Memory and Dream

Vignettes From Bohemia

I

Newford, June 1975

Although the snow was long gone and there was not a soul in sight, Izzy was still nervous the first time she walked down the lane off Stanton Street that led to Rushkin’s studio in the old coach house. She thought being here would re-awaken memories of the mugging, but the only piece of the past that arose in her mind was a more immediate memory from a few weeks ago when she’d finally gone down to the police station to look at their mug books. She’d dutifully scanned page after page of criminal faces, but none looked familiar. The whole exercise seemed pointless, especially after the detective told her how most such attacks never saw an arrest in the first place, little say were brought to trial.

“It’s especially frustrating in a case of random violence such as your own,” the detective went on.

“Nine out of ten times, the victim knows her assailants. Not necessarily well—it might be the guy who takes your change at the subway, or some neighborhood kid you upset through no fault of your own, but there’s usually a reason for this sort of an attack. Once we know it, we can work our way backwards from the motive. In your case, however, that line of inquiry takes us right up against a dead end. And since you weren’t robbed, we can’t even hope to trace your assailants through stolen goods—a distinctive piece of jewelry, that sort of thing.

“I’m sorry, Miss Copley. I wish I had better news to give you than that. All I can tell you is that we’ll keep the file open. If anything new comes up, you can be sure that we’ll contact you.”

But while her going to the precinct hadn’t made much of an impact on the lives of her attackers, it did have an effect upon her own. Now instead of seeing shadowy, unrecognizable features or, what was worse, Rushkin’s face on the youthful bodies of her attackers, she had a whole new vocabulary of faces to fuel her bad dreams.

Izzy sighed, still hesitating at the mouth of the lane. It could have been worse. At least you woke up from a dream. But knowing that didn’t make the nightmares any easier to endure. She wondered how Rochelle had learned to deal with the aftereffects of her own attack. What kind of dreams did she have?

She sighed again. She’d put off returning here for as long as she could. Having finally made it this far today, she knew she had to follow through.

You’re not dreaming now, she told herself and set off down the lane.

The coach house was overhung with a tangle of vines just coming into their summer growth. Yellow and violet irises ran along the sides of the building in bands of startling color, each pocket of flowers surrounded by an amazing array of ferns and the plants’ long, pointed leaves. She paused for a moment, looking for movement in one of the second-floor windows, but she could see nothing moving. The building had an uninhabited feeling about it—not quite abandoned, but not lived-in either.

As she drew nearer, another memory rose up. This one was more painful. She looked past the coach house to where the lane continued on under a canopy of maple and oak boughs. That was where she’d first seen John—really seen him and his resemblance to The Spirit Is Strong instead of talking to him in the shadows of the library’s steps. She wished he could be there now, but that part of the lane was as empty as the length of it that she’d already walked down.

Don’t think about him, she told herself. Easier said than done, but she had to make the effort.

She went up the stairs and tried the door. Locked. Descending, she went to look under the clay flowerpot by the back door. The key was there, just where Rushkin had said it would be in his letter.

So he really had gone away.

At the top of the stairs once more, she used the key to open the door and walked into a curiously unfamiliar studio. It had the same layout as she remembered, but all of Rushkin’s art was gone, which made the room appear much larger than it ever had before. The only finished art was her own, which he’d obviously taken up from the storeroom below and put on one of the walls. The two easels remained, hers and his, as did the long wooden worktable that ran almost the length of the room. There she could see boxes of art supplies—paint tubes, brushes, turpentine, linseed oil and the like, all still in their manufacturers’ packaging. Under the table were stacks of blank canvas, frames, pads of sketching paper, cans of gesso and other materials. Her easel stood where it usually had, with her paints and brushes neatly arranged on the small table that stood beside it. A blank, primed canvas waited for her on the easel. Rushkin’s easel was empty, as was the top of the small table beside it.

Izzy walked slowly around the studio, taking it all in. The room held such an eerie sensation of loss and emptiness. The feeling of disuse she’d sensed outside was so much stronger here. Even the air was different—a little close because of the closed windows, but lacking the smells of a working studio as well.

Paints and turpentine.

She found a note on the worktable that basically repeated what the letter he’d sent her had said. The only addition was an assurance that the rent and utilities would continue to be paid while he was gone.

Gone where? she wanted to know.

But that was Rushkin. He only explained things when he felt like it.

At the bottom of the letter was a postscript that told her if she had any questions, or if any problems arose in his absence, she was to call Olson, Silva & Chizmar Associates. After the name of the law firm, he’d written in their phone number.

Izzy stared thoughtfully at the name, then went downstairs to see if Rushkin had left the phone connected. When she got a dial tone, she called The Green Man Gallery.

“Hello, Albina,” she said once the connection was made.

“Izzy. It’s good to hear your voice. How are you feeling?”

“Much better. I’m going to start painting today.”

“Good for you.”

“But I was just wondering something. You remember that offer that was made for The Spirit Is Strong at my show—can you tell me the name of the law firm that made it?”

“Let me think. It was Silver, something or other. I’d know it if I heard it.”

“Silva?” Izzy asked. “Olson, Silva & Chizmar Associates?”

“Yes, that’s it. Why? I thought you couldn’t sell the painting.”

“I still can’t. I just ran across that name and something made me think of the offer.”

After a little more small talk, Izzy managed to get off the phone. She wandered around Rushkin’s apartment, but there was even less to be seen here than upstairs. The furniture remained and there were some canned goods and staples in the kitchen, but everything else was gone. All the paintings and sketches. All of his personal belongings. It was as though he’d never lived here at all.

Returning to the studio, Izzy went through some of the boxes whose contents she couldn’t guess and found still more art supplies. Taking the items out, she soon had an array of soft and oil pastels, vine charcoal, pencils, cans of fixative and any number of other useful items laid out on the long worktable.

It was like having her own art shop, Izzy thought, right here in her studio. Except it wasn’t her studio, was it? It was Rushkin’s, but Rushkin was gone, taking with him every trace of himself that the long room had held.

She turned slowly around, studying what remained.

Why had he gone? Why had he left her all of this material? Why did he have his lawyers make that offer on The Spirit Is Strong when he’d wanted her to destroy it herself? Surely he hadn’t meant to spend that kind of money just so that he could do the honors?

But then she shook her head. No, he’d distinctly said that only she could send John back. She’d brought him over, so it would have been up to her to send him back.

She drifted over to the window and sat down, staring down at the place where John had been sitting that autumn morning. None of it made sense. Not what Kathy had taken to calling her numena. Not Rushkin’s disappearance. Not how she had inadvertently sent John out of her life ....

Although how inadvertent had that been? Perhaps it would be more fair to say that she’d been taking his measure and he’d been found wanting. Maybe he’d never lied to her, but what hope could there be for a relationship built upon vagaries and riddles? When one of them had no past. When one of them hadn’t even been born, but was called up by the other through magic.

After a while she got one of the pads of paper and a stick of vine charcoal and returned to the window seat. She sat and drew what she could see of the lane while she let her thoughts go round and round in her head, giving them free rein until they began to run into one another. They became a kind of a mantra, the questions losing their need to be answered, eventually dissolving into a state of mind where all she did was draw.

I’m not going to ask questions anymore, she decided. Not of people. I’ll only ask questions of my art.

She put aside the pad and took the stump of charcoal over to her easel and began to block in a painting. By the time the sky began to darken outside the studio windows, she had an underpainting completed. Cleaning up, she locked the studio door behind her and pocketed the key. She ate out at the Dear Mouse Diner, and that night she went out to one of the many parties on Waterhouse Street, where she had far too much to drink. Instead of going home, she let some young poet, two years junior to her venerable twenty years of age, take her home to his bed.

Around four in the morning she woke up with the feeling that they were being watched. She sat up and looked around the unfamiliar room, then went to look out the window. The bedroom was on the third floor and there were no trees outside, no fire escape that someone could have climbed up, not even any vines or gutters.

Instead of returning to the bed, she got dressed and went to the bathroom. It took her a few minutes to track down a bottle of aspirin. She took three with a glass of water, then left the poet’s apartment and walked the two and a half blocks back to her own on Waterhouse Street.

She didn’t return to the poet’s bed, but two nights later she slept with his best friend.

II

November 1975

Izzy had seventeen pieces hanging in her second solo show at The Green Man Gallery. By the end of the first week of the show, every one of them had sold.

“Obviously we priced them too low,” Albina said the night that she, Kathy, Alan and Izzy went out to celebrate.

They had a corner table in The Rusty Lion with a view of Lee Street. The shops were all closed, but the street, even on this brisk November evening, was bustling with people, an even mix of bohemian types and commuters, tourists and area residents, on their way home, on their way out for a night on the town, or just on their way from one indefinable point to another. In the midst of the crowd, Izzy spotted a tall woman with a lion’s mane of red-gold hair. She walked with a pantherish grace, oblivious of the chill, her light cotton jacket hanging open. Men turned to look at her as she went by, noting her obvious charms rather than the way her ears tapered into narrow points from which sprouted small bobcat-like tufts of hair. But it was dark, Izzy thought, and the red-gold spill of the woman’s mane hid them from sight.

Izzy had finished the painting that brought this numena over two days before hanging her show. She hadn’t named the piece yet, but seeing the woman in the flesh, admiring the fluid movement of her musculature as she glided by, she decided to call it simply Grace. She wished she’d thought to set the main figure off against a crowd the way she appeared here on Lee Street, rather than having her leaning against the base of one of the Newford Public Library’s stone lions as she was in the painting.

“I’m truly sorry,” Albina said.

It took Izzy a moment to realize that Albina was speaking to her. Alan smiled.

“She’s become far too successful now to talk with plebes like us,” he said. “Haven’t you, Izzy?”

“Ha-ha.”

“The next time,” Albina went on, “we’ll definitely ask for more.”

“Yes,” Kathy declared loftily. “We must ask two or three times the current price for subsequent shows. We have here the makings of a true artiste to whom all the world will one day bow in homage.”

“Oh, please,” Izzy said, aiming a kick at Kathy’s leg under the table, but she blushed with pleasure.

Kathy moved her leg and all Izzy succeeded in doing was stubbing her toe on the rung of Kathy’s chair.

“Now, now,” Alan told her. “You don’t see Van Gogh carrying on like this.”

“That’s because Van Gogh’s bloody dead,” Kathy said. “Don’t you keep up on current events?”

Alan’s features took on a look of exaggerated shock. “You’re telling me he’s passe?”

“Or at least passed on,” Kathy said. “Unlike our own belle Izzy, whose star is definitely on the rise.”

While Izzy knew that they were only teasing her, she still couldn’t stop feeling somewhat awkward at how well the show had done. The paintings all selling. The reviews all so wonderful. Other painters she only knew from their work or their reputations coming up to congratulate her. The success was more than a little frightening, especially when she knew that what had ended up in the show hadn’t been her best work. She hadn’t put one of the pieces that called up the numena in the show, and they were all far better than the cityscapes and real-life portraits that had sold. It wasn’t that she had invested more of herself in the paintings that called up numena; they just seemed to draw the best up from her, to push her artistic limits in a way that the other paintings didn’t. Or couldn’t. The ones she’d sold had been technically challenging. The paintings of her numena challenged something deep inside her to which she couldn’t attach a definition.

“Unlike your so-called friends,” Albina said, “I’m being serious. We’re really going to have to reconsider our pricing for any future work of yours that the gallery hangs.”

Izzy hated to talk business. She gave a shrug that didn’t commit her to anything. “Whatever.”

“We can talk about it later,” Albina said.

“That’s right,” Kathy announced, raising her wineglass in a toast. “Tonight we’re here to celebrate.

Here’s to Izzy—long may she prosper!”

Izzy blushed as Albina and Alan echoed Kathy’s toast. She could feel the people at the other tables looking at her.

“Let’s put this in its proper perspective,” she said, clinking her glass against theirs. “Here’s to us.

May we all prosper.”

Kathy smiled at her. “Amen to that, ma belle Izzy.”

It was after dinner, while they were having their coffee, that Albina brought up Izzy’s paintings of her numena.

“I don’t suppose,” she said, “that you have any other finished work at your studio, what with having to prepare for the show and all?”

“Nothing that I want to sell,” Izzy told her.

“Jilly tells me you’ve been working on a series of fairy-tale portraits—something along the themes she’s beginning to undertake in her own work, only not quite so fanciful.”

Izzy nodded. “But they’re just something I’m experimenting with.”

“I’d have a look through them, if I were you. The sooner we can hang some more of your work, the better it would be. We have a certain momentum going for us at the moment. It would be a shame to not build on it.”

“I suppose.”

Izzy looked out the window at Lee Street. The crowds had thinned by now. Christy’s brother Geordie was busking with his fiddle on the corner in front of Jacob’s Fruitland. He started to pack up as she watched, with a couple of guitarists waiting in the wings, as it were, for their turn on the pavement stage. Across the street a mime and a hammered-dulcimer player were vying with the few straggling passersby on their side of the street. Grace’s numena was long gone, and Izzy could see none of the others at the moment.

It was odd how often she would spot her numena now, blended into crowds, caught from the corner of her eye, but so far none of them had approached her the way that John had. She had the sense that they were as curious about her as she was of them, but something held them back. Sometimes she wondered if John had warned them away from her. Or maybe they thought that she wanted to ask after him. The first time she got to talk to one of them, she would set the record straight. She was completely over John Sweetgrass, thank you very much. She didn’t even think of him anymore.

She resisted the urge to put a finger to her nose to see if it started to grow at the lie.

Albina touched her arm. “Izzy?”

Izzy focused on her friend and gave her a vague smile. “I’m sorry. I got sidetracked.”

“About those paintings you have finished—these experiments. I’d be interested in having a look at them.”

Izzy shook her head. “Sometimes you have to do things just for yourself,” she said, trying to explain.

“It’s like, if everything you do goes up for sale, you’ve nothing left for yourself. There’s no way to judge where you’re going, how you’re doing. I need the freedom of knowing that there are paintings I can do that aren’t for sale, that don’t have any consideration in how or why they came about, or in what they have to say. Paintings that just are, that I can look up from my easel and see them hanging on the wall and ... oh, I don’t know. Grow familiar with them, I guess.”

“I think I understand,” Albina said.

Perhaps she did, Izzy thought. Perhaps what she was telling Albina did make sense to someone who didn’t know about the numena and how they came to be, but she still felt that the only person at the table who could read between the lines of her explanation was Kathy. When she glanced over at her roommate, Kathy smiled and gave her a wink.

III

Two weeks after that night at The Rusty Lion, Izzy came back to the apartment from working at the studio to find a fat manila envelope waiting for her on her bed. Her pulse quickened when she recognized the handwriting as Rushkin’s.

Why now? she wondered. Why was he contacting her now after all these months of silence?

She picked the envelope up and looked for a return address. There was none. The postmark was too smudged to read, but the stamps were domestic, which narrowed down its place of origin to someplace between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. It could have been mailed from Newford, for all she knew.

After hesitating for a long moment, she finally opened it. Inside was a thick sheaf of paper covered in Rushkin’s handwriting and profusely illustrated with ink sketches. It was, Izzy realized, once she started to read it, a review of her show at The Green Man. Rushkin had gone to it. Gone and loved her work.

But

She read on, nodding her head at his critiques, glowing at his praise. Much as everyone had loved her work in the show, Izzy’d had misgivings about certain of the pieces—nothing she could put her finger on, nothing that anyone else might even notice; she just knew that something wasn’t quite right and had no idea how to fix it. For each one of those paintings Rushkin provided a detailed critique, showing her where she’d gone wrong and how to fix it, should the problem arise again.

His insight astounded her. She enjoyed working on her own—painting in Rushkin’s studio now gave her the freedom she’d had at the Grumbling Green-house Studio behind Professor Dapple’s house, with the added benefit of being provided with everything she could possibly require to do her art. But she realized that she missed her erstwhile mentor. Not the way he was when he got angry, not when she had to tippy-toe around his ego and temper. But all those many other times that far outnumbered the bad.

When they worked together and he would step over to her easel and point out this or that mistake. Or she could go to him with a problem she was having and he would either solve it for her, or give her the tools and information she needed to work the problem through on her own.

It wasn’t the same with him gone, she thought, holding the letter against her chest. It was so unfair, both Rushkin and John disappearing out of her life at the same time.

She wondered when he’d gone to the show. Where he was now. When he was coming back.

The letter answered none of those questions. Its tone was affectionate, but it addressed only the works that had been hung in the show, nothing else. There was no news, no inquiries after her, how she was doing, how she felt. She couldn’t even answer him, because there wasn’t a return address anywhere inside the envelope either.

She sighed. In this way Rushkin was exactly like John. They could both be so frustrating.

IV

February 1976

At four o’clock in the morning, Izzy found herself out on the street, shivering from the cold. It was well below zero with a bitter wind cutting through the tunnels of the downtown streets, making it feel far colder than the weatherman had claimed it would be. She’d gone out for a night of clubbing and hadn’t dressed for really cold weather, thinking she’d be inside and traveling in cabs all night. Now she wished she’d forgone fashion for practicality. Her feet felt frozen in their thin leather boots. Her hands weren’t too bad, tucked into her armpits, but the cold was turning her stockinged legs blue under her short skirt and she was sure she was getting frostbite on her ears and face.

She could have stayed in the warm bed she’d vacated a half hour ago, but no, she had to get up and go home the way she always did, forgetting that she didn’t have any money left after a night of buying and consuming far too many drinks. Not enough for a bus or the subway. Certainly not enough for a cab. Not even a dime to call someone like Alan to give her a lift—not that she would, mind you. Three hours ago, before she went home with whoever it was she’d gone home with, she might have been tempted. But she’d been so tipsy and she didn’t want to be alone in her bed—that always came after, when she woke up in someone else’s bedroom and simply had to go home.

Maybe she should sleep with Alan some night, she thought. At least then she’d only have to walk across the street to go home. But she liked Alan too much. She couldn’t sleep with Alan and not have a relationship with him and what she didn’t want was a relationship. Alan was her friend. If they started sleeping together, sooner or later he’d walk out of her life and she’d lose another best friend the way she’d lost John.

Oh, don’t get all maudlin, she told herself, and with practiced ease she pretended to put John Sweetgrass out of her mind.

She was so cold by the time she finally got home that she could barely stop her hand from shaking to insert the key in the lock. But she finally managed. When she opened the door and stepped inside, it was to find Kathy sitting up, reading.

“I th-thought I’d d-die out there,” Izzy told her through chattering teeth. “There’s tea made.”

Izzy shook her head. “No, I’d just be up peeing all night. Is there anything left in that bottle of whiskey that Christy gave us?”

“Let me go see.”

While Kathy went into the kitchen, Izzy pulled off her cold coat and boots and settled down on the pillows near where Kathy had been reading. There was an afghan there, and she wrapped herself in it.

“There was enough for one shot for each of us,” Kathy announced, returning with the small glasses, half full of amber liquid.

Izzy accepted hers gratefully. The first sip went down like liquid fire, and within moments its warmth was spreading through her.

“That’s better,” she murmured, snuggling deeper into the afghan. “You were out late,” Kathy said.

Izzy shrugged. “I was out clubbing and met this guy ....” She let her voice trail off and took another sip of the whiskey.

“You’re meeting a lot of guys these days,” Kathy said. “It seems like every week there’s one or two new ones.”

“I didn’t know you were keeping count.”

Kathy sighed. “It’s not like that, Izzy. I’m just a little worried, that’s all. This isn’t like you.”

Izzy gave her a bright smile. “I’m experimenting with drunkenness and promiscuity,” she announced with a solemnity that was belied by the twinkle in her eyes. “You know, trying to live a life of mild debauchery the way all the great artists have.”

“You still miss him, don’t you?” Kathy said.

There was no need to name names, not for either of them.

“I don’t know who you could possibly be talking about,” Izzy said.

Kathy sighed again. “God, I feel like a parent. I’m just going to shut up, okay?”

“Okay.”

“But I hope you’re being careful.”

Izzy slipped her foot out from under the afghan and hooked the strap of her shoulder bag so that she could pull it toward her. Rummaging around in it, she came up with a handful of condoms that she gravely showed to Kathy.

“I’m being ever so careful, Mom,” she said.

Kathy just threw a pillow at her.

V

March 1976

Izzy was working late at the studio the night she met Annie Nin. She had a new painting-in-progress on her easel, but it wasn’t going well, and hadn’t been for the past two days now. With the new show due to be hung in less than a few weeks’ time, she knew she had at least two more paintings to finish, but she couldn’t seem to concentrate on the work at hand. All she wanted to do was paint numena, which was fine except that painting numena wouldn’t get her any further ahead in terms of being prepared for the show, since she still refused to part with any of the numena paintings. But the cityscape she was working on bored her, and it showed in the painting. Finally she dropped her brush into a jar of turpentine and went to slouch in the window seat.

It had started snowing earlier in the evening; now it was a regular blizzard, one of March’s last roars.

A blustery wind was busy sculpting drifts that had grown progressively taller throughout the evening. The plows would be out on the main thoroughfares, but they wouldn’t get to the lane that ran alongside the coach house until sometime tomorrow, so here the drifts were free to expand into graceful sweeps of snow that blocked the entire width of the lane in places.

The snow depressed her. Winter depressed her. March especially depressed her. It was a full year now since she’d broken up with John, and this week everything seemed to exist not in its own right, but as part of a conspiracy to remind her of how stupid she’d been that night. Correction, she thought. How stupid she’d been since that night. Throwing herself at whoever happened to come along. Drinking too much. Partying too much. Feeling sorry for herself way too much.

Her art was the only thing that kept her sane—in particular, her numena paintings, but she felt guilty every time she did one. She had two voices arguing constantly in her head: John’s telling her to be responsible, to be careful, to not play god; and Kathy’s assuring her that the numena were in no more danger when they were brought into the world than was anybody else who lived here, life itself was a risk, and besides that, it was their own choice, whether or not they crossed over, Izzy wasn’t making them inhabit the shapes she painted.

Both arguments made sense and she didn’t know which of them was right. She wished sometimes that she’d never learned the process of bringing numena across, but those paintings brought her closer to the soul of her art than anything else she painted and it was a hard thing to consider giving it up. With everything else seeming to have gone askew in her life, the numena paintings were the only things she felt that still connected her to herself.

She guarded the numena paintings carefully—almost to the point of paranoia. She’d changed the lock on the coach house’s second-story door so that only she had access to the studio. Every morning when she arrived, she took inventory and then studied each of the paintings to make sure that nothing had happened to any of them. She constantly monitored her dreams, faithfully scrutinizing them for any hint of the horrors that had visited her before.

Her vigilance appeared to have paid off. The paintings remained safe. The numena they brought across were free to make their own lives in the city without fear of attack. But she still felt a constant guilt that wouldn’t ease. It was no use talking to Kathy about it; she already knew everything Kathy had to say on the matter. As for John, the fact that his views hadn’t changed was made very clear simply through his continued absence in her life.

Sighing, she got up from the window seat and went to stand in front of the wall on which the numena paintings hung.

“Why won’t any of you talk to me?” she cried. “Why won’t you tell me how you feel?”

There was no reply, but then she wasn’t expecting one. She heard only the wind, whistling outside the studio’s windows. The shift and creak of the building as it stoically bore the fury of the storm.

Shaking her head, Izzy walked back to the window seat. What she should do, she thought, was go home and get a good night’s sleep, but she didn’t want to leave. That would be too much like giving up. And she knew as well that if she did leave, the temptation to drown her troubles by making a round of the bars and clubs would more than likely win out over a night’s sleep.

Because drunk, her problems would temporarily fade and for a few hours, she wouldn’t remember them.

She scraped a new buildup of frost from the window and stared out at the storm. Reflected movement on the darkened glass caught her eye, and she turned to find herself no longer alone in the studio. A slender red-haired figure stood by the wall holding the numena pictures—a gamine in jeans, her body overwhelmed by the large sweater she wore.

Izzy’s gaze went from the young woman’s angular features to settle on one of the paintings that hung on the wall behind her. The painting had been rendered in oil pastels and was called Annie Nin. Its subject and the young woman standing under it were identical.

“Maybe it’s because you make us nervous,” Annie said, replying to Izzy’s earlier question.

Though Izzy had long since accepted that her paintings could bring beings across from some otherworld, the reality of this numena’s presence was still a new enough enchantment to fill her heart with awe and set her pulse drumming.

“I make you nervous?” she finally managed.

Annie gave a wry shrug that she might have learned from John, it was so immediately expressive.

“Well, think about it,” she said. “It’s kind of like meeting God, don’t you think?”

“Oh, please!”

Annie laughed. “All right. So you didn’t create us, you just offered us shapes to wear. But we still wouldn’t be here without you and you’ve got to admit that meeting you would be sort of intimidating for one of us.”

“If you’re trying to make me feel even more guilty, it’s working.”

“Why do you feel guilty?” Annie asked.

She crossed the room, walking toward the window seat. Izzy made room for her and she hopped on the broad sill, leaning her back on the window frame opposite from where Izzy was sitting.

“It’s dangerous for you in this world,” Izzy said.

Annie cocked her head, then gave it a slow shake. “You’ve been talking to John,” she said.

“Not lately, I haven’t.”

“Yes, well, he is stubborn.”

“Why does he hate me so much?” Izzy asked.

“He doesn’t hate you, he’s just too full up with pride. Give him time and he’ll come around.”

“It’s been a year now,” Izzy said. “Is it because I haven’t stopped, you know, painting? Bringing you across?”

Annie frowned. “If it is, he has no right to make you feel that way. We chose to come across on our own, just as he did.” Her features brightened. “And I don’t regret it for a moment. I love your world. We all do. There’s so much to see and do; so many people to meet and places to go. I’d take just a day in your world against never having the chance to be here at all.”

Izzy couldn’t help but return the numena’s smile, it was so infectious. “But why do you keep us all here?” Annie went on. “We’ll soon crowd you out if you keep painting as much as you do.”

“For safety,” Izzy explained. “So no one will hurt you.”

“But who would hurt us?”

“John told me Rushkin would,” Izzy said, and then went on to relate the dream she’d had the night after she’d broken up with John. Rushkin with his crossbow, hunting her numena through a snowstorm so similar to the one that howled outside the studio’s windows tonight. The death of the winged cat, how Paddyjack would have died if not for John’s intervention.

“You must have felt so awful,” Annie said when Izzy was done.

Izzy nodded. “And I don’t ever want that to happen to any of you again. That’s why I have to keep you hidden.”

“We’re very good at hiding ourselves,” Annie assured her. “Nobody can see us unless we want them to.”

“I mean your paintings. I have to keep the paintings safe.”

“But Rushkin’s gone,” Annie said. “He’s left the city.”

“I know. But he came to my last show. He sent me a critique of it.”

Annie’s eyebrows rose quizzically. “That sounds more helpful than dangerous. Are you sure it was Rushkin you saw with the crossbow?”

Izzy nodded.

“But it was in a dream.”

“Well, yes.”

“So how can you be sure it really was Rushkin?” Annie asked. “I mean, people dream the oddest things, don’t they, and then when they wake up they realize none of it was real.”

“But the ribbons were still there when I woke up and two of the paintings were ruined.”

“It still doesn’t mean it had to be Rushkin.”

“But, John said—”

“I like John,” Annie said, interrupting. “We all do. And we’re certainly harmed if something happens to our gateway paintings, but I’m not so sure we can be positive that Rushkin is the threat. John doesn’t like the man, period, so he’s liable to think the worst of him for no other reason than that he doesn’t like him.” 2

“I don’t think John would do something like that.”

“I’m not saying he’d do it deliberately. But I know he was jealous of all the time you spent with Rushkin. And besides that, I know he took a dislike to Rushkin right from the first. Paddyjack’s told me and he knows John better than any of us.”

“Still,” Izzy said. “I’d rather be safe than sorry.”

“No one’s going to hurt our paintings if you put them in a show,” Annie said. “The gallery would have some sort of security, would it?”

“Yes, but what if Rushkin buys them? He’s certainly got the money.”

“Just tell the woman in the shop not to sell any to him,” Annie said.

Or to his lawyers, Izzy thought. But she still felt uneasy about the whole idea.

“What difference does it make to you if I put the paintings in a show or not?” she asked.

Annie shrugged. “It’s starting to feel crowded in here. We’re each connected to our gateway painting, you see. No matter where we are, all we have to do is think of our painting and we can return to it.” She smiled. “Sometimes it gets pretty busy in here. We like to be near our paintings, but we don’t necessarily want to hang around with each other, if you know what I mean. And besides,” she added, waving an arm about the studio, “this work you hide away deserves a bigger audience than us and the few friends you have over to the studio.”

By the time Izzy and Annie left the coach house, each to go her own way, Izzy didn’t know what to think anymore. When she told Kathy about the numena’s visit, Kathy just looked smug.

“You see?” she said. “I told you they weren’t your responsibility—not in the way you think they are.”

“But if their paintings are damaged, they die. I’m responsible for keeping those paintings safe.”

Kathy shrugged. “God knows I don’t wish any of them harm, or think they should be put into any sort of danger, but I agree with your Annie. That work deserves a larger audience. And if Rushkin’s not the threat—”

“Whoever it is,” Izzy said, breaking in, “is still out there.”

“My advice is to talk to more of your numena before you make any hard-and-fast decisions for them,” Kathy said. “Let them decide for themselves—just like they did when they crossed over.”

“If I can ever track any of them down,” Izzy said.

But Annie’s visit seemed to have done something to help overcome the shyness of the other numena as well. Two days later Izzy unlocked the studio door to find her lioness numena, Grace, lying on the recamier, reading a magazine. Grace was so tall and gorgeous, and carried herself with such regal assurance, that Izzy felt completely intimidated in her presence.

“I think I see what you mean,” Izzy told Annie when the other numena reappeared in the studio that evening. “I mean, Grace wasn’t mean or anything, but I couldn’t help but feel so ... small around her.

And I don’t just mean in height.”

Annie laughed. “Oh, she’s a piece of work all right.”

“She told me pretty much the same stuff you did,” Izzy went on, “you know, about it getting to be too crowded in here for everyone.”

“I don’t think Grace likes any room that has another woman in it.”

“She told me you don’t like her because you think she stole away this guy you were interested in.”

“I wasn’t interested in him,” Annie protested; then she sighed. “Well, not a lot. But you see what I mean. We’re just like you. We come in all different sizes and shapes of personalities and some of them just don’t mesh.”

Izzy nodded. “But I’d still be worried if anything happened to any of you.”

“Then take it on a one-by-one basis,” Annie said. “The ones who want to go out into the world—their paintings can go into your shows. The others would stay here.”

That made the most sense of anything Izzy had heard yet.

“How about you?” she asked. “Would you want to go?”

Annie shrugged. “I don’t mind either way. If my painting was to go anywhere, I’d like it to be to a library because I do so like to read. But I wouldn’t want to be too far from you. I love seeing how the paintings come to life.” She smiled. “Now, that’s the real magic.”

“What was it like in the before?” Izzy asked. “I’ve talked to John about it, but he wasn’t exactly forthcoming.”

“That’s because we don’t really know. I’ve talked to lots of the others about it, but no one can really remember much. It’s like our lives only really began when we stepped across.” She grinned at Izzy’s disappointed look. “But I can tell you what it’s like for us here,” she added.

So that night, while Izzy worked on a new painting, Annie perched on a stool beside her and they chatted away to each other for hours. Later in the evening another of Izzy’s numena arrived, the gargoyle Rothwindle, and the three of them gossiped away the rest of the night, getting to know each other better.

As the days went by, all of Izzy’s numena came to visit at one point or another. Some came more than once, others just to meet her before they carried on with their own lives. The only exceptions were John Sweetgrass and Paddyjack. John’s absence Izzy understood, and pretended it didn’t bother her at all. But she dearly wanted to meet Paddyjack—as much because he was one of the first numena she’d brought across as to ask him about that winter’s night a year ago.

“He’s too scared to come to this place,” Rothwindle explained one afternoon. “He says this is the house of the dark man who has no soul.”

Annie sniffed. “Sounds like he’s parroting John, if you ask me.”

“Maybe I could meet him somewhere else,” Izzy said.

“Maybe,” Rothwindle agreed, but it never did seem to work out.

So Paddyjack’s painting, like John’s The Spirit Is Strong, were among the few paintings that Izzy wouldn’t put into a show or even give away. They had to make the decision for themselves, and so far as she was concerned, their absence told her where they stood. Except for them, none of the other numena seemed much concerned that Rushkin was any sort of a threat, and in time Izzy found herself feeling the same way.

VI

April 1976

Izzy’s third show at The Green Man Gallery was her first to have an overall theme. She called it Your Streets Are Not Mine and used it as a way of exploring the presence of her numena in the city. Each piece contained a strange element, a jolt of the unexpected that could often be missed if the viewer wasn’t paying enough attention. It might be the glimpse of a sunlit meadow, ablaze with wild-flowers, that appeared in the rearview mirror of a yellow cab driving down a benighted Newford street, the pavement slick with rain, the reflections of the neon lights in the puddles broken and distorted by the spray of passing vehicles. It might be the leonine main figure of Grace, the tufts of bobcat hair rising from the points of her tapered ears mostly hidden by the spill of her cascading red-gold hair. Or it might be the painting from which the show took its title, which depicted a row of gargoyles crouching on a grey stone cornice, looking down at the busy street below; most people missed the fact that the figure on the far right, half-secreted in shadow, was a real boy rather than a stone figure.

After a lot of soul searching she’d finally let herself be convinced to hang a few of her numena paintings in the show. It wasn’t until the theme took shape in her mind that she realized how necessary those paintings would be to its success. She was careful, as always, not to make the numena too outlandish in appearance so that they could fit in more easily when they wandered about the city, but once the decision to include them was made, she felt as though a great weight had been lifted from her.

She continued to feel responsible for the numena, but finally came to accept that it really was their decision to cross over or not, to have their paintings remain in the studio or go out into the world. They had lives of their own that had only as much to do with her as the friendships she made with a few of them, and in some ways she was happy to see the paintings gain a wider audience, rather than have them stockpiling in her studio. She wasn’t like Rushkin in that sense. Art, she believed, was made to be seen, not squirreled away. At the sums these paintings were selling for—Albina had priced them all in the fifteen-hundred—to three-thousand-dollar range—she was sure that their owners would take good care of them and the numena would remain safe from harm.

Albina was delighted by the decision and priced the three numena paintings—Grace, Your Streets Are Not Mine and one of a scarecrow-like figure chasing crows from a back lane garden, called Why the Crows Fly—at the high end of the show’s price scale. They were her favorites of the fourteen paintings in the show and were also the ones most singled out by reviewers. There was so much positive response to them that Izzy almost regretted not putting her other completed numena paintings in the show, but they hadn’t seemed to fit in as well with the theme.

The show took a little longer to sell out, but that, Albina assured her, was only because people were more cautious with their checkbooks once the art entered this price range.

“Trust me, Isabelle,” she said. “We can consider this show an unqualified success and a harbinger of even more success to come.”

One of the real surprises of the show, insofar as Izzy was concerned, was making a reacquaintance with one of her fellow students from her last year at Butler U. She spotted him at the opening, all freckles, tousled red hair and rumpled clothes, and remembered thinking, Oh god, Thomas Downs. Why did he have to come? In class he’d always seemed so full of himself, and she’d hated the way he constantly argued about fine art versus commercial. He had little good to say about any of the professors at the university, singling out Professor Dapple in particular, which hadn’t endeared him to Jilly either. He wasn’t even in any of Dapple’s classes.

Izzy hid a grimace when he came up to her, but she wasn’t able to hide her surprise at what he had to say.

“I owe you an apology,” he said.

“You do?”

He gave her a disarming smile. “Oh, it’s nothing I’ve ever said or done.”

“That doesn’t leave much to apologize for.”

Tom tapped a finger against his temple. “It’s the way I’ve thought about your work in the past. You see, I’ve always dismissed you as a Rushkin-wannabe—”

“But now you’ve found out that I studied under him,” Izzy finished for him, “so you’ve changed your mind.” This was so boring. She couldn’t count the number of times she’d heard variations on this theme.

“Not at all.” Tom waved a hand in the general direction of her paintings. “These changed my mind.”

“I don’t get it. I can see Rushkin’s influence in each one of them.”

Tom nodded. “Yes, but that’s because you’re now seeing things the way he might have—distilled through your own ability to perceive the world around you, to be sure, but you’re obviously now using the tools of vision that he taught you to use rather than merely aping his style. Your earlier work didn’t have this sense of vision—personal, or Rushkin’s.”

“Well, thanks very much.”

“Don’t get me wrong. I know how hard a process this can be. I had the same early luck as you, except I got to study under Erica Keane—you know her work?”

“Oh, please,” Izzy said. “Give me some credit.”

Keane was only one of the most respected watercolorists in the country, at the top of her field in the same way that Rushkin was in his. She had a studio in Lower Crowsea and Izzy had been there once during the annual tour of artists’ studios that the Newford School of Art organized every spring. She’d come away stunned at the woman’s control of her medium.

“I’m sorry,” Tom said. “You know how close-minded people can be when it comes to a discipline other than their own.”

“I suppose.”

“You’d be surprised at how many oil painters don’t recognize her name, little say have any familiarity with her work.”

“I love her mixed-media work,” Izzy said. “Especially her ink-and-watercolor pieces.”

Tom smiled. “Me, too. But to get back to my point, my work’s been saddled with endless comparisons to hers just because I’ve studied under her, but what the critics seem to miss is that what a good mentor teaches his or her students isn’t simple technique and style, but the way in which they view the world. We can’t help but incorporate that way of seeing things into our own work and because of that, because a Keane or a Rushkin has such a unique perspective on things, I think it’s a little harder for their students to break free and paint with their own—shall we say, ‘voice.’

“You’re beginning to do that with the work I see here tonight and I admire you for it because I haven’t been able to do the same thing myself—or at least not yet—and that’s why I felt I owed you an apology. You might be a wannabe, but what you want to be is your own woman and you’re making remarkable inroads to attaining that goal.”

Izzy gave him a long searching look, certain that he was making fun of her, but the gaze he returned was guileless.

“Apology accepted, I guess,” she said finally.

“Great.” He paused, looking a little self-conscious, before he added, “Are you doing anything special after tonight’s festivities wind down?”

Izzy gave him another considering look, but this time for a different reason. “You’re beginning to get a reputation,” Kathy had told her a few weeks ago. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Kathy had shrugged. ‘just that you like to have a good time and you’re not big on there being any strings attached. You’re a very attractive woman, ma belle

Izzy, and there are a lot of men out there who are more than happy to take advantage of what you seem to be offering.”

Izzy had been mortified, though in retrospect, she shouldn’t have been surprised. Her life, when she wasn’t in the studio, really had become one long party. But at the time all she’d wanted to know was

“Where did you hear that?”

“No one place,” Kathy had said. “That kind of thing just gets around.”

“I had no idea ....”

Kathy had given her a sad look. “It’s been over a year now since you broke up with John,” she said.

“The only person you’re hurting is yourself”

She’d wanted to get angry with Kathy, but she couldn’t. Kathy was right. Izzy knew that the reason she was running so wild was to get back at John; the reason she didn’t want to make a commitment to any relationship was that she didn’t want to get hurt again.

“Oh, god,” she said. “This is so embarrassing.”

“No one’s saying it meanly,” Kathy had added. “At least not in our circle of friends. We’re all just worried about you—that you might get into a situation that you can’t handle.”

“I won’t let that happen,” she’d assured Kathy, and she’d kept that promise in the only way she knew how: she just stopped going out to the clubs and parties and poured all her pent-up emotions into her work instead. The visits from Annie Nin and the others had helped a lot.

All of that ran through Izzy’s head as she thought about what Tom had just asked her. He was a very attractive man. She could see them going somewhere dark and pleasantly noisy for a drink, or two, or six. Then back to his place ....

She glanced over to where Kathy and the rest of her friends stood in a gossiping clutch, laughing and talking. Sophie and Alan. Jilly and Tama Jostyn, whose novella “Wintering” was going to launch Alan’s new expansion of the East Street Press from publishing a literary journal to actual books.

“I’ve already made plans,” she said.

Tom nodded. “I sort of thought you might have, but it was worth a shot.”

“But I’d be free for lunch tomorrow,” she added.

Lunch would be safe. She’d just stay away from alcoholic beverages and keep her wits about her for a change.

“Should I pick you up?”

Izzy shook her head. “Why don’t we meet at The Dear Mouse Diner at twelve instead?”

“Sounds good. I’ll see you there. I’m going to take another turn around the show.”

“Thanks,” Izzy said as he turned to go. When he raised his eyebrows questioningly, she added,

“You know, for being supportive.”

Tom smiled. “Working with who we have, we’ve got big boots to fill,” he said. “We’ve got to stick together because other people don’t understand that.”

And then he stepped away into the crowd. Jilly came up to her once he was gone.

“What were you doing talking to him?” Jilly wanted to know.

“Oh, he’s not so bad,” Izzy said.

“The way he’s always on about the professor ...”

Izzy had to smile, thinking of how nothing ever seemed to faze Professor Dapple—especially not adverse criticism. He seemed to have been born with thicker skin than anyone else she knew. And the truth was, she thought he rather liked to be the center of an argument, even if he wasn’t there. “I don’t want you to stop thinking as soon as you leave this classroom,” he’d said on more than one occasion.

“Apply what we’ve talked about to the world at large. Discuss it amongst yourselves. Argue, if you must.

Just don’t commit the crime of complacency.”

“I don’t think it ever bothered the professor one way or the other,” she said. “But still.”

“Oh, July. Lighten up. It’s not like I’m going to many him or anything.”

“This is true,” Jilly allowed. “And he is a handsome devil.”

“I don’t even want to hear about that,” Izzy said. “I’d rather hear about this album jacket that Sophie says you got commissioned to do.”

“I can’t believe she told you. That was supposed to be my big announcement for tonight.”

“You’re supposed to tell people when you want something to be a secret,” Izzy said, leading Jilly back to where the rest of their friends were waiting for them. “Then we’d know to keep it to ourselves.”

“Fat chance with this lot ....”

VII

May 1976

The day after she received the fat envelope containing Rushkin’s critique of her Your Streets Are Not Mine show, Izzy made her way down to The Green Man Gallery. She spent a few minutes browsing through a mixed-media show by Claudia Feder before agreeing to Albina’s invitation to have a cup of tea in the back room.

“Taking a bit of a break?” Albina asked her.

Izzy nodded. She tended to work such long hours during the day that she rarely took time off to go visiting. Most of the artists she knew relaxed after a major show—for a few days, at least—but hanging a show always inspired Izzy in new work. She did some of her best paintings in the weeks immediately following a show.

“I’ve got to stretch some new canvases today,” she explained, “and you know how much I love doing that.”

“Well, you deserve a bit of a holiday. You’ve been working very hard lately.”

“It’s not like work for me,” Izzy said with a shrug. “Which isn’t to say I don’t find it hard. It’s just not work—not the painting, not any of it.”

“Except for stretching canvases.”

Izzy smiled. “And measuring frames.”

“I often wondered why so many of your pieces were of a set size.”

The tea was ready to be poured then. They spoke a little of the Feder show that was in the gallery at the moment as they added their milk and sugar to their cups. Izzy didn’t bring up the real reason she’d come to see Albina until just before she left.

“Did you ever meet Rushkin?” she asked, keeping her voice casual.

“I don’t even know what he looks like,” Albina admitted. “He was the original mystery man of the Newford art scene. I can remember hearing that he didn’t even attend his own openings—at least not as himself “

“Who did he come as?”

“I’ve no idea. I was told that he’d come in disguise so that he could see the reaction to his work without having to actually speak to anyone.” Albina laughed suddenly. “Although why he’d have to disguise himself when no one knew what he looked like anyway is beyond me.”

So much for trying to find out when he’d seen her show, Izzy thought when she was back at the coach-house studio. But at least he had gone to see it and his critiques were as helpful this time out as they’d been the first time he’d written to her. There was more praise in his most recent letter; he seemed to be able to find fault with less in these new paintings. When he did have a criticism, it dealt mostly with arcane bits of technique that no one else would probably notice, or compositional elements where he suggested alternate viewpoints, not because they were better, he wrote, but so that she could see the other possibilities and perhaps utilize them in future work.

Needless to say, Izzy was pleased with his praise and the fact that, wherever he was, however he did it, he still managed to fit in the time to see her work and comment upon it.

She wondered if John ever went to her shows. Maybe he didn’t have to. Maybe meeting his fellow numena in the streets of Newford was enough for him.

VIII

July 1976

On a hot muggy day, with both the temperature and humidity climbing into the nineties, Izzy ran into Jilly at Amos & Cook’s when she took a break from her current painting to pick up a few art supplies.

Jilly was as preoccupied as she was, and they only noticed each other when they both reached for the same tube of viridian.

“Well, howdy, stranger,” Jilly said.

Izzy smiled. “It has been a while, hasn’t it?”

“Weeks and weeks. You’re turning into a hermit.”

“Not really. I’ve just been working on changing my priorities. Less partying, more painting.”

“Good for you. Just don’t overdo it.”

Jilly glanced at the palette-shaped clock that hung behind the airbrush counter. It took her a moment to work out that the paintbrushes that served as the clock’s hands were pointing to the equivalent of eleven-thirty.

“Do you have time for an early lunch?” she asked.

“Depends. Is the place you have in mind air-conditioned?”

Jilly laughed. “I take it your studio isn’t either.”

“I’m wilting.”

Because it was only a few blocks over on Williamson Street, they settled on The Monkey Woman’s Nest. They took a table by the window so that they could look out from their comfortable vantage point at all the people going by, who were less fortunate than they were because they still had to fight the heat.

Two iced teas and grilled cheese sandwiches later, the conversation got around to Tom Downs.

“You’re seeing a lot of him these days,” Jilly remarked.

Izzy shrugged. Her relationship with Tom had never developed further than friendship, but meeting him at the opening had marked a turning point for her in terms of how she related to men. There were no more one-night stands. There was no more casual sex, period. She focused all of her energy instead on her work and her friends and her numena.

“You make it sound like a crime,” she said.

“He just bugs me, that’s all.”

“He used to bug me as well, but he’s turned out to be a pretty decent sort. Have you seen much of his work?”

Jilly sighed. “That’s what’s so really infuriating about him. Unlike so many other people who’ll launch into a half-hour lecture at the drop of a hat, he can actually paint. Technically, he’s really good. A little reminiscent of Keane at times, but not so much as he used to be. And he really does practice what he preaches. I can’t believe how realistic his work is while still keeping its painterly qualities.”

“And he’s doing it with watercolors.”

“I know.” _Ally paused. “Well?” she asked when Izzy didn’t fill the silence. “Are you serious about him?”

Izzy shook her head. “No—or at least not in the sense that you mean. I’m serious about him as a friend. It’s nice to have a man to go to a film or an opening with and not have to fend off advances or worry about all sorts of strings being attached. And I like to listen to him go on. I don’t agree with him all of the time, but I still fmd what he has to say interesting.”

“Uh-huh,” Jilly said, as though she thought there had to be more to it than that.

“It’s true,” Izzy said.

Jilly studied her for a long moment.

“You still miss John, don’t you?” she asked.

“Not at all,” Izzy lied. “I can’t remember the last time I even thought about him.”

IX

March 1977

Izzy finished La Liseuse on the second anniversary of having broken up with John. She stood back from the canvas and was surprised herself at how well the painting had come out. She almost expected the red-haired woman to step gracefully down from the easel, book under her arm, that solemn look in her eyes counteracted by the warmth of her smile. Then Izzy had to laugh at herself. Well, yes. She would be stepping down from the painting, wouldn’t she? Crossing over from the before to here. That’s what numena did.

Her crossing over wasn’t the question at all. The question was, what would she be like?

Izzy had taken the inspiration for the reading woman from Kathy’s story of the same name. Rosalind was the character’s name; its numena would have the same. This was the first time that Izzy had deliberately set out to bring to life a numena whose genesis lay in another’s creativity rather than her own, and she had no idea what was going to happen. Would Rosalind be like the character in Kathy’s story, or would she be similar only in how both Izzy and Kathy had described her?

“Rosalind,” she said softly. “If you cross over, I hope you’ll be your own woman.”

“Whose else’s would I be?” a soft voice asked.

Izzy turned slowly to find the painting’s numena standing in the studio behind her. She had never seen one of her numena so soon after it had crossed over, and she studied Rosalind carefully, worried that she might feel disoriented and wondering what she should do if Rosalind was. But the numena radiated an aura of peace, just as Kathy had described in her story, just as Izzy had tried to capture on her canvas.

“Do you feel okay?” Izzy asked.

Rosalind’s smile broadened. “I’ve never felt better. Thank you for bringing me across.”

“You remember the crossing?”

“I remember I was in a story,” Rosalind said in that soft voice of hers, “but I don’t remember what it was.”

For a moment Izzy thought she was talking about Kathy’s story, but then she realized Rosalind was speaking of the before, describing it the same way John had. There were stories, he’d told her once. That seemed like a lifetime ago now.

“Can I get you anything?” Izzy asked. “Some tea, or something to eat?”

“I think I will sit for a moment.”

Rosalind crossed the room and settled in the window seat. She looked out over the snowy lane that ran beside the coach house, her face in profile. Izzy had painted her head-on, but only after much indecision and having sketched any number of alternate poses. She was surprised to see that Rosalind’s profile was exactly the way she’d imagined it to be, though why that should surprise her, she didn’t know. After a moment, she wiped her hands on a rag and went to join her visitor in the window seat.

“What’s the book about?” she asked.

She’d painted a book because in the story, Kathy’s Rosalind had always been reading. It had been the character’s connection to herself, a lifeline that helped her through the bad times, then a pleasure that she’d continued when her life finally turned around and she was able to have hope for the future once more.

Rosalind smiled at her question. “I’m not sure. I haven’t begun it yet.” The smile reached her eyes as she added, “But I have the feeling that it will be different each time I read it. That’s the way it is with enchantment, isn’t it?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

Rosalind turned the book so that Izzy could see the one-word title on its spine—Enchantment—then brought the book back to her chest and folded her arms around it.

“I think I might take a walk,” Rosalind said. “I’d like to explore the city a little before I go.”

“Go?”

“To the island,” Rosalind explained. “I have this feeling that I will never be as comfortable indoors as living out among the elements. I will make myself a home there in a birch wood. There is a birch wood, isn’t there?”

“Where?”

“On the island.”

Izzy gave her a confused look. “I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about.”

“Wren Island. It was your home, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. But ... how do you know that?”

Rosalind considered that, then finally shook her head. “I don’t know. It simply feels as though I always have.” She laughed lightly. “But then always is a rather short time when you consider how long it’s been since I crossed over.”

She rose from the window seat. “You don’t mind, do you?”

“That you live on the island? Of course not.”

Rosalind shook her head. “No, that I go for a walk. I know it’s rude to leave so soon after we’ve met, but I feel as though I need to look for somebody.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know that either. I’m living on intuition at the moment.”

“Let me get you a coat,” Izzy said.

“Oh, the cold won’t bother me.”

“Yes, but everybody else is wearing one. You don’t want to stand out, do you?”

“They will only see me if I choose to let them.”

Izzy nodded slowly. “How come I can always see you—I mean, you know, those who have crossed over? It doesn’t matter where I am, here in the studio or out on the street, I can always see you.”

“You’re a maker,” Rosalind said. “Makers can always see those who have crossed over through the objects that they have made.”

She stepped closer to Izzy and touched a hand to Izzy’s cheek, the way a mother might touch her child; then she glided more than walked to the door of the studio, stepped out into the snowy night, and was gone. Izzy stood looking at the door for a long time. She remembered what Rosalind had said earlier about why she was going for this walk and couldn’t get it out of her mind.

I feel as though I need to look for somebody.

Izzy had the feeling that Rosalind wouldn’t find who she was looking for out on Newford’s streets.

Nor would she find it on the island. Izzy turned slowly to regard her easel. She took Rosalind’s painting from it and put up a fresh canvas that she’d primed earlier in the week. She didn’t even have to think about what she was doing as she began to block in the composition, because she was remembering another conversation now, something Kathy had once said:

“Sometimes I like to think that my characters all know each other, or at least that they could have the chance to get to know each other. Some of them would really get along.” She’d paused for a moment, looking thoughtful. “While some of them need each other. Like the wild girl. I think the only thing that could ever save her in the end is if she was to make friends with, oh, I don’t know. Someone like Rosalind. Someone full of peace to counter the wildness that the wolves left in her soul.”

“Are you going to write a story about it?” Izzy had asked, intrigued with the idea.

But Kathy simply shook her head. “I don’t feel that it’s my story to tell. I think they’d have to work that one out on their own.”

Except first they had to meet, Izzy thought as she continued to work on the new canvas. The underpainting was still all vague shapes of color and value, but she could already see the wild girl’s features in it. It was only a matter of translating them from her mind to the canvas. Because of what Rosalind had said about moving to Wren Island, Izzy didn’t plan to put the figure of the wild girl on a city street the way Kathy had in her story. Instead she meant to surround her with a tangled thicket of the wild rosebushes that grew on Wren Island. She hoped Cosette wouldn’t mind.

X

Izzy worked in a frenzy, finishing The Wild Girl in less than a week. The piece almost seemed to paint itself, translating itself effortlessly from her mind to the canvas, pouring out of her in a way that she’d never experienced before with her art. Jilly and Sophie had both tried to explain to her how it felt, those rare occasions when the process itself seemed to utterly possess them and they couldn’t put down a bad stroke if they wanted to, but she’d never really understood what they meant until she began work on Cosette’s painting. She also understood now how frustrated her friends felt that the experience wasn’t one they could call upon at will.

Rosalind was a regular visitor to the studio during that time, spending long hours in conversation with Izzy when she wasn’t exploring the city’s streets and meeting with her fellow numena. Rosalind liked both well enough, but she still spoke of moving to the island. By the third day of her company, Izzy realized that she was going to miss Rosalind when she did move. She was like a perfect combination of mother and friend, a relationship that Izzy would have liked to have had with her own mother. Rosalind was everything Izzy’s mother wasn’t: supportive, even-tempered, interested in not only the arts, but in everything the world had to offer. She radiated such a sense of well-being that in her company, worries and troubles were as impermanent as morning mist before the rising sun.

But Rosalind did have her weaknesses, as well. From the first moment that Rosalind had arrived Izzy wanted her to come back to the apartment to meet Kathy, but Rosalind was far too shy.

“Oh, no. I couldn’t,” she told Izzy. “I would feel terribly awkward.”

“But Kathy wouldn’t be weird about it at all. I just know she’d love to meet you. You were always one of her favorite characters.”

Rosalind sighed. “But that’s just it. You brought me across, but you don’t treat me as though I’m something you made up out of nothing. But Kathy would. She might not think she was doing so, she wouldn’t even mean to do so, but the only way she would be able to see me is as something she created on the page that has now been magically brought to life. How could she possibly think otherwise? It would seem such a natural assumption.”

Izzy was ready to argue differently, to try to explain that Kathy simply wouldn’t be like that, but she heard in Rosalind’s voice an echo of John’s, reminding her of her own inability to deal with him, and she knew Rosalind was right. She could deal with all of her numena as separate from herself, as real in their own right, except for John. Even now, no matter how hard she tried, no matter that she truly believed that she’d only given him passage into this world, she hadn’t made him up out of thin air, the act of having painted The Spirit Is Strong still lay between them and it wouldn’t go away.

“I ... I understand,” she said.

Rosalind gave her a sad smile. “I thought you would.” She glanced at the canvas on Izzy’s easel and used the unfinished painting to change the subject. “You have me so curious about this new painting,” she said. “How long before it’s done and you can tell me about the surprise?”

“Soon,” Izzy promised her.

But when she finished the painting the next day, Rosalind was out on one of her walkabouts through the city. Izzy busied herself with cleaning brushes and her palette and straightening up the studio, feeling ever more fidgety as the afternoon went by and still Rosalind hadn’t returned. Nor had the painting’s numena arrived. Finally Izzy’s patience ran its course and she just had to go out and look for Rosalind.

She found her wandering through the Market in Lower Crowsea, engrossed in studying all the varied wares that were displayed in the shop windows. Izzy ran up to her, bursting with her news.

“The painting’s finished,” she said.

Rosalind looked delighted.

“Now, don’t you go teleporting yourself back to the studio,” Izzy added. “I want to be there when you see it.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Rosalind assured her.

But when they returned to the coach house, nothing went quite the way Izzy had planned. The painting was still there, looking even better than Izzy had remembered it, and its numena had finally crossed over and come to the studio, but instead of the bold-as-brass gamine Izzy remembered from Kathy’s story, the wild girl lay on the floor in a corner of the studio, curled up into a fetal position and moaning softly.

“Oh, no!” Izzy cried. “Something went wrong.”

Horrible visions raced through her mind. Cosette must have been hurt as she crossed over. Or she was somehow incomplete—there was enough of whatever it was that animated the numena present to allow her to make the crossing, but not enough that she could survive here. It must have been because of how the painting was done, Izzy realized, berating herself for not sticking to her tried-and-true method of painting.

She dashed across the studio to where Cosette lay.

“There’s a blanket under the recamier,” she called to Rosalind, but when she turned to see if Rosalind was getting it, she found the other woman merely standing by the door, shaking her head, a smile on her lips.

“Rosalind!” Izzy cried.

“She’s not sick,” Rosalind said. “She’s drunk.”

“Drunk?”

Rosalind pointed to what Izzy hadn’t noticed before: an empty wine botde lay on its side a few feet from where Cosette lay. It had been a present from Alan that Izzy had been planning to bring home. A full bottle of red wine. All gone now.

“But you don’t drink or eat,” Izzy said.

Rosalind shook her head. “No, it’s that we don’t have to. But it appears that our young friend arrived very thirsty indeed.”

She crossed the room and knelt down beside Cosette, lifting the girl’s head onto her lap. With a corner of her mantle, she wiped Cosette’s brow. Cosette looked up at her.

“Hello,” she said. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

Izzy ran to get a pail, but she was too late.

They cleaned Cosette up and laid her out on the recamier, where she complained that the room wouldn’t stop moving. After they scrubbed the floor and washed out Rosalind’s mantle, they each pulled a chair over to where Cosette lay.

“I take it that this is the surprise,” Rosalind said.

Izzy gave a glum nod. “I guess I blew it. It’s just that you said you were looking for someone and I remembered Kathy telling me once how you and Cosette would be so good for each other. So I thought I’d bring her across to surprise you, because I was sure she was who you were looking for. Kathy said you two had a story that you’d be in together, but that she couldn’t tell it. You’d have to tell it yourselves

....”

Izzy’s voice trailed off. “I’m sorry,” she said after a moment.

Rosalind shook her head. “Don’t be. I was looking for her—I simply didn’t realize it until you brought her across.”

“But ...” Izzy waved a vague hand around the studio, which was meant to include the empty wine bottle, Cosette getting so drunk, her getting sick on Rosalind’s lap.

“We are who we are,” Rosalind said, smiling. “And I think Cosette and I are going to get along just fine.”

They both returned their attention to the occupant of the recamier. Cosette nodded her head slightly in agreement. She sat up a little and tried to smile, but then had to put her hand to her mouth, her eyes going wide. Izzy ran to get the pail again.

XI

September 1977

By the time Alan published Kathy’s first collection he already had two books under his belt and had worked out most of the kinks involved to make a successful promotion for a book. He sent out a mass of review copies, not just to the regional papers, but to selected reviewers across the country. For the launch, he booked Feeney’s Kitchen, one of the folk clubs that they all used to hang out at when they were going to Butler U., and hired Amy Scallan’s band Marrow-bones to handle the musical honors. By the time Izzy arrived, the little club was full of Kathy’s friends, the press and all sorts of various hangers-on who’d managed to get in. Marrowbones was playing a rollicking set of Irish reels and the free bar was doing a booming business.

Izzy paused in the doorway of the club, a little taken aback at the bombardment of sound and people. Finishing up the last few pieces for a new show that was due to be hung in a couple of weeks, she’d been spending sixteen-hour days at the studio, even sleeping there a couple of nights. The noise and bustle had her blinking like a mole, and she almost left. But then she spotted Kathy looking oddly wistful at the far end of the long room and slowly made her way through the crowd.

“You’re supposed to be happy,” she told Kathy when she finally had her to herself for a moment.

“I know. But I can’t help but feel as though I’ve lost my innocence now. Every time I sat down to write up to this point, I wrote for me. It was me telling stories to myself on paper and publication was secondary. But now ... now I can’t help but feel that whenever I start to write I’ll have this invisible audience in my mind, hanging on to my every word. Weighing them, judging them, looking for hidden meanings.”

“Welcome to the world of criticism.”

“That’s not it,” Kathy said. “I’m used to being criticized. It’s not like I haven’t had stories appear in magazines and anthologies and been the brunt of one or two attacks by someone who’s not even interested in my work—they just have an axe to grind. But this is going to be different. It’s the scale of it that freaks me.

Izzy smiled. “I don’t mean to bring you down, Kathy, but Alan’s only published three thousand copies of the book.”

“You know what I mean.”

Izzy thought about her own shows and slowly nodded. Success, even on the small scale that she was having, had already made her more self-conscious when she approached her easel. She tried to ignore it, and she certainly didn’t work for that invisible audience, but she was still aware of its existence. She still knew that, so long as she kept doing shows, her paintings didn’t only belong to her anymore—they also belonged to whoever happened to come to the show. Whoever saw a reproduction of one. Whoever bought an original.

“Yeah,” she said. “I guess I do.”

“Alan told me tonight that there’s all this interest in the paperback rights for the book,” Kathy went on. “And we’re not talking chicken feed, ma belle Izzy. These people are offering serious money—like six-figure-advances kind of money.”

Izzy’s eyes went wide. “Wow. But that’s good, isn’t it?”

“I suppose. I know just what I’d do with the money, too.”

Kathy didn’t have to explain. They’d had any number of late-night conversations about Kathy’s dream to found an organization devoted to troubled kids—a place that didn’t feed them religion in exchange for its help, or try to force the kids back into the same awful family situations that had driven them out onto the street in the first place. “We should be able to choose our families,” Kathy often said,

“the same way we choose our friends. The round peg is never going to fit in the square hole—it doesn’t matter how much you try to force it.”

“You’re just going to have to teach yourself to ignore that invisible audience,” Izzy said. “Just remember this: it doesn’t matter how big it gets, they still don’t get to see what you’re working on until you’re ready to show it to them.”

“But I’m afraid that I’ll start to try to second-guess them,” Kathy said. “That I’ll tell the kind of stories that I think they want to hear, instead of what I want to tell.”

“That,” Izzy assured her, “is the one thing I don’t think you ever have to be afraid of “

“Money changes people,” Kathy said in response, “and big money changes people in a big way. I don’t want to have this deal of Alan’s go through and then find myself looking in a mirror five years from now and not recognizing the person who’s looking back at me.”

“That’s going to happen anyway,” Izzy said. “Think about what we were like five years ago.”

Kathy gave her a look of mock horror. “Oh god. Don’t remind me.”

“So maybe change isn’t always so bad. We just have to make sure that we pay attention to it as it’s happening to us.”

“Too true,” Kathy said. “But this conversation is getting far too earnest for the occasion. Any more of it and I’m going to become seriously depressed.” She looked down at her empty beer mug, then at Izzy, who wasn’t holding a mug at all. “Can I buy you a drink?” she asked.

“I thought there was supposed to be a free bar.”

“There is, there is.” Putting her arm around Izzy’s shoulders, she steered them toward the bar, where Alan was drawing ale from the three kegs he’d provided for the launch. “But I’m in the mood for some Jameson’s, and that, ma belle Izzy, Alan isn’t providing.”

“And here you are, about to make him all sorts of money.”

“I know,” Kathy said. “It’s a bloody crime, isn’t it? Let’s go give that capitalist pig a piece of our minds.”

XII

January 1978

“They’re paying you how much?” Izzy asked.

She’d gotten home from the studio early for a change, so she happened to be at the apartment when Kathy came bursting in with the news of the paperback sale Alan had negotiated for The Angels of My First Death.

“Two hundred thousand dollars,” Kathy repeated.

“Oh, my god. You’re rich!”

Kathy laughed. “Well, not exactly. The East Street Press gets fifty percent of that.”

“I can’t believe Alan’s taking such advantage of you.”

“He’s not. That’s the standard cut for a hardcover house when it sells off the paperback rights.”

“Oh. Well, a hundred thousand dollars is nothing to sneeze at.”

Kathy nodded. “Mind you, I don’t get it all at once. Half on signing, half on publication. Alan figures I’ll see a check for fifty thousand in about a month and a half “

“It seems like all the money in the world, doesn’t it?”

“More than we’ve ever seen in one place before, that’s for bloody sure. Mind you, if Albina keeps doing as well by you, who knows? You could be selling paintings for that kind of money in a year or so.”

Izzy laughed. “Oh, right.”

“You got nine thousand for that last one.”

“Fifty-four hundred after the gallery’s commission.”

“And you’re complaining about Alan’s cut,” Kathy said.

“I never thought of it like that,” Izzy said. She considered it for a moment, then added, “Maybe Tom’s right—you know, the way he’s always going on about how middlemen are feeding off the artists that they represent. They don’t do the work, but they get almost as much money for it.”

“Where would we be without Albina and Alan?” Kathy wanted to know. “It’s all very well to complain about middlemen, but if it wasn’t for them, you and I wouldn’t have an audience—or at least not the kind of audience they got us. I don’t want to be a waitress all my life.”

“No, no,” Izzy said. “How many times do I have to tell you? You don’t define yourself by what you have to do to make a living, but by what you want to do. You’re a writer. I’m an artist.”

“I still find it hard to believe that I can actually make a living at writing,” Kathy said.

Izzy knew just what she meant. The only reason Izzy herself had been able to survive as long as she had without a second job was because she’d had the bulk of her art supplies and her studio space provided for by Rushkin, and since she and Kathy still lived here on Waterhouse Street, where the rent on their little apartment remained so cheap, her living costs were minimal. Before this, the money Kathy had made from her writing barely paid for her paper and type-writer ribbons.

“So now that you’ve got this money,” she asked, “are you really going to use it to start the Foundation?”

“Absolutely.”

“It doesn’t seem like it’d be enough.”

Kathy sighed. “I don’t think any amount of money would be enough, but I’ve got to start somewhere and fifty thousand dollars makes for a pretty good jumping off point.”

It was Kathy’s turn to make dinner that night. When she went into the kitchen, Izzy tried to imagine whether she could be as philanthropic if she were to come into that kind of money. There were so many other things one could do with it. Use it as a down payment on a house. Go traveling all around the world.

“I saw one of your new numena today,” Kathy said, poking her head around the kitchen door. “It was mooching around down by the east tracks of the Grasso Street subway station. I wonder if some of them have taken to living in Old City.”

Old City was the part of Newford that had been dropped underground during the Great Quake, around the turn of the century. Rather than try to recover the buildings, the survivors had simply built over the ruins. Although Izzy had never been down there herself, she knew people like Jilly who had.

Apparently many of the buildings had survived and were still standing, making for a strange underground city that extended down as deep in places as it did aboveground.

There’d been plans at one time for making a tourist attraction of the underground city, as had been done in Seattle, but the idea was put aside when the city council realized that the necessary restructuring and maintenance simply wouldn’t be cost-efficient. Recently, after many of the growing numbers of homeless people began to squat in the abandoned ruins, city work crews had been sealing up all the entrances to Old City, but there were still anywhere from a half-dozen to twenty others that the street people knew. The best-known entrance was a maintenance door situated two hundred yards or so down the east tracks of the Grasso Street subway station, where Kathy had seen the numena.

“Which one was it?” Izzy asked.

There were so many now. She still had her old coterie of numena friends who dropped by the studio on a regular basis, but the newer ones went their own way and she’d never even met some of them.

Kathy had met even less of them. Most of the numena didn’t like to spend time with people who knew their origin. It made them feel less real, Rosalind had explained to Izzy on one of her visits from the island, where she lived with Cosette and those numena who felt more comfortable out of the city.

“I’m not sure,” Kathy said. “But I think they’re making a home for themselves in Old City. July’s told me that the people squatting down there have been seeing all sorts of strange things.”

As she went back into the kitchen to return to her dinner preparations, Izzy trailed along behind her.

She pulled out one of the chairs from the kitchen table and slouched in it.

“What kinds of strange things?” she wanted to know.

Kathy shrugged. “Hybrids like in your paintings—part human and part something else. So they must be your numena.”

“Well, what did the one you see look like?”

Kathy stopped chopping carrots long enough to close her eyes and call up an image of the numena she’d seen.

“Very feline,” she said, turning to look at Izzy. “Small, but with broad lion-like features and a huge tawny mane of hair. And she had a tail with a tuft at the end of it. I guess she’s from a painting that you haven’t shown me yet, because I didn’t recognize her. I remember thinking at the time that it was kind of odd how you’d mixed elements of a male lion with a young girl.”

“I didn’t,” Izzy said.

“No,” Kathy said. “This lion girl was definitely real and not human.”

But Izzy was still shaking her head. “What I mean is, she’s not one of mine.”

“But you’re the only one who makes these creatures,” Kathy said. “You’re forgetting Rushkin.”

Except, Izzy added to herself, he wasn’t supposed to be able to bring them across anymore—at least that was what he’d told her before he’d disappeared. “That’s right,” Kathy said. “He must be back.”

A faint buzzing hummed in Izzy’s ears, making her feel light-headed. Hard on its heels she got an odd sensation that was like, but was not quite, nausea. It started in the pit of her stomach and ascended into her chest, tightening all the muscles as it rose.

“I guess he must be,” she said slowly.

She couldn’t begin to explain the feeling of anxiety that filled her at the realization that her mentor had returned—not to Kathy, not even to herself.

XIII

February 1978

The only mail that ever arrived at the coach-house studio was flyers or junk mail addressed to

“occupant.” Izzy simply threw it all out. But a week after the day that Kathy told her about seeing the lion-girl numena by the Grasso Street subway station, Izzy spied her own name on an envelope just as she was about to toss the morning’s offerings into the wastepaper basket. She tugged it out of the handful of flyers and recognized Rushkin’s handwriting immediately. As she was about to open the envelope, the last few lines from the note he’d sent to her just before he’d disappeared returned to her.

I can’t say how long I will be, but I promise to contact you before I return so that, should you wish, you will not have to see me. If this should be the case, I will understand. My behavior has been unforgivable.

And then she could see what she’d let herself forget. She saw it as clearly as though she’d physically stepped back through the years, to that winter night, the snowstorm in her dream that echoed the storm outside her bedroom, and there was the hooded figure, Rushkin, the bolt from his crossbow piercing the body of her winged cat ...

And then there was John’s voice, playing like a soundtrack to that awful scene: He feeds on us, Izzy.

I don’t know how, but it has something to do with the way he destroys the paintings that call us over.

And then mixed into that already disturbing stew of memories was a disjointed recollection of how she’d been assaulted in the lane outside the studio, the faces of her assailants all wearing Rushkin’s features again, instead of those from the mug books she’d gone through at the precinct.

Her fingers found the tattered bracelet of woven cloth that she still wore on her wrist. She looked around the studio at the paintings of her numena—the ones she hadn’t put up for sale yet, the ones she never would and the new ones that she was still working on. She had the sudden urge to hide them all.

To call Alan and ask him to meet her downstairs with his car so that she could stack the paintings on its backseat and he could ferry them away. Her and the paintings. Out of Rushkin’s sight. Away from the possibility of his discovering that they even existed in the first place. Away to safety. Oh, why had she ever let anyone convince her that he wasn’t dangerous?

She forced herself to calm down and take a few steadying breaths.

Lighten up, she told herself. You don’t even know what the letter says.

But she did and she knew she wasn’t wrong. The lion-girl numena Kathy had seen was a harbinger of what this letter was about to tell her. She could feel Rushkin’s return in the rough texture of the envelope that rubbed against the pads of her fingers, in the ink that spelled out her name and the studio’s address.

Slowly she worked a finger under the flap, tore the envelope open and pulled out a single sheet of thick paper the color of old parchment. Unfolding it, she read: Isabelle,

I hope this finds you well and productive. I will be returning to my studio in Newford on February 17th. You are, of course, welcome to stay on and share the space with me, but I will understand your reluctance to do so should you choose to seek other arrangements.

In any event, no matter what you decide, I hope you will still allow us the opportunity at some point to exchange a few words and catch up on each other’s news.

Yours, in anticipation, Vincent

Izzy read the letter through twice before laying it down on the table beside the easel that held her paints and palette. She tried to think of what the date was, but her mind was a blank. She went downstairs, planning to call Kathy to ask her, when her gaze fell upon the Perry’s Diner calendar that she’d tacked up there in December. Her finger tracked across the dates to settle on the sixteenth.

Rushkin would be here tomorrow.

Her earlier panic returned. This time she did call Alan and arranged to have him come by at midafternoon to help her transport her work back to the Waterhouse Street apartment. The rest of the morning she spent taking her paintings down from the walls and stacking them by the door, bundling up her sketches and value studies into manageable packages, dusting, sweeping, scrubbing the floor—especially around her easel—and generally acting and feeling like a teenager who’d had a huge open house while her parents were out of town for the weekend and was still madly trying to clean up while their ETA drew ever closer.

She was standing at the worktable with a cardboard box, trying to decide what brushes, paints and other art supplies she could honestly consider her own, when she heard Alan knock at the door.

Sweeping her arm across the top of the table, she dumped everything she hadn’t been able to make her mind up about into the box on top of what she had decided was hers and hurried to let Alan in.

One of the things Izzy liked best about Alan was how he never seemed to feel obliged to question the inherent chaos that represented the lives of so many of his friends. Instead of trying to make sense of what often even they couldn’t rationalize, he simply went with the flow, listened when they wanted him to, or could, explain, and was generally there for them when they needed him, absent when they needed to be alone.

“This is a lot of stuff;” he said as he surveyed everything Izzy felt she had to bring with her. “I think it’s going to take a couple of trips.”

“That’s okay. Just so long as we can get it all away this afternoon. Rushkin’s back, you see, or at least he will be here by tomorrow, so it’s all got to go.”

Alan regarded her for a moment. “I thought he was letting you use the studio.”

“He is. He was. I still could, it’s just that—oh, it’s too complicated to explain, Alan.”

Alan smiled. “So what do you want to take first?”

The move took three trips all told, because only so many canvases could fit in the back of the car at a time, but they were finished well before six. Once everything was safely stowed away in her bedroom, Izzy fetched them both a beer from the fridge.

“I love this piece,” Alan said, picking up a small oil pastel portrait. “She sort of reminds me of Kathy.”

“It’s the red hair,” Izzy said.

Alan laughed. “Izzy, almost all the women you paint have red hair.”

“This is true. And I have no idea why.”

“Maybe it’s because Kathy has red hair,” Alan said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” Alan told her. “It’s just that a lot of artists tend to use their own features, or those of their friends, because they know them so well. I thought you were doing the same.”

Put like that, Izzy thought, there might well be something to what Alan was saying. She certainly knew Kathy’s features better than those of anyone else in her life—better even than her own.

“But it’s not just the hair that reminds me of Kathy with this one,” Alan went on. “It’s more just a—oh, I don’t know. A Kathyish expression, I suppose.”

“I call it Annie Nin.”

“After Anaïs Nin?”

“Who?”

Alan smiled. “She’s a writer. You’d probably like her work.”

“I’ve never heard of her before. ‘Annie Nin’ just popped into my head the day I finished it.”

“Well, it’s beautiful. You know I like all your work, but I really love the movement of your brush strokes on this one—they’re so free and loose.”

“Actually, I did that with oil pastels. What you’re admiring is the marks of the pastel stick on the board.”

“Whatever. I still really like it.”

As he start to put it down, Izzy pushed it toward him. “Take it,” she said. “I’d like to see her go someplace where she’ll be appreciated.”

And besides, she thought, Alan’s apartment was the closest thing to a library without actually being one that Izzy could think of Annie would love it there. “I couldn’t just take it,” Alan said. “It must be worth a fortune.”

“Oh right. Like you haven’t seen what my work goes for in the gallery.”

“Not nearly what it’s worth,” Alan told her.

Izzy smiled, relaxing for the first time since the mail had arrived at the coach-house studio that morning.

“You’re being sweet,” she said, and then refused to accept no for an answer from him. It didn’t take much more convincing, and by the time they’d finished their beers and he was leaving, the painting was tucked in under his arm and went with him.

Later, Izzy had cause to be grateful for that moment of generosity, for that was how Annie Nin’s numena survived all the deaths that were to come, following Rushkin’s return to the city.

XIV

March 1978

Izzy was determined to ignore Rushkin’s presence in the city, but in the end she couldn’t stay away.

Because her numena were still unharmed and the awful dreams she used to have about them being hurt hadn’t returned, she let the old arguments convince her again that he meant neither her nor her numena any harm.

She thought of the helpful letters he’d sent, critiquing her shows. Of all she’d learned from him. Of all the good times they’d had, talking about art and all the strange and wonderful places he’d been. Of how he’d provided her with art supplies when she had nothing. Of how he’d allowed her the use of his studio for all the years he’d been away. It was easier to simply forget his towering rages. His need to control.

The fact that he really might be the monster that John insisted he was.

She remembered him with uneasiness and affection, both emotions milling about inside her in equal doses, until she knew she had to go see him to judge which was the most true.

She didn’t return to the coach house immediately. At first she mooned about the apartment, looked into getting a new studio, ran about the city with Kathy and visited all those friends she’d never seemed to have enough time to visit because the call of the studio was stronger. But eventually two weeks had gone by and she found herself trudging through a new Ell of snow that littered the lane running from Stanton Street to Rushkin’s studio.

It was a gloomy, cold morning, the sky overhung with clouds, her breath frosting the air, her feet already going numb in her thin boots. She’d left the apartment at eight, planning to get to the studio before Rushkin started work for the day, but instead she’d taken about as indirect a route as she could have managed, walking all the way downtown and then back up Yoors Street before finally finding herself on Stanton. It was going on nine-thirty when she turned into the lane.

Ahead of her, the lights spilling from the studio’s windows were warm and inviting, a golden glow that promised safe haven, a sanctuary from the bitter cold. But that promise was a lie, wasn’t it? She remembered trying to explain it to Kathy when Kathy got home that night after Alan had helped her move all her things back to the apartment.

“What happened?” Kathy asked, looking at the claustrophobic closet that Izzy’s bedroom had become with the addition of the stacks of paintings and boxes. “You get evicted?”

Izzy shook her head. “No. It’s Rushkin. I got a letter from him telling me he’d be back tomorrow.”

“So?” Kathy said, echoing Alan’s response earlier. “I thought he said you could use the place when he was gone?”

“He did. It’s just ... you know ....”

Izzy shrugged, wanting to leave it at that, but unlike Alan, Kathy wasn’t one to be easily put off once she had her mind set on knowing something. “Know what?” she asked.

Izzy sighed. “It’s my numena. I had to get them out of there before he came back.”

“You really think he’s after them?”

Izzy had never told Kathy about the death of the winged cat in her dream, or how Rushkin had tried to kill Paddyjack—would have killed him, if it hadn’t been for John. She hadn’t told her about Rushkin trying to buy one of her numena paintings for five thousand dollars from her first show at The Green Man Gallery. She hadn’t told her about how Rushkin seemed to have changed after she first met him, from troll to a normal man. There were so many things she’d never told anyone about Rushkin.

She shrugged. “You know what John said, that they keep him young. That they’re like a kind of food for him.”

He feeds on us, Izzy.

“Do you believe it?” Kathy asked.

“I don’t know. But why take a chance, right?”

Kathy nodded. “If you’re that uncertain,” she said, “then you did the right thing. And maybe you should keep on doing the right thing: stay away from him.”

“I will,” Izzy had promised.

Except here she was where she’d said she wouldn’t be, climbing the stairs to the studio, knocking on the familiar door. She’d left a key to the new lock in an envelope that she’d slipped into the mail slot of the apartment downstairs, but she still had a key to that door in her pocket, she realized. She should give it back to Rushkin. That would be her excuse for coming, she decided. To return the key and thank him for the use of the studio and then just go, because she really shouldn’t be here, she’d promised herself as much as Kathy that she would keep her distance from Rushkin. But then the door opened and all her good intentions were swept away.

“Isabelle!” Rushkin cried, his whole face lit up with pleasure at seeing her. “It’s so good to see you.

Come in, come in. You look frozen.”

He seemed different again, Izzy thought as she let him usher her inside. Not the grotesque troll she’d caricatured in that sketch at St. Paul’s Cathedral all those years ago, but not the quirky, stoop-backed man not much taller than herself that she remembered from just before he went away, either. The man who met her at the door was far more ordinary than that—he was still Rushkin, still unmistakably the odd bird with his too-bright eyes and his outdated wardrobe, but there was nothing either threatening or senile about him. He hadn’t grown any taller and he remained as broad in the shoulders as ever, but the power he exuded still came from within, rather than from any physical attribute.

“How ... how was your trip?” Izzy asked.

“Trip?” Rushkin repeated in a tone of amusement. “You make it sound as though I was on a holiday.”

“I didn’t know what you were doing.”

“Lecturing, Isabelle. Lecturing and touring and studying the masters, when I had the time, because one can never learn too much from those gifted ones who went before us.”

He led her across the studio to the window seat and sat her down where the air from the heat vent rose up and warmed her. Without waiting to ask her, he fetched her a mug of tea from the thermos he kept on the worktable and brought it back to where she was sitting. Izzy gratefully cradled it in her hands and let the warm steam rise up to tickle her cheeks.

“I got your letters,” she said after she’d taken a sip. “I found them really helpful.”

“Then it was worth the time I took to write them.”

“I couldn’t tell where you were when you mailed them—the postmarks were all smudged.”

Rushkin shrugged. “Here and there—who can remember?”

“I was surprised that you even had a chance to see the shows.”

“What? And miss such important moments in the life of my only and best student?”

Izzy couldn’t help but bask in the warmth of his praise. When she looked about the studio, she saw that it was full of paintings and sketches again, only they were all unfamiliar. Some looked as thought they’d been painted in Greece or Italy or southern Spain. Others reminded her of the Middle East, Africa, northern Europe, the Far East. Landscapes and portraits and every sort of combination of the two.

“I only wish I could have been in town for the openings,” Rushkin went on, “but my schedule being what it was, I was lucky to be able to fly in and see the shows at all.”

Izzy wanted to ask why he hadn’t stopped by the studio, but the question made her feel uneasy because she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the answer. She didn’t fear Rushkin simply for the sake of her numena or because of his temper. There was a darker undercurrent to her fear that she couldn’t quite pinpoint. Whenever she reached for it, it sidled away into the shadowed corners of her mind that she could never quite clear away.

“You’ve been busy,” she said instead, indicating the new paintings. “Indeed I have. And you?”

“I suppose. But not like this.”

She felt warmer now. Still holding her mug, she walked about the studio, admiring the new work. It never ceased to amaze her how, after all the years Rushkin had been painting—and especially when you considered the sheer quantity of superior work he’d produced—he never failed to find a fresh perspective, the outlook that other artists invariably missed. No matter how prosaic his subject matter might appear at an initial glance, he had a gift for instilling in it a universal relevance. His use of light was as astounding as ever, and looking at this new work, Izzy felt the inspiration for a dozen paintings come bubbling up inside her.

“I’d like to see some of your current projects,” Rushkin said. “Perhaps I could come by your studio one afternoon.”

“I’m kind of in between studios at the moment,” Izzy told him. “Well, when you get settled into a new place then.”

Izzy was surprised at the disappointment she felt when he didn’t try to convince her to come back and work here with him. Instead, he joined her as she walked about the studio and spoke about the various paintings and sketches, gossiping about the places and people they depicted, explaining particular problems he’d had with certain pieces and how he’d solved them. By the time she left Izzy realized that she’d learned more in the few hours she’d spent just listening to him than she had in all the time he’d been gone.

It was with real regret that she finally left the studio and trudged back home through the cold.

XV

June 1978

Izzy finally got herself a new studio at the beginning of April. It was no more than a large empty loft in a refurbished factory on Kelly Street, but she loved it. Up to that point she’d been depending on the kindness of others for studio space—initially Rushkin, then Professor Dapple—so this was the very first time she had a place of her own, chosen by herself, for herself. She paid the rent and utilities. She was entirely responsible for its upkeep. And because it was her own place—rather than Rushkin’s, which she knew she had to keep private even when none of his work was in it—this year she was able to participate in the annual spring tour of artists’ studios organized by the Newford School of Art, something she’d wanted to do from the first time she moved to the city. She didn’t have much available for sale, but everything she did have sold on the first day.

There were things she had to get used to with the new studio, beyond having to cover her expenses.

The hardest thing was losing touch with most of her numena. In the period between moving from the coach house to finally finding her own place, those whose paintings she still kept hadn’t liked to visit her in the apartment. It wasn’t private enough for their tastes. They came less and less often until, by the time she moved into her Kelly Street studio, her only regular visitors were Annie Nin and Rothwindle.

Rosalind and Cosette still came by whenever they were in town, but that wasn’t all that often. The rest of her numena seemed to just drift out of her life. Most of them she saw about as often as she did John, and she had yet to meet Paddyjack.

Her art took a new direction when she was finally settled in enough to begin work. Inspired by the paintings that Rushkin had done on his travels—taken mostly by how, as Tom Downs had put it, Rushkin saw things, rather than simply his technique she embarked on an ambitious series depicting the architecture of Lower Crowsea, juxtapositioning the vanishing older buildings with those that were replacing them, or had been renovated. What she found particularly intriguing in working on the series was giving a sense of entire buildings while concentrating only on a few details in each painting: a doorway and its surrounding vine-draped brickwork and windows; an alleyway with an old grocery on one side, a new lawyer’s office on the other; the cornice of the old fire hall showing two of its gargoyles, behind which rose a refurbished office block with all new stonework and an additional two stories.

Figures appeared, where appropriate, in a few pieces, but only one had a new numena. She was a kind of Paddyjill, since she looked to be a twig-girl cousin of sorts to Paddyjack, standing half-hidden in the vines that covered the riverside wall of the old shoe factory on Church Street. The painting was an immense work called Church Street II: Bricks and Vines, and Izzy saw it as the centerpiece of the series, which she’d taken to calling Crowsea Touchstones. It was due to be hung at The Green Man in October.

Albina was excited about the show and all of Izzy’s friends loved the series, but the person whose opinion she really craved was Rushkin, so that was how their weekly visits to each other’s studios began.

She dropped by his studio at the beginning of May and, after a pleasant hour or so of conversation, invited him to come by her studio the next day to have a look at some of her new work.

Every time Izzy saw him, Rushkin couldn’t have been nicer. By the end of June, the faint niggle of anxiety she’d associated with him had entirely vanished. They never spoke of numena—nothing odd or strange or out of the normal world ever came up in their conversations at all. Instead they talked about art; Rushkin criticized, gently, and praised, lavishly. Izzy forgot John’s warnings, forgot Rushkin’s temper, forgot everything but the joy of creating and sharing that joy with an artist that she admired so much it was almost an infatuation.

She didn’t mean to hide the fact that she had renewed her relationship with Rushkin, it just never came up whenever she was around Kathy. Her roommate might have heard it from someone else except that, having finally received her share of the advance for the paperback sale of her book, all her time was caught up in the work of establishing her children’s foundation—everything from finding suitable staff and applying for charitable status to renting a small building in which to house the operation.

As she’d predicted to Izzy back in January, the money from her advance wasn’t nearly enough—not even starting at the modest scale at which she planned. Late in June she organized a combination benefit concert and art auction that, when added to her fundraising efforts once her charitable status came through, raised another seventy-two thousand dollars. Eleven thousand of that came from the sale of one of Izzy’s paintings.

“The doors open July twelfth,” she told Izzy a few days after the benefit. “Are you going to have a party to celebrate it?” Izzy asked.

“Of course. But it’s going to be a potluck affair. I don’t want any of the Foundation’s money to be used for anything except for the kids. The thing that really worries me is that we’re going to get swamped and I don’t want to turn anybody away.”

“So organize another benefit,” Izzy suggested.

“I don’t think it would be as successful. People only have so much money and there are a lot of other worthwhile causes. It’ll work better on a yearly basis, I think.”

Izzy smiled. “You better get writing then.”

“I am. I have—whenever I can spare the time. Alan says there’s already a lot of interest in a second book and the first paperback’s not even out yet.”

“Will you take it to the same publisher that’s doing the paperback edition?” Izzy asked.

Kathy shook her head. “I’m letting Alan publish it first and then he’ll offer it to them. It’s a chance for his press to really establish itself and after all he’s done for me, I figure it’s the least I can do to repay him.”

“But if he gets fifty percent of the next paperback sale as well,” Izzy began. “He won’t. He didn’t even take that for Angels.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s earmarked forty percent of what would go to him as an ongoing donation to the Foundation.”

“Wow. I can’t believe he’s giving up all that money.”

“Some people would say the same thing about the painting you gave us to auction.”

“That’s different,” Izzy began, but then she shook her head. “No, I guess it’s not.”

“I couldn’t ask for better friends,” Kathy told her. She tried to stifle a huge yawn, but wasn’t successful. “I have to go to bed,” she said. “I’m dead on my feet.”

Kathy’d been losing weight, Izzy realized, taking a good look at her roommate. It wasn’t something you noticed right away, because of the baggy clothes she usually wore. But she was thinner, and there were rings under her eyes from lack of sleep.

“Don’t overdo things,” Izzy warned.

“I won’t,” Kathy said as she stumbled off to bed. “I’m just so happy that everything’s actually going to happen.” She paused at the doorway to her bedroom to look back at Izzy. “You know, that maybe I can save some kids having to go through the shit I had to.”

But you don’t look happy, Izzy thought as Kathy continued on into the bedroom. You look dead on your feet.

XVI

July 1978

It seemed as though everybody that Kathy and Izzy knew showed up for the open-house party to celebrate the opening of the Newford Children’s Foundation. The only exceptions were Rushkin and John, both of whom had been invited—Rushkin by Izzy and John by Kathy, who’d run into him in the Walker Street subway station the week of the benefit. The house had been furnished in what Jilly called Contemporary Scrounge, because everything had been acquired from flea markets and yard sales.

“The furniture just has to do its job,” Kathy had said, resenting any money spent that didn’t go directly to the kids. “It doesn’t have to be pretty.”

To offset the battered desks and filing cabinets, Izzy and Kathy, along with a number of their other artist friends, had spent a few weeks repainting all the rooms, making curtains, wallpapering, painting wall murals in the kitchen and offices and generally giving the rooms a more homey feel. The centerpieces of the waiting room, which also housed the reception desk, were the two paintings that Izzy had based on Kathy’s stories: La Liseuse and The Wild Girl. She’d given them to Kathy a year ago.

“I’m so glad you hung them here,” Izzy said, as she and Kathy finally got a break from greeting the guests and were leaning up against a wall in the waiting room, sipping glasses of wine.

Kathy smiled. “I love the way they look in here. I know you based them on stories in Angels, but they perfectly suit what the Foundation’s all about. The Wild Girl is all the kids we’re trying to help and La Liseuse is a perfect image of what so many of them have never had and never will have: the quintessential mother figure, about to read them a story before bed. I can’t imagine them anywhere else.

In fact, they’re part of the Foundation’s assets now and I’ve written in a stipulation in our charter that says they’re always to hang in the Foundation’s waiting room, no matter where we eventually move, no matter what happens to me personally.”

“I like that,” Izzy said. “I think that’s my favorite thing about any of the arts, that we each get to put our own interpretation upon the message that’s being conveyed. There’s no right or wrong way to appreciate, there’s only honest or dishonest.”

“I see her from time to time, you know,” Kathy said. “Rosalind.”

Izzy looked at her, feeling a little confused. Considering what she knew of Rosalind’s feelings about meeting Kathy, she was surprised to discover that the numena had managed to overcome her shyness in the matter.

“Really?” she said finally.

“Oh, I’ve never talked to her or anything,” Kathy explained, “but I catch glimpses of her from time to time—across a street, sitting in a cafe, walking through a park. It’s both odd and neat to see someone from one of my own stories walking about in the city. It gives me a better idea what it must feel like for you when you bring the numena across.”

Izzy really wished that Rosalind could overcome her shyness. She just knew that the two of them would get along famously. She’d often considered secretly setting up a meeting between the them, but then she’d think of John, she’d think of how Rosalind had entrusted her with her feelings, and she wouldn’t let it go any further than a thought.

“And Cosette?” she asked. “Do you ever see her?”

Kathy shook her head. “I’m too civilized to visit the kinds of places that she’d hang around—don’t you think? But I’ll bet Jilly’s seen her.”

“I think Jilly knows every fourth person in the city.”

“More like every third—and she’s working on the rest.” Kathy paused. “How come you’ve never told her about the numena? It’s so up her alley.”

Izzy shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m not trying to be selfish or anything, but I feel like everything would change if I told anybody else.”

“You told me.”

“That’s different,” Izzy said. “That’s more like telling another part of myself.”

“Are we going to be friends forever?” Kathy asked.

Izzy turned to look at her roommate. Kathy looked so serious that Izzy stifled the humorous response she’d been about to make.

“We’ll be friends forever,” she assured Kathy.

Kathy gave her a quick smile. “That’s good, because, you know, you’re the only good thing I ever had in my life that didn’t turn around and hurt me.”

“Look around you,” Izzy said. “All these people are your friends, Kathy. None of them would be here if it wasn’t for you.”

“I know. But the way I feel about them isn’t the same as I feel about you.”

Izzy put down her wineglass to give Kathy a hug. “That’s because a person can only ever have one real best friend,” she said, “and we’re stuck with each other.”

Kathy hugged her back. “Stuck together. Like salt and pepper.”

“Crackers and cheese.”

“Bacon and eggs.”

“Now I’m getting hungry,” Izzy said.

“Me, too.”

Izzy plucked her wineglass from the windowsill where she’d set it down earlier; then, arm in arm, they aimed their way through the crowd to see what was left of the potluck dinner.

XVII

August 1978

A few weeks after the open house at the Newford Children’s Foundation, Izzy came back from sharing a picnic lunch with Tom Downs to find her studio looking as though it had been vandalized. There were sketchbooks, loose papers and art books scattered everywhere. The floor was a jumble of paint tubes, brushes, pencils, sticks of pastel and the like. The easel lay on its side, her current work-in-progress beside it on the floor—faceup, she realized, thanking whatever gods there were for small mercies.

She walked numbly through the mess. Straightening the easel, she replaced her canvas on it, then slowly took stock. Her first thought was that the place had been burglarized, but nothing appeared to be missing. A quick inventory of her numena’s gateway paintings told her that all were still present and hadn’t been harmed. But who could have done this?

She bent down to start putting pastel sticks back into their box when some sixth sense made her look under her worktable. There she saw a familiar red-haired figure leaning against the wall, knees drawn up to her chest, arms wrapped around her legs.

“Cosette,” she said, the shock plain in her voice.

The wild girl turned a tear-streaked face toward her. “I ... I knew it was wrong ... even while I was doing it,” she said in a small broken voice, “but I ... I just couldn’t stop myself “

Izzy knew she should be angry, but the hurt and confusion she saw in Cosette’s features wouldn’t allow the emotion to take hold. She regarded the wild girl for a long moment, then crawled under the table to join her. She gathered Cosette in her arms and stroked the bird’s nest of her hair, gently working at the tangles with her fingers.

“What happened?” she asked.

“I was ... I was trying to draw a picture, but it wouldn’t come out right. No matter how hard I tried, it just wouldn’t come out right at all, at all. But still I tried and I kept trying, but then everything ...

everything started to feel ... I felt like I was choking ... and I just pushed all the papers off the table and it didn’t ... the choking feeling wasn’t so bad then ... and the more I kicked things around, the more it went away. I knew it was bad. I knew it was wrong. I I ... I didn’t want to do it, but I couldn’t stop myself “

“I used to get just as frustrated when I was learning how to draw,” Izzy told her.

Cosette gave her a grateful look. “I have to be able to do it,” she said. “I just have to.”

“Nobody’s good right away,” Izzy said. “It takes a lot of hard work to get anywhere with it.”

“But I’ll never get it because I don’t have anything inside me. I thought doing it would put something inside, but you have to be someone first. Like you. You are someone. I want to be just like you.”

“You don’t have to be like me to be able to do art,” Izzy told her. “Every artist is different.”

But Cosette shook her head. “No, I have to be like you.”

“Whatever for?”

“I want to be real.”

“You are real,” Izzy told her.

“No, I’m not. I’m like Solemn John.”

“John’s real, too.”

Cosette shook her head again. “He says you don’t really believe that. And if you don’t believe it, then it must be true, because you’re the one who made us.”

“I didn’t make you,” Izzy said. “All I did was open a door for you to step through.”

“Then why does John say what he does?”

Izzy sighed. “John and I have a problem communicating with each other.” Which was an understatement if she’d ever heard one, considering they hadn’t spoken to each other in years, but Izzy put that firmly out of her mind. That wasn’t the issue here. Cosette was.

“Not everything he says means exactly what it seems to mean,” Izzy went on.

“Like what he says about the dark man?” Cosette asked.

It took Izzy a moment to understand what Cosette was asking. “You mean Rushkin?” When Cosette nodded, Izzy said, “John just doesn’t much like him, so he suspects the worst about him.”

“So he doesn’t ... eat us?”

“I ..... Izzy hesitated. Her head filled with images of that old dream, the snowstorm, Rushkin with a crossbow, her winged cat dying, Paddyjack rescued by John. But then she heard Annie Nin’s voice in her mind. People dream the oddest things, don’t they, and then when they wake up they realize none of it was real.

“I don’t think he does,” she said.

“I still wish I was real.”

“You are real. Honestly. Look me in the eye, Cosette. Can’t you see that I believe what I’m saying?”

“I suppose.”

They sat quietly under the table for a while longer, neither of them speaking until Cosette finally sighed.

“Are you very mad at me?” she asked.

Izzy shook her head. “No. I understand what happened. Will you help me tidy up?”

Cosette gave her a shy nod.

“Well, come on then. Let’s see how quickly we can get it done.”

It only took a half hour before the studio was back to normal—or at least as normal as it ever got. It was still a mess, but an organized mess, as Izzy always liked to put it.

“I should get back to the island,” Cosette said when they were done. “Rosalind will be worrying about me. I didn’t tell her where I was going.”

“How will you get back?”

Some of Cosette’s normal bravado had returned. “Oh, don’t worry about me. I’m in and out of the city all the time.”

“Well,” Izzy said dubiously. “If you promise to be careful ...”

“I’m always careful,” Cosette began; then she looked around the now-tidied studio. “Well, almost always.”

Izzy couldn’t help but laugh. She walked over to her worktable and picked up an empty sketchbook and a couple of pencils.

“Here,” she said. “Take these.”

“Really?”

“Really. I want you to practice your drawing. If you need any help, just come and see me.”

“I’d rather be able to just do it,” Cosette said.

“Wouldn’t we all. Do you want some paints as well?”

“Oh no,” Cosette told her, clutching the sketchbook to her chest. “This is wonderful.” She hesitated for a moment, then added, “You won’t tell Rosalind, will you? She’d be so disappointed in me.”

“I won’t tell her,” Izzy said.

“Oh thank you!” She gave Izzy a quick kiss on the cheek. “You know, you’re not at all like John says you are.” And with that she seemed to spin like a dervish and whirl out of the door.

Izzy stood in the middle of the studio, regarding the door that Cosette had left open. It swung back and forth before it finally settled in a half-ajar position. “I wish John realized that,” she said softly.

XVIII

September 1978

Early in September, Izzy ran into Rosalind while on a sketching expedition in Lower Crowsea. She’d been out all morning trying to get a few good views of the old fire hall for one of her Crowsea Touchstones paintings when she spied the numena across the street. Rosalind noticed her at the same time and crossed over to join her at the bus-stop bench where Izzy was sitting.

“I wish Cosette had your discipline,” she told Izzy.

“I take it she’s not practicing.”

Rosalind smiled. “She feels that she should be able to do it immediately and since she can’t, why then she’ll never get it so why bother trying?”

“I was hoping she’d come by again to show me what she’s been working on. I offered to help her.”

“I know you did. She was so excited when she came home from her last visit.” Rosalind sighed. “But by the next day she’d torn the book up, thrown the pencils away and was busy making a giant bird’s nest with Paddyjack.”

“Well, it’s not something you can force someone to do,” Izzy said. “You either have the desire and drive, or you don’t.”

Rosalind nodded. “But it’s so frustrating because I know how badly she wants to be able to do it.”

Izzy put a hand on her knee. “Don’t worry. She’ll settle down with it when she’s ready.”

“I wonder.”

“Would you like to take home another sketchbook in case she decides she does want to try it again?”

“No. If she wants to that badly, let her come back and get it from you herself “

They sat quietly together for a while, enjoying the crisp September weather and watching the people go by. As they sat there, Izzy wondered if people could see both of them, or did they only see her, talking to herself?

“You haven’t seen Rothwindle lately, have you?” Rosalind asked after a few minutes had gone by.

Izzy shook her head. “I hardly see any of them anymore. Just Cosette a couple of weeks ago and Annie still comes to visit, of course, but that’s about it. But now that I think of it, Annie was asking about her, too. Why, were you looking for her?”

“I wanted to ask her to come stay with us on the island for a little while. I know she’s happy in the city, but apparently she’s become such a hermit of late that I’ve been worrying about her.”

“Maybe she’s met another gargoyle. Kathy’s always saying that some of them wake up once the sun sets and they go wandering. She even wrote a story about it.”

“I hope that’s all it is,” Rosalind said. “She’s such an innocent—like Paddyjack is. I’d hate for her to have gotten in with the wrong crowd.” Izzy had to smile. “You sound like a mother.”

“I feel like a mother sometimes,” Rosalind said, returning Izzy’s smile, “but I don’t mind. I like feeling needed. Useful. And speaking of which,” she added, rising to her feet, “I should finish the rest of my errands.”

“Well, if I hear from her, I’ll tell her you were looking for her,” Izzy said.

Rosalind smiled her thanks and wandered off down the street, her features creased with uncharacteristic worry lines. Izzy closed her eyes and pictured My Darling ‘Goyle, the painting through which the gargoyle had crossed over. Where had Rothwindle gone? she wondered.

XIX

November 1978

“You’ve got quite the collector interested in your work,” Albina told Izzy a few weeks after the Crowsea Touchstones show had closed.

Once Izzy had gotten past the flurry of excitement and work that had gone into the opening of the Newford Children’s Foundation, the rest of the summer and early autumn had proceeded at a perfect, lazy pace for her. She painted in her studio, with Annie for company as often as not, and went out sketching on location, visited with or was visited by Rushkin and Tom Downs and her other friends, and spent all sorts of time with Kathy when Kathy wasn’t busy writing. The two of them often spent evenings at the Foundation, sorting clothes and doing the behindthe-scenes work so that the counselors could concentrate on their clients. The only thing lacking in Izzy’s life was a romantic relationship, but even that wasn’t enough to spoil the sense of peace that had settled over her. So many of her friends were single that it didn’t seem odd for her to be that way as well. They filled up the holes in each other’s lives and managed to pretend, most of the time, that they didn’t need anything else.

That the Crowsea Touchstones show had done so well simply seemed to fit into the natural progression of positive events that made up this particular year of her life. Kathy would tease her about it sometimes, but it wasn’t so much that she was becoming blase about her success as that she wasn’t really paying attention to it. So when Albina brought up the idea of a serious collector of her work, Izzy couldn’t quite seem to muster up much more than an idle curiosity in the subject.

“How so?” she asked after taking a long sip of the tea that Albina had brought along on her visit to the Kelly Street studio.

The two of them were sitting in one of the disused rooms in the old factory building that the various tenants used as sitting rooms because their studios, like Izzy’s, were usually too much of a mess. The windows here gave out upon a long view of alleys and backyards, with office complexes rising up behind them in the distance. Albina poured herself another cup of tea from her thermos before she replied.

“Well, he’s been buying one or two of your works from every show—and they’re always the most expensive ones.”

“Don’t tell me,” Izzy said. “Let me guess. He’s a doctor, right?”

Albina shook her head. “A lawyer, actually, although I think he’s buying the work for a client, so maybe you’re right. It could be a doctor.”

But Izzy wasn’t listening to her anymore. A deep stillness had settled inside her at the word lawyer.

“What ... what’s his name?” she asked in a voice gone soft.

Albina smiled, unaware of the change in Izzy. “Richard Silva,” she said. “Of Olson, Silva and Chizmar Associates. You asked me about them before and I couldn’t remember the name, but I’ve cashed so many checks with their name on it by this point that I’d be hard put to forget it now.”

The stillness deepened inside Izzy.

“And the paintings he bought?” she asked.

Her worst fears were realized as Albina began to name the pieces. Each title was of a painting of one of her numena. All of John’s old accusations came flooding back into her mind and she had nothing to say in her own defense.

How could you? she wanted to scream at Albina. How could you let him buy them all? No wonder Rushkin hadn’t been worried about her having her own studio and working elsewhere; he’d found another way of acquiring her numena. But the words remained stillborn because she realized that Albina wouldn’t know what she was talking about. There was no way Albina could screen all buyers to make certain they weren’t Rushkin. All Izzy could do was stop offering them for sale, or stop painting them altogether.

The pain deepened inside her when she realized that one of those paintings had been My Darling

‘Goyle. Oh, Rothwindle. How could she have been so stupid? How could she have betrayed the gargoyle like this? No wonder John would have nothing to do with her. She was just as irresponsible as he’d warned her not to be.

“Is something wrong?” Albina asked, finally picking up on Izzy’s change of mood.

Izzy looked at her, but there was nothing she could say.

“No, I’m just feeling moody. I think I’m premenstrual,” she added, by way of explanation.

“There’s something to be said for menopause,” Albina told her. “It’s the one aspect of growing old that I don’t regret.”

Izzy found a polite smile, but it never reached her eyes. All she wanted now was to be alone with her grief and her anger. The latter was directed as much at herself as it was at Rushkin. How could she have let herself fall under his sway again when she knew, she knew he was not to be trusted?

It seemed to take forever before Albina finally left to go back to the gallery.

XX

It’s not your fault,” Kathy said when Izzy told her that evening. “You couldn’t have known.”

It was what Izzy wanted to hear, but she knew it wasn’t true. She sat at the kitchen table, hugging her bunched-up jacket to her chest, and looked across the table at Kathy through a shimmering gauze of tears.

“But that’s just it,” she said, mournfully. “I did know. I should have realized that Rushkin was a real danger to my numena and that he wouldn’t give up so easily. John warned me about it and I saw Rushkin kill my winged cat. I saw him try to kill Paddyjack.”

“I thought you’d told me you’d dreamed that.”

“I did,” Izzy said. “But no matter how much I want to pretend it didn’t happen, I know it was a real dream—like looking at a movie of something that was actually happening, except I was in it at the same time.”

Kathy reached across the table and took one of Izzy’s hands in both of her own.

“I just feel so sick,” Izzy went on. “When I think of how nice he’s been, how much I’ve been enjoying his company, and all along he was feeding on my numena behind my back ....”

“Wait a minute,” Kathy said. “Is this still Rushkin we’re talking about?” Izzy nodded.

“But I thought you weren’t seeing him anymore.”

“I wasn’t planning to. It’s just, oh, I don’t know. I kind of fell back into a relationship with him. I’d stop by his studio, he’d stop by mine. It was all so harmless and friendly. I was learning so much ....”

“It still wasn’t your fault,” Kathy said. “You don’t have any control over what Rushkin does.”

Although she knew she deserved to be held to blame—she was to blameIzzy was grateful to Kathy for refusing to hold her responsible for what had happened.

“But I should have believed John,” she said. “It’s just that I didn’t want Rushkin to be what John told me he was.”

“When you want things to be different from how they are,” Kathy said, “it’s sometimes easy to convince yourself that they are.”

Izzy nodded unhappily. “But I won’t risk any more of them. From now on, all I’m painting are landscapes, cityscapes, skyscapes—anything except for numena. If I want people in a painting, I’ll do real-life portraits.”

“You can’t do that,” Kathy told her.

“What am I supposed to do? If I paint more of them and bring them across, it’ll just put them into danger. I’d have to keep the paintings all locked away here, or in my studio, and what’s to say he won’t find a way to get at them anyway? He got to the paintings I did at the Grumbling Greenhouse Studio and stole away their vitality without ever laying a hand on them.”

“That you know of “

Izzy shook her head. “No, it was snowing that night. If he’d been in the studio, I would have seen his tracks outside. There would have been some sign of disturbance.”

“So there’s a risk,” Kathy said. “But we’ve had this conversation before. There’s always a risk in life. We take our lives in our own hands just walking across a street.”

“But those are our lives. I can’t be responsible for theirs as well. I can’t seem to protect my numena, so it’s better that I don’t bring them across in the first place.”

“Which leaves them trapped there forever—wherever ‘there’ is.” Izzy gave her a puzzled look.

“What are you saying?”

“From those of your numena that I’ve met,” Kathy said, “it strikes me that they’re happy to be here.

That you’ve taken them from some place that’s not as good as what we have here and given them a new lease on life.”

“We don’t know that their world is so terrible. We don’t know anything about it at all. They don’t even seem to be able to remember what it was like themselves.”

“Maybe they don’t want to remember,” Kathy said. “Don’t look at me like that. It’s not like it’s a novel theory or anything. Some people embrace their traumas, but a lot more just put them out of their minds and pretend that they never occurred. Selective amnesia. Half the time their subconscious handles the chore for them and they’re not even aware of sealing the bad memories away.”

Izzy felt uncomfortable at the idea, though she couldn’t have explained why. It was just that, as Kathy spoke, she seemed to feel shadows shift inside her, deepening and intensifying.

“I think you owe it to your numena to continue bringing them across,” Kathy went on. “They chose to make the passage here. Granted, it’s not safe here, but it’s not safe anywhere—maybe especially wherever it is that they come from.”

“But—”

“You have to remember that they’re not unhappy to be here. Just look at how John was. Without you, they’ve no hope at all.”

“And when they die? When I can’t protect them and Rushkin gets to them? I can’t stand the idea of carrying around the weight of more of them dying.”

“Don’t sell the paintings,” Kathy told her. “Don’t make any more of them for public consumption.

Keep them safe. Here, or in the studio. Rent a secure storage space if you have to. But you’ve got a gift, ma belle Izzy, and I don’t think it was given to you capriciously.”

“No, it was given to me by Rushkin so that I could feed his needs.”

Kathy shook her head. “All Rushkin did was teach you how to use a gift you already had. Why do you think he was drawn to you? You were already capable of bringing numena across; all he did was show you how.”

Showed her how, Izzy thought. And pretended to be her friend. Pretended to care. But then he’d turned around and betrayed her trust, leaving her with a huge hole in her life.

“I don’t know if I can,” Izzy said.

“You have to,” Kathy said. “There’s no one else to help them across.”

“Except for Rushkin,” Izzy said.

Kathy nodded. “But remember what you said he’d told you about angels and monsters? It stands to reason that, being the way he is, he can only bring across monsters. Someone has to balance things out and allow the angels to cross over as well.”

“Why doesn’t he just feed on his own numena?”

It was a terrible thing to say, Izzy knew, but she couldn’t help herself. At least if Rushkin fed on his own, he’d be responsible, not her. Her own numena would be safe.

“Maybe he can’t,” Kathy said.

Izzy nodded slowly. Of course. Why else had he plucked her off the street and taught her what he had? He’d merely been sowing seeds for future harvests. The thought made her feel nauseated and a sour taste rose up from her stomach.

“I think I feel sick again,” she said.

“I’ll be here for you, ma belle Izzy,” Kathy assured her.

Izzy knew it was true. And it was that, more than Kathy’s arguments about the numena needing her in order to come across, that had her begin painting them again a few weeks later.

This time she didn’t confront Rushkin the way she had before, though she couldn’t have explained why. Whenever the thought arose, it was accompanied with an uneasiness that left her feeling tense and irritable. Instead, she simply stopped going by his studio and refused him admittance to her own. The fact that he made no comment on the sudden change in their relationship only confirmed her belief in his culpability.

She questioned the new numena that she brought across and they all professed gratitude to her for her giving them passage into this world, but they didn’t keep her company. None of the numena did anymore. Not even Annie.

XXI

February 1979

When she got the news that her father had died, Izzy didn’t feel a thing. She sat in the kitchen, phone in hand, listening as her mother explained how he’d had a heart attack while doing the morning chores, and it was as though she were hearing about the death of a stranger. She’d stopped going out to the island almost three years ago, and while she’d spoken to her mother on the phone in the interim, her last visit to the island was also the last time she’d talked to her father.

She’d always thought that her success as an artist would make him change his attitude, that he’d be proud of all that she’d accomplished, but if anything her success had worsened their relationship. They’d had a huge blowup that night, after which she’d packed her bag and walked down to the pier, rowing herself over to the mainland. From there she walked to the highway and hitchhiked back into the city.

Kathy had been angry when Izzy finally showed up at the apartment at four o’clock in the morning.

“You should have called me or Alan,” she’d told Izzy. “God, you could have been raped or killed.

Anybody could have picked you up.”

“I couldn’t stay,” Izzy explained, “and I was damned if I’d accept a ride from either of them.”

“But—”

“There’s no phone out by the highway,” Izzy had said. “And I didn’t think of calling before I left the farmhouse.”

Kathy looked as though she was going to say something more, but she must have realized how miserable Izzy was feeling because all she did was say, “Well, thank god you’re okay,” and give her a hug.

Her mother had called her the next day to try to apologize for her father, but this time Izzy wouldn’t accept any excuses for him. If he loved her, he had yet to show it and she was tired of waiting. All she’d said that day to her mother was “How can you live with him?”

She’d kept in contact with her mother, but they never spoke of her father again until the day he died.

Izzy went out to the island to stay with her mother and she attended the funeral for her mother’s sake, but she still felt nothing—not at the funeral home, not in the church, not as she watched the coffin being lowered into the grave. It was only later that night, after she and her mother returned to the island, that she felt anything. With her father three days dead, she lay in her old bedroom in the farmhouse and stared up at the familiar cracks in the ceiling. And then the tears came.

But they weren’t for the father who had just died. They were for the father she’d never had.

XXII

April 1979

“It’s not like it’d be forever,” Izzy said.

Izzy and Kathy sat on the front stoop of their apartment building, enjoying the mild spring evening.

From where they sat they could watch the traffic pass on Lee Street. Their own street was quiet tonight.

Over the years since they’d first moved to their Waterhouse Street apartment, the area had undergone a slow but steady change. The boutique and cafes were outnumbered now by convenience stores and pizza parlors, the bohemian residents by young couples and single working men and women on the rise, looking for an investment rather than a home.

“One day,” Alan had told them morosely, “all that’ll be left is ghosts and memories of us.”

And Alan, Kathy had told Izzy later, because she doubted that he’d ever move away. But the others did, and now Izzy had been put in the position to consider doing the same.

Her mother had decided to move to Florida to live with her sister. She wanted to put the island in Izzy’s name, but only if Izzy lived there. She didn’t want Izzy to sell it and then have strangers living there—at least not in her own lifetime. “Once I’m dead, you can do what you want with it,” she’d said when she called up to discuss it with Izzy. But Izzy had told her that she could never sell the island. She might have bad memories of her father, but the island itself retained its magic for her. She thought it always would.

“It’ll just be for a while,” Izzy went on to tell Kathy. “To see how it goes.”

“I know,” Kathy said. “You don’t have to explain. It makes perfect sense.”

“I love that land and it’d really be a great place to work.”

Kathy nodded. “And safe, too—for your numena.”

“Not that I’d ever know,” Izzy said.

She knew many of her numena had taken up residence on the island, but they didn’t communicate with her any more than the ones in the city did. She understood why. She’d let them down. She’d let them die. But that didn’t make the pain any easier to bear.

“I meant for both of us,” she went on. “The farmhouse is huge, Kathy. I’d be rattling around in it on my own.”

After having shared living space with Kathy for so many years, the idea of living without her seemed unimaginable. Izzy had any number of friends, and she knew she’d miss seeing them on a regular basis, but she wasn’t all that sure she could live without Kathy. They were more than best friends. Sometimes it seemed to her that they were two halves of some magical alliance that would be greatly diminished if they ever went their separate ways.

“I can’t live that far away from the city,” Kathy said. “It’s not just because of my writing, either. I know I get my inspiration from being here, but I suppose I could write anywhere.”

“It’s the Foundation.”

“Exactly. There’s still so much to do and I feel I have to stay involved until I can be sure it’ll run on its own.”

“I’m going to miss you terribly,” Izzy said.

Then why are you going? she asked herself. Wren Island held the best memories of her childhood, but also the worst. There was no question but that the years she’d lived in Newford far outweighed them.

Still, she felt as though she were in the grip of some old-fashioned covenant, like a knight under the spell of a geas in one of the Arthurian romances Kathy liked to read. She was called back to the island, not by her mother, but to fulfill some older, more binding contract that she couldn’t even remember having made. The only thing that could keep her from going was if Kathy asked her to stay.

But all Kathy said was “I’ll miss you, too, ma belle Izzy.”

XXIII

Wren Island, June 1979

Names, Izzy had realized a long time ago, before she even moved from the island to attend Butler U., had potency. They pulled their owners in their wakes, the way that dreams can, the way you can wake up from sleep and believe that what you dreamed actually occurred. And even later, even when you realized the mistake, it was difficult to readjust your thinking. You knew your boyfriend didn’t cheat on you, but you looked at him with suspicion all the same. You understood that you hadn’t really done the painting, but you found yourself looking for it all the same.

But if dreams were potent, names were more so, especially the ones people chose for themselves.

They might grow into the ones that were given to them, through the familiarity of use, if nothing else, but the ones they chose defined who they were like an immediate descriptive shorthand.

When she first moved to Newford from Wren Island seven years ago, she had put Isabelle behind.

Isabelle of the quiet moods and even temperament. Who avoided confrontations and was more comfortable with her sketchbook in the forest than with people. Who had inherited her father’s stubborn streak but never acquired the meanness it had manifested in him. Who didn’t argue, but merely agreed and went ahead and did what she felt she had to do anyway, dealing with the repercussions only if she had to.

Kathy was the first to call her Izzy, making a play on Isabelle with her ma belle Izzy, but she herself was the one who took to the name and wore it into her new life. Izzy wasn’t simply a role she played, a coat she put on to protect her from inclement weather that was easily discarded once more. All those years in Newford she was Izzy. Being Izzy let her fit in with the art crowd at university, her Waterhouse Street cohorts, the bohemian scene in Lower Crowsea. Being Izzy had opened all the doors that shy Isabelle wouldn’t even have paused at before. She only signed Isabelle’s name to her paintings because of Rushkin, because it had been easier to do so than argue with him about what he perceived as the inappropriateness of going by a nickname in the world of fine art.

But Izzy hadn’t been all strength and chutzpah. Names were potent, but changing your name couldn’t entirely discard the baggage you had to carry along from the past to where you were now. Izzy still had her insecurities. Izzy was still capable of being browbeaten by the Rushkins of the world, abandoned by the Johns, mugged by a gang of street punks who didn’t know what her name was and certainly didn’t care. Izzy still preferred to avoid confrontations and to hide her pains deep in the shadowy recesses of her mind, where they wouldn’t be easily stumbled upon.

Names were potent, Izzy understood, but in the end they were still only labels, easy tags that could never hope to entirely encompass the complex individuals they were supposed to describe. All they could ever do was reflect some aspect of the face you wanted to turn to the world, not define it. But they helped—in the same way that labels made it easier to choose between one thing and another. Coffee or tea? Smoking or nonsmoking section? Expressionism or Impressionism?

Returning to the island, she realized that Izzy had been left behind by the roadside, somewhere in between Newford and the turnoff to the island, and she was ready to embrace Isabelle once more. Was ready to define herself as Isabelle—at least insofar as she needed a label for herself. The differences between the younger Isabelle and who she was now were few. She was twenty-four now, not seventeen.

She was a moderately successful artist. Her father was dead. She was on the island by choice, not because she had to be.

She spent her first few weeks on the island feeling very much at loose ends. Organizing her living space swallowed some time. She set up a studio in the back bedroom and made a storage space for her numena paintings in the attic. It took her a little while to get used to sleeping in her parents’ bedroom, but once she’d repainted and moved her own furniture in, it seemed more her own. Her old bedroom she converted into the guest room—although privately she already thought of it as Kathy’s room.

Her mother had auctioned off all the farm animals and equipment, including the barge that had been used to transport livestock and crops to the mainland, but left her the old rowboat. A hired boat from one of the marinas down the coast had been all she’d needed to transport her belongings to the island, and the rowboat was enough to get her back and forth from the mainland, where she parked the used VW that she’d bought from Alan.

She found she missed the sound of the city at first—the traffic, the sirens, the constant hubbub of noise that she’d entirely tuned out after a while. But the quiet nights and open skies of the country had been bred into her at an early age and she was soon seduced by them all over again. Initially, it had been hard to work because it was so quiet; within three weeks the difficulty in getting started was because she tended to have her morning coffee out on the porch and then found herself puttering in the garden or going for a long ramble out along the shore or in the forest and the next thing she’d know, the whole morning and half the afternoon was gone.

Still, she was painting, at first more in the evenings than during the day, and was surprised to realize that, by the fall, she’d have enough pieces to hang for a new show without having to give up working on her new series of numena.

The numena. She could feel their presence on the island, but they still re-fused contact with her. All of them—even Rosalind and Cosette. Even Annie Nin, who’d been the one that had really convinced her that she should sell the numena paintings in her show. But if they kept their distance from her, they still went into her studio. Many times she came into it to find that things had been rifled through, and small items were missing. Some pencils and paper, a paint-brush, a tube of paint. Cosette, she’d think, and then feel sad all over again.

But she even grew used to that and where at first she’d looked forward to her trips into the city, by the time June was rolling up on July, it was all she could do to get into her car and make the drive in. She missed Kathy, though, and it was because of her that she nude sure that she went to town at least once every couple of weeks.

XXIV

Newford, September 1979

Isabelle was completely disoriented the first time she visited Kathy in her new apartment on Gracie Street. All the familiar furnishings were there, but they were all in the wrong place. The old floor lamp with its marble stand that they’d picked up at a flea market still provided illumination for Kathy’s favorite reading chair, but both of them stood in an unfamiliar corner by a bay window they’d never had on Waterhouse Street, overlooking a view that belonged to a stranger. Kathy’s collection of antique photos was in the hall, along with some of Isabelle’s own sketches that Kathy’d had framed, but they were all in a different order. Isabelle knew the bookcases, the carpets, the sofa, the drapes, the various knick-knacks, but their new configurations kept surprising her, no matter how often she came to visit.

She’d tried to explain it to Kathy once, but her friend had only laughed. “You’re far too set in your ways,” she told Isabelle. “In fact, I almost had a heart attack myself the first time you came back from the island wearing that red-checked flannel shirt of yours. I don’t think I’d ever seen you wear anything but black before that.”

By the time the summer ended, Isabelle was only coming into town when she had to.

“I guess the real news is that I’ve fmally finished my second collection,” Kathy said when Isabelle dropped by the Gracie Street apartment on her latest trip into town. “Alan’s going to publish it in the spring.”

“What’s it called?” Isabelle asked.

Though they still talked on the phone at least once a week, Isabelle was feeling more and more out of touch lately. Her afternoons were spent far from her phone, wandering the island, reacquainting herself with all the haunts of her past; mornings and evenings found her in the studio, working, more often than not ignoring the phone when it did ring. She had yet to buy an answering machine, so when she did speak on the phone it was usually when she made the call.

“I’m calling it Flesh of the Stone,” Kathy said, “after that story that appeared in Redbook last year.”

“Will it have that story about the whistling man in it?”

Kathy smiled. “That and everything I’ve written since Angels, including two new stories that even you haven’t seen yet.”

“Do I have to wait?”

Kathy reached over with her foot and used her big toe to tap a fat manila envelope lying on the coffee table. “I’ve got copies for you to take home right here.”

“With all your work at the Foundation, I’m surprised you found the time.”

“Well, you know what you always told me,” Kathy said, “you have to make the time.”

“Too true.”

“So Alan wanted me to ask you if we could use one of the paintings that’s hanging at the Foundation for the cover of the East Street Press edition. He wants to use La Liseuse. The paperback sale hasn’t gone through yet, and he can’t guarantee anything, but he’ll try to get them to use the cover for it as well.”

Isabelle looked uncomfortable.

“What’s the matter?” Kathy asked. “I thought you’d love the idea.”

“I do—sort of. But it makes me worried.”

“You’ve lost me.”

“Those are numena paintings,” Isabelle explained. “I can’t help but be afraid of putting them in the public eye like that.”

“I’m not about to sell them to Rushkin,” Kathy said. “Give me that much credit.”

“Of course you wouldn’t. But Rushkin doesn’t even know they exist. I’m afraid if he did, he’d find a way to get at them.”

“But—”

“One of the things I hate about being away from the island is that I’m always afraid he’s going to sneak into the farmhouse while I’m gone and steal the ones I have there.”

“I don’t think you have to worry about that,” Kathy said. “Except for Paddyjack hanging in the kitchen, you’d have to be very determined to find the rest of them.”

There were storage spaces behind the eaves in the attic, between the drywall and the outer walls, and Isabelle had hidden the numena paintings in them, enfolding them in protective wrappings and then covering them over with old insulation and boards. Kathy was the only person Isabelle had ever shown them to.

“I know. But still ...”

“Actually,” Kathy said, “I don’t think you have to worry so much about Rushkin anymore. Didn’t you hear? According to Nora, he’s got himself a new protege.”

“Anybody we know?”

Kathy shook her head. “Her name’s Barbara Nichols and apparently she’s just a young thing—still in art school.”

“That sounds familiar.”

“You seem pretty blase about it.”

Isabelle laughed. “Why do you say that? Did you think I’d be jealous?”

“No. but I was thinking that maybe she should be warned—you know. About Rushkin and the numena and what he does to them.”

“I don’t think so,” Isabelle said. “If he hasn’t already told her about them, she’d think I was nuts—or at least jealous. And if he has taught her how to bring them over, nothing anyone might have to say would stop her from continuing to paint them. Trust me on this. I know.”

Or at least she hoped she did. She hoped she was saying this for the reasons she was giving to Kathy and not for a more selfish reason. But she had to admit the thought had crossed her mind that if Rushkin had found another artist to provide him with the numena he needed, then it would mean that her own would be safe.

“Have you seen her work yet?” she added.

“No,” Kathy said, “but Jilly has. She says it’s stunning.”

The poor girl, Isabelle thought.

“So anyway,” Kathy went on. “Don’t you think that puts the threat of Rushkin out of the picture?”

Isabelle hated to disappoint Kathy, but she had to shake her head. Unless she could be absolutely sure, she couldn’t take the risk.

“I know you must think I’m paranoid,” she began, but Kathy dismissed her explanation with a wave of her hand.

“Don’t even worry about trying to explain,” she said. “I understand. But you have to promise me one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“That one day you’ll illustrate one of my books.”

“I ...” Isabelle hesitated.

“Oh, come on. One day Rushkin will be dead and gone and you’ll be able to do it with a complete peace of mind.”

“All right,” Isabelle said. “One day I’ll do it.”

“I’ll hold you to it,” Kathy assured her, then changed the subject. “So when does your new show open?”

“In October. I just have a couple more pieces to finish for it.”

“I think it’s going to do great. The island just seems to flow through your paintbrush onto the canvas.”

“I’ve always loved painting on it.”

“And you are going to stay with me for the week of the opening?”

“Try to keep me away.”

XXV

Wren Island, Beltane Eve, 1980

“What a great idea this was,” Kathy said. She adjusted the folded blanket she was sitting on and leaned back against a rock with her feet near the fire.

Isabelle nodded contentedly from beside her. It was still jacket weather once the sun went down, but they’d lucked into a perfect day for their Beltane Eve party. After the morning mists rising from the lake had been burned away, the skies had remained clear for the rest of the day. It was too early in the year for mosquitoes or blackflies and for once the reason you couldn’t see any no-see-urns was because they weren’t about yet either.

The bonfire was on the beach of a small cove on the east side of the island—a towering blaze of salvaged driftwood that was tended by whoever happened to be near enough to toss another few logs in when the fire got low. Isabelle had lost count of how many people had arrived by now. The dirt road on the mainland leading from the highway to her pier was crowded with parked cars, and her little rowboat and two others she’d rented from the marina had been ferrying people back and forth from the island all afternoon and well into the evening. The field up behind the cove was dotted with tents. Those who hadn’t brought tents had laid out their sleeping bags in the big barn. A hardy few planned to sleep under the stars—easily the best choice, Isabelle had decided once the sun finally set, for it was one of those nights when the sky went on forever, the stars seeming to flicker a handsbreadth away from your face.

With the potluck dinner finally over, music had started up on the far side of the fire. A dozen or so musicians jammed on a mix of folk songs, old hit-parade favorites and Celtic dance music. From where she sat with Kathy, Isabelle could see Christy’s brother Geordie among them, playing his fiddle, and Amy Scallan with her pipes, the two of them happily playing along on both Beatles’ songs and Irish reels.

Sitting near the musicians with their more traditional instruments was a whole contingent of people keeping rhythm by tapping sticks against each other or drumming them on rocks. On the stretch of sand between the lake and the fire a growing crowd was dancing, singing along when they knew the words.

Wine and beer continued to flow abundantly and the air was redolent with the smell of the fire, the lake and the pinewoods behind them, all mingled together with a sweet underlying scent of marijuana.

When a joint came their way Isabelle shook her head but Kathy took a long toke before passing it on.

Isabelle had a couple of glasses of some mystery punch that no one was quite sure who’d brought and, she decided from the slightly woozy way she was feeling, it must have been spiked stronger than she’d thought at first. She wasn’t exactly drunk; it was more that she was unusually focused. Everything she looked at or concentrated on for any length of time seemed inordinately interesting.

Kathy turned to look at her, the firelight making her hennaed hair seem to glow with its own inner lights.

“I’m having the best time,” she said.

Isabelle nodded. “I didn’t think so many people’d show up, it being a Thursday and all.”

“What, are you kidding? I don’t think one of our friends has a regular job.”

“But still.”

Kathy smiled. “I know. It’s like one of the old Waterhouse Street open houses, isn’t it?”

That was a perfect description, Isabelle decided, because just as at those parties, she only recognized about half the people here. But by all indications, as small groups got together, broke up and then re-formed into new configurations, everyone was still connected to someone she knew.

“I’ll bet most of them stay straight through the weekend,” Kathy added. “Oh, god. I hope my plumbing survives the onslaught.”

She’d put the old outhouse back into service, but people were going into the farmhouse to use the facilities as well. The plumbing dated back to her grandfather’s time and had never been upgraded.

“I just hope the beer lasts,” Kathy said.

“We can always make a run to the marina tomorrow,” Isabelle told her. “We’ll probably need more food by then, too.”

“Well, don’t pay for it all yourself—take up a collection before you go.”

“Yeah, right. With this crowd?”

“It’s worth a shot.”

“I suppose,” Isabelle allowed. “Say, do you know who that guy is?”

She’d been noticing him on and off throughout the afternoon and evening, but every time she went to meet him, someone came up to distract her. As the evening progressed she found herself getting more and more curious about him.

Kathy peered in the general direction that Isabelle had indicated. “Which guy?”

“Just on the other side of where Jilly and Sophie are sitting. The one that looks sort of out of place.”

There was something old-fashioned about the cut of his clothes and his hairstyle, though it was hard to tell exactly what because of the poor light. Still, she couldn’t help but feel he’d be more at home on a turn-of-the-century street in Lower Crowsea than here on her island.

“We’re all out of place here,” Kathy said with a laugh. “Except for you, my hardy country girl.”

“You know what I mean. Who is he?”

“I haven’t a clue.” Kathy turned to her. “Do you like him?”

“I don’t even know him. He just looks familiar and it bugs me that I can’t place him.”

“Familiar as in you might have seen him around, or he looks like someone you do know?”

“A little of both.”

“So go ask him,” Kathy said, ever the pragmatist.

“I would, except I can never seem to get near to him. Whenever I try, that’s exactly the moment somebody comes up to me and asks me something and the next thing I know he’s gone.”

“Allow me to investigate this phenomenon,” Kathy said loftily, beginning to rise to her feet.

Isabelle pulled at the sleeve of Kathy’s sweater, making her sit down again. “Too late. He’s gone again.”

It was true. The place where he’d been standing was now occupied by two women having an animated conversation. Isabelle knew that the Oriental woman was a performance artist, but she couldn’t remember her name. The other woman was a complete stranger to her.

“Now I’m intrigued,” Kathy said. She turned, suddenly. “You don’t think it was one of your numena?”

Mostly Isabelle had gotten used to life without her otherwordly friends. She still painted an occasional gateway painting and she kept all of them safely stored away, but it was starting to get to the point when their existence seemed to be nothing more than a dream—a fading memory from the past that she wasn’t sure had ever actually been real. But then something would remind her of them and the memories would tumble back into her mind along with a blazing shock of realization that couldn’t be denied. They had been real. And she missed them terribly.

Kathy’s casual mention of her numena reawoke all those old memories and feelings. Isabelle felt a sudden tightening in her chest, but she forced herself to remain calm, to not let the memories take hold and spoil her mood.

“If he is,” she said after a moment, “he’s not one of mine.”

“Hmm.” Kathy gave her a quick smile. “I wonder if that new protege of Rushkin’s has come far enough along in her studies to bring them across. Maybe she’ll paint the perfect companion for me.”

“Oh, please.”

“Well, you won’t.”

“Trust the voice of experience,” Isabelle said. “It doesn’t work out.”

Kathy shook her head. “Sorry, but I don’t buy it. The next thing you’ll tell me is that if your relationship with the first boyfriend you ever have falls through, then you might as well just give up on ever finding another one.”

“You could be right.”

“Oh, poo. You’re far too young and attractive to become a hermit—which is what’s basically happening to you. You do know that, don’t you?”

“This from the woman who hasn’t had a steady boyfriend for as long as I’ve known her?”

“That’s different,” Kathy told her. “I’m just waiting for you to bring across the perfect numena.”

Isabelle sighed with mild exasperation.

“So until then,” Kathy added, “we’re stuck with each other.”

“That I can handle.”

“Hey, Izzy!” someone called.

Isabelle turned to see an indistinct figure approaching them. It wasn’t until she stepped into the light cast by the fire that Isabelle recognized her as Nora. With her spiky brown hair standing at attention and her baggy jacket and jeans hanging loose on her slender frame, she looked like a gamine set loose from a Dickens or Hugo novel and gone feral in this setting.

‘jack’s here with the Maypole,” Nora said when she reached them, “except he doesn’t know where you want it.”

Initially Isabelle had planned to put it in the field behind them, but it was so full of tents by now that she couldn’t see how it would fit.

“Why don’t we do put it up in that meadow you took me to this morning?” Kathy said. “The one that had all those yellow fish flowers in it.”

“Trout lilies,” Isabelle explained for Nora.

“They didn’t look anything like trout to me,” Kathy said.

“They’re called that because of their speckled leaves.”

Nora nodded. “My grandmother’s got those in her garden except she calls them adder’s-tongue.”

“An even more apt description,” Kathy said wryly. “Anyway, I think it’d be the perfect spot.”

Isabelle agreed. “I’ll come show you where it is.”

“You’ll have to show Jack yourself,” Nora said. “I think I’ve had one glass of wine too many to go traipsing off into the woods about now.”

In the end, Isabelle and Kathy both went along to help. Isabelle had to grab Kathy’s arm for a second when she first stood up, because everything went spinning.

“Are you okay?” Kathy asked.

“Too much mystery punch,” Isabelle explained.

Kathy laughed. “Too much vodka in the mystery punch is more like it.”

Jack Crow was the last person Isabelle would have approached to help her with the Maypole. He worked in a tattoo parlor and looked more like a biker, with his leathers and all his tattoos, than someone who would have gone out with Sophie for a few months. But Jilly had assured her he’d be perfect, and now that Isabelle could see his work—albeit in the light cast by a couple of flashlights—she had to agree that he’d done a wonderful job. There seemed to be hundreds of streamers of colored cloth, wrapped around the pole to transport it, each one a different color and breadth, complementary colors vibrating against each other so that the entire length of the pole appeared to pulse. Looking at the pattern they produced made Isabelle think of the cloth bracelets she’d made from Paddyjack’s ribbons. Without thinking of it, her hand strayed to her wrist, but the bracelet wasn’t there. She’d stopped wearing it a long time ago and kept it tacked to the wall of her studio. She hadn’t thought of it in months, but for some reason she missed it now.

It took them a half hour to get the Maypole to the meadow Kathy had suggested and then set it up.

The last thing they did was unwrap the streamers. A light breeze plucked at them, making them whirl and dance. Isabelle watched them, mesmerized. It seemed as though the streamers all had afterimages that pulsed and throbbed with as much energy as the streamers themselves, making a whirling kaleidoscope of moon-drenched color. For a moment she thought she could hear a rhythmic tappa-tap-tap, but it was only in her memory.

“This’ll be so perfect,” Kathy said as they stood back to admire their handiwork. “When the sun comes up to hit all those streamers, it’s going to look seriously gorgeous.”

Isabelle couldn’t imagine it looking any more magnificent than it already did.

“I hope somebody brought a camera,” Kathy added.

“I saw Meg earlier,” Isabelle assured her when she was finally able to tear her gaze from the light show of the streamers.

Meg Mullally was a photographer friend of theirs who never went anywhere without a camera or two slung over her shoulder. What with Kathy’s surname being Mully, Alan used to kid them that they had to be related somewhere back in the dim corridors of antiquity.

“I know there’s tons of people here tonight,” Jack said as they started back, “and they’re probably all over the place by now, but I can’t shake the feeling that there’s somebody else out here with us as well.”

“What kind of somebody?” Kathy asked, obviously intrigued.

“I don’t know. Somebody old and mysterious.” Isabelle could hear the embarrassment in his voice.

“Maybe ...” He cleared his throat. “Maybe, you know ... not quite human. It’s like I can feel somebody watching me, but whenever I turn around, there’s no one there. No one that I can see, at least. But I can still feel them there, watching me.”

He was sensing her numena, Isabelle realized. Time to change the subject. But before she could, Kathy piped up, her voice pitched low and serious.

“Well, the island is supposed to be haunted,” she said. “Didn’t anyone tell you?”

“Haunted?”

Isabelle gave Kathy a poke with her elbow, but Kathy pretended she didn’t feel it and simply went on.

“It’s like there are ghosts or faeries in the woods,” she said. “We don’t know what. We just know there’s something out there.”

“Yeah, right,” Jack said, and then he laughed, but Isabelle could sense a vague nervousness behind the sound. “You sound like Jilly now.” So much for his tough-guy image, she thought.

“Believe what you like,” Kathy told him.

“So have you ever, you know, seen anything?” Jack asked.

Or maybe he’s just stoned, Isabelle amended. Lord knows with the quantities of alcohol and hallucinogens being consumed tonight people would be liable to see anything. She felt a little stoned herself, rather than drunk, even though all she’d had was a couple of beers in the afternoon and then the mystery punch with her dinner.

“Well, once,” Kathy began, and then she launched into an improbable tale that borrowed as heavily from Hawthorne as it did a tabloid.

Since they’d reached the farmhouse at that point, Isabelle left them to it. She went inside, walking around and talking to people until she found herself in her studio. The bracelet she’d made from Paddyjack’s ribbons drew her attention, pulsing where it hung on the wall with the same energy as the Maypole’s streamers. She looked at it for a long moment, then took it down from the wall and put it on her wrist. She moved her arm back and forth a few times, tracking the afterimages the bracelet left, then finally went back outside again.

She stood on the porch for a long moment, trying to pinpoint exactly what it was she was feeling at the moment. Her senses seemed to have expanded, assuming far more intensity than normal, and it was getting hard to concentrate on any one thing.

Don’t go all stupid now, she told herself and walked over to the far end of the porch to rescue Alan from the attention of Denise Martin. Denise was a second-year drama student at Butler U., a beautiful, lanky eighteen-year-old with flowing blonde hair that was tied back in a French braid tonight. Ever since she’d been introduced to Alan at a party last year she’d had a mad crush on him that wasn’t reciprocated.

“I like her well enough,” Alan had confided to Isabelle and Kathy one afternoon when they were having a picnic in Fitzhenry Park, “but I just can’t relate to her on a romantic level. She’s just so young.

We don’t have anything in common.”

“A seven-year difference in age isn’t exactly a May-December kind of a thing,” Kathy had told him.

“So you go out with her.”

“She’s not exactly my type,” Kathy had said, and they all laughed.

Denise drifted away when Isabelle showed up and put her arm in the crook of Alan’s. As they talked, Isabelle looked across the farmyard to where Kathy and Jack were standing. Kathy was leaning with her back against the clapboard of the farmhouse. Jack was in front of her, one stiff arm supporting his weight against the wall as he leaned in close to talk to her. Kathy looked more bored than uncomfortable, but Isabelle decided to go over to them anyway.

“I think Kathy needs rescuing now,” she said.

She gave Alan a quick peck on the cheek and crossed the farmyard. The walk seemed to take forever. Every single thing her attention happened to fall upon was intimately distracting. When she realized that she’d slowed down so much she was almost motionless, she gave her head a quick shake and purposefully closed the distance between herself and the place where Kathy and Jack were standing.

“Come here,” she told Kathy. “I’ve got somebody I want you to meet.”

Kathy gave Jack a regretful look and happily followed Isabelle back across the farmyard. They paused when they saw Jack head off toward the cove.

“Well, I thought you and Jack were getting quite close there for a while,” Isabelle teased.

“Oh please. Do you know why he and Sophie broke up?”

“Well, I suppose it’s because they don’t really have that much in common,” Isabelle tried.

“Think again. It’s because all he ever wants to do is tattoo you.”

Isabelle laughed. “So what was he going to do for you? A rose on your ankle?”

“Would you believe a dragon on my inner thigh?”

Isabelle laughed even harder.

“Serves you right,” she finally said when she caught her breath. “The way you were going on about faeries and ghosts.”

“But there are mysterious presences on the island, ma belle Izzy.”

“Touche.”

“It’s not like I—”

“Oh wait,” Isabelle broke in. “There’s that guy again.”

Before Kathy could say anything, Isabelle bolted after the figure she’d glimpsed walking off behind the barn. Kathy started to follow, then shook her head and went into the farmhouse to get a beer instead.

“Hey, wait up!” Isabelle called as she rounded the corner of the barn but when she made the turn, no one was there.

Isabelle leaned against the side of the barn, brought up short by a sudden spell of vertigo. She stood there for a long moment, eyes closed, but that only seemed to make things worse. Weird patterns of light played against the backs of her eyelids, making her dizzier than ever. She staggered away from the barn, stumbling through the wild rosebushes until she had to lie down in the grass.

She might have lain there among the shadows of the rosebushes for minutes, or it might have been hours—she had no idea which. Time had ceased to feel linear. She looked up through the crisscrossing branches, thick with buds, into the night sky. The stars tugged at her gaze, trying to pull her up among them, or she was pulling them down to her. She was on the verge of some great discovery, she realized, but she had no idea what it was, what it related to, whether it even had anything to do with her at all.

Was she a participant, or an observer? Did the world center around her, or could it carry on quite easily without her input? Looking up at those stars, feeling the embrace of their light as it enfolded her, she felt both small and large, as though everything mattered and nothing did. When someone crouched down beside her it took years for her to turn her head to see who it was. All she could make out was a dark shape, a vague outline of head and shoulders silhouetted against the stars, the rest of the body lost in the shadows of the rosebushes.

“Hello, Isabelle,” Rushkin said.

Isabelle thought she should feel alarmed at his appearance, but she found it too hard to concentrate on being concerned. Rushkin shifted slightly on his heels and she saw that he wasn’t alone. Behind him stood another figure and for some reason she could make him out perfectly clearly. It was the old-fashioned stranger she’d been chasing before whatever had happened to her had happened. He stood there, long-limbed and handsome, with a half-smile on his lips, watching her.

“This is Benjamin,” Rushkin said. “He’s an old friend of mine. His origin dates back to before I lost the ability to bring his sort across.”

So he was a numena, Isabelle was able to think. Only not hers, and not one of Rushkin’s new protege’s either.

“We’re having a wonderful time here,” Rushkin went on. “Truly we are. But it’s time for us to go now and we were wondering where you’d put the party favors.”

Isabelle looked blankly at him. She heard what he was saying, but when he’d shifted his position earlier, it had let the moonlight fall upon his features and she was utterly bewitched now with how the light played across the road map of his wrinkles. When Rushkin fell silent and the silence dragged out, she finally realized that he was waiting for her to speak. She cast her mind back through the bewildering snarl of her memories. It was impossible for her to track anything down in a linear sense, but through random access she eventually stumbled upon a fragment of what he’d been saying.

“Favors?” she asked.

It was interesting listening to the way her voice modulated, she thought. She’d never thought about it before, but there was a world of meaning tangled up in those two syllables.

“The paintings,” Rushkin said. “I’ve come for the paintings. There’s no need to get up and fetch them for me. Simply tell me where they are and Benjamin here will help me deal with them.”

While she couldn’t muster alarm for herself at Rushkin’s appearance here on the island, her numena were another matter entirely. At Rushkin’s mention of them, she caught hold of his sleeve and pulled herself up into a sitting position. She felt as though there were bits and pieces of her mind lying all over the lawn, and she made a huge effort to gather them together and focus on the moment at hand.

“You. Can’t. Have. Them,” she said, carefully articulating each word. “Now, that’s plain ungratefulness,” Rushkin said. He looked over his shoulder. “Don’t you think, Benjamin?”

“I would never have thought it of her,” the numena agreed.

Benjamin has such a wonderful voice, Isabelle thought. So resonant. John’d had a wonderful voice as well. Maybe it was something particular to numena.

Rushkin sighed, returning his attention to her. “And after all I’ve done for you, too.”

“What ... what ..... Isabelle began, but then she lost track of what she was trying to say. The word continued to echo inside her head long after she’d spoken.

“I certainly didn’t come emptyhanded,” Rushkin told her.

“She probably doesn’t appreciate your gift,” Benjamin said.

Rushkin peered a little more closely into Isabelle’s face.

“Yet she certainly appears to have sampled it,” he said. His breath was warm on Isabelle’s cheek and smelled vaguely of cinnamon. “Potent, isn’t it, Isabelle?”

Isabelle. That was her name. She was Isabelle. Fine. But what did cinnamon and numena have to do with ... with ...

The thought was confusing enough to begin with and she simply couldn’t hold on to it any longer. She watched it flicker away, past Rushkin’s head, past where Benjamin stood, up and up, in among the stars, until it suddenly winked out like a snuffed candle, a faint glow remaining before it, too, faded and was gone. When she looked back at Rushkin’s face, his moonlit features strobed. From the farmyard came the sound of voices raised in alarm. She could hear what they were saying but it took the longest time for anything to make sense to her.

“... so it must have been in the punch.”

“... oh, shit ...”

“... had three glasses ...”

“... thought I was having a flashback, I was getting so ...”

“... spiked with ...”

“... I know acid, man, and I’m telling you this is ...”

“... feeling too weird ...”

“... cut with some serious speed ...”

“... this sucks ...”

“... if I find the asshole who ...”

“... I think he’s freaking out ...”

“... oh, man, I am gone ...”

“... somebody hold her ...”

The strangeness inside Isabelle ebbed and flowed. From only being able to see Rushkin as a light show she slipped into a long lucid moment where she clearly understood what was going on. But that was almost worse. Raw panic swept through her once she realized that it was Rushkin who had brought the jugs of punch spiked with LSD, that she, along with God knew how many others, were now tripping.

“You can give the paintings to me,” Rushkin was saying, “or I can make you give them to me, Isabelle. The choice is yours.”

She looked at him in horror. “How could ... how could you do this to us ...?”

He shrugged. “It’s a party. I thought you’d appreciate a litde excursion into an altered state of consciousness. Quick now,” he added. “I haven’t all night to waste on this.”

“Maybe we should take another look around,” Benjamin said.

Rushkin shook his head. “No. They’re here, they’re close. I can feel them. But she has them too well hidden.” His face pressed up close to hers again. “Isn’t that so, Isabelle? You thought you could hide them away from me?”

“You ... you ... monster ...”

Isabelle’s moment of lucidity was rapidly slipping away once more. Rushkin’s features began to distort, distending and receding at the same time. When he pushed a box of wooden matches into her hand, she tried not to take them but found herself gripping them tightly all the same.

“They’re in one of these buildings,” Rushkin said. “I know that much.”

In the distortion that passed for his face, his eyes seemed to glow. Isabelle couldn’t take her gaze from them. She felt cut loose from her body, adrift except for the grip of his gaze on hers.

“Tell me which one,” Rushkin said, “and we will take what we need and go.”

It took all the effort Isabelle could muster to shake her head.

“If you don’t,” Rushkin warned her, “I will make you destroy them. Your hand will set the fire that will feed me.”

Isabelle dimly remembered something Kathy had told her once about a bad acid trip she’d taken.

“The only thing you can do,” she’d told Isabelle, “is let yourself go. Fighting it just builds up the pressure.

If you let go, you just pass out and lose a few hours of your life. If you fight it, you could lose your mind.”

She glared at Rushkin. “I won’t,” she tried to say.

The words only came out as muffled sounds without meaning, but it didn’t matter. She stopped trying to control the drug, stopped fighting it. Instead she let herself fall into its embrace. She could still hear the wild uproar that rose from the general vicinity of the farmyard. She could still see Rushkin’s distorted features, pressing up against her own, his cinnamon breath clogging her nostrils. She still held the box of matches in her hand, squeezing it so tightly that the cardboard was caving in along the sides. And then it all went away. She was swallowed by an eddying vortex that took her past the amplification of all her senses to a place where there were no sights or smells or sounds. To a place where there was only silence. And darkness.

And then nothing.

XXVI

May Day, 1980

Isabelle awoke lying on her back in a grove of birch trees on the north part of the island. A wide open field edged the grove, spreading away from the trees until it went tumbling down into the lake in a series of ragged cliffs. From where she lay Isabelle could hear the sound of the lake as its waves lapped against the rocky shoreline. The sunlight burned her eyes and there was an incredibly foul taste in her mouth. She rolled over onto her stomach and felt it do a couple of slow, queasy turns before it settled down again. There was a distinctive odor in the air, but it took her a few moments to realize what it was: the charred smell of an old campfire.

Recognition of the smell ignited her memory process and it all came back to her, the whole awful train of events that had begun with her chasing Rushkin’s numena around the side of the building to finding out that she’d inadvertently ingested god knew how much acid.

She sat up very slowly and looked down at herself. Her hands and clothes were smudged with soot as though someone had taken a stick of charcoal and scribbled with it all over her body. She had no idea how it had gotten there. She could remember nothing from after she’d taken Kathy’s old advice and stopped fighting the drugs. When she let the acid take her away, her ensuing unconsciousness had swallowed all subsequent recollection.

Although not exactly, she realized as she thought a little harder. At some point she’d slipped from the oblivion of the drugs she’d ingested into a dreaming sleep. Her dreams had been horrible. The farmhouse had burned down, taking with it all her paintings. And then the numena had begun to die—frail burning bodies dropping in the farmyard, their ghastly remains lit by the roaring inferno that the farmhouse had become. She remembered taking them in her arms, trying to ease the pain of their dying, her cheeks streaked with tears, her heart breaking. She’d been unaware of the people around her, but then most of them had been stoned as well and paying little attention to either her or the dying numena, everyone so far gone that the farmhouse was long past saving before anyone could think to fight the fire ....

A deep coldness entered Isabelle and everything went still inside her. She looked at her hands again.

If that had been a dream, then why were her hands and clothes all black?

Slowly she made her way from the birch grove and looked south. On the far side of the island she could see a thin tendril of smoke rising up above the canopy of the forest. The coldness penetrated her, settling deep in her chest so that she felt her heart and lungs were encrusted with frost. She floundered in the general direction of the farmhouse, not wanting to go, but unable to stop herself from moving toward it. When she reached the meadow where the Maypole stood, she took a moment to rest. The beribboned pole looked so forlorn. There was no breeze and its streamers hung limply along its length.

Maypole.

For May Day.

Mayday. SOS.

She remembered Rushkin and his numena finding her behind the barn. Remembered Rushkin demanding she give him her own numena paintings. Remembered him pressing the box of matches into her hand.

I will make you destroy them. Your hand will feed the fire that will feed me.

She shook her head. No. She couldn’t have done it. Even messed up on drugs, there was no way she could have done it.

She stumbled on, away from the Maypole, along the familiar forest path that wound through the trees and up to the hill where the farmhouse stood. Her progress was slow and halting, but eventually she emerged from the cover of the trees. She stood there in that borderland between the wild wood and the cultivated gardens that surrounded the farmyard and stared bleakly at the ruins of her home. The fieldstone chimney of the farmhouse, its stones blackened with soot, was all that remained. Everything else had been reduced to charred timbers and ashes. The smell of smoke was cloyingly thick here.

Numbly, she looked around the farmyard, but there was no sign of the dead numena. There were only her friends, standing about looking as shaken as she herself felt. A red-haired figure detached herself from one group of muted on-lookers and hurried up to her.

“Oh, ma belle Izzy,” Kathy said, putting her arms around Isabelle’s shoulders. “I’m so sorry.”

“I ... I didn’t do it,” Isabelle said.

“Do what?” Kathy asked.

Isabelle pointed a trembling hand toward the ruins of the farmhouse. “He tried to make me, but I swear I didn’t do it.”

“Who tried to make you?”

“Rushkin.”

“Did he spike the punch?” Kathy asked.

Isabelle nodded.

“I’ll kill that bastard,” Kathy said. “I swear I will.”

All Isabelle could do was stare at the smoldering ruins of her home. The farmhouse had always been there, so far as she was concerned. It had stood there before she was born and she’d always assumed it would still be there, long after she herself was dead. It seemed inconceivable that it was gone. The farmhouse and her paintings.

“The ... the numena paintings,” she asked, gaze locked on the charred timbers that lay in front of her.

Had that been one of the rafters? Had that been the carved wood of the mantelpiece? “Did anyone save the paintings?”

Kathy hesitated for a moment, then said, “Everybody was too screwed up to think straight. And only you and I knew about the numena. By the time I got back to the farmhouse, it was too late to get up to the attic.”

“So they’re all gone,” Isabelle said. “He got them all.” She turned an anguished face to Kathy. “He got John,” she said.

Kathy held her more tightly.

“Was ... was I here?” Isabelle asked. “When it was burning?”

“I don’t know,” Kathy told her. “It was craziness. Everybody was stoned and ...” She shrugged helplessly. “I looked for you,” she said. “I’ve been looking for you all morning. But I didn’t see you last night—not when the farmhouse was ... burning.”

Isabelle turned to regard the charred remains of the farmhouse once more. Her hands were closed into fists at her side, fingernails making half-moon indentations in her palms.

Think, she told herself. For once just think, don’t hide the memory away.

She forced herself to remember but all that came was old truths that she’d hidden away, from herself perhaps more than from the world: John hadn’t walked out on her, she’d sent him away. She hadn’t been mugged by street punks, Rushkin had beaten her. Tangled up in those two major truths was the real story behind a hundred and one of the other lies she’d told herself over the years, told herself so convincingly that she actually believed them. But of last night she could remember only one thing: Rushkin pressing the matches into her hand.

I will make you destroy them.

Could anyone have that much control over another person? Could they make them do something so evil?

Your hand will feed the fire that will feed me.

She looked down at the soot that was ground into her palms and fingers, then pressed her face against Kathy’s shoulder. The coldness that had entered her earlier was a part other now, burrowed deep inside her, and she knew she would never be free of it again.

XXVII

Newford, May 1980

It was a week after the fire before Isabelle felt strong enough to confront Rushkin. She went to his studio with Kathy, but of course he denied any involvement whatsoever, denied even being in the area that night. He claimed to have been in New York at the time and even had the airline boarding passes and hotel receipts to prove it.

Isabelle stared dumbly at him, unable to believe that she’d hallucinated the entire encounter with him and his numena, but unable to prove that he was lying as well. She only half listened to his condolences for the loss of her home and her paintings. All she could do was remember waking up with the soot on her hands and clothes and feel sick. Eventually, she let Kathy lead her away, back to Kathy’s apartment on Gracie Street, where the two of them were staying.

Isabelle never returned to Rushkin’s studio.

XXVIII

June 1980

Isabelle came to a decision after the night of the fire. It was too late for her own numena. They were gone now, except for the very few whose paintings had not been at the farmhouse and so had survived the fire. Rosalind and Cosette, both hanging in the Newford Children’s Foundation. Annie Nin in Alan’s apartment. A handful of others, given away or sold to people other than Rushkin’s lawyer. But that was it. So few survivors out of the almost hundred numena she’d brought across.

There would be no more. She couldn’t stop painting, but she vowed to open no more gateways for others to cross over. She didn’t care if they made the decision, she was still responsible. If she didn’t open the door for them, they wouldn’t come through and die. She’d miss painting them, she knew, but that was the price to pay—a small enough price considering what her art had cost the numena. She would only lose a part of her art; they had lost their lives. To stop herself from even being tempted to render another numena, she turned her back completely on her previous work and embraced abstract expressionism.

But that didn’t solve the problem. There were others who could open those gates.

Just before dinner one night, she left the studio she was sharing with Sophie until the renovations on the island were completed and made her way across the Kelly Street Bridge to the art department at Butler University. There was a students’ show on in the arts building, and she paused for a long time in front of the two paintings by Barbara Nichols that hung in it.

They were both Ferryside street scenes. The detailing, the use of light, everything about them was stunning. Looking at these examples of Nichols’s work, Isabelle could easily see what had attracted Rushkin to the young artist. In fact, she could already see elements of Rushkin in the two paintings—not in the style so much but, as Tom had once pointed out to her, in the way Nichols viewed her subjects.

She approached the street scenes in the way that Rushkin would have. In the way that Isabelle herself would have, had she been painting these particular cityscapes.

After a while, she turned away and went looking for someone who might be able to help her find the artist. She talked to a number of people who knew Nichols, but no one seemed to know where Isabelle could look for her at the moment until she chanced upon a young artist working in one of the second-floor studios. He was a tall and somewhat gangly boy in his late teens, straw-colored hair cut short in a buzz cut, shoulders already stooped. She stood in the doorway for a few moments to watch him work, admiring the vigor of his brushstrokes, until he suddenly became aware of her presence and turned to look at her. His eyes were a pale blue and bulged slightly, giving him a birdlike look of constant surprise.

“She mentioned something about putting in a little study time at the library,” he said in response to Isabelle’s question. “If she’s not there, try Kathryn’s Cafe over on Battersfield. It’s where everybody hangs out.”

“I know the place.”

Some things never changed, Isabelle thought. Kathryn’s had been the university art crowd’s hangout when she’d gone to Butler U. as well. “Okay. Well ...”

His body language was so obvious. All he wanted was for her to leave so that he could get back to work. Isabelle knew just how he felt, but she had one more question.

“What does she look like?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Short dark hair, narrow features, very intense eyes. Kind of scrawny.” Isabelle had to smile; he wasn’t exactly Mr. Universe himself. “She was wearing cutoff jeans and a T-shirt with a print of Monet’s lilies on it when I saw her this afternoon.”

“Thanks. You’ve been a lot of help.”

“Whatever.”

He was back at his painting before she had a chance to turn around and leave the studio. She found herself envious of him as she retraced her way out of the building. What muse drove him? she wondered, although what she was really asking was, what would it have been like for her if she’d never met Rushkin? Or what if she’d just said no to him that day on the steps of St. Paul’s, or hadn’t gone to his studio? Where would her art be now? Who would she be?

Silly questions, she thought, because in some ways she didn’t feel as if she’d ever had any sort of a choice in the matter. She’d already been enamored with his art, long before she met him. It was part of what had set her to taking a paintbrush in hand in the first place. When the opportunity arose for her to study under him, it often had seemed to be simple fate. A magical gift. But then, just like in all those fairy tales that Kathy loved so much, there was always a price to be paid for accepting magical gifts, wasn’t there? Too dear a price.

With her informant’s description in mind, she found it easy to spot Nichols. She matched the boy’s description perfectly, except Isabelle wouldn’t have called her scrawny. Trim was the word that came to Isabelle’s mind. And certainly attractive. Her eyes were almost the same intense blue as Jilly’s. Isabelle wondered if Rushkin had made her strip down for him on her first day in the studio, too, and felt a surge of sympathy for the girl.

She was leaving the library at the same time as Isabelle was coming up the stone steps. The chill that had yet to leave Isabelle deepened for a moment as she realized the significance of where they were meeting. She touched the cloth bracelet she’d taken to wearing again, trying not to think of John as she continued up the steps and called Nichols by name.

“Oh please,” Nichols said. “Call me Barb. ‘Ms. Nichols’ makes me think of my mother.”

Isabelle smiled. When she introduced herself, Barb’s eyes softened with compassion.

“I heard about the fire,” she said. “You must have been devastated.”

Isabelle glanced at the space beside the stone lion where John had once stood and talked to her from the shadows. She could almost feel his ghost there, could almost hear his voice again. Her fingers were turning the bracelet around and around her wrist without her being aware of doing it.

“I still am,” she admitted.

“This is so weird,” Barb said. “I mean, standing here, talking to you. You’re one of my heroes.”

Isabelle could feel the heat rise in her face.

“I just love your work,” Barb went on, “and when I think of what happened to it, it just makes me feel so sick that—” She broke off. “I’m sorry. You’re probably trying to forget, and here all I’m doing is reminding you about it.”

“It’s not something you can forget,” Isabelle told her. When she thought of how she’d failed her numena, she added, “I don’t think it’s something one should forget.”

Barb gave her an odd look, but Isabelle didn’t explain what she meant. She didn’t know how to explain.

“I wanted to talk to you about Rushkin,” she said. “I don’t know where to begin, but ever since I heard that you’ve been studying with him I felt I should warn you ....”

Her voice trailed off at the dismissive look that settled on Barb’s features.

“Rushkin,” she said bitterly. “I was so excited when he first approached me to work with him.” She gave Isabelle a knowing look. “You’re probably the only person besides me who would understand just how thrilling it felt to be walking down that laneway and then climbing the stairs up to his studio.”

Isabelle nodded. “So what happened?”

“Probably the same thing that happened to you. I mean, I could tell right off that he was a control freak, but I thought, Okay. It’ll be worth it to put up with some weird shit if I get to paint like him—or like you.”

Isabelle tried to ignore the compliment. She wanted to ask about numena.

What had Rushkin told her about them? How many had Barb brought across? But before she could start to frame the question, if only in her mind, Barb went on.

“The first time he hit me, I let it pass.” She looked away, across the campus, and wouldn’t meet Isabelle’s gaze for a moment. “I didn’t like it,” she added, her voice pitched low, “but he put on such a good show, he was so bloody sorry that I was stupid enough to buy what he was saying and stay.”

“Until it happened again,” Isabelle said.

Barb nodded. “I couldn’t believe it. I mean, I really couldn’t believe—that’s how stupid I was—but I was mad, too. I hit him back. I picked up the canvas I was working on and just laid it across the side of his head. And then, while he was lying there trying to make me feel sorry for him, I packed up my stuff and left.”

A great admiration for her companion rose up in Isabelle. Where had her own anger been when Rushkin had struck her? Swallowed by her greed to learn from him, she realized. Her anger and her courage and her integrity had all been put aside by her greed. Or was it also part of a pattern that she’d learned from her mother? The way her mother had always sat by helpless through all the verbal abuse Isabelle had to endure from her father?

“I haven’t been back since,” Barb said. She finally looked at Isabelle and gave her a wan smile.

“Was that what you were going to warn me about?”

She doesn’t know anything about the numena, Isabelle realized.

“I wanted to tell you as soon as I heard you were studying under him,” she said. It was only partly a lie. Her first concern had been for the numena, it was true, but she had been thinking about Barb as well.

She’d wanted to spare Barb the pain she’d gone through herself. “I just didn’t know how to approach you. I thought you’d think it was sour grapes, that I was jealous because you’d taken my place in his studio.”

Barb nodded. “I don’t know what I would have thought before it happened. I knew from the first day that he was wired a little wrong. But I could deal with his yelling at me. My father used to yell at me all the time. He only ever hit me once. I left home that night and I’ve never been back.” She gave Isabelle a puzzled look. “Weird, isn’t it? I gave Rushkin more of a chance than I did my own father.”

“My father used to yell at me, too,” Isabelle said. “He was always picking away at me—when he wasn’t giving me the cold shoulder. But he never hit me. Not like—” Her mind’s eye filled with a vision of that winter day in the studio, Rushkin kicking her and beating her, then finally throwing her down the stairs to make her own way home. “Not like Rushkin did.”

“I still don’t get it,” Barb said. “He’s responsible for some of the most ten-der, moving works of art that anyone has ever produced. How can he also be the way he is?”

“I guess we expected too much,” Isabelle said. “We didn’t separate the work from the man who created it.”

“How can you? When the work is so heartfelt, how can it be separated from the artist?”

Isabelle didn’t have an answer for that. It was a question she’d often asked herself. She’d come no closer to answering it than Barb had.

“Listen,” Barb said. “I don’t mean to be rude, but talking about all of this—it’s been good, you know to share it with someone, and I really appreciate having had the chance to meet you, but I feel a little screwed up thinking about all that shit again. I’ve got to go.”

“I understand,” Isabelle said. “But before you go ...”

She asked for Barb’s phone number, explaining how she wanted to give it to Alan, how it might generate some work for her. Barb scribbled the seven digits down in the back of her sketchbook, then tore out the page and handed it to Isabelle.

“I can’t promise anything,” Isabelle said.

“I understand.”

“But I’ll give it to Albina Sprech, as well,” Isabelle added. “She owns The Green Man Gallery.”

“Really? That’d be great. I haven’t been able to get my foot in the door anywhere. It’s really an old boy’s network out there.”

“Maybe we can change that,” Isabelle said.

Barb laughed humorlessly. “I guess we can try.”

“Look, I’m sorry about bringing this all up for you again. I never realized you’d already stopped studying with Rushkin. If I had, I wouldn’t have come bothering you.”

“Don’t be sorry. It gave me a chance to meet you, didn’t it?”

Before Isabelle had a chance to get flustered all over again by the young artist’s admiration for her work, Barb fled as though chased by the ghosts that had been called up by their conversation. Isabelle stood alone on the library steps, lost in thought, until the press of her own ghosts made her leave as well.

She didn’t go as quickly as Barb had, but she walked briskly all the same. And she didn’t look back.