Last Plane to Heaven

The Tentacled Sky

The first note was scribbled on a piece of old cardstock, fountain-pen ink splattered carelessly across the fuzzed textures as if it had been written in haste by someone’s elegant grandmother. The handwriting itself was hardly Palmer Method, instead being as sloppy as the inkwork. Again, signaling haste.

I turned the slightly irregular missive in my well-protected hands, looking at the back where a scrap of printing could just be made out to read “EALOU” in faded vermilion ink that reminded me of old blood. Jealous? I wondered. Or some portmanteau product name such as Sealout. The faint smell of roses emitted from the cardboard, though I was put more in mind of a funeral home than a florist.

Significantly, neither my name nor my address was on the reverse. Only the faded printing and some wear scars. The note itself simply read, “TUESDAY 7:13 P.M.”

Unsigned, undated, unadorned. Stuck into my door, just above the latch where I’d be sure to find the note immediately upon my return from my errands about the city.

Note to gentle readers: I should not like to reveal more about my erstwhile whereabouts for fear of endangering you. Please forgive my lack of specificity concerning such an otherwise elementary matter.

Later on, the rain descended. The matter of climate had much been bruited in the newspapers of late, for so far in the course of this year barely halfway past we had challenged most prior records for annual precipitation. The weather-wise were declaiming that by the end of August this year of rain in the city should be one for the record books. The weather-foolish were proclaiming a need for honest citizens to provision themselves with boats for their porches, and flotation devices that the children might yet swim to school when the curriculum resumed in September.

This year’s rain had been in general possessed of a distinctly unaqueous elasticity. Instead of washing the streets and clearing the air, the water clung with a nigh gelid tenacity to buildings, gutters, trees, and even the unfortunate birds. I was put much in mind of studies recently published in several lower-tier journals of academics and science regarding the polymerization of water. Ordinarily such drastic pronunciations about novel states of matter are thinly disguised pleas for funding or continued sponsorship, and as such I pay them little mind.

Our rain of this year in the city was revising my opinions on this particular matter.

I sat to watch the street through the cracked glazing of my front window. Naturally it was surgically clean on the inside, smelling faintly of surfactants and rubbing alcohol. However, on the outside the glass was somewhat obscured by the persistent sheet of water clinging like a drowning man to the last rope of his hopes. Though I had largely ignored the note of the previous weekend, it continued to perch on my mantel, ungainly harbinger of vague portent.

My grandfather’s railroad clock had struck the seventh hour of the afternoon not so long ago. Now I peered into the street, looking through the rain that fell like clear aspic to see what might be in store at the hour appointed by my anonymous correspondent.

A single figure shuffled along the thoroughfare, eschewing the sidewalks in favor of the cobbled expanses where the day’s traffic had so recently wound down to the usual evening trickle. I had to laugh, for the approaching entity was as something designed by children in pretense of threat—long leather car coat that flapped in the wind, the figure beneath shrouded in shadow and rainfall; a wide-brimmed hat pulled low over the face until nothing could be seen from my second-floor vantage except crown surmounting shoulders; and a shambling gait of which any bedtime-story boogeyman would be proud.

Could this jack-o-the-streets be my mysterious correspondent? Or an agent of theirs?

No one else appeared—no autobus or taxicab, no private automobiles rushing for medical aid or cruising for the evening air. Just this creature who dropped below my line of sight. I heard my apartment building’s front door creak open, that bad hinge ever worsening in the endless rain. I heard a heavy tread upon the stairs. I heard the floorboard outside my door squeak as always it did when I had a visitor.

I tensed, waiting for the knock that would doubtless be a thunderous echo. My heart raced despite my airs of amusement, and my breath was harsh in my throat.

I counted to a hundred, but no knock came. Neither did the floorboard squeak again. Taking my courage in hand, I crept to the door and pressed my ear against the varnished wood, my nose reporting old oak, turpentine, and mold. I expected stentorian breathing, or some harsh life-noise of rough trade waiting to spring upon me.

Silence.

Noting that the clock now reported 7:15 of the evening, I rallied my intestinal fortitude and cracked open the portal, keeping the stout brass chain in place. I cannot say who or what I expected to find without, but no one stood in the hall.

Only the broad-brimmed hat lay there, upside down as if carelessly discarded before my door. Another piece of cardstock had been dropped into the inverted crown.

I listened a moment, for surely the visitor had not departed. I’d heard no footsteps, the floorboard had not squeaked, neither stairs nor front door had echoed in their invariable manners. Still, I heard no breathing, nor the rustling silence that usually shouts of a person holding themselves still and secret.

Either my visitor was a practitioner of one of those Asiatic arts of noiseless assault and stealthy concealment, or they had contrived to noiselessly vanish from the upstairs hall of my building. Into the apartment of one of my three immediate neighbors? I’d heard no knock, no click of latch, no usual murmur of polite social intercourse.

Once more summoning my courage, for by now I was deeply and obscurely disturbed, I pushed my door to, unsecured the chain, then opened it to step out into the fearful precincts that were my own front hallway transformed.

Only a hat threatened me. Damp, silent, inner band still warm from someone’s head, with a further bit of cardstock left carelessly therein. An afterthought, missive from an uncaring universe. I pulled on a latex glove from the supply I keep always in my pockets and carefully lifted the card.

Unadorned, unaddressed, this time smelling of pocket lint and damp wool, one side proclaimed “UTTON,” the other simply read “FRIDAY, 10:17 A.M.” in the same hasty hand and splattered fountain pen.

With a sigh, I took my prizes and retreated to the dubious safety of my apartment.

I washed my hands a good long while with three different soaps while contemplating my next move. Clearly some game was afoot, though I understood nothing of it yet. Just as clearly this was not a matter for the authorities. What complaint should I bring to the police? That someone had gifted me with a hat and a pair of odd notes? Unfair as it might be, I was already aware of my reputation in certain sections of the city. The compromise of my dignity through the mandatory psychiatric confinement of two years ago was unjust, as any reasonable person could see, but neither the courts nor the medical authorities were overly concerned with reason, preferring instead their petty little rules and straitened expectations.

No, I could expect no help from those quarters. I was, as usual in this life, set upon my own devices once more.

Properly cleansed, I examined the hat with stainless steel tongs and a lacquered chopstick. Under my patient and persistent prodding, the headgear revealed no particular secrets. It was a fine-grained leather, lined with dark maroon silk. There was no maker’s label or stamp on the inner band, though the threading indicated high-quality work, most likely a bespoke effort.

My children’s monster in the street had been a fashionable fellow, for all his or her air of menace.

After much thought, and no little steeling of my resolve, I tugged on a latex skullcap. My hair, auburn ringlets of which I allowed myself small vanity, fit well enough beneath. This was little different from those times when I dressed myself to be someone else in the world. After spraying the inside of the hat with disinfectants, I gingerly placed it upon my head.

Gloves and skullcap, I reminded myself. It would not touch the flesh of my body.

I stood and regarded myself in the mirror above the mantel. Adjusting the brim, I thought I could pass for the stranger in a view from above. Should that ever be necessary.

Passing was a skill of mine, carefully cultivated against necessities both dire and trivial. Binding or padding my breasts, lifts in my shoes, a change to the curve of my spine and shoulders, the proper wig—I could be anyone.

Except yourself, a voice whispered. After a moment’s startle, I recognized it for my own.

On Friday morning, the city was gloomy but no longer half-drowned. Not for the moment, at any rate. I sat by my window, the broad leather hat totemically perched upon my head. My street was busier than at the previous visitation; crowded with the usual midmorning traffic of rag pickers, letter carriers, delivery men, and harried mothers with preschool children.

I watched for the shambling visitor, and was not disappointed. Soon the mysterious figure appeared from behind a dark brown package truck disgorging some mercantilist sending into the home at 1406, near the beginning of my block. They shambled once more, this time bare-headed as any clown, curled hair moving in slight breeze outside. The car coat flapped, and their pace seemed more vigorous today. Of course, if my visitor cultivated anonymity, a slow, menacing gait would not be their best choice at such a busy hour.

Once again they disappeared from view just below me. Once again the front door swung open with the squeal of distressed hinges, the steps echoed, the floorboard outside my door squeaked. Once again there was no knock, only a psychic miasma of menace. Once again I stood, listening, waiting with the patience of snakes until the old railroad clock struck half past the hour.

I threw the door open in an outburst of showmanship to find a pair of tall leather boots in the hall, another cardstock note propped between them.

Elusive, once again.

Through the entire afternoon I scanned the sky for serpents. Sometimes I glimpsed the bladed and bloody future, another aspect of my life for which neither the civil authorities nor the medical establishment had any patience. The world to come leaves its tracks around us in the frost on hearses, railroad car graffiti, visible-but-secret patterns in park plantings and concert posters plastered to brick walls. One needs only attune oneself to read this.

I mostly keep my distance from these truths. They disrupt the flow of my life and introduce fears that can overwhelm. But the emergent structure of mysterious notes and visitations reminded me all too much of my prior visions.

So I watched, and waited, trying to catch sight of what might yet come.

Nothing emerged from the watercolor clouds but rain and more rain. No writhing tentacles, no bleary eye of God staring down in indifferent judgment. Haruspication is a lost art at the best of times, and my own small precognition has rarely served to provide more than trouble.

I was not sure this was trouble. Yet, something still moved.

“REED” was scheduled for “SUNDAY, 4:44 P.M.” I spent the day scrubbing down the apartment. I was out of lye, but was able to compensate with some additional HCl at 32 percent concentration. I wanted to be ready, and the cleansing always aided my thinking. The idea of installing small cameras in the hall seemed logical enough, but was beyond my means both fiscally and technically. I was reluctant to wait outside and watch. My usual horror of the filth of the world was very much at issue, but also an inner sense on my part that if I broke the pattern, so would my visitor.

So I scrubbed and thought, thought and scrubbed, and focused on what would come next. Perhaps I should throw open the door as soon as I heard footfalls on the stairs? Or wait for the creaking of the floorboard?

Except this had already assumed the aspects of ritual. Breaking a ritual was a fearful thing. I could not even bring myself to vary the order in which I filled my small basket at the grocery store every Sunday afternoon. How could I violate this implied trust?

In the end, I waited in the window, boots upon my clingwrap-coated feet, hat upon my latex-capped head. Just about 4:40 my visitor appeared, walking more slowly due to the crowding of the street. Visibly female now, her car coat flapped behind her, her bare head flashing with auburn curls. From my vantage, she appeared to be barefooted.

I waited until she passed out of my sight into my building, then leapt to my door, a scrubbed and polished fireplace poker in my hand. The usual noises proceeded in the usual order, until I heard my neighbor’s door creak open. Mrs. Willets, in 2B, across the hall.

She must be even now encountering my mysterious visitor at the head of the stairs! I heard the murmur of voices, but could not make out what was said, even as I strained. The tones seemed to be those of guarded familiarity, not challenge.

I realized then with sick horror that everyone in my building was in on the conspiracy. My visitor left her gifts before my door, then slipped silently into Mrs. Willets’s apartment to outwait me.

No one was to be trusted. I’d learned that lesson practically in my cradle. But I’d let uncouth familiarity dull my wariness of those on whom most suspicion should naturally fall—the people around me every day. They were most in a position to deduce the patterns of my life, find my secret vulnerabilities, coöperate in a clandestine manner with the police and the doctors.

Angry now, I hurled open my door, poker at the ready.

Nothing was before me but a folded leather car coat and a piece of cardstock.

Frustrated, I stalked up and down the hall twice, but there was nowhere to hide and no one hiding there. Mrs. Willets was gone. The visitor was gone.

I used the tip of the poker to pick up the car coat—it took several tries—then kicked the cardstock through my open door. I retreated, shutting, chaining, and double-locking myself into the now-dubious safety of my apartment.

I did not want to have to move.

When I dumped the car coat onto the floor, I saw that the tip of the poker was mucky with some foulness. On close inspection, it was a mix of blood and hair. I whirled around, weapon at the ready, to see a naked woman slumped in my flowered wingback chair. Her neck was bent at an odd angle, while blood caked the right side of her face. Oddly, she wore a latex skullcap just like mine, and latex gloves no different from my own. Her features were as familiar as my mirror.

No, I thought. Not again.

I hurled the incriminating poker away from me. It clattered against the steam heater, then wound up beneath, leaving a deep maroon smear on my hardwood floor. Heedless, I picked up the cardstock and looked at it.

“URDER,” it read. “TOO LATE NOW.”

I understood that message well enough. It could be translated as, “We are coming, beware.”

Stepping to the window, I checked the sky for signs. Serpents flew from the house of the sun. The first of many sirens wailed in the distance.

Bare-headed and bare-handed, I shrugged myself into my car coat, donned my leather hat, pocketed my stack of cut-up cardboard and my father’s fountain pen, and stepped out into the glittering barbs of the gimlet-eyed future.

The filth of my life I left behind me.

Such Bright and Risen Madness in Our Names

Her Fingers Like Whips, Her Eyes Like Razors

Mother never has been patient. Old as she is—and there are hills Above of which she can remember the birth—time has never blessed her with the sort of wisdom lore informs us is inevitable with the assumption of the grace of age.

This does not bother me. I am not one of the mabkin. They toil at her leisure, they sweat to her pleasures, they suffer to her pains. Sooner be a worker ant in a burrow than one of those pretty, pretty, doomed butterflies. Mother always pulls the wings off her children and eats them in the end.

No, my purpose in this life is different. Someone must keep the Doors, after all. The great copper hinges on which the boundaries of night and day swing do not clean themselves of verdigris. Neither do the shadowed locks forged by Chronos himself in the time before the light first came into the world oil their own tumblers.

You who live Above tell stories. I am never certain if this is a sickness or a blessing, though in my weaker moments over a glass of lifewater I have confessed a time or two to envy. I have even caught the way of it from you. Everyone who comes begging at the Doors launches their plea on the wings of some tale. They tuck their feet beneath their knees amid the riot of spring flowers, or a moment later they huddle fast amid the snowdrifts and the winter wind, or a moment after that lean with the stiffness of their aging against some patient draft animal and croak out a querulous plea against the final bloody sunset of their mayfly days.

The Doorkeeper listens to all. The Doorkeeper hears all. The Doorkeeper is the keyhole to Mother’s heart, here Below. Mother is not patient, but I am, for I hold her heart in my left pocket along with a hawk feather, three apple seeds, and the list of True Names, which is so short and infinite that it has been scriven on the inside of a silver thimble.

Come, then, and tell me your story, for Mother will never listen, and I always will. Like the icy seed of winter hidden inside a summer rain, Below is always here. Like the golden fire of summer hidden inside a winter freeze, Below is always here. And you will never be on the right side of the Doors, unless your tale makes the seahawk fly from my vest, the three trees bloom, and the thimble whisper your True Name in the voice of the distant, amniotic sea.

Then Mother’s heart will take another beat, she will age another day, and we will all be a moment closer to freedom.

Come. Tell me.

The chemo port implant scars on Addison’s right chest still ached a little, and she ignored the continuing sensation that the surgeons had left a Bic pen inside her. Another twinge, to the chorus from her ribs and the partial thoracectomy that had removed her tumor. Besides, she was away from all that now, for a little while. Or maybe longer, despite the appointments next week back in Laramie.

The day here was fine and cold, the wind brisk, and she was outdoors. Addison climbed through what felt like more bracken than any hills had a right to be covered with. A week earlier, she hadn’t even known what bracken was. Ferns and flowers?

Hills without mountains seemed strange to her, but she was a long way from Wyoming. The last few nights camping in her little tent, she’d felt a long way from anywhere. It had taken her great mental effort to remember the name of the little airport she’d flown into over the weekend, after changing planes four times and crossing an ocean.

“I’m not worried,” she told the empty sky, over which not even a hawk circled. The sky held no answers.

She slipped a half-eaten Clif Bar from her pocket, which slowly became a three-quarter-eaten Clif Bar before her gag reflex kicked in. Figs, who the hell ever thought figs were a good idea? Addison was eating less each day, which was odd, because she wasn’t really at any significant altitude.

Just the top of the world, from this view.

Her grandfather Locke’s words kept coming back to her.

He’d sung her to sleep with those words when she was a baby and a little girl, and later on made her memorize them. Addison had spent her winters with Grandfather Locke in the little house in Laramie, while her parents and brothers worked their high-country ranch. She’d been too weak for the deep snows, she’d been told all her childhood. Too delicate a constitution.

Addison had never had a cold a day in her life. Not a moment’s illness.

Not until now.

She crossed a ridge so low and subtle she almost missed the fact she wasn’t climbing anymore. The sun stood overhead, directly at its zenith. The scent was different here—the slight rank of bracken overwhelmed by the underlying acidity of the stony soil and a damp tang of metal.

The smell of magic, when you feel like you’ve been chewing wires.

Where the hell had that thought come from? In Grandfather’s voice.

There wasn’t any higher to climb. Not here, not now. No beck to put at her back, either. The watercourses had vanished to rivulets a day ago, and she was carrying her last two quarts on her hip. All she saw in front of her was a shallow bowl of a high valley, a place that by rights should have cupped a little tarn reflecting the blue sky with the indolence of water.

Close your eyes and follow your nose.

Grandfather Locke had died last winter with a smile on his face, looking no older than he ever had since she was born. Not even tired, just finished, as if his life work had been carving a young adult Addison from the stuff of childhood.

Now he was talking to her.

So she listened. That’s what she was doing here, right? Walking east from the Heartbeck.

Addison closed her eyes and breathed in the place she stood. Trace of bracken. Soil. Wind, bearing a bit of damp from some more fortunate locale. The droppings of something small and herbivorous. Metal.

Metal.

Copper.

Mouth open, she turned, facing first one way then the other, until she thought she knew where the metal tang was strongest. She advanced slowly, her hiking pole a cane now. No point in breaking an ankle in the one gopher hole for forty miles on this high, hollow hill.

Did they even have gophers on this side of the Atlantic?

Step, sniff. Step, sniff. Step, sniff.

When she bumped into the solid mass on the ground, Addison was not the least bit surprised.

She opened her eyes to see a pair of copper slabs stretched before her. No, not slabs, doors, for all that they were flat against the bottom of the little valley. They looked like nothing so much as the blast doors to a Wyoming missile silo, if the air force had been hiring Italian espresso-machine designers to build the Cold War infrastructure.

The margins of each door were worked in high-relief chasings of snakes and trefoils, which themselves seemed to form a script, though not one she recognized. Tiny eyes winked between the leaves. Tiny mouths screamed ecstasy and terror. Battles and seductions worked their way across the vast spaces between the margins. The doors seemed almost alive.

She looked about to find a girl who hadn’t been there a moment before sitting on one corner of the doors, twenty feet away. A young woman, much her build and age, wearing a rather smart denim miniskirt and a hunter green ragged wool vest far too large for her. And apparently nothing else, which made Addison’s heart skip a beat before she looked away from the curve of exposed breast, then found herself drawn back again.

The girl was the girl in the mirror.

“Hello,” the stranger said. Her voice was soft, familiar, though the accent was strange, like nothing Addison had ever heard.

“Uh, hello.” Addison’s own voice sounded odd in her ears now.

They stared at one another, ordinary brown eyes locked on ordinary brown eyes. She’d never been anything special, had always longed for the fiery red hair and green eyes of all the brave servant girls who were future queens in the books she’d devoured from the library, but Addison’s looks had remained resolutely plain.

On this girl in her ragged, open vest, here in the crown of the high hills, those looks were as exotic as any raving beauty on the page. Unthinking, Addison plucked at her own hair.

“Do you bear sorrow or joy?” asked the girl.

“You—” Addison blurted, then stopped. “You look like me.”

Laughter that could have rung the bells of morning. Why don’t I laugh like that? “Better to say you look like me, stranger.” A long, thoughtful pause, something deceptively close to compassion in those brown eyes. “No one finds these doors by accident. Well, almost no one. But surely not you.”

“No, no…” Addison paused, stared at her own slender, callused fingers a moment. She was still thirty feet from the other girl, but she could smell her. A far-too-familiar scent somewhere between sex and sleep. It was… disturbing. “Grandfather sent me.”

“Whose grandfather?” Now the voice was gentle.

Why was this question important? She’d fallen into some modern version of the riddle game, like talking to her therapist but with such different, unknowable stakes. Addison stalled by walking around the verge of the doors. There was certainly no way she was going to set foot on them.

The other girl was patient. Addison got the impression the stranger would have waited a decade for her to round the corner and walk face-to-face to answer the question.

“My grandfather. Grandfather Locke.”

“Morfar or farfar?”

“Excuse me?”

“Your mother’s father or your father’s father?”

“Oh. Mother’s. Daddy was a Keyes.”

Something stirred in the girl’s vest pocket. She glanced down in apparent surprise, looking into a dark place that seemed much deeper than the ragged woolen vest could contain. “Lock and key,” mused the girl.

“I’m Addison Keyes.”

The pocket shifted again. Was she carrying an animal in there?

The girl just stared back.

Eventually Addison filled the silence. “And you are…?”

The answer was prompt if unhelpful. “Waiting.”

“For what?”

She patted the copper doors. “Locks and keys.”

Something shifted in Addison’s head, half-forgotten words of Grandfather Locke’s. Another verse.

He really had been a bit strange…

“I can take the hint,” Addison said. “Nominate determinism is just silly, but if you want me to be, I am both a Locke and a Keyes.”

“If you think names do not count, then you have learned nothing.” This close, the girl touched Addison’s hair, then sniffed. A spark passed between them, like petting a cat during thunderstorm weather. Addison didn’t jump, but was surprised at the tingle inside her breasts and groin. “You were raised by a mabkin.”

“What?”

“Your morfar. Locke? He is a mabkin. I can smell him on you.”

“He passed away last summer.”

“Really?” She smiled sweetly at Addison, though there was nothing but menace in those pearly teeth for a moment. Addison wondered if she, too, were almost-fanged. “Did you see the body?”

“N-no. He died in the hospital, and the funeral was closed casket.”

The smile was positively evil. “If you dug it up, you’d find a dead wolf and a few stone of rags and feathers. He hasn’t come home yet, but he will. I would know.”

“And I would know if he was alive!” Addison shouted, suddenly enraged. “He never was going to come home, damn you. That’s why he told me all the stories, and bought me a plane ticket before he died, and spent all his time filling me with ideas about wearing my clothes inside out and carrying pebbles in my pockets! He was crazy and I love him.”

“You’re not wearing your clothes inside out,” the girl pointed out quite reasonably, ignoring Addison’s anger.

“And the only rocks I have are inside my head, I swear.” Addison huffed, trying to settle down. She had not come this far to fight with some imaginary twin. “He’s dead, girl-whoever-you-are-in-waiting. I watched him slip away. Colon cancer, and they took it out of him three times until he was shitting in a plastic bag and eating nothing but oatmeal. Whatever a mabkin is, no one noticed on the operating table. Or in the CAT scans.”

“The crab disease.” This was the first time the girl seemed taken aback. “A mabkin, in the presence of a grimalkin, was struck down by the crab disease…”

Grimalkin? An old cat. The CAT scan? Riddles, and more stupid wordplay. Addison stuck to the point, for fear of talking in mystic circles. “What, you people don’t get cancer here?”

“We die of nothing but grief or the sword. Sometimes at the same moment.”

“Grandfather Locke died on the sword of cancer, then. But I held his hand when he was done. I don’t think he grieved.”

“Did he call for Mother?” the girl asked gently.

“Yes,” said Addison, and burst into tears.

Later they sat close in front of the primus stove while Addison boiled water for ginger tea. The girl, who would answer to “Door” but called herself nothing that Addison could determine, had been delighted with a white chocolate macadamia Clif Bar. Their shadows lengthened eastward, and Addison kept wondering if she would camp up here. She wanted to see where Door would go at nightfall, because experience had already taught her about the rapid descent of frost on these hills.

Door seemed unconcerned about the passage of time, or really, anything else other than Addison’s camping gear.

“You carry fire with you in a little bottle. This is so much more clever than wooden sticks.”

“I have matches, too,” Addison admitted.

“Surely. Monkeys are clever.”

“I am not a monkey.”

“Not you.” That almost-fanged smile. “But you were raised among them, and you have brought back their clever ways.”

“I’ve brought back something else, too,” Addison admitted. She touched her chest, just below the right clavicle.

“Yourself, of course.” The later the day grew, the more feral Door seemed to become. At noon she’d been almost reserved. Now she was tricksy.

Ignoring the chilly air, Addison slipped out of her fleece vest, unbuttoned her wool shirt, and dropped the shoulder on her thermal top, tugging the sports bra’s band with it. “See this,” she asked, pointing at a red-lipped seam on her neck and another on her chest.

“I could do much better.” A copper blade shaped like a rhododendron leaf appeared as if from nowhere in Door’s hand.

“Stop it,” Addison said, slapping the girl’s wrist. Feral, feral.

The touch caused another spark to leap between them.

With that, the blade vanished. Door cocked her head, looking for all the world like a curious robin. “What, then?”

“It’s a chest port. I start chemotherapy next week back at home.”

Door looked puzzled.

“Cancer. The crab disease.” Addison sighed. “What killed Grandfather Locke. It’s trying to kill me.” She wasn’t supposed to think of it that way, her therapist had been very insistent.

Now Door seemed completely taken aback. Addison wondered if the other girl’s preternatural confidence faded with the light. “You have come to the Doors bearing the crab disease?”

“Well… yes?”

“Some come here seeking life eternal. Some come here seeking the true death of the soul, for fear of the same thing. Some come seeking riches. Or a lost love. What do you hope for here?”

Whatever Grandfather Locke set me to find, Addison thought, but did not say. Her fingers brushed her chest where the port implant ached. “He… He always told me I would discover where I belonged.”

“You belong wherever you are,” Door said simply. For the first time, Addison thought she heard compassion in the other girl’s voice, but when she looked up, all she saw was the gleam of the Primus flame in Door’s eyes. It was like staring into a tiny, liquid hell.

“I don’t want to die,” Addison whispered.

“Ah, life eternal.” The smile flashed, even more fanged in the encroaching gloam. “We don’t have that here. Chronos is long since fallen. We merely abide endlessly without the benefit of time.”

“Cancer is a disease of time.”

“Life is a disease of time.”

Another touch, their third, and on this occasion the spark was like summer lightning. Door drew Addison into a close embrace. Like hugging herself, but not. Like masturbating, but not. Like a mirror so close one could step into it.

“Would you go Below?” Door whispered in her ear. Inside Addison’s head.

“Would I come back?”

“You would carry the disease of time into the Quiet Lands. Is that what you want?”

More of Grandfather Locke’s words came to her then.

Had she only ever been his pawn as well? Was even the cancer her morfar’s gift to her? “I would not wish this on my worst enemy if I had one,” Addison whispered to herself.

“Time is everyone’s worst enemy,” Door whispered back from within. “The sword of ruin. That is why it does not pass beneath these hollow hills.”

“Cancer is the sword of ruin, thrust through the body.” Addison thought back on Door’s words. “Both grief and the sword.” The disease of time, indeed.

“Your story will sweep open the doors,” Door replied. “They may never shut again.”

Did she want to? Who were the people under the hill to her? Mabkin, her grandfather Locke’s folk, but he’d never spoken of them. Just filled her head with stories, filled her heart with his death, and filled her hand with a ticket to elsewhere.

Addison wasn’t certain what choice she was making. To go home and slowly poison herself, while poisoning the cancer a little faster. Or to pass beneath these copper doors and come to face her great-grandmother, who lived outside time.

Sooner pass between the pages of a book.

You always did want to pass between the pages of a book, girl, her grandfather Locke said. And someone must break the chains under the hill, someday.

Though Door’s fingers barely touched the copper, the slabs swung upward as if pressed forward by hands the size of houses. They smashed into the ground on each side with an echo that Addison felt deep in her bones. The inner faces of the doors were decorated just as ornately as the outside, though in the last of the twilight, the carvings seemed alive, fields of men fighting flowers while winged archers sailed overhead laughing.

A stairwell descended into darkness. The steps themselves were carved from the stone of the hill, each one bowed and worn with generations of passage. There was no light at all below, but the air smelled of roses and grave dust and meat.

It was an invitation.

A vector of change now, aimed at the deathless heart of the unchanging, Addison touched her woolen vest, fingered the seam of her denim skirt, and set off into the darkness below with an ache in her chest and her grandfather’s memory in her heart.

Mother will learn patience now. If the monkeys know anything we do not, it is that death is the greatest teacher life can set before us. I am not one of the mabkin, but I have sat at the borders of Mother’s realm so long I might as well be one.

That a monkey came for me is one of those blessings which can only be the world playing with its own sense of humor. Her stove burned me a little, but I got the hot tea off and into my belly. It will be strange, eating their food, but I have a ticket that will take me somewhere else.

Change is coming Below, where change has never been welcome. I wonder who set the Locke and the Keyes on their course, or if that is just another of the world’s little jokes upon itself.

Leaving the flame behind to light the night, I follow Addison Keyes’s scent back down from the high hills. As Above, so Below. Mother’s fingers may be like whips, but they will never tear at me now. Mother’s eyes may be like razors, but they will never cut at me now.

I thank my sister, I thank myself, and I sing a song of crabs and cats as the bracken whips at my hiking boots and my monkey pants and I bounce down into the wider world armed with bright teeth and a copper knife.

I am coming. I might even become a Mother myself someday, in Addison’s high Wyoming hills.

Are you afraid? Or are you laughing?

Mother Urban’s Booke of Dayes

In a basement that smelled of mold and old cleansers, Danny Knifepoint Wielder prayed down the rain. The house wasn’t any older than the Portland neighborhood around it. Most driveways were populated with minivans, children’s bicycles, heaps of bark dust and gravel accumulated for yard projects postponed through the dark months of winter. None of Danny’s neighbors knew the role he played in their lives. They would have been horrified if they had.

Not making it to church on time carried scarcely a ripple of consequence compared to what would happen if Danny didn’t pray the world forward. Lawn sprinklers chittering, children screeching at their play—these were the liturgical music of his rite.

“Heed me, Sky.”

Danny circled the altar in his basement.

“Hear my pleas, freely given from a free soul.”

Green shag carpeting was no decent replacement for the unbending grass of the plains on which the Corn Kings had once vomited out their lives to ensure the harvest.

“I have bowed to the four winds and the eight points of the rose.”

Woodgrain paneling echoed memories of the sanctifying rituals that had first blessed this workroom.

“Heed me now, that your blessing may fall upon the fields and farms.” With a burst of innate honesty he added: “… and gardens and patios and window boxes of this land.”

“Daniel Pierpont Wilder!” his mother yelled down the stairs. “Are you talking to a girl down there?”

“Mooooom,” Danny wailed. “I’m buuuusy!”

“Well, come be busy at the table. I’m not keeping your lunch warm so you can play World of Warships.”

“Warcraft, Mom,” he muttered under his breath. But he put away his knife, then raced up the steps two at a time.

Behind him, on the altar, his wilting holly rustled as if a breeze tossed the crown of an ancient oak tree deep within an untouched forest. Oil smoldered and rippled within the beaten brass bowl. Rain, wherever it had gotten to, did not fall.

That night Danny climbed up the Japanese maple in the side yard and scooted onto the roof. He’d been doing that since he was a little kid. Mom said he was still a kid, and always would be, but at twenty-two Danny had long been big enough to have to mind the branches carefully. If he waited until after Mom went to her room to watch TiVoed soap operas through the bottom of a bottle of Bombay Sapphire, she didn’t seem to notice. The roofing composite was gritty and oddly slick, still warm with the trapped heat of the day, and smelled faintly of tar and mold.

The gutters, as always, were a mess. Something was nesting in the chimney again. The streetlight he’d shot out with his BB gun remained dark, meaning that the rooftop stayed in much deeper shadow than otherwise.

Sister Moon rising in the east was neither new, nor old, but halfway in between. Untrustworthy, that was, Danny knew. If Sister Moon couldn’t make up her mind, how was Sky to know which way to pass, let alone the world as a whole to understand how to turn? This was the most dangerous time in the circle of days.

He had his emergency kit with him. Danny spent a lot of time on his emergency kit, making and remaking lists.

That last was what he spent most of his allowance on. Beeswax candles, and sometimes the right herbs or incense. That and new copies of the Almanac every year. The Booke of Dayes he’d found at a church rummage sale—it was one of those big square paperback books, like his The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Magic, with a cover that pretended to look like some old-timey tome or grimoire. The entire kit fit into a Transformers knapsack so dorky looking he wasn’t in any danger of losing it on the bus or having it taken from him, except maybe by some really methed-out homeless guy or something.

Danny had figured out a long time ago that he’d get farther in life if he didn’t spend time worrying about being embarrassed about stuff.

This night he lay back on the roof, one foot braced on the plumbing vent stack in case he fell asleep and rolled off again. The black eye he’d gotten that time had taken some real explaining.

It hadn’t rained in Portland for sixty days now, which was very weird for the Pacific Northwest, and even the news was talking about the weather a lot more. Danny knew it was his fault, that he’d messed up the Divination of Irrigon specified in the Booke of Dayes to shelter the summer growing season from Father Sun’s baleful eye. That had been back in June, and he’d gotten widdershins and deosil mixed up, then snapped the Rod of Seasons by stepping on it, which was really just a dowel from Lowe’s painted with the Testor’s model paints he’d found at a rummage sale.

You could never tell which compromises the gods would understand about, for the sake of a good effort, and which ones brought down their wrath. Kind of like back in school, with his counselors and his tutors, before he’d quit because it was stupid and hard and too easy all at the same time.

Anyway, he’d gone the wrong way around the altar, then broken the Rod, and the rain had dried up to where Mom’s tomatoes were coming in nicely but everything else in the yard was in trouble.

Since then, Danny had been studying the almanac and the Booke of Dayes, trying to find a way to repair his error. He was considering the Pennyroyal Rite, but hadn’t yet figured out where to find the herb. The guy at the Lowe’s garden center claimed he’d never heard of it.

He’d finally realized that having offended Sky, he would have to ask Sky how best to apologize. And so the rooftop at night. Sky during the day was single-minded, the bright servant of Father Sun. Sky in darkness served as a couch for Sister Moon, but also the tiny voices of the Ten Thousand Stars sang in their sparkling choir. Sometimes a star broke loose and wrote its name across heaven in a long, swift stroke that Danny had tried again and again to master in his own shaky penmanship.

Tonight, as every night for the past week, he hoped for the stars to tell him how to make things right.

A siren wailed nearby. Fire engine, Danny thought, and wondered if the flames had been sanctified, or were a vengeance. More likely someone had simply dropped a pan of bacon, but you could never tell what was of mystic import. Mother Urban was very clear on that, in her Booke of Dayes. Even the way the last few squares of toilet paper were stuck to the roll could tell you much about the hours to come. Or at least the state of your tummy.

He listened to the trains rumble on the Union Pacific mainline a few blocks away. Something peeped as it flew overhead in the darkness. The air smelled dry, and almost tired, with a mix of lawn and car and cooking odors. The night was peaceful. If not for the scratchiness of the roof under his back, he might have relaxed.

A star hissed across the sky, drawing its name in a pulsing white line. Danny sat up suddenly, startled and thrilled, but his foot slipped off the vent pipe, so that he slid down the roof and right over the edge, catching his right wrist painfully on the gutter before crashing into the rhododendron.

He sat up gasping in pain, left hand clutching the wound.

“That was not so well done,” said a girl.

Danny’s breath stopped, leaving his mouth to gape and pop. He tried to talk, but only managed to squeak out an “I—”

Then his Transformers knapsack dropped off the roof and landed on his head. The girl—for surely she was a girl—leaned over and grabbed it before Danny could sort out what had just happened.

“Nice pack,” she said dryly. He was mortified. Then she opened it and began pulling his emergency kit out, piece by piece.

Miserable, Danny sat in the rhododendron where he had fallen and looked at his tormentor. She was skinny and small, maybe five feet tall. Hard to tell in the dark, but she looked Asian. Korean? Though sometimes Mexicans looked Asian to him, which Danny knew was stupid. She wore scuff-kneed jeans and a knit top with ragged sleeves.

He had no idea if she was twelve or twenty-two. Of course, Danny mostly wasn’t sure about himself. He knew what his ID card said, the stupid fake driver’s license they gave to people who couldn’t drive so those people who were completely undeserving of pity or scorn could get a bus pass or cash an SSI check. His ID card said he was twenty-two, but lots of times Danny felt twelve.

Almost never in a good way.

“This your stuff?” She turned the retainer over in her fingers as if she’d never seen one.

“Nah.” Danny stared at the broken branches sticking out from under his thighs. “They belonged to some other guy I met up on the roof.”

She laughed, her voice soft as Sister Moon’s light. “You should tell that other guy he’d get farther with a silver athame than with a stainless steel butter knife.”

“It’s the edge that counts,” Danny said through his pout.

The girl bent close. He could almost hear the smile in her voice, though he wouldn’t meet her eye. “You’d be surprised how many people don’t know that,” she said, so near to him that her breath was warm on his face. “A sharpened paper clip and grass cuttings will serve for most rituals, if the will is strong enough and the need is great.”

Now he looked up. She was smiling at him, and not in the let’s-smack-the-stupid-kid-around way he’d grown used to over the years. Then she reached into her sleeve and pulled out a short, slightly curved blade that gleamed dully under the gaze of Sister Moon. “Try this one,” she said, handing it to him, “and look on page 238 of the Booke of Dayes.”

Danny stared at the knife a moment, then glanced up again. She was gone. Not mysteriously, magically vanished—he could hear the girl singing in the street as she picked up a bicycle and pedaled away with the faint clatter of chain and spokes. But still gone.

The knife, though… Touching it, he drew blood from his fingertip. Wow, he thought, then raced inside to read page 238 by flashlight under the covers.

Danny didn’t have the workbook—he’d only found Mother Urban’s Booke of Dayes by accident in the first place. He’d checked, though; the workbook wasn’t available on Amazon or anywhere. So he’d done without. Most of the time he’d been able to sort out the needed ritual, trusting in his own good faith to bridge any gaps. This was not so different. He understood the Third Supplicative Form well enough. Still, he’d never noticed the Reversal of Indifference before.

It was such a big book, with so many pages.

Mice, and binding, though. There were mice in the basement, in the heater room and sometimes in the laundry closet. He went to set out peanut butter in the bottom of a tall trash bucket, built a sort of ramp up to the lip of the bucket out of a stack of dog-eared Piers Anthony novels, then considered how to bind the sacrificial animals once they were his.

The answer, as it so often seemed to be, was duct tape. Danny was excited enough to want to try the Reversal of Indifference that same night. He had his new athame, and the star had certainly sent him a detailed message in the mouth of that strange Asian girl. A practitioner could only be so lucky, and he aimed to use his luck for all it was worth.

Danny had harvested four mice within the hour, so he left one inside the trash bucket for a spare in case he made a mistake. One by one, he took the other three and wrapped them in duct tape. They were trembling, terrified little silver mummies, only their shifting black eyes and quivering noses protruding.

“Sorry, little guys,” he whispered, feeling a bit sick. But magic was serious business, the lifeblood of the world, and he had failed to call down the rain.

No one would miss a few mice.

Then Danny made himself sicker wondering if one of the mice was a mother, and would little mouse babies starve in some nest behind the walls.

He shifted his thoughts away with the heft of the athame in his hand. The knife was tiny, but nothing felt like silver. The Third Supplicative Form—as best as Danny understood without the workbook available—was a long chant followed by the delivery of the sacrifice. Usually he sacrificed a candy bar, or maybe a dollar bill. In tonight’s case, the sacrifice was obvious.

This time Danny remembered to take the battery out of the smoke alarm. Then he lit his candles, purified his hands in the bowl of Costco olive oil, and began the chant. The mice shivered on the altar, one little mummy actually managing to roll over and almost fall off onto the green shag. He nudged it back into place and tried to concentrate on magical thoughts instead of what he was about to do.

When the moment came, the mice bled more than he thought they could. One managed to bite his finger before dying. Still, he laid them in the hibachi, squirted Ronson lighter fluid on them, and flicked them with the Bic. The duct tape burned with a weird, sticky kind of smell, while the mice were like tiny roasts.

Guilt-ridden, Danny grabbed the trash bucket to go free the last mouse into the yard, but halfway up the basement stairs he had to throw up. By the time he got outside, the last mouse had drowned in the pool of vomit, floating inert with the potato chunks and parsley flecks from dinner.

He washed his mouth and hands for a long time, but still went to bed feeling grubby and ill.

Morning brought rain.

Danny lay in his little bed—he had to curl up to even lie in the blue race car, but Mom kept insisting how much he’d loved the thing when he was seven—and listened to water patter on the roof. Portland rain, like taking a shower with the tap on low. It didn’t rain so much in August, but it was never this dry either.

He’d done it.

Sky had heard him, and returned blessings to the land.

Danny didn’t know if it was the girl’s athame, or the mice, or just more careful attention to the Booke of Dayes. He wanted to bounce out of bed and write Mother Urban another letter to her post office box in New Jersey, but he wanted more to run outside and play in the rain.

Then he thought some more about the mice, and looked at the red spot on his finger where one of them had bitten him, and wept a while into his pillow.

It rained for days, as if this were February and the Pacific storms were pouring over the Coastal Mountains one after another. Danny performed the Daily Observances and leafed through the Booke of Dayes in his quiet moments to see what else he’d missed besides the Reversal of Indifference. Mostly he let Sky take care of the land and wondered when he’d see Father Sun again.

Mom seemed distracted, too. Danny knew she loved him, but she was so busy with her work and taking care of the house, she didn’t always remember to hug him like their therapist said to, or feed him like their doctor said to.

That was okay. He could hug himself when he needed, and there was always something to eat in the kitchen.

So mostly Danny mooned around the house, watched the rain fall, and wished he could take the bus to Lowe’s to look for new magical herbs in the garden center. He wasn’t allowed TV, and there wasn’t much else to do except read Mother Urban or one of his fantasy novels.

Except as the days went by, the rain did not let up. First Mom became angry about her tomatoes. Then he saw a dead puppy bumping down the gutter out front, drowned and washing away in a Viking funeral without the burning boat. The news kept talking about the water, and how the East Side Sewer Project wasn’t ready for the overflow, and whether the Willamette River would reach flood stage, and which parks had been closed because the creeks were too swollen to be safe.

Danny watched outside to see if the Asian girl came by again on her bike. He wanted to ask her what to do now, what to do next. There was no point in climbing the roof to ask Sky—the only answer he would get there was a faceful of water and Oregon’s endless, featureless dirty cotton flannel rainclouds.

If anything, Sky was even less informative in such a rain than when Father Sun shouted the heat of his love for the world.

So Danny sat by the dining room window looking out on the street and leafed through Mother Urban’s Booke of Dayes for anything he could find about rain, about water, about asking the sun to return once more.

He read all about the Spelle for a Seizure of the Bladder, but realized after a while that wasn’t the right kind of water. Maidens’ Tears & the Love of Zir Hearte had seemed promising, but even from the first words, Danny knew better. Still, he’d studied the lists of rose hips and the blood of doves and binding cords braided from zir hair. Closer, in a way, was the Drain Cantrip, though that seemed more straightforward, being a spell of baking soda and vinegar and gravity.

Danny tried to imagine how much baking soda and vinegar it would take to open up the world to swallow all this rain.

The news talked about people packing sandbags along the waterfront downtown. All the floodgates were open in the dam at Oregon City. A girl drowned in the Clackamas River at Gladstone, trying to feed bedraggled ducks. A grain barge slipped its tow and hit a pillar of the Interstate Bridge, shutting down the Washington-bound traffic for days.

All his fault. All this water.

He prayed. He stood before his altar and begged. He even tried the roof one night, but only managed to sprain his ankle slipping—again—on the way down. And he read the Booke of Dayes. Studying it so closely, Danny realized that Mother Urban must have been a very strange author, because often he could not find the same spell twice, yet would locate spells he’d never seen before in all his flipping through the book.

Meanwhile, his own mother complained about the weather, set buckets in the living room and bathroom under the leaks, and sent Danny to the basement or his bedroom more often than not. Something had happened to her job—too wet to work outdoors at the Parks Department—and she stopped using the TiVo, just watching TV through the filter of gin all day and all night. He wasn’t sure she slept anymore.

Danny was miserable. This was all his fault. He never should have listened to the Asian girl, never should have killed those mice, not even for a ritual. If only he could bring them back to life, or set that stupid, fateful star back into the sky.

He couldn’t undo what was done, but maybe he could do something else. That was when he had his big idea. It couldn’t rain everywhere, right? If he worked the ritual again, somewhere else, the rain would leave Oregon behind to move on. Things would be better again, for Mom, for his neighbors, for the people fighting the flood. For everyone!

Excited but reluctant, Danny caught five more mice. He put them in a Little Oscar cooler with some newspaper, along with cheese and bread to eat, and pounded holes in the lid with a hammer and a screwdriver so they could breathe. He gathered the rest of his materials—the silver athame, duct tape, the brass bowl, the bottle of Costco olive oil, the Ronson lighter fluid—and stuffed all of it in his dorky Transformers knapsack.

All he needed was money for a bus ticket to Seattle. They wouldn’t even notice the extra rain there. Mom never really slept, but she was full of gin all the time now, and spent a lot of her day breathing through her mouth and staring at nothing. Danny waited for her noises to get small and regular, then crept into her room.

“Mom,” he said quietly.

She lay in her four-poster bed, the quilted coverlet spotted with gin and ketchup. Her housedress hung open, so Danny could see her boobs flopping, even the pink pointy nipples, which made him feel weird in a sick-but-warm way. Her head didn’t turn at the sound of his voice.

“Momma, I’m hungry.” That wasn’t a lie, though mostly he’d been eating the strange old canned food at the back of the pantry for days.

She snorted, then slumped.

“Momma, I’m taking some money from your purse to go buy food.” There was the lie, the one he’d get whipped for, and have to pray forgiveness at the altar later on. Mother Urban’s Booke of Dayes was very clear on the penalties for a Practitioner’s lying to the Spirit Worlde.

But without the money, he could not move the rain. Besides, surely he’d buy food on the way to Seattle. So it wasn’t really a lie.

He reached into her purse, pushed aside the pill bottles and lipsticks and doctor’s shots to find her little ladybug money purse. Too scared to count it out, Danny took the whole thing and fled without kissing his mother good-bye or tucking her boobs back in her dress or even locking the front door.

Danny’s pass got him on the number 33 bus downtown. Even in the floods, Tri-Met kept running. The bus’s enormous wheels seemed to be able to splash through deep puddles where cars were stuck. The rain had soaked him on the way to the bus stop, and at the bus shelter, and even now its clear fingers were clawing at the window to drag him out. Danny clutched his Little Oscar cooler and his Transformers knapsack and stared out, daring the rain to do its worst.

If he made the rain mad enough, and Sky, who was both mother and father of the rain, maybe it would follow him to Seattle even without the Reversal of Indifference.

The Greyhound station downtown had a sign on the door that said NO SERVICE TODAY DUE TO INCLEMENT WEATHER. Danny wasn’t sure exactly what “inclement” meant, but he understood the sign.

He sat out front and stared at the train station down the street, crying. It was in the rain, no one would notice him in tears. The Little Oscar emitted scratching noises as the mice did whatever it was mice did in the dark. He knew he should draw out Mother Urban’s Booke of Dayes and try to work out what to do next.

Then the girl on the bike showed up again. She came splashing through puddles with a big smile on her face, as though this flood were a sprinkler on a summer lawn. The bike skidded sideways in front of him, splashing Danny with grimy water. She leapt off like she was performing some great trick, and let her bicycle fall over into the flooded gutter.

“So how’s your edge, Danny?” she asked brightly.

He couldn’t remember that he’d ever told the girl his name. It wasn’t like he knew hers. “Th-this is all your fault!” he blurted.

Somewhere out in the rain a ship’s horn bellowed, long and slow. The bus station was near the waterfront, Danny knew.

The girl’s grin expanded. “Somebody’s going to hit the Broadway Bridge.”

“You s-set me up.”

“No, Danny.” She leaned close, her hands on her knees. “I just told you how to do what you wanted. You set you up. A Practitioner must know zir Practice.”

He was startled out of his growing pout. “You know everything about the Booke of Dayes, don’t you? Tell me, how do I fix this?”

Another laugh. “Think,” she said. “Smart kid like you doesn’t have to go to Seattle to stop the rain.”

“I been doing nothing but think for days!” The tears started up. “People been drowning, that p-puppy, Mom’s got no w-work, the tomatoes are rotting…” Danny screwed his eyes shut to shut the tears off, just like Mom always made him do.

When the girl’s voice spoke hot-breathed in his ear, he squeaked like a duct-taped mouse. “What’s the name of the ritual, Practitioner?”

“R-reversal of Indifference.”

“What does that mean?”

He wasn’t stupid! Danny concentrated, like they’d always tried to make him do in school. Reversal… reversal… The meaning hit him suddenly. “You can turn something around from either direction,” he said with a gasp.

She clapped her hands with glee. “And so…?”

“And so…” Danny let his thoughts catch up with his words. He could see this thread, like a silver trail in the sky, tying a star back into place. “And so I can make Sky stop thinking about rain on Portland, make Sky take the rain back.”

“Bravo!” Her eyes sparkled with pure delight.

“Wh-what’s your n-name?” he asked, completely taken in by the girl’s expression.

“Geneva,” she said, serious but still amused. “Geneva Fairweather.”

He squatted on the bench in front of the Greyhound station and opened the Little Oscar. Five sets of beady eyes looked from a reek of piss and damp animal. Danny already had his duct tape out, but when he reached for the first mouse, he remembered that it was the edge that counted. Geneva Fairweather had said you could work most rituals with a sharpened paper clip and grass cuttings.

So maybe he didn’t need to kill three mice. Or even tape them into tiny mummies to bind them. His fist would hold the mouse. The athame was sharp enough to prick three drops of blood from the mouse’s back. The poor animal squirmed and squealed, but it was not dead. He folded the blood into a corner of paper torn from Mother Urban’s Booke of Dayes, and followed the ritual from there.

Within moments, the rain slackened and Father Sun peeked down for the first time in three weeks. Danny turned to Geneva. “See? I could do it!”

A distant bicycle splashed through the puddles. She was gone.

Still, it didn’t matter. Danny knew he’d done something important. Real important. And Geneva Fairweather would be back, he was sure of it.

As for Danny, if he could do this, how much more could he do?

What effect would a Reversal of Indifference have on his mom?

Clutching his bus pass, Danny walked back toward the Tri-Met stop. He would study Mother Urban’s Booke of Dayes all the way home.

On the bus, he noticed for the first time the tiny illustration of a girl on a bicycle that appeared somewhere on every page of Booke of Dayes. Sometimes inside another illustration, sometimes tucked within the words, sometimes on the edge.

Had she been there before?

Did it matter?

The mice rustled in his jacket pocket. A pungent odor told Danny they were already making themselves at home there. That was fine with him. Smiling, he pricked his finger with the athame, right there on the bus, and watched the blood well like a fat-bellied ruby. Once he got home, some things would begin to change.