue starts wriggling up the ass, it doesn’t stop until it has perforated the liver. Indeed, such creatures exist, and each is awful in its own special way. Some of these might be considered your ill-gotten offspring. However, none of them are quite as dreadful as you seven lords, subject of the original campfire legends and boogeymen tales.

Lords Dig, Clutch, and Dark haven’t shown themselves since the Interregnum. Possibly they were destroyed, although you remain skeptical. Dr. Slake dwells in the utter North in a cave carpeted with bones of men and beasts. He is feted by processions of rosy-cheeked lads and lasses sent by jarls desperate to protect their humble villages from slaughter. Mr. Speck inhabits the Royal Catacombs of the Imperial City and has done so before slaves heaved its founding stones into place. No shortage of effete, powdered twats that close to court—Mr. Speck dines in luxury. How he hasn’t withered from anemia from thin gruel is another question. Mr. Batten lurks high in the Andalusians upon a desolate crag. His is the guise of a leprous sphinx whose visage has eroded and cracked. He promises unwary travelers safe passage if they can answer a riddle. Like all of you, Mr. Batten is a dirty liar.

Your mind is far away with your scattered brethren as you cynically appraise the double dozen peasants chained to the floor of the dungeon. Tribute from several baronets, offal smokers who aren’t a spot on their haughty forefathers.

Water drips. Cold wind whistles through flues in chimney rock. Peasant eyes roll white with terror. The peasants stink of animal sweat and vintages of piss. They gibber and supplicate their gods, their saints, their ancestors. Nary a buxom, full-blooded maiden among these mongrels. Nor a village hero of steely thew and steelier resolve; not even a blacksmith’s son bulging with raw potential while innocent of his destiny. This collection is chaff; the beaks, assholes, and gristle that make up processed sausage peddled by back-alley hucksters. Flesh and blood are not all the same, as qualities of light and dark are not all the same. The inferiority of this tribute suggests a shift in the balance of power. A corrective action may become necessary if it’s not too late.

You pluck the least smelly and emaciated of the lot, lift her high, kicking and squirming, and decant her pulp into your up-tilted mouth. This semi-ripe milkmaid is your payment as trustee of the appetite of immortal darkness. You cast aside desiccated scraps. The rest of the mewling livestock is property of that greater self of which you exist as an anthropomorphic facsimile, a projection of false life. Predictably, the peasants are distressed by the milkmaid’s exsanguination. They emit a chorus of howls and redouble their prayers and imprecations. The ritual is as tedious as Time itself.

Brawny Peloki wildmen in executioner hoods crank a windlass. A section of worked stone grinds upward. Petroglyphs realign as seals are broken. The siren song of infinite blackness pierces your mind. It begins instantly because it never ceases. Your miserable tumor of a heart quickens to be so near its Maker (unMaker?). Oh, the perverse irony to have birthed from such a devourer. You cover your ears—not to muffle the impending carnage, certainly not! Nay, you seek to block the call of the dark, to turn away the colloidal blots of memory of your previous unlife. Pleasurable agony suffuses you as the soundless song keens.

A wall of quartz reflects bits of lamplight, and at its heart a jagged crimson hole that could be plugged by a large man’s fist. The hole expands slightly as the Void inhales the scents of warmth and fear. A dozen smaller holes materialize as a helix orbiting the larger opening. Each emits music; each bubbles with the radiation of superheated infinity. The stomach acids of primal reality smoke as they carve channels into the crystal.

The celestial song ascends, becomes a shrill fluting that rises and rises to a prolonged shriek. This shriek encroaches the mortal spectrum and causes sphincters to loosen. Gravity shifts sideways and increases dramatically. One by one, villagers are wrenched free of their bonds (trailing shorn limbs and yolks of viscera) as if caught in the invisible coils of a cyclone. Bodies smack the wall and hang pinioned. Momentarily. The pull of the Void is irresistible. They are sucked into the crystal aperture, inch by skin-shucking, bone-crunching inch. Living meat fed through an abattoir grinder. Screams dwindle and cease. Leftover puddles go wicked into the black hole and leave the dungeon floor spotless as a licked platter. At last your servitors let crash down the warding gate. The men hang their heads. Sobs escape their hoods.

For once, it’s hard not to empathize with the puling mortals. This whole messy process would be so much damned easier if the notch between the mortal plane and the Great Dark was a smidgeon wider. Ironically, Mr. Speck presides over a chasm in the earth; Mr. Slake is projected from a pit wide enough to gulp an elephant. You? You are the apple of the eye of a knothole. Were it possible, you’d relocate in a trice. A certain volcano in Peru comes to mind . . .

“Master?” Smirking Jaye stands upon the flagstone steps that curve upward into your castle proper. Smirking Jaye seems blandly ordinary except for his flat affect. However, under the fur-trimmed velvet gloves his hands are bare bone. His feet (knee-high boots) and penis (iron codpiece, also fur trimmed) are in a similar fleshless condition. Is he alive or living dead? He can hold his breath for an extended duration for whatever that’s worth. Similar to yours, his heart (which you once beheld after he suffered a grievous slash from some do-gooder’s axe) is not a muscle, but instead a prodigious tumor. He does not smile unless you catch him from the corner of your eye, albeit catching him is akin to tricking one’s own image in a mirror. Legend has it that only his victims see the real smile.

“Is it possible visitors have arrived unannounced? King Mingy’s envoys? There are two among them . . . a Royal Dragoon and an upright beast of the Ur Blood? Sir Marion Hand and Rabbit Abbot? Should I fear the worst?” Your henchman (a man cursed with the inability to utter a declarative sentence) isn’t given to emotion, much less hyperbole.

You consider the unhappy ramifications of this surprise visit by the king’s agents. Concentration is difficult this close to the source of your greater self and its eternal song. The Void raves beyond the thin barrier, louder after its recent feeding. It cannot be propitiated. It cannot be sated. It seeks to wipe away your facsimile personality and send you on a mission of annihilation. You struggle to retain individuality and succeed by a gnat’s hair.

“Jaye.”

“Yes, Baron?”

“Did they bring the dog? I hate dogs, especially him.”

“No?”

“A stroke of luck. Break out the good china.”

The Metal Womb of a Terror Star

Snow melted and returned. An emperor and several kings shed the bonds of flesh and deliquesced into the soil. Several small wars were waged. Life went on as usual. Occasionally, an unkindness of ravens perched atop the hill and shat upon the standing stones. Many roosted among the limbs of the dread wave-a-bit tree which had tolerated the birds for millennia. None of the ravens were of the Ur lineage; they could not articulate what compelled them to gather. The Peloki and Malet peoples considered ravens spirit messengers and heralds of the Underworld. It is possible the unkindnesses waited for a special variety of death.

Meanwhile, unimpeded by earthly laws of physics, Lochinvar’s body and conscious mind hung suspended within the black ice of a glacier transported from the southern pole of a deserted planet that orbited a star so distant from Earth it could not be seen by telescope. Her subconscious flickered in orbit around the aforementioned star. She did not comprehend the paradox. The voice of the Overmind (as the disembodied intelligence that inhabited surrounding shadows referred to itself) soothed her. A peculiar form of education commenced, delivered by this spectral presence of a long-extinct species. Mother’s secrets, and the secrets of the civilization Mother and her kind served, were revealed via an intravenous drip directly into young Lochinvar’s brain.

One day her subconscious beamed home from the galactic rim and thus reunited mind, body, and soul. Her animating pattern was downloaded into a specially designed and semi-indestructible body. On her left shoulder, the tattoo of a shrike imprinted a storehouse of fragmented lore that might improve her lot among troglodytes or see her burned as a witch. Armor and weapons appropriate to the milieu were provided. Before Lochinvar exited the steel womb beneath the hill by the nameless river, the Overmind warned her not to return. Defense protocols were in effect.

Your pattern has developed to maximal saturation. Employ your knowledge in the service of great and terrible deeds, the Overmind said.

“I don’t feel as if I know anything,” Lochinvar said.

Relatively speaking, this is also true.

“Am I a changeling?”

No longer. Now you are real girl again, more or less. Gravity reversed and lifted the real girl toward the surface of the world. Goodbye, Lochinvar. Wreak havoc—here, and in every possible universe.

Last Supper at Castle Blood

Supper is a disaster. On the scale of Pompeii or Krakatoa or Atlantis or the last act of a Shakespeare play.

The King’s agents station their entourage outside in the bailey. These two, the Ur beast and the knight, are not interested in foie gras nor your impressive array of summer wines. They have come because they are concerned with rumors of rape and plunder and darker deeds that waft from your barony. Peasants are missing by the wagon-load. Whole villages lie deserted but for the rats.

The blondie dragoon’s eyes narrow and his smile sharpens. He observes your unnatural height and frightful countenance (which you oh so subtly manipulate as the lamps flicker; you are a distorted mirror of those around the banquet table). He is such a cocky bastard in his snow-white plate mail and velvet cape. So handsome it hurts. No doubt he has left many a deflowered maiden and a passel of bastards scattered across the land.

Rabbit Abbot strokes his whiskers. Wisely, he doesn’t touch his goblet or plate. He nonchalantly asks if you happened to receive a local woman named Elizabeth Lochinvar—wife to Esteban Lochinvar, a hunter and flautist extraordinaire.

Apparently, Rabbit Abbot and the lady were comrades and had, some years prior, served as frumentarii in the Imperial Ministry of Vigilance. Later, she retired to civilian life while he became Superior of Speculatores, lately emeritus. The rabbit wears a gold tabard over his silky black fur. The tabard denotes his special status as King Mingy’s favorite envoy. He weighs twenty stone if a pebble, primarily muscle, and his eyes are dark as honey glazed with the blue tint of age. He has no need to carry a blade. His incisors are wicked sharp, as are the claws of his hind legs. Like most Ur beasts, Rabbit Abbot presents a serious threat to any who provoke his ire. You provoke his ire. It’s a challenge and it’s fun!

“Lord Abbot, Master of the Empress’s hunters—”

“Those were the good old days, Baron. Today I speak as an ambassador to the King.”

“Forgive me. Protocol, precedence—”

“Some might consider it a demotion. I view it as a working retirement. Again I ask: an informant claims your man,” Rabbit Abbot wrinkled his nose in distaste, “went to her home and made a wreck of the place. She and her daughter are missing and the husband’s bones lie upon the ruins of their abode. I pray you to explain.”

“Of course, my lord. You are fond of the pleasure automaton.”

“Automaton?” Rabbit Abbot’s nose twitches. He’s a shrewd one; mill wheels are grinding in his febrile brain. Evidently the Lochinvar woman’s true nature was a mystery to even her boon companions. Were his life expectancy to exceed the next few minutes he would doubtless catch on to the whole truth.

“No matter. It happens.” You shrug. “In your capacity as bedeviler of ingrates and criminals, you ran legions of scofflaws to ground. Killed many of them. Listened to their cries for mercy and then heated the irons. You took pleasure in this thing, yes?”

“The Creator says we should take pride in our accomplishments and pleasure in our deeds.”

You hunker upon your throne at the head of the table, having endeavored to keep a dozen well-trained and heavily armed guards between you and him. You permit your genteel smile to widen into a grin. Such a relief to let the façade crumble. Mind reading isn’t your gift, although surface fears and desires are yours to breathe in as a wolfhound winds its prey. You whiff a particular memory and your expression imitates the exuberant malice of a trapper who’d snared baby Rabbit Abbot once upon a time and left the scar of a wire snare embedded in his hind leg.

“Exactly, Lord Abbot. The Creator says so. What does Satan say? Recall, if you will, the squeals of craven victims and then imagine those sounds escaping from the lips of your lady friend as I subjected her to scarcely conceivable indignities. Imagine my delight in grinding her bones for my snuff box.” The pièce de résistance to your speech is the moment you produce said snuff box, a crimson lacquered affair with the initials BN, pop the hinge, and snort corpse dust.

One of your servants wallops a gong and it’s on.

On cue, Smirking Jaye slithers from behind a tastefully erotic Roman tapestry and loops a garrote over the dragoon’s neck. Possibly Smirking Jaye falters—he received permanent injuries from his encounter with the aforementioned Lochinvar woman. Also, Sir Hand has a reputation for world-beater skill in battle—single-combat champion at the King’s Tourney five years running. He performs as advertised. His plated mail gauntlet catches and snaps the wire in a reflexive convulsion. He reaches over his shoulder, grasps Smirking Jaye by the forearm, and flings him across the feast hall.

Sir Hand draws his blade and grins. “Come on then, fuckers.” He doesn’t wait for the guards to accept his invitation, but begins chopping them to ribbons at once. Snicker-snack. Marksmen lurk on the balcony. Crossbow bolts zing around the dragoon. Three quarrels stick into his armor. Other bolts glance aside harmlessly except for a scratch on his fair brow. Now he’s angry.

Rabbit Abbot springs onto the upper deck. His levitation is as effortless as that of the mystics of the Far East who sleep upon beds of nails when not breathing fire and massacring their foes in battle. The marksmen hunch to reload. Slow going, alas. Rabbit Abbot sweeps past; he snips their heads with jaws like hedge clippers trimming a row of daisies. Then he drops from the balcony and is among your guards and it isn’t any prettier. He swipes with his claws, front and back. Faces and limbs are scratched off entirely.

A horn sounds. The front gate crashes inward. The King’s men-at-arms rush through the gap, swords whetted for slaughter.

What your enemies do not comprehend is that your valiant doomed guards are not here to prevail. Nay, the cannon fodder is present only to provide you with a repast of gore and fleeing life essence. You are the extension of the rift in the cellar. Muffled by tons of stone, it shrills for sustenance. Its need is your need. You inhale deeply. Streamers and gouts of blood redirect from wounds and sluice through the air into your enormous funnel of a maw. Your belly distends and your reach lengthens. Your laughter changes. Your disfigured shadow falls over these puny vermin as they struggle in extremis. All heads turn to regard your awesome aspect.

For a while you even think you might win.

The Old Homestead

Lochinvar had not seen the home of her youth since she’d fled its destruction forty winters ago. Scant traces of the cabin remained. An overgrown pile of rocks marked the family hearth where the Lochinvars once gathered to drink cocoa and sing yuletide carols. She glimpsed her mother, nude and pale as ice, leaning against a hemlock. Lochinvar emitted an uncharacteristic scream and clapped her gauntlet over her mouth in chagrin. Mantooth trotted over and sniffed. Finding nothing of interest, he gave his mistress a puzzled whine.

Hand swigged from a wineskin, as he did every few minutes without appreciable result.

“Miss Lochinvar, how is it you don’t look a day over sweet sixteen?”

She removed her winged helm and wiped away sweat. “I get lots of beauty sleep.” Lochinvar hadn’t known the disgraced knight long, except by reputation and her mental reconstruction of the massacre at Baron Need’s castle. Mother had not spoken of him or Rabbit Abbot. Indeed, until the day of her husband’s murder, Mrs. Lochinvar successfully hid the existence of her former life as a spy and provocateur.

Mantooth had dutifully tracked Hand to a village dump site and dragged him out of a pile of refuse by the scruff. Lochinvar introduced herself and Bowie. Once Lochinvar explained her intentions, Hand ceased struggling and sobered in a hurry.

You intend to confront Need? he’d asked. Why do you want me? Why the scout? She’d shrugged. I need the scout because muscle is handy and he’s cheap. I want you because you defeated the sonofabitch once and I’m superstitious like that. They say he fears dogs, and Mantooth owes him a reckoning. Flint? I can’t be expected to walk, can I?

The curse Rabbit Abbot laid upon the Baron is not indefinite. The passing seasons bring evil ever nearer to a renewal of its unquenchable blood lust. Each of you loved my mother in her youth. Her gaze fell upon the hound and charger as well. Each of you owe her memory a debt and so I’ve assembled this company of vengeance. Baron Need is said to be one of the Undying. Assuming this to be the case, it is questionable whether we can permanently destroy him. That we shall try is enough for the moment. My blade cuts through a spectrum of resistance. My . . . music box . . . will apprehend his vital essence. The sight of old nemeses such as yourselves might freeze the Baron for a crucial moment. Whether or not any of you can provide material assistance is beside the point—this is a dire task and your comradery would make it easier to bear.

A nice speech. Coupled with an impressive armament and genuine facility for violence, it secured the loyalty of her ragtag band. Their journey had led them into the Headsman Mountains and to this overgrown plot. The men shuffled their feet and watched the young woman in the ancient armor press her forehead against the hearth stones in the attitude of prayer.

Bowie said to Hand, “The scribes say you and Rabbit Abbot brought low Baron Need and burned his castle in the winter of ’09. Royal decree proclaims it a no-man’s land for one hundred years and a day. I must ask: How did you defeat him?”

“Defeat isn’t the word that best describes that cluster of fucks. ‘Escaped while making a hell of a mess is closer’ to the truth. Apparently our foe yet lives—to wit, his pet vampire bat you whacked the other night.”

“The lingering presence of the Baron’s cronies and servitors does not necessarily indicate his survival.”

“Somebody’s got to pay the wages.”

“There’s that. Tell me anyway, how it happened.”

Hand looked toward the sun as it drifted behind the peaks. The trees were already lumping together into a charcoal blot. “Yeah, we went at the baron hard. Rabbit Abbot was convinced he’d discovered your mother’s identity and murdered your entire family. He didn’t have any evidence, but got a royal writ due to his connections. I went along for the ride. I lived to fight and was a bit sweet on your mom anyway. Fools, the both of us.

“In the end, Rabbit understood what we faced.” He considered his wineskin. His deep-set eyes were red around the rims. His formerly aquiline nose (once featured by portrait painters throughout the realm) hooked. He had three teeth in his mouth and wattles on his still thick neck. His former bulk had otherwise melted away to cords and bones. “We went to his castle thinking Baron Need a common murderer, a petty tyrant who’d gotten too big for his pantaloons. I expected debauchery, defiled maidens, a few bodies. Instead . . .”

The knight shuddered and took another drink from the skin. That steadied him. “The action commenced and everyone in the feast hall began dying. The Baron . . . changed. No longer sickly or gaunt as a leper. Satan inhabited him. The chandeliers blazed hellfire, but the hall became darker and darker. The Baron’s face caved under his bulging eyes and became a light-sucking hole. Blood flowed to him from every corner. He didn’t simply inhale blood. He gulped in the very light and sound around us, the heat from our bones. Never moved from his spot at the head of the table. His ropelike arms unwound and from every corner of the room that demon snatched men and rammed them into the seething ruin of his visage. His claws stabbed through my soldiers, chainmail and flesh, two or three at a clutch, and lifted them as if they were paper dolls. Their shrieks and oaths went down his throat, twisted in reverse.”

“Yet you prevailed,” Bowie said. “Rabbit Abbot saved the day.”

“The Ur beast died so that the rest of us might live.” Hand regarded his ragged boots in shame.

“How, dragoon? By what miracle?”

“It’s in the scrolls.”

“The scrolls leave much to the imagination, friend.”

“My mother fabricated a device,” Lochinvar said. “She entrusted it to the safekeeping of Rabbit Abbot and the Ministry of Vigilance when she retired from Imperial service. That’s what undid the enemy.”

Bowie raised his gray brows. “Wouldn’t look anything like an out-of-tune music box, would it?”

“She carried a talisman. Break-in-case-of-cosmic-evil sort of a deal. Exceedingly lethal to things that go bump in the night. Pity she did not foresee her own necessity. One doesn’t expect to draw evil incarnate as a landlord when one retires into the country, I suppose.”

“Yes, yes, a talisman.” Hand nodded at the memory. “Rabbit brandished it as the Baron dragged him to his doom. The talisman flared with a pure white radiance. There came a sound . . . All the devils in hell keened as one. Those of us who remained were stricken with blindness that lasted many hours. Fortunately, reserves I’d stationed in the bailey rushed to drag us from the castle as it burned.”

“This raises some interesting questions,” Bowie said to Lochinvar. “Since your mother’s death, I have heard certain rumors regarding her provenance. Some whisper she was not mortal, that she was Seelie from Under the Hill in Oberon’s court sent forth to mix blood with mortals for reasons privy only to that ilk—”

“Hmm. It’s my mother this, my mother that, with you, Jonathan. There you were in the middle of a war; a pair of spies, danger at every turn. Allow me to do the math. Romances have sparked over less . . .”

“—and a sage in the far west claims in that winter of ’09 you were taken by the fey and lived several winters among them. That you’ve been sent forth to do their bidding with mystical armor and a dread blade cast from star metal. They say you, like Jon Foot and others of that ilk, command the Voice of the Dark.”

“Little people are a myth,” Lochinvar said.

“What about little green men?” Hand gestured as if to brush aside the emerging stars.

“Little green men are taller than you’d assume.” Lochinvar balanced the music box upon her palm. “My friends under the hill taught me to carve such trinkets, and Mother before me. Five winters and too many tears for me to ever forge another.”

“Secret weapons are to the good. Your soul-trapper may do in a pinch.”

“Add souls to the manifest of things that don’t exist. Sentient beings possess consciousness. Consciousness can be bottled.”

“I’m not a philosopher, Ms. Lochinvar. I’m a drunk. Why disguise your weapon as a music box?”

“Because I can’t play a harmonica.”

An Ever-Sharp Knife

Beans and weak tea for supper. Lochinvar laid her head against Mantooth’s side and drifted away to sleep. Flint cropped the tough grass that grew in the mountains. The men sat in the dark near the dying fire, drinking the last of Hand’s wine.

“Smirking Jaye—alive or dead?” Bowie asked.

“An excellent question.”

“No guesses?”

“I didn’t see him die if that’s what you’re wondering,” Hand said. “Frankly, I don’t care either way. He took his orders from the man. The Baron is the architect of our various miseries, not his footmen.”

“Lochinvar differs on that score. She dreams of mounting his head on a pike.”

“We’ve each got our fantasies. What do you dream?”

Bowie had been regarded as the greatest barbarian-fighter in a dozen generations. During the peak of the Westward Expansion handbills bore his likeness and pennants flew in his honor. Even then, wags at the Capital called him Peloki-Killer behind their sleeves. He’d separated hundreds of blue-painted devils from their heads. Men, women, and children without discrimination. The title followed him even now, long after the wars were highly embellished anecdotes inked on a scroll. His eldest brother had sung for kings and his youngest brother invented outlandish knives, fought duels, and finally got himself killed in one (for the record, a mutual destruction). Both men were enshrined and beloved by a grateful populace. Jonathan Bowie had saved an empire. His reward? Obscurity except to grudging scholars, most of whom were eager to whitewash the seamy details of the expansion. Starting with the many, many massacres Bowie had orchestrated.

“We’re up north, in a field after a battle. Me and some comrades from the regiment. Of course, those guys are dead. The air is heavy with blood. I’m taking scalps. Hundreds of them from faceless men.” He held a Green River knife so it glinted in the firelight. His famous brother had forged the fighting knife for him and engraved Number One Peloki-Killer on the hilt. “You?”

“Nothing so exotic. I’m in my favorite alley in the Capital, drinking. Dog shit and mud up to my shins. Buzzing flies cover the sound of the market shouts and that damned infidel pipe-music the Easterners play.” Hand sighed and cast the empty skin aside. At the end of the day he sat straight and his hands were steady. “Are these visions of the hell that awaits us?”

“A strange idea of hell. Ain’t so awful. I never run short of scalps and my blade is ever sharp. Scalping in the quiet that follows the screams and war cries is soothing. Meditative, like weeding a garden for eternity.”

“Perhaps you’re on to something. My flask is bottomless. The drone of the flies is sort of comforting.”

“There you go.”

“Huh,” Hand said.

Meanwhile, Lochinvar dreamed of a pure, boundless void and her mother’s toneless, metallic voice calling from the distance, counting down.

Culling Song

Rabbit Abbot detonates his holy hand grenade.

A star bursts in the feast hall and a vast, invisible pattern that conjoins the Great Dark and mundane reality is obliterated with a thunderclap. Closed circuit; your connection to the Void is instantly severed and you come unraveled. Flesh melts from your bones. Blood escapes your deliquescing corpse like steam from a whistling kettle. Your skeleton puffs to ash and makes an arabesque upon a pillar. As the material projection of eternal darkness, you cannot die in the traditional sense, so you simply cease to exist as a collection of coherent particles.

You are a mask of flesh; torn away and discarded. Essence diminished, you assume the existence of a drowsing haunt, reliving your greatest defeat again and again by way of muddled and disjointed dreams. The worst of these dreams have nearly awakened you. These are the days when unseasonal storms wrack the Headsman Mountains, when streams flow crimson, and earthquakes shake loose landslides, only to subside as you relapse into deepest slumber.

Today, though, a sacrifice . . .

Fleetwood, last of the red-hot sycophants, flutters over the parapet, through a hole in the wall, and dies at your feet with an expulsion of bodily fluids. His warmth rouses you from a torpor that has persisted for years. Your physical form has congealed to a mold stain on a pillar. The configuration of this stain frightens away wildlife and gives the occasional ambitious tomb robbers night terrors before one of your dwindling supply of henchmen does them in as they sleep in furtive camps at the edge of the property.

Fleetwood’s melodramatic expiration sends a trickle charge into your heart (that beats once a fortnight) and gets it thumping faster. The connection to your greater self is still lost. You sense the Void and its hunger the way you might scent smoke and discern a fire. Since that fateful supper, your greater existence is reduced to abstraction in a manner similar to how matters of existentialism are for any mortal philosopher. Unlike the monks and the scribes, you possess proof that incomprehensibly awesome cosmic forces are in motion. You are the proof. Perhaps after eons of enslavement you are also free.

Dawn is brisk. Wisps of vapor rise from Fleetwood’s corpse. The wisps twist into phantom shapes of the Ur bat’s recent memories. You behold the ghostly visages of enemies on the approach. Two men, gray and infirm, yet formidable in their hatred and self-righteousness. The girl resembles her mother. The horse limps slightly; he hates the drunken knight. Only the dog frightens you. However, given his decrepitude, surely he presents little danger.

The column cracks with the sharpness of your grin. Bits of plaster tumble.

Full manifestation requires nourishment. Though your body is temporarily disbanded, an immense reservoir of willpower endures. You project it in a psychic melody. A culling song. Softly, sweetly until the roaches come. Stronger, stridently, and then the rodents emerge. You drain them in their hosts. Scraps of fur and desiccated shells form a carpet of death spiraling outward.

Yes, a heap of rats, bats, and cockroaches give their all before you are restored to a shadow of your former glory. Undead again is close enough, and you are ready for the night.

Castle Blood II

The ruins of Baron Need’s castle were embedded in the flank of Mowat Mountain. A central tower, a section of the inner bailey, and the main house stood intact—the rest had collapsed and become overgrown with a thicket of sickly hawthorn and copses of twisted cedar and birch. Human skulls decorated the brush like popcorn strung through the branches of a diseased Yule tree.

“Powerful cheery,” Bowie said.

“Tomb robbers and brigands are in short supply in these hills, and now we see why,” Hand said.

“The People shun this place. Smack dab in the heart of their tribal lands before the Empire annexed the mountains. Yet the First Kingdoms declined to reclaim it.”

“The Empire taints everything, eh?” Hand said without irony.

“Can’t argue against.”

Mantooth snuffled some bones. He growled and his hackles rose.

Lochinvar glanced at him as she dismounted Flint. “What’s the matter, pup?”

“A bad thing lives in the house,” Mantooth said.

“Bad dangerous bad,” Flint said. The charger’s nostrils flared and his eyes showed much of their white.

“Can’t bite it.”

“Can’t trample it.”

“Nonsense,” Lochinvar said. “It can be trampled and bitten and cleaved, or blown to smithereens.”

“I am afraid,” the dog said.

The horse whinnied.

“Me three.” Lochinvar put on her helmet. She became a pitiless, inhuman creature once the winged helm settled upon her brow. “Don’t see me pissing my breeches, though.” She said to Mantooth, “Orlando was your pup. You have business to attend.”

Mantooth lowered his snout and whimpered in shame.

“Hold fast while I reconnoiter.” Bowie vanished into the underbrush with nary a rustle. A few minutes later he uttered the call of a raven, the prearranged signal. Lochinvar, Hand, and Mantooth climbed the slope to the ruins. Flint stayed back. The big horse cropped grass and kept watch. He muttered, “Good luck, dog.”

The sun shone hot.

“I’m with the critters on this,” Hand said. Pale and shaky from a dearth of booze, he lagged a few paces to the rear. “It returns to me now. The full effect of horror.”

“Courage, Sir Hand,” Lochinvar said.

“Believe it or not, I was a brave man.” Hand carried a bokken stained with blood and grime. He’d pawned his broadsword long ago. “Bravest in the land.”

“Bravery and stupidity are the Ouroboros of youth,” Lochinvar said. “Follow me, knight. I want to speak with the monster before nightfall. There’s much to discuss. We are alike, he and I.”

“Alike? Wait, doesn’t the villain usually say that to the hero, and laugh?”

Lochinvar laughed. “Happy?”

“Uh, truthfully?”

“I didn’t live under a hill with fairies those lonely years. I incubated in the black glow of a terror star and learned what Rabbit Abbot discovered at mortal cost and Mother already knew—the secret of Baron Need. He is merely an appendage. After absorbing the genetic memory of a civilization older than the dust of the first mountains, I hatched to walk the earth once more. Vengeance is an honorable cause. This, however, is a mission of mercy. In truth, I’m not here for the Baron. Not entirely.”

“Lady Lochinvar, I don’t take your meaning.”

“Which part?”

“The whole thing.”

She laughed again. Rebuke glowed in her left gauntlet, its metal awash with bloody clouds.

Showdown

Bowie emerged from a clump of bushes and led the company under the shadows of the gate arch. He hacked aside brambles with a siege axe. Ravens warbled from the battlements as the foolish humans and their dog walked through the gaping entrance of the main house. The birds had seen this routine before. One way or another, soon there’d be fresh carcasses to feast upon.

Lochinvar and her companions breached the inner courtyard and entered the castle. Holes gashed the soot-caked ceiling. Marble floors were buckled and cracked. Withered saplings clawed toward the sun. Brown vines clung to pillars carved with grotesques of beasts. Bones of rats crunched underfoot. Carapaces of beetles and roaches layered the ground in concentric rings. Everything in this place was dead—all thorns, detritus, and ash.

“Saints protect us.” Hand adjusted his hat as he took in the vista of slaughter. “There are many ghosts here. I can almost hear them.”

“Hold that thought,” Lochinvar said. Under different circumstances, protocol demanded protective circles, chants, and onerous rituals. Tarrying near the pit whence Baron Need had sprung to plague the world presented too great a risk. She opened the music box and made an adjustment to its setting. The device emitted the groans of a man or woman getting his or her throat slit. The horrid death cries echoed among the pillars and dust.

Presently, Bowie whistled. “To the left, friends.” The scout’s vision remained sharp—a shadow crept forward to the edge of a cascade of sunlight and resolved to the gangling figure of a tall man. The figure hunched, yet loomed in tattered robes. Air flickered the way a stream undulates over a bed of stones. Light and heat bent toward the distortion. Chill enveloped the shattered hall.

Mantooth snarled. Foam drooled from his jaws. “Bite. Rend. Kill.”

Lochinvar gripped Rebuke’s hilt and stepped forward. “Gentlemen . . . Mantooth . . . Positions, please.” At her word, the others fanned out as they approached the figure, and halted a few feet short. “Good afternoon, Baron. We meet again.” She gave a mock curtsy.

“I’m certain I would recall a morsel delectable as you, dear.” The Baron’s voice was low. It quavered slightly. Fear? Anticipation?

“You met my mother. I’m the new and improved design.”

“Met her? I ate her. Skin, bones, and all. Can an automaton be rightly said to have a child? Can the child of an automaton be rightly said to have a mother?”

“She was not an automaton,” Lochinvar said. “There’s a civilization of those cold bastards out there; post-singularity predators, never doubt. My mother’s people are different . . . human enough where it counts.” She tapped her helm. “They simply traded degradable skin for a more durable alternative. Me, I’m second-generation hardware. A skin bag of self-replicating circuitry and rage piloted by a carbon-based brain.”

“Primate with advanced tools.”

“You’re ejecta from a black hole that mindlessly hungers for everything that exists outside its maw. At least I have free will, puppet.”

The Baron’s form shrank and contracted, then expanded once more, and the roiling of the air around him intensified. He turned his head to regard Bowie, Hand, and Mantooth, and back to Lochinvar. “Mindlessness is an uncharitable assessment. I possess thoughts and feelings. Strong feelings.”

“An algorithm doesn’t equate sentience,” Lochinvar said.

“Boring, boring. Perhaps I shall devour you and end this dreary conversation.”

“If you possessed your full strength, I am sure you would try. Why don’t you go ahead and try? The timing of my visit is no accident. The calculations were exacting. Arrive too early, you might not have regenerated to corporeal form. Arrive too late and you’d be full of snuff and vinegar.”

“Twit. As arrogant as your mother.”

“Leave off skulking among carrion and have at me if you dare.”

The Baron sighed and uncoiled, claws first—

Lochinvar raised the music box like a duelist aiming her blunderbuss. The box popped open and emitted a funereal chime. Baron Need fell to his knees, hissing. His nails dug into the earth and tore it up in clods.

Lochinvar nodded toward Mantooth. “Do you know him? By reputation, surely. You killed his pup. Remember Marion Hand? Picture him a clean-shaven lad with a lovely blond mane. Or Mr. Jonathan Bowie? He’s a coiffure expert.”

“The past is here for you, monster,” Bowie said.

Discordant notes harmonized into “The Hearse Song.”

Worms crawl in—

The dirge lashed the Baron. He rocked so his upper body pitched near the light. His features dissolved and reformed. He flickered and flickered—man, animal, woman. A cadaverous giant, an Ur rabbit, a noble, a peasant, a milkmaid, and others.

Worms crawl out—

Lochinvar made an adjustment and the rhythm increased as its tones lowered.

Baron Need’s eyes bulged and his ghoul tongue whipped and flung bile. He tore his hair and rent his cheeks until tar-thick gore spilled from the wounds. Bones shifted and reconfigured and his visage softened into that of an agonized woman. She extended her arm in supplication. Meanwhile, Karl Lochinvar stood with her three-body-blade raised high for the killing stroke.

Worms play pinochle on your snout—

Lochinvar’s mother said, “Darling, I’ve missed you. I’m sorry.”

The sword descended in its arc and the apparition’s head was struck from her shoulders. Tendrils of vapor slithered from the corpse, twined around Lochinvar’s sword, and poured into the music box as its eerie melody devolved into a cacophony of discord. The crystal shrike’s heart pulsated radioactive crimson, and then darkened but for a solitary mote revolving in its interior universe. She snapped shut the lid.

Mantooth sat on his haunches and howled.

“It must have been hard to strike down the beast,” Bowie said. His hands shook as he lighted a cigarette. “Such a cunning devil to resemble your mother in detail. He thought to undo your resolve. Joke’s on him.”

“Was it worth the pain to behold her phantom?” Hand said to Lochinvar.

“No, but trapping Need’s miserable, shriveled life-force pays for all.”

“And what shall you do with it?”

Lochinvar caressed the worn enamel of the box. This provoked a muffled buzzing, as of a tormented wasp. “The box is a kind of iron maiden. Or a strappado. Or a rack. It has two modes—oblivion and torture. Eternal sleep or unceasing agony. I designed it to bind the twenty-one grams that animate men and many of the things that seek to pass as men.”

“You mean to torment him . . . what remains of him,” Bowie said. “I applaud the exaction of vengeance, and yet wonder how long this can go on.”

“Until the stars fall from the sky.” She nodded in satisfaction as the tiny screams crested and ebbed with her ministrations.

Hand and Bowie exchanged a glance. Neither had the stones to say anything, and then it was time to go away from that place.

The Loneliest Shack in the Black Forest

After the intruders depart in gloating triumph, you hobble through the front gate of the castle. At first you are an inky thread—turn sideways and you’d be invisible. The yammering of the Void fades with every step and with every step your form gains substance. Night forests and night skies merge. Your heartbeat quickens. You limp. You stride. You fly along game trails. A swath of woodland creatures shrivels and desiccates in your wake. Eventually, trees give way to a pocket of rancid marsh.

You pass over a collapsed picket fence and are among dilapidated hutches caked with muck and leaves and the slime of the deep woods. Rabbits squeal at your approach. Hundreds of them huddle in the darkness, nipping and jostling one another as their terror mounts.

Your shadow blackens the door of a moldering cottage. Kerosene light dribbles between shutters. A tendril of smoke lolls from the chimney and it smells of roast coney. You knock once, heavy.

“Master?” Smirking Jaye is wrapped in soiled pelts. A knife drops from his fist as he kneels. He weeps and presses your hand to his cheek.

You lick the supernumerary’s tears from your talons. The walls of his rude shack are draped with rabbit skins. Buckets under the table and near the hearth brim with entrails. His prattling recedes into the background of your consciousness. Only in this instant do you relax your guard and spare a thought for the scrape with Lochinvar. The fool. Possibly you could’ve slain the woman and her geriatric companions. Beaten them, eaten them, and been absolved of the whole mess of persistent vengeful foes. Lochinvar’s devices and inhuman physiology presented unknown hazards, especially given your diminishment.

Discretion must out at such moments. Thus, when the enemies arrived on the doorstep, you projected a fraction of your anemic core, a sliver of the multitudes that constitute your solid state, and granted Little Miss Avenging Warrior a cheap victory. You kept a low profile as she captured the lesser spark of your essence in her peculiar contraption and galumphed away, none the wiser.

The loss of the mother’s pattern was a small price to pay for such a grand deception. Will young Lochinvar ever twig to the fact it really is her mother’s soul, for want of a better term, which now inhabits the strange music box prison? Who can say? Who cares?

“Jaye, attend me.” His obeisance gratifies your sense of propriety. On the other hand, the years have not been kind and perhaps he’s forgotten how to serve you properly. “I have a craving.”

“Are you hungry, Master?” A silly question—your hunger is unquenchable.

You pat his head. “Yes. As luck would have it, I’m in the mood for meat.”

Smirking Jaye retrieves his knife and limps for the door. “How many?”

You think of the logging villages that once nestled in these hills and valleys. You think of the towns and the cities that lie beyond the range. “Oh, let’s start with all of them.”

MR. DOORNAIL

Maria Dahvana Headley

Mr. Doornail has eaten my heart!” the old man cried in the village one morning, noticing belatedly the horror that had been done him. Shortly thereafter, he took off his spotless white fedora, threw it into the air, and sidestepped casually into the path of an automobile.

Mind, no one had wanted the old man alive for at least ten years. He went in and out the front door, dressed in his pressed suit, his beard trimmed, but he spoke to no one in the house, and perhaps to no one in the world. Even dogs disliked him. Terriers sometimes sensed the thing he lacked and chased him through the town.

Had the old man not been defended by goats, he would’ve wandered into the dark long before he did. Goats would keep company with anything. They didn’t mind an empty tin. They’d kick it along, bring it back home when it was tired, and follow it up the stairs. The old man had been for ten years blessed by this bevy of goats, who slept in his bookshelves and on the headboard of his bed, all around the room like furry bricks, a small herd of side-eyeing sympathizers.

The car that ran the old man over was swiftly mobbed by his companions, spry hooves onto the roof, horns in the windows, bleats and contempt for the driver who gave up, got out, and went to the bar. It was too bad, but what could he do? The old man had leapt in front of him, and the car was moving at full speed. Besides which, the old man was a known scourge of goatiness, a cloud of fur and bells; a woeful, slow-going weirdness, moving through town and blocking traffic.

The old man was very dead. His hat landed atop a light post and was colonized, first by doves, and then by bats, who’d been hunting any house at all.

Who among us has not tried to bar winged things from the house? A hundred bats can hang inside a hat. A thousand sparrows can nest atop a four-poster, looking down into the bedclothes. A hundred thousand moths can hide in the wallpaper, flattening until they seem as though they’re only part of the pattern, not hungry creatures seeking wool. Winged things find a way in.

Bernardine, the newly widowed mistress of the house, wafted over the polished floors, vibrating with triumph. Oh, she was delighted. The servants knew it. Everyone knew it.

No marriage of forty-three years was without its revulsions, but particularly not a marriage in which one party had sold a piece of the other without the other’s permission. Sharing a house with a man whose heart you’ve fed to a monster was nothing nice.

It was only a small ritual, the theft of the heart, taken one night with a sharp knife and a spell made of wax and twine, the heart wrapped in cotton and bundled into a copper pot, boiled with saffron, and delivered to Mr. Doornail. Unfortunately, the old man roused partway through it and in half sleep, bespelled and bemused, he told Bernardine that he’d never forgive her, and that this was the end of their marital conversation.

Those were the last words she heard him speak, but he stayed alive out of perversity.

Whenever she looked at him, she was reminded of her crime, and whenever he looked at her, he was reminded of something he couldn’t remember. That was how it had gone for a decade and more, and a very unpleasant decade it was. He occasionally walked past, looked at her woefully, and she in turn looked at the sky until he departed. His woe was like pox.

She’d slept in a separate room with a lock on the door for years, and he’d slept surrounded by goats and bits of hay, his daily doings unmonitored, his household run by the seven women of his family, and eleven women of the servants, who wearied of him more each day.

The old man’s feelings were mute and moot, but Bernardine’s were not. She had a wringer, and through it she ran his shirts, crank by crank, managing her rage through wringing, though the servants did the rest of the laundry.

At long last, the old man was laid out in the formal dining room. He was flat and smooth as could be, as though his body itself was made of boiled wool. He’d been brought back home on a cart.

Bernardine donned her blackest dress and her darkest veil. She looked out from behind it, and smiled. The old man had lived for an appallingly long time after his heart had been eaten by Mr. Doornail.

There was a tall door behind the table that held the old man’s body. It was three stories high and made of mahogany, stretching from the grand entryway to the attic. It was never opened. There were iron locks all the way up, and bars that slid across the wood, and chains that secured those bars to their fastenings.

From behind the door, the monster groaned in anticipation of its next meal.

If one did not know Mr. Doornail was there, one might have mistaken the groan for the sound of wind whistling. Those in the house knew better. The servants were in charge of polishing the dark door with furniture polish, and shining the locks. Sometimes one of the servant girls peeped through a keyhole, to see if Mr. Doornail was visible, but there was only a blurry redness, like the sun seen through an eyelid. All that was ever visible of Mr. Doornail was the liquid that welled from beneath the door.

A servant marched importantly into the room with a mop. The ooze to be removed was dark and thick, a bloody drink of seawater, drowned desperation.

Who among us has not tried to clean something ghastly from a floor? Who among us has not tried to banish the memory of the ghastliness with bleach and lemons? The ghastliness always remains, bait to cats, intriguing to dogs, no matter what one does. The world is soaked in wrongful substances, that’s the truth, and every bit of the earth has been touched by terrible things.

The servants in the old man’s villa were grateful. The old man had been filth forever. No one could bear the way he tracked mud over carpets, and often worse than mud. It was about time Mr. Doornail took him.

The carpets might be whitened again now, and the floorboards sanded, the windows soaped, and the linens starched. There would be no more goats allowed into bedchambers, no more goats bleating evilly in the kitchens. Who could be bothered with goats who stood on the roof warbling the devil’s hymn? No one had ever liked the goats, no one but the old man, and if he was gone, the goats would be ignored or roasted in pits.

Now there were almond cakes to bake and sausages to fry. The mourning could not be minor; there were standards to uphold. The town would come to the funeral reception, and the daughters of the house were to hold court from the hardest sofa. Rituals of regret.

The servants had been running the villa for decades, through two mistresses who thought themselves queens, both Bernardine and her mother. The servants had no patience for the follies of the rich. They came from the country, where no one wore corsets they had to be tugged into, and no daughters stood at the top of the staircase lamenting the fit of their frills. In the country, goats were not allowed indoors. The rich had different ideas. Ten years of difficulty since the old man had gone bad, and now chickens came into the house to roost on the tops of the curio cabinet and curtain rods. Eggs dropped from high places and cracked on the floor. Who could be bothered to fight with chickens? At the end of each day there was an angry mop.

It was the first day of the mourning, and in the street outside the villa the funeral band commenced to play, banging pots and pans, and singing, and occasionally a man played a trill on a flute, and another took up a fiddle while the rest stamped their feet and played their horns.

The servants sighed as one. The band was dirty too, and they would no doubt trample through the villa in their mourning, dirty feet, dirty songs.

Who among us has not heard the dreadful song of the funeral band, and tried to keep it out? It cannot be kept out with cotton, and neither may it be kept out with wine. The only way to keep a funeral band out is to ban death from the house. Who among us hasn’t tried those spells? They’ve never worked.

It had always been Bernardine’s job to provide for herself and all five daughters, and she’d done what she had to do. The old man was a gambler. Without a heart, no man could play cards. That was well known. After his heart was gone, the old man stood at the corner of the table, bewildered, while all his former conspirators shuffled, bet, and ate sardines. Heartless, the old man was reduced to a diet of bland porridge. Nothing tasted good, and nothing felt good. He shuffled from square to square.

Bernardine, on the other hand, had become a productive and powerful witch with the sale of her husband’s heart. She ran a business killing people’s enemies. People came to her for awful things to put inside smoke bombs, potions that would drift out into the air, turning everyone who inhaled them pale green. They came to her for flowers that might be pinned into the bosoms of the wives of generals, suffocating them as they danced.

Her powers came from the monster to whom she’d sold the old man’s heart. Mr. Doornail had power to spare, and no cares for the future.

Oh, Mr. Doornail was terrible. The monster behind the door had tentacles, perhaps a hundred of them, perhaps a thousand, and the tentacles touched the doorframe, tenderly petting the wet warp of the wood. Each tentacle had the face of one of Bernardine’s daughters, or, when Mr. Doornail was in another mood, the face of everyone in the town. The tentacles could play like puppets, the monster moving its own arms around in the space behind the door, making a show for itself.

The funeral band played in the street, and Bernardine’s fingers moved in her gloves. The band would keep any ghosts from settling. Ghosts hated this sort of music, this clang and clamor. She’d commissioned the band to play for six weeks, day and night. They’d be fed on chickpeas and egg pancake, and every day she’d allotted them seven bottles of wine from the cellar. She wasn’t stingy in matters of mourning.

Bernardine danced for a moment, all alone, and through one of the keyholes, Mr. Doornail watched her.

Who among us has not tried to keep a monster in the house, under lock and key? Monsters do not belong in houses, but even so, as many as a hundred monsters can hang inside a closet, or wedge themselves in layers beneath a bedroom floor. A tremendous monster can dwell inside a central courtyard, accessible only by flying things. The truth of monsters, however, is that they will always find a way to freedom.

The funeral band was not a dancing band. They were a death band: thin, bird faced, some of them with mustaches and some not. Their black clothing ran in the rain.

There were twenty-one men in the town, and they all knew better than to marry any of Bernardine’s dreadful daughters. Mr. Doornail, while not known by name, was known by reputation. No man among them wanted to lose his heart. It was best to be in the funeral band instead. There’d been an emergency meeting. Most of the musicians had no skill at all at instruments. There was a quick handing out of tin cans and boiling pots, metal spoons and wineglasses, and those without kitchens were left to whoop and howl in mourning for a man no one knew.

That old man. He’d traveled for years from end to end of the town, walking very slowly, and periodically he’d stop, take a piss, or drink a coffee, and then move on. He’d never cared whose stoop he pissed on. He’d never cared whose coffee he drank. He took cups right out of people’s hands, and when you looked into his eyes, you saw his lack. Look at him: an abyss.

There was only one man in town who’d not joined the funeral band, and that man was the bookseller.

The bookseller walked toward the house to pay his respects to the old man, who’d been a customer of the bookstall for years. Rather other than a customer: he’d been a person who stood at the corner of the stall and petted the books, though he could no longer read them. Heartless, the old man had been left without a story, and though he sought one, he couldn’t find the one he’d been born with.

The bookseller knew the dead man’s goats too. They liked hide glue, and often needed to be chased away, but he allowed them entrance when the old man came. All the way to the house, he was accompanied by trotting goats, insisting on vengeance.

They wanted the widow, and they wanted Mr. Doornail, and they wanted to trample the house down to the cobblestones and eat it up.

This was the nature of goats: loyal, vicious, insubordinate. The goats were a herd and they accompanied the bookseller, informing him of his need for knives and witchcraft. The bookseller didn’t understand how to speak with goats, however, and so he came bearing a bouquet of flowers instead, a present for the youngest daughter of the house.

The bookseller, it may be mentioned, was a fool to imagine that the youngest daughter could be wed. She was, of course, the property of Mr. Doornail, and any husband of hers would be Mr. Doornail’s property as well.

But the bookseller was only a man, no expert in magical mortality, and the goats were not his army. On they came, over the cobbles, fifty furious goats on their way to the villa. They missed the old man, and the sound of his daughters shouting in the upper story of the house was enough to make them want to climb the roof and remove the roof tiles, drop through the roof beams, and eat the universe.

Goats wanted things just as much as anybody else, perhaps more. Goats had no concerns about monsters. Goats were equal to the task at hand. They’d listened to the house, and they knew where the keys were.

They came for Mr. Doornail, hoof by hoof.

Who among us has not tried to keep goats out of the house? Goats cannot be kept from their desires. If a goat wants to come down the chimney, it does so. If a goat wants to roost in the eaves, it does so. If a goat wants to eat an automobile, it will eat the automobile, even if that automobile is a Model T Ford, and painted white, with tin cans trailing behind to announce a wedding. The goats will eat the cans. The goats will eat the streamers. The goats will move into a house like bridesmaids who’ve murdered a rival bride, and there will they stay.

“Come lace me, wretched sisters!” Bernardine’s eldest daughter shouted down the stairs. Anguish was thirty-nine. Who’d name a daughter Anguish? A mother who named each daughter after the pains of her labor.

The second eldest daughter, Arch, came from her own bedchamber. “She made me dye even my gloves black,” she said and flexed her illegally lacquered red nails.

The third and fourth daughters, Ache and Fever, followed, both grim. They came from the dye pots, their newly blackened hair parted in the center, twisted into coils at the napes of their necks. All the clothing had been dyed in the bathtub in the yard, the black poured into the soil. Next year, the lettuce would be blue, and the kale gray. The hair was dyed in the sinks, and even the cracks in the porcelain had gone to black.

The daughters’ dresses were still damp. Whenever they sat, they left shadows of themselves, shadows shaped like ghosts, the curve of bustle and bone, hips caged by black brocade and wet wool stockings. The dye turned their skin, and each of the daughters was now dove-colored from throat to thighs, striped with inky lines and speckled with daubs of dark. They were too hot, and too wet. The daughters each had a trousseau of pale pink silk, embroidered with tiny butterflies and birds, but none had worn any of the pieces. A bad old tomcat named Bite nested in the trunks of knickers and petticoats, chemises and soft lace brassieres, purring triumph.

“Why black?” lamented Ache. “We’ll be worse off than we were.”

“She wants us to be proper,” said Fever. “We have a reputation to protect.”

“We have her reputation to protect,” Arch corrected.

The fifth daughter came into the room. She was still young and beautiful, and she was sure that was all that mattered. She was only twenty, and of the names, she’d gotten the best one, Tear. She was convinced that her trousseau, at least, would be used.

Tear wore her green dress beneath her black dress, tissue silk embroidered with blades of grass and beaded with golden crickets, but this was a Hadeian household now. The black dress had previously been lavender muslin and embroidered with orange blossoms. Now it had gray flowers, and all that work was in vain. She was melting beneath the layers, but she would not surrender. Tear fingered the lacy edge of her greenest petticoat and thought about a spring wedding. She thought about the man she’d met, the one with the pompadour and the floral cologne, the one with the mouth that spoke secrets into her ear.

He was a secret himself, he with his volumes, he with his vest.

The five sisters stood in a line, and each sister pressed her foot into the spine of the next sister, and pulled her corset strings.

What could create a woman like their mother? It was hard to say. Perhaps she’d been made with a chisel, her body wrested from the shale that surrounded the estate. Their mother was lava encased in lace. There was nothing to be done about her. The daughters were prisoners of spite and spiders. It was the mother’s house, and she was the law.

“It is no reputation we are protecting,” muttered Ache. “It is only Mr. Doornail.”

“Only? Mr. Doornail is more than an only. In eight years of mourning, I’ll be forty-seven,” said Anguish.

“And instead of taking care of your own children, you’ll be taking care of Mr. Doornail,” said Fever. “That will be your task when Mother dies. You know it will.”

“She’ll never die,” said Anguish. “Just look at her. And look at Grandmother.”

Indeed. The grandmother, who lived in the attic, and whose name was Maria Josepha, had little business still being alive, but she persisted, her hair twelve feet of silver white glory. She was tiny and fragile, but she carried knives in her belt. Sometimes she braided her hair and hung by it to prove her mettle, and when she did, she smiled an evil smile.

She had six gold wedding rings, amethyst bobs for her ears, giant necklaces of emeralds. Her jewels weighed her down and she refused to make a will. The old woman danced in a witchy circle in the top story, and her hair trailed behind her, picking up dust. Floors below her, the servants looked up and sighed at the sound of her clicking heels.

She was strong enough to kill anyone with her braids alone, and, in fact, she’d killed six men that way in her life. A hundred and twenty-two years, and she’d gotten weary several times. No man imagined he’d be strangled in his sleep by the braids of his wife.

Though he should have.

No man ever imagined his heart might get fed to a monster.

Though he should have.

Now she left her hair loose. One of her husbands had called the hair her glory. It wasn’t. It was the mane of a wild white horse. Her jewels came from all the men, and from broken bottles too. She wore glass as well as she wore emeralds. She still had all her teeth.

Mr. Doornail was the only one who’d ever been strong enough to love her. In the attic the great grandmother put on her amethyst bobs. Her hair unfurled behind her like a train.

Who among us has not tried to keep an elderly relative in the house? They cannot be kept in. They make their way into the streets, buy luxurious provisions without their purses, throw oranges at newsboys, swear at police. They find new loves in the form of other elderly lost souls, and then they marry strangers in the courthouses, and all the while, their children hunt, unable to capture them. The elderly, like monsters, like bats, will not be caged.

Some people thought that Bernardine was a monster. Perhaps she was. Though she’d fed her own husband’s heart to Mr. Doornail, she had a perverse desire to deny the monster now. There were all these daughters, and none of them were wed. She would certainly not marry again. She wanted more power, more of something, a reward for the difficulty of finding men for her horrible daughters. The daughters were nothing nice. The men in the town were nothing nice either. They ought to offer gifts, money, land. Instead, they averted their eyes when she passed, unless they required a spell.

Mr. Doornail was beginning to wonder about its next meal. It was beginning to call to men, to send out the scent of perfume, to bypass Bernardine, who disliked the bypassing. The locks were sound and the chains were strong, and Bernardine imagined she controlled everything. She imagined her spells were solid.

They were not. No spell ever is.

Who among us has not tried to keep a daughter in the house? They slip out of the cracks in the windows, slither out through the bottoms of the doors, and everywhere, everywhere, there are futures waiting to meet them in dark corners, present them with flowers, kiss their throats. As for virginity, well. If you live in a village such as this one, you know it’s all a game of pretend in the end, the insistence that only a virgin can be a proper bride in white. We all know those spells too, the ones for making something look like something else.

Anguish had her own lover in the house, and whose business was it that her lover was the assistant cook who stole meat and salt and fat, who made feasts in the village for all the orphans and all the cats? It was no one’s business but Anguish’s own that she often knelt in the kitchen with her knees in flour and sugar, spending afternoons with her tongue under a girl’s apron, her fingers pressed into hips like she was kneading dough. Anguish could fit each of her kneecaps into a serving spoon, and her skin had been pressed with rolling stamps, embossed with the flowers that normally would decorate tea cookies.

Anguish was not the least bit lonely, witch’s daughter though she was. Her mother’s spell had applied only to men. To anyone who was not a man, Anguish was permeable. There was no shortage, not for this house’s daughters. This was a house of eighteen women in total, and none of them were meant to be the wives of men, with the lone exception, perhaps, of Bernardine, who had neatly rid herself of her husband. Fever, Ache, and Arch felt just as Anguish did. There were women all over the village, visiting scholars, a traveling salesman in a suit who was, beneath the serge, not as he appeared. There were persons in the village who had no gender at all, persons whose actuality fell outside the edges of the spell. Fever cared not for love at all, but for the heavens, and at night she looked out her bedroom window and numbered the stars, plotting the course of eclipses. And then there was Tear, the only one who wanted anything to do with husbands. Her sisters looked at her and grimaced. That green dress. That hair falling out of its braid. The rest were peaceably living in this house, their affairs their own, the spells of their mother nothing to do with them.

The spell was old fashioned and foolish, as spells often were, deceived by tongues and whispers outside window frames, deceived by love letters wrapped around the scaly ankles of doves. Who among us hasn’t tried to use a spell such as this one?

Mr. Doornail sent a scent of sea, of fried dough and pickled peppers, a waft of salted chocolate, and the grandmother danced.

Mr. Doornail liked hearts and it liked tears, and it liked Maria Josepha, because long ago, she’d met it on a beach and drawn it up out of the surf, a terrible thing contained inside a copper vessel covered in barnacles. Someone had thrown the monster into the deep, but monsters float.

The grandmother was a young girl then, in a white dress embroidered with eyeballs. She had never been at all nice. She did her own needlework, and she was training in secret with the witch of her own village, training to be trouble.

Maria Josepha had unusually large eyes, a pointed face like the face of a fox, and hair the color of midnight. She kept her hair in a corona to cover the fact that she’d stolen some stars from a neighboring witch’s workshop to decorate it.

When she found the copper vessel she rapped her little fist smartly on the exterior.

“What are you in there, then?” she asked it, and smiled when it whispered back at her.

“A wonder,” said the thing inside the vessel, and that was all Maria Josepha needed to know to go to her father, borrow his hatchet, and slice open the soldering that had kept the monster dry in its voyage.

Mr. Doornail emerged hungry, ate Maria Josepha’s father’s heart, and then she was quite at liberty, a daughter on the loose.

“We’ll live here together, you and I,” she said, taking down her braids. Mr. Doornail had been quite comfortable enclosed in the central courtyard of the house, for a hundred years and more, periodically hungry, periodically fed on husbands’ hearts. There were plenty of husbands and there were plenty of hearts. Mr. Doornail had grown fat and lazy there behind the door, comforted by bones, and the house grew to accommodate it.

Now it was hungry again.

Mr. Doornail used one tentacle to peer through a keyhole, at the daughters. The monster pressed itself to the wood, experimentally. It called out into the house, swelling, but the locks held.

“I hear it,” said Ache.

“It’s calling again,” said Arch. “Horrid.”

A tentacle quested beneath the door like a worm after a storm. The daughters shuddered, and Anguish rang the servant bell.

Outside, the goats marched in formation, making their way, bringing the bookseller with them. Or perhaps the bookseller brought them. In any case, there was a rattling in the earth, and a trampling, the running of the bulls or a religious pilgrimage, but seen through the eyes of the goats, sideways light, glittering warfare. The goats trotted toward the villa, each one with its own plans.

The sisters trooped down the stairs. The house smelled of garlic, which one of the servants had festooned over everything, perhaps to mask the smell of the corpse, perhaps as an insult to their mother.

Bernardine wasn’t a vampire. Witches paid garlic no mind, nor lilies, nor stakes. It wasn’t as though the house had ever smelled nice. The monster exuded a particular odor.

Anguish held her handkerchief to her nose, and tried not to look at the body of the old man. This old man had left nothing to anyone. He’d eaten his holdings at some point in the last years, coin by coin, paper bill by paper bill, and then shat it all into the yard. It was still buried out there, and no one wanted to retrieve it.

The five daughters sat down across from the flat old man, on their designated formal sofa, the one upholstered to itch, the one with no swan’s-down. They felt humid and dark as storm weather, waiting for the town to come and pay them respect.

Mr. Doornail waited too.

Tear had climbed out of her bedroom window one night and run across the rooftops until she saw her future husband below her in the street, selling books at a stall, his sleeves rolled up to the elbows, a pair of thick wire-framed glasses, a vest made of paisley silk. There, she thought. There is my husband.

“Look up here,” she called, and he looked. She lifted her skirt to show first her ankles, then her knees, then her thighs, and then she tucked the skirt between them to show him the plump shape of her ______. The man’s eyes widened.

“Who are you, then?” he asked.

“The witch’s littlest daughter,” Tear said, and toyed with her schoolgirl braids. She pretended to be rather nicer than she was. She was not so nice. She’d been in her mother’s workshop and eaten a great deal of a marzipan that could turn her into an owl. If she merely spread her skirts, she’d be able to fly down to him, but she did not. It was no good to reveal all of one’s skills on a first meeting. She didn’t want to frighten him. She could see that he was a man of good breeding, and his stall was full of books with fine leather bindings. He had a horse of his own, and his family owned a large house with marble floors. He was not only a bookseller. He was a man worthy of her time.

She lifted her skirt an inch higher and showed him a set of bloomers decorated with slender green serpents, each one embroidered with silk floss and lifelike enough that they seemed to slither.

Months had passed since then, and Tear had been waiting patiently for a proposal. Not for mourning. She did not have time for this.

The grandmother burst from her bedchamber and ran down the stairs, a tiny thing made of fury. She stamped, and the sisters sighed.

“Grandmother is dancing again,” said Fever.

“Grandmother enjoys the funeral band. It kept me awake last night until my eyeballs were parched,” said Ache.

“I haven’t slept in ten years,” said Anguish, with superiority. “Put on a cloak, Tear. I can see the edge of your green. You think it’s a secret, but it’s not.”

“I have to have something for myself,” said Tear.

“I’m wearing a red ribbon,” said Ache.

“Where?”

Ache smiled and refused to answer. The rest of the sisters snorted. Ache had always been Ache, and they had always been themselves.

“Grandmother cannot be loose again,” Tear announced. “She’ll damage our reputation. None of us will ever find husbands.”

Her sisters looked at her. She was the only one with a reputation. She was the only one who wanted a husband. The rest had decided this was not a viable plan. They had no interest in the care and feeding of Mr. Doornail, and they thought their sister was a fool to imagine her husband’s heart would not be used for dinner. Tear was a romantic, and the rest of the sisters were pragmatists. They were well accustomed to working around the difficulties of spells.

Tear looked at her grandmother’s lovely long hair and thought she might have it spun into silk and made into a wedding dress. She would be the one in charge of that bookstall, and she’d read every book in it before she sold them. She’d tend them gently, making sure no bookworms made their way into the pages. She’d polish the bindings like fine boot leather, and touch the gilded edges with a soft cloth. Her husband would drink sherry every night while she read by candlelight. Tear was very young. She thought that these things were all that mattered.

There was a ringing at the door, and a galloping on the roof. Throughout the house, the servants stiffened. The funeral band had stopped playing.

Bernardine came down the front staircase, her ring of keys jangling, her black-slippered feet stepping carefully, like hooves, her little selection of knives, twine, pots, and saffron at the ready.

The bookseller put his head around the doorframe, startled at the lack of greeting.

“You’ve come!” Tear cried out.

From the white fedora, bats took flight. On the roof, two goats did a tarantella. The rest of the goats waited. They were everywhere.

Mr. Doornail stretched, anticipating its next fifty years.

Who among us hasn’t tried to keep love in the house? It always resists, burning itself in the oil lamps, folding itself into dirty laundry to be sent out for cleaning. It fights confinement, looping itself through pocket-watch chains and inserting itself into the beaks of chickens, only to fly out when they peck in the feed. It takes flight, clinging to the fur and feathers of animals, to the wings of bats, to the scales of fish, and, particularly, it enjoys wrapping itself about a finger, twining on someone else’s wedding ring, and leaving for the train. What is love but hunger?

The bookseller came hatless into the house and Mr. Doornail observed him through the keyhole. There was a heart in that breast, yes, a fat and throbbing heart, a heart the monster might enjoy stewed.

The bookseller sat on the couch opposite the daughters.

“I’ve brought flowers,” the bookseller said, and brought them out from his jacket. They were made of paper and perfumed with lemon. It was a flattened bouquet of posies, and when he shook it in the air, it unfolded, a giant mass of pink and white and red, all of it written on with the words of some old poet.

They were pages painted and folded carefully, perhaps a hundred roses made of paper, and Tear leaned forward to take them from him, but Bernardine took them and presented them to Anguish instead, who was bewildered.

“What are these?” Anguish said. “This is a funeral. We are in mourning.”

She had no interest in this bookseller. His vest was the color of a persimmon, and he had a beard. She hated it. She hated men altogether. The notion of a husband was as foreign as lemon-scented prose roses, as foreign as thorns she could tear with her fingertips.

The assistant cook marched through the parlor just then, hands full of almond pastry, her ass round and firm as bread fresh from the oven. Anguish watched her, speechless. She’d imagined that there would be no betrothal for her, not at thirty-nine years old.

Bernardine looked at the young man’s perfect heart, and nodded. The tomcat named Bite came charging through the house, claws full of shredded pink silk.

“This man will marry my eldest daughter,” Bernardine announced, and Tear and Anguish both gasped.

A servant dashed in with a mop to make sure no one slipped in the ooze, and the grandmother danced past the door, her jewels gleaming. The funeral band had returned to playing outside, though they were four bottles into the afternoon. One of them had already vomited into his hat, and another had first bothered and then been butted by a goat.

Bernardine rattled her keys.

“Daughters,” she said.

“Mother,” said Anguish. “I will not marry that man.”

“You will,” said Bernardine. “Mr. Doornail insists, and Mr. Doornail is the law of this house.”

The grandmother moved one of her seven wedding rings from finger to finger, and back again. It was heavy and made of dark gold embossed with tentacles. Oh! She loved it. It had been given to her by a sailor. Or perhaps she’d found it on the finger of a drowned man and tugged it, bit by bit, over the knuckles of his pale blue finger. Or perhaps—

Who among us has not known a Mr. Doornail?

Bernardine held her own wedding ring in her hand, and then she put it around the finger of the bookseller. She unspelled Anguish, and the eldest daughter felt an unknotting, the spell dismantling itself.

Behind the door, Mr. Doornail moved in a way that could not truly be described. It climbed the wood with all its suckers at once; a soft, clinging climbing, like that of a fly moving along the surface of milk, or a maggot making its way out from the nostril of a dear, dead man and into the air.

Mr. Doornail was darkness, but Mr. Doornail was loved.

The grandmother danced, clapping her hands, her brightest jewels and most flamboyant petticoats, a flamenco in slow motion.

Bernardine put a key to a lock.

“Father,” she said. Perhaps she was a monster after all. She had never denied it. She was a monster’s daughter.

There was no answer.

“What will you give me if I give you a new heart?”

The door shook, and Mr. Doornail sent seven tentacles out from above and below, clutching the door frame, twisting through the locks. The door shuddered, and Mr. Doornail pulled back the bars and dismantled the chains.

The five daughters shuddered, and Mr. Doornail sent out tentacles with their faces, each one dressed in a black gown, each one a futureless daughter with no notions of her own.

The bookseller walked toward the door, not Mr. Doornail’s door, but the door to the street.

The bookseller had not been bewitched into this by Bernardine or by Mr. Doornail. He had been bewitched by goats.

Who among us has not tried to live forever? It takes work, immortality, just as does immorality. Meanness is laborious. One has to pay for it. It is expensive. Some of us have tried to achieve immortality with olive oil and oranges, and others have tried it with bribes to witches, and still others have tried to get it by hanging by our heels over the heads of monsters, waiting for our chance to strike.

There was a thundering, a raging, a rattling of goats. There was a drift of white fur, and the ringing of bells, loud and certain, bells like a church gone chaos. All the ringing of a thousand goats, and all the singing of a thousand goats, goats for miles around come to pay their respects to the old man. The goats were stampeding into the villa, knocking down the door.

Outside, the fedora quivered, emptied of bats, and in the chimney, bats hung upside down, each one a beating heart with wings.

In the villa, there was a green edge to a petticoat, and then an entire green dress, as Tear tore the front of her black gown and revealed the springtime beneath it, as the bookseller opened his eyes to see what was coming for him.

Mr. Doornail stretched its thousand tentacles, each with the face of a townsperson, and in the band, men’s hearts beat frantically, wanting to offer themselves to the monster, ensorcelled by Bernardine and by the magic of Mr. Doornail.

On the table, the old man’s body rose up, his clothing filled with bats. He was lifted into the air. The old man flew across the room and out the door, and with him went the music of the funeral band, a song of failing trumpets. The goats and the old man were stealing their hearts away.

The chimney shook, and the rafters, and the door frame.

Mr. Doornail emerged.

Mr. Doornail wanted the world. It was abruptly starving, and all through the village, its tentacles rippled, its oozing monster limbs and fluid, its body an ocean full of lava, bits of it like rocks and other bits like quince jelly.

The servants of the house were finished tolerating any of this. A mop rose up like a sword, as a thousand goats stampeded over Mr. Doornail, into the central courtyard, up the walls and down again.

The goats were hungry. The goats were in love.

Who among us can ever forget the sight of Mr. Doornail? A wave of monster, a tsunami of monster, a broken dam of monster, and all of it filled with the love of the lost, hearts eaten and memories melded into the overall flood? Who can forget the way the goats stood atop Mr. Doornail, every goat in a hundred miles singing their devil song, sharpening their hooves, and then beginning to eat the monster away from its foundations, just as they might eat a Model T?

Who can forget the way the ghosts surged up from the foundations the moment the band ceased playing, a white mist of husbands, a hasty cloud of the heartless?

Who can forget the bookseller, the way he’d made a raft of books, the way he took the witch’s youngest daughter in his arms and brought her aboard, even as Mr. Doornail poured toward the sea? The bookseller didn’t care that the witch’s youngest daughter was nothing nice. He was nothing nice either. He’d read every book in his stall, and from them he’d gleaned the edges of the world.

Bernardine in her black dress, and Maria Josepha in her bridal gown, the remaining four granddaughters of Mr. Doornail, all of them stood in the courtyard of the villa, the bats dancing above them, as one by one the daughters tore off their dark gowns and bared their ruby talons.

All of them were monsters, and all of them were lovers, and all of them were fleet footed and free of the house. They were gone in moments, to futures, to pasts, to stars and possibilities. Pastries and pasties. Chickens flew from the roof.

Maria Josepha was lifted to the top of a foaming, roaring wave of monster, all her wedding rings shining, until she and the horrible thing, the wonder, the husband of this history, were flung out into the ocean, unencumbered by the rules of courtship.

Off they went, and we all watched them, the men of the band, and the goats nipping away the chains that had bound Mr. Doornail to our town, the bats carrying away the grandmother’s jewels, the chickens on the curtains, and the servants with their spears disguised as mops.

In the end, all that was left was Bernardine in a small rowboat, where once had been a house. Who among us hasn’t gone out from the storm, and into the flood? Who among us hasn’t made enemies with wing and tentacle? Who among us hasn’t seen a woman in black unspell herself, and sit, for a time, in the middle of a little boat in a tossing ocean, accompanied by ghosts, the peaks of buildings catching her as she drifts among the drowned?

There are other kinds of endings to stories about monsters, but in this one, there is a white fedora floating on a newborn sea, and an old man just beneath the waves, wearing it, as he opens his eyes again.

THE SECRETS OF INSECTS

Richard Kadrey

Detectives Leonard Moore and Dale Komiski walked the prisoner to the car. With the killer cuffed and shackled, it took a few minutes to get him out of the elevator and put him into the backseat. Dale was careful not to strike the prisoner’s head on the door frame and to make sure that his hands and feet were safely inside before closing the door. Len nodded in approval. The prisoner was important and he wanted everything locked down, secure, and, above all, boring.

“Boring is always the best scenario,” he liked to tell younger detectives. “It’s like going to the doctor. If there’s something wrong with you, you want it to be boring. If the doc gets too interested, you’re fucked.”

“Dull enough for you, boss?” said Dale, getting into the car. He smiled at the older man.

“So far, so good,” said Len. He got behind the wheel and steered them away from the San Francisco central holding facility. Ten minutes later they were on the freeway, heading south. The afternoon was clear and sunny. Hot even. Traffic on 101 was sparse. A good beginning, he thought.

Dale fiddled around with the air conditioner controls.

“How’s that?”

Len nodded.

“Just fine.”

He rapped on the cage separating the backseat from the front with his knuckle.

“Don’t start,” said Len.

“I’m being polite,” Dale said. He half turned in his seat. “How’s it for you back there, Looney Tunes? Comfy?”

The prisoner was thin and tall enough that his head grazed the car’s ceiling. When he smiled, which he did now, his face was all teeth.

“Very. Thank you, Detective Dale,” he said.

“That’s Detective Komiski. And when you’re referring to my partner, it’s Detective Moore.”

“Of course.”

The prisoner pressed his face to the window and looked up into the cloudless sky.

“I wonder if it’s going to rain.”

Dale looked out his window.

“Are you kidding? It’s never going to rain again.”

“The drought. Some say it’s the act of an angry God.”

“Who says that?”

“Oh, you know. People.”

“Sometimes people don’t know shit.”

“I agree completely. Still. It would be nice if it rained.”

“That it would.”

The prisoner didn’t speak again for over an hour and they passed through San Jose.

“Ah. The happy hunting grounds,” he said, then frowned. “That was a gruesome thing to say, wasn’t it?”

“A little,” said Len.

“Sorry. Still, it’s interesting how definitions of acceptable versus unacceptable change; don’t you think so, Detective Dale?”

“Change how?” said Dale.

The prisoner looked out the window.

“An older black man like Detective Leonard chauffeuring a young white man like you. Why, back in my daddy’s day, people would have thought something of that. How the situation denoted who had status and privilege. But in these more enlightened times, no one bats an eye.”

Dale looked at Len. Len shook his head.

“I told you not to start, didn’t I?” he said.

Dale turned to the prisoner.

“That was an asshole thing to say, Asten” he said. “Through this whole thing, the trial and everything, you weren’t an asshole. Don’t start now.”

“Of course. You’re right,” said the prisoner. “Detective Leonard, please accept my apologies. You too, Detective Dale.”

Dale frowned and turned to the front.

“For the record, Detective Moore always drives because he likes it.”

“And because you drive like my half-blind grandmother,” said Moore.

“That’s what you keep telling me.”

“Banter. How fun,” said the prisoner.

Dale rapped the cage again.

“No more talking for a while. Let’s do that, okay?”

“I’ve upset you again. It wasn’t my intention. I’m tense. This is all new to me, you know.”

“What did I just say?”

“No talking for a while. A very good idea.”

Traffic was picking up as they headed south through San Jose. Len slowed the car, but worried that if the traffic kept piling up they’d be late making their delivery.

He gave Dale a quick glance. In some ways, his partner worried him as much as the cars crowding in around them. Dale was a good detective. He knew how to work a crime scene. He had a good feel for interrogations and he never went too rough on anyone they brought in for questioning. Len knew plenty of other detectives Dale’s age who couldn’t wait to play Dirty Harry with suspects. But Dale was more restrained, more of a head guy than some of the other detectives he’d come up with. However, something had changed recently. The Nightcrawler case did something to him, though Len couldn’t quite put his finger on what. And there were more obvious changes, like the chatter with Asten. That’s not something he would have done a few weeks ago.

The prisoner didn’t speak again until they drove through Gilroy and the pungent scent of the garlic fields filled the car.

“Thank you for using my name earlier, Detective Dale.”

“Did I?”

“Yes. You said ‘That was an asshole thing to say, Asten.’ No one has used my name since this whole ugly episode began. I wanted to thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Now let’s circle back to the no-talking rule, right?”

“Of course.”

A delivery truck cut across two lanes of traffic, barely missing them. Len had to slam on the brakes. When he accelerated again he said, “Everyone all right?”

“I’m fine,” said Dale.

He looked back at Asten.

“He looks all right too.”

From the back, Asten began to hum. Something low and simple, in a peculiar pentatonic scale. It was almost pretty, which grated on Len. He’d played guitar in college. Free jazz mainly. Wild hours, long improvs with young hotshots all wanting to show off their chops. Len thought he’d heard every funny scale and chord pattern possible back in those days, but the humming was something different.

“Would you please stop that?” he said.

“Sorry,” Asten said. Then he began to quietly sing the same strange melody.

Dale turned around.

“He said stop.”

“He said to stop humming. I was singing. Sorry if I misunderstood.”

Dale shook his head.

“And what was that exactly? It sound like you were trying to play a cat’s ass like a flute.”

Asten smiled faintly.

“It was an old hymn, inspired by Detective Leonard’s skid back there. It seemed like the time to get the angels on my side.”

“The angels deserted you a long time ago, pal.”

The prisoner scratched his nose, which wasn’t easy in his tight cuffs. There was a lot of twisting of his wrists and head.

“It was also an ancient incantation,” he said. “You know, historically, hymns and incantations are closely linked. For example, back in Sunday school, we used to sing ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers.’ Do you know it? An amazing little ditty. If it’s not a war god chant then I’m the Big Bopper.”

“Is that what you were thinking about when you killed all those people? War? God?” said Dale.

Asten shrugged.

“They’re compelling topics, don’t you think? But I have other interests.”

He pointed to Dale’s wrist.

“That’s a sweet timepiece you have there, detective. Is it new?”

Dale glanced down at his watch.

“Brand new. You like watches?”

He held it up so Asten could get a good look at it. Len wasn’t sure if Dale was being polite or taunting the prisoner. Either way, he didn’t like it.

“I like all sorts of technology,” said Asten. “You might even call me a technophile.”

“I can think of a lot of things to call you, you fucking lunatic.”

“Dale,” said Len.

“Sorry.”

“Technology. That’s why I came to the Bay Area. High tech. Silicon Valley. I like being around smart people.”

“Lucky us,” said Dale.

“It was a compliment.”

“On my planet, compliments from killers don’t count for a lot.”

“Don’t talk to him,” said Len.

Dale settled back in his seat.

Mist rolled in from the west, came tumbling over the hills like a slow-motion avalanche. It was a bit early in the day, thought Len, but the drought had fucked up all the local weather patterns. This was just one more unwelcome gift from the sky.

The mist quickly turned to fog and blotted out the sun. The temperature dropped. Len reached down and turned off the air conditioner. Traffic slowed and cars began to turn on their headlights.

Len noticed that Dale was turned around in his seat again. From the look on his face, he could tell Dale was going to say something stupid and start an argument. He had to get in there first.

“Asten Set,” said Len.

Asten sat up.

“That’s my name. Don’t wear it out.”

“We know that’s not your real name,” said Len. “We found all your books.”

“All of them? Are you sure?”

“You seem to really enjoy Egyptian mythology.”

“Not really. I just like the pretty pictures.”

“I don’t believe you,” said Len. “Your last name. Set. That was the Egyptian name for the devil.”

Asten laughed.

“Don’t be thick, Detective Leonard. The Egyptians wouldn’t know the Christian devil if he prodded them with a pitchfork. No, Set was merely the god of the realm of the dead.”

“In your books, he also personified chaos, darkness, and drought. Calling yourself something like that sounds to me like a plea for attention.”

“Are you accusing me of being mentally unstable, detective?”

Len nodded, looking at Asten in the rearview mirror.

“We’ll find your real name. Who you really are.”

“Well, you better hurry. From what I hear, I won’t last much longer in jail. Something about me killing that police officer?”

“Shut up about that,” yelled Dale.

Len reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. Dale settled back into his seat.

Traffic came to a stop. The fog had all but swallowed the freeway. Len couldn’t see much of anything on either side of the road but headlights and taillights glowing in the mist.

“What the fuck is this?” he muttered.

“Looks like we’re going to be late,” said Dale.

“It does at that.”

“Do you get a demerit for that?” said Asten. “Will this affect your final score? I’d hate to be the reason you had to repeat a grade.”

“Hush,” said Len.

The cars barely moved through the fog. Len didn’t have to touch the accelerator. He’d just take his foot off the brake and the car would roll a few feet at a time all on its own. At this rate, they wouldn’t be there until morning.

“What time is it?” he said.

“Nearly five,” said Dale.

“Five?” Time had slipped by very quickly. And now, not only were they stuck in an opaque fog, but it was rush hour too, which meant that the traffic was only going to get worse.

“Nightcrawler,” said Asten. “Nightcrawler. Do you like that name, Detective Dale?”

“What do I care? It’s your name, not mine.”

Asten sighed.

“I really preferred the Ravenswood Ripper. It had a charming Victorian ring. Why did you change it?”

“We didn’t.”

“The press did,” said Len, cutting Dale off. “It changed because you only killed your first two out in the marsh.”

“Still. Nightcrawler. It sounds like we’re going down to the ole fishin’ hole.”

“We thought Nightcrawler was more appropriate too,” said Dale.

Asten nodded.

“Because I like to work in the dark.”

“Yes.”

“And because of the insects.”

“Yes. Plus, you’re bug-fuck crazy.”

“And because you translated one of the words I left on the walls.”

“That’s right,” said Len.

“Who did the translation?”

“Your code was good, I’ll admit. No one in our department could figure it out. We had to send it to the FBI crypto squad.”

Asten shook his head. Len looked at him in the mirror again. Maybe Dale was smart. Maybe if they kept Asten talking long enough, he’d say something incriminating and they could add on new charges. There were rumors he’d killed in other states, some with the death penalty.

Asten said, “You should have gone to an archaeologist or paleographer. They would have figured it out faster and been more accurate.”

“How’s that?”

“Your crypto guys and gals didn’t get it quite right. It’s not crawler. It’s crawling.”

“What’s the other word?” said Dale.

Asten slumped back in the seat so he almost vanished in the dark.

“I forget,” he said. He began to sing the quiet hymn again.

The car crept forward. The fog rolled in.

“While you’re in a chatty mood, why don’t you tell us why you killed all those people, Asten?” said Dale.

He laughed briefly.

“If I didn’t talk about it at the trial, why would I now?”

“It passes the time. We have a long drive ahead of us.”

“Is this little chat admissible in some future court hearing?”

“Of course not.”

“I’m not sure I believe you, but I’m bored, so okay. I didn’t kill anyone. They all just died.”

An opening, thought Len. He looked at Dale thinking, Don’t press too hard. Don’t blow this. Dale didn’t look at him, but Len couldn’t worry about that now. It was hard enough keeping the car on the road.

“What do you mean they just died?” said Dale. “You drilled holes in their heads. You put insects in their fucking brains.”

Asten shrugged.

“I was looking for something.”

“What?”

“I am the word. I am the messenger. But it’s not an easy job. I could use an assistant.”

Don’t blow this, thought Len.

“What word? What kind of message?”

Something flashed on the dashboard. Len looked down.

“Shit,” he said. “Who gave us this damned car?”

Dale braced a hand on the dashboard.

“What’s wrong?”

“We’re almost out of gas.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Look for yourself.”

Dale looked past Len. The gas gauge was almost on E.

“That’s some detective work, detectives,” said Asten.

“Shut up!” shouted Dale.

Asten smiled and sat back, resting his head on the window.

Dale turned to Len.

“We can’t stop. We have a prisoner.”

“We don’t have any choice. We’re not going to make it without filling up.”

“Shit. Okay. I’ll keep an eye out for a station.”

Len peered through the fog for the light from a station sign, a truck stop, something.

In the back, Asten began singing quietly.

“Stop that!” shouted Len. He looked at the prisoner in the rearview mirror. Asten’s face was lost in shadows. When they passed under a freeway light, it didn’t illuminate the back. Asten was still a shadow. He leaned close to the cage separating the seats.

Len blinked.

Asten’s face was gone. There was nothing but a man-shaped void filled with grinning, leering mouths.

The car lurched onto the freeway shoulder as Len jerked his head around to look at the back seat. Asten was there, staring at him, bored and sullen.

“Len,” said Dale.

Len nodded, twisted the wheel, and the car bounced back onto the freeway.

“You all right?” said Dale.

“Fine. I just thought I saw something.”

“What?”

Len shook his head.

“Keep looking for gas.”

“There’s some right ahead. See it?”

Len looked and just past the next exit was an Exxon station. He steered them off the freeway, across the empty feeder road, and up to the pumps.

“I’ll pump,” said Dale. “You watch him.”

“All right,” said Len.

“There’s one more thing.”

“What?”

A look of embarrassment played across Dale’s face.

“I really have to piss.”

“For god’s sake. Can’t it wait?”

Dale adjusted his position.

“I just need a minute.”

Len breathed in and out, glanced at Asten in the back. The prisoner raised his eyebrows at him.

“Fine. Go. But don’t fuck around.”

Dale smiled.

“Thanks. I’ll be quick.”

Dale got out. He fumbled with the gas cap in the fog, but got it off and put the hose in place. As the gas pumped, he headed toward the station, disappearing almost instantly the mist.

Asten sighed.

“A-hunting we will go, a-hunting we will go. Heigh-ho, the derry-o, a-hunting we will go,” he said.

“Hush,” said Len.

“The insects are a test, detective. In case you were wondering.”

Len looked at him.

“What kind of test?”

“I thought you wanted me to hush.”

Len looked for Dale through the fog. He couldn’t see a goddamned thing.

“I’m tired of your games, Asten. If you have something to say, say it.”

The prisoner didn’t say anything for a minute. Then, “Insects know secrets, but they don’t have a true voice. I give them one.”

“Through the people whose heads you put them in?”

“Through the worthy.”

“Who’s worthy, Asten?”

Asten put his head down. For a split second, Len saw the mouths again, but he shook off the image, refusing to be spooked.

“My companion is dying. He moves through the bodies of insects, but he needs something more. I’ve been looking for a vessel. I still am.”

Len looked at Asten, trying to figure out if he was angling for some kind of psych plea to escape prison by way of a mental hospital.

“The Egyptians worshiped me once, Detective Leonard. They called me Dust Devil and the Black Pharaoh. But my followers turned against me. They destroyed my temples and statues. Do you know what it’s like to be a god and then not?”

“It’s not going to work,” Len said.

“What’s not going to work?”

“This insanity defense you’re trying for. It’s not going to work.”

“Don’t you believe in God, detective? Don’t you believe in the wisdom of insects? Of anything greater than yourself?”

“I’ll tell you what I believe,” he said, but cut himself off.

A grasshopper landed on the windshield. Then another. And another. In a few seconds, they covered the glass.

“May I ask you a simple, honest question, Detective Leonard?”

Len rapped on the glass, hoping to scare the insects off. They ignored him.

“What?” he said.

“Where are you taking me?”

There was a subtle thunk outside. The gas pump had stopped. Now where the hell was Dale?

“Where are you taking me, Len?”

Len turned in his seat.

“The state holding facility in . . .” He realized at that moment he couldn’t remember.

He hit the windshield again, but the grasshoppers weren’t interested.

“Doesn’t it strike you as odd that San Francisco PD would send two detectives to transport a prisoner out of town? They have whole squads and armored vans for that kind of thing, don’t they?”

He was right, thought Len. Who had given him and Dale the assignment? The name was on the tip of his tongue.

“It’s like a plague, isn’t it?” said Asten. “You’re pharaoh and Moses is somewhere out there in the fog calling down God’s wrath on you.”

“Who does that make you?”

“Guess the other half of my name and I’ll tell you.”

Something banged against the side of the car. Len turned and saw Dale putting the gas hose back on the pump. When he headed back to the car, the grasshoppers flew off. He was smiling when he got in.

“Thanks,” Dale said. “I feel a lot better.”

Len pointed out the windshield.

“Those bugs didn’t bother you flying off like that?”

“What bugs?”

“On the windshield.”

“I didn’t see anything. But it was pretty bad out there. I couldn’t find the car for a couple of minutes.”

“But you must have heard them,” said Len.

Dale held up his hands.

“I’m sorry, man. I didn’t notice anything.”

Len started the car.

“Forget it.”

“Remind him where we’re going, Detective Leonard. In case he forgot.”

He steered them out of the station and back onto the freeway.

“Asten is right,” said Len. “I can’t remember where exactly we’re headed. What’s the address?”

“Don’t let him bother you. I know where we’re going. Just keep us pointed south. It’s not far now.”

Len nodded. He wanted the subject gone and done with, so he didn’t ask any questions.

“They divided up my domain, you see,” said Asten. “They invented Thoth and Set to take my place because they were afraid of one god having all the power I possessed.”

Dale looked at Len.

“He’s been chattering the whole time I was gone?”

Len let out a breath.

“That he was.”

“Anything interesting?”

“I was explaining about my fall from grace, Detective Dale. And about the false gods who took my place.”

Dale nodded.

“I think I read about that. In those Egyptian books and the other one. The old one.”

“De Vermis Mysteriis.”

“That’s it. About an old god replaced by two younger ones.”

“That old book was in Latin,” said Len. “You can read Latin?”

Dale shrugged.

“I studied a little in high school. The book talked about the All-Seeing Eye. The Crawling Chaos.”

“Crawling? You knew about that word this whole time and you didn’t say anything?” said Len.

“It didn’t seem important. We’re nearly there. It’s the next exit,” Dale said.

Len glanced at him, then turned back to the road, looking for the exit.

“What else did the book say?”

“That the Chaos is the soul of the old Outer Gods.”

“And messenger,” said Asten.

“Yeah, and messenger. He’ll prepare the way for the Outer Gods’ return.”

“And you didn’t think any of that was important to mention,” said Len.

Dale shook his head.

“Why would it be? It’s just old stories, right?”

“A-hunting we will go, a-hunting we will go. Heigh-ho, the derry-o, a-hunting we will go,” sang Asten.

“Quiet,” said Len. When he looked in the mirror he didn’t see Asten, but a mass of writhing tentacles. He ignored the sight and turned his eyes back to the road. Little by little, the fog began to dissipate. By the time he took the exit, the sky was almost clear.

“I don’t see anything,” Len said. “What’s the address?”

“It’s about a mile farther up. There’s a turnoff. You can’t miss it.”

“If you say so.”

“The All-Seeing Eye. Crawling Chaos. Nyarlathotep. The Ravenswood Ripper. I’m sure you can see why I was so disappointed being known as the Nightcrawler.”

“It isn’t much of a name for a god,” said Dale.

Len saw the sign and turned the car onto the side road. He scanned the sky above the trees, looking for the guard towers and stone walls of a prison.

“Where are we? I don’t see a thing,” he said.

“One more turn. Right up here,” Dale said.

Len turned the car. A few hundred yards later he stopped. They were at a dead end, by a beach facing the Pacific.

“Where the hell are we, Dale? Did we take the wrong exit?”

“We’re fine,” said Asten. “Aren’t we, Detective Dale?”

Dale rubbed the bridge of his nose with a finger.

“He was telling the truth before, Len. He didn’t murder anyone. People just died.”

Len looked through the windshield at the beach. He stayed calm and looked calm. Until Dale looked out the window too. Then he went for the pistol in his shoulder holster. He’d barely moved when he felt Dale’s gun pressed against his temple. Len sat back and let Dale take his gun and toss it on the floor. Dale lowered his own pistol, but kept hold of it.

“We don’t need these, Len. It’s just you and me.”

“And him,” said Len inclining his head toward the back seat.

“Don’t worry about him. This part is you and me.”

Len ignored him. He turned to Asten.

“Why this game?” he said. “You have what you wanted. Someone as crazy as you to grovel at your godlike feet. Why bring me all the way out here?”

Asten leaned his forehead against the screen separating them.

“Do you have a laptop, Detective Leonard? Don’t you back it up in case something happens to it?”

“Copies. Redundant systems,” said Dale.

“I like all sorts of technology. And smart people,” said Asten.

“Clearly I wasn’t smart enough to see this coming,” Len.

“Don’t think about it that way,” said Dale. “I didn’t see so many things until he showed me.”

“I made your partner an offer,” said Asten.

“What kind?”

“Don’t you want to live forever, Len?” said Dale.

“Not really.”

“Don’t worry. If things don’t work out you won’t live much longer anyway,” said Asten.

Len looked at him, then Dale. But Len didn’t see him. What he saw had bulging, segmented eyes and barbed mandibles. Len looked down at his own hands, just to make sure he was real. That he was really there. Dale put a hand on his arm, and it was like the stick leg of a centipede.

When Len looked up, Dale was himself again. He was holding a small battery-powered drill in his hand.

“Please, Len. It hurts so much less if you don’t fight it.”

“Listen to him, detective. He helped me out on a lot of hunts.”

Len looked out the windshield. Something massive seemed to move across the night sky. The stars shifted in its wake. He didn’t recognize the constellations anymore.

Grasshoppers massed on the car, covering the windows. Len looked at the floor. The gun was too far away to reach and Dale still had his.

“Where’s the insect?” said Len.

“In my pocket. You don’t want to see it.”

Len thought about that. He could fight, but Dale would kill him for sure. He thought, Where are you going to run when something overhead is moving the stars?

Len closed his eyes.

The sound of the drill was loud in the car.

Later, the grasshoppers flew away. The car reversed and drove carefully up the road they’d come down half an hour earlier. They got back on the freeway and turned north.

The stars were back in their original positions. Or so it seemed. Len wasn’t sure anymore. It didn’t matter. He couldn’t drive, couldn’t even hold the wheel, so Dale steered them home. From the back seat, Asten sang his quiet hymn.

Voices filled Len’s head. Dale, the Crawling Chaos, and one that buzzed with mad secrets from somewhere infinitely cold and far away.

He touched his scalp, just above his right ear. No more blood. Dale was right. The drill hadn’t hurt much and now, Len was certain, nothing would ever hurt again.

EXCERPTS FOR

AN ESCHATOLOGY QUADRILLE

Caitlín R. Kiernan

1. June 1969, West Hollywood

It would be a gross understatement to say that Maxie Honeycutt is a nervous man. Cat gets out of bed every morning; he checks his shoes for bugs, and not the creepy-crawly sort, but the sort he imagines the DOD and CIA and the goddamn LAPD leave there while he sleeps. Cat sits down to breakfast; he’s digging in his box of Wheaties to be sure no one’s planted a microphone at the bottom. One day or another, he’ll be walking down Sunset Boulevard or Ventura and a car’s gonna backfire, and Mr. Maxie Honeycutt’s gonna shit himself, then drop dead from a coronary. This will happen, sure as pigs make little baby pigs, this or some other equally histrionic ending for the skinny little man his friends—such as they are—call Paranoid Jack. No one quite remembers why people started in calling him Jack, though the paranoid part is obvious to anybody who’s spent fifteen straight minutes in this cat’s company. So, you’d think he’d do his best to steer clear of weird shit and questionable business ventures with nefarious individuals. You would, however, be wrong. For example, tonight Maxie’s in a booth at the Whiskey A Go Go, trying to be heard over shitty acid rock and a hundred stoned motherfuckers talking all at once. Across from him, Charlie Six-Pack is rolling a joint, some primo shit just come in from Panama. Charlie Six-Pack is a good example of the company Maxie Honeycutt keeps. Cat spent seven years up at Folsom for robbery and a concealed weapons charge. Says he didn’t do it, but what the fuck else would he say?

Maxie leans way across the table, not quite shouting, but it’s not like he can hear himself think over the noise. And he says, “I don’t give two shits and a crap what the damn thing’s worth, man, ’cause I ain’t gonna hold it, not for love nor money.”

“Don’t be like that,” says Charlie Six-Pack. “I thought you were my go-to guy, right? I thought we was tight, and you were the guy I could go to when I can’t go to anyone else, right?”

“Well, no,” replies Maxie. “No, not this time. This time, you’ll just have to find someone else. I ain’t holding that thing. I don’t even like to look at it.”

Now, what he’s talking about is the little jade figurine that Charlie Six-Pack came back from Nevada with last week. There’s a brown paper bag on the table between them, and inside the bag is the figurine. The bag’s rolled closed, and there are what appear to be grease stains on it, like maybe it held fried chicken or churros before it held the jade figurine. Charlie, he calls it an idol, claims it was carved by the Apaches or the Incans or some shit like that. For all Maxie knows, it was made last month in Tijuana or by some Buddha Head down on Magdalena Street. Whoever made the thing, that cat must have been having just about the nastiest magic carpet ride since Albert Hofmann accidentally dosed himself back in 1943. It’s almost big as Maxie’s fist, the thing in the bag, and when Charlie pulled it out and showed it to him, Maxie got this queasy tight feeling in his gut and goose bumps up and down his arms.

“Yo, man, don’t be like that,” says Charlie Six-Pack, and he scowls fit for a Greek tragedy and lights the doobie. “Forty-eight hours, right? Hell, probably not even that long. Just until the Turk comes back from that thing in Catalina and I don’t gotta worry about my place getting tossed before I can make the handoff, okay? Pigs toss the place and find this, then nobody gets a payday.”

“What the hell the pigs gonna want with it?” Maxie asks, eyeing the greasy paper bag even more warily than before. “You steal it?”

“If I’d have stolen it, I’d have told you up front.”

“Then what do the pigs want with it?”

Charlie Six-Pack sucks in a lungful of Panama Red, and he squints at Maxie through the haze. “Pigs don’t want shit with it,” says Charlie, and he blows smoke from his nostrils like a Chinese dragon. “I’m just saying, is all. Why take chances?”

“Well, I don’t like it,” Maxie Honeycutt tells him.

“I ain’t asking you to like it, man.”

“What’s the Turk even want with something like that?”

“Jesus, Jack, what the Turk does and does not want ain’t none of my business, and it sure as hell ain’t none of your business. One night, maybe two at the outside, you get five percent of my cut, just for babysitting a paper bag. And don’t tell me you can’t use the bread. I know you, and I know better.”

“Ain’t the bag that bothers me,” says Maxie, Mr. Paranoid Jack himself, he who swears it was aliens working with the Mafia, the Bilderberg Group, and the RAND Corporation had Jack and Bobby Kennedy killed. Same cat will talk for hours about how fluoridated water, filtered cigarettes, and artificial sweeteners are an Illuminati plot aimed at pacifying the masses. Point being, the cat is given to flights of fancy.

“Man, you’re one for the books,” says Charlie Six-Pack. “Why don’t you just simmer down and stop freaking out on me.” He takes another toke, shakes his head, then offers the joint to Maxie. Now, normally Maxie’s fine getting high with the likes of Charlie Six-Pack, but right at this particular moment, well, he’s thinking he’s better off trying to keep a clear head. So he says no thank you, and he asks again where the thing in the bag came from. Not that he actually wants to know, mind you, or thinks he’ll get any sort of an honest answer, but Maxie figures he keeps this up long enough, Charlie’s bound to grow discouraged and go looking for someone else to hassle.

“I told you,” says Charlie, “some Indians made it. You ever heard of the Donner Party, those folks got lost in the mountains and had to eat each other to keep from freezing to death?”

“Yeah, man,” Maxie replies, “I’ve heard of the freaking Donner Party. Who the fuck hasn’t heard of the freaking Donner Party?” And he sits back in the booth and takes an unfiltered Pall Mall from the half-empty pack in his shirt pocket.

“Okay, well, so the dude from whom I acquired this little objet d’art,” and Charlie nods at the paper bag, “this dude’s a professor out in Salt Lake City, this Mormon dude—Brigham Young University—and he claims the doodad there belonged to one of the survivors of the Donner Party, one of those didn’t get eaten, but did the cannibalizing. Professor, he tells me that this guy—”

“What was his name?”

“What’s whose name? The Mormon dude?”

“No, man. The Donner Party cat.”

“Fuck if I know,” says Charlie Six-Pack, and he takes another hit. “Who cares what the guy’s name was, man? Do you want to hear this or not?”

Maxie Honeycutt, he taps his Pall Mall on the back of his left hand, then lights it. He shrugs and stares at this chick at the bar, because he thinks she looks a lot like Grace Slick, and he’s got a serious hard-on for Grace Slick, even if he can’t stand fucking hippie music.

“I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t,” he says.

Right then, Charlie Six-Pack snaps his fingers real loud and Maxie jumps. “His name was Breen. Patrick Breen.”

“Whose name was Patrick Breen? The professor?”

“No, man. The cannibal. Way that guy at Brigham Young told it, Breen said he found the thing”—and Charlie nods at the greasy paper bag again—“up there in the mountains, and it was the doodad here told Breen that if they ate the dead people, if they could get over being all squeamish and shit, maybe they wouldn’t all starve and freeze to death hundreds of miles from civilization and no hope of rescue till spring. Some kind of Indian fetish or heathen idol or some shit, I don’t know, right, and desperate people, well, you figure they were all just looking for some excuse not to let that meat go to waste. So, great, fine, blame it on voices from this doodad. Rationalization, man,” and Charlie Six-Pack taps at his forehead.

“How’d this professor get his hands on it?”

“No idea, man. He didn’t say, and I didn’t ask.”

“And what’s the Turk want with something like that?” Maxie asks again.

“Look, ain’t the Turk who wants it. It’s this cat out in Australia, right? So, you gonna hold onto it for me or what? You do it, I’ll cut you in for seven percent.”

“I don’t want to go getting messed up in some sort of heavy Apache hoodoo horseshit,” Maxie Honeycutt tells him, and he takes a long drag on his Pall Mall, then checks his watch like maybe he’s got somewhere better to be when he most certainly does not. “I don’t like the look of the thing.”

“Oh, for pity’s sake,” sighs an exasperated Charlie Six-Pack. He licks a thumb and forefinger and pinches out the joint, then stashes it in a snuff tin. “I always knew you were crazy, man, crazy fucking Paranoid Jack, loonier than a run-over dog, but I didn’t ever take you for the superstitious sort. Didn’t finger you for the sorta guy’s gonna let a spook story get in between him and easy money, leaving me fucking hanging in the wind like this.”

“It ain’t nothing personal, Charlie.”

“Sure it ain’t,” Charlie tells Maxie, and the cat makes no effort whatsoever to hide his displeasure. “But don’t think word ain’t gonna get back to the Turk how you had a chance to lend a hand and didn’t do squat, all right?”

“Sounds fair,” says Maxie Honeycutt, though he doesn’t think it sounds fair at all, the off chance he might find himself in Dutch with the Turk just because he doesn’t want to play nursemaid to Charlie Six-Pack’s little green gargoyle.

“What time you got?” Charlie wants to know. “I have to make some calls, man, try to find someone ain’t such a goddamn pussy.”

“My watch says it’s seven fifteen,” Maxie tells him, “but it’s running a little slow, because of all NASA’s excess electromagnetism or something.”

“You and your fucking watch,” snorts Charlie Six-Pack, and he takes his greasy brown paper bag and leaves Maxie Honeycutt alone in the booth. And Maxie, he tries hard to feel relieved. He sits there chain-smoking Pall Malls and staring at that girl who doesn’t look even half as much like Grace Slick as he at first glance thought she did. He’ll have a few beers, stick around for the band, then head back to Silver Lake and the two-room rattrap he calls home. And round about dawn, cat’s gonna wake up from the worst bad dream he’s had since he was a kid. He’s gonna wake up and find he’s pissed the sheets. He’ll turn on the radio real damn loud and sit by the kitchenette window, smoking and drinking from a warm bottle of Wild Irish Rose while he watches the sun come up. He’ll sit there trying hard not to think about Charlie Six-Pack’s ugly fucking doodad or blizzards or a raw January wind howling through high mountain passes.

2. January 2007, Atlanta

The way I heard it, Ms. Esmé Symes was born Esther Simon, the youngest daughter of an evangelical minister who spoke in tongues, handled rattlesnakes, and drank strychnine from Ball Mason jars. There are two or three different stories floating around about why she up and left that pissant backwater Florida town, but they all come back around to her daddy not keeping his hands to himself. Might be she killed him. Might be her momma killed him. Might be the man only lost his ministry to the scandal and slunk off into the Everglades to drink away whatever was left of his miserable, sorry life. Whichever, Esther became Esmé and spent some time with a traveling show, reading palms and Tarot cards, telling rubes what they’d want to hear about their futures, instead of telling them what she really saw. Oh, I’m not saying I believe she was a bona-fide psychic or clairvoyant or whatever. But that lady, she most definitely made a living convincing people she was, and, to tell the God’s honest truth, if I’m gonna deny there’s anything to all this sixth-sense folderol, well, then I’m left with the mystery of how exactly it was she led two detectives from APD Homicide to that empty warehouse between Spring Street and West Peachtree.

It wasn’t the first time she’d helped the police. There was that kid who’d gone missing out in Stone Mountain, two years earlier, and there was the Decatur woman who’d been raped, murdered, dismembered, and buried in her own backyard. Remember her? Well, Esmé found both of them, so when she made the call about the warehouse, we sat up and listened. Now, if she’d been up front and warned us what she thought we were going to find in there, I like to think someone would have had the good sense to hang up on her. To tell her to go fuck herself. But she didn’t. And looking back, that whole day seems sorta like walking into an ambush, climbing the three flights of stairs up to that long fucking hall, and then, she’d told us, go all the way down to the end. That’s where we’d find what we were looking for. Down at the end of the hall.

Franklin Babineaux, that skinny kid from New Orleans, he’s first into the room, and then me, and then Audrey. Yeah, she was still my partner, right. This was still six months or so before her accident. Anyway, so, by the time I make it through the door, Babineaux, he’s already gotten an eyeful, and he’s just sorta standing off to the side, fucking dumbstruck, gawking. And there before us was the nightmare that Esmé Symes had neglected to elaborate on. My first thought—I shit you not—my very first thought was how it all had to be some sort of sick-ass practical joke. Something like that, your brain doesn’t want to admit you’re really seeing what you think you’re seeing, and if you are seeing it, well, then it can’t possibly be what it looks like. Oh, you’ve seen the photos, I know, but the photos, let me assure you, they don’t convey one one-hundredth the sheer surreal fucked-upness. The photos, they’re like a fading memory of the real thing, like, let’s say, a copy of a copy. For one, you look at them and you don’t get the smell. Like a fish market or a salt marsh at low tide, and just beneath the oily, fishy, ocean smell, there was the sharp metallic stink of all that blood. See, you take away the smell and you take away that punch to the gut. Thank sweet damn Jesus it was winter. I don’t even want to imagine what it would have been like walking into that shitstorm in July, instead of January.

But, like I said, first thing through my head was that someone had set it all up just to fuck with us. Because right there in front of me, hanging from the ceiling was this goddamn fourteen-foot great white shark. The tip of its nose was just barely touching the concrete floor. I knew what kind of shark it was, because when I was a kid, my dad and me, we used to deep-sea fish down in Destin, and once one of his buddies landed a great white. Only, the one in the warehouse was bigger, a lot bigger. Probably, right then, it looked like just about the biggest goddamn fish ever was. Later, I heard it weighed in at something like fifteen hundred pounds. Anyway, the shark had been suspended from a hook, from a block-and-tackle rig that had been set into the ceiling of that place, a rope looped about the shark’s tail. Its jaws were bulging out of its mouth, just because of gravity, I guess, because of its own weight. There were rows and rows of glistening triangular teeth big as my damn thumb, serrated like a steak knife. And its eyes were bugging out, too, those horrible black fucking eyes. Even when a shark’s alive, its eyes look dead.

Of course, you know that’s not the worst of it. Not even close. That fish was just the opening act, right?

So, there we are, and the initial shock’s beginning to fade. Audrey, I remember she started in laughing. At the time, it pissed me off, but now I get it. I mean, it really is like the setup for a bad joke, right? Three cops walk into an empty warehouse in downtown Atlanta. There’s a fucking dead shark hanging from the ceiling. One cop says to the other cop, et cetera. Real funny. Anyway, I remember Babineaux looking over at me like, Hey man, you know what this is, right? You’ve seen this shit before, right? Me, I’m just trying to let it all sink in, okay. Because it’s not just the shark. There’s this enormous design drawn on the concrete floor, sorta painted on the floor in red sand. You know, like those Tibetan monks do. Later, one of the specialists that the department called in—an anthropologist from Georgia Tech—he said the design was a mandala, like in Hindu religion. To me, what it put me in mind of was a maze. And right at the center of all those parallel lines, all those circles inside circles, was the shark.

“Call it in,” I say to Babineaux, and Audrey, she says to me, “What the fuck is he supposed to call it in as?”

I was the one who found the body. But you know that, too. Those lines of sand on the floor, they were spaced just far enough apart from each other that you could walk without stepping on them. Straight off, I felt this instinctual sorta revulsion at the thought of doing that, putting a foot down on one of those lines. Step on a crack, break your momma’s back, right? So, while Babineaux is making the call, I go and ignore that little nagging voice in the back of my head that’s telling me just to get the fuck out and let someone else deal with this crazy shit. Audrey, she tells me we should wait for the ME, and when she says that, I swear she sounds scared. And that also pisses me off. “Christ,” I tell her, “it’s just a goddamn fish. What the fuck.” All the same, crossing that space between the doorway and the shark—and it couldn’t have been more than ten feet—I am perfectly cognizant how I’m being so careful not to step on even one of those lines, acting like some superstitious seven-year-old, and, hey, that’s something else pissing me off. That’s the thing pissing me off the worst.

I get up close, and I see how the shark’s belly is split open, right down the middle. Well, not just its belly. The fish has been sliced open from the underside of its head most of the way back to the tail. And here and there it’s been sewn shut again with nylon fishing line. We couldn’t see that when we first came in, because of the angle it was hanging at. Anyway, this doesn’t come as a surprise. No reason it should. You catch a fish, you gut it. And who the hell ever had gone to the trouble to drag a fifteen-foot great white shark up three flights of stairs, surely they’d have done themselves the favor of not hauling along the extra weight of its innards. That’s just plain common sense.

“They’re on their way,” says Babineaux.

I reach into a pocket and pull out a pair of latex gloves, and that’s when I see three fingers poking through between a gap in those nylon stitches. A thumb, an index finger, the middle fucking finger—a woman’s fingers with this deep red nail polish, some shade of red so dark it was almost black. And the fingers, they’re fucking moving, okay. I yell, “We need an ambulance—we need a fucking ambulance right fucking now,” or some shit like that, and I’m digging around in my coat, trying to find my pocketknife. Next thing I know, Audrey’s standing there beside me, and Jesus God, the look on her face. I could talk all day, and I wouldn’t ever come up with words to convey that expression. She starts in tugging at the fishing line with her hands, but it’s slippery with blood and oil and shit, and the line’s like, you know, hundred-pound monofilament test. Finally, I get my knife out and start cutting, and—whenever I come to this part of the story, it’s always like, looking back, like right here a flashbulb goes off in my head or something. Suddenly, everything is so clear, so stark, more real than real—and I know that doesn’t make sense. I get that, see, but I don’t know what would. If you’ve ever been in a car crash, it’s kinda like that. That exact instant when two cars collide, a moment that seems so perfectly defined, but that also seems smeared.

Anyway . . .

It doesn’t take me all that long to get the fish’s belly open again. I nick myself once or twice in the process, but I don’t even realize that until later, when the EMTs arrive. I have a scar on my left palm from that day. Souvenirs, right?

She was still alive, the woman they’d stitched up inside the dead fish. Only barely, but, well, you’ve read the files. You probably read the book that cocksucker from New York City wrote about the whole thing. So, you know how it was. We’re standing there, and Audrey, she’s saying, “Oh God, oh dear God, oh God,” over and over, and back behind us, Babineaux is praying the fucking rosary or some other sorta Catholic mumbo jumbo. The woman in the shark, she’s completely naked, and she looks maybe twenty-five, probably younger, but it’s hard to tell much because she’s covered in rotting shark, head to toe. “We have to get her out of there,” says Audrey, and I’m holding the sides of the fish’s belly open, and Audrey, she’s leaning in and putting her arms around the woman. Thank fuck she wasn’t conscious. I think that’s the one small piece of mercy we got that day, that she wasn’t conscious. Audrey’s in up to her shoulders, and I’m starting to gag from the stink. I just know I have maybe ten seconds before I spew coffee and Krispy Kreme donuts, and that’s when Audrey says, “Oh Jesus, Mike, they’ve been sewn together.”

“What?” I ask. “What’s been sewn together?”

“She’s sewn in here,” Audrey replies, “sewn to the fucking fish,” and there’s this terrible, brittle tone in her voice, like eggshells. I’m never gonna forget the way she sounded. And that’s when I saw what the woman inside the shark was holding. The sons of bitches who’d done it to her, they’d arranged her hands—sewn them together, too—so that she was cradling the thing in her palms. She seemed to be holding it out to us, like an offering. Only, I knew it wasn’t three cops that offering was meant for. I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking—hell, I wasn’t thinking, not by then. I was running on shock and instinct, shit like that. I took it from her hands, that jade idol, what the fuck ever it was, and I just stood there, holding it, staring at it. You spend fifteen years on the force, and you think maybe you’ve seen evil, maybe you’ve stared it in the face enough times that you and evil are chummy old acquaintances. But I knew that day how wrong I was. That chunk of rock, not much bigger than an orange, that was evil, true and absolute, indescribable, and I wanted to put it down. More than anything, I just wanted to set it down on the floor with the lines of red sand. But I couldn’t. It sounds hokey as hell, but it’s like that Nietzsche quote, about staring into the abyss and it staring back into you. I was still standing there holding that thing when backup arrived. I’m told they had to pry it out of my hands.

As for Esmé Symes, one week later she hung herself with an extension cord. She’d already been brought in twice for questioning, so I think she knew she was the closest thing we had to a suspect, that she was in the department’s sights. The DA was screaming for blood. And her apartment, it was fucking wallpapered with sketches of that goddamned jade atrocity, right? Dozens and dozens of sketches, from all different angles. But she didn’t leave a note, not unless you’re gonna call all those drawings a suicide note. You ask me—and I know you didn’t—but you ask me whether she was involved or not, and all I got to say is Miss Esmé Symes got off easy. She got off scot-fucking-free.

3. December 1956, West of Denver

My Dearest Ruth,

I’m beginning this as the train pulls out of Union Station. The day is bright and sunny, though it snowed here last night, and I imagine it’s as fine a way to spend a Christmas Eve as any, being ferried on steel rails through the front range of the Rocky Mountains. I’ll post the letter when we reach Grand Junction, and then I’ll be traveling on to Sacramento. I have quite a lot of work to do before the semester begins. I hope that you’re well, and I hope this holiday season finds you in all ways better than did the last.

When I spoke with Sarah Beringer in Chicago last week, she was emphatic that I write and tell you of my encounter with Marquardt and her woman, though I can’t imagine I have anything to say that will prove useful to anyone who’s had as much firsthand experience with those two as have you. I’m also not especially keen to revisit that autumn evening in Providence. It still, on occasion, gives me nightmares. I’ve awakened in a cold sweat from dreams of the gathering on Benefit Street. Regardless, I promised Sarah that I would write, and I do hope that I may be of some help to you, no matter how small. I trust, of course, your discretion in this matter, and I trust that what I write here will be kept strictly between the two of us.

As you know already, as Sarah has told you, I met Marquardt through an acquaintance, an anthropologist formerly on faculty in the Department of Archaeology at Brown. He has asked that I please omit his name from any and all accounts I may write on the subject of Dr. Adelie Marquardt, and I am bound by our friendship to oblige him. It only matters that he knew of my interest in Dagon and in Semitic Mesopotamian fertility gods in general and that, through him, the fateful introduction was made, following a lecture at Manning Hall. That was last October, on the afternoon of the twelfth, and it was then that I was invited to the gathering on Benefit Street. I admit that I found Marquardt personable enough on our initial meeting. Certainly, she’s striking, just shy of six feet tall; the sort of woman I do not hesitate to term handsome. I don’t mean in any way mannish, but handsome. The sort of woman for whom I’ve always had a weakness. From what I’ve gathered, she excels at making good first impressions, the same way, I think, that a pitcher plant excels at seducing hungry insects. Aggressive mimicry, as the evolutionists say. Her gray eyes, her easy smile, her immediate interest in whomever she’s speaking to, the authority in her voice, and yet, I also confess to feeling the faintest inkling of apprehension when we shook hands. I can’t say why. I mean, I don’t know why. The vestige of some primal survival instinct, perhaps, something meant to keep us safe that human beings have, to our detriment, forgotten how to recognize for what it is.

Her companion was not with her that day, and I gather that’s fairly unusual, seeing the two of them apart. I wouldn’t meet her until the evening of the gathering.

“I know your work,” Dr. Marquardt told me. “Your article in Acta Archaeologica on the Septuagint’s account of the destruction of the idol in the temple of Dagon in Ashdod. I read that. Fascinating stuff.”

Now, if you wish to flatter me, Ruth, and gain some measure of my trust, you have only to claim a passing familiarity with my research. I’m easy that way, as, I suspect, are most academics laboring in obscure and esoteric fields of study.

“I have something I’d very much like you to see,” she continued. “A piece I’m told was recovered from the ruins at Ras Shamra during Claude Schaeffer’s excavations there in 1929. It’s been hidden away in a private collection for decades, so you won’t find it in the literature anywhere.” She told me that no one seemed to know why the artifact in question hadn’t gone to Strasbourg with the rest of Schaeffer’s material.

“If it’s genuine,” said Marquardt, “it’s very important, indeed.”

I told her I looked forward to seeing it, thanked her for the invitation, and we parted ways. I spent most of the next week up at Harvard, at both the Semitic Museum and the Peabody. My department’s endowment is modest (some would say meager), and it isn’t often I have the opportunity to visit institutions back East. As is always the case when I can travel, I was determined to make my stay as productive as possible, wringing the most from every waking hour, even if it meant wearing myself down to a frazzle. Which I promptly did. By the evening of Dr. Marquardt’s gathering, which was Friday the 29th, I was exhausted, and I very nearly begged off. Of course, in hindsight, heeding the wishes of my exhausted mind and body would have proven the most fortunate course. I’d not now be writing you this letter, and my sleep would not be so frequently interrupted by bad dreams. My nerves would not be always on edge. Hindsight, though, is rarely more than a cruel voice, taunting us from the shadows.

I showered, got dressed, and walked from my room at Miller Hall to an old slat-board house at 135 Benefit. It’s built partway into the steep hill, with the basement opening out onto the street, and has been painted a ghastly shade of yellow. I’ve read it was constructed in 1763 by a Providence merchant named Stephen Harris, who fell on hard times almost as soon as the house was completed. Therefore, naturally, it has a reputation as a cursed house. I’d been told to arrive at 6:00 p.m. sharp, so the sun was well down by the time I reached the address. A housemaid greeted me at the door, and I found to my surprise that the gathering was already in full swing.

The maid took my coat and ushered me from the foyer down a narrow hallway to a spacious drawing room. The air was smoky and redolent with the commingled odors of cigarettes, cologne, and perfume. Adelie Marquardt spotted me almost at once, and I was immediately introduced to her companion, Ecaterina, for whom I never got more than a first name. She was a very pretty woman, dark eyed and her hair black as coal, and I must confess that she and Marquardt made quite a dashing couple. She’s from Bucharest, the companion, and she spoke with a heavy Romanian accent.

“I trust you had no trouble finding the house?” asked Marquardt, and I assured her that I’d had no trouble whatsoever. “Good,” she said, “good. I don’t yet know Providence well myself, and I confess I still get turned about from time to time.”

“Am I late?” I asked, looking about the crowded room.

“No, no. You’re right on time,” she said. “You’re fine, my dear.”

Another servant arrived, this one with a silver tray of fluted glasses, and she offered me champagne. I took a glass, though I’ve never much cared for the taste. Marquardt had begun explaining how she and Ecaterina had met in Paris, four years earlier, but I was, at best, only half listening. My attention had been drawn to the other guests, of whom there were at least fifteen or so. Ruth, when I say that they were an odd lot, I’m not exaggerating. I know that I have a reputation for being something of a prude; I’ve never kept company with Beatniks and Bohemians and whatnot, but I think even your beloved Kerouac and Ginsberg would have been taken aback by this outré bunch. Most were women, and there was a definite effeminacy about the few men in attendance, both in manner and appearance. I would say there was a conscious, purposeful outrageousness to the way these people dressed and carried themselves. They reminded me of a flock of some peculiar species of songbird, birds whose feathers are far too gaudy to be beautiful and whose bodies are so ungainly that one wonders how it is they manage ever to fly.

“Well, would you like to see it now?” asked Dr. Marquardt. “The artifact from Ras Shamra?”

I might have said yes. Or I might only have nodded. I can’t remember. But I do recall that, just then, I noticed a young man on his knees before the fireplace. He was entirely naked, save for a crown of ivy on his head and a red cloth tied about his face for a blindfold. His lips and cheeks had been rouged, and his head was bowed slightly, so that I couldn’t clearly see his face. A woman stood on either side of him, each dressed in gold and garish shades of red. Each held a silver chalice. I started to say something, to ask for some explanation of this bizarre tableau, when Marquardt said, “Oh, don’t be shocked, my dear. It’s only a bit of sport. We like our games, you know.”

All this time later, little details still keep coming back to me. For example, it was just a few weeks ago that I remembered the huge old Victrola in the drawing room, and that the record on the turntable was Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust.” That was a favorite of my mother’s, and it was also one of the first songs I learned to play on the piano (I gave up music after high school). Oh, and the roses. I’ve not mentioned them. There were bouquets of rosebuds placed all about the room, arranged in reproductions of Ming vases. There must have been a hundred roses that night, but not even a single one of them had opened. Their petals had been dyed blue, Mohammedan blue to match the blue of the porcelain vases. I’m digressing. But all of these details, and so many others that I don’t have time to include here, somehow they added up to a singular wrongness, as if the room in that yellow house at 135 Benefit Street had been carefully decorated so as to achieve a very specific and disorienting effect.

There were pocket doors separating the drawing room from a small book-lined study, and Marquardt slid the doors open and ushered me inside. Ecaterina followed, and then Marquardt pulled the doors shut again, muffling the music and the voices of the other guests. In the center of the room was a small table, a scallop-topped tea table, and the thing that she’d invited me to that house to see sat alone at its center. When I saw it, I think I actually gasped. Were I writing to almost anyone else, Ruth, instead of to you, instead of to someone who has had firsthand experience with these people, I think that might sound hysterical. But yes, I must have gasped. And this seemed to please both Marquardt and her companion. They exchanged a smile, and I had the distinct impression that they were sharing some secret, like the punch line of a joke to which I’d not been privy.

“Remarkable, isn’t it?” said Marquardt. “The craftsmanship is exquisite. And obviously it isn’t actually Ugaritic, despite its provenance. Likely, it came to Ras Shamra from Egypt, possibly during the reign of Amenemhat III, sometime after 1814 BC. According to Schaeffer’s field notes, this piece was found in association with a stela depicting the pharaoh.”

For a few moments, then, I forgot Marquardt and her companion and their strange guests. I forgot about the blue roses and the naked boy kneeling at the hearth. For those few moments, the statuette on the table completely consumed my attention. Yes, the craftsmanship was exquisite, but there was nothing of beauty about the object. It was in all ways hideous. If I say it was wicked, would you understand my meaning? I think you might, knowing what you know and having seen what you’ve seen. The jade statuette was a wicked thing. And vile. And yet I found myself unable to look away from it.

“It isn’t Dagon,” I said, finally. “Whatever else it’s meant to be, it clearly isn’t an image of Dagon.”

“I agree,” said Marquardt. “Obviously. Are you familiar with the early Sumerian and the later Assyro-Babylonian texts that suggest Dagon, or Dagan, had a wife? And that the wife may have been the goddess—”

“Of course,” I said, interrupting her. That isn’t like me, interrupting anyone. But suddenly I was dizzy and my mouth had gone cottony. I took a sip of champagne and stared at the hideous statuette. “But this isn’t Ishara.”

“No, it isn’t. But in Schaeffer’s notes, there’s a description of something he calls ‘Mother Hydra,’ and it’s accompanied by a sketch of this artifact. He says that when one of his workers uncovered the figurine, all the men fled in terror, and that only after it had been removed from the site would they return to the diggings.”

“So, if it didn’t go to Strasbourg, where did it end up?” I asked.

“As I said, a private collection. It appears that Schaeffer sold it to a Frenchman, Absolon Thibault Moreau, who’d been a student of Helena Blavatsky’s when he was hardly more than a boy. Moreau was obsessed with the various myths and traditions concerning sunken continents—Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu, and so forth—and he believed that the Phoenicians knew of a submerged land in the South Pacific called R’lyeh. He also believed that the god Dagon had originated in R’lyeh, and that the god’s consort, this”—and Marquardt waved a hand at the statuette—“still dwelt there, waiting for a coming apocalypse—a great flood, to be precise, that would herald the resurrection of a still mightier being than either Dagon or his wife.”

There was a sharp knock at the doors, then, and Ecaterina slid them open just enough to whisper with whoever was on the other side.

“So, if it went to this Moreau fellow,” I said, “how did it come into your possession?” I’d taken a step nearer the table and the statuette, and as much as I wanted to be away from the thing, I also wanted to pick it up, to hold it, to know the weight of it in my hands. I imagined it would feel oily.

“He was arrested for murder,” she said. “Eight murders, to be precise. The bodies were found buried on his estate, just outside Avignon. There were allegations of cannibalism, but nothing was ever—”

Just then there was a terrific commotion from the drawing room. Someone cried out—an awful sound, like a cornered, hurting animal—and my mind returned at once to the blindfolded boy at the fireplace. Ecaterina quickly pulled the pocket doors shut again. She glanced over her shoulder and muttered something in Romanian. At least, I assumed it was Romanian. And I saw, or more likely I only imagined that I saw, a reddish iridescent shimmer in the woman’s eyes, like the eyeshine from a wild animal. And I thought, I do not believe in werewolves, but if I did, then I would believe without hesitation that’s exactly what this woman is.

Then Adelie Marquardt took my elbow, and she said, “You must leave now. I do apologize, but there’s an urgent matter that requires my attention. I regret the inconvenience.” The way she said this, it seemed exactly as if she were reading a prepared and carefully worded statement. She nodded to a small door opposite the tea table, a door I hadn’t noticed. “That will lead you back out to the street. It’s best you hurry.”

And I did hurry. I found that I wanted—more than I’d ever wanted anything, I think—to be out of that house and away from those strange people and that wicked statuette. Somewhere above us, bells had begun to chime; they sounded very much like buoy bells. I exited the study, followed a narrow, musty hallway, and was soon back out on Benefit, looking back from the safety of a flickering pool of gaslight. I’m not sure how long I stood there by the lamppost, my heart racing, regarding Stephen Harris’s unlucky yellow house. Five minutes? Ten? And then I went back to Miller Hall. I left the lights burning until dawn, and I didn’t sleep. I left Providence the next day, three days earlier than I’d planned, and was grateful to be on my way back to California.

I will add one last thing, and then I’ll close. Two weeks or so after that night, I received by mail an envelope containing a clipping from the Providence Journal. There was no return address, and I have no idea who sent it, but there was a Boston postmark. On November 5th, a week after Marquardt’s gathering, a body was found floating in the Seekonk River, not so far from the yellow house. The nude body of a young man. His tongue had been cut out, as had his eyes.

As I said, I’ll post this from Grand Junction. Be safe, dear Ruth. Please stay away from that woman.

Yours truly,

Ysabeau

4. April 2151, Isle of Brooklyn Proper

A light wind is blowing from the northeast, and the morning smells like oil. The sky is filled with hungry, noisy gulls.

From her perch on the roof, Inamorata is using Old Duarte’s spyglass, trying to spot the slick she’s been told rose up in the night, a great black bubble freed by a breach in one of the ancient concrete storage tanks. It only takes her a moment to pin it down, a muddy, iridescent smudge marring the blue-green shimmer of Queens Bar, less than half a mile out from Prospect Beach. A slick that long, that wide, it could easily yield fifteen, maybe twenty thousand gallons. She’s seen bigger, but not for several years now, and not since the Hud extended its reach to the barrier islands. It’s surprising there’s not already a company team on the scene, siphoning it off. There will be soon enough, surely by noon, noon at the latest. One of the big sweeper skiffs docked at Carnegie Island and a host of support vessels will slip smooth and silent through the heat haze, set up shop, and get to it. And any jackals caught trying to nip a tub or three will be sunk on sight, with the governor’s blessings. But for now, the slick is a pristine blemish on the sea. In this light and at this hour, it’s almost beautiful, the way that so many poisonous things are beautiful.

Inamorata puts down the spyglass just as Geli comes up from below. She’s a sanderling girl, is Geli Núñez, stalking the drift lines for whatever refuse the tides fetch up. She’s nineteen, and most of her life she spent on the Row, with the other beachcombers and the crabbers and the bums. Before she met Inamorata, before they became lovers and Geli came to live with her in Old Duarte’s house on Cemetery Hill, she worked for one of the black-market agents. Now, Inamorata has her registered with a legal pickers syndicate, and Geli gets top dollar and doesn’t have to worry quite so much about the law.

“You seen it, then?” she asks Inamorata.

“I’ve seen it,” Inamorata replies.

“It’s a gulper,” says Geli, and she sits down near Inamorata’s perch and begins emptying her morning’s haul of plastic out onto the roof to dry and be sorted. In the sunlight, Geli’s auburn hair shines like a new copper pot.

“It’s big,” Inamorata tells her, “but it’s not as big as all that.”

Geli shrugs and pulls a fat wad of green nylon fishing line from her gunnysack, all tangled with wire weed and kelp. “Well, Joe Sugar, he says it’s a gulper.”

“Joe Sugar like to exaggerate, and you know he hasn’t seen it for himself. Good take?”

“Oh, just you see this,” Geli grins, and she looks up, squinting at the bright morning sky, cloudless and a shade of blue so pale it might as well be alabaster. “Down at the pilings, right in close to Fincher’s docks, there was a stranding. All of it starfish and urchins, hundreds upon hundreds of them—thousands even, maybe. Starfish and urchins big about as my hand. I think they mighta washed up the current from Park Sloop or the Slaughter.”

Inamorata looks back to sea again, staring out across the water toward the oil. “Could have been poisoned by the slick,” she says, half to herself.

“Maybe. There was some sheen on the sand, so might have been the slick got them. But, anyway, that ain’t the point of it,” and then Geli reaches deep into her sack and pulls something out from the very bottom. “This,” she says and holds it up for Inamorata to see. “Found it at the stranding, mixed in with the dead stuff. It’s jade, I think. Real jade, not poly or resin. It doesn’t float. Gasper already offered me an even twenty for it, before I could get back here, which means it’s worth eighty, easy and sure.”

Inamorata is island born and island raised, not so much more than a sanderling herself, and in her twenty-seven years she’s seen her share of ugliness and misbegotten dragged in by the tides. There’s a whole drowned world out there, always puking up its secrets and mistakes, the shameful ghosts of a wasted, shining petrol city that went under before her grandmother’s mother was born. But this, this is something rare, indeed, the milky green lump in Geli’s hand, and it catches her off-guard.

“Looks Japanese,” says Geli. “Doesn’t it look Japanese? I think maybe it’s an oni. An oni or a dragon.”

To Inamorata, it doesn’t look much like either. Geli holds it out to her, and Inamorata leans forward and takes the thing from her hand. It’s about as big around as her balled-up fist and heavy—definitely stone—though she’s hardly qualified to say whether the thing is actually jade or not. She holds it up to the sun, and finds that it’s translucent. Whoever carved it, whenever and why ever it was carved, however many decades or centuries ago, they’d clearly meant to convey something terrible, and Inamorata would have to admit that they succeeded in spades. The word that comes first to her mind is troll, because when she was little her mother told her a fairy story about three nanny goats trying to cross the ruins of the Williamsburg Bridge. But there was an enormous sea troll nesting below the span, a monstrous, malformed creature of slime and muck and rusted steel, and whenever the goats tried to cross, the troll would rise up and threaten to eat them. This thing that Geli’s found on the beach, it could be the graven likeness of her mother’s bridge troll, a refugee from Inamorata’s childhood nightmares. Except she always imagined the troll to be male, though she can’t recall whether her mother ever explicitly stated that it was. The maybe-jade thing, it’s unmistakably female, an obscene caricature of the feminine form, from the exaggerated fullness of its breasts, hips, and buttocks to the gape of its vulva. But its bulging eyes, those make her think of the fishmongers’ stalls down on the Row, and the mass of finger-like tendrils sprouting from its belly remind her of a sea anemone.

“It’s not the bridge troll,” Geli says, and Inamorata frowns and looks at her, then looks back at the ugly lump of green stone she’s holding. Emil Duarte, who’s seventy-three and went to school in some faraway dry place, has referred to Geli as an “innate twelfth-hierarchy intuitive,” and he has explained to Inamorata how people like Geli are used by the military and the multicorps. Down on the Row, there were folks who called her a witch, who thought she was possessed by demons, because of the way she often knows things that she shouldn’t know, that she has no way of knowing, and that she can never explain how she knows. Inamorata hasn’t ever told Geli Núñez about her mother’s bridge-troll story.

“And Gasper offered you twenty?” she asks, passing the thing back to Geli. The stone feels slippery, oily, and when she looks at her fingers and palms, they glisten like she’s been handling slugs. She wipes her hands on her skirt.

“I can do better,” Geli replies.

“Probably,” Inamorata agrees. “Have Sully post it for you, full span. I’ll cover the tab. You want more than forty, then the buyer’s gonna have to come from somewhere besides the island.”

“Will do,” says Geli, turning the thing over and over, examining the object from every angle.

Admiring it, Inamorata thinks, and the thought gives her an unpleasant little shiver. To Geli, it isn’t horrible at all.

“I wish you could have seen all those starfish and urchins,” Geli says, and she returns the green thing to her gunny. “Heaps of them, thousands and thousands, like maybe the sea’s gotten bored with starfish and urchins and sent them all packing.”

And just then, far out across the water, a siren starts to wail; a few seconds later, another pipes up, and shortly after that, a third joins the chorus, the shrill cry of the Hudson Authority’s hurricane warning towers. Inamorata picks up the spyglass again and scans the low waves, but there’s still no sign of a company crew, only a few ragged fishing boats, bobbing and rolling and going about their day-to-day business. The waves, the boats, and the slick. Nothing she can see to warrant an alarm.

“What’s happening?” asks Geli, sounding more curious than concerned. “Why would they wind up the screamers on a day like today? There’s not a cloud in the sky.”

“I don’t know,” Inamorata tells her, and then she focuses on the slick, which seems bigger than it did only five or ten minutes before. An enormous flock of gulls have gathered above it, and she watches as the birds dive, one by one, from the sky and plummet headfirst into the oil. There’s no splash when they hit. Not even a sludgy ripple. They’re just gone. But odder still, the slick seems to be drifting nearer Prospect Beach, moving south and east, even though the current from the sound should be pushing it west, off toward Liberty Bay.

“You go find Emil,” she says, and the way she says it, Geli doesn’t hesitate, and she doesn’t ask why. She just gets up and heads quickly back downstairs, shouting for the old man. Inamorata doesn’t take her eye from the spyglass, not looking away from the falling birds or the shimmering oily patch, hardly half a mile from shore now and creeping slowly closer. But she’s thinking of that ugly chunk of stone from Geli’s sack, and she’s thinking of dead starfish and sea urchins, and she’s remembering the way her mother did the voice of the bridge troll.

And the sirens scream.

JULES AND RICHARD

David Nickle

“Iwas crossing back there . . .”

Jules pointed, with his good arm, to the intersection a dozen meters to the east, just beyond the tangle of his once-reliable old commuter bike. “. . . and as I was building up speed—”

“—over you went,” she said.

“Over I went,” said Jules. He thought about it a moment, his mishap. “Stupid. I was checking to make sure I had my glasses in my pocket.”

“Did you?”

“I did.”

“You don’t have them now though.”

“They fell out,” said Jules.

“Ah. Over there.”

The glasses had fallen into the shadow of the exhaust pipe of a parked van. Jules couldn’t see them, but she rose to fetch them and returned them to Jules. They were new glasses and they weren’t cheap. He put them on, and blinked at his rescuer.

“Funny. I thought you were older,” he said, and immediately apologized. “I’m a little shaken up,” he explained.

She nodded. “Did you hit your head?”

“No. I hit my hand and my knee.”

She helped him lift his bicycle from the road, and together they stepped up on the sidewalk. He leaned against a low wrought-iron fence and took a deep breath.

“You don’t look well,” she said. “Come with me. I’m just around the corner. See?”

She pointed to a house on a narrow side street—indeed, right around the corner. Jules had seen it before. It was a massive, detached red-brick Victorian with a much higher fence than the one Jules leaned on, containing a thick garden that made a veil for the wide front porch.

Jules allowed himself a moment of erotic speculation as she led him through the gate and garden, toward the steps to the front door. The pain in his knee was getting worse and a different agony was growing in his left shoulder. It was not debilitating, not by any means. But he would call the studio, and tell them he’d had an accident and would be in later or possibly not at all, depending on the seriousness of his injuries . . . or whatever the Fates had in store for him.

She took the bike from him and lifted it one-handed to find it a spot against the porch railing. She was strong—Jules’s bicycle was an older, less expensive, steel-framed model, by no means lightweight. With his shoulder the way it was, he certainly wouldn’t have managed it without difficulty.

He followed her inside to a large sitting room, with dark hardwood floors and dark-stained beams across the ceiling. Above the fireplace hung a wide canvas, depicting a tableau from mythology of a man holding the severed head of a snake-haired Medusa. Theseus or Perseus, one or the other.

She disappeared into the kitchen for a moment and returned with a glass of water. He drank it down in two gulps, using his right hand. He wasn’t sure he could lift his left at all. He should likely go to a hospital.

And yet . . . the painting fascinated him. Theseus, or Perseus, was facing off against a crowd of men, amid what seemed to be a celebration gone horribly awry. The men, half naked and carrying spears and small swords, seemed at once outraged by and terrified of the head, dangling by its serpentine mane like a lantern. Where the deathly gaze from the Gorgon’s head fell, flesh turned gray as stone.

She took his empty glass from him and set it down on the floor beside his chair.

“Ovid,” she said.

“I’m sorry?”

“It’s a scene from Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Perseus”—Aha! Perseus!—“is confronting disruptive suitors to the beautiful Andromeda at court. He lifts the severed head of Medusa and in so doing transforms all of them to stone. Even the last, begging Phineas, wasn’t to be spared.”

“It looks very old.”

“It’s supposed to. It isn’t, though. Richard painted that in 1978.”

“Richard?”

She nodded, a somber expression on her face. “You couldn’t really call it a forgery, because it’s not that good. It’s based on a painting by Giordano. Which is old. Richard used to do a lot of that in those middle days. Copying.”

“Richard. Is he your father?”

“No.” She sat down and crossed a leg, and let her skirt fall away from her knee. It was, thought Jules, a very nice knee, with smooth skin that reflected the morning sunlight like a metal, or a fine-polished hardwood.

“You’re not very bright,” she said.

“I—I’m sorry?”

“You should be going to a hospital. But you won’t.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you won’t.” She smiled prettily. “You’re hoping for sex.”

Now that put things out in the open. Jules didn’t respond immediately. Was he hoping for sex? He had certainly allowed himself to consider the possibility and even reviewing his circumstances and injuries, thought that possibility far from disagreeable. But this Richard fellow, the painter . . . what about him? Jules removed his glasses with his good hand, and wondered then: was she hoping for sex?

And that, finally, was how he answered. Was she?

Her eyes narrowed, but in a good-humored way. “I worry about that shoulder.”

And then she laughed, and so did Jules and that, he guessed, was that.

The house was a good deal bigger than it appeared from the street, but Jules wasn’t surprised—the looming old Victorians in this part of town had a way of extending and expanding rearward, and upward, and even perhaps into the earth, in a way that often seemed to defy geometry. He and Helen—yes, Helen! What a thing! Jules and Helen were married!—used to make a weekend hobby of crashing real estate open houses in these neighborhoods, to snoop at homes they might never afford and could barely imagine owning if they could.

This place was not so well appointed as those, but it had a similar scale. They climbed a wide set of stairs bound by a thick oak railing, into an upper hall that stretched and bent toward the rear of the house and presented another staircase, this one narrower and steeper, turning back on itself, leading up to an attic bedroom that was more of a suite unto itself—with bath and sitting area and a vast bed, all lit by a bright skylight and including a walkout into a rooftop deck.

The walls of the corridors and along the staircases were painted as brightly as the first floor, and along them were hung more canvases. Were these also Richard’s work? Jules asked as they climbed and she answered yes, that was right. More copies? Not all, she said. But a number of them. Jules didn’t linger at the canvases but he certainly took note of the variety there. A nude, brown-skinned woman reclined on a blanket; participants in what must have been a witches’ Sabbath cavorted among devils, around a tree whose limbs formed a great beast; fruit rotted on a table next to a lopsided human skull; a harvest of pumpkins and squashes and melons that fell from the arms of a big-bosomed farm maid (Jules admired the visual pun); nude men conversed at the base of gigantic ruins that might have been Greek or Mesopotamian while the sky roiled with thunderheads to dwarf them all.

The walls of her bedroom were not suitable for paintings. They folded inward to parallel the steep-sloped rooftop above. In the place of painted artworks dangled various interesting mobile sculptures—some low enough that Jules had to bend around them as he moved to join her, where she had already arranged herself on the bed, itself set precisely beneath an oblong skylight.

“Take care,” she warned as he removed first his shirt and then his trousers and, trying not to wince as he pulled a pant leg unstuck from the congealed blood at his knee, slid against the smooth, cool flesh of her hip.

Had he struck his head after all? wondered Jules as in the darkened room some hours after he hastily untangled himself from the sheets and groped his way to the toilet. There, he emptied the contents of his stomach and clutched the cool porcelain to steady his equilibrium.

No. He hadn’t struck his head. He had caught a scent of something—sweetly corrupt, with a fecal whiff to it . . . and something other . . .

And it had flipped his stomach. He flushed the toilet and with his good arm pushed himself back to his haunches, then raised his head, and cautiously sniffed, and (with his good shoulder) shrugged to himself. Whatever he had smelled was gone now.

She was still asleep when he stepped out of the toilet, underneath a canopy of stars that shone through the skylight. Jules squinted up at them, and wondered that there were ever so many. He couldn’t remember when he’d seen such stars here in town.

Jules thought he was feeling a good deal better after the business in the toilet. He was, as he thought of it, feeling quite peckish. Odd, given that he had just vomited; reasonable, given how he’d spent the afternoon. So he gathered his trousers from where they’d fallen at the foot of the bed, found his shirt where he’d draped it over the back of a rocking chair, and made his way carefully down those treacherous stairs.

He stopped at the bottom, amid all those paintings, and listened. Had he set the chair rocking upstairs? Was there a songbird somewhere in the house? Perhaps a kitten?

“Puss puss,” he whispered.

There was no answer; the house was quiet again.

Jules felt his way along the banister and down the stairs to the main floor. He stood a moment in the hall that connected between front stoop, living room, and kitchen, and winced as a board creaked underfoot. And there was that mewling sound again . . . like a kitten, but not so tiny.

Jules swallowed hard—there was that, and the scent again.

Jules thought about turning back upstairs, making for the second-floor bath, when he saw movement down the hallway in the kitchen: a shadow, much larger than a kitten—quite a large shadow indeed—reordered itself at the counter.

—Well good evening, said the shadow.

“Hello,” said Jules, and introduced himself, and wondered aloud if this might be Richard to whom he was speaking. It was. Richard shifted off the stool, and stepped into a darker corner of the kitchen.

—Are you an intruder, Jules? Or a visitor? You look as though you’ve gone a couple of rounds, one way or another.

“Oh,” said Jules, “I’m a visitor, I think.” He explained his bicycle accident. Richard listened, and when the story was finished wondered whether Jules intended to visit a hospital.

—I mention it because you don’t look well, said Richard.

Jules fidgeted with his hands. He didn’t know quite what to say to that. He wasn’t sure how unwell he was, but he was certainly uneasy: he had just left Richard’s wife upstairs sleeping after having, as Richard had put it, “gone a couple of rounds” with her. Part of what Richard saw was doubtless the telltale of Jules’s simple anxiety. But it was only a part.

“There’s an unusual smell,” Jules finally said.

—I’ve been told it doesn’t agree with everyone, said Richard. Just a moment.

The faucet in the sink turned on and off, and presently Jules found a damp washcloth in his hand.

—Hold this to your nose and mouth as you inhale, said Richard. Remove it as you exhale. Yes, like that.

“Thank you, Richard,” said Jules, and put the cloth back over his face.

—Not at all. Now take a deep breath through that damp rag, and when you’ve a good lung-full, tell me the rest of it.

The cloth did an excellent job taking care of the stink. Now, it was all anxiety.

“Your wife was very kind to me,” said Jules, and then added (delicately, he thought): “I hope everything’s all right.”

—Why shouldn’t it be? But tell me, Jules, did she tell you she was my wife?

Jules drew a deep, dewy breath. She hadn’t. She’d said she wasn’t his daughter. But she hadn’t said anything about her and Richard’s relationship beyond that. He shook his head no.

—I’m pleased to hear that she was kind to you. You seem like a gentle soul.

“She’s not your wife?”

—We aren’t married. She didn’t tell you anything?

“She told me about the paintings,” said Jules. “They’re very beautiful.”

—That’s kind of you to say, Jules. Some are better than others.

“I like them very much.”

—Did you have relations with her?

And there it was. An interrogation, as blunt as her invitation that afternoon. Jules set the cloth on the edge of a counter and steeled himself.

“I’m sorry,” said Jules. “I did, yes.”

He took a deep breath, his first without the aid of Richard’s damp cloth. He half thought, half hoped the stink would make him retch and give him some excuse to escape this conversation. But Jules seemed to have grown accustomed to it in its brief absence. It smelled a bit like yogurt . . . no worse than a strong cheese.

—Do you intend to remain here?

“Remain? I hadn’t thought . . .”

—Too soon, said Richard. It’s too soon to say. She hasn’t broached the subject with you yet. I see, yes. Well when she does, it is something you ought to consider, with great care. Do you have family in town?

“I suppose,” said Jules.

—But you don’t give them much thought.

Well, there was . . . but. “No,” Jules said.

—Are you an artist?

Jules shook his head emphatically. “I work at a design house. With Photoshop and so on. I’d hardly call it art.”

—Modest.

“Not like your art, I mean.”

Richard leaned and reached across the kitchen to take the washcloth from the counter. He tossed it into the sink.

—I don’t know if my art is the measure you want to hold your own work against, Jules. I fear my best years are behind me. Oh, I’ve a following—quite a rabid following, dare I say. But they . . . they are unworldly.

As he spoke, Richard reached deep into a wine rack and pulled a bottle out, and, driving his thumbnail deep into its cork, opened it.

—Fetch a pair of glasses, said Richard, indicating another shelf.

Jules obliged, and when Richard had finished pouring took a sip from his. It tasted rich, sweet . . . earthy. Jules thought it might be an Amarone. Or one of those eastern European blends . . .

—She is going to invite you to stay. She’s been planning to for quite a while, I expect. She is often lonely, in the long nights of my absence.

“We only just met this morning,” said Jules, and began to recite the story of his bicycle accident again. Richard interrupted.

—We’ve all had our accidents, Jules.

“Of course. I’m sorry.”

—I hope you don’t think that I’m angry. Richard slurped his wine noisily.

—I am not. But I do wonder. You haven’t gone to the hospital. The way you’re favoring that shoulder . . . it’s odd that you haven’t.

Jules took another sip of wine. “I suppose,” he said.

—Yes. I suppose it is. Jules? Would you do something for me?

“Of course.”

—Would you flip on the light? The switch is on the wall to the left of the doorway you came in.

Jules got up and found the switch. “There,” he said, and squinted across the kitchen. Richard was refilling his own glass, squinting and blinking himself. His lips pulled back in a tooth-baring smile, and he reached forward with the wine bottle, neck first. Jules let him refill his own glass.

—You’re taking this well, said Richard.

“Sure,” said Jules.

Richard dipped his tongue into his own wine and lapped some up. He gave Jules a look that might have been appraising.

—Tell me what you see right now, Jules.

“Well, it’s a lovely kitchen.”

—It’s a bit of a mess.

That was true. Jules had obviously interrupted Richard in a late-night snack. The pink marble counters—well, he guessed they were pink—would need a scrubbing before anyone tried to make breakfast.

—But that’s not what I was asking. Tell me what you see when you look at me.

Jules squinted. “You’re quite a big fellow. You lift weights?”

—No. What about my skin now?

“Perhaps it’s the light in here. But it seems that you don’t get much sun.”

—That’s true. Anything else?

Jules looked away, and took a deep drink of the wine. “Just the usual.”

—You know, I had a bit of an accident too, said Richard.

Jules felt himself flush.

—Once. Not really an accident, I suppose. Although your accident wasn’t one either. So there you are.

Jules wondered if Richard might not be getting into his cups. He didn’t remark on it, but set his own glass down.

—In those days, I was working in illustration—design—like you. Not on a computer. I painted covers for magazines, storybooks, and drew illustrations in pen and ink, sometimes charcoal, for the stories inside. They were macabre illustrations. For macabre stories.

Jules thought of the painting of that witches’ Sabbath, the skull on the table, and nodded. “I can see that,” he said.

Richard slurped more wine and poured the remains of the bottle into his nearly empty glass.

—Can you? Jules—May I call you Jules? You are not native, are you? To New England, I mean. No. Your accent betrays you. But where, now . . . ?

Jules was from Montreal originally, and said so.

—Canada. Young country.

“Compared to here,” said Jules.

—Damn right compared to here. How did you come to be here, Jules? And don’t tell me you fell off a bicycle.

“School,” said Jules. And along with that was Helen, and the wedding, and the job at the Herald, and the layoff and the more recent business. He didn’t go into those details, though, even when Richard pressed him on it, even when he pressed to the point of unpleasantness. It might have gone beyond, but before it did, Richard stopped himself short. He looked past Jules, into the dark over his shoulder.

“I didn’t expect you back for weeks,” she said.

Jules winced as he turned in his chair. She was behind him, wearing a short silk robe drawn loose at her waist, leaning against the frame of the doorway to the hall.

—I gathered, said Richard.

“What happened?”

—Finished early. Scrawfinch’d had enough.

“Did you get what you needed from him?”

—Got what I could. It’ll do.

“Scrawfinch is one of Richard’s models,” she said, addressing Jules.

“I see.”

“He is back to using models these days. For life drawing.”

Richard snorted.

—Life drawing, he said.

She gave a half-wise smile and stepped around Jules, into the kitchen. She appraised the mess.

“Ah. You’ve already eaten.”

Richard shrugged, and she looked between Jules and Richard, and the empty bottle.

“And you two have been into the wine, I see. Do you think that’s wise, Jules? I thought I heard you at the toilet. Are you sure you didn’t hit your head?”

Jules was sure and said so. She opened the refrigerator and removed a bottle of Chardonnay.

“I trust you don’t mind if I join you then.”

Richard gestured to an empty stool. She fetched her own glass, twisted the bottleneck, and poured herself a generous helping. Richard swilled his glass empty and held it out to be filled. Jules put his fingers over the top of his, to show he was fine for the moment.

“Well you’ve both had a chance to chat,” she said. “That’s good. What do you think, Richard?”

—What does it matter?

“It matters.”

—Pretty, said Richard. Pleasant.

“Do you think you’d like to paint him?”

—Don’t be stupid. She’s being stupid, he said to Jules.

“It was a thought,” she said. “It might give you something to do together. I’m going to ask him to stay.”

Jules smiled. That straightforward, put-it-out-there bluntness seemed to be the way business got done in this house.

“Thank you,” said Jules, as he thought how refreshing it all was, then raised his glass as in a toast and drank down its dregs in a single gulp.

“More wine, Jules?”

She didn’t wait for an answer before pouring.

Jules’s shoulder had stiffened up by Saturday, and that afternoon she presented him with a sling for it.

“At some point you’ll need to exercise it. For now: rest. Let it heal.”

The sling was made from a brightly colored swathe of linen—it looked cut from an old hippie skirt. She placed it round his neck, and with her help he slid his arm into the loop. It hurt fiercely, but once he settled it did indeed feel better.

His bicycle was gone. He noticed that Friday evening, the day before the gift of the sling, stepping out onto the front porch for a breath of air, to admire the sculptures, maybe take a walk (the pain in his still-stiffening shoulder making bicycling unappealing) to work off dinner, clear his head from the wine. But the bicycle was gone, probably stolen. He thought about calling the police and reporting it, but she said that was, all things considered, unwise.

“They always ask questions,” she said, leading him back indoors, “and you probably don’t have good answers for them, and you know how they get when you don’t have the right answer.”

She had an odd look about her as she said that, causing Jules to suspect that she might have had a better idea than he how the police could get, faced with wrong answers. But something else in that look told him not to probe too deeply. So on Saturday evening, arm swaddled in tie-dye, he asked Richard about it: had she ever been in trouble with the police?

—Not the police. But the law, yes. You might say that. It was a long time ago.

Jules was sitting on the stairs to the cellar. Richard was crouched a few steps below, as far as he would come up when he was working. It was only the second time that Jules had seen Richard since that first night. His studio was down below, and he was at work. He mostly came up for wine, and he explained the second time he was up that he prided himself on not doing that on consecutive days.

“Can I ask what sort of trouble?”

Richard snorted.

—Big trouble. They were going to kill her.

“Kill her! What did she . . . what was she accused of?”

—She bewitched my great-great-grandfather. He was wed to another. She used her art to bring him to her and take his seed. My own great-grandmother swore against her. And she was to be hanged.

Jules thought about that for a moment. “How . . . how old is she?”

—Not polite, young Jules, to ask a lady’s age. Damn, you who don’t even know her name!

And at that, Richard threw back his head and howled—and Jules, catching on finally, joined him. They both gasped, and Richard steadied himself as Jules slapped his knee and wiped tears from his eyes.

“You almost had me,” said Jules.

There was no television at the house and no Internet either. There was a radio but it was contained in the belly of an old cabinet-style hi-fi in the living room and made inaccessible by a pair of heavy soapstone carvings on its lid. The only books were the dozen or so locked in a glassed case in her bedroom: first editions, she said when he asked.

It didn’t matter. Jules wasn’t bored. How could he be? He was, he remarked to her on Sunday morning from a tangle of sheets and limbs, entirely swept up. He had not felt this way in many years, if he ever had. It was (and she nodded in earnest agreement as he said it) “a species of joy.”

And on those hours that she left him to his own devices, Jules had the paintings with which to engage himself. Copies they may have been . . . but what copies! It was like living in the Museum of Fine Art, or the Louvre perhaps, with the majesty of the ages spread before him. Jules could sit in front of a single canvas for hours, his eyes tracing the forms that Richard had so masterfully transcribed . . . communing with art, he imagined, as thoroughly as he communed with flesh when she took him to her bed.

He wondered, as he looked, about the impulses that drove Richard through this copyist phase of his career. There was, as Richard himself had remarked about his commercial work for magazines on the night of their first meeting, an element of the macabre in many of the works, but by no means all. There were works of exuberant impressionism, copies of Cubist masterpieces, some more modern realism—and religious-themed works—many of them depicting the young Christ at play under the watchful eye of His mother.

When next he met Richard—on a cold afternoon where rain and wind battered the windows and rattled the bare branches outside—he asked: What did Richard mean in attacking such different styles and periods of artwork?

—I am attempting to broaden myself, said Richard, after thinking a moment. No, that’s trite shit. I am working to educate myself, I suppose, and my patrons also. I am more and more disposed toward a deathly sameness . . . and they know nothing more.

Jules thought about telling Richard that he might be being too hard on himself, but he stopped himself. For who was Jules to give this advice? Regardless of Richard’s encouragements, Jules knew he was no artist. He had never had to consider the question of whether he were being bold or original enough, exploring the depths and heights of experience anew or simply regurgitating his last project as if it were his most recent meal.

“What are you disposed to?” asked Jules instead. “You and your patrons?”

Richard bared the tips of his teeth in what might have been a grin. He regarded Jules closely.

—You are curious?

Jules swallowed, and nodded.

“Sure,” he whispered.

—Pornography, Jules. When it’s added up, nothing more than cheap, vile pornography.

Jules actually had a rather high opinion of pornography. Made with care, he believed it to be neither cheap nor vile. It was to Jules a reliable companion, a liberating force. Indeed, over his time at the house he had taken a certain pride in applying many of its lessons in the upstairs bedroom. But he could see by his glaring and fidgeting that Richard did not feel the same.

“Can I see it?” he asked when Richard seemed to have gathered himself. “I am really curious. I’d like to judge for myself.”

It took more convincing than that, of course, but not as much as one would have thought.

Richard led the way, bounding through the back of the kitchen and down to his studio. By the time Jules had reached the bottom of the long stairway to the house’s cellars, Richard was waiting impatiently, almost giddily, rocking on his heels.

Jules had peered down from the top steps, never set foot this far below. From the kitchen, floor beams obscured all but a small area of poured concrete, and the dim light on the stairs didn’t reach far beyond. Now that he set foot, his eyes adjusted and he apprehended a greater sense of the space. They stood in space wider than Jules could credit. There were pillars, hard to say how many, made of a black brick that seemed very old. The nearest formed the corners of a square about the stairs. Beyond those pillars, Jules could see clearly eight more, forming a larger square beyond those. Each of those twelve pillars held four sconces, bearing ropy melts of candles that burned hot, with tiny blue flames.

Beyond those eight, James might have seen more, by those candle flames at least—except that he was not certain that they were held to anything, given as they appeared to drift in the murk as he watched them.

—You are becoming unnerved, Richard noted. Jules didn’t disagree. Richard made a grunting noise and hurried past Jules back up the stairs. There was a slamming sound and at once the light from the kitchen, and the light over the stairs too, was gone.

—It is too dark now, yes? Richard called from the top of the stairs.

“Open the door please.” The candle flames provided scant illumination on their own—just enough to mark themselves as star points.

—You stay still. I will come for you.

Presently Jules felt Richard’s hand on his elbow.

—Your eyes will adjust.

As Richard led him between the flames, Jules’s eyes indeed did adjust. He saw shapes in the dark—tall rectangles that seemed to stretch to the sky; a great round stone in a rough stone wall, a sconce with a flame in its middle that cast radial beams to its edge: what Jules first thought might be a man, tall and gaunt and wearing a wide-brimmed hat, but stood so still that it must have been a statue. They came upon an archway—one high enough to lead Jules to understand that despite encountering no stairs or even a discernible slope, they had at some point descended deeper under the house—and passed through it. Here the dark grew by degree so that once again, Jules was blind.

“How do you paint down here?” Jules’s voice echoed back at him.

—With brushes and pigment. Ha!

Richard’s voice echoed in the black chamber too—but its reverberations took on a mewling quality, so that had not Jules known better, he might have thought there might be a chorus of kittens following them.

—You mean to ask how I paint in the absence of light.

“Yes,” said Jules, “that.”

—My eyes have had longer to adjust. Oh—step carefully.

Jules found himself on a metal stairway now, with a handrail that felt rough with rust. It led down only a few steps, and then along a floor that was also metal and bonged under their footfalls. Richard stopped then, and there was a clanking sound as a door opened to reveal a rectangle of the palest light. A cool, damp breeze touched Jules’s cheek. Richard beckoned Jules to follow him.

They emerged through a doorway into what seemed a long corridor, but huge, stretching to the left and the right for some distance. What light there was came in a sickly gray through a shaft in its ceiling spaced between great iron girders, far off in either direction.

—It is a subway tunnel, Richard explained, and pointed to the floor, several feet below the narrow ledge on which they stood. See the tracks?

Jules could, but barely. Rusted iron emerged here and then there, but there was a great deal of detritus there too; what looked like clumps of leaves, branches . . . jumbles of what looked like old fabrics.

“Which line?” Jules asked.

—Oh, said Richard, long forgotten. Come down, if you’re able. Don’t worry—no trains come here these days. Long forgotten.

The two of them climbed to the level of the track, and Richard set off again, fast enough that Jules was soon outpaced. Rationally, Jules knew this shouldn’t matter—there was only one way to go, and sooner or later he was bound to catch up. But as Richard had observed—what must have been only moments before—Jules had become unnerved. His shoulder ached anew, as though the dampness in here had penetrated the damaged cartilage, and he couldn’t take two steps without stumbling over some a twist of cable or a block of wood or a rotted bundle of cloth. His steps were haunted by an awful echo, that strange mewling sound. And further to all that—for the first time in days, Jules realized, he had stepped beyond the confines of her house.

It was as though he were a child, misplaced at night by distracted parents.

The light shifted and grew as he stumbled, and finally, he stepped out into a wider space. The girders extended to his left and his right, and there were those pillars again: touched on each corner with those hot blue flames. The track continued up the middle, and in the very center of the space, there stood an antique tram car, listing to one side, a wheel turned out as though the axle had snapped. Jules thought he spied Richard but as soon as he had, he wasn’t sure: there were several figures moving around the ruined tram, their shadows mingling with the dark gathered at the great chamber’s walls. Richard could have been any of them—or none.

He gave a tentative wave, and called out Richard’s name, and amid a chorus of chirps and squeaks—like cats trying to lure a bird within reach—one of the figures waved back and stepped forward. As he neared, Jules could tell it wasn’t Richard.

—Hello! You are the new fellow?

Jules introduced himself. This fellow was very tall, and although he seemed dressed shabbily, carried himself with a certain grace.

—Yes! Young Jules! Richard said you were on your way. I am Scrawfinch.

“Oh!” Jules smiled and stepped forward, extended his good hand. “Richard’s model!” Scrawfinch took his hand and shook it vigorously. Then Scrawfinch turned and called out to the others that it was Jules, and a small group of them broke off to meet Jules and get a closer look. Scrawfinch introduced them in turn: Crullixer and Abodine, Redwater and Phynius and a smaller fellow who Scrawfinch explained was too old for the business of proper naming. Where was Richard?

—He is at work, said Scrawfinch. Would you care to observe?

“Yes!” said Jules. He explained that he was very curious to see what Richard was up to these days, and that was why he was down here at all, and the six fellows listened while he explained that he had recently moved into Richard’s house under unconventional circumstances.

—Ah, yes. The Queen, said Redwater when Jules was finished.

—She has taken an interest in you, Scrawfinch said and the others nodded sagely.

Jules remarked that he had never heard her called “Queen” before, and Crullixer noted that it was not a title she preferred, and, snickering, suggested that he not repeat it outside present company. Jules promised he would not and then, wincing as Scrawfinch clapped him on his bad shoulder, followed the six as they led the way to Richard and his work.

It was quite near, really—beyond the busted and burning tram, contained within a tall arch at the edge of the station, spread glistening in the firelight across a span of brick wall as wide as a barn.

—Well what do you think? Richard called. He was perched atop a high wooden stepladder, a palette in one hand and a brush in the other.

“It’s kinetic,” said Jules.

—Weasel word, said Richard. Tell us what you see. Let us try that.

—Yes, said Scrawfinch, describe it.

—In great detail, added Abodine.

Jules drew a breath, and swallowed hard at the smell. “It’s a subway platform, I think. It might be this one that we’re in. Am I right? There is a great crowd of people who are surrounding the tram car in the middle.”

—And what are they doing? asked Redwater.

“They seem quite anxious to board it, and some of them are doing so. But there’s very little room inside, and so there, that one is helping passengers out,” said Jules, pointing to a well-built figure drawing a small, squalling child through a shattered window. “Why, Scrawfinch—that muscular fellow looks like you! Richard, did Scrawfinch model for this painting?”

Richard nodded, and Scrawfinch, nodding also, stood a little straighter.

“I really like it,” said Jules. “There’s a realism . . . no, an intensity to it that I haven’t seen in your work back at the house. The fellow who’s climbed on the tram roof—he looks as though he might leap out of the picture.”

—That’s me! said Abodine, although Jules didn’t see it. The fellow raising his arms toward the power line overhead had a long black mane, and Abodine had just a few wisps of white hair trailing down the back of his neck. Jules wasn’t about to point that out, of course, but he obviously wasn’t any good at hiding his skepticism because Scrawfinch immediately explained that this had taken place quite a number of years ago when they had all been quite a bit younger.

—’Twas a great day, croaked the one too old for naming.

—Nearly the end of us, said Redwater.

—Thank the Queen, said Crullixer, and the old one muttered “Queen bitch,” and Richard gave them both a stern look.

—That’ll come back to me, growled Richard.

“Wait,” said Jules. He removed his glasses, wiped the lenses on the sling, and replaced them. “I think I may be misinterpreting the scene.”

—Do you now? the old one purred.

“It’s—it’s not fellows, waiting to get onto the tram now, is it? No. They’re unclothed, basically—and the proportions are a bit different, aren’t they? Their legs—those there, are jointed like a dog’s, right? And their faces . . . well, it’s hard to be sure.” Jules removed his glasses again and repeated the procedure.

—It happened a long time past, said Scrawfinch. The tunnels had been our lands, our nation, for a night so very long. We dined well from the boneyards over our heads. When the nation above pierced those tunnels . . . It was an affront.

—An affront and a feast! Redwater said.

Jules stepped close to the mural, to the spot where Richard had painted two men within the tram, desperately trying to hold the door shut as three of the huge creatures outside pried it open with long, iron-black claws. One of the beasts bore an uncanny resemblance to Crullixer.

“This happened,” said Jules.

—Nearly a hundred years past, said Scrawfinch. We killed more than any of us can count. A feast. And it would have been the end of us . . . they would have poured gas and fire into our tunnels and killed us for our excess.

“If not for your Queen,” said Jules. He turned away from the painting now, to look on the fellows who’d brought him. They were quite large—even the smallest, oldest one was a head higher than Jules. They grinned at him beneath great snouts, around strong, tearing jaws.

—She helped the world above to forget us, said Scrawfinch. And her grandson—with his art, he helps us remember.

—Makes our blood boil for it all over, offered Abodine, trembling now about the shoulders.

—Richard’s a genius, said Redwater.

—Genius! cried Abodine, and Crullixer said something that might have been the same word, though it sounded like nothing so much as the screech of a tomcat.

Phynius, silent until then, opened his own jaws wide and joined the caterwaul, lifted his great clawed hands, and, with a finger, ran a talon along Jules’s arm. It was a curious feeling that amplified—first a tickling, like the caress of a feather, and then a tearing sensation, as the tip of Phynius’s nail dug into the soft flesh of his shoulder—the unstoppable fascination of watching blood well, and run, and sheet down his pale flesh.

“Richard?” Jules stepped back, and Phynius withdrew too, regarded the gory tip of his claw, and then split his jaws and drew a great black tongue along it. Jules might have fled then. But he was stopped by a leg of the tall ladder. “Richard,” he said, his voice rising as the pain blossomed white-hot in his shoulder, moved with a sizzling veracity along his arm, “I think I need to go back.”

When he turned, Richard had already started down the stepladder from his terrifying mural.

He called out to the creatures that surrounded them. He shrieked at them. It dawned on Jules that Richard may have shrieked at them before, may have done so to Jules . . . that there might have been quite rather a lot more shrieking than Jules had credited over his time here.

It had its effect. They stepped away, Phynius turning so that his bloody claw was hidden by his huge torso, like a precious, purloined toy.

Richard reached down to touch Jules’s shoulder, and when he spoke, it was in tones decidedly quieter. Jules couldn’t make out precisely what he was saying though. Whatever it was, it seemed kindly . . . a cooing that was gentle—pitying, perhaps? Disappointed?

Jules turned away from the others, toward Richard—and looked at him properly, and considered that question that he now realized he had never answered properly:

—Tell me what you see when you look at me?

Had he words, he might have said: I see an immense beast, with terrible jaws and a fierce vulpine snout, and cracked, yellowed tusks—and eyes glittering bright beneath a thick Neanderthal brow. I see arms like a pale, subterranean ape, and claws black with ash and grave dirt . . . a death-white, withered cock dangling senseless between legs bent thrice.

Or he might have said this: I see a thin wisp of smoke, of Richard, swirling about a bright, devilish witch-fire stoked by his once-devoted grandmother, a creature of bone and sinew and lust, lovelier than Andromeda and older too.

But there were no words, certainly not the old words, that Jules could summon in this place.

Richard seemed to understand, though, and indicating a smile, he beckoned Jules to follow—across the forgotten platform and around the tram, through another great archway and into an almost interstellar dark.

“It was . . . absurd. I can’t explain it.”

Helen agreed with the first point, but told Jules that he needed to work harder on the second.

He sighed, and put the sketchpad they had given him on the hospital side table. “All right. I had been thinking about it for a long time I suppose. I’m not exactly getting younger, right? Nor you. And work . . . well, it’s work. Not an avocation. Nothing that I’ve done means much, does it?”

So Helen wondered aloud: did Jules want to run off, disappear as he had? She knew things hadn’t been going well with them, she said: she could feel it in her bones that matters were deteriorating. But was he leaving?

“It was circumstance. I—” he thought about the morning, the eyeglasses, the van, and he realized that he truly didn’t want to go over it again, not again. That was part of the problem.

“I met someone. Some people.”

She stood at that point, shuffled her chair, and stepped around the vacant hospital bed in the ward room, to the window. She told Jules she had been worried when he hadn’t called, when he hadn’t appeared at work, hadn’t arrived at home. She feared something terrible had befallen him. Of all the things she feared, though, she hadn’t feared what he seemed to be saying.

She had thought better of him.

“You wanted me to explain. All right. It’s been what, a week now since they found me. I’d been under the city, in a deep tunnel.” He grinned at the thought of it. “A secret tunnel. I saw things there—things that I hadn’t imagined before, pieces of art that were . . . sublime? Numinous? They spoke to me . . . that was the thing. But the artist who made them . . .” Jules shook his head, his grin vanishing as he did, “. . . it was no good. I couldn’t stay. I didn’t have the ‘art’ in me. It wasn’t going to be safe. He wanted to free me. I don’t know. We were beyond words, beyond language. But I knew I couldn’t stay.”

Jules pressed the button on the control of his hospital bed, and it tilted up to give him a better view. She brought a hand to her face, so her fingers touched on her brow as her neck tilted forward.

“So he left me outside. And the police I think, brought me here.”

She said that was so. He had been ill; malnourished, injured, delirious with hypothermia. He had an infection of some sort. He had worms. But he was, the doctors said, on the mend. She put it to him:

Was Jules ready to come home now?

He shook his head again. “I’m different now,” he said. “I’m not going back to my job. I don’t know if I can come back to you either. I’ve got to make myself worthy.”

She suggested that might take some time, but Jules said that she might have misunderstood. He wasn’t talking about worthiness of Helen. He needed to be worthy of Richard. And of his Queen. Of her.

Ah, she said. It’s like that. And although he knew on some levels that it was like that, Jules attempted to convince her that it was also far more than that. The walk through the strange, black lands beneath the city had solidified matters. Indeed, it was only as he and Richard delved deeper through those un-visible cathedral halls, the bone-shard caverns, and past the bilious lakes, that Jules saw, truly saw, what he might grasp, what he might become, and how much greater that was than the fading attraction of her cool, smooth flesh, her obliviating embrace.

He had been trying to recapture that numinous element, with some success, since they had pulled him from the ditch water, brought him to this hospital, and to calm him, given him the rudimentary materials—a pencil, a pad of paper—that he demanded.

“Look, this is what I’ve been working on,” said Jules. He gathered the sketchpad from the table, opened it to the last page, and handed it to her.

“I feel as though I am finally beginning to see,” he said.

Helen looked at Jules’s drawing, and gagged. She took a breath, and held it a heartbeat, finally letting it out slowly through pursed, bloodless lips.

Then she shut the pad, set it back in Jules’s lap, and in clear, quiet tones, asked him for that divorce.

GLASSES

Brian Evenson

Geir had never worn glasses, had never needed them, and then, suddenly, at forty, she did. Not every moment of every day, not for everything, but definitely for reading. As soon as she’d gotten them, she wondered how she’d managed to read without them.

At first they made her a little dizzy, the world seemingly moving at a different pace within the frames. She put her glasses on and off, put them in their case, took them out again. But then her brain adjusted and just ignored the world as it was and she didn’t notice the difference so much anymore. After a while, it was just easier to leave them on and look over the top of them when she didn’t need them.

“You could get bifocals,” said her husband. “Or progressives. Then you wouldn’t have to look over your glasses.” He didn’t have bifocals—he did the same thing she did, pushing his glasses down to the end of his nose and looking over the top of them—and she had said the same thing to him countless times. At first she thought he was teasing her, but then decided that, no, he seemed to think he was uttering something he’d thought of on his own.

“I just bought these,” she told him, just as he had always told her. “Maybe when I need a new pair, I’ll get progressives.”

Geir considered herself a liberal, though if she’d been asked to explain what exactly that meant she would have been hard-pressed to answer. She voted, she supported causes, she cared about the world.

It was in support of one of these causes, to call for the resignation of a mayor who had overlooked the industrial poisoning of his city’s water supply, that she found herself on a train on the way to a rally. Her husband couldn’t go, he had to work, but he considered himself a liberal as well—he would have come if he didn’t have to work.

So it was just her. She’d envisioned the train trip as a kind of party, the train full of people like her. But, in fact, the train was mostly empty. One car had a few older men sitting across from one another playing an incomprehensible variation on gin rummy. Another had two businessmen, one at the front end of the car, the other at the back, dressed identically and reading the same newspaper, turning the page with apparent synchronicity.

She went from car to car, her placard slung over her shoulder, but she was the only one carrying a placard. Maybe everyone else had carpooled?

In the end, she asked the conductor. He just removed his hat, scratched the crown of his head.

“What rally?” he finally asked.

And, after she explained, “Lady, what train do you think you’re on anyways?”

She’d gotten on the wrong train. She waited anxiously next to the doors for the next station to arrive so she could get off and take a train back and try again.

But by the time they were finally pulling into the next station it was almost noon, and she knew it was too late to get back for even part of the rally. And when the train stopped she realized she was in a car that didn’t have a platform below it, she was too far back. She had to leave her placard behind and rush up and through the doors between cars and even then barely made it in time, jumping through the train doors just as they closed, her glasses slipping off her nose in the process and falling down onto the tracks below.

Once the train had departed, she climbed down and examined what was left of the glasses. There was nothing salvageable. The next train, she was told by the schedule posted beside the deserted ticket booth, wouldn’t arrive until two. She settled down to wait for it. She had a book, but didn’t have her glasses. She tried to read, but even with the book held at arm’s length she had to mostly guess at what the words were. She sighed and put the book back in her purse, went to find something to eat.

The town was small and dusty, seemed to consist of little more than a single street, the buildings all of an identical pale red brick. The only place to eat was the back counter of the drugstore, which just served milk, apple juice, and tuna sandwiches wrapped in plastic wrap, all taken from a small square fridge. The proprietor was a thin, elderly gentleman who wore thick glasses and who seemed surprised to see her.

She had a glass of milk and a tuna sandwich. Neither was delicious but both were edible. The proprietor stayed at the counter and whenever a crumb fell onto it rather than her plate he would wipe it away. Him standing there made Geir nervous enough that she felt she had to strike up a conversation with him.

“I’m Geir,” she said, and stuck out her hand, the one not holding the sandwich.

“Geir,” he said, his voice old and broken, slightly foreign. “Geir. Isn’t that a man’s name?”

“Is it?” she said. She didn’t know. All she knew was it was her name.

The man nodded. “Perhaps there was a mistake in the hospital,” he said, “some sort of switching of babies by a malevolent nurse.” He said it in such a bland, benevolent way, almost as if it were a joke, that she had a hard time being upset. She just shrugged.

When she had finished, she paid and headed for the door. On the way out, she realized that one wall of the drugstore was covered with eyeglasses. She went closer, squinted at them, realized the prices were remarkably low, realized too that there was no glass in any of the frames.

“You do prescription lenses?” she asked.

“What is your prescription?” he asked, and when she told him he nodded. “Reading glasses. Not in all styles,” he said. “But in many of them.”

She chose out some frames and brought them to him. He examined them closely, then nodded. “Reading glasses,” he said again.

On impulse she said, “Not reading, progressives.”

He shook his head. “No progressives.”

“Bifocals then,” she said.

His hand, which had been reaching for a box, stopped. “Biofocals,” he said, adding an extra vowel.

“Bifocals,” she said, correcting him.

But he seemed not to have heard her. “You want biofocals?” he said. “Are you certain you want biofocals?” And since Geir had had a grandmother who had said “heliocopter” whenever she meant “helicopter” and didn’t notice the difference when you corrected her, she simply said yes.

The man was behind the counter, rummaging, talking to himself. “Biofocals,” he was saying, “she says she wants biofocals, but does she really?” He lifted his head and looked at Geir with a piercing gaze. “Woman with a man’s name,” he said, “I will make you reading glasses.”

“No,” said Geir stubbornly, “bifocals.”

He shook his head, pursed his lips, and stared at her. But when she continued to meet his gaze he finally looked away and shrugged and disappeared through a door beside the wall of glasses.

For a time Geir thought he was gone for good, that he’d preferred simply to exit and not reappear rather than making bifocals for her. She kept checking her watch. She wandered about the store, but there was nothing that caught her attention. She was just about to leave when he reappeared with a case in his hand.

“There you are,” he said. “Biofocals.”

But when she tried to take them, he kept hold of the case. “You must know: you will see, but be seen as well. Perhaps reading glasses instead?” he said. But then he let go and she had them and was heading back to the platform to catch her train. Only after the train had already begun pulling away did she realize she’d never paid for the glasses, and wondered why the proprietor hadn’t tried to stop her.

Unlike the other train, this one was full. All the seats were taken and the aisles too were full with people standing, supporting themselves by grabbing the seatbacks.

As she couldn’t sit and read, she left the glasses case in her purse. The ride back was elbowy and hot, hellish really, and by the time she got back to her hometown station she knew that even if she could have gone on and gotten to the rally in time, she wouldn’t have. She was exhausted.

She climbed off the train and made her way to her apartment. Almost four. Her husband would be home in an hour or so.

She lay down on the bed and closed her eyes, just for a moment, just to catch a second’s rest.

When she awoke, her husband was there, standing over her, saying her name.

“Geir,” he was saying, “Geir, Geir.”

“Isn’t that a man’s name?” she said, half awake, and then remembered it was her name. For a moment his face was entirely without expression and then he said, “Come on, quit joking. Do you want to make a real dinner or should I open a can of soup?”

She opted for him making soup. She got up, stretched, and wandered to the sectional. She dug the glasses case out of her purse, her book as well, and settled in to read.

But when she opened the case, she realized there was something odd about the glasses. They were not the frames she had chosen, but something slightly more ornate, baroque. And the lenses glittered oddly when she turned them, like they had been overlaid with near-invisible, translucent scales. On the side of the earpiece had been stamped the word “biofocals” with the “o.” A brand name, maybe? Was that why the man she had bought them from had kept saying “bio-” instead of “bi-”?

She turned them over in her hands, then put them on. They seemed to work just fine. The magnification was correct. Maybe just a little misty, but they’d do, at least until she could get another pair. But they definitely weren’t bifocals. The magnification was the same no matter where she looked through them.

She’d read a page and a half when she caught a glimpse of movement and looked up over the top of her glasses, expecting to see her husband. But it was not her husband; there was nobody there. But when Geir looked down at her book again, there it was. She looked up and over. No. Looked back down. Yes. There was something she could only see in her glasses. Which meant there was probably something on her glasses.

She took them off and polished them on her shirt. The surface of the lens wasn’t perfectly smooth but just slightly irregular. Perhaps that was what gave the glass its scale-like appearance. She put the glasses back on. Nothing there. She went back to reading.

A paragraph later, there it was again, a kind of darting, shadowy movement across the upper quadrant of her vision. This time, instead of just lifting her eyes and looking over the glasses, she raised her head and looked through them.

There was something there. Or, no, there wasn’t. Just the impression of something, a strangeness in the air, a kind of blot or spot. What was it? She looked around the room and saw something similar in several other places, a discoloration floating in the air, as if something was almost there but wasn’t. She turned back to the original strangeness and looked carefully, but couldn’t make it seem any less strange. Maybe nothing at all, maybe just the glasses, an irregularity in the glass that came out in certain lights.

She peered and squinted and tilted her head a little, and it was as if something suddenly loomed out of nowhere. She jerked back in her chair, the book falling onto the floor. What had she seen? Something large and formless, very dark, inky. Jellylike and soundless, moving in a way that suggested it was alive and, as she turned her head just right, as if oozing forth from a crack in the fabric of the world. It was like coming around a corner and seeing, suddenly, something that couldn’t possibly be there.

But that had not been what disturbed her—or only partly so. What had truly disturbed her was the thing that had been directly behind it, the thing she caught the barest glimpse of, just a second or so. For where the first thing had been more like an amorphous cloud, this had been more a shadow, long and very dark, so dark that it was like she was looking into a hole except for the two overly large gaps where eyes would be. Through these gaps, she could see portions of her living room. It was roughly humanoid in form, with human-like limbs, but the fingers, if they were fingers, were twice as long as fingers should be and flailed about. The head, too, had what she first thought of as a kind of beard, but as the thing turned she realized it was like no beard she had ever seen. It seemed a writhing mass of something, tendrils, tentacles; from the silhouette alone, she couldn’t say for certain.

All that frightened her. But the thing that frightened her most was that where the cloudlike thing had been seemingly unaware of her, this was not. When she had started upon seeing it, it too had started, as if surprised to be seeing her.

She left the glasses lying on her lap, staring at them as she slowly convinced herself that she hadn’t seen anything at all. She was tired, she’d been traveling all day, her eyes were playing tricks on her.

After a while, she began to believe it. She put the glasses back on.

And there it was again, clearer this time, as if her brain was learning to see with these new glasses. A lightless form, very thin, very tall, the hole-like eyes that now had moved very close indeed. It was there just in front of her, bent down, looking at her. Before she could do anything it reached down and tapped on her glasses.

She shuddered and whipped them off, dropping them onto the couch. She had felt that. Or not felt exactly, but it was as if a strange energy had coursed through her. She stared at the glasses and wondered what she should do with them.

And then, suddenly, the glasses vanished. They were, from one second to the next, simply gone. She stared at the spot where they had been and then reached out to feel for them but there was nothing there.

But a moment later, the glasses were back again. She reached out and touched them, and shuddered. They were wet, sticky, and a little warm, as if they had been held in something’s mouth.

She picked them up, her hands shaking, a lens in each hand. She was just preparing to twist them apart when her husband said, “What are you doing?”

She stopped. “These glasses,” she said, “there’s something wrong.”

“That’s no reason to ruin them,” he said. “You can just take them back and get them replaced. What’s wrong with them?” He moved toward her, holding his hand out. “Give them here.”

Reluctantly, she handed them to him. She saw him squint at them, frown. “They’re heavy,” he said. “How did they get wet?”

“I—” she started to say, but he had opened the hinges and was raising the glasses to his face. “Don’t,” was all she had time to say, and then they were resting on his nose, his eyes staring out through them, brow still furrowed.

“What’s wrong with them?” he asked. “As far as I can tell—”

And with that, he was plucked out of the air, simply gone, without a sound.

She waited. She did not know what else she could do but simply wait. Who could she tell about this? Nobody would believe her. The glasses had come back earlier, maybe her husband would too, wet and warm but still alive.

But he did not come back. The light faded and she remained sitting there in the lengthening dark, just waiting. When she began to see things in the shadows, she got up and turned on the light which, at least, gave her fewer shadows to see things in.

There was a light clinking sound. There were the glasses again, on the floor this time. Both of the temple pieces had been twisted and bent and there was blood smeared on one of the lenses.

But nobody ever saw her husband again. Nobody, that is, except Geir, for she made the mistake of almost unconsciously raising the glasses to her eyes to see what had become of him. Nobody would ever see her again either.

WHEN THE STITCHES COME UNDONE

A. C. Wise

Nick crested the hill, easing off the gas as the holler spread out below him. The beat-up rust bucket he’d been driving since the divorce balanced a moment at the peak, then gravity had him, pulling him down into the navel of the world that was King’s Hollow. Home.

As sudden as that, with the car coasting downward, the sky shivered to a flat white. An eye with the lid peeled back, seeing him in the most terrible way. Nick almost jammed on the brakes, slewing the car into the trees. His front right tire skidded on the verge and he jerked the wheel sharply to the left, narrowly avoiding a bundle of rags that he could swear for a second was a body lying on the side of the road.

What happens when the stitches come undone?

The words crashed into the empty space where his stomach should be. Sweat slicked his palms, but somehow Nick managed to tap the brake instead of slamming it. His stomach lurched back into place. He glanced in the rearview mirror. There was nothing on the side of the road. No body, no bundle of rags, nothing.

The road leveled out, gliding him into the town proper. Telephone lines knit up the sky, and behind their crisscrossing pattern it was only gray—the pale, washed-out shade of an oncoming storm.

Nick’s pulse steadied, but memory came gnawing in the wake of fear. A wound he didn’t remember opening, as if it had never been closed.

As a kid, he’d seen the sky go that flat shade of white. But he’d seen it from the wrong angle, lying on his back—struggling to get up, struggling to breathe—with the weight of all that openness pressing down on him, barely restrained by stark, tossing branches. The smell of leaves, thick, on the edge of rot, filling up his mouth and nose. And the earth had rumbled—old, hungry, and slow.

Nick leaned forward, peering through the windshield. The sky remained gray, clouds piling to shutter the eye he’d felt watching him. He pulled into a space in front of the diner, bracing his hands against the wheel to stop their shaking before he turned off the car and opened the door. The first fat drops struck the pavement as Nick hurried inside.

Val waited in one of booths set against the diner’s long window, overlooking the street. She rose to hug him, failing to hide her big-sister concern. When she removed the mirrored shades she claimed were standard issue for a small town deputy, Nick saw worry gathered at the corners of her eyes. But as they sat, she slid the key to their parents’ house across the table to him without asking how long he planned stay in the house while he “got back on his feet” or uttering the dreaded How are you holding up? Nick was immensely grateful.

Nick sank back against the worn vinyl, glancing around. The oversized clock he remembered from his youth loomed above the jukebox he’d never seen anyone play. Even the same specials were chalked on the blackboard. Nick half expected to see his kid-self, Val beside him, both kicking their heels against the polished rails of the red-padded stools as they sipped thick chocolate milkshakes.

“Nothing ever changes around here, does it?” Nick said.

“Nope.” Val handed him a laminated menu, grinning.

The grin faded, and Nick realized how raw his expression must look. Too late he tried to match her smile, then gave up, letting his shoulders slump. The weight of the holler crashed on him all at once, more mundane than the panic that had struck him on the road into town. Leaving had been an illusion—moving east, marrying Melanie, all of it. Somehow he’d ended up right back where he’d started.

It was depressing as fuck, and the kicker was, he’d always known. Deep down he’d felt the circularity of his life, a spiral leading him back to the beginning. A truth he’d never fully realized until now. It was why he’d deflected Melanie’s questions about getting a real job, buying a house, having kids, all of it.

“Think Mabel still keeps a secret stash of brandy under the counter?” Nick tilted his head.

Val raised an eyebrow, but before she could tip over into sympathy, the waitress arrived with coffee.

“Come around for dinner once you’re settled.” Val stirred her coffee. “Mike and Joey have been going on about seeing ‘Uncle Nicky’ ever since I told them you were visiting.”

Nick set his own coffee aside. The world-dropping-away feeling he’d experienced as gravity carried him down the hill returned, but different this time. He opened his mouth, searching for a reply less pathetic than he felt, but his spoon rattled in his cup, distracting him.

“Earthquake?” Even as he spoke the word, it tasted wrong. Like rotten leaves. Like earth, and the ground shuddering.

“Hmm?” Val lowered her cup.

“You didn’t feel that?”

The window glass shivered, light skipping across its surface. Motion caught the corner of Nick’s eye. A shape, just on the other side of the street. Small and pale.

“Nick?”

He hadn’t realized he’d stood until Val’s voice called him back. The only things across the street were parked cars and storefronts, people going about their day.

“Are you okay?” The vague concern in Val’s eyes grew more specific, the worry lines at the corners of her mouth turning to a full-on frown.

Nick lowered himself back into the booth.

“I’m fine.”

What happens when the stitches come undone?

Nick clenched one hand into a fist under the table. The ground shivering, the sky turning white. In the woods, with the shack. They’d run. The ground had bucked beneath his feet, and he’d landed face-down in the dirt. Then he’d rolled over, bruised, scrambling up as the sky closed down and the earth rose and the entire holler became a mouth trying to grind and swallow him.

“What is it?” Val leaned forward, reaching across the table, but stopping just short of touching his hand.

The stitches.

He wanted to clamp down on the words, the thoughts, but they insisted—tapping at his teeth, opening his mouth.

“Do you remember how we went into the woods when we were kids? In the summer?” Nick’s mouth dried. He wasn’t entirely sure what he was trying to say. “You and me, Deb and Lindy and . . .”

His tongue stumbled on their youngest cousin’s name. E something. Eric. It stuck in his throat, sour and raw—a shape he wanted to spit out and couldn’t. He tried again, approaching from a different angle.

“The five of us.”

“Four.” Val corrected absently. “I remember. Are you sure you’re okay?”

Four. Nick stared at his sister. Himself, Val, Deb, Lindy. And. The name slid away from him again, jagged when he tried to grab hold, leaving his grip slick and red. And. He opened his mouth, closed it again.

The shape flickered in the corner of his vision again. Nick turned his head so sharply pain shot up his neck, already stiff from the long drive. Cars. Storefronts. People. There was nothing else there.

Nothing. He and Val only had two cousins. Not three. Except . . .

Dread pooled in Nick’s stomach. And, absurdly, it rumbled at the same time, even though the thought of putting food in his mouth sickened him. Two cousins, not three. He tried to believe it, crushing his other hand into a fist now too and ignoring the way it trembled. It had to be true. Because of the way Val looked at him.

And it couldn’t be true. Because of the way the earth churned and opened a dark hungry mouth. Because when Nick looked back, Eric wasn’t there anymore.

No!

He wasn’t sure if he said the word out loud and he didn’t care, already out of his seat and moving toward the door. His sister called after him. Nick ignored her. The floor tilted, trying to pull him back into the center. Circling and circling, inward and downward and . . .

“Sorry,” he called over his shoulder. “Tired. Long trip. Rain check.”

He didn’t wait for Val’s answer. He had get back to the car. Before the earth rose up. Before the sky peered down. Before memory swept him away. Before the holler swallowed him whole.

“They’re Indian burial mounds,” Lindy said. “We read about them in history class.”

Nick’s cousin puffed her chest out, wearing the authority conferred by being the oldest of the five cousins like a badge of honor. Lindy was the only one so far who’d graduated to the middle school wing of the K–12 building where they all attended school.

“I heard it’s where the cannibals who live in the woods bury their bones.” Deb leaned forward, grinning.

“There are no cannibals in the holler.” Val elbowed her.

Nick let the girls bicker as he studied the mound. It was just tall enough that he couldn’t see beyond it, but he was sure there was a field on the other side. The trees held a line at their backs, the border of the woods. This was the farthest they’d come on their summer adventures so far. Except for the quarry, of course.

Nick pushed the thought away. He didn’t want to think about the quarry, so he focused on the mound instead. There was something familiar about it, like an itch he couldn’t quite reach.

His class hadn’t read about Indian mounds the way Lindy’s had, but in geology they’d learned about rivers and glaciers carving the land. This felt different. Deliberate. Like someone had built it up. Changing the land, though Nick couldn’t imagine why. He tilted his head to one side, squinting his eyes half closed.

A buzzing certainty crept into his mind; beyond the mound there were other ridges scarring the earth. Concentric rings. A path. Crossing back and forth over the earth. Stitching it closed.

Nick caught his breath. Nothing changed. He didn’t move. Yet the grass flattened. Wind rolled like a tide over an open field where the land rose in wave after wave. Like steps. Like the path leading down to the quarry. There were no trees in the field to hold back the sky. Without the trees, the sky could see him. An eye, catching him. But if he placed his foot there, and kept walking . . .

“Nick!” Val’s voice jerked him back.

Nick realized his foot was raised. He lowered it, cheeks flushing.

“Are you coming?” There was a nastiness to Deb’s voice.

“Coming where?” Nick’s stomach sank, realizing he’d missed some key part of Deb’s latest devious plot. If they were going somewhere and it was Deb’s idea, it was bound to get them in trouble.

“Told you he wasn’t paying attention.” Lindy elbowed Val.

“To see the cannibals.” Deb rolled her eyes. “They live in that old shack in the woods, like I said.”

Without waiting to see if they’d follow, Deb turned and marched away. Middle-child syndrome—that’s what Nick’s parents called it when they thought he and Val weren’t listening. It made Deb the ringleader—too loud, too brash, leaping first and looking later. Like the other day, in the quarry, when she’d almost pushed Eric into the dark and . . .

“There it is,” Deb whispered.

Nick nearly crashed into her. When had he started walking? He glanced over his shoulder. Trees stretched behind him as far as he could see, the raised mound of earth completely invisible.

“There.” Deb nudged his shoulder and he looked where she pointed. Two buildings, both on the edge of rot, stood between the trees: a shack with a shed behind it. Only a pipe chimney rising through the shack’s tin roof set it apart as a place people might live.

“It’s really cannibals?” Eric pressed against Lindy’s side, his fingers creeping toward his mouth, his eyes wide. He’d just turned five, and even though he was far too old for it, he still had a tendency to suck on his fingers and thumb when he needed comfort.

“Nick’ll go look.” Deb poked him in the small of the back.

“Me?” Nick flinched forward, voice cracking.

“Yeah.” Deb grinned. “I dare you. I double dog dare you. Walk up to the window and look inside.”

Nick glanced at his sister, but Val deliberately wasn’t looking at him, worrying at a ragged bit of skin along her thumbnail. He looked back to Eric and it occurred to him that he hadn’t heard his little cousin whine once all afternoon—not to ask for a snack, not to say he was missing his cartoons.

He’d been different since they’d climbed out of the quarry. Since . . . Nick peered at Eric. Something squirmed at the center of his eyes. A pattern. A path. A spiral leading in and downward.

Nick reached out, poised to catch the thread and draw the path out of his cousin’s eye. Eric flinched, his bottom lip pushing out, and tears starting. Realizing what he was doing, Nick stepped back. He looked again. Eric’s eyes were only their normal gray-blue, if wide and uncertain. He wanted to tell Eric it was okay, but the words stuck in his throat. Instead, he pivoted, walking toward the shack. One quick look, and they could leave. They’d go home and he’d even let Eric play with his action figures, never mind that his fingers were always sticky.

Dead leaves crunched underfoot. Nick lifted his chin. He could feel Deb watching him, waiting for him to chicken out. He didn’t dare look back.

His feet fell into a rhythm. The woods seemed to expand and contract around him. He was in the field on the other side of the mound, under a sky that rolled like the tide. He was deep under the earth, following a path that spiraled down and down. There was something important about the way he walked, the drumming of his steps like a lullaby, quieting the earth. Stitching it closed.

Nick stopped, almost bumping into the shack. He nearly looked over his shoulder to see how far he’d come, but remembered Deb would be watching him. He took a deep breath, focusing on the shack. The windows were dirty, pounded by years of muddy rain and never cleaned. Just one look, then they could go. He cupped his hands around his eyes and pressed his face against the window.

The tangled shadows inside the shack resolved. A little girl sat in the middle of the floor, facing away from him. An empty spool of thread rolled past her knee. He could almost hear it crossing the bare floorboards. Deafening. Far louder than it should be. And through the cacophony—

What happens.

What happens when?

The words scrabbled at him, tiny whispery things demanding entrance.

He didn’t see the woman until she swooped across the floor, snatching the girl and rushing toward the window with unnatural speed. She smacked her palm against the glass, peeling her lips back to show bloody teeth. Nick swallowed a shout, tripping over his heels.

He struck the ground hard and the sky swung above him, the strange crisscrossed branches tossing wildly. Stitches pulling free, a white eye opening to look at him. From the shed behind the shack came a horrible sound. A rust-and-stone sound. Grinding and wet. Hungry and inhuman. Nick scrambled up, barreling toward his sister and cousins.

“Go!” he shouted.

Nick’s feet pounded the leaves, drumming against the skin of the world. The earth drummed back—a vast heartbeat sound. The roar from the shed grew louder, accompanied by thrashing chains. Nick looked back, knowing he shouldn’t.

The woman stood halfway between the shack and the shed, spidery limbs wrapped around the girl, holding her close. Despite himself, Nick slowed. The rational part of him screamed to keep running, go faster. There was something wrong with the woman’s skin. Stitches. Jagged black lines of thread covered her arms. Her cheeks. Her hands. Every part of her he could see. Dense threads spiraling. Binding. Holding a wound closed. Holding back something vast and terrible.

The pattern jittered. The woman’s skin straining, the thread tugging as another roar sounded from the shed and shook the ground. A look of pain crossed her face and she closed her eyes. Nick stopped. He hadn’t meant to stop. Entranced, he turned, lifting his foot to step back toward the woman and the little girl.

Behind him, Val screamed his name. But the sky and the earth and the holler all screamed louder. Screaming at him. Screaming along with whatever was in the shed.

Nick was ready to add his voice to the din, but the ground heaved, throwing him face-down in the dirt. He rolled over, struggling for breath. His stomach growled. He wanted to fill it with something. Or something wanted to fill him. He opened his mouth to . . . to what?

With a terrible groan, one of the trees tipped over, breaking his concentration. Roots tore from the earth and Nick threw his arms up to cover his face. The ground juddered with the impact. He opened his eyes. Fresh panic slammed into him, shooting him to his feet. Eric had stopped running too.

“Eric!” Nick couldn’t move fast enough.

Eric’s wide eyes spilled tears, but he didn’t move. Behind him, the air thickened, growing darker. Eric’s fingers crept to his mouth, slipping inside so he could suck on them, but otherwise he remained still.

“Eric!” Nick screamed again, but the woods—eerily silent now—swallowed his voice.

Eric had been seen by the blue eye at the bottom of the quarry. Eric and Nick had both crouched in the dark of the rough tunnel dug into the stone. Something had breathed up at them from under the earth. Tasting them. And it knew them now.

Nick lunged.

Too late. His fingers brushed empty air. The earth opened a mouth, and Eric dropped inside. Nick hit the ground, skidding on his stomach to balance precariously over the hole. It went down farther than it should. Moist, hot air swept past him. Eric was nowhere in sight.

“Eric!”

The hole twisted Nick’s voice, threw it back. Dirt slid, trying to carry Nick with it. He scooted backward. He couldn’t see Eric, couldn’t hear him. Not even a whimper.

Shaking, Nick crawled farther from the hole. He’d get a grownup, the fire department, someone, everyone. He wasn’t running. He wasn’t leaving Eric behind. He’d come back for him. He would. The words—repeated as he pelted over the forest floor, breath hitching, tears smearing his vision—were almost enough to let him block out the sound of wet chewing behind him.

Nick sat at his parents’ kitchen table. It had been three months since his mother had succumbed to cancer, around the same time as the divorce was finalized, everything dovetailing into a perfect storm of misery. It had been five years since his father had passed away from the same disease, but Nick couldn’t think of the house any other way than theirs—missing only his mother’s laughter, the smell of his father’s famous five-alarm chili. Tomorrow he’d start sorting, deciding what to keep and what to throw away before he and Val put the house on the market. It was why he was here, after all. Not fleeing the divorce, or a dead-end job and an empty apartment, or the fact that his life amounted to nothing.

Nick pulled a photo album from the stack in front of him. Coming back home for his mother’s funeral, he’d felt an acute sense of loss, but one he could name. Now, he felt uneasy. Something was missing, but not something he could put a finger on. Eric. The name was clear in his mind now, nagging at him. But even that didn’t sit right. Val didn’t remember their youngest cousin. Why? He hadn’t dared to contact Deb or Lindy, Eric’s sisters. What if they didn’t remember him either?

He flipped open the album. Even when the world went digital, his mother had insisted on printing everything, trapping the moments of their lives beneath thin plastic. A beer from the fridge he’d stocked with the basics—milk, cold cuts, condiments—sweated at his elbow. Fragments of his life flashed past. Backyard barbeques; his seventh birthday party; Val’s high school graduation; his parents’ wedding anniversary; Val, Deb, and Lindy waging an epic water balloon fight in the front yard. In every picture, in every album, his family was there, but Eric was not.

It didn’t matter how far back or forward Nick went. It was as though Eric had been erased completely. Snipped out of the world, replaced with hungry mouths, and the shuddering earth. And Nick was the only one who remembered. Because he’d seen the darkness and been seen by it in turn? Because the darkness had breathed on him and it knew him. Because he was still there, and he hadn’t left. He was with Eric, still crouched in the mouth of whatever had tasted them, no matter how much time had passed.

He tried to shrug the thoughts away, but they remained. The quarry. The shack in the woods. The woman with stitches in her skin, and her little girl. Eric. It all fit somehow. Or maybe it didn’t, and Nick was the one coming undone.

Maybe he’d only ever had two cousins, one who’d grown up to be a doctor, the other a lawyer. Maybe he only had them and a sister who was now a deputy in the sheriff’s office. Maybe Nick had invented Eric out of whole cloth, wanting someone to look up to him. Someone who needed him. Val, Deb, and Lindy’s careers all revolved around helping people. What did he have? A divorce. A shitty, beat-up car. A crappy job in a warehouse. A head full of memories no one else had—Eric, and trees that didn’t grow the right way. A woman covered in stitches, and the earth covered in scars.

“Shit.” Nick closed the album, pressing the heels of his hands against the ache behind his eyes.

Carrying his beer, Nick stepped onto the back porch. His father’s heavy-duty mag light sat on the railing as if his father would be back for it at any minute. Nick aimed its beam at the screen of trees bordering the yard.

The light flattened the trunks—stark, gray lines drawn on the night. His breath snagged; a figure stood between the trees, small and pale. A child just Eric’s size. He swung the light back, making shadows jump. Nothing. Nothing but a gap, slightly larger than the rest, between the trees. The start of the trail he and Val and his cousins had taken on their summer treks. Waiting.

“It’s too high.” Eric stood on the top step leading down into the quarry, skin starting to pink and eyes growing big with the threat of tears.

The girls had already gone ahead. Nick briefly considered leaving his cousin behind. If he lifted Eric down the steps, he’d have to haul him back up again on the way home. Nick sighed, adjusting the strap of his backpack.

“I’ll help you.”

They shouldn’t be here. At very least they’d get in trouble with their parents if some other concerned adult didn’t catch them first. He’d said as much before they set out, but once Deb latched onto an idea, she rarely let go.

A splash sounded from below as one of the girls skipped a stone across the water pooled at the bottom of the quarry. The water was eerily blue, like an eye watching Nick as he lifted Eric down step by step. A dim shape flickered, coiling under the opaque surface. Nick almost missed his step. Loose stones skidded under his feet.

“Hurry up!” Val shaded her eyes, looking up at him.

Nick blinked. There was nothing under the surface of the water, just the endless blue, unsettling enough.

By the time they reached the bottom, Nick’s arms ached from carrying Eric. The girls had abandoned the water, their attention fixed on something one tier up from the eye-watering blue. Ignoring his shaking muscles, Nick boosted Eric, and scrambled up beside them.

“What do you think it is?” Val asked.

“It’s a tunnel. Duh.” Deb picked up a loose stone, angling her wrist back to toss it into the dark.

“Wait.” Nick grabbed her arm.

Deb turned, mouth twisted in a frown that crept into a smirk at Nick’s tone of alarm. He let go, unsure why he’d stopped her. The unease remained as he got a better look at the tunnel, barely hip height and burrowing back into the rock. Bright as the sun was, Nick couldn’t see more than a few inches past the entrance. A creeping sensation spread through him. He tried to shrug it off, but his whole back felt cold and Nick fought the urge to spin around and see if someone was watching them.

“Let’s eat first, then we can explore.”

Nick reached into his backpack hoping Deb would forget about the hole by the time they finished their packed lunch. Deb’s smirk only deepened. She cocked her wrist back again, deliberately meeting Nick’s eye, then let the stone fly. Nick stifled a choked sound, missing whether an echo came back or not. Not satisfied, Deb frowned.

“Hey, Eric. You should check it out.” Deb caught her little brother by the shoulders, steering him toward the hole.

“I don’t wanna.” Eric dug his heels in, leaning back against his sister.

“Leave him alone.” Nick reached for Deb, but she sidestepped him.

“He’s the only one small enough.” Deb shoved Eric harder.

Eric’s sneakers scuffed, finding no purchase. Nick could see him building toward a full-throated howl, and threw a glance at Lindy, hoping she’d intervene. Lindy only shrugged. Even though she was the eldest, Deb was their leader. That was the way it had always been.

“Go.” Deb gave Eric a final shove and he tripped forward, landing on hands and knees.

Instead of the broken wail Nick expected, there was only a huff of air, breath released in shock as Eric hit the ground. Deb stepped back, ready to run in case something really did reach out to snatch her brother. But there was nothing. Only that huff of Eric’s breath. Then a huff again, like something breathing back at him.

For a moment, Nick was frozen, then he lurched forward and caught Eric around the waist. The earth shivered. A breath rolled out of the dark, warm and wet. Nick scrambled back, pulling Eric with him. The breath clung to his skin, marking him. A terrible grinding noise rose from the tunnel mouth, something impossibly vast turning over in its dreams. Hungry dreams. Wanting, needing dreams going back to the beginning of time.

Eric let out a piercing shriek as Nick jerked him backward. The sound finally unfroze Lindy, and she moved to her little brother’s side.

“Look what you did,” Lindy snapped at Deb, her face turning red. “He wet himself.”

Lindy gripped Eric’s arm with one hand, the other poised as if she might slap Deb. Exasperated, Lindy spun on her heel, pulling Eric in her wake. After a moment, Val and Deb trailed behind her, Deb looking only slightly chagrined.

Nick watched them spiral up the path. The same dizzy sensation that had struck him standing at the top of the quarry washed over him in reverse. The sky looked down and the pool looked up, and Nick was caught between them, trapped in the infinite gaze.

He stumbled, fighting the sensation of falling upward. Glancing back at the hole one last time, he hurried after his sister and cousins. The hole was too deliberate to be natural. Something had put it there. And it was hungry.

“What do you know about the history of the holler?” Nick toyed with a half-empty beer bottle.

“What do you mean?” Val looked up from her own beer.

Noise from the television filtered over from the far side of the room where his nephews sat on the couch that divided Val’s open-floor plan. In the kitchen, Nick could hear Val’s husband loading their dinner plates into the dishwasher.

“You know, like what was here before there was a town.” Nick shrugged, trying to squirm out from under Val’s scrutiny.

“Grandpa had some local history books that are probably still in the attic at Mom and Dad’s place. Why?”

Before Nick could even try to come up with a plausible explanation, his eldest nephew’s voice rose over the sound of the television.

“Stitch witch. Stitch witch.”

“Mom!” Joey’s voice cut through his brother’s. “Make him stop.”

Val sighed and rose.

“That’s enough, you two. Time for bed.”

“But, Mom . . .”

“No buts. Bed. Now.”

Reluctantly, the boys turned off the TV, dragging their feet as they retreated down the hall to their shared room.

“What’s a stitch witch?” Nick tensed, but he couldn’t help asking the question.

“A departmental nightmare that’s already becoming local legend.” Val took a long pull from her beer as she reclaimed her seat.

“About six months ago, we got a call about a woman’s body dumped by the side of the highway. Right along the road leading into town.”

Nick flinched, thinking of the pile of rags he’d seen. Rags in the shape of a body. But of course there’d been nothing there. Val continued.

“You know the holler. Nothing ever happens here worse than a speeding ticket.” Val rolled her shoulders against tension.

Except the earth opening to swallow his cousin whole. Nick kept his mouth shut.

“We figured foul play, but the coroner said heart failure. Our best guess is she was trying to walk out of town and collapsed where we found her.”

Val held up her hand as if Nick would interrupt her, even though his lips were pressed together. He clenched his hands together under the table, resisting the urge to look out the window to see if the small, pale figure of their cousin watched them.

“It gets weirder,” Val said. “She had no ID and no one came forward to claim her body. A search for dental records and fingerprints turned up nothing, like she was living completely off the grid. Even her clothing looked homemade.”

Val glanced back toward the hallway where the boys had retreated to their bedroom before continuing.

“There’s this kid in our department who works reception, Ben Elmer, fresh out of college. He’s a good kid, good at his job, but a bit of a conspiracy nut. He swears up and down the woman has to be Annabelle May, this girl who disappeared along with her family back in the 1950s when she was just six years old. There was some crazy rumor going around about cannibals and cult activity, the Keepers of the Starving Man or some kind of bullshit.”

Val took another sip from her beer, making a face like it had gone flat or sour. Nick stared at her. There was no flicker of recognition in Val’s eyes when she mentioned cannibals, or the woods. Like the entire afternoon, the entire summer had been erased along with Eric. Fear twisted through him. How could he be the only one who remembered?

“The woman was probably in her early sixties, so the timing would be right.” Val picked at the edge of her beer label. “The whole thing is just so far-fetched. Except sometimes I wonder. She . . . Her body was completely covered in stitches. Not medical stitches, but like some bizarre form of self-mutilation. Some kind of ritual. Maybe there’s something to Ben’s theory after all, but Annabelle May was young enough when she disappeared, there’s nothing in the database on her. We can only guess. Now kids are threatening each other with the stitch witch.”

Nick almost knocked his beer over, catching it just before it fell.

“Hey, you okay?” Val tapped the table to get his attention, and Nick looked up, startled. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

The woman with stitches in her skin. The woman from the shack. The body on the side of the road.

“Sorry.” Nick shook his head, standing. “I should probably get going anyway. Thanks for dinner.”

“Any time.” Val frowned. The way she looked at him, it was as if she thought he was going to fly apart at any minute.

And maybe he was. The stitches were coming undone. He could feel them, pulling, loosening, coming free. The holler was a wound that wouldn’t close, and the darkness inside its skin was just waiting to break free.

Nick tugged the cord, flooding the attic with light. He felt guilty about leaving Val’s in such a hurry. He could have tried telling her the truth, but something in the back of his head insisted she wouldn’t understand. She didn’t remember Eric. She’d never heard the earth howl, or felt the sky looking at her with its merciless eye.

A narrow path wound between piles of boxes. Somewhere in here were his grandfather’s books, the ones Val had mentioned. It was after midnight. He should be asleep. Exhaustion thrummed in the space behind his eyes, a steady beat. At the same time, wired tension sung a counterpoint. Tired as he was, he might never sleep again.

Focus. Concentrate. He moved between the boxes. If he didn’t pay attention he might . . .

The world tilted. Defying the attic’s confines, the path under his feet spiraled inward. Down into the quarry, down to the blue eye in the hollow of stone. Down between the trees and the raised barrows of earth, hunger humming back at him from underground, his steps barely keeping it contained. He walked the wound, stitching it closed.

Above him, the sky opened. Instead of piled boxes, mounds of earth guided his steps. Wind hissed over him like crashing waves. A tide retreating deep under the earth.

“The king comes to his castle. The king comes to the hollow.”

Nick struck his shin against a box. It wasn’t until he hit the attic floor on his hands and knees, biting his tongue, that he realized he’d been speaking aloud. Where had those words come from? Nonsense coming from somewhere deep inside him, feeling true. The beer he’d carried into the attic sprayed foam as it rolled across the floor, coming to rest against a box labeled Dad’s Books in his mother’s careful hand.

It was all so absurd that a ragged chuckle escaped him, bouncing strangely off the walls. The sound cut off almost as soon as it started. His stomach growled. Nick grabbed a pile of books from the box, scrambling down the narrow attic steps. The roof could peel away at any moment, and there would be nothing between him and the sky.

Nick set himself up at the kitchen table with a fresh beer. He sipped, paging through his grandfather’s books until a section written by a man who’d worked on the crew digging the quarry caught his attention.

. . . told the mining company not to send any more men to King’s Hollow because of an attack by the local Indian tribe. They hadn’t just attacked the miners; they’d attacked their families. Two dozen people in all. Their bodies were found stacked in the mining tunnels, piled one on top of the other, almost to the ceiling. My granddaddy worked for the mining company, and he was one of the few who survived. He said the story about the Indians was a lie. The Indians tried to warn the miners. They said there were ways to cut the earth—patterns to keep the “the Hungry Way” from opening. My granddaddy told me how Indians showed the miners mounds they’d built in the earth, but the miners called them godless heathens, and kept digging the way they had been before.

That story about the Indian massacre was just what the foreman reported back to his bosses at the mining company so he wouldn’t have to admit his own men went mad. My granddaddy was sleeping in a tent right next to where one of the men cut his own son’s throat before going after the boy’s ma. The screaming woke my granddaddy. He heard the man raving about the dark coming up from under the ground and how he had to build a wall of flesh to stop it. That’s when my granddaddy ran.

I never had trouble believing my granddaddy’s stories. There were stories when I worked the quarry crew, too. Men who heard voices whispering from the stone, saw things out of the corner of their eyes. There were stories about one man who took his family into the woods to start some kind of crazy cult. The stories said he swallowed the darkness to keep it from devouring the world. I don’t know about that, but I do know sixteen men were murdered. We found their bodies crammed into low, ugly tunnels scratched into the quarry walls, barely big enough to fit a child. There shouldn’t have been tunnels there. Whoever killed those men must have dug them. And whatever darkness he found when he started to dig must have scared him bad enough that he crammed the bodies in there to stop up the holes, just like those miners did in my granddaddy’s time.

Nick jerked awake, a sour taste in his mouth. He didn’t remember falling asleep, especially not curled awkwardly on the couch with his grandfather’s history books piled around him. Through the gap in the curtains, he could see the sky was just starting to lighten. He’d been dreaming about endlessly climbing down the steps of the quarry, and remnants of the dream still clung to him.

He set coffee going. Once it was ready, Nick carried a mug onto the back porch. Chill seeped from the boards to his bare feet as he scanned the trees. Mist curled, blurring the woods and creating the illusion of a shadow moving between the tree trunks. A child-sized figure creeping low to the ground, playing hide and seek. Nick caught himself against the porch rail, just about step onto the grass. Hot coffee sloshed over his hand.

What happens when the stitches come undone?

Maybe the better question was, what would happen when he came undone? Because it was happening. Or it had already happened. Melanie, his job, his apartment, everything he’d left behind—they had always been temporary. He was always coming back here.

“The king comes to his castle. The king walks the hungry way. The king devours the dark, and the king is consumed.”

The words sounded flat, but Nick recognized his own voice. His throat ached; he tasted blood. His feet itched to walk, the pattern calling him.

Nick turned his back on the woods and stepped inside. He dumped the rest of his coffee in the sink before moving to the bedroom to pull on jeans, a heavy flannel shirt, and thick woolen socks. He filled his pockets with things he probably wouldn’t need—a flashlight, a package of matches, granola bars, a bottle of water. He left his phone behind. The last thing he took was his father’s old machete, still sharp. He could use it to clear a path, though Nick suspected the way would largely be clear, waiting for him.

The sky showed flat gray between the neat, even stitches of the trees. A sheen of sweat gathered as Nick swung the machete, less to cut brush and more to release nervous energy. Sooner than expected, he came to a downed tree, the downed tree. He was certain it was the same one. Earth clotted the exposed roots. Nick had the sudden urge to curl up in their shadow. Dig right in. The dark would be warm and moist, breathing on him.

He kept walking. Branches stirred, restless, wind hushing over them in a retreating tide. But the wind was a layer within the sky, touching only the trees. Below, everything lay still. Not even insects chirred.

Nick stopped abruptly. The shack was there, between the trees. His feet had spiraled him through the labyrinth, through the maze. The king, coming to his castle. The king coming home.

Something flickered in the corner of his vision. Nick turned to see Eric running barefoot through the trees. He vanished behind the shack, and the ground shivered. A hungry, grinding sound, like one he’d heard years ago, like all the trees bending toward him at once even though they stayed utterly still.

Part of the shack’s roof had collapsed and been patched with newer material. New enough the tin hadn’t rusted yet. The stitch witch. Annabelle May, or whoever she had been. She was dead. Val had told him. Nick had seen her body for himself, or at least the echo of it, his mind already coming undone the moment he entered the holler. Was someone else living in the shack? Nick moved closer. Close enough to see the clotted shadows behind the dirty windows.

“Dare you,” Nick murmured. “Double dog dare you.”

Gripping the machete, Nick cupped his free hand and pressed his face to the glass. He half expected to see the little girl, the empty spool of thread rolling past her knee. But a woman stood next to a rough wooden table, her back to him. She took a knife from the table and slipped it into the pocket of her skirt, which looked homemade. Her sleeves were rolled up, showing jagged stitches crossing her skin.

The woman turned. Nick ducked, pressing against the shack wall below the window. It couldn’t be the same woman. She was dead. There were fewer stitches in her skin, more blank space between the threads. He thought of the little girl playing with the empty spool, the way her mother had scooped her up in her terrible arms. Patterns and patterns, spiraling down into the hungry dark.

Nick pressed his fist against his mouth, biting back a sound that might have been a scream, or a laugh, or a sob. The woman inside the shack must be the little girl, all grown up to take her mother’s place. Maybe the same way the older woman had once taken her own mother’s place years ago. Keepers of the Starving Man. Wasn’t that what Val had called them? A cult of just one family, holding back the dark.

Behind the shack, something in the shed roared. Nick pushed himself up, meaning to run back through the woods to his parents’ house. But his feet turned the other way. Or the woods spun around him. Disoriented, he stopped short, almost smashing into the shed. Somehow, the shack was behind him now, and he was caught between the two buildings. Nick fought to get his breathing under control, deliberately putting his back to the shed and taking a shaky step forward. The shed rose before him. A nightmare, where everything was familiar, but he couldn’t find his way home. Lost in the woods, trapped in the pattern. A choked sob lodged in his throat. He leaned against the shed. After a moment, he pressed his eye to a gap between the boards.

His vision adjusted, unraveling the dark until it became a man hanging from a mass of chains looped around a hook embedded in the ceiling. Old, though Nick couldn’t be sure of his age exactly. Something about him seemed unspeakably ancient. Or as if his flesh was an illusion, holding something much older inside. The man’s arms were pulled painfully above his head, scars covering the wasted flesh between the rusted metal. The man thrashed, throwing his head back and howling.

The earth answered, a groan vibrating up through Nick’s feet. The stitches were coming undone. Nick could feel it, the threads popping, the ground opening with a wet chewing sound.

The chained man stilled. Nick pressed closer to the shed. The man swiveled his head, one eye rolling in his skull, a low, sick moon, fixing Nick with its light. The world narrowed. Wind rolled over him, a slick wave. The path spiraled him into a blue eye at the bottom of the quarry, a mote in the gaze of something vast and incomprehensible.

On the far side of the shed, the door creaked open. Light flooded the space as the stitched woman stepped inside. The machete slipped from his hand, thudding to the leaf-strewn ground. He expected the sound to draw attention, but all noise had been sucked out of the world save within the shed itself.

The woman’s footsteps scraped as she moved toward the chained man, drawing the knife from her skirt pocket. Nick watched in horror as she placed the knife against the chained man’s flesh—a rare patch between loops of rusted metal—and peeled it away in one long strip. The man threw his head back, opening his mouth to show blunted teeth that looked as though they’d been deliberately broken. His scream was utterly inhuman. In it, Nick felt the thing in the darkness—the hunger and wanting pressed against the skin of the world.

And for a moment, he saw it, too. Not a man chained in a shed, but a vast, roiling darkness contained in human flesh. The thing thrashed, straining against earth and bone. Vast and impossible, reaching everywhere under the earth, around the earth. The dense black between the stars. A system of roots. An ocean. A maw held shut by the scantest of threads. The man who’d gone into the woods to devour the dark. The king in his castle.

The chained man was only a man again as the stitched woman tilted her head back, lowering the strip of flesh into her mouth. Nick gagged, feeling it slide down his own throat. As she chewed and swallowed, the woman pulled a needle and a spool of thread from the same pocket as the knife.

Nick felt the needle’s bright point, his skin puckering around the drag of the thread as the woman pushed it through her arm. The chained man fell still. The roaring of incessant hunger subsided. A low growl, coming up through the earth. Not sated, but contained, stitched up inside the woman.

Nick staggered back, trying one last time to flee. He tripped, hitting the ground and knocking the breath out of his body. The shed door opened. Wheezing, he rolled onto his back, staring up at the white sky between the trees, the eye stitched closed. But it was too late, it had already seen him.

The woman leaned into his field of view. She reached for him, and Nick tried roll away, but she didn’t grab at him. She held her hand out, patient. Dazed, Nick let her pull him to his feet, her stitched palm rough against his. Blood dotted her skin around the fresh thread. It smeared her mouth, too but it was her eyes that held Nick’s attention. Sadness. Weariness such as he’d never seen before. She leaned forward, her voice hoarse as if unused to speaking.

“The king is dying.”

The woman squeezed Nick’s hand, asking him to understand. And he did, the rush of tide finally breaking over him. Ever since the dark had breathed on him, he’d known. A hunger so vast it called the world into being just to have something to consume. Calling the miners and the quarry men to kill and kill and cram the bodies into the earth. Swallowing Eric out of the world. A hunger that knew Nick down to his core.

A hunger so vast only more consumption could hold it at bay. It had called the old man in the shed into the woods to walk the pattern years ago. The king in his castle. The father devouring the dark, and first the mother, then her child, eating from him and stitching it inside their skin. Patterns in the earth and patterns in flesh closing up the hungry way.

“He’s dying,” the woman said again.

Tears hung in her eyes, not for the old man, but for herself, taking her mother’s place. And maybe for Nick. Because someone had to hold back the dark.

“You need to eat,” the woman said.

Nick shook his head, trying to pull his hand away. He pictured the bloody flesh dropped into her mouth. The woman tightened her grip, her voice urgent.

“Eat the dark.”

His eyes widened. He’d seen the thing in the shed for what it was, hunger contained in human skin. And now this woman was asking him to become the same thing?

“I can’t.” Nick tried again to pull free.

“Please.” The word shocked Nick into stillness.

How long had it been since she’d spoken to another human being? She’d never known any other life, but Nick knew what he’d be giving up, what she was asking him to sacrifice, to choose. Except she was asking. Please—not a demand, an entreaty. The woman let go of his hand abruptly, and Nick staggered back, gasping for breath. Because that was it, he had to choose. The darkness had chosen him, but he had to choose it as well. Close the pattern.

He glanced over his shoulder. Eric stood pale between the trees. Nick closed his eyes and saw himself at the bottom of the quarry, caught in the blue eye of something infinite and unfathomable. He saw himself and Eric, children, huddled in the mouth of the earth and feeling it breathe. The terror he’d felt then, multiplied a thousandfold to devour the entire world. That was what would happen if the darkness went unchecked.

Nick opened his eyes. The woman with stitches in her skin continued to watch him. All those empty spaces in his life—Melanie, his shitty job—now he could finally fill them with something that mattered. He could make it right for failing to keep Eric safe all those years ago. He could make it right for Val, for his nephews, and their children years down the road.

Hunger in the pit of his belly, gnawing at him. The stitched woman took his hand again, warm palm pressed against his own. His stomach growled. It had already started. He concentrated on the space, letting it expand, room enough to hold the darkness inside.

“Yes,” he said.

His throat was too tight for any more words. Nick took a step toward the shed, the stitched woman at his side, and Eric’s pale ghost following behind.

ON THESE BLACKENED SHORES OF TIME

Brian Hodge

I saw it happen, watched the street open up and swallow my son whole.

I understand human stress response, how it works. When violent chaos hits you without warning, the mind has to catch up. It lags behind to make sense of things. Four seconds, on average. Your world can end in those four seconds.

When I replay the moment in my head, in those four seconds I do superhuman deeds. I spring into action a nanosecond after the pavement starts to buckle. I cross the cul-de-sac at the end of our street in a blur. I catch Drew’s car by the bumper, so it teeters on the brink long enough for him to scramble out and jump to safety before I let go, then hold him tight as we watch the taillights plummet down the sinkhole.

In those four seconds, I’m not a former special agent with the Bureau. I never went into the private sector for the money, giving corporate seminars on better business through reading body language. None of that. In those four seconds, I’m the superhero my boy grew up believing me to be.

Instead, while out front threading a new length of hose onto the soaker line in the flowerbeds, I looked up at the sound of his Mazda and watched it happen without moving a muscle. When Drew got within thirty feet of the cul-de-sac, the street gave way as his car’s front end rolled over the weak spot. The Mazda tumbled into this freshly opened wound in the asphalt, nose first, tail end flipping into the air, then out of sight with the sound of grinding.

Then I ran. Four seconds of eternity later. By the time I got there, Drew was already gone, and all I could do was stand on the lip of the chasm and gape into the blackness that took over a few dozen feet down. I couldn’t even see the car. It was as if the earth had yawned and opened a gullet years in the making.

Come to find out, it was. This was a calamity that had been built in stages, over time.

Two years ago, for the newest piece of it. Nearly a century for another.

Beyond that, we’re into the millions.

The neighbors were kind, as neighbors are when one of their own succumbs to fate, and for a time there was hope. We clung to it because we all knew the way these incidents were supposed to turn out in neighborhoods like this. The toddler gets pulled out of the forgotten well. The puppy is rescued from the storm drain. Watch enough TV news and you’ll be trained to expect it.

“They’ll get him out, that’s how this day is going to end, you wait and see,” our next-door neighbor Dale told me. I’d always seen something of the high school and college athlete gone sedentary in him, thick in the middle now and florid faced, a man built for sweating. A Saturday’s worth of ginger stubble covered his cheeks the same as it covered half his skull. “The air bag should’ve gone off, that would’ve cushioned him on the way down.” Dale stared at the flurry of activity around the hole and nodded, as if he could will it so. “They’ll get that winch down there. They’ll knock out the back window and pull him out that way. You wait and see.”

I wanted to tell Drew this myself, but whenever I tried his cell phone, it went straight to voice mail, as if he weren’t in range. Which could have been a consequence of the earth itself, insulating and interfering, but then it didn’t seem as if this sinkhole should be any worse than the average sub-basement or parking garage.

My hope was that he would already be standing on our lawn by the time Ginny got home from teaching her Saturday morning class down in Scranton. It wasn’t to be. The first I saw of her, wiry and shorthaired, she came sprinting across the lawns from where she’d had to park up the street, because the intuitive part of her already knew. I caught her and we dropped to the spring grass, and I held her until I was sure she wasn’t going to dive down the hole after him.

Plan B, then: Drew would be up and out by the time his sister got here. Katee was across the state in Pittsburgh, a sophomore at Carnegie Mellon, and would be home by evening.

“It’s Drew, isn’t it?” was how she answered her phone. They’d always been like that with each other, Katee more so than her brother, but it still went both ways. It’s a twins thing, they would tease. You wouldn’t understand.

Over the morning, our ill-fated street filled up with uniforms and barricades, flashing lights and vehicles with various department logos stenciled on the doors. All we cared about was the wrecker big enough to handle a semi-truck, and the spooled cable it fed into the hole, and the man in coveralls riding the giant hook down, like a child standing on a swing.

From a hundred feet away, we watched them work, another man operating the winch and a woman on a walkie-talkie, her free hand pressed to her other ear. I didn’t know how much cable was on that spool, but eventually they came to the end of it. There was no place left to go but in reverse, and after a few moments in which it felt as if I’d lost the last moorings that kept me upright, the spool began to rewind.

We didn’t need anyone to come over and update us. All the apprising Ginny and I needed was in their body language.

They hadn’t even found the car yet.

There may have been dozens of places in Pennsylvania coal country where this could’ve happened, but it had happened here. Our neighborhood—which came as a bitter surprise to one and all—had been built over the Tecumseh Mine #24. What had given way beneath Drew was the opening of the main shaft.

We learned this in our living room from a geologist with the state’s Bureau of Abandoned Mine Reclamation. Her name was DeSalvo, and by now it was Sunday morning. With her graying hair gathered loosely at the back of her head, she looked as if she hadn’t slept since she’d awakened the day before. Katee was home now, and none of us looked any better. We sat on the sofa—the Whitesides, family of three now—and DeSalvo across from us, as if she were the firing squad and we were the targets.

The mine had been closed in 1927, when the location was more remote than it was now, decades before the town of Carbon Glen had grown out to absorb it.

Even then, ample regulations governed how a mining company was supposed to close a site. But what are regulations for, if not to be circumvented? Tecumseh Mining had closed #24 fast and on the cheap. They’d either made it look right enough to pass inspection, or bribed somebody to avow that it had.

They’d demolished the headframe built over the shaft, along with the hoist house and additional shacks. All this would have required was dynamite. Then they tossed these broken timbers and the rest of the rubble down the hole until it caught in the shaft like fish bones in a throat. A few tarps, too, to catch the soil and rock they finished it off with. Pack it, level it, job well done. What should have been a proper seal instead amounted to a cork in a bottle.

“What worked it loose after all this time,” DeSalvo said, “was the flooding you folks had here a couple of years ago.”

Most people think of floods as happening only around rivers, lakes, oceans. But those of us who live with mountains can know something about them too. What you sometimes get with peaks and valleys is a network of funnels, capable of taking a heavy rain from across a wide region and draining it into a narrow area. On rare occasions, under freakish circumstances, enough rain might fall in a short enough time to overwhelm its normal channels.

Two autumns ago, it started raining one September morning and didn’t stop for four days. Rather than blowing through toward the Atlantic coast, the storm stayed put and slowly circled overhead. It acted, meteorologists said, like a tropical storm.

Our neighborhood was lucky, on high ground. The worst we saw was soggy lawns and battered gardens and a few poorly sealed basements turn into wading pools.

We couldn’t have known that rather than washing over us, millions of gallons of water were thundering through a system of tunnels far underground. The region is honeycombed with mineshafts known and forgotten, and it’s likely that some ended up newly connected, even though they were never meant to be.

Tecumseh #24 among them.

Although it had taken only a few days to dismantle what had held intact since 1927, the blockage hadn’t washed away all at once. More likely, it had gradually subsided in the nineteen months since, until all that was left was a scab of pavement that could no longer bear the weight of a car. Then it was just down to chance: Who’s going to be the unlucky one?

“How deep is it?” I asked. “If you haven’t even found Drew’s car . . .”

DeSalvo stiffened at this. They’d found it, or thought they had.

“Six hundred feet for the main shaft. We have the map that was registered in the Twenties, but it doesn’t appear to be complete.” DeSalvo could tell we expected more, even if it was bad. “There’s the main shaft. That’s vertical. According to the map, they went four levels down. Those are horizontal. They follow the coal seams, so they split off, into what are called galleries. But eighty feet down, there’s what’s called a slope shaft branching off the vertical, at a forty-degree incline. That’s not on the map. I don’t know if they dug it at the same time, or if it was an earlier shaft they ran into, or what. If it’s an earlier shaft, there’s no longer any sign of a matching opening on the opposite side of the vertical. So I don’t know what to make of it. I just know you dig one or the other. Vertical or slope. You don’t do both.”

“And the car’s in the slope shaft. That’s what you’re getting at?”

“It’s the only possibility. If the car had dropped straight down the main shaft, it should be at the bottom, in the sump. But it’s not.”

Perched on the edge of the couch the whole time, Katee had had enough. “How? How does a falling car change directions like that?”

“The only thing anyone can figure is it got diverted by debris on the way down. Some of those pieces from the headframe are bigger than railroad ties. The headframe is the framework that supports the elevator cage for the miners, and the coal cars going up and down, so these supports had to be heavy duty. If one or two were angled across the main shaft, in the right place, they could’ve acted as a ramp. They’re not there now, but they could’ve been dislodged on impact after the car went into the slope shaft.”

“You’re telling us this like it’s still a theory,” Ginny said, her face sharp and her eyes narrow. Most days she looked more like Katee’s older sister than her mother. Not today. “That means you still haven’t actually seen the car.”

And here it came: “There’s been a partial tunnel collapse at the opening to the slope shaft. At least twenty feet in. It’s fresh, they say.”

I could still think, in a wobbly, groping way, but I could no longer feel. It wasn’t really me. Somebody else was doing the thinking and I was the numb one watching. Conceivably, Drew’s car could have rolled all the way to the bottom, a distance no one even knew. This really was a worst-case scenario.

“I’m sorry,” DeSalvo said.

This was when my hopes began to get dragged down the shaft too, and the idea of seeing Drew again began to slither from my grasp. Nobody was giving up. I knew that. But now this may have been a recovery operation for a body. Like any challenging rescue operation, it would take time, time Drew didn’t have. Because I knew this much, too: If he could have left the car, he would have. He would’ve crawled back up the incline and clawed through as much muck as possible and yelled his lungs out until somebody yelled back.

This was the Drew we knew and loved.

“That’s all I can really tell you right now,” DeSalvo said, clearly wanting to leave, but hesitant, as if it would be rude unless she had our permission.

“One more thing,” I said. “Do you know why they were in such a hurry to seal off the mine?”

Nearly a century ago, men had cut corners and it had led to this day. I didn’t want to always wonder why. I wanted my hatred of them to be fully informed.

“I mean, was it greed? Were they just lazy? Some other reason?”

DeSalvo sat with the question awhile. “They did it a few months after the mining riots of 1927. Do you know about those?”

I didn’t. But if you go back far enough, you’ll often find trouble around a mine.

“Then why don’t you let it keep for another day. You all have enough weighing on you now. I’m not the best one for the details anyway.” She gave her phone a few pecks, then jotted something on the back of a business card. “This is who you should talk to. Wesley McNabb. He’s a mine historian. He’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

I walked her to the door, recalling the look in her eyes from moments earlier, and how her jaw had tightened. She hadn’t wanted to get into it in front of a mother and twin sister who were already bearing more than they could handle.

But now that we had discretion going for us: “It’s that bad?”

“Somebody mentioned you used to be with the FBI. If you’re like everyone else I’ve met with that kind of background, you’ve seen enough to have . . . oh, a diminished assessment of humanity in general, let’s call it. Or am I wrong?”

I shook my head no. “You’re not wrong.”

She made that expression where the lips curl inward and the mouth turns grim. “Tecumseh #24 should finish it off entirely.”

We stayed hidden and watched them work from our windows.

The news vans had converged from the beginning, because their crews knew better than anyone how this was supposed to end. I grew increasingly annoyed by the crowd of onlookers, treating this like their day-off entertainment. They gathered on lawns until the property owners shooed them away, then drifted to others. Most seemed the type who hoped for the worst, to make their trip worthwhile. Our neighbor Dale got into a shoving match with two of them, a scuffle with another.

The one they really had to fear was Ginny. They just didn’t know it. She taught women’s self-defense from here to Allentown, gave all-day seminars as far south as Philadelphia. She could’ve laid out any of them. She would seethe at them through the windows, then turn away. She was disciplined. The sinkhole was all that mattered.

“The people responsible for this,” she said. “I want to dig up their graves and throw their bones down that hole.”

The rescuers finished clearing the slope shaft’s blockage Monday morning and worked their way to the car, which had traveled more than a quarter mile down the incline. As quickly as our hearts soared at that news, they plummeted again upon learning that Drew wasn’t in it, or anywhere near it.

They plumbed the sump at the bottom of the vertical, in case he’d been thrown clear of the car, but I knew they wouldn’t find him there. He was good about wearing a seat belt. No, he’d gone into the slope.

“Maybe he wasn’t thinking straight,” Katee said. “If he hit his head, maybe he was going on instinct. If you get in trouble . . .”

Work your way downhill.

Those would be the instincts of a skier, dazed and in the dark. Drew had been on skis since he was six. Now he was a strapping, shaggy-headed kid who taught other six-year-olds how to snowplow and slalom. When the twins graduated from high school, Katee knew what she wanted to study, and where, but Drew wasn’t sure about college and couldn’t say when he would be. Over a lifetime, what was a year or two to know himself better?

He loved skiing, though, and sharing his enthusiasm for it, and was ridiculously patient with kids, so it was the slopes of the Poconos for him. The season had stretched into the first week of April, and he’d been home a week. Where we always thought he was safer.

Work your way downhill. Because downhill is where help is.

The problem with that, in this rogue slope shaft, was that at a distance equivalent to two city blocks past the point where the car had stopped, the slope plunged into water, probably a remnant of the flooding nineteen months earlier.

So now our hopes began to drown, as well.

They brought in the world’s gutsiest diver, experienced with exploring sunken caves, who deemed the conditions the worst he’d ever seen. His lights couldn’t do much in such black, sludgy water. No map, pitch dark, visibility of inches, the possibility of another structural collapse? Nobody had to tell me this was the most dangerous thing he’d ever done. And for us. Our peace of mind.

When he packed it in after a few hours without recovering a body, I had nothing left in my heart to argue with.

By the end of the week, there was no closure anyone could provide. There was just a big, inconvenient hole in the street that needed filling in. They started with truckfuls of rock and earth, then pumped in mixer after mixer of concrete.

“You can’t let them do this,” Katee kept telling me, frantic to the point of tears. “Drew’s not dead. I’d know if he was dead.”

There can’t be any worse feeling of failure than to reveal to your children how fallible you really are. No superhero to my son. Now, to my daughter, ineffectual before bureaucracy, and trying to use logic to get her to accept the unthinkable. I wasn’t giving Drew up for dead. Just admitting he would’ve been down there waiting for rescue if he could have.

“You’re wrong. You’re so wrong,” Katee told me. “Would it be easier for you to accept I know this if we were identical? If I was his brother or he was my sister, and we looked exactly alike?” She shook her head, giving up on me, if not Drew. “It’s still a twins thing. You still don’t understand.”

You take your consolation where you can, and for me, the only source came from watching the spectators wander away without a payoff.

No body for you, you goddamn league of ghouls.

Adjustment went slowly.

For weeks, Ginny drifted more in silence than not, barely within my reach. She would curl onto Drew’s bed for hours. She would open his closet to bury her face in his clothes, her grief on an animal level, taking in his scent as if it might help her track him down. I began to fear I would never get her back all the way.

She came most alive when Katee called, in Pittsburgh again and trying to finish a semester that had gotten away from her. I could tell from our end that Katee spoke to her about Drew as though he were still alive. Did it help? I had no idea what was healthy anymore.

You should move, people told us. I knew what they were thinking. Every trip along the street, Ginny and I would be rolling over our son’s grave. How are you supposed to do that and get past it? As for the neighbors, maybe selfishness was involved, too: if we stayed, we would be a reminder they were doing the same.

Ginny and I talked about it, if only to get it out in the open and confirm that we couldn’t bear to do it. It would be like trying to erase him, outrun his memory.

That’s not Drew down there, we decided. He’s gone. Whatever part of him that’s stayed behind, it’s in the house. This house. It’s in the yard. This yard. That maple tree out front, we planted the sapling when he was five, and I remember the day, how he thought he was helping. We can’t take that with us. Out back, that was his first ski slope, when he was six, and he’d pack every fresh snowfall into a ramp for three seconds of joy at a time. The bedroom, that’s his color, we let him paint it himself when he was fourteen, and remember how frustrated we got when he had to paint it five times in eight months to find the perfect mix of blue and white? That’s all him. We can’t turn it over to strangers. Not now.

So we stayed, and no one was more adamant about it than Katee.

How was Drew supposed to find us again if we didn’t stay put?

Our cool spring gave way to a summer whose wet heat fell on us like a boiled blanket. We were weeks into it when I decided the time to know had come. The anger still burned and always would. I hated men who’d left this world decades ago, whose company had been defunct since before the Second World War. I needed to know who and why.

I slid the card the state geologist had left me out from beneath its refrigerator magnet and called the number on the back. Her mine historian, Wesley McNabb, had been expecting it. He agreed to meet me at his home in Wilkes-Barre, a tidy two-story tucked back from the street behind some very old trees.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said in the doorway. “That godforsaken mine, still causing misery to this day.”

McNabb canted to one side when he walked, clumping along on a left leg that was clearly a prosthesis. He had the unruly beard, more salt than pepper, of a man who needed reminding to trim it, and the dull, weathered cheeks of someone who’d spent a lot of time in bad elements.

He led me to a big bedroom turned office. Tidy ended at its door. This had been a man cave since long before anyone had thought to coin the term, stuffed with cabinets and bookshelves, and an ancient roll-top desk with enough cubbyholes to serve a rural post office. Archaic pickaxes hung mounted on the walls, along with square lanterns made of battered tin. Shelves held flat-brimmed helmets with early electric lamps, and even older caps made for carbide lamps. A room like this took decades to accumulate.

And it wasn’t made for company. The chair I took had come from a kitchen.

“They first sunk her in 1919, the spring after the Great War,” McNabb began. “I’ll tell you what’s in the public record, and agreed upon, more or less. Then, if you want, we can get into the rest.”

He gave names of owners and foremen and labor leaders. None of them meant anything, just characters in a story that started normally, most inclined toward peace after years of machine guns and mustard gas in Europe. But, eventually, everyone’s true nature reverts to form.

The riots of 1927 had begun with labor strikes. Better pay, conditions, safeguards—the usual. You couldn’t fault them for it. Digging coal had always been one of the worst jobs in the world, and maybe the slowest to improve.

Negotiations didn’t last a week before the mine bosses cut them off and brought up a trainload of scabs from Philadelphia. McNabb ventured that the bosses never intended to settle in the first place, but were merely giving the appearance of it while they rounded up replacement workers.

“And to a striking miner,” McNabb said, “there’s not a lower form of life on earth than a scab. A man willing to take his job, and do it cheaper and probably not as good.”

Hence the welcoming committee at the train station for the new arrivals. Those who preferred a longer reach showed up with axe handles and ball bats; leather saps and knuckle-dusters for those who liked to get in close and dirty. The bosses weren’t stupid, and knew what to expect. They’d hired security accordingly, railroad bulls with clubs and saps of their own, and shotguns if needed.

The heaviest clashes went on for ten days. Six men went to the cemetery, dozens to the hospital, and Tecumseh #24 became an armed camp. But against a fixed number of local miners, and with a war chest for imported muscle, the company was always destined to win. After that, the violence dwindled to isolated brawls, mostly when scabs got caught outside the perimeter, their need to go whoring outweighing their sense of safety.

Seven weeks into the strike, the locals’ resolve began to crack—nothing gained, too much lost, and ready to ask for their jobs back. And that was when a cave-in on level four went chain reaction, causing a secondary collapse on level three.

“That’s where they all were, those bottom two levels,” McNabb said. “The mine had been going for eight years. Levels one and two were played out. Level three was getting there, but there were still some working it. Most were down on four. Three men, that’s all that got out. They’d just brought a carload to the shaft. Everybody else, killed or trapped.”

It was assumed there were more survivors than casualties. Cave-ins usually meant tunnel blockages rather than a collapse of the entire roof. Most of the men would simply have been on the wrong side of tons of rock and earth, timber and ore, with a limited supply of food, potable water, and maybe air.

“Under any other circumstances,” McNabb went on, “you’d have the entire townful of men working to clear the blockage, as soon as they could get down the shaft. Not this time. Scabs, remember. No lower form of life on earth.”

“Jesus,” I whispered. “You mean they just . . .”

“Left them right where they were. Because scabs got what was coming to them. I understand the contempt. But bottom line, this is a situation every man who goes down a mine fears. He needs to know that if it happens to him, the ones up top have got his back. That’s the bargain. So how a man sits in a church pew doing double duty as a meeting hall, looking Jesus in the face, and votes to do nothing . . . I don’t know. But they did it. Unanimous. ‘You brought ’em in, you dig ’em out’—that’s a direct quote from the strike leader to the company.”

“Did they?” I asked.

“Tecumseh? No. They weren’t any more eager to do it than the strikers, they just had different reasons. They claimed they had evidence there were no survivors, and if there were, they wouldn’t survive as long as it would take to get to them anyway. They said all the right things . . . we regret the loss of life, don’t want to endanger any more, blah blah blah. More likely, they didn’t want to spend the money. And the scabs, they weren’t union, so United Mine Workers didn’t touch it.

“So that, more than anything,” McNabb said with an air of wrap-up, “explains the haste in closing the mine, the half-assed job they did blocking the shaft. A thing like that becomes a shame over an entire community. It wasn’t their tragedy, so there was nothing to memorialize. They didn’t want to keep anybody’s memory alive. The sooner they covered it over, the sooner they could get to pretending it never happened.”

I wondered how collective the decision really was. If it had been genuinely unanimous, or a mandate issued by a few, everyone else encouraged to go along with it if they knew what was good for them. Even then, it was a decision with a point of no return. You couldn’t change your mind two weeks later, asking what have we done, and make it right.

It took a lot to appall me, but this managed it. Our neighborhood was built over the bones of men who’d boarded a train to take whatever job they could get, and died clawing at the dirt.

In retrospect, I wasn’t sure what I expected from the meeting. It only validated a hatred I was going to feel anyway for men whose evil came not from some grand design, but cost-benefit analysis and spite. It didn’t bring Drew back. It didn’t dissipate the pall of mourning that settled over our home like a cloud that might never leave.

Most of all, it was never going to dissuade Katee of her notion that Drew was not dead, a fixation she persisted in nurturing as the months went by. To her, everyone had conspired out of a growing sense of inconvenience to bury her brother alive. It put me in the worst position imaginable—hoping Drew had died within the first hour of the accident, that he’d staggered dazed from his car and tumbled to a swift and merciful end in the cold black water at the bottom of the shaft. Better this than lingering to dehydrate and starve.

Only Katee didn’t see it happening that way, either.

“He’s alive,” she said in late April. “I’d know if he wasn’t.”

As Ginny and I felt like the enemy, reminding her that denial was a normal phase of loss, and would pass.

“He’s alive,” she said in May.

As Ginny and I wondered if we shouldn’t get her to a grief counselor.

“He’s alive,” she said in June and July.

The question was, was Katee, anymore?

This was her nineteenth summer, and it bore no resemblance to the previous eighteen. It was as if she no longer had friends, nor anyone she wanted to date. She had secured no job or summer internship, not even with me. Last year, I’d hired her as my assistant while on the road from seminar to corporate seminar. Not this year—but then, I’d cut my schedule to the bone.

Katee had her bedroom, and that was all she wanted. Its window overlooked our street, but she now rejected the view, and covered the glass with black construction paper. When we asked if she didn’t want to paper over it with a poster, something with a view of a beach or ski slope, she pointed at the solid black and said, “Why? That’s what Drew sees now.”

As Ginny held her through some very long nights.

Me, I mostly wondered how to bring her back.

She’d always been the most forward-looking person I’d ever known. Her course of study at Carnegie Mellon was called Transition Design. Katee wanted to steer cities and systems and products toward sustainability rather than using everything up and throwing it away as fast as possible.

Now her sketchbooks gathered dust.

We’d all gone down that hole, and one way or another, had to find our way out.

Wesley McNabb probably understood this as well as anyone.

As for the rest of what he’d had to say, the parts that came down to supposition and rumor, I wasn’t sure what I believed and what I didn’t. Or rather, what I wasn’t prepared to believe.

Ginny, however, had taken a lot more on board than I realized that July evening I came back from Wilkes-Barre with the ugly history behind Tecumseh #24. She held it inside herself and gave it time to grow. I perceived none of this until the August morning I discovered her side of the bed empty and assumed she’d spent another night with Katee.

Wrong. Sometimes it felt like I’d been trained to catch every miniscule detail of everything except what was going on under my own roof.

I found her at the kitchen table, behind her coffee. She was dressed in charcoal-colored tactical pants, and a tank top and sports bra combo that showed off her cable-tight shoulders and arms. Her ass-kicking clothes, I called them. This was the uniform she wore whenever she taught women how to find their strength, how to dig in and fight, how to kill if that’s what it took.

Only she wasn’t in teaching mode. She was beyond, in doing mode. She looked like a mother, worried and committed and sleepless and fierce.

“What have you done?” I asked.

The uncertainties surrounding Tecumseh #24 began with the cause of the calamity. Nobody could definitively say what it was.

“Even in 1927,” McNabb had told me, “mining was a lot safer than it was twenty years before. That’s mainly down to the switch to electric lamps instead of working by open flames, waiting to hit a pocket of methane. Even cheapskates like Tecumseh could get behind that. But those three survivors said they heard explosions, at a time when there weren’t any scheduled. Not just one, but two. As miners, though, they were green, and scabs to boot, so their word was suspect. It made things sound deliberate. One of them, a fella name of Alvin Barnsley, went so far as to say he heard men fighting down on level four before it went to hell. No little scrap, either, but a big sudden uproar. That was part of the rationale Tecumseh had for declaring everybody dead already.”

“How likely is that? Green or not, they had to be smarter than to let some disagreement get that out of control on the job.”

McNabb tossed his hands up. “Anything’s possible. What makes it suspicious is that, not long after, very much on the quiet, Tecumseh deeded over six acres to Alvin Barnsley, within a mile or so of the site, right up against the hills outside Carbon Glen. Why? Can’t say. I don’t know if it was for backing the company line, or what, but if that doesn’t look like a payoff, I don’t know what does.”

“Wouldn’t money be even quieter?”

“You’d think. But maybe under the circumstances it was the most disposable capital they had to work with. It was a strange situation all around.” McNabb took a breath, going slower, as if accessing a new databank. “See, once they’ve been active long enough, and gone deep enough, sometimes mines start to develop their own mythologies. Miners start to see things, hear things. Tommyknockers—maybe you’ve heard the term? They’re spirits down in the earth, up to no good most of the time, tapping on the other side of rock walls that shouldn’t have anybody over on the other side of them.

“Well, those last weeks Tecumseh #24 was operational, it turned odd. They were supposedly pulling some peculiar things up out of there. But it’s all just rumor, mostly. These weren’t local men, letting their families in on a secret. It’s scabs making pillow talk with whores. So consider the sources.”

“What do you mean by peculiar things?”

McNabb folded his knotty hands together, turning pensive as he looked at the far wall. Through the wall. “When a mine turns strange on you, it’s not necessarily the what that makes it strange. It’s the fact that something’s down there at all. Nothing’s strange about an iron kettle or some crude old hammer. You look at them, you know what they are. What makes them strange is that they’re embedded in the coal. Shouldn’t be there. But there they are.”

I couldn’t detect a hint of lying, nor even exaggeration. He believed every word.

“Is that the kind of things they were finding?”

McNabb shook his head. “No. Stranger. This time, it’s the what, too.”

He slipped a photo from one of his desk’s cubbyholes and handed it over. It looked old, felt old, on yellowed, edge-curled stock thicker than a postcard. It showed what, lacking scale, I might have identified as some eccentric collector’s idea of a Bowie knife. Except it was laid next to a yardstick, and was a tad longer.

“That’s the only picture I’m aware of, of anything that came up.”

The weapon was half blade, half handle, and I couldn’t fathom how someone could comfortably wield it. The handle looked like the tip of a large drill bit, a deep-set flange curving up and around the central shaft—three times in eighteen or twenty inches, as if something were meant to grasp it by wrapping inside the groove. The blade was nearly as unusual, with sweeping curves and small barbs, an altogether cruel-looking instrument.

I flipped the photo over. On the back, in pencil whose penmanship had an old-fashioned flourish: Pulled from Tecumseh #24, June 16, 1927.

“Supposedly they found some carvings, too. Statuettes. And items nobody even knew what to call. It would’ve been an ideal time for bringing things up and keeping them to yourselves. The company had its hands full trying to keep peace with the locals, get that situation resolved. They wouldn’t have wanted to know. As for the hired goons, their curiosity likely didn’t go any further than how big a knot they could raise on someone’s noggin.”

A scenario came together in my head, greed meeting opportunity. The pieces were rough, but if you pressed hard enough, they might eventually fit.

“Is it possible that a bunch of guys started thinking of themselves as treasure hunters rather than miners?”

McNabb returned the picture to the cubbyhole. “Then turned on each other? That would fit the narrative the company preferred. But there’s one more factor . . . the most outlandish, but it’s there. The rumor was that two days before the accident, they hit a wall. I don’t mean in the usual rock-wall sense, a natural formation. I mean artificial. Constructed. With engravings on it, so that’s how they knew it was something more. Huge, supposedly, but that may have been exaggeration.”

“How is that possible? That can’t be possible.”

McNabb tapped the end of the photo. “If you accept this one, you have to consider the possibility of the other. I don’t take a position. I just make note of the talk from back then, and this picture came from the local Carnegie library. They’d had it forever and never knew what to do with it, so they gave it to me. My theory? Whatever these men ran into down there, they tried to blow their way through it, or into it, and didn’t know near as much about what they were doing as they thought they did. That accounts for a lot of things, assuming the survivor, Alvin Barnsley, was telling the truth. The collapse, the two explosions, the fighting and uproar.” McNabb grinned, more challenge in it than mirth. “If you can put it all together into something that makes more sense, you’re welcome to try. I do hope you’ll share it with me.”

He was right. It ticked a lot of check boxes. Except, for me, a significant one.

“Do you know if Barnsley turned around and sold the land they deeded to him?”

I was still bothered by that. If he’d only wanted money, it seemed as if Tecumseh could have sold the acreage faster, and the payoff would’ve stayed quiet. It wouldn’t have been a matter of public record.

“He did not,” McNabb said. “He moved onto it. Apparently he wanted to give farming a try.”

“A scab miner moving into a community that would’ve hated him. Did he have a death wish? The cave-in didn’t kill him, he thought the locals might?”

“A farmer might not have thought it was worth the risk. But a treasure hunter could’ve.” McNabb waved off the specter of him, leaving no doubt of his contempt. “The man was desperate enough to be a scab and fool enough to brag on what they’d been pulling out of the mine. It follows he may have been fool enough to believe he still had a future there.”

It had been a month since I’d gone to see McNabb and brought his stories home. For me, it had been the end of something—not closure, but at least an understanding of the chain of tragic events.

For Ginny, though, it had been a beginning.

I began to see the past month differently. The times when she’d taken longer than usual to come home from teaching a class. The increased hours she’d spent on her computer. Another man might have looked at such symptoms and suspected an affair. But Ginny wasn’t the type to sneak. She was sufficiently blunt that she would’ve told me I was fucking up badly enough to get her thinking in this direction. Regardless, an affair was the last place she would have channeled her grief, her worry over Katee.

“I should’ve believed her,” Ginny told me at the kitchen table, with her coffee and her ass-kicking clothes. “From the very start, I should’ve believed her.” She laid a hand over her belly as if, even now, she could feel a kick within. A tapping on the other side of her uterine wall. “They spent nine months together in the dark. In here. If Katee says she’d know if Drew really was gone, then I should’ve had more faith that she knows what she’s talking about.”

Herself, she was stressing. Not me. The processes she was describing could never have included me. The three of them had been bound together in flesh and blood and water and, if you wanted to go that far, spirit. Even as her husband, their father, I was still on the outside. And I’d had to learn the hard way that sometimes the better part of fulfilling those roles meant knowing when to shut up and listen.

Ginny pushed her phone across the table to me. “Do you recognize him?”

The photo in the display showed as much as a mug shot, with an indistinct background that might have been a living room. Its subject looked several years older than we were, fiftyish, or maybe it was bad living: a man with thinning hair and meaty cheeks and a bowed, prissy mouth. I found something unsavory about him. He had a look I’d seen accompanying too many case files about men who’d spent years filling crawlspaces with bodies.

He hadn’t wanted his picture taken. I could tell that much.

“No,” I said. “I don’t.”

“You should. He was in the street outside our house for most of that week in April. We’re practically neighbors. He’s less than two miles from here.”

“Is his name Barnsley?”

Ginny nodded. “Otto. He’s the grandson. Third generation on the same property. Who does that anymore?”

Ginny drained her coffee, then came around the table and leaned on me with her arm strong and tender around my neck.

“You need to eat something, Trevor,” she said, her chin resting on the crown of my head. “I got this far on my own and kept you out of it. I’m not doing the rest by myself.”

It seemed unwise to leave a car untended for hours in a place we didn’t belong. We covered the distance on foot, the summer heat building in that first quiet hour of daylight as we skirted the backsides of homes and neighborhoods that petered out against the hills.

The Barnsley land was six acres of nothing much. Enough traces of outbuildings and fences remained to show that, decades ago, it might have passed as a small farm. Now it was a rundown pocket of decay, a pustule of times past clinging to the land. The house, two stories and shabby, was in need of paint and new shingles, and matched the unsavory impression I’d gotten from Otto Barnsley’s candid snapshot.

And Ginny had come here alone.

“It bugged me that McNabb might not have been giving Alvin Barnsley as much credit as he should’ve,” she told me along the way. “His intention all along was getting back into the mine. That much seems obvious. I started wondering if he didn’t know something more than he should have. He either knew of another way in already, or thought he could find it.”

The thought had crossed my mind even before Drew’s car had been recovered. Another way in—it’s the kind of thing you pray for, and the answer’s always no. I’d still asked, and DeSalvo had double-checked her department’s archives. When she said there was no such route, I believed her. Even though she hadn’t known about the slope shaft, I trusted her.

Because the alternative—that a back way existed, but no one knew where to find it anymore—was too terrible to live with.

Maybe it had taken someone like Ginny to disregard the experts.

“Sometimes mines link up with cave systems, or older mines. Or something happens to connect one thing with another,” she said. “Do you remember hearing about the Knox Mine disaster, growing up?”

The name was familiar, but had no details attached.

“It happened around here too. 1959. The Susquehanna broke through into one mine gallery and flooded God knows how many others between Port Griffith and Exeter. They were digging where they shouldn’t have. So yeah, things link up, even when they’re not supposed to.”

To our left, from where we stood on this derelict homestead paid for with blood and starvation, the hills rose and rolled away, green and thick with trees festooned with the last tatters of morning mist.

“The water that washed out that shaft underneath our street had to come from somewhere. It didn’t come from our storm drains. Whatever’s upstream of there, it has to extend a long way.” Ginny pointed into the hazy hills. “It may not start here. But it runs through here.”

She said this like there was no question about it. She knew. Maybe not yesterday. But today, after whatever she’d done in this house last night, she knew.

“I’ve seen the map.”

“You didn’t think about going through official channels on this?”

She looked at me as if, for the moment, she was forced to suffer a fool. Every husband knows that look. “Channels are what got the sinkhole filled in inside of a week. Channels are what left those miners down there to die. Channels would be less concerned with what I found and more with how I found it. So fuck channels. I’m here for Drew and Katee.”

I followed her across the sagging boards of a creaking porch, inside.

The house put me in mind of Wesley McNabb’s office, but that was one room. Here it consumed everything, and must have taken lifetimes, a single obsession passed down through generations.

The walls were hung with maps. One appeared so archaic a museum might have valued it at a small fortune, but it detailed no geography I could recognize, its text in no alphabet I knew. The newest, global, bristled with pushpins—one at our location, and three dozen more across every continent from west to east, from Antarctica to Siberia. Others showed Earth’s landmasses in different stages of continental drift: Pangaea, then Gondwanaland and Laurasia, and onward, the later ones appended with a vast island in the South Pacific that had no existing correlate. R’lyeh, some ornate hand had labeled its work.

Photos? Those too, spanning decades of excavations and expeditions, in deserts and jungles, forests and mountains. A man with slicked-back hair and a machete stood over a litter of ferns beside an idol that might have been worshiped by maritime pagans. A sepia-toned team stood atop a jumble of stone blocks, dwarfed by them, in the cleft of a remote alpine valley.

Books? God, yes. Innumerable volumes on archaeology, geology, anthropology, astronomy, biology, metallurgy, advanced geometry and mathematics. An entire shelf was devoted to human anatomy, including textbooks on autopsies. Another was themed around ritual magic. They were supplemented by notebooks and legal pads beyond counting. I could think of bureau profilers who would’ve loved to spend a month combing through everything.

And all this was just along the path to where Ginny had secured Otto Barnsley hours earlier, his right wrist lashed to his left ankle with a zip-tie cuff. Another secured his right ankle to the iron leg of a woodstove. She used these plastic cuffs in her classes, teaching women how to fight with their hands bound; how to break the cuffs if they were strong enough. She’d never used them with bad intentions.

Just like that, it occurred to me: We are on the wrong side of the law here. And right now I don’t care about that, because I don’t know what he’s on the wrong side of.

“Oh, my,” Barnsley said when he saw me, in feigned alarm. “He’s a big one.”

“I came here hoping I could appeal to his sense of decency,” Ginny told me. “He doesn’t have one.”

Otto Barnsley peered up at us as if studying curiosities. Although the hours may have left him uncomfortable, he was not afraid. He was a soft-looking man, something larval about him, wholly unwholesome, the kind of person whose handshake would send you looking for the nearest faucet.

“I have other virtuous attributes.” He glanced at Ginny, then down at his predicament. “Some evidently need a little more work.”

The side of his face was bruised. I’d never known Ginny to go on the offensive. But she was an easy one to underestimate at first glance, with no second chances.

“What did he do?” I said. “What did he try?”

“I handled it.” She laid a steadying grip on my arm. “Keep your set point. What we’re here for.”

We locked eyes, and she didn’t let go until I calmed my breathing again. She was right. I wasn’t ready to know what this man had thought he could get away with. Not yet. Details gave you reasons to snap.

Instead, I focused on this: Otto Barnsley didn’t seem the type who ventured out to gawk at tragedies. He had to have been engrossed in the sinkhole itself, enough to show up every day with a vested interest in what the crews might discover. I suspected he’d gone home relieved.

“The map’s over here,” Ginny said, and retreated to the nearest dingy corner.

She’d removed it from its frame and spread it across a tabletop: yellowed paper the size of a poster, lined with a faint grid and filled in with what looked like ink over initial tracings of pencil. It was creased with enough folds to reduce to pocket size, but felt as if it had been a long time since it had been anything other than flat under glass.

It showed an entrance and a meandering channel that periodically branched off to other passages or ballooned into chambers. Near the south, it doglegged down into a linkup with Tecumseh #24, overlaid shadings depicting the various galleries of the mine’s third and fourth levels.

This point of connection between the mine and the rest was the real anomaly. There weren’t many straight lines on the map. But here, where the passage linked to the mine, was a square. I wasn’t sure what the map’s scale was, or if it was even accurate, but in context, this feature appeared to have the foundational dimensions of a house.

They’d hit a wall, McNabb had told me. Nothing natural, but constructed.

I tapped the map. “What is this square?”

Barnsley grinned, mocking. “What indeed?”

Ginny touched my arm. “If he decides to tell you anything more than he told me, fill me in. I need to round up some things for us on the back porch.”

She folded the map and took it with her. Barnsley watched it go as if this was the first thing to cause him distress. I caught it in that split second he tensed and squinched his eyes. A form of what’s called eye-blocking.

“My grandfather thought his fortune was going to come from artifacts,” Barnsley said. “In time, he realized it was in knowledge, instead. Knowledge being the true pearl of great price. But that structure down there was one thing he never understood. My father fared no better in his short life. It was a discovery ahead of its time.”

“But you understand.”

“I believe I do. Not without help. I’m just its humble custodian. There are people and organizations who’ve been studying the eclipted mysteries since long before Alvin Barnsley came north to steal a man’s job and found a new path in life.”

“What is it, then?”

Otto plainly loved to hear himself talk, but now he dodged. “Are you a godly man, Mr. Whitesides?”

“Not especially.”

“Oh, what a pity. It’s always delicious when someone’s celestial illusions are shattered.” Now Barnsley was the one reading me, that I had ceased to follow him. “Sometimes you brutish types who go into career fields where you get to legally hurt people have a crusader mentality. You have the kind of devoutness that leads you to conclude your god made you big for a reason. You break all the harder for it.” He sighed with disappointment. “I would’ve enjoyed seeing that.”

“Not a godly man yourself, I take it?”

“To the contrary. I have many gods. The kind that are worthy of the title because they have no use for it. Or for me. It’s a big universe out there. What kind of worthy god would stoop so low as to concern itself with jabbering apes like you and me? Worthy gods only care about worlds. Not their inhabitants. Worthy believers don’t care about worship. Only transfiguration.”

It was a relief to hear Ginny calling up the hallway from the back of the house. Barnsley, I had decided, was the type who liked to appear cooperative, but only to steer a conversation where he wanted it to go. All I needed to know was this: If that structure in the mine was artificial, then Barnsley and his fathers had taken what was potentially the greatest archaeological find in history and kept it to themselves. Or, going by the evidence on the walls, between themselves and a clandestine network whose beliefs were beyond understanding. These were grotesquely selfish people.

“If you’ve got something to add, now’s the time,” I said. “It’s getting late.”

“Before you go, would you do me the kindness of cutting these oversized bread ties she’s trussed me up with?” He looked at the clock. “You’ve reached the point of inhumane already. And there’s a possibility you won’t be coming back—not anytime soon, anyway— so there’s no reason to compound the inhumanity by leaving me like this to perish. We wouldn’t want that on your conscience, would we? Or are you as deficient of conscience as I am of decency?”

When I hesitated, he knew what that meant.

“You think I want to stop you from this mission? Not at all. You’ll be the first newcomers in years who wanted to go in there willingly. I’m as curious as you are to see what happens next. I’m happy to share.”

I’d heard enough. I followed Ginny to the back of the house and found her in a storeroom off the porch, furiously scouring the inside of a pair of facemasks with alcohol swabs. More safety gear was stowed here than one man alone would need. Barnsley had called himself the mine’s custodian, had alluded to groups coming to study it as far back as his grandfather’s day, and this much I could believe. This house was a way station for strange people with stranger agendas.

“We’ve got a decision to make,” I said. “Do you have the cutter for his cuffs?”

Ginny didn’t want to release him. But neither did she want to be the kind of monster who left him this way indefinitely. It wasn’t a proud moment for either of us.

I cut him loose.

“You were somebody’s son once. I just want to get mine back, if he’s there to be found. Whatever condition he’s in. Even if it’s just bones. You get that, don’t you?”

Barnsley stretched and massaged the ligature creases in his plump skin. “What’s not to get?”

“Have you seen him?” I leaned close enough for Barnsley to smell murder on my breath. “When’s the last time you were down there?”

“I tried once after the flood. Still too mucky for my tastes. And now . . . ?” He shrugged. “My ankles swell. As hikes go, it’s not what my British friends call a doddle.”

I drew back again. “What is that structure down there? Is it a room, a vault . . . ?”

He looked at me with bloodshot eyes, watery and puffy, but dreamer’s eyes nonetheless. I’d seen these eyes on killers with trails of graves behind them, driven by a calm conviction that they were so far ahead of the rest of humanity they might as well have been recognized as a more advanced offshoot of the species.

“I’ve come to regard it as a machine,” he said. “The oldest machine in the solar system. One of the engines of creation.”

And if I wasn’t sure what to make of that, I believed one thing he’d said: He was happy to share. But whether he thought he was sharing it with us, or us with it, I couldn’t tell.

We found the entrance where the map and Barnsley’s elaborations said it would be. Even then, it wasn’t easy. We trekked over the first steep hill behind the farm, then halfway down the other side. No trail, no signs, just landmarks amid trees that all looked the same.

It was screened so well a hiker could have passed by five feet away and not known it was there. Saplings had sprung up generations ago as the first rank of cover. Vines and ivy then hung like a curtain over a recessed doorway—a framework of huge, black timbers anchored into the hillside. If it hadn’t been the entrance to a very old mine, then it had been built by people who’d wanted to give that impression. If you got this far, a Danger sign was there to warn you away, bolted to a door stout enough for a medieval hall. It was secured with a padlock as big as a tuna can, whose shackle was thick enough to shrug off bolt-cutters.

Barnsley had given Ginny the key. I hurled the lock downslope as far as I could, in case he’d thought to come up later and secure it behind us.

The door opened inward, on quiet hinges, something that could only have come from decades of oiling. I shined my flashlight on the back of the door, unsure whether I wanted to see evidence of someone having clawed at it to get out, unclear whether I was relieved that I didn’t.

We were enveloped by an age-old smell of earth and stone, minerals and must. A claustrophobic corridor led in, braced by wood cut and cured when our grandparents were children. It ran level for yards, past the reach of daylight, then plunged down into a darkness more absolute than I had ever known. It was more than an absence of light. It seemed a solid substance, letting our flashlights cut it because it knew it would heal instantly.

Time to gear up. All we’d brought from home were pullover sweatshirts, while the back room at the Barnsley’s had provided everything else: knee-high rubber boots to slip over our shoes, and flashlights and hardhats with mounted lamps running to battery packs on our belts. Around my neck I dangled a multigas detector. If we hit a hazardous level of methane or carbon monoxide or hydrogen sulfide, we had the facemasks she’d cleaned and a small air tank on our backs.

At the top of the steps, Ginny touched my arm. “Is it even possible? That Drew could still be . . . ?”

Her defenses were coming down. The shell had cracked and she didn’t have to pretend anymore. There was just me now. But I think I was still the one who needed to hold the other more.

“I want to believe so,” I said. “Even if I don’t see how.”

We began the descent, down steps carved into rock and fashioned from wooden slabs, until we hit a point where the way was smooth underfoot, the natural floor of a passage that undulated along like a serpent frozen in a slow, steady dive. Our hardhat lamps pushed ahead, squeezing the dark back. The air was cool and moist, like a cellar closed to the world, with the steady temperature of a late autumn day. The walls were grim and unfinished looking, nothing like weathered stone on the surface, known to the sun and moon.

“Do you hear that?” Ginny stopped and said at one point. “Do you feel it?”

I had to follow her lead, but yes—I did. It was an ambience on the threshold of awareness, like the sound of time and the weight of the hills bearing down atop us.

Our only sense of distance came from the map, charting our progress by a chamber, a turn, a branch peeling off to someplace that hadn’t been worth the cartographer’s ink. In time, the floor became permanently damp, a layer of muck sucking at the soles of our rubber boots.

And the air turned warmer.

Hundreds of yards later, we were funneled to a cleft in the rock, an ancient fracture whose walls were just far enough apart to let us scoot through sideways. Along the way we’d passed spots that left me wondering what was natural and what might have been worked, but by the end of this claustrophobic passage there was no doubt it had been widened, with scars in the rock and matching chunks of rubble on the floor.

As we emerged from the passage, an expanded sense of space swallowed our voices and our headlamps turned feeble, without the closeness of the walls to contain them. We switched on our flashlights, too, and it became clear we’d emerged into Tecumseh #24’s northernmost gallery, glints and glimmers reflecting from the unmined anthracite as if the darkness had turned glossy.

But to our left . . . ? Despite our reason for being here, the only thing that mattered, we could only stop and stare. Here was the very definition of out of place and time. We swept our flashlight beams up and down it, and from side to side.

Miners kept their ceilings from collapsing by leaving pillars of coal in key locations, but that didn’t explain this. It was too big, too square, and it wasn’t coal. This was something else entirely, fashioned from harder stone, thirty feet on each side and painstakingly chipped free of whatever coal had once entombed it.

Its walls were flat, on the smooth side of rough, except in three equidistant places where the entire structure was circled by bands of bas-relief carvings—pictographs or hieroglyphs or ideograms that didn’t connect with anything I knew or ever wanted to. Some of them might have been text. Some might have depicted life forms known only from fossils, things that scuttled, swam, and flew, chiseled with a stylized sense of aesthetics I couldn’t begin to grasp.

It looked to stand at least twenty feet tall, jutting through the low ceiling into the level above, but this was only the visible part. It didn’t appear that our own level ground was its base. Where its sides met the floor, it looked as if someone had made an attempt to excavate further down. The trenches they’d left behind were now filled with slurry carried by the floodwaters of two years ago.

Ginny traced her finger down one corner edge. “It’s not perfectly straight up and down. See how it slopes in toward the top?”

She was right. It wasn’t a pyramid, though. More like an enormous pylon.

“No seams, either,” she said. “This wasn’t fitted together. It’s all one piece.”

“Barnsley called it a machine, though. An engine of creation, he called it.”

“Do you believe him?”

“I don’t know yet.”

But consider the implications of how far down we were. Consider what this monolith was anchored in. Whatever its purpose, coal had formed around it. Meaning it had stood in the swampy forests of a primeval world, watching over the growth and death and decay of vegetation by the ton, until it was buried. Millions of years. Tens of millions.

Snippets of old science classes came floating back. The Carboniferous Period, I remembered that, and that the latter half was called the Pennsylvania Period. Just the sort of thing local science teachers enjoyed relating.

An incomprehensible 300 million years ago.

Yet before any of that could have happened, this had been shaped with purpose and design, and set in place for a reason.

And the air around it felt warm. It shouldn’t have been warm.

“Trevor?” Ginny whispered. That’s what you did in the presence of such a thing. “Whatever this is, it’s not going anywhere. Let’s get moving. We’ll have time later to wrap our heads around this.”

Farther into the mine, freestanding water had pooled, the last remainder of the flood that had washed our lives from underneath us. A few inches deep at first, until we were wading in chilly black water that swirled near the top of our knee-high boots.

Pale things slipped and slithered through it, away from us—wormlike creatures that wriggled in the flashlight beam, then submerged as if to escape the glare. Okay. Okay. Maybe they’d washed down here from a cave system, a place where they’d always been.

Even so, the more we saw of the mine, its galleries and corridors, the less any of it was what we’d expected. The water’s surface was strewn with patches and swirls of lavender pond scum, algae that had learned to feed on something other than daylight. The rocky walls were slimed with growth. Gray fungus clung to stone and coal, and climbed frameworks of century-old timbers that helped secure the ceiling. This wasn’t a defunct mine anymore. It was becoming an ecosystem, hundreds of feet from the reach of the sun.

In the main tunnel I stepped on something that shifted beneath my boot, then gave with a crunch. I probed with my foot, too much rubber in the way to discern anything, so I pushed up my sleeves and plunged my hand into the cold water. When it came up with a length of spinal column and a rib cage, I flung them away in disgust.

Ginny stared after the splash. “One of the miners? Almost forty of them died down here. Those poor men couldn’t all have buried each other. And these Barnsleys don’t seem like they were ever the type to do right by the dead.”

It was obvious she hadn’t seen the bones as well as I had. In that glimpse I’d caught in the headlamp, they didn’t seem right, something malformed about them. The spine was overly long and twisted, as if from scoliosis. The rib cage had seemed wider, flatter. To me, it was only human because of expectations. Actually, I wasn’t sure it was human at all. But I wasn’t going to dredge it up again for another look.

We kept going, calling out for Drew as our lamps bounced off the disturbed water to make the walls ripple with shadow and light. It brought this place alive in the worst ways, the movement tricking us into thinking we weren’t alone, that something was trying to flank us.

We cleared one gallery, then another—not hard, here where the water came to our knees. However Drew had gotten in from the slope shaft, he would’ve sought higher ground, dry earth.

We were slogging our way to the next gallery when a new sound began to creep up on us: a growing hum, low and steady, like a ground loop in a loudspeaker. Or the discharge around high-voltage towers. Since it was originating from behind us, there seemed only one possible source.

Whatever the so-called engine of creation was doing, I decided I’d rather know than not. I splashed back up the main tunnel, following my lights as they bounced around the curves, until I could see this aberration again. The hum had been joined by a second sound, a hollow, resonant grinding like stone or metal dragged across itself.

As Ginny splashed along behind me, we came in sight of the engine as it began to emit a pressurized hiss. A miasmal fog jetted from rows of narrow vents that had opened along the bands of carved symbols. It drifted along the roofline, then began to disperse and descend. It may have been no more than water vapor . . . but this was nowhere for misplaced trust.

“Masks,” I said, and Ginny was already ahead of me. We opened the valves of our air canisters, then backed away from the cloud and resumed the slog ahead. At our backs, the warming air felt thickened, soupy. The multigas detector around my neck didn’t make a peep—a relief, and the truth was, whatever the engine was generating, we’d probably been breathing some degree of residue this whole time.

Because this event couldn’t have been a one-off. Undoubtedly, the structure had been doing this for a long time. Maybe it had reactivated during the flood. Maybe it had been running for decades, triggered by the miners’ discovery of it. Or maybe it never stopped, and had continued to operate in its tomb of coal, venting fumes through minute cracks, all the way to the surface and bubbling through the groundwater.

It outgassed for three or four minutes before falling silent again. Only then did I think to activate the timer function on my watch. Depending on how much longer we were here, I could see if it was random, or had a pattern.

Farther south, we found a shoreline along this stagnant black lake, where the next gallery led up to dry ground. In its farthest recesses, our lights swept across a row of heaped debris. When we saw what looked like filthy rags, we glanced at each other, and through our masks I saw that Ginny’s eyes looked as stricken as I felt.

The air, I imagined, was vile here. What lay before us was mostly bones, many of them, all long past stinking, but there were bodies, too, putrid with advanced decay. The bones were caked with mud and wrapped with rotten vegetation, the fibrous debris that gets swept along with floodwaters. Their arrangement was too orderly to be anything but deliberate. Someone had pulled these jumbled skeletons from the water, piece by piece, after the chaos had calmed. The kind of thing a survivor would do. As for the bodies, I counted eight, but these were newer casualties. Decaying for two years sounded about right, as if they’d perished in the same deluge that had scattered the bones.

As if men given up for dead long ago had, in defiance of every natural law, clung to life all this time.

I just couldn’t tell what their corpses were supposed to be. Not anymore.

“No,” Ginny said. Only that, and nothing else. “No. No. No.”

If someone—Otto Barnsley, maybe—had assured me they’d been men once, miners all, I would’ve said okay. I can see that. But then what? What happened to them? What happened to their skulls, to flatten the cranial domes? Why did their jaws seem to jut, uppers and lowers alike? Why did their teeth look like ivory pegs now, and why had their limbs shortened? What made their rib cages look squashed in, flattened out, as if no longer meant for people who walked, but instead, for things that crawled?

Never in my life would I have thought that for men abandoned by the world, starving and dehydrating in the dark would’ve been the merciful thing.

I took Ginny’s hand, so we could finish what we’d started.

And when we spotted him in the next gallery, even from a distance of many yards away, I knew it had to be Drew, because the heap along one rough wall was so much smaller. Just one person, lost in perpetual darkness, swathed in dirty clothes I never thought I would see again. How he’d loved that blue flannel shirt.

My boy. Oh, my beautiful boy.

Ginny ran to him, the way only a mother would, stripping the mask from her face and letting it dangle by the tube to bang against her legs. Her helmet clattered across the ground, the beam of light cartwheeling as she dropped beside him. To touch him, hold him, as only a mother could.

I took my mask off too. Where you go, I go.

But as a father, god forgive me, I was slower, because I was terrified of what I would find, then appalled by what was there.

Drew was beyond pale, with the pallor of skin no longer meant for a world with a sun. Our lights caused him pain, made him flinch and recoil, but even that movement looked clumsy. What happened inside when bones softened, when sinews relaxed? This. This happened. This puddled bag of reconstituting skin and bones that struggled to sit upright. He recognized the voices beside him, weeping and trying to soothe him, but he had trouble saying anything in return. We’re here, we told him. We’re here. He croaked and sobbed and made sounds unlike anything I’d ever heard from a person. And where was the grin I remembered, the smile that could brighten rooms? Gone, along with most of his teeth and half of his once-shaggy hair.

I dropped at his other side, so that Ginny and I looked at each other across him, the way we would when he was bedridden and tiny. Chicken pox. Mumps. Fevers and colds. He always got better. We’d always feared he wouldn’t. No reason, it’s just the way you worry when they’re little. You never quite lose that fear, even after they’ve grown so robust they seem immortal.

And for all I knew, that’s what he was now. The corpses next door were proof of that. Barring calamity, he might live for ages. Just no longer in a form I would recognize as anything that had come from me.

He wouldn’t want this. He couldn’t want this. We couldn’t leave him to it. Not our Drew. And not Katee, either, because a part of her would always be caught down here with him in the timeless black.

Ginny touched him so much more readily than I could. She stroked his cheeks until he could open his eyes. She put her face close so he would know how much she loved him. She found the kind of smile I would’ve thought she’d left above. She wiped away both their tears, making mud of the grime on their cheeks. She touched her lips to his clammy forehead, and held his hand so gently, because it seemed as if one good squeeze might crush its bones.

I’d never known such shame, because it was all I could do to rest my hand on his sinking chest, feeling its shallow, panting breaths, fighting the sort of disgust that strains the very fabric of a love you thought was inviolable.

And she knew. Ginny knew. She knew everything that mattered right then.

“Why don’t you go?” she said after a while. “Back out to the tunnel. You should go.” When I protested, a whisper: “I don’t want you here for this.”

For a few more moments I curled on the floor beside him, shaking, and so did she. I kept my eyes shut. It was purely presence then, the ineffable spirit of someone you love that you could never mistake for someone else. And it was Drew. My boy. My beautiful boy. But fading away, into something else.

Then I kissed him and left them together, for as long as it would take Ginny to do what we both knew I couldn’t.

Time to wrap our heads around things later—that was the promise. Right now, it was all I had to keep my mind from cracking in two.

I sat by the edge of the black lake, the surface as still as a sheet of obsidian. These were the shallows, but there had to be depths, too, a gradual decline or a sudden drop into a cold chasm. The diver who’d searched the bottom of the slope shaft had found as much, even if he hadn’t been able to navigate a way through it.

Yet Drew had. The two sides were connected, and Drew had found the way. Tumbled from his car downhill, all the way into the water at the bottom, and instead of crawling back up the shaft toward daylight, he’d emerged over here. Hurt, disoriented, in darkness, without an air tank, he’d accidentally done what a trained diver couldn’t?

I couldn’t believe that at all.

But I could believe he’d been brought by someone who already knew the way.

As recently as the flood, survivors from the cave-in had been alive down here. Don’t ask how, not yet, just go with what I can say for certain. There were survivors. I’d seen the bodies. Bodies and bones that someone had cared for. So there had been at least one survivor from the flood, as well.

Good god. Imagine that. Entombed alive. Nine decades of abandonment, betrayal, mutation. I couldn’t imagine anything lonelier than being the sole survivor after your pitch-black world was inundated and the last of your fellow exiles have drowned. If even one spark of humanity remained, you’d do anything to not be alone anymore.

What a gift Drew must have seemed.

Back in the gallery, Ginny was singing to him, a cradle lullaby I hadn’t heard in eighteen years. The acoustics made it sound as if we were in a church instead of a tomb.

At my feet, on the shore of this stagnant lake, the black glass surface rippled, as if disturbed from far away. I moved nothing more than my eyes, scanning the shadows as far as they let me see.

It may have only been the flipping of one of those pale eels I’d seen earlier.

But I didn’t think so.

So with one ear I followed Ginny’s song, and with the other listened for a splash.

I let the grief in deeper and imagined how she would do it. She knew how to break people, but knew how to put them to sleep, too. She knew how to wrap her arm around someone’s neck from behind, how to notch their throat in the crook of her elbow and squeeze so the blood stopped flowing to the brain. It’s only uncomfortable for a few seconds. Then the lights go out. That’s when you should release the choke. Unless you intend lasting harm. To kill the brain, all you have to do is keep holding the person close and not let go, for the longest few minutes of your life.

Up the tunnel, back where we’d come in, the engine of creation hummed to life again. I checked my watch—thirty-six minutes—then reset the timer and debated putting my mask back on. Could be it was too late already, because we’d breathed the air down here before we’d ever switched to the tanks.

I hoped it took more exposure than that. Days of it. Weeks of it.

It was the key to everything, though. If something could rightly be called an engine of creation, then it could just as easily be an engine of re-creation.

Terraforming—that was the word that came to mind. Paving the way for life as something altogether other knew it.

I pictured the monolith as it must have been, a mysterious and indestructible pylon squatting in the forested hush of our world at its most primeval. Humming like a swarm of dragonflies the size of condors and spewing its fumes to the wind, casting seeds of life and metamorphosis. One of dozens, assuming this was what was marked on that map on Barnsley’s wall, pinned with sites from pole to pole.

Its vast antiquity was beyond questioning. Only who had put it here was up for grabs. Barnsley’s many gods, I had to guess—the worthy gods that cared only about worlds and not their inhabitants. Least of all, a few poor scabs who thought they’d found their fortune.

Near my boots, the waterline rippled again, as somewhere out in the darkness, drips and drops plinked to the surface. Down the tunnel I glimpsed a pale shape, like the inverse of a shadow, rising from the water, then descending again.

I wished I’d worn my old sidearm. But there were rocks.

You poor bastards, I thought. Mythology was full of heroes who lamented that we were only the playthings of fickle gods. The miners would know better. They weren’t even that much, just casualties to a process that had never factored them in in the first place.

Behind me, the lullabies were no more.

My family. Oh, my beautiful family.

Still, I wondered if those miners hadn’t battled like heroes just the same.

For months, one thing had bugged me about that slope shaft. The only apparent opening was the one Drew had been diverted into. The rescuers hadn’t found any sign of a corresponding opening on the other side of the vertical. But nobody could afford to worry about that at the time.

So what if it had never been a long-forgotten shaft sunk from the surface at all? Suppose it had been dug from below, by something trying to get out. Whatever the miners were becoming, and scabs or not, some may yet have known how to excavate a tunnel that wouldn’t collapse on them. They’d only misjudged, and run into the blockage that Tecumseh had dumped down the main shaft.

Maybe by then they’d realized they didn’t have time to try again.

Christ—how had they lived even that long? Water could have been seeping in even then. And for a time, they might have fed on their dead. Beyond that, I didn’t want to know. The engine of creation had made them its own soon enough.

One thing was certain: By the time Alvin Barnsley had found his way back in, his comrades were no longer fit for the topside world. Otherwise, they would’ve left.

I knew it was done when Ginny sobbed, a sound ripped from an imploding core, and something in me broke too. We had no son anymore. Katee had no brother. We had only memories now, until our minds might unravel and let them spill with all the rest.

For a moment I intended to rejoin her, then reconsidered. No. She would want these moments to herself, as well. This I knew. Sometimes it felt like I knew her so well I had no idea who she actually was anymore.

As for whatever had been watching from the deepest darkness of the mine, and must’ve fled when it heard us coming, it understood what had just happened as well as any of us. It must have been waiting for this moment.

At first it was merely ripples coming toward me, a V shape gliding through the water, the vague suggestion of something’s back. Then it hit the shallows and struggled to find its feet again. I caressed the rock in my hand.

And if one good thing could come of such a terrible moment, it was that I could feel peace over what we’d spared our son.

In it, you could still see the man it had been, even if it was a man reshaped by the archaic reptilian forms lost to a world 300 million years gone. The connection wasn’t in its eyes, though. It had none, only vestigial bumps where they’d been. It found me by sound alone. It wasn’t in the shape of the face, either, with the flattened crown of its skull and the wide, jutting jaw brimming with peg teeth. It wasn’t in the grotesquely lengthened torso, or the stumpy limbs, or the skin so pale it looked blue against the black. And it certainly wasn’t in the thick, tapering tail it was trying to hide.

No. It was in the pride he took in trying to stand. There was the man. In his pride, and the way he carried the ancient miner’s pick in the clawed appendage that had been his hand.

I let my rock drop to the floor.

Even across 300 million years of speciation, in a creature I’d never seen, I knew his body language. I knew exactly what he was begging for.

He offered me the pick, then plopped to the ground, on all fours, half in the water and half out, where he looked so much more at home. And with his head at my feet, he waited.

I should have hated him for what he’d done to us. I should’ve condemned him to a life of renewed solitude. But I couldn’t. He’d only wanted what we all want. Wretched as he was, he had only wanted to not feel so alone.

In my hand, the pick’s handle felt rough and rotten, sloughing off splinters. The iron end curved like a rusty crescent moon. I squeezed it until my knuckles went as pale as he was, then hoisted the tool over my head.

I could think of nothing crueler in the cosmos than gods that cared only about worlds.

It took an inhabitant to care about mercy.

BRIGHT CROWN OF JOY

Livia Llewellyn

[::AFTER::]

Once upon a time, when I was a little girl, there were birds. Thin, delicate arrows of bone and feather, crossing the dry horizons of the earth like the needles of the universe, stitching the planet together with their call. Billions of them, spiraling in coils like windswept dragons kissing the baby blue vault of the sky. Settling into the trees during cold nights like clusters of fluttering dark leaves, and bursting into high, bright song every morning as the unstoppable sun breached the horizon like a volcanic god. Once upon a time, I was a girl and there were birds.

But those days have been gone for many long millennia. All warm-blooded life, all land once bone dry, all seasons once cold—all have been long banished from this warm-water realm; and all the birds have died, along with most of the animals we few remaining half-humans remember, those magnificent amber-eyed creatures of feather and fur. Like childhood, they exist solely as memories, outdated maps to a country we can never return to. In the wake of His passage, all has been transformed.

When I sleep, I dream deep and hard, as we all do. Sleeping, I drink in and drown in memories, the last memories of the last survivor of a long-dead race. I awake still dreaming, the smell of pine pitch and rustlings of birds and trees lingering in the tendrils of those long-lost territories. Gradually, always, the sounds disappear into the soft song of stone chimes hanging from the arches of my roofless chamber, sounding out the passage of tiny cnidarians as they float and swim through the hot, damp air. I rise up from my bed and watch their pulsing bodies push through the ceramic domes, tentacles trailing like strands of winking lights. Outside, larger beings, capillatas and medusas and creatures I have no names for, catch in the overgrown vegetation then burst free in silent explosions of gelatinous flight, disappearing into the pale, sunless mists that have muted day and lightened night. These are the birds of the world now. And they are stupendous. They are beautiful.

The boy, hardly a boy anymore but something caught between boy and alien wonder, lingers in the crumbling remains of the other room, waiting for me to rise, his soft lips always in a slight smile that hides a mouth of teeth that ages ago fused together into a single ridged wall of bone. His reluctance at leaving me behind on the evolutionary ladder touches me. Sometimes I catch him slumbering, and I press my unclothed body against his, eyelids lowering as I join him in reverie. More and more, we remain like that for immeasurable passages of time, flickering images of past lives washing through our conjoining flesh and minds, breaking apart only when some mysterious creature brushes past us in its accidental perambulations through our home. No such lingering coupling for us this wan morning, though. Outside and far away, on the last and highest mountaintop in the world, our youngest children patiently await us, and, as if in a dream, I have realized that the time has come to meet them.

[::MEMORY #2724869.1::]

July 17, 24—, 11:38.52 PM

Roman Wall City, Mount Baker

PrionTech TemporalCortexDiary #74543.01

[::WAKE::]

[::WAKE::]

[::WAKE::]

[::REMINDER: 12:15.00 AM CAR PICK-UP, 1:00.00 AM DESTINATION SUMMIT CRATER ESTATES::]

He is coming. He is coming. He is coming. The alarm is going off, but it’s this nightmare that’s really ripping the sleep from me, again. I’m waking up as I always do, trembling and panting, sheets all twisted around my body, the mattress and my T-shirt are so wet and slick that—no, I didn’t wet the bed. Huh. Well, that was a horrifying moment. God, it’s so hot. I bet the AC has gone out again. Let me check.

I was whispering when I woke up. He is coming. Repeating it, chanting, like a prayer. How long have I been saying those words? My mind keeps going over the dream. The horizon, the Pacific bulging up and out like a bowl until the waters break.

No, it’s working, barely. Going through the motions. [::REC OFF::]

[::REC ON::] I went to the bathroom, and now I’m in front of the open food locker, letting this feeble chill wash over me as I drink the last of the filtered water—though I’d specifically saved it for my morning tea, and my grocery appointment isn’t until the nineteenth. Oh, well. I needed it. I probably shed five pounds of sweat onto my poor bed.

It’s pitch black outside, so I’m rolling both the blinds and the UV shades up. I hope the video for all of this is uploading. No lights in the apartment, no reflection in the window except for a faint purple wink of the wireless implant at my left temple. I’m pressing my nose against the glass; I can see all the way across and down the southwest slopes to the edges. Autumn comes earlier every year, and already great swaths of gold and red run through the forests, needles and leaves falling faster than rain. People are saying this is the final die-off, that this is the start of the end. They say that every year, though. There are little pockets of light all the way down the mountain into the foothills and valleys, pockets of those like me who can afford twenty-four-hour electricity and avoid the brownouts. The rest of the slope is dark as a tomb. Occasional flashes of light, though—probably fires. Sometimes police cars or ambulances.

Sometimes, though I don’t know why I think this, the lights look like something else. Organic, almost bioluminescent, like the flashing of giant anglerfish, luring we few night owls outside, into our benthic doom. There they go, again.

[::M-FLASH::]

seven years ago, after the Pan-Pacific tsunami waters receded

valleys and rivers of green fire.

[::/M-FLASH::]

I don’t know if this is even uploading to my online diary or if I’m the only one who will ever read this, when I’m old and bored and out of memories to make. The aurora borealis—bands of bright orange and cold blue flickering high above the horizon. Unfolding and spiraling upwards in thin streams, like twisters of wildfire, like the ocean is unraveling. It’s the wrong time of year for the lights. How odd.

Beyond the valley, beyond the peaks of the Olympic Mountain Archipelago and the Vancouver Island Ranges, is the Pacific. I can’t see it from here, even as high up as I am and as much as the ocean has risen, but those even higher and far richer than me, those with homes at the summit with their high-powered telescopes, they can see the coast grow closer with every passing year, filling up valleys, sliding over low foothills, filling in all the spaces of the world. In less than two hours I’ll be in one of those summit homes, one of those guests-of-a-guest affairs where I’ll be granted access to the gated stronghold of one of the few remaining mega-rich families via the arm of my handsome silver-haired date, a banking acquaintance farther down the ridge at Colfax Peak, who’s probably looking for a companion higher up the mountain he can move in with when the waves start knocking at his door. I’m not judging: tonight I’ll be doing the same thing. We all spend our lives looking up now, much more than looking down. There’s so much less to look up to anymore. I should get ready.

[::REMINDER!::] Pack my collapsible water bottle, in case there’s no timer on their bathroom faucets.

Oh, the nightmare. I never got around to having that DreamCatcher app installed in my wetware, way back before Internet access got so slow and spotty you can’t upgrade anything anymore, and so I was going to think all the images into this diary when I woke up—that was the whole point of this entry. And of course, I’ve forgotten most of the details. All I remember now are bells, gigantic church bells or gongs, a constant thunderous ringing as all the oceans of the world pour up into the sky, and everything sinks below.

[::/MEMORY::]

[::AFTER::]

We take the long way, as always, across the great delta to the watery marshes that lap against the chain of ancient mountain peaks we and the other remaining elders have made our final home. I never need to remind or insist, the boy knows my every routine as if it is his own. Roads and trails have been reduced to shadows and suggestions of themselves, spectral threads of our previous passage that are only slightly less overgrown than the surrounding jungle. Our feet know the way only by instinct anymore. You could call it mere, but instinct seems more and more to be the wondrous order of our endless day. We sleep and dream and eat and breathe in the super-saturated air; and decades and centuries and perhaps even millennia go by before we stop and think, I am doing this, I am picking up that, I remember that place and that time, I am here, right here, and it is now. And we no longer remember the terrible, human limit of finite days and years, all that weight of decay and mortality. Time simply is, it stretches out like this wilderness, like the waters, like the river of stars that spirals across the sky, drawing ever closer with every phase of the moons. There is so much of it now. Sometimes the boy and I weep at the thought, the thought of us being within it and a part of it, of becoming vast and endless and, and. And.

So much endless becoming. We lap at the edges, daring to taste, to wonder: what will it be like, when we finally succumb, are subsumed? And then, like tiny fish, we dart away. For now.

Through jungles of gold and green ferns, high as trees, across warm rivers and wetlands, draped in brown hanging moss and blood-red flowers. All the colors of a crisp northern fall, erupting out of an endlessly subtropic world. Masses of giant starfish-headed worms cling to boulders, their rows of bead-black eyes noting our progress as their suckered arms grind the smooth surfaces away. We find the skiff, an ancient hardwood beauty, tied to the tree that has grown higher and thicker in the long stretches of time between each journey, and slip into the currents. Skeletal vestiges of the tips of skyscrapers glide past, covered in green, followed by slender tree trunks and vines mimicking the angular shapes of the towers they once latched onto and fed off of, towers that collapsed ages ago as the trees grew on. Our public spaces, our thoroughfares and byways, are lush carpets of seagrass in shallow waters, waving us through the serene backwaters of what were once our last cities, our last homes.

Above the roof of the wilderness, three pale spires float into view. The fourth barely rises above the tree line, looking like the broken stub of a finger bone. And then: a column-lined stone road leading to an arched gateway that devours it like a mouth; and beyond the gate, the high stone and granite walls of the crumbling former holy palace that has become through all our ages and evolutions so many different kinds of schools, the crown that rests on the highest summit of the last remaining land mass in the world. Next to the water’s edge, a figure sits at the broken base of a cyclopean Buddha, worn back down into the featureless aerolith from which it was born. The man. He spends all his time now with the children, watching them grow, teaching them and learning from them, embracing change almost as quickly as they do. I wonder which of the oldest I will no longer recognize. I wonder which of them will no longer recognize me. Someday, the boy and I will join them, as will the few remaining humans like us, the elders who still live alone in the lands; and then it will be all of us together, a colony of one, pulsing and expanding as one, drawing up all the waters of this world as our body becomes a sail with which to catch and ride the sonic songs of distant stars.

The skiff catches the shore, and the boy leaps out. The man moves forward, offering to me his graceful, fingerless hand. He sees and speaks and breathes solely through his limbs and soft skin now, his features long subsumed into the smooth brown of a hairless head that even now the ghost of a welcoming smile lingers within. He pulls me up with ease, and we stand together in the shadows of the leaves, arms encircling, foreheads touching. He still knows us, but he no longer knows who we are. A familiar fading purple light at the side of his head winks once, like a candle that sputtered into flame only to immediately die. He is trying to commit our faces to permanent memory again, his brain and the technology going through the motions without understanding that it is nothing more than a death rattle. Like the boy, and all the other Elders, whose cerebral hardware and ports died out at the start of the After, their past lives have vanished. There is only the present for them, a memory-free, streamlined evolution into the future. Only I still remember that even these moments will be wiped away clean. I have no choice. I cannot forget.

[::M-FLASH::]

his beautiful silver hair

[::/M-FLASH::]

[::MEMORY #2724869.3::]

July 18, 24—, 02:05.07AM

Ballad House, Summit Crater Estates, Mount Baker

PrionTech TemporalCortexDiary #74543.04

[::FILE CORRUPTION::]

—by the standards of today, I’m rich and jaded and cruel, but even for me it’s a bit grotesque. I could never eat that. I politely decline and the waiter gracefully moves away into the crowd with his silver tray. The first group is back from their tour, moving through the double doors into the living room, most of them excited and flushed, a few somber and quiet. People forget their drinks and their important conversations, crowd around them, touch their bright red cheeks and gasp and laugh. What they’ve just seen, few people in the world have seen for hundreds of years—and even the most powerful people on the planet, scientists and politicians and queens, they have not seen, will never see this thing. Perhaps they don’t remember it exists anymore. We’re all so busy running from the ocean and cowering under the sun, there’s no time for anything else anymore. A shiver is running through me, despite the almost suffocating heat in the room. I’m in group twelve. I don’t mind waiting. I’ve found out that when you’re the last, it means you can find out little things the ones who went before you didn’t know, secrets and cheats. Sometimes you learn how to stay as long as you want.

I’m walking over to the side of the room, now, to the bar. Except for my date, I don’t know any of these people here tonight. Not the usual crowd that attends these events.

No more unlimited ice—they started rationing before the first half-hour was up. Our hosts have been gracious and apologetic, explaining the lack of usual amenities to the unusual temperature spikes, to the diverting of resources to other areas of the estate. Money can buy anything, but we’ve long been coming to the end of how much there is in the world to buy.

Another drink, with a single shard of ice, no larger than one of my nails. Gone. It’s disappeared so quickly, I might have imagined it. I’m walking out into the square outdoor courtyard that sits in the middle of the house, and look up past the slashing lines of concrete and steel to the faint twinkle of stars pushing through the humidity and haze. God, what an ugly-looking building. Uglier than most. Certainly not a mansion, barely a house. More like some giant reached into the mountain, grabbed the top of a nuclear bunker and pulled it halfway out of the rock. It’s been built to survive anything, I’ve heard—all of the buildings at Summit Crater have. Our hosts insist that they designed every last detail of their home, as well as all the other homes on the gated estate, but over the decades, rumors have flown.

[::M-FLASH::]

weapons testing facility

center for disease control

torture and detention center

?astro-archaeology?

[::/M-FLASH::] [::REC OFF::]

[::REC ON::] Boring conversation over with. It’s almost my group’s time to go. People are pointing up. The lights again, the aurora borealis, streamers of thick blue and white lights overhead like comet showers. What was the name of that famous one that crossed the planet’s path every century? [::SEARCHING . . . SEARCHING . . . /SEARCH::] No Internet. Never mind. I’m standing in the middle of the courtyard with everyone else, staring up at the moving sky. All the constellations, spiraling, circling. All of us, drifting like torn seagrass, falling up—

In the next room people are laughing, like waves over breaking glass. I’m stumbling over to a bench, my evening companion suddenly at my side, his hand around my bare arm. My head bent down. It’s okay, I’m not drunk, I hear myself saying as I’m rubbing my eyes. It’s just the stars. It’s just the bells.

[::/MEMORY::]

[::AFTER::]

All schools look the same, smell the same, sound the same, I think, as we walk through the echoing halls. Even after so many eons, even in air so thick with water that most days now the boy’s and my too-slowly-evolving antediluvian lungs struggle to breathe. The tiny purple and blue light that still sparks and winks at the side of my glabrous head, it remembers for me. It lets me forget nothing. The colors of curled crayoned papers fluttering against cream and lime walls. The speckled linoleum, yellowed and cracked with blooms of algae and moss bursting between each square. The long hallways, silent and high and wide, lined with rusting lockers and dusty windows and open classroom doors. The miniature size of each round-edged wooden desk and rickety chair. All as familiar as if we were human children again. The only thing missing is the soft smell of chalk in the air.

I reach out with the tip of one long sticky digit, and touch the faded remains of a drawing of tall green plants. The paper is so delicate that it dissolves at my slightest touch, bursting into thousands of particles that hang in the air like insects. Had it been the work of one of my thousands of children, back in the early centuries of the post-transformation of the world, when we were still more human than not? The implant in the dissolving remnants of my brain comes up with no memories. As we move down the cracked stone floors, past pale branches with snapping flowers and clusters of tall seagrass erupting from lockers and doorways, a single bell peals gently from one of the towers. Wind, perhaps, or a school of floating polyps. The boy and I smile in unison.

Hallways and stairways converge, pouring into a roofless, multi-leveled atrium. Tiny lizards sleep on the balustrades and warm floors. The man heads off in another direction, down wide steps of graying marble that lead to underground rivers, bioluminescent rooms, and glittering nocturnal pools, where those children and elders reside as a single entity that is so far beyond and above us that the boy and I hear its song only as a faint impulse, a tug of the heart that catches only to release and melt away before we can join in.

Not yet. It’s not my time just yet.

The boy and I continue down the steps toward the masses of supine bodies that cover the floor, drape across balustrades and up stairwells, hang over balcony railings like glistening tapestries. Toward the center of the room they begin to merge, bodies conjoining and melding together, forming a singular living mass that flows down through a wide, round fissure in the middle of the space. Beneath the collective breath and shifting of their bodies, the constant low roar of the ocean works its way up through the remains of the mountain, through the funnel of pulsing flesh that endlessly descends toward their brothers and sisters in the watery chambers below. Plumes of brine and sweet decay fill my lungs, the scents of my children and the elders as they begin their final journey into the ever-increasing being that shall someday span the ocean, that shall someday consume the entire planet, that shall someday take its place once again as a traveler of the dark river of stars, that shall someday find some other bright blue world in which to sink and shrink and settle and dream until the time is right once again for the cycle of life to repeat.

We make our way through ropes of softening bone, columns of vibrating limbs, our hands running over humming flesh as we pass through the room to the other side. I feel their thoughts vibrate into me like electrical currents, welcomes and salutations and declarations of familial love, equations and astral projections and all the cosmic revelations that come with pending godhood. The air becomes easier to breathe, and the myriad needle pains of my ageless body fade. These children of mine do not understand me, but they love me and they heal me, because I have shown each of them the wondrous and mind-altering glimpse of what is to come, of what we will all become. I alone contain the glimpse of our future-self.

[::MEMORY #2724869.4::]

July 18, 24—, 04:12.08AM

[::SEARCHING::]

PrionTech TemporalCortexDiary #74543.07

Dammit dammit I forgot to turn the diary back on until now. Much better now—it was just the heat, that’s all. And now I’m standing at the end of a long underground hallway with one of my hosts, and the six other people in my group, my silver-haired date included. I’m looking back down the hallway, and I can’t quite make out the door we entered through. That’s how long it is. There’s a steep slant to the floor. We went down.

My date is next to me, holding my hand; we’re watching in silence as our host and their security team unlock the door. We’re all looking away, respectfully, although they’re not entering codes. The entire door is covered in locks and cogs and tumblers. It was built for a world without electricity—that’s why there are small shell-shaped recesses in the walls. For candles or lamps, maybe. I bet this used to be a shelter. The higher the oceans drive us, the lower we sink. I can’t help but feel we deserve this, that we brought this all on ourselves.

Enough of that. My date’s hand is at the small of my back. He’s smiling, and I’m returning it. This, right here and now, is an incredible, singular moment I’ll remember for the rest of my life. This will shape and define me in ways I have yet to understand. It’s only a few degrees cooler within the mountain, but I’m so unused to the difference, I’m almost high—and this is just the start. The vertigo and confusion of earlier in the night is gone—I was overheated, dehydrated; the alcohol didn’t help. Guests always faint at these things; we don’t know how to pace ourselves anymore. Now I’m practically levitating with excitement.

The door is clicking, our host—he’s saying something . . . it was once one of only three in the Northern Hemisphere, but he has it on good authority that the other two are long gone, and there are no more in the south . . . something about quadruple-insulated glass walls, twenty-four-hour security, blast doors and walls . . . slow down, I missed a date. It’s very old, the oldest thing you could imagine, created even before the Ice Age, whenever that was. One of the guards is ushering us through into a small antechamber, where we’re being instructed to slip on long fur-lined coats with hoods, facemasks, gloves, heavy booties that look like tree stumps. The room is growing cool, very cool, very quickly. We’re crowding together, there’s just enough room for all of us with all this fabric swaddling our fancy outfits. I’m pressed between my date and a young man, maybe fourteen or fifteen, with long blonde hair and a baby-soft face. Familiar—the host’s son, or a donor clone? So hard to tell anymore. The door behind is clanking shut, and the door in front of us is now opening. He is coming, I whisper. Shaking my head, laughing like I told a stupid joke. I meant to say, This is it.

The woman in front of me is passing out as the door slowly opens—

—super-cold—

—murky heat of th—

—opens into the snow—

[::FILE CORRUPTION::]

—she cannot remember this image

—yes we agree

[::FILE LOCK::]

—son-clone, is speaking to my date, I’m catching the end of their conversation, his amazing offer we’re both now saying yes to in unison, as we’re directed back through the two-foot-thick doors into the hall. It seems our night of wonders has yet to end.

[::AFTER::]

Past the oculus of ocean-saturated flesh we wander, through the crumbling arch of a doorway and up wide stairs. More hallways, lined with worn stone doors. Rough bands of dead coral and the tiny bones of antediluvian sea creatures are embedded in the surface of the walls, creatures completely unfamiliar to me. After the After, there were waves of tsunamis that circled the surface of the world again and again, remaking it entirely new, there were epochs of monstrous and amazing creatures that thrived and died off in mass extinctions as the planet recalibrated again and again, as we who survived realized that we too had recalibrated, and were part of the chain of change. To our right, light pours in through rows of windows, the glass panes long cracked and worn away. Fog sifts over the sills in flowing bands of soft pure white, and our thin bodies turn it into coiling serpents that wilt and fade in our wake. That color is a rarity now, it reminds me of a moment so thoroughly buried in my past, that to access it takes lengths of time that spans the cycles of the moons. Only with the help of my children can I melt the eons away. But it is more than that. I want them all to know what it was to be awake, alive.

The boy stops before one partially open door. I follow him in. In this place, more than any other, sometimes the old thoughts and emotions reemerge, and curiosity comes to life again within us. This is the room with the globes, row after row of round, almost weightless planets and moons, perched on stands that allow them to spin and gyre in place. I don’t know if the boy remembers what they represent anymore, but it is clear he remembers his pleasure in spinning them, in staring at the continents and islands and rivers and seas whirling with the touch of his hands. Most of the map features have vanished, some globes have rotted away into half-shells, others are simply dust. All are static snapshots of a planet whose surface has shifted countless times. Faint traces of maps cover the classroom walls, painted on the stone and plaster. Long ago, when they were legible, I could make out trails and calculations, the plans of routes and journeys, cuneiform scratches that spelled out destinations. There was a time we thought we could reverse the process, escape our fate. But from this place, the highest mountaintop in the world, there was nowhere else to run.

An elder appears before us in the doorway, its featureless head nodding as multiple arms beckon us forward. I don’t recognize it. Are they someone I once knew, in our human life before the After? They have no mouth. Their port, if they ever had one, is dead, and their mind is already becoming attuned to the writhing confluence below, their body soon to follow. No urgency drives its movements, only instinct, and so we continue our circuit around the room, taking as much time as we need and desire, our fingers entwined, mesmerized by the thick layers of pasts crowding the space like ghosts. We let them wash over and through us until we are sated, until some restless primal human emotion or urge in each of us has subsided. I let the boy leave the room first, and I follow, both of us letting the elder lead us to the end of the hall and into a small classroom covered in soft rugs and lined with chains of bright prayer flags.

Multiple heads and eyes turn toward me. It always takes me by such surprise, it’s a jolt to my heart I never can steel myself against. Multiple human heads, human faces. Is this what I looked like when I was a child, or when their father, the boy, was a newly formed child clone? Small mouths and noses, rows of even teeth, pupils of blue and hazel and green that dilate beneath lids lined with delicate lashes of hair, but that’s where any resemblance ends. Their bodies are tall and thin like reeds, they tower over me. Some of the children have no ears, a few have thinning hair, most have no genitals. They have arrived at that moment in their lives when puberty once would have taken over and shaped them into adult human beings, but they are about to take a far different path to adulthood, if it can be called that anymore. They will shift and morph, and there will be ages of wandering and discovery of each other and what lies beyond the horizons of these waterlogged peaks. They shall dream, dream of an existence in which they never awaken. And eventually they shall return, and become part of the whole, become what I saw rising from the waves and its dreams so many, many countless ages ago.

The boy stands at the side of the room as I make my way to the middle. As I lay down, hands reach out and touch my naked skin. I settle in, relaxing as my children form a cocoon around me, bodies draped over me, each touching the other so that none of them are not in some way connected to the others. This is how they communicate, how they learn. I close my eyes. Eventually, I feel the delicate touch of fingers at my left temple. They are about to merge with my wetware, enter the vast network of memories and files. There is only a moment of unease, and th—

[::REC INTERRUPTED::]

[::REC OVERRIDE::]

[::ACCESS TRANSFER COMPLETE::]

[::MEMORY #2724869.5::]

July 18, 24—, 05:32.08AM

Ballad House, Summit Crater Estates, Mount Baker

PrionTech TemporalCortexDiary #74543.08

[::FILE CORRUPTION::]

—ver seen such lighting in the sky. Great bolts of it split the dark apart, each one so bright that we gasp in shock and clutch our eyes every time the sky lights up around us. And yet no thunder—this storm is completely silent. The aurora borealis has vanished, pushed away by whatever system is moving through the night. The boy is guiding the hands and face of my silver-haired date to the massive telescope that rests on the edge of the expansive covered terrace that crowns the house. Their fingers move together and apart, the boy’s hand rests against the back of the man’s head as he adjusts the lens until the man nods slightly. They work well together. [::DELETION::] He’s got the hang of it now, and the boy is moving away, letting the man aim the massive column of bright metal in a slow arc back and forth across the slopes of the mountain. He’s exclaiming how he can see into people’s apartments, halfway down Mount Baker, watching TV, arguing, having sex. He’s looking for his apartment now—not his current home, the one he grew up in, that’s long been subsumed by the Pacific. The boy is smiling. Everyone does this, apparently. They all want to see remnants of the places they once lived in, the towns their parents and grandparents came from, the waterlogged vestiges of Bellingham, Everett, Seattle, the cloudy peaks of the Olympic archipelago. Everyone wants to see their past.

Despite the eerie weather, a few other people have joined us, close friends and family of the hosts only, the most private of parties within the most private of parties. Everyone has a drink in one hand, is ranting about the strange room half a mile below our feet, the odd lights in the southern sky, the restlessness and unease that none of us can seem to escape. I’m sitting down in a cushy chair, clutching the arms and staring up at the tiny votive candles that flicker on cocktail tables scattered across the space. I’m squeezing my eyes shut until all I see are orange flickerings of hot life that wink in and out of view.

Someone is talking softly about the bells.

The boy is tapping me on the shoulder; it’s my turn now. The man is stepping aside, placing one hand on my back again as I take his place. I’m following his instructions, moving the levers around as I adjust the lens. You won’t see the old cities, he’s telling me, except for the skyscrapers, most of them are gone. Farther out, I’m telling him. The boy is helping me turn the telescope—it moves easily but I’m surprised at the weight of it beneath my hands. Together we aim it south and east, just beyond the remaining mountain peaks. I’m looking for our enemy ocean. I want to see exactly what’s coming for me.

Long slivers of silver. The light of the full moon, reflecting in the silky rippling dark. That’s it. The ocean. A continent of water, nothing more. From here, it’s so benign. I sense no malice in the horizon before me, no intent. Above it sits a night sky hazily studded with stars, stretching out forever. Everywhere, so much neutral, quiet water and space. I’m blinking, staring at the crest of the horizon again. The silver light quivers slightly—is it curving? Are the waters moving? Whales, I’m saying, are there still whales out there because it looks like something’s swimming across the surface, and the man replies, No one’s seen a whale in two hundred years while the boy is reminding us of the floating cities, multitudes of ships sailing in unison from one land mass to the next and now it’s hitting me oh god I know I know what’s happening He is coming I’m so cold I’m so cold I’m saying this out loud oh it’s a wave it’s a wave the light at the top of the wave tsunami it’s a tsunami and thunder, so loud it stops my hear—

[::FILE INTERRUPTION::]

—ailing of the tsunami sirens begins, echoing all up and down the mountainside. Behind me, screaming, crashing of chairs, the sounds of panicked people scattering like flies. I’m going, are you coming because I’m not waiting, the man is shouting at me, but I shrug his hand off my arm, Just go already, I start to yell but he’s already gone, I can hear his voice from far off telling people to get the fuck out of his way and the boy is placing his hands around my trembling tight fingers telling me, It’s okay it’s okay just let go I won’t leave you I’ll make sure you’re safe and silence now except for distant commotion from other parts of the house the squeal of car wheels and horns a single gunshot, and my breath sounds like some panting anim—

[::FILE INTERRUPTION::]

—oor beneath my feet, traveling up through my bones, as fast as those deep white lighting strikes ripping up through the night. A vast, heavy, steady roll of the earth, so powerful my heart is matching it beat for beat, as if there is no other way to survive. My head is slamming against the telescope; I’m bouncing back against the boy. The building is moaning along with the earth, cracks ripping through the walls and sending dust and pebbles of concrete showering through the air, the glass terrace doors shattering. I [::UNINTELLIGIBLE::] and the boy and I start toward the doors, and freeze again. Blast plates are lowering. The building is a watertight box, impenetrable; it’s how they’ve survived so many other waves. But we have to be on the ins—

[::FILE INTERRUPTION::]

—other massive strike rolls through the air, almost tugging us behind in its wake as it travels up through the mountain but lesser than the one before, and I grab the boy and he holds me tight. Lights and engines, shutting down all around us. I’m squinting in the dark, looking for any sign of life, looking for any way out but I can’t see it. We’re standing at the top of a world that doesn’t exist anymore. No wind. No quakes. No sirens. It’s so quiet. So quiet.

We’re going to die, I’m saying, and the boy is replying, I know. He is coming, I say. Yes, says the boy. We hold each other in the dark, listening for the coming wave, but it’s still so far away. The aurora borealis is back, or whatever that light is, a deep and relentless green that I now see rises up out of the ocean. I have to, I can do this, I can move, I’m walking stiff choppy steps, the boy beside me always, I’m grasping the telescope handles again and he’s helping me move it. Is this what you want, he’s asking, I’m saying, Yes, I need to do this, I can’t just stand here and wait. Tell me what you see, he’s saying, don’t stop talking, just keep telling me what you see, and I’m telling him:

Great ribbons of fire dancing along the edges of the water, the edge of the water, a wall moving continually without breaking, green and blue, deep colors like a crown.

So beautiful.

Stars moving behind, or comets, little sparkles of white light like glass in the sun like glass on tar roads when the sun hits it you remember how that looks.

The water is lighting up now, can you see it? All the blues and greens are, it’s like a wall of stained glass, liquid fire.

So fast. So fast. Sorry, I can hardly breathe, I didn’t think it would be this fast.

Put your arms around, yes, tighter. Tighter.

This is it.

I can feel it now, yes, that, rumble, that roaring, louder, everything’s trembling, OH MY GOD the wave is passing over the edges of the Olympics it’s coming so fast now there’s something in the water. Something in the—

OH GOD OH MY GOD IT’S NOT WATER THIS [::UNINTELLIGIBLE::] NOT WATER THAT ISN’T LIGHT there are so many parts so much movement coming NONE OF THIS IS WATER it’s so wide it’s so wide oh my god oh my god it’s almost HE’S HE’S HE’S—

[::UNINTELLIGIBLE::]

EVERYWHERE EVERYWHERE EYES EYES EYES I SEE YOU I SEE YOU INSIDE INSIDE INSIDE I SEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE—

[::AFTER::]

The air is choked with green wisps of gossamer webbing, thread-thin streamers that catch against our bodies, collide and collect against the vines that have made their way up to the rooftop of the school. The boy and I pull them gently from our naked skin. There is no repulsion in our act, no curiosity. We only wish to set them free. Like us, they are a part of this world; they are our dreaming god set free to cover and transform this planet, a component of our communal body whose purpose we cannot yet fathom, an integral part of the great After, of the great god, and in fact ourselves. The threads drift away in the slow breeze.

Downstairs, our children sleep in the classroom, dream in each other’s arms, their last afternoon surrounded by the ghost ruins of a human childhood they never experienced. Tomorrow they will be moved lower, closer to their conjoined siblings. Already their minds have processed the unimaginable, and it’s sparked the beginnings of a physical transformation into the very thing they uncovered in my mind. Or so we believe. We will not know for certain until it is finished, until we join them. Three floors above them, the boy and I spread out on the rooftop at the base of the broken spire, our bodies warming under the heat of a surprisingly strong sun that dares to occasionally break from behind an oddly cool haze. The man sits somewhat apart from us, his head nodding back and forth slightly. More and more he does this, his earlier greeting already slipping from his mind as his thoughts become attuned to all our children below, those at the beginning of their journey and those nearing the end. By the time we leave the school, he’ll remember little of our time together, if anything at all. The boy has these moments as well. There are long periods where he sits in our home, his thoughts adrift, his body trembling and shifting as he fights and accepts the biological call. What I feel inside, perhaps it was something I once called sorrow. I still remember everything that has happened in my life, before and After, except for one insignificant event that the loss of plagues my every waking thought, and I do not know why. Is it that moment when I dared to look upon the face of an ancient elder being? Is it that moment I became the first and only human who looked in his infinite eyes and did not go insane? Is it his face my children need to discover within my mind, or some other elusive memory that is hidden to me, some incident in my life that prevents me from becoming a part of the whole?

I’ll probably never know.

Below, the jungle spreads out before us in a thick carpet, down to the river that winds in and out of the edges of the ocean, an ocean smoothed out and dampened with patches of bright and dark greens, bubbles and slicks of primordial flesh that crest the surface and slide back down silently to the nurturing depths. Where the river and ocean and vast marshes all come together in a torrent of untamed life, I can make out the remains of the low, flat fields where I and the other elder humans who had once been female lay on our backs in countless rows, where we watched the seasons pass and the moons circle the skies a million times over as eggs poured out of us, a torrent of latent life, the only way our newly transformed bodies could give birth. Those birthing fields once spread to the horizon. Every remaining human female from every corner of the world traveled here, like spawning fish, trapped in a biological drive our transforming bodies were helpless to ignore. Countless times I’ve sat on this roof with the boy, watching sexless elders like the man tend our future children, moving our brood into the school as they hatched into life. Countless times I’ve walked into those schoolrooms, opened my mind to their probing thoughts, and given them access to the image of what we once were and are once again becoming. A great elder being, reborn.

There are so few unhatched eggs now, and the fields are being subsumed into the wide maw of the encroaching marshes and swamps. This part of the cycle is ending. Birthing has ended. There are no more females or males in the world, and most of the human elders are gone. Melancholy—is that the word? Perhaps, but also anticipation. Curiosity. Wonder and joy. All the things that oceans and mountains cannot hold, that nature cannot impart or receive, that universes cannot feel.

I stretch my arms high into the air. Who is to say what will happen when I am received into the oculus below, when my body and mind and that tiny bit of circuitry that will not die join everyone I have ever loved and birthed and known. Perhaps this time we will become a being that rejects nothing and accepts all. Perhaps this time no one will be forgotten, and everyone remembered. Perhaps there will be no more dreaming.

[::MEMORY #2724869.4::]

July 18, 24—, 04:12.08AM

[::LOCATION UNKNOWN::]

PrionTech TemporalCortexDiary #74543.07

[::/FILE CORRUPTION::]

[::FILE UNLOCKED::]

—is this it? is this the memory of the dreaming goddess?

—yes this is what mother saw

—yes this is what we must find

—yes below the water, below

—yes this is what we will become

[::PLAY FILE::]

—passing out as the door slowly opens—she’s the first to feel the super-cold air slashing through what now feels like the murky heat of the antechamber. She’s falling against me, one of the guards is catching and moving her to the side as the door opens into the snow vault. Stupid, I’m crying a little, I never ever thought I’d feel cold air again, the cruel cold air that squeezes your lungs and stings your eyes, not the sad semi-efforts of the food locker or the AC. Rows of dim track lighting illuminate the chamber, most of them pointed at the center of the room. I’m staring at the very last remaining pack of snow from Everest. This is it. The heart of a glacier that once crowned the highest peak of the planet, that carved deep canyons in the earth that remain to this day. This is the last piece of glacier anywhere in the world. The great goddess Chomolungma lies naked and bare. All the mountains are naked and bare. We killed them all.

I’m stepping forward, slowly, one of the guards watching my every move. Someone is exclaiming as they walk to the other side, the host explaining how they moved it here thirty years ago from another facility—two more people are asking to leave the chamber, the sub-zero temperature is just too much for them. It’s not what I imagined it would look like. Parts of it are dirty and gray and hard, pocked with thousands of tiny holes. I don’t know what I was expecting—a mile-wide river of brilliant white and blue ribbons that glowed like a pearl, like in an old movie or book? It sort of looks like a chunk of cement the size of a delivery van. The man has pulled his facemask down, and he’s sniffing the air. I do the same, even though our host advises against it. The air is so dry and crisp it hurts to breathe. I don’t have any words for what it smells like. We smile and laugh and clouds of white jet out of our nostrils and mouths, hanging in the air like insects.

We’re walking around it in a circle now, the host rattling off a number of statistics and facts. I don’t care about those. No, he laughs, they won’t chip off bits for the drinks. The guards never take their eyes off us—they’re all armed. There’s a small round spot on one side of the rectangle, shiny as glass, no longer gray but pure brilliant white from years of supplicating hands wearing it away. So beautiful I almost gasp. One after another, we’re removing a glove and placing our hand briefly in the hollow. It’s my turn. Biting. Needle-pricks against my skin, wet-smooth ice, numbing, gelid. Life, ancient and incomprehensible, connected to all, to me. This is me.

Walking away, slipping the glove back on even though we’ll be back in the antechamber and undressing in seconds. Feeling the warmth soak through the layers of freezing skin and stiffening muscle, burning through me in delicious pain as if I’ve dipped my hand in fire. My heart, racing. I’ll never not be cold again. I’ve touched the heart of the world. I am this world. I’m not insignificant anymore.

[::LOCK::]

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Laird Barron is the author of several books, including The Croning, Occultation, and The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All. His work has also appeared in many magazines and anthologies. An expatriate Alaskan, Barron currently resides in upstate New York.

Siobhan Carroll is an associate professor of English at the University of Delaware. When not globetrotting in search of dusty tomes, she can be found puzzling over arcane horrors in the stacks. Readers interested in learning more about the setting of “Nesters” should seek out Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl—an ominous account of one of the greatest ecological disasters in American history. For more fiction by Siobhan Carroll, visit http://voncarr-siobhan-carroll.blogspot.com/.

Brian Evenson is the author of over a dozen books of fiction, most recently the story collection A Collapse of Horses. He has been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award three times. His novel Last Days won 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 has just been rereleased by Coffee House Press. He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes as well as an NEA fellowship. He lives in Valencia, California, and works at CalArts.

Award-winning horror author Gemma Files has also been a film critic, teacher, and screenwriter. She is probably best known for her Weird Western Hexslinger series: A Book of Tongues, A Rope of Thorns, and A Tree of Bones, and has published two collections of short fiction, Kissing Carrion and The Worm in Every Heart, as well as two chapbooks of poetry. Her book, We Will All Go Down Together: Stories About the Five-Family Coven, was published in 2014. Her most recent novel is Experimental Film.

Orrin Grey is a writer, editor, amateur film scholar, and monster expert who was born on the night before Halloween. His stories of ghosts, monsters, and sometimes the ghosts of monsters have appeared in dozens of anthologies, including The Best Horror of the Year, and been collected in Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings and Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts. He can be found online at orringrey.com.

Maria Dahvana Headley is the New York Times best-selling author of Magonia, Queen of Kings, The Year of Yes, and, with Kat Howard, The End of the Sentence. With Neil Gaiman, she is the editor of Unnatural Creatures.

Her short fiction has been nominated for the Nebula and Shirley Jackson awards and anthologized in many “Year’s Best” collections.

Forthcoming are the novels Aerie: A Magonia Novel and The Mere Wife, as well as a musical collaboration with Emmy Award–winning composer Lance Horne, involving good, evil, and centuries of song.

You can find more information at mariadahvanaheadley.com and on Twitter @MARIADAHVANA.

Brian Hodge is one of those people who always has to be making something. So far, he’s made ten novels, with number eleven due out in late 2016. He’s also authored over 120 shorter works and four full-length collections. His first collection, The Convulsion Factory, was ranked by critic Stanley Wiater among the 113 best books of modern horror.

He lives in Colorado, where he also likes to make music and photographs; loves everything about organic gardening except the thieving squirrels; and trains in Krav Maga and kickboxing, which are of no use at all against the squirrels.

Connect through his website (www.brianhodge.net) or Facebook (www.facebook.com/brianhodgewriter).

Stephen Graham Jones is the author of sixteen novels and six story collections. Most recent is Mongrels, from William Morrow. Stephen lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Richard Kadrey is the New York Times best-selling author of the Sandman Slim supernatural noir books. The eighth book in the series, The Perdition Score, has recently been published. His other books include The Everything Box, Metrophage, Butcher Bird, Dead Set, and the graphic novel, ACCELERATE. Sandman Slim was included in Amazon’s 100 Science Fiction & Fantasy Books to Read in a Lifetime, and is in development as a feature film.

Caitlín R. Kiernan was recently hailed by the New York Times as “one of our essential authors of dark fiction.” A two-time winner of both the World Fantasy and Bram Stoker awards, she has published ten novels, including The Red Tree and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. She is also the recipient of the Locus and James Tiptree, Jr. awards.

Her short fiction has been collected in thirteen volumes, including Tales of Pain and Wonder, The Ammonite Violin & Others, A Is for Alien, and The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories. Subterranean Press has released a two-volume set collecting the best of her short fiction, Two Worlds and In Between and Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea. She is currently working on a screenplay for The Red Tree; her next novel, The Starkeeper; and her next short-story collection, Dear Sweet Filthy World.

John Langan is the author of three collections, Sefira and Other Betrayals (Hippocampus 2016), The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies, and Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters.

He has written a novel, House of Windows, and, with Paul Tremblay, co-edited an anthology, Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters.

He’s one of the founders of the Shirley Jackson Award, and served as a juror during its first three years.

He lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with his wife, younger son, and a growing collection of swords.

Livia Llewellyn is a writer of horror, dark fantasy, and erotica, whose fiction has appeared in ChiZine, Subterranean, Apex Magazine, Postscripts, and Nightmare Magazine, as well as numerous anthologies. Her first collection, Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors, was published in 2011 by Lethe Press, and received two Shirley Jackson Award nominations, for Best Collection, and Best Novelette (for “Omphalos”). Her story “Furnace” received a 2013 SJA nomination for Best Short Fiction. Her second collection, titled Furnace, was recently published by Word Horde. You can find her online at liviallewellyn.com.

David Nickle is an author and journalist living and working in Toronto, Canada. He’s the author of several novels, including Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism, and his stories are collected most recently in Knife Fight and Other Struggles. His fiction has appeared at Tor.com, in Cemetery Dance, Pseudopod, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and The Best Horror of the Year, and has been adapted for television.

A. C. Wise’s fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Apex, Shimmer, The Best Horror of the Year, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, among other places. Her debut collection, The Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron Saves the World Again, was published by Lethe Press in 2015. In addition to her fiction, she co-edits Unlikely Story, and contributes a monthly Women to Read: Where to Start column to SF Signal. Visit her online at www.acwise.net.

ABOUT THE EDITOR

Ellen Datlow has been editing science fiction, fantasy, and horror short fiction for over thirty-five years. She currently acquires short fiction for Tor.com. In addition, she has edited more than eighty science-fiction, fantasy, and horror anthologies, including the series The Best Horror of the Year, Lovecraft’s Monsters, Fearful Symmetries, Nightmare Carnival, The Doll Collection, and The Monstrous.

She’s won multiple World Fantasy Awards, Locus Awards, Hugo Awards, Stoker Awards, International Horror Guild Awards, Shirley Jackson Awards, and the 2012 Il Posto Nero Black Spot Award for Excellence as Best Foreign Editor. Datlow was named recipient of the 2007 Karl Edward Wagner Award, given at the British Fantasy Convention for “outstanding contribution to the genre,” was honored with the Life Achievement Award given by the Horror Writers Association, in acknowledgment of superior achievement over an entire career, and the Life Achievement Award by the World Fantasy Convention.

She lives in New York and co-hosts the monthly Fantastic Fiction Reading Series at KGB Bar. More information can be found at www.datlow.com, on Facebook, and on Twitter as @EllenDatlow.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Nesters

Little Ease

Eternal Troutland

The Supplement

Mortensen’s Muse

Oblivion Mode

Mr. Doornail

The Secrets of Insects

Excerpts for An Eschatology Quadrille

Jules and Richard

Glasses

When the Stitches Come Undone

On These Blackened Shores of Time

Bright Crown of Joy

About the Authors

About the Editor