Charlie Finlay has written about the American Revolution before (in fact, you'll find his story “We Come Not to Praise Washington” on our Website this month), but his latest project is his most ambitious. Since he wrote “The Minutemen's Witch,” he has gone on to write three novels that continue the story begun here. He calls the series “Traitor to the Crown” and book one in the series, The Patriot Witch, is due out in April under the byline of “C. C. Finlay."

Proctor dreamed he heard a gunshot and it woke him, or else a gunshot had stirred him from his dreams; either way, the full moon was well past its apex, so it was a few hours before the break of dawn and he lay only half-asleep in bed. As he tugged up the wool blankets and rolled over, a horse galloped down the Concord Road and a voice shouted across the spring fields that the Redcoats were coming.

Sleep sloughed off him. The twenty-year-old jumped from bed and dressed in a minute, tugging suspenders over his shoulders as the door creaked open below. He ducked his head when he came to the narrow steps and ran downstairs. Outside, the chickens cackled in their coop.

A candle flickered in the kitchen. His father sat shut-eyed in the corner, propped in a highback chair, wrapped in blankets. Light snagged on the pale scar across his forehead where he'd been scalped and left for dead during the war against the French and their Indian allies.

There'd be no chance of anything like that tonight. The regular army and the colonial militia, they were all Englishmen at root. A show of force would remind the royal governor of that, just as it had in February at Salem.

Proctor retrieved his father's old doglock musket and tin canteen from the cupboard. Powder horn and hunting bag went over his left shoulder, hatchet in his belt, hat in hand. He reached for the door, but it swung open in his face.

His mother barged in with a lantern in her hand and unloaded two eggs from her dress pocket into a bowl on the table. “Where're you off to in such a hurry?” she asked.

"To muster—the Redcoats are marching on the armory."

"Not without a scrying first, you aren't."

"Mother, there isn't time."

"I've been awake all night with worry, because I knew something was coming. Now that I know what it is, I'll not risk you dying from the guns of the Redcoats without a glimpse of the future first.” She blew on her hands and rubbed them together for warmth.

Nothing could dissuade her once she had a notion to do something. Truth was, Proctor wanted to see what was coming too. He propped his musket against the door and put down his hat. “Let's be quick."

She fetched another bowl, a pitcher of water, and moved the candle to the center of the table. Proctor held the chair for her. Wooden legs scuffed across the floor as he pulled his own seat catty-corner to hers.

She nudged the broad shallow bowl to the middle of the table and poured water into it. Drops splashed cold and sharp on the back of Proctor's hand.

One by one, she retrieved five small candle stubs from her pocket and handed them to Proctor, who arranged them in a circle around the bowl. She frowned, made minor adjustments in their position, then lit them with the candle. A honeyed scent spread across the table.

Proctor tapped his shoe impatiently, forced his foot to still. The other minutemen would be marching without him, and scrying didn't require any candles or rituals.

His own talent had appeared by accident, no rituals required. He'd been carrying in the eggs and dropped one—it'd practically leapt out of his hands, an egg near to hatching that left the tiny chick inside sprawled dead, wet in the dirt. Without knowing why he said it, Proctor announced that his friend Samuel was dead. The next day they heard that Samuel had been shot by Redcoats during a riot in Boston. That's when Elizabeth Brown told her son about the family talent for witchcraft, passed down generation to generation from their roots in Salem.

His mother turned the two brown eggs over in her hands, squinting at the specks.

"I'm surprised you could find any eggs this time of night,” he said.

"The hens lay more at the full moon.” She pursed her lips, selecting one of them, and had it poised to crack on the edge of the bowl. Over in the corner, Proctor's father moaned and rocked so hard his chair banged against the wall. Proctor winced—his father hadn't been the same since his apoplexy.

His mother switched the eggs. She tapped it on the edge of the bowl, letting the white drain from the cracked shell into the water.

Her free hand sought Proctor's, gave it a squeeze. “Holy Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name,” she prayed.

Proctor leaned forward to study the picture formed by the egg white.

"If I have found grace in Thy sight, then show me a sign that Thou speakest with me. Be Thou a light in the darkness of days, showing us the way forward, that we might know the path Thou wishest us to take."

A shudder ran through her arm. The eggshell crunched in her palm and the yolk splashed out into the middle of the bowl.

They both flinched. Proctor didn't know if it meant anything or was just an accidental spasm. She didn't say.

The yolk floated in the center like the sun reflected in a pond. Candle-

light slicked off its thick bulge as egg white filmed over the surface, forming ghosts in the water. A streak of red blood trailed off the yolk into the white.

Hairs went up on Proctor's neck. He could feel a vision gathering in the back of his head like bees to a hive, but he wasn't ready for it yet.

His mother flicked the eggshell pieces onto the table and wiped her hand on her apron. She licked her right forefinger and traced the name of the angel Gabriel across the circle of water. Gabriel, the messenger, revealer of the future.

The yolk swirled round, off-center, as reflections from the candles danced with one another. A sharp intake of breath and his mother pulled her hand back to the edge of the bowl.

She swallowed, and then tugged Proctor's finger up to the bowl. “Take a moment to sweep your mind clean,” she said.

He nodded acquiescence, but the broom in his head chased futilely after the stray thoughts. The other minutemen would already be on their way, and he didn't want to look like a Johnny-come-lately. Then a tightness formed in his chest, the way it always did when the sight was coming on.

"Heavenly Father,” he said. “If it pleases Thee, give me a sign, so that I may better know Thy will."

His eyes drifted shut.

This vision was clearer, more vivid than any Proctor had ever scryed. A militia man, an officer, marched across the green in the pale before dawn. A horse stamped through the grass—its flanks, the rider's boots, blocked Proctor's view of the militia officer, but the mounted Redcoat's face flushed with anger. A golden coin of fire burned at the Redcoat's throat. The Redcoat leaned over and aimed a pistol at the militia man's back. He was going to shoot—

A sudden bang made Proctor's eyes blink open, but it was only his father's chair cracking into the wall. The old man moaned as if he'd been wounded.

Proctor breathed deeply and fell back into the vision. At first everything was white, like fog, only dry and sharp—the smoke from musket fire. The bitter taste of black powder ran across his lips. A single line of red bled through the white haze. Then more lines of red, slashing across the back of his lids until they resolved into shapes of men, marching—no, running—away. The backs of the Redcoats. A sense of their fear, of his own elation, flushed through him.

His eyes opened.

"And what did you see?” his mother asked quietly.

Pulling his hands away from the bowl, he said, “I saw the Redcoats, Mother. Marching back to Boston, in a fine hurry."

"Is that all?"

He nodded firmly.

Her mouth tightened and she jabbed a finger into the yolk, breaking it. She whipped the egg into the water, mixing it all together.

"I thought I heard gunfire,” she said. “And I think I saw men shot, dying."

"That last part is your fear talking. I didn't see anything like that, only the Redcoats marching off."

"It would gratify me deeply if you were not to muster,” she said. “Let other mothers with children to spare send one of theirs, and not risk my only son."

Proctor couldn't blame her, not with his father all but gone. But he had to do his duty. “I'm on the roster, Mother, so I have to muster. Don't worry, we just need to show the governor our resolve to stand up for our rights. It won't come to shooting."

Maybe a single round of warning fire, just for show, like in his vision, and the Redcoats would march back to Boston. If only he knew what the golden coin at the Redcoat officer's throat meant.

He rose to go. His mother leaned over and blew out the five candles in one breath. “Be cautious,” she said. “The future is a blank road to me like it has never been before."

"I won't do anything to put myself in harm's way,” he said, picking up his hat and musket. “Besides, you know what Miss Emily would do to me if I got myself hurt."

His mother smiled, just like he hoped. She was almost as fond of Emily Rucke as Proctor was. The two of them were a bit young to be getting married yet, at just twenty and nineteen. But in truth, he expected to rightfully take over the farm soon if his father's health continued to fade, and he and Emily could live there with his mother.

"You best hurry on then,” his mother said, resigned. She wrapped an end of bread and a slice of cheese in cloth, and tucked it in his pocket. “You wouldn't want them to muster without you."

"No, ma'am,” he answered. He paused at the door and looked back to see his mother fussing with the blankets around his father's shoulders. He tipped his hat to her and ran out into the night.

The wind gusted—the air was chillier than he expected. He stopped at the well to fill his canteen. When he was done, he pulled Emily's yellow ribbon from his pocket and tied it to the buckle. Smoothing the silk through his fingers made him eager to see her again, but that would likely have to wait for another day.

He crossed the pasture to the road, his path broken by boulders; lights flickered like stars in distant windows, forming a constellation of his neighbors. Shadows moved through the moonlight on the road ahead.

"Hold up,” he shouted.

Someone called back and the shadows paused. Proctor ran over the field, the horn, bag, and canteen banging against his sides. He climbed the stone wall that lined the road; the moon was bright enough to see their faces. There was old Robert Munroe—carrying the same heavy Queen's Arm musket that he carried during the last war when he fought beside Proctor's father—with square-jawed Everett Simes and his nephew Arthur.

"Good morning, Proctor,” Munroe said, tugging at his beard. “Your father not coming?"

"No, sir,” Proctor answered.

"No, didn't think so. He was a good ‘un in the thick of it, though. Sure hope you take after him some."

"I could do without seeing the sharp end of an Indian tomahawk,” Proctor said, and the other men chuckled. He started one way and they turned the other. “Shouldn't we be headed into Lincoln to muster?"

"Cap'n Smith says a few of us ought to fetch back a firsthand report of the situation from Lexington,” Arthur explained. He'd turned fifteen back in January but was small enough to pass for twelve. Although not on the militia rosters, he showed up to every muster.

"Well, all right then,” Proctor said quickly and fell in.

"Say, Proctor, we'll march right past the Rucke place, won't we?” Everett asked.

"Reckon so,” Proctor said, trying to sound as if he was talking about the weather. He was eager to change the subject before they started teasing him about Emily; Arthur carried a long fowling piece for his weapon, so Proctor said, “You going bird hunting there, Arthur?"

"Sure,” Arthur answered back, deadpan. “Plan to shoot some redbirds if I see ‘em."

Proctor chuckled with the others but the remark made him uncomfortable. Sure, there'd been some conflict between the soldiers and the colonists, but they were all Englishmen. They might squabble with each other, like a large family did; in the end they'd set aside their differences and make things right. It wouldn't come to shooting.

The other three began to chatter about how many Redcoats might be marching out of Boston, and how many militia men would show up to fight them. Proctor walked in silence, slowly drawing ahead, not wanting to be part of their discussion. It didn't help. As they passed through the swampy land west of Lexington, the wind did odd tricks with sounds, bringing snatches of voices from homes too far away to see. Every farmhouse between Cambridge and Salem was awake by now, having the same conversation.

When Proctor rounded Concord Hill and came in sight of the rooftops of Lexington, the large, familiar house ahead was lit up bright as day. Even from a distance, he recognized the feminine silhouette in the main window.

As he ran ahead and up to the porch, the silhouette disappeared. He was reaching for the brass knocker when the door flew open. A round-faced brown woman stood there in a dress thrown hastily over her shift.

"Sorry to come calling so early, Bess,” Proctor said, addressing a house slave Thomas Rucke had brought with him on a voyage from the West Indies. “I wondered, if Miss Emily were awake, if I might have a brief word with her."

"She right here, be out in a second.” Sleep filled Bess's eyes, and she frowned as somebody behind her nudged her gently aside. It was Emily, in one of her best dresses, despite the hour. She was slender, with a heart-shaped face and big brown eyes. Dark curls tumbled out from under the edges of her cap.

"Well, this is certainly an unexpected visit,” she said; but she glanced at his weapons and her face turned cool. “I can't imagine what're you're grinning at."

Proctor dropped his gaze and his smile. “Might be because I'm looking at the sweetest woman I know."

"You only say that because my father is in the sugar trade."

"I'd think you were the sweetest woman in the colonies if your father traded lemon rinds."

Bess snorted and pushed past them, a drowsy-eyed chaperone, shawl over shift, carrying a basket of darning. She grunted as she eased herself into the porch rocker and spread the work on her lap. The wood creaked rhythmically. A faint voice down the road called, “Brown?"

"Emily,” Proctor said, in a rush. “Please believe me, there's nothing to fear."

"Oh, Proctor!” She wrung her hands. “Father says those rebels—that mob behind the tea party and everything since—they want to start a war!"

He shook his head. “No, no one wants to start a war."

"Brown!” The voice was stronger as the other three militia men marched around the bend.

"I have to go, Emily."

She stared meaningfully at the yellow ribbon tied to his canteen. “If my affections mean anything to you at all, Proctor Brown, you will not be part of any mob tonight."

The creaking on the porch had stopped. Bess sat with her chin on her chest, the darning egg naked in her lap. Impulsively, Proctor took Emily's hand and leaned close to whisper. “You know the secret I told you, about the ... the things I see?"

"Yes,” she said. “But what has that to do with—"

"Sometimes I can see a short ways into the future. You might call it scrying."

"It sounds like you mean witchcraft.” She tried to pull her hand away but he held on tight.

"It's not like that,” he said. “It's like ... like the parable of the talents. God gave me this talent, and He meant me to use it, not bury it. I used it tonight, and I saw the Redcoats marching back to Boston. There won't be any war."

Emily yanked her hand away and covered her mouth.

"You done courting there, Brown?” Everett Simes's voice said, right behind him.

"Yes, sir, I am,” Proctor said. He straightened up, slid his thumb under his powder horn strap to readjust it, and gave Emily a firm nod. “I was just telling Miss Rucke here there's nothing for her to worry about."

"Good eve, Miss Rucke,” Everett said, squinting toward the east to see if dawn had poked its nose over the horizon. “Or maybe it's good day. It'd be best if your father didn't come out to visit you. With his support of the governor and all, he might find a welcome made of tar and feathers."

"It's so pleasant to be threatened on my own front porch. I see the kind of company you've decided to keep, Mister Brown. Be so good as to call on me again when you can come alone.” She went over to the rocker and shook the slave awake. “Come, Bess, we should go inside. It's dangerous to be out here. Good day, gentlemen."

"It won't come to shooting,” Proctor assured her.

He stood watching the closed door for a moment before he rejoined the others. As they marched toward Lexington Green, he thought about whether he needed to go back to repair the situation with her. She was high-spirited—he loved that trait in her, though it meant she upset easily. She'd be fine once the current commotion had passed.

The air grew colder and the men's breath frosted as they chatted. When the conversation came back around to the British, it shoved Proctor's thoughts back to that golden coin in his vision. He was sure God meant him to see it, but he didn't know what it meant.

Lexington was close. They passed the burying ground, with grave markers thrust up from the darkness like tripstones. The four men went more quietly.

Cattle lowed uneasily in the common pen as they came to the green. Lexington Green was a triangle where the country roads joined together headed for Boston. They passed the schoolhouse at the wide end and crossed the open grass toward the meeting house that sat at the point. Small groups of militia men moved like shadows across the green; maybe a dozen others, their faces lit by lanterns, gathered around a cask of ale outside one of the houses that faced the green.

"Don't look like they're ready for the Redcoats,” Munroe muttered. “If'n they're comin'."

"Don't look like there's more'n fifty men here total,” Everett said.

"But a thousand Redcoats are marching from Boston!” Arthur said. “How will we fight ‘em?"

"There won't be any fighting—"

Proctor's opinion was interrupted by a ragged volley of musketfire east of the green. He fumbled for his powder horn.

Old Munroe laughed at him, planted the butt-end of his weapon in the ground and leaned on it. “I think that's thems as made up their minds to enter Buckman's tavern."

That's when Proctor heard casual whoops and laughter from the same direction. But of course—you couldn't carry a loaded weapon into a tavern. He relaxed, chuckling at himself.

"We could go to the tavern,” Arthur suggested hopefully, and his uncle glared at him.

"That'll be the best place to find Cap'n Parker,” Munroe said. “He uses it as his headquarters when the militia drills."

As they headed toward the tavern, a man came out and crossed the road toward the green. Proctor would've walked past him, but Monroe stopped and lifted his chin in greeting.

"Good evening to you, Cap'n."

The man stopped. Parker was a tall man in his mid-forties, with a large head and high brow. He coughed into his hand, sick with consumption—both his eyes and his cheeks were sunken—but too stubborn to give in to it. “Good evening, Robert. Who're your friends?"

"These are the Simes, cousins from up by Lincoln,” Munroe answered. “And this is Brown. We picked him up on the road in."

"We're grateful for your hike, but it doesn't ‘pear as though we'll see any Redcoats tonight after all,” he told them, his voice stronger than Proctor expected. “I'm giving men permission to disperse to their homes."

Everett sighed loudly. “But if I go home now I'll have to plow and my ox in't fit for it."

Parker smiled and excused himself to take the same message over to the men gathered at Munroe's house. Arthur yawned and stared down the road toward Boston. “Guess we wasted our time."

"Not Proctor,” Munroe said. “At least he had the chance to visit his sweetheart."

"And next time I see her, I can tell her I was right, that nothing happened,” Proctor said.

He was shifting the bag and horn on his shoulder for the march back home when a man ran onto the green shouting, “The Regulars have passed the Rocks—they're half a mile away!"

Arthur's young face vacillated between thrill and terror. “What do we do?"

"Keep a cool head,” Proctor said. “This'll be peaceful."

Captain Parker headed back toward the tavern, pausing only long enough to send a man sprinting to the belfry outside the meeting house. In a second, the bells were clanging.

Munroe chased Parker across the green. “Hey, cap'n!"

Parker paused at the sound of his name. “Seems I spoke too hastily,” he said. “Would you parade with my company?"

"That's why we came,” Munroe said firmly.

Young Arthur pushed past his uncle. “I can stand in line too."

Everett grumbled, “And do exactly as he's told."

"Thank you all,” Parker said, and hurried off, calling for his drummer to beat to arms. The other three men moved to join the rest of Parker's company, but Proctor stood still.

He had seen the Redcoats marching back to Boston. Nothing was going to happen.

"You coming, Brown?” Everett said sharply.

Proctor nodded, a bit numb, and followed them.

For the next few moments, Lexington Green looked like an ant hill stirred up with a stick. A small boy beat his drum while the bells continued to ring their alarm overhead. Captain Parker shouted at the men to form a line at the wide end of the green. Men from the tavern reloaded their weapons as they ran to obey. Proctor and the other three took a spot on the far right end of the line. Anxious families gathered by the schoolhouse.

One of the Lexington militia men left the line to go speak to his wife over by the schoolhouse. Parker ran him down, and shoved him back in line. “The time for second thoughts is done! Form up!"

Old Munroe loaded his musket, fitted the ramrod in place under the barrel. He nudged Proctor. “You might want to feed that weapon if you plan to empty its guts."

"I'll wait,” Proctor said. He looked down the line of men and made a quick count. “If it's sixty of us against a thousand Redcoats, there won't be any shooting."

Arthur finished loading his fowling piece. “Here they come,” he said, his voice shaking. “Here they come now."

The Lexington drum was drowned out by the sound of other drummers, and the first Redcoats marched around the bend beyond the meeting house. To judge by the brogue, an Irishman set the pace—his accent carried across the green as he yelled the soldiers on. They came fast, for all their delay in getting this far, and once they started, they seemed to keep on coming, a long line of red uniforms stretching as far as the eye could see. Proctor tried to count them too, but the dawn twilight blurred their numbers. His heart began to pound—there were hundreds, maybe even a thousand of them. They formed a line with startling alacrity, several ranks deep, as wide as the green, not more than seventy yards away.

But they would march back to Boston—he was sure of it.

Three British officers on horses rode onto the green and galloped at the center of the colonial line. One waved a sword and yelled, “Throw down your arms! You rebels, throw down your arms, damn you!"

A light flashed at the throat of the officer who shouted, and a sharp pain stabbed Proctor's eyes.

"Did you see that light?” he asked.

"No,” Munroe said. He was staring at the same officer. “Wouldn't mind a little light to aim by."

Uncertainty fluttered in Proctor's throat. It was the light, the same one from his vision, but he had no idea what it meant. He reached into his hunting bag for a ball to load his musket. They might have to make one volley, just so the Redcoats could save face when they retreated.

He had his ramrod in the barrel when Captain Parker approached the British officers. Parker met them eye to eye, speaking quietly; they blustered back, shouting orders at him to disarm his men.

A cry came down the line. “Don't fire unless fired upon.” Everett took up the order and repeated it to Arthur. “Hold your fire—we're not to start any war."

"But if they start it, we'll give it back to them,” Munroe said. He put his flints and lead balls into his hat and set it on the ground before him for quicker reloading. After a second, Everett copied him.

Proctor finished loading his weapon and looked up to see the situation had quickly deteriorated. Two mounted officers cantered across the green, while the third one, the one with the golden light, shouted at Captain Parker.

"Who is that?” he asked.

"Sounds like Major Pitcairn,” Munroe said. “According to those what know him down in Boston, he's a real firebrand. Fearless in battle. The men go wherever he leads."

That made Proctor even less easy of heart. The mass of Redcoats had grown so deep it was impossible to see if more were coming. Meanwhile, flashes of brown and russett showed behind the stone walls surrounding the green, where men too cowardly to join the line of the militia took cover. Women and children bunched by the cattle pen and between the houses that lined the commons, straining for a view.

The Redcoats took up their battle cry, shouting, “Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!” The roar made Proctor's skin goose pimple. He saw Arthur pale, and Everett swallowed nervously.

"There won't be any shooting,” Proctor whispered.

Captain Parker finally turned away from Pitcairn, who was left mouth open in mid-rage, and walked back toward his company of militia.

"They won't listen to reason and mean to disarm us,” he shouted down the line. “And we'll have none of that. Take your arms and disperse, go home at once."

"What do we do?” Arthur asked his uncle, looking more like twelve than fifteen.

"We'll disperse, that's the order,” Everett said.

Proctor breathed a sigh of relief; maybe he could stop by and talk to Emily on the way home, make things better there.

As the other men in the line started to break away in groups of two and three, Munroe pointed across the road behind them. “Let's stay off the main road. We'll circle the burying ground and cut back through the trees."

"That sounds good,” Everett said, and he bent to pick up his hat and flints.

But Pitcairn chased after Captain Parker, circling his horse and shouting. “Order them to lay down their arms, or by God every man on this field will end the day dead! Surrender, or you will die!"

He pulled his pistol, as if sixty or more armed men at point blank range were nothing to fear, and aimed it at the Lexington militia captain. The golden coin of light at his throat was blindingly bright. Proctor squinted, realizing that he was the only one who saw it.

And then time slowed down, just like a fish swimming beneath the frozen surface of a winter pond. Pitcairn's horse stamped and whinnied. Pitcairn leaned over and aimed his pistol at Captain Parker's back, clearly intending to shoot.

Proctor felt a knot of tightness in his chest, the same as when he scryed. The other militia men had all turned away, or left. No one else could save Lexington's captain.

"Hey!” Proctor raised his musket and aimed it at the shining circle of light.

He heard a bang, like a chair slamming into the wall. When the smoke cleared from the end of his muzzle, Pitcairn stared at him. Untouched. He lowered his gun quickly before anyone could see what he'd done.

"Boy, what did you just do?” Munroe asked.

Scattered popping already echoed around the green and a second later the Redcoats’ line erupted in a wall of smoke shot with flame. Proctor turned to answer Munroe just in time to see the old man's head split open by a lead ball, flinging him backward in a spray of blood.

What had he done? It wasn't supposed to happen this way. This wasn't what he'd seen.

While these thoughts roiled through his head, his training kicked in and he started to reload. The jumbled Lexington militia responded to the Redcoats with ragged shots, but when the second British rank fired, men all around Proctor threw themselves to the ground.

Some of them went down for a different reason. Everett had taken a ball through his leg and was trying to staunch the flow of blood. Arthur stared at his uncle; his shaking hand spilled gunpowder everywhere but into his barrel. Behind them women screamed and children shrieked, some running forward through the gunfire to check on their husbands and fathers, others scattering to their homes.

Across the green, British officers shouted for the next rank of soldiers to step forward while the first finished reloading. Proctor tugged on Arthur's sleeve. “We best be on our way."

"I'm staying! I'm—"

"You take him,” Everett said through gritted teeth.

Proctor didn't need permission. He grabbed the back of the boy's coat and dragged him across the road toward the cemetery. They ran with their heads down as the guns cracked and another round of lead buzzed over their heads. Behind them, a Redcoat shouted “Fix bayonets!” Proctor held on to Arthur, running past the smithy and into the graveyard, among the crosses and headstones.

"We aren't going to take that,” Arthur said, twisting to get free. “We aren't just going to let them march in and tell us what to do and shoot us. We have to get my uncle!"

Proctor tightened his fist on the boy's jacket and kept running. He glanced at his musket—the firing pan was empty, the hammer down—he'd shot a second time but he couldn't recall aiming or pulling the trigger.

What he did recall was the way the Redcoats concentrated their fire around him, because he'd been the first to shoot. And Robert Munroe, who had survived the Indian wars alongside Proctor's father, was dead.

How was he going to explain himself to his father?

Or to Emily?

Shouts behind them were followed by random shots. Proctor pushed Arthur's head down as they ran into the cover of the trees. “Left,” he said, guiding the boy with a shove—they'd have to get back to the road before they ran into the swamp.

Proctor's vision from the scrying came back to him again. He hadn't just lied to his mother, he'd lied to himself.

The smoke of muskets.

The taste of black powder.

The Redcoats running.

Why had he assumed they were marching back to Boston? They were chasing the militia. And why in God's name had he felt compelled to shoot at Pitcairn, the officer with the golden coin at his throat?

"We need to find our company and report,” he told Arthur, who was too stunned to respond. The real battle was only beginning.

They clambered over the stone wall when they came to the road. There was a light on in Emily's house. He couldn't stop to speak to her now, but he'd come back later to set things right.

Meanwhile, signs of the country rising were all around them. Warning beacons on hilltops to the west alerted other towns, and the fitful wind carried snatches of church bells ringing the same message north and south.

They lost those signs when they rounded Fiske's Hill and passed under the high bluff that sheltered the road. Arthur stumbled, and Proctor hooked an arm under his shoulder and hauled him along. The poor kid was probably exhausted. Before Proctor could say anything encouraging to him, hoofbeats sounded on the road behind them.

"Let's hide,” he whispered. The road was lined with boulders and loose stones, topped with logs. Proctor banged his knee on a stump end as they vaulted a low spot and crouched behind cover. Arthur tried again to reload his fowling piece.

Proctor reached out, stopped him, and stood. The rider was a boy, a colonial, galloping hard toward Concord.

"Hey! Hey, what's the news?"

The boy reined in, kicking up dirt as he turned around. “The Redcoats shot the militia at Lexington. They're marching for Concord!"

"We were at the green when they started shooting,” Proctor said. “They shot Robert Munroe in the head."

Arthur pushed forward. “Do you have any word about Everett Simes? He was injured—we had to leave him behind."

"I don't know the names,” the boy replied, “but they bayoneted some of the injured men, speared them like they were fish."

Proctor's jaw dropped open. Arthur started back for Lexington but Proctor grabbed him.

"I need to carry the warning ahead,” the boy explained as his anxious horse spun in circles. Proctor said, “God speed."

As the hoofbeats faded down the road, Arthur tried to pull free of Proctor's grip. “We've got to go back."

"There's no help for your uncle now.” His own voice sounded hard to him despite the evenness of his words. “There'll be plenty of shooting ahead."

Arthur's lips rolled into a grim frown, and he set off for Concord at twice the pace he'd had before. Proctor jogged after him, but his thoughts trailed behind. How could his gift have been so wrong? Why hadn't he seen the Redcoats firing at the militia?

The fields and farmyards along the road were empty. At Hartwell's farm, a trunk full of valuables had been left beside the barn. When Proctor and Arthur crossed the bridge at Tanner's Brook, even the tavern was empty. Closer to Concord, at Merriam's Corner, three generations of Merriams had gathered to barricade the road.

"The British killed men at Lexington,” the youngest Merriam shouted. Proctor tensed, waiting to hear how he'd started the shooting, but the other man continued without mentioning it. “They shot Robert Munroe's head off and stabbed Everett Simes—Oh, hey, there Arthur."

"We were there,” Arthur said. Proctor's glance shifted from face to face. Maybe fifteen men, all brave and angry. What would they say if they knew he'd been the first to shoot?

The youngest Merriam, outside without a hat, brought them cups of fresh water. “They shot Jonathon Harrington in front of his own home,” Michael Merriam told them. “He bled to death on the doorstep in front of his wife and children."

"They'll do the same to you,” Proctor said, wiping water from his chin. “There's no way you'll stand against them."

"We don't mean to. We're just watching the road until they come, then we'll fall back and join the militia in Concord."

"We'll see you there then,” Proctor said. “We have to muster, and report what we saw."

They said their good-byes and continued on toward Concord. The last stretch of road ran beneath the shadow of Arrowhead Ridge. “We could pick them off from up there,” Arthur said. “While they were marching below."

"Reckon we could,” Proctor replied. Picking off a few of them wouldn't make any difference to Robert Munroe or Everett Simes, but it might make the Redcoats slower to shoot the next time. Or quicker. That Major Pitcairn meant business.

Drums and fifes played in the distance, coming toward them—several companies of militia marching toward Lexington. He and Arthur stepped to the side of the road. He only saw young faces like their own—the minutemen. His company from Lincoln was among them.

A sense of relief flooded Proctor.

"It took you long enough,” he said. He fell in with the column, saluting Captain Smith, a competent and usually taciturn man just a few years older than himself.

"Brown,” Smith said. “We marked you down for absent."

"I went into Lexington with Munroe and Everett Simes, saw the shooting there."

"Was it as bad as we heard?"

Proctor swallowed hard, wondering how much of it was his fault. “Worse. There must be close to a thousand Redcoats, and the major of the marines is fearless."

"We're bound to see more fighting today, now that they started it,” Smith said. “Captains Barrett and Minott of the Lexington minutemen are leading this group, so we're just here to provide support. Is that clear?"

"Yes, sir.” Firmly.

"Then fall in."

"Sir, can I keep Arthur with me?"

Smith looked back at Arthur, saw the intensity in his eyes, and said, “You can. But Arthur?"

"Yes, sir?” His voice trembled.

"You're not to put yourself in the way of any exceptional danger. Your mother would have my hide if you did."

"It's a bit late for that,” Arthur said angrily, but Proctor had taken his arm and let the column pass. They exchanged greetings with the rest of the men as they went by, until Proctor saw a familiar face—sandy hair and an open smile above a cleft chin—and fell in beside him.

"Amos Lathrop,” he said. “Good to see you."

"I understand you already heard the British guns.” He pushed his cheek out with his tongue, then said. “Do you always have to be so impatient to do everything?"

Proctor smiled from habit, though he didn't feel it inside. But Amos was his best friend. Being the only one to work their farm, and not having much family on either side, he didn't have many close friends. What time he did have for socializing this past year, he'd spent pursuing Emily. “Where's the rest of the militia?"

"Their captains voted to guard the town center,” Amos said. “The minutemen companies voted to meet the Redcoats on the road. So here we are."

Proctor made a quick count of the line. There were only a hundred minutemen present. “You know how many Redcoats there are?"

"I've heard,” Amos said. “But somebody's got to go out to meet ‘em."

The beat of the drum steadied Proctor's nerves and marching gave him a moment to think. If he was the only one who could see the golden medallion shining at Pitcairn's throat, then it must be some kind of witchcraft. But what was it for and what could he do about it?

The companies left the road, threading their way among the rocks to take up a position along the hilltop overlooking Tanner's Creek. A dozen or so Merriams, retreating from their homestead, joined the line. Proctor reloaded his musket. All around him, men arranged their balls and flints and horns in the manner they preferred for fast reloading. Proctor kept his ready for another quick retreat.

The sun was up now and he was thirsty, so he took a sip from his canteen. He curled the yellow ribbon around his finger while he took a second sip, thinking of the curls in Emily's hair. Around him, men whispered to their neighbors about the coming battle.

Proctor—and Arthur, he reminded himself—were the only men in these companies who had ever been in battle before, and that had only been a few hours previous. But here their line stood, ready to face the most efficient and deadly military in the world. The “deadly” aspect was chief in his mind.

"Let's bow our heads in prayer,” Captain Barrett, in charge of the Concord minutemen, called out. Proctor put both hands around the barrel of his musket, propped butt-end in the soil, and bowed his head.

"Heavenly Father,” Barrett said. “You bring these tribulations upon us as a chastisement because we fall away from Your Holy Word. Use Your rod to guide us back into Your safe pastures. And beat off the English wolves. Amen."

"Amen,” Proctor said, echoed by a hundred other voices. He knew what some of the men would say, that talents like his, skills they'd call witchcraft, were part of any falling away from the Holy Word.

Were they right? If he knew how to fashion a charm like Pitcairn's, would he make it for himself? Was it a Christian gift, made with God-given skill, like his mother insisted their talents were? Or was it made with some other kind of magic?

Sunlight glinted sharp off movement in the road at the far edge of the horizon, and the wind carried the faint sound of drums rattling out a quick march. A double line of British regulars came into view. The sun behind them reflected on their arms and turned their coats as red as blood.

"Them's the ones who stabbed my uncle,” Arthur told Amos and a few other men near by.

Amos didn't change his expression, but he let off a low, skeptical whistle.

A British officer rode ahead on his horse, twisting in his saddle to shout orders. Proctor wondered if it was Pitcairn, and then felt certain that it was. The drummers changed their cadence and the Redcoats spread out over the fields, forming a skirmish line opposite the minutemen. Men around Proctor began to speak up.

"Cap'n, there're too many of them."

"We could hold this hill for one or two rounds, but they'll flank us."

"Don't care for the looks of that, sir."

Proctor agreed with them, and his first resolve to do something to even the score melted away like dew.

"We'll stay here until they get within a hundred rods,” Barrett said finally. “Delay them that long, give more men time to rally in town. Then we'll make an orderly retreat."

Proctor tightened his fist on his weapon, and he saw Amos and a few other men nodding. They could do that much.

If they had the chance. The Redcoats skirmish line came fast, looking eager to engage and expecting to win any contest of arms. They were less than a quarter mile away when Barrett signaled to the drummer and the colonials began their retreat. Proctor was frustrated at his powerlessness, but also quietly relieved. He checked over his shoulders once or twice to see if the British were gaining on them. But the militia drummers matched the rhythm of the British drummers, beat for beat, with the fifers playing similar tunes. It would have felt like one of the parades he'd seen in Boston were it not for the deadly circumstances of that morning.

They marched into Concord with the British still a quarter mile behind them. The rest of the militia companies were lined up in formation on the high hill across the road from the meeting house. The liberty pole stood behind them, a thin reed stark against the pale sky, next to a pole flying the town flag. The minutemen hurried up the hill to join them.

As the officers shouted the retreating into the new formation, Proctor looked below. Even with all their forces together, the Redcoats still outnumbered them two to one. And they swept down the road like a scythe at reaping.

Along the hilltop, townswomen were bringing food out to the men. Proctor snatched a warm piece of buttered bread from a pale, determined girl he'd never met. She glanced down at the Redcoats and hurried away with her basket before he could thank her. Arthur started after her, but Proctor put a hand on his shoulder and handed him the bread. While Arthur devoured that, Proctor reached in his pocket, crumbled off a piece of the cheese his mother had given him, and slipped it in his mouth, savoring the sharp taste.

The British drums pounded and a thousand pairs of boots thumped in unison. Behind Proctor, the Concord militia officers debated a course of action.

"What are we waiting for?” Arthur said. “Let's go and meet them."

Eleazar Brooks, an old gray-haired veteran from Lincoln and a friend of Proctor's father, stood nearby them in the line. “No, not yet. It will not do for us to begin the war."

"The war's already begun,” Proctor said, and told him what happened to Munroe and Everett.

Brooks sucked his teeth. “That's unfortunate, especially for Munroe. He was a good man. Still, we must make sure the regulars are the ones as start the war."

Up and down the line, it was the same thing. The older men were cautious and wanted to wait, while the young men were all for meeting the British and giving them a whipping.

Would the young men feel different if they knew what Proctor knew? He doubted it.

Captain Smith came running down the line, mopping sweat from his forehead. “More militia are coming in,” he said. “We're going to retreat across the North Bridge to Punkatasset Hill, until our strength is equal to theirs."

"Another retreat?” Arthur asked, his voice cracking. “Why so far?"

"The hill's a good choice,” the veteran Brooks said as Smith moved on, repeating the order. “It'll give us a clear view to see them coming. And it's a bigger field for us to make formation."

Proctor was torn. If enough militia showed up, the British would have to back off, the way they should have done in Lexington—just like in his vision. But he wanted one more chance at Pitcairn too, and he wouldn't get that without more shooting.

Once again the drums and fifes played, and once again Proctor retreated another mile, this time through the town and north. Their double file stomped on the wooden planks as they ran across the North Bridge, drowning out the sound of the drums.

Punkatasset Hill was a broad field that looked over the Concord River and across the great meadows on the other side. You could see the center of town, so it was the perfect place to watch the Redcoats march in to occupy their homes.

The sun climbed higher in the sky and the air grew warm. Men who had worn both vests and coats out the night before began to open or remove them. Proctor took another sip of tepid water from his canteen while British forces ran to take the bridge below. Half the group split off and continued up the road toward the mill where the Concord militia had hidden their munitions.

"There must be Tory spies around,” old Brooks said, “if they know exactly where to go."

Proctor found himself nodding agreement. One of the other Lincoln men nearby said, “I hear that Rucke up from Lexington is one of them. He moved out here with his daughter just so's he could spy on the militias."

"That's a damned lie,” Proctor blurted out.

"Says who?” The man who demanded to know was a few years older and a few inches taller than Proctor. He had a lopsided mouth that made it look like he was ready to bite someone.

"Says me.” Proctor balled his fist and stepped right up into the slanderous fool's ugly face.

Eleazar Brooks shoved between them, holding up his hand for peace. “Save it for the Redcoats, boys. We'll be needing both of you afore the day is out."

Proctor pushed harder, but the other man backed away. “That'll be fine,” he said. “There'll be time to deal with Tory spies and any other sinners the way God wills after this day is over."

At the other man's words, a cold knot tightened in Proctor's chest, different from the one he had when scrying. The only thing worse than a spy was a witch. In his mother's family, there'd been some killed in Salem for the sin of witchcraft. There was no way he could tell these men what he knew about Pitcairn, not without revealing himself, and putting him and his mother at risk.

He turned back to his place in line, tightened his grip on his musket, and watched the Redcoats enter Concord.

"I haven't ever heard anything like that about Miss Emily's father,” Arthur said quietly.

"Because it's a damned lie,” Proctor snapped under his breath. Immediately, he regretted it. “Forgive my intemperance, Arthur. It wasn't meant to be directed at you."

"We'll show those damned scoundrels,” Arthur replied. “And we'll give them something back for what they did to my uncle. If I see any of them lying there injured, I'll bayonet them myself."

Proctor swallowed his first real laugh since sunrise. “But you don't have a bayonet."

"Then I'll use a hatchet,” the boy said, deadly earnest, eyeing the one in Proctor's belt.

A barking dog slammed into Proctor's leg, knocking him off-balance, before it chased another dog up the hill and into the mass of confusion there. Men's dogs had followed them from their homes and farms and, not knowing that a battle had taken place miles away this beautiful morning, frolicked as if it were a picnic.

In some ways the scene did resemble a church picnic. Laundry hung from the lines outside the house atop the hill. Women and children ran back and forth from town with food and news. Old faces mixed with young, the black faces of slaves and former slaves mixed with the white. The officers were dressed in ordinary clothes; the colonel in charge wore an old coat, a flapped hat, and a leather apron. Reverend Emerson, Concord's minister, was present in his dark coat, moving among the crowd, offering words of encouragement and prayers. Only the musket he carried gave sign that anything was out of the ordinary.

Arthur tugged on his sleeve. “Look!"

A column of smoke rose from the town below. “That appears like it's from the town hall,” Proctor said.

Many of the militia men, including Proctor, were poised to charge down the hill, but the drums started beating, calling them to order. As they fell into a double line, he realized there were at least two full regiments gathered—more than enough to take the bridge. With other volunteers coming in from the outlying towns, they had maybe as many men as the entire British force.

He braced his feet as they went down the slope. The colonel, in his leather apron, stomped along the length of the line. “Do not fire first,” he reminded the men every few steps. “Don't be the first to open fire."

Proctor looked away, unable to meet his eyes.

Down the line someone called out, “But what do we do once they fire on us?"

The colonel paused to answer him. “Then you remember your training and fire as fast as you can. Aim low for their bodies.” That elicited murmurs of respect.

At the bottom of the hill, the badly outnumbered British soldiers beat a quick retreat across the bridge. As the colonials continued their steady march down the long slope, a few Redcoats ran back onto the bridge and began to rip up the wooden planks, rendering it impassable.

With the sound of the splitting wood still in the air, the colonel left the colonial line and ran ahead, leather apron flapping against his legs. “Stop that! Stop! That's our bridge, to our homes—you leave it be!"

"Cap'n, can we shoot ‘em?” asked a man near Proctor, and a fellow just beyond him yelled, “That's our bridge!"

Proctor clenched his jaw and gripped his musket tighter. All around him, the Concord men beseeched their commanders to attack. The sound of another plank ripped loose was followed, over the rooftops in town, by sparks shooting into the air and the doubling of the column of smoke.

No single man gave an order, but a consensus was reached, just as in a town meeting, and the deliberate march downhill began to move as fast as a Nor'easter, sweeping Proctor along with it.

The Acton fifer, a little blond boy about Arthur's age, played “The White Cockade,” a quick little Jacobite song the British thought seditious, and the minutemen from Acton ran to the front. The Concord minutemen jumped in behind them, and Proctor's Lincoln company came next, all forming the first line of attack. Most of the casualties would be in the front rows; everyone knew it, including Proctor.

He glanced over his shoulder. The ordinary militia companies filled out the middle ranks, followed at the rear by the unorganized volunteers who answered the alarms.

The Redcoats saw the minutemen sweeping toward them like a storm front, and they turned to run for shelter. At the same moment, a second company was running from town to provide support. The two units collided with each other just beyond the bridge, and in an instant, the western shore of the river became a jumbled mass of confused Redcoats, with frantic officers trying to sort them out.

In sharp contrast, the front line of the minutemen spread along the causeway on the eastern side of the river. Proctor remembered the British order to fix bayonets on Lexington Green and was glad; with the river between them, the British had no way to make a similar charge.

Across the river, concentrated at the bridge, the Redcoats made a hasty three-deep firing formation. Seeing their guns aimed at him, Proctor pulled up his musket and aimed back.

"Hold your fire!” Captain Smith bellowed. “We're not to start it."

But I already did start it, Proctor thought. And then he pushed that thought aside. Pitcairn had been ready to shoot Captain Parker in the back, knowing that witchcraft protected him from any retribution. Proctor had to act.

"Once they do start it,” Smith ordered, “aim for the brightest coats first—that'll be their officers."

Proctor's heart pounded. Waiting was harder, now that he knew what was coming.

A gun cracked—a puff of smoke went up from the front of the British line. Proctor swallowed, kept his own finger frozen, waiting for the order. The Acton fifer began another round of “The White Cockade."

Two more British shots went off, and then the front row of Redcoats let go with a ragged, unordered volley. One of the Acton minutemen went down, his chest burst open, spurting blood. The fifer dropped, his tune cut off in mid-note. A second volley came from the British line and a few more minutemen fell. Proctor's heart was drumming in his ear.

And his captain was shouting.

"Fire! For God's sake, fire!"

Proctor aimed for the reddest coat and squeezed the trigger. For the next few moments, all he was aware of were the men beside him, the men he aimed at, and the mechanical process of reloading his musket. Dense clouds of bitter smoke obscured both sides of the river. Before the third ball left his musket he realized he no longer heard lead whizzing past.

The British lines had broken.

Men were down around him. Some of the militia retreated from the carnage to regroup; others ran toward the bridge to secure it. Proctor stood frozen, glad, for the second time that day, to find himself still standing.

The musket fog began to clear; the harsh taste of gunpowder filled his mouth. Across the river, the Redcoats were in full retreat toward Concord Green.

Just like in his scrying.

The British dead sprawled awkwardly in the road, while the wounded cried out in pain. One Redcoat clutched his belly and crawled on hands and knees after the retreating column until he fell on his face and lay there moaning, gut shot, bleeding to death. A Concord man crossed the bridge, pulled out his hatchet, and calmly split the Redcoat's skull. Proctor was not sure if it was cruelty or mercy. You killed a chicken in the yard that way, but not a man. And yet didn't he want the British dead? Hadn't they done the same to Everett Simes?

While he stood there unsure of his own feelings or next action, men began to carry the colonial dead and injured toward the farmhouse on the hill.

"Proctor,” a small voice said beside him. “Proctor?"

He looked over and saw Arthur standing there, pale and trembling. His chin was slick with vomit. “Arthur!” Proctor asked. His heart lurched. “Have you been shot?"

"No. But I don't feel so good."

Proctor grabbed Arthur's shoulder, turned him side to side to make sure he wasn't hurt. “Maybe you should go home and check on your mother and your sisters."

"You sure that's proper?"

"I'm sure. The bridge is ours now. But don't go through the center of town. Cut through the pasture and go around behind the ridge, until you come to the Bedford Road, and if that's clear, then take the road on home."

"All right.” He continued to stand there.

"If you have to tell them about your Uncle Everett, you do it straight out, without the details or embellishment,” Proctor said. “You don't want to upset them more than need be.” He reached out and used his sleeve to wipe the spit off Arthur's chin.

Arthur jerked his head away and scowled, wiping his own chin. “I know what to do."

He ran off, leaving his hat on the ground with shot in it. Proctor didn't have the heart to call after him, so he put the lead in his hunting bag and tucked the cap in his belt. Arthur crossed the bridge, sprinting past the Redcoat who'd had his skull split open. Proctor watched Arthur until he climbed up over the far hill and headed off through the woods behind town.

He wasn't the only one to leave. Here and there, other men headed off in other directions, ignoring calls to return.

Proctor didn't understand. A boy like Arthur was one thing, but the work here wasn't done yet—you didn't plow a field without planting it too. There were still Redcoats on both sides of the bridge.

He found Captain Smith making sure the last of their injured were removed up hill. “What're we to do next, sir?” Proctor asked. “The Redcoats haven't exactly packed their kit for home yet."

Smith looked past the bridge to the center of town. “No, they haven't. Gather as many men as you can before they scatter more. We're caught between four British companies still on this side of the bridge, and the rest in Concord. Could be a hammer and an anvil if we're not careful."

"I'll do what I can,” Proctor said.

He hurried along the causeway and up the hillside, calling the men from his company and telling them to report to Captain Smith. He grew bolder as he went and started commanding other men to report to their officers too. “The fighting's not done,” he said again and again. “The Redcoats're coming back for another try at us."

He wasn't sure if it was true, but he had to do something, anything, to make up for his decision on Lexington Green.

The companies hadn't even reformed when the order came to split their force, with the minutemen holding the eastern side of the bridge. Proctor ran across it with the others, skipping over the gap where planks had been pried up. They took up a position behind the stone wall on the hillside. Proctor double-shotted his musket when he reloaded. He wanted to do as much damage with that first volley as possible.

Smoke still rose from the center of town, but it was a smaller column now, more like a bonfire than a housefire. “What do you think they're burning?” he asked.

Amos Lathrop crouched next to him behind the wall. “The carriages for the cannons, that's what one of the girls said. At least the cannons are safely hidden."

"We can build new carriages in pretty short order,” Proctor replied. “But the cannon would be harder to replace."

"The Redcoat officers have to be thinking the same thing."

It appeared they were thinking of retaking the bridge first. The Redcoats who had been routed reformed with the rest of the troops and marched back in fighting formation. When they saw the militia lined up behind the wall, they halted just outside the range of the muskets. Their officers rode forward of the troops for a better look.

One officer rode out farther than the others, well within range of their guns. Major Pitcairn. Proctor again saw the spark at his chest, even though he had the sun behind him.

Almost against his own will, he sighted his musket at the officer, just as he had on the green. The urge to shoot was almost overwhelming. He fought the urge until his finger cramped, then eased it off the trigger and lowered his weapon. It would be wasted lead.

The captain, coming down the line, rapped him on the shoulder. “I saw that—hold your fire! We won't shoot until they shoot first."

As he went down the line repeating that message to other men, Amos shook his head. “Shooting's already started. We held our fire at the bridge and lost good men."

Proctor rolled his tongue through his cheek and spit. “It's not like he's telling us to let them shoot first, then turn the other cheek."

Amos laughed. “There is that."

The mounted officers retreated behind their troops again, Pitcairn last. At the same moment, a shout rose from the militia units on the western bank holding their position on the hill above the road. When the shout died down, Proctor heard drums. The other four companies of Redcoats were returning from the colonial armory at a quick march. When they saw they were surrounded by colonials, the front ranks broke into a run.

The militia units had their muskets trained on them, but every man held his trigger. Nor did the British shoot first.

How four companies of Redcoats marched under the guns of the militia without either side firing a shot, Proctor couldn't say. He brought his own weapon to shoulder and winced; the four quick volleys at the bridge left him bruised.

Still no one fired.

At Lexington, and again at the bridge, it had taken only one stray shot to set off volleys of fire. This time, the Redcoats crossed the bridge, quietly gathered up their dead and wounded, and continued their tense march under the guns of the minutemen until they rejoined their main force.

Amos lowered his musket and took a deep breath. “Why'd we let them by like that?"

"When they're all bunched up together they make a bigger target,” Proctor said. “Some of those old men in the militia, their eyesight's going bad, and they need that advantage."

Now that they'd been stung, the British moved slowly. They milled around town, forming their march, stealing carriages for their wounded, and sending skirmishers out along Arrowhead Ridge to protect their retreat. It was noon before the drums beat the call to arms and the Redcoats started back toward Boston.

As soon as the British column began moving, Captain Smith came down the line. “It's been decided that we mean to teach them a lesson. They're not to make it back to Boston, not one of them if we can help it."

There were somber murmurs at this, including Proctor's own. He thought about Munroe, and Everett, and that fifer from Acton. “That's more like it."

"The militia's been raised from all over,” Barrett went on. “We're setting up along the road to harry the Redcoats. Our job is to get to the curve at the Bedford Road just past Tanner's Creek before they do."

"That's more than three miles cross-country,” one of the men said. And another answered, “That's right—so what're we waiting for?"

Proctor pushed his way to the front. “I can take the lead. That's out towards my father's farm, and I know the paths between there and town as well as any man."

Smith nodded and let him go to the front.

They ran the whole way, single file on narrow trails over rocky pastures and through the open woods. Fierce gunfire sounded south of them as they crossed the old road above Merriams's Corner, and Proctor turned to go join it. But Captain Smith stopped him.

"There're other companies down there, that's their work, leave it to them,” he told Proctor. “We've got to be at our station on the curve to do ours."

"Yes, sir,” Proctor said. He led the file of men through the little Mill Brook valley, where they splashed across the creek, and up over the hills, down into the swampy lowlands around Tanner's Creek.

Again gunfire echoed down the valley from the direction of Brooks Hill. This time when the men tried to change their path to join it, it was Proctor who grabbed them and aimed them over the water and up the hills on the other side.

"To the curve,” he told them. “We'll get our chance—go to the hill above the curve."

Proctor reached the top of the hill to find the Concord men taking positions among the trees, and the Lincoln men joined them. He crouched behind an elm and caught his breath. The Reading militia were strung out low on the hillsides, near the start of the curve. Brown and russet jackets shifted from tree to tree on the far side of the road. Probably men from Woburn, Proctor thought. He almost felt sorry for the Redcoats. Drawn out in a narrow line, penned in by stone walls, with tree-covered hills on both sides—they didn't stand a chance.

They came marching around the bend in a line that was much more ragged than it had been, leaving Concord.

Across the road, the Woburn men fired first, followed by the Reading militia in their positions at the bottom of the hill. The Redcoats were caught in a vicious cross-fire. One or two of the men around Proctor let off a shot, but Smith shouted, “Hold your fire!"

Captain Barrett, of the Concord minutemen, shouted the same thing. “Wait till they're closer, and stagger your shots. We won't get them all with that first volley."

Down below, some of the British were trying to fight back, but those who left the road and tried to climb over the wall to reach the men from Woburn and Reading only made themselves easier targets. The smarter Redcoats ran forward to escape the fire.

"Here's our chance now,” Smith said.

Proctor took aim at the Redcoat in the lead, waiting until he'd almost reached the second bend and then fired. A dozen muskets went off around him at the same instant. There was no way to tell who shot the man, or how many times he'd been shot, but several Redcoats in the front fell.

Proctor stepped behind the tree to reload and heard bark splinter as the Redcoats returned fire. When he stepped out to shoot again, he saw that the Redcoats kept pushing forward. They had to—they were being attacked from either side, and from behind, and a man could only load and shoot so fast. As long as the Redcoats kept moving, most of them would get through. Through a second and third volley, they kept marching and their carriages kept rolling, until only their dead and wounded were left.

He had looked for Pitcairn and missed him, probably one of the times he was behind the tree reloading. He doubted that the British major had fallen.

"Where to now, captain?” Proctor asked.

"We've got to skip ahead of them again,” Smith said.

This was Proctor's land, figuratively if not literally. He lived within a mile and knew every road and trail, every farm and pasture. “The south side of the road is too low and swampy, you get much beyond here. But we could make our way to the Bluffs outside Lexington."

"I was thinking the same thing,” Smith said.

Proctor was off and running again without waiting for an order. Looking back, he saw they didn't have a full company anymore. Men who were wounded, or who had family wounded, stayed behind, as did men tired of the fight. But the Redcoats had been thinned as well.

They crossed the Bedford Road and passed through Mason's pastures. This time when they heard gunfire down around Hartwell's farm, not a man turned aside. In truth, there was no place where they did not hear gunfire now, and nowhere they went that they did not glimpse other groups of militia running through the fields and woods. Proctor took a twisting path over pastures strewn with granite boulders. He was panting, and several of the others were drenched with sweat, but they came to a hill above the road, once again ahead of the British troops.

There were only two or three dozen of them now, mixed men from Concord and Lincoln, but others hid among the boulders and in the ditches, waiting for the Redcoats. Proctor started to lead the men down there, thinking it would be his best chance to get at Pitcairn.

"Not there,” Smith said between breaths. “Further up, on the hill."

It had a steep slope, covered with rocks, and would be harder for the Redcoats to assault. He didn't have the strength left to explain all that, but the men saw it, understood, and followed. Proctor was the last to go.

Smith chose a position on the next curve in the road. Proctor walked among the company of men already waiting on the hillside, until he recognized Captain Parker and the other Lexington men. A few wore bandages over wounds they'd taken that morning; many more had faces black with powder.

Parker stood tall, out in the open, listening to the stuttering beat of the British drums and the distant crack of muskets, waiting for the Redcoats to appear. He coughed quietly into his palm, eyes widening in his gaunt face at the sight of Proctor.

"You look familiar,” he said, his voice hoarse.

Proctor's throat tightened. Was he going to be blamed for starting the shooting this morning? “Proctor Brown, sir. Stood on the green with you this morning."

"That'd be it,” Parker said, and stifled another consumptive cough. He was going to die soon, whether a British officer shot him in the back or not. “You look like you've been far today, son."

"All the way to Concord and back,” Proctor said.

"That's a long way to go on a day like this,” Captain Parker said. “God bless you for coming back to help us a second time."

"I'm sorry for the way things happened—"

Parker interrupted him with a shake of his head that might have been general or specific. “Don't think about it. The situation was bound to come to shooting sooner or later. Either way, the Redcoats owe us a debt for what they did once the shooting started, and we plan to make them pay back every cent with interest."

Amos sidled between them. “Being that's how you are with loans, I guess I shouldn't ask to borrow lead from you, though I don't have more than three shot left."

Captain Parker laughed at that, and his laugh turned into a cough. Once his coughing stopped, he signaled for one of his men to come over. “We won't loan you shot, but we'll give it to you, how's that?"

"That'll suit just fine,” Amos said.

Proctor put his hand into his hunting bag and counted the lead balls—he could fire nine more times if he didn't double-shot. Then he checked his powder-horn and saw that he didn't have nine measures left.

Gunfire peppered the road just west of them and smoke from muskets marked the imminent arrival of British troops. Proctor scooted downslope and took cover behind a tree that none of the Lexington men had claimed yet.

The Redcoats rounded the bend.

A mounted officer led them, untouched by the hail of bullets. Even before Proctor saw the golden spark flashing near the officer's throat, he recognized Pitcairn. The major was holding the Redcoats’ retreat together by the example of his courage and the force of his will.

"Fire!” Captain Parker ordered.

Proctor aimed but didn't pull his trigger. As the smoke thinned, he saw Pitcairn still untouched, though men around him had fallen.

While the militia reloaded, Pitcairn shouted an order to his marines to take the hill. Militia men in the ditch screamed out as they were bayoneted and a thin red line moved up through the trees.

Proctor grabbed Amos by the shoulder. “Pretend you're an ax-cutter and clear a lane for me through the trees. I mean to cut the head off that long red snake."

Without waiting for Amos's answer, he started down the steep slope.

A marine, hatless, wild-haired, raging, charged up the hillside with his bloody bayonet. Amos's musket cracked behind Proctor and the Redcoat dropped, shot through the leg.

A second marine lunged at him from the right, bayonet extended, and Proctor discharged his own musket point-blank. The other man fell, clutching his eyes, blinded by the discharge. Proctor dropped his weapon and leapt into the road.

He fell short of Pitcairn's horse, stumbling and falling. A marine with a broken bayonet swung the butt of his musket at him; Proctor rolled out of the way, freeing his hatchet from his belt. When the musket butt came at him a second time, he knocked it aside and rose to his feet.

The horse snorted, stamping, twisting to kick Proctor, pushing between himself and the marine. Proctor grabbed the bridle with his free hand and swung the hatchet at Pitcairn; his eyes were blurry, wet from the sting of musket smoke.

Pitcairn caught Proctor's wrist on the downstroke.

Grappling face-to-face, there was nothing extraordinary about Pitcairn—he smelled of sweat and dust and powder, like anyone else. Proctor dragged him half out of his saddle, tearing at his collar. There, beneath the shirt—a gold coin, hanging from a gold chain. It burned with an unnatural light.

Proctor tried to rip it free, keeping his feet as the horse spun in a panic. Pitcairn let go of the hatchet and grabbed Proctor's other hand with both his own.

Fire flowed through Proctor's palm, and he felt the heat race up his arm with every pulse of his blood. He tried one last time to wrench the charm away, and glimpsed the underside of the coin—an angel with a shield, and letters, though he didn't recognize them, just like those his mother wrote on the bowl of water.

Light flared in the coin, and fire speared up his arm, and then it went dull the same moment that his arm went numb.

Pitcairn pried the coin from Proctor's hand. The coin was an ordinary coin, with no light at all. “God damn you, what have you done?” Pitcairn snarled.

A musket fired at close range, striking the horse, which whinnied in fear and stumbled sideways, tearing Pitcairn away from Proctor.

A fist grabbed Proctor's jacket, yanking him back toward the ditch, and Amos was there, one arm under his elbow, yanking him up the hillside. Someone shoved his musket back into his numb hands. Turning, Proctor saw that Pitcairn's horse was down. The British major was trying to rally his men, but their resolve had shattered. There was no cohesion to their assault up the hillside, only desperation and the roar of fear. Lead whistled overhead, tearing through bark and leaves, and then it was bayonets, and Proctor ran through the trees, from cover to cover, until he was alone, unsure where he was, pausing, back against a boulder, to reload his musket. He stopped in mid-action to wipe his bloody hands—where had that come from?—across his breeches.

When he peered over the boulder again, he saw that he'd become separated from the other men in his company and the last British stragglers were fleeing toward Lexington. Still numb from breaking Pitcairn's magic charm, he staggered to his feet and back to the road, where, amid the abandoned cases, clothes, and weapons, he found two wounded Redcoats left behind by the routed army. One patched the other's bloody leg, while the second was binding the first one's arm. Seeing Proctor, they flinched, raising their hands.

"We surrender,” they said.

"Good for you,” he rasped as he passed them. Thirst sandpapered his throat. He fumbled for his father's tin canteen, and lifted it in unsteady hands, uncapping it.

Nothing came out. The metal felt cool on his lips but it was dry. He shook it, but nothing. A jagged edge snagged his sleeve. He turned it over—shot had smashed through the bottom of it. He had no idea when.

And where did that yellow ribbon come from?

Emily!

He ran.

There was Emily's house. His feet pounded across the porch and he beat on the door, calling her name, asking if she was all right. When there was no answer, he ran to the windows and saw sheets tossed hurriedly over the furniture inside. It was shut up tight. Bess and the rest of the household had no doubt packed up and headed for Boston first thing that morning.

He felt as empty as the house.

Militia from a dozen towns passed down the road, following the Redcoats’ retreat into Lexington. Proctor mechanically fell in with them. As he marched past the burying ground, he thought that the battle would end where it began, on Lexington Green. The Redcoats could expect no mercy there, not after what they'd done this morning. He glimpsed splashes of red running in the distance.

This, he told himself, was the scene he'd scryed. His mother had been right in seeing men dead; and he'd been right in seeing a retreat to Boston. With his last reserves, he hurried forward onto the green. The oak tree and belltower and meeting house were framed against the blue sky. Cheers rose ahead, the cheers of the militia assured of victory.

A cannon shot blasted through the meeting house, busting it to splinters.

He was halfway across the green when he saw that a full British brigade had come out of Boston to rescue the other soldiers. The retreating Redcoats ran past the defensive lines. They were cheering their salvation.

The cannons boomed again, raking the pursuing militia. Something hot sheered the edge of Proctor's neck, knocking him off his feet.

He rolled over, rose, fell down, finally pushed himself to his feet. Blood streamed over his shoulder. He staggered, lost, until a woman in a green dress came and guided him away out of range of the British guns. She tried to bind up his wounds, but he shoved her away and staggered off, saying things incoherent even to himself. He needed to go home. He wanted to talk to his mother about the scrying. He needed to talk to her about the gold medallion. About the way his talent revealed their magic. In a daze, he stumbled in the right direction.

Somehow his mother knew he was coming. She met him halfway across the fields and guided him inside. His father was propped up in a chair in the corner. There was something Proctor meant to tell him. “Robert Munroe,” he said.

His father continued to rock, eyes unfocused.

"He's—” The words choked off in his throat. “What he said, what Munroe said was, he said you were a good man in a fight."

His mother gently guided him into one of the other chairs. He saw a fresh bowl of water on the table, an empty pitcher, five puddles of wax, and a pile of broken eggshells. “I had to go over to the Ames's,” their neighbors, “for more eggs,” she said, dropping her eyes.

Proctor stared at the broken shells, thinking if he hadn't scryed, maybe he wouldn't have shot at Pitcairn. Maybe the Redcoats would've held their fire, the way both sides did at the North Bridge in Concord. Maybe the day would've ended peacefully.

"Mother,” he mumbled. “I did something bad, terrible bad."

"Hush.” Her voice was as soft and trembling as her hands.

"I think I've ruined my prospects with Miss Emily."

She sighed as she wrung out the rag and dipped it in the bowl of fresh water. She wiped the cool cloth over his throat. “Oh, Proctor, if that shot had been two inches the other direction, it would have killed you for certain."

He folded his hand around hers and pulled it away from his wound. No, there was no undoing what had already been done. “Come now. If it had been two inches the other direction it would have missed me completely."

Generation Dead, by Daniel Waters, Hyperion, 2008, $16.99.

A good idea can't carry a book, but it can sure give it a great kick-start. Take the premise behind Daniel Waters's first novel, Generation Dead:

Some teenagers who die aren't staying dead, although they aren't exactly alive, either. The PC term for them is the “living impaired” or “differently biotic,” but the kids at Phoebe Kendall's high school call them zombies.

Nobody wants to hang out with them. Nobody even wants to be in the same classes or eat next to them in the cafeteria. And because they're officially dead, there are no laws to protect them from parents who kick them out of their homes, or from the people who want to kill them again—this time for good.

Waters doesn't spend a whole lot of time explaining the phenomenon except for when his characters are speculating about why this is happening. That's a good thing, because intricate explanations often take away the mystery and bog down a good story. Instead, Waters focuses on a few “breathers” and how they interact with the dead kids in their school.

There's Phoebe, the Goth, who's attracted to Tommy Wil-liams, the leader of the dead kids; her best friend Margi who hates them, but feels guilty for how she rejected her own friend Colette when she came back; Phoebe's next door neighbor Adam who's been crushing on her for years and is trying to understand her sudden interest in the dead kids. And then there's the school bully Pete Martinsburg who just wants to hurt the zombies, maybe because when his girlfriend died, she didn't come back.

Mix in a few of the dead kids who have no more of an idea as to why they came back either and you have an intricate tangle of relationships that Waters explores to great effect.

I'm not going to get into what a great metaphor the dead kids are, mostly because you can figure it out for yourself, but also because on some level every teenager feels alienated and messed up. What makes Waters's book so successful is that he explores this element on both personal and societal levels without ever stumbling into a lecturing mode. He simply lets the story do the work and leaves readers to make their own conclusions.

It also helps that he's such a skilled writer with a great handle on dialogue—from the teenspeak of the living characters to the slower cadences of the dead kids. Put it all together with that initial great idea and you've got a novel that puts a deliciously fresh spin on the coming-of-age novel in a high school setting.

Oh, and that ending! Didn't see that coming. Talk about a tough lesson in having to assume responsibility.

Highly recommended.

Hands of Flame, by C. E. Murphy, Luna, 2008, $14.95.

This is the third outing for Murphy's lawyer character Margrit Knight and the Old Races she's discovered inhabiting New York City. If you've been following along in the previous books—which you really should do if you want to appreciate the nuances of the character relationships in this book—you won't find a lot new here in terms of the background. This is one of the problems with a series: the new ideas and fresh characters become very familiar as we go from book to book and it takes a good writer to make a new entry something more than “the same, but different."

I'm happy to report that Murphy pulls it off in Hands of Flame. There are no big surprises like, There's a hidden race of gargoyles that only come to life at night! Or, NYC is riddled with dragons and vampires and djinns (oh my)! But there are lots of little ones that are no less entertaining for their subtlety, and all the big questions and worries you might have had from reading the first couple of books get wrapped up in a satisfying manner.

I especially appreciate the character growth arc that continues from the previous books. Margrit is still the headstrong lawyer who tackles her problems head-on, but with every conciliation she makes with and for the Old Races, she learns more about herself and her capabilities, truly earning the title she gains among them: the Negotiator. It's also gratifying to see how “timeless” characters—such as her gargoyle lover Alban, the dragon Janx, Daisani the vampire, and especially the selkie Cara—learn and change through their relationships with her.

While I doubt this book will win Murphy new readers (for reasons discussed above), it will be completely satisfying to those who been following The Negotiator series to date. And if you haven't been doing so, now that all three books are out, it's time you headed down to your local bookstore or library and picked up the first book to try. It's called Heart of Stone, and you won't be disappointed.

Fantastical Creatures Field Guide, by Aaron Lopresti, Watson Guptill, 2008, $19.95.

Kudos to Aaron Lopresti for finding a fresh bestiary of fantastical creatures for us to explore. The full title of the book is Fantastical Creatures Field Guide: How to Hunt Them Down and Draw Them Where They Live, but it's not really a how-to book. That section only makes up the last sixteen pages. The bulk of the book takes us from continent to continent on an exploratory journey complete with full color art and sepia ink sketches.

The art is delightful, charming and imaginative. I like Lopresti's ink work the most—the sketches are lively whether the linework is tight or loose—but the watercolor paintings are skillfully rendered and amusing. Both media highlight what I appreciate most about this book: Lopresti's sense of humor and whimsical imagination, and his ability to so successfully compress it down into two dimensions for us to enjoy.

Each of the entries has text accompanying the art that gives us anecdotal and “factual” information about the creatures (as well as hilarious National Enquirer-styled “headlines” of news stories), but it's the creatures themselves that are the real draw. We have everything from the Bayou Boogeyman ("Town begins to doubt that a ‘bayou boogeyman’ ate local pig farmer's limb") to Pastry Elves ("Succumbing to greatest weakness, gangs of sweets-obsessed pastry elves strike again. Local Parisian proprietors outraged"); from the Island Terrapin ("Toxic waste believed to be behind popular tourist draw") to Cave Harpies ("High interest rates and the Carter Administration are to blame for creature's reclusiveness").

Or my favorite: Saber-toothed Jackrabbits ("As rumor of a possible prairie dog posse continue to spread, saber-toothed jackrabbits begin to worry"), though you'll have to read the hilarious text entry to understand that “headline."

This is a fun book that deserves to be left out on your coffee table for guests to thumb through. I guarantee they'll soon be grinning from ear to ear.

Material to be considered for review in this column should be sent to Charles de Lint, P. O. Box 9480, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1G 3V2.

Saturn's Children, by Charles Stross, Ace, 2008, $24.95.

Singularity's Ring, by Paul Melko, Tor, 2008, $24.95.

Earth Ascendant, by Sean Williams, Ace, 2008, $7.99.

The whole idea of themed book reviews makes me itchy. And yet ... somehow all the best books that hit my mailbox this month seemed to be poking sticks at the same question:

What comes after evolution? What happens to our species when the line on the chart goes vertical and the pace of change outstrips our ability to adapt? Or, put another way: What does the seamy underbelly of Singularity look like?

One of sf's favorite answers to this question has always been The Collective. You know what I'm talking about: the Swarm; the Borg; It; pod people in all their many paper and celluloid iterations (stay tuned for new news about pod people below). Most early sf visions of the collective were cautionary tales—thinly veiled metaphors for fascism, communism, suburbanism, or whatever -ism was the bogeyman of the month. At some point, however, the collective as cautionary tale gave way to an idea of the collective as a natural (perhaps even desirable) future product of human evolution. New Wave Kid that I am, I'm tempted to point to Bruce Sterling's shaper-mechanist stories as the moment when that shift happened. But more likely it was one of those sea changes that sweep through science fiction from time to time, reshaping the imaginary shoreline so gradually and so completely that it takes a concerted effort just to remember the way it used to look.

This change of attitude was accompanied by a parallel change in the real world scientific discipline that most science fiction writers look to for inspiration, as hardware-oriented electrical engineering metaphors gave way to the CS -inflected jargon of software designers. Some of this is just a case of science fiction mindlessly replicating nifty-sounding science factoids. (After all, lately all the cool kids and hot ideas do seem to be moving from the electrical engineering building to the computer science building.) But the three authors reviewed this month put real substance behind the jargon. And the essence of that substance is a shift from envisioning human nature as an EE-style hard drive in a bone box to envisioning it as an open-ended design process ... one in which humans can only do their best to stay afloat and catch the cresting wave of evolution.

Unsurprisingly, Stross's Saturn's Children is the most overtly CS-oriented of this month's books. It begins with the reminiscences of an aging female robot named Freya. Humans built Freya's original “template matriarch” to be an artificial female escort. Then they became inconveniently extinct, leaving Freya and her template sisters with nothing but not-so-fond memories and a “yawning hole in the center of our badly designed lives."

The post-human solar system is ruled by a new slave-owning caste of robot Aristos who use human-invented “slave chip” technology to control their less fortunate brethren. While the Aristos party on, the Pink Police hunt down and exterminate outbreaks of “pink goo” (biological replicators). Freya isn't sure how she feels about the Pink Police; after all, slavish adoration of humans is coded into the very core of her soul chip. But when an ambitious Aristo faction hatches the idea of growing its own tame human in order to wield the sledgehammer of Asimov's Laws more effectively, she soon realizes that the resurrection of humanity may be a nightmare instead of a romance.

Saturn's Children is first and foremost a romp: Bruce Sterling meets P. G. Wodehouse in a future full of tongue-in-cheek references to giants of Golden Age space opera. But, as in all of Stross's books, the fun and games play out against a backdrop that flirts with sf's perennial Big Questions. Is Freya merely an appendage of her template mother or a separate and unique being? And if she does possess a self apart from her template, how can she find purpose in a life rendered obsolete by human extinction? By pursuing individual fulfillment? Or by submerging her identity in a larger collective?

Stross, being Stross, comes down pretty strongly on the side of flamboyant individuality—complete with his characteristic open source optimism about the ability of individuals to reboot their lives and reshape their destinies. In this, as in many other regards, the author of Accelerando continues to fly the glorious colors of sf's Golden Age. But though Stross's unabashedly individualist stance may be sf's version of old-fashioned comfort food, there is nothing old-fashioned (or comforting) about his vision of a Tik Tok, robot-eat-robot, clockwork world winding down in the aftermath of humanity's self-inflicted extinction.

If Freya has to face the unnerving idea of life as an unwitting beta release, then Paul Melko's characters face an even stranger dilemma: what's the meaning of life when your entire species is just leftover tech from someone else's Singularity?

Melko's protagonist—a five member “pod person” called Apollo Papadopulos—is born onto a ravaged Earth inhabited only by those left behind after a Singularity Event that is creepily evocative of the mass suicides of Jonestown and Heaven's Gate. When a wired guru tries to kick off a second Rapture, Apollo must struggle to discover his place in the world—and to unravel the core mystery of pod existence.

Melko tells Apollo's tale through a series of deftly handled changes of POV as each pod member adds his or her facet to the composite story. The strength of this book is its laser-tight focus on the character, psychology, and subjective experience of the pod members:

Chemical thoughts pass from hand to hand in our circle, clockwise and counterclockwise, suggestions, lists, afterthoughts. I stand between Moira and Quant, adding what I can. This is our most comfortable thinking position. If we rearrange ourselves, me holding Manuel's hand perhaps, or Moira and Meda together, the thoughts are different. Sometimes this is useful.
Ideas whirl past me and I am only a conduit. Some thoughts are marked by their thinker, so that I know it is Quant who has noted the drop in temperature and the increased wind speed, which causes us to raise the priority of shelter and fire. Consensus forms.... The list passes among us. We reach consensus on decision after decision, faster than I can reason through some of the issues: I add what I can. But I trust the pod. The pod is me.

People often talk about first novels in a condescending “good-enough-for-a-first-effort” tone. But this is a first novel that burns with the raw energy of a writer who's terrified he doesn't have what it takes to keep the reader's eye's glued to the page. The writing is polished and starkly beautiful, and the new images and ideas keep coming at you right up to the last page. Some writers do their best work when they're scared; Paul Melko is obviously one of them.

And besides ... no real sf fan can resist a story that includes gems like: “Our hands are cold: we have removed our gloves to think."

The last book in this month's column is Earth Ascendant, the second novel in Sean Williams's remarkable Astropolis series. Words like riveting, gripping, and page-turning get tossed around pretty cavalierly, but they all apply to the Astropolis series. In Earth Ascendant Williams expands on the grand galactic history that he sketched out in Saturn Returns and the superb linked novella Cenotaxis. These books are not without fault (after all, if I build them up too much you'll only be disappointed). But despite their flaws, they have a scope, an intellectual reach, and an intoxicating speculative energy that makes me feel all starry-eyed about the future of science fiction.

In Williams's future, time is the evolutionary jackhammer pounding human nature into a new shape. Once humans were the beneficiaries of a rich pan-galactic civilization held together by virtually immortal collective minds called Forts. But when a tech plague called the Slow Wave ravages the galaxy, the Forts die and humanity is left to its own meager devices. The scattered survivors struggle to keep interstellar civilization afloat, but without the Forts it's a losing battle against time, distance and entropy. And the collapse threatens individuals as well as cultures; most post-humans long ago incorporated some type of Fort-like multiplicity into their own personality architectures and must now “find new ways to survive in a galaxy beset by failing communications and unreliable transport."

Life after the Slow Wave is a cognitive game of Paper, Rock, Scissors in which something's going to get cut, covered, or shattered no matter which choice you make. “We do what we must to survive,” one character tells another during a pivotal moment of betrayal. “Remember that and you'll be a lot happier."

The Forts are among the most resonant and thought-provoking creations in recent sf. And if the Forts are a grand sf speculation, then their Frags—the severed, near-autistic survivors of the Slow Wave—are a piece of grand science fiction pathos. They are idiot savants, speaking in shreds and shards of language, quoting poetry, obsessively counting angels on quantum pinheads. Only after encountering a number of Frags did I finally figure out what their oracular utterances reminded me of: AI koans.

Is Williams suggesting a vision of human culture as a kind of vast emergent artificial life form? Is he hinting that the riddles of pre-sentient AI might be symmetrical under rotation with the slow heat death of post-sentient civilization? If so, the hint remains just that: veiled, oblique, open-ended. Williams offers no answers—here or anywhere else in the series.

He walks a fine line here, and reactions to the Astropolis books will probably vary depending on individual readers’ tolerance for ambiguity. Personally, I enjoy it. The quest for rigor in sf can all too easily become a fetish for the closed, univalent, airless storyline. Clarity is good to a point, but it's easy to forget that in real science some logic (yes, I really am shameless enough to stoop to the easy pun) is fuzzy.

For those who crave clarity, however, Williams does offer one clear view of humanity's future—albeit a somber one. Throughout the series his characters keep stumbling on grisly pig-piles of corpses. These are the physical remnants of once-mighty Forts: confused frags who panicked when they were severed from their collective brains, failed to take rational survival measures, huddled together, and died blindly seeking communion in the only way still open to them. This macabre image seems to bring us full circle from the collective as bogeyman to the collective as savior. Resistance isn't just futile. Resisting the collective is resisting evolution. And the wages of resisting evolution are extinction.

The weel of evolution may grind slow, this month's authors seem to be saying, but it grinds exceedingly fine. I'll leave the last word to Stross, who dishes up the perfect image of humanity's futile race against change and time (along with a nouvelle wave tip of the hat to Ed Bryant) in his description of the nomad city, Cinnabar:

Cinnabar rolls steadily around the equator of Mercury on rails, chasing the fiery dawn.... Sixteen tracks span a cutting that slices across craters and through mountain ranges with Sisyphean consistency—a cutting with a floor of melted rock, fused by the continouus megaton heat-flash of an orbital mirror over a hundred kilometers across. The city grinds ever onward along this artificial scar, a vast articulated behemoth two hundred meters wide and twenty kilometers long, The domes and spires of the rich gleam beneath the vanishing starlight, their peaks clawing toward the blazing, unrefracted sunrise that must forever stay just out of reach.

On her Website, Ms. Emshwiller comments that her favorite author is Franz Kafka. Perhaps the author of “The Metamorphosis” would have enjoyed this story.

This is the best idea we've ever had. Not that there aren't some problems to it. It's the perfect disguise. Creep in the ear and take over the world. But don't bother with the opposable-thumb creatures. That's where most other takeovers made their big mistake.

We keep telling our young seeds not to be tempted by thumbs. Those creatures’ lives are thankless. Full of wars and work. All sorts of problems. More anxiety than you'd want. We wouldn't wish that kind of a life on any of our kind even while waiting for the takeover. You young ones might as well enjoy your confinement in a happy host. Not only that, a host that gets looked after all its life.

What you want is fun and play and getting stroked and patted. Opposable thumb beings don't get much of that—not that they don't like it just as much as any creature. What you want is getting patted but also having teeth.

Don't take on the characteristics of your hosts. If you do, you'll feel loyalty you shouldn't feel. You should be loyal only to your own kind. Don't ever forget your breezy blowing relatives. Don't worry about getting found out as you take over. If the opposable-thumb creatures spot you, they'll take you for a floating dandelion seed.

On the other hand, you shouldn't waste too much time getting ready. We have to take over before these creatures completely destroy their world.

Feel no jealousy for thumbs. You don't need them. You'll have other abilities.

Later, when the signal for the takeover comes, it'll be so high the thumb creatures won't hear it. That's another good reason for this host we picked out especially for you.

It's a pretty good world. So far. But you have to be careful. You mustn't seem too smart. Be sure you don't do anything that isn't native to the species we've selected.

So spread out, waft down, and take over.

I went for a small cute host. I was in the mood for fun. It had been a long hard voyage in cramped quarters. It was good to go off by myself.

I like my host so much I don't think I'll ever want to give him up. I wonder if I'll have to at the end. He's mostly white with one ear up, the white one, and one black floppy ear.

I want to look straight into the opposable-thumb people's eyes. I want to smell their crotches. I want to get a pat or two—see what that's like.

The only trouble is, my host is in the wrong part of town. I don't want to be cared for by just anybody. Of course right now it's raining and you'd think I'd take what I can get, but if we're going to take over the world, why not do it from the top down? Why not begin with the rich so we can pass the waiting time in luxury? But for that you have to be in the rich part of town.

The pods in charge said to spread out. I did that. I wafted and floated about for hours and ended up down here, and here was this perfect funny-looking host.

The rich live on a hill and they have a view of the ocean. They have a chunk of the beach.

Now, though, I drink from the gutter.

I'll go up and find a rich opposable-thumb old lady. I can change her life. A cat only goes so far in changing one's life whereas I get people outside and walking.

But now I'm dirty and matted, wet and shivering. I'll take this misery up to see what the rich will do about me.

I sneak uptown. But I'm getting too cold and wet to be choosy. I think I'm going to have to make do with whoever comes along.

And what comes along is a very wet and cold older man, shivering as much as I am.

I had slipped through a gate where I saw an old lady at a window. I hid under the bushes by the garage when ... (I was thinking: No sense in coming out for just anybody. I was thinking: I'm small enough to be let up on the couch. I was thinking: I hope she likes music) ... when ... along comes this man.

We look at each other and there's instant recognition—of cold and damp and misery. His hair is plastered to his forehead and he smells of wet earth.

I wag my tail as fast as I can and he throws back his head and laughs a big laugh. Without him telling me to do it, I “speak” three times. But I wouldn't have had to do anything. When we looked at each other and saw our misery, we were stuck with each other.

This isn't what I wanted, but it'll have to do. For now. And I can see in this creature's eyes that they were right about the thumbed ones. There's loneliness and pain and much too much thinking.

I'm still looking for a fun time after that long bunched up confinement. Wet and miserable as he is, even so, he did laugh that great big laugh. He's the best I can do.

He says, “I see we agree about the weather."

Just how much dare I show I understand? I don't have many options. I know better than to nod. I cock my head this way and that. That makes him laugh again.

He takes me into the garage. It's a little warmer in there. He finds an old towel and wipes himself off a bit and then me.

He says, “You wouldn't be bad looking if you were cleaned up some.” And then, “I know exactly what to do with you."

There's a connecting hallway between the garage and the house. He brings me inside to the kitchen. Now I see he has a limp and that the sole of one of his shoes is built up by more than an inch.

It's nice and warm in there. Also quiet. Seems as if nobody is home but us. First thing he feeds me some very good leftovers, beef cooked in wine. I want to savor the food, but I don't dare. That wouldn't be like my species. (If I get to live like this I wouldn't have to jump up on the table to snatch tidbits.)

Then he cuts out the tangles in my coat and gives me a bath. I even get blow dried. He keeps talking all through it. That's what they told us: These creatures talk all the time. Cramped in as we were on our voyage, that would have been hard to bear, but this isn't. Mostly he talks a lot of nothing but I do hear that I'm supposed to cheer somebody up. He tells me I should smile.

Afterward he holds me up to the mirror. What a nice thumb person!

Then I get presented to my old lady. Just the one I'd hoped for.

He's gotten dressed up for the occasion. He's put on slacks and a sweater.

"Mother,” he says, “I brought you somebody to cheer you up."

She's lying back on a big couch. Not doing anything at all. And she does look morose. I can smell it, too. Just like they said, the opposable-thumb creatures have a hard life. I'd rather be back on our transport's cramped hold than to be her right now.

She looks like the man except her hair is all white while he only has a little white at the temples. Neither one is handsome. Even if he hadn't called her Mother, I could have smelled that they're relatives. Inside myself I congratulate my host creature for his nose.

"Poor little guy. He needed a lot of cleaning up."

She doesn't say anything, but I can see on her face how much I please her. She reaches for me and now I get to feel what getting stroked and petted is like. I can see why they wanted us to experience it. Dry and warm and fed and cuddled ... I fall asleep. I see why they warned us not to get too much under the spell of getting stroked.

And I do cheer her up. I dance on my hind legs. I twirl. I wag myself all over. I talk back to her in whimpers and whines. I sing when she listens to opera. I haven't seen her on the couch doing nothing since that first time.

She keeps calling me a Pussy Cat. I understand almost everything the thumb creatures do (after all, I've been trained for these creatures), but I don't understand that.

She starts right out teaching me tricks. The usual ones: roll over, speak, sit. It's hard not to do everything just right the first try. I want to please. It's my host's nature. I mustn't get too caught up in my own intelligence. They warned us about something else, too. Enjoy yourself, they said, but beware of love.

Remember that we love you more than any of these creatures ever can. We know who you really are. We love your thistledown and rudder. We love the sharpness of your probes.

And they have to walk me. Down the street there's a coffee shop. They sit at the outdoor tables and have breakfast every morning. I don't think they ever did that until I came along. I'm good for both of them.

I behave myself, trotting at the man's left heel as if I had been trained for it. I only misbehave if there's a chance to make them laugh. Even though he always acts as if he's cheerful, he needs as much cheering up as she does.

As we sit, I watch the people pass by. I check out their smells. My man needs a woman to make him happy. I can tell if any passing women are compatible with him or not. But when I find the perfect one I don't know what I should do about it. Except maybe put on a performance of all my comical tricks. I'd try to be a conversation piece so she couldn't help but come over to say something about me.

Watch the sunrise over the water from the highest window, pick a clear day. Remember that this world will soon belong to us. You'll be free, then, to drift and float about with no host at all. And you can come back to us to love and be loved. Be patient.

These messages have become an interruption. I know we need to be reminded of our mission, but I'm not going to forget what I'm here for. It's that this interruption comes just when I smell a good match for my man.

As usual we're at breakfast. She's walking by. Not young. A little gray at the temples just as he is. He ought to like her looks because she has the same sharp nose, the same slimness with hunched shoulders as if they both think they're too tall.

My man never holds my leash as we sit. He doesn't need to. I never run away, but now I do. I let her get a head start down the block and then I take off after her. Of course right away my man jumps up and runs after us as best he can. They can't afford not to have me. I'm their happiness.

But how to stop her? She's striding along and I've got short legs. If my man gets to me before I can stop her they'll never meet, and he's moving a lot faster than I thought he could.

I manage to get up to her feet, run between them, and trip her. She goes down harder than I wanted her to, but I had to do it. Right away I smell pain.

My man kneels beside her. He keeps saying he's sorry—so, so, so sorry. He can't figure out what got into me. I never did anything like this before.

He touches her shoulder ... keeping her down. “Don't get up yet. Rest a minute."

I was so focused on her smell I didn't notice much else about her but now I see she's attractive in spite of her nose and her large mouth. In fact those are what make her looks special.

There's blood on the knees of her nice tan slacks—actually, on one side, a hole right through them—and blood on the palms of her hands. At least she didn't break anything. I would have smelled that.

My man still kneels next to her, touching her arm. “We found him in a rain storm. He's a stray. Does he know you from before? Is he yours?"

She's not ready to answer anything yet.

I sit still so they won't look at me. I'm thinking: Look into her eyes. Maybe she'll see who you are just as I did. Except she's the one, not ready to look at him yet.

We sit. He keeps quiet. Finally he helps her up and brings her, both of them limping now, back to the table where his mother sits. I come back, too, dragging my leash.

The woman still hasn't said a word. They get her tea. My man wets his handkerchief and washes the blood and dirt from her palms. His mother is asking, can she get you this or that? Even the mother is saying she's so sorry.

"Does he know you? He's never acted this way before."

Finally, after a few sips of tea, the woman speaks. “I've never seen him before."

"I can't imagine what got into him. He's always so well behaved. We live just down the block. I can get the car and take you home. But I should take you to the emergency room. Wait here with my mother."

Finally, she looks up into his eyes and sees who he is.

She doesn't live far. There's a lot of back and forthing that ends up with the woman getting bandaged up at the emergency room and then going home for fresh clothes and then everybody going out to supper ... without me.

I “stay” and pay attention to messages from our pods.

This will all be yours. The view of the Milky Way, the North Star in the north.... Does any other world have any such view? Does any other world have dragonflies? A single moon? Butter? Pine needles? Strawberries? Chickadees?.... This will be yours.

Actually I'm really thinking more about my man and the woman than the pods’ messages. I'm wondering how they're getting along. I already know how beautiful this world is and with all its smells, I don't need to be reminded. It's us seeds who are down here appreciating everything. The pods just talk about it. It's we who really know.

I wonder how many others of us seeds are in the middle of the same adventures I am, changing things for our owners? It's part of our hosts’ nature to help the opposable-thumb people. It's part of our enjoyment of this world.

I can tell when they're on their way home. I rush to the door, twirling and dancing, and right after the mother and the man come in I can tell my plans are already working.

Now almost every morning we all four of us including me ... meet for breakfast at the sidewalk café and walk together afterward. First they walk the mother home and then the two of them walk me to the park.

My man always walks farther than is comfortable for him. When he comes home he takes a long hot shower and then uses a heating pad on his leg. I lick his hands and arms and, when I can, his face, to show how I feel, but I'm not sorry for him. I know he wants to do it to prove to the woman, and to himself, also, that he's a whole man.

He always tastes good.

But my man needs help. He's not making a move. I don't know what to do. I'm wondering if I should trip her again. Would that put her in his arms? I keep them laughing, but, so far, that hasn't brought them closer to what they both want to do. Perhaps I should trip him instead of her.

One good thing, though, they're both tall people who slumped to seem shorter and now they stand up straight.

He does take her hand now and then but only to help her up the steeper places. He's the one that needs help for those. I suppose she knows that and yet takes his hand and leans on him anyway.

They've found a secret place. Off the path. Surrounded by trees and bushes and at the top of a hill.

One day they take the mother home and then bring a picnic so as to spend more time in their special spot. They even bring snacks for me.

They sit side by side on a rock, put me through all my tricks and give me a tiny bite after each one. They keep laughing at me. Then I do a whole set of tricks all on my own and they laugh even more. The woman says, “I do love Pussy Cat.” I know she doesn't really mean she loves me, though she does. Then she says, “And I'm glad he tripped me."

I'm wondering if my man can hear what she really wants to say. Or is he too busy thinking about his bad leg? I can tell it hurts him by now. Is that foot going to spoil everything? Though why not? It's spoiled his life so far.

I lie down right on top of his bad foot.

He looks at me and I stare back. I try to tell him things with my eyes and what voice I have: Put your arm around her. Pull her closer. If that goes well, kiss her. For Heaven's sake! And it will go well.

He doesn't do any of it.

Then it's she who dares to lean her shoulder against his.

I move from his foot to hers. I look up at her. Then at him. Then at her. I don't know how they do it, but they get the idea. They laugh at me and then look at each other and then kiss. Really kiss and I leap up and kiss them, too. They laugh again and kiss all the more.

And right then the signal comes. So high pitched it even seems high to my host. The pods have already left the transport.

Move suddenly. If you're quick it won't matter how small you are. Those of you in the alleyways, find the first of the thumb people you see. Their thumbs are useless against your teeth.

This very moment, as you attack, we're creeping out of our shells. Without your impregnation we'll lie unfertilized ... shriveling.

I sense others of us not far from me. We're busy at our jobs, guarding thumb people's property, letting ourselves be dressed up in silly costumes, retrieving ducks, leading blind thumb people, running after sticks, getting petted.... We're enjoying it as much as our hosts do. We don't make any moves against our owners.

This was not the perfect infestation after all. No wonder no other aliens tried it ... or perhaps they did and didn't succeed. Probably they ended up as we have, dwindling away and drying into nothing. What a pity. This is such a nice place.

This story marks the third consecutive issue in which Mr. Cowdrey has had a story ... but he professes to having no rivalry with Robert Reed for being our most prolific contributor.
He does, however, admit to being a student of history, which helps explain this story's juxtaposition of old times and new.

The first time they met, the Viking—ice-blue eyes, tangled red beard, arms like hairy cables—strode out of a wintry dusk and right through Eric Mumford, shattering the globe of silence that enclosed him.

For an instant Eric felt penetrating cold, inhaled a smell like an elephant house, heard the ka-thump of a single heartbeat and the crunch of a heavy footfall in a pile of dirty snow. Then the Viking was gone, his broad leather-clad back vanishing down a battlemented wall, across a wooden footbridge, and through a narrow doorway into a massive stone tower.

But that's impossible, Eric thought. Not seeing a Viking—he'd been doing things like that since he was seven. But in all his visions he'd never heard a sound or sniffed an odor. He felt like a moviegoer of the Twenties, accustomed to the gesticulating phantoms of the silent screen, suddenly awakening to the fact of sound. But even that moviegoer wouldn't have inhaled Theda Bara's scent or felt Valentino's hot breath.

In the small, musty den of the row house Eric shared with Chris, he lay still for a while, puzzling over his experience. Then his alarm clock beeped, and he heard Chris in the kitchen down the hall, rattling plates—making breakfast for herself, but of course not for him.

The world that is sometimes called real engulfed him. Same old wife, he thought wearily. Same old life. Yawning, grunting, scratching his scalp and backside, Eric disentangled himself from his unwashed sheets and stumbled out of bed to confront another lousy day.

At Pocatelli's Pasta Garden on Fell's Point the lunchtime crowd turned the place to bedlam. Yet even when he was hustling trays, reciting the specials, appeasing obnoxious customers, getting yelled at by the chef and yelling back, Eric's mind kept going over last night's experience. What exactly had happened, and above all, why?

That evening he brushed his teeth in the little blue-painted downstairs bath he shared with a lively community of small roaches and went to bed as usual on the futon in the den. In the bedroom over his head, Chris was phoning one of her girlfriends, telling her loudly what a rat he was and how unlike Lord Vyvyan Gyles in a romance novel she was reading called The Mistress of Hardcastle. And, thought Eric, probably showering her sheets with cookie crumbs and drops of spilled gin, her usual bedmates ever since he ceased to be.

Then his eyes closed, and without any sense of transition he was back on the castle wall.

Alas, the Viking wasn't. Eric hovered inside his usual bubble, hearing and feeling nothing. His immaterial state allowed some crisp snowflakes to pass through him, drifting and spinning. Thirty feet or so away, bearded men-at-arms wearing clumsy wool mittens and ratty-looking cloaks shivered and rubbed their hands over a smoky fire in a black iron bucket. In the fields beyond the castle, dun-colored peasants gleaned the last stalks from the dun-colored earth.

God, how boring the Dark Ages were. Almost as bad as Baltimore.

He awoke in a gelid predawn. Chris was rattling dishes in the kitchen. He stumbled out of bed and went to work. He came home in the wintry twilight, watched the Ravens lose a game on TV, and returned to bed. A week passed, the days falling one by one with the sullen iteration of a dripping faucet. He and Chris had two more fights. He accused her of entertaining other men while he was at work and called her a sleazy slut; she denied the charge and called him a fool, a failure, and a faggot. He threw a lamp at her. She threw a plate at him. Neither connected.

Every night he went back to the wall, where absolutely nothing happened either. It rained or didn't rain, snowed or didn't snow. He might as well have tuned into a ninth-century weather channel.

Then, one otherwise forgettable Tuesday morning, Eric lurched off the futon as usual, only to discover a painful bruise on his right knee. Where'd I get that? he wondered. It hadn't been there the night before. His telephone lay on the floor, mournfully beeping. The familiar, battered furniture of the den had been randomly pushed around, and the ratty pale carpet bore damp footprints. When he stepped on one, his foot covered the print precisely.

Shaking his head, Eric staggered loowards, only to find the shower curtain pulled loose and water still trickling in the stall. Baffled, he washed sketchily, dressed, and was heading for the front door when he encountered Chris in the foyer. As a rule, they said as little as possible to each other, especially in the morning. But today she stated—in a screechy voice that was particularly hard on his nerves—that she intended to report his vandalism to Barton U. Scheisster, the lawyer who was handling her divorce.

Eric naturally inquired what vandalism she was referring to.

"You knocked over that antique table in the upstairs hall, the one Aunt Mae gave me. Two legs are broken."

"I never went upstairs last night."

"Oh, can it. After the crash woke me up, I was lying there in the dark listening, pretty scared if you want to know the truth, and I heard you running into things. Drunk again, I suppose. Then you started talking out loud—babbling like an idiot. I ran to the bedroom door and opened it and switched on the light just in time to see that ratty old Dortmunder Beer T-shirt you sleep in disappearing down the stairs."

"You were so soused on gin last night you probably broke that crappy little table yourself."

"Lying jerk."

"Boozy bitch."

On that affectionate note, they parted.

Eric's journey to Fell's Point, always dreary, became drearier as he admitted to himself that he'd turned into a sleepwalker. Worse, his stressed-out personality had fractured into components that knew nothing of each other's doings—which sounded like a formula for lunacy. He was no longer merely an unhappy schmuck, he was now an unhappy nutcase as well. Brooding thus, he arrived at Pocatelli's, where another workday began.

That evening he pub-crawled home through the sleaze of Greenmount Avenue, pausing now and then to down a few Dortmunders and reject the advances of a couple of fat old whores.

In the last bar on his itinerary, a dreggy hole that smelled vaguely like puke, companioned only by three other isolated men and a bartender perusing a racing form, he succumbed to meditation. Usually Eric avoided thinking about the toilet his life had fallen into. But there were times, like now, with some brews in his belly and absolutely nothing to do, when he found himself asking that most depressing of all questions, Where did I go wrong?

Maybe, he thought, with his very first vision, back when he was a child. That was when his inner life began the long, slow task of transforming him into a man who was really alive only when asleep. It happened in a small, comfy condo in Homewood, where he and Mama had moved when he was seven. Behind them lay hard years after his Papa, a Norwegian businessman, died in a plane crash before he and Mama could marry. They'd lived on welfare until she found a job keeping patients’ records for a surgical clinic attached to Maryland General Hospital. That gave her the credit she needed to buy the condo—and yeah, it was small, but after the slum apartment on West Lombard they'd come from, it looked luxurious.

Eric slept on a cot in the dining alcove, feeling with pride that now he very nearly had a room all his own. On the day after Christmas, 1981, he wasted a lot of time and water in the bathroom, donned Winnie the Pooh PJs, kissed Mama goodnight, and crawled into bed with one of his gifts, a stuffed Scotty named McTavish who wore a tartan ribbon around his neck. Eric's eyelids grew heavy, closed, then seemed to open again on a scene far, far away.

From a grove of vine-draped trees on a jungle hillside he was gazing across a narrow green valley at a flight of wide steps climbing the slope opposite. Only the steps weren't like any he'd ever seen—they were pools of water, and in each, tiny ladies wearing trousers and wide hats were bowing and rising, bowing and rising. Eric wanted to go and find out what the ladies were up to, but all he could do was look. Sunlight vibrated on the terraced hillside and flashed in the water of the rice paddies, but he didn't feel heat. Tendrils of steam rose from the jungle, but he didn't feel dampness.

Fascinated; frustrated; he tried to break through the bubble that confined him. Instead, he really woke up back in his bed, breathing air that was chilly and faintly resinous from a small Christmas tree standing in the condo's minute foyer. His sticky eyes met the resentful gaze of two shiny black buttons—McTavish asking silently why Eric had left him behind on his trip to another world.

Another world. Sighing, grown-up Eric slid off the bar stool and headed home. Chris was nowhere to be seen, so that was okay. Sacked out on the futon, he turned on his side, drew his limbs into the fetal position, fell asleep and for the nth time woke up on the wall—where, at long last, things had changed.

The Huns had arrived.

Actually, they might have been any kind of eastern invaders. Eric called them Huns because they rode small shaggy horses and looked ferocious. Below the wall, warriors carrying short maces and braided lariats and heavy curved swords slouched in and out of brown felt yurts. Dark-haired women with chains of silver coins woven into their hair tended campfires or stirred cookpots. Filthy children skittered about like fleas. Goats and other hoofed mammals browsed on remnants of grass while waiting to be milked or slaughtered.

All in silence, of course. But he didn't need sound to realize that the Viking's castle was under siege. And that an attack was imminent.

Ragged slaves were hammering together crude ladders. Hun archers were bending and stringing short recurved bows. Some began taking practice shots at the dozen or so men-at-arms watching them from the wall. A crossbowman replied with a bolt that missed its target but killed a goat. A fire still burned in the bucket, only now serfs wearing garments like gunny sacks were heating oil in a black iron cauldron hanging from a tripod.

Abruptly the Viking strode out of the tower and across the footbridge. He wore a greasy chain-mail shirt over a leather jerkin, a heavy straight sword hanging from his iron-studded belt, and a pointed helmet pressed down on his hayrick of flaming hair. As he passed, Eric merged with him again. Instantly he regained the four senses he'd been missing, and he clung to the inside of the Viking's capacious chest. In the red darkness Eric worked himself up through slippery channels of flesh, until he could look at the world through the eyes of his host.

Down below, a Hun warrior, maybe a clan chief to judge by the barbaric splendor of his lacquered armor, vaulted with acrobatic ease onto his shaggy little horse and shouted a guttural command. The bowmen sent a flight of barbed arrows hissing toward the wall, and a defender went down with a feathered haft sticking from his neck. He flopped and twisted like a landed fish, but nobody paid attention because the Hun warriors with a ragged cheer were raising the ladders and rushing the wall.

Wood slammed against stone. Serfs muscled the cauldron to the battlements and dumped boiling oil a gallon or two at a time on the attackers. Screams of pain added to the racket. Horns blared and reinforcements came trotting across the bridge from the tower, some carrying hooked lances. The Viking roared orders until the inside of his head resounded like an echo chamber.

The crisis was now. Huns were hacking and thrusting and trying to fight their way between or over the battlements. A man-at-arms took an arrow in the eye, and as he fell the Viking dropped his sword and snatched a chain mace from his hand. He whirled it around his head, making it whistle and moan as he ran with heavy jarring steps toward a broad-shouldered warrior with eyes of jet. The spiked ball of the mace smacked the top of the Hun's helmet of lacquered leather and his head collapsed like a building pancaking in an earthquake. He fell back onto the man behind him and both tumbled from the ladder. Two men-at-arms came running with a hooked lance, caught the top rung, and the ladder went over backward and crashed, Huns squirming out from under it like grubs from under a rock. The defenders cheered and beat the stone battlements with the flat of their swords, and—

Eric woke up.

For a few minutes he lay still, regretting the invention of daylight. Then the door opened, and for the first time in weeks Chris poked her head into the den.

"I thought you might care to know,” she said in tones that could have etched glass, “that I've got my old job back, and tomorrow morning I'm moving out."

She took a deep breath preparatory to delivering her standard speech about his deficiencies as a husband, man, mammal, and vertebrate, when involuntarily Eric did what he often did upon awaking. The sound was almost explosive.

"Oh, you ... PIG!!” she cried, and slammed the door.

He lolled around on the futon for a while, thinking about how truly rotten their lives had become. But he'd pretty well lost interest in that topic, and anyway she'd soon be gone. So he pulled the foul sheet up to his bristly chin and thought instead about something important—the battle between the Viking and the Huns.

Who'd won? Who'd lost? Had the castle been given up to fire/slaughter/mayhem/rape and all the other customary incidents of warfare, ancient and modern? Or had the Huns taken a beating and gone riding off to plunder somebody else?

His life had suddenly acquired a point of interest, and his feelings of despair lessened. He sang “Stout-Hearted Men” in the shower, and down on Fell's Point whistled while he worked until Mr. Pocatelli made him stop. When evening came, he dined at a quiet bistro, drank two quiet glasses of Merlot, and went quietly home, intending to bed down early and catch the next chapter of his ongoing serial.

In the front hall he brushed by a woman who looked vaguely familiar. When she averted her eyes and said nothing, he realized she must be Chris. Feeling he ought to make up for his faux pas of the morning, he asked, “You need some cab fare for when you scram tomorrow?"

She responded with a look that would have squashed a toad. Anger returning, he snapped, “Well then, don't let the frigging door hit you in the frigging ass when you frigging go."

A banal remark, he reflected while undressing. But satisfying. Relaxed and smiling, he drifted toward sleep, while overhead she was telling her girlfriend about the disgusting and ill-bred comments he'd made that day from both ends of his anatomy. He smiled more broadly—after all, she was caught in this crappy life, like a mouse in a glue trap. But he wasn't.

He began to recall the places he'd been, the things he'd seen. He had no idea where some of them were. That deserted palace, for instance—the one with the long marble hallway where pale geckos flickered up and down the walls and dead leaves littered the gorgeous mosaic pavement. Or that ancient-looking clock tower where life-sized mechanical men banged out the hour on a big iron bell.

As a child he'd thought he could ask adults questions about his visions and get answers. He soon found out different. When he tried to talk to Mama, she gave him a scornful “Kids!” if she was busy, or a patient “That's nice, Honey,” if she wasn't. The man who finally helped him understand his gift did so only by accident. As a teenager Eric served a lengthy sentence at Dolorosa High, where his religion teacher, Father Dedman—a beady-eyed, blue-chinned cassocked tyrant—one day, while denouncing pagan superstitions, used and defined the word shaman.

Christ, what an epiphany that had been. So there were other people like himself, visionary adventurers in the land of Nod!

He pictured his soul slipping into a sort of Platonic realm where distance was abolished, where time's arrow could fly in any direction. The idea enthralled and seduced him. He developed a sudden passionate interest in history and dead languages, and his grades soared, though at a heavy price, for he was more than ever separated from the interests of the other boys at Dolorosa. As for girls, he didn't help himself in that department by adding to the doubtful attractions of his gauche manners and weedy frame the round-shouldered look of a scholar. Too arrogant to ask for help, and convinced nobody would believe him anyway, Eric comforted himself by making frequent love to his own right hand, and went his isolated way.

By sheer hard work he won a fellowship to Johns Hopkins, and as soon as possible selected a major in World Literature and Classics. Mama correctly pointed out that such studies formed an eight-lane highway to oblivion. But he paid no attention to her, for by then a chill had crept into their once warm relationship. What had happened was this:

One day when she was at work and he was home, he started going through drawers and cabinets, looking for stamps or loose change or something. In a little desk in her bedroom he came across a faded brown envelope bearing a cancelled stamp that said Norsk and the postmark Ålesund. For a few seconds he stood paralyzed, wondering if he could possibly be holding a long-ago message from his Papa. He shook the envelope, and out fell a faded color shot, not of the well-attired businessman Mama had described to him, but of a young guy with a merchant seaman's cap perched on his mane of yellow hair, hands jammed into the pockets of a pea jacket and an arrogant grin splitting his horsy face. Eric turned the picture over and found on the back, written with a blue ballpoint pen in a semiliterate's careful, clumsy script, From Your Frogg-Prinz, 1973.

What did it mean? Eric had never seen anybody who looked less like a frog. Or less like a prince, for that matter. The date, on the other hand, spoke only too clearly—he'd been born in 1974. Norwegian businessman, hell. Clearly, he owed his earthly existence to nothing whatever but the fact that his Mama had hooked up with a transient sea rover who, in the way of his kind, had screwed her and sailed away.

Adolescent Eric was profoundly shocked. How could she have dared to be as young and inexperienced and dumb and lustful then as he was now? Did she lack common decency?

So he was in no mood to listen to The Old Bitch, as he now thought of the woman who had borne, loved, and supported him for eighteen years. Anyway, he'd won the scholarship by his own efforts, and was supplementing it by working as a busboy at Pocatelli's. For once he was paying his own way, and his hereditary Nordic pig-headedness increased exponentially. He went for the classics in the hope that soaking up the languages and lit of bygone times might stimulate his shamanism—the only part of his life that really felt real.

And it worked. His visions became more frequent, also more varied. He watched soldiers on the Western Front in World War I slog through a pelting rainstorm, their tin hats lowered like the heads of cattle enduring a storm. He saw ladies in bustles twirl and giggle at a gas-lit Victorian ball. One night he fell asleep over Boswell's London Journal and found himself in a murky, low-ceilinged tavern crowded with red-faced periwigged men drinking coffee—one of them sufficiently big, pockmarked, ugly, lumpy, jerky, and all-around peculiar to be Dr. Samuel Johnson himself! Alas, it was still a mime show, so he couldn't hear the Great Bear lay a crushing retort on anybody, including Boswell (who might have been the fat young man standing just behind him).

Otherwise his life continued drab. For months after he started working, he came home after midnight so exhausted, his flimsy scholar's muscles so racked by hefting big trays of dirty dishes, that he thought of nothing but Tylenol and sleep. Then his muscles hardened up, his frame lost flab and gained heft, and he began to look—well, more than a little like his Papa.

His newly broadened shoulders won him the attention of a plump and smiling young woman named Chris Malone, whose freckles and impish grin had already caught his eye in the bursar's office where he went to collect his stipend once a month.

Soon he and Chris were wandering hand in hand through Druid Hill Park. Or sharing lunch beside the Inner Harbor. Or downing steamy bowls of frutti di mare at Pocatelli's. Like a pedestrian stepping into a manhole, Eric fell headlong into that most agonizing and delusive of states, long overdue first love. Chris was the only featherless female biped he'd ever met who wanted him in her bed, and that was enough. After a courtship marked by naïve lust on her part and premature ejaculation on his, they decided to marry.

When he told his Mama, she snapped, “You're quitting school to marry that lazy nitwit? For God's sake, why?"

"Well, uh, she, uh, wants to."

"You,” said his loving mother, “are without doubt the second biggest fool I've ever known in my life."

Eric wondered who was the first. Maybe, in view of the Frogg-Prinz, herself.

The memories faded. Sleep came on little cat feet. Eric was back on the wall again, only to find—Goddamn it!—that he'd missed everything important.

From his familiar, silent bubble, he viewed the aftermath of a hard-won victory. Again the time was dusk. A slow, cold rain was washing the once bloody stones. Under a hastily constructed lean-to the fire bucket glowed dully, lighting in silhouette a single sentry leaning on his spear. Below the wall the tents of the Huns had vanished, leaving burned-out campfires, piles of dung, remnants of slaughtered animals, and the sodden embers of what might have been a funeral pyre.

Then he felt a tug. A gentle pull. He drifted slowly along the wall, following some sort of shamanistic scent-trail, his motion random-seeming like a butterfly's. He bobbed and wove across the bridge to the tower, finding at the end a closed gate, a latticework of rusty iron strips. He was puzzling about how to proceed, when—very quietly, as if he'd done it a dozen times—he passed through the gate like a puff of wind.

The tower was the castle keep. Just inside, a guard slept on a wooden stool, his gap-toothed mouth open and his long mustache quivering. Down a narrow corridor a heavy door stood half open, outlined by firelight. Eric drifted that way and a familiar bird's nest of red hair came into view. Exhausted by the battle, the Viking lay asleep on a wide, crude wooden platform under a heap of tanned animal pelts with the fur turned down.

He slept profoundly, hardly breathing. Eric drifted closer, surprised by his youth. Not much more than a boy—twenty at most. But the product of a hard life. Scars seamed his face and gray nits like seed pearls peppered his shaggy eyebrows. His thick right hand lay exposed, deformed by a veinous pink membrane between index finger and thumb. Eric slipped briefly inside his head, found nothing happening there, and slipped out again.

Curious, he drifted around the room. The firelight came from glowing coals in an iron brazier. A gray wolfhound the size of a small pony snoozed beside the bed, ignoring a restless army of mice scuttling through the moldy straw that served for a carpet. A battered shield and sword leaned against the wall. A narrow window looked out on the sea, where a longboat with a pale furled sail bobbed at anchor.

Suddenly the dog jumped up, eyes blazing. Eric didn't need hearing to know he was barking madly. He galloped to the door, nosed it open wider, and disappeared. Eric was staring after him when a door hidden behind a piece of crude tapestry slammed open and either Brünnhilde or her twin sister erupted into the room.

A huge blonde with swaying breasts that had never known the constriction of a bra. A swirl of red robe trimmed with greasy ermine. Madly blazing blue eyes, bee-stung lips, discolored teeth, bare powerful arms. She rushed through Eric, pulling him along in her slipstream, and he heard her shrieking like a berserk steam engine. She grabbed the Viking by his long hair and began to shake him, volleying over and over, Hrothgar! Hrothgar!—a word that began with a growl and ended with a throaty trill. When he didn't respond, she dropped him, seized the sword and shield and followed the wolfhound. Swept along in her wake, Eric followed, down the corridor to the iron gate—now standing open—across the bridge, and back onto the wall.

Armed men were swarming over the battlements in a tsunami of leather and iron. The Huns had just been fooling: they'd galloped away only so they could return and stage a surprise attack under cover of darkness.

Brünnhilde rushed them like all the Valkyries combined, smacked one in the face with the boss of the shield and knocked him over backward. Not pausing a beat, she swung the sword blade down on the neck of another Hun and he hit the stones in three pieces, the third being his helmet, which went bouncing and skittering away from its former contents. The dog, shedding flecks of foam, grabbed the leg of a third invader and Brünnhilde attacked the leg's owner, wielding the heavy sword like a flail.

Yet things were looking bad. The Huns had outsmarted the defenders and kept expanding the area of the wall they controlled. They had a solid foothold, and it was growing. If this kept up Eric knew the castle was lost, and without bothering to think about the matter he joined the fray in the only way he could.

He sped back into the room where Hrothgar lay, entered the Viking's head and tried to make him move. At first he felt like a quadriplegic occupying a body that would not respond. Come on, he thought, move, move, move, you big son of a bitch! And all at once Hrothgar did move. His muscles began to jerk like speared frogs. The whole huge body began thrashing around, entangled in the verminous skins that served as bedclothes and also in a long, itchy woolen nightshirt he turned out to be wearing.

Eric felt like a kid who climbs aboard some idle piece of earth-moving equipment and—half scared, half delighted—finds it starting to shudder and move underneath him. Gradually he mastered the wiring of the right arm, then the left. The legs stopped their poisoned-roach kicking and began to coordinate. He got the Viking untangled and onto his feet—no, he fell down again. Three times in fact, on his face, on his back, and on his butt. The mice infesting the straw fled squeaking. On the fourth try, Hrothgar rose and began lurching like the Frankenstein monster toward the door.

His heavy bare feet thumped hollowly across the footbridge. He started roaring, the only sound Eric knew how to make him make. He had no weapon, no armor, and in a flash of panic Eric realized that he'd probably killed the Viking by driving him into the fray unarmed and helpless.

But then Hrothgar's reflex systems came to life. Combat was all he knew and it roused him, set him moving on his own. He began to dodge and weave. A Hun arrow flicked by him. He snatched an axe from a man-at-arms and whacked off another head. This time the victim stood absolutely still for an instant while bright arterial blood spurted ten or twelve feet into the air, then crumpled like a puppet whose strings had all broken at once. The men-at-arms gave a hoarse cheer and closed around their leader with shields raised. Brünnhilde and the wolfhound joined them, forming a solid wedge that drove the attackers back into their comrades still coming over the wall. The Huns got entangled, tripping over themselves and one another. The confusion was lovely to see.

Eric was ecstatic. The weedy kid, the hump-backed scholar, the visionary dweeb, the tray-hustling waiter, the despised spouse—all his previous selves evaporated. He'd never felt this way before. No past, no future, hope and fear forgotten, everybody thrusting and hacking and roaring, metal squealing and crumpling, gobbets of spit and sweat and skin and blood flying through the air. When your life's on the line, he realized, that's when you really live.

And the tide was turning. New men-at-arms came swarming out of the castle keep, jumping straight from bed to battle, barefoot and wearing only ragged shirts plus a helmet and a piece or two of armor they'd grabbed at random. In twenty minutes of mayhem, the Nightshirt Army threw the last of the Huns off the wall.

It was time to caper and howl. But Eric had only a few seconds to enjoy the triumph. All at once Hrothgar began shouting unfamiliar words, then stringing the words together into sentences. The men at arms turned toward him gaping and grinning. They understood what he was yelling. Something hit Eric like a soundless explosion, and he popped out of the Viking's skull like a cork from a bottle of warm champagne.

Suddenly he was seeing Hrothgar from outside. The big man was a mess—disheveled, a gash down one arm, a barbed arrow embedded just under his left clavicle where a scarlet bloodspot was soaking the gray wool of his shirt. He panted like some huge exhausted animal, sweat pouring off his glowing face and dripping from the tips of the coppery hairs of his beard. And then—

Eric awoke.

Only not on the futon. He woke upstairs, among the cookie crumbs and the romance novels, lying beside Chris's recumbent form.

They were both starkers. Her rosy flesh exhaled a kind of post-coital steam. She turned over slowly, smiling, giving little grunts of sowlike contentment. The bed looked like Bull Run the day after the battle. She, he, and it smelled like a rutting camel, or the way Eric imagined a rutting camel smells.

Morning light poured through a dusty window. For a time he just lay there, inhaling marshland odors and feasting his eyes. He'd almost forgotten how good Chris looked when attired solely in her brown aureoles, fuzzy delta, and big bare bottom. Eric's whole midsection from navel to knees existed in a state of bliss it hadn't known for many months. The languor of the afterglow suffused his being. But dammit, he thought, I can't remember what we did to make the old prostate sing.

Then he forgot about his prostate, seminal vesicles, and attached plumbing. He and Chris were together again, not fighting, and utterly at peace. A moment more and her eyelids fluttered open, and she murmured, “Well, you're full of surprises."

How musical, after all, her voice could be when it sank below the hinge-like screech of anger to a husky, sexy contralto. Even her morning breath smelled kind of sweet, maybe from all the cookies she'd been eating. Husband and wife edged closer. “I ought to charge you with rape,” she murmured, but then drew the poison of that remark by planting a brief, damp kiss upon his bristly chin. Thus encouraged, he was soon able to resume lovemaking—and this time he was fully conscious throughout.

Afterward both of them remembered that morning as the starting point of a new life. Only a starting point, of course, but enough to show that they were utterly weary of hating each other and wanted to get on with their lives. With their life—singular. Their life together.

Toward noon, Eric put on jeans and dragged the futon into the alley for the trash men to take away, while Chris used the phone to dump Mr. Scheisster (who billed them anyway for services not rendered). A month-long second honeymoon ensued, leading to a far deeper reconciliation when Eric and Chris discovered that she was pregnant.

After the customary gestation period, she gave birth to a fine fat babe duly named Eric, Jr., but always called Little E. Eric had not quite shed his old suspicion that Chris might have had a lover, back in the days when they were fighting. Was it possible that somebody else had begotten Little E? He secretly had a swab of the baby's abundant spit tested and the DNA compared with his own. The results left him feeling ashamed, because—by odds of billions to one—Little E really was his child.

Despite the stinking diapers and the nightly squalling, Eric's cup ranneth over. The year that followed transformed the Mumfords’ lives in another way. Eric needed badly to make more money, and his Mama—as wacko as any other woman over her first grandchild—not only reconciled with Chris but used the savings of a lifetime to help him embark on a new career. With her loan and a ton of practical advice from Mr. Pocatelli, who'd followed Eric's marital trials with the breathless interest of a soap-opera addict, Eric and Chris opened a steak-and-seafood house in Annapolis they called Beefeaters. After a slow start it began to do pretty well, serving besides steaks such standards as Maryland crab cakes and surf'n'turf and stuffed potatoes with chives and sour cream.

Along the way, Eric and Chris found that working together—really working—did wonders for them and their marriage. Properly motivated, the lazy nitwit he'd married turned out to be a shrewd and incredibly energetic young woman. During Beefeaters’ tough startup days, he often watched her in the restaurant office—balancing the books, making out tax forms, taking reservations, sweet-talking creditors, and pausing now and then to change the baby or pop a nipple into his rosebud mouth—feeling the sight was more astounding than any vision he'd ever had. And speaking of visions, Eric stopped having them. He was too busy and too absorbed in real life and too damn tired when he went to bed for anything but sleep.

In order to be close to their work, he and Chris moved to an Annapolis townhouse with an egregious mortgage. Their first Christmas night in a burb named Camelot was warm and cheery and Dickensian, even though the chill and murky waters of a brackish tidal inlet called South River lapped at the development's communal dock. The night of the twenty-fifth, with the restaurant closed after dispensing turkey and cheer, Chris was in the kitchen making nog while Eric's Mama held Little E in her arms and tried to con him into a smile. The minute fireplace flared and shadows flickered on a sheepskin rug, and the Christmas tree, exhaling the scent of boreal forests, shimmered in the baby's wide blue eyes with Druidical splendor.

Sprawled on the couch, Eric was browsing a present he'd just received, a scrapbook Mama had made him, with records and pictures of his early years. He viewed again the Frogg Prinz, and Mama at long last told him the true story of their fling, and his father's name, which she felt almost positive had been either Ragnar Harmunsson or Harman Ragnusson. Eric asked casually why she called him the Frog Prince, and she explained that he had webbing between his index fingers and thumbs, “just like Kermit."

Eric, she added, had had the same defect, but the surgeons at the clinic where she worked had fixed the problem, and because he was so young at the time, the scars had healed invisibly. Little E didn't have the webbing, but then it sometimes skipped a generation.

"Don't worry, your grandchildren will probably be bullfrogs, too,” she concluded. “Just don't let them eat any flies."

Eric tried to smile, but suddenly the contents of his head were whirling madly and rearranging themselves, like a well-shaken kaleidoscope, into entirely new patterns.

Tired as he was, he lay awake for hours that night, brooding about his ancestor, the Viking. He wondered how he could have failed to spot the connection long before.

It wasn't just the webbing, though that was what gave him the clue. It was everything—the way Hrothgar channeled for him, the way that Eric could rouse that alien body, set it moving, even take it into battle. Across the vast gap of forty or so generations, the barbarian and the steakhouse proprietor were linked, cell to cell, by the molecular chain that binds the ages. And if Hrothgar was his ancestor, then surely Brünnhilde must be his ancestress. Why else could she have channeled for him too?

So far, so good. Only ... that wasn't the whole story, was it?

He grunted and rolled over and gnawed one thumb. A green-lit clock said three-twenty-nine. What obsessed him now was that long-ago sleepwalking episode. What if—Eric rolled over again, drawing a murmur of protest from Chris, though she didn't wake up—what if shamanism, like the webbing, were hereditary? What if Hrothgar had visited Eric's world in his absence, had floated into a strange (yet not totally strange) body, had gone blundering around a house full of baffling objects, accidentally turning on the shower, tracking up the rug, busting Aunt Mae's stupid little table, leaving his host with a large painful bruise on one knee and no recollection of how it got there?

There was worse to come. What if he'd visited again during that long, deep sleep of his following the first day's battle? What if he'd waked in the rowhouse in Baltimore—more knowledgeable this time, believing the fight was over, in a mood to revel, and well aware that a woman was sleeping upstairs? What if, while Eric was saving the big stinking barbarian's castle, Hrothgar was cuckolding him and using his own body to do it?

Was that why Eric found himself in bed with Chris next morning, awaking post coitum with no memory of doing the coitum? Was that right? Was that fair? And did a raping and pillaging barbarian give a monkey's fart whether it was right and fair or not?

The more Eric thought about it, the madder he got. Maybe it was fighting the Huns, or maybe it was sheer bloody-minded macho rage at this fugitive from the Iron Age snatching his body, screwing his woman, begetting his child for him. By morning, Eric had determined on revenge: he would return to the Viking's castle, watch for an opportunity to take over his smelly carcass, and do unto Brünnhilde what Hrothgar had done unto him. So it was incest, so what? Could you commit incest at a distance of forty generations?

"Two can play at that game, big guy,” he muttered.

Cunning was needed. He couldn't leave Chris open to a second, uh, Viking raid while he was off conducting one of his own. Fortunately, Beefeaters closed for inventory between Christmas and New Year's Eve, and Mama Malone in Timonium—suburban jewel of Baltimore County—had been begging Chris for a visit, with cherub, of course. Next morning she was easily persuaded to take Little E and make a day-and-night of it.

That evening Eric's preparations were cool and deliberate. He drank Bass ale instead of wine, and ate a couple of sandwiches of stone-ground bread and partially charred cow from the restaurant freezer. At bedtime he dropped Carmina Burana in the Bose, hit the button that made the CD repeat ad infinitum, and went to bed with a dusty volume of medieval literature left over from his college days. He was deep in Chaucer's bawdy masterpiece “The Miller's Tale,” when—as usual, without any sense of transition—he fell asleep, and found himself back on the wall.

The distant woods were leafless and dour. A shower of slow sullen rain was drifting away with the sullen clouds that had made it. Every sign of the besiegers had vanished and the castle looked, and somehow felt, empty.

Eric drifted to the wooden bridge, passed through the gate—it was standing open, no guard—and into the Viking's chamber. No Hrothgar, and yet he felt that old sense of something drawing him on. Again he looked out at the slow ripples of a leaden sea, then passed—leisurely as a cloud—through the arrow-slit window. He floated over the castle's seaward wall, and finally saw where everybody was. They were down below, crowding a narrow strip of gray shingle around the prow of the half-beached longboat.

On deck, surrounded by piles of firewood, Hrothgar's body lay stiffly. His face and hands, pale as ivory, protruded from a robe embroidered with runes. So that single Hun arrow, by puncturing the subclavian artery, had been enough to do the big man in. Death came easily in the Dark Ages, even to the strong. Beside the Viking rested the body of the wolfhound, slain to free its spirit to go hunting with him again, once he reached Valhalla.

Oh shit, thought Eric. There goes my revenge.

Gently as an autumn leaf, he drifted over the crowd of ragged serfs, men-at-arms leaning on spears, hefty women cradling naked babies, young warriors with thick red hands and corn-silk beards, girls adorned in bright tresses and bright dresses. Brünnhilde stood beside the ship, gorgeously arrayed in scarlet and ermine, brooches and buckles of hammered gold glittering on her robes, a silver fillet binding her torrent of yellow hair. She held a burning torch, and as Eric drifted down beside the Viking's body, her powerful arm flung it into the firewood.

Young men put their shoulders to the longboat's bow and shoved until it floated free, spun once and drifted slowly on an ebbing tide toward the glimmering horizon. Around Eric the flames crackled and roared up, but he didn't feel heat or smell smoke, because his channeler was dead and gone, and he would never hear or feel or smell this world again. He floated free, rising above the pyre into a stray weak sunbeam that had penetrated the clouds. Suddenly the air was opalescent and glittering and a rainbow formed, making the bridge the Vikings believed connects Earth to heaven.

And Eric woke, back in his bedroom.

Only ... something wasn't right.

His body lay sprawled on the bed, breathing stertorously. But Eric couldn't seem to enter it. He tried to push his way in, but somebody was pushing back.

All at once he understood what was happening. Raging, he forced his way into his own head, shouting silently, “You can't steal my wife, my son, my life!” In reply, a burst of probably obscene Old Norse issued from his own mouth.

He and the warrior grappled, two ghosts fighting for a single machine. The body that was their field of battle tumbled out of bed, came to its feet, gave itself a hard punch in the eye, growled like a dog, bit itself on the right forearm, got itself by the throat, pulled its hand loose, crashed into a wall, crashed into another wall, tumbled and flopped around the floor like a freshly landed tuna, tried without success to kick itself in its own balls, used both hands to pound its own head against the floor. Then the body was up again, and the dresser fell over and the bed collapsed as it threw itself down to finish the fight on the mattress.

And quite suddenly, everything went quiet.

"Good Lord,” said Chris next morning, staring at the man who opened the front door for her. “What happened to you? And why in the world are you naked?"

A bitter wind redolent of ice, salt, and dead marsh grass swept up the Chesapeake and across South River and whistled through the doorway. But the man standing there in his bare skin only smiled, exhibiting the loss of one front tooth to complement his two black eyes. He put a finger to his lips, took the baby in its carrier from her and set both on the floor by the Christmas tree. At his movement, the ornaments winked, little bells tinkled and green branches stirred. The smell of resin was intense.

He licked a drop of blood off his remaining teeth and drew her masterfully into his arms.

"Here? On the rug? Now?” She sounded both outraged and fascinated. “Well, at least let me close the door!"

The door slammed. The Viking raid proceeded. But which Viking it was, she only found out later.

As the holiday season approaches, Jerry Oltion offers us glad tidings from the Pacific Northwest.

Toby always makes a wish for Christmas. It almost always comes true. The only time it doesn't is when he wishes for too much, and even then he always gets at least a part of it.

The gift only seems to work at Christmastime. The rest of the year he can wish all he wants, but he has to work just as hard as everyone else to make anything happen. At Christmas, though, he only needs to make his wish, go to sleep on the night of the twenty-fourth, and by New Year's he gets what he asked for.

It has worked like that ever since he was a kid. The candy truck that crashed in the front yard; the house fire that didn't kill Bobby Dorton, the school bully, but did make his family move away; the exhibitionist who moved in next door when he was a little bit older—all were manifestations of Toby's peculiar gift.

None of his wishes are ever delivered in a package under the tree, but Toby has always thought it must be Santa Claus who grants them just the same. Who else could it be? Certainly not Jesus, unless the Son of God is going through a rebellious phase. Toby doesn't ask for anyone's death anymore, but he doesn't use his wishes on goody-goody stuff, either. He tried that a couple of times, and once had the great joy of watching Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin sign a peace treaty brokered by President Carter, but it had taken nine months to happen and it hadn't lasted. And the other time, when the Berlin Wall came down, hadn't exactly turned out rosy for the Russians, either.

He doesn't muck around with world politics anymore, but he doesn't waste his gift, either. He spends the entire year mulling over his next wish. He has notebooks full of possibilities, but he's always open to new ideas. In fact it has become a bit of an obsession. With only one wish a year, he wants to make the most of them.

Except this year he can't decide. He doesn't have everything a man could wish for, but he's comfortable. He has money, a nice house, a wife whom he loves and who loves him, popularity, talent, and good looks. What he doesn't have, despite all that, is much fun.

So he goes to bed thinking, “I want to have fun.” It's a bit nebulous, and therefore a bit dangerous, but that only adds to his excitement. What will the universe come up with?

When he wakes up, nothing obvious has changed. Sonya doesn't have an extra pair of boobs or anything, which is a relief. He doesn't think his gift would do something like that to her, if only because his happiness pretty much depends on hers, but he had worried just a little.

He checks his penis in the shower. It's not any bigger.

The first hint comes when he opens the cupboard for his breakfast cereal and discovers that the box of Cheerios has become a box of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs. Never mind that those haven't existed outside of a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon until this morning; he has some in his cupboard.

They aren't bad. Certainly sweet, but if he dilutes them with enough milk ... hmm. Wow, “caffeine” is certainly high on the ingredient list, isn't it?

He opens the paper and reads while he's eating his cereal, and sees that there will be a Christmas concert in the bandshell today featuring 100 tubas—and nothing else. He can't imagine what that would sound like ... but then he doesn't have to imagine it, does he? In a couple of hours, he can find out.

Sonya is surprised when he suggests it, surprised and pleased. That's not usually the sort of thing he likes to do.

"Maybe we should go see a movie, too,” he says.

"Which one?"

He feels a little stab of irritation, just the tiniest twinge of tarnish to his perfect morning. He hates poring over the movie listings to figure out which one is least likely to suck, and then they have to figure out what time to see it, and whether they'll eat first or eat afterward. It's more trouble than a movie is usually worth. So today he says, “Let's just go to the theater when we're ready to watch something, and pick whatever is showing next."

Sonya raises an eyebrow. “What if it's a Spielberg flick?"

"Then we'll sit in back and make out."

She considers this, then smiles and turns away to get ready for their day on the town.

It's raining out, a soft drizzle that Toby has come to call Northwest photons. He wished for sunnier weather once, but after the worst drought in Oregon history he learned not to mess with the weather. He and Sonya put on their jackets and gloves without complaint.

On their way to the tuba concert, Toby at the wheel of their hybrid Toyota, a big white Ford Excursion roars past them in the right lane, then cuts them off and turns left in front of them, but the driver is apparently blind because he turns into the path of an approaching Humvee, and the impact is like the irresistible force meeting the immovable object. The sound is nothing like car-chase movies have led Toby to expect. For one thing, the whole event happens in less than a second. The initial impact is like a box being flattened all at once, then there's a grinding squeal that rises quickly in pitch, mixed with the pop of window glass shattering, and finally another deep thud as the two vehicles’ engines meet. Toby has to swerve hard to avoid tail-ending the Excursion, but he clears the bumper just as the Excursion rolls onto its side with the Humvee astride it, and then they're past. A rearview mirror bounces alongside Toby's car for a few feet, then smacks into the grille of an oncoming pickup truck.

"Should we stop?” asks Sonya.

Toby pulls into a parking lot and looks back at the accident. The driver of the Humvee opens his door and climbs down—why is it always weaselly short guys driving those things, Toby wonders?—where he is angrily accosted by the driver of the Excursion, who climbs out the back of his destroyed vehicle and begins shouting at the Humvee driver as if everything were his fault. There were apparently no passengers in either vehicle, because the two drivers get right down to pushing and shoving, and soon fists are flying.

"I don't think we're needed here,” Toby says, and he pulls out onto the street again.

The scene is repeated ten blocks later with a Chevy Suburban and a Dodge Ram. And five blocks after that, a Trooper runs a red light and tears the back end right off a minivan. The van's gas tank rips open and bursts into flame, but both drivers have time to get away before the tangle of wreckage becomes a burning pyre to the gods of excess. Of course there were no passengers in either of those vehicles, either.

"This is getting eerie,” Sonya says as they creep around the accident in the farthest lane.

"A bit monotonous, too,” Toby says, and that realization is apparently enough to reset the universal “fun” control. They get all the way to the tuba concert without witnessing another accident, but they do see a meter maid putting a ticket on a double-parked BMW.

The concert is amusing, and surprisingly good, but one person right up front keeps talking on a cell phone. Toby is about to ask her to put it away when a gust of wind catches her hat, and when she throws her arm upward to grab it, her cell phone slips free and continues along a high arc into the bell of a tuba. The audience's laughter brings “O Little Town of Bethlehem” to a halt, and there's a great deal of confusion before the band director figures out what has happened. He retrieves the cell phone and hands it back to its owner, who slinks away, her cheeks redder than the band director's Santa hat.

The rest of the concert goes smoothly. Despite the caffeine jitters that have kept Toby quivering like a plucked string all through it, he and Sonya are both cold by the time it's over, so they decide to have lunch next and go to the movie afterward. Sonya surprises him by suggesting they go to Hooters.

"You're kidding,” he says.

"Merry Christmas,” she says. “Besides, I've never eaten there before. What if the food is actually good, and I've been missing out all this time?"

The food is good, they discover, although Toby has a hard time paying attention to it. Their waitress is flirting with a table full of college kids, and she's very good at it. The college kids are clearly embarrassed and trying not to show it, but the waitress is merciless.

"Hey,” she says in a voice that fills the restaurant, “did you hear we're gonna open up a home-delivery service? We're gonna call it Knockers.” Sonya laughs, and the waitress winks at her. Toby is suddenly certain that they're in collusion, that Sonya has arranged something with her. He has fantasized about just that sort of thing before, but it has always been just fantasy, and that's how he likes it. The idea of it actually happening scares the daylights out of him, and not just because of performance anxiety. He isn't the world's most sensitive man, but he does actually use the word “relationship” once in a while, and he doesn't think a roll in the hay with a Hooters waitress will improve his and Sonya's any.

He's trying to figure out how to say this to her when she waves a hand in front of his face and says, “Earth to Toby. Man, you dropped out like a hippie on acid. I didn't think anything could take your eyes off her boobs, but you were gone."

"I think I just saw my life flash before my eyes,” he says.

"That's an interesting reaction to a pair of antigravity chest nodules."

"Yes,” he says. “And that's about all the fun I think I can stand here. Let's go see a movie."

On the drive to the theater, they see someone blowing leaves into the street with a backpack blower. As they approach, the engine belches a blue cloud of smoke and the cylinder head or the piston or something flies straight into the air, to come down on top of the astonished operator's head, knocking him to the ground. Toby slows the car, thinking he'd better stop and help if the guy is injured, but when the man rolls to his feet and begins cursing a blue streak, Toby drives on by.

A little farther on, a boomcar roars past, its subwoofers turned up to 11. The windows on Toby's car rattle, but the windows on the boomcar do them one better: they shatter in a spectacular spray of glistening fragments. The boomcar pulls to the curb and goes silent.

Toby didn't realize that his idea of fun was quite so sadistic. Not that people who force their noise on everyone else don't deserve some comeuppance, but this seems a little extreme. He has to admit, though, that he enjoys their misfortune.

The movie is Ringworld, and it stars a bunch of actors that Toby has never heard of before, but he expects he'll see them everywhere after this. It's a blowout production, the first science fiction film to live up to the book. The special effects are so seamless he can't tell where they start or stop; everything seems so real, it's two hours of total immersion in an alien world without a single false step. When the titles start to roll, Toby is surprised to find himself in a theater, and he has to unlock his fingers from their grip on the arms of his chair.

He and Sonya recount their favorite scenes on the drive home. As they pass Wal-Mart, Toby notices a big banner hanging from the top of the building: “Going Out of Business Sale.” A couple blocks beyond, the windows of Emile's Eclectic Emporium glitter with renewed luster.

At home, the neighbor's cocker spaniel is barking, as it always does when they drive in, but Toby and Sonya are barely inside the house when they hear a yowl and a screech and yips of mortal terror, then silence. Toby looks out the window to see a mountain lion leap the fence with the dog in its jaws.

He should be shocked. He wants to be shocked, and he wants to feel at least a little sympathy for the neighbor, who will no doubt feel terrible when he finds out what happened to his dog—and on Christmas day, to boot—but he can't suppress his wild grin. A mountain lion ate the neighbor's yappy dog!

He catches Sonya grinning, too, and suddenly they're laughing out loud. The strangeness of the day can't be held back any longer, and they fall into each other's arms, laughing so hard the tears run down their cheeks. They wind up pulling each other's clothes off and making love right there in the living room, and when Sonya asks him if he's thinking about the Hooters waitress, he laughs again and says, “Well, if I wasn't before, I am now.” But in truth, he can't even remember what she looks like.

They spend the evening puttering around the house, playing the new music that they have given each other and preparing dinner. They usually fix a big meal on Christmas, but by mutual consent they decide just to make soup and sandwiches this time. They read during dinner, and for a while afterward. Toby would have sworn he'd read every book Robert Heinlein had ever published, including the awful ones he'd written near the end of his life, but Sonya has given him one he's never seen before, and it's from the early days. It's as good as his memories of the other ones, which means it's at least an order of magnitude better than they really were.

When they go to bed, he discovers that his toothpaste tastes like chocolate. They crawl under the covers and turn out the light, and he snuggles in against Sonya, marveling as he often does at how well they fit together.

As he drifts off to sleep, he wonders what the morning will bring. What if his “fun” was just for a day?

He shivers. What if it lasts all year?

Perhaps it was the extensive flooding in the U.S. midwest in 2008 that brought this story to mind, or maybe simply the fact that its eeriness is memorable. Whatever the reason, when I was asked to choose a story for the anniversary, “Rising Waters” was an obvious pick. In many ways the story typifies what I have always admired about F&SF. When I worked for the magazine under the editorship of Ed Ferman, a hard and fast rule was that “slush” (unsolicited manuscripts) was always read. “Who knows,” Ed said, “the next Asimov or Bradbury might be in those piles of manuscripts.” Sure enough, many outstanding stories emerged from the slush pile. Patricia Ferrara's “Rising Waters” was one such tale.
"Rising Waters” was first published in the July 1987 issue of F&SF, and later anthologized in The Best Horror Stories from the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and it also represents yet another admirable trait of the magazine: throughout F&SF's history, it has published and continues to publish the best in fantasy, science fiction—and horror. “Rising Waters” is a simple, elegant—and horrifying—story that is among this “best.”
—Anne Devereaux Jordan

And eventually what had been the flood plain of the river became part of the river itself, as age changed the Ohana from a thin, angry sluice into a flat ribbon that rippled in the sunlight, still as a lake. But Rory had not yet been born when his grandparents had deserted their house by the old riverbank and moved far up into the gentle hills to a broad swell of land safe from the runoff of a hundred snowy winters. To him, the river existed with the same reliable constancy as the school bus. Every morning in the summer, he woke up to the river; and every night he slept beside it, thinking it of only average interest. Mostly he wondered how he could get a ride into town to play the video games at the supermarket. Space Invaders had been his favorite, and he was startled when, in rapid succession, a Pac-Man game displaced it, and then a Millipede game. The constant change was irritating, because his quarter bought more time on a familiar game. His wrist had never got the trick of slipping the gobbling button around the corners, and then the bouncy spiders had proved more than he could handle. The two quarters Grandma allotted per trip bought maybe five minutes of Millipede. Grandma took him to the supermarket only once a week to help with the groceries, unless she forgot something; and since she never forgot anything, he never got any better at the games. Once they had to go back because the milk was sour, and he had to stand with her at the manager's high window while she talked bitterly about out-of-state milk and a sweet-tempered cow that had been dead and gone for fifty years. She'd held on to his arm tightly, grasping at something other than her grandson. Afterward she wouldn't let him play even one game, although he'd come all that way with her. She wanted to go straight home, and she drove there silently, her lips forming a mushy rosebud as she pouted and trembled.

Then the great boiling heat of August came, and the water of the river retreated from its banks, leaving several feet of unpleasantly sharp stones embedded in dank clay between the clipped grass and the flood. Then he was glad to be near the river. It was something to do to go down to the riverbank with his lunch in a box and spend the day cooling off in the water and getting hot in the sun. The process tired him out pretty much if he stayed until dinnertime, and the sweltering heat kept it from being boring.

He was lying on the bank one day in August, with a whiff of evening breeze reminding him that it was almost time to go in for dinner. And while he was lying there, thinking about nothing in particular, a peculiar noise drew his attention to the river. The river had never made a noise like that before. He looked west, his hands cupped over his eyes against the sun, and saw that a dark triangular streak lay motionless far out on the waves, jutting hard-edged above the line of the water, but blurry where it merged into the shining ripples. He stood up to get a closer look, but it remained a sharp outline, its details lost in the backlight of the round red sun directly behind it. He stared at it until the setting sun made his eyes water and slit closed; in the meantime, he lost track of the vitally important timing that would land him at the dinner table just as the food came onto it. His grandma was angry with him when he finally came home, and he ate his dinner lukewarm and alone.

The thing was gone when he came back the next day. Yet it had been so odd, not like a log, but geometric, like something someone had made. He let it pass until, a few days later, he flopped down on his towel, fairly winded from a swim, and breathed in great whooshes of air for a few minutes before turning over. As he sighed and vainly rolled west against the glare of the sun, the dark streak reemerged so suddenly that he jumped. The sun was just past meridian, and he could see the object clearly. It was not a triangle at all, but a quadrangle that sort of tilted in the water, and out of it thrust another flat geometric form at an angle to the first. He brooded on the puzzle for a bit until he noticed two pillars or posts propping up the second plane from beneath. The object was a roof, then, sloping down to the overhang of a porch. He debated the probability of this guess being true. He had seen pictures of houses in floods, but the river was bone-dry. He looked down to check his facts. The water stood limpid and still, and three feet back from its banks. And the roof wasn't moving, not even rocking on the water. After a bit of brooding, he concluded that if it couldn't have floated down the river, then the river must have uncovered it. The physics of the matter troubled him, but he dismissed the improbabilities. After all, the thing was there.

He watched it from the bank for a while longer, wondering what house it was, when he remembered Grandma's often-repeated story of the old house, and how they had had to desert it after the last flood had wrecked it, when the federal government had made one last payment and refused to insure the place again. No one had ever heard such a thing, Grandma said. That was always the last line of her house chant. He had heard it so often, and he had paid so little attention, that the upshot was, he defined insurance vaguely as something no one had ever heard of. But the appearance of the house in the river made the story interesting, and he pieced odd bits of the tale together from memory and rolled it over in his mind while he looked. This might be the house. He wondered whether he should tell Grandma. But that would mean having to leave it behind while he ran up the hill, and the last time he left the thing alone, it had gone under. After a while he struck on the idea that he might swim out to it. It was a long way out, over half a mile maybe, but the porch roof was flat enough to serve as a pier. He could rest once he was out there, and with a safe haven halfway in the round trip, it was no farther than he had swum before. And so he plunged in.

The water seemed cooler than it should have been this time of day; after he'd gotten over the shock of the first swim of the morning, the river should feel like bathwater. But this was an adventure, and adventures always made things seem different. He pushed on through the clear water, stopping now and again to look up and correct his course. The house seemed to get no nearer, not for a long time, and he did not look back to see that nonetheless the shore was getting smaller behind him.

He was far out when his efforts were finally repaid by a better look at the house. As he paused and trod water, he could see the weathered shingles making a shaggy web of the roof, and only a great ragged gap in the grid remained impenetrably black in the distance. This encouragement had to last him a good while longer, for his neck was aching too much for him to keep on looking as he swam. His breathing was getting uncoordinated, too, and occasionally he choked and snorted out an inadvertent gulp of water. But there was nothing for it; he had to keep on paddling to the resting place on top of the porch. When the water suddenly turned tan and thick with churned-up mud from the river bottom, he stopped and looked up again for the first time in a long time. The house rose up less than twenty feet from where he swam. It seemed to stand higher out of the water now, and he could see the top of a third pillar holding up the porch roof, and the pediment over a doorway that gaped empty beneath.

He swam through the dirty water to grasp the post closest to him, but it was slick with moss, and his hands slipped. His heart thumped fearfully in his ears. He might be too tired to climb up. His enervated fingers scratched at the rotting wood, but it flaked and splintered in his hands. He pushed his feet up around the pillar, and shimmied and hopped and scrambled until his belly creased up over the edge of the roof. And there he lay for a moment, exhausted, until a creak and a slight tilt indicated the house was listing, and he pushed himself frantically, spread-eagle, out onto the smooth grid of shingles. The creaking stopped, and he tried to rest. But his heart pounded and his nerves sang, and he could not rest.

He was not familiar with the stink of things long buried coming into the air again. It was not a comfortable smell, and as soon as he could catch his breath, he lifted his head up away from the reeking shingles, slick with mud and fungus. His body was covered with patches of the stuff in front. He tried wiping the smears off his face, away from his nose. But he only complicated the stink with a perpetual itch of red clay that clung to him from the water, and the stink and the itch together exasperated him. If he scratched or wriggled, the house creaked and moved; and when he scraped a foot on the roof to ease the itch, down he stepped, dangling into the attic. He pulled his leg back with the frantic delicacy necessary on thin ice, flattening his body out belly-up on the slimy shingles. The warmth of the sun encouraged the foul odor of the house to spread itself around and made black spots flicker in front of his eyes. He closed the lids over his eyes tightly, but the sun shone through each individual cell, and he risked lifting up a forearm over the sockets. This brought the itch to his eyes, but he kept the cool forearm aloft anyway until the red fire died down behind his eyelids and he could breathe regularly.

When he cautiously removed the arm and blinked, he saw that the sun had gone far west of the meridian. He raised himself up slowly, and eased away from the hole he'd made in the roof. He'd have to start swimming back pretty soon. It was getting late. But the tan pool spread out widely, and he felt a certain revulsion toward jumping through its opaque surface.

His cautious movements again irritated the delicate balance of the house, and he lay back down quickly to soothe it. From inside came a slight scuffling sound and then a thump that made the thin membrane of the roof quiver. The noise was startling, for Rory had assumed the house had been washed clean by the current of the river. But of course, something could have drifted in through an empty windowframe and rattled around like a fly trying to find its way back out through a screen. The house kept shifting restively despite his stillness as he thought, and he crept carefully over to the end opposite the tilt to appease it.

This maneuver left him only inches from the original hole in the roof, and he could hear quite clearly the rattle and bump as the contents of the house wove from wall to wall. But there was no splashing noise involved, and that was odd. He looked down into the hole, something of his original curiosity rekindling. A sort of drier smell came up, equally as foul as the wet smell outside. He leaned in farther, and still nothing was visible, for little light came in through the two holes in the roof. It looked like some sort of attic or loft.

But he had leaned over too far, and with a faint whoosh, the rotten shingles collapsed feebly inward and dropped him gently on the floor. He grabbed immediately upward at the sky hanging light above him. But after his first lunges failed, he realized that his leaps brought on a chorus of angry squeaks from the house, and he stopped dead until they subsided. It was cold in here, even if he stood in the patches of light, and his teeth chattered as he stood rigidly still from his ankles to his earlobes, and his toes did a little terrified dance on the dry floor. It was dangerous inside, however low the river might be. Something rolled at him from a dark corner, and he jumped, heedless of his movement's effect on the creaking house. As the thing flashed into the sunlight, he recognized it rolling green and white in front of him, and he picked it up. It was a can of peas. It was a new can of peas, with the label dry, the tin ends still shiny. A green giant grinned at him above a heap of perfect green dots. The can was a good bit dented, and the rims were mucky from rolling on soft, rotten wood, but it was only an ordinary can of peas.

His teeth had stopped chattering, although shudders kept seizing his shoulders. He held the can of peas in his hand tightly, for he needed to grip on to something as he struggled to formulate options. The house was teetering constantly now, whether he moved or not. He decided that it would be best to go to the lowest part of the sloped roof and poke through the brittle shingles with his hands; and then he would clamber onto the roof and jump off as soon as ever he could, and swim toward shore. His shoulders still ached from the swim out, but it didn't matter; he would make it back. He could float for a while if he had to, and then swim some more. But he had to get started right away. And so he slid his right foot forward like a skater across the floor toward the low end of the roof. The floor leaned to follow. Then his left foot slid forward, and a slow, mushy sound squished behind him. He looked back.

There was something else in the corner where the peas came from. The sun threw one great, slanting shaft of light through the biggest hole in the roof, and he could just see a kind of gray mass standing out from the dark wall behind him. But he had no time to explore. He turned to his task again, sliding his feet forward. The gray thing scraped on the planking as the floor tipped under him. The house had bent forward far enough so that he could see the clay water through the gap in the shingles now. He leaned his body toward the opening, keeping his feet still, and one hand clutched at a rafter while the other batted the can of peas at bits of shingle and river ooze. After he'd cleared a hole big enough to jump through, his fingers curled around the rafter gently, and he pulled. It held firm, strong enough to bear his weight. He readied himself to jump. But as he closed his eyes, a vision seized him: he jumped up beautifully, up, out into the water, and the house tumbled in the air and dived after him, turning upside-down over him like an empty basket. He forced his mind away from this, opened his eyes and tossed the can of peas into the river, then clutched at the rafter with both hands. He tried to push the thoughts away, and jerked himself forward to jump; then he pulled back again from the vision of the capsized house, and his little dance of indecision shook the house more, making the gray mass behind him rock and tumble down and then up the floor, down and then up again until the lumpen mass flipped cozily around his legs and came to rest. He froze his fingers onto the rafter and pointed his tightly shut eyes straight up to the sky. His ears rang a bit, and he could hear himself panting. The tangle around his legs was heavy. He tried to move his left leg. It was stuck. He would have to look down to see how to free himself.

The sunlight hit the mass full on as he swiveled one eye down and sideways. A few details confirmed that the thing was human. He swallowed once and said, “He-hello?” There was no answer. He had expected none. He shifted his right foot gently and pushed. The body wobbled, but his left foot was still trapped. He kicked hard, and an arm rolled free from his foot, and for one strangled moment, he saw the face before it shot him screaming up through the roof hole.

After the first fit of screams, he descended into a whimper. He wanted to jump into the clear water and swim, but the clay pool stretched out for yards in front of him, and the body beneath still entangled him, pulling his legs under the water in his thoughts. He crawled away from the hole to the far end of the porch, away from the sound of her tumbling in the attic.

The face stood between him and his own eyelids if he shut his eyes, between him and the sun and the water if he dared open them. It was a woman's face, smashed in by great round black marks that made swollen crescents all over it. And he laughed hysterically, mixed up a little with wailing, to think she'd got her head smashed in with a can of peas.

He'd have to yell for help; there was nothing else to do, and he bellowed as loud as he could. But his voice was small and cramped with fear, and the yells didn't carry. The shore was very far away, and he could see that his grandparents’ house was beginning to be covered with the shadows of the aspen trees in front. He looked up sharply. The sun had slid almost to the horizon while he was inside the attic. It was still bright on the river, but dark would come quickly once the sun was down; the river would soon be a great mirrored sheen by the darkened shore, and then the river itself would grow dark. His grandma must be looking for him. It was past dinnertime, and she knew he was down by the river. His towel would still be there on the bank. He waved his arms, hoping that she could see him backlit by the sun; he cried out a few times more. He couldn't see anyone, just the faint glow of the white house, and the vivid yellow-green of the trees and grass where the sun hit, and the shadows growing more purple behind them.

But there were police. They had motorboats; even in the dark, he would be able to hear them, see their lights. Yet the shifting house might not wait. It creaked constantly now, no matter what. He tried to think of swimming again; but he couldn't, he just couldn't. He might swim round and round in circles in the dark, unable to see the shore, with the body drifting after him, waiting to ensnare his legs with its dead arms.

Soon the sun was a thin red rim glowing behind the hills, and the river was opaque and shining. He looked around for the last time, he knew, for a long time. And in the distance he saw something: a boat perhaps, for it was moving. He yelled at it, his voice hoarse from the water and the stink. It was coming swiftly, purposefully downriver toward the house, more swiftly than the current would carry it. He yelled again and waved his arms. There was more than one. Five or six specks emerged; they were boats, surely. He stopped yelling for a moment, thinking he would hear a reply; but there was no response, not even a cry muffled by the wind, nor any sound of motors or paddles lapping in the water. The boats came silently toward him, closer and closer, and his voice died in his throat. They carried no flashlights. And as they grew larger, a faint glimmer of light showed that the shallow boats streaked forward in their own widening pool of clay-colored water, and the breeze brought him the penetrating sour smell of something long buried as the house gently shifted, and knelt into the water like a trained horse bowing to its rider.

Strange but true, this story marks Barry Longyear's first appearance in F&SF. For the three of you who don't recognize his name, Mr. Longyear was a mainstay of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine during its early years and won great acclaim and many awards for his 1979 novella, “Enemy Mine.” Since then, he has published about a dozen novels, four or five collections of short fiction, and a few books of nonfiction, including an invaluable workshop for writers and Yesterday's Tomorrow: Recovery Meditations For Hard Cases. You can find all this information online at www.barrylongyear.net but the only place you'll find his tale about the Monopoly man is right here.

The end. This was it: Cheri Trace was in it thick. She'd been close before. That time with the bangers on Broadway. The other time with that ... time she didn't like to think about. But this was the real end. Panic was in her face, an arm down her throat and a ragged claw hooked into every nerve.

She was out.

Out.

That trumped it all: The punch in the face, the money gone, the purse gone, the blood on her tube top, the pain in her face and ribs, the indifferent smear of faces rushing past in the night fusing into the jumble of lights on West Forty-second. Next to being in pain, sick, and out, nothing's important. Death a distant second. Getting close to ultimate options.

She leaned back against a wall trying not to look up at the passing faces, the theatergoers, touristas, and street sludge who had yet to be sucked all the way down. On the marquee across the street, Kimberli Fallon in Party Girl.

She laughed bitterly. “The suck's coming for you, too,” she whispered at the marquee.

Cheri jumped at an imagined movement within a shadow, made a grab at the air, another, then covered her eyes with one hand and sighed. “Bastard. Even took my cigarettes."

Never even got a look at him. Muggers. Think you're immune. Look tough, street cred, like you belong here, man, one of the people, not prey but fellow predator. Code. Honor among bastards. Only protection is to have eyes all around your head and guns pointed in all directions, a sign that says “AIDS, fool! TB! Leprosy! Dynamite in every pocket!"

Beware, man, I'm made of cyanide—Yeah. Like they could even read....

She slowly turned her face against the wall, rested her bruised cheek against cold glass, forced herself not to cry. Red puffy eyes not attractive. Besides, girl crying on the street and next thing Crusader Rabbit shows on a salvation mission.

...Humpty Dumpty had a great fall—

Don't cry. There, there, honey, it'll be all right.

All right? That word “all” covers a lot of ground, dude. Don't make promises you can't keep.

So, all the king's horses and all the king's men—

Aw hell.

Cheri didn't want to meet Jesus or Dudley Do-Right unless he was holding. She held her aching left cheek against the cold glass as universal truth ground at the back of her head: If she didn't score something soon, the universe would end. Worse than that, it might not end.

Get something.

—Focus, direction. First money. Before money, market the goods. Before marketing, inventory. She stood back from the wall, looked down at the blood drying on the front of her white tube top. She wondered what her face looked like. Hamburger probably.

Rest room. McDonald's back on the Square. She could slip into the rest room there, wash her face, rinse her top, use the blow dryer, maybe borrow someone's makeup and stay out of the strong lights—

She caught a glimpse of her right shoulder reflected in the glass protecting a poster advertising the motion picture Brooks, Kevin Costner as serial killer. The poster was very dark. Poster and glass made a great black mirror. Where her face had rested against the glass was a smear of blood. She moved to her right until she could see her entire face. It wasn't just a bloody nose. Cheri's upper lip looked like a wiener, her left eye was bruised almost black and partially closed. “Who would want that?” she cried.

Her cute little white beret was gone, too. She looked so good in it. Her hair ... god, what a mess.

She closed her eyes, her head shaking.

Is this the night, she thought. Is this the night it all catches up with me?

You're in a foot race with a monster who is meaner, faster, stronger, tougher, and more patient than you. And you get surprised when it catches up?

Fool. Fool.

Shadows. She needed deep shadows. Safety was no longer an option. Those who look for love in shadows don't expect much. Of course, acknowledged Cheri, they don't expect to pay much. Enough, though.

"Enough to score—enough to get home."

Cheri had some stuff hidden back in the room she shared with Trina, if Trina hadn't found it and shot it all. That was why Cheri had taken to carrying most of her help with her in her purse. If she could just make it back to the room. Before that, money. Before that, business. Before that, shadows.

Bryant Park, thickly bordered with trees, nothing going on at this time of year. Too cold for concerts and summer fashion shows, sipping spritzers on the grass. Not cold enough yet for ice skating or winter fashions. Lots of shadows, bushes. Once you're noticed, plenty of places to go not to be noticed again. The negotiation of virtue for medicine—a little something to keep off the crawlies.

She turned from the poster and, keeping her face down, walked east toward the park, the crowds thinning rapidly once she reached the corner of Sixth. A chilling breeze whipped up the wide avenue and she glanced down at her legs barely covered by the miniskirt. She nodded to herself as her gaze elevated to rest upon the trees of the park. The legs were still good. Cold, but commercial.

Crossing Sixth when the light changed, she could see figures moving among the trees. Joggers, a couple or two bundled up against the chill, walking, some older kids shuffling along, profiling for each other, a few looking to score. Working girls. They'd have pimps nearby who'd add some to Cheri's looks if they caught her.

She got on the paved path flanked on her left by the ranks of trees. One of her johns once told her they were sycamores. He could've been wrong. He was sure wrong about some other things, like that piece of tin in his pocket.

Automatically she looked for both cops and distribution outlets. Two guys holding; recognized them both. The one across the street was Cuff. Cuff wouldn't extend credit to his own mother to keep her from starving to death. He wasn't violent. Just had the heart of a crocodile. His favorite saying: “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” The other one, farther up on her side of the street beneath his favorite tree, was Rackshack. Cheri had ripped off Rackshack. Shortest love affair in history. She moved in, found his bags in the wall, she moved out—with her purse packed with Rackshack's merchandise. Terrific three weeks and until she ran out she'd been everybody's best friend. Everybody's but Rackshack's. He'd kill her if he ever saw her.

That ultimate option again: Quit the race. Lay down—put down, throw down—that burden. Shoot it, crush it, choke it, kill it, let it and everything else in the universe die.

Tired.

Suddenly Cheri felt very cold, very old, and very tired—the flint-hard kind of bone weariness that didn't care where it slept, whether in a bed, a gutter, or a grave. The cold. If she could just stop shaking, get the cold out of her bones, the ants out of her skin. She turned and glanced again at Rackshack. He usually packed. Had him a S&W nine he was proud of. Maybe he could do her this one last favor.

"What's it cost, Rack?"

"Huh?” Rackshack was always quick with that witty comeback.

"A cap outta that nasty old nine you got tucked in your shorts under that bad old Rangers jersey, Rack. Let me have the first one for free? Right here in my head?"

She hovered in a limbo of indecision. Rackshack just stood there: tall, dark, a perpetual smirk on his face, an oversized Mets cap on sideways, dealing his death. The Rack don't do no drugs. He net himself four-five large a day and it go in the bank right there in the corner and make it self four-and-a-half to five percent, and all is right with Rack's world.

No loser he.

While Cheri stood in the shadows, shook, stared at Rackshack, and hovered between suicide and homicide, she heard something to her left. Sounded like a flutter of wings.

Angels of death?

Pigeons.

She glanced quickly and saw the rows of trees edging the walkway. There was a man sitting on one of the folding chairs that littered the path. There was a row of such chairs beneath the trees facing away from the street, a body here, a body there sitting in them. Partygoers getting a splash of cold air before navigating home, lovers meeting on the sly, bums, homeless. This man was different. His was a double chair. Loveseat. The view from that vantage point was of another row of chairs with their backs against a concrete balustrade, the dark empty center of the park, and above it the buildings along West Fortieth, the top of the Bryant Park Hotel all lit up like an aging Christmas tree. But the man was looking at Cheri.

He had shiny shoes: black, glossy, expensive-looking. The cuffs coming down to them were dark blue with a thin pinstripe. Cheri walked over to him. Only two kinds of men wore pinstripes in Bryant Park after eleven: big shots looking to buy and stoned Yankee fans. This guy didn't look like baseball. He wore a dark overcoat and a pearl-gray homburg, the hair beneath it white. She stopped in front of him, her arms folded across her chest, her hands in her armpits for warmth. He had a big white mustache with pointy ends like the man in the Monopoly game. “Mister,” she said quietly.

"Yes?” he answered. His eyes were sharp blue. “Something I can do for you, my child?"

"You got ten dollars I could borrow—I mean, I could, you know, whatever you want. I really—"

"I'm sorry, my dear.” He turned his head to the right and nodded in that direction. “Are you familiar with that building?"

She looked to her left, her heart sinking. “Yeah. The Bank of America building.” She looked back at him. “What about it?"

"All my money is in there."

"All of it?"

"With the exception of some funds my daughter spent, lost, and gave away, and other funds she now has for traveling, it's all right there."

Another chilly breeze stirred the leaves on the walk, and Cheri shook the man's answer out of her head and sat next to him. “Look at me, man. Look at my face. I been beat up, robbed, I got no way home, I'm freezing, and I need something so bad right now I'd do anything. I feel so awful."

He took his hand, touched her chin, and studied her face. Pulling back, she covered her face with her hands. “Don't look at me, man. God, I look terrible."

He laughed, and it was a pleasant laugh. “Well, I have neither money nor credit cards, but I can help you a little.” He stood, removed his overcoat revealing an expensive dark blue double-breasted suit, a blue silk hanky in the breast pocket that matched his necktie. He bent over her and wrapped the overcoat around Cheri's shoulders. “Here, stand up so you can get it under you."

Cheri stood, and the coat's hem touched the ground it was so large. She felt lost in it, but it was so very warm, so clean, and smelled faintly of some kind of cologne. “Thanks, mister. Thanks, but—"

He motioned for her to sit down, she did so, and he sat on the seat next to her. “You were saying."

"This is warm. So warm. Thanks. I was going to say I need something—you know, some stuff.” Cheri thought very hard about what she needed. “I don't know. The crawlies went away.” Her confusion transformed into weariness. “Tired,” she said. “Need some rest. That's what I need. I need a new life, but first some rest. Man, am I tired."

"Pull your legs up so the coat covers your feet."

"You sure?"

"Of course. Get your feet warm and if you feel like taking a little nap, I'll stand guard."

Cheri looked long and hard into the man's face. “I'm not a fool, mister. If you want me to do something for you, just ask."

"I want you to take care of yourself. That's all I ever want."

Her eyes welled with tears at his answer because, although it had to be crap, it sounded genuine. She bent over, removed her heels, held them tightly in her hand, and pulled her aching cold feet up on the seat next to her beneath the coat. She realized she was leaning against his left arm. He lifted it and put it around her shoulders. “Mister, really, I mean if you want to reach in and cop a feel or something that's okay—” she yawned. “Really that's okay."

"Thank you, Cheri.” He patted her arm with his left hand. “I'll be too busy watching over my fortune."

She felt herself falling asleep, wondering how much money the old guy thought he had and how this man knew her name.

There was a moment during the night when voices half-awakened her. Cop voice.

"Good evening, sir.” Cops say that to people who look like they got money. The rest they tell, “Move along, dirtbag. This ain't no hotel."

"Good evening, sir."

"Good evening, officer,” replied the man in a quiet voice.

"Is everything all right?"

"My daughter has had a remarkably tiring day. She thought she'd rest for a moment. I don't have the heart to wake her."

"You from out of town?” asked the cop.

"Mamaroneck now, but I grew up right on Central Park West."

"Then you know late at night in a New York City park is not the safest place to be."

"We're safe enough. You seem to have things well in hand, officer."

The cop chuckled. “Good night, sir. Have a pleasant stay in the city."

"Thank you, officer. Good night."

Cheri opened her eyes and saw that she had the man's overcoat pulled up around her ears. The man had called her his daughter. It was a scam to get rid of the cop, but it felt good. For a little mini-fantasy, it felt good. Cheri snuggled in and fell asleep.

When Cheri awakened daylight was coming through a window to her left, she was sitting in a chair before a desk, and there was a young woman on the other side of the desk. The desk accessory on the edge of her desk identified her as Kelly Brandt. She looked like a Kelly Brandt: blonde and blue, slim and perky. Kelly smiled brightly at her, pushed a stack of books and bound report forms at her, and said, “Good luck, Cheri."

Kelly smiled at the next person sitting in a chair against a wall to Cheri's right and motioned for the woman to take Cheri's place. The newbie was wearing blue pajamas. Cheri saw that she was wearing blue pajamas as well. Kelly, on the other hand, was wearing a red turtleneck over gray slacks. Besides Kelly's name, her nametag said that this was a place called New Beginnings, which sounded suspiciously like a drug rehab.

That edge of panic rose. “Doesn't this cost money?” Cheri asked.

Kelly's eyebrows went up. “You bet it does. You're paid in full, though, provided you complete treatment."

"Who?"

"I'm sorry. The donor is anonymous."

"What? How does that work?"

"It's been going on ever since I've been here. A graduate from New Beginnings takes on the payment of two uninsured patients, provided they successfully complete treatment. Usually the new patients go on to fund two more and so on."

"And you never find out who paid?"

"No."

"And if I don't finish treatment?"

Kelly smiled. “The next piece of mail you get will be a bill for the time you spent here."

"What if I walk out right now?” asked Cheri.

"We'll refund your misery with interest, no charge."

Cheri's head was numb. That bone weariness was still with her, although the crawlies seemed to have gone. What had happened to the Monopoly Man, though? Where was the man in the expensive suit who had wrapped her in his wonderful overcoat and called her his daughter?

"Where am I?"

"This is New Beginnings Rehabilitation Center. We're in Brooklyn."

"How'd I get here?"

Kelly held her hands up and out to her sides. “Sorry. I just don't know. Your form lists you as self-admitted. Are you going to give it a try?"

Cheri looked around the office, sighed, and shook her head. “Can you tell me where I'm supposed to go now?"

Kelly told her. Fourth floor for final room assignment, then screening, orientation, physicals, lectures, group therapy, and always the promise of a new life if she could risk letting go of the old one. AA meetings, NA meetings, talks in the lounge with other patients, one-on-ones with counselors, physicians, and psychiatrists. Writing, reading, more writing and more reading.

Nearing the end of her stay three weeks later, Cheri had an interview at a halfway house where, after rehab, she'd live, look for a job, go to meetings, attend aftercare sessions, and become whatever it was she had the desire, the talent, and the determination to become.

What to become? So many possible beginnings. There were some paths that were closed because of her record. Tough to get bonded as an au pair when you've done time for possession and solicitation. Many were open, though. She saw the men and women around her working at the rehabilitation center, throwing out those slender lifelines, on a good month pulling thirty percent out of the nightmare. She didn't know if she could develop the strength for that kind of work. So easy to hitch your wagon to a falling star.

On her last night in New Beginnings, after packing, she was with a few other patients watching the news on the television in her wing's lounge when she saw a couple of familiar faces. One face was so familiar that everyone on Earth who had ever come within fifty feet of a television set or newspaper knew it: Kimberli Fallon, beautiful bad girl heiress to her father's shipping fortune, pop star, actress, divorcée, and in trouble once again. Another drunk driving bust, but this time she'd been holding flake and had beaned a New Jersey State Trooper with her cell phone. Unless her attorney could pull yet another legal rabbit out of his pricey fedora, Kimberli would be spending at least part of the near future behind bars.

A tiny bit of Cheri delighted in this spoiled rich kid finally getting some reality dirt under her well-manicured fingernails. Then Betty, one of Cheri's groupmates, said, “Maybe this time she'll get some help."

"Help?” said Bob scornfully. “She can afford to buy her own chain of drug rehabs."

Betty nodded. “Which means she can also afford to keep help so far away it can never get to her."

Cheri felt guilty about her tiny moment of glee at Kimberli Fallon's predicament. If the beautiful heiress was an addict and had the money to keep help away long enough, she was in bigger trouble than almost anyone in New Beginnings. She might have been spoiled, but that wasn't what was going to kill her. Kimberli was taxi dancing with addiction and could afford to buy up all the tickets.

And how the news pundits seemed to delight in the rich girl maybe having to be locked up and do without makeup for a couple of weeks. The jokes: drunk Kimberli, fried Kimberli, party-'til-you-drop Kimberli. What fun. They didn't realize what they were laughing about, though: the victim of a fatal disease, unless she could get the help she could pay to avoid.

Cheri got up to get a cup of tea in the floor kitchen when she heard the voice-over mention Kimberli's father, Jack Fallon. Cheri paused and glanced back at the screen. Jack Fallon's father had lost everything in twenty-nine and never got ahead another cent. Then his son Jack was born in nineteen-thirty. Twenty years later he signed on as a merchant seaman and half a century later he was a billionaire. Jack Fallon had died of a stroke two years earlier, leaving his fortune to his only child, Kimberli. His picture came up and Cheri grabbed the back of a chair as she felt her knees sag.

Big white mustache, pinstripes, that smile, those fierce blue eyes—in her mind's eye she could still see him sitting on that loveseat in Bryant Park in October. Jack Fallon: He was the Monopoly Man. He had wrapped her in his overcoat two years after he had died.

She slowly shook her head at her own thoughts. “I got to talk with someone."

There was a floor counselor, a young woman named Shana, and they talked in Cheri's room. Cheri told Shana about that night, the beating she took, the crawlies, the Monopoly Man, her waking up in rehab with no knowledge of how she had gotten there, and that the Monopoly Man was a dead ringer for Jack Fallon, except that it couldn't be because Jack Fallon had been dead for two years.

Explanations explain everything. Jack Fallon and his daughter Kimberli had been in the news for the past ten years, ever since the girl had turned fifteen and had been first taken into custody for vandalizing the yacht club to which her father belonged. No charges, of course, but plenty of copy and airplay. In her confused drugged state and in her desperate reach for help, Cheri simply became confused by a little salvation fantasy. She had met an imaginary Crusader Rabbit on her way to get help.

It was all in Cheri's head.

Maybe, thought Cheri as Shana left her room. Maybe.

After Cheri graduated from the halfway house and was beginning her college education in preparation to become a treatment counselor, on a return visit to New Beginnings she met someone. She was passing through the main patient lounge on the fourth floor on her way to meet with her old group counselor when she heard a familiar voice call out, “Yo, Cheri? Is that you?"

She turned and saw Rackshack getting up from a couch where he'd been talking to half a dozen very clean looking persons. He was still tall, dark, and wearing a Mets cap. She nodded dumbly, not knowing for certain if she should shake hands, embrace him, or run like hell. He walked over to her and stopped, his mouth wide with smiles, and looked down at her. “Girl, you clean. How long?"

"Eight—” Her throat was very dry. “Eighteen months. How are you doing, Rack?"

"Good,” he said as he nodded. “Real good. You doin’ all those meetings, workin’ those steps?"

"That's my medicine. Are you visiting someone here?"

He laughed. “No, girl. I earn my way into this hotel."

She raised an eyebrow. “I thought Rackshack never did drugs. Drugging was for losers."

"Got that right.” He smiled sheepishly as he rubbed the back of his neck. “Fooled you as well as me. Got a minute?"

"Sure.” She nodded and they sat in a couch away from the other patients. They made a special kind of small talk: she apologized for stealing all that cocaine and running out on him. He expressed relief at the information because he didn't remember Cheri ever moving in with him, stealing the drugs, or moving out. All this time he thought he had used it all himself and had become immune to overdoses, a theory that had blown up in his face about three weeks ago.

"I was dead. Out in Bryant Park under my old tree. I saw angels, swear to God, and they was laughing at me. So sick I wished I'd never been born. Then this old dude he picks me up off the ground like I was a little child. He sits me down in this seat. I don't know what I said, what he said, or anything, unnerstand?"

Cheri nodded.

"I remember the rattles so bad I thought my eyeballs were poppin’ out my head. This old dude, real expensive threads, he puts his overcoat on me.” Rack snapped his fingers. “Just like that I stop shakin'. Never been so warm or at peace in my whole life. Got to be at least a foot taller than that old dude, but I near got lost in his overcoat. Can't figure that. Anyway, sat me down, covered up my feet. I think I fell asleep.” He looked around and held out his hands. “Woke up in this place. You ever see a picture—"

"The Monopoly Man,” said Cheri.

Rackshack nodded vigorously and pointed at her. “From the game. Got handlebars on his lip just like the dude in the Monopoly game.” He glanced around to make certain no one would overhear what he planned to say next. “Maybe I'm crazy, but I thought I saw him on the TV."

"Jack Fallon,” said Cheri.

He stared at her. “Yeah.” He glanced down at the floor and back up at Cheri's face. “That old dude's been dead more'n three years.” He held up a hand, palm faced toward the ceiling. “So?"

"I don't know what to tell you.” She placed her hand on his shoulder. “Rack—What's your real name?"

"Luther."

"Luther, I'm going to tell you how I wound up here. A lot of people look like a lot of people, and talking about ghosts might not be the swiftest way to get through your psych evaluation, but here it is.” And Cheri told Rackshack about her night in the park wrapped in the Monopoly Man's overcoat and how she woke up in rehab.

When she finished, Rackshack rubbed the back of his neck, then let his hand fall to his lap. “What if it was Kimberli Fallon's old man? What if it was a ghost?"

"Whoever it was, whatever it was, he saved my life. Yours, too, Luther, if you do the work here."

He held up his hands, palms facing her. “You preachin’ to the choir, girl. I am a believer.” He lowered his hands. “I heard a kid named Ted talkin’ in the lounge about how he got here: Overcoat Park Express. We all crazy?"

She looked down at her hands. “I don't know. I hope the Monopoly Man is real, though."

Rackshack leaned back in his chair. “Monopoly Man, he say to me he watchin’ over his fortune. Later on, Cheri, he talkin’ to someone who woke me up. It was a woman. Anyways, he tell her I been through a tough day and I'm all wore out.” A pause. “He tell her I his son. His son.” A tear streaked down the left side of the man's face. Embarrassed, he laughed at the tear and wiped it off his face with the heel of his hand. “He call me his son,” he whispered. “What's it all mean?"

Cheri took the man's left hand in both of hers. “I don't know, Luther. I'm guessing if you need to know, it'll come to you.” She leaned over, kissed his cheek, and said, “Good luck. Do what they tell you and keep off the grass."

They both laughed and Cheri left for her appointment. When she was done she went down to Admissions to talk about arranging anonymous payment for her two patients. She thought about going to Bryant Park that night. Part of her wanted to believe Jack Fallon was there. If he was, though, she didn't know what she could make of the information. She didn't want him not to be there, though. She decided against pinching herself awake from this dream: she owed it too much.

After her graduation from college and internship Cheri applied for a counseling position at New Beginnings. She was accepted and was an assistant there for a year when her lead counselor retired and recommended her to fill the opening. Cheri Trace had been a full group counselor at New Beginnings for almost two years when Kimberli Fallon's name found itself once again upon a police blotter. This time the actress's antics affected a great many drug rehabilitation facilities. While high she had driven her BMW into the rear of a police car, narrowly missing a young woman and her three-year-old son. Her mug shot was the takeoff point for a thousand talk show jokes. The party girl was getting decidedly worn around the edges. Where the rehabs came in was because this time her latest high-priced attorney thought that voluntary rehab might look better in front of the court than more pictures of her bare butt on YouTube or evening news footage of her showboating at parties.

Feelers were sent out to a number of rehabs. Big staff meetings at all of them and just about every rehab administrator and group counselor in the business had thrown Kimberli out of rehab before she even made it through the door.

Too disruptive.

Media circus.

Couldn't possibly take her recovery seriously.

How would the other patients be able to concentrate on their recoveries?

At New Beginnings it was about decided by the director, staff, and counselors to tell Kimberli's attorney that she would have to go someplace else to find recovery when Cheri said, “I'll take her."

After a stunned silence, then much ado about Cheri's relative lack of experience, aspersions regarding her possible motives, and the possible damage to her other patients, not to mention damage to the institution—

"And,” Cheri interrupted, “there are a few conditions that must be met and a few procedural changes to make.” And she told them her plan.

There was considerable debate. Cheri's plan was fraught with possible liabilities, licensing issues, zoning violations—or as Dr. Manter, director of New Beginnings, put it, “For all we know, you'll run afoul of Homeland Security."

Still, the issue was what it always was: Getting the addict through the doors and clean long enough to be able to make that terrible choice. In addition, Kimberli Fallon had as much right to recovery as any pimp, crack whore, doctor, or football player. Cheri looked around the table at the faces of her fellow counselors, the staff and director of New Beginnings, recovering alcoholics and addicts every one. “After all,” she said, “none of us got to this table because of a perfect history of wise choices and good manners."

The staff voted Cheri's plan in unanimously. Dr. Manter later asked Cheri why she had been willing to take on such a risk as treating Kimberli Fallon when the safe course would have been to steer clear of America's party girl.

Cheri would have liked to tell the director that she owed Kimberli's father a big favor. Instead, she simply smiled.

When Kimberli Fallon showed at New Beginnings, it was the media circus everyone had feared. Cameras, vans, uplink dishes crowded the streets on two sides of the complex, and Kimberli, of course, arrived in a limo escorted by her attorney, Michael Braden, and her current rent-a-phallus, Manager Richard Evan Garvey. Kimberli was all blond, spectacular makeup, sheared beaver coat over hip-huggers, spiked gold sparkle heels, and maximum wiggle. The mouthpiece and the manager were turned away at the main entrance, as expected. Both then proceeded to deliver prepared statements to the media after a small spat over who would get to deliver his statement first.

As the different media blow-dries were sending their pieces off to satellites and around the globe, Kimberli was taken to a room in which she was unceremoniously shucked of everything but her underwear and issued New Beginnings blue pajamas and slippers. Her bags were searched and all cell phones, electronic devices, money, jewelry, over-the-counter drugs, herbal remedies, prescription drugs, and an ounce and a half of crystal meth were removed. The legal items were placed in a bin to be returned to her upon release. The illegal items were confiscated.

She was given a physical by a female physician and her screening was done by a female psychiatrist. Once all the testing was done, it was early afternoon. She was hustled down to the ambulance loading bay by three males who looked like street thugs, save for the New Beginnings nametags on their upper wear. She was loaded into the ambulance along with her bags and her three companions. The doors closed and the ambulance left the bay, no sirens, no Christmas lights. The slender blond guy with the sad blue eyes and nervous smile sitting next to her handed her a small package of cheese and crackers along with a Diet Coke. His nametag said his name was Ted Franks. “What's this?” she demanded, holding out the fare.

"That's lunch. It'll be a while before we get to the unit.” Ted opened his own pack of cheese and crackers, placed two complete cracker sandwiches together into his mouth and bit down. After a couple of chews, he opened his own Diet Coke and took a slurp.

She looked across at the two men sitting on the bench seat facing the one upon which she and Ted sat. “Where are you taking me?"

"Old Overcoat Unit,” said the tall dark one. He was rugged looking with an easy smile and wearing black denims, white Air Jordans, and a Mets cap. His name tag identified him as Luther James.

"I didn't know anything about any move. No one told me. My attorney didn't say anything about moving me elsewhere."

"Nobody knew, ‘cept the unit,” answered Luther. “In a few minutes somebody from the rehab will announce your treatment won't be taking place at New Beginnings."

"Where?” she demanded.

"At an undisclosed location,” said Ted. “No media, no visitors, no interviews, no calls, no complications."

"You get to concentrate on your recovery,” added Luther.

"I have to be able to talk with my attorney,” said Kimberli. “There are legal matters, court, business—"

"Frito?” said Luther to the fellow sitting next to him.

Dark brown complexioned, black hair, dead black eyes, the man called Frito had a thick ropy scar on his left cheek that went from his eye almost to his chin. He wore a black knit cap down to his eyebrows that covered his ears and he had a simple gold ring dangling from the left corner of his mouth. His nametag said his name was Alfred Tomas.

Slowly Frito reached to his side and picked up a red backpack. Taking a manila folder from the bag, he held it up and wiggled it. “You signed the papers, Kimberli. We got you for three weeks—"

"I'm paying for this,” she snapped. “I can leave—"

"No, you're not paying for this,” Ted interrupted quietly. He held up another pack of crackers. “Want some more?"

"What do you mean I'm not paying for this?"

"We are.” Ted nodded toward Luther and Frito. “All of us. The members of the Old Overcoat Unit. We're paying for your treatment. You only have to pay if you don't complete treatment."

"In any case,” said Frito leaning forward, his elbows resting on his thighs, “We got you for three weeks. You going to detox and maybe get a new start."

"This is not what I agreed to,” she protested angrily.

Frito grinned widely and tapped the file folder. “Want to read your copy?"

Luther leaned forward and handed Kimberli a couple pieces of facial tissue. After a chilly stare, she took them. The muscles in her cheeks flexed. “I'm a prisoner?” she said at last. “Is that it?” She looked at Luther. He stuck his hands in the pockets of his denims and slouched back against the wall of the ambulance.

"You are definitely a prisoner, Kimberli. And the first step in escaping from a prison is—” He arched his brows and looked at his two companions.

"—To accept that one is in a prison,” they replied in unison.

"Why ... that's just stupid,” said Kimberli. “That doesn't make any sense at all."

"Give it time,” said Frito. “It's going to sound real smart in a few days."

An icy night wind came up Sixth Avenue driving tiny sharp particles of snow before it. Cheri Trace waited for the light to change, one hand making certain the wind left her cute white beret on her head. She was wearing a white coat over a wine-colored top and dark slacks as she stood looking across the street at the naked trees in Bryant Park. Once the light changed she crossed almost at a run, her cheeks burning from the cold. Hardly anyone in the park. Cuff was doing business beneath Luther's old tree and not looking well. Very thin. Two diehard joggers in sweats with towels over their heads rounded the corner from Sixth and continued down West Forty-second. Cheri got on the path that put the trees between the street and her, the rows of chairs getting just a dusting of white.

A fellow collecting newspapers to pack in his clothes for insulation, the sharp laugh of a working girl as she pulled at her john's arm. There was a well-dressed man in a blue pin-striped suit sitting in a loveseat, his overcoat wrapped around what looked to be a child of about seven or eight. Cheri tried to feel fear or wonder at the man's manifestation. It was, without a doubt, Jack Fallon. She looked at the child wrapped in the Monopoly Man's overcoat. A girl. Cheri smiled, thinking of what Luther must have looked like at seven, lost in that overcoat.

"How are you doing, Jack?” Cheri asked.

"Hello, Cheri,” he said without looking up from the girl's dark innocent face. “You're looking well."

"I am well.” Cheri sat in the chair to the man's right. “We've got her in treatment, Jack. Kimberli's in the middle of detox. The media thinks it's a big laugh and the paparazzi are going crazy trying to find out where she is."

His eyes closed for a moment, then they opened. “How is she doing?"

"She's having a rough time. She's out of stuff, thinks she has all the answers, wants her own way, and right now that means getting some heavy medication and getting the hell out of treatment.” Cheri smiled sadly. “She's refused medication for withdrawal because, in her opinion, she doesn't have a drug problem."

"Is she in a lot of pain?"

"Yes and getting worse by the minute. You got a tough girl there, Jack. It's going to take her a while to realize her pain is self-inflicted. We have her at least for two and a half more weeks."

"Cheri, is that going to be long enough?"

"Maybe. Pain is the teacher we listen to. Maybe not.” Cheri smiled and bundled herself more deeply into her coat. “Kim's in a good group, Jack. Luther's assistant counselor, Ted and Frito are interns, and the rest of the group are made out of return visitors and new patients you know.” She looked down at the sleeping girl. “Everyone in the group slept where she's sleeping."

"And you're the group counselor."

Cheri nodded. “Jack, I came here to tell you something. You've done all you can do for Kimberli. It's up to her now. Even if she completes treatment and makes a good try at staying clean, it won't be easy. The media will never leave her alone, they'll never regard anything she says or does to aid her sobriety as sincere, and any Twelve Step meetings that she attends are going to have anonymity tested like nobody's business. If she wants it, though, she can have it."

"And?” he prompted.

She glanced at him. “Jack, if you want, you can rest now."

The apparition stared into the distance for a moment, then smiled at Cheri. “I don't need rest. Besides, I've got to watch over my fortune.” He nodded toward the girl wrapped in his overcoat. “My daughter's name is Sabrina. She's had a remarkably tiring day and she wanted to rest for a bit. I don't have the heart to wake her."

Cheri stared at Jack Fallon and the charge he had taken on. Everyone knows you get to pick your own Hell. What only a few lucky ones get to find out is that you get to pick your own Heaven, too. “Then you have a good visit in the city, sir,” said Cheri.

"Thank you officer,” answered Jack with a grin.

They sat that way on the chairs in the falling snow for several moments when a sleepy voice asked quietly from the depths of the overcoat, “Is everything okay?"

"Everything is fine,” answered Jack.

"Is your fortune safe?"

"For now.” He patted the girl's shoulder. “For now."

Cheri placed her hand on the ghost's arm and was not surprised to find it warm.

I must admit I find the increasingly common show-biz practice of identifying one's self by a one-word name dreadfully pretentious. I'll give a pass to old time Mexican actor Cantinflas and his career-long clown persona. But with modern performers like Madonna and even directors like McG—who actually feels the need to abbreviate his one-word name—it seems to simply be a matter of arrogant branding. Coke. Madonna. Brands you know and love. (Or hate, as the case may be.)

It is perhaps understandable, then, that a director whose greatest wealth and recognition has come from making commercials for brands like Coke, Nike, Smirnoff, and Lexus—one word name recognition for all—should take the same route. Tarsem (formerly known as Tarsem Singh, and before that as Tarsem Singh Dhandwar) also achieved early success in the music video field. His fresh-out-of-film-school REM video for “Losing My Religion” brought him fame, lucrative employment, and also set his style—possibly for life. To wit, mix an obscure storyline in dark shadowy tones with flashes of archetypal figures wearing showy costumes in artsy, colorful settings.

Splashes of color and obscure but eye-arresting visuals do work well in advertisements (where you have only a minute to sell and brand-imprint your audience) and music videos (where you have a more expansive two and a half minutes to do the same), but shock-and-awe shill games do not completely serve the filmmaker's craft, which should always bring art, commerce, and performance to the service of an actual narrative.

That last bit is the part Tarsem has struggled over during his transition to feature film director. His first full-length movie was the serial killer extravaganza, The Cell (2000), in which the pulchritudinous Jennifer Lopez incongruously portrays a social worker turned therapist who uses a space-age laboratory (and a red-ridged bat suit with super breast definition!) to enter the unconscious states of comatose boys and men. In the case of her first patient, it is to help a tormented young son of a wealthy couple come out of his coma. In the case of Carl Stargher (Vincent D'Onofrio), she attempts to penetrate the mind of a man who tortures, drowns, and bleaches—yeah, you heard me right—young women, to assist an FBI team (even more incongruously led by Vince Vaughn) in locating the unconscious killer's last victim before she actually perishes.

The concept is predictable and dopey, and the science is ludicrous, but the costumes and dreamscape settings are so arresting that they almost make you forget the stupidity playing out before you. Since most of the action occurs in the nightmarish landscape of Stargher's damaged brain, viewers are presented with scene after scene of surrealistic nastiness. The settings are either stark or baroque or American gothic, and the outfits are to die for. It's Silence of the Lambs meets Project Runway. J-Lo gets to dress up as everything from a Scarlet Virgin of Guadalupe to a possessed temptress in see-through black lace and red S&M collar.

In many ways, The Cell was the perfect movie for modern audiences with their short attention spans and desire to be constantly over-stimulated. Therefore, some viewers were enthralled and delighted by the spectacle. I, myself, was both impressed and appalled by the film. And I thought, “If this filmmaker can ever put his extravagant visual sense to good use within a real story, he will really have something to offer."

Therefore, even though I was more than a bit dubious, I was also hopeful as I approached the second feature film of Tarsem; he, now, of one name. The movie is one the director claims to have been prepping for and making his entire career. It seems that many years ago, as a student, he saw a 1981 Bulgarian film, written by Valeri Petrov and directed by Zako Heskija, called Yo Ho Ho. In the original, a hospitalized and crippled young man befriends a young boy and weaves a marvelous fairy tale for him, hoping to manipulate the lad into acquiring for him the means of suicide. In the end, the friendship between the two is so heartfelt and genuine that the man rejects suicide and decides to embrace life again.

Tarsem liked the way that narrative within a narrative played out and how well it illustrated the interactive and collaborative nature of storytelling, with both the teller and the listener contributing to and transforming the plotline.

Yo Ho Ho sounds like a charming movie. Perhaps I'll get to see it someday. But stories within stories are certainly nothing new. (The Princess Bride is one most fantasy fans know and love.) Nor is the concept of the teller's ulterior motive. Shahrazad (Scheherazade) spun tales to beguile the royal bridegroom intent on cutting off her head. Spinning fantasies to get suicide drugs pales in comparison to that.

Still, Tarsem seems to have had this basic plot in mind over seventeen years of scouting locations while helming exotic advertisement or video shoots. And all the while he collected striking locales, bizarre vignettes, and scenic wonders he hoped to put together in his dream movie project. Since he planned on shooting his uninsurable movie over several years and numerous continents, using an unknown cast and no screenplay—despite three credited writers, including Tarsem—to speak of, it is not surprising that the movie ended up as a self-funded “indie” (read: “vanity") project.

Over four years, he would fly his cast and crew out at the end of commercial jobs to capture a place or a scene in his elaborate story within the story. This was after a twelve-week shoot in a South African hospital (substituting for a 1915 Los Angeles institution) to capture the framing tale.

In the set-up, we are introduced to a depressed, paralyzed young man, Roy (Lee Pace), an actor in early Hollywood, now hospitalized and heart-broken after a stunt goes very wrong and his starlet girlfriend leaves him for the leading man. Roy meets, befriends, and weaves an epic adventure for a young Romanian immigrant girl, Alexandria (Catinca Untaru), who like him, took a fall. In her case, she fell from a ladder in the orange groves where she toiled with her mother and sister and broke her arm.

The “real-life” story is not without its charms. Lee Pace, although largely unknown at the time he started the movie (but now the star of ABC's quirky fantasy series, Pushing Daisies), is a wonderful actor with a timeless look suitable to both period pieces (like last spring's Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day) and the most challenging of modern roles (like the transgendered Calpernia in 2003's Soldier's Girl).

In Tarsem's film he needs to play both the self-pitying yet sympathetic story-teller and the dashing hero of the epic, the Black Bandit. He does the former with morose sensitivity and the latter with rakish, silent-film-like elegance. Pace also does a lovely job in helping to guide the artless performance of his co-star, Catinca Untaru, a young girl with supposedly no acting experience and even less English when she was hired for the film.

The naturalness of young Untaru's performance is no accident, it seems. The director shot the hospital scenes, in sequence, at the very beginning of work on the film. And he freely admits that his aim was to achieve a performance as realistic and haunting as that of tiny Victoire Thivisol in the 1996 French drama, Ponette.

He achieved this, to my mind, by being a liar and a scoundrel. To create the kind of naturalism he wanted from the girl, she was informed that her role was actually in a documentary, and her interaction with co-star Pace was with an actual disabled performer. (And to make sure she stayed in the dark, the paralysis lie was actually told to the entire cast and crew!) In addition, Tarsem used limited cameras and put them behind curtains and outside windows in the early hospital scenes, to keep the movie-making hidden from the girl. In short, he wanted to trick the tyke, with her limited language skills, into giving the unstudied performance of her life.

Such arrogant manipulation seems unnecessary, and wanders into the realm of sadistic when you see scenes, late in the movie, in which a drunken and suicidal “Roy” seems intent on killing himself and every character in his fairy tale, to the obvious distress of little “Alexandria.” It's probably easier to get away with child cruelty using a foreign moppet in a foreign country, but that doesn't make it right. However, I do think this backstory of the film's process tells us something about the god complex Tarsem exhibits as an “auteur."

And if you need any further proof, all you need to do is descend into the story within the story that Roy expounds for his little friend. It is a showy and overblown affair, more spectacular than any fairy tale, dime novel, or film anyone in 1915 would ever be likely to dream up, even in a morphine-induced hallucination.

The lead character is the Black Bandit (Pace), who joins forces with an escaped slave, Otta Benga (Marcus Wesley), an Italian anarchist and explosives expert, Luigi (Robin Smith), a mud-caked mystic (Julian Bleach), as well as naturalist Charles Darwin (Leo Bill) and his little monkey sidekick. The motley yet extravagant crew have all, for various reasons, sworn deadly vengeance against the supposedly evil (yet oddly absent, until the final scene), Governor Odious, who ends up looking exactly like the movie star (Daniel Caltagirone) who stole Roy's lady love away.

This story cross-contamination is one of the truly entertaining, yet often confusing, aspects of the fantastical epic saga. Because Alexandria is populating the story that she hears from Roy, the characters in the tale look like people she knows from the orange groves or the hospital. For example, the noble escaped slave is played by the nice ice man who delivers to the hospital. And the female lead, Princess Evelyn (Justine Waddell), takes on the guise of the nice nurse who comforts Alexandria in the night.

In a comical (but more funny-strange than funny-haha) misunderstanding, cowpoke actor Roy spins a subplot about a noble Indian brave. He is thinking about a Native American as he tells his story, of course. But Alexandria (whom we discover, very late in the movie, works in the groves with South Asian men) instead pictures a handsome man in a turban and his ill-fated “squaw” wife in a sari.

This aspect of the story is a lively one, but never particularly logical, as some of the fairytale figures are hard to spot in the “real” part of the story. (Deleted scenes at work?) And others would likely not be assigned their epic roles by the little girl. For example, the movie star who steals Roy's girl plays the evil villain, but Alexandria doesn't really know him. (Wouldn't she be more likely to cast him as, say, the cruel overseer from the farm fields?) And if this is Roy's role assignment, why is the duplicitous and very poorly developed Princess Evelyn played by a nice nurse and not his inconstant real-life lover, who can't even bother to visit him in the hospital?

Looking for internal logic in a movie like The Fall is foolishness, of course. Tarsem wants to wow his audience with spectacle, outrageous costumes (by the brilliant if overly imaginative Eiko Ishioka), and breathtaking locales. And this he does, until audience members go into sensory overload and decide they'd be happy to skip some of the razzle-dazzle in exchange for a story that flowed and made a bit of sense.

Still, who needs the Travel Channel (which always seems to do poker shows these days, anyway)? Like to see the “Blue City” of Jodhpur? Tarsem would be glad to take you there, without explaining where you are or putting this or his many other locations into any kind of narrative context. (In a strange fish tale of a tally, Tarzem began by saying he shot his film in eighteen countries, but with every interview the number grew and, last I read, it is currently at twenty-four.)

His shots of Bali, Namibia, Cambodia, India, the Czech Republic, and all the rest are arresting—sometimes beautifully and sometimes frighteningly so—but they often leave the impression of being mere eye candy, or perhaps eye Smirnoff. All the pretty scenery doesn't help the plot or the actors. If anything, the poor characters mostly seem lost in their sweeping landscapes. (Sometimes literally so, since Tarsem's extended multi-continent shoot meant that he would often have to substitute body doubles for one or more of the actors who couldn't make the latest trip.)

Story and performance be damned. You're not supposed to worry over such trifles when a four-story white drape hangs in the desolate landscape wicking up crimson blood or when you can watch an elephant swim in blue waters or several dozen whirling dervishes fill a scene with their hypnotic dance.

It's all over the top, and willfully so. In fact, The Fall is, to date, the ultimate in self-indulgent filmmaking. Michael Cimino, you are SO off the hook, dude!

When I look over this review, it sure sounds like a pan. And I guess it is. Still, a director with this much extravagant, exuberant (if ultimately empty) vision deserves to have his movie seen. My advice is, rent the DVD and play it on the largest-screen TV you can find. See what you think. You may be wowed or irritated by the full panoply of Tarsem's dream project. Chances are you will feel both emotions in great frequency and abundance.

This issue seems to have several contributors whose names might not be familiar to most of our readers. Case in point: Michael Meddor. Mr. Meddor's first published story, “The Wizard Retires,” ran in our Sept. 1999 issue and went on to find a place on the final ballot for that year's World Fantasy Award. Mr. Meddor remains silent when asked if he has published any work under other names, and instead hastens to note that this new story has its origins in a talk given by storyteller Sheila Kay Adams. Mr. Meddor and his wife recently moved to a new home near Charlotte, North Carolina.

I were always scared of Granny when I were a little girl, and my Daddy had a lot to do with that, as you all know, because he were always talking about her behind her back. It were her fault that Momma run off, and it were her fault that Momma never come back. Some of you say she had a good mothering instinct, but she weren't never no substitute in my eyes. You all sit there in your rocking chairs, talking about the good old days, and you let her off by saying she were a mountain woman and she had her ways, but I tell you she had a hard look around the jaw, and she were hard on me and Bobby. I guess she loved us though. She always helped us out when she could.

You want to know about that time she came to live with Daddy and me and Bobby. Daddy never let me tell that story when he were alive. He had his reasons, but he kept them to himself. Daddy clammed up whenever somebody asked him about it, and if it looked like I might up and answer for him, he would say, “Ain't you got dishes to do?” Or he might say, “About time you got to mending that dress of yours, don't you think?” Of course my dress never needed mending because I wouldn't let myself be seen in a torn dress.

When my brother, Bobby, were eight years old, he got kicked in the head by a horse. I always thought Little Betty is probably the one that done it. She never had much patience, and Bobby always loved to pester the animals. It happened in the barn and no one saw it nor knew just when it happened. When Daddy found him lying in the dirt, Bobby were babbling something under his breath that Daddy couldn't understand. Strange, Daddy said, because the boy were unconscious and limp as he could be. He had never seen anything like it in the war or since. We put Bobby to bed, which was all we could do, and he stayed unconscious for many days. He come real near to death. Me and Daddy prayed right hard over him.

We sent for the doctor, but he didn't come right away. We prayed for Bobby, like I said, and now and then we got some water down him, but never no food. Then one day he just woke up. I were standing right next to him when he opened his eyes. He saw me, but he didn't recognize me, and that's when I guessed that he wouldn't be Bobby anymore, poor thin little thing that he were. The doctor finally came, but there wasn't anything he could do. That's when Granny come to live with us, because I couldn't take care of everything by myself. I were only twelve.

Granny stood no more than five foot two, but she were heavy and round. She had her own method of keeping house, and she let everyone know it, especially me. It were her special delight to scold me by way of teaching me how to cook and clean. I didn't like it, but Daddy said that's the way it's got to be.

Granny said, “The boy will come back to us one day. He'll be as strong as ever. We just got to be patient.” I knew that weren't right. It would take a miracle, so I prayed for Bobby every night, and I waited for the miracle. Granny wouldn't help me pray. She never said why.

I made up a plan because I thought it were up to me to bring my little brother back to normal. Daddy couldn't do it because he were too busy with the farm, and I didn't have no faith in Granny. I decided that Bobby needed to see his friends. He needed to play and run around and get to being his old stinky self. I announced this plan at dinner one night. Granny had a biscuit in her hand, and she stopped it halfway to her mouth. She said, “It's too soon, dear. It's not safe.” I had no idea what she meant by that. What's not safe?

Daddy had taken a big drink of cider. He let it settle for a second. He said, “We'll let time take its course. Time and prayer.” I said okay, fine, sure, but I wanted to get it done, and, I have to admit now, I wanted the credit. I wanted it to be me that fixed Bobby. But I had to bide my time.

After a couple of months, Bobby walked around the farm without falling down and he ate with his own spoon and mostly took care of himself in the bathroom and whatnot, but he never said nothing except to babble under his breath. He couldn't do chores, and sometimes he got lost if he went around to the back side of the barn, but Granny would send me to find him and he'd always be okay. I thought he were doing real good, and Daddy believed that our prayers were what done it, so I said we should take him to church one Sunday. I thought he might meet some of his friends that way, though I didn't say so. Daddy didn't object to the church idea. “Be good for the boy,” he said. “A little church never hurt nobody.” Granny shook her head, but that were a battle I had won before it even started.

It were me, and Daddy, and Bobby. Granny didn't go. She never went to church. That were a big reason that Daddy talked bad about her. Anyway, being in a crowd did not bother Bobby. Folks said Hi and Glad To See You, and he seemed to take it okay. He knew which pew to go to although I had to give him just the tiniest shove before he would enter it. The service began and everything were fine until we sang the first hymn. We got a little way into it and then Bobby started singing along with us even though he had never said a word back to anyone. He sang loud and sort of like a girl, and the rest of us kind of trailed off to hear him, we were so surprised, but he kept right on singing with only the organ helping him. And then Mr. Bellamy broke down a few pews back of us. “It's Mary Jane,” he cried, and after that he couldn't say anything more. And we all knew he were right. Bobby sat real still in the pew singing like Mary Jane who were that very year dead and buried right outside. The organ stopped playing, Bobby stopped singing. Or were it Mary Jane stopped singing? Mr. Bellamy left the church and I swear he didn't show up again for two years or more.

The preacher back then were the Reverend Mr. Silver, the one who had the buggy with the yellow-painted wheels. I'm sure you remember how even-tempered he used to be. He picked right up where the service had left off. He gave a reading and a short sermon. We come to another hymn. The organ played and we all sort of half sang, half listened for Bobby. He sang, but it weren't Mary Jane this time. Everybody took a deep breath and their singing got better. But I knew, even if no one else did, that Bobby were singing for a boy he used to play with named Craig who got run over by a tractor.

After the service we walked on back home and no one stopped us to say Hi, and everybody kept their distance. I knew why. I said, “Daddy, Bobby has other people inside him."

"Don't talk nonsense, Alice."

"But you heard him,” I said.

"It ain't nothing. He sings like folks he heard before he got hurt. Ain't nothing surprising in that."

"Maybe we should leave him with Granny next Sunday."

Daddy thought it over, his face crinkling up. He always squinted when he had to think. “I guess we'll try it again. Church is the best thing for him. Jesus saves, not old women who don't believe.” I thought he were probably right, and maybe then the other kids would say Hi.

In the end though, after a couple more weeks, the Reverend Mr. Silver asked us not to bring Bobby to church anymore. Too many people heard their dearly departed in Bobby's voice when he sang, and everybody had got pretty spooked. Attendance had dropped way down. The Reverend Mr. Silver feared for his flock. It near broke my heart that even the church were against me and Bobby.

I didn't dare give up, though, and I prayed that something might happen to make him happier and bring him back to himself. That summer there were a picnic over to Lamarr which is where Granny lived before she come to live with us. I thought it were a good chance. Didn't nobody know me and Bobby over there, so I thought it would be okay to go there and show Bobby a good time. I saw by Granny's face that she were against the idea, but she also wanted to see her friends back home, so for her part she agreed. Daddy decided to go too.

And Bobby did seem to be pretty happy there for a while, sitting at a picnic table. He ate up a prodigious load of sweet potatoes plus all the hot dogs I brought him, and he laughed to see the other children at their games. But then some fellers with guitars and a banjo started playing and singing at the next picnic table. Bobby swayed and hummed and then he took up singing along with them. Seemed like he knew all the songs, even at his age.

Granny and me noticed that Bobby sounded like someone different every time he sang a new song. I begun to get worried. Daddy were away somewhere looking over horses and tractors. Nobody seemed upset though, so I held my peace and we let Bobby go on.

One of the guitar players got up to go take a nature break, and he gave Bobby his instrument to hold. Bobby strummed it. The man asked, “Do you play?” but Bobby didn't say anything. He would have said no if he could talk. When the guy walked away, Bobby put the guitar on his knee and played. It were real pretty, but we knew it weren't Bobby. Then he sang something and right away Granny took notice. “This is not good,” she said.

"Do you know who it is?” I asked.

"Yes."

The man came back for his guitar. Bobby wouldn't give it to him. The man reached out to take it. Bobby raised the guitar up high and threatened by his gestures to bash it to pieces on the picnic table. His eyes went black and his face went white. It was like his flesh had been pulled away leaving only the skull behind. He roared out a challenge to everyone in the park, and glared at the closest ones with his skull face. No one dared go near him. The man who owned the guitar ran away, and I guessed he were going after a shotgun. Bobby settled back into himself then, and took to playing and singing some more, only it were rough singing, angry singing. Whenever anyone took a step to get near him he rose up a little and showed that skull face.

That were the end of the picnic, obviously. The people gathered up their children and they all hightailed it for home. I wanted to run away too, but it were Bobby, and I daren't move. Bobby played and played. Granny and I hugged each other as we watched. I tried to pray for God's grace, but it were hard to think of words. Daddy returned at last, only he couldn't do anything either. He couldn't get close without bringing out that awful face. Bobby's soft little fingers started to bleed on the strings, the drops falling onto the knees of his jeans, but whoever had him by the soul wouldn't let him stop playing. Bobby cried as he sang, his tears rolling down his cheeks bright in the sunlight. I prayed, and I prayed, and I prayed.

Some rocks come sailing out of the woods. They landed all around the picnic table and some of them bounced off it until one of them hit Bobby. He stopped singing and sort of slumped off the picnic table. The guitar slid out of his grip. With the instrument gone the bad part were over. Daddy picked Bobby up and held him like he were a little baby. After a while Bobby stopped crying. I knew Bobby wouldn't be getting off the farm ever again. How would I ever save him?

When we got home, Granny washed Bobby's fingers and covered the tips with gauze and tape. When that were over, Daddy gave Bobby his most prized possession. It were the leather-bound copy of the New Testament that he got from his own Daddy for Christmas one year. “You hold on to this, Bobby. You keep it with you always and you won't have no more trouble with demons."

"Ghosts,” Granny said.

Daddy stared Granny down, the only time I ever saw such a thing happen. From the look she gave him I guessed they both knew who the ghost were, but neither would give it a name. Daddy said, “Whatever it might be, it's after my boy's very soul, and it ain't no coincidence."

I thought, that's right. Because it can't get the soul it really wants. So I hated Granny for Bobby's sake and I knew that her soul were already lost and black as sin.

Granny sat in Momma's rocker looking at me kind of sad like, and she didn't say anything back to Daddy.

Daddy took hold of Bobby by both of his little patched up hands and said, “Ghosts or demons or whatever evil thing might come our way, you have no reason to fear. You hold tight to this good book, for Jesus is in every page, and Jesus saves us all.” Daddy's hands were rough and scarred from the war and from working with the plow, yet he pressed Bobby's hands ever so gently around the New Testament. “Do you hear me, son?"

Bobby showed no sign that he heard any of us. Even so, I felt better for Bobby having that good book.

Later that night, after I went to bed, Granny poked her head in the door of the room where me and Bobby slept. She whispered, “Don't cry, Alice. Don't cry. There's still hope."

I sat up in bed and yelled at her. “You leave him alone, you old witch. Don't you ever do nothing more to him, or I'll get you, I swear.” I had more to say, but Granny were gone.

Over the next few days Bobby might sing three or four words of something and then catch himself. He would grit his teeth and work the muscles in his jaw to keep the next note from coming out. He always seemed to have tears in his eyes. Daddy made sure every morning that the New Testament were in Bobby's jeans pocket. It were too big for the front pocket of an eight-year-old boy, but it fit snugly in the back pocket. “It gives him the strength,” Daddy said.

"Something gives him the strength,” Granny said. “But for how long?"

I didn't like her talking against Daddy.

There came the day that Daddy had to go over to Jefferson County for an auction. I don't recall what he needed, cows or horses or what. But he were up before dawn and out of the house before any of the rest of us stirred. He left me a note on the kitchen table, and the note said that while he were gone I should do what Granny said.

Granny got Bobby up and dressed him which normally Daddy would do. She put a big wool shirt on him and I didn't say nothing even though it were going to be a hot day. She brought him out to the parlor and sat him on a stool in front of the fireplace. He started to sing, but Granny said, “Hush,” and he fell silent.

"I'll go get breakfast,” I said.

"No. We'll have breakfast later. Right now we got to save Bobby."

I got some crazy pictures in my head, like we were going to do some witch dance right there in the parlor, or do something else equally bad that we were warned about in the Bible. I knew I had to prevent it, whatever it turned out to be. Granny opened her purse and pulled out a little silver pistol, the kind Daddy always called a woman's gun. And there Bobby sat staring at Granny with his back to the stone fireplace, the perfect target. And I'm thinking, do we got to kill Bobby to save him?

I grabbed Granny's arm to take the pistol away from her, but she shook me off like I were a little straw doll. I jumped up and stood in front of Bobby with my arms stretched out to keep him from getting shot. Granny checked her pistol to make sure it were loaded and all, then she dropped it into her apron pocket. I reached for the back of Bobby's pants to get the leather-bound New Testament, but it weren't there.

I begun to worry that Granny would shoot me in the back, and I begun to shake because, one, I couldn't go look for the New Testament and leave Bobby to get shot, and, two, without the New Testament I couldn't protect Bobby from Granny and whatever evil had got into her.

I heard an odd noise and I spun round to face her. From behind the sofa Granny had lifted out a brand new guitar and the odd noise come from the strings brushing the cushions. Lord knows where she got the guitar or how long it been hiding back there.

She come over to the stool. Bobby reached for the instrument. I tried to keep him from getting it, but Granny pinched me in the ear just so, and I fell away. Bobby took the guitar and right away that bad face were there, that bad thing.

Granny backed away. I saw her hand settle on the silver gun in her pocket. I cried out, “No, Granny, No!"

The white skull and the black eyes, they grown large and smoking. They defied her. Granny said, “You can't have him, Earl. He ain't yours and he ain't mine.” She showed the gun. The flaming eyes died back a bit. Granny said, “Now you get out of there, Earl. I mean it.” The skull face seemed to get meaner and madder. Granny said, “I killed you once with this very gun, you unholy bastard, and I'm fixing to do it again.” She raised the pistol and took aim. The ghost or demon or whatever it were howled in fear. I can still hear it today. I shouted, “Bobby, look out!” as I charged Granny. I rammed her with all my strength, but she wouldn't budge. I pulled at her arm with both of mine, but she just sighted down that barrel and pulled the trigger like I weren't even there.

The bullet lifted Bobby up off the stool and tossed him into the fireplace. And even though it were summer and we had no fire, poor little Bobby started to burn. I knew he were dead, but I found the strength to run to his slender little body and pull him out of the fireplace. I beat at the flames with my bare hands, and then he slapped at me and fought me off and he were coughing and wheezing and he weren't dead after all.

Granny helped me sit him back on the stool. She opened his big wool shirt, and there, tied to his chest, were Daddy's copy of the New Testament. Granny opened it up. The bullet had penetrated almost all the way through. Granny said, “Jesus saves."

Bobby said, “Alice, look at this bruise.” His whole chest were turning purple. “It's a big un,” he said.

I couldn't believe that he were speaking to me after all this time.

"They fear to get trapped in dead uns,” Granny said. I like to have hauled off and punched her for that, but I guessed she wouldn't even feel it. “I'll go make breakfast while you two get reacquainted,” she said. And that's what she done.

Daddy never spoke to Granny again. More than once he told me that Granny were the cruelest person on the planet not to tell me what she planned to do. But I think she needed my fear, my panic, and my love for Bobby to make her bullet work. And that's why, a few years later, I forgave her.

So, maybe she were a mountain woman like you all say, and when you say it you ain't saying all that you mean, or maybe she were just old and knew things we ain't learned and maybe never will, but either way I were not afraid of her no more. I were grateful to her, mean as she were, because she were the one who fixed Bobby.

Jim Aikin hangs out on message boards for authors and devotees of text-based games. (He has written a few, including “Lydia's Heart,” which is available for free download at www.musicwords.net.) During some discussion, the title of this story came up—how many of you recognize it? If you played computer games in the 1980s, you probably do. Inspiration being what it is, Mr. Aikin took the line and ran with it, creating something completely unrelated to the source.
By the way, this story marks the second time this particular Elvish sword has appeared an F&SF story—check the July 2001 issue if you want to find the previous instance. But first, here's a new story for your enjoyment—

Hanging on the wall above the trophy case was an elvish sword of great antiquity. During dinner my eye was drawn to it again and again, so that I fear I was somewhat inattentive to the conversation that flowed around me. We were nearly a dozen—Portnoy James, our host, and his charming daughter Patricia; Mimi Selkirk the celebrated actress; the industrialist Rupert Savage and his wife; Bishop Choat; and three or four others whose names, I am sad to say, I no longer recall. James's dining room was paneled in dark oak, which had been rubbed to a high gloss, and a fire had been laid on account of the chilly November weather. The firelight danced across the blade of the sword, rendering it in shifting shades of red and gold.

The sword was small, suited to an elvish hand, and had a hilt of fine silverwork. From my seat at the dining table I could see that its blade was incised with runes, but I was too far away to read them. I say that it was “of great antiquity” because I subsequently got a closer look at the runes, when the sword was passed from hand to hand around the table.

The servants moved in and out noiselessly, replenishing our wineglasses at need, bringing the soup and the meat and later the dessert. Silverware clanked, and I can still hear Miss Selkirk's warm peal of laughter as if it were a sable fur draped across my arm. Miss Patricia James was rather starstruck by Miss Selkirk, and lost no opportunity to draw her out on the subject of her numerous successes and the male film stars with whom her name had been linked in the popular press. I believe the bishop may have snorted audibly at one or two points during this discourse. Rupert Savage, a large man with a heavy jaw, merely chomped; his wife tittered, and drank more wine than perhaps she should have.

As James stirred sugar into his coffee, he turned to me. “You seem quite taken by my sword."

"It's a curious piece,” I said. “Elvish, by its look."

"Indubitably. We had a warren of them down by the river—a regular hive. After it burnt to the ground, I spotted this one day while riding through the rubble. Evidently they had left it behind when they fled. Not surprising. Elves are often careless."

"Your own servants seem quite punctilious.” I gestured at the silent, black-clad elf who was at that moment tilting a crystal decanter to fill Mrs. Savage's wineglass. The decanter was large, and the elf was small; he had to hoist it in both hands practically over his head to pour; yet never a drop spilled.

"They'd better be. They know the consequences. One lad I had to horsewhip. Made a thorough mess out of polishing my best boots. I had to get new ones."

Bishop Choat cleared his throat. “Had a man once beg me to baptize an elf,” he said. “Couldn't do it, of course. They have no souls, elves. Our Savior's irrelevant to them, as there's nothing there to save."

"Oh, but surely elves have contributed so much to our popular culture,” Miss Selkirk said. “Their wonderful songs, the famous elfin code of honor—to say nothing of the fine needlework!"

"Elf honor's naught but pagan rubbish,” the bishop said. “You won't find it in the Bible, I can promise you. And the pointy-eared devils ignore it when it suits them to, which is most of the time. They kill their own babies, did you know that, if they even suspect the father's human? Won't raise a half-breed child, for all it would improve the bloodline."

James pushed back his chair and rose. “Would you like to see the sword?” Without waiting for an answer, he strode to the trophy case and took it down. He brought it to the table holding it horizontally in both hands, with the blade flat against the flesh of his fingers. It glinted brighter in the firelight than before, except where his shadow fell across it.

He held it out to the man on his right, who took it and brandished it experimentally, feinting at the nearest candle. “Feels like a toy. Looks sharp enough, though.” He passed it on to Patricia James, who took it nervously and passed it hurriedly to Miss Selkirk.

While Miss Selkirk was inspecting the workmanship, I had an opportunity to glance at the runes. They were in an archaic style, as I knew from having taken a course in comparative linguistics while at Oxford. Thus I inferred that the sword was not newly wrought, but a relic of some earlier age. I saw the rune for “king's hand,” the one for “unerring flight,” and the one for “violence turned,” which is often mistranslated “vengeance.” Some of the others were unfamiliar to me, but while I would not have attempted a faithful translation, the purport was appallingly clear.

Miss Selkirk attempted to hand the sword to me, but I put my hands in my lap, and would not take it. She raised a glamorous eyebrow at me. “I'd rather not,” I said lamely. “Forgive me, but I have an unreasoning horror of weapons of any sort."

Portnoy James's laugh boomed out across the dining room. “Squeamish, eh? Wonder how you shave."

I touched the smoothness of my cheek. “I manage,” I said.

"A week in the country'll put the steel in your backbone,” James went on. “Tomorrow we'll be up early and shoot some grouse. You'll love it."

Miss Selkirk made a delicate moue of distaste, but her eyes twinkled, as if to say, “Men! What else can you expect?” Rupert Savage, on my other side, grunted. He pushed back his chair with a heavy scrape; its rear legs caught on the carpet, and the dining table shuddered so that the candles swayed. He stepped behind my back and grabbed the sword where Miss Selkirk had laid it on the table. “Not much use against a repeating rifle,” he said, swinging it casually in the air. “Is it true elves won't use firearms?"

Not long after, I excused myself to wash my hands. As I was passing down the long hall between the dining room and the library, one of James's servants stepped out of the shadows. It was not, I think, one of those who had waited table at dinner, but they were none of them known to me. He had the long narrow face and slanted eyes of the Irish elves, and tufts of white hair as fine as down grew from the tall tips of his ears. “You should not linger here tonight,” he said softly, and passed on.

I considered the matter gravely while studying my face in the bathroom mirror. I may have trembled a little; when I combed my hair, I believe my comb fell into the basin. On returning to the dining room, I made effusive apologies to our host. Pressing business in the city, a busy week ahead, certainly not a reflection on the charming company (with courteous bows to Miss Selkirk, Miss James, Mrs. Savage, and the other ladies), and so forth. All of the ladies, I may say, had handled the sword as it was passed around the table, some of them gingerly and others with evident relish. As I wrapped myself in coat and scarf and took my leave, James had not yet hung the weapon back up in its accustomed place; it rested on the table at his elbow, like common cutlery.

The hour was already late. I started the engine of my motorcar (no small feat, in such icy weather) and drove off down to the end of the lane. There I stopped, and switched off the headlamps and engine. I wrapped myself in a heavy lap rug; while I did not much fear for my safety, I saw no reason to risk catching a chill.

Several hours passed. At one point I thought I saw three or four small black-clad figures slipping through the trees, moving down the lane away from the house, but the moonlight was fitful; I could not be certain my eyes weren't playing tricks on me.

Along toward 2:30 in the morning by my watch, the still of the night air was pierced by a long and hideous scream, which came from the direction of the house. I waited, wondering if the scream would be repeated.

I suppose I might at length have climbed out of the car and gone back up to peer in the windows of the house, in order to bear witness to what had transpired, but the need to do so was taken from me. No more than a minute had passed since the scream, when a white-clad figure rushed down the lane. It was Patricia James, her face contorted by terror, the long loose nightgown billowing out behind her as she ran.

She saw my motorcar and veered toward me. “Thank God,” she cried. “Father, and the bishop, they're all—that hideous—you must save me!” She gripped the side of the car in a hand whose bones stood out beneath the skin as stiff as a claw.

No sooner had the words escaped her lips than I saw her nemesis plunging toward us. The moon had emerged from behind a cloud, and the blade of the sword flickered with silvery radiance as it flew swift as an arrow beneath the skeletal boughs of the trees. Perhaps she heard the thin whistle it made as it sliced the air, or perhaps something in my face hinted at what was to come, for her eyes opened wider just for a moment.

The sword thudded into her body from behind, so forcefully that its tip emerged through her breastbone. It poked the fabric of the nightgown into a new little peak, higher than her breasts. Her mouth opened and blood gushed forth. As she fell to the ground, her head struck the running board with a heavy thump.

The sword wrenched itself from her body. Twice more it plunged into her, just as viciously, guided by no hand that I could see. Then it rose into the air, twirled, and flew back toward the house.

I started the engine once more and drove off toward town.

The newspapers were full of the story for days afterward—how the groundskeeper had come up the lane at daybreak and found Miss James lying butchered in an ice-crusted pool of frozen blood. Tyre tracks led to the main road, and vanished; as they were of a common tread, not even Sherlock Holmes could have traced them any farther. Within the house the groundskeeper found the entire party slaughtered. James's head had been cut clean off, and Miss Selkirk was mutilated most horribly. The bishop—well, some things are best left unsaid. The servants had vanished, as elves will, and inevitably the blame for the tragedy was placed squarely upon them.

The newspaper accounts said nothing, however, of the weapon that was used; nor was I able to find any mention of an elvish sword being found at the scene. I should have been very surprised if there had been.

The bishop was quite wrong on one point, though I forbore to correct him at the time: It is not true that the elves always kill half-breed babies born of elf-maidens who have been raped. Some of us are so loved by our mothers that they cannot bear to part with us, no matter how painfully our rounded ears and gross stature must remind them daily of the infinitude of wrongs done them.

Dean Whitlock's first published story, “The Million Dollar Wound,” appeared in our Jan. 1987 issue. After that debut, he published about a dozen stories in our magazine, Asimov's, and elsewhere, but for most of the past decade he has been focusing his talents on community theater and most recently on books for younger readers; his fantasy novels Sky Carver and Raven have been published and more are in the works. You can find out more about him and his work at www.deanwhitlock.co.
"Changeling” is fantastical but it is not, strictly speaking, fantasy. We think you'll like it anyway.

She was the homeliest person he had ever met. Gavin hated to use the word ugly, because it was an ugly word, and he'd been raised to be polite. But it came to him anyway.

"It's all right,” she said. “I usually work in the kitchen. We're just shorthanded tonight."

Gavin blushed and glanced down at the menu, too flustered to focus on the words. Had he been that obvious?

"Uh, what are the specials?” he asked. He put on a polite smile.

She told him, but he missed most of them. He couldn't ignore her face. It was hard to pinpoint just what about her was ugly. There was no single ghastly feature; it was just that nothing fit, as if all the pieces came from different people. The nose was a little too long and lumpy; the eyes a little too wide and a little too far apart, and the left one wandered about on its own. Her forehead was too broad, her chin too pointed, her teeth too small for the mouth, which was too wide for her face. Her hair was simply plain, her eyes unremarkably brown, her skin pale, without a single freckle or dimple to give it charm. She was neither thin nor fat, and her waitress outfit—a pink smock with a frilly white apron—hung on her like its only purpose was to fend off the occasional, undoubtedly accidental glance.

She finished the list of specials and waited for him to choose. He caught himself staring at her wandering eye and quickly looked at the menu again. All he could see now were the prices, much higher than he'd expected, almost as high as those on the elaborate menus posted outside of the fancy restaurants he'd passed over. Even the specials were more than he could really afford. He'd figured Dan and Ann's Diner would be reasonable; hopefully even cheap.

"Do you need more time?” she asked.

"No! No. Sorry. I'm just a little spacey. I've been driving all day."

"Heading where?” She didn't sound insulted. Gavin relaxed a little.

"Here. I mean, not here, not Dan and Ann's specifically. Portsmouth. I just moved here."

"Where from?” She sounded interested, and Gavin relaxed some more. He'd been feeling lonely after unpacking in his little apartment in the big, empty house. Sitting by himself in a booth in the half empty diner hadn't really helped. And he could never start conversations himself, with anyone, let alone a strange-looking waitress in a strange town.

"Kansas,” he replied. “Well, Pittsburgh. That's where I drove from today. I've been there this past year, but I grew up in Kansas."

"Welcome to Oz.” She must have read something in his expression then, because she quickly added. “Sorry. I'll bet you get that all the time."

He shrugged. “Just don't call me Dorothy."

"Okay, Toto, what would you like for dinner? The cook's fresh out of kibble."

He relaxed completely. “I guess I deserved that. My name's Gavin. Gavin Knight."

"Ah, a knight errant, from the Western Lands, by way of Pittsburgh. And I was supposed to say, ‘Hello, I'm Amanita. I'll be your server this evening.’ I always forget."

"Amanita?” He looked for a smile, but her homely face was unreadable. He decided she was pulling his leg. “As in, Extremely Poisonous Death's Head Amanita Mushroom?"

She arched a heavy eyebrow. “You know what it means! What, you're a mycologist?"

"No, I'm a—"

"A botanist, a doctor, a poison specialist?"

"No, I—"

"A poisoner! That's it, you're Mad Kansas Jack, the cat poisoner."

He laughed. “Not hardly. I'm a grad student, at UNH."

"Even worse. Why aren't you living in Durham, on campus?” she asked.

"My advisor lives here. He's got a big, old place over in what-cha-call-it, Strawbery Banke. Or is it Bankee?” He made point of pronouncing the final e.

She smiled, which mellowed her features a little, though not nearly enough. “It's Bank without the ee, at least among us groundlings."

"Do you live here in Portsmouth?"

"Ayuh."

He smiled at her pronunciation. “A born and bred New Englander, huh?"

"Nope,” she said. “I'm a changeling."

"A what?"

"A changeling. I was left in a basket on the front step of the richest man in town. Right there in Strawbery Banke.” Her smile dared him to disbelieve.

Gavin decided to take the dare. “That makes you a foundling. A changeling is switched with a human baby."

Her eyebrows lifted slightly; now her smile said, Do I look human? Gavin blushed again, certain he'd insulted her, but all she really said was, “Foundlings don't have second sight."

Gavin couldn't help glancing at her wandering eye, which was staring right at him at the moment. “Second sight. Okay. Like, see the future."

"That's right."

Gavin wondered if she was pulling his leg again or simply crazy. It was impossible to read her face. “Okay. If you can see the future, why did you have to ask where I was from?"

She smiled. “That's not the future, it's the past."

"Then why do you have to ask what I want to order?"

She snorted. “That's the present. And it's far too unimportant."

Gavin surrendered. “Okay. What do you see in my future?"

She closed her right eye and let the left one wander his way. Then it wandered the other way. Gavin stared, fascinated. She reopened her right eye and regarded him curiously.

"What?” he asked.

"You're going to meet a small, gray stranger,” she announced.

Gavin laughed. “Safe call! Everyone here is a stranger to me."

"Small and gray?” she asked.

"Okay, that's a new one,” he allowed. “Should I be afraid?"

"No, no dangers looming. But you will fall in love."

"With a small, gray stranger?” he asked.

"No,” she replied. “Well, yes, but that will be completely platonic. You've already met the true love of your life. Now, my turn to ask a question: What'll you have, Gavin?"

I guess the seance is over, he thought. “A grilled cheese sandwich. And a glass of milk."

"Fries? Salad? Batter-dipped mushrooms?” She flashed an evil grin. Her small teeth looked sharp.

"No, thanks. I'm on a budget."

"Ah, the poor, wandering student; the mendicant friar. Not a knight errant at all."

She took the menu and walked around the counter and into the kitchen. Dan and Ann's was done up in a retro style that went with the waitress outfits: red vinyl upholstery, chrome edging, Formica tabletops, and long windows between the counter and the kitchen, where a cook was hustling in front of the grill. Apart from a greatly sagging pot belly, he looked normal. Amanita—that couldn't really be her name, could it? Whatever, she seemed to be making his sandwich herself. She glanced up, and Gavin quickly turned to the miniature jukebox fastened to the wall at the end of his booth. He studied the list of titles, but the only one he recognized was “Love Me Tender,” by Elvis. He guessed they all must be from the ancient days of rock-and-roll.

Not that he could afford to waste a quarter on music. He had arrived with very little left in his pocket, and he wouldn't be paid for another two weeks. Gavin sighed. He was supposed to be in Scotland right now, researching medieval folklore with his new advisor, Professor Jury, but the funding had fallen through. Gavin's had at least; Dr. Jury had left without him, and wouldn't be back until halfway through the fall term. Gavin, meanwhile, was supposed to do his half of the research on the Web and at the UNH library, as well as take care of the good professor's big old drafty block of a house up in Strawbery Banke without the ee. Not the best of ways to get to know his new department and new town. He was not good at making his own introductions.

Amanita brought his sandwich, and he was going to ask her if that was really her name, but business had picked up and he didn't want to get in the way. The meal went down quickly, with no one for him to talk with, but just as he was finishing, she hurried past and set down a plate with a big slice of apple pie on it.

"On the house, Friar Gavin,” she said. “Pay at the counter when you're done."

Then she was off to another table. She was busy in the kitchen when he left, so he couldn't tell her how delicious the pie had been. He paid the other waitress (who had a very pretty face) and left feeling only half full.

Gavin walked around Portsmouth for a while. It was nothing like Kansas City or Pittsburgh, the only two cities he knew. The buildings were mostly brick, with shops or restaurants along the streets and apartments above. They were built low, too; the high steeple of a white church was taller than most. It was quiet by his city standards, but then it was a chilly Tuesday evening in May. It was after eight p.m., and the shops were closed. Following his nose, he came to a river. The water was low, exposing muddy walls and pilings that gave off a pungent odor. He wondered what caused it; it wasn't unpleasant but was definitely unfamiliar. He looked downstream; the river swept out of sight around a broad curve lined with buildings and wharves. He knew from the map that Portsmouth was right by the Atlantic Ocean. He'd never seen an ocean before. He wondered if the odor came from the sea.

He decided to walk that way, just in case the sea was near. The city streets didn't border the river or follow any regular plan, so he wound this way and that, catching glimpses of water between the buildings. He wasn't worried about finding his way back to the professor's house—Gavin never got lost.

Soon he came to a park that bordered the river. Boats of various sizes, some with masts even, were tied up in neat rows along the docks. Children were playing on climbers, and couples strolled on the pathways or sat under the trees. Gavin started to feel lonely again. He turned onto a path that cut across the park toward the street, ready to find his way back to Strawbery Banke. As he passed between two tall oak trees, a voice called out.

"Hello!"

Gavin looked around. He couldn't see anyone close by, but the voice called again.

"Hello!"

Gavin looked down. A small, gray parrot was standing at the base of the left-hand oak tree. It cocked its head and peered up at him. Its eyes were bright and round and rimmed with white feathers. Its tail was bright red.

For a moment, Gavin could only stare. The hairs at the back of his neck prickled. A small, gray stranger? Then he laughed; he couldn't help it. Of all the impossible and ridiculous coincidences, this had to take the prize. He knelt and spoke to the parrot.

"Hello, yourself,” Gavin said.

"Here's a pretty boy!” the parrot squawked.

"You are a pretty one,” Gavin agreed. “Polly want a cracker?"

The parrot blinked. “Bite me!” he replied.

"Okay,” Gavin murmured. “Either you're not Polly or you don't like crackers."

He looked around to see if there was anyone near, and the parrot flew right to his shoulder. “Whoa!” Gavin exclaimed, almost toppling against the oak.

"Whoa Nelly!” the parrot agreed. It turned, batting his cheek with its red tail, leaned out, and looked him right in the eye. “Hello!” it said. “Let's go!"

Gavin asked everyone nearby, even overcoming his shyness to interrupt a couple snuggling on a bench, but no one recognized the parrot. The bird, meanwhile, sat on his shoulder, ignoring the other people and occasionally rubbing its evil-looking beak against Gavin's ear. Gavin finally stopped in the deepening twilight at a crossing of the paths.

"Now what?” he murmured.

"Go with the flow!” the parrot squawked.

It seemed like the only course. “I don't have any food for you in the house,” Gavin told the bird. But he thought he knew where he might be able to get some.

He retraced his steps to Dan and Ann's Diner. The parrot muttered on his shoulder, occasionally letting out a shrill whistle or a hoarse “Hello” at a passerby. As Gavin rounded the corner, he saw that the lights in the diner were off. His excitement dimmed a moment, until he realized that Amanita was at the front door, talking with two young men in suits. He hesitated, suddenly feeling foolish. He really wanted to hear what she'd say when she saw that her joking prediction had come so oddly true. But he also didn't want to break into her real life.

He started to turn away when the parrot let out another whistle and squawked, “Go with the flow!"

Amanita saw them. Immediately, she waved and called, “Hi, Gavin!” She said something to the two men and hurried up the street.

"Well, look who you picked up,” she said.

"She's a pretty girl!” the parrot squawked.

Gavin blinked. If anything, Amanita was homelier than he remembered. “Look,” he said, “I don't want to interrupt you and your friends."

She laughed. “Hardly. They're Jehovah's Witnesses. You have saved me from a cruel fate, oh knight in shining armor."

He smiled. “You're lucky they didn't follow you over. I never know how to escape from them myself."

"No problem. I just told them you were a practicing wiccan. Who's your new friend?"

"I don't know, but don't call it Polly. I just found it in the park by the river."

She pursed her lips and made chirping noises at the parrot. “Hey, pretty boy,” she said. “Have you got a name?” It chirped back. “Hmm. All right. How about Sancho?"

"Hello!” the parrot replied.

"I guess that's a yes,” Gavin said. “Why Sancho?"

She smiled at him. “Every knight needs a squire. Come on, let's get him some food."

She let them back into Dan and Ann's, sat them at the counter, and rummaged in the big cooler. Sancho nibbled gashes in the corner of a menu, nipping at Gavin's finger when he tried to stop him. When Amanita came out of the kitchen with some fruit and lettuce cut up in a bowl, Sancho whistled his thanks and began tearing apart an orange slice.

"You've made a friend,” Gavin remarked.

"How about you?” she asked. “More pie and milk?"

"Hey, that was great,” Gavin said. “I really appreciate it, but I can't keep—"

"Sure, you can,” she said.

So he ate the pie and drank the milk while Sancho ripped into his fruit and Amanita watched with her wandering eye. When he was done, she gave him a bag of fruit and veggies for Sancho and offered him a lift home. Gavin was about to refuse, but Sancho said, “Let's go!” So he wound up climbing into the passenger seat of her car, which turned out to be a sky-blue vintage Volkswagen Beetle in nearly perfect repair.

"Nice wheels,” Gavin said.

"It suits me,” she replied, and Gavin wondered if she meant its odd looks.

She headed in the right direction, but missed the turn that would have taken them into the narrow, windy streets of Strawbery Banke.

"Hey,” Gavin begin, “that's—"

"Yes, I know. I'm kidnapping you,” she said. “You've never seen the ocean, right? I didn't think so. I know a good spot. Don't worry, it's very public."

"Go with the flow!” Sancho squawked, nipping at Gavin's ear. Gavin took his hand off the door handle and tried to relax. He really was interested in seeing the ocean. But he wasn't sure he could handle any more of her surprises.

It only took ten minutes or so along quiet, winding roads. They drove out of the city glare and into the pewter gleam of moonlight. The pungent smell from Portsmouth's river receded, then resurged. They came out of the trees and houses and crossed a stretch of dark meadow land. Amanita stopped at a tee junction, and Gavin could hear a soft grumbling sound. She turned right, skirting a row of houses, then made a final turn and pulled the Beetle up to a bank of sand at the end of a narrow dead-end street. They got out. Gavin was shivering with anticipation. She led him through soft sand, up a low bank.

And there was a great sweep of darkness that stretched as far as he could see under the moonlight. The beach was a long, gentle slope of lighter gray that ended at a snaking line of silver, where waves thumped and growled at the lip of the sea. Stars dotted the horizon, and Gavin couldn't tell where the sky ended and the sea began. He felt a moment of vertigo, almost fear, at the unbroken immensity. The waves muttered a warning.

"Thar she blows!” Sancho cried, and Gavin jumped.

"Oh, yeah,” he said.

He tore his eyes from the grip of the sea's expanse. To right and left, the beach reached out in a broad, flat crescent. Houses looked down on it, lighting patches of sand with their glowing windows. The sky above and behind was bright with city glow and moonlight. A sea gull laughed from the roof of a nearby house. Gavin let his eyes wander back to the dark reach of the sea. He had stood at night on the wide plains of Kansas, where the sky and land were just as lost in distance and darkness, but he had never seen the world's end like this. He shivered again.

He noticed a light flash out to sea. In a minute, it flashed again. A lighthouse? he wondered. He noticed other lights to its left that were too large to be stars.

"Those are the Isles of Shoals,” Amanita said.

"People live out there?” It seemed crazy.

She didn't answer immediately. He glanced at her face, but it was blurred by shadow. Only her eyes showed: each a faint gleam fixed on the lights of the islands.

"The aides used to bring us here from the orphanage once or twice a year.” Her voice was soft, with none of the edge it held when she was joking. “I was sure the islands were my birthplace, that my mother's people still lived there. That I would have lived there, if she hadn't died.” She chuckled. “Childhood fancies. I didn't realize you can't see those islands, not in daylight or under the moon."

Gavin thought he understood. “Only in dreams?"

She turned her face toward him, half lit now by moonlight and window shine, half still smoothed by darkness, with her humped nose a stark edge between. “Not only in dreams. The darkness just has to be deep enough, and you have to have the courage to believe. Come on, I'll take you home now."

Gavin was happy to follow her up the beach, away from the dark sea, but he had the odd feeling that he had just done very poorly on an exam.

The next day, he put an ad in the Portsmouth Herald announcing a lost parrot. He knew it was the right thing to do, but he also stocked up on fresh fruit and hoped Sancho would be around to share it. He bought a copy of the newspaper, too, to put under Sancho's perch. Sancho had chosen the back of a spindly chair for his regular roost, and he occupied it like a prince on a throne. It was by a window that overlooked the narrow street, and he commented shrilly on every passerby: There's a pretty girl! Let's go! Hello! And a wide repertoire of whistles, including the opening measure of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.

Gavin set up his laptop on a small, old table beside Sancho's chair. The house itself was more than 250 years old, if you could believe the date painted over the front door, and everything in it seemed to be an antique, except for a modern kitchen and the wireless Internet hub. Gavin's email was already filled with messages from Dr. Jury, asking him to research this old manuscript or to find the source of some equally obscure reference to a bit of lost saga. Gavin logged into the UNH library and got to work.

By evening, his brain was fogged. He nuked a frozen pizza, gobbled it down (Sancho stuck to his fruit), and went for a walk, with Sancho perched happily on his shoulder. He came back, found a book titled Legends of Faery in Dr. Jury's crammed library, and fell asleep after half a chapter. Sancho woke him at daybreak with his discordant rendition of the Fifth's first four notes. After the twelfth repetition, Gavin crawled out of bed to feed them both.

It became a comfortable routine: a quick morning walk to get a paper, followed by email, Dr. Jury's questions (most without answers), lunch, a trip to the store for groceries, more research, dinner, a walk, reading, bed. Gavin learned the layout of the town on foot, without really having to fit in. He let Sancho say hello for the both of them. Sancho was his companion, the computer his outlet, the research his only care. Apart from money, and that problem was eased at the end of the second week when his first paycheck arrived from UNH. That evening, he drove Sancho back to the beach.

It was June now, the days were getting long, and the sea was brightly lit. People walked along the crescent of sand or lay on towels. A few waded in the wash of the gentle waves. Gavin watched from the top of the beach.

"Thar she blows!” Sancho squawked.

"Yeah.” Gavin steeled himself and walked down the long slope to the edge of the dark, wet sand that marked the highest reach of the waves. Proximity didn't help any more than daylight; the unending expanse of water made his stomach knot. He could see the Isles of Shoals clearly in the daylight, rising in a cluster this side of the horizon. There were fields and buildings; one looked like a big, white hotel from the last century, but nothing really out of the ordinary. And they were only six miles away—he'd checked Wikipedia. But they might as well have been on the far side of the moon. He didn't linger. He drove back to the house, ate a dull dinner, then took Sancho for a late walk.

Without even thinking about it, he followed the path he had taken on his first evening there, and found himself turning the corner by Dan and Ann's Diner. Still without thinking, he walked in. A waitress spotted Sancho immediately.

"I'm sorry, we can't allow pets,” she said.

Gavin began to stammer an apology, but Amanita appeared in the window to the kitchen and called out, “It's okay, Hazel; I know this guy. That's his service animal. He's allergic to dogs."

Hazel looked suspicious, but she let Gavin in. He ordered the apple pie and a glass of milk, and watched as she and Amanita held a whispered consultation behind the counter. Hazel gave him a curious look, but she was smiling when she brought the pie, along with half a banana. Sancho charmed her with a long wolf whistle and called her a pretty girl, which, Gavin admitted, she was. She wasn't going to charge for the pie, but Gavin insisted. Amanita was busy washing up and only had time to wave. He waved back. He couldn't help contrasting her face with Hazel's and felt an uncomfortable mix of pity and guilt. He ate quickly and left.

Amanita was waiting on the sidewalk. “I'm off early tonight,” she said. “Your timing's perfect."

Gavin shrugged, feeling even more guilty. “Thanks for getting me in,” he said. “That was quick thinking. I'm surprised Hazel bought it; I'm obviously not blind."

"No problem. I told her you were bipolar and the parrot kept you from losing it."

Gavin laughed. “Did you tell her I was a wiccan, too?"

Amanita gave him her evil grin. “She'd assume that. If you know me, you must be. Where're you headed?"

He shrugged again. “Just walking. The river park, I guess."

"Let's go!” Sancho squawked.

So they wound their way down river. Amanita made wry comments about the various restaurants and stores, most of which she said catered to tourists and the town's cadre of young professionals on the make. When they reached the park, she led him down onto the wharf. Even more boats were tied there now, some lit, some dark. Light glimmered on the water from both sides, and the half moon's reflection danced in the current. They walked all the way to the end of the park, where a concrete ramp led down into the river's fragrant waters. Amanita had grown quiet, her mismatched face oddly still. She frowned at the ramp and the water.

"This is where I'll start from,” she said.

"What?” Gavin wondered if he'd missed some earlier comment.

"I can launch the Beetle right from here,” she replied. “It's watertight, you know. That's why I bought it."

"Your car?"

"That's right. It's watertight; I can drive it right down the ramp and let the ebb tide carry me out to sea. It'll save gas."

"Okay, I guess it would,” he said. Once again, he had no idea if she was joking.

"Seriously,” she said. “Two guys drove a VW Beetle across the English Channel back in the sixties."

"Across the English Channel?"

"Most of the way. The engine stopped, so they opened the sunroof and paddled until the tide turned against them and the waves came up."

"Whoa Nelly!” Sancho squawked.

"Yeah,” Gavin said. “That's crazy."

"Well, sure. They should have kept better track of the tides. We won't have that problem. If we can get the light right, I think we'll only have to go a few miles."

"The light right?” Gavin felt like he kept missing something.

"To see the isles."

He remembered her childhood fantasy. “Oh, right. And if you get it wrong?"

"Then we'll paddle."

He noticed she kept saying we, but he wasn't quite ready to play along. “Well, you'd better take a life jacket, too, and plenty of food."

"Men,” she scoffed. “It's all about appetites, isn't it. Come on, I'll walk you home."

"This is where they found my basket,” she said, as they reached the granite steps leading up to the paneled, date-capped door.

Gavin's mouth dropped open. “Your mother left you with Dr. Jury?"

She laughed. “Not your boss: his father, G. Sumner the First. Your boss is G. Sumner, Junior. Some people think he's my brother.” He stared. “Yeah, I know; the family resemblance is hard to see under the moonlight. Good night, Gavin."

"Would you like to come in for some tea or something?” It came out on its own, an embarrassed attempt to cover up for staring.

"Thanks, but it's late. I'm on early shift tomorrow."

"Okay, then, I guess—” Gavin groped in his pocket, then the other. “Oh, dang!"

"Dang?” she echoed, smiling.

"I've lost my keys!” Gavin said. He searched his pockets again, then peered at the ground, hoping they might have just dropped out. “Do you see them anywhere?"

"No. When did you have them last?"

"I can't remember."

"Do you know where they are, Sancho?” she asked.

"Bite me!” Sancho replied.

"Dang!” Gavin hit the door post. “We're locked out!” Amanita was chuckling. “It's not funny. Dr. Jury will kill me."

"Sorry,” she said. “I just can't believe you say dang. Such a gentleman."

Gavin blushed. “I don't feel like one right now."

"Look, you can get a locksmith in the morning. UNH will vouch for you."

"What about tonight?"

"You can stay at my place,” she said. “I've got a pullout couch."

"Oh, I can't do that,” Gavin said.

"Afraid I'll seduce you?” she asked. “Or just too much of a gentleman?” She flashed that sharp-toothed smile again.

Gavin shrugged, totally flustered. “I just...."

"Who else do you know?"

That was it, of course: He didn't know anyone here but her.

"Go with the flow!” Sancho advised.

"Yeah,” Gavin muttered.

Amanita's apartment was two floors up, across from Dan and Ann's Diner, and it was a studio: one room, plus bath and kitchen nook, distressingly small. Yes, she had a pullout couch, but it was the only bed. Before Gavin could say anything, she threw the seat-back cushions on the floor in the far corner and produced some extra blankets from the closet to construct a small nest. He insisted on sleeping there. She shrugged and told him to take the first turn in the bathroom. He came out and waited, awkward and embarrassed, until she went in, then took off his shirt and slipped under the blanket, still in his pants and undershirt. Amanita came out a few minutes later, discreetly clothed in a T-shirt and sweatpants, got into the bed, wished him good night, and turned out the light.

Gavin relaxed slowly, but finally fell asleep to the sound of her soft breathing. When he woke to Sancho's serenade the next morning, sunlight was leaking in around the shades, and she was already gone. Gavin lay still for a moment, groping at a vague memory of a dream: He was lying on the cushions. Amanita stood by the window, holding something; a mirror, perhaps? It seemed to glow, as though moonlight shone from behind its glass. Seagulls called faintly. She turned toward him, and her face was different. Rearranged. All of a piece. She set down the mirror and came toward him. Her left eye glowed.

That was all he could remember, but it seemed uncomfortably real. He shivered and threw off the covers, then sat up, scrubbing his face with the heels of his hands. It had been a long time since he'd had a girlfriend, but Amanita? He liked her, yes. She was interesting. Kind to him. Clever. Funny, too. But funny in both ways. Odd. It wasn't just her face, he told himself firmly. Besides, she wasn't the dream woman, not really. That was just some figment of his unconscious. That's all.

"She's a pretty girl!” Sancho squawked.

"Yeah, right,” Gavin muttered. “But not my type."

He kept reminding himself that for the next two weeks. The dream didn't come back, not as a dream. But during the evenings, he argued with the memory. When his next paycheck arrived, he decided he had laid the issue to rest. She was his friend, and that was fine. He'd head over to Dan and Ann's to get some pie and say hello. Maybe they could go to a movie or something.

When Gavin went into Dan and Ann's, Amanita wasn't in the kitchen. He hesitated by the register. Without her striking face, the diner felt hollow, its chrome and vinyl a sham.

"Where's our pretty girl?” Sancho called.

All the diners looked up, and Gavin felt his face go red.

Waitress Hazel came over and flashed a pretty, blue-eyed smile at Sancho. “Table for two?” she asked, pulling a menu from the rack by the register.

"Is Amanita working tonight?” Gavin asked.

"Who?” Hazel asked.

"Where's our pretty girl?” Sancho repeated.

"Oh, her.” Hazel frowned; in an instant her face soured. “She's supposed to be. She didn't show up today or yesterday."

"Is she sick?” Gavin asked.

Hazel shrugged. “Beats me."

"Didn't anyone call her?"

"Hey, she's the one who's supposed to call. Do you want to sit down or not?"

"Bite me!” Sancho squawked.

"Yeah,” Gavin muttered. “I mean, no. No, thank you. I'm not hungry."

He stumbled out onto the sidewalk. The sun was setting and the air had grown cool. Couples brushed past. Music thumped from a passing car. Gavin looked up at the window to Amanita's tiny apartment. A faint light showed behind the half-closed shade. Gavin stared, watching for some sign of movement, of presence. She's all right, he told himself. It's just a cold or something. But he didn't believe it.

"Let's go!” Sancho squawked, nipping his ear. “Let's go!"

Gavin hurried across the street and up the narrow staircase to her landing. He knocked gently. There was no reply. He knocked a little louder and called, “Amanita? It's me, Gavin."

Dead silence. He tried the knob. It turned, and the door eased open. He peered inside. The lamp on the table was lit. The couch was open, empty, the covers a mess.

"Amanita?” he called.

Sancho whistled shrilly, then burst from his shoulder in a gray flurry and flew to the table. Feeling like an intruder, Gavin went after him.

"Come on, Sancho,” he said. “We shouldn't be in...."

There was a letter on the table, stark under the lamplight. An official logo proclaimed it was from the Reynolds Orphanage, New Hampshire Department of Human Services.

"Dear Mary,” it began.

Gavin blinked and read it again. Mary. So plain. He could understand why she would change it to something like Amanita. He wondered what other names she had given herself. He couldn't help reading the rest.

"Last week, we received a correspondence from your birth mother. This is not an unusual occurrence, and we follow a strict policy regarding our clients’ privacy. You can rest assured we have not shared your current name and address with her. Instead, we have questioned her closely and contacted several references to confirm that she is who she claims to be and, most important, is in a stable situation in her life. If you wish, I would be happy to meet with you to discuss your own feelings about the possibility of a meeting between the two of you. It would be completely up to you, of course."

There was more, about the process, the availability of counseling services, a polite signature. But Gavin's eyes returned to two words: birth mother.

Two words that shredded the fable she had woven to adorn her homeliness, to make her plainness special. She could change her name but, Amanita or Mary, she couldn't change the facts of her birth. And what would she do now, faced with those ugly facts?

Heart racing, Gavin checked the bathroom. It was empty. So was the closet. No one floating in the bathtub, hanging from the clothes pole. He looked out the kitchen window, down into the twilit parking lot. Her VW Beetle was gone.

"Damn!” He punched the window sill. “Where would she go?"

"Thar she blows!” Sancho cried. “Thar she blows!"

"No,” Gavin said. “She wouldn't. Would she?"

"Thar she blows!” Sancho replied.

He hurried back to Strawbery Banke for his car and sped to the beach.

The blue VW was hub-deep in the soft sand at the end of the beach access road. She'd gotten it a good eight feet off the pavement before it bottomed out. Gavin felt a momentary pulse of relief, until he realized the Beetle was empty. He clambered out, Sancho clinging to his shoulder, and hurried over the mound of sand to the beach.

The water was much higher than he'd seen it before, and smooth as a mirror, lapping calmly just a few dozen yards in front of him. It was dark, lit only by stars and the patterns reflected from the islands. There was no moon. The lighthouse winked once, twice, then swung into darkness. Before it returned he spotted her, a forlorn hump of shadow sitting at the water's edge. Gavin exhaled, almost stunned by relief. Sancho shook himself but held his tongue.

Gavin walked slowly down the soft slope and across the hard sand below the high tide line. He stopped beside her, suddenly as awkward as he'd been that night in her apartment. Something glimmered faintly in her lap. She was cradling a small hand mirror, white as an old shell. The glass seemed pearly, as though fogged by moonlight. A gull called in the distance.

"You came,” she said, unsurprised. She didn't turn her gaze from the sea.

"Yeah.” He knelt beside her. “Is that okay?"

She shrugged. “It's your nature."

That hurt a little. “I was worried about you,” he said.

"You read the letter."

He blushed. “Uh, yeah. I ... Sancho was on the table and...."

"You thought I might do something desperate. Slit my wrists, hang myself. Throw myself into the crashing sea."

"Well, yeah,” he admitted. “I'm glad I was wrong."

She shrugged again. “Why bother? Nothing has changed really.” For the first time, she sounded bitter. She looked directly at him. “See?"

Even in the moonless night, he could. Now he shrugged.

She studied his face with both eyes, but when he stayed silent, she turned back toward the sea.

"I was going to drive right out there,” she said. “It's dark enough. I've planned it long enough."

He followed her gaze over the dark water and shivered. “All your life,” he said.

"All my life,” she agreed.

"But now?"

"I got stuck.” She was silent then. Finally, she turned to him again and asked, “What do you think, Sir Gavin, my poor, goodhearted knight? Am I mad?"

"Yeah. But no more than most."

"Really?” She arched a heavy brow. “Should I do it then?"

"That's your choice to make, not mine."

"Would you come with me?"

He turned to the sea again. The lights seemed very small, as distant as the stars. He swallowed.

"Go with the flow!” Sancho squawked suddenly, and they both jumped.

Gavin laughed. “It's what, six miles?” he said, voice high. “I guess I could."

"Right.” Amanita rose and took two steps up the beach. Then she paused, turned back, and threw the mirror over the water. It turned once, flashed, and dropped lightly into the sea.

"What—?"

"It was in the basket with me,” she said. “I can see my way well enough without it. Let's go.” She strode away.

Gavin hesitated, looked back at the black, starlit sheet, marred only by the spreading ripples where the mirror had struck and sunk.

"Let's go!” Sancho squawked, and he flew to Amanita's shoulder.

"Traitor,” Gavin muttered, hurrying after them.

He caught up with her at the peak of the sand, and they walked the rest of the way together.

"It's in pretty deep,” Gavin remarked, studying the VW's half buried rims.

"We'll get it loose,” she said, kneeling by the right front wheel. She twisted off the valve cap and began to let air out of the tire. “Have you got a tire gauge?"

"Yeah. What—?"

"We want to let out at least half. It's like a dune buggy: Soft, wide tires get better traction in soft sand. Get your gauge."

Gavin did as she asked and started letting air out of the rear tires. Amanita decided twelve pounds was about right.

"You're going to ruin these tires,” he said.

"I suspect that's the least of your worries,” she replied, and he blushed again, because she was right. “Okay, I'll drive, you push."

She got in with Sancho, and Gavin set his feet firmly in the sand. He bent over, grabbed the rear bumper, and tensed. Amanita started the engine; it puttered into life.

Oh, Lord, what am I getting myself into? Gavin thought, but then Amanita revved the engine, eased out the clutch, and he was heaving against the funny round bumper with all his strength, digging his feet into the soft sand, slipping and slithering, half on his knees while the Beetle's rear end bucked and slewed and the tires threw rooster tails of sand three feet high on either side of him. Suddenly the car lurched, rose, and surged forward. Gavin almost fell flat on his face. Sancho whistled Beethoven gleefully from a perch on the passenger side window frame.

Gavin scrambled after the car, hopped onto the rear bumper, and clung desperately to the handle on the engine compartment door. Behind its louvered hood, the engine gnashed and sputtered like a drowning cat. Amanita shifted up, the car lurched again, and they climbed the last few yards to the top of the mound. The Beetle's nose dropped into the down slope, but Gavin's stomach kept rising.

The Beetle crossed the high tide line, and Amanita slowed. “Get in!” she yelled.

Gavin obeyed, stumbling from the still-moving bumper to the uneven sand. He managed to grab the door handle and yank it open, throwing himself into the seat just as the beach began to level out. The Beetle rolled onto the hard, damp sand and shot forward. The door swung shut, with Sancho flapping wildly to keep his perch.

"Make sure it's shut tight,” Amanita said.

Gavin was staring through the flat windshield at the rapidly approaching sea. His stomach was still rising and he tried to swallow it back into place, without much success. He groped blindly for the door handle, swung the door wide, and slammed it shut as hard as he could. Sancho shrieked in outrage, tottering on the window ledge.

"Bite me! Bite me!” he screeched.

"Sorry,” Gavin muttered.

He scooped Sancho into his lap and cranked up the window just as they reached the water. Spray arched from the front wheels, splashing onto the windshield and across the side windows. The front bumper submerged for a moment, and Gavin gripped the dashboard with white knuckles. Sancho spread his wings and whistled. The Beetle pushed up a bulge of bow wave. The front end bobbed. The rear wheels bumped, skipped, raced, and suddenly the car was afloat. Amanita shifted into fourth and throttled back. The engine settled. The Beetle slowed. Burbling gently from the submerged muffler, they eased away from shore toward the distant lights of the islands.

Amanita laughed sharply. “Well, this is a bit of an anticlimax, isn't it?"

The old Beetle had a handhold at the top of the dash above the glove compartment. Sancho climbed onto it and peered out the front window, head cocked.

"Whoa Nelly!” he squawked.

Gavin tried to laugh, but gulped instead as the Beetle lifted on the first small swell. He forced a smile. “Shouldn't you turn on the lights?” he said. “In case there are boats or floating logs or something?"

"It'd ruin our night vision,” Amanita replied, but she turned on the parking lights at least. Amber light fanned from the Beetle's four quarters onto the coal-black sea. The dim green glow from the dashboard reversed the shadows on her face.

"Thanks,” Gavin said. He spoke in a half whisper, but his voice still sounded loud to him. He fell silent.

Slowly but steadily, the Beetle puttered farther from land, rising and falling as the slight ocean swell rolled beneath them. Somewhere in the distance and half a beat off, a bell buoy rang. The lighthouse winked in its own slow rhythm. Gavin's heart beat double-time to them all. As far he could tell, the lights of the islands weren't getting any closer. His eyes began to ache from the strain. He glanced at Amanita. She was looking through the windshield, both hands on the wheel, shifting it slightly right and left, as though she was driving on a highway, with white lines and medians and guard rails and road signs to mark their path. Not an ocean, with nothing but starlight, bells, and a course plotted on the chart of her childhood dreams.

He looked back out the windshield, and the lights had changed somehow. The alignment was wrong. And it was still shifting, as though the islands were drifting to the left.

"They're moving,” he said.

"We are,” she replied. “There's a strong current here."

Of course, he thought. Islands can't move. But as he watched the lights shift against the apparently fixed stars, he couldn't shake the feeling that the islands were sliding aside, dodging, leaving the Beetle on a clear path to the open sea.

"Don't worry,” Amanita said, “it'll slow as the tide turns.” She gave him a smile that he supposed was meant to be comforting, but the low, green light from the dash only made her seem fey.

Still they crept onward, Amanita steering always toward the islands, though they seemed to slide farther and farther askew. Gavin leaned his head against the side pillar and stroked Sancho's head. Sancho murmured and fluffed his feathers. Gavin opened the window a bit, and a breeze blew in, cooling his cheek. The air was moist, salty, and stung his nose. The noise of the bell wavered oddly. The motion of the Beetle freshened. Wavelets began to lap against the fenders, and the lift of the swells increased. Gavin took a firm grip on the handhold. Sancho perched on his knuckles.

Now the lights ahead seemed to waver. The breeze grew more damp, and smoky tendrils wafted through the amber glow of the parking lights. Beads of condensation appeared on the windshield, lensing the starlight.

"Fog,” Amanita said quietly. “The final barrier.” Her smile grew.

The tendrils thickened. The beads swelled and began to roll down the windshield, leaving oily tracks that scattered the lights of the islands into splinters of rainbow. Then even that disappeared, and all they could see were the fans of amber streaming from the Beetle's quarters into a dense, billowing fog. Amanita turned on the wipers. They didn't help.

Gavin stared ahead, desperately trying to see though the drifting curtain. He lost all sense of direction. There was nothing beyond the amber glow of their own making.

No, wait, he thought. Is that...? The fog seemed to lighten, as though a moon had lifted above an unseen horizon. A shadow, a shape, a hint of something solid wavered beyond the arched smears on the windshield. The Beetle rocked slightly, and water purled beneath the running boards. A minor key. The hairs prickled on Gavin's scalp. He strained, listening. The water made a sound like laughter. He glimpsed ... A mound? A tree? A face?

Dazed, he turned to Amanita. Her smile was mirrored in the windshield.

Mary? he thought. No, never that. Look at her: eyes wild, shining, cold and sharp and filled with longing. Longing so deep it could drown islands itself. Look at her hands on the wheel, turning into the waves, then back on course. She knows where she's going; she's going where she believes. A belief so fierce nothing can stand before it. Surely not fog. Nor dark. Not even the tide and a million miles of open sea. And I'm going with her, willy-nilly. No turning back, no choice now. It was her choice, and it will be until we arrive ... somewhere. The Isles of Shoals, the isles of dreams, the halls of the fairy kings ... wherever she chooses to take us.

Suddenly, he laughed, past caring.

She looked surprised. She studied his face. Then she laughed with him. Her smile glowed in the fey light. Her eyes burned. Her hair seemed to stream in an invisible breeze. She was wild, yes, and wide open as the sea, transformed and beautiful in a way that terrified him. She sounded the Beetle's horn, and the tinny beep made both of them laugh harder.

Sancho whistled and shrieked, “Whoa, Nellie!"

Amanita turned the wheel away from the faint loom of light and shadow before them. She reached into the back seat, pulling forth a wooden paddle almost as long as the little car was wide. She laid it across Gavin's shoulder. He took it, rolled down his window, and thrust the paddle into the water, leaning out to add strong strokes to the Beetle's putting engine. The car pulsed forward with each one.

Sancho flew out the window. “Let's go!” he cried. “Let's go!"

"Sancho!” Gavin yelled. “Come back!” The fog swirled, wet and deafening. He leaned farther out, searching the darkness. The car rocked violently. His stomach lurched. “Sancho!"

Amanita held their course. “He'll find us,” she said. “He knows the way."

Gavin hardly heard her. He stared out, back, straining to see. To hear. Was that a splash, a laugh, a ripple of movement, hanging above the water behind them, where Sancho had disappeared?

But Sancho flew back into the amber glow. He settled on the handle at the turn of the hood. “Go with the flow!” he squawked, peering forward like a demented figurehead.

Gavin laughed again and resumed paddling. The fog soaked his face, dripped off his eyebrows, ran down his cheeks, and filled his mouth with the faint taste of iodine and brine. A bell rang faintly somewhere before them, borne on the damp breeze. Behind, the keen of faint music faded away. Maybe it was the muttering engine, the lapping sea. Slowly, steadily, the Beetle muddled onward.

Dawn came in a slow twilight that Gavin didn't even notice until the fog had turned pearly and the amber parking lights dim. His arms were sodden with fatigue and the weight of water in his shirt. He kept paddling. A strange shape loomed suddenly in the darkness: a buoy, swaying and clanging with a bell muted by fog. It swept past and was lost again. The sea swirled, slewing the Beetle right and left. A swell slapped the side, splashing a little water through the window. Gavin heard the wet grumble of waves washing on a shore. He was about to call a warning to Amanita when the sun topped the horizon. The fog turned to spun gold. Warmth played on their faces. Sancho whistled Beethoven.

The fog eddied, thinned, and disappeared as if vanished by a spell. They were motoring along a channel between two rock-bound islands barely a hundred yards to either side. Straight ahead lay the low, dark silhouette of a third island. Boats rode at anchor in a small harbor sheltered by the three rocky mounds. And beyond the harbor and the islands, the sun laid a bright pathway across the ripples of the broad sea.

Gavin turned to Amanita, his face split by an uncontrollable grin. She had her own face back, her normal, human face, and the sunlight painted her features gold.

"It's beautiful,” he said. “Even if it's not....” Where? he wondered. Where had she thought she was taking them? Where had they gone? “It's the Isles of Shoals. Is that okay?"

She looked uncertain for just a moment, but it passed. “It's fine,” she replied. “It was the going that mattered.” She returned his smile twofold, and he glimpsed the fey beauty at play in her eyes.

Beaming like an idiot, Gavin stared at every rock, house, and stunted tree on the three islands, as Amanita piloted their uncommon craft into the still water of the harbor and around the end of a long pier jutting from the right-hand shore. She brought them alongside a small, floating dock lined with dinghies, and reached behind her seat again to draw forth two coiled lengths of rope.

"Tie us up,” she said. “And Gavin? Don't open the door."

He stopped, hand poised on the door handle. “Oh, right,” he said.

So he heaved himself out through his window, and greeted Sancho, who flew to his shoulder as he bent to tie the Beetle at front and back. Then he returned to the passenger window and helped Amanita climb out. Somehow, in reaching for her hand and trying to support her elbow and catching her as she almost tumbled into the water, he wound up holding her close in an awkward sideways hug, with his right arm tight around her breast. She winked. He blushed and stepped back, but kept hold of her hand.

"What do you think?” she said. “They must serve breakfast somewhere on this island."

"Let's hope so,” he replied. “Come on, we'll find someone to ask."

"Hello!” Sancho cried. “Hello! Go with the flow!"

Squeezing her hand, Gavin led the way off the dock and up the path toward the heart of the island.

BOOKS-MAGAZINES

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MISCELLANEOUS

If stress can change the brain, all experience can change the brain. www.undoingstress.com

Support the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship Fund. Visit www.carlbrandon.org for more information on how to contribute.

FOUND: Near Strawbery Banke. One parrot, gray with red tail. Says, “Here's a pretty boy.” Nice.

Witches, trolls, demons, ogres ... sometimes only evil can destroy evil! Greetmyre, a deliciously wicked gothic fantasy ... “A haunting read” (Midwest Book Review). Trade Paperback at Amazon.com or call troll free 1-877-Buy Book.

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This bizarre, surreal, and hilarious novel of one century ago features a plotline shockingly relevant to our own time ... filled with terrorist cabals and suicide bombers.

One evening Gabriel Syme, a young idealist, is enticed into a pitch-black room, interviewed by an unseen man, and recruited into a secret agency dedicated to catching anarchists. But the anarchists are organized; they have democratically elected a council of seven men, each code-named for a day of the week. Syme infiltrates the council and is elected the new Thursday.

Each of the other six anarchists has his own bizarre traits and secrets, as Syme gradually discovers. But the strangest and most terrifying anarchist is the group's cryptic leader, Sunday.

The story is a constant flow of action, including probably the very first car chase in popular fiction. There's also an elephant chase, a balloon chase, and the whole universe inside a masquerade party.

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The Man Who Was Thursday is a clear influence on the TV series The Prisoner, featuring a similar use of symbols and images with multiple interpretations in a global village where individuality is malleable. In an essay published the day before his death, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) stated that this novel represents humanity's triumph over pessimism.

—F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre

Those of you who have been disappointed at the lack of novellas in the last few issues need not worry—we have several in the works, including a classic reprint that will have to remain a surprise for now.

Some of the stories that are coming soon include a new fantasy novelette by Yoon Ha Lee, “The Bones of Giants,” Bruce Sterling's descent into the hidden side of Turin, “Esoteric City,” and John Kessel's tale of future Prague, “The Motorman's Coat."

We've also got a passel of tales in hand by writers who are new to F&SF, including Henry Garfield, Jack Skillingstead, Sarah Thomas, and John C. Wright.

This year promises to be a special one. Subscribe now so you won't miss any of it.