Terror Incognita

ADORATION

The breasts I knew at midnight

beat like the sea in me now.

–Anne Sexton, “Dreaming the Breasts”

Carpet of rain-slicked leaves, black and glossy as flesh swollen with rot, trees like fossilized lightning stabbed into the earth, tiny pallid mushrooms like the protruding fingers of buried infants, still-damp sky the same dismal gray as the clapboards of the dilapidated house the two men could see ahead through the last of the scarred trunks. They stole upon the structure from the rear as if afraid they might startle it into fleeing or disappearing. After all, it had the aura of a place that had long eluded discovery, that had been built out in this remote spot for the sake of concealment. An overgrown dirt road snaked away from its front, and must connect up with some road sooner or later, though for these men it had been easier to park their car and approach the house through a stretch of forest. McComis only half-fancifully wondered if that dirt road led off to even more secretive places, a whole town or even an entire looming city similarly gray, similarly hidden away from all but those few souls who found the way.

They had seen no other houses along their stroll. They had heard no birds, the only sign of animal habitation being a high, strange chittering. Startled by its suddenness, McComis had looked above and around him for its owner.

“Red squirrel,” Dore had explained. “They like to scold you.”

But McComis had been doubtful. The sound had contained something of the insect in it, and yet also the suggestion of a human child’s voice.

At the perimeter of the property there was a trace of ancient stone wall, half buried and the rest—like vertebrae jutting from the earth—smothered in lush plants, against which little white clusters of lilies-of-the-valley stood out. Those tiny, delicate bells had been McComis’ mother’s favorite flower; it grew in shadowed places.

The two men stepped over the wall and into a tiny clearing filled by the house. It was utterly drained of color, slats fallen from its sides in places, holes gaping in its eaves where birds or squirrels—or whatever had made that angry sound—no doubt took refuge in the colder months, which were poised to descend seemingly at any moment.

McComis followed Dore around to the front of the two-story house. Its windows were all blinded by shades like eyelids fallen in death...though McComis wondered at what might be peering at him around their frayed edges.

They mounted a few steps, but before he knocked on the door, Dore opened the front of his expensive sports coat to show McComis the handle of the semi-automatic pistol tucked in his waistband, indenting his swollen belly. McComis had thought the man had more the look of a gangster than a businessman, and now that image was only heightened. Dore buttoned his coat again.

“Just so you know I’m able to protect you. You won’t need me to protect you, so long as you stick to the rules we’ve discussed, but I just want to reassure you. Don’t be afraid, okay? I’m right here. Nothing’s going to happen to you...if you just stick to the program.”

McComis nodded, and swallowed what felt like a sea urchin. “I understand.”

Dore stared at him another moment, and then turned to rap on the door.

It opened almost instantly, as if the opener had been on the other side listening to their exchange. And as the door swung inward, gray light fell on a shadowed face and McComis felt his already trotting heart surge forward as if to dash itself to death against his ribs.

The man who stood in the doorway was dead, seemingly as long dead as the house itself, and in fact both looked as if they had never been alive. His flesh was not purplish but purple, purple and slick as that of an eggplant, except where it was torn or ulcerated, in which places it had a white crustiness. The eyes were so caked in bright yellow scabs that McComis wondered if the corpse had vision, or navigated by other senses. But its hair cut was fairly neat, and its suit was no less expensive that those of the two living men.

The creature stepped back to permit their entrance. It didn’t stagger, didn’t seem sluggish in its movements. McComis would have preferred it to be less coordinated. Without a word to the thing, Dore moved past it, into the house’s interior. McComis followed swiftly, keeping his gaze straight ahead but shuddering as his sleeve brushed that of the dead man.

In the short hallway, there was a staircase to the second floor. At its head was another dead man, of the same general appearance except that this one was obese, though whether he had been that way in life or if he was expanded with the gases of decomposition, McComis couldn’t guess. The corpse waved an arm indicating that they should mount the steps, and Dore did so. McComis trailed behind after darting a furtive look over his shoulder.

There were no lights on in the house. No music or TV played. Still as a mausoleum, its atmosphere damp as that of a basement, the smell of mold strong from the brown, water-stained and sloughing wallpaper. Past the obese cadaver, the two visitors passed along another hallway, foregoing several closed doors in favor of the door at its end. There, a third dead man awaited them. This one, too, stepped aside to permit their entrance. But this time, Dore did not enter. He hung back, and McComis looked to him.

“Go on,” Dore prompted him, even smiling. “This is what you paid for.”

Yes...and he had paid a lot. But now he wasn’t so sure he wanted to see what his money had bought him. He wouldn’t ask for it back, or he was sure that Dore or the others wouldn’t let him leave alive (and then would he himself become a fourth “body” guard?). He would let Dore keep the money. He just didn’t think he could go through with this...

But the door was already open. Dore waited expectantly. Stick to the program, Dore had warned him. Wheels were already in motion.

McComis stepped through the threshold. The door snicked shut discreetly behind him.

There was a large bed at the center of the small room, a bed that loomed like a planet with an atmosphere of sickly sweet perfume, somewhat musty like the petals of dying roses. And in this expanse, this vastness of bed, in a shimmer of silk nightgown, reclined Marilyn Monroe.

Her flesh was not purple, festered with sores. It was creamy-smooth and softly luminous as if it were filmed through a smear of Vaseline, to soften the effects of age. But it was not a glowing ghost he saw. Her toenails were actually painted. Her full, voluptuous body physically depressed the mattress. Her eyes were not crusted in yellow pus, but shone at McComis, narrowed in a smile.

“Hi, honey,” she breathed. She ran her hand across the mattress in little circles. “Come on in...don’t be shy.” That trademark, wispy little girl voice.

McComis had had a crush on Marilyn Monroe from childhood. She might have been his first of many celebrity crushes, and though he had other favorites now, Marilyn was the ultimate celebrity, wasn’t she? An icon. A goddess. Immortal...

And yet, for all her beauty, he feared her more than the dead men. They, at least, were honest about their condition. And he had never intended to touch the dead men. But he was here to touch the flesh of this woman. To press his lips to it. To enter the most vulnerable part of him into it...inside it. Might the decay, the wretchedness be lurking deviously within? And yet how could she appear so healthy, so alive, on the outside if the fruit were rotten at its core?

She patted the mattress. “Come on, baby...I won’t bite.” She giggled. “Unless you want me to.” And as she shifted, a strap of her nightgown slipped off the smooth roundness of her shoulder.

McComis again nearly choked on a barbed, dried ball of saliva. But he took one step further into the room. He had been resting his back against the closed door for support. Now, free of it, he felt like he might totter and fall...and he seemed to stagger toward the bed against his will, drawn by the planet’s gravity. And Marilyn slid over to make room for him, still smiling. The idol of millions for decades, but it was him she wanted. Him...

Still staggering those few steps to the great bed, he saw her slip her nightgown up over her head. Nipples pink as if flushed with living blood. Nipples pink against lush white flesh like rose petals fallen on the marble of a gravestone.

But she was not cold, like stone, when he touched her at last. Warm...soft...so warm and soft...

* * *

“Well?” Dore asked, still smiling. Had he been smiling all the while, these past few hours? Lingering outside the door with the dead man, both of them listening?

McComis didn’t tell him how it had been. “Let’s go,” he murmured. But as he started ahead of Dore down the hall, his back to the other man, he said, “I’ll be back next week.”

“Marilyn again?”

“No,” McComis said quietly, as if she might hear him and be hurt, though he wasn’t sure she was even in that room any more. In the house any more. Had she already been returned to wherever it was she had been summoned or conjured from?

“Lady Di? Selena?” Dore brought forth their names with a hint of enthusiasm that suggested he had enjoyed the products of this place himself.

The idea of calling up such recently deceased celebrities nauseated McComis for some reason. It made them too real, whereas Marilyn was almost the stuff of myth; harder to imagine she had ever been a real, living person, a child, a corpse.

“No,” he said. “Maybe Grace Kelly. Maybe Carole Lombard.” More goddesses. More myths.

“Those old movie broads were too chubby for my tastes,” opined the paunchy Dore. He lit a cigarette as they descended the stairs.

Outside, it had begun to drizzle again, but McComis welcomed the open air, despite the moldering of the leaves beneath their feet. At least it cleared his head of the delirious scent of rose petals. He only wished Dore would quicken his pace through the forest, before they became lost out here when night fell, which must be imminent.

“How did you find this place?” McComis asked him while they walked.

“I can’t tell you stuff like that. Look...I didn’t find it; it was shown to me. I have a boss I answer to, like I told you before. Someone like you. Someone with money. Somebody who could have anything he wanted. In other words, somebody really bored. I think he might have made the place, somehow. Or I mean, made it into the place that it is. With enough money, you can make anything happen, if you hook up with the right people with the right knowledge. I don’t know much more than you, and I can’t tell you any more about the man I work for.”

“Does anyone besides me and him come here?”

“There are a few other clients.”

“Who do they ask for?”

“Marilyn has been called before,” he said, grinning over at McComis as if he thought he might be jealous. “But not just movie stars. One guy wanted Joan of Arc, and Cleopatra, but they wouldn’t come. Either they’re too long gone, or it has to be someone whose image is really clear in your mind, like a rock star or a TV celebrity. One guy calls up male actors. James Dean. Elvis Presley. Elvis looked great. I saw him. And they never refuse. They always act like they want it. Elvis would’ve kicked the shit out of this guy if he tried that stuff when he was alive, but dead folk don’t say no.”

“In life, they had all that adoration,” McComis mused aloud.

“Yeah, that could be it. They miss that. Maybe they need it, to stay alive in our minds. I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s even really them, or a kind of recording. A videotape. But they’re flesh, you know that.”

McComis didn’t respond. But yes, he knew that. He had ultimately kissed Marilyn passionately, his tongue in her mouth, her mouth moist with saliva inside. So moist inside...

* * *

He rented a video with Marilyn Monroe, but after fifteen minutes he had to turn it off.

Alone in his house, watching the movie, it had frightened him too much, as if it had been those three animated dead men he’d seen captured on celluloid.

Alone in his house—yes. He had been divorced for three years now. His wife had since remarried. A pretty woman; he doubted she would have married a plain-looking man like himself in the first place, had it not been for his money. He had never been good with dating. He experienced romance vicariously, in film. But then, didn’t most people? Did anyone’s life approach the glamour of fabrication?

It was his mother, he felt, who had inspired his love of movies, particularly older movies. Bette Davis had been her favorite actress. Watching these women always brought his mother to the front of his mind, as if she were the actual star of each film; their immortality lent her a wispy immortality, too. She had been a pretty woman herself; photos of the poet Anne Sexton put him in mind of his mother. The lean tapered face, the dark hair, the pale intelligent eyes.

His mother had passed away, from breast cancer, when McComis was twelve years old.

Thinking of her now, he wanted to go dig out his scrapbooks, filled with photos of her. But instead, he stared at the blank television screen with a slowly mounting intensity...as if he expected to suddenly hear the tape machine begin to whir again, and it would be his mother’s face he would see on the screen, once again alive.

* * *

“She’s waiting for you,” said Dore. Smiling.

McComis locked his eyes with the man for several beats. Dore began digging for a cigarette, breaking their gaze. McComis then turned and let himself into the bedroom.

A woman stood silhouetted at the window, peeking out secretly around the torn shade. At his entrance, she turned. Her slender frame was draped in a light, flowered summer dress. Dark hair, limned in the light from the window in a nearly extinguished corona.

“Oh, honey,” the woman cooed, stepping away from the window. “Oh, Tom...baby...how I’ve missed you.” She held open her arms to him. “How I’ve missed you, all these years.”

And he found himself staggering to her, again drawn as if against his conscious will, but some part of him obviously anxious, desperate, in need. McComis fell into the youthful arms of his mother, dead for these many years but not aged a day since he’d last seen her. And he crushed her in his arms, as hers went around him. It was the smell of her familiar lily-of-the-valley perfume, ultimately, that made him cry.

“I’ve missed you, too,” he sobbed in her hair, against her slim throat. “I’ve missed you, too.” He bucked hard with his sobs, and she kissed his neck to soothe him, ran her hands across his back.

“Shh, it’s all right now, darling,” she whispered. “We’re together now.”

“I think about you all the time...but I never dreamed I could see you again...I never dreamed...”

“I know,” she sighed. “We need each other, don’t we? I’ve dreamed of you, too. I can still remember holding you as a baby in my arms. Breast-feeding you. And now...at last...here we are again. You in my arms.” She gently pushed him out of their embrace, her hands running tenderly down his chest. She unfastened the one button that held his jacket closed, and began to slip it off his shoulders. “We don’t have to be alone any more...”

McComis took hold of her thin wrists, held them away from him. “What are you doing?” he rasped.

His mother, now shorter than he was—yes, even a few years younger than he was—smiled up at him. “Don’t worry, honey,” she giggled softly. “I won’t bite you. Not unless you want me to...”

McComis shoved the woman away from him. She almost fell, grabbed the footboard of the bed for support. He, in turn, backed away from her...against the door...

“You aren’t my mother!” he cried.

“Of course I am, Tom!” She still smiled, despite his violence, her pale eyes hungry. Hungry for his love.

“My mother wouldn’t do that! And I never loved my mother like that!”

“Every woman a man loves is really his mother, Tom.”

McComis whirled around to grapple with the doorknob.

“What are you doing?” his mother demanded, floating suddenly toward him. “Wait!”

He finally got the knob turned—he mustn’t let her touch him—and was out through the door, slamming it in her face. He heard her slight but solid body thud against it, heard her pound the heels of her fists against it.

“Tom!” she wailed. “Come back! Please—I need you!”

“What’s wrong?” Dore asked, alarmed, straightening up warily. The dead man, as well, swivelled about to face him.

But McComis plunged between them, bolted down the hall.

“Isn’t that what you wanted?” Dore asked, trailing after him.

* * *

This time, McComis made his way to the house in the woods without his escort. He knew the secret, unmarked path through the forest by now. Dore wasn’t even aware of this excursion.

In each hand, McComis slung a heavy red container filled with gasoline. In one pocket was a tin of lighter fluid, in the other a disposable lighter. And in his own waistband, a semi-automatic handgun.

He saw it, through the trees, gray beneath a gray sky. Just before he entered the clearing, he heard that chittering scolding sound again. An alarm, a warning? He expected to see one of the sentries come around the edge of the house then...but none did. Still, he mustn’t take any chances. He worked swiftly, uncapping the first container and splashing the outside of the house, working his way entirely around it.

Did she watch him through the bedroom window, peeking around the shade? Golden Marilyn? Tragic Jean Harlow? His mother? And were they, perhaps, really all the same creature, or merely made the same by their desperate longing?

Finally, he emptied the lighter fluid in a short trail, like a fuse. And crouching down, he lit it. The flames began to spread, an invasion of bright light and bright color in this bleak, ashen spot.

He backed off quickly, and pulled the pistol from his waistband, lest something come blundering out from the interior, howling and grasping for his throat.

And as the flames spread and engulfed the old structure, began to consume it in their own greedy lust, he did in fact see one of the dead men smash his upper body through one of the windows, extend its arms toward him threateningly, its mouth wide and full of fire—but it made no sound, and after only a few seconds it fell away back inside the house with the inferno closing over it. He lowered the gun he had been pointing at the thing.

He returned his attention to the upper floor. The bedroom window. But he saw no face at the glass, no imploring arms reached for him. He did, however, believe he heard one pitiful cry—just briefly. Yet it sounded too far away, much farther away than the house directly before him.

Tears began to fill his eyes, and they reflected the wavering light of the flames, until he became blinded by the two. But he wiped his sleeve across them. He had to hurry now, back to his car, and drive away where he could make a call, report the fire before it spread into the forest. Leave here before Dore should come and find him. Not that he really cared about either of those things too greatly. Most of all, he just wanted to leave here. He wished he had never come here in the first place. But he couldn’t change that, could he?

Despite the conflagration, he knew that the past could be resurrected much more readily than it could be burned away.

COFFEE BREAK

Hell didn’t have to freeze over; it was already icy cold in places, and Fleming was as glad to get in out of it as he was to get out of the roaring flames in other regions. The windows of the café had glowed warmly to him across frigid expanses of white tiled floors with drains to collect the rivers of blood. Now, here he was. Bells tinkled when he opened the door.

Chani looked over from behind the counter; after a moment to recognize his cold-blackened face she smiled and waved. Fleming grew warmer. Chani’s cat Bast looked toward him also. The black cat had liked to ride on Chani’s shoulder in life; now it was fused there, inseparable. Her punishment for loving animals but not the Son. But like some punishments here, it was actually in Chani’s favor. She had loved Bast dearly and now could have him with her through eternity. Though all animals automatically went to Hell, that didn’t guarantee that pets and their owners were reunited in the after world.

Fleming took a vacant stool, the red vinyl sighing under his weight. “Man,” he breathed.

“It’s been a while, Flem,” said Chani. “Espresso?”

She remembered him so well. It felt good. You could still feel good like this, in little ways, in Hell. “You got it. How you been?”

“Bored.” Wasn’t that the way? Chani was forever warm in here, never in cold or in flames, always with people with whom to chat. But that was her curse. In life she had been a traveler. Here, she not only never went outside but never even came out from behind the counter. “Where you been to? Someplace new?” Her back was to him as she worked.

“I found a jungle. A lot of animals there, and native-type people. Aborigines. Neanderthals. It was interesting. They didn’t seem to be suffering too much. Diseased and everything, but...” He shrugged. “I did see hunting parties after them, though. One of those chased me out.”

“Bastards.”

Fleming glanced over at a Neanderthal who sat at the end of the counter, in fact. In his loincloth, he was huddled over a hot chocolate. Born before the birth of the Son, the only gate to salvation, he was eternally damned. His heavy brow was forlorn.

At least he could come in here for a hot chocolate. In fiery regions there were far-spaced bars where you could get a beer, ice cream parlors floating in lakes of magma. The Father, in His mercy, gave the damned breaks. Once a year, every damned soul could stop in one such establishment for one hour. It became the anchor for sanity, the reason to trudge on rather than give up and fall and suffer in one spot for all time. It was a place to draw those tiny moments of pleasure. But even that was a punishment. The punishment was experiencing the contrast of pleasure, in a brief, teasing taste. The punishment was having to leave.

Fleming glanced elsewhere about him as his face slowly reverted to its normal color and shape...without pain. Inside these establishments was the only place one could regenerate painlessly. Normally, regenerating from one’s mutilations was more agonizing than receiving them, and much slower. Once Fleming had been overpowered by a gang of drawling Angels in white hoods, who had tied him up and attached a number of hand grenades to him. Reforming after that had been the worst suffering Fleming had experienced in his twelve years in Hell.

At a corner table gazing out the great window was a man with no arms, the stumps closed now and slowly lengthening. He drank tea through a straw. Oriental; shaven head and a robe. Had to be a Buddhist monk. At his feet was a wicker basket with four babies in it. They were healing also, all dozing. He must have found them and collected them up, carried them in here on his back for some fleeting peace. Carved or tattooed on them all were the words found on every unbaptized infant or child: “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.”

Fleming looked back around as Chani set his espresso before him. The aroma made him want to cry. He sipped it without waiting for it to cool; extremes of temperature were now second nature to him. He wanted to drink it quickly so he could have more. “Mmm,” he moaned.

“Hungry?”

“Everything you have for breakfast. I want a taste of it all. Pancakes, eggs, sausages, home fries...”

“Ed,” Chani called over her shoulder. “Barnyard.” She smiled at Fleming, shook a cigarette out of a pack from her apron. She lit it for him while his eyes wandered to a TV up near the ceiling behind the counter. Teasing taste of the upper world. Not some evangelical program to lecture and berate his unsalvageable soul; you could see them on TVs everywhere in Hell, hanging from trees and nests of barbed wire. Here, a sitcom played. Fleming didn’t recognize any of these new actors. It didn’t matter. He ached to be with them. To have sex with that pretty young actress. And most of all, to warn them. They were so dangerously oblivious...

“You weren’t here last year,” Chani noted.

He returned his attention to her. “Sorry. Too far away. I stopped in a Chinese restaurant. Had me a Zombie. A Zombie for a zombie.”

“That’s okay.” She lowered her eyes. “So many other places to explore, any way. Why always go to the same rest stop?”

“Well,” he said, feeling guilty, “this is my favorite one.” He meant it.

“Thanks,” she said, smiling sadly, reaching up absently to scratch Bast under the jaw.

“Hey, at least you get to explore TV...see the world. Anybody famous die we might be seeing?”

“That serial killer they executed, the one who used to dress up like a clown? He came in here last year. Ate two Barnyard breakfasts. Be careful for his type, Flem; they go around hunting their own kind, folks like you and me. It’s a field day for them. As if the Angels weren’t bad enough.”

“Don’t worry, I’ve got a guardian angel.” Fleming held his coat open to show her the automatic pistol he wore in a holster. “Got it off an Angel I managed to get away from. I messed that goon up good...not that it hurt him any, but it incapacitated him so I could run. This thing’s a beauty...never runs out of ammo.”

“Neat.”

The Angels were people who had died in the good graces of the Father. Hell was the chosen Heaven for many Angels, who spent their eternity hunting Demons like Fleming, torturing them when they found them. Raping women. For some Angels, this was more entertaining than the replicas of Disney World and Las Vegas up in Heaven. Of course, they could always go up there and come back here as their moods changed, as they grew bored. No limitations for Angels.

On the specials blackboard behind Chani she had written at the top: “We’re No Angels!” Fleming hoped none ever came storming in here and saw that. Once she had mouthed off to an Angel, a visiting minister, who had chopped Bast off her shoulders with his sword and taken the cat away with him, tossing him into a mile-deep ravine. It had taken months for Bast to return to Chani and pull his sad body up to his perch by her head, there to blend again.

Breakfast came. Chani laughed at the amount of salt Fleming shook across the expanse of fried food. “That stuff’ll kill ya,” she told him.

Sipping his orange juice, he smiled up at her. God...what he wouldn’t give to vault over the counter top and hold her. Make love with her on her side, standing up if they had to. But he would be repelled violently from her floor, and she from his. Magnets of the same pole.

Oh, the damned could have sex. In the flames. On the frigid tiles. And he did. Bleeding, burnt. Some women he met again, some never. But they were in too much agony to find real comfort or release in their clinches. Maybe it was because he couldn’t have Chani that he wanted her. Maybe it was seeing a woman who could still smile. Or maybe it was her smile, in particular.

She had been an environmental activist, besides being an animal lover and a Jew. She had believed in Gaia; that the Earth was like a living, breathing God itself. Ohh...big mistake. On the smooth forehead of her otherwise unmarked pretty face were tattooed the words: “Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.”

They couldn’t mar her prettiness. It wasn’t truly flesh, after all, but the tangible image of her spirit. And how he wished to press the lips of his spirit to hers. And yet he was shy. Of her, of the others around. And there was so little time. So very little time...

Then back to eternity.

Machinegun chatter outside. Screams. Fleming calmly checked over his shoulder. He saw a man slam up against the glass, smearing the blood from the holes in his face as he slid down the surface. Robed, hooded figures came into view, pulled him away. Fleming heard a chainsaw revving up. More screams. Fleming drained the last of his espresso.

“One more?” asked Chani.

“I got time?”

She looked to a wall clock. “Ten minutes, about. You came in at quarter to eight.”

“Eight at night?”

“Yes.”

Only ten minutes left, and yet now Chani was called away from him to tend to another customer down the counter. Fleming was bitter and agonized. He was used to the cold he’d just braved for eight months to get back here. The mutilations, the disease. But it had been a long time since he had had to feel this pain.

When she came back he would take her hand atop the counter, he decided. Squeeze it. He could do that, at least. Link his fingers through hers. Maybe then lean forward and kiss her. Or if not that much, at least he would have broken the ice for next time...

She returned just as he drained his last black coffee. He didn’t have to glance at the clock; he felt the magnetic pull already rising up, like a current, beginning to lightly tug him toward the door. He could resist another minute only...

“Well,” Chani sighed. “Hope you liked it. No tip?”

“Put it on my tab.”

“See you in another couple years?”

“I’ll see you one year from today.”

“Oh come on, you don’t have to do that. There are so many other places to see. It’s something to do, isn’t it? To look around? Even at Hell.” It was big enough, after all. Much, much bigger than Heaven, with its small and elite population.

“There’s something to be said for familiarity, too,” he replied. “Comfort...”

“I guess.”

Oh, this was too intense a pain. His body was accustomed to the horrors beyond this jingling door. Humans were so adaptable. Hadn’t he once read that children had still played while imprisoned in Auschwitz? Those children had since told him that in person, since so many of them who had been burned there were here to burn again.

“Well...” he said. The door jingled behind him as a new soul staggered in. He was distracted, and miserable. Her hand, he hissed at himself within. It was there flat on the counter...waiting...

The pull was growing stronger. Insistent.

A man seated himself on the stool directly to Fleming’s left. He hated the poor mangled bastard for it. And yet, it was almost a relief to be forced not to act.

Instead, Fleming reached out to Chani’s hair. Or so it seemed for a moment. It was Bast’s sleek fur he stroked. The cat seemed to remember him also, and purred at his touch. Now he felt a little better. They were linked, Chani and Bast. He withdrew his hand feeling that he had also caressed her, in a way. In a way.

The man to his left began trying to speak, his lower jaw gone. It would grow back just in time for him to eat a little bit of something. Chani slid the man a pad to write his order on. She looked irritated at the distraction also. In fact, Fleming thought her eyes even appeared moist...

The pull yanked him backwards off the stool suddenly; he almost fell but righted himself, leaned away from the pull to fight it a moment longer, caught hold of the counter. No one but Chani was looking at his struggles.

“Next year,” he promised her.

“Next year,” she smiled.

He slid toward the door. Through it. Out. The bells jingled. The door closed. Warm yellow light came through the windows, but he couldn’t see anything other than that through them. Otherwise he might stay here and watch Chani through the glass until next year. Mouth conversations to her. Maybe they knew he would want that, and kept the glass one-way.

“Hey, buddy,” a voice addressed him. Two hooded Angels came sauntering toward him, their robes splashed red, one with an UZI and one with a chainsaw. “Agnostic, huh?” Good guess. It was branded across his forehead.

“Nice coat, clown,” the other one mocked him. It was full of bullet holes already, slashed by swords. “Need some new holes?”

Fleming turned slowly and grinned. “How about you?” From inside his coat came the stolen automatic, and he fired. The UZI went off, but he got them good first. Both went down. It might not hurt, and they might regenerate ten times as quickly as he, but he still felt better for it as he bolted away. The air froze the insides of his lungs to crystal. But he laughed. Angry laughter. Sad laughter.

Yeah, those little pleasures. You could still thumb your nose in Hell...in between the Angels cutting it off.

Don’t feel so bad, he cheered himself while he ran. It wasn’t his fault that the breaks were so short, and he’d worked enough years of his life that he should be used to that by now. Bosses were bosses, people were people...as above, so below.

Next year, he’d promised her. Next year, he promised himself.

He had all the time in the netherworld.

THE BOARDED WINDOW

Alan used his trowel to poke at the thing in the rain gutter.

It resembled a dead baby bird; translucent, purple-pink flesh devoid of feathers, crooked limbs like rudimentary wings and legs. But it was as large as a full grown pigeon, or larger. A group of pigeons favored the roof of his mother’s tall old house, sleeping in the cornices and in gaping holes in the eaves. He guessed it was one of those birds, dead and decomposing. Still, it didn’t look long dead. And the mouth...he prodded the small limp carcass once more. The mouth looked more like it possessed lips than a beak.

Disgusted, Alan used the trowel to flip the animal over the side of the gutter to drop into the large trash barrel below.

He had decided to clean out his mother’s rain gutters himself, since neither she nor he could afford hiring someone at the present. The gutters had become more like flower pots in the past few years since his father had passed away; lush green plants filled this one stretch of gutter, no doubt seeded there by the tall tree which grew along the side of the sorrowful-looking Victorian. Alan had borrowed a ladder from a friend, and brought up with him a number of small trash bags to be filled with the plants and the layer of debris they grew in. When each bag was full he meant to drop them down into the bucket.

But the discovery of the bird or flayed squirrel or whatever it might be had distracted him from his project. That, and the broken attic window.

The window was visible from the ground; it ran diagonally, filling a space between a higher and shorter level of the roof where the attic rose above the second story. It consisted of three square panes, none of which seemed able to slide or swing open. However, one of the panes was broken at the corner. From the ground Alan hadn’t been able to see this, the plants in their trough helping to obscure the damage.

Another project. Alan sighed. Well, who else could help his mother tend to these things? For now, he would simply go up into the attic and tape a piece of cardboard over the hole so that no pigeons or squirrels would get in there to make it their home.

He’d do that first. He hated heights, and now found he welcomed the chance to come down from the high ladder.

Before descending, however, he dared to lean closer to the window, near enough to touch it with his fingers if he had cared to stretch, which he didn’t. He tried to see into the attic from here. He had played in it as a boy, despite his father forbidding him from going up there. It had been years since he’d really looked around in there.

He was trying to imagine this diagonal window from the other side, in relation to his memories of the attic rooms. He found he couldn’t picture it from the inside.

He couldn’t see into the attic through it, either. The panes might have been painted black inside, for all he could tell. The most he could make out was his own curious face reflected in the dirty glass, staring back at him.

* * *

When Alan stepped up into the attic a small creature hopped behind a box of books, thrashing its upper limbs. He gasped, became a frozen pose framed in the threshold. Then he heard the cooing, and saw the white droppings on the floor boards. Damn pigeons; how had they got up in here? Why did his mother have to throw bread out for them and encourage them to congregate? When he came further into the attic he saw that a window in this end had been propped open with a board. Mother. She must have done that to let some air in while she was up here one time, and had forgotten to close it again. Alan sighed. He’d have to close it and catch each pigeon individually and carry them outside. Yet another project. Maybe he should just go home, he thought.

For now he left the window as it was, and moved into the darker end of the attic, where the walls angled closer together...

It was no wonder he couldn’t see through the window from the outside. It was thoroughly boarded up on the inside. This also explained why he hadn’t been able to recall the window from the inside from his boyhood; it had apparently been covered like this for many years.

Leaving the attic to borrow his father’s old toolbox from his mother, Alan first gave her hell about the pigeons up there, and then asked, “Why did Dad board up that slanted attic window? On this end of the house, up over the back door?”

“Oh, my father was the one who did that. Your father started to take the boards off once so the attic would get more light, but then he changed his mind and boarded it back up again.”

“Well, why did Granddad board it up in the first place?”

“When your grandparents owned the house there was a big thunderstorm one time, and I guess a lightning bolt struck that window. I remember that night...I was about eight, I think. It was terrible. The whole house shook. I don’t know what the lightning did to the window, though. Maybe it scorched the glass black or just cracked it all.” She shrugged.

“It isn’t cracked. One piece is broken off, is all. Recently, too; I saw the broken pieces in the gutter.”

“I don’t know.” She shrugged again.

“Well, I’m gonna pull the boards off. The attic is real dark down in that end and there’s no electric lights. It could use a little sunlight.”

His deceased father’s toolbox in hand, Alan returned to the back hall, climbed up past the second floor, up into the attic.

* * *

Alan pulled the uppermost board off first, using the back of a claw hammer. The first thought that struck him as he looked out through the glass was how quickly it had become dark. It was only five thirty in the afternoon, and here it was summer. Maybe a thunderstorm was brewing.

He glanced over his shoulder, into the opposite, roomier end of the attic. That end of the attic was awash in golden sunlight. Dust motes swam lazily in the slanting mellow beams.

Alan jerked around to gape at the diagonal window. After a moment of confused hesitation, he began to pry off the next board down. It was nailed thoroughly and he really had to lever and strain, splintering the wood, but at last it clattered at his feet.

The sky out there was almost entirely black, but closer to the horizon was streaked in startling reds and purple. Alan saw a distant cluster of birds or perhaps bats cross the bands of laser red.

Could that be an approaching storm, or was the earth more in shadow in that direction as the sun sank? It seemed far, far too great a contrast to be that. Strangely alarmed, Alan pried off the next board with several great jerks.

“Dear God,” he breathed, stepping back from the window. He clutched the hammer tightly before him as a weapon or merely for reassurance that reality had not abandoned him without leaving some sort of hand hold.

The roofs of neighboring houses should be out there. Trees bushy between them, and familiar church steeples rising against a backdrop of gentle hills.

Should be...

Instead, the distant hills were jagged rocky peaks, ominous in the red glow of twilight. Red and purple light glistened on a lake or large pond in the distance, where he knew none should be. In the foreground there were weirdly gnarled and tangled trees, the closest ones showing him that their branches were thorny and leafless.

Alan wanted to scream, up there in that claustrophobic space, the ceiling close to touching his head, the walls slanting in toward him, dust coating his lungs. He wanted to turn and bolt from there. And yet, he was riveted. Mesmerized. Too afraid to move. Reality indeed was not as it seemed. If he moved, what terrible revelation might next yawn wide before him to engulf his sanity?

Without stepping nearer to the window or reaching to tear free the last board, he looked more closely out upon what could be seen at present. His eyes adjusted to the dark of the scene, and he decided he could make out a few rooftops here and there after all...amongst the thorny trees and across the dark lake. None of these houses or buildings had any windows lit, however, despite the deep gloom.

A breeze stirred the twisted trees; Alan felt it through the broken corner of window, and though the breeze was merely cool he shivered as though it were an arctic gust. He realized then that he could also hear this hallucination as well as feel it; he heard the scrape of those barbed wire branches against one-another as the breeze stirred them. And there were the distant cries of birds, perhaps. Very faint...but he wished, from their odd child-like quality, that he could not hear them at all.

What had that lightning bolt done to this window?

It had to be a corresponding dimension he was looking out into. A parallel universe, an alternate interpretation of the same space. Somewhere far away but in this same space there was another old house with an attic, and it was as though he himself were now standing in the attic of that alien building gazing out. This idea so shook him that he had to look wildly around him to convince himself that he was still here in his mother’s attic. But the sun still shone warmly at the opposite end. Nothing else had changed around him.

A bird flapped by out there, closer than the others had been. Its movements were unexplainably frightening, unnatural. Awkward or just too weirdly different. How could a creature without real wings fly? It was dark, but he had seen the creature well enough to know that it was identical to the one he had found in his mother’s rain gutter.

Alan sought to comprehend how the creature he had discovered had blundered into his reality. The murmur of a pigeon behind him made him realize that in the doppelganger house, a window must have been left open also. The bird-thing had come into the alien house that way, and exited through the diagonal window. The attic window of that house must not be boarded, and thus permitted exit. But when the creature broke out through the glass to take to the sky again, it had entered into his dimension, and died, either from its injuries or because of the different conditions of Alan’s world.

That meant that the window in the parallel house had been altered, also. Their views had become switched, traded. The alien window must look out, now, upon the more plentiful roof tops of his New England town. Distant church steeples, gentle hazy hills...

He had to board the window back up again. As his father had done, when he had discovered its secret.

Alan took new nails from the toolbox, filled his pockets. He didn’t want to near that window but he couldn’t leave it like this for his mother to find. What if something else came through that broken hole? What if she stuck her hand through the hole to see what it looked like translated into the reality of that other realm?

Alan picked up one of the fallen boards, moved to set it back in place. Closer to the window now, and looking further down, he saw the dark face that was out there, peering in at him.

He cried out, dropped the board, tore desperately into the sunny end of the attic.

It was several minutes before he could go back. He smoked a cigarette, gazed at the dark window from a distance. At last, determined, he returned. He picked up the board, set it in place. He didn’t look out there this time. He looked only at the grain of the board. Then of the next one. And on, until he had sealed that window closed for the third time in its history.

* * *

Outside the house, he mounted the ladder once again. Now it was actually becoming darker as evening approached in his world. He had found a can of black paint in his father’s work shop, and had taped a brush to the end of a broken broom handle.

But when he reached the roof, he couldn’t help but strain to gaze into the attic through the window once more.

He saw several things then. He wouldn’t be able to reflect on all of them until later...but this time he could see inside.

The interior of that other attic, pretending it existed within his mother’s house through the two-way trickery of the glass, glowed red not with dusk but with dawn. It was the rising sun, not the setting sun, that had streaked that alien sky. More light entered the parallel attic now than before, permitting him to see inside. It was not boards that had darkened the view earlier, but merely the pre-dawn gloom. The alien window had never been boarded.

But these were the realizations Alan made later, after he had painted the window panes black. At the moment he stared through the mysteriously altered glass, his mind registered only one thing.

And that was the face of the creature—the being—inside that attic, gazing out at him. It was the same dark face he had seen outside the window before. When he had been inside his attic, it had been atop its ladder peeking in at him. And now that he was atop his ladder, it had changed places with him, and was inside its own attic.

As they locked eyes in that moment, the being lifted a board in place, meaning to nail it there. To shut out the terrifying visage it had witnessed.

That was when Alan began to paint...trying not to see the face as he did so.

Because the face was not human. Not remotely human. But more horrifying than this fact was Alan’s realization that—despite its terrible distortions—that face was in effect his own.

ELIZABETH RISING

It was a hilly graveyard. That was the thing.

Dean trudged up a flight of stone steps set into the central hill, the stones pitched and slanted by decades of frost heaves, tainted green by a century of having been steeped in the rich dark soil of Elysium Fields Cemetery.

The steps paused at an earthen landing of sorts before the next rising swell. He stopped here a moment. To either side the narrow landing trailed off down the hill as a path, bordered by evenly spaced and similarly twisted trees. The tree closest to Dean had an empty bottle of Canadian Club wedged in its crotch at about Dean’s crotch level.

Jerks, he thought. No reverence for the dead. But what did he expect when so many people didn’t even have a reverence for the living?

Perhaps Dean would have thought himself morbid for exploring the graveyards of New England had he not been chased, so to speak, into these quiet places on the outskirts of towns by those who lived within such towns. This was a refuge for him. The only kind of place, it often seemed, where he could feel at peace amongst his fellow beings.

That was why the bottle dismayed him. Sometimes those of the race of tormentors found their way into these sanctuaries. From atop the first tier of the hill Dean gazed out across the sprawling graveyard below for signs of others. But there were no others here this early summer evening. No children riding bikes, no old people tending to the boring neat ranks of newer graves on the boring flat section cleared and leveled in recent times. Good. They might not be tormentors themselves but they would make him feel self-conscious. They must all be home with their families, preparing suppers, Saturday cook-outs. Good. That left Dean here with his family.

Had one come up the granite steps then they might have thought that dappled shadow from the line of trees had fallen across Dean’s face. Until he moved, and the shadow went with him. The purple birthmark covered half his face, making a living yin and yang of it. In contemplating this stain, this anomaly, this blight on him, Dean had thought of himself as a mere portrait of a person, half his face painted in a shadow he could never walk out of.

But this was a place for shadows. See? The lowering sun was already drawing long shadows like taffy out of the silhouetted grave stones. Early evening or night was the time to come, except in those cemeteries so given over to night partiers that he had had to forsake them. He came in the very early morning, and rainy or snowy days were good. Beautiful in such a melancholy way. Though he had only been to this graveyard once before, they were all magically linked. They were all the necropolis he called his home town.

Dean continued up the next section of steps.

He regretted not having his camera this evening, but now that he had discovered this wonderful new place only a few towns over from his, he could come back here any time. His apartment above an elderly couple was decorated with framed enlargements of photos he had taken of interesting monuments, and statues whose white eyes glowed at him without judgment.

He reached the broad level summit of the hill. Here, phallic monuments thrust at the deepening sky, smaller stones clustered around these looming leaders. The stones themselves in graveyards seemed like beings to Dean, quiet but sentient things. Had the people below them known Dean in life, they too might have mocked him, but death makes people benign. Now, transformed, they were his friends and he studied their lettered faces, touched their pitted skins.

On its far side, the plateau dropped off fairly steeply toward a pond ringed by dark woods, this body of water so perfectly round it was almost startling. Dean’s first impression, gazing down at it, was that at some long distant time a meteor had crashed here. Some heavenly object. This was Elysium Fields, after all. He imagined that a dense migration of souls had failed to escape earthly gravity, and come plummeting back in a comet trail of flaming ectoplasm to bury themselves again in the ground...leaving this bowl to fill with the tears of their fellows on high, who had witnessed the ethereal tragedy.

Dean glanced over his shoulder to confirm his solitude, and then started down the slope.

Somehow there were graves along the slope, most of the stones leaning as if to topple down toward the pond. Dean imagined that the coffins must be buried almost at an angle. Maybe space had been scarce at that time, before the cemetery’s expansion.

But there were more numbered disks in the ground than there were full markers, and Dean had seen enough potter’s fields in his day to know one when he was in it. No wonder they were hidden over here on the dark side of the hill. Even in this haven for outcasts, there were outcasts. This was the stained half of the hill’s face.

Most of the disks were nearly grown over. Who knew how many were fully covered? Dean wondered if he himself would become a disk. An anonymous number. Did it make a difference?

He was drawn, however, to a full-sized marker of greenish-stained white stone down almost at the water’s edge.

The pond was still, its surface a flat scummed expanse like a floor of murky green glass Dean imagined he could almost walk out across. A dragonfly or two bobbed along the vast corrupt skin. He had never seen a body of water so uniformly and thickly filmed in scum, but looking back up the hill, he wondered if it had to do with those cheap potter’s field coffins buried in the slope. Coffins rotted away through the years. Releasing their putrefied contents...their liquefied freight...to stream down through the soil of the hill slowly but inevitably into the waters of the pond.

There were old candy wrappers down here at the shore. A tangle of fishing line in a low branch from a bad cast. The worm at the end of it had long since been eaten away by insects. Dean saw the ripped corner of a rubber’s wrapper. This grave had had company over the years, however hidden. In fact, it had been given another epitaph of sorts on its blank side. “Ricky and Rhonda,” it read, in an amorous spray of black paint, contained in the outline of a black heart. All sorts of offerings, then. Everything but flowers.

Dean moved around the stone to read its actual inscription, which faced out upon the pond.

It read:

Elizabeth Rising

“Pretty Betty”

1865-1890

Erected by her friends at

Bluedale State Hospital

“Pretty Betty,” Dean repeated to himself in a whisper. And then, “Elizabeth Rising.”

A prick at the back of his neck. He slapped at it, looked into his hand. A mosquito smashed there in a stain of his own blood.

* * *

Dean had never before been to the Bluedale Library, but libraries were a secondary refuge for him. Though they attracted live people, they were quiet enough and he had learned which were the least occupied times of the day.

Dean waited until no one else was at the desk before he approached the librarian, who was the only male librarian he had ever seen, an elderly man who didn’t look threatening.

“Excuse me, ah, do you have microfilm or records or something of the Bluedale Gazette for 1890?”

“I have a niece with a wine birthmark,” the old man smiled, arching his brows over the rims of his glasses. “It covers most of her thigh. She doesn’t wear shorts. Always wears black hose. I’m sure her husband has seen it, though. Up close. I’m sure he doesn’t mind, either. I wouldn’t mind; she’s a very pretty girl.”

Dean was so horrified by these casual revelations that for a moment he was struck dumb. He considered turning away and walking out but he was too meek a person to be rude. “It’s hard, I know. I’d wear black hose over my head if I could.” Trying to joke.

The old man liked the joke, chuckled. “Well, Gorby has helped us get used to those things, right? At least he still serves that purpose.”

“Yeah, I guess, huh? Um, the Bluedale Gazette...”

“No, no. We lost all our old papers and a lot of our older books in the fire of ‘27. You’d be better off going to the Gazette’s office. Know where that is? You’re not from town; I’d recognize you.”

“Especially with my face, huh?” Dean joked. His laugh trembled a little.

“Right. Uh, what was it happened in 1890 that you wanted to look up? I’m a walking encyclopedia on Bluedale. Often thought of writing a town history like they’ve published for Eastborough. Nice book like that.”

“I’m sure you wouldn’t know. A mental patient died that year. She’s buried over in Elysium Fields...”

“Pretty Betty,” the man said, with strange fondness, as if he had known her personally. “Yeah, she’s buried in Elysium Fields. She was also killed in Elysium Fields. In fact, almost right there where her grave is.”

Dean was too fascinated now to be resentful toward the man. “She was killed? Murdered, you mean?”

“They found her floating at the water’s edge. Face down, naked. She’d been drowned. Of course they couldn’t test a body then like they can now, but it was clear enough she’d been raped. She’d been punched a few times and all.”

“God...that’s terrible.”

“She was always escaping from the hospital. As often as not she’d return on her own. But it’s funny that someone would’ve raped Betty, because she’d give herself to you readily enough. They say half the young men in Bluedale had her at one time or another. She gave the clap to half of the ones she went with, too. I’ve never seen a picture of her, if there ever was one, but they say she had the face of an angel.”

“No killer was ever found?”

“A drunk, maybe. Some boys who got too rough. Someone out for revenge because he’d already caught the clap off her. We’ll never know. You sure aren’t from Bluedale, my boy, not to have heard about the Green Ghost.”

“Green...”

“The kids say they’ve seen a ghost in the graveyard at night. Supposed to be Pretty Betty, waiting for all her dead lovers to rise up and join her. Or maybe looking for more young men to seduce amongst the living.” The old man was grinning. “If she’s still as pretty as they said, I’d go down there and wait for her myself.”

“Wow. That’s really interesting. Thanks. I saw the grave and I was curious...”

“You like exploring graveyards, huh?”

“Well...sometimes.”

“Well, if you ever run into Betty down there, give her my regards.”

* * *

That night, as he often did, Dean lay watching his television for hours. It was the only light in his apartment, its bluish colors flickering on the glass of his framed headstone photographs.

He was watching an insipid soft-core movie on Cinemax, foreign and poorly dubbed. A portly man was chasing a giggling blond around and around a bed until the film kicked into comical high speed, so that the bouncing of her profound bosom became freakish. The film then went to slow motion, the flopping of her great orbs even more surreal.

But however fast or slow they moved, Dean kept his glassy eyes on them. Dean had only ever seen breasts like this or in magazines; in the second dimension. He had never felt the pliant weight of breasts such as these, their warmth, the silkiness of their skin and the greater silkiness of their aureoles.

There was a faint scratching at the mesh of his window screen. A rose chapper or Japanese beetle, no doubt, plucking at the wire like the strings of a harp...but it was too dark out there for him to see anything on the screen.

A very slight breeze stirred the sultry air, stirred his gauzy curtains, and brushed the skin of his face.

* * *

It was eleven at night, and Dean was mounting the steps of the hill at the heart of Elysium Fields...as though he were climbing the stairs of his church, his temple. As if there would be some ritual in that church tonight. A wedding, or a funeral.

And Dean was as nervous as a groom. He looked to left and right as he mounted the stone flight, expecting to see some apparition standing off amongst the stones, its green glow reflected softly on marble. Or some furtive green figure ducking behind a monument. She needn’t be afraid of him. He only wanted what she wanted. To haunt this lonely place, free of tormentors. They were kindred spirits.

Some said ghosts wouldn’t linger in graveyards because they had no personal attachments to such spots, and the husks of their bodies contained therein were of no more importance to them. They were more apt to haunt the places where they’d lived or died. Well, Pretty Betty had died here. And she had imprinted her life here, in the gasp of orgasm. For Dean knew intuitively that this was where she had brought most of her admirers. Down by the water.

He reached the top of the plateau. Already mosquitoes bred of the marshy pond were buzzing around his head, but he didn’t resent them. Their life in this dead place was oddly comforting. It was like they were excitedly greeting him.

And now he reached the point where the slope angled down toward the pond, which was a black expanse through its border of trees, like a crater filled not with water but with nothingness. A void.

Dean had half expected to see her there, down by the water. Down by her marker. The Green Ghost. Pretty Betty. Elizabeth. But she wasn’t there. Both disappointed and relieved, he started down the slope nonetheless.

Had he really expected to find her here? Had he really believed that she haunted this place...or that somehow she had summoned him here tonight? Summoned him to this cemetery in the first place?

He squatted by the grave, stared at the inscription there until he could begin to make it out. Carven words filled with green stain. These symbols were all that was left of her sad life. They could not portray the loveliness of her face. The torment of her heart.

Whatever lay below the headstone had rotted, or drained into the pond as had the others ranked unevenly along the slope. Fertilizer for mosquito eggs...nourishment for the dark things which lived in that water beneath its noxious green skin.

He was a fool. A pathetic fool, he thought. Crouching here at a gravestone, mooning over some insane woman who had died a hundred years ago. What was he doing here? Could he really blame others for driving him to this humiliation, or was it all some flaw, some deficiency in his own being? How sane could he himself be?

She hadn’t summoned him. There was no kindred spirit or any other kind of spirit here, but for those minute and mindless souls of the mosquitoes. He was alone. Ever alone. How could he have thought it would be otherwise, tonight? Or any other night to come?

Heavy tears of self-pity and self-loathing wound down his face, fell to the overgrown, matted grass of her plot.

He could see her inscription more clearly now, even through his tears. The green stain in the letters seemed more vivid; the stone seemed to be reflecting the glow of the moon...

But tonight there was but the thinnest white smile of a moon.

Still hunkered low to the ground, Dean turned around to look out on the water, one hand curled in the grass and the other holding onto Elizabeth’s stone for support. Both hands tightened their grip when he had turned himself fully.

There was the hum of thousands of voices in the air. Low, and yet terrifying for their multitudes...as if all the souls in this graveyard were moaning softly in unison. And yet this sound was subliminal, a background for what Dean was seeing.

The scum of the pond was swelling upwards, ballooning at its center, as if a great bubble were forming there. And the sick green matter which composed that skin was giving off a luminosity even more sickly green in color, a glow so subtle it almost didn’t exist. But undeniable, also.

Dean was flushed cold with fear. And awe. Gas from the decomposing dead, he told himself, swamp gas rising up. That huge bubble would burst, any moment now. He told himself this. But he knew better. And when the head came clear of the pond, and the shoulders followed, he could no longer deny what he was seeing.

The Green Ghost rose to her full height from the pond. She towered there in the night.

She was so faint, she would no doubt not be seen by anyone outside the graveyard’s borders, despite her great size. One driving by the front of the cemetery might see a vague mist against the black sky. It was good that the phosphorescence was so dim, considering her immensity.

The rim of the pond formed the hem of her gown. She loomed above Dean, who felt tiny huddled by her grave, fragile compared to the apparition despite his more fleshy existence. Vulnerable, so near to the edge of the pond, from which she had drawn the elements of her manifestation.

The scum of the pond was her skin, and her gently blowing garment. Was it water or a mist of moisture inside that green skin, supporting it? Air, or swamp gas? She had sculpted herself of all these things. Her hair blew sideways in the air, like seaweed rippling in a current. Her features were indistinct. He could still not discern her loveliness, despite her majestic efforts, but her breasts were distinct swells. Huge, maternal, those of a fertility goddess.

Why had she made herself so great? Was it her insanity, obliterating perspective? Was she glutted on the liquefied souls of those drained into the pond, the fetid semen of her many buried lovers? Was she showing him the enormity of her power?

She was a vision. A goddess of nature.

Her arms lifted higher, as if to embrace the sky. Her soft blur of a face inclined down toward him more...and he could see a darkness there lengthening. It was her mouth, he realized. Opening wide.

The humming grew louder, and a dark exhalation came from her mouth. A black cloud of humming souls.

“Elizabeth,” Dean breathed. Tears were running down his face again. He was too frightened to let go of her grave and the grass of her plot, too humbled to rise to his feet. He began to sob. And yet he was smiling.

The cloud of mosquitoes drifted down at him. Became a thick mass around his head, a living nimbus. They settled thickly on his face, and covered the stain there in a mask of their bodies. They covered the white half of his face as well. They had made him a new face. Dean did not brush them away.

He was, like a saint, transfigured.

* * *

There are some teenagers who are not dissuaded by even the creepiest local legends, and yet there are still few who care to party at night in the graveyard called Elysium Fields. Fewer now even than there were before, when there was much talk of the Green Ghost. The story of the man found dead in Elysium Fields last summer is still too fresh in their minds. This man died only a year ago, not a hundred. And yet, his body was found in the same place Elizabeth Rising’s body was found all those years ago; floating face down in the water at the edge of the green-scummed pond.

Most of the people of Bluedale don’t know whether it is true or merely the embellishment of legend, that somehow the man was drained of most of his blood, and his features nibbled away by fish or whatever else lives in those dark waters, so that he was rendered unrecognizable.

And yet however disfigured, when they fished the corpse out, it’s said that he was smiling in that mysterious and knowing way that corpses seem to smile.

But who can believe these stories, these folktales in the making? Stories related by those few drunken teenagers brave enough to venture into that place at night? Stories such as the twin greenish will-o’-the-wisps that are said to flit along the surface of the pond, as if chasing one-another? Stories such as the two greenish figures who are said to mount the granite steps at the center of Elysium Fields nightly, walking hand-in-hand?

THE HOUSE ON THE PLAIN

The black ship lay steaming on the plain, more a globe than a ship, like a great spherical meteor which had magnetized to it a thousand odd-matched fragments of machinery, all of it now scorched black by the hurtling speeds which had dropped it here. But the ship was made more of ceramics than metal, and the baroque details of its shell all served their practical functions. Probes extended to sniff the air, to test the temperature, camera eyes panned, skeletal arms unfolded to dig into the bland colorless soil.

For it was a boring enough planet. The sky was a dull, heavy platinum. The horizon was as flat as an ocean’s, though there were no oceans on this unnamed world. While in orbit, the ship had scanned no life.

The temperature was moderate and the gravity Earthlike, but the air was thoroughly unbreathable, so the three humans who set out from the globe wore full protective suits and helmets, their suits uniformly black but the helmets individually colored—neon green, orange and yellow—to make the explorers identifiable to each other and to the other two who remained aboard, should communications fail. These three were the most vital instruments the globe had extended.

It was a drab landscape, as stated. There was barely even a breeze to stir the bone dust grit beneath their boots. It was this chilling salt-flat emptiness, in addition to the mind-shaking incongruity itself, that made the old wooden house looming before them all the more startling.

“It’s a Victorian, I think,” said J’nette over her helmet mike. She tipped her head back to gaze up at the third floor, evidently an attic level. The house seemed taller than it might have in a less desolate setting.

“It can’t be Terran,” chuckled Dennis, wagging his head. “It can’t be. Seth, man, let’s go back in and get some guns, huh?”

“No way, I told you.”

“This could be a trap! Who knows what built this place! Somebody wants to entice us inside...”

“They’d fabricate a space craft or at least a contemporary structure.”

“Not if they were observing Earth through a time lapse. Could be they think this is contemporary.”

“Could be they built it as a trap back when it was contemporary,” mused J’nette.

“The scans show no life,” Seth, the expedition leader, reminded them both. “Not even inside.”

“No life that our scans can recognize,” Dennis advised.

“Whatever it is,” J’nette commented, “it could use a paint job.” She moved forward toward the dilapidated structure but Seth caught her lightly by the elbow. She looked to him puzzledly.

“Denny,” he muttered, “go back in the ship and bring me one handgun.”

* * *

J’nette was running her hand along the clapboards of the house, once apparently painted white but the wood now as bone-bare as the plain the house rested on like some great many-eyed cattle skull. “It isn’t an illusion,” she said. “Or else it’s a better illusion than we thought.”

Dennis was holding a device against the outside of the house, watching the small screen set into it. “My scan isn’t hallucinating. It’s real. And it’s real wood.” He turned his head to Seth. “There are no trees on this planet, boss.”

Seth had been gazing in through a window. The glass of every window seemed intact but the shades were drawn in all the ground-floor windows except for this one. Too gloomy inside to see much; indistinct shadows, presumably furniture. He had been afraid, perhaps irrationally, that he would see one of the hunched shadows suddenly move. At Dennis’ words he nodded as if distracted by other thoughts. The pistol was clipped on his belt and now he unsnapped the holster. “Let’s go inside.”

* * *

J’nette went about the spacious living room raising the shades, letting in the lifeless silvery light, while Dennis lifted a TV Guide from the cheap pressed-wood coffee table. Seth had picked up a remote control device and pointed it toward the blank screen of a television set. Nothing happened. Dennis glanced over. “No electricity, chief. They didn’t own individual power cells then, but were all linked up to a municipal utility system.”

Seth noticed the electrical cords snaking from the TV and ancient videotape recorder into a wall outlet. A lamp was plugged into this outlet also but nothing happened when he tried its switch. He wasn’t surprised.

“Well, the house was already old before these things were added,” J’nette observed, her pretty brown face pinched with intensity. She moved to a built-in bookcase, and checked the copyright or printing date in the front of each. The most recent book she found was one from 1992, and most of them were older. Some much older. Titles in English, Latin and German. There were books on non-Euclidean geometry, “rubber-sheet” geometry, Klein bottles and Moebius strips and the studies that had made possible at last the traversal warpage that had brought their ship here through compressed folds of space, crossing distances that otherwise would be impossible for them to cover in mortal life spans.

But in addition to these scientific volumes there were those quite old books with odd titles, all of them apparently studies of mysticism and magic, witchcraft or something much darker. J’nette hefted one heavy tome and it fell open to a page where a sheet had been inserted as a bookmark. Seth drew closer to look over her shoulder.

“Weird,” he said, reading the scribbled incantations the owner of the book, of this house, had copied from the discolored pages. The incantations were modified, however, on the notebook sheet – altered and with new sections inserted. Geometric figures had also been inserted as illustrations, and some resembled the simplified diagrams of Klein bottles and wormholes Seth had studied in his academy days.

The book was replaced, the three drifted on into other rooms, pointing their flashlights and lifting shades. In the kitchen, J’nette knelt by a dog dish and a water bowl, the water long since evaporated.

Dennis gestured to the two doors in here. One, with lacy curtains over a window, obviously was a back way leading outside. The other probably led into the basement. He moved toward this one.

J’nette rose, approached Seth to show him something she had gathered from the floor. “Dog hairs, sir. We could make up a clone when we get back to base.”

“We’d have a dog, all right, J’nette. But I don’t think it could tell us much. Even if we find a hair from a human...we can’t clone its memories.”

“We could at least prove that he or she was a human. A human being from Earth.”

“J’nette,” Seth said, “I don’t think that needs to be proven any more.”

“Look,” called Dennis, and the other two rushed to his side at the tone of his voice.

The cellar stairs seemed to disappear into the ash-like dirt of the plain after only several steps. As if the basement had flooded in sand.

“This house was displaced here,” Seth breathed. “Transplanted here intact. Without so much as a window cracked or a cup knocked over in a cabinet.”

“How?” Dennis chuckled, wagging his head again. “By whom? I don’t see a traversal warp engine under the kitchen sink.”

“Another way, but the same result. This house came from Earth before us. Before we’d even invented warp travel.”

“You think the owner did it? Come on. Do you see any machines he might have built? Unless they were in the basement and got left back in the foundation on Earth a hundred years ago.”

“Maybe he didn’t use a machine,” Seth half whispered.

“What?” Dennis had scrunched his face.

“The books in the parlor...”

“Oh. Right. He used magic...”

“One generation’s magic is the science of the next.”

“Hey,” J’nette said. She had moved to the back door and opened it. The two men went to her.

“What are those?” Dennis asked. “Tree stumps?”

The trio stepped back onto the vast plain. The objects of their attention must have been hidden from their sight behind the house, before. When the globe had descended, its occupants must have been too shocked at the house itself to take notice. Now they approached the tree stumps, as Dennis had called them.

They stood around the closest of the three. Dennis said, “No life here, huh?”

“They don’t register as life,” J’nette observed, pressing her hand scanner to the thing. “It must have been alive once.” It did indeed resemble a tree stump even this close up, the stump of a very large tree, with a star-shaped deep opening in the top. The roots were thick and forked, trailing away into the dirt, the bark a glossy black and wrinkled, grooved, hard. Her scanner bit into the tough bark and collected a sample for more detailed study.

Dennis sighed, sat on the table-like top of the stump to gaze out across the plain. It taunted him with its mysterious emptiness, a mood so persuasive that the cryptic house seemed a crystallized personification of it. “Well, boss, maybe you’re right. But I think some other force or intelligence reached out to Earth and dragged this house here.”

“Why, though, a house that just happened to have books anticipating traversal warpage?”

Dennis had no further replies ready.

They returned to the interior of the house, moved upstairs. There was a bedroom. Framed photographs on a bureau. Seth lifted one. A man with an intense face and thinning hair with his arm around the shoulders of a plain but warmly-smiling woman. From a drawer, J’nette removed a scrapbook. The two men flanked her to peer at it also.

“James Ward,” J’nette said. “That was his name.”

School pictures. As a boy, Ward had looked no less intense. He had done well in school; pasted honor rolls cut from newspapers. Later pictures showed Ward enrolled in a university. Still later, photos of the woman from the framed picture in Seth’s hand. Then, toward the end, an obituary for Margaret Ward, aged 42, dead from cancer back before they had a cure for it, obviously.

“This must have been their dog,” J’nette noted, tapping a photo of a German Shepherd. “The one whose hairs I found.”

“If Ward and the dog were teleported here with the house,” Dennis observed, “they both would have died within minutes at the most. They wouldn’t be able to breathe. Right?”

“Right...” said Seth.

“So where are the bodies?”

Now it was Seth who had no reply at hand.

Across the landing was another bedroom, and they passed into this. There was no bed, however, the room having obviously been used by Ward as a study. Book shelves overflowing, stacks piled on the floor. On the desk blotter was a notebook filled with more of the indecipherable nonsense that had filled the sheet in the old book on magic. Seth lifted an odd paper weight and turned it over in his gloved hands; black crystal with striations of red streaked through it. Symbols had been carved into its many faces.

“Check this,” J’nette told him. He joined her and Dennis at the center of the room, where a pentagram or some such geometric figure had been burned into the otherwise lovely golden boards of the hardwood floor. Between the arms of the star were reproduced some of the symbols Seth recognized from the black crystal.

“I’m not much on twentieth century religion,” Dennis said, “but I’d say Mr. Ward was into some very unorthodox practices.”

“Maybe he was just an explorer,” Seth said softly. “Just like us.”

A ghostly white movement in the corner of his eye, and Seth was spinning about, his hand slapping to the gun holstered on his hip.

It was only the gauzy window curtains stirring subtly in a very mild breeze. This one window at the back of the house was open. He went to it idly to look down on the tree stumps.

“Jesus!” Seth gasped, as soon as he had parted the curtains with his hands.

The mummy was suspended in air just a few feet beyond the window. Its attitude suggested that this being had dove suicidally from the window, only to be frozen in mid-air. It was impossibly suspended. It faced away from him, but the hands and back of the head, with its scant hair, suggested mummification. Seth didn’t need to see the face to know that these were the earthly remains of their host, James Ward.

Dennis and J’nette had crowded in beside him. J’nette said, “This is just too much! What the hell happened to this guy?”

“I don’t think I wanna know,” said Dennis.

“Hey,” said Seth.

“What?”

“The tree stumps are gone.”

Dennis leaned his head out the window, incredulous. The tree stumps were indeed gone, as if they had never been there. No depressions or covered mounds where they had been. There did appear to be, however, three broad trails all leading in to one center point...as if the three stumps had been dragged together to that central point. But then what? At that spot there was nothing but the featureless flatness of the plain.

“Let’s get back on the ship!” Dennis hissed, pulling inside hurriedly.

J’nette had found a folding measuring stick, perhaps having been used to map out the figure on the floor, and unfolded it so as to prod Ward’s body. She could stir his clothing with it, but when she pushed at one of his hands it was so unyielding that the stick bowed.

Dennis yanked her away from the window. “Don’t do that!”

“This could be a dangerous situation,” Seth had to agree. “We’d better get back on the ship until we can run further tests and scans. We’ll call station. They might even advise us to go orbital until further notice.”

“I think we should do that anyway!”

They turned from the window, descended the creaking stairs, left the old house through the front door. All of them walked very briskly back to the globe...as if the very earth beneath their feet might open up and swallow them. Just before they had reached the ship, there came a beep in their headsets. Seth answered it. “Yes?”

“Chief,” came the voice of Louise, aboard their craft, “you’d better get back in here quick.”

“We’re on our way now...what is it?”

“Just come look, please. Hurry.”

The trio of explorers boarded, felt automatically safer sealed back inside this shelter of their own period. Removing only their garish helmets, they hastened to central command...and as they entered, froze in the doorway as if whatever force had seized hold of the body of James Ward had locked onto them as well.

Scan technician Louise, Sam their pilot and a panting German Shepherd looked up at the paralyzed trio. The dog, beautiful and healthy, was smiling black-lipped in the way dogs seemed to smile.

“He just walked into the room with us,” said Sam. “like he’d been on the ship with us the whole time.”

“Friendly,” Louise added, her hands stroking the animal.

Seth turned to gaze at the banks of monitor screens above the scan stations. The old house was there. Looming. In need of paint and some repair. Black glass eyes gazing back at him enigmatically.

“Magic,” he whispered to himself.

THROUGH OBSCURE GLASS

— For Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire

She plummeted...

...into a black well of space, a wormhole to other dimensions. She plunged into the abyss like an angel struck down by an arrow shot from that netherworld. Hurtled...and in her terror, wished that she would strike the bottom of the pit at last, and find the relief of death...for it wasn’t death she feared, but the falling...

Judith opened her eyes with a snap, just as the bus cleared the tunnel in the wooded mountain side. Again, the interior of the bus was flooded with sunlight. She was embarrassed, thinking she had let out a scream in waking, but she could tell from the lulled, quiet aspect of those around her that she hadn’t. Sitting up in her seat, she glanced at the passenger seated beside her, a pretty teenager headed for Seattle, she had told Judith a few hours earlier. She was blissfully asleep, her head resting against the window and her thick dark hair fallen into her face like a blanket.

Judith smiled faintly and looked away from the girl, but something made her look back. The girl’s shroud of hair covered all of her face except for her mouth and chin, and Judith had had the weird idea that if she were to part the girl’s hair, the eyes she would uncover would be horrible. Inhuman. Though she knew the girl had friendly hazel eyes, in her mind she had thought that eyes of glowing pink, lurid and bright as a sunset, lay hiding behind those curtains of hair, glaring out at her secretly through the strands. Further, the way the girl’s head was tilted, and her mouth hung open in sleep, it appeared as if her mouth were a vertical opening in her head. Like a vagina, Judith thought...with teeth.

Flotsam and jetsam of dream, she told herself, looking away from the girl. And yet, her presence so near to her unnerved Judith, and after a few minutes she stealthily gathered up her purse and magazine and stole to another seat closer to the rear of the bus.

* * *

Judith was the only passenger to disembark from the bus in front of a combination gas station/general store, and from its derelict aspect she couldn’t decide whether this was deserted or still saw customers. Age-bleached letters on a sign announced to no one but her: SESQUA DEPOT.

But she wasn’t alone. As she set her bags at her feet in order to dig a cigarette from her purse, Judith noticed that a figure stood framed in the threshold of the store, shadowed from the sun. It was an elderly man, wearing dark glasses, and apparently watching her through their lenses.

“Hello,” Judith offered, unsettled at his presence. A too-cool burst of breeze ruffled her short dark hair, and a nervous smile flicked one corner of her mouth. “I guess I shouldn’t be smoking with a long walk ahead of me, but they wouldn’t let me smoke on that bloody damn bus.”

The old man obviously took note of her British accent. “You’re a stranger here,” he stated.

“I’ve been here once before...very briefly. My husband and I stayed one night at his mother’s house. We weren’t married then, actually. I hope I remember the way...it was six years ago.”

“Who is your husband?”

Judith didn’t feel she needed to tell the man that it was her ex-husband. After all, she had said “husband” herself, hadn’t she?

“Robert Fuseli,” she told the man, and then hopefully: “Do you know him?” Perhaps this man could tell her if she might indeed find Robert living in his mother’s house. She had recently learned that Robert’s mother had passed way five months ago. Robert was to have inherited her house in such an event, he had told her. It was the most obvious place to look for him...for she had also recently learned that Robert had disappeared five months ago...

With a creak of wood, and perhaps of bone, the old man stepped from the doorway and clumped stiffly toward Judith. Involuntarily, she took a step backwards...though he was stunted and obviously frail. It was his dark glasses that lent him an air of ominousness. It had become overcast, and again, he’d been lurking in gloom. Could he be blind? Or might the eyes behind those dark lenses be a glowing lurid pink?

“Robert Fuseli lives in his mother’s house,” the elderly man related. “But you would do well to leave him alone in his task, my dear.”

“Robert is here?” Judith said. Though she had known he must be, an ache of both excitement and dread wrung her heart like a rag in her chest. And then: “What task?”

“The task of his mother, and his father before that. You aren’t from Sesqua, my dear girl...you can’t understand our tasks and callings. He should never have left here. He should never have married an outsider. Go back to where you came from, my dear.”

Judith tossed aside her unlit cigarette, and slung her bags over her slight shoulders. “Thank you for your help,” she said curtly, and started away. She didn’t like the way the old man had kept stiffly advancing on her, like some animated corpse, as if he might not stop until he had hold of her.

“Wait,” he croaked, behind her back.

She turned, and started—for the man had removed his glasses. And his eyes were not pink...but a silvery color, as if clouded with cataracts.

“If you must find your husband...then stay here with him. Outsiders have made their home here before. But don’t take him away from his task. Now that his mother is dead...who else is there?”

Judith could not respond to the man, at first. For one thing, his words made little sense to her. For another—those metallic eyes. For they were so like Robert’s own eyes. And his mother’s. The effect was more subtle in the Fuselis, but similar enough. She had found Robert’s eyes magical, unique, beautiful...and unnerving. They had excited her for unnerving her, in the beginning. But she had taken it to be a peculiar family trait.

“Are you related to Robert?” she asked.

“We are both Sesquans,” the old man replied. “You are not.” And with that, he stopped advancing just short of stepping out of the shadow of the building and into the pallid sunlight.

Judith stared at the man a moment more, and then turned away from him again, hurrying on her way. She didn’t look back this time, but felt his silvery gaze upon her until she had turned a bend in the narrow, forest-flanked road.

* * *

By the time she reached the old two-story house, it was early evening, and a light chill rain had just begun to fall. For the last half hour, Judith had become increasingly anxious, afraid that she had taken the wrong road. For that last half hour she had seen no other dwellings along the narrow road that wound through black fir trees so massed that it seemed it would be impossible to enter amongst them. But now, the house lay before her as she came around a bend, as if the black curtains of trees drew back to unveil it.

Beyond the house she could see a wide pasture, long overgrown with weeds and wild grasses, waist-high, yellow and bent down in a greeting to autumn. The pasture was bordered on its distant edge by a looming inky line of trees like the spiked and spired wall of some fairy tale fortress. And lending itself to this mystical image was a large standing stone in the very center of the clearing, gray in the gray light, tilted in the soil, like some fragment of an exploded world thrown to earth, impaling it.

Though from Britain, Judith was a city girl and had never herself seen any of the megaliths scattered across her land. This sight had made her marvel when Robert first showed it to her.

She had asked him if it had been erected by a primitive people for religious or astrological purposes. He told her, as some asserted regarding the British megaliths, that it was probably just a scratching post for cows to rub their hides against.

Judith held back a few moments, watching the softly yellow windows for a passing silhouette, but saw none. The rain was starting to pick up, however, and she found herself floating to the door like a somnambulist. Watched her arm float up. Listened to the feeble rap of her knuckles.

The door opened, and there were the dark eyes with the silvery sheen, as if he wore contacts of a translucent chrome. Robert. His short dark hair, like her own, was tousled...his skin, like her own, as pale as that of some cave-dwelling animal that the light might wither. He needed a shave, and he looked thin in an oversized T-shirt, baggy pants, his bony feet bare. He looked distressed, as he took her in...as if he thought that she had died in these past months, and it was an apparition of his ex-wife he saw standing on his doorstep.

“What are you doing here?” he husked.

She gave him a strained little smile that barely touched her lips. Her lipstick was brown, his favorite shade, because it complemented her large dark eyes and the full dark brows that lowered over them intensely, mysteriously. She knew the power her own eyes held over him, but tried not to let her knowledge be transparent. In a voice dark as her looks, she casually joked, “I’m getting quite wet, is what I’m doing.”

He craned his neck, peering over her head into the gathering murk. “You shouldn’t be walking alone out here at night. You shouldn’t be here at all...” He gestured at her bags. “What are these for?”

“Please help me with them, Robert.” A moment, and then: “Please let me come in.”

She saw his throat move as he swallowed. And then he was stepping aside for her, and holding the door wider.

* * *

He made a fresh pot of coffee; he knew she preferred it to tea. They had first had coffee together, on their first date, while strolling through Victoria’s Butchart Gardens. Judith’s family had moved to the very British city of Victoria, on the southern tip of Vancouver Island, shortly after she had graduated from school. In her mid-twenties, she met Robert, who had also left his home behind; the Sesqua Valley in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. She was the art director for a printing company. He was an aspiring artist who ran a printing press to pay his bills. In that regard, nothing much had changed for them over the five years of their marriage. In that regard.

After her long chill walk, Judith sipped the black coffee gratefully. Coffee had been the first passion they’d shared.

They stood about his small, warm kitchen, and now Robert turned to fully face her, to address her. “Why are you here, Jude?” he asked grimly.

Jude the Obscure had been his teasing nickname for her. They had also shared a passion for the works of Jude’s author, Thomas Hardy. Robert’s favorite of his novels was Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Thinking of the standing stone in the pasture, Judith remembered the climactic scene of Tess’s capture and symbolic sacrifice at Stonehenge, after murdering her cruel lover so as to return to her husband...

For all their power over him, Judith still found herself averting her eyes. They didn’t feel powerful at the moment. “Ian and I are no longer together, Robert.”

Several moments. And then: “Really? Did you leave him, or did he leave you?”

“He’s back with his wife. They’re going to try again.”

“I see. He dumped you. And so now, here you are. Here. With bags.”

“Robert...you must believe that when we broke up—Ian and I—I was honestly relieved. I was actually happy. He’s doing the right thing, going back to try to salvage his marriage. He should never have left her in the first place.” She lifted her gaze to his at last. “And I made a terrible mistake as well.”

Robert’s voice had risen a trifle, and trembled slightly, but he was obviously struggling to keep its tone icy and composed. “A relief, huh? You were happy he dumped you? You weren’t at all hurt? At all angry?”

“Yes...I was hurt and angry, too. But I was relieved. I was anxious to find you...”

“Find me. The spare tire, now that the other is flat. Find me...your second choice.”

“Robert.”

“Jude, you would not be here if Ian hadn’t broken off with you. He’s the love of your life. The one you left your five-year marriage for...”

“Robert, I never stopped loving you. It wasn’t easy for me, leaving you. It hurt me horribly.”

“I’m sure he comforted you. Listen, Jude...I can understand why you left me. You should never have been with me in the first place. I was poor...we lived more on your money than mine. We could never vacation, struggled with our bills...”

“I never blamed you for that.”

“But the money made it tense. We were scared, and we fought. Subconsciously, maybe, you resented me for not trying harder. Thought I was weak...”

“No. I never resented you. But yes, the money problems depressed me greatly. I was unhappy. We were both of us miserable. And then—Ian came along. Charming...handsome. I became dazzled like a wanky little teenager. He distracted me from all the fear and depression. But you weren’t the source of my fear and depression, Robert.”

“Ian is the man you always wanted. You were reluctant to be with me from the start, but I was persistent. You always said we weren’t perfectly suited. Ian is British...he’s more your ideal in every way.”

“No, Robert. You and I aren’t perfectly suited...no couple is. But we’re both artists, and that makes us as well-suited as any two people could be. Don’t blame yourself for this in any way. It was entirely me. People are greedy, selfish. They become jaded, and lose their perspectives. They’re restless and never content. Our...bloody consumer-obsessed society teaches us to always want more, something better, something different; that relationships are disposable like everything else...”

“I never felt that way.”

“I know you didn’t. You’re different. You’re loyal. Loyal to your family. Loyal to me. Don’t put yourself down. You didn’t disappoint me. God, you’re too forgiving...but at the same time, I’m here to ask your forgiveness.” Her dark voice had grown husky, and now cracked. Her brows gathered like storm clouds over her eyes. “I’m so sorry that I hurt you...”

“You think...you think I can just forget that you left me for him? That you laughed with him? Held his hand? That you made love? Him inside you, his hands on you? It poisons me, Jude. And I can’t be someone’s second choice.”

“Robert, you are my first and only choice, now. I can see that Ian didn’t love me as I thought. That changed my feelings for him. Yes, I was hurt. But it felt right that he left me. It felt right to remember my love for you.”

A cruel, agonized smile marred Robert’s face. “It’s ironic, isn’t it? Neither of us can be the first choice of our loves. You aren’t Ian’s, and I’m not yours. So I guess we two unwanted things are well-suited, after all.”

“Robert, I’m telling you, it isn’t that way...not any more...”

“You can never convince me that it isn’t. You would be with Ian forever if he hadn’t changed that.”

“I don’t know that. And I’d like to try to change your mind...if you’ll only give me the chance.”

“I can’t go through this again, Jude! I barely survived it once. If it didn’t work again...I can’t. I could understand your leaving me. I could accept it because I felt I never deserved you in the first place. But don’t do this to me now...” his voice broke, his face crumpled like a child’s “...don’t...”

Judith started toward him, reached out to him, but he backed against the sink, held up warding hands.

“Anyway, it’s too late. I’m back in Sesqua, Jude. I swore I’d never come back here...even though I knew my poor mother was sick. But when we broke up, when I had nowhere else to go...”

“It isn’t too late...”

“It is too late!” he half shouted, half sobbed. “I have things to do here, things you could never understand. Things I can’t even describe, and that you’d never even believe...”

“What are you talking about? Robert, please—I’ll do anything you ask. I’ll even move here with you if that’s what you want. I’ll quit my job, freelance from here. Robert...only you matter...”

“No! No. You can spend the night. But tomorrow you have to leave. It’s the only way it can be.” He covered his face in his long, graceful artist’s hands, scarred by years of factory labor. “It’s too late...”

Judith once more thought of Hardy’s Tess, how she had told her husband it was too late for them to be together again. Too late to stop the terrible gears of her fate. But Judith was determined that it was not too late for herself. She did not again try to touch Robert so as to comfort his weeping. But by the same token, though this was his house, she had no intention of leaving it tomorrow. She could have been wrong, but she believed that in his heart of hearts, he didn’t want her to leave now any more than he had wanted her to leave him the first time...

* * *

In her dream, she knew the name of the tower that soared with impossible height from the caverns below...soared to touch the crust of the waking world. Koth, it was called...

And she knew the beings were called Gugs, before she could even discern them. At first, they were merely shambling hulks, dark and dark-furred. If only they hadn’t reached that circle of stones. In its center, they had lit a bonfire. The light of its flames illuminated the silent procession...and their terrible activities at the megaliths they had erected. Each of these was a brother to the stone in Robert’s pasture...

The flames seemed to glow inside pink eyes set on jagged, hooded projections of bone. And mouths gaped wide, soundlessly. Mouths that gaped vertically in hideous faces...fangs that flashed back the colors of fire and blood.

And what they were doing. What they were doing...God help her that she ever should have seen. The Great Ones had banished them for just such practices...

And there was something more horrible yet...

...and that was that the creatures seemed to be aware she was observing them. First one, then another, then all turned to gaze directly at her invisible dreamer’s form, amongst them, spying on them.

It was then that the first of the Gugs started toward her.

It was then that Judith awoke with a gasp.

As her breathing slowed, she reached out shakily for a light. At first, she half-expected to find Ian beside her. But this was her ex-husband’s bed, and the spot beside her gaped empty. Robert slept on his sofa, in the other room. He had insisted she sleep in his bed. His pillows smelled subtly of his shampoo, his aftershave. She had wept into them.

The rain had stopped, the night lay still. No sound of city traffic, no sound even of rustling trees. Judith heard only one sound, and she had no idea what it was.

A scraping? A scratching? She was reminded of their former apartment together, on the second floor of an old house in Victoria. The branches of a tree, on windy nights, would scratch against the kitchen window like nails on a blackboard. It was just like that. Only...only it seemed to be coming up from the floor. Up from the cellar she knew lay below, though she had never gone down there herself.

She sat up in bed listening to the scraping. While she did so, her distracted gaze took in a gun rack on the wall, in which a shotgun and two rifles rested, and it vaguely disturbed her, as she knew Robert abhorred hunting. She was fully awake now; it was more the nightmare than the sound that kept her from slipping back beneath the covers, but now that she was awake, the sound tugged at her. At last, giving in to it, she slipped out of bed and stole out into the living room. For some reason, the sound made her afraid...as if it were the creak of a rope from which Robert dangled, unable to bear the fear of losing her a second time...

But he lay asleep on the sofa, curled against the pain that held his jaw tense and brows knitted intensely even in sleep. Standing over him, Judith wanted to gently smooth that brow, soothe it, but she did not touch him. Instead, barefoot, she continued on past him, into the kitchen where the door to the basement stood double-bolted.

She slipped both bolts, threw a switch against the wall. A breeze so chill it made her shudder was exhaled up at her, like a kiss from dead lips. Judith began to descend rough wooden steps that creaked and sagged even under her slight weight. At their foot, the darkness branched off into two directions. On her right, she heard the hiss of a water heater, saw the shadowy hunched forms of a washer and dryer. Prosaic enough. But the high-pitched scratching came from the left, from a room of the cellar into which only the dregs of light reached.

Boxes of books, of tools, bundled newspapers and old furniture were piled against the walls, but at its center there was one thing only—a great, rounded hump covered completely by a tarp large enough to cover a car. The squealing scratches came from this mound, from under that heavy tarp...

Bricks weighed the corners of the tarp, and Judith stooped to remove several of them. For a moment she hesitated to go further. Then, curling her fingers around the tarp, she threw its edge up over the top of the mound. She didn’t know what she would find, and when she found it, didn’t know what it was.

It appeared to be a great globe of dark metal or glass, buried in the cement floor of the cellar but for its upper surface. Or was that all there was of it, a huge concave object? Whether sphere or hemisphere, the scratching came from its inner surface.

Granted, it was gloomy in the basement, but at first the glass seemed truly opaque, if not absolutely black. But as she studied it, the surface seemed to gradually lighten. Until she was certain that it was indeed growing lighter. A murky gray. At last, somehow, miraculously, almost entirely transparent. It was gloomy within the glass, also...gloomy under the cellar floor, which the glass seemed to peer into like a monstrous lens. But she could discern light in that gloom...a flickering light bleeding in from the distance. The reddish glow of a nearby fire.

And there were two other lights, closer at hand. They floated nearer, like luminous fish at the bottom of the sea, rising to investigate her. The twin smudges of light moved in unison...and were of a soft pink color.

Before Judith could back away—before she could scream – the face pressed up against the interior of the glass. Huge nails raked against the inside of the lens. The thing’s jaws gnashed vertically, so that its fangs ground across the glass as well. And the eyes of the Gug glared hungrily out at her.

“No!” Judith heard Robert shout behind her. “Don’t let it see you! Don’t let it see you!” He was suddenly pushing her out of the way, throwing himself across the lens as if to blot it out, pulling down the dreaming eyelid of the dark tarp and pinning it again with bricks.

Judith fell back against the wall, gasping for air as when she had been jolted from her nightmare. When Robert whirled to face her, they stared at each other in horror and despair.

“Robert,” Judith began to sob, “what is it? What are they? What’s down there?”

“It’s the Dreamlands, Jude. It’s why you shouldn’t have come. It’s what you shouldn’t have seen, and what my family has been chosen to guard against since my grandfather’s father built this house around the Dream Lens.”

“I don’t understand!”

He continued on as if in a trance, as if a terrible numbing calm had fallen over him. “The Dreamlands are on another plane, Jude. But Sesqua is a special place. The veils are very thin here. Extremely thin in a spot like this. It should not have been seen. Especially not by an outsider. Now you know why I can never leave again, and why I can’t have you here...even if I wanted.”

The scratching continued, frantic, desperate, hungry. Judith shook, hugging herself, eyes fixed on the shroud of the tarpaulin. The mound was like a belly pregnant with a monster anxious to be born. Who knew how many monstrosities, waiting to be born into this world?

“I’m afraid now that it saw you, and you saw into its world,” Robert went on, “that...that things will be bad. The two worlds mustn’t see into each other. It starts a door to open. My father looked too long in the lens, once...” He let the story trail off. “But it’s too late, now. You didn’t know; it isn’t your fault. It’s...too late to change anything now.”

* * *

Robert had to support Judith as he walked her back up the stairs, and down the hall back to her bed. He sat on its edge as he covered her. As he rose, she looked up at him imploringly, her large eyes like those of a frightened child, and lay a hand lightly on his arm.

“Please,” she whispered. “Don’t leave me.”

He sat beside her again, and held her hand. Held it until mercifully dreamless sleep clouded her stunned mind. Continued holding it. Long minutes after she was asleep, at last he whispered back, “I won’t.”

* * *

Was it a nightmare?

Robert was at the bedroom window, his body tense as a deer’s...or a cougar’s, ready to spring on the deer. He was staring out into the night, and Judith heard him whisper, “No...God, no...”

He whirled from the window, lurched toward the door. Judith caught a glimpse of his eyes, wide and flashing silver, and then he was at the gun rack. And then out through the door. She swung her legs out of bed. “Robert!” she called after him.

As she rose, Judith turned to glance out the window, and the curtains were still spread, as if some ethereal veil had been parted so that she might see what lay behind her former reality.

A translucent mist lay over the pasture like a milky membrane, a caul, a burial shroud, and the moon had come out from behind the dispersing rain clouds. It made the mist glow.

In the center of the wild meadow, the standing stone was gone. In its place towered a ghost, seemingly made of that same glowing fog.

“Robert!” Judith cried again, and then she too was darting from the room...barefoot, in her nightgown, like a sleepwalker running from her nightmare—or running deeper into her dream.

He had already left the house ahead of her...was already racing through the tangled field. As she burst through the door into the night air, Judith saw again that figure of mist where the standing stone had been. It was not a ghost, but a ghostly outline of the megalith’s former essence. The mist sparkled in that smoky pillar, and then she felt she knew why. The stone had not turned to mist...but its substance had come unwoven, unmeshed, so that the tiny granite crystals swirled and glittered like powder.

As Judith waded into the meadow, the weeds and tall grass grabbed at her bare ankles like myriad living limbs of one vast, malignant creature. She thrashed wildly along, and at one point she fell. As she struggled back to her feet and lifted her head, she saw two things—that Robert had very nearly reached the center of the pasture...and that a pair of glowing pink eyes had appeared within the ghostly megalith.

Robert planted himself in a stance, worked the shotgun’s slide, and a crashing report like thunder rumbled across the meadow as he fired into the mist...and then again...and then again. Judith flinched at each blast...and saw the pink eyes quickly withdraw.

She resumed her wading into the field, and Robert saw her coming. He called to her, “A sacrifice will appease them. Blood will close the door again. I think I got it.” But he returned his attention to the unwoven obelisk, and added, “It’s not closing...Jude, go back to the house!”

Pink eyes rushing...and then the Gug was through...

It stooped to pass through the portal of fog, but quickly raised itself to its full height. A tower of shaggy blackness with those orbs blazing near its summit. In one motion, as it came through, it swung one heavy forelimb—and Judith saw Robert go flying back as if struck by a car, the shotgun spinning end over end through the air.

She heard the weapon thud somewhere ahead of her. She beat her way toward it, trying not to look upon the great beast or being that shambled toward Robert. It took its time in reaching him. It did not expect him to escape it. No sound came from its jaws, which worked vertically like a giant clam fused into what passed for its face.

The Gug stood over Robert, and then turned its head abruptly to see Judith there, bringing the shotgun up and squeezing the trigger.

A small dry click like a twig snapping. The Gug took a step, now, toward her...reaching out...great clawed fingers spreading...fingers dripping dark drops of human blood...

Judith pumped the slide and squeezed the trigger again and the recoil kicked her back a few steps. She saw one of the twin pink suns above her suddenly go black.

It made no cry, but the Gug whirled away—in agony, now a cyclops—and stooped again into the portal. Was gone...

Judith turned to see that Robert had risen to his feet. He hugged himself tightly as if against the cold, but from the dark ribbons flowing over both arms, Judith knew he was holding himself together. Their eyes met.

“Robert!” Judith sobbed, her whole body quaking. “Robert...I’m so sorry. Oh Robert...my love...I’m so sorry...”

He smiled, and turned his back on her as if afraid she would see how badly he was wounded. He trudged painfully toward the misty pillar, and just short of reaching it he faced her again.

“Sacrifice will appease them,” he repeated. “Blood...will close the door...”

“Robert!” Judith cried, but she didn’t try to stop him as he began to back into that glittering, swirling mist.

He smiled again. “I forgive you,” he told her, and then was gone, as if it were his own essence that resolidified into that dark, leaning standing stone.

* * *

It was a crisp, early autumn morning, the sky so blue and the bleached double peaks of Mt. Selta—looming over the valley—so bright that they nearly hurt the eyes. And morning found a small, lovely woman with dark hair and eyes walking up the road to the combination general store/gas station, where the infrequent buses stopped.

His eyes hidden by dark glasses, an elderly man hovered in the doorway, watching the woman approach. When she was near enough, he asked her, “Are you returning now, my dear?”

But Judith didn’t stop at the spot where buses came. She continued approaching the old man, until she stood before him. “Is your store open?” she asked him in a calm, quiet voice.

“Yes,” the old man replied, a bit confused.

“There will be things I need to buy. For the house.”

“For the house?”

“Yes—there’s a task that needs to be seen to,” Judith told him. “I’ll be staying.”

JOHN SADNESS

Jane Thistle was wrenched with sobs as the tiny raft was carried by the holy men to the water’s edge. She walked in the procession, though she was still weak from the long labor that had delivered the blighted infant. Her husband John Thistle helped support her. Others, deemed more important in the ritual, walked ahead of them, even though they were the parents. There was the mayor of the village, John Stout, and the village surgeon, John Copper, their black top hats severe like parading towers. The four religious men in their cowled robes and sandaled feet, bearing along the flower-decorated raft, took the lead.

The nameless lake spread out before them, vast and black, misted gray where it blended with a distant horizon, lapping the shore with an insidious calm. Violent storms never blew in off this lake, and the oily waves never much varied their steady, somnambulant rhythm. Fish were not caught from this lake, and boats were never sailed upon it. Even travelers from the villages on its far side would rather spend months skirting around it than weeks sailing across it. Too many had been lost in the attempt. Too many had died eating the fish. It was said that these waters were tainted with the fluids from the machinery of those ancient people who had once populated this land, but had died out many ages ago, extinguishing themselves so thoroughly that they took most of their artifacts along with them.

But there was an island at the center of the lake, Jane Thistle had been assured by the surgeon who examined her newborn, and the mayor who had given the Word, in accordance with the laws of their religion. No one alive had ever set foot upon this island, but it had been sighted before travel on the lake had finally been entirely outlawed. Though never visible from the shore, it was a large island, thick with black fir trees choked in swirling mist. It was the island to which the waters would either literally—or only symbolically—carry away her child.

And now the robed men set the raft down in the thin water that slurped around their ankles (they would take long purifying baths to cleanse themselves, later). All throughout the walk from the village, the infant had been quiet, had not fussed. Was he sleeping, or blinking up innocently at the churning gray skies, the faces of the strangers who bore him toward his fate? His name was John Sadness. The parents of the blighted were discouraged from naming these infants, when they were occasionally born. But Jane Thistle had named him secretly. Even her husband did not know his name.

But now, as if he knew he was to be sent to an obvious death, John Sadness began to cry. And so did his mother, who in a burst of anguish sought to rush to his side. Her husband held her back. He was afraid that if he didn’t, one of the constables behind him would do so instead.

Mayor John Stout addressed the distraught woman in a deep, oratorical voice that belched out steam into the chill air. “Madam, I have given the Word, in accordance with the laws of our Lord and Master, and upon the advice of Surgeon John Copper. But you need no surgeon’s eyes to see that your child is blighted, and must be sent from us to the place where his brothers dwell.”

“No other blighted children dwell on that island!” Jane Thistle cried, a vein standing out on her flushed forehead like a brand of disgrace. “You know as well as I that they all perish from the cold, or in the water...or if they do wash up on the island, that they are too young and weak to care for themselves!”

“We do not murder these children. They are the Lord’s children, howsoever malformed. We simply turn them over to the Lord’s hands. But the Word tells us that they must not live amongst us, to spread their polluted seed. Would you have every child born of our village to be as this child?”

In her pain and helplessness, Jane’s legs turned watery, insubstantial beneath her, so that she leaned more heavily into her husband’s arms, however much she resented them at this moment. Her sobs increased as her child bawled more lustily. He wanted milk. He wanted his mother.

“He isn’t that badly off!” she rasped, only half believing her own lie. She had had to drip milk into his twisted mouth with a dropper. And she had screamed when first she saw his face—not only because she knew he would be sent away, but out of simple terror itself. “Couldn’t we castrate him, so that he won’t breed? He has two arms, two legs...he could support himself when he’s older...be of help to the village...”

“There are no exceptions. He would be sent away if he had but a cleft palate, a milky eye. It is the only way that the rest of us can be sure of our purity. We cast no blame on you, Jane Thistle. You did not ask for this curse, nor deserve it I am sure. But the Word is the Word. And we can delay the Lord’s decree no longer...”

“Please...please,” Jane husked, now nearly limp in her husband’s embrace, no longer struggling, “let me kiss his brow—one last time...”

But the holy men either did not hear her beaten whimper, or did not heed it, as they pushed the miniature raft out into the lake of liquid obsidian. There, it was rocked obscenely, if gently, like a cradle. Jane Thistle could see nothing of her son John Sadness upon that floating coffin but for the flowers, and his two small arms—deformed as they were—reaching up for the neck of his mother, or in an appeal to their God.

* * *

Jane Thistle wore only long black mourning gowns for the ten years that followed the exile and death of her child. Her husband did not try to discourage her. The black attire, snug around her slim waist but the skirts voluminous, complemented the severe beauty of her dark hair and eyes and her contrasting colorless skin. He was grateful that she would still bare that skin to him in its entirety, after the fruit their love had seeded. But there had been no further fruit, and that was no doubt why she permitted their love-making. The surgeon told her the child had probably damaged her womb in his birth. John Thistle felt his wife was relieved for this—that there would be no other children. But at the same time, he felt that her mourning garments were not only for their blighted son, but for her other children who would never be born at all.

Ten years had passed. Jane Thistle had been twenty then, was now thirty. In that time, other women had watched their infants sail out to the unseen island. Some had sobbed, as she. Some had watched in icy relief. In those ten years—as in all the years before—not one raft had washed back ashore. No flotsam of wood, no tiny fish-like bones. Only flowers...nothing more.

But one day, a cry went up. The whole village was gradually aroused. Some children casting rocks out into the ebony lake had seen something shadowy in the distant fog, and soon the constables were called to the water’s edge. Other townspeople joined them. John Thistle told his wife about it as he hurried to their barn, slipping into his jacket as he moved. There, he took up a pitchfork.

“I’m going with you,” Jane Thistle told him.

“They say it’s a ship, Jane,” John told her gravely. “At first, the boys thought it was a whale—some great beast. But it’s a ship...heading toward our shore...”

Jane pulled her fringed black shawl around her shoulders, the chill autumn breeze stirring her black curls about her face. “I’m coming with you.”

* * *

At the edge of the lake, a brisk wind snapped at Jane’s skirts. A grayer Mayor John Stout held a plump hand to his top hat’s brim to keep it from being dislodged. The constables had muskets in their fists.

The ship had already run aground by the time Jane and John Thistle arrived. Its prow was lodged in plowed-up mud. The vessel loomed; not even before craft had been outlawed from these waters had such a large vessel sailed them. The villagers murmured how it resembled, in general outline and in size, an ocean-going vessel. But resemblances ended there.

The hulking ship seemed to have a skin of glistening scales (no doubt why the boys had taken it for a living thing). These scales, up close, proved to be a mosaic of glossy white tiles, perhaps ceramic. There were no sails, nor even masts. Several small structures up top were also tiled and without windows or portholes. Here and there were pipes of a brassy color, up top and growing out of the sides of the ship, and thick black hoses like veins running in and out of white flesh. Here and there atop the huge craft were clusters of brassy and silvery machinery, like boilers and furnaces, with shiny chimneys that belched no smoke, but seemed only to vent a thin steam. The machinery made no sound.

“This can’t be from the villages across the lake, and there are no rivers that connect with it,” John Thistle breathed in awe. “It has to have come from the island.”

“How could this have been built without us having heard any sounds of it?” Surgeon John Copper wondered aloud. He had taken to dyeing his graying hair red. “Even across the distances, wouldn’t we have heard something?”

“Perhaps it was built at the bottom of the lake, and risen up,” said Jane Mason, wife of one of the constables.

“Built by whom?” John Thistle asked.

“Look at it. Look at the machinery. This is the work of the Ancient People,” said Jane Mason.

“The Ancient People were demons in the flesh,” John Stout said, “and the Master cursed them and cleansed them from our lands. They are extinct, and rightly so.”

“We don’t know what exists on that island. It could be the Ancients still survive upon it, if only in small number. But look at that ship, John Stout! Who else could have created it?”

“Hallo!” John Stout bellowed, advancing further across the damp gritty sand but not actually nearing the slithering membrane of the surf. “Hallo, in there! Show yourselves!”

In answer, the assemblage heard a grating of metal from above. Then, a whispery scrabbling sound...

John Stout backed up several steps, and in a rather less confident tone repeated: “Hallo?”

Below, they caught a fleeting glimpse of dark, silhouetted hands moving in quick darts and flurries, as fistfuls of flowers and broken petals were cast from atop the ship. The mayor stumbled backwards frantically now, as if the touch of the snow of petals might be poisonous.

With the petals still fluttering in the air like moths, a head rose up furtively to gaze down at the villagers. It was silhouetted, and thus difficult to make out—difficult, even, to fathom—but seemed to resemble the fleshless skull of a horse. And then, timidly, the body followed. Ribs curled free of the chest like those of a skeleton, and the vertebrae protruded in a line of jagged dorsal fins. The forelimbs were great pinchers, like those of a crab...and with these the thing was lowering a rope ladder over the side...

“Dear God!” one of the constables cried, and shouldered his musket, and fired.

Thunder. The very air was burned. The skeletal apparition went back down out of sight abruptly at the impact. The villagers had all heard its inhuman shriek of pain and surprise.

“Demons!” cried John Kettle, the blacksmith. “It’s the Ancient People!”

“No,” said Jane Thistle in a voice so low only her husband beside her heard it. She clapped a hand over her heart, and in a tone of awed, anguished joy said, “It’s our children!”

“It’s our children!” said Jane Mason at the same moment, in a louder voice and in a tone of absolute horror.

Now, from above, came other voices. Rumblings, and chatterings...hissing whispers, and panther-like growls...

“Jane,” said John Thistle, “we must get back to the house...”

“No!” she replied, moving forward.

He took her arm. “We must! Hurry!”

The first of them dropped off the back of the ship, where they were less vulnerable to the constables’ muskets. The villagers could hear them splash as they landed. And then, they charged out of the ship’s shadows, kicking up the poisonous black water as they came. In their speed, in their fury, in their vast and varied hideousness the constables were barely able to aim at them. A ragged line of shots cracked the air, and then the creatures were upon them...

“Run!” yelled John Thistle, violently pulling his wife along now, but still holding onto his pitchfork. “Run! Run!”

And despite her terrible joy, Jane did run, when she saw one of the creatures embrace Mayor John Stout in four obese arms dangling folds of creased flesh, and thus engulf him totally. A translucent head which was little more than a gelatinous bag closed over the mayor’s head like a caul.

As Jane turned and fled, holding hands with her husband, she saw the surgeon John Copper run past her. He was moving very fast for a man of his years, and then she realized that he wasn’t so much running as being propelled along by the momentum of a creature which had hold of him. The thing galloped on its hands and feet but its body was normal enough; like all the creatures, it wore no clothing. From its eye sockets, however, writhed twin nests of milky tendrils like those of an anenome, and its bony hooked jaws pierced Copper’s neck like the mandibles of an ant warrior.

Thistle let go of his wife and whirled about, gripping the pitchfork in both fists now. He lunged at the creature, and the trident caught it through its own neck. Jetting blood, it collapsed atop the surgeon, but the man was already jumping with his final electrified spasms. Thistle again took his wife’s hand; again they ran. Jane’s black skirts flapped the air like storm-lashed sails, and the ground seemed to hammer with a maddened heartbeat under their thumping footfalls.

Something that squealed like a pig being slaughtered could be heard racing up behind them as they sprinted into their yard, and whatever it was thudded against their door just as John got it closed and bolted. They rushed from window to window, locking them and drawing the curtains. Finally, John panted, “Upstairs, Jane...move!”

Jane’s hair was in her face, and her eyes gleamed madly from within its tangle. “They survived, John. Some of them...the strongest. And helped the weaker to survive. All these years, they were building that ship. Building it from what they found on the island...machinery that the Ancients left behind. Building it all this while, so they could return to us...”

“For revenge, Jane!”

She wagged her head. Tears streamed down her flushed cheeks.

John again urged her upstairs, and this time she obeyed him. They entered their bedroom; John shut and barred its door. He turned to close the curtains to the one window, and saw the creature which had been waiting for them.

It had been struck by one of the constables’ musket balls; dark blood was winding down its pallid flesh. It was stooped but towered over them, emaciated yet also suggesting great strength. Its eyes, each as large as a normal man’s head, were two great cloudy sacks, hanging from a head that had not grown since its infancy. Its hair was still wispy as corn silk.

Though the eyes had grown so much larger, its cadaverous body so much taller, Jane Thistle recognized her son, John Sadness, instantly.

“My boy!” she sobbed, spreading her arms. “My boy!”

It took a lurching step toward her, fingers three times longer than they should be curled into a skeleton’s talons...

“No!” John Thistle cried, darting toward the small fireplace to seize up a poker...

The creature fell upon his wife, and she struggled with it. But as Thistle raised the poker above his head, he realized that the thing had crumpled, and Jane was fighting to hold it up. John dropped the poker, and helped take hold of the scarecrow-like body...walked it to the bed with her, where they laid it down.

The creature gurgled up at them. Its pendulous orbs were nothing like eyes, might have been blind. Maybe it was scent that had led it here. Or mere memory. But it reached up feebly, unerringly to Jane’s face and stroked her cheek.

John took hold of its other hand and sat on the edge of his bed. In this bed, they had made this creature. Their son. John watched as his wife bent over John Sadness.

Her tears fell upon its tiny face and great eyes as she kissed it, one last time, on the brow.

Then, with a small contented shudder, the creature died.

* * *

A dozen townspeople had perished in the battle. None of these victims had been children, however, for which the townspeople were grateful.

All of the monstrosities that had disembarked from the ship were finally slaughtered. It took several days to track down the last of them in the woods. Whether there were more aboard the ship, or back on the island, no one could tell...but the strange vessel was gone by the time anyone returned to the beach.

Sometimes Jane would stand at the spot where it had arrived, holding her husband’s hand. There they would both look out across the black lake, staring at where the island must lie, as if hoping the mist would part, sunlight would beam down upon it. But it remained cloaked in its winding sheet of fog. And while most of the villagers no doubt gazed out at those waters in dread, Jane and John Thistle did so with tears in their eyes, and sad smiles on their lips.

COLLAPSED ROOF

Ned Corben’s garage was really just a roof that connected one side of his house to one side of a dilapidated shed his grandfather had once used as a workshop. There were no support columns, because after all it was meant as a garage. For years it hadn’t even had a back wall, until his grandfather finally put one up a few years before he died, at which time the house had been left to Ned’s parents. Now that they had moved to Florida, the house belonged to Ned. But whether out of subconscious premonition or not, he had never used the garage as anything but a storage place for the lawn mower and the bags of trash waiting to be taken to the dump on Saturday.

Tonight he had been watching TV, rocking in the wicker rocker, cocooned in a blanket and drinking a beer, when he’d heard a terrific crash as if a tree had fallen. He had been watching a program that purported to document real life encounters with angels, re-enacted dramatically. Some of these encounters had more the flavor of ghostly visitations than what Ned would imagine a visit from an angel might be like, and he had found himself wrapping his nest of blanket more tightly around him, and wishing he had left more lights on in the house before he settled in to watch TV. It had still been light then. He had been watching for hours, moving only his thumb across the remote, and rocking, except for the monumental effort of getting a new beer and draining the last several times. It had been his Saturday routine since Brenda left, and lately his weeknight routine as well.

Now it was dark, and he was unsettled, and when he heard the crash he stopped rocking. The abrupt halt stopped his heart in his chest as well.

Had it been a tree? For the past few weeks, the snow had been unprecedented. It was nearly two feet deep in his yard, with just a tunnel of a pathway to the driveway he had paid to have plowed. Might a tree or at least a heavy bough, weighted with the snow, cracked at last under the pressure?

He rose from the rocker and, still wrapped in his blanket, switched on a lamp. In the kitchen he found and tested his flashlight. It was dim, the batteries low. He had to thumb the switch on and off several times until he got the beam to stay as bright as it could manage. And then he went out into the back hall.

He expected to see an angel waiting for him there, waiting just at the top of his second floor stairs, but a real angel, not one of those too-human ghosts. An angel with wings, and glowing aura, something more than human, its robes stirring in slow motion as if it stood at the bottom of the sea, which to an angel the earth must surely be like...creatures like Ned the equivalent of those ghastly fanged fish that dwelt at the ocean floor.

There was no angel.

An elderly couple rented the apartment downstairs from him. He seldom conversed with them or even saw them. For all their silence, they might have died weeks ago. He descended the stairs, passed by their door and switched on the outside light.

It didn’t work.

Of course it didn’t. Nothing worked. Not even him.

Ned had lost his job a month ago. He had been a pasteup artist for a printing company that was bought out by a large corporation. There had been promises that he and the others in his department would be taught how to do their jobs on new computers that were to be brought in.

The computers did come in. And most of the crew went out. Ned had been a pasteup artist for eleven years. The new owners had promised there would be no hiring of outsiders. Before he was let go, Ned saw the company hire a pretty set of twins, apparently just out of their teens, to work at the computers in his place. They could type quickly, and that was all they needed to do. How to balance a business card’s components, how to shoot a halftone, how to trap color separations were all irrelevant skills, as obsolete as chiseling hieroglyphics. It didn’t matter that the old phototypesetting was much cleaner, much nicer looking than the type churned out by the computers. Desktop publishing had, Ned felt, lowered the standards of excellence in printing. He believed the technology hadn’t caught up to the aspirations yet.

The technology was flawed. Hyped. Like everything, from laundry detergent to love. It was a deception of perfection, a lie. A pretty distraction, like those twins who weren’t really grown up enough to have true skill, to say that they had mastered a profession. But the twins were too shy, too cute for him to hate. Much as he wanted to hate them. Much as he needed to.

He had used all of his 401k savings to pay off his bills, so that he could survive just on unemployment until he could find a new job.

He hadn’t tried too hard yet. But of the places he had tried, none had called back.

He was thirty-eight years old.

It was a good thing he had no family to support. He was divorced. That hadn’t worked out in the long run, either. Promises, promises. Promises of security, of happiness, of forevers. A deception.

It was all like a cancer, ash gray under the pink of skin, spreading even into the most mundane, banal objects and matters.

Two days ago, after loading up his car for the dump, he had found that it wouldn’t start. He knew nothing of cars. He was more handy putting together small pieces of paper. He had the car towed. It needed a new starter. The whole thing cost him two hundred dollars. Thank God for the 401k money...even though he had lost more than thirty percent of it to taxes and penalties.

His kitchen faucet only trickled water lately. He would have to call a plumber. His father was good with things like that, but had never taught Ned to be. His father had never been close even when he was close, and now he was in Florida.

Now the bulb to the outside light was out. It didn’t surprise him. It was just another symptom of the disease, like the torn shower curtain, the leak in his bedroom ceiling he had patched up with silver duct tape, the cellar staircase that sagged alarmingly under his weight, the mineral stains in his bathtub and the spider plant that was dying in his parlor. He was too disgusted to be dismayed. It was a fatalistic acceptance.

But that didn’t mean he wasn’t nervous venturing outside, into the frigid dark, the anemic beam of his flashlight barely playing across the heaped snow that had turned his long-familiar yard into a surrealistic, alien landscape.

To his right, alien ruins lay half covered in snow.

“Oh...that’s great,” he said softly.

His garage roof had collapsed under its burden of snow. Just yesterday afternoon he had looked up at the roof and remembered how his father would make him climb onto it from a second floor window so he could shovel it off. He could have done that this winter, but had been afraid the structure wouldn’t support his weight. Now he was glad he had been timid about it.

He drew nearer. The roof hadn’t fallen flat, but had actually only dropped to the ground on the left side, the right still supported, so that it formed a great lean-to. But in dropping on the left, the roof had torn the window of his grandfather’s old workshop right out of the wall, leaving a hole in its place. He would have to nail some plastic over it to keep stray cats and skunks out of the workshop. But that was the least of his problems.

How was he supposed to deal with this? How to bring the roof down completely, and then, how to break it up and dispose of it? He, who could barely hang a picture without making a frustrating major project of it? He surely couldn’t afford to pay others to do it for him.

What would his neighbors think, particularly the ones behind his house? Last summer, through his window screens, he had overheard them bitching to friends about how awful his house looked, long unpainted, the eaves full of holes squirrels popped in and out of. Last summer, he had found a gift on his rickety front porch: a basket full of weeds. He had no doubt that his neighbors had left it as a comment upon the lawn he hadn’t mowed in weeks. But his lawn mower had broken down halfway through the summer.

He craned his neck to see if the back wall of the garage had fallen into the neighbors’ yard; he didn’t dare climb into that half-collapsed cave for a closer look. He could easily imagine them suing if so much as a splinter had dropped onto their property. To his relief, he saw that the back wall remained standing. He had at least been that lucky.

It was disorienting seeing the structure fallen like this. He had played in that garage as a boy. Parked his bike in there as a teenager. He used to set up targets in there, against the back wall, to shoot with his BB gun.

Now, it lay crushed. Was the rest of the house so weak? Would the whole of it cave in upon itself like this next winter? Next week?

There was nothing he could do tonight. Not that there was anything he could do tomorrow. Already accepting this latest development, Ned began to turn back toward the house. As he did so, his eyes swept the side of his grandfather’s workshop again. Yes, tomorrow he would have to put plastic over that...

...window...

There was someone in the window.

The figure was gone in a blink. When he swept the weak flashlight beam there, he saw nothing but a gaping hole, black as a bottomless pit, like a portal opening to the vastness of space.

But he had glimpsed something. A figure, apparently nude. All white against the dark, and softly luminous. Skeletal. With great black skull socket eyes...

A ghost.

His grandfather’s ghost, perhaps. Jolted out of the ether at the destruction of the garage, peering out mournfully from his old workshed at the damage...

Ned wanted to hurry back into the house. Pretend that he hadn’t seen that apparition, that his peripheral vision had tricked him. But his curiosity was strong, and so was his anger. Because maybe it hadn’t been a ghost, but some stranger, some teenager who had entered the unlocked shed. Some years back he had surprised two contractors, working on a house in the neighborhood, who were suspiciously peering through the shed’s window. It might be something like that. Someone who had been attracted by the dramatic crash, and been tempted to snoop.

Ned had guns in the house. But if he went in to get one the stranger might flee. It had no doubt seen him notice it, and ducked out of sight.

There was no time. Ned moved closer to the workshop’s door, having to wade into deep snow where he hadn’t bothered to shovel.

With one hand he pointed the light, with the other shoved the old door open.

He expected his grandfather to be standing there before him, at that moment. Tall, lean, smiling, his gray hair stirring lazily as if he stood at the bottom of the ocean...

Instead, he saw only various depths and shades of gloom. Leaning boards. Stacked, broken furniture. The long workbench that ran along the wall where the window had been wrenched away.

A little snow here and there where it had sifted through the holes in the roof.

No grandfather. No ghost. No teenager or contractor. Ned began to withdraw from the threshold. And heard a tiny creak.

A cat? Merely a board he had displaced under his weight? He aimed the flashlight down toward the floor.

And then he saw the face peering out at him from the corner of the room, back in the dark, sheltered in the collection of scrap wood like an animal in its den. It glowed more dimly even than the flashlight. A pallid white glow, just enough to make the figure look fuzzy, slightly out of focus.

Those gaping skull sockets he had glimpsed before were not hollows, but huge convex eyes, blank as those of a shark. There was little more to its face than that black unreadable stare; the nose and mouth were unfinished, just afterthoughts. Its head was hairless. The one hand he saw, its fingers curled over the edge of an old baby carriage, was impossibly long, as if it possessed more joints than a human hand.

“Jesus!” Ned gasped.

Either his exclamation or the light rousted the entity from its hiding place. Its burst out into the open, leaped onto the workbench, nimble for such a tall scarecrow of a being. It scarcely made a noise, didn’t disturb a single rusting tool or jar of screws on the bench. Hunched, it seemed to be racing along the workbench toward him, and in terror, Ned whirled and plunged out into the night.

His legs sank into the snow and after only two steps he had fallen, twisting around to crash onto his back, jerking his right ankle painfully in the process. The wind yanked out of him, curling in the air above his head, he could only gaze in horror as the skeletal apparition scampered out of the gaping window. He realized then that the window had been its destination, and not his throat. He continued to stare as the being raced across the slanted roof, toward the back wall, and dropped away, presumably into the neighbors’ yard. For one crazy moment, Ned felt dread that the creature might do some damage to their yard that he would be blamed for.

It was gone, and at last he struggled to his feet. The flashlight was gone, dropped and no doubt buried in the snow. He didn’t linger to look for it, instead made his way back to the house as quickly as the snow and his twisted ankle would permit.

Back inside his second floor apartment, he locked and chained the door, put on most of the lights, and then went to load his .357 Magnum, a chrome-bright nickel-plated revolver with a four-inch barrel. He kept his guns in the spare bedroom, which he and Brenda had mostly used for storage, and he had left the lights off in here. As he pushed the revolver’s loaded cylinder back into its frame, he peeked around a window shade into the yard below.

The snow all around seemed to glow slightly luminous in the night. Alien landscape...

Perhaps, he considered, that thing had been the straw to break the camel’s back, creeping across the garage roof, causing it to fall. Perhaps, even, its craft had silently, stealthily alighted upon the roof—collapsing it—and had then whisked itself away in alarm, leaving one of its small crew stranded behind...

As Ned peered out into the murk, he saw a flitting pale form duck from behind one dark tree in his yard to another. The trees were slender, but then the being was slenderer still. He watched the second tree for a long time, his gun clenched in his fist so tightly that the checkered walnut grips ended up leaving an imprint in his palm, but the figure didn’t emerge, and at last Ned gave up, withdrew from his watch.

He didn’t sleep much that night, however. He just rocked in his chair, wrapped in his blanket, watching TV. But in place of the bottle in his hand, he kept the Magnum. He must stay alert. He couldn’t afford to muffle his senses, let down his guard. They might yet try to take him away. They had no doubt come to do just that...

* * *

The next morning, bleary-eyed, he ventured outside again. He even dared approach the workshop so as to close the door he had left open in his flight. In his quick glance inside the shadowy shed, he saw no crouching figures gazing out at him. He then covered the window hole with a large trash bag, pinning it in place with numerous thumb tacks.

He detected no prints of the creature in the snow across the slanted roof, but it had snowed a little during the night, his car lightly veiled in the driveway, and the creature wouldn’t have left deep prints anyway. It couldn’t weigh more than a bare skeleton, and besides its cadaverous frame, it had had that blurry, insubstantial look, as if its cells were made of ectoplasm, as if the thing were visiting here from another dimension, but only half here, maybe the rest of its essence back on its own plane, whatever and wherever that might be.

Ned ventured out for milk, bread and a few videos, but made sure he was back well before dark, and he checked every room of his apartment carefully for any invaders who might have entered during his absence. Satisfied that he was alone, he locked himself in. By the time night fell, he had loaded two other pistols and a rifle. He hid one pistol in his bedside chest, one in the top drawer of the microwave cart in the kitchen, and the .22 rifle with its thirty-shot banana clip he pushed under the couch. This way, no matter what part of the house he might be trapped in by an intruder, a weapon would be close at hand.

The Magnum he kept with him.

* * *

By nightfall, he was nestled in the wicker rocker, watching one of the videos...peripherally aware of the window covered by curtains and drawn shade just by his elbow, but not peeking out of it for fear of what he might see lurking down in his yard.

In the adult movie, two actresses who were supposed to be sisters were acting out an incest scenario. Ned’s rocking rhythm was almost an unconscious complement to their mounting passions, the squeaking of the wicker a sound effect for the bed they writhed upon.

Ned imagined what it would be like if those young twins from work were to entwine their slender naked bodies for his viewing pleasure. They were much prettier than these actresses. He projected them over the women on the screen, until it was truly as if it were those actual sisters he was ogling. He imagined what it would be like to tie those sisters together into artificial Siamese twins, bind them into one multi-limbed exotic creature, some sensual mutation. A pet to keep. A pet to play with. And beat when he was angry...

* * *

He lifted his head to the realization that, deprived of sleep, he had dozed off in the wicker chair. The tape had rewound itself and a nature show was on, the volume low. A female praying mantis was twisting around and munching on the head of her copulating lover, starting with one large grape-like eye.

A white blur at the edge of his vision attracted his attention, and his eyes flicked to the kitchen doorway even as a pale figure darted back out of his view.

Ned’s hands scampered in his lap, clawing for the gun that had slipped from his grasp during his doze. The remote clattered to the floor. He found the pistol, lurched to his feet, nearly became tangled in the blanket as he started toward the kitchen. Already his finger was pressing hard against the trigger, on the verge of shifting it...

He saw no one in the kitchen. Grasping the handgun in both fists like a trained policeman would, he stepped around the stove. Nothing crouching there. In the bathroom, nothing. He used the pistol’s barrel to thrust the shower curtain aside, tearing it a little more as he did so.

Just his own shadow on the mildewed tiles.

It had escaped, and now Ned knew that locked doors could not keep the being—or beings—out. Yes, they had to be made of something less, or more, than flesh. They might be able to step out of their dimension at any point they chose. So how could he defend himself from them? How could he ever have peace, now that they had decided to haunt him?

He paced the house. Looked in every room, again and again. He made coffee, and as he paced with the gun in one hand and a mug in the other, he took note of the cracks in the plaster of the kitchen ceiling. Had he simply neglected to notice, or were they more pronounced than they ever had been? He didn’t remember them ever being so extensive before...

Could the alien—the aliens—have something to do with this? Were they lurking even now in the attic above him? For months now he had heard stirrings up there, creaking boards, faint scampering he had taken to be squirrels that had gotten into the eaves, storing nuts or whatnot for the winter. The beings’ weight up there where no one ever ventured might have stressed the plaster of the ceiling...

Maybe they even did these things on purpose. That might well explain the extent of the seeming decay around him, now that he knew they could venture right into his house with him. Might they have done something to his kitchen faucet to make its flow a trickle? Might they have tampered with his car’s starter one night?

Why would they do that, the bastards? He set down his mug, glared again at the cracked ceiling. Why? The power to cross dimensions, and just so they could act as poltergeists, as gremlins, wreaking petty havoc? Why?

Ned smiled bitterly, narrowed his eyes, contemplating possible motivations. It might be an experiment. Perhaps they had made him a lab rat in his own home, to be probed and taunted, his agitation observed. Maybe they wanted to test the reaction humans might have to their kind.

But no, they were too mischievous for that. Ned considered the possibility that it might in fact be children, or at least the alien equivalent of teenage delinquents, skipping into the human realm to tease him, have some wanton fun.

But the fun seemed too wanton, even for cruel children. Ned considered something else, remembering the many stories of abductions by these entities, the way they bound and probed, practically tortured their helpless victims.

Perhaps it was as simple as their being a race of sado-masochists. Maybe it excited them to make their victims helpless, and afraid, in the way that a rapist feels empowered, or a bondage freak when he ties up and dominates another, or a stronger prison inmate when he sodomizes a weaker. In the prison of existence, maybe that was the relationship humans fulfilled for these other, supposedly superior beings. They were warped, and mean-spirited, and needed to feel empowered, and even when they were not literally capturing their prey they still took delight in playing games with them, making them afraid, terrified...

But Ned’s anger was fast beginning to drown out his fear. They were taunting the wrong man. They would find that this prisoner had a shiv hidden in his palm.

“Come on,” he whispered to the cracked ceiling, as if they might hear him through the cracks, have their huge black eyes pressed to them. “Come on,” he taunted them back.

* * *

Ned lay on the living room floor, belly down, ear flat to the dusty boards. Did he hear a faint movement down there? Maybe the beings hadn’t removed or killed the elderly couple after all. At last, he got up and called their number on the phone. The old woman answered, and he hung up. It probably was her voice, but not necessarily.

Could they take on human guise? He had considered that. If so, how many of the people he had known in his life might be one of them? Or if they could not literally become human, might they at least enter into humans somehow, to possess them, control them like a skeleton hand inside a clown puppet?

He had even wondered if they might be what remained of humans...dead humans. Might that being in the workshop actually have been his grandfather? All that was left of his grandfather, his soul, visiting from whatever plane the soul really did depart to? No...he doubted that. It would not explain the stories of abductions, experiments, the ships that delivered them here from whatever world or plane they dwelt on. But Ned did believe that the being or beings he had seen might very well explain the stories of visitations by angels over the centuries. Luminous entities, otherworldly, ethereal.

And from his own experiences, he believed that they might just as easily account for stories of demons, as well.

“Come to the zoo,” he muttered, making a fresh pot of coffee, glancing up at the ceiling. He drank no beer at all now, just lots of coffee, coffee to keep him alert. He wasn’t getting much sleep, mostly just naps in his chair while it was light out. “Is that it? Come see us in the zoo? Stare at us? Laugh at us in our cages?”

After he had stirred in his sugar and milk he stood in the center of the room, head tilted up. “You think we’re funny? You think I’m funny, is that it?”

A tiny creak of sound answered him. And he saw one of the spider-webbed cracks in the ceiling widen, ever so slightly. He heard the sifting fall of plaster dust. Both sight and sound were so subtle, it was like watching the minute hand of a clock move. But the minute hands of clocks did indeed move, and cracks in plaster widened, and he had seen it happen.

Without another word, Ned set down his mug, picked up the .357 from the counter and went out into his back hall, started up the stairway to the attic. His jaw jutted from the clenching of his teeth, the tightness of his smile.

It was late afternoon, gilded sunlight lying in elongated patches across the dirty attic floorboards. Thank God evening hadn’t yet fallen. He needed a new flashlight. If it had been evening, he wouldn’t even be up here. Maybe he’d make them sorry they hadn’t kept quiet until the sun went down.

An object momentarily distracted him. On a ratty old arm chair rested a sheet of cardboard, and on that was all that remained of a wreath his aunt had given him and his wife on their first anniversary. Some kind of dried arrangement. Now all that was left of it were bits and pieces, not even describing a circle. Bugs, maybe, or the sun blazing on it through unshaded windows. Or perhaps, bored and mischievous, his house-guests had sat up here plucking at it. Brenda had left behind a lot of forgotten things in boxes up here, and the idea of those creatures poking through them only exasperated his mounting fury...

He moved toward a half-closed door that marked the place where the roof narrowed. The room beyond had sharply slanted walls, and just one window at its end, looking out on the driveway. It would be dark in there. The chimney came skewering through that space, and there were stacks of boards and boxes to hunker behind. It was the perfect place in which to hide.

With his toe, Ned pushed the door open all the way.

But they weren’t even hiding. Had they become so bold that they now dared to stand and confront him? Were they no longer afraid to be seen? No longer afraid of him?

Their brazenness caught him off guard. Some of his fury was washed back by an icy wave of fear.

There were two of them standing side by side at the end of the hall-like space, framed in the window, silhouetted in a way that lessened their phosphorescent quality, made them appear more corporeal. They were indistinguishable from one another, identical.

Tall, bony as prisoners of war. Dead prisoners of war. So unnaturally, uncannily elongated, as if they were distorted in carnival mirrors. Yet there was something vaguely feminine in their form; maybe a slight flare in the hips, the adolescent suggestion of breasts.

Silhouetted as they were, it was difficult to make out their great insect-like eyes. Mantis eyes. But somehow, seeing the eyes in suggestion made them more eerie to him than if they had been clearly lit.

“What do you want with me?” Ned hissed at them. He was sorry he spoke. He meant his voice to sound demanding. Instead, he heard its tremor. But he couldn’t help but blurt, “Why can’t you just leave me alone?”

And with that, he lifted his arm to point the .357.

They moved faster than humans should, with bird-quick jerking swiftness. First one and then the other of the identical beings whirled and dropped out the window, which Ned hadn’t noticed was open before. Like jumping spiders, they were so fast. Gone, before he could level the red front sight on them.

Ned surged forward down the murky hall, came to the open window. Directly below the window was the slanting, half-collapsed garage roof.

He saw no prints in the deep snow of the roof, as he should. Maybe they hadn’t actually jumped onto it, but scrabbled down the side of the house and leapt to the ground itself. It didn’t matter...Ned caught a glimpse of one of them as it ducked inside the cave of the garage. He was sure the both of them now huddled in its furthest shadows, like vampires waiting for night to fall.

“You just stay there,” he whispered. “You just make yourself right at home.”

* * *

There wasn’t much more that Ned could do that evening, but he got up early the next morning as if to go to work. Nonchalantly, he ignored the garage as he walked past it and got in his car.

In town, he bought two lengths of strong nylon cord.

In the parking lot of the store he examined his car, figuring out how he might attach one end of the linked cords. He had no trailer hitch. The frame beneath, somewhere? It was easiest, he decided, to open both rear windows and pass one end of the cord right through the back, in one side and out the other. Satisfied with at least this end of the problem, he drove home to confront the second half of the equation. As he steered the car, his heart raced like a rat in a wheel, as if its mad workings were what powered the vehicle as it sped back to his haunted house.

He backed the car into the driveway, got out, and began to uncoil his rope, sheltered on the far side of the car so his actions couldn’t yet be seen. But he couldn’t help throwing a smile at the dark maw of the garage. Did the vampires slumber, or were they watching avidly with their lidless eyes?

He fastened one end of the joined cords through the back of his car, as he had planned. “You should have messed with the car again,” he muttered. “You should have done something else to it, huh?”

From under his coat he withdrew the Magnum. Then, taking his rope with him like a spelunker venturing into a labyrinth deep in the earth, Ned crouched down and gingerly entered the garage.

Since last evening he had tried to remember what kind of supports the cross beams had, what might be holding up this end of the roof...if it were even something a car might dislodge. The answer was better than he had hoped. It filled him both with gratitude, and horror that he had dared to enter this potential rat trap.

All that really continued to support the roof on the right was a gallows-like structure, a frail little brace of wood. All he had to do was fasten the cord to the lower part of that brace, yank it away, and the top portion would surely give way. The roof must be precarious even now.

But were they in here, to be trapped?

The gallows brace was half-way into the garage. Keeping his eyes on the shadows at the back of the cave, he straightened up as best he could and began tying the cord around the forty-five degree support arm. In order to do this, he had to reluctantly tuck the pistol in his waistband. His breathing grew rapid, and his breath became an obscuring ectoplasm before his eyes. Suddenly very frightened not to be able to see into the back of the garage, he held his breath while he finished tying off the cord. He knotted it again and again, so that the car’s pull would not simply unravel it.

At last he finished, and squatted back down so he could retreat. He thought he really should venture in just a little deeper, to verify that they were indeed back there before he fully toppled the structure. But no...that was what they wanted. This was their den, now. They were there; he knew it.

As he turned to go back, he saw one of the aliens’ faces peering out at him from the garage’s rubble, not two feet from his face. Huge black eyes, compressed slash of a mouth, a blank face with no soul behind it to give it life.

He cried out, wrenched free his handgun and continued the motion by smashing it like a hammer across that staring visage in a vicious backhand blow.

Glass shattered, and he felt his flesh tear in several places. The gun dropped from his hand and fell through the old leaning window pane he had just struck.

He clutched his bleeding hand to his chest. Just a reflection. But it couldn’t have been his...he hadn’t mistaken what he’d seen. It had to have been one of the aliens, lurking behind him, peering over his shoulder.

He twisted sharply around. Neither of them was there. But he knew they were close at hand. Without waiting for them to pour in upon him, he left the gun behind and scurried out of the garage into the glaring safety of outside air.

Still gripping his gushing hand, Ned slipped into his car. Started it. Yes, they should have screwed with this starter too, shouldn’t they?

Ned clamped his fists on the wheel and stamped his foot on the gas pedal. His car lurched forward...began to race up the slope of the driveway, spitting a fusillade of pebbles behind it...

And then it was brought up short with a jolt, as if it had struck a phone pole. Ned hadn’t fastened his seat belt, and nearly pitched into the windshield.

Behind him came the delayed second half of the crash he had heard inside his house that night.

“Yes!” Ned exclaimed, savoring the monstrous shriek of tormented wood. It might have been the banshee wail of his grandfather’s ghost, anguished at seeing his grandson level the remnants of the structure.

Did he actually hear some unearthly shrieking mixed in with the falling-tree sound of the crash?

Gripping his slashed hand once more, Ned stepped out of the car to take in the results. He saw that the nylon cord had snapped, but only after its work had been done.

The roof was not totally flat. There had been an old washer and stove in there, other items and piles of debris to prevent the roof from uniform flatness, but it was flat enough to have crushed anything remotely human inside it. Ned would have worried about a stray cat being caught in that avalanche.

The back wall alone was standing, though leaning and with boards torn free. Through a gaping section, Ned could see the neighbors who had left that basket of weeds on his porch as a gift, peeking through to see what the noise had been. Two pairs of glittering, stealthy eyes. If he had still had his gun in his hand, Ned would have fired through the boards at those eyes. In fact, he reached to his waistband before he remembered he had lost the Magnum in the cave-in.

“Go away!” he shouted at the two of them instead. “Why don’t you just leave me alone?”

* * *

For the next few nights, he didn’t see the aliens again.

But one night, when he stood at the toilet, his mind filled with the golden haze of beer, his peripheral vision picked up a dim glow reflected in the mirror over the sink.

He jerked back so abruptly that he spattered the floor, backed out of the bathroom and clawed at the light switch on the wall outside the door.

The overhead light came on. He stole back into the room, stole up to the sink, steeled himself for a dead-on look in the mirror.

Just his reflection. But he regarded it with a frown. He had lost weight, his cheeks bony, his thin lips a tight line. His eyes glared from dark hollows. He was tall and slender to begin with, and now looked all the more cadaverous.

He had been sleeping in his bed again. Drinking again. He had let his guard down...

Could they have returned? Could one of them, at least, have survived? And invaded him in a place where it couldn’t be evicted?

He backed out of the bathroom a second time, not lowering his gaze from his own gaze.

That was what they thought, that they couldn’t be evicted...

He would watch for them. He would check, every day.

He still had the guns hidden throughout his house. He must not let his guard down again. He must remain vigilant.

He had killed two of them. He would kill each one that came for him. He would shoot them. Each and every one...until, besieged, he either shot them all or was overrun, trying.

And if he saw in the mirror what he had seen reflected in that old window in the garage...if it came to that...then he would shoot himself, as well.

And so he watched. And he waited.

T-SHIRTS OF THE DAMNED

“T-Shirt Babylon, purveyors of the extremely unpleasant...can I help you?” Hays said when he answered the phone. He came up with a new motto every day, much to his own amusement. Yesterday it had been, “T-Shirt Babylon, where the T stands for torture.” Not one of his best ones, but the phone had rung before he had a wittier one prepared.

It was his fiance, Dawn. She wanted to know how late he’d be staying at the shop; his parents were coming to dinner tonight to celebrate their engagement, and he was already forty-five minutes later than he’d said he’d be.

Hays stalked his office with the phone tucked under his jaw, its extra-long cord trailing. He always paced while on the phone, which was a lot, while Dawn handled more of the actual production details. Not that she chose the subject matter of the T-shirts...oh no, that was the most fun to be had, and this was his company. T-Shirt Babylon and Dicky Hays were one and the same thing.

“I’m still waiting for that pinhead LeClair to call me, babe. He said he’d call at four. He better not have forgotten me...that human slime.”

Again Dawn warned Hays of what another dealer had told them about LeClair...that he would buy a fairly small number of shirts, then tell Hays he hadn’t sold them all yet rather than ordering more, when in reality he had had his people copy Hays’ shirts and was selling his own bootleg versions instead.

“Hey...bear in mind too, babe, that Jimmy wants all our business and doesn’t want us sharing with LeClair...right? Of course he’s not gonna exactly tell us LeClair’s the second coming of Christ, is he?”

Hollywood; you were wounder or wounded. But Dicky Hays knew the drill. The street below was filled with the walking wounded, the living dead of deadly living, the human flotsam of many a sunk ship of dreams. But Dicky Hays was nice and dry up here. Sink or swim in this town.

While Hays listened to Dawn persist in her admonitions to be cautious, his eyes idly flowed over the posters filling every available inch of his little office’s walls. Movie posters, old and tattered or glossy new, advertising lurid horror films foreign and domestic. He smirked now at a newly acquired one for an old Mexican horror/wrestling masterpiece. Movies about busty young women in prison. A poster for Eraserhead. That this film was considered by many to be a work of art was of no interest to Hays; it was weird and gross and that was all that concerned him. Hays never tired of his colorful surroundings. How could he? That would be like tiring of himself.

Dawn told him he shouldn’t wait around much longer. Hays replied, “I’ve already called his number three times and no one’s there. Look, if the turd doesn’t call me in an hour I’ll come home no matter what—okay? So what are you gonna make, anyway?”

Dawn laughed. She was going to call in an order of Chinese food. Nothing but the best for his parents, she told him.

Hays was proud. His parents approved of Dawn...they got along very well. He had almost stopped hoping for them to like one of his girlfriends. He didn’t suppose they’d approve of Linda, who he’d been sleeping with lately, but he didn’t suppose Dawn would be too crazy about her either. She was supposed to call soon, too, but he couldn’t tell that to Dawn. He glanced to his watch.

Linda was definitely juicier than Dawn, but he actually loved Dawn. He was probably more shocked when he realized this than his parents were. His friends had teased him. Dicky Hays...in love? Dicky Hays going to get married? He had almost felt like apologizing for forgetting who he was.

And once in a while he found himself washed in a chilly wave of doubt, almost like pre-panic. But he loved her. How often did that happen? And besides, getting his parents to finally approve of him was almost enough incentive in itself.

But he wasn’t married yet and Linda was supposed to call soon...or should have called already, that dumb bitch...so Hays again reassured Dawn that he wouldn’t be much longer. “Love you too, Boobs,” he told her goodbye. His aptly-chosen pet name for her. Hey—it wasn’t just a girl’s personality that got Dicky Hays to the altar.

Hays hung up the phone, his eyes playing across stacks of the new mail order catalogs just in that morning from the printer. The front displayed the “new fashions for spring”...a T-shirt featuring James Dean’s slick little sports car squashed like a pumpkin...a Vietnamese officer shooting a prisoner in the head point-blank...a kitten with the top of its head opened up and wires threaded into the raw wound, from a flier protesting animal experimentation. All these with appropriately hilarious captions, thought up, of course, by Dicky Hays.

His parents didn’t approve. A lot of people didn’t approve. But a lot of people were buying his shirts. And as long as the demand was there, he would be there.

Dawn needn’t worry about his dealings with LeClair. He had dodged and ducked and eluded half a dozen lawsuits already, mostly for using photos without permission. Well, he realized that as he grew he shouldn’t be taking risks like that. Luckily he had recently bought the rights to reproduce anything he wanted from a book on circus freaks and another on medical curiosities, and there was a gold mine of material between those two volumes. It wasn’t easy being an entrepreneur, but these days you had to be one to get ahead, and he had the right mind for it.

Hays was lighting a cigarette when the phone rang. “About time,” he said, meaning it for either LeClair or Linda...those two inconsiderate morons.

“T Shirt Babylon...where the T stands for tawdry trash.” Okay, so that made two mottoes in one day.

“You’re right.”

“Hello...who is this?”

“I’m not an admirer, Mr. Hays.”

The connection sounded distant, like one from overseas. You could always swear you were hearing the ocean the wires ran under. A man. It didn’t help that he wasn’t speaking loudly, either. Hays squinted, as if that might help him hear better. “Hello. Is it my understanding that I’m speaking to a non-fan who intends to shame me into seeing the error of my ways?” It wouldn’t be the first such call.

“After having the misfortune of seeing your last catalog, I’m convinced you have no shame, Mr. Hays.”

“Hey, you should see my newest catalog just in, if you liked that one...I’ve got a juicy shirt with a dead dog smooshed by a car, in vivid red and black, and...”

“Didn’t you ever have a dog, Mr. Hays?”

“Yeah, as a kid I had several. Did you ever have a lobotomy? Kinda sounds like it, from your voice.”

“Didn’t you feel badly when they died?”

“No...I celebrated, what do you think? Hey, pal, it isn’t that you don’t have a brain...it’s that people like you don’t have a sense of humor.”

“Where is the humor in T-shirts which feature photographs of movie stars as they appear in death...or victims of war and murder...deformed circus performers and deformed children...with captions that make light of death and pain, animal and child abuse...”

“Ah, just a minute, reverend.” Hays was actually smiling as he reached out to flick ash into his waste basket. He loved to take these people on, even if they never did concede to his points, such as the concept of freedom of speech. They called to aggravate him, but Dicky Hays was the master of aggravation. “I’ll bet your parents have taken in a circus sideshow or two in their time, pal. Maybe you yourself...and hey, I didn’t run over that dog. I didn’t start any wars or murder anybody. I’ve never given somebody an extra couple of legs. You wanna complain to somebody about the horrors in the world? Go talk to the president and God, pal...but I suppose the president and God can do no wrong in your book, huh? And of course a guy like you wouldn’t dream of looking at a car accident if you drove by one, right?”

“To be curious about pain and misfortune is natural. To seek to comprehend it and deal with it is natural. To celebrate it and trivialize it is disturbed.”

“Hey, pal, who is really the disturbed one here? I think up-tight frightened little prudes like you are the ones obsessed with death and sin and all that. Have a laugh, guy, live a little. I help people face pain and suffering by getting them to laugh at it.”

“I hadn’t realized your noble intentions, Mr. Hays,” said the distant, softly droning voice. “But I doubt that dog’s owners would have a good laugh to see it on your shirt. Nor would the grieving parents of a deformed dead infant be very amused at your therapeutic T-shirts.”

“Hey, you can’t please everybody, pal. You live your life and let me live mine. I don’t go telling other people how to live.”

“You contribute to the moral climate. You distribute a product to impressionable young people. You have a responsibility...”

“To entertain people. I do sell these things, ya know. And speaking of entertainers, Elvis and John Lennon wanted to be famous and immortal, right? Well, they got it.”

“What about respect for the dead?”

Dicky couldn’t hear what was said immediately following that, as there was a buzzing increase in static which seemed to be full of dozens of incoherent voices, maybe other callers on the same line bleeding through. Sounded like a tape over-dubbed with layers of voices, making for one rasping howl, but through it Dicky thought he heard the caller add, “John doesn’t like it.”

“I think it’s time to change the channel, Mr. Swaggart. Do you have anything to say to conclude your sermon?”

A long pause. Just the diminished but still audible fizz and crackle of the bad connection...those other voices talking in the far distance.

The voice said, “How would you feel if it were you?”

Dicky narrowed his eyes warily. “How’s that, partner?”

“Aren’t you concerned about the consequences of your actions?”

The blood began rising hot into Hays’ face. “Is that a threat of some kind, my friend? Because if it is I’d like you to know that I have a beautiful fifteen-shot Beretta, and if you wanna come around and play games you can be the first person on one of my shirts that I did actually kill myself...understand?”

“I have to go now, Mr. Hays,” the voice on the other end droned.

“Yeah, pal, I think you’d better.” And Hays slammed the phone into its cradle. Goddamn creeps. Hays liked to engage them but he didn’t like threats, blatant or subtle. Not that he hadn’t had those before.

Probably this clown had a kid with a club foot, or his father had died in World War II, or his dog had got hit by a car. Hey, Dicky Hays wasn’t the master of Fate...he just made some T-shirts.

* * *

Linda never called, and her phone went unanswered. To hell with that bimbo. He did finally hear from LeClair, however. Strangely, he flinched when the phone rang, was hesitant to pick it up and even relieved to hear LeClair’s oozing voice. Definitely time to call it quits for the evening. They settled their business quickly and Hays was finally clear to go home.

The car was in the shop, that brand new hunk of junk. No problem; his apartment was a fifteen-minute walk. A real catch, so close to the teeming action, the gaudy electric life of Hollywood Boulevard. His light jacket slung over his shoulder, Hays started down there now. He knew some of the hookers (not intimately; he couldn’t risk that with Dawn working for him, so close) and exchanged greetings with them. The stars were sticky and ugly with grime under his feet. It made him smirk to think how sentimental morons sniffled over these long-dead people, still had crushes on them. Rotten hideous corpses. Why shouldn’t he show them that? They could use a good slap in the face. Welcome to the real world, pal.

Look at the life here. Rich and colorful and diverse as the life of a neon coral reef. Bikers and teenagers, hustlers and dealers...all richly alive. And on their own terms. But no doubt a repressed little clown like that one on the phone would be only too happy to come down here and tell everybody how they should live and behave.

Up ahead as he lit a fresh cigarette, Hays spotted a knot of teenagers, clustered in the light from a shop like tropical fish in a glowing aquarium, and there looked to be some juicy teen girls amongst them. The yummiest. Linda was just out of her teens. If he had more time he might start up a conversation with some girls like those...mention that acquiring cocaine was no problem for Dicky Hays. But he was in a hurry and they had a couple of tough-looking punk boys with them anyway...

Hays might have just kept on walking past them, but he stole a sideways glance at one girl’s chest, and in so doing got a look at the front of the T-shirt she was wearing.

“Hey,” he said, involuntarily reaching out to take her elbow, turning her toward him a little to see it better.

“Hey,” she said also, slapping his hand away.

“You got a problem you wanna discuss, mister?” sneered one of the thug boyfriends.

“I just wanted to see the T-shirt you’re wearing,” Hays said, staring at it.

“You just want to look at my breasts, I think.” The girl dragged out the word teasingly.

The shirt showed a dead woman, hanging by the throat. Young, pretty—once. Busty. She looked so much like his juicy friend Linda it had startled him.

“Where did you get a shirt like that?”

“From a man. He was selling them in the street today. Don’t ya love it?”

Pretty close competition, both in subject matter and locale. Hays didn’t like it. “What else did he have?”

“All kinds of great stuff.”

“Move along, will ya, mister?” said the sneering punk. “Can’t you see we’re busy over here?”

“What did he look like?” Hays asked.

“He was creepy—like you,” laughed the girl.

Without cocaine and in the presence of the boys, Hays couldn’t say anything to change the girl’s opinion of him, so he just resumed his walking...but with a last, furrow-browed glance over his shoulder at her.

He felt unsettled. Not just because of the competition. That girl on the shirt looked so much like Linda...length and style of hair and all...

The second shirt was worn by a boy with a purple mohawk...such a cliché of a punk teenager that he might have been auditioning for a part in a TV show.

Hays saw the shirt first from a distance, couldn’t make out details, but kept his eyes on it until he was close enough to make it out...and when he did he said, “Jesus!” and took the boy by the arm.

This time he was punched in the mouth for his uninvited arm-touching.

The boy’s friends laughed and pulled the mohawk punk away; they started off down the street. Passing people glanced down at Hays in half-sneering disgust for lying on the star of some dead actress with blood on his chin.

“Hey, kid,” Hays snarled, dragging himself to his feet, “I just want to look at your Goddamn T-shirt!”

“Look at this,” said one boy, pretending to open his fly. The mohawk boy turned to laugh, and Hays saw the shirt again for a moment...

Had it just been a picture of a dead man, propped shot against a wall, who resembled his father, he might accept that. Or a dead woman, also riddled and awash in black ink blood, he could dismiss that, maybe...even if she did resemble his mother. But not both—and in the same picture.

“Kid! Hey—kid!” Hays roared after them. They didn’t look back again; one just raised his middle finger. Hays took a step or two forward and nearly fell...staggered. In falling he had smacked the back of his head on the pavement and you’d better believe that hurt worse than the punch.

Hays wanted to scream a swear after them but was in no condition to fight if they should come back. And in any case, within moments he found himself a new focus to command his attention.

Someone had taken his arm to help support him.

It couldn’t be his parents. Someone else’s parents...

He began to turn groggily to see who had come to his aid.

Couldn’t be Linda. Somebody else he didn’t know...

As he turned he saw the shirt first, because the man was so tall that it was nearly at Hays’ eye level.

It couldn’t be Dawn on the shirt, her arms and legs hacked off, reducing her to a man-made, bogus circus freak—staring glassily out from the shirt so vividly that the image seemed more than a photograph: he had been talking with her on the phone only an hour ago, and that wasn’t enough time...wasn’t enough time for someone...some insane, psychotic monster...to do this...

...someone else’s fiance...not his...

Hays stared at the man’s T-shirt in numb, vibrating awe and terror, then looked up as the man gently holding his arm said in a soft droning voice, “Hello, Mr. Hays...”

The man was a stranger to Dicky, and to California, obviously. He was just much too pale.

Hays’ mouth began to work soundlessly, the pain in his head rushing in as a flood of drowning icy water...

“Fashions for spring, Mr. Hays. Would you care to laugh?”

Hays did, in fact, start to laugh a moment later. And laugh. And laugh...

MANDRILL

There were 3,000 mandrills surviving in the wilds of Central and West Africa, 300 in captivity, 3 in a cage at PlayTime Amusement World in New Hampshire and 47 dead mandrills living inside the body of Nathan A. Tower.

Nat, to family and friends—both rather depleted these days. Nat was one of the caretakers of the animals at PlayTime. His pale blue uniform was a heavy burden on this scorching summer day, and to the woman who observed him as he placed a bowl of fruit inside the mandrills’ cage, he looked like a sweaty, tired war-time surgeon. She drew closer to the enclosure, marveling at his courage.

The thought of being inside the cage with her back to two of the three bizarre creatures gave her a shiver. The mandrill was a fantastical assault on the eyes: God, or Mother Nature, depending on your bent, had been on peyote that day. The one male was particularly showy. The size of a large dog, his fur olive-brown above and silvery below, his massive head made pointed by a tuft of fur...and that face. Yellow beard, black-masked yellow eyes, a long scarlet snout bordered on either side by ribbed patches of bright blue. He looked to the woman like a baboon gone punk. Nature had provided the garish war paint that primitive men had had to dab on by hand...and women buy at the cosmetics counter.

The male went from pacing on all fours to sitting back on his haunches, and Nat handed him a hard-boiled egg, minus the shell. The monkey accepted the gift and picked it apart, popped the pieces into its mouth. The woman caught sight of big yellow tusks in there.

“Why does a herbivore need such big fangs?” she asked Nat.

Clapping his hands clean, he turned to her and smiled. He had already noticed her peripherally. “They aren’t herbivores; they’re omnivores, like us.” Not many people who came through here used the word herbivore. Some people who came through here seemed little more proficient at speech than Nat’s charges. “They can kill a large animal if they have to. Though they prefer bugs and reptiles.”

“Wow, they’re more like me than I thought. You aren’t afraid in there?”

“They know me. They’re basically shy animals.”

“Baboons, are they?”

“No...related. A species of Old World Monkey, technically. Mandrillus sphinx. I like that—they are kind of sphinx-like. Mythical-looking.”

The woman chuckled. “That’s for sure. Psychedelic, I think the word is.”

“I remember one rather unfair scientific appraisal of them. ‘Probably without exception the most disgustingly hideous living beings’.”

“Oh, yeah...that’s terrible. Grotesque, maybe, but not disgusting. Or hideous. Had to be one of those uptight Victorian naturalists, huh?”

Nat had turned his head to watch the hundred-pound male pluck some fruit from his bowl. “I think they’re beautiful.”

“Why the bright faces?”

Nat gave her his attention once more, smiling mischievously. “It’s a mimicry of his genital region.”

“Say what?”

“It serves as a threat. His...um...”

“Go on.”

“His penis is bright red and his scrotal patches are bright blue. Just like his face.”

“So calling a mandrill dick-face is no big insult, just telling it like it is, huh?”

“Exactly. Other monkeys mimic their genital regions, though usually with their chests. And what about us?”

“Us?”

“A human woman’s breasts and buttocks resemble each-other quite closely. More or less, of course, depending on the woman. But it’s been suggested that there’s significance.”

“Oh, come on. Breasts and asses are purely functional.”

“Not so much asses. We had asses before we had chairs. Asses didn’t adapt to us, we adapted to them.”

“What’s your name?”

“Nat. Nat Tower. Gonna report me to my boss for suggestive lecturing?”

“No. I’m Molly. Molly Hanson.”

“Big-time yuppie name, Molly. Sorry.”

“Former yuppie. I was laid off this week.”

“Ouch. Sorry again. I know how you feel. You may have heard about PlayTime.”

“No—what?”

“We’re closing. This is our last summer.”

“Oh my God...I’m so sorry. That’s so weird. I came here as a kid, I haven’t been back until today and now the place is closing. That’s sad.”

“Mm.”

“I thought only cretins fed fruit to Old World monkeys but I can see I was wrong. When do you get off work, Nat? I think you and me could both use a drink. And I need to hear you explain to me why my breasts can’t mimic my ass or my ass mimic my breasts just a little bit better.”

Nat grinned. He hadn’t grinned in a long time.

* * *

They ordered sandwiches and beer at a PlayTime restaurant with a tacky-nostalgic Western motif which just added poignancy to Molly’s knowledge that PlayTime was doomed. Nat was explaining why.

“PlayTime’s amusement rides were always geared for younger kids, not teenagers, but today all but the very youngest kids would find our rides lame and wimpy. And kids would rather hang around in malls than look at animals.”

“So what becomes of the animals?” Molly asked, truly concerned by now. It felt good to be concerned about something other than herself after this hellish week.

“They’ll be going to zoos throughout the country; some into Canada. A few will go to nearby zoos—the gorillas are going to a place in Massachusetts, but it’s small and I’m concerned. Some will end up in private collections. In fact, Michael Jackson is taking our wallabies.”

“That upset you?”

“Not so long as they’re alive and well. How many people get to see them is of little or no importance to me.”

“And your mandrills?”

“Washington Zoo. Where the politicians can come and throw them peanuts.”

Molly smiled at him sadly, impressed with his compassion. He wasn’t bad-looking, either. His nose a little big...but if it were mimicking his genital region...

“The mandrills are endangered. But what isn’t? They’re hunted for food. That’s akin to cannibalism, to me. It tears me up inside, Molly. You can’t know.”

“People need to eat, too—it isn’t easy. Try to explain conservation to a starving tribesman.”

“We have to try. And if education fails, we’ve got to take action. Look at the rain forests...burned to plant crops in soil that’s no good after a couple of plantings. We have to get together...all the world...and go in there and tell them, yes, they’re your trees, but it’s our air. The whole world’s air. Now let us help you do it the right way.”

“That’s scary talk, Nat...going in and taking over.”

“The alternative is scarier. It’s such a fine, delicate balance. All the gorgeous life being sacrificed. It kills me.” Nat was staring off at a booth crowded to bursting like a too full stomach with an overweight father, overweight mother and two corpulent children. Wolfing down hamburgers. Nat’s stomach rumbled and he nudged his own burger away guiltily. “Sometimes I feel like I carry the whole burden of the world.”

“I know, but...”

Nat winced, gripped the table edge and leaned forward against his hands. “Christ...”

“Are you okay?”

“Sorry. Gas.”

“Oh God,” Molly chuckled nervously. “You scared me.” He was leaning back now but his face had yet to uncrumple. What a character. She liked him. She just hoped he didn’t take his burden of the world stuff too seriously. There was only so much one person could do.

* * *

Molly cocked her head to read the spines of Nat’s books. The Little Flowers of St. Francis. Joseph Campbell. Several by Desmond Morris. But there were also titles by Colin Wilson, and more obscure volumes on mysterious phenomena and faculties. A good-sized collection of these, in fact. One title was The Transmigration of Souls.

Straightening up, wine in hand, she called into the adjacent kitchen, “I wouldn’t have thought a scientific pundit like you would be into the occult.”

Aproned Nat leaned into view. “The supernatural is just the natural that science hasn’t legitimized yet.”

“Your quote?”

“Yes.”

“Sounds rehearsed.”

“Admittedly.”

It was their third non-PlayTime date. Nat’s house was a two-story on a shady but somewhat crowded suburban street in a town a half hour’s ride from his work. The house was a bit neglected, a dozen projects half started, but his disorder was as fascinating as his tastes were eclectic. A print by Magritte and an art deco lamp and an African mask all in one corner. Molly lightly touched the mask. Looked old, not some tacky import store piece.

“Been to Africa?”

“Yes. Three years ago, when PlayTime changed hands and looked like it had a future.”

“Wow...you’ll have to tell me.” Molly spied on him for several moments as he worked at the counter. He was almost too interesting. It was a foolish feeling, ridiculous to be somewhat wary of him, suddenly...but then, despite all the highly touted individualism of Americans, Molly knew that what they really expected of each other was conformity. Colorful people, complex individuals, even true heroes, too often, were best admired in the movies. Well, she shouldn’t let herself think like that. Look at him, working in there so intensely. Listen to the Irish folk music he was playing. What was she worrying about? She allowed herself to smile at him, and lifted her glass.

* * *

A troll-like thing, hunched and dark-skinned, crouched naked at the foot of the bed, staring at Molly with small glittering eyes when she awoke. A shroud of a curtain billowed in slow motion behind the creature.

The troll barked a laugh. It was Nat’s voice. “Sorry...couldn’t sleep. I just like looking at you.”

“You scared me. Man.” Molly pulled herself up into a sitting position but held the sheet across her breasts. A cool breeze was coming through the window. “You looked just like that painting with the monster sitting on the woman’s chest, and the white horse in the background?”

“Fuseli. Lord Byron owned that painting.”

Molly fumbled for her cigarettes, then a lamp. Nat was sitting cross-legged at the foot of the bed, not crouching as he’d appeared, and now his flesh was pallid. While she lit her smoke, Molly let shreds of their lovemaking flutter back to her like dream fragments.

It had been tender and mellow for quite a while...they hadn’t rushed anything. Nat savored her as he had his meal, with that intense concentration of his. But toward the end he had become more passionate, had ridden her without restraint. Rough, could she call it? She didn’t want to use that word, but why was she feeling slightly distant from him now? Toward the end he had propped himself up over her, staring down at her fiercely...lunging into her with abandon, and making deep grunts. Maybe it was just the contrast with his foreplay. Maybe it was just her anxiety about work, her former boyfriend, all she had lost previously, doing its best to prevent her from feeling secure now. Still, there had been a weird energy in the air toward their climaxes. Something... uncontrolled. And it had unsettled her.

“Uh,” Nat grunted. Molly glanced up at him. His face was pinched, and he was gazing out the window where the breeze had lifted the vaporous curtain. Hand on his chest.

“Maybe you’re getting an ulcer,” Molly suggested.

She thought he said, then, “I’ve got one of them.” But what he had actually said was, “They got one of them.”

* * *

Summer proceeded, taking PlayTime closer to extinction.

She enjoyed him. She really did. But there was that tension when night came, and they were alone in the dark. Was it her, she still wondered? Some neurotic fear she was superimposing over him? She entertained this idea because the feeling was so unsubstantial.

On the seventh time they copulated, the tension broke outward. She let it, without holding it inside to turn over and pick at any longer. He had asked her to present her rear to him, on all fours...something he had never asked before. She wasn’t surprised—as if she had been expecting it.

“I don’t like it that way,” she snapped, drawing away from him. “It’s humiliating...it’s like you don’t want to see my face.”

Nat seemed stunned that she should react so strongly. Had she misunderstood about where he intended to enter when she reversed herself for him? He didn’t think so. “Hey, you keep your eyes closed most of the time anyway...you aren’t looking at my face, but I don’t accuse you of trying to humiliate me.”

“Doing it ‘doggie’ doesn’t appeal to me, okay? It’s bestial.”

“Oh, listen to you! Where is this coming from? What hidden pocket of religious guilt did I break into just now? Bestial is suddenly sinful, and let’s keep the natives in the missionary position. Christ, Molly, this isn’t like you.”

“I don’t like it, okay? I don’t have to explain myself to you.” And she slid out of bed, slapped barefoot off for the bathroom. Moments later he heard a bath running, signaling an end to their lovemaking.

He sat there on the bed...more hurt than angry. She didn’t understand him. How could he have hoped her to be different? He was alone. It had to be that way. Alone with his burden.

In the steaming, purgative water, Molly finally wondered at her reaction. Particularly since she had never minded being entered from behind with her previous boyfriends...

It’s me, she decided at last. Yes, definitely. She felt insecure, humiliated at having been laid off, abandoned by her last lover. She was afraid that Nat would degrade her, too...but she could see, rationally, that he meant her no harm. He was an extremely concerned man. Yes. It was her. She felt guilty, rose with steaming pink flesh from her bath of contemplation. She would apologize to him...entreat him to be patient with her...

Wrapping a huge white towel around herself, Molly padded out into the dark house to find him, her bare footfalls soft and gentle this time. She peeked into the bedroom; he wasn’t there. Downstairs, no doubt. She descended the carpeted, silent steps.

A slight rustling of noise toward his cluttered study, just off the living room: no more than the air being disturbed. Molly followed it. Something made her want to call out to him, let him know she was coming as she extended her hand for the knob. Something in her wanted her to remain stealthy, and poised for retreat. It was the electric energy which had been unsettling her all along that she suddenly seemed to be homing in on, but it was too late to steal back upstairs. Her hand was on the knob, his name freed from her mouth.

The door swung open, the study was in gloom, a hunched small figure whirled to face her... its head pointed, its features dark and hideous. Molly screamed, stepped back, screamed again. The hunched creature lurched toward her.

“Molly, shh, please!” Nat rasped, pulling away the tribal African mask he’d been wearing...the one from the living room wall. He was naked, otherwise. “Please!”

“What are you doing? Don’t come near me—don’t!”

Nat held his ground, straightened up. Chuckled uncomfortably. “I know this looks strange...”

“I’m going now, Nat. I won’t talk about this...I just want to go and I want it to be over...”

“Please let me explain, if I can. I’m not crazy. It has a reason, what I was doing.”

“I’m sure it does, to you, but I’m going...”

“Molly, please.” Tears came into his eyes. The agony in his face was childlike, and pierced her, against her better judgment. She had to get out...he might kill her. He was insane. But his pain riveted her. He could see she was waiting for him to explain, now...

“I ache for these animals, Molly...I can’t even express it. Their beautiful souls, that energy, wasted...spent...by humans who have no souls. Where does it go? Heaven should only exist for animals...”

Molly’s eyes dropped to a heavy bookend on a desk against the wall between them. A good weapon if she needed it. And it was an ape holding a human skull in contemplation, appropriately enough.

“I can’t save them all. I’m not sure why the mandrills, specifically, but...I wanted to help them so badly, but I can only reach so far to them, and even my three will be out of my reach and my care soon! That need to reach to them...to save them forever...I...I came upon a way to capture that spent energy. To catch their souls before they dissipate, and are lost forever. It’s long and complicated, but it involves my occult studies, and this ritual you just caught me performing. Every time a mandrill dies...is murdered...its soul comes into me. Since I’ve begun, forty-eight of their spirits have entered me.” He laughed in sad irony. “Every mandrill that’s eaten, I eat its soul.”

“Nat. Your...commitment to help these animals has become an obsession with you. Okay? It’s...”

“Not healthy? No kidding. Yes—it is an obsession. But it has to be...I have to make up for the apathy and selfishness of everybody else! No one else has room for them, so I’ve committed myself to them. You see? I’m their new home. I’m their jungle. The mind is that infinite a place, isn’t it?”

Yes, thought Molly, staring at Nathan A. Tower. It is.

“I told you I had a burden...”

“You do have a burden, Nat. But I still have to leave now. I’m sorry.”

She expected him to lunge at her then, as she began to back steadily away from him. Lunge and seize her with a bestial cry. But instead he crumpled, lost some of his height. “I understand,” he sobbed. “I knew it couldn’t last. This work has to be done alone. It’s a sacrifice...”

“I’m sorry, Nat. I’m sorry.” Molly made it to the stairs, and flew up them. The first thing she did was find a pair of scissors, but he didn’t follow her. As she dressed she listened for him at the open door and could hear him softly sobbing down there. Her chest suddenly ached as if torn inside, and she wanted to go to him. But she couldn’t risk it. She would write him a letter tonight at home, mail it tomorrow. Thank him for their time together. Express her sympathy for his burden. Urge him to get help. And insist that he never try to contact her again...

Molly crept downstairs, to the door, out to her car...still expecting him to leap out at her from the study, from behind a bush. Wearing that mask again. He didn’t. She drove away.

* * *

The jungle was on fire.

Molly lay in bed, naked, without sheets, while the trees burned all around her...but there was a clear protective shield surrounding the bed, its walls flush to the sides of it. Molly knew there was a shield because not only didn’t she feel the heat of the inferno, but maddened tropical birds were occasionally plummeting blindly out of the forest, their wings in flames, only to smash against the invisible walls and rebound dead.

The screams from the depths of the burning jungle were horrifying; a cacophony of shrieks, screeches, wails. Rising up on one elbow, she watched a hippo...or so it appeared...lumber along within the line of approaching flame, moaning forlornly with head thrown back, its heavy body burning, charring, a raft of fire in an ocean of fire. Monkeys leapt aflame from one torch of a tree to another. The fire was closing in on all sides of her simultaneously, at the same rate. It was like looking into an aquarium full of hell on each side...or being lowered by bathysphere into hell itself.

The first mandrill fell against the glass, its tormented face only inches from hers, just as the fire reached the barrier on all four sides, and then the mandrill fell away. But across the bed, fists pounded on the glass. Behind her now. Cries of agony lanced into her head from all sides. Molly saw black hunched shapes inside the fire, just shadows, clawing at her walls, jumping up against them and bouncing off, piling over each other in desperation. Frantic black figures all around her now. And she wanted to reach out to them, draw them in, but of course it was too late. She couldn’t let the fire in...and besides, there wasn’t enough room in here anyway...

* * *

The phone woke her; she went up on one elbow, her heart punching. She clawed at the light. Third ring. She made no move to get out of bed yet, waited to hear her answering machine’s message, then the voice of the caller. While her own voice played, a glance at her clock. Only 1:15, but she had work tomorrow...

She knew who it would be, even before she heard his voice. It had been over a week and he hadn’t replied to her letter. Now as she heard him the first thing she thought was that she should have called the police that first night, just to let them know about him in case anything happened to her. How could she have begun to think it was so easily over?

His voice was pained...hoarse. Weak. “Molly...”

She shivered, made no move to get out of bed. His voice was a croak, barely human...

“Molly please...”

“Go away,” she whispered.

He chuckled sadly. “It was a mistake, Molly. I made a zoo. The cage is too small. They want to be free...they’re wild things—you know? How could I have thought they’d want to live in me?”

He grunted abruptly, then groaned, causing Molly to flinch. “Please, Nat,” she said to the phone across the room.

“Once a zookeeper, always a zookeeper, huh?” he said.

He needed help. She couldn’t just sit here. But who to call? Who would care, who was prepared to help him? Did she have a right to make a move like that? Shouldn’t she just ignore him until he went away?

A scream came from the answering machine. Shrill, piercing. A shriek of the damned. A shriek from her dream...

The phone beeped. The tape rewound.

Molly slid out of bed—through the invisible wall.

* * *

The police had already arrived when she got there. And there was an ambulance. People standing about, some in bathrobes.

Molly came up beside a young woman in a nightshirt, a baby in her arms. “Excuse me...I know him. What happened?”

“Ohh...are you a friend?”

“Yes. Is he okay?”

“Oh, man...I’m sorry...really. You aren’t his girlfriend?”

“No. He isn’t...dead?”

“I’m sorry, really. Yeah...he is, honey.”

Molly looked up at the house. In the bright upper windows shadows of policemen passed across the shades. “How did it happen?”

“Somebody said it looked like a heart attack, but he was only in his thirties, wasn’t he? Was he into coke or anything?”

“I don’t know. No...”

“I really am sorry...”

Molly sighed. She wasn’t crying, wasn’t even going to. Not tonight. But there was a great emptiness that opened inside her, as if the floor of her soul had fallen away, leaving her to hang above a void. It was a horrible, helpless sense of loss too immense for her to comprehend.

The young woman removed one damp arm from under the weary infant to touch Molly’s arm. “You okay? Maybe you should talk to the police...”

Molly saw that windows were broken, curtains snagged in the shards. She faced the woman. “Did you hear anything?”

“Christ...yeah. I’m sorry, but that’s why I asked you about drugs. He had a real fit up there. Throwing things...screaming. When I came out I saw him jumping around up there. It was pretty scary. At first I thought he was being murdered.”

“Why?” Molly asked wanly.

“Well.” The woman glanced at the upper windows, visibly shivered. “You know how lights can throw a lot of shadows from one person...but it looked like a whole bunch of people were throwing a fit up there. I saw shadows like leaping up and down in more window than one...you know? Like, in all of them...”

Molly didn’t say anything when the woman waited for her reaction, so she continued.

“And it sounded like...lots of voices. Lots of people screaming. I guess...maybe it was just echoes. And then suddenly they all just faded away.”

Molly nodded. Turned to gaze up at the house.

“Are you gonna talk to the police?”

“Thanks,” Molly told her, and walked back to her car...

* * *

Again and again Molly played the tape from her answering machine, listening to the end of that scream, so many times that it no longer caused her to tremble. Listened and listened...as if on the next listening...this next one...she would finally hear, before it was cut off, the one scream split into many.

She sat cross-legged in the middle of her bed, safe away from its edges, but feeling guilty for her safety. And listened.

DISFIGURED

Mrs. Kingston’s new forehead was high and broad, culminating in a plateau over-hung with a close fringe of bangs. Just under the fringe were a few metal clasps, and a long scar ran down her forehead from one of them. Her eyelids were weighed heavily three-quarters shut. Another long scar ran under her jaw, passing over one of the two steel bolts protruding from the sides of her slim throat.

She still lay on the table. Mr. Roy swiveled a monitor screen down to her so she wouldn’t yet have to raise the alien weight of her head.

“Oh,” she croaked, still drowsy, a small smile emerging. “Beautiful.”

Roy smiled humbly, nodded, touched buttons that gave her different angles and magnifications. She hadn’t wanted green skin, as he had suggested. She wanted to be partly recognizable. He agreed that that was desirable. Normally he didn’t consult with the clients, but some wanted to work along with him, and he had to tolerate such individuals. Normally his clients delighted in his surprising them, and he preferred that artistic license.

For Mrs. Kingston they had consulted a book on old, old horror films. He had steered her easily from her first attraction to the Bride. “Just hair,” he told her. “That isn’t enough...that won’t catch the eye.” She had agreed on the Monster. Jack Pierce’s design. Roy liked that name. He had briefly considered changing his professional name to Roy Pierce but decided that was too phony. He despised phoniness.

Mrs. Kingston had been inspired to seek out Mr. Roy when she saw his masterful transformation of her friend Mrs. Violet into Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera, accomplished by shaving her hair back, bulging her eyes, drawing back her lips and making her nose skull-like. Normally Roy preferred not to work so closely from an existing model, another man’s art, but it was nice for an occasional change, and he had become intrigued with Lon Chaney. To play a hunchback, Chaney had strapped a huge heavy appliance onto his back with a harness which prevented him from straightening. For the Phantom, he had pulled at the skin around his eyes and lips and nose with a variety of painful means, as in some self-inflicted torture. Roy admired that sense of commitment, but his creations were surgical, were painless, and were not performed on himself.

* * *

May couldn’t help but steal glances over the top of her magazine at the man across from her. Sometimes she saw only his eyes over the top of his magazine. He was reading a glossy-covered copy of Disfigured!, the soft porn magazine which appealed so to both men and women. It also contained articles, reviews, fashion layouts, but was most famous for its glamorous photo spreads of clothed and unclothed men and women, surgically deformed, maimed, transfigured.

There was still enough to see, however. The man’s head was a mushroom cloud of flesh, a bulbous mass hung with lank scatterings of hair. At one point when the man traded one magazine for another May saw how his mouth was twisted into an uneven sneer, and the man caught her gawking. She began to look away, but he spoke to her.

“The Elephant Man,” he said. “John Merrick. I was lucky to get rights—others have inquired since. Normally Mr. Roy doesn’t do work based on unoriginal sources but he says he’s always been intrigued by John Merrick. He’s sworn to make me an exact duplicate. I have only a few sessions to go. How about you?” The man eyed her up and down. May’s face was smooth and untouched but maybe there was some amazing work evolving under her clothing which Mr. Roy had yet to complete. Huge warts? A network of distended purple veins? Dozens of moving, blinking human eyes scattered across her body?

“I’m not sure. I guess I want to be surprised.”

“Oh, I’m sure that’s fun, too,” said the man, though not too enthusiastically—not wanting to seem unhappy with his choice.

“May?”

May looked up at the smiling hostess, who in leaning over her gave May a good look at the deep ragged fissure which ran down the center of her face from hairline to chin. “Mr. Roy is ready for you.”

* * *

Roy sent Armand Pittman out of his office to the front desk to make his next appointment; the bat wings which had sprouted from the sides of his head could flap, fold and retract, controlled by a chip implanted at the base of the skull, but he wanted next to have the webs of the wings tattooed with Egyptian hieroglyphics. At his desk in his office, Roy had a few moments to scan the application of May Azul for the first time on his monitor. There was a long waiting line to this, one of the most renowned offices in the city.

College student. Wealthy parents. There was a photograph.

A knock, and the hostess Iris opened the door to let in May Azul. Roy stood to extend his hand. Iris left May to advance with a shy smile.

His eyes ate up her face like a horde of ants swarming over it, scurrying in and out of hollows, nostrils, through the forest of eyebrows, all at once. He was filled with a dismay he had felt surfacing the moment his screen unveiled her photograph.

She had shoulder-length auburn hair, with an almost brassy undertone, and green-gray eyes, drowsily lidded, though not in the manner of Mrs. Kingston’s new eyelids. Her face was not “perfect”...her nose was a bit boyishly unrefined and her “bee-stung” lips (he loved that term) were asymmetrical, this more pronounced with her lopsided bashful smile. But she was immediately striking. Her skin was white and silken, her neck long and thin, her body encased in a tight black sweater falling just to her upper thighs and banded at the waist with a realistic plastic snake (another college fad). Her legs were long in their black nylon sheaths. All this black only further heightened the snowy smooth perfection of her exposed flesh.

“Pleased to meet you.” Her hand was small, soft, a little damp in the hollow palm. “Please make yourself comfortable.” They both sat. Roy’s smile was professional, didn’t reveal his discomfort...he was as adept at smiling as at his art. He took in May’s profile as she scanned photographs on the walls and his framed credentials in art and medicine. Why should she be so striking? At this time, medicine being what it was, there were nearly no natural deformities. After a fire or accident there was no need to remain scarred. There was no need to go bald, become obese, and shrivel up with age so quickly. Roy had seen perfection for most of his life. That was why people came to him and his kind, in fact. For something different. To stand out, make a statement, express their individuality. Almost everyone who could afford it wanted some kind of embellishment, ornamentation, or full transformation—young or old, male or female. Business was booming.

She shouldn’t stand out to him, but she did. She wasn’t perfect. That was it. She was beautiful, but she had a singular kind of look—that is, he would recognize her again in a crowd. She had features he had seen before but in a fresh arrangement. She already looked individual.

“Do you have any idea what you want, May?” Her application showed three question marks on the line below a similar question.

“Well,” her attention came fully upon him, “not really. I like the idea of being surprised with an original creation...I’m sure you could think of better things to do with my face than I could. You’re the artist. The only trouble is, my parents are a little tight with their money and a little old-fashinoned and they told me they wouldn’t pay for it again if I don’t like what I get.”

That was the risk with the surprise approach, but Roy had very few dissatisfied customers come back (or go elsewhere) to have his work undone or converted to something else. As May had just said, he was the artist, he knew best, his clients trusted his decisions, no matter how wild or surprising. And sometimes he really got elaborate—inspired. He would sweat over one work for eight hours straight, then. The work could be undone, converted (for a heavy extra charge), but usually this was only done for those who came back every year or even sooner than that for a fresh new look.

“Maybe, ah, you should think about it a while longer,” Roy told her. “The fads change so quickly, too...I think the more involved procedures will die back down to minor touches soon. If you can’t afford to have your look adjusted or returned to normal I’d advise you to think twice about undergoing a major make-over which may become obsolete and which you’ll be stuck with until you have the money to change it.”

That appealing lopsided smile. “I’ve never met a doctor before who tried to get me to spend less money...I know doctors who’d prescribe me a brain transplant for a headache.”

“I’m not a doctor—I’m an artist. I’m an artist for the artistic gratification first...the money second. I have a compulsion to be an artist. I’m not a doctor, or a mechanic, May.”

“I’m sorry.” She looked embarrassed.

“Don’t apologize—please. I’m not offended, I’m just making a distinction. Really. So...I’m really not sure what to suggest, either, May...if you’re sure you want to do this.”

“Oh yeah, I want something.”

“What have you seen that you like?”

“Well, like I said, I want you to decide, but my friend Stacee had her head shaved bald with a ring of like glassy balls implanted around it that change color with her moods. A friend of mine, Jhonn, had one arm removed and a tentacle put in its place with a mouth at the end and a tongue.” May smiled bashfully at the implications. “Zelda had her ears pointed and face made a lot like a cat, even with whiskers. I like them all but they’re all different.” She threw up her hands.” I like old art. I was thinking maybe something Picassoy. You must know Picasso?”

He did. “Picasso. That sounds extreme, May.”

“Well, I don’t know...”

“I suggest something subtle. The fad will change soon, as I see it.”

“Well I can always get the money to change it in the future.”

Roy sighed. He stared at the monitor on his desk, wondering if he should have her take a look at his photo file of previous customers. Her photo on the monitor gazed back at him. Striking. Lovely. He didn’t suggest the file.

“I’ll think of something,” he said. “In the price range you’ve listed your work will be done within two to three hours. Are you ready?”

“Yes. Are you ready?”

She sensed his reluctance. “Yes...of course.” He rose.

“What about the man in the waiting room, if he has to wait three hours? Do you have an associate?”

“No. Rhik just likes to come early, read, hang around. He likes it here.” Roy could almost keep the bitter edge out of his words. “This way, please.”

Picasso. He hated Picasso.

* * *

Roy made a big mistake in having had May Azul undressed and laid starkly, whitely naked like a corpse on his slab. A corpse without bullet-hole, wound, mark of violence. It only heightened his confusion. But still, her face remained his focus. He was a portraitist, primarily. A face man.

For a full half hour he paced around the table, coffee in hand, studying her. She was a tree. He was a chainsaw. And she wanted to become a chainsaw sculpture from the tree.

It wasn’t easier to do a Mrs. Kingston or Mrs. Violet simply because they were less beautiful than this young woman. Of course that reaction was natural. But his reluctance had grown beyond his dismay at the application photograph—grown upon talking with her. She was shy...cute...sweet, he thought. It was easy to despise the college types—they sought the most outlandish expression of his aristic contempt. But she was naive, he told himself, simply giving in to peer pressure. She couldn’t really want to look like one of Picasso’s excuses for beauty...

Slowly, uncertainly, he set about preparing his pallet, eyes never straying long from that bare canvas.

* * *

Still in his lab smock, taking a break from his work on Rhik, Roy went into the recovery room to see how May Azul was doing. Roy had sent Iris in a few minutes ago to revive her, and when he entered May had already swung her bare legs off the side of the bed. She wore a plastic smock. She was already viewing herself in a display of wall screens. Iris stepped aside. Roy’s stomach was clenched in a fist of dread.

“Hello, May.” Professional smile. “So what do you think?” Light tone.

“Well.” She fingered it timidly. His sculpture. Her face. “It’s a little subtle. I thought we’d agreed to do a little more.” She had checked the time...it hadn’t been any three hours. He’d better not charge her for the three-hour range.

“I thought you trusted my artistic instincts.”

“I do. But...well.” A small red jewel, glowing with a light inside it, was implanted in her forehead. From the corners of her eyes, two implanted, thin, rounded black plastic strips extended to her temples, then curved down under the line of her jaw to connect under her chin. That was all. “I still look kind of boring.”

Boring. With those bee-stung lips. “Did you see this?” He picked up a small device. Touched a key. The forehead jewel turned sapphire. Another key. The black plastic half-frame around her face became white. Pink. Metallic gold. The gem became an emerald.

“Yes,” May murmured, only half looking into the screens. “I just...I like it, but I could probably buy jewelry like this and glue it on. I thought from the friends I described, and from the price range we agreed on, you’d do something more distinctive. I trust your artistic instincts, but this is me ...I’m the one who has to be artistically gratified. Right?”

Maybe she could be bashful and sweet, but she could be cold and bitter also, he observed. “This is what I saw for you,” he said emotionlessly. Iris looked uncomfortable. “I’m sorry you don’t like it.”

“I’d like a little more, if I have the money left over.”

“You do. But I really don’t know what else I might do for you.”

“I’ve seen your photographs on the walls, Mr. Roy! I saw that guy Rhik in the waiting room! What do you mean you don’t know what else you can do?”

“Iris, will you tend the front?” She nodded, split-faced, left. Roy moved to a coffee maker and got himself a cup. May declined. His back to May, the artist said, “Why does such a lovely woman want to look like an axe murderer attacked her and a drunken doctor patched her back together?”

“Why are you saying this? Lovely? Nobody looks at me! I don’t stand out! I want to make a statement!”

“Those aren’t their statements. They’re mine. They aren’t individuals. They’re all the same. Can’t you see how beautiful you are? You want me to ruin that? I don’t like Picasso, May...I like Renoir.” He faced her.

“You’re a hypocrite, Mr. Roy. You do things like I saw in your photographs and you act like you disapprove.”

“I do.” He sipped his coffee grimly.

“Why?” She gaped at him in disbelief.

Roy’s eyes were hot in a face that was clean-shaven, somewhat plump and boyish, and devoid of any artistic embellishment. Only now did May notice that. He said, “John Merrick the Elephant Man ached to look like regular men. He dreamed of it...in vain. Never had a wife. Died young, after years of pain. And I have a...ludicrous fool on a table in this other room who wants to look like him exactly! If I could only trade his body with Merrick, but I can’t. Can you see the horror in this?”

“What horror? He looked happy to me. He chooses to look like that. Merrick didn’t. In our time nobody will make fun of that man or pity him—they’ll admire him and envy him! So what’s so horrible?”

Now it was Roy’s turn to gape in disbelief, coffee hovering in his hand. “Don’t you see it isn’t natural?”

“Natural? I don’t believe you, not at all! Look at you. Is it natural for humans to wear clothes, jewelry? Is it natural for you to wear deodorant, cut and comb your hair and shave? What’s natural? You’re the artist—why do you do it? Just for the money after all, after your big speech about ‘artistic gratification’?” She mocked the words.

Roy set down his coffee. “I didn’t lie to you, Miss Azul. I do achieve a great deal of artistic gratification. More so than when I used to repair people who had been burnt or disfigured, making them beautiful again. I love deforming these fools and blathering, mindless sheep who follow the drunken herdsmen of fashion!”

“So you’re a poet too, eh?” May hugged her arms, sneering her pouty bee-stung lips at him to hide her nervousness.

“An unhappy poet, Miss Azul. With a talent for working from the black ink well. The dark end of the pallet. I am only too happy to hack the arm off a buffoon like your friend and give him a tentacle instead and take his money. He’s a horror to me, a monster. I laugh at him.”

“You’re sick! You know that? You’re sick.”

“Oh? But he’s happy with his tentacle, isn’t he? You don’t see me with a tentacle. We’re all sick, May.”

“I didn’t come for a philosophy lecture, Mr. Roy. What do I owe you? I’ll go elsewhere for what I want.”

“No.” Roy dropped his coffee cup three-quarters full into the trash zapper. “I’ll finish with Rhik and be right with you—it will just be an hour.”

“I’m not sure I want you now.”

“You may have to wait elsewhere for weeks for a session. Go read a magazine. One hour.”

“All right,” May muttered, slipping off the table, gathering up her belongings. “I just want what I want,” she said in a softer tone.

“I know.” Roy didn’t look at her, and left her to dress although she had lain naked for him to manipulate before...a field of snow inviting the trampling of a herd of mindless sheep.

While Roy finished up with Rhik’s session he flipped through books from his extensive collection in his mind. Horror movies. Texts on medical anomalies. A half dozen on circus sideshows of old. Bosch. Maybe a little bit of each?

Mr. Roy was inspired, now.

He sweated eight hours over May Azul.

CRIMSON BLUES

He smelled the top of her head, as he had sniffed her head when she was a wispy-haired newborn. But she was a woman now, and in bending his nose against her scalp he inhaled shampoo and mousse. Shutting his eyes, James tugged the spiked blade of the awl out of the base of his daughter’s neck.

He was crouched on the floor, Cheri sprawled half in his lap. Her open mouth was still moist against his left palm as if suction-cupped to it. He let her down onto her back, the plastic drop cloth under them rustling. The chair that he had told her he meant to paint, here in the middle of the kitchen, had been knocked on its side in her brief struggle—a few convulsive kicks.

James stood over her now, looking down, as he had looked down at her in her crib so many times. After his wife had left him, he had sometimes thought to suffocate that sleeping infant as he watched her blissfully dreaming. She would have been better off if he had done it then, he knew now. And so would he. He fought down the rising sob in his throat. It was a sob of self-pity more than of guilt.

After all, she had meant to leave him. Just as her worthless mother had abandoned him. And hadn’t she become every bit the whore her mother had been? He had seen his daughter chatting so cozily with the mailman on the front step. That was only an example, that was only what he saw. She even flirted with his sister’s husband, his smarmy brother-in-law, Curtis. And when she kissed him goodnight, him, her own father, didn’t she linger just a moment too long? Her lips pressed to his cheek? Wasn’t she trying to seduce even him? Yes, she was better off now, delivered from further temptations of evil. And now James was delivered from his own.

No one would suspect that he had murdered his own daughter. No one did that. Their wives, girlfriends, certainly, that was practically a fad. But in this, he felt safe. And he had had it all planned. The drop cloth under her, which he had lured her onto like those nets in the movies that gathered people up into the trees. And the awl, its spike so slim, to minimize the splashing of blood.

Yes, it was pooling now into folds of the drop cloth, but James lifted Cheri’s head to stuff a kitchen towel under her neck, as if tenderly slipping a pillow beneath her, to absorb it. And there had been a little spattering of blood across his sleeve, across the drop cloth. He had, after all, had to stab her several times. But he would burn his clothing in the fireplace, and sweep out the ashes after that. And her body would be wrapped up in blankets, driven out into the woods and set aflame also, then the remains buried. He would tell those who asked that his daughter had run off with some ominous-looking young man whose name he didn’t know. Hell, he’d even call the police and report her missing. Maybe gone to search for her missing mother, he’d speculate.

James stooped, began to fold the edge of the drop cloth over Cheri like a blanket. Like a shroud. As he did this, a small black shape caught his eye. Something by Cheri’s head.

It was a large black beetle. No, a cricket. Good-sized, almost an inch. Weren’t crickets an omen of good luck? Cheri must have let it in with her.

James shooed it. Waved at it to swat it off the drop cloth rather than crush it, feeling in a merciful mood. It jumped. A good jump, too—so good that it jumped right out of his vision. But in that split second before it leaped, before it vanished, James had seen the single spot of red that glistened wetly on the cricket’s back.

“Damn,” he hissed to himself, and got down on hands and knees to peer under the table.

Well, he had to find it, didn’t he? Cheri’s disappearance would be noticed sooner or later even if he didn’t call the police himself. A boyfriend, a class mate, his sister Ann and that smug bastard Curtis might come looking for her. Ann and Curtis had acted like Cheri was their daughter rather than his, over these past seventeen years. Always fretting, always meddling. They would come, yes, and he would tell them no, no, he had no idea where Cheri had gone. And then a black shape would leap incriminatingly out into the center of the floor between their feet, or onto the table between their coffees, and then there it would be, the cricket, a spot of red on its back like the hourglass of a black widow. A moving, living piece of evidence. Like a charred black skeleton’s finger, pointing accusingly to him.

No, he had to find it, but it was trapped in the house with him for the moment, so he took the time to finish rolling Cheri up in the drop cloth. He scooped the bundle into his arms and carried her into the bathroom adjoining the kitchen, deposited her in the bathtub, out of his way. Off came his bloodied shirt, his speckled trousers. He tossed them on top of the bundle in the tub. Atop these he rested the ice-pick like awl. In the sink he washed his hands thoroughly. There. Now, in his underwear, he went hunting for the insect.

“Oh,” he whispered, crawling ever so stealthily across the linoleum on hands and knees, “we can’t have any witnesses, can we?” So much for good luck, eh? What was that song the cricket sang in that Disney movie? “Give a little whistle,” and he did, as if he thought it would lure the bug out. Softly, as if singing a lullaby, he added, “And always let your conscience be your guide.”

From the living room beyond came a chirp, as if to answer his song.

“Ahh,” James cooed, and like a giant bug himself, scurried through the threshold into the dimly-lit parlor.

No more chirps. No, it was teasing him, taunting him. Catch me if you can, a game, like those of a child. Hide and go seek. It was as if in dying, Cheri had passed her spirit on to the body of the cricket. Ahh, but he wouldn’t let her get away with that. He had killed her once, he could do it again. He had shown the cricket mercy once. He wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.

He peeked under the sofa, holding his breath now, silent. He peeked around in back of the TV. A peripheral movement. “Yeah!” he cried, springing to his feet. He was sure he had seen it disappear under the arm chair, and he shoved it aside with such force that the legs scratched the wood of the floor. He stomped the dust balls there. Then looked, lifting one foot and then the other to examine their soles. No smashed bodies. Nothing.

An hour of hunting later, sweat now sheathing James’ entire body and his knees dirty and gritty, he went to his bookcase and pulled out an encyclopedia. CLOISTER-DIGITALIS. “Cricket,” he muttered. “Cricket.” Ha. They had more on the stupid game than on God’s prevalent animal of the same name.

“Gryllus assimilis,” he murmured. Ah, it was the forewings the bug rubbed together to produce its chirp, not the legs. Hm. “Learn something new every day.” James hoped to learn something about the behavior of crickets that would help him find this one. They fed on book bindings. Well, maybe he could lure it that way, using this very book. Or some other food as a lure? Something he could poison? If nothing else, he could use the encyclopedia to smash the thing.

A page fell open, and there was a section on CRIME. It showed an FBI forensic expert examining the bottom of a shoe. James thumped the book shut as if the technician might look up from the page and spot him.

There! There! James saw it, on the floor just under the coffee table. He hurled the book, and it plowed across the top of the table, scattering candy from a dish, knocking a butt-piled ashtray to the floor. The cricket hopped, but came down within view. James scooped up the ashtray, threw it like a baseball. It didn’t shatter, but dented the floor, and the cricket hopped, this time through the dark doorway leading into Cheri’s bedroom.

“All right, bitch,” he hissed, sweat running down his sides, his heart punching. “All right, bitch,” he said, although it was the male cricket that chirped. “You want to play games? Huh? Huh?” He stomped toward his own bedroom.

He had to kill it. Tonight. They had wings, they could fly, it would try to escape from the house when he opened the door and it was so small and so fast. He must not leave the house until it was dead. He must not let it escape from him...

James fed shells to his shotgun until it could hold no more, and racked the slide. The sound made him feel good.

“All right,” he announced himself, and stormed into the bedroom of his daughter. He felt for a lamp, switched it on. Posters of drippy-looking TV hunks; homogenized James Deans. Smell of perfume. A funny ache rocked James’ heart like a wave swelling under a moored boat but he ignored it, and there it was, the bug by the baseboard and he fired.

The shotgun boomed his fury. The shell clattered. Plaster dust had raised a cloud, and as the chalky grit settled James saw that the bug was gone. Blown to smithereens? He got down on his belly to look under the bed.

There! Hiding under the bed like a frightened child! Boom! The sound deafening enclosed under the bed like that. He saw baseboard wood splinter, gouged. But after the blast, he saw no cricket there.

“Bitch!” he raged, jumping to his feet, shoving the bed out away from the wall.

There was an urgent female voice calling from the kitchen. He must have left the TV on in there. And a scream, now. A horror movie? He ignored it. Plenty of time for TV later; right now he had a cricket to kill. James pivoted his head slowly from side to side. There! Boom! No—there! Boom! The windows of the bedroom rattled with the thunder. Cheri had been afraid of thunder, as a child had come running to bed with him. Whore! Boom!

Dust settled, sweat ran from his pores and tears poured from his eyes but he didn’t realize it, and there was the cricket, there in a scattering of plaster chunks. Unmoving. Gray from the plaster on it...but not so gray that he couldn’t see that telling spot of crimson.

He must not rush it. It might be dead, struck by plaster, or it might only be stunned. Or it might be luring him, tricking him. Approaching it slowly, James gave a questioning little whistle. His shotgun was empty, so he leaned it against the bed so that he could use both hands to scoop the bug up.

Voices in the kitchen again. Had the TV gone off only to come back on? A woman sobbing, babbling. Sounded like Ann, almost, his sister...

His sister. And men’s voices this time. Curtis, but others too. The police! They had noticed Cheri missing already! Had James phoned them? No, he hadn’t yet, he remembered. Footfalls nearing. He had no choice now but to lunge for the bug, grab it and stuff it in the waistband of his briefs before they found him in here...before they could see it, and that spot of glowing neon red.

The authoritative footfalls almost behind him. James made his move, scooped up the bug. He’d got it! Was it dead? He thought he felt a weak tickle of a moving limb against his palm but wasn’t sure, didn’t wait to find out. He popped the cricket into his mouth, and swallowed it down whole in one gulp...accusatory blood stain and all.

He had done it, without a second to spare! He’d outsmarted them...done away with the witness, the evidence, the vengeful spirit of his daughter all in one swallow. As the policemen stepped into the room, their pistols trained on him, James calmly, confidently turned around to face them, his hands raised. Ha! Idiots! One of the men had fresh blood stains on one hand from somewhere, James noticed, but not he, oh no, not he...

Grinning through the sweat and plaster on his face, he asked innocently, “Something wrong, officers?”

EMPATHY

They would call it a murder-suicide, though it was never fully understood. Perhaps it was one, actually—in its way. Or perhaps it wasn’t just that Marie empathized with the things at Blue Flamingos...but they with her.

Blue Flamingos Antiques and Collectibles was the name Edwin, Marie’s husband, had given the three-story brick warehouse, and it was a blue-painted lawn flamingo he had placed in the front window beside the blue lava lamp, though he could have as easily called it Pink Elephants or Flying Aardvarks to get his point across.

There were certainly enough traditional antiques to draw serious collectors, and some of them were willing to part with serious money. The vast ground floor was nearly as neatly laid out as a department store, with tables and counters and shelves, corridors built of merchandise. Clean, well-preserved merchandise; this was no flea market. Edwin had had his name, and the name Blue Flamingos, printed in a magazine article last year in commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of the jukebox. It was tacked up by the cash register, his brief quote on the restoration of jukeboxes circled.

But it was the collectibles rather than the antiques for which the place was best known. The article could indicate that. Edwin was a collector of ‘50s paraphernalia. Art Deco furniture. Old radios; a whole tall shelf just of those in the darker, quieter, somewhat less neat second story. Primitive futuristic TVs, the sad unlit shells of arcade games, the colorless translucent bones of neon signs. Items so odd and unique that people were willing to drive here from Boston sometimes for the chic junk of yesterday. Art Deco, old radios and jukeboxes were always popular, but also there had been the resurgence of interest in the ‘60s, and Blue Flamingos had done well for that. College kids in abundance, no doubt feeling very hip when they punched up old Roy Orbison songs on the gorgeously gaudy replica Wurlitzer 1015 by the counter where you first came in, drawn to it moth-like, like kids in the ‘40s, mindlessly lured by the green, orange, yellow plastic colors, the water bubbles tumbling corpuscle-like through lurid veins. Lights, movement, noise; a carnival in a futuristic sarcophagus, now a sacred American icon...the predecessor of TV, and MTV. Today’s mall mentality served Edwin well. The allure of things.

Marie’s husband knew what they wanted because he loved these things as they did. He might not have been able to part with any of it, jealous collector that he was, if there wasn’t a constant stream of new things coming in to replace those that left. Flea markets, field auctions. He read obituaries, contacted relatives about the possessions of deceased parents and grandparents. College kids and Bostonians didn’t know where to go, and didn’t want the bother of that anyway. They would pay double, triple, more for their cherished junk, while throwing away the stuff they bought in the malls, the treasure of tomorrow’s scavengers.

“It’s like the ultimate attic!” one woman enthused to him at the counter, paying thirty dollars for a Barbie doll Edwin had acquired for five dollars, along with three others in a box of toys at a yard sale.

From across the room, gently dusting a stuffed baby alligator that reared on its hind legs like some mummified miniature dinosaur, now extinct, Marie watched as Edwin smiled and offered some obligatory banalities. Edwin wasn’t very good with small talk, just with the large talk of his drinking companions. Basically, Marie’s husband preferred things to the human beings that made them. But then, who didn’t?

* * *

Marie also cherished the many things collected in her husband’s shop, and often felt more pained than he to see them leave. But hers was not the love of a collector. Marie had never collected anything in her life. As a deaf child, living in a school for deaf children during the week and with her mother in a two-room apartment on weekends, she hadn’t had the room—the private space—to accomodate the luxury of collection. Marie was fond of malls in the way she was fond of museums. She loved to drink it all in, then went home full. She was not materialistic. She loved the collectibles and old things because they were bits and pieces of lives. She could see and smell the life—the love, often—still in them, soaked deeply in their pores from the hands of their owners. Now discarded, orphaned by unsentimental survivors of those gone before. They were sad things. Lonely things. Of course, she should feel happy to see them adopted...but she became attached to them, liked to see them all here together in her home. She felt as one with them. She felt empathy with these dustily alive things.

Edwin had disgustedly given in to her pleadings, for a while, to let her keep a certain old doll or teddy bear or children’s book, bring it up to their apartment on the third floor, which for its decor could very easily have been mistaken for part of the store. But now he told her she had enough things, and he had a business to run. He made her feel guilty for her sensitivity, made her wonder if she really had gone overboard with it. He mocked her, for instance, for no longer accompanying him to field auctions because she couldn’t bear to see the boxes of rain-soggy stuffed animals, once warm with children’s hugs, and the rest of the things left for junk in the field after the bidders had picked what they really wanted from the boxes they bought. A corpse-strewn muddy battle field after.

What Marie didn’t tell her husband, however, was that she mostly didn’t accompany him because she sensed that he didn’t really desire her company. No longer offered to buy her a hotdog under the snack pavillion. No longer talked to her on the way home.

You would think that he didn’t know how to communicate with a deaf woman. He had attended classes for signing when they first met five years ago, knew how to sign perfectly well...but that would require him to show too much of an interest in her. His brusque signs now were more like impatient gestures of dismissal than sign language.

It was a rainy October day today, and in fact Edwin was at an auction, so perfectly scheduled for such weather. Marie wandered throughout the second floor, dusting. The shop was tended by Mrs. Morris, who couldn’t sign a jot and thus moved her mouth with ludicrous exaggeration so Marie could read her lips.

Dangling from the high ceiling were antlers and pop guns, catcher’s mitts and musical instruments. Marie worked her way toward the back, dusting the rows of uglier, less artistic steel and glass jukeboxes of the 50’s and 60’s. She had once been afraid to come up here alone, before she had dared to let herself feel this was her home. Now when she occasionally glanced over her shoulder, it was only because she felt Edwin would be standing there, arms crossed, some complaint ready. The sad deer head, the fluorescent, crumbling papier-maché ghoul from a carnival horror ride didn’t mean her any harm.

At the end window, she gazed down at the rain-blurred street. A young couple were running toward the building, his coat spread over both their heads. They were laughing. Marie smiled. Marie herself was only twenty-five. Edwin was a decade older. She wondered if that was part of his change. Maybe he resented her youth. Maybe subconsciously the discard he saw on days like today ate at him too...reminded him of his mortality, and the fact that he would never be remembered as a Barbie doll or Wurlitzer 1015 is remembered.

As she did every day, now that she accepted the fact that her husband no longer loved her, Marie tried to fathom his change. The rain helped her abstract and liberate her thoughts, and to travel back in time.

He had never been a sunny man. She had made the error, as so many women do, of mistaking surliness for sexiness. And his artistic air had been even easier to interpret as romantic. For Edwin’s true desire had been to be a painter. He hadn’t painted in two years. When she first knew him he would still contribute to the town’s annual art show, and sold the occasional piece. But even before Marie had met him he had given up trying to get backing for his own show. Now he had retreated to his world of things, no longer trying to create new things of his own. Maybe, Marie wondered, he even resented his collections for the preservation and interest he and his art would never know in future times. Or maybe vicariously he sought longevity through association. But it was all connected. Art was things too, and it was with mute things that Edwin best interacted. Because he didn’t seek true interaction. He just wanted to paint himself into an environment worthy of his complex identity. He had boasted to one drinking buddy that he was a cross between Salman Rushdie and Cat Stevens. He was misunderstood, and played that angry song by the Animals on the bogus Wurlitzer frequently.

Marie hurriedly finished up so she could dust downstairs, and steal peeks at the attractive young couple. They didn’t notice her at first, so stealthy was she in her own silence, but the girl gave her a glance. The boy gave her a glance and a second glance with a smile tossed in. Marie was beautiful—dark-haired, full-lipped, the lips ever sealed into a unit, it seemed, though she could speak in her difficult way when she occasionally chose. Large-breasted, small and slender. God, in his wise guy’s wisdom, had given her all but the ability to hear. She would have deflated her breasts for that. But then, would Edwin have married her, had she been less attractive, though hearing? She doubted it, these days. Doubted it severely. Simply because his passion for her body was as strong now as it had been five years ago. He held onto her in his private collection for that reason alone.

Maybe he had collected her for that reason alone in the first place, though now he was better able to cut his motivation down to its reality, uncluttered by pretenses to love and affection. Yes—maybe he had never loved her. Watching the couple leave the store, Marie had tears in her eyes. No, he loved me, part of her countered desperately, almost panicking at the thought. But he’s grown more and more bitter with life. He’s close to me, and that’s why he can take it out on me.

Did she believe that? She certainly wanted to. But in recent months, she had come to feel that she had always been just another blue flamingo in Edwin’s collection. A glorified, extra realistic blow-up doll you didn’t need to talk to, who couldn’t voice complaint. A beautiful mannequin, to be put away with the rest of the attic treasures when not in use.

Deaf friends Marie had known in school, but now lost track of, had been feisty, taught to be independent and bold. But in others, the world crushed that, like a tank over a foot soldier. Friday, for instance, Marie had driven to the market to do the weekly grocery shopping. On the way to and from, impatient drivers cut her off, road her tail, swore at her and thumped their wheels in frustration at her careful driving. In the store, she had to ask the man at the deli counter a question three times in order to read his lips, and she had read at last, “What are you, stupid?” A woman banged her hip with her cart without apology. Another, whose cart blocked the way, wouldn’t move it when Marie asked, forcing her to move the woman’s cart herself, in a rare act of strength. Another woman had glared and actually pulled her child away when Marie patted its head. It was all just little things. But so many, and every day. This was common life. They could do this, though they would hate to have it done to them. They simply did not empathize with one another, so obsessed were they with their own destinations and needs and desires.

And handicaps didn’t bring out the best in people, she knew...but the worst. They activated the pecking order syndrome. The abolition of the weak, the mutant. They couldn’t empathize with that, because they didn’t want to see themselves as that. Acknowledge their frailty and mortality. So it was now also with the handicap of age. Old things were hip, but old people weren’t. The mutely strutting models on MTV were desirable objects, but not the silent reality. Edwin had once told Marie, when drunk and lofty-mouthed, that Renoir nudes didn’t sweat, didn’t have periods. Marie remembered that now and cemented her conviction once and for all.

Which hurt, because, either out of programmed masochism or simply the need to feel important to at least one person in this world, Marie still loved him.

* * *

It had taken Marie a while to figure out why she had such empathy for the stuffed alligator. Her feelings for the toys and knick-knacks made more sense. Maybe because it had once been truly alive. And a baby, too. But there was a stuffed iquana, gray, its mouth filled with red-painted plaster, and some trophy heads of higher animals. It had to be that the thing was so shocking to see, its condition so cruelly unnatural and humiliating. The alligator was positioned so as to stand on its hind legs and tail, a foot tall that way. In its out-stretched arms, like Oliver Twist, it proffered a wooden bowl, presumably as a change holder. Maybe candy, depending on its artist’s perversity. Its hands were fastened to the bowl with crucifying nails. In its fanged grin it clamped the end of a red light bulb. It was a table lamp. It was the bizarre and grotesque lengths someone had gone to that so disgusted Marie, and made her hurt for the thing. Like a shrunken head, or a lamp shade made from a Jew. A blasphemous work of art.

With the ball of her thumb she lightly wiped the dust from its black, unblinking eyes. She fantasized about burying it. Looking up, she was startled to see Edwin there smiling at her derisively. He was late back from the auction, and he’d been drinking already. “I’ll cry the day I have to part with that beauty,” he told her, though not in sign language. “I should just take it upstairs.”

“It’s horrible and sick,” Marie signed to him. She hadn’t wanted to use the intimate awkwardness of her voice with him for weeks now.

“I saw you mooning over it. Don’t get disgusted at me; I didn’t kill the thing.” Edwin joined Mrs. Morris behind the counter. “I’ve loved that thing since I saw it,” he told the older woman. “Freaky.”

“You like the freaky, Ed,” she replied distractedly, otherwise occupied. Though she didn’t exaggerate her mouth’s movements, Marie could read her lips.

“When I was young you could still go to a carnival and see those deformed babies in bottles they called pickled punks, before somebody made a stink about transporting dead bodies over state lines. If I could find any of them today, I’d buy them and put them upstairs for sure. How’s that for freaky?”

“Yuck.”

“Marie.” He looked up at her. “I’m wet; go make me a cup of coffee, will ya?” He was good-naturedly ugly from drinking and from coming back empty-handed from the hunt.

Marie didn’t doubt at this moment that Edwin would also buy a shrunken head or a lamp shade of human skin if he could find them. She set aside her feather duster to go upstairs.

Freaky, her mind echoed.

* * *

The smell of sex always seemed to repulse Edwin afterwards, so he went to take one of his long, languid baths with a paperback and a Scotch Marie brought him. She left him to go down into the store, to sit by the shelf of old books and read in her own manner...maybe to fill the void of emptiness inside her with something at least dustily alive.

She chose a book she had browsed through repeatedly recently, a volume of poetry by Thomas Hardy. There was a poem there she had read last time, and she looked for it again. As she flipped through, she glanced up at the alligator standing on the glass counter beside her. She felt the strange desire to change the red bulb to a normal one, and have the creature light her reading for her. An intimacy rather than an exploitation. She didn’t do it. She had found the poem: “The Mongrel.”

The rain droned on still outside as Marie read, Mrs. Morris long gone home, to discover the bodies tomorrow upon her return.

The poem told the story of a man who could no longer afford to keep his dog, and so threw a stick into the ocean to trick it into drowning itself. The dog’s naive trust and love showed in its eyes as it bravely tried to paddle back to shore, the stick in its mouth. Finally it succumbed, however, sucked under by a strong current...but in dying, and realizing the treachery of its master in the face of its own unswerving loyalty, a look of contempt for the whole human race came into its eyes. Like a curse, wrote Hardy.

Marie empathized with the dog.

She shut the book. The salt in her tears burned the vulnerable surfaces of her eyes. She was moments from being swept under. Now she allowed herself to feel the hatred she had been repressing. It felt like a curse.

Marie rested a hand on her thigh. In Maine, as a child, when she was still considered retarded rather than deaf, a babysitter had purposely ground her heel into the top of that hand while Marie was playing on the floor.

And the thigh under her hand—Edwin even now would still kiss it, run his tongue along it. But he had also crushed that thigh in his hand recently while they were in the car, so enraged had he become at her driving. He hadn’t hit her—yet. Marie felt that first blow moving toward her through time. The bruises from his grip had taken days to fade.

Marie closed the book, slid it back into the shelf. At a table close by, she stood and gazed down at the unique items spread there. A tarnished pocket watch. Costume jewelry. Several ivory-handled straight razors, the blades old and brittle but still frighteningly sharp...

She sat back down beside the glass counter where the alligator stood, an array of African tribal masks hanging above it like an audience of spirits. Marie didn’t mind their company. They were a comfort, in fact. They could lead her away, if they wanted. She rolled up the sleeves of her bathrobe, hating the smell of sex on her now also, and anxious to escape it. She wanted to drown like the dog, in salt tears. In blood. She cursed the frail impermanence of humankind, which caused so much greedy fear. She would have plenty of time to let this happen; Edwin would remain in the tub for two hours or more, soaking himself outside and in. She reached out to the alligator...somewhat guiltily...and flicked on its bulb for the first time. Red pupils of light were reflected in the animal’s ebon eyes, and the dark glow would hopefully wash out her own vivid color when it came...but it was intimacy, not exploitation.

* * *

Mrs. Morris found Marie, and the horror of it made her scream. Pale as she was, Marie looked like a mannequin propped in her chair. Mrs. Morris called out for Edwin, and bolted upstairs to wake him...where she screamed a second time.

It was a perverse way to kill a man, the police said when they came. As perverse in imagination as the creation of that lamp in the first place. First they found a wooden bowl in the threshold of the bathroom. Then in the tub they observed the male corpse. He had died by electrocution, the cord of the lamp plugged into an outlet close at hand. But rather than simply toss the alligator lamp in there with him, the woman had gone to the trouble of stabbing the nails which protruded from the creature’s palms into the sides of her husband’s neck, so that it seemed to be strangling him.

But the sequence of all this was confusing. There was no great splashing of blood in the bathroom, so she had had to have slit her wrists after the electrocution. How, then, or when, had the woman managed that other bizarre flourish...that of wetting the hind feet of the alligator in her blood, and tracking its prints up two flights of stairs and on into the bathroom?

“Freaky,” the policemen said, in disgust of her.

—For Rose