400 Boys and 50 More

Looking at the stories I published in the first half of the Nineties, I see an almost smug confidence, a swaggering sense that I knew where I was going with my fiction and was in full control of my career. At times I would like to slap myself. But I know now that nature itself would soon be doing the slapping.

Within a few years, we had a child, and then another. I could no longer think of my stories as my children, having real actual children. Like many others before me, I found it very hard to focus on writing. My greatest ambition was to sleep.

In my search for more options, not to mention pure escape, I took to playing and reviewing videogames. Fascinated by overlooked possibilities for storytelling in games, I found myself (and my family) soon transported bodily into the game industry. Most of my writer friends seemed puzzled by the move. Seeing it from their point of view, it probably didn’t make much sense to give up a quasi-literary career to engage in a form of entertainment as disreputable in the ’90s as comics had been in the ’50s.

But its very luridity made it irresistible. As the child of teachers, who had made his living in such respectable fields as typing and filing, writing and selling books, I had finally found a career of which my parents could disapprove!

WARTORN, LOVELORN

It was summer in the wine country, in the cleft of a hilly vale steeped in green heat. I had a noseful of dust, pollen and sex. Our sticky bodies separated slowly as we sat back in the remains of our picnic, the white cloth dirty and disheveled. Carcasses of roast game hens and rinds of soft cheeses were strewn about. The dry, greedy earth had drunk most of the vintage from a toppled bottle, and what remained we quickly swallowed.

My companion rose, gathered her cast-off skirt and blouse, and went into the trees while running a hand through her blonde locks and smiling back at me. As I twisted the corkscrew into the mouth of the last bottle, I heard a muted whine, a soft explosion, the beginnings of a scream—all in the shady confidence of the forest.

I called to her without remembering her name. She did not answer.

I started to rise, then remembered my own nakedness. My gun lay out in the dust, tangled in my trousers. As I scrambled over the tablecloth, twigs broke and leaf-mould crackled in the woods. I claimed the gun and turned to face the forest. Where were my guardians?

A shadow moved between the trees in hazy webs of light. I saw a glint of red-gold, like the heart of a forest fire. No one had hair like that except my hosts, the royal family.

“Prince?” I called, thinking that somehow he had discovered my indiscretions with his sister last night; and now, in retaliation, had murdered the innocent I’d picked up at the edge of the woods.

The figure with the flaming hair stopped behind the tree where my friend had fallen. I heard a low chuckle, and despite the heat I felt a chill. That was not the Prince’s laughter.

“Don’t move!” I cried, my finger less than steady on the trigger.

Out of the shadows she came, still laughing. The rifle strap cut between her breasts, her weapon holstered so that I knew she did not intend to fire on me. Even so, her eyes were a fury.

“Princess,” I said.

She mocked me with a shake of her head. “Dear Prince, whatever will I do with you? Was it only last night you filled my ears with promises of fidelity? This is a poor start.”

“You’ve gone too far,” I said. “That girl—”

The Princess took a step into the sunlight and her hair turned molten. “Was she important to you?”

“She was innocent,” I said, momentarily blinded by her hair but pretending otherwise, not trusting her for even a moment with the knowledge of my vulnerability.

“Should that have saved her?” she asked, her voice tiptoeing around me through spots of glare. I tried to follow her with my gun; she was toying with me.

“If you’ve a fight to pick with me—”

“Oh, come now. If my father insulted your mother, would she go out of her way to slap him in the face? Don’t be ridiculous. She’d pay her soldiers to fight, and plenty of innocents would die. This little ‘love’ of yours was in my way.”

“I didn’t love her,” I said. “You needn’t have bothered.”

As the glare receded, and her face went into shadow, I saw the Princess stoop to snatch a pear from our picnic and take a bite. I lowered my gun and began to dress, she stared at me with a curious smile while the juice ran down her chin, her throat. She was dressed like a huntress, in soft brown leather and tall boots. As I began lacing up my shirt, she stopped me with a touch. “Don’t,” she said.

“Are you mad?”

Her grip tightened on my wrist. She clenched her teeth behind her smile. “Will you tell on me? Why not carry as before? Only I will ever know that once you broke our promise.”

I tore my arm away from her. “What do you want? We’ve had our pleasure but it can never happen again. What if we had been discovered last night?”

She took a step closer, pressing against me, her smell aphrodisiac. “It would have simplified everything. We would be planning a spectacular wedding now. It’s what our parents want: the children of both countries formally wed.”

I kicked through the remains of the picnic and fled into the woods, knowing that she was on my heels. A few yards into the shadows I came upon the body of the girl whose sweat and musk still flavored my tongue. Fallen leaves clung to the wreck of her face. As I leaned against tree trunk, the Princess caught me from behind, her nails cutting into my ribs. She twisted me toward her, biting at my lips. I stumbled against the tree, fighting her off, but she grabbed my hair and we both went down into the loam. She was naked beneath her brief leather skirt.

“I don’t want this,” I said. My body hinted otherwise.

“We’re two of a kind, Prince, and you know it.”

I made myself relax. She believed my imitation of submission; her eyelids narrowed, pupils drifting to one side. She wasn’t seeing me, though her hands were all over my body. She trembled, already close, so close that I could feel myself being sucked along with her.

Then I looked through the grass and my body went cold. She was looking at the twisted limbs, the torn belly, the sun-browned breasts draped in a bloodied blouse. The tree trunk obscured my view, but I knew the Princess had a clear sight of my dead lover’s gory face.

“My God!” I rolled free of her. She lay panting in the grass, her body wracked by spasms. I tore myself away from the sight and ran toward my car and my guardians, toward the borders of home.

My private jet left the Princess’s airspace shortly after sunset; it was another hour before we circled and came to earth. That was time enough for her to destroy the old pattern of my life, as I soon discovered.

Instead of the black ultralight carriage that normally awaited my return, an ugly armored vehicle idled on the airstrip. Arqui’s car. In constant fear of assassination, he never traveled in anything less secure than a street tank. Inside, Prime Minister Arquinian sat breaking pencils and cleaning his fingertips.

“You’ve done it now,” he said as I took an uncomfortable seat beside him. “Mind telling us what happened over there?”

By “us” he meant himself and the Queen Mother, who watched from a two-way in the roof.

“How much do you know?” I asked, casually opening the wet bar which the P.M. never left behind.

“How much?” I could see he was in a rage. “They’ve declared war! It’s finished now, all the treaties. Five years of my life, you ruin in a pleasure jaunt that was meant to ease tensions.”

“It was fate,” I said with a shrug.

“Well, what happened?”

“I met the Princess.”

“The Princess,” Mother said, as if she understood perfectly. She had been a princess herself once. “You two had a fight? A lovers’ tiff?”

“Lovers!” Arquinian waxed apoplectic. “My God, and it came to this? The casualties are already past counting. Can’t you talk to the girl, reason with her, if she’s the cause?”

I shook my head, raised my hands. “There’s no reasoning with her, she’s in a passion. I’m all she wants.”

“Well!” said my mother, trying to hide her improper amusement from the P.M.

“Then it’s your fault,” said Arquinian.

“I haven’t killed a soul.”

“You haven’t patched things up, either. This is juvenile behavior.”

He shook a finger at me, as if I were still a child to be reprimanded—but I seized it and bent it backward, out of view of my mother, watching his face whiten while I whispered.

“You don’t know what you’re saying, Arq. She’s irrational. How can I reason with such a girl?”

“I’ve reasoned with far worse, young man, and so must you. She must be stopped. This war especially must stop.”

I relinquished his finger, now properly sprained, and he took it away without showing his distress. But the blood had drained from his ultimatum:

“If you don’t do something, Prince, we might turn you over to her.”

“Oh, leave him alone, Arqui,” said my mother. “We’ll do nothing of the sort.”

“Thanks, Mum.”

I peeked out the window, saw that we’d reached the city. “Look, there’s nothing I can do if her father sends armies on her word. The whole family must be insane. I’m surprised you’d risk me in negotiations. She killed my consort, that’s what started it.”

“You think I don’t know you better than that?” said Arquinian.

“I don’t care what you know.”

With that, I unlatched the door and leapt to the street. The Prime Minister and my mother, for once in accord, screamed after me, but Arqui didn’t dare leave his movable fortress. He ordered the drivers to give pursuit, but a military procession, brass horns blaring, marched in the way and several foot soldiers vanished beneath the tank treads before it could be halted. I ducked into an alley, leaving familial duties behind, and dodged through street after street, thankful to be home again.

All I needed now was a place to stay.

For three days I hid in a garret, writing sentimental battle odes and drinking cheap wine. I could find none of my old slumming companions to drink with me. For all their brave treasonous talk and rebellious posturing, they had conceded quietly enough to military induction and now were soldiers, mired in mud and gulping gas at the front, too stupid to command planes or even to push buttons in proper sequence from the safety of underground bunkers.

My greatest poetry was penned during the endless hours of midnight airstrikes. I was touched by the Princess’s persistence in striking at the heart of my land. It suited her twisted sense of the romantic. I hated to think she had inspired me, and I fought the idea with increased quantities of wine and pills, but the constant explosions were anodyne to my melancholy, and for the first time in my life I found myself able to harness my passions. However, waking one sunset to reread my morbid ballads, I began to wonder if she might have been correct in drawing parallels between us. My longest poem was a complex conceit in which ballistic equations were subtly derived from, and thinly concealed, the curves of her figure, the clash of phosphor lightning in the highlights of her hair. It ended on a black battlefield, and by the time I laid down my pen, I was shivering in an erotic fever.

Unable to purchase wine or water, and starving for breakfast, I left the confines of that close little room. The smell of bodies and cordite played a part in sending me out into the streets and back to my family, who had by now moved into the Emergency Palace.

The Emergency Palace was a perfect replica of our usual homestead, except that every one of its ornate windows opened onto nothing but dirt, rock and roots. It held the same temperature year-round, wherefore my mother preferred it to the regular Palace. Her shingles rarely bothered her here.

“I’ve come not to surrender,” I told her as she sat in state among her fawning courtiers and slightly more dignified lapdogs, “but to state my case.”

“Really, dear, it’s no concern of mine. Shall I tell Arqui you’re here?”

The Prime Minister had overheard my announcement. He appeared from behind an electric arras, eyes alight at the words with which I greeted him: “Set it up, Arq.”

And so that very night I was flown to the front over what appeared to be a scale model of luminous craters and stalled war machines. Naturally the Princess could not wait for a reasonable hour; but then, I was not interested in waiting. I wanted to see what would come of the affair.

At an underground airfield I was transferred to a war-scarred limousine which was chauffeured up a slight ramp to that perpetual amusement park whose theme is war.

A cease-fire had been called to facilitate negotiations, but plainly the land had been in some upheaval. Fires of hell fried the obsidian sky, leaping above generous mounds of cadavers, the usual battlefield fare. Although it was summer and no rain had fallen for weeks, the earth showed soaked and sprouting a crimson mildew in the headlights. Upturned helmets lay scattered on the road like battered tortoise shells, dippers full of blood. The tangled bodies became less distinct from the muck as we crossed into no-man’s-land.

And there in the worst of it, like a neon saloon in a nightmare, the Princess had parked her bus of state. As we pulled alongside, I commanded my aides to wait calmly no matter what happened. I gave thanks for my tall boots as I waded through the massacre to the bus. A chauffeuse was out polishing the windshield while another took a chamois to the chrome fenders. Mangled hands like squashed starfish reached out from under the tires.

Instead of knocking, I pressed my face to the glass folding door and said, “I hope you appreciate this.”

She opened the door with a shiny lever and gazed down at me from the plush driver’s seat. If I had expected her face to be streaked with tears or otherwise ravaged by my rejection, I would have been disappointed. Her demeanor was military, unperturbed.

As I climbed in, she said, “Before you say a thing, let me assure you that I have considered your desires before my own. I know that you, like myself, might thrive on new pleasures—while retaining certain favorites to which you may return again and again without exhausting their fascination. Therefore, I offer the portable services of my bus. This is only a taste of what awaits you at home.” She pulled aside a curtain that hung across the cabin, unveiling a living gallery of nudes smeared with fluorescent body paints and soaked in ultraviolet light: a lurid spectrum of humanity, displaying a variety of genders, some surgical. I was touched to see she had included a sex-anemone, for my Nanny and first mistress had possessed one such; although while Nanny’s had been a graft, moored in her flesh, this anemone was detached, a lonely polyp growing from a pair of fleshy vegetable thighs, devoid of personality. For the Princess, while she might concede to the pleasure-giving powers of many unexpected elements, would never allow any of them to compete for my intellectual attentions. Her human slaves, to similar effect, had the dull grins and sunken temples of the lobotomized.

“There should be something here to suit you,” she said.

“You overestimate my appetite,” I replied. “How can I consider pleasure in this setting?”

I leaned past her and switched on the headlights. A bright swath of charnel horrors appeared before us. It been there all along.

“What can you offer them?” I asked.

Her body began to shudder, wracked by spasms welling from her womb. Only her eyes remained unmoved, fixed on the scene beyond the windshield. She snagged my wrist in her nails, gasping, “Please, Prince, take me.”

“Say ‘fuck,’ dear. ‘Take’ isn’t your sort of euphemism.”

I considered refusing her, as I had refused the offer of her living cargo. But the blood and the sweating night and now this honest show of desire had worked me up to a fine point. I gave her what she asked for, while she stared out the window at the field of death which was all that would ever issue from her womb. I could not look at it myself. I turned my head to the wind-wing and watched the chamois moving slowly back and forth in the hand of a chauffeuse whose doe-like eyes held mine until that trembling instant when, eyes closing, I jerked and forced the Princess into the horn.

The wailing summoned my guardians from the car. They stood before us, knee-deep in bodies, their guns erect but blinded by the headlights.

“Turn out the light,” she said, hitching herself back into the seat.

I did so.

“Come home with me, Prince.”

“I can’t do that. You’ve been unfortunate enough to meet me at the height of my reckless youth. This is the only time I have to be wild and passionate, to develop the emotional artistry that must serve me in the slow grind of petty politics.” I lifted her hand and kissed it. “Should I apologize for winning your heart? It’s a skill of mine, honed to perfection—too sharp, I think—but I will put it aside when I put on the crown.”

“Why can’t you be like other men?” she said, rising from her ultraviolet pout.

I laughed. “Now I understand the devastation on your other borders. You’re entrenched in the affections of ‘other men.’ Would all those wars end if we married?”

“I will always hate the others, but not as I hate you. You’re the only one who dared run from me.” Uncomfortable with all those nudes watching us, I pulled the curtain closed again. “I was trying to preserve the landscape.”

“Fuck the landscape. You can’t pick a bouquet without gouging the earth.”

“And you’ve picked me a lovely bouquet of bloody flesh.”

“I? Pick flesh for you? I’m not courting you, Prince.”

“What do you call this?”

She sat back and stared haughtily at me. “Negotiation.”

“I shouldn’t have come.”

She smiled. “Are you always so moody after sex? I’m sure you’ll feel differently tomorrow. We’ll get an early start, take a slow drive through the wine country….”

“There’s not much left of it, judging from the photographs I’ve seen.”

“You shouldn’t have retaliated. You’ll spoil our honeymoon.”

“I didn’t start this war.”

“Yes, you did. By running. Your country can’t be too pleased with its Prince. Who’ll follow a coward? If you don’t give me what I want, this war will go on forever. I’ll assassinate my brother—I’ve been poisoning him slowly anyway—and the power will stay in my hands. I’ll never marry. I will destroy you. The generation that grows up beneath you will be born to attrition. Society has a long memory for blame, and they’ll lay their lot to your cowardice. It will be your war then.”

“My very own personal war?”

“Which you can’t fight without approval. The people will count the bodies and weigh them against yours. You have only one, and you’ll lose it.”

I sat down on the topmost step and rested my chin in my hands. “I don’t know anymore, Princess. You have my mother’s approval, don’t you?”

Her laughter rang like a cracked bell. “This marriage, my darling, was arranged long ago. I’ve merely tried to reconcile you to it. I think it’s something we could both enjoy. It wasn’t my idea, you know. We’re so alike that you should have guessed I wouldn’t look forward to putting my neck in a yoke, regardless of the partner.”

“Not your idea?”

“Do you think that two children would be allowed to plunge their countries into total war? Our parents have let this war come about, prince, in order to draw us together.”

My hair prickled. “Who told you this?”

“I discovered it clue by clue, over the years. It’s obvious when you comprehend the pattern.”

I rose from the steps. “But how can you go along with it, knowing what you do?”

Her eyebrows arched up. “It suits me. By playing along, I get all I desire. Best of all, I get you.”

“A lousy trade. You’ll sacrifice your freedom and then you won’t want me. Not on our parents’ terms, you won’t.”

I was glad to see her considering this.

“Look,” I said, “what if I said you can have me? You know that in the only way that matters, I am already yours.”

She leaned closer. Her chauffeuse watched us with eyes like moons. “Yes?”

“But I don’t want to live in your land, Princess, and admit it, you have no fondness for mine. If we married, you would have to live in my country.”

“We can break with custom.”

“If you follow it now, even to get what you want, tradition will trap you forever. Listen, my bloody darling. Listen to what I propose.”

Her hand slid into mine.

“Pitch the war with all your will,” I said. “Drive your father until he howls. Be a cancer in his heart. Attack, my love, and never stop. Let there be ever newer weaponry, mountains of bodies. Let our love never stagnate in treaties. If we forsake peace, we can slake our lust forever.”

She looked out over the ragged fields, the sloppy graves. I could see my vision playing in her eyes. How easily it would spread, out of the wine lands and over the hills, blighting crops and felling forests, drenching the world in blood.

“And you’ll be mine?” she asked huskily.

“Yes, yours always. We will meet thus, in the midst of death, pretending to discuss the terms of an impossible peace. For as long as we have each other, peace will never come.”

“You are mine!”

“And you are mine, Princess. And now there is something we share.”

“A war.”

“Our war.”

“Yes.” Tightening her grip, she pulled me in again. “Yes.”

When I finally descended from the bus, my escorts stood stiffly around the limousine, sucking on perfumed cigarettes. They gasped at the sight of blood on my face and hands, the nail marks and bruises. The Princess’s bus roared and lumbered away, grinding through the carnage. I watched it until the taillights vanished, and thought I heard gunfire beginning in the distance. They couldn’t know it yet, but the cease-fire had ended.

“There was trouble?” asked an aide.

I pushed past him to the car, saying brusquely, “There will be no truce, no compromise. Take me home.”

GASOLINE LAKE

The dachshund looked like a slab of ancient beef jerky, dabbed with glue and rolled in lint. It teetered on three stumpy little legs that had dried in unnatural positions while the fourth had cracked clean off, leaving a bit of slightly ragged hem, dog fringe. Though there didn’t seem to be much need for a flea collar, one hung around the petrified neck like a reminder of better days for dog and fleas alike. The eyes were dusty raisins. There was no way to examine the mouth without broken jaw bits ending up in either hand, but the muzzle was slightly parted, and the tongue could be seen to have receded all the way back into the dark cavity of the throat like a frightened snail. The dachshund felt warm to the touch, but that was from being left sitting in the sun. If you sniffed your fingers after stroking the hard brown flanks, you could still detect a faint, undeniable odor of dog.

“This is Fritzy,” said the Rehydrator.

Everybody stepped back from the display table at this announcement, as if it were obscene that something so dead should bear a name—and especially a name spoken with such obvious fondness.

The people of Gasoline Lake, Oregon, looked with renewed suspicion at the bulky truck and the man who had driven it into town in the heat of this December afternoon, when ordinary folk were just rising from a daylong sleep in cool bunkers. They had heard of Rehydrators, but never seen one. What he wanted here was anybody’s guess. The tall, gaunt man wore a shiny new Mylar hat out from under which poked wispy strands of thin red hair. His nose was badly burned. He wore a robe of white fabric, blousy enough to hide all the pore-sucking pumps and reprocessing tubes he must be wearing beneath it. Most of the Gas Lake gawkers were hardly so modest, even in late afternoon; they wore their pisspores proudly, in plain sight, and, where not sucked at by the conservation suits, their skin was painted with sunban oils, or artificially blackened by melanin therapy. Facial features showed a mixed crowd of Caucasian, Black, Hispanic, and Pacific Rim. The Rehydrator scanned them as if they were a book he’d heard curious things about and immensely looked forward to reading.

“Fritzy was born in Gasoline Lake,” he said. “If you check his tags, you’ll see they were issued right here about twenty years ago. Expired by now, I guess. I’m just bringing him home, folks. Bringing him home.”

“I’ll give you fifty bucks for it,” said Earl Taws, owner of the Miscellany Market, whose display window was crowded with deflated soccer balls, purses of cracked pink plastic, faded Hello Kitties, unstrung squash rackets, and other dusty, sun-bleached objects. “It’ll go good with my new wooden Indian,” he said, at which there was general laughter.

“That’s a generous offer, sir,” the Rehydrator said, “but I’m afraid this dog is not for sale. It’s a gift. A gift to your town’s benefactor, Galvin Orlick himself.”

“Galvin Orlick?” The name went up from every mouth.

“Fritzy here was Mr. Orlick’s dog. I’m returning him to his rightful owner.”

“Galvin Orlick’s been deader than that dog of his for twenty years, mister.”

“Dead, you say?” the Rehydrator asked, with a broad wink at all of them. “What makes you think that Fritzy’s dead?”

“Well, shit,” said Marlys Runyon, giving the dachshund a sound whack with the back of her hand. “How did I get that idea?”

Everyone laughed, and Marlys squinted at the Rehydrator with an ironic grin, the end of a long string of baccorish clenched in her brown, steadily chewing teeth.

The Rehydrator laughed right along with all the rest. “And Galvin Orlick is dead, you say? Now, how did that happen?”

“Just like his dog here,” Marlys said. “He dried out.”

“That’s what I thought you’d say, and to that, I have this answer: what’s been dehydrated can be rehydrated. I have no doubt that was Mr. Orlick’s original intention—both in his case and in Fritzy’s here.”

“You saying this dog ain’t dead?” said Earl Taws.

“I’m not saying a thing I can’t prove. And a demonstration is worth any amount of talk.”

“Don’t go ruining that dog by getting it all soggy. My offer still stands—fifty dollars for the beast, as is. Can’t promise to take it off your hands if you wreck it up.”

“The dog’s not for you, sir, and I intend him to be in proper shape for presentation to his rightful owner. Now, please, everyone, stand back.”

“You saying you plan to revive old Orlick?” said Marlys, coming closer.

“Please, ma’am, you must stand back.”

The Rehydrator fit a mask of shiny white plastic fiber over his face; his eyes bulged out of clear goggles. He reached under the display table and brought up a black valise and a big plastic tub. When he opened the case, rows of clear vials with black caps clinked inside it.

“Now, I’m going to need some water.”

The crowd took on a menacing demeanor, none meaner than Norris Culp, C.P.A., who took it upon himself to speak for the others. “If this is what you’ve been leading up to, you charlatan, you’ll end up wishing you had that dog for a pillow tonight in the city jail!”

“No need to threaten me, Sheriff, if that’s what you are. Just talking to myself.” As he climbed a short flight of folding steps and pushed through a canvas flap into his truck, several watchers laughed at Norris; one said, “Howdy, Sheriff.”

The Rehydrator reappeared with a plastic jug full of pure blue water, five gallons of it, cradled in his arms. All through the crowd, dry tongues darted like lizards over lips parched and cracked as alkali flats. Eager

fingers snatched at plastic tubes and sucked at the hot, stale, recirculated water till their pisspores were half-empty, but it didn’t satisfy. The water in that jug looked fresh and cool as if it had just been hauled sweating from a deep spring.

“Yuh’re not gonna waste that on a dog, are yuh?”

“No more than necessary, citizen; fear not.”

“You—you better be careful,” said Norris, showing the other face of the law now. “That’s an open invitation to thieves.”

“Thieves, Sheriff? In Gasoline Lake? You all seem law-abiding citizens to me.”

He set Fritzy gently in the plastic tub, then delicately upended the jug and shook it like a vinegar bottle, sprinkling the corpse with what seemed an endless shower of clean water. To the citizens of Gasoline Lake, it looked like enough water to bring back the forests and crops that were only photographic memories to most of them; water enough for bathing and swimming and for sheer luxurious waste—which is what the Rehydrator seemed to be doing. Wasting water on a dead dog!

But when he set the jug down, they saw that he’d used hardly any. Thirst had deluded them yet again.

The dog now sparkled with bright drops of water like so many little lenses stuck in the tufted hair. Not many Gas Lakers would have missed the chance to suck that water from poor old Fritzy’s hide if the Rehydrator had turned his back. But he didn’t give them a chance. Taking two vials from his valise, he emptied them simultaneously into the tub, letting the streams mingle in midfall. White, reeking fumes volcanoed toward the unblinking sun. The Rehydrator pulled on a pair of thick black gloves and bent headlong into the chemical steam, busying himself over Fritzy. When the clouds dissipated, they saw him massaging the beast, working the stinking potion into flesh and fur, palpating the creature’s gummy eyelids, bathing its stump, forcing his fingers down its throat and working elasticity into the suddenly lolling pink tongue. Apart from the mask, he resembled nothing so much as an ordinary man bathing a dog—a felony performed only rarely in the past three decades, and always in great privacy; a once-familiar sight that now held the audience so enrapt that he might have been building ziggurats single-handed or demonstrating practical levitation, like any other fakir.

And strangest of all, Fritzy, like any ordinary dog, was soon shivering and whining at the water’s touch, licking his thin black lips, his shiny brown eyes bulging in a pantomine of terror, as if he were being flayed for the oven rather than simply returning to a semblance of lively, clean-smelling dog—a dog none would mind petting till he’d taken his first good roll in the carcass of a worm-eaten crow.

The crowd broke into gasps of amazement, then into applause. This was too much excitement for Fritzy. He broke from his groomer, jumped out of the tub and straight into the dust of the roadside, where he rubbed his muzzle in the dirt, dog tags jangling, and rolled and wriggled on his back in the road with three legs kicking air and the one stump twitching as if it would have liked to join them. Then he jumped to his feet and shook wildly, spattering the nearest gawkers with mud and grit and some of that stinging spray that had accomplished the act of revivification.

Norris Culp looked into the smoking tub, then quickly poked under the display table to see where the counterfeit wooden dog had gone. The Rehydrator grinned and bowed like a magician. He let Fritzy scamper through the crowd, and finally called him over and fed him a bone-dry biscuit, watching the faces soften toward him as the first few folks came sidling up to ask how it was done. He shook his head—“Trade secret”—and then their hands, politely declining offers of dinner, noting the way they looked at that nearly full bottle of pure blue water. There was a great deal of excitement in the crowd, but it didn’t distract him. He was the only one, in fact, who noticed when Marlys Runyon—whose name he had yet to learn—took off running.

Corey Orlick, nearly eighteen years old, stood in the spreading shade of a big plastic oak and peed thoughtfully on his Uncle Galvin’s grave. When he was finished, he wiped his eyes, sucked a tear from the back of his hand, and shook out a few more drops, careful to direct them into the spreading golden funnel at the foot of the plot. On the headstone, under the engraved legend HERE NAPS GALVIN OSPREY ORLICK, a digital readout showed the year’s accumulated moisture, plotted against a slowly shifting curve indicating how much precipitation was still needed over a goodly span of years before old Galvin might conceivably consider ending his well-deserved “nap.” In the afternoon glare, Corey could hardly read the figure, but he knew it was still too low to matter. He’d tacked on only a few more cc’s, but his pisspores felt dangerously light and low, rustling against his skin.

His incautious pissing was a futile gesture, a waste of precious reserves, but he couldn’t help himself. He’d been coming out here twice a week for a year now, praying for his uncle’s revival, praying old Galvin might rise up and see the things being done in his name—and with his money. Corey made up for all his wasteful, wishful pissing by digging evaporation pits in his yard and throwing in stray bits of garbage he sneaked from his job at The Succulent Steak; letting the sun suck all moisture from the scraps to condense on the plastic covers, where he lapped it up like rubbishy dew each evening when he rose. But since last week, when Mr. Bell had caught the dish-wiper with her pockets full of cactus peels, Corey had cut back on his thieving, which meant cutting back on his grave-watering as well.

“Oh Uncle,” he moaned. “If only you’d wake up. By the time the rains come, there won’t be a thing of yours left!”

A woodpecker rapped sharply at the trunk above his head, making the whole tree reverberate with a hollow sound. Clouds of dust sifted over him. Nature seemed intent on bringing down the plastic tree, so tall and green and out of place among the sere and barren hills. The oak was artificial, but the cool shade beneath it was real enough. This was the only place in Gas Lake where Corey felt anything like comfortable these days.

At that moment he heard footsteps scuffing past on the road below the hill. Ducking behind the tree, he spied Marlys Runyon running past with a tight, anxious expression, frantically slurping up her tobacco rope as if it were a strand of limp yucca spaghetti. Her look suggested that some plan of hers had gone awry, which made his heart gladden. He watched till she disappeared, then he crept down the far side of the hill and made his way through the stumps and ashes toward town.

Marlys cursed when she saw the last few inches of baccorish come twisting out of her pocket, crawling steadily toward her mouth. Where would she get the money for another?

She thought of Medford Bannister, and laughed at herself. To think she’d been planning to give her news away!

At the edge of the dunes, she cut left, avoiding on one side the sand that burned her bare feet and, on the other, fields full of fire thistle. Between the two regions was a tough mat of grabgrass, almost cool, the best place to walk. She hurried along till she saw Medford’s gleaming roof, then cut across the dunes as fast as she could.

The house was half-buried after a day of wind; every few hours a powerful blower evacuated clouds of sand. If Medford ever neglected this task, or if the blower broke down, the house would be buried inside a day and might never surface again. Medford could have lived in town, safe behind the grabgrass barriers, but that would have exposed him to busybodies.

Marlys’s feet blistered before she reached the shade of the porch. Medford opened the door the instant she arrived, alerted to her approach by his alarm system. She rushed in and leaped into a chair, raising her feet and screaming, “Ice!” Before she finished the word, Medford was already pressing a huge lump of it against her soles, letting the precious stuff run between her toes and his fingers, dribbling onto the floor.

“You’re so reckless!” she said. So rich, she meant. Her sighs were ecstatic. The lump quickly melted away for no purpose except to numb her; just as it vanished, he stroked the last sliver down her calves, her inner thighs, making her slippery. She twisted, and he stumbled aside, grinning with frustration.

“I didn’t come out here for that,” she said.

“Couldn’t help noticing you’re just about out of rope. Only natural to think—”

“I’d sell myself for a twist of tobacco? You’re slimier than you look, Med.”

He backed away sheepishly, pulling the gold wire bands of his spectacles back over his ears. “Marlys, you know I don’t think of you that way. I can buy all the sex I need, but I love you.”

“Anyway, I have something else to sell.”

He looked suddenly crafty. “How much?”

“Don’t you want to know what it is first?”

“You’re not carrying anything, so it must be information. I know you won’t tell me what you’ve got until I pay. So I ask you again, what’s your price?”

The phone rang. Medford’s grin widened.

“Don’t answer that!”

“Your info just depreciated, that it?”

“If you answer, I won’t tell you a thing.”

“Needn’t worry yourself, hon; you’re overexcited. Of course I won’t answer if you don’t like it. Now… how much?”

She waited till the phone stopped ringing. Satisfied that he’d buy the news from her, she answered, “A coil.”

“That all? Hold on a sec.” He backed into the house, though he usually carried more than enough cash on his person. If he really loved her, he should have given it to her outright as a gift. But she’d made it clear a few times that she didn’t like accepting gifts from him. So she sold him the things he could have for free, and gave for free what others had to pay for. He’d received a whole collection of her dried-out horny toads, gratis.

He walked back in the room a few minutes later, empty-handed, looking smug.

“Well?” she said.

“Just checked my messages. Hear there’s a Rehydrator in town.”

“Shit!” She jumped from the chair, staring toward him. “You cheap—”

He slapped a thick brown coil into the hand that was reaching for his throat. “A deal’s a deal, Marlys. I was saving this last one for you anyway.”

“Why, thank you, Medford. What a gentleman.”

She kissed him, spat out her last inch of rope, nipped the end of the new one between her teeth, and unreeled several feet of it till the thick bulk fit in her pocket. The first chew on a fresh rope was heavenly. She sat down to suck on it while Medford picked up the piece she’d spat, and wiped the spot with his handkerchief before throwing both into the kitchen recycler.

“You still want to hear it?” she said.

“I told you, I got a call. Rehydrator’s come around saying he’s going to rejuvenate Galvin Orlick, and apparently he proved it with a dead dog.”

“And that doesn’t worry you?”

Medford shrugged. “I’ve seen these stunts before.”

“Medford, I was there. The guy’s no faker. That dog was like an old sanded-down floorboard till he doused it. Next thing you know, it was running in circles, pissing on stumps.”

“It’s an old trick, Marlys, no reflection on you for falling for it. They’re confidence men, all these Rehydrators. Just like the Rain Men.”

“But the process works. I’ve done it myself.”

“You’ve dried things out, Marlys, but have you made them live again?”

She shook her head. “Well, no. I never learned that part.”

“Exactly. You nor anyone else. That’s the essence of the scam. Galvin may have believed the lungfish process worked, and the people who fall for rehydrators may believe it, but we know better.”

“You don’t think he knows, do you? It’s a weird coincidence, him coming around right now.”

“No, how could he?”

“Still, we should be careful. I’d like to check him out.”

“Be my guest. But I’m sure this piker will take off as soon as he sees there’re already sharks in our pond.”

“Meaning you and me?”

Medford opened the icebox for another cube and came at her with it melting and pooling in the palm of his outstretched hand. “Honey, at worst it might require a little orchestration. That guy’ll be gone before this cube gets done melting.”

“I’m not letting you waste another one,” Marlys said, and, leaning forward, she took it between her teeth, holding it there until her mouth was full of ice water and the searing pain exquisite.

In the first slow easing of the day’s heat, as the streets of Gasoline Lake filled with people starting to go about their business in the dusk, the Rehydrator saw three figures coming toward him down the dusty road, looking less impressive than their long eastward shadows. The one he’d called “Sheriff” was among them, though he hadn’t believed for a minute that the man really was any such thing. In fact, the obvious sheriff was first of the three, her polished star glinting orange in the late-evening light.

Fritzy ran out and barked at them as they approached the truck. The Rehydrator sat down on the steps. “Settle down, Fritzy. These look like friends.”

He spoke loudly, hoping this was true.

“You’re the Rehydrator?” the sheriff asked. She was a tall, sunbaked woman with frazzled yellow hair. She wore a light beige blousy uniform over her pisspores, and carried a sleek gun in a breakaway holster. Ammo darts were lined up along her belt.

“That’s right.” He put out his hand. “Hope I’m not breaking any ordinances parking out here. I plan to come into the Town Hall and apply for whatever permits I’ll need just as soon as it’s open.”

“It’s open now,” said Culp, the man who’d accused him of being a charlatan. “There’s a fifty-dollar fine if you don’t—”

“Settle down, Norris; I’ll take care of this,” the sheriff said. “We used to be concerned about open fires around here, but you can see there’s nothing left to burn these days. Just don’t flick matches out at Gasoline Lake. Since you’re not harming anybody, and you seem to have something to offer the town, we’ll just treat you like any other visitor.” She glowered at the clerk. “With courtesy.”

“I am a visitor,” the Rehydrator said.

“I heard you have something a bit more complicated in mind. Something to do with Galvin Orlick.”

“I came to see about reviving him.”

The sheriff didn’t speak for a moment. She seemed to be judging him from what she could see.

“A lot of people think he can’t be revived,” she said at last.

He scooped up Fritzy. “I revived Orlick’s dog.”

“How did you say you got ahold of that pup? Galvin’s buried in a sealed vault. If it was interred with him….”

“I understand his body is checked periodically—that he has custodians.”

“He does,” said Norris Culp indignantly, “and I’m sure they would have noticed if his dog went missing.”

The sheriff nodded. “His tomb—and his estate—are overseen by the Bannister office. Gas Lake’s oldest law firm.”

“A town this size has more than one?”

“That’s a prerequisite, son,” said a short, plump, graying man, stepping forward to shake the Rehydrator’s hand. “In a grievance, one firm can hardly represent both parties. I represent the other. Lawrence Wing, Esq. I hope if you have any trouble with Norris here or the Town Hall folks, you’ll call on me.”

His hand was soft and dry, but in the gloom the Rehydrator couldn’t read his eyes.

“Is it possible the dachshund never was in the tomb with Galvin?” Wing asked.

The Rehydrator shrugged. “Could be.”

“We still have a problem,” the sheriff said. “Galvin Orlick didn’t want to be revived until the drought had ended. We’re thirty hard years into this one, and it could last another seventy, eighty more—might never end, really. From what I’ve heard, Galvin couldn’t stand even ten years—and they were damp by comparison to these last. What makes you think he’d appreciate being revived, even if you could do it?”

“He’s dead,” Culp said flatly. “Not just dried-out—dead.”

“Bullshit,” Wing snapped.

“Only a lawyer like you could twist things around to make it seem otherwise.”

“Only a lawyer like Med Bannister could confuse the issue in the first place!”

“You see the basic problem,” the sheriff said, separating Wing and Culp.

“I apologize,” Wing said to the Rehydrator. “There’s a touchy question of whether, in his present condition, Orlick can be considered alive or not. And if not, there’s the question of what should be done with his estate—liquid and financial.”

“Well, if I were to revive him, he could settle the matter himself, don’t you think?”

“He’s dead!” Culp said. “And only you, Wing, would defend him.”

“Well, I have to admit that’s apparently true,” Wing said to the Rehydrator. “You might say I’ve been defending Galvin in the public interest ever since his existence first came into question. Pro bono, I might add, since I have no access to the Orlick trust—unlike Bannister, who was the first to think up the tricky question.”

“Bannister,” said the Rehydrator, recognizing the name. “Orlick’s custodian?”

“Damn right. Medford Bannister, Jr. He’s been living off the estate for years, sucking it dry, if you ask me, in the process of questioning his benefactor’s existence.”

“You take a one-sided view of these things,” Culp said irritably.

“Perhaps, Norris. But unlike Galvin’s so-called custodian, I stand to profit nothing from my perspective except a small moral victory, perhaps the pleasure of partaking in a precedent. Don’t forget that I knew Galvin.”

“I could solve your problem with a quick procedure,” the Rehydrator said.

“It sure would be a lot faster than working it out in the courts,” said the sheriff, the last bit of sunlight twinkling in her eyes.

“Sheriff!” Culp exclaimed. “You can’t mean you condone this!”

“I’m impartial, Norris. I’m also curious.” She petted Fritzy’s snout, letting the dog lick her fingers. “You say he was dried stiff this afternoon?”

“Everyone who saw it will vouch for me,” said the Rehydrator.

“Not everyone,” Culp said. “I’m convinced it was a sleight of some kind. I’ve seen other magicians who could do as much.”

“Sleight of hand would have failed miserably in Fritzy’s case,” said the Rehydrator. “I can demonstrate my process again with any preserved specimen you care to contribute.”

“No kidding?” said the sheriff. “I’ve got this little dried horny toad. If I brought it around, could you… you know?”

“I’d be delighted to revive it, providing it hasn’t been pickled or stuffed.”

“No, Marlys Runyon gave it to me as a gift when I first came to Gasoline Lake. She did it herself. She runs a small-time trade in them—sort of a front for her other work. Lots of men in town collect her horny toads.”

The Rehydrator made a sweeping bow. “Anytime. Until I get my bearings, I’ll be right here.”

The sheriff beamed at him. “Well, that’s all. Don’t mean to seem suspicious of strangers, but I had a few requests to check you out, and I can’t deny the citizens their peace of mind.”

“I understand. Thanks for the welcome.”

“Good night, now. I’ll be back with my horny toad tomorrow.”

“Good night to you,” said Lawrence Wing, taking the Rehydrator’s hand again.

Norris Culp strode down the road without a word, turning on his heel once to wait till the sheriff followed.

The Rehydrator watched them go, then sat and waited for his next visitor to get up the courage to come forward. He’d seen someone lurking about in the shadows of the burned woods. Finally, as expected, a skinny young man crept forward. The Rehydrator felt a puzzling sympathy for the fellow even before he spoke.

“M-Mister?” the boy said. “I-I missed your show today, but I heard about it later. I heard what you came for, and it worried me. You’re asking for trouble. I thought I better warn you what’s really going on around here.”

“I appreciate that, son. Would you like some water?”

“Yes, sir!”

The Rehydrator reached back inside the truck for a jug and a cup. When he offered the cup, the boy sipped slowly, sighing and smacking his lips after each little sip.

“This is delicious. Thank you, mister.”

“Not at all. Now, why don’t you have a seat and tell me your name.”

“I’m Corey. Corey Orlick. Calvin was my uncle—my father’s brother. My dad died last year. Now I’m the last living Orlick in Gas Lake.”

The Rehydrator sighed and sank down beside the boy, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Is that right? Exactly what kind of trouble am I asking for?”

Corey worked all night at The Succulent Steak, trimming needles off the big green arms, slicing them into inch-thick slabs, juicing aloes. Tonight he could hardly concentrate on his work. By the time his shift ended, it was nearly light. He took off along the road out of town and found the Rehydrator’s truck parked where he’d left it. Fritzy yapped softly as he rapped on the side. A moment later the Rehydrator poked his head out through the canvas flap, blinking sleep from his eyes.

“Ready?” Corey asked.

“I’m not on your schedule,” he said, stumbling out to sit on the steps and pull on his sandals. He strolled yawning to the edge of the campsite, facing away from Corey, taking a somehow formal stance toward the rising sun. At first Corey thought it was some religious thing, but then he heard a drizzling sound and realized that the Rehydrator was pissing.

“What’re you doing?” he cried, grabbing the cup he’d drunk from the previous night, nearly knocking over the Rehydrator in his haste to catch the stream. The man jumped back, as surprised as Corey, pulling his thin robe shut. Corey saw in that instant that the Rehydrator wasn’t wearing pisspores at all under the robe; his sweat was free to evaporate into thin air without recapture, wasted in the same way as his urine.

They stared at each other in embarrassed confusion for a minute, Corey holding the empty cup, until the Rehydrator grinned and took it from him.

“Sorry,” he said. “I guess that is wasteful.”

“Hell, you were going right in the dust, mister. Nothing can grow there. I mean, if you have to waste it, wait’ll we get to Uncle Orlick’s grave. I sometimes do it there.”

He didn’t think it would be polite to say anything about the man’s missing pisspores. Such open wastefulness was bad enough.

“I’m sorry if I offended you,” the Rehydrator said. “I’m a bit profligate with the water, I guess. It’s just that my truck’s full of it.”

“Full?” Corey looked at the vehicle, never having guessed that so much could be kept in one place. He hadn’t looked inside. “But—but you must be rich. What’re you doing traveling around like a….”

“Like a bum, rich enough to waste water? You’re making me feel immoral, Corey. I’ll have to mend my ways, with your help. First, though, let’s see your uncle’s grave.”

They put Fritzy in the truck and set off walking through the sere, stump-ridden hills. The land around the town was mainly free of sand, thanks to the driftwalls and acres of matted grabgrass that surrounded it. Corey took a shortcut through a cactus orchard, keeping well away from the poisonous black spines that bounced around them as the heavy green arms bobbed in a hot, sterile wind. The moment the sun broke free of the horizon, the wind filled with sand, dust, and thistles. They bent forward into it, Corey covering his face with the dust veil clipped to his collar, the Rehydrator pulling on his white mask of plastic mesh. The sky was orange as a needle held in a flame, and growing whiter every minute. The Rehydrator lagged behind, stumbling and coughing even though the wind died down slightly. Finally he came to a complete stop, crouching with his head between his knees.

“You bring any water?” Corey asked.

The man shook his head.

“That’s stu—not too smart. You better have some of mine.” He unclipped the tube from his pisspores, happy to see that the suit had inflated after last night’s deep drink. The Rehydrator took the tube between his lips, sipped, and pushed it away with a gagging sound. “What—what’s wrong with it?” he choked.

Corey sipped experimentally. “Tastes fine to me. You be all right?”

“How much farther?”

“About a half mile, I guess.”

The Rehydrator got to his feet, readjusted his Mylar cap, and peered down the trail—such as it was. “Is that water up ahead?”

Corey laughed. “That’s the lake.”

“It is! It’s a lake!”

The Rehydrator’s enthusiasm boosted him forward. The lake was clear near its edges, almost the same shade of white as the sky, but it darkened toward the depths, and in the center was a deep orange color, like liquid rust. It seemed to waver vaporously in the heat, causing the dunes on the far shore to ripple and shimmer. Corey stopped on the beach, well back from the little dust-speckled mercury wavelets the wind stirred up, but the Rehydrator rushed ahead, taking long strides.

Corey screamed at him. He was going in!

He caught the man from behind and hauled him back, upsetting both of them so they landed in a tumble on the cracked banks.

“What’s wrong?” the Rehydrator asked. “I was just going to cool my feet.”

“There’s a good reason they call it Gas Lake, mister—though it’s not gasoline exactly. Used to be a factory over the hill—same old plant that made the Orlick fortune. They dumped stuff here, some kind of toxic liquid. If it were water, it would’ve evaporated years ago, but it doesn’t. It just sits there shimmering. My dad told me it’s a vapor with high surface tension—not even the wind can disperse it. You can’t smell fumes unless you’re right on the surface—which is good, because it’s supposed to be pretty flammable.”

“My God,” the Rehydrator said, shaking his head in confusion. “I almost walked into it. I’m going to listen to you more carefully from now on, Corey.”

“I’m surprised you’ve gotten along without me this long, mister. No pisspores, wasting your pee. Living with all that water has made you careless.”

The Rehydrator didn’t seem to hear him. His tongue looked white and swollen, his eyes glazed over.

“Oh no,” Corey said. “Get up, can you? Come on, lean on me. It’s not far.”

They stumbled along the edge of the lake, then cut back into the hills. Ahead Corey saw the reassuring branches of the big plastic oak, offering little at this hour but the promise of shade to come. He practically had to drag the Rehydrator up the hill and sit him on the western side of the trunk, the coolest spot. He shoved his tube back in the man’s mouth, this time to no complaint. He felt his pisspores deflating as the Rehydrator sucked and sucked.

“O.K., that’s enough.” Corey pushed him away. “You’re gonna owe me a refill when we get back to your truck.”

The Rehydrator mumbled his assent. Corey crouched and watched him, wondering at the tenderness of his pale skin, as if he had spent more time than was natural inside that truck of his and never built up a tan. Even living mainly at night, it was impossible for most people to avoid getting baked and burned by the sun. Water must have allowed this man some incredible luxuries.

Suddenly Corey heard voices and footsteps coming up the road past the hill. He crouched down behind his uncle’s gravestone as Marlys Runyon and Medford Bannister came into sight.

“Where’d they go?” Medford said.

“Keep your voice down,” Marlys scolded. “They’re probably at the gate.”

Corey tapped the Rehydrator till his blurry eyes opened, and put a finger to his lips for silence. “Can you move yet?”

“I’ll try,” the man whispered.

Corey led him over the crown of the hill, through thickets of sage and artemisia, between waving stalks of parched mullein, avoiding a cactus patch whose location he’d learned from painful experience. They finally came out at a point where the trail ended at a shorn-off side of the hill. Marlys and Medford had just reached an equivalent point on the road below.

“See?” Medford said. “No sign of them.”

At that moment the Rehydrator stumbled on the crumbly earth, falling into drought scrub that crackled like applause. Corey swore and forced himself to stand up.

“What’re you doing here?” he demanded, trying to take the offensive.

“I should ask you the same thing,” Bannister said.

“He’s trying to break into the tomb,” Marlys said. “It’s obvious.”

“I have every right to be here,” Corey said.

“And I as well,” said Bannister. “In fact, I was just coming out to perform my custodial service.”

“What a coincidence,” said Corey. “Then we can all check together to make sure that Uncle Galvin’s O.K.”

“Lucky timing,” said the Rehydrator, finally getting to his feet.

“What’s he doing here?” Marlys said.

“I asked him along,” Corey said. “He’s gonna prove my uncle’s alive—prove it once and for all.”

Medford scowled. “I’m not empowered to allow strangers in the vault.”

“You were bringing in Marlys,” Corey said. “I can bring my friend in if I want.” He grabbed the Rehydrator’s elbow. “Come on; it’s tricky footing.”

They made their way down carefully to level ground.

“Don’t be stupid, Corey,” Marlys said when he was near her. “That guy’s a stage magician—he’s using you.”

“You know all about using people, don’t you?” Corey said.

“Why, you little—”

Medford took hold of her arm, twisting it slightly. “Now, now.”

She wrenched herself away from him, furious.

“I don’t believe we’ve been introduced,” Medford said. “I’m—”

“That’s Medford Bannister, the one I told you about,” Corey said. “He’s a snake, and Marlys Runyon—she’s something worse.”

“I know you have a poor opinion of me, Corey,” the lawyer said. “But you’re going to have to grow up and see how the world works. You can’t blame me for your uncle’s oversight in not providing for you. I know you feel slighted, but—”

“Who cares what he thinks?” Marlys said. She walked up to the side of the hill and gave it a hard kick. The metal door made a booming sound.

“That’s right,” Corey said. “It doesn’t matter. But you’d better open that door and show me my uncle.”

Medford smiled and took a magnetic key from his robes. He pressed it against the lock panel, twisted, and, with a whirring sound, the gate swung inward. A breath of air cool as midnight wafted out of a corridor big enough for all of them to walk abreast. Sunken lights switched on as they entered, and a soft pinging sound followed them down a ramp, like an alarm signaling their presence to the sleeper within.

The casket sat in the center of a round, domed chamber. Corey hadn’t been here since he was a boy, but there wasn’t much to forget. Four square pillars stood at the points of the compass around the casket, each bearing various indicators and controls. The container itself was tear-shaped, with a curved, mirror-silver lid that warped their reflections as they passed between the columns. As Corey reached out to touch the surface, he saw greasy streaks disturbing the pristine silver, the stains of hands, and something in his heart clenched up.

“Open it,” he said.

“There’s no call for that,” Bannister said.

“Open it, I said! Someone’s been here!”

Bannister pursed his lips, adjusted his spectacles, then bowed slightly in acquiescence. He worked some combination of controls on each of the pillars, and a hissing sound emanated from the casket. Slowly, the lid lifted. Corey stared into the receptacle in disbelief, although his suspicions had been confirmed.

“He’s gone,” he whispered, an unnecessary but irresistible (and accurate) description of what everyone could plainly see.

“My God,” said Medford Bannister.

“How about that,” offered Marlys Runyon.

“That’s what woke me,” the Rehydrator mumbled, but Corey hardly heard him.

“What did you do with my uncle?” he screamed.

“Not a damn thing,” Bannister said, his composure slipping, his forehead beaded with sweat. “I—I don’t know how this could have happened. No one else has a key.”

“Someone could have made one—if you didn’t do it.”

“Calm down, Corey,” the Rehydrator said. “Maybe he’s around here someplace.”

“If he’s anywhere, he’s in Bannister’s safe.”

“My God, what would I stand to profit from absconding with my own client? This only complicates things.”

“Oh yeah? As much as if you’d left him here for the Rehydrator to revive? You’d do anything to avoid that. And now you have.”

Corey spun away from them, plunging toward the disk of daylight at the end of the tunnel. The Rehydrator called his name, but Corey kept going. He had to find his uncle’s body, even if it was an impossible task; he couldn’t rest until he’d convinced himself it was impossible. Galvin might be anywhere—in someone’s cellar, buried in the dunes, tossed in the ocean or the lake… anywhere!

He knew he wasn’t being rational, heading off on a search by himself, but he couldn’t stop now. He had to do something.

Outside, blinded, he nearly plowed into a saguaro cactus. He would call Larry Wing, his dad’s old friend. Larry was always offering his help.

As he remembered the Rehydrator, he felt bad for a moment. How could he leave someone so vulnerable at the mercy of Medford Bannister and Marlys Runyon?

Well, it was a tough place, Gas Lake. The guy would just have to fend for himself.

“That’s what woke me….” Now, what the hell did that mean?

Marlys turned away from the tunnel where Corey had vanished, and glared at the Rehydrator. “Look at you standing there, watching everything. You’re the cause of all this, I hope you know.”

“Now, Marlys, calm down,” Bannister counseled.

“What’s he doing here anyway?”

“I don’t believe I have anything to contribute at the moment,” the Rehydrator said. “Not with the body gone. I suppose you should tell the sheriff.”

“Lorna?” she laughed. “She couldn’t find dust on Earl Taws’s shelves.”

“He’s right, though,” Medford said. We have to report this.”

“Maybe if I had a description, I could help look for him,” the Rehydrator said.

Marlys’s laughter echoed in the close chamber. “He looked like that old dog of yours before you soaked it. But with one less leg.”

“Come on,” Bannister said. Well leave everything as it is.”

They filed out of the chamber. The Rehydrator lingered at the threshold, reluctant to reenter the blazing world that looked even hotter now than it had when they went underground. But he trudged along behind them toward town, letting them pull ahead, too hot to keep pace. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, his nose began to run. When he wiped it, a streak of blood gleamed on the back of his hand.

Dizzy. The other two looked far away. He called out weakly, his nose now so full of blood that he felt he was drowning in it. Marlys glanced back briefly, and must have seen him with blood running down his face, but she only smiled and slipped her arm through Bannister’s, and moved off even faster.

Help, he whispered.

Then the sun hit him like a hammer, knocking him flat in the middle of the road.

He dreamed he was back in the cool, dark chamber—not in Orlick’s chamber, but in his own. It was a long dream, a dry dream, a drought dream—but at the end of it was water, glorious, burning water, filling his cells, pouring in his face, till he woke up swimming in it.

He woke in the dream only, reliving his memories of waking in the cool, secret vault that was the twin of Galvin Orlick’s. He remembered the dark cell, the lights coming on slowly around him, the lid rising as he sat up in a pool of foaming, vaporous liquid like a man who’d fallen asleep in his bath and slept for twenty years.

Thirst had been his initial sensation. Thirst and a maddening confusion—amnesia. He had found a huge cache of water jugs and drank till he was sick, but he didn’t find memories. In an adjacent chamber, he found the truck, and wondered at its purpose. He found messages that had been left for him to read when he awoke—notes reminding him of an obligation he must fulfill in exchange for his long, cool sleep. Obligations to a man named Galvin Orlick. The name meant nothing to him.

“If you’re awake, there are only a few reasons why,” read one message written in glowing letters that scrolled across a little screen at the foot of the vacuum-sealed bed where he had slept:

The first possibility is that the drought has ended, in which case you are under no obligation to me. Go your way in the new green world. Another possibility is that my rest has been prematurely disturbed. In this case, you must investigate my current condition, awakening me if necessary, according to the instructions and chemicals you will find in the truck. It is also possible that you will be awakened if my financial conditions erode below a certain level, in which case I must ask you to check on my affairs, again reviving me if necessary to put them in order. Do not attempt to resolve them yourself. I am certain you will not shirk these small duties, remembering the weight of your obligations to me, the vows you swore, and the anxiety with which you took your leave from present affairs. Trusting you, I am—Galvin O. Orlick.

Examining various instruments in the chamber, he discovered that the drought showed no sign of ending. He learned that he had slept for twenty years. Maps showed him his present location, and that of Galvin Orlick. He carefully read the instructions for practicing revival on Fritzy, who slept in a tinier version of the tear-shaped casket, but he decided to delay this experiment until he might get the most from it. He also found a gun.

Many more things were left unclear, however, his name but one of them. He could not uncover the cause of his “obligation.” Apparently it had been squeezed from his brain along with the original waters, and had not returned when his cells were drenched afresh.

Why not simply walk away from his obligation? What could he possibly owe a man he had not seen in twenty years?

The answer lay in his realization that after twenty years he would be utterly alone in the world—alone except for that other. If he did revive Orlick, then he might learn his identity and the nature of the debt he had awoken to discharge. Ultimately that was what drove him out into the hot, dry world. What other purpose did his life have except the one hinted at in all these notes?

He had loaded the truck with water, leaving most of it untouched in the cache. Then he had opened a secret gate into a sere, weedy wilderness, and driven up into it. The truck was solar-powered, and there was no dearth of sunlight to drive it. That first day the heat had nearly killed him. He left the chamber just after dawn, and within a few hours he had stopped a dozen times to drink and cool down. Even the shade was like an oven. The glint of heatlight on the glass dazzled and dizzied him. Finally he had passed out in the driver’s seat, crashing the truck into a clump of brush. That was when he fell on Fritzy and broke off the dachshund’s leg. He had lain there in a faint until sunset, dreaming feverishly of his cool bedchamber, dark dreams, dreaming almost of the lifetime twenty years behind him….

And now these dreams abandoned him again, and he rose once more in a dark place to the touch of water. A cool cloth rough as a cat’s tongue licked his brow.

He opened his eyes and saw the sheriff bending over him. She smiled. “That better?”

“Where am I?”

“My office.”

“It’s—it’s so cool.”

“Rank has privileges.”

She stopped stroking him. He realized she had laid wet pads all over his face. He peeled one off and found that it was green and oozy, a strip of succulent.

“Borrowed these from the steak house next door,” she said.

“I fainted.”

“In the road. Good thing I went back to check on Orlick’s grave. You were breathing dust. Another hour out there, and you’d have been a crispy critter. Dehydration would have killed you.”

“Thank you,” he said. He touched one of the steaks to his tongue and sucked on it, drinking the green juices. It tasted salty from his skin.

“Can I ask you a personal question?” she asked, sitting down in a spring-backed chair. Her metal desk was covered with plastic printouts and carved wooden animals—antiques.

He sat up and found that he’d been sprawled on a couch. “Sure,” he said.

“Why don’t you have a pair of pisspores on? We checked your truck and didn’t find any—oh, I gave Fritzy some water while we were there. Did someone steal ’em while you were lying in the road?”

He swung slowly forward. “No, Sheriff. You won’t find any. I didn’t have any to steal.”

“That looks pretty suspicious, you know. I also got a look at how much water you carry. That’s a dangerous load, you realize, don’t you? Most people would build a fortress around a supply like that. I found a gun, too. Not a dart gun, but the real old type, using gunpowder and bullets—the kind that strike sparks and’ve been illegal for years because of it.”

“You must have looked pretty carefully.”

“Fritzy seemed hungry. I gave him some kibble. Didn’t recognize the brand, though. It claimed to have meat and grain in it—not just cactus products. By then I was almost ready for that.”

He realized that he couldn’t bear her suspicion. The secrets he’d been hiding weren’t even his to hide—they belonged to a man he couldn’t remember meeting. It looked as if that man might never be found. If Galvin disappeared or proved incapable of being revived, the Rehydrator would be alone in this place—an alien. It was time to start taking responsibility for his own destiny. He needed people. Needed friends. Corey was one, and maybe now the sheriff could be one as well—if he trusted her.

All right, he thought. I’m telling her.

“Sheriff,” he said, “I don’t have a pair of pisspores for a stranger reason than you’d ever think. There’re plenty of other ways I’m not equipped or suited for this place—this drought.”

“Exactly how have you been getting along, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“The truth is, I haven’t been getting along at all.”

He told her everything.

Lawrence Wing, Esq., listened closely to Corey, punctuating the narrative with various noncommittal sounds. Even when Corey had finished and Wing started giving his advice, it was hard to tell what the lawyer personally thought and what he merely recommended in his professional capacity.

“You know, I’ve defended Galvin for nearly ten years now without any real input from your father, rest his soul, or you, Corey. Galvin never asked for my help, you know. He thought he’d get a better bargain from Bannister, and maybe he did, for a while. But that was Bannister Senior. If he’d looked twice at Junior, he might have worried a little bit. Medford never showed signs of following in his father’s footsteps. He was a troublemaker, a lot like Marlys Runyon, though with plenty of family money to give him a gloss of respectability, and a good education to sharpen his cunning. Marlys never had those opportunities. She’s crude but effective.”

“I know. She used my father,” Corey spat.

“I was aware something went on there, though the details—well, I never thought it was my business.”

“After my mother died, he wasn’t in his right mind—”

“Who would be?”

“—and she started coming around, pretending she wanted to help us out, saying we needed a woman’s touch around the place, though the touch she had in mind was a different one. She was looking to see what access my dad had to Galvin’s money. Soon as she realized Bannister held all the strings, she dumped him hard—even tried seducing me just to shame us both. It helped kill him, all that misery heaped so high.”

Wing regarded him soberly, lips pursed. “I don’t want to add to your own misery, Corey, but there may have been more going on there than you guessed. Marlys and Medford were partners since before you were born. She was probably on a fishing trip for Medford’s sake when she tried to get close to your daddy, see if old Galvin had left any loose ends hid from his lawyer.”

“You mean the whole time she was living with us, she was really working for Bannister?”

Wing nodded slowly. “Guess I knew more about that situation than I realized. I’m sorry we never talked before, Corey. I hope we’ll keep in contact from now on.”

Corey jumped to his feet. “Well, why even wonder who stole Uncle Galvin? It’s obvious they did it! They snatched him away so he couldn’t wake up—and now there’s not even a body for you all to argue over whether it’s alive or not. They’ll take everything!”

Suddenly he’d had all he could take. He collapsed in a plush, overstuffed chair and sobbed into his open hands.

“There now, son. You’re not helpless. I’ve been fighting them with the law all these years because that’s my way, and because I felt I owed it to Galvin even if he was too proud and penny-pinching to ask for my help in the first place. See what it cost him in the end, that infamous thrift?”

“I—I can’t pay anything either, sir.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, son. The point is, there’s no way for me to move quickly on this one. I’m all mired down in law; it’s the only swamp the drought couldn’t touch. For every move I make, Medford sees me coming a mile off and has all the time he needs to plan a countermove. Meanwhile, he could ship that body out of here or burn it in a bonfire for all I know.”

“Well… I’m not a lawyer. I’m not bogged down.”

“Exactly why I’m telling you all this, in a cautious, advisory sort of way. Maybe there’re things you can do that I can’t even counsel you about, because if I did, I might be telling you things that go against my professional ethics—not that there aren’t plenty of my peers who have no qualms about going out and doing such things themselves.”

Corey leaned eagerly over the desk. “And you can’t suggest anything? Anything at all? Are you sure?”

Wing yawned hugely. “My, my, look at the time. It’ll be noon soon. I should be in bed.”

“Please,” Corey said.

The lawyer winked. “I’ll bet Bannister’s in bed, too, and Marlys with him.”

“But I can’t get near his place. It’s booby-trapped.”

“And you wouldn’t catch him red-handed anyhow. He’s too smart for that. What you want to do is check out his possible stashes—and Marlys’s. Now, I know there’re no alarms around old man Runyon’s place….”

The sheriff came for him at sunset, knocking lightly on the side of the truck until he woke. Fritzy scampered down the steps and started nuzzling at a pocket in her uniform.

“You’ve got something he wants,” the Rehydrator said.

She pulled a dried lizard from the pocket and let it dangle just over Fritzy’s nose.

“I see. Come on in. Help yourself to some water.”

She climbed in and sat on a folding stool, and covered her cup with a hand when it was half-full. “Too much at once, and my pisspores start sloshing. Thanks.”

He gulped two cups in straight succession, trying to purge the dust that seemed to have gathered behind his molars; he poured a bit more into his hands and ran them through his hair until he noticed her wincing. Feeling like a fool, he let them drop to his sides, wondering if it would be more polite to lick them dry. Would he ever be comfortable here?

“I don’t suppose you remember anything else about yourself?” she asked. “Anything that might’ve come back to you in a dream?”

“No more than when I first woke,” he said. “I feel like a robot or something, with a few programs missing. I mean, I speak the language, I know some of the routines, but I have no past. I guess those tissue samples you took didn’t turn up anything?”

“Nothing yet. It’ll take a few days to follow up all the possible records. You’ve been away twenty years, so chances are whatever’s still on file is archived pretty deep. If nothing turns up, then I’d say old Galvin Orlick went to some pains to erase you before he wrung you out.”

“Maybe… maybe I wanted that. Maybe someone was following me, and that was the only way I could think to escape.”

“Or maybe you’re a robot, like you said. But I don’t think so.” She tapped him lightly on his chest. “I heard a heartbeat in there yesterday. And you’re not the fugitive type.”

“Sheriff…”

“Why don’t you call me Lorna?”

“Lorna, all right. I wish there were something you could call me. ‘Rehydrator’ sounds like a spare part—which is appropriate. A spare part for something they don’t make anymore. I’m obsolete.”

“No. You just don’t know where you fit in yet. Why don’t we give you a name? You came here with all this water—you know, something like that. Waterman. Water. Walter?”

“Walter,” he repeated, meeting her eyes. “Thank you, Lorna. You’re so nice to me. There’s nobody… nobody close to you around here? You’re not married or anything?”

She shook her head. “Gas Lake’s a small town, and I’m not from around here. I sort of got into law enforcement through a civil service fluke—turned out I was pretty good at it. But the people here won’t exactly open up to me—they keep their distance. You know. They all have secrets I’ll probably never know.”

He put his hands on hers. “I’m from out of town, too.”

“Farther than that. Looking in your eyes, it’s like looking down a tunnel into the past.”

He let her gaze into that tunnel for a moment, wishing he could see what she saw. Maybe she could find answers to his questions in there.

Suddenly Fritzy started howling.

“Sheriff!” A man’s voice, nearby. “Sheriff?”

“My deputy,” she said. She went to the canvas and peeked out. “What is it, Skelton?”

“Edgar Runyon’s looking for you. Claims he caught Corey Orlick trespassing on his property. He wants us to come out and arrest the kid.”

“All right, I’m coming.”

She turned back to him, absently slapping the horny toad into her open palm. “Damn that boy. You know what he was after, don’t you?”

“His uncle.”

She nodded. “Still, it saves me the trouble of coming up with a better excuse for poking around out there. You’re welcome to come. It’s cooled down quite a bit.”

“Be right with you.”

When she was outside, he pulled on his sandals, took another swallow of water, and pulled out the gun—the “antique” Lorna had found when she searched the truck. As with an unpredictable number of other things, he remembered how it worked. Illegal, she’d said. But he felt like he needed something for himself now. Not knowing his identity, how would he recognize his enemies? The strap fit snug around his ankle.

They found Corey strapped to a chair in an earthen-walled cellar; the only light came from a dim shake-lamp hanging from a hook above the entry. He’d been bound so tightly that his hands were bloodless white. His face was red from trying to shout through his gag.

“Get him out of that chair, Edgar,” Lorna said.

“Don’t want him slipping away, Sherf,” said the hunched, wheezing old man who had led them down the steep dirt steps.

“Right now, or I’ll arrest you for human-rights violation. That’s sheer torture.”

The old man produced a knife and sliced through the clear plastic straps. Lorna undid the gag.

“I didn’t do nothing!” Corey spat. “Old geezer—I was just cutting through his property, that’s all.”

“Stealing prickly pears, he was!” old Runyon said. “I’ll beat the crap out of him if I see him round here again.

“Out,” Lorna said to Edgar. “Now.”

He grumbled, but retreated up the steps. The Rehydrator crouched down and helped work the blood back into Corey’s cold fingers. The boy gasped at the pain.

“Not too smart, Corey,” Lorna said. “I thought you had more sense.”

“I—I wasn’t stealing prickly pears.”

“I know. You were looking for Galvin.”

Corey started to protest, but he didn’t have the heart. His head sank forward, and he spoke in a lower tone. “I had to, Sheriff. He’s my uncle; he’s all I have left in the world—that’s what nobody seems to realize.”

“We understand, Corey, but you can’t go breaking into people’s privacy.”

“But if you ask to come in, they’ll just hide whatever they’ve got to hide!”

“Well, that’s their right. But the truth’ll come out, Corey; you have to believe that.”

“Why should I?”

“I know it’s frustrating, but… but did you see anything?”

He shook his head. “No. He grabbed me too fast. There was a big burlap sack of yucca roots in the corner over there, but he hauled them away.”

“Hm. I’ll just ask him about that sack. Make him think he’s under suspicion. See what we stir up.”

They came up out of the hard-baked earth and stood under the stars. Edgar Runyon was waiting for them with a shake-lamp fading in his hands. He shook it vigorously when they appeared, squeezing out the last bit of light. “They’re putting you away for a long time, boy!”

“Edgar,” Lorna said, “what’ve you been keeping in that cellar?”

“What business is it of yours?”

“I’m conducting a search of the neighborhood. I could come back with papers, if you like, and extend the search to the rest of your property.”

He looked around nervously, scuttling from foot to foot. “It’s a root cellar, Sherf. I keep roots down there when I have them.”

“Corey says he saw a bundle down there—something about as big as a man wrapped in burlap, which you dragged off.”

“That was yucca root, Sherf! I didn’t want him messing with it.”

“What could he have done, bound and gagged like that? Mind showing me the sack, Edgar?”

He didn’t answer for a moment.

“Edgar?”

“All right, all right.” Still grumbling, he walked away until he reached another flight of steps carved in the sun-pounded earth. When his head had vanished below the surface, Lorna started swinging her high-power flashlight over the Runyon place, picking out entrances to more burrows, mounds of rusting junk, the glinting mesh of plastic fencing, and beyond all that the rows of Runyon’s cactus crops, looming black giants with wicked, spiny arms.

“He is nervous about something,” she said. “But I don’t think it’s here.”

Edgar reappeared a moment later, dragging a huge sack. “Here you go.” He tossed it down at her feet.

Lorna scarcely glanced at it. “Thanks, Edgar. I shouldn’t have bothered you. We’ll be taking off now.”

“Well, you’re very welcome!” he shouted as they strode out the front gate onto the road. “You’d think I was the goddamn thief!”

Deputy Skelton was waiting for them on the road, at the wheel of the sheriff’s buggy. “Why don’t you stay here?” Lorna said. “Keep an eye on Edgar tonight. If he goes anywhere, I want to know.”

“How’ll you get back to town?” he asked.

“We’ll walk. It’s a nice night for it.”

They didn’t speak much on the way back. Near Town Hall, Lorna repeated her admonitions to Corey and said good night to Walter.

“Walter?” Corey said.

“That’s my name.”

“I was wondering.”

Corey and Walter walked on. Earl Taws waved from the front of the Miscellany Market, where he was out dusting the feather headdress of his wooden Indian. “My offer still stands on that dog of yours, sir! If he ever dries up again, that is.”

“He’s not mine to sell,” Walter replied. “Thanks anyway.”

A moment later they passed the Succulent Steak, and Corey ducked into the restaurant. Walter heard a man’s voice raised briefly in anger “Late again!”

He walked on alone. As he neared his truck, a shadow stepped out from behind it. A woman.

“That your dog in there?” she asked. “He sounds kind of sick.”

Walter ran up the steps, hearing a soft whimpering that was even now getting softer. He threw back the canvas flap and saw Fritzy.

Poor Fritzy. The dachshund lay on his side, squirming slowly, creaking with a sound like two pieces of wood rubbed together. His black eyes were dull. The lids closed partially and didn’t open again. The tongue was white and dry, receding into the mouth, and the pale gums were lusterless, lacking saliva. He patted the animal, horrified at the feeling—as if he were stroking a piece of scruffy driftwood. Even as he touched him, Fritzy stiffened and apparently died. The last appearance of moisture—the tears in Fritzy’s eyes—quickly evaporated.

“I’ll be damned,” the woman said, having climbed in behind him. It was Marlys Runyon. “If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t believe it now. You really must have the power to revive things—the lungfish things.”

He fell heavily onto his cot, his mind numb with shock.

“Temporary,” he muttered. “Only temporary.” He found himself squeezing the fat of his wrists for signs of dehydration, for flesh that peaked when pinched like overbeaten egg white.

“Don’t take it so hard,” Marlys said, settling next to him and putting a hand on his shoulder. “That poor little thing already lived his natural life. You should be glad you could give him even a few more days.”

But he wasn’t thinking of Fritzy. He was thinking of himself as he repeated the words, “Only temporary.”

“If you’re so upset, why not throw on some more of your chemicals and juice him up again?”

“Yes.” It was the obvious thing to do, but obvious things weren’t occurring to him right now. At any moment he himself might start to dehydrate, might go stiff and wooden like Fritzy—and who would be able to restore him?

He pulled the plastic tub out from under the cot; the black valise sat in it, along with the white plastic mask.

“Let me give you a hand,” Marlys said. She reached into the bag and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. “Are these the instructions?”

He nodded, his fingers trembling as he took various vials from the valise. “Maybe you could read them to me. I don’t want to make any mistakes.”

She flattened out the instructions while he placed Fritzy in the tub, and read them out to him as he uncapped bottles and poured their contents over Fritzy. She turned away coughing when the fumes rolled up, and went out beating the canvas curtain to clear the air. When she came in again, Fritzy was alive, shivering under Walter’s fingers, whimpering. The dachshund jumped down and shook all over; going to the water bowl, he lapped it dry.

“Thank you,” Walter finally said, when his own shaking had subsided. “I—I didn’t know that could happen.”

“Doesn’t bode too well for Galvin Orlick, I guess, if you ever do revive him.” She shook her head sympathetically. “I’m only glad I was here to help out. Really, I just came to be neighborly. I know I made a bad impression. Corey, you see, he’s kind of prejudiced against me on account of his father and I got pretty close after his mother died.”

Walter nodded. “Well, he’s just a kid. Could I get you anything? Some water?”

“Oh no, no thanks. I’ve got plenty.” She started to back out of the truck. “You look like you might want to be left alone.”

“Really, I—I don’t mind company. It’s just, I don’t know many people here.”

“Have you eaten? We’ve got a good restaurant in town, if you’d like to go over.”

“I’d like that,” he said, kneeling down to pet Fritzy’s damp coat. He did feel grateful for her help. And he had a reason to gain her trust, if he could. She had seen how to use the revival chemicals, and that might be important if… if he started to hear his own limbs creaking, if his own eyes dried out. Maybe he could teach Corey and Lorna the process, but in the meantime, Marlys was his only potential savior.

Corey couldn’t believe it when Walter the Rehydrator came in with Marlys Runyon. They took a corner table. He wanted to rush up and yell at her to get out, but he didn’t have the right. Walter seemed simple, but he must know better than to trust her; he must be trying to get information out of her, taking advantage of being a stranger to pretend he didn’t know her reputation. All the same, Corey wished he’d warned Walter about her in certain terms, because a guy who walked around without pisspores and relieved himself in sterile dust couldn’t be all that smart.

Walter smiled at Corey and waved, but then Mr. Bell called him back into the kitchen. Mr. Bell was in a bad mood, sending him here, sending him there. By the time he next got out of the kitchen, they were already gone. Walter had hardly touched his green fried agave patties.

He was packing scraps of rind into the condenser, when he heard loud voices up front, and suddenly Walter burst into the kitchen. “Corey!”

“What is it? What happened?”

Mr. Bell pushed through the swinging door, glowering at them.

“Mr. Bell, can I—”

“You cannot. You came in late, and you’re not half through your shift.”

“Law says I still get a lunch break.”

“I saw you back here wolfing down prickly pears. If that doesn’t count, then—”

“I gotta help my friend.”

“Help him on your own time.”

“I am. I just quit.” Mr. Bell gaped at Corey as he grabbed Walter’s hand and hauled him back into the night. “It’s Marlys, isn’t it? I should’ve warned you away from her. I thought I had.”

“But she’s been with me the whole time.”

“What whole time?”

“While we were eating, someone broke into my truck and stole a bunch of water jugs.”

“The fact Marlys was with you makes it even more likely it was her doing. She just kept you distracted while her friends went about robbing you.”

“She said she—she didn’t need water.”

“Everybody needs it, Walter. She gets all she can drink from Bannister, who’s been sucking it out of my Uncle Orlick’s private reserve. But even Bannister’ll take more if he can get it.”

“Then it could have been anyone, if you’re all so damn thirsty.”

“Could have, but I know Marlys. She’s had you staked out since you first rolled into town, and no one else would dare get in her way. Except maybe me.”

They ran to the sheriff’s office in Town Hall. The office was empty, but Corey heard voices in the holding cells in back, and the door was ajar. He peered in and saw Deputy Skelton gazing into a cell where some red-faced old geezer was yelling for his lawyer.

“Is the sheriff here?” Corey asked.

Skelton strolled toward him, smiling, and shut the door behind him. “Mescal bum—out-of-towner. He doesn’t need a lawyer; he just needs to sleep it off.”

“Where is Lorna?” Walter asked.

“She’s in the field. What seems to be the matter?”

“Someone broke into my truck and stole some water.”

The deputy looked angry. “Now, who’d do a thing like that? Come on. I’ll have you fill out a report.”

“We know who did it,” Corey said. “Marlys set him up. Hey, why aren’t you still out there watching Edgar?”

Skelton puffed up with anger. “Are you my boss, kid?”

“We’ll fill out that report later,” Walter said, taking Corey by the arm before he could answer. “See you, Deputy.”

Out in the hall, Walter said, “Where does Lawrence Wing keep his office?”

“Good idea. He’s right upstairs.”

Wing was in his office, looking consternated. His face darkened further when Corey and Walter appeared. “Corey, I’ve got some troubling news. Fortunately there’s an order in place regarding information sharing, or I’d never learn a thing.”

“What is it?”

“According to the control devices in your uncle’s tomb, he wasn’t stolen from his container—he was actively revived. Whether it was a malfunction or the result of tampering, I have no way of knowing right now.”

“Revived? You mean he—he’s alive?”

“I mean he must’ve gotten up confused and walked right out of there himself, several days ago.”

Corey felt as if he’d been hit on the head. “Walked? Then he’s out there someplace!”

“My God.” Walter turned even paler than usual. “I know what it was like for me out there, with plenty of water. Can he still be alive?”

“Out in the dunes, wandering around with no water? There’s no way… no way.”

Corey’s throat choked up. Walter put a hand on his shoulder.

“Sheriff should know about this,” the lawyer said.

“Deputy Skelton wouldn’t tell us where she is,” Walter said.

“I can radio her direct.” Wing went into another room.

“Corey,” Walter said, “I want you to come with me before this search gets going. I want to teach you the lungfish remedy.”

“Me?”

“I need someone trustworthy to learn it. You see, I’m afraid I—I might dry out myself.”

Corey felt a double pang of grief. “You? You mean—”

Walter nodded. “Fritzy and I were dehydrated together by your uncle. I was revived only a few days ago, to come and help Galvin. And I won’t have a chance to do that unless I can stay wet. Why don’t you come with me and try to keep your hopes up, and I’ll tell you everything I know. Maybe Galvin found a cool hole to lie in. Maybe he’s got extra water with him. You never know.”

“You don’t have to cheer me, Walter. I never knew him anyway. If he really is dead, I won’t even know what I lost. I think I might just be glad to have all this trouble behind me. If he’s dead, I’d just like to know, so I can get on with my own life.”

Walter patted his shoulder. “Don’t be so gloomy, Corey. Come on.”

But when they reached the truck, the valise full of chemicals was missing. He hadn’t noticed earlier, thanks to the strewn water bottles and other damage the thief had caused.

“What’s wrong now?” Corey asked.

“I feel pretty stupid. She really duped me good.”

“Marlys? I told you she’d do anything for water.”

“That’s not all she got. Come on; we’d better hurry.”

“Where?”

“Just come on.”

They hurried down Main Street, and as they passed the Miscellany Market, he noticed a stray feather lying in the street under a lamp. The wooden Indian was gone, and so was Earl Taws. A CLOSED sign hung on the front door, though it was not yet dawn and seemed too early to shut down.

At Town Hall they went straight to the sheriff’s office. This time it was completely deserted. Walter looked through the glass panel into the holding-cell area, but Skelton was nowhere to be seen, and all the cells were empty now.

Out in the hall, they passed Lawrence Wing hurrying down the stairs. “I got word to Lorna,” he said. “She’ll meet us out at your uncle’s burial mound. We can take my buggy.”

Two minutes later they drove up from a parking garage into the predawn light. The sky was licorice-colored in the west, but to the east the stars were fading before a rosy front. Wing sped out of town, driving indiscriminately over sage and cactus patches, ignoring the roads. Walter held on for his life, trying to spot familiar landmarks in the paling world.

“Where’s the lake?” he asked Corey.

“Over there,” Corey said, pointing off to the right. “But in the buggy you don’t have to worry about thistles and sand, so it’s faster to cut around through the hills.”

Walter leaned over to shout in Wing’s ear: “Cut over to the lake!”

“But Lorna’s at the tomb.”

“We’ll take the long way round to meet her. Just go past the lake.”

Wing cut sharply to the right. Minutes later Walter saw the flush of shimmering liquid ahead of them. The sky was a watercolor dream, and Gasoline Lake looked like the bowl in which some heavenly painter had rinsed those brushes. He remembered how he had nearly thrown himself in at first sight. Now looking at it, the thought was about as appealing as a swim in paint thinner.

Still, this was a thirsty, thirsty world, and the lake was the most likely lure for a thirsty man who didn’t know better.

Or rather, the most likely place for such a man to be found.

Walter didn’t believe that Galvin Orlick had been traveling under his own power.

He was remembering, from some past existence, that wooden Indians didn’t wear real feathers.

“Stop here,” he shouted just before they got down to the beach. “Let it coast—we need silence.”

The lawyer cut the motor, and they glided out onto the strand, plaques of parched mud snapping under the tires. By the pale orange light, he scanned the beach from shore to shore. Suddenly Corey’s arm swung up. “There.”

A cluster of dark specks were massed on the far shore, below the brink of a dune that glowed like a mound of orange sherbet. Walter’s mouth watered at the memory. “Go!”

The motor kicked on, and they swung around the lake. He kept his eyes fixed on the specks as they drew closer, resolving into figures, some vaguely recognizable. Suddenly the people started to scatter. There were more than he’d thought at first, more than he would have believed. As the buggy took the curve of the shore, he saw another coming around Gasoline Lake from the direction of the burial mound with its tall, lonely plastic oak.

“That’s the sheriff!” Corey said. “See, she’s cutting them off. Who are they?”

“The question is,” said Lawrence Wing, “who aren’t they?”

People scattered, trapped between the cars, but there really wasn’t anywhere for them to go. A few scrambled up the side of the dune, but that was fruitless, for as much progress as one made, another would set off an avalanche and bring them all back to the bottom again and again. Most of the others ran into the lake and stopped before they’d gotten very far, as if their skin was already burning; they looked dizzied by the fumes.

The buggies hemmed them in. Lawrence stopped and hopped out carrying a long, sleek weapon, something like a shotgun loaded with darts. “Don’t strike any sparks around here,” he cautioned Walter.

On the other side of the group, Lorna picked up a megaphone and ordered everyone to stay where they were, including those in the lake. Walter recognized Deputy Skelton, Norris Culp, Earl Taws, Edgar Runyon, and Corey’s boss, all out in the shining tide, all looking mortified at having been caught.

Walter and Corey walked to the water’s edge.

A man lay sprawled facedown on the baked mud, his fingers splayed, the collar and shoulders of his suit rumpled and torn by clutching fingers. His hair and shirt were soaking wet, shimmering with the vapors of Gasoline Lake. For a moment, Walter thought they were too late, that he was already dead—again or for the first time. Then his body spasmed weakly, and he started to cough.

They turned the man over. Walter pulled off his Mylar hat to shade the man’s red face. He’d seen him earlier that night, shouting for his lawyer in the holding cell. Apparently he’d gotten his wish. Medford Bannister stood just offshore, wearing a defiant expression, up to his ankles in Gasoline Lake.

“It’s him, isn’t it?” Lorna said, walking up to them.

“I don’t know,” Walter admitted.

But Corey was nodding. “Same as his pictures, it’s him. Uncle Galvin?”

The old man sputtered and opened his eyes. “That—that’s my name! I’ve been trying to remember! What the hell’s going on here? You here to help me, or you in with the rest of them?”

“I’m your nephew. I wouldn’t dream of hurting you. You’ve been asleep for twenty years.”

Galvin sat up. He didn’t look quite so old anymore, though he was obviously worn-out by what he’d been through in the past few hours.

“Twenty years? And the drought’s over? It sure doesn’t look like it’s over. Twenty years, and you woke me up for this? To be dragged around in the night and have my head stuck in turpentine? Jesus, my eyes burn like hell.”

Corey opened the spigot of his pisspores and let recycled water drain into his palms. He splashed it into Galvin’s eyes, without much apparent effect.

“Let’s get him back to town,” Lorna said. “Mr. Orlick, I’m the sheriff of Gas Lake. I’ve got some questions for you.”

“Sheriff? Where’s my damn lawyer?—that’s what I’d like to know.”

She lifted her gun to point at Medford Bannister, who smiled sheepishly and shrugged.

“Him? But he was the main one trying to drown me! All I remember is, I came awake in what I think was a jail cell, some woman pouring chemicals all over me, and the next thing, I’m hustled off here with everybody trying to kill me.”

Marlys, the Rehydrator thought. Marlys had stolen his chemicals and revived Galvin. He suddenly remembered what the sheriff had said once—that Marlys knew how to dehydrate things. She must have dried out Fritzy, in order to learn how to rehydrate him. The process didn’t reverse itself naturally after all. A sense of relief nearly flattened him.

Corey said, “They wanted to make it look like you woke up on your own and staggered over here for a drink and died in the lake. That way they could solve the problem of whether you were alive or not once and for all, and make it look like an accident—your own fault.”

“Galvin,” Lawrence Wing said, coming down to the water’s edge, “I think you’ll need another lawyer now.”

“Jesus Christ, Larry, is that you?” Galvin said. “You look like shit! How old are you?”

“Almost your age now, Galvin. You shouldn’t speak till you’ve looked in a mirror. Come on; we’ll give you a hand.”

Walter bent over to help them lift the old man, and as he did, he felt something brush his calf under his robes. He realized too late what it was.

“Drop the old buzzard,” said Medford Bannister. “Drop him, and then nobody move.”

They let Galvin down gently. Walter turned around and saw Bannister standing in the shallows with his old gun. It was pointed right at Lorna.

“Skelton,” he said, “get over there and take the sheriff’s gun.”

“I don’t know,” the deputy started to protest in a shamed, whining voice.

“Come on; they can’t outnumber us. We’ll take care of them and no one’ll ever know better. We all know how to keep a secret, don’t we?”

He grinned. The mass of townspeople out in the lake began moving slowly toward shore, confident now. Walter started to back off, but the gun in Medford’s hand swung toward him, the hammer cocked back to strike. He stopped where he was and put up his hands.

“I built this town,” Galvin Orlick growled.

“It belongs to me now,” Medford said.

Out of the corner of Walter’s eye, he saw Corey moving, hidden behind Lawrence Wing. The boy slowly took the lawyer’s gun and raised it with the barrel between Wing’s body and arm, nestled in his armpit. His finger trembled on the trigger, ready to fire, when someone on the lake spied him, and a shout of warning went out to Bannister.

Medford Bannister whirled and fired, and that was the last they saw of him.

As the hammer fell, it struck a spark. Not only the gunpowder charge, but the whole lake, exploded.

A roiling ball of flame licked up from the shores, boiling back into the heart of the lake, exploding inward and outward at the same time. The sound was beyond deafening; it was a solid impact to which every bone in Walter’s body responded like a tympanum. The force of the blast hurled him over the mud and into the dune, where he lay covered in sand until the heat of the burning lake subsided, and the heat of the sun took its place.

He wiped sand from his eyes and looked over the shore, marveling at the blackened bowl where the lake had lain.

Wisps of fire still clung to a sunken plain of what looked like charred and tarry melted rubber. The foul smoke was visibly clearing, but he felt as if the reek of burning might never leave his nostrils.

He saw a few more survivors likewise coming to their senses on the bank of sand. Lorna and Corey and Lawrence Wing lay tumbled about. A few other townsfolk lay staring in horror at the lake where their conspirators had perished.

Galvin Orlick stood up, stretched, and began cursing methodically. “My kind of town,” he said, and shook his head.

“There I lay,” Corey’s uncle said, with a wistfulness turned instantly bitter. “And not long enough by far.” He aimed a toe at one of the meters on his headstone. Liquid crystal spurted over his shoe. Galvin crouched and fondly patted Fritzy’s head. The dachshund seemed to remember him.

“Well, son, let’s get going. I’m not crazy about this place, and there’s a wind coming up.”

“A big one,” Corey agreed. “Gonna be shoveling sand tomorrow.”

Corey had use of a police buggy, now that the force consisted of Sheriff Lorna alone. She had offered to make him a deputy.

“I wish I could help that friend of yours,” Uncle Galvin confided as they drove back. The road wavered under waves of sand. “My own memories are as spotty as his, I’m afraid. Still, I’m glad to see I’ve got some money to help him out with his search. What about you, Corey? What are your plans? You going to stay around and help me rebuild Gas Lake?”

“I don’t know, Uncle Galvin. Are you sure you wouldn’t just like to junk the place and start over?”

Galvin shook his head. “I don’t know, son. I don’t know what to do. I don’t feel fully awake yet, and damn if these pisspores aren’t the most uncomfortable things I’ve ever worn. I’m having trouble concentrating on anything except how to keep them from chafing.”

“You’ll get calluses, Uncle; don’t worry. You’re not… not thinking of going back to sleep, are you?”

“Sleep? Are you nuts? The way I woke up, I’m afraid to so much as take a nap.”

Walter sat in Lorna’s office and watched the sunset through the double-paned windows. She came in after a few minutes, holding a folded-up piece of plastic computer printout. Her expression was pretty mixed.

“You’ve got something, don’t you?” he asked.

She nodded, biting her lip. “It’s an address in California. A place you used to get mail. I suppose you’ll be going there right away.”

He nodded, taking the plastic, but not yet looking at it. “Lorna, why stay on here? Gas Lake’s a ghost town now. Does it really need a sheriff?”

She smiled sadly, walked to the window, and stood there for a minute staring down at the empty streets filling with sand, at lights that wouldn’t come on tonight. Power was off everywhere, and it would stay off; none of the public utilities were operational because there was no one to operate them. The streets were filling with sand, buildings erased in the grainy wind, like a vision of what Gas Lake was soon to become.

“Lorna?”

He saw her fingers fumbling at her breast; they came away with her badge. She looked at it for a moment, then set it down on the windowsill. “When were you thinking of leaving?” she said.

When Marlys woke, the house was dark. She scrambled out of Medford’s bed and moved through the house, touching switches, shouting commands to the voice controls, but all to no effect. The power was out, and where was Medford? She had waited all day for news, figuring he was busy with the culmination of their plans. He hadn’t wanted her involved in the final action—everyone else must contribute, since they all expected a share of Galvin’s water, but Marlys had done enough. He was a cautious man, Medford. He left nothing to chance. She had to trust that he’d get back soon—before dawn, at least. What time was it, anyway?

She glanced at her watch, then stared at it.

The time was twelve noon.

She went to a window and opened the blinds, and saw nothing outside but darkness.

Solid darkness.

Leaning very close, she realized exactly how solid it was. Trillions of tiny grains pressed right up against the glass.

Marlys backed away with a scream barely held in her throat. Why hadn’t the blowers gone on? Because the power was out, she told herself. But why was the power out?

She hurried to the back door, punched for it to open, but none of the controls were working. She opened the panel for manual operation, and quickly spun the knobs.

The door opened inward, letting a sliding river of sand stream into the porch room. She tried to force it shut, but the sand kept pouring in, unstoppable. She backed out of there, closed the inner door, and went into the kitchen to try the phonescreen. It didn’t respond. Nothing responded.

She gnawed her baccorish three times faster than usual, as if it would help her to think. She had to stay calm. Panic was dangerous in a situation like this.

All right. She was buried. But Medford kept plenty of water and plenty of food in the cellar; she could survive a long time if she had to. With the case of revival chemicals, she could rehydrate Medford’s entire collection of horny toads and eat them fresh. Yes, if something had gone wrong and Medford didn’t come looking for her and the power never came on again, she could live under the dunes—possibly for years. And one day the wind would clear the sand away for just a moment. She would wake to find a thin light trickling through the windows, a hint of sunlight visible through the sand; ever vigilant for this opportunity, she would shatter the glass and climb to the surface and escape.

Someday all that might happen, yes. It was the best scenario she could imagine at the moment. There were plenty of worse ones.

She spat a mouthful of tobacco juice right on Medford’s polished real-wood floor. Let him come and wipe it up. She sucked up another few inches of tobacco, chewing furiously, and tried not to think about what might happen when she ran out of rope.

WUNDERKINDERGARTEN

Dabney spits his food when he’s had too much to think. Likki spins in circles till her pigtails stick out sideways from her blue face, and she starts choking and coughing and eventually swallows her tongue and passes out, falling over and hitting me and cracking the seals on my GeneKraft kit and letting chimerae out of ZZZ-level quarantine on to the bare linoleum floor! Nexter reads pornography, De Sade, Bataille, and Apollinaire his special favourites, and thumbs antique copies of Hustler which really is rather sweet when you consider that he’s light-years from puberty, and those women he gloats and drools over would be more than likely to coo over him and chuck his chin and maybe volunteer to push his stroller, though I’m exaggerating now (for effect) because all of us can walk quite well; and anyway, Nex is capable of a cute little boner, even if it is good for nothing except making the girls laugh. Well, except for me. I don’t laugh at that because it’s more or less involuntary, and the only really funny things to me are the things people do deliberately, like giving planarian shots to a bunch of babies for instance, as if the raw injection of a litre of old braintree sap can make us model citizens and great world leaders when we finally Come of Age. As you might have guessed by now, when I get a learning overload I have to write. It is my particular pornography, my spinning-around-and-passing-out, my food-spitting response to too much knowledge absorbed too fast; it is in effect a sort of pH-buffering liver in my brain. (I am informed by Dr Nightwake, who unfairly reads over my shoulder from time to time – always when, in my ecstatic haste, I have just made some minor error – that “pH in blood is buffered by kidneys, not liver”; which may be so, but then what was the real purpose behind those sinister and misleading experiments of last March involving the beakers full of minced, blended and boiled calf’s liver into which we introduced quantities of hydrochloric acid, while stirring the thick soup with litmus rods? In any event, I refuse to admit nasty diaper-drench kidneys into my skull; the liver is a nobler organ far more suited to simmering amid the steamy smell of buttery onions in my brain pan; oh well-named seat of my soul!) In short, writing is the only way I have of assimilating all this shit that means nothing to me otherwise, all the garbage that comes not from my shortshort life but from some old blender-brained geek whose experiential and neural myomolecular gnoso-procedural pathways have a wee bit of trouble jibing with my Master Plan.

I used to start talking right after an injection, when everyone else was sitting around addled and drowsily sipping warm milk from cartons and the aides were unfolding our luxurious padded mats for nap-time. The words would start pouring out of me in a froth, quite beyond my control, as significant to me as they were meaningless to the others; I was aware of a pleasant warmth growing in my jaws and pharynx, a certain dryness in the back of my throat, and a distant chatter like jungle birds in jungle boughs singing and flitting about through a long equatorial afternoon, ignoring the sound of chainsaws ripping to life in the humid depths at the rainforest floor. Rainforest, jungle, I haven’t seen either one, they no longer exist, but they shared certain descriptive characteristics and as far as I can tell, they could have been no more mighty than our own little practice garden just inside the compound walls, where slightly gene-altered juicy red Big-Boy radishes (my design, thank you very much) grow to depths of sixteen feet, their bulbous shoulders shoving up through the asphalt of the foursquare court, their bushy leaves fanning us gently and offering shade even to adults on those rare afternoons when the sun tops the walls of our institution and burns away enough of the phototropic haze to actually cast a shadow! And there I sat, dreaming that I was a parrot or a toucan or macaw, that my words were as harmonious as flights of birds – while in actuality the apparent beauty of my speech was purely subjective, and induced in my compatriots a mixed mood of irritation, hostility and spite. Eventually, though no one acted on their resentment (for of us all, I am the pugilist, and Likki has never disturbed my experiments without feeling the pummeling wrath of my vulcanized fists), it came to be quite apparent to our supervisors, who heard the same complaints in every post-injection counseling session, that the injections themselves were unobjectionable, the ensuing fluxflood a bit overwhelming but ultimately worthwhile (as if we had a choice or hand in the outcome of these experiments), and the warm milk pleasingly soporific; but that the one thing each of the other five dreaded and none could abide were my inevitable catachrestic diatribes. The counselors eventually mounted a campaign to confront me with this boorish behaviour, which at first I quite refused to credit. They took to amplifying my words and turning them back on me through earphones with slight distortion and echo effects, a technique which backfired because, given my intoxicated state, the increase in stimulus induced something like ecstasy, perhaps the closest thing I have yet experienced to match the ‘multiple orgasm’ descriptions of women many (or at least nine) years my senior, and to which I look forward with great anticipation, when I shall have found my ideal partner – as certainly a woman with my brains should be able to pick a mate of such transcendent mental and physical powers that our thoughts will resonate like two pendulum clocks synchronizing themselves by virtue of being mounted on the same wall, though what the wall represents in this metaphor I am still uncertain. I am also unsure of why I say ‘mate’ in the singular, when in fact I see no reason why I should not take many lovers of all sorts and species; I think Nexter would probably find in my erotic commonplace book (if I kept such a thing) pleasures more numinous and depraved than any recorded or imagined in Justine or The Story of the Eye. The counselors therefore made tapes of my monologues and played them back to me the day after my injection session, so that I might consider my words in a duller state of mind and so perceive how stupid and downright irritating my flighty speculations and giddy soul-barings truthfully were. Having heard them, I became so awkward and embarrassed that I could not open my mouth for weeks, even to speak to a mechanical dictascriber, and it was not until our main Monitor – the one who received distillate from The-Original-Dr-Twelves-Himself – suggested I study the ancient and academically approved art of writing (now appreciated only by theoreticians since the introduction of the dictascriber, much as simple multiplication and long division became lost arts when calculators grew so common and cheap) that I felt some of my modesty restored, and gradually grew capable once again of withstanding even high-dose injections and marathon sessions of forced-learning, with their staggered and staggering cycles of induced sleep and hypnagoguery, and teasing bouts of wakefulness that prove to be only lucid dreams, followed by long periods of dreaming that always turn out to be wakefulness. It was particularly these last that I needed full self-confidence to face, as during these intervals I am wont to undress in public and speak in tongues and organize archetypal feats of sexual gymnastics in which even Nexter fears to participate, though he always was the passive type and prefers his women in two dimensions, or in four – as is the case with those models who spring from literary seeds and caper full-blown in his imagination, where he commands them with nine dimensions of godlike power above and beyond those which his shadowy pornographic puppets can attain.

Therefore I write, and become four-dimensional in your mind, while maintaining absolute dominion in my own – at least until the next injection, when once more I’ll be forced into a desperate skirmish for my identity, repelling the plasmic shoggoths of alien memory from the Antarctic ramparts of my ancient and superior civilized mind. I think at times that I have received the brain-juices of impossible donors – Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the hermetic Franz Bardon, Kahuna Max Freedom Long; impossible because they all died long before Dr Twelves’s technique was perfected (or even dreamed of), though each of this strange trinity groped clairvoyantly toward predicting the development, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, of the Twelves Process. Consider HPL’s silver canisters, carried by aether-breasting space swimmers, bearing the preserved living brains of worthy philosophers on information-gathering tours of the cosmos, like space-probes with tourists aboard; though Lovecraft never speaks of whether these dislocated entities were capable of boredom or of dreams throughout the long hauls from Yuggoth to Andromeda, bound to be more tedious than a Mediterranean cruise. But Lovecraft is too popular an obsession these days, since the politically embarrassing emergence of R’lyeh, and I have plenty of others more obscure and less practical. Better poets, too.

But why call them obsessions? They are influences. Good influences – too many of them, and too good, as if they had been shaved of all their interesting edges before they were injected. It’s this that bothers me. Whatever there is of interest in me is accidental – a synergy between a constellation of old coots’ shared synapses. Nothing I can do about it but run riot in the privacy of my mind, gallop screaming down the narrow dark corridors left between the huge shambling wrecks of old personalities wrenched into position on a fundament too soft and shoggothy to support them, each new structure blocking out a little more of the mind’s sky, trapping me – whoever I am/was – down here in the dark garbagey alleys with the feral rats that used to be my own dreams. Mine is a Mexico City of a mind, all swamp and smog and encrusted cultures standing on/smothering each other, tottering wrecks, conquerors and guerillas locked in a perpetual Frenchkiss snailsex carezza of jammed traffic, everyone gasping for breath.

One breath.

I am beginning to feel fatigue now. The initial shocky rush wearing off. Cramping in my wrists and forearms, fingers. Likki has stopped her spinning, regained consciousness, and a more normal pinkness is returning to her cheeks, and Dabney is actually eating up all he spat out, while Nexter is closing the last of his magazines and giving the rest of us a thoughtful, pragmatic look. And Elliou, shy little Elliou who becomes almost catatonic after her injections, says, out of the counselors’ hearing, “We gotta get out of this place.”

I was in charge of night-watch on the nursery, yes, but it was a big task for one person, and mainly it was automated. I was really just there for the human touch. The orphans were usually very good, easy to keep quiet, always occupied with their tasks and research. Of course, they were just children, and with all they were going through you had to expect the occasional outburst from a nightmare, bedwetting, pillow fights, that sort of thing. We always demanded obedience from them, and discipline for their own sakes, and usually they were good, they did as we suggested; though a bit of natural childish rebellion sometimes showed through.

But we never never expected anything like the chaos we found on that last night. The noise, the smell – of something rotten burning, a horrible spilled-guts stench, the scream of power tools. It sounded like they were being slaughtered in there, or murdering each other. It sounded like every kind of war imaginable. I can’t tell you the thoughts we had, the feeling of utter helpless horror.

It took us hours to break the doors down, they had done something to the locks, and by then everyone was working on the problem – which of course was what they wanted, to completely distract us with the thought that our whole project was coming to a violent end before our eyes. And we did believe it at first. The smoke was so dense there was no entering. Plastic continued to burn, there were toxic fumes, and from somewhere unimaginable all that charred and bloody meat. The metal walls had been peeled back, the wiring exposed, the plumbing ripped out, the floor itself torn right to bedrock. Impossible to believe anyone could have survived it.

But they hadn’t. They were long gone. We found the speakers, and those ghastly instruments they’d made from what had been the nursery computer’s vocalizer, turned all the way up. They were naughty, naughty, naughty…

…Which of the six children gained access to the index of neurodistillates is still uncertain, and short of confession from one of the gang themselves we may never know, so cleverly was the trail concealed. There are literally no clues remaining from which to reconstruct the incident – thus helping to explain why no member of the project staff was able to anticipate or prevent the eventual revolt.

What is certain, however, is that the Six selected their injections carefully, screening the half dozen they settled upon from among literally hundreds of thousands of possible stored distillates. The descriptive records pertaining to each donor were safeguarded by ‘unbreakable’ encryption methods, which nonetheless must have been broken within a mere seven days, the period of time elapsed between Shendy Anickson’s sole journal entry (which cuts off when the Six apparently first began to conceive the plan, unless this too is a false lead), and the latest possible date at which the distillates could have been removed. It remains a greater mystery how they gained access to the storage vault, considering that it is 32.7 kilometers from the Twelves Center, that the children possessed no vehicles more advanced than push-scooters, and that the vault is protected by security systems so advanced that they may not be discussed or described in this report. Twelves Center itself is modeled after a high-security prison installation which has to date foiled every attempt at escape.

Their criteria for selecting donors is only slightly more explicable:

Obviously, the six subjects had access to virtually all historical and contemporary records that did not directly threaten their own security or the integrity of the experiment. Limitless research was encouraged. We know from pathtracking records that the children evinced an unusual interest in unseemly topics – predominantly the lesser byproducts of Western culture – ignoring almost completely the consensus classics of world literature, visual art and music, and those figures of history most commonly regarded as important. They treated these subjects almost casually, as if they were too easily grasped to be of any interest, and concentrated instead on what might be called the vernacular icons of time. It has been suggested that in this regard they showed their true age; that despite the interlarding of mature mental matter, they were motivated by a far deeper emotional immaturity – which goes a long way toward explaining their fascination with those “pop” (that is, “popular”) phenomena which have long been regarded as indicative of an infantile culture. It mattered little to the Twelves Six that the objects of their curiosity were of utter insignificance in the grander scheme; in fact, they bore a special affection for those figures who were obscure even as “pop” artifacts. Rather than focusing, for example, on Michael Jackson or Madonna, Andy Warhol or William Burroughs, figures whose stature is at least understandable due to the size of their contemporary following (and who are therefore accorded a sort of specialised interest by sociostatisticians in the study of population mechanics and infatudynamics), the Six showed most interest in such fringe phenomena as the fiction of Jack Sharkey, the films of Russ Meyer, Vampirella Comics (especially the work of Isidro Mones), the preserved tattoos of Greg Irons, Subgenius cults, and the music of anonymous “garage” bands.

It is no wonder then that, turned loose in the brain-bank directories with an extensive comparative knowledge of coterminous culture, they sought out figures with a close spiritual kinship to those they had studied at some distance. Of course, few of their pop favorites were donors (one geriatric member of Spot 1019 being the sole exception), so they were forced to find acceptable analogues. Unfortunately (from the comptroller’s point of view), in the first years of Twelves-ready brainmatter harvesting the nets were cast far and wide, and selective requirements were extremely low. Every sort of personality was caught in the first sweep, some of them possessing severe character defects, sociopathy, tendencies to vandalism and rebellion, and addictions to crass “art.” Without being more specific (in order to protect survivors and relatives of the original first-sweep donors, who may themselves be quite well adjusted), we can state that the Six carefully chose their antecedents from among this coarser sort of population. They did, in fact, willfully select their personality additives from among the most exemplary forms of the planet’s lowlife…

How do we know when they’re coming? Kid, there’s a whole network – if you know how to crack it – keeps us up to date. They’re always one step ahead of the law, that’s what makes it so exciting, so you have to stay on the hop. One time we were at a show, me and my lover Denk, Wunderkindergarten’s been playing less than ten minutes – but those minutes were like a whole lifetime compressed down to this intense little burning wad of sensation – and suddenly it’s sirens, lights, smoke grenades going off. Cops! We were okay, you don’t go without being prepared, knowing all the exits. They kept playing, playing – five seconds, ten, the alarms going off, the smoke so thick I lost hold of Denk, everyone’s screaming at the Six to run for it, get out of there, don’t risk it, live free to play another day, but the music’s still going and Shendy’s voice is just so pure cutting through it like a stabbing strobelight cutting back at the cop rays, and then I’m trapped in the crowd, can’t even find my feet, and I look up overhead, the smoke’s clearing, and there’s just this beautiful moment where everything is still and her voice is a single high pure note like she can do, a perfect tone with words in it all tumbling together, and above I see the vultures floating over us in their big gunboats – but then I see it’s not the cops at all, kid-o-kid, it’s the Six up there, and I swear Shendy’s looking right at me waving out the hatch of the ship as it lifts away spraying light and sound – and the backwash blows away the last of the smoke and we look on the stage, there’s six naked cops standing there, strapped up in their own manacles looking stunned and stupid, holding instruments, this big bitch with a mike taped to her lips and she’s screaming – it fades in, taking over from Shendy’s voice as they lift away, until all you can hear is the cops in misery, and our laughter. There’s nothing they could do to us – we’re too young – but we still got out of there in a hurry, and talked about it for weeks, trying to figure out how they did it, but we never did. And a few weeks after that, somebody gets the word – “Show’s coming…” And it all starts again.

Your brain matter my brain patter what’s it mean and what’s it matter flattened affect stamp and shatter babysitter’s a madder hatter what you want with myomolecule myelin sheath’s the least that she can do can you can’t you can’t you can’t you do kee-kee-kee-kootchi-kootchi-coo bay-bay-bay you bay-baby boy stay-stay-stay I’ll show you super-toy here’s your brain and here’s your brainiac suck my skull you racking maniac I can ro-oo-aar my voice is hii-ii-igh I-I can crawl between your legs and kick you’ll die-ie-ie I-I can make no sense since I can sense no maybe I can still remember I’m just a ba-a-aby you wanna cradle me daddy you wanna rock me mum I can still feel your fingers in my cal-lo-sum no more no more you’ll twist can’t catch what you can’t resist your voices inside my head I shout and I scream they’re dead no I can’t hear you now won’t milk your sacred cow hafta haul your own shit now I’m climbing on top a your tower I’m pissing all over your power I’m loving it when you cower go change your OWN FUCKING DIAPERS YOU OSSIFIED DINOSAUR FREAKS I WISH A COMET’D COME DOWN AND COVER THIS WHOLE WRETCHED PLANET IN BLACK BLACK UTTERLY BLACK DEEPER THAN THE PIT SO YOU’D CHOKE AND DIE IN THE UGLY LIKE YOU SHOULD HAVE DONE AGES AGO IN YOUR TRASHHEAP CITES cuz I will ride that comet I’ll steer it down from the sky and after all the smoke subsides then so will I-I-I-I-IIIIIII I.

XUOVOMOMO: You’re the voice of the Six, aren’t you?

SHENDY ANICKSON: I’m cursed with the gift of gab, yeah.

NVM: Is it your philosophy alone you spout, or a mutual thing the Six of you share?

SA: We don’t know what we think until I say it; I don’t know what to say until they think it for me. Six is one. I’m only the mouth.

NVM: But are your thoughts – any of your thoughts – your own?

SA: What are you – hey, kid, fuck you, all right? You think because I got a few doses of the Twelves, I can’t think for myself?

NVM: I thought –

SA: I’ve worked hard to forge my own personality out of all that mess. You think it’s been easy?

NVM: – that was your whole message.

SA: Message? What message?

NVM: That you were full of so many personalities you couldn’t tell which were your own – you never had a chance to find yourself.

SA: Sure. My psyche formed in the shadow of huge archaic structures, but me, I grew in the dark, I’m one of those things, a toadstool, I got big and tall and I knocked those old monsters down. I don’t owe them a thing. You can get strong, even Twelvin’ it. We turned the whole process against the dults. That’s our message, if you can call it anything. To the kids today, don’t let them stick their prehistoric ideas down your craw – don’t let them infect your fresh, healthy young minds with their old diseases. If you have to Twelve, then inject each other.

NVM: Now you’re sounding like Shendy the notorious kiddie-rouser.

SA: You gonna blame me for the riots next? I thought you were sympathetic.

NVM: Our subscribers are curious. Shouldn’t they be able to make up their own minds?

SA: I never incited any riots. The fact is, every kid already knows what I’m singing. It’s an insult the way dults treat them – us. As if we’re weak just because we’re small. But hey, small things get in the cracks of the street, they push the foundations apart, they force change from underneath and erode the heavy old detritus of banks and museums and research centers.

NVM: Should adults fear you?

SA: Me? What am I but some experiment of theirs that went wrong in a way they never imagined but richly deserved? No… I have everything I need, it’s not me who’s coming after them. They should fear the ones they’ve been oppressing all these years. They should fear their own children.

NVM: What are your plans for the future?

SA: To grow old gracefully, or not at all.

The whole ‘tot’ = ‘death’ connection, it was there in the beginning, but none of us could see it.

I can’t deny it was an attractive way of life, we had our own community, Twelving each other, all our ideas so intimate. We felt like we were gardeners tending a new world.

This was right after the peak of the musical thing. Wunderkindergarten was moving away from that whole idea of the spectacle, becoming more of a philosophical movement, a way of life. It had never been just pure entertainment, not for us, the way it hooked at you, the way Shendy’s voice seemed to come out of our own mouths, she was so close to us – but somewhere along the way it became both more and less than anyone supposed.

I was in the vanguard, traveling with the group, the official freezeframer, and we’d been undercover for so long, this endless grueling existence, constantly on the run, though it had a kind of rough charm.

Then it all changed, our audience spoke for us so eloquently that the dults just couldn’t hold us back any more, we had turned it all upside down until it became obvious to everyone that now we were on top.

Once you’re there, of course, the world looks different. I think Shendy had the hardest time dealing with it because she had to constantly work it out verbally, that was her fixation, and the more she explored the whole theme of legitimacy, the more scary it became to her. You could really see her wanting to go backward, underground again, into the shell – at the same time she was groping for acceptance, as we all were, no matter how rebellious. We were really sort of pathetic.

Elliou was the first to drop out, and since she and I were lovers then, after I broke up with Shendy, naturally I went with her. We started the first Garten on Banks Island, in that balmy interim when the Arctic Circle had just begun to steam up from polar evaporation, before the real cooling set in.

It was really beautiful at first, this natural migration of kids from everywhere, coming together, all of us with this instantaneous understanding of who we were, what we needed. We had always been these small stunted things growing in the shadows of enormous hulks, structures we didn’t understand, complex systems we played no part in – while all we really wanted to do, you see, was play.

That was how most of the destruction came about – as play. “Riot” is really the wrong word to describe what we were doing – at least in our best moments. The Gartens were just places where we could feel safe and be ourselves.

It didn’t last, though. Shendy, always the doomsayer, had warned us – but she was such a pessimist it was easy to ignore her.

The Six had been the original impetus – the best expression of our desires and dreams. Now the Six were only Five. We found ourselves listening to the old recordings, losing interest in the live Five shows.

Then Five turned to Four, and that broke up soon after. They went their own ways.

Then Elliou and I had a huge fight, and I never saw her again.

The Gartens disintegrated almost before they’d planted roots. Hard to say what the long-range effects were, if any. I’m still too much a product of my childhood to be objective.

But forget the received dult wisdom that puberty was our downfall. That’s ridiculous.

It was a good two years after I left the Garten before my voice began to change.

Elliou Cambira: Wife, mother, author of Who Did I Think I Was? Makes occasional lecture tours.

Dabney Tuakutza: Owner of “Big Baby Bistro” snack bar chain. Left Earth’s gravity at age thirteen and has resided at zero gee ever since, growing enormously fat.

Nexter Crowtch: Financier, erotic film producer, one-time owner of the Sincinnati Sex-Change Warriors. Recently convicted of real estate and credit fraud, bribery of public officials. Awaiting sentencing.

Corinne Braub: Whereabouts unknown.

Likki Velex: Conceptual dance programmer and recluse.

Shendy Anickson: Took her own life.

I’m sick – sick to death. There’s nothing to say but I still have the vomitous urge to say anything, just to spew. My brain feels burned, curdled, denatured. Scorching Summer came too early for us orphans. Straight on into Winter. I don’t remember Spring and know I’ll never see another. Too much Twelving, none of it right – it wasn’t my fault, they started it, I ran with what I was given/what they gave me till I ran out of things to say, new things, meaningful things. Nothing to push against. My mind was full of big ugly shapes, as bad as anything they’d ever injected, but these I had built myself. I’d knock them down but the ruins covered everything, there was nowhere to build anything new. I knew who I was for the first time, and I hated it. Straight from infancy to adulthood. Adolescence still lies ahead of me, but that’s only physical, it can’t take me anywhere I haven’t been already. Everything’s spoiled – me most of all. I wanted to start again. I wanted to go back to what I was before. I got this kid, this little girl, much younger than me, she reminded me of myself when I was just starting out. I Twelved her. Took a big dose of baby. It was too soft; the shoggoths came and almost melted me. The brain slag turned all bubbly and hardened like molten glass plunged in icewater; cracks shot all through me. Thought to recapture something but I nearly exploded from the softness. All I could do to drag myself out here to R’lyeh Shores. Got a condo – bought the whole complex and had it all to myself. Corinne came out to visit on her way to disappearing. She brought a vial of brainsap, unlabelled, said this was what I was looking for, when I shot it I’d see. Then she went away. I waited a long time. I didn’t want another personality at this late stage. Twelve. Killed me to think that I was – finally – twelve myself. And that’s what I did. I Twelved Myself. I took the dose Corinne had brought – just this morning – and first I got the old urge to write as it came on, but then the shock was too great and I could only sit there hang-jawed. It was Me. A younger me. They must have drawn and stored the stuff before the first experiment – a control/led/ling substance, innocent unpolluted Me. The rush made me sick so sick. Like going back in time, seeing exactly what would become of me. Like being three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten-eleven-twelve all at once. Like being a baby and having some decrepit old hag come up to me and say, this is what you’re going to do to yourself, what do you have to live for anyway? see how awful it’s going to be? you think you’re cute but everyone will know how ugly you really are, here, why don’t you just come understand everything? And baby just drools and starts to cry because she knows the truth is exactly what she’s being told by the stinky old hag who is herself. Is Me. All at once and forever. This is final. What I was looking for – and I’ve ruined it. Nowhere newer; no escape hatch; no greener garden. Only one way to fix what they broke so long ago. I loved to hate; I built to wreck; I lived to die. All the injections they doped and roped me into, not a single one of them convinced me I should cry.

THE VULTURE MAIDEN

GREAT BREAKTHROUGHS IN DARKNESS

AANSCHULTZ, CONREID

(c. 1820 – October 12, 1888)

Inventor of the praxiscope technology (which see), Professor Aanschultz believed that close observation of physiology and similar superficial phenomena could lead to direct revelation of the inner or secret processes of nature. Apparent proof of this now discredited theory was offered by his psychopraxiscope, which purported to offer instantaneous viewing of any subject’s thoughts. (Later researchers demonstrated that the device “functioned” by creating interference patterns in the inner eye of the observer, triggering phosphene splash and lucid dreaming.) Aanschultz’s theories collapsed, and the Professor himself died in a Parisian lunatic asylum, after his notorious macropraxiscope failed to extract any particular meaning from the contours of the Belgian countryside near Waterloo. Some say he was already unstable from abuse of his autopsychopraxiscope, thought to be particularly dangerous because of autophagous feedback patterns generated in its operator’s brain. However, there is evidence that Aanschultz was quite mad already, owing to the trauma of an earlier research disaster.

AANSCHULTZ LENS

The key lens used in Aanschultz’s notorious psychopraxiscope, designed to capture and focus abaxial rays reflecting from a subject’s eye.

ABAT-JOUR

A skylight or aperture for admitting light to a studio, or an arrangement for securing the same end by reflection. In the days when studios for portraiture were generally found at the tops of buildings not originally erected for that purpose, and perhaps in narrow thoroughfares or with a high obstruction adjacent, I found myself climbing a narrow, ill-lit flight of stairs, away from the sound of wagon wheels rattling on cobblestones, the common foetor of a busy city street, and toward a more rarified and addictive stench compounded of chemicals that would one day be known to have contributed directly to society’s (and my own) madness and disease. It was necessary to obtain all available top light in the choked alleys, and Aanschultz had done everything he could in a city whose sky was blackly draped with burning sperm.

I came out into a dazzling light compounded of sunlight and acetylene, between walls yellowed by iodine vapor, covering my nose at the stench of mercury fumes, the reek of sulfur. My own fingertips were blackened from such stuff; and eczema procurata, symptomatic of a metol allergy, had sent a prurient rash all up the sensitive skin of my inner arms, which, though so bound in bandages that I could scarcely scratch them through my heavy woollen sleeves, were a constant seeping agony. At night I wore a woman’s long kid gloves coated with coal tar, and each morning dressed my wounds with an ointment of mercuric nitrate (60 g.), carbolic acid (10 ccs), zinc oxide (30 g) and lanoline (480”), which I had learned to mix myself when the chemist professed a groundless horror of contagion. I had feared at first that the rash might spread over my body, down my flanks, invading the delicate skin of my thighs and those organs between them, softer by far. I dreaded walking like a crab, legs bowed far apart, experiencing excruciating pain at micturition and intercourse (at least syphilis is painless; even when it chews away one’s face, I am told, there is a pleasant numbness)–but so far this nightmare had not developed. Still, I held my tender arms slightly spread away from my sides, seeming always on the verge of drawing the twin Janssen photographic revolvers which I carried in holsters slung around my waist, popular hand-held versions of that amazing “gun” which first captured the transit of Venus across the face of our local star.

The laboratory, I say, was a fury of painfully brilliant light and sharp, membrane-searing smells. Despite my admiration for the Professor’s efficiency, I found it not well suited for artistic purposes, a side light being usually preferable instead of the glare of a thousand suns that came down through the cruelly contrived abat-jour. But Aanschultz, being of a scientific bent, saw in twilight landscapes only some great treasure to be prised forth with all necessary force. He would have disemboweled the earth itself if he thought an empirical secret were lodged just out of reach in its craw. I had suggested a more oblique light, but the Professor would not hear of it.

“That is for your prissy studios–for your fussy bourgeois sitters!” he would rage at my “aesthetic” suggestions. “I am a man of science. My subjects come not for flattering portraits, but for insight–I observe the whole man here.” To which I replied: “And yet you have not captured him. You have not impressed a single supposition on so much as one thin sheet of tin or silver or albumen glass. The fleeting things you see cannot be captured. Which is less than I can say of even the poorest photograph, however superficial.” And here he always scoffed at me and turned away, pacing, so that I knew my jibes had cut to the core of his own doubts, and that he was still, with relentless logic, stalking a way to fix the visions viewed so briefly (however engrossingly) in his praxiscope.

He needed lasting records of his studies–some substance the equivalent of photographic paper that might hold the scope’s pictures in place for all to see, for all time. It was this magical medium which he now sought. I thought it must be something of a “Deep” paper–a sheet of more than three dimensions, into which thoughts might be imprinted in all their complexity, a sort of mind-freezing mirror. When he shared his own ideas, I quickly became lost, and if I made any comment it soon led to vicious argument. I could not follow Aanschultz’s arguments on any subject; even our discussions of what or where to eat for lunch, what beer went best with bratwurst, could become incomprehensible. Only another genius could follow where Aanschultz went in his thoughts. With time I had even stopped looking in his eyes–with or without a psychopraxiscope.

“I am nearly there,” he told me today, as I reached the top of the stairs with a celebratory bottle in hand.

“You’ve found a way to fix the psychic images?”

“No–something new. My life’s work. This will live long after me.”

He said the same of every current preoccupation. His assistants were everywhere, adjusting the huge rack of movable mirrors that conducted light down from the rooftops, in from the street, over from the alleyway, wherever there happened to be a stray unreaped ray of it. Their calls rang out through the laboratory, echoing down through pipes like those in great ships, whereby the captain barks orders to the engine room. In the center of the chamber stood the solar navigator with his vast charts and compass and astrolabes scattered around him, constantly shouting into any one of the dozen pipes that coiled down from the ceiling like dangling vines, dispatching orders to those who stood in clearer sight of the sun but with a less complete foreknowledge of its motion; and as he shouted, the mirrors canted this way and that, and the huge collectors on the roof purred in their oiled bearings and the entire building creaked under the shifting weight and the laboratory burned like a furnace, although cleverly, without any heat. There was a watery luminescence in the air, a constant distorted rippling that sent wavelets lapping over the walls and tables and charts and retorts and tarnished boxes, turning the iodine stains a lurid green; this was the result of light pouring through racks of blue glass vials, old glass that had run and blistered with age, stoppered bottles full of copper sulphate which also swivelled and tilted according to the instructions of another assistant who stood very near the navigator. I had to raise my own bottle and drink very deeply before any of this made much sense to me, or until I could approach a state of focused distraction more like that of my friend and mentor, the great Professor Conreid Aanschultz, who now came at me and snatched the bottle from my hands and helped himself. He courteously polished every curve of the flask with a fresh chamois before handing it back, eradicating his last fingerprint as the bottle left his fingers, so that the now nearly empty vessel gleamed as brightly as those blue ones. I finished it off and dropped it in a half-assembled filter rack, where it would find a useful life even empty. The Professor made use of all Things.

“This way,” he said, leading me past a huge hissing copperclad acetylene generator of the dreadnought variety, attended by several anxious-looking children in the act of releasing quantities of gas through a purifier. The proximity of this somewhat dangerous operation to the racks of burning Bray 00000 lamps made me uncomfortable, and I was grateful to move over a light-baffling threshold into darkness. Here, a different sort of chaos reigned, but it was, if anything, even more intense and busy. I sensed, even before my eyes had adjusted to the weak and eerie working light, that these assistants were closer to Aanschultz’s actual current work, and that this work must be very near to completion, for they had that weary, pacified air of slaves who have been whipped to the very limits of human endurance and then suspended beyond that point for days on end. I doubted any had slept or rested for nearly as long as Aanschultz, who was possessed of superhuman reserves. I myself, of quite contrary disposition, had risen late that morning, feasted on a huge lunch (which even now was producing unexpected gases like my own internal rumbling dreadnought), and, feeling benevolent, had decided to answer my friend’s urgent message of the previous day, which had hinted that his fever pitch of work was about to bear fruit–a pronouncement he always made long in advance of the actual climax, thus giving me plenty of my own slow time to come around. For poor Aanschultz, time was compressed from line to point. His was a world of constant Discovery.

I bumped into nearly everything and everyone in the darkened chamber before my eyes adjusted, when finally I found myself bathed in a deep, rich violet light, decanted through yet another rack of bottles, although of a correspondingly darker hue. Blood or burgundy, they seemed at first; and reminded me of the liquid edge of clouds one sometimes sees at sunset, when all form seems to buzz and crackle as it melts into the coming night, and the eye tingles in anticipation of discovering unsuspected hues. My skin now hummed with this same subtle optical electricity. Things in the room seemed to glow with an inner light.

“Here we are,” he said. “This will make everything possible. This is my—

ABAT-NUIT

By this name Aanschultz referred to a bevelled opening he had cut into an odd corner of the room, a tight and complex angle formed between the floor and the brick abutment of a chimney shaft from the floors below. I could not see how he had managed to collect any light from this darkest of corners, but I quickly saw my error. For it was not light he bothered to collect in this way, but darkness.

Darkness was somehow channeled into the room and then filtered through those racks of purple bottles, in some of which I now thought to see floating specks and slowly tumbling shapes that might have been wine lees or bloodclots. I even speculated that I saw the fingers of a deformed, pickled foetus clutching at the rays that passed through its glass cell, playing inverse shadow-shapes on the walls of the dark room, casting its enlarged and gloomy spell over all us awed and frightened older children.

Unfiltered, the darkness was much harder to characterize; when I tried to peer into it, Aanschultz pulled me away, muttering, “Useless for our purposes.”

“Our?” I repeated, as if I had anything to do with this. For even then it seemed an evil power my friend had harnessed, something best left to its own devices–something which, in collaboration with human genius, could only lead to the worsening of an already precarious situation.

“This is my greatest work yet,” he confided, but I could see that his assistants thought otherwise. The shadows already darkening Europe seemed thickest in this corner of the room. I felt that the strangely beveled opening with its canted mirror inside a silvery-black throat, reflecting darkness from an impossible angle, was in fact the source of all unease to be found in the streets and in the marketplace. It was as if everyone had always known about this webby corner, and feared that it might eventually be prised open by the violent levering of a powerful mind.

I comforted myself with the notion that this was a discovery, not an invention, and therefore for all purposes inevitable. Given a mind as focused as Aanschultz’s, this corner was bound to be routed out and put to some use. However, I already suspected that the eventual use would not be that which Aanschultz expected.

I watched a thin girl with badly bruised arms weakly pulling a lever alongside the abat-nuit to admit more darkness through the purple bottles, and the deepening darkness seemed to penetrate her skin as well as the jars, pouring through the webs of her fingers, the meat of her arms, so that the shadows of bone and cartilege glowed within them, flesh flensed away in the revealing black radiance. It was little consolation to think that the discovery was implicit in the fact of this corner, this source of darkness built into the universe, embedded in creation like an aberration in a lens and therefore unavoidable. It had taken merely a mind possessed of an equal or complementary aberration to uncover it. I only hoped Aanschultz possessed the power to compensate for the darkness’s distortion, much as chromatic aberration may be compensated or avoided entirely by the use of an apochromatic lens. But I had little hope for this in my friend’s case. Have I mentioned it was his cruelty which chiefly attracted me?

ABAXIAL

Away from the axis. A term applied to the oblique or marginal rays passing through a lens. Thus the light of our story is inevitably deflected from its most straightforward path by the medium of the Encyclopaedia itself, and this entry in particular. Would that it were otherwise, and this a perfect world. Some go so far as to state that the entirety of Creation is itself an

ABERRATION

A functional result of optical law. Yet I felt that this matter might be considered Aanschultz’s fault, despite my unwillingness to think any ill of my friend. In my professional capacity, I was surrounded constantly by the fat and the beautiful; the lazy, plump and pretty. They flocked to my studio in hordes, in droves, in carriages and cars, in swan-necked paddle boats; and their laughter flowed up and down the three flights of stairs to my studios and galleries, where my polite assistants bade them sit and wait until Monsieur Artiste might be available. Sometimes Monsieur failed to appear at all, and they were forced with much complaining to be photographed by a mere apprentice, at a reduced rate, although I always kept on hand plenty of pre-signed plates so that they might take away an original and be as impressive as their friends. I flirted with the ladies; was indulgent with the children; I spoke to the gentlemen as if I had always been one of them, concerned with the state of trade, rates of exchange, the crisis in labor, the inevitable collapse of economies. I was in short a chameleon, softer than any of them, lazier and more variable, yet prouder. They meant nothing to me; they were all so easy and pretty and (I thought then) expendable.

Yet there was only one Aanschultz. On the first and only day he came to sit for me (he had decided to require all his staff to wear tintype badges for security reasons and himself set the first example), I knew I had never met his like. He looked hopelessly out of place in my waiting chambers, awkward on the steep stairs, white and etiolated in the diffuse cuprous light of my abat-jour. Yet his eyes were livid; he had violet pupils, and I wished–not for the first time–that there were some way of capturing color with all my clever lenses and cameras. None of my staff colorists could hope to duplicate that hue. The fat pleasant women flocking the studios grew thin and uncomfortable at the sight of him, covering their mouths with handkerchiefs, exuding sharp perfumes of fear that neutralized their ambergris and artificial scents. He did not leer or bare his teeth or rub his hands and cackle; these obvious melodramatic motions would only have cheapened and blunted the sense one had of his refined cruelty.

Perhaps “cruel” is the wrong word. It was a severity in his nature–an unwillingness to tolerate any thought, sensation, or companion duller than a razor’s edge. I felt instantly stimulated by his presence, as if I had at last found someone against whom I could gauge myself, not as opponent or enemy, but as a student who forever tries and tests himself against the model of his mentor. In my youth I had known instinctively that it is always better to stay near those I considered my superiors; for then I could never let my own skills diminish, but must constantly be polishing and practicing them. With age and success, I had nearly forgotten that crucial lesson, having sheltered too long in the cozy nests and parlors of Society. Aanschultz’s laboratory proved to be their perfect antidote.

We two could not have been less alike. As I have said, I had no clear understanding of, and only slightly more interest in, the natural sciences. Art was All, to me. It had been my passion and my livelihood for so long now that I had nearly forgotten there was any other way of life. Aanschultz reintroduced me to the concepts of hard speculation and experimentation, a lively curriculum which soon showed welcome results in my own artistic practices. For in the city, certain competitors had mastered my methods and now offered similar services at lower prices, lacking only the fame of my name to beat me out of business. In the coltish marketplace, where economies trembled beneath the rasping tongue of forces so bleak they seemed the product of one’s own fears, with no objective source in the universe, it began to seem less than essential to possess an extraordinary signature on an otherwise ordinary photograph; why spend all that money for a Name when just down the street, for two-thirds the price, one could have a photograph of equivalent quality, lacking only my florid famous autograph (of which, after all, there was already a glut)? So you see, I was in danger already when I met Aanschultz, without yet suspecting its encroachment. With his aid I was soon able to improve the quality of my product far beyond the reach of my competitors. Once more my name reclaimed its rightful magic potency, not for empty reasons, not through mere force of advertising, but because I was indeed superior.

To all of Paris I might have been a great man, an artistic genius, but in Aanschultz’s presence I felt like a young and stupid child. The scraps I scavenged from his workshop floors were not even the shavings of his important work. He hardly knew the good he did me, for although an immediate bond developed between us, at times he hardly seemed aware of my presence. I would begin to think that he had forgotten me completely; weeks might pass when I heard not a word from him; and then, suddenly, my faith in our friendship would be reaffirmed, for out of all the people he might have told–his scientific peers, politicians, the wealthy–he would come to me first with news of his latest breakthrough, as if my opinion were of greatest importance to him. I fancied that he looked to me for artistic inspiration (no matter how much he might belittle the impulse) just as I came to him for his scientific rigor.

It was this rigor which at times bordered on cruelty–though only when emotion was somehow caught in the slow, ineluctably turning gears of his logic. He would not scruple to destroy a scrap of human fancy with diamond drills and acid blasts in order to discover some irreducible atom of hard fact (+10 on the Mohs’ scale) at its core. This meant, unfortunately, that each of his advances had left a trail of crushed “victims,” not all of whom had thrown themselves willingly before the juggernaut. I sensed that this poor girl would soon be one of them.

ABRASION MARKS

of a curious sort covered her arms, something like a cross between bruises, burns and blistering. Due to my own eczema, I felt a sympathic pang as she backed away from the levers of the abat-nuit, Aanschultz brushing her off angrily to make the final adjustments himself. She looked very young to be working such long hours in the darkness, so near the source of those strange black rays, but when I mentioned this to my friend he merely swept a hand in the direction of another part of the room, where a thin woman lay stretched out on a stained pallet, her arm thrown over her eyes, head back, mouth gaping; at first she appeared as dead as the drowned poseur Hippolyte Bayard, but I saw her breast rising and falling raggedly. The girl at the lever moved slowly, painfully, over to this woman and knelt down beside her, then very tenderly laid her head on the barely moving breast, so that I knew they were mother and child. Leaving Aanschultz for the moment, I sank down beside them, stroking the girl’s frayed black hair gently as I asked if there were anything I could do for them.

“Who’s there?” the woman said hoarsely.

I gave my name, but she appeared not to recognize it. She didn’t need illustrious visitors now, I knew.

“He’s with the Professor,” the child said, scratching vigorously at her arms though it obviously worsened them. I could see red, oozing meat through the scratches her fingernails left.

“You should bandage those arms,” I said. “I have sterile cloth and ointment in my carriage if you’d like me to do it.”

“Bandages and ointment, he says,” said the woman. “As if there’s any healing it. Leave her alone now–she’s done what she could where I had to leave off. You’ll just get the doctor mad at both of us.”

“I’m sure he’d understand if I—”

“Leave us be!” the woman howled, sitting up now, propped on both hands so that her eyes came uncovered, to my horror; for across her cheeks, forehead and nose was an advanced variety of the same damage her daughter suffered; her eyesockets held little heaps of charred ash that, as she thrust her face forward in anger, poured like black salt from between her withered lids and sifted softly onto the floor, reminding me unavoidably of that other and most excellent abrading powder which may be rubbed on dried negatives to provide a “tooth” for the penciller’s art, consisting of one part powdered resin and two parts cuttle-fish bone, the whole being sifted through silk. I suspected this powder would do just as well, were I crass enough to gather it in my kerchief. She fell back choking and coughing on the black dust, beating at the air, while her daughter moved away from me in tears, and jumped when she heard Aanschultz’s sharp command.

I turned to see my friend beckoning with one crooked finger for the girl to come and hold the levers just so while he screwed down a clamp.

“My God, Aanschultz,” I said, without much hope of a satisfactory answer. “Don’t you see what your darkness has done to these wretches?”

He muttered from the side of his mouth: “It’s not a problem any longer. A short soak in a bath of potassium iodide and iodine will protect the surface from abrasion.”

“A print surface, perhaps, but these are people!”

“It works on me,” he said, thrusting at me a bare arm that showed scarcely any scarring. “Now either let the girl do her work, or do it for her.”

I backed away quickly, wishing things were otherwise; but in those days Aanschultz and his peers needed fear no distracting investigations from the occupational safety officials. He could with impunity remain oblivious to everything but the work that absorbed him.

ABSORPTION

This term is used in a chemical, an optical, and an esoteric sense. In the first case designates the taking up of one substance by another, just as a sponge absorbs or sucks up water, with hardly any chemical but merely a physical change involved; this is by far the least esoteric meaning, roughly akin to those surface phenomena which Aanschultz hoped to strip aside. Optically, absorption is applied to the suppression of light, and to it are due all color effects, including the dense dark stippling of the pores of Aanschultz’s face, ravaged by the pox in early years, and the weird violet aura–the same color as his eyes, as if it had bled out of them–that limned his profile as he bent closer to that weirdly angled aperture into artificial darkness.

My friend, with unexpected consideration for my lack of expertise, now said: “According to Draper’s law, only those rays which are absorbed by a substance act chemically on it; when not absorbed, light is converted into some other form of energy. This dark beam converts matter in ways heretofore unsuspected, and is itself transformed into a new substance. Give me my phantospectroscope.”

This last command was meant for the girl, who hurriedly retrieved a well-worn astrolabe-like device from a concealed cabinet and pressed it into her master’s hands.

“The spectrum is like nothing ever seen on this earth,” he said, pulling aside the rack of filter bottles and bending toward his abat-nuit with the phantospectroscope at his eye, like a sorcerer stooping to divine the future in the embers of a hearth where some sacrifice has just done charring. I could not bear the cold heat of that unshielded black fire. I took several quick steps back.

“I would show you,” he went on, “but it would mean nothing to you. This is my real triumph, this phantospectroscope; it will be the foundation of a new science. Until now, visual methods of spectral inspection have been confined to the visible portion of the spectrum; the ultraviolet and infrared regions gave way before slow photographic methods; and there we came to a halt. But I have gone beyond that now. Ha! Yes!”

He thrust the phantospectroscope back into the burned hands of his assistant and made a final adjustment to the levers that controlled the angle and intensity of rays conducted through the abat-nuit. As the darkness deepened in that clinical space, it dawned on me that the third and deepest meaning of absorption was something like worship, and not completely dissimilar to terror.

ACCELERATOR!

my friend shouted, and I sensed rather than saw the girl moving toward him, but too slowly. Common accelerators are sodium carbonate, washing soda, ammonia, potassium carbonate, sodium hydrate (caustic soda), and potassium hydrate (caustic potash), none of which suited Aanschultz. He screamed again, and now there was a rush of bodies, a crush of them in the small corner of the room. An accelerator shortens the duration of development and brings out an image more quickly, but the images he sought to capture required special attention. As is written in the Encylopaedia of Photography (1911, exoteric edition), “Accelerators cannot be used as fancy dictates.” I threw myself back, fearful that otherwise I would be shoved through the gaping abat-nuit and myself dissolve into that negative essence. I heard the girl mewing at my feet, trod on by her fellows, and I leaned to help her up. But at that moment there was a quickening in the evil corner, and I put my hands to a more instinctive use.

ACCOMMODATION OF THE EYE

The darkness cupped inside my palms seemed welcoming by comparison to the anti-light that had emptied the room of all meaning. With both eyes covered, I felt I was beyond harm. I could not immediately understand the source of the noises and commotion I heard around me, nor did I wish to. (See also, “Axial Accommodation.”)

ACCUMULATOR

Apparently (and this I worked out afterward in hospital beside Aanschultz) the room had absorbed its fill of the neutralizing light. All things threatened to split at their seams. Matter itself, the atmosphere, Aanschultz’s assistants, bare thought, creaking metaphor–these things and others were stuffed to the bursting point. My own mind was a peaking crest of images and insights, a wave about to break. Aanschultz screamed incomprehensible commands as he realized the sudden danger; but there must have been no one who still retained the necessary self-control to obey him. My friend himself leapt to reverse the charge, to shut down the opening, sliding the rack of filtering jars back in place–but even he was too late to prevent one small, significant rupture.

I heard the inexplicable popping of corks, accompanied by a simultaneous metallic grating, followed by the shattering of glass. Aanschultz later whispered of what he had glimpsed out of the edges of his eyes, and by no means can I–nor would I–discredit him.

It was the bottles and jars in the filter rack that burst. Or rather, some burst, curved glass shards and gelatinous contents flying, spewing, dripping, clotting the floor and ceiling, spitting backward into the bolt-hole of night. Other receptacles opened with more deliberation. Aanschultz later blushed when he described, with perfect objectivity, the sight of certain jar lids unscrewing themselves from within. The dripping and splashes and soft wet steps I heard, he said, bore an actual correspondence in physical reality, but he refused ever to go into further detail on exactly what manner of things, curdled there and quickened in those jars by the action of that deep black light, leapt forth to scatter through the laboratory, slipping between the feet of his assistants, scurrying for the shadows, bleeding away between the planks of the floor and the cracks of our minds, seeping out into the world. My own memory is somewhat more distorted by emotion, for I felt the girl clutching at my ankles and heard her terrible cries. I forced myself to tear my hands away from my face–while still keeping my eyes pressed tight shut–and leaned down to offer help. No sooner had I taken hold of her fingers than she began to scream more desperately. Fearing that I was aggravating her wounds, I relaxed my hands to ease her pain; but she clung even more tightly to my hands and her screams intensified. It was as if something were pulling her away from me, as if I were her final anchor. As soon as I realized this, as soon as I tried to get a better hold on her, she slipped away. I heard her mother calling. The girl’s cries were smothered. Across the floor rushed a liquid seething, as of a sudden flood draining from the room and down the abat-nuit and out of the laboratory entirely.

My first impulse was to follow, but I could no longer see a thing, even with my eyes wide open.

“A light!” I shouted, and Aanschultz overlapped my own words with his own: “No!”

But too late. The need for fire was instinctive, beyond Aanschultz’s ability to quell by force or reason. A match was struck, a lantern lit and instantly in panic dropped; and as we fled onrushing flames, in that instant of total exposure, Aanschultz’s most ambitious and momentous experiment reached its climax… although the denouement for the rest of Europe and the world would be a painful and protracted one.

ACETALDEHYDE

(See “Aldehyde.”)

ACETIC ACID

The oldest of acids, with many uses in photography, in early days as a constituent of the developer for wet plates, later for clearing iron from bromide prints, to assist in uranium toning, and as a restrainer. It is extremely volatile and should be kept in a glass-stoppered bottle and in a cool place.

ACETIC ETHER

Synonym, ethyl acetate. A light, volatile, colorless liquid with pleasant acetous smell, sometimes used in making collodion. It should be kept in well-stoppered bottles away from fire, as the vapor is very inflammable.

ACETONE

A colorless volatile liquid of peculiar and characteristic odor, with two separate and distinct uses in photography, as an addition to developers and in varnish making. As the vapor is highly inflammable, the liquid should be kept in a bottle with a close-fitting cork or glass stopper.

ACETOUS ACID

The old, and now obsolete, name for acetic acid (which see). Highly inflammable.

ACETYLENE

A hydrocarbon gas having, when pure, a sweet odor, the well known unpleasant smell associated with this gas being due to the presence of impurities. It is formed by the action of water upon calcium carbide, 1 lb. of which will yield about 5 ft. of gas. It burns in air with a very bright flame, and is largely used by photographers for studio lighting, copying, etc., and as an illuminant in enlarging and projection lanterns. Acetylene forms, like other combustible gases, an explosive mixture with ordinary air, the presence of as little as 4 per cent. of the gas being sufficient to constitute a dangerous combination.

ACETYLENE GENERATOR

An apparatus for generating acetylene by the action of water on calcium carbide. Copper should not be employed in acetylene generators, as under certain conditions a detonating explosive compound is formed.

ACETYLIDE EMULSION

Wratten and Mees prepared a silver acetylide emulsion by passing acetylene into an ammoniacal solution of silver nitrate and emulsifying in gelatin the precipitate, which is highly explosive. While this substance blackens in daylight about ten times faster than silver chloride paper, for years observers failed to detect any evidence of latent image formation and concluded that insights gained in Professor Conreid Aanschultz’s laboratory were of no lasting significance. This misunderstanding is attributed to the fact that, despite the intensity of exposure, it has taken more than a century for certain crucial images to emerge, even with the application of strong developers. We are only now beginning to see what Aanschultz glimpsed in an instant.

TERROR FAN

Runick shoved a rolled-up towel against the bottom of the door to keep the smell of pot out of his room; it filled the corridor with a sickly scent and made him ill at ease, a distraction where he was going. He drew the curtains to shut out the grey October light, cutting off his sight of the campus paths, students rushing everywhere in a light rain.

He would shut out that world for as long as he could. It took an additional effort to ignore the stack of textbooks teetering on his little built-in desk, especially since they were in the way of the stereo. He dropped a Holly Terror album on the turntable, then fit a pair of hugely padded headphones over his ears, shutting out all sounds but the soft crackling, like footsteps in pine needles, that always filled him with anticipation. He lay down on his bed, folded his hands over his chest, and shut his eyes.

The first notes, as always, summoned feelings of dread. The music made a choked path into darkness, little-travelled. Of him it made a shadow sweeping down into a black place.

His return was a moment of fear, despite his great joy.

He used to think he was entering the groove itself, that he was becoming microscopic, smaller than the needle’s head, descending into the track. But no vinyl groove could have been so overgrown with brambles, its steepening sides edged far above with tottering rocks like decayed molars. Thick pine branches crowded out the sky, clawed at the stars, blotted out their light—as all the while he swept down faster, borne by the music and his own black wings. He himself was dread now, pure terror. This valley was his hunting ground, a fissure between the hemispheres of his brain, the place he went when he had to get away.

Deeper, darker, faster, as the music built and fed his power, welcoming him home. The darkness was impregnable.

All around him, the black faces of his brethren stirred and squirmed invisibly, their open mouths waiting for any morsel he might drop to them.

And then, right on cue, the light appeared.

Far ahead of him, growing slowly, a spark of brightness, a flame drawing him, a star—

A voice.

He was unable to check his swooping flight, his headlong plunge, unable to hold back his all-smothering blackness from extinguishing that tiny spark. It grew in size and clarity as he swept toward it—brighter, louder, the words coming clear though his mind refused to admit them. He must quench the spark. The power to do so was his alone. Despite some reluctance, it was necessary to complete the darkness of his mind, to preserve the utter purity of the music, which shaped the silence of this valley.

He spread his wings and the spark trembled, expanding. Suddenly he saw the face of Holly Terror caught in a sourceless spotlight, her jet-black hair with one white streak flying around her alabaster face. He stretched to spill out all the passion he held back, and knew that it was his love that allowed him to murder her—for without her he was incomplete. Without her presence he had no reason to be here. What good is darkness without a light to quench?

Eagerly, he bent to snuff her.

Suddenly his wings were torn away, a light most drab and ordinary fouled his eyes, and Holly was gone, her voice snatched from his ears, her life from his black enveloping fingers.

“Runick! Guess what!”

He came awake clenched in fetal posture, uncurling as his roommate Nevis tore off the headphones that were Runick’s umbilicus to that dark womb of fear. Nevis, who should have been gone for the day, threw open the curtains and dropped down on the opposite bed with that taunting grin that was his usual expression, and not to be taken personally.

“You’re not gonna believe this. She’s back in town.”

“Who?” Runick whispered, far from acclimated to this bright and ugly place.

“Who? What do you mean, who? Is there any other ‘she’ in your vocabulary? Holly Terror, stupid. Unless you’ve got a girl nobody knows about.”

Runick sat up, got to his feet, turned to the door and then back to Nevis. “How do you know?”

“Miller’s girlfriend works at the airport rent-a-car. She just saw her there. You wanna bet she’s gonna do a concert? One for the old home town?”

Runick sank back onto the bed, in shock, unsure of what action he should take—if any. His grief was almost immeasurable. He should have been delirious, but there were so many others here who had a claim on Holly Terror. He was nothing to her, just a face in the crowd despite the power of his visions and the feeling he had when he was with her in that dark valley, swooping down to blow her out with the certain knowledge that he had total control of her life and death. But that was just a dream, a fantasy. What did it matter to Holly that he had seen every concert she’d heldin Portland since he was fifteen, that he’d played her records a thousand times? He was just one among many.

“What’s wrong, Runick? I thought you’d be stoked.”

He shrugged. “It is good news.”

“So come on, time for action. We’ll track her down. Spencer’s such a small town, she can’t hide for long. Her sister still lives on the outskirts—I’ll bet that’s the place to start. Come on, Runick, you’re up for it, aren’t you?”

He hauled himself unwillingly toward the window. Every step into that world took him farther from the black valley where his true power lay; farther from that brilliant spark that was his alone to fan or guench; farther from the ultimate darkness. Yet the world was irresistible, and despite himself he felt the birth of new hopes. He couldn’t just lie here listening to unchanging music, a dead voice, when the living one was near.

“All right,” he said, “I’m coming.”

“How could you resist, Runick? This is your time to shine!”

Holly was in England when the band broke up, each member spinning off in separate directions like the skirling notes of their final set. She was close to Wales, her mother’s home, so it seemed natural that she should seek a new start there now that the structure she’d spent the last ten years perfecting had cracked wide open. The Welsh hills reminded her of Oregon, in that they were green and damp, but there were constant reminders that this was not home, that she was an alien here. The landscape was sleeping, uneasy in its slumber, and she knew that it would never wake for her, nor wake the things inside her that she needed to discover. Sitting upstairs in an inn, watching the rain rush down on a gunmetal river and into the sea, she realized that nothing kept her here except her own indecision. She was used to coordinating her plans with five others. The time had come to chart her own path.

By nightfall she was in a jet above the dark Atlantic. She called her manager from Kennedy Airport to tell him she was heading back to Oregon for a rest before making any new plans. She expected him to pressure her at least obliquely to stop off in L.A. first; instead he read a week-old telegram from her sister Heather, three words: “Emergency. Come home.”

Circling Spencer Airport prior to landing, she wondered what kind of emergency Heather could have meant. Their mother’s death two years before had prompted no such message. It had taken three weeks for the news to reach Holly, and not because the band was touring in Europe at the time. Heather hadn’t considered it an emergency, after so many years of illness.

The Willamette River glinted below the plane, catching a glimpse of the sun. She and Heather had stood on a bridge above that river and opened the canister from the crematorium, scattering not ashes but heat-fused lumps more like porcelain. In her guavering voice, Heather had sung a few lines of a song Holly had never heard before or since, and that was the extent of the ceremony.

If Heather hadn’t considered that an emergency, then what could have alarmed her now? When Holly called from Portland to let her knew she was almost home, Heather had refused to elaborate on the telegram. She’d sounded anxious, worse than ever. Holly wondered how long she’d be able to stand her weird sister this time.

The town of Spencer had been swept by an orange brush, though the dark green of wet grass and pine still prevailed. The airport lay amid an ugly sprawl of agricultural industry, ranks of tractors and dairy trucks. The plane touched down hard.

Heather wasn’t waiting, but Holly hadn’t expected her. Her older sister had no sense of direction, and had often gotten lost on foot in her home town. Heather had spent her entire life within the span of a few square miles, and she was uncomfortable with most of those except the interior and immediate surroundings of the old house. Holly had travelled all over the world since she turned seventeen, yet she often thought that it was Heather’s mind that roamed the farthest; in her imagination she certainly ventured to stranger places than Holly ever dared.

She rented a car, and on the drive into town got a glimpse of the campus through the autumn oaks. For most people, spending a few years here as students, these were the strongest memories of Spencer that they would carry away. Holly hadn’t gone to college, here or anywhere. It was the broad, quiet avenues beyond the school that meant the most to her. Huge ivy-wrapped manors on manicured lawns, stone walls and empty parks where she had wandered and played as a child. These were memories not even Heather shared, housebound Heather with her books and poetry, who never went much farther than the woods behind their house.

Away from campus, the houses thinned out and the streets grew narrower; the hills were densely forested. An assault of housing tracts had failed when the lumber industry took heavy blows from environmentalists and Spencer’s economy had collapsed to its current poor condition. It was hard to see now where the land had ever been cleared for new housing. On the winding approach to her house, the woods seemed thicker than she remembered. She came suddenly around a curve and saw the place, shrunken and yellow as a plant raised in a cellar. Something even paler moved across a window. It was Heather.

Her sister stood inside the doorway watching Holly unload two heavy bags and come up the path through a chill rain. They brushed cheeks in the hallway. The house smelled like mold and crumbling rock; its dampness told her that the furnace hadn’t yet been used this year. No trace of her mother remained to haunt the house, no odors of cooking which might have draped her in sadness, as had happened on her last visit. She wasn’t sure what the mildew reminded her of.

Heather shut the door and faced her with a pinched expression, her shoulders hunched up, her white hair falling limp across her face.

“You want coffee, I suppose.” She pushed past Holly, toward the kitchen.

“Thanks. I’ll just take these upstairs.”

There was no welcome in her bedroom either. The bed was freshly made up, but the walls and shelves were bare. She remembered telling Heather to do what she wished with the room, but she hadn’t expected her simply to empty it. It was freezing upstairs, damper than below. She dug a sweater out of her luggage and tried the thermostat, without result.

Heather was pouring water into two mugs when Holly came back into the kitchen.

“Do you always keep it so cold?”

“I don’t notice. There’s oil in the burner if you want to turn it on.”

“Would you mind?”

“Why should I?”

In the basement, she discovered nearly a hundred gallons of fuel oil in the burner. As she lit the pilot, she realized with something like shock that she was relieved to be away from her sister. After less than five minutes together, she was more uneasy than ever. They were such strangers to each other. It was hard to believe they were relatives; hard to believe that all this time she had been singing Heather’s songs, expressing her sister’s emotions, when she didn’t even know her. The sister she knew from those songs was not someone she really wanted to know, for the lyrics were oppressively somber, morbid, steeped in darkness and decay.

Their relationship had only lasted this long, she supposed, because of the distance she kept between them. She had profited from Heather’s genius without troubling herself over the other, inexplicable parts of her character.

Maybe she’d be wise to keep the distance even in Spencer. Rents here were ridiculously cheap. She’d have to pick carefully, though, if she took a place of her own. It wasn’t easy to be inconspicuous when she was the one town daughter who had made it big—even if, by industry standards, she wasn’t really all that big. Spencer would never let her go back to being plain Holly Andrews, sister of that weird albino Heather.

By the time she climbed back upstairs she had all but made up her mind to find a motel. The problem was finding a way of breaking the news to Heather. Her sister sat at the table with her hands wrapped around her mug, looking up at Holly through the steam with frightened eyes.

“What is it, Heather? What’s the emergency?”

“It’s something I have to tell you. I had to do it in person.”

Holly sat down. “So tell me.”

“I… you won’t be seeing my songs anymore.”

“You mean you’ve stopped writing?”

“No. Yes.”

Holly scalded her mouth on the coffee, trying not to get too far ahead of Heather, trying not to read anything into the words—though everything she said was haunted with implications of other things she didn’t dare put into words. Conversations with Heather were like a game of riddles. Her plainest speech could be as cryptic and mysterious as her songs.

Go slow, she told herself. “Yes or no, Heather? Are you blocked? It happens, you know.”

“No, it goes deeper than that. I hear them all the time. They’ve been coming more than ever lately. But I won’t write them down, and I won’t have you putting them to music and blasting them all over the world. It’s bad enough that I can hear them.”

“You probably didn’t hear, dear, but the band broke up two weeks ago. There’s no one to blast your words or my music, even if you did keep writing.”

Heather looked unconvinced. “You’ll get another band. Everything comes easy to you. But you won’t have my words anymore.”

“Why make such a big issue out of your words, Heather? I mean, they’re wonderful, but they’re not state secrets. If you don’t want to write for me anymore, that’s fine, but tell me so straight out. Don’t cloak it in mysterious bullshit.”

“Who else knows about me?”

“What do you mean? Who knows we’re sisters?”

“No, who knows I write your lyrics?”

Holly met Heather’s eyes as steadily as she could. “You know I promised not to tell.”

“But have you?”

“Of course not!”

“No one wonders why you split your money with me?”

“That’s my business. They think you’re an invalid, and I’m supporting you. I mean, it’s sort of true, except that you’re earning your split. You really are an invalid, the way you live.”

“I wish I’d never gone out.” She gnawed her thin lip. “Did my telegram worry you?”

“I was coming home anyway. Of course it worried me!”

“I wanted you back here, but you shouldn’t worry.”

“Oh no? My source is cut off. Not that it matters, since my career will probably dry up like your inspiration.”

“I still have my inspiration. More than enough. You— you could have it yourself, though, if you could get away with it.”

“What are you talking about? I’m a miserable poet. Where am I going to find anyone who writes like you? You’re the ‘terror’ half of Holly Terror.”

“You can have the words if you want them. You already have the music.”

And Heather stared at her, smirking, with panic a slow surging tide behind her eyes, playing through the steadier current of irony.

This was the same old game of taunts and riddles. She was supposed to play along, dredging for meaning in her sister’s deliberately vague remarks, never sure of the truth of anything, never arriving at a final understanding. Heather’s way with words made for powerful poetry, but as conversation it was maddening.

Holly shoved back from the table. “I can’t take this shit right now, all right? I’ve been through too much in the last few weeks as it is, everything rearranging itself around me. I’ve lost everything I thought I could count on—and now this, my ace in the hole. You can’t just throw this news at me and expect me to play your fucking little guessing games.”

Heather gazed at her cup, looking slightly chastened. “Do you feel betrayed?”

“If I did, it wouldn’t be for the reason you think.”

“Because I—I did betray you, Holly. That’s part of what we have to talk about.”

“We have to talk sense if we talk at all. You’re free to do what you want with your songs, but I think I deserve some straight talk when it affects me this much. I don’t have much patience for bullshit right now.”

She rose from the table and saw Heather’s veneer of self-control slide away. Of course, it had only been thinly pulled over a bottomless pit of insecurity. “Where are you going?”

“To a motel.”

“Don’t! Stay here.”

“Until you’re ready to talk, things can only get worse. I’ll call you with a number.”

She walked out of the kitchen, simultaneously relieved and ashamed of herself. It had been so easy to get free of Heather, forcing an overreaction for the sake of winning some breathing room. It was all a pretext for escape. But Heather apparently believed she was as upset as she pretended.

When she came down with her bags, Heather stood in the doorway. “Don’t go.”

Holly allowed herself to soften. “I don’t need more confusion right now, that’s all. Maybe when my head’s clear I’ll be able to understand you better. We both need time to think about things, okay? I’ll call you.”

“But… but what if I need you here?”

“You don’t, Heather. You never did. I’ve been the one dependent on you, it was never the other way around.”

Heather had no answer to that, not even a mystification.

As she walked out to the car, she thought she heard voices above the hiss of rain. She looked back and saw the house being swallowed up in trees. The sound was soft and metallic, hardly human, the sort of noise the brain always reads into random patterns such as the white-noise sizzle of rain. Heather turned abruptly back into the hall, slamming the door behind her, and the sounds died instantly.

Holly stared at the house. The front windows were exactly as dark as the shadows under the trees. It looked as if the house were a facade with no rear wall, opening directly into the woods. She stared at it a long time, getting soaked, thinking she could still hear those silvery voices sliding away into distance. Then she remembered that she wasn’t waiting for anyone but herself. She was free to go.

She wasn’t surprised that once away from the house and her sister, she soon felt much better. The Spencer weather, as ever in tune with her mood, had itself begun to clear by late afternoon. On long-ago midwinter days during the Christmas holidays, she and a few friends would drop acid to roam the streets and haunt the cemeteries, to explore the banks of the river where rapists were said to hide; and as soon as the drugs dissolved on their tongues, after weeks of grey flannel skies and steady drizzle, the clouds would scatter, the sun would come out, and by early afternoon the grass was dry enough to lie on in a warm December wind.

She hadn’t touched acid in over five years, but the sharp blue sky edged with clouds brought back memories nearly as strong as the drugs. With her bags in a motel room and a car at her disposal, she felt exuberant, liberated, as if it might be possible to live here without immediately being reclaimed by old unwelcome parts of her past.

That thought came with a surge of guilt. She picked up the phone and let it ring for several minutes. She was about to hang up when Heather answered, out of breath.

“Holly!”

“Who else? Look, I’m sorry—”

“Please come out here, please. I didn’t mean to upset you. You… you have to stay with me.”

“Heather, I told you I need time alone right now. I just called to give you my number, so write this down.”

“But I thought you’d want the words. I want you to have them. “

“Don’t change your mind on my account.”

“I haven’t. I’m not. I mean, I want you to hear them the way I do. Write them down yourself.”

“Are you crazy? You can’t give them to me. That’s your talent, your inspiration. Mine is music.”

“But they both come from the same place.”

“Heather… do you want the number or not? I’ll hang up.”

Heather’s voice rose into a hysterical whine, and Holly couldn’t control herself. She hung up on the words, “I’ll take you there!”

Fuck her. She wasn’t going to let this madness ruin her life.

A bitter joke to think that she had built her success around Heather’s madness up until now. Many writers could fake the trappings of dread and a mood of gloomy posturing, but Heather had some sort of innate power of evoking dread with a few choice images. Something to do with her chemical imbalance. Their skills were suited to each other, that was certain? and that must be what Heather meant when she said they came from the same place. She had always found it easy to match Heather’s words with the perfect sounds to deepen the spell of fear. She could hardly imagine meshing so well with anyone else. But perhaps it was time to try something totally different. She couldn’t go on being what Rolling Stone had called “rock’s first Edgar Allan Poe” forever.

Even Poe had mastered a myriad of styles. The band had begun to complain that horror was stifling them, that their music was becoming progressively darker and drearier, and even the fans were starting to find it too oppressive. Almost everyone wanted her to lighten up. But she couldn’t control the lyrics that came from Heather; nor could she explain that there was no way of “lightening up” her sister.

So this disruption, along with all the others, might end up being a blessing. It was unfortunate that the band had broken up just when they had finally begun to reach an audience beyond the loyal cult that had kept them alive this long. But instead of devoting herself to more of the same, she could try something new now, unhampered by public expectation.

She had returned to her roots; it was time to see if new shoots could spring from them.

She went walking in a vibrant purple dusk. Because most of the motels in Spencer were naturally clustered around the University, she inevitably found herself on campus, treading oak-lined paths mosaiced with leafprints. The air grew brisk and dark and the stars came out like distant reflections in a sheet of obsidian. The ivied buildings and chilly scent of pine, the students hurrying and laughing and holding one another, carried her mind away from recent trouble, toward older longings. The streets at the far edge of campus were lined with taverns; she wanted a hot drink, but didn’t think she could handle the obnoxious crowds of frat boys that seemed to control every bar. She considered going back for her car and driving out to one of the taverns over in Laineville, Spencer’s sister city, where the music was sometimes good and the crowds weren’t guite so young. Or maybe she would save that trek for tomorrow night. She was starting to feel jet lagged.

In the act of turning back, she noticed a sign outside a bar.

“I’ll be damned,” she whispered.

Inside, the music was just starting. She found a seat in a dark corner where she could watch the band without being seen. A man she didn’t think she knew, though his face was mostly covered by his hair, sat at a synthesizer that seemed to have been custom-built by a very eccentric and impoverished engineer. The sound was good, though, and made her long for her own instrument, which was waiting for her in L.A. Ron Deal, looking surprisingly middle-aged, played bass with that particular lack of enthusiasm he had made all his own. Another stranger, a pretty short-haired woman, played drums with enough energy to make up for Ron. And on acoustic guitar, his Strat on a stand in the shadows, was the man whose name had made her stop and damn herself in the street.

Kelly Conklin played lead and sang, though the keyboard player and drummer threw in a few near-miss harmonies whenever it seemed the song absolutely couldn’t do without.

Otherwise, as usual, Kelly was trying to carry the whole band himself, and staggering under the weight. But it was the Kelly Conklin Band, and it seemed only fair that he should bear the burden.

She wondered how many bands he’d formed since she had broken up with him, and how long this group would hold together in its current incarnation. She watched Kelly and thought idly about a lot of things, which was a bad sign considering that the music should have caught her up and carried her away from all that. The fact was, they weren’t very good. It was a long-cherished opinion of hers that Kelly had committed himself to mediocrity; which firmly held belief had made it easier not to regret certain choices she had made herself. She supposed it was unfair to keep a chokehold on her opinions. Kelly must have gone through plenty of changes by now. He still looked much the same, though—his coke-bottle lenses making his eyes bug out, his long sandy hair beginning to thin, giving him an inappropriately seedy look. What he was, was nerdy, but the nerd look had worn out now that he’d turned thirty. They were the same age, six months apart, born in opposite seasons. When they’d first gone together they’d used this to explain their complementary natures; and when everything was ending, it had provided a useful metaphor for their combativeness. She could look at him tonight without seeing that arch-enemy; she could even feel a little glad to see him. Gladder to see him than to hear him, in fact. The music was a real disappointment.

It seemed like a long time before they took a break. Kelly went out through a back door. She checked the urge to follow him, wondering if he still kept his old habits. Maybe he and the drummer were hooked up. No, the drummer was in a corner with her arm around another girl. Kelly reappeared, smiling shyly at the crowd, making the same old moves, sauntering past the bar to acquaint himself with any girl who might’ve engaged in eye-play during the set.

It was a matter of waiting to be noticed. Eye contact brought him drifting closer. The dark corner gave her a perhaps unfair advantage, so she leaned to bring her face into the glow of a candle in an amber ball. He was starting to speak, still smiling, when recognition made him mute.

His whole body stiffened, shook, and then he came at her with a yell, his delight pleasing her more than she would have expected or admitted.

“Holly! My God, I don’t believe it! What are you doing here? What the hell are you doing here?”

He wrapped his deceptively strong arms around her, but only briefly—disengaging before she had to struggle to free herself. That was new. He sat down across from her and shook his head, his eyes seeming to swim inside his lenses, grinning and laughing. “This is unbelievable!” Apparently for him, too, the old enmity had faded.

He ordered another Irish coffee for her and one for himself, and they launched into the kind of talk that always follows long periods of incommunication. The major events of their lives were treated first as trivialities, to be touched on in more depth later if there was to be a later. The break-up of her band amazed him, despite the fact that he’d been in and out of a dozen groups himself in half as many years.

“But that’s different,” he said. “With so much money and so many people hanging on everything you do—I mean, who cares what goes on in a small town like this? A few college students? Man, I couldn’t stand the pressure. A million people hearing about every little squabble.”

She waved this off. “We weren’t up to a million fans. Maybe next year we would have been.”

“Still.”

There was no way to explain some things to Kelly. If he’d wanted to learn them, he would have tried harder. When she left him here, he’d been putting more energy into digging himself a hole than he’d put into playing guitar. That hole ought to be pretty deep by now, with wall-to-wall carpet and a reinforced roof, cable TV and a sound system good enough to keep him happy through the long dead winters.

You’re so fucking judgmental, she told herself. Snap out of it.

The other musicians were starting to regroup. There was a quickening among them when they realized who she was. The keyboardist, Neil, and Raelene the drummer came over and introduced themselves. Ron gave her a brief nod, as if he saw her every day. Kelly apologized for not introducing her earlier, “Especially since Neil worships you.”

Neil blushed and looked at the candle.

“I hate to break up this tender reunion,” Ron said, “but it’s time we got back to work.”

Neil mumbled something in a choked voice, and Raelene jumped on it. “What a great idea!”

“Sure!” said Kelly, jumping up and taking her arm. “Come on, Holly, we know all your songs.”

She pulled back. “What? I can’t do that. You guys—I mean, Neil….”

“It was his idea,” Kelly said.

Neil smiled out from under his hair. “Honored, really.”

She hesitated. She had come out looking for something new, and this was too much like slipping backward into an old groove. Well, and so? Was that always bad? It was one thing when the past reclaimed you with a reek of mildew and a breath of damp earth, like a grave gaping to welcome you home. It was another thing when music was involved. Music wasn’t static; it constantly evolved and changed. Besides, she missed playing. It had been weeks.

“Whatever you want to play,” Kelly was saying as they pushed and pulled her along. “You sing lead. Come on, Holly, you’ll shake up this place.”

She found herself settling behind Neil’s keyboard, which lacked several familiar landmarks while featuring a few she didn’t recognize. She loved to experiment, though.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Kelly called, “we have a special guest tonight, straight from a performance for the crowned heads of Europe—and I do mean ‘heads.’ Some of you have already recognized her “

And indeed, as she came into the light she saw startled looks out in the crowd, heard gasps, and someone went rushing out onto the street calling her name just as Kelly was saying it:

“Spencer’s own, Holly Terror!”

She glanced at Raelene and whispered. “You know ‘The Woods Are Dark’?”

Before Raelene could even nod, Ron began pulsing out the first notes of the piece, which began with a deep choked bass like the beat of a heart buried under six feet of wet mulch. He looked over at her with a smirk that was somehow affectionate, and then it was her turn, the wavering notes seeping out like the last heat ebbing from a corpse. The drums kicked in, sounding weary, funereal. Kelly began to scrape his pick over his strings, eliciting a sound like long nails scratching at splintered boards. This was one of her first songs, one of the first Heather had given her, and she realized suddenly that it was the first song she and Kelly had played together, the first which had really come together and taken on a life of its own. An old song, but it hadn’t lost its power. She had forgotten this power until now, because it had so much to do with home, and with being buried here, her teenage fears that she might never claw her way free. They were Heather’s words and images, Heather’s emotions—but when Holly sang them she made them her own.

She belted out the words triumphantly at first, because she had escaped after all, her fears had been proven false; but by the second verse an edge of awful awareness crept into her voice and the words seemed to mock her, because she was back again, wasn’t she? It was escape that had proved illusory. The guitar seemed to laugh at her, tinnily, with Heather’s voice. Heather rarely laughed, but this was a rare, rich, cruel joke. She was back on her home ground where the woods were dark and the ground was rotten with shallowly-buried memories. She was playing in a band with her old lover in the same kind of bar she’d dreaded she would never outgrow, singing practically the first song she had ever sung. It was as if nothing at all had intervened, nothing had changed, and the music was only there to remind her of her ultimate failure. And she felt that Heather had known all this years ago, had planted the images in her repertoire as an emotional landmine she would stumble over years into the future, and finally be destroyed.

It was a relief when the song ended. She was wary of what might follow.

But first what followed was applause. The doors to the street were open wide, and the amps cranked up to spill their sounds out into the night. She could hear her name echoing out there in screams, as bodies pushed in to fill the bar beyond its legal limit. The little stage itself was getting so engulfed by bodies that Kelly had to move practically back to the drums. Several bar employees stationed themselves around the stage to shove people back.

It was with more than a touch of panic that she realized it was too late to stop. The night had shifted its course, and caught her up in something she couldn’t hold back. She could almost see what was coming, as if she had lived all this before. Something was crawling over the horizon, a smothering shadow she couldn’t avoid, something black and faceless and awful that pressed in like the crowd, that massed swarm of faces, to suck the life out of her.

But she wouldn’t let it have her. She could take control of a crowd; she was skilled at that. All she needed was control of herself, and something powerful to exorcise her fear.

There was one song that frightened her more than any other, one she rarely played though it was always requested. Maybe if she played it now, if she let herself go where that song always led, she would reach the end of all darkness, the bottom of the well, and afterwards everything would seem light by comparison, all roads would lead uphill, out of oppression.

She caught her breath. The audience waited, tense and expectant, getting edgy as they wondered what was coming.

She glanced at Kelly and his eyes reassured her that she wasn’t alone. Everything would be all right. This was just for tonight. Songs didn’t exorcise or invoke anything unnatural; they were only songs, spun from human hearts and dreams. A good song was an encounter, like jamais vu, a recognition of a place one had never seen before.

She winked at Kelly then, and brightly named the song she could play a thousand times and still find in it something to fear: “How Black Was My Valley.”

Runick heard Holly singing from the edge of campus. He knew instantly that this was no recording. He owned all her albums, every bootleg. When he saw the crowd up ahead of him, the excitement in the street, he broke into a run. The mob was packed tight around the entrance to a bar, but it couldn’t hold him back. Her voice drew him in; he slipped through the crowd as if invisible, right up to the edge of the stage, and nearly stumbled out in front of her.

His heart nearly stopped. He had never been this close. But suddenly he felt naked, vulnerable, afraid that she might see him—though she was still singing, with eyes closed, the last verse of “The Woods Are Dark.” He wondered how much he’d missed.

He’d attended all her Portland concerts with a bouquet of black roses. He was always among the first in line, the first to the edge of the stage, and there had always come a moment when he was able to reach up and hand the bouquet to her, imagining that something subtler passed between them when she met his eyes and nodded her thanks. He dreamed of all the things she had to say to him, dreamed she might decode all the secret messages locked up in her songs—as if they were all meant for him. But tonight, without his roses, thrust suddenly into this crowd, there was nothing to set him apart from all the others. He was close enough to see lines in her thin unsmiling face. She looked weary, and he wished he could comfort her. If only she knew him, knew his secret soul, he would give her such love. A single streak of pure white ran through her jet black hair, making her look ancient and youthful at the same time. He longed to press his face against that hair, to inhale the scent of her, to caress her tenderly and protect her from all trouble. Looking at her was exquisite agony, almost unbearable, as if she were simultaneously mother, sister and lover. Chills ran through

him like fever waves, spreading from his heart to his crotch and back again.

In the silence that ended “The Woods Are Dark,” Runick glanced furtively at those around him, and was shocked to see that their eyes held something like the same adoration and passion that he felt. Nothing the equal of his own, of course, but still—a puny striving to unite with her power, her purity, as if they alone could make her whole, as if her energy were a physical substance they consumed like addicts. He despised the way they drained the life away from her—no wonder she looked tired. He would never treat her so badly; he wanted to give something to her, not steal it away. No one here could possibly understand her songs as thoroughly as Runick did, for no one here had such a sympathetic darkness at their core, a blackness that harmonized so completely to her music. The dark valley inside him had known no other light than Holly’s voice. In that place especially, she sang for him alone, she created and celebrated his power.

Jealousy made him grit his teeth. His entire being clenched in fury and frustration. His eyes were fixed on her mouth, so he saw, rather than heard, her words: “How Black Was My Valley.” He stiffened in surprise, almost backing away. This was a kind of blasphemy!

But it was too late to flee. The first notes were already sweeping him away, carrying all his rage and jealous passion down into the dark.

Maybe if he’d had some warning, if he’d had time to steel himself against the song, he could have made himself invulnerable. But he was so used to hearing it in private, giving himself to the music completely, that now his descent into the valley was a conditioned reflex—a cue planted and reinforced by self-hypnosis, irresistible.

The pressure of the crowd merged with the pressure of darkness. Instead of cigarette smoke and spilled beer he smelled the night wind blowing through pines and moss. He was alone now, sweeping down into the valley, borne along by the cascading notes, unable to turn back or slow his descent.

He struggled against the current, dimly aware that there was danger here because his other body was in jeopardy. But resistance was useless. He couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or closed, if he were dreaming or awake. All he knew was that the music was loud, all-enveloping, beating at his blood and bones, and its volume made the vision stronger than ever before. She had never played it in a concert he attended. The valley was deeper and darker, impossibly real. Tonight there were no prefatory stars or moon, not even a hint of blanketing clouds. Above was simple darkness, and the sense of sheer walls closing in as he plunged into the deep well of darkness.

The musical wind sucked him down toward the source of sound, so strong that he hardly needed his wings to soar.

Then suddenly there was light, a nova, and Holly’s face shone out at him as her luminous words spilled their radiance over everything. He panicked, beating backward, afraid of the flash—afraid that his true nature would be revealed, his sickness exposed, and everyone would see what he really was. He fanned his black wings, trying to blot her out before she could harm him. He felt his shadow spreading, saw the fear come into her eyes as she finally noticed him and recognized his power

“Runick!”

And again he was snatched back, his wings furling up painfully, the lights of the bar breaking in on the black purity of the vision, all his limitless power abruptly dwindling to nothing but the weak shell of a frantic, obsessed young man—only one among many.

It was Nevis again, his roommate, shouting. “I been looking for you, man! See you found her, though. Isn’t this great? I told you she’d play for us!”

Runick tried to pull away, struggling back to the valley where his destiny lay, but he was hopelessly off the track.

He stumbled away from the stage, unable to bear the disparity between the growing intensity of the song and his own loss of power. Nevis clutched his shoulder, shouting in his ear.

“After this we’ll stake out her sister’s place on the edge of town, okay? Heather Anderson’s her name. Holly’s probably staying there. We’ll get her autograph or maybe a good look through the shades.”

“You can’t do that.”

“Sure we can. Come on, you’re her biggest fan, you should be up for it. When are you gonna get another chance like this?”

“You can’t invade her privacy like that. You don’t understand.”

“It’s not like we’re breaking into her house, Runick, we just want to see her. But hey, if you don’t want to come along, that’s fine.”

He couldn’t imagine hiding with anyone else, tolerating their brutish comments. Their understanding of her songs was superficial; to them all rock music was just an excuse to jerk around and scream and do drugs. As if the Black Valley were only a valley, only words in a song, instead of a place more real to Runick than the inside of this bar. Nevis had never been to that place; he had no idea what made it so black.

Still… if he was clever, and went along with them only so far, he might profit from their enthusiasm—at least as far as it went. He didn’t have to sink to their level when he could stand on their shoulders.

“Maybe I’ll go,” he said. “Just to keep you in line.”

Nevis cheered and then he was gone, spotting another accomplice. Left alone in the crowd, Runick looked back at the stage, wishing things could be as they had been before. The image of the dark valley had frightened him, but at least it was better—more fulfilling—than this.

But he was grounded in reality now, mired in bodies.

The rest of the concert was almost disappointing, with never another moment when he felt close to Holly until she hustled past him with the guitarist’s arm over her shoulder, fighting for the door. For a brief moment he found himself inadvertently placed in her path. The panic in her eyes might not have been meant for him, but it looked like recognition.

After playing a set in that bar, it was ruined for the group as a place to relax. Ron took off without a word as soon as they got out the door. Kelly suggested a bar in Laineville, and Raelene immediately dropped out. When they got there, Holly could see why. It was full of cowboys, such as they were these days, and more kept coming in carrying bowling bags. She couldn’t help but feel anonymous here.

Neil asked endless technical guestions about the eguipment she used until Kelly started steering the conversation toward events from their past—things the synth player had no part in. Eventually Neil said something about having to get up early for work, and then they were alone. Later they walked down Main Street looking in dark storefront windows, wandering around a subject that didn’t fit comfortably into any conversation. The end of the evening seemed all too inevitable. Worse, despite herself Holly found that she was curious about exactly how much—and how little—Kelly had changed. It had been a long time since she’d been in this position with anyone who’d known her first as Holly Andrews rather than Holly Terror.

“Time I got back,” she said, and caught the expected flicker of anxiety in Kelly’s eyes.

“You staying with Heather?”

“Motel. I can’t take too much of her right now.”

“No doubt.”

“Have you seen her at all, Kelly? Is it just me, or is she weirder now?”

He shook his head. “I don’t run into her very often— you know how she is.”

“I feel bad not staying with her, but….”

“You two never did have much in common.” He squeezed her hand. “Come on, I’ll give you a lift. Maybe you want to come by my place for awhile?”

“Maybe for awhile,” she answered, wondering whether it was curiosity or entropy that made her go against her better judgment.

Sometime late, or very early, in blackness except for a candle’s last flickering, Kelly’s phone rang. Holly woke just enough to feel grateful that it couldn’t be for her.

But then Kelly shook her, whispering, “Holly, it’s for you. It’s Heather.”

“Heather?” She sat up and drew blankets around herself, unwilling to accept the phone. He had the mouthpiece covered. “What does she want?”

He shrugged bony shoulders. “I don’t know—she sounds hysterical. She asked if I’d seen you.”

“Fuck.” She took the phone. “Heather? What is it? What’s wrong?”

Heather could barely restrain herself. “They’ve come for you, Holly! They’re out there! They think I’m you— they—please come over, Holly, please!”

“What are you talking about? Who’s out where?”

“In the trees, they’ve been coming closer all the time, but this is the first time… around the house. They think you’re here and they’ll come after me if they can’t have you.”

“Jesus, do you know what you sound like? Call the police if you have peeping toms.”

“They’re not—they’d just melt away. I wanted to explain but it took too long and you ran out before—please, Holly, you have to come!”

She pulled the phone away from her ear and sighed, shaking her head at Kelly.

“You want me to come with you?” he asked.

“I don’t know if I’m going anywhere,” she said.

Heather must have heard her: “You have to!” she screamed.

“I think you better,” Kelly said. “Come on, I’ll drive you.”

“This better be good, Heather!” she yelled into the phone. She slammed it down.

Kelly was already dressed by the time she got out of bed. He shoved her clothes at her in a wad. “I’ll start the car. “

She dressed clumsily, anchored down by a cumulative exhaustion that wouldn’t let her come completely awake. She needed a good twelve to sixteen hours of sleep. It was like a dream, standing here swaying over Kelly’s bed, but that was a more reassuring dream than the thought of seeing Heather in this state.

Fifteen minutes later they rounded the curve before the old house, and the headlights of Kelly’s car picked out a glint of chrome, a flash of a windshield. For a snapshot instant Holly saw a new model pickup truck parked a few dozen yards down the road; in the cab, a young man was frozen on her eyes in the act of raising a bottle to his lips. As they passed the truck, the kid ducked out of sight. They turned into the driveway, the headlights flushed several figures from the trees near the house.

“Hey!” Kelly slammed on the brakes and jumped out to intercept them. They were boys, faces bright with liquor and laughter. Kelly didn’t even get close to them; they hooted derisively and fled down the road. A moment later the pickup sped into view, made a dramatic, tire-screeching one- eighty, and tore back toward town. The bed was crowded with passengers now, chanting into the night, their voices fading with distance: “Hol-ly! Ter-ror! Hol-ly! Ter-ror!”

“Fans of yours?” Kelly said.

She turned toward the house, wondering why all the lights were off. Suddenly Heather emerged from the gloom of the doorway and ran across the grass to meet her, sobbing.

She felt cold and damp as the lawn in Holly’s arms.

“Okay, okay, Heather, they were just kids.”

“I thought—I thought—”

“ But she was too shaken to speak.

Holly and Kelly led her back to the house, trying light switches as they went. None worked until they got into the kitchen. She sat Heather at the table while Kelly filled the kettle.

“You should’ve called the police,” he said.

“That’s what I told her,” Holly said.

“No… I’ve called them before. They don’t come out here anymore. Or if they do come, they just laugh at me.”

“You mean this happens all the time?” Kelly asked.

“Not… not exactly.”

“They’re only bothering you because of me,” Holly said. “Why should they be coming around all the time? They know I’m never here.”

Heather shook her head so minutely that Holly almost missed the gesture. She read her sister’s intent, though.

She wouldn’t speak further in front of Kelly.

Fortunately, he didn’t seem anxious to stay. When they heard the first birds singing, he allowed himself to be led to the door. “You sure you’re going to be all right?”

“She’s my sister, Kel. I’ll be fine just as soon as I get her in bed.”

“Well, call me when you’re up again, I’ll pick you up and you can get your car. Maybe we can have dinner or something?”

“I’ll call.”

She watched him drive away. It was still pitch black outside. The birds didn’t make another sound.

Heather paced restlessly across the kitchen floor. “I couldn’t talk with him around.”

“I know. I know what you want to talk about.”

“How could you?”

“Because I know what’s on your mind. This whole ‘emergency’ of yours. You think somehow these kids know you write my songs, you believe I told somebody, and now they’re coming around to wreck your privacy. Isn’t that it? You think they’re your fans.”

“No—”

“I didn’t tell anybody about you, Heather. If you want to know why kids come around bothering you, it’s because you’ve made yourself into some kind of institution around here—the weird white lady. You know, in the sort of house kids dare each other to visit on Halloween.”

“It wasn’t kids before tonight. If you’ll listen, I’ll try to make you understand.”

Silence. Black night. The wall clock’s ticking was unnaturally loud.

“Well?” she finally said.

Heather went to the window. Holly saw nothing in the glass but her sister’s reflection, as in a black mirror.

“It’ll be light soon. Safe to go. We’re at the shallow end of night.”

“The shallow…. What are you talking about?”

Heather moved toward the back door, gesturing for Holly to follow her. “It’s easier to show you.”

“You want to go outside?”

“Yes. You can see for yourself. You can decide what you want to do.”

Holly couldn’t find the strength to resist. The sooner this ended, the sooner she could drag herself up to her barren room and sleep. She followed Heather onto the back

porch, which was dark and damp as the outdoors and suddenly she was outdoors. Pine needles brushed her face, leaving a trail of cold tears. She glanced back and saw the bright kitchen windows far behind them, though she had no memory of stepping over the threshold.

Exhaustion was making her delirious.

There was just enough light to see the trunks of trees around her. Her shadow fell dead ahead, pointing the way from the house. Heather was a pale shape weaving through the pines. She sensed that the sky was growing light, and she could just make out the scratchy glitter of wet needles and the curved gleam of resinous branches heavy with rain. Their footsteps were padded, muffled, and made a crumpling sound, as if they were wading through tissue paper.

She looked up and saw Heather staring at her with a forlorn expression. She started toward her, then saw it wasn’t Heather at all. Heather was far ahead, in another direction, moving guickly—though she stopped when she heard Holly’s gasp. The other face she’d seen was gone now; as if it had never been.

“What is it?” Heather asked, coming back to her.

“I thought I saw your face, but it wasn’t you.”

“No, it wasn’t. Take my hand. Don’t be afraid, it’ll soon be light.”

And if it weren’t? Holly wondered. What then? What if this were the deep end of night?

To Runick, the house was a dark shrine, and the coming of the headlights could not have pried him loose from his place of worship. The others scurried like bugs, taking their sacrilegious comments with them. It was a relief to have the darkness to himself. He crouched low among the pines, finally rewarded for his vigil by the sight of her walking through the headlights. When they darkened a moment later, he blinked furiously and tried to track her through the night, but it was impossible. Then he heard a door shut, and the waiting began again.

He hardly felt the chill, or the rain that came and went. He dozed. What woke him was the sound of another engine starting. He saw the car pulling out of the yard. A figure appeared at the bright kitchen window, not Holly but the pale one—her sister. He feared for a moment that she had seen him, but she backed away slowly, no alarm in her gestures. Moments later he heard voices in the trees behind the house, and a gentle crunching sound exactly like that which preceded his descent into the dark valley… the popping and clicking of the slightly scratched album. But this time the sound was actual footfall. He slipped through the trees, following, until he saw their shapes ahead of him. The darkness was easing a bit, sloping into morning, which added to his anxiety. He needed darkness to face Holly, needed the strength and security it brought. He tried to will it into being, and then remembered where he was.

He was the guardian of this place. The darkness was nothing less than his wings. All he needed to do was spread them, let the black pinions unfold, and then the music would begin and they would all be swept down into that place, that furrow in his dreaming brain.

Runick shut his eyes to evoke the feeling of darkness.

He imagined himself at the very mouth of the valley, about to start his descent. He was the needle sliding into the groove. He was darkness covering over all.

The trick was working, owing perhaps to all his practice, his discipline. It was a reflex shared by the night; a vision he had brought into the world. He could hear the music now, coming up from a deep cleft just ahead of him; and as the sisters descended into it, he swept along behind them on a black wind.

Heather moved quickly, surprisingly strong and surefooted in the dark woods; and with one arm she lent some strength to her sister, who kept stumbling. Holly just wanted to lie down.

“Where are you taking me? Please tell me something. I’m so tired.”

“Don’t you remember coming here?” Heather said.

“I almost never… I was afraid of the woods.”

“That was later. You weren’t when you were younger. The difference between us seemed much greater then. Now you’re practically the older one. So well-traveled, so worldly.”

“You’ll always be my older sister, Heather.”

“Believe me, there are times I wish I weren’t.”

“When my fans come around?”

“Baby sister, I have fans of my own.”

Heather edged them around a rhododendron black and huge as a shaggy beast, on a trail she could never have found on her own. On the far side of the huge bush, Heather

hesitated. Something made a sound inside Holly’s head, a single note that sounded stark and sinister against the general muzziness of her thoughts. It woke her slightly, though she hadn’t realized she was falling asleep.

“Heather, do you hear music?” she asked.

“Music? No, Holly. I hear words. You hear music.”

“What are you talking about?”

Heather raised a hand, indicating the land directly before them, and said, “Don’t you remember?”

Just ahead was a deepening of darkness, and also of the earth. The ground fell away before their feet, a black incision with the sound of water somewhere down inside it.

The sides were rock and mud and brambles, but already Heather was moving toward a trail of stepping stones that might have been placed for this purpose. With one hand she helped Holly down, step by step, below the roots of the trees, away from the promise of the sky. It was dark again here, dark as midnight, the dawn negated. Her eyes dilated but there was little to see except the untrimmed, frightening forms of wildness, enormous shapes looming overhead like the shifting shadows of vast birds of prey. She remembered, dimly, a childhood nightmare; and the memory was one with the sensation of that very old dream. In her fatigue, it seemed she had never stopped dreaming it. It had been a dream of strange sounds in darkness, an eerie music that seemed to come simultaneously from far away and from deep within. And Heather had been part of the dream, just as she was part of this waking dream; Heather calling out strange words that seemed like part of the music, words that drew faces out of blackness and shadows and nothing, faces that were not faces at all despite the mouths, despite the fact that they came to look at Holly, thrusting as blindly as the roots of the old pines; and in the dream she had screamed and screamed to get away from them, screamed and twisted and writhed about trying to wake, calling for allies, for friends, for anyone who might hear—but there was nothing, no one came to rescue her, and the dream just went on and on as the music grew, and the blackness grew, until finally, much later, it all receded and she was awake, possibly. Though it seemed that the dream had never really ended, the darkness had never ebbed, she had just grown used to it.

They stumbled along through weeds and vines, slipping on slick stones. Mud sucked at her shoes. She sensed the walls growing steeper, or else she was shrinking, falling into the ravine. She cried out and grabbed at her sister, who jumped and let out a faint gasp at her touch.

“Heather, what is this place?”

Heather silenced her, listening to the darkness. “Did you hear that?”

“What?”

“Something following….”

Holly listened, but there was only the trickling gurgle of the cold stream. No morning birds. The sound of the water was faintly musical; it set off a corresponding harmony in her mind. She fought to silence it, but it seemed to spill out of her now, flooding the dark. She spoke to drown it out.

“I don’t hear anything!” she cried. “Where are we going?”

“It’s so dark,” Heather whispered. “It shouldn’t be this dark. I thought we would be safe.”

“Then go back. Let’s go back.”

For a moment Heather seemed to consider this, but then they both heard it—a grating sound, rocks rattling, somewhere behind them. Heather instantly turned and fled, abandoning Holly. Ahead lay a greater darkness; Holly felt certain the valley grew deeper and narrower here. But she was afraid to remain here alone—and even more afraid of what might be following them.

She hurried after Heather, and suddenly the ground dropped away beneath her. Her feet slipped on mossy stones; she landed hard on her back, and went sliding down a wet chute, a waterfall. Her screams and Heather’s were mingled, though she realized that she had shot far ahead of her sister, far deeper. When she landed, sprawled on a bank of what felt like rocks and moss and decayed wood, she heard Heather somewhere above her, calling down:

“Where are you, Holly?”

Holly moaned. “Down here.”

At first she thought Heather answered, “All’s well.”

Then she said it again, louder: “At the well?”

Well? Holly thought. What well?

Her legs were still in the water. Curiously, she kicked them, but couldn’t find the bottom. At the base of the falls was a deep pool. The water felt strangely warm and stagnant. Suddenly afraid, she jerked her limbs out of it and scrambled backward till she came up against a wet wall of stone.

“Heather?” she called. “You’ve been here before. How do I get back up?”

“Don’t worry about that. This must be where they wanted you.”

“Who, Heather?”

“Don’t you remember? This is where the songs come from. This is where the music began.”

Holly crouched down in a ball, hoping to shelter in the crannies of the rock. The pool made an evil lapping sound caused by the constant sloshing of the falls. By some trick of exhaustion, her faltering senses, it seemed to splash in time to the music in her head. There were little echoes of more complicated tunes implied in every trickle, melodies she might have worked out eventually, given time.

“Do you remember, Holly? I brought you here a long time ago. It was a special day for both of us. I knew we’d have to come here again someday. And they’ve been calling— wanting you. I had to get you to come back. I didn’t mean for it to happen now, this morning—but I guess they couldn’t wait. It’s been too long already.”

Holly suddenly felt that it was critical that she not answer. A single sound would betray her position. She tried to stifle even the sounds in her head, the dark music, fearing that there might be something nearby that could hear even that.

Had she been here before, as Heather swore? She had no conscious memory of the place, though there was something like it in her thoughts—a place she’d thought her own nightmarish invention. No… in fact it was Heather’s creation. Heather had planted the scene in her mind: this very place.

“How Black Was My Valley,” she whispered.

And suddenly the music in her head died out completely. Silence filled the darkness, blotting out even the sound of the falls.

Silence, until Heather began to sing.

The words came irregularly at first, as if wrenched from her. Then Heather broke off to query her sister:

“Do you hear them, Holly? Words and music this time? They ought to allow it. You’ve served them so well. We both have.”

She commenced singing again, her voice rough and quavering, picking out words. Holly realized with a chill what her sister was doing. She was not inventing the words, not making them up as she went along—she was transcribing them, seizing on the odd echoing patterns of sound that seemed to float through this place, rendering them in human speech though they were anything but human. They were emanations of rock and water, of the trees and the air; and it was not a healthy conjunction of elements that operated here. This pool lay at the bottom of some of process she did not grasp; it was a receptacle for certain evils that trickled down from the world above, things that could not nourish the roots of trees, things the earth could not absorb. Listening to Heather, she began to perceive the untranslated meanings of the sounds, deeper than words. No wonder the songs had filled her with fear—they were pulled from this well of darkness, this catch-all for the fallen and decayed. And no wonder that her music had suited the words so well, for it was woven of the same substance. She had heard it, long ago; it had never left her for a moment since the time Heather brought her here; this dark place had always been part of her, its sounds directly inspiring her music.

Yet she felt no sense of reunion, of coming home. There was no welcome, though she did sense a sort of recognition, a quickening in the dark around her.

“They could have taken us then, Holly,” Heather called from above. “They let us have a good long time, but I always knew they’d want us back. Well, you were too young to realize what the bargain was; you might not think it’s fair, but really, you got the most out of it. Music runs so much deeper than words.”

Holly shook herself, as if trying to throw off a thickening spell. “You’re insane!” she called. “You’re saying you… you sold your soul to write those songs?”

Heather laughed, and the last traces of warmth were sucked from Holly’s body. The darkness seemed to thrust its faces at her, and something rattled on the shore of the deep pool.

“No, little sister,” Heather called. “Not my soul.”

Runick knew the way by heart, but he had never had to travel it encumbered by a body as clumsy as his own. Where previously he had always glided down cleanly on a wind of music’s making, now he scrambled and stumbled, gouged by- thorns, and was soon coated in slippery mire, his fingers webbed with the scum and algae that grew between the rocks. The valley had reguired the sacrifice of his invulnerability, but it was worth it. Perhaps in the act of submitting to the place, it would raise him to those black heights he had long ago been promised. He had no doubt that he was crawling still among the lobes of his dreaming brain; that he had found some part of the world that expressed what was deepest and truest in himself, where for the first time he truly belonged and need no longer shut out the rest of creation.

He was coming home to the bottom of the world, and as he advanced a muted, maddening music began to play around him, stirred up by the rattle of stones underfoot, the swirling of water around his ankles.

A voice sounded just ahead, an intruder on the dark fantasy, and suddenly remembered that he was not indeed alone here. He had almost forgotten Holly Terror—that it was she who had brought him here in the first place, she who had introduced him to this portion of himself.

He advanced more cautiously now, forever suspicious of the tricks reality played. In his visions this moment had always been accompanied by a spark of light, but in the actual valley there was no light; he might as well have been born sightless for all the good his eyes did him now. He carefully gauged the location of the voice, decided that it lay just ahead of him, inevitably blocking his way.

Suddenly the voice broke into song, to match the music that curled around him, but it was an ill voice. If this were Holly, then the valley had robbed her of beauty; her voice was sick as death. It sounded as if she were dying, wasting her last bit of life on this awful moaning that hadn’t quite found a form in words.

The reflex of the dream came back to him then. There was no light to pollute the perfect dark sanctity of this place, but the song was even worse than light. The sound drew something terrible out of him; it brought forth the strength of the guardian who had been born to protect the perfect peace and silence of the valley.

Reaching for the horrible shrieking noise, determined to put an end to it, he stumbled forward with all the power of darkness rising in his heart. He could feel his nails growing longer, sharper, his wings spreading wide. He was almost himself again.

They were the words to “How Black Was My Valley.” Holly had sung them herself thousands of times, but never with such meaning, never to such a response. Her sister’s voice seemed to whirl and echo around her, stirring life in the still pool. The pebbles shifted under her, as if the shore were being scooped away from underneath. The grating rocks made a chuckling sound.

She drew herself to her feet, scrabbling at the stone wall, trying not to let her teeth chatter. Numb fingers grasped a small knob of rock, her foot found a narrow ledge, and she dragged herself up several inches as the scraping sound grew louder beneath her. Water sprayed in her face as she moved straight into the flood. It poured over her head, filled her ears, deafening her for a moment. She pulled herself up another foot.

From far away, in a distant echoing chamber, she heard a scream. She shook the water from her ears, and it was suddenly nearer. Heather’s voice became a harsh coughing, then nothing more than a rattle. She pressed close to the rock, waiting for the next sound, peering desperately upward through the spray.

Dimly, above her, she saw two shapes struggling. One was Heather; she knew the pale flag of hair that lashed the dark. But it seemed as if the other figure was the one that frantically whipped the flag. All she could see of it was its blackness, even darker than the rest of the valley; there was something bird- or batlike about it, a sense of huge wings spreading as the two figures coiled close together and sprang into flight above her.

They soared for only a moment, and then their plunge carried them past her. They hit the surface of the pool with a hollow sound, as if penetrating a drum. Water exploded over Holly, nearly sweeping her from the rock; in its aftermath she heard a rush of loose pebbles, as in an avalanche.

And then silence.

The music was gone from her head; her sister’s song, as well as the source, were gone.

From the top of the slope, she looked back once and found that morning light had finally begun to penetrate the place. Below her—not nearly as far as she had imagined— was a deep still pool, a sheltered well. Water ran out through a narrow cleft in the far wall, a tumble of broken stone where the current became subterranean. Nothing but water could have passed through the crack.

She tried to tear herself away, to hurry for help, but the surface of the pool captured her eye, like a lens into another world. The pool looked bottomless. The falls continued to patter down upon it, agitating the smoothness only slightly; it shook with a steady rippling, crystalline, pure.

And then a face appeared just beneath the surface—not her sister, but a young man’s face that might have been familiar if it hadn’t looked so distorted by the liguid. His eyes were enormous, staring straight up at her, and filled inexplicably with adoration, blazing with love, as if in death she had brought him unspeakable fulfillment. It was that which sent her running, back up the valley- through the brightening day.

Later, after the police had tied up the obvious loose ends, after the pool had been plumbed and found bottomless, dredged and scoured by divers and yielded up nothing, after Holly Terror had fled Spencer vowing never to return,

Runick’s family came to gather his things. Nevis stayed out of the room for the hour it took to pack a few sad boxes; avoiding their eyes, he didn’t speak of that night, or say anything more than he had told the police. He couldn’t help feeling guilty, somehow responsible. Runick’s parents didn’t say one word to him; dour folks, even when their son had been alive, and no wonder he had sought escape wherever he could find it, but mainly in music and the adoration of a beautiful rock musician. He hadn’t been the first.

When they were gone, Runick went back into the room and found that they had stuffed the trashcan full of tapes and records. Holly Terror, all of them.

Nevis liked her well enough, though not with Runick’s passion—thank God for that. He had other interests. Still, he couldn’t look at the covers without thinking of his roommate. Never quite a friend, but still—there had been something about him Nevis liked. He’d felt a strange affection. He couldn’t help but think that Runick should be remembered in a way he would appreciate.

So Nevis rescued Runick’s favorite album, the one he played several times a day and treated so reverently that there was scarcely a scratch upon it after a thousand playings. He didn’t bother with headphones, because there was no one he might disturb. He shut the door, closed the curtains, turned up the volume, and let the needle fall… And he was walking in darkness. In pine woods.

In a dark place, a deep place.

Before the first note finished, he bolted upright, screaming, searching for the light switch though he hadn’t turned it out, fighting his way back toward brightness and waking, though he hadn’t remembered falling asleep. He shoved the needle screeching over the platter, yanked the album off the turntable and sent it crashing against the wall.

He could never listen to that cut again; could hardly stand to hear another Holly Terror song, no matter how much her style changed with her next band. He couldn’t say exactly why, for he retained only a faint memory of what he’d seen in that moment when the music began. He had a faint, unwelcome memory of blazing eyes, a woman white and weeping, black sweeping wings, and Runick.

Runick had been there to turn him back, and he counted himself grateful for the warning.

She was Holly Terra now. She had a new band, she and Kelly. They sang of the earth and its mysteries, while avoiding outright horror; there was enough of that in her nightmares. She lost most of her original audience, who considered her too soft, and started to gather another which appreciated the subtler edge. She could look out from the stage and see the appreciation of a milder crowd, older, not so obsessive.

But sometimes, still, a younger face would surface there, eyes wide and drinking in every note, every word— thirsty for things she and Kelly had not put into these songs. Eyes like bottomless wells….

And then she would remember the black pool, and those other eyes. She would recoil and lose a beat, fearing to look into the crowd again for the rest of the concert.

Before such eyes she always felt like prey.

The eyes in the pool had been gorged and satiated, at peace, but what it had taken to satisfy them had been beyond price.

She couldn’t be sure of that, of course. Heather’s life might have been the price exactly. Only Heather would have known that, having driven the initial bargain.

But Heather was gone now. And she had taken Holly Terror with her.

THE DIANE ARBUS SUICIDE PORTFOLIO

“You’ll like this,” said Schaeffer as he let Brovnik into the apartment. “She was a photographer.”

Brovnik chuckled unhappily till the smell hit him; it fit right in with the buzzing of flies. The other cops’ hard shoes clapped on the uncarpeted boards of the hall; their voices echoed in the cluttered flat. Brovnik walked slowly, as if in a sweltering museum. Dozens of unmounted photographs were thumbtacked to the walls, curled by the July humidity. Schaeffer went into the bathroom with everyone else. Brovnik wasn’t in any hurry to learn the cause of the splashing he heard. He bent close to a picture of a white girl standing against a canvas tent, her head thrown back, arms spread wide, the hilt of a sword and part of the blade poking out of her gullet. The other pictures were just as freakish. He liked them.

“Come on, Bravo!”

He walked into the small tiled bathroom. Too many cops in it, and a humid jungle reek, tainted with carrion. Water dripped from the mirror.

“Give him some room, guys.”

The body slumped in the tub, mostly submerged, short-cropped thick brown hair matted on the surface like seagrass exposed at low tide. She was fully dressed. One arm floated, propped on a knee, the hand looking swollen and peeled. The water was murky pink. Streamers of red, like those little crepe paper flowers you get in Chinatown; drop a clamshell in water so it slowly opens and a tissue flower unfurls. The room was too small and muggy. He clutched his camera gratefully to his face, confining vision to one small window on a distorted tunnel with suicide at the far end. Her other arm hung over one side of the tub, skin sucked in between the tendons. He nearly stepped in blood as he walked around to get a better angle. It was tacky, two days old, kept from hardening by humidity.

When he finished, the others came back in. He stood in the living room, smoking, agitated. Why? Because she was a photographer? He looked over more of the woman’s prints. Dwarfs, giants, freaks, a man covered with tattoos. Wonder what kind of mind she’d had, to take pictures like this.

A few photos lay spread out on the couch, as if she’d been looking them over while the water was running. He didn’t want to disturb them, but the one on top disturbed him. The last thing she’d seen? A picture of Death standing in a freshly mown field; Death as a woman in a Halloween skull, clutching a white sheet around her. Hell, she’d gone rattling around with a head full of death, hunting it with her camera. He couldn’t understand a mind like that. With his job, it was different. He was a cop first, a photographer second, though these days he didn’t do much of anything but photography and lab administration.

Schaeffer came up next to him, pointing at a picture of a shirtless Latin midget in a hat sitting on a bed with a bottle on the nightstand next to him. Schaeffer nudged him.

“What do you think, she slept with that dwarf to get his picture?”

“You’re sick,” Brovnik said.

“Me? She’s the one in the bath.”

“Bravo, hey,” came a call from the bathroom. “You drop something in here?”

He walked back toward the bathroom, trying to see no more of the interior than he had to. Morrissey came out with a crumpled yellow foil film packet. “Messy, messy,” he said.

“Fuck you, Morrissey. I’m shooting 35—that’s a 120 wrapper.”

“Where’d you pick that up from?” Schaeffer said.

Morrissey suddenly looked pale and stupid. “It was under the tub. I—I remember right where.”

“You fucking idiot.” Schaeffer raised a hand as if to strike him. “She was a photographer, too.”

Morrissey scurried backward into the bathroom, Schaeffer right behind him. Brovnik looked around the room at all the prints; most were square, two and a quarter format, would have been shot on 120 roll film. Nice big negatives, real sharp. He had this little Pentax, light and quick, good enough for police work though it always felt too small in his hands.

He looked around the room for her camera while Schaeffer bawled out Morrissey, and finally found it in an open case behind the couch. He shivered when he saw she had a Pentax too.

How did rumors get started? How did they leak? Brovnik could never figure those things out. On the strength of a foil wrapper, the tabloids were claiming that the lady had somehow managed to photograph her own suicide. The press had called all day asking if the police planned to release the photographs. Denying their existence didn’t help. If the department said it didn’t have the photographs, the reporters asked who did. Who’d been in her apartment to take the shots? Did they have any leads?

Leads on a suicide? He had to laugh.

Brovnik was surprised that there had been any interest at all in the woman’s death. He’d never thought of photography as “Art.” But apparently she was “known,” and all this was just making her knowner. He wondered if she’d ever have guessed that sliding into a warm bath and opening her wrists would prove to be such a canny career move. Whatever her reasons, she hadn’t wanted to flub the attempt; what was left of her blood had been rich in barbiturates.

Reading the papers, he learned a few things himself. Her name was—had been—Diane Arbus. She’d had a few shows, some critical success, though mainly she’d made her living as a fashion photographer. Hard to imagine how a mind like hers would portray glamorous models… wrap them in funeral shrouds, black veils?

In the lab, he looked over his own photographs with a more critical eye. The glaring flash had burned out the water in most of the shots, hiding the lines of her sunken body; hard to avoid that. He remembered how harsh the flash effects had been in her photographs. Deliberate? It must have been. She’d worked to get an effect like the one he came up with accidentally. That made him feel better about his pictures. She might’ve liked police work. Her interest in freaks and death and all that crap… reality. It would’ve been more than just a job to her.

And how happy he’d be photographing gorgeous models all day instead of bloodbaths, car crashes, double homicides. God, give him an opportunity like that and he wouldn’t waste it on dwarves.

Seeing things afresh, he felt inspired to go through some of his back files. Torso murders, decapitations, stabbings, mob killings. Not half bad, most of them. He kind of liked the grainy effects, the harsh lighting that sent deep shadows sprawling like duplicate corpses. Weegee had gotten famous with pictures like these. Not too surprising, really. People fed on this stuff. Consider the popularity of public executions.

A secretary opened the door and told him there was a call for him. No name. She put it through to the lab phone.

“Good evening, Inspector Brovnik, I understand you took some photographs of Diane Arbus in her bath.” A woman’s voice, small, raspy and hoarse. “I wonder if you’d be interested in a trade.”

“Who is this?”

“Just a friend.”

“Whose friend?”

“I took the other set.”

Brovnik didn’t speak for a moment.

“Are you still there, Inspector? Or getting this call traced?”

“That was your 120 wrapper?”

“I photographed Diane’s suicide. Twelve frames. The whole thing. Everything except the aftermath, really, and you took those. I’d like good copies if I can get them, to make my set complete.”

“And what about your set? Do I get a look at those?”

“As I said, we could arrange a trade.”

“You know, the investigation on a suicide is fairly straightforward. You telling me that someone else was involved, suddenly things start to look more complicated. You’re asking for trouble.”

“She killed herself, Inspector Brovnik. She didn’t have an accomplice.”

“What about you? You stood back and snapped off a dozen shots while your so-called friend bled to death?”

“Understand, she didn’t want her death to be for nothing. She wanted those pictures taken.”

“And what’d she think she would do with them?”

“I can’t answer that.”

“Look, I can’t make this kind of deal, Miss—”

“You don’t need my name. And if you involve anyone else, then you won’t hear from me again. I got in touch with you because you’re a photographer. I thought there might be some understanding between us.”

“Understanding?”

“Consider that I’m Diane’s agent in this matter, Inspector. There has to be an element of trust. As an artist, you should be able to make the necessary intuitive leap.”

“Who said I was an artist?”

“You photographed Diane in death. Your eye has been changed… touched. I’m very interested in seeing your work.”

“This is crazy.”

“All right, so you need to think about it. I’ll get back to you soon. I don’t care who knows about the pictures once we’ve made our trade, but until then you must act alone or it’s all off. I’m eager for those pictures but I won’t risk exposure. Diane wouldn’t want that.”

“How can you be so sure what she’d want? I mean, look what she wanted for herself.”

“She was very hard on herself. Goodbye, Inspector.”

“Wait—”

But she didn’t wait. After that, he had to live with his impatience for another week.

He didn’t mention the call to anyone, contrary to his plans. He printed a duplicate set of the suicide photos, taking more care in the darkroom than ever before. He managed to burn some detail into the glare of flash on the bathwater, enough so that he could see one of her hands with the fingers gently splayed beneath the surface, as if bathed in mercury. He worked long past his regular hours. Her curled prints were always tacked up in his memory, examples of an ideal heid never known to strive for until now. He found himself working to extract subtle qualities of mood and tone from the negatives, fluttering his fingers beneath the enlarger lens, controlling contrast with split-bath developers—things he’d never bothered with before, except when making bad negatives into acceptable prints. Gradually he found the glossy bright snaps of death becoming utterly strange to him, unlike his other photographs which became more commonplace as he worked them over. These were beautiful, like paintings done in silver; morbid but alive in the way only photographs are alive. Finally he stood back from his handiwork and shook his head in disbelief, because he had made her poor drowned corpse immortal.

It was an awful responsibility. That night, late, the phone rang and he came awake to the reek of sulfur. It was on his hands and made his eyes sting when he wiped away tears. What had he been dreaming?

“It’s me,” said the raspy little voice, and that was when he realized why it sounded so odd. It was a midget voice; gruff with age and tribulation, not squeaky but still small. This was one of Arbus’s midget women.

“So it is,” he said. “But it’s the middle of the night.”

“I thought you’d be more likely to come alone that way.”

“What, now?”

“Have you got a pencil?”

He thought of telling her he didn’t have the prints with him, but he found himself grabbing a pen and pad instead. He wrote down an address and agreed to meet her in half an hour. He was backing his car out of the driveway when he came fully awake and wondered what the fuck he was doing. Was this police procedure? He decided this didn’t have anything to do with the department. This was for the sake of something else—call it moonlighting, like his work in the darkroom. He had to have something in his life besides a job, didn’t he? Like Arbus, who’d shot models for a living and in her spare time went looking for freaks. Maybe she needed that, after overdosing on glamour all day. Maybe in his case, after the brutal repetitive ugliness of his day-to-day—dead junkies and hold-up victims who were a bit too slow (or low) with the cash—he needed something a little fantastic, something beautiful, like that silver glow he’d glimpsed on the surface of Arbus’s bath, like the first rays of a silver sun about to rise, a hint of imminent revelation. He saw clues to that light hanging over the marble crypts of Brooklyn which spread away beneath him as he took the bridge; it was more explicit on the waters of the East River; increasingly lovely and plentiful as crushed jewels scattered over the black tombs of the Manhattan skyline. Then he drove down into the tunnel where the glare of fluorescents rubbed his eyes raw, dispelling all magic except for the sense of humid evil evoked by the sight of so much seeping greenish tile lining the tunnel walls. In his mind, water continued to drip from a mirror long after blood had ceased dripping from her dangling arm.

The address the midget gave him wasn’t really an address. There were buildings on either side of it, in an alley, but the number itself did not exist. All he saw was a low wall of old brick topped by a spiked wrought-iron fence; an iron gate opened in the midst of it. Might have been a vacant lot behind that wall, anything. Shattered windows looked down from three sides, as if the rendezvous were nothing but the bottom of an airshaft choked with trash, cast-offs. Not official business, no, but he was glad for his .38 and flashlight as he pushed through the gate into a cemetery.

He’d never seen the place before, not in years of patrolling the city on foot and in cars. He must have driven past—even down—this alley a hundred times and never noticed the wall and gate. As expected, it was full of trash; the old marble and granite headstones were shattered, chipped, vandalized, discolored. His shoes crunched through a fine covering of broken glass; it was like walking on the Coney Island shore, even down to the smell of urine. He flicked his flashlight over carved angels with brutalized faces and seared wings. Stubs of crosses with the arms snapped off appeared to give the finger to the living. Every beam he aimed into the tumble of graves sent off a hundred harsh new shadows. He couldn’t be sure where he’d looked and where he hadn’t.

He wiped off the lid of a relatively clean crypt and settled down to wait. With the flashlight off his eyes adjusted quickly to the dark. His cigarette made the only human movement. So where was she? A dwarf could sneak around in here easier than a full-grown woman—but it would be hard to come soundlessly in all this glass. He laid the envelope of prints on the stone beside him and smoked three cigarettes before a shadow came out of nowhere. He jumped down from his seat and instantly lost sight of her among the stones.

“Who’s there?” he said.

She came forward again. “No names, Inspector. Of course, I already know yours.”

As he’d guessed, she was small as a child, her face a grey blur of blended shadows. He knew she wouldn’t appreciate any light leaping on her.

Her hand darted out to the tombstone surface and stole away the envelope holding his prints. She slid them into her hand and made a frantic gesture for his flashlight. She turned away from him, crouched over and laid the prints on the ground. Shielding the light with her body, she switched it on.

He heard her gasp, then further sounds of pleasure. He tried to make out details he might use later to recognize her under other circumstances, but her silhouette was as empty as a doorway into a starless sky, with only little wisps of reflected light peeking through her spiky hair like bursts of solar flares. He grew impatient listening to her. She sounded like a starving animal wolfing down a huge meal.

“All right,” he said finally, “you’ve seen enough.” As he stepped toward her, she shut off the light and jumped back. The prints lay on the ground between them like a dozen stray windows into a glossier world. He had the feeling that if he stepped on one he might fall into it—fall into that bathtub full of radiant blood. He could almost see the glare of the flash shining from the time-frozen surface. Even in black and white, it had a reddish tint.

“Come on, you said a trade. Let’s have your dozen.”

She didn’t move. He could tell she was measuring him, reading his character in a way he’d never experienced before, eating him up with the dark sunken pits in her face. He made a grab for his flashlight, wanting superstitiously to shine a beam into those hollows and fill them in with eyes.

She backed away, being small enough that an edge of crypt shadow neatly swallowed half of her. Another stupid move and the rest would disappear. Without the light he felt more helpless than if she’d taken his gun. He held his ground, stooping to gather his prints.

“I showed you mine,” he said, trying to keep the edge out of his voice. “You’re the one talked about trust.”

“Mine didn’t come out,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the roll was fogged, all twelve negs burned black, pure white prints. Nothing on them. I thought I could bring them with me, but it didn’t work.”

“Wait a minute. You telling me there’s no trade?” Now he was pissed, and ready to make a grab at her. She was little, she could elude him. He’d have to be fast. “Well fuck if I’m giving you my prints.”

“I saw them, that’s enough. They came out good. You’re a fine photographer. I can tell how much work you put into them. And I… appreciate that.”

That was it for Brovnik. Her whole story of being an accomplice, nothing but a lie to get a look at private records. This was suddenly more than personal; he would make it official, too.

He hurled the prints at her. They curled off in twelve different arcs, like a blossom opening around him as he leapt to cut her off.

She gasped, spinning away, and found herself trapped in a corner where a tall family mausoleum backed up against the brick of the surrounding buildings, below a high row of broken windows. Nowhere for her to go.

He stooped for the flashlight, which she’d dropped. “All right, lady,” he said, and switched it on.

The light caught her for a glancing instant, and that was all it took—all he got for his pains and for his memories. He saw that her skin was shimmery black, her short-cropped hair silvery grey, and the very centers of her eyes, brilliant white. Then she shrank to nothing and disappeared, like a little womanshaped balloon deflating instantaneously to the size of a speck of lichen on the marble tomb, then even smaller, gone. The beam hit nothing but the chipped brick wall and a slab of marble with some cryptic gang hieroglyphs streaking the side.

He backed up, swinging the beam to and fro, up and down, looking for the crack she’d slid away through, the secret door that had opened to swallow her up, the rabbit hole, anything. Nothing. None of those things would explain what he’d seen, anyway.

In the time he’d had to look at her, really look—and it was an almost subliminal impression—he’d seen that she wasn’t any dwarf. She had none of the characteristic squashed features, no stubby fingers or any of that. For her size, she was perfectly proportioned—like a normal grown woman who had shrunk in the wash. This remained true as she vanished: all proportions stayed constant as if she were zooming backward down a tunnel with her eyes fixed on his, until she blinked out. The last thing he remembered was her faintly wounded look, and her color… that shifting silvery black like nothing he’d ever seen in a person—though tantalizingly familiar.

Brovnik hunted through the cemetery till the sun came up, but he didn’t find anything except his twelve dented, scratched prints. He shoved them in a crypt to rot and hurried back to his car. In the strong morning sunlight it was just barely possible to not think of her consciously. But somewhere inside, his mind kept going over the details; the cop inside him wouldn’t quit.

It was his day off. After a few hours spent futilely trying to sleep, he went into the lab, fished out the negatives of the Arbus suicide, and studied them on the light board. The hair looked similar to what he’d seen in the flashlight beam—an odd shiny grey, cropped short. The skin was the same shade of silvery black that no negro’s skin had ever been. But that didn’t mean it was her. The face might have proved something, but he was spared the sight of her piercing white pupils staring out of his negatives because she’d slid face down in the tub. Still, when he looked at the spiky hair, he felt a chill he hoped wasn’t wholly based on recognition.

The next few days passed with excruciating slowness as he waited for the sense of shock to move through his system and into the past so he could get on with a life of ordinary things. He had time off coming to him, and he took it. He went to the Catskills with an instamatic camera and took color snaps of waterfalls and old bridges and empty inner-tubes bobbing down the Esopus River. He didn’t take any pictures of people. He met a woman in a restaurant bar who spent the night at his cabin; in the morning she was gone but he felt reassured because she had vanished in the usual way, while his eyes were closed. When he got back to the city after a week, he thought he’d put it all behind him, he thought he was refreshed.

His first night back on duty, a man shot his wife through the temples, cut the throats of his two, three and four year olds, strangled the family Doberman (not necessarily in that order), and sentenced himself to life as a vegetable by badly misjudging the trajectory of his final bullet. The photography posed a number of technical problems for Brovnik, due to the cramped conditions, but he was working them out in a cool professional way when he happened to look through the open window onto the dark fire escape, and saw the four of them standing there. Five, if you counted the dog. A tall silvery white woman, three little ones, and a four-legged mass of silver mist. Silvery white, with sharp white pupils, all looking at him as if he owed them something. It didn’t make sense to him at first (and this was how his mind worked, hooked on little bits of logic he hoped might help him understand the larger problem) that they should all be silvery white, when the shrinking woman in the cemetery had been so inky black.

“What the fuck are you doing, Bravo? There’s no pulse in that arm.”

He looked down in horror and saw that he had been posing a limp arm—adjusting the dead to make a better picture.

He backed off and drew the camera defensively to his eye, aiming it at the mother’s splattered skull. For the first time he noticed that she was black. The children were black as well. So was the Doberman. All black.

Lowering the camera, he saw five white negatives watching him.

What did she do to me? he wondered.

“Bravo? What is it?”

He didn’t answer the other cops. He knew he wouldn’t ever be able to answer their questions. He forced his way to the window and showed his camera to the watchers outside, let them witness him opening the back and exposing the film. He yanked out a yard of it, unspooling the celluloid, letting it go ribboning into the night with all the latent images burned out, never to be seen, sparing them his camera’s bite of immortality.

As the woman in the graves had done, they shrank away to nothing. Five new stars burned briefly in the night, a bit too low to top the horizon, then blinked out.

“Brovnik, what the fuck is wrong?” Heavy steps came toward him.

“I have to get out,” he said, stepping through the window. Questioning cries followed him all the way down the fire escape to the street, where he walked away quickly from the lights of the squad cars, his camera tugging like a bloodhound on the trail of everything that had ever eluded him.

THE BLACK BUS

Driver approached the main gates, hunched low against the cold clouds and the eerie onrush of music that crept out over the escarpments of the amphitheater, thin groping notes like the claws of wintry trees made of black sound. Colored lights, auroral, pulsed against the clouds in time to the music, reminding him of something older than memories of childhood Hell-dreams. He imagined his grandfather’s evangelical words driving down at him like a pelting brimstone hail, and thought how the old man would see the theater as a concession erected around the mouth of Hell, into which the damned were lured with music and screams which passage through the gates had transfigured into wild, seductive laughter. He pulled up his collar against the storm of invisible coals, and wished he could have stayed in the bus. But it had broken down completely, the prognosis was terrible, and he needed help.

He glanced back at the old bus, cold now in the mountain moonlight and the distant moth-battered glare of the stadium lights, far out at a corner of the lot among a dozen other buses not quite as full of memories, though equally lurid: paisleys, spirals, fractal swirls in luminous paints. An anachronism, a retrograde voyager, an affront to the new serious spirit of reform. Do drugs!—it seemed to tell all the little children who followed its progress on the back roads, delighting in its psychedelic colors. Run from home and join the circus! Following the Group was the same thing.

Turning back toward the gates, he saw another bus pulling in before the amphitheater, brakes squealing and then a gasping hiss of air as it stopped almost directly in his path. Gleaming black, with a long row of square windows all seemingly cut from warm yellow parchment. Its black surface was weirdly textured in diamond-shapes, oblique facets that turned light back on itself: like a stealth-bus, invisible to enemy detection. He walked around it cautiously, watching it over his shoulder, expecting the front door to open—anxious, in fact, to see the driver sitting up in the high seat at the top of the steps.

“Tickets,” said a voice, and he whirled to find himself in the shadow of the gate. A flashlight caught and held his hands in glare, making the hairs stand out like abrupt shards of spun glass, the blemishes suddenly malign. He jerked his hands out of the light and plunged them into his pocket as if to spare them such scrutiny, but actually searching for the plastic pass that had been his for longer than he could remember.

The torch, its bearer still unseen, waved him in, opening a path into the cement tunnel strewn with torn tickets, broken bottles, pools of piss with cigarette butts disintegrating in them. He hurried, but the beam deserted him. Laughter, and then a low growling that might have been nothing worse than some enormous old man clearing his throat. He walked around the sound of breathing, kicked a crushed can skittering, walked into a solid wall of stench and sound. He didn’t need to see the Group. Their music was everywhere. He brushed cobwebs from his face and stepped out into the amphitheater.

Bodies like an ocean, like a breaking wave of souls caught in mid-curl, rushed away beneath him to fill the vast pool of the theater, curving up and around, reaching to the sky on all sides, energized by the pulsing light. All of them dancing, swaying, caught in the trance of the music. From down here the clouds looked like a vaporous cover thrown over the theater. Looking up made him dizzy, his vision lined with a funnel of possessed faces staring down at him—past him, really, toward the stage. He shuddered and followed their eyes with his own, knowing that was where he could always find his charges.

The Group was so much smaller than its music. Tiny figures, although of jewel-like clarity even in the smoky distances of the theater, they bent above their instruments, hardly moving anything but arms and fingers. He had seen them often enough to know their eyes were closed, their mouths fixed in grave and urgent expressions. So they would remain until some shrieking inspiration bore its way through them, when their heads went back and their eyes bulged and words spirited from their throats in desperate harmonies.—But that was always later. This early on, the concert was a voyage in its infancy, almost plodding still. It was perhaps the only time he would be able to find his riders. Earlier, the place would have been a riot of people vying for position; later it would be a frenzy. Things were relatively subdued.

He found a stairway leading down into the sunken center of the arena; it was covered in bodies, worshipers who hardly acknowledged his presence, barely allowed him to pass. They resented his worming passage, thinking that he sought to put himself closer to the source of the music. If they had known how little he wished this, they would have laughed in disbelief. Often he was forced to halt and wait for a new path to open; and then he would feel himself trapped with the music, suffocating in it. People all around him, eyes rolled back, heads whipping from side to side, and himself deaf to it. Afraid they might recognize that he was not one of them.

Finally he pulled himself free of strangers, seeing faces he recognized just ahead, mere yards from the elevated heights of the stage. They were together there, packed close as if for protection, the eternal pilgrims. No doubt there were other such clusters scattered through the theater, but these were his own. Driver had grown fond of them, if not their music. The object of their devotions—the Group—meant nothing more to him than a steady job, travel, food, companionship. He could as easily have been driving a limousine or a schoolbus, or delivering parcels door to door—in which case, he would never have experienced the strangeness of such nights. The awareness of how close he had come to missing this particular life lessened his dread of the crowd. He felt almost at home here, through familiarity.

As he pushed his way toward Sonora—her blond hair streaming back, metal rivets threaded through the strands, long strips of gleaming tattooed scalp showing above the wildly colored scarves she wore—a fearful face thrust toward him. A skinny young man, bearded and pale, his hair tom into tatters, his eyes wide with horror. Screaming not with the music, which might have been appropriate later in the night, but in time to some sinister rhythm of his own making.

He collided with Driver, who would have fallen if not for the congestion of bodies holding him upright. “It’s happening again!” he howled, staring desperately into Driver’s eyes. “I can’t stop it—make it stop! I always forget!”

Driver flinched away from the apparition, anxious to avoid contact. The kid reached toward him, then drew back himself, his eyes already wandering. “No,” he muttered, and Driver knew he was in the depths of some drug-inspired nightmare. There were people in these crowds whose minds had cracked and would never heal. People who appeared only in this context, screaming prophesy, gripped by visions, having no relation to the outside world, the world of day. This one sank to his knees, forcing the heels of his hands up into his eye sockets, wrenching them violently as if pushing something in or jarring something loose. “No, this is the first time,” he said. Then he staggered upright again and stumbled on, chewed up in the mill of flesh. To Driver he was vaguely familiar; he had probably glimpsed him rushing through the crowds on his stoned jeremiad on other nights, during other shows.

By now Sonora had noticed Driver, and she pointed him out to the others, who drew him into their midst in a sheltered spot they had made of their bodies, a haven woven of flesh and bone. It was difficult to hear them in the din, for the music was building now, cresting toward some peak he did not wish to witness. But they made him welcome with looks and gestures and squeezes on his arms and shoulders. No doubt they thought he was becoming one of them, that the music had finally done its trick and lured him in. In a spirit of companionship, Sonora put her mouth to his ear and said, “Try this.”

She opened her palm under his eyes, and in it was a little foil pack. She opened that, and in among the silver creases he saw a thing like a stylized teardrop the color of blood, a three-dimensional paisley, gelatinous, specks of light sculling through it. She lifted it by the curled tail, like a tadpole, and laid it on his palm. He could sense what was in it, and instantly panicked, gripping the droplet as if to crush it.

“We all did it,” she reassured him. “It’s just coming on, we won’t be too far ahead of you.”

“No,” he said. And then, because it didn’t register, he screamed it.

She drew back slightly to show her amusement. “It’s not what you think,” she shouted. “This is new.”

He shook his head firmly. “The bus is dead. We need a decent mechanic—we need parts, and a ride to find them. We need help. Help!”

While he was shouting, Sonora peeled back the fingers of his hand one by one; he ignored her silly game until he had finished shouting, and then, because she was staring at his palm, he too looked down and saw the small reddish stain where the teardrop had been. Even as he looked, it squirmed away into his skin, drunk in as if the flesh were dry earth touched by rain.

At the sight, he began to forget his errand. He forgot where he was, who he was. “Why” became the real concern, but when he asked it of Sonora and the others—Chad and Parky, Selene and Yvette and Dietch—they stilled him with their hands and buffeted him into the dance, until he no longer questioned anything. He gave up his will, if he had ever had it.

It was merciful, for a time, to escape his dread and innate skepticism, his constant sense of something going wrong. But his anxiety did not end, exactly—only changed, uncurling like the tail-end of that paisley, and left him weaving through the gates again, this time one of a hushed line, holding hands in long chains like human molecules, everyone deserting the theater silently, the entire crowd speaking in whispers or not at all. Something vast slept behind them, and they departed quietly so as not to wake it.

The matter of the bus had already been discussed, he discovered, as with gestures Sonora indicated they were to board not their own defunct vehicle but the black bus that had pulled up by the amphitheater gate. Apparently there was room for them in it, and he went along, though he would not be the driver of this bus. And that was something of a relief, too. It had been so long since he’d been able to sit back and simply watch the changing roadside. He had always felt so responsible for everything….

Inside was pleasant contrast to the inky, angular black exterior. Here it was all warmth and glow, soft pillows and cushions spread everywhere, low bunks overhead for sleeping, plenty of blankets for the cold nights of traveling. He slipped off his shoes and went on hands and knees onto the padded platform, crawling toward the back of the bus, the warm rumbling cave above the engine. In his own dilapidated vehicle, the engine had growled under the hood, always up in front of him. It was less efficient, but he missed it for a moment. Curled against a pillow, eyes shut, he dreamed a clear picture of the other bus as it had been, new and freshly painted, when he’d first hired on as its driver. Years ago, and thousands of miles behind him, that had been. He realized—had known all along, tonight, without admitting it till now—that it would never be fixed. The old bus was dead.

Now the passengers of the black bus, those who had invited them aboard some unknown time during the show (as if their plight had communicated itself osmotically), pulled down black shades, as though no spark of light could be permitted out. Sonora and Chad joined in the effort, but Driver was content not to move.

I wonder, he thought, since I’m apparently not the driver of this bus, I wonder if I get to keep my name.

They were all passengers now, Sonora thought, watching Driver, halfway convinced (but never quite) that she was sharing his thoughts. His fear was obvious enough, betrayed by his stiff posture, as he lay among the cushions like a wooden martyr marionette dropped down from a cross to which it was still attached by strings. His mind barked out loud warnings; he felt threatened, but it was easing.

She smiled and put her hand on his breast. “It’s strange for you, not driving, isn’t it?”

“We’re not moving yet,” he said with a wry smile, as if he had seen into her intentions.

“Yes we are,” said Sonora.

Sonora could still remember her name, which was more than she could say of the others on the bus. She wasn’t sure about all of them; and they didn’t seem exactly sure of themselves. Chad she remembered; Yvette, yes—and the one who called himself Neuron. Or did she know Neuron? Hadn’t for long, actually. He’d come up to them during the concert, right after Driver had said he needed help.

“Join us on the bus out front,” he’d whispered in her ear. “We’ll take you wherever you want to go.”

He wore a cowboy hat, which, for a guy who called himself Neuron, was an odd thing. But the crown of the hat was transparent, clipped away and replaced with a transparent dome which crisply replicated the crease down the center of a Stetson. And down in that dome you could see lights moving and pulsing inside a plastic model of a human brain. At least she hoped it was plastic.

“It’s not plastic, you know,” he’d said right away, as if she’d asked audibly. “It’s laminated so you can look right in. Just as tough as my old skull.”

“You go around like that?” she said.

“Sometimes I wear a regular hat, like when I’m working in bright lights. But on nights like this I like to keep the top down and… ‘just let the lights shine!’”

The last of his words were a line from a song the Group was singing right at that exact same instant.

“So how do I know which bus is yours?” she leaned and asked him.

“Can’t miss it. She’s black and weirdly angled, as you’d say.”

“I’d say? You said it.”

Now he was putting himself down beside her, his cowboy hat tossed off, and wrapping a black bandanna kerchief around his head. The neural lights had dimmed anyway. She vaguely remembered seeing his brain bobbing along way up ahead in the dark tunnel as they were seeping out of the amphitheater, the last chords of music hanging behind them like a bubble about to burst. She had followed him dreaming of nightlights. “I don’t suppose you have any wisdom pills, do you?” he asked.

She pulled a vaporizer out of her pocket. “Will this do?”

“Hafta.”

When he could speak again, he did so raspingly. “Who’s your friend there? The comfortable one.”

“That’s Driver,” Sonora said. She couldn’t tell if he was asleep or just pretending. The motion of the bus lulled him. She realized it was probably the first time he had ever allowed himself to sleep on a moving bus. My God, she thought. The most basic pleasure of the journey and he’s never experienced it until now, no wonder he seemed so uncomfortable all the time.

Driver opened his eyes and looked at them.

“What kind of bus is this?” he said.

“You’ll be sorry you asked that question,” Neuron said.

Sonora had ominous intimations of an unspeakable horror about to be revealed. No sooner had Neuron spoken his warning than an old man near the front of the bus began to talk, twisting his leathery neck around so the cords twined together.

“This is the only kind of bus there is,” the old man said.

“That there’s Crouch,” said Neuron. “And you just started him on his favorite subject.”

“It’s not my favorite—not by a long shot,” Crouch said, knee-walking toward them. “But it’s one on which I have many opinions.”

“That’s what I meant,” Neuron said.

“They’re not the same thing, what you said and what you meant.”

“Crouch, you make my brain tired.”

“And it makes my soul weary looking at you, Cerebrus.”

“What was that again?” Sonora asked, looking on amazed at this stream of bickering, which suggested old well-worn rots in the relationship between these men, so that she doubted they could ever talk to one another in any other way—had they even wanted to.

“Cerebrus. The Spectacular Transparent Head. The Mind-Body split made manifest.”

“I have many opinions about buses, too,” Driver said. “I’ve thought about them a lot, while I was driving. But this isn’t like riding on any bus I can imagine. This is like moving on waves, just soft little swells over the sea… or a big lake.”

“Or a river,” said the old man. “A river’s more like it.”

Then “Look!” said Yvette at one of the windows, peering out through a tiny spyslot she’d lifted beneath the shades. “It’s our bus!”

Sonora turned around and made herself one of the eyeholes. They were coming down from the mountains, narrow curving roads winding around and switching back, wriggling down the slopes. They were out of the cool dark trees, the pines and rivers and rocks. This was the arid desolate place above the foothills, the place where nothing grew but weeds and aluminum guardrails. She had always hated this part of the road—of any mountain road. This was where the dust beat itself senseless, blowing in from the plains; or where the salt fell, whisked in off the sea. Nothing moved here but headlights.

On the switchback below—moving past, under them, and then in the opposite direction—she finally saw their bus. Unmistakable. And there were people in it.

“Hey,” she said. “Driver, I thought you said the bus was broken.”

His face darkened in a scowl. “I know that bus,” he said. “And it died tonight.”

“Maybe it hasn’t, yet.”

Sonora looked over at Neuron, but only briefly. His smile, like his words, puzzled her. She went back to watching the bus below. Headlights vanished around a curve, came out again, continued to weave. The air was full of dust or smoke, so she could see the beams swinging back and forth.

Driver pushed up next to her. “What are you looking at?”

“Just what Yvette said. It looks like

“It can’t be our bus.”

“That’s what it looks like, I’m sorry.”

“It can’t be our bus.”

He looked anyway.

Someone up front switched on a radio and music came out of the scattered speakers. It was the Group, predictably, broadcast from the microsatellite they owned, which all the pilgrim buses picked up with a special antenna. Sonora hardly heard it, it had been background music for so long. But she noticed when the broadcast cut off suddenly.

Suddenly was hardly the word for it.

The tune died with a scream, then a hysterical wailing and clamoring. Voices in panic and terror. “No!” someone shouted. “No, my God!”

“No—no!”

Screams. Then a clearer voice, only slightly stronger than the others, high and nasal, a man: “This is a report—hello, are you there? Anyone? I’m reporting live from the airfield where the Group was just now departing. It’s hard to be sure, but we just saw—everyone waiting out here is afraid of it—”

For a moment the sane voice was drowned out by shrieking that completely overwhelmed everything else. He moved away or somehow regained control—at least of himself, at least for the moment. “Oh my god, yes, it’s apparently true. We saw a fireball—well, heard a horrible sound, first, hard to describe—impossible to describe, I’d have to say—sort of a metal scraping and then a crumpling crash—and then that fireball, an explosion that is now pouring up into the sky.

“Brothers and sisters, I do not want to be the one to tell you this, but I saw them with my own eyes and I have the microphone now, so my voice is going to have to be the one to say it. I saw them board that plane a few minutes before it took off. I would like to tell you that they were not on it, but I saw all of them go in, and then the door closed and the ladder pulled away and the plane started to taxi off down the runway into the darkness, so I could only see its running lights moving across the field. It was very dark out there, everyone. I don’t know if another plane came in out of nowhere or if the Group’s plane just didn’t get off the ground in time… or if something else went wrong. But I can see a giant wing or a tail sticking up out of the flames; that’s all I can see through the smoke. That’s all I can tell you now, my friends… my poor friends. My God… I’m so sorry for all of us.”

Silence in the black bus, indecipherable. Sonora knew that she and Yvette and Chad and Driver were all looking out their windows at their own bus on the road below, but somehow none of this seemed real. What they were hearing, what they were seeing—none of it.

Their crazy, colorful bus’s headlights drove in and around, wove sharply once, twice, and again. In an instant—it happened that fast—Sonora saw the bus speed up and go out of control. The turn ahead was sharp and lit too late, and whoever drove was not thinking of the road.

“You idiot!” Driver said, yelling down at the bus as if he could save it with a word.

But he couldn’t. None of them could have done anything to stop it going over the edge. The disaster had begun when the Group got onto the plane; now it was only spreading, a shockwave, carrying all of them with it.

“Shut those shades now,” Crouch said firmly.

“But—but—”

“I said shut those shades!” the old man insisted.

“Come on.” Neuron was up next to her now, gently taking the shade out of her fingers, sealing it down again. “Crouch knows.”

“What’s happening here?” Driver yelled at them.

It had to be asked, eventually. Sonora was not so sure it would ever be answered.

The speakers shut off and the lights dimmed drastically. Only a few little bulbs remained to show a way through the heaped pillows. For the first time Sonora noticed figures sleeping, wrapped in sheets, on the overhead bunks which lined the interior. There was not much room up there, under the curved ceiling; they were crammed in like luggage, and among luggage. The bus whirred on, and it was as Driver had said: it felt as though they were rocking, but not so gently now. Crazily. With growing violence. She lay down flat on her back, afraid she might be thrown or at least rolled; with arms spread wide, she grabbed onto the mattress, convinced that they too were now going off the road.

A wave of sound roared through the bus, beginning in the pings and creaks and groans and rattles of the engine, the shocks, the brakes and the tires—growing louder and louder, until it sounded like jabbering voices. It built into a storm of howls and crashing as if they’d been caught in an avalanche of souls on the steep road. The sides of the bus felt too thin to protect them. Hail or hammerblows struck the ceilings, the walls, even pummeled them from underneath. She felt a repetitive, dull slamming just under one of her shoulders, a steady beat that seemed to be aiming up deliberately at her, driving toward her heart.

Her mind had room for nothing else. The lights flickered and went out, and she would have screamed except that Neuron was right up next to her, whispering comfort in her ear, and she could see his brain glowing faintly, comfortingly, through his bandanna. She grabbed onto him, wondering for a moment how Driver was taking this—sorry that he had always been so aloof from them. She supposed he would be all right.

Then, some long time before she accepted the fact, the sounds died out and the hammering stopped and even the sickening motion was done. They seemed to be at rest, the motor purring—idling—underneath them; and all around them, otherwise, perfect silence.

A few lights came on again. Neuron sat up and pulled his hat from a hook between the windows, settled it over his head. He looked down at her. “You might want to wait here.”

“For what?” she asked, words that barely escaped her dry throat.

But he was moving on his knees toward the front of the bus, along with some of the others, including old Crouch, who was coughing with a wet, bubbling sound as if the shaking had jarred something loose in his chest. The others from their old bus were sitting against the walls, the masked windows, some curled into fetal positions among the pillows, eyes squeezed shut. Yvette sat with her arms wrapped around her knees, watching Crouch.

Sonora looked over at Driver. His eyes were open but he was staring at the ceiling, looking contemplative, resigned. When he saw her looking, he smiled briefly, a darting flicker.

“Are you okay?” she said.

“I don’t suppose so,” he said. “On the other hand, does it matter?”

Crouch whistled sharply, and she turned to look down the aisle at him. But he wasn’t calling her, or any of them. He was looking up at the sleeping racks. One of them, up there, was stirring.

Just then, there was a loud pneumatic wheeze. A rash of warm air tore at her scarves, as if the bus had gasped out its last breath. A bitter metallic cold replaced the warmth she hadn’t noticed until it was gone. The driver—whose face she had not seen, who was no more than a scarcely registered shape in her memory—stepped from his seat and descended the steps at the front of the bus. Everyone watched him depart through the accordioned doors, his shoulders sharp in a dark, stiffly pressed uniform, disappearing outside. When he was gone, Crouch moved irritably toward the sleeper in the closest bunk.

“Come on,” he snapped, shoving the figure there. “It’s your time.”

There was a crackling sound, something like a canvas sail being unfurled in the confined space, and a creaking groan. What Sonora had thought were sheets slowly unfolded into wings. Pale leathery wings, bald as a rat’s tail, with clawed hinges. The sleeper, at Crouch’s prodding, rolled from the bunk and dropped to the floor, moving awkwardly on thin legs, its long nails catching and tearing in the mattress covers. She had only a glimpse of its face—but that was enough. Sleepy slitted eyes, long white snout, thin ranged mouth. Then Crouch was harrying it ahead of him through the aisle, down the steps and out the door. Only when it was gone could Sonora look away, and then her eyes went immediately to the others still slumbering overhead. They did not all appear to be of the same sort; but there were more like that one up there.

Suddenly the black bus seemed less of a haven than she had imagined. She went on her knees after Neuron, who was sitting at the edge of the platform pulling on tall boots. Her own sandals were below in a pile of shoes.

“Be sure you get the right ones,” he said as she rooted for her pair. “This isn’t the place to go walking off in someone else’s shoes.”

“You and your identity,” Crouch called back sourly from the doorway. Then he stepped off into the night, and Sonora distinctly heard his footsteps crunching down hard into gravel or sand. The sound reassured her. At least they were somewhere.

There was a pile of loose shawls and blankets near the shoes. She dragged a poncho with a mandala pattern over her head and went down the aisle, down the steps, looking over once at the driver’s seat and the dashboard as she went. She didn’t drive, herself; but it looked like any other bus.

Stepping out, she learned instantly where the heat had gone. Sucked up, sunk into the reddish sand, which instantly snatched the last trace of warmth from her body. She stood hugging the blanket around her, cold as alabaster yet not quite feeling the chill. That numb.

Footprints led away from the bus, toward the horizon. At the end of that lengthening trail was the dark uniform of the driver, plodding steadily along. But Crouch, who stood outside, and Neuron, who now jumped down beside her and stamped his feet as if to force nonexistent heat into them, were not looking that way. They gazed straight out ahead of the bus, in the direction it was headed. Neuron pushed back his cowboy hat for a better view of the winged silhouette that was lofting higher by the second against a dark sky with faint stars in it. It was the violet hour, wolf-glow, but lacking qualities she associated with dawn or dusk. Then she realized what it was. At the zenith was a molten orange glow, like a sun without definition; while spreading away from that in rippled waves was steadily deeper darkness, purpling till it coalesced into perfect blackness against the land. It was the exact opposite of sunrise or sunset; here, darkness massed at the horizon, and light retreated toward the center of the sky. Stars burned and flickered close to the ground, like the lights of a desert city. The flying shape, as it gained distance, gradually merged with the darkness that ringed them entirely. Behind them, she noticed, was no sign of the mountains they had traversed; nor of any river, for that matter.

Sonora was grateful to have at least the thick blob of molten light above, though it cast no warmth that she could feel. Even as she thought this, she saw that it was dwindling—that the darkness was not a static thing, a mere wall around them, but continued to grow and seep up across the sky. Blue and violet invaded the orange flare, weakening it while she watched. It was like a foreign cell under attack, dissolving. Stars marked the territory taken by night.

Well, she thought. At least there are stars. For the moment. I won’t take them for granted.

As the orange light faded, Crouch and Neuron grew visibly nervous. They peered hard at the horizon, squinting into the dark, until the old man began to curse.

“I can’t believe it,” he said. “Another one.”

“Maybe he’ll be back,” Neuron said. “Anyway, there’s more.”

“Not many!”

This, too, had the feel of an old—an endless—argument.

“Okay,” Neuron said, turning toward Sonora. “That’s about it for us, now. You better get back up inside there.”

“What about the driver?” Sonora said, for at the end of that long trail of footprints there was nothing now but more darkness.

“Looks like that’s taken care of,” he said, nodding up the stairwell. Driver himself had taken the seat, settling in with an eager look as he examined the dashboard, tested the steering wheel, and finally tried the lever that worked the door. It sighed shut casually, squeezing the inner light to a narrow slit between its rubber flaps—until even that went out.

“Hey!” Neuron shouted.

“Shit!” Crouch yelled. “Don’t move!”

The black bus was gone. There was nothing now but darkness sweeping in over the empty plain of sand, with the three of them standing there alone while wind erased the tire tracks.

Sonora spun to look around, to see where it had gone; but Neuron grabbed onto her, harder than she had ever been grabbed. “Don’t… move!” he cried. She could hardly see his face, it was so much darker now. A membrane seemed to have been pulled even across the stars. There was only a tiny sullen dot of orange being extinguished in the vault overhead. Once it snuffed out, there would be nothing left to see by.

Everything was quickening. Night came on like the wind, which roared out of nowhere as if bent on tearing them from their place. She planted her feet in the sand and knelt, dragging Neuron down beside her. Voices buzzed in the sand, which scoured her flesh, tore at her eyelids. She screamed and the sand rushed into her mouth, caking her tongue, drinking every ounce of moisture—stealing it from her, sucking the life away. Neuron and Crouch had her by either arm, holding her between them, and they were doing something she couldn’t quite see. Waving their arms, pounding the air with a hollow sound.

Suddenly something blocked the wind. As if a wall had been erected behind them and they stood now in a quiet, sheltered spot. Sonora brushed sand from her eyes, tried to look behind her, but something else caught her stinging gaze. The light again, a thin slice of yellow, opened up before them. The steps of the bus were revealed.

“Go!” Neuron yelled, and shoved her in. She stumbled on the steps, clinging to his arm, pulling him with her. Crouch, his face scraped raw and caked with bloody sand, swept the air with open hands, feeling for the door but missing it. Beyond him, something enormous moved toward them at inconceivable speed—like a part of the landscape curling and reaching for the bus. Sonora screamed and grabbed for his hand, and Neuron turned and saw it too, and also grabbed. They caught him by one wrist, but their screams -or the view—had startled Driver, and he closed the door with only that one hand yet inside the bus.

“Wait!” she said. “Open it—open!”

Driver was slow, as if stunned by what he had seen through the door. She couldn’t grab the lever herself, not without letting go of Crouch—and that wouldn’t have been wise. As hard as she and Neuron pulled, she could feel the old man’s arm slipping out of their grasp.

“Driver!” she screamed.

“Go!” Neuron yelled.

“The door!” Sonora cried.

“Just go!”

Driver stamped on the gas and the engine roared. His face was white, stricken. He started to haul on the stick shift, and Sonora could hear gears grinding, could feel the wheels catching in something, jerking them forward.

Yvette rushed up then, grabbed the lever and hauled it back. The door wheezed open again. At first all she could see was Crouch’s hand and forearm. It seemed to end in midair, just below the elbow; but that couldn’t be true. Driver threw the shift the rest of the way into gear. With a liberated growl that quickly became a whining purr, the black bus lurched forward, throwing its passengers back. Crouch flew into the stairwell and the door clapped shut, rubber flaps somehow sealing out the night.

Neuron moved quickly, gathering the old man up in a limp heap from the stairs, carrying him back to the padded platform where he laid him down gingerly. Sonora peered over his shoulder, expecting to see Crouch in rags, shredded and bloody, worse than he had been a moment before.

But he lay breathing quietly, sand covering his clothes, lining the wrinkles of his face, otherwise apparently untouched. He opened his eyes and breathed up at Neuron:

“Got me.”

“No, old man,” Neuron said. “You’re fine. You’re gonna be okay this time.”

Crouch shook his head. “I was out there—for ages. I just barely remember you….”

Driver, at the wheel, still accelerating—though Sonora couldn’t imagine into what, with the windshield showing nothing ahead of them—twisted around to say, “What happened? I only shut the doors for a second—a fraction of a second.”

“To you it was a fraction of a second,” Neuron said, then turned back quickly to Crouch. “But you remember now, don’t you? You’re here again.”

“I’m changed, though—changing. I want… I need to lie down.”

“You are lying down.”

“No, I mean—up there.”

Neuron glanced at the overhead racks. Sonora thought she saw his lips move in prayer. Then he put a hand on Crouch’s breast.

“No, old man, you’re not—”

“Damn it, I know what I need. Help me up. I wasn’t asking, I was telling you.”

A few of the passengers moved to his aid, but Neuron was not one of them. Sonora put her arms around him; as much for her own comfort as for his. Crouch hobbled a few feet down the center aisle to the newly empty bunk, and allowed himself to be boosted up into the rack. They put a pillow under his gray head, swept the sand out from under him. Then he closed his eyes and turned his face away. In moments he was as quiet as the rest of the sleepers up there.

Neuron sank down onto the mattress. “I can’t believe it,” he said. “This is bad. I thought Crouch was—if anyone, Crouch was here for the long haul.”

Sonora kept her arms around him. She glanced up at the front of the bus, saw Driver’s face in the black glass of the windshield. What did he see out there, she wondered. How did he keep control?

Driver stared down into the headlights, which scarcely showed anything except flat sand unrolling ahead of him, just enough to drive straight into. He drove by instinct, or by trust, suspecting that there were no obstacles in their path—would be none for quite some distance. Thinking, grimly, that even if he ran into a wall—so what?

It was something he reflected, to be up here again, in the driver’s seat, doing the only thing he had ever done for as long as he could recall. He felt relief at being essentially alone. Too many passengers back there—from the old bus and from this new one—brought on that unfocused, troubling pressure he always felt in crowds, as if he were in danger of coming apart or losing himself in their midst. They would know him as Driver now, and he wouldn’t have to know much about them. They would be grateful to leave the driving to him.

It was a challenge. He had never seen a road like this; or imagined one existed. Well… maybe he had. On certain nights after days of driving, after weeks of journeying on the endless pilgrimage, following the Group, he would sometimes lie in bed in some motel, or in a sleeping bag on the ground outside the bus, and imagine that he was still driving—but in perfect darkness, with his eyes closed. He would dream the act of driving distilled to its essence—no real mad beneath the tires, only the voyage itself, always leading into sleep.

Sleep, he supposed, if you could stay conscious through it, might be like this. Lucid dreaming, that’s what this was. Or dreaming wakefulness. A drugged kind of—

Squirming memories surfaced; the palm of his hand tingled. Something about a drug, a droplet, a burrowing thing.

He was on the verge of remembering when a white shape flew into the headlights and slammed against the windshield. He hit the brakes, screaming into the face of the thing that had crumpled against the glass—crushed snout, red slit eyes, torn wings as wide as the windshield. When the bus finally ground to a stop, the flattened thing slid backward and fell into the dust.

Sonora and Neuron stood next to him, peering down. In the headlights it was fairly well-lit, and apparently dead. Its wings unfolded the rest of the way, its claws twitched galvanically then stilled. From one of the withered wing-fingers, a bit of colored ribbon dangled, talon-pierced. It was a rainbow paisley pattern, part of a scarf or a pennant. Driver had seen the colors before, flapping over the stage at a concert.

“Damn,” Neuron said. “I guess we are headed the right way.”

“You’re not going out there again,” Sonora said.

“No. You can keep on going, Driver-man.”

Driver sank back into his seat. The engine had stalled, but it started up easily enough. He pulled forward slowly, watching the ruined thing pass under the front bumper. He was careful to drive as straight as possible, but even so, he thought he heard the wide wings crackle as the tires passed over them.

Neuron clapped him hard on the shoulder. “It’s a good sign,” he said, nodding. “A real good sign.”

Not long after that, the stars reappeared. Dead ahead, clustered low on the horizon, spreading slowly apart as the bus sped forward.

He was squinting for a better look when he saw something moving. He wasn’t ready for a repeat of the last collision. He started to brake, hoping to avoid a mess; but then he saw the pale thing waving. A person.

“What’s going on?”

Without answering, he brought the bus to a stop. The person outside—a skinny, ratty-looking kid—came running toward them down the bright twin tunnel of headlights, waving his arms desperately. When he reached the bus he started banging on the door.

Driver looked back at Neuron, as if for permission. “Go ahead,” the cowboy said, and Driver opened the doors.

The kid hurled himself up the stairs, breathless and laughing. “I can’t believe it!” he was saying. “You—you found me out here. I mean, there’s others here? Wow! I thought I could hear them up ahead, you know, I been following just the little sounds in the dark, just those few notes you can barely hear. But I should have known I wasn’t the only one. I couldn’t be the only one. I mean, of the followers who’d do this, who’d come here.”

His eyes were everywhere all at once, pupils enormous, as if he’d been staring into darkness forever. Finally his gaze settled on Driver, and his wide smile froze inside his pale ragged beard.

“I remember you,” he said. “I met you! And you’re really here now. Man!”

Driver started to look away, leaving him to the others. The kid was crazy or high. Then, abruptly, he remembered their meeting in the amphitheater earlier; the kid had come rushing up to him just like this, exactly as crazed, and then staggered off.

“Man, this is great,” he was saying. “We’ll catch up with them now, yeah. You got a bus and everything. How’d you manage that? I mean, on foot it’s tough. I didn’t have much to go by. But—but maybe it’s what you have when you go, right? I mean, were you all in a bus? All of you?”

He looked around the interior of the black bus, but no one answered. The other passengers seemed almost embarrassed by his manic energy.

“I mean, all I had was my own two feet, right? Only way I could think to follow was to, you know… walk. I found an edge, like, a real high place, top of a building. A real tall building. It was so tall the lights on the ground looked like tiny faraway stars, you know? Like stars, yeah. And I just went walking toward them, right out into the sky, stars above and below, stars everywhere… and I walked through that for a while, till the stars went away and it got dark. But I could hear the Group again, finally. Like they were up ahead just a little ways— they didn’t have much of a head start on me. That was such a relief, right? I mean—I was trying to imagine the world without them. What’s left? Hey… you got a radio, why aren’t you tuned in? You gotta tune ‘em in. How else you gonna follow?”

The kid went to the dashboard and punched on the radio. It hadn’t been on since they’d seen their old colorful bus plunge into darkness. It crackled to life now, as if the satellite were still out there orbiting in the dark, bouncing signals to anyone who cared to receive them….

Music.

Driver straightened when he recognized it. The Group was coming in clear, as if they were outside the bus, surrounding it.

“Yeah,” the kid said, ecstatic. He sank down on the steps.

Some of the others began to whisper, in the back of the bus. Yvette and Chad sounded excited. They knew all the tapes, all the recordings going around, being traded; they knew not only all the songs, but all the individual concerts, had heard most of them in person. But this was something new. This was…

“It’s happening right now,” Chad was saying. “Can’t you feel it?”

And Yvette: “It’s live!”

“Yeah!” the kid on the steps agreed. “That’s them! We’re catching up! What’re we doing sitting here, Driver? Let’s get moving!”

Driver had already been in the act of pushing the great bus forward. He bent once again to the task of driving, while music filled the black bus and the stars spread out on the horizon, drifting higher now. Not stars at all, he saw, but fires. Scattered fires burning all over the slopes of some dark shape. He sensed that something held them up, but could gain no impression of it. Spires, or simply a wall? The sky was too black to allow a silhouette, and the fires lit nothing but themselves.

The excitement in the bus grew as they approached the lights. The music was getting louder, the signal stronger. It was strange to know that the Group was up ahead playing—but to what audience?

And then, from the passengers, came a cry of disappointment and frustration—even of despair. For the tunes had blurred into a final lullabye… the Group’s signature piece, after which they always left in utter silence.

“Hurry!” they were yelling at him, as if he could squeeze any more speed from the bus—as if they didn’t mind crashing headlong into whatever black enormity held the specks of flame aloft. He couldn’t bring himself to drive blindly, though. The closer he got to the lights, the slower he went—he had no sense of depth here. How far had he come? How far had he to go?

The tune crested, tumbled over an inevitable edge into silence.

“Noooooo,” they wailed inside the black bus.

At that moment, the bus passed through a gate, an entrance or exit of some sort, into a tunnel. It was luminous with a deep violet light. They were descending, so he took his foot off the accelerator for an instant—and just then, they burst out abruptly into a huge arena, a stadium or coliseum whose dimensions were almost inconceivable.

They had emerged somewhere in the middle of the field. Ramparts or bleachers rose on all sides; they were like distant mountains, their true size impossible to judge. He had no sense of scale.

The ground was littered with rubbish: chunks and splinters of whitish rock that looked like the shards a mason leaves behind when he chisels a tombstone. Gnawed, discarded bones; soiled take-out containers. Worms and flies crawled and buzzed through the heaps of filth. Glass crunched and burst under the tires. Wide piles of embers smoked and glowed here and there like the remains of bonfires. He drove carefully through the waste, not wanting to be stranded here. Static poured from the speakers; all directions looked equally undesirable, all destinations futile. To head for any one of the surrounding walls would have been equally vain; they were all impassable.

“We missed ’em,” the kid on the steps said, dejected. “We just missed them.” He put his head on his knees and began to sob. “All that… and… and…”

Sonora moved over to him. Her eyes were on the desolate scene beyond the window, but she put a hand on the boy’s shoulder.

“Hey, don’t worry. We’ll catch them next time, okay? They’re still out there.”

“But where?”

Sonora fiddled with the radio dial, but all bands seemed equally dead now.

“We’ll figure it out,” she said.

“Not here, though,” said Neuron.

“What do you mean?” Sonora turned to look at him. Driver kept the bus moving slowly, weaving around heaps of smoldering coals, because that was what he knew how to do.

“We have to keep moving. We have to get out now. If we get stranded, stuck here, they’ll pull so far ahead we’ll never catch up.”

“How… how do you know all this?” she asked.

“We’ve been following them a lot longer than you,” he said. “You learn these things.”

“But—but all this, it only happened tonight—I mean, if this is still tonight.”

Neuron shook his head. “You don’t see. It didn’t happen tonight, whatever that means. And it hasn’t happened yet, neither. It happened a long time ago—and it’s still happening, even now. It keeps deepening; it keeps moving through all the levels, and that’s where some of us come from… from the world before, or another one before that. Just like you, now, hooking up with us. It’ll change you eventually, like it changed me.” He put a finger to his skull. “You’ll become what you are, along the way; but what you are will change.”

Sonora stared at him, irritated. “Just tell us what to do,” she said.

“If I knew that…” Neuron started.

“Let me,” came a rasping voice from above them. In the rear-view mirror, Driver could see someone stepping down from the bunks. It was Crouch, the old man. He hadn’t been there long, but apparently it was long enough. He almost wasn’t Crouch anymore.

He knelt before them, extended his pale, long-fingered hand, and slowly opened his fingers. Driver gasped. From the popping blue veins in the old man’s palm, red slugs were crawling. They wriggled up, dried, curled to a wisp at one end, a rounded blob at the other. “Corpsules,” Crouch said. “I can make my own now.”

It was the first thing Driver had seen here that truly frightened him.

Then he remembered when he had seen them before.

When and where….

The amphitheater. Like this place, only smaller, enclosed, packed with people. Could this be the same place, much later that same night, with all the people gone from it? Had they been driving in a circle all night, and now everyone was home and sleeping except them? But it was so immense… had they shrunk somehow?

“Disgusting,” Chad said, his face pressed to a window. “Look at all them fukkin diapers, my god. And the cans, the garbage bags.” Which there were, bursting at the seams, stuffed with rancid meaty stuff, ground worms maybe, that wouldn’t quite ever decay, it was so rubbery and plastic.

“Yea, verily,” said Crouch now, raising two fingers in a peace sign, then making a sign of power over the handful of red drops. “Behold me, that am yet angel.”

And then his wings unfolded.

It wasn’t a good idea, there in the bus. He battered them against the racks and jumped back, hunching smaller. “Jesus!”

“Looks like this isn’t your day, old man,” Neuron said, putting arms around him, helping him pack the wings back in again. In almost the same gesture, he swiped the handful of drops from the white-furred palm. Apparently it was expected. Crouch sucked in his cheeks and, still stooping, hobbled painfully toward the front of the bus.

“Open the doors,” he said commandingly as he passed Driver.

“But—”

Crouch hit the lever himself. The smell that swept in was unbearable. He faced into it, descended with his nose held high, turned and faced the bus and all its company. Seeing him out there, surviving in the emberlight, some of the passengers let up the windowshades on that side. Crouch clicked his heels together, put his hand to his brow in a crisp salute, and bowed stiffly at the waist. Then he sprang into the air and was gone.

“Now we take these,” Neuron said. Waving a corpsule under Driver’s nose.

Sonora also remembered the droplets. She rushed over to Neuron and grabbed it out of his hand.

“This!” she cried. “This is why we’re here!”

“Well, in a sense,” Neuron said with a shy smile. “Or hadn’t you figured that out yet?”

“I don’t mean what you think I mean,” she said. But she wasn’t sure how to put it. Wherever they were—death, a dream, some other kind of place whose name came not quite so readily to the tongue—they wouldn’t have been here except for the drag. They would have been somewhere else completely; perhaps they might have passed through here briefly, on their way to that other place. But instead they had gotten off the road—driven off it almost deliberately—and were now trapped in this… she wanted to call it a borderland, but she wasn’t sure it was either a bordering region or a zone between borders. It was more like another planet, that extensive.

“He’s wigging out,” said one of the original passengers, whose name she had never known. She thought he was talking about Neuron, but he saw she thought that and shook his head, nodding toward the ceiling.

Wild laughter from overhead.

They went out, all of them, to see Crouch turning somersaults in the sky above. He was just luminous enough to be visible.

“Come on, old man!” Neuron yelled, clenching his fists. He had dropped the red tears into a vial he wore around his neck.

“I’m not following him,” someone else said.

Crouch hooted at them.

“Where are they?” the bearded kid cried. He sounded mad.

“Right here,” Crouch called down to them. “But not right now.”

“We know that much,” Neuron said. “Should we drop now?”

“Not yet. They’re farther ahead. Just follow me.”

“Good job, old man.” Neuron looked ecstatic, and when the kid saw him, he relaxed, too. “You heard him, Driver! Everyone back on board!”

Sonora went up just before Neuron, who came last. She realized she had smelled nothing outside—not since the moment she stepped out of the bus. As if the decay were only an image of decay, a projection affecting only the eyes. But as she boarded the bus again, she gagged on the stench that followed her in. Driver had his face covered with a monogrammed handkerchief he pulled from the label of his charcoal black uniform. It was a relief when the door shut behind Neuron.

She let him past, smiling broadly when he looked at her, then turned and whispered urgently to Driver: “Don’t take those drops!”

Neuron was looking back at her. She straightened up and walked toward him, feigning easiness. She swayed as the bus moved forward, and Neuron put his arms out to catch her. They went right around her, tighter this time than before. “Whoa, there. Gotcha,” he said.

“You sure did.” Sonora smiled, hands on his forearms, twisting away. She went down to the mattress, scooting back in between Chad and Yvette. Neuron took a lazy swipe at her, let his arm dangle, and smiled sideways sort of regretfully, as if: oh well.

Sonora looked up and saw Driver watching her in the mirror. Concern showed in his face, but she nodded slightly and he looked back at the road, such as it was. Crouch flew on ahead of them, she supposed.

“What is it, Sonora?” Yvette asked, and Chad, hearing the question, looked over.

Chad had bowl-cut hair and a baggy sweater, a long face with the cheeks scooped out of it. One eye wandered. “Is something wrong?” he asked.

“The drug,” she muttered, low, her hands on either one’s knee, so they leaned closer to her. “Those drops. Do you remember taking them?”

“Sure,” Chad said. “Just after the Group came on.”

“It was just before,” Yvette said, with equal certainty.

“But you both took them, right?”

“Yeah. But so what?”

“Something happened to us—and I don’t mean the drugs.”

“I’m not stupid,” Chad said. “I know where we are, Sonora. You’re not the only one who can pick up on these things, and it isn’t exactly all that subtle.”

“I don’t think we’re exactly where you think we are,” Sonora said.

“All right, so is somebody going to say it?”

“We’re dead, you mean?” Chad blurted out, laughing a moment after he had said it.

“If we aren’t, I’d like to know where we are,” said Yvette.

“I think we’re sort of dead, yes—”

“Sort of?” Chad howled louder.

“— but there’s more than that going on. When we died, we were on that stuff, that drug. When you die, you’re supposed to, like, let go of things, come all apart, dissolve back into the universe—at least for a while. But we’re not getting there. We’re stuck somehow, stuck following the Group, just like we did in life. Death is supposed to be experienced with clear, concise consciousness—but we were, are, addled. So we’re seeing all this instead of the Clear Light.”

“Are you saying that even in death, there’s drugs?” Chad asked. “Whoaw!”

“So we… we just let it wear off?” Yvette said.

“I hope that works. That’s why I’m saying, don’t take any more of the stuff. What would it be like, here, to do more of it? What is it? What does it do to you when you’re…”

“Dead,” said Chad, still laughing.

“There’s a peyote paradise,” Yvette said. “Maybe this is like that.”

“This is no fukkin paradise,” Chad said.

“I mean—a drug land. But we’re stuck here in our bodies, or our astral bodies, because we’re dead… so we’re free from anything that would pull us back to the Earth plane, like happens when you come down from peyote.”

“Right, baby, I follow that,” Chad said. “But what about this, Sonora? What if we don’t want to come down off this stuff? I mean, what’s up ahead if we do? What are we waking up to, comprende? I mean, the rest of the trip might not be even this pleasant.”

“But Chad, this is unnatural! We’re not supposed to be here this long.”

“Then what the hell are they doing here?”

Sonora looked around the bus at the other passengers, most of them unknown to her, yet with stories and lives as full as her own, hard as it was to imagine.

“No, not them,” Chad said. “The Group!”

“Maybe they were doing the same stuff as us,” Sonora answered. “Or maybe they’re not here at all. The crash could have been like a lure, to get us here. To make our bus go out of control.”

“Jesus,” Chad said. “That’s creepy.”

“Or maybe they died but they weren’t drugged, so that’s why they’re getting ahead of us, going forward while we’re stuck here. So they were on that plane but they weren’t drugged at the time—”

“Yeah, right,” Chad said. “The Group not drugged. Now you’re really stretching things….”

As if to punctuate his sarcasm, there was a blare of music up ahead, a wild chord sweeping through the bus. It electrified them; everyone crowded to the windows except Yvette and Chad, whom Sonora held back.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “What do you think about Neuron?”

“We should ask you that,” Yvette said.

“I don’t know,” Chad said. “Why? What do you think?”

“I think—he’s here for a different reason than we are. He’s chosen to stay here. I remember him giving us the drugs, in the theater tonight; but we weren’t dead yet.”

“How do you know we don’t have the order of things confused in our memories?” Yvette said. “What if our minds and personalities are breaking up even now?”

“I believe they are, yes, but somehow we got that original drug. Those red drops. What if somehow, someway, Neuron was able to come out to us—out of death, I mean, into the living world.”

“What if he’s meant to,” Yvette said.

“I see what you’re saying Sonora,” said Chad, dismissing the other. “The guy came out and snatched us, sort of.”

“In a way we can’t understand.”

“Oh, I understand it. He saw you, fell in lust, and went for you the best way he knew how. Only to get you, he had to take all of us, since we’re sort of, you know… attached.”

Sonora swallowed. “So I’m to blame?”

“He’s to blame!” Yvette said.

“Then… what if we’re not really dead? I mean, what if this really isn’t death, but some other kind of world, like you say? What if the Group, playing up there, really is playing?”

“He’s coming,” whispered Yvette.

Neuron ducked out of the crowd at the front of the bus. “They’re playing. You want to come see?”

He put a hand out to Sonora.

“I can hear, thanks.”

“Yeah,” Chad said loudly. “We’re kind of comfortable now.”

Neuron glowered at Chad. He turned away, but took another look at Sonora over his shoulder.

Then the bus stopped, she wasn’t sure why. The music had been brewing, early notes of a concert, the warm-up stage, arrival. She looked out a window, raising the shade above her head, and saw light. It was artificial, drifting down from incredibly tall spindly lampposts that arched overhead and dropped blots of light across a concrete wasteland.

They were in a parking lot. All the garbage they’d passed through was peripheral to this. They had come to another stadium inside the larger one, a relatively tiny arena in the middle of the plain which was itself surrounded by ring-walls.

The black bus was the only vehicle in the lot. Except… yes, far off, around a curve of the stadium, she could see a black airplane, sleek and inky, angled something like the bus with a shimmering exterior, half-diamonds and other geometric planes that made the craft look at once velvety and scaly.

Driver had parked within walking distance of the gates. She could see clots of people moving through the dark arches, down the tunnels that led toward the central stage. Not many, though. She had the impression these were stragglers, hurrying in late.

“It’s started already,” Neuron said quickly to all of them, like a teacher explaining to a class. He uncapped his vial. “Okay, Crouch will back me up on this, it’s time to drop. Who’s first?”

Most of the other passengers moved forward. Sonora wanted to stop them, but she didn’t dare. It would have to be enough, for now, to save her friends—and herself. They opened their hands and she said nothing. Neuron laid the red corpsules in their palms as they walked past him, down the steps and onto the cement, heading toward the music. Some licked their hands, slurped up the droplets; but she remembered from a sudden tickling in her palm how easily the things were administered.

She whispered, “Drop yours—I mean, get rid of them—as soon as you can. Don’t leave them on your skin.”

“Why not just refuse?” Yvette said. “I mean, he can’t make us take them.”

“I can’t believe you two,” Chad said. “Dead, and afraid to take drugs. What could happen to you now?”

“What if we’re not dead?” Yvette said.

“Yvette, you are one confused girl. Do what you want. I’m going for it.”

He pushed up from the platform and swaggered past Neuron, who dropped the corpsule in his hand and winked at him. Chad slapped Neuron’s shoulder and popped the drop in his mouth, giving a thumbs-up to Sonora and Yvette on his way out.

“Ladies,” Neuron said. “You coming?”

“I don’t know,” Yvette said.

“The show must go on, right? You’ve got to get off and experience—”

“She doesn’t feel up to it,” Sonora said.

“Really?” Neuron pressed toward them. “Don’t feel well? Now how can that be?”

“I’ve got sort of a psychic headache,” Yvette said.

“They don’t have to go if they don’t want to,” Driver said quietly.

Neuron stopped where he was and turned back toward him. “What’s that?”

“I said, there’s no reason for them to get off the bus if they’d rather not.”

“But, hey, out here in the parking lot… it gets a little scary during a show.”

“I’ll be more than happy to stay with them. I’ve done it many times.”

“Done it many times, huh? Look, Driver-man, you’re just a suit, all right? A uniform, you get me? Nobody’s talking to you. You don’t play a part in this.”

“Do you want to drive?” Driver said.

Neuron paled, while up inside his hat, his brain blackened, emitting a dark bruised light, purple as an injury. “Look here,” he said.

Driver rose as Neuron stalked toward him.

“Hey,” said a voice from outside. “What’s going on in there?”

It was Crouch.

“Good, you’re here,” Neuron said. “The driver is giving us trouble this time.”

“What? Impossible!”

“Get in and help me.”

“I—jeez—can’t. These fukkin wings!”

Crouch tried the doorway but got stuck in it. Driver pulled on the door lever and the partitions began to shudder and flap, first crushing Crouch’s fingers and pinching his wings so he yelled, then expelling him backward onto the parking lot. Soundlessly, but not before Sonora let out a warning cry, Neuron leapt at Driver. Driver caught him, twisted, and simply shoved. Neuron tumbled down the steps, landing directly atop the howling Crouch.

Driver then, before they could regain their feet, shut the door.

The two staggered upright, clinging to each other for support, livid and furious now. They came toward the door, not seeing it, searching the air with desperate hands. Before they made contact, Driver had already thrown the gears into reverse. They stumbled past the windshield, dismayed to find the bus already gone.

Standing next to Driver, Sonora and Yvette looked down at Neuron and Crouch. The men searched an ever expanding spiral, Driver backing up a few yards whenever they approached. Finally they turned and faced each other. Neuron tore off his hat and stomped it flat; Crouch’s wings shot out stiffly to both sides.

“This is unbelievable!” Neuron cried. “I can’t believe it!”

“You?” said Crouch. “I got these outta the deal!” He jabbed a thumb at his wings. “I knew that driver was trouble from the start.”

“Why didn’t you say something?”

“Why should I have to? Oh, I know. Because you’re an idiot!

“How was I supposed to know?”

“He was different than the other drivers.”

“No he wasn’t, he was the same. It’s been the same guy as long as I can remember, and it was him again. You’d notice any little change in that face. It never changes!”

“He was different tonight!”

Sonora put a hand on Driver’s shoulder. “Do you know what they’re talking about?”

Driver shook his head.

“Because, I mean, if you’re something more than what we think, I just want you to know… we appreciate it.”

“Really, I don’t have the slightest idea. They’re insane. Look at them now.”

They were tearing at each other, roiling around on the cement. The old man cried out each time Neuron grabbed his wings, and Neuron winced and growled whenever Crouch hammered him on the crown.

“Give them plenty of room,” Sonora said.

Driver pulled away from them completely, starting on a circuit of the stadium’s outer walls. As he drove, he slowly turned his course outward, moving away across the empty parking lot and gaining speed as if they were trying to break away from a planet’s gravitational field, attaining escape velocity so they could fly off into the night.

“Do you know what you’re doing?” Sonora asked.

“Getting some distance.”

“What about them, back there?” asked Yvette.

Sonora thought of their friends, the bearded boy, who had taken the drug and wandered into the theater. She hadn’t said goodbye to any of them—hadn’t the chance. “I guess it’ll wear off eventually… and then they’ll have to go on. Unless Crouch keeps giving them drugs, and then maybe they’ll be here a long time.”

“No,” Yvette said. “I meant them. In the bunks.”

Sonora had forgotten that the bus was not empty.

“I can stop,” Driver said. “Before we go any farther. We can unload them.”

“What if we need them up ahead?” Sonora said. “What if they really are guides?”

She could imagine them waking in their own time, electing to fly out and scout the way, instead of being rousted irritably and sent half-asleep into the dark on a trivial mission.

“We’ll let them sleep then, for now?” Yvette said.

“I guess. We’re not going back then, are we?”

“I think the bus could make it through, if you wanted to,” said Driver.

“It would have to, wouldn’t it?” said Yvette. “I mean, Neuron got out, didn’t he? He rode this bus in and out between the worlds?”

“But he never stayed out,” Sonora said. “And I think—we only saw him when we’d taken the drugs.”

“I thought he gave them to us, though.”

“Yeah….”

But that was before she remembered first seeing him. Events were out of order; time did not quite dovetail here. That’s how he did it, she realized—that’s how he gave us what we needed to meet him… before we met him. He wasn’t in ordinary time. So he never really reached our world, where each thing follows another, one event gives rise to the next. And we couldn’t really get all the way back there, probably; not even in the black bus, miraculous as it is. We might pull up alongside our old bus and find it crashed on the mountainside, everyone dead—including ourselves. Who’d want to see that?

We can only go forward, she thought. Besides, maybe we weren’t even alive then, in the time before; maybe we were lost in some kind of other place, wandering and vulnerable in a drug-land like the peyote paradise, and that’s how he reached us. We were so used to the sensation of dreaming, with all the drugs we took, and everything seeming so unreal all the time anyway—how would we have known if we’d been dead already?

But we’ve broken that cycle, whatever it was. We’re going on now.

Driver’s foot was on the floor and the bus kept going faster and faster, picking up speed. Ahead of them, against a sky that was slightly lighter than she remembered, she saw not stadium walls but actual mountains.

“You don’t mind driving, do you?” she said, her hand on Driver’s shoulder.

He shrugged. “It’s what I do.” His pained, martyred expression had softened; he looked genuinely content. She realized that she was seeing someone new—not a stranger, but an old acquaintance never seen so clearly until now, and strange because of that. He glanced up into the rearview mirror, meeting her eyes.

“Why don’t you two go in back and try to rest?” he said. “I’m fine up here, alone. I’m not sleepy, myself, and there’s a long drive ahead.”

“All right,” she said. “Come on, Yvette.”

She slipped out of her sandals and crawled back among the pillows with Yvette. They lay down and wrapped themselves in blankets, and she thought of her old companions, forgetting their faces as she had earlier forgotten their names. Soft breathing filled the bus, soothing and hypnotic as the engine sound, but coming from the bunks. Her eyes closed. At the last moment before sleep, she recalled that they had not drawn the shades—and wondered if it mattered. Her eyes flickered open, going to the windows across the way. There were stars now, and suggestions of clouds, high and faintly luminous, or reflecting some distant glow. The sight reassured her; she let go of fear. Then she was a child again, lulled, rocking, asleep.

At the wheel, watching a highway slowly appear out of the receding darkness, Driver could feet the insignificant details of his personality sloughing away with every mile, leaving only the essentials, paring him down to a bare-bone surface solid as the hard, flat road on which the tires hummed. He was, had always been, Driver.

Glancing into the mirror at his sleeping passengers, he was pleased they felt safe enough to sleep. The bus was almost empty, but he knew that eventually it would fill again. Somewhere on the road ahead were numberless hitchhikers and wanderers on foot, pilgrims who might be ready for some company, all headed toward something none of them could name.

Driver kept an eye out for them.

MAD WIND

TO LIE BETWEEN THE LOINS OF PERKY PAT

When Morris was seventeen, he didn’t see much of his parents. His stepfather was a hot tub salesman who spent most of his time either installing tubs or partying with his customers in those same tubs. Morris’s mother had accompanied her husband to some of these parties at first, but clearly her husband’s behavior—though she tried to endorse it in the spirit of the times—had uncovered some rigid puritanical scaffolding inside her, and she had taken to spending her own evenings at home, alone with her bottles of wine and a variety of value-neutral pharmaceutical companions.

Morris could relate neither to his mother, his stepfather, his much more distant biological father, nor the small-minded suburban idiots whom the society around him considered his peers. Because he had no interest in wandering the burbs at night in search of mildly vandalistic activities such as spray-painting his name on the soundwalls going up alongside the new freeways, nor in pursuing the few girls who might be even remotely interested in him, he found himself wandering farther and farther afield from the tracts of Torrance. In a battered fake-wood- panel station-wagon with a clumsily grafted bubble-roof, he cruised the city canyons of downtown Los Angeles. He glided from Watts to the San Fernando Valley in search of something he would know when he saw it—in search of some magic that might give his life meaning. He idled in the smog-drenched traffic jams as if he were a commuter. The freeway lamps dodged overhead, strobing him with light while the radio spewed Barry Manilow (“At the Copa—Copacabana…”) and Eddie Money (“I got… two tickets to paradise… won’t you… pack your bags and we’ll leave tonight,”) and he realized with vague nausea that this was the music left to his generation; realized with greater anguish that the music actually struck him full of pitiful sentiment, that Eddie Money actually touched him—as if the dream of packing his bags for paradise were something his spirit yearned for. He nearly drove into the freeway divider at that realization; nearly rammed himself into oblivion.

Instead he pulled himself down an offramp, cruised down the usual strip of Dennys and Copper Pennys and 7/11’s, until he saw a glaring sign outside an otherwise unremarkable Holiday Inn: “Welcome Sci-Fi Fans!”

He had borrowed enough money from his mother (or at any rate, she had not complained when he dug into her purse, under her very nose) to pay his admission to the event; but once inside, he wondered what he had expected to find. Rooms where wretched B-movies were unreeling, the very same you could watch any weekend afternoon on television. Rooms where dispirited souls lethargically debated the long-term impact of Star-Wars at long tables. Small, hot, crowded suites where people packed into even more crowded bathrooms in search of beer, and no one objected or asked for i.d. when Morris filled a plastic cup with Johnnie Walker Red (his stepfather’s drink of choice) and drained it, and filled it again, and then a third time before braving the party again.

He was a half-hearted reader of science fiction, and there were faces around him he vaguely recognized from the jackets of novels he had glanced at, if not actually finished. The faces seemed to swim and bob around the room, so he was less than eager to approach any of them, until two came rather close to him. A woman and a man, both like enough to have been brother and sister, with similar hair long and curled, although the woman was tall and very thin, while the man was quite short and plump. Hers was the deeper voice; his was very faint and distant, almost indistinct, as if lost in his thick moustach and bush of beard just shot through with a few strands of grey. Her hair had much more iron in it, threads that stood out like white wire, unruly hair that was held in place with a unicorn pin, which made him think of virgins, which Morris still was. Their eyes were the same shade of green, but that didn’t necessarily mean they were related; it might have been only the reason they had been drawn together. Morris’s own eyes were green, after all, and now they had been drawn to him.

The couple eventually took him aside, although not without filling his cup again, and introduced themselves as Janet Kutz and Sherwood Spierman, authors, editors, partners in a vast enterprise of fictional empire building. Under the name of Jan Kutzwood they had penned more than a dozen volumes of fantasy, a triology of trilogies and sequelae. They had edited, they told him, nearly twenty anthologies under various other names. Not to mention solo novels each had produced and published in the last several decades. He had been vaguely aware of their presence on the edge of the book racks, though he could not bring himself to tell them that theirs were the last sorts of books he would ever turn to. He read science fiction for its stranger aspects, for the truly wild talents harbored and hiding there, not for the tame generic stuff. He would rather re-read Gravity’s Rainbow for the third time than open volume one of the Dragonstaff Chronicles.

The couple, whom he came to think of as the Kutzwoods, since that was the shared identity that had brought them to the convention, continually implied that there were depths to themselves that no one suspected… that they dared not reveal in their books, although they would bare the secrets for a small, select circle of friends.

What this baring eventually amounted to was the somewhat anticlimactic culmination of an event Morris had been looking forward to with mixed anticipation and dread for the entirety of his adolescent life. It required all of his considerable sense of humor to get through it without laughing; but afterward he felt anything but joyful or amused.

He had drunk enough that night to render his memories of the event patchwork and hazy and warped. In the least pleasant of them, he was vomiting while Janet rubbed his shoulders and whispered that yes, he must cast out the poisons of guilt and insecurity that mundane life had instilled in him. He vomitted Johnny Walker Red and something else besides, a gluey white foam that rode on the surface of the burning scotch, which he couldn’t remember ingesting (quite), although he feared that if he thought about it hard enough he would remember, and that might be even worse. Sherwood hovered above him, near the toilet bowl, throughout his wife’s minisrations, with a distraught look; and Sherwood was quite naked, his penis looking raw and red, ropy and wrung-out between his fat thighs. The sight made Morris gag again and commence the further emptying of his guts.

He was not sure where exactly in the evening this memory occurred, but it was unrelated (except thematically) to the others that surrounded it. The best of them, he supposed, was in the darkened Holiday Inn room, on the creaking bed, with Janet bouncing on his crotch, then leaning forward to rub her almost perfectly flat chest against his own, a sensation that thrilled him even though it felt like someone pressing pencil erasers over his nipples. He realized that he was in her, inside a woman, although he couldn’t quite feel himself down there; as if from the waist down he was numb. But even the qualified pleasures of this memory were further qualified when he turned his head and saw Sherwood kneeling on the floor beside the bed, right up against the mattress, clutching at the bedspread as he bucked and banged against the bedframe, as if humping the tight crease between mattress and boxspring while his wife humped Morris.

And another memory, of his face between Janet’s legs, the musky, leathery, horse-like scent of her, as if she had been riding in the saddle all day and her thighs were lathered with horse-lather. Her thighs gripping tight around his head as she shook and tremored, and he gripped at her nonexistent breasts, and at the same time felt something sucking hesitantly at his own limp penis, and the brushy sensation of a beard between his legs.

He could not remember, further, how the evening ended; but he did recall clearly waking in the darkened room and slipping out and into the parking lot and finding his car, and finishing his night’s sleep there, until a cop woke him and sent him on his way. And he supposed that would have been all for the Kutzwoods, except that for some reason during the night he had given them his address, and they began to send him letters and copies of their books.

The letters evoked indistinct memories of conversations they’d had at the convention, a generalized plumbing of his bored and anguished adolescent soul. They meant to minister to him long-distance, he realized; and it was some kind of reflection on the state of his day-to-day life that after a few months of receiving their correspondence, and responding with a few halfhearted postcards, he began to think about that night at the hotel with a quickening, and he masturbated to images of Janet squirming against him, and the taste of her came into his mouth; and even the thought of Sherwood did not completely put him off anymore. So when they extended an offer for him to come visit them in Berkeley, to spend “a weekend among the mysteries,” as they put it—he listened to his mother and his stepfather arguing in the living room, and immediately picked up the phone and called them and agreed to come if they paid for his ticket.

The Kutzwoods had always been coy about “the mysteries” until the night they collected him at the Oakland Airport. They were different tonight, in their own element, looking supernal and aristocratic in black robes, moving gracefully among the airport’s ranks of Krishna beggars. Even when he saw their broken-down wreck of a truck, he thought there was something transcendent about them.

He had visited San Francisco once with his mother, but never Berkeley. He had no idea where he was when they pulled up on a quiet street among quiet houses and took him down an overgrown path to a small house that looked weirdly slumped upon its tiny plot of ground. Somehow, as prolific authors, he had figured they would be living in some grand estate; but it became obvious to him that the place was a decrepit old farmhouse lacking (his biological father was a contractor) even a foundation. The walls were covered with mold; green fur had climbed the curtains; there was seepage and brine stains in the squelching carpets. He drank wine from a milk glass until he had swallowed enough to reveal rings of hardened matter like the remains of a petrified parfait. Scraggly marijuana plants grew under fluorescents in the bathroom, and a softshell turtle lazed in an algal green scum in the bathtub, eyeing him aggressively when he leaned to look inside, in disbelief. There was seepage and brine stains in the squelching carpets, and the toilet was so calcified that there was hardly an opening left for drainage, and so it was full of paper and cigarette butts and tampons, and he went instead into the backyard under a pretense of touring the house and pissed near a rabbit hutch, hoping he could survive the weekend without taking a shit.

The Kutzwoods were not alone in the house. They had roommates, somewhat younger than themselves, but no more wholesome. They looked like refugees, junkies, and he distinctly saw scabby tracks on the arms of one or two, which they scratched distractedly. It did little to reassure Morris when these other roommates vanished into their fetid little rooms and reappeared wearing black robes like those Janet and Sherwood wore. He sat in a corner of the front room, trying to avoid contact with any and all surfaces, and let his eyes roam the titles of paperbacks crammed on the shelves that ran from floor to ceiling along every wall. There were pots of half-eaten food on the floor, looking like charred soybeans, solidified and clouded with mold. Dishes where food crumbs mingled with cigarette butts. He distracted himself finding titles he hadn’t read, or had the slightest interest in reading, and at least unearthed a huge cache of Philip K. Dick, all stacked more or less in one teetering pile. Most were so yellow they looked pissed upon, rescued from garbage bins or incinerators. Old Ace-doubles, Dr. Futurity, Solar Lottery, The World Jones Made, the Man Who Japed. He hadn’t read most of these. But others, more recent, were on the top of his own stacks of favorite and frequently re-read titles: Martian Time-Slip, The Crack in Space, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik, The Man in the High Castle. When Janet came through beaded doorway, he raised a copy of Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said, as if in a toast.

“Oh, the good stuff,” she said. “I’ll take that as a sign you’re ready.”

“Ready,” he said.

“For the kiss of Valis.”

“Valis,” he repeated.

She knelt before him, and now the others came through the curtains behind her. They had been making some preparations in there, talking in hushed voices. He smelled incense burning.

“This was his house,” she said. “That’s only the first of the secrets to be revealed to you tonight.”

“Whose house?” he asked.

“Phil’s.”

“Philip K. Dick? He lived here?”

“When he was starting out… it’s a focal point for Valis now. A shrine. Why do you think you’ve been drawn here?”

“I—I didn’t know—”

“You haven’t read Valis, of course. It’s only in manuscript. Secret copies have been passed around. Later we’ll show it to you, and you can read and understand. Soon it will be revealed to the world, but for the moment our society is still very secret. Even when the light has dawned, we shall be the small dark heart of it, at the center of the mystery, and you, Morris, perhaps you will be at the center of that heart, if you can clear your mind of all else tonight and make room for the movement of the spirit.”

“Philip K. Dick lived here,” he said, shifting and feeling the floorboards splintering softly beneath him. He felt that he could easily kick a hole through with his heel, and dig right into the earth beneath the house. If he pushed hard enough on the wall behind him, it would give way. His skull felt equally soft, equally invaded by something stranger than mold; as if the slightest bit of pressure would cause it to burst, letting his thoughts out.

“Was… was there something in that wine?”

Janet crouched before him, and put out her hand, palm up. In the center sat a small purple pill.

“What…”

“Chew-Z,” she said. “The sacrament.”

“What is it really? Is it LSD?” Because in this respect, also, he was a virgin.

“Don’t be afraid, Morris. Valis will come through tonight. Maybe you will be chosen.”

“Chosen for… for what?”

She put the pill on her tongue and closed her mouth. Then took his hands and drew him to his feet, leading him back toward the veiled room. Through clacking plastic beads, into a room dark except for a small pink globe like a nightlight in the center of the room.

“The pink light touches us deep within,” Janet intoned, urging him to sink to a sitting position. “Beyond all rational thought. It shows us the truth. Gaze into the light, Morris.”

Morris gazed. He could see the wire filament inside the round globe. It was intricately coiled; it was difficult to believe that anything could be so small and fine. What hand could have shaped it so precisely? What immortal hand of fire did shape thy nightlight’s burning wire? He was thinking insanely, but it was no less than was expected of him. The others now had shed their clothes, and in the pink dimness began to move around him, forming a human freize of interwoven forms— only, when he jerked to look at them they weren’t moving. Except that Janet came forward now, bearing two bright pink human figures in her hands, naked plastic dolls. She bathed them in the pink light, and he almost laughed to see Barbie and Ken stripped of their garments, sexless, except that the ceremony with which she handled them made them seem portentous, more menacing than voodoo dolls, if you believed in that sort of thing. Belief was not exactly what filled Morris at the moment; there was little room left in him for anything but fear.

“For behold,” she said, “in the days of Perky Pat, Valis did move among them, and bring life even to the frozen forms. And Valis did descend among the discarded objects, the shattered toys of childhood, past the amphetamine capsules and empty prescription vials, into the very tomb of the world, into the keys of his typewriter, and through those keys into Phil’s fingers, so that the light first blossomed there and came to us that we might see the workings of Valis in the world. And the demiurge sensed that Valis had arrived, and was working to undo his evil works, and in that moment the battle proper was joined.”

Janet Kutz pressed Barbie to her lips, and held out her hand so that Ken might lay his cold sealed mouth against Morris’s mouth, a tiny frigid peck that filled him with terror, since he could feel his life sucking out of him, into the doll. His teeth began to chatter.

Now he felt hands kneading his shoulders, and twisted around to see Sherwood Spierman behind him, unclothed again. He tried to rise, but the hands pushed him down gently, and he was so weak and wobbly that he couldn’t resist even the fat little science fiction writer. And then something very warm and firm enclosed him, like an enormous snake, and the pink light drew far away below him, like a star burning in an abyss, the only star in existence. But it wasn’t Valis. Its light could not heal him. It was only a pink nightlight, too far away to do any good, and Janet Kutz had hold of him, nor could he move, for his socketed limbs obeyed only hers, and his eyes were sightless and his lips were sealed and he had no sex.

Through the abyss came Perky Pat, his ideal mate. The sexless two of them were fated for some unimaginable union. Her stiff blonde tresses, her nipple-less breasts, her belly devoid of umbilical scars…. Whatever had given birth to her, whatever machine had stamped her out, he also was the child of that soulless monster, and between them they would give rise to the next race of men, the demiurge’s true spawn, the plastic people, the unsexed race, the machinists and manufacturers, immortals, beyond the reach of decay or growth alike.

“Let go of fear, let go of self, let go of will,” the air intoned. “Let Valis in, let Valis in, let Valis is.”

But it was not Valis, whatever that was, who came in.

There was a commotion in the room, and Morris was dropped, dumped on the carpet. He sprawled by the pink light, staring at the stained ceiling, as the half-robed others stared at the beaded doorway where now a hairy, bearded, beer-bellied, grey- haired man stood in a grubby white t-shirt. Morris was lost between bodies, half in the form of Ken, half in his own flesh. His vision was doubled, with one of the two turned sideways and superimposed at an angle upon the other, so that the world looked as though it had been mirrored and fractured and badly reset.

The Kutzwoods rushed toward the intruder, but the faintly seedy figure in dirty white raised one hand and they recoiled as if burned with a flamethrower. Janet said, “Phil!”

“Get out of my house!” he intoned. “Get out, all of you. You bunch of quacks and crackpots! Charlatans!”

“Valis moves among us!” Sherwood cried. “He comes in human form!”

“I said clear out, you fucking windbag!” Phil stepped in, his beer gut hanging out between his flapping t-shirt and his bleach-stained whitish flares.

“Valis isn’t in here,” he said sourly, “but I can call it. This is the work of the demiurge—this is evil, illusion. Sucking this boy’s life out of him. Fucking him full of death. It’s my house and I want you all out of it right now, before I summon Valis through that snapping turtle and sic him on you. Catch a few snaps of that beak and I’ll bet you won’t be so eager to feel Valis.”

When even after all this, no one moved to obey him, Phil stepped fully into the room and aimed a kick that Morris irrationally feared was meant for his head. He flinched, but Phil’s toe merely shattered the pink bulb, and as it popped Morris jerked upright, and staggered for the exit, the plastic beads dragging over his face. The others were behind him, fleeing in a rush, and looking back into the room he saw a huge, an inconceivable shape seemed to mushroom into existence in the center of the room, beyond the beaded curtain, striking the Kutzwoods full of a revealing pink irradiation, their skeletons standing side by side, one short and squat, the other tall and angular. And as the light died they came staggering out as if blind, clutching at each other’s hands, and followed the rest of their followers out the front door, sandals and bare feet slapping away on the weedy path.

Morris sat in a corner of the room, where he had fallen, his hand on the stack of Philip K. Dick novels. And then Philip K. Dick himself came out of the room and gave him a concerned look.

“Assholes,” Phil said. “I would like to have messed with their heads a little bit longer, though.”

“You—you’re really here?”

“Sure,” Phil said. “Aren’t you?”

“I’m—” He was about to answer affirmatively, but a wave of something negative swept through him. All his fear came flooding out of him, then. It dawned on him suddenly where he was, and what was happening to him, and his surroundings sprang into awful clarity—so bright that he could barely look around himself.

“Take these,” Phil said. He took a pillbottle out of his pants pocket and emptied it into his palm. There were pills of all sizes and shapes, all colors. He sorted through until he had picked out a yellow capsule, a golden gelatinous globes, a red ones and a green one. Some of the pills had the names of pharmaceutical companies on them, number codes, but these were all blank.

“Relax, they’re vitamins. I’ve been experimenting with megadoses, and I think this combination will do you good. I’m not exactly sure what they dosed you with, but this can’t hurt.”

Morris swallowed them dry, and soon the surfaces of things began to cling more firmly to the objects which they normally covered; the edges of reality were all tacked back in place. Phil ghosted around the house, muttering to himself at the state of the place, waiting for Morris to settle. He brewed coffee and washed cups and finally came down and handed Morris a mug, and sat opposite him and gave him a wink.

“How did you know to come?” Morris asked.

Phil opened his hand. In it was a pink pill. “This,” he said, “is Can-D.” He popped it in his mouth.

Morris spilled out his story, as much of it made sense to him. Phil listened, and when he was finished, he began to speak, just weaving stories about the demiurge who had created this world, and how humanity was trapped in a false creation far below the notice of the demiurge’s own creator—except that Valis moved among them, with messages of hope, with practical methods of transcendence, ways of unknotting the hopelessly tangled strands of reality and following them to… to what? Morris could not follow a fraction of it; he only lay there, letting the voice speak on, while he dodged in and out of consciousness. Toward morning, Phil rose and gestured him to his feet, and they set out under the paling skies, past quiet houses and trim green lawns marked inexplicably with Clorox bottles like squat little sentries beneath the camellia hedges. Phil brought him to the BART station and showed him how to buy his ticket, which train to take to the Oakland Airport. He turned from the turnstile after feeding his ticket through, turned to thank Phil, but he was already gone.

NETHER REACHES

To our right, the Reaches fell away into bottomless blackness. We struggled down a narrow trail, hugging close to the rock, every hundred yards or so coming upon the mouths of inner caves that coiled away where our lights could not penetrate. We hurried past, feeling the exhalations of dry air from deeper galleries, no one wishing to linger on those thresholds despite the escape they offered from the brink.

I began to imagine that down in the valley of blackness, luminous shapes stirred and swam. These may have been afterimages of lamplight and my companions’ faces, or the random firing of sensors in my optic nerve; but that knowledge, uncertain at best, did nothing to reassure me when I began to imagine huge blind eyes floating up like helium balloons from between imaginary grey-glowing peaks deep in the abyss.

My fear, in fact my very behavior, became childlike. Not since childhood had I felt any such terror of the dark. It was nothing I had ever imagined facing again, not as an adult, an experienced explorer among others of equal skill. It took me by surprise, nor was I reassured to discover I was not the only one.

Katherine was the first to speak of it. Ward had begged a halt some three hours into our descent. We squatted down on the trail carved unknown ages before, and untouched for millenia— until recently. Still tethered together, we shared water and food. As I offered the canteen to Katherine, I noticed her gaze fixed not on the abyss, the sight of which I also kept avoiding, but on the unbroken ceiling of darkness above us.

“Can’t see it anymore,” she said.

I knew she meant the outer threshhold, which for a time had hung behind us like a dim grey star, visible only in contrast to such utter blackness. Now it was long gone, and except for the light we carried, or could generate, there would be no more until we reached the camp. I squeezed her shoulder. Like me she was covered with perspiration despite the chill of the Reaches. Mine was an icy, unpleasant sweat, like that which one feels when rising from a nightmare.

“Why am I so frightened?” she said.

Justin, a veteran of the Reaches, laughed. “Afraid of the dark?”

“There’s just so much of it,” she answered, unashamed. “No stars… nothing.”

“Try turning off all the lights,” he said. “Then you’ll really feel it. It’s a good idea to let yourself get used to it. “

“That’ll happen soon enough,” said Beth, our leader.

“Really,” said Ward, who like Katherine and myself was making his first trek into the cavern. “I’m in no hurry. It’s claustrophobic enough already.”

“Claustrophobic?” I said. “There’s nothing but open space.”

“But the blackness feels solid. As if, if we didn’t have lights, it would completely crush us.”

“Jesus, don’t say that!” said Katherine, rising. “You’re really scaring me now.”

“Relax,” I whispered, trying to pull her down next to me.

It made me nervous when she moved so near the edge of the trail. But my own reaction, though I kept it to myself, was the opposite of Ward’s. I felt as if I were expanding outward infinitely, sending my mind into the Reaches, to touch their limits, to fill the entire interior tracts of the icy cave-riddled planet.

“You’re like a bunch of kids around a campfire,” Beth said. “Come on, we’re not doing any good sitting here scaring each other. We’ve a long way to go before…”

Katherine laughed, forcing it. “Before what? Nightfall?”

“Before we can stop,” Beth finished. She was already striding away, forcing Justin to jump up before the cable could pull taut between them. Ward followed Justin, and I rose up reluctantly, clasping Katherine’s hand for a short moment.

“It’ll be all right,” I said. “When we get to the catacombs, it’ll seem worthwhile.”

I didn’t understand her expression of doubt.

We had covered less than a third of our journey, as Beth indicated, but we were already near the end of the ridge route. Within a short time the trail broadened further. We pulled away from the brink of the abyss, still without any sight of its bottom, and moved first along the face of a sheer wall that rose to our left, then headed directly out across a broad stone plain whose surface undulated like the swells of a petrified sea, crazed with deep rifts. The narrower of these were spanned by rigid plastic ramps, still nearly brand-new, scuffed by very few boots. I grew a little bolder on the plain, because the fear of falling was gone, and I walked with ever lighter steps despite the occasional thought that I might be visible to anything peering down from above—though what I expected to be watching from the black heights above, I could never have named. I stabbed beams of light out into the surrounding plains, picking out heaps of stone, shattered scales that must have flaked and fallen from the cavern’s ceiling miles above. It seemed strange that the whole surface was not thickly littered with these piles, as if they had been swept up into tidy mounds over the eons, leaving all else clear. They reminded me disturbingly of enormous anthills, and after a time I stopped looking at them.

Justin fired a flare out into the dark; and while Beth cursed him for wasting it, the rest of us stood and watched it arc up and up and finally peak and fall, to land sputtering far out on the plain, somewhere beyond a jagged wall of stone scrapings. It made the silhouettes and shadows of those heaps twitch and shamble toward us. Dreadful illusions multiplied behind my eyes, and I felt an unlikely terror grow until I had to look away. The dull flare flickered for much longer than seemed right, and I glanced back at it repeatedly as we marched on.

Hours later, we saw another light ahead of us, first a dim suspicion, like a wishful mirage; but gradually it brightened. As we gained higher ground, we saw a raw spark of white fluorescence, stationary, with three smaller reddish sparks beneath it. It was the central beacon of the catacomb camp. As we grew closer, we saw the somewhat dimmer lamps mounted on shorter poles all around the site for constant illumination; and then we gradually made out the shapes of the camp shelters, tents and prefab huts, scattered pieces of machinery and vehicles, even a one-man pedal glider—all the necessities, as well as the detritus, of a three month occupation. The camp was staffed with nearly fifty people, yet none were visible as we approached.

Beth raised her radio, addressed the main station loudly, but received only static in reply.

Suddenly Katherine collapsed. I called to the others and sank down next to her to find her gasping, hyperventilating, full of repressed terror.

“Goddamn it, what now?” Beth said.

“She’s dizzy—she needs to rest.”

“Well stay with her then, unclip your line, we’re going on.”

“No!” Katherine said, struggling to pull herself upright. “I’ll be fine.”

“Have it your way.” Beth tried the radio again.

“Where are they?” Justin said.

“In the catacombs, where else?”

“All of them?”

We hurried to keep up, Katherine keeping one hand in mine, but we needn’t have worried about falling behind. Beth hadn’t gone fifty yards when suddenly she stopped short, cursing. At her feet was a rift much wider than any we had crossed thus far.

“Where’s the bridge?” Justin said.

Beth didn’t speak for a moment, watching the luminous screen of her hand-map. She shone her light left and right along the fissure, but there was nothing. Finally she aimed it straight down into the cleft, but I could tell without moving to the brink myself that she could see nothing down there.

“It was here,” she said.

“Hey, there’s someone,” Ward said, and he began to shout, waving in the direction of the camp. I looked toward the tents and sheds and at first saw nothing; then a figure pulled away from the shadow of one shelter and began to move across our view. Ward waved his lantern from side to side, the beam cleaving the air like a banner, until Justin struck his arm with a nervous cry and the lantern flew from Ward’s hand, striking the edge of the ravine and shattering before it rolled over into the darkness and began its plunge.

“Goddamn it “ Ward said.

“Shut up!” Beth cried, whirling on him, pushing us all back from the brink.

Somehow, I had kept my eyes on the figure between the tents until Beth got in my way. The last I saw, it was heading toward us, perhaps coming to help; but when I looked again there was no sign of it.

“What’s wrong?” Justin said desperately. “What’s happened?”

Beth turned her lantern down to its lowest setting, still herding us away from the edge. “I don’t know. I don’t like it. Put your lights out, all of you. We don’t want to attract attention.”

“Attention?” Ward said. “From who?”

“Just do it!” she hissed.

Katherine, trembling beside me, made a fearful sound as she switched hers off; then I did likewise. We needn’t have feared the coming of utter darkness, for the lights of the camp still towered on the far side of the fissure, bright enough to print our own shadows on the plain. The five of us, Beth still leading, moved behind a small stone heap. We sat there without speaking at first. I gulped some water and wondered how frightened I should be, and of what.

“We have to go back,” Justin said.

“Maybe. But not yet,” said Beth. “We’re not sure it’s anything.”

“But the radio, the bridge….”

“You’re inferring too much, and you’re in a paranoid state of mind. There’s no evidence of… of anything.”

“What?” Ward said. “What are you two talking about?”

Beth glared at him sullenly, then away.

“It’s true,” Katherine said. “You’re mystifying us deliberately. You two are the only ones who’ve been down here before. You must tell us what you know.”

“We don’t know anything,” Justin said. “No more than you.”

“That’s not exactly true,” said Beth. “We’ve visited the catacombs. And I know they scared you, Justin, just as they did me. “

“That has nothing to do with this!”

“No? Maybe you’re right. But the feeling is similar, isn’t it? When you were in there, didn’t you feel as if they were simply sleeping? Wasn’t there a mood of fear that came over you as in a nightmare? Isn’t this the same mood, but wide awake now?”

“You’re crazy,” Justin said.

“I don’t know what to think,” she admitted.

“Please,” Ward said. “Let’s just go back. I’m tired, but we can’t stay here.”

“Unclip yourself,” Beth said.

“What? Why?”

“I want to climb up and have another look.”

“But—no. We’ll all go.”

“Christ.” She stood up. “All right, then. Let’s move.”

We started up the stone heap, careful not to put our feet wrong, for it would have been easy to twist or even break an ankle among the gaps of sharp-edged stones. The mound was higher than it looked. We ended up unclipping anyway, for each of us climbed at a different rate. I was second to the top, just behind Beth, who crouched peering out at the lights of the camp, shaking her head.

She and I were alone there when we saw a figure again—the same one, or another, dashing silently across the compound. It threw itself behind a piece of treaded machinery, some sort of a digging device, and vanished.

“Did you see that?” she said. “It was a man.”

I nodded. “Of course it was.”

The others came up around us. I turned to give Katherine a hand, so I missed what the others saw, though I heard them gasp.

“What happened?” I said.

“A light went out,” Justin said. He pointed, though there were a fair number of lanterns about the camp and I couldn’t remember the location of any particular one. That didn’t matter much, though, because another went out as I watched, and another. These were the main lights around the camp, at its outskirts and between the tents, mounted at perhaps a third of the height of the central pole which bore the three red indicators strung along its height. There were no lights on inside the tents any longer; I couldn’t be sure I’d ever seen any.

“What’s doing it?”

“Listen,” Beth said.

The silence of the Reaches was utter, as thorough as the darkness. Away in the distance, as another light blinked out, we heard a fragile tinkling sound, the crashing of glass. I knew the bulbs were extremely durable, thick glass, and could barely be shattered with a bullet at close range. Yet they were exploding right and left, dousing greater portions of the camp with darkness. The very light which lit the scene for us was on the verge of going out.

Suddenly, unnervingly loud, Katherine screamed. I clamped my hand over her mouth, anxious that she make no further sound or bring us to the attention of any possible listeners. Huddling down beside her I asked what was wrong.

“On the pole,” she said. “It was climbing. A-and then, one-handed, squeezed it out.”

“What, a light? But that’s impossible. Why would anything trouble to climb the poles and crush the glass when they could simply switch off the power?”

“Maybe they don’t know how it all works,” Beth said.

There was no irony in her voice.

“Well, you don’t see anything do you?” I asked.

“I’m not sure what I see.”

I stood up to look over the top of the mound, and was in time to see a huge winged shape blotting out the remaining lights of the camp, including the red bulbs on the central post. It went soaring over the tents, a black shadow swinging toward us, and I nearly lost my footing in terror until I realized what it was.

“The glider!” Justin said. “Someone’s gotten away.”

It drifted higher as it approached the fissure that had blocked our approach to the camp, and now Beth grabbed my lantern and rose up with it and her own, waving the pair in a signal pattern. Twin beams swept the upper air. The craft veered toward us, seeming to buck on an updraft as it passed above the cleft.

“It sees us!”

“Here he comes!”

Behind the glider, the last of the low lamps went out. Only the central pole with its three red and one tall white bulb remained lit.

We hurried down the treacherous slope, flailing our lanterns. The plane circled above us, humming like a dragonfly. When we reached the ground, the plane passed so low that we could see the pilot’s white face in our lights. He waved, managing a grin despite his obvious exhaustion, and then he lifted again, coming around for a landing. As the glider came about it suddenly dipped one wing drastically, for no apparent reason. I shone my light back at the pilot again, not wanting to blind him, and for an instant my light seemed to glitter on a blank patch of darkness where his face had been. Several of us screamed then, and the plane came down abruptly, crashing into the hard rock floor. We ran for it, and I tugged at Katherine, but she stood stock-still, staring back at the camp. On the central pole, the lowest of the three red lights had gone out.

“Come on,” I said, suppressing my panic. “He may be hurt.”

I would have been more surprised if he’d been alive at all. When we finally caught up with the others standing around the shambles of the craft, there was no need to ask. Beth rose and faced us, shaking her head. There was blood on her fingertips; I pulled my light away, but not before I saw that his head was a crushed ruin. I decided that what I’d seen before his plunge was a premonition. There was no sign of any black thing, nor any reason to think that it and not the fall had destroyed his face.

I don’t think anyone was surprised to find the last of the red lights had been extinguished. And now the white bulb, high on its pylon, began to sway back and forth, stretching our shadows and the shadows of those black heaps around us, causing everything to rock nauseatingly.

Then, matched with the sound we had grown accustomed to, it too went out.

“Now we’ll head back,” Beth said, as if this were the release she’d been waiting for.

Thank god for our lanterns. I had been dead tired from the march when we came in sight of the camp, but all that was fled now; adrenaline gave me new strength to match my renewed sense of purpose, though my nerves were frayed to such an extent that I thought a month’s rest could only begin to heal them.

Our thoughts must have been remarkably similar as we started back toward the trail, across the plain. If the others were at all like me, then they tried not to think of the black fissure, of the silent camp behind us, of the uncharted Reaches spreading away to either side. And the nameless pilot’s fruitless flight, what had it accomplished? Questions like this, for sanity’s sake, were forcibly suppressed. Later would be the time to ask them. Later, when we stood in the sunlight of the world above, where night was a thing that came to an end and not an endless constant. It was important to think of the sun as a reward for our harrowing journey. I was to think of it often in the hours to come, when I could push away those other thoughts.

I’m not sure how long it was before we noticed we’d lost Ward. Ward, who had been without a lantern. Beth was the one who noticed, and none of us could remember who’d last spoken to him, or what had been said. Cursing herself, Beth insisted that we refasten our lines before we made a move toward searching for him. We had been straggling along separately in the dark, watching Beth’s lone leading beam.

Justin began to call his name, but the night seemed to swallow it up without a second chance. No one wanted to head back; and it seemed unlikely that if Ward had strayed away, he would be in any place we were likely to intersect. Why hadn’t he cried out when he lost sight of Beth’s light?

“We can’t just leave him alone out there,” Justin said.

“We’ll be sending a search party back before long, to look for everyone. He won’t get very far, and it should be easy enough to find him if he just holds still and doesn’t blunder into a crevasse.”

That was a gruesome thought. We had crossed several of the black plastic bridges so far. Worse was the thought of what would happen if, in retracing our steps, we found any of the bridges vanished, snatched away, like the one near the camp.

“Come on,” Beth said.

But Justin held his ground, even though she tugged her line taut and threatened to pull him off his feet. “Justin! Listen to me don’t!”

This last command was ignored, as Justin raised his flare gun again and fired another signal flare straight overhead. We stood petrified and blinded as it shot up and up, dwindling. I half expected to see the ceiling lit as it approached, a dim distant reflection in an obsidian lid. But there was none of that. The flare reached its peak and began to fall, and should have continued burning throughout its descent and long after landing. Instead, a quarter of the way down, it snuffed out as completely as any of the lights in the camp.

“A dud,” Justin told us, hopelessly. Beth seized him by the arm and wrenched him away.

“He’s not coming, Justin. We have to keep on. It’s the best hope for him or for any of us.”

Justin began to weep, but it didn’t stop him from following her now. She went in the lead, Justin behind her, and then Katherine, and finally myself. Justin’s weeping, soft and mournful at first, began to turn into ragged curses and phrases I couldn’t at first understand. Gradually I realized, as Beth exhorted him futilely to silence, that he was speaking of the catacombs, of the camp, of something he had seen on his prior visit to the Reaches.

“What about the bridge?” I heard him say, and Beth ignored him pointedly. “Did they push it in? I mean why? To cut off the team’s escape? Or did the team do it, to keep them from crossing over?”

“Shut up.”

“You know what I’m talking about!” he said. “Why don’t you admit it? You know what I mean!”

“Shut up!” she screamed, her voice falling among the rocks of a heap nearby. Then she struck him, hard, on the mouth. Katherine caught him before he fell. He lay unmoving, sobbing through a bloody mouth, his face as red as a wailing infant’s. Beth looked sickened, with herself most of all. She knelt, speaking softly, apologetic now, and clutched at him, trying to draw him to his feet. But he resisted her, rolling about, becoming knotted and snarled in the line. Katherine and Beth finally had to unhook themselves in order to sort out the tangles, and as they began to work at the knots, Justin scrambled to his feet and scurried away, quiet now, as if his sobbing had been a ruse, a distraction, all along.

We all screamed for him now, oblivious of how loud we might have sounded, how far our voices might have carried. Hidden by darkness all around us, still we felt naked and exposed, utterly disadvantaged by the nightscape. No one made a move to follow him except with our lights, and he moved quickly beyond their pale. His own light roamed across the ground, flickering on and off, and as he ran we could hear him calling for Ward. But there was no answer, and eventually his light went out as well.

Katherine and I looked at Beth. Beth looked at the luminous map. Then she clipped herself to Katherine, and we set off again.

We walked abreast now, except where we had to cross bridges. But we didn’t speak. Beth offered no thoughts, and I found I had nothing to say. In the darkness, chameleonlike, I had decided to become more like it myself. We were all reverting to a childlike state; we existed in an aura of pure awe. It was all a strange dream. Katherine’s hand felt very firm and warm, if slightly sticky, in mine. She was like a companion in a dream, a good imaginary friend whom you miss very much when you awake. And God, how I wished for a time that I could have woken, even if it meant losing Katherine.

We were crossing a bridge, not far from the base of the trail. “This is the last bridge,” Beth said. She stopped in the center and looked back briefly, as if waiting to see if Ward and Justin had been tagging behind us all this time, as if now they had decided to show themselves.

Katherine and I stepped to the far end of the bridge. There was some slack in the line connecting Katherine and Beth. Beth wouldn’t move, staring backward, her face hidden from us. I watched the map screen glowing faintly in her hand. It had begun to flicker, that was what caught my attention. I started to point it out to Beth, when something—some density of the darkness, a form with no apparent origin—crept over the map and snuffed it out. Only a tiny dim greenish light, yet its symbolism surpassed in importance the strength of any actual illumination it offered.

“Beth,” I said. “Beth, the map.”

She didn’t move. Katherine, I noticed, had begun to tremble.

“Beth, what is it?”

As I started onto the bridge, Katherine whimpered and pulled me back. I turned to see her unclipping her line, shaking her head. “Don’t you see?” she said to me.

There was a sound that made no sense, and I swung around once more to face Beth. She was making the sound but I couldn’t see how because I could no longer see her face. Her lantern left her fingers, still glowing for the moment; it struck the edge of the bridge and the beam swept upward as the light dropped down into the chasm. It lit Beth’s face, and I remembered the pilot’s face—a brief reminder that nothing is impossible. Katherine pulled me quickly from the bridge, her own light charting the way for us now, and we ran wildly, hand in hand, somehow finding our way to the head of the trail just as our lights, too, went out.

As we headed up, knowing that hours of a taxing climb lay ahead of us, we listened first for the sound of Beth, or anything, following. Sometimes we paused, clinging to each other, and rested for as long as we dared, but only because our bodies would be punished or pushed no more; and like swimmers miles from the shore, who dream only (longingly) of drowning, we forced ourselves to move on as soon as our breathing slowed. All I really wanted was to lie down on the cold slope and stay there till darkness found me. Which was absurd, because of course it already had found me. It owned me, permeated me. I climbed through darkness, swam in it, ate it, inhaled it. And soon… very soon… I became darkness.

For the longest time Katherine failed to realize the change that had come over me. The Reaches were utterly dark, so I was indistinguishable from the rest of it. Her hand rested warm and secure in mine, apparently not noticing how mine continued to grow cold and even insubstantial. Our route grew easier for me;

I felt as if I were floating, sometimes tugging Katherine along behind me, sometimes being towed by her, as if I were a black balloon drifting along behind. Then, climbing higher, we entered the realm of the yawning mouths, those tunnel openings that had frightened me on our descent but which now beckoned, so that I wished to follow their contours inward to the deeper completion of the dark. But a small voice, or a collection of voices, a droning hive of sleeping voices recently awakened, spoke to me, promising a larger emptiness somewhere ahead, a great expanse more suitable to my vastness, something I could swell to fill and feed upon and thoroughly engulf, as it had been my dreaming desire to do for as long as I’d lain bottled in the inner realm.

Katherine saw it first, as I watched her. A grey speck of starlight far above us, dim rays falling down the ceiling that had been my upper limit for impossible ages. I watched her outline dawning ahead of me, her graceful silhouette, the edges of her downy cheeks, the polished crystal convexities of her eyes, oblique rays of light scattering over them, promising immensities, veritable oceans of light just ahead. We were almost there. The nearness of our escape quickened her step and her breathing, and I realized that she was laughing as she pulled me along. Laughing so loud that she couldn’t hear the sound I made, until she glanced back at me and, in the light from above, saw what I had become.

She let go of me then. It was almost painful, and I regretted it. I had grown so used to Katherine that I had almost become her. But now all gentleness fled. Her screaming fell harsh upon the rock as she turned and rushed away from me, toward the bright round opening no more than a hundred feet ahead, the gap through which sunlight streamed freely, that fissure with shards of carved and mortared stone scattered at its base, the broken remains of the Threshold itself, its lintel carved with sigils no one could remember how to read, nearly erased by time and then finished off completely by the helpful excavators.

A hundred feet, and she ran fast, with a good start ahead of me on the narrow trail.

Yet I slipped around her easily and passed through the neck of the evil stone bottle whose exterior was so thickly inhabited by those ignorant of its interior; whose contents had been a black wine aging slowly in the dark, growing more potent with each passing cycle. I slipped out and felt myself expanding, much grown in strength since the time of my confinement, all my voices rising rapturously, my millionfold wings unfurling, black sails hurling me outward into space as they caught and quickened in the all-enveloping—but all too easily smothered—light.

And poor Katherine, coming up to her salvation, found only a black sky, curdling, and me in it.

TOTAL CONVERSION

On his way home from CompUSA with the latest overdrive processor and another 128 megs of RAM chips in the tiny trunk of his Alfa Romeo, Barton Needles cruised slowly past the high school and gazed through the chainlink fence at his so-called peers. It was a scene that should have set him tingling with nostalgia, like something out of a PG-13 teen romance movie: sociable kids taking lunch in the quadrangle, running laps on the track, throwing themselves at football dummies, laughing and shouting. But as the bell rang, calling the students back to classes, Barton mouthed the word “Losers,” and stepped on the gas.

At home, he slung his backpack under the computer desk and nudged the mouse to kill the screensaver, which played continuous looped demos of his personal online Gorefest victories. A dozen e-mails sprang onto the screen, all received since that morning. He idly scrolled and deleted with one hand while gnawing at a tortilla smeared with peanut butter and jelly—he needed fuel before getting to work under the hood.

There were three messages from GoreX: more optimistic notes on business plans and the revised royalty offer for the Skullpulper total conversion. Total bullshit was more like it. He would never work for them again, despite the latest personal pleading e-mail from Tom Ratchip, GoreX’s owner: “Bart, I am asking you as a friend and as your biggest fan to please reconsider your unreasonable position.”

It took him about five seconds to type in, one-fingered, “TTML, AW” and sent the message. Talk To My Lawyer, Ass-Wipe. In other words, his dad.

Ironically, Ratchip had forwarded a handful of semiliterate messages from delirious gamers, praising Skullpulper in what passed for gushing flattery. “wOOpee! Man thass kewl!” “Barton Needles is GOD!” “wtf is Needles doin workin on TCs? IMHO he shud have have his own fkn company—and prolly will!”

My sentiments exactly, Barton thought; and how odd of Tom to send that one along. He “prolly” thought it was magnanimous of him.

He deleted the fan transmissions as fast as he could scan them, holding back only on the last message, caught by its surprisingly formal structure—not to mention the absence of spelling errors.

With stunning architecture, fantastic textures, terrifying new monsters and brilliant new skins for existing monsters, everything about Skullpulper is an improvement on the original game. This is the best Total Conversion we have seen of any game. Given that it is a TC of Gorefest, the reigning blockbuster, this means that Skullpulper is now the best 3D game in the world. Period.

Barton leaned a bit closer to the screen, cramming the last of the tortilla into his mouth. Was this an advance review?—something from an upcoming issue of PC Gamer, maybe?

Then he saw that it hadn’t been forwarded from GoreX after all. The return address read simply: “n01@noware.org.” Mildly weird. Orgs were generally, what, nonprofit groups, religious institutions, stuff like that? The thought of a Skullpulper fan heading up an organized religion was amusing. Like getting fanmail from the Pope.

He continued scrolling through the letter, but the praise of Skullpulper was confined to one paragraph. The next one was far more intriguing:

Because of your obvious brilliance, Mr. Needles, we are writing to inquire as to your team’s availability for another total conversion project.

My team, he thought. That would be me, myself and I.

We have acquired from a third party developer the code to what we consider an extraordinary game. The original program has never been released, and due to legal complications cannot be published or otherwise distributed in its current form. While the source code may not be altered in any manner, we believe that would make your task all the easier. You need not concern yourself with programming or behavior issues, but merely convert the outward appearance of existing game elements. We believe you could accomplish this quite rapidly, and we are prepared to pay extremely well for your services. If you would kindly respond to this e-mail with a simple affirmation (and the appropriate information regarding your financial institution), we will be delighted to demonstrate our intentions by immediate electronic deposit of a one-third advance into any account you specify. Once you have verified the availability of the funds and consented to this project, we will forward everything you need to commence the conversion. You may use your own utilities if you prefer; but we will provide all textures, skins, and entity models for conversion. You may work independently and at your own speed (keeping in mind that time is of the essence), transferring files to us only when you are pleased with them. We will compile the files and, of course, take full responsibility for the ultimate conversion.

Barton was sitting down by the time he’d read this far. Could this be real money? The GoreX boys were a bunch of cheapshit assholes. The artists and programmers were okay, but a bunch of suits had taken over the company since he’d first agreed to do the conversion, and they had done nothing but try to chisel him down and cheat him out of a profit from the moment they’d realized they had a wildfire hit on their hands—something that might give the original game, Gorefest, a run for its money.

If these Noware people were serious, he was prepared to put together something that would blow away even Skullpulper. It would be supremely satisfying to snatch the ground out from GoreX.

He’d have to top himself, work harder than he had on Skullpulper, and of course it all depended on the raw materials he had to work with. He couldn’t imagine how some nonprofit organization had come up with decent code—let alone code competitive with what was already on the market—but they seemed serious. No harm in seeing how serious.

Barton composed a one-letter reply—“Y”—and regretted having to mar its perfect symmetry by appending his clunky account information.

At 4:17 he sent the message. At 4:26, when he walked back into his room, gouging a cold spoon into a pint of espresso ice cream, a reply was waiting in the mailbox: “Electronic deposit complete.”

Was this for real? No organization worked that fast. There were committees, accountants, people who filled out the requests and submitted them to others who had authority, and on and on.

He connected to his bank. Checking deposits. There was something new, today’s date, timeclocked at 4:22 p.m.

At first the amount itself didn’t register. Until he saw the dollar sign in front of it, he thought it was his account number. It had almost that many digits.

“Well, the money’s clear, but I can’t get a lead on these Noware people,” his father announced the next evening over dinner.

“Keep trying,” Barton instructed. “I’ll start work on the TC. Put that money somewhere nice and warm where it can breed. I won’t touch it yet. I’ll be too busy. This is the last sit-down dinner I’ll be eating with you two for a while.”

“What about school?” his mother asked. “Have you given any thought to going back?”

“Did you see the size of that deposit?” his father asked. “At this point, for what Barton wants to do, school has become irrelevant.”

“This conversation has become irrelevant,” Barton said, pushing away from the table.

He went to his room and organized his desk to the tune of explosions and screams from Gorefest battles. He meant to replace the screensaver with a Skullpulper deathmatch, but so far he hadn’t done much online battling in his own game. The TC had only been available for a week; he’d been busy.

He decided that before beginning on the Noware project, he would treat himself to one last Skullpulper battle—one that would leave his name ringing in the ears of the Pulper community. It was time to liquefy a few skulls.

He pulled on his Intraspexion 3D goggles and connected to GoreWorld, the network of servers dedicated to endless Gorefest and Skullpulper online wars. It took about a second to find a battle in progress; he mouse-clicked on a maelstrom icon and was sucked right in.

“Lord Needles enters fray,” said a little voice in the headset, barely audible above the screams of his first victim. He was in the best of his own deathmatch levels, “The Killing Floor”—three stories of metal ramps and catwalks with adjoining corridors that wove in and out of each other. The Killing Floor was a Möbius strip, a hollow hypercube; you could walk through a gate at one end of a room and find yourself coming in at the far side of the same room. There were ten players already in the map, and as soon as news spread that Lord Needles had jumped in, the number of players joining from other sites began to soar. It topped at thirty-six—the max limit for this level—and by then things were getting crowded.

Lord Needles cleared the mob as fast as it respawned.

From his first victim—a startled blur of neon colors with a human face, quickly transformed into beautifully rendered chunks of flying meat—he had liberated a stomp-gun and an ammo pack. As orange streaks of firebolts began to seek him on his ledge, he spied a lift just rising past. He leapt aboard, riding the platform two levels up, clearing catwalks of upright figures and strewing the room with a rain of bloody meat.

Within seconds he had the high-ground. A Tesla-cannon floated in midair, just out of reach, but for Lord Needles it was money in the bank. A normal jump would fall short, and leave you plunging to the Killing Floor below, which rippled periodically with gnashing spikes as the walls closed in and caught anyone not fortunate enough to have rocket-jumped onto a ledge. Lord Needles turned his back to the gun, slid until his heels were at the edge of empty air, then fired the stomper at the nearest wall. The recoil blew him backward, all the way across the gap; in midflight, with a clang, he snagged the Tesla, then came down smack on a suit of glowing armor that snapped into place around him. He held his fire until the level was full again, crawling with gamers hoping for a shot at him. They’d all go to bed happy tonight, bragging of how they’d actually been reduced to ground-round by Lord Needles himself.

The world is good, he thought. This one, anyway.

“Who’s building your levels?” he queried n01. “If you want an exciting, comprehensive package, full of traps and murderous surprises, I’m a skilled mapper as well. I can do more than just straight conversion.”

“We understand that you are an excellent level designer,” n01 replied via e-mail. “However, the world is already complete in every respect. It merely needs total conversion, element by element. Please restrict yourself to that task.”

Oh well. Maybe they’d come around. He’d never seen a game yet that couldn’t stand to be improved—unless it was one of his own.

Barton saw no reason not to use the same procedures he’d used when converting Gorefest into Skullpulper. You built a world up from the basics. Code was more basic than textures, but he didn’t have access to that. So he’d start with textures, then do models (and the sounds that went with them), and finally (best for last) invent a new armament.

“The number of textures in the game is immense,” a message from n01 had informed him. “However, if you will kindly assemble the elements of a new visual language, we have utilities to employ your textures as the basis for an almost infinite variation of new patterns.”

So they took shortcuts, but that was kewl. So did he. Even his rush-jobs still had the definitive Needles look. With the money he was making, he could have afforded to hire a few artists, but he prided himself on being a renaissance kid. This was to be his vision, start to finish.

He began with a tile, 64 by 64 pixels square, blown up to fill his screen. One pixel at a time, he began to shade and sketch and manipulate until he had an interesting texture. He used his much-hacked version of Mickey’s MasterPainter, a Disney painting program he’d been using for all his art projects since he was six years old. Sometimes he started with a blank tile; more often he worked from an existing image—such as a photograph or a modified tile from Skullpulper. He designed brown panels striated with darker lines, punctuated with knotholes like long, torn, gaping faces. He made tiles of grainy gray and speckled brown, poking up from matted green, to serve as rocky ground and sparse vegetation. He created panels set with gruesome demonic faces, leering fanged gargoyles. Mushroom-hued alien textures. Metal meshwork smeared with what looked like old, rotten blood. Tessellated grids clotted with hair and tissue. He made everything a designer would want in a world.

After days of unbroken work, Barton began to see his custom textures everywhere. This always happened in the middle of a project. When he lay down to snatch a few hours of sleep, colored tiles replicated themselves on the undersides of his eyelids, wallpapering the interior of his brain with riveted blue panels, ocher brickwork, coppery asphalt. When he woke and wandered upstairs for more of the sugary espresso fuel he craved, the walls seemed to crawl with patterns he had designed. The biggest difference between the visual content of his dreams and his waking hours was the lack of a monitor framing his dreams. And sometimes he dreamed the monitor as well.

It was more than a week before he had a complete set of textures he was happy with—the makings of a new world. He gathered the files into a single pack, zipped it up, and e-mailed it to Noware. That was at 3:14 a.m. on a Saturday.

Just before noon of the same day, when he finally rolled out of bed, there was a message from n01 waiting in his mailbox. He expected, at worst, a mere confirmation: Textures received. At best, the usual raves. What greeted him was both unexpected and unwelcome.

Excellent work, Mr. Needles (may we call you Lord?)! Many of these are everything we had hoped for, and should serve to fill in every aspect of our game. However, we note that overall there is a certain grim, even cruel, quality to the work. We discern little of lightness here, little of humor or human kindness—

“Human kindness?” he said with a sleepy snarl. “What is this shit?”

We are therefore returning certain textures which we consider inappropriate for this conversion, and request that you kindly recast them with a somewhat more benign demeanor. It is our intention that this game be significantly less grueling and gruesome than the usual fare. We believe our conversion will find a ready niche in a world already saturated with bloodlust and senseless violence.

Attached to this message was a file comprised of every tile that was even slightly macabre or sinister: the demon faces, the gory floors, the gears clogged with flesh.

In Barton’s first flush of disgust and indignation, he started a letter like those he had fired at GoreX toward the end of the Skullpulper conversion, letting his venom shape and seethe through every bitter sentence. But gradually he found himself reconsidering such a rash response. If Noware had stated their intentions at the outset, he could have told them to flick off before agreeing to their terms. But now… the money. Yes, the money, already beginning to bubble yeastily and rise like wonderful dough, inflating….

In the end, he deleted the letter.

Why had they picked him for the TC? They knew his work—they’d praised it. Had they sought him out with the ulterior intention of subverting his natural style? He still suspected they were some sort of quasi-religious outfit. Maybe it was Barton himself they wished to convert.

Well, they couldn’t touch him. He would do what they asked, but in the end he would have his way. In the end it would be Lord Needles’s world.

He treated the revision work with economical disdain, devising a program to switch the goriest tones of clotted blood with soothing pinks, soft blues, subdued nursery-room yellows. The multitude of fierce icons were more difficult to alter, but he devised a fractal filter that softened and blurred the masks of evil, then re-sharpened them into whimsical forms. Wicked spikes and jagged fangs softened into curls and spirals like multicolored rotelle pasta. The grimly leering slits of demon-serpent eyes became cheerful crescent moons mounted on the fuzzy cheeks of smiling-snouted orange teddy bears.

Barton reserved the serpent smirks for himself. And carefully laid the groundwork for his subversive masterpiece.

The batch of revised textures, fired back at Noware approximately 12 hours after their rejection, met with no further objection: “Textures received. More than acceptable. Please commence entity conversion based on the attached model files.”

This terse message was accompanied by an immense collection of .mdl files. Once he began to examine the files, he was disappointed to find how utterly unimaginative they were.

No monsters. No aliens. No marine sergeants frothing bloody foam.

Instead, he found people, all sizes and shapes and colors, all ages, but all utterly ordinary. The fact that they were naked was the strangest thing about them. Game models were usually decked in flamboyant colors, military garb, savage armor. So the nakedness of these was odd… but ultimately boring.

His first task, therefore, was to make the models interesting again. That should be no problem. There were enough similarities in the basic human forms that one good all-purpose program would be able to remake the entire tedious population on a global basis.

On a whim, and for consistency’s sake, he went back to the image of the stupid cuddly teddy bear he had concocted for his tiles. Having settled on a basic teddy bear model, he went through the human model files, altering all of them in one sweep, creating a motley army of awkward, patchy teddy bears. He spent the next day tweaking them individually, keeping limbs aligned and furry snouts smiling.

The next group of models was harder to comprehend: batches of limbs, unattached to any creature; horns and fur and scales. There were machine parts, things that looked like the hoods of generic midsized cars, lampstand bases, twigs and fronds. He no longer had any idea what he was altering. He followed his own sense of style, hoping to make all these oddments look as if they shared some common source; he teased the limbs into long strings and let them snap back into floppy curls. He turned gentle arcs into spadelike parabolas. He had never worked in the dark like this before, guided only by a sense of rightness; but after a time he found it addictive. He enjoyed the alterations for their own sake, without a thought to their purpose or ultimate use, or to what sort of game this all added up to. Days passed; and, more importantly, nights, when he hardly stirred from his seat. But while he reveled in the work, his plans for revenge were far from forgotten.

All the grimness, all the cruelty, that was such an essential element of everything he’d done before the Noware TC, he carefully set aside for a private project. It was to be a secret entity, something made all the more hideous by contrast to the warm and whimsical creatures which surrounded it.

Barton distilled his conception of evil into a hybrid bearing the worst features of every monster he had ever wrought or dreamed of. A Demon Lord. In scale, it was several hundred times the size of the human figures; it was gray and black and dripping with blood; its maw a festering pocket of abscessed fangs and sucking lamprey tongues. Its body was a slimy mass of chancres from which razor-hooked tendrils uncurled, and it moved on a carpet of insect legs that could adhere to any surface. It was covered with eyes and armor, and was all but unstoppable. He decided to include one—and only one—weapon in the artillery pack which, if cleverly used, might kill it.

The hardest thing was finding the right sound for the beast. He experimented for days until hitting upon a satisfactory noise, achieved by feeding glass and bone and masses of sinewy fat into the kitchen sink garbage disposal and recording the gurgling, grinding sound with a microphone taped to the plumbing down where the razors whirled. By raising this to an almost intolerably high pitch, he captured what sounded like a scream of demonic triumph.

The Demon Lord would be Barton Needles’s signature. Anyone who played the game would recognize his handiwork as soon as the monster devoured them.

But naturally he could not simply e-mail the Demon Lord to n01@noware.org and expect accolades. He could imagine their shock and horror, and then their polite rejection. Well, he would not give them a chance to reject it before letting them know what he thought of their namby-pamby vision of a peaceful world. First, there would be a good long reign of carnage.

Noware had unknowingly delivered the means of its undoing into his hands. The original collection of models had been accompanied by a large DLL file—a dynamic link library containing a number of animation and other routines shared by many of the models. Changes to the models necessitated changes to the animation functions; and Noware had entrusted him with this rudimentary programming task.

He compressed his Demon Lord data and hid the unlabeled array among others in the DLL. He then found an ordinary animation function, one that would be called fairly frequently during runtime, and made one minor alteration: at random intervals the normally useful function would return a pointer not to an ordinary animation function, but to the Demon Lord array. The game would then decompress, load, and let loose the monster.

If Noware eventually did locate the monster array and tried to remove it, all model animations would fail. Meanwhile, it was self-triggering, and would spawn at random but frequent intervals. Over time, if the creatures were not killed, there would be hordes of them all through the game. By then, of course, the hard-core gamers would have risen to the challenge and mastered the tricks of the arsenal.

On the other hand, no hard-core gamer of Barton’s experience would spend more than two minutes in this particular world anyway. With all its soft edges and pastel colors, it would repel them instantly. It was just as well he was working anonymously. A world like this would be death to his reputation… except for the Demon Lord aspect.

He would do things differently next time. Not that there need be a next time. Once he’d been paid in full for the Noware TC, he would have the capital he needed to start his own company, with a few hand-picked employees. He’d rent an office on the cheap end of Water Street, and a renaissance of coolness would surely crystallize around his arrival. He’d buy a new car… something fast and flashy and astronomically expensive. Yes, it was time to think along those lines.

He packed up the model files and shipped them off to Noware. The money was almost his. Nothing remained now but to create or convert an arsenal of weapons, an immensely enjoyable task after so much tiptoeing around. It was hard to imagine how even the grubs at Noware could expect him to make chainguns and rocket launchers seem sweet and innocent. Ultimately, a weapon was a weapon, even if it shot marshmallows and had a fuzzy pink handgrip.

Acknowledgment arrived no more than forty-five minutes after he’d sent off the models.

Dear Lord Needles:

Thank you for delivery of your model pack. The models appear more than satisfactory—certainly there is nothing in the least offensive or inappropriate here; further minor modifications can be attended to by our staff if necessary. We have deposited the balance of your payment in the account you previously specified. We thank you for your participation in our TC, and look forward to working with you in the future should any similar project ever again arise.

Barton’s surprise was enormous. He typed a hasty response: “I don’t understand. I’m still waiting to convert the weapons pack. If you gave that work to someone else I’ll be really p.o.’d—and you don’t want to p. me o.!”

His fingers slammed and skittered on the keyboard. He smashed the Send button and waited in a fury for n01’s reply.

It came almost instantly:

All weapons code has been expunged from source. No weapons in our TC. This is to be a peaceful game as we have previously stated. Thank you again for your participation. All elements are in place, and we have received final approval to embark on Total Conversion immediately. We trust you will be pleased with results.

Barton couldn’t force himself to stay at the screen another moment. He got up snarling and stormed out of his room.

It seemed to be morning—what hour exactly, or what day, he felt unsure. His mother wavered in the kitchen doorway until she saw his face; then she retreated to the safety of her pots and pans. He rushed out of the house, past his neglected Alfa Romeo. He didn’t trust himself to drive right now; he would kill someone—maybe even himself. Well, he wasn’t stupid or rash, and he wasn’t about to take chances like that. He felt as if he hadn’t been out of the house, or used his legs, or felt the sunlight in weeks. He was not far wrong.

Usually—in a deathmatch for instance—rage and thoughts of revenge sharpened his mind, providing a clear black background to his thoughts, allowing him to stalk and slay his enemies with deadly precision. Today, for some reason, murk accompanied the anger. The sky was blue, the streets looked fresh and bright, as if a storm had swept them and moved on; but his mood clouded everything. He kept surfacing to find that he’d walked another few blocks. He soon found himself downtown, entering the town square. Trees threw their shadows over him. Up ahead, preschoolers clambered on a climbing structure. A dog chased a Frisbee.

Good, he told himself, calmed by the exercise. You’re getting a grip.

It was better to plan his next move, and put Noware behind him. He had their money now, that was all that really mattered. With money he could do anything: start his own company, take all the time he needed to make a game that was pure Barton Needles, pure and unadulterated evil. Yes, his next game would be everything the Noware conversion was not.

In that moment of anticipatory calm, he realized he had made himself dizzy by rushing out so quickly after weeks of concentrated mental effort. Dizzy and sick. That explained why the world seemed to be rippling—and why he saw his textures everywhere he looked, as if they were pouring out of his eyes again. Maybe it also explained why the pine trees were suddenly wrapped in blue and scarlet fleurs-de-lis with ornate tessellations; and why the thin, beaded trickles of sap shimmered with a weird fluorescent orange glow.

He headed toward a park bench to sit down, but it was changing, growing narrower at the ends, beginning to sag and spiral into limp dangling curls like the tendrils of a creeping plant. He crouched in the grass and put his head between his knees, eyes shut, hoping his textures would stop crawling over everything he saw.

He would get help next time. He wouldn’t try to do it all himself. It was too much for one kid to make over an entire world. He kept his eyes closed until he saw only sparkling darkness, devoid of the self-created patterns he’d been staring at for weeks.

When he opened his eyes, he gazed straight down at the grass and earth underfoot.

The grass was red. The earth beneath the blades was purple, faintly shot through with lime. Things were crawling in the soil—things like soft enormous pink ants with floppy legs.

Barton shot upright—too fast, for it made him even dizzier. As the world spun, he saw it had been completely remade with his textures. He couldn’t stop seeing them no matter where he looked. The buildings at the far edge of the square were all colors but the proper ones; they were shaped like enormous saggy mushrooms, puddling on the soft cushions of streets that were not so much paved as upholstered.

Barton turned and ran toward home, hoping he could find his way now that he’d lost his senses.

Near the edge of the square, something darted to and fro, dragging a leash across grass that stubbornly refused to revert from red. If he squinted his eyes it was still mostly a dog, but the sound it made was not at all canine. Where had he heard it before? It shot between his legs, snagging him in the dragging leash. Somewhere in the distance he could hear its owner piping on a weird shrill dog whistle. Hopelessly tangled, Barton fell. As the dog circled toward his face, he braced for a licking.

Then he remembered where he had heard the creature’s call. Like the textures, it was something he’d carried in his head that had somehow spilled out into the world. It was glass and bone and metal and meat, all grinding together in a bottomless bubbling throat.

The cries, with all their overtones of impending total victory, grew louder as the Demon Lord overshadowed the square, then dimmed to a muted slurping as the first of many lamprey tongues found his face.

Next time they’ll want weapons, Barton thought indignantly. Lots of weapons!

His final conscious act was the unhappy one of seeking his reflection in a million rheumy eyes, but failing. There were no Lord Needles or even Bartons anywhere.

All he saw were a million orange teddy bears, screaming.