Dagger Key and Other Stories

EMERALD STREET EXPANSIONS

I went down to Emerald Street in search of something new, an attitude with keener claws, a sniper’s calm and distant eye, a thief’s immersion in the night. I wanted some red and unreasonable religion to supplant the conventionality I believed was suffocating my spirit…though I was less dissatisfied by conventionality itself than by my lack of dissatisfaction with it. That I had embraced the cautious and the conservative so readily seemed to reflect a grayness of soul. I thought adding a spare room to my mind, a space with a stained-glass window through which I could perceive the holy colors of the world, would allow me to feel content within my limitations.

It was a gloomy Seattle morning with misty rain falling and a cloud like a roll of silvery dough being squeezed up from the horizon and flattened out over the Sound. The shop, to which I had been directed by friends—satisfied customers all, successful young men and women of commerce who once had suffered from maladies similar to mine—was a glass storefront sandwiched between a diner and a surgical arcade. A hand-painted sign above the door depicted a green crystalline flash such as might be produced by a magical detonation, with the name—EMERALD STREET EXPANSIONS—superimposed. As I drew near, two neutral-looking, well-tailored men in their thirties, not so different from myself, emerged from the shop. The idea that I might be typical of its patrons diminished my enthusiasm. But recognizing that the mental climate that bred this sort of hesitancy was precisely my problem, I pushed in through the door.

The interior of the shop was furnished like a living room and all in green. The color of the carpet was a pale Pomona, the grouped chairs and couches a ripe persimmon, and the attendant was a woman of approximately my own age, wearing a parrot-green dress with a mandarin collar and a tight skirt. Her features were too strong for beauty, her cheekbones too sharp. Yet she was striking, impressive in her poise, perched alertly on the edge of a chair, and I had the thought that this was not a considered pose, that she must always sit this way, prepared to launch herself at some helpless prey. Her skin had a faint olive cast, testifying to a Latin heritage, and a coil of hair lay across her shoulder and breast like the tail of a black serpent. She glanced down at her hand, at a tiny palm console that—assuming the doorway was functioning—revealed my personal information. She smiled and indicated that I should sit beside her.

“Hello, David,” she said. “My name is Amorise. How may I help? Something to brighten the overcast, perhaps? Or are you interested in a more functional expansion?”

I explained my requirements in general terms.

“I assume you’ve read our brochure,” she said, and when I said I had, she went on: “We provide you with a perceptual program that you’ll access by means of a key phrase. It’s the usual process. The difference is that we only do custom work. We expand what is inborn rather than add an entirely new facet to the personality.” She glanced down at the palm console. “I see you design weapons. For the military?”

“Personal protection devices. Home-defense.”

“David LeGary…” She tapped her chin with a forefinger. “Wasn’t there a piece about you on the news? Murderous appliances, windows that kill…that sort of thing.”

“They sensationalized my work. Not all my designs are lethal.”

We talked for fifteen or twenty minutes. As Amorise spoke she touched my hand with a frequency that appeared to signal more than simple assurance; yet I did not believe she was teasing me—there was a mannered quality to her gestures that led me to suspect they were an element of formal behavior. Her eyes, of course, were green. Lenses, I assumed. I doubted such a brilliant shade was found in life.

“I was going to pass you off to another therapist,” she said. “But I’d like to treat you myself…if that’s all right.” She rested a hand on my forearm. “Do you want to hear what I have in mind?”

“Sure.”

“A poet,” she said.

My face may have betrayed disappointment, because she said hurriedly, “Not an ordinary poet, but a poet maudit. A lover, a thief, a man who shed the blood of a priest. He lived six hundred years ago in France. Like your own ancestors, David.”

“You can provide elements from a specific personality? I didn’t know that was possible.”

She passed my comment off with a wave. “The man’s name was Francois Villon. Have you heard of him?”

I said, “No,” and Amorise said, “Well, it’s not an age for poetry, is it?” She looked down at her hands, as if dismayed by the thought. “Villon was a cynic, but passionate. Sensitive, yet callous. A drunkard and an ascetic.”

“I don’t believe any of those qualities are inborn in me.”

“I’m certain that they are. Though the world has done its best to murder them.”

I recognized that people in her line of work were gifted with intuition, capable of quick character judgments, but this intimation that she had some innate understanding of me, a knowledge that ran so contrary to my own—it seemed ridiculous. A silence shouldered between us, and then she said, “Let me ask you something, David. If you had the opportunity to create something miraculous, something that would ensure the continuance of a great tradition, but to achieve it you would have to risk everything you’ve worked for…What would you decide?”

“It’s too general a question,” I said.

“Is it? I think it’s the basic question you’re asking yourself, the one you’re trying to answer by coming here. But if you want specifics, let’s imagine you’re Francois Villon, and that if you surrender your soul to a woman, you will achieve immortality as a poet. What would you do?”

“I don’t believe in souls,” I told her.

“Of course you don’t. That’s why I phrased my original question as I did.”

“I suppose,” I said after a moment’s consideration, “that I would like to feel comfortable with taking that kind of risk.”

“Taking that kind of risk never bestows comfort,” said Amorise.

“But I’ll consider that a ‘yes.’” She got to her feet and offered me her hand. “Are you ready?”

A dozen questions sprang to mind, but they all illustrated a tiresome conventionality, and I left them unasked. I filled out a form, essentially a disclaimer, paid the fee, and Amorise ushered me into a small room in the back containing a surgical chair with arm and leg restraints. Once I had taken a seat, she handed me a cup half-filled with a bright green liquid, saying that it would put me to sleep. After I drank down the sweetish mixture, she leaned across me to secure the restraint on my left arm, her breast pressing my shoulder. She did not draw back immediately, but remained looking down at me.

“Are you afraid?” she asked. The unreal clarity of her brilliant eyes—they made me think of the painted eyes on signs outside psychics’ doors.

I was afraid, a little, but I said, “No.”

She caressed my cheek. “You surrender your power so easily…like a child.”

Before I could analyze this obscure comment, she kissed me on the mouth. A deep, probing kiss to which, dizzied by the potion I had swallowed, I could not help responding. It was such a potent kiss, I can’t be sure whether it or the liquid caused me to lose consciousness. When I woke, light-headed and groggy, I found the restraints had been removed and I discovered in my hand a business card advertising a club called the Martinique in South Seattle. On the back of the card Amorise had written the following:

These are your codes. The first accesses Francois, the second is to exit.

“Je t’aime, Amorise.”

“Je te deteste, Amorise.”

Those phrases, when I put them together with the kiss…they unsettled me. I suspected that Amorise had done something to harm me, or at least something that I might regret. I pocketed the card and stepped into the corridor. It was empty, as was the anteroom. I went back into the corridor and called loudly for Amorise. A petite blond woman poked her head out from another door and hushed me. In a calmer voice, I said, “I’m looking for Amorise.”

“She’s with a client…Oh, wait!” She put a hand to her cheek. “I believe she had an emergency.”

“I need to talk to her.”

“Well, I’m sure she’ll be back.” The woman glanced at her watch. “No…maybe not. It’s late. She might not come in again until tomorrow. I’m sorry.”

She started back into the room from which she had emerged. Inside, a woman was lying in a chair like the one in which I had been treated, different only in that a cylindrical machine mounted on the ceiling had been lowered to fit over the woman’s head.

“The machine,” I said. “That provides the therapy?”

“Yes.” The woman pushed me gently away. “Now please…I have work to do.”

“There was no machine in my room! I think she did something to me…I don’t know. It doesn’t feel right.”

The woman closed the door on her patient and said firmly, “All the rooms have machines.”

“Not the room I was in!”

She let out an impatient sigh. “Which room was it?”

I pointed. “There.”

She preceded me into the room.

“You see?” I said, triumphant.

She pushed a button on the wall; a section of ceiling slid back, and a machine like the one I had seen in the other room lowered to a point directly above the surgical chair.

“She didn’t use the machine,” I said. “I have no memory of it.”

“I have to see to my client.” The woman retracted the machine. “But I’m sure you’ll be happy with the work. Amorise is extremely capable.”

“You don’t understand!” I said. “I think…”

“Have you tried out what she did?”

“No, I…”

“Give it a try,” she said. “If you’re not satisfied, call and we’ll set up another appointment. You can ask for me. My name is Jane Eisley. Now, please…I do have to get back to my client.”

The earthquake of ’19 had leveled downtown Seattle, and from the windows of my apartment I could see out across the rebuilt city, the skyscrapers replaced by green domes of glass silicate whose facets winked like emeralds, nested among gardens and stands of firs. The Emerald City. Perhaps it had been a foolish conceit on the part of the city fathers to remodel the business district after the nickname applied by an advertising agency, but I enjoyed the view it afforded. However, after pronouncing the phrase, “Je t’aime, Amorise,” I found the prospect trivial. Jewels like fat green bugs and not the subtle traps and trickeries of light that true gems embody. I wanted to stand in the sky above them and piss down the purest of criticisms. The century, I thought, aspired to be its own ornament, a bauble floating upon the bloody river of history.

I had a thirst, but there was no wine in the apartment. I called Spirits, an environment of black leather booths and chrome ornaments in the subterranean levels beneath my complex that pretended to be a bar, and ordered a case of wine sent up. Shortly after I received it, while sitting by my window and trying to discover the characteristics of whatever it was that Amorise had done, my message wall bonged and the larger-than-life image of my ex-girlfriend Angelica Korn snapped into view. I had not talked with her for several weeks, and I saw that she had lost weight, her skin drawn taut from cheekbone to jaw. She had always struck me as somewhat clownish in appearance. Coarsely, commonly pretty, with her thick eyebrows and an overly generous mouth. But there was nothing clownish about her at that moment. Her body language, formerly a vocabulary of exuberant head-tosses and giddy gestures, was restrained, elegant, and her steady gaze unnerved me. Instead of offering pleasantries, she said, “You’ve been down to Emerald Street. How was it?”

“I’m not sure yet,” I said. “I didn’t tell you I was going, did I?”

“You need to explore it,” said an off-screen voice.

Carl McQuiddy stepped into view behind Angelica. A slim dark man whose goatee and receding hairline lent him a vulpine look. He was one of those who had recommended Emerald Street Expansions as a cure for my malaise. Yet had it been his recommendation alone, I would have paid it no mind. I didn’t care for him, and I had assumed Angelica felt the same. If the Devil were to need a lawyer, McQuiddy would be a perfect choice. His black eyes were cold and inexpressive. If anything, they seemed more so than usual that day.

“Perhaps you should get out of the apartment,” he suggested. “Go someplace that will bring it out.”

“Bring what out?” I asked.

“The effect.”

“Are you afraid?” The corners of Angelica’s mouth lifted in a half-smile, causing me to believe that her repetition of Amorise’s words was no coincidence. It angered me to think that she might be playing games, that she and McQuiddy were baiting me.

“Afraid of what?” I said.

“Whatever it is you’re afraid of,” she said. “Take my advice. You won’t remember much. Just scraps. So don’t waste time trying.”

“Tacque Thibault,” Carl said. “Do you recall the name?”

“No.” The name did sound a murky resonance, but I had no wish to say anything affirmative to him.

He smiled thinly. “Yet your name is familiar to me.”

“Are you trying to trip me out?” I asked. “That’s pitiful.”

Carl turned his back. “See you tonight,” said Angelica, and the wall was restored to its normal white blankness.

The call put me in a foul temper, yet I was delighted by the richness of my anger, a far cry from my usual pallid incarnation of the mood. For a time I drank and experimented with the two key phrases, saying them in succession, over and over, like a child playing with a light switch. Whenever I said, “Je t’aime, Amorise,” the apartment with its metal furniture and white walls and stainless steel workbench seemed a cross between a morgue and a dentist’s office, annoying in its spotless minimalism. When I said, “Je te deteste, Amorise,” it became charming, functional, comfortable. Yet as I continued to alternate between these states, I came to see the place in a generally unfavorable light, as if the perceptual lens I had acquired was infecting all my orderliness.

Troubled by this, I accessed Francois Villon on the computer and learned that the surname was a nom de plume, taken in honor of his benefactor Guillaume du Villon. His given name had been Francois Montcorbier. Born in poverty in Paris in 1431, educated at the University of Paris. Convicted of the murder of a priest, the sentence of death dropped when he was found to have acted in self-defense. Always a martyr to love, he had been especially stricken by a woman named Martha Laurens. In 1453 he had been condemned to death a second time for fighting in the streets, the sentence commuted to banishment from Paris, a term during which he had written his most famous work, “The Testament,” at the age of thirty—my age exactly—whereupon he vanished from history. It was believed that he had begun the poem while in prison, and it was assumed that he died shortly after completing it, probably from syphilis.

Nothing of this shadowy life was familiar. Yet when I began to read “The Testament,” a poem constructed in the form of a will that enumerated dozens of bequests, the bulk of them ironic…as I read the poem, the names of his beneficiaries resonated in me. Noel Jolis, Fat Margot, Guillaume Charruau, Jeahn Cornu, Jeanneton the Bonnet-Maker, Tacque Thibault—the name McQuiddy had mentioned. Villon’s jailer and torturer. There were ninety-two names (ninety-three if I counted Villon), and I could have sworn I remembered every one, yet I could not call the people they signified to mind. They seemed to be standing just beyond a locked door in my memory, and the poem itself…the words latched onto my mind as if slotting into spaces already created for them. After two readings I could quote sections by heart.

On occasion Villon was given to stitching his name and those of others down the left-hand side of his poems, forming acrostics, and toward the end of “The Testament,” written in this exact way, was the name Amorise DeLore. This discovery aroused conflicting emotions in me. Paranoia, due to my suspicion that Amorise, perhaps obsessed with Villon, was using me to further some insanity; and frustration stemming from the fact that I remembered nothing of her namesake, Amorise DeLore. Acting out my frustration, I threw a wine bottle at the wall and stood admiring the purple stain it created. It served me as a kind of divination—staring at it, I realized that if I wanted to gain a better grasp of the situation, I had no choice other than to visit the club in South Seattle. I fingered out the business card and noted that the address was located in a high crime area. On my workbench lay a variety of psychotropic sprays, macrowebs, and other sophisticated devices designed for personal defense, but without a thought for these weapons, I chose a flick knife that I used to trim wire—it seemed perfectly suited to my anger.

South Seattle had not been rebuilt in such grand fashion as the downtown. Most of the buildings were one or two stories, spun by genetically engineered beetles out of cellulose, but there were a smattering of stores and homes that pre-dated the quake, the building that housed the Martinique among them—a low cement block affair with a facade rising above roof level. I must confess that by the time I reached the club, I was not certain which of my key phrases I had most recently uttered. However, I do know that I had come to detest Amorise—I was convinced she had performed an illegal manipulation—and this may indicate that I was under the spell of “Je t’aime, Amorise,” for hate was something I had never before indulged. Though like everyone I had experienced bouts of temper, rancor, and so forth, my life until that day had been undisturbed by obsessive emotion.

A straight-down rain was falling when I emerged from the cab, and I stood beneath the overhang of a Vietnamese restaurant across the street from the club, watching the neon script letters on its facade come greenly alight one after another. The initial T was shaped like a coconut palm. My thoughts proceeded in a curious fashion, entirely unlike my usual process. On spotting a whore sheltering in a doorway next to the club, arms folded, a white thigh gleaming through the slit in her skirt, I imagined her face to be an undertaker’s dream of lust, a corpse prettified by sooty eyes and spots of rouge. In a moment she would step forward, open her mouth to the black wine spilling from God’s table, and be renewed. The passage of a car, puddled rainwater slashing up from its tires, bred the image of a razor slicing translucent flesh, and two drunken shadows walking away from the club, laughing and stumbling, implied a revel of shades within. I crossed the street, anxious to join them.

Inside, the smoky brown gloom seemed like an exhaust generated by the babble of voices. Perhaps a hundred patrons were gathered about tables and along the bar. On the walls were murals depicting scenes of voluptuous women with fanciful headdresses dancing in jungles. Spotlighted on the stage, visible above the heads of the crowd, a tall black man cried through a golden saxophone, backed by a bass and drum. His cheeks bulged hugely, and he glowed with sweat; his sidemen were all but invisible in the shadows. The melody he played was slow and lugubrious, but the rhythms beneath it were those of a drunken waltz, and this lent the music a rollicking air, making it seem that the idea of sadness was being mocked. I felt the tune tugging at some ghost of memory, but could not put a name to it. However, I recognized the man to be a street musician who played in the fish market and had once cursed me for not tossing money into his instrument case.

I located an unoccupied bar stool and ordered a glass of wine. Most of the patrons were of an age with me, fashionably dressed, and as I glanced about, I realized I knew everyone that I had thus far seen, either as business associates or chance acquaintances. Just down the counter was Joan Gwynne, a lovely dark-haired woman who had catered several of my dinner parties before I was forced to let her go due to our unfortunate romantic entanglement, one toward which she had since expressed great bitterness. She had on a parrot-green dress identical to that Amorise had worn, and her drink shone with the same hue and intensity as the neon letters on the facade. Though all about me other women were being clutched and pawed, no one was bothering Joan. A space had been cleared around her, and she sat without speaking, her viridian eyes flicking side to side. Behind the bar was a long mirror so unclouded it appeared to form an adjunct to the club. In its reflection I saw Carl McQuiddy and Angelica Korn conversing together, separated from me by at least a dozen people. They were dressed in matching gray suits and black shirts. A large golden pin nested in Angelica’s hair. I had no urge to join them.

I drank several glasses of wine and continued to stare at Joan. Something about her made my thoughts bend like a field of wheat impressed by a force of wind. I might have approached her, but her eerie solitude restrained me, and when the saxophonist completed his song to scattered applause, she downed her drink and moved off into the crowd. I was oddly distressed by her departure. Someone jostled my elbow. I spun about and confronted John Wooten, my lawyer for the last few years—he had recently successfully defended me in a civil suit brought by the families of two clients who had been killed when they misused one of my devices. Thick-waisted and jovial, with shoulder-length chestnut hair, clothed in a blue suit. He looked down at my hand and said with wry amusement, “Quick to anger as ever, Francois.”

I discovered that without my notice, as if obeying some old barfighter reflex, I had put knife to his belly; but this did not concern me as much as the fact that he had called me Francois.

“Guillaume de Villon,” said the man I knew as John, inclining his head. “I was your friend, Francois. Of course I have no memory of that time. We have only your words and fragments of history to tell us who we were. Nonetheless, I’d know you anywhere.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “Put your knife away, man. Things have always been unclear. Our task is to make as much light as we can in the darkness of life. Let us enjoy this night.”

He raised his glass in a toast, and responding to what must have been a vestigial trace of camaraderie, I followed suit.

“What’s happening here?” I asked.

“I confess that my understanding is incomplete,” he said. “But from what I can gather, Amorise has brought us all forward from the fourteenth century to enact a certain rite that will allow us—and her—to continue.”

I stared at him, rejecting this preposterous notion…and yet something would not allow me to completely reject it.

“Of course,” he went on, “I’m merely repeating the consensus view. I haven’t spoken to anyone who claims to know anything for certain.”

“Are you saying she carried our essences inside her? Our…”

“Our souls,” he said. “Her sinecure at Emerald Street afforded her the means to effect the transfers.”

I wanted to inquire further, but at that moment a woman’s voice sounded from the stage, asking for our full attention. It was Amorise. She posed as if embracing the spotlight, her arms outspread, wearing a simple white dress whose hem grazed the floor. Beside her, Joan Gwynne stood swaying, her eyes closed. The crowd grew still. It was so quiet I could hear the rain beating down on the roof. Amorise took Joan in her arms and kissed her deeply. Just as she had kissed me back at the shop. The kiss lasted nearly a minute, I reckoned, and for its duration no one spoke. Amorise’s cheeks filled then hollowed, as if she were breathing into Joan’s mouth. The expulsion of breath appeared to be causing her difficulty, for she soon began to tremble. At last she broke from the kiss. Two men jumped onto the bandstand to support Joan by the elbows, or else she might have fallen. Amorise steadied herself and then, flinging up her arms, she proclaimed, “The sublime act has begun!” She gestured at Joan. “I wish to present she who was last Martha Laurens! Our beautiful friend, Joan Gwynne!”

Martha Laurens.

The woman who, according to “The Testament,” had metaphorically buried Francois Villon’s heart in a little casket.

Shaken, I stared at Joan as the crowd applauded, seeing another woman, or rather seeing in her the force of another, one toward whom I felt both an intense longing and an intense aversion. Moved by no act of will or conscious desire, merely drawn to her, I pushed toward the stage. By the time I reached it, she had regained her senses and—to a degree—marshaled her composure. She looked as I imagined I must have when I woke from my kiss. Ruffled and disoriented. But there was no alarm in her face, and it occurred to me, thinking about her green dress, her solitude at the bar, that she had been prepared for whatever had happened. When she noticed me, the corners of her mouth lifted in a smile. She extended a hand so I could help her down from the stage, and then led me toward the bar, glancing at me with shy anxiety as we proceeded. We sat on stools near the end of the bar and considered one another.

“I don’t know what to call you,” she said. It was as if another face were melting up from beneath the pallor of her familiar face, thus making her doubly familiar. Though disguised by bright green lenses, the shape of her eyes fit a shape in my brain that seemed to have been waiting for this sight. As did the fullness of her mouth, the concavities of her cheeks, her graceful neck and smooth forehead, every part of her.

“Aren’t you going to say anything?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

She laughed, letting her head drop and glancing away, and the delicacy of that movement enraptured me. This was wrong, I told myself. I didn’t want to feel what I was feeling. I wanted the comfort and security of David LeGary’s blighted yet well-tended mental garden. Je te deteste, Amorise. I said it beneath my breath, but to no effect.

Joan, Martha, this creature whom I sat before, nervous and eager as a dog hoping for a treat, she looked at me, and that look became a heated environment, an absolute immersion—I had no idea why. Martha Laurens was to me no more than a name that caused a bloom of heat beneath the ice of my soul, and Joan Gwynne was an attractive, personable, yet rather soi disant woman who, according to other of my business associates, had—following our brief fling—seen the light of the White Goddess and was now an avowed lesbian with a live-in lover. Yet blended together, cooked in the same flesh (this, if I were to believe the improbable scenario related by John/Guillaume), they became a third person whose luminous specificity enlivened and bewildered me. If what I had been told was truly happening, why was it happening?

A rite, Guillaume had said. To allow our continuance. But for what reason did we continue…and what was “the sublime act?”

The saxophone man was back on stage, executing a mournful ballad. The people who milled about us were all, like Joan, doubly familiar, as if two identities had been combined within their bodies. I did not believe in souls. So I had told Amorise. Yet feeling what I felt, having witnessed what I had, how could I not believe that the kiss had effected a transference, that Amorise had breathed some essence into me, into all assembled, and now into Joan?

“What are you thinking?” Joan asked, taking my hand.

That simple touch caused my head to swim. I saw that she had removed her green lenses; her eyes were still brilliant, live wheels of agate. The tip of her tongue flicked the underside of her upper lip. I was overwhelmed by sensory detail. The push of her breasts against green silk, the long sweep of her thigh…

“I’m trying to make sense of this,” I said.

Joan leaned close, kissed my cheek, then—briefly—my mouth. “How does one make sense of a kiss?”

Her comment distanced me, seeming to imply a perspective on the situation that I had not yet achieved. I asked her if she cared for a drink, signaled the bartender and ordered two glasses of wine. A soul, I thought. A scrap of energy to which only trace memories attached and yet which sustained emotions such as love. A force that could be transferred from one mouth to another. My thoughts, pure contraries, ideological oppositions, began to strangle one another before they could fully establish themselves.

The wine came, and we drank. Everywhere I cast my eye I saw someone I knew and whom I sensed that I had also known half a millennium ago. Thomas Hamada who, until his incompetence cost me a large sum of money, had served as my accountant. Diana Semple, a former patron. Several old lovers. There were, as I’ve stated, about a hundred people in the Martinique that night, and I suspected that if I were to introduce myself to each and every one, I would discover there were exactly ninety-two, and that their names would be those Villon had mentioned in “The Testament.” The poem, I decided, was likely central to the rite that Guillaume had mentioned. And since I was ostensibly the poet, I must also be central to it, trapped in its unclear heart like a flaw in the depths of an emerald.

“I want to be alone with you,” Joan said.

I wanted to be alone with her, too, though I was not entirely certain why. Something was being orchestrated here, some music of action and word I was supposed to perform. The thought that I was being manipulated infuriated me, and I felt a more profound rage as well, one emblematized by a section of “The Testament” that then surfaced from my mind:

I renounce and reject love

And defy it in blood and fire

With such women death hustles me off

And they couldn’t give a damn…

Ignoring Joan’s startled cry, I stood and walked briskly away, intent upon returning home and getting to the bottom of whatever was going on; but as I made for the door, Carl McQuiddy and Amorise emerged from the crowd to block my path. She had changed out of her robe into a black cocktail dress with a short skirt and low-cut bodice—her weapons in full view, she seemed even more the predator. “Where are you going, David?” she asked.

That she dared to ask this or any question of me, it was like gasoline thrown on a fire. I lunged at her, but McQuiddy stepped between us. I shoved him back and drew my knife. “Stand aside,” I told him.

“A knife,” said McQuiddy. “That’s so fifteenth century!”

He gave a flick of his left hand an almost imperceptible shadow briefly occupied the air between us. I felt the skeins of the macroweb settling over me, flowing down my face and shoulders in a heartbeat, growing and tightening, rendering the upper part of my body immobile. I knew that to strain against it would cause the web to tighten further, and I stood without twitching.

“What do you want of me?” I asked Amorise.

“I want you to enact the laws of your nature,” she said.

“I was about to do that very thing,” I said. “Dissolve the web—I’ll be happy to oblige.”

The web began to tighten. McQuiddy was standing beside me. I could not turn my head to see him, but I knew he was controlling the web, because I had not stirred. The mesh cinched about my throat and chest—I had difficulty drawing breath.

“Carl!” Amorise frowned at him. The web loosened slightly, and McQuiddy whispered in my ear, “Just like old times…eh, Francois?”

Amorise moved closer, so that her startling green eyes were inches from my own. Perhaps, I thought, they were not lenses.

“If you let your soul speak,” she said, “you will know what I want.”

“My soul? Are you referring to the thing you breathed into me, or the one whose place it usurped?”

“There’s no difference between the two now. But don’t be alarmed, David. You worked in machines instead of words, but you always had the soul of a poet maudit. I’ve done very little to you. I’ve simply given you the chance to fulfill your destiny.” Then, to McQuiddy, she said, “I’m through here. Take his knife and release him.”

Grudgingly, McQuiddy did as instructed.

As the web dissolved, a more protracted process than it had been to ensnare me, Amorise studied my face. What she saw there must have pleased her, for she smiled and allowed herself a laugh, a mere spoonful of sound.

“I’ve chosen well,” she said. “You will create a beautiful text.”

Je te deteste…

Je te deteste…

Je te deteste, Amorise…

Had they not been given me to say, I would have said those words on my own, repeated them a thousand times as I did that night and into the morning, for I hated Amorise. Whenever I said them I hated her more, for no change followed upon them. Whether Villon or a transformed David LeGary, or a syncretic being comprised of the two, I was trapped in the role Amorise had designed for me, thanks to her witchery…and what else could this be but the product of witchery? Science did not rely on kisses for an empirical result. My thoughts were iron flails demanding a target. I strode about my apartment, lashing out at end tables, framed photographs, sculptures, and chairs, wrecking the accumulation of a life to which I had ceased to relate. At one point, giving in to a longing I was unable to suppress, I called Joan Gwynne’s office; but she had not yet come in to work and I couldn’t pry her home number out of the secretary. I flung myself onto a couch and scribbled down some thoughts and then realized that what I had written formed the first few verses of a bitter poem concerning my previous relationship with Joan. I crumpled the paper, tossed it into a corner, and continued to drink, to destroy the artifacts of David LeGary’s trite existence, and then drank some more. And when morning came dull and drizzly, like an old gray widow hobbling out from the dark, her cold tears freckling the sidewalks, in all my drunkenness and disarray, I went down to Emerald Street to seek my satisfaction.

“Mister LeGary,” said the blond woman, Jane Eisley, who had dealt with me the previous afternoon. “We’ve been trying to call you.”

Something about her seemed familiar, in the way that the individual members of the crowd the night previous had seemed familiar, but this resonance did not interest me. “I broke my phone,” I said grimly. “Where is Amorise?”

“I’m afraid she no longer works here,” Jane Eisley said. “But I have good news. We checked the machine she used to treat you. It was inoperable. The power leads were burned out. She could have done nothing to you. That’s why we had to let her go. She received payment for work she didn’t do. I have your refund here.”

She held out a slip of paper that I supposed was a record of a transfer to my credit line. I knocked her hand away. “Where is Amorise?”

“You’ve no reason to act this way!” She fell back a step. “Take the refund. She didn’t do anything to you.”

“The hell she didn’t! She doesn’t need a fucking machine. Give me the address!”

When Jane Eisley refused to cooperate, I pushed past her and went along the corridor searching for the office. At the very back lay a room with a desk atop which a computer was up and running. I searched the files for Amorise’s address. It was listed under the name Amorise LeDore, and I recognized it to be a house on Vashon Island whose defense system I had installed six weeks before. I recalled that I had not dealt with the owner, but her lawyer, who had referred to her merely as “my client.”

The lawyer had been Carl McQuiddy.

Just off the office was a room containing a number of lockers. The name “LeDore” was written on the third one I came to. The door was loose, and I managed to pry it open. Inside were a pair of athletic shoes, cosmetics, and a slim leather-bound volume that I assumed to be an address book. I pocketed it and went out into the corridor. Jane Eisley was at the front of the shop, talking on the phone. I tore the phone from her grasp and said, “Don’t cause me any trouble, or my lawyer will smother you.” She made a shrill response that I, in my anger and haste, failed to register. I slammed the door behind me with such force, it called after me in a fruity computerized voice that I would be charged for any damage that had been incurred.

On returning to my apartment, I found that the leather-bound volume I had taken from Amorise’s locker was no address book, but rather a compendium of arcana entitled Against Nature, authored by someone who called themselves Novallis. I asked the computer to search for information relating to the author—it could supply none, but informed me that in Europe during the Middle Ages, dabblers in the black arts often adopted Latinate noms de plume. The book itself was of ancient vintage—the pages waterspotted and brittle, the leather cracked. A strip of green silk served as a bookmark, lying across the opening of a section called “The Sublime Act.” It was written in archaic French, but thanks to my knowledge of the modern language, I understood that it described some sort of complex magical operation, one involving the manipulation of a large number of people in order to produce what Novallis referred to as “the Text.” Once the Text had been created, those involved in the operation would live out their natural spans (unless taken prematurely by act of God or man), but their essence (“elan vital”) would be collected by “The Host”, who would convey them through the years, keeping them safe for a period of time Novallis termed “the Interval,” at which point the Sublime Act would need to be performed again in order to ensure the rebirth and survival of its participants. There was a great deal of stress laid upon the consideration that the subjects must be perfectly suited to their roles, and finally a good bit of nonsense about the Many becoming Three, the Three becoming One, and the One becoming Zero. Also a long section whose essential theme I failed to comprehend, though the word “retribution” was frequently used.

Having deciphered this much, I tossed the book aside, went to my workbench, and called up my designs for Amorise’s house on my computer. If I were, indeed, infected by the soul of a dead poet, one spat into my body by a centuries-old witch—and it seemed such was the case—I refused to be her pawn. I did not intend to produce a text, and more, I resolved to put an end to the Sublime Act, and to Amorise herself. It was not merely anger that inspired me. As I examined the plans, determining what I might need to neutralize my defensive system, I experienced a feeling of revulsion in reaction to the Sublime Act, an apprehension of sacrilege, of unholy practice—I thought this might well be Villon’s reaction and not LeGary’s.

The message wall bonged, and John Wooten appeared. Sitting in his study, wearing a black dressing gown. He looked worried, and his first words to me were, “David, we have problems.”

“What are they?” I asked, returning my attention to the plans.

“I had a call from an attorney representing the Villanueva family. They’re planning to refile on the basis of new evidence.”

“The suit was dismissed,” I said.

“Yes, but not with prejudice. They have the right to refile.” He leaned back, lowered his chin to his chest so that his jowls flattened out like a fleshy ruff framing the lower portion of his face. “They’re also urging the district attorney to institute criminal charges. Negligent homicide. Reckless endangerment.”

“That’s ludicrous!”

“Perhaps. But it’s a problem nonetheless.” Wooten folded his hands on his belly. “What new evidence could they have, David?”

“You know, John,” I said, my temper fraying. “This is not my concern. You’re the lawyer. Find out what they have.”

“I’m trying to do just that. It would help if I knew what there was to find.”

“Nothing!” I slapped the palm of my hand hard against the workbench. “These fucking people! They could have heat sensors, motion detectors…but normal security isn’t enough. It doesn’t satisfy their urge to be trendy. So they hire me to devise clever little toys they can show off to their friends…”

“Calm down, David.”

“House pet assassins! Robotic freaks! Then when two Mexican rich kids don’t bother to read the manuals and zap themselves, I’m to blame for what happens? It’s bullshit!”

“I agree,” Wooten said. “But you’re the standard of the industry, David. I doubt the Villanuevas can win in court. They’ve already lost once. But you have to expect to be the target of litigation now and then.”

“You know what I expect?” I said. “I expect you to handle the Villanuevas. You’re the fucking lawyer. I don’t want to be bothered. If you can’t do it without calling me every five goddamn minutes, I’ll get someone else.”

“It would be unprofessional of me—if not unethical—to fail to consult you.”

“All right. You’ve consulted me. What else?”

Wooten appeared puzzled.

“You said there were problems,” I said. “Give me the rest of it.”

He was silent for a short count, then he said, “Francois…”

I looked up at him, calmer, as if he had spoken to some deeper part of me, though I was still angry at his intrusion. “What?” I said gruffly.

“Nothing…Never mind.” He broke the connection.

I continued my preparations for breaking into Amorise’s house, but my anger had cooled somewhat, and by mid-afternoon another passion had taken its place. Everywhere I aimed my thought I met with the image of Joan Gwynne and the ghost of Martha Laurens. I saw Joan’s long legs, those amazing eyes, the lush curvature of her lips. I tried to suppress these yearnings, but they surrounded me like perfume, and finally I called her office again, intending to threaten the secretary. But this time she put me through without hesitation. Joan was sitting at her desk, dressed in a dark blue business suit. She smiled on seeing me, but it was a troubled smile.

“I was going to call you,” she said.

“After the way I broke up with you…and then last night, I don’t know why you would,” I said. “I was rude. I…”

“I understand. It’s all so new…so strange.”

“Can we meet somewhere? I want to make it up to you.”

Her expression grew more distressed. “I don’t know.”

“Dinner,” I said. “We can go anywhere you like.”

She put her head down a second. “I have…” She sighed, as if arriving at a decision, and glanced up at me. “I’m involved with someone, David. I don’t know what to do about it. I want to see you, but I’m not sure what’s right here.”

“Are we not involved?” I asked, recalling what I had heard about her lesbian lover.

“So it would seem. But I…” She shook her head, signifying her bewilderment. “You have to give me time to sort things out.”

“How long?”

“A day or two. I’ll call you.”

Try as I might, I could not sway her. I ended the call and paced about the apartment, feeling like a fool for being so besotted by a woman with whom I’d had only fleeting intimacy in the present, no matter how deep our relationship in the past. But I no longer wanted to deny the connection, and I decided to send her flowers. As it was late in the afternoon, I thought I would send them to her home. If it aroused the suspicions of her lover, then so much the better. Once again I called the office and asked the secretary for her address. At first she refused to provide it, but when I told her my purpose she relented. She read it to me, and I did not have to write it down. The address was on Vashon Island.

Joan lived with Amorise.

I was, for several seconds, absolutely blank, and the thoughts and feelings that rushed in to fill the blankness, though framed by an overarching anger, were touched with admiration at the neatness of the web in which I had become stuck. Every strand led to Amorise, and I realized she was inviting me to come to her. She had contrived her design so that everything I wanted was under her control.

Close upon this recognition came a powerful sense of loss and a comprehension that—although I had walked away from Joan the night before, and no matter the source of the attraction—those feelings were as sharp in me as the touch of fire. I could not, for several minutes, compose myself, realizing that Amorise had placed Joan beyond my grasp. This recognition overwhelmed any logic that might deny or ameliorate its truth. My brain had turned to iron, penetrated by a single white-hot thought that had no voice or means of expression…at least not at first. For as I sat at my desk, unable to move or even to contemplate movement, words came to me, almost without any awareness on my part, and I found myself scribbling on the sides of a circuit diagram:

The black dog who carries my heart in its jaws

Firmly so as not to drop it into puddles or pissholes

Having been marked by God for this special task

To remind me that Love is such a caring beast…

I wrote dozens of lines, perhaps eighty or ninety all told, an entire poem of such acid and fulminant bitterness, I felt drained from having given it birth, and when this fever of creativity lifted, I had the fleeting impression that I was not sitting in my apartment but rather at a wooden table sticky with spilled food and drink, and above me were smoke-darkened beams, and on every side was the brightness of human activity, people laughing and conversing. Even after this brief confusion fled and I recognized myself to be seated at my workbench, it seemed that I could perceive a variant architecture of thought inside my head, gothic arches of compulsion and buttresses of emotion whose antiquated sweep and form were different from yet somehow akin to my own. It was the clearest sense yet I’d had of the spirit wedded to me by the Sublime Act, and as it faded, submerged once again into the turbulent soul we were together, my hatred for Amorise swelled to monstrous proportions, increased by the knowledge of what she had done not only to me, but to Villon.

I began to study the plans of the security system I had designed for her. It was likely that she had made modifications, but I doubted she would have had time to install an entirely new system. Once inside I could lock the house and prevent her from escaping, but she would then retreat into the panic room and call the police. Of course I could cut her lines, jam her outside communications, and I could override her alarms and counterfeit an all-is-well signal to the private cops that patrolled the neighborhood. That would leave us in a stalemate—Amorise in the panic room and me standing by the door. But a stalemate might be all that was required. My actions might convince her that I would not do her bidding…not this time around. Afterward I could take a short vacation, or a long one, and let Wooten handle the fallout. One way or another, though, I intended to make a statement with Amorise.

The house was a twenty-eight-room structure of gabled gray stone facing the water—in the moonlight it had an air of somber opulence, like a hotel for vampires. Amorise had not tricked up the external security, and I was able to penetrate the grounds without difficulty. It was after one in the morning, and I watched the house from amid a stand of old-growth firs, dressed in burglar black, my breath smoking in the cold damp air. In my pockets were a freon spray, a scrambler, a laser torch, and an ultrasonic whistle. I had coated my skin and clothing with an agent that would dissolve macrowebs on contact—I had set several booby traps utilizing such webs and I could not be certain that Amorise had not altered their locations. There were a couple of lights on downstairs, but I believed that was for show. I doubted anyone was awake. Keeping to the shadows, I made my way to a side window. When lifted by an intruder, the bottom of the window would, once weight was placed upon the sill, extrude a hidden blade and slam down with the force of a guillotine. It was exactly as I had created it, not modified at all. I deactivated the mechanism, and after I had climbed inside, I overrode the alarms with my palm console and locked the house down. This all seemed far too easy. I switched on my penlight, bringing bulky sofas, a pool table, and an oriental carpet up from the shadows, and scanned the immediate area for electronic activity, finding none.

I had made my entrance into a smallish game room, but the living room beyond was as big as the lobby of a grand hotel, with a marble fireplace, five groupings of chairs and sofas ranging its more than one-hundred-foot length. The air was scented by a half-burned cedar log in the hearth, and the area was filled with security devices, all coded so as to prevent remote disabling, each keyed to ignore those people whom its detectors registered as familiar. I moved into the room and a cleaning robot—a flat black shape capable of prospecting for dust beneath the furniture—came trundling across the carpet toward me, spitting blue tongues of electricity. I jumped aside and immobilized it with a freon spray. As I went forward, I was attacked by a lamp cord of so-called “intelligent plastic” that tried to garrote me, whipping up into the air like a flying snake. I immobilized it as well. Most of the security devices in the room were centered about a vault set in the left-hand wall—I gave it a wide berth and continued on cautiously, a scanner in one hand, laser torch in the other, searching for any potential threat. I managed to negotiate the room without further incident, but as I stepped out into the main entryway, at the foot of a curving marble staircase, one of the larger cleaning units, a domed white shape the size of a wastebasket, hurtled at me, visible in the moonlight spilling through the windows flanking the front door. I eluded its rush, and as it turned back toward me, I swung the laser torch over the top of the dome, where the control package was housed, burning a seam along the right quadrant. It kept coming. I held the torch steady, burning smoking lines across the entirety of the machine, but in the instant I disabled it, it succeeded in brushing against my leg, transmitting a shock that threw me onto my back and left me stunned. I lay for a moment, gathering myself. Apparently Amorise had been able to make more significant changes than I had believed possible. I wondered why I wasn’t dead—the unit I had just disabled carried a lethal voltage. Then I had a revelation: Amorise must have reduced the charge. She could not afford to kill me. Not, at any rate, until I produced the Text. I felt suddenly foolish. What was I doing here? I could thwart Amorise’s intentions simply by leaving town. It was only my anger—Villon’s anger, I thought—that had brought me to the house.

I struggled to my feet, still woozy, and started for the front door. But every step I took caused a resurgence of anger, and my desire to harm Amorise was reinvigorated. I stood for a moment, revising my plans. If she had not been roused by the incident with the cleaning unit, and I presumed this to be the case, for I had given no outcry, then I might be able to get to her before she succeeded in locking herself in the panic room. I was not certain what I would do to her if I were able to head her off, but I was willing to let that decision await the moment. But if she had locked herself away, well, the panic room was on the second floor, and I remembered now that I had suggested to McQuiddy that I install a reinforced framework to support the room; he had rejected the idea due to budgetary concerns. It might be possible to set a fire that would eat away the supports beneath it, and the steel box with Amorise inside would come hurtling down—at the very least she would be injured.

I was about to head upstairs to find Amorise’s bedroom when from the various rooms and corridors that opened off the entryway there poured an army of household appliances and robots. More than a hundred, by my estimate. I darted back toward the living room, but that avenue of escape was blocked by a green gardening robot, headless yet taller than a man, armed with several pairs of snapping foot-long shears. Glittering and beeping, the machines formed into a semi-circle, forcing me back against the front door. The sight was both frightening and absurd. At their forefront was a twelve-slice toaster that I had made mobile by the addition of six black humanoid feet. It was a conversation piece, a status item intended to evoke laughter. But now, waddling about and lashing its non-functional plug like a maddened tail, the general of a force composed of various cleaners and scrubbers, centipedelike air purifiers, and saucer-sized spiderlike ceiling sweeps, there was little humorous about it. I’d been prepared to deal with the machines individually—en masse they presented a problem. I fumbled out my scrambler and punched in an emergency override. The gardening robot became inactive, but the rest remained jittering, trembling, leaking a high-pitched electronic babble, the moonlight polishing their sleek surfaces.

Deciding that I had a better chance on the move than standing my ground, I leaped over half the force, landing amidst a cluster of sweeps. Several of them clung to my leg as I jumped again, clearing the edge of the marshaled machines, and ran full tilt along a darkened corridor. I managed to scrape the sweeps off my leg, crushing one of them against the wall—I could hear the rest of the machines beeping and squeaking behind me. I pushed through swinging doors into the kitchen, a large cluttered space bright with moonlight. Something rushed at my ankles—I kicked at it and it let out a yelp. It was only a dog, and a smallish one at that. I heard it whimper, its paws clittering on the linoleum as it slunk away. The next instant something bit into my shoulder and buried itself into the wall beside me. An electric knife. It tried to wrench itself free, but I grabbed the hilt and broke off the blade. Blood was trickling down my arm from the point of my shoulder. I wrangled a refrigerator in front of the door, blocking it, and stood for a second, breathing hard. Slants of bone-white light, alternated by zones of deep shadow, fell across the center island and hanging copperware, an enormous range, and a counter lined with bins and appliances. The kitchen was a dangerous place, but I liked my chances there better than out in the corridor. I crawled up on top of the center island just in time to avoid a buzzing object that thudded into the base of the island. I was safe for the moment, but I knew I could not stay there long and I decided to try for the pantry, which opened onto another corridor—this led, after a turn or two, back to the entryway. I walked cautiously across the top of the island, torching a food processor that had been lurking behind a colander, pretending to be an ordinary appliance—half its circuits fused, it lunged forward on stilt-like legs in a futile attempt to maim me, then fell on its side. I stopped with a foot in the air, remembering the microwave, in front of which I was just about to pass. I eased back a step, stood one-footed and removed a shoe. I took a couple of warm-ups and then slung the shoe at the door of the oven. A beam of ruby light speared it, causing it to burst into flame. I skipped to the other end of the island before the oven’s laser could reset. I sat on the edge of the island, holding the laser torch at the ready, and stretched my foot down. A toy truck rolled out of the shadows and tried to impale my foot with the electrified spike extruded from its grille—I hit it with a swing of the torch and it expired with a tinny rattle.

The pantry door, a flat white rectangle with a recessed square, looking rather like an invitation blank that had not yet been printed upon, lay twenty feet from the island. I did not believe there were any other mobile units left in the kitchen, but adrenalized as I was, I couldn’t be sure. I stretched out my foot again, and when nothing attacked it, I leaped down and dived through the door. The air inside the pantry was sweet, musty. I flattened myself against the shelves and scanned the area. No sign of activity. I went to the opposite end of the room and thought what to do. A mad dash seemed to be the best solution—if I remained in the pantry, sooner or later the little army of machines would break through the kitchen door and push on in. The narrow windows that flanked the front door were of ordinary glass. If I could reach the entryway, I thought, I might be able to smash one of the windows and squeeze through it. I shrugged off my jacket and wrapped it about my right forearm. I cracked the pantry door, scanned. Then, one-shoed, I raced along the corridor. But on rounding a corner, I caught sight of a large indistinct shape hovering in the air, silhouetted against the light of the entryway. I put on the brakes. It was a moth, a gray death’s-head moth with a ten-inch wingspan. Beyond it, also hovering, were a number of smaller moths. Twelve in all. I had manufactured them for McQuiddy, but he’d told me the client had rejected them as being too dangerous and that they would be returned. Each powered by a microscopic chip; a brush of their wings, coated with a contact poison, would cause a painful death. Amorise must have taken them to another craftsman and had them activated. The ultrasonic whistle, which I’d brought to counter a machine guarding her bedroom, would keep the moths away if I played the correct tones, but I had designed the moths to be difficult to control—the tones would have to be exact, and because I had not thought of them in some time, I was less than certain in my memory. Nevertheless, I had no choice. It was barely conceivable that Amorise had rendered them non-lethal, but I could not trust that she had. The fibers of the wings had been saturated with poison, and to minimize the effect would require painstaking work of which very few people were capable.

With trembling fingers, I took the whistle from the inside pocket of my jacket and set it to my lips. If I were to gasp, if my breath were to falter to the least degree as I played the pattern of notes, the moths would attack me. I moved forward, one careful step at a time, playing the progression that, I believed, would keep me safe. The largest moth drifted to within inches of my face, so close I could see every detail of the ghostly patterns on its carapace and read the words I had imprinted as a macabre joke half-hidden in the patterns—Death Courtesy of David LeGary. The tip of its wing fluttered past my cheek and then slid away without touching me. I had the urge to let out a sigh of relief, but I held firm and continued my inaudible tootling. Two more moths flittered near, and though my chest muscles tightened, I managed to keep my throat relaxed and played my way past them. A group of four, the smallest of the bunch, darted at me, dancing on air like gray leaves in a storm. I swallowed in reflex, but thankfully this occurred during an interval. I thought I heard my heart slugging against my chest wall. The five remaining moths formed into a picket line across the corridor. I mustered my resolve and went forward, my cheeks puffed, trying not to blink, watchful of their every flutter, and they parted before me, fluttering up toward the ceiling. Once past them I kept playing for a few steps, and then, my breath sobbing out, I ran.

As I came into the entryway, my feet skidded on the marble floor, but I righted myself and pushed hard toward the window to the right of the front door, showing like a narrow box of moonlight. Upon reaching it, I slammed my elbow against the glass, splintering it. But as I knocked aside the shards that remained stuck in the frame, I heard an electric gabbling at my back, and on turning, saw the army of household machines wobbling, whirring, vibrating, scuttling toward me. This time they did not hesitate. The toaster waddled forward, leading a group charge. I kicked at the thing and sent it flying, but it delivered a painful jolt to my ankle with its plug. A ceiling sweep bunched its silvery legs and propelled itself into a feathery leap that left it clinging to my shirtfront—I hurled it against the wall before it could sting me with its wire molding brushes. For the next two or three minutes, like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, I engaged in battle with this cartoonish troop, swinging the torch in wild arcs, brushing the sweeps off my clothing, crushing the littlest ones underfoot. But I received countless shocks, and at last one of the sweeps managed to scale the back of my trousers and shirt and deliver a jolt to my neck that knocked me flat.

I must have lost consciousness for a time, because when next I looked about, the army had withdrawn, leaving behind their scorched and crumpled casualties. Painfully, I struggled to my feet, and as I leaned against the door, trying to get my bearings, to decipher the patterns of moonlight and shadow that lay across the entryway, the lights went on, confusing me for an instant. Standing at the top of the stairs were Amorise and Joan Gwynne, both dressed in nightgowns. At the bottom of the stair, his back to the banister, was Carl McQuiddy, wearing black slacks and turtleneck. He offered me an amused smile. Amorise, too, smiled, but it was an expression of pure triumph. Joan appeared upset.

“That was epic, David,” said Amorise. “Truly entertaining.”

The workings of my mind were clumsy, impaired, and I could only stare at the three of them, though I felt anger pressing against the fogginess that hampered my thoughts, like a dome of heat bulging up from some buried molten turbulence. Then Amorise drew Joan into a kiss, one almost as deep as that she had given her on stage at the Martinique, and the anger broke through, not clearing my head but seeming to irradiate the fog.

“And, of course, your machines are delightful,” Amorise said, breaking from the kiss. “Such a wonderful imagery. I imagine it must be strange for you to be attacked by them. Rather like old friends turning traitor.”

I tried to speak, but succeeded only in making a strangled noise. McQuiddy chuckled and said to Amorise, “I don’t think he’s up to a conversation.”

“Fuck you!” I said.

“Well, we don’t really have much to say to one another, anyway.” Amorise took Joan’s hand and they descended partway down the stairs. “David knows what he has to do…don’t you, David?”

“I’m not going to do anything for you,” I told her. “And there’s nothing you can do to make me.”

“I don’t know,” Amorise said. “I might find a way. You tried to assault me at the club. You stole from my locker at Emerald Street. Now you’ve broken into my home and destroyed considerable of my property. Those are serious charges. What will you say in your defense? That I’ve kissed the soul of a poet dead these six hundred years into your body? That won’t gain you much credence.”

“I have a witness who’ll back me up,” I said. “John Wooten.”

“Oh, I don’t think you can count on John,” McQuiddy said. “He was extremely distressed by the way you spoke to him earlier today.”

That they had been privy to my private communications did not surprise me, but McQuiddy’s assured demeanor was unnerving.

“You don’t have any friends, David,” Amorise said. “You offend everyone who tries to befriend you. No one cares about you. In fact, they’d love to see you fall.”

I was beginning to regain control of my body, to be more aware of my surroundings. The chandelier that lit the entryway applied a high gloss to McQuiddy’s forehead and put glittering points in the eyes of the two women.

“You did this!” I said to Amorise. “It’s not me.”

“Did I?” Amorise laughed. “The anger, the disdain for others…they’ve always been part of you. You were the perfect subject.”

“Actually,” McQuiddy said, “I think it’s a distinct improvement. At least the bastard will serve some purpose now.”

His smile acted on me like a goad, and I sprinted toward him. He flicked out a macroweb, but the strands dissolved as they touched me, and I knocked him off-balance with a glancing blow to the cheek. He recovered quickly and reached into his trouser pocket—for another weapon, I assumed. Before he could withdraw his hand, I struck him hard in the neck with my fist, and then again flush on the jaw. He fell backward, cracking his head on the banister, and went down. I stood over him, waiting for him to stand. His eyes were open, lips parted. Dark blood was pooling beneath his head, spreading across the marble floor. I knew he was dead, but I hunkered down beside him anyway and touched my fingers to his throat, hoping to detect a pulse. Yet at the same time I exulted in the death of my old tormentor, Tacque Thibault.

“Oh, David! What will you do now?”

Amorise was pointing a small caliber automatic with a chrome finish at me. Joan stood at her shoulder, her expression horrified.

“You can wait for the police here if you like,” said Amorise. “Or if you prefer, you can make a run for it. But I can guarantee that the authorities will meet you at the ferry dock.”

I wiped my fingers on my slacks to clean them of McQuiddy’s blood and glared hatefully at her.

“There’s something you may want to factor in to your decision,” said Amorise, descending the stair—she gestured at me to move away from McQuiddy and I complied, retreating to the door. “Running will certainly lend the appearance of guilt. If you stay, you might be able to justify a plea of self-defense. Of course the validity of such a plea will depend upon my testimony. And I’m certain I’ll be too distraught for several days to be clear on the details of what has happened here. Perhaps in the interim, you’ll consider how you might influence my decision.”

Once again I was astonished by the neatness of her scheme. I recalled Villon’s fragmentary history, how he had been charged with murder and released once it was established that he had acted in self-defense. Had he begun writing “The Testament” while incarcerated, and changed his mind after his release? So I suspected, and I suspected further that Amorise had been instrumental in obtaining that release, and that when he had failed to complete the Text, she had subsequently managed to have him indicted for another capital crime, which she then managed to have commuted. She was duplicating those events to a nicety. The Sublime Act was halfway to being complete.

“For example,” Amorise went on, “I might testify that I’d been having difficulty with your machines and called you here to make some adjustments. I might say that poor Carl had tampered with the machines with the idea of killing you. He has a history of enmity with you. You caught him in the act of sabotage. He attacked you and you defended yourself. Who knows what his specific motives might have been? An emotional entanglement, perhaps. It’s well known that he was attracted to Joan.”

I tried to catch Joan’s eye. Concern was written in her face, but she refused to look at me. I believed she wanted to help me, but could not, being under Amorise’s thrall.

Amorise kneeled beside McQuiddy and to my surprise, still pointing the gun at me, she kissed him on the mouth. She closed her eyes, as if savoring the kiss, and then smiled as if enjoying a subtle aftertaste. The kiss had been brief, not at all like the one she had given me at Emerald Street. I imagined the soul must quit the body more readily than it entered, and that McQuiddy’s sour scrap of vitality now was lodged in some secret cavity within Amorise’s flesh.

“It may cross your mind to try and take the gun from me,” she said. “Let me assure you, I’m an excellent shot. I won’t kill you, but I will happily cripple you. It’ll make your self-defense plea slightly more difficult to justify. But I can always say I was confused—I thought you had attacked Carl and realized too late what the actual circumstances were.”

I did not hesitate in making a decision, for in truth there was no decision to be made. She had walled me off from every possibility but one.

“I’ll wait for the police,” I said.

All the events of this world are liable to a variety of interpretations. I have always understood this, but only lately have I come to recognize the absolute rule of this truism, and the corresponding impossibility of penetrating to the heart of any action. Either there is no heart, no immutable center, or else the ultimate nature of the universe is a profound ambiguity that will not admit to certainty. I believe the nature of the Sublime Act reflects that essential imprecision, that core deceptiveness. Evidence of this may or may not have been presented me on the third day of my incarceration in the King County Jail, when I received a visit from Amorise LeDore.

The guard ushered me into a closed-in metal booth equipped with a telephone and scored with graffiti, most of it obscene in character. Seated opposite me, separated by a divider of scarred, clear plastic, Amorise was wearing a green silk blouse adorned with delicate silver accents. Her long black hair was loose about her shoulders, and her hawkish face was made up to seem softer and more feminine. She picked up her receiver and asked, with no apparent irony, how I was doing.

“Is that a formality?” I asked. “Or do you really care?”

“Of course I care, David. You’re dear to me…as you well know.”

Though I despised her, I had become acclimated to hate—it was an environment in which I dwelled, and I felt I could speak to her without losing my temper.

“Then you’ll be glad to hear I’ve been writing,” I said, and held up several sheets of paper that I had brought with me from my cell.

“May I see?”

One after the other I pressed the pages against the plastic so she could read them. When she had done she said, “It’s good…but not up to standard. You’ll have to do better.”

“I might be more highly motivated if you were to recover your memories of the crime of which I’ve been accused.”

Her brow furrowed, expressing a transparently insincere degree of concern. “I’m working very hard in therapy. I’m sure I’ll have a breakthrough soon.” She brightened. “But I do have something to tell you. Whether you perceive it as an encouragement…that’s entirely up to you.”

I signaled that she should continue.

“Joan Gwynne, as you recall, came to embody the soul of Villon’s lost love, Martha Laurens. Carl was Tacque Thibault. John Wooten…Guillaume du Villon. But have you ever asked yourself who embodies the soul of Amorise LeDore, and why, of all those people gathered in the Martinique to celebrate the inception of the Sublime Act, she is the only one with whom you have no apparent previous connection?”

“Is that important?”

“Everything is important, David.” A note of venom crept into her voice. “Surely as a craftsman, a devisor of murderous machines, you realize the importance of details?”

“Very well,” I said. “Who are you?”

“Let us suppose that this woman, the woman whom you know as Amorise LeDore, is also named Allison Villanueva. And that her brother Erik and her sister-in-law Carmen were murdered by one of your security devices.” She gave these last two words a loathing emphasis. “Let us further suppose that in her grief Allison came to recognize that if the courts would not punish you, she must seek her own vengeance, and after the lawsuit against you was dismissed, she traveled from her home in Merida to do that very thing.”

Astonished, I jumped to my feet and the guard stationed behind Amorise gestured at me with his baton. I sat back down. “What are you telling me!”

“What I’m telling you,” she went on, “is what I am telling you. Make of it what you will.” She reached into her purse and withdrew the book I had taken from her locker at Emerald Street Expansions. “Novallis. Did you notice, David, that by rearranging the letters you can also spell out the name Allison V? It’s not a difficult chore to forge an antique, and Allison may have taken pains to do so. Or she may not. Did you verify the book’s age?”

“No,” I said in a tight voice. “I did not.”

“Well, if you had, you might have discovered that the book, if a forgery, is a very good forgery. I doubt any expert would claim that it is inauthentic. Be that as it may…” She restored the book to her purse.

“I don’t believe you!”

“What is it you don’t believe? That I’m Allison, or that I’m Amorise? Perhaps both are true. That would suit the subtle character of the Sublime Act, would it not? The subjects must be suitable, and Allison is perfect for Amorise. But then, too, Amorise is precisely what Allison needed.”

“You fucking witch!” I said. “Don’t try to con me!”

“Why not, Francois? You’re a natural-born mark.”

“I know who you are…and I know who I am.”

“Let’s examine who you are,” said Amorise. “I must confess I’ve deceived you to an extent. We did do a little something to you at Emerald Street.”

“That’s crap!” I said. “The woman there…the blonde. She told me the machine didn’t work. The leads were burned out.”

“Jane Eisley. She’s a friend. Actually, you know her, too. You dated her sister at Stanford. There was some slight unpleasantness involved. A pregnancy, I believe. An abortion, a broken heart. And a very long time ago, you may have known her as Fat Margot, a Parisian prostitute.”

I was at a loss, capable only of staring at her.

“We didn’t have to do much,” she said. “It’s as I told you the other night, you were perfect for Francois. Well…almost perfect. I needed you to fall in love with Joan, so we tweaked your emotional depth a bit. The rest of it…the anger, the violence, the disdain. You supplied all that. But love was needed to make you fully inhabit those qualities, to bring them to flower.” She fixed me with her disturbing green eyes. “Do you understand me, David? I wove the web, but you flew into it with passion, abandon, arrogance. All those qualities you thought you lacked and wanted to explore. From the moment we met, you surrendered yourself to me. You desired what I have given you…and what I have given you is yourself.”

“What do you want?” I pressed my palms hard against the plastic barrier, hoping for a miraculous collapse that would allow my hands to close about her throat.

“No more than what I told you at the club. I want you to enact the laws of your nature. So far you’re doing a splendid job.” She settled back in her chair, folded her arms and regarded me coolly. “I’d like you to consider the possibilities. On the one hand, it’s possible that this is no more than an ornate Latina cruelty. That Allison Villanueva has manipulated you through completely ordinary means in order to avenge her brother and her sister-in-law. That utilizing your suggestibility, your gullibility, your penchant for the macabre and your underused yet nonetheless potent imagination, she has persuaded you that a witch has come from the fifteenth century to implant the soul of Francois Villon into your body for some arcane purpose—something she may have done many times before. And now she’s telling you that the entire scenario may be a fraud. That would be the logical conclusion…at least if we are to accept the logic of the age. On the other hand, it’s conceivable that the story of the witch is true. Or, a third possibility, both stories are true. This speaks to the beautiful symmetry of the Sublime Act. It begins with a multitude of options, but eventually reduces those choices to three. Ultimately those three become indistinguishable.”

It took all my strength to restrain anger—I wanted to yell at her, to revile her; but if I did the guards would return me to my cell, and I wanted to stay, to hear everything she had to say.

“Next,” she said, “consider the character of the Sublime Act. I believe Guillaume du Villon told you that it was ‘to ensure our continuance.’ Were those not his words?”

I nodded.

“For the sake of argument, let’s say that our continuation is simply the mechanism by which the Sublime Act is effected. Its character may well be something other than mere immortality. Why would a woman, a witch, wish to drag the same ninety-three souls forward in time, skipping like a stone across the centuries, causing the same event to be re-enacted over and over? What purpose could this painful form of immortality serve…if not vengeance? Do you see the correspondence, David? Why the subjects must be suitable? A crime, a terrible crime committed millennia ago, is redressed endlessly by conforming to a contemporary crime and thus achieves the most terrible of vengeances. The kind that never ends. An eternity of punishment. A hell that the object of vengeance creates for himself by enacting the laws of his nature. The Sublime Act. Sublime because the witch achieves sublimity through her creation. She is an artist, and vengeance is the canvas upon which she paints variations on a theme.”

“What crime,” I asked shakily, “could merit such a punishment?”

“Perhaps I’ve already told you. Perhaps someday I will tell you. Perhaps I’ll never tell you. So many questions, David. Were some or all of your acquaintances in the Martinique acting, or were they, like you, manipulated by science or witchery or both? Is Joan Martha, and will you ever have her again? Or is she just another person whom you have wronged and who hates you with sufficient passion to be my complicitor? Could she have a connection to that ancient and possibly fraudulent crime? You will never answer any of these questions…unless you create the Text. Then you may discover the truth, or you may not. The thing you must accept is that whoever I am—Amorise or Allison or both—I own you. I control you. I may testify in such a way that you will be set free, but I will still control you. I’ll continue to cause you pain. I’ve surrounded you with a circumstance you cannot escape. You may come to think that you can injure me, but you can’t. My wealth and power insulate me. I swear you will never be happy in this life or any other. Not until I decide enough is enough. If, that is, I ever do.”

She closed her purse and stood looking down at me. “There is one way out. But to take it you must go contrary to your nature. You can disobey me and not create the Text. Then I’ll testify that you murdered Carl McQuiddy, and you will die. That’s your choice, the only one I offer. To die now, or to create the Text and die after long years of suffering. What will you do, David…Francois? You can’t believe a thing I’ve told you, and yet you cannot disbelieve me. The stuff of your being has been transmuted from confidence to doubt. Logic is no longer a tool that will work for you.”

“I wouldn’t be here,” I said, “if I hadn’t killed McQuiddy. It was an accident. You couldn’t have predicted it.”

“You always kill, Francois,” she said. “A priest, a lawyer…Are not lawyers the true priests of our time? You’re drawn to detest such authority as they represent. If you hadn’t attacked McQuiddy, he would have attacked you. I own him as well.” She let out a trickle of laughter, a sound of sly delight. “So many questions. And the answers are all so insubstantial. What will you do?”

She walked away and my anger faded, as if my soul had been kindled brightly by her presence, and now, deprived of her torments, I had sunk back into a less vital state of being. At the door she turned and looked at me, and for an instant it seemed I was gazing through her eyes at a man diminished by harsh light and plastic into a kind of shabby exhibit. Then she was gone, leaving me at the bottom of the world. I perceived my life to be a tunnel with a round opening at the far end lit like a glowing zero.

I let the guard lead me back to my cell. For a long time I sat puzzling over the conversation. A hundred plans occurred to me, a hundred clever outcomes, but each one foundered and was dissolved in the nets of Amorise’s gauzy logic. Eventually a buzzer sounded, announcing lock-down. The gates of the cells slammed shut, the lights dimmed. Everything inside me seemed to dim. A man on the tier above began to sing, and someone threatened him with death unless he shut up. This initiated a chorus of shouted curses, screams, howls of pain. They seemed orchestrated into a perverse and chaotic opera, a terrible beauty, and I recalled a line from “The Testament” that read: “…only in horrid noises are there melodies…” I wondered what Villon had been thinking when he reached this point in the Act, what kind of man he had been before meeting Amorise. If, indeed, any of that had happened. For an instant, I felt a powerful assurance that the Act was a fraud, a mere device in the intricate design of Allison Villanueva’s vengeance; but then this sense of assurance dissolved in a flurry of doubt. It would never be clear. Only one kind of clarity was available to me now.

From beneath my pillow I removed the stub of a candle I’d bought from a trustee. I lit it, dripped wax onto the rail of my iron bunk and stood the stub upright in the congealing puddle I had made, and as I did I seemed briefly to see an ancient prison, begrimed stone walls weeping with dampness, a grating of black iron centering a door of age-stained wood, a moldy blanket and straw for bedding. I slipped a writing tablet from beneath my mattress, thin and smelly as an old man’s lust. I opened the tablet and set it upon my knee. It made no difference whether the woman who had done this to me was Allison or Amorise. Either version of reality provided the same sublime motivation. I felt words breaking off from the frozen cliffs of my soul and scattering like ice chips into plainspoken verse, the ironic speech of a failed heart. Then, in the midst of that modern medieval place, with the cries of the damned and the deranged and the condemned raining down about me, I began: