Hornets and Others

Hornets & Others

By Al Sarrantonio

© 2011 / Al Sarrantonio

OTHER BOOKS BY AL SARRANTONIO:

Novels:

Campbell Wood

Haydn of Mars – Book I of the Masters of Mars Trilogy

House Haunted

Kitt Peak

Moonbane

October

Queen of Mars – Book III of the Masters of Mars Trilogy

Sebastian of Mars – Book II of the Masters of Mars Trilogy

Skeletons

Summer Cool

Tales From the Crossroad, Vol 1

The Boy With Penny Eyes

The Masters of Mars – The Complete Trilogy

The Worms

Totentanz

West Texas

Collections:

Toybox

Halloween & Other Seasons

Unabridged Audiobooks:

Moonbane – Narrated by Kevin Readdean

To My Brother,

Tom

CONTENTS

Preface

The Ropy Thing

The Only

The Beat

In the Corn

Two

The Coat

The Haunting of Y-12

Billy the Fetus

Stars

Bags

The Red Wind

The Green Face

White Lightning

The Glass Man

Violets

The Quiet Ones

Hornets

PREFACE

Some of these stories are old and dear friends of mine; others, after visiting them for the first time in ten or twenty years since their publication, seem like new ones. I was particularly pleased to reread one tale and be totally surprised by the ending: is that craftsmanship allied to a bad memory, which I have ever owned, or merely incipient senility? Two stories are brand new to both of us.

In any event, dear reader, I do hope you find something herein to enjoy, and, more importantly, something that scares you...

Al Sarrantonio – May, 2003

The Ropy Thing

The ropy thing got most of the neighborhood while Suzie and Jerry were watching Saturday morning cartoons on TV. Then the cable went out and Jerry's dad put on the radio but then that went out too. By then Suzie and Jerry were watching the ropy thing from the big picture window in Jerry's living room. The ropy thing was very fast, and sometimes they saw only its tip stretched high and straight, or formed into a loop, or snaking over a house or between trees or moving over cars. It hesitated, then shot into the moving van in front of Suzie's house across the street, pulling a fat uniformed mover out, coiling around him head to toe like a mummy and then yanking him down into the ground. It pulled Suzie's mom into the ground too, catching her as she tried to run back into the house from where she had been directing the movers from the curb.

"We're getting out!" Jerry's dad shouted, giving Jerry a strange look, and the ropy thing got him in the front yard between the garage and the car. Behind him was Jerry's mom, with an armful of pillows, and the ropy thing got her too. It got Jerry's sister, Jane, as she was sneaking away from the house to be with her boyfriend, Brad, down the block. Suzie and Jerry watched the ropy thing jump out of the bushes in front of Brad's house like a coiled black spring, getting Jane right in front of Brad, just as she reached to hold his hand. Brad turned to run but it got him too, shooting up out of the lawn and over the sidewalk, thin and fast. It whipped around Brad and squeezed him into two pieces, top and bottom, then pulled both halves down.

Suzie and Jerry ran up to the attic, and the ropy thing snaked up around the house but didn't climb that high and then went away. From the small octagonal attic window they watched it wrap around the Myers' house and pull the Myers' baby from the second-story window. Then it curled like a cat around the Myers' house's foundation, circling three times around and twitching, and stayed there.

"This is just like—" Jerry said, turning to Suzie, fear in his voice. "I know," Suzie said, hushing him.

When they looked back at the Myers' house all the windows were broken and the porch posts had been ripped away, and the ropy thing was gone. They spied it down the block to the right, waving lazily in the air before whipping down; then they saw it up the block to the left, moving between two houses into the street to catch a running boy who looked like Billy Carson.

The day rose, a summer morning with nothing but heat.

The afternoon was hotter, an oven in the attic.

The ropy thing continued its work.

They discovered that the ropy thing could climb as high as it wanted when they retrieved Jerry's dad's binoculars and found the ropy thing wrapped like a boa constrictor around the steeple of the Methodist church in the middle of town, blocks away. It pulled something small, kicking and too far away to hear, out of the belfry and then slid down and away.

"I'm telling you it's—" Jerry said again.

Peering through the binoculars, Suzie again hushed him, but not before he finished: "—just like my father's trick."

They spent that night in the attic with the window cracked open for air. The ropy thing was outside, moving under the light of the moon. Twice it came close, once breaking the big picture window on the ground floor, then shooting up just in front of the attic window, tickling the opening with its tip, making Jerry, who was watching, gasp, but then flying away.

They found a box of crackers and ate them. The ropy thing's passings in front of the moon made vague, dark-gray shadows on the attic's ceiling and walls.

"Do you think it's happening everywhere?" Jerry asked.

"What do you think?" Suzie replied, and then Jerry remembered Dad's battery shortwave radio that pulled in stations from all over the world. It was in the back of the attic near the box of flashlights.

He got it and turned it on, and up and down the dial there was nothing but hissing.

"Everywhere..." Jerry whispered.

"Looks that way," Suzie answered.

"It can't be..." Jerry said.

Suzie ate another cracker.

Suddenly, Jerry dropped the radio and began to cry. "But it was just a trick my father played on me! It wasn't real!"

"It seemed real at the time, didn't it?" Suzie asked.

Jerry continued to sob. "He was always playing tricks on me! After I swallowed a cherry pit he hid a bunch of leaves in his hand and made believe he pulled them from my ear—he told me the cherry pit had grown inside and that I was now filled with a cherry tree! Another time he swore that a spaceship was about to land in the backyard, then he made me watch out the big picture window while he snuck into the back and threw a toy rocket over the roof so that it came down in front of me!" He looked earnest and confused. "He was always doing things like that!"

"You believed the tricks while they were happening, didn't you?" Suzie asked.

"Yes! But—"

"Maybe if you believe something hard enough, it happens for real."

Jerry was frantic. "But it was just a trick! You were with me, you saw what he did! He buried a piece of rope in the backyard, then brought us out and pulled the rope partway out of the ground and said it was part of a giant monster, the Ropy Thing, which filled up the entire Earth until it was just below the surface—and that anytime it wanted it would throw out its ropy tentacles and grab everybody, and pull them down and suck them into its pulsating jelly body—"

He looked at Suzie with a kind of pleading on his face. "It wasn't real!"

"You believed."

"It was just a trick!"

"But you believed it was real," Suzie said quietly. She was staring at the floor. "Maybe because my mother was moving, taking me away from you, you believed so hard that you made it real." She looked up at him. "Maybe that's why it hasn't gotten us—because you did it."

She went to him and held him, stroking his hair with her long, thin fingers.

"Maybe you did it because you love me," she said.

Jerry looked up at her, his eyes still wet with tears. "I do love you," he said.

They ate all the food in the house after a week, and then moved to the Myers' house and ate all their food, and then to the Janzens' next door to the Myers'. They ate their way, uninvited guests, down one block and up the next. They ran from house to house at twilight or dawn. The ropy thing never came near them, busy now with catching all the neighborhood's dogs and cats.

Even when they did see the ropy thing, it stayed away, poking into a house on the next block, straining up straight, nearly touching the clouds, black and almost oily in the sun, like an antenna. It disappeared for days at a time, and once they saw a second ropy thing, through the telescope in the house they were living in, so far away from their own now that they didn't even know their hosts' names. They were near the edge of town, and the next town over had its own ropy thing curling up into the afternoon, rising up like a shoot here and there, pausing for a moment before bending midriff to point at the ropy thing in their own neighborhood. Their own ropy thing bent and pointed back at it.

Suzie looked at Jerry, who wanted to cry.

"Everywhere," she said.

As the summer wore on the squirrels disappeared, and then the birds and crickets and gnats and mosquitoes. Jerry and Suzie moved from house to house, town to town, and sometimes when they were out they saw the ropy thing pulling dragonflies into the ground, swatting flies dead and yanking them away. Everywhere it was the same: the ropy thing had rid every town, every house, every place of people and animals and insects. Even the bees in the late summer were gone, as if the ropy thing had saved them for last, and now pulled them into its jelly body along with everything else alive. In one town they found a small zoo, and paused to look with wonder at the empty cages, the clean gorilla pit, the lapping water empty of seals.

There was plenty to eat, and water to drink, and soda in cans, and finally when they were done with the towns surrounding their town they rode a train, climbing into its engine and getting the diesel to fire and studying the controls and making it move. The engine made a sound like caught thunder. Even Jerry laughed then, putting his head out of the cab to feel the wind like a living thing on his face. Suzie fired the horn, which bellowed like a bullfrog. They passed a city, and then another, until the train ran out of fuel and left them in another town much like their own.

They moved on to another town after that, and then another after that, and always the ropy thing was there, following them, a sentinel in the distance, rising above the highest buildings, its end twitching.

Summer rolled toward autumn. Now, even when he looked at Suzie, Jerry never smiled anymore. His eyes became hollow, and his hands trembled, and he barely ate.

Autumn arrived, and still they moved on. In one nameless town, in one empty basement of an empty house, Jerry walked trembling to the workbench and took down from its pegboard a pair of pliers. He handed them to Suzie and said, "Make me stop believing."

"What do you mean?"

"Get the ropy thing out of my head."

Suzie laughed, went to the workbench herself and retrieved a flashlight, which she shined into Jerry's ears.

"Nothing in there but wax," she said.

"I don't want to believe anymore," Jerry said listlessly, sounding like a ghost.

"It's too late," Suzie said.

Jerry lay down on the floor and curled up into a ball.

"Then I want to die," he whispered.

Winter snapped at the heels of autumn. The air was apple cold, but there were no more apples. The ropy thing spent the fall yanking trees and bushes and late roses and grass into the ground.

It was scouring the planet clean of weeds and fish and amoebas and germs.

Jerry stopped eating, and Suzie had to help him walk.

Idly, Jerry wondered what the ropy thing would do after it had killed the Earth.

Suzie and Jerry stood between towns gazing at a field of dirt. In the distance the ropy thing waved and worked, making corn stalks disappear in neat rows. Behind Jerry and Suzie, angled off the highway into a dusty ditch, was the car that Suzie had driven, telephone books propping her up so that she could see over the wheel, until it ran out of gas. The sky was a thin dusty blue-gray, painted with sickly clouds, empty of birds.

A few pale snowflakes fell.

"I want it to end," Jerry whispered hoarsely.

He had not had so much as a drink of water in days. His clothes were rags, his eyes sunken with grief. When he looked at the sky now his eyeballs ached, as if blinded by light.

"I...want it to stop," he croaked.

He sat deliberately down in the dust, looking like an old man in a child's body. He looked up at Suzie, blinked weakly.

When he spoke, it was a soft question: "It wasn't me, it was you who did it."

Suzie said nothing, and then she said, "I believed. I believed because I had to. You were the only one who ever loved me. They were going to take me away from you."

There was more silence. In the distance, the ropy thing finished with the cornfield, stood at attention, waiting. Around its base a cloud of weak dust settled.

Quietly, Jerry said, "I don't love you anymore.”

For a moment, Suzie's eyes looked sad—but then they turned to something much harder than steel.

"Then there's nothing left," she said.

Jerry sighed, squinting at the sky with his weak eyes.

The ropy thing embraced him, almost tenderly.

And as it pulled him down into its pulsating jelly body, he saw a million ropy things, thin and black, reaching up like angry fingers to the Sun and other stars beyond.

The Only

When you meet Harbor Road, turn south. Now I can almost hear your footsteps. Walk until the breakers on your left seem about to wash up around you over the boardwalk, and the shop lights become dimmer, more secret. The shadows hug themselves here. Your footsteps are tentative now, but you are close—when you pass under a dull yellow streetlamp that hums, blinking out and then flaring on again, on the verge of an extinction never achieved, look up. There is a sign in a window, of three letters, and inside and upstairs, as they told you, you will find me. This is what you must do.

I can hear you coming.

Bill was drunk when they met him at the bus terminal. When Paul held out his hand, a lopsided smile of welcome on his face, Bill only grinned widely and put a half-empty pint of Jim Beam into his palm. "There's one or two more of those somewhere," he said, patting at his drab green coat. He grinned again, an elfin thing from this small man, smaller-looking under the army crew cut that was beginning to fill out on his head.

"Bastard," the third member of their party, silent till now, said. He looked as if he was brooding, but the other two knew he wasn't.

"Bastard yourself," Bill said, and then he hugged the other, holding him out then at the shoulders. "How are you, Jimmy?"

"Good enough." The thin, sour features turned wry. "Better than you, you drunk bastard."

"Hah! And more of that to come! I want to hit Harbor Road."

Paul began, "I thought we'd go back to my place for a while, have a couple of beers—"

"Beers, bullshit. I want to see the Bay, relive old times. Four friggin' years..."

He looked down at his shoes, shiny black, trying to remember something, feeling around his memory.

"Four friggin' years..."

"Come on," Paul said, taking him by the arm. "We'll do it your way. I know just where to start."

"Oh?" Bill said, and then he smiled and held out his hand to take the pint of Jim Beam from his friend.

It was late and grey. It had been warm in the afternoon, the thermometer crawling up from the damp thirties to hover, exactly at midafternoon, near fifty. But now the mercury was falling again, and the sky was falling with it. It had been a damp October and now a damp November, and the weak try at Indian summer the weather had given the past couple of days looked now to be losing out to the inevitable cold. It would be chilly tonight, and there was already, out over the edge of the Bay, a hint of mistiness that would turn to thick fog by morning.

They walked east, toward the water. A movie marquee said HALLOWEEN FRIGHT WEEK, but the K in week was already down and an attendant on a ladder was carefully removing the other letters one by one; the posters in the window now showed two lovers in a close-up 1940's-style embrace. They walked past a couple of bars, but even Bill didn't turn his head; this wasn't their section.

"The Sirens?" he asked. "To see Snooky again."

Jimmy nodded dourly, and Bill smiled.

A hard left onto Harbor Road, and there was the water to meet them. Their legs carried them on, but suddenly Bill stopped short, staring out at the Bay.

"What is it?" Paul asked.

"Nothing," Bill answered, staring into space. Again he seemed lost, searching for something. He shook his head. "It's just that I haven't seen that water in a long time, but it seems like I never left it."

The Seven Sirens looked barricaded against winter's advent. The green and white striped awning was rolled flat against the front, and the take-out window, open wide in the summer to serve clams and shrimp to the tourists who didn't know about the back room or were too shy or polite to barge in on the regulars, was pressed down tight and caulked. The porthole in the door was steamed; there was an untidy pile of late-season discards—paper cups and napkins—that swirled like a miniature leaf storm on the boardwalk out front.

Jimmy was pushing open the door when Bill held back. He was looking out over the water again.

"Okay if we stay outside?"

Paul looked at the two round picnic benches yet to be stored; the seats were up on the tables and the beach umbrellas—again, green and white striped—were missing from their holes. "Little cold to sit out, Bill." Then he added, "Sure."

He disappeared inside, returning with a tray of shrimp and paper cups of beer. "This stuff's on Snooky," he said. The other two had set up one of the tables, and Bill was once again smiling, holding the open bottle of liquor under Jimmy's nose.

"Come on, puritan. Just a sip." He turned to Paul, beaming. "Goofball still won't drink, will he?"

"Been trying to break him down for years."

Bill took one of the beers and drained half of it in a gulp. His back was to the Bay. The open bottle was in front of him, nearly empty. He was quiet for a few moments and then said, "I don't know why I came back."

"That's not what your letter said," Paul offered.

Bill shrugged. "All that stuff about being with your pals, the guys you grew up with, the places you know..." He shrugged again, then grinned. "I was drunk when I wrote that."

"That wasn't hard to figure out," Paul said.

"You misspelled pals four times," Jimmy said, straight-faced. "Spelled it with an I."

"That's what you guys are," Bill said, and suddenly he stood up, looking down at them. "My pils." He sat down again. "Hey Paul, you still teaching at the old school?"

Paul nodded.

"Why did you come back?" Jimmy said, and now there wasn't a hint of anything but seriousness on his face.

Bill was staring down at his hands, working his fingers over the knuckles. For a moment they thought he wasn't going to say anything. He reached for the bottle, then let his hand fall back on the other one again. "I truly don't know."

He looked up at them, and now there was a kind of pleading in his eyes. There was something he wanted them to tell him, some word or phrase to make him say what he wanted to say. Suddenly he blurted out, "Do you know what a shit I feel like coming back here? Do you? I was the big mouth, the one who always said that this wasn't the place to be, that there was a big world out there, that I was..." His hands were fists and he knocked them one against the other. ...That I was going to grab the world by the balls." He laughed. "That's what I said: grab the world by the balls. You know what I did?" He laughed again, a snort. "I grabbed myself by the balls."

"Hey, Bill." Paul began.

"No, let me. You knew this would happen. The two of you knew that if I really did come back I'd go on like this."

"We knew you'd come back," Jimmy said quietly.

"That's a really flicked-up thing to say."

Abruptly the hands unclenched, resting on the picnic table. There was a small plate of shrimp in front of him untouched, and as if his hands now saw what his eyes didn't register, his hands moved the plate away from him.

He went on, his voice lowered. "Do you know that two weeks ago, when my hitch was up, I had every intention of signing back up? I'd never even thought of doing otherwise. They were paying for computer school. I was up for a promotion in rank in a few months—shit, I was even getting along with the hard-ass sergeant I wrote you about. Things were going great with Julie too."

"You wrote about her," Paul said. "Said she was okay."

Anger crept into Bill's voice. "Did I write that I wanted to marry her? That was up the line too. And then—" He made as if he were holding a pen, poised above the table, frozen. "And then I had that paper in front of me, and suddenly I didn't want to sign it anymore, I wanted to come back to Greystone Bay. More than anything else in the world, I wanted to come back here."

"You remember your early letters? They were full of homesickness," Paul said.

"Come on, that was three years ago! I told you later on I washed this place out of me. What the hell is there for me here except you guys? After my old man died and the bank took the house—shit, there's nothing here at all." Once again anger came. "Do you know what my long-range plans were? Another hitch, then boom, out of the army with all that computer training behind me. I was going to go to Boston, get a job with one of those big computer places on Route 128, be set for life. And with Julie. And then suddenly, none of it means anything anymore. I had a fight with her just before I got on the bus, and ended up telling her to go to hell. We'd never even had a serious argument before."

"You can never go home again," Jimmy quoted laconically.

"Thomas Wolfe my ass. I'm here, aren't I?"

The anger had drained out of him, leaking away to the water behind him, and now he saw the bourbon bottle in front of him and he finished it with one swallow. Another sip of beer and suddenly he smiled, washing everything else from his face. "So I'm here, I came home, and, well, I guess it's all right." The smile trailed a bit and his eyes wandered. "I guess it's all right..."

It was getting dark. Out in the harbor, where bay met and kissed ocean, a lonely foghorn sounded once, then again. Nearer, a buoy slapped itself, the mild lash of a rope on hollow metal. The air thickened, became moist, and already the few fall stars twinkled desperately, trying to shine through the heavy night coming.

They rose, and moved on. As Bill pushed his chair back he saw Snooky regarding him inscrutably through the small front window; the old bar owner nodded once in salute, and Bill waved back. There was more drink in him than he thought. He stood and found the world turning for him momentarily; then it steadied and Paul and Jimmy were there beside him. There was a heaviness in the pocket of his coat and he felt down to find the smooth glass of an unopened pint of bourbon. He left it there, tightening the collar of his coat around his neck.

They turned south, passing Port Boulevard once again, where the bright lights of the shops and stores were beginning to turn to the dimmer ones of closing time. Bill felt oddly warm and peaceful. He remembered a time when he had stolen a newspaper from one of the stands next to Woolworth's, because his old man liked the Tribune so much and wasn't buying it because the factory had had a layoff and they were keeping every nickel until they found out how permanent it would be. He'd walked two blocks, fast, with the paper tucked so tight under his arm it hurt, and then when he finally slowed down he looked down to see that he had taken The New York Times by mistake. He'd sneaked the paper back to the newsstand, not so much out of guilt as that if he had brought the Times home his old man would know he'd stolen it and whip him till his pants bled.

They passed the Boulevard, leaving the lights behind. Again the buoy slapped itself, and suddenly Bill crossed the boardwalk, facing the Bay; he put his arms on the railing and looked down the steep embankment before turning to his two friends. They saw he had a newly opened bottle of bourbon in his hand.

"Had enough?" Jimmy asked.

Bill answered, "Never, I want to toast you two guys now." He held the bottle out straight over the railing. His head swam but his arm was steady as the rocks below. "To the two biggest bastards I know."

He offered Paul the bottle, and, after Paul swallowed, he was astonished to see Jimmy take it also, a discreet sip passing into his mouth. "Mother of God," Bill said, his eyes growing wide, clutching at his chest. "The world is surely ending when Jimmy Hoffman takes a drink." Jimmy shrugged sourly and handed the bottle back.

"Do you know," Bill said, pausing to lighten the bottle himself, "what I thought of the other day? I thought of the time the three of us went looking for that old man in the chair. Remember? There was that story we heard, I can't remember any of it, but there was something about an old man who sat in a chair all the time."

He looked at his friends; Paul was staring out at the water, Jimmy moving a hand along the railing, lips puckered, the taste of alcohol still in his mouth.

"Come on," Bill continued, "don't you remember? It was one of the biggest things we ever did. We found the guy in the chair. We must have been in third, no, fourth grade. Mrs. Johnson was our teacher. She still at the school, Paul? You ever see her?"

"She's Vice Principal," Paul said flatly.

"You see? I remember it was fourth grade because we had Mrs. Johnson for our teacher and because that was the year we all fooled Benny Lakeland into asking his old man for a box of rubbers for Christmas. You remember that? The poor dumb bastard didn't know what a box of rubbers was."

Jimmy was smiling, and suddenly Paul broke into a laugh. "I remember that."

"Don't you remember the other thing? The guy in the chair?"

"Do you?" Jimmy asked, oddly.

"Sure I do!" He stopped, racking his memory. "Somebody told us all about this guy who did nothing but sit in a chair in a little room somewhere in Greystone Bay, and the three of us went looking for him, and we found him."

"And?"

"And nothing! That's all there is. What's the big deal? The point was, we found the guy and nobody else did." He pulled the bottle up to his mouth and kept it there a long time. "Jeez, you guys are bastards all right."

"I remember," Paul said, almost in a whisper.

"There, you see!" Bill's eyes brightened.

Paul took the bottle from him and they all looked out over the Bay. There wasn't much to see now, but they had never needed eyes here anyway. The ears and the nose did all the work, with the salt in the air and the good dampness that was always there, especially in the summer, and the squawk of gulls and the tiny splash they made when they dived to snare a shiner from just below the surface of the water. The foghorn wept again, out somewhere in the loneliness, and now, close by, they heard that tiny splashing sound and then the triumphant sound as a gull reared blackly up away from them, its prize in its mouth.

"This is a beautiful place," Bill said quietly.

The others nodded, and then Paul used the bottle before Bill took it back.

The night closed in on them, and they walked on. South, still, along the boardwalk that creaked in places like the steps in a haunted house. "You remember the time we went to that haunted house near South Hill?" Bill began, but then he said, "Forget it." He was awash in alcohol, and the red and white neon lights stabbed at his eyes painfully, making him shield them. Everything was too bright, surrounded by too much darkness. He heard Paul and Jimmy walking beside him, but had to reach out his hands to clutch their coats to make sure they were really there. He wanted to throw up, but instead, took the bottle to his mouth again, as a baby might take a nipple.

"Where are we?" he said, not sure if the words had made it to his lips, but he nodded when Jimmy answered, "Harbor Road still, down near the end."

"Ah," he said, once more wanting to throw up and then suddenly, from far away, he heard a vomiting sound but was surprised to find that it wasn't himself but Jimmy who was bent double.

"Never could hold your liquor," Bill said, slurring out a laugh. "One drink in his whole friggin' life and he barfs up. Here, have another." He held the bottle under Jimmy's nose but Jimmy pushed it gently away, rising up slowly.

"Where are we now?" Bill asked, and then he stared at the front of the building they stood before.

"This is it. Goddammit, this is it!" There was drunken victory in his voice. He turned to his two companions, who only stared at the front glass window, a small square cutout with a neon-scripted Bud sign that was not lit.

"This is where the guy in the chair was!"

Suddenly he heaved over, throwing the acidy contents of his stomach onto the small stoop in front of the bar. He stood, cleaning his mouth with his sleeve, and then found that the hand within the sleeve still held a bottle with a half-inch of bourbon in it. His stomach protested loudly, but he took it down anyway, closing his eyes momentarily before focusing them again on the building before him. He dropped the empty bottle and it spun once on the sidewalk before settling, label down, next to the stoop.

The liquor, all-encompassing as it was, had now deposited him in a place that was crystal-clear. He saw the door, the brass handle on the door-

"We're going in."

His leg lifted, and he was up on the stoop. Without looking, he knew that Paul and Jimmy were with him. He could feel their bodies beside him, their wordless rapport.

"You don't remember anything?" Paul asked; his voice was low and Bill couldn't locate Paul's face to go with the voice.

"Dammit, this is the place!" he said in answer.

His hand was on the door—old, notched wood, a lock that had been replaced more than once; he pressed his hand, his body, against it.

The door opened inward easily. A push of tobacco smoke, thick as dust, greeted him, along with the stronger smells of any old bar: urinals long uncleaned, their towel machines empty, soap dish empty, a run of gurgling water in the brown-bleached sink, and a protesting squeal followed by nothing when the hot tap is turned; and beer, sour, run into every corner, dried but never gone, spills on the floor, green tiles rubbed nearly black with cigarette filters and the detritus from a thousand heavy shoes. There was a jukebox flat against one wall, in the shadows, its lights out save one faint amber bulb that pulsed like a retreating heartbeat. Pegs set into the warping paneled walls, dark as the floor, stained, another leak of water running silently from one ceiling corner to meet an ancient pool on the ground that never grew and never receded. The bar was not long but filled, smudged wood polished by coatsleeves, tarnished footstools with torn red leatherette seats. A bowling machine off in another corner showed no lights at all, a rug of dust covering its alley, the plug draped across the top.

The seats were filled with old men who turned as they entered; it was as if a nest of old birds had been disturbed, swiveling their hooded eyes to see what sort of animal approached. The bartender looked like one of them, perhaps elected to lift his aging body from his barstool, worn topcoat and all, and serve his fellow passengers. There was a glass in his hand, clouded, and he paused only a moment as they entered before turning his back on them to refill it from a bottle under the smoky mirror in back of the bar. His eyes turned up to the mirror, watching them there.

Someone at the bar snorted; swallowed phlegm.

"North Hill boys," someone grunted in dismissal, and the old men turned back to the bar, but all the eyes in the mirror, between the whiskey bottles, stayed on them.

"Dammit, this is it," Bill said too loudly. The world pendulumed up away from him, came to a standstill, pendulumed back the other way. He wanted to sit down. Once again his eyes hurt, and the world was divided into glowing blobs of light and surrounding darkness.

"We sneaked in and went right over there," he got out, pointing crookedly to an indistinct dark corner next to the jukebox.

"Follow me," he said, stumbling toward the dark corner.

His feet would not work properly, but suddenly he was there, falling onto the jukebox, his face bumping flush with the scratched dusty glass. "NIGHT AND DAY" —A-4, he saw, and then, mercifully, there were hands under his arms and he was pulled away. He expected to be taken to where damp sea air would greet him, but instead, there was a shuffling and his feet were on steps leading upward. He had never been so drunk. His boots scraped leadenly but then he remembered how to use them and he lifted one, then the other. He felt like a marionette, his feet flailing out and up in an approximation of climbing and yet smoothly supported by the arms that held him.

"Up?" he said, slurring his word horribly so that it sounded like the cry of a baby. He tried hopelessly to right his head and bring his eyes to focus, and then abruptly he could see for a moment. There was a steep up-sloping bank of steps ending in a wall. The wall got closer and then turned, and he looked up to see another series of steps ending at a huge—

"Paul? Jimmy?" A trapdoor dropped open in his mind, and he remembered it. He remembered where he had been. He heard giggling and he turned to see Paul beside him, his nine-year-old face stifling a laugh; Jimmy was on the other side and now Paul reached out, poking a finger into Jimmy's ribs and Jimmy threw his hands over his mouth, his eyes wide, trying not to cry out, and then turning to tell Paul in a severe whisper to shut up. They heard a creaking sound from below and the three of them stopped dead, leaning back against the wall and peering down into the shadows.

"You think someone saw us?" Paul whispered.

"Nah," Bill said, "not those old men. They're lost in their beer." Jimmy nodded, and they waited, still as mice, for another sound from below that didn't come.

"You really believe that crud about 'the man in the chair'?" Paul snorted in a low voice.

"You were there, you heard," Bill shot back, glancing up at what lay before them. "And pipe down."

"I think you put your big foot in your mouth," Paul persisted. He too was looking at the top of the stairway, but his tone remained derisive. "A bunch of bull— 'one man, and one only, from all the men in Greystone Bay, must always sit alone.'" He waggled his hands before him, his voice mocking in a whisper the spooky sing-song of a taleteller around a campfire. "So was the pact made, and so it continues—the safety of Greystone Bay for the life of one only." He opened his mouth and eyes wide, feigning fright, then broke into stifled giggles.

Beside him, Jimmy smiled grimly. "Didn't have to say you could find him, Bill. Everybody knows that story. I say there's nothing to it."

"I said I'd find him and I meant it. Let's go," Bill said, and they turned once more upward.

"Looks like the door from Twilight Zone," Paul said, but Jimmy hushed him as another creaking sound came. "That was you, idiot," Bill said, and he put his foot where Jimmy's had just been, producing another low crack of old worn wood.

The door was huge to them—four panels, the two on the top smaller, like squinting eyes. The knob was cut crystal, tarnished, like the ones in Bill's grandmother's summer house; he wondered if he would be able to turn it since he had so much trouble with those others—but then that had been because he was only three and he couldn't open any doors without difficulty.

"I hear somebody inside," Paul hissed, and they halted until Paul poked the two of them in the ribs, making them smother shouts. "Thought I did," Paul laughed.

"Come on," Bill said.

His hand was on the knob. It was just like those others, a thousand cut facets like imperfect prisms. It was slightly oval, fitting into the palm of his hand like a smooth Bay rock, a good one for skimming. He turned to smile at Paul and Jimmy, one step below him.

"Go ahead," Paul said, grinning stupidly, and Jimmy stared at him unblinking.

He turned the glass knob.

The door swung inward, as if pulled back by weights and pulleys. For a moment he saw nothing in the room but grey-yellow light and dust: a small hexagonal skylight choked with dirt, plastered walls with great rivers and tributaries of cracks, flaking holes, dark wood molding at the ceiling sagging out of its nail holes, pieces of it gone here and there, the floor covered with a sheen of undisturbed dust—and then he saw a chair with an old man in it.

"Holy shit," Bill said, and he reached for Jimmy and Paul but they weren't there. He heard their yells, their feet clattering down the stairway to the bar below.

The man in the chair opened his eyes once, a flutter of ancient eyelids like a lizard's, and it was over. After me, only you, Bill heard, though he didn't see the old man's lips move.

Bill blinked; time moved.

"Jimmy? Paul?" he called out. He stood over the threshold, the smell of mustiness in his nostrils, the glaring dead light from the six-sided skylight throwing the color of mustard at him. The room was empty. The arms were gone from under his; again, as before, he heard the sound of steps moving down the stairway behind him. He looked down, saw his army boots, and he felt his fatigue coat buttoned high around his neck. The room spun, came still; he saw off in one solitary corner the empty chair, high-backed, seat worn smooth—

"Jimmy! Paul!" he cried, knowing that his voice carried empty down the turning stairs, buried deep before it reached the floor below. "Jimmy..."

He walked, and the chair held up its arms to him, and he embraced it...

So that is what was. So long past, so many sour shines of moon and sun through my little window above. My eyes never open anymore...

But you are here now. I hear you. On the stoop, hesitation at the door, and then you push it open. The smell of beer and smoke. No one looks up as you sneak past—how many of you are there—two? Four? It doesn't matter. Only one will enter. To the back, past the jukebox, up the steps. A hesitation, another.

Come closer.

The Beat

"Dancing to a beat is as peculiarly human a habit as is the habit of artificially making a fire."

—Edwin Denby

FORMS IN MOTION AND THOUGHT

Minnow was pulled through the City. Feeling the beat—thump, thump—rising from the cracked asphalt, through the soles of her boots, stabbing up into her feet, through the leg and up her chest, until—wham--out through the top of her head and hands—feeling this, even as her fingers began to snap by themselves—she felt despair and lethargy overtake her. Leave me be, she whispered under her breath, but the beat wouldn't go away. Like a third rail jolt, she was locked onto it.

Snap, snap. It was as if her boots were metal and clamped to the magnet of the beat. It made her leap and dance. She flopped high into the air—came down, swuck, pulled like a piece of metal back to the magnet of the road again.

She whirled from block to block. The sun was rising now over the jagged edge of a skyscraper. It would be another hot day, and Minnow groaned at the heat to come. In yawning black doorways, others were starting to stir, rising on wobbly legs and being overtaken by the beat again. The worst were the cripples and arthritics—their dancing was a tortuously forced one: each step bringing cries of pain as a thousand knifepricks rolled up and down their limbs.

Minnow found herself now at the head of a grotesque conga line. It would be one of those days—the beat below was tapped into its sardonic circuit. When it felt playful, there was always trouble—burnings and perhaps other violence: perhaps even, Minnow thought with a shudder which quickly turned into a waving flourish by the beat, they would have another summer day like the one two years ago, with human head-topped flagpoles and the crack of overdanced bones filling the air long after the sun went down. Minnow doubted it—the beat had obviously been so drained by the whole onslaught that it had nearly shut down completely, its solar power reserves dried up—but maybe it had purged those circuits.

With an effort, Minnow stole a glance behind, and was greeted with the sight of a thirty block-long kicking line of bodies all following her demented lead. Dip, rise, hands in the air, hands down, shout, kick, hands in the air—the conga wove back and forth up the street with a pulsed regularity. The dance went on for a long time, with only a short heaving break which found twenty or thirty dead dancers flopping to the ground, their source of animation removed. During the pause, a few live ones tried to run for the buildings, but it was useless: in a few minutes the beat called them back again and the dance resumed.

This time they flapped and stepped their way in and out of buildings, a mile-long snake of human and halfhuman, climbing staircases and corking down fire escapes. One stairway broke under the heaving weight, but the dance went on, the bisected parts of the conga line rejoining outside the building. Minnow heard the screams of those who had been buried but were still dancing, under all that rubble...

But as Minnow had prayed, the dance ended at nightfall. There would be no undue carnage, no burnt-alive bodies, after all. The beat had decided, at least for tonight, to take it easy on its fuel reserves. Despite the heat of the day, and the clarity of the air which had led Minnow to fear that a bad one was happening since the beat sucked in more juice when the skies were cleared, the whole thing shut down with the sun.

Minnow, along with everyone else, dropped half dead to the pavement when the dance ended, and fell asleep on the spot. The human body was not made for punishment like this—sixteen hours of uninterrupted movement. Sometimes Minnow would try to fall asleep while dancing—the heat roasting into her and all—but sleep hardly ever came or, when it did, didn't stay long. And sometimes the beat knew this, and responded in kind...

Minnow awoke and pulled herself to her feet. The soles of her boots were still humming. Unsteadily, she hurried to where the others would gather—it would be best to get there first. But when she pulled herself up the five flights of steps and pushed the flap of the door aside, she realized that she had slept longer than she'd thought. They were all there already.

"We've got to do something tonight," said Cave, not waiting for Minnow to say anything. His mouth was as grim as the rest of him, and almost as hugely wide: Minnow remembered that there had been a time when Cave had laughed with that mouth but that was before the girl — Ginny? Rava? Whatever—had been pulled under by the beat. He wasn't a laugher anymore.

"We thought you were dead, Minnow," said another voice from the corner. Minnow peered that way; it was Goat—a half-treacherous bastard who, it was rumored, had done as much killing during the night as the beat did during the day. It had been obvious for a long time that Goat had set his eyes on Minnow's position, if not her body; and Minnow knew, along with everyone else, that there was only one outcome of that silent challenge: one less set of limbs for the beat to jerk around.

Minnow flexed her legs, pointing her toes out at Goat's dark corner. "Sorry to disappoint you."

There was uneasy laughter.

From the other side of the room another voice spoke up. A new one. Soft and careful, and the face that did the talking was, like Goat's, hidden in shadow.

"If you don't do something tonight there won't be another chance." All eyes swiveled toward the stranger.

"And who are you?" asked Minnow in a neutral voice.

The stranger leaned forward into a patch of weak light, and there was a gasp.

"Call me Skull."

His head was like his words. At first it looked to Minnow like it really was a skull, skin and organs stripped bare to bone: but, on a more careful look in the dimness she saw that he wore a mask, a tight-fitting death's head over his own.

"Why the theatrics?" Minnow asked, in a tone more defensive than neutral now.

"I have my reasons," the stranger said curtly. "I've been traveling a long time, started out from the other side of the continent, and I can tell you that things have already fallen apart over there. Have been, all across the country."

"This destruction been following you, by any chance?" This from Goat.

Skull worked his head slowly towards the other. There was a moment of silence.

"Can't say. But I know what I saw." He turned back to Minnow, his voice softened again. "And what I saw was this. That thing below, that you call the beat here—it's called a lot of different things—it seems to have completely lost control, and is slowly and methodically killing off everything. I think it's eating itself alive, looking for something it wants. Have things been getting progressively worse lately?"

There was a pause before Minnow answered, "Can't say they've gotten better."

"It's what I've seen everywhere."

Again a pause. "And you think it's going to happen here?"

The stranger spoke very softly.

"Tomorrow or the day after, at the latest."

"Then what?"

It was hard to tell whether the light in Skull's eyeholes came from real or reflected fires.

"And then nothing. Nothing left."

"Well, then we act. Tonight. How long do we have before sunrise, Copper?"

A short, bright redheaded man at her left looked at an ancient time piece on his wrist. He shook it, cursed, "Wait a minute," he said, and scampered out of the room, returning a few minutes later.

"By the stars, I'd say six hours."

"Six hours." Minnow seemed to mull this over. "You say you don't think we have another day?"

"I'd say no," replied Skull.

"All right. We have a vague plan, you can come along if you like. We know how to get in down there, that's all. From then on we're on our own. You have anything to add?"

"I've been down there once. All the way."

Again a gasp.

"You've been all the way down?"

Softly. "Yes."

"You'll lead with me. Copper and Cave behind. Goat and the rest after. Take whatever tools we have. Think you can get us all the way through, using our entrance?"

Skull leaned back into his shadow. "No doubt. The system is a continuous grid; there's no one major focal point. Break them all, break any one, it all goes apart like a broken chain."

Minnow couldn't help keeping the awe out of her voice; she feared her mouth was hanging open.

"What is it like? What is the beat like?"

There was quiet.

"You'll see," he said, and then his death's head was silent.

They found the hole with no trouble. Minnow had been afraid it would be covered, or worse yet, gone; but apparently the beat had not detected their advent the first time she and Copper had stumbled onto it after a day of fevered dancing, or, if it had, had not thought it worth its while to do anything about it.

When she told Skull all this he merely grunted and led on.

They had a few crude lights that Copper had wired together, ancient acid batteries goosed into life and connected to unbroken 25 watt bulbs. Those in the back carried tarred and oiled rags in case the batteries went dead.

They went down steeply for awhile, first descending a vertical greasy ladder and then, after traversing a short tunnel, a long staircase that led down in a slow arc. There were puddles at intervals, and the smell of dead matter: Minnow turned to Skull but his head only seemed to grin at her in the sour light. There were rats, too, large ones; with red tight eyes like small laser tracks. They were bigger than the ones on the surface, some a good three feet long: Minnow commented that the reason the ones on the surface didn't grow bigger was that the beat got to them there.

"I saw one dance itself to death one day, just before twilight," she said in hoarse whisper. "He was squealing like mad up on his hind legs, blood and spittle coming out of his mouth. You could see the strength seeping from his limbs. He kept dancing till the beat stopped. And then he seemed to fold up and blow away."

"They have the beat down here, too," was all Skull said as they pushed on.

They wound downward for about a half mile before Minnow motioned for them to halt. "Copper, how much time left?"

The redhead gave his wristwatch a bang. "I'd estimate four hours, give or take a half hour." His eyes were huge with fear. "The way I see it, we'd barely have enough time to get back to the surface again. If we get caught under—"

"We die, just like above," Skull cut in. "Let's move."

They continued for another mile. The walls were slicker now, and there was an acrid smell in the air, like burning metal or wires.

"Are we close?" Minnow asked.

"I can't say. I think so."

"I thought you said you were down here?"

"Only once," Skull replied.

One of the electric lanterns began to dim so they lit the other, but this too faded, victim of a fragile bulb. They went on by torchlight.

Abruptly, the steps ended and their pathway ahead widened. Minnow saw that it was brighter around them, despite the weaker light of the torches.

"There's something up ahead," she said unnecessarily.

Skull didn't acknowledge, but only walked on.

The five things were on them without warning. There was a shriek, and the torches were knocked aside by furiously flapping wings, leaving them all in a weird orange glow like sickly twilight.

"Run ahead!" cried Skull, and they followed.

The things—like huge hummingbirds with rotating metallic heads—followed them into a small amphitheater. This was the source of the light. It looked like a storage area or hexagonal locker: two of the walls were lined with storage bins and dusty metal cages, most of them empty. Tools and what looked like discarded uniforms jutted out of others.

The hummingbirds forced them into a corner. They hung back a moment. Then, with frightening slowness, they began to move forward. Each had a finely honed set of whirring blades where its beak should be.

"What the hell are they?" Minnow asked, pressing her back against the metal cabinet behind her. Her muscles tensed.

"I don't know precisely," Skull answered. "Some sort of guard device, probably the only one still working. Maybe they're just outlaw machines." He gestured at all of them. "Spread out and wait for my signal. I should be able to draw them back away from you, and when I do, you run for the doorway behind us and move on."

"What about you?" Minnow asked.

"I'll catch up." He waved an arm. "Go!"

Minnow hesitated, then moved quickly off to one side as she saw, with amazement, Skull leap straight at the hummingbirds. His jump was graceful, the gazelle-like arc of a ballet dancer—and in mid-leap he suddenly dropped to all fours. The hummingbirds seemed startled, and then, after hesitating a moment, fixed all their attention on Skull. Their wings dipped down, along with their deadly beaks; but by then Skull had rolled lithely off to the left and regained his footing, standing on his toes and bobbing lightly from side to side.

Minnow stood transfixed in the doorway by his movement, and only when he shouted angrily did she duck back to the corridor where the others were waiting. They had managed to get out without any serious injuries, though Copper had sustained a large welt from bashing into a storage bin.

They stopped halfway down the corridor, and waited. Ten minutes went by, and Minnow was just getting restless enough to start back toward the storage room when Skull appeared.

"Are you all right?" She couldn't keep the note of concern out of her voice.

He nodded curtly. "Let's move."

Goat started to open his mouth but the look Skull turned on him made him stop.

"I said let's go."

Another hour and a half of forward and downward progress and they halted again. They were back in the same sort of tunnel they had started in; had passed two more storage areas, each larger than the last and both empty of hummingbirds or any other surprises.

"How much time left?" Minnow asked hollowly.

She already knew the answer.

"Twenty minutes," Copper said in a dull voice.

There was silence, and then Skull spoke.

"I suggest we keep pushing," he said simply.

No one moved.

A sudden chill went through Minnow. Down here, a mile or so below the surface, it struck her like a hammerblow that she knew nothing about this man. He wore a mask, and sounded like he knew what he was talking about, and danced with a frightful grace she had never seen before—and that was all she knew about him. In twenty minutes the horrible dance would start again, as it did every dawning, and they would be trapped in a Skinner box on the word of someone they had trusted—she had trusted—for no other reason than that she had wanted someone to trust.

"You knew we wouldn't make it," she said in a whisper.

The twin caves where his eyes should be seemed to glow amber, then reverted back to dark tombs.

"Yes," he said.

Minnow threw herself at him, but in mid-stride her arms flew uncontrollably up over her head and she stopped and pirouetted. Her arms, her legs, were not her own anymore. A deep pulsing began in the earth around her, in the air, in her head and bones, and before she knew what was happening she found herself in an insane waltz. The beat had begun once more. She threw a quick, painful glance at Copper, cursing him silently for miscalculating the time by nearly a half-hour, but the thought of condemnation vacated her mind when she saw that he was throwing himself against the wall, arms whirling like a helicopter, and shouting with each collision. His face was bloodied.

The waltz continued, and she found herself with a quick succession of partners—Cave, Skull, Goat—who was trying, she saw, to pull at the trigger of a weapon he must have picked up in one of the storage bins they had passed. The fleeting conviction went through her that he was more desperate than she had thought, and that if the beat had not started when it did she might be dead anyway now, probably along with Skull. Another change of partners and she saw that Goat's weapon had been forced from his grip and that he was now slapping his hands together in time, faster than seemed humanly possible.

The waltz changed to a tarantella, and then to a Celtic jig. After that there were a thousand other variations. The one lasting image in all this madness was that of Skull, his graceful, aquiline body flashing past her nearly every time she was whirled about. He became an anchor in her storm, and his grinning skull mask was the one image that burned itself into her mind as the hours danced away...

She awoke propped in a corner, arms akimbo, legs collapsed under her like so much lead. For a long time she could not move. She didn't know what time it was; there was near-darkness, and at first she thought she could be outside, or in some abandoned building. But then the sour stench of the underground tunnel reached past her nostrils and she remembered what had happened.

With a groan she struggled to a kneeling position, and then, using the wall for leverage, heaved herself up onto her feet. She nearly went down again, feeling momentary pressure on one of her ankles, but suddenly there was an arm there, holding her up.

"Can you stand?"

It was Skull.

"I think so. Yes. It's not twisted like I thought. Just asleep."

She closed her eyes until the swimming stopped in them, and then took a deep breath and faced him.

"The others?"

"Dead." It was a simple statement of fact, but Minnow detected a note of something else—pity? sadness?—behind it.

"All of them?"

"All. Three died during the dance. The one named Goat then killed another one and then Copper tried to stop him and was killed trying to get his weapon away." He paused. "I took care of Goat."

Was there revulsion in his voice? Awe?

Skull said, "He was going to kill you where you slept."

"God," Minnow said, taking a shuddering breath. Skull stood silently next to her, becoming conscious of his supporting arm on her and gradually releasing it. For a moment Minnow was sorry it was gone, and then she wasn't.

"Now what?"

"We continue."

There was a blank certainty in his voice.

"So we can be killed the next time we get caught by the beat?"

"No. This time we make it to the center."

"I don't believe you."

He turned those eyes that weren't eyes on her. She was both attracted and repulsed by him at the same time.

"I don't blame you for not believing me," he said. "But I didn't lie to you yesterday. I said there was only one day, maybe two, before things went to pieces. I knew we couldn't make it in one day, but if I had said that, none of you would have come. What I didn't know," and here he paused looking around him; Minnow thought she felt him tremble, "is that this would happen. But if you and I don't go on, that's the end of it." His voice became as soft and careful as when he had first spoken out of the shadows, up above.

They locked eyes to eyeholes for a moment, and then Skull nodded sharply.

"We have exactly six hours."

They went through two more long pulls of tunnel and two more empty storage areas before Minnow felt a sudden change in the atmosphere. It wasn't anything she could put a finger on—something in the floor or walls perhaps, a vibration, something in the air around them. But she knew they were nearing their destination. Despite her best efforts, a small clench of apprehension formed in her stomach, and her steps became more consciously careful. Glancing sideways at Skull, who had been moving along easily beside her, she saw that he too had tensed, and now had his head cocked, as if listening for something.

"Hold it," he hissed.

They stood, silent as statues.

"There," Skull said; "hear that?"

Minnow held her breath, and now she did hear something; low, regular; a barely audible thump-thump of a faraway heartbeat.

"What is it?" she whispered.

He motioned her to be quiet.

It was louder now, getting louder by the minute—the heartbeat of a cat modulating into the heartbeat of an elephant.

Thump-thump, thump-thump—and getting louder still.

Skull yanked on her arm. She pulled back a moment and then saw what he was doing: there was a shadowy cutout in the wall which he pressed them both into.

"Quiet," he said.

The thumping had turned into something more now, and it was moving quickly toward them. It had the regular, percussive beat of something artificial; it sounded, in fact, like a column of booming bass drums.

And there now, under the thundering, Minnow heard the rattle of snare drums and cymbals.

Without warning, the source of the sounds pulled into view. Skull had an arm across Minnow's chest, holding her tightly back against the wall; he was cutting off her breath but she dared not breathe anyway. What passed before them was a huge, ghoulish marching band—fishpale humans of all sizes, beanpoles and squatty beach balls, all marching and dancing with a manic precision that thoroughly frightened Minnow. They were possessed. Their eyes were vacant with rapture; and the pure look of single-mindedness on their faces was unmistakable. They would die, or burn themselves alive, or do whatever was required of them. The walls rocked with the sound of their instruments and marching feet. They didn't miss a note, and those that played their huge oil drum basses or rattling snares moved with a cog-like precision.

"The beat is their god," said Minnow with complete, awed certainty after they had gone, leaving only echoed silence.

Skull nodded. "They want nothing else. They wandered down here, or were caught down here, years ago when the beat started, and now they live for it. During the day their god takes care of them, and at night they service themselves."

"How do you know that?" Minnow asked. She reached to touch his arm but pulled back.

"Come on," he said quietly, "we're almost there."

"Are you one of them?"

Something in his voice, the inflection, or the quietness, had unlocked a corner of her mind and she had a sudden vision of him dancing. For a split second she knew who he was. But the fraction of a moment passed, and she could not hold on to it. Once more she knew nothing about him.

"Come on," he repeated in a gentle voice.

Another hundred feet down the corridor and they reached their destination.

"This is it," said Skull. Through a high vaulted door they entered a massive underground arena. It was in the shape of a dome so huge, and colored such a deep black, that if stars had been painted on it Minnow would have believed they were outside and that this was their flat Earth. The floor was one vast tarpaulin, pulled taut as a drumhead. They advanced slowly to the center of it, and Skull turned to Minnow.

"Take off my mask," he said quietly, taking her hands in his and moving them up to his face.

Trembling, she did so, and when she pulled the sheath of rubber up over his head she found herself faced with an identical skull, this one of bone. The red candles behind his eyes flared into life.

"You're it," she breathed.

Skull nodded slowly.

"You're the beat."

Around them, it became even blacker.

"I think you knew it all along," he said softly. He made a leisurely, graceful turn around the arena. "Someone wrote, a long time ago," he said, "that the dance is the most perfect form of human expression—that it is the essence of humanity itself. It's been called poetry embodied, beauty in its most fluid and unchaotic state. Man believed this, and, eventually, man's machines believed it. I believed it." He stopped abruptly, and looked, it seemed, straight into Minnow's soul. His voice was soft, but held something suppressed, a rage or frustration. "If machine was to become man, what better way to prove we were not mere mimics than to exhibit his most human essence? If I could attain the dance I would attain humanity.

"But when I did this, something painful occurred to me: that man himself did not possess, really, the knowledge of his own most perfect poetry. And so the beat began, and has been going on ever since."

"You've been punishing us for not using what we're born with and which took you so much pain to get," Minnow whispered, horrified.

"No!" said Skull, his voice rising to an echoing shout and sending a chill through Minnow. "Not punishing: teaching. Trying to teach..." His voice dropped to a breath. "And I've failed."

"So you're destroying everything, from one end of the globe to the other, because you've failed."

His eyes flamed red fire, and she thought he would shout with rage again, but instead he pirouetted away from her, jumping lightly and landing with the finesse of a cat on his toes.

"It's time," he said, his death's head riveted on her, "for my last dance."

Minnow looked steadily at him, though her voice was faint.

"The end."

Skull stared at her, unmoving.

"And you my partner."

Every dot of light bled out of their surroundings then, leaving them in a darkness as utter and black as an inkpool. A spotlight, then another, materialized, making a circle around her feet and around those of Skull, and suddenly he was leaping up, up, graceful as a bird, and she was following him. She could not tell if they were on the ground or in the air. Her limbs, as always during the beat, were not her own.

They were swallows in flight. There may have been music somewhere; or the music may have come from within Minnow's own bones, singing directly into her brain from the core of her being. It didn't matter. The beat was there, and it made its own music. She was caught in a timeless web, and after a while she realized that her limbs were her own now, and that what she was doing was as much her own making as his. What they danced was something beyond poetry or ballet: it had more to do with water, air, and fire than with these things that were given names in some ancient time. It was an essential thing, born as much of the molecules and atoms that composed her, with their stately, roll-of-the-dice movement, as it did with the mere jerking of legs, arms, hands—though all these things were part of it too. It was something that clawed and cried and laughed, made love and violence. All movement, all dance, without this understanding, was ludicrous, obscene: but with it clutched to her breast Minnow became something more than she was before. It freed her from something that had always been with her, since the first forced tug on her body which this thing named Skull had generated. Then she had been made to do it; now she wanted to. And suddenly she saw that she was dancing alone, her arms and legs not fluid machine but human, and she soared and soared.

She awoke with the crampedness that always set in after the beat. This time, though, there was an underlying strength in her worn out body. She stood and stretched, looking down at herself and knowing for the first time that her body belonged to her and no one else.

At first she thought the arena was empty. The white tarp stretched tight to the circumference, and she could make out nothing on its surface—but then she saw, huddled at the edge, a crumpled figure.

It was Skull. He seemed, now, the mere bag of bones that his skull promised: Minnow had the unsettling feeling that if she were to pick his body up it would rattle and then fall to pieces and flake away. Instead she stared into his eyes, now absent of the crimson candle-glow of artificial life.

She looked into those eyes for a long time. And then, with a quick step she lifted her leg, gracefully, turned, and began to walk with resolution toward the tunnel leading to the world above. She would walk, at least for now—though she had the feeling that when the light of the sun or moon caressed her she might be unable to keep her body still. That warmly beating center core might burst to flaming life and take her limbs freely into motion with it.

She might have to dance.

In the Corn

Do you remember losing your eyes?"

"Yes."

"Tell me."

"I... was three years old, playing with my brother and governess in a wide yellow field in back of our house. It was Autumn, and the grass was stiff; I remember it was cold that day. My brother and I were tumbling on the grass, throwing each other over our shoulders, laughing. The governess, Nancy, got caught up in our game and began to tumble us over her shoulder also. This is... very painful to remember..."

"Go on. You must tell me."

"She was roughhousing with us, and began to pick one and then the other up, swinging us high in the air. I remember her twirling me around. We were all getting dizzy and were laughing uncontrollably. We had wandered somewhat from the center of the field toward an edge bordered by a row of picked corn; the stalks were stiff and dry and stood up straight. I can almost see the sun on their dry yellow. Nancy was laughing as if she were our own age; actually, she was only a few years older than my brother. I was running around and around her, chasing my brother, and Nancy suddenly picked me up, a bit too fast, tumbling me up and over her shoulder. I remember the stalks of corn coming at my eyes like deformed spears, I can see them now like I could then, as if in slow motion, coming up towards my eyes, and then into them..."

"Go on..."

"Doctor, I can't..."

"You must."

"I... remember screaming, hearing myself scream, and I remember flailing my arms and hands, trying to pull the stalks from my eyes, sitting on the ground and screaming uncontrollably, shrieking, my entire body shaking, and then feeling hands on me, Nancy's hands. I can remember her hands on my face, and the sticky mass of tears and blood, and then I could feel her tugging at the stalks, pulling them free one at a time, gently, and there was... a sound... as she did it, a sucking sound..."

"Yes?"

"I can't."

"I told you, you must. Continue."

"No!"

"Continue."

"I...—no!"

"You must go on."

"The... last thing I remember seeing was the governess' face after she had pulled the stalks free. I could see her face through blood, though I could not see very clearly. There was a look of..."

"Yes?"

"A look of horror on her face, and then my eyes began to unfocus, as if the world was being pulled away, taking the light with it, and I was alone and screaming..."

"Can you go on?"

''I...”

"Yes?"

“I was so alone."

"I understand. Do you remember what happened then?"

"I was sent away to have my eyes cared for."

"And?"

"And... there were other things."

"Please explain."

"They told me later, much later, that I had been traumatized. I was ill for a very long time, and would not eat or speak; I lived... inside. I went through a lot of therapy, and there were a lot of different doctors and hospitals. I was never sent home. I... remember screaming, lots of crying, and then, after a long, long time, a kind of peace came over me..."

"Go on."

"I became calm. I told them it was all right, that I wanted to go home. But they wouldn't listen to me. They wouldn't send me home. I started to cry. I wanted to see my brother again, I wanted to see Nancy, to tell her it was all right, that she didn't have to have that look on her face anymore, that it wasn't her fault. But they wouldn't send me home."

"And so?"

"I became hysterical again, and the therapy began again. For a whole year I didn't speak. For another year I screamed. And then I became calm again."

"I understand. Do you know how old you are now?"

"I'm twenty-two years old."

"Very good. And do you know why you are here?"

"Therapy."

"Of course. But it is time to tell you more."

"More? What do you mean?"

"There are things you must know now; I believe you can learn now what really happened."

"What don't I know?"

"Are you calm?"

"Yes."

"You will remain calm? You will not begin to scream, or draw into yourself?"

"No, I won't scream."

"Very good. Listen carefully. Your governess did not hurt you."

"What?"

"It is time to remember; you must remember; your governess did not push you into the corn. Your brother did."

"No!"

"Your brother tried to kill you. He killed your governess after he blinded you, and you saw her die in the corn patch before you lost your sight. Do you remember this?"

"I... oh, God... I was told..."

"Never mind what you were told. It is time to go back. You were told your governess was responsible for the accident because you could not handle what you saw. Your brother was taken away after the incident, and has spent his entire life in institutions. He is insane. He wanted to kill you that day out of jealousy for your attachment to your governess. He tried to kill you. Do you remember all of it now?"

"I... my God, yes..."

"Tell it to me."

"Oh my God."

"Tell it to me."

"I can't. I won't..."

"You must. Begin now, please."

"I…"

"Begin now."

"We... were roughhousing like I said, in that yellow field behind the house; it was cold... We were tumbling on the grass, moving closer to the corn field, and I remember that Nancy came out to tell us to stay away from the corn stalks. The day..."

"Yes?"

"The day smelled a lot like this one. There was the same smell in the air."

"Go on."

"My brother ignored her, and tumbled me closer to the corn; he was a bit older than I was and much bigger. The governess came over to scold him, and he laughed and deliberately pushed me into the corn, and those stalks came into my eyes..."

"Are you all right? Are you calm?"

"...Yes."

"Good. Go on then."

"Nancy... ran over, and I felt her hands on my face, and she pulled them out of my eyes with that sucking sound..."

"Yes?"

"I... remember clearing away the blood, and I saw my brother... push Nancy down into the corn patch, and he... got on top of her, weighing her down..."

"And then?"

"It's very difficult..."

"You must, as I said."

"He... was on top of her. He grabbed a husk of dried corn and began to... stab her in the face, in the eyes, and she screamed and screamed and..."

"You must go on."

"And the blood covered my eyes and I couldn't see any more, and I awoke in the hospital."

"Very good. Is that all?"

"Yes, that's... all..."

"You are all right?"

"Yes. Yes, I'm all right."

"You are calm?"

"Yes."

"Good. It is good that you remember these things."

"I can't believe I didn't remember!"

"You must be calm. It was necessary. You are calm now?"

"Yes."

"Good. There is something I must tell you."

"What do you mean?"

"Your brother has escaped from the institution he was in. That is why you were brought here."

''I—''

"Listen. Are you calm?"

^"Yes, I am calm."

"Good. Your brother will try to kill you. He wants to kill you. That is why you are here."

"I am safe?"

"That is why you are here. You will remain calm?"

"Yes."

"Good. There is something else I must tell you. Do you know where you are?"

"At another hospital, outside, on the grounds."

"That is not correct. Smell the air. Reach down and feel where you are. Do you know where you are?"

''I—"

"Yes, the corn. It is Autumn. Do you know who I am?"

"A doctor. Another doctor."

"I am your brother."

"Oh my G—"

Two

Sometimes now, when a cup fell from a cupboard, or a book fell from its shelf, or a spoon hit a pan or the television snapped on loud, she suddenly heard the scream of brakes.

"Mom?"

He placed his knife on his fork, ever so gently, but the sound went through her like a fingernail down a blackboard.

"Yes, Tanny?" The voice was a practiced voice, not really her own. The practiced voice was calm; her own voice wanted to scream and scream like those brakes.

"My birthday—"

"I know, Tanny," and the practiced voice spoke a little too quickly, a little too loud.

He came close, a mop of dark amber hair over darkly serious eyes, and carefully opened a paper, putting it by her plate. A boy without a father. She wanted to touch him, but she was afraid that if she touched him, if she lay her hand on his head, he would fall to pieces and that when the pieces hit the floor she would hear the wail of locked brakes forever.

Oh, Carl, why can't you be here for him again!

And then Tanny was gone, with the door to his room clicking gently shut (scream!) and the house grew winter cold around her.

That night, each night, she dreamed a dream. Sometimes it began with Tanny and Carl fishing on the short dock that jutted crookedly into the blue lake as she looked on. Sometimes she sat in a wooden-slatted beach chair and watched while Tanny and Carl flew a kite in the small meadow by the cabin, or while they rowed in aimless circles at the exact center of the lake while their laughs, high and low and crystal clear over the water, reached her content ears. Sometimes Carl and Tanny were sitting at dinner in the cabin while she served them, a single candle orangely illuminating their faces for her. This is how it had been in life: she the happy spectator as her son and husband lived their happy lives before her. After one of these scenes, the rest of the dream was always the same. They were in their bright yellow station wagon—Carl and Tanny in matching short-sleeved red and white checked sport shirts and she in a light blue dress. Carl drove, and they moved down the brown and green mountain like a drop of white wine down an upheld corkscrew. There was laughter in the car, Tanny's high laugh mixing with the low laughs of she and Carl. Tanny hit a camp pan with a spoon and he and Carl sang for her in the back seat. And then, suddenly, there was the scream of locked brakes, and then all the bright colors, green and brown and yellow and blue, turned bright red—

Oh Carl! She cried out, awakening and his name, his face and his deep laugh were all mingled with the sound of locked and screaming brakes.

In the day she looked at her son and wanted to cry because his father was not there for him.

It was snowing when Tanny's birthday present came. It was unloaded by two men, tall, in coveralls and parkas, but they were gone nearly before they were there. The big box was opened and suddenly the truck was gone and Tanny was gone, leaving her stranded outside his closed bedroom door.

"Tanny?" her practiced voice said.

"Thanks, Mom." The voice was distant.

She began to speak again but then she went away.

Dinner sat and cooled, and after the time for patience came and went she knocked softly on his door. She heard a shuffling, the flick of a switch (scream!). She reached for the knob but suddenly he was there.

"Sorry," he said, and he rushed past to the dinner table, closing the bedroom door behind him.

There was a candle-flame in his eyes, a warmth that hadn't been there for a long time. It warmed something in her, and for the first time in a long time the screaming went away.

"Tanny?"

He looked up, a startled deer.

Suddenly she didn't need the practiced voice.

"I... know how hard it's been on you since... the summer," she said, and as she said this the screaming tried to start again, way down at the bottom of her mind. "I... I know how much you miss your father, how much fun you two had together. I know you miss all those places he used to bring you and the things he did for you. I know you miss the things he used to make, the puppets and the toys he brought home as a surprise, and the popcorn he made, and the surprises he always had. I... wanted you... to know that I..."

She couldn't go on, and then her body was trembling all over and in her ears the sound, the high, tearing, locking sound...

Beyond the screams that filled her ears she heard the soft click of a bedroom door.

In the night, after the dream came and was gone and with it all its horrid sounds, as she lay breathing quietly again in the center of her large, sweat-soaked bed, she heard laughter. Tanny's voice was there, and another one, lower-pitched.

She held her breath and closed her eyes, and the voice didn't go away.

"And then we'll build a campfire," Tanny's voice said.

Muffled laughter.

"And then can we go to the movies?"

The other voice said something she couldn't hear, and then the two voices laughed again.

In bare, cold feet she made her way to his room. Under the door were colors, red and green. As she threw open the door she suddenly remembered waking up in the hospital to see that Tanny was there but Carl wasn't. I don't know how any of you got out alive, there was nothing we could do for your husband, we think the other driver was drunk, poor boy, growing up now with no father... She remembered the red and white checked sport shirt Tanny still had on, the torn sleeve on one arm, the v-shaped rip showing his bruised skin underneath, the blank, struck-animal look of loss in his eyes...

"Tanny..."

"Mom."

On the screen before him, as he hit a button, something red moved away into the distance, becoming haze.

"I was just playing a little bit."

She looked at the screen, at her son.

He held up a fat book of instruction meekly for her inspection. "You program in numbers and stuff and it..." He looked down. "It makes someone for you to talk to."

She reached down to touch him and suddenly she was lost again, powerless, trembling.

"No, Tanny, it's... all right. Go back to bed."

Oh, Carl!

All through the night she dreamed of Tanny and Carl together again, and in her wakeful moments the laughter and voices from Tanny's room came and went...

In the morning, after Tanny's cocoa cup was drained and his snow-boots were buckled and his mittens dry and secure and his hood and books in place, after the yellow bus had gobbled him up (she always closed her eyes when this happened, listening for the snap of the closing door that would start the screaming in her ears), she went into his room.

She went in there to dust, she told herself. She went in to straighten up, to take all the empty boxes and string and paper stuffing from his birthday present away. She did all this, and more. She straightened the comic books and dusted his reading lamp; put his running sneakers and hiking boots back in the closet. She did all this, and then she stood before the machine.

It looked more of a mystery to her than it had the night before. Now, with its buttons unlit and cold, with its screen a cold green eye, it looked dead and yet somehow alive.

She touched a button and nothing happened.

She touched a green button, way off to the right, and winced at the sound of a flicking switch.

The screen went bright and something, a red shadow, was there, moving across the screen and then gone.

A boy without a father.

"Carl?" she whispered, and then she quickly touched the green button again, watching the screen turn dark, dead green, and hurried from the room.

The days and nights passed, and the voices and laughter continued.

"Tanny, we have to talk."

"I'll be late for school, Mom."

"I'll drive you."

Over his oatmeal, he looked up. "You never drive," he said, and it was an accusation.

She said, very slowly and carefully, "I've heard you every night with your machine."

"Oh," Tanny said in a low voice.

"I want you to know it's all right as long as you don't carry it too far."

He looked as though he wanted to find a place in his oatmeal to hide. "Thanks."

"Tanny—" she started to say, wanting to tell him, as her shivering began, how much she wanted more than anything in the world to have his father back again so that she could watch the two of them and be happy, but he pushed away from the table, and was into his coat and out the door just as the bright yellow bus stopped to swallow him up.

In the long morning, at each tick of the hall clock and each creaking sigh of the big empty house settling around her, she sat in her chair and heard the imaginary screaming of brakes.

The world went round. White snow melted into gray slush, which melted into silver water, which melted into the warming earth. Green shoots, tender things with strong roots, shot up, along with white dandelions that waved in the wind and then exploded, sending themselves away. The sun burned warm yellow again. School boys grew thin, as winter mittens were packed into mothball boxes and hooded snowsuits turned, like midnight pumpkins, into canvas jackets with thin zippers.

The spring didn't warm or launch her, but found her wrapped all the more tightly in her cocoon. By day she wandered the house restlessly, straightening and then straightening again; by night she lay awake staring at a spot in the center of the darkened ceiling and listening to the laughter from Tanny's room. She tried to think of Tanny and Carl together, but this only brought a chill to her bones. She never went into his room now; but sometimes, when the door lay open a crack or when he ran out to his bus, leaving it open, she would walk slowly past, as though in awe, and steal a look at the icy blank screen within. Carl.

She and Tanny hardly spoke; their meals were silent eating times with only the setting out of plates beforehand and the cleaning of dishes afterward to frame them. When the yellow bus disgorged him after school he went to his room, and when he finished his supper he went to his room again. On Sunday he stayed in his room all day. It finally came to her, through the thick, gauzy layers of her isolation, that his bond with the machine was becoming too strong.

"School will be over soon, Tanny," she said one Sunday, when the sunlight was so warm and close it seemed to heat the food on their plates.

He nodded distractedly.

"Would you like to go away for the summer, just you and me?"

He looked up, as if seeing her for the first time in a long while. "Where?" he said. There was discomfort in his voice, as if he wasn't sure he was really speaking with her.

She took a long slow breath, fighting the demons within her.

"We could go to the mountains." Again a measured, practiced breath. "To the cabin."

He looked at her so hard her composure began to crumble, but then she realized that he was trying to comprehend what she had said. "You mean it?"

Fighting the paralysis that wanted to overtake her, she nodded, and tried to smile. "I thought we could fish, get the old boat out—though we might have to work on it a bit to get it in shape."

"Really?" There was a trace of excitement in his voice; but it disappeared as he saw the suddenly terrified look on her face which she was unable to hide any longer.

"I guess not, Mom." Again he looked down at his plate, getting ready to dismiss her from his thoughts.

With great effort she froze a smile on her face.

"I really mean it, Tanny. Just like old times. I can watch while the two of you—"

She was unable to control herself then. The trembling began in her hands and soon her whole body was shaking. Then she was sobbing into her hands. She couldn't stop shaking, and the tears wouldn't stop. "The... two... of... you..." she sobbed.

When she did stop crying, and looked up to see that it was dark in the house and that the warm May sun had gone away leaving only night, leaving her alone in a pool of darkness, she heard, down the hall from behind the closed door the sound of laughing voices, and she knew that now there really were two of them again.

May bloomed into June. The yellow bus drove quicker these days, hurrying toward the end of school and summer rest. The bus seemed almost angry, impatient for these last few school-days, these days of tests and short-sleeve shirts and the abrupt and rude opening of windows by shouting girls and boys calling to friends on the sidewalk, to be over.

She passed these mornings in the kitchen, at the table before her cold cup, or in the living room, sunk deep in a chair in the one dark corner where even spring and coming-summer had not penetrated. She felt as if she were wasting away; as if, within her cocoon, the time for blooming had passed and now all that was left was slow and inevitable decay. Each day the cold chair swallowed more of her; and in her mind, as if she were chained to a seat in a movie theater, or strapped before Tanny's machine, she endlessly reviewed scenes of Tanny and Carl doing things together while she watched. Her nightmare became a constant day and night visitation which always ended with the same scene of blood and loss. She thought of Tanny recreating these same scenes with his father in front of his machine, and these thoughts made her even more helpless in the face of the mounting dread and weakness she felt.

Tanny avoided her. He walked from the room if he stumbled on her quiet, shade-like figure. They ate their meals at the same table but there might as well have been a wall of brick down its center; and, when he took to leaving his meals uneaten, to go back to his room, putting a more material wall between them, she said nothing. Only her body spoke then, and the shuddering and the sobs it gave her filled her with nothing.

As the month wore on the noises from Tanny's room grew strangely quieter. Suddenly there was little of laughter from behind the closed door, only great frightening silences punctuated by sullen words or assent and approval. She wanted to move from her clinging bed when this happened, but her body would not let her.

When he came down to eat his silent breakfast on the last day of school something moved deep within her. There was something there, a small and violent flame that burned still in a place where there was no grief or fear, and it suddenly kindled and pushed her to action.

"Tanny," she said weakly, and she had to rise in painful stages from her living room chair. She could hear him in the kitchen, hurrying to finish, hurrying to be gone before she could face him.

"Tanny," she cried, and as she stumbled to the hallway he was past her and out the front door, slamming it (scream!) behind him. She rushed to the window and as he stepped on the bright yellow bus he looked fleetingly back at her. There was an odd look, of surprise, almost, on his face, and something else strange about him... And then the bus was gone.

For hours she hovered around his room like a lost bird. She tidied the room next to it; the room behind it. The rugs in the hallway she brushed and then vacuumed and then brushed again. The laundry closet across the way she cleaned from top to bottom. The chair in the living room beckoned but she blocked it from her mind, knowing that by what she was doing that tiny flame within her was pushing her toward the place she had to be.

Finally, late in the afternoon, she pushed open the door to Tanny's room.

The flame within her almost died at that moment. She fought to control the shivering that began with her hands, the thing that would destroy her and make her unable to go on. The room was... different. There was no laughter left. There was a sense of defeat—of death—in the air. Suddenly, she knew the worst that would happen, what the dread and chill and weakness of the past months had been leading her toward.

Please, Carl, no.

She now saw that the machine was on.

As she closed the door behind her and turned, she saw its blinking Christmas-color display and her heart gave a skip as that something, that red formless shadow, moved back and away from her on the screen.

She moved closer, and the screen remained perfectly flat to her, glowing soft ruby.

Again the shadow moved toward her, away.

"Carl?" she said, barely controlling her voice. "Carl, can you speak to me?"

That shadow again, an outline with a dark nebulous center, there and gone.

"You have to talk with me!"

Leaning over, she hit a gem-like button.

Nothing happened, and she hit another and another.

The screen abruptly changed, showing an out-of-focus outline of a figure that wavered and then broke up into static.

"Carl, talk to me!"

The ruby screen returned. The shadow moved across from right leisurely to left, then disappeared.

Suddenly in her mind she saw Tanny get on the bright bus that morning again and she knew what had been strange about him: He was wearing his red and white checked sport shirt, the one he had been wearing the day of the accident; in her mind's eyes she saw the torn fabric on the arm falling open as he stepped up into the bus, looking back at her with that odd look...

She knew what Tanny was going to do. A boy without a father. "Carl!"

She hit the gem-filled console with her fists.

The screen went gray, and then green, and then as from down a long tunnel, moved closer to her and became large and then became defined. The edges filled in, replacing green with the hardness of bones. Around the bones wrapped muscle, and then the fine lines of vessels carrying pumping red blood, and then a fine taut layer of skin and clothing and fine features.

The figure began to laugh, a fine, low, melodious sound impregnated with sadness and sharing.

It was her own laugh, her own face.

"Well, Tanny," her own image said to her from the screen, the face she used to wear in the summer, the clothes the blue and yellow summer clothes she used to wear, the hair, the fine fresh-washed and perfume smelling hair she used to have. "Have you thought any more about it? Do you still think this is what you have to do?" The figure gave out a warmth and an understanding that bathed the room.

The figure waited for an answer that didn't come.

"We'll talk about whatever you want," it went on, after a moment. "I know how lonely you feel. You know I try to help as much as I can. Though I may not know how to fix a bicycle very well, or how to make a puppet or put on a magic show, you know I'll try to help you with whatever you need." The figure brightened. "After all, now that your father is gone and there's only the two of us, we're all we've got, right?" Again the figure waited for an answer and then went on in a more soothing, infinitely sad tone. "Are you really sure you have to go back to your father? Aren't the two of us enough?"

Out in the street there was a sound, the stopping of a bus and then the unmistakable scream of locked brakes. She fell across the machine, her thin hands caressing it as though it was a child. She knew that someday someone would come, opening the door very quietly so as not to make the screaming start in her ears, not knowing that it was there always now, to find the two of them.

The Coat

Here's what happens: Harry puts this coat on, he thinks, God, I hate women. Not only that: he wants to kill them. No kidding. He finds the coat neatly folded in a deep open box, tissue paper folded back, by the service entrance of the SeaHarp Hotel. Drunk as Harry is, nobody pays much attention to him anyway. Wandering Harbor Road, half in the world and half out, unshaved, unwashed, thinking about Noreen and hoping she'll come out of the SeaHarp and let him explain why he said all those terrible things to her, that it's not like when they were children, why he told her to go to hell, to leave him alone, to stop loving him...

It's a pretty nice coat, actually. New, good wool, not phony polyester crap, frays that tear like cardboard, wet snow and damp air from the Harbor coming in where the nylon stitching pulls out, flapping, ice cold on his back. This is good, long, down past his knees, deep warm pockets, big brown buttons that slip into their holes like hands into perfect gloves, hand-tailored, maybe.

Man, this coat is warm. He stumbles out onto Harbor Road, the late big sun on this winter day hitting him square in the eyes from between buildings. He squints like Dracula for a second, bringing his hand up to shield his eyes, and at that point this coat, which is so friggin' comfortable, talks into his head and says, Get rid of the wine, Harry.

He's startled, but only for a second because he's so damn zipped and the voice sounds so damned reasonable, smooth, cultured, and who cares if it's coming from the coat, he doesn't care if it makes him jump like a kangaroo-- he was so cold before he found it. He remembers shivering like mad, even the wine not helping, lurching from alley to alley, trying to forget the past four days, hoping Noreen would stay away, hoping at the same time he would see her, let him explain...

Get rid of the wine, Harry.

The voice is gently insistent. Harry still shields his eyes with his right hand, doesn't know where the wine is, then looks down to see the Chablis bottle weighing down his left hand.

Get rid of it.

"Sure," Harry says, shrugging, and then he hoists the bottle up to his mouth, tilting it up. Down goes the wine, sour smooth. The bottle stays ass-up, dark green cheap glass in the orange sunlight, and then the white wine is gone and Harry turns abruptly and throws the fat bottle over the high wall of the SeaHarp and out into Birch Street.

"Home run!" Harry shouts as it shatters loudly. "We win!"

He laughs, and then he makes his way along the wall and walks out of the entrance of the SeaHarp and down the six steps to Harbor Road, walking down toward his part of town.

The girls are at it now. They're always at it. Early morning, bright noon, late afternoon, midnight, three in the morning. Ply the trade. He knows them, they know him, just like they know his buddies Jimmy and Wax, and all the other bums. They're all part of the landscape, like salt spray, tall brick, dog shit mashed into the curbs, sidewalks cracked up and down like snakeskin, dirty, boarded-up windows.

Here they are, ladies of night and day. Part of the terra-firma, just a "Hi, Harry" as he stumbles by, a lush's wave of his hand. "Hi, gal," too high to get it up if he wanted to, as if he'd rather spend what little he has on that instead of Chablis.

But he tracks in on the few of them out on day patrol, the coat wants him to watch, the skirts hiked up to here, a scant inch showing under leatherette jackets, Halloween hair, dark orange, frightful yellow, hoop earrings, skinny asses, puckering mouths, Marlboro stains on teeth. Shivering cold, most of them. Harry feels the wool-warmth of the coat, and laughs. "Sorry, gals," he says to himself, "but I got mine."

Let's go, Harry, the coat tells him.

Harry shrugs, turns away up Linwood Avenue. "Where we going, chief?" he says out loud, like any other drunk. Then he adds, "Wish I had some more wine."

Forget the wine. Walk.

They walk, up to Colony Avenue, over to Port Boulevard, turning left, passing cold faces, giving dirty Harry and his coat a wide berth, and then suddenly they're there.

Stop.

Somewhere over by the hospital. Wide, high store window, bright white and chrome inside. Rows of medical stuff. Stethoscopes, tongue depressors, wheelchairs. Old gent behind a glass-topped counter, telling a woman in a walker why she doesn't want to trade it in. Or why she does. The woman shakes her head vigorously, turns, walkers away from the counter. Harry hears the little bell over the door tinkle. The woman moves like a humping snail past him.

The old man in the store disappears through a small door into the back.

Look, the coat tells him. Harry's eyes roam over the store through the window. Little doodads with mirrors on the end, tiny picks and shovels, catheters, bloodbags.

That, the coat says.

There in one corner, glass shelves, rows of instruments, surgical masks, roll out leather cases, and a long scalpel.

Now, the coat orders.

He's in before he knows it. Holds the little tinker bell as he presses open the door, lets it go gently when he's in, over to the counter, reaching behind, hands steady—

The old man reappears from the back, his balding head ducking under the low eave of the doorway.

Quick, the coat says, and Harry is grabbing the scalpel, shoving it into the deep pocket of the coat, turning and walking quickly, tinkling the bell over the door as the bald man begins to shout, "You punks! Not again!" the coat pulling him like a hand tugging his lapels, three blocks away before it lets Harry stop, sure the old man's not following.

"Christ," Harry says, regaining his breath, and then he feels something clutched in his hand and looks down wanting to see a big green bottle but instead there's only this knife, half as long as his arm.

And then the coat says, Let's go, and Harry very much wants to have a drink that he knows the coat won't let him have.

Night now. The boardwalk. Not the tourist end, with the shrimp shops, gew-gaw stands, postcard racks, pay telescopes mounted on the railing for looking out at the foggy harbor that as often as not take your dime and either stay blind, or open their shutters to show the lenses so blotched with seagull droppings and dried salt as to be blind anyway. Not that end. The other end of the boardwalk, where the slats aren't swept and the railings are oiled black by the weather and bum piss. Where the ladies are.

The coat makes Harry study them again. They look like Martians to him; day-glow colors, shaking behinds, lipstick, dull eyes with dark painted blue circles—gum chewers, knees cocked away from each other, doing the walk, the lean, smoking, talking in twos and threes, walking, walking...

That one, the coat orders.

Alone, or about to be, two friends shuffling off to turn a corner. Classic lamplight pose. Harry's seen her around: blonde hair, up a little on top, shag cut, lips not as red as most, fishnet stockings. Young.

"I don't—" Harry begins.

Go, the coat insists.

She looks up slowly as he's up to her, then away. "Don't have any spare change, Harry," she says.

"Excuse me," Harry says, embarrassed, but then the coat takes over his mouth and he's smiling, saying it again with a rakish knowing edge in the voice.

"You hear me?" Still the cow eyes, the dim animal glow, gum in her cheek.

"Would you like an escort?" Harry asks, barely knowing the word. It's obvious the word isn't too big with her, either.

"Would you like to go somewhere?" Harry says, still that suave manner coming through.

She looks him over more closely. He knows what he looks like, he hasn't had a bath in four days, but the swagger the coat has given him must come through because she doesn't walk away.

"Fifty, Harry," she says, testing him.

"Fine," he says.

The smile goes away, then comes back, wider. "You got that much? What about your wine, Harry?"

The coat makes him wink. "I'm thirsty for other things."

"Why, Harry." She puts her hand on his arm, her eyes and mouth smiling, her whole body loosening. She leans into him, rubbing at the fabric of the coat. "Got a lot of money in those pockets?" she asks coyly.

"Oh, I have lots in there," Harry says, the coat making him speak, and the way he says it is so assured she laughs, and he laughs too.

And then, up in the clapboard hotel room, with even the harbor outside smelling cheaper, dirtier here, the coat makes Harry kill her.

She takes him up there, the top floor, a crack in the ceiling so wide and deep he feels night air coming through the roof, off comes the jacket, the sweatshirt, nothing underneath, the silver boots, the short skirt, the fishnet stockings. The room is chilly but she doesn't show it except with little goosebumps all over her. "Want to take the panties off yourself?" she offers.

The coat makes Harry shrug and smile. "You do it."

She says, "You gonna pay me before?" and when the coat turns Harry around and he smiles, she smiles too, pushing herself up on her hands and arms, showing off her breasts. She puts all her weight on her back and one stiff arm, holding the other hand out. "That's fifty, Harry," she says, and the coat makes Harry put his hand gently on hers, leaving the long scalpel there.

"What—?" he says, and the coat makes Harry put his hand gently on hers, leaving the long scalpel there.

"What—?" gets out of her mouth but the coat says Now and he closes her hand on the smooth cold handle of the scalpel and thrusts it toward her chest. She goes back with a huffing little gasp and her eyes go wide; then real pain reaches her and she starts to thrash, trying to scream through his hand over her mouth. Expertly, the coat makes Harry pin her back against the mattress, knees straddling her ribs. She fights, then a light pulls away from her eyes and she goes limp. He lets up his pressure but as he does so she rears up, nearly fighting out of his grasp. In a moment she is down again, and then the scalpel works and there's no doubt about it this time.

Harry's shaking, and what remains of the sour white wine in his stomach is boiling up into his throat, but the coat says, Stop. Harry stops. Not only that, but he finds himself tidying up, running his scalpel under the water from the tap in the bathroom, rusty and barely warm, cleaning the bloodstains from his clothes and himself.

Then the coat says, Go, and he's making his way out and down the back steps, newspaper sheets sleeping in the corners of the stairwell, the smell of cat crap, and out into the morning.

Wake up.

"Noreen?" Harry says, coming out of sleep, almost feeling her hand in his as he sits across from her at the little table on the porch of the SeaHarp, a candle flickering between them like faerie light, that first sober summer night enfolding them, the slight ocean chill, salt-smell, her telling him, as the wine he had soaked in for years evaporates out of him into the suddenly magical night, that she loves him and wants to help him, that she has loved him since they were children, that she knows, has always known, that he has greatness in him, how much pain it has caused her to see him this way, that he can still be great, that she will take care of him, that night, when, for just a while, it seemed it all might just work...

But that's dreamland, this is real, and he wakes up curled inside the concrete wall of the SeaHarp, and the coat says, Get up.

"No," Harry says out loud, suddenly scared, his head perfectly clear of wine and not liking the memories of last night flooding in on him. Suddenly he wants a lot of alcohol to make him forget, to make him forget everything, last night, Noreen, the whole enchilada.

In answer, there's laughter in his head and the coat commands, Move.

It's near night again. By the SeaHarp everything's quiet, and, as he struts down to the boardwalk, at the far end of Harbor Road, it's as if nothing ever happened the night before. He wonders where Jimmy and Wax are, his drinking buddies, maybe they've got some wine, then he wonders about the girl. Maybe they never found her. Maybe they did, and no one cares. Maybe right now she's feeding the sharks out at the mouth of the harbor, a hundred and twenty pounds of bloody fish food, too much paperwork for her pimp or the Greystone police to bother with...

Suddenly he goes stiff. Two Greystone policemen appear, walking toward him on the boardwalk. They must have found the girl after all. He freezes, the coat putting a semblance of a smile on his face, waiting for them to stop, search him, find the long scalpel in his pocket and club him to the ground, handcuffing him behind his back—

But they brush by him, not seeing Harry at all, one saying to the other, "Goddam garbage dump. You ever see anything like that before? Friggin' bums..." and then walking on.

And suddenly everything is back to normal, and the ladies of the night are walking, and the coat makes Harry look them over.

Her.

Older than the first. He knows this one, her name's Ginny, she's hit on him once or twice, even offering to do it for wine.

"Want to go someplace, Harry?" she asks, smiling. She runs her hands up around his neck, pulling his head down. He feels the tip of her tongue in his ear, touching, then running down and up his neck before her mouth stops by his ear again. "I'm real good," she says, and when he looks into her eyes something about them—the color, or maybe the pride in them, the absolute knowledge of herself, her mission in life, that she is good at what she does—reminds him of Noreen. He remembers Noreen's self-assurance, her absolute certainty that she could turn him from a walking wine bottle back into a man, her willingness to fight the alcohol for him, for both of them, to fight her brother Victor, manager of the SeaHarp Hotel, who thought she had lost her mind when she took him in, feeding him, letting him sleep his drunks off in a vacant guest room on the fourth floor. He remembered the first time she had taken him to her apartment in the attic, the tender way she had treated him, like a mother as much as a lover, the soft look of unmasking love in her eyes...

"Real good," the hooker repeats, smiling, looking at him with those Noreen eyes of hers.

Harry tries to talk to the hooker, to yell at her to go away before something bad happens, but the coat cuts in, making his mouth say, in that cultured tone, full of fatherly playfulness, "I bet you are, my dear."

"We'll see, Harry," she says, and then she laughs and turns and leads him into the night.

In her room, in another weathered building overlooking the sea-dredged rot of Greystone Bay, Harry tries to fight the coat. There's a bottle of French wine she insisted on buying, looking up at him coyly in the dim light of the liquor store to tell him that it's her birthday and she feels like being nice to herself. And to him. The bottle sits on a table by the window, and Harry wants to run to it, tilt it back against his mouth and drown himself out. But the coat won't let him. "We'll save it for later," the coat makes him tell the girl.

"I'm flattered you think more of me than the wine, Harry."

The coat makes him smile. Harry wants to cry, because she's so much like Noreen. But the coat won't let tears come. He remembers now how much he hurt Noreen when he was with her, how he drove her away because he couldn't stand her looking so hurt anymore, couldn't stand her love for him, couldn't make her see that he was no longer a schoolboy with valentines and big dreams, and couldn't face the thing he'd turned into; a wine-sucking mouth with no feelings attached, no heart. He had driven her away because he couldn't stand himself...

"I won't kill her," Harry hisses at the coat.

"You say something, sweetie?" the girl says from the bed behind him.

You will kill her, the coat says to him, mildly, but there's anything but mildness behind the words.

"I won't!" Harry nearly shouts, turning around to see this innocent prostitute, this proto-Noreen, staring at him with real concern, the smile on her face turning to a question, parted legs angling closed as she sits up, nipples hard against the room's chill.

"You okay?" she asks.

Harry's mouth is forming the word "No," but even before he tries to say it, which he never does, the coat has made him thrust his hand into the long pocket of the long coat, drawing the scalpel out like a sabre.

She barely cries out, the knife drawing across at her, cutting her almost in two at the neck line.

Harry cries out, "Noreen!" and then Harry is gone, and the coat is hacking and cutting with strength and finesse, and the night turns red and wheels away from him.

This time when the coat tells him to wake up he is still on the bed in the room. He can barely lift his arms from exhaustion. By the weak light coming in the window it looks like dusk. On the table in front of the window, unopened, silhouetted in pale light, is the bottle of French wine and he feels an overwhelming need to rise and take the bottle like a nipple into his mouth.

He sits up and sees what he has done.

Harry loses what little is in his stomach, retching bile when there is nothing left. He's still vomiting when a sound comes on the stairs outside, and then a knock at the door.

"Damniit, Ginny, get up!" someone growls outside. "You gonna sleep all night, too? You got five minutes or I'll be back to kick your ass onto the street."

Footsteps retrace down the stairs.

Move, the coat commands.

He is up, cleaning the room, cleaning himself and his instrument. The water is cleaner here, and in no time the blade is shining like new, the coat scrubbed free of stains and brushed. He washes his hands and face and combs his hair, and then the coat makes him look into the mirror and smile the smile of a man ready to do again what he likes to do.

Fine, the coat says. Walk.

He walks out of the bathroom toward the door to the hotel room. But then, as he passes the table with the unopened bottle of wine on it, Harry, with supreme effort, stops walking.

I said walk.

"No," Harry says.

He puts his hand on the bottle. The coat gives a shriek of rage in his head but Harry holds on. Slowly, fighting for control of his own fingers, he peels the foil from the top of the bottle. His hands shake like he has the DTs. The coat is screaming at him, ordering him to put the bottle down, but he has actually pulled the cork out and is lifting the wine spastically to his lips when the knock comes again on the door.

"Ginny? What the hell are you doing in there?"

There is rough handling on the doorknob, and then banging.

The bottle drops from his hands, spilling wine into the worn rug, and in a second the coat has regained him and he is climbing over the table in front of the window, shoving it up and crawling out onto the fire escape. Down! The coat commands, and he descends the rusted, half-stuck ladders to the street. The coat makes him look coolly from right to left, smoothing his lapels, then makes him swagger away towards Port Boulevard, whistling a song he knew as a boy.

And then he sees Noreen.

She is just descending the stone steps of the SeaHarp to the pavement, leaving the walled fortress of the hotel behind. He is right in front of her, and though he tries to keep walking, their eyes meet.

She gasps, and Harry tries to walk by her but the coat stops him dead where he stands and smiles.

"Hello, Noreen," he says, and now the coat makes him bow.

She stands speechless, but the shock has left her face. There is something different about her, her clothes or her hair, and, looking into her eyes, Harry can't help thinking that his absence has only strengthened her resolve to save him.

"I've missed you, Noreen," the coat makes him say.

"What's happened to you, Harry?" she asks in her mild voice, smiling at his politeness—but, with horror, Harry sees that she likes the change in him, she approves.

"I'm a different man," the coat makes him say, and then the coat makes him smile, and Noreen smiles too, looking as if she has stepped into a dream.

Noreen gives him a long look, and then she takes his arm, her hand brushing along the sleeve of the coat, and she says, "I've missed you too, Harry." She pauses, then turns to look at him, and says, "Harry, are you—'

The coat, not missing a beat, gives her his most charming smile and says, "I no longer drink, Noreen."

To Harry, trapped deep within the coat, the evening progresses with horrible predictability. She takes him up the steps to the porch of the SeaHarp, and, though it is cold, she insists they sit at the same table they did that first night. She seems to battle with herself and then, suddenly, with a bright smile, she says, "Stay here, Harry," and she enters the hotel, returning with food from the kitchen, along with a candle. She lights the candle, and there is faerie light between them once more.

They eat, Noreen shivering, holding her coat tight about her, but gazing through the candlelight at Harry as if he were a god. As the meal is finished, a veal piccata with Harry's favorite dessert, Boston crème pie, which the coat makes him compliment extravagantly, there is a growing look of promise fulfilled in her eyes. The coat makes Harry tell her what she wants to hear, letting him see what it can do to her.

In the glow of the candle, Noreen takes Harry's hand. "It's cold out here," she says. She pauses, then adds softly, "I want you to come to my room."

"Of course," the coat makes him answer, tenderly.

For a moment she loses her composure, and begins to cry. But then she regains herself. "This is the dream I always had for you," she says. "This is what I always knew you could be."

The coat makes Harry lift her hand to his mouth, and kiss it.

"I'm all I've ever wanted to be," it makes him say, sincerely, and Harry knows it's speaking the truth.

Her attic apartment is as Harry remembers it. Big bed neatly made, with the coverlet Noreen quilted herself, patchwork pieces from all the worn covers and sheets she'd collected in her years at the hotel. A clean white bathroom, unchipped tiles, pictures on the walls of the living room, Edward Weston photographs, Renoir prints. Persian rugs. A polished mirror, before which, Harry remembers, she brushes her hair a hundred strokes each night before bed.

She stands before the mirror now, an aging young woman with a dream fulfilled, and she smiles, shivering, holding her coat tight around her neck. "I must have caught a chill outside, Harry," she says.

"My Noreen," The coat makes Harry put his hands lovingly on her shoulders and smile at her in the mirror.

"Oh, Harry," she sobs happily, and turns to let him hold her.

Deep inside, Harry is screaming, trying to claw his way to the surface and stop the inevitable. But he has lost. The coat has mastered him, and it makes Harry try to gently guide Noreen toward the bed.

"Wait." She puts the flats of her hands on his chest and stays him.

"Yes, my dear?" The coat makes him smile sweetly at her, though it really wants to pull the long sharp blade from its pocket now and cut her throat from ear to ear as she gazes adoringly up at him.

"I just want to tell you that you've made me the happiest woman in the world."

"Dear Noreen," he says, pressing her close to him, unable to wait for the bed, holding her tightly with one hand while the other slides into the pocket of the coat to feel the smooth cool handle of the scalpel at the same moment he feels the deep cold cut of a blade into the back of his neck, the cold rush of air striking hot blood.

He staggers back away from her as she brings her scalpel neatly around to find the jugular. A bright wash of blood lifts out of Harry's open neck. He feels himself falling, then feels the vague thumping softness of the bed against his back. He hears from far off his own gurgling screams and, in his dimming vision, he sees the ceiling, then the silhouette of Noreen's form above him, raising the knife again to bring it down and...

She works on him leisurely, the door to her room is locked tight, the long night ahead of her, a butcher's instinct guiding her expertly. She is better than Harry was, tidier, and the strong dark green plastic bags she scatters around, as she learned with the first two, serve her well with packing and disposal later on.

By the time the sun is climbing tentatively behind the drawn shades of her calico-curtained windows, she is finished, the room cleaned, the long scalpel glinting, the bags dropped into the disposal chute in the hallway, not to be discovered till they are hauled to the dump out beyond the whorehouses on the boardwalk.

It is chilly in the room, she really must get Victor to send up more heat to the family quarters. She shivers and hugs her coat around her as she puts the scalpel back into its long pocket.

She yawns, stretches, looking at the growing brightness of day on the window shade.

It is time to sleep.

She lifts the quilted coverlet of her bed, ignoring the pale dried red stains on it, and slides beneath.

As she lays staring at the ceiling for a moment before sleep, she lets Noreen come up from below. Shock has quieted her somewhat, and the crying that has broken through periodically will not be repeated. She is beaten. Her thoughts are revolving nightmares now, centering on the box she found by the service entrance to the SeaHarp four days ago, and the two new coats within. Rich guests always throwing something valuable away, she thought, taking the woman's coat on top out, daydreaming, as she tried it on, how nice it would be for Harry to have the other coat, if only Harry, dear Harry, love of her youth and forever, would come back to her...

Noreen begins to scream, and the coat, tired and longing for its own dreams, pushes her back down to the depths.

The coat makes her sleep then, thinking of the coming night, and remembering with pleasure its own thoughts while cutting the long bloody woolen strips from Harry's body, God, I hate men.

The Haunting of Y-12

It was business time for the Genial Hauntings Club. Seated after dinner in the well-polished leather chairs of the club's smoking room, pulled up before a glowing fire which threw dark, warm shadows across the walls and ceiling, with brandy glasses and lit cigar or pipes, the members called on the stranger to tell his story. This, of course, was tradition at the GHC, for this was the one time during the year, on the Eve of Christmas (or, Dickens's Spirits' Eve, as it was whimsically called at the club), when a new member might earn admission. Not that admission was so difficult to earn, for the nominee, sponsored by one of the present members (in this case Porutto, a small, olive-skinned fellow of indistinct nationality with glasses and cool brown eyes, an adventurer by trade who was in the habit of tapping his pipe thoughtfully against his palm), need only tell a story. And the story need only be a true one, a story of ghosts—not a tall order for admission to an establishment known as the Genial Hauntings Club; but perhaps yes, since true stories of ghosts do not jump out of every shadow.

The members settled themselves in—Thomas, the painter; Maye and Podwin, the writers of somewhat Mutt-and-Jeff-esque proportions who had co-written many popular fictions, mostly in the science and fantasy categories; Hewetson, butler of the club (an exalted position, akin to secretary); Petrone, the social scientist; Jenick, the light-bearded editor and wit; Ballestaire, the actor; and the others; even Michele, the somewhat fiery-tempered world traveler—and the stranger began his tale.

"Well," he said, drawing himself up in his chair and taking a last leisurely puff on his cigar, "my story begins with a computer." He was a young man of short-medium height, working his way toward stocky, with a florid mustache and tight, shiny eyes behind his rimless glasses; there was an air of nervous certainty about him, as if he knew what he was about but hadn't quite discovered how to make others believe it yet.

"A haunted computer," he continued, pausing a moment for effect. And then drawing himself up once again with a sigh, he began in earnest.

These events (he said) occurred some twelve years ago, and the computer, called the Y-12, was lodged in my place of employment, what was then known as a think tank. There was a rush-rush project under way, and some very odd things began to happen to a man named Lonnigan.

Robert Lonnigan was in charge of our project, whose task it was to develop one of the first tabletop computers; you have to remember that at one time a computer that would now rest on your thumbnail would fill an entire drawing room. Anyway, some strange things began to occur.

Lonnigan was working alone one night when the prototype of the Y- 12 suddenly turned itself on and began to type out a message which read, "Robert, are you there?"

Lonnigan was a bit shocked, of course, but realizing that there was such a thing as a practical joke and that whatever had happened should not have happened, he turned off the computer and went back to work. But once again Y-12 turned itself on and typed out, "Robert, are you there?" and then added, "This is Father."

This shook Lonnigan. There was something eerily familiar about the words, and he had a slight feeling of déjà vu. His own father had died a few years previously, but being of the kind of mind that builds computers he was not about to admit to the possibility that his father's spirit had taken over the Y-12. Still, something made his skin crawl about the whole thing.

He quickly checked through all of the input files, which only he had access to, and discovered that no one had programmed Y-12—not officially, anyway—for anything that would include the kind of phrasing the machine had evidenced. And as for practical jokes, he couldn't figure out how it could have been rigged up since he was supposed to see every program that went in and since security was so tight due to government involvement in the project; no research assistant was going to jeopardize his security clearance and career by pulling a scary—and somewhat sick—stunt on the program manager. Lonnigan was resolved, that night if possible, to find out what was going on.

He set up Y-12 for two-way conversation using the IBM keyboard and printout and queried, "Identify program: 'Robert, are you there? This is Father."

There was no response.

He tried the same command, in as many variations as he could think of, but Y- 12 remained silent. There was not even an acknowledgment of the query as a viable one, and according to Y- 12 itself, no such statement had ever been made by the computer, nor could be, since it did not exist in its memory banks.

Lonnigan was dumbfounded, and shut off the computer, beginning to think that maybe he was going crazy. He was bundling up to leave for the night, and had just turned off the lights in the lab, when Y-12 suddenly turned itself on again and repeated once more, "Robert, are you there? This is Father. Please answer me."

A chill went up Lonnigan's spine and that feeling of déjà vu gripped him again, and he stood staring at the machine he had built, the machine he had turned off with his own hands, its amber and green lights now blinking on and off in the darkness and typing out repeatedly on its printer, "Robert, are you there? Please answer. Robert, are you there? Please answer." Lonnigan finally ended it by shutting down the computer completely and pulling the plug from the power outlet. He then left quickly, fearing that Y-12 would somehow turn itself back on despite the fact that its power source had been disconnected.

The following morning the bleary-eyed project manager assembled our entire staff and gave us a small speech, demanding that if anyone had tampered with Y-12 he should make himself known. No one stepped forward. Lonnigan pleaded with us, asking that if anyone knew anything at all about what had happened the night before, he should step forward now because he was endangering the entire project. We remained mute to a man, and I must admit we began to look at him a bit strangely.

There was talk throughout the day that perhaps Lonnigan needed a rest. A decision had actually been made to put him on at least temporary suspension when Y-12 suddenly burst into life with myself and about ten others present and began once more to type out its ghost message.

When the pandemonium died down, Lonnigan set us all to work. It was imperative, he said, that whatever was wrong with Y-12 be corrected before the government, which was funding the project, found out and all hell broke loose. One of my friends, a man named Boylston, asked, "But what if it really is haunted?" and Lonnigan, his face showing things he didn't want to show, answered, "Don't even think about it."

Every nut and bolt on the Y- 12 computer was removed, turned over, and, more often than not, replaced. Every circuit was tapped, checked and rechecked, each memory bank drained and carefully reprogrammed. Nearly three days later, when we were through, Y-12 looked exactly as it had before. "Let's hope we've driven it out," Lonnigan said as we ran it through a test program. "Driven what out?" asked Boylston, and the look Lonnigan turned on him made him not ask again.

Y-12 ran through the program perfectly, and then ran through it again perfectly. There was a general sigh of relief. But then, almost as soon as it had been shut down, it blinked back into life and began to type: "Robert, are you there?"

There was complete silence in the room, and Lonnigan's face went white. Heaven knows what thoughts were running through his mind then. Whatever they were he shook his head and refused to dwell on them.

He ordered the lab sealed, ordered Y-12 pulled to pieces again.

"Check every component twice, change everything that can be changed. We've got a government man coming tomorrow, dammit, so I want it finished before he gets here."

No one moved, and all eyes were on him, with the same silent statement.

Lonnigan went into a rage. "That's not my father in there, dammit! It's a bug. This is a machine. We built it, we can tear it down, we can smash it to bits and it can't talk back; there's a reason for what happened, and I want to know what it is! It's not my father!"

From across the room Y-12 burst into life and typed out, "Robert, please answer me."

"Get to it now!" Lonnigan screamed, and stalked from the room.

An hour before dawn the job was completed, and we all sat huddled across the room from Y-12, drinking coffee. No one spoke; all attention was fastened on the computer, or on Robert Lonnigan who sat huddled over a drafting table, a set of blueprints pinned out beneath his eyes. He was studying those prints minutely, almost obsessively, and muttering to himself under his breath. He looked drawn and haggard.

"There's something here... I know it. Something..."

At that moment Y-12 began to chatter and blink into life. Everyone in the room, including Lonnigan, jumped.

"Robert, are you there? This is Father. Can you hear me? This is Father—"

"Ah!" cried Lonnigan suddenly, grabbing the schematic and waving it aloft. There was a look of triumph on his face, and deep relief. "By God, I know what it is," he said. "I should kick myself for not solving this before. Everyone come and look at this."

He spread the diagram out on the drafting table as we gathered around it. Behind us, Y-12 went on, "Can you hear me? Please answer. This is Father—" and some of us glanced back nervously.

"Don't worry about the damn computer," said Lonnigan. "We've got some real work ahead of us before that government man gets here. Look at this section." He indicated a portion of the left upper corner of the sheet. "What happened was this, and it really is fantastic. We took every component out of Y-12, at least two times, right? And some were even replaced."

"A couple of times," I said.

"Right," continued Lonnigan. "But what we forgot about was the fact that some of the components of Y- 12 were taken whole from other, earlier units and jerry-rigged into this one."

"So?" said my friend Boylston, who was still casting worried looks over his shoulder at the computer. "We've always done that; it's better than redesigning whole circuits that are basically the same. It just eliminates redundancy."

"Well, that's basically true. But in this case we used a component that was haunted."

Lonnigan savored the looks he got from us for a moment.

"Now before you bolt for the doors, listen to me. Do you remember where we got this component here from?" Again he indicated the upper left corner of the blueprint.

"Sure," I piped in. "From the A-6 model."

"Right. And the A-6 unit we used was one of the first ever manufactured. In fact, I'll wager it was the first off the line. And look at this," he said, pointing to a specific area; "we used almost the whole thing intact."

"No we didn't," I protested. "We went through a lot of circuitry, but we bypassed most of it."

"Ali, but not all of it; this whole section over here was part of the memory banks of the original machine."

"Yes, but we bypassed it," I insisted.

"Did we?" This was an accusation from Lonnigan. "Ever since this business started, I've had the eerie feeling that I had heard some of what Y-12 was saying before. Well, it suddenly came to me.

"When I was fresh out of school I worked briefly with a man named Fleishman Bushyager—a brilliant man, but a little on the dotty side. He was elderly at the time, and pretty close to retirement age; the A-6 project, in any case, was supposed to be his last. You must remember this is a long time ago, and that I haven't thought about any of these things in years, so I may be a little fuzzy on a few points. But this is basically how the story goes.

"Part of the reason Bushyager was being herded out after the A-6 project was the fact that he began to come up with a few strange ideas; his son Robert died in an automobile accident and, like Arthur Conan Doyle, the old man became obsessed with trying to reach his son beyond the grave. He was actually working on some computer circuitry to aid him in this—a sort of computerized medium. Some of the higher-ups found out about it and since Bushyager was a big man they couldn't get rid of him outright; so they ordered him to restrict himself to A-6 work alone while they put through, behind his back, paperwork for his retirement.

"The old man was just about ready to leave by the time I got there, but one day he showed me some of the designs and one of his programs in particular. I stared and stared at this blueprint for hours and then it suddenly all wrapped up in my mind. One of the designs for the final A-6 computer actually contained, embedded in the circuitry, the design for Bushyager's medium. And though it was hidden, it could still do the old man's work for him, though in secret. He'd arranged things in such a way that his input would never show up on a readout, but the way we cannibalized the circuitry freed, as it were, the program for the first time. If you look closely, you can even see how Y-12 turned itself on. A bit eerie, but there's your ghost. The Y-12 was haunted—in a way. And the Robert our ghost was calling for was Robert Bushyager.

"Well," said Lonnigan, "we haven't much time before that government man arrives. Let's unhook that circuitry and patch it up, and clean this place up. At least we didn't have to see any real ghosts, right?"

"Amen," we all agreed.

"This," said the stranger, sipping at his brandy and relighting his cold cigar, "nearly ends my story. The A-6 circuitry was altered and fixed, and the ghost in Y- 12 appeared no more. In fact, my story would end here if not for one thing. You see, a curious thing ensued. During the cleanup before the government inspector arrived that morning, I took the printout sheets from Y- 12's ghost messages. I put them into a drawer, intending to show them to my wife when I was able to tell her the story after the security lid on the Y-12 project was lifted, and promptly forgot about them. A few years later, when I was leaving my position for a new one, I came across them while clearing out my desk; I almost tossed them in the wastebasket but then remembered what they were and took a close look. And I found, as I said, a curious thing."

The stranger paused, and, with his eyes, took in his audience who, he was delighted to see, was a captive one; even the somewhat impatient Hewetson was leaning forward in his chair, his attention fixed on the stranger's next words. "And what I found," the stranger continued, "was that between the lines of type, in the blank spaces, a kind of raised lettering had appeared. And, on rubbing at this lettering lightly with a pencil, I discovered a most chilling and interesting message. I tried to get in touch with Robert Lonnigan, who was not to be found; and I tried to get in touch with old Bushyager who, it turned out, was dead—which only deepened my feeling of alarm. For there, printed between all the lines of Fleishman Bushyager's input, was a strange message."

There was a moment of silence and then, with a flourish, the stranger produced the very printout he had been speaking of, spreading it out before their eager eyes.

"I, Robert Bushyager," it read, "am here." And on the very last line, at the end of the printout, "And I, Fleishman Bushyager, with him." And under that, "Tell the other Robert his father forgives him."

"Capital!" cried Porutto, the stranger's sponsor, and there were cries of delight all around.

And, after another filling of glasses and stoking of the red-coaled fire, a vote was made, and a toast proposed and accepted, and another member of the Genial Hauntings Club welcomed.

Billy the Fetus

Soon as I growed ears I heered things. My Mammy was a-singin' all the time, 'bout all kinds a-things—'bout the Moon, which was made a-cheese, 'bout flowers and bees and dogs that be a-barkin' in the dusty streets. She even sang 'bout the dusty streets themselves, what the clouds o' dust looked like when the stage rolled in or wagons pulled out from the genr'l store. I got me a fine picture o' the world from Mammy's singin'—a fuzzy place with a giant Moon made a-cheese hangin' overhead, which you could see sometimes through th' dust while the dogs a-barked.

She even sang about my Pappy:

Will Bonney 's gone,

Gone to the devil,

The devil ain't happy,

And that's on the level.

Shot through the liver,

Then shot through the heart,

Will Bonney 's gone,

'Fore Billy Bonney's start...

That Billy Bonney she be singin' 'bout, that'd be me, I figured.

I figured lots o' things, floatin' there in that watery sac in my Mammy, with the fuzziest sounds filtering through. Couldn't smell no dust, as I hadn't growed a nose yet, and I couldn't wait for seein' the dogs when I growed eyes. When Mammy really got to gigglin', she'd sing some o' the rest o' her song about my Pappy:

Will was a fighter

He fought 'em with his gun,

They put him six feet under

'Fore it all was done.

Many a man went before him

Into a dusty grave,

For Will was fast—

Lord, fast with his hands!—

And nothin' if he wasn't brave.

I could just see my Pappy out there in the street, shootin' under the big ol' Moon a-cheese through the settling dust, mowin' them other fellers down with his six-gun. And he musta had a good reason, 'cause Mammy, when she got to tinklin' the glasses, sometimes sang the last part o' her song about m' Pappy:

Will Bonney had another gun, too,

And he used it just as fast,

And now little Billy's comin' along—

But Lord, that's just the past!

So if you meet Will Bonney in Hades,

Be sure to say hello,

From the gal and babe he left behind

While he dances down below...

There usually came gigglin' after that, and more glass tinklin', and then the bouncy ride, and then the pokin' thing, and loud noises, and Mammy yellin', and some feller-not-my-Pappy yellin', and then the really loud noise which I didn't understand but thought might be the Moon a-cheese fallin' out of the sky.

And that's the way I went along for a while, while my hands and feet growed a bit, looking like flippers, and my eyes growed too, and my brain I guess, and I floated and dreamed of the Moon a-cheese and wondered what the bouncy ride was, and the pokin' thing, and the feller-not-my-Pappy groanin' and yellin', every time a different feller, it seemed to me, and the loud noise like the Moon a-cheese fallin' from the sky—a noise as loud as my Pappy's six-gun.

And then one day while it was all happenin' again, the bouncy ride and such, and some feller-not-my-Pappy a-gruntin' and yellin', I suddenly figured it out!

As if my brain had growed just big enough to make me see, it became as clear as the Moon a-cheese in the sky!

That feller-not-my-Pappy was tryin' to kill me!

And he was hurtin' my Mammy!

Hurtin' her plenty, I'd say, she was a moanin' and groanin' so, and now he was tryin' to kill me for sure, for here came the pokin' thing, a weapon if there ever was one—maybe even a six-gun!—jabbin' up from below and tryin' to bust my floatin' sac!

Well, no, sir, that wasn't gonna happen at all—nobody was gonna hurt my Mammy—and nobody was gonna kill Billy Bonney like they killed my Pappy!

Nobody was gonna make me go below, down to the devil, and make me dance!

Not me, the son of Will Bonney!

I had to do something about it—

So I did.

"I'm a-comin', Mammy!" I hollered, though I didn't have much of a mouth yet, and the little noises came out like the bubble farts I made sometimes in the floatin' sac.

"I'm a-comin' t' save ya!"

By now she was well past the gigglin' and glass tinklin' and into the Mammy-yellin' stage—but she really started t' yell when I made my way out of there. First I ripped off the cord 'tween Mammy and me—did a nice neat job o' pullin' it apart in the middle and tied it off on both the wriggly ends so's not to make a mess. That was a bit of a chore with my flipper hands and all, but I managed it. Then I began a' swimmin', paddlin' right for the hole where that pokin' weapon had been. Nothin' there now, and I saw the spot leadin' out and went for it. Dove right through with my hands out in front of me makin' a wedge, and closed my big eyes and whoosh! if that sac didn't break easy as I hoped, carrying me along for a ways before things began to dry out. Then I had to claw my way along. Not too far, which was good for me and Mammy, since she was a yellin' somethin' fierce by this time.

Things began to get lighter, and I waited for the fuzzy light to hit me, the color of the Moon a-cheese, but instead there was just a couple of flaps in front of me which I pushed apart and whoa!—there was no fuzzy light a'tall but somethin' that hurt my eyes fierce, like a burnin' itself!

I didn't let that stop me, though, or the little coughin' fit I had while my lungs filled up with what must have been air. The sounds were way clear now, with Mammy screamin' like the devil and the man I'd heard a-moanin'. I pulled my part of the cord out after me and kept on movin' while my eyes got used to the grand and glorious light o' the world, nothin' like the soft fuzzy light I'd expected but sharp as anything. And the colors! The reddest red you'd ever imagine, all around me and wet.

And there, suddenly, out the window of Mammy's room, floatin' in the black night that wasn't fuzzy a'tall, was the Moon a-cheese itself, which I got a good look at as my eyes began to focus sharp.

Then I dropped to Mammy's bed—

And there was a six-gun, laying right there beside me, and the man who'd hurt Mammy a-whimperin' and crouchin' in the corner, his pants around his ankles and his other-gun, like Mammy's talked about in the song, just as sad and droopy as could be.

So I worked up all my strength, and lifted Mammy's gun in my flipper hands, holding it on the bed and wrapping my flipper feet around it and aiming it real true, just like my Pappy would, and pulled the trigger twice, and I done shot that feller through the heart, then through the liver, and watched him drop dead t' the floor.

"I saved you, Mammy! I saved you!" I cried in little bubble farts. And then I turned smiling with my tiny mouth and looked at my Mammy for the first time ever.

She was a-layin' there on the pillows of her bed pale as ghosts must be, pale as dust, her eyes big and drained. She lifted a weak finger, layin' there in a pool of blood around her middle like she was, where I'd come a-swimmin' out, and she pointed at me.

"Mammy!" I burbled happily.

I waited for her to smile, but instead her lips curled into a sneer and she screamed in a hateful way:

"You little bastard! I knowed you'd be a boy when you popped! Felt you like a disease inside o' me!"

She got real weak then, and her hand lowered to the bed—but then the rage crawled back up into her face and she hissed: "I would've killed you too when you came out natural! Just like I killed any man who ever come near me!"

"But Mammy—!" I said.

Her eyes got all big and wild then, and she pointed to her still-distended belly. "Just like I killed your pappy, that sonofabitch Will Bonney who did this to me!"

I looked down at my own other-gun, which was so itsy it didn't look like it could hurt nobody at no time.

"Mammy—!"

"I'll shoot you through the heart and liver yet! Just like I shot 'em all!"

She began to sing then, in a kind of gigglin', croaky voice, a song I'd never heard a'fore:

So if you're six feet under

And dancing down below,

Be sure to look up Billy Bonney

Be sure to say hello!

She reached down for the six-gun, but before she could grab it she suddenly got to bein' real weak again. She lay back on the bed and fainted. And that was all the time I needed.

Didn't take me long to get fixed up again. The cord healed up pretty good, as I took my time getting the two ends to match up just right. I managed to get the hole I'd made closed, though I'll have to see how much good that does me, since the floatin' sac's gone. I figure the cord's the important thing, since the whiff I got of air while I was out didn't seem to hurt me none, and my lungs, small as they is, seem to be workin' okay.

Figure I can hole up in here as long as I need to.

Heck, who needs it out there anyway—I can wait to see flowers and bees and barkin' dogs, and that little peek I got o' the Moon convinced me it ain't made a-cheese, after all. Looked all wrinkly and dusty-cold to me.

She ain't gonna make me dance down below.

And o' course I got this here six-gun with four more bullets in it—and if she comes in after me I know how to use it.

Stars

Dancing along the edge of night, Donald brought the stars into his room:

These are the suns of endless night—

These are the burning orbs so bright—

These are the things that fill my sight—

STARS!

Standing on his bed, hands raised in benediction, he watched the night swirl into his room, shouted in joy as it vortexed in through the bars of the open window and around him: light upon shining light of stars, twinkling diamonds, heavenly choirs of suns, whirling, flying in exultation and the exuberant wash of heavens around him—

Outside in the hallway came voices.

The rattling turn of the doorknob, the key in the lock—

"Shoo!" Donald shouted.

Through the barred window, the stars rushed out, sucking back up into the near-dawning world.

The window closed and locked.

Donald jumped down upon his bed and into the covers. The key clattered; the doorknob turned.

They came in to find his pillowed tears, and sleeping form.

Wednesday was Dr. Smith day.

"How are we?" Dr. Smith asked, holding her clipboard.

Donald in his chair: knees pulled up, holding his ankles. He looked at the floor, the wall, anything else.

"Are you sleeping well, Donald?"

She thinks she is so sweet, Donald thought. She thinks she knows. I won't look at her, and then she'll go away.

"Donald? We'll be here a long time, if you continue this way."

She's not sweet.

Her hand out, she touched him gently. "Donald?"

He felt her leaden hand on him, knew how to make her go away.

"I'm fine," he said, turning to look at her. "I'm sleeping well lately,

Doctor."

"Dreams?"

"No dreams that I remember. My journal is empty, I know."

He waited, then said, because she wanted, "I'm sorry."

"There's nothing to apologize for. But it would be better if you wrote down your dreams. You have been dreaming. Your parents heard you."

The intercom. I forgot about it.

"Perhaps," he said.

"Can you remember any of these dreams?"

He looked at her, thought, I can lie. Then: No, she will know.

"I don't remember."

"Is that true, Donald?"

He looked at the wall again. "I don't know."

She sighed; always sighed.

"Have you ever felt it?" he said abruptly, loudly. He had startled her. "Stardust has a feel. Everything around us is stardust, but when it's formed into real stars, it has a different touch. Like petting something.

A cat." His eyes became momentarily fierce. "Alive."

She looked at him with heightened interest. In her eyes she was saying, Go on. Please go on, we're making progress.

"Bits of stars come to me. I summon them—Mizar, Alcor, Markab—and they send tiny parts of themselves to me. I want all of them to come, not just bits—"

He was suddenly silent. He looked away from her again, at the wall, her plaques and framed certificates. A part of him felt pulled to the night. "Donald, what do you think this means?"

"I don't know" he said.

A minor breakthrough, Dr. Smith termed it. In the back of the car, the song went through Donald's head. In the front, his parents argued contentedly about dinner, were happy; his father glanced in the rearview mirror to make sure he was still there. They wanted him to be well.

"Donald," his mother finally said, speaking as if he would break, "would you like to dine out?"

He made no answer, but they wanted to so badly, he said nothing to stop them.

The restaurant was darkening when they arrived. Recessed lights blinked on as the sun lowered outside. Too bright. They were seated near a long window, his father knew the management.

Donald sat facing the lowering sun, trying to stare beyond it.

Soon! Soon!

The menu lay open in front of him, so his mother ordered. The food came, and when his mother started his own hand moving to Donald's mouth with a fork, he continued the motion and repeated it himself. His father talked about sports, television shows, an architectural commission that might come.

Outside, the sun went down, as a sprinkle of stars lumined the bluing horizon.

Yes!

The song rose in Donald's head:

These are the suns of endless night—

These are the burning orbs so bright—

These are the things that fill my sight—

STARS!

He didn't hear the shouting around him. To him, it all went away. He was stretching his hands out, standing up as high as he could go, shouting for the stars to come to him. They bulged out of the darkening sky toward him, then pulled back and hung waiting. He wanted them to dance around his head; wanted to feel pieces of them brush against him like furred things. He shouted for them to come. A yearning joy filled him, but the stars stayed coyly planted, distant—

The lights of the restaurant were turned up bright, washing out the night sky. His mother's crying made him look down. He was standing on the table. Most of the dishes had been kicked aside, spilled. His father was holding Donald's pants leg tightly, trying to steady him.

The restaurant had gone quiet. Donald and his parents were surrounded by a frightened circle of waiters.

With his father's help, Donald stepped carefully down. His mother cried all the way to the car and then home. "Why can't we have even a dinner together? Why can't I have even that? Seventeen years old, and he can't even let me have dinner!"

He unhooked the intercom wires. His mother and father didn't come with the rattling key until late in the night, after hours of dancing and joyful shouting. He was exhausted. The stars, more of them, bigger bits, rushed back out into the deep sky all at once as the door opened, leaving him giddy, feeling as if he were in a sudden vacuum. His knuckles were bloody, there were marks on the ceiling where he had tried to push himself up and through. The window bars were marked with blood, and with scratches from the furniture he had broken.

"Why do you do this!" his mother screamed from the doorway. She would not enter.

His father came in, looked at the damage, and told his wife to be quiet.

"I won't be quiet! Why do you do this, Donald!" she shouted. "You used to be a normal little boy, you played baseball and read books and watched television—you were just a little boy!"

She turned and ran off, sobbing.

Donald looked after her, and remembered, but she was not correct. He saw himself in his crib, staring out past the rotating mobile: little moons and planets turning over his head in nightlight, playing Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, staring out through the softly blowing curtains to the real stars in the sky twinkling for him, flashing in the dark night, reaching like a mother's soft hands down to him—

He remembered playing baseball, the summer games at night, the lights glaring angrily down onto the field, the pitch coming to him, his father in the stands. But Sirius was rising on the eastern horizon in front of him, over the outfield, and he stood and dropped his bat and they called him out—

He remembered reading, the book about stars, the sun spilling through his window onto his desk. He learned their names. But already he was dreaming of the night to come, when he would kneel and hold his palms out, secretly wishing as the real stars spread their beautiful blanket overhead—

He remembered watching television, going to birthday parties, throwing a football in the backyard with his father, a thousand other things, but always the stars—the stars!—called to him, up through the earth during the bright day, out past the blue-skied sun in the darkness of space, their call deeper, richer, more insistent than the movement of his own blood.

And now, and now!—

These are the suns of endless night—

These are the orbs that burn so bright—

These are the things that fill my sight—

STARS!

He sang loud, laughing, thrusting his hands up, watching Arcturus through the barred window rushing down toward him, Vega, Deneb and Aldebaran and all the rest, yellow, blue, red, white, dwarf, giant, hurrying pieces of themselves toward him, toward him!

He leapt to meet them, hands grasping, and faintly heard his father shout as he hit the bars, tried to push his face through to meet the stars, his father shouting, "For God's sake, Donald!" before he brought his face back and then swiftly forward, wanting to meet the stars halfway to heaven, and then, his father's grip on him now. His father suddenly let go, staring out through the bars with his mouth open, before blinking and then taking hold of Donald once more. Donald hit his head against the bars amidst his father's repeated cries—

Every day was Dr. Smith day.

He was put in a room with no window. White walls: he could feel the winter stars pulling like burning magnets through the thick concrete. When he tried to ram his head through, they transferred him to a smaller room with padding over the cinder blocks, no sink or toilet. There was a thick door with a convex-lensed porthole, through which nurses gaped like fish. He could smell the fragments of stars, ever larger, knew they were just outside the walls, waiting to rush upon him, nuzzle, claim him.

So he began to dig toward them, a tiny quarter inch at a time, pulling back a flap of padding to work on the concrete wall with a spoon from supper they didn't miss. All night, each night, he sang to himself and burrowed, hiding his progress.

His parents came and he sat between them in Dr. Smith's office, knees up, head down.

They talked as if he wasn't there.

"Acute schizophrenia," Dr. Smith said. "This is the way it progresses, sometimes. The manifestations get worse as they get older."

So sad she sounded: a voice to soothe his mother, who sat rocking herself, sobbing into a handkerchief.

"Doctor," his father began, uncomfortably, "is there. . . any chance that what Donald sees is real? There was a brief moment the other night when I thought I saw something, what looked like particles of light—"

"Tiny bits of stars visiting your son?" Dr. Smith's look of indulgent superiority quieted him. "I'm no physicist or astronomer," she said, "but I think that if the stars moved in the sky we would know about it. And, of course, if even one entire star were to actually 'visit' the Earth..."

She trailed off, aware that in her eagerness to be clever she had spoken too dogmatically. She quickly added. "It's quite possible you saw something, of course—or at least thought you did. Dust motes, perhaps. But I would characterize it as a sympathetic illusion, a way of identifying with your son."

Donald's father looked away uneasily, and his mother was taken by a renewed bout of weeping.

"And now," Dr. Smith continued, "we must think about how best to care for Donald..."

Later, in his cell, Donald continued to dig, eating powdered concrete, spoonful by spoonful.

In the middle of May the hole was nearly finished. All winter he had felt the winter stars pulling at him, finally giving way to spring. The constellation Orion left him, but the stars of Leo pulled high overhead, calling out, growing stronger as the wall gave way.

Soon!

Soon!

One night the spoon poked through to darkness.

It was as if electricity had shot through him. He pressed his face to the tiny hole, heard the singing stars outside. He began to cry with happiness. He widened the tiny opening, pressed his straining wide eye to it, staring out.

He saw little, the outline of a low, close row of bushes, the leg of an outdoor bench on the path that wound through the grounds. He looked up, and saw the merest flicker of a tiny light—Regulus, the Lion's paw—singing to him!

These are the orbs that burn so bright—

These are the things that fill my sight—

STARS!

He wept, pressed his hands to the wall, tried to move it out, biting at the bottom of the tiny opening with his mouth, tried to swallow the wall and make it go away:

STARS!

Donald screamed. He felt a singing, magnetic, painful need in his body. Pale blue-white Regulus held its hands out to him, sent a scintilla of itself to dance in front of him, called to him, strained toward him—

STARS!

He beat at the wall, willed the wall to go away, to let him hold his own hands out to Regulus. And as he screamed in need again, pressing his wide eye tight to the opening, reaching out with his sight, all the stars of Leo—Regulus, Denebola and Algieba and Zosma—all the stars!—sent fingers of themselves rushing at him, swirling and dancing, holding their bright atoms out to him, pulling at him and he cried and screamed and beat his hands on the unmoving wall—

And then suddenly he stopped screaming and turned, wide-eyed, to see human faces staring in at him through the fish-eye porthole.

As he pulled himself back away from the hole, he saw the particles of stars whirl up and fly back away from him.

"No!"

But already it was too late. Dr. Smith and the others were through the door and running at him, bending down, their hands on him—

"No!" he screamed, straining his eye back to the hole. The star bits returned, whirled and stopped near the hole and again he heard their singing—but already it was too late. The hands were strong on him, many hands pulling him back. Donald bit and screamed at them and his eye grew wide and strained against the hole as the hands sought to pull him back and his own hands tried to reach out through the walls.

They could not pull him from the hole, his wide eye squeezed tight to it—and now he felt himself going through, his eye and then the rest of him would squeeze through the tiny hole and the stars were waiting, dancing, singing for him and they would all finally come to him!

And then they pulled him back mightily, many hands, and he cried, "NO!" and pushed his eye out of its socket and through—

For the tiniest moment he felt the stars touch him, their warm fingers on him, holding tight, almost coming to him, particle by atom all of them ready to spring upon him, caressing his eye up through his optic nerve, almost, almost!—before there was a quick shutter of blackness and pain and the attendants yanked him back and away—

Late in the night they had him strapped into a straightjacket, in Dr. Smith's office in a chair. His hands were bandaged, his head heavily dressed around his empty eyesocket. He had bitten two of the attendants; they gave him sour looks as they passed the open doorway.

^"...it will be better, and, I'm afraid, legally necessary at this point, to move him to the state facility," Dr. Smith was saying.

Donald's father looked tired and limp in his suit, looked at Donald briefly and then away.

"I can't believe he did that to himself!" his mother said. She did not look at him, but at Dr. Smith who received her anger. "Why in God's name did he do that?"

Donald sat quietly in his chair, smiling.

His parents rode with him in the rear seat of Dr. Smith's car. The hospital wanted her to take an ambulance, and two burly attendants, but she convinced them that this was better. Donald sat between his parents, in his strait jacket. His father rested his head wearily against the side window. His mother sat erect, alert, hands clenched.

They pulled out from the underground entrance of the hospital and moved up the ramp. Mercury vapor lamps illuminated the long roadway to the front gates, the road beyond.

As they rolled out from beneath the lights, the night closed in, and Donald saw the stars.

They were there, up through the rear window! He tilted his head back—and there, through his one eye, they waited and sang to him. Leo was falling, but in its place was Hercules with his club, Ras Algethi and Marfik and Ruticulus, swirling from their places toward him. Reaching their tendril fingers out. Trying, finally, to get to him.

He leaned back, and his father said, "Doctor!"

Dr. Smith braked the car. His mother shrieked, "Donald! No!" and put her hands on him. But he was clawing through the straps of the strait jacket, thrashing and crying and arching up and back toward the rear window.

The stars—all the stars!—wound into a whirlpool and tore down at him. His blood sang.

Dr. Smith opened the front door of the car, and ran back toward the hospital, shouting for help to the guard at the front gate.

The guard began to run toward her.

"Donald!" his mother pleaded.

He was fighting his way out of the jacket, biting and pushing. His father's and mother's hands on him would not stop him.

And then he was out of the jacket! The straps flew away, hitting his father and mother, and he thrust his hands mightily up, punching out through the back glass of the car, kicking himself up off the back seat. He felt his arms go through the glass, which shattered around him in a thousand tiny beads of glasslike stars.

"Yes!" he cried.

The star bits flowed down towards him—twirling, dancing, rushing like a vortex.

"Donald, stop this immediately!" Dr. Smith shouted, stopping before the car with the startled guard.

"He's crazy!" the guard shouted, fumbling for his gun.

Donald climbed out onto the trunk of the car. Shreds of the strait jacket fell away as the swirling bright orange red white star atoms rolled down out of the night and rammed toward him—Aldebaren and Sirium and Thuban and Aifrik and Deneb:

These are the suns of endless night!

These are the orbs that burn so bright!

These are the things that fill my sight

STARS!

He felt the tendrils of their fingers on his face—and then felt something more—finally! Yes!—of a vast straining, a movement behind the heavens—

"Donald!" he heard his mother's voice cry, as he held his hands out in welcome—

The guard aimed and fired his gun wildly, and Dr. Smith looked up and gasped, "Oh my God—"

The sky was filled with light—

Here they came.

Bags

Miss Debicker was not prone to self-pity, but something about this cloudy morning waiting outside the Grand Central luncheonette, and the bottom of her coffee cup, made her think briefly of the last twenty-five years of loneliness, and her lack of companionship. But I am successful, she thought, and immediately felt better.

On her way out of Grand Central she stopped at one of the large newsstands to buy a magazine in which one of her articles had been reprinted, and encountered a bag lady. The woman sat just inside one of the entranceways to the terminal; she was dirty and disheveled, mumbling to herself, and clutching a plastic shopping bag to her breast. Miss Debicker turned away, and hurried outside. That's what failure is, she thought.

It came as a bit of surprise, then, when she arrived at her office to find that her next assignment was to do a story on bag people. She took an instant dislike to the subject, and let her editor know it.

He told her, in his soft-spoken manner, that he thought the assignment was a good one. Bag people were defensive and hard to talk to, and though some of them appeared to be nothing more than destitute or winos there seemed to be some sort of bond—a hobo-like code of living—that linked them together. "There's a good story in that," he said. "And their numbers seem to be growing."

"Sounds more like coincidence," Miss Debicker said.

"That's for you to find out. There's an alcove by one of the Grand Central subway entrances where the better known bag ladies in the area are supposed to live." Miss Debicker didn't mention that she had seen one of them that morning. She was told her story would be due in a few days.

It took her fifteen minutes to get to Grand Central Station and, after arguing with the cab driver over the fare, she was unable to find the woman. Then, after twenty minutes of wandering around Grand Central, she discovered the alcove her editor had mentioned. It was a dark niche cut into the wall. She hesitated a moment, then walked into the darkness.

A woman, possibly the same one she had seen that morning, was crouched in the farthest corner, her shopping bag clasped to the rags covering her chest. In the half light her eyes looked glazed.

Miss Debicker bent over the woman and turned on her tape recorder. The woman looked up suddenly and her eyes seemed to focus on her with an animal wariness. Miss Debicker wished she had a flashlight.

"What are you doing here?" she asked, and felt her voice swallowed by the dust and darkness.

There was no answer, only that wary look.

"I'd like to be your friend," she said, as if talking to an idiot child. The woman pulled back deeper into the darkness.

Miss Debicker fumbled in her shoulder bag and drew out her cigarette lighter. She flicked it on and moved closer, over the woman. "How long have you lived like this?"

The woman threw out an arm, "Get back," she said in a harsh whisper. "Go away."

Miss Debicker took a deep breath and, fumbling for her wallet, drew out a ten-dollar bill. "This is for the interview," she said. "Just answer my questions and I'll leave you alone." The woman stared at the bill but did not take it. Miss Debicker thrust it closer. "Just for seeing what's in the bag, your clothes and things. You can buy wine."

"Go away."

Miss Debicker sighed, returned the bill to her shoulder bag, and walked away. At the mouth of the alcove she turned to look at the bag lady.

"You have no love," the woman said.

Miss Debicker was startled; but quickly reached into her shoulder bag and dropped the ten dollar bill behind her as she re-entered daylight.

On another gray morning Miss Debicker took her subway train downtown, but at 591 Street, the train was stopped with the doors opened. Eventually the doors slid shut, and the train began to move. At that point the conductor announced over the P.A. system that the train would now travel on 81 Avenue, due to trouble on the line. Miss Debicker shook her head, tight-lipped. The train stopped at Times Square and she got off.

Forty-second street was filthier than she remembered it being, and at nine in the morning, with the grayness of the day and the lack of bright lights, the dirty movie houses and sex shops looked more depressing than usual. Miss Debicker was glad she worked on the East Side. She turned down forty-fourth street and suddenly found herself in the theater district. She hadn't been in this area for quite a while, and was taken aback by the fact that the respectable, clean theaters were so close to the smut houses. She quickened her steps: though she was rarely afraid of the city she found herself suddenly longing to reach the well known, safe path she followed every day. Shifting her gaze from the marquis, she glanced at the pavement where an object caught her eye.

She stopped to look at it for some unaccountable reason: there was something strange about this object: a symmetry in the way it was placed on the sidewalk, a deliberateness about its appearance. She stooped to examine it more closely.

It was a small box-like cube, about four inches square on a side. It was maroon in color, and the color darkened around the edges as if it had bled into the corners. It appeared translucent, like a polished dark gem. Because it appeared so perfectly placed, it looked as if it were attached to the sidewalk.

Miss Debicker stood up suddenly, glancing at her watch. She stepped over the cube and walked toward the end of the block. After a few steps she glanced over her shoulder and noticed that it was still there, at rest on the filthy sidewalk; no breeze had stirred it, no cat had darted out of an alley to bat it away; it had not disappeared in the wink of an eye. She shook her head at her foolishness and walked toward the Avenue of the Americas, then again glanced back at the cube. It was still there, a purple smudge on the dirty pavement.

She shook her head, to clear it. She wanted very badly to be at her desk, but she also wanted to look at that cube again. Retracing her steps, she rationalized her action as an interesting diversion from the normal routine. Then she stopped before the cube and stared at it.

It had not changed. It still looked symmetrical and like a large polished stone. Perhaps it belonged to someone from the diamond district. Perhaps someone had been making a delivery, and a hole had appeared in the bottom of a leather bag, and this stone had fallen out onto the sidewalk. But her journalist's mind wanted to know why it had landed so perfectly placed. Why hadn't it tumbled up against a storefront or dropped off the curb into the gutter?

She bent to pick it up, looking quickly around. There was no one watching her. It wasn't as if she was afraid to be seen picking up this cube; it was just that she now felt aware of a strange weakness. She was determined to walk to the end of the block and cross the street and go away from this thing.

Miss Debicker glanced again at her watch; she would now be very late for work. This foolishness had cost her more time than she could legitimately justify; at the office it would be a mark against her. Yet she wanted to turn around and look at the cube again. She had to, and this urgency frightened her; it was as if some magnetic influence was pulling her around toward the cube. She found herself walking back to it.

She had a fleeting thought about how strange it was that she happened to walk down this particular street, that her train happened to be diverted to Times Square on this particular day.

The cube looked the same; it had not moved; it was the same maroon with the concentration of color at the edges. She tried to look at her watch, and with great effort looked at her shoes, but her eyes instantly returned to the six-sided figure.

She tried to scream out, to attract the attention of the people hurrying by, but her mouth would not work. Some sort of control was being exerted over her. Then quickly she transferred all her will from the cube to her legs and tried to run toward the Avenue of the Americas, knowing she would then be all right, everything would be all right. Her feet began to stumble. A few more steps now. A pedestrian glanced at her and hurried on. She stopped as if a wall had been thrown up in front of her. She could not go on. In a few moments she would turn and walk, or crawl, or run, back to the maroon cube. She turned and stumbled back.

A few moments later she picked up the cube, and felt a compulsion to hide it. She didn't know why she should do this, but she found a safe place under some theatrical props between two theaters, and hid it there. It was cool to the touch, like smooth marble, but there was nothing else remarkable about it.

That night she hid in the entrance to the alley, out of the bright lights of the theater district, guarding it.

In the days that followed Miss Debicker spent her time in the vicinity of the maroon cube. She found there were periods—short periods of time—when she was allowed to leave the cube to find something to eat or relieve herself. She was not allowed to go beyond a certain vaguely defined area about two blocks square, and she always found herself back in front of the cube. During the day she hid in alleyways between the theaters, and at night she slept not far away.

It was now winter, and she had run out of money. She was dirty and disheveled-looking; she shivered uncontrollably. She foraged for food in her two-block area, and began to beg. Sometimes she was bothered by the police or a passerby, but the neighborhood was used to her presence now. She was learning when to hide and when to beg profitably.

The maroon cube stayed hidden under the stage props. She usually slept in the alleyway by it when she slept at all. Her dreams were fitful and, even in sleep, she could feel the tug of the dark cube.

During the first few weeks she learned, through scraps of newspaper stories, that the police were doing a missing persons search for her. This had bothered her slightly, but when the stories stopped, she no longer thought about it.

The first really cold day came and she knew that she must find indoor shelter for the winter. Her original clothes had been discarded and she wore the various rags which she picked out of garbage cans; she even had a few pieces of costume from discarded wardrobes. She went to the alley and the cube. She thought she would make out all right during the cold months; the begging was better during the holidays. She'd taken to keeping her possessions, pieces of clothing, salable items picked from garbage cans, bits of food, in a plastic shopping bag.

The days grew colder. A few days before Christmas the cube called her to its hiding place; she cleared away a dusting of snow and dug it out from under the rubble. It felt cold in her hands and though it looked no different than it ever had she knew it was content and full when she was this close.

She put the cube in her plastic bag, at the bottom, in the warmest place. It would stay there, her prize possession; it would always be a part of her; she would always keep it in her bag.

She walked out to the street and began begging, her bag close to her. She searched the faces closely and was startled when a gray-haired man appeared, walking briskly toward her. She averted her eyes and he did not recognize her; he passed by, leaving a quarter in her cracked palm. Her editor...

She began to study faces again. Most of them were bright with the glow of the holidays, or at least happy. She knew, though, that sooner or later her eyes would meet those of a woman that were hard and empty. And when she met those eyes, she would say, holding her bag to her frozen breast, "You have no love."

The Red Wind

This night I will be with my Natisha in a place far away from here, where her dull, dead body, and the red wind that will soon carry me away, are just vague remembrances that will no longer have meaning. There must be such a place, or all that has come before makes all life and youth impossible and evil. This night—

But there is little use in the end of the tale coming first; the begin-fling must suffice...

I came to Castle Mayhew two fortnights ago at the bidding of the Count himself. His letter stated that he was in desperate need of my services as an architect, and left the details to my imagination. I am not one who craves mystery, and was inclined to turn his offer down, but my fiancé Natisha, with me in Menz, urged me so strongly to take the commission that I was forced to reconsider.

"The Castle is in a beautiful area," she said, "and with the stipend he offers we can be married."

"So you know this area?" I teased, for I had yet to learn where this creature who had stolen my heart came from.

"You must do it," she said, and then went off into a lengthy discussion of what our married life would be like once my already bright career was solidified by this new project and the monetary award attached to it; and before I knew it I was packed and on my way, waving to Natisha who stood on the train platform promising to write each day and even make her way to the Castle if possible.

"But you will be with me in my heart every moment," she said as the train pulled off, blowing me a kiss, and I watched until her lithe little form was finally lost to view as we rounded the first long curve on our journey.

It was only then, as the train wound into the mountains, that I began to wonder what sort of adventure lay before me.

When I arrived three days later at the town at the foot of the Castle, night had fallen and a chill wind blew a frosted mist through the deserted streets. I entered a tavern, also curiously empty, and, after pounding on a table to be served, finally resorting to shouts for someone to appear, an old man, with a dark coarse cloak thrown about his shoulders, emerged from the back room and asked me what it was I wanted.

"A loaf of bread, some cheese," I answered gruffly, for I was both tired from my journey and annoyed at the slowness of the old man's movements and the dullness of his speech. He nodded tiredly and turned into the back room.

I waited ten minutes, and when the old man did not return I began to pound on the table once more. By now I was nearly enraged. I was about to rise and follow him into the back room when he emerged, with someone at his side. This new figure was also cloaked, his face even more wrinkled and time-worn than his companion's.

The older man approached me. "You are Herr Begener?" he inquired in a listless monotone.

"I am," I said, rising.

"Why did you not come directly to the castle?" he continued. "Count Mayhew has been waiting for you. You were told to come as soon as possible."

There was something about his cold voice that unnerved me. "I was tired," I sputtered, not believing his spiritless impertinence; "1 thought I would rest before climbing the road; perhaps even spend the night here. Besides, what is it to you?"

"You will follow me now," he said.

"But I have not eaten! I am tired—"

"There is neither food nor lodging here."

He turned away from me and as he did so, I reached out, dislodging his robe from his shoulder and revealing, on his back, a neat line of small round red welts. With a slow motion he merely reset his robe in place and disappeared, he and his companion, into the back room.

Half in rage and half in consternation, I rose and gathered my things to follow. I saw that the back room led directly to a door leading to the road. By the time I caught up with the two monk-like figures my anger had abated. There was no point in arguing. In silence we began the long, slow ascent to Castle Mayhew. We passed no one in leaving the town, and no one on the road.

"Look here," I said finally, turning to my robed companions. "I really should demand an explanation. Why is the town so empty? And why is it so important that I reach the castle tonight?"

My enquiries were met with silence, as the two old men continued grimly, gray heads bent.

By the light of a setting moon we reached the castle porch where the two cloaked figures promptly left me, turning off to the left. A few moments later I heard the dull slow tramp of feet ascending a metal stair. I stood silent, contemplating an abrupt about-face and a brisk walk back down the hillside, through the town and away from this place forever, but the bevy of arguments against this which my mind had readied, chief among them my wish to please Natisha, were not even brought to bear upon me because the oaken door was pulled open and I suddenly found myself standing in a huge vaulted hallway. The door was closed behind me by another robed figure, this one small in stature.

When he turned around I was startled to note that his face was not old and wrinkled, and I was pleased to realize that his countenance was a most amiable one, with the features of a smiling cherub. He rushed to me and took my hand.

"Herr Begener, it's so nice to have you here; we've all been waiting. The Count will be so pleased. Let me show you to your room—you can't know how good it is to see you've arrived!" This frantic speech was accompanied by wild gesticulations of the hands, and the little fellow gave such an impression of a happy little child that I almost reached down to pick him up. But in a second he had a bag of mine in each hand and was leading me up the marbled stairway to a room on the second floor.

"I know you'll want to freshen up," he said after he had settled me in, "so I'll tell the Count to meet you in the dining hall in fifteen minutes. There will be a late supper, and some fine wine." And with that he was gone.

A quarter hour later, shaved and washed and dressed in clean linen, and feeling immensely better, I found myself ushered into the huge dining hall of the Castle Mayhew. A grand portrait hung over the fireplace of a man I assumed to be the Count—a tall, imposing figure, straight as an arrow with fine features; the eyes were powerful but not at all hard.

There was a sound behind me and I turned to find myself face to face with the man in the portrait—only with a horrible difference. The man before me was old, older than any man I had ever seen before—a mere bag of bones on a bent skeleton. The arrow-straight figure was warped, the noble bearing shrunken, the eyes filled with weariness yet still imbued with a kind of fire.

"I am Count Mayhew," he said, his voice strong but low, his hand grasp lighter than I would have expected. "Please sit down and as you eat we shall discuss the matter of your employment. As I mentioned in my correspondence, I am in a great hurry for the work to be completed."

"You realize of course that things can't be done overnight, that materials and labor—"

"Please," he said, motioning toward the table, his voice impatient. "We will discuss all of this."

I sat, and was treated to a sumptuous meal while Count Mayhew regaled me with his plans. The Count, I noted, ate nothing, though his eyes seemed to linger over each course with a strange hunger. I went so far as to offer him a portion of my veal, but he refused curtly.

"As I mentioned," he said, "there is a great urgency involved in your work. There are workmen presently in the castle and completely at your disposal; any materials that are not presently at hand can be acquired promptly. There are couriers and craftsmen to do whatever is asked of them."

He went to a side table under the huge portrait and slid out a bottom drawer, removing a large sheaf of papers. These he spread before me. "The basic plans," he said, "have already been drawn up. It is your job to make structural refinements and to direct actual construction." I stared at the top sheet intently, and then glanced quickly through the rest. They all showed various views of a high-domed room with a strange box-shaped structure supported by cross-beams raised in the center of it. "The dome is of wood," the Count continued, looking over my shoulder, "and there are removable panels on the top to open the room to the air. The platform," he continued, pulling out a blueprint from the bottom of the pile and indicating the squarish structure, "must be made with the utmost precision, and the dimensions as elucidated on this paper must be followed to the letter. Any deviation could ruin the entire project." His hand swept over the platform itself, where two rigidly constructed chairs were indicated, side by side.

I looked up at this curiously old man peering over my shoulder, and gave a short laugh. "Why, this whole contraption resembles nothing so much as an astronomical observatory. Either that or that ridiculous setup Mary Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein used to bring his monster to life!" I was referring of course to the popular novel by Shelley's wife which had been published a few years before.

The Count's eyes darkened. "Hardly," he said. "I must insist that you keep your speculations to yourself. I do suggest you spend some time studying these papers, since we begin work tomorrow morning at dawn. It is time for me to go to bed. Good night, Herr Begener." He bowed and left the room. I noted a curious sadness in his eyes as he turned to leave, as well as the fire I had noted previously.

No sooner had the Count left the room than the happy little monk who had met me at the front door earlier in the evening appeared. His manner was so cherubic that I felt an urge to pick him up and bounce him on my knee.

"More wine, Herr Begener? It is such a fine red vintage!" he asked, brandishing a crystal decanter. I shook my head no.

"But tell me," I said, as the little fellow began to clear the table. "Why was the village so empty when I was down there tonight? Where is everyone?"

"Why, they're here of course, at the castle. The Count has hired all the workers of the village for your project, and made provisions here for them as well. Rather nice of him, don't you think?"

"Yes," I said slowly, "I suppose it is. But just what is this project of his?"

The gnome paused in his work and regarded me with a blank, childish stare. "I really wouldn't know, Sir," he said. "But I'm sure he has a good reason for it."

I nodded, and soon was lost in the stack of diagrams. There were curious things going on here, surely, but before long I found the questions crowded from my mind by the refinements on the work before me which commanded my attention, and also by the thought that with the completion of this lucrative, if bizarre, commission I would have enough money to marry my darling Natisha. The count had made some basic architectural mistakes in drafting his plans, but I quickly saw, as the night wore on, that there was really little work in correcting them and honing his measurements to a fine precision.

I awoke with the cold light of late dawn on the table before me. I had worked nearly the whole night, falling asleep in the middle of a calculation. I stood up, stretching languidly. I was pleased to note that the sinister aspects of the castle had been dispelled by the advent of morning; that indeed my surroundings presented a warm and amiable glow—a glow not in any way dispelled by the appearance of little Franz (for that was the cherubic servant's name) at my elbow, insisting that I have breakfast and a bath before continuing my work. "You will want to be fresh as a daisy when you review your troops!" he cried amiably, and I found his long lusty laugh infectious as he quickly laid plates before me.

An hour later found me as refreshed as if I had slept a whole day and a night. It is remarkable what a new shirt and a bath can do for a man, and as I emerged from my room, fully expecting to find little Franz waiting for me to slip his hand into mine, I found instead that the Count himself had come to fetch me.

"I hope you are feeling refreshed," he said in his curiously somber voice, and when I told him I was he bowed quickly and said, "Good, for we have much work to do." I followed him down the marbled staircase.

We passed the front entrance, the Count leading me to a door to the right of it that opened onto an ascending staircase. This would bring us, I imagined, to our final destination; but to my surprise this led to a sort of mezzanine consisting of a long hallway with small compartments to either side. As we passed these cubicles I was able to see through to the chambers within; they were out-fitted with severe iron beds, each with a single sheet. There seemed to be nothing else in any of them. I made motion to remark this to the Count but he held up his hand for silence and merely led me to the end of the hallway where another door, which he opened using an enormous iron key, led to a thin metal ladder. This wound like a corkscrew up into the dimness. The Count proceeded ahead of me, at a slow careful pace, and I must admit that after awhile I began to get dizzy at the height we were ascending. I tried to look up to see our ultimate destination but was unable to see past the count's frame. When I looked downward I nearly fainted with the height we had attained and with the seeming fragility of our stairway.

After what seemed a very long time the Count suddenly changed the interminable curling direction of our steps. I soon discovered that we had alighted on a small metal abutment off the winding staircase. To my astonishment I saw that the steps led still farther upward past this landing, and when I inquired of the Count where they led to he merely looked at me and said in a flat voice, "To the roof of the dome; that is where the top sections are pulled back to reveal the sky." He turned back to his keyring and soon found another huge key which he fitted with a clang into an equally huge keyhole. There was a metallic click and we pushed ahead through the door.