Ceremonies

Book One: Portents

It has long been my conviction that, were an absolute and unremitting Evil to find embodiment in human form, it would manifest itself not as some hideous ogre or black-caped apparition with glowing eyes, but rather as an ordinary-looking mortal of harmless, even kindly mien – a middle-aged matron, perhaps, or a schoolboy… or a little old man.

Nicholas Keize, Beneath the Moss

May First

The city lies throbbing in the sunlight. From its heart a thin black thread of smoke coils lazily toward the sky. April is almost thirteen hours dead; already the world has changed.

In a park above the Hudson the Old One waits, blinking his mild eyes at the sun. Insects plunge and dart around the refuse by the water's edge and buzz amid the grass beside the bench. But for their hum, the lap of oily waters, and the swish of passing cars, the park is still, the air hushed and expectant.

A cry from overhead breaks the silence: three long, tremulous notes…

And then the bird is gone. Leaves rustle softly, one branch at a time. The Old One sits forward and holds his breath. Soon it will happen.

A sudden breeze sweeps up from the river; blood-red blossoms scatter at bis feet. The pages of an old newspaper shift and curl, revealing smudged bootprints, a naked leg, a jagged slash.

Above him trees hiss urgently in the wind. With a flash of green the leaves lift together and point toward the city. All the grass leans one way.

In the distance the coil of smoke whips back and forth, then twists in upon itself. Silently its black tip sways against the sky, splitting into a serpent's tongue.

The Old One licks his lips. It is beginning.

All the way from New York, as the bus sped through the grassy haze of the Lincoln Tunnel humming with Sunday-morning traffic, past the condos and diners and car lots that lined the highway, Jeremy Freirs had been thinking about the farm.

The ad had been enticingly vague: nothing but a three-by-five recipe card with a row of bright green vegetables printed along one side. It had been tacked to the bulletin board just above the table where he usually sat at the Voorhis Foundation Library on West Twenty-Third Street, as it left there for him alone. The handwriting had been neat and somehow girlish-looking: SUMMER RENTAL

Private guest house on N.J. farm.

Fully electrified. Quiet surroundings.

$90/week inc. meals. R.F.D. I, Box 63, Gilead.

At that price, if he could manage to sublet his apartment – a fourth-floor walk-up on Bank Street – he would actually make himself some money on the summer. And it seemed to him that 'quiet surroundings' were exactly what he needed right now. It would probably mean a couple of months of celibacy, of course, but that wasn't much different from what he'd been going through this spring. It also meant he'd be able to forget the fact that he'd be turning thirty; there'd be no need to suffer through the celebration his friends were so keen on having, the lavish dinner at someplace expensive, followed by booze and slaps on the back. Well, he would just have to celebrate out there on the farm, away from civilization, like Thoreau. Probably be good for him, concentrate his mind on more important things. There was also his thesis to think about, The Something Something Something of the Gothic Imagination; he would figure it out eventually. Focus on the Participant Observer, maybe, or The Interplay of Setting and Character. Or, even more promising, Setting as Character… He was sure it would come to him; these things usually did. Meanwhile he'd be reading up on the subject – the primary sources, Le Fanu, Lewis, and the rest – making notes for a course he'd be teaching next fall and, who could tell, perhaps for years to come. To spend a summer among books: it was an appealing prospect.

So was the notion of escaping from the city this year: from the three flights of echoing stairs that, even after twice that many summers, left him panting and sweaty by the time he'd reached the top; from his claustrophobic little bedroom, the secondhand air conditioner churning endlessly in the window, blocking the view of the street; and, maybe most important of all, escape from the inevitable memories of a certain Laura Rubinstein who had shared that bedroom with him for so much of last summer and whose moving out at the end of it had been responsible for, among other things, the abandonment of a planned trip to England, the loss of a lucrative teaching assignment at Queensborough Community College (because of Freirs' erratic attendance and, as the department head had noted, 'insufficient classroom preparation'), and the habit of stuffing himself with food as he sat up reading late into the night, alone in his apartment, resulting in a gain of twenty pounds by winter's end and the drastic alteration of Freirs' wardrobe.

He still missed Laura. For a while he'd actually believed she'd be his second wife, the one who'd prove that, whatever mistakes he had made in the past, this time around he'd get it right. There'd been a couple of other women since her, but no one he'd really cared about. Three weeks ago, on the day of Laura's marriage to an old boyfriend with a family house in Sag Harbor and tenure at NYU, Freirs had written to the box number in Gilead, asking for more information and suggesting today, the first of May, for a possible visit. He had already discovered that the town was too small for most maps of the state (except for one highly detailed Geological Survey map he'd found at Voorhis), but Hunterdon County Transport operated a twice-a-day bus service from the Port Authority which, upon request, made a detour to the town.

The reply had come less than a week later. It was written in the same girlish hand on lined yellow paper obviously drawn from a legal pad. Three photographs had also been enclosed.

Dear Mr Freirs,

My husband and I were pleased to get your letter, and we'll be happy to have you come out on May Day and see our place. The Sunday bus arrives in Gilead shortly after two and will let you off across the street from the Co-operative. That will be closed when you arrive, but there's a bench on the porch where you can wait, and my husband will be by in the truck to pick you up as soon as services are over. You shouldn't have to wait long, and we'll see that you get back to town in time for the return bus.

The guest house is one of our outbuildings. It is newly renovated and electrified and, though you can't see it in the photograph, we will be putting new screens on all the windows. The left half of the building is used as a storeroom, but you should find the right half more than ample for your needs. There is a brand new bed, a wardrobe, a set of shelves, and a spare table you can use as a writing desk. (Your work sounds very interesting! At one time my husband and I considered teaching as a career.)

We are not fancy people, but I can promise you three square meals a day, well prepared, just as we ourselves eat. Our farm is not yet a fully working one (we purchased it only in November), but by this summer we expect to be eating our own produce. We are lifelong members of the Brethren of the Redeemer, a religious order with adherents all over the world, though most of its membership is concentrated here in Gilead, with other settlements in

Pennsylvania and New York. Both my husband and I have attended college outside the community. We welcome the interest of those outside the faith and do not impose our beliefs on anyone.

We have no telephone, so if you cannot come to see us on May Day, please let us know in writing as soon as possible. If we don't hear from you, we'll assume you're coming, and Sarr will be there to pick you up – but I see I'm repeating myself! So in closing, I look forward to meeting you and hearing about life in New York.

Sincerely,

(Mrs) Deborah Poroth

P.S. Jeremiah is our prophet, and so your name strikes me as a very good omen!

Freirs had read the letter, with the rest of his mail, on the subway up to Columbia. He'd found something charming about the woman's tone; it was like getting a message from a pen pal in another country, complete with three exotic snapshots. Yet as he'd scrutinized the photos, tilting them forward and back in the subway's glare, he'd felt a faint twinge of nervousness.

The pictures were in color; but for that, they would not have been out of place in some long-forgotten album of the past. The first showed a dirt road bordered by woods, with pale winter sunlight slanting through pine boughs and the leafless branches of an oak. In a clearing on the left stood a small white clapboard house with an open porch in front, nearly level with the road, and a line of thornbushes making twisted shapes against one side. The porch was bare save for two narrow wooden chairs, one of them empty, the other occupied by a woman in a long black dress, her dark hair tied back in a knot, her face masked by shadows. On her lap rested something small and yellow, with a second at her feet; squinting at the photo, Freirs saw that they were kittens. The woman was sitting straight in the chair, staring directly ahead. The whole scene seemed touched with the stillness and silence of a Hopper painting.

Behind the house lay a tiny fenced-in garden, though neither flowers nor vegetables were in evidence. The picture looked as if it had been taken on a winter afternoon; Freirs hoped to find the place a good deal greener now. He could see, beyond the trees, an open field broken only by clumps of weed and sporadic knots of bramble. At its edge stood further pine and oak, rising in a dense forest.

The second picture showed another portion of the field, an arid patch of reddish earth and stubble. A small brook glistened blurrily along the distant edge. In the center of the picture stood a slim, bearded man, somewhat Lincolnesque in appearance, posed stiffly with a rake in his hand like a rustic in an ancient woodcut. By his feet crouched a fat grey cat, glowering at the camera. The man was clean-shaven above a fringe of dark beard; he wore a vest, homespun-looking black trousers, and a somewhat wrinkled collarless white shirt. He looked around forty. His face was pale and his expression somber, but Freirs thought he detected a hint of a smile at the corners of his mouth, perhaps for whoever held the camera.

The third photo was slightly darker than the others, as if taken when evening approached. At the edge of the picture stood the rear wall of the farmhouse, while squatting in the center was a low grey cinder-block structure reminiscent of an army barrack. It appeared to have two entrances, with a glass-paneled door near each end. Freirs suspected that it was a converted henhouse.

Beyond its roof rose a dark line of treetops where the woods began. The building faced away from them, looking out upon the lawn; the grass grew right up to the doorways without a trace of path, as if, till now, no one had had occasion to approach it. Most of the brickwork in front was concealed beneath a dense growth of ivy, which had already spread over the rims of the windows. These were bare and very wide, allowing a view completely through to the back, where the trunks of massive trees cut out the light.

Even on the crowded subway, there'd been something about the scene that had disturbed him. He still wasn't sure what it was.

The photos, with their air of isolation, were like souvenirs of another world, removed in time or space: early settlers, maybe, or backwoods Maine. It was hard to believe that they'd been taken only recently in New Jersey, in a spot less than fifty miles from New York.

A month ago, his picture of Jersey had been compounded of a long-ago rock concert in the Meadowlands he'd let his wife drag him to, a disastrous interview in Newark during his leaner postgraduate years (to teach, of all things, Black English to inner-city youths), and several Metroliner trips to visit friends of Laura's in Washington. He'd always imagined the state as one vast slum, grey with swamp gas and pollution, populated by ghetto dwellers and gangsters.

Somewhere beyond it, outposts of light, lay the monastic seclusion of Princeton and the boardwalks of Atlantic City, all taffy stands, convention halls, and casinos. Along its eastern edge, just across the river from New York, stretched a wasteland of oil tanks and marsh water, lit up redly here and there, deep into the night, by tiny sputtering flames.

But he'd been wrong. For the past weeks he'd been reading about the state, his interest piqued by the photos. It appeared that there was real wilderness out here after all, with deer, foxes, rattlesnakes, even a few bears. There were the Pine Barrens to the south, over a thousand square miles of them, where a man could walk all day without seeing a sign of civilization. The books told of places down there that outsiders never heard of, tiny little villages completely cut off from the rest of the state, with nothing but a church and a general store with one or two gas pumps out front. There were ghost towns, too, and towns with names like Hog Wallow and Long-a-Coming, and towns with dialects all their own. Some of them weren't even on the map.

To the west lay the Delaware Valley – there'd been a piece on it in Natural History – where, in a certain hollow just upriver from Philadelphia, one could still find relics of idols the Indians worshiped. In the hill country north of it rose Tackisaw Ridge, riddled with a network of hidden caverns. Hikers had found queer words and symbols carved into the rocks, but no one had managed to puzzle out their meaning, or even what language they were in.

Some of the towns were still just names to him – names like West Portal and Winterman and Vineland, which billed itself as 'the witchcraft center of America.' Others came complete with odd histories: Monson with its string of unsolved murders, and Redcliffe with its 'devil museum,' and Budd Lake with its reports, back in the forties, of a chanting heard on certain nights, echoing over the water. There'd been similar reports, ten years later, of a chanting near the Jersey City docks, and rumors of stone objects – 'ancient ceremonial artifacts,' the local papers called them – unearthed during excavations for the stadium in the Meadowlands.

And then there were the religious communities – pockets of ignorance, to judge by the descriptions: bearded men, black-robed women, and a polite fuck-you to strangers. It was astonishing that such places had survived, and on the doorstep of one of the biggest cities in the world.

But then, isolation, he'd come to realize, was also a state of mind, and an insignificant little village might easily be overlooked – except when, now and then, some journalist heard about it and decided it was quaint enough to warrant a photo and a few inches of copy. Freirs had read how, in May of 1962, the Times had 'discovered' one such religious community near New Providence. Its existence had never been a secret; it had simply been ignored, until one morning New Yorkers had picked up their papers and there it was: a town that looked much as it had in the late 1800s, when it was first settled. The old religion, the customs, the special schools for the children, they'd all survived unchanged. Farm work was done entirely by hand, town worship was held every evening, women still wore long dresses with high collars – and all this less than thirty miles from Times Square.

These places were real. A few, it was said, had even had stone walls around them once – places such as Harmony and Mt Jordan, and Zion and Zarephath, with round-the-clock Bible talk on the radio. Places such as Gilead, his destination.

Kenilworth, Mountainside, Scotch Plains, Dunellen… they themselves seemed far from Jersey: names out of Waverley novels, promising visits of castles, highland waterfalls, and meadows dotted with flocks of grazing sheep. But the signboards lied, the books had lied, the Times had lied; the land here was one vast and charmless suburb, and as the bus passed through it, speeding west across the state, Freirs saw before him only the flat grey monotony of highway, broken from time to time by gas stations, roadhouses, and shopping malls that stretched away like deserts.

The bus was warm, and the ride was beginning to give him a headache. He could feel the backs of his thighs sweating through his chinos. Easing himself farther into the seat, he pushed up his glasses and rubbed his eyes. The scenery disappointed him, yet it was still an improvement over what they'd just come through. Back there, on the fringes of the city, every work of man seemed to have been given over to the automobile, in an endless line of showrooms and repair shops for mufflers, fenders, carburetors, ignitions, tires, brakes. Now at last he could make out hills in the distance and extended zones of green, though here and there the nearness of some larger town or development meant a length of highway lined by construction, billboards touting banks or amusement parks, and drive-in theaters, themselves immense blank billboards, their signs proclaiming horror movies, 'family pictures,' soft-core porn. A speedway announced that next Wednesday was ladies' night. Food stands offered pizzaburgers, chicken in the basket, fish 'n' chips. Too bad the bus wasn't stopping; he'd wolfed down an omelet two hours ago, standing in the kitchen of his apartment, but he was already hungry again.

With a sigh he turned back to his reading. He had brought a manila envelope bulging with photocopied articles from Sight and Sound and Cahiers du Cinema, enough for him to fake his way through still another week's installment of the film course he was teaching at the New School. Luckily that bunch wasn't hard to stay ahead of: art students, mostly, on transfer from Parsons, satisfying their English requirement by sitting through a dozen or so old movies.

The bus was nearly empty, and he had a pair of seats to himself. No need to make halting conversation with some ignoramus who hadn't bought along a magazine to read. Around him all the other riders looked like Jersey types, blank-faced men and women in dowdy clothes, off on mysterious Sunday-afternoon errands. Farther forward sat two teenage boys cradling knapsacks and caps, a fat woman and her equally fat daughter clutching shopping bags, an old man chattering nonstop to the driver, and one lone young woman whose face betrayed nothing, probably on her way to meet a lover, he decided, or returning from some wild night in New York. Toward the rear a large black woman gazed impassively ahead, already looking out of place. White folks' country here. In the row in front of him a pale red-haired youth with an armed forces duffel bag was fiddling with his radio: not a suitcase-sized monstrosity like the black kids carried or the tinny little transistor Freirs himself owned, but a solid grey plastic thing, souvenir of some PX. A song by Devo had just ended in a burst of static, and a voice announced the time: twelve fifty-seven in Z-100 land. They were passing another industrial park now, its wide black lots deserted for the weekend: an electronics firm, a cannery, a forbidding-looking plant labeled Chemtex. To the west the sky was nearly cloudless, flooding the bus with sunlight. Hot for May; perhaps a promise of worse to come.

The Poroths' ad had mentioned electricity, but would that include air conditioning? Unlikely. But he supposed it would be good to be a little warm. Sweat the pounds away.

He felt the bus slow slightly and saw a sign for Somerville approaching in the distance. He remembered the map he'd studied. They were halfway across the state.

Now, gradually, there was a change in the land. At first it was only evident in the stores along the road: a farm supply house with burlap sacks of feed and grain piled against the porch; a tractor showroom; a sporting goods outlet with advertising placards for guns and ammunition in the window. Then, here and there, an occasional well-tended farm set far back from the highway, the distant farmhouse seeming to turn slowly as the bus went past, the trees or fenceposts along the roadside flashing by in a blur. The land was greener now, the acres of asphalt and angry-looking rust-red earth receding into the east. He felt something in him quicken. On the radio one row ahead the electrified pastorale of Jethro Tull was fading beneath a shrill, insectlike buzz, and the youth twisted the dial to something else. 'Then Jeremiah went forth out of Jerusalem,' the radio said, 'to go into the land of Benjamin, to separate himself thence in the midst of the people.'

They were moving deeper into the country.

He had never spent time in the country before. Where he'd grown up, in Astoria, northern Queens, there'd been playgrounds, empty lots, little green patches of lawn, but nothing that hinted of real nature, nothing for a boy to explore. It was a neighborhood where Cub Scouts had learned to read subway maps, where the closest things to wildlife were pigeons and grey squirrels.

The only open land, besides La Guardia Airport to the north, had been Flushing Meadows Park and a cluster of enormous treeless cemeteries where various Freirs, Freireicher, and Bodenheim relatives lay buried. The park had been the site of two World's Fairs. It was mostly grass now, but a few of the pavilions remained, and Shea Stadium occupied its northern half. As a boy Freirs had spent hours sitting in a favorite tree beside one of the artificial ponds, watching planes come in and out of La Guardia. They'd come in all night as well, one every few minutes until early morning. On summer nights, standing on the roof of his apartment building, he could look to the right and see the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge glowing in the distance, and the Triborough to the left, with the lights of Manhattan behind it. A central Con Ed power plant had stood just a mile and a half away, a monstrous thing with five huge smokestacks, like some great beached ocean liner, and he'd always believed that it made the electricity for all those lights. The planes had been beautiful, winking in the darkness, and the noise hadn't bothered him much; he'd grown up with it. Manhattan, when he'd moved there after college, had seemed almost quiet by contrast.

Paradoxically, like so many other children in New York, he'd grown up with the idea that what he loved best was the country. Phrases like 'the dark woods,' 'the forest primeval,' and 'the wide open spaces' had made him shiver with longing. He'd felt an inexplicable nostalgia at the pictures of farms and mountains in his schoolbooks; even a poster of bland brown Smokey the Bear was capable of moving him. At age six he had wandered through the parking lot behind his house stamping out cigarette butts, convinced he was helping prevent forest fires. Later, in junior high school, he'd been certain he wanted to be a forest ranger when he grew up; so had nearly half the class. He had imagined himself sitting all day in some solitary tower, reading stacks of books, gazing through binoculars from time to time, then slipping down the ladder, beardless young Jewish St Francis, to check up on the bears and feed the deer.

Now, for all he knew, he was heading toward that very world, or at least that world's domesticated neighbor, and he was beginning to feel a little less certain of its rewards. The bus had left the highway back hi Somerville and had already made half a dozen stops in small towns and roadside depots – Clover Hill, Montgomery, Raritan Falls: bastions of silence and boredom where, on a Sunday afternoon in May, not a soul was to be seen except the occasional tall scowling man or hard-eyed woman in a pickup truck or station wagon, waiting for a passenger to disembark. These were towns without drugstores or banks, towns where the nights were for sleeping and homes went dark early. Kids here, he supposed, would build backyard tree houses and fortresses in the woods; they would join 4-H clubs, save up for their first rifles, and spend their teenage evenings driving up and down back roads, following their headlights while the roadbed bumped and dipped beneath their wheels.

He tried to imagine a place like Gilead, tucked away up one of those roads, hidden in the less settled part of the county in a region of woodland and marsh. Unlike the towns he'd just passed through, it would be truly self-contained, turned inward, its inhabitants wary of the shopping centers and uninterested in their rural neighbors. For the first time, he could see how such a place might survive, even in a county as fast-growing as Hunterdon. It would need little from the rest of the world, nor would it offer much. Outsiders would have no reason to visit, unless, like him, they deliberately sought it out. Those born into the community would never leave it; all their friends and relations would be nestled right there beside them. The land would thus be locked up tight, the area closed to newcomers -and, considering the religion practiced there, closed to new ideas as well. TV might be regarded as the devil's tool. Telephones, for all he knew, might also be proscribed; certainly the Poroths did without one. Yet even if they'd had a phone, how useful could it be if there was no one outside town to call? Lines of communication meant nothing if they weren't used; and these would not be. So Gilead would live on in its isolation, following its own peculiar paths until, in the course of time, it would simply be ignored, overlooked, and -he wondered if in fact this were already true – all but forgotten.

'I brought you into a plentiful country,' the radio was saying, the words singsong as if from years of repetition, 'to eat the fruit thereof and the goodness thereof; but when ye entered, ye defiled my land, and made mine heritage an abomination.'

For the dozenth time he considered changing his seat. The youth one seat ahead of him, hunched glassy-eyed over the dials, had turned the volume down at Freirs' request, but the preacher still sounded as if he were speaking at the top of his voice. It was a Bible station out of Zarephath, and hot for Jeremiah. The town lay miles to the east, but the voice, though strident, had an unsettling intimacy about it, as if the man himself were crouched just inches from Freirs' face; he could almost smell the gamy breath and feel the spray against his skin. He'd had his fill of jeremiads, all this fire and spit and brimstone was beginning to give him a headache, but he felt curiously reluctant to ask the youth to turn the volume down again. Superstition, maybe; in a country of believers, you didn't interfere. And there was a kind of fascination to the rhythm of the words, even if their meaning was a mystery; it was like listening to a recording of one of Hitler's speeches. Besides, he liked the idea that people out here made so much of Jeremiah. He'd never cared much for his name before.

The Poroth woman had commented on it, the coincidence of names. He wondered what she and her husband would be like, and what they'd think of him. The woman, at least, sounded eager for company.

Reaching into the pocket of his jacket on the seat beside him, he withdrew the envelope containing her letter and the snapshots. He studied her face in the photo, holding it up to the sunlight streaming down beside him. It was hard to tell for sure, maybe it was just his lonely imagination, but she looked rather pretty, and younger than she'd first appeared. Maybe he should start thinking of her as Deborah.

The husband? Rather gloomy-looking. Not much humor there. But of course he was still little more than a cipher.

He looked at the third photo. This screened-in former chicken coop was where, quite possibly, he'd be spending the summer. It looked serviceable enough, yet there was something about it, he'd felt it from the start: something that disturbed him.

Perhaps it was the all-enveloping ivy, or the squat shape of the roof, or the way the shingled eaves hung low over the doorways. Or.. . yes, that was it – the windows. The windows in the back. They were too big, and too near the trees, and the trees seemed to press toward them in a way he didn't like. While the front windows looked out upon a comfortable expanse of lawn bathed by the pale rays of a late afternoon sun, those in back seemed to open on another world, a twilight of tangled branches and shadowy black forms. They offer no protection, he decided.

Later he would wonder what had prompted such a thought, and what there was to be protected from. But at this moment, with the photo before him and the bus bearing him toward that very scene, all such questions fell before a single overriding conviction: It isn't right to build a house so close against the woods.

Its outskirts had become the haunt of bargain hunters, a busy region of shopping centers and showrooms, but the town of Flemington was quiet on this Sunday afternoon, though cars still lined the parking lots of the churches at the edge of the business district. Farther up the street the bus stopped before a red-brick card and candy shop. New Jersey Lottery stickers on the window and commercial notices fluttering from a bulletin board by the door. Several passengers filed off, the youth with the radio among them; the lone attractive girl had long since disappeared into one of the small towns back down the road. With a hiss of air brakes, the bus continued on past the venerable white pillars of the Union Hotel; then a bakery, odd star-shaped loaves in the window; a real-estate office with its shades drawn; and the old county courthouse, beyond whose worn stone steps the killer of the Lindbergh baby had been tried. At the end of the street stood the offices of the local daily, the Hunterdon County Home News. Next to them a funeral parlor's awning reached toward the sidewalk.

The bus followed the main road as it curved westward, the stores and municipal buildings giving way to handsome suburban houses with gables, ornate shutters, and broad well-tended lawns, which in turn gave way to freshly plowed fields, pastures where cattle grazed, and occasional patches of woods. Abruptly the bus veered north, leaving the main road for a narrower one that twisted between tall hedges like the footpath it may once have been. It wound past small, shaded bungalows half hidden by trees and secretive little lanes where foliage blocked the view ahead. Down one of these the bus turned, branches scraping at its sides. The lane cut through a stand of cottonwoods and over a gentle, sparsely forested rise choked with ground ivy and brambles. Beyond it, winding away from each side of the road until they were lost amid the trees, ran what appeared to be the ruins of an ancient stone wall. As the bus passed through them, Freirs felt as if he were trespassing onto private ground.

The way continued through a lane of cottonwoods and maples that looked as if they'd been there for centuries. Behind them stood a succession of dark-shingled houses, three on one side, four on the other – dwellings without ornament, obviously old, with lawns trimmed neatly and glimpses of gardens in back. Just past them the road suddenly widened and came to an end at another running perpendicular to it, forming a T. Facing the intersection stood a rambling white clapboard building with a wide front porch and a Post Office sign by the doorway. Behind it, and apparently attached, rose the tall rust-red pillar of a grain silo and the black gambrel roof of a barn, its weathered shingles curling in the sunlight.

The bus slowed as it came into the intersection and pulled noisily up to the building. In front of it Freirs could see three old-fashioned gas pumps and, along one side, what appeared to be a loading area, with broad ramps leading up to a garage adjoining the barn. By one of the doorways stood a dusty little tractor and a wagon piled high with bags of grain. An empty pickup truck was parked ahead, near the pumps, with another parked farther back, in the shadow of the barn. Both trucks looked decades old, like the car he'd noticed in a driveway down the street; their paintwork was dark, lacking all decoration and chrome.

No one was about. The porch was empty save for a straight-backed wooden bench; the front door was closed, the windows shuttered, the place as quiet and deserted an empty film set. There were no street signs to be seen, not even a sign above the building, and there'd been no words of welcome down the road. But Freirs knew, even before the bus driver turned and announced the name, that at last he'd reached Gilead.

The bus left him standing alone before the store, holding his jacket and his envelope of clippings. As Deborah Poroth's letter had warned, there was no one to meet him, and as he turned to look around, he felt marooned. Across the street, set well back from the road behind a line of massive oaks, stood a building that he guessed to be a school – a square red-brick structure with a patchy brown playing field beside it and two lonely seesaws in front. At the opposite corner, on a piece of ground slightly higher than the rest, stood a little cemetery, old but obviously well tended, though here and there a tombstone was askew, like trees after a storm.

The sound of the bus's engine faded beyond the curve of the road, leaving a silence broken only by the buzzing of insects and the occasional cry of a bird.

Freirs hadn't really expected the town to be this small. He'd expected at least a town center, someplace for the populace to meet. Yet except for the schoolhouse back behind the trees, there appeared to be no civic buildings of any kind, not even a Grange hall or an American Legion post.

What surprised him most of all was the absence of a church. From where he stood he could see. nothing but well-scrubbed houses bordering both sides of the road, and maples and oaks whose new foliage looked cool against the burning blue sky, the treetops receding into the distance toward a line of low green hills. The skyline was unbroken by either a golden cross or a slim white steeple. Perhaps services were held in some simple one-room tabernacle concealed behind a bend in the road.

Turning, with a sigh, toward the clapboard building – obviously the Co-operative mentioned in the letter, though for a store it was curiously bare of window placards and advertising – he climbed the steps to the front porch, wishing there were somewhere around to take a pee. The bench did not look comfortable, and wasn't. Above him, as he sat, he noticed a row of ominous-looking iron hooks protruding from a beam in the porch ceiling. Probably where they hung the sinners. He wondered, briefly, what sins lay on his own head.

He sat for a few minutes, savoring the silence. He was going to like this place, if the farm was as quiet as the town. Who knows, even boredom might be welcome. Tedium as Therapy: The Uses of Ennui. Time as a Function of… He was already beginning to feel drowsy. All those hours on the bus, and now this heat and solitude: it took a lot out of a body.

His bladder was full, though, and there seemed little likelihood there'd be a bathroom handy. Typical, that he hadn't thought to go back there on the goddamned bus. Opposite him, by the schoolyard, a line of oaks made patterns of shade along the roadside; inviting, but he'd be too conspicuous there. Past the farther corner the stone slabs of the cemetery stood bathed in sunlight; behind them rose secluded clumps of trees. That was the likeliest place. Besides, there might be some interesting old tombstones; do some rubbings there someday. At least it would help pass the time.

He strolled down the porch steps and across the street. Climbing the slope to the cemetery, he felt self-conscious. What if they didn't like strangers walking over great-granddaddy's head? That probably wasn't the case, though. People around here would be proud of these things, of how far back their families went.

Here was one, for example; he stood looking down at a small white headstone that the years had worn almost smooth. Ephraim Lindt; who Died 1887 in the 63rd year of his Life. That wasn't as far back as he'd expected. Obviously you couldn't go by the condition of the stone; the white ones tended to weather more.

Nearby he saw an older one that had held up better. Johann Sturtevant, Call'd to His Maker 1833, Aged Fifty-One. His Dutiful Wife, Korah, Join'd with Him in Heaven 1870, Aged Seventy-Eight. Jesus, a widow for almost forty years, and in a place like this.

Farther back stood a small stand of willows and, behind them, a scraggly hedgerow. He approached them, unzipping his fly, and let loose a splattering yellow arc on the base of one tree. Insects circled round in protest. Off to the right he could see the assemblage of headstones regarding him like an audience – Buckhalter, Stoudemire, van Meer – but there was no one to see him but the ghosts of the dead, and surely they were tolerant. Envious, even. How long had it been since his citified cock had been touched by actual sunlight? Damn, but this place felt healthy! Zipping up and with nothing to flush, he wandered back to the graves.

Slowly he made his way through the aisles, stopping at intervals to read the inscriptions on the older stones. Their quietude, the sense of souls and bodies in repose, had begun to make him drowsy again. Many of the stones had faces on them, or angels' heads, or skulls; some of the more modern ones had willows, like the one he'd just watered. There were also smaller headstones, for children. Picturing the tiny wooden coffins, Freirs tried to imagine how parents must have felt in an era when half the population died in childhood. Maybe, in those days, they didn't mind so much.

Often married couples shared a single stone, but a number of others were in pairs, one for the husband, one for the wife, as if, in life, they'd slept apart and now saw no reason to change. Here lay the van Meers, Rachel and Jan, their gravestones side by side like bedboards. On hers, 1845 to 1912:

Such as I am,

Thus shall thou be.

Just a cheery little reminder. And hubby, 1826 to 1906:

Let this to thee a Warning be:

Quickly thou must follow me.

Not something he felt like thinking about right now. Later, maybe. He moved farther down the row, wiping sweat from the back of his neck. Maybe it was the sun that made him tired.

Butterflies flitted between the tombstones; bees poked among the tall grasses along the bottom of the hill. He looked once more toward the store across the street. The door was still shut; no one had returned.

Near the end of the row he stopped to puzzle out another inscription; the stone was of slate, and chipped almost beyond reading. Getting up again required too much effort. Dropping his jacket and envelope, he sat himself on the grass and stretched his legs, his feet merging with the shadow of the adjoining monument. It was the largest object in the row, a dark four-sided column whose top was jagged and oblique, yet obviously sculpted that way, as if to suggest that the shaft had been broken off. He craned his head back to read the words. The thing appeared to commemorate an entire family; a way of saving money, perhaps. You left a little space after the names, and, one by one, as the people dropped off, you added the years they died.

Isaiah Troet

1839 – 1877

Hanna Troet

1845-1877

They had died the same year. Well, sometimes grief did that to people. Was it happier that way, or even sadder?

His eyes felt heavy. He lay back in the sunlight, cradling his head in the grass, and squinted up at the rest of the names.

THEIR CHILDREN

Ruth 1863-1877

Tabitha 1865-1877

Amos 1866-1877

Absolom 1868 Tamar 1871-1877

Leah 1873-1877

Tobias 1876-1877

Odd. They all had died that year. Some sort of disaster, maybe. Plague, flood, famine in the land.

His eyes closed. Sunlight beat against the lids, while blades of grass brushed his cheek. For a moment he had a vision of long-lost souls with funnily spelled names.

Just as sleep claimed him, he recalled something else that had been odd: they had left out the death year for the one called Absolom. Idly, in a final thought, he wondered what it meant.

Maybe Absolom had simply died the same year he was born. Poor kid, he thought, and slept.

Wind sweeps in gusts across the Hudson, carrying the scent of oil from the Jersey shore: oil, and a burning, and the strange sweet far-off scent of roses.

No one has noticed – no one but the plump little figure perched unobtrusively at the end of the bench, a battered old umbrella by his side. No one else is watching; no one would understand. No one sees the patterns in the water, or smells the corruption beneath the flower scent, or hears the secret sound the grass makes when the wind dies.

Once more the air grows still. Small green moths flit among the weeds; hornets buzz thirstily around a barrel of refuse. No one could guess what is happening. The river rolls past the park, unobserved; the planet rolls through space, unsuspecting; the Old One's squat black shadow lengthens on the bench.

In the shadow, shielded from the afternoon sun, a baby sleeps peacefully, its tiny olive face protruding from a tight cocoon of blanket. A woman, presumably its mother, sits slumped beside it, head fallen forward, eyes sunken and shut tight, skeletal arms hanging like dead things at her sides. On the ground beneath her lies a crumpled paper bag from which the neck of a bottle emerges; the cap has long since rolled into the grass.

Except for the three figures on the bench, this area of the park is almost deserted. The only movement comes from near the trash barrel, where a pair of glossy yellowjackets rise and dip in ceaseless search for food. His face impassive, the Old One watches as one of the insects slips from sight behind the rim and falls greedily upon some rotting thing within. The other circles round the spot in ever-widening arcs until, having flown as far as the bench, it pauses above the paper bag, tiger stripes thrashing furiously beneath a blur of wings. Settling atop the bottle, it disappears inside.

Suddenly the air changes; he can feel it. Whispering the Second of Seven Names, the Old One turns his gaze toward the river, the farther shore, and the shadowy hills beyond. Strange clouds have appeared on the horizon; part two of the sequence is almost complete. He sits poised, ready, rigid with anticipation. In a moment- In a moment A small green moth flutters past his face and comes to rest on the back of his hand. Feebly its wings open and close, open… close. .. then at last fall open and lie still. All movement ceases.

At the far end of the bench the woman's head falls back as if, in a dream, she has offered her throat to the knife. A small bubble of saliva grows and bursts at her lips. Her mouth opens like a rose.

High overhead a white bird wheels erratically in its flight and falls screaming toward the Hudson.

The signs are all about him now. It is time. The Old One sings the Death Song to himself and shivers with exultation. He has been waiting more than a lifetime for this – waiting, and planning, and readying himself for what he has to do. Now the moment is at hand, and he knows that the years of preparation have not been in vain.

Above the park the sky remains a blinding blue; the sun glares mercilessly down. With a metallic gleam the second yellowjacket lifts from its feast and comes spiraling toward the woman on the bench, to hover inches from her gaping mouth. From the empty bottle the other insect rises buzzing toward the baby's face. Mother and child sleep on.

The Old One regards them silently, watching the slow rise and fall of the woman's chest, the hollow cheeks and ravaged flesh, the infant in its mindless sleep. Here it lies, in all its glory: humanity.

He has plans for it.

And now, after a century's contemplation, he is free to act; the future is clear at last. He has heard the strange, piercing cries of the white birds circling overhead. He has read the ancient words chipped into the city's blackened brick. He has seen the foulness at the edge of a young leaf, and the dark shapes that lie in wait behind the clouds. Last night as he marked the birth of May, standing in solemn observance upon the rooftop of his home, he has seen the horned moon with a star between the tips. There is nothing left to learn.

Flicking the moth from his hand, he reaches for his umbrella, stands up from the bench, and grinds the tiny body into the earth. No longer shielded from the afternoon sunlight, the baby stirs, squints, and opens its eyes. A yellowjacket settles lightly onto its cheek; the other buzzes with interest round a frantically twitching eyelid.

Bound within the blanket, the infant struggles helplessly to free its arms. The little mouth opens in a scream. Oblivious, the woman sleeps on.

The Old One stands watching for a time. Then, with a wintry smile, he turns his footsteps toward the city.

The world had darkened. A deep voice was intoning his name. Freirs jerked awake, grumpy and scared, to find his head in shadow; for a moment he didn't know where he was. A figure was standing over him, blocking out the sun.

'Jeremy Freirs?'

He managed a grunt of assent.

'I'm Sarr Poroth. My truck's down there by the road.'

The man looked as tall as the monument beside him. The sunlight at his back made him hard to see.

Still dazed, Freirs got to his feet and brushed himself off, then picked up his jacket and papers. Yawning, he rubbed his eyes behind his glasses.

'I think that bus ride knocked me out.'

Wishing he were still asleep, he followed Poroth through the rows of tombstones and down the slope toward an old dark-green pickup truck parked at the edge of the road. The Co-operative across the street was open now, he saw, with several more trucks and autos in the adjoining lot. All were as somber in color, and most of them as antiquated-looking, as the ones he'd seen earlier, like cars in old photographs. The Co-op's windows were unshuttered now, with merchandise spilling out the open door, and a balding man with glasses and a fringe of beard was busily dragging straw baskets of sponges, axe handles, rubber boots, and overalls from the doorway onto the porch. It looked like moving day. The porch ceiling was already filled, garlands of clothes-line, shiny metal farm implements, and kerosene lanterns dangling like mobiles from the hooks that had looked so ominous before. A stocky mechanic was bent beneath the raised hood of a car parked off to the side of the gas pumps; Freirs could hear the regular iron scrape of some tool he was using and, in the distance, the hum of a tractor. Sounds of civilization. He blinked in the sunlight as he followed Poroth toward the truck. His legs still felt stiff from his nap.

The screen door across the street swung wide and two young men – brothers, from the look of them, and hardly more than teenagers – emerged from the store carrying mesh bags stuffed with groceries. They couldn't have been more than high school age, yet both, like Poroth, wore beards without mustaches and dressed in black overalls over collarless white shirts, making them appear almost elderly. They had been talking together with some animation but fell silent as they saw Freirs and Poroth descending from the graveyard across the street. Poroth, ahead of him, raised his hand in greeting; they waved back. The smaller of the two glanced at Freirs in surprise but quickly looked away, following the other down the steps toward one of the parked trucks. The strangeness, a feeling almost of foreignness, lay not so much in how they dressed as in how they moved: they walked closer together than boys in Freirs' world, and without the defiant swagger most of them affected. As they climbed into their truck, giving Freirs a last subdued glance over their shoulders, he had the impression that they'd have liked to stare longer but that it would have been rude, betraying an unseemly curiosity. Such restraint was somehow unnerving; he felt like one of the first Westerners to enter Japan must have felt, being received courteously and correctly but, it was clear, by people who considered themselves superior.

He wished he weren't wearing the chinos and blue workshirt, imitation L. L. Bean that here just looked phony and college-boy. Plus his goddamned gut hanging out. What Poroth and the others were wearing, that uncomfortable-looking black and white getup, a virtual uniform – was apparently what real country people wore. Beneath his shirt Poroth's broad back was probably as well muscled as any of the people Freirs knew who hung around $600-a-year health clubs or spent their leisure hours pumping iron at the Y. Though now that he looked at it closely, the shirt itself was sweat-stained and none too clean; was this the way the man attended church?

Poroth patted the metal flank of his beat-up green truck as if it were a farm animal. 'She probably isn't what you're used to,' he said regretfully. Freirs expected him to qualify this, to add some assurance of the truck's homely virtues, but the other merely swung himself up into the driver's seat and waited for Freirs to climb in beside him.

The pair of youths had just pulled out from the parking lot and disappeared up the road in their own truck, and once more the loudest sound to break the quiet was the regular metallic scrape from across the street where the mechanic labored over his engine. The man paused above some unseen part; then, as Poroth gunned the pickup's motor, he looked up, his face betraying neither friendliness nor interest. His beard looked somehow incongruous above the grease-stained overalls, a man out of the Bible attempting to pass for modern.

Poroth drove fast, either from a desire to impress or a simple impatience to be home. Thanks to the truck's height, Freirs enjoyed a commanding perspective of the road ahead. With every uneven-ness in the surface the two of them bounced on the springy black seat like cowboys on horseback; several times Freirs found himself reaching out almost surreptitiously to steady himself against the dented metal of the dashboard. He stole a glance at Poroth, whose skin, while rough, seemed surprisingly pale for one who spent most of his day working in the sun. Against the dark beard his face seemed all the paler. The beard, and the man's sheer size, made it difficult to tell his age. In the photo he'd looked as old as forty, but Freirs now suspected he was as much as a decade younger, perhaps as young as Freirs himself. He tried, in his imagination, to erase the beard from Poroth's chin and to do the same for the long, obviously home-cut hair. What sort of person would Poroth be in the city? Stick him in a three-piece suit, or on the subway with a briefcase beneath his arm, or sipping at a beer in some restaurant near Abingdon Square… No, it didn't work, he just wouldn't fit; he was too tall, too broad of shoulder, too obviously meant for outdoor labor. His very features were too stern, his brow thrust too far forward. There seemed no urban counterpart for him.

Poroth still hadn't asked him anything about himself, his interests, his impressions – none of the chat that Freirs would have offered a Sunday visitor. Had he done something wrong? Maybe Poroth had resented his snoozing in the graveyard.

'When you saw me resting back there,' he said, speaking loudly over the sound of the truck, 'I hope it wasn't also the resting place of some relative of yours.'

Surprisingly, Poroth didn't answer right away, and he gave Freirs a quick, unsettling look. 'Well,' he said at last, 'the fact is, pretty much everyone around here is related in one way or another. It's like a tribe – you know, a limited area with a few extended families. A sociologist would have a field day.'

Freirs heard the complicity in Poroth's voice – he'd been speaking as one educated man to another – and remembered what Deborah had written: Both of us have attended college outside the community. Clearly Sarr didn't want him to forget it.

'Sounds incestuous.'

Poroth shrugged. 'No more than any other tribe. Our order's pretty strict. And there are also Brethren living outside of Gilead, so it's not as if we only marry each other. My wife's from Sidon, over in Pennsylvania – an even smaller settlement.'

'You met at college?'

'No, we'd met years before that, at a Quarinale, a kind of planting festival. But we didn't get to see each other again till college. I was at Trenton, Deborah spent two years at Page. It's a Bible school.' He paused. 'We've only been back here for six or seven months. Deborah's still learning to fit in.'

'Is fitting in important?'

'Very.'

Freirs felt a stir of interest. 'I guess she and I will have a lot in common, then.'

Poroth darted him a glance. 'In what way?'

'We're both newcomers around here.'

The other mulled this over, frowning. 'I guess you're right. There are some strong personalities in Gilead, and a few people haven't really accepted her yet. It's all a bit new to Deborah. At this point, she's still trying to get all the families straight. There are faces to remember, names and relations-'

'Yes, I saw a lot of those names on the tombstones back there. Sturtevant, van Meer

'That's right. And Reid, Troet, Buckhalter, a few stray Verdocks-'

'That was the stone I fell asleep by,' Freirs said. 'Troet.'

'Ah, yes.' Poroth kept his eyes on the road. 'Actually, they were a distant branch of my mother's family. She's a Troet too. But that branch is gone now.'

'They all seem to have died at the same time.'

Poroth nodded. 'Some kind of fire, I think. The Lord works in strange ways.' He fell silent; then, as if realizing that this was insufficient: 'Fire's always been a hazard in the country. These days, though, people around here live pretty much the way everyone else does, and they die of the same things other people do – heart attacks, cancer, an occasional accident… all the usual things. Of course, they may live a few years longer, what with working hard, breathing clean air, eating food they've grown themselves.'

'Well, I plan to do plenty of hard work this summer,' said Freirs, settling back, 'but it'll be more the mental sort. Still, this looks like a healthy place to do it.' He patted his belly. 'Maybe I can even lose a little weight.'

Poroth smiled. 'I should warn you, Deborah's a good cook. I hope you're one who struggles against the temptations of the flesh.'

Freirs laughed. 'No better than the next man, I guess! You know what they say about the best way to get rid of a temptation.' He laughed again and looked over at Poroth, but the other was no longer smiling.

They had already passed through a lane of brick houses, square and unadorned, notable only for the absence of children's outdoor toys, junked auto bodies, and whimsical lawn decorations that Freirs had seen in front of other rural homes he'd passed today. Many of the houses were bordered by plots of land in earthen rows, dotted here and there with little shoots of green. Children tended garden beside their elders; they waved to Poroth as he went by, eyeing Freirs uneasily. A house was under construction, bearded men clinging to the framework like sailors in the rigging of a ship. They, too, waved, their faces impassive.

'I see there's no restriction against working on Sunday,' said Freirs.

'Far from it. We believe that labor's holy, and all days are sanctified by it. "For thou shall eat the labor of thine hands: happy shalt thou be, and it shall be well with thee."

'Amen,' Freirs said automatically, though Bible talk merely bored him, like words from a foreign text that had lost, in translation, some essential meaning. But at least he'd found a reason for the state of Poroth's clothes; every sweat ring was presumably a badge of honor.

They had been following the road over a slight rise of land, Poroth gunning the motor to maintain their speed. Now, on the farther side, they passed a sprawling red farmhouse and a barn that looked pegged to the earth by the broad silo beside it. Cattle grazed up and down the slope.

'Prosperous-looking place,' said Freirs.

'Verdock's dairy,' said Poroth. 'More relations. Lise Verdock is my father's sister.'

The cattle all faced the same direction, as if in prayer. A few were moving idly among the others in what seemed slow motion; the rest were as immobile as creatures on a billboard. Freirs, smelling grass and manure, breathed deeply. This stuff was supposed to save him.

'They stand tail to the wind,' Poroth was saying, 'so when they all look east like that, it means good weather.' He nodded toward a more imposing house beyond the dairy farm, at the top of a long tree-lined drive. 'Sturtevant,' he said. 'Brother Joram has considerable influence in these parts.'

'And does your father have a farm out here too?'

'No, he died ten years ago this fall. And he was never a farmer; he ran the Co-operative. So did his father and his father. Now the Steeglers run it – Brother Bert and Sister Amelia. Bert's mother was a Stoudemire, which makes him… let's see, a third cousin once or twice removed.' He grinned. 'See, it gets complicated.'

'Maybe I should just regard everybody as one big happy family.'

Poroth seemed to consider this a moment. 'Yes,' he said at last. 'Yes, happy.' He nodded, though it seemed as much to himself as to Freirs.

Freirs watched the scenery roll by, the dark fields corduroyed by rows of early corn. So Poroth was taking to the land again after generations in town. That made him, in a way, as unfamiliar with farming as Freirs was himself. It was somehow good to hear.

They turned right and continued downhill, a shade more steeply now. At the bottom, Poroth swung the truck abruptly to the left, the road following a shady, swiftly flowing stream half hidden from view by trees along its banks. Through the open window Freirs could hear the contented percolation of the water as it passed among the rocks with a sound like something singing to itself.

'Wasakeague Brook,' said Poroth, raising his voice to be heard. 'A branch of it runs past our land.'

They kept to the brook as it wound by straggly orchards, cornfields, and an occasional ancient-looking farmhouse, the sort where strangers knocked on wintry nights and fires blazed within. It felt like a scene in some book from his childhood. 'Boy,' said Freirs, 'I feel as if New York's a thousand miles away.'

Poroth eyed him quizzically. 'And is that a good feeling or a bad one?'

'Good… I think.' Freirs smiled. 'I'll let you know at the end of the day.'

The road cut through a stand of beech and cottonwood. Branches snapped against the truck's hood; leaves flattened themselves against the windshield. Freirs moved back from the window as the foliage rushed past.

'As for me,' Poroth said suddenly, 'a thousand miles away's exactly where I like it.' He sounded like a man with something to get off his chest. 'Even two thousand would suit me just fine.'

'Oh?' Freirs was still concentrating on the flashing branches. 'Wouldn't that make getting in and out a little inconvenient?'

'Yes, I imagine it would! But you see, I don't go in and out. I saw the place for the first time around ten years ago, and I've never set foot there since.'

Uh-oh. For a moment he'd forgotten where he was: among the apple-knockers. Garden State variety. These people voted against cities at election time and probably preached against them too.

'Sounds like you had a bad experience.'

'Memorable, anyway. I'll tell you about it sometime.'

'And how old were you then?'

'Let's see, I would've been… just seventeen.'

So Poroth was actually younger than he. Hard to believe – and hard to believe a young man of normal curiosity could grow up so close to New York without ever hopping on the bus to see what it was like.

'It's a big world out there, Sarr. Don't you think you ought to give it another chance?'

Poroth shook his head. 'I've already seen the world – as much as I want to see, anyway. I spent seven years out there. How many have you spent around here?'

'Why, none, of course,' said Freirs, with a shrug. 'It's hardly the same thing.'

'I disagree,' said Poroth. 'You've only seen one side of the world. I've seen both. But I'm home now, and it feels right.'

'Home for good?'

'Yes, sir! I intend to die right here in Hunterdon County.'

'And Deborah,' Freirs said carefully, 'does she feel the same?' He already suspected that she didn't.

'No, Deborah's a bit more… adventurous than I am. And not so quick to judge, I'll grant her that. She's visited the city a few times, and I can't pretend she shares my feelings about it.'

'I guess it was Deborah, then, who put the ad in the library.'

Poroth looked blank. 'What library?'

'The Voorhis, where I'm doing my research. That's where I saw your ad – on the bulletin board.'

Poroth took his eyes from the road and turned a suspicious glance on Freirs. 'You mean the notice that Deborah wrote out?'

'That's right. On some kind of recipe card, I think.'

He shook his head. 'Impossible. I put it up myself – at the bus depot over in Flemington. I wasn't sure, at first, that we'd want anyone from too far away.'

'You mean, from New York?'

'At the time, yes. You see, we'd never done this before – it seemed safer to start with someone who already knew the area. The ad was kind of an experiment. I figured someone passing through Fleming-ton might see it at the bus stop.' He paused. 'That's where I thought you'd seen it.'

'Nope. I'd never been to Flemington in my life, before today.' He was as much in the dark as Poroth but found something curiously enjoyable in the other's bewilderment. 'All I know is, I saw it in New York. I guess somebody just decided to move it.'

'Sure, but who?’

Freirs shrugged. 'Some do-gooder, maybe. Or maybe it was fate. Unless you've got a better idea.'

Poroth, staring distractedly down the road, fingers drumming on the steering wheel, said nothing.

He was still silent when, minutes later, the trees thinned out. Ahead of them the road forked to the right and led onto a crossing. Halfway up a hill above the opposite bank, guarded at the back by a line of aging cedars, stood a small stone cottage, squat, slate-roofed, and overgrown with vines. Battalions of flowers separated the house from the surrounding expanse of lawn. Additional rows had been planted in front, forming a series of terraced steps that led down to the stream.

Spanning the stream, and constructed of the same stone as the cottage, rose the arch of an old stone bridge only wide enough for one car to pass over at a time. Its railings were low and no doubt insubstantial, mere slats of wood; you'd hear them bend and crack before your car went off the edge, but they wouldn't keep you from falling. Freirs inadvertently held his breath as the truck rumbled across, but Poroth drove without pause or hesitation – perhaps, even, with a touch of bravado.

On the other side, unexpectedly, he slowed, following the road as it encircled the hill, the cottage from this vantage point looking like a kind of outpost meant to warn those farther inland of encroaching civilization. The flowers that surrounded it were sleeping sentries, ready at any moment to snap to attention.

'Nice-looking little place,' remarked Freirs, as they were passing.

Poroth nodded. 'My mother's. I expected to see her out in the garden. She's usually there this time of day.' He scanned the yard, looking for a sign that she was home, and seemed vaguely troubled when he found none. Or perhaps that business of the ad was still on his mind.

'What are those things?' asked Freirs, nodding toward a trio of upright boxes on legs, like midget armoires, that stood in the yard on the side farthest from the stream.

'Beehives,' said Poroth. 'She even had 'em when we lived in town. My father and I used to get stung all the time.' He shook his head, remembering.

As the road wound inland now, Freirs looked back. Just before the house was lost from view behind a wall of boxwood, he glimpsed something in one of the upstairs front windows – something that, for all the intervening distance, looked singularly like a face, frowning at them from the darkness.

Mrs Poroth, more than nine years a widow, stood at the top of the stairs, watching the truck till it disappeared up the lane. Sunlight slanted through the small square windowpanes, setting in relief the rock-hard features, the strong, almost hawklike nose and masculine jaw, the tiny sharp lines where the corners of her mouth turned down as if with grief. And she had cause for grief. The vision had been confirmed; her prophecy had proven correct. Many a woman would have wept.

On a normal Sunday afternoon in spring she'd have been outside, silently absorbed over her lilacs and rosebushes. But today, after the hours of worship that had filled the morning, the songs and invocations to the Lord, offered up this week at the home of Brother Amos Reid, she had returned to her cottage and stationed herself by the window, waiting pale and troubled for her son's truck to pass, determined to see the visitor it would be bringing before he saw her.

And she had seen him.

Like one in a dream, she made her way with slow, unthinking footsteps down the ancient staircase and through the lengthening shadows of the front room, moving absently toward the door. Stepping outside, she gazed unsmiling at the garden. A haze had passed before the sun; the countryside lay bathed in amber light. Honeybees poked drowsily among the rows of blossoms spread across the south face of the hill. Framed as she was within the doorway, her hair still black, though touched of late with streaks of charcoal grey, and her shapeless black dress reaching almost to the floor, she seemed the only truly dark thing in the landscape.

There was too much to think about now, events too grave to contemplate; her mind refused, for the moment, to grapple with them and turned instead, from force of habit, to the mundane concerns of earth and leaf and weather. She surveyed the ranks of blossoms with a practiced eye, the flower beds extending down the slope past scattered clumps of rosebushes and lilacs to the banks of the stream. The season had, so far, been a warm one, just as she'd foreseen, and all the signs now pointed to a summer of unusual severity. The tulips and hyacinths had already begun to wither on their stalks, and the lavender, she knew, would be opening too early, perhaps within the week. She would have to harvest it soon.

The lilac bushes, too, had blossomed early – a month ago, in fact -though by tradition they should not have reached their fullness till today, May first, the Beltane: sacred, some believed, to Baal's teine, the ancient god's sacrificial fire. Legend said that, on this day, one who bathed in lilacs' dew would be granted beauty for a year.

The legend held no charm for her. The time of her beauty was past, and she was past mourning it. There was no one on earth that she cared about, not even her only son, Sarr. The lilacs' time was past as well; soon they too would wither and turn brown.

Stepping from the doorway, the air around her humming with cicadas and bees, she strolled morosely among the ordered rows of flowers. Their lives, though brief, had always been vastly more interesting to her than people's. The crocuses and snowdrops were long dead and the daffodils dying, but the peonies and baby's breath had just begun to bloom, and a few other species were now at the height of their season: the blue and purple columbines whose leaves, when grasped, brought courage to the fearful; the delicate pink gillyflowers, sprung from Mary's tears, whose petals could be used for divination; the lilies of the valley – born, it was said, from the blood a saint had spilled fighting dragons in the forest – whose cup-shaped blossoms, properly prepared, were an aid to failing memory.

Not that she herself had need of memory aids, or courage, or divinatory powers. She forgot nothing, feared little, and foresaw far more than she cared to. The Lord, in His harsh wisdom, had singled her out from the rest. He had shown her shadows of the future, tormented her with visions of the world to come. He had seen to it that, despite what good befell her, she would never be happy for long.

It had not always been this way. She had been born with certain 'gifts,' as the Brethren called them, a certain wayward talent for prediction or the lucky guess, for reading secret thoughts from people's faces; but such gifts were common to the women in her family. Others before her had known them.

They were a small people, the Troets, given more to scholarship than farming, which set them apart from the rest of the community; yet in some ways their strength lay far deeper than the farmers'. It had always been, curiously, a female's strength, expressed not in the usual human terms of opposition to nature, or in futile attempts to master or control it, but in a kind of day-to-day alliance with its laws. Nature had, in turn, rewarded them; the Troet women – one or two, at least, each generation – had been blessed with certain powers of intuition, as if they were in touch, more directly even than the farmers, with aspects of some fundamental process: rainfall and impending winds, vegetation's cycle, the changing of the seasons and the moon. Mrs Poroth remembered her own maternal grandmother, a Buckhalter by name but a Troet by descent, who could read approaching weather in a cockcrow or a certain slant of light, and who'd speak familiarly of 'little signs' that others had ignored. It had been a gift beyond her ability to explain; when asked about it-as, when still a child, her granddaughter had asked – the old woman would say simply, with an indifferent shrug, that there were 'other ways of knowing.'

Mrs Poroth herself, it was believed, had inherited some of these powers; as a little girl she'd begun to understand, in a primitive way, how to let the world speak to her through the smells and colors of flowers, the shapes of leaves and clouds. But there'd been nothing truly exceptional about her talents – until that summer morning of her thirteenth year when, on the day after her grandmother's funeral, drawn by some unaccountable impulse to climb the stairs to the old woman's attic, she had discovered the Pictures.

They had been inside a folder tied with ribbon, crushed beneath a pile of dusty books in the darkest corner of the room. The renderings were crude, the sort of things a bright nine-year-old boy might have produced. They were drawn in luridly colored chalk on cheap rag paper, yellow and cracking around the edges and stiff with age. They looked at least half a century old.

Her eyes had widened as she sifted through them; she'd felt the sudden pounding of her heart. Crude though they were, the images had stood out from the cracked and yellowed paper with terrifying clarity. There were twenty-one drawings in all, each on a separate sheet and each, in its own way, filling her with inexpressible horror. There was a white birdlike thing with blood upon its breast, dying; a pool of dark water, with the hint of something crouched beneath it; a pale yellow book, fat and somehow repellent; a low earthen mound of odd proportions, and a red satanic-looking sun, and a cold oppressive moon, and a round white shape against a black background that she first took for another heavenly body, a planet or a moon, until suddenly, with a shudder, she saw it for what it was, a great round lidless eye…

Some of the Pictures were so queer she couldn't tell what they were meant to be. Like the slim black sticklike object; and the things that looked like dogs, only so badly drawn it was hard to be sure; and a pulpy thing that might be a coiled worm and might be smiling lips; and another figure, small, dark, and shapeless, with the half-formed look of dead things and decaying leaves, like a child's attempt to draw some creature he had heard about but never seen.

And with each new image, impossible memories were stirring; even the strangest of the Pictures, the three concentric circles with the red slash down the middle, seemed somehow familiar, in ways almost painful to think about. And there were others even worse: a horrifying scene drawn entirely in white, and another entirely in black; and a hideous thing that may have been a rose, except it had what looked like teeth; and a tree with something in it, a thing that glared and beckoned.

She knew that it was beckoning to her. The room was tipping forward; she was slipping, falling, the world spinning around her, drawing her toward that terrible face in the tree…

Dizzy, she had somehow had the presence of mind to hide the evil things, to shove them back beneath a stack of old papers before stumbling wild-eyed and delirious down the stairs.

When they found her minutes later, crumpled and unconscious on the second-floor landing, it was believed she'd had a fall. She was carried into what had been her grandmother's bedroom and laid on the dead woman's bed. There were some who felt uneasy about using the chamber of one so recently departed, and a younger brother wondered aloud if her fall hadn't perhaps been occasioned by a glimpse of the grandmother's ghost, stalking the attic overhead. But the Brethren were, above all, a practical people and not inclined to place much importance on such concerns. They knew they had nothing to fear from ghosts.

She had lain all that day as if under a spell, barely breathing enough to stir a goose-down feather held beneath her nose. Her face had become as rigid as a mask; when they peeled a lid back, they found the eye turned up in her head so that Utile more than the white showed, as if she were gazing at the inside of her skull. Her family feared for her life and, having just buried one of their number, spent the hours in prayer, begging the Lord to content Himself with the pious old woman He had so recently taken to His bosom and to spare this unworthy child. But if He heard them, He made no sign.

The trance had continued through the night and into the following morning, a hot, windless day that turned the old house into a furnace. Brethren gathered on the first floor to mop their brows and pray for the girl's soul, many quietly preparing themselves for a second funeral. A few even wondered if this wasn't perhaps a judgement on the whole Troet clan and its strange contrary ways.

And so things had remained until evening of the second day, when suddenly the girl's eyes opened and she sat bolt upright, startling those assembled at the bedside with a scream that sounded like 'The burning!' She was quickly declared to be out of danger; her dramatic awakening seemed merely to have been the culmination of a nightmare, and her family was relieved to discover that, despite her cry, she appeared to have no fever.

But the nightmare had been real, she'd been sure of it. She'd been flooded with visions, lying there, images of murder. Somewhere just outside Gilead a girl very like herself was about to die. There was light, and a tree, and an odd design with three concentric rings…

Her confused ravings were not entirely dismissed – the Brethren took such warnings seriously, aware that the Lord occasionally allowed men glimpses of events to come- but it was difficult to make sense of what she said. A tree? There were thousands of trees not half a mile from the house. A girl? It could be anyone's sister or daughter. And as for the design she'd babbled of, what were they to make of it? They could hardly be expected to act upon a prophecy so vague.

And in the end she had relented. Perhaps they were right, her family and the others; perhaps it had been a nightmare after all, brought on by her discovery of the Pictures – whose existence she'd been desperately anxious to keep secret.

Two days later a group of hunters had come upon the partially burned body of a girl from a nearby village, suspended from a tree in the part of the woods they called McKinney's Neck.

She had felt, in part, responsible for the death. A vision had been vouchsafed her, and she had failed to heed it. Never again would she allow this to happen.

That had been in 1939. Since then, over the years, she had sifted the Pictures many times, though always without joy, studying them at night by her bedside. She no longer had to see them all; merely staring at a few of the now-familiar images, drawn at random from the pile, was enough. Invariably the dreams would come.

She had never told a soul about the source of her knowledge. The community had no suspicion. The Brethren regarded her as a model of piety, and, after her first prophecy had been proved true, they accorded her a superstitious respect not untinged with fear, coming to her often for advice. She doubted they'd look kindly upon her use of the Pictures.

She detested them herself; she knew what dreadful visions had inspired them. She knew the identity of the dark, formless creature, and the terrible things it could do. She'd learned what the circular design meant, and where it was to be used. And she knew – had always known – who had drawn them all. Even in those first dreams in her grandmother's house, she had seen in the Pictures the hand of her vanished ancestor, the boy Absolom Troet.

Over the years she had come to suspect, if dimly, what the boy's instructions might have been. And she trembled at them. For beneath the dreams that the Pictures inspired loomed a great black certainty that haunted every waking hour, a vision of the future which, as a young girl, then a housewife, now a solitary widow, she felt powerless to alter or prevent.

Though she knew she'd have to try. Surely the Lord expected nothing less.

In recent years, like one who leaves unread a message of bad tidings, she had resorted to the Pictures less frequently – had avoided them, in fact, preferring to leave them tucked safely inside the great leather-bound Bible on the nightstand by her bed, as if to thereby make them holy. She had no need to open the Bible; its every word was as familiar to her as the images Absolom had drawn.

'And now, Lord, what wait I for? My hope is in thee… '

She frowned as she moved farther down the hill, troubled by what she saw: the scattered clumps of rosebushes, the late-blooming teas and early-blooming damasks and mosses that grew here and there above the stream. They reminded her of something.

For just last night, aware that a visitor, an outsider, was due among them this May Day, and knowing with dread that, exactly as prophesied, a month with two full moons lay ahead, she had succumbed to curiosity and the demands of conscience. At bedtime she had opened the Bible, slipped out the Pictures, drawn forth at random the images of moon, rose, and serpent…

The dream, she recalled now, had been set right here, in this garden, by that moss-rose halfway down the slope.

Darkly it came back to her.

She'd been walking here, just as she was now. Only it had been night, and hot, and moonlit. One leaf on the moss-rose bush had looked different from the others in the ghostly light: a single leaf half hidden by the night shadows of the damasks, but her sharp eyes had picked it out from several yards away. There seemed to be – there at the tip – an odd, unnatural whiteness…

No, not just at the tip. She saw as she drew nearer that the entire leaf was edged in whiteness, the dark familiar greenness in retreat, as from a creeping frost or a cold invisible fire.

She ran her fingers over its surface; she was sensitive to plants, they spoke to her in a hundred furtive ways, and surely this one had secrets to reveal…

Her fingers, this time, told her nothing. Around her the air throbbed with the buzzing of unseen bees. Grasping the rose branch, she tugged lightly at the leaf. There was a sudden stinging pain, and with a cry she yanked back her hand. Protruding from the fleshy area just below her thumb was a pale green thorn snapped off jaggedly at the base. She pulled it out; it was curved, wicked-looking, nearly an inch long. How had she failed to see it in the moonlight?

The buzzing had grown louder, more insistent. As she brought her wounded hand to her lips, the blood flowing salty and warm, something occurred at the end of the branch just inches from her face.

A rosebud moved.

Her eyes widened. Why hadn't she noticed it before? The bud was fatter than the others, the skin moist and somehow pulpy-looking. It was clinging to the thin branch like a lump of rotting meat.

Warily she reached for it. It shifted at her touch. The air shrilled with an angry insect sound that clamored like a warning in her ears, and there beneath the radiance of the moon, in the heat of that rose-perfumed night, she felt a chill.

Torn from the branch, the bud seemed heavy in her hand. Her fingers probed the dark-veined leafy covering. One by one the leaves peeled back; like a piece of hollow fruit the skin split and fell away. Inside lay a pale, ropy thing curled like a length of intestine. As the moonlight fell on it, it stirred.

She saw now what it was: a plump white worm, thick as a baby's finger – a plump white worm that, as she watched, uncurled, raised its unwrinkled head, and glared at her. A plump white worm with a human face.

Grimacing, she dropped it to the ground. She was sure she heard the creature scream as she crushed it beneath her shoe: scream words at her as from a human mouth, human lungs, a human throat, words in some dark ancient tongue she'd never heard spoken aloud, but whose meaning, upon waking, she'd felt sure she understood.

And now, just this afternoon, she had seen the visitor, all plump and pink and innocent, arriving with her son. She had recognized something in his innocent face. The dream had not lied. The Pictures were real. For the first time in her life, she felt too tired to pray.

Absolom, the Old One, still lived: she'd known it all along, all her blighted life. She'd always known that one day he would make his move, assemble the performers – the man, the woman, the Dhol -and allow the process to begin. She had known that it would start the first of May and end the first of August, in a month with two full moons.

But she'd always believed she had at least a decade left to her. She'd believed she would have more time to prepare. She hadn't realized it would come so soon. This year. This May.

This summer.

His journey takes him south, where rows of skyscrapers reflect the westering sun and cast giant shadows up and down the avenue. An idle weekend crowd fills the sidewalks, strolling past the ranks of street vendors and spilling from the shops to join the mass that merges and splits and merges again into a living stream.

Unnoticed, the Old One walks among them.

A half-naked boy limps toward him, pale head swollen like overripe fruit, clutching a thumb-stained envelope. A blind trumpeter blares against the traffic from the doorway of an abandoned building. Someone stands hunched over a pay phone, mouth working furiously. On the corner a haggard woman waves a blackboard scribbled with names and exhorts the planet to save itself; humanity, she cries, has been judged and found wanting.

He knows that she is right. That judgement is his as well. Turning his back on the woman, he's confronted by his reflection in a store window: the short, plump figure swinging an umbrella, the blue serge suit gone baggy at the knees, the wide cherubic face beneath its halo of fine white hair.

It is the reflection of a little old man.

Once he had something in common with the figures crowding past him on the sidewalk; once, more than a century ago, he was one of them, part of the loathsome race that swarms over this planet. Now only the semblance remains, the organs, bones, and flesh. He has been washed clean of humanity; he feels no trace of kinship for these odious doomed beings, only a cold and unremitting hatred. As he passes down the avenue they part before him like stalks of corn.

Stoplights change from red to green and the crowd surges forward. A bus groans, lumbering away from the curb. Brakes screech as a taxi sounds its horn. Dark feline shapes crouch beneath a parked car, then dart into an alley. From the next block echo the cries of children and, from another part of the city, the wail of sirens. As the Old One turns westward once more, the sun is sinking toward the distant Jersey hills, toward the factories and the dumps and the oil refineries. Suddenly the land is touched with red and the refineries glow as if ignited, hills turning to flame. The river shines with fire.

The Old One blinks his mild eyes and smiles. Great events are imminent, and nothing that he looks upon will ever be the same. The crowds, the traffic, the hateful little faces of the children- soon, after the Voolas, they will trouble him no more.

But first there are a few more preparations to be made. There is not much time left, and he will never get another chance: five thousand years must pass before the signs again are right. He will have to act quickly.

He has already selected the man: some insignificant little academic with no family and no prospects. There are hundreds just like him in the city – all young, all hopeful, all doomed – but this one has been born on the necessary day, and (though the young fool doesn't know it yet) his interests lie in just the right direction. At this very moment he'll be out there on the farm, no doubt busily convincing himself that he likes it. He appears to be highly suggestible. He will do.

Now the Old One is faced with an even more important task, a task which has to be completed by Midsummer's Day.

He has to find a woman.

Not just any woman. The age has to be right. And the background. And the color of her hair.

And, of course, she will have to possess that very special qualification…

'Wonderful place you've got here.' He was being just a little ingenuous, tramping through the undergrowth with Poroth. The farm looked better than it had in the photographs – greener, certainly -but it plainly needed a lot of work. Even Freirs could tell that, and the last farm he'd seen had been in Days of Heaven, with Richard Gere shoving a screwdriver into Sam Shepard. The Poroths had already cleared an irregularly shaped plot of land nearly twice the size of a football field, extending westward from the farmhouse's back lawn, past the barn and down to the meandering little brook that curved across the southern edge of the property, but there appeared to be many times this area still to be attended to, including a huge uncultivated section on the far side of the brook that Poroth had spoken of 'saving for next year.'

The place was much bigger than it had looked from the road -close to fifty acres, all told, though most of this was forest, or fields of weed too thick and high to walk through. Freirs reminded himself that the Poroths had moved in just last fall, and that, till then, the land had lain untended for seven or eight years. Perhaps this was why a young couple like the Poroths had been able to afford it.

He would have liked to ask Poroth how much the place had cost, now that the two of them were alone out here, lunch under their belts and the land stretching green and sun-soaked before them, but for most of the day – at least ever since they'd passed his mother's house, back there on the road – Poroth had fallen into some kind of mood, replying to Freirs' occasional polite questions with an air of gloomy distraction. Here was Brother Lucas Flinders' place, he'd said, barely nodding toward some tidy farmhouse they were passing. That one was the Reids'. Down this way lived Brother Matt Geisel… More than that he'd seemed disinclined to say. And then, toward the end, barreling down the three miles of pitted, unpaved road that wound through woods and brambles to the Poroths' farm, he'd barely talked at all, too preoccupied with keeping the old truck from going off into a ditch. Before them the road had seemed to buck and twist beneath their wheels like a wild thing, at times almost doubling back upon itself- 'like it's trying to throw us off,' Freirs had said, holding tightly to the door handle and wishing the other would slow down. What in hell was he trying to prove? Poroth had said only, 'This sort of road's not meant for driving on,' and hadn't so much as glanced in Freirs' direction.

He'd recognized the farmhouse from the photograph as soon as it came into view, a small grey-shingled boxlike affair, as tall as it was wide and obviously quite old, set close to the edge of the road as if eager to greet the few strangers who ventured out this far. The thornbushes along the side were green now, dotted here and there with dark red rosebuds. Deborah, Poroth's wife, had been standing there on the porch as they drove up, a pair of cats gathered like children at her feet. Even at this distance, Freirs could see that she, too, looked much as she had in the photo, dressed in homespun black from neck to ankle. She had waved gaily to them as Poroth spun the wheel and brought the truck around to the side of the house, where it came to an abrupt halt on a bare section of the lawn.

The first thing that had hit him was the silence. He'd noticed it as soon as Poroth shut the motor off. As he climbed out onto the grass, grateful to be on solid ground again, it was as if the whole world had suddenly come to a stop. Back in Gilead, standing alone, he had felt a similar quiet, but there it had seemed somehow less dramatic, a more fragile thing soon to be shattered by the inevitable noise to come, traffic noise and tractors and the intrusion of human voices. Here, though, he sensed that except for the small sounds of insect, bird, and wind in the trees, the silence was permanent, a central fact of life.

Deborah immediately came down from the porch to meet them. She was a handsome woman, even better looking than he'd hoped, with strong cheekbones and wide dark eyes beneath heavy un-womanish brows. Her mouth was large, the lips sensual and thick-not a puritan's lips at all; with makeup, in the right clothes, she would really be something to see. Her mass of black hair was obviously long and full, but she wore it swept back behind her head and knotted in a complicated bun with a severity that looked almost painful. He wondered what she'd look like with it down.

'I sure hope you didn't have to wait long,' she said, after Sarr had introduced her. 'Services always run so late at the Reids', the way Brother Amos can talk. I was afraid you'd get fed up and start walking back to New York.'

Freirs smiled – in part to make up for Poroth, who, he saw, was scowling at his wife. Probably didn't like her putting down the neighbors. 'Oh, I wasn't about to walk home. In fact, I had myself a little nap.'

'I found him sleeping in the graveyard,' said Poroth. 'Right by that big stone of the TroetsV

Deborah laughed. 'A good choice! They're Sarr's old relations.'

'Yes,' said Freirs. 'I gather almost everyone is.'

'And guess where he found our notice,' said Poroth. 'The one I put up in Flemington.'

'Where?' She turned to Freirs.

'I found it on a bulletin board in New York.'

This news, he saw, had caught her by surprise. She looked from him to her husband, as if the two men shared a secret. 'How did it get there?'

'That's what we don't know,' said Poroth grimly. 'Some kind of prankster, maybe.'

'Or else a good Samaritan,' said Deborah. She considered this a moment, then nodded. 'Yes, it must have been, don't you see? Look how nicely everything's turned out. It just might be a sign from God.' Eyes wide, she turned back to Freirs. 'It's like your name -from Jeremiah. I'm sure that's an omen too.' She grinned. 'Maybe you'll turn out to be a prophet.'

Freirs laughed uneasily. 'I'm afraid I'm no relation. But then, you never can tell.'

'I can tell,' she said. 'You were meant to come here, I'm sure of it. And I'm sure you're going to fit right in.' Scooping up a cat, she began moving toward the house. 'Now come on, both of you. I have lunch ready, and then Sarr can show you around. You two just better be hungry. There's sliced ham and cheese, and fresh dandelion greens-' Looking back at Freirs, she added, 'Nothing from our own garden, not yet, anyway – but there's a rhubarb pie from the Geisels right up the road.' To Sarr she added, 'Brother Man's coming by later. I think he wants to meet our guest.'

'Sounds like just what the doctor ordered,' said Freirs, hurrying after her. For a moment he caught a glimpse, in back of the house, of the outbuilding where he'd be staying. It looked somehow less welcoming than the farmhouse. Maybe they didn't want to show it to him till they'd softened him up. Well, that was okay; he could use a good lunch. He followed Deborah up the porch steps, surreptitiously eyeing her swaying hips encased in the black dress, the hemline sweeping barely an inch above the floor. A wonder it didn't get dusty.

Behind them in the yard, Poroth sighed. The matter of the rental notice seemed to be closed. 'I'll leave the truck out,' he called, coming after them. 'We'll have to start back to town by five to make the bus.'

While Deborah held the screen door open for Freirs, a pair of cats dashed past her feet and into the house, closely followed by another that Freirs hadn't seen. This could be a problem; he hadn't counted on there being so many.

Inside, the house seemed cramped and dark, with an unmistakable odor of cat; his nose tickled alarmingly. He heard Poroth's footsteps on the porch behind him. The old floorboards creaked. 'It's lighter in the back,' Deborah said, leading the way. They passed from a small front hallway to what was obviously the living room, where a rocker and a low, rather worn-looking couch stood facing a small fireplace. Beyond it lay the kitchen, afternoon sunlight streaming through the windows and a screen door in the rear.

It took Freirs a moment to realize what was missing. He looked in vain for lamps, a light switch, television; there was nothing but a small kerosene lantern on the mantelpiece. As he entered the kitchen, he saw another on the shelf by the doorway. He cleared his throat. 'I thought your ad said "Fully electrified." '

'The outbuilding is,' said Poroth, ducking as he came into the kitchen. T ran the wires in myself not two months ago. But in our own home-' he shrugged. 'W e prefer to keep the modern world at a distance. Here, you see, we're independent of the city and its ways.'

Freirs sensed, not for the first time, a hint of disapproval. Across the room he noticed a huge cast-iron woodburning stove rubbing shoulders with a shiny little Hotpoint. He turned to Deborah, who was busying herself at the sink, cats milling at her feet. 'I suppose that stove is gas-powered.'

'Correct,' said Sarr. 'We bought it secondhand from a man in Trenton.'

'Honey,' Deborah said over her shoulder, 'show Jeremy the tanks out back.' Freirs watched her lay a platter of ham on the kitchen table and remembered how hungry he was.

'Here, look at this.' Poroth pushed open the screen door and led Freirs out into the back porch, where two more cats were lying on the dusty wooden steps. 'Each one lasts about a month,' said Poroth – but he was pointing to a pair of silver canisters standing like miniature spaceships against the rear wall of the house, surrounded by rosebushes and weeds. 'Ordinary propane. It heats our water and cooks our meals.' Draping a long leg over the railing, he leaned back against the weathered wooden post and folded his arms.

'I don't get it,' said Freirs. 'You say you want to be independent of the modern world, but gas is just as modern as electricity. And probably just as expensive.'

He thought perhaps he had offended Poroth, but the other seemed amused. 'I know it doesn't sound very rational,' Poroth said. 'I don't pretend it is. The choices we've made have been largely… symbolic. Expressions of our faith.' He smiled wryly. 'Does that make any sense?'

Freirs shrugged. 'I suppose so.'

'Look,' said Poroth, 'we're not fanatics, Deborah and I. We have indoor plumbing. We own a truck. When one of us gets sick, we see a doctor. Some of the Brethren are stricter than that; others may think we're too strict. There's plenty of room for differences. You'd be surprised how open-minded the Brethren can be.'

He would, all right. He hadn't forgotten the looks they'd given him in town. But he said politely, 'You people must be a lot more liberal than I figured. I'd had you pegged as a New Jersey version of the Amish.'

Poroth made a face. ' "Blackhats," we call them. They're little better than tourist attractions, if you ask me.'

'I guess I was going by appearances. I mean, you seem to dress the same as they do, except for the hats.'

'It's true, we have our similarities. Certain customs, outward forms… This sort of thing.' He pointed to Lis trousers. 'See? No pockets. Pockets breed avarice. Give a man pockets, and pretty soon he'll want something to put in them. "He that is greedy of gain troubleth his own house." ' Poroth smiled. 'That's what I meant by symbolism.'

'No kidding! I thought those pants looked strange.' Wait till he told them about this back in New York.

'It's the same with the beard. See? Brethren don't wear mustaches because the military wore them – in Europe, anyway – and we refused to leave the farm.' Abruptly he swung his leg down and stood; he was nearly a head taller than Freirs. 'Electricity's a symbol too. You'll find a battery in our truck, another in our radio. We like to listen to the Bible broadcasts. But Deborah and I, we're not ones for labor-saving and luxury. We have no interest in wiring up our home. As I see it, an electric wire's a golden chain that binds a body to the city – and that, my friend, is the citadel of corruption. When the city flickered, we'd flicker. When the city went dark, we'd go dark. That's a tie we'd rather do without.'

He started back inside. Freirs lingered a moment on the porch, gazing at the land that lay behind the house, at the outbuildings, orchard, and fields, but thinking of the monstrous Con Ed plant back in Astoria and how it had lit up the night sky like an ocean liner.

At last the view drew his attention. Where the fields ended, sloping gently downhill from the farmhouse, his eye was caught by the distant glimmer of a stream. The property was more extensive than he'd imagined, though its exact limits were hard to discern, for it merged gradually with the woods which, in every direction, formed a backdrop to the scene. They were dark with shadows and, even at the height of afternoon, far from inviting. He realized suddenly how far he was from the city, and felt a tiny shiver of excitement. This was the real thing.

The three of them ate in the kitchen, seated on some heavy high-backed chairs before an ancient wooden table that some long-dead Poroth ancestor had made. The farmhouse, he'd discovered, had no dining room; it was simply too small – three rooms upstairs, two rooms down, and rough plank floors with spaces often wide enough to see through. Deborah, smiling, had remarked that, when she swept out the kitchen, the crumbs slipped through the cracks and ended up in the root cellar below, where the mice ate them.

'And they, in turn, get eaten by the cats,' Sarr added, as if compelled to remind her of this. 'All part of God's plan.'

Freirs studied the two of them while Poroth said grace and the cats prowled restlessly beneath the table. Except for the difference in height – for even when he was seated, Sarr towered over them both -and the fact that Deborah was, from what he could see, full-breasted and wide of hip while Sarr was tall and rather willowy, the two looked much alike, as if they'd stepped from the same faded tintype, representatives of some earlier generation. Despite their dark hair, both had skin of a surprising smoothness and pallor, considering the time they probably spent outdoors. It was already clear to him that

Deborah was the friendlier of the two; yet in moments of quiet like this one, as she sat listening, eyes downcast, while her husband thanked the Lord for His bounteousness and the guest He'd sent them today, Deborah wore an air similar to Sarr's – a kind of guarded dignity. They seemed brother and sister, in fact: two solemn-faced children raised in the wilderness, both of them on speaking terms with God.

By the time grace was over, though, Freirs had become distracted by a growing need to sneeze. 'It's nothing to worry about,' he explained with irritation when the two finally looked up. 'I just happen to be allergic to a variety of things – cats most of all.' He gritted his teeth and tried to smile as a pair of them, a yellow tiger-stripe and a charcoal grey, both obviously young, crowded closer to rub against his legs. He was as angry with himself as with the animals; he'd have been happy to reach down and pat them, scratch the downy hair behind their ears, but with each successive breath he could feel his nose becoming clogged, as if somewhere a mechanism had been triggered that he was helpless to control. The corners of his eyes had already begun to itch.

Sarr sat watching him in silence; maybe he saw such afflictions as evidence of weakness or of God's displeasure. Deborah appeared more sympathetic.

'I think it's a good sign,' she declared, watching beneath the table as the cats, no doubt in an effort to leave their mark on a stranger, continued to rub themselves diligently against the bottoms of Freirs' pants legs. 'I mean, the way they've taken to you. It shows you're welcome here. I guess we're all starved for visitors.'

Sarr frowned. Clearly this sort of thing made him impatient. 'Shall I put them outside?'

That was, in fact, precisely what Freirs wanted, but he was in no mood to make a scene; these animals were the closest things the Poroths had to children. Surely they could all work it out over the summer. 'They're okay here,' he said lightly, and launched into an elaborate cock-and-bull story – though who could say, maybe it made sense – about how the only way he'd ever get over the allergy was by exposing himself to the offending animals as often as possible. 'It's just a matter of building up the right antibodies,' he said, privately resolving to see a decent allergist as soon as he got back.

Deborah looked relieved. 'Well, just remember now,' she said, 'If you ever have problems like this over the summer, there's always antihistamine in the medicine chest.'

She sounded as if it were a foregone conclusion he'd be staying with them; and maybe it was. He already felt as if he knew them. Obligingly he marched off to the bathroom in search of the pills, grateful that she hadn't offered him some Brethren-approved medication like herbs or mud or some other crazy folk remedy.

The bathroom was a crowded little chamber just off the kitchen, with a small curtained window looking out upon the rosebushes at the side of the house. In the corner stood a bulky metal water heater apparently connected to the tanks out back and, next to it, a primitive sink with separate faucets for hot and cold. Freirs wondered why nobody'd had the sense to connect them; it only took a simple Y-shaped pipe. The room was dominated by a gigantic old claw-footed bathtub, big enough for two, that would probably take hours to fill. No showers for him, then, if he spent his summer here. He told himself that baths were more relaxing: reading classics in the tub, soft music on the radio – it might not be so bad.

The medicine cabinet was a revelation: dusty little plastic bags with roots in them, and colored powders, and things afloat in brown unlabeled bottles, side by side with a handful of prescription drugs for headaches, nausea, nerves – plus mouthwash and aspirin and scented bath talc, and, on the top shelf near the end, a half-empty package of strawberry douche. The Poroths must have an interesting marriage, he decided.

Back in the kitchen Deborah had set out a platter of cheese beside the ham and was busy slicing a loaf of thick brown bread, the kind he saw at German delis but that always seemed too expensive. She was wielding a bread knife that looked half as long as a sword, while San-sat watching her impassively, a king on his throne.

'Now this looks good,' said Freirs, seating himself across from Poroth. He poured himself some milk from a ceramic pitcher and washed down the pill, some local version of Contac.

'Yesterday, I want you to know, that milk was in the cow,' said Deborah. 'It's from Sarr's uncle's dairy.'

'Sure, I remember. We passed it on the way.' He swallowed a large bite of bread and cheese. 'And I'll bet this bread's homemade.'

She nodded, pleased. 'I haven't bought bread since we lived in Trenton. It's all baked right here.'

'In that thing?' Freirs nodded toward the huge black wood-burning stove that stood beside the Hotpoint, already seeing pictures out of Norman Rockwell, Currier amp; Ives. 'It looks at least a century old.'

'It is,' said Deborah. 'It's as old as the house. But it's hard to regulate. We only use it for heating in the winter… and for certain ceremonial occasions.'

'Does this place get very cold in the winter?'

'The attic needs work,' said Sarr, obviously looking forward to it. 'I'll have to put new insulation in this fall.'

'It gets cold here all right,' said Deborah. 'You've heard people talk about three-dog nights, when you need all three dogs in the bed? Well, this January, Sarr and I had a couple of six-cat nights!'

Freirs winced, but not at the idea of such cold. His eyes were still red and he hadn't stopped sniffling. 'God,' he said, 'I probably wouldn't survive the night! Though I guess on a farm like this six cats must have their uses.'

'Seven,' said Deborah. 'You probably haven't seen Bwada yet. That's his cat.' She nodded at Sarr.

'And where is he?' asked Freirs.

'She,' said Poroth. 'She stays outside all day – sometimes nights, too. She's more adventurous than the others. I've had her since she was a kitten.'

Deborah added, 'She's fat and just plain mean. That's why she sleeps by herself. Now, these are the nice ones, Jeremy-' And until dessert she proceeded to furnish him with detailed biographies of the other six, complete with ancestries. They all had names like Habakkuk, Tobias, and Azariah, names which sounded as if they'd been taken from obscure portions of the Bible and which Freirs immediately forgot. He was too busy thinking of Deborah. It would be heavenly, he imagined, to pile into that big soft feather bed they must have up there and he beside her on a long winter night, slipping the flannel nightgown above her waist and breasts, feeling her warmth against the cold and darkness outside.

Dessert was a tart red rhubarb pie and a plate of lacy brown molasses cookies, the kind he bought at block fairs in the city. He wondered, over his second cup of coffee, if all the meals were going to be this elaborate. If so, he wasn't going to lose much weight out here, but he'd probably be content just the same.

Once coffee was over, Poroth wiped his mouth, pushed back from the table, and offered to show Freirs around. 'You may as well see what you came for,' he said, stretching as he rose so that his fingers bent back against the ceiling.

'You can see my garden from here,' said Deborah, pointing out the window at a small brown fenced-in plot beside the house. 'It doesn't look much right now, but by summer there'll be squash, tomatoes, peas, cucumbers, carrots… We'll be eating well, I promise you that.'

Clearly they were trying to sell him on the place. They must be counting on his ninety dollars a week.

'We're starting awfully late this year,' said Sarr, as the two of them descended the steps from the back porch, Deborah having elected to remain in the kitchen. A pair of cats scampered out behind them just before the screen door slammed. 'We'll probably just have enough for the three of us. But by next year we expect to produce enough to sell.'

Even that prediction seemed somewhat optimistic. The garden looked far from flourishing, though there were small shoots where the carrots were coming up and green wooden stakes standing in hopeful rows above the young tomato plants. The adjoining lawn, by contrast, looked surprisingly hardy, as if the land's true destiny was to be one of the suburban estates that were already taking up so much of the county.

Across the lawn, and well off to one side, lay the weed-strewn wreckage of an old wooden outhouse, grass growing over the doorway. Freirs wrinkled his nose as they approached, but the air smelled of nothing but damp earth and pine. 'You're free to use it if you like,' said Poroth, making one of his infrequent jokes. 'I believe it's still in working order.'

'Wonderful!' Freirs peered through the gaps in the planks. The bench inside was the double-seater sort, for the ultimate in rural togetherness. Welcome to Appalachia. He thanked God that the farm had modern plumbing.

Farther down the slope, its back to the surrounding wall of forest, was the low, barracklike outbuilding he'd be renting. It was the one he'd glimpsed from the front of the house; he recognized it immediately from the photograph.

'Am I right,' asked Freirs, 'in assuming that the place was originally a chicken coop?'

'True enough,' said Poroth. 'We've never used it as one, though. We keep our chickens in the barn.'

The building looked somewhat more cheerful in the spring sunlight than it had when the photo was taken, though ivy now covered the walls more thickly and was curling over the edges of the windows, an ever-shrinking green frame.

'It's not completely fixed up yet,' said Poroth, looking it over with a critical eye. 'I still have to put up the screens. Still, I suppose we ought to go in.'

Inside, the place was surprisingly dark, ivy blocking much of the sunlight. 'I'll have all that trimmed away before you get here,' Poroth said, snapping on a shiny new wall switch that turned on the overhead light. 'If I did it now it would just grow back by summer.'

There was nothing inviting about the room; the best Freirs could do, by an exercise of imagination, was to see it as a kind of monk's cell, unromantic but suited to the intellectual labors he hoped to perform this summer. It had a pale blue linoleum floor with a slightly uneven seam down the middle and was empty save for a sturdy-looking bed (room for just one, Freirs saw), a chest of drawers, and an oppressive-looking old wooden wardrobe standing like a watchman in the corner. There seemed to be only one closet. 'Later this spring I'm going to build some bookshelves in here,' said Poroth, eyeing one of the bare plasterboard walls, 'and we can move in a table for you to use as a desk.' He seemed happy to leave.

The other half of the building, with an entrance of its own at the opposite side, was being used as a storeroom. Its cement floor was packed haphazardly with lumber, battered-looking furniture, and dusty steamer trunks. The air smelled of mildew. Along the front windowsill, a row of dirty Mason jars collected cobwebs and dead flies.

'Deborah wants to fix this up too,' said Poroth, 'since we've already brought in the electricity. She'd like to turn it into another guesthouse.'

Freirs was peering at a pile of old books, their covers warped and faded. The Law of the Offerings. Footsteps of the Master. God's Providence and Gospel. Religious tracts. 'And how do you feel about that?'

The other paused. 'I'd rather see how things work out this summer.

He turned to go, but Freirs had pushed past the furniture to a door in the far wall. 'What does this lead to? A closet?'

'Open it and see.'

Freirs pulled it open, then smiled. He was looking into the other room – his room. With surprise he realized that, in his imagination, he'd already taken possession of it. The familiar linoleum floor and narrow bed looked almost welcoming.

As they strolled outside, Poroth eyed him hesitantly. 'So,' he said at last, 'do you think you want to rent the place?'

'Yes, I do,' said Freirs, though he hadn't really made his mind up till that moment. 'It seems to be just what I'm looking for.'

Poroth nodded. 'Good.' He sounded, Freirs thought, as if he meant it, but he wasn't smiling, and there was uncertainty in his face. Freirs felt faintly disappointed. 'And when do you think you'd want to come?'

'Probably right after my last class ends. There's a Friday evening course I'm teaching that doesn't get out till the twenty-fourth of June. I figured I'd come out here that weekend.'

'AH right. We'll try to be ready for you.' Instead of turning back toward the house, he was moving in the direction of the fields and obviously expected Freirs to follow. 'By the time you come out, I should have this land cleared off all the way back to the brook.' He gestured toward the line of distant trees. 'And it'll be under cultivation.'

To the west a row of stumps showed where Poroth was engaged in cutting back a column of encroaching pine. Immediately ahead the land was bare, but marked by scattered mounds of ashes where great piles of underbrush and weeds had been burned. It looked like the aftermath of a battle.

'Of course, this place needs plenty of work,' said Poroth, gazing around with apparent satisfaction. 'That's what happens when land lies idle for so long. Deborah and I are already behind in our labors. Most of the Brethren finished planting weeks ago, beneath the last full moon.'

'That sounds quite picturesque. What do you people grow?'

'Corn. That's what this land is made for. "Therefore God give thee of the dew of heaven, and the fatness of the earth, and plenty of corn and wine." Of course, the Indian corn I'll be planting isn't what old Isaac had in mind.'

'Ah. Hmm.' What the hell was the guy talking about? 'Are you people allowed to drink wine?'

'In moderation.' He turned. 'And you?'

Freirs patted his stomach. 'Like I said before, my vice is food.'

Poroth smiled, but only for a moment; then his face resumed its old preoccupied look, and he continued walking.

Before them rose the huge, sagging shape of the barn and, beside it, a gnarled old black willow with scales like a dinosaur, practically touching the overhanging roof, as if tree and barn had grown up together. Beyond it the still-uncleared land lay covered with the same ropy-looking weeds and homely little saplings that Freirs had seen in New York vacant lots.

The barn was where Poroth kept his truck at night. Flies buzzed over the ancient hay still scattered on the floor, though it had obviously been many years since livestock had sheltered here. Leaning against the wall lay a rusty collection of farm implements and, in the shadows at the back, an antiquated mowing machine that Poroth said he planned to repair. They all looked to Freirs like museum pieces; it was hard to picture anyone actually using them.

Along the left side of the barn, on a loft platform as high as Freirs' head and reachable by means of a trapdoor and a simple wooden ladder, Poroth had constructed a chicken coop. At the moment it housed only four fat hens, all recent purchases, and a pugnacious-looking black rooster who glared at Freirs accusingly, as if aware that under normal circumstances it would have been inhabiting Freirs' quarters.

'They're from Werner Klapp's farm right here in Gilead,' Poroth explained. He shooed away a cat that was pawing the ladder. 'They're not laying regularly yet, but by summer we should be getting all the eggs we need.'

By summer. By summer. This was the Poroths' refrain. It was rather inspiring, how optimistic they were, as if the two of them, those earnest children, could make this place a paradise all by themselves. Freirs almost believed it might be possible. He knew he couldn't do it, couldn't repair houses, move masses of earth, apply the magic that would make the land yield its secret stored-up fruit. But these were rural people, country-born despite their lack of experience. Who could say what they'd be capable of?

Near the barn stood a small grey-shingled smokehouse covered with brambles and vines, its door hanging partially open. 'I wouldn't go poking around there,' said Poroth, giving it a wide berth.

'Why?'

'Wasps.' He nodded toward a few black insects hovering like guards above the doorway. 'They've got a nest in there, just below the roof. I mean to clean them out as soon as I get the chance.'

Freirs peered inside as they passed. The ceiling, like that of the porch at the Go-operative, was arrayed with wicked-looking iron hooks where probably, years before, hams and bacon had hung.

Down the slope from it lay the shallow brook he'd seen from the back porch. Flowing past rocks and fallen trees, it curved out from the woods and ran a meandering course past the acres of stubble that might some day be a cornfield, until it lost itself again in the swampier woods to the west. Legally the Poroths' property extended far beyond its banks, but all the area on the other side was forest now – a dense wilderness of pine, oak, and maple that, in this century, at least, had never known a woodman's axe – so that the brook effectively marked the southwest border of the land.

It also marked the limits of the afternoon's tour. Poroth, taking a position at the water's edge, stood with arms folded, surveying the-brook's winding path as if he contemplated rerouting it. 'We've got minnows here, frogs, a few turtles,' he said. 'Still, it's no trout stream.'

'In that case I won't bring my fishing pole.' Freirs stared idly into the brook's clear depths. He was eager to get back to the farmhouse, and maybe spend some more time with Deborah before returning to the city. He glanced at his watch: nearly a quarter to five. They would have to be starting back soon. Already the sun was sinking toward the western pines. He thought of the work he'd meant to do by Monday that would be waiting for him in the heat of his apartment.

Poroth had seen him check the time. 'Well, there's really nothing more to show you,' he said morosely. 'We may as well be – ah, here you are!' He was looking down at a large grey cat by his feet. 'This is Bwada.' He bent down and began scratching her head, an attention the animal seemed merely to tolerate, for though her eyes closed momentarily as if in pleasure, she soon moved out of reach.

Freirs watched her uncertainly. She was fat and sleek, with fine grey fur halfway between charcoal and silver. Placid-looking enough, but you never knew about these animals. Hesitantly he reached out to stroke her, but she backed away – mostly, it seemed, out of fear, though as his hand drew closer she made a menacing sound deep in her throat. He decided it was best to keep his distance.

'She's the oldest of the cats,' said Poroth, 'and it takes her a while to get used to people. She's not even sure of Deborah yet.' With a sigh he squinted at the sun. 'Well, we should probably be heading back. I want to get you into town in plenty of time.'

Freirs followed him up the grassy slope through the lengthening shadows. Looking back, he saw Bwada crouched on the bank, eyes wide as she followed the bobbing flight of a dragonfly above the stream. Inching forward, she thrust out her paw and dabbed tentatively at the moving water, as if testing whether the surface were strong enough to walk on, then settled back again to watch and wait.

'She's found a way to cross the brook by some fallen logs over in the woods,' said Poroth, who had turned to see why Freirs had stopped. 'She's afraid to try and cross anywhere else. She really hates the water.'

His stride had an athlete's spring to it as he continued toward the farmhouse, rising up onto the toes of his boots with every step, arms swinging easily at his sides, as if drawing upon some private source of power. Strong ankles, too, no doubt. Freirs himself was beginning to feel bushed. It couldn't be just the walk, he told himself; he walked farther every day in the city. The antihistamine, maybe, or something to do with the country air. The air seemed healthy here, but maybe it was only an illusion. Though you had to admit those pines smelled sweet and good, down by the brook, nothing like the disinfectant pine smell he was used to, in aerosol and after-shave. You only smelled the real stuff in the winter, walking past a sidewalk stand of Christmas trees.

As they rounded the barn, they saw that a second pickup truck was parked in front of the house. Freirs felt a sudden rush of disappointment. 'That's Brother Matt Geisel,' he heard Poroth saying. 'He and Sister Corah are our closest neighbors. They live up the road, just past the turn.'

The man was in the kitchen with Deborah when they came inside, leaning stiffly against the counter as if his limbs were too long to fold into a chair. 'Hello there!' he said in a gravelly voice, beaming from

Poroth to Freirs. 'We still had a few winter parsnips left over, and I thought you folks might find a use for 'em.' He looked about sixty or seventy, his face lined and deeply tanned, like patches of leather stitched together.

'Matthew's brought us enough for a full-size family,' said Deborah, nodding toward a pile of greens and pale carrotlike vegetables on the counter by the sink. She made a mock frown. 'I wanted to give him some of these cookies, but he says he's getting too fat.'

Geisel grinned broadly, displaying a mouthful of small stained teeth. 'It ain't just me that says it. Corah, she says it too!' He blinked. 'Anyways, we got ourselves a cellar full of parsnips from the winter, and with the weather like it is, pretty soon they won't be good for much. No sense wasting 'em.'

'Brother Matthew,' said Poroth, 'I want you to meet Jeremy Freirs.'

Solemnly the old man took Freirs' proffered hand. His grip was as steely as Freirs had expected. 'You the fellow from New York City?' he asked, cocking his head and glaring at him with – Freirs had caught on now – the humorous gruffness that old codgers like this sometimes assumed.

Freirs nodded, playing the game. 'Four fifty-two Bank Street, right in the heart of Greenwich Village.'

'Jeremy's going to be renting our guest house this summer,' added Poroth.

Deborah's face brightened. Casting a quick inquiring glance at her husband, who nodded to confirm the news, she turned to Freirs and grinned. 'Good, Jeremy! I'm so glad.' Freirs felt his skin grow warm; in less formal company, he'd almost have expected her to hug him.

But already her expression had changed. 'Uh-oh, don't we have to get you back to town?'

'I'm just about to take him in,' said Poroth.

Geisel ambled forward. 'Well, I'm heading up to the Co-operative myself,' he announced. 'I'll be glad to give your young friend a ride.'

'Thanks,' said Freirs, and, seeing that Poroth appeared pleased, he added, 'Yes, I'd appreciate that.' He glanced at his watch. Nearly five o'clock. 'But I think we're going to have to leave right now.'

As they filed out to the porch and down to where the trucks were parked, he surreptitiously touched his wallet, wondering, suddenly, if the Poroths were going to hit him for a deposit.

'So it's all straight now, right?' he said, standing beside the trucks. 'I'm aiming for the weekend I told you, the twenty-fourth of June. Of course, I'll get in touch before that. And you'll be able to pick me up again at the bus stop?'

'I'll be there,' said Poroth. 'Just let me know the time.'

Geisel's old black Ford pickup looked even more beat up than the Poroths'. Geisel slapped its rusted fender. 'A beauty, ain't she?' he said, grinning. He opened the door on the driver's side and climbed gingerly into the front seat. 'I'll just slide my bones behind the wheel here… 'Freirs climbed in beside him and waited as Geisel fiddled with the ignition and the choke, the other's solemnity genuine now, an old man operating something he still didn't quite believe in. The motor rattled, turned over, and caught. Freirs waved goodbye to the Poroths, returning Deborah's smile; they made a traditional-looking tableau as they stood waving back, the old grey house rising cozily behind them.

As the truck began to pull out, easing onto the bumpy surface of the road, Freirs looked back. Sarr was turning toward the fields, already preoccupied with some new task, while Deborah, still waving, had retreated to the porch steps, the late-afternoon sun shining almost directly behind her, outlining her full figure as she stood there, hips cocked, one leg on the higher step. As Freirs gave a last farewell wave, he couldn't help but notice that she didn't seem to be wearing anything beneath the long black dress.

Crack!

The axe blade bit deep into the wood, scattering chips of bark. The pine stood trembling; branches shook. The tree was part of God; he felt it testing him. But other matters occupied him now. He swung the axe back for another blow.

Crack!

He was thinking about the summer ahead – and about the visitor they'd had today, who'd be coming among them this summer with his books and clothes and city ways. He wondered if he and Deborah had done right.

Crack! Leaving the axe buried in the tree, he paused to smooth his hair back and wipe away the sweat. Pensively he ran a thumb along his fringe of beard. He felt perplexed. Lord knew they needed the money the visitor would provide, there was no gainsaying it; though it was hateful to ask payment for the things a proper Christian should have offered guests for free, he and Deborah were deeply in debt to the Co-operative, an institution his own father had once run (this is what stung the worst), and he wouldn't be able to hold up his head among the Brethren till all of it was paid. Oh, the money would certainly be useful. And yet…

He yanked the axe from the tree, hefted it in his hand, and swung it back.

Crack!

And yet somehow he had bad feelings about the arrangement. He'd had them from the start. He had been ready – eager, even – to return to the fold from which his family had strayed and to identify himself henceforth as a farmer, a tiller of the earth, a toiler in the vineyards of the Lord. It was the one truly worthy occupation he knew of, in God's eyes and his own, offering a life of piety and independence, a life close to nature. The souvenir plaque above his mantelpiece expressed it all: A Plow on a Field Arable Is the Most Honorable of Ancient Arms. And now – crack! – he was being asked to alter that dream. Though he only half acknowledged it to himself, at the back of his mind was the thought – unworthy, selfish, even snobbish – that he didn't want to play hotelkeeper. It wasn't right; it was degrading. It made him and Deborah little better than servants, peasants in the hire of a godless master…

Crack!

He was beginning to think he should never have let Deborah talk him into it. Taking in a lodger had been her idea; she was already pressing him to make room for another. It was she who'd persuaded him to convert the old chicken coop into a guest house; it was she who'd convinced him to bring in electricity ('You show visitors a kerosene lamp out there,' she'd said, 'and they'll turn right around and go home'); it was she who'd written the advertisement and gotten him to leave it on the bulletin board over in Flemington, despite the disapproval of the Brethren, who saw all forms of advertising as devil's work.

And now – crack! – was come the fruit of her endeavors. A stranger was due to enter their midst, an outsider; someone ignorant of their beliefs who could have but little sympathy for their chosen way of life. True, the man had seemed polite enough, but his

I godlessness was obvious in his every word, and he'd brought with him a reek of corruption from the city he was so determined to flee. He had already asked too many questions; he had already made too many jests. Of course, he'd sounded educated, in what passed for education among the worldly – was even a teacher, he had claimed -and doubtless it would be good for Deborah to have someone else to talk to. But – crack! – who could say where that might lead? Deborah was a fine God-fearing woman, but sometimes the woman in her nature seemed stronger than the fear of God. She was modest one moment, hot-blooded the next; there was no telling what she might do. What was it the prophet had warned? The heart is deceitful above all things…

Crack!

Deborah was inclined to wander from the path, that much he knew, and this smooth-talking teacher might prove a most dangerous influence. Claimed he'd spend the summer among his books… The thought made Poroth downright uneasy. Oh, he'd studied books himself once, far more than the Brethren would have wished, and he still owned a few. He had felt the magic in them, the lure of worldly knowledge, new notions, sweet-sounding words. But with the Lord's help he had put such things behind him; the Good Book was enough for any man. The rest were just invitations to idleness -and idleness was a sin that led to others.

Yes, the stranger would have to be watched; there was no telling what mischief he might get into. He had all but admitted, back in the truck, that he made it a practice to yield to whatever temptations lay before him. As if his stomach hadn't already revealed as much! And the way he'd looked at Deborah…

Crack!

With a groan the tree splintered and came crashing to the earth.

The old truck bounced noisily toward town, Geisel navigating her like a ship in a storm. He drove slowly, with his head thrust well forward, stretching his long, lined neck as he squinted at the road.

'Well, Mr Freirs,' he said at last, turning to face him, 'what do you think of our little town?'

Freirs' mind had been on Deborah. Had it been his imagination, or had she really been naked beneath that dress? And what if she'd known he could see? With a sigh he turned to Geisel. Freirs had been deliberately avoiding conversation with him lest the old man turn the truck over in a ditch while doing exactly what he was doing now, looking away from the road. Just his luck to die here in the wilderness with some old farmer he didn't even know.

'It is a little town,' he said finally, keeping his own eyes straight ahead. Maybe Geisel would take the hint. 'I was surprised, in fact, how tiny it really is. There's nothing in it but one big general store.'

Geisel seemed to see that as a compliment. 'Yes, sir, all a man needs is right to hand. Mind you, there's also the Bible school across the street, where they keep the town records. And don't be forgetting the cemetery.'

'I saw it,' said Freirs. 'Some nice old tombstones there.'

The old man smiled. 'Been lookin' at our ancestors, have you?'

'A few, anyway. It's interesting to see the local names.'

The other gave a genial nod. 'Yep, that's where they all end up around here. You stay long enough, you'll end up there, too.'

Freirs laughed uneasily. 'Not that long, I hope! I'll only be here for the summer.'

'I know,' said Geisel. 'Young Brother Sarr's gone and fixed the place up real nice. You should have yourself a mighty comfortable time. I saw how he and Sister Deborah even went and put in electricity.'

'I guess that's pretty unusual around here, isn't it?'

The old man scratched his head. 'Well, none of as have it. Fact is, some of the others here in town, some of the oW-timers' – he said this with a hint of smile – 'they've had their differences with the Poroths and their ways. They say the pair of them are too lax on some points.'

Deborah without her panties, strawberry douche in the medicine chest. Maybe the Brethren, too, had their generation gap. 'And do you agree?'

'No, sir, not me. Brother Sarr and Sister Deborah are neighbors of ours, and we stick by 'em. They're good God-fearing folks, you'll find out quick enough. See, that's the strength of our order. It don't look that way to outsiders, maybe, but we like to think we've got room for differences of opinion. The Lord wants for us to live His way, right enough, but He knows we're all just children, and – well, He's always been good to us.'

He lapsed into silence. They were nearing the stream now, the dirt road well behind them. Freirs was pleased to see that he already had a sense of the distances involved, if not of the actual twisting route they'd been following. The hedgerow-bordered lanes and snug farmhouses seemed almost familiar, viewed in reverse from his trip out, and the countryside somehow smaller, like a room remembered from childhood that one visits after the passage of years.

The road was winding gradually downhill. They rounded a wall of boxwood and abruptly Freirs saw, on the slope to the left, the small stone cottage where Poroth's mother lived.

'Now there,' he said, 'is one beautiful little place.' He peered at the windows as the truck moved past but saw no face this time. 'They don't build 'em like that nowadays.'

'That house is' – Geisel did some figuring – 'more than a hundred and sixty years old. It's always belonged to the Troets.'

T thought Mrs Poroth lived there now.'

'Yes, but she's one of them.'

'Oh, that's right. Sarr mentioned it.'

'Those Troets.' Geisel shook his head. 'They never were much for breeding, and most of the line's kind of died out over the years.'

Gnarled hands gripping the wheel, he brought the truck around the base of the hill and onto the narrow stone bridge, which he took far more slowly than Poroth had. Freirs waited till they were across before he spoke again.

'I saw their monument back in the cemetery, a big granite thing. Sarr said they died in some kind of fire.'

'Yes, sir. Back in the 1870s, it was. Even before my time.' He didn't smile. 'Wiped out one whole branch of the family.'

Freirs tried, in vain, to imagine how all those people could have perished in a single fire. It must have been at night… But could anyone sleep that soundly? Mother, father, kids? Blackened bodies in the ashes. 'It's strange,' he said, 'in that list of names, I remember one of them didn't have a date of death.'

The old man rubbed his chin. 'Well, you see, young Absolom Troet, he didn't die in the fire. Fact is, some folks say 'twas him that set it.'

'What? You mean he killed his own family?'

Geisel shrugged. 'Well, that Absolom, he was a queer one, so folks used to say. 'Twas quite a ways before my time, of course, and I ain't so sure of the details. But my old grandma, God rest her, she remembered him. Grew up with him, in fact. She said he was as sweet as can be, to look at him, with a face just like a baby. A likely little feller too, God-fearing as the next… And then one day, just about Christmastime, it was, seems he goes off somewhere, and when he comes back home he ain't quite right in the head. He was always up to some sort of mischief after that. Regular little devil!'

The wind is blowing steadily now, with the first hint of a chill. The sun is just a dirt-brown smear above the Jersey shore. Top halves of the taller buildings remain illuminated, glowing like pillars of fire. The lower parts are plunged in shadow.

The old man is tired, but at last his walk is ended. He has come to an area of tenements, ancient warehouses, and shops with foreign names. In the distance the oily river churns. He has reached his goal.

The cathedral looms above him, grey with soot. Around the great bronze doors at the top of the steps, saints and demons stand awaiting his arrival. On each of the twin towers a cross catches the waning sunlight.

White birds, the Gheelo, shriek high overhead. Their shadows vanish as the light fades, and the crosses retreat into gloom. The sky is dark as ashes.

Below his feet the pavement vibrates to the thunder of a subway. The stones of the cathedral tremble. Tucking the umbrella beneath his arm and whispering the Third Name, he starts up the steps.

Ahead of him, by the great doors, the blind eyes of the saints seem to widen in sudden understanding. The demons grin more boldly from their concrete resting place. A gargoyle laughs aloud.

Beyond the doors lies the hall of worship; beyond that, the convent. Here he will begin his search.

It will not be easy, he knows. He will have to be subtle about it. And persuasive. The sisters will be suspicious of a stranger's interest, and reluctant to confide in him.

He will have to win them over first. It is going to take time.

After all, he can't just walk into a convent and say, 'I need a virgin.'

June Twenty-fourth

Carol was staring out the window of the children's section when the little old man walked in. She looked up with surprise. Most adults remained downstairs, in the library's general reading room, and seldom ventured onto the second floor without a boy or girl in tow. Those who did were usually young mothers with a child home sick, or else had wandered up here by mistake.

But this man was far from young – he looked sixty at least, perhaps a decade more – and he appeared anything but confused. He made directly for where she was standing, a battered leather briefcase tucked beneath his arm and, peeping from it, the tip of a stubby little umbrella, even though there hadn't been a hint of rain all day. In his baggy blue suit, wisps of fine white hair catching the sunlight, he cut a rather comical figure.

Carol readjusted the shade and turned to meet him. She decided that he must be somebody's doting grandfather; from the way he gazed at the little girl who ran mischievously across his path, it was obvious he adored children.

Approaching the window, he brought his face close to hers as if about to offer a secret. Suddenly he smiled, an impish little smile that made his eyes twinkle.

'I think,' he said, 'you're just the person I've been looking for.'

It was Friday, the ending of an uneventful week and the prelude to another empty weekend. She had spent the morning in bed, too tired to get up, lying naked on the sheets and staring lazily out her window. Beyond the padlocked grate that stretched across it, beyond the iron railing of the fire escape, she could see the dark bricks of the building next door, the topmost branches of a tree, a narrow ribbon of sky.

Lying there in silence in the gathering heat, she'd been daydreaming of a ballet she had seen the night before, the whole cast dressed in bright red leotards against a field of snow. How beautiful it had been! – and how unearthly! They had looked like whirling roses

… She had started a letter about it to one of her older sisters, married and living in Seattle, but had put it aside before finishing the page; somehow, as if disturbing the waters at the bottom of a pond, the very act of writing had stirred memories of a different sort – not of the ballet, but of a dream it had inspired that same night. Not a good dream, either. Something about roses, something better left forgotten… And forgotten it had been; but all morning long a certain apprehension had remained, a flicker of unease, dancing in the shadows just beyond her reach.

With an effort she had roused herself at last, shaken off the dream, turned her thoughts to job and clothes and food. Her roommate had gone out after having eaten the one remaining orange and the last of the cottage cheese. The refrigerator was practically bare save for half a dozen eggs, and she'd recently begun to wonder if it wasn't wrong to eat even these; she had renounced meat while back at St Mary's. Better not yield to the temptation; God, she knew, would reward her for her strength. She settled for a cup of instant coffee and a thick slice of Italian bread toasted on a fork over the top burner of the stove. Rochelle, she gathered from the emptiness of the refrigerator, was on one of her periodic diets; lately she had taken to calling Carol 'anorexic' with undisguised envy. The girl could be impulsively generous and good-hearted, but Carol had begun to see signs of a selfishness beneath, perhaps even a growing resentment. They had been rooming together for less than a month. Carol suspected, occasionally, that it might have been a mistake to move in with her, and wondered what changes in their relationship the future would bring.

She herself had always been thin; her goal was to keep her weight just below one hundred, and the last time she'd checked it – old Mrs Slavinsky, whose apartment she had shared until last month, had owned a scale – she'd been pleased to see that she'd succeeded: ninety-seven pounds. Food was, like so many other things in life, a test of will, something to steel herself against.

As she showered, she ran her fingers through her hair, trimmed almost as short as a boy's now, and felt a wave of relief. Until last week, reluctant to waste a quarter of her paycheck at one of the city's over-priced styling shops where rock music blared and dead-eyed young men and women chattered to one another over the inert heads of their customers, Carol had left her hair long, wearing it pinned up in a style she liked to think of as old-fashioned but which she'd realized, in the end, was just plain ugly. Her roommate had offered to cut it, more in the spirit of adventure, Carol suspected, than of friendship, but the thought of the slovenly Rochelle wielding a scissors over her was enough to discourage such experiments. Finally, one day last week, after returning stiff and sweaty from her dance class, she had gone and cut it herself. This, too, had been an act of will; her hair was, after all, her best feature. She knew that in other respects she was no beauty; she looked as if she might – and did, in fact – have an extremely pretty sister. Yet heads would turn to watch her, even in a crowd, for her hair was thick, silky, and strikingly red: as red, so her father had once told her, as sunset through a stained-glass window.

She missed her father. Poor old man! she sometimes thought, at odd moments in the day. Old he had been, as long as she'd known him, gaunt and white-haired, the pale skin hanging wearily from his bones. Old to have fathered five children: nearly two decades his wife's senior, and she herself had married in her thirties. That infant after infant had sprung from their loins seemed at once miraculous and obscene. Somehow together they had found the energy to create four daughters, Carol the third of them, until on the fifth try they'd produced a son. Here they'd stopped, presumably contented, but by then Carol's mother was herself a worn-out, shapeless woman with shadows beneath her eyes and hair that Carol had watched go grey; and her father, with the first demoralizing taste of surgery behind him and a series of operations on the way, was suddenly preoccupied with his own mortality. Until ill health had forced his retirement he had made an unsuccessful living selling advertising space on billboards; his only legacy, Carol sometimes thought in anger and humiliation, was an endless parade of ugly highway signs. He had died last December, shortly before Christmas, his energy exhausted. She remembered him in his final days, sitting transfixed before the television and, later still, lying spent in the hospital ward, waiting for death with what first had seemed stoicism but had proved in the end to be mere resignation, something close, even, to boredom, no strength left to be frightened, no strength to contemplate eternal life ahead.

Carol understood something of how he felt; she had seen it before. She had lived all but two of her twenty-two years in a drab little mill town up the Ohio River from Pittsburgh, and she knew what it was to be bored. She remembered her brother shooting endless solitary baskets at the hoop in their yard; and a neighbor's boy who spent each evening driving aimlessly up and down the highway; and her grandmother on her mother's side, solemn and alone in her room at the end of the hall, who'd told her why she always slept past ten: 'Because if I get up any earlier it makes the day too long.'

There'd been times, in her girlhood, when Carol had felt the same. But not often. Life had been too full of possibilities. She had been a princess from the fairy tales, blessed by an auspicious moon and accustomed to getting what she wanted. Inevitably a prince would come to marry her, and together they would accomplish great things. It was only a matter of time.

To this day she couldn't have said just how poor her family had been, but her years of girlhood in a tottering old two-family house near the railroad tracks had been comfortable ones, and she could recall nothing she'd really longed for which, while her father was alive, she hadn't received, save, perhaps, a milk-white stallion, a dragon's egg, and, at one brief stage, the habit of a nun.

Like her two older sisters, she had attended St Mary's, a large, well-to-do parochial school for girls in nearby Ambridge, though by Carol's turn the family had found it necessary to accept, not without shame, some aid with the tuition. The two youngest children ended up in public school; once again Carol counted herself lucky – or even, perhaps, blessed.

She'd survived the years at St Mary's with her confidence intact, though by then she'd come to think of it as 'faith.' God, or someone, would look after her; God, or someone, always had. Not once had she stopped to question what the future really held in store; she'd been far too busy flirting with more agreeable ideas – ballet lessons, a film career, a modern-day Saint Joan – and even, on occasion, with the school's youthful priest (who'd been surprised to find himself mistaken for a prince). She'd met few boys her own age except at functions with other schools or at home in her neighborhood, and the ones she'd met had seemed, without exception, ignorant and immature, their conversation limited to the local basketball standings and the cars they'd someday own. Besides, she hadn't had the sort of figure that attracted many of them; she'd reminded herself that the sophisticated beauties of the future, the girls who turned out to be the professional models and actresses, were frequently dismissed in their school days as awkward and skinny. Most of her crushes had been confined to older girls in the school, though she'd looked with interest at the boys her two older sisters brought home. The younger and more sexually active sister had brought home a lot. One of them, a slim, quiet boy with long eyelashes and poetic-looking long brown hair, had become, at a Halloween party more than a year later, the first person other than a doctor that Carol had allowed to touch her breasts. She had liked it so much she'd grown flushed and almost dizzy, but she'd been slow to repeat the experience, and hadn't allowed any touching below the waist; it wasn't hard to get. a reputation in a small Catholic town in Pennsylvania, even in the 1970s. She had heard the way people talked about her sister, who, parochial school notwithstanding, had lost her virginity by sixteen and had been known to go driving with men in their thirties. Carol was ashamed of this sister; it pleased her to be seen as the virtuous one.

' She had never quite relinquished the desire to dance, to act, to be a star, but in later years, as she dreamed her way through another St Mary's – college, this time – on a more-than-modest scholarship conveniently provided by the church, her world had grown more private and less physical. Her hours now were occupied by Thomas a Kempis and Tolkien, her mind by pastel visions: the Star of Bethlehem, Gandalf s resurrection, Jesus preaching to the hobbits. She'd known little of the doctors' bills and mounting debts at home, though that was where she still lived. Even when her father had been forced to quit his job, she'd been all but unaware of a change in their circumstances. Surely his condition would improve; perhaps it was a kind of test, such as so many of the faithful had endured. Having just completed a sophomore course in the Mystics, she wondered if she might not be one of them herself. She saw evidence of the Divine hand wherever she looked; all around her lay the City of God, with shining towers brighter than the sun. At times she half fancied she could see the angels who populated it, insubstantial creatures shimmering like snow. She sensed that she'd been chosen, though could not have said for what. But she knew if she was patient, God would tell her.

He had been curiously slow to speak. College had ended, the future was upon her, and nothing had changed. Her prince had not yet arrived; things, in fact, were growing worse. Her father was dying; her mother was being supported by relatives. The two older sisters had married – having a reputation hadn't mattered after all -and there was talk of selling the house. Carol realized that she'd been a fool; she had contributed nothing, she had cost her family much. How selfish she had been, and how blind!

One thing was certain: there was no place for her here. But perhaps there still was something she could do… Shaken, but with expectations undimmed, the fairy-tale princess had set off for New York.

The change, though, had not been a drastic one. For Carol it had simply meant replacing one saint for another, another set of walls, another world of earnest ceremonies and cheerful, well-scrubbed females. St Mary's, St Mary's, St Agnes's: a school, a college, a convent.

The move, it's true, had not been undertaken lightly; she'd known no one in the city but a few contacts her school had provided – sisters and clerks and administrators, a list of Catholic names without faces to go with them – and New York had seemed, in her imagination, a terrifying place. But then, as it had turned out, St Agnes's wasn't really part of New York, and there'd been little need to venture beyond its gates; she'd slipped quickly into the security of its daily routine as if she'd known it all her life.

And now even that was behind her. She was on her own at last, twenty-two years old and still lucky, happily ensconced in a new job without even having had to search for it. Clearly she was still among the blessed.

Yet in one respect she was worse off than ever, for she was almost totally without money; her pay, after taxes, was just $109.14 a week. And while a lifetime of poverty no doubt qualified one to walk the streets of heaven, it was depressing to think how many places in this earthly city were all but barred to her: the theaters, the clubs, the restaurants with their twenty-dollar meals, the dress shops where even a scarf or a belt was beyond her means. She was sick of avoiding such places, sick of abstaining from taxicabs, first-run movies, and hardcover books. Just once she'd have liked to be able to afford a good seat at the ballet; sitting in the back row no longer made her feel virtuous. Life was short, and she was getting too old for games like that.

Her job was less than fifteen minutes' walk, but the thought of those blazing sidewalks sapped her energy. Still, she was grateful for the work and knew how lucky she was to have gotten it, lucky that Sister Cecilia, God bless her, had phoned her when she did. Especially considering that she'd been out of St Agnes's so long…

Work was, for her, the position of 'junior assistant (part-time), circulation division,' at the Voorhis Foundation Library on West Twenty-Third Street. She had been employed here since the middle of May and arrived every day at noon. Voorhis was one of the shabbier of the city's many private libraries and, like most of them, predated the free public system that Carnegie had built. Though it had fallen on hard times, it still maintained an extensive collection of nineteenth-century British and European literature, as well as ample general holdings and children's sections upstairs. Dues were sixty dollars a year, but there were special rates for students, golden-agers, and others, so that few members paid the full amount.

The library itself occupied a staid old building on the south side of the street, less than a block from the old Chelsea Hotel, with slate-grey walls and a line of high vaulted windows along the lower story. White paint peeled in jagged strips from the ceiling; two square pillars, tall and thick as trees, cast oppressive shadows across the floor.

She spent the first part of the afternoon maneuvering an overladen book cart through the maze of cabinets, tables, and display racks that filled the ground floor. The work was slow, undemanding, and dull, and she could be alone with her thoughts. No one so much as glanced her way. By midafternoon, as usual, many of the available seats were taken by scholars of various sorts who frequented the special collections: serious, bespectacled young men with dirty hair and ill-fitting suits, young defeated-looking women as faded as the building's plaster walls – aging grad students, most of them, down from Columbia or Fordham or City College or up from NYU. Their briefcases had to be searched carefully when they left; in the past, there'd been a lot of thefts. The remaining seats were occupied by elderly residents of the neighborhood: widowers, retired union men, social security pensioners – people with little money and lots of time.

There were always a few of them, she'd heard, waiting outside the doors each morning for the library to open, pacing impatiently up and down the sidewalk or slouched coughing in the entranceway. Once inside they'd take a newspaper from the rack, or a thumb- smeared magazine in its clear plastic binder, and for the rest of the day they'd sit hunched over it with what seemed intense concentration, moving only to turn each page. Others would select some book at random from the nearest shelves; laying it open before them on the table, they would fall asleep, head on their arms, until closing time. The same ancient faces reappeared day after day, except in the poorest weather; they came and left without speaking a word to anyone, not even a good morning or good night.

Carol didn't mind these solitary souls; in fact, she rather liked them. People that age were comfortable to be around. Here within the walls of Voorhis, amid the dusty sunlight and drowsing old men, the city seemed far away. The place, in its very routine, seemed a kind of fortress.

She took particular comfort in certain familiar sights and sounds that marked her day: the buzz of the fluorescent lights, the pale figures sprawled silent and motionless over their reading, the reassuring feel of her book cart as she wheeled it down the aisle, and the books themselves, symbols of order on their backs – young adulthood reduced to 'YA,' mystery reduced to a tiny red skull.

When she forgot the miserable pay and put all dreams of the future from her mind, Voorhis filled her with something close to nostalgia – as if, despite the years, she had never really left school. The high ceiling and the faded green walls, the solidity of the dark brown wooden shelves, the potted plants gathering dust on the window ledge, the shades above them glowing yellow in the sun and billowing like ships' sails at the smallest breeze – all were touched with a kind of holiness. Nothing, they promised, had changed. All her life she had been hypnotized by the same great metal clock that ticked off the minutes at the front of the room. When she crowded into the little glassed-in office and pulled up a chair before her battered wooden desk, running her fingers along the pencil grooves, the places where the varnish was worn away, the ragged green blotter marked with ring stains from the coffee mug, she felt a sense of permanence that revived the years of her childhood. Only the nuns were missing, and the crucifix on the wall.

Occasionally it occurred to her that, far from being out on her own, she had merely traded the school and the convent for another set of walls. So much for the expectations she'd had on leaving St Agnes's

…

She had spent more than six months there, but in January she had moved out, convinced that her vocation, her destiny, lay elsewhere; she still believed – though some might have mocked such pretensions – that she had a destiny. Someday she would look back on her life and see the reason for it all, shining through it like a golden thread that would draw her, in the end, headlong toward some brave and wonderful purpose.

Her first steps in this direction, though, had been hesitant ones and had ended in a rent-controlled two-bedroom apartment on West End Avenue and Ninety-third Street, where, fresh from St Agnes's, she'd found work, of a sort, as live-in housekeeper and attendant to a tiny eighty-two-year-old Polish woman named Mrs Slavinsky. Carol's expenses, along with $120 a week, had been provided by the woman's divorced daughter, who lived on the East Side and appeared delighted to have found, in this day and age, a well-bred young white girl to look after her mother. The arrangement had been, at the time, equally convenient for Carol, since it had spared her the necessity of finding a place of her own. Less agreeable was the fact that, though the job had been advertised as that of 'companion,' the old woman was in no shape to appreciate companionship, having but slight command of English. Worse, her hearing was failing, and seemingly with it, her mind.

Thus had begun four months of preparing kosher food and washing two sets of dishes (an observance Carol still found exotic), of vacuuming the worn Persian carpets and dusting the soot from the Venetian blinds, of walking the old woman to the supermarket or the park or the toilet and remaining nearby while, through the winter and spring afternoons, she mumbled to herself or snored or squinted vaguely at the TV. The days had been monotonous. At least, Carol reflected, she'd had a bedroom and a TV of her own, luxuries she hadn't had at the convent; and two nights a week she had thrown herself into her modern dance class at a school twelve blocks south on Broadway, returning stiff and elated to the brightly lit apartment, usually to find Mrs Slavinsky and her daughter, who came to sit with her those nights, engaged in some fierce and incomprehensible argument in Yiddish. The daughter also visited on weekends, allowing Carol to take the days off; but with few acquaintances outside her dance class and no other place to call home, Carol often found herself remaining near the apartment. She searched the want ads for interesting prospects, wondering where her talents lay, and resolved, come summer, to look into a course or two in dance therapy.

The second week of May, however, she had received an unexpected phone call. It was Sister Cecilia, one of the administrators from St Agnes's; she had just heard about a job opening, assistant librarian at someplace downtown called the Voorhis Foundation, and, remembering how Carol had shown such a fondness for literature, always burying her head in a book, she had wondered if Carol might be tempted to apply. ..

Carol had been grateful, though somewhat puzzled; the sister had never shown this sort of interest in her back at St Agnes's. The next day, leaving the house shortly after noon as if to go shopping – it was understood that, from time to time, the old woman might be left alone for an hour| or two – Carol had taken the subway down to Voorhis.

The balding little desk clerk had raised his eyebrows with surprise. Why, yes, there was a job open m the circulation department, though it was rather strange to find someone already here inquiring about it, seeing as the officers of the library hadn't even agreed yet upon the wording of the ad they'd be sending to the Times.

'I heard about it from a friend,' said Carol.

'Hmmm.' The clerk had pursed his lips and eyed her skeptically. At last he'd given a little shrug and admitted that, since Carol had taken the trouble to come all the way down here, perhaps there were some people she might talk to. It was, he added, absolutely perfect timing on Carol's part; the boy who'd held the job till recently had simply not shown up one day last week, and even seemed to have disappeared from his apartment. All very mysterious. 'And a shame,' the clerk said wistfully. 'He was a very sweet boy.' He sighed; probably now he had no one to look nice for. 'But Mrs Tait seems to prefer a girl this time… ' With a pout he had sent Carol upstairs.

Mrs Tait was the circulation manager, and only one of the people who interviewed Carol that day; junior assistants were expected to fill in for any number of departments. Carol also talked to Mrs Schumann, the children's librarian, Mr Brown in acquisitions, and a sleepy-looking man in charge of maintenance. None of them seemed particularly curious about her background, or in making more than a few polite inquiries into her skills, and as the afternoon wore on it occurred to Carol that the job was hers if she wanted it; it was so lowly – only thirty hours a week, for the present, and paying even less than she made now – that the staff was obviously not inclined to waste time evaluating applicants. Besides, if they hired Carol, they wouldn't have to pay for an ad in the Times.

With all its drawbacks, Carol had felt inclined to take the job (surely it would lead to something better), and after the round of interviews it had, as expected, been offered. She'd realized, from the casualness with which the offer was made, that anyone who'd applied that day would probably have been hired; she'd simply had the luck to get there first. Once again she congratulated herself on her charmed life. But no sooner had Mrs Tait invited her to start work the following Monday than Carol had had second thoughts -doubts about the salary, the sudden necessity of finding an apartment of her own, but also misgivings, now that the decision was hers, about her eagerness to abandon old Mrs Slavinsky. She had requested, and been allowed, 'a day or two to think things over.'

The hour had been later than she realized; it was nearly five by the time she'd reached home. She had noticed an ambulance parked outside the building, and an empty police car, but her thoughts had been on other things. Upstairs, when the elevator opened, she'd heard men's voices; they were coming from the old woman's apartment. Suddenly fearful, she had unlocked the door. A policeman was standing in the front room, talking to Mrs Slavinsky's daughter, while another spoke softly on the phone. Two black ambulance attendants were unrolling something near the entrance to the old woman's bedroom. All turned to look at Carol when she came in, but the only one who spoke to her was the daughter, who explained to her quite calmly, with little apparent grief and without a trace of accusation in her voice, how, sometime after Carol had gone out, she had phoned her mother, gotten no answer, tried again an hour later, still without success, and how at last she'd hurried over to find that the old woman, no doubt having returned to bed for an afternoon's nap, had somehow contrived to wind the blanket around her face…

She didn't seem to blame Carol. Later, after the men had left, bearing with them the shapeless thing in the bag, she had even offered to let Carol stay on in the apartment, at least until she was able to find a suitable place of her own. But Carol was in no mood to remain there; she was too horrified by the voices in her head, the guilty one that insisted it wasn't her fault, she'd done nothing wrong, and the one that reminded her how remarkably convenient the old woman's death had been. For now she was free to take the job at Voorhis; would have to take it, in fact. Absolutely perfect timing…

She reported for work at the library the following Monday and spent part of the first week in the Chelsea Hotel just up the block. But despite the place's legendary glamour and the furtive fascination with which Carol regarded the tenants and visitors who strolled its echoing yellow halls, the hotel was far too expensive. A roommate service in a shabby second-floor office on Fourteenth Street had connected her with Rochelle, whose previous roommate had moved out. Carol was more than willing to take the tiny bedroom; it was private, at least. Rochelle, who slept on a sofa bed in the living room, had the run of the apartment. She was not the sort of person Carol would have chosen to live with, and in the month they'd been together they had not become real friends; but (Carol reminded herself) the girl could be quite good-hearted at times, and besides, with the situation as it was, Carol knew she couldn't be choosy. She was grateful for the roof over her head, grateful she could remain in the city. For a while she'd been haunted by visions of returning home to Pennsylvania a failure, to throw herself, like a child, back on the support of her family. Now, at least, she had a job; she could survive here after all.

At two fifteen today she'd been summoned to the first-floor office by the assistant supervisor, Miss Elms, a greying, harried-looking woman whose desk, opposite Carol's, was piled high with correspondence.

'You look as though you could use a change of scene,' she said, regarding Carol dourly over the top of her glasses. 'When you come back off your break, I'm sending you upstairs. Mrs Schumann's got a four o'clock story hour – and since it's the last day of school, those kids may get a bit rambunctious.'

Carol would have much preferred working downstairs, but told herself that, with the weather grown so warm these days, most of the children would probably be staying outside.

'Remember,' the supervisor added, 'you're not up there to read, and you're not up there to daydream. You're there to give Mrs Schumann a helping hand.'

Climbing the stairs, Carol wondered if Mrs Schumann had been complaining about her to the supervisor. If so, it seemed unfair; she worked just as hard as anyone else. There simply wasn't very much to do on the second floor, short of helping fledgling readers with the harder words and keeping an eye out for the occasional fight. Yet she knew there'd been truth in what the supervisor had said; she had recently discovered that she preferred children's books to the children themselves.

All but the central desk upstairs was half-sized, a world in miniature: worktables like low wooden platforms rose just inches from the floor, and several of the chairs came only to her knee. Though she herself was slight of build and had small, delicate features, it was hard not to feel oversized here, like Alice down the rabbit hole or some invading giant from one of the fairy-tale books in the corner.

Mrs Schumann, the children's librarian, sat placidly behind the desk. She was a heavy, slow-moving woman who perspired easily and who left her chair only with the greatest reluctance. Except for her, a pair of laughing little girls, and a dispirited-looking preschooler trudging glumly round the bookshelves with his mother, the floor was deserted, the air oppressive and still. Above the humming of four small electric fans that turned their heads from side to side, she could hear the chugging of the Xerox machine on the first floor, the swish-swish, swish-swish of the outer doors swinging open and shut, and the tread of footsteps on the stairs. School was out; soon the room would be filling up.

The footsteps echoed hollowly in the silence of the hall; a tiny face emerged above the banister. The child peered uncertainly around the empty floor like the first guest at a party, then slunk toward the central desk to confer in urgent whispers with the librarian.

Carol drifted toward the front window and stared idly down at the street. The buildings across the way were drab and dull, a large old residential hotel gone seedy, a furniture showroom, a warehouse with trucks lined up in front of it all day.

The rear windows held a better view. Here sunlight slanted down upon a tiny courtyard hidden between the buildings; overgrown by creepers, vines, and weeds, it had lain black and apparently lifeless all winter, she'd been told, but in recent months had flourished, until it presently resembled a transplanted patch of forest. During free moments of the day – and when, as now, she'd been assigned upstairs before the schoolchildren arrived – Carol liked to stand by the window, glad to find some glimpse of nature amid the bricks.

Below her a clump of thornbushes were irregular green blobs upon a darker field of undergrowth and earth. An oak and two young maples struggled upward toward the light, their trunks thin as walking sticks, while delicate green fernlike vines grew up the side of the opposite building, higher than the floor on which she stood. Through the glass she watched the fronds blow and tremble in the breeze, some of which passed over the top of the open window just below the ceiling. The shade stirred softly above her. Lifting its bottom edge, she felt the touch of cooler air upon her face; it carried the smell of soil and leaves and, from somewhere, the faintest, most elusive trace of roses.

Downstairs the outer doors went swish-swish, swish-swish.

Seen from this height, the view from the rear windows reminded Carol of a garden gone back to the wild, and she could never think of it without a queer, indefinable longing; given over entirely to plants, it hinted at some mystery far deeper than the mysteries in the books that lined the wall. She felt a strangeness in it, yet without the sense of dread that wilderness on a vaster scale inspired. No being had ever set foot back there, at least no one she had seen; she wasn't even sure that one could reach it, for the courtyard appeared to be surrounded by high metal fences. It remained forever beyond the windowpane, like a fragile green world preserved within a bottle.

Suddenly, in the midst of the green, something small and black caught her eye. It lay almost directly below the library window and half in the shadow of a thornbush, down among the ground vines and weeds. She leaned forward to peer more closely, pressing her forehead against the glass, but from this distance it was impossible to say just what it was, only what it appeared to be: an arrangement of small black sticks protruding from a shallow hole in the earth, forming a vague pattern, a circle bisected by a line extending slightly on both sides.

Carol sighed. So someone had been back there after all. Whether the objects had been dropped or buried, they were certainly a sign of human intrusion. Whatever their origin – some broken fragments of a plant, perhaps, a bit of machinery, or merely Utter-it came to only one thing: her garden had been violated.

She was still bent dejectedly over the window, a little surprised at the strength of her reaction, when, from the hallway behind her, she heard the measured tread of footsteps coming up the stairs.

'I'm not a young man anymore,' he was saying. 'The doctors tell me not to make any long-range plans.' He smiled wistfully and blinked his mild eyes. 'But before I die I'd like to finish a little book I've been working on. A book about children.'

They stood talking softly by the window, barely disturbing the stillness of the room. The little man's words didn't carry far, and they had a gentle, lisping quality which she found strangely soothing. His voice was high and quavery as a flute.

Though at first she'd half resented him for interrupting her reverie – why didn't he bother Mrs Schumann if he had a problem, why had he come straight to her? – Carol had to admit that there was something rather touching about the man. For all his paunch and double chin he looked surprisingly frail up close, and a good deal older than she'd at first supposed, perhaps well along in his seventies. He was no taller than she was, with plump little hands, plump little lips, and soft pink skin with little trace of hair. He reminded her of a freshly powdered baby.

'This will be a book about your own children?' she asked, preparing herself for an onslaught of reminiscence.

He shook his head. 'No, nothing like that. I've never been blessed with children.' Again the wistful smile, all the more affecting in so droll a figure. 'I do enjoy watching them, though. Like those two over there.' He gestured toward the bookshelves in the rear. 'Can you see what they're doing? My eyes aren't what they used to be.'

Carol glanced over her shoulder. Behind the central desk, two small girls darted silently through the aisles of books. 'Oh, them!' she said. She wondered if she should tell Mrs Schumann, but the librarian was leafing through a pile of catalogues. 'I'm afraid they're being rather naughty. They seem to be playing tag.'

The little man nodded. 'A game that predates history. Once upon a time the loser would have paid with her life.'

From behind the shelves came a screech of laughter.

'That's the subject of my book,' he went on. 'The origin of games. And nursery rhymes, fairy tales, and the like. Some of them go back – oh, even farther than I do!' He cocked his head and smiled. 'What I mean is, there's a bit of the savage behind even the most innocent-looking creations. Do you follow me?'

'I'm not sure I do.' She felt a flicker of impatience; he still hadn't said exactly what he wanted.

He pursed his lips. 'Well, take today, for instance, the twenty-fourth of June – traditionally a very special day. Magic spells are twice as strong right now. People fall in love. Dreams come true. Did you have any dreams last night?'

'I can't remember.'

'Most likely you did. Young girls always dream on Midsummer Eve. The night just seems to call for it.'

'But surely we're a long way from midsummer,' said Carol. 'The season's just begun.'

He shook his head. 'The ancients saw things a bit differently. To them the year was like a turning wheel, one half winter, one half summer, each with a festival in the middle. Winter had the Yule feast, summer what we're celebrating now – Midsummer Day. For us, of course, the year's been flattened to death on a calendar, and Yule is just another word for Christmas, but originally it had nothing to do with Christ. The only birth it marked was the birth of the sun.'

'Wait, you mean… another Son?'

He laughed, a little louder than necessary. 'No, no. Oh, my, no! I was referring to that big fellow out there.' He nodded toward the window. 'You see, Yuletide celebrates the winter solstice. Afterward, the days start getting longer. As of last night, though, we've come to the other end of the wheel. The days are growing shorter now. The sun's begun to die.'

Carol found herself watching the sunlight as it streamed obliviously through the window, its radiance undiminished. How odd, with all the hot days still ahead – how odd to think of it cooling, dying, growing dark…

'Long ago,' he was saying, 'Midsummer was a time of portents. Rivers overflowed their banks or suddenly dried up. Certain plants were said to turn to poison. Madmen had to be confined, witches held their sabbats. In China dragons left their caves and flew about the sky like flaming meteors. In Britain they were known as drakes, serpents, "worms," and Midsummer was the time for them to breed. They say the whole countryside shook with the sound, and that farmers lit bonfires – in those days that meant fires of bones – in an effort to drive them away. There were other fires, too: fires, dancing, midnight chants to commemorate the passing of the sun. Even today there are places in Europe where children celebrate Midsummer Eve by dancing round a bonfire. At the end of the dance,' one by one, they leap across the flames. It seems harmless enough, of course – at worst a burnt bottom or two! – but trace it back to the beginning and… well, I think you can guess what you'll find.'

'More than just a burnt bottom, I suppose.'

He laughed. 'A lot more! A ritual sacrifice! Or take a more familiar example: an innocent little counting rhyme like "Eeny meeny miny mo.

'Catch a beggar by the toe?'

'That's it. Except that twenty years ago, before they cleaned up the language, you would have said "Catch a nigger by the toe." And two centuries ago you'd have repeated a string of nonsense words: "Bascalora hora do," something like that. There are hundreds of variations. The one you grew up with, incidentally, puts you – hmm, let me see… ' He scratched his head. 'Oh, I'd say somewhere around Ohio. Am I right?'

'Hey, that's really incredible! I'm from Pennsylvania, right across the border.'

He nodded, not at all surprised. 'A very pretty area. I know it well.' Turning, he gazed dreamily out the window, sunshine playing on the little pink baby skull, the wisps of hair that glowed white with a touch of yellow.

Carol watched him in silence as he stood before her, blinking in the light. There'd been something in his tremulous old-man's voice which hinted at considerable experience, but till now she hadn't been inclined to take him seriously. Maybe it was his size, or his funny little lisp; he was far too small to be threatening. No doubt his reference to Ohio had been a lucky guess; still, she found herself oddly impressed.

Presently he turned. 'I'll tell you what's even more remarkable,' he said. 'You can trace that little rhyme of yours all the way back to the Druids.' He smiled at her look of disbelief. 'Oh, I assure you, it's quite true. Once upon a time, when Britain was occupied by the Romans, it was a sacrificial chant. The Druids had a rather nasty habit, you know – they liked to burn people in wicker cages! – and they used the "Bascalora" method to choose a victim. "Basca" means basket, and "lora"-'

'Isn't that Latin for "straps"?'

His smile widened. 'Well, bless me, you are smart! Binding straps, yes. To tie the hands.'

She was pleased to see the admiration in his eyes. 'My one good subject,' she said, and allowed herself a modest smile. Briefly another thought intruded: the night sky, a mound aglow with flames, and a girl very much like herself bound naked to a kind of altar. Something long and white was emerging from the shadows. She pushed it from her mind. 'I've had a lot of practice,' she said. 'In Latin, I mean. And your subject is – this type of thing? Childhood and primitive rituals?'

He nodded. 'More or less.'

Behind him three more children had arrived, and soon they'd be asking for her help. She would have to cut this short. 'It sounds absolutely fascinating,' she said, 'but you know, you're really in the wrong place. The books we have up here – well, they're very basic, strictly for pre-teens. You want downstairs, under Anthropology. Or you might try looking through Child Development… '

He nodded genially. 'Yes, I know, I've already been down there. Voorhis has a very good collection.' He patted the briefcase beneath his arm. 'Until this afternoon, in fact, I'd been looking for a certain little book, a study of Agon di-Gatuan, the so-called "Old Language." I'd searched the whole city, top to bottom, and this was the only place that had it.'

Carol was amused at how pleased he sounded with himself. 'Oh, really?' she said. 'Top to bottom? You must be pretty thorough! The city's an awfully big place.'

'Not at all. Not when you know what you're looking for.'

He smiled and took a step closer.

'And of course, the nice thing is, you get to meet such interesting people. If I hadn't come up here, I'd never have made the acquaintance of a charming young lady like yourself.'

'Oh, now you're just teasing,' said Carol, flattered and uneasy. She had heard this sort of thing before; there were always one or two old men who tried to flirt with her in a joking, grandfatherly way. 'Maybe I'd better say goodbye now. My mother always said that when a man pays a compliment, watch out!'

'What? Watch out for a poor old thing like me?' He laughed and shook his head. 'I assure you, young lady, I'm perfectly harmless!' His smile was so dazzling that she didn't stop to wonder if he wore false teeth. 'I'm nothing more than a-'

Suddenly he looked past her. Carol saw his smile fade into a frown and, at the same moment, felt an insistent tug on her sleeve. She pulled back, startled; a belligerent little white face was peering up at her.

'I have to have something on entomology,' the boy demanded, still gripping her sleeve. 'With pictures.' He seemed greatly put out by Carol's hesitation. 'Insects!' he hissed, and was duly directed one row past Outdoors and Adventure.

When she turned back to the little man, he was staring out the window. She realized that he still hadn't explained precisely why he'd come upstairs. No doubt he was just another lonely old pensioner who'd lived too long and read too much and now wanted a chance to tell somebody what he'd learned.

As if sensing her eyes on him, he turned. 'Lovely garden,' he said softly. Behind him the topmost vines arched toward the sunlight. 'I wish I had more time for nature, but that's the one thing I don't have. I'm busy every minute of the day.'

In that case, Carol wondered, why is he wasting time up here?

'The truth is,' he said, 'there's a job enough for two. I've been trying to find someone at Columbia to work with me, some bright young student, but I didn't care much for the people they sent.' He shook his head. 'No, I didn't care much for them at all.'

He gazed absently toward the garden once more, then turned back to her. 'You know, when I was downstairs today I couldn't help noticing all the scholars down there, looking oh so self-important as they pored over their books, but not really knowing half as much as they liked to think. And I suddenly asked myself, "Why bother with people like that? Why not turn to a professional? I'll bet there's a children's librarian right here at Voorhis who'd be a lot more useful to me, and who'd probably be grateful for the extra work." That's why I came up here. It was just a whim.'

Carol's interest was stirred, but so were her suspicions. Was this funny little man about to offer her a job? Or was he merely looking for an unpaid volunteer? His project sounded interesting enough, but she was in no position to work for free. She hoped he wouldn't ask her.

'I've collected a huge amount of data over the past few months,' he was saying, 'and I expect to be acquiring more over the summer. You know the sort of thing: journal articles, newspaper clippings, dissertations, and so forth. More than I'll have time to read myself.' He patted the briefcase again. 'I'm an old man – at least that's what they tell me! – and frankly, I'm going to need some help.' Laying the briefcase on the windowsill, he leaned toward her as if he had something urgent to confide; she noticed with approval, that he smelled of talcum powder and soap. 'What I'm looking for, you see, is someone to read over the material, pull out the important ideas, and, wherever possible, summarize them for me. Part-time, of course. Ten or fifteen hours a week.' He stood back, hands on hips. 'So, young lady, there it is in a nutshell.'

'I see.' She recalled the work she'd done four winters ago at college, the dark evenings at the library and the endless pages of notes. 'You want a sort of research assistant.'

'That's right,' he said. 'Someone I can depend on. Someone who's smart, who writes well, and who has an interest in the field.' He paused a moment and regarded her quizzically; the wide, gentle eyes, level with her own, seemed to float in their sockets, taking in her surroundings, her features, her hair. 'I feel certain that you meet my qualifications.'

'Well, I – I do have an interest in the field,' said Carol, not entirely sure what field he meant. She wondered if he'd mistaken her for a regular children's librarian, instead of just one of the downstairs assistants. Dare she tell him? And dare she ask him about pay?

'These articles,' she said at last. 'How would I obtain them?'

'Well,' he said softly, leaning toward her again, 'I rather like to do my own collecting.' Idly he reached up to scratch at the comer of his eye, and Carol felt a wisp of breeze against her cheek. Above her the shades billowed and collapsed. 'Sometimes I might ask you to locate a particular item for me, but that won't happen often. We'll meet each week, and-Whatever's the matter?'

'No, no, it's nothing. Please go on.' For a moment she had felt a tiny stinging just above her left temple, but already it was gone. She smoothed back her hair and tried to look interested.

'Well, I was saying- Here, let me brush you off.' His hand swept gently over her shoulder, and came away trailing several strands of her newly clipped red hair. 'I was just saying that we'll meet wherever's convenient – here at the library or at one of our homes.' He stepped back, slipping his hand into his pocket. 'I live uptown, by the way, near the Hudson. It's an easy walk from the subway.'

He paused as if awaiting a reply. Carol resolved not to give him her address, at least not for the moment. She remained silent.

He licked his lips. 'None of this is important,' he said at last. 'It can all be arranged later. Each time we get together, you'll give me your notes and I'll give you the new material… along with your pay.'

So there was to be money after all. 'And this pay would be-'

He laughed. 'I thought I'd mentioned that! I was thinking of twelve dollars an hour, plus expenses. Does that sound all right?'

'Twelve dollars an hour?' Hastily she tried to calculate. He'd said ten to fifteen hours a week; that would be anywhere from $120 to

… She gave up; her heart was beating too fast. She only knew she wasn't worth that much.

He looked momentarily uncertain. 'If you don't-'

'That sounds absolutely fine,' she got out. She hoped she appeared composed, but in her imagination she was already buying the outfit she'd seen in a shop on Greenwich Avenue, and a subscription to next season's ballet. Maybe even an air conditioner, too. God loved her.

'I'm glad it's satisfactory,' said the little man, with the faintest of smiles. 'It'll be off the books, of course.'

'Off the books?' She wasn't sure exactly what that meant, except that it was something illegal. The ranks of dancers faded and the air conditioner stopped. The room grew warm again.

He nodded. Was there impatience in his face? T assumed you'd prefer it that way. You won't have to give anything to your Uncle Sam.'

'Yes, yes, of course.' This was too good to be true. 'You mean, then… I could keep everything.'

'That's right. You would, I take it, be interested?'

'Yes, absolutely. This is just the sort of thing I've always been fascinated by – fairy tales, and myths, and primitive religion… ' She finished lamely, unable to recall if this was his intended subject; he hadn't actually said anything about religion, had he?

'Excellent,' he was saying. 'You sound like just the person I've been looking for. I need someone with an inquiring mind, who's not afraid of a little hard work.' He unfastened the strap to the briefcase and began digging inside. 'It may sound old-fashioned, butOh, dear!' He drew forth a plump, pale yellow book and turned it over to examine it. There were catalogue numbers on the spine. 'Oh, for heaven's sake, look at this. I'm getting so absent-minded these days! I seem to have walked off with someone else's book.' He grinned sheepishly. 'I'm afraid this must belong to that nice young fellow downstairs – the one with the glasses. Do you know him? At the table by the bulletin board?'

Carol shook her head.

'Well, I'll just have to make sure to return it.' With a sigh he laid the book idly on the windowsill, then turned back to Carol with a dazzling smile. 'Now, young lady, where was I?'

Downstairs, where rows of scholars frowned over texts, scribbled silently, or dozed, Jeremy Freirs reached for the yellow book and cursed when he realized it was gone. It was a dog-eared old copy of The House of Souls by Arthur Machen, bound in saffron-colored cloth, and it had been lying on top of the pile on his desk. He searched the pile again, but didn't find it. Damn! That pesky old queer must have taken it.

They had met, in fact, over that very book less than an hour before. Searching for it through the labyrinth of Voorhis's open stacks, Freirs had rounded an aisle in a deserted section of the library where bookshelves high as hedgerows blocked the sound from the street, and had come upon the old man hunched over the volume as if tracing its words with a his finger. At Freirs' approach he had glanced up like a child caught reading pornography – he was hardly more than child-size himself, in fact – and then he'd snapped the book shut. Freirs had seen him slip something hurriedly into his pocket. A pencil! No wonder the old guy had looked guilty. He'd probably been writing in the margins.

There was something not quite right about the man. He didn't look as seedy and dispirited as the other old-timers who frequented the library, yet he seemed far too elderly to be an academic. He looked like the sort of man who'd play the kindly uncle in some saccharine 1940s movie – not Freirs' style at all. Freirs had ignored him at first, but he'd been unable to find the book he sought on the shelves. Behind him the old man said softly, 'Could this be the one you're looking for?'

He held the book out for inspection. Freirs glanced at the spine. 'That's it, all right. Are you using it?'

'No, no, I'm all done.' Smiling, he handed over the book. 'Here, take it.'

Freirs hefted the book in his hand. It was fat and heavy, damn it, and he didn't have much time left to look through it all. He turned to go, but a hand caught his arm. The old man was looking up at him. His voice was practically a whisper. 'You're familiar with Machen? With his beliefs?'

'No,' said Freirs, a little louder than necessary. 'I've never read him. I just want to see if I should. ' Once more he made as if to leave. If he stayed away from his seat too long, someone might steal his book bag.

'Oh, you should, you really should.' The little man seemed not to care that he was detaining Freirs. 'He knew a thing or two, our Arthur. You'll be well repaid for reading him, I promise.'

Freirs nodded. 'Good, I'm glad.' Turning his back, he made his way up the aisles to his table.

He had a small square table to himself, in the rear, just beneath a bulletin board laden with clippings and notices like a brick wall overgrown with ivy. Throughout the spring it had been his usual place of work; the better tables, farther down the row, looked out upon the little patch of garden in back of the library, but he seldom arrived at Voorhis early enough to secure one. And just as well, too; if he'd had a window seat, he'd probably have spent all day staring out at godforsaken weeds instead of finishing his work.

Even without the distraction of a window view, he hadn't gotten quite as far as he'd expected over the past two months; he was still compiling a reading list for his projected dissertation, whose working title was currently 'Hell's Abhorr'd Dominions: The Dynamics of Place in the Gothic Universe,' though this now struck him as a Utile pretentious, even for Columbia. He added the Machen to the pile already on his desk, first transcribing the publication data -London, 1906 – and a list of the book's contents, some half dozen stories. He was searching the literature at the moment, still uncertain of his dissertation's scope. Even the most unlikely books might be worth a footnote or two, if only as a way of dropping the name; the longer he could pad out his bibliography, the more unlikely it would be that the board of examiners would be able to check all his references.

He was leafing through the second-to-last chapter in a Gothic bibliography, alternately amused and aghast at the titles – The Benevolent Monk, or, The Castle of Olalla, 1807; Deeds of Darkness, or, The Unnatural Uncle, 1805; The Midnight Groan, or, The Spectre of the Chapel, Involving an Exposure of the Horrible Secrets of the Nocturnal Assembly, 1808 – when someone cleared his throat. He looked up to see the old man standing beside his table, smiling down familiarly at him.

'I wonder if I can borrow Mr Machen back from you for just one moment,' the old man asked. 'Would you mind terribly? There's a passage I really ought to check.'

With a shrug Freirs tapped the yellow book at the top of the pile. 'Be my guest. Just bring it back when you're done, okay?'

But after opening the book the old man showed no signs of moving; he stood riffling through page after page and peering at each with an almost comical fervor, head darting back and forth with the movement of his eyes.

'Ah, here we are!' he said at last. He nodded to himself. 'Ah, yes

… yes.'

Freirs sighed and returned to his own reading – Gondez the Monk. .. Phantoms of the Cloister… Horrors of the Secluded Castle – but moments later the old man began to speak. ' "We underrate evil," ' he said, his voice a portentous whisper.

Freirs looked up. 'What's that?'

' "We underrate evil," ' the man repeated, reading a passage from the book.' "We have quite forgotten the awfulness of real sin. What would your feelings be, seriously, if your cat or your dog began to talk to you, and to dispute with you in human accents? You would be overwhelmed with horror. I am sure of it. And if the roses in your garden sang a weird song, you would go mad. And suppose the stones in the road began to swell and grow before your eyes, and if the pebble that you noticed at night had shot out stony blossoms in the morning? Well, these examples may give you some notion of what sin really is." '

Finally he looked up from the book, face oddly transfigured, almost ecstatic. 'Marvelous!' he said, all but smacking his lips. 'What do you suppose the man is driving at?'

Freirs shook his head, reluctant to involve himself in a discussion, yet drawn to the game. Around them several readers looked up with curiosity or annoyance. 'Obviously it's a kind of moral metaphor,' he said. 'Evil as a violation of normal physical law, an aberration – something like a disease. But the symbols he's dreamed up are unusual, to say the least.'

The old man nodded. 'Yes. Yes, I'm sure you're right. I can see that you're a very bright young man.' He smiled slyly. 'But then again, of course, they may not be symbols after all. For all we know, Machen may have meant them quite literally.'

Freirs had been glad when, at last, he'd wandered away, no doubt to bother some other unsuspecting soul. But now the damned book was gone too; the man must have walked off with it. Freirs looked around the room but didn't see him; nor, despite the lost book, was he especially sure that he wanted to.

Anyway, the day was almost over. He had his final class to teach at eight and wanted to get home first to prepare for it, to go over his students' papers and brush up on his Cahiers and Film Comments. Celluloid, swish pans, mises en scene. Another world, that one, far from gloomy monastics and their Gothic battlements, farther still from flowering stones and singing flowers. Beyond the window several seats behind him, shadows were lengthening in the garden, doggedly climbing the bricks. He checked his watch: almost five o'clock. He'd press on to the end of the chapter, then get the hell out of this place.

Sunlight still streamed freely through the second-story windows, but suddenly the old man's eyes narrowed as if he'd seen a shadow cross the sky. Frowning, he glanced quickly at his watch.

Across the room, summoned by an impatient gesture from Mrs Schumann (now reimmersed contentedly in the catalogues that covered her desk), Carol was leafing through a stack of books on dinosaurs for the benefit of a small boy and his mother, while a daughter awaited her turn. 'He just can't get enough of 'em,' the woman explained proudly, as her son studied pictures of steaming primeval swamps where monstrous reptiles preyed upon the weak, jaws tore flesh, and giant serpents struggled against batlike things with sharp-clawed wings and impossibly long beaks. None of it was real, Carol told herself; none of it had ever been real. Later, searching through Perrault and Andersen to find a fairy tale for the daughter, she stole a glance at the little man across the room. He was leaning against the windowsill, gazing idly at the book he'd carried upstairs. The sunlight from behind him made a nimbus of his hair. Suddenly, as if aware that she was watching him, he looked up and winked at her. His smile was radiant; even from the other side of the room it made her feel good.

So this, then, was to be her future employer. She still couldn't believe it was true. Nor could she believe that, for the duration of the summer, she would more than double her income. How could he afford to pay so much? He certainly didn't look rich; Carol recognized a cheap suit when she saw it. Was he a liar or a lunatic, and the job a hoax? Somehow she felt inclined to trust him. Perhaps he'd saved his money all his life, and now, reaching the end, found himself with no one else to give it to. She wondered how he'd made his living.

For her part, she reminded herself that she hadn't been entirely truthful with him. Thank God he didn't know that she was only an assistant here. As she read a page aloud, more to mother than daughter, she prayed she looked professional.' "Whenever a good child dies, an angel of God comes down from heaven, takes the dead child in his arms, spreads out his great white wings, and flies with him over all the places which the child has loved during his life. Then he gathers a large handful of flowers-" ' Lord, no! So depressing. She handed the woman a Disney Cinderella and made sure the little girl approved.

Over by the window, the old man was staring at her. He nodded reassuringly. 'I see you have your hands full,' he said, when she'd returned to his side.

She laughed. 'Oh, today's one of our slow ones. You should come up here on a rainy afternoon. It's like a playground!' She smoothed back her hair. 'I'm used to that, though. I grew up with three sisters and a brother.'

'Ah, really.' His smile was a trifle vacant. 'I'm sure they're all very proud of you, coming to the big city like this.'

'Well, I – I do hope to make something of myself,' she said.

Perhaps she should try to impress him, lest he change his mind about the job. 'As a matter of fact, I'm planning to take some psychology courses next fall. In dance therapy.' If, she added mentally, I find the money. 'I may take night courses once or twice a week, up at Hunter.'

He gave a courtly nod. 'A fine institution. I know it well. This job should help you meet some of the expenses.' He began to turn away.

'Speaking of expenses,' she began, then regretted it.

'Yes?' His look was guarded.

'Well, you mentioned something about "twelve dollars an hour plus expenses," and I was just wondering' – she hoped she didn't sound greedy – 'not that it makes the least bit of difference, of course, but I was wondering what expenses you meant.'

He shrugged. 'The usual. Paper, photocopying, typewriter ribbon. .. You do own a typewriter, don't you?'

'Oh, yes, of course. That is, I have access to one. It's my roommate's. She's almost never home.' Some residual bitterness from the morning made her add, 'And when she is, she's in no position to use it.'

'A roommate, you say?' The little man pursed his lips. 'Hmmm. A bit of a free spirit, is she?'

Carol nodded. 'She thinks so, anyway. But-' She stopped herself; she really didn't mean to be unfair. 'It's not that she does anything wrong. We just come from totally different backgrounds. She went to a big state university; I went to a little Catholic school. Girls only.'

'And where might that be?' He didn't sound very interested. The shadows in the room shifted as a cloud passed in front of the sun.

'St Mary's, in Ambridge.' The little man blinked reflectively. 'I'm sure you've never heard of it,' she added. 'There are at least twenty others with the same name.' She looked past him, out the window. The fronds were tossing in the breeze.

He moved slightly, blocking her view. 'Indeed I have. It's just above the highway, am I right? At the top of a hill?'

'You're thinking of the high school,' she said. 'I went there too.' It was spooky, how much he seemed to know. 'You have nothing against parochial schools, I hope.'

'No, no, quite the contrary. They're the only places left that still teach proper English.' He moved away from the window. 'So you stayed within the fold, then. From St Mary's to St Mary's.'

She nodded. 'And then to St Agnes's, here in New York.'

'Another college?'

'It's a convent, actually. Over on West Forty-eighth Street.' She waited to see his reaction. 'I spent around six months there. I've only been out since January.'

'You – a nun? Why, I never would have guessed it!' His eyes twinkled merrily.

'Well, not really a nun. I only got as far as my novitiate, in fact. I never even put on a habit.' She noticed that, for all his professed astonishment, he didn't look particularly surprised. 'It was just something I felt I had to try,' she added. 'I realize now that I joined for the wrong reasons -1 mean, selfish reasons – but at the time there just seemed no place else to go. Things were really bad at home. My father was sick, and somehow I got it into my head that if I went and took the vows… well, that things might get better. Maybe my father would recover.'

He nodded. He seemed to understand. 'A kind of sacrifice,' he said. 'You made a very difficult choice.'

'Yes, I suppose so. But for a while I had the feeling that it wasn't really my choice at all. I felt as if somehow I'd been chosen.' She shrugged. 'I guess everybody feels that way at times: that they've been singled out for something special. I thought so, at any rate. It was a chance to give some direction to my life – which I thought I needed.'

'Direction, yes.' He appeared to consider this. 'But you didn't stay very long.'

'Well, you see… my father died.'

'Oh, how sad.’

'And anyway, the whole thing just wasn't for me. I began to think about all I'd be giving up – meeting someone, falling in love, getting married – and when you start having doubts like that, you know you're in the wrong place.' The memories returned. 'Still, I was so sure that I'd been-'

'Chosen?'

She nodded.

'Well,' he said, 'who knows? Maybe you have been – but for something else. Something you never even dreamed of.'

He did understand! She was going to enjoy working with this man.

'Anyway,' he added, as if he'd read her thoughts, 'I've chosen you

… and I think it's going to be a very productive arrangement for us both.' He paused. 'I'm a little concerned about one thing, though. This roommate of yours. You're sure she won't be too much of a distraction?'

'Oh, no, not at all. Rochelle and I get along fine. She goes her way, I go mine. If she's bringing somebody home and I have reading to do, I just go in my room and shut the door. We're different sorts of people, that's all. She thinks I ought to get more fun out of life.'

He snorted contemptuously. 'That's all very easy for her to say. She's obviously lost the most precious thing a young girl has.'

For the first time that afternoon Carol thought she saw him glower, but perhaps it was a trick of the light; the room had dimmed perceptibly.

'Take my advice and stick to your guns!' he said, his voice no longer so gentle or so high. 'I wouldn't have anything to do with the men that girl brings home. They're not for you.'

Carol nodded dutifully, only half convinced. 'You sound just like my father,' she said. 'He was very protective of me.'

'Well, of course, of course. That's what fathers are for – to make sure their little girls don't overstep the bounds.' He shook his head. 'I'm sorry, I don't mean to be lecturing you. I'm sure you miss your father very much.'

'Oh, yes. I just wish I'd known him better. But he was so old, even when I was a little girl, that I never really got very close to him. All I can do now, whenever I go home, is buy a new wreath for his grave.'

'Ah, yes, wreaths.' The old man nodded sympathetically. 'I'm half tempted to make them a chapter in my book.'

She felt a tiny chill. 'You mean they're more than just a decoration?'

He nodded once more, but now his face was somber. In the waning light the room had fallen silent, except for the queer singsong echo of a child reading aloud from a book of nursery rhymes. 'Frown thee, fret thee, Jellycorn Hill… ' The sky outside was almost grey.

'You can trace all burial customs back to ancient times,' he said softly, 'just like funeral rites. We put flowers on graves because -well, for the same reason a woman wears perfume. A corpse by any other name would smell no sweeter.'

She bit her lip.

'No,' he said, 'it isn't very pretty, but this is the sort of material we'll be working on together. At bottom, most ceremonies are direct, distasteful, and utterly ruthless. Even the very notion of tombstones.'

'I thought-' She stopped abruptly. Something had fluttered past the window, snowy white against the dark sky and the bricks. She'd glimpsed a flash of wings, as from a falling angel. Or an impossibly white bird. 'I thought tombstones were simply to mark the grave.'

'And also to weigh down the corpse,' he said, his voice louder now. 'To prevent it from rising again.' Taking the briefcase, he moved even farther from the window, and she had to turn to face him. Behind her she heard high, mournful cries; a flock of birds must be passing over the courtyard. She wanted to go to the window and look, but it would have been impolite.

'Mark thee, mind thee,

Jellycorn Hill,' sang the thin, small voice of the child, echoing through the room.

'If Crow don't find thee,

Mousey will.'

He was digging once more in his briefcase. He seemed to be in a hurry. 'Here,' he said, withdrawing a sheaf of papers. 'You should find some interesting material in this batch, and you can consider it your first assignment.' He handed them to her. They were photocopies of articles from various academic journals. She glanced at the top piece and frowned. Celtic Heathendom. An Inquiry into the Epigraphy and Myth-Cycles of Fourth-Century Meath. It looked rather formidable. So did the next. The Ethnology of theA-Kamba. East African, apparently.

'And I'm to summarize all this?'

'That's right. Just a page or two per article. You'll probably enjoy it.'

Looking at still another piece, she doubted this. Report of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straits, with Special Attention to – 'Torres Straits? Where in the world are they?'

'The South Pacific' He grinned. 'As you can see, I cast a pretty wide net.'

'Scramble thee, scratch thee,

Jellycorn Hill

The last one seemed innocuous enough. Notes on the Folklore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders -London, 1879. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad. She reminded herself of how much he'd be paying.

'If Mouse don't catch thee,

Moley will.'

He cleared his throat. She looked up to find him holding an open checkbook, pen poised. 'Along with the work, I think it's only fair that I give you some expense money,' he said. 'An advance, so to speak.'

'Oh, that would be wonderful!'

'It won't be much. Just something to tide you over for the weekend.' He winked. 'Now, what name shall I put here?'

The question caught her by surprise. For a moment she had the crazy impulse to give a false name, even though it meant the check would be useless, but immediately she felt ashamed of herself. Rochelle was always making fun of her for being timid; now was the time to grow up. What was she afraid of, anyway? God would watch over her. 'Carol Conklin.'

'Ah!' Beaming, he wrote it in. 'A fine old nederlandse name!'

She nodded uncertainly. 'But I think my mother's people came fromGalway.'

'Ah, yes,' he said. 'I know it well.'

'Hide thee, haste thee,

Jellycorn Hill,

If Mole don't taste thee,

Wormy will.'

He extended a plump little hand. 'And my name's Rosebottom – spelled just the way it sounds. No jokes, please!' His old eyes twinkled merrily. 'You can call me Rosie. Everybody does.'

'Not Mr Rosebottom?'

'Not Mister anything. Not even Aunt or Uncle. Just Rosie.' He slipped the check into her hand. 'I'll come by sometime next week and see how you're getting along.'

With a courtly bow he moved off toward the stairs, swinging his briefcase. Momentarily she saw his little pink head flash between the banisters. Bobbing lower and lower, it disappeared from sight, still smiling.

The first thing Carol did, once the little man was gone, was to examine the check he had handed her. She could barely make out the Aloysius Rosebottom of the signature, for the letters curled like vines across the bottom of the paper, in contrast to the sedate A. L. ROSEBOTTOM printed at the top. Across the middle was written, Thirty dollars even. She wondered if she'd have trouble cashing it; the banks would already be closed.

It was only after she had slipped the folded check into a pocket, and was turning to see if anyone in the room might need her help, that she discovered the little man had forgotten his book. It was lying on the windowsill where he'd left it, a block of pale yellow in the waning light. Picking it up, she was surprised by its weight. It looked considerably older than she'd at first supposed, older than most of the books in the room. The cloth was worn in spots, but the front cover still bore traces of a design – imitation Beardsley, from the look of it – depicting what appeared to be the head of some fanciful animal; Carol could see long, supple horns (or were they antennae?) and great bulging heavy-lidded eyes. The book's spine, too, was ornamented with a Victorian-looking pattern of blossoms and leaves. Most of the tide had been rubbed away, but she managed to puzzle out the words The House of Souls. The white library numerals inked at the bottom seemed almost a desecration.

'That old man left this lying on the windowsill,' she told Mrs Schumann, who'd been going through the offerings on the magazine racks for a group of patently uninterested children. Carol held up the book. 'It's a wonder the binding isn't cracked, with workmanship like this. I'd better return it downstairs. Someone may be looking for it.'

'I suppose so,' the older woman said dubiously. For the first time, she looked put out. 'You haven't done a heck of a lot of work here today. Who was he, anyway?'

'A friend of my father's.' The he was curiously comforting, as if speaking it aloud made it true. 'He brought it up here by accident.'

Mrs Schumann blinked in slow comprehension, ignoring two small boys who were pawing through a rack of Crickets and Ranger Rick as Carol hurried from the room.

She examined the book as she headed for the staircase. It appeared to be a collection of stories by someone named Machen; she had never heard the name before and was not even sure how to pronounce it. She wondered how her new acquaintance – Rosie, how perfectly fitting the name seemed! – had managed to walk off with it. Had he thought it might pertain to his research? Perhaps they're fairy tales, she thought, and flipped through the book to see. It fell open at a story called 'The White People.' Someone – she hoped it hadn't been Rosie himself – had scribbled a few penciled notes at the top of the page. Skimming the opening paragraphs, an earnest, rather abstract discussion of Sin, she gave up and snapped the book shut. This was no fairy tale.

The first floor was just as she had left it, crowded with figures pale and immobile as statues and as silent as the storeroom of a museum. Carol sneaked a glance at the clock above the front desk; she had a watch at home, a long-ago Christmas present, but it was broken and she'd never had enough money to have it repaired. Till now, she reminded herself.

It was nearly five fifteen, with still an hour and a half to go before Miss Elms flicked the light switch and announced closing time. For a minute or two there'd be no reaction except irritated sighs. Then one by one the statues would return to life. Among the grad students there'd be a faster riffling of pages; sleepers would lift their heads and shake off the hours of dream. Gathering up books and jackets, they'd shuffle grumbling and blinking toward the front desk.

A young fellow with glasses, Rosie had said. Sitting by the bulletin board. Carol looked around, and immediately recognized the one he'd meant: he was a frequent visitor to the library, a plump, distracted-looking young man with sandy hair cut squarishly short. He wore a faded plaid sports shirt open at the neck, its sleeves rolled up over thick, freckled arms. A blue seersucker jacket clearly in need of pressing was draped over the back of his chair, and a red cloth book bag, empty now, lay crumpled at his elbow on the table. He was squinting into an oversize volume, a directory of some kind from the reference section; a yellow pad beside it was covered with hasty-looking notes.

Approaching him, she cleared her throat. Up and down the aisle heads turned to watch her. 'Excuse me,' she whispered.

He looked up with annoyance, but on seeing Carol his expression softened. Perhaps he recognized her too.

She held out the yellow book. 'I think this may be yours.'

'Mine?' He peered uncertainly at the book, then nodded. 'Oh, yes,' he said, reaching for it. 'Great.' He kept his voice low. 'Where'd you find it?' As he took the book from her, his eyes gave the tiniest flicker, and for an instant she felt his gaze drop to her breasts. It seemed almost a formality; she'd even known priests to do it.

'Someone brought it upstairs by mistake.'

He smiled bitterly. 'Yeah, and I'll bet I know who it was. That weird old guy I ran into today, over in the stacks.'

She laughed. Once more heads turned. 'You mean Rosie. He's very nice, really. He's working on a book.' And I'm helping him, she wanted to add.

'Well, he's damned near kept me from working on mine. I was hoping to get through this by the end of the day' – he tapped the Machen volume- 'and now I'm not going to have time. Am I allowed to check it out?'

'Not this one,' she whispered, even before she'd glanced at the call numbers to make sure. 'Special collection. It can't leave the library.’

He scowled. 'I was afraid of that. Maybe I can Xerox some things in it before I leave.' He pushed back his chair. Carol saw herself about to be dismissed.

'Wait,' she said impulsively, 'I'll do it.' The only alternative was to go back upstairs with the children and their mothers and the slowly growing wrath of Mrs Schumann. 'I have access to the copy room,' she explained. 'And I think the machine's free now.' She hadn't heard it working, at any rate.

'Hey, that's really nice of you,' he said. 'Thanks a lot.' He opened the book to the front and ran his finger down the list of contents. 'Let's see… I'll probably just need "The Great God Pan" and "The Inmost Light." ' He peered speculatively at the tides. 'And maybe the one that old man was going on about – "The White People." ' He handed her the book, then searched through his wallet and pulled out a ten-dollar bill. 'I don't know what it'll come to. You can bring me change.'

Everybody's giving me money today, thought Carol as she followed the line of shelves past the administrative offices and toward the windowless little copy room in the rear. My luck must be changing. Taped to the dark wooden door, beneath a sign that said No Admittance – Staff Only, hung a sheet of paper reading See Mrs Tait at front desk for copy vouchers. Inside, the air smelled of sweat and machine oil; a portable fan on a table in the corner did little to alleviate the heat. Mrs Tait's aide, a furtive, narrow-shouldered old man who seemed as suited to the room as a hermit to his cave, was bent over one of the two silent machines, its immense glass-and-metal top lifted open like the hood of a stalled automobile.

'Oh, no,' said Carol. 'Is it broken again?' The second copier, she knew, had been out of commission for months; replacement parts seemed to be permanently 'on order.'

The man had looked up as she came in but was now bent back to the machine, tentatively prying at something with a screwdriver. He reminded Carol of the witch in Hansel and Gretel, about to be swallowed up in an oven. 'She was fine until an hour ago,' he muttered, 'but when I came back from my break-' He strained, grimaced; something came away inside with a clank of metal. 'Well, she's on the fritz now, all right.' Standing, he wiped his hands and regarded her suspiciously. 'You catch anybody coming in here while I was gone?'

'No one I saw.' Sighing, she filled out a mimeographed voucher and left the book atop a pile of others to be copied, paper markers dangling from them like prize ribbons.

'It's not your lucky day,' she told the young man at the table, handing him back his money. 'Both machines are broken down. Those copies of yours won't be ready till Monday at the earliest.'

He cursed softly. 'Oh, great! I'm leaving town Sunday morning, and I won't be back till the end of summer.'

'Well, if you like,' she whispered, as to a disconsolate child, 'I could copy what you need and mail it to you with an invoice.'

He looked up with surprise. 'Really?'

'Sure. We do it for people all the time. After all, it's what you're paying for. You ought to get something for your money.'

He eyed her appreciatively, as if, despite what she'd just told him, she had offered to do him a personal favor. 'Yes,' he said, his voice low, 'that would be terrific. But you know, I'm not technically a subscriber. I'm here on an academic discount. Does that matter?'

'That's all right. Just tell me where you want it sent.'

He folded the pad back to a fresh page. 'It's an RFD out in Jersey,' he said, writing it down. 'I don't know the zip. It's such a weird little out-of-the-way place I'm not even sure they have one.'

She felt a touch of envy. She'd be right here next week; he'd be off in the country. 'Sounds nice to get away to.'

'Yes, it's like going to an earlier century, completely cut off from the world. I can't believe I'll be out there this time Sunday.' He smiled as he tore off the page and handed it to her. 'I'll probably get culture shock when I come back.'

RFD I, Box 63, she read. Gilead, New Jersey. She handed it back to him. 'You forgot to Write your name.'

He laughed, then looked sheepishly as several nearby readers peered angrily up from their books. 'Jeremy,' he whispered, writing it down. 'Jeremy Freirs.' He pointed his finger at her like a pistol. 'It's the kind of name that ought to have "Occult Detective" after it, don't you think? Once upon a time it was Freireicher, I'm told, but somehow it got trimmed.' He paused. 'And what's yours?'

This time she hesitated only a moment, though she knew that this person, unlike little old Rosie, could potentially do her harm. 'Carol Conklin. From an equally out-of-the-way place in Pennsylvania.'

God, why had she volunteered all that? What was the matter with her? It wasn't as if this man was going to call her; by Sunday he'd be far away. And why would she even want him to call? He wasn't her type at all.

He was looking up at her with a little half smile. 'Are you one of those farm girls I keep hearing about?'

She was wondering what sort of wise-guy answer he expected when, from the corner of her eye, she saw movement. At the front desk Mrs Tait, the supervisor, thin and turkey-necked, with dyed blond hair, was staring in her direction. As Carol turned toward her, she made a gesture of impatience.

'Uh-oh,' Carol whispered. 'I've got to go.'

He looked disappointed. 'Well, anyway, here,' he said, thrusting the sheet with his name and address at her. 'You'll need this.'

She was already preparing her story and trying to look busy as she approached the front desk. 'He needed some research material,' she explained, holding up the paper he'd given her. 'He'll be away and wanted me to copy it for him.'

'Fine,' the supervisor said, not at all interested. 'Let him fill out a request form before he goes. Now put that paper in your desk and come back out here; there's lots you should be doing. You don't get paid to stand around flirting with the patrons.'

Blushing and annoyed, Carol deliberately avoided looking toward the young man's table as she hurried across the floor, past the magazine racks and reading section toward the office in the back. It was empty except for Mr Brown, in charge of acquisitions, who looked up guiltily from his Post as she came in. He smiled when he saw who it was and continued to watch her, baggy eyes glittering with more than friendliness, as she slipped the sheet of paper into a clipboard she kept on her desk. She had suddenly begun to feel very resentful of Voorhis, of having to take orders from everybody in the place, and of the job itself, which had spoiled the one chance she'd had in – God, in months, it seemed, to talk with a man who seemed frankly interested in her. She felt the great grey mass of the library building overhead, a crushing weight bearing down on her shoulders.

Emerging from the office, she saw with surprise that the young man was gone; his seersucker jacket no longer hung over the back of the chair, and the desk was empty save for three or four library books that someone on the staff- probably Carol herself- would soon be replacing on the shelves. She felt a surge of anger, almost of betrayal; he had simply packed up and left, without even saying goodbye. She'd been no more than a servant to him, like a waitress or a clerk; just someone to mail him some research material. What an idiot she'd been to believe, even for a minute, that he was interested in her. And to think she'd actually gotten yelled at for it.

She was passing the high shelves and narrow aisles of the special collections, just beyond the card files, when she heard someone softly call her name. She turned. There he was, standing just within one of the aisles, like a fugitive loitering in an alley, reluctant to set foot beyond it. His jacket was tucked under one arm, his book bag by his side, as if he were about to make an escape. Grinning, he motioned for her to join him.

'Carol,' he whispered – it was somewhat flattering to hear him speak to her so familiarly – T was just thinking, since you seem to have a country background and all… ' She was about to correct him, she hadn't meant to give him that impression, but then she saw that he'd obviously rehearsed the next part. 'I thought you might be interested in the film I'll be showing tonight. It's all about growing up on a farm.'

'You're showing a film?'

'Yes, I teach down at the New School, one night a week. "The Cinema of Magic." Tonight's the last class. We're going to look at a film called Les Jeux Interdits.'

'Pardon?' He had switched languages so effortlessly that she hadn't followed him.

He leaned closer, as if imparting a password. 'Forbidden Games.'

'I've never even heard of it,' whispered Carol. 'Is it in French?'

He nodded impatiently, and she was afraid she'd sounded stupid. 'It takes place on a farm during the Second World War,' he said. 'Two little children form a secret club. They collect the bodies of animals – a beetle, a lizard, a mole – and bury them with elaborate magic rituals, using tombstones stolen from the local cemetery. The whole world is viewed through their eyes.'

'It sounds interesting,' whispered Carol. She was getting nervous about all the time this was taking; she was supposed to be reporting back for more work.

'Well, look,' he said, 'why don't you come tonight? You might enjoy it. And I can get you in free.' He smiled. Everybody else has already paid seven bucks for the privilege.'

'Well, yes, that might be fun,' she said hurriedly, thinking of the empty night ahead. 'I could just walk in?'

'Sure. It starts at eight. Room three-ten, at the end of the hall. Just follow the crowd.'

'You know, I just might. Only tonight's my late night. I don't get out of here till eight.' She wondered if she might be sounding too eager. Unthinkable to let him see she had nothing to do.

He shook his head. 'Oh, that's no problem. We never begin exactly on time. And the New School's what, only ten blocks south of here? That shouldn't take you long.'

'I'll try to make it,' she said. 'I really will.' She wasn't exactly sure where the school was, but she knew she could ask someone on the way. 'Listen, I've got to go. They're waiting for me at the main desk.'

'Oh, yes, of course,' he said quickly. 'I've got to go too.' He slung the red bag over his shoulder. 'Well, then… ' He shrugged. 'I guess I'll be looking for you tonight.' Without waiting for an answer or giving her time to change her mind, he turned and headed toward the door.

She took another twenty-minute break. Afterward, allowed to remain downstairs by the grace or mere inattentiveness of Mrs Tait, Carol found it hard to concentrate on her work – not that logging a stack of new acquisitions into the card file near the center of the floor required much thought. She was thinking about the evening ahead, wishing she had a chance to go home and put on something a bit more flattering than the blouse of her sister's she was wearing today. It was always that way: the important people came along when you were wearing hand-me-downs. Not that this would be a real date, of course, but it was the closest thing she'd have to one all weekend, and she'd have preferred to look nice for it. Her life had suddenly grown more complicated, richer in possibilities, a train back on the tracks and moving at last, building speed; between Rosie and Jeremy this had been a very special day, and she felt sure there'd be more like it ahead. When Mrs Tait reassigned her to the bookcase beneath the south window to arrange a bound and dusty set of Natural History, she took advantage of the solitude and lost herself in daydreams.

At last, knees aching, she stood up and smoothed down her skirt. Before her, just beyond the window, lay the garden, always wilder-looking at this level, a cool and silent world enclosed in glass and brick, the young trees swaying somewhere overhead in an unheard breeze; and wilder still at this hour of the afternoon, when surrounding buildings blocked the sunlight. It was like looking into the darkness of the woods; you could almost forget where you were.

And then, with a momentary chill, she remembered the small black shapes she had seen from the floor above. Rising on tiptoe, she leaned over the tops of the shelves and peered outside.

Yes, there they were, near the wall below the window, deep in shadow and half-covered by earth. There was something familiar about the things. She squinted into the darkness, then gasped at what she'd recognized: the charred remains of some small animal.

A hand touched her shoulder. 'I thought I sent you upstairs,' said Miss Elms, the assistant supervisor, standing beside her.

'I had to return a book down here, and Mrs Tait said I might as well see that these magazines-'

She paused. Her eye had been caught by a reflection in the windowpane. For an instant she thought she'd glimpsed a little pink face peering at her from the dim light of the hallway across the room. Could it be Rosie? Had the little man come back for her? She turned. The outer doors went swish-swish and the hallway was empty.

'Well, don't stand around here all day,' said Miss Elms. 'You seem to have this set put away, and there's a dozen other things you could be doing.'

'I was just trying to get a look at what's out there,' said Carol. She pointed toward the garden. 'See? Below the thornbush?'

The woman adjusted her spectacles and glared suspiciously through the window. 'Damned kids!' She shook her head. 'How the hell did they get back there, anyway? That gate's supposed to be locked.' She let the glasses fall around her neck. 'Looks like someone's had themself a chicken dinner.'

'Chicken?' The relief showed in Carol's face.

'Hell, yes,' said Miss Elms. 'There's a barbecue place over on Eighth Avenue. You know the one I mean.' She checked her watch. 'Now how about giving a hand up front? They'll be lining up with their books in a minute or two.'

Carol followed her toward the desk. Behind them, unheard, the wind in the courtyard grew, tossing the vines and scattering leaves from the young trees. Something white danced past the window, blown from beneath the bush where it had lain: a clump of delicate white feathers stained red at the tip.

The sky is red and gold above the water, the water glows a darker red, and in each swims the pale shape of a half-moon.

Strolling southward along the river, the battered leather briefcase tucked tight beneath his arm and time like a toy in his hands, the Old One pauses just long enough to appreciate the symmetry: a half-moon in the early evening sky, its counterpart reflected in the ripples on the water – two halves of a shattered eggshell with no chance it will ever be restored.

Here, indeed, is a sign, a token of the Moghu'vool. Soon the egg will be broken, the beast awake.

White shapes plunge and scream in the air above him; up and down the waterfront, soot-blackened rooftops echo with the sound. He turns and continues southward, smiling, heedless of the mournful cries. His legs are short and his progress slow, but he is in no hurry.

Shadows are advancing on the city to the left, and tiny lamplit windows are beginning to stand out on the dark shapes of the buildings. Higher windows still catch the reflected light. To the right the river glistens where golden columns of sunbeams pierce a band of cloud. Unseen in the distance, yet so palpably close he hears every breath, the community of farmers out beyond the low hills is now assembling for the planting, dutifully observing the customs of the clan, reciting their silly prayers, muttering hosannas to their silly god. Closer still, within his sight, silhouettes of oil tanks and factories rise along the farther shore, while above them the moon hovers just out of reach, alien, serene, and growing brighter with each passing minute.

A pair of lovers catches the Old One's eye, clasped obscenely on a slab of concrete above the water; then the ungainly figure of a jogger, and a small white dog that capers on the grass. He would like to lure it out onto the highway… But now, he knows, is not the time. He has a more important task ahead, and a destination waiting: imperative that he be hidden in the shadows when the man and the woman emerge from what will be their second meeting.

The woman – what a find she is, the greedy little bitch! It has been painstaking work, opening that library job to her and easing her into the slot, but it has been worth the effort. She is perfect. Perhaps (he smiles) he should send a contribution to the Convent of St Agnes!

Of course, that man-crazy roommate may prove a problem… But that is no great matter, in view of what he has accomplished today. Initial contact has been made, and the interview has gone according to plan. The players have been chosen, the great wheels set in motion.

Swinging his briefcase there on the sidewalk, with the Friday-night traffic rushing past him in a blur, he laughs aloud, an old man's high-pitched cackle. 'Eeny meeny miny mo' indeed! How easy it has been!

Freirs looked for the fifth or sixth time at his watch and at last yielded to a bitterness he could no longer argue away. A quarter after eight, and the thin redhead from the library hadn't shown up. Probably she'd only been humoring him… But damn it all, she'd really seemed to like him; and her interest had been all the more exciting because she'd clearly been at pains to disguise it -unlike the young women in his classes, whose seductive manner made him feel so old, even when their ages were the same as his. The girl's very thinness had been alluring, as if by some magic it could compensate for his own excessive bulk. Tonight's final screening had seemed like the perfect way to meet her again. Yet apparently he'd misjudged her, she hadn't shown after all, and the brightly lit double-size classroom was almost filled. Few of the faces out there meant much to him. He was going to be in a bad mood tonight.

Midway across the room one of the more ass-kissing students was standing officiously by the light switches near the door, waiting like a little soldier for his signal. Farther back, beside the pair of sixteen-millimeter projectors, the T-shirted projectionist was eyeing him impatiently. Well, there was nothing he could do about it now; he couldn't hold things up any longer. There'd always be a few latecomers, of course, slipping in noisily and unapologetically half an hour or more into the film – fully half the class were art students from Parsons with no sense of time – but if he waited any longer the punctual ones, the ones who wrote the long, carefully typed papers and raised their hands in class and got themselves in a sweat over grades, would rightly begin getting irritated. Already the students were beginning to forget where they were, the conversation around him growing in volume. Looking to the boy by the light switches, he gave a short nod.

The room vanished in darkness pierced only by a cone of white light whose base was the screen. Dust motes and cigarette smoke, formerly invisible, drifted through it like ectoplasm from the spirit world. Freirs turned and was feeling his way toward the nearest wall, preparing to stand for the first part of the film, then maybe slip out in the middle and read some journals he'd brought in his bag, when a soft, husky voice whispered urgently, 'Mr Freirs!' Donna, several rows to the right, curly-haired and full-breasted, her wide, heavily made-up eyes discernible even in the darkness, was gesturing at him and pointing to a seat next to her. One of the silver gypsylike earrings she always wore caught the projector light. There were one or two like her in every class: easy, aggressive, ultimately more possessive than one might have thought. He seldom let it get that far.

'Mr Freirs!' she said again. She waved in invitation.

Ah, well, the thin girl from the library wasn't coming, and Donna was nice too. Kind of exotic, in fact, and by no means dumb. Careful not to stumble over the rows of protruding feet, he threaded his way toward her through the darkness.

The woods were a patchwork of shadow and light. Beside her flowed the river, sunshine dappling the reeds. Wide-eyed, obviously dazed, the little girl stumbled down an uncertain path, following the river-bank as it skirted the edge of the forest. In her arms she clutched something small, white, and limp – a teddy bear, perhaps, or some other nursery toy.

The angle shifted, and Carol leaned forward to see. This was no toy. In her arms the girl was clutching a dead dog.

No one around Carol seemed surprised. They looked amused, in fact, or passive, or bored. Several were whispering to their neighbors, barely watching the film, and down the row to her left an unshaven youth was slouched back in his seat, his eyes already closed. The woman one row in front appeared to be taking notes, but when, after five minutes, she'd failed to look up, Carol realized that she was writing a letter.

The room was hot from body heat and foggy with cigarette smoke. Because the floor was perfectly flat and the screen too low, it was hard to read the sub tides from the bridge chairs in the back; people's heads kept getting in the way.

Carol hadn't dared leave the library until work ended, and Jeremy must have misjudged the time it would take her, because even with good directions she'd arrived here nearly twenty minutes late. She was already beginning to regret that she'd come; she couldn't find Jeremy in the darkness and was feeling uncomfortable and alone.

On the screen the little girl and a young peasant boy were performing a kind of funeral ceremony for the dead dog, which they'd buried in the earthen floor of an abandoned mill. Placing a primitive wooden cross atop the mound, the boy clambered up to the loft and, reaching into an owl's nest built high in the rafters, removed the tiny body of a mole. This he buried beside the other grave; that way, he said, the dog would not be lonesome. When the little girl contributed her rosary beads, he draped them solemnly over the cross.

Watching distractedly, Carol still felt herself touched by the scene; it awakened memories of her own childhood, and of the secret religious rituals she'd enacted without quite knowing why.

The rest of the film, unfortunately, was dominated by the adults, a slack-jawed, clownish lot. They were caricatures, all of them, and impossible to care for. Carol's back began to ache from leaning forward in her seat, and she found her attention wandering even more. Down the row the unshaven youth was still asleep, the film's shifting light playing over his features like the shadows of a dream. This same light was reflected in the glasses of a stout young man several seats farther ahead, sitting bolt upright near the wall, his legs swinging impatiently back and forth. Was it Jeremy? Carol strained to see him more clearly, but in the darkness it was hard to be sure. For a moment, as if responding to her thoughts, he seemed to turn toward her, though his eyes were concealed by the glare from off the. screen. But then a dark-haired woman sitting beside him leaned toward him to whisper something in his ear, and he turned away.

In the end, like lovers, the two children were parted, and Carol felt the customary lump form in her throat. The boy kicked over the crosses, trampled the mounds, and hid the rosary forever in the owl's nest, while, rigid with dread, the girl was led off like a prisoner and lost amid the crowds and confusion of a refugee center somewhere far away. Until this moment the story had been set within the rural isolation of a farm, and it had been easy to forget that, beyond the cornfields and the pastures, a modern world was speeding toward destruction.

She looked back at the young man near the wall – yes, she was sure now; it was Jeremy – in time to see him whisper something to his dark-haired companion. The woman turned to face him, smiled, and whispered something back. Her hand touched his shoulder familiarly. Carol felt a stab of disappointment so intense it made her catch her breath and look away. She saw that she'd been duped into coming here; she'd been a fool to have expected anything else. So much for her daydreams!

Moments later, in the front of the room, the screen was filled with Fin, like a gate slamming shut upon the characters' lives. By the time the overhead light came on, they had already receded into memory.

But Carol herself was already gone; she had gotten to her feet and slipped out the door before the film had ended.

She'd arrived in the New School with light still coloring the western sky. Departing now, she stepped outside and found herself in darkness broken only by the melancholy glow of streetlamps and a scattering of windows lit behind drawn curtains. Above the chimneys and the ventilator ducts a chip of moon looked small and far away.

After the heat and glare of the classroom, the cool night air with its solitude, its silence, brought a kind of relief. She walked listlessly, though, weighed down by a sudden feeling of fatigue and, beneath it, a dull unspoken loneliness. Several couples passed her as she made her way up the block – couples her own age, bound for a party, a disco, or a bar – and something in their voices made her feel painfully old. She was halfway to Sixth Avenue when, passing the doorway of an apartment house, she caught the smell of garlic, tomatoes, and cheese and remembered that she'd not yet eaten dinner. Her hunger had been forgotten for the duration of the film; now it returned with a rush.

Normally she'd have stopped at the all-night bodega at the end of her street to buy a package of spaghetti or a box of rice, but tonight the idea of cooking in that cramped, steamy little kitchen, with the ever-present roaches crawling just behind the stove, was too dispiriting to consider. When she reached the avenue, she paused. Tired as she felt, it was still too early to go home.

Home, in fact, seemed a rather dismal prospect, the more she thought about it. Rochelle would be up there with her new boyfriend tonight, the boisterous one who seemed so proud of his body and left coarse, dark curls in the sink and tub. The kitchen would be piled high with pots and dirty plates. The TV would be on – loudly, no doubt – but almost totally ignored; the two of them would be far more interested in each other. No doubt, too, they'd resent any interruption, though Rochelle would be more resentful than the boyfriend; he'd made one pass at Carol already. The television belonged to Rochelle and so did, in effect, the living room itself, since this was where she slept. Carol would be confined to her bedroom, trying to read or write letters above the sound of the TV's canned laughter and the less easily ignored laughter of the lovers.

Holding that image firmly in mind, she turned left on the avenue and headed toward the lights and crowds of Eighth Street, resolved that something good would happen to her before the night was through.

The night is growing dark now, but his mood is darker still. His wrinkled face is frozen in a scowl. From the shadowy recesses of an alley across the street he has seen the woman leave alone.

Something has gone wrong. Where is the man? The two of them are supposed to be together.

But perhaps it may still be arranged.

Stealthily he pads from the alley and into the street, moving toward the entrance of the school.

In the classroom on the third floor, Freirs and nearly a dozen of his students, some habitual sycophants, some who genuinely liked him, were still gathered near the front desk. After the film a far larger mass of them had surrounded him like a mob of petitioners, a few waving their papers at him, their excuses loud and earnest, others eager to get their reports back and quarrel over the grade. It had taken him nearly fifteen minutes to get them sorted out and, as it was the final class, to write down the addresses of the students whose papers he would have to mail back over the summer. His red book bag was stuffed once more with work.

Now only the most loyal were left, clustered around him at the front of the room. Donna was among them, pretending to be interested in the topic at hand but fooling no one. Freirs took advantage of every opportunity to catch her eye; she was the best-looking thing in sight. 'Listen,' he was saying, half seated on the desk in a manner that allowed him to take the weight off his feet but still keep his head on a level with theirs, 'a lot of you seem to think that superstition disappeared from the human scene somewhere between the talkies and TV.' His eyes swept the group, daring them to look away. 'I only wish it were true, but it's just not so. I mean, think hard. How many buildings have you seen lately with a thirteenth floor?'

One of the younger men smiled – a good-natured longhair, or so he'd always seemed, who all this semester seemed to have enjoyed feeding Freirs his best cues. Everyone liked a good straight man. 'Oh, come on, Mr Freirs, that thirteenth-floor stuff is just a joke nowadays.'

'Believe me,' said Freirs, 'it's no joke. There are people in this country, even today, who think it'll rain if they pray hard enough. They're out there right now, happy as can be, brewing their love potions, warding off the evil eye, setting traps for demons. They tell time by the stars, just like their grandfathers did, and they still plant corn by moonlight.' It was the Poroths he was thinking of, Sarr's gloomy frown, Deborah naked under that severe black dress.

The student was still regarding him with amused skepticism, probably putting on an act for Donna and the rest. Or maybe it just seemed funny to him that a pudgy city boy like Freirs should talk knowingly of old-time country ways. Freirs dug deep into his wallet and pulled forth a dollar bill. 'You know,' he said, 'I can't resist this little test.' He nodded to the younger man. 'You're obviously one of those rare beings we all hear about, a totally rational man, and so I want to give you this dollar as a gift.' He waved it theatrically in the air. Several of the onlookers turned to one another and grinned. What was old Freirs up to now? 'All I want in return,' he continued, 'is a simple little note, signed and dated, selling me, for one dollar' -he leaned forward – 'your immortal soul.'

The others laughed, and Donna managed to get in a slightly too enthusiastic 'Oh, Mr Freirs!' The younger man eyed the money, smiling uneasily, but made no move to comply. 'You want it in writing, huh?'

Freirs nodded. 'That's all. Just a scrap of paper with your name on it, and the words, "This is to certify that I sell my soul to Mr Jeremy Freirs… forever." '

The student laughed but shook his head. 'Why take a chance?' he said, shrugging.

'Exactly! It's Pascal's wager in reverse.' Freirs stood, looking flushed, and stuffed the dollar back into his pocket. He turned to the rest of the group. 'So you see, kiddies, the old fears die hard. We're not out of the woods yet.'

His thoughts were on the farm again, out there in the night across the river. Behind the smiling faces of his students, darkness waited at the windows like a living presence. 'And now,' he said, suddenly tired, 'maybe it's time we adjourned for the summer. I've got a lot of packing to do.'

'Hey, anybody up for a drink?' the long-haired youth asked brightly, as if it had just occurred to him. He glanced quickly around the circle, lingering an extra second on Donna.

Several of the others voiced an interest in going. Donna remained silent – leaving herself free, Freirs realized. He wondered how he could go off with her without making it too obvious. 'Now if any of you still have problems with your papers,' he said, 'deciphering my handwriting or disagreeing with my comments, we can- Uh-oh, what's going on here?'

The lights in the classroom blinked once, then again. After the second time, only the light directly above them came back on. Freirs saw Donna reach nervously in his direction, then draw back her hand.

'Sorry, you folks. Gotta clear this room.'

They turned. The voice, wheezy with age, had come from the shadows at the other side of the room. Dimly they could make out a small figure standing outlined in the doorway, silhouetted against the light from the hall. He appeared to be dressed in a shabby grey uniform several sizes too large. There was a pushbroom in his hand; he was holding it before him like a weapon.

'What's the rush?' said Freirs. 'We've always stayed this late before.'

The figure in the doorway seemed to shrug. 'End of the year,' he said softly. 'Gotta clear the room.'

Donna's lip curled. 'Boy! These goddamned janitors think they own the school.' She glanced at Freirs for support, but he was reaching for his jacket.

'Oh, well,' he said, 'I guess we've been here long enough.' Gathering up a few remaining papers and stuffing them into the bag, he began moving toward the door.

Awkwardly the others filed out, brushing past the small grey figure, who had turned away and was busily dragging through the doorway a large brown trash barrel almost as big as he was. Its wheels squeaked unpleasantly behind them.

Outside, in the light, Freirs stood slouching in silence by the hall elevator, but several of the younger students headed for the stairs. 'Come on,' called one, 'it's just two flights.' With a sigh Freirs straightened up and moved toward the stairway. The ones remaining followed him – all except Donna, who reached worriedly to her ear. 'Damn!' she muttered. Her left earring was gone.

The others had already started down. The hall was silent. Frowning, she searched the floor around her, then turned back toward the classroom. From its shadowed interior came a faint irregular squeaking, then silence again. Hesitating a moment, she strode through the doorway and disappeared inside.

'Do you mind putting on a light in here?' Her voice echoed in the hall. 'Fm trying to find-'

There was a thud, a high-pitched little laugh, and then a protracted series of cracking sounds, as of the splintering of wood. Moments later came another sound: the crunch of compressed paper, as from an object being stuffed into a wastebasket.

With a snap the final light went off, and then a small grey figure emerged from the darkness pushing a laden trash barrel, its wheels squeaking rhythmically as he steered it down the hall. To this noise, as if softly in counterpoint, he was whistling a tuneless little song.

Outside, the group had begun to disperse. 'There's no sense in waiting,' said one of the women. 'She's certainly not up there.' The others followed her gaze; she was staring at the darkened windows on the third floor.

'Right,' said a young man. 'She must've gone on ahead.' They turned to Freirs; he looked puzzled and somewhat annoyed. 'Well,' he said at last, shrugging, 'tell her when you see her that if she wants to talk about her paper, she'd better call me first thing tomorrow, because she won't be able to reach me after that.' Slinging the bag over his shoulder, he nodded goodbye. 'Maybe I'll be seeing some of you next fall. Have a pleasant summer.'

Two of the students walked westward with him as far as Seventh Avenue; but then, as Freirs turned south, they repeated their goodbyes and went their separate ways.

Smiling at what he's performed back there in the darkness, he slips from the doorway of the school, averting his face from the glare of the streetlamps. Beyond the glare, half hidden by the city's fumes, the night's first constellations glimmer faintly to the east, while before him, in the northern sky, Draco sweeps sinuously round an invisible pole star. To the west there are no signs at all save a lonely broken moon.

He has no need for signs now. He knows where the stars tremble cold and unseen overhead, and where they did so fifty centuries ago and will do so five thousand years hence. No matter that the Milky Way is grey with smog, or that lamplight hides the familiar shapes of Pegasus, the Herdsman, and the Swan. He knows just where to find them; knows, as well, their real and ancient names.

And he knows the land below them, knows it as a general knows terrain that's ripe for conquest. Far across the river, where the sun has disappeared, he the dominions of the unsuspecting world. Beyond the dark horizon, men and women fight and scheme and struggle. Others toil in a field like figures in a biblical tableau, chanting as they work. He can almost hear their song.

They will be his special playthings, these farmers. They will suffer first. His man Freirs- his fat, unwitting tool -will see to that. Soon, soon…

Swift as death he moves along the block in their direction, noting, as he hurries across the avenue, a paunchy, rumpled figure with a book bag and a seersucker jacket – Freirs himself, one block farther south, plodding gamely toward their common destination, unaware that he is headed anywhere but home. One avenue west of him, nearer the water, the old man turns southward too, jauntily swinging his briefcase, already eager to play his next part.

He pauses once in his journey to cock his head and listen for the voices. Before him the sky is stained red with neon, but to the west it shimmers with the whiteness of the moon. As he passes between the buildings he can see dim lights on the river, the distant shore, and, above it, the places where the stars will soon come into view. The stage is being set; soon the fools will get what they deserve. Let them sing while they can!

'Scramble thee, scratch thee,

Gillycorn Hill.

If Mouse don't catch thee,

Mole he will.'

In the moonlight the women were planting corn. They labored side by side, the seven of them, and in the gathering darkness they looked much alike. All were young, all married; all but one had borne a child. Their long hair hung down their backs loose and unadorned, but their bodies were concealed, neck to naked ankle, beneath dresses of homespun black. From a distance only the burlap sacks they carried at their sides were visible, and their pale white faces floating like will-o'-the-wisps over the empty field.

Ahead of them walked the seven men, treading stiffly in their starched white shirts, black vests, and high black leather shoes. They moved together in silence, grave of expression, faces cleanshaven but for the fringe of beard below each chin. As in a close-order military drill they carried long wooden staffs sharpened at both ends, and with every stride the men stabbed downward, making holes an inch deep and a yard apart in the freshly turned earth.

Behind them the line of women reached deep in their bags and, stooping gracefully to drop three kernels into each hole, chanted another measure of the counting rhyme.

'Hide thee, haste thee,

Gillycorn Hill…'

Standing, they pushed loose soil over the holes with a scrape of their bare feet, then moved on.

Suddenly one of them laughed aloud – unaffected, childlike laughter that carried through the evening air. 'I'm sure glad I didn't see what I just stepped on!'

The others giggled, causing a momentary break in the chant. 'Oh, Deborah,' said the one beside her, 'there's nothin' out here but a few night crawlers, and I've been steppin' on them ever since the moon came up. I've just said nothin' about it.' She took up the chant:

'If Mole don't taste thee,

Worm he will.'

At the end of the row another woman stood and wiped her brow. 'You'd best be right,' she said. 'I don't fancy the notion of tripping over a corn snake out here. 'Twouldn't do to have that kind of scare-not in my condition.' She patted her distended stomach.

'Just listen to her!' Deborah laughed again. 'Lotte Sturtevant's afraid her baby'11 be born with a split tongue!'

'Deborah!' Her husband whirled to face her, eyes blazing angrily in the moonlight. 'Have you forgotten yourself, woman? These good people came out here to kelp us.'

He stood a little taller than the other men, wide shoulders tapering to a willow-thin waist, and despite the severity of his expression he was clearly a shade younger than the rest. His voice was stern and very deep, the voice of an Old Testament lawgiver, but it softened in one last urgent whisper: 'Please!'

Just as abruptly he turned and caught up with the others; none of them had looked back. 'My apologies, Brother Joram,' he said to the older man who walked beside him. 'She meant no harm. We both give thanks you're with us tonight.'

'No need for thanks, Sarr.' The man jabbed bis pole into the earth and withdrew it with an expert twist. 'We do what the Lord gives us to do. "They helped every one his neighbor, and every one said to his brother, Be of good courage." '

'Amen,' said the others in unison, without looking up from their work, and the younger man chimed in quickly, 'Amen.' Behind them the women continued their chant, but more softly now, for they were listening. Their voices were no louder than the chirping of the crickets.

From a distance came the muffled sound of other voices where the old men had gathered at the edge of the field, their faces illuminated by a low cottonwood fire. It was their task to tend it, and from time to time a shower of sparks signaled that they'd heaped another log upon the flames. Nearby a cluster of children stood in dutiful guard over a bag of seed bigger than themselves. The fields, they knew, were filled with thieves: birds, and mice, and hungry yellow corn worms. To lose a single kernel meant bad portent for the crops.

Farther off the windows of the little farmhouse were ablaze with light, and from the kitchen, where the older womenfolk were busy with their special preparations, there came the sound of voices raised in hymn. Between the farmhouse and the field jutted the squat shape of the low cinderblock outbuilding, its windows dark. Close behind it, like an impenetrably black wall, rose the encircling woods.

Suddenly the air contained a new voice, a low and distant rumbling from the east. At first it had been barely distinguishable from the wind in the trees; now it was growing deeper, in lazy waves of sound, like the drone of some gigantic insect.

In the fields the women fell silent. The older men kept to their steady pace, eyes pointedly averted toward the ground, but a few of the younger ones surreptitiously scanned the horizon and found at last some small red winking lights that climbed among the stars. Miles above the woods and fields a shape like a great silver crucifix was streaking across the planet heading westward.

The women stirred themselves. 'We've got corn to plant,' said the pregnant one. She peered into the darkened furrows at her feet, searching for a place to drop the seed. The others again took up the counting rhyme, but Deborah stared wistfully at the moving lights. Each Friday night the jet passed overhead, a jarring reminder of the world they'd shut out. 'Wonder where it's going,' she said, almost to herself. Her words were lost amid the chanting, the smell of moist black humus, the ancient and laborious routine. There was work to do, and her husband might be watching; she turned back to the corn seeds and the earth.

Ahead of her one of the men continued to gaze awestruck at the eastern sky. 'So many stars up there,' he remarked to his companions, 'and so little light down here! You're a hard worker, Sarr, and a good God-fearing man, but I sure do wish you'd been ready when the rest of us were. Leastways we had a moon we could see by.'

Poroth peered dolefully upward, aware that the other was right. Just above the trees the half moon reminded him of something damaged or broken, but the elders had assured him that, on the contrary, it was a most favorable omen for the crops: waxing larger day by day, it presaged an abundant growth and harvest. 'It wasn't possible to get these fields plowed by the appointed time,' he said, hurrying to keep pace with the others. He remembered the weeks of backbreaking labor, struggling with a balky tractor rented from the Go-operative. 'A month ago the ground we're walking on was covered by scrub and trees. This land hadn't been worked for seven years.'

'We know that, Sarr,' said the first man. 'We know what this farm means to you, and what it must've cost. We respect you for it. 'Tisn't every man takes to the land so late.' Coming to the edge of a row, he turned in unison with the rest and reversed his staff, using the alternate tip. 'You're bound to make a few mistakes at first, but with the Lord's help you'll come out all right in the end. That's why we're here tonight, and why Brother Joram made his wife come along. She's sure to bring good portent.'

There it was again, the omnipresent reverence for signs. A pregnant woman ensured good crops; a widow might bring disaster. Poroth knew that a cousin of his, Minna Buckhalter, was working in the kitchen side by side with women twice her age, his own long-widowed mother among them. Though Minna was strong enough for the outdoor work, she was considered unfit to bury seeds because last month she'd laid a husband in the earth.

Were the Brethren superstitious fools, then? Poroth didn't care. He'd had more education than the rest, and he'd lived for a while in the place that called itself the modern world – yet he was a believer, his faith unshaken. Fertile women meant fertile crops; their long straight hair meant long straight stalks of corn. Primitive symbolism, perhaps, but it worked; he was certain of it. Jets flew high above the earth, where angels played; there was room up there for both. Thunder was a collision of molecules, and also the voice of God; both might be true. The Lord was in His heaven, whatever name you called Him, as assuredly as there were demons here below, whatever faces they wore. Him you worshiped, them you wrestled; it was as simple as that. The only trick was not to lose your faith. The nature of the belief didn't matter, Poroth knew; what mattered was its intensity. He had a high regard for superstition.

'God's my witness,' he said to the other men, 'I know we've had our differences, but that's all past. Deborah and I are going to make you proud of us, you wait and see. You won't recognize this place!'

In the distance light spilled from the kitchen doorway of the farmhouse; moments later came the slam of the screen door, echoing across the field.

'By Michaelmas,' he went on, 'I'll have every acre planted, clear back to the stream.' He smiled at the thought. 'You wait and see. This land's going to look like the Garden of Eden!'

The one called Joram paused and looked his way. If he was smiling, the darkness concealed it. 'Mark you, Brother Sarr,' he said softly, 'the Gospels speak of another garden.' They knew he meant Gethsemane.

From beyond the fire came the faint clanging of a bell. Joram held up his hand. 'It's ready,' he said. 'Come.'

They followed him from the field.

The Village was alive tonight. The shoe stores and overpriced boutiques that lined both sides of Eighth Street were already closed, their windows dim, but the crowds were out in force and the food stands and novelty shops were packed. Comic T-shirts, zodiac posters, pizza slices, frozen yogurt: there was something for everyone, and everyone had a gimmick on display. Carol passed a fat girl in dirt-farmer overalls; a goateed black with a gypsy headdress and an earring; a young couple with leather pants and shiny blue streaks in their hair, the girl wearing a wristband ringed with spikes.

Perhaps it was her mood, but she found herself disliking almost everyone she saw. It did no good to narrow her eyes and view the world through a veil of lashes; the faces still swam at her out of the shadows, only now they were distorted, as in a waking dream. From a doorway a dark figure made explicit sucking sounds and hissed something at her in Spanish; a group of heavy-set blond boys staggered past, football types from the suburbs, drunk already and raining blows on the one in front, nearly shouldering her off the sidewalk. Dodging a black selling incense and a party of teenagers arguing where to go next, she slipped into a bookshop just off Sixth Avenue and killed some time by leafing through the fashion magazines. They had foreign editions of Vogue here, and photo annuals from Japan. Glossy sullen-faced women in shiny dark lipstick pouted across the pages. She tried picturing herself as some of them, and for the first time the idea didn't seem so far-fetched. St Agnes's seemed far in the past; or maybe it was just the prospect of more money to spend and her close brush with the young man at the library.

Leaving these fantasies on the rack, in magazines selling for five dollars or more, she journeyed back out onto the sidewalk, up the block, and around the corner to the relative quiet of MacDougal Street. It was less noisy here; ahead lay the darkness and trees of Washington Square, as if she'd come to the edge of the city. It was time she got some food in her.

That was not going to be easy, unless she was willing to stand at a counter eating vegetable tacos or falafel or a greasy wedge of pizza. She had only seven dollars in her wallet, with perhaps two more in change. This might well have to last her till Monday; Rosie's expense check was useless for the moment, and – if her supermarket refused to cash it – would remain so all weekend. Her roommate never had any money either; she got men to pay for everything. It was an arrangement that, at this point, Carol would have welcomed.

With a hand on her pocketbook and an eye peeled for strangers she wandered farther south, lingering a minute or two before a shop off the park, where she stared pensively at a slinky blue dress in the window and tried to imagine herself in it. Afterward she considered a more modest transaction – treating herself to cappuccino and a croissant in one of the coffeehouses along Bleecker Street – but a dollar eighty-five seemed a foolish price to pay for a cup of coffee. Besides, all the seats were taken in every place she passed; couples waited morosely by the open doorways, peering inside for vacancies, while others sprawled over tables set up cafe-style on the sidewalk. Movement here was only partially impeded, but farther west the sidewalks were completely blocked by street musicians. Standing behind open guitar cases or hopeful-looking upturned hats, they played wherever the crowds were thickest. From every side their music filled the night.

Carol fought her way past the crowd surrounding a Jamaican steel drummer and felt her exhaustion returning; somewhere soon she would have to rest. She was just crossing the street to avoid an even larger mob near the corner, flute music issuing from its midst, when, among the knot of spectators, their backs to her, her eye was caught by a bit of movement and a flash of red. It was a red canvas bag, swinging back and forth at the end of an all-but-unseen hand. Regularly it swung out from the crowd, then was lost again from sight, like the pendulum on an overwound clock – or the leg she'd seen swinging in the darkness of the classroom.

It was him, of course; Jeremy, the young man from the library. Even from behind, she recognized the book bag, the stocky build, the rumpled seersucker jacket that hung from one plump shoulder. He seemed to be alone. And as she watched the bag appear and disappear, appear and disappear, she was struck by the crazy, not unpleasant notion that, like an engineer flagging down a train, fate was giving her a sign.

Her first impulse was to hail him, but she stopped herself in time; she didn't want to seem too aggressive. Crossing the street once more, she slipped to the opposite side of the crowd and wormed her way up to the front. At first she could see nothing but the encircling faces; they were gazing toward something on the sidewalk. She looked down. At her feet squatted a diminutive old man with shiny black skin and grimy turban, piping frenziedly upon a wooden flute. Beside him lay a battered black umbrella. Between his knees he gripped a basket filled with loose change, from the middle of which rose a pale, serpentine thing that swayed before his face.

Carol blanched. For an instant she had taken the object for some grotesque phallic joke, but now she realized what it was: a stick of wood carved to resemble a rearing snake, moved by pressure from the flautist's knee upon a metal rod. From a distance the illusion might have been effective; here on the sidewalk in front of her it just looked silly.

Suddenly the man's eyes widened as he turned toward someone in the crowd. His pudgy black fingers curled more fiercely over the stops, his cheeks puffed in and out, and the music climbed to a shrill tremolo, just as a dollar bill fluttered like a dying moth into the basket at his knees'.

Who was throwing dollars away? Carol looked up – and recognized Freirs at the same moment he recognized her. He was standing on the other side of the circle, his tie slightly askew, jamming a wallet back into his pants pocket. Street light was reflected in his glasses. As he turned and saw her, his face brightened; he signaled to Carol to wait where she was. Pushing his way through the knot of people, he made his way to her side.

'So it's you again,' he said. 'The elusive librarian!' He seemed quite pleased to see her. 'There's just no missing you – that hair of yours really stands out in a crowd. It's like a flag.' Behind him the piping grew faster, as if in celebration. 'I looked for you in class tonight. It's a shame you didn't come.'

Carol shrugged. 'I had to stay late at work,' she heard herself say. 'Maybe next time.'

'There won't be a next time,' he said, looking pleased at the fact. 'At least not till next fall.' He glanced doubtfully up the block, at the head shops and frozen-custard stands. 'Don't tell me you live around here. This is no place for anyone who works at Voorhis.'

'Oh, no,' she said, 'I was just taking the long way home.'

'Really?' He appeared to consider it a moment. 'Feel like stopping off for a drink? A cup of coffee maybe?'

She felt a queer thrill of triumph out of all proportion to the question. Absurd, of course, but there it was: a tiny voice that whispered, Anything can happen now. It was almost as if he had asked her to marry him.

Within the stone circle the flames snapped ravenously, demanding still another log. Insects danced and died amid the smoke, which, rising in a slender column, twisted among the stars and was lost in the surrounding darkness.

At the edge of the firelight the children crouched impatiently by the bag of corn seed, their eyes drawn past the flames to the tables that the older men had brought from the house and were now busy setting up: a folding bridge table, a sewing table, and the small square wooden table from the Poroths' kitchen, arranged in a row and, as the children watched, draped with a dark cloth to form one long platform. The screen door slammed again, and four women could be seen hurrying across the yard like stretcher bearers, hauling something heavy in a sagging white bedsheet. Behind them emerged others, arms laden with large brown thermos jugs which they placed by the fire. None of them spoke, and none were smiling; the only sound now was the distant clatter of pans from within the kitchen and, regular as a pulse beat, the slow and steady cadence of the crickets.

Suddenly, for the second time, the night was split by the clanging of a large brass dinner bell brandished by one of the elders. Setting it down beside him, he reached for a hand-hewn limb of cottonwood and added it to the fire. It fizzed and crackled like a living thing.

Nearby the women had lifted the bedsheet onto the tables and were crowded alongside, backs to the firelight, busily molding a flat, straw-colored mass that lay inert upon the cloth. They had been working since sundown, gathered around the huge cast-iron stove, measuring out the cornmeal, the molasses, the shortening, milk, and eggs. With practiced fingers they had scraped the separate portions still hot from the pans, fitting them together into the prescribed shape, using icing as mortar. Now at last it was ready, arranged hot and smoking by the fireside, awaiting the workers' return from the fields.

The younger women struggled in behind the men. Theirs had been the harder job, as tradition dictated; man's work would come later, with the cultivation and the harvest. All were tired and hungry, in no mood for surprise; but all of them stopped short, men and women alike, when they saw what lay upon the bedsheet, burnished by the flickering light.

It was the size that astonished them; it was longer than a man and covered most of the combined tabletops. In shape it resembled an immense five-pointed star, its entire surface studded with an intricate pattern of currants, nuts, and glistening sweetmeats. It smelled of corn and fruit and molasses, and everything about it spoke of holidays and feasting. Only its name, born of long custom, was ordinary: cottonbread, they called it. Ceremoniously they filed around the tables.

'I didn't think I'd be seein' this again so soon,' said one of the men, wiping the dirt from his hands. 'It's a sight bigger than the loaf we had last week, wouldn't you say, Rachel?'

'That's because we don't have so many mouths to feed,' said his wife.

A heavy-set man grinned and nudged the first one in the ribs. 'Not yet, anyways!'

The men around them chuckled – all but Poroth, the youngest here, who stood a little apart from the rest, silent and uneasy. He wasn't one for joking, especially about matters such as that. Children were holy, a gift from the Lord; a woman's body was His sacred instrument.

He glanced anxiously at his wife. She was hunched beside a little girl, whispering something in her ear to coax a smile. It wasn't right that she herself was childless. Just as soon as they were out of debt he would make a mother of her; he knew she was impatient for that.

How beautiful she looked with her hair down – far more beautiful than the local wives. If only she would learn to hold her tongue! After all, this was his land and these people his guests. Even though other hands had prepared the food that lay before them, he'd refused their offers of charity and had paid for it himself. It had put him even deeper into debt; but then, first planting was a once-in-a-lifetime occasion. He prayed that nothing would mar it.

Behind the friends the townspeople assembled by the tables, behind the knots of children and old men, he noticed the spare, severe-looking figure of his mother. She was talking with his Aunt Lise and Lise's widowed daughter, Minna Buckhalter, both of them a full head taller than she was, their jet black hair drawn tightly in the back. Lise had been his late father's sister, and she and Minna bore an almost haunting resemblance to him. It was a look perhaps more handsome in a man – the wide and sturdy shoulders, the thin ascetic lips, the stern, deep-set brown eyes – though it lent them an undeniable air of strength.

His mother's back was turned to him, as it had been so often these past years – ever since, with Bible school behind him, he'd made his impetuous decision to leave the community. In time he had returned to it, with much learned and no regrets, but there was still a coolness between them. What Utile love there'd been had proven difficult to restore, like corn that wouldn't grow in played-out soil.

But then, he remembered, he had himself to blame: for when he'd returned, he hadn't been alone. He'd had a wife with him – a stranger who, while of their faith, came from outside the area and, more important, seemed to make little effort to adapt herself to local ways. Her morals were, of course, beyond reproach, her training as strict as his own; he wouldn't have considered marrying any other kind. Still, there were those who thought her frivolous, high-spirited – dangerous, even. And then there'd been the question of the ceremony itself, that hurried little song-and-dance performed by an assistant college chaplain, with none of the parents in attendance… Yes, it was a lot for a mother to forgive, especially one who had no other child. Though he couldn't help but wish she were a little less reluctant to so much as speak Deborah's name.

Lately he'd begun to wonder if this hardness of his mother's wasn't somehow connected, in some mysterious and fundamental way, with the very things that made her so special in the community – her supposed 'gifts.' He himself felt no particular reverence for them; what good had they ever done him? What good, for that matter, had they ever done her? Sometimes, in fact, it seemed as if this special knowledge was all but wasted on her; it apparently brought her not a moment's pleasure. She was like one who, shown a magic window to the future, yawns and looks away. Throughout her life she'd seen things, heard things, felt things coming – bitter winters, summer droughts, births and deaths and storms – but none of them had ever seemed to matter. Nothing had commanded her attention, nothing moved her: nothing, at least, within the bounds of the visible world. "Tisn't right to get attached to things,' she liked to say. 'The Lord don't mean for us to love one another too much.'

She had baffled him even in the early days, before his father's death. There'd been times when she appeared to lead an almost secretive existence apart from the family, nor had she ever shown the slightest interest in its affairs. She had shared none of her husband's devotion to business, the doings of the town, the rise and fall of others' crops or the fortunes of his own beloved store, the buying and selling of grain and supplies, the faithful nightly entries in the ledger, the bedside prayers for guidance as he balanced his obligations to God and the community with the same care he brought to balancing his books. Instead, even then, she'd been prone to moods of distance and distraction, as if listening for faraway voices or preoccupied by some half-remembered dream.

It had been clear, even then, that the Brethren felt uneasy in her presence, though they were loud in the praise of her piety. Many of them still clearly regarded her as something of an oracle, and she was popularly reputed to have second sight. As to the actual extent of her powers, Poroth himself couldn't say; he only knew that he had inherited no such powers himself – for which he supposed he was glad. Still, watching her as she stood there in the darkness, her face, as always, turned away from him and the moonlight so cold on her hair, he found himself recalling all the things this night represented and longing for some small token of encouragement from her, some word of benediction.

But that, he knew, would have to come from somewhere else.

Nor was it long in coming. The others, he saw now, had fallen silent. They were watching a grey-haired woman, Sister Corah Geisel, who stood at the head of the table. Her hands held something out of sight.

'We're plain folks,' she began, gazing into the familiar faces around her. 'And I'm no good at speechmaking. You all know that this farm's been standing empty for too many years, ever since Andy Baber gave up working the land, and so we're all real glad to see it under cultivation again. But probably no one's half as glad as we are, Matthew and me. You see, livin' where we do, just over on the next road, we've always felt kind of on the edge of things out here, and. .. well, it's good to have some company again!' The others laughed and nodded. 'So, bein' as we're their closest neighbors, and since there's no one likelier to do them this service, we wanted Sarr and Deborah here to have our chaplet.' She held up a dried and withered garland of corn: two ears, the husks, and a shaggy mass of leaves. 'It's from a good crop – the Lord was bountiful last summer -and you all know it just wouldn't be right to plant without one. We're hopin' it'll get these young people off to a proper start.' Solemn as if she were crowning a queen, she placed the garland upon the uppermost point of the star-shaped loaf.

Faces turned toward him expectantly, his mother's among them; Poroth realized he would have to say something. He cleared his throat. 'Brother Matthew and Sister Corah do us a real honor, and I know the Lord'll bless them for their neighborliness. We give thanks for the bread we're about to eat, and thanks for those who prepared it. It's made from store-bought cornmeal, but next year, thanks to you good folks, we'll be using our own.'

'And next year we'll be planting on time!' Deborah had added that. She'd replaced Sister Corah at the head of the table and stood clutching a long, serrated bread knife, its blade gleaming redly in the firelight. The brightness was reflected in her eyes.

'And now,' he said quickly, 'let us bow our heads together in silent prayer.' He stood biting his lips, eyes closed, but the only sound he heard was one of the children driving some predator from the corn seed.

At last he looked up. He had been distracted, annoyed at his wife; there had been no prayer in his heart. He wondered if somehow the others had seen, but they were staring pensively at the cottonbread as if lost in recollection. Only Deborah herself stood watching him now – and, just beyond the firelight, seven pairs of wide unwinking eyes. He hadn't noticed them till this moment.

'How did they get out?' he whispered, nodding toward the cats as he moved beside his wife.

She shrugged. 'I never locked 'em up.'

'Of all the dumb-' Once more he dropped his voice. 'You know how Brother Joram feels.'

'Oh, honey, don't be angry with me. Tisn't anything important. Joram will just have to watch his step.' She reached once more for the knife. 'Are we ready?'

He nodded curtly. 'Ready.'

Metal flashed. She brought up her hand and, with a smooth stroke, sliced off the topmost point of the star. It remained lying before them, still decorated by the cuttings from last year's crop.

Just beyond the firelight the seven pairs of eyes followed every movement, missing nothing. Silent as shadows, two of the animals' rose and padded back to the house. The others crouched nearer the flames, purring softly.

Corn fragrance hung above the table, reminding those assembled of their empty bellies. With the first clean slice the spell that held them had been dissipated, replaced by simple hunger. They murmured in anticipation.

'Brothers, sisters,' said Poroth gravely, 'let us break bread.'

The command was, this time, a literal one. Crowded around the bread loaf, the celebrants broke chunks off with their hands. They were polite, even deferential; the pieces they took were not large. Still, the star's smooth contours soon looked ragged, and before long, limbs devoured, it had been reduced to a shapeless yellow mass. The severed portion, a triangle nearly as large as a kite, was brought past the fire to the children, who greeted it with shouts of pleasure. It had been garnished with extra sweetmeats, including three plump candied crab apples and a slice of glazed peach; they fell upon it eagerly. The garland of corn had been removed beforehand and left in a prominent place at the head of the table, where it presided over the destruction of the loaf.

Like corn bread it was dry, crumbly, and provoked an immediate thirst. Cups were handed around; the thermos jugs were emptied, disgorging strong hot coffee brewed with chocolate. Older children trooped forward for their share; the younger ones sang planting songs, or dozed, or fought over the sweetmeats. Men were lying full-length on the grass; benches were not part of this occasion. Some of the married couples sat together in the darkness, washing down the last of the bread while they searched the zenith for meteors; others remained standing, sipping their coffee as they gazed dreamily into the flames. In the warm reddish light their features were drained of detail, taking on the ageless look of masks. Here and there a lightning bug glowed and dimmed above the lawn, and in the sky beyond the cornfield the Sickle rolled serenely toward the western horizon. Children chased a buzzing June bug from the bag of seed; overhead Draco and the Queen wheeled in an endless chase around the pole star, the Dragon's tail directly overhead. In its tip shone Thuban, pole star of the ancients, once a herdsman's beacon and the light to which the pyramids aspired, stony angles pointing toward its gleam. Since that hour five thousand years had flashed and died like sparks; the heavens had shifted. But not until this present spring had the world really changed.

At night the city seemed immense. The sidewalks looked as wide as streets, the streets like highways; in the absence of traffic the avenue resembled a dim, empty arena, its spectators all gone home. Cars passed only at intervals now, in groups of two or three, and could be heard from blocks away. Carol's voice sounded loud amid the silence.

'Jeremy, I can't keep up with you!'

'Sorry,' he said. 'I guess I'm still upset about that bag.'

The two of them were walking north toward Chelsea, their footsteps slapping heavily against the pavement. Freirs no longer had his book bag. Earlier that evening they had stopped to eat in a crowded little Italian restaurant on Sullivan Street, Freirs slipping the bag beneath his chair, and later when he'd reached for it, it had been gone – stolen, most likely, though Freirs still clung to the hope that it had been taken by accident and might eventually be returned; it had contained nothing but books and student papers.

The loss of the bag had spoiled what had been, until then, a happy evening, though for Carol the incident was already receding into the haze of the past. The two of them had shared a bottle of chianti over dinner; she'd had nothing to eat since her afternoon break, and that first glass had immediately gone to her head. Later, after coffee, he'd convinced her to join him in a brandy. It had never taken much to get her drunk, and tonight she'd been especially susceptible. Despite the coffee, she was beginning to feel drowsy and, in her imagination, was already staggering into bed and pressing her body in sleep against the cool sheets. She could think about the day's events tomorrow morning.

It was now well past midnight. A mile to the north the red, white, and blue lights that illuminated the Empire State Building throughout the July Fourth season had gone dark, with only the wink of a red warning beacon left to mark the top, while up and down the avenue the lights of the deserted shops glowed pallidly behind steel security gates. In the shadows of a butcher's window, hanging carcasses and the goose-pimpled body of a turkey pressed against the metal bars like creatures in a cage.

She walked slowly, aware that she'd eaten too much. Still, hadn't it been nice of him to take her out like that! It was something she missed, here in New York, where most restaurants were beyond her means, places to pass without entering. Today, though, her luck seemed to have changed. All evening she'd been thinking of Rosie's check, carefully folded in her handbag, and of how she was going to spend it. Two benefactors on the same day – it was almost too much to believe.

'I feel like I've eaten enough to last the whole weekend,' she said, hoping she sounded sufficiently grateful.

'I wish I could say the same.' As he walked he stared gloomily down at his paunch, as if surprised it was still there. 'I've really got to get in shape this summer. If I don't lose around twenty pounds

… ' He shook his head.

They were passing the open doorway of a barroom, its patrons concealed by darkness; the sounds of salsa music and argument spilled out into the night. Carol hurried after him.

'I don't think you look so bad. Honestly.'

'Well, thanks.' He stood a little straighter. 'But you should have seen me a year ago, during my diet. I was positively lean then. Like you.'

She shrugged, though she knew she'd been complimented. 'My two older sisters have really full figures. I was always the skinny one.'

'Not me,' he said mournfully. 'When I was growing up I was a regular little tub. My parents had to send me to a weight-watchers' camp in Connecticut.' He slowed, briefly, for her to catch up. 'You know, come to think of it, that was just about the only time I ever really got out into the country. That, and a temple youth-group trip, and a few weeks at a tennis camp on Long Island. Pretty provincial, huh?'

'Oh, I wouldn't say that.' She wondered if he'd been kidding. 'I'll bet you think it's the rest of us who are provincial.'

He grinned. 'I don't deny it! But then, that's what comes of being a New Yorker all my life.' With an easy sweep of his hand he took in the nearly deserted street, the lights of distant traffic, and, it seemed to her, the whole titanic nightscape of the city, the dark alleys, silent buildings, and the millions around them now dreaming in their beds.

She envied him his growing up here. It was a world he knew well enough to thrive within, and one he might help her know better -something, anyway, worth hoping for. For a moment, as she walked up the avenue with him, Freirs already ahead once more, it seemed to her that she was on a different street entirely, one that, if only she didn't stumble, would lead her to a future in which all things were possible.

'I can't help wondering,' she said at last, 'what you'd make of my town.'

Tm sure I'd like it.'

She laughed. 'Don't be. It isn't very interesting.'

'Well, you know – Pennsylvania and all.' He waved his hand vaguely to the left. 'I expect it's pretty scenic out there.'

She glanced at him skeptically. 'You sound as if you've never been west of the Hudson.'

'Oh, don't get me wrong,' he said. 'I've done my share of traveling. L.A., Chicago, Miami…" He waited till she'd drawn beside him. 'My parents moved down to Florida a few years ago. Horrible place! And after college I spent some time in Europe. But as for good old country living in the good old U.S.A. -you know, going to sleep with the chickens, getting up with the hogs, or whatever it is they do out there… ' He shrugged.

They were approaching another bar now. Carol moved closer to his side. She couldn't explain why, but she felt quite safe with him, despite the fact that he himself was plainly somewhat tense. Both of them had been sobered by the loss of the book bag, and the night had sharpened her senses when she'd first stepped from the restaurant, but now her giddiness was returning. Perhaps it was Jeremy, or perhaps only the drink. Love stories always made her weep when she read them late at night, whether or not they were really sad; she trembled at mysteries after too much black coffee, even when their plots held no terrors. It was hard to tell for sure.

Normally she might have been a great deal more apprehensive. Although they were nearing her own neighborhood in Chelsea now, she was unaccustomed to being outdoors at this hour, when every stranger was potentially a threat: the sleepy-eyed schoolboy who shuffled past them, hands plunged deep into his pockets, might be secretly caressing a rosary down there, or his own nakedness, or a knife. Faces which would have been ignored by day now took on a peculiar cast, and she was acutely aware of figures in the distance, coming toward her through the empty streets. Even their footfalls were audible; she could hear them, and anticipate the encounter, from several blocks away.

At this moment the view ahead held only a bored-looking householder walking his dog. From the sidewalk behind came the voices of a couple speaking rapidly in Spanish and, across the avenue, the echoes of a small, lumpish figure staggering after them upon a black cane, a tattered parcel clutched beneath its arm. Newspapers swept like ghosts through the foyer of an abandoned movie theater near the corner, its marquee blank, display case bare of posters; wind stirred the heaped-up trash against the doors as the two of them hurried past, reminding Carol of the rustle of dead leaves.

'You know something?' she said. 'I think the country will be good for you.'

'Really?' He sounded as if he cared. 'I sure hope so, because I keep suspecting I've been missing something.'

'Well, I think you have. Of course-'

She stumbled slightly and felt his hand reach out to steady her. He seemed to hold her longer than was necessary.

'Of course, I don't know you very well,' she said, pulling away slightly. 'You may get bored. What are you going to do if you're unhappy out there?'

'Unhappy? What do you mean?'

'Can you just come back here to the city if it turns out you don't like it? I hope you haven't paid the whole thing in advance.'

'No, I haven't paid anything yet,' he said. 'But I told the Poroths I'd stay the summer, and they're expecting me to, so I guess I have a certain commitment.'

'Still, that's hardly the same as a contract.'

'Maybe,' he said, glancing at the figures behind them. 'But I feel my word to the Poroths is just as binding as a contract. It's the way those people operate. And anyway, I did sign something with the other couple, the ones subletting my apartment. They wanted the place till September, and I gave it to 'em. They wanted the whole thing in writing, and' – he shrugged – 'I gave it to 'em. So I just made my mind up: I'm going to stay the whole summer and that's all there is to it. You won't find me coming home crying!'

For a moment she thought she'd heard real self-pity in his voice, but then, screwing up his face, he made a mocking little sound like the sobbing of a baby, and she broke into laughter. Soon he was laughing with her – but only for a moment; clearly the doubts she'd raised were still on his mind.

'Jesus, I hope I don't get bored out there,' he said. 'I certainly don't expect to. My dissertation alone should keep me busy round the clock. If you could see the size of my reading list… 'He shook his head. 'God, I'm still so pissed about that book bag. There were things in there of my own, aside from all those papers. You wouldn't believe the catching up I've got to do. There's a course I'm teaching next fall that I'm completely unprepared for, a night class at Columbia-'

'I thought you taught at the New School.'

'Sure, but nobody's going to pay the rent on that. You've really got to scramble for the jobs these days. You've got to take whatever comes along and hope that someday someplace gives you tenure. Me, I admit it, I'm a bit of a hack. I'll go wherever you pay me and teach whatever they like.'

She felt a trace of envy. 'The pay must be good at Columbia.'

'Well, it isn't actually the college I'll be with, it's the General Studies program. But it's the best I can do right now. The course itself is partly my idea… '

The rest of his words were drowned out when, beneath their feet, the pavement trembled like the roll of a hundred drums. In an instant they were engulfed by a cavernously deep rumbling, as if something vast and invisible were bearing down upon their lives. Through the subterranean corridors below them an IND express hurtled noisily uptown, leaving only silence in its wake.

Silence… but broken by a certain sound behind them, a queer irregular thump-and-scrape from somewhere down the block.

'What will it be on?'

'Pardon?' He was peering over his shoulder, but quickly turned back to her; one didn't stare at cripples. In the distance the little figure with the cane, head bowed, continued its laborious progress up the sidewalk. The emptiness and the night seemed to press heavily upon it.

'Your course,' she said. 'What'll it be on?'

'I'm calling it "The Gothic Imagination." That's the kind of title they go for up there. I told them I'd start with Shakespeare and work right up to Absalom, Absalom, and believe it or not, they bought it. They must think-'

'Wait a second! Since when did Shakespeare write gothics?'

He paused. 'Well, there's always Hamlet. You know – ghost on the battlements, lost inheritance… But that was just part of the sales pitch. The same with the Faulkner; I threw them in for the names. The truth is, I'll mainly be reading a lot of crazy old horror stories, the sort of stuff I should have read ten years ago. I've been faking it all this time, and now's my chance to find out what I've missed.' He turned to look at her, smiling. 'Should be fun, eh?'

She felt a tiny urge to needle him, for there was something about his enthusiasm that irritated her – the same smug faith in good fortune, perhaps, which she occasionally recognized in herself. Or perhaps it was just that he seemed so blithely prepared to leave her.

'And what will you do out there,' she asked, 'if you get sick of ghost stories?'

'Oh, that shouldn't be a problem,' he said. 'I'm pretty good at keeping myself busy. One thing's for sure, I'm not going to spend the summer sitting on my ass. I'm going to get myself in shape, maybe even do a little jogging. Establish a routine and stick to it. Bran and yogurt at breakfast, dental floss at night, shoes on the shoe trees before going to bed… '

She noticed with some amusement that, as he spoke, he was swinging his arms more forcefully and holding his head up straighter.

'And in the evening,' he said, 'who knows? I might try to teach myself astronomy. That's something you can't do in the city – stargazing. I'm bringing out a book with all the maps. It'll be nice to learn what's actually up there.'

The two of them looked upward as they passed along the block, but by now the city sky was almost starless. The moon had vanished behind the buildings to the west; they saw it shining low over the cross streets and the vacant lots.

'If things get too boring,' he added, 'I suppose I can always get a lift into Gilead. What there is of it, anyway.' He shrugged. 'And, of course, if worst comes to worst, I can always try bird-watching, I hear that's fun, or go for walks in the woods. In fact – now, don't laugh! – I'm bringing out a whole slew of those little illustrated field guides. I mean, let's face it, I don't know a hell of a lot about campcraft – I'm like the guy in the joke: the last time I tried rubbing two sticks together was in a Chinese restaurant – but there are quite a few things I'd really like to learn: like mushroom hunting, and animal tracks, and the names of some of the flowers. Round-lobed hepatica, Dutchman's-breeches' – the names rolled off his tongue -'bachelor's button, touch-me-not… '

She nudged him with her elbow. 'You sound just like the nature counselor at B.C.Y. C'

'Oh, yeah?' He stopped and faced her. 'And what, pray tell, is B.C.Y.C.?'

'Beaver County Youth Camp.'

His mouth opened in a incredulous grin. 'Beaver County? Is that where you're from?'

'Uh-huh!' She burst into giggles.

He laughed, too, with something like relief. 'The girl from Beaver County… What a find!'It was as if a wall between them had been broken. They leaned against one another, rocking with laughter. 'And what a great title for a film! We'll get-'

Suddenly he caught his breath. She felt him stiffen.

'Jesus! How does that guy keep up with us?' He squinted into the darkness. 'I've never seen a cripple move so fast.'

She turned and looked, but the sidewalk behind them was empty, the streets hushed but for the wail of a distant police siren, rising and falling, rising and falling, like a hungry baby screaming unheeded in the night.

The time of idleness was drawing to an end. Away from the others, near the rosebushes at the side of the house, the Poroths lay drowsily in the long grass and the shadows from the kitchen light, resting beside one another. They were alone here but for a trio of their cats, two stretched in sleep between them, another curled purring on Deborah's stomach. With the murmur of voices so distant and the bonfire out of sight behind the house, Sarr felt sorely tempted to roll over and hold her in his arms – they were used to making love among the animals, outdoors as well as in – but he forced the desire from his mind. Not for another full day; not until the planting was complete. Sunday, though, was going to be special. Sunday after services…

'Just a few more hours of this, Lord be praised,' he said. 'But I can't say as I look forward to tomorrow night, with just the two of us.

I'll bet we end up working straight through to Sunday morning.'

Deborah made a sympathetic noise. 'I sure hope I don't doze off again in the middle of the sermon. They've never let me forget it!'

'Don't worry,' he said sharply, 'I'll make sure you stay awake. But as soon as we come back here, I'm going to sleep for the rest of the day. And you're going to be right there beside me, naked as Old Mother Eve; so that when I get up-'

'Oh, no, I'm not, honey. And neither are you.' She reached over and ran her fingers through the dark hair on his chin. 'Don't you remember? We've got a visitor coming on Sunday.'

Sarr made a face in the darkness. 'I forgot all about him.' With a sigh he sat up, dislodging a cat about to seat itself on his chest. 'Well, at least it'll bring in some money. Lord knows we can use it.' He turned and looked across the lawn at the outbuilding, a squat black form against the night sky.

'We'll have to get the place fixed up tomorrow,' said Deborah, as if reading his thoughts. 'Put up the screens and get the ivy off those windows. And I don't intend doing it all myself.'

He grunted noncommittally.

'We'd best do it early,' she went on. 'We'll have more planting at night, and Sunday'll be too late. 'Twould be awful if he came out here with all his goods, took another look at the place, then turned around and went home.' She paused, speculating. 'I sure hope he doesn't mind a few bugs.'

He got to his knees and began brushing the dirt from his pants. 'Well,' he said, 'you never know about those city people.' Yawning, he stood and sniffed the air; the wind was blowing off the marsh, but he could smell the fragrance of the freshly planted field, the moist soil and vegetation. 'All right, woman!' He prodded her gently with his toe. 'High time we got back to the others.'

'Sure wouldn't want old Joram to squawk!'

'No, wouldn't want that.' He smiled in spite of himself, but then felt a surge of anger. How dare she talk that way? And how dare he let her? Troubled, he turned from her to stare into the distance. As always, the view calmed him. He was simply going to have to make her understand. But not now, not on such a night…

There was a faint glow in the eastern sky, past the outbuilding and the woods. The wind was blowing from behind him and went hissing through the tops of the trees; they nodded together as if sharing a secret. As a boy, on nights like this, he'd used to pretend that, if he stood on tiptoe, he could see truck depots, railroad yards, and glimmering lights – the lights of New York City, not fifty miles away.

Rejoining the others gathered around the cottonwood fire, they savored the last quiet moments before their return to the field. Here and there a knife blade rose and fell in the ruddy light as the younger men sat sharpening the ends of their staffs. Two acres had already been planted; before they departed tonight they'd have completed two more. A fifth would still remain, but after dark tomorrow Poroth and his wife could see to that themselves. "Twill keep 'em out of mischief on a Saturday night,' joked one of the men. 'We'll see 'em stagger into worship next morning with corn seed in their hair!'

Poroth made no answer. He was crouched in the shadow of the table and, as tradition demanded, was busy binding last year's garland to the top of the staff. The dried husks and withered ears dangled from the wood like talismans atop a spear.

Some of the more flirtatious wives stood near the men but talked among themselves, flaunting their long, unfettered hair. As a rule it was worn pinned up in a severe and deliberately unbecoming style, to be let down only at bedtime before one's own husband. During the yearly planting, however, this rule was relaxed.

'Like a pack of spoony schoolgirls!' came a low, laconic voice from the darkness. ' "Father, turn away mine eyes from beholdin' vanity." '

Deborah's youthful figure broke away from the others. 'Why, Rupert Lindt, is that all you can say after staring at us half the night?' She took another step forward and, with a toss of her head, struck a mock-seductive pose. 'You better go back and read the second half of the book: "If a woman have long hair, 'tis a glory to her." '

From the darkness came the man's embarrassed laugh and an automatic chorus of amen's. The one called Joram frowned and looked away. Among the Brethren it was considered unseemly for a woman to speak to a man other than her husband, and they took an equally dim view of those who quoted scripture back and forth in argument; for a people so conversant with the Bible it was far too easy to do. 'Sarr,' he said at last, turning to the younger man, 'you've come back to us like a prodigal son, and we rejoice in it – just as we rejoice in the wife you've brought back. The Holy Spirit's in her, we all know it is, but there's still much she'll have to be taught. 'Tisn't a night for jests. "They that sow in tears shall reap in joy." I think you know the rest.'

'I do,' said the other, aware of the correct response. ' "He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him." Don't worry, Brother Joram. I'll teach her to weep.'

Beside him came a muttered 'Amen.'

From the west a breeze gathered, carrying the scent of marsh water and rotting pine; it ruffled their beards and stirred the rosebushes at the side of the house. The night was cooler now, and the work sweat had dried on their bodies. They turned to face the fire, the men in their vests, the women in long dresses. Bats flitted through the darkness above them like the shadows of small birds; moths clustered around the dancing flames where the old men stood talking. Across the lawn bustling shapes moved to and fro in the light of the kitchen. The screen door opened, and a line of older women emerged from the house bearing small metal lanterns to help with the clean-up. The door slammed shut. Low in the sky the half-moon seemed close enough to touch, God's oppressive thumbnail poised just above their heads.

Joram stood. 'Up, brothers, sisters,' he called softly, striding toward the fields. 'We've sore travail before us.' Passing the knot of children, he bent and addressed the smallest of them, all but dwarfed by the bag of seed. 'Now mark you don't let varmints eat a single one,' he warned. "Twould be bad portent!' With his face turned away from the firelight it was impossible to tell if he was smiling.

Soundlessly the others followed. The time of rest was over.

By now the tables had been cleared of the last scraps of food and of the cloth that had covered them. A lantern had been placed upon the one in the center, and in its beam a younger woman stood folding up the bridge table, her hair knotted back like that of the elders in the kitchen. Moving past the tables, Poroth set down his staff and approached her.

'I want to thank you, Cousin Minna,' he said, putting a hand on her shoulder. 'It was good of you to come tonight. I only wish you could've been out there with the rest of us.'

The other nodded gravely. Above the glowing lantern, her homely face looked prematurely aged. 'Piet wouldn't have wanted me to stay home and mope. You know how he loved a night like this, with all the folks gettin' together underneath the stars. I can feel his spirit with me right this very minute, standin' by my side. It's with me all the time, these days. I expect you feel it too.'

'I do,' said Poroth – and in a way he did. Or maybe it was just a passing breeze. 'I swear he's almost close enough to touch.'

Hearing a faint movement behind him, he turned half eagerly to look and found himself facing his mother. She was carrying one of the empty brown jugs back to the kitchen.

'Here,' he said, 'let me help you with that.' He took it from her and started toward the house, expecting she would walk beside him. But moments later, looking back, he saw that she hadn't moved. She was standing perfectly still, as if the shores of some vast and invisible ocean were stretched before her feet, and she was watching him with an expression which, in the dim light, he found difficult to read.

'You go on,' she said. 'Your Aunt Lise is in there washing up.'

'I know she is,' he said, puzzled. 'So are all the rest. Aren't you coming?'

She shook her head. 'I've got to be getting along. It's later than I thought.' Poroth heard a certain weariness in her voice. He was about to return to her side, but she stepped away from him and held up her hand. 'No, don't worry about me. Ain't nothing more I can do to help around here. You'd best be getting back to the field. The others'll be out there by now.'

'I don't plan to keep them waiting,' he said. 'But first I'd like to hear just how you think you're going to get home.'

She shrugged. 'The Lord gave me two good legs, and I'm not too old to use them.'

Somehow he had known that that was what she'd say. There was really no arguing with her, once her mind was made up, though he felt it his duty to try. 'Mother, with all its turns that road's a good six miles long, and it's at least another mile to your house. That's quite a ways to walk.'

'You don't have to tell me how long it is,' she said. 'I've been down that road before.'

'That was during the day. This time you'll be walking in the dark.'

'You know what they say. Tis only dark for them that will not see.' She began moving away.

'I don't understand,' he said. 'What's all this hurry for? You came with Aunt Lise, and now she'll be expecting to take you home. Or if you don't mind waiting a spell, you can go with Amos Reid. He and Rachel brought their car tonight. So did lots of others.'

She shook her head again, looking vaguely troubled. No, not troubled, exactly. It was something about her eyes, a kind of resignation. 'I haven't time to wait,' she said almost mournfully. 'The night's got me thinking, somehow, thinking about what's coming and what's past, and how there's something I should be doing that I'm not. I just can't seem to shake it, the thought of what's ahead… ' She muttered something under her breath.

The young man strained to hear what she had whispered; it had sounded like 'the Voolas.' He had never seen her quite so bad before. 'Now just hold on a minute,' he said. 'You've gone and got yourself in a state. And there's no cause to, not tonight. Tonight's a time for rejoicing. After all, just look at me!' He threw wide his arms. 'Here I am, all set up now, back where I belong. On our own land.'

'Don't go talking foolishness, son. The land ain't ours. You know very well that Andy Baber owned this place, and so did Andy's father, and his father before him.'

He scowled. 'Well, it was ours a hundred years ago – which means that we came first. That's the whole reason I bought this farm. I figured you'd be pleased, seeing as how your people were the ones who built it.'

'They weren't my people. It's a big family, you know that. They were just another branch.'

'They were Troets.'

She nodded bitterly. 'And you remember what happened to them?'

He felt a chill pass over his shoulders. Why had she brought that up? Was she trying to spoil this night for him?

But she had already begun to apologize. 'Don't pay me no mind,' she was saying. 'I'm just a useless old woman. Fact is, it's done me good, seeing you here in this house of your own, the seeds in the earth, the bread on the table. The night's been blessed, so far, and

I'm sure the crops'll do just fine. I just wish there was something I could do for you and Deborah, but… ' She paused, as if remembering. 'But now it seems it's later than I thought.'

With a brief dismissive wave she turned and moved off across the lawn, passing between the outbuildings and the farmhouse, heading toward the road. For a moment, walking through the squares of light spread on the grass beneath the kitchen windows, her figure seemed to grow larger and, somehow, almost fierce; then she'd passed beyond them, becoming once again as dim and insubstantial as a wraith on some forlorn moonlit errand. Circling around the side of the house, she slipped into its shadow and was gone.

He remained standing there, watching for her to reappear among the trees that lined the road, but after a minute or two he turned away. Setting the jug back near the foot of the table, he stooped to retrieve his staff and walked bemusedly toward the fields to join the other men. The night was indeed turning out to be a blessed one; his mother's private sorrows were already forgotten. At long last she had mentioned Deborah by name – surely that meant something! – and the crops, she'd said, would do just fine.

He felt like singing.

Behind him, past the fire, the younger women had replenished the sacks they'd carried at their sides, leaving the huge burlap seed bag only a quarter full. Huddled nearby, their features drawn and fatigued, the children sat watching intently for every kernel spilled-but no more intently than the four remaining cats, who crouched unseen in the shadows beyond the ring of stones, eyes aglow like coals.

As the women shouldered their now-heavy sacks and trudged slowly back to the fields, the smallest of the children dipped his hand into the bag and brought up a streaming fistful of seeds. Wagging a finger in solemn imitation of his elders, he admonished the corn in a grave whisper:

'Mark thee, mind thee,

Gillycorn Hill… '

Stooping amid the plowed furrows, the women took up the chant and repeated the same traditional warning:

If Crow don't find thee,

Mouse he will.'

As they straightened up, one of them groaned and rubbed her stomach. The woman beside her smiled. 'What ails you, sister? Too much cottonbread?'

The other nodded. 'That star was big as a barn door, and I think I ate half of it! Don't know why they call it cottonbread – it's heavy as a stone.'

Deborah paused to push back a lock of hair. 'My husband knows all about that sort of thing,' she said, 'but he seems to want to keep it to himself.'

The moon was settling into the treetops. They peered ahead into the gloom, where the seven men were a row of moving shadows. 'That was stone-ground white flint cornmeal' Poroth was saying. 'I had to send all the way to Tipton for it. The man who sold it to me – a blackhat from the Barrens – said it'd been milled by waterpower.'

One of the others shook his head. 'Probably charged you double for it!'

A few of them laughed, but the younger man pretended not to hear. 'It was made of the same seeds we're planting tonight,' he went on, 'the same white flint corn that the Indians grew. Just the thing for a start as late as this. They say it has the shortest season.'

'Let's hope it's not too short,' came a stern voice from the down the row. 'Short the life of man, and soon the harvest.'

'Now let's be fair, Joram,' said another. 'You said yourself it made a real nice cottonbread.'

His wife, walking several paces behind them, had been waiting for this moment. 'Amos,' she called, 'will you ask Brother Sarr something for me?'

The chanting died. In the sudden silence her words rang across the field.

'Ask him why they call it cottonbread?'

The young man didn't wait for the question to be repeated. 'I thought everybody knew that,' he said quickly, without looking back over his shoulder. 'It's because they used to cook it over the cottonwood fire. Tasted real good, I'll bet!' As if to put an end to the subject, he slammed his staff with special vehemence into the earth. The crown of corn leaves rustled fiercely.

The question had come as a surprise; he hoped he'd sounded convincing. Obviously Deborah had been talking again. Would she never learn? Back there by the fire Brother Joram had practically told him to take a stick to her, and he, for all his college education, had found himself agreeing. She was getting to him, that woman, in more ways than one…

He paused a moment and turned to watch her slip three seeds into the hole he'd just made. Her hair swept loosely past her face, the way it did as she climbed into bed beside him each night. Standing, she covered the hole with a careless scrape of her bare foot, and as she looked up their eyes met. She smiled. It was a loving smile, and a knowing one.

He looked down, biting his lip. He was hungry for her, and she knew it. All week he had avoided her embrace, hoarding his pent-up energies for the planting; it would help ensure a bountiful crop. But now the sight of her moving another pace closer and bending toward the earth, deliberately thrusting out her hips, so aroused him that he had to turn his face away or he'd have cried out. Savagely he plunged his staff into the furrowed ground and gave it a violent twist; several leaves were shaken off and lost in the darkness. If only he hadn't made that vow… He thought of her round body, the softness of her skin beneath the rough dress, and wondered, as he rejoined the ranks of the men, if he dared hoist that dress and enter her tonight, with all the corn seed not yet sown.

Nudging the woman beside her, Deborah nodded toward her husband. 'Did you see the way Sarr was looking at me?' she said in a low, husky voice. 'As soon as you folks leave, I swear he's going to take me right here in this field!'

The image was a scandalous one, but credible nonetheless. They burst into delighted laughter.

Poroth heard the laughter, but not what had provoked it. 'Like a pack of spoony schoolgirls,' Rupert Lindt had said, and he'd been right. How deliriously innocent they were, Deborah no less than the rest. And how shocked they'd be if he told them the truth about what they'd done tonight.

'Hide thee, haste thee,

Gillycorn Hill… '

He had stumbled upon it, quite by accident, in German class; a book in the college library, confirming his suspicions, had hinted at still darker things, older than the pyramids, older than recorded history. He'd read of pre-Christian nature worship and how, each spring, tribesmen had once sacrificed their gods in human form. The rest he'd figured out for himself. Beneath his neighbors' sober-sided piety he had glimpsed the painted face of the savage; behind this evening's quaint observance he had seen a blood-stained altar and a figure stretched naked upon it like a five-pointed star. He had witnessed the ritual slashing of the throat, the rending of the limbs; while his friends enjoyed their moonlit meal, he'd had a vision of frenzied hands tearing at a thing without a head, while, just beyond the firelight, children fought greedily over what looked like a face. Though their flood now bore a deceptive modern name, it had formerly been known as Gottin bread, symbol of what they'd once devoured – the flesh of the Goddess incarnate, her hair the garland that now crowned his staff.

'If Mole don't taste thee,

Worm he will.'

All such goings-on, of course, were safely in the past; there was no harm in them today. Perhaps he'd read more history than the rest of the Brethren, and perhaps he'd seen more deeply tonight, but his faith remained as strong as it had always been. The origin of everything was dark, no doubt, but blood spilled long ago had long since dried. Time, he knew, made all deeds respectable; some people even ate their god each Sunday. For him all gods and goddesses were one, aspects of an all-encompassing Divine; and after tonight's sacrament, followed by his mother's benediction, he walked with the confidence of one who'd been truly blessed.

Behind him, appropriately, the women had reached the final, optimistic verse of their chant:

'Fly thee, fleet thee,

Gillycorn Hill… '

Forcing his thoughts from the altar, the naked victim, the memory of his wife, he raised his voice with theirs in an exuberant shout:

' If Worm don't eat thee,

I will!'

There was a sudden splintering of wood. The point of his staff struck something hard and wriggling. From the earth before him rose an angry sound like fat sizzling on a fire, and something thrashed convulsively, almost wresting his staff from his grasp. An ear of brittle corn snapped off and fell silently at his feet. In the distance one of the cats leaped up and went streaking across the lawn.

Lifting the staff, he squinted closely at its tip, but the moon was almost gone and he could see nothing. The wood felt cracked and pitted near the end; it was sticky to the touch, and oddly cold.

His stomach now unsettled, he pressed the staff once more into the ground, turning it against the clean soil. He said nothing to any of the others, and by the time the third acre was planted he had driven the incident from his mind.

It was then that it happened. The hour was late; the crickets still sang, but the lightning bugs were dimmed, and the moon had long since disappeared behind the scrub pines to the west. Suddenly, by the faraway blaze, a child cried out in dismay.

She was standing over the bag of seed, pointing to something at her feet. Soon she had been joined by a group of the older men.' 'Tis nothing!' one of them called hoarsely. He waved the laborers back to the field, but Poroth and his wife continued hurrying toward the fire. In its light, amid a milling crowd of children and elders, they saw the seed bag lying on its side, looking slightly more shrunken than they'd remembered it. Gaping from the bottom was a small circular hole through which spilled a steady stream of corn seed.

' 'Tis nothing,' repeated the old man. 'We'll get it all.' Around him his comrades were already gathering up the individual kernels that lay scattered in the grass.

But what none of them spoke of was the other hole they had seen and quickly covered over – a hole that, before the bag rolled on its side, had lain just below the first, twisting sinuously into the earth.

Carol was sorry when at last they reached the front steps of her building, where tattered aspidistra struggled against cellophane bags and candy wrappers in two soot-covered boxes on either side of the doorway. The place, which till now had seemed a haven, somewhere she could actually afford, suddenly looked very shabby to her; she was glad it was night and that the nearest streetlamp was several houses away. Freirs acted as if he didn't notice, but she was afraid he was only being polite. He had to be richer than he pre- tended, she was certain of it, one of those self-confident New York Jewish boys who'd grown up with all the advantages and didn't realize how lucky they were. Or if he wasn't rich, he was at least generously supplied with money and would soon be relaxing in the country while she'd still be here working all summer. For their entire walk together she'd been acutely aware, with every block they passed, that he'd be leaving the city on Sunday; and though she reminded herself that the day had been an extraordinarily good one -blessed, practically – she couldn't help feeling that, at the same time, God was being curiously cruel: no sooner had she met someone she might truly fall in love with than he was being taken away from her.

Freirs himself, she'd noticed, had begun to grow inexplicably jumpy as their walk drew to an end. He'd become skittish as a greyhound, in fact, seeing shapes in every shadow, certain they were being followed, and some of his tension had rubbed off on her. Only a few yards from her house he had frozen without warning in his tracks and seized her arm, yanking her back as if before a chasm and gesturing wordlessly at a thing the size of a pea pod that had scuttled across their path. Carol had let out a little cry before she'd realized it was only a waterbug. How in the world was a person like this going to get along in the country?

She paused at the bottom of the steps, not sure whether to ask him up for coffee or to say goodbye. 'Well, Jeremy,' she said, 'it sounds like you're in for a great summer. I envy you, I really do. I just hope you'll give me a call when you get back to the city.'

'Hell, we can do better than that. How about coming out to visit me sometime? It would do you good, get you away from the dusty old books and little old men. You could come out for the weekend' -his confidence seemed to slip – 'or else just for the day, whatever you like.'

'Oh, Jeremy, I'd love to!'

'Gilead's just a couple of hours by bus,' he went on. 'It's a nice scenic ride, really not bad at all. Or you could take the express to Flemington, around twelve miles east of it, and save yourself almost an hour. Either way, I could come pick you up. The Poroths have a truck they'd let me use.'

'That sounds wonderful,' she said. 'It would be lovely to get away for a weekend.' She wanted to ask where she would sleep if she stayed over, but didn't have the courage. Surely the farmer and his wife must have a spare room she could use.

'Great,' he said. "Then it's settled.' He already had a scrap of paper pressed against his knee and, with his foot on the bottom step, was scribbling down her house number from above the doorway. 'I'll write you when I get out there and let you know everything’s okay.'

Standing with him on the sidewalk, she followed his gaze, then looked up past the tiers of dirty brick and plaster to a row of windows on the fifth floor. They were dark. Maybe Rochelle had gone out with her boyfriend, and for once Carol would have the place to herself. More likely, though, she was in bed, and certainly not alone. 'If you'd like to come in for coffee,' Carol said, making up her mind, 'we'll have to be very quiet. My roommate's probably asleep already.'

'Oh, that's okay.' After the triumph of getting her to agree to see him, he seemed disinclined to press his luck. 'It's late, and I've got a ton of books to pack tomorrow.'

'Just don't forget to take along those nature guides,' she said, starting up the steps. 'I want you to be an expert tracker by the time I come out.'

She heard him hesitate, then follow her. When she turned he was standing beside her, smiling 'I was hoping you'd come out a good deal sooner than that,' he said. 'Maybe even next weekend.'

He held the outer door open while she reached into her handbag for her keys. 'Well,' she said, a little surprised, 'maybe I could… ' She searched her mind for doubts, objections, other plans – and realized, feeling suddenly foolish, that she had none. She had no plans for the entire summer. 'Yes,' she said, 'that might be very nice. I think I can probably get away.'

'Okay, then. I intend to write you as soon as I get out there. And you'd better write back!' He tapped her nose with the tip of his finger. 'Remember, I'm depending on it.'

'Don't worry. I've got two married sisters plus my mother, and I never miss a letter.' She paused, fitting the key into the inner lock; it was time to make her goodbyes. 'Well, I've had a wonderful evening, and I really want to thank you for- Oh, no! Look at this.' She withdrew the key and pressed against the door. It swung open at her touch. Something had happened to the bolt.

He bent to examine it. 'Looks like somebody unscrewed the little metal plate,' he said, poking at the pitted wood with his finger. 'I wonder if anything's been robbed.' He shook his head. 'This fucking city.'

She stared uncertainly into the dim light of the hallway. 'It's sort of scary.'

'Look, would you like me to come up with you? I'll just see you to your door, I don't want to come in or anything.'

'Could you, please? I'm sure there's nothing the matter, but just in case someone's inside there… ' She swallowed.

'Glad to. I'll go first.'

Frowning, he stepped into the hall. She followed him. The passage was a narrow one, and silent at this hour; their feet scraped audibly against the yellowing white tiles that climbed stained and broken halfway up the walls. At the farther end a thick black metal door concealed an elevator scarcely larger than a closet, lit by only one bare bulb that dangled from wires in the ceiling. It trembled as the two of them crowded inside, and again when the inner door slid echoingly shut.

With a whirr of distant gears the car gave a lurch and rose slowly up the darkened shaft, their shadows flirting back and forth with the swinging of the bulb. They watched the shadows, the curls of paint around the emergency button, and the numbers sliding past the small glass porthole in the door. Through it, as each new floor came into view, a pale circle of light winked open and shut like an eye, then disappeared below them. They said nothing, both of them hushed, listening.

The car slowed, sighed, and came shuddering to rest at the fifth floor. Peering through the glass before Freirs pushed ahead of her, Carol could see that there was no danger after all. The hall was empty.

She walked beside him to her door and slipped her key into the lock. It was an awkward moment; maybe she should plead with him to come in.

'Well,' she heard herself say, 'thank you once again. I had a really lovely evening.' She hoped he could see that she meant it, and wondered if he felt the same. At the turn of the key the door swung inward; beyond it the front hall was dark. She dropped her voice to a whisper. 'And it was really sweet of you to come up here like this. I only wish it weren't so late.' Quickly, before she lost her nerve, she encircled his neck with her arm and pressed a kiss to the side of his mouth. He seemed to take it as his due.

'Amen,' he said. 'See you in Jersey.'

'I'll be waiting for your letter.' She stepped into the darkness; he raised a hand in farewell and turned away. Shutting the door, she heard the clang of the elevator and, moments later, the churning of gears as it started down.

The apartment smelled of garlic and fried meat and, from the doorway of the living room, men's after-shave. Rochelle and her date had not gone out, then; there'd be no dawdling in the kitchen tonight, and no light to guide her to her room. Half feeling her way, Carol tiptoed through the hall; the only illumination came from beneath the bathroom door at the other end. As she passed, it swung silently open. In its light stood the boyfriend, staring at her open-mouthed, olive-skinned and hairy. He jumped back when he saw that it was her, his sex jiggling; she tried to look away. The light was snapped off, and she heard a low chuckle. 'Thought you were Shelly!' he said. There was toothpaste on his breath.

'No, it's only me.' She could feel the nearness of his body as she brushed past him; she groped blindly, nearly stumbling, toward her bedroom. There was the sound of breathing behind her, then a pause, and she heard him pad slowly down the hall.

Once inside the room, she closed the door tightly and switched on a small lamp by her bed. The dancers on the posters seemed to leap out from the wall, arms outstretched in welcome – Merrill Ashley, Baryshnikov, Karen Kain as the Swan Queen – but it was hard to turn her mind from that figure in the bathroom, the damp and shining hair. ..

She forced herself to think of Jeremy, hoping he was really going to send for her, reminding herself, lest she be hurt, how little she really knew of him. How strangely nervous he had been at the end of their walk here, furtively watching for criminals – and cripples! – yet never for a moment losing that special New York cockiness of his. Maybe she should have insisted he come in; she wished he were here beside her, to hold her all night in his arms, but by now he would be downstairs, perhaps back on the street. She went to her window to see.

Parting two slats of the Venetian blind, she peered outside. Yes, there he was, trotting briskly down the front steps, his body foreshortened from this angle. He seemed to be moving fast, his stride lengthening; she hoped it came from feeling good about tonight, and not from any eagerness to leave. Within seconds he'd reached the dying maple that stood halfway up the block, leaves trembling in a final ray of moonlight. Soon he would be past the corner, out of sight.

She was just about to turn from the window when, from the shadows somewhere beyond the row of tenements to her left, almost at the edge of her vision, she thought she saw a small white shape drop soundlessly to the sidewalk and go scurrying after him, waving something in its hand as if it were a wand. Midway to the corner it made a queer, mincing little pirouette and disappeared behind a line of cars parked beneath the tree.

This was no cripple; it looked as plump and agile as a child, though surely no child could be out at such an hour. Tugging at the cords along the end, she readjusted the blinds for a better view. The slats tilted open; parallel bands of street light flooded the room. She peered outside again, but it was too late: the moon had set, the street was still, the tree dark and unmoving against the sky. A trail of mist was rising in ghostly tentacles from the sidewalk. Both figures were gone.

June Twenty-fifth

A very special day indeed! Dawn has broken over the horizon like the lifting of a vast, immeasurable curtain, and the sky is rosy with promise. At ease upon the rooftop of his building, he settles back in the dusty canvas deck chair and blinks contentedly at the heavens, his face aglow with early morning sunlight. The air up here is temperate, with just a hint of blossoms beneath the street smells and the scent of roofing tar. Birds cry raucously overhead; breezes stir the pale wisps of his hair. Behind him lies the dark river, sweeping past hills still mottled by shadow. Before him, eastward, stretches the city, its towers like an endless line of tombstones, black against the brightening sky.

The Old One lies back, yawning, and allows himself a smile. He has had a full day of it, and a full night. There has been much to do: roles to play, rituals to perform, the theft of a minor belonging. He has spent the greater part of the night observing the man and the woman; later he narrowed his attentions to the man and stood watch in the street below his window – a squat, shabby little figure hovering just beyond the lamplight, patient and alone, standing huddled beneath the black umbrella, unmoved by the rain that broke the stillness, or the stillness that followed the rain.

At last the window had gone dark, like the woman's a mile away, and, noting the time with a satisfied nod, he'd begun his journey homeward. Even then he was busy, preparing lines of future conversation, reciting certain chants, whispering a word in a long-forgotten tongue. Years of calculations have waited to be verified within the compass of a single sunrise; there have been readings to be taken from the shadows it produced – from the winking red and yellow lights of an unknown vessel passing silently up the Hudson, from reflections of a fading star in the puddle at his feet. His figuring has had to be precise, his timing flawless. In this way, and no other, can the final sites be chosen for the Ceremonies.

Now he is tired, too weak to do more than turn his head from side to side and contemplate the clear, unclouded sky. Yet still he has not slept; nor will he, until the thing he's planned is done. Of human needs, food alone remains, and the occasional dose of sun to warm his bones. As for the absurd routine of sleep – the head mashed to the pillow, the face relaxed or clenched, the mind unmoored, eight hours adrift, lost among infantile fantasies – he has put all that behind him long ago, as easily as a serpent sheds its skin. As for dreams, they have not troubled him for more than half a century.

Not that he would sleep now, in any case. He is far too pleased with the progress he has made. In every act, her every word, no doubt her every thought, the woman has proven herself suitable – positively eager, in fact. She has come through her first day splendidly: after a certain delay, quite inconsequential and in no way her own fault, she has gone on to establish a really promising emotional relationship with the selected man. Final contact is complete.

The man himself is perfect, right down to the date and the hour of his birth nearly thirty years ago. Perfect, too, that he's a solitary soul, lonely and suggestible – the sort who'll pose no problems if correctly used. And used he will be, that much is certain. After all, what else are tools for?

The roommate is another story. Something is going to have to be done about her. 'Free spirit' indeed! Why, she's nothing but a common whore! He isn't going to have her tempting his little virgin. Not a chance!

Yes, something will definitely have to be done – and soon. He isn't sure what method he will use, but he has never lacked for ideas.

The ascendant sun is dazzling now, making rainbows in his eyes. The Old One blinks and looks away. Beside him, arrayed upon the low brick wall that runs along the edge of the roof, lies the simple apparatus that will occupy his day: the jelly jar, still empty, and the bag, quite full, and – resting on a musician's practice book to keep the pages from turning in the breeze – the shabby leather flute case with the black plastic handle. Common objects, all of them. There will be nothing strenuous for him today, but he will not be idle.

Taking the bag by its cloth straps, he hangs it on a nail projecting just inside the wall, where it dangles heavily, suspended a few inches above the surface of the roof. The leather case is next; from its velvet lining he withdraws a stubby white flageolet that shines like polished ivory. Before putting it to his lips, however, he lays the music book upon his lap, opened to Exercise Seven: Atonal Syncopations. He has, in fact, no interest in music and no intention of wasting time on such a composition, but the seventh exercise bears a vague resemblance to the complicated patterns he'll be playing, and any other tenant who chances upon the roof today will see only a harmless little man, lips puckered, lunch stowed on the wall beside him, laboring earnestly over an unmelodic series of minors, trills, and dissonances. It is good to be prepared.

Already the air has begun to grow warmer; the breeze is soothing at this height, with the occasional fragrance of early summer foliage from the park a dozen floors below. He breathes deeply. Holding the flute in both hands, he blows three notes, soft and low, that fade into silence. The air grows still. Eagerly he looks toward the bag.

Inside it, something stirs.

The touch of a smile crosses his face; he blows the notes once more. The bag stirs violently now, as if something inside it were struggling to be free. It gives a sudden jerk, almost dislodging the brick on which the jar rests.

Carefully placing the jar at his feet, he begins to play.

There is no rhythm to his playing, and no tune. The patterns are impossible to discern. To any listener, it would seem – but for a certain exotic quality in some of the phrases – little more than a succession of random tones, like a man punching typewriter keys in an unknown language. And yet the notes, in fact, form a song. The Death Song.

Which, curiously, is a song about birth.

The gleaming white tube sways erratically before his face; his fingers scuttle like spiders up and down its length. Above him the air trembles with the sound, and whirlwinds sweep invisibly toward the heavens.

It is a moment of awakening. The bag rocks back and forth. All nature is stirring now – the river, the trees, the dancing air – and something outside nature, deep beneath the earth, where rock grinds slowly against rock. He can hear it stirring, and is glad.

Raising his eyes from the now-blinding sun, he goes on playing, gazing into a sky so blue it looks as if it were ready to shatter into a million pieces, like the rending of an egg.

It is going to be a beautiful day.

All morning he plays softly upon the flageolet, his small pink head bobbing in elusive time, the flute sound competing with the cries of the birds. At intervals he pauses to watch the movement in the bag; the thing inside thrashes wildly, nearly tearing through the cloth. Whenever he sees this, he smiles.

Once the sun has wandered to the other side of the sky and is settling toward the western hills, he plays his last three notes. They are the first three he played, but in reverse order. Laying aside the instrument, he pronounces a certain word and pushes himself up from the chair. Five hours or less till midnight: his present work is all but done.

By sunset he is ready. The chair is folded and in place beside the elevator tower, the music tossed away; the flute case and the jelly jar, now full, he takes downstairs.

Behind him, in the center of the roof, lies the aftermath of his day's labor: a glistening pink cruciform of entrails, tied with a stolen red hair.

And spread beneath it, torn as if by razor claws, lies the empty canvas bag, glowing scarlet in the sunset – a bag that, till this day, has held no more than books.

Darkness finds him crouching on the walkway by the river's edge, his dim white form reflected in the water, making certain languid motions with his hand in the space between the concrete and the railing. From the distance of the park he would seem a vulnerable little figure, like a child crouched before a mud puddle, absorbed in some grave and private task. His hand flicks downward, and a cascade of small bright objects, jagged shards as white as bone, falls glimmering in the moonlight to vanish beneath the waves. Here and there a feather, like a speck of cloud, is carried by the wind.

All that remains is the Libation, the offering of the Orh'teine. Formula calls for a beaker or a flask; the jelly jar, he knows, will do as well. With a flourish he empties it into the river. In the instant before it is lost from sight, it stains the waters a cloudy black -though by daylight they may well have shown up red.

Clutching the rail with both hands, he climbs to his feet and stands facing the river. Across it lies the Jersey shore, and beyond that rolling farmlands, the plowed earth cooling now and plunged in night. A few tiny lights flicker like campfires in the dark hills.

To this the man is bound. Tomorrow, with the morning, he'll be speeding toward the countryside, his head stuffed full of ignorant romantic nonsense, his bags weighed down with piles of books -books of just the right sort. How useful he is going to be, once he comes of age and, in the moonlight, reads the passage from the storybook…

The old man speaks the Fourth Name, whispers three more words, and smiles. A chilling breeze from off the river stirs the pale wisps of his hair. Watching the stars sweep majestically toward the horizon, he thinks of all that is to come.

The woman is to play the major part, but the man's role will come first. The blind fool doesn't know it yet, but there are going to be some changes made amid those distant hills – changes beyond dreaming.

And on the night that he turns thirty they will all begin with him.