infinities

short stories, novel extracts and a complete novelette

from infinity plus and friends

Eric Brown, John Grant, Anna Tambour, Keith Brooke, Garry Kilworth, Iain Rowan and Kaitlin Queen

Linda Nagata, Scott Nicholson, Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Steven Savile

edited by Keith Brooke

Published by

infinity plus

www.infinityplus.co.uk/books

Follow @ipebooks on Twitter

© infinity plus and contributors 2011

Cover design © Keith Brooke 2011

No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

The moral right of contributors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

Contents

infinity plus authors and their books:

Welcome

Keith Brooke: five volumes of short stories (science fiction, fantasy and horror)
— infinities includes complete short story The Man Who Built Heaven.

Eric Brown: a novella and a collection of short stories (science fiction and fantasy)
— infinities includes complete short story Venus Macabre and an extract from short novel A Writer's Life.

John Grant: a short novel and novella double and a collection of short stories (science fiction and fantasy)
— infinities includes complete novelette Wooden Horse.

Garry Kilworth: a collection of short stories (science fiction and fantasy)
— infinities includes complete short story Phoenix Man.

Kaitlin Queen: a novel (crime)
— infinities includes an extract from the novel One More Unfortunate.

Iain Rowan: a collection of short stories (crime)
— infinities includes complete short story One Step Closer.

Anna Tambour: a novel and a collection of short stories (literary fantasy and satire)
— infinities includes an extract from the novel Spotted Lily.

friends of infinity plus:

If you like what we're doing, you might also like these: titles available from other authors and publishers

Linda Nagata
— infinities includes an extract from the novel Memory.

Scott Nicholson
— infinities includes an extract from the novel The Red Church.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch
— infinities includes an extract from the novel The Disappeared.

Steven Savile
— infinities includes an extract from the novel The Immortal.

and if you really want to know more:

about infinity plus

Welcome

Welcome to infinities, an anthology of work from infinity plus ebook authors and our friends.

Is it a catalogue? Is it an anthology? Well it's a bit of both, really, but above all we hope it's a good read. In this volume you'll find not only a full listing of our available titles, but also extracts from our books, including complete short stories and one entire novelette. We've also taken the opportunity to include information and samples from other authors and publishers working in our field. So as well as acting as a guide to purchasing books, it's a book in its own right.

At infinity plus we're publishing a range of titles, bringing older works back into 'print' (often with bonus material and significant revisions by the authors), as well as producing completely new books. We hope you'll find what we're doing interesting and entertaining.

In addition to this, we're working hard to keep costs down: depending on the distributor, this sampler anthology is free or set to the lowest price possible, and most of our books are priced at $2.99 to $3.99, and most of this goes straight to the authors.

We hope you'll enjoy what we're doing, and will continue to support us!

Keith Brooke
April 2011

Coming soon from infinity plus: books from Molly Brown, Paul di Filippo, Eric Brown, John Grant, Neil Williamson, Robert Freeman Wexler and more. Follow us online for all the latest news:

web: www.infinityplus.co.uk/books

blog: keithbrooke.wordpress.com

twitter: @ipebooks

Keith Brooke

Collected short fiction, in five volumes, all stories with new afterwords by the author:

Embrace: Tales from the dark side

Eleven stories from the darkest reaches of Keith Brooke's imagination, each with a new afterword. Revisit the haunts of your youth, retell the story of your life, embrace your inner demons. Listen to the voices, go on...

Buy now: Embrace by Keith Brooke $2.99 / £2.21.

Faking It: Accounts of the General Genetics Corporation

A brash entrepreneur buys a small company as a platform for his big ideas, and the General Genetics Corporation is born. GenGen has a vision for the future of humankind, and the company will stop at nothing to get its own way. Nine stories of sex, drugs and manipulation, each with a new afterword. Includes new story "Faking It".

Buy now: Faking It by Keith Brooke $2.99 / £2.18.

Liberty Spin: Tales of scientifiction

Multiple personalities fighting for control of a single body; a single personality constantly splitting and reinventing itself and its past; a Mars that never was; an interstellar war has always been. Nine science-fiction stories from an author described by Locus as "in the recognized front ranks of SF writers".

Buy now: Liberty Spin by Keith Brooke $2.99 / £2.18.

Memesis: Modifiction and other strange changes

A world where islands of rock float on a molten sea, a man whose son flies high while he can only watch, a seaside town held together by the belief of its inhabitants. Eight stories about strange changes and the strangely changed, each with a new afterword by the author of Publishers Weekly starred novels Genetopia and The Accord. Includes new story "The Horseman of Two Torrents, or..."

Buy now: Memesis by Keith Brooke $2.99 / £2.18.

Segue: Into the strange

Sidestep into modern Himalayan legend, join an ocean crossing that traverses more than just the sea; discover an 18th century mermaid incursion, and try to dodge the paparazzi in your head. Nine stories of fantasy and the strange, including new story "Protection".

Buy now: Segue by Keith Brooke $2.99 / £2.18.

'Genetopia is quite remarkably fascinating.' —John Clute (two Genetopian stories included in Segue)

'I have read "Beside the Sea" perhaps four or five times since its original publication... It's a magical fantasy, a parable in the form of a rite-of-passage story, both frightening and bizarre... It's a story I come back to again and again, and one which I wish I had written myself - and there can be no greater recommendation than that.' —Eric Brown ("Beside the Sea" included in Memesis)

'"Jurassic and the Great Tree", with its brilliant and remorseless anthropological logic, resembles Michael Bishop at his best. But that's because it's well-argued anthropology, rather than well-copied Bishop.' —Simon Ings, Foundation (this story included in Liberty Spin)

'a dazzling work of the imagination.' —SF Site, of Brooke's The Accord (Accord story "The Man Who Built Heaven" included in Faking It)

'I am so here! Genetopia is a meditation on identity - what it means to be human and what it means to be you - and the necessity of change. It's also one heck of an adventure story. Snatch it up!' —Michael Swanwick

'if you're looking for great, well-written new science fiction novels by writers you have a reason to trust, then Brooke is now your man' — Trashotron (yes, okay, we're talking about short stories here, not novels, but what the Hell ;-))

'a progressive and skilful writer' —Peter F Hamilton

'Keith Brooke is a wonderful writer. His great gift is taking us into worlds we never imagined...' —Kit Reed

'Keith Brooke's prose achieves a rare honesty and clarity, his characters always real people, his situations intriguing and often moving.' —Jeff VanderMeer

'in the recognized front ranks of SF writers' —Locus

complete short story:
The Man Who Built Heaven by Keith Brooke

Last night I dreamed. The same old dream. The same old dream, and different every single time.

You... laughing, fooling around. To see you so liberated, so you, is a blessing in itself. I hardly need more, although... I always need more. You take my hand, lead me down to the river. Long sleek cruisers line up like toys along the far shore. A rank of needle towers, each 60 storeys high, scrapes the sky beyond them.

We walk. And talk, of childhood, of writing in chalk on the pavement outside your house, of tying skipping ropes between gate and lamp-post to snare passers-by. Of the beach nearby, childhood playground, childhood escape, shaggy dunes alternating with craggy extrusions, a row of white coastguards' cottages facing the sea. That childhood, long before you were elected.

You will take me there one day. You tell me that, in the dream, the same old, different old dream.

~

Noah Barakh tucked his head low against the drizzle and walked. The river loured, flat and grey, to his left, a scattering of tour boats lining the far shore, a single, half-constructed needle tower clawing a vertical, dark slot out of the city skyline. All around, people pressed, hurried, coats slick, breath steaming.

Noah didn't like to come to the city. As one of the principal architects of what they had recently taken to calling the Accord, Noah, if anyone, should be adept at virtual working, and his studio out in the wild Essex flood-marshes was normally his chosen place of work.

But some days there was still no substitute for an old-fashioned flesh-meet, and this was one of them.

The fact that Electee Priscilla would be at the Complex was irrelevant. Noah ducked lower against the rain. He was smiling, smiling at the pain and longing that loomed large over every aspect of his miserable, world-changing, epoch-making little life.

The doors slid open for him, greeted him cheerily; there was always a welcome for Professor Barakh. He walked into the lift and closed his eyes to deal with mail while he was whisked up to the 12th floor.

She was there already, talking intensely with Warrener, but as the door opened she looked up. Her eyes met Noah's briefly, a smile pulled at her mouth, and then she was talking again, her sentence barely interrupted. Noah and Priscilla were colleagues, she the Electee overseeing the project, he the advisor, the consultant, the architect. There was nothing more to it than that.

~

"We are building it," Noah reiterated. "It is an incremental process. With all the processing power in the world, we could not push the process much faster than we do currently."

"We run and re-run realities all the time," said Priscilla, leaning towards him across the wide meeting table. He had explained that to her months ago: so many realities needed in order to build consensus!

Noah's attention was caught by the charms hanging from a delicate silver chain around her neck. He had kissed that neck, he knew its taste, knew the soft gasp she gave in response to the touch of his lips, his teeth, his tongue. But he did not, had not. Could not.

"We do," said Noah. "It is the process. Consensual reality, however, is of a different order of magnitude. It will come when consensus has been reached, a critical mass of realities, an accord, if you will." He smiled, realising that it was the first time he had spoken the name aloud, the label the media were applying to the project: the Accord, the consensual reality that would leave all other VRs behind, a reality built from the mass of human experience, a super-city of the mind, a reality where humankind could live on after death.

Noah was its principal architect: he and his team were building the Accord. Noah Barakh knew that he would go down in history as the man who built heaven.

And every night he ran and re-ran realities, private realities, a consensus of one.

Priscilla nodded. "I'm not pushing you, Professor Barakh," she said softly, her green eyes locked on his. "I am being pushed."

In his head she pinged him, one to one, a warm hug, a friendly embrace. She didn't mean to come down on him like this, he knew.

She did not need to mention the trillions of euros that had been sunk into this, but she mentioned them still. She did not even need to push him. Noah Barakh would deliver the Accord: they all knew that. But still, they had to jump through the political hoops, and minuted records of these meetings helped tick boxes in Brussels and Shanghai.

~

We sit in a seventeenth century pub by the water. This time, this dream, we are out on the coast, a broad Essex creek laid out before us through the windows. Yachts stand higgledy-piggledy on the exposed mud, wading birds scuttle and probe, dogs walk their owners in an age-old routine.

We have just kissed across the table. We have just spent the morning making love, sunlight streaming into our room above the bar.

Your hand is on the table. I cover it with mine.

"You were so shocked!" you say, chuckling. "Even though we had always flirted like that."

"Not like that," I say.

That day, the day we are laughing about, was the day we had crossed the line. Fleetingly. For the shortest of times we had been more than Electee and consultant.

"You asked and I answered!" you say, mock-indignant.

"I asked what was on your mind, you seemed distracted."

"I was. It was a revelation to me, a paradigm shift: that moment when you changed from Professor Barakh to oh my! Something about the look in your eye just then, the way you held my gaze a moment too long..." You smile, reliving that moment, as we do so often.

"You didn't put it quite like that."

Your smile broadens. "So I was more succinct."

"You said you were imagining fucking me like there was no tomorrow."

You look down. "I shouldn't have said that."

"You should."

I dream of you. I always dream of you. I make sure that I do. I am the architect of Accord: I can run reality. I can run realities.

~

Noah had been hooked into pre-consensus Accord for most of the day. Emerging was a disorientating experience. He had been walking the streets of a consensual Manhattan, downing bourbon with Dylan Thomas in the White Horse, unconvinced as ever by the quality of the reconstruct. That was not what consensual reality was all about in any case: it was a consensus of the living, of the yet-to-die. Already, the Accord was being built from the consensus of over a million souls, and the project teams were adding more every day, batched up and re-batched into assorted realities, fractal fragments of what would become consensus. Poor Dylan was a gimmick, a toy to amuse the Electees and the media, and all he had was virtual whiskey and a way with words with which to defend himself.

Noah rose from his chaise longue and walked slowly to the window. Marie was down at the end of the garden, hacking at a rambling rose.

Noah swallowed, turned his gaze away, stared unfocused at the distant marshes; ribbons of silver water snaked through hard mud matted with samphire and purslane.

He should not feel this way. He had done nothing wrong. He had not betrayed Marie, had not once laid a finger on another woman. On the other woman. Priscilla. Not once.

He turned his back on the window.

He had betrayed Marie many times. He had the guilt many times over. He was betraying her now, always, repeatedly.

He closed his eyes: mail from Elector Burnham. Priscilla must have reported to him by now, even though Noah had given her little to report. The Elector would want hard dates, commitments, a precise measure put on the unquantifiable... When do you know that heaven has been built? When do you know it is time to open the gates? Noah knew they were close, but the gut feeling of an artist of the uber-real was not adequate for Burnham's needs.

He opened his eyes, left the mail unviewed. Let them think he was lost in his work.

He sank back onto the chaise, and was immediately back in the data shell of the Accord. It was time to reload. Those who chose to live on in the Accord after death would only do so as the last-recorded instance of themselves — the final minutes, hours, days would be lost forever, all the way back to their last upload... always working from the last snapshot of the soul. Noah had not uploaded for most of a month, preferring to let instances of himself continue to play out their existence in the Accord realities in which he had placed them. But now it really was time to reload, before anyone spotted what he had been doing.

He drifted, allowed himself to be read for change, development, difference, so that the new him would overlay any previous instances.

Outside the window, Marie sang an old pop song, something about love, always something about love.

~

"You look distracted... What's in your thoughts?" he asked Priscilla.

They were leaning close, drinking tea, peering into multiple overlays of data on the widescreen display. Noah had been trying to explain the concept of fractal realities, how they would ultimately combine to form a super-reality, an over-reality, an entire virtual universe in which the dead could live again. She understood, he knew. She was just playing dumb, teasing him, toying with him. But then... then she had paused, her eyes locked with his. Something had changed.

"You really want to know?"

He nodded.

"You sure?" Her reluctance seemed genuine now, no games.

Noah sensed boundaries being pushed, lines being redrawn. He nodded again.

"I'm thinking, well fuck, I'm thinking, Christ, I'd like to screw that man like there's no fucking tomorrow."

Noah stared. He felt his skin prickling with sudden heat. He felt his throat suddenly dry, his heart racing. He stared. I love you, he thought. He had always loved her, from the very first day.

"And now you're thinking, Christ, how do I get out of this awkard, embarrassing situation with the woman who is ten years my senior and controls my budget, aren't you?" She looked away now, down, into her steaming tea.

"No," he said softly. "I'm thinking how much I would like to kiss you right now, even though there are people in the room. I'm thinking how beautiful your eyes are — how here I am, a man trying to create perfection but who has perfection sitting right at his side. And finally, I'm thinking, Christ, yes, yes, please do fuck me like there's no tomorrow."

Warrener strode across from his console just then. "The Shanghai question?" he asked Noah.

"Hnh? Oh... Shanghai. They can wait, can't they?"

Warrener gave him a funny look and then turned away. But by then the moment was lost and Priscilla was staring into the distance, dealing with mail, moving on.

~

You take me to New York, make me walk half the length of Manhattan. We take the ferry from Battery Park out to the Statue of Liberty and climb up inside to look back upon the city. You kiss me there. Kiss me while I look back upon the city of my birth. We cross Brooklyn Bridge on foot, heading ultimately for the Heights. We both marvel and laugh at the aches and pains and fatigue we are suffering from all the walking. "This is a reality," I remind you. "It is meant to feel real!"

I am showing you my childhood haunts, distant memories as they are for me. You want to know it all, everything about me. You want to get inside my head, find the real person that I am. I have never known anything like this, an all-consuming passion to share. You know me so well already. It is a continuing cause of wonder to me that since we started this thing, we each of us have discovered a person, a lover, hidden inside the public person we already knew, and that the private you, the private me — we really are two halves of a single whole.

How could we ever have known that it would be like this? How could we ever have known what we might have been missing if we had turned away, accepted the impossibility of our relationship?

You stop me halfway across Brooklyn Bridge. I think it is to do the tourist thing and stare back at the view of the Manhattan skyline, but no: you take my face in your hands and kiss me long and hard.

"Thank you," you say, in such a quiet voice.

I raise an eyebrow. "Why?"

"Just... thank you."

You take my hand and we resume our walk. Almost at the far side, you smile at me and say, "Will you come and see where I grew up one day? I'll take you, show you everything."

I smile. We will do that.

~

It was nearly two weeks before their next encounter. Noah had mailed Priscilla, gently reminding her of their conversation, prompting her but not pressing. Priscilla had not replied.

He walked into the crowded boardroom and seated himself at one of the few remaining places.

Electee Priscilla was already there. She caught his eye immediately, held it.

Noah swallowed, looked away.

A short time later, Elector Burnham entered the room and the meeting could begin. Afterwards, there was coffee and Noah mixed with the attendees until finally his path crossed that of Priscilla.

"You know that we can't," she told him, cutting straight to the point. "It's impossible."

"'Can't'?"

"Like there's no tomorrow," she said. "Or like anything."

"You have changed your mind?"

She locked his gaze. "Not one bit," she said.

"So...?"

"Darling!" A smile broke out across her features and she turned, kissed Elector Burnham on the cheek, one hand resting lightly, briefly, on his chest.

"Elector," said Noah, bowing his head.

Burnham studied him with narrowed eyes for a moment and then smiled, and said, "Noah, you old code monkey! When're you going to be finished, eh? Heaven can't wait forever."

Later, as the crowded room started to thin, Noah got Priscilla alone again. "So tell me," he said, "why is it impossible?" He did not know why he asked, why he pushed — he had never done anything like this before, had never been so compelled.

She raised her eyebrows. "Because I am a respected Electee and you a high profile v-space architect, and if it ever got out we would both be ruined. Because I am married to a man who is not only one of our state's five Electors, but an utter ruthless bastard into the bargain. He would destroy you. He would destroy us both. And not least, Noah, because you are married too — had you forgotten that?"

"I have never done anything like this before. I have never wanted to..."

"And you won't. Not with me. I'm sorry, Noah. I should never have said what I did. It simply is not possible."

Noah smiled then... "But it is," he said. "It is."

~

Everything is new, fresh. I have been reborn, but reborn whole, adult, myself. I have been reloaded.

I am in my studio, rising from the chaise longue. I am in a reality, I know, one of the fractal realities that will contribute to consensus. Out in the garden, you are there. Priscilla. My love. The other half of me.

I remember you telling me that it wasn't to be — that "we" could never be. That it was simply not possible.

I create realities. I run and re-run realities until one day they will come together into a whole, a consensus.

In my realities we can be free, we can be us. We can be.

In my realities we can explore the selves that we hide from the world, plot the course of our love, find out what "we" really is, and can be.

I am in my studio, rising from the chaise longue. Walking towards the French windows, pushing one open, going to greet you in the garden, in our garden, in a world where all the complications, all the responsibilities and risks and assumptions — a world where all of that is as nothing.

I have been reloaded.

I go to greet you.

~

"Okay, then..." she said. She wouldn't meet his eyes and it was not simply that she was not looking directly into the cam. She would not meet his look. "Okay — come. Now. He's going back to the city for the weekend. Come to me, Noah. Prove that what you say about us is true."

Noah cut the link.

He had told her. Told her how it was, how in realities other than this, where they were able to be together, they had fallen so deeply, madly in love... gone way beyond the mutual attraction they felt now.

Finally, he had told her that he loved her — that the Priscilla he knew from meetings and consultations and social events for the project was a woman who fascinated and beguiled him.

And she had said, "Okay then..."

He pushed open the French windows of his studio, called across the garden to his wife. "Darling?" She looked. "I've been called away. London. I may be late."

She rolled her eyes and shooed him on his way. He loved her, and was surprised at his own surprise: he had always loved her. This was not about him loving or not loving Marie, it was about Priscilla, always about Priscilla.

~

She had told him to enter by the side door, that it would be open, and so he did. He had never been to this house before — a weekend home in the heart of the South Downs granted to Elector Burnham by the state.

The house gave every impression of being empty. She had told him that she and her husband had planned to be here for a quiet weekend, and that Burnham had taken his bodyguard and two assistants with him when he was called away.

Hesitantly, Noah called out, "Priscilla?" Then more loudly, "Priscilla, are you here?"

~

She was in one of the bedrooms, lying slumped on the floor, her body twisted. Blood pooled around her, staining the cream carpet almost black. Red spatters punctuated the wall and a nearby chair.

Her face was white, so deathly white, one strand of long hair trailing across her cheek, her eyes staring, unmoving.

The blood came from a gaping wound in her chest.

But she was breathing...

Noah rushed to her, kneeled, hot stickiness seeping through the knees of his trousers. He reached out a hand, tentatively touched knuckles to her cheek.

Her eyes moved, locked on him.

"N... Noah?" she gasped.

"My love..." He leaned close, her voice so faint.

"He found out..."

"Who found out?" But he did not need to ask. Burnham. The Elector had done this.

"He was suspicious. He read my mail..."

His face was almost touching hers. His tears started to fall onto her cheek.

He kissed her. Softly, briefly, on the lips. They had never kissed before now, had barely even touched, and yet he knew her so well, knew her responses, the way she moved. He knew what they could have had, what they could have been together...

~

I find you out in the marshes, walking along the seawall, arms wrapped around yourself against the stiff easterly. You have been crying; I think you still are, although you smile when you see me.

"Noah?"

I meet your look and wait.

"Why can't we be like this in reality?"

I take you in my arms now, bury my face in your hair.

"This is reality," I tell you. "It is now."

You sense something. You have always been so perceptive to subtle changes in intonation, in body language.

"What's happened, Noah?"

I tell you straight. "You are dead," I say. "Burnham became suspicious, so he read your mail, found the things we had said. He killed you. He will probably get away with it — he is an Elector, after all."

You understand immediately.

"Oh, Noah," you say, stroking my cheek. "You must hurt so badly."

Out in the real world: the grieving, the loss, the pain of holding the woman I love in my arms as she dies.

But there is more than that, the part you leave unspoken. Out in the real world, I would grieve, but then I would come to terms with loss, with a love that never really was. I would move on. With every day that passed I would move further from you.

I hold you away from me, so that you must look into my eyes. "I could not carry on without you," I tell you now. "How could I?"

Back in my studio... the drugs, they would haved been quick. I took them after I had reloaded for the last time.

This is it now. This, our reality. A fractal reality, a component of the consensus that must happen very soon now, a critical mass of consensual realities that will take on a permanence of their own, a new reality. A new heaven. A new heaven for you, Priscilla, and me.

I smile. We are together. What more could we possibly want?

"You said you were going to show me," I say now.

You look briefly puzzled.

"You said you would take me there, to the place where you grew up."

Now, at last, you manage a smile. You pull away, lead me by the hand back towards the cottage, the car. Together, Electee and Architect await the coming of consensus, of accord.

~

Afterword

Near-future wheeling and dealing with a backdrop of manipulative corporations and — later — underworld involvement in murder, people-trafficking and more. This could so easily be another GenGen story, but it's not; it heads off in other directions altogether.

"The Man Who Built Heaven" is another of those stories which, as soon as I started work on it, I knew could, and should, be part of something much larger. And so, rewritten, it forms the opening of my novel The Accord, which follows the development of Noah Barakh's virtual heaven, and the unfolding of his feud with Burnham — a feud that can never die, because the two of them can never die.

The idea came to me one morning when I was driving to work at my local university. Originally it was going to be a fantasy story: the tale of an emperor's trusted advisor who falls in love with the emperor's wife; the only way they can pursue this love is in a magical fantasy world of the advisor's creation. I shifted it to science fiction rather than fantasy because I wanted to ground it firmly in the here and now: it was far more interesting to me for a story that spanned millennia to start close to the present day. The Accord is the novel I'm most happy with; it really stretched me to write it and the end result comes close to what I was trying to achieve. And it's the only novel I've written that has inspired someone to approach me in the street and ask how on Earth I came up with as twisted and nasty a character as one of the main figures in the story. I took that as a compliment.

Copyright information
© Keith Brooke 2008, 2011
"The Man Who Built Heaven" was first published in Postscripts in 2008, and is reprinted in the infinity plus ebook Faking It by Keith Brooke:

Buy now: Faking It by Keith Brooke $2.99 / £2.18.

Eric Brown

The Angels of Life and Death

The Angels of Life and Death collects ten science fiction stories from two times winner of the BSFA short story award Eric Brown. From cyberpunk visions of post-human futures to traditional tales of alien encounter and time travel, what connects these tales are Brown's storytelling ability and his concern for the human element. Whether he's writing about telepaths fleeing alien assassins on a vast spaceport city in the Bay of Bengal, or a woman reporter finding true love in the far, far future, Brown imbues his fictions with a concern for character and headlong narrative pace.

Buy now: The Angels of Life and Death by Eric Brown $2.99 / £2.21.

'SF infused with a cosmopolitan and literary sensibility' — Paul McAuley

'He is a masterful storyteller. — Strange Horizons

'Eric Brown joins the ranks of Graham Joyce, Christopher Priest and Robert Holdstock as a master fabulist' — Paul di Filippo

complete short story:
Venus Macabre by Eric Brown

Devereaux chose Venus as the venue for his last public performance for two main reasons: the stars cannot be seen from the surface of the planet, and Venus is where he first died.

His performance parties are the event of the social calandar on whichever world he visits. The rich and famous are gathered tonight on the cantilevered patio of Manse Venusia, deep within the jungle of the southern continent: film stars and their young escorts, ambassadors and ministers of state, artists and big-name critics. They are all here, come to witness Jean-Philipe Devereaux perform what Le Figaro once described, before the Imams invoked the sharia on Earth and censored the reporting of such decadence, as 'an event of diabolical majesty!'

Devereaux wears a white silk suit, Italian cut, long-lapelled. He moves from group to group with ease and grace. He converses knowledgeably with politicians and film stars, scientists and karque-hunters alike. His reputation as a polymath precedes him; intellectuals queue to fox him, in vain, with the latest conundrums of the age. He seems to have an intimate understanding of every philosophy and theory under the three hundred-and-counting suns of the Expansion.

Many guests, hoping that they might fathom the mystery of the man, find after a few minute's conversation that he is an enigma too deep to plumb. A paradox, also. He talks about everything, everything, but his art. The implication is that his art speaks for itself. Guests speculate that his pre-show ritual of socialisation — a bestowing upon them of his brilliance — is a ploy to point up the disparity between the urbanity of the man and the barbarity of his act, thereby commenting on the dichotomy inherent in the human condition. At least, this is the theory of those who have never before witnessed his performances. The guests who have followed his act from planet to planet around the Expansion know not to make such naive assumptions: his art is more complicated than that, they say, or alternatively more simple. One guest alone, beneath the arching crystal dome, speculates that his creations are nothing more than a catharsis, a blowing-out of the intense psychological pressures within his tortured psyche.

"By the way," Devereaux quips, almost as an afterthought, to each clique, "this will be my very last public performance."

He registers their surprise, their shock, and then the dawning realisation that they will witness tonight that pinnacle of performance arts, the ultimate act.

Devereaux moves from the marbled patio, up three steps to the bar. As he pours himself a cognac, he disengages from his Augmentation — that part of him he calls the Spider, which he employs in conversation with his guests — and descends to the biological. The descent is a merciful relief. He leaves behind the constant white noise of guilt which fills the Spider with despair. As he settles himself into his biological sensorium, he can tolerate the remorse: it simmers in his subconscious, emerging only occasionally in berserker fits of rage and self-loathing. He downs the cognac in one.

Devereaux turns to the guests gathered below and experiences a wave of hatred and disgust. He despises their ignorance. More, he despises their lack of understanding, their easy acceptance that what he lays before them is the epitome of fine art. He tells himself that he should not submit to such anger. Their very presence, at one thousand units a head, more than subsidises the cost of his therapy.

Across the crowded patio he catches sight of a familiar figure, and wonders if he is the exception. He did not invite Daniel Carrington; he came as the friend of a guest. Carrington stands in conversation with a Terraform scientist. He is tall and dark-haired. The perfection of his face is marred by a deep scar which runs down his forehead, between his eyes, over the bridge of his nose and across his left cheek. He was attacked six months ago by an irate subscriber to Venus-Satellite Vid-Vision, on which he hosts the most watched, though at the same time most hated, prime-time show. Carrington films suicides in the act of taking their lives. He employs an empath to locate potential subjects, and a swoop-team of camera-people and engineers. He films the death and follows it up with an in-depth psychological profile of the individual's life and their reasons for ending it. Wherever he is in the Expansion, Devereaux makes a point of watching the show. There is no doubting Carrington's sincerity, his humanitarianism, and yet although the programme is watched by everyone, he is universally reviled: it is as if his viewers, needing to transfer their guilt at their voyeurism, find in Daniel Carrington an obvious scapegoat... When he was attacked last year, he chose not to have the evidence of his mutilation repaired. He wears his wounds as the ultimate exhibition of defiant iconography.

Devereaux thinks that Carrington might be the only person in all the Expansion capable of understanding him.

He lays his glass aside and claps his hands.

"Ladies and gentlemen, if you please. I beg your indulgence."

Faces stare up at him.

He begins by telling them the story of the benign dictator of Delta Pavonis III, who loved his people and whose people loved him; a man of wisdom, wit and charm, who was assassinated long before resurrection techniques became the plaything of the ultra-rich.

"Tonight you will witness the tragedy of his demise."

He leads them from the dome and out onto the deck of the split-level garden, into the balmy sub-tropical night. On the lower deck is a stage, and before it the holographic projection of a crowd. The guests look down on a scene long gone, something quaint and maybe even poignant in the odd architecture of the stage, the costumes and coiffures of the colonists.

Devereaux descends to the lower deck, walks among the spectral crowd. They respond, cheer him. Something has happened to his appearance. He no longer resembles Jean-Philipe Devereaux. Projectors have transformed him into the double of the dictator. He mounts the stage and begins a speech. He recounts the life of the dictator, his theories and ideals.

The social elite of Venus watch, entranced.

Devereaux gestures.

Seconds before he is flayed alive in the laser crossfire, he sees Daniel Carrington staring down at him in appalled fascination. Then all is light as a dozen laser bolts find their target.

Purely as visual effect, his demise is beautiful to behold. His body is struck by the first laser; it drills his chest, turning him sideways. The second strikes laterally into his ribcage, compensating the turn and giving his already dying body the twitching vitality of a marionette. Then a dozen other bolts slam into him, taking the meat from his bones in a spectacular ejection of flesh and blood. For a fraction of a second, though it seems longer to the spectators, his skull remains suspended in mid-air — grotesquely connected to his flayed spinal cord — before it falls and rolls away.

Then darkness, silence.

After an initial pause, a period during which they are too shocked and stricken to move, the guests return inside. They are quiet, speaking barely in whispers as they try to evaluate the merit of the performance as a work of art.

On the darkened deck below, the hired surgeons and their minions are conscientiously gathering together Devereaux's remains. Hovering vacuums inhale his atomised body fluids; robot-drones collect the shards of bone and flaps of flesh. His skull has come to rest in one corner, grinning inanely.

From the circular orbit of the left eye socket, a silver ovoid the size of a swan's egg slowly emerges. A polished dome shows first, then pauses. Next, a long, jointed leg pulls itself free of the constriction, then another and another, until all eight are extricated. The Spider stands, straddling the ivory, grinning skull. Devereaux, with a three hundred and sixty degree view of the surrounding deck and the salvage work going on there, tests the Spider's spindly limbs one by one. When he has mastery of their movement, he hurries off towards the dome. The legs lift high and fast with an impression of mincing fastidiousness as he skitters through the bloody remains.

Locked within the digitised sensorium of the Spider, Devereaux is a prisoner of the guilt that suffuses the analogue of his mind. At least, when he inhabits his physical self, the guilt shunts itself off into the storage of his subconscious for long periods. The memory of his sins, his remorse and regret, have no refuge in the Spider: they are all up front, demanding attention. He cries out in silence for the refuge of his biological brain. He does not know how he will tolerate the next seven days, while the surgeons rebuild his body.

He scuttles up a ramp, through the garden and into the dome where the guests are gathered. A dozen of his spider-like toys scurry hither and yon, affording him the perfect cover.

He finds Carrington and climbs onto the back of an empty chair. He stands and watches, his body pulsing on the sprung suspension of his silver limbs.

"Perhaps," Carrington is saying, "rather than viewing his art from the standpoint of trying to work out what he means, what we should be asking ourselves is why? Why does he employ this macabre art form in the first place?"

There is silence around the table.

"Maybe," Carrington goes on, "the answer lies not so much in Devereaux's attempting to come to terms with the outside world, but with the monster that inhabits the darkness of his inner self."

Carrington turns his head and looks at the Spider, but his eyes do not dwell long enough for Devereaux to be sure if he knows for certain.

"I've heard it said that our host was once a starship pilot."

The Spider climbs down from the chair and skitters across the marble floor towards the darkness of the manse.

~

For Devereaux, the seven days he is captive in the Spider seem like as many years. Never has he known the time to pass so slowly. While he exists within the Spider he cannot sleep, nor shut down the process of intellection. The unbearable recollections from all those years ago howl without cessation in his awareness.

On the eighth day he is restored to his biological self. It is like coming home, returning to a familiar, comfortable domicile. He hurries to the lounge and checks his video and com for calls. There is a communiqué from Daniel Carrington. Will Devereaux care to meet him in Port City, to discuss a business proposal?

That evening, Devereaux sits in a leather armchair overlooking the jungle. He is aware of the degeneration of his body. He is exhausted. His bones ache. He is beset by irregular muscular spasms, hot and cold flushes and bouts nausea. This is to be expected. How many times has this body died, and been put back together again? Fifteen, twenty? Devereaux gives thanks that soon it will all be over. He looks ahead to his rendezvous with Carrington, the confession he will make to someone who will understand his guilt.

~

Devereaux hires a chauffeured air-car to transport him the five hundred kilometres to Port City. The metropolis has changed since his first visit to Venus, twenty years ago. Then it was little more than the beachhead settlement of an infant colony, struggling for autonomy from Earth. Now it is a thriving community the size of Tokyo or Rio, grown rich from the mining of the planet's many natural resources.

The air-car descends and speeds through the twilight streets to the headquarters of VenuSat, the station with which Carrington has his show.

He takes an elevator to the penthouse suite. A servant shows him along a corridor and into a large, glass-enclosed room, more like a greenhouse than a lounge, filled with a riot of brilliant blooms and vines. A white grand piano occupies an area of carpeted floor before a view of the illuminated city. Black and white photographs stare at him from every wall. He recognises them as the late subjects of Carrington's shows.

Carrington himself, urbane in a black roll-neck jacket and tight leggings, emerges from behind a stand of cacti.

He smiles and takes Devereaux's hand.

"So pleased..." he murmurs. The livid, diagonal scar that bisects his face is wax-like in the dim lighting.

"I conducted a little wager with myself that you would be in touch," Devereaux says.

"I found your final performance..." Carrington pauses, searching for the right word "...fascinating. Would you care for a drink?" He moves to the bar and pours two generous cognacs.

"Of everyone present that night," Devereaux says, "your speculations came closest to the truth."

Carrington affects surprise — but it is just that, an affectation. "They did?"

"You saw through the charade of the so-called 'act' and realised that it was nothing more than a rather self-indulgent form of therapy."

Carrington makes a modest gesture, not owning to such insight.

"I presume," Devereaux goes on, "that you summoned me here to find out why, why for the past twenty years I have indulged in such psychotherapy?"

He suspects that Carrington is wary of coming right out and saying that he wishes to record his very last act. Devereaux has the reputation of a temperamental recluse, an artist who might not view kindly the trivialisation of his death on prime-time vid-vision.

But why else did Carrington summon him, other than to secure the rights to his ultimate performance?

Carrington surprises him by saying, casually, "But I know why you have resorted to these acts."

"You do?" Devereaux walks to the wall-window and stares out at the scintillating city. Surely, even so celebrated a journalist as Daniel Carrington could not successfully investigate events so far away, so long ago?

He turns, facing Carrington. "Perhaps you would care to explain?"

"By all means," Carrington says. "First, Jean-Philipe Devereaux is a non-de-plume, the name you took when you began your performances."

"Bravo!"

"Please, hear me out. Your real name is Jacques Minot, born in Orleans, 2060. You trained at the Orly Institute in Paris, graduated with honours and joined the Chantilly Line as a co-pilot on the bigship Voltaire's Revenge."

Devereaux — for although Carrington is correct, he will be Devereaux to his dying day — hangs an exaggerated bow. "I applaud your investigative skills, M. Carrington." He is oddly disturbed by the extent of Carrington's knowledge. He wanted to confess to him, admittedly — but in his own time.

Carrington continues, "You served on the Voltaire for ten years, then twenty years ago you were promoted to pilot and given your own 'ship, the Pride of Bellatrix. The same year you made the 'push to Janus, Aldebaran, and on the darkside of that planet something happened."

"But you don't know what?" He feels relief that Carrington does not know everything, that he will after all be able to confess.

"No, I do not know what happened," Carrington says. "But I know that it was enough to make you quit your job and perfect your bizarre art."

"I must applaud you. I never thought I would live to hear my past delineated with such clinical objectivity." He pauses. "But tell me — if you know nothing about what happened on Janus, how can you be so sure of my guilt?"

Carrington smiles, almost to himself. "You were a little insane when you landed on Venus all those years ago — perhaps you still are. You found a street kid. You gave him your laser and a lot of creds and told him to burn a hole in your head. You told him that you deserved it. Not that he needed any justification — all he wanted was the cash. But he couldn't bring himself to laser your head. He put a hole in your heart instead, figuring it was all the same anyway — you'd be just as dead. Except it wasn't the same at all. When the medics found that you were carrying a pilot's Spider Augmentation and had the creds to pay for rehabilitation, they brought you back. After that..." Carrington shrugs. "I think you developed a taste for dying as a way of assuaging your conscience. You turned it into an art form and it paid for your resurrections."

Devereaux says, "I take it you found the boy?"

Carrington makes a non-committal gesture, as if to say that he cannot divulge his sources.

Outside, lightning zigzags from the dense cloudrace, filling the room with an actinic stutter. Seconds later a cannonade of thunder trundles overhead.

"How did you find out?" Devereaux asks. "About my past, about what I intend to do?"

"What do you intend, M. Devereaux?"

Carrington's attitude surprises him. What might he gain by feigning ignorance?

"Let me proposition you, M. Carrington. You can have the exclusive rights to my absolute suicide, if you will listen to my confession..." Such a small price to pay.

"Your suicide?"

"Not just another performance — this will be the real thing. I have played with death long enough to know that nothing but true extinction can pay for what I did. Or did you think I planned an ultimate physical suicide, and that I intended to live on in my Augmentation, immortal? Now that would be a living hell!"

But Daniel Carrington is shocked. He stares at Devereaux, slowly shaking his head.

"No..." he says. "No, I can't let you do that."

Devereaux is flustered. "But come, isn't that why you wanted to see me? To arrange to broadcast the ultimate event?"

From the inside of his roll-neck jacket, Carrington withdraws a pistol. It is a karque-hunter's dart gun. He holds it in both hands and levels it at Devereaux.

"Do you think for a minute that I like what I do, M. Devereaux?"

"Why, my dear man..."

"Do you think I enjoy living with death? Christ, everyone on the planet despises me. I have this..." he gestures to his scarred face "...as a continual reminder."

Devereaux tries to be placatory. He is non-plussed.

"You didn't want to meet me to ask my permission—?" he begins.

"I asked you here to kill you," Carrington smiles.

Devereaux is sardonic. "With that?" he says. "My dear man, you'll need more than a dart gun to destroy my Spider." He pauses, peering at him. "But why?" he whispers.

"I've hated you for so long, Devereaux," Carrington smiles. "Of course, I naturally assumed you were dead — but I still felt hatred."

~

"You...?" Devereaux says. He recalls the kid he picked up, all those years ago.

"I didn't realise you'd survived, you see," Carrington says. "All I could think about was that you'd used me to kill yourself." He pauses. "Then I saw your picture on the vid, read about your forthcoming trip to Venus — and I knew I needed revenge. I had to kill you."

He fires without warning. The bolt hits Devereaux in the chest and kills him instantly — kills, that is, the body, the meat, the biological entity that is Jean-Philipe Devereaux. As the body falls to the floor, Devereaux finds himself in the sensorium of his Spider.

"Monsieur Carrington..." His transistorised voice issues from his unmoving lips. "There is a laser in the inside pocket of my jacket. If you set it at maximum, it will despatch my Augmentation."

Carrington is standing over him, staring down.

"But first..." Devereaux pleads. "First, please, let me confess."

"No!"

Carrington steps forward, slips a small laser from his jacket.

"That..." the Spider says "...is hardly powerful enough."

"For the past five years I've dreamed of this moment."

"Please, my confession!"

"I dreamed of putting you to death, Devereaux — but that would be too good for you."

Devereaux screams a hideous, "No!"

Carrington lifts the laser and, with an expression of revulsion, fires and separates Devereaux's head from his shoulders. He grasps the a hank of hair and lifts the head. Dimly, thorough failing eyes, Devereaux makes out on Carrington's features an expression of supreme satisfaction. "That would be far, far too good for you."

~

Time passes...

Devereaux has known seven days as a prisoner in his Spider — in one case ten days — but always these periods were made tolerable by the knowledge that soon he would be returned to his body. Now there is no such knowledge. Upon killing him, Carrington bisected his head and fished out the Spider, bound his limbs and imprisoned him within a black velvet pouch, so that he did not have even the compensation of vision with which to distract his attention from the inevitable... He had only his memories, which returned him again and again to the darkside of Janus.

At spiraldown, his co-pilot had withdrawn from the net, left Devereaux — or Minot, as he was then — to oversee the simple docking procedure. Devereaux had disengaged from his Spider a fraction of a second too soon, forgetting that he was on the darkside of Janus, where icy, hurricane-force winds scoured the port. He had not been paying attention, had been looking forward to his leave instead. The Spider would have been able to save the ship — calculated the realignment co-ordinates pulsed from the control tower — but Devereaux had no hope of processing so much information in so short a time. The Pride of Bellatrix overshot the dock and exploded into the terminal building, incinerating a hundred port workers, as well as the ship's three hundred passengers, beyond any chance of resurrection...

Devereaux alone had survived.

His dreams are forever filled with the faces of the dead, their screams, and the unremitting stars of darkside illuminating a scene of carnage.

~

Devereaux calculates that one week has passed when Daniel Carrington unties the pouch and daylight floods in. He expects Carrington to have devised for him some eternal torture: he will entomb him in concrete and pitch him into the deep Venusian sea, or bury him alive in the wilderness of the central desert.

Carrington lifts him from the velvet pouch.

Devereaux makes out the turgid Venusian overcast, and then the expanse of an ocean far below. They are on a chromium catwalk which follows the peak of a volcanic ridge. This is a northern tourist resort; silver domes dot the forbidding grey mountain-side.

Carrington turns and walks along a promontory overlooking the sea. Devereaux knows, with terrible foresight, what Carrington has planned.

Carrington holds the Spider before his eyes. Devereaux tries to struggle, realises then with mounting panic that his legs have been removed. Even his only means of psychological release, a scream, is denied him.

"I've had a long time to think about what I should do with you," Carrington whispers. "At first I wanted to kill you."

Devereaux cries a silent: No! He knows now that Carrington will pitch him into the sea, and that he will remain there for ever, alone with his memories and his remorse. He tries to conceive of an eternity of such torture, but his mind baulks at the enormity of the prospect.

"And then, when you told me that you intended to kill yourself anyway, I decided that there was another way of punishing you."

No! Devereaux yells to himself.

Carrington is shaking his head.

"But to do that would be as great a crime as doing what I thought I had done to you, twenty years ago." He stares off into the distance, reliving the past. "Perhaps the only way I can cure myself, Devereaux, is by saving you — and the only way I can save you is by destroying you."

Carrington turns then and strides along the catwalk. Seconds later he is standing on a railed gallery, a fumarole brimming with molten lava to his left. To his right, the ocean surges.

"Which way?" Carrington says. "Left, or right?"

He smiles. "Oblivion, or eternal torment?"

Oh, oblivion! Devereaux cries to himself.

Carrington smiles. He is not a cruel man, despite what people think. With little ceremony, he hefts the remains of the Spider and pitches it from the gallery.

Devereaux gives thanks to Daniel Carrington as he tumbles through the air. The seconds seem to expand to fill aeons. He experiences a surge of relief, and for the very last time the pain of guilt.

Devereaux hits the lava, and the casing of the Spider melts in the molten stream, and then he feels nothing.

Copyright information
© Eric Brown 1998, 2011
"Venus Macabre" was first published in Aboriginal SF in 1998, and is reprinted in the infinity plus ebook The Angels of Life and Death by Eric Brown:

Buy now: The Angels of Life and Death by Eric Brown $2.99 / £2.21.

A Writer's Life, by Eric Brown

Mid-list writer Daniel Ellis becomes obsessed with the life and work of novelist Vaughan Edwards, who disappeared in mysterious circumstances in 1996. Edwards' novels, freighted with foreboding tragedy and a lyrical sense of loss, echo something in Ellis's own life. His investigations lead Ellis ever deeper into the enigma that lies at the heart of Vaughan Edwards' country house, Edgecoombe Hall, and the horror that dwells there. In a departure from his science fiction roots, Eric Brown has written a haunting novella that explores the essence of creativity, the secret of love, and the tragedy that lies at the heart of human existence.

Buy now: A Writer's Life by Eric Brown $2.99 / £2.23.

"British writing with a deft, understated touch: wonderful" — New Scientist

"One of the very best of the new generation of British SF writers" — Vector

"Eric Brown has an enviable talent for writing stories which are the essence of modern science fiction and yet show a passionate concern for the human predicament and human values" — Bob Shaw

extract: A Writer's Life by Eric Brown

Edwards, Vaughan, (1930-1996?). English novelist, author of twelve novels and two collections of stories. His first novel, Winter at the Castle, (1951), received considerable critical acclaim but, like much of his subsequent output, little widespread popularity. Edwards was very much a writer's writer, eschewing the trappings of sensationalism in his fiction and concentrating instead on his own peculiar and unique vision. In book after book, this singular novelist wrote of a rural England haunted by ghosts of the past—both the spirits of humans and the more metaphorical apparitions of times long gone. The novel considered his finest, The Miracle at Hazelmere, (1968), tells, in his customary highly wrought prose, the story of William Grantham, an estranged and embittered artist, and his (perhaps imaginary—it is never revealed) affair with the phantom of a sixteen year-old girl from the Elizabethan period. This novel, in common with the rest of his oeuvre, contains much striking imagery, pathos and a yearning for a long gone era of bucolic certainty. Artists and loners burdened with tragic pasts appear again and again in his writing, and there is speculation that the novels and stories drew much from the author's own life, though, as Edwards was an intensely private person, this has never been confirmed. Critics generally agree that his final novels, the Secrets of Reality series, marked the artistic low-point of his career. Though beautifully written, and containing much of ideative interest, the novels, beginning with Those Amongst Us, (1990), continuing with A Several Fear, (1993), and The Secret of Rising Dene, (1996), show an obsessive preoccupation with the arcane, and found only a narrow readership. The series, a projected quartet, was unfinished at the time of the author's mysterious disappearance in the winter of 1996.

From the Encyclopaedia of Twentieth Century British Novelists, Macmillan, third edition, 1998.

~

The above entry was the first mention I had ever heard of the writer Vaughan Edwards. I was surprised that I had never happened upon his work, as I have a pretty comprehensive knowledge of British writers of the last century and especially those publishing after the Second World War. The discovery filled me with a wonderful sense of serendipitous anticipation: there was something about the entry that told me I would take to the novels of Vaughan Edwards. The fact that he was relatively unknown now, and little regarded during his lifetime, gave me the sense that I would be performing a service to the memory of the man who had devoted his life, as the entry stated, to 'his own peculiar and unique vision'. Perhaps what gave me a certain empathy with the novelist was that I too was an unsuccessful writer, the author of half a dozen forgotten novels, as well as over fifty short stories buried away in long-defunct small-press magazines and obscure anthologies.

I showed the entry to Mina. For some reason—perhaps subsequent events have branded the very start of the episode on my consciousness—I recall the night well. It had been a grey, misty day in early November; a gale had blown up after dinner, and now a rainstorm lashed the windows of the cottage, instilling in me the romantic notion that we were aboard a storm-tossed galleon upon the high seas.

Mina was reading in her armchair before the blazing fire. Her favourites were the classic Victorians, the Brontës, Eliot and the rest. Now she lay the well-read paperback edition of Wuthering Heights upon her lap and blinked up at me, perhaps surprised at the summons back to the present day.

I set the thick tome on the arm of the chair and tapped the page with my forefinger. "Why on earth haven't I come across him before?"

She pushed her reading glasses up her nose, pulled a frown, and read the entry. A minute later she looked up, a characteristic, sarcastic humour lighting her eyes. "Perhaps because he's probably even more obscure and terrible than all those others you go on about."

I leaned over and kissed her forehead. She laughed. The masochist in me found delight in setting myself up as the butt of her disdain.

I relieved her of the volume, sat before the fire and reread the entry.

Why was it that even then I knew, with a stubborn, innate certainty, that I would take to the works of this forgotten writer? There was enough in the entry to convince me that I had stumbled across a fellow romantic, someone obscurely haunted by an inexplicable sense of the tragedy that lies just beneath the veneer of the everyday—or perhaps I was flattering myself with knowledge gained of hindsight.

Mina stretched and yawned. "I'm going to bed. I'm on an early tomorrow. Come up if you want."

Even then, a year into our relationship, I was insecure enough to ascribe to her most innocent statements an ulterior intent. I remained before the fire, staring at the page, the words a blur, and tried to decide if she meant that she wished to sleep alone tonight.

At last, chastising myself for being so paranoid, I joined her in bed. Rain doused the skylight and wind rattled the eaves. I eased myself against her back, my right arm encircling her warm body, and closed my eyes.

~

Though the novels of Daniel Ellis are founded on a solid bedrock of integrity and honesty, yet they display the flaws of an excessive emotionalism which some might find over-powering.

From Simon Levi's review of the novel Fair Winds by Daniel Ellis.

~

But for Mina, I would never have come upon Vaughan Edwards' novel A Bitter Recollection. During the month following my discovery of his entry in the encyclopaedia, I wrote to a dozen second-hand bookshops enquiring if they possessed copies of any of his works.

Of the three replies I received, two had never heard of him, and a third informed me that in thirty years of bookdealing he had come across only a handful of Edwards' titles. I made enquiries on the Internet, but to no avail.

I forgot about Vaughan Edwards and busied myself with work. I was writing the novelisation of a children's TV serial at the time, working three hours in the mornings and taking the afternoons off to potter about the garden, read, or, if Mina was not working, drive into the Dales.

It was an uncharacteristically bright, but bitterly cold, day in mid-December when I suggested a trip to York for lunch and a scout around the bookshops.

As I drove, encountering little traffic on the mid-week roads, Mina gave me a running commentary on her week at work.

I listened with feigned attention. The sound of her voice hypnotised me. She had a marked Yorkshire accent that I have always found attractive, and an inability to pronounce the letter r. The word 'horrible', which she used a lot, came out sounding like 'howwible'. Perhaps it was the contradiction of the conjunction between the childishness of some of her phrases, and her stern and unrelenting practicality and pragmatism, which I found so endearing.

She was a State Registered Nurse and worked on the maternity ward of the general hospital in the nearby town of Skipton. In the early days of our relationship I was conscious, perhaps to the point of feeling guilty, of how little I worked in relation to her. I could get away with three or four hours a day at the computer, five days a week, and live in reasonable comfort from my output of one novel and a few stories and articles every year. By contrast Mina worked long, gruelling shifts, looked after her two girls for three and a half days a week, and kept up with the daily household chores. When I met her she was renting a two-bedroom terrace house, which ate up most of her wage, and yet I never heard her complain. She had just walked out on a disastrous marriage that had lasted a little over eight years, and she was too thankful for her new-found freedom to worry about things like poverty and overwork.

Her practical attitude to life amazed me—me, who found it hard to manage my bank balance, who found the mundane chores of daily life too much of a distraction...

She once accused me of having it too easy, of never having to face real hardship, and I had to agree that she was right.

There were times, though, when her pragmatism did her a disservice. She often failed to appreciate the truly wondrous in life: she fought shy of my romanticism as if it were a disease. She could be cutting about my flights of fancy, my wild speculations about life on other worlds, the possibilities of the future. On these occasions she would stare at me, a frown twisting her features, and then give her head that quick irritable, bird-like shake. "But what does all that matter!" she would say—as if all that did matter was a strict and limiting adherence to the banality of the everyday. She had gone through a lot: she was content with her present, when compared to her past. She feared, I thought, the uncertainty of the future.

We never argued about our differences, though. I loved her too much to risk creating a rift.

"Daniel," she said, her sudden sharp tone causing me to flinch. "You're miles away. You haven't been listening to a word... I might as well be talking to myself!"

"I was thinking about a dream I had last night."

Why did I say this? I knew that she hated hearing about my dreams. She didn't dream herself, or if she did then she failed to recall them. It was as if the evidence of my over-active sleeping imagination was something that she could not understand, or therefore control.

I had dreamed of meeting a fellow writer in an ancient library filled with mouldering tomes. I had gestured around us, implying without words the insignificance of our efforts to add our slight fictions to the vast collection.

The writer had smiled, his face thin, hair gun-metal grey—a weathered and experienced face. He replied that the very act of imagining, of creating worlds that had never existed, was the true measure of our humanity.

The dream had ended there, faded from my memory even though I retained the subtle, nagging impression that our conversation had continued. Even stranger was the fact that, when I awoke, I was filled with the notion that my partner in the library had been Vaughan Edwards.

More than anything I wanted to recount my dream to Mina, but I was too wary of her scepticism. I wanted to tell her that to create worlds that had never existed was the true measure of our humanity.

~

I frequently feel the need to lie about my profession. When people ask what I do, I want to answer anything but that I am a freelance writer. I am sick and tired of repeating the same old clichés in response to the same old questions. When I told Mina this, she was horrified, appalled that I should lie about what I do. Perhaps it's because Mina is so sparing with the details of her personal life that she feels the few she does divulge must be truthful, and cannot imagine anyone else thinking otherwise.

From the personal journals of Daniel Ellis.

~

We parked on the outskirts and walked across the Museum Street bridge and into the city centre. Even on a freezing winter Thursday the narrow streets were packed with tourists, those latter-day disciples of commerce: mainly diminutive, flat-footed Japanese with their incorrigible smiles and impeccable manners. We took in one bookshop before lunch, an expensive antiquarian dealer situated along Petergate. Mina lost herself in the classics section, while I scanned the packed shelves for those forgotten fabulists of the forties, fifties and sixties, De Polnay and Wellard, Standish and Robin Maugham, minor writers who, despite infelicities, spoke to something in my soul. They were absent from the shelves of this exclusive establishment—their third-rate novels neither sufficiently ancient, nor collectable enough, to warrant stocking.

Mina bought a volume of Jane Austen's letters, I an early edition of Poe. We emerged into the ice-cold air and hurried to our favourite tea-room.

Was it a failing in me that I preferred to have Mina to myself—the jealous lover, hoarding his treasure? I could never truly appreciate her when in the company of others. I was always conscious of wanting her attention, of wanting to give her my full attention, without being observed.

One to one we would chat about nothing in particular, the people we knew in town, friends, incidents that had made the news. That day she asked me how the book was going, and I tried to keep the weariness from my tone as I recounted the novelisation's hackneyed storyline.

Early in our relationship I had told her that my writing was just another job, something I did to keep the wolf from the door. I had been writing for almost twenty-five years, and though the act of creating still struck me as edifying and worthwhile, it no longer possessed the thrill I recalled from the first five years. She had said that I must be proud of what I did, and I replied that pride was the last thing I felt.

She had looked at me with that cool, assessing gaze of hers, and said, "Well, I'm proud of you."

Now I ate my salad sandwich and fielded her questions about my next serious novel.

How could I tell her that, for the time being, I had shelved plans for the next book, the yearly novel that would appear under my own name? The last one had sold poorly; my editor had refused to offer an advance for another. My agent had found some hackwork to tide me over, and I had put off thinking about the next Daniel Ellis novel.

I changed the subject, asked her about her sister, Liz, and for the next fifteen minutes lost myself in contemplation of her face: square, large-eyed, attractive in that worn, mid-thirties way that signals experience with fine lines about the eyes. The face of the woman I loved.

We left the tea-room and ambled through the cobbled streets towards the Minster. She took my arm, smiling at the Christmas window displays on either hand.

Then she stopped and tugged at me. "Daniel, look. I don't recall..."

It was a second-hand bookshop crammed into the interstice between a gift shop and an establishment selling a thousand types of tea. The lighted window displayed a promising selection of old first editions. Mina was already dragging me inside.

The interior of the premises opened up like an optical illusion, belying the parsimonious dimensions of its frontage. It diminished in perspective like a tunnel, and narrow wooden stairs gave access to further floors.

Mina was soon chatting to the proprietor, an owl-faced, bespectacled man in his seventies. "We moved in just last week," he was saying. "Had a place beyond the Minster—too quiet. You're looking for the Victorians? You'll find them in the first room on the second floor."

I followed her up the precipitous staircase, itself made even narrower by shelves of books on everything from angling to bee-keeping, gardening to rambling.

Mina laughed to herself on entering the well-stocked room and turned to me with the conspiratorial grin of the fellow bibliophile. While she lost herself in awed contemplation of the treasures in stock, I saw a sign above a door leading to a second room: Twentieth Century Fiction.

I stepped through, as excited as a boy given the run of a toyshop on Christmas Eve.

The room was packed from floor to ceiling with several thousand volumes. At a glance I knew that many dated from the thirties and forties: the tell-tale blanched pink spines of Hutchinson editions, the pen and ink illustrated dust-jackets so popular at the time. The room had about it an air of neglect, the junk room where musty volumes were put out to pasture before the ultimate indignity of the council skip.

I found a Robert Nathan for one pound, a Wellard I did not posses for £1.50. I remembered Vaughan Edwards, and moved with anticipation to the E section. There were plenty of Es, but no Edwards.

I moved on, disappointed, but still excited by the possibility of more treasures to be found. I was scanning the shelves for Rupert Croft-Cooke when Mina called out from the next room, "Daniel. Here."

She had a stack of thick volumes piled beside her on the bare floorboards, and was holding out a book to me. "Look."

I expected some title she had been looking out for, but the book was certainly not Victorian. It had the modern, maroon boards of something published in the fifties.

"Isn't he the writer you mentioned the other week?"

I read the spine. A Bitter Recollection—Vaughan Edwards.

I opened the book, taking in the publishing details, the full-masted galleon symbol of the publisher, Longmans, Green and Company. It was his fourth novel, published in 1958.

I read the opening paragraph, and something clicked. I knew I had stumbled across a like soul.

An overnight frost had sealed the ploughed fields like so much stiffened corduroy, and in the distance, mist shrouded and remote, stood the village of Low Dearing. William Barnes, stepping from the second-class carriage onto the empty platform, knew at once that this was the place.

"Where did you find it?" I asked, hoping that there might be others by the author.

She laughed. "Where do you think? Where it belongs, on the 50p shelf."

She indicated a free-standing bookcase crammed with a miscellaneous selection of oddments, warped hardbacks, torn paperbacks, pamphlets and knitting patterns. There were no other books by Vaughan Edwards.

I lay my books upon her pile on the floor and took Mina in my arms. She stiffened, looking around to ensure we were quite alone: for whatever reasons, she found it difficult to show affection when we might be observed.

We made our way carefully down the stairs and paid for our purchases. I indicated the Edwards and asked the proprietor if he had any others by the same author.

He took the book and squinted at the spine. "Sorry, but if you'd like to leave your name and address..."

I did so, knowing that it would come to nothing.

We left the shop and walked back to the car, hand in hand. We drove back through the rapidly falling winter twilight, the traffic sparse on the already frost-scintillating B-roads. The gritters would be out tonight, and the thought of the cold spell gripping the land filled me with gratitude that soon I would be home, before the fire, with my purchases.

For no apparent reason, Mina lay a hand on my leg as I drove, and closed her eyes.

I appreciated her spontaneous displays of affection all the more because they were so rare and arbitrary. Sometimes the touch of her hand in mine, when she had taken it without being prompted, was like a jolt of electricity.

The moon was full, shedding a magnesium light across the fields around the cottage. As I was about to turn into the drive, the thrilling, bush-tailed shape of a fox slid across the metalled road before the car, stopped briefly to stare into the headlights, then flowed off again and disappeared into the hedge.

...continues

Copyright information
© Eric Brown 2001, 2011
A Writer's Life was first published by PS Publishing in 2001, and is reprinted in ebook format by infinity plus:

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John Grant

Qinmeartha and the Girl-Child LoChi

Tarburton-on-the-Moor – just another sleepy Dartmoor village. Or so it seems to Joanna Gard when she comes to visit her elderly aunt here, until the fabric of the village begins, like her personal life, to unravel. The villagers become less and less substantial as she watches, the local church degenerates into a nexus of terrifying malevolence, siblings of a horrifyingly seductive family pull her inexorably towards them, elementals play with her terrors on the midnight moor ... At last Joanna is compelled to realize that a duel of wills between eternal forces is being played out – that nothing, herself included, is what it seems to be.

In this uncomfortably disturbing tale of clashing realities, Hugo- and World Fantasy Award-winning author John Grant skilfully juggles a strange, fantasticated cosmology with images from the darker side of the human soul.

Includes bonus novella "The Beach of the Drowned".

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Take No Prisoners

In the fifteen superbly literary stories of this, his first collection, Hugo- and World Fantasy Award-winning author John Grant goes to places other fantasy and SF writers have yet to find on the map. As a special bonus, this new e-edition of Take No Prisoners includes two novelettes from the author's Leaving Fortusa cycle: "The Hard Stuff" and "Q".

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'Grant's hate for the war and the warmongers almost sets the pages on fire, but the love he portrays is just as powerful.' — Lois Tilton, Tangent, on 'The Hard Stuff'

'There is more than enough hatred for the George W. Bush administration to go round and John Grant's 'Q' is not the only story to fuel itself on this anger. It might well be the best, though.' — Martin Lewis, The Ellen Datlow/SCIFICTION Project, on 'Q'

'I am struck here not only by the variety of these stories, and the impressive imagination, but by the control of voice. This is a book of first-rate work, by a writer worthy of more of our attention.' —Rich Horton, Locus

'Do not open this book until you are prepared to dive in and forget the day. The worlds of John Grant are harsh, interconnected, florid, fluent, fun; and, more than all of that, they are generous. His tales are long and full. And his characters live at full stretch, because John Grant gives each of them his own contentious, passionate, loving heart. Read and weep, read and laugh; but don't begin to read until you're ready for a long joy.' —John Clute

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complete novelette: Wooden Horse by John Grant

It was while I was studying for my doctorate in veterinary science that I first developed that passion for the cinema which came to dominate my later career, at the expense, alas, of all the dogs and cats and cows and horses I might have treated had my life gone according to the original plan. It's silly to wish one could change the past, of course, but sometimes I catch myself thinking that each of us should be given more than one life – not sequentially, but in parallel, so we could pursue several lifelines simultaneously. I would like to have been a vet as well as an expert on the movies, the author of over twenty critical studies, a reference work that I revise annually, and more articles and reviews than I could possibly have the time to count. But then the director calls for silence and I start speaking into the television camera, presenting some movie or another, or discussing the latest releases, and my fancy dies because I haven't the time to continue giving it life.

I wasn't born a movie fan. As I say, I was in my mid-twenties and studying for a doctorate when circumstances conspired to germinate an interest that I suppose, on reflection, must have been latent somewhere inside of me from the outset.

Those circumstances were not particularly glamorous. Mine isn't a tale of some mentor taking me under his wing and engendering in me a deep love of the silver screen. The main factors were: shortage of money; the rule that the laboratories and library were reserved exclusively for undergraduates on Monday afternoons; and the Rupolo Cinema on Broad Street.

They don't make movie theaters like the Rupolo any more. Nowadays, aside from the fringe cinemas you can find in the bigger cities that show either experimental movies of stupefying opacity or porn, or the latter masquerading as the former, just about all the movie theaters in the country are multi-screen links of this major chain or that one, all showing only the most blatantly commercial of the new releases. But in the days when I was a footloose postgraduate, forever counting my coins to make sure I could both eat and pay the rent, you could find little cinemas like the Rupolo in small towns all over America. Sure, they carried the new movies, but generally about three months behind – an interesting temporal dislocation because, by the time a movie came to a cinema near you, you tended to have forgotten all the television hype there'd been around the time of original release and, often enough, to be able to recall even the title only dimly. As well as these new/oldish movies, cinemas like the Rupolo took it upon themselves to show special items, to have matinees for the kids on a Saturday morning, to run occasional "seasons" devoted to one theme or another ... It was a golden era for public appreciation of the movies, thanks to those small and generally run-down cinemas, and we didn't fully realize it until it was – and they were – gone.

Whoever owned the Rupolo – and I never did discover who that was, or even think about it very much – had a penchant for old British war movies of the 1940s and 1950s, most of them in black-and-white and many of them originally intended to be support movies. (And that's an artform that likewise disappeared without our noticing: the B-movie.)  He – I assume the owner was a he – was not totally devoid of commercial sense, mind you. He might have had a passion for these old movies, but he wasn't going to be fool enough to show them at any time when he might pull in a bigger paying audience for something new starring Robert Redford or Faye Dunaway. So the aged war movies were relegated to Monday afternoons, notoriously the leanest time of the week for movie theaters. Weekday afternoons are generally pretty quiet for the cinemas anyway, except during the school holidays; and Monday is the quietest of them all, as people recover from the excesses of the weekend.

But Monday afternoon was ideal for me. On my budget, I couldn't afford those weekend excesses: I worked instead, partly through diligence but mostly because it was a cheaper way of getting through Saturday and Sunday. The labs and the library were forbidden to me on Monday afternoons, and my rotten little one-room apartment was almost impossible to study in because of the din of the fish market underneath it, the lack of a chair, and the thunder of Mrs. Bellis's bloody television soap operas booming through the thin wall from her equally small and squalid apartment next door. It was a depressing place to be at the best of times, but most of all during the day. The Rupolo charged seventy-five cents for admission on a Monday afternoon, which was just about within my budget. Besides, I told myself repeatedly in a desperate attempt to assuage my youthful guilt, it was important that I give myself at least some leisure time during the week, and Monday afternoon was as good a time as any to take it.

So, with my seventy-five cents in hand – a dollar if it had been an economical week, so I could buy some stale popcorn as well as my ticket – each Monday at two o'clock I would be outside the Rupolo, waiting for the doors to open. Inside, once I'd paid my money and crossed the musty-smelling foyer in the company of perhaps a couple of dozen other stalwarts, the routine for the afternoon was always the same: a feature, followed by trailers for forthcoming attractions, followed by another feature. Well before six o'clock, when the current main attraction would be shown for the first of its two evening performances, we would be out of there. The owner didn't bother to show any ads during these Monday-afternoon nostalgia fests: with an audience so small, and usually with several of them either sleeping or necking, it was hardly worth it – and nor was it worth his while to lay on any more staff than the minimum for these performances: there was just the projectionist – I assume, because I never saw one – and the old guy at the door who took the money for the tickets and, if required to do so, reluctantly moved over to the counter to sell vintage popcorn, dubious nuts and even more dubious candies. I never learned this guy's name either: he was just a hooked nose and a pair of bright little intense eyes and a hunched-over back. He never said anything more than "seventy-five cents" or "twenty-five cents" or, just occasionally, "fuck you."

The first time I went there it was a bright sunny September afternoon, and my guilt was thereby intensified. I could hear my mother's voice telling me I should be doing something outside, taking advantage of the sun and the fresh air. I might have turned and left, might have gone off to bore myself rigid doing something healthy and outdoorsy, were it not for the fact that the guy behind the cashier window took advantage of my indecision to reach through the gap and deftly extract my coins from the fingers that had been clutching them, replacing them with a dog-eared cardboard stub before I'd quite realized what was going on.

It was a pretty amazing double bill, that first one I saw. First up was The Wooden Horse; then, after trailers for Traitors Within and The Wind from the South, came The Dam Busters. In the first of these movies a group of British prisoners-of-war incarcerated in a prison camp in Germany used all sorts of stratagems to tunnel their way to freedom. The movie's title came from their use of a gymnastic vaulting horse to cover up some of their clandestine activities. Surprisingly, at the end of the movie, most of the prisoners did indeed succeed in achieving their freedom. I watched the trailers with that curious fascination one has when seeing extracts from movies one knows one will never actually trouble to see in their entirety, and then came The Dam Busters. This concerned itself with the efforts of an inventor called Barnes Wallace – I believe that was his name – to devise a sort of super-bomb that could skip across water and thus more effectively destroy Axis dams. Through much of the movie the other characters kept telling him and each other that the scheme was crack-brained, and I tended to agree with them; but in the denouement we saw that this seemingly implausible technique did in fact work. It was a part of the war I hadn't known about before – assuming it was indeed based on history rather than being just a screenwriter's fantasy – so I found the movie extremely interesting, even if Wallace's device didn't in the end alter the course of anything very much.

I was disappointed when the movie had to come to an end, as all movies do, and I emerged blinking into what was still bright sunshine. I picked up a hot dog from a corner deli and walked back to my apartment and Mrs. Bellis's television set with my inner eyes full of flickering black-and-white images, dark clouds and darker aircraft. Even as I strolled along the sidewalk, munching my hot dog – the frank had been overboiled, as usual – I was fully cognizant of the fact that I had been hooked. Whatever my mother's remembered voice might say on other Mondays, there was no way short of a broken neck I was going to miss another of these World War II double bills.

~

That night I phoned home – collect, of course – just to see how the folks were getting along and perhaps, if the conversation went along the right lines, to hint subtly that a cash donation would be joyously received.

"Hi, Mom. How's it going?"

"Very much the same. Your father's still got his indigestion. Have you met a nice girl yet there at the university?"

"Not quite, Mom. There aren't many girl students, you know." This was true, but it was an evasive answer to her question. I couldn't afford a girlfriend, and anyway, a late developer, still hadn't gotten over my adolescent neuroses about getting too close to any member of the opposite sex. My love life was confined to fervent and anatomically inaccurate imaginings about the body of one of the girls at the checkout counter in the local supermarket, to which mental images I would industriously manipulate a penis that I was convinced was too small. "I'd hoped Dad would be better by now."

"Well, it's all the stress, poor man."

My father had been retired for eight years, during which he'd done nothing more stressful than mow the lawn and complain about his indigestion. My mother, fifteen years his junior, put up with his self-pity rather better than I'd ever been able to, and was constantly ready with an excuse for his perennial and probably imagined ailment. This week it was stress. Next week it would be food additives.

"Glenda Doberman still often talks about you, Kurt. She's such a nice girl, don't you think?"

People often talk about dogs and their owners resembling each other, but Glenda Doberman was the only person I'd ever met who had come to resemble the dog after which her family had been named. The whole of the rest of her face seemed to have been designed as a pedestal for the prognathous thrust of her jaws and nostrils. And the similarity didn't stop there. I'd once been forced into taking her to a prom, and dancing with her had proved to be like dancing with a sackful of conger eels, all solid and unpredictable muscles. The obligatory necking session in the car afterwards, outside her home, had been a nightmare I preferred to forget. I had nursed a sprained shoulder for weeks afterwards.

"And I'm sure she'll soon meet someone ... worthy of her," I said, in what I hoped was a smooth deflection of the subject. Mom didn't know – and I certainly wasn't about to tell her – that soon after her eighteenth birthday Glenda had become known as Hershey Bar Doberman because that was reckoned to be the maximum a boy had to invest to get inside her pants.

"So like you, Kurt. Always wishing the best for other people." My Mom had illusions about my father, and they extended to me as well. Who was I to destroy those rosy visions of hers?

"But you should be looking out for someone nice for yourself," she said. For her, people were either "nice" or they didn't qualify for an adjective. "You're going to be twenty-five next month ..."

"Mom. Dad was forty-one when he found you."

"Yes, but that was different."

There was no way I could argue with this.

"What's the weather like at home?"

"Oh," she said, "just weather. It's been hot for September."

"Same here."

There was a pause during which all we heard was an electrical rendition of someone's burger catching fire on the barbecue.

"Are you feeding yourself properly?"

"As well as I can, Mom. Money's a little bit tigh—"

"Make sure you eat plenty of vegetables."

"Well, vegetables are pretty expens—"

"And fruit. There are some nice apples in the supermarkets at the moment."

My hot dog lurched inside me. Under the watchful eye of the deli's owner, Mr. Perkins, I'd piled it as high with sauerkraut as I dared, on the basis that on a budget like mine one should grab free additional nutrition wherever one could. That had possibly been, in retrospect, a mistake.

"How are your studies going?"

"Very well indeed," I replied, relaxing for the first time during this ritual weekly inquisition. It was true. So long as I kept my nose to the grindstone for the rest of the academic year, my doctorate was in the bag.

"Well, do keep yourself safe, dear. Your father and I miss you very much indeed."

Dad missed me so much that he could never bring himself to come to the phone to talk to his only son. As I put the phone down, after the usual tepid goodbyes exchanged with Mom, I entertained the fantasy that finally, fed up with his constant grousing, she'd slaughtered him with his own lawnmower and buried the shreds in the back yard. I'd never have known if she had, for all the contact there was between him and me except during those vacations that I went home. Yes, at Christmas-time I'd arrive back at the family bourn to discover my mother waiting to make a tearful confession to me ...

"Your father – he had a terrible accident. He mistook himself for a clump of dandelions, and before I could find the lawnmower's off-switch he'd reduced himself to a heap of tuna melts."

"Now, mother," I'd say sternly, "there is no need to lie to me. Where did you bury what was left of the old bastard?"

"Well, I didn't so much bury the bits as hammer them into the ground with the back of a shovel. Can you ever forgive me for having deprived you of a parent?"

"Break out the beer."

I shook my head, grinning at myself. Mom would never say a harsh word about my father, let alone murder him. It wouldn't be "nice."

~

The next week was spent in the usual hamster-wheel of study, although my mind was constantly being distracted by anticipation of Monday afternoon at the Rupolo. The owner didn't announce in advance what movies he'd be showing: he assumed the addicts and the adulterous or underage couples would just turn up anyway and be happy to take pot luck. This actually suited me well: knowledge of what movies were going to be screened would probably have dulled the keen edge of my expectancy. As it was, I could dream of unknown glories without being shackled by any fetters of the realistic.

That second Monday, one of the two movies was in color – a great disappointment to me, because more even than the subject matter it was the black-and-white ambience of these movies that had so rapidly addicted me. The offending movie was The Man Who Never Was, a tale of British intelligence officers outwitting the Axis by inventing a personality and grafting it onto an anonymous corpse, which they then arranged to have discovered by the Germans; the point of the story was that planted on the corpse were all sorts of faked secrets, so that German efforts would be misdirected. As with The Dam Busters, all this was absolutely absorbing as an item of forgotten – at least by me – history, and yet for a very similar reason it all seemed rather remote and irrelevant. It was as if I were watching a swarm of angry hornets from behind the safety of a sealed window, so that the fury could be impressive and perhaps even slightly frightening but at the same time so distanced by the presence of the glass that it could be appreciated intellectually rather than emotionally.

That was the second of the two movies shown. The first was in trusty, much-loved black-and-white, and was called Reach for the Sky. In it a British fighter pilot managed to lose both legs in an accident, yet with the aid of prosthetics was able to take to the skies once more and continue his career of shooting down Axis planes. He was shot down himself and spent some time in reassuringly familiar territory – a prisoner-of-war camp. There were some great flying shots, and the story had considerable human interest. The fact that much of the acting was as stiff as a clergyman's collar didn't detract from this – if anything, it added to that ambience I had so swiftly come to adore. A lot of the slang, being veddy British, meant nothing to me, but I was able to muddle through and get the general sense of it all.

That evening I didn't make the mistake of eating one of Mr. Perkins's hot dogs, but instead bought from him a couple of ham sandwiches with lashings of salad. I have never liked lying to my mother, and in fact have never been terribly good at it, so I thought it'd be handy during our weekly Monday-evening phonecall to be able to tell her truthfully that I'd had a – relatively – healthy supper.

I needn't have worried. Mom could talk about hardly anything except the latest hot news, which was that in the intervening week it had leaked out that Glenda Doberman was pregnant, and had thereby suddenly slipped out of the "nice" classification, being now worthy of no adjectives at all. I was reassured that I had had a lucky escape; the words "whore of Babylon" lurked somewhere just off-stage, but would forever remain there. My own theory was that Glenda, in a mad burst of frictional enthusiasm that excelled even her own many earlier efforts – which had earned her another nickname, The Human Tuning-Fork – had finally succeeded in melting the condom.

"And what have you been up to, Kurt?" asked Mom after several excited minutes, more by way of form than out of any true interest.

"Oh, nothing much. I went to the movies this afternoon."

"Shouldn't you have been studying?"

I explained to her about Monday afternoons and the undergraduates and the labs and the library and Mrs. Bellis's soap operas and the fish market. She sniffed cynically, but accepted the explanation. I told her about Reach for the Sky and The Man Who Never Was, and the silence at the other end of the line told me she was dutifully pretending to listen – that's what moms are for, after all: to listen to their sons. She'd listened to me all through my childhood and adolescence, doing the listening job of two parents because my father never saw it as his responsibility. She'd bought me my first baseball bat and glove, and spent hours in the back yard hitting the ball or pitching for me; she could have been fairly good at it if she'd ever taken the game seriously, but she showed no signs of disapproval when I proved to be quite hopeless. She drew the line at football, but she would shoot baskets with me for hours, or go out fishing on the lake with me, letting out perfectly genuine whoops of enthusiasm on the rare occasions when we caught anything. In homework she explored with me the equally torturous topics of algebra and the Punic Wars, never grumbling. But, more than all this, she'd listened to me when I explained my little-boy concerns as I'd discovered the world and my place in it.

"Such imaginations these moviemakers have," she said when at length I dried up. "It's so long since I've been to the cinema." There was a wistful note in her voice. "Your father doesn't believe in it. Says it's all Sodom and Gomorrah. And he's right, of course ..."

I felt like shouting at her that she should ignore the prejudices of an ignorant old bigot, but bit back the words. They wouldn't have done any good; all they'd have done was upset her.

As ever, the phone conversation ended in an unsatisfying tangle of desultory well-wishings. I returned the receiver to its hook at the bottom of the stairs, then climbed back up to my dreary little apartment. It was too late for soap operas, so Mrs. Bellis was watching cop shows instead. Someone was getting the shit beaten out of him in the interrogation chamber by a couple of cops who were convinced he was part of a communist plot against someone or other. In the middle of him screaming for mercy the broadcast segued into a commercial for diaper cream. Even over the din of the tv set I could hear Mrs. Bellis cursing and shuffling as she hunted for the remote. She liked a good torture scene – I'd learned that much about her through the walls over the past few months. I wondered if she'd ever had any use for diaper cream herself, but came to the conclusion she hadn't. I couldn't imagine her husk-like body ever having borne children, ever having suckled them to her nightmarishly visualized breasts. She might have harbored the occasional pupa, but even that I doubted. She was, however, capable of the loudest farts I have ever heard from any man or woman. Sitting in front of her soap opera or cop show, presumably secure in the false knowledge that anything she did would go unheard because of the walls and the boom of the tv set, she not infrequently let rip with the most astonishing noises. The first time I heard her I assumed she must have started stripping wallpaper. I'd grown to know better.

I went over to the window – it required only about two paces – and looked out. On the other side of the road was a little park with swings and slides where kids were playing in the evening sunlight, their yells coming to me muffled through the glass. Their mothers were sitting on benches chatting animatedly to each other or sitting alone with books, some of them idly rocking a stroller or a baby carriage with a spare hand, soothing the next tidal wave of children who'd be playing on the swings and slides.

At any other time the scene would have appeared normal enough to me, but I was in a peculiar mood that evening, and something about it seemed subtly wrong – somehow unnatural, as if it had all been staged for my personal benefit, as if I were the sole member of an audience watching an enormous, worldwide play, a play in which everyone except myself was performing. I was the only one who, having been designated once and for all eternity "audience," wasn't permitted to take a role in this play. It was a curious feeling of dislocation from reality, and it took me a while to put my finger on what was causing it.

Then I realized. The scene I was watching through the rectangular frame of the window was in color. I had become so immersed in watching scenes in rectangular frames that were in black-and-white – and this after seeing only three movies this way – that now it was the mundane reality that seemed artificial, the flickering monochrome images on the Rupolo's small gray screen the true reality. I was more at home in a world where cardboard-faced actors with implausible British accents called each other Chips and Frobisher than I was here, where the kids were yelling names like Duane and Randy and where every vowel didn't have to be contorted before being uttered.

I shook my head irritably, but the sensation persisted of being on the outside of a performance in which all the rest of the world was taking part, and I couldn't prize it loose. In the end I gave up, and went to bed with a book while the sky was still full of twilight. Not long afterwards, I fell asleep, and stayed that way until my alarm clock woke me in the morning.

~

The following Monday the double bill consisted of two black-and-white movies – no color this week, thank heavens. The first one – and the better of the two, I then thought (and still do, in the eye of memory) – was called I Was Monty's Double, and it told of a cunning British plan to use an impersonator in place of their Field-Marshal Montgomery for public appearances and the like, thereby foiling any possible plot to assassinate him, while at the same time misleading the Axis concerning his whereabouts and therefore his doings. Montgomery was for once a historical figure I'd heard of, although I couldn't remember much about him save the name and that he was reputed to be a quite brilliant military general – the Allied equivalent of Rommel. I made a mental note as I hung on the edge of my seat, watching the story unfold, to go look him up in the library's encyclopedia the next day, to find out if he had survived the war and, if so, what had eventually become of him; but this was something that in the event I never got around to doing until years later, by which time my interest was no longer so poignant. (As I now recall it, he did indeed survive – until the mid-1970s sometime – living in seclusion as an honored but largely ignored figure.)

Whatever the historical veracity, the movie was engrossing – for the first hour or so, anyway. After that it became more like a standard adventure thriller ... or, at least, that is my recollection of it.

The second feature, Mrs. Miniver, was less interesting to me. Again it centered on the British experience of the war, but this time at the domestic level. The eponymous character was a housewife in England, and she and her neighbors pluckily came through Axis bombings and the like. I wasn't surprised at the end to discover it had been an American movie, despite its British setting, because throughout I had been troubled by the stylistic differences between it and the others. Something about it had just not rung quite true. Traditional Hollywood England, like traditional Hollywood Arabia, is a strange otherworld that never really existed outside the moviemakers' imaginations.

My phone conversation with my mother that night was brief, covering only the basics: who the father of Glenda Doberman's unborn baby might be (a matter on which Glenda herself was apparently pretty vague, as I might have guessed) and whether the girl might be wise to get an abortion; the latest stop-the-presses news about my father's indigestion (no change); the question of my fruit and vegetable intake; and the insistence that I shouldn't be wasting my life sitting in stuffy cinemas the whole time but should instead be either studying or running around playing ball in the fresh air, or preferably both at the same time. It was a conversation I could have scripted myself by cutting and pasting fragments from previous phonecalls, and the sensation I'd had the previous week of being dislocated from the rest of reality returned in full force. And, once more, it persisted. Long after I'd put the phone back on its hook and retreated to the relative sanctuary of my single room I still felt as if the walls and furniture around me were no more real than movie props, that if I bumped against them too hard they'd ripple or collapse.

And the feeling extended to people as well. Was Mrs. Bellis, with her overloud television set and her farts and all, actually real? I hardly ever saw the woman – I saw her as little as I possibly could, if the truth be told – and so, for all I knew, all the rest of her existence might just be as a soundtrack blasted through the intervening wall to torment me. Mr. Perkins at the deli, the intense old guy at the Rupolo, my colleagues and peers at the university – all of them seemed to me suddenly to be puppets or special effects, all controlled by some unseen, insane director. Sitting on my lumpy, thin-mattressed bed, I began to concoct fantasies about this director, the quasi-god who had brought all of this false display into existence, the puppet-master who made the people around me perform the charades they did. He was called Qinmeartha – I have no idea where the name came from – and he was the only one among the gods who had thought creation was a worthwhile enterprise. For going against their jointly expressed opinion and bringing the universe into existence, he was punished by being constantly mocked by the failure of his creation ever to achieve full, one hundred per cent reality. Always it remained just this side of fully convincing, even to him. Always his creatures remained puppets, or two-dimensional projections on the flat screen of his universe, their true reality forever being somewhere else. The only key that could change this situation was another aspect of him, called – again the name came to me from nowhere – the Girl Child LoChi, but she didn't wish to be a part of Qinmeartha any longer, and had fled from him. A further part of the curse the other gods had placed upon him for his audacity was that for the rest of eternity he would chase the Girl Child LoChi but, even if he located and trapped her, would never be able to persuade her to rejoin him and thereby make the universe fully real.

I lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling, which displayed a map of some of the more obscure parts of Canada, or maybe Scandinavia – somewhere with plenty of fjords, anyway. Two cops were arguing heatedly about the morality of shooting traitors in cold blood. The fish market was noisily closing for the night. (In all my time in that apartment I never once bought fish from the market, even though it was almost directly downstairs. The fish looked good and smelled good. I think it was the constant daytime noise of the staff and customers shouting at each other, a noise that started at five in the morning and went on until seven at night, that engendered my aversion to the produce.) A kid bellowed, presumably having fallen off its swing. Were there fjords in Canada? I couldn't remember. Maybe the map could be of a bit of New Zealand – I was pretty certain there were fjords there ...

And once more a deep and dreamless sleep took me into its arms.

~

And so the weeks went by and went by, each of them following very much the same pattern. Christmas, with its excruciating visit home, came and went. Although I continued to work hard at the university – my parents had made sacrifices to get me there, so it was my obligation to do so – I found that more and more I was living for my Monday afternoons at the Rupolo, that veterinary science was being shifted off towards the edge of my preoccupations. Only during those three and a half hours each week when I was sitting in the Rupolo, with or without popcorn (more usually without), did I feel that my mind was truly alive, and enlivened. It was the genesis of a lifelong passion, one that has molded the man I now am.

Of course, at this distance of years I cannot possibly recall the titles of all the movies I saw during those Monday afternoons, and, although I can remember great tracts of their plots, sometimes I suspect they have all become jumbled each among the others, so that what I bring to mind are not individual movies but just some gigantic composite, a sort of huge metamovie. Most of the movies were British, or at least centered on Britishers, and generally the Britishers were in conflict with the Germans; but there were a few that featured Americans, and their struggles with either the Germans or the Japanese or both. The movies were generally from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, although occasionally the Rupolo's owner saw fit to show something a bit more recent. A few of the titles that I do remember are Albert RN, The Great Escape, The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Colditz Story, Ice Cold in Alex, Stalag 17, Sahara, D-Day, Gallipoli, Danger Within, Foxhole in Cairo, The Captive Heart, The Mackenzie Break, The Purple Heart, The Longest Day, Tora! Tora! Tora!, Hannibal Brooks, King Rat, The Password is Courage, The Betrayal, Prisoner of War ...

I suppose I should make a confession here. I am not an unusually stupid man, and several decades ago, when I was studying for my doctorate, I was undoubtedly brighter and sharper than I am today. However, I have to admit that, while I followed the plots of these movies keenly – others might snore during a Rupolo Monday matinee but not me – it took me a long time to realize that a composite was emerging from the whole sequence of movies that was, well, distinctly ... odd. I still cannot understand why it took me such a while to notice this. Nor can I understand why it was that, for all my genuine and unbridled passion for these features and by extension for cinema as a whole, it never occurred to me until near the end of that academic year to do more than simply watch the movies – never occurred to me that the university library must contain scores if not hundreds of books on the cinema in which I might revel between one Monday afternoon and the next. I suppose the truth is that I was at the stage of being merely a fan; my awakening as a student of the cinema was for some reason delayed. Or maybe it was the subconscious notion that, the moment I began to take my devotion more seriously, as symbolized by my starting to search out books on the subject, would also be the moment I had to confront the fact that my interest in veterinary science, to which I had sacrificed nearly a decade of my young life, had ebbed to such a degree that all that was left was a darkening of the sand.

Whatever the reason, it wasn't until sometime in the late spring or early summer of the following year that I located the Performing Arts section of the university library and then, embedded within it, the long shelves dedicated to books on the cinema. I strolled backwards and forwards in front of those shelves for several minutes, I recall, reluctant to take the final step of actually pulling a book down and opening it. There were books about individual directors, actors, studios ... even individual movies. There were histories of Hollywood in general, and of specific genres; this was the first time that I realized, for example, that animation was something more than kids' stuff but was worthy of serious consideration by grown-up human beings – a significant discovery, as it was to prove, because animation has become one of my major obsessions within the broader field of cinema studies. There were books on the philosophy of the movies, books on the silents, books on series like those starring Tarzan or Flash Gordon or Dick Tracy or Batman, books on the technologies of cinematography and special effects, encyclopedias and movie guides, how-to books for wannabe screenwriters ... There was a whole world contained within those books, and I had been doing nothing more than looking at the outside of one of its aspects. They presented a challenge starkly before me: if I wanted, I could turn and leave the building and forget all about them, become a vet who enjoyed watching the movies whenever he had the spare time; otherwise, I was going to start an exploration that would likely remain incomplete even if I dedicated the rest of my life to it.

Knowing exactly the import of what I was doing, I eventually reached out a slightly shaking hand and took by the spine a copy of Brunner's Companion to the Cinema. I carried it over to a desk and opened it. I saw in a blur two pages jammed full of small print. It was an encyclopedic listing of movies – over 20,000 of them, according to the splashline on the cover. Once I got my eyes to focus properly, I could see that the movies were listed alphabetically, each with basic details such as year of release, running time, director and stars, plus a short synopsis. The spread I had open in front of me contained these brief descriptions of movies like Four Men and a Prayer, The Four Musketeers, The Four-Poster, Four Sided Triangle, Four's a Crowd, The Fox and the Hound, Fragment of Fear, The Franchise Affair, Francis of Assisi ... Reading the summaries – none was longer than a couple of sentences – was a tantalizing and soon frustrating experience: I began to salivate at the prospect of all these movies still waiting in the future for me to watch, but what I really wanted was to watch them now – and all of them at once.

Brunner's Companion to the Cinema bore a bold blue REFERENCE stamp, so all I could do was look at it there – I wasn't going to be able to take it home with me and browse through it late into the night. I looked at the price on the cover and realized glumly that it would be a long time, no matter how much I scrimped, before I could save up enough money from my allowance to buy a copy of my own. But there were other books on the shelves which I was allowed to borrow, and soon I'd amassed a stack of half a dozen of them – as many as my university library card entitled me to borrow at any one time. Clutching them to me as if I were a small child who'd just discovered a trove of chocolates and was making good his escape while the coast was clear with as many as he could carry, I checked them out and made my way back to the apartment.

Now here's a curious thing. I cannot for the life of me remember what those books actually were – an omission from memory as grievous as if I'd forgotten the name of the woman to whom I'd lost my virginity. (No, not to Glenda Doberman.) But certainly I discovered that they had the property of banishing the sounds of the fish market and the shrieking kids and Mrs. Bellis's soap operas. I got home in the late afternoon and didn't stop reading until I fell asleep face-first into the third of the books I'd started, my last memory before unconsciousness hit me and the words on the page receded wildly from my vision being that a lot of people seemed to be laughing very loudly on the other side of the wall at the quips of a chat-show host.

The next day I had to drag myself to the laboratory. It had to be faced that, overnight, veterinary science had transformed from an interest – albeit by now only a marginal one – into a chore. I did a few studies of the larynx of a dog, wrote a couple of paragraphs of my dissertation, stared out the window a lot. I'd brought the two cinema books I'd finished last night with me, and at lunchtime I almost sprinted to the library – not just to exchange them for two more but also for an hour's uninterrupted browsing through the pages of Brunner's Companion to the Cinema.

Lenny, Leo the Last, The Leopard, The Leopard Man, Lepke, A Lesson in Love ...

It was only then that it occurred to me that, rather than just leafing through the book, I might be more profitably occupied using it to find out something about the specific genre of movies with which I'd fallen in love – those old World War II movies I saw at the Rupolo. Accordingly, I turned back through the pages to the Gs, hunting for The Great Escape.

I found The Great Diamond Robbery – a minor comedy thriller, apparently – and Great Expectations, but clearly Mr. Brunner thought The Great Escape was beneath his notice. I wasn't unduly surprised: most of the Rupolo's Monday-afternoon presentations were obviously very obscure and very aged B-movies, and any reference work has to draw the line somewhere. Maybe I'd have better luck with Reach for the Sky.

I didn't. Nor with The Bridge on the River Kwai, or The Wooden Horse, or Ice Cold in Alex, or The Colditz Story, or ...

In fact, Mr. Brunner had ignored all of the war movies whose titles I could offhand recall.

I shut the book and stared at its cover in a state of complete incredulity. It was reasonable that some – possibly most – of these undistinguished movies might have been omitted for reasons of space, but all of them? It didn't seem feasible.

And it was then that something which had for months now been subliminally troubling me about my weekly forays to the Rupolo came hammering irresistibly into the forefront of my conscious – that disturbing pattern that evidenced itself in the Monday-afternoon movies as a whole. In items like The Great Escape and The Wooden Horse I'd seen plucky British prisoners-of-war outwitting rather stupid Germans and gaining their freedom. There were battle movies in which the forces of the Axis got the crap beaten or bombed out of them by the Allies. The Brits or the Americans had almost always been portrayed as brave heroes; the Germans and the Japs almost always as cowards or villains or both – or just as expendable non-people who could be mown down in their hundreds and thousands without the smallest tear being shed. Moreover, although it hadn't been stated, these movies' stories had seemed implicitly part of a larger story in which the Axis had been defeated and the Allies had triumphed. Indeed, now that I began to think about the whole thing properly – started using that rational mind which my parents had donated so many thousands of dollars to train – it seemed distinctly peculiar that any of these movies had ever been made at all. OK, one, perhaps two – as curios in which the tables were turned on history. But dozens of them?

Taking this further, how come the cops were allowing the Rupolo to show such seditious features? – for seditious they were, now that I'd begun to regard them analytically rather than just with the wide-eyed, naive gawp of enthusiasm. Surely the place should have been busted by now and its owner marched off for, at the very least, extensive interrogation? A chill ran down my spine as I realized that the audience, too, should have been scooped up in the net. We were almost as guilty as the Rupolo's proprietor through having returned, week in and week out, to watch such dangerous stuff. Without ever noticing that I was doing anything illegal, I'd become in effect a habitual criminal, a serial offender – a traitor in thought and arguably a traitor in deed as well.

Up to this point in my life I had always been the most law-abiding of persons. I hadn't committed so much as an act of littering. Now I was involved in an extremely serious crime.

Is it any wonder that I never made it back to the laboratories that afternoon, but instead drifted home haphazardly, my stomach feeling as if it were filled with ice and my head most certainly filled with visions of my arrest, my interrogation and the shame I would bring down on the heads of my parents?

~

Yet by the morning my attitude had changed. This might seem surprising – indeed, in retrospect it's slightly startling even to me – but you must remember that I had for months now been affected by that curious sensation of being more related to the fictional world of Chips and Ginger and Forbes-Hepplewhite and the rest than to what my intellect but not my gut acknowledged as the real world: the world around me. In that sense, to ask myself to give up my Monday afternoons at the Rupolo was to require of me more than forgoing a pleasurable activity: in a very true sense it was to require me to give up my existence – in effect to commit suicide – for I was a part not of a three-dimensional Technicolor world but of a two-dimensional monochrome one. If I abandoned the monochrome world, then something that strongly resembled a doctoral student called Kurt Stroheim would continue to go through all the action of existing in the Technicolor world, but he wouldn't be me: he – or it – would be just another puppet, like all the rest of the denizens of that world.

There was another factor, which was that I was young, and immature even for my age. Continuing to attend the Rupolo's Monday double-bill matinees was risky and risqué, it was to partake of forbidden fruit – and thus it was infinitely appealing to me. Life as an impoverished postgraduate was generally dull and sometimes duller than that, and the excitement of deliberate illegality added a sparkle to something otherwise sparkle-free.

So the following Monday I was back at the Rupolo with my seventy-five cents.

The old guy looked up at me as he reached out his clawed hand for the money, and as he studied my face I could see something die in those fanatic eyes of his – some element of the fire that normally lit them. And, although there was no alteration at all of his habitually hostile facial expression as he grabbed the coins and grudgingly emitted the usual torn card stub through the hole in his window, I could somehow tell that he was disappointed in me. After a moment of disconcertedness I shrugged his attitude off: why should I give a shit about the opinions of a misanthropic old vulture – who anyway, by the look of his nose, probably had some Semitic blood in his ancestry?

Don't get me wrong here. I am not a prejudiced man, and I believe that the Final Solution, as perpetrated both in Germany under the Fuehrer and here under President MacNaish, was almost certainly an unnecessarily inhumane means of dealing with an acknowledged problem. There seems to me no reason at all why the Jews could not have been dealt with in the same way as MacNaish coped with the nigger problem. But in my youth I was more encumbered by the cultural baggage of my elders and peers. That moment when I recognized that the old ticket-seller might well be partly Semitic and yet did nothing about it was a major leap forward in the evolution of my own, independent worldview. From now on I at least recognized that there was the possibility for me to develop attitudes and a morality that were not merely carbon copies of those my parents lived by.

I shuffled into the semi-gloom of the theater and, sure enough, my regular seat was vacant – fifth row from the front, on the right side of the aisle. There were still a few minutes to go before the torn red-plush curtains would draw back and the screen flicker into life, and so as always I craned round to check that all the regulars were arrived or arriving. There was the middle-aged woman with the tightly clutched beadwork handbag and the perpetually watery eyes. There was the young couple who came here to neck in the back row and who I could swear once went the whole way there, right through the central section of a movie called Casablanca, in fact; at the end one of the characters said something like "Play it for me again, Tom" and half the small audience burst into sniggers. There was the tall man who carried himself so upright that I always guessed he'd been in the military fifty years ago. And there were the rest. You understand, none of us ever spoke to each other or even acknowledged each other's presence, yet in a strange way we'd each gotten to know our fellows, and there was a certain bonding between us. Quite how we'd have reacted had any of us ever run into one of the other Rupolo Monday-afternoon regulars I do not know: it never happened to me, and it was a prospect that made me quail. Today, as usual, there were a couple of new faces, too – doubtless stragglers who'd wandered in off the street less to watch the movie than to make three and a half hours of their lives disappear.

I turned back toward the screen just as the curtains drew apart.

The first movie to be shown today was called Private Kohl's War, and it was directed, according to the opening credits, by Thea von Harbou – one of the directors whose biographies I'd noticed on the library shelves. It told the story, in color, of a young soldier who'd taken part in the invasion of England and then fought in the sequence of battles that led to the Fall of London. At the end it showed him celebrating the surrender, contributing to the extermination of the Communists, and making plans to import his beautiful blonde German girlfriend so they could marry and raise kids on the small plot of farmland he'd been permitted to annex. It was a well enough made movie, and some of the camerawork and sets were superb – strongly influenced by Art Deco in places – but overall I found the movie unsatisfying and often tedious. Where were Chips and Ginger? The few Brits who had speaking parts were either villains of the stupidest sort or wise collaborators who might as well have been Germans themselves. And where was all the poignancy of watching stiff-upper-lip heroes who didn't know that, despite all their courage and dedication, they were doomed to be on the losing side, whatever their temporary triumphs? Where was all the antiquated slang I had come to love?

I glanced around me as the lights came up. So far as I could tell, none of the other regulars had found the movie in any way less enjoyable than usual – I seemed to be the only one to have noticed the very different character of this piece from our customary fare. Well, there had been other dreary movies in the Rupolo's seemingly neverending season devoted to World War II, and I supposed it was about time that the owner showed one that presented the other side of the story, as it were.

I settled back to watch the trailer for the movie that was showing in the evenings all this week. It was called Robotic Cop Two, and if the trailer was anything to go by it involved a machine taking the place of a cop and shooting everything and everybody in sight for a solid two hours. I decided not to bother watching it even when it came onto tv.

The second feature that afternoon was called The Rising Sun Shall Never Set, and at last we seemed to be back in familiar prisoner-of-war territory. I relaxed briefly in my seat, luxuriating in the sensation of having come home, but that happy state did not last long. The prisoners-of-war proved to be not Britishers incarcerated somewhere in Germany but Japanese being held in one of the concentration camps that the traitor Roosevelt established in this country. Aside from that the plot was fairly routine, following the lines I had come to expect from my earlier viewing, although with the additional complication that Japanese escapees had a tougher time of it, because of their distinctively non-American appearance, as they tried to make their way across country to join their comrades or make contact with the Resistance. The gimmick of the movie – which for all I know may have been historically based – was that the intelligent Japs got their imbecilic guards, mainly niggers, so involved in learning samurai skills that they relaxed the actual business of guarding. The close of the movie saw the liberation of the camp and a general rejoicing over the assassination of the hated Roosevelt.

My mind was in something of a ferment as I wandered home, clutching one of Mr. Perkins's roast beef and Swiss sandwiches with "the works." Was it possible that sometime during the past week the cops had quietly warned the Rupolo's owner to alter his ways or be busted for sedition? Or was it not more likely that he'd simply had a change of heart? Or maybe he'd run out of movies of the other sort and, rather than start repeating himself, he'd decided to move on to more realistic dramas? Or had he sold the business, and the new owner ...? There were endless possible reasons for the double bill I'd just witnessed, but none of them seemed entirely plausible to me.

I was still nagging away at the problem as I climbed the stairs to my apartment. Just as I put the key in the lock I was startled by a bellow from behind Mrs. Bellis's door.

"Your maw called," she yelled. "You gotta call her back, you fucker."

I paused. For Mrs. Bellis to speak to me at all was unprecedented. For her to give me a phone message was something I'd never considered outside the bounds of fantasy. Normally, if she answered the phone and it was for me she just slammed the receiver back on its hook and swore – I'd heard her do exactly this several times. Mom must have been extremely firm in her instructions that I was to be informed.

The key still in my hand, I retreated down the stairs and dialed the operator. In a few moments my collect call had been put through and I was speaking to my mother.

Who was in near-hysterical tears.

After all those years of complaining about his indigestion, and how it could be related to a serious heart condition, my father had been chasing some Jehovah's Witnesses off the property when he'd inadvertently stepped into the path of a fire-truck racing to an emergency. He'd died not just immediately but emphatically, with bits of him smeared halfway down the street, although apparently the paramedics had had some difficulty extricating his heavy walking stick from his tightly clenched fist. She'd wired some money to me so I could, as my father's only child, his son and heir, come home the following day.

I comforted her as best I could over the phone, standing there in the hallway with the shouts of the playpark kids and the fish-market habitues coming in through the thin door. I think I helped her with just the sound of my voice – a reassurance to her that she still had something left of her family. After I put the phone down I trudged slowly up the stairs to get my bags packed.

~

It was nearly a month later that I returned, and then only briefly – to tell the folk at the university face-to-face that I was abandoning my doctorate, and to clear out my apartment. It was pathetic that I could fit all my remaining possessions there into a single medium-sized case. I yelled a goodbye to Mrs. Bellis as I departed, case in hand, but her only response was to jack up the volume on her tv set a bit higher and to emit one of her thunderous farts as a farewell memento – one of the most effective mementos I've ever been given, in fact, because I can remember it quite clearly to this day.

On my way to the station, I made a detour to bid adieu to the Rupolo, the place where I'd spent so many happy Monday afternoons, the place that had been responsible for changing the course of my life. From a distance the cinema looked very much as tatty usual, but as I approached it along the sidewalk I realized that its doors had been boarded up and that the posters outside still advertised Robotic Cop Two. Although I was becoming a little anxious about being in time to catch my train, I went into Mr. Perkins's deli to ask him what had happened; from the fact that he refused to answer me, or even to recognize me, I deduced that the cops had finally stepped in.

On the train, as soon as we'd left the station behind, I pulled out of my bag the copy of Brunner's Companion to the Cinema I'd bought with part of my father's surprisingly sizable legacy and began to browse lackadaisically through it. I hardly saw the words, though. Instead I was thinking about how my life had changed so radically over the past few months, and in particular over the past few weeks. Mom had initially not taken kindly to my insistence that I was ditching my veterinary career in favor of becoming a student of the cinema – she had wailed that I was insulting my father's memory, for had he not paid to put me through college so I could establish myself in a worthwhile and respected career? – but eventually she saw such moral-blackmailing arguments were going to get her nowhere, and that I was absolutely resolute about my new future. After a while she actually began quite to like the idea, and started introducing me to her friends as "my son, the film critic."

The funeral had been ghastly, of course. My father had more friends in death than he had ever had in life. The worst moment of all was when, after the service, Glenda Doberman made a bulging attempt to hit on me. Gossip must have exaggerated the size of my inheritance.

Still idly turning the pages of Brunner's Companion to the Cinema, I forced such memories out of my head. This was a more recent edition of the book than the one in the university library, and I wondered if the expansion trumpeted in the blurb meant that it now included some of the old World War II movies I'd watched in the Rupolo.

No such luck.

I gazed out the train window at huge cornfields and placid cows speeding by, and another fantasy began to build itself in my mind.

It had been my assumption that Andrew Brunner had omitted the movies I'd watched on Monday afternoons because of their seditious content, their undesirability – he didn't list porn flicks, so it was reasonable to figure that he wouldn't want to list politically reprehensible movies either, censoring himself for reasons of either pragmatism or good taste. Or perhaps his publishers had insisted such items be expunged.

But what if that mundane explanation was totally wrong-headed?

It's very obvious that the future is malleable – or, to put it another way, that at any particular moment in time there are numerous possible futures lying in wait for us. We tend to think of the passage of time, the movement of the moment that is "now" from the present into the future, as being much like the train on which I was currently sitting lost in speculation. A train can travel along just a single track – no way can it go along two tracks simultaneously. But I began to think – and I've believed it more and more as the decades have passed – that the passage of time isn't like that at all: the movement of the "now" is like that of the impossible train which can run on more than one track at once: on many tracks, on an almost infinitely large number of tracks. And I think it's open to us to decide which of those tracks we perceive the train to be running on. Over the past month or so I had opted – wittingly or unwittingly – to shift my perception of the track along which my own personal train was traveling. One of the many railway lines had been leading to a station that was the security of a career as a vet, and for over a decade that had been the only track I could see. But then had come my Monday afternoons at the Rupolo. Nothing in the physical universe had been changed by my experience of them – that would have been a ridiculous notion – but my perception had been altered, so that now the chief railway line I saw was the one leading to a station called Cinema Historian and Critic. I was still conscious that the other railway line was there, but I no longer perceived it.

My mind explored this concept, and then took it further.

Trains don't just go to stations, they come from them as well.

Which implied that, all my life so far, I'd been perceiving only one of the many railway tracks along which my personal train – my own personal "now" – had been traveling. Had I somehow been possessed of the ability to perceive the totality of the passage of my past time, I'd have experienced not just a single past but many. In other words, if I could happily accept that the future was unformed and therefore malleable, then I must also accept the far more difficult proposition that the past, too, was readily malleable. It's an old cliché that we mold our own futures. Is it feasible that, through our selective perception, we can likewise mold our own pasts?

If so, then there was another explanation for Andrew Brunner's omission of all those old World War II movies from his Brunner's Companion to the Cinema.

They were movies that had never been made.

Or, at least, they had never been made in the particular past which the consensus of the people alive in the world today had perceived, and indeed still perceived. Yet our train had been traveling along many lines at once, not just the one we'd noticed, and along one of those other lines it was perfectly plausible that the Allies had emerged victorious – perhaps the D-Day landings had been successful rather than a fiasco, or perhaps the traitor Oppenheimer's team had proved nuclear fission possible after all, rather than being misled by the nonsensical Jew science of the charlatan Einstein. I wasn't a historian, so I couldn't even begin to hazard a guess at these things. Whatever the details, it seemed to me that, just because we were able to perceive only a single past, we were getting a completely misleading picture of what the past had actually been like – we were regarding as simple something which had in fact been infernally complex, a huge number of different railway lines that knotted and unknotted as the history train sped along all of them at once. The past, in short, had been molded into its apparently immutable form not through any physical property of the universe but through the sheer inability of the human brain to perceive it fully.

Those movies hadn't been made in our past, but they had been made in the past.

Along at least one of the railway tracks of history, the victors in World War II had been the Allies, and their movie producers and directors had set about solidifying the past they preferred. Of course, they wouldn't have realized that this was what they were doing – they were merely making triumphal entertainments, just as our own moviemakers had created such propagandistic efforts as The Rising Sun Shall Never Set and Private Kohl's War and countless others you can certainly think of yourself – but that was the effect of what they did.

How the movies had been brought into our present was something about which I could hardly even begin to guess. Perhaps there are some people who are able to perceive directly that the train of time is always running along more than a single track, and perhaps one of those people succeeded in, as it were, moving the cans of film across from one side of the train to the other. Or perhaps they just slipped accidentally from a different track, of the many that constitute the passage of time, onto ours. However it came about, the anonymous proprietor of the Rupolo – and perhaps his counterparts in numerous small, scruffy suburban cinemas all over the country – had realized they represented a way of altering people's perceptions, and thereby of changing the shape of history, of reifying a different past.

And to a great extent it had worked – I knew that at first hand. Even to this day, whatever the evidence of my senses or my intellect, I know deep inside me that World War II was fought in black-and-white and that the winners were those slightly comical chappies with their strangled accents. At the time I was sitting on the train home and these notions were formulating themselves in my head, the knowledge was much stronger. Ever since I'd started going to the Monday matinees I'd been having those occasional but powerful flashes when the world around me seemed to be nothing but a charade, the powerful feeling that true reality was what I saw on the Rupolo's screen. Were my own experience to be repeated all over America or all over the world, to be shared by millions upon millions of others, then assuredly the consensus perception of which railway line the train had pounded along might change.

And the past with it.

The only reason the ploy had ultimately failed in my own instance was that I had begun to think of the movies analytically – it had been my conscious decision to continue watching them, but now on the basis that they were thrillingly verboten presentations. Had I continued to watch them uncritically, seeing them through the lens of my emotions rather than that of my intellect, I might have eventually come to see the world they depicted as the only possible past, the true history. No wonder the other Monday regulars at the Rupolo hadn't seemed disappointed by Private Kohl's War and The Rising Sun Shall Never Set. While I'd been watching those two ditchwater outings the rest of the audience had been watching something else – The Fall of Berlin, perhaps, or Convoy to Nairobi, or ... They'd seen those movies because there was no reason for them not to. I, on the other hand, had been able to see only movies that accorded with my own particular perception of the way the past had run. Along the railway track to which my perception was once more limited, the victors had made the movies that reinforced the consensual past.

~

Whoever those conspirators were – if they even existed outside the bounds of my own fertile imagination – their scheme patently failed, and not because of the cops busting cinemas like the Rupolo all over the country but because in due course no human being can continue to observe and accept outside stimuli completely uncritically: eventually, as with myself, the analytical faculty must step in to limit the scope of the mind. For me to say that this self-limiting mechanism of the brain is a tragedy might seem rather rich, coming as that statement does from someone who has made a lifetime career – and a very great deal of money – out of deploying that very same analytical faculty. Yet I stick to the contention. Without a full perception of the true, complicated nature of our past we are not fully prepared as a species to tackle the equally complicated, multiply braided future that awaits us. We will forever be blind to the flowering of the simultaneous realities of our own future, instead perceiving only a single stalk, permitting ourselves to glance neither to left nor to right as we charge ahead oblivious to the splendors all around us. It is a sterile course we are following, this faith in our perception that there is only a single, unique future, and I believe that in due course it will lead to our extinction. If there are other species out there among the stars, I have no doubt they will have learned not to make the same mistake we've made and persist in making, and that they'll thereby be equipped to deal with the future: to welcome it as the burgeoning treasure-store it is in a way we are not. Perhaps only here, on this world, has the mistake ever been made.

As for the movies themselves? As I've said, I am a rich man, and I've spent some of my wealth on employing researchers to try to track down those whose titles I can recall: Albert RN, The Great Escape, Reach for the Sky, The Bridge on the River Kwai ... But so far they've come up with nothing, and I doubt that now this will ever change. What I still think of as The Rupolo Movies were, if you like, just temporary visitors to our consensual and ever-evolving history; whether they'll ever come back – or be brought back – is something about which one can't guess. My suspicion is that we've seen the last of them.

Every now and then I wonder what our consensual present would be like had we indeed been able to perceive a railway track along which one of the stations was the Allies winning World War II. Would things be so very much different? Would they be better or would they be worse? Again, who can guess?

This particular version of history has been very good to me. I've led an extremely comfortable life doing more or less exactly what I wanted to do, indulging my own especial passion and being paid large sums of money simply to enjoy myself. And most of the time, as I look around at the rest of the world, everything there seems pretty near ideal as well. But sometimes I wonder.

This week in the New York Times there was much reporting of the bloody suppression of yet another escape plot by the niggers in one of the slave camps of the South. Scores of them were shot or hanged, including children, and the ringleaders were roasted alive, as is the custom there. I am not one of those who would pretend that the niggers are anything other than a debased subspecies of humanity, but at the same time I cannot believe that this is right: I would not roast a dog or a cat alive, so how can it be right to do this to a nigger? The week before, two homosexuals were lynched in Massachusetts; that was considered to be such a routine occurrence that the story was given only a single paragraph tucked away at the bottom of page twelve. Again, can it be truly right to punish someone with death for their sexual preferences? To be sure, the law would have delivered them a jail sentence, which is certainly justified enough, but the tone of that single paragraph seemed to condone the actions of the lynch mob. I feel uneasy at the ease and frequency with which our penal system carries out executions, often of people who seem to me to be more mentally ill or impaired, or simply more independently minded, than genuinely criminal. And I wish that when vagrants are rounded up they did not simply disappear.

So, yes, sometimes I wonder.

Copyright information
© John Grant, 2002, 2011
"Wooden Horse" was first published in The Third Alternative in 2002, and is reprinted in the infinity plus ebook Take No Prisoners by John Grant:

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Kaitlin Queen

One More Unfortunate

It's the mid-1990s and Nick Redpath has some issues to resolve. Like why he is relentlessly drawn back to a circle of old friends and enemies – and an old love – in his seaside birthplace in north Essex. And why he won't let himself fall in love again. But first he must prove that he didn't murder his old flame, Geraldine Wyse...

Kaitlin Queen is the adult fiction pen-name of a best-selling children's author. Kaitlin also writes for national newspapers and websites. Born in Essex, she moved to Northumberland when she was ten and has lived there ever since. This is her first crime novel for an adult audience.

Buy now: One More Unfortunate by Kaitlin Queen $2.99 / £2.18.

'There are twists and turns galore before finally the murder is solved... The characterizations are vivid, and in a couple of cases really quite affecting; the taut tale-telling rattles along at good speed; and the solution to the mystery is both startling and satisfying. Recommended.' —5* Amazon review

novel extract:
One More Unfortunate by Kaitlin Queen

One more Unfortunate,
Weary of breath,
Rashly importunate,
Gone to her death.

—Thomas Hood, The Bridge of Sighs, 1844

Chapter 1

He had to get going. He had to move.

Sitting at the wheel of his old VW Golf, Nick Redpath tried to pull himself together.

He had to go for help.

To guide him he only had Betsy's vague instructions and his own sepia-tinted memories. It might be a long drive, he thought.

"There's a public house," Betsy had said. His wife insisted he should be called Marcus now, but he'd always been Betsy at school. "Just across the level crossing. Head towards the Ipswich Road. What's it called? Caroline? The name?"

Betsy had drunk a lot this evening and it was clearly a great effort for him to think straight. Even the shock hadn't sobered him up.

"Does it matter, Marcus?" Caroline snapped. "There's a pub. It'll have a telephone."

Nick left them arguing on the uneven wooden deck of the chalet. They'd be divorced in a year, he was certain of that: they'd been at each other's throats all evening.

A soft murmur of voices came from the next chalet. Trevor Carr was in there, comforting his girlfriend. Mandy's response had been erratic: one minute calm and rational, the next verging towards hysteria.

As Nick reached the parking area at the back Ronnie Deller appeared out of the night, still belligerent with drink. "I'm going," Ronnie said. "It's my place. I'm ... responsible."

"Come on, Ronnie," said Nick. He felt tired. He just wanted it all to be out of his hands, but not if that meant passing it on to Ronnie. "We decided," he said. "Will you let me through?" They'd all been drinking and at least Ronnie had been smoking dope. As Nick was the most sober it had been agreed that he should go and make the call while the others stayed together at the Strand.

For once Ronnie backed down, slouching away into the darkness. Before Nick had managed to start the engine, he heard him arguing loudly with Caroline Betts.

Alone with the night at last, Nick felt strangely secure in his old car. He felt that he might just slide down into the seat, wrap his arms around himself and try to forget. The temptation was strong.

He had to get going. He shook his head, slapped his face sharply. Once, twice.

Things seemed a little clearer now. Carefully, he set off, up Strand Lane with the Stour estuary spreading out behind him, all mud and water and drifts of sea-purslane.

It was mid-September, but the air was still peppered with bats and moths, sudden flashes of white in the full beam of the headlights. A long time ago he might have had names for them. Were those little bats called something like Pepperoni? Pipistrani? Pipistrelle?

He slapped his face again and then snatched at the wheel before the hedge could intervene. His mind was wandering. He had to pull himself together.

The lane could only be half a mile long, but it seemed to be taking forever, first surrounded by trees, now with open fields to either side.

Eventually, he came to the level crossing. There would be no trains at this time of night. Not even a late boat-train heading for an overnight sailing to the Hook.

He drove on and soon afterwards he came to a T-junction. Remembering Betsy's instructions, he turned right, and as he rounded the first corner he spotted the pub. It was called the Plough. A single bulb illuminated the sign. Other than that the place was in complete darkness.

He checked his watch. One-thirty.

He pulled up in the car park, convinced that he would be out of luck: the telephone would be inside, locked up. Maybe he could rouse someone to help, but there was something about the place, with its shabby white stucco walls and peeling paint, that told him he'd be wasting his time.

Betsy had been right, though. There was a call box—old-fashioned, red—tucked away by the road. To beat back the darkness Nick parked with his headlamps directed full into the box.

For a moment before he entered he froze in the twin beam, like a rabbit on a road. Inside, his body cut out most of the light and his eyes had trouble adjusting, but he could have made the call blindfold in any case.

Trying, without much hope, to gather himself, he swallowed and then pressed the three nines.

~

Driving back to the Strand seemed so much quicker—the way back never takes as long. He knew where he was going now, it was simply a matter of retracing his route.

He had waited a long time in that deserted pub car park. He had wanted to cry, but tears are never easy when you need them the most.

Back left out of the car park, on a short distance to the unmarked junction, then left again over the level crossing, still clear. He took the lane steadily, trying to convince himself that he was being sensible and not merely delaying his return.

The lane was single track, unsurfaced, with grass growing along its spine. Ahead, through the breaks in the trees, he could see the estuary again: lights on the water, and a dark grey smudge he knew to be the exposed mud-flats of Copperas Bay.

His rearview mirror suddenly flashed urgent blue at him and harsh headlights winked on and off impatiently. He pulled over into a gateway and waited as two blue-lighting police cars scrambled past, followed by a third unmarked Astra. They were in more of a hurry than he was. It was all in their hands now. He should be relieved, but all he could feel was the tiredness dragging at his every movement.

When he reached the Strand, he had to drive on past the police cars by Ronnie's chalet in order to park. There was a row of maybe twenty A-frames here, on the western lip of Copperas Bay. All the same triangular profile—timber roofs right down to the ground on either side—they backed onto a raised earth bank and the muddy track which the Strand Lane had become. At the front, the bank dropped away and the chalets were supported on stilts which plunged into the grassed-over ooze of the estuary. About halfway along, there was a gap between the cabins, and here a ramshackle jetty of roped-together pontoons snaked out across the mud. Years ago this development had been the start of something bigger but, in the Bathside way, it had never been completed.

Nick Redpath left the car and headed back to the chalet. There were already four or five uniformed men at the scene, and two officers in shabby, plain suits. Another car pulled up as Nick approached. He heard raised voices, lowered voices, Mandy Kemp whimpering again from the neighbouring chalet. Engines grumbled, tinny robot monotones came from two-way radios in the open cars and attached to heavy belts. Torches leapt along the path that led into the wood, then they clustered partway along. Lights around a moth, he kept thinking, irrationally. Lights around a beautiful, fragile moth.

But the moth was dead.

He leaned back against a tree, straightening the weary curve of his spine. He liked the solidity, the coolness against the spreading stiffness of his body. He shouldn't have tried to drink tonight, it always made him feel like this: instantly hungover and miserable. He had never been able to gain pleasure from alcohol or drugs, no matter how hard he tried to educate himself. Pints with the lads were always, for him, orange juice or Coke, and driving duties afterwards.

Slowly, his body slid down the trunk, snagging on the bark. He crouched, elbows on knees, face pressed into his hands.

Time passed, during which he was dimly aware of the buzz of activity around him, the occasional rush of air as someone passed nearby. He started to lose track of what was happening.

He rubbed his eyes, looked up.

Caroline Betts was pointing at him, talking to a stout man who looked like he dressed by mail order. "That's him," she said, her tone unusually low. "Over there. Against the tree." Beyond her, Betsy—Marcus—was dividing his attention between Caroline and a policeman who was trying to question him. He was trying to catch Caroline's eye, but she wouldn't respond.

"Nicholas Redpath?" A controlled, neutral tone.

Nick looked up at the officer, who had left Caroline and come to stand looming over him, cutting out the light. He was a tall man as well as broad, his shaggy black hair haloed by a car's headlights somewhere behind him.

Nick nodded and tried to work some spit into his dried up mouth so that he could speak.

"Nicholas Redpath," the officer repeated. "My name's Detective Sergeant Cooper. I'm arresting you on suspicion of the unlawful killing of Mrs Geraldine Louise Wyse. You're not obliged to say anything unless you wish to do so, but anything you do say may be put in writing and used in evidence. Do you understand?" The forced neutrality of Cooper's tone never faltered.

Nick looked across to where Betsy and his wife were being questioned. Ronnie and Trev and Mandy were with officers in the chalets, he was sure. Why him?

Slowly, he shook his head. "What's going on?" he said, his mind in freefall. What was going on?

~

Nick Redpath stared at the tape machine, not really seeing it. He was in an interview room at the Bathside police station, only a couple of streets from the damp prefab where he had spent his first fourteen years. He'd already been passed fit for questioning by the police doctor, but he was still struggling, desperately, to understand.

The interview room had grey, scabbed walls, no windows, a glaring striplight stuck to the ceiling. Nick sat in a stiff plastic chair, a table in front of him bearing the tape machine and the elbows of a thin-haired man who had introduced himself as Detective Inspector Langley. The officer's jutting ears made Nick think of Prince Charles, except they were smaller. Ian Rush, maybe. Their scooped forward interior shone greasily, reflecting the single light of the room.

"Describe your feelings towards Mrs Wyse," said Langley. "When you were at school. When you met her again last week. Tell me again: what sort of relationship did you have with her?"

Nick stared at the blank face of the tape machine, struggling to shape a response.

"Answer me, Nick. Come on. You've already told me you were friends. Is there something more?"

He thought he'd always been discreet. He'd been in Jerry's registration class for three years, before they'd taken him away from Bathside. He'd sat behind and across from her. Even now he could picture her short, streaked, blonde bob, from behind and across—the way it moved with her head as she talked and laughed. Adolescent days spent watching her, studying her in secret, as an entomologist studies some rare and exquisite butterfly or moth, mentally logging every detail, every nuance of movement or mannerism. Nights spent in recollection.

"Were you attracted to her, Nick? Was that it?"

How did this DI Langley know? He'd always been subtle, he thought. Had everyone seen through him from his first lustful thought?

"What about tonight? What was it that you said to her? What were you hoping to achieve when you came back to Bathside?" Langley was suddenly animated. "Why did you go to the Strand? Did you want to give her one, like you should have done twelve years ago? Is that it?"

There was a cough from behind, which reminded Nick of the presence of a solicitor they had told him to hire. Langley caught himself, nodded, said more calmly, "What happened, Nick? When the two of you were alone in the woods."

He remembered her lips, moist against his own for that briefest of moments. Her hands against him. "Please, Nicky." Her voice had hardly changed after all this time. "Take me away from all this. I'd be grateful." Her meaning had been clear enough.

His own hands, rising quickly, forcing her away. Breaking contact. He remembered the suddenness of that movement, and then again, he remembered her lips against his own.

He shuddered violently, put his hands to his face.

"Tell me about it, Nick. Tell me all about it." Langley's voice was closer now. He was leaning forward, pressing his attack home. "You've told me already: you confronted her, you argued—a lovers' tiff? What did you do next? There's a gap: one moment you're arguing, then you skip ahead to being with the others and nobody knowing where Mrs Wyse has got to. There's a gap there, Nick. What happened?"

Nick shook his head. "I told you. I went for a walk. Try and clear my skull."

"Somebody tried to clear Mrs Wyse's skull. Did you strike her?"

"I went for a walk."

"In the woods? At one in the morning? Come on. You can do better than that. Did you strike Mrs Wyse?"

At last, he was crying, and he hated himself for it.

"Did you hit her?"

"I don't know," said Nick. "I don't know what happened. I just ... don't ... know."

Chapter 2

The way back nearly always seems quicker: retracing the outward journey, following the trail back to source. Yet here he was: taken away from Bathside when he was barely fourteen, and now a man of twenty-six.

It had taken him twelve years to find his way back.

Nick Redpath took his old VW Golf gently around the twists and turns of the Ipswich Road. He passed the first turning to the Strand Lane and Copperas Bay. As a boy he'd trekked out there to watch the birds that gathered on the mud-flats: black-tailed godwits, brent geese, flickering carpets of widgeon and teal.

He found that the familiar sights were triggering old memories. Copperas Wood, a nature reserve now, but back then it had been unmanaged, criss-crossed with muddy paths used by gatherers of sweet chestnuts every autumn.

There was a new bypass, branching off from a roundabout just before the first build-up of houses. Where to? Bathside occupied the end of the north-east Essex peninsula, beyond the town was only the mouth of the estuary and the North Sea: the road had nowhere to go. To the first of the docks at Westquay, he supposed, or even across the mud-flats to Eastquay.

He drove on into the fringe of the town. There were new houses here, filling in what had been open spaces: the old School for Troubled Adolescents, as they had been told to call it, had closed, replaced by a retirement complex; a fistful of neat little bungalows had been scattered across its playing field.

He drove past All Saints' Church and a cluster of shops, then took a right turn at the war memorial. Down Upper Bay Road, then right again into Hill Lane to cruise slowly past his old school. The regimented grey blocks were no different, except maybe a little more shabby. A chip van was pulled up onto the grass, quiet after the lunchtime rush.

The Prom had been transformed, a vista of crisp concrete sea defences yet to be browned and dulled with age. He tried to picture how it had been before, but he couldn't, he only knew that all this was new. He drove slowly along the front, bleak in its mid-September greyness, almost deserted now that the summer season was over and the kids back in school. A few dogs—To Be Kept Strictly Under Control, the signs said—and their owners. Some gulls, lifting into the air and then settling again, each time someone passed too close.

He parked in Third Avenue and set out on foot to find himself somewhere to stay. There had always been plenty of guesthouses and bed and breakfast places in this part of town.

~

The man who answered Nick's knock introduced himself as Jim McClennan. He was a dried-up shell of a man. His face was pink and stubbly, creased like an elephant's legs; his thin white hair was stained nicotine-yellow.

"Tenner a night, off-season rate," he said. "Full cooked breakfast with the trimmings, if the wife's well enough. Key's on a string in the letterbox if you're coming in late." McClennan tongued his moustache. "If you have anybody stopping over, you pay me another tenner, you hear?"

Left alone, Nick surveyed his room. It was clean and tidy, but it looked as if it had been furnished from a jumble sale. Nothing matched, and everything was worn or marked in some way or another. He pulled the velveteen curtains as wide as they would go, and parted the lace curtains. He could see the white roof of his car in the street below and if he craned his neck a little he could see a tiny corner of the bay, dull and lifeless under a flat Essex sky. This would be the best room, he supposed, with its sea view.

He left the house. Sometimes he just had to be outside. He hated the walls gathered all around him, the ceiling so low. He straightened, breathed deeply, collected himself.

He slipped into his scuffed, brown, leather jacket and pulled it tight. All he had was what he was wearing and what was in his car and the room he had just taken. He had never needed much in the way of possessions. You learn that, shunted from one institution to another: value anything and it's a weakness. Someone always exploits your weaknesses.

He crossed over Coastguards' Parade, glancing along at the Minesweepers' Memorial, a monument to the men who had kept the estuary and bay navigable during the wars. He had a great uncle on there somewhere but now he chose not to go and look for his name, as he had done so often as a boy.

Instead, he stood at the railings at the top of Cliff Gardens. Below him, grass and a few trees slid away towards the Promenade. Farther along, near to Queen Victoria's statue, there would be a tunnel under the road. Once, he'd been part of a gang that had ginger-knocked an entire street, then sprinted away through that tunnel, losing themselves in the Gardens before even the first door had been opened.

He didn't know why he had come back to Bathside. It should have been behind him, the twelve years a welcome buffer. The place was a bad memory for him, ashes he had no reason to rake over again.

He walked.

He was kidding himself. He couldn't simply forget Bathside. He had needed to make this trip. He had roots which could not be denied. The place was in his blood, much as he hated to acknowledge that: it was a weakness, a hold.

He headed into town to find himself a meal and see what else had changed.

~

He kept thinking that he should bump into people, spot a face in the crowd, be recognised by an apparent stranger: "Hey, Nick! My man! Remember me?" The struggle to fit a name to those half-remembered features, that familiar voice. But nearly half his life had passed in other towns, with other people. What would his fourteen year-old friends look like now? They'd have jobs, if they were lucky. They might be in suits or work clothes. They'd probably have kids of their own, for God's sake!

He could look them up, he thought. But he had little idea of how to set about it. The telephone directory, perhaps—he could work his way methodically through all the surnames he could remember, all the Smiths and Joneses, he had a year or two to spare. Would the school have records? And would they let him see them if they did?

He wondered how many of the people he had known had moved away by now. Better jobs, better prospects, elsewhere. But he knew that Bathside was the kind of place where people found themselves stuck without realising. Maybe it was because it was at the end of a peninsula: it was a place with—literally—only one way out. You couldn't simply drift away from Bathside, it was a place you had to make a conscious decision to leave.

Wandering through the town centre, he recognised no-one. Drinking his Coke at the Station Inn, he saw no-one. He played bar billiards with a group of likely looking lads of about his age, but none of the faces or talk triggered anything. "You local then?" asked one of them, bringing him another Coke.

"Once," said Nick. "A long time ago." But the conversation led nowhere.

Later, he ate alone, sitting in the window-seat of a burger bar on the High Street, watching faces passing by outside.

He got back to his digs at a little after nine, but already the place was in darkness.

He fished in the letter box for the string, extracted the key and let himself into the quiet, musty house.

~

Up early on Monday morning, still no sign of life in the house, a milk float humming by outside. In his track suit and a decent pair of Adidas running shoes, Nick Redpath set out at a steady jog, past the Minesweepers' Memorial and up Bay Road, away from the sea. There were large Victorian houses along here, many divided up into flats. Lights shone from some of the windows, even though the sky was rapidly brightening.

He turned down towards his old secondary school, then took a right along a rough track known as Squat Lane, which ran along the top of the school grounds. Kids would come here to smoke and bunk off. Older teenagers would come here on their motorbikes, scrambling through the trees and mud to impress their girlfriends, still young enough for school.

Long Meadows Estate had sprawled in the last decade or so. The fields where every winter Nick had watched short-eared owls and hen harriers were gone. In their place were detached family homes, bungalows with symmetrical gardens, a maze of new Closes and Ways and Roads, each named after a different type of bird: Peewit Road, Sandpiper Close, Woodcock Way, even—they must have been struggling by then—a Blue Jay Way.

He ran hard, adrenalin coursing through his body, burning up the Roads, Ways and Closes behind him. Leaving the new estate, he ran back along Low Road, past the bottom end of the school playing fields on one side and the caravan park on the other.

When he reached the Prom he was almost sprinting, taken up in a burst of manic energy. His feet slammed into the ground like a boxer's fists working over a punch bag.

He made himself slow down, a little worried about what was happening to his head. He knew the signs to look for: the sudden fits of hyperactivity, the need to do, followed inevitably by the gloom and depression. He managed his mind like the Naturalists' Trust now managed Copperas Wood: always watching, always ready, keeping the extremes of his own wild nature in check. It had been a difficult skill to acquire.

When he reached Cliff Gardens he ran up the first steeply sloping path, then back down the next, zigzagging his way along to the statue of Queen Victoria, and then finally back to his digs and the smell of hot, greasy cooking from the kitchen.

~

Later, he walked down to Eastquay. Here, four or five roughly parallel streets were squeezed into the narrow head of the peninsula, criss-crossed with countless alleyways and cobbled lanes. This was one of the oldest parts of Bathside, protected for a long time by stockades and marshes from the marauding Essex hordes.

His head was buzzing, memories bobbing up to grab his attention. Again, he wondered what he was doing here, what had driven him to return. He walked past St Nicholas' church, and the old Electric Palace—open again, he saw, showing last year's Hollywood pap.

He went into the Two Cups for a sandwich and some juice. He'd come here once before, not long before he left the town. He'd always looked mature for his age and it was a busy night. He'd bought cider for himself and his other under-age friends and together they had watched Another Citizen's first real gig. He remembered their first song—a cover of 'Purple Haze'—but after that he had been lost in an alcohol daze and the evening had devolved into a blur of booming music, pressing bodies, mindless dancing and jostling and finally being sick against a wall. The band had gone on to have a minor hit in the mid-eighties with 'Montevideo', and they had provided Nick with his first inept chat-up line: "I used to sort of vaguely know their bass player, you know."

The back room where Rod and the boys had played had been converted into a seafood restaurant called Trawler's. Nick sat in one of the remaining two bars and set to work on his club sandwich.

"Nicky Redpath, is that you? Go on, tell me it ain't!"

A heavy hand slapped onto his shoulder and a smell of after-shave and sweat settled around him. He turned and squinted at a grinning face, well-fleshed but not yet fat. The man was of average height, with curly, dark hair, and moistness glinting on lips, eyes and brow. It was the suit that threw Nick at first. Even as the man settled onto the next stool, Nick couldn't picture Ronnie Deller in a suit and tie.

"It is," said Nick. "I am."

"So you're back then."

"I'm back."

The barman brought Ronnie a pint of Adnams without needing to ask, then waited as Ronnie fished out a wallet and paid.

"What's with the suit and tie?" asked Nick, sipping at his orange juice. For a moment there was a flash of hostility in Ronnie's eyes, but it was checked, forgotten in an instant.

Nick chastised himself. He had forgotten how carefully Ronnie had to be handled.

Ronnie Deller had been in Nick's year at school, always the wild one, always on the brink of expulsion. Ronnie would fight with anyone he took offence to, no matter how big or old. Pain had been no barrier for him, he'd keep on fighting regardless. Cut off his legs, people used to say, and he'd kick you with the stumps. Ronnie Deller in a suit...

"Lunch break," he said, now. "On the blower to the fucking Dutch all morning—" he reached for his beer "—I need something down my throat."

"So what do you do?" Nick had been at the wrong end of a kicking from Ronnie on one occasion, but other than that they had never had much contact, as far as he could recall.

"Shipping agent. Goods from A to B. Or right now, stuck in some fucking Customs yard waiting for clearance because we didn't get the right papers through from the Hook." He drank again. "Started when I was sixteen, worked my way up. I'm a self-made man, me." He flicked his tie. "I'm doing okay. How's about yourself, then Nick? What were you—fifteen? sixteen?—when you went away? What line are you in then?"

"I was fourteen." Bad memories. He choked them down. He wasn't going to show any sign of weakness. "Went to Chelmsford, Colchester, then two places in Norwich."

"Couldn't handle you, right?"

"That's just the system," said Nick. "It's no big deal. I'm in security now, bits of this and that. Enough to get by."

"You mean you're a bouncer?"

"Sometimes. Nightwatchman, on-site security, bouncing, some bodyguard work. Save some money and then drift, I suppose."

Ronnie shook his head. "Ironic, isn't it?"

That wasn't a word Nick would ever have expected Ronnie to use. "What's ironic?" he asked.

"You, me. The way things are." Ronnie swirled his nearly drained glass. "You were always the brains, right? Going on to good things, that kind of thing. Me, I had to be chained to the desk to keep me in school, but I got my exams and my job doing the copying and making teas. Now I'm sat at a desk, on the blower all bloody morning to old Claus, while you have to earn a crust with your fists."

Twelve years was a long time. Everything was different.

"You looking for work now?"

"Depends," said Nick. He had enough money to last him for a few more weeks yet. He wasn't looking too hard.

"We won't have anything, of course," said Ronnie. "We have the office alarm for security." He laughed, and Nick smiled thinly. "But I've got my contacts, you know? If I hear of anything, I'll put it your way?" Ronnie had a way of turning a statement into a question.

"Thanks," said Nick, finishing his drink. "Another?" He pointed at Ronnie's empty glass. Buy the drinks and regain some standing—he was getting by.

"My shout, my shout." In a single movement Ronnie had swept up the two glasses and caught the barman's attention. He produced his wallet again, and Nick told himself he was reading too much into the gesture: they weren't two schoolboys vying for status any more. "What did you have in the juice, then?"

"Just orange juice," Nick told the barman. "Thanks."

They drank in silence for a few minutes, watching the other customers, the lunchtime trade. The Two Cups had moved upmarket since Nick's one previous visit. Now it was all highly polished brass and exposed wood, bullseye glass in the windows distorting Quay Street outside. The men wore suits and fashionably loud ties, the smaller number of women wore split skirts and big hair; the air smelt not of beer and smoke, but of after-shave and perfume. A lot of them seemed to be having a quick drink either before or after lunch in Trawler's.

"So why are you back in Bathside, then?" asked Ronnie, halfway down his second pint of Adnams.

Nick shrugged. He'd been asking himself the same question since yesterday, but he had still failed to come up with a satisfactory answer. "See the old place," he said. "I haven't been back in twelve years, what with one thing and another." He looked down into his drink for a moment.

"Need to get it out of your system, right? You looked anyone up yet?"

"I lost contact with everyone when I went away," said Nick. "I had a lot on my mind. I don't know what anyone's doing these days."

"Listen," said Ronnie. "You want to meet up with a few old faces? I've got a place up the river at Copperas Bay, you know it? At the Strand. A little cabin I use some weekends. I've got a little boat, do a bit of fishing, get some beers in, right? Sometimes we have a bit of a bash, like this coming Friday. Some people you'll know. I've got keys to another cabin, too, so there's space to stop over. Fancy it?"

"That's good of you," said Nick. "I'll think about it. Thanks. D'you need a yes or no straightaway?" He was trying to stall, he didn't want to commit himself to anything he might regret for the rest of the week.

"Just turn up, Nick. Just turn up. It's number 12. My car'll be outside—a red BMW 325i. You can't miss it." He rose, put his hand on Nick's shoulder again. "Been good," he said. "But I gotta go. You know how it is. Keep Claus on his toes, you know?"

"I know," said Nick, nodding. After a decent interval, he finished his drink and left, setting out along the front, past the Low Lighthouse, heading for the Dubbs and Stone Point.

Chapter 3

On Tuesday morning Nick Redpath chose a different route for his run. He set off along Coastguards' Parade and then Bagshaw Terrace to the Main Road, then right towards Eastquay. But before he reached the High Lighthouse he took a left over the railway and into the Riverside Estate.

He hadn't intended to come this way. The impulse had taken him by surprise, although he suspected some dark corner of his mind had planned it all along. Riverside was a low-lying area, sandwiched between the final curve of the railway and the kink in the estuary between Eastquay and Westquay. Once it had all been salt-marsh but it had been drained in the nineteenth century. Since then it had been in and out of use, mainly for storage and short-term housing, but after the war the council had taken it over and thrown up a swathe of housing, almost overnight. The great flood of 1953 had devastated the estate but it had soon been reconstructed. Nick had moved there when he was a boy, it was the part of town he remembered most clearly.

He turned right, then second left into Rebow Street, but everything had changed. Numbers sixteen to twenty-four had been a cluster of old prefabs, at least ten years past their expected life even when Nick and his mother had first lived there. He remembered the black patches of damp that had spread over the walls every winter and receded in the summer. He remembered the draughts, and the cockroaches and the rats that lived somewhere underneath.

Now it was a building site, the old temporary housing finally giving way to the modern age. The shells of six houses rose from the mud and debris, glassless frames in the windows, piles of bricks and heaps of sand scattered about. Nick was surprised at his reactions: the fondness of the memories, the sense of trespass at this violation of his old territory.

He had stopped when he reached Rebow Street, but now he started to run again, resisting the urge to sprint, to burn up the energy that fizzed in his veins. From Basin Road he could see the looming silhouette of the gas cylinder. As a boy, Nick had climbed it, until he was so high up that Bathside was spread out like Toytown below. There was the sea-wall, too, where he had spent long hours roaming, with friends or alone.

Perhaps this was what he had come back for: some kind of exorcism of his past. He had read somewhere that dreams were the way the brain organised and filed away the experiences and emotions of the preceding day. Maybe this visit was serving a similar function: allowing him to sort out his old memories, finishing off a process which had been cut short twelve years earlier. Maybe now he would be able to return to his digs, pack his bag and get away from here forever.

He had to wait for the boat train to clear the level crossing, then he cut across the old part of town and headed for Stone Point.

The Point was a long breakwater, jutting out into the mouth of the estuary. It had been built by the Victorians to alter the flow of the river and prevent the harbour from silting up. They had intended it to be over half a mile long but they had miscalculated and abandoned it a little over halfway. He ran out to the very end, past a couple of early morning fishermen. Children were always warned not to go out on Stone Point, but he had never heard of anyone being swept away by a freak wave. He stopped for a time, to watch the surging of the muddy waters. A cargo ship was heading out into the North Sea and for a moment he thought its bow wave might top the breakwater but it didn't and he turned away, perversely disappointed.

Ahead of him, as he ran back along Stone Point, was the sudden bulge of Beacon Hill, its silhouette hardened and broken up by the shells of long abandoned blockhouses and gun emplacements. The hill had been turned into a fortress during the war and, ever since, local children had known it not as Beacon Hill, but as the Dubbs, short for WD, the War Department.

The Dubbs had still been fenced off—however inadequately, where determined children were concerned—before, but now a public footpath had been opened up across the heart of Beacon Hill. Nick jogged slowly through, past signs that warned against exploring the ruins. Notices proclaimed plans to renovate the land, razing the old buildings to make way for a new marina and residential complex. It seemed that everywhere Nick went in Bathside the developers wanted to erase yet another of his childhood memories. Now, he wished he had skirted the Dubbs, as he had on the previous afternoon, sticking to the Prom.

By Cliff Gardens he had less energy to burn than on the previous morning and so he avoided the steep, zigzagging paths.

He let himself into the house, and as soon as he had showered and dressed, Jim McClennan was serving him with another greasy breakfast. "How's your wife?" Nick asked, hearing sounds from the kitchen. He still hadn't seen her.

His landlord just looked at him, and then left him to his meal.

~

Jerry caught up with him later, as he turned onto Coastguards' Parade for the second time that morning, undecided about his plan for the day. It was only later that he began to suspect that she had been watching the house, that she had engineered this 'chance' meeting.

He had paused at the corner to look out across the bay. It was clearer today, with a freshness that made him grateful for his old jacket. One or two yachts dotted the sea, and down towards the Naze Nick saw the black hulk of a Thames barge. On the horizon, a cargo ship merged with the haze. He wondered how much the town would be changed by the Channel Tunnel, luring away the passenger trade and the freight.

"Nicky, is that you?"

He turned and Jerry Gayle was approaching him, a quizzical look on her face. She'd let her hair grow, so that now it brushed her shoulders, but it was still the same streaked blonde. The way it hung around her face, combined with her distracted air, made her look vaguely like some starlet from the sixties. Her wide, cobalt eyes were edged with crows' feet, he saw, although she was only a month or two older than Nick.

She stopped, suddenly nervous, unsure.

"It is you, isn't it?"

He saw that her clothes were expensive: printed silk with a crumpled linen jacket and skirt. Her body, as slim as he remembered, if not more so. He had a sudden mental image of Jerry's naked torso, its angular form, the bones jutting, the small breasts rising and falling rapidly with her breathing.

"Jerry," he said, trying to blot out the image, cursing his mind for the tricks it played. "Hello." He half-turned, paused, and she joined him, walking slowly along the wide pavement of Coastguards' Parade.

"You're looking good," she said, with a sideways glance.

Good, not merely well. He swallowed. He never knew how to handle these situations. A bar fight, yes: he could pick out the key figure—not the one who started it, but the one who looked most likely to keep it going—and eject him from the premises. He could deter a group of drunken students who had been barred from a nightclub. He could sort out any of these situations with hardly a thought. But this...

He swallowed, licked his lips. "I look after myself," he finally said. "You learn to." He risked a glance, knowing that he would store up every image, every gesture. The light, shining back off her lips, those eyes which were never still until suddenly they locked on your own.

He realised he had broken the rules. He should have returned her compliment with one of his own—You look even more beautiful than I remember—instead of defensively trying to explain himself.

"Have you come back to stay?"

"I don't think so," he said. At least he could try to answer a straight question. "I'm in a B and B for now. I just wanted to see the old place again. And some of the old faces."

She smiled at this. "You've never been back in the entire twelve years?"

She remembered exactly how long he'd been away. He shook his head. "Things get in the way," he said.

"Don't they always? Do you have time for a drink?" They had reached the junction with Station Road now, and there was a terrace with tables and brightly coloured parasols, part of the Bay Hotel.

He nodded. Of course he had time for a drink. The hotel formed the end of a four-storey Regency terrace. The rest of the row was the natural hue of the local brick, but the Bay Hotel had been stuccoed white, with ornate cast iron and baskets full of tumbling geraniums and lobelia dotted at regular intervals across its facade. They went inside to order—Earl Grey, slices of lemon—then returned to the terrace.

"What's happened to you in the last twelve years?" Nick asked. He remembered her inconsistent moods, how sometimes she would talk and talk, when at others the best she could offer was a semi-detached gaze and half a smile. "Have you been here all the time?"

Her eyes were wide, suddenly fixed on the Bay. Nick thought she was going to drift, but then she smiled, her eyes flicked towards him, then away again, and she said, "I've been away. I've come back. It's my home—it always pulls you back in the end, don't you think?"

He couldn't argue with that. A woman brought their tray of tea out, making little secret of the fact that she thought them insane to be sitting outside on a day like this.

Jerry picked up a slice of lemon and squeezed it into her tea, then took another slice and let it float on the surface. She licked the juice from her fingers with delicate dabs of her tongue, then glanced, again, at Nick. "My little treat," she said, and for a dizzy moment he wondered what she meant.

He put milk in his tea, then three sugars. "You're only the second familiar face I've seen since Sunday," he said.

"Oh?" A questioning tone, but she clearly wasn't interested.

He changed tack. "I went out to Riverside, this morning. Looked for our old house in Rebow Road. It's a building site now. I don't know what I expected."

They exchanged brief smiles. "Well you're the early bird," she said. "Catch any worms?"

They smiled again.

"I run," said Nick. "Or work out. Every morning, before the rest of the world starts up. It's the best time of the day. Everything's new, the air's better. The day hasn't had a chance to be spoilt by then."

"You make me want to join you." She giggled. "But look at me: I'm so out of shape. I couldn't run to catch a cold."

He looked and she sucked in a deep breath, patted her abdomen, giggled again. He looked away. "You look fine to me," he mumbled.

When finally he returned his gaze from the yachts, now multiplied across the Bay, her gaze locked on his own. "Where have you been Nick?" she asked. "All these years? Why did they take you away from me?"

~

He had left Bathside when he was fourteen, after the worst six months of his life. Jerry knew about his mother. She knew that she had been ill, that she had died, that Nick had been taken away.

It had been so sudden, even though it took half a year in the end. One minute, it seemed, his mother was organizing the AGM of the local history society and then he had come home from school to find her waiting for him, when she should still have been out at work.

The look on her face would be imprinted on his brain forever. It was a blend of the stubbornness, which he knew he had inherited, and some strange serenity he had never seen before and had never seen in anyone since.

Somehow—from that look, he supposed—he had known before she told him. "I'm going to die, Nick," she said, simply.

She always talked straight with him.

He had known about her stomach pains, and her frequent visits to the doctor, but he had never suspected that it was cancer, a cancer that had insinuated itself so rapidly that it was already inoperable.

She fought it, because that was the way she was, but it seemed that every day she was a little worse, a little weaker. He did what he could, but he was only fourteen. For a long time, before and after, all he had wanted to do was wreck the world that had done this awful thing.

"She made arrangements for me," he told Jerry, aware of her eyes on his face. "But it was confused. They didn't work out."

"What about your family?"

He nodded back along Coastguards' Parade to the Minesweepers' Memorial. "Uncle Jack's on there," he said. "The rest are under stones at St Nick's, or All Saints, or buried at sea." His family was a Bathside family of long standing—his mother had traced them back to the days they had worked in Sir Anthony Deane's yard, building ships for Charles II—but Nick was the last of the line.

"You had nobody?"

He'd never known his father, and his mother had never spoken of him. That was up to her, Nick had always thought. If the truth hurt her then he didn't want to know.

He shrugged. "The Council took me in. I went to a temporary place in Colchester, then down to Chelmsford for a couple of months. Then two places in Norwich until I was old enough to get out."

"You moved a lot, Nicky. That can't have been good for you."

He met her look now, and smiled. "I wasn't exactly cooperative," he said. "I kept getting into fights. Trouble has a way of finding me."

Jerry smiled at that. "Like I found you this morning, perhaps? What happened when you were old enough to get out of the system?"

"Like I say: trouble has a way of finding me." Suddenly he didn't want to talk about it any more.

His tea had gone cold in the cup. Her eyes were flitting about again. He marvelled at the way she could change from vacant gaze, to sudden focus, to this skittishness.

It would be easy to become infatuated again, with a creature such as this.

He waited until she was looking at him, then said, "Will I get a chance to see you again, while I'm in town? Or is this it?"

She smiled, then dabbed her mouth with a serviette. "Of course you'll see me again, Nicky. Didn't Ronnie invite you out to the Strand for the weekend?"

~

Who, exactly, was he trying to fool? It was never a question of whether he would become infatuated all over again. Seeing her had been enough: the infatuation had never died. For the rest of the day he had been unable to get her out of his head. Ghost images of her face, fragments of their conversation. You're looking good.

Over the course of the day, he came to believe that he had discovered the real reason for his return to Bathside. He had come back for a second chance.

She had always been his.

Next morning, he was up with the sky still dark. He hadn't been able to sleep. At first his head had been full of Jerry; later, it had been congested with doubts. Alone, in the dark, he could no longer believe what his senses had told him during the previous morning, as he had sat on the terrace outside the Bay Hotel, sharing a pot of Earl Grey with Jerry Gayle.

He ran along an alleyway, separating the back yards of two rows of terraced houses, to the Main Road, then out, past the hospital and the golf club and the end of the new bypass until he reached Westquay Station. There was a police box in the middle of the road here, only allowing through traffic for the station or the docks.

He turned back, passing through a huddle of terraced streets built for the first influx of dockers and railwaymen into Westquay, about a hundred years ago. He came to the end of a road, swung himself over a gate with one flowing movement and then he was running over a tract of wasteland which stretched all the way back to the old cement works at St Augustine's. This whole area was known locally as the Hangings, although Nick knew that the name strictly only applied to a short, abandoned stretch of railway cutting by Ray Island Cemetery.

He followed a track that ran by the railway, with the estuary just beyond. At one point he heard a wader crying—seven brief whistles—and he remembered that it was a whimbrel, the smaller cousin of the curlew. For the first time since yesterday, his head was clear. All he was aware of was the wild land all around him and the power of his own body. Early morning was always the best time.

Later, he went to call on Jerry's parents.

~

When he had known her the first time around, Jerry had lived in Caulders Road. The houses here were detached, modern, with gardens laid out like military kit for inspection. The road dropped away down one of the steeper hills in Bathside, from Bay Road at the top, to Coastguards' Parade at the foot. Because of the hill, the view across the bay was unimpeded, and to young Nick Redpath, living in his damp, prefabricated council house on Riverside, this house had been a sure sign of Jerry's class.

Now, he saw that the street was no more than comfortably middle class. Pilots and teachers would live here, he supposed, and moderately successful local businessmen.

He recognised the house, with its front garden all paving slabs and gravel and those awful miniature conifers. He crunched up the path and rang at the doorbell.

"Mr Gayle?" he said, to the man who answered the door. He wasn't sure, after such a long time. He had only ever seen Jerry's father once or twice. The door opened wider, to reveal a tall man with steely grey hair, slicked back behind fleshy, furred ears. His nose had been broken and then reset askew and then Nick noted those eyes: the deep cobalt blue, flitting from Nick's face to his clothes, to his shoes, to the street beyond, then back to his face.

"Mr Gayle, I'm sorry to bother you. My name's Nicholas Redpath. I used to know your daughter. I wondered if I might have a few minutes of your time?" He was conscious of the change in his own manner: the straightening of the spine, the formality of his tone.

Mr Gayle's expression remained politely blank for a few seconds, then he gave a single nod and stepped back from the door. "Just brewing up," he said, in exactly the clipped, educated voice Nick had expected. "Assam?"

"Very kind," said Nick, crossing the threshold with a sudden thrill. Entering the house where Jerry had been raised. They went through to the kitchen, where a large china teapot sat in the middle of a polished table, a pair of delicate cups inverted in their saucers by its side. Out through a glass door and the conservatory window, Nick saw Mrs Gayle settled on a plastic kneeler, plucking the dying summer bedding from a sloping border with a steady rhythm. She looked a good ten years younger than her husband, although still well into her fifties.

"Redpath, you say," said Mr Gayle, producing another cup and saucer, then turning all the cups up the right way. "Local History Society. Am I right? Fran—my wife—knew your mother. Lost touch, I'm afraid. You moved away, you said?"

"I left the area when I was a teenager," said Nick. "My mother passed away."

A look of horror crossed Mr Gayle's face. "God, I'm sorry," he said. "My mind was elsewhere. Of course. It all comes back. You must think me terribly..."

Nick shook his head, then spooned the sugar into his tea.

"The old brain's a little slow these days. Of course. I should have made the connection. Fran and Geraldine were terribly upset at the time, of course. I should have realised." He paused to pick up the third cup of tea. "You must come out into the garden—Fran will want to see you, of course."

Nick followed him out.

"Nick Redpath," said Mr Gayle, as his wife rose to her feet, peeling yellow rubber gloves from her hands. "Mrs Redpath's lad. Local History." His demeanour had changed in his wife's presence: less stiff, more boyish.

"It must be years," said Fran Gayle, clinging limply to Nick's hand. "Does Geraldine know you're back? She still talks of you, you know?"

Nick felt awkward under the scrutiny of Jerry's parents. "I did bump into her," he said. Yesterday morning. But she forgot to give me her number or address. That's why I called, really. I wondered if you might...?"

"Of course, of course." Mr Gayle went back into the kitchen, produced a jotter and began to write. Then he paused and glanced out at Nick, the penetrating, mischievous look his daughter used so well. "You know she's married, of course?"

"Of course," said Nick, smiling, nodding. "She told me yesterday. What's his name again?" He didn't, and she hadn't—he'd have noticed a ring on her finger, he felt sure—and it was all he could do to keep the shock from writing itself in bold capitals right across his face.

"Matthew Wyse," said Mr Gayle, resuming his writing, apparently satisfied. "Antiques and art dealer. Premises in Colchester and Manningtree. Here. They live on the Stoham Road—no street numbers. Just past the Yew Tree, you know it?"

Nick accepted the slip of paper and nodded. "I'm most grateful," he said. "Thank you for your time."

"Welcome, boy. I have plenty to spare since I left the Service." Nick recalled that Gayle had been something in the Civil Service. "You'll come again, will you? You don't need an excuse, you know."

~

He couldn't sort it all out in his head. He had probably misinterpreted the whole encounter with Jerry—she had recognised him and shared a pot of tea, no more—he had misread all the signals. But why should that be the case? The simple fact that she was married didn't mean she was uninterested, that an old spark hadn't been stirred.

But he knew that everything was different for him now. The fact that she was married might not prove anything, but it did increase the likelihood that he had got it all wrong. And even if he had not, and she had been doing more than idly flirting, any further developments would have to be secret, they would always be plagued by the fear of discovery. Was it more exciting that way? Or simply more shabby?

Some time during the next two days he realised that he was being foolish. He'd been thirteen, fourteen, and smitten by a girl he had never really got to know. Now he was twice that age, but still with the same foolish thoughts.

He was being stupid.

On Friday morning, as he ran as hard as he ever did—across the sands, hurdling the groynes, up the steps to the Prom and down the next flight to the beach again ... as he ran he knew that he would not get into his old VW that evening, to drive out to Ronnie Deller's get-together at the Strand. He couldn't go through with it.

Mrs Geraldine Wyse was a stranger to him and young Jerry Gayle was a part of his childhood dreams, a fragment he should keep untainted in his own mind, rather than risk spoiling it with unpleasant factors like truth and reality.

Back at his digs, showered and changed back into jeans and a T-shirt, he went down for breakfast. His landlord was waiting in the corridor. "Had a 'phone call," he said. "Lady. Said she'd call back at half-nine."

"Thanks," said Nick, his resolve dissipating in a matter of seconds.

McClennan turned and headed for the kitchen. "Not a bleedin' answering service, is it?" he muttered, before the door slammed shut behind him.

~

It was Jerry, as Nick had known it would be. He had waited by the telephone since just before the appointed time.

"Daddy said you called round," she said, after the exchange of greetings.

Now was the time to tell her, Nick thought, but instead he just said, "That's right. He made me tea."

"That's good," said Jerry. He recognised her mood. She would be staring off into some private distance as she spoke, slightly detached from the real world.

"You never told me you were married."

"Should I have?"

He had no answer to that and so there was silence for a time, which Nick felt reluctant to break. Finally, he said, "I was thinking of leaving. I'm not cut out for all this." There. He had said it with a single phrase: all this. All this subterfuge. I don't sleep with married women. I like things out in the open.

Straight talking had always been the family way, but it was a skill Nick had never really mastered.

"But you'll be there tonight, won't you Nicky?"

She had missed what he was saying and he couldn't say it again. "I don't know," he said, although he did. "Will Matthew be there?" There was no way to ask that question without it sounding tacky.

"He's going to London," she said. "I'll be on my own. Will you be my chaperone?"

"I don't know," he said, again. To risk spoiling the dream, or not?

"Please, Nicky. Just for tonight."

...continues

Copyright information
© Kaitlin Queen, 2010
One More Unfortunate is published by infinity plus:
Buy now: One More Unfortunate by Kaitlin Queen $2.99 / £2.18.

Garry Kilworth

Phoenix Man

The man who learned to walk on water, a man who learned to beat fire, a visionary who sees a world filled with people quite unlike his own, a man who can soak up anything that's thrown at him. Thirteen eclectic stories of discovery and wonder – five of them original to this collection – from a writer described by New Scientist as "the best short story writer in any genre".

"The best short story I have read for many years."
—JG Ballard , on Kilworth's "Sumi Dreams of a Paper Frog" (Songbirds of Pain)

"As a whole the book is a captivating collection!"
—Murio Guslandi, in Emerald City Magazine, on Kilworth's Moby Jack and Other Tall Tales

"Garry Kilworth's stories refuse easy categorization; they’re gorgeously written, heartbreakingly poignant, multiculturally savvy, sharp and smart, and always strange and surprising."
—Claude Lalumiere, on Kilworth's Moby Jack and Other Tall Tales

Buy now: Phoenix Man by Garry Kilworth $2.99 / £2.18.

complete short story:
Phoenix Man by Garry Kilworth

The world's gone crazy lately. Eruptions, earthquakes, floods. Two nights ago there were meteorite showers in the northern hemisphere. Thirteen people were killed in one town alone. Phil Mackerby, a guy I knew at school, had a hole in the top of his head the size of a walnut. The meteorite went down through his brain, his throat, neck and on and on through his chest, stopping only at his pelvis. Crazy. Whoever heard of anyone getting killed by a walnut from space? It never used to happen. But it has now. Just as it happened that a couple in the Australian outback were fried by a shaft of sunlight which slipped through a crack in the atmosphere. Burned the skin right off their heads and backs. And the Japanese fishermen, a whole boat load, who went blind looking at a harvest moon reflected on the surface of the water. Just another one of those phenomena, some which follow the laws according to science, others right out of the kook book.

And then there's the plague of course. The White Death. Destroying towns by the month. Not quickly, not easily, but surely. It creeps in through the back door and wipes out the whole household, unless there are strict regulations in force and the local law ensures they're adhered to.

That's why it's not so hard to accept what's happening to Dan Strickman.

Let's back up a little. My name's Clark Sutherland. I work at Maggot's Place, on Quay 7. I sell diesel to the fishing boats, and private yachts, and anyone else who wants it. I also run the office and the yacht chandler's. I have a lot to do, one way or another. I get paid pretty well for it, but I'm never going to be wealthy. Just comfortable. Dan Strickman on the other hand, owns the cod packing plant, and is already a rich man by anyone else's standards. In this town, anyway.

I was engaged to be married to Jenny Leiner, Fred Leiner's daughter. She was nineteen then. A couple of years have passed since she first said yes to me – then she said no, but that was later. We met at Cajun dancing. My brother, Rick, he has a Cajun band. Actually, they play everything from country to blue grass, but they call themselves a Cajun band. I play the fiddle. Jenny came to learn to dance and she just stood in front of the stage the whole night long and watched me fiddle.

As I say, that was over two years ago, and since then Dan Strickman took her away from me. Married her. Left me looking at myself in the mirror and wondering whether I had a growth on my nose that everyone else but me could see.

Then this thing happened.

I'll get straight to it now. Dan Strickman sacked a guy, who it turned out was not right in the head. The guy went home and got himself a can of gasoline, waited for Strickman to leave his office, and threw it over his old boss. Soaked him. Laughing like a maniac – hell, he was a maniac – he struck a match. He was so busy talking, telling a blubbing Strickman what was going to happen to him, he burned his fingers on the match, dropped it onto the half-full can of gasoline, which of course exploded in flames. The arsonist was incinerated, right there and then, and unfortunately for Strickman, the flames from the blow-back leapt out and fired him too. For the next few minutes he was a blazing torch, running around screaming: hair on fire, clothes on fire, skin on fire. The crackling sound first turned my stomach over and then the stink actually made me vomit. Not that I stood around and watched for more than a shocked few seconds. I was one of three guys who rushed to help.

We threw a canvas sail over him, one from the drying rack, and managed to put him out after a few minutes.

'Call an ambulance,' I said, redundantly. 'He's badly burned.'

The paramedics were already on their way. When they slotted him into their vehicle I thought that was the last we would see of him, before the funeral. I tried not to think of the fact that Jenny was free again.

The following morning, Jenny called me.

'Can you come to the hospital,' she said over the phone. 'Please, Clark, will you come?'

I left two boats waiting for fuel, locked the office and put a closed sign on the door of the chandler's. Jenny met me in the waiting room.

'He's still alive,' she said, excitedly. 'I don't understand it, but he's still alive.'

'What am I here for?' I asked, trying hard not sound disappointed.

'The doctors want to know what happened.'

A young doctor questioned me.

'Was he actually on fire?'

'The flames were three feet tall. I saw his eyes melt – sorry, Jenny. His hair, his clothes, everything went up. Is the other guy dead? Well, there was nothing to choose between them. They both looked as if they'd tried to escape from hell through the back door. I burned my hands trying to wrap the sail round him. Look.'

They looked. The young doctor said, 'Blisters?'

'I told you – he went up like a distress flare. I stuck my hands under a cold tap, straight after.'

The doctor shook his head. 'Come and look,' he said.

He led me into a ward with two beds. One of them was empty. On the other lay a pale but healthy Strickman. He wasn't smiling, exactly. He was looking stunned. But he was whole. I stared at his skin. It wasn't right, but it wasn't black and charred, like it should be. When I last saw him he didn't have skin. He was one red weeping wound, from head to foot, all the raw flesh showing, along with one or two bones.

'What is this?' I said, turning to the doctor. 'Some new miracle cure you've discovered. Hell, that's not just quick, it's indecent. What's it called?'

'We did nothing. The skin regenerated itself, overnight. He cured himself, somehow.'

Strickland managed a weak smile now. 'Ain't that a blast?'

I couldn't say anything. There was nothing to say. All we could do was look at one another. We soon got tired of that, and besides, the media had arrived. Just local at the moment, but I knew the nationals would soon be here. Men don't return from the dead every day.

'I've got to get back,' I said. 'Jenny? All, I can say is, he was a pillar of fire, yesterday. I don't know what he is today.'

That night I went out and got drunk. I'd lost Jenny twice now and it hurt like Hell. Of course, I didn't want Dan Strickman to die, but I had thought he was dead. I felt a little cheated. It sounds mean to admit that, but it's true. I was confused. Last night he was as dead as a red snapper on a barbecue spit. Today he was laughing and joking about his 'ordeal'. How could that happen? I couldn't cope with such aberrations without a skinful of liquor. Maybe you could, but not me.

That should have been the end of the affair, but it was the beginning of the affaire, so to speak. I kept away from the Stricklands, trying to erase my feelings, and was just congratulating myself on what a good job I was doing, when Jenny turned up on my doorstep one night.

'Can I come in?' She looked distressed.

'Sure.'

I made us drinks and found her tearful. I steeled myself for a session of 'Dan doesn't do this' and 'Dan does that'. I wasn't looking forward to being the confidante. Jenny was sitting there with her brown eyes brimming. I wanted to carry her into the bedroom, and I knew I was going to have to listen to woes and wherefores. But I wasn't strong enough to tell her to leave. Instead I said, 'What?'

'He keeps doing it,' she said, through clenched teeth. 'Twice a week now.'

What? I didn't want to hear about sexual deviancy with Jenny as the recipient. Maybe he was beating her? She didn't look bruised or battered. If he was hitting her, I could maybe do something about that, if Jenny wanted me to. Maybe she just wanted me to listen?

'What? What does he do?'

'He keeps setting fire to himself.'

I jumped up, spilling my drink. 'Shit!'

'No – really – he gets off on it. You should see his face when he goes down into the cellar to do it. It's like he used to look when we had sex behind your back. Sorry, Clark. I'm not myself. I'm frightened. I keep thinking, "What if he wants me to join him?"'

'He – he wouldn't make you do that.'

She screwed up her nose. 'I'm sick of it, anyway.' Her voice changed in tone. 'Can I stay here, Clark? Just for tonight? I'll sleep in a chair.'

She didn't sleep in a chair, of course, she slept in my bed. I got the chair.

I don't like to leave things festering. I went straight round to Dan Strickman's house the next morning.

'Jenny stayed at my place last night. We didn't do anything, but she says she's scared of you.'

'Jealous,' he said.

'I'm not jealous of you,' I said, misunderstanding as it turned out. 'I got over that a long time ago.'

'No, I mean Jenny's jealous of what I have.' We were on his porch. He gave me a sly grin. 'Hell, you don't know what it's like, Clark. Fire. It's so cleansing. I feel pure afterwards. All my sins gone up in smoke. I can't explain how good that feels, to be utterly, completely, clean. In a spiritual sense, of course. A soul without a blemish. It's as if – it's as if I've been reborn. An angel couldn't be more chaste, more innocent of carnal crimes. There's a double whammy. It's unbelievable, the feeling of being totally pure and stainless, but that's only half of it. The other incredible jolt is sinning for the first time after a cleansing.'

'It is?' I said, not really interested in all this philosophical crap. This is the sort of garbage you hear people yakking on about when they've been through some hellish experience – lost at sea, held hostage by a gunman – how it had changed them forever and now they live for one day at a time, yak, yak, yak. What I wanted to know about was the act of being burned itself. What did it feel like? 'Doesn't it hurt at all?'

His eyes changed. I could see the pain in them.

'It hurts like hell – the burning. But it's worth it. Afterwards. Hell, to experience that kind of pleasure you've got to suffer, Clark. It doesn't come for nothing. But what's a few minutes agony, compared with the regeneration that follows – the high, afterwards? The pain doesn't last very long. Just as long as the fire itself. Once I've snuffed myself, then I'm free to let myself feel in a spiritual sense.'

'How do you "snuff" yourself?'

He laughed. 'Makes me sound like a candle, doesn't it? I mean, once I go out, once the flames have gone, the burning feeling doesn't last. I enter another plane. My senses are tuned to the highest pitch, but my nerves cease to function. I'm on a spiritual level by that time.'

I could no longer hold back my disapproval. I was truly appalled by what he was doing – to himself and to his wife.

'Listen, you really need some psychiatric help, man. You have to see a doctor. You're heading for destruction! Let me call someone.'

His eyes turned steely. For a moment he looked quite dangerous and I wished I'd kept my mouth shut.

He said, 'Have you any idea what it's like to be bad once you've cleansed yourself? Incredible. You've never experienced anything that comes close to it. Booze, drugs, sex – nothing compares. There's the cleansing, then there's the defiling to follow. I find myself committing some atrocious acts, just to dirty my purity, just to get that second kick. You want to watch? I'm just about to...'

'Have your fix? No, I've seen the results of one of your atrocious acts. What do you think all this is doing to your wife? What about Jenny?'

'What about her? She's left me. Do I look as if I care?'

After that it was as if I didn't exist. He walked into his house and descended to his cellar. I followed and stood at the top of the stairs, looking down into the dimness below. After a few minutes there was a whumph, then a bright flare followed by a sustained intense glow. I could hear him moaning with pain. Then there was silence for a while. The fire dimmed and finally some noises I would rather not have heard. It was like listening through thin walls to a couple making love in the next apartment. I left, wondering what 'atrocious' acts. What was he doing, after dark? It wasn't smoking behind the bike shed, that much was certain. Robbery? Rape? Murder? Dr Jekyll's 'Mr Hyde' would not have been satisfied with stealing sweets. The crimes might start small but they have to grow in nefariousness. Is that why Jenny had left him? Because she suspected that he was carrying out terrible deeds behind her back?

When I got back to my own place, Jenny was talking to Burt Yammon on the doorstep. Burt is the law in our town. He looked concerned.

'Hey, Clark,' he said.

'Has Jenny told you what Dan Strickman's doing?'

'I got far more serious worries than that, Clark. We've got a case of the White Death in the shack line. The town's under quarantine. Nobody goes out, nobody comes in.'

The 'shack line' was where the lobster, crab and shell fishermen lived – a line of shanties on the south foreshore.

'Shit!' I said, a horrible leaden feeling in my stomach. 'The plague comes to town.'

'Yep. We've been expecting it.' His expression was naturally grim. 'Now, it doesn't spread that quickly, as you know, but once you've got it, that's it. Five days. We've got the guy at the infirmary and he's passed the fever stage. He broke out in erupting boils at two this morning. He's a goner. We don't want any more.'

'Oh, Christ.'

'Look, the town's under Martial Law now. We've got to conserve supplies, because, basically, we're not going to get any. Your boat fuel. You don't give it to anyone without my authority. And don't let anyone land. Fly that little yellow flag of yours on the jetty pole...'

'That's the quarantine flag for ships.'

'Fly it anyway. Sailors will know what it means. Anyone does land, you keep them here. You've got my permission, backed by my authority, to shoot anyone who tries to steal a boat and get away from town. You understand? This is a serious business, Clark. I hate to ask you to do this, but this is the way it's got to work.'

'I understand. I don't know if I can shoot anyone, but I understand. I haven't even got a gun.'

'You've got to. That's the law now. I'll get you a gun. I'll call by the jetty in an hour, okay?'

'Okay, Burt.'

Once he had gone, I said to Jenny, 'I saw Dan. He's crazy.'

'I told you.' Then more bitterly, 'I bet it was him who brought the plague here.'

I didn't want to hear this, but I asked anyway. 'Why do you say that?'

'He went with a girl in Kettelstown. Took her against her will, he said. She died six days later, of the White Death. He brought it all right. He eats down at the shacks every Wednesday night.'

Rape. I knew it. Murder next. This was a nightmare. Everything was coming at us at once. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, charging right in, slaughtering. Burt had enough on his plate at the moment. He wouldn't be able to handle a rape investigation. I'd have to wait until the plague had gone, then tell him. The girl was dead, Jenny said, which would make a conviction harder. Perhaps impossible. Yet we had to stop him somehow. It would be murder next. It was written in the sky with big flaming letters. The guy was out of his head.

'They've got the plague in Kettelstown all right. Why didn't Dan get it then?'

'Maybe the fire burned it out of him? He's always talking about how cleansing it is.'

'Well, you'd better stay here, until this quarantine thing is over. Then – well, you can make up your mind what you want to do. Go to relatives, or whatever.'

She nodded. 'That's fine. You know I always liked you, Clark.'

'Yeah, well, I thought it was something more than that, once.'

'It was.'

So, in this world that had been turned on its head, I was gradually getting back all I had lost. In the week or two that followed we heard lots more stories about Dan and his obsession with fire. He started doing it in public, going down to the town square and setting light to himself in front of an audience, like some Far Eastern priest protesting about the occupation of his country. People told me how he went up like a bowl of overheated fat. It was street entertainment: a side-show. Everyone was scared shitless of the White Death, which was gradually spreading, so the crowds were small, but it must have provided a distraction for some who wanted their minds taken off an omnipresent horrible death.

One night he did it outside my house, I think to taunt me. He didn't care about his wife, but he cared that I was learning things about him. His exhibition was a warning to me. To show I wasn't worried, I got out my fiddle and played while he blazed down in the street: wild, gypsy music, the strings singing, my bow hand zipping across them, my head full of rage. He burned, I fiddled. His name should have been Tony Rome, from that movie with Frank Sinatra. It was a crazy night. Jenny screamed at the two of us, running from me to window and back again, making an insane situation worse, the whole thing spiralling into mayhem.

'Let's do this again sometime,' yelled a toasted Strickman, his white eyes and white teeth stark against his blackened over-cooked face. 'That was fun, kids, that was fun!'

That same week there were two copycat deaths. It hadn't occurred to me how many lunatics were in our town, but it seemed there were several Dan Strickman wannabes out there. Two of them managed to torch themselves to death. They found in their last moments of agony that they hadn't got the magic touch. They stayed as crisp as bacon left under the grill for far too long. As with all of Dan's little acts, the stench of burnt flesh was sickening, and people were throwing up right there in the street, as these two misguided fools formed a double pyre.

I wondered why Burt or one of the lawmen in the town didn't arrest Dan for causing a public nuisance, but like Burt had said, he was up to his neck in other worries, and when I mentioned it to him he said, 'Where would I put him? The jail's full of looters. Can you believe that? People stealing from someone dying of the plague? Risking death themselves for a TV set or microwave oven? Aw, he'll run out of gasoline soon, you'll see. The gas station's already empty. He won't have the fuel to cause a disturbance. What's he going to use, kindling? I've closed the two hardware stores. There's nowhere he can get inflammable liquids, not in any quantity. In the meantime, we've got seventeen more cases of the plague...'

'Will you go back to Dan, once all this is over?' I asked Jenny. We were sleeping together now.

'I don't know.' She seemed genuinely upset by having to make the choice at that time. 'I really don't know. I am his wife.'

'But you're with me now.'

'Yes, but I am his wife. Things are a bit strange at the moment. With the plague around. You do things you wouldn't normally do. Like a war. People think they're going to die tomorrow, so why not grab a little pleasure today. And he might get over this addiction, you know? Once he runs out of fuel, he'll have to cold turkey, won't he? I think he'll break the habit, once that happens.'

'Don't bet on it.'

'I have to give him the chance, Clark. You – you wouldn't do anything, would you? You wouldn't hurt him in any way?'

'Why should I?'

'Jealousy?'

'Go to hell,' I replied, angry with her, with him, with the whole world.

That night – it had to be that night, didn't it, with this conversation still fresh in her mind – that night there was a prowler in the boat yard. I took Burt's rifle and went out on the jetty.

'Who's there?'

There were no lights on around the yard, since the power had failed. I had a flashlight but the batteries were low and weak. I shone the dim light around me and saw that the diesel pump lock had been broken. The nozzle was lying on the jetty, still oozing some diesel. Someone was on the end of the jetty, walking quickly towards town. I could see a dim figure carrying something in one hand.

'Stop!' I yelled. 'I have orders to shoot.'

'Fuck you,' came the reply.

Burt was shooting looters now. It had become too serious. He had ordered me to do the same. I raised the rifle and aimed.

'I'm warning you. You have to stop.'

There was no answer this time. Just the sound of running feet on the boards. I was shaking. Burt had distinctly told me not to physically engage looters. He had already lost one of his men, stabbed by a looter who pretended to give himself up. 'Warn them three times, then shoot,' he told me. The next moment I fired into the darkness. I did it without thinking. My finger seemed to squeeze the trigger before my mind told it to.

There followed the thump of a body hitting the boards, then the skidding sound of a heavy object sliding along the end of the jetty. With my heart thumping wildly, I ran to inspect what I had done. I was horrified to find Dan Strickman lying there, bleeding, a bullet hole in his chest. A can of diesel was leaking from a broken cap, running through the cracks in the boards and drizzling on the surface of the water beneath.

He looked up at me, and said, 'I'll be all right, in a minute. Boy, that was some...'

Poor Dan. He was dead before the minute was out. In his wild state he had confused being fireproof with being immortal. He was no more bullet proof than the next man. His metabolism had found a way of dealing with burns, eradicating them, nullifying them – something. But he was still vulnerable, still able to be knocked down by a speeding car, crushed by falling wall – or killed by a bullet from a gun.

'You did it on purpose,' Jenny said, later. 'You knew it was Dan – that's why you killed him.'

'Is that true, Clark?' asked Burt. 'Is that true what she says? Did you give him three warnings?'

'Two. I didn't have time for the third.'

'I said three Clark. The law requires three warnings. Otherwise I have to treat it as an illegal killing. Shit, just tell me you warned him three times, that's all I want to hear.'

'He killed him out of jealousy, because he wanted me forever,' Jenny said, stubbornly. 'I know it. I can feel it.'

'You couldn't feel a marline spike if I jammed it in your eye,' I yelled at her. 'You're incapable of feeling anything.'

'All right, that's enough. I've got too much on now, but I'll get back to this later, Clark. In the meantime you better let me have the rifle back, before you do any more damage.'

'Any more damage? Fuck you, Burt, I never wanted it in the first place. I'm not trained for this. You're the one who told me to shoot people. I shouldn't have been given a weapon. I shouldn't have had the responsibility. I haven't fired a gun in my life before now. You tell me to shoot looters, then you call me a fucking murderer. That's not right.'

'Well, we'll get back to it later.'

But he never did. Burt died of the White Death before it finally left town in the Spring. Jenny went away. When the police interviewed her, she said she wasn't there, at the shooting, and didn't know anything about it. There were no witnesses. I changed my story. I told them I yelled at the intruder three times, then fired. They let me go.

In the meantime, Dan had the last laugh on everyone. He was having the time of his life, down there in the fires of Hell. There was a law in force, during the plague year, that anyone who died had to be cremated, to kill any dormant bacteria I imagine. So Dan was burned, and burned again, and burned yet again, each time his corpse grotesquely reappearing from its own ashes, rising as it were like that fabled bird, the Phoenix. We couldn't get shot of him. He just wouldn't go away, damn his re–emerging hide. He became the joke of the town. Even I had to laugh. In the end they tied him to the back of a boat, dragged him out into the ocean, and threw down ground bait to attract the sharks.

Those bastards soon got rid of him.

Copyright information
© Garry Kilworth, 2005, 2011
"Phoenix Man" was first published in Don't Turn Out The Light edited by Stephen Jones and is republished in Phoenix Man, published by infinity plus ebooks:
Buy now: Phoenix Man by Garry Kilworth $2.99 / £2.18.

Iain Rowan

Nowhere To Go

Eleven stories of murder, obsession, fear and — sometimes — redemption. Featuring stories published in Alfred Hitchcock's, Ellery Queen's, and more, Nowhere To Go is a collection of Iain Rowan's best short crime stories.

Iain's short fiction has been reprinted in Year's Best anthologies, won a Derringer Award, been voted into readers' top ten of the year, and been the basis for a novel shortlisted for the UK Crime Writers' Association's Debut Dagger award.

"During the five years that I published Hardluck Stories, 'One Step Closer' and 'Moth' were two of my favorite stories. I loved the nuances and true heartfelt emotion that Iain filled his stories with, and Iain quickly became a must read author for me— everything I read of Iain's had this tragic, and sometimes, horrific beauty filling it, and was guaranteed to be something special."
—Dave Zeltserman, author of Outsourced, and Washington Post best books of year Small Crimes and Pariah

"A short story writer of the highest calibre."
—Allan Guthrie , author of Top Ten Kindle Bestseller Bye Bye Baby, winner of Theakston's Crime Novel of the Year

"Iain Rowan's stories never fail to surprise and delight, and just when you think you know what will happen next, you realize how much you've been caught unaware."
—Sarah Weinman , writer, critic, reviewer, columnist for the Los Angeles Times and News Editor for Publishers Marketplace

"Iain Rowan is both a meticulous and a passionate writer, and these stories showcase his ample talent wonderfully well. You owe it to yourself to discover Rowan's fiction if you haven't already had the pleasure."
—Jeff Vandermeer, author of Finch, Shriek: An Afterword, City of Saints and Madmen; two-time winner of the World Fantasy Award

Buy now: Nowhere To Go by Iain Rowan $2.99 / £2.12.

complete short story:
One Step Closer by Iain Rowan

"I mean it," the gunman shrieked, and he pointed the revolver at Ward, the end of the barrel moving in tiny circles with the shaking of his hands. "I mean it. One step closer..."

Ward stopped where he was. Other than the man with the gun, no-one else was standing. The sun was shining bright through the frosted windows, and somewhere in the bank a lazy dying fly buzzed and battered against the glass. The bank smelt of floor polish. Ward could taste the pickle from the sandwich he had eaten an hour earlier. Everything was very real, as sharp and defined as the stars on a cold and cloudless November night.

I've not been a bad man, Ward thought, although I could have been a better one. But I've not been a bad man. There's always that. He thought about how blue and perfect the sky had been that morning. He thought of Sarah, of how they were before it had all gone wrong, and he wondered what she was doing now. He hoped that she was happy. I don't think I have ever felt more alive, he thought. And now I know I've wasted so many things. So much time.

~

He'd almost not bothered with the bank at all—had ducked his head through the door, seen the lunchtime queue, and thought briefly about going to get the other things he needed first. Some shop-brand beans and some potatoes, a cheap shirt for work and maybe a book from the library. But he thought no, you're here now and it's not like you've got anything else to do with your day, so you might as well join the queue.

Which turned out to be bad timing, but then that was life, Ward thought. A bad call here, some bad luck there, and everything turns around. One year you're married, and the next you're not. One year you have a career, a house in the London suburbs, and then you're just stumbling from one dead-end job, one rented room, to another. One day you go to the bank and you roll your eyes at the slowness of the staff, and the next moment a man in a stained combat jacket and a baseball cap pushes in front of you and holds an old-looking revolver pressed into the cheek of a woman in a print dress and shouts "Money, in bags now, or I'll do her" and the whole world goes into slow motion and everybody stands very still and there isn't a sound other than the drip, drip, drip on the floor where the woman wets herself.

Everyone stood very still.

The puddle of urine rolled lazy tendrils across the floor and around Ward's shoes.

The gunman noticed everyone else for the first time, and shouted, "The rest of you, down on the floor now, and no-one fucking move."

It's a film, Ward thought. This isn't real life, this is a film. Even the words sound like they're from the script of some straight-to-video clunker. But he sat on the floor, all the same.

"Get a fucking move on." The gunman took the revolver away from the woman with the print dress and pointed it through the glass at a bank clerk who opened and closed her mouth with no sound, like a fish. "Piss me about and I'll do you n'all."

He's not a pro, Ward thought. Too nervous. Too slow. Too dangerous.

The combat jacket was torn on one side, and greasy. The gunman had heron legs in tight black jeans, and a sports bag slung over one shoulder. As he stood there he rocked from foot to foot, eyes darting to the left, to the right, always in motion. Junkie, Ward thought. God knows where he's got the gun from. Robbed from his granddad's attic, from the look of it. Probably blow his hand off if he tried firing it.

The cashier behind the window was filling faded fabric cash bags with money from the drawer under her desk, stuffing them through the tray in the counter. One got stuck, and she sobbed with frustration, pushing it hard and making it stick even more. The gunman grabbed the bag, pulled, nearly went over backwards.

That was the time, Ward thought, for the hero bit. The gun was pointing up at the ceiling, the man was off balance, but like everything else, you only thought about it when it was too late, and the opportunity was gone, the words had already been said, the deed had already been done, life had moved on and left you behind floundering in its wake, trying to stay above water. Ward knew this well.

Then the door to the bank opened, and a man in uniform walked in and the gunman shouted something that didn't sound like anything and there was a loud crack and all the people sitting on the floor flinched and some of them screamed and the man in uniform went backwards and would have fallen right out of the door but he hit the edge of it and just slid down it and ended up on the floor, half in, half out, all tangled arms and legs.

"Who called them? Who fucking called them?" the gunman shouted, and he swung the gun back towards the counter. "You press an alarm? Did you? Did you?"

"He's a traffic warden," The elderly man with a blue blazer and a red face was sitting on the opposite side of the bank to Ward. He glared up at the gunman.

"What?"

"You shot a traffic warden. He's a damn traffic warden. Look at him man, can't you tell the bloody difference?"

"Shut the fuck up."

"Animal," the old man said, and the gunman pointed his gun and Ward shut his eyes just before the bang and when he opened them again the old man was sitting rigid and silent with fear and the wall next to him was splintered and chipped.

"Next time I don't miss," the gunman said, and Ward did not know why but he was as sure as he had ever been of anything that the gunman had not meant to miss the first time.

"One more bag. Go on, move it," the gunman said, and again the gun was back against the woman in the print dress, who shivered throughout her whole body, like long grass in a squall. The cashier filled another bag, and again it got stuck in the tray when she tried to push it through, but she pushed it again hard, and it came through. The gunman stuffed it with the others in his sports bag, and began to move towards the door. Ward sat very still, thinking, it's not over until it's over. The gunman stepped over the body without looking down, got half way out of the door. Then it seemed to Ward as if several things happened very quickly, so quickly that perhaps it was all at once, or maybe in a different order than it seemed. There was a screech of tyres outside, some shouts, two cracks in quick succession, a distant sound of broken glass falling to tarmac, the slam of the bank door. Then the gunman was back inside with them, panting as if he had just run a race, ragged sobs, wild eyes. He waved the revolver around in the vague direction of the people sitting on the floor, then he turned, shoved the body out of the door with one kick, slammed the door and slid the top bolt shut.

The woman in the print dress let out a shudder of breath which spoke for what the sound of the bolt closing had meant for all of them. This is going to be a long haul, Ward thought. If the gunman hadn't waited for that last bag he would have been outside when the police arrived, and whatever would have happened would have played out on the street. Now they were here, locked together, the nine or ten people and the man with the gun.

It always hinges on the little things, Ward thought. Like everything else. The devil is in the little things. One step that on its own seemed like nothing. A bag that sticks. The hotel receipt you meant to throw out, should never even have taken in the first place, but which you left in your pocket. The first time you think, I know, the best way to get through this is to have a drink. The boss who runs out of staples, and looks in your drawer and sees the bottle. Always the little things. A tattered piece of paper. An empty box of staples. And life jumps the rails, runs away from you and there's no catching it up. Not ever.

"Sit down."

The woman in the print dress collapsed on the floor next to Ward. He wanted to put his arm round her, to comfort her, but he also did not want to move, not even to breathe. The gunman paced up and down, never stopping moving, talking to himself. Ward caught the woman's eye and smiled. It'll be all right. It'll be over. You can go home, collapse in the arms of the man who gave you that ring on your finger and cry and cry until you're all cried out, and then you can have the longest bath you've ever had and drink wine until the day is drowned by it. She stared blankly back at him, and he smiled at her again. Hang on in there. She mouthed something at him, her eyes wet with tears, and he did not catch it. He furrowed his brow—what?—and she mouthed it again. My kids, she said. My kids. And then she kept on saying it, over and over, not making any sound at all, and Ward waited until the gunman was looking somewhere else and then he reached out slowly and placed his hand over and around the woman's hand, squeezing gently. You'll see them again, he tried to say with his touch. You'll see them again.

"Might as well give yourself up." The elderly man had recovered his composure enough to speak up again. You're brave, Ward thought. Bet you're an old soldier, judging by your tone of voice, ramrod back, shiny shoes. So you should know when it's the time to be brave, and when it's the time to just hide in the foxhole and ride out the shelling. "They'll not let you out of here, you know. You've had it now."

"Shut up," the gunman said, but quietly, as if he was saying it to himself.

"They'll have snipers out there now," the old man said. "Marksmen. Shoot you down like a dog if you walk in front of the right window. Serve you right, too."

"Shut up."

"Like a dog. You won't stand a chance. Just give yourself up."

The gunman lifted the revolver and fired. Don't look, Ward said to himself, don't look, but he had to and then he looked away, the world spinning and he knew he would never forget what he had seen. The air in the bank stank of the gun, and now more besides, and the ringing in Ward's ears did not stop.

"Told him to shut up," the gunman said, "I told him," and again it sounded as if he was talking to himself. We don't even exist for him, Ward thought. We aren't even people. There is nothing in his world but himself.

A phone rang, behind the counter, and then a voice outside, distorted from the amplification, said that they wanted to talk, please answer the phone.

"Get it," the gunman said. "Tell them I want them to back off, want a car, now, fast one, or I'm going to shoot someone in here. Tell them if they try anything, I'll kill her." He pointed the gun towards the woman next to Ward, and she shook in her skin.

"They say they want to talk to you," the cashier said.

"Fuck do they want to talk to me for? It's a trick. They fuck with your head. Tell them I won't. Tell them a car, and them gone, right out my way, or she's fucking dead." Ward squeezed the woman's hand tighter and thought how many shots did the gunman fire when he was at the door? One or two? How many does he have left? He fired one when he shot the old man. One more when he shot the wall. And one for the traffic warden. That made four. Five if he shot twice out of the door. Ward thought that he had, but ever since the gunman had walked into the bank time had slipped and stuttered and all the events since seemed to merge into one, so he could not be sure.

A long time ago, in a different life, Ward had a lot of things he did not have now. One of those things was a brother-in-law. He took Ward out once, blasting away at pheasants with a shotgun in between hammering the contents of a hip flask. Was that really me, Ward thought. Was that really me standing there bored and with a whisky headache, listening to him talking guns all day? It felt as if it was someone else, a different Ward who just happened to look the same, talk the same, but whose life was different in every way. But still, the other Ward's conversation was there, in his memory now. So what is the difference between a revolver and an automatic then, Ward had asked, vaguely aware that revolvers were what they had in cowboy films but not much more. He didn't care, but felt that as he was drinking the other man's whisky he at least ought to show interest in his pet subject. He'd only half listened to the answer, but when he'd heard one part he thought of course, six-shooters, how could I not remember that, and then his brother-in-law had moved on to talking about his car again and Ward had switched off and begun watching orange stain the sky as the sun sunk behind the stands of trees and crows flew in lazy, noisy circles.

The phone rang again.

The gunman twitched and so the gun twitched and so everyone sitting on the floor of the bank twitched. The woman next to Ward, the woman in the print dress, started to say something to herself, over and over again as if she were saying the rosary. Her eyes were wild and she looked everywhere around the bank, first here, first there, as if her salvation was going to spring from behind a fire extinguisher, or out of a set of leaflets about mortgages and savings accounts.

"You, answer the phone." The gunman gestured to the cashier. "Tell 'em I don't want to talk no more, they do what I say or I start fucking shooting people. Tell 'em."

The woman next to Ward said "No, no no no, oh no."

"Starting with you, you stupid bitch," the gunman said, "and if you don't shut up now, I won't even wait. Understand? Fucking shut up."

He's going to do it again, Ward thought. They're taking too long outside, they don't know what's going on in here, they're making sure they're getting it right, but it's going to be too long, too late, and he's too brittle. The woman in the print dress shivered and moaned like a baby with a fever. "My children," she said. "Please."

"Shut up," the gunman shouted, and spit flew from his mouth and danced in the sun as it drifted to the floor. "Fucking shut up. I can't think with you whining, it's doing my fucking head in, just shut up, shut up, shut up."

The woman made a frightened noise at the back of her throat, and her heel clattered against the ground as her leg shook. He's going to do it, Ward thought. One last shot.

Ward smiled at the woman, and stroked her shoulder, gently, as if he were shushing her off to sleep. Then he stood up.

"Fuck you doing?" the gunman said.

Ward stepped towards him.

"You mad? I'll fucking do you, so help me God. Sit down now! Now! Now!"

Ward took another step. He wondered whether the police outside had counted the shots like he had. He wondered whether he had counted right. He wondered whether his brother-in-law had said that all revolvers had six shots, or only some. He wondered whether the man had any more ammunition in his pockets.

"I mean it," the gunman shrieked, and he pointed the revolver at Ward, the end of the barrel moving in tiny circles with the shaking of his hands. "I mean it. One step closer..."

Ward stopped where he was. Other than the man with the gun, no-one else was standing. The sun was shining bright through the frosted windows, and somewhere in the bank a lazy dying fly buzzed and battered against the glass. The bank smelt of floor polish. Ward could taste the pickle from the sandwich he had eaten an hour earlier. Everything was very real, as sharp and defined as the stars on a cold and cloudless November night.

I've not been a bad man, Ward thought, although I could have been a better one. But I've not been a bad man. There's always that. He thought about how blue and perfect the sky had been that morning. He thought of Sarah, of how they were before it had all gone wrong, and he wondered what she was doing now. He hoped that she was happy. I don't think I have ever felt more alive, he thought. And now I know I've wasted so many things. So much time.

And then he took one step closer.

Copyright information
© Iain Rowan, 2005, 2011
"One Step Closer" was first published in Hardluck Stories and is republished in Nowhere To Go, published by infinity plus ebooks:
Buy now: Nowhere To Go by Iain Rowan $2.99 / £2.12.

Anna Tambour

Monterra's Deliciosa & Other Tales &

"Exuberant Decadence brought into the twenty-first century ... verve, style, and an endless appetite for succulent detail. Rapacious, intelligent and witty."
--Jeff VanderMeer

More than 30 stories and poems from an author described by SF Site as "one of the most delightful, original, and varied new writers on hand".

Temptation, indulgence, exploration and shortcuts. Love and compulsion. An ocean in Kansas, the Magic Lino, the real story behind the one told by Robert Louis Stevenson, a chef dying of ennui, gathering bluebirds, paying with candywrap. And the greatest story ever told--by Asher E. Treat, of course. The glorious chaos of singing, prancing, perfumed and stinking, the dead and the busy, tragic and achingly otherwise--life itself.

Includes 17,000 words of bonus material.

Chosen in two categories (Collection and Novelette) in the Locus 2003 Recommended Reading List.

Buy now: Monterra's Deliciosa & Other Tales & by Anna Tambour $2.99 / £2.18.

Spotted Lily

"a wicked, thoroughly unpredictable romp"
--Locus

Angela Pendergast, escapee from the Australian bush, grew up with the smell of hot mutton fat in her hair, the thought of her teeth crunching a cold Tim Tam chocolate biscuit-the height of decadent frivolity.

Now, though her tastes have grown and she knows absolutely what she wants, her life is embarrassingly stuck. So when the Devil drops into her bedroom in her sharehouse in inner-city Sydney with a contract in hand, she signs. He's got only a Hell's week to fulfil his side, but in the meantime he must chaperone her — or is it the other way around?

Shortlisted for the William L. Crawford Award.
A Locus Recommended Reading List selection.

Buy now: Spotted Lily by Anna Tambour $2.99 / £2.18.

"I hate giving away the story, but allow me to say that this novel is not going where you think it is....teaming with genuine wit and humor... excellent writing... One thing I’m sure of is that it should be required reading for all those who go into writing fiction with dreams of great remuneration and fame. If it were, Tambour would already be both wealthy and famous."
—Jeffrey Ford

"...a wicked, thoroughly unpredictable romp ... Spotted Lily might just be a particularly inventive comic take on wish-fulfillment, but soon enough it strays far from the beaten path... a dizzying but delightful journey through old myths and modern chaos, turning Faust and Pygmalion on their ear as it cuts its own path toward something like self-knowledge."
—Faren Miller, Locus

"Funny, believable, refreshingly different ... Perhaps most of all it is a very funny book, without being what you would call a comedy... Anna Tambour, on the strength of Spotted Lily and her earlier story collection, Monterra's Deliciosa & Other Tales &, is one of the most delightful, original, and varied new writers on hand. "
—Rich Horton, SF Site

"Spotted Lily is a remarkable novel of dark satire. It is brutal and terrifying. It is painful and beautiful. It is profound and I think it has the makings of a classic. This is, to me, a work of literary significance, far transcending the boundaries of genre of the fantastic."
—Vera Nazarian

novel extract:
Spotted Lily by Anna Tambour

—1—

'How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?' I asked.

'Six, I think. But, really, dear, this is not my field.'

'And I read somewhere that you turn us into sort of butterflies, and keep us in lacquered boxes with airholes, for transport.'

'I couldn't possibly comment on that.'

The Devil and I were sitting in my room, getting to know each other. He'd just been accepted in our sharehouse, 'Kitty is thirty-five dollars a week, no coffee or coffee substitutes or power drinks included' for the room next to mine, which was convenient for both of us.

It was Pledge Week, and we had to make the most of our time, but to do that, we had to get to know each other a little better.

I changed the subject.

'Why do you have Pledge Week?'

He examined the pressed tin ceiling, seeming to be considering whether he should answer. When I had almost forgotten my question, he answered. 'We have to. We lose too many to heaven these days.'

I knew I had to learn fast, but if he didn't start to make sense, this was not going to work. 'Come again?'

He cocked an eyebrow at me, then scratched himself behind somewhere and examined his nails. I tried not to look at his hands. As he wasn't forthcoming, I tried again. 'Isn't forever forever?'

'Ah ... Yes, it is, in hell as it is on earth. But you make the rules, not we. And when you change your minds, you do manage to make an ado for us.'

'Like what? Please don't speak in riddles.'

'A regular omnium-gatherum of disorder, don't you know?'

I obviously didn't.

'A tumult, bother, hubbub, farrago of disorder. A regular huggermugger of change that we could well do without.'

I still didn't understand his words in this context, and with some of them, in any context. What the hell sprang to mind, but the words that came out were, 'Could you give me an example?'

He sighed.

'And could you please try to speak in more accessible language. We are in twenty-first century Australia here. You do keep up, don't you? You must have some Australians there.'

He bowed, a trifle condescendingly. 'I will try. Eh, you know, don't you read the papers? Don't you see what you're doing to us? It messes our morale something awful, you know.'

Although the 'Eh' was New Zealand, and he was trying a leeetle too hard, I couldn't quibble with his delivery. However, I was no closer to understanding. I think he must have thought me frustratingly dense, because his brows beetled, and I felt a prickle of sweat chill my back. He waved his hand, and in it appeared an International Herald Tribune. 'Look at this article,' he commanded, and threw the paper into my lap. It was singed but readable, and two days old.

I had no idea which article, so began to read down the first page, with rising panic.

'Oh dear. I do so apologize,' he said, in either an apologetic or a patronizing tone. It was so hard to read him. He grabbed the paper and opened it up, folded it neatly, and handed it back. 'Read that,' he pointed, 'and do try to think. Think about the after-effects.'

I hate it when someone talks to me like that. But I read.

ANGLONG VENG, Cambodia In a case of Disneyland meets the killing fields, Cambodia's Ministry of Tourism is drawing up grandiose plans to upgrade the final stronghold of the Khmer Rouge into a million-dollar theme park.

I looked up, grinning. 'This is a joke, isn't it?'

He scowled, something I do not wish to see again. 'Do I look like a jokester,' he asked, rhetorically. 'Read on.'

I did, all of it, including the part that said:

"Pol Pot was a kind man and the only people killed during the Khmer Rouge time were Vietnamese spies," said Kim Syon, director of the Anglong Veng health center and son of a senior Khmer Rouge leader. "In the next 10 years people will begin to see the positive result of what Pol Pot did."

I wanted to wash. 'But this is gross.'

'No, love, it is normal,' the Devil said sadly. Do you know how many people we will lose, and do you know what our futures markets are saying about the new arrivals whom we had banked on for the next few years?'

Whomnow. Was he having me on? Was the 'on' itself, the dangling preposition—snide? And ... and futures markets. Wait a bloody minute. I thought of something Dad said whenever he met someone he thought was serving him potato skin and calling it bangers and mash: 'There's something crook in Muswellbrook.' I felt in this conversation with the Devil, like I was standing in Muswellbrook's main street as the main attraction—the town fool. It was about time I assert myself.

'You're shitting me,' I told him. 'Why are you trying to take advantage of my gullibility?'

His eyelashes fluttered. 'Oh dearie me. You asked, and I'm telling you how it is. I never lie.'

I shot him a look that would pierce most people of my acquaintance.

He looked blandly back. However, he seemed truthful.

But first, I had to take care of something that was making this getting-to-know all the harder. 'Would it be possible if you don't call me "dear" or "love"? In my culture, it is kind of a put-down.'

He might have been miffed, for he said, 'Miss Pendergast—'

We could not go on like this. 'Excuse me, but "Miss" isn't something I've been called since I was fifteen, by anyone with whom I wish to associate.'

He looked uncomfortable, and his brows began to move.

'My friends call me Angela,' I added quickly, and then wondered if that would offend. 'Would you mind calling me Angela?' Or if you prefer, any other name would be fine. Like maybe Imelda. Someone you know.'

'Imelda?'

She was the only one who came to mind. Perhaps not dead yet.

I was wracking my brains when he coughed. I looked at his face and he smiled. 'Angela has a certain ring to it. Look, Angela. Think of Jefferson. Do you know Thomas Jefferson?'

'Yeah. Great American forefather. I don't imagine you would know him.'

He scratched somewhere I don't want to know again, this time with a smug grin. 'You obviously don't keep up. He's in our place now. Something to do with his love life.'

'You mean...'

'You decide, we abide, my, er ... Angela. And we must keep abiding, which means that our populations are forever moving back and forth ... and even disappearing and appearing again.'

'What do you mean?'

'Caligula? You do know of him?'

'I saw the movie.'

'Before the movie.'

I don't like to be reminded of what I don't know, but thought it best not to obfuscate. 'No.'

'You don't have to feel defensive. Caligula was a wonderful ... what would you say ... resident, for centuries, and then faded away. He's only recently come back to us. And with your attention span these days, it could be that we only have the pleasure of his company for one or two of your years.'

'Unless "Caligula" is re-released,' I mumbled, thinking.

'Come again?'

'Skip it,' I said, still thinking.

Suddenly a sharp tang of stink stung my eyes and jammed its choking fumes down my windpipe.

'I do demand respect,' he said.

'Sorry,' I mouthed. And I was. It was impossible to breathe.

He waved his hand and the worst evaporated.

'Sorry,' I repeated, to clear the air completely. 'I think I'm beginning to understand. 'But don't you gain from heaven, too?'

'Yes. Like I said, we've got Jefferson now, and the markets say we'll have Ghandi soon. You know Ghandi?' he added somewhat condescendingly.

'Yes,' I said, somewhat hurt.

'Well, it is hard to tell, you know.'

'The markets?' I had to ask.

I was secretly (though I couldn't let it show) happy that he looked at last, confused. 'Don't you know markets?' he asked.  'Futures trading? I thought you were all obsessed with it nowadays.'

'Not all of us,' I had to remind him. And all of a sudden I realized that for all his ultra-cool appearance, he was remarkably ignorant. Very gently and respectfully I asked, 'You don't know much about us, do you?'

'What do you mean?' he answered, and I was happy to smell that he wasn't offended.

'Well, here we are in a share house, and maybe you need some background on your housemates. Kate, remember—the one who chaired the interview today. She teaches ethnic studies at Sydney Uni, but she also inherited this house which was an investment from her North Shore parents who didn't think enough of her to leave it to her unmortgaged. So then there's us tenants who are also her housemates. Jason, who is going to bug you to death on your implants. Did you see his bifurcated tongue? It's very like yours.'

'I didn't notice. I was looking at his tattoos.'

'They're only part of his performance. He is a work in progress.'

The Devil yawned.

I tried not to gag. 'Do you mind if I light a cone?'

'What do you mean?'

'Incense. I like to burn incense. Little cones of scented natural dried stuff.'

He waved his hand graciously. 'Be my guest.'

I was crawling over to the little table with its celadon saucer and collection of Celestial Sky, thinking I should possibly change brand names tomorrow, when he grabbed my arm with a grip you might expect the Devil to have.

I thought I was about to die, or whatever.

'It's not garlic, is it?'

'Never,' I managed to smile.

'I do apologize,' he said after a final little squeeze. I felt like a fruit. 'Did I hurt you?' he asked solicitously.

'Only a bit,' I lied. 'But what do you care?'

He shrugged, the same shrug as the bank manager gave me in some little French coastal town when he refused to cash my travellers cheque because my signature on it didn't exactly match the one on my passport.

'That reminds me,' I said, (though it hadn't—I just needed to change the subject), as the scent of, I think it was called 'Bavaghindra' filled the room. 'Why do you have Pledge Week?'

'You aren't very perspicacious,' he observed. 'Pledge Week,' he said slowly as if I were a child, 'is necessary because, outside of our permanent population of futures markets operators, Pledge Week provides the only new source of once acquired, stable and permanent population that we have.'

The fingers of fate frolicked upon my back in a most disconcerting manner. I shrugged, which not only made me feel great and I hope, annoyed him in the same can't-admit-it way as his shrug did to me, but I think established my position far closer to the peer level necessary to our smooth working relationship.

He must have thought I still did not understand. 'When you come with me—'

'My coming is forever.'

We looked into each other's eyes for so long that I wondered whether it was a blink contest. Eventually I had to blink. 'That is correct,' he said. 'When you come with me, your coming is forever.' And his face changed from its solemnity, to one of Christmas cheer.

The actual elements of his smile, when I could steel myself to really look, were rather heart-flutteringly beautiful, and not at all like Jason's barracuda-shaped mouth of crooked, filed teeth. The smile of the Devil was broad, and his teeth looked good enough to be capped.

—2—

I was just thinking I had enough mental meat to chew on for the moment when the Devil asked, 'Why did you Pledge?'

'Don't you know our motivations?'

The Devil was still sitting on my bed on the floor. He picked up a corner of my bedspread and leaned over to smell the sheets. I don't know why, but this embarrassed me. The laundromat was four blocks away, and since I didn't have anyone I was sleeping with at the moment, I hadn't bothered stuffing them into my backpack for a rather long time. He sniffed deeply. 'I am not the Omniscient, you know,' he said, smoothing the bedspread back into place.

I didn't ask about the Omniscient. This was already almost too much for one day.

He crossed his legs and rocked back. He had already looked pretty amazingly hung in those tight jeans—the major reason that Andrew had voted for him in the house meeting—but now he looked oddly enough, double hung.

I couldn't help asking, 'Do you have a tail?'

'Of course.' He adjusted his crotch and then scratched it, looking for all the world, just very very male-modellish. 'But I asked you,' he said. 'Why did you call?'

Now he had me confused. 'I didn't call. What call?'

'When you wrote to your Julie "I just want fame. Only that, and I wouldn't mind it in a week, and at this point I don't give a shit what I write."'

I could feel a flush climbing my face. 'You have read my emails?'

'We only read mail when it relates to us.'

'But I never mentioned you at all.'

'But you did,' he said, reminding me for a moment of Miss Waldenmere in first form.

'But please, I don't mean to be rude, but I did not.'

The left side of the Devil's lip rose as if caught by a fishhook. 'Angela, my dear—'

I hoped my anger was not showing, but Jeesus, I yearned to pound him into fishpaste.

'Angela,' he sighed, in a maddening display of put-upon tolerance. 'Your undertext reeked of the appeal for me to save you.'

The books piled all over the floor did not help me one bit. I glanced at the top one on the nearest pile: The Bestseller. It leered at me.

'And when I arrived this morning, what did you do?' he needled, in a maddening tone of reason.

I thought back. Sunday morning. The day of the interviews for the new housemate. There had been a number of calls already, and we knew that the kitchen would be full. So tedious, but if I didn't attend, I wouldn't have a vote, and then I could get a housemate-from-hell on the other side of the wall. So I had groaned and crawled out of bed. I had then thought of the other duty of my day: to produce something. Anything. And that made me look forward to the house meeting, in preference.

I remembered what I did next. Check my email, in which there was a letter from Julie telling me about how she has this new idea for a screen play and how she is going to begin writing it. And then I remembered my reply to Julie. And then I remembered smelling a smell that made me check the extension cord, and then I remembered finding it just fine, but still there was that smell, and then I saw this person in the corner.

'I remember,' I said to him.

I remembered more.

'What the fuck are you doing in my room!' I hissed at the person, not wanting to yell in case he was a sleep-deprived spunky-looking-overnighter of Simone's who had just strayed to the wrong room from the loo downstairs. Simone always liked exhibitionists, and this one looked just her type. Very sexy, but in a narcissistic way. A great head of hair, but I do remember thinking that if he really wanted the horns to show, he should shave himself bald, though maybe he thought that was common. I was just thinking of telling him to get out and back to Simone's bed, when he spoke.

'Are you interested in developing your true potential?' I remember him—the Devil—asking, and then I remember to my shame, that I answered 'yes', though upon reflection, this is the worst come-on line I have ever heard.

~

I was mind meandering when the Devil dragged me back to the here-and-now. 'When I explained to you who I was, you didn't fidget or scream, or run out of the room, or jump out of the window, did you?'

I thought back. 'I guess not.'

'Have you thought about why?'

I was thinking, when he interrupted. 'I'll tell you why,' he said, cracking his knuckles one by one. 'You—and I mean all of you—never truly think of the future. Only of what you want now ... and you think the future can, I think your phrase is, "go to the Devil", but again, you don't mean it.'

'Don't mean it?'

'You don't think it will come. Not when it is what you don't want. At least when it relates to yourself.'

I thought about my credit card.

'Then you've answered your own query,' I observed, as he hadn't repeated his question about my motivation for wanting him, or not being frightened about doing a deal with him when it came right down to the deal itself.

He bent and eased the laces on his thick black boots. 'You were very creative,' he said 'about getting me into the house.'

'What? The Australian War Memorial communications officer  who is on stress leave, with your lifestyle-discrimination case pending in the Federal Court?'

'Yes, that. I could never have thought of that.'

Perhaps he was flattering me. Perhaps not. 'You need to know cultural stuff, to be able to have the right cover.'

'So true,' he crooned, and I wasn't sure why. 'And the name.'

'Your name?'

'Yes.'

I was unaccountably pleased. 'You like it?'

'Quite.'

'Brett Hartshorn does kind of roll off the tongue,' I admit that I bragged. 'And with respect, your ideas...' and then I ran out of words—'sucked' seemed suddenly, ineloquent.

But there was one question that had to be answered before we could really establish a working relationship. 'Why are you here for the week?'

He opened his bootlaces even more, and sighed. 'Quite frankly,' he said, 'a holiday.'

This was something I had never read about. 'The Devil ... you ... take holidays?'

'I need to keep in touch.'

'Don't you know what's going on all the time?'

'Do you?'

'Of course not.'

'The deuce you say!' he grinned, and his chin bristled with five-o'clock shadow. 'Well, I don't either. You must stop thinking of me as omniscient.' A thought seemed to strike him. 'Think of me as a construct. Does that help?'

He even pronounced it as CON-struct. For one wonderful and awful moment, I thought: are all the philosophy professors dead? But anyway, this was getting too deep for me. He was incontrovertibly the Devil, and he was sitting on my bed, the only soft sitting place in my room, and I was cross-legged on the floor a metre away. I had more questions.  But first: 'Uh, I don't know how to put this, but what do I call you?'

Now he was confused. 'Can't you guess?'

I hadn't a clue. So many names came to mind. Mister Devil (sounding like a drink), Beelzebub, the Evil One, the Tempter, the Prince of Darkness, His Satanic Majesty, plain old Satan.

But none of them seemed right. Besides, they were all hard on my tongue. For comfort, I would have preferred what he would have been called where I grew up, if he'd rolled into town: Beez, Evo, Maj, or even Horny. And then there were the other names that were just part of Bunwup's Saturday night crowd: Ugly (handsomest bloke in town), Boozer (the parson who came to the pub and drank orange squash), and of course, the ever common Blue, for redheads.

The Devil interrupted this train of going-nowhere thought. 'I was always partial to "The Angel of the Bottomless Pit", he said. 'Until you called me Brett.'

He smiled that wide smile of his.

'So, Brett,' I continued, rather inordinately pleased. 'Why do you come up here—or is it down?'

'It's more like over, he said, stretching himself full length on the bed. 'I like to get a feel for things during Pledge Week, and then we always have our pledgers chaperoned by someone, as it were, throughout the week.'

'Why?'

He plumped my pillow and shoved it under his head. 'Trust. And getting the job done.'

This was confusing all over again. I remembered all the instances I'd read about the time being up and the person being dragged off to hell, or shoved in the Devil's collecting box and stuffed in his pocket. 'I thought a deal is a deal with you.'

'It is,' he said, 'but we've got competition. You must know of our competition? And besides, you...' And here he bowed and waved his hand in a gallant swashbuckle of a flourish. 'I don't mean to impute—but you in a more generic sense—don't always play straight. We prefer not to let you go once you've signed.'

That made sense. Once, in response to a radio station's pledge drive that had some story that made me cry, I rang the station and pledged. This reminded me.

'And besides,' he said. 'About that award-winning best-seller that you're going to write, that's going to win you fame...'

'Yes?' Suddenly I felt all over again that thrill of signing the contract, only hours ago.

'Who's going to write it?'

I panicked as the whole vision fractured. 'Me?'

His raised his eyebrows so high, his horns moved. 'Not a word, my silly worrier,' he said, and I know I should never use the word soothingly, but he did say it that way.

I was trying to figure out how he was going to coerce anyone really good to write it when he pointed to his chest. And then he smiled not only soothingly, but rather egotistically. I didn't care. After five years of everyone asking When is it coming out? I was off the hook. I could just go to work and come home, and in a short time, only a hell's week, the book would be done and I would be ...

The room swam with the smell of success, mixed with Celestial Sky.

I felt alive of an aliveness that I had never felt. In one week (I hadn't asked about the details of what this meant exactly, or read the contract that closely, as it had seemed rude at the time), anyway, it was hard to put all these thoughts in coherent order (which had always been one of my problems)—there would be me, the finally-famous writer of some book (unnamed as of yet). My whole body thrilled (I could feel somewhere—probably my intestines—effervesce with joy). The book—my book that had eluded me for bloody years—this book that I'd talked about writing for years but never specified, would finally be written, holdable, read by others, translated, quoted, and plagiarized—and would be ghost-written by the Devil himself, 'Brett Hartshorn', the best words of fiction I ever thought up.

...continues

Copyright information
© Anna Tambour, 2005, 2011
Spotted Lily was first published in 2005, and is reprinted as an infinity plus ebook:

Buy now: Spotted Lily by Anna Tambour $2.99 / £2.18.

friends of infinity plus

Linda Nagata

Memory

A quest, a puzzle, and multiple lives:

Jubilee is a bold young woman of seventeen, on the cusp of leaving the security of her family home to seek out her own future. But her life is thrown into tumult by a visit from a forbidding stranger who has come looking for Jubilee's beloved brother, Jolly—who is seven years dead.

Jolly died as a child, consumed in an unprecedented flood of "silver"—a mysterious substance resembling a thick, glowing fog. Silver is a force of both destruction and creation. Sometimes it dissolves what it touches, at other times it randomly rebuilds structures from the lost past, but no person caught within its reach has ever survived it.

And yet...

If Jolly is truly dead, how could this stranger know him? And if Jolly is alive, how did he survive the silver? And where has he gone? Jubilee soon discovers that the stranger is not the only person interested in her brother's fate.

Looming over all is the question of the silver's nature and purpose. Silver is rising in the world, flooding ever more often and more deeply so that someday soon the world must drown in it.

Determined to find answers, Jubilee leaves home one step ahead of a ruthless pursuit. The quest she undertakes will unlock the memory of a past reaching back farther than she ever imagined.

"The feel of visionary fantasy mixes with hard SF in this powerful novel of a young woman's quest for a missing brother in a far future world beset by out-of-control technology."
— Locus

"...Nagata's book conjures up a richly realized world in which a truly eerie landscape serves as the vibrant background of a tale of self-discovery and courage in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds."
— Booklist

Buy now: Memory by Linda Nagata

novel extract: Memory by Linda Nagata

For Junzo—
A Quest, a Puzzle
And Multiple Lives

Chapter 1

When I was ten I had a blanket that was smooth and dark, with no light of its own until I moved and then its folds would glitter with thousands of tiny stars in all the colors of the stars in the night sky. But the pale arch that appears at the zenith on clear nights and that we call the Bow of Heaven never would appear on my blanket—and for that I was glad. For if there was no Heaven, I reasoned, then the dead would always be reborn in this world and not the next, no matter how wise they became in life.

This was always a great concern for me, for my mother was the wisest person I knew and I feared for her. More than once I schemed to make her look foolish, just to be sure she would not get into Heaven when her time came. When my antics grew too much she would turn to my father. With a dark frown and her strong arms crossed over her chest she would say, "We have been so very fortunate to have such a wild and reckless daughter as Jubilee. Obviously, she was sent to teach us wisdom." My father would laugh, but I would pout, knowing I had lost another round, and that I must try harder next time.

I seldom suffered a guilty conscience. I knew it was my role to be wild—even my mother agreed to that—but on the night my story begins I was troubled by the thought that perhaps this time I had gone too far.

I lived then in the temple founded by my mother, Temple Huacho, a remote outpost in the Kavasphir Hills, a wild land of open woods and rolling heights, infamous for the frequency of its silver floods.

As often as three nights in ten the silver would come, rising from the ground, looking like a luminous fog as it filled all the vales, to make an island of our hilltop home. I would watch its deadly advance from my bedroom window, and many times I saw it lap at the top of the perimeter wall that enclosed the temple grounds.

That wall was my mother's first line of defense against the rise of silver and she maintained it well. Only twice had I seen a silver flood reach past it, and both times the chemical defenses of the temple kobolds that lived within the wall stripped the silver of its menace before it could do us harm. True silver is heavy and will always sink to fill the low ground. But the remnant silver that made it past the wall spired like luminous smoke, tangling harmlessly in the limbs of the orchard trees.

Because silver was so common in that region no one dared to live near us. Only a temple, with its protective kobolds, could offer shelter from the nocturnal floods, and Temple Huacho was the only one that had been established anywhere in Kavasphir. So the mineral wealth the silver brought was ours to exploit, while the temple well was famous for producing new and mysterious strains of the beetlelike metabolic machines called kobolds. My mother harvested the kobolds while my father prospected, and eight or nine times a year small convoys of truckers would visit us to collect what we had to trade.

On that evening, two trucks had arrived from distant Xahiclan and the drivers had with them a boy named Tico who was also a lesson in wisdom for his parents. Naturally I loved him on sight, and so did my brother Jolly who was a year older than me but not nearly so useful to our parents. We abandoned our younger siblings (who we were supposed to watch) to play wild games in the orchard. After dinner—a magnificent feast that my parents had prepared and that we did not appreciate except for the sweets at the end—we disappeared again, this time on a special quest.

In the old enclaves like Xahiclan the temples all had long histories. Thousands of players depended on their protective powers, and so they had become sacred places. Children were not allowed to play on the grounds, and only the temple keepers were permitted inside the buildings. None of this solemnity was attached to Temple Huacho. Our outpost was not thirty years old; it was home to no one but our own family; and it was the only playground my brothers and sisters and I had ever known.

Jolly and I were oldest, so we could go where we wanted within the confines of the temple wall, though perhaps not to the well room, not without supervision. But Tico wanted to see the well of the kobolds. He told us he had never seen a kobold well before. Jolly and I were so astonished to hear this that it took only a moment for us to reason that the rule about not visiting the well room was an old one, and that if we were to ask, our mother and father would surely say we were old enough now to go there on our own ... but of course we couldn't ask: they were busy with the truckers and would not want to be bothered, while it was up to us to keep Tico entertained.

So we crept quietly through the halls, accompanied by Jolly's little dog, Moki—a sharp-faced hound with large upright ears, a short back, lush red fur, and a long tail. Moki had been Jolly's pet for as long as I could remember. He stood only knee-high, but he followed my brother everywhere. Now he trotted beside us, his nails clicking against the tiled floor.

Temple Huacho was a house of stone, made from the abundant minerals of Kavasphir. The floor tiles were a cream-colored marble laced with gold; the walls were of lettered stone, in a shade of green like malachite with the letters compressed into barely readable veins of black print; the ceilings were made of translucent slices of a lighter green stone bearing the image of fossilized forests. Lights shone behind the ceiling panels, giving the effect of walking through a woodland on a cloudy day. Tico was much impressed by this décor. On the way to the well room he kept whispering about how wealthy we must be until I decided that perhaps I didn't like him quite as much as I had thought.

The entrance to the well room was framed by the trunks of two trees fossilized in white jade. Jolly held on to Moki while I leaned past the nearest trunk, taking a quick, cautious look around the room, confirming that it was empty. Then I motioned Tico and Jolly forward.

The well room was a round chamber, its walls lined with cabinets holding hundreds of tiny, airtight drawers where mature kobolds were stored. On the right-hand side, in front of these cabinets, was the broad jade table that served as my mother's workbench. Her microscopes and analytical equipment were shapeless lumps beneath a white dust cover. On the left side of the room another workbench supported stacks of transparent boxes—test chambers for uncataloged kobolds—but they were empty.

At the center of the room was the temple well. A thigh-high mound of fine soil surrounded its throat. Over the years I had watched this mound grow until now it spilled onto the tiles around it, where its soil was scuffed and crushed to a fine brown powder by passing feet.

Tico did not wait for further invitation. He strode past me to the mound's edge, where he looked over the embankment of dirt, and down, into the dark, jagged hole that was the throat of the well.

A kobold well is made wherever a plume of nutrients chances to rise from the steaming core of the world, a bounty that awakens the kobold motes, tiny as dust, that lie dormant everywhere in the soil.

I felt proud when I saw the awe on Tico's face. The well was the heart of Temple Huacho. It was the reason my mother had settled there. It was the source of our security, and our wealth. So I was surprised when Tico's expression changed. Awe became confusion. And then confusion gave way to a wicked scowl. "Is that it?" he asked. "A dirty hole in the ground?"

I frowned down at the fine, loose soil, wanting desperately to impress him. "There are kobolds," I said, and I pointed at the well's throat where two newly emerged kobolds were using their weak limbs to claw free of the hard-packed ground. These were large metallophores—metal eaters—as big as my father's thumb and beetlelike in appearance, their color as dull as the soil that nourished them.

Kobolds were a kind of mechanic, a machine creature, and like any machine they were created by the labor of other machines: the kobold motes, to be specific. That was the essential division among the animate creatures of the world: mechanics were made, so that they began existence in finished form, while organic life had to strive for existence through the complexities of birth and growth and change.

Mechanics were living tools. The metallophores that I pointed out to Tico could be configured to make many kinds of simple metal parts. As a spider eats and secretes a web, so kobolds could take in raw material, metabolize it so that it took on a new form, and secrete it. But where spiders secreted only webs, kobolds could produce things as diverse as medicine or machine parts, depending on the strain. The common metallophores of our well did their work inside a metabolic foam, which they would excrete in layer upon layer for many days depending on the size of the artifact they had been programmed to make. When the project was complete the foam would be washed away, revealing the fan blade, or bracket, or truck body that the configuration had called for.

All players were dependent upon mechanics, but we were especially dependent on the kobolds. We could not have survived without them, so it was easy to believe the legends that said they had been made for us.

But Tico showed no sign of being impressed by the large metallophores, so I hurried to look for other kobolds, and soon I spotted some that were tiny, the size of a grain of wheat or even smaller, moving through the mound's soft soil. "See those?" I asked Tico. "There. Where the soil quivers? Those are probably the kind that make platinum circuits. My mother's been trying to improve that strain."

He shrugged. "Who cares about kobolds? I've seen thousands. I thought you were going to show me a well like the ones in Xahiclan. They're a hundred feet across, with crystal walls crawling with rare kobolds no one's ever seen before."

A hundred feet across? I wondered if it could be true. I looked at Jolly. He had circled around to the well's other side where he stood with his hands clasped behind his back, a sure sign he was getting angry. Moki sat beside him, his alert ears listening for any familiar words in our conversation. Jolly said, "At Temple Huacho we find lots of kobolds no one's ever seen before. More than in all of Xahiclan, because this temple is new."

I smiled, pleased at my brother's parry. But now the line had been drawn and Tico had territory to defend. "New kobolds out of this little hole? I don't believe it!"

It took me a moment to understand that he had just called my brother a liar. When I did, my cheeks grew hot. "Why do you think your dad comes all the way out here?" I demanded. "It's because our kobolds are special."

"Uh-uh!" Tico countered. "It's for the minerals."

Jolly smiled his signature half smile. I saw it, and took a step back from Tico. In a quiet voice Jolly said, "You forget where you are, Tico. This is the Kavasphir Hills. You're not in an old, tame enclave like Xahiclan. We don't need a big well, because the silver here is powerful."

Jolly was a beautiful child, smooth-skinned and bright-eyed, his blue-black hair sprouting in unruly spikes—but he was eleven, and the easy cheerfulness of his early years had already begun to fade under the pressure of a growing self-doubt, for no talent from his past lives had ever returned to him. Every new skill had to be learned with great labor, as if for the first time. Though I was younger, I was far ahead of him in reading and math, because for me each new lesson only wakened a knowledge I already had, while Jolly had to earn it. He would grow frustrated, and rail that he must have been the stupidest player in existence, to have learned nothing from his past lives.

That night though, he was a player. He told Tico, "This land belongs to the silver. It's in the ground. It's in the well." He stomped his shoe softly. "It's here, right under our feet."

Tico didn't like this idea. He took a step back. "It's not."

"Oh, yes it is," I said, rising to my brother's aid—though the idea of silver lying in wait underground was new to me, and deeply unsettling ... because it made sense. Questions I had never thought to ask were suddenly answered, and I echoed them aloud: "Where do you think kobold motes come from?" (As if I knew!) "The silver makes them, that's where. It's in the land."

"It is not!" Tico said. He was becoming desperately angry now. "My uncle's a stone mason. I've been to a quarry where stones are cut out of the ground, and there's never been any silver underneath any of them."

"This is a temple," Jolly said.

Well it certainly was and Tico had never been in a temple before. What did he know about temples? Nothing except the silly rumors he'd heard in Xahiclan of wells a hundred feet across. But Tico was proud of his ignorance. He shrugged; his lip thrust out in a pout. "Your well is still boring to look at."

This was too much for me. To belittle the well was to belittle the life my mother had made for all of us and that I could not bear. "Come with me, then," I said, and I started to climb carefully over the mound. "If you want some excitement, then come with me and see the silver—unless you're afraid."

Jolly's eyes widened when he saw what I was doing. "Jubilee!" But the well lay between us, and he could not stop me.

I looked over my shoulder at Tico. "What's the matter? Don't you want to come?"

Warily he asked, "What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to climb down the well. That's what you have to do to see the silver."

"But I can see the silver outside any window. It's rising tonight. My dad said so."

I edged closer to the well's dark throat, placing my feet carefully so as not to crush the lumpy shapes of dormant kobolds that lay buried beneath the surface of the mound. "But it's in the well too. Always. Night or day. Don't you want to see it?"

I didn't expect him to follow me. I thought fear (or wisdom) would get the better of him, and he would run away and then Jolly and I could have a good laugh together. But Tico was a gift to his parents, and to me. "Okay," he said. "You go first."

Of course I had never climbed down the well. I had no idea if the silver really could be seen at the bottom, or even if there was a bottom, but Tico was watching me with a wicked smile. He knew I was lying. He was only waiting for me to give up and admit it, but how could I? I glanced at Jolly. He was my big brother. He was supposed to keep me out of trouble, but he only looked at me with merry eyes, saying, "The chimney bends about ten feet down, but if you wriggle past that, you can keep going for almost thirty feet."

I could not hide my astonishment. "You've been down the well?"

"Sure. How do you think I know about the silver?" He looked past my shoulder and his smile widened to a grin. I turned to see Tico fleeing the well room. The sound of his footfalls faded in the direction of the dining hall. "He won't tell on us," Jolly said. "He'd only get himself in trouble."

Tico was already forgotten. I turned back, to glare at my brother. "Have you really been down the well?" I didn't want to believe it. I didn't want to believe he'd done something so momentous without me. And he didn't want to admit it. I could see that at once. "You have gone down it!" I accused.

He looked askance. "Only one time. When you went with Dad to Halibury."

That was the time my father had taken me to see the matchmaker. Jolly was oldest and he should have gone first but our father wouldn't take him—not until he knew what Jolly's talents were. My own special talent was languages. I had a knack for them that had been clear by the time I was six. Naturally my brother had been jealous, and he must have been bored too in the days I was away—but that was months ago! He should have forgiven me, and confessed. I wondered what other secrets he kept. "You should have told me."

"Why? You would only want to go yourself."

"So?"

"So it's dangerous. You really can see hints of the silver down there."

"I'm not afraid."

"Jubilee—"

He was only a year older than me. I knew I could keep up with him. I always had. "You can follow me, Jolly, if you want to, but I'm going."

~

I lowered myself into the well's dark throat. The shaft sweated a cold dew. Knobs of jade stuck out from the narrow walls as if they had been put there on purpose to make a ladder. I moved cautiously from one to the next. Jolly and I had climbed every tree in the orchard, we had scaled the wall around the temple at a hundred different points, and we had even climbed up to the roof once, when my father was away and my mother was busy with the new baby. But the shaft was a new experience for me, and I didn't like it.

I could feel my shirt getting wet, and crumbles of dirt trickling past my collar. The smell of dirt was strong. Beneath that though, there was something else: a sharp scent that made me think of knives, or melting glass. The walls were tiled with the shapes of dormant kobolds. I could see their legs folded against their machine bodies, and their scaled abdomens, but the complex mouthparts that decorated their beetle faces were only half-formed.

I had never seen an unfinished kobold before. I stroked the back of one. Then I pried my fingers into the dirt around its pupal shape to see if it could be freed. It popped loose with surprising ease. I almost dropped it, but managed to catch it with my left hand, while my legs held me propped against the wall.

"You shouldn't do that," Jolly said.

I looked up at his foreshortened figure braced across the well's throat, and I made a face. Out of sight in the well room, Moki was whining anxiously, wondering where we had gone. It was a lonely sound, and did not help my mood, but I had things to prove. So the pupal kobold went into my pocket and I continued down.

The bend in the well shaft was just as Jolly had described. I wriggled past it, leaving behind the friendly light of the well room. I felt the shaft open out around me and I had the feeling I'd entered a secret chamber. It was warmer here, and it was dark enough to make me breathe hard. I couldn't see the shapes of the pupal kobolds in the walls anymore, but I could feel them, bumpy-smooth, like river rocks under my hand. The sharp, glassy scent had grown stronger.

Jolly was wriggling past the bend now, so I started down again to get out of his way. "Where's the silver?" I asked softly.

"Farther down. It's trapped in the walls."

"It can't get out, can it?"

"I don't know."

My hands trembled. The temple protected us from the silver. But it was night—the time when silver rose. And I wasn't exactly in the temple; I was under it.

"Did you climb down at night?" I asked Jolly. "Or during the day?"

"At night."

Okay. I bit my lower lip. It was only thirty feet or so to the bottom. That's what Jolly had said. I climbed faster. The sooner I touched bottom, the sooner I could come back up.

It was too dark to see anything.

I couldn't believe Jolly had climbed down here by himself.

Or maybe I could believe it. Jolly was like that. I would never have done this alone—and that was a hard knowledge to bear.

I slipped. I slid only a few inches and then I caught myself on a knobby rock. But now my eyes were playing tricks on me. Was there a gleam in the walls of the shaft? Yes ... like threads of light beneath the black soil, but not silver threads. Their color was bronze. I brushed my fingers over them and some of the covering soil crumbled away. The light grew brighter, and closer to silver in color, but the texture was wrong. "Jolly?"

"Yeah?"

"Is this what you meant? Is this the silver?" It didn't look much like silver to me.

"Tiny veins in the wall?"

"Uh-huh."

"That's it."

I felt a little calmer. I could handle this. I started again for the bottom, moving faster now. I wanted this adventure to be over. I wanted to be out in the temple's sweet artificial light. But to get there, I had to touch bottom first.

The well came to an abrupt end. Still clinging to the walls, I felt around with the thin soles of my shoes, but I could not discover any further passage. I was a bit disappointed. Despite my fear, it would have been fun to find a new passage, and venture just a little farther than Jolly.

"Where are you?" Jolly called. His voice sounded far away. I glanced up, and saw him silhouetted against a patch of gray. He had come only halfway down from the bend. His black shape hung there like a giant spider.

"I'm at the bottom."

"Then come back. And hurry. Mama's going to be looking for us soon."

"In a minute." Gingerly, I lowered my weight to the floor. Something brittle crunched under my feet and I half expected the shaft to give way and drop me all the way through the world to the ocean.

Nothing so dramatic happened. All around me I could see the tiny veins of embedded light glowing in the walls. They were everywhere at the bottom of the shaft, like luminous spiderwebs under the dirt. Or maybe they were just easier to see there, so deep down inside the world. I traced their tangled paths with my fingers. "This doesn't look like silver," I said. I looked up at Jolly. "Are you sure it's not just a mineral?"

"I didn't dig it out."

My father had once shown me a grotto near our home where silver could be seen even in the daytime. He had not allowed me to go inside, but standing at the grotto's entrance I could clearly see the silver tucked into the crevices and the hollows of the rock. It had looked just like silver looks in the night: cottony tufts of luminous fog. These gleaming veins didn't look anything like that. Instead, they looked like strands of metal. "I don't think this is silver."

"Jubilee, come back up."

I scraped experimentally at the dirt. I was still angry with Jolly. How I would love to prove him wrong! I scraped harder, but it hurt my fingernails. That was when I remembered the pupal kobold in my pocket. My fingers slipped around it, exploring its hard shape, and the way its abdomen came to a sharp point like a tiny pick. I pulled it out, and—gently at first, but with more force at every stroke—I used it to scrape at a vein.

Jolly must have guessed what I was doing. "Jubilee!" He started down toward me.

I kept scraping. Little streams of dirt rattled to the floor. The line of light beneath my excavation brightened. Encouraged, I stabbed my little weapon hard into the vein, and something popped. It was a tiny sound, like a clucking tongue, far away. Then a spurt of glowing silver slurry shot out across my hand like a pulse of blood. Or acid. My hand burned as if someone had laid a wire of red hot metal across its back. I dropped the pupa and screamed a little half scream, bit off at once because worse than a burn would be Mama finding out what I had done.

"Jubilee?" Jolly whispered, a note of panic in his voice. "Where are you? What's wrong?"

"I'm okay!" I said. "Go back up. Go back up." My hand hurt so badly. I whimpered, expecting a cloud of silver to ooze out of the wall at any moment to engulf me. The traceries of light still gleamed, while the vein I had attacked wept tiny drops like luminous quicksilver.

"Jubilee?"

"I'm coming!" I climbed frantically toward his voice, knocking loose the pupal cases of several half-formed kobolds in my haste.

~

I kept my hand hidden from Mama. The wound was a livid red trench that ran from the knuckle of my little finger to the base of my thumb. After a few minutes it stopped hurting, but I could hardly bear to look at it and I certainly didn't want to explain where it had come from. So I said good night with my hand thrust deep in my pocket. Then I hurried to the room I shared with Jolly, shut the door firmly, and crawled under my blanket of stars. I lay in the dark, staring at the trees beyond the open window, their leafy branches bathed in a pale gleam. I was terribly tired, but my guilty conscience would not let me sleep. After a few minutes, Jolly came in, with Moki following at his heels.

"You okay?" he asked.

"Yes."

He walked to the window. Pale light shone across his face. "The silver's deep tonight. It's almost over the wall."

I crawled to the foot of the bed to look. Kneeling beside him, I leaned out the window.

Temple Huacho was built at the summit of a softly rounded hill. I looked down that slope, past the orchard my mother had planted, to see a luminous ocean lapping at the top of the perimeter wall. The silver's light filled all the vales so that once again our hilltop had become an island, one of many in an archipelago of hills set in a silvery sea, though all the other islands were wooded. Ours was the only one where any players lived.

The oldest stories in existence, the ones brought forward again and again through time, tell us that in our first lives we came from beyond the world. A goddess created this place for us and the silver was her thought: a force of creation and destruction that could build the bones of the world or melt them away. She brought us out of darkness to live in her new world, for it was her hope that each of us might gain talents in our successive lives so that someday we would grow beyond this world and ascend to Heaven too.

The goddess had made the world in defiance of darkness, but the darkness was an angry god and he pursued her and sought to slay her world. A great war fell out between them and while he was cast back into the void, she was broken, her existence reduced to a fever dream with the silver the only visible remnant of her creative power.

We call it silver, but other languages have named it better. In one ancient tongue it is the "breath-of-creation." In another it is "the fog of souls," and in a third, "the dreaming goddess."

That was how my mother spoke of it. When the silver rose she would say that the goddess was dreaming again of the glorious days of creation, and certainly the silver brought with it both the beauty and the madness of dreams. It was an incoherent force, wantonly powerful, that entered our world at twilight and stayed until dawn, reshaping what it touched. In the course of a single night it might dissolve a hundred miles of highway, or the outer buildings of a failing enclave, or a player unlucky enough to be caught out after dark. In the same night it might build new structures within the veils of its gleaming fog, so that a columned mansion would be discovered in an uninhabited valley, or a statue of glass would be found standing in meditation amid a field of maize. But while the silver could both dissolve away the structures of our civilization and build them anew, it acted always as an impersonal force, never seeming aware that this was our world, or that we existed in it.

So we walled it out.

A silver flood might get past the protection of the temple kobolds that lived within the perimeter wall, but not without losing most of its strength. More temple kobolds guarded the orchard, and more existed in the temple itself so that the silver could never reach us. So my mother promised.

Every temple was an enclave, an island of safety in the chaotic wilderness of the world. The truckers had brought their vehicles into the courtyard; my father had closed the gate behind them. They would sleep in the guest rooms tonight, and we would all be safe.

I watched the silver lapping at the top of the wall, somehow eerily alive that night. I watched the first tendrils reach over the wall's flat top. When they encountered the chemical defenses of the temple kobolds they smoked and steamed, rising as a fine mist into the air. But the advance of the silver did not stop. More tendrils spilled over the wall, and these were not turned back so easily. I watched first one, then many more, flow down the face of the wall, gathering against the ground like smoke on a cool morning.

I retreated from the window.

My fear must have shone because Jolly said, "It's okay. It won't come inside the temple. It can't."

That's what Mama would say—but she didn't know about my adventure in the well. She didn't know I'd disturbed what was there.

Jolly left the window to sit beside me on the bed. Moki followed him, snuggling in between us. "How's your hand?"

"Better."

He was silent for a minute. I could smell the silver: a fresh, strong scent as I imagined the ocean would smell. "Do you ... ever feel like you're having a dream?" Jolly asked. "Even though you're awake?"

I puzzled over his question, wondering where it had come from. "You mean like a daydream?"

"No."

"Then what?"

I could see he was already regretting saying anything. "Never mind."

"Are you having a dream right now?" I asked him.

Silver light glittered in his eyes.

"So what do you dream about?"

But he looked away. "Never mind. Go to sleep."

I was tired, so I lay down again, wriggling about for a minute so the stars on my blanket gleamed brightly. I looked at Jolly, still sitting at the foot of my bed, gazing out the window at the silver, his hand moving slowly as he stroked Moki, who had fallen asleep in his lap. I wasn't sure, but I thought I saw faint motes of silver sparkling over his hand. Then I was asleep, before even the stars in my blanket had begun to fade.

~

Moki woke me, his sharp high bark like an electric shock. I sat up. Jolly had fallen asleep where he'd been sitting. Now his head jerked up. I was astonished to see motes of silver dancing in his hair and over his hands and in the folds of his clothes. He turned to the window.

The silver light was brighter than I had ever seen it. Jolly was silhouetted in its glow. He rose slowly to his knees, staring out the window like someone mesmerized.

"Jolly!" I spoke past Moki's frantic yipping. "There is silver on you."

He looked at his hands. Then he swiped them against his pants as if to wipe the evidence of silver away, but the motes would not leave. "It's too late," he whispered. "I called it, and now it's coming."

At first I didn't know what he meant. Then Moki went ominously silent, and a moment later the silver rose over the windowsill. It had rolled up through the orchard all the way to the temple. Now it spilled through the window and into the room: a luminous stream that spread in a smoky pool across the floor. Its fresh, crisp scent filled my lungs and planted a quiet terror in my heart.

I crept backward, to the far corner of my bed, pulling my blanket of stars with me until I felt the wall against my shoulders. I could see no way to escape, for the silver had already rolled up against the door.

"Mommy!" I whispered it like a spell, a word with magical warding powers. "Mommy." Too frightened to shout.

The silver started to rise. It inflated in ghostly tendrils that swirled toward Jolly, who seemed hypnotized by it, for he didn't move. I reached out, grabbing a fold of his shirt where the silver motes were thinnest, and I yanked him backward. "Get away from it!" I whispered. "Move back. Move back."

He seemed to wake up. Had he still been asleep? He scrambled into my corner. Moki came with him, barking frantically again. I put my hand over his muzzle and hissed at him to hush! I did not want Mama to wake. What would happen if she hurried to our room, if she threw open the door? She would be taken.

"Go away!" Jolly whispered. "I didn't mean it."

He had boxed me into the corner, put himself between me and the looming silver fog. Never had I seen silver so close. I peered past him, in terror, in wonder. It looked grainy. As if it were a cloud made of millions of tiny particles just like the silver motes that clung to him.

The cloud touched the edge of my bed.

Jolly started to creep away from me, moving toward it. "No," I whimpered. "Don't go."

I grabbed his shirt again and tried to drag him back, but he turned on me in fury. "Don't touch me! If the silver takes one of us, it'll take the other too if we make a bridge for it to cross."

"I don't care!" I started to cry, but I didn't touch him again. I held on to Moki instead, who was trembling in my lap. "I want Mama. I want Dad."

"I do too," Jolly said in a soft, shaky voice. Then a tendril of silver slipped across the bed and touched his knee. For a moment the tendril glowed brighter. Then it flashed over him, expanding across his legs, his torso, his arms, his face, all of him, in a raw second. For one more second he knelt on the bed like a statue of a boy cast in silver. Then the cloud rolled over him, hiding his terrible shape within a curtain of perfect silence.

I couldn't breathe. Air wouldn't come into my chest. I pressed myself against the wall and held on to Moki, wanting to scream, wanting it almost as badly as I wanted air, but I didn't dare because I didn't want Mama to come into the room and be stolen by the silver too. Even when the glittering mist began to retreat, leaving the foot of the bed empty, with ancient letters newly written in gold on the bed frame and on the stone floor, I stayed silent in my corner. I waited until the cloud had drifted out of the room—not out of the window, for the window was gone, and most of the bedroom's wall with it, dissolved in the silver, just like Jolly.

I stared out at the orchard, wondering why the trees had remained unchanged, but silver was like that: sometimes it would leave things and sometimes it would change them, but it always took the players it touched, and animals too. I waited, until the last wisp still clinging to the ruined wall evaporated from existence. Then I screamed.

Chapter 2

If a child should ask, What is the world? a parent might answer, "It is a ring-shaped island of life made by the goddess in defiance of the frozen dark between the stars. On the outer rim of this ring there is mostly land, and that is where we live. On the inner rim there is only ocean. We have day and night because the world-ring spins around its own imaginary axis. At the same time it follows another, greater circle around the sun so that we see different stars in different seasons." These are the simple facts everyone accepts.

But if a child should ask, What is the silver? the answer might take many forms:

"It is a fog of glowing particles that arises at night to rebuild the world."

"It is a remnant of the world's creation."

"It is the memory of the world."

"It is the dreaming mind of the wounded goddess and you must never go near her! Her dreams will swallow any player they touch. Do you want to be swallowed up by the silver? No? Then stay inside at night. Never wander."

What is the silver? After Jolly was taken, that question was never far from my mind. I interviewed my mother, I consulted libraries for their opinions, and I asked the passing truckers what they thought. It was from the truckers I first heard the rumor that the silver was rising. The oldest among them had lived more than two hundred years, and they swore it was a different world from the one in which they'd been born: "The roads were safer in those days. The silver did not come so often, nor flood so deep."

Sometimes their younger companions would scoff, but as I grew older, even the youths insisted they had seen a change. "The silver is rising, higher every year, as if it would drown the world."

I began to keep records. I noted the nights on which the silver appeared, how often it touched the temple's perimeter wall, and how often it passed over. That first year I kept count, it reached the orchard only once, but in the second year it breached the wall three times, and seven times in the year after that.

I was fifteen when I showed these notes to my mother. Her expression was grim as she studied them. "Kavasphir is a wild land," she admitted, handing the notes back to me.

"Do you think the silver is rising?"

She was hesitant in her answer. "All things move in cycles."

"I have heard the silver moves in a cycle of a thousand years. That it grows more abundant with time, until the world seems on the verge of drowning in it ... and then it is driven back until there is almost no silver left and that is almost as bad."

My mother said, "I have heard that too."

I waited for her to elaborate, to explain why this was a foolish rumor, but she was lost in thought. It was night, and we sat together in her bedroom, the only sound that of the fountain playing in the garden beyond the open window.

At last I spoke again, my voice hushed. "Do you think it's true?"

"It's hard to know for sure."

"But it could be?"

"The world is old, and most of our past forgotten. But fragments remain. In the libraries ... and in the lettered stone and the follies the silver makes. There is enough to convince most scholars that the world has passed through many ages of history. Sometimes the silver was common. Other times it was rare. No one can say why."

"No one has explained it?"

She shrugged. "Many have tried to explain it, but none in a manner to convince me. Players love stories, but they do not always love facts." We traded a smile. "Don't be afraid, Jubilee. Perhaps the silver is rising, but I don't think we are on the verge of drowning just yet."

What is the silver? Eventually I decided it must be all the things players claimed it to be. It was a remnant of the world's creation: that was how it was able to disassemble solid objects, breaking them down into its gleaming fog while it compiled new objects in their places. It was the memory of the world, mapping the structure of everything it touched, so that it could bring ancient objects forward in time—to create meaningless follies in the wilderness, or to deposit veins of valuable ore in the exposed rock of the Kavasphir Hills. And it was the mind of a dreaming goddess, or at least of some savant of an ancient world far more learned than ours. This I allowed only because of a handful of legends. Mostly the silver acted in a way that seemed random, and unaware. Now and then though, there were stories of some tool or talisman brought forward through time, delivered at a crucial moment, as if someone beyond the silver sought to move the pieces ...

But why only now and then?

I would look at the scar on the back of my hand, remembering the night Jolly was taken, and I would wonder.

I never told my mother how I got that scar. It was a strange mark: an intricate ridge of reddish tissue that didn't fade as any normal scar would. I would look at it, and wonder: Had I caused Jolly's death with my adventure in the kobold well? For neither I nor anyone else could explain why the silver had been able to breach the temple that night.

But if ever I got to thinking it might be my fault, I would remember what Jolly had said, a moment before the silver spilled over the windowsill: I called it, and now it's coming. Those words were engraved in my memory, though how he—or anyone—could summon the wild chaos of silver I didn't know.

There was much I didn't know, but I swore it would not always be so.

I was never lonely in those years. By the time I was seventeen, the count of my younger siblings had grown to six and I had long since corrupted my nearest sister, Emia, and our oldest brother after her, Rizal, and made them my companions in many adventures that our parents did not approve. But I abandoned them that year, when my father's brother came to live with us.

I haven't said much about my father. In a sense, there isn't much to say. He was a wayfarer who had traveled a third of the way around the ring of the world to find his destined lover, and during his years on the road he had many adventures, and many narrow escapes. Then one sunny day he found his way to the enclave of Halibury, and as he'd done in hundreds of enclaves before, he went to see the matchmaker.

That self-righteous old man wanted nothing more than to send this foreign ruffian on his way. But against all expectation, this Kedato Panandi turned out to possess the blood pattern that matched my mother's. The matchmaker sent a note to her at Temple Huacho, giving the worst description.

My mother was not a young woman. She'd given up wayfaring ten years before. Having reached her late forties, she'd settled her mind to a single life. Now she read the matchmaker's description and was afraid. The body speaks its own language. What if this stranger truly was a wicked man? And what if she loved him anyway? Such things happened. This was no perfect world.

So she dithered in her answer, until finally Kedato bribed the matchmaker's assistant and got her name. The body speaks its own language. They were married on the day they met, and though she was twenty years older than her husband and far more learned, Kedato Panandi was a gentle, intelligent man, and together they were able to make a marriage of love and of respect. Theirs was the same story told in a thousand romantic tales out of history. (No one tells the stories with bad endings.) Read any of these to understand my father.

Like his older brother, Liam Panandi too had traveled alone a third of the way around the ring of the world, stopping at every enclave he passed to visit the matchmaker and enter his blood pattern into the local market pool. But he had not found a lover yet.

Who hasn't paused to wonder why the world is made this way? Our dogs, and the animals that run wild, are all able to mate freely: any male and any female of their species together stand a good chance of producing offspring. So why is life harder for men and women? Why do our bodies speak in individual languages that almost no one else can understand?

"Because the goddess who left us here was wicked and cruel." That's what Liam growled, that first night he was with us, still surly from the road, and I thought he might be right. Who else but a wantonly powerful goddess could find romance in the notion that only one lover exists for all of us, in all the vast world?

There was no question of Liam and I becoming lovers. We were not a match. But he was only twenty-five while I was already seventeen, and we soon became good friends, hunting and exploring the wilderness around Temple Huacho until my sister complained I had forgotten her name.

~

Late in that year my father announced a plan to journey to Xahiclan. He liked to travel, so three or four times a year he would take the truck to Halibury or Xahiclan, bringing one of the children along with him each time. I whispered to Liam that we should grab the seats.

I'd heard a rumor in the market that there had been a great flood of silver on the Jowádela Plateau, and that truckers from Xahiclan had since sighted a vast field of newly deposited ruins north of the highway. The site was nearly three hundred miles from Temple Huacho, but Liam and I had fared as far as a hundred miles over roadless wilderness, camping overnight on hilltops before returning home. So three hundred miles didn't sound so far, especially if we could ride most of the way in the truck.

My father was agreeable. So we loaded our off-road bikes onto the truck, shoved our savants in beside them, then climbed into the cab, waving good-bye to my jealous siblings and promising to bring them trophies from the ruins, if there were any to be found.

The morning was brilliant, the air steamy after a night of hard rain. We set off down the hill on a switchback road that had been rebuilt six times in the last year alone, after being destroyed by the night fogs. By contrast, the bramble of sweet raspberries surrounding the road never seemed to change.

That was the fickle nature of the silver: no one could say what its particles would seize and transform, and what would emerge unchanged from its fog, except that animate creatures could not survive the least contact with it—not the deer of the forest or the cats that hunted them, the birds or the insects or the players—and no living thing had ever been returned by it to the world.

That is why in some languages the silver is called the fog of souls.' It is true that in their last exhalations the dying breathe forth clouds of silver that sink to the bedding or the floor, and then quickly vanish. This silver is said to contain the memory of the life that has passed, but I have done the math, and in a thousand years there are not enough dead to explain the silver that arises in just one night. So it would seem that human souls are but a small part of the memory of a world.

At the bottom of the hill the brambles came to an end, and shortly after that so did the pavement. For the next sixty miles we made our own road, driving through shallow vales filled with nodding fields of shoulder-high grass.

Long before I was born, a crew of engineers had passed through Kavasphir, laying out a route for an army of road-building kobolds to follow. For three months a smooth ribbon of pavement linked Temple Huacho to the Xahiclan highway. Then the silver rose, and in one night erased the road. What impressed me most about this story was that the road had lasted ninety days. In my lifetime I would expect it to be gone in less than ten.

So there were no roads in Kavasphir, but I didn't mind. The slopes were gentle, and riding in the truck on its gliding suspension, propelled by silent engines through oceans of grass as high as the windows, I would pretend I was a bird, skimming the valleys on my smooth wings, free.

We stopped once in late morning, on a rise of land between two wide vales where a folly had been deposited by a recent flood of silver. It was an arched gateway of blue lapis lazuli sprouting between the rock outcroppings that stood watch in the narrow pass. The gateway's two decorated pillars held up a sloping roof studded with stone dragons peeking out from under the shingle. The surrounding rocks were also decorated, with a frieze depicting a busy enclave populated by thousands of fanciful animals carrying on at tasks of trade and entertainment as if they were players.

My father frowned at the lovely obstruction, and offered his mundane assessment: "It's too narrow to get the truck through." And there was no way to drive around.

But it was early in the day so I wasn't worried. "Out," I said to Liam, pushing him toward the door. "I want to read the inscriptions."

"I can read them from here," Liam said as he slid off the seat and dropped to the ground. "It says 'Luck and goodwill.' It's what these follies always say."

But Kedato didn't agree. "It's neither one for us if we can't get through."

"We'll get through," I said as I scrambled out of the truck. Then I hurried to read the inscriptions while I still could.

The language was a version of the Ano syllabary: spiky symbols carved deep in the mottled blue stone and painted in gold leaf to make them stand out. I made out "luck" and "prosperity" so Liam was not far wrong. But there was far more that I could not read just yet, so I went to the back of the truck to retrieve my savant.

Kedato and Liam were there, arguing over which kobolds to use against the gate. My father glanced up at me, and smiled. He knew what I had come for. My savant was already unloaded, floating beside him at shoulder height. "Hurry and make your pictures," he said. "We need to be on our way."

"A minute," I assured him. "No more."

I crooked a finger at the device. The savant was a feather-light aerostat, held up by the low pressure of air within its slender wing. Gel lenses at the wing tips gave it sight, and fine wires embedded in its paper-thin shell acted as antennas so it could link to the market. Its surface was mimic, so it could assume the blue color of the day sky and disappear from sight, or drop to ground level and act as a video window when I wished to visit the market at night. The intelligence within it was based on a scholar of ancient languages who had lived in an enclave called Pesmir that was abandoned six hundred years ago when the silver began to encroach upon its borders.

Under my direction the savant surveyed the folly, recording both the carvings and the gateway from every side while Liam made jokes about what the symbols might mean. "This column here," he said, pointing to stacked symbols on the inside of the gateway, "means 'give us a kiss and you can go past.'"

"Give us a bite, more likely," Kedato said. "The silver has left us a pretty gate, but it's in the wrong place. If a trucker making the run to Huacho found himself stopped by this in the late afternoon, it could be his death gate."

That was the hazard of travel: the silver changed things unpredictably. It could build a folly to block a narrow pass, or re-lay a road in a false direction, or leave a wilderness of towering stone where a road used to be. Truckers passed news of changes into the market—assuming the hilltop antennas were still standing, which wasn't always true. Temple Huacho was cut off from the market several times every year when silver broke our chain of communication.

My father had selected his kobolds. They were a model of lithophores, stone eaters. Tiny as termites, they worked in much the same way. He emptied a vial of the little mechanics along both sides of the gateway. Their gray bodies crawled off in random directions until one stumbled into the stone. It must have emitted a signal, because all the others instantly turned and joined it. They set to work, chewing passages into the lapis rock, so that after a few seconds all that could be seen of them was a fine stream of dust dribbling out of a hundred tiny holes.

We sat on the ground beyond the gate and had a light lunch and waited.

From this ridge we could look ahead into the next valley. It was much like the one we had just left, carpeted in green shoulder-high grass, with broad-leafed trees owning the higher slopes. I watched a herd of antelope foraging on the western side; only the sharp points of their long horns were visible above the grass.

"It must have been a major flood to reach this high," Liam said.

I glanced back at the lapis gate, then up at the hilltops and saw what he meant. Silver flowed downhill, which meant that both valleys must have been flooded to several hundred feet before the tide could drown this pass. Only the peaks of the rocks that framed the gate could have remained above it ... unless the flood had started here on the ridge?

Kedato said, "It was a flood like this that took Jolly."

I glanced at my scar, and frowned.

My father spoke again, in a voice soft and thoughtful, while I watched the antelope leave the grass to disappear one by one into the forest. "In all my traveling, I've never seen a land as turbulent as these hills. They say it's worse in the high mountains or in the basin of the Iraliad, but no one wants to live in those places. This"—his hand swept in a gesture that took in the valley before us—"it's a beautiful land, but never at rest. Never safe."

This was the silver as a creative force, one that reworked the shape of the land, creating new landforms and bringing veins of pure metals and semiprecious building stone writhing into existence.

More fascinating to me was the silver as memory, the dreaming goddess who remembered the past, trading it sometimes for the present, so that an ancient, undisturbed forest might stand for centuries on a high mesa, until some great silver flood washed it away, rearing a ruined enclave in its place—one that had disappeared into the silver thousands of years before, or so we told ourselves.

But even when the silver brought forward objects from the past, it did not rebuild them exactly as they must have been. The folly that blocked our road might truly have been made of lapis lazuli in its first life, but I have seen newly laid roads of jade running for miles from nowhere to nowhere. I have seen walls of sulfur and statues of salt, or quartz-lined pools in wilderness vales, connected to no other structure.

The silver returned ancient texts too, but most often as fossilized lettered stone in which the writing was compressed, and illegible. Only in rare specimens could fragments be read—though I was always happy to try my skill. Languages came easily to me. They were my talent. Not that I was quick to figure them out. It was just that I already knew them, and only had to struggle to recover the memory, no doubt carried forward from my past lives.

As I sat on that ridge, with the sun climbing toward noon and a soft breeze whispering in the grass below us, I tried to imagine what it would be like to live in a quieter time, when silver came rarely and then only in shallow tides that rejuvenated the lowland soil but did little more. What would it be like to be alive in a time when things did not change? When there was no danger, no threat of anything new? I could not imagine it. In the Kavasphir Hills the past was always erupting, while at the same time everything was kept fresh and new by the silver's flood. When I thought about what had happened to Jolly I hated the silver, but I could not envision a world without it.

~

We waited an hour, then we climbed back into the truck. The lapis gateway looked the same, but it was not. My father ordered the truck forward. "Brace yourselves," he said. I grabbed the dash. Liam held on to the door. The wide front bumper struck the two pillars and the truck shuddered. Kedato ordered it to reverse. As we wheeled backward the pillars crumbled, launching a dense cloud of blue dust into the air as they collapsed in twin heaps of rotten stone. We put the windows up as Kedato drove the truck forward again, the fat tires climbing easily over debris that collapsed like chalk under our weight. The kobolds we had released would continue to process the rock to powder, so there would be no barrier to block the next convoy that came this way.

~

North of the Kavasphir Hills the land rose gradually through a country of dense brush bright with purple flowers and swarms of bees that kept pinging against the truck's windshield as we followed a grassy track toward the highway. Copses of small-leaved trees grew in the gullies, their highest branches barely rising above the general grade of the land so that it looked as if they were hunkering down against an expected storm. The wind could blow fiercely off the Jowádela Plateau, but that day the air was hot and still. It was an ancient, weather-worn land, less subject to silver storms than either the plateau or the Kavasphir Hills—which was why it hosted the highway between Halibury and Xahiclan.

We reached the highway—a ribbon of textured white concrete just wide enough for two trucks to pass—near noon, and turned east, running at forty miles an hour on an easy grade. We slowed when a herd of pygmy horses bolted out of the brush and across the highway just in front of us, and again, when a jackal wandered onto the edge of the concrete, standing in the baking heat to watch us pass.

The jackal reminded me of Moki. Both dogs were the same size, though Moki, with his short back and red coat, was much handsomer. He'd become my dog since Jolly was taken, and I felt a pang of guilt for leaving him home, but ruins were often filled with hazards and I didn't want him getting in trouble.

"Look," Liam said, pointing ahead to where the road could be seen through a heat haze, swinging north in a wide loop as it climbed toward the Jowádela Plateau. A flash of sunlight on metal caught my eye.

"A convoy," my father said.

Liam squinted past the windshield. "Three trucks, I'd say."

My father nodded. "They'll be on their way to Halibury, with a stay at Temple Kevillin tonight."

My father would be staying at Temple Nathé. He expected to be in Xahiclan by early afternoon on the following day.

We watched the convoy approach and as it drew near we stopped for a quick exchange of news. The other drivers wanted to know if we'd had trouble. That was always the first question my father was asked because he didn't drive in a convoy. Professional truckers won't go out alone because a breakdown could leave them stranded on the road overnight, a predicament that would be fatal if the silver came. My father assured them we were fine, and invited them to stop at Temple Huacho, if they ever came that way again. They had stayed at Temple Nathé the night before, and they reported the highway to be in good condition all the way to Xahiclan.

We said good-bye, and a few minutes later the truck downshifted as we began the climb to the Jowádela Plateau. A call came in. I answered, and found my mother looking up at me in surprise from the mimic panel on the dash. "Jubilee? You're still there?"

I nodded. My father planned to drop us off at the edge of Jowádela, another half hour at most. "We're a little behind schedule," I said. "There was a folly in the road. It took time to clear." It occurred to me that she had called expecting me to be gone.

She looked over at Kedato. "Where are you, then?"

"Climbing to the plateau. Don't worry, love. There's plenty of daylight left. It's these two"—he nodded at Liam and me—"who will be taking their chances."

My mother looked at me again, her manner almost furtive. "Are you and Liam still going to see the ruins?"

"Of course. Mama, what's wrong?"

She bit her lip. Then she looked again at Kedato and said, "We need to talk."

Her worry leaped to him. "Tola, is something wrong? Are the children—"

"They're fine. Nothing's wrong. Kedato, I'll call again later—"

"No. Jubilee, hand me the headphones."

I didn't like it, but I did as I was told, retrieving the headphones from a dash compartment and passing them to my father. He put them on. Then he shut off the mimic panel and stared grimly ahead at the white road, listening. Liam put his hand on my shoulder while I searched my father's expression for some hint of what this call might be about. The last thing I expected to see was the grin that spread like dawn across his somber face. He said, "I'm not laughing."

Liam and I exchanged a look of raised eyebrows.

"Tola," Kedato went on, "this is not bad news ... Yes, yes, of course ... Yes, I'm going to tell her ... No, I'm not worried. She's a sensible girl, and there's time ... All right. I'll have her call you later. I love you too. Good-bye." He pulled off the headphones and tossed them on the dash, wearing a grin like a man who has just conceived his first baby.

"What?" Liam and I spoke the question at the same time.

Kedato shrugged, enjoying his moment. "The matchmaker has found a lover for Jubilee, that's all." Then he did laugh, while Liam and I stared, too stunned to speak.

~

His name was Yaphet Harorele and he was exactly my age, seventeen. My mother had seen a picture of him and reported that he was handsome. Most young men are.

"Your mother was reluctant to tell you the news," Kedato explained, "because she was afraid you would take it into your stubborn head to run away, and it's a dangerous journey. So the news is not all good. Though this boy is young and handsome, he lives very far away. Seventeen hundred miles away, in an enclave called Vesarevi. The northern reaches of the Plain of the Iraliad lie between you, and beyond that the Reflection Mountains. Crossing those wastes would make the shortest journey, but not the safest. The silver storms in the Iraliad are legendary. The worst in the world, some say. Better to journey north, to the coastal road. The way is long, but most of that road is reportedly in good shape ... though at some points you'd have to travel by sea." He sighed. "I traveled by sea only once. I would not want to do it again."

"Neither would I," Liam said darkly. "There's no shelter from the silver there."

Kedato nodded. His smile returned. "Well. You're young, Jubilee. Too young, your mother says, and she's right. We won't allow you to go. Not now. And the boy's father ..." Kedato hesitated, a flush warming his dark cheeks. "Well, apparently the boy's father is unwilling to let him travel at all. He has only this child—"

"Only one child?" I interrupted. I had never heard of any family with only one child.

"It's what we were told. The mother is deceased. Some kind of accident, not long after the boy was born."

"You mean after Yaphet was born," Liam said, startling me with the sullen anger in his voice. "His name is Yaphet."

Kedato looked at him, his expression carefully neutral. "You are happy for us, Liam?"

I felt my cheeks heat, and I did not want to be sitting between them just then. But Liam answered as he should. "Yes. Of course."

"You'll find your lover," Kedato told him. "It's only a matter of time."

Liam turned to stare out the side window. I looked at the road ahead, conscious of his stiff back and my own fear.

My father was puzzled by our gloomy moods. "This is something to celebrate!" he insisted. "You should both come into Xahiclan with me. Jubilee? You're a woman now. Come. Have fun."

But Liam was already shaking his head, and I ... Though I didn't want to make my father unhappy, I could not bear the thought of facing the crowds in Xahiclan, and my father telling everyone I had a lover and the endless grins and the congratulations because I had won a boy I didn't want and had never seen before. "I think ... I think I need time to settle my mind, Daddy. Besides, I really did want to see these ruins before anyone else."

Kedato chuckled. "You look as worried as your mother." Then he squeezed my hand. "You're a lucky girl, Jubilee. So lucky. I hope you know that."

"I do." Then I kissed his smooth cheek, and everything was right between us.

~

As we topped out on the plateau, the ruins came into view for the first time, and we all got out to look. The site was still many miles away across a rolling grassland, but there was no mistaking it. "Look at that!" my father exclaimed. "It's an actual city."

There was no other word for it. Standing on the bumper of the truck, I could see hundreds of low white buildings surrounding two white towers that thrust their spires up above the shimmering heat waves of midafternoon. Even Xahiclan was not two-thirds this size.

"Now I wish I was going with you." Kedato said. "I've never heard of the silver returning a ruin so large."

"So stay," I urged him, suddenly aware we would not have many more years together.

"I can't. There are shipments to make, and appointments to keep. Reputation is everything."

Liam was rolling his bike down the ramp at the back of the truck. "So if there's anything worth looking at, we'll all three return here, as soon as you get back."

"Yes," I said. "That's what we'll do. You'll come, won't you, Dad?"

"Of course." He put his arm around my shoulder. Liam had returned to the truck to get my bike. "I'll miss you when you finally go, Jubilee."

"Dad! I'm not going yet."

"You'd better not." We hugged. Then he spoke softly, so that Liam couldn't overhear. "Your mother will send you Yaphet's market address. He has yours. It's only fair."

I nodded. Then he was back in the truck, waving good-bye and ordering us to be careful. "I'll be home in a week," he promised, and I believed him, though I've learned since that promises are not always possible to keep.

Chapter 3

"Liam, are you angry?"

He was astride his bike, his sunglasses on so I couldn't see his eyes.

He shrugged. "So. Maybe a little." We had talked of wayfaring together when he was ready to return to the road. Now he would have to go on alone.

The afternoon was hot and still. There were no clouds, and the sky had been baked to a pale, pale blue. "It wasn't supposed to happen like this," I said. "I don't think I'm ready."

"Don't you dare complain, Jubilee. You've won the prize."

So I had.

I looked out across the rolling plain of grass to the distant city shimmering in the heat. "I've never been anywhere, Liam. I've never done anything."

"So go visit him. Go to live with him! That journey should give you all the adventure you'll ever want."

"I wish the matchmaker had found a lover for you instead."

He sighed. "So maybe I'll go with you when the time comes. Maybe there'll even be someone there for me, and you and I, we'll live close together. Kedato's right, Jubilee. You have a lot of luck about you. Do you think it could stretch that far?"

"I don't know. I hope so." It was a strange kind of luck I had; a kind that didn't make me happy.

"Come on," Liam said. "Let's get going. It's later than I like." He nodded toward the city. "If those towers are accessible, we can stay in them tonight. But if not, it's going to be a long run to Olino Mesa."

I nodded. We would need to be in some kind of sanctuary by nightfall, in case the silver should rise. High ground was safest. If we could get into one of the towers we could camp on an upper floor, where we'd be beyond the reach of all but the worst silver storms. But if the towers were closed to us, we'd have to cross a hundred miles of wilderness to reach Olino Mesa, the only significant eminence on the plateau. Of course, even if we were forced to camp on the plain, the odds favored us, for in this country the silver still came only an average of one night in ten. But when it's your life being gambled, one in ten odds are not so good.

I climbed onto my bike, balanced it, then kicked up the stand. "I hope Yaphet stays home, and that I'm the one to do the traveling."

Liam grinned. "Your mother knew you'd feel that way. It's why she didn't want to tell you about Yaphet." He touched his ignition and his bike whispered to life, a soft purr of pumps. "I don't know anything about this boy of yours, Jubilee, but I can tell you that no father of mine would have been able to keep me home if I found a lover like you."

I blushed, then looked down, fumbling at the ignition switch to start my bike.

"Put your glasses on," Liam said.

I did. Then, in a small voice, I whispered my greatest fear. "What if I hate him?"

"It won't matter."

"Liam! Don't say that."

He studied me a moment through his dark sunglasses. Then he turned back to the city. "It'll be all right for you, Jubilee. Don't worry. But it's late. We need to go."

~

The plateau was a softly undulating land, covered in crisp brown, waist-high grasses that hid the dry streambeds riddling its surface like cracks in the glaze of a dropped dinner plate. We followed the drainages when we could—that way at least we couldn't fall into them—but the dry streams meandered in lazy paths while we knew our destination. So we spent the better part of an hour stirring up clouds of dust as we slid in or climbed out of a chaos of shallow gullies. We disturbed a few rabbits and a small herd of ankle deer, but it was a blue hawk, drifting overhead, that marked our arrival at the city.

We stopped just short of a stark boundary. The grasslands of the plateau ran up against the gleaming white stone of low buildings separated by equally white streets that looked as if they had been sliced off from outlying neighborhoods by some great knife. Stark, brilliant white was the color of every surface, even the shingled rooftops, which caught the sunlight and split it apart, so that the buildings were haloed in a rainbow glow. Despite its weight, despite its great size—the city was larger by far than the enclaves of Halibury and Xahiclan together—it had about it a sense of impermanence as if it might melt in a rain, or crumble in a drying wind, or vanish overnight into another silver flood like the one that had created it. It made me think of some gigantic fancy of sugar crystal. I wondered if it might really be sugar, or salt. When we advanced to the city's edge I tasted a wall, but it was not.

Many of the buildings looked as if they'd been reworked by silver, perhaps many times, before the whole city was finally taken. Their walls were melted, the white stone puddled in round lenses that sent dancing heat shimmers rising into the baking air. Liam looked grim as he surveyed the damage. "If the silver touched only the outlying buildings at first, then the residents might have had time to get away before the final flood came."

That was the way history described the erosion of an enclave. A failing temple could not produce enough kobolds to ward off the silver. As the defensive perimeter thinned, silver would creep over the walls, licking first at the outlying buildings, then moving deeper into the city's heart on each subsequent night. Only someone with a death wish would stay to meet it.

Our world had existed for thousands upon thousands of years. That was clear from the fragmented histories that had come down to us, but most of the past was lost, washed away by time and silver floods. Uncounted enclaves have vanished from the world and no one now remembers their names. I could not guess what city this might have been, or how long its memory had been preserved in the silver before it was finally rebuilt by the flood. Perhaps it had been swallowed up only yesterday, in some far land on the other side of the world. Or perhaps it had existed in an epoch recalled by no one for a thousand years.

I walked along the city's perimeter, gazing down the narrow streets, each much like the one before it. Nothing moved among the buildings that I could see, not even birds.

Choosing a street at random we entered the city, walking our bikes between ornate buildings three and four stories high, their arched windows sealed with panes of clear glass. Heat reflecting off the street and the buildings had sent the temperature soaring, even above the oppressive heat of the open plateau. It might have been a hundred ten degrees in that little street. Sweat shone on my bare arms and shoulders, and my sunglasses weren't nearly dark enough.

We tried the doors on several buildings, but none of them could be opened. They were like decorative panels—imitation doors cast in the same pour of stone that had made the walls. We peered through the windows but saw only barren rooms. There was no furniture, no shelves, no art of any kind. No books. Each sealed room appeared empty and pristine. "As if no one ever lived here," Liam muttered.

Then we found a building with double doors standing open. They were false doors like all the others, part of the solid block of the house so that they could not be swung shut, but at least we could get inside.

I entered, hoping the open doors would mean this house had a different history from all the rest, but I was disappointed. The rooms were as empty as those we'd seen through windows. We wandered the house, looking into every open room and climbing the stairs. All the walls, all the floors, and even the ceiling were made of the same white stone. The only other element was the glass in the windows, but the windows would not open. There were no plumbing fixtures, no panels for lights, no mechanism for electricity. The monotony was unsettling, as if we had stumbled onto a stage set being prepared for some terrible drama.

"There's no point in doing a house-to-house," Liam said, "if all the houses are like this."

I nodded. Already I was hungering for some color other than white. "Let's find the towers." We needed to know if we could spend the night here, or if we would have to move on.

So we returned to the street, and rode swiftly for the city center.

~

The engines of our bikes made only a soft hum, and the sound of their tires was like the sound of gentle rain, but in that empty city even these slight noises reverberated like the carousing of vandals.

We rode for a mile, until our street ended suddenly at a wide square, at least two acres in size, surrounded on all sides by decaying buildings that must have once been beautiful. Most had wide stairs and columns and graceful balconies, but all of them were badly damaged. Many had collapsed roofs. Some had fallen walls that had spilled white rubble into the square, each fragment a perfect cube. But it wasn't the buildings that commanded my attention.

At the center of the square was a working fountain. Thin jets of clear water rose from all around its edge, arching inward for a few feet before falling back to the pool in a splashing rainbow of light. In the center of this pool was a large circular platform raised a foot above the water. It was perhaps a hundred feet in diameter, and rising from its center was a white mast.

The mast was a gigantic structure. It dominated the square, reaching at least ten stories high, and I knew at once that this was the smaller tower we had seen from the highway. A cross pole branched from it at half its height, with arms as wide as the island platform. A second cross pole, half as wide, branched at right angles above the first, and two successively smaller spars split off near the top. White ropes trailed from these arms, their ends touching the stone like the broken strands of some abandoned spiderweb.

I could not imagine what purpose such a structure might serve. I tried to picture it as an antenna, but why give an antenna a position of such prominence in the city? Maybe it was to display banners? But it looked too massive, too powerfully built for that purpose. "Perhaps it's a folly of the silver," I said softly.

Liam shook his head. "I don't think that's it." He squinted at the mast, like an artist bent on seeing a scene in its essential shapes. "I think I've seen something like this before ... in a picture maybe."

"I don't like it. It gives me a bad feeling."

"This whole city is a nasty place. Have you noticed we haven't passed a single temple?"

I hadn't noticed, but now that he mentioned it, I knew it was true. Temples have a distinctive architecture, with their sprawling walls and one-story structures. We'd seen nothing like that since entering the city. I nodded at the monstrosity in the square. "So what do you think this is?"

"I don't know. I just feel like I should know." He swung off his bike, kicked down the stand, then opened one of the compartments behind the seat. His savant was there, packed within the thin cushion of his sleeping bag. He took it out, unfolded its narrow wing, and released it. It drifted before him, its silver skin shimmering. "Find a match for this scene if you can," Liam instructed it. Then he turned to me. "Let's get out of the sun."

~

We drank water and ate chocolate on a veranda held up by tall columns carved to resemble the trunks of royal palms. Our water supply was dwindling rapidly, so I took the filter and walked out into the sun again, filling all our empty water cells from the fountain. There was no wind at all to stir the air and the heat had become overwhelming. Actually frightening. I had never felt anything like it before and I dreaded returning to the narrow streets where the temperature was sure to be even higher. But we would have to move on soon. We needed to know if the second tower could offer us refuge for the night, or if we would have to make the long run to Olino Mesa.

Whether it was the heat or the anxiety this city wakened in me I cannot say, but as I returned to the veranda's shade I was conscious of my heart fluttering in a weak and rapid beat like the heart of a frightened bird. Liam was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the veranda, studying the mimic screen of his savant. "Did you find something?" I asked as I collapsed beside him.

"Yes. I know where we are now." He nodded at the screen.

I wiped the sweat out of my eyes and leaned forward. Displayed on his mimic screen was a ghastly painting. I could see the texture of the paint, so I knew it was not a true image, but that did little to assuage my horror. Pictured there was the very square where we found ourselves, but changed. The white buildings were all of dark gray stone. Thousands of people crowded the pavement, most of them men in uniforms of black and red. Black banners were draped from the balconies of the encircling buildings, while black flags flew from the top of the mast and from the ends of its cross poles. The purpose of the mast was quite clear. At least a hundred tiny figures hung from the cross poles, suspended by black ropes tied about their necks. Their faces were covered, but their legs were shown in postures of kicking, twisting agony. All of them had their hands tied behind their backs.

"Mother of all!" I whispered, and turned away, wishing I had not looked, and that I didn't know.

Liam cleared the mimic screen. "The painting is ancient. It's supposed to be an illustration of the crusade of Fiaccomo."

"Fiaccomo?" I knew that name. Everyone did, for Fiaccomo was a legendary figure.

It was said that in the beginning of the world the silver obeyed the will of players and all was paradise. Then the dark god came, and the goddess withdrew from the world to wage war against him. The silver vanished with her, and players were left without food or tools or clothing or the simplest pleasures, for all such things had come to them through the silver. Great armies formed to fight over what remained. Hunger and war were everywhere, and so many players died that none of those left could find a lover and there were no children. The world lay on the edge of ruin.

Fiaccomo had been trained as a warrior, but he loved life, and could not bear to see the world die. So he gathered about him brave players, and together they fought their way past the scavenging armies and ventured into the high mountains, where it was said traces of the goddess might still be found.

The goddess had won her victory over the dark god, but not without cost. The battle had left her wounded and delirious. When Fiaccomo's entreaties caused her to turn her mind again to the world she was horrified to behold her beautiful land all in ruins and her beloved players sunk in wickedness and war. She came upon the band of heroes in a fury, and in the guise of a silver flood she swept all those good players away. Among them, only Fiaccomo kept his wits. Even as his mind dissolved in the silver, he whispered to the goddess all the desires of his heart, and his passion was so like hers that she loved him, and their minds entwined in a kind of lovemaking never known in the world before and never since, and in those moments of union Fiaccomo seized the creative power of the silver and dreamed the first kobolds into existence.

The goddess gave Fiaccomo back his life, and more, she gave him a gift that he could pass through the silver unscathed, and command its flow when he had need. He returned to the world bringing with him both the silver and the kobolds, and prosperity followed after him, and peace.

That was the legend as I knew it, but the painting Liam had found did not show a time of prosperity or of peace.

"It doesn't make sense, Liam. This city is a real place. But Fiaccomo is a myth . . . isn't he?"

"I wouldn't know."

"No one can survive the silver," I insisted. "No one can pass through it unscathed."

"I won't argue it with you, Jubilee. I have only told you what the painting is supposed to show."

I looked out across the brilliant white square, but it was the dark painting I saw.

The past is deep and jumbled and more than half-counterfeited, or so I believe, and we, even with the help of our savants, can recall it only as we recall our dreams, in fragments detached from beginnings and ends. This city had gone through the silver and it was clean to look upon, but it did not feel clean. "Was Fiaccomo supposed to be one of those hanging from the mast?"

"The document didn't say. But it occurs to me, Jubilee, that in an age without silver or kobolds, there would be no reason to build temples."

I thought about that, until Liam insisted we move on.

~

A wide, straight boulevard on the far side of the square led directly to the second tower. It rose high into the cloudless blue sky, its smooth white walls tapering to a narrow summit. Arched windows looked out from a dozen different floors. They did not appear to have glass in them. "If we can get up to the top," Liam said, "we should be safe."

A low flight of broad steps led up to the tower's entrance. We rode our bikes up, the tires bending around the angles of the stairs so that our ride remained smooth and secure. Great double doors stood open, as if inviting us to enter. The first floor was surrounded by the arched windows we had seen from the street. As we had guessed, they were without glass, so light and air passed freely to the inside.

The interior was a single room that encircled a central column where another set of huge doors—I suspected they were elevator doors—looked back at us, but these were closed. "Want to bet we can't get them open?" Liam asked.

"No thank you."

We stopped briefly to inspect them, but Liam was right: the closed doors were purely ornamental, like all the others we had seen in this city. "Maybe there's another way up?" I suggested, trying to sound more confident than I felt. The afternoon was waning, and I did not want to be caught on the open plateau when evening fell.

"Stairs, you're thinking?" Liam asked.

"It's worth looking."

So we rode our bikes around the column, and there it was: a stairwell, with its door standing ajar, just wide enough to allow a bike to pass.

I stopped beside it, and looked in. Daylight reached just far enough to show me a short flight of white stairs that turned back on themselves at a narrow landing. I was surprised to feel a hot breeze flowing over my shoulders and tugging at the strands of my hair, blowing into the stairwell as if it were a great chimney piping hot air up. "Feel that wind?" I asked. "There must be an opening somewhere above." Then I backed up my bike, and gave him a chance to look.

He peered inside. Then, "Awfully convenient," he said, turning to look at me over his shoulder.

I nodded. "Like we were expected. Does the silver have a sense of humor?"

"Oh, yes," Liam said. "Sharpest in the world."

He flicked on his headlight. Then he eased his bike through the door while I followed after him.

~

The stairs rose in a zigzag column beside the elevator shaft, with a tight, 180-degree turn at the end of each flight. I had to put a foot down for balance and skid the back tire of my bike at every landing while my headlight glittered crazily across white walls. After three flights we found a door, but it was closed and useless. Three flights higher there was another door, also closed. But we could still feel hot air rushing up the stairwell, so we kept going.

We went up past nine floors until finally, on the tenth story, we found an open door. Sunlight spilled onto the landing, but there were no dust motes drifting in the air and that absence seemed as strange as anything I had seen that day.

I followed Liam into the room. It circled the tower's central column just as the room on the first floor had, though this one was much smaller. Not surprisingly, it was also empty.

I stopped at a window and looked down on the city, blazing white in the afternoon light, with a rainbow iridescence above the rooftops that gave it the aura of a mirage. "It's too clean," I said softly. "Too perfect. There's no dirt. No insects. No birds." I shook my head, groping to explain what was troubling me. "Even if this city came out of the silver looking like this, it should be showing some wear by now. Some dust or bird dung at least."

"But there's nothing," Liam said.

"It's like some invisible curator has been keeping it tidy."

"Don't scare yourself."

I raised my chin. I didn't want him to think I was afraid. "Do you want to spend the night here? We're high enough. It should be safe."

I was half hoping he would say no, and instead opt for the long sprint to Olino Mesa. But he kicked down the stand of his bike and dismounted. "It's so late now, we don't really have a choice."

...continues

Copyright information
© Linda Nagata, 2003, 2011. Published by Mythic Island Press LLC; Kula, Hawaii. First published by Tor/Tom Doherty Associates, LLC in April 2003.
Buy now: Memory by Linda Nagata

Scott Nicholson

The Red Church

Book I in the Sheriff Littlefield Series

Stoker Award finalist and alternate selection of the Mystery Guild

For 13-year-old Ronnie Day, life is full of problems: Mom and Dad have separated, his brother Tim is a constant pest, Melanie Ward either loves him or hates him, and Jesus Christ won't stay in his heart. Plus he has to walk past the red church every day, where the Bell Monster hides with its wings and claws and livers for eyes. But the biggest problem is that Archer McFall is the new preacher at the church, and Mom wants Ronnie to attend midnight services with her.

Sheriff Frank Littlefield hates the red church for a different reason. His little brother died in a freak accident at the church twenty years ago, and now Frank is starting to see his brother's ghost. And the ghost keeps demanding, "Free me." People are dying in Whispering Pines, and the murders coincide with McFall's return.

The Days, the Littlefields, and the McFalls are descendants of the original families that settled the rural Appalachian community. Those old families share a secret of betrayal and guilt, and McFall wants his congregation to prove its faith. Because he believes he is the Second Son of God, and that the cleansing of sin must be done in blood.

"Sacrifice is the currency of God," McFall preaches, and unless Frank and Ronnie stop him, everybody pays.

"A damn scary story well told."
—Christopher Ransom, author of the international bestseller The Birthing House

"Like Stephen King, he has an eye and ear for the rhythms of rural America, and like King he knows how to summon serious scares. My advice? Buy everything he writes. This guy's the real deal."
—Bentley Little, author of The Disappearance

"Keep both hands on your pants because Nicholson is about to scare them off."
—J.A. Konrath, Origin and Serial

"Always surprises and always entertains."
—Jonathan Maberry, Patient Zero

"Scott Nicholson knows the territory. Follow him at your own risk."
—Stewart O'Nan, Boston Noir

"A wonderful storyteller."
—Sharyn McCrumb, author of The Ballad novels

Learn more about The Red Church and the real Appalachian church that inspired the novel, and buy now: The Red Church

novel extract:
The Red Church by Scott Nicholson

CHAPTER ONE

The world never ends the way you believe it will, Ronnie Day thought.

There were the tried-and-true favorites, like nuclear holocaust and doomsday asteroid collisions and killer viruses and Preacher Staymore's all-time classic, the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. But the end really wasn't such a huge, organized affair after all. The end was right up close and personal, different for each person, a kick in the rear and a joy-buzzer handshake from the Reaper himself.

But that was the Big End. First you had to twist your way though a thousand turning points and die a little each time. One of life's lessons, learned as the by-product of thirteen years as the son of Linda and David Day and one semester sitting in class with Melanie Ward. Tough noogies, wasn't it?

Ronnie walked quickly, staring straight ahead. Another day in the idiot factory at good old Barkersville Elementary was over. Had all evening to look forward to, and a good long walk between him and home. Nothing but his feet and the smell of damp leaves, fresh grass, and the wet mud of the riverbanks. A nice plate of spring sunshine high overhead.

And he could start slowing down in a minute, delaying his arrival into the hell that home had been lately, because soon he would be around the curve and past the thing on the hill to his right, the thing he didn't want to think about, the thing he couldn't help thinking about, because he had to walk past it twice a day.

Why couldn't he be like the other kids? Their parents picked them up in shiny new Mazdas and Nissans and took them to the mall in Barkersville and dropped them off at soccer practice and then drove them right to the front door of their houses. So all they had to do was step in and stuff their faces with microwave dinners and go to their rooms and waste their brains on TV or Nintendo all night. They didn't have to be scared.

Well, it could be worse. He had a brain, but it wasn't something worth bragging about. His "overactive imagination" got him in trouble at school, but it was also kind of nice when other kids, especially Melanie, asked him for help in English.

So he'd take having a brain any day, even if he did suffer what the school counselor called "negative thoughts." At least he had thoughts. Unlike his little dorkwad of a brother back there, who didn't have sense enough to know that this stretch of road was no place to be messing around.

"Hey, Ronnie." His brother was calling him, it sounded like from the top of the hill. The dorkwad hadn't stopped, had he?

"Come on." Ronnie didn't turn around.

"Looky here."

"Come on, or I'll bust you upside the head."

"No, really, Ronnie. I see something."

Ronnie sighed and stopped walking, then slung his book bag farther up on his shoulder. He was at least eighty feet ahead of his little brother. Tim had been doing his typical nine-year-old's dawdling, stopping occasionally to tie his sneaker strings or look in the ditch water for tadpoles or throw rocks at the river that ran below the road.

Ronnie turned—to your left, he told himself, so you don't see it—and looked back along the sweep of gravel at the hill that was almost lost among the green bulk of mountains. He could think of a hundred reasons not to walk all the way back to see what Tim wanted him to see. For one thing, Tim was at the top of the hill, which meant Ronnie would have to hike up the steep grade again. The walk home from the bus stop was nearly a mile and a half already. Why make it longer?

Plus there were at least ninety-nine other reasons—

like the red church

—not to give a flying fig what Tim was sticking his nose into now. Dad was supposed to stop by today to pick up some more stuff, and Ronnie didn't want to miss him. Maybe they'd get to talk for a minute, man-to-man. If Tim didn't hurry, Dad and Mom might have another argument first and Dad would leave like he had last week, stomping the gas pedal of his rusty Ford so the wheels threw chunks of gravel and broke a window. So that was another reason not to go back to see whatever had gotten Tim so worked up.

Tim jumped up and down, the rolled cuffs of his blue jeans sagging around his sneakers. He motioned with his thin arm, his glasses flashing in the mid-afternoon sun. "C'mon, Ronnie," he shouted.

"Dingle-dork," Ronnie muttered to himself, then started backtracking up the grade. He kept his eyes on the gravel the way he always did when he was near the church. The sun made little sparkles in the rocks, and with a little imagination, the roadbed could turn into a big galaxy with lots of stars and planets, and if he didn't look to his left he wouldn't have to see the red church.

Why should he be afraid of some dumb old church? A church was a church. It was like your heart. Once Jesus came in, He was supposed to stay there. But sometimes you did bad things that drove Him away.

Ronnie peeked at the church just to prove that he didn't care about it one way or another. There. Nothing but wood and nails.

But he'd hardly glanced at it. He'd really seen only a little piece of the church's mossy gray roof, because of all the trees that lined the road- big old oaks and a gnarled apple tree and a crooked dogwood that would have been great for climbing except if you got to the top, you'd be right at eye level with the steeple and the belfry.

Stupid trees, he thought. All happy because it's May and their leaves are waving in the wind and, if they were people, I bet they'd be wearing idiotic smiles just like the one that's probably splitting up Tim's face right now. Because, just like little bro, the trees are too doggoned dumb to be scared.

Ronnie slowed down a little. Tim had walked into the shade of the maple. Into the jungle of weeds that formed a natural fence along the road. And maybe to the edge of the graveyard.

Ronnie swallowed hard. He'd just started developing an Adam's apple, and he could feel the knot pogo in his throat. He stopped walking. He'd thought of reason number hundred and one not to go over to the churchyard. Because—and this was the best reason of all, one that made Ronnie almost giddy with relief—he was the older brother. Tim had to listen to him. If he gave in to the little mucous midget even once, he would be asking for a lifetime of "Ronnie, do this" and "Ronnie, do that." He got enough of that kind of treatment from Mom.

"Hurry up," Tim called from the weeds. Ronnie couldn't see Tim's face. That wasn't all bad. Tim had buck teeth and his blond hair stuck out like straw and his eyes were a little buggy. Good thing he was in the fourth grade instead of the eighth grade. Because in the eighth grade, you had to impress girls like Melanie Ward, who would laugh in your face one day and sit in the desk behind you the next, until you were so torn up that you didn't even care about things like whatever mess your dorkwad brother was getting into at the moment. "Get out of there, you idiot. You know you're not supposed to go into the churchyard."

The leaves rustled where Tim had disappeared into the underbrush. He'd left his book bag lying in the grass at the base of a tree. His squeaky voice came from beyond the tangle of saplings and laurel. "I found something."

"Get out of there right this minute."

"Why?"

"Because I said so."

"But look what I found."

Ronnie came closer. He had to admit, he was a little bit curious, even though he was starting to get mad. Not to mention scared. Because through the gaps in the trees, he could see the graveyard.

A slope of thick, evenly cut grass broken up by white and gray slabs. Tombstones. At least forty dead people, just waiting to rise up and-

Those are just stories. You don't actually believe that stuff, do you? Who cares what Whizzer Buchanan says? If he were so smart, he wouldn't be flunking three classes.

"We're going to miss Dad," Ronnie called. His voice trembled slightly. He hoped Tim hadn't noticed.

"Just a minute."

"I ain't got a minute."

"You chicken or something?"

That did it. Ronnie balled up his fists and hurried to the spot where Tim had entered the churchyard. He set his book bag beside Tim's and stepped among the crushed weeds. Furry ropes of poison sumac veined across the ground. Red-stemmed briars bent under the snowy weight of blackberry blossoms. And Ronnie would bet a Spiderman comic that snakes slithered in that high grass along the ditch.

"Where are you?" Ronnie called into the bushes.

"Over here."

He was in the graveyard, the stupid little jerk. How many times had Dad told them to stay out of the graveyard?

Not that Ronnie needed reminding. But that was Tim for you. Tell him to not to touch a hot stove eye and you could smell the sizzling flesh of his fingers before you even finished your sentence.

Ronnie stooped to about Tim's height—twerp's-eye view—and saw the graveyard through the path that Tim had stomped. Tim was kneeling beside an old marble tombstone, looking down. He picked something up and it flashed in the sun. A bottle.

Ronnie looked past his little brother to the uneven rows of markers. Some were cracked and chipped, all of them worn around the edges. Old graves. Old dead people. So long dead that they were probably too rotten to lift themselves out of the soil and walk into the red church.

No, it wasn't a church anymore, just an old building that Lester Matheson used for storing hay. Hadn't been a church for about twenty years. Like Lester had said, pausing to let a stream of brown juice arc to the ground, then wiping his lips with the scarred stump of his thumb, "It's people what makes a church. Without people, and what-and-all they believe, it ain't nothing but a fancy mouse motel."

Yeah. Fancy mouse motel. Nothing scary about that, is there?

It was just like the First Baptist Church, if you really thought about it. Except the Baptist church was bigger. And the only time the Baptist church was scary was when Preacher Staymore said Ronnie needed saving or else Jesus Christ would send him to burn in hell forever.

Ronnie scrambled through the bushes. A briar snagged his X-Files T-shirt, the one that Melanie thought was so cool. He backed up and pulled himself free, cursing as a thorn pierced his finger. A drop of crimson welled up and he started to wipe it on his shirt, then licked it away instead.

Tim put the bottle down and picked up something else. A magazine. Its pages fluttered in the breeze. Ronnie stepped clear of the brush and stood up.

So he was in the graveyard. No big deal. And if he kept his eyes straight ahead, he wouldn't even have to see the fancy mouse motel. But then he forgot all about trying not to be scared, because of what Tim had in his hands.

As Ronnie came beside him, Tim snapped the magazine closed. But not before Ronnie had gotten a good look at the pale flesh spread along the pages. Timmy's cheeks turned pink. He had found a Playboy.

"Give me that," Ronnie said.

Tim faced his brother and put the magazine behind his back. "I—I'm the one who found it."

"Yeah, and you don't even know what it is, do you?"

Tim stared at the ground. "A naked-woman book."

Ronnie started to laugh, but it choked off as he looked around the graveyard. "Where did you learn about girlie magazines?"

"Whizzer. He showed one to us behind the gym during recess."

"Probably charged you a dollar a peek."

"No, just a quarter."

"Give it here, or I'll tell Mom."

"No, you won't."

"Will, too."

"What are you going to tell her? That I found a naked-woman book and wouldn't let you see it?"

Ronnie grimaced. Score one for dingle-dork. He thought about jumping Tim and taking the magazine by force, but there was no need to hurry. Tricking him out of it would be a lot more fun. But he didn't want to stand around in the creepy graveyard and negotiate.

He looked at the other stuff scattered on the grass around the tombstone. The bottle had a square base and a black screw top. A few inches of golden-brown liquid were lying in the bottom. He knew it was liquor because of the turkey on the label. It was the kind that Aunt Donna drank. But Ronnie didn't want to think about Aunt Donna almost as much as he didn't want to think about being scared.

A green baseball cap lay upside down beside the tombstone. The sweatband was stained a dark gray, and the bill was so severely cupped that it came to a frayed point. Only one person rolled up their cap bill that way. Ronnie nudged the cap over with his foot. A John Deere cap. That cinched it.

"It's Boonie Houck's," Ronnie said. But Boonie never went anywhere without his cap. Kept it pulled down to the bushy line of his single eyebrow, his eyes gleaming under the shade of the bill like wet ball bearings. He probably even showered and slept with the cap plastered to the top of his wide head.

A crumpled potato chip bag quivered beside the cap, fluttering in the breeze. It was held in place by an unopened can of Coca-Cola. The blind eye of a flashlight peeked out from under the edge of the chip bag.

Ronnie bent down and saw a flash of silver. Money. He picked up two dimes and a dull nickel. A couple of pennies were in the grass, but he left them. He straightened up.

"I'll give you twenty-five cents for the magazine," he said.

Tim backed away with his hands still behind him. He moved into the shadow of a crude stone monument, made of two pillars holding up a crosspiece. On the crosspiece was a weathered planter. A brittle sheaf of brown tulips stabbed up from the potting soil.

Tulips. So somebody had minded the graveyard at least once since winter. Probably Lester. Lester owned the property and kept the grass trimmed, but did that mean the tobacco-chewing farmer had to pay respects to those buried here? Did the dead folks come with the property deed?

But Ronnie forgot all that, because he accidentally looked over Tim's shoulder. The red church was framed up perfectly by the stone pillars.

No, NOT accidentally. You WANTED to see it. Your eyes have been crawling right toward it the whole time you've been in the graveyard.

The church sat on a broad stack of creek stones that were bleached yellow and white by eons of running water. A few of the stones had tumbled away, revealing gaps of darkness beneath the structure. The church looked a little wobbly, as if a strong wind might send it roof-over-joist down the hill.

The creepy tree stood tall and gangly by the door. Ronnie didn't believe Whizzer's story about the tree. But if even half of it were true-

"A quarter? I can take it to school and make five bucks," Tim said.

The magazine. Ronnie didn't care about the magazine anymore. "Come on. Let's get out of here."

"You're going to take it from me, ain't you?"

"No. Dad's supposed to be coming over, that's all. I don't want to miss him."

Tim suddenly took another step backward, his eyes wide.

Ronnie pointed, trying to warn him about the monument. Tim spun and bumped into one of the pillars, shaking the crosspiece. The concrete planter tipped over, sending a shower of dry black dirt onto Tim's head. The planter rolled toward the edge of the crosspiece.

"Look out," Ronnie yelled.

Tim pushed himself away from the pillar, but the entire monument toppled as if in slow motion. The heavy crosspiece was going to squash Tim's head like a rotten watermelon.

Ronnie's limbs unlocked and he leaped for Tim. Something caught his foot and he tripped, falling on his stomach. The air rushed from his lungs with a whoosh, and the smell of cut grass crowded his nostrils. He tasted blood, and his tongue found the gash on the inside of his lip just as he rediscovered how to breathe.

A dull cracking noise echoed across the graveyard. Ronnie tilted his neck up just in time to see the planter bust open on the monument's base. Tim gave a squeak of surprise as dingy chunks of concrete rained across his chest. The pillars fell in opposite directions, the one on Tim's side catching on the ledge just above his head. The crosspiece twirled like a slow helicopter blade and came to rest on the pillar above Tim's legs.

Ronnie tried to crawl to Tim, but his shoe was still snagged. "You okay?"

Tim was crying. At least that meant he was still alive.

Ronnie kicked his foot. He looked back to his shoe—

NO NO NO

—red raw burger hand.

An arm had reached around the tombstone, a bloody arm, the knotty fingers forming a talon around his sneaker. The wet, gleaming bone of one knuckle hooked the laces.

DEADGHOSTDEADGHOST

He forgot that he'd learned how to breathe. He kicked at the hand, spun over on his rear, and tried to crab-crawl away. The hand wouldn't let go. Tears stung his eyes as he stomped his other foot against the ragged grasping thing.

"Help me," Ronnie yelled, at the same time that Tim moaned his own plea for help.

Whizzer's words careened across Ronnie's mind, joining the jumble of broken thoughts: They trap ya, then they get ya.

"Ronnie," came Tim's weak whine.

Ronnie wriggled like a speared eel, forcing his eyes along the slick wrist to the arm that was swathed in ragged flannel.

Flannel?

His skewed carousel of thoughts ground to a halt.

Why would a deadghost thing be wearing flannel?

The arm was attached to a bulk of something behind the tombstone.

The hand clutched tightly at nothing but air, then quivered and relaxed. Ronnie scrambled away as the fingers uncurled. Blood pooled in the shallow cup of the palm.

Ronnie reached Tim and began removing the chunks of concrete from his little brother's stomach. "You okay?"

Tim nodded, charcoal streaks of mud on his face where his tears had rolled through the sprinkling of potting soil. One cheek had a red scrape across it, but otherwise he looked unharmed. Ronnie kept looking back to the mangled arm and whatever was behind the tombstone. The hand was still, the sun drying the blood on the clotted palm. A shiny fly landed and drank.

Ronnie dragged Tim free of the toppled concrete. They both stood, Tim wiping the powdery grit from the front of his shirt. "Mom's going to kill me... ." he began, then saw the arm. "What in heck ...?"

Ronnie stepped toward the tombstone, his heart hammering in his ears.

Over his pulse, he could hear Whizzer: They got livers for eyes.

Ronnie veered toward the edge of the graveyard, Tim close behind.

"When I say run..." Ronnie whispered, his throat thick.

"L-looky there," Tim said.

Dorkwad didn't have enough brains to be scared. But Ronnie looked. He couldn't help it.

The body was crowded against the tombstone, the flannel shirt shredded, showing scoured flesh. The head was pressed against the white marble, the neck arched at a crazy angle. A thread of blood trailed from the matted beard to the ground.

"Boonie," Ronnie said, his voice barely as loud as the wind in the oak leaves.

There was a path trampled in the grass, coming from the underbrush that girded the graveyard. Boonie must have crawled out of the weeds. And whatever had done that to him might still be in the stand of trees. Ronnie flicked his eyes from Boonie to the church. Had something fluttered in the belfry?

A bird, a BIRD, you idiot.

Not the thing that Whizzer said lived in the red church.

Not the thing that trapped you and then got you, not the thing that had wings and claws and livers for eyes, not the thing that had made a mess of Boonie Houck's face.

And then Ronnie was running, tearing through the undergrowth, barely aware of the briars grabbing at his face and arms, of the scrub locust that pierced his skin, of the tree branches that raked at his eyes. He heard Tim behind him—at least he hoped it was Tim, but he wasn't about to turn around and check, because now he was on the gravel road, his legs were pumping in the rhythm of fear—NOT-the-thing, NOT-the-thing, NOT-the-thing—and he didn't pause to breathe, even as he passed Lester Matheson, who was on his tractor in the middle of a hayfield, even as he passed the Potter farm, even when geezery Zeb Potter hollered out Ronnie's name from his shaded front porch, even as Zeb's hound cut loose with an uneven bray, even as Ronnie jumped the barbed wire that marked off the boundary of the Day property, even as the rusty tin roof of home came into view, even as he saw Dad's Ranger in the driveway, even as he tripped over the footbridge and saw the sharp, glistening rocks of the creek bed below, and as he fell he realized he'd hit another turning point, found yet another way for the world to end, but at least this end wasn't as bad as whatever had shown Boonie Houck the exit door from everywhere.

CHAPTER TWO

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Like you'd understand? You didn't understand the first time." Linda Day balled her hands into fists. She could smell beer on David's breath.

Drunk at three o'clock, she thought. Doesn't he know that the body is sacred? If only he were more like Archer.

David closed in on her. She backed against the kitchen table. He'd never hit her in their fifteen years of marriage. But his face had never set in such a mix of hurt and anger before, either.

He waved the papers in the air, his thin lips crawling into a sneer. "A lie. All those years ..."

God, he wasn't going to CRY, was he? Mr. Ain't-Nothing-It'll-Heal that time he flipped the tractor and had his forearm bone poking through his denim jacket?

She looked into his wet brown eyes. Who was he? What did she really know about him? Sure, they'd gone to high school together, were both in the Future Farmers of America, lost it together one fumbling Friday night in the pines above the Pickett High football field, never really dated anybody else, got married like everybody expected and—after that little California interlude—settled down on the Gregg family farm after cancer had chewed her father's lungs away.

More than half of their lives. Not nearly enough time to figure David out.

"Don't start that," she said.

"I ain't the one who started it. You said when we got married that all that foolishness was over and done with."

"I thought it was."

"Thought it was?" he mocked. His face twisted.

"I was going to tell you."

"When? After you'd sneaked another hundred lies past me?"

Linda looked away, anywhere but at his burning, red-rimmed eyes. The stick margarine on the counter was losing its sharp edges in the heat. Two black flies were playing hopscotch on the kitchen window screen. The roses that made a pattern on the yellowed wallpaper looked as if they needed watering. "It's not like that."

"Sure, it ain't." A mist of Pabst Blue Ribbon came out with his words. "When a man's wife gets love letters from another man, why, that's nothing to worry about, is it?"

"So you read them."

"Course I read them." He stepped closer, looming over her, six-three and shoulders broadened by lifting ten thousand bales of hay.

"Then maybe you noticed that the word 'love' isn't in a single one of them."

He stopped in his tracks. Linda thought about retreating to the hall entrance, but she was trying hard not to show fear. Archer said fear was for the meek, them that huddled at the feet of Christ.

David's brow lowered. "There's lots of different kinds of love."

She studied his face. Twice-broken nose. A white scar in one corner of his mouth. A strong chin, the kind you could forge steel with. Skin browned by years of working in the sun. Had she ever really loved the man who wore that face?

"There's only one kind of love," she said. "The kind we had."

"The kind you and Archer had."

"David, please listen."

He reached out. She held her breath and leaned away. But he didn't touch her, only swept the can of Maxwell House from the table behind her. It bounced off the cabinet under the sink and the lid flew off, sending a shower of brown granules onto the vinyl floor. The rich smell of the coffee drowned out David's sweet-sour breath.

His teeth were showing. Broad and blunt. Pressed together so tightly that his jaw trembled.

Linda scooted along the edge of the table to her right. There was a knife on the counter, a skin of dried cheese dulling the flash of the blade. If she had to-

But David turned away, slumped, his shoulders quivering.

David never cried, at least not in front of her. But since he'd found the letters, he was doing a lot of things he'd never done before. Like drinking heavily. Like leaving her.

"Hon—" She caught herself. "David?"

His work boots drummed the floor as he strode away. He paused at the back door and turned, looking down at the letters in his hand. Tears had shimmied down one side of his face, but his voice was quiet, resigned. "Archer McFall. Pretty funny. Who'd you put up to doing it?"

"Doing what?"

"We both know it ain't Archer, so quit lying. Is it one of your buddies from California?"

Linda shook her head. He doesn't understand. And I had hopes that he would join us. "No, it's nobody."

"Nobody? Nobody who's been writing you letters while dumb-and-happy David Day runs a hammer and eats sawdust for ten hours a day, only he don't mind because he's got a wonderful family waiting at home each night waiting to shower him with love and bullshit?"

His bulk filled the door frame, blocking her view of the barn and the pasture beyond. The room darkened as a cloud passed over the sun. "I told you, it's not the way you think," she said.

"Sure. Archer McFall just happened to walk back into your life at the exact same time that you started to get the letters. That's a mighty big coincidence."

"This isn't about Archer or the Temple. It's about us."

He flapped the letters again. "If it's about us, how come you didn't tell me about these?"

"I was going to."

"When? After hell finished freezing over?"

"When I thought you were ready to listen."

"You mean when I was ready to swallow it hook, line, and sinker. And get reeled into that mess the same as you. I thought you learned your lesson the last time."

The cloud passed, and the sun lit up the mottled spots on the window. She looked past them to the reddish square of the garden, at the little rows of green that were starting their seasonal push to the sky, then looked beyond to the wedge of mountains that kept North Carolina from slopping over into Tennessee. Two hundred acres of Gregg land, every inch of it stony and stained, every ash and birch and poplar stitched to her skin, every gallon of creek water running through her veins like blood. She was as old-family as anybody, and the old families belonged to the McFalls.

"It's only letters," she said. "That doesn't mean I'm going back in."

"Why did you ever have to fall for it in the first place?"

"That was nearly twenty years ago. I was a different person then. We were different people."

"No, you were different. I'm still the same. Just a mountain hick who thinks that if you say your prayers and live right, then nobody can break you down. But I reckon I was wrong."

"You can't still blame me for that, can you?" But his eyes answered her question by becoming hard and narrow. "Don't you know how terrible I thought it was to be trapped here in Whispering Pines forever? Stay around and squirt out seven kids with nothing to look forward to but the next growing season? To be like my mother with her fingers as knobby as pea pods from all the canning she did? What kind of life is that?"

"It's good enough for me. I didn't need to run off to California."

"I must have asked you a dozen times to come with me."

"And I asked you a dozen-and-one times to stay."

"You were just afraid you'd lose me."

He hung his head and shook it slowly. "I reckon I did," he said, barely above a whisper. "Only it took me this long to find out."

"The kids will be home soon," she said. "Ronnie's been looking forward to seeing you."

He held up the letters again. "You're not going to drag them into this mess, are you? Because, so help me, if you do—"

The threat hung in the air like an ax.

"Archer's not like that." Linda said it as if she only half-believed her own words.

"You said the group broke up."

"I ... most of us left. I don't know. When they said he was dead, I—"

"He's dead. Now, the question is, who's trying to bring back this?" David held up one of the letters, more for effect than anything. Because Linda knew perfectly well what was on the letter.

She could see the symbol from across the room, even though it was bunched into the top right corner. It looked like one of those Egyptian symbols, only the cross was topped with two loops. Two suns. The Temple of the Two Suns.

Not that she needed to see it, because she was sure now that it had been seared into her brain, that its power had reached over years and across three thousand miles and through the thick white walls of her renewed faith in Jesus. Because, after all, there was only one true savior. And his name was Archer McFall.

If only David would open his heart. Sure, he'd been born with Baptist blood, he'd been dipped in the river below the red church so that his sins would be washed away, he'd given his ten percent, but there was so much more to faith than the rituals and scriptures and prayers. Her own heart was swelling again, budding, unfolding like a flower under a bright sun. No, under two suns. Twice the love. If only she could share that with David. But he wouldn't understand. He was as blinded by Jesus as everybody else was.

David watched her carefully, waiting for her reaction. She swallowed her smile and let her face slacken.

"The Temple," he said in a sneer. "You promised you were over it. But I guess I'm the fool."

"He's not asking for money."

David laughed, a bitter sound. He rubbed his forehead with his right hand. "Probably the only thing he's not asking for, whoever it is."

"Since you read the letters, you know exactly what he wants."

"Yeah." He held up one of the letters. "'We've missed you, sister,'" he read.

"And that's all."

"'There will come great trials, but we bathe in the light of faith.'" He shuffled to the next letter. "'The stone is rolled away.'"

"Where's the love in that?" Linda was straining to show disinterest. David wasn't from one of the old families. She had been a fool to think Archer would accept him, anyway.

"Where's the love? Where's the love? Why, right there on the bottom, where it says 'Forever Yours, Archer McFall.' On every single one of them."

"Maybe he didn't die. Or maybe somebody started up the group again and is using his name. That's all it is. I don't care one way or another."

But I DO care. I've always cared, even when you thought you and your Christian friends had "cured" me. There was always a little room in my heart tucked away for nobody but Archer.

David's eyes had cleared a little as he sobered, but kept their bright ferocity. "You don't care so much that you didn't even bother to throw the letters away, huh?"

"Don't matter none to me."

"That so?" David started to crumple the letters into a ball.

Linda's mouth opened, and her arm reached out of its own accord.

David smiled, but it was a sick smile, the kind worn by a reluctant martyr. He crushed the paper into a hard wad of pulp and tossed it on the floor at her feet. "I seen him come around. Last week. Laid out of work just so I could hide up in the hills and watch the house. Just me and a six-pack. Mostly I was curious if you were sending out any letters yourself."

"You bastard."

David licked his lips. "Is ten o'clock the regular meeting time?"

Linda felt the blood drain from her face. How much did he know?

"Got himself a Mercedes. I guess this 'cult' business pays pretty good."

"It wasn't—" Linda started.

David nodded. "I know. It wasn't Archer McFall. Then why don't you tell me who it really was?"

Linda wondered how many times David had watched the house from the woods. Or if she could trust anything he said.

Trust. That was a good one.

David slowly approached her. She was like a deer frozen in the headlights of his hate. She looked down just as his boot flattened the wad of letters.

"How long?" he said, and his eyes were welling with tears again. As if the reservoir had been filling all his life and, finally full, now had to leak a little or bust.

"It's not like that." She looked again at the butcher knife on the counter, close to tears herself.

He took another menacing step. "I wondered why you been acting strange lately. And why you ain't been up to going to church."

Linda grabbed a gulp of air and scooted from the table to the kitchen counter. David was close behind her and caught her when she spun. His hands were like steel hooks in her upper arms, holding her firmly but not squeezing hard enough to bruise.

She stared at his stranger's face with its wide eyes. She'd never noticed how deep the two creases on his forehead were. The hard planes of his cheeks were patched with stubble. He looked old, as if all his thirty-seven years had dog-piled him these last few weeks.

"Tell me who it is," he said.

She shuddered with the force of his grip. Those hands had touched her so tenderly in the night, had softly stroked her belly when she was pregnant with the boys, had tucked daisies behind her ears when they fooled around in the hayfield. But now they were cruel, the caresses forgotten, the passion in them of a different kind.

She turned her face away, afraid that he'd see the fear in her eyes. The knife was beside a bowl of melted ice cream, within reach. But David grabbed her chin and twisted her eyes back to his.

Archer had warned her what the price of belief would be. Persecution. Pain. The loss of everything human. She could hear Archer's voice now, pouring from the geysers of her heart. There will come great trials. And great sacrifices. Because sacrifice is the currency of God.

But the reward was greater than the sacrifice. Belief paid back a hundredfold. Devotion now brought Archer's steadfast love unto the fourth generation. Surrendering to him meant that her offspring would reap the harvest. She had been telling herself that ever since Archer and the Temple of the Two Suns reclaimed her heart. And she reminded herself now, locked in David's grip.

He'd never hurt her before. But Archer said those who didn't understand always fell back on violence, because violence was the way of their God. That was why the world had to end. From the ashes of their heavenfire would come—

"Who is it?" he asked.

She grunted through her clenched teeth. David relaxed his grip until her mouth could move. "Ahh—Archer."

"Archer. Don't lie to me, damn it." He clamped his fingers tight again.

She fumbled with her left hand, running it along the edge of the counter. She felt the cool rim of the bowl. If only she could keep him talking. "It is. And he doesn't want me ... that way."

"It can't be Archer."

"He's come back."

David choked on a laugh. "The second coming. They really do have you again, don't they?"

"No, I meant he's come back to Whispering Pines." Her hand went around the bowl and touched wood. Her fingers crawled along the knife's handle. Archer said sometimes you had to fight fire with fire, even if it meant descending down to their level. Even if it was a sin.

"You said he was dead."

"They said ... I thought ... I never saw his body."

"It's not Archer."

"It is. You know I'd never cheat on you."

He released her arm with his left hand and drew his arm back. He was going to hit her. She snatched at the butcher knife, then had it in her palm, her fingers around it, and all the old memories flooded back, all the energy and power and purity that Archer promised and delivered. She raised the knife.

David saw it and stepped away easily. The blade sliced the air a foot from his face. He lurched forward and caught her wrist on the down-stroke. The knife clattered to the floor.

They both looked at it. Silence crowded the room like death crowded a coffin.

A chicken clucked out in the barnyard. Somewhere over the hill, in the direction of the Potter farm, a hound dog let out one brassy howl. A tractor engine murmured in the far distance. The clock in the living room ticked six times, seven, eight. David reached out with the toe of his boot and kicked the knife into the corner.

He exhaled, deflating his rage. "So it's come to this."

"I didn't mean to—"

"Is that what they preach? Stabbing your own husband?"

"I ... you scared me." The tears erupted from her eyes even as David's tears dried up, probably for good. "I thought you were going to hit me."

"Yeah." He was calm again, walking dead, a man who wouldn't harm a fly. "I guess you never could trust me, could you? Not the way you could trust them."

"I didn't lie to you."

"Which time?"

Archer was right. Pain was a steep price. Faith required sacrifice. "When we got married, and I said I was through. I believed it then."

"And I believed it, too. Guess you're not the only fool in the family."

"Please, David. Don't make this any worse than it has to be."

"Fine." He spread his arms in surrender. "I guess it don't matter none who it is. I just don't see why you had to make up this stuff about the cult."

"It's not a cult."

"And Archer McFall just happens to walk back into your life twenty years after he died. You really must be crazy, or else you think I am."

Archer always said he would return. How could she ever have doubted him?

Easy. You had your world taken away from you, and you came back to this safe, normal, God-fearing life and slipped into it like a second skin. You hid away your heart like it was separate from loving and mothering and living. But this normal life was all a lie, wasn't it? Maybe David was right, even if he was right about the wrong thing.

"I reckon I'll get the kids, then," he said, and a chill sank into her, deep-freezing her bones.

"No." She went to him.

"Any judge in the land would give me custody. Don't worry. I won't make no claim on the farm. That's rightly yours as a Gregg, if for no other reason."

"Not the kids," she wailed. She pounded her fists on his chest. He didn't try to stop her.

The blows softened and she collapsed, grabbing his shirt for support. He kept her from falling. She felt nothing in his embrace.

"How are we going to tell the boys about us?" She sniffled.

"They already know. They ain't dumb."

"I thought ... I don't know what I thought." But Linda knew exactly what she thought. She thought the children were hers, to love and protect and introduce to the joys of worship in the Temple of the Two Suns. To deliver unto Archer, so the generations would be spared.

"Now quit your crying. They'll be here any minute."

Damn him for trying to be strong. Acting like she didn't matter. Her eyes went to the knife in the corner.

"Don't do it, Linda. I'd hate for that to come up at the custody hearing."

Jesus-loving bastard. But she wouldn't lose hope. Archer would know what to do. Archer would—

"Did you hear that?" David asked, releasing her.

"Hear what?" She rubbed her arms, trying to wipe away the memory of his rough touch.

David went to the door. Linda thought about the knife. No, if she used the knife, they'd take the kids away for sure. She heard something that sounded like a calf caught in a crabapple thicket and bawling its heart out.

"It's Ronnie," David said, then leaped off the porch and ran toward the creek that divided a stretch of pasture from the front yard.

Ronnie raced across the pasture, moaning and wailing, waving his arms. Tim was farther back, running down the road, and even from that distance Linda saw that her youngest boy had lost his glasses.

Ronnie reached the little wooden footbridge that spanned the creek, a bridge that was nothing more than some pallet planks laid across two locust poles. His foot caught in a gap in the planks and his scream went an octave higher as he plummeted into the rocky creek bed. Her own shout caught in her throat.

David reached the creek and jumped down to where Ronnie lay. Linda scrambled down the bank after him. Ronnie was facedown, his legs in the shallow water. His head rested on a large flat stone. A trail of blood ran down the surface of the rock and dribbled into the creek, where it was quickly swept away.

"Don't move him," Linda shouted.

David gave her a look, then knelt beside Ronnie. The boy moaned and lifted his head. Blood oozed from his nose. His lip was swollen.

He moaned again.

"What?" David said.

This time Linda was close enough to hear what he was saying.

Ronnie's lips parted again. "Uhr—red church."

His eyes were looking past both of them, seeing nothing, seeing too much.

CHAPTER THREE

Sheriff Frank Littlefield looked up the hill at the church and the monstrous dogwood that hovered beside it like a guardian. He'd always hated that tree, ever since he was a boy. It hadn't changed much since the last time he'd set foot in the graveyard. But he had, the world had, and Boonie most definitely had.

The young get old and the dead get deader, he thought as he studied the shadowed belfry for movement.

"What do you figure done it?" asked Dr. Perry Hoyle, the Pickett County medical examiner.

Littlefield didn't turn to face the man immediately. Instead, he squinted past the church steeple to the sun setting behind the crippled cross. The cross threw a long jagged shadow over the cemetery green. Somebody was cutting hay. Littlefield could smell the crush of grass in the wind. He scratched at his buzz cut. "You're the ME."

"Wild animal, that's my guess. Mountain lion, maybe. Or a black bear."

"Sure it wasn't somebody with a knife or an ax?"

"Not real likely. Wounds are too jagged, for one thing."

Littlefield exhaled in relief. "So I guess we can't call it a murder."

"Probably not."

One of the deputies was vomiting in the weeds at the edge of the cemetery.

"Don't get that mixed in with the evidence," Littlefield hollered at him. He turned back to Hoyle. "Black bear wouldn't attack a man unless her cubs were threatened. And it'd have to be a mighty big mountain lion."

"They get up to two hundred pounds."

"But they're extinct up here."

"One of them college professors down at Westridge believes mountain lions are making their way back to these parts."

Littlefield resumed rubbing his scalp. He'd just had it trimmed at Ray's, a good clipper job that let the wind and sun get right to the scalp. The department thought he wore the short style to give himself a ramrod appearance, but the truth was, he kind of liked the shape of his skull. And his hat fit better when he went to the Borderline Tavern to kick up his heels to some Friday-night country music. Boonie used to dance at the Borderline, too. Back when he still had feet.

The two men stood quietly and looked at the church for a moment. "Never been many happy times here," Hoyle said.

Littlefield didn't rise to the bait. He was annoyed that Hoyle would fish those waters. Some things were for nothing but forgetting. He hardened his face against the past as easily as if he'd slipped on a plastic superhero mask.

"Who found the body?" Hoyle hurriedly asked.

"Couple of kids who live down the road. They were walking home from school this afternoon."

"Must have bothered them something awful."

"Hell, it's bothering me, and you know I've seen a few ripe ones."

"What did they tell you?"

"The older one, he's about thirteen, fell running home and busted his face up. He'll be all right, but for some reason it got to him worse than it did the little one. Kept mumbling 'the red church' over and over again."

"How old's the little one?"

"Nine. Said he saw some stuff laying in the graveyard and went through the bushes to have a look. He said he saw a cap and a flashlight and a bottle of liquor, but he didn't touch any of it. Ronnie, the thirteen-year-old, came back to see what was taking so long, and that's when the victim must have dragged himself out from the bushes and grabbed ahold of Ronnie."

Littlefield didn't like calling Boonie Houck a victim. Boonie was a good fellow. A little bit creepy and plenty lazy, but he was in church of a Sunday morning and was known to vote Republican. Nobody deserved to die this way.

Hoyle looked like he could use a cup of coffee, maybe with a few drops of brandy in it. "He lived a lot longer than he should have with those kinds of wounds. My guess is he was attacked sometime in the early morning, between midnight and sunup."

Littlefield's stomach rolled a little. How did Boonie feel lying in the weeds, wondering about the wound between his legs, knowing that whatever had ripped him up was somewhere out there in the dark? "You going to send him to the state ME's office?"

"Reckon I ought to. They can do a better job of guessing than I can." Hoyle pulled a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and wiped the sweat from his bald head. "The press is going to want to know something."

"Wonderful."

"Plus, if it is a wild animal, might be some rabies going around. That could make an animal go nuts and do something like this."

"We haven't had that up here in a long time, either."

"Times change."

The sheriff nodded. You used to have hair, and I used to be worth a damn. Boonie used to be alive, and the red church used to be white.

"Let me know when you're ready to drive him down," Littlefield said. "We'll get the pieces together."

He didn't envy Hoyle. The drive to Chapel Hill took about four hours. Boonie would be kicking up a mean stench by the time the trip was over. But Littlefield decided he ought to save his pity. Unlike Boonie, at least Hoyle would be coming back.

Littlefield patted the medical examiner on the shoulder and went to examine the articles lying on the grass in clear plastic bags. He bent over the bag that held a porn magazine. He fought an odd urge to flip through the pages.A camera flash went off. "Could you please move to one side, Sheriff?"

He looked up. Detective Sgt. Sheila Storie waved her arm. She was taking photos of the crime scene.

No, not a CRIME scene, Littlefield had to remind himself. An accident. A tragic, violent, unexplained ACCIDENT.

The kind of thing that happened too often in Whispering Pines. But Littlefield was relieved that a psycho with a set of Ginsu knives wasn't on the loose in his jurisdiction. They'd had one of those down the mountain in Shady Valley a few years back, and the case was never solved. Damned inept city cops.

He already knew he was going to put Storie in charge of the investigation. When they arrived and found the mess, she hadn't even blinked, just got out her clipboard and tape measure and went to work. She was too young to be so unmoved by death, in Littlefield's opinion. But maybe she was a little bit like him. Maybe it was the kind of thing that made them cops.

Got to keep yourself outside of it all. Don't let them get to you. No matter what they do, no matter what the world takes from you.

"What do you make of it?" he asked Storie.

Her eyes were blue enough to hide everything, as unrevealing as her camera lens. "Extensive trauma. Death probably due to exsanguination."

Storie's educated flatland accent always surprised him, even though he should have been used to it by now. Most people took her for a local until they heard her speak. "That's what Hoyle says. Only he calls it 'bled to death.'"

"Unless shock got him first. Same to the subject either way. I haven't seen this much blood since those driver's ed films they show in high school." She took two steps to her right and snapped another picture, then let the camera hang by its strap over her chest.

"Must have taken a while. You looked over in the bushes where he crawled after the attack?"

"Yes, sir. He left a few scraps."

Littlefield swallowed a knot of nausea.

"Footprints go from this grave marker here, where the boys said they found the stuff. They're deep, see?" She pointed to the pressed grass. The smaller prints of the boys were visible as well. But Boonie's were clearly marked by the thick treads of his boots.

"That means he was running, right?"

"He must have seen or heard whatever it was and gotten scared. He was probably attacked just before he started running."

"Why do you say that?"

"Blood here is coagulated almost to powder. The blood over there- "-she waved to the slick trail of slime where Boonie had crawled out of the bushes- "-isn't as oxidized."

Littlefield nodded and passed his hand over his scalp. The breeze shifted and he could smell Boonie now. A person never got used to the odor of death. The detective didn't even wrinkle her nose.

"Hoyle thinks it's a mountain lion," Littlefield said.

She shook her head. Her brown hair was a couple of inches past regulation and swished over her shoulders. "Wild animals typically go for the throat if they're treating something as prey. There are a few wounds around the eyes, but those are no more devastating than the other injuries. And it doesn't look like the subject had an animal cornered so that it would be forced to defend itself."

Littlefield was constantly amazed by the level of instruction that new officers received. A college degree in Criminal Justice, for starters. Then state training, not to mention extra seminars along the way. Littlefield had long since quit going to those things, at least the ones that didn't help him politically.

Or maybe Storie was a little too educated for her own good. Frank knew that as a female in a rural department, she had to be twice as smart and icy and sarcastic as everybody else. She couldn't go out for after-shift beers.

Pay attention, damn it. In case you're going senile and need a reminder, one of your constituents is gathering flies long before his natural time.

"So you don't necessarily hold to the wild animal attack theory?" he asked.

"I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that if it was an animal, its behavior was unnatural." She looked across the stretch of tombstones to where the cemetery ended near the forest. Her brow furrowed.

"What is it?" Littlefield asked.

"The thing that bothers me the most."

If STORIE'S bothered ... A small chill wended its way up Littlefield's spinal column and settled in the base of his neck.

"No animal tracks," she said.

The sheriff's jaw tightened. So that was what had been bothering him ever since he'd first walked the scene. An animal's claws would have ripped chunks out of the ground, especially if it were attacking.

"Damn," he whispered.

"No tracks means no easy answers." She almost sounded pleased. "There are no other human footprints, either."

Storie had cracked a big case last year, when an ex-cop had hauled a body up to the mountains for disposal. Perp was a big goofy guy who went around bragging about how he'd never get caught. Well, Storie set her nose on his trail and nailed him so hard that his lawyers had to recite scripture in the courtroom to save him from a lethal injection. The conviction got statewide coverage, and Storie's picture was in both the local papers.

This looked like it might be another of those high-profile mysteries that, if she solved it, would make her a legitimate candidate for sheriff. If she ever ran against him, she'd have him beat all to hell on looks. Her accent would hurt her some, though.

"Tell me, Sergeant. What do you think did it?" he asked.

"I can honestly say I have no idea, sir." She folded her arms over the camera.

"Any chance that somebody did it with a sharp weapon, without leaving footprints that we could see?"

"The pattern of the wounds seems random at first glance. But what bugs me is the ritualistic nature of the injured areas."

Areas? Littlefield wanted to remind Storie that those body parts were once near and dear to Boonie Houck. But he only nodded at her to continue.

"Look at the major wounds. First, there's the eyes."

"We haven't found them yet."

"Exactly. That's an inconvenient spot for a rampaging animal to reach. In any event, it's unlikely that a claw would take both eyes."

"Unless they were shining, and somehow attracted the animal's attention. The moon was over half full last night."

"Okay. Let's go on to the hand. Seems like an animal would have started gnawing at a softer spot."

"Maybe it did."

"That brings us to the fatal wound."

"Now, that's not been determined yet." Littlefield felt the tingle of blood rushing to his cheeks.

"I saw the rip in the front of his pants." She lifted the camera. "I took pictures, remember?"

"Guess so." His tongue felt thick.

"With the loss of that much blood, I'm amazed he survived as long as he did."

"You said the wounds were ritualistic. What's that got to do with his ... er . . ."

"Penis, Sheriff. You can say it in the company of a woman these days."

"Of course." His face grew warmer with embarrassment. He looked across the mountains. He would love to be walking a stream right now, flicking a hand-tied fly across the silver currents, the smell of wet stone and rotted loam in his nostrils. Alone. Anywhere but here with blood and the red church and Sheila Storie. "So what does it mean?"

"It may mean nothing. Or it may mean we have a deviant personality on the loose." The flash of her eyes gave away her belief in the latter. Or maybe she was only hopeful.

"Is it because we haven't found the ... other part, either?"

"I don't know yet."

"Think we ought to call in the state boys?" Littlefield knew Storie would bristle at turning the case over to the State Bureau of Investigation. She would want a shot first.

"That's your decision, Sheriff."

"I suppose we'll have to wait for the state medical examiner's report. Hoyle's sending him down to Chapel Hill."

"Good."

Littlefield tried to read her expression. But the sun was in her face, so her half-closed eyes didn't give away anything. He knew she thought Perry Hoyle had about as much forensic sophistication as a hog butcher. The whole department was probably a joke to her. Well, she was a flatlander, anyway. "Hoyle doesn't think the wounds were made by a weapon."

"You asked for my opinion, sir."

Littlefield looked up the hill at the church. Suddenly he felt as if someone had reached an icy hand down his throat and squeezed his heart. His brother Samuel was on the roof of the church, waving and smiling.

His dead brother Samuel.

Littlefield blinked, then saw that the illusion was only a mossy patch on the shingles.

He sighed. "I'm putting you in charge of the investigation."

Storie almost smiled. "I'll do my best, sir."

Littlefield nodded and stepped over the strings that marked off grids at the scene. He knelt by the toppled monument. "What do you make of this?"

"The boys' footprints lead over here. I'd guess vandalism. Tipping tombstones is an old favorite. Maybe they were messing around when the subject heard them and tried to crawl out of the weeds."

"Seems like they would have heard Boonie yelling." He stopped himself. Boonie wouldn't have called out, at least in nothing more articulate than a groan. Boonie's tongue had been taken, too.

Hoyle rescued him from his embarrassment. "We're ready over here, Sheriff," the ME called. Littlefield winced and started to turn.

"I'll handle it, sir," Storie said. "It's my case, remember? I might see something I missed the first two times."

She was right. Littlefield's shoulders slumped a little in relief. He hoped Storie hadn't noticed, but she didn't miss much. She had detective's eyes, even if they were easier to look at than look through. "Go ahead."

Littlefield headed across the cemetery and up the hill toward the red church. He glanced at the markers as he passed, some so worn he could barely make out the names. Some were nothing more than stumps of broken granite. Other graves were probably forgotten altogether, just the silent powder of bones under a skin of grass.

The ground was soft under his feet- good mountain soil, as black as coal dust. Almost a shame to waste it on a graveyard. But people had to be buried somewhere, and to the dead, maybe the most fertile soil in the world wasn't comfort enough. Maybe his kid brother Samuel had yet to settle into eternal rest.

The names on the markers read like a who's who history of this end of the county. Potter. Matheson. Absher. Buchanan. McFall. Gregg. More Picketts than you could shake a stick at.

And three Littlefields off by themselves.

He knelt by two familiar graves. His mother and father shared a single wide monument. He looked from the gray marble to a smaller marker, which had a bas-relief of a lamb chiseled in its center. Its letters were scarcely worn, and the fingerlike shadows of tree branches chilled the stone. Littlefield read the damning words without moving his lips.

Here Lies Samuel Riley Littlefield. 1968-1979. May God Protect and Keep Him.

His heart burned in his chest and he hurried away, his eyes frantic for a distraction. He stopped by the dogwood. The thing looked like it was dying. But it had looked that way for the last forty years, and every spring it managed to poke a few more blossoms out of the top branches. A memory stirred and crawled from the shadows before he could beat it back.

The red church. Halloween. The night he'd seen the Hung Preacher.

The night Samuel had died.

He shuddered and the memory fell away again, safely buried. The sun was warm on his face. Down the slope, Hoyle and Storie were hauling Boonie's body to the back of the overgrown station wagon that served as the county's non-emergency ambulance.

Littlefield moved away from the tree and put a foot on the bottom of four steps that led into the church foyer. The door was large and made of solid wooden planks. The cracks between the planks were barely distinguishable due to the buildup of paint layers. Over the door was a small strip of colored glass, two deep blue rectangular planes separated by an amber pane. Those had survived the onslaught of juvenile delinquents' rocks.

The sheriff climbed the rest of the steps. The top one was a wider landing, scarred from the tailgate of Lester Matheson's truck. Littlefield examined the thick hinges and the door lock. There was a lift latch in addition to the dull brass handle. Littlefield put his hand on the cool metal.

Wonder if I need a warrant to open it? Naw. Lester won't mind if I have a peek.

There was a small chance that if Boonie had been murdered, some evidence might be hidden inside. Or the door might be locked, but he didn't think Lester would bother keeping up with a key just to protect a hundred bales of hay. People didn't steal out in these parts. The thieves and B&E addicts kept to Barkersville, where the rich folks had their summer homes.

Littlefield turned the knob and the catch clicked back into the cylinder. He nudged the latch up with his other hand, and as the door creaked open and the rich dust of hay hit his nostrils, he realized he hadn't set foot inside since shortly after Samuel's funeral.

Please, God, just let it be a plain old ordinary murderer. Some drunk who got mad because Boonie took two swigs before passing the bottle instead of one. A Mexican Christmas tree worker with a grudge. I'll even take a crazy if you got one.

His palms were sweating, the way they had when he was seventeen and he'd first heard the laughter in the belfry.

The door opened onto a short, windowless foyer. A shaft of light pierced the ceiling from the belfry above.

Where the bell rope used to hang.

The bell rang in his memory, a thunderclap of angry bronze, an echo of the night Samuel died.

The plank floor creaked as Littlefield crossed the foyer. Golden motes of dust spiraled in the draft. What must it have been like a century ago? The worn wood had endured a hundred thousand crossings. Trembling and red-faced virgin brides with their best dresses dragging on the pine, solemn cousins come to pay their respects to a dear departed, women in bonnets and long swirling skirts gathering for Jubilee. Littlefield could almost see the preacher at the steps, shaking the hands of the menfolk, bowing to the women, patting the heads of the children.

The sheriff peered up through the tiny rope hole, an opening barely large enough for a child to scramble through. The hollow interior of the bell was full of black shadow. But that would tell him nothing. He returned to scanning the floor for signs of blood.

The foyer opened onto the main sanctuary. The chill crawled up his spine again. He didn't know whether it was caused by childhood legends, or the chance of finding a killer hiding among the bales of hay. For a frantic moment, he almost wished he wore a firearm.

The bales were stacked to each side, forming a crooked aisle down the center of the church sanctuary. Lester had left the altar undisturbed, probably because lifting hay over the railing was too much work. The altar itself was small, the pulpit hardly more than a rectangular crate with a slanted top. A set of six wormy chestnut beams, hand-hewn, crossed the open A-frame overhead. The interior walls were unpainted chestnut as well. In the dim light, the woodwork had a rich, deep brown cast.

The bales were packed too tightly against the walls to afford hiding places.

Unless somebody had removed a few bales and made a hollow space inside the stacks.

He'd done that in his family's barn, when he wanted to hide out on an autumn day, or when he and his brother played hide-and-seek or army. But few hours could be stolen back then. Crops, livestock, firewood, fence mending- a long list of chores was waiting at six every morning that never got finished before dark. But back then, Littlefield had slept in dreams and not bad memories.

Nothing stirred amid the hay. The church was silent, as if waiting for a congregation to again fill it with life. Littlefield walked to the dais. The chill deepened even though the air was stuffy. A small wooden cross was attached to the top of the pulpit. Like the cross on the church steeple, it was missing a section of the crosspiece.

Littlefield leaned over the waist-high railing and looked into the corners of the altar. The small vestry off to the side held nothing but bare shelves and cobwebs. He didn't know what he expected to see. Maybe he was just trying to ease his own mind, to reassure himself that old rumors and long-ago strangeness were put to rest. Boonie was dead, and that had nothing to do with the red church or Samuel or the Hung Preacher.

As he was turning to leave, he noticed a dark stain on the dais floor. It was the kind made by a spill. Maybe Lester had stored building materials in here once. At any rate, the rust-brown stain was far too old to have been made by whatever had killed Boonie.

But something about it held his attention. The shape seemed familiar. He tilted his head, as if stumped by an inkblot in a Rorschach test. When he realized where he had seen the form before, he drew in a dusty gasp of air.

The dark shape in the belfry, that long-ago Halloween.

Littlefield strode back through the church, suddenly anxious to be in the sunshine. He was going to go with the animal theory for now. If Storie wanted to play her forensic games, that was fine. But he wouldn't allow himself to believe that something masquerading as human had ripped apart good old Boonie Houck. Not in Pickett County. Not on God's ground. Not on his watch.

As he closed the door and looked across the graveyard where Storie searched the weeds for clues, the chill evaporated. Something fluttered in the belfry.

Bird or raccoon, he told himself without looking up. NOT the thing that had laughed as Samuel died.

He hurried down the slope to see if Storie had found any of Boonie's missing parts.

CHAPTER FOUR

Bummer.

That was Ronnie's first thought when the gray blindfold of unconsciousness dissolved into light. And that was the last thought he'd had when the anesthesiologist had pressed the mask to his face. Or maybe not. He'd been so stone-black-buzzed from the injection that he couldn't be sure if he'd had any prior thoughts at all.

His face, at least what he could feel of it, was like a molasses balloon. Pain tingled and teased him through a curtain of gauze. It was a sneaky, funny pain, a bully that skulked around the edge of the playground, waiting for you to chase a stray kickball. Once you were alone, it would jump on you and beat you and kick you and rip you--

More of the druggy haze fell away. Ronnie opened his eyes and the light sliced at his pupils. His eyes were overflowing, but he couldn't feel the tears on his cheeks. His stomach turned crooked flips. Mom and Dad were blurry images beside the bed. A man with a mustache whose eyes looked like licorice drops leaned over him.

"I think we've got somebody waking up." The man's mustache twitched like a caterpillar on a hot griddle. He wore a white coat.

Doctor. Ronnie's thoughts spun, then collected. Pain plus doctor equals hospital.

He opened his mouth to speak, but his tongue was too thick to find his teeth.

"Easy now, little partner," the doctor said. "Take it slow."

Slow was the only way Ronnie could take it. His arms and legs felt like lead pipes. He turned his head to look at his parents. Despite the numbness, he felt a warmth growing in his chest. Mom and Dad were together.

Well, they weren't holding hands, but at least they weren't yelling at each other. And all it took to make that happen was for Ronnie to ... what had he done?

He slogged through the tunnels of his memory. He remembered the ride to the hospital, Dad holding him in the back seat, Dad's shirt against his face. The shirt should have smelled of sawdust and sweat and maybe a little gasoline, but Ronnie had smelled nothing but blood.

Then, farther back, before that, the little footbridge, falling, the rocks ...

Ouch.

Ronnie was old enough to know that the memory of pain could never quite match up to the real thing. Which was a good thing; otherwise, everybody would be running around as crazy as old Mama Bet McFall, or Grandma Gregg down at the Haywood Assisted Care Center back before she slipped into the grave. But even Ronnie's memory of the pain was strong enough to wipe out some of the numbing effects of the drugs.

Dad stepped forward, his lower lip curled, his face made sickly green by the fluorescent strip lights. Dad never looked quite right indoors, sort of like the tiger Ronnie had seen in a pen down at the Asheboro zoo. Both of them nervous and impatient, pacing, too large for walls or bars.

"Hey, Ronnie," Dad said, unsuccessfully trying to funnel his deep voice into a whisper. "How are you feeling?"

"Muuuuhr." Even Ronnie couldn't translate the sound his vocal chords made.

Mom leaned over him, a tight smile wrinkling her face. The skin under her eyes was dark blue. She reached out and brushed hair away from his forehead with a clammy hand. "It's okay, baby."

The doctor checked Ronnie's pulse. "Coming around fine. You'll be able to take him home in an hour or so. Buzz one of the nurses if you need anything."

The doctor left the room, and the draft from the closing door swept over Ronnie like a tide of water. Being a molasses-head wasn't all bad. His thoughts weren't dropping as fast as usual, but he was thinking wider than he ever had before. If not for the pain bully waiting behind the numbness, Ronnie wouldn't mind hanging out in this half-speed dreamscape for a while.

This was almost peaceful. If he closed his eyes, the white walls fell away and the sky got big and he could float on a cloud and no one could bother him, not even dingle-dork—

Tim. What had happened to Tim?

The molasses of his face rippled as his eyes opened wide. Mom and Dad and ... where was Tim? Because suddenly it was all coming back, the molasses creek turning a bend and flowing into sunlight and, now hot and golden, churning over a precipice in a sugary waterfall. The run home, the hand on his foot, the bleeding thing—they got livers for eyes—the toppled monument, the red church, the graveyard.

Had the bleeding thing trapped Tim?

Dad must have sensed his agitation, because a hand on his shoulder prevented him from sitting up. "Now, you heard the doctor, son. Just rest up."

Mom chewed on the skin at the end of her thumb. "You got busted up pretty good when you fell. Broke your nose. The doctor said you were lucky you didn't crack your skull."

Good old Mom. Found the bright side to everything. So he had a broken nose. He thought of some of the players on his football cards, how their noses had great big humps across the bridge or were twisted off to one side. Just what a guy like him needed. Now Melanie would never talk to him.

The molasses mask slipped a little more, and the pain bully chuckled from the shadows, knowing an opportunity was drawing near. Ronnie became aware of a lower portion of his body, where the knot of snakes nested in his stomach. He was going to throw up.

Total bummer. He groaned and his tongue worked.

"What is it, honey?" Mom said, her face now paler and her eyes wider.

"Poooook," he said. His right arm flailed like a water hose under pressure.

"Puke?" She looked at Dad. "Oh, Lord, David, he's going to throw up."

Dad looked helpless. The situation called for quick action and compassion. As a caregiver, Dad made a good pallbearer.

Mom spun and began searching under a counter beside the bed. A mirror ran along the length of the counter, and Ronnie was startled by his own reflection. His nose was purple and swollen, little clots of bloody gauze hanging out of his nostrils. His eyes were like green-brown marbles pressed into ten pounds of dough.

The image accelerated his nausea. He turned his body with effort, and now Dad helped, putting a hand in his armpit to lean him over the steel railing of the bed. The scene in the mirror was doubly disorienting from being reversed. The greasy snakes crawled up Ronnie's throat.

Mom found a plastic pan made of a yucky aqua color, but that was okay because yucky was just what the situation required. She held it under his face, and the snakes exploded from his mouth. His eyes squeezed shut in the effort of vomiting, and drops of something besides molasses beaded his forehead. His abdomen spasmed twice, three times, four, a pause, then a fifth eruption.

"Oh, my Lord," Mom exclaimed to Dad. "Call the nurse."

"He said this might happen. And look, it's stopped now."

"But it's blood."

"What did you think it would be, grits and sausage gravy? They just operated on his nose."

Ronnie looked into the pan and his guts almost lurched again. A thick gruel of blood and mucus pooled in front of his face. And what were those things floating in-

Fingers. They cut off my fingers and made me eat them.

Dad's words came as if through cotton. "What the hell are those?"

"Get a nurse." Mom waved her hands helplessly.

The draft of the door opening wafted over Ronnie again, but this time it provided no comfort. He lay back on the raised pillows.

A tired-looking nurse looked in the pan. "Oh, those are the fingers of surgical gloves. The doctor stuffs them with gauze and uses them as packing."

"How did they get in his stomach?" Mom's voice was a thin screech.

"The packing must have worked its way down the pharyngeal openings of his Eustachian tubes. I'm sure it's nothing to worry about."

"Nothing to worry about?" Dad's voice was loud enough to make Ronnie's head hurt. "It's not your kid in the bed, is it?"

The nurse gave a forced smile that Ronnie figured she wore while giving medicine to somebody who wasn't likely to last the week. A smile that plainly said, If there were another job in Pickett County that paid this well, he could puke rubber fingers until he choked, for all I care.

But all she said was, "I'll see if I can find the doctor."

After she was gone, Mom said, "You didn't have to raise your voice."

"Shut up."

"David, please. For Ronnie's sake?"

Ronnie wasn't bothered by the argument. The relief of passing nausea was so great that he would have slow-danced with the pain bully, he felt so wonderful. So what if more sweat had popped out along his neck and in his armpits and down the slope of his spine? The stomach snakes were gone.

The act of vomiting also cleared his head a little. That was a mixed blessing. Or mixed curse. Because not only were the good wide thoughts gone, they were being replaced by memories.

Before he'd been wheeled into surgery, the sheriff had talked to him about the things that happened at the red church. It was scary enough just to talk to a policeman, especially one with a crew cut and a face that looked like it was chiseled out of stone. But the sheriff wanted him to remember what had happened, when Ronnie really, really, really wanted to be in the business of forgetting.

Forgetting the wet, slooshing sound his shoe had made as he jerked his foot from the graveyard grip.

Forgetting the raw, bloody arm reaching around the tombstone.

Forgetting the laughter that had fluttered from the belfry of the red church.

The sheriff finally went away, and they had rolled Ronnie to the operating room. Then came the needle and the mask and the wide thoughts and the darkness.

"How are you feeling, honey?"

He looked at his mom. Her hair was wilted and stringy, a dull chestnut color. She looked about a hundred and twelve, older even than Mama Bet McFall, the crazy woman who lived up the road from the Day farm.

"Better," he whispered, and the air of his voice scraped his throat as it passed.

The door opened again and Ronnie craned his neck. The doctor was whistling an uneven tune through the scrub brush of his mustache. Ronnie would bet money that it was a Michael Bolton song. Or maybe something even lamer. Ronnie was almost glad that his nose was clogged. He would have bet double-or-nothing that the man was wearing some sissy cologne. He flopped his heavy head back on the pillows.

"I heard you had a little episode," the doctor said.

Episode? Was that the medical term for vomiting up fingers?

"I'm okay now," Ronnie said in a wheeze, mainly because the doctor was leaning over and reaching for his nose. And even though the painkiller was still dumbing him down, he was smart enough to know that being touched there would hurt like heck. Even through the molasses that encased his brain.

The doctor backed away at the last moment. "The packing looks like it's still in place where the break occurred. I don't think any harm was done."

Nope. No harm at all to YOU, was there, Mr. Mustache?

"We could always roll him back into the OR and pack some more gauze up there," the doctor said to his parents, as if Ronnie weren't even in the room.

"What do you think?" Mom turned another shade closer to invisibility.

"I believe he's okay," the doctor said, fingering his mustache. "In fact, I'd say you could go ahead and take him home. Call me next week and we'll schedule a time to take the stitches out."

Dad nodded dumbly. Mom worked at the gnawed skin of her fingers.

Ronnie was eager to go home. By the time the nurse showed up with a fake smile and a wheelchair, he was sitting up in bed, feeling dizzy but no longer nauseated. As the nurse wheeled him to the elevators, he was floating away again. The outside air tasted strange and thick.

Ronnie was surprised to see that the sun was setting. He felt as if years had passed, not hours, since he'd fallen. Pinkish gray clouds wreathed the horizon above the dark mountains.

Mom had pulled her big black Coupe De Ville by the hospital doors. Dad eased him into the backseat and they were on their way home. They had gone about two miles when Ronnie remembered Tim.

"Where's Tim?" he managed to ask. He was sleepy again, a molasses-head.

"At Donna's. They went back to the graveyard to find his glasses."

So Tim had survived the encounter at the red church. The Encounter. Sounded like a title for a cheesy monster movie. Whatever. His thoughts were getting wide again.

He wanted to be asleep by the time they drove past the red church.

He was.

~

"Didn't see nothing," Lester Matheson said. His face was crooked from decades of chewing his tobacco in the same cheek. He ground his teeth sideways, showing the dark mass inside his mouth, occasionally flicking it more firmly into place with his tongue.

"Last night, either?" Sheriff Littlefield turned from the man's smacking habit and looked out over the rolling meadows. A herd of cows dotted the ridge, all pointed in the same direction. Like their owner, they also chewed mindlessly, not caring what dribbled out of their mouths.

"No, ain't seen nothing up at the red church in a long time. Course, kids go up there to mess around from time to time. Always have."

Littlefield nodded. "Yeah. Ever think of posting a 'No Trespassing' sign?"

"That would only draw twice as many. I'd never keep nothing out there that I couldn't afford to get stolen."

Littlefield shifted his weight from one foot to another and a porch board groaned. The Mathesons lived in a board-and-batten house on the edge of two hundred acres of land. Even Lester's barns seemed better built than the house. It was roofed with cheap linoleum sheeting that had visible patches in the material. The windows were large single panes fixed with gray strips of wood. The air coming from the open front door was stale and cool, like that of a tomb.

The sun was disappearing into the angle where Buckhorn Mountain slid down to the base of Piney Top. The air was moist with the waiting dew. Pigs snorted from their wooden stalls beside the larger of Lester's two barns. Crickets had taken up their night noises, and the aroma of cow manure made Littlefield almost nostalgic for his own childhood farm days. "Have you ever seen Boonie hanging around the graveyard?"

Lester scratched his bulbous head that gleamed even in the fading light. His hand was knotted from a life of work, thick with blue veins and constellations of age spots. "Well, I found him in the red church one time, passed out in the straw. I just let him sleep it off. As long as he didn't smoke in there, he couldn't really hurt nothing."

"Have you noticed anything unusual around here?"

"Depends on what you mean by 'unusual.' The church has always been mighty unusual. But I don't have to tell you that, do I?"

"I'm not interested in ghost stories," Littlefield lied.

Lester emitted a gurgling laugh and leaned back in his rocker. "Fine, Sheriff. Whatever you say. And I guess Boonie just happened to get killed in one of them gang wars or something."

"Perry Hoyle thinks it was a mountain lion."

Lester laughed again, then shot a stream of black juice into the yard. "Or maybe it was Bigfoot. Used to be a lot of mountain lions in these parts, all right. Back in the thirties and forties, they were thick as flies. They'd come down out of the hills of a night and take a calf or a chicken, once in a while a dog. But they're deader than four o'clock in the morning now."

Lester was a hunter. Littlefield wasn't, these days. "When's the last time you saw one?" the sheriff asked.

"Nineteen sixty-three. I remember because everybody was just getting over the Kennedy mess. I took up yonder to Buckhorn"—he waved a gnarled hand at the darkening mountain—"because somebody said they'd seen a six-point buck. I set up a little stand at a crossing trail and waited. My stand was twenty feet up a tree, covered with canvas and cut branches. Moon come out, so I decided to stay some after dark, even though it was colder than a witch's heart.

"I heard a twig snap and got my rifle shouldered as smooth as you please. We didn't mess with scopes and such back in them days. Just pointed and shot. So I was looking down the barrel when something big stepped in the sights. Even in the bad light, I could see its gold fur. And two shiny green eyes was looking right back up the barrel at me."

Lester drained his excess juice off the side of the porch. The old man paused for dramatic effect. People still passed down stories in these parts. The front porch was Lester's stage, and they both knew his audience was duty-bound to stay.

The sheriff obliged. "You shot him," he said, even though he knew that wouldn't have made a satisfactory ending to the tale.

Lester waited another ten seconds, five seconds longer than the ritual called for. "About did. I knew what he was right off, even though his fur was about the same color as a deer's. It was the eyes, see? Deer eyes don't glow. They just sop up light like a scratch biscuit draws gravy."

"What happened next?"

"He just kind of stared back at me. Damnedest thing I ever saw. Looking at me like I was an equal, or maybe not even that. Like I was a mosquito buzzing around his head. He drew his mouth open like he was going to snarl, and his whiskers flashed in the moonlight. And I couldn't pull the trigger."

"Scared?" Littlefield asked, hoping Lester wasn't insulted. But Lester seemed to have forgotten the sheriff as he stared off at the mountain.

"In a way I was, but that's not the reason I didn't pull the trigger. There was something about him, something in the eyes, that was more than animal. You might think I'm crazy, and you probably wouldn't be too far wrong, but that cat knew what I was thinking. It knew I wouldn't pull the trigger. After maybe half a minute of us staring each other down, he slipped into the woods, his long tail twitching like he was laughing to hisself. Like I was a big ball of yarn he'd played with and gotten tired of."

The sun had slipped behind the horizon now, and Littlefield couldn't read Lester's expression in the darkness. All he could see was the crooked shape of the farmer's face.

"I was frozen, and not just from the chill, either," Lester continued. "When I finally let out a breath, it made a mist in front of my face. I was sweating like I was baling hay and racing a rainstorm. I strained my ears for any little sound, even though I knew the cat was gone."

Littlefield had been standing more or less at parade rest, a habit he had when he was on official business, even around people he knew. Now he let his shoulders droop slightly and leaned against the porch rail. As a youngster, he'd hunted at night himself. He could easily imagine Lester in the tree, muscles taut, ears picking up the slight scurry of a chipmunk or the whispering wings of a nighthawk. Like any good storyteller, Lester had put the sheriff in another place and time.

"You're probably wondering why I'm going on so about this mountain lion," Lester said. "You're asking yourself what that's got to do with Boonie Houck's death."

"That mountain lion would have died a natural death long ago."

Lester said nothing. There was a clattering inside the house, then the rusty skree of the storm door opening. Lester's wife Vivian came out on the porch. Her hair was in a bun, tied up with a scarf. She had a slight hump in her back, a counterpart to her husband's twisted face. The interior light cast her odd shadow across the yard.

"You done yapping the Sheriff's ear off?" she asked, her voice trembling and thin. She must have been a little hard of hearing, because she talked louder than necessary.

"Ain't hardly started yet," Lester said, not rising from his rocker. "Now get on back in the house before I throw a shoe at you."

"You do and I'll put vinegar in your denture glass."

Lester chuckled. "I love you, too, honey."

"You going to invite the sheriff in for pie?"

"No, thank you, ma'am," Littlefield said, bowing a little in graciousness. "I've got a few other people to talk to tonight."

"Well, don't listen too much to this old fool. He lies like a cheap rug."

"I'll take that under advisement."

The door sprang closed. The darkness sprang just as abruptly. "So you haven't seen a mountain lion since then?" the sheriff asked Lester.

"Nope."

"And you're sure you haven't seen anything strange around the red church?"

"Haven't seen nothing. Heard something, though."

"Heard something?"

"Last night, would've been about three o'clock. You don't sleep too well when you get to be my age. Always up and down for some reason. So when I heard them, I figured it was one of those in-between dreams. You know, right before you fall asleep and your real thoughts are mixing in with the nonsense?"

Littlefield nodded, then realized the old man couldn't see his face. "Yeah. What did you hear, or think you heard?"

Littlefield glanced at his watch, about to chalk up his time spent talking to Lester as a waste. The luminous dial showed that it was nearly nine o'clock.

"Bells," the old man said in a near-whisper.

"Bells?" Littlefield repeated, though he'd plainly heard the man.

"Real soft and faint, but a bell's a bell. Ain't no mistaking that sound."

"I hate to tell you this, Lester, but we both know that the red church has the only bell around here. And even if some kids were messing around there last night, there's no bell rope."

"And we both know why there ain't no bell rope. But I'm just telling you what I heard, that's all. I don't expect you to put much stock in an old man's words."

The ghost stories. Some families had passed them down until they'd acquired a mythic truth that had even more power than fact. Littlefield wasn't ready to write Death by supernatural causes on Boonie's incident report. Since Samuel had died, the sheriff had spent most of his life trying to convince himself that supernatural occurrences didn't occur.

Just the facts, ma'am, Littlefield told himself, hearing the words in Jack Webb's voice from the old Dragnet television show.

"There were no recent footprints around the church. No sign of disturbances inside the church, either," Littlefield said, piling up the evidence as if to convince himself along with Lester.

"I bet there wasn't no mountain lion paw-prints, either, was there?"

This time, Littlefield initiated the ten-second silence. "Not that we've found yet."

Lester gave his liquid laugh.

Littlefield's head filled with warm anger. "If you believe so much in the stories, why did you buy the red church in the first place?"

"Because I got it for a song. But it won't be my problem no more."

"Why not?"

"Selling it. One of the McFall boys came by the other day. You know, the one that everybody said didn't act like regular folks? The one that got beat near to a pulp behind the football bleachers one night?"

"Yeah. Archer McFall." Littlefield had been a young deputy then, on foot patrol at the football game. Archer ended up in the hospital for a week. No arrests were made, even though Littlefield had seen two or three punks rubbing their hands as if their knuckles were sore. Of course, nobody pressed the case too much. Archer was a McFall, after all, and the oddest of the bunch.

"Well, he says he went off to California and made good, working in religion and such. And now he's moving back to the area and wants to settle here."

"I'll be damned."

"Me, too. And when he offered me two hundred thousand dollars for the red church and a dozen acres of mostly scrub pine and graveyard, I had to bite my lip to keep from grinning like a possum. Supposed to go in tomorrow and sign the papers at the lawyer's office."

"Why the red church, if he's got that kind of money?" Littlefield asked, even though he was pretty sure he already knew.

"That property started off in the McFall family. They're the ones who donated the land for the church in the first place. Remember Wendell McFall?"

Coincidences. Littlefield didn't like coincidences. He liked cause-and-effect. That's what solved cases. "That's a lot of money."

"Couldn't say no to it. But I had a funny feeling that he would have offered more if I had asked. But he knew I wouldn't. It was like that time with the mountain lion, like he was staring me down, like he knew what I was thinking."

"I guess if he's a successful businessman, then he's had a lot of practice at negotiating."

"Reckon so," Lester said, unconvinced. He stood with a creaking that might have been either his joints or the rocker's wooden slats. "It's time to be putting up the cows."

"And I'd best finish my rounds. I appreciate your time, Lester."

"Sure. Come on back anytime. And next time, plan on staying for a piece of pie."

"I'll do that."

As Littlefield started the Trooper, he couldn't help thinking about the part of Lester's story that had gone untold. The part about why a bell rope no longer hung in the red church, and why Archer McFall would want to buy back the old family birthright.

He shook his head and went down the driveway, gravel crackling under his wheels.

Copyright information
© Scott Nicholson, 2002, 2011
The Red Church was first published in 2002, and is reprinted by Haunted Computer Books (2009):
Learn more about The Red Church and the real Appalachian church that inspired the novel, and buy now: The Red Church

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

The Disappeared: A Retrieval Artist Novel

New York Times bestselling author Orson Scott Card calls the Retrieval Artist series "some of the best science fiction ever written." Io9 says Miles Flint is one of "the top ten greatest science fiction detectives of all time." The Disappeared is Flint's very first adventure, the story that turns him from a police detective in the Armstrong Dome on the Moon into a Retrieval Artist.

In a universe where humans and aliens have formed a loose government called the Earth Alliance, treaties guarantee that humans are subject to alien laws when on alien soil. But alien laws often make no sense, and the punishments vary from loss of life to loss of a first-born child.

Now three cases have collided: a stolen spaceyacht filled with dead bodies, two kidnapped human children, and a human woman on the run, trying to Disappear to avoid alien prosecution. Flint must enforce the law—giving the children to aliens, solving the murders, and arresting the woman for trying to save her own life. But how is a man supposed to enforce laws that are unjust? How can he sacrifice innocents to a system he's not sure he believes in? How can Miles Flint do the right thing in a universe where the right thing is very, very wrong?

"Rusch does a superb job of making the Retrieval Artist books work as fully satisfying standalone mysteries and as installments in a gripping saga full of love, loss, grief, hope, adventure, and discovery. It is also some of the best science fiction ever written."
—New York Times bestselling author Orson Scott Card

Buy now: The Disappeared by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

The Disappeared: A Retrieval Artist Novel by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

One

She had to leave everything behind.

Ekaterina Maakestad stood in the bedroom of her Queen Anne home, the ancient Victorian houses of San Francisco's oldest section visible through her vintage windows, and clutched her hands together. She had made the bed that morning as if nothing were wrong. The quilt, folded at the bottom, waiting for someone to pull it up for warmth, had been made by her great-great-grandmother, a woman she dimly remembered. The rocking chair in the corner had rocked generations of Maakestads. Her mother had called it the nursing chair because so many women had sat in it, nursing their babies.

Ekaterina would never get the chance to do that. She had no idea what would happen to it, or to all the heirloom jewelry in the downstairs safe, or to the photographs, taken so long ago they were collectors' items to most people but to her represented family, people she was connected to through blood, common features, and passionate dreams.

She was the last of the Maakestad line. No siblings or cousins to take all of this. Her parents were long gone, and so were her grandparents. When she set up this house, after she had gotten back from Revnata, the human colony in Rev territory, she had planned to raise her own children here.

Downstairs, a door opened and she froze, waiting for House to announce the presence of a guest. But House wouldn't. She had shut off the security system, just as she had been instructed to do.

She twisted the engagement ring on her left hand, the antique diamond winking in the artificial light. She was supposed to take the ring off, but she couldn't bring herself to do so. She would wait until the very last minute, then hand the ring over. If she left it behind, everyone would know she had left voluntarily.

"Kat?" Simon. He wasn't supposed to be here.

She swallowed hard, feeling a lump in her throat.

"Kat, you okay? The system's off."

"I know." Her voice sounded normal. Amazing she could do that, given the way her heart pounded and her breath came in shallow gasps.

She had to get him out of here and quickly. He couldn't be here when they arrived, or he would lose everything too.

The stairs creaked. He was coming up to see her.

"I'll be right down!" she called. She didn't want him to come upstairs, didn't want to see him here one last time.

With her right hand, she smoothed her blond hair. Then she squared her shoulders and put on her courtroom face. She'd been distracted and busy in front of Simon before. He might think that was what was happening now.

She left the bedroom and started down the stairs, making herself breathe evenly. For the last week, she hadn't seen him—pleading work, then making up travel, and a difficult court case. She had been trying to avoid this moment all along.

As she reached the first landing, the stairs curved, and she could see him, standing in the entry. Simon wasn't a handsome man. He didn't use enhancements—didn't like them on himself or anyone. As a result, his hair was thinning on top, and he was pudgy despite the exercise he got.

But his face had laugh lines. Instead of cosmetic good looks, Simon had an appealing rumpled quality, like an old favorite old shirt or a quilt that had rested on the edge of the bed for more than a hundred years.

He smiled at her, his dark eyes twinkling. "I've missed you."

Her breath caught, but she made herself smile back. "I've missed you too."

He was holding flowers, a large bouquet of purple lilacs, their scent rising up to greet her.

"I was just going to leave this," he said. "I figured as busy as you were, you might appreciate something pretty to come home to."

He had House's security combination, just like she had his. They had exchanged the codes three months ago, the same night they got engaged. She could still remember the feelings she had that night. The hope, the possibility. The sense that she actually had a future.

"They're wonderful," she said.

He waited for her to get to the bottom of the stairs, then he handed her the bouquet. Beneath the greenery, her hands found a cool vase, a bubble chip embedded in the glass keeping the water's temperature constant.

She buried her face in the flowers, glad for the momentary camouflage. She had no idea when she would see flowers again.

"Thank you," she said, her voice trembling. She turned away, made herself put the flowers on the table she kept beneath the gilt-edged mirror in her entry.

Simon slipped his hands around her waist. "You all right?"

She wanted to lean against him, to tell him the truth, to let him share all of this—the fears, the uncertainty. But she didn't dare. He couldn't know anything.

"I'm tired," she said, and she wasn't lying. She hadn't slept in the past eight days.

"Big case?"

She nodded. "Difficult one."

"Let me know when you're able to talk about it."

She could see his familiar face in the mirror beside her strained one. Even when she tried to look normal, she couldn't. The bags beneath her eyes hadn't been there a month ago. Neither had the worry lines beside her mouth.

He watched her watch herself, and she could tell from the set of his jaw, the slight crease on his forehead, that he was seeing more than he should have been.

"This case is tearing you apart," he said softly.

"Some cases do that."

"I don't like it."

She nodded and turned in his arms, trying to memorize the feel of him, the comfort he gave her, comfort that would soon be gone. "I have to meet a client," she said.

"I'll take you."

"No." She made herself smile again, wondering if the expression looked as fake as it felt. "I need a little time alone before I go, to regroup."

He caressed her cheek with the back of his hand, then kissed her. She lingered a moment too long, caught between the urge to cling and the necessity of pushing him away.

"I love you," she said as she ended the kiss.

"I love you too." He smiled. "There's a spa down in the L.A. basin. It's supposed to be the absolute best. I'll take you there when this is all over."

"Sounds good," she said, making no promises. She couldn't bear to make another false promise.

He still didn't move away. She resisted the urge to look at the two-hundred-year-old clock that sat on the living room mantel.

"Kat," he said. "You need time away. Maybe we could meet after you see your client and—"

"No," she said. "Early court date."

He stepped back from her and she realized she sounded abrupt. But he had to leave. She had to get him out and quickly.

"I'm sorry, Simon," she said. "But I really need the time—"

"I know." His smile was small. She had stung him, and hadn't meant to. "Call me?"

"As soon as I can."

He nodded, then headed for the door. "Turn your system back on."

"I will," she said as he pulled the door open. Fog had rolled in from the Bay, leaving the air chill. "Thank you for the flowers."

"They were supposed to brighten the day," he said, raising his hands toward the grayness.

"They have." She watched as he walked down the sidewalk toward his aircar, hovering the regulation half foot above the pavement. No flying vehicles were allowed in Nob Hill because they would destroy the view, the impression that the past was here, so close that it would take very little effort to touch it.

She closed the door before he got into his car, so that she wouldn't have to watch him drive away. Her hand lingered over the security system. One command, and it would be on again. She would be safe within her own home.

If only it were that simple.

The scent of the lilacs overpowered her. She stepped away from the door and stopped in front of the mirror again. Just her reflected there now. Her and a bouquet of flowers she wouldn't get to enjoy, a bouquet she would never forget.

She twisted her engagement ring. It had always been loose. Even though she meant to have it fitted, she never did. Perhaps she had known, deep down, that this day would come. Perhaps she'd felt, ever since she'd come to Earth, that she'd been living on borrowed time.

The ring slipped off easily. She stared at it for a moment, at the promises it held, promises it would never keep, and then she dropped it into the vase. Someone would find it. Not right away, but soon enough that it wouldn't get lost.

Maybe Simon would be able to sell it, get his money back. Or maybe he would keep it as a tangible memory of what had been, the way she kept her family heirlooms.

She winced.

Something scuffled outside the door—the sound of a foot against the stone stoop, a familiar sound, one she would never hear again.

Her heart leaped, hoping it was Simon, even though she knew it wasn't. As the brass doorknob turned, she reached into the bouquet and pulled some petals off the nearest lilac plume. She shoved them in her pocket, hoping they would dry the way petals did when pressed into a book.

Then the door opened and a man she had never seen before stepped inside. He was over six feet tall, broad-shouldered and muscular. His skin was a chocolate brown, his eyes slightly flat, the way eyes got when they'd been enhanced too many times.

"Is it true," he said, just like he was supposed to, "that this house survived the 1906 earthquake?"

"No." She paused, wishing she could stop there, wishing she could say no to all of this. But she continued, using the coded phrase she had invented for just this moment. "The house was built the year after."

He nodded. "You're awfully close to the door."

"A friend stopped by."

Somehow, the expression in his eyes grew flatter. "Is the friend gone?"

"Yes," she said, hoping it was true.

The man studied her, as if he could tell if she were lying just by staring at her. Then he touched the back of his hand. Until that moment, she hadn't seen the chips dotting his skin like freckles—they matched so perfectly.

"Back door," he said, and she knew he was using his link to speak to someone outside.

He took her hand. His fingers were rough, callused. Simon's hands had no calluses at all.

"Is everything in its place?" the man asked.

She nodded.

"Anyone expecting you tonight?"

"No," she said.

"Good." He tugged her through her own kitchen, past the fresh groceries she had purchased just that morning, past the half-empty coffee cup she'd left on the table.

The back door was open. She shook her hand free and stepped out. The fog was thicker than it had been when Simon left, and colder too. She couldn't see the vehicle waiting in the alley. She couldn't even see the alley. She was taking her first steps on a journey that would make her one of the Disappeared, and she could not see where she was going.

How appropriate. Because she had no idea how or where she was going to end up.

~

Jamal sampled the spaghetti sauce. The reconstituted beef gave it a chemical taste. He added some crushed red pepper, then tried another spoonful, and sighed. The beef was still the dominant flavor.

He set the spoon on the spoon rest and wiped his hands on a towel. The tiny kitchen smelled of garlic and tomato sauce. He'd set the table with the china Dylani had brought from Earth and their two precious wine glasses.

Not that they had anything to celebrate tonight. They hadn't had anything to celebrate for a long time. No real highs, no real lows.

Jamal liked it that way—the consistency of everyday routine. Sometimes he broke the routine by setting the table with wineglasses, and sometimes he let the routine govern them. He didn't want any more change.

There had been enough change in his life.

Dylani came out of their bedroom, her bare feet leaving tiny prints on the baked mud floor. The house was Moon adobe, made from Moon dust plastered over a permaplastic frame. Cheap, but all they could afford.

Dylani's hair was pulled away from her narrow face, her pale gray eyes red-rimmed, like they always were when she got off of work. Her fingertips were stained black from her work on the dome. No matter how much she scrubbed, they no longer came clean.

"He's sleeping," she said, and she sounded disappointed. Their son, Ennis, was usually asleep when she got home from work. Jamal planned it that way—he liked a bit of time alone with his wife. Besides, she needed time to decompress before she settled into her evening ritual.

She was one of the dome engineers. Although the position sounded important, it wasn't. She was still entry level, coping with clogs in the filtration systems and damage outsiders did near the high-speed train station.

If she wanted to advance, she would have to wait years. Engineers didn't retire in Gagarin Dome, nor did they move to other Moon colonies. In other colonies, the domes were treated like streets or government buildings—something to be maintained, not something to be enhanced. But Gagarin's governing board believed the dome was a priority, so engineers were always working on the cutting edge of dome technology, rather than rebuilding an outdated system.

"How was he?" Dylani walked to the stove and sniffed the sauce. Spaghetti was one of her favorite meals. One day, Jamal would cook it for her properly, with fresh ingredients. One day, when they could afford it.

"The usual," Jamal said, placing the bread he'd bought in the center of the table. The glasses would hold bottled water, but it was dear enough to be wine—they would enjoy the water no less.

Dylani gave him a fond smile. "The usual isn't a good enough answer. I want to hear everything he did today. Every smile, every frown. If I can't stay home with him, I at least want to hear about him."

Ever since they found out Dylani was pregnant, Ennis had become the center of their world—and the heart of Jamal's nightmares. He was smothering the boy and he knew it. Ennis was ten months now—the age when a child learned to speak and walk—and he was beginning to understand that he was a person in his own right.

Jamal had read the parenting literature. He knew he should encourage the boy's individuality. But he didn't want to. He wanted Ennis beside him always, in his sight, in his care.

Dylani understood Jamal's attitude, but sometimes he could feel her disapproval. She had been tolerant of his paranoia—amazingly tolerant considering she had no idea as to the root cause of it. She thought his paranoia stemmed from first-child jitters, instead of a real worry for Ennis's safety.

Jamal wasn't sure what he would do when Ennis had to go to school. In Gagarin, home schooling was not an option. Children had to learn to interact with others—the governing board had made that law almost a hundred years ago, and despite all the challenges to it, the law still stood.

Someday Jamal would have to trust his boy to others—and he wasn't sure he could do it.

"So?" Dylani asked.

Jamal smiled. "He's trying to teach Mr. Biscuit to fly."

Mr. Biscuit was Ennis's stuffed dog. Dylani's parents had sent the dog as a present from Earth. They also sent some children's vids—flats because Dylani believed Ennis was too young to understand the difference between holographic performers and real people.

Ennis's favorite vid was about a little boy who learned how to fly.

"How's Mr. Biscuit taking this?" Dylani asked.

"I'm not sure," Jamal said. "He's not damaged yet, but a few more encounters with the wall might change that."

Dylani chuckled.

The boiling pot beeped. The noodles were done. Jamal put the pot in the sink, pressed the drain button, and the water poured out of the pot's bottom into the recycler.

"Hungry?" he asked.

She nodded.

"Long day?"

"Two breakdowns in dome security." She grabbed a plate and brought it to the sink. "Every available person worked on repairs."

Jamal felt a shiver run down his back. "I've never heard of that."

"It happens," she said. "Sometimes the jobs are so big—"

"No," he said. "The breakdown in security."

She gave him a tolerant smile. "I usually don't mention it. The dome doors go off-line a lot, particularly near the space port. I think it has something to do with the commands issued by the high-speed trains coming in from the north, but no one will listen to me. I'm too junior. Maybe in my off time…"

But Jamal stopped listening. Another shiver ran down his back. It wasn't Dylani's news that was making him uneasy. The kitchen was actually cold and it shouldn't have been. Cooking in such a small space usually made the temperature rise, not lower.

He went to the kitchen door. Closed and latched.

"…would result in a promotion," Dylani was saying. Then she frowned. "Jamal?"

"Keep talking," he said.

But she didn't. Her lips became a thin line. He recognized the look. She hated it when he did this, thought his paranoia was reaching new heights.

Maybe it was. He always felt stupid after moments like this, when he realized that Ennis was safe in his bed and nothing was wrong.

But that didn't stop him from prowling through the house, searching for the source of the chill. He'd never forgive himself if something happened and he didn't check.

"Jamal."

He could hear the annoyance in Dylani's voice, but he ignored it, walking past her into the narrow hallway between the kitchen and the living room. He turned right, toward their bedroom.

It was dark like Dylani had left it, but there was a light at the very end of the hall. In Ennis's room.

Jamal never left a light on in Ennis's room. The boy napped in the dark. Studies had shown that children who slept with lights on became nearsighted, and Jamal wanted his son to have perfect vision.

"Jamal?"

He was running down the hallway now. He couldn't have slowed down if he tried. Dylani might have left the light on, but he doubted it. She and Jamal had discussed the nightlight issue just like they had discussed most things concerning Ennis.

They never left his window open—that was Dylani's choice. She knew how contaminated the air had become inside the dome, and she felt their environmental filter was better than the government's. No open window, no cooler temperatures.

And no light.

He slid into Ennis's room, the pounding of his feet loud enough to wake the baby. Dylani was running after him.

"Jamal!"

The room looked normal, bathed in the quiet light of the lamp he had placed above the changing table. The crib nestled against one corner, the playpen against another. The changing table under the always closed window—which was closed, even now.

But the air was cooler, just like the air outside the house was cooler. Since Ennis was born, they'd spent extra money on heat just to make sure the baby was comfortable. Protected. Safe.

Jamal stopped in front of the crib. He didn't have to look. He could already feel the difference in the room. Someone else had been here, and not long ago. Someone else had been here, and Ennis was not here, not any longer.

Still, he peered down at the mattress where he had placed his son not an hour ago. Ennis's favorite blanket was thrown back, revealing the imprint of his small body. The scents of baby powder and baby sweat mingled into something familiar, something lost.

Mr. Biscuit perched against the crib's corner, his thread eyes empty. The fur on his paw was matted and wet where Ennis had sucked on it, probably as he had fallen asleep. The pacifier that he had yet to grow out of was on the floor, covered in dirt.

"Jamal?" Dylani's voice was soft.

Jamal couldn't turn to her. He couldn't face her. All he could see was the gold bracelet that rested on Ennis's blanket. The bracelet Jamal hadn't seen for a decade. The symbol of his so-called brilliance, a reward for a job well done. He had been so proud of it when he received it, that first night on Korsve. And so happy to leave it behind two years later.

"Oh, my God," Dylani said from the door. "Where is he?"

"I don't know." Jamal's voice shook. He was lying. He tried not to lie to Dylani. Did she know that his voice shook when he lied?

As she came into the room, he snatched the bracelet and hid it in his fist.

"Who would do this?" she asked. She was amazingly calm, given what was happening. But Dylani never panicked. Panicking was his job. "Who would take our baby?"

Jamal slipped the bracelet into his pocket, then put his arms around his wife.

"We need help," she said.

"I know." But he already knew it was hopeless. There was nothing anyone could do.

~

The holovid played at one-tenth normal size in the corner of the space yacht. The actors paced, the sixteenth-century palace looking out of place against the green-and-blue plush chairs beside it. Much as Sara loved this scene—Hamlet's speech to the players—she couldn't concentrate on it. She regretted ordering up Shakespeare. It felt like part of the life she was leaving behind.

Sara wondered if the other two felt as unsettled as she did. But she didn't ask. She didn't really want the answers. The others were in this because of her, and they rarely complained about it. Of course, they didn't have a lot of choice.

She glanced at them. Ruth had flattened her seat into a cot. She was asleep on her back, hands folded on her stomach like a corpse, her curly black hair covering the pillow like a shroud.

Isaac stared at the holovid, but Sara could tell he wasn't really watching it. He bent at his midsection, elbows resting on his thighs, his care-lined features impassive. He'd been like this since they left New Orleans, focused, concentrated, frozen.

The yacht bounced.

Sara stopped the holovid. Space yachts didn't bounce. There was nothing for them to bounce on.

"What the hell was that?" she asked.

Neither Ruth nor Isaac answered. Ruth was still asleep. Isaac hadn't moved.

She got up and pulled up the shade on the nearest portal. Earth mocked her, blue and green viewed through a haze of white. As she stared at her former home, a small oval-shaped ship floated past, so close it nearly brushed against the yacht. Through a tiny portal on the ship's side, she caught a glimpse of a human face. A white circle was stamped beneath the portal. She had seen that symbol before: it was etched lightly on the wall inside the luxurious bathroom off the main cabin.

Her breath caught in her throat. She hit the intercom near the window. "Hey," she said to the cockpit. "What's going on?"

No one answered her. When she took her finger off the intercom, she didn't even hear static.

She shoved Isaac's shoulder. He glared at her.

"I think we're in trouble," she said.

"No kidding."

"I mean it."

She got up and walked through the narrow corridor toward the pilot's quarters and cockpit. The door separating the main area from the crew quarters was large and thick, with a sign that flashed No Entry without Authorization.

This time, she hit the emergency button, which should have brought one of the crew into the back. But the intercom didn't come on and no one moved.

She tried the door, but it was sealed on the other side.

The yacht rocked and dipped. Sara slid toward the wall, slammed into it, and sank to the floor. Seatbelt lights went on all over the cabin.

Ruth had fallen as well. She sat on the floor, rubbing her eyes. Isaac was the only one who stayed in his seat.

The yacht had stabilized.

"What's going on?" Ruth asked.

"That's what I'd like to know," Sara said.

She grabbed one of the metal rungs, placed there for zero-g flight, and tried the door again. It didn't open.

"Isaac," she said, "can you override this thing?"

"Names," he cautioned.

She made a rude noise. "As if it matters."

"It matters. They said it mattered from the moment we left Earth—"

The yacht shook, and Sara smelled something sharp, almost like smoke, but more peppery.

"Isaac," she said again.

He grabbed the rungs and walked toward her, his feet slipping on the tilted floor. Ruth pulled herself into her chair, her face pale, eyes huge. Sara had only seen her look like that once before—when they'd seen Ilanas's body in the newsvids, sprawled across the floor of their rented apartment in the French Quarter.

Isaac had reached Sara's side. He was tinkering with the control panel beside the door. "Cheap-ass stuff," he said. "You'd think on a luxury cruiser, they'd have up-to-date security."

The door clicked and Isaac pushed it open.

Sweat ran down Sara's back, even though the yacht hadn't changed temperature. The smell had grown worse, and there was a pounding coming from the emergency exit just inside the door.

Isaac bit his lower lip.

"Hello?" Sara called. Her voice didn't echo, but she could feel the emptiness around her. There was no one in the galley, and the security guard who was supposed to be sitting near the cockpit wasn't there.

Isaac stayed by the emergency exit. He was studying that control panel. Ruth had crawled across her cot, and was staring out the panel on her side of the ship. Her hands were shaking.

Sara turned her back on them. She went inside the cockpit—and froze.

It was empty. Red lights blinked on the control panels. The ship was on autopilot, and both of its escape pods had been launched. A red line had formed on a diagram of the ship, the line covering the emergency exit where the noise had come from. More red illuminated the back of the ship.

She punched vocal controls. They had been shut off—which explained why silence had greeted her when she tried the intercom, when she hit the emergency switch, even when she had touched the sealed door.

Warning, the ship's computer said. Engines disabled. Breach in airlock one. Intruder alert.

Sara sat in the pilot's chair. It had been years since she'd tried to fly a ship and she'd never operated anything this sophisticated. She had to focus.

Warning.

First she had to bring the controls back online. Most of them had been shut off from the inside. She didn't want to think about what that meant. Not now.

Intruder alert.

She needed visuals. She opened the ports around her, and then wished she hadn't.

A large white ship hovered just outside her view, its pitted hull and cone-shaped configuration sending a chill through her heart.

The Disty had found her—and they were about to break in.

Two

Miles Flint stepped inside the crew tunnel leading to the docks. He thought he had escaped this place. Two months ago, he'd been promoted to detective—a job that would allow him to remain inside Armstrong's dome and solve crimes, rather than arrive in the Port at 0600 and launch at 0645, to play traffic cop in the Moon's orbit.

Of course as a space cop he'd seen a few detectives in the Port, but only rarely. Most crimes found by traffic cops had clear perpetrators. Those that didn't were referred to Headquarters and usually the crimes were solved without the detective ever setting foot in the Port.

Just his bad luck that he would get a case that required his presence here. He suspected that he and his partner, Noelle DeRicci, had been chosen specifically for this one, primarily because he knew how the Port worked.

DeRicci walked several meters ahead of him. She was a short, muscular woman who had been a detective for more than twenty years. Her dark hair, shot with gray, remained its natural color because she felt people gave more respect to older detectives than younger. She hadn't paid for other cosmetic enhancements either, for the very same reason.

She scanned the sheet on her hand-held as she walked. Flint wondered how she could see. The old colonial lighting was dim at best, the energy cells nearly tapped out. The light was yellowish-gray, giving the tunnels the look of perpetual twilight.

The crew tunnels were one of the few original underground structures left. They'd been reinforced after a few cave-ins had convinced Armstrong's governor to spend the funds to prevent more lawsuits.

The public tunnels leading from the Port to the dome were newer—if something that had been around for fifty years could be considered new. They were wider and safer, at least, built to the code finally developed for underground structures once Armstrong realized it couldn't expand horizontally any more.

But cops weren't allowed in the public areas, unless they were acting as security. Armstrong made a large chunk of its income off tourists who came to see the Moon's history, wrapped in one place. Armstrong not only boasted a large number of original colonial structures—the first ever built on the Moon—it was also the site of the first lunar landing, made when human beings wore bulky white suits and jettisoned into space in a capsule attached to a bomb.

Flint took several long strides to catch up to DeRicci. "What've we got?"

She gave him a sideways look. He recognized the contempt. She'd been trying to intimidate him from the moment they became partners. For some reason, she seemed to think intimidation would work.

It was probably his face. He looked younger than he was. His ex-wife used to say that she sometimes thought she had married an overgrown baby. In the early years of their marriage, she'd said that fondly, as if she loved the way he looked. That horrible last year, she'd spit out the words, angry that the grief which had consumed both of them and devoured their marriage hadn't left its mark on his face.

"Well?" he asked, knowing DeRicci wouldn't answer him if he didn't press.

"Won't know what we have until HazMat's done," she said and clicked her hand-held closed.

He already knew why they had come here. A ship with bodies aboard had arrived at the Port sometime that afternoon. But he knew there had to be more information than that. He used to tow disabled ships as part of his space-cop duties. Before ships got towed, the space cops entered, and usually their reports were sent on to the investigative team if one was needed.

He would find out what happened soon enough. They were heading toward Terminal 4, where derelict and abandoned ships were usually towed. If the ship had a living crew member or a recognizable registration, it went to Terminal 16. Ships whose owners were suspected of criminal activity went to Terminal 5, and ships carrying illegal cargo went to Terminal 6.

The tunnel opened into the office ring. Square offices, walled off by clear plastic, clustered against the wall. This section of each terminal looked the same—tiny desks inside tiny rooms, littered with notices, signs, and electronic warnings. A few of the desks had their own built-in system—again on the theory that direct uplinks were untrustworthy—but most of the Command/Control center was on the upper levels.

Signs pointed the various directions that the crews went, many to clock in, others to find their uniforms before beginning shift. Also down these corridors were interrogation rooms, holding cells, and the required link to customs. Flint had taken several illegals into that link, never to see them again.

The main corridor went to the terminal proper. Each terminal had its own dome that opened whenever a ship needed to dock. More tunnels led to the docks, only these tunnels were open, made of clear plastic just like the offices were. They had their own environmental controls, which could be shut off at a moment's notice. The tunnel doors could also slam closed with a single command from Terminal 4's tower—a security precaution that Flint had only had to use once in his eight-year stint on Traffic.

Two uniformed space cops were waiting at the edge of the docks. DeRicci touched the chip that made the shield on her collar flash.

"Which way?" she asked them, but Flint didn't wait for their answer. He could see which dock held the ship. The HazMat crew's orange warning lights covered the tunnel, warning Control not to set any ship down in a dock nearby until HazMat had cleared the area.

As Flint walked toward the affected tunnel, he scanned the far end, searching for the ship. He had to squint to see it, small against the tunnel's opening.

A space yacht. Its design—narrow and pointed—made it of Earth construction. It was a fairly new ship, built for speed not luxury, certainly not the kind of vehicle that was usually abandoned or left derelict in the Moon's orbit.

In fact, he couldn't remember the last time he had seen a yacht in Terminal 4. Sometimes yachts were used for contraband, and sometimes they were used to transport illegals, but never did they arrive here, where someone had to trace their registration to see who had abandoned them. Yachts were stolen and often resold, but never abandoned. They were too valuable for that.

Two more space cops stood near the tunnel entrance, hands behind their backs, staring straight ahead. Flint recognized the posture. They were guarding the entrance, a duty given only to the cops who found the vessel. When a space cop was in charge of a vessel, that charge didn't end until HazMat was done and the vessel was released to the appropriate authority.

The cops were both male, and at least ten years younger than Flint. He introduced himself, pressed the chip that illuminated his badge, and said, "I take it you two towed in the vessel."

The cop closest to him, whose hollow cheeks and muscles spoke of deliberate malnourishment in the name of exercise, nodded.

"What've we got?" Flint asked.

"It's in the report," the other cop said. He was older, more experienced. His almond-shaped gray eyes had a flat expression, as if he resented talking to a detective.

Flint peered at the cop's last name, sewn across the pocket of his uniform's jacket. Raifey. "I didn't have a chance to read the report. Why don't you fill me in?"

The cops glanced at each other, then looked away. Neither of them, it seemed, wanted to say anything.

This was going to be harder than Flint thought. "Listen," he said. "I was just transferred from Traffic to Armstrong proper. My partner doesn't like to share and, frankly, I don't think she'll understand this one anyway. Before she gets here, tell me what's different, so that I can—"

"The bodies," said the first cop. The name above his pocket read McMullen. "I've never seen anything like them."

Flint glanced at Raifey. McMullen's words were a cue for the more experienced partner to comment on the younger partner's naïveté. But Raifey didn't. He didn't say anything at all.

"What about the bodies?" Flint asked.

"How anyone could do that—" McMullen started, but Raifey held up his hand.

"Regulations," he said, more to his partner than Flint. "Let the detective make his own determination."

Technically, Raifey was right, but often space cops told detectives what to see, what to find.

"Murder?" Flint said.

McMullen made a choking sound and turned away. Raifey's mouth curved in a slight smile. "Why else would they call you?"

There were a thousand reasons. Theft, illegal cargo, damage to the ship, sign of illegals in an abandoned vessel. But Flint chose to ignore the belligerence.

"What else?" He continued to look at Raifey, not McMullen. Flint wanted to prove to the older cop that they could work together if they had to.

Raifey met his gaze for a long moment, as if measuring him. Behind him, Flint heard DeRicci's boot heels clicking on the metal floor.

Raifey's gaze flicked over Flint's shoulder, obviously taking in DeRicci's approach. Then Raifey leaned forward and lowered his voice.

"The bodies weren't that unusual," he said. "You'll recognize it. It was the autopilot. Someone set that yacht on a collision course with the Moon. They should have left the thing to float in space. I would have. But instead, they wanted it here."

Flint nodded. That was unusual. Bodies were found in abandoned vessels all the time, and some of those bodies were murder victims. But usually, they were victims of a failed life support system, inoperative engines, or a lack of fuel. In all of those cases, the ship continued on its regular course or floated when the fuel was gone.

He'd never heard of anyone setting autopilot for a collision course with the Moon itself. Such a course was guaranteed to draw Traffic's attention.

Flint said, "Were they—?"

"HazMat is nearly done." DeRicci had come up behind him, talking over him deliberately. She glared at both space cops, who looked away, their expressions neutral once more.

Flint suppressed a sigh and peered down the tunnel. Sure enough, the HazMat team was coming off the yacht, carrying their gear as they walked. As they moved through the tunnel walls, the orange warning lights turned yellow.

No hazardous materials on board. No lethal biological agents. Normally that meant that the Port crews could process the vessel. But the yellow lights meant that a police investigation was underway. No one could go through that tunnel without the proper authorization.

The space cops stood back as the first members of the HazMat team came out of the tunnel. Their protective gear made them all look like something alien, even though they were all clearly human. It covered them from head to foot like a second skin, obscuring their facial features. The gear provided its own environment. The thick webbing allowed nothing to pass through to the people inside—at least nothing that HazMat had encountered so far.

The team's leader touched a spot on the gear's neck and the facial protection fell away, revealing a middle-aged woman with delicate features. Her gaze met DeRicci's.

"You've got a hell of a mess in there."

"Any ideas?" DeRicci asked.

"I've got plenty of ideas," the HazMat team leader said. "We'll talk when you're done if you want, but I think it's pretty self-explanatory."

DeRicci nodded. "Okay, Miles," she said. "Looks like it's just you and me and three dead—"

"Anything we should watch out for?" Flint asked the team leader, deliberately ignoring DeRicci.

That was the question she should have asked. Sometimes HazMat ruled unidentifiable objects as potentially hazardous, should they be touched in the wrong way or accidentally opened. Technically, HazMat was supposed to warn any team going in of such things, but sometimes—particularly in cases of gruesome death—they focused so strongly on the corpses that they sometimes forgot to warn about the other problems.

The team leader glanced at DeRicci. DeRicci's skin had flushed a deep red. She wasn't used to being overridden by Flint. He'd been courteous to her from the day they'd started working together, suffering her insults and her derision.

But he wasn't about to go on a yacht with three dead bodies on board without asking the proper questions.

"There's nothing suspicious," the team leader said after a moment. "At least as far as we're concerned."

Flint nodded. Then he glanced at DeRicci. She raised her eyebrows at him, both mocking him and telling him to go first. He stepped into the tunnel.

All Port tunnels smelled the same: the cool metallic scent of consistently recycled air, the faint stench of sewage from overflowing ship systems, and the industrial deodorizer that attempted to mask all of those smells. He felt his shoulders relax. He was used to this place.

The tunnel was short. Most of it was permanent, but the shipside end could be extended or retracted depending on need. He stepped past the warning lights and took the small door on the side instead of going straight into the ship. He wanted to examine the exterior first.

As he stepped down, he saw DeRicci sigh heavily. She was only a few meters behind him. She glanced at the ship's closed airlock door, then at him, apparently deciding she didn't want to enter the yacht alone.

She came down the steps backwards, holding the railing as if she were coming down a ladder. That confirmed it for him; DeRicci rarely handled the Port. They had gotten this assignment because of his experience, not hers.

She reached the main level and looked around. He tried to imagine the dock from her perspective. The dome was metallic, without a view of space the way Armstrong had. The artificial lighting was on the lowest regulation setting, so dim that shadows and darkness predominated.

"Lights full," Flint said, adding the command code. The lights rose.

The dock had been built for vessels one hundred times the size of the yacht. The yacht seemed small inside the enclosed area—more like a robotic repair vehicle than a spacefaring one.

Flint walked toward it, noting that the name—normally painted in large letters on the side—had been taken off. The lack of a name was a violation of most interstellar regulations. He suspected they would find more violations before they were done.

"You recording this?" DeRicci asked.

Flint started. He hadn't even thought to make a video record. "I figured HazMat did."

"We need our own." DeRicci approached the hull as Flint pressed one of the chips on his uniform sleeve. He would record everything from now on.

She was looking at a scorch mark that ran along the side, but she didn't touch it.

"Weapons fire?" she asked, and she was checking with him. She hadn't done that before either.

He nodded. He moved closer. The yacht had an expensive blast coating, but not enough to protect it from whatever had shot at it.

"Looks like only a few shots," he said. "Powerful, but I'd guess they were meant as warning shots."

"How old are they?"

"Fresh enough." Flint touched the hull. It was smooth against his fingers. "It looks like the blast coating got reapplied regularly. This hull should be pitted from space debris—happens to all ships over time, no matter how well shielded they are—and this one isn't."

"No name either," DeRicci said.

Flint nodded. He'd worked his way to the back of the ship. "And no registration. All the required parts codes have been removed as well."

Parts codes were placed on all pieces of material for ships made on Earth or to be used at human-run ports. There were a thousand ways to identify a ship aside from its own registration, and judging by the cursory examination, this ship had gotten rid of all of them.

"Someone spent a lot of money to keep this ship in working order and its identity secret," DeRicci said.

"Looks like it didn't work," Flint said.

"You can't be sure that whoever killed the people inside this ship knew who they were," DeRicci said.

As he rounded the side of the ship, he stopped. "Noelle," he said, calling her over. He usually didn't use her first name. She came quickly, just like he expected her to.

She frowned at the ship. "What is it?"

"The escape pods are gone. The hatches are still open."

"So someone escaped," DeRicci said.

Flint nodded. "And no one inside the ship closed the hatch doors. If I were under attack, I'd make sure those hatches closed quickly. One good shot in them could do serious damage to the ship."

"Why wouldn't they close automatically?" DeRicci asked.

"Redundant technology," Flint said. "This ship is a medium-level yacht, not high end. The logic is that if you have to abandon ship, the ship is lost. No need to protect it or its cargo any longer."

"Two pods for a ship this size?"

"Regulation. If you had the suggested-size crew and passengers, everyone should be able to fit into the pods. It would be a tight squeeze, and you'd better pray someone would find you pretty fast, but you'd be all right for a few days."

"So we should be looking for some pods."

"We'll put Traffic on it. We also should ask anyone who comes into the docks in the next two days if they've seen or picked up pods."

DeRicci nodded. "That's a break then."

"Maybe." Flint glanced at her. "If our killers used the pods, they might have had another ship waiting nearby."

"If they had another ship, why would they use the pods?" DeRicci asked.

"Good point." Flint scanned the rest of the hull and found nothing except a few more blast marks.

"You ready to go in?" DeRicci asked.

"You coming with me?" Flint asked.

DeRicci nodded. "I worry when HazMat says we have a mess. They usually concentrate on their job, not ours."

That had been Flint's sense of it too. He took the stairs two at a time and stepped back into the tunnel. The tunnel's mouth attached to the yacht's main entrance. Before he pressed open the outer door, he paused.

"What?" DeRicci asked. She had stopped right beside him.

She was actually letting him take the lead instead of trying to intimidate him or browbeat him. She really had to feel out of her depth here.

"This ship was attached to something else, and just recently." He pointed to the scrape marks beside the door. "Something which isn't regulation, and couldn't latch onto the ship properly."

"Are you saying they were at a different port?"

He shook his head. "If I had to guess, I'd say they were boarded."

DeRicci's mouth formed a thin line. "In that case, jurisdiction—"

"Is ours. The bodies ended up here."

She nodded. "Make sure you get that on the recording."

He already had. He palmed open the outside door. The HazMat team had left the interior door closed, just the way the airlock would have been in space.

"Damn HazMat," DeRicci said, looking down. "God knows how much evidence they trampled here."

He hadn't even thought of that. He still had a lot to learn as a detective. As a former space cop, he saw HazMat as a godsend, not a potential problem. "We should have bagged their boots."

"We'll get them if we need them."

Flint moved his arm, making sure he got everything in the tiny airlock recorded. There was so much about investigation that he didn't know.

"What're you waiting for?" DeRicci asked, and he realized she expected him to open the door.

He didn't answer. Instead, he pushed the main door open.

The smell hit him first. Urine, blood, feces, and the beginnings of decomposition. In all his years, he hadn't smelt anything that foul.

"They turned off the environmental systems," he said, through the hand he'd put over his face.

"HazMat?"

"No, whoever was here last. Maybe the folks who left on the escape pods." He got a small swatch of Protectocloth from his pocket, and stretched the cloth to fit over his nose and mouth. The cloth was just like HazMat gear, only smaller and for emergencies. He considered this stench an emergency.

"Not all of the systems are off," DeRicci said. "I recognize that smell. That's decomposing flesh, which can only happen in an oxygen-rich environment."

"But the system should have scrubbed this smell out of everything," he said, "and it's still here."

"Even if the bodies are here?"

"On a yacht like this, bad smells get engineered away. Even if the bodies are still here."

DeRicci had put a Protectocloth over her face too. "Let's stick together."

They stepped into the crew work area. A control panel flashed to Flint's left. Just beyond it, the door to the cockpit stood open. A small galley faced him, and beyond it, a corridor. To his right was another door, and it was closed. It probably led to the passenger section.

The cockpit would hold the answers, but DeRicci had opened the passenger door.

"Flint," she said.

He stepped beside her. Blood bathed this compartment, rising up along the walls, spattering the ceiling and the floor. The gravity had been on when the killings occurred and it stayed on throughout the entire flight.

The bodies were staked side by side, the yacht seats moved to accommodate the sprawl. One of the bodies was female, the other male, both on their backs, both spread-eagled. They had been eviscerated—probably while they were alive, judging by the blood—and their intestines looped into a familiar oval pattern.

"A Disty vengeance killing," DeRicci said.

Even Flint recognized that, although he'd never seen such bodies in person before. Only in class, as one of the many things he had to learn about alien killings.

"Only I've never seen one done in space before." She frowned, crouched. "Everything else is textbook."

"Doesn't that make it suspicious?" he asked.

She shook her head. "The Disty are precise about this sort of thing. They have to be."

He shuddered. Disty vengeance killings were rare on the Moon. They happened most often on Mars, which the Disty more or less ran. If this was a Disty vengeance killing, there would be nothing he could do. Under hundreds of interstellar laws, under even more multicultural agreements between the member species, cultural practices like vengeance killings were allowed.

Although Flint was a new detective, he knew how this case would run. He and DeRicci would check the victims' DNA to see if they had outstanding Disty warrants against them, and if they did, then the case would be closed. According to the various agreements, no crime would have been committed.

Even sending the yacht to the Moon made sense in this instance. The bodies had to be accounted for. The Disty used vengeance killings as a deterrent. They would want everyone to know that these people, whoever they had been, had died because they had done something wrong.

The problem would come if the Disty hadn't targeted these victims. If this was, in fact, a real crime made to look like a Disty killing.

But if that were the case, why send the yacht toward the Moon?

"The third body has to be somewhere else," DeRicci said.

"I vote for the cockpit," Flint said. "We have to go there anyway. I want to find out when those pods were ejected."

DeRicci glanced at him. "The pods don't fit, do they?"

"Not with a Disty vengeance killing. Unless we find the pods later, with the occupants either gone or dead in just this way." Flint stepped over blood spatter and through the main doors back into the crew area. No blood here. But if a Disty ship had boarded the yacht in flight and the Disty had committed the killings, it would be logical to find some trace in this room

The control panel still blinked as he went past. He paused to look at it. Someone had bypassed the controls to open this door, and the system was still complaining about it—weakly. There should have been a vocal component to the complaint, which should have continued no matter how long ago the breach had occurred.

He made a mental note of the override, then headed into the cockpit—and stopped. The third body faced him. It was not spread-eagled like the others. It had been strapped to the command chair. The evisceration was the same, but the rest of it—the rest of it was much worse.

Flint turned away, and found DeRicci watching him.

"She was the one they wanted." DeRicci's voice was flat. "The others, they were merely warnings, something that happened to the helpers. She was the one they blamed the most."

"If this was the Disty."

She nodded. "If."

But she sounded convinced. Maybe he was too. He wasn't certain.

"I was going to check the logs, the databases. I was going to—"

"You can't," DeRicci said, stating the obvious. No one could get into that room without disturbing the body—or what the body had become. "We have to wait for the forensics team. The bodies have to be removed now. Then you can check the logs."

Flint took a deep breath. He had been thinking like a space cop again. Check the logs, find out what happened, let the team on the ground worry about the next step.

Only now he was the team on the ground—and, with a mess like this, he doubted that the two space cops who'd found this ship had even tried to download the logs.

"If we're lucky," DeRicci said, "the DNA will come back positive and you won't have to go in there at all."

"Oh, but I will," he said.

She looked at him as if she didn't understand him.

He gave her a cool smile. "We have to know who released the pods and why. There might be more people out there, more people the Disty are after."

"It's not our problem," DeRicci said. "If the Disty are doing vengeance killings, then they have every right to hunt those people down."

"And if these people are only peripherally involved?" he asked.

"You know the law, Miles," she said. "We stay out of it."

He knew the law. He'd just never faced it before. So far, his cases had involved humans committing crimes against humans. He always knew he would deal with the various alien cultures that existed in this part of the universe, but he hadn't expected to so soon.

"I'd read about these things," he said, "but I had no idea how gruesome they really are."

Something in her face caught him, a softening, a look behind the tough woman she always pretended to be. "You'll have to get used to it. The Disty are one of our nearest neighbors and closest allies. We never complain about them, no matter how hideous their sense of justice is."

Then she walked away, heading back toward the passenger cabin, effectively ending the conversation.

Flint stared at the body scattered around the cockpit. That desecrated corpse had been a human being not too long ago. He shook his head, willing the thought away. He had learned, after his daughter died, how to keep his emotions and his intellect separate from each other. That was one of the reasons he'd been promoted to detective.

He didn't dare lose that detachment at his first gruesome crime scene. He studied the carnage until it became a puzzle, needing to be solved, and then, like DeRicci, he left.

Three

Ekaterina leaned back on the plush seat of the space yacht. The man who had brought her here, the man who said his name wasn't Russell even though that was what she should call him, had told her to get some rest.

But she couldn't rest, any more than she could eat. She kept playing that last encounter with Simon over and over again in her mind. That would be the last time they would ever see each other. The last time they dared see each other, and it hadn't gone the way she wanted it to. If she had the chance to do it her way, she would have told him everything, sworn him to secrecy, and apologized for getting involved with him in the first place.

But she hadn't done that. She couldn't do that. Even if he promised never to reveal a thing she had told him, he might not be able to live up to that promise.

One small sentence would be enough of a slip to get a Tracker following her. And a Tracker would report to the Rev.

The passenger section of the yacht was big. It seated ten in the front where she sat now, and the seats folded out into single-bed-sized cots. The back boasted four suites: bedroom, living quarters, and bathroom designed, she supposed, for the Disappeared who paid some sort of premium.

Or perhaps the suites were standard on a yacht of this type. She had no idea and no one to ask. She had expected to be one of many on this yacht, all of them going to new lives in new places. New identities, new jobs, new ways of approaching the world. She had imagined conversations—not about what they'd done or why they believed they needed to be Disappeared, but about their fears, their hopes, their dreams.

She still had dreams. There was only one she stifled, and that was the one about returning to her old life, to San Francisco and to Simon.

She had to be someone else now. It was the only way she, and the people she loved, would survive.

Ekaterina stood and paced, as she had been doing ever since the yacht left Earth orbit. It felt odd to be sitting in the passenger section of a ship this small. When she was in college, she'd made money running orbital ferries during the summer. She took tourists around Earth, and showed them the sites from orbit. The job got old after a while, but handling the controls didn't.

Maybe the folks at Disappearance Incorporated would use her piloting experience and give her a similar job on another world. Maybe she would have a chance to try something she had dreamed of doing. She knew she wouldn't be practicing law any more—that would be too obvious—but perhaps she would work in a related field.

She touched the petals in her pocket. She was surprised they were still there. She had expected to be searched when she got to the space port, but she hadn't been.

The man who wasn't Russell had walked her inside as if nothing were unusual. They had gone through side doors that led to a series of private yachts. She had never taken a private space flight before. All of her previous trips had been on commercial flights, and the regulations there were strict. Everyone was searched. Only so much extra weight could go on board, and everything was examined for its potential harm to the flight.

Days before she left home, she had put a laser pistol in her purse. She had thought she might have to use it before she Disappeared, but no one had approached her. Even as she was finishing her final preparations for her Disappearance, she had left the pistol in her purse. The people at Disappearance Inc had told her to trust no one—not even the people who were to take her from place to place.

The laser pistol, miraculously, made it out of Earth's orbit, something that never would have happened on any other flight.

If she had known that those regulations would be so lax, she would have brought a few other things. Her engagement ring, maybe, or a tiny silver pin that had been made by a Maakestad ancestor in the seventeenth century.

One or two tiny things to remind her of home.

Of course, that was precisely what she wasn't supposed to do. Precisely what, the administrator at Disappearance Inc had told her, most people who got caught did wrong. They couldn't let go of their past. They couldn't let go of their own identities.

They got caught because they didn't understand how important it was to be reborn as someone else. No baggage, no past life, nothing except the person Disappearance Inc told them to be.

You have to forget who you were, the administrator said. And you have to become someone new.

Ekaterina could do that. She had known it from that first conversation with Disappearance Inc three weeks ago. She might have known it even before she approached them.

But it still felt odd to be stripped down to her core self. Nothing would remain the same, not her job, not her name and maybe, if the company felt it necessary, not her face. The only thing she would have would be her memories, and she wouldn't be able to share them with anyone. Ever.

The door to the crew section slid open. The woman who told Ekaterina to call her Jenny entered. She was slender, her features as flat as Russell's. Everyone she had met at Disappearance Inc had been so enhanced that they no longer looked like the person they had once been.

It made Ekaterina uneasy.

The door slid closed. Jenny handed Ekaterina a hand-held. Ekaterina hadn't been linked for nearly a week. She usually wore security chips that linked her to her house's system, her office, and the net. She had never gone for the full package—total linkage all the time—because she had valued her privacy.

But not being linked now reminded her how alone she was. She couldn't tap a chip and record a conversation, and she couldn't—with a silent command—have House call emergency services. If Ekaterina were attacked now, she'd have to fend off the attacker on her own—no police, no instant 911 recording, no way of getting immediate help.

The hand-held felt hard against her fingers. She hadn't used one since she had gone to college on a scholarship, long before she could afford security chips and total linkage.

"What's this?" she asked without looking at the screen.

"Your new identity," Jenny said. "Read it, understand it, and prepare for it. We'll give you links and chips before you leave the yacht. Some of this information will be downloaded to you for easy access, but the rest has to come naturally. You have to make this fit."

Ekaterina nodded. She'd heard the speech before. It seemed to be standard at Disappearance Inc.

"We used all the forms you filled out and your psych profile." Jenny's voice was soft. She had clearly given this speech a lot. "Remember, we can't change anything. That's not our job here. This is the best DI could do. It's up to you to make it work."

She gave Ekaterina a false smile and stood up.

"Have you read this?" Ekaterina asked.

"It's coded," Jenny said. "You should have gotten the password before you left."

Ekaterina had, but she wanted to double-check Jenny's answer.

"So we're nearly there," Ekaterina said.

Jenny shrugged. "I was instructed to give you the hand-held at this point in the journey. Where we are and where we're going is not something I know much about."

She left the passenger area. Ekaterina watched the door close behind her. What would it be like to ferry people from place to place, not knowing where you were going or why? Did people like Jenny take the job for the excitement, the possibility that something might go wrong, and she might have to use her expensive security training? Or did she take it for the opportunity to travel? Or were her reasons more altruistic than that? Was she one of the political ones, the ones who believed that alien laws should not be able to target humans, no matter what the humans had done?

Once, Ekaterina would have said that she had no opinion on that matter. She did now that it was too late.

She settled into the yacht's lounge chair and tapped the hand-held, twisting so that her body protected the screen as she punched in the code.

Her new name was Greta Palmer. She stared at it for a long time, trying mentally to make it work. All her life, her name had had a lot of syllables, had been almost a language in itself. Greta Palmer seemed too simple, too plain to be her name. To be anyone's name. It sounded made up to her.

Ekaterina supposed any name would sound like that. If it were too fancy, she would worry that it sounded contrived. Too simple obviously bothered her as well.

But she couldn't hide with any variation on her name. She had to accept the new one.

Only she wished they had let her pick it out herself.

She read her new bio with interest. Greta was the same age Ekaterina was, born on the Moon just like she had been and moved to Earth at age three just like she had, and had gone to high school in San Francisco. After that, their bios diverged. Greta had stayed on Earth, not even taking an orbital until she accepted her new job. Ekaterina had traveled to the outer reaches of explored space. Her early training had included guaranteed jobs on three different alien-owned colonies, including Revnata, where she had gotten in trouble.

Once she had planned on being a lawyer who was certified to argue in front of the multicultural tribunals. Instead, she was running from one of their rulings.

She hated the irony.

With a sigh, Ekaterina shifted position, and continued to read. Her new job was recycling textiles. She froze. Textile recycling meant taking ruined fabrics, like torn blankets and ripped upholstery, and remaking them into something cheap and functional. The job was menial and labor intensive. It was about as far from lawyering as a person could get. Intelligence was not an asset at a job like this. It was a liability.

Surely there was a mistake. Maybe when she got to her destination, she would be reassigned. Or maybe they thought she could hide at a textile plant for a few years, since it would be the very last place the Rev would look.

But would it really be a good hiding place? She was an educated woman, whose accent, whose simple sentence structure, made it clear that she had spent years studying with some of the galaxy's greatest minds. Hiding that would be difficult, and might even be impossible.

Surely Disappearance Inc would have thought of that.

Maybe they had. Maybe it was buried deeper in the information they had just given her. Or maybe she had the wrong idea about plant workers. Maybe her objections had more to do with her own prejudices than with her abilities or lack of them.

The idea of working in a textile recycling plant, with fibers floating in the air, not to mention the filth that had to be cleaned off other people's possessions, made her queasy. She hadn't had a job like that ever.

Her palms were damp. She rubbed them on her pants and looked at the rest of the profile.

The textile plant was in Von, a town she'd never heard of. She would have her own apartment—a one bedroom, company-provided by the plant, and if she managed to save enough money, she might be able to buy a place of her own.

She ran a hand over her face. Money would be a problem. She had been short on funds before, but she'd always had the family money in a trust. This time, she would have no backup. When she got the company-owned apartment, they would own her. She would need the job and the terrible pay, and she would have to begin all over again.

For the very first time, the reality of the change she was undertaking was sinking in. Before she had understood the loss, but not the future. She hadn't thought about where she was going because she had no idea. She had decided not to fantasize about her new life because she hadn't wanted to be disappointed.

But she was disappointed anyway.

An impoverished thirty-five year old woman whose skills only let her do manual labor, who lived in an unknown town.

She frowned, wondering where the town was. There was nothing about her upcoming destination in the bio. It had to be somewhere else in the material Jenny had given her.

Or perhaps it was in the hand-held's database. Most computers carried the same basic information—dictionaries of over 1000 main languages, food compatibility charts for human/alien physiologies, and, of course, maps. She searched the hand-held for a moment, wondering if its memory had been purged of non-relevant information, and finally found what she was searching for.

The map function. She typed in Von and added that it had to be in territory that could be occupied by humans. She only got one hit.

It was on Mars.

She stared at the map for the longest time. The blinking feature showed that Von was in Mars' northernmost region, above the Arctic Circle. Obviously the town was big enough to have its own dome, but not really large enough to be well known.

And that bothered her, because she'd been to Mars and she knew what this place would look like.

Mars was run by the Disty, small creatures with large heads, large eyes, and narrow bodies. They hated the feel of wide open spaces and built their own colonies like rats' warrens. When they took over human colonies, the way they had on Mars, they added corridors and false ceilings and narrow little passageways, so the entire place felt claustrophobic.

She could get used to that. She knew there was a possibility she would go somewhere that wasn't controlled by humans but where humans were tolerated. Initially, she'd even thought she'd go to Mars because the Disty and the Rev did not get along. They avoided each other's colonies and were barred from each other's home worlds.

Then she had done some research. Both the Disty and the Rev had ventured into each other's colonies in the past few years searching for Disappeareds. Because the Disty and Rev had similar missions, they respected each other's warrants and often helped each other find Disappeareds on each other's land.

Both alien species had caught on to the game that the Disappearance services were playing, and were foiling them on the ground. Instead of hiding Rev fugitives in Disty territory and vice versa, the good Disappearance services were now going for less obvious hiding places.

Her stomach twisted. She thought she had done the right research. According to everything she'd looked for, all the people she'd talked with, Disappearance Inc was the best Disappearance service in the known universe.

Why then would it hide her in a place the Rev surely would look?

She put the hand-held on her lap. Maybe the administrators at DI had misunderstood. After all, she hadn't written down whom she was running from. She'd told as few people as required by DI's business practices, but she never told them what she had done because, they said, it wasn't relevant, and she told only a few of them who she was hiding from since they had to know to keep her out of certain places.

Like Mars.

Unless things had changed even more than she realized. Maybe their research was more up to date than hers.

But, judging by the personality profile they pulled, the job they gave her, and the place they had chosen to hide her, their research was shoddy. Either that, or they had confused her with another client.

She picked up the hand-held again, and scanned the rest of the information. Her name wasn't in it, of course, but that bio suggested that this was hers.

Ekaterina stood, her restlessness growing. Damn them for not allowing her to bring anything along. She couldn't even carry a hardcopy of her agreement with DI because that was like carrying a piece of identification. She wasn't linked, so she couldn't used the password they had given her to access the information.

Had they planned it this way? If so, why? So that she wouldn't complain? Were the reports of satisfied customers made up?

She had no idea.

Her stomach turned again, that queasy feeling remaining. The Rev never gave up searching for fugitives from their justice system. If she got caught, she'd spend the rest of her natural life in a Rev penal colony.

She'd seen Rev penal colonies. Working in a textile recycling plant in a Disty-run Mars town would seem like heaven in comparison.

She would do it if she had to. The problem was that she didn't feel this identity would hide her.

But she had no idea what her options were. She tried to remember the text of the agreement she'd signed. Essentially, she was putting her life into DI's hands. It was, she knew, the only way to survive.

She hadn't even asked the lawyerly question: what if they were wrong? She had done what all naïve clients did. Once she had completed her research, she had trusted blindly.

Of course, she had been panicked at the time. Her case had been denied by the Eighth Multicultural Tribunal. The Rev warrant, issued so many years ago, stood, and the Rev would come for her immediately.

An old friend who clerked at the Tribunal had sent her a warning before the Tribunal made their announcement. She had no idea how long she had until the Tribunal spoke, but she knew it wouldn't be long.

So she had done what she could, researching and finding a Disappearance service. But she hadn't been as thorough as she should have been.

That was incredibly clear to her now.

She'd allowed her panic over being discovered to override her natural caution. She still had funds. Accessing them would be tricky, but it could be done. She could hire a different Disappearance service if she had to.

And she just might have to.

At least there was one clause in her agreement with DI that she had memorized. She had done that on purpose, worried that if she hadn't, she would be stuck in just this situation.

She could terminate at any time.

DI wouldn't be liable for her safety, of course, but they were required to take her to a settlement. They couldn't just eject her in space and hope that she survived.

She swallowed hard. Firing DI was as much of a risk as disappearing in the first place. But she had to trust her own instincts. Maybe she could browbeat the crew into taking her to DI's nearest headquarters and they could rerun her profile. Maybe they could see what went wrong in the San Francisco offices and repair it.

She shut off the hand-held and slipped it into her purse. Then she slung her purse over her shoulder and walked to the door separating the passenger section from the crew areas.

The door wasn't locked as it was supposed to be. Clearly Jenny had forgotten to reseal it when she had brought out the hand-held. Either that or the crew hadn't sealed it at all, thinking one slight female passenger wouldn't be a problem, no matter what she had done.

Ekaterina pushed the door aside and walked through. She had never been in this part of the crew area. The airlock was to her left, a small galley to her right. The carpet was still plush here, although it got thinner closer to the cockpit.

The theory was that the crew didn't need luxury, not like the passengers on the space yacht did.

No one sat in the galley. She walked toward the cockpit, her boots making no sound as she moved.

Voices filtered toward her. She couldn't make out the words, but the tone sounded official.

As she peered through the cockpit door, she froze. Through the main portal, she could see the orange and blue stripes of a Rev penal ship.

"We'll be evacuating the yacht in thirty Earth minutes," the pilot was saying through the interlink. He was clearly talking to the Rev. "She won't know we're gone. Give it another thirty minutes and you can board."

Jenny was sitting beside him, her hands behind her head, as if she were watching a vid. The co-pilot was on the other side, tapping something into the ship's system.

The pilot continued. "I'll be picking up the ship from impound in a week or so. If there's permanent damage, I'm coming after you."

Ekaterina's mouth was dry. The pilot was selling her to the Rev. He would make more money from them than he would as a contract employee of DI. Supposedly, services like DI screened-out people like him.

But not in this case.

The Rev would take her and imprison her for life. Few humans survived in a Rev penal colony for more than ten years. The work alone was too much for the human frame. That didn't count the xenophobia, the way that Rev inmates treated someone who was completely different.

She eased away from the door. No one in the cockpit had seen her.

She had been given a slight chance to save herself.

Now she had to figure out how to use it.

Four

As they stepped out of the ship's tunnel, DeRicci's hand-held beeped. She cursed and took it out of her pocket. She punched the screen, information already blinking. "As if we don't have enough to do. We've got another."

"Where?" he asked.

"Terminal 5," she said, more to herself than him. Terminal 5, while technically next door to Terminal 4, was a healthy hike from where they were. "What the hell's that one again?"

"Suspected criminal activity by a ship's owner."

DeRicci glanced at him. "You're useful in the docks."

"I'm useful most of the time," he said.

There was nothing else on the hand-held. Just the order to report to a ship tunnel in Terminal 5. Someone would meet them and explain the situation.

"I hope to hell this isn't something complicated," DeRicci said as she headed back to Terminal 4's main entry. "I want to put this Disty thing to bed."

Flint was feeling uncomfortable. Detectives got one, maybe two cases down here per week total. Now he and DeRicci were getting two in one day.

"We're better off taking the train between terminals," Flint said. "If we walk, we'll lose that time advantage Headquarters wants us to have."

DeRicci frowned. She clearly didn't like his new outspokenness. But he was tired of letting her run things. She was out of her depth in the Port. He was going to take over this partnership whether she liked it or not.

He led her to the interior train system. It had been designed to link the various terminals after the Port had taken over the bulk of space traffic control for the Moon. At that point, the Port had mushroomed into something with unwalkable distances. Fifty interior trains ran at set times. Only one ran all the way around the Port, and it was usually crowded.

Flint took DeRicci to the tracks that worked for the shuttle between Terminals 4 and 5. Because the locals weren't advertised in the Port, they served mostly as crew shuttles. If tourists had to go from one terminal to another, they took the main, crowded train.

The train pulled up, its dark glass sides reflecting the lights in the waiting area. The doors slid open silently and three workers in blue uniforms got off. Then Flint walked on. DeRicci followed.

There were no seats. Passengers held onto bars and metal hand rings. The tougher passengers stood, feet braced, in the center of the car. It took skill and talent to ride the trains that way without getting hurt.

Flint had learned how to do it, but hadn't enjoyed it. He gripped the rail now, and DeRicci did the same. They had the car to themselves.

The moment the door closed, the train sped backwards in the direction it had just come. After a moment, it reached its top speed, moving at a velocity faster than the high speed trains that ran between the various domes littering the Moon.

DeRicci looked startled and reached her other hand around the metal bar. The train slowed, and then, smoothly, stopped. Even though the movement was even, Flint watched DeRicci's body yank forward then back. She glared at him as if the effect of the train were all his fault.

He supposed, in an odd way, it was. He should have warned her about the speed. These trains had been designed for efficiency, not for comfort. Back in the days when the interior train system was first built, Armstrong Dome had been known for its efficiency.

A lot had changed since then.

The doors opened. DeRicci touched a hand to her short hair, as if the swift ride had created a wind that ruffled her.

"You okay?" he asked.

"You did that to torture me."

"Maybe that was a secondary reason," he said with a smile. To his surprise, she smiled back. The expression surprised him.

He had been blaming her for her unwillingness to give him a chance, when he had once treated his new partners in Traffic the same way. DeRicci had gone through five new partners in five years, all of them beginning detectives. Perhaps it wasn't so odd that she expected him to prove himself before she started to give him the benefit of the doubt.

They emerged from the train station into Terminal 5. It was set up the same as Terminal 4. If a person ignored the signage, the only way to tell the difference between the two terminals was to look at the ships docked nearby. Terminal 5 was nearly full, and none of its tunnels had yellow warning lights.

A slender man, his dark skin shiny with sweat, stopped in front of them. He had his arms wrapped around a stack of warning signs, hugging them to his chest as if they were more important than he was.

"Officers?" he asked.

"Detectives," DeRicci corrected. She always did that. To her, being called an "officer" was the same as a demotion.

"Detectives." He bobbed his head and bit his lower lip. "I'm Stefan Newell. I'm in charge of this terminal. I take it you've been briefed?"

"We'd only been told to report," DeRicci said. "We've just come off another assignment in Terminal 4."

"Oh, dear." Newell glanced at Flint. "I was hoping you would have brought more people with you."

That caught Flint's attention. "Why?"

"Because we have an unfolding situation. I told your dispatch that. We need as much help as we can get—"

"We were already at the Port." DeRicci spoke slowly, as if she were talking to a child. "I'm sure others are on their way."

"I hope so. I'll send the distress call again."

"First," Flint said, "tell us what we're dealing with."

Newell bit his lower lip again, so hard this time that the skin below it turned an odd shade of white. "The border patrol caught a ship leaving Moon orbit. They're bringing it in."

"The border police are equipped to handle their own problems," DeRicci said. "I'm sure—"

"What's the problem?" Flint asked, not letting her finish. She was going to try to leave, and he had a hunch that decision would have been bad for all of them.

Newell hugged the signs tighter. "It's a Wygnin ship."

Flint felt himself grow cold. The Wygnin almost never ventured into human-occupied space. They rarely left Korsve, their home world.

"Definitely a border problem," DeRicci said. "Come on, Flint. We have a case to finish—"

"Ma'am. Detective. Please." Despite his words, Newell's tone had grown harsh. "I'm not handling the Wygnin alone."

"You'll have the border patrol."

"They'll have their hands full."

"What's on the ship?" Flint asked.

"Children. Human children," Newell said. "And the Wygnin lack the proper warrants."

...continues

Copyright information
Copyright © 2002 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.
Cover Art Copyright © 2011 by Jonathan Kort
Published by WMG Publishing 2011
Buy now: The Disappeared by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Steven Savile

The Immortal

The Immortal is a brand new near-future thriller debuting straight to Kindle and other e-reader formats in April 2011.

Buy now: The Immortal by Steven Savile

novel extract:
The Immortal by Steven Savile

The night was a bitter black. There were no stars. The last star – the one they had stupidly called Hope – had faded away months ago. All that remained were layers of choking fog where not so long ago there had been thousands of points of light.

Temple watched a sad-faced girl making a boat out of folded paper. Her hands trembled as she set it down in the gutter and let it sail away with all of her hopes and dreams stashed aboard. The paper boat bobbed and bounced up against the kerb, tumbling over the rapids of rain as they washed down the drain, and for a moment it looked like it might make it. The girl didn't care. Even before it floundered she shrank back into her doorway. She pulled the collar of her threadbare coat up around her throat. The wind had that familiar cutting edge to it. Any day now, snow.

Someone pushed past him, head down. Their grunt of apology or accusation was lost in the folds of their scarf.

Reaching into his pocket for his tobacco tin and the makings of a cigarette, Temple sat down on the stoop of a crumbling tenement. A washer woman's mop sloshed around his feet, suds soaking down through the cracks in the pavement. He could smell cabbage boiling somewhere. It set the hunger pangs going again. Ignoring them, and her, Temple watched the girl.

Her fingers moved through some kind of sign, he realised. It wasn't just a random twitch. Her fingers were signing a subliminal message to her soul. He had seen it before. Give up, it said in the language of the streets. Curl up in your doorway and die. Close your eyes on the end of the world and open them again on some fantastic place. He drew a deep breath into his lungs. Held it. Counted silently to eleven in his head then let it raft up slowly over his face like a veil of ghosts.

At least she wasn't one of the silver-eyed dead yet, he thought. He had started seeing them all over the city. He had started thinking of them as The Soulless. At first it had been a case of one or two a day. He'd see them standing on street corners, just looking out into the middle distance. But in the last week he'd counted more than thirty of them. They were his personal entourage of ghosts. People beaten down by the city. He wasn't the only one freaked out by them. He had overheard people talking. It was some sort of new drug on the streets. An escape. Temple shuddered at the thought of that kind of escape and just what it must have meant for the people they had been once upon a time.

While he smoked wrapped-up bodies shuffled in and out of the small soup kitchen that had once been the Christus Church when people still had the resolve to pray. They were like the animals coming two-by-two, clutching their tinfoil trays of mashed potato and meatballs, and drinking in the steam of the hot food. The spectres of the Lady Hamilton Hotel and the lead-stripped spire of the old church haunted the maze of dirty streets. Stockholm had changed beyond all recognition in the short time he had been here. Temple exhaled another wraith of smoke to haunt this ghost town. In the distance the bells of the meat wagons played their nursery rhymes, taunting the living, still breathing corpses. The plague still had its teeth in the city. They were talking about burning down the outlying houses and confining everyone to the one central island. That was the only good thing about Stockholm, burn down two bridges and the entire city centre was quarantined.

Kids crawled over the husk of a car, half-in half-out of a shop window, caught between the glass teeth of shopping mall, and behind it, shelves naked in the darkness.

Temple ground the butt of the cigarette out beneath his heel. He knew he ought to feel something, but he didn't. He listened to the cries of "Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!" and just as easily have been listening to a circus barker crying "Roll up! Roll up!" because they weren't his dead. They had no claim on his soul, on the emptiness working like a worm chewing its way from his insides out. If that made him a bad man then so be it. He had never claimed to be a knight or a hero or any other kind of damned fool. He was a survivor. That was all there was to him.

A cannonball had lodged itself into the second storey of the street corner. It was an odd little detail – a relic from a war more than five hundred years old – but it stuck with him.

A scuffle broke out in the food line. A metal tray clattered to the floor, the food wasted. It didn't take long for lupus-disfigured hands to scrabble after it, people shouting as others stuffed the scraps into more than one hungry mouth. Temple watched it all with a sense of dislocation. It was the play of every day life but it didn't matter. It didn't touch him. There was nothing here for him. These unforgiving streets weren't his home. These hopeless actors weren't his friends. He was one of a new breed. The Dispossessed. But in a way he was just like them. He was just another type of scavenger feeding off the bloated corpse of this not so Brave New World.

He hadn't seen any real traffic for weeks. Since before the Centennial Clock on the wharf stopped ticking. We're not so different, you and I, he thought, watching a fat bodied rat pick a path through the mound of faeces steaming on the street corner. The rat was just another breed of survivor.

Temple pushed himself to his feet and turned his back on the black rat. He took up his place in the line with the rest of the thin-faced crowd, clutching his food tray.

The eastern edge of the square was a corrugated iron fence. Rust pitted gates hung like the broken wings of a fallen angel. The Gates Of Heaven some forgotten wag had painted across the ripples of iron. Someone else had spray-painted HELL over the heaven. And they might just as well have been. Headless statues of long dead statesmen stood either side of the gates, keeping a blind watch. Through the gates loomed the ruin of the old King's Palace where the politicians buried their heads in the sand while they waited for a miracle that wasn't coming.

An old tank rumbled slowly along the line of the iron fence, its caterpillar tracks eating the rubble and rock dust of the road. A snake of street boys danced in its wake. Their faces were painted white and tattooed with spider webs. They had come to loot the corpses. Their wordless whooping chant ululated through the Old Town.

An olive-skinned boy threw himself in front of those relentless tracks, light and flame engulfing his corpse as one of the web-faced street boys poured gasoline on his blue jeans and another ignited it with a carelessly tossed match. It was as quick as it was brutal. Others turned away, but Temple watched the boys' burning dance, fascinated by the slowly charring skin and the blisters that wept beneath the flames.

A pretty young girl – twelve, younger, maybe, or a little older, it was difficult to tell with kids these days, they all looked the same – moved down the food line, offering her wilted flowers for sale. Her brother worked the subway entrance, polishing shoes and hoping for a miracle in silver. She moved passed Temple, the hunger plain in her watery eyes. At least they weren't silver. Not yet. But who knew what colour they would be the next time he saw her? Temple could only shrug when she offered the sad blooms, and swap a dull coin for a brighter smile.

Like a magician, he drew a second coin from behind her ear and pressed it into her hand. "Take it and feed yourself," he whispered, looking at the emptying trays of food further up the line. "But go somewhere—" he was going to say nice but checked himself. "Better than this."

When it was his turn, Temple took a ladleful of the swill they were serving, and five meatballs the size of his knucklebones.

He picked out the black flecks of dead insect as he ate.

Done, he licked the tray clean and buried it beneath the folds of his long coat. Temple cupped his hands around his mouth and blew a funnel of warm air back up over his face. He stamped his feet, trying to force the blood to flow before he started another lonely walk between the dead buildings and their baleful ghosts.

Of course, they weren't real ghosts.

They weren't the spectres of dead fireboys burned beneath the eyes of the street kids, or the wraiths of hope cast adrift on a gutter sea in paper boats.

No.

These were the ghosts of celluloid and memory. Of newspaper cuttings and a life that belonged to someone else. He had nothing and that was just the way he needed it.

What is identity anyway? What's in a name? What is the power of it? What makes it so important? Does it matter who I am? Does it change what I am? He asked all these questions and more but the face he saw distorted in a store window didn't have any answers for him. Was it a question of self-worth and ownership? Or something deeper? Something more profound? There was a hole where his life should have lived, and in that hole he was left to invent himself, his dreams, his past. How long had passed since he had awoken in that fleapit motel, bills paid four weeks in advance, with nothing more than the clothes on his back and line of bruises and track marks marring the inside of his left thigh? He hadn't just lost track of the now of his life, he had lost the then as well. All of that stuff that came before.

That had been the worst of it by far; not knowing himself. Not owning a history. A personality. Values. All of these things that made a man a man and he had none of them. He had stared at his naked body in the mirror with no memory of who he saw being who he actually was, and forced himself to pick a name from the pocket Gideon bible on the nightstand because he needed to be somebody.

"My body is my Temple," he whispered out loud, tasting the rightness in the bitter irony of the words. His body was all he had, and so he was reborn: Temple.

It was as good a name as any.

In the memories he gave himself, Temple had prayed for immortality as a child, when the nightmares had seemed so real, when the night itself was the loneliest time and simply making it through from one side of it to the other was a small victory. Walking through the crowds of Shuffling Dead, Temple knew this kind of mute eternity wasn't an immortality worth craving. He needed to find a new dream. One worth living.

A beady-eyed black bird watched him from the window ledge of the old Rigoletto cinema. Rubble and broken stones lined the sidewalk. Through the rubble a baby's arm clung to the life it was yet to live. Temple dropped to his knees and began pulling the stones away, throwing them across the street as he desperately tried to dig the baby out of its premature coffin, moving urgently at first but then slowing as the hopelessness of it settled over him. What was he doing? Delaying its death by a day, maybe two. He couldn't feed himself let alone another mouth. He stood, dusted off his bleeding hands and walked away, leaving the baby to what he hoped wouldn't be a lingering death.

The sense of utter uselessness life had thrust upon him still hurt. What sort of man was he? "The sort of man capable of leaving a kid to die," he said bitterly.

The bird watched it all. And maybe through its bird eyes it could see the baby's lifeforce slipping away as the threads binding soul to skin and bone unravelled. Why else would it stand vigil? It needed to feed as much as every other wretch.

The baby's cries followed him down three streets before they quieted.

Gritting his teeth—hardening his soul—Temple walked on.

A hospital tent had been set up on the corner of Stora Nygatan, beneath the awning of the Grey Monk Cafe. People queued for their weekly fix of rehabilitators, slack skin and sharp bones denying the promise of healing offered by the Red Cross on the side of the dusty tent. The air quality was so poor these days that they were giving out inhalers almost as frequently as they were giving out nutrition supplements and cognitive dampeners. No-one wanted to think anymore, because thinking meant understanding what was happening to them. Above the cue, the night sky was full of phosphorous stars on strings, cheap two-dimensional lies less real than the old celluloid ones that had lit up the city like a bonfire before the Fall.

The Fall.

That was a pretty way of saying the end of civilisation—or at least all things good about it.

Those first few days just after had been the worst.

The mask of humanity had slipped from the Death's Head of the world, and beneath, the bone grin, the bloody teeth and vacant sockets of chaos eager to be unleashed.

That's when Nina had been born out of the ruined face of a movie starlet on a poster. Nina, with her eyes so full of sky and diamonds and promise. Her name was still on the billboards and hoardings surrounding the Rigoletto but time and the elements had combined to break her fake plastic smile down the middle like her fake plastic heart. Her right cheek lay in pieces on the floor, ground in to the dirt of the street. But no amount of rain could wash away those diamonds. He had dreamed a world where she was his lover and confidant. Through that she gave him hope. In return he gave her all of his love, did fall in love and did feel the need and the ache that went with finding himself alone again now that she was his. Because that was what she was. His. One of his dead. She didn't need silver eyes.

It wasn't about the corpses stacked up waiting for the meat wagons. His dead were the memories he'd made up and fed off daily. They were the ghosts he couldn't escape. Every building, every street and alleyway sheltered spectres he'd created and couldn't kill.

~

Rain began to fall.

Temple watched her as she came running down the street. Her slender white legs stumbled over the cracks in the pavement. She still clutched that bunch of dead flowers in her hands. Her head was back and she was running hard. Tears mingled with the rain on her cheeks.

Then she saw him and began running even harder.

She tripped on an uneven splinter of stone where the pavement had been crushed under the rolling tank tracks and fell face first. She flung her hands out to break her fall and hit the ground hard. Her face twisted with the pain, but she didn't stop to cry. She just pushed herself back to her feet and carried on running straight towards Temple as if her life depended upon it.

He didn't move.

"My brother," she gasped, desperation in her eyes and hands as she grabbed at him. Little girl lost. He'd seen it a dozen times a day in a dozen different kids. There was nothing new about it. "They've taken him."

So? He wanted to say. He didn't. "Hold on," he said instead. "Who's taken him? Where?"

"A jeep came. The Spider Boys were all over it. They grabbed him and took him through The Gate. Mister, please. You've got to help me…"

"What would make you think that?" Temple asked.

"Because you're different. You gave me money. You helped me once."

"So because I helped you once, you expect me to do it again? Give me one good reason not to walk away?"

She looked at him like he had just broken her heart by disproving everything she'd stupidly believed about him. He wanted to tell her that there were no good people left. But sometimes it was better to show people, that way they learned the lessons you were trying to teach them.

"They'll kill him if you don't."

"More likely they've already killed him."

"No," she said, "He's still alive." He could see how difficult it was for her to refuse to believe what was almost certainly the truth.

"Okay, let's say they haven't killed him yet, why should I care about one more death on my hands?"

"He's all I have."

"Is that it? Sorry, little one, your answer isn't good enough. People die. Deal with it. Move on."

"You cold-hearted bastard," she spat at him.

"Of course I am, sweetheart. That's how I stay alive. You should try to become more like me if you want to live a few more years. Charity won't last much longer, and then what do you have left to barter away?"

She looked around helplessly. No-one was going to help her. No-one was going to step in to save her. "I'll pay you," she said, fastening onto the idea with a bright flare of hope.

"Will you now?"

"My body," she offered, and for a moment Temple found himself studying the shapeless lines of her body: the curves had already begun to define the woman she was becoming.

"No," he said, a wry smile touching his lips for the first time. "I don't play with children, so as far as I am concerned that's no sort of payment. Offer me something I want and I'll think about getting myself killed for you, little one."

She looked helplessly at the sad flowers still clutched in her hand. She was trembling now, on the verge of fresh tears. He shook his head. "I have a little money," she said without meeting his eyes.

"I don't want your money, child. Something else?"

"Nothing," she said, giving in to the tears. "I have nothing except my brother, and and and…"

Temple crouched down beside her and took her free hand in his. He had already decided he was going to help her. He'd made that decision back in the square outside the church when he'd put that coin in her hands. She wasn't his responsibility, but he was about to make her just that. "Think child. Think of something you might know, something you might have seen on the streets that I might need. Think of something that could help me, something that could open a door or save a life. Think of something worth buying your brother's life with. That is how it has to be, an exchange. Anything given freely is unreliable. Something given in trade is bound. There is honour in that, do you understand?"

She nodded, but didn't stop crying. After a moment she stabbed her chest with sharp fingers, "I have nothing except this," she protested.

"Then he dies."

Temple turned away and started to walk off. He closed his eyes, willing the girl to say something, to shout at his back and find an answer. He couldn't bring himself to look Nina in her billboard eyes. She didn't. He stopped and waited, but still she said nothing. He could hear her breaking her heart behind him, and no matter what he thought of himself, he wasn't a monster. He walked back to where she knelt, curled up into a ball. She looked up at him. "I need a reason. I want the life that goes with it. I want a purpose. Give me that, sweetheart, and I'll go fetch your brother."

Temple took her small hands in his bigger ones, and stroked her bloody palms with gentle thumbs. "I am Nobody," he whispered, saying it as a name. "Do you understand that? I don't exist. No papers, no family, no life, no future, no past. There is no meaning to my life. No point. No purpose. If I died today no one would grieve for me. There are no lives out there that I have touched. No-one lies awake wondering where I am. No-one comes begging strangers to save me."

"We," she said hesitantly. "We could be your family…"

A faint smile touched his hard lips. "You could, couldn't you? I would be so proud of a daughter like you. But I can't feed myself let alone two more mouths."

"But this isn't fair! You said—"

"Life isn't fair, little one. I wish it was, but I don't have that kind of power."

"Then make saving Luke your purpose, Mister," she said, hopefully, latching onto the idea. "People go missing every day. Make them your purpose. Make your life mean something. Make it mean their survival." A slow smile crept across her face. She spat on her palm and pressed it out at him. "That sounds like a life worth living to me, Mister," she said, waiting for Temple to shake her hand.

Temple grinned and took her delicate hand again. They shook on it, a pact sealed. A trade. He was amused by the seriousness in her eyes.

"Do you have a picture of him? Something I can use to make sure I rescue the right boy?"

She rummaged through the folds of her skirts and pulled out a sepia-tinged portrait of a happy family. Her hand trembled slightly. He looked at her again, reassessed her age as closer to fifteen. This was her history. No wonder she didn't want to let go of it. She probably couldn't remember anything about this happy family any better than he could remember his own.

"You'll get it back, I promise."

Reluctantly, she handed it over. He studied it: a boy and a girl, on the lawn outside a big old country house. Not big enough to be called a mansion, but big enough to mean money. Lots of it. Behind them, he saw an angel with a face of still waters and picnics and motherhood. Contentment shimmered in the clear blue of her eyes. Temple felt a twinge of jealousy as he slipped the photograph into his pocket and the familiar emptiness took over.

"Bring him home to me, please, mister."

"Temple," he said, winking with a confidence he didn't feel. "That's my name. Not mister."

"Temple," she said, tasting it on her lips. "Sounds like you have God on your side, Mr Temple."

"Been a long time since I had anyone on my side, kiddo, but He's got to be on someone's side, right? So why not mine? Give me two hours, if I am not back here… well, go get someone else. Maybe they'll have more luck."

"I'll wait, I promise," the girl said, gravely. "And you'll bring him back. I know you will." For all that she had been through, she had somehow managed to retain a glimmer of that simple innocence that was youth. Despite himself, Temple found himself warming to her. That was bad.

"Two hours," he said, and he slipped off, moving back in the direction of the square.

He didn't look back.

...continues

Copyright information
© Steven Savile, 2011
Buy now: The Immortal by Steven Savile

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