Memory and Dream

The Bohemian Girl

I

Newford, December 1973

“And where do you think you’re going with that?” Rushkin demanded.

It was just after lunch, two weeks before Christmas, and Izzy was getting ready to leave the studio for a class she had that afternoon at the university. She looked up from where she’d been putting a small canvas into her knapsack to see Rushkin glaring at her. The subject of the painting in question was a still life of three old leather-bound books and a rose in a tall vase, surrounded by a scattering of pen holders and nibs. She’d finished the piece a few weeks earlier and had been waiting for it to be dry enough to take home.

“It’s a present for my roommate,” she said, not hearing the warning bells that rang faintly in the back of her mind. “For Christmas.”

“For Christmas. I see. I’d thought we had a certain set of rules concerning the work you do while you are in this studio, but I can see I was mistaken.”

A hollow feeling settled in Izzy’s stomach. She read the warning signs now, but knew she was seeing them too late.

“N-no,” she said nervously. “You’re not mistaken. I ... I just forgot.” Rushkin had been adamant from the first that everything she did in the studio remained in the studio until he said otherwise. He wouldn’t explain why, and he wouldn’t allow any exceptions. “I didn’t think you’d mind.”

“No, of course you wouldn’t.” She could see the rage building up in his eyes, hear the growing vehemence in every word. “I’m merely here to provide you with a workspace and supplies so that you can shower your friends with the pitiful fruits of your labor that exist only through my largesse.”

“It’s not like that ....”

“You certainly aren’t learning anything, are you?”

“But—”

He strode across the wooden floor and tugged the canvas from her hands. He held it gingerly, his severe look of distaste giving the impression that she’d rendered it in dog shit.

“My god,” he said. “Will you look at this? It gives a whole new meaning to the concept of naive art.”

Izzy had thought it the best piece she’d done yet. It had been the first time that she really felt as though she’d managed to capture light in one of her oils: the way it fell across the various textures of her subjects, the glowing sheen and pronounced shadow on the leather of the books, the delicacy of the rose’s petals, the sparks of highlight on the pen nibs. She’d titled it By Any Name, knowing that Kathy would appreciate the literary allusion of both the title and subject.

“What could you have been thinking of?” Rushkin wanted to know.

“I ... I just thought Kathy would ... would like it,” she said. “She’s a ... writer ....”

“A writer.”

Izzy nodded.

Rushkin lowered the painting and studied her. His fierce scowl did little to ease the unhappy feeling that had grown inside her. She felt sick and dizzy and all she wanted was to be anywhere else but here.

“You think me unfair, don’t you?” Rushkin said softly.

Izzy knew better than to reply.

“Did you ever stop to wonder why I would make such a rule? Did you ever think that I’m doing it for you as well as myself? Do you not think that a certain level of competency might be appreciated before you begin handing out your work to all and sundry? For the sake of my reputation, and that of my studio, if not for your own?”

“But, it’s just my friend Kathy,” Izzy protested before she realized what she was doing.

“Fine!” Rushkin roared.

He threw the painting at where she was sitting on the floor, looking up at him. A side of the small canvas caught her in the midriff. Surprise, more than the actual force of the blow, made her lose her balance and fall backward, gasping for breath.

“Take the painting!” Rushkin cried. “Take it and yourself and get out. But don’t you dare come crawling back to me. Do you understand me?”

Izzy lay where she’d fallen, arms folded over her stomach. Her body shook with an uncontrollable trembling.

“I ... I didn’t mean to—” she began.

“Stop contradicting me!”

Suddenly he was standing directly over her. She tried to scrabble away from him, but her hands and feet could get no purchase on the smooth floor and he was too quick. His shoe lashed out and he caught her in the side with its hard leather toe. Pain flared, white and hot. Tears sprang in her eyes, blinding her.

“How dare you contradict me?”

Izzy curled up into a fetal position, trying to protect herself from his foot, but he kicked her again.

And again. She heard a voice crying for mercy and only recognized it as her own when the blows finally stopped.

“Oh my god,” Rushkin said. “What have I done? What have I done?”

She tried to escape his touch, but he knelt on the floor beside her and gathered her close to his chest, stroking her hair, his voice choked and filled with horror until he could speak no more and all he could do was weep.

They seemed to hold that tableau forever, but finally Rushkin’s grip loos-ened and Izzy managed to extricate herself from his embrace. She moved away from him, but didn’t feel strong enough to get to her feet. Her torso and legs were bruised and every movement she made hurt. It even hurt to breathe. She wanted to get up and flee, but the most she could manage was to wrap her arms around herself and stare at the pitiful figure Rushkin cut, her vision still blurry with tears.

Rushkin knelt in front of her, head bowed down to the floor. He had stopped weeping, but when he finally lifted his face, his cheeks were glistening.

“You ... you should go,” he said, his gravelly voice strained with emotion. “I am a monster and I don’t deserve to be in the same room as you. God knows why you’ve put up with me.”

“Why ..... Izzy began. She paused, rubbed her nose on her sleeve and cleared her throat. “Why do you ... hurt me?”

Rushkin shook his head. “I wish to god I knew. I ... A blind rage comes over me, as overpowering as my need to paint. Sometimes I think it’s the dark side of my muse: the side of her that craves destruction and despair.”

His gaze fixed on Izzy, but she remained silent. What he was telling her only made her feel more confused than ever.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he went on, lowering his gaze once more. “I’m making excuses, rather than taking responsibility for my brutality. But when that rage comes upon me, I am no longer in control. It is as though I have been possessed. The monster rises up and I can do nothing but weep at what it leaves in its wake.”

Rushkin lifted his head. “I’m sorry. None of what I’m saying can alleviate in any way the repugnance towards me that you must be feeling.” He rose slowly to his feet. “You should go home. Let me call you a cab—or ... or do you need to go to the hospital?”

Izzy slowly shook her head. She was bruised and sore, but the last thing in the world she wanted was to have some doctor pushing and prodding away at her. And how would she explain what had happened to her? It would be so humiliating.

She flinched as Rushkin stepped toward her, but he was only retrieving her painting. He placed it in her knapsack, then closed the fastenings.

She didn’t flinch as he approached her again, but she rose to her feet under her own steam. Rushkin didn’t offer to help her up. He merely waited for her to put on her coat, then handed her the knapsack.

“That ... that painting,” she said.

“Please. Take it. It’s yours,” he said contritely. “It has a certain charm and I’m sure it will delight your friend.”

Izzy nodded. “Thanks,” she said. She hesitated, then added: “Can I ask you something personal?”

“Certainly.”

“Have you ... have you thought of seeing somebody about this problem you’ve got with your temper?

Like a ... a therapist of some sort?”

She almost expected him to fly into another rage, but all he did was slowly shake his head.

“Look at me,” he said. “I have the appearance of a monster. Why shouldn’t I carry one inside me as well?”

Izzy did look at him and realized then that her familiarity with him had changed the way she viewed him. She didn’t see him as ugly at all anymore. He was just Rushkin.

“That doesn’t have to be true,” she said.

“If you really believe that, then I will do it.”

“You’ll get some help?”

Rushkin nodded. “Consider it a promise. And thank you, Isabelle.”

“What do you have to thank me for?”

“For showing me the charity that you have after what I’ve done to you.”

“If you really mean it,” Izzy said, “then I want to keep coming back to the studio.”

“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” Rushkin told her. “A therapist might well not be able to help me and even if I should have success, there’s no guarantee that the monster won’t arise again before the process is completed.”

“But if you’re going to do this, I can’t just walk out on you,” Izzy told him. “I can’t let you go through it alone.”

Rushkin shook his head in slow amazement. “You have a spirit as generous as it is talented,” he said.

Izzy lowered her head as a hot flush rose up her neck and spread across her cheeks.

“I will phone my doctor this afternoon,” Rushkin said, “and ask him to refer me to someone as soon as possible. Still, I think we should take a break for a few weeks.”

“But—”

Rushkin smiled and wagged a finger at her. “You’ve been working hard and you deserve a rest. You can return in the new year.”

“You’ll be okay?”

Rushkin nodded. “With the faith you’ve shown me, how could I be otherwise?”

Izzy surprised herself as well as him then. Before he was quite aware of what she was doing, she stepped up to him and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. “Merry Christmas, Vincent,” she said, and then she fled.

II

Newford, May 1974

Feeney’s Kitchen was busy Friday night, crowded and loud. Smoke hung thick in the air and not all of it originated from tobacco. On stage a four-piece Celtic group called Marrowbones was ripping through a set of Irish reels, and the small dance floor was filled with jostling bodies attempting their own idiosyncratic versions of Irish step dancing, flinging themselves about with great and joyous abandon.

Izzy sat at a table near the back with Kathy and Jilly, enjoying the raucous mood for all that it made conversation next to impossible. It was only when the band took a break that they could talk with any hope of understanding each other. After the waitress brought them another pitcher of beer, the conversation got around to a discussion of the benefits of a fine-arts curriculum at a university such as Butler as opposed to an apprenticeship under an established artist. Izzy, being the only one of the three involved in both, found herself elaborating on one of Rushkin’s theories, which brought cries of elitism from both her companions.

“That’s where Rushkin’s got it all wrong,” Jilly argued. “There’s no one way to approach art; there’s no right way. So long as you apply yourself with honesty and create from the heart, the end result is truthful. It might not be good, per se, but it still has worth. And I think that goes for any creative endeavor.”

“Amen,” Kathy said.

“But without the proper technique, you don’t have the tools to work with.”

Jilly nodded. “Sure. I agree with that. You can teach technique; just as you can teach art history and theory. But you can’t teach the use to which a person puts their technique and theory. You can’t tell someone what to have in their heart, what they need to express.”

“You mean their passion,” Izzy said.

“Exactly. You can nurture it in somebody, but you can’t teach it.”

Over the course of the past nine months, Izzy had begun to approach the heart of Rushkin’s alchemical secret in her own work; she could feel something opening up inside her, the way a window seemed to open in a canvas sometimes and the painting almost appeared to create itself. But she’d also come to accept the truth of what Rushkin had meant about a new language being required to explain it.

She wanted to share what she was learning with her friends, especially with Jilly since it so specifically applied to the visual arts, but as they sat here talking she realized that they really didn’t have access to the same lexicon she had come to acquire studying under Rushkin. And without it, she was helpless to do more than fumble for words that simply didn’t exist.

“But what if you could teach passion?” she asked. “What if there was a way to take a piece of yourself and put it into the canvas?”

“But isn’t that what art’s all about?” Jilly said.

“The same goes for writing,” Kathy added.

“Yes, I know,” Izzy said. “But what if that process could be taught?”

Dilly topped off their glasses from the draft-beer pitcher and took a sip from her own. “If Rushkin’s been telling you that, he’s pulling a scam. I’ll grant you that working with an artist of his caliber, you couldn’t help but feel you were privy to secret techniques, but when it comes down to the crunch, everything worth anything still has to originate from inside yourself.”

But it does, Izzy wanted to tell her. It’s just with what I’m learning, that process is so much more intense, and the end result so much closer to the original vision. But she knew it was pointless. They’d been having variations on this conversation for a couple of months now, but their disparate vocabularies remained an insurmountable barrier.

“All language was one, once,” Rushkin had explained to her when he was in one of his conversational moods. “Then we tried to not only touch God, but to think of ourselves as gods as well, and our tower was brought tumbling down about our ears. It wasn’t just language that splintered on that day, but all the arts. We lost our ability to communicate in every medium—not just with words—and that original language has all but vanished from the world.

“What we’re doing here in this studio is trying to reclaim a portion of the original language, an echo of it. We are desperate voices, trapped in Babylon, seeking what we lost and coming close—so very close; that and no more. Imagine what we could do if we could actually learn to speak that ancient tongue.”

It made so much sense when Rushkin spoke to her of it, but Izzy couldn’t seem to translate it when she tried to repeat what she was learning to her friends.

“You should attend more of Dapple’s lectures next year,” filly said. “Just before the finals he got us all into this really interesting dialogue about what we were doing with our art, where we wanted to go with it and why.”

Izzy gave up trying, as she invariably did, and went with the new turn their conversation had taken.

“You really like Professor Dapple, don’t you?”

“He’s been great to me,” filly said. “He’s even going to let me use one of his spare rooms as a studio over the summer. Someone else was using it last year and they left behind all kinds of supplies. He said I could use whatever I wanted for myself.”

Kathy laughed. “Sounds like he’s got the hots for you.”

“Oh please.”

“Well, really.”

Jilly shook her head. “What about you, Izzy?” she asked. “Are you going to work at Rushkin’s studio full-time until school starts up next year?”

“Actually, I don’t know if I’m going back to school next year.”

“That’s the first I’ve heard of this,” Kathy said. “What’s going on?”

Izzy sighed. “My scholarship’s dependent on my keeping up my grades and I was stretched so thin this year that all I managed was a C-minus average. That’s not enough, so the scholarship’s been cut off.

I won’t be able to afford to go back in the fall.”

“What about your parents?” filly asked.

“They don’t have any money, or if they do, they’re not telling me about it. They think I’m wasting my time anyway.”

“But your work’s so good. Did you tell them about Rushkin choosing you and how he’s never taken on a student before? Well,” she added, “at least none that anybody I know has ever heard of. I’ve learned more about him from you than I think any of our art history profs know.”

“I told them,” Izzy said, “but my father’s really down on the whole idea of my becoming an artist. My mother’s not so bad, but he’s basically written me off as a lost cause. We don’t talk about it anymore.

Actually, we don’t talk anymore, period.”

“You should have told me,” Kathy said.

“I didn’t know how to,” Izzy said. “It means I have to leave residence, and I’m going to miss you so much, that I just ...” She shrugged helplessly.

“We’ll get a place together,” Kathy said. “Off campus. Alan says there’s all these really cheap bachelors and lofts available on Waterhouse Street. He’s planning to move into one himself on the fifteenth.”

“I’m living in a rooming house just a couple of blocks north,” Jilly said. “It’s a great area, cheap but still pretty. There’s all sorts of artists and musicians living around there. You’d love it, Izzy.”

Kathy nodded. “We’ll be a real community. And you could get a student loan.”

“I don’t know.”

“And you could sell some of your paintings,” Jilly said. “You must have a ton of them by now. I know a gallery you could show them to. I can’t guarantee they’d take them, but you could try.”

“Or sell them down by the Pier to the tourists,” Kathy said.

Jilly nodded. “Sophie sells pen-and-ink sketches of Newford landmarks there on the weekends and she says sometimes she makes a real killing.”

Izzy regarded her friends through a film of tears that blurred her gaze. She’d been so depressed, trying to figure out how to break the news to Kathy, trying to figure out what she was going to do for money. She wanted to stay in the city, to be close to her friends and keep studying under Rushkin. She wanted to finish her B.A. at Butler. But mostly she refused to crawl back to the farm, dragging her tail between her legs and proving her father right.

“You guys are so great,” she said. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.” Kathy took her hand and gave it a squeeze. “That’s what friends are for, ma belle Izzy. Don’t worry. Everything’s going to work out fine.”

III

Jilly’s got this friend at a gallery who’ll look at my work, you see,” Izzy said.

She eyed Rushkin nervously, but he merely nodded a “yes, go on” in response. His features gave away nothing of what he was thinking, which only made Izzy feel more jittery. Although he hadn’t hit her again since that last time just before Christmas, some things hadn’t changed. He was still dictatorial and bad-tempered, needing very little provocation to launch into a scathing tirade of verbal abuse. She’d tried to be supportive about his therapy, but he simply wouldn’t discuss it, and though it was true that he hadn’t laid a hand on her again, there were many times she went home in tears. She would sit up, unable to sleep, trying to understand why she put up with all she did from him, vowing that she’d have it out with him, once and for all. Except invariably, once she arrived at the studio the next day, he’d be warm and supportive, and all her good intentions would drain away, if not her confusion.

He had a hold on her that went beyond their student-teacher relationship and she knew it wasn’t healthy. She admired him tremendously, for his talent and his insight and his dedication to his art, but he also seemed to mesmerize her, and in so doing, exacted far too much control over her. His moods ruled their relationship, and she often got a headache trying to second-guess what he was thinking or how he would react to even the most innocuous comment or incident.

It had taken all her courage this morning to bring up the question of taking some of her work into a gallery, and even so she could only approach it by a circuitous route.

“So I thought maybe I’d do that,” she went on, “because I’m really broke and I need the money to get an apartment.”

She kept expecting him to explode into one of his rages, but his features remained a bland mask. His apparent calm fed her jumpiness, making it increasingly more difficult for her to go on, never mind actually come right out and ask him what she wanted. In the end, all she could do was stand there beside her easel, fiddling with a cleaning rag, unable to finish.

“And how is it that I enter the equation?” Rushkin finally asked.

“Well, the only paintings I have that are any good—that I think are any good—are here.”

“And you want me to help you choose which ones to take in?”

Was it going to be this easy? Izzy thought. Unable to trust her voice, she nodded in response.

“What was the name of the gallery again?”

“The ... Green Man.”

“I see,” Rushkin said. And then he said the last thing she’d been expecting. “Well, I think it would be an excellent venue—not so highbrow that your work might be diminished in comparison to that of their more established artists, yet with enough of a reputation to insure that the paintings will be viewed with some seriousness.”

“You mean it’s okay?”

“Your ability has been progressing by leaps and bounds,” Rushkin told her, “and I think you are due some recompense for the dedication you’ve shown to date.”

Thank god she’d caught him in a good mood, Izzy thought.

“Besides,” he added with a smile. “I can’t have you sleeping in alleyways. Think of what it would do for my studio’s reputation if the word ever got out that I drove my best student into penury.”

The morning took on a surreal quality for Izzy. From Rushkin’s actually cracking a joke, to his helping her choose and frame a half-dozen paintings, none of it seemed real. It was as though she’d strayed into an alternate world where everything was almost, but not quite, the same. She wasn’t complaining, though. The Rushkin of this hypothetical other world was such good company that she wanted to stay here with him forever.

Still, obliging and good-natured as he was, the old Rushkin hadn’t entirely disappeared. The choices he made seemed so arbitrary at times that Izzy couldn’t fathom what his reasoning might be. More than once he would pass over a preferable painting for one that Izzy knew was clearly inferior by comparison.

The ones he picked weren’t bad by any means; they just weren’t the best of what she’d done.

“What about this one?” she dared to ask, when Rushkin set aside the painting she’d done of the oak tree outside her dorm at the university. She was particularly proud of how it had all come together, from the first value sketches all the way through to the final painting on canvas.

But Rushkin shook his head. “No. That one has a soul. You must never sell a work that has a soul.”

“But shouldn’t they all have soul?” Izzy asked. “I mean, to be any good?”

“You confuse painting with heart with a painting having heart. Artists must always put the whole of themselves into their work for it to have any meaning—this, I think, we can agree to be a given. But sometimes a painting takes on a spirit of its own, independent of what we have brought to it. Such works require our respect and should never be treated as a commodity.”

Izzy looked around the studio at the vast array of Rushkin’s paintings that hung from the walls and were stacked in untidy piles throughout. “Is that why these are here?” she asked.

Rushkin smiled. “Some. The rest are failures.”

“I’d give my eyeteeth to be able to produce ‘failures’ like these,” Izzy said. Rushkin made no response.

“Why don’t you show your work anymore?” Izzy wanted to know. The air of easy companionship in the studio this morning was making her feel bold. “I’m no longer hungry,” he replied.

“But it’s not just about making a living, is it?” Izzy said, shocked at his response. “That’s not why we do this.”

Rushkin looked at her with interest. “Then why do you paint?”

“To communicate. To share the way I see the world.”

“Ah. But to whom do you communicate? Or rather, which is more important: your viewing audience—those potential purchasers—or Art itself?”

“I’m not sure I follow what you’re saying. How can we communicate with art?”

“Not with art,” Rushkin said, “but the spirit of art. The muse who whispers in our ears, who cajoles and demands and won’t be silent or leave us in peace until we have done her will.”

He gave her an expectant look, but Izzy didn’t know how to reply to that. She knew about being inspired—what most people meant when they spoke of a muse—but Rushkin spoke as if it was an actual person who came to him and wouldn’t let him rest until she’d gotten what she needed from him.

“You’ll see,” Rushkin told her after a few moments.

“What’ll I see?”

But Rushkin was finished with that conversation now. “It’s a good thing we’ve had you working in such standard sizes,” he said. “I think I have finished frames for all the pieces we’ve chosen. Help me bring them up from the store-room, will you?”

Izzy knew better than to press any further. She followed him downstairs and they spent the remainder of the morning framing the paintings Rushkin had chosen and carefully wrapping each of them for transit.

“How were you planning to take them to the gallery?” Rushkin asked when they were finally done.

“My friend Alan’s waiting for me to call. He’s going to drive me over.”

When Alan arrived, Rushkin helped them lug the paintings down to Alan’s car. He shook hands with Alan, wished Izzy good luck, then disappeared back into his studio before Izzy had time to thank him for all his help. She adjusted the paintings in the backseat of Alan’s Volkswagon one last time, then got into the passenger’s seat beside him.

“So that’s Rushkin,” Alan said as they pulled away from the curb. Izzy nodded.

“He’s not at all like what I expected.”

Izzy glanced over at him. “What were you expecting?”

“I thought he’d be more like that drawing you showed me of him last year.”

“Like it how?”

“Well, more grotesque, I suppose. I didn’t realize you’d done a caricature.”

“But I didn’t do a caricature ...”

“Whoops,” Alan said. He gave a quick embarrassed laugh. “I guess I put my foot in my mouth this time, didn’t I? Look, don’t pay any attention to me, Izzy. What the hell do I know about art? Hey, are you and Kathy really planning to get a place on my block?”

“If we can afford it.”

She let him steer the conversation away, but she couldn’t get what he’d said out of her mind. She knew that all artists had blind spots in how they perceived their own work, thinking it better than it was, or worse, but she hadn’t thought that she could have gone that far astray when she’d redone her sketch of Rushkin last September. Granted, she hadn’t had him sitting in front of her the way he’d been in the original drawing that he’d taken away with him when he left, but still ...

IV

Albina Sprech—the, as she put it, “proud owner and sole employee” of The Green Man Gallery—was much older than Izzy had imagined she would be. Because Jilly had referred to her as such a good friend of hers, Izzy had been expecting someone in her mid—to late twenties, but when she thought about it, she really shouldn’t have been surprised. July’s friendships crossed all borders: age, race, sex, social standing, and lack thereof.

Albina was in her fifties, a small, compact woman with greying hair that had lost none of its luster.

Her facial features, the pronounced cheekbones and high brow, combined with the pale blue eyes that didn’t seem to miss a thing, reminded Izzy of a Siamese cat. She had a feline grace when she moved, as well, a lazy elegance that, like a housecat’s, couldn’t quite belie the wild spirit lying just under the veneer of her cultivated demeanor. She was dressed casually in a wool sweater and slacks, her only jewelry a pair of small gold hoop earrings and a gold broach shaped like an artist’s palette. Izzy hoped she’d age half as well herself.

“Jilly certainly didn’t overstate your talent,” Albina said after studying the paintings that Izzy and Alan had brought into the gallery. “Although I must admit that I am somewhat surprised at the maturity that’s already so evident in your work. Quite a remarkable achievement for an artist of your years.”

“I, urn, thank you,” Izzy mumbled, her cheeks burning.

“We don’t see enough of this style anymore,” Albina went on. “At least not from the younger artist.

Realistic, certainly, yet undeniably painterly. It—I hope you won’t mind me saying this—but these paintings of yours remind me a great deal of Vincent Rushkin’s work. Your palette, your use of light, your handling of textures.”

“I study under Rushkin,” Izzy said.

Albina gave her a considering look, eyebrows arching. “Oh, really. Isn’t that odd. I’ve heard so little of the man in the past decade or so, I thought he’d passed away, or at least retired.”

“He still paints every day; he just doesn’t show anymore.”

“And,” Albina said, her eyes taking on a faraway look, “does his work still retain its power?”

“Very much so. If anything, he keeps getting better.”

“You’re very lucky to be working with him. Whenever I look at The Movement of Wings, I can’t help but shiver. I have a reproduction of it hanging in my dining room at home.” She looked up and smiled at Izzy. “I think his work was what drew me into this field in the first place.”

Izzy returned the gallery owner’s smile. She’d had a postcard of The Movement of Wings on the wall of her bedroom back on the island and lost herself a thousand times in Rushkin’s cloud of pigeons, circling about the War Memorial in Fitzhenry Park.

“I know exactly what you mean,” she said.

“Well, then.” Albina shook her head as though to clear it. “This puts an entirely different light on matters.”

“How so?”

“Frankly, while I was quite taken with your work, I felt it was perhaps a little too derivative of Rushkin’s style to take for the gallery. You know how the word can get around, how spiteful people can be. At this stage in your career, the last thing you need is to be thought of as simply an imitator. A critique like that can stay with you throughout your entire career. But there is, of course, a long tradition in our field, of a student’s work reflecting aspects of her mentors’.

And I can see, particularly from your use of perspective, that you have already begun to gain a sense of your own style.”

“I’m trying,” Izzy said.

“Of course you are. And while these things should never be rushed, I can see where you will be having your own shows in the not too distant future.” Lead-ing the way back to her desk, Albina added,

“Now we’ll have to fill out a few forms. We take a forty-percent commission and our checks go out once a month. That’s not a hard and fast rule, however. If something of yours has sold and you’re desperate for some cash, I’m sure we’ll be able to work something out. But please. Don’t be calling me every day to see how your paintings are moving ....”

V

All right!” Alan cried once they were out on the pavement in front of the gallery. “You did it!”

Izzy accepted his hug, but she was finding it a little hard to muster as much enthusiasm herself

“What’s the matter, Izzy? I thought you’d be thrilled.”

“I am, I guess.”

“But ... ?”

Izzy gave him a halfhearted smile. “It’s just that I feel the only reason she took my stuff on was because of Rushkin. It’s like my paintings only have validity because they were done in his studio, under his eye.”

Alan shook his head. “Whoa. Wait a minute now.”

“No. You heard what she said. She thought my stuff was too derivative for her gallery until I told her I was studying under Rushkin.”

“Well, so what?” Alan asked. “Don’t knock it, Izzy. Whatever works, you know? Do you have any idea how hard it is to get your work hung in a good gallery?”

“I know. But still ...”

“And besides. In the long run, people are going to buy the pieces because of what you put into them, because of your talent, not because they’ve got a whiff of Rushkin about them.”

“Do you really think so?”

“I know so. Kathy’s not your only fan.”

“No,” Izzy said. “Just my biggest.”

They both had to smile, thinking of the way Kathy championed the work of her friends, particularly Izzy’s.

“I can’t argue with that,” Alan said.

He unlocked the VW’s passenger door for Izzy, then went around to the driver’s side to get in.

“Wait’ll I tell her,” Izzy said, her excitement returning as she thought of how Kathy would react. She slipped into her seat and banged the door shut. “She is just going to die.”

“Now, that’s better. For a minute there I thought you’d lost all sense of perspective.”

“Oh, but didn’t you hear what Albina had to say back there?” Izzy said cheerfully. “My perspective’s particularly my own.”

“I thought she said peculiarly.”

Izzy punched him in the arm.

“Hey,” Alan told her. “Careful of how you treat the driver.”

Izzy stuck out her tongue at him and then sank happily back into her seat for the drive back to the university. Things were still going to be tight when it came to luxuries, but at least she knew she could now afford to get that apartment with Kathy on Waterhouse Street, and that was what was really important. All she’d have to do was sell one of those paintings at the gallery and she’d have her next month’s rent, plus a little to put aside.

Things were definitely looking up.

VI

But the excitement of Albina’s agreeing to hang her work in The Green Man was brought down a second time when Izzy returned to her dorm and looked at the sketch she’d done of Rushkin last year.

Alan had been right. What she held in her hands was a bad caricature of the artist, not a realistically rendered portrait. How could she have gotten so far off base?

Rushkin was homely, but her sketch made him look positively grotesque: a gargoyle in tramp’s clothing. And while it was true that he was short, he wasn’t a dwarf. He slouched a great deal, but he didn’t have a hunched back. His wardrobe was out-of-date, the clothes well-worn, but he wasn’t the tatter-demalion her drawing made him out to be. She’d drawn a raggedy troll, not a Mari.

She cast her mind back to that first sight of him she’d had, feeding the pigeons on the steps of St.

Paul’s, and saw only the Rushkin she knew. But something niggled at her memory when she looked down at the sketch in her hand. She knew herself. She wasn’t given to the exaggeration that this sketch represented, and familiarity, while it could make one overlook something such as a hunched back or dwarfish stature in one’s dayto-day dealings with a person, couldn’t physically take the fact of it away.

Yet the only other explanation seemed even more implausible: that Rushkin had looked like this when she’d met him and he had since changed.

No, Izzy thought, comparing the drawing to how Rushkin had looked when she’d left his studio today. Not changed. He would have to have been completely and utterly transformed.

She stared at the sketch for a long time, then finally stuffed it away. Rushkin hadn’t changed his appearance. She’d just had a bad day with her faculties of recall the day she’d drawn it. It wasn’t as though Rushkin had actually been in front of her when she’d done the second drawing. She’d just remembered him wrong. Lord knew Rushkin was an odd bird. It would be so easy to fall into caricaturing when trying to draw him from memory after only one brief and rather confusing encounter.

She had to smile then. Wasn’t that just the whole story of her relationship with Rushkin: an endless series of confusing encounters. But before she could take that line of thought any further, Kathy came in and asked about how it had gone at The Green Man that day and Izzy was able to set the whole confusing puzzle aside. Kathy’s infectious excitement about the good news made it impossible for Izzy not to get excited all over again herself, and this time the feeling didn’t go away.

But that night she had a dream that had come to her before. In it, she walked into the section of Rushkin’s studio where she did her work to find that all her paintings had been destroyed. Some of the canvases were slashed, others were burned, all of them were ruined beyond repair, even the unfinished piece that was still on her easel. She knew when she woke that it wasn’t true, that the dreams were just her subconscious mind’s way of dealing with those feelings of self-consciousness that plagued every person who ever tried their hand at a creative endeavor at one point or another in their career. Some people would dream that the world ridiculed their work, their peers laughing and pointing their fingers at what they had done; she dreamt that her work was destroyed—the ultimate act of censorship.

Somehow destruction seemed worse. More personal. More vindictive. And though it was only a recurring dream, and she knew it was no more than a dream, she wished her subconscious mind would find another way to deal with her feelings of inadequacy because when she was in the dream, it felt too real. She would wake up so upset that she’d skip breakfast and rush out to the studio, where she could be reassured that the paintings were, in fact, unharmed.

Rushkin never asked her why she arrived so early some mornings and immediately took stock of her paintings, and she never told him about the dreams. The one thing Rushkin didn’t lack was self-confidence, and she knew he simply wouldn’t understand. She didn’t think anyone would. Oh, they might be able to relate to her occasional bouts with a lack of self-confidence, but they wouldn’t understand why the dreams felt so real and why they upset her as much as they did, even when she knew they weren’t real.

She wouldn’t be able to explain it because she herself didn’t know why the dreams’ despair lingered so strongly when she woke, lying like a black cloud over her day until she could hold the paintings in her hands and be reassured that they were truly safe.

VI I

Newford, October 1974

Izzy found living on Waterhouse Street to be everything Kathy and Jilly had promised it would be.

While Crowsea itself had always been a popular home base for the city’s various artists, musicians, actors, writers and others of like persuasions, for two blocks on either side of Lee Street, Waterhouse was as pure a distillation of the same as one was likely to find west of Greenwich Village in its own heyday. Izzy quickly discovered her new neighborhood to be the perfect creative community: a regular bohemia of studios, lofts, rooming houses, apartments and practice spaces with the ground floors of the buildings offering cafes, small galleries, boutiques and music clubs. She met more kindred spirits in her first two weeks living there than she had in the whole nineteen years of her life up to that point.

“There’s a buzz in the air, day and night,” she told Rushkin a few weeks after she and Kathy got their small two-bedroom across the street from Alan’s apartment. “It’s so amazing. You can almost taste the creative energy as soon as you turn off Lee Street.”

Living on Waterhouse Street was the first time that Izzy really felt herself to be part of a community.

She’d got a taste of it living in Karizen Hall, but now she realized that what she’d experienced there wasn’t remotely the same. The main commonality shared in the dorm had been that they were all attending Butler U. Beyond school life, her fellow students’ interests and lives had branched down any number of different, and often conflicting, paths. The bohemian residents of Waterhouse Street, on the other hand, despite their strong sense of individuality, shared an unshakable belief in the worth of their various creative pursuits. They offered each other unquestioning support and that, Izzy thought, was the best part of it all. No one was made to feel as though they were wasting their time, as though their creative pursuits were frivolous trivialities that they would outgrow once they matured. It might be three o’clock in the morning, but you could invariably still find someone with whom you could share a front stoop and have a conversation that actually meant something, who would celebrate a success or raise you out of the inevitable case of the blues to which everyone involved in the arts was susceptible at one point or another. Perfect strangers offered advice, shared inspiration, and didn’t remain strangers for long.

And it wasn’t all seriousness. The residents of Waterhouse Street could party with the best of them, and there always seemed to be an open house in full swing on one block or another. Although she could appreciate their need to cut loose, Izzy wasn’t quite as uninhibited as some of her friends. Sometimes she thought a little too much drinking went on, too many psychedelics were ingested, too much hash and marijuana was smoked. She herself didn’t drink, and she was scared to death of drugs, but no one forced her to partake of one or the other, and if it sometimes seemed that everybody had slept with everybody else at some point or another, well, no one forced that upon her either.

The tolerance, the way they took care of each other, was what utterly charmed Izzy and let her forgive all the other excesses. That such strong-minded individuals could still be so open-minded to conflicting tastes and ways of life gave her hope for the world at large. If we can do it here, she would think, then someday it’ll be like this everywhere.

She loved the little apartment she shared with Kathy. Their furniture consisted of wooden orange crates and scattered pillows in place of sofas or chairs; bookcases made of salvaged brick and lumber; throw rugs, lamps and kitchen necessities bought at the Crowsea flea markets; on the walls, posters and various paintings by Izzy and their friends; in the bedrooms, mattresses on the floor; in the kitchen, a scratched and battered Formica kitchen table with mismatching chairs rescued from a curbside one night before garbage day. Izzy knew her mother would have been horrified at the way she was living, but she didn’t care. Her father would have been disgusted by the company she kept, but she didn’t care about that either.

To her, Waterhouse Street was the beau ideal to which the rest of society should aspire; and perhaps that was why, when the harsh reality of the outside world did intrude to leave its mark upon their lives, Izzy always took it as a personal betrayal.

VIII

The most awful thing’s happened,” Kathy said as she tossed her coat onto the empty seat and slid into the booth beside Izzy.

They were meeting for dinner in Perry’s Diner at the corner of Lee and Waterhouse, a favorite hangout for the neighborhood because not only was the food good, it was cheap. Izzy had been drawing the people at the bus stop outside the window while she waited for Kathy to arrive, practicing three-quarter profiles. She set her sketch pad aside at Kathy’s arrival.

“What?” she asked.

“Do you remember Rochelle—Peter’s girlfriend?”

Izzy nodded. “Sure. She’s promised to model for me when she gets some spare time. I think she has the most amazing bone structure.”

“Yeah, well, some other people weren’t quite so artistically inclined in their appreciation of her bod.”

“What are you talking about?”

“She was beaten and raped, Izzy. Three guys pulled her into a car while she waiting for the number sixteen by Butler Green. They dumped her back there early this morning—just rolled her out of the car and left her lying on the pavement.”

“Oh my god. Poor Rochelle ....”

“It just makes me sick to think that there are people like that in the world,” Kathy said. She pulled a paper napkin from its holder and methodically began to shred it.

“Have the police been able to—”

“The police! Don’t make me laugh. What they put her through ...” Kathy looked away, out the window, but not before Izzy saw the tears brimming in her roommate’s eyes. Kathy cleared her throat.

“They might as well have been in on it for all the compassion they showed her. Jilly was at the hospital when they were questioning her and she was furious, so that should tell you something.”

Izzy nodded. Jilly simply didn’t get angry—or at least not so as Izzy had ever seen. She could be passionate, but it was as though she didn’t have a temper to lose in the first place.

“What about Jilly’s friend?” Izzy asked. “That guy she knows on the police force—Leonard, or Larry something. Couldn’t he do anything?”

“Lou. He’s going to look into it for her, but he’s only a sergeant and there’s nothing he can really do about the way the other cops treated Rochelle. It was like a big joke to them. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Lou told Jilly that if they ever do pick these guys up, their lawyer’s going to treat Rochelle even worse once they get into court. Jilly says Rochelle is devastated; she just wishes she’d never reported it in the first place.”

“But that’s so wrong.”

“No,” Kathy said. “It’s evil—that’s what it is.” The little heap of torn paper on the table in front of her grew as she started on another napkin. “What’s really scary is that this kind of thing’s going on all the time. I guess it doesn’t really hit home until it happens to someone you know.”

“It doesn’t always seem so real until you can put a face to the victim,” Izzy agreed.

“Pathetic, isn’t it? We’re letting these sick freaks take over the world, Izzy. Sometimes I think they’re already starting to outnumber us.” She let the last pieces of shredded napkin fall from her fingers. “Maybe Lovecraft was right.”

“Who?”

“He was this writer back in the thirties who used to write about these vast alien presences that haunt the edges of our world, trying to get back in. They exert this influence on us to make us act like shits and try to convince us to open these cosmic gates through which they can come back. The closer we get to their return, the worse the world gets.” She gave Izzy a sad look. “Sometimes I think they’re due back any day now.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Probably. But something’s gone wrong with the world, don’t you think? Every year we lose a little more ground to the bad guys. Five years ago, you didn’t have to worry about waiting for a bus at Butler Green. You could walk through most parts of the city, day or night, and not have to worry; now that’s unthinkable. We’ve loosed something evil in the world—maybe not you or me, personally, but if we don’t fight the problem, then we’re as much a part of it.”

“I don’t know if I can believe in evil existing of and by itself,” Izzy said. “It seems to be that everybody’s made up of a mix of good and bad and what sets us apart are the decisions we make as to which we’ll be.”

“So you can see something good in a child abuser? Or these guys that attacked Rochelle? You could forgive people like that?”

Izzy shook her head. “No. No, I couldn’t.”

“Me neither,” Kathy said glumly. “Rochelle’s only allowed visitors in the afternoons. You want to come see her with me tomorrow?”

“I’ve only got one class,” Izzy said. “I’ll be finished by four.”

Kathy pushed her little heap of torn paper aside and picked up a menu. She looked at it for a moment, then shut it again.

“I don’t have any appetite,” she said. “I can’t eat because my stomach’s all in knots, just thinking about what happened to Rochelle.”

Izzy closed her own menu. She tried to imagine what Rochelle had gone through last night, how she’d be feeling today, and felt sick herself. “Let’s just go home,” she said.

That night Izzy’s dreams were particularly bad. When she entered Rushkin’s studio, there were dead people strewn in among the ruin of her artwork, the subjects of her paintings given physical form and then cut and burned with the same methodical brutality that had been employed to destroy her art. She woke before dawn, weeping into her pillow, and couldn’t fall asleep again. By seven o’clock, she was dressed and out the door, heading for the studio, where everything was as unchanged as it had been when she left except that she could tell from the canvas on Rushkin’s easel that he’d continued working long after she’d left the coach house the previous thy.

Yesterday, he had barely sketched in his main subject; today, a completed painting was drying on the easel.

IX

Your friend is quite correct,” Rushkin said when Izzy brought up the idea of pure evil and pure good later in the morning. “And that is why you and I must proceed with such care in our endeavors. We are haunted by angels and monsters, Isabelle. We call them to us with our art—from the great beyond, perhaps, or from within ourselves, from some inner realm that we all share and visit only in our dreams and through our art, I’m not sure which. But they do exist. They can manifest.”

Izzy gave a nervous laugh. “Don’t act so serious about it. You’re starting to give me the creeps.”

“Good. For this is a serious business. Evil is on the ascendant in these times. What we create, what we bring forth, counteracts it, but we must be very careful. The very act of creating an angel opens the door for the monsters as well.”

“But we’re just ... just painting pictures.”

“Most of the time, yes,” Rushkin agreed. He laid down his brush and joined her where she was taking a break. She was lazing in the windowseat that over-looked the lane running by the coach house and pulled her legs up to her chest to give him room to sit. “But we aspire to more,” Rushkin added. “We aspire to great works in which the world may revel and find solace. Those works tap into that alchemical secret I wish to share with you, but the formula is so precise, one’s will and intent must be so focused, that without the vocabulary we are building up between us, I would never be able to teach it to you.”

Izzy studied him for a long moment, looking for some telltale sign that he was putting her on, but his features were absolutely serious.

“You ... you’re talking about more than making paintings,” she said. “Aren’t you?”

Rushkin placed a stubby finger against the center of her brow. “Finally you begin to open your eyes and actually see.”

“But—”

“Enough of this chatting,” Rushkin said. He stood up and smoothed his smock. “There is work to do.

I believe your friend Sprech has requested more paintings from you?”

“Yes, but—”

Rushkin continued to ignore her attempts to have him expand on the new scattering of hints and riddles that he’d left for her to consider. “The gallery has sold how many now?” he asked as he returned to his easel. “Fifteen?”

“Twelve, actually.”

Rushkin nodded his head thoughtfully. “I believe it’s time you had your own show there,” he said. He picked up his brush and regarded his new canvas for a long moment, then turned his gaze toward her, one brow cocked. “Don’t you think?”

“I don’t know. I guess so. But what about these angels? You can’t just leave me hanging now.”

“I can’t?”

He seemed amused more than threatening, but Izzy knew better than to press him on it. Their relationship had progressed to where she had more freedom to question him, but she also knew her limits.

“You should finish the Indian,” Rushkin said as Izzy swung down from the windowseat. “It could well be the centerpiece of your show.”

Izzy gave him a surprised look. “I thought you didn’t like the fact that I put him in jeans and a T-shirt.”

“Nor am I overly fond of the city backdrop you have given him, but I can’t deny that it’s a powerful piece.”

Izzy could feel herself redden, but she was pleased as much as embarrassed at his praise. She was proud of how the painting was turning out.

“But you won’t sell it,” Rushkin added.

“I won’t?” Then she remembered what he’d told her the first time she’d been choosing paintings for Albina’s gallery. “Because it’s got a soul?”

“Partly. But also because having one or two items marked ‘not for sale’ will make your audience that much more eager to buy the ones which are available.”

“Oh.”

It made a certain kind of sense, Izzy supposed, but she couldn’t quite shake the feeling that there was more to it than that. Still, she didn’t press Rushkin on this either. He had already returned to his own work and she knew from experience that she’d heard all he had to say on the matter.

Taking down the still life that was on her easel, she replaced it with the unfinished canvas of the young Kickaha man. She’d seen him this past summer in Fitzhenry Park—or at least the idea of him. Following Rushkin’s rule of thumb, she had used the value studies and sketches she’d done that day as a basic blueprint for the piece. The details that made him an individual she’d drawn up from within herself so that the young man looking back at her bore no real resemblance to the original model except for how he was posed. Oddly enough, it made her subject appear more real to her than if she’d simply rendered the young man she’d seen in the park. She couldn’t explain why, any more than she could put into words what Rushkin was teaching her. All she knew was that there really did seem to be a connection between what she brought to life on her canvas and some mysterious place that was either deep inside her, familiar only through dreams and her art, or elsewhere entirely. Like Rushkin, she couldn’t say which, only that the connection existed and that through her art, she was allowed to tap into it.

She worked on the painting for the rest of the morning, then cleaned up and left as soon as she’d gotten Rushkin his lunch. She was taking half-classes at Butler U. this semester and she had to hurry to get to Dapple’s art-history class for two. Much as she appreciated what she was learning at the university, it was at times such as this, when her work in Rushkin’s studio was going particularly well, that she wished she hadn’t gotten the student loan to continue her schooling. Why go into debt this way, when she was already learning everything she felt she’d ever need from Rushkin?

“Look,” Kathy had told her. “You’re two-thirds of the way to getting your B.A. Do you really want to throw away all the work you’ve done over the past two years?”

“No,” she’d replied. “Of course not.”

But her time seemed at such a premium that she couldn’t help wondering some days if she wasn’t throwing away the hours she could be in the studio by taking these courses. What was she going to do with a degree anyway? Hang it on her wall? She’d much rather put a painting there. But she stuck with it all the same, if only to prove—to Kathy, and perhaps to her parents, if not herself—that she wasn’t a quitter.

When Dapple’s lecture was finally over, she was the first out the door, running across the common to where she’d agreed to meet Kathy. The bus they took to the hospital to visit Rochelle was crowded, standing-room only, but Izzy didn’t mind. Nor did she really register Kathy’s muttered complaints. Her head was full of the canvas waiting for her at Rushkin’s studio, planning brush strokes and the details of the painting’s background, until they reached the hospital. But then the harsh reality of what Rochelle had suffered cut through her daydreams.

The pretty girl who had agreed to pose for Izzy a few weeks ago didn’t seem to exist anymore.

Instead a stranger looked up from the bed when they came into Rochelle’s room. Her face was swollen and discolored with ugly bruises. She had a broken arm, cracked ribs, a fractured pelvis. But worst of all was the lost and hurt look in her eyes. Izzy remembered a sweet, trusting gaze and had the sick feeling now that it would never return.

After giving Rochelle the get-well card she’d made the night before, Izzy sat quietly on the end of the bed while Kathy ancliilly talked to Rochelle, trying to cheer her up. Izzy wanted to join in, but all she could do was sit there and look at the pitiable figure their friend cut, lying in that bed, swathed in bandages, her only sustenance coming to her through an IV tube. It made Izzy feel more determined than ever to continue her studies under Rushkin. If what he taught her could help counteract such terrible injustices as Rochelle had been forced to suffer, then Izzy would do everything in her power to learn what he had to show her. She didn’t fully understand Rushkin’s explanation as to how their art could be of any help. She wasn’t sure she even believed in the idea of angelic manifestations. But so far he’d made good on all of what he’d promised to teach her and she was willing to trust him that everything else would become clear in time.

Looking at Rochelle, she desperately wished it were all true. She wished she really could learn to call up angels. Joyful spirits, protective spirits, guardian spirits. She wished she already knew how, so that she could have prevented what had happened to Rochelle last night. Like Kathy’s growing plans for helping underprivileged children, Izzy was determined to do more than simply rail against the injustices of the world. She couldn’t pinpoint the source of the evils that plagued the world any more than Kathy could.

Like Rushkin’s alchemical secret, they could have their original source from outside a person—be it one’s environment or Kathy’s cosmic evils—or they could originate in the darkness that everyone carried inside them, that most people rightfully refused to allow into the light of day. It didn’t matter where they came from. All that mattered to Izzy was that they were real and confronting them was more than simply tilting at windmills.

X

Izzy finished The Spirit Is Strong the next day, but she had no time to admire her portrait of the Kickaha brave in his urban setting. She had to rush to another class that afternoon and then, when it was done, she spent what was left of the day at the university library, working on a paper that was due the next Monday. When she finally stepped outside, she blinked in surprise. She’d lost all track of time and night had fallen while she was cloistered away in the study cubicle with a stack of art-history books.

Her stomach rumbled and she realized that she’d not only missed lunch, but supper now as well. She felt so tired she could have lain down right there on the library steps and gone straight to sleep except she had just enough common sense left, in the fuzzy space between her ears that was passing for her mind at the moment, to know that she should get herself home first.

“You look beat,” a stranger’s voice said from behind her. “What’re you doing—burning the paintbrush at both ends?”

“You mean candle,” Izzy corrected absently as she turned to see who’d spoken.

A figure stood leaning in the shadows beside the stone lion statue on the left side of the library’s doors. She could see he wore a white T-shirt and blue jeans, and his long hair was dark, but his face was just a daub of shadowed skin color in the bad light and she couldn’t make out his features. There was enough of a nip in the air that she found herself wondering how he could stand being outside in only those short sleeves.

“But you’re an artist,” he said, “so I thought paintbrush would be more appropriate.”

“Do I know you?” Izzy asked. There was something familiar about him, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it.

“Does it matter?”

Izzy had been about to take a step closer to get a better look at him, but she paused as the memory of Rochelle’s bruised features rose in her mind. Oh shit, she thought, taking a quick look around herself, but they were alone on the library steps. Through the leaded panes of the doors, she could see people moving around inside the building, but she knew they were too far away to do her any good if she had to yell for help.

She wanted to turn and run, but the idea of crossing the dark common with this guy chasing her held no appeal whatsoever. But she couldn’t get by him to go back inside either. All he had to do was grab her and drag her away into the bushes and nobody’d know. Nobody’d know at all.

“Look,” she said. “I don’t want any trouble.”

“I’m not here to hurt you,” the figure in the shadows told her. “Then what do you want from me?”

“Nothing, really. I was just making conversation. Go ahead and leave. I won’t stop you.”

Right, Izzy thought. I’ll just walk off onto the common and make it easy for you. Then something else struck her.

“How’d you know I’m an artist?” she asked.

“You’ve got paint under your nails and you were reading up on art history.”

“So you saw me inside,” Izzy said.

“Probably.”

Izzy shivered. What kind of an answer was that? It was so creepily vague. “Look,” she said. “You’re starting to freak me out a little.”

“Sorry. I just wanted to meet you, hear what your voice sounded like—that’s all. I didn’t mean to upset you. You can go back inside or wherever you were going. I won’t bother you.”

Izzy started to relax then. Now she thought she knew what he was doing out here, waiting for her.

He’d seen her inside and was trying to work his way around to asking for a date.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Mizaun.”

“I’m sorry,” Izzy said, leaning forward a little. “What did you say?”

“Call me John.”

Izzy frowned. The first thing he’d said hadn’t sound at all like “call me John.”

“Well, John,” she said. “Being mysterious and everything’s kind of interesting—I’ll give you that—but considering what happened a couple of nights ago, it’s not exactly all that endearing at the moment, if you know what I mean.” The figure in the shadows shook his head. “What happened two nights ago?”

“You don’t know? What planet did you beam down from tonight anyway—Mars?”

He hesitated for the length of a few heartbeats, then said, “I’m not sure I understand the question.”

Oh boy, Izzy thought. Maybe it was time to reevaluate the idea that he wanted a date.

“This is getting a little too weird for me,” she began. “Maybe we should just forget about—”

Before she could finish, the door to the library opened and two girls came out, a brunette and a blonde, chatting to each other, books bundled up against their chests. Izzy stepped aside to let them pass by, but when she turned back to where her mysterious companion had been standing in the shadows, he wasn’t there anymore. Alarm bells went off in her mind.

“Hey!” she called to the departing girls. When they paused to look back at her, she added, “Are you going as far as Lee Street?”

“Just as far as the bus stop at the Green,” the blonde said.

“Mind if I walk with you?”

“Not at all.”

“Great. I’m kind of nervous of walking over the common by myself tonight.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” the brunette confided when Izzy joined them. “Everything feels a little weird after what happened the other night.”

Izzy looked back at the library steps, but they were still empty. Where had he gone? Hopped over the wall into the vegetation that grew on either side of the steps? But then why hadn’t she heard him moving in the bushes?

“You’re telling me,” she said slowly.

Her nerves felt all on edge and she realized that she wasn’t at all tired anymore. Or hungry. The strange encounter had stolen both her fatigue and her appetite. She was never so glad to be in her apartment as she was that night, even if Kathy was out for another hour before she returned home as well.

“Oh yuck,” Kathy said after Izzy related what had happened to her. “You’re giving me goose bumps.”

“Do you think he was dangerous?” Izzy asked.

“Jeez, that’s a hard call. But let me assure you, I would’ve done exactly the same thing you did.

There’s no way I would’ve stuck around to find out. Uh-uh.

“No, of course not,” Izzy said thoughtfully.

Kathy had to shake her head. “Oh, ma belle Izzy. Don’t start romanticizing it.”

“I’m not. It’s just ...”

“Just what?”

Call me John. Not “my name is John.”

“I don’t know,” Izzy said. “I guess I just felt like I knew him from somewhere.”

Kathy sprawled out on the cushions under the window and laced her fingers behind her head. “Let’s see now,” she said. “You said that he didn’t strike you as either threatening or shy—right?”

Izzy nodded.

“Well, then how did he strike you?”

Izzy had to think about it for a moment. “Odd, I guess,” she said finally.

“And maybe a little lost. Like he was a stranger, still trying to get his bearings.” Kathy started to play an imaginary violin until Izzy threw a pillow at her. “Be serious,” Izzy said.

“I’m seriously glad you took off when you did,” Kathy told her. “I’m just not all that keen on hearing you mooning over this guy. You don’t know anything about him except that he hangs around outside the library, giving people the willies.”

“If it was all innocent—”

“And he can make a good exit.”

Izzy sighed. “I suppose. But I can’t help but wonder if the reason it all seemed so weird is because of what happened to Rochelle. I mean, everybody’s been feeling weird lately.”

“And no wonder.”

“But if what happened to Rochelle colored something that was perfectly harmless—”

“Oh please,” Kathy said. “You don’t even know what he looks like. Maybe he was hiding in the shadows because he’s got a face like a toad.”

“You like toads,” Izzy pointed out.

“This is true, but for themselves—not as a frame of reference for a potential boyfriend’s features.”

Izzy’s face went red. “I never said—”

“I know, I know. Just do me a favor. The next time you talk to him, do it in a crowd.”

“If I get the choice.”

Kathy nodded. “If he’s as interested in you as you are in him—hold on, let me finish,” she added as Izzy started to protest, “then you can be sure he’ll be approaching you again. And if he’s got any kind of smarts whatsoever, he’ll do it at a more appropriate time, like the middle of the day when there’s lots of people around. If he doesn’t, my advice is: run.”

“Advice duly noted and to be followed,” Izzy said.

“Good. Now ask me about my night.”

“How was your night?”

“Borrrring,” Kathy said. “Alan and I went to a poetry reading at The Stone Angel and I honestly didn’t think we’d get out of there before our brains had turned to mush.”

“I thought you guys liked poetry.”

“We do. But this wasn’t poetry. It was more like—” Kathy grinned suddenly, “—posery.”

After two years of being roommates, by now Izzy was used to the way Kathy liked to coin words.

“Which means?” she asked.

“They were more interested in the way they looked—in being ‘poets’—than the content of their work. Except for this one girl—Wendy something-or-other. I didn’t quite catch her name and she left before I had a chance to talk to her. She was good.”

They stayed up a little while longer, talking over a pot of tea before finally calling it quits around midnight. When Izzy finally fell asleep that night, she didn’t dream of ruined paintings, but of a shadowy figure who stayed out of the light and called himselfJohn. She woke up wondering when, or indeed if, she’d ever see him again, not at all sure that she was even looking forward to another encounter with him in the first place.

XI

But Izzy didn’t have to wait all that long to find out how she’d feel. The next morning as she was coming down the lane toward Rushkin’s studio, she spied John again, a lean shape in a white T-shirt and jeans, lounging against the stone wall a hundred yards or so farther down the lane on the far side of the coach house. She hesitated briefly, then continued past the coach house, coming to a sudden halt when she was a half-dozen yards away from him. She’d stopped more from shock than from any fear of his harming her.

He smiled, but looked a little uncertain as to his welcome.

“Hello, again,” he said as the long moment of silence continued to stretch out between them.

All Izzy could do was stare at him. Last night’s feeling of familiarity had returned in a rush, but it was no longer vague. She knew those broad, flat features, those dark eyes, that spill of long black hair.

“This is so weird,” she said finally. “You look exactly like the guy in the painting I just finished yesterday.”

Right down to the small silver earring shaped like a feather that dangled from his left earlobe. The resemblance was so uncanny she couldn’t suppress a shiver.

“Really?” he said. “I’d love to see it.”

Izzy turned to give the coach house a glance, then brought her gaze back to her companion’s handsome features. “Maybe some other time. My teacher doesn’t much care for visitors.” She paused, still off-balance, still trying to sort through what she was feeling. To cover her uneasiness, she added,

“Aren’t you cold?”

“Maybe a little.”

“Then why don’t you wear some warmer clothing?”

He shrugged. “This is all I have.”

“Oh.”

She still couldn’t get over the way he was exactly like the painting. It wasn’t that he bore a resemblance to the young man she’d used as a basic model for the pose rendered on her canvas; no, he was exactly like the man in her painting.

“There’s a used clothing place on Lee near the corner of Quinlan,” she found herself saying. “Rags and Bones. I was in there the other day and they had some really cheap jackets, you know, for like under five dollars.”

He smiled. “I don’t have any money, either.”

Izzy remembered an article she’d read in The Newford Star recently about the abject poverty on the Kickaha reserve. God, and she thought she had trouble paying her tuition and making her rent. Here was someone who couldn’t even afford a warm shirt or jacket.

“Um, I guess you’d,” she began, hesitated, then started again. “Would you be insulted if I spotted you the money to get yourself one?”

“That depends,” he said.

“On what?”

“On whether or not I can see you again.”

He gave her another smile and that, she realized, was the one thing she hadn’t gotten quite right in her painting. His was a smile that was utterly guileless, that spoke of the pure joy of simply being alive and breathing the crisp autumn air, jacket or no jacket, never mind the cold.

“Well?” he said.

Oh boy, Izzy thought. Like you have to ask. Then she remembered how Kathy’d been teasing her the night before and felt herself starting to blush. She wondered if he’d noticed, which made the flush rising up her neck grow hotter, then realized that he was still waiting for her to answer him.

“Urn, sure,” she said. “Maybe we could have dinner tonight. Do you know Perry’s Diner? It’s also on Lee.”

“No, but I can find it.”

“Around six?”

“Sounds fine.”

Feeling a little awkward, Izzy dug out her wallet. All she had was a pair of tens, so she handed one of them over to him.

“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll bring you the change.”

“Sure. Whatever. Just get yourself something warm.” Izzy glanced back at the coach house and this time she saw Rushkin standing at his window, watching them. “Look,” she added. “I’ve really got to run. I’ll see you tonight—okay?”

He nodded.

“My name’s Izzy,” she said before she left. “Isabelle, actually.”

“I know.”

“Oh.” How did he know?

This time he was the one to look up at the coach house. “I’ll see you tonight,” he said, his gaze dropping back down to meet hers once more. “Be careful, Isabelle.”

“What do you mean by ... ?” Izzy began, but he’d already turned away and was walking off down the lane as though he hadn’t heard her. She started to call after him, but then shook her head. She’d ask him tonight. There were a lot of things she was going to ask him tonight. She wondered how many straight answers she’d get, and then realized that she didn’t really care. The whole mystery of it was sort of fun. His resemblance to her painting, the way he just kept showing up, the way everything he said seemed so ... so ambiguous. She remembered how he’d frightened her last night, but she didn’t feel he was at all scary anymore. Odd, yes. And he still seemed a little lost. But any fear she’d felt toward him was gone.

She was humming happily to herself by the time she climbed the stairs up to the studio. Tonight was going to be fun.

XII

Who was that?” Rushkin demanded.

“Just this guy I met last night,” Izzy replied.

She took off her coat and hung it on a nail by the door, then walked over to her easel where The Spirit Is Strong was still drying. Yes. Except for the smile, he was exactly the same.

“But it’s so strange,” she went on. “He looks just like the fellow in my painting here.”

“You must not see him again.”

“What?”

Izzy had been so taken with her encounter in the lane earlier, and in subsequently comparing John to her painting, that she hadn’t really been paying much attention to Rushkin since she’d arrived. She looked up now to see him glowering at her. The fear that had been absent when she’d met John returned now, but John wasn’t the cause of it.

“I ... I’m sorry,” Izzy said. “I didn’t mean to be rude.”

And as she spoke, she could hear the last thing John had said to her, the words echoing in her mind: Be careful, Isabelle.— What did he know?

The anger left Rushkin’s face, not without some obvious effort upon his part to calm down. He regarded her now with what was merely a stern expression, but Izzy was unable to relax. She stuck her hands in her pockets to keep them from trembling.

“Do you remember what I told you about angels and monsters?” he asked.

Izzy nodded slowly. “But what’s that got to do with anything?”

“It has to do with everything,” Rushkin replied. “Come, let us sit down.”

He led the way to the windowseat, where Izzy had seen him standing earlier. The bunched knots in Izzy’s neck and shoulders started to ease when she realized that they were only going to talk. She gave the lane a hopeful glance as she sat down, but John was long gone. Although Rushkin noted what she was doing, he made no comment.

“The ancient Hellenes,” he said instead, “believed in the Garden of the Muses as well.”

“The who?” Izzy said, not wanting to break in, but also wanting to make sure she knew what they were talking about. There were often times when the train of Rushkin’s conversation grew so arcane that she was left more confused after they’d talked than before they’d begun.

Rushkin didn’t take offense at the interruption. “The Greeks. They themselves never used the word

‘Greeks.’ That was a Roman invention.”

“Oh.”

“They considered themselves to be descendants of Hellen, the son of Deucalion, the Greek Noah.

When he navigated his ark and landed his passengers on the top of Mount Parnassus, he brought them to the heart of the Garden of the Muses—the home of Apollo. Now one can either take such a story at face value, or consider it a metaphor, but what can’t be denied is that the Hellenes believed that the world abounded in deities, all of whom had their place of origin in this holy garden.”

“Sort of like Eden?” Izzy tried.

Rushkin shook his head. “No one was cast out of this garden. Its inhabitants were free to come and go as they pleased between it and our world. We might call them spirits and the Hellenes believed that they touched upon every facet of our lives. Every country lane and mountain, every river and tree had its own spirit with which we might commune. Every endeavor of man had its patron spirit.”

Although her grasp of classical mythology was undoubtedly not on a par with Rushkin’s, Izzy at least didn’t feel quite so lost. Yet.

“It was through their arts,” Rushkin continued, “they could call these spirits to them. Their presence was considered a great blessing—which we can still see from the stunning display of art that the Hellenes left behind—but those spirits were also responsible for the great wars between the Greeks and the Persians and that which finally decimated their culture, when they went to war with Lacedaemonians—you might know them better as the Spartans.”

Izzy nodded in agreement. She had heard of Sparta, though she’d always been a little fuzzy on the context beyond an adjectival use to describe austere lifestyles.

“Before their downfall,” Rushkin went on, “from artists of great genius to merchants trading in commodities which only happened to be art, theirs was an era of glory; their art, the perfect marriage between inspiration and technique. We have had too few of them in the history of the human race.”

“And ... and this is another?” Izzy asked, wondering if that was what he was leading up to. Living on Waterhouse Street as she did, and from the explosion in all fields of the arts that had begun at the tail end of the sixties, she could easily believe it.

But Rushkin shook his head. “No. I waited forty years to find someone who had the potential to learn and use this gift. It might be another forty years, or even longer, before another could be found. But that will be your concern, not mine.”

“My concern.”

“When the time comes for you to pass on the knowledge I am giving you.”

Izzy wasn’t so sure she was at all interested in teaching anybody anything, but she gave a dutiful, if uncertain, nod of agreement. Rushkin fixed her with a long, considering look before he finally finished up with, “So you see why we must take such great care as to what spirits we invite into this world with our art.”

Now that, Izzy thought, seemed to come right out of left field and all she could do was shake her head. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I don’t see it at all. What do the ancient Greeks or Hellenes or whatever you want to call them—what do their beliefs have to do with us?”

“They made the same covenant with the spirits from beyond that we do,” Rushkin explained. “As the Hellenes did, we connect with those spirits through our art; if they agree with our renderings of them, the art allows them to cross over.”

“You’re talking about real ... what? Ghosts? Spirits?”

“Yes,” Rushkin said patiently. “Angels and monsters. Beings capable of leaving great good in their wake, but also those that may leave great evil.”

“Please don’t take this wrong,” Izzy said. Her nervousness came back and made her mouth go dry.

She had to swallow a couple of times before she went on. “But this is all a little hard to accept, you know?”

“I thought exactly the same thing when it was explained to me.”

“Well, good.”

“But you have felt the spirit growing in some of your paintings, haven’t you?” he went on. “That sense of connecting with something beyond human scope, of reaching into some mysterious beyond—call it the Garden of the Muses, for convenience. I know you have felt yourself reaching into it and returning with something more in hand, some ... power independent of yourself or the painting on your easel.”

“I’ve felt ... something,” Izzy said cautiously.

“Then trust me in this. When I saw that spirit in the flesh, when I saw him accost you in the lane below this window, I knew immediately that he means you harm. How he will harm you, I can’t say. It might occur today, it might occur a year from now, but he means you ill. This I can guarantee.”

“So what are you telling me?”

“You must not allow him in your company.”

“Just like that.”

Rushkin nodded. “And we must destroy your painting. He will not die with it—not immediately—but it is all that ties him to this world. With the painting gone, he will be drawn back to wherever it was that he initially originated and no longer pose a threat.”

Izzy stared at her mentor with openmouthed shock. She thought of her recent dream, the charred and bloodied limbs strewn in between the destruction of her paintings, and started to feel sick.

“You ... you can’t be serious,” she said.

“I am most deadly serious.”

But Izzy was shaking her head. “Absolutely not,” she said. “No way. I will not destroy my work because of some crazy story.”

She was so upset that she didn’t care if Rushkin’s own temper flared or not, but her mentor only nodded, accepting her reaction with a calmness that Izzy found a little eerie.

“The choice is yours,” he said. “There is nothing I or anyone else can do. Only you can make the decision and only you can send the spirit back.”

“Well, I’m glad we’re agreeing on that much, because if you think for one moment I’d—”

“But the time will come when you will remember this conversation—just as I did when my own mentor explained it to me—and you will do what is necessary.”

“This is not the kind of conversation I’m liable to forget,” Izzy told him.

“Good. Now, I think we should perhaps forgo work for the remainder of this morning. It might do you good to be away from the studio to think upon what was said here today.”

Izzy got up from the windowseat and regarded Rushkin cautiously. “I ... I’m taking my painting with me,” she said.

“That is your decision,” Rushkin replied, his voice still mild. “I won’t stop you. You forget that I have been through all of this before: the joy of the creation, the covenant with a spirit from beyond, the disbelief in the true existence of that same spirit; and then finally understanding the danger some of these creatures represent to myself; and to this world which I love so dearly. I have had to destroy certain pieces of my work, so that the monsters they called up would be sent back. Each time, it broke my heart.

The first time, I was almost too late and it was only by luck that the monster didn’t kill me before I cast it back into the beyond. I pray you will come to the proper realization before such a situation arises for you.”

“Sure,” Izzy said. “Whatever.”

“Please understand,” Rushkin said. “You are not at fault. No one can blame you for what your art brought across. It can happen to any of us, at any time. We have no control over the process. But we do have the ability, and the responsibility, to send these creatures back when we do inadvertently bring them over.”

Izzy nodded—not in agreement, just to let him know that she’d heard him. She collected her coat and knapsack and put them both on. The Spirit Is Strong was still tacky, but she carefully collected the painting from her easel all the same and walked with it to the door.

“Tomorrow will be business as usual,” Rushkin told her. “We won’t speak of these matters again until you are the one to bring them up.”

Izzy only nodded again. The way she was feeling at the moment, she wasn’t so sure she’d ever be back—at least not without a couple of big guys to help her collect her canvases and, while they were at it, protect her from the seriously crazy man that she was beginning to suspect Rushkin really was.

“Fine,” she said.

Rushkin gave her a sad smile as she opened the studio door to leave. “Be careful, Isabelle,” he said.

An eerie shiver went up Izzy’s spine as Rushkin’s words, echoing John’s earlier caution, went spinning through her mind. She looked at the small figure her mentor cut, still sitting there in the windowseat, and then down at the image she’d captured in the painting she held. Who to believe? Who did she need to be careful around? Well, John was mysterious, but he didn’t seem crazy. And Rushkin was the one who had beaten her.

“I ... I will,” she told him, then closed the door behind her and made her way down the stairs, trying not to bump the still-wet oil painting on anything as she made her retreat.

XIII

Izzy thought that John had stood her up when she first arrived at Perry’s Diner that evening. A pang of disappointment shot through her until she spotted him sitting in a booth at the back. When he raised a hand and gave her a lazy wave, she made her way down to where he was sitting. He was wearing a well-worn, flannel-lined jean jacket that she wasn’t sure would do him all that much good when it got colder, but it was better than the short sleeves he’d been wearing to date. And he certainly did look good in it.

“For a moment there, I didn’t think you’d come,” she said as she sat down across from him.

“I always keep my promises,” he told her. “My word’s the only currency I’ve got that’s of any real worth. I don’t spend it lightly.”

Izzy smiled. “Highly commendable, sir.”

“It’s just the truth,” he said, but he returned her smile.

Izzy slipped off her own jacket and bunched it up into a corner of the booth. When she turned back, John slid a ten-dollar bill across the table to her. “What’s this?” she asked.

“Your money. I ran into a bit of work after I left you this morning and made enough to buy the jacket without having to use what you’d lent me.”

“Good for you. Did you get a good deal on it?”

“Is eight dollars a good deal?”

“You’re kidding.”

John shook his head. “I went to that store on Lee Street you told me about.”

“I’d say it was a real bargain.”

When John shrugged, she wasn’t sure if he really didn’t care about money, or if he just didn’t want to talk about it. Probably a bit of both, she decided. “So what’ll we have?” she asked, opening her menu.

“Just black coffee for me,” John told her.

She eyed him over her lowered menu. “Look, if you haven’t got enough left over, I really don’t mind—”

“No, I’ve got the money. I had a late lunch, that’s all. I couldn’t eat if I wanted to.”

“Well, if you’re sure ...”

Izzy settled on the soup of the day—cream of cauliflower—and a side order of French fries. She also ordered a coffee, but she took hers with cream and sugar, adding John’s creamer along with her own to her mug since he wouldn’t be using it. Silence lay between them while they waited for Izzy’s meal to come, but it wasn’t anything like the comfortable silences she could share with Kathy or her other friends.

There was still too much of the unknown between them for her to feel completely at ease, and the fact that he bore such an uncanny resemblance to a painting she’d done before she’d met him continued to unnerve her.

“So you’re an Indian,” she said finally, to fill up the silence.

John smiled, amusement dancing in his dark eyes, and Izzy wished she’d never opened her mouth.

What an inane thing to say. Of course he was an Indian.

“I mean a Native American,” she corrected herself. When he continued to look amused, she added,

“Well, what do you call yourself?”

“Kickaha. It means ‘the people’ in our language. If I were to introduce myself to one of my own people I would say, I am Mizaun Kinnikinnik of the Mong tudem.”

“You told me your name was John.”

He shrugged. “John’s as good a name as any in this place.”

“Is ‘Mizaun’ the Kickaha name for John?”

“No. My name means Thistle in the Sweetgrass—I was a hard birth to my mother, but she told me I had cherubic features.”

But not anymore, Izzy thought. There was nothing of the pretty boy about his rugged good looks.

“And ‘Mong,’” she asked. “That’s your—what? Your totem?”

John shook his head. “Not exactly. In Kickaha tudem means clan, but I suppose it could also mean totem in the sense that you’re using the word. My clan is sacred to the loon.”

Izzy tried, but couldn’t suppress a giggle.

“I know,” John said, smiling with her. “Everyone believes that our totem should only be eagles and wolves and bears, but there’s good in all creatures and one can take pride in belonging to the clans looked over by the black duck or the frog as well. Or the loon.”

“It’s a beautiful bird, really,” Izzy said, remembering them from when she used to live on the farm on Wren Island. “And ‘Mong’ is a better name for it—it doesn’t sound quite so, you know, silly.”

“The loon represents fidelity to my people,” John said, “so it’s anything but a silly bird. Of course, I’m biased.”

“Would you prefer me to call you John or Mizaun?”

“Oh, John’ll be just fine.”

“Your Kickaha name is really beautiful.”

“So is Isabelle.”

Izzy blushed. “But it doesn’t mean anything.”

“That’s not true. It comes from Elizabeth, which means ‘consecrated to God.’”

Izzy pulled a face.

“Well,” John said, “if you’re not religious, just think of it as meaning you are sacred to the great spirit that oversees the world. You can’t find fault with that.

Izzy shook her head.

“And Isabelle,” he went on, “is also related to the name Isa, which means ‘iron-willed.’”

“Oh great,” Izzy said. “An iron will’s about the last thing I’ve got.” But speaking of names reminded her of something. “How did you know my name this morning?”

“I asked someone—I don’t remember who.”

Well, of course that made sense. The waitress brought her order then and they went on to talk of other things. Izzy felt a little odd, eating while John was having nothing, but he assured her again that he had no appetite, so she fell to. She was starving. All she’d had to eat all day was a muffin she’d grabbed on the way to her afternoon class.

“What did you mean last night,” John asked when she was finished with her meal, “about that being a bad time, or rather a bad way, to approach you?” Izzy gave him a long look. “You really don’t know, do you?”

When he shook his head, she told him about what had happened to Rochelle.

“I’m surprised you didn’t hear about it,” she said. “It was in all the papers and everybody’s been talking about it.”

“I wasn’t in the city that night,” John said.

“Isn’t it just awful what they did to her? And that’s why you spooked me when you stood there talking to me from the shadows. I couldn’t see your face at all, so I didn’t know what to think.”

“That was wrong,” he said. At first Izzy thought he was talking about last night, but before she could tell him that she knew now it had simply been bad timing, he went on. “The worst thing you can do is take away a person’s right to make a decision for him or herself. Without free will, we’re nothing. Slaves.

Objects. Nothing more.”

“I agree,” Izzy said. “I mean, who wouldn’t? But ...” Her voice trailed off. “But what?”

“Well, what about hunting and trapping? That’s what your culture’s based on, isn’t it? Those animals didn’t decide to die.”

John smiled. “No. But long ago we made a pact with the wild things of the forest. We take only what we need, no more. And we do it with respect. We have no fear of facing the spirits of our victims when we all meet together in Epanggishimuk.”

“When you meet where?”

“The spirit land in the west—where we go when our wheel upon this world has made its final turn.”

The amusement returned to his eyes, but this time it held a hint of mockery. “You know: those famous ‘happy hunting grounds.’”

Izzy nodded. “I guess you must get tired of everybody having something to say about your culture, and none of them knowing anything about it.”

“Not really. We don’t have a particular monopoly on spiritual enlightenment and many of our people don’t follow the old beliefs themselves, but I still think our relationship with the natural world has much to offer as a kind of touchstone for others to form their own pacts with the earth. They should only remember that we’re not perfect ourselves. Our people fit no more tidily into boxes as a whole than might any race. We were not the murdering heathens we were made out to be when the Europeans first took our land, nor were we noble savages. We were just people, with our own ways, our own beliefs—nothing more, but nothing less.”

“I wish there were more people like you,” Izzy said. “If there were, then maybe something like what happened to Rochelle would never have taken place.”

“The ones who hurt her will receive their just reward,” John said. “This I can promise you.”

Something about him changed as he spoke. His features were stern and there was such a grim tone to his voice that it scared Izzy a little, enough so that she could barely suppress a shiver. When she looked into his face, he didn’t seem to see her. Instead it was as if he was staring off into some far unseen distance where that terrible vengeance was taking place.

“By their very actions,” he said, “they have stepped onto a wheel where retribution will play a principal role.”

Izzy wished he’d come back from wherever it was he had gone. She didn’t like this dark side to his personality that had suddenly been revealed. In the back of her head she heard Rushkin’s voice telling her that John was evil, for her to be careful. But just as she started to get really spooked, John’s gaze focused back on her and he offered her a weak smile.

“Or at least that’s what my people believe,” he said.

Izzy was surprised at how relieved she felt to have him back. “Speaking of beliefs,” she said,

“Rushkin—the guy I’m studying under—he thinks I made you up.”

She thought it was kind of funny, and brought it up to clear the air and maybe bring a real smile back to her companion’s features. But John didn’t laugh. All he did was cock an eyebrow questioningly.

“He told me that I brought you to life through that painting I did,” Izzy explained. “No. How did he put it? That I gave you passage from some nebulous otherworld to here by painting you. You’re supposed to have watched me work and when you agreed on how I made you look, you crossed over.”

John laughed and all Izzy could do was think, Way to go. She’d succeeded in changing the mood, but only at the cost of making herself sound like a fool.

“He was pulling your leg, right?” John said.

Izzy shook her head. “No. He seemed quite serious.” She hesitated a moment, then decided to plunge on ahead. “He even warned me against you. He told me you were evil and I should destroy the painting and send you back.”

A frown took the humor from John’s features. “He should talk.”

Izzy blinked in surprise. “You know Rushkin?”

“I know his kind. They don’t live in the world, but they’ll sit in judgment of those who do and take what they want from it and from us.”

“No, you’ve got him all wrong,” Izzy said. “He’s a brilliant artist.”

“I don’t think so. True artists live in the world from which they take their inspiration. The two are inseparable—the subjects and those who render them. They return to the world as much—more—than what they take away.”

“He goes out,” Izzy said, thinking of how she’d first met her mentor.

“Oh yes,” John replied. “To observe. To take back what he’s found and capture it in his art. But not to partake of life. What does he give back?”

Me, Izzy thought, because that was all she knew Rushkin gave back. He teaches me. But he didn’t show anymore, and he’d told her often enough that he didn’t like to go out, didn’t like to talk to people.

“Can’t think of anything?” John asked.

“He’s just a little reclusive, that’s all,” Izzy replied. “But he’s inspired any number of people to enter the arts, so you can’t say he’s never given anything back. I can’t tell you how many people I know who got involved in the arts in one way or another because of him.”

John shrugged. “Any good a man such as he might do, is inadvertent.”

His reaction had been so strong to what Izzy had hoped would just be an amusing anecdote that she felt depressed. It was beginning to look as though they weren’t going to agree on anything. And what was worse, she couldn’t stop herself from thinking about what Rushkin had told her. She realized that for the past twenty minutes or so she’d been really studying John, almost as if she were trying to find the brushstrokes.

Suddenly she leaned across the table to get a closer look. John returned her scrutiny with a mild curiosity, but he didn’t say anything.

“Are you real?” Izzy found herself asking him, more than a little half-serious.

John leaned forward as well. He put his hand behind her head and gently pulled her toward him and then he kissed her in a way Izzy had never been kissed before. There was tenderness in the soft brush of his lips, but urgency as well; he was utterly focused upon the act, putting all of his attention on her and the contact of their lips until Izzy felt she was swimming through thickened air.

“What do you think?” he asked when he finally drew back.

Izzy took a long steadying breath. She couldn’t stop the smile that widened her lips. She didn’t want to.

“I don’t think it matters,” she told him. “I don’t think it matters one bit.” This time she was the one to initiate the kiss.

XIV

Newford, November 1974

Izzy didn’t go back to Rushkin’s studio the next day, or Friday, but by Monday morning she was itching to return. All her art supplies were there, all her paintings, and while Rushkin might be an odd bird, she knew that she’d learned more in the months she’d studied under him than she could have in years of working on her own. If he wanted to believe that some paintings could bring their subjects to literal life, that they could in effect create real physical representations of what appeared on the canvas, let him. She didn’t have to buy into the extremes of his eccentricity to keep learning from him. And one or two odd ideas certainly didn’t invalidate all she had learned, and could yet learn, from him.

But she was still nervous, returning to the studio. Not for fear of their continuing that weird discussion, nor even that Rushkin might really want her to start destroying certain paintings, but because of his temper. Since that awful day last December, he’d been true to his word and he hadn’t hit her again, but Izzy had gotten no better with confrontations and she could easily see this fueling more of them. But that Monday she returned, Rushkin kept his word once more. He didn’t bring up the subject again. The weeks went by and their conversations revolved around art, if they originated from Rushkin; anything else they talked about, Izzy had to bring up first. It got so that she forgot Rushkin had ever tried to convince her that she had brought John to life by painting him.

It was John who reminded her.

“Do me a favor, Isabelle,” he said when she was trying to decide where to store her painting of him,

“and keep it somewhere safe.”

At that time the painting was leaning against the wall of her bedroom, but her bedroom was so small and cluttered that she was afraid of inadvertently damaging the canvas by dropping something onto it, or putting her foot through it on her way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. It was too imposing to hang anywhere in their little apartment, and besides, she thought it was a little weird, the idea of having this huge portrait of her boyfriend up on her wall.

“What do you mean, keep it safe?” she’d asked him. “I thought you didn’t believe what Rushkin told me.”

John gave her a lopsided grin in response. “I just like it,” he said. “And there’s no harm in being careful, is there?”

And that was all he would say on the matter. When she tried to press him on it, he’d turn her questions aside. He was good at that. Whenever something came up in their conversation that he didn’t want to talk about, he’d steer them onto some other topic so skillfully that it wouldn’t be until she was at home in bed, or maybe even the next day working at her easel, that Izzy would realize she never had gotten a straight answer.

John liked to retain a sense of mystery about him, and Izzy learned to accept it. She knew he was staying with an aunt who “didn’t much like white girls”; that he worked at odd jobs; that he never seemed to have much of an appetite; that he had an unquenchable thirst to know about everything and anything so that he was never bored and, consequently, it was hard to be bored in his company, for his enthusiasm for the most mundane subject inevitably became catching; that he had a great treasure of the stories and history of his people that he would share, but very little to relate in terms of personal history except that he’d been in trouble a lot when he was younger and he didn’t like to talk about it anymore.

He was also the best lover Izzy had ever had. She knew she didn’t exactly have the world’s largest experience along those lines, having only taken three up to the time she’d met John, but each of those previous relationships had been disasters. For some reason, when it came to boyfriends, she was always attracted to men who treated her badly, or indifferently. John treated her as if she were made of gold.

She got the impression, from the little he talked about the trouble he used to get into, that he had a violent side to him, but it was never turned toward her. She had seen him angry, but it was always directed toward something or someone else, never at her.

If she had one real complaint in their relationship, it was that they were rarely a couple around her other friends. Somehow he was just never there when they were all getting together. He tended to call her at quiet times, or would simply show up when she was alone—returning from the studio or from the university—and then they went off on their own. It never seemed planned, but for all that most of her friends had met him, after three weeks, he was even more of a mystery to them than he was to her.

Talking about it with him never seemed to resolve anything because they always ended up talking about something else that was of far more immediate interest, and since it never appeared to bother any of her friends, eventually Izzy just let it go. Everyone was intrigued with him, but no one seemed to be insulted that he was rarely a part of the crowd.

Kathy was particularly happy with John’s appearance in Izzy’s life, having mother-henned her roommate through almost two and a half years of Izzy’s bad luck with men.

“You see?” she’d said after the first time she met John. “There are still good people around.”

“But I don’t know anything about him.”

“All you have to know is that he’s a good person,” Kathy replied, reversing their roles now that she’d met him. “You can see it in his eyes. This guy is seriously enamored with you, ma belle Izzy, and why shouldn’t he be?”

“Don’t start,” Izzy said, starting to feel embarrassed. She hated it when Kathy got into cataloguing all of what she felt were Izzy’s strong points.

“No,” Kathy told her. “Don’t you start. Give this relationship a chance to go where it’s going to go before you start making up your mind about where you think it’s headed.”

Over the past few months Kathy had gotten a lot more serious with her writing. She took to spending long evenings at the library, researching and writing, and always made a point of letting Izzy know when she’d be back. Izzy wasn’t so sure that Kathy actually needed to do so much research, and she certainly could have written at home, but it did allow Izzy some intimacy with John that they wouldn’t have otherwise been able to share since he didn’t have a place of his own.

“Where did you put the painting?” he asked one night when he came over. “It’s going to be in the show,” Izzy said. lily’s letting me store it at her studio until then.”

She’d been surprised, certainly more than a little self-conscious, but ultimately delighted when Albina had agreed to give her a solo show at The Green Man. It was going to be in January. She planned for The Spirit Is Strong to be the centerpiece.

“You’re going to sell it?” John asked.

Izzy shook her head. “Oh, no. Rushkin says it’s good to have a couple of NSF pieces hanging with the ones that are for sale—it supposedly gets people into the buying mood.

And besides, I think it’s one of my best pieces.”

“I’d feel you were selling a part of me, if you did sell it,” John told her.

Izzy knew what he meant. Though she’d painted it before she’d met him, she still thought of it the way people thought of the first time they met, or a first date.

“I could never sell it,” she assured him.

XV

From The Newford Sun, Thursday, November 28, 1974

POLICE HUNT VIGILANTES

by Maria Hill Newford Sun

Police have launched a manhunt for the killers of three Butler University students brutally beaten to death yesterday.

Robert Mandel, 19, John Collins, 19, and Darcy McClintock, 20, died after being savagely attacked in Lower Crowsea at approximately 11:30 P.M., police said.

The bodies of the three students were discovered in a car parked in front of the Crowsea Precinct at 1:00 A.M. by Const. Craig Chavez. The car was registered to McClintock.

With the bodies was a note alleging that the three students were responsible for the brutal assault and rape last month of a female Butler University student.

Detectives have few details on the vigilantes and are appealing to the public to help provide information, said NPD spokesman, Sgt. Howard Benzies.

“We have no idea how many were involved in the attack,” said Benzies, adding that there was also no indication whether the fatal assault took place inside or outside the car.

Police had no comment when asked if there was any evidence that the victims had been involved in the assault last month.

An extensive search of the area by police officers failed to find the murder weapons.

Anyone with information is asked to call the Crowsea Precinct at 263—1112.

> Grief Hits Pals Hard as Victims Mourned: Page 5

> Rise of Violence on Campus: Page 5 > Editorial: Page 10

XVI

At first, all Izzy could do was stare at the frontpage headline of the newspaper that Kathy had left out for her to read. Then she began to read the piece. She forgot all about getting herself a coffee or making breakfast as she worked her way through the various articles and finally the editorial related to that headline.

“Weird, isn’t it?” Kathy said, coming into their little kitchen from the shower. “Justice is served.”

She had a towel wrapped around her wet hair, another wrapped around her torso. Filling a couple of mugs with coffee, she brought them over to the table and sat down across from Izzy.

“Do you think they really are the guys that attacked Rochelle?” Izzy asked. “God, I hope so. I don’t know who killed them, but they should get a medal for giving the scum what they deserved.”

Izzy wasn’t so sure. While she certainly didn’t want Rochelle’s attackers to remain at large, if these really were the same men, the punishment seemed too extreme. Jail, yes. Lock them up forever, even.

But to be beaten to death like this ...

“I take it you don’t agree,” Kathy said.

“It’s not that. It’s just ...”

“Excessive.”

“I guess.”

Kathy sighed. “Look. If they did it once, the odds are they’d do it again. Rochelle wasn’t necessarily the first woman they attacked, and she certainly wouldn’t have been the last.”

“We don’t know that.”

“Statistics bear me out on this one,” Kathy said. “It’s not something I want to be right about—believe me.”

“I know,” Izzy said.

But her mind wasn’t really on the conversation anymore. She was thinking instead of that night with John in Perry’s Diner, when she’d told him about what had happened to Rochelle. He’d looked so grim.

The ones who hurt her will receive their just reward, John had told her that night. This I can promise you.

John with his violent past.

John of whom she still really knew next to nothing.

John who’d also told her, I always keep my promises. My word’s the only currency I’ve got that’s of any real worth. I don’t spend it lightly.

John who, she’d discovered since, always did keep his word.

John who’d assured her that Rochelle’s attackers would pay for what they had done.

This I can promise you.

Her gaze drifted back to the newspaper. Phrases leapt up from the newsprint and went spinning through her mind.

‘‘... brutally beaten to death ...”

. savagely attacked ...”

. fatal assault ...”

The scary thing was that she could imagine John doing it. Gentle as he was with her, she knew how strong he was, how much he abhorred injustice, how he had no fear of breaking the law because they were “white man’s laws. We never agreed to them.”

What kind of a friend are you, she asked herself, that you’d even suspect such a thing of him?

This I can promise you.

And then she thought: Angels and monsters. Spirits called from beyond. Guardian spirits ... and vengeful ones as well?

She shook her head. This was crazy. But she couldn’t suppress a shiver all the same.

“You okay?” Kathy asked.

Izzy nodded. “I’m just a little creeped out, that’s all.” She let her gaze rove to the kitchen clock.

“God, look at the time. I’ve got to get to the studio.”

“What? Rushkin’s got you punching a time clock now?”

“No. It’s just that I’ve got a class at two, but I really wanted to finish off this painting I’ve been working on.”

She managed to make her retreat and leave their discussion finished without having to bring up the fear of John’s involvement in last night’s murders that had lodged inside her. But she couldn’t make it go away, either. It stayed with her all day, affecting her ability to paint, distracting her in class. She felt guilty for even thinking what she was thinking, but it loomed so large in her mind now that she knew she had to hear John’s innocence proclaimed from his own lips before she could let it go.

My word’s the only currency I’ve got that’s of any real worth. I don’t spend it lightly.

He wouldn’t lie to her. She trusted in that much. Even if he had killed those men last night, he wouldn’t lie to her when she asked him about it.

She felt like such a traitor when she spotted him cutting across the common to meet her after class.

He looked the picture of innocence as he ambled over the grass, hands thrust deep in his jeans; his hair the glossy black of raven feathers, swallowing the sunlight; the white of his T-shirt showing through his open coat even though everybody else was buttoned up and wearing scarves and hats and gloves. When he got close enough, he didn’t even say hello, just swept her into his arms and gave her a long kiss that left her happily breathless. But the question that had plagued her all day rose up between them and stole away her pleasure in the moment.

“Did you read in the paper about what happened to those guys that attacked Rochelle last month?”

she asked as they started to walk back across the common.

John shook his head. “No, but I heard about it. I told you retribution was waiting for them on the wheel that they’d chosen. It was only a matter of time.”

“Do you think they deserved to die?”

He paused and turned to look at her. “What you’re really asking is, did I do it?”

Izzy couldn’t read the expression in his features. He didn’t look sad, or even disappointed in her, but there was something new there all the same. “I guess I am,” she said.

“Maybe you should look at this first,” he said. He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and brought out something wrapped in brown paper. “I was trying to think of how to bring this up, but I guess I might as well be as up front about it as you are.”

Izzy took the parcel. The blood drained from her features as she found herself looking at a corner of mounting frame with some canvas attached to it. The ends of the frame were charred, as was the edge of the canvas, but there was enough of the image left for her to recognize that it was all that was left of her painting Smither’s Oak. The rest was gone. Burned. Just as her paintings were in her dreams.

“Where ... where did you get this?” she asked.

“In the trash behind your studio.”

Not her studio, Izzy thought. Rushkin’s studio. Where Smither’s Oak was supposed to be in storage with the rest of her paintings that weren’t stacked up around her easel in the upstairs studio proper.

Her chest felt tight, but she didn’t feel the helplessness that always accompanied her dreams. Anger rose up inside her instead, unfamiliar, dark and over-powering.

“What do you want to do about it?” John asked.

“What do you think?” she said. “I’m going to confront him with it. Right now.”

John fell in step beside her as she marched off, but she stopped and shook her head.

“I appreciate your wanting to help,” she said, “but I have to deal with this by myself “

“What if he gives you a hard time?”

“The only person that’s going to get a hard time is him,” Izzy said, her voice grim.

She looked down at all that was left of her painting. The sorrow at its loss would come, she knew, but all she felt now was the pure hot burn of her anger. Just let Rushkin try and raise a hand against her, she thought. Her gaze lifted to meet John’s.

“I just have to do this myself,” she repeated. “If you come it’s going to make everything more complicated.”

“I understand,” John told her.

He walked her as far as the bus stop, but when the bus came, he stayed behind. It wasn’t until she was almost at her stop that Izzy realized that once again she hadn’t gotten an answer to a question she’d asked John.

XVII

When Rushkin opened the downstairs door to the coach house, Izzy thrust what was left of her painting at him, poking him in the chest with one end. He backed up a step in surprise and she followed him inside, jabbing him again.

“It had spirit, did it?” she said. Her voice was so cold, she couldn’t recognize it as her own. “It couldn’t go to the gallery because you don’t sell paintings with spirit—right?”

“Isabelle, what are—”

“But burning them is fine.”

“I don’t—”

“How dare you do this to my work?”

Images from her dreams flashed before her eyes. They’d been horrible enough on their own, but to know that they’d been prescient warnings made them all that much worse. How many of her paintings had he destroyed?”

“Isabelle—”

“Who died and made you God? That’s what I want to know. You’ve treated me like shit most of the time I’ve come here, but I put up with it because I could still respect you as an artist. I thought you really believed in the worth of my work. God knows I’m nowhere near your level, and maybe I never will be, but I was trying. I was doing the best I could. And then you do this to me.”

She thrust the charred remains of Smither’s Oak up in the air between them, almost poking him in the eye. He backed up another step, but this time she didn’t follow. She stared at what she held and her eyes suddenly brimmed with tears. Her anger was still there, deep and strange to her and so very painful, but the sorrow she thought she’d be able to put aside until she’d dealt with Rushkin rose up to overpower her.

Rushkin moved forward, a hand raised to touch her shoulder, but she backed away from him.

“You ... you betrayed me,” she mumbled through her tears.

“Isabelle,” Rushkin said. “That is not your painting.”

She looked blankly at him, everything blurred through a veil of tears. Her gaze dropped to the charred canvas in her hand. Though she couldn’t see it clearly now, she’d studied it on the bus ride over.

She knew the brushstrokes, the subject matter, the palette.

“I ... I know my own work,” she said.

But Rushkin shook his head. “I did that painting.”

“You ...”

“I’m intrigued by your choices of subject, your use of light,” he said. “I wanted to get inside your work.”

“You’re copying my paintings?” Izzy rubbed her sleeve against her eyes, trying to clear her vision so that she could get a better look at him. He had to be making fun of her. But all he did was nod. “Isn’t it supposed to go the other way?” she asked.

“The artist who stops learning,” Rushkin said, “is either dead or not an artist.”

“Sure, but I’m the student here.”

“Do you think the teacher can’t learn anything from his student?”

“I don’t know. I never thought of it before.”

“Come with me,” he said.

He led the way back to the spare bedroom that he used as a storage space, and there they were, Smither’s Oak, all her paintings, intact, unharmed, just as she’d left them.

“You see?” Rushkin said. “I would never dream of harming your work. I know how important it is to you.”

“But ..... Izzy lifted the charred bit of canvas and wood she was holding. “Why did you burn this?”

“Because it’s your work. I did it as a study, for myself, nothing more. I didn’t want to keep such pieces around because ... well, what if I were to die and they were found in my estate? Do you think anyone would believe that I had copied them from you?”

Izzy slowly shook her head.

“Exactly. So once I’ve learned what I can from a piece, I destroy it to preserve the integrity of your art. I wouldn’t dream of letting your unique vision appear to be based upon work I’d done—and I was only insuring that no one else would gather the wrong impression.”

“But what could you possibly be learning from me?” Izzy had to know. Rushkin hesitated. “I’ll tell you,” he said after a moment, “but remember, you were the one to bring this up, not I.”

Izzy nodded.

“Let me take that,” Rushkin said.

Izzy gave him the canvas that he’d asked for and watched as he dropped it into the brass wastebasket that stood by the door. He led her back into the kitchen then and poured them each a mug of tea from a pot he’d had steeping when she burst in. Not until they were settled at the table did he go on.

“We talked about spirits before,” he said. “Of how artists can call them up from ... well, no one knows where. But we call them up with certain paintings or songs or any creative endeavor that builds a bridge between our world and that mysterious Garden of the Muses.”

“I remember,” Izzy said. She got an apologetic look on her face. “I’m just not so sure I can believe in it.”

“Fair enough. But it doesn’t matter. Insofar as the current situation lies, all that matters is that I believe it. Are you with me so far?”

“I suppose.”

“I used to be able to bring them across,” Rushkin said. “I made homes for those spirits in my paintings, gave them bodies to wear. My work was a bridge between the worlds. But no longer. I’ve lost the touch, you see. For many years now, when I paint, I make a painting. A wondrous enough enchantment in its own right, to be sure, but when you’ve known more, merely painting can no longer be enough.”

“But you ... you said you were teaching me how to do that.”

Izzy felt a little odd as she spoke. She didn’t believe, but she felt cheated at the same time to learn that this calling up of spirits was no longer possible.

“I was,” Rushkin said. “I am. I still will. You see, I can remember how I did it, but I have lost the ability to do so. Lost the gift. But you have not. It lies strong inside you. So I was copying those pieces of yours in hopes of building a bridge to that other place to see if I could regain what I had lost by seeing how you did it.

“And?” Izzy asked, forgetting for the moment how she felt about the whole idea. “Did it work?”

Rushkin shook his head. “No. All that resulted was exact duplicates of your work. After each attempt, I destroyed them.”

Izzy frowned, thinking this all through. “So the painting can call up spirits—spirits that can physically manifest in our world.”

“Yes.”

“And do they become real, then?”

“What do you mean?”

“Once they’re here in our world,” Izzy asked. “Are they real like you and me?”

“They become real, but not like you or I,” Rushkin told her. “There remains a bond in them to that place from which they originated so that they always carry a piece of otherness inside. They might seem like you or I, but they don’t have our needs. They require neither food, nor sleep. They don’t dream.

And because they can’t dream, they are unable to create.”

“And it’s just people that come across?” Izzy asked.

“Beings,” Rushkin said. “Yes. However, they won’t necessarily seem like people. They have the same source as legend and myth, Isabelle. When the ancients first made their paintings and sculptures of marvelous beings—dryads and satyrs, angels and dragons—they were not rendering things they had seen. Rather they were bringing them into being. Not all of them, of course. Only those artists with the gift. The others were working from observation, but what they observed was what the gifted had first brought across.”

“What about the tree in Smither’s Oak? You said it had spirit. Did it come across as well?”

Rushkin’s shoulders lifted and fell helplessly. “I don’t know. Perhaps. I have never been aware of such a crossing, but it seems possible. Of course, such a spirit would have no mobility. It would be forced to remain at whatever spot it crossed over.”

“And what you were saying earlier,” Izzy asked. “You weren’t just talking about painting. You made it sound like music or writing could build a bridge as well.”

“It seems logical and so I’ve been told, but I know only how to use the gift through my painting. My understanding of it has always been limited in that sense.”

What got to Izzy the most was Rushkin’s sincerity. He took such impossible concepts and damned if he didn’t make them seem plausible.

“You really believe in this stuff, don’t you?” she asked.

“Without question,” he replied. “Though as I told you before, I was as skeptical when my mentor told me of them, as you are listening to me.”

XVIII

It was while Izzy was riding home on the bus that the fatigue hit her hard. She’d been burning adrenaline all the way to the studio and through her confrontation with Rushkin, so angry that she hadn’t even had time to feel scared. After his explanation, her energy deflated. Her head spun from the emotional roller coaster she’d just been on and she felt so weak it was all she could do to sit upright in her seat. But the events of the day continued to turn over and over in her mind.

She would have cheerfully killed Rushkin, she realized. That easily. And over what? Paintings. It was true that she’d invested an incredible amount of herself in each one, but paintings could always be redone. When she likened what might have been her loss to what had happened to Rochelle, there was really no comparison at all. What had been stolen from Rochelle could never be recovered.

Izzy thought she understood Kathy’s argument better now, seeing it from the other side of the coin as it were. And as for what had happened to Rochelle’s attackers ... She didn’t necessarily agree any more than she had earlier, but it was easier to empathize with the killers now.

Killers.

Or killer?

She knew now why John had deflected her question earlier in the evening by handing her that piece of charred canvas he’d found behind the studio. He had done so to make her understand what true anger meant. Justified anger. Had he been involved in the deaths of Rochelle’s attackers? At this moment she thought it was more to the point to ask, was he even real?

Rushkin’s arguments were so seductive that, impossible though they had to be, she had left the coach house halfway convinced that spirits could be called up through certain art, through the concentration and focus one held while working on a piece. Rushkin had never lied to her before. Why should he begin now? And why with something so bizarre?

If that process Rushkin described was real ...

She had painted John before she’d ever met him. John never seemed to eat. He never seemed to sleep. He never spoke of dreams. He remained as much an enigma to her now as he’d been when they’d first met. It could simply be the way he was. But if Rushkin was to be believed, the mystery she always sensed surrounding John might not be inborn, or self-produced; it might have its source in that piece of otherness that he’d brought with him when her painting had called him up from that other place.

The whole idea was crazy, but she knew now that she had to explore it or she’d really feel she’d gone mad. Imagine if it was real and she turned her back upon it.

She would go to July’s studio, away from Rushkin’s influence, and deliberately attempt to call up a being from that so-called otherworld. Not a man like John who, because he had the appearance of a normal person, could as easily be a product of either world, but a being for which there would be no question that its place of origin was utterly alien. And then she would wait and see. If it would come to her. Here. In this world.

You’re mad, she told herself as she got off at her stop and walked down Waterhouse to the apartment. Well and truly. Except she knew she had to make the attempt. Because, what if ... ?

She wouldn’t think of it anymore. She was tired enough as it was without exhausting herself further worrying over it. Tomorrow she would just do it. Start a painting. And then see what, if anything, it called to her.

As she was making her way down the block, she saw that John was waiting for her, sitting on the stoop of her building. She thought the spectre of the day’s suspicions would rise again at the sight of him, but either she was too worn out, or the decision she’d made to conduct her own experiment put everything else on hold until that one question was resolved.

“How did it go?” John asked, rising to his feet at her approach. She felt as though she could just melt into the hug he gave her. “Are you okay?” he added.

Izzy nodded against his shoulder. “It wasn’t my painting you found,” she told him. When they sat down together on the steps, she leaned against him, appreciating the support as much as the contact. “It was a copy of it that Rushkin had done,” she went on to explain. “He destroyed it so that people wouldn’t think I was copying from him, even though it was the other way around.”

“Why would he want to copy your work?”

Izzy sat up straighter and turned to look at him. “Because he thinks I’m magic,” she said, smiling.

“Remember? He’s lost his magic and he thought he might be able to recover it by doing a painting the way I do it. Or at least that’s what he says.”

John gave her an odd look.

“It’s okay. Honestly,” Izzy said. “I saw my paintings and they were all still there.”

“If you say so.”

“Oh, don’t go all vague on me, John. I’m way too tired. If you’ve got something to say, just say it.”

He hesitated for a long moment, then took her hand in his. He traced the lines on her palm with a fingertip.

“You really thought what I brought you was a piece of your own painting, didn’t you?” he finally asked.

Izzy nodded. “I know my own style. God, I spent so long on parts of that painting I could redo it in my sleep.”

“And the works that were intact—they were yours?”

“Yes.” She started to get an uncomfortable feeling as she saw where this was heading. “Look,” she said. “Rushkin’s a genius. Of course he’d be able to duplicate my work.”

“Enough so that you couldn’t tell the difference?”

“Well, in some ways, that was the whole point of why he did it, wasn’t it? To do it exactly the way I did it. Otherwise he wouldn’t be able to find this magic whatever-it-is that he’s looking for.”

John nodded. “So how do you know that the paintings he destroyed were the ones he did?”

For a long moment all Izzy could do was look at him.

“I ... I don’t,” she said in a small voice. “What are you saying? That he lied to me?”

“I’m just saying to be careful. Don’t be so trusting.”

Again that warning, Izzy thought. John warning her against Rushkin, Rushkin warning her against John. It made her head hurt, trying to work it all out.

“Why would he lie to me?” she asked. “What could he possibly stand to gain by lying to me?”

“Maybe that’s the wrong question to ask,” John replied. “Maybe what you should be asking is, what does he stand to lose if you know the truth?”

“You’re presupposing that he is lying.”

“Doesn’t what he told you about copying your work seem more than a little odd to you?”

“When you come down to it, everything’s odd about him.”

“Just think about it, Isabelle.”

I don’t want to, she thought. But she knew she would. It was the kind of thing that, once someone brought it to your attention, you couldn’t help but think about. She hated carrying around suspicions. It was like today all over again, except it would put Rushkin in the seat of scrutiny instead of John.

She regarded him for a long moment. Suspicions concerning Rushkin, suspicion in general, made her mind travel a certain circuit. Without wanting them to, all her earlier uncertainties concerning John were back in her mind again, demanding that she deal with them.

“Did you kill those men?” she found herself asking.

“No,” John replied.

Believe him, Izzy told herself.

“I believe you,” she said, and by saying it aloud she knew it was true. She did believe.

My word’s the only currency I’ve got that’s of any real worth.

How could she not, and still love him?

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That I had to ask, you know.”

“Friends don’t need to apologize.”

“When one of them’s wrong they do,” Izzy said. She paused, then gave him an uncomfortable look.

“I’ve got to know one more thing.”

John smiled. “And that is?”

“Are you real?”

He took her hand and laid it against his chest. She could feel the rise and fall of his breathing.

“Are you?” he asked.

And that was all she could get out of him that evening.