Supernatural Noir

Though he had reached this conclusion on his own, he wanted to deny it now but could not—he recognized her from some foul adit of experience, a dead end, a still-life alley with full moon and heaped garbage bags glistening like fat black boulders, and while she gave a blow job to some middle-aged douche he would wait in the zebra-striped island of light and shadow beneath a fire escape, her agent, her mystic protector, counting the cash, watching her shade kneel and merge with the flaps of a raincoat, and afterward she would hurry over to him, wiping off her lips, and ask, “We got enough?” Enough for the joys of modern chemistry, enough to transform an abandoned house into the Beverly Hilton, cockroaches into glittering brown jewels, life into a death trip with pretty colors, hunger into a cool side effect, love into a blue movie with a warped soundtrack and junk food.

“Bet you don’t believe me,” she said.

“You might be wrong.”

As if saying this bridged some vital distance between them, he felt close to her, shrouded in a thick, honeyed sexuality, and believed he knew her completely.

“Am I?” she said.

“Can’t you tell? I thought you were onto me.”

“Quit teasing!”

“I’m not teasing,” he said. “Can’t you tell?”

He pulled her atop him, nuzzled her breasts. He thought he could taste her resilience, her fragility, the lesser hopelessness she might call hope, all braided together in the chewy plugs of her nipples.

“It’s me you want?” she asked, tremulous, a virgin asking for proof. “It’s really me and not just . . . things?”

“You,” he said with such a wealth of solemnity that his mood was broken, but then she pushed his hand between her legs, saying, “See . . . see how much I want you, see . . . ,” and he was with her again, nearly breathless, easing two fingers inside her. Her ass churned, her tongue was in his mouth and she moaned at the same time. They rolled and tossed, the dim mirror filling with their thrashing shadows, the walls billowing, fiery specks jiggling in midair, all locked into the rhythm of the tumbling bed. He had a feeling of liberation and unfamiliarity, as if this were something more powerful and involving than the sex he remembered, but when he sat up, braced on one hand, preparing to enter her, he froze, a cocaine freeze that left him dead and empty, like a machine whose current had been stopped. He felt isolated, embedded in miles of darkness, and he thought if he were to shift his head an inch, the wires holding it in place would snap. His elbow ached from the strain of supporting his weight, and his forearm began to tremble.

“What’s wrong?” she said, urgency burring her voice, trying to guide him between her legs.

Thoughts poured from his head like dirty water down a drain. He was poisoned, out of his element, unable to speak. His erection wilted. The girl took him in her mouth again and that did the trick that sent a jolt of current flowing through the dead machine. But when he entered her, when she lifted her legs, her heels digging into his calves, and she cried out, “Oh God, God . . . ahh God,” her speech had the rushed monotonous cadence and impersonal fervor of somebody calling a horse race, and he remained distant, never losing himself in the turns of her body, fucking her with mechanical ferocity and never once speaking her name.

——

Years before, a couple of years after he ran away from home, he and a girl named Chess had fled LA, planning to live as one in some lush, secret paradise, to produce children and art, and think the eloquent thoughts of the Awakened. Instead, they wandered around Mexico, stealing and fucking other people for drugs and food. He had believed he loved her and in a sense he had. The problem had been that they, too, were the same people and he had loved her with the same malignant intensity with which he loved himself. In the end he pimped her to a prosperous middle-aged German for a quantity of Mexican mud, and Chess and the German guy flew off together for what was supposed to be a week in Valparaiso, never to be heard from again.

He talked about Chess a great deal over the ensuing years; he told their story of squandered love to friends, to marks, to Charlie. The story became his big-ticket item, the heartbreakingly honest confessional he used to impress people with his depth, his soulfulness, convincing them to let him get close enough so he could take advantage of them in some way; but the more he talked, the less he remembered of what he had felt, as if each word was carrying off a fragment of experience, until he could no longer recall how it had actually been between them. He could summon up her face, but it was a dead face, a police sketch of a face, devoid of nuance, of energy.

This girl now, lying with her pale back to him, dozy from sex . . . no way he felt about her as he had about Chess. That is, if what he recalled wasn’t total bullshit. But this girl . . . What was her fucking name? Tammy, Trudy . . . something like that. Tracy. He couldn’t deny she had a certain appeal. Maybe it was her ignorance, the sheer doggedness of it—maybe that bespoke a measure of innocence. Innocence was a quality he could use to delude himself into believing there was more to the relationship. He ran a hand along the curve of her waist and hip, and she stirred to the touch. No, he decided. He didn’t need any complications.

“Hey, Tracy.”

He nudged her and she made a complaining noise. He flicked on the bedside lamp and said again, “Tracy!”

“Oh, Lord! I forgot.” She squinted up at him. “When I hitchhike I never use my real name. It makes me feel safer out there. I know it’s silly. I meant to tell you, but . . .” She flashed a lopsided grin. “We got a little busy.”

She scooted up to a sitting position and gave him a peck on the cheek and said, “Sorry.”

He caught a whiff of Elfland Hospitality Pak Shampoo.

“My name’s Carole,” she said. “Carole with e on the end.”

For some reason it seemed harder to dump a Carole than a Tracy, and he was tempted to relent. Then she began to prattle like she had in the car, wondering if there was a place open where they could get some food, probably not, it must be two o’clock already, and she couldn’t hardly wait to hit Seattle, she bet the seafood there was awesome . . .

“Listen, Carole,” he said. “I don’t think we should travel together.”

Uncomprehending, she gaped at him.

“I’ll give you money for the bus,” he said. “And enough so you can get situated in Seattle. But that’s it.”

She made a weak, half-completed gesture toward her brow. “What do you mean?” she asked. “I thought . . .”

“I don’t want to argue,” he said.

She seemed prettier than she had earlier, the sharpness of her face less evident. “But we were . . .”

“And don’t be telling me how wonderful it can be,” he went on. “If we stay together, all that’ll happen is one of us will rip the other off.”

She started to object and he said, “I’ll give you a thousand dollars,” seeing this as a stroke of moral genius, charity abolishing the sin of theft, saving himself grief and at the same time giving the girl a shot. He would still have six thousand left.

“I don’t give a damn about your money!” she said tearfully. “I want to be with you!”

“It’s not going to happen.”

She let out a thin cry and clasped her hands to the side of her head.

“It’s for the best,” he said. “If you stay calm and think about it, you’ll see that.”

She hugged her knees, rocking back and forth, doing her mad-girl impression, singing tunelessly, breathily, the song of a fly buzzing in an asylum window, drunk on sunlight.

“Stop that!” he said.

Her keening rose in pitch.

“What are you . . . fucking nuts? Talk to me.”

He expected her to start blubbering, but she didn’t leak a single tear and kept on with her broken-teakettle noise.

“That’s not going to get it,” he said. “Acting all crazy and shit. I’ve seen crazy, I know crazy. You can’t sell that shit here.”

Her eyelids drooped so that slits of white were visible beneath them.

Fed up with her, he pulled on his pants, shrugged into his shirt and stepped out into the breezeway, slamming the door behind him. The Dodge minivan he had parked beside was gone. He wished that he hadn’t left his car keys in the room. He could have booked. A thousand dollars? Christ, what was he thinking? She was likely used to selling her ass for fifty, a hundred tops. The cool air soothed him, tuned his anger lower. He dug the loose change from his pocket and went padding barefoot along the breezeway toward the vending machines next to the office. If he got her something to eat, that might placate her. It might be worth driving somewhere—that pancake house back on the interstate might still be serving. Once she was loaded with carbs and sugar he could talk her down from hysteria, open a dialogue, reason with her, and in the end they would share a hug, a semichaste kiss, alas, alack, adios, adieu, we’ll always have the Elfland.

He selected a bag of chips and a Snickers from the vending machines, and then noticed particles of glass on the sidewalk in front of the office—the door had been blown inward and glass shards strewn across the carpeting, as if something had struck it with explosive force. The lights were on, but the night man was nowhere in sight.

Michael stuck his head inside and called out. No reply. He picked his way across the carpet, walking on his toes, and peered behind the desk, half expecting to find the night man’s bullet-riddled corpse, but saw only an overturned office chair and what might have been a dusting of Doritos crumbs on the counter. Going back outside, he surveyed the parking lot, an acreage of blacktop divided by concrete islands and the occasional patch of shrubbery, slots demarked by diagonal white lines, luminous under the arc lights. His sense of unease spiked. There had been at least six or seven cars in the lot, not counting the minivan, and now there were none. What were the odds that their owners had all checked out between midnight and two a.m.? Not inconceivable, he told himself. The Elfland might be a no-tell motel. He scanned the faзade of the building. Yellow lights sprayed from the open door of a second-floor room, silhouetting a short, squat figure no larger than a child. Whoever it was didn’t move a muscle. Michael waved, but the wave was not returned. The figure might have been stone . . . or wood. It looked to be wearing some sort of hat. Like a Santa hat.

Oh, no you don’t, he said to himself.

You’re not going there, you are definitely not buying into the Carole-induced premise that magical Nazi elves have taken over a motel in Bumfuck, Oregon.

“Hey!” he shouted at the motionless figure. “What’s going on?”

Silence.

“Somebody broke into the office! Did you see anything?”

A clattering sounded behind him—like someone running in wooden shoes.

He spun about. Something darted behind a shrub about fifty feet away. Something quick and approximately elf sized. He couldn’t be certain of it—he would have liked third-party corroboration. He was exhausted, coming down from a coke binge, and his eyes were playing tricks.

“Is anybody there?” he called in a shaky voice.

The shrub quivered, as if being shaken. He shot a glance toward the second-floor room. The figure in the doorway was gone.

Michael’s balls tightened. He eased toward the parking-lot exit, choosing a path that led well away from the suspicious shrub, intending to put some distance between himself and the motel, cross the road to the Boron station and take stock. Let his nerves settle and then head back to 120, because it had become clear he was under the influence of the coke and of that nut bag Carole-with-an-e-on-the-end, and he needed to gain perspective. That was all. He’d pull it together, return to the room, grab his keys, and drive. Thinking this made him feel steadier. He’d go as far as Portland and find a motel not named the Elfland, a Comfort Inn, a Travelodge or Best Western, a good old American franchise free of Black Forest statuary and street meat . . .

The lights went out.

Not just the lights of the motel and the parking lot, but also those of the Boron station, the shops, and the winking traffic signal. The darkness was unrelieved. It was as if a dense black cloud had lowered over the town, reducing visibility to almost zero. Power failure. He waited for the lights to come back. When they did not, he moved forward, groping, shuffling along, making for the exit, determined to follow through on his plan of taking stock, pulling it together.

He heard the clattering again. It was louder, closer, issuing from every direction—lots of diminutive wooden feet darting near. As he turned this way and that, tracking the noise, something snagged his shirttail and nearly succeeded in dragging him down. Panic put a charge in him and he ran blindly, his arms pumping. Pieces of gravel stuck in the soles of his feet. He ignored the discomfort and kept running until he crashed into the hedge bordering the lot. Twigs tore at his sides, dug into his chest. He fought to break through the hedge, tearing away handfuls of leaves, but it was impenetrable—he hung there, supported by the bushes. The clattering had stopped, and, but for the wheezing of his breath, the silence was absolute. No semis grinding on the interstate, no barking dogs, no ambient noise whatsoever. He pictured the town cut off from the universe of light and life, adrift on an infinite ocean of nothingness, monsters with mile-wide mouths rising toward the surface, lured by this tasty morsel, and panic took him a second time. He struggled free of the hedge, lost his balance, and fell backward, smacking his head on the asphalt. Splinters of white light lanced through his skull. Dazed, he rolled over onto his side, preparing to sit up.

Overhead, the Elfland’s sign switched on, humming, buzzing, painting on the asphalt a ragged island of illumination upon which he was marooned. The leprechaun on the sign mocked him with a knowing leer. Michael’s instincts prompted him to flee, but he was too enfeebled to do anything other than scrabble at the pavement. He waited for the leprechaun to leap down from the sign, for whatever form the next shock might take.

“Who’s there?” he shouted, and then: “Quit fucking with me!”

Darkness swallowed his words.

He remained lying there, alert for the least sound and hearing none. Moths came to whirl whitely like windblown snowflakes about the sign, and this emblem of normalcy helped restore his capacity for thought. No other lights showed, either in the motel or the town, and that did not make sense, that the sign was the sole source of radiance, unless he were to believe in a reality he wanted to reject . . . And yet he couldn’t reject it. The girl, Carole, she’d never denied being a witch. She must be orchestrating this somehow. That funky singing she did now and again, it could be part of a spell, a retarded Tennessee mantra that helped her focus. She was the only person who had reason to screw with him. Except for Charlie, maybe. Except for Chess. Except for damn near every fucking person he had ever met, everyone he had used and abused while working out his parental issues. Perhaps that’s what was happening here: karmic retribution.

He laughed off the possibility and then had the urge to cry out for help; but even if things were normal, if everyone was safe in their beds and the town was not the empty, abandoned-by-God place he envisioned, there was nobody within earshot. And if help arrived, what would he say then? This redneck bitch I picked up hitchhiking, goes about a hundred five, hundred ten pounds, IQ of a snail, she’s a freak, man, she’s tripping me out, animating the elf population of Whidby Bay. Sure, son, the cops would say. Let’s put you into the nice holding tank where you’ll be protected from her unnatural power. Hey, where’d you get the seven grand? You suppose this white powder might be an illegal substance? Got a pink slip for the Caddy?

At length he got to his feet, feeling stronger for the effort, and began walking toward the motel, its unlit faзade melting up from the dark. He was in rotten shape, his head throbbing, vision fluttering, feet and torso bleeding, but bottom line, he had to get the keys. Arguments occurred to him as he went. Explanations. The Elfland’s sign must be on some weird separate circuit. The night man had blundered into the door, shattered the glass, and run away. Vandals had set the elf in the second-floor doorway, or else it was a kid wearing a funny hat. He had been unsteady on his feet and imagined the tug on his shirttail. The clattering . . . Well, he’d have to work on that one. None of this held water, but neither did any less-rational explanation, and he allowed it to satisfy a need for some logical ground, however flimsy, on which to stand.

On reaching the rear of the motel he was blind again, and virtually deaf. The breezeway lights had not come back on, and the crash of the surf drowned out lesser sounds. He moved out onto the grass, cool, dewy, and easier on his feet, and shuffled along, waving an arm before him to feel for obstructions. His instep came down on some hard, sharp thing. He yelped and sprawled on the ground, squeezing his foot to stifle the pain. Once the pain had subsided, he groped about in the grass and found a sprinkler head. He twisted the thing angrily, trying in vain to uproot it, and then clutched at his foot again, rubbing away the soreness. Suddenly weary, he hung his head and closed his eyes. He could have nodded off, no problem, but he remembered that this sort of sleepiness was a symptom of concussion and forced himself to stand. His thoughts narrowed to keys, car, drive.

He must have gotten turned around, because after a couple of steps he came up against the wall at the edge of the cliff. He clung to it for an instant, getting his bearings, and made a beeline for the breezeway—he estimated that no more than fifteen or twenty steps would carry him there. But he took twenty-five steps, then thirty, and still was walking on grass. Thinking he might have gone off on a diagonal, he altered his path by a few degrees and continued. He went another twenty steps. The lawn hadn’t been this extensive—he should have hit concrete by now. He decided to return to the wall, get his bearings again, and start over; but he walked until, by his reckoning, he was somewhere out over the Pacific and did not encounter the wall. He tamped down his anxiety, telling himself to stay calm . . . And then he saw that the character of the darkness had changed. Whereas before it had been dead black, now the air had acquired a distinct shine, a gloss that reminded him of obsidian or polished ebony, and appeared to be circulating around him, as if he were at the center of a slow whirlpool. Behind the currents of the whirlpool he could see the elves. Not clearly and not for long, but they were gathered around him, cutting off every avenue of escape, fading out and reappearing closer to hand and in different postures—like watching a streaming video with gaps in the continuity. Fear seeped into the corners of his mind, but did not flood and overflow it. It was fear tempered by doubt and disbelief, by a degree of acceptance, and by one thing more. He wanted the elves to be real. Death at their hands would be preferable to the ignominy of an overdose, hepatitis, any of the protracted stand-ins for suicide toward which he was inexorably bound. This would be death by punch line. Suicide by elf.

“Bring it, bitches,” he said, slurring the words.

On Sleazy, on Spongehead, on Ratfuck and Groper.

He gave an amused grunt. Now this was some funny shit. I mean, really. Elves. They were almost in striking distance, cudgels lifted, knives at ready, their scowling faces knotted in fury. In their original context, they might have been seen as brave and resolute, the defenders of a helpless village. Rambos among elves. Forest guerrillas. Hardy little fuckers. Here they could only be misunderstood.

At the last second fear eroded his intention to meet death head on, and he made a panic move, stumbling forward in an attempt to break through their defenses. Something cracked the top of his head, and he found himself gazing into the depths of the whirlpool, into a funnel of blackness at whose blacker-than-black bottom a convulsed flower revolved, a bloom with a thousand petals that rippled and undulated like those of some vast and complicated sea creature sucking him down into its nothing-colored maw.

——

An orange glow penetrated his lids and his first thought was that the breezeway lights had come back on, but on opening his eyes he realized it was the early sun. He lay at the base of the wall and everything ached, especially his head. His clothes were soaked with dew. Laboriously, he made it to his knees and saw over the top of the wall other cliffs, stratifications of reddish sediment towering above the ocean. Beneath the shadows of high cumulus the water was dark purple, and among the cloud shadows lay swatches of glittering orange. The soft crush of the surf was constant and serene. He touched the crown of his head and couldn’t tell whether he felt his scalp or the pads of his fingers.

“Thank goodness,” said the girl’s voice behind him. “I thought I was going to have to call nine-one-one. What happened?”

Her hand fell to his shoulder and in a reflex of fright he knocked it away and scrambled to his feet. She retreated, bewilderment plain on her face. At her rear, a couple of yards distant, stood the elves—an evil Walt Disney platoon prepared to follow their hillbilly Snow White ditsy queen into battle. He was fairly certain they were grouped and posed differently from when he had initially seen them. Dizzy, he sank down in the grass and leaned against the wall.

“You got blood all over you,” she said, and held out a packet of tissues. “I bought you some wipes.”

If she were a witch, if she had almost killed him and was gaming him now, she had a smooth fucking act.

“Did you know the office door’s busted out?” she said. “That have anything to do with how you got bloody?”

“You tell me.”

She took to running her mouth, saying there was so many criminals these days, why, even in a piddly place like her hometown, people were always breaking into Coulters, this big old department store, and robbing the Dairy Queen and all. His paranoia ebbed and, though with half his mind he believed that her asinine rap was designed to put him at ease, make him let down his guard, he permitted her to kneel beside him and dab at his injuries with the wipes. The astringent stung, but it felt better than it hurt. He kept an eye on the elves. Sunlight glistened on their caved-in faces, charged the tips of their weapons. Their scowls seemed diminished. They approved of this union between Magic Girl and Action Lad. What the fuck, Michael said to himself. If you believe what you think you believe, you should render her ass unconscious and beat it—but he wasn’t sure he could drive.

“You’re wrong to be doing this,” said the girl as she finished her cleanup.

“Doing what?”

“Breaking up with me.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, if you don’t think so, there’s nothing to say, ’cause when you go and think something you’re bound to believe it. I may not know much about you, but I know that.”

He rested his head on his knees. “I don’t want to talk.”

After a while the girl said, “I’m sorry.”

He cocked an eye toward her. “What for? Did you do something to me?”

“That wasn’t my meaning. I’m just sorry about everything.”

The wind gusted, flattening the grass; a thin tide of light raced across the lawn and from somewhere below the rim of the cliff came the crying of gulls. Michael felt weak and lazy in the sun.

“You really going to give me a thousand dollars?” she asked.

“I meant it when I said it.”

She plucked a handful of grass and let the wind take it from her palm. “I been trying to think how to convince you we’d be good together. I know what I was feeling last night. It was just a start—I understand that. But it was real, and if you can’t remember how it was, if it got knocked out of you or whatever, maybe you should hunt up what you felt and take a chance on it. ’Cause that’s all feelings are—things you catch and ride as far as they’ll take you. It’s sorta like hitchhiking.”

That Tennessee mountain homily, pure as moonshine trickling from a rock.

I hear you, Sonnet darling, but things got a tad too freaky for me.

“That’s not the point,” he said. “I . . .”

“Let me talk, all right? I ain’t asking for nothing.”

She tugged at the crotch of her cutoffs; her face was calm.

“When you said you’d give me a thousand dollars,” she went on, “I was angry. I thought you was treating me like a whore. Then I got to wondering why you’re giving me so much.”

Impatient with analysis, he said, “You don’t have to explain this shit.”

“It won’t take a minute.” She peered at him. “You feeling okay? You don’t look too good.”

The time has come for solicitude, he thought. After passion, after anger and despair, after the fear and the trembling, a little friendly concern: the cheese tray of the romantic supper.

“I’ll live,” he said.

Actually, lover, I’m in tiptop shape. I’m sitting here communing with my peeps, the Mojo Demon Elves, the Kamikaze Hellfighter Elves, while you and I discuss, among other subjects, Sexual Politics in the Theater of the Real.

“I told myself, he can’t be giving me all that money just to make hisself feel better,” she went on. “I guess that showed me you wasn’t trying to deny that something happened. And it made me see things your way. Like maybe you were right about us.”

“Uh-huh, yeah,” he said listlessly.

“I don’t understand why it’s okay to split up,” she said. “But I guess it is. I never thought I’d say that after last night. I suppose the money helps make it okay. I ain’t a total fool—I know that’s part of it. But I keep wanting to say for us to give it a try. And I keep thinking it’s me who’s right.”

She looked him straight in the eye, a strong look, something certain behind it. The wind strayed a few strands of hair across her cheek, touching the corner of her mouth—she didn’t bother to brush them aside.

“It’s funny how when you’re surest about things, at the same time you’re scaredest that you’re fooling yourself,” she said.

She poked a finger into the black dirt beneath the grass, digging up a clump. Michael was enthralled. There was a new tension in her delivery and he believed she was building toward something important, something that would punctuate or define.

“It may not make sense,” she said. “But the way I see it, maybe we’re both wrong.”

Disappointed, his thoughts shifted miles and hours ahead to Seattle in the rain, new night streets, new opportunities for failure, for fuckup.

“Know what I’m saying?” she asked.

“Yeah, well,” said Michael. “It’d be sort of hard not to know.”

——

The girl drove past the shattered office door and the empty parking lot, past the shops, none of them open, no one in the streets, not a stray cat or a loose dog. Sitting beside her, Michael was spooked but too wasted to react. They had seen only one person in Whidby Bay and now even he was gone. Someone should be up and about, putting out the trash, opening for business.

“I don’t see a hospital,” the girl said.

“I don’t want a hospital. Drive.”

“You should get yourself checked out!”

“There’d be too many questions. They might call the cops. All manner of shit could go wrong. Just drive. I’ll get myself checked out later.”

“You want me to drive anywhere special? Some other hospital?”

“Seattle.”

“That mean we’re sticking together?” she asked in a chirpy tone.

It might add some zest to his latest downward spiral to hang with a chick who possibly could animate elves or transform him into a lizard, and herself as well, and they’d go scampering along the ditches and make scaly, tail-lashing love underneath a yucca plant . . . Or she’d set a fire with her eyes in a trash alley and they’d lean out a window with a cardboard flap for a curtain and toast marshmallows, until one day she got super pissed and crushed underfoot the teensy spider into which she’d implanted his soul. Not knowing about her would be exhilarating. Inspiring. And how could this bizarre uncertainty be worse than what he’d been through already? Or worse than where he was ultimately headed. It was a tough call. Regular Death or Premium? Two blocks slid by before he said, “I don’t care.”

She slowed the car. “What do you mean, you don’t care? I don’t know what that means.”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s all good,” he said. “Just keep driving . . . And make sure I don’t go to sleep.”

She stepped on the gas and after another block she said, “How am I supposed to do that?”

“Talk. Engage me in conversation.”

She pulled out onto the interstate. It too was empty, devoid of traffic. “What you want I should talk about?”

“Fuck, I don’t know! Tell me why there’s no people around, no cars. Where the fuck are we? Limbo? You’re a goddamn motor mouth—it should be easy.”

“Limbo? That some place in Oregon?”

Naw, it’s over in Moontana, Suzi Belle.

“Well, is it? Say.”

“Never mind.”

She sang her tuneless tune and before long a car passed, traveling in the opposite direction.

“See,” she said. “There’s a car.”

“Yeah. Quite a coincidence.” He shifted in the seat, half-turned toward her. “What’s that singing thing about?”

She gave him a quizzical look, and he did a poor imitation of her.

“Oh, that!” she said. “It’s just something I do, you know, when I’m concentrating on stuff . . . or when I get emotional. ’Bout half the time I don’t know I’m doing it.” She punched him playfully on the shoulder. “But I don’t sound nothing like that. You make me sound awful!”

Gray clouds obscured the sun and the world grew increasingly gloomy as they drove. Traffic picked up, but he didn’t see people moving about in the food marts and gas stations along the highway. The sun was a tinny glare without apparent vitality or warmth that leached the evergreens and billboard images of color. The girl began to sing again and Michael noticed that she had an erratic, glowing silhouette—the light dimming and brightening around her ever so slightly with the rhythm of the tune. His vision still wasn’t right, flickering at the edges, but he chose to accept that what he’d noticed was not the product of a concussion. That’s my girl, he thought. My special Jesus groupie, my Mary Magdalene. He settled into the ride, stretching out his legs, unkinking his neck, and said, “This country’s deader than shit. I hope Seattle’s got some fucking people in it.”

The girl’s singing trailed off—she kept her eyes straight ahead and said, “It’s a big city, dummy. There’s bound to be people.” She hadn’t spoken to him this way before, flat and disaffected, like a woman disappointed in a man she had once held high hopes for. Then, with a lilt in her voice, a distinct hint of sly merriment, she added, “Course, you just can’t never predict what kind of people they’re going to be.”

——

Lucius Shepard’s short fiction has won the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, the International Horror Guild Award, the National Magazine Award, the Locus Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, and the World Fantasy Award.

His most recent books are a short-fiction collection, Viator Plus, and a short novel, The Taborin Scale. Forthcoming are another short-fiction collection, Five Autobiographies; two novels, tentatively titled The Piercefields and The End of Life as We Know It (the latter, young adult); and a short novel, The House of Everything and Nothing.

| THE LAST TRIANGLE |

Jeffrey Ford

—

I was on the street with nowhere to go, broke, with a habit. It was around Halloween, cold as a motherfucker in Fishmere—part suburb, part crumbling city that never happened. I was getting by, roaming the neighborhoods after dark, looking for unlocked cars to see what I could snatch. Sometimes I stole shit out of people’s yards and pawned it or sold it on the street. One night I didn’t have enough to cop, and I was in a bad way. There was nobody on the street to even beg from. It was freezing. Eventually I found this house on a corner and noticed an open garage out back. I got in there where it was warmer, lay down on the concrete, and went into withdrawal.

You can’t understand what that’s like unless you’ve done it. Remember that Twilight Zone where you make your own hell? Like that. I eventually passed out or fell asleep, and woke, shivering, to daylight, unable to get off the floor. Standing in the entrance to the garage was this little old woman with her arms folded, staring down through her bifocals at me. The second she saw I was awake, she turned and walked away. I felt like I’d frozen straight through to my spine during the night and couldn’t get up. A splitting headache, and the nausea was pretty intense too. My first thought was to take off, but too much of me just didn’t give a shit. The old woman reappeared, but now she was carrying a pistol in her left hand.

“What’s wrong with you?” she said.

I told her I was sick.

“I’ve seen you around town,” she said. “You’re an addict.” She didn’t seem freaked out by the situation, even though I was. I managed to get up on one elbow. I shrugged and said, “True.”

And then she left again, and a few minutes later came back, toting an electric space heater. She set it down next to me, stepped away and said, “You missed it last night, but there’s a cot in the back of the garage. Look,” she said, “I’m going to give you some money. Go buy clothes. You can stay here and I’ll feed you. If I know you’re using, though, I’ll call the police. I hope you realize that if you do anything I don’t like I’ll shoot you.” She said it like it was a foregone conclusion, and, yeah, I could actually picture her pulling the trigger.

What could I say? I took the money, and she went back into her house. My first reaction to the whole thing was to laugh. I could score. I struggled up all dizzy and bleary, smelling like the devil’s own shit, and stumbled away.

I didn’t cop that day, only a small bag of weed. Why? I’m not sure, but there was something about the way the old woman talked to me, her unafraid, straight-up approach. That, maybe, and I was so tired of the cycle of falling hard out of a drug dream onto the street and scrabbling like a three-legged dog for the next fix. By noon, I was pot high, downtown, still feeling shitty, when I passed this old clothing store. It was one of those places like you can’t fucking believe is still in operation. The mannequin in the window had on a tan leisure suit. Something about the way the sunlight hit that window display, though, made me remember the old woman’s voice, and I had this feeling like I was on an errand for my mother.

I got the clothes. I went back and lived in her garage. The jitters, the chills, the scratching my scalp and forearms were bad, but when I could finally get to sleep, that cot was as comfortable as a bed in a fairy tale. She brought food a couple times a day. She never said much to me, and the gun was always around. The big problem was going to the bathroom. When you get off the junk, your insides really open up. I knew if I went near the house, she’d shoot me. Let’s just say I marked the surrounding territory. About two weeks in, she wondered herself and asked me, “Where are you evacuating?”

At first I wasn’t sure what she was saying. “Evacuating?” Eventually, I caught on and told her, “Around.” She said that I could come in the house to use the downstairs bathroom. It was tough, ’cause every other second I wanted to just bop her on the head, take everything she had, and score like there was no tomorrow. I kept a tight lid on it till one day, when I was sure I was going to blow, a delivery truck pulled up to the side of the house and delivered, to the garage, a set of barbells and a bench. Later when she brought me out some food, she nodded to the weights and said, “Use them before you jump out of your skin. I insist.”

Ms. Berkley was her name. She never told me her first name, but I saw it on her mail, “Ifanel.” What kind of name is that? She had iron-gray hair, pulled back tight into a bun, and strong green eyes behind the big glasses. Baggy corduroy pants and a zip-up sweater was her wardrobe. There was a yellow one with flowers around the collar. She was a busy old woman. Quick and low to the ground.

Her house was beautiful inside. The floors were polished and covered with those Persian rugs. Wallpaper and stained-glass windows. But there was none of that goofy shit I remembered my grandmother going in for: suffering Christs, knitted hats on the toilet paper. Every room was in perfect order and there were books everywhere. Once she let me move in from the garage to the basement, I’d see her reading at night, sitting at her desk in what she called her “office.” All the lights were out except for this one brass lamp shining right over the book that lay on her desk. She moved her lips when she read. “Good night, Ms. Berkley,” I’d say to her and head for the basement door. From down the hall I’d hear her voice come like out of a dream, “Good night.” She told me she’d been a history teacher at a college. You could tell she was really smart. It didn’t exactly take a genius, but she saw straight through my bullshit.

One morning we were sitting at her kitchen table having coffee, and I asked her why she’d helped me out. I was feeling pretty good then. She said, “That’s what you’re supposed to do. Didn’t anyone ever teach you that?”

“Weren’t you afraid?”

“Of you?” she said. She took the pistol out of her bathrobe pocket and put it on the table between us. “There’s no bullets in it,” she told me. “I went with a fellow who died and he left that behind. I wouldn’t know how to load it.”

Normally I would have laughed, but her expression made me think she was trying to tell me something. “I’ll pay you back,” I said. “I’m gonna get a job this week and start paying you back.”

“No, I’ve got a way for you to pay me back,” she said and smiled for the first time. I was 99 percent sure she wasn’t going to tell me to fuck her, but, you know, it crossed my mind.

Instead, she asked me to take a walk with her downtown. By then it was winter, cold as a witch’s tit. Snow was coming. We must have been a sight on the street. Ms. Berkley, marching along in her puffy ski parka and wool hat, blue with gold stars and a tassel. I don’t think she was even five foot. I walked a couple of steps behind her. I’m six foot four inches, I hadn’t shaved or had a haircut in a long while, and I was wearing this brown suit jacket that she’d found in her closet. I couldn’t button it if you had a gun to my head and my arms stuck out the sleeves almost to the elbow. She told me, “It belonged to the dead man.”

Just past the library, we cut down an alley, crossed a vacant lot, snow still on the ground, and then hit a dirt road that led back to this abandoned factory. One story, white stucco, all the windows empty, glass on the ground, part of the roof caved in. She led me through a stand of trees around to the left side of the old building. From where we stood, I could see a lake through the woods. She pointed at the wall and said, “Do you see that symbol in red there?” I looked but all I saw was a couple of Fucks.

“I don’t see it,” I told her.

“Pay attention,” she said and took a step closer to the wall. Then I saw it. About the size of two fists. It was like a capital E tipped over on its three points, and sitting on its back, right in the middle, was an o. “Take a good look at it,” she told me. “I want you to remember it.”

I stared for a few seconds and told her, “Okay, I got it.”

“I walk to the lake almost every day,” she said. “This wasn’t here a couple of days ago.” She looked at me like that was supposed to mean something to me. I shrugged; she scowled. As we walked home, it started to snow.

Before I could even take off the dead man’s jacket, she called me into her office. She was sitting at her desk, still in her coat and hat, with a book open in front of her. I came over to the desk, and she pointed at the book. “What do you see there?” she asked. And there it was, the red, knocked-over E with the o on top.

I said, “Yeah, the thing from before. What is it?”

“The Last Triangle,” she said.

“Where’s the triangle come in?” I asked.

“The three points of the capital E stand for the three points of a triangle.”

“So what?”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Here’s what I want you to do. Tomorrow, after breakfast, I want you to take a pad and a pen, and I want you to walk all around the town, everywhere you can think of, and look to see if that symbol appears on any other walls. If you find one, write down the address for it—street and number. Look for places that are abandoned, rundown, burned out.”

I didn’t want to believe she was crazy, but . . .

I said to her, “Don’t you have any real work for me to do—heavy lifting, digging, painting, you know?”

“Just do what I ask you to do.”

Ms. Berkley gave me a few bucks and sent me on my way. First things first, I went downtown, scored a couple of joints, bought a forty of Colt. Then I did the grand tour. It was fucking freezing, of course. The sky was brown, and the dead man’s jacket wasn’t cutting it. I found the first of the symbols on the wall of a closed-down bar. The place had a pink plastic sign that said Here It Is, with a silhouette of a woman with an Afro sitting in a martini glass. The E was there in red on the plywood of a boarded front window. I had to walk a block each way to figure out the address, but I got it. After that I kept looking. I walked myself sober and then some and didn’t get back to the house till nightfall.

When I told Ms. Berkley that I’d found one, she smiled and clapped her hands together. She asked for the address, and I delivered. She set me up with spaghetti and meatballs at the kitchen table. I was tired, but seriously, I felt like a prince. She went down the hall to her office. A few minutes later, she came back with a piece of paper in her hand. As I pushed the plate away, she set the paper down in front of me and then took a seat.

“That’s a map of town,” she said. I looked it over. There were two dots in red pen and a straight line connecting them. “You see the dots?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“Those are two points of the Last Triangle.”

“Okay,” I said and thought, “Here we go . . .”

“The Last Triangle is an equilateral triangle; all the sides are equal,” she said.

I failed math every year in high school, so I just nodded.

“Since we know these two points, we know that the last point is in one of two places on the map, either east or west.” She reached across the table and slid the map toward her. With the red pen, she made two dots and then made two triangles sharing a line down the center. She pushed the map toward me again. “Tomorrow you have to look either here or here,” she said, pointing with the tip of the pen.

The next day I found the third one, to the east, just before it got dark. A tall old house, on the edge of an abandoned industrial park. It looked like there’d been a fire. There was an old rusted Chevy up on blocks in the driveway. The E-and-o thing was spray-painted on the trunk.

When I brought her that info, she gave me the lowdown on the triangle. “I read a lot of books about history,” she said, “and I have this ability to remember things I’ve seen or read. If I saw a phone number once, I’d remember it correctly. It’s not a photographic memory; it doesn’t work automatically or with everything. Maybe five years ago I read this book on ancient magic, The Spells of Abriel the Magus, and I remembered the symbol from that book when I saw it on the wall of the old factory last week. I came home, found the book, and reread the part about the Last Triangle. It’s also known as Abriel’s Escape or Abriel’s Prison.

“Abriel was a thirteenth-century magus . . . magician. He wandered around Europe and created six powerful spells. The triangle, once marked out, denotes a protective zone in which its creator cannot be harmed. There’s a limitation to the size it can be, each leg no more than a mile. At the same time that zone is a sanctuary, it’s a trap. The magus can’t leave its boundary, ever. To cross it is certain death. For this reason, the spell was used only once, by Abriel, in Dresden, to escape a number of people he’d harmed with his dark arts who had sent their own wizards to kill him. He lived out the rest of his life there, within the Last Triangle, and died at one hundred years of age.”

“That’s a doozy.”

“Pay attention,” she said. “For the Last Triangle to be activated, the creator of the triangle must take a life at its geographical center between the time of the three symbols being marked in the world and the next full moon. Legend has it, Abriel killed the baker Ellot Haber to induce the spell.”

It took me almost a minute and a half to grasp what she was saying. “You mean, someone’s gonna get iced?” I said.

“Maybe.”

“Come on, a kid just happened to make that symbol. Coincidence.”

“No, remember, a perfect equilateral triangle, each one of the symbols exactly where it should be.” She laughed, and, for a second, looked a lot younger.

“I don’t believe in magic,” I told her. “There’s no magic out there.”

“You don’t have to believe it,” she said. “But maybe someone out there does. Someone desperate for protection, willing to believe even in magic.”

“That’s pretty far fetched,” I said, “but if you think there’s a chance, call the cops. Just leave me out of it.”

“The cops,” she said and shook her head. “They’d lock me up with that story.”

“Glad we agree on that.”

“The center of the triangle on my map,” she said, “is the train-station parking lot. And in five nights there’ll be a full moon. No one’s gotten killed at the station yet, not that I’ve heard of.”

After breakfast she called a cab and went out, leaving me to fix the garbage disposal and wonder about the craziness. I tried to see it her way. She’d told me it was our civic duty to do something, but I wasn’t buying any of it. Later that afternoon, I saw her sitting at the computer in her office. Her glasses near the end of her nose, she was reading off the Internet and loading bullets into the magazine clip of the pistol. Eventually she looked up and saw me. “You can find just about anything on the Internet,” she said.

“What are you doing with that gun?”

“We’re going out tonight.”

“Not with that.”

She stopped loading. “Don’t tell me what to do,” she said.

After dinner, around dusk, we set out for the train station. Before we left, she handed me the gun. I made sure the safety was on and stuck it in the side pocket of the brown jacket. While she was out getting the bullets she’d bought two chairs that folded down and fit in small plastic tubes. I carried them. Ms. Berkley held a flashlight and in her ski parka had stashed a pint of blackberry brandy. The night was clear and cold, and a big waxing moon hung over town.

We turned off the main street into an alley next to the hardware store and followed it a long way before it came out on the south side of the train station. There was a rundown one-story building there in the corner of the parking lot. I ripped off the plywood planks that covered the door, and we went in. The place was empty but for some busted-up office furniture, and all the windows were shattered, letting the breeze in. We moved through the darkness, Ms. Berkley leading the way with the flashlight, to a back room with a view of the parking lot and station just beyond it. We set up the chairs and took our seats at the empty window. She killed the light.

“Tell me this is the strangest thing you’ve ever done,” I whispered to her.

She brought out the pint of brandy, unscrewed the top, and took a tug on it. “Life’s about doing what needs to get done,” she said. “The sooner you figure that out, the better for everyone.” She passed me the bottle.

After an hour and a half, my eyes had adjusted to the moonlight and I’d scanned every inch of that cracked, potholed parking lot. Two trains a half-hour apart rolled into the station’s elevated platform, and from what I could see, no one got on or off. Ms. Berkley was doing what needed to be done—namely, snoring. I took out a joint and lit up. I’d already polished off the brandy. I kept an eye on the old lady, ready to flick the joint out the window if I saw her eyelids flutter. The shivering breeze did a good job of clearing out the smoke.

At around three a.m., I’d just about nodded off, when the sound of a train pulling into the station brought me back. I sat up and leaned toward the window. It took me a second to clear my eyes and focus. When I did, I saw the silhouette of a person descending the stairs of the raised platform. The figure passed beneath the light at the front of the station, and I could see it was a young woman, carrying a briefcase. I wasn’t quite sure what the fuck I was supposed to be doing, so I tapped Ms. Berkley. She came awake with a splutter and looked a little sheepish for having corked off. I said, “There’s a woman heading to her car. Should I shoot her?”

“Very funny,” she said and got up to stand closer to the window.

I’d figured out which of the few cars in the parking lot belonged to the young woman. She looked like the white-Honda type. Sure enough, she made a beeline for it.

“There’s someone else,” said Ms. Berkley. “Coming out from under the trestle.”

“Where?”

“Left,” she said, and I saw him, a guy with a long coat and hat. He was moving fast, heading for the young woman. Ms. Berkley grabbed my arm and squeezed it. “Go,” she said. I lunged up out of the chair, took two steps, and got dizzy from having sat for so long. I fumbled in my pocket for the pistol as I groped my way out of the building. Once I hit the air, I was fine, and I took off running for the parking lot. Even as jumped up as I was, I thought, “I’m not gonna shoot anyone,” and left the gun’s safety on.

The young woman saw me coming before she noticed the guy behind her. I scared her, and she ran the last few yards to her car. I watched her messing around with her keys and didn’t notice the other guy was also on a flat-out run. As I passed the white Honda, the stranger met me and cracked me in the jaw like a pro. I went down hard but held onto the gun. As soon as I came to, I sat up. The guy—I couldn’t get a good look at his face—drew a blade from his left sleeve. By then the woman was in the car, though, and it screeched off across the parking lot.

He turned, brandishing the long knife, and started for me.

You better believe the safety came off then. That instant, I heard Ms. Berkley’s voice behind me. “What’s the meaning of this?” she said in a stern voice. The stranger looked up, and then turned and ran off, back into the shadows beneath the trestle.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” she said and helped me to my feet. “If that girl’s got any brains, she’ll call the cops.” Ms. Berkley could run pretty fast. We made it back to the building, got the chairs, the empty bottle, and as many cigarette butts as I could find, and split for home. We stayed off the main street and wound our way back through the residential blocks. We didn’t see a soul.

I couldn’t feel how cold I was till I got back in the house. Ms. Berkley made tea. Her hands shook a little. We sat at the kitchen table in silence for a long time.

Finally, I said, “Well, you were right.”

“The gun was a mistake, but if you didn’t have it, you’d be dead now,” she said.

“Not to muddy the waters here, but that’s closer to dead than I want to get. We’re gonna have to go to the police, but if we do, that’ll be it for me.”

“You tried to save her,” said Ms. Berkley. “Very valiant, by the way.”

I laughed. “Tell that to the judge when he’s looking over my record.”

She didn’t say anything else, but left and went to her office. I fell asleep on the cot in the basement with my clothes on. It was warm down there by the furnace. I had terrible dreams of the young woman getting her throat cut but was too tired to wake from them. Eventually, I came to with a hand on my shoulder and Ms. Berkley saying, “Thomas.” I sat up quickly, sure I’d forgotten to do something. She said, “Relax,” and rested her hand for a second on my chest. She sat on the edge of the cot with her hat and coat on.

“Did you sleep?” I asked.

“I went back to the parking lot after the sun came up. There were no police around. Under the trestle, where the man with the knife had come from, I found these.” She took a handful of cigarette butts out of her coat pocket and held them up.

“Anybody could have left them there at any time,” I said. “You read too many books.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” she said.

“He must have stood there waiting for quite a while, judging from how many butts you’ve got there.”

She nodded. “This is a serious man,” she said. “Say he’s not just a lunatic, but an actual magician?”

“Magician,” I said and snorted. “More like a creep who believes his own bullshit.”

“Watch the language,” she said.

“Do we go back to the parking lot tonight?” I asked.

“No, there’ll be police there tonight. I’m sure that girl reported the incident. I have something for you to do. These cigarettes are a Spanish brand, Ducados. I used to know someone who smoked them. The only store in town that sells them is over by the park. Do you know Maya’s Newsstand?”

I nodded.

“I think he buys his cigarettes there.”

“You want me to scope it? How am I supposed to know whether it’s him or not? I never got a good look at him.”

“Maybe by the imprint of your face on his knuckles?” she said.

I couldn’t believe she was breaking my balls, but when she laughed, I had to.

“Take my little camera with you,” she said.

“Why?

“I want to see what you see,” she said. She got up then and left the basement. I got dressed. While I ate, she showed me how to use the camera. It was a little electronic job, but amazing, with telephoto capability and a little window you could see your pictures in. I don’t think I’d held a camera in ten years.

I sat on a bench in the park, next to a giant pine tree, and watched the newsstand across the street. I had my forty in a brown paper bag and a five-dollar joint in my jacket. The day was clear and cold, and people came and went on the street, some of them stopping to buy a paper or cigs from Maya. One thing I noticed was that nobody came to the park, the one nice place in crumbling Fishmere.

All afternoon and nothing criminal, except for one girl’s miniskirt. She was my first photo—exhibit A. After that I took a break and went back into the park, where there was a gazebo looking out across a small lake. I fired up the joint and took another pic of some geese. Mostly I watched the sun on the water and wondered what I’d do once the Last Triangle hoodoo played itself out. Part of me wanted to stay with Ms. Berkley, and the other part knew it wouldn’t be right. I’d been on the scag for fifteen years, and now somebody’s making breakfast and dinner every day. Things like the camera, a revelation to me. She even had me reading a book, The Professor’s House by Willa Cather—slow as shit, but somehow I needed to know what happened next to old Godfrey St. Peter. The food, the weights, and staying off the hard stuff made me strong.

Late in the afternoon, he came to the newsstand. I’d been in such a daze, the sight of him there, like he just materialized, made me jump. My hands shook a little as I telephotoed in on him. He paid for two packs of cigs, and I snapped the picture. I wasn’t sure if I’d caught his mug. He was pretty well hidden by the long coat’s collar and the hat. There was no time to check the shot. As he moved away down the sidewalk, I stowed the camera in my pocket and followed him, hanging back fifty yards or so.

He didn’t seem suspicious. Never looked around or stopped, but just kept moving at the same brisk pace. Only when it came to me that he was walking us in a circle did I get that he was on to me. At that point, he made a quick left into an alley. I followed. The alley was a short one with a brick wall at the end. He’d vanished. I walked cautiously into the shadows and looked around behind the dumpsters. There was nothing there. A gust of wind lifted the old newspapers and litter into the air, and I’ll admit I was scared. On the way back to the house, I looked over my shoulder about a hundred times.

I handed Ms. Berkley the camera in her office. She took a wire out of her desk drawer and plugged one end into the camera and one into the computer. She typed some shit, and then the first picture appeared. It was the legs.

“Finding the focus with that shot?” she asked.

“Everyone’s a suspect,” I said.

“Foolishness,” she murmured. She liked the geese, said it was a nice composition. Then the one of the guy at the newsstand came up, and, yeah, I nailed it. A really clear profile of his face. Eyes like a hawk and a sharp nose. He had white hair and a thick white mustache.

“Not bad,” I said, but Ms. Berkley didn’t respond. She was staring hard at the picture and her mouth was slightly open. She reached out and touched the screen.

“You know him?” I asked.

“You’re wearing his jacket,” she said. Then she turned away, put her face in her hands.

I left her alone and went into the kitchen. I made spaghetti the way she’d showed me. While stirring the sauce, I said to my reflection in the stove hood, “Now the dead man’s back, and he’s the evil magician?” Man, I really wanted to laugh the whole thing off, but I couldn’t forget the guy’s disappearing act.

I put two plates of spaghetti down on the kitchen table and then went to fetch Ms. Berkley. She told me to go away. Instead I put my hands on her shoulders and said, “Come on, you should eat something.” Then, applying as little pressure as possible, I sort of lifted her as she stood. In the kitchen, I held her chair for her and gave her a cup of tea. My spaghetti was undercooked and the sauce was cold, but still, not bad. She used her napkin to dry her eyes.

“The dead man looks pretty good for a dead man,” I said.

“It was easier to explain by telling you he was dead. Who wants the embarrassment of saying someone left them?”

“I get it,” I said.

“I think most people would, but still . . .”

“This clears something up for me,” I told her. “I always thought it was pretty strange that two people in the same town would know about Abriel and the Last Triangle. I mean, what’s the chances?”

“The book is his,” she said. “Years after he left, it just became part of my library, and eventually I read it. Now that I think of it, he read a lot of books about the occult.”

“Who is he?”

“His name is Lionel Brund. I met him years ago, when I was in my thirties. I was already teaching at the college, and I owned this house. We both were at a party hosted by a colleague. He was just passing through and knew someone who knew someone at the party. We hit it off. He had great stories about his travels. He liked to laugh. It was fun just going to the grocery store with him. My first real romance. A very gentle man.”

The look on her face made me say, “But?”

She nodded. “But he owned a gun, and I had no idea what kind of work he did, although he always had plenty of money. Parts of his life were a secret. He’d go away for a week or two at a time on some ‘business’ trip. I didn’t mind that, because there were parts of my life I wanted to keep to myself as well. We were together, living in this house, for over two years, and then, one day, he was gone. I waited for him to come back for a long time and then moved on, made my own life.”

“Now you do what needs to get done,” I said.

She laughed. “Exactly.”

“Lionel knows we’re onto him. He played me this afternoon, took me in a circle and then was gone with the wind. It creeped me.”

“I want to see him,” she said. “I want to talk to him.”

“He’s out to kill somebody to protect himself,” I said.

“I don’t care,” she said.

“Forget it,” I told her and then asked for the gun. She pushed it across the table to me.

“He could come after us,” I said. “You’ve got to be careful.” She got up to go into her office, and I drew the butcher knife out of its wooden holder on the counter and handed it to her. I wanted her to get how serious things were. She took it but said nothing. I could tell she was lost in the past.

I put the gun, safety off, on the stand next to my cot and lay back with a head full of questions. I stayed awake for a long while before I eventually gave in. A little bit after I dozed off, I was half wakened by the sound of the phone ringing upstairs. I heard Ms. Berkley walk down the hall and pick up. Her voice was a distant mumble. Then I fell asleep for a few minutes, and the first thing I heard when I came to again was the sound of the back door closing. It took me a minute to put together that he’d called and she’d gone to meet him.

I got dressed in a flash, but put on three T-shirts instead of wearing Lionel’s jacket. I thought he might have the power to spook it since it belonged to him. It took me a couple of seconds to decide whether to leave the gun behind as well. But I was shit scared so I shoved it in the waist of my jeans and took off. I ran dead out to the train-station parking lot. Luckily there were no cops there, but there wasn’t anybody else either. I went in the station, searched beneath the trestles, and went back to the rundown building we’d sat in. Nothing.

As I walked back to the house, I tried to think of where he would have asked to meet her. I pictured all the places I’d been to in the past few weeks. An image of Ms. Berkley’s map came to mind, the one of town with the red dots and the triangles, east and west. I’d not found a triangle point to the west, and as I considered that, I recalled the point I had found in the east, the symbol spray-painted on the trunk of an old car up on blocks. It came to me—say that one didn’t count because it wasn’t on a building, connected to the ground. That was a fake. Maybe he knew somehow Ms. Berkley would notice the symbols and he wanted to throw her off.

Then it struck me: what if there was a third symbol in the west I just didn’t see? I tried to picture the map as the actual streets it represented and figure where the center of a western triangle would be. At first it seemed way too complicated, just a jumble of frustration, but I took a few deep breaths, and, recalling the streets I’d walked before, realized the spot must be somewhere in the park across the street from Maya’s Newsstand. It was a hike, and I knew I had to pace myself, but the fact that I’d figured out Lionel’s twists and turns gave me a burst of energy. What I really wanted was to tell Ms. Berkley how I’d thought it through. Then I realized she might already be dead.

Something instinctively drew me toward the gazebo. It was a perfect center for a magician’s prison. The moonlight was on the lake. I thought I heard them talking, saw their shadows sitting on the bench, smelled the smoke of Ducados, but when I took the steps and leaned over to catch my breath, I realized it was all in my mind. The place was empty and still. The geese called from out on the lake. I sat down on the bench and lit a cigarette. Only when I resigned myself to just returning to the house, it came to me I had one more option: to find the last point of the western triangle.

I knew it was a long shot at night, looking without a flashlight for something I couldn’t find during the day. My only consolation was that since Lionel hadn’t taken Ms. Berkley to the center of his triangle, he might not intend to use her as his victim.

I was exhausted, and although I set out from the gazebo jogging toward my best guess as to where the last point was, I was soon walking. The street map of town with the red triangles would flash momentarily in my memory and then disappear. I went up a street that was utterly dark, and the wind followed me. From there, I turned and passed a row of closed factory buildings. The symbol could have been anywhere, hiding in the dark. Finally, there was a cross street, and I walked down a block of row homes, some boarded, some with bars on the windows. That path led to an industrial park. Beneath a dim streetlight, I stopped and tried to picture the map, but it was no use. I was totally lost. I gave up and turned back in the direction I thought Ms. Berkley’s house would be.

One block outside the industrial park, I hit a street of old four-story apartment buildings. The doors were off the hinges, and the moonlight showed no reflection in the shattered windows. A neighborhood of vacant lots and dead brick giants. Halfway down the block, hoping to find a left turn, I just happened to look up and see an unbroken window, yellow lamplight streaming out. From where I stood, I could only see the ceiling of the room, but faint silhouettes moved across it. I took out the gun. There was no decent reason why I thought it was them, but I felt drawn to the place as if under a spell.

I took the stone steps of the building, and when I tried the door, it pushed open. I thought this was strange, but I figured he might have left it ajar for Ms. Berkley. Inside, the foyer was so dark and there was no light on the first landing. I found the first step by inching forward and feeling around with my foot. The last thing I needed was three flights of stairs. I tried to climb without a sound, but the planks creaked unmercifully. “If they don’t hear me coming,” I thought, “they’re both dead.”

As I reached the fourth floor, I could hear noises coming from the room. It sounded like two people were arguing and wrestling around. Then I distinctly heard Ms. Berkley cry out. I lunged at the door, cracked it on the first pounce and busted it in with the second. Splinters flew, and the chain lock ripped out with a pop. I stumbled into the room, the gun pointing forward, completely out of breath. It took me a second to see what was going on.

There they were, in a bed beneath the window in the opposite corner of the room, naked, frozen by my intrusion, her legs around his back. Ms. Berkley scooted up and quickly wrapped the blanket around herself, leaving old Lionel out in the cold. He jumped up quick, dick flopping, and got into his boxers.

“What the hell,” I whispered.

“Go home, Thomas,” she said.

“You’re coming with me,” I said.

“I can handle this,” she said.

“Who’s after you?” I said to Lionel. “For what?”

He took a deep breath. “Phantoms more cruel than you can imagine, my boy. I lived my young life recklessly, like you, and its mistakes have multiplied and hounded me ever since.”

“You’re a loser,” I said and it sounded so stupid. Especially when it struck me that Lionel might have been old, but he looked pretty strong.

“Sorry, son,” he said and drew that long knife from a scabbard on the nightstand next to the bed. “It’s time to sever ties.”

“Run,” said Ms. Berkley.

I thought, “Fuck this guy,” and pulled out the gun.

Ms. Berkley jumped on Lionel, but he shrugged her off with a sharp push that landed her back on the bed. “This one’s not running,” he said. “I can tell.”

I was stunned for a moment by Ms. Berkley’s nakedness. But as he advanced a step, I raised the gun and told him, “Drop the knife.”

He said, “Be careful; you’re hurting it.”

At first his words didn’t register, but then, in my hand, instead of a gun, I felt a frail wriggling thing with a heartbeat. I released my grasp, and a bat flew up to circle around the ceiling. In the same moment, I heard the gun hit the wooden floor and knew he’d tricked me with magic.

He came toward me slowly, and I whipped off two of my T-shirts and wrapped them around my right forearm. He sliced the air with the blade a few times as I crouched down and circled away from him. He lunged fast as a snake, and I got caught against a dresser. He cut me on the stomach and the right shoulder. The next time he came at me, I kicked a footstool in front of him and managed a punch to the side of his head. Lionel came back with a half dozen more slices, each marking me. The T-shirts on my arm were in shreds, as was the one I wore.

I kept watching that knife, and that’s how he got me, another punch to the jaw worse than the one in the station parking lot. I stumbled backward and he followed with the blade aimed at my throat. What saved me was that Ms. Berkley grabbed him from behind. He stopped to push her off again, and I caught my balance and took my best shot to the right side of his face. The punch scored, he fell backward into the wall, and the knife flew in the air. I tried to catch it as it fell but only managed to slice my fingers. I picked it up by the handle and when I looked, Lionel was steamrolling toward me again.

“Thomas,” yelled Ms. Berkley from where she’d landed. I was stunned, and automatically pushed the weapon forward into the bulk of the charging magician. He stopped in his tracks, teetered for a second, and fell back onto his ass. He sat there on the rug, legs splayed, with that big knife sticking out of his stomach. Blood seeped around the blade and puddled in front of him.

Ms. Berkley was next to me, leaning on my shoulder. “Pay attention,” she said.

I snapped out of it and looked down at Lionel. He was sighing more than breathing and staring at the floor.

“If he dies,” said Ms. Berkley, “you inherit the spell of the Last Triangle.”

“That’s right,” Lionel said. Blood came from his mouth with the words. “Wherever you are at dawn, that will be the center of your world.” He laughed. “For the rest of your life you will live in a triangle within the rancid town of Fishmere.”

Ms. Berkley found the gun and picked it up. She went to the bed and grabbed one of the pillows.

“Is that true?” I said and started to panic.

Lionel nodded, laughing. Ms. Berkley took up the gun again and then wrapped the pillow around it. She walked over next to Lionel, crouched down, and touched the pillow to the side of his head.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

Ms. Berkley squinted one eye and steadied her left arm with her right hand while keeping the pillow in place.

“What else?” said Lionel, spluttering blood bubbles. “What needs to be done.”

The pillow muffled the sound of the shot somewhat as feathers flew everywhere. Lionel dropped onto his side without magic, the hole in his head smoking. I wasn’t afraid anyone would hear. There wasn’t another soul for three blocks. Ms. Berkley checked his pulse. “The Last Triangle is mine now,” she said. “I have to get home by dawn.” She got dressed while I stood in the hallway.

I don’t remember leaving Lionel’s building, or passing the park or Maya’s Newsstand. We were running through the night, across town, as the sky lightened in the distance. Four blocks from home, Ms. Berkley gave out and started limping. I picked her up and, still running, carried her the rest of the way. We were in the kitchen, the tea whistle blowing, when the birds started to sing and the sun came up.

She poured the tea for us and said, “I thought I could talk Lionel out of his plan, but he wasn’t the same person anymore. I could see the magic’s like a drug; the more you use it, the more it pushes you out of yourself and takes over.”

“Was he out to kill me or you?” I asked.

“He was out to get himself killed. I’d promised to do the job for him before you showed up. He knew we were onto him and he tried to fool us with the train-station scam, but once he heard my voice that night, he said he knew he couldn’t go through with it. He just wanted to see me once more, and then I was supposed to cut his throat.”

“You would have killed him?” I said.

“I did.”

“You know, before I knifed him?”

“He told me the phantoms and fetches that were after him knew where he was, and it was only a matter of days before they caught up with him.”

“What was it exactly he did?”

“He wouldn’t say, but he implied that it had to do with loving me. And I really think he thought he did.”

“What do you think?” I asked.

Ms. Berkley interrupted me. “You’ve got to get out of town,” she said. “When they find Lionel’s body, you’ll be one of the usual suspects, what with your wandering around drinking beer and smoking pot in public.”

“Who told you that?” I said.

“Did I just fall off the turnip truck yesterday?”

Ms. Berkley went to her office and returned with a roll of cash for me. I didn’t even have time to think about leaving, to miss my cot and the weights, and the meals. The cab showed up and we left. She had her map of town with the triangles on it and had already drawn a new one—its center, her kitchen. We drove for a little ways and then she told the cab driver to pull over and wait. We were in front of a closed-down gas station on the edge of town. She got out and I followed her.

“I paid the driver to take you two towns over to Willmuth. There’s a bus station there. Get a ticket and disappear,” she said.

“What about you? You’re stuck in the triangle.”

“I’m bounded in a nutshell,” she said.

“Why’d you take the spell?”

“You don’t need it. You just woke up. I have every confidence that I’ll be able to figure a way out of it. It’s amazing what you can find on the Internet.”

“A magic spell?” I said.

“Understand this,” she said. “Spells are made to be broken.” She stepped closer and reached her hands to my shoulders. I leaned down. She kissed me on the forehead. “Not promises, though,” she said and turned away, heading home.

“Ms. Berkley,” I called after her.

“Stay clean,” she yelled without looking.

Back in the cab, I said, “Willmuth,” and leaned against the window. The driver started the car, and we sailed through an invisible boundary, into the world.

——

Jeffrey Ford is the author of the novels The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, and The Shadow Year. His short fiction has been published in three collections: The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, and The Drowned Life. His fiction has won the World Fantasy Award, the Nebula Award, the Edgar Allan Poe Award, and the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and two sons and teaches literature and writing at Brookdale Community College.

| THE CARRION GODS IN THEIR HEAVEN |

Laird Barron

—

The leaves were turning.

Lorna fueled the car at a mom-and-pop gas station in the town of Poger Rock, population 190. Poger Rock comprised a forgotten, moribund collection of buildings tucked into the base of a wooded valley a stone’s throw south of Olympia. The station’s marquee was badly peeled and she couldn’t decipher its title. A tavern called Mooney’s occupied a gravel island half a block down, across the two-lane street from the post office and the grange. Next to a dumpster, a pair of mongrel dogs were locked in coitus, patiently facing opposite directions, Dr. Doolittle’s Pushmi-pullyu for the twenty-first century. Other than vacant lots overrun by bushes and alder trees and a lone antiquated traffic light at the intersection that led out of town—either toward Olympia, or deeper into cow country—there wasn’t much else to look at. She hobbled in to pay and ended up grabbing a few extra supplies—canned peaches and fruit cocktail, as there wasn’t any refrigeration at the cabin. She snagged three bottles of bourbon gathering dust on a low shelf.

The clerk noticed her folding crutch and the soft cast on her left leg. She declined his offer to carry her bags. After she loaded the Subaru, she ventured into the tavern and ordered a couple rounds of tequila. The tavern was dim and smoky and possessed a frontier vibe, with antique flintlocks over the bar, and stuffed and mounted deer heads staring from the walls. A great black wolf snarled atop a dais near the entrance. The bartender watched her drain the shots raw. He poured her another on the house and said, “You’re staying at the Haugstad place, eh?”

She hesitated, the glass partially raised, then set the drink on the counter and limped away without answering. She assayed the long, treacherous drive up to the cabin, chewing over the man’s question, the morbid implication of his smirk. She got the drift. Horror movies and pulp novels made the conversational gambit infamous—life imitating art. Was she staying at the Haugstad place indeed. Like hell she’d take that bait. The townsfolk were strangers to her and she wondered how the bartender knew where she lived. Obviously, the hills had eyes.

Two weeks prior, Lorna had fled into the wilderness to an old hunting cabin, the so-called Haugstad place, with her lover Miranda. Miranda was the reason she’d discovered the courage to leave her husband Bruce, the reason he grabbed a fistful of Lorna’s hair and threw her down a flight of concrete stairs in the parking garage of Sea-Tac airport. That was the second time Lorna had tried to escape with their daughter Orillia. Sweet Orillia, eleven years old next month, was safe in Florida with relatives. Lorna missed her daughter, but slept better knowing she was far from Bruce’s reach. He wasn’t interested in going after the child; at least not as his first order of business.

Bruce was a vengeful man, and Lorna feared him the way she might fear a hurricane, a volcano, a flood. His rages overwhelmed and obliterated his impulse control. Bruce was a force of nature, all right, and capable of far worse than breaking her leg. He owned a gun and a collection of knives, had done time years ago for stabbing somebody during a fight over a gambling debt. He often got drunk and sat in his easy chair cleaning his pistol or sharpening a large, cruel-looking blade he called an Arkansas toothpick.

So, it came to this: Lorna and Miranda shacked up in the mountains while Lorna’s estranged husband, free on bail, awaited trial back in Seattle. Money wasn’t a problem—Bruce made plenty as a manager at a lumber company, and Lorna had helped herself to a healthy portion of it when she headed for the hills.

Both women were loners by necessity—or device, as the case might be—who’d met at a cocktail party thrown by one of Bruce’s colleagues and clicked on contact. Lorna hadn’t worked since her stint as a movie-theater clerk during college—Bruce had insisted she stay home and raise Orillia, and when Orillia grew older, he dropped his pretenses and punched Lorna in the jaw after she pressed the subject of getting a job, beginning a career. She’d dreamed of going to grad school for a degree in social work.

Miranda was a semiretired artist, acclaimed in certain quarters and much in demand for her wax sculptures. She cheerfully set up a mini studio in the spare bedroom, strictly to keep her hand in. Photography was her passion of late, and she’d brought along several complicated and expensive cameras. She was also the widow of a once-famous sculptor. Between her work and her husband’s royalties, she wasn’t exactly rich, but not exactly poor, either. They’d survive a couple of months “roughing it.” Miranda suggested they consider it a vacation, an advance celebration of “Brucifer’s” (her pet name for Lorna’s soon-to-be ex) impending stint as a guest of King County Jail.

She’d secured the cabin through a labyrinthine network of connections. Miranda’s second (or was it third?) cousin gave them a ring of keys and a map to find the property. It sat in the mountains, ten miles from civilization amid high timber and a tangle of abandoned logging roads. The driveway was cut into a steep hillside—a hundred-yard-long dirt track hidden by masses of brush and trees. The perfect bolthole.

Bruce wouldn’t find them here, in the catbird’s seat overlooking nowhere.

——

Lorna arrived home a few minutes before nightfall. Miranda came to the porch and waved. She was tall, her hair long and burnished auburn, her skin dusky and unblemished. Lorna thought her beautiful—lush and ripe, vaguely Rubenesque. A contrast to Lorna’s own paleness, her angular, sinewy build. She thought it amusing that their personalities reflected their physiognomies—Miranda tended to be placid and yielding and sweetly melancholy, while Lorna was all sharp edges.

Miranda helped bring in the groceries. She’d volunteered to drive into town and fetch them herself, but Lorna refused, and the reason why went unspoken, although it loomed large. A lot more than her leg needed healing. Bruce had done the shopping, paid the bills, made every decision for thirteen torturous years. Not all at once, but gradually, until he crushed her, smothered her, with his so-called love. That was over. A little more pain and suffering in the service of emancipation—figuratively and literally—following a lost decade seemed appropriate.

The Haugstad cabin was practically a fossil and possessed of a dark history that Miranda hinted at but coyly refused to disclose. It was in solid repair for a building constructed in the 1920s—on the cozy side, even: thick slab walls and a mossy shake roof. Two bedrooms, a pantry, a loft, a cramped toilet and bath, and a living room with a kitchenette tucked in the corner. The cellar’s trapdoor was concealed inside the pantry. She had no intention of going down there. She hated spiders and all the other creepy-crawlies sure to infest that wet and lightless space. Nor did she like the tattered bearskin rug before the fireplace, nor the oil painting of a hunter in buckskins stalking along a ridge beneath a twilit sky, nor a smaller portrait of a stag with jagged horns in menacing silhouette atop a cliff, also at sunset. Lorna detested the idea of hunting, preferred not to ponder where the chicken in chicken soup came from, much less the fate of cattle. These artifacts of minds and philosophies so divergent from her own were disquieting.

There were a few modern renovations. A portable generator provided electricity to power the plumbing and lights. No phone, however. Not that it mattered—her cell reception was passable despite the rugged terrain. The elevation and eastern exposure also enabled the transistor radio to capture a decent signal.

Miranda raised an eyebrow when she came across the bottles of Old Crow. She stuck them in a cabinet without comment. They made a simple pasta together with peaches on the side and a glass or three of wine for dessert. Later, they relaxed near the fire. Conversation lapsed into a comfortable silence until Lorna chuckled upon recalling the bartender’s portentous question, which seemed inane rather than sinister now that she was half-drunk and drowsing in her lover’s arms. Miranda asked what was so funny, and Lorna told her about the tavern incident.

“Man alive, I found something weird today,” Miranda said. She’d stiffened when Lorna described shooting tequila. Lorna’s drinking was a bone of contention. She’d hit the bottle when Orillia went into first grade, leaving her alone at the house for the majority of too many lonely days. At first it’d been innocent enough: A nip or two of cooking sherry, the occasional glass of wine during the soaps, then the occasional bottle of wine, then the occasional bottle of Maker’s Mark or Johnnie Walker, and finally, the bottle was open and in her hand five minutes after Orillia skipped to the bus and the cork didn’t go back in until five minutes before her little girl came home. Since she and Miranda became an item, she’d striven to restrict her boozing to social occasions, dinner, and the like. But sweet Jesus, fuck. At least she hadn’t broken down and started smoking again.

“Where’d you go?” Lorna said.

“That trail behind the woodshed. I wanted some photographs. Being cooped up in here is driving me a teensy bit bonkers.”

“So, how weird was it?”

“Maybe weird isn’t quite the word. Gross. Gross is more accurate.”

“You’re killing me.”

“That trail goes a long way. I think deer use it as a path because it’s really narrow but well beaten. We should hike to the end one of these days, see how far it goes. I’m curious where it ends.”

“Trails don’t end; they just peter out. We’ll get lost and spend the winter gnawing bark like the Donners.”

“You’re so morbid!” Miranda laughed and kissed Lorna’s ear. She described crossing a small clearing about a quarter mile along the trail. At the far end was a stand of Douglas fir, and she didn’t notice the tree house until she stopped to snap a few pictures. The tree house was probably as old as the cabin; its wooden planks were bone yellow where they peeked through moss and branches. The platform perched about fifteen feet off the ground, and a ladder was nailed to the backside of a tree . . .

“You didn’t climb the tree,” Lorna said.

Miranda flexed her scraped and bruised knuckles. “Yes, I climbed that tree, all right.” The ladder was very precarious and the platform itself so rotted, sections of it had fallen away. Apparently, for no stronger reason than boredom, she risked life and limb to clamber atop the platform and investigate.

“It’s not a tree house,” Lorna said. “You found a hunter’s blind. The hunter sits on the platform, camouflaged by the branches. Eventually, some poor, hapless critter comes by, and blammo! Sadly, I’ve learned a lot from Bruce’s favorite cable-television shows. What in the heck compelled you to scamper around in a deathtrap in the middle of the woods? You could’ve gotten yourself in a real fix.”

“That occurred to me. My foot went through in one spot and I almost crapped my pants. If I got stuck I could scream all day and nobody would hear me. The danger was worth it, though.”

“Well, what did you find? Some moonshine in mason jars? D. B. Cooper’s skeleton?”

“Time for the reveal!” Miranda extricated herself from Lorna and went and opened the door, letting in a rush of cold night air. She returned with what appeared to be a bundle of filthy rags and proceeded to unroll them.

Lorna realized her girlfriend was presenting an animal hide. The fur had been sewn into a crude cape or cloak, beaten and weathered from great age, and shriveled along the hem. The head was that of some indeterminate predator—possibly a wolf or coyote. Whatever the species, the creature was a prize specimen. Despite the cloak’s deteriorated condition, she could imagine it draped across the broad shoulders of a Viking berserker or an Indian warrior. She said, “You realize that you just introduced several colonies of fleas, ticks, and lice into our habitat with that wretched thing.”

“Way ahead of you, baby. I sprayed it with bleach. Cooties were crawling all over. Isn’t it neat?”

“It’s horrifying,” Lorna said. Yet she couldn’t look away as Miranda held it at arm’s length so the pelt gleamed dully in the firelight. What was it? Who’d worn it, and why? Was it a garment to provide mere warmth, or to blend with the surroundings? The painting of the hunter was obscured by shadows, but she thought of the man in buckskin sneaking along, looking for something to kill, a throat to slice. Her hand went to her throat.

“This was hanging from a peg. I’m kinda surprised it’s not completely ruined, what with the elements. Funky, huh? A Daniel Boone–era accessory.”

“Gives me the creeps.”

“The creeps? It’s just a fur.”

“I don’t dig fur. Fur is dead. Man.”

“You’re a riot. I wonder if it’s worth money.”

“I really doubt that. Who cares? It’s not ours.”

“Finders keepers,” Miranda said. She held the cloak against her bosom as if she were measuring a dress. “Rowr! I’m a wild woman. Better watch yourself tonight!” She’d drunk enough wine to be in the mood for theater. “Scandinavian legends say to wear the skin of a beast is to become the beast. Haugstad fled to America in 1910, cast out from his community. There was a series of unexplained murders back in the homeland, and other unsavory deeds, all of which pointed to his doorstep. People in his village swore he kept a bundle of hides in a storehouse, that he donned them and became something other than a man, that it was he who tore apart a family’s cattle, that it was he who slaughtered a couple of boys hunting rabbits in the field, that it was he who desecrated graves and ate of the flesh of the dead during lean times. So, he left just ahead of a pitchfork-wielding mob. He built this cabin and lived a hermit’s life. Alas, his dark past followed. Some of the locals in Poger Rock got wind of the old scandals. One of the town drunks claimed he saw the trapper turn into a wolf, and nobody laughed as hard as one might expect. Haugstad got blamed whenever a cow disappeared, when the milk went sour, you name it. Then, over the course of ten years or so a long string of loggers and ranchers vanished. The natives grew restless, and it was the scene in Norway all over again.”

“What happened to him?”

“He wandered into the mountains one winter and never returned. Distant kin took over this place, lived here off and on the last thirty or forty years. Folks still remember, though.” Miranda made an exaggerated face and waggled her fingers. “Booga-booga!”

Lorna smiled, but she was repulsed by the hide, and unsettled by Miranda’s flushed cheeks, her loopy grin. Her lover’s playfulness wasn’t amusing her as it might’ve on another night. She said, “Toss that wretched skin outside, would you? Let’s hit the sack. I’m exhausted.”

“Exhausted, eh? Now is my chance to take full advantage of you.” Miranda winked as she stroked the hide. Instead of heading for the front door, she took her prize to the spare bedroom and left it there. She came back and embraced Lorna. Her eyes were too bright. The wine was strong on her breath. “Told you it was cool. God knows what else we’ll find if we look sharp.”

——

They made fierce love. Miranda was much more aggressive than her custom. The pain in Lorna’s knee built from a small flame to a white blaze of agony and her orgasm only registered as spasms in her thighs and shortness of breath, pleasure eclipsed entirely by suffering. Miranda didn’t notice the tears on Lorna’s cheeks, the frantic nature of her moans. When it ended, she kissed Lorna on the mouth, tasting of musk and salt, and something indefinably bitter. She collapsed and was asleep within seconds.

Lorna lay propped by pillows, her hand tangled in Miranda’s hair. The faint yellow shine of a three-quarter moon peeked over the ridgeline across the valley and beamed through the window at the foot of the bed. She could tell it was cold because their breaths misted the glass. A wolf howled and she flinched, the cry arousing a flutter of primordial dread in her breast. She waited until Miranda’s breathing steadied, then crept away. She put on Miranda’s robe and grabbed a bottle of Old Crow and a glass and poured herself a dose, and sipped it before the main window in the living room.

Thin, fast-moving clouds occasionally crossed the face of the moon, and its light pulsed and shadows reached like claws across the silvery landscape of rocky hillocks and canyons and stands of firs and pine. The stars burned a finger width above the crowns of the adjacent peaks. The land fell away into deeper shadow, a rift of darkness uninterrupted by a solitary flicker of man-made light. She and Miranda weren’t welcome; the cabin and its former inhabitants hadn’t been, either, despite persisting like ticks bored into the flank of a dog. The immensity of the void intimidated her, and for a moment she almost missed Bruce and the comparative safety of her suburban home, the gilded cage, even the bondage. She blinked, angry at this lapse into the bad old way of thinking, and drank the whiskey. “I’m not a damned whipped dog.” She didn’t bother pouring but had another pull directly from the bottle.

The wolf howled again and another answered. The beasts sounded close, and she wondered if they were circling the cabin, wondered if they smelled her and Miranda, or whether their night vision was so acute they could see her in the window—half in the bag, a bottle dangling from her hand, favoring her left leg, weak and cut from the herd. She considered the cautionary tale of Sven Haugstad and drank some more. Her head spun. She waited for another howl, determined to answer with her own.

Miranda’s arms encircled her. She cupped Lorna’s breasts and licked her earlobe, nibbled her neck. Lorna cried out and grabbed Miranda’s wrist before she registered who it was and relaxed. “Holy crap, you almost gave me a heart attack!” The floor creaked horribly; they’d even played a game of chopsticks by rhythmically pressing alternating sections with their shoes, but she hadn’t heard her lover cross the room. Not a whisper.

——

Something metallic snicked and an orange flame reflected in the window, and sweet, sharp smoke filled Lorna’s nostrils. Miranda gently pressed a cigarette to Lorna’s lips. Miranda said, “I needed this earlier, except I was too damned lazy to leave the covers. Better late than never.”

“God, you read my mind.” Lorna took a drag, then exhaled contentedly. The nicotine mixed with the alcohol did its magic. Her fear of the night land and its creatures receded. “I guess I can forgive you for sneaking up on me since you’ve offered me the peace pipe. Ahhh, I’ve fallen off the wagon. You’re evil. Did you hear the wolves?”

“Those aren’t wolves,” Miranda said. She reclaimed the cigarette. She inhaled, and the cigarette’s cherry floated in the window as her face floated in the window, a blur over Lorna’s shoulder. “Those are coyotes.”

“No shit?”

“Is that why you’re so jumpy? You thought the wolves were gonna get you?”

“I’m not jumpy. Well, sheesh—an almost full moon, wolves howling on the moor—er, in the woods. Gotta admit it’s all kinda spooky.”

“Not wolves. Coyotes. Come to bed . . . It’s chilly.”

“Right. Coyotes,” Lorna said. “I’m embarrassed. That’s like peeing myself over dingoes or raccoons.”

Snug under a pile of blankets, Lorna was drifting off to sleep when Miranda said in a dreamy voice, “Actually, coyotes are much scarier than wolves. Sneaky, sneaky little suckers. Eat you up. Lick the blood all up.”

“What?” Lorna said. Miranda didn’t answer. She snored.

——

One morning, a woman who resembled Vivien Leigh at the flowering of her glory knocked on the door. She wore a green jacket and a green-and-yellow kerchief and yellow sunglasses. Her purse was shiny red plastic with a red plastic strap. Her gloves were white. Her skirt was black and her shoes were also black. She smiled when Lorna opened the door, and her lipstick was blood red like the leaves. “Oh, I’m very sorry to disturb you, ma’am. I seem to be a trifle lost.” The woman introduced herself as Beth. She’d gone for a drive in the hills, searching for the Muskrat Creek campground.

“Apparently, I zigged when I should’ve zagged,” she said, and laughed a laugh worthy of the stage. “Speaking of zigzags, do you mind?” She opened an enamel case and extracted a cigarette and inserted it into a silver holder and lighted up with a stick match. It was all very mesmerizing.

Lorna had nearly panicked upon hearing the knock, convinced Bruce had tracked her down. She invited the woman inside and gave her a cup of coffee. Miranda had gone on her morning walk, which left Lorna with the task of entertaining the stranger while deflecting any awkward questions. She unpacked the road map from her Subaru and spread it across the table. She used a pencil to mark the campgrounds, which were twenty-odd miles from the cabin. Beth had wandered far off course, indeed.

“Thank goodness I came across you. These roads go on forever.” Beth sipped her coffee and puffed on her fancy cigarette. She slipped her sunglasses into her purse and glanced around the cabin. Her gaze traveled slowly, weighing everything it crossed. “You are certainly off the beaten path.”

“We’re private people,” Lorna said. “Where’s your car?”

Beth gestured toward the road. “Parked around the corner. I didn’t know if I could turn around in here, so I walked. Silly me, I broke a heel.” She raised her calf to show that indeed, yes, the heel of her left pump was wobbly.

“Are you alone?”

“Yes. I was supposed to meet friends at the campgrounds, but I can’t reach anybody. No bars. I’m rather cross with them and their directions.”

Lorna blinked, taking a moment to realize the woman meant she couldn’t get proper phone reception. “Mine works fine. I’d be happy to let you place a call—”

“Thanks anyway, sweetie.” Beth had sketched directions inside a notebook. “It’ll be a cinch now that I’ve got my bearings.” She finished her coffee, said thanks and goodbye, waving jauntily as she picked her way down the rutted lane.

Lorna started the generator to get hot water for a quick shower. After the shower, she made toast and more coffee and sat at the table relaxing with a nice paperback romance, one of several she’d had the foresight to bring along. Out the window, she glimpsed movement among the trees, a low and heavy shape that she recognized as a large dog—no, not a dog, a wolf. The animal almost blended with the rotten leaves and wet brush, and it nosed the earth, moving disjointedly, as if crippled. When it reared on its hind legs, Lorna gasped. Miranda pulled back the cowl of the hide cloak and leaned against a tree. Her expression was strange; she did not quite appear to be herself. She shuddered in the manner of a person emerging from a trance and walked to where the driveway curved and left three paper plates pressed into the bank. She spaced the plates about three feet apart. Each bore a bull’s-eye drawn in magic marker.

Miranda came inside. She’d removed the hide. Her hair was messy and tangled with twigs and leaves. “Who was here?” Her voice rasped like she’d been shouting.

“Some woman looking for a campground.” Lorna recounted the brief visit, too unnerved to mention what she’d witnessed. Her heart raced and she was overcome by dizziness that turned the floor to a trampoline. Miranda didn’t say anything. She opened a duffel bag and brandished a revolver. She examined the pistol, snapping its cylinder open, then shut. Lorna wasn’t particularly conversant with guns, but she’d watched Bruce enough to know this one was loaded. “I thought we were going to discuss it before you bought one,” she said.

Miranda rattled a small box of shells and slipped them into the pocket of her vest. “I didn’t buy one. A friend gave it to me when I told him about Brucifer. An ex-cop. This sucker doesn’t have a serial number.”

“There’s no reason to be upset. She was lost. That’s all.”

“Of course she was.”

Lorna watched her put the gun in her other pocket. “What’s wrong?”

“You’ve only paid cash, right? No debit card, no credit card?”

“You mean in town?”

“I mean anywhere. Like we agreed. No credit cards.”

“Tell me what’s wrong. She was lost. People get lost. It’s not unheard of, you know. And it doesn’t matter. I didn’t tell her my name. I didn’t tell her anything. She was lost. What was I supposed to do? Not answer the door? Maybe stick that gun in her face and demand some ID?”

“The campgrounds are closed,” Miranda said. “I was outside the door while she gave you her shuck and jive. She came in a panel van. A guy with a beard and sunglasses was driving. Didn’t get a good look at him.”

Lorna covered her face. “I think I’m gonna be sick.”

Miranda’s boots made loud clomping sounds as she walked to the door. She hesitated for a few moments, then said, “It’s okay. You handled her fine. Bruce has got entirely too much money.”

Lorna nodded and wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “We’ll see how much money he has after my lawyer gets through with him.”

Miranda smiled. It was thin and pained, but a smile. She shut the door behind her. Lorna curled into a ball on the bed. The revolver fired, its report muffled by the thick walls of the cabin. She imagined the black holes in the white paper. She imagined black holes drilling through Bruce’s white face. Pop, pop, pop.

——

Miranda brought Lorna to a stand of trees on the edge of a clearing and showed her the hunting blind. The bloody sun fell into the earth and the only slightly less bloody moon swung, like a pendulum, to replace it in the lower black of the sky. “That is one big, bad yellow moon,” Miranda said.

“It’s beautiful,” Lorna said. “Like an iceberg sliding through space.” She thought the fullness of the moon, its astral radiance, presaged some kind of cosmic shift. Her blood sang and the hairs on her arms prickled. It was too dark to see the platform in the branches, but she felt it there, heard its timbers squeak in the breeze.

“Been having strange dreams,” Miranda said. “Most of them are blurry. Last one I remember was about the people who used to live around here, a long time ago. They weren’t gentle folks, that’s for sure.”

“Well, of course not,” Lorna said. “They stuck a deer head over the fireplace and skinned poor, hapless woodland critters and hung them in the trees.”

“Yeah,” Miranda said. She lighted a cigarette. “Want one?”

“No.”

Miranda smoked most of her cigarette before she spoke again. “In the latest dream it was winter, frost thick on the windows. I sat on the bearskin rug. Late at night, a big fire crackling away, and an old man, I mean, old as dirt, was kicked back in a rocker, talking to me, telling me stuff. I couldn’t see his face because he sat in the shadows. He wore old-timey clothes and a fur jacket, and a hat made out of an animal head. Coyote or wolf. He explained how to set a snare for rabbits, how to skin a deer. The dream changed and jumped around, like dreams do, and we were kneeling on the floor by the carcass of—I dunno what. A possum, I think. The meat was green and soft; it had been dead a while. The old man told me a survivor eats what’s around. Then he stuck his face into that mess of stinking meat and took a bite.”

“That’s a message,” Lorna said. “The great universal consciousness is trying to tell you—us—to adapt. Adapt or die.”

“Or it could be a dream, full stop.”

“Is that what you think?”

“I think it’s time to get our minds right. Face the inevitable.”

“The inevitable?”

“We’re never going to get away,” Miranda said.

“Well, that’s a hell of an attitude.”

“I saw that van again. Parked in that gravel pit just down the road. They’re watching us, Lorna.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“Don’t worry about those bastards. They’ll be dealt with.”

“Dealt with? Dealt with how?” Lorna’s mind flashed to the revolver. The notion of Miranda shooting anyone in cold blood was ridiculous. Yet, here in the dark beyond the reach of rule or reason, such far-fetched notions bore weight. “Don’t get any crazy ideas.”

“I mean, don’t worry yourself sick over the help. Nah, the bigger problem is your husband. How much time is Bruce going to get? A few months? A year? Talk about your lawyer. Bruce’s lawyer is slick. He might not get anything. Community service, a stern admonition from the judge to go forth and sin no more.”

Lorna winced. Stress caused her leg to throb. The cigarette smoke drove her mad with desire. She stifled a sharp response and regarded the moon instead. Her frustration dissolved in the presence of its cold, implacable majesty. She said, “I know. It’s the way of the world. People like Bruce always win.” She’d called Orillia earlier that evening, asked her how things were going at the new school. Orillia didn’t want to talk about school; she wanted to know when she could see Daddy again, worried that he was lonely. Lorna had tried to keep emotion from her voice when she answered that Mom and Dad were working through some issues and everything would soon be sorted. Bruce was careful not to hit Lorna in front of their daughter, and though Orillia witnessed the bruises and the breaks, the sobbing aftermath, she seemed to disassociate these from her father’s actions.

“There are other ways to win.” Miranda was a black shadow against the dead silver grass. “Like you said—adapt or die. The old man showed me. In the beginning you need a prop, but it gets easier when you realize it’s all in your head.”

It was a long walk back through the woods. Dry leaves crunched beneath their shoes. They locked themselves into the cabin and got ready for bed.

Lorna’s dreams had been strange as well, but she’d kept quiet. She wasn’t open about such things, not even with Miranda. The ghost of old man Haugstad didn’t speak to Lorna; instead, her dreams transported her to the barren slopes above the tree line of the valley. The moon fumed and boiled. She was a passenger in another’s body, a body that seethed with profound vitality. The moon’s yellow glow stirred her blood, and she raced down the slope and into the trees. She smelled the land, tasted it on her lolling tongue, drawing in the scent of every green deer spoor, every droplet of coyote musk, every spackling of piss on rock or shrub. She smelled fresh blood and meat-blacked bone. There were many, many bones scattered across the mountainside. Generational heaps of them—ribs, thighs, horns, skulls. These graveyards were secret places, scattered for miles across deep, hidden caches and among the high rocks.

Lorna stroked Miranda’s belly. Miranda’s excess had melted away in recent days. She was lean from daylong hikes and skipped meals, and her scent was different, almost gamy, her hair lank and coarse. She was restless and she whined in her sleep. She bit too hard when they made love.

Miranda took Lorna’s hand and said, “What is it?”

“I’m afraid you’re going to leave.”

“Oh, where the fuck is this coming from?”

“Something’s different. Something’s changed. You weren’t honest about where you found the coat. The skin.”

Miranda chuckled without humor. “Let sleeping dogs lie.”

“I’m not in the mood for cute,” Lorna said.

“My sweet one. I left out the part that might . . . frighten you. You’re skittish enough.”

“I’m also not in the mood for twenty questions. What did you mean earlier—the old man showed you?”

“Old man Haugstad told me where to look, what I needed to do.”

“In a dream.”

“Not in a dream. The day I discovered the blind, a coyote skulked out of the bushes and led me along the path. It was the size of a mastiff, blizzard white on the muzzle and crisscrossed with scars.”

“I don’t understand,” Lorna said, but was afraid she might.

“We’re here for a reason. Can’t you feel the power all around us? After I lost Jack, after I finally accepted he was gone, I pretty much decided to off myself. If I hadn’t met you at that party I probably would’ve died within a few days. I’d picked out the pills, the clothes I intended to wear, knew exactly where it was going to happen. When was the only question.”

Lorna began to cry.

“I won’t leave you. But it’s possible you might decide not to come with me.” Miranda rolled to her opposite side and said nothing more. Lorna slowly drifted to sleep. She woke later while it was still dark. Miranda’s side of the bed was a cold, blank space. Her clothes were still piled on the floor. In a moment of sublimely morbid intuition, Lorna clicked on a flashlight and checked the spare bedroom where Miranda had taken to hanging the fur cloak from a hook on the door. Of course the cloak was missing.

She gathered her robe tightly, sparing a moment to reflect upon her resemblance to the doomed heroines on any number of lurid gothic horror-novel covers, and went outdoors into the freezing night. Her teeth chattered and her fear became indistinguishable from the chill. She poked around the cabin, occasionally calling her lover’s name, although in a soft tone, afraid to attract the attention of the wolves, the coyotes, or whatever else might roam the forest at night.

Eventually she approached the woodshed and saw that the door was cracked open by several inches. She stepped inside. Miranda crouched on the dirt floor. The flashlight was weak, and its flickering cone only hinted and suggested. The pelt covered Miranda, concealed her so she was scarcely more than a lump. She whined and shuddered and took notice of the pallid light, and as she stirred, Lorna was convinced that the pelt was not a loose cloak, not an ill-fitted garment, but something else entirely for the manner in which it flexed with each twitch and shiver of Miranda’s musculature.

The flashlight glass cracked and imploded. The shed lay in utter darkness, except for a thin sliver of moonlight that burned yellow in Miranda’s eyes. Lorna’s mouth was dry. She said, “Sweetheart?”

Miranda said, in a voice rusty and drugged, “Why don’t you . . . go on to bed. I’ll be along. I’ll come see you real soon.” She stood, a ponderous yet lithe uncoiling motion, and her head scraped the low ceiling.

Lorna got out fast and stumbled toward the cabin. She didn’t look over her shoulder, even though she felt hot breath on the back of her neck.

——

They didn’t speak of the incident. For a couple of days they hardly spoke at all. Miranda drifted in and out of the cabin like a ghost, and Lorna dreaded to ask where she went in the dead of night, why she wore the hide and nothing else. Evening temperatures dipped below freezing, yet Miranda didn’t appear to suffer; on the contrary, she thrived. She hadn’t eaten a bite from their store of canned goods, hadn’t taken a meal all week. Lorna lay awake staring at the ceiling as the autumn rains rattled the windows.

One afternoon she sat alone at the kitchen table downing the last of the Old Crow. The previous evening she’d experienced two visceral and disturbing dreams. In the first she was serving drinks at a barbecue. There were dozens of guests. Bruce flipped burgers and hobnobbed with his office chums. Orillia darted through the crowd with a water pistol, zapping hapless adults before dashing away. The mystery woman, Beth, and a bearded man in a track suit she introduced as her husband came over and told her what a lovely party, what a lovely house, what a lovely family, and Lorna handed them drinks and smiled a big, dumb smile as Miranda stood to the side and winked, nodding toward a panel van parked nearby on the grass. The van rocked, and a coyote emerged from beneath the vehicle, growling and slobbering and snapping at the air. Grease slicked the animal’s fur black, made its yellow eyes bright as flames.

A moment later, Lorna was in the woods, chasing the bearded man from the party. His track suit flapped in shreds, stained with blood and dirt. The man tripped and fell over a cliff. He crashed in a sprawl of broken limbs, his mouth full of shattered teeth and black gore. He raised a mutilated hand toward her in supplication. She bounded down and mounted him, licked the blood from him, then chewed off his face. She’d awakened with a cry, bile in her throat.

Lorna set aside the empty bottle. She put on her coat and got the revolver from the dresser where Miranda had stashed it for safekeeping. Lorna hadn’t fired the gun, despite Miranda’s offer to practice. However, she’d seen her lover go through the routine—cock the hammer, pull the trigger, click, no real trick. She didn’t need the gun, wouldn’t use the gun, but somehow its weight in her pocket felt good. She walked down the driveway, moving gingerly to protect her bum knee, then followed the road to the gravel pit where the van was allegedly parked. The rain slackened to drizzle. Patches of mist swirled in the hollows and the canyons and crept along fern beds at the edges of the road. The valley lay hushed, a brooding giant.

The gravel pit was empty. A handful of charred wood and some squashed beer cans confirmed someone had definitely camped there in the not-so-distant past. She breathed heavily, partially from the incessant throb in her knee, partially from relief. What the hell would she have done if the assholes her husband sent were on the spot roasting wienies? Did she really think people like that would evaporate upon being subjected to harsh language? Did she really have the backbone to flash the gun and send them packing, John Wayne style?

She thought the first muffled cry was the screech of a bird, but the second shout got her attention. Her heart was pounding when she finally located the source, about a hundred yards farther along the road. Tire tracks veered from the narrow lane toward a forty-foot drop into a gulch of trees and boulders. The van had landed on its side. The rear doors were sprung, the glass busted. She wouldn’t have noticed it all the way down there, if not for the woman crying for help. Her voice sounded weak. But that made sense—Beth had been trapped in the wreck for several days, hadn’t she? One snip of the brake line and on these hills, it’d be all over but the crying. Miranda surely didn’t fuck around, did she? Lorna bit the palm of her hand to stifle a scream.

“Hey,” Miranda said. She’d come along as stealthily as the mist and lurked a few paces away near a thicket of brambles. She wore the mangy cloak with the predator’s skull covering her own, rendering her features inscrutable. Her feet were bare. She was naked beneath the pelt, her lovely flesh streaked with dirt and blood. Her mouth was stained wine dark. “Sorry, honey bunch. I really thought they’d have given up the ghost by now. Alas, alack. Don’t worry. It won’t be long. The birds are here.”

Crows hopped among the limbs and drifted in looping patterns above the ruined van. They squawked and squabbled. The woman yelled something unintelligible. She wailed and fell silent. Lorna’s lip trembled and her nose ran with snot. She swept her arm to indicate their surroundings. “Why did you bring me here?”

Miranda tilted her misshapen head and smiled a sad, cruel smile. “I want to save you, baby. You’re weak.”

Lorna stared into the gulch. The mist thickened and began to fill in the cracks and crevices and covered the van and its occupants. There was no way she could navigate the steep bank, not with her injury. Her cell was at the cabin on the table. She could almost hear the clockwork gears of the universe clicking into alignment, a great, dark spotlight shifting across the cosmic stage to center upon her at this moment in time. She said, “I don’t know how to do what you’ve done. To change. Unless that hide is built for two.”

Miranda took her hand and led her back to the cabin and tenderly undressed her. She smiled faintly when she retrieved the revolver and set it on the table. She kissed Lorna, and her breath was hot and foul. Then she stepped back and began to pull the hide away from her body, and as it lifted, so did the underlying skin, peeling like a scab. Blood poured down Miranda’s chest and belly and pattered on the floorboards. The muscles of her cheeks and jaw bunched and she hissed, eyes rolling, and then it was done and the dripping bundle was free of her red-slicked flesh. Lorna was paralyzed with horror and awe, but finally stirred and tried to resist what her lover proffered. Miranda cuffed her temple, stunning her. She said, “Hold still, baby. You’re gonna thank me,” and draped the cloak across Lorna’s shoulders and pulled the skullcap of the beast over Lorna’s eyes.

“You came here for this?” Lorna said as the slimy and overheated pelt cupped her and enclosed her. The room went in and out of focus.

“No, babe. I just followed the trail, and here we are. And it’s good. You’ll see how good it is, how it changes everything. We’ve been living in a cage, but that’s over now.”

“My God, I loved you.” Lorna blinked the blood from her eyes. She glanced over and saw the revolver on the table, blunt and deadly and glowing with the dwindling light, a beacon. She grabbed the weapon without thought and pressed it under Miranda’s chin, and thumbed the hammer just as she’d seen it done. Her entire body shook. “You thought I’d just leave my daughter behind and slink off to Never Never Land without a word? Are you out of your fucking mind?”

“Give it a minute,” Miranda said. The fingers of her left hand stroked the pelt. “One minute. Let it work its magic. You’ll see everything in a whole new way. Come on, sweetie.” She reached for the revolver, and it barked and twisted in Lorna’s hands.

Lorna didn’t weep. Her insides were stone. She dropped the gun and swayed in place, not focusing on anything. The light began to fade. She stumbled outside. She could smell everything, and strange thoughts rushed through her head.

There was a moment between twilight and darkness when she almost managed to tear free of the hide and begin making the calls that would return her to the world, her daughter, the apocalyptic showdown with the man who’d oppressed her for too long. The moment passed, was usurped by an older and much more powerful impulse. Her thoughts turned to the woods, the hills, a universe of dark, sweet scent. The hunt.

——

Two weeks later, a hiker spotted a murder of crows in a raucous celebration as they roosted around the wrecked van. He called emergency services. Men and dogs and choppers swarmed the mountainside. The case made all of the papers and ran on the local networks for days. Investigators found two corpses—an adult male and an adult female—in the van. The cause of death was blunt-force trauma and prolonged exposure to the elements. Further examination revealed that the brake lines of the van were sawed through, indicative of homicide. The homicide theory was supported by the discovery of a deceased adult female on the floor of a nearby cabin. She’d died of a single bullet wound to the head. A fourth individual who’d also lived on the premises remained missing and was later presumed dead. Tremendous scrutiny was directed at the missing woman’s estranged husband. He professed his innocence throughout the subsequent trial. That he’d hired the deceased couple to spy on his wife didn’t help his case.

Years later, a homicide detective wrote a bestseller detailing the investigation of the killings. Tucked away as a footnote, the author included a few esoteric quotes and bits of trivia; among these were comments by the chief medical examiner who’d overseen the autopsies. According to the ME, it was fortunate that picture ID was present on scene for the deceased. By the time the authorities arrived, animals had gotten to the bodies in the van. The examiner said she’d been tempted to note in her report that in thirty years she’d never seen anything so bizarre or savage as these particular bites, but wisely reconsidered.

——

Laird Barron is the author of two collections: The Imago Sequence and Other Stories and Occultation, both from Night Shade Books. His work has appeared in places such as Fantasy & Science Fiction, Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, Lovecraft Unbound, Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror, Clockwork Phoenix, and The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy. It has also been reprinted in numerous year’s-best anthologies. Mr. Barron lives in Olympia, Washington.

| THE ROMANCE |

Elizabeth Bear

—

Last, the bullet blooms against steel. Still almost pristine until that moment, now its conical head flattens. Its copper jacket splinters into shrapnel needles, wire-fine, scattering. The core splashes, the force of impact so great that cold metal splatters like syrup, droplets blossoming in an elegant chrysanthemum. The butt of the casing flattens against the engine block for a split second before it peels away and falls.

But it’s already exited the girl, and the girl is falling.

——

January is baking brownies.

She watches water and butter boil together with a mass of green leaves, once dried and now rehydrating. These are grown-up brownies. Her kitchen reeks of burnt sugar and wet rope, complicated and musty as copal.

She makes sure the water doesn’t boil off. Too-high heat destroys the THC. Cooking is an applied form of chemistry.

She pours the slurry into a pottery bowl through a strainer draped with cheesecloth, then twists the cloth to get the last of the butter. The water and butter go in the fridge to cool. She cleans the tools and starts breaking apart squares of Ghirardelli unsweetened chocolate, which she will eventually combine with brown sugar and melt into the separated butter.

——

The bullet blasts a gaping exit wound in the girl’s body. It’s not the penetration of the bullet that does this; the bullet is quite small. Rather, it’s transferred energy—a shock wave—that knocks a plug of blood and muscle and skin out of her side, that vaporizes a portion of her body and splashes it over the massive open block of the carousel engine a moment before the bullet splashes, too.

That bullet has already passed through the girl when she reaches weak, estranged hands for the impact point and staggers one step back, then two, teetering among littered tussocks on high heels she never should have worn to the carnival.

——

January takes the brownies to the birthday party. The clamor of the Wurlitzer greets her as soon as she opens her car door, but the carousel is out of sight, turning and turning in its great wood-and-glass enclosure that glows like a Christmas ornament in the blue twilight. The sound of the one-machine band climbs against a clear October evening. The western sky’s still creamy gold, though a band of indigo shows to the east, stars prickling through. January’s breath mists, and oblong yellow leaves somersault across the grass, but once she’s inside she’ll be warm.

For now she tugs her scarf tight and balances the plate of brownies on one hand while locking the car doors with the other. She picks her way over uneven ground, watching another dark shape or two rattle keys, check doors, and drift through the gloaming like ghosts drawn to a sйance. January follows a tall, slender woman in a plain gray dress, much younger than most of the crowd. Somebody’s daughter?

The carousel is housed in a circular structure like a train roundhouse—except smaller, and intricately decorated. The row of windows under the cedar-shake eaves are stained glass—this side, over the open double door, shows autumn scenes shading into winter.

January imagines the theme is carried all the way around. Around the curve of the building, the milk-glass snows probably melt out in lime green and gold.

The band organ almost blows her hair back as she passes inside. It thumps through the cold cement floor. The bass drum shudders in the empty spaces of her chest. The lofty space isn’t as warm as she’d hoped—cold air settles along the neckline of the pushed-back hood of her cardigan—but it’s bright and crowded and full of the smell of popcorn and the voices of crowds of people January knows sort of halfway well, or used to know well in college.

She waves with her free hand as she moves around the outskirts of the carousel, looking for the birthday boy, the snack table, or both. The crowd keeps her from getting a good look at the merry-go-round; apparently Martin can turn out enough friends for his fiftieth to make even a carousel housing seem crowded. But that’s okay; she can wait until she’s found Martin to go pet the wooden ponies.

As if her determination were a summoning, he materializes before her, one hand extended for the plate and the other to take her shoulder and kiss her quickly in hello. He’s got crow’s feet and spectacles now, and he’s thicker in the middle than when they were lovers. The hair slicked back into his ponytail is more silver than ginger.

He points to the brownies with the corner of his eyeglasses. “Adulterated table?”

“Would I let you down?”

He grins, a grin that pays for all their long and questionable history, and takes her arm. Progress to the refreshments is slow—the penalty for traveling with the guest of honor—but the inevitable interruptions allow January to gaze her fill upon the carousel.

Because she was curious, and because she has the research skills of any good children’s librarian, she knows that it was carved between 1911 and 1914 by Russian Jews who had immigrated to Ohio. She knows that their previous work was carving ladies’ hair ornaments, and she knows that the carousel stood in its original setting for fifty years before being shipped east to its new place of pride as the focal point of a municipal park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted—where you can rent it for birthday parties at night or in the off-season.

But that’s not the kind of knowledge that can prepare one for the glow of lights and the flash of mirrors, the chiaroscuro and the colors. The crashing of the Wurlitzer echoes until January can only make out what Martin is saying because she knows him so well, and eventually they find themselves by the snack tables.

The larger one has a white cloth, and is covered with casseroles and chips and desserts. A cooler must contain cans of soda. The smaller one has a tie-dyed cloth, and the cooler underneath contains beer.

Martin sets her plate in the center of the display, whisking off the plastic to reveal a stack of two-bite chocolate squares, each stuck with a toothpick with a paper cannabis leaf glued to the top—just in case there should be any misunderstandings. Before he turns away, he liberates a brownie. “You made these kind of small.”

“I made them kind of strong,” she answers. A responsible herbalist always tests the merchandise before turning it loose. “Anyway, there’s three-quarters of a pound of chocolate in those things.”

Judging by the blissful expression that crosses his face when he sniffs the brownie, that’s the right ratio. “Someday, these will be nearly legal again.”

“Nah,” January says. She takes Martin’s arm and leads him toward the carousel. “It’ll take generations to recover from the eighties. Come on. Let’s ride.”

Despite the crush of people, there’s no real line, and even if there were, clinging to the birthday boy’s arm has its benefits. Martin, licking brownie grease off his opposite thumb, hands January up onto the deck of the carousel, which—unlike the smaller merry-go-rounds she rode as a kid—doesn’t settle beneath her weight.

Martin releases her hand. The Wurlitzer hesitates.

The carousel has more than just horses. The closest animals, three abreast, are giraffes, vivid yellow and chocolate brown with caparisons of gold and red and blue. Their long necks look knotty; January can see the places where one piece of wood was joined to another to make up the length. The giraffes look awkward and their blown-glass eyes bulge unnaturally, catching the harsh glow and reflecting it back like raccoon eyes in headlights.

“Lasers fully charged.”

“I don’t think the carvers ever saw a live giraffe.” Martin’s a contractor now—four years of college and it turns out he’s that much happier with a hammer in his hands. It took him years of thrashing to figure it out, but the fun of being fifty is having done the figuring.

He ducks to inspect the hooves. “These don’t move. Do giraffes really have hooves? I’d have thought camel feet.”

“They really do.” She reaches way up to pat the nearest giraffe on the nose. “And the next row go up and down. It looks like just the circus animals don’t move.”

Martin stands as if the rising thunder of the Wurlitzer raised him. He leans around the giraffe to follow her gaze. The next row of three is horses, and if the giraffes are stiff, the horses are stunning. The Russian cousins were apparently better at familiar animals, because these breathe. They’re slightly caricatured, flaring nostrils and bulging eyes—glass again, too-round bubbles affixed to the insides of the hollow heads, so the carousel lights shine through them—but the cartoonishness expresses itself as heroism rather than ridiculousness. The carved necks arch, the carved teeth champ, the carved manes mount like breaking waves. The outside horse in each row is larger and braver than his brothers, the exterior side of each pony more brilliantly decorated than the one inside.

January touches a palomino ear and feels a thrill. She walks the length of the horse, letting her fingers trail down his neck and across the saddle. The saddlecloth sparkles with silver gilt, though the stirrup irons hanging from stretched leathers are worn. When her fingers reach the tail, she almost jerks back; there’s hide under the cream-colored locks. It’s a real horsetail.

“Better pick a pony,” Martin says. “The ride is filling up.”

She smiles and moves on. Past a lovers’ carriage—red and gold, and decorated with cherubs even more uncanny than the giraffes—and another row of standees—elephant, lion, and tiger. (“How come the giraffes get three representatives?” Martin wants to know, and under her breath January answers, “Quotas.”) The elephant is a little questionable, and the lion and tiger are not to scale—the lion is largest of the three—but the carving on the big cats is spectacular. Their eyes squint over frozen snarls. Pink tongues roll slickly behind curved yellow fangs. Small chips at the tops of each canine tooth must be from children shoving their hands into the big cats’ mouths. She shudders. Even in play, who would want to do that?

Behind them are grays—and January’s heart skips. The inside pony might be the plainest on the carousel—in fact, January wonders if she was borrowed from an older merry-go-round to make up a gap—and the stallion on the outside is a heavy-hoofed, broad-shouldered draught horse, his whiskery head so huge it looks like his neck is bowed under the weight of it. But the mare in the middle is perfect—medium sized, caught at the bottom of her leap for easy mounting, and with a gentle expression and crimson leaves braided into the toss of her mane.

“Her,” January says, and strokes the pale-pink wooden muzzle under the long, dappled wooden nose.

“Oh, not the middle one,” says Martin. “You can’t catch the brass ring if you’re on the middle one.”

“Brass ring?” January tucks her long, felted-wool skirt around her tights.

“Sure,” Martin says. “This carousel still has brass rings. Catch one, and you get a free ride.”

“But the rides are all free—”

He waves his hand in that airy manner that used to make her want to kiss him, dismissing all protests. “It’s the principle.”

She rolls her eyes and puts on her best I’m humoring Martin face. Recognizing it, he grins.

“Fine, but I’m riding Buttercup next time.”

“Buttercup? You’re not keeping her—”

He stands aside so she can mount the stallion, but it still looks uncomfortably wide, and she turns to the plain little filly on the inside. She’s stiffer than the others, more plainly made, her seams more apparent. Even her paint looks dull. The bulging glass eyes are more crudely fitted, and this pony has not only a tail of real horsehair, but a mane also, mingled strands of black and white and gray.

“Macabre,” January says, petting it, and swings up into the saddle.

It’s been a long time since she was on a real horse, and she’s never done it in heels—even low heels like these Mary Jane clogs. But once her feet are in the stirrups and she’s remembering how to use the leverage, she finds herself sitting comfortably, legs extended, one hand resting on the spiraling brass sleeve that covers the steel pole the horse hangs from. Her skirt drapes the saddle like a lady’s cloak in a tapestry.

“Brass ring,” she says to Martin, who is watching her from under furrowed brow.

“Brass ring.” He swings onto the stallion, which—at the top of its arc—makes him seem miles and miles taller.

Other riders fill in. The elephant immediately in front of January is occupied by Martin’s freshman-year roommate Andrew. His narrow height is distorted in the middle by a potbelly now, but his colorless hair still sticks out every which way, though there is less of it. He dangles himself over the back of the beast and extends one telescopic arm to pat the dragonfly ornament between the gray filly’s eyes. “You got the ugliest ride in the joint again.”

“But the elephant has the ugliest rider,” she answers, and watches him try to take it as a joke, the way people who camouflage their viciousness as humor generally have to. He manages, more or less, but while he’s arranging his face January rolls her eyes at Martin.

Martin rolls them right back. Andrew must catch the exchange, because he says, “Don’t tell me you two are back together?” in a prickly voice, which makes Martin laugh like he’ll never stop.

January grins at him, and the carousel starts.

——

Ripples of force spread across the girl’s flesh from the clean entry wound, small as a puncture. The impact and transfer of force cause cavitation: shock waves blow the path of the bullet as wide as if a fist were shoved into the injury. The wound collapses again.

Human skin and muscle are elastic; bone and liver are not.

——

January is getting the hang of this brass-ring thing. She’d expected they would be on hooks overhead, so you’d have to stand in the saddle to reach. In retrospect, that strikes her as a silly supposition—imagine the liability issues!—but how was she supposed to know? She’s never seen a carousel that still has them before.

The rings are in long-armed dispensers, one outside and one inside the deck of the carousel, between the inner edge and the brightly painted and bemirrored drum. They are easy to reach—January doesn’t have to lean far out of her saddle to hook her fingers through one—but they are mostly not shiny brass at all. All the ones she collects are sweat tarnished and dull brown, but there’s still something satisfying about the hook, the tug, the click, the release.

Andrew, with his long arms and quick fingers, is getting two or three rings at once. He can reach out ahead, swipe the first, and the dispenser has reloaded before he’s out of range. Martin is much more casual about it. He snags his rings as if lifting an hors d’oeuvre from a passing waiter’s tray. Martin is mugging for her, feet out of the stirrups, knees drawn up, sitting high in the saddle of the big carved Percheron as if he were a jockey in the Kentucky Derby. She wants to tell him not to fall and split his head open, but she’s also known him long enough to know better.

There are probably worse ways to die.

The painted ponies don’t just go up and down (sorry, Joni Mitchell)—they travel in geared circles, undulating forward as the carousel spins. The Wurlitzer booms and squeaks and plinks. Inside it, January imagines bellows and hammers and little plinky valves. The bars on the glockenspiel jump when struck, and the swell shutters on its gold-and-white face open and shut, controlling the volume.

“Dixie” is ending and January expects the carousel to slow, but apparently it’s two songs a ride, because the Wurlitzer hiccups and wheezes and swings into “Bicycle Built for Two” as she comes around again. Andrew snags a brown ring, two, and as he palms the second one January sees a gold-bright flash of brass when his hand comes down.

She’s not prepared for the jump of her heart, the surge of adrenaline, the way it feels, for a moment, as if the pony under her stretches warm, real flanks and surges forward. She leans into the stirrup, skirt furling in the wind of her passage, feeling the tension and strength up her leg, and lets her fingers grope forward—

But Andrew’s fingers flash again, there’s the rattle of the springs, and the brass ring is gone, replaced by one dull and lifeless. January settles into the stirrups, balanced again, the strain equalized through both legs. Whatever trick of perception made the gray filly seem to move like a real horse is gone, and she’s just a painted pony again.

After the ride, Andrew tries to give January the brass ring, but she decides she’d rather have a brownie.

——

Before the bullet strikes the girl, it is blown from the muzzle of the pistol at a velocity of some 830 feet per second, pushed before a cloud of hot, expanding gases. Those gases, the product of combustion, are created when the propellant in the bullet’s cartridge undergoes deflagration. Smokeless powder is a solid propellant, and it burns rather than detonating.

Rifling along the barrel of the pistol (a brand-new, innovative Colt 1911 model, all blued steel and the gin smell of gun oil) imparted a spin to the bullet, gyroscopically stabilizing its trajectory and improving its accuracy. In this instance, the rifling made no difference to the outcome. A bullet doesn’t wobble much at point-blank range.

——

January dangles a paper cup of hot cider by the rolled edges to avoid burning her fingers and listens to Martin talk to Jeff about mortgages and gardening. It’s a better conversation than you’d expect—Jeff is younger, in his thirties, a muscular African American with mobile, elegant hands. He’s a work friend of Martin’s from before Martin owned his own company, and he’s sharply witty and not too impressed with what one of January’s lesbian friends calls the Social Program.

In any case, Jeff is in the midst of an involved history of his attempts to use nonlethal force to keep what he refers to as the Yard Bunny from consuming his corn plants when the brownie takes hold of Martin. Because Martin blinks, holds up a hand to pause Jeff’s conversation, and says, in his best Tommy Chong, “Whooaaaa.”

Jeff switches gears effortlessly—“Colors?”—leaving January making a mental note to get the rest of the bunny story later. Somehow, she suspects that the beleaguered corn plants were not the final victors.

“Good brownies,” Martin says, with a grin. “Don’t eat two. For a minute there, I thought the ponies were moving.”

“It’s a carousel,” Jeff says. “They’re supposed to.”

Martin flips him off genially. “A lot of help you are.”

January feels the uncontrollable swell of her Internet research toward her vocal cords, and doesn’t even try to choke it down. “You know this carousel is supposed to be haunted?”

Jeff cocks his head; Martin stops with his glass already tilted toward his mouth. “Haunted? No kidding. What do they say?”

“Well . . .” She leans forward conspiratorially, to draw the anticipation out a little. “Supposedly it runs backward at night, and Martin, you’re not the first one to think he’s seen the horses moving. And there are the usual reports of cold spots, weird film exposures, shadows with nothing to cast them—”

“Runs backward?” Martin checks ostentatiously over each shoulder. “Hey, has anyone seen that nice Mr. Cooger?”

January tosses her head back and laughs. It feels good, easy, and that’s not just the influence of the brownie. “I dunno,” she says, “but some kid was looking for you. Do you think ghosts affect digital cameras?”

Jeff opens his hands, expressing something that could be bewilderment unless he’s simply making the universal gesture for the ineffable. “Yeah,” he says. “Supposedly you get the same kind of effects. Cameras pick up all sorts of things the human eye doesn’t.”

“Ghosts are kind of Jeff’s hobby,” Martin says.

“Nah, nah, now.” Jeff stretches out one hand with a finger extended, drawing it through the space between him and Martin. “Call it an interest. It’s kind of inevitable, given my work.”

Jeff specializes in renovating old houses. In this part of the world, old means eighteenth century, or the early part of the nineteenth. Not at all an old house by England’s standards, but then, in England they don’t generally build dwelling places out of wood.

January can’t resist. ’Tis the season, after all—Martin’s birthday is only a week before Halloween. “Have you ever seen a ghost?”

Jeff grins, flash of teeth stained slightly from too much coffee, and January suddenly finds him beautiful. Martin nudges her. He sees through her like a sheet of oiled paper. Try not to perv on the infants, you dirty old woman.

Jeff, thank God, seems oblivious. He’s busy gathering himself for whatever tall tale he’s about to tell, his attention somewhere off to the right while he figures out where to start. Just when January is starting to get antsy, he folds his fingers together and begins. “So you know contractors leave gifts inside houses, right?”

January doesn’t. “Gifts?”

Jeff’s head bobs emphatically, while Martin folds one arm over the other and lets his shoulders drop, his own cup of apple cider still hanging from his left hand. Either his cooled off faster than January’s, or his hands are impervious. “I like to leave a nice bottle of Scotch and a newspaper. Some guys do wine, photos, toys—it’s just kind of a message to the next guy to knock the wall down from the last one.”

“A gift,” January says, understanding. “Like when you sell a house, you leave toilet paper and paper towels for the people moving in.”

Jeff laughs, delighted. “Maybe not quite that practical. Anyway, I’ve found the damnedest things inside houses. Like, once a pair of suede slippers, new in box, except not such a great idea, because some kind of bugs had eaten them. Wine is common. Sometimes it’s vinegar. Scotch is a better idea.” He nods to Martin. “I like to leave books. Classics, nice editions. But you have to seal them up really well or they wind up like the slippers.”

“So what does this have to do with ghosts?” January rolls cider over her tongue. The taste is fruity, acid, complicated even before you consider the layers of sweet spices. She thinks there’s orange peel in there, star anise, allspice, cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, clove. And some unexpected things—black pepper, maybe. Bay leaf. It makes her want to suck air over it and rub her tongue against her palate to extract the subtleties.

“Well, so this one house had a china plate in the wall,” he says. “Willowware, sealed in a tiny little crate with wood shavings for packing material. Anyway, funny thing—as soon as I took that plate out, everything with the job started to go wrong.”

“It’s supposed to be a creepy doll,” Martin says, “that comes to life and starts trying to kill people until the final girl scorches its face off with a steam iron.”

Colored swirls follow the men’s movements. January knows they’re not real, but they are pretty.

“Now, when I say everything, I mean—drill bits snapping, nail guns jamming, the homeowner complaining of cold spots and feeling watched all the time. She was expecting a baby—we were renovating the nursery—and she eventually miscarried. So the husband took the plate and boxed it up, with styrofoam this time, instead of the wood shavings. And I opened the wall back up and tucked it inside, nice and careful.” He pauses, heavily, and raises one hand as if avowing, attesting, and swearing. “And that was the end of the troubles.”

Martin says, “It doesn’t sound as if anybody saw a ghost.”

“Cold spots.” January shivers dramatically. “Very good sign of a ghost infestation. If you have cold spots, look for ghosts.”

“If you have sawdust, look for termites.” Martin unfolds his arms and touches her. “Come on, I’m starving. You think there’s some food still left that isn’t laced?”

“Stoners,” Jeff says, following them back to the snack bar. “So predictable.”

——

Jeff and Martin start talking about repairing antique wood paneling in technical detail, and January decides that this is the opportune time to visit the snack tables. She pushes through the press of people and gets herself a small popcorn, more for the smell than the taste, and checks on the status of her brownies. Despite being cut small, they have already attrited by half. A small, round, white woman in a flowing skirt stops her, blue eyes peering through slipping strands of straight gray-brown hair that hang to her nominal waist. “You’re January, right?”

January nods, groping after a half-remembered name. “Mmm—Martha?”

“Marsha,” the woman says, with a winning smile and a negligent wave of her hand. “Don’t sweat it. I just wanted to say the brownies are really good. How do you get them not to be gritty?”

“Family secret,” January says. “It’s all about the butter. Pardon me.” She winks and turns away, as unenthralled suddenly with the technical details of infusing herb extracts into fats as she was with dadoing mahogany for tongue-and-groove construction. The line for the carousel has thinned as the evening has progressed, and since a group has just gone in, there is nobody standing at the gate. January presents herself just as the young Latina in gray coveralls who apparently came with the rental is closing the latch.

The carousel operator smiles apologetically. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Next ride?”

“I’m in no hurry,” January answers.

The woman nods and turns away to start the great machine revolving. She must have filled both hoppers with rings already, because as the music swells and the mounts begin to revolve she swings neatly up a stepladder and grabs a lever that extends both arms. The sound of wood on wood is almost buried under the Wurlitzer’s noise.

She comes back, dusting her hands, with a grin that makes January want to befriend her.

“Do you like your job?”

The woman looks down shyly. “I don’t mind it. Sometimes the kids’ birthday parties are a bit hairy, and sometimes it’s drunk college kids. We had a wedding in September. That was nice.”

“I work in a library.” January tosses her hair behind her shoulder. “I hear you about the kids.”

She extends her barely touched popcorn to the woman, who waves it off.

“Once you’ve worked here a month, you can’t get near the stuff anymore.” She wipes her hand on her trousers before she sticks it out and waits for January to clasp it. “I’m Maricela.”

“January,” January replies, giving her a little squeeze.

Maricela’s face softens with surprise—possibly even shock. “You’re pulling my leg.”

January is used to reactions, but this one seems a little over the top. “Fifty-one years,” she says. “Is there some reason it shouldn’t be?”

“No,” Maricela says, visibly gathering herself. “It’s just a little unusual, is all. A weird coincidence. Do you like carousels?”

“Love ’em,” January says. It isn’t as if she could have missed Maricela changing the subject. “More now than before. I read up on them when I found out Martin was throwing himself a kid party.”

“Everybody needs a kid party now and again,” Maricela says. “Especially people who don’t have kids. So you know about the horses having a romance side, the outside that’s all carved and pretty?”

“And a back side,” January says. “Which is so plain it doesn’t even get a pretty name.”

Maricela laughs, nodding.

Behind January, someone whoops, having caught the brass ring. It sounds like a child, but there are no kids at this party.

——

The combustion that propels the bullet—while not, properly speaking, an explosion in and of itself—is triggered by an explosion. A minuscule one: the detonation of the cartridge’s primer. That explosion is caused by the smack of the firing pin against the cartridge. It ignites the propellant, and the propellant pushes the bullet.

What causes the firing pin’s descent, of course, is the convulsive clenching of a human hand.

——

They’re not as young as they used to be: by midnight, the crowd has thinned. January’s still there, and so is Martin, and so is Jeff. In search of a place to sit, they’ve moved to the mostly empty carousel and claimed one of the carriages, really two ornately carved and gilded red-painted benches set facing each other. The boys sit together with January across, her feet tucked against the footboard and her knees between Jeff’s and Martin’s.

January’s coming down, and she’s pretty sure Martin is long grounded. It must be seriously cold outside; there was a frost warning, and the draft every time the doors open to let somebody else leave is bitter. She thinks she’ll be good to drive in another twenty minutes, anyway, and somewhere east of here her cats are probably picketing.

She’ll make her excuses after two more rounds on the carousel. The woman running it for the rental party is probably ready to go home to whomever she has, even if Martin has the place until one.

Besides, if January stays much longer, she’ll be stuck cleaning up.

The conversation has reached that point where they’re tidying up stray threads from earlier—like the end of a well-constructed movie—and Jeff has just finished telling them how the Yard Bunny defeated him as roundly as the Road Runner waxing Wile E. Coyote when she remembers something she was going to ask about earlier. Her research bump is itching: it’s a hazard of being a librarian.

“Did you ever find out what the backstory on the ghost plate was?” she asks.

“Backstory?” Jeff looks sleepy and contented, to the point where January is a little worried about him driving home. She doesn’t think he’s touched a drop of anything mood altering all night, however, which puts him on firmer ground than she and Martin, even if they’re both coming all the way back through sober and into a little cold and achy.

“You know.” She gropes dreamily after the right words. She has to raise her voice to be heard over the thump and blare of the band organ as they come around in the circle once more. They’ve been through its rolls—assuming they are rolls; the Internet tells her many band organs now run on MIDIs—so many times that she knows what order the songs come in now. She’ll be hearing them in her sleep.

One rank ahead of the red-painted chariot, the gray ponies—including the mismatched one—go up and down in little circles, riderless as horses in a funeral parade. “Provenance. History. Who put it there and where did it come from? That sort of thing.”

Jeff leans his head back, closes his eyes, and shrugs. “Houses are mysteries, and not all of those mysteries are nice things. Sometimes it’s best to not ask.”

Behind him, the brass ring glints in the dispenser, but January is so surprised to see it she doesn’t think to stand up and grab it until it has gone by. The carousel slows, song ending. She’d thought they were the only riders, but there must be somebody on the other side. Because when they come around again, the ring in the dispenser is just dull wire.

She’d swear the gray filly flicks its tail in annoyance, but of course it’s just a cold draft from the opening door. Somebody else is leaving the party for the long drive home.

——

Once the decision to fire the gun is made, the neural impulse to pull the trigger travels from brain to finger. Or possibly the action is reflexive. Possibly deep in the animal regions of the brain, electrical activity commences, leading the finger to convulse upon the trigger, the gun to discharge, and the mind—a few tremendously significant fractions of a second later—to justify the action to itself, believing it—I—has made a decision.

Or maybe those animal regions of the brain are part of its I, whether—culturally speaking—we are trained to regard them as such. Maybe those bits of ourselves that we alienate as subconscious impulses are as much I as the things Freud quantified as the ego and superego.

That I will provide reasons—motives, justifications, triggers. Jilted love or spurned advances. Money, sex, control. Any homicide cop can tell you those are the reasons people die.

In real life, it’s simple. The romance only happens in the movies.

——

All her best intentions of making a clean getaway evaporate, and January—of course—winds up staying behind to help clear. She and Martin and Jeff divide the spoils between them. Her share of the take includes a plate and a half of assorted cookies (unadulterated—January notes with a bit of pride that all of her brownies are gone), half of a tuna casserole, three deviled eggs, the heel of the saffron bread, and some shrimp dip. She won’t have to cook for a week.

She hopes none of the folks who left plates behind want them back, because she’s got no clue who brought what, or even who half the people in attendance were.

Behind her, the carousel sits empty and silent, even the Wurlitzer no longer breathing out its jangling tunes. The lanky Latina operator has been bagging trash and hauling it out to the dumpster. She seems overjoyed that some of the partygoers stayed behind to help tidy, and keeps shooting January shy thank-you smiles whenever their paths cross.

Actually, considering the crowd, the mess isn’t bad. January finds the brooms and dustpan behind the popcorn counter. While Martin starts cleaning out the popcorn machine, Jeff takes the big push broom, leaving January with the flat corn broom. She climbs onto the carousel platform and begins ferreting crumbs and paper wrappers from under chariots and between horses. She holds onto the pole that runs through a panda, leaning down to sweep between its paws, and the surreality of the moment strikes her.

The poles impaling the standing animals are the ones that support the platform. She can almost feel the weight of it, the tension, prickling her palm. If she’d thought about how the carousel was constructed, she realizes now, she must have thought the turntable rested on bearings, but really it’s cantilevered out on sweep arms, and those arms are supported by the poles that hang from above. The whole things turns around one central pillar.

She discards two dustpans’ worth of debris, starts on the third. Now she’s working around the lion and the tiger and the out-of-scale elephant, and in a moment she’ll be back to the gray ponies. That’s probably where she should dump; there will be another dustpanful at least in the rest of the carousel. As she passes, she can’t resist the urge to pet the ugly filly on the nose.

Velvet skin and hot breath tickle her fingers.

With a wheeze, the Wurlitzer shudders to life. The carousel begins to turn with a savage jolt that sets January teetering. Pain stabs her ankle. It stretches as her Mary Jane rolls sideways and the tendons give. The broom skitters from her hand as she windmills like Wile E. Coyote on the edge of a cliff. If she falls backward into the center of the carousel, the sweep arms will catch her and drag her over the concrete floor.

She flails, diaphragm tightening, fingertips splayed. Gravity pulls her down. But as the fall becomes inevitable her right hand slaps something rigid, closes on it, pulls hard. She remembers reading about panic strength, how in extreme peril your body discards the safety margins and does whatever it has to do, whatever it can, to get you out of harm’s way.

She’s never experienced it before.

When she comes back to herself, she’s breathing raggedly, in deep concentrated gasps that hurt her trachea and lungs. For a moment, those breaths are all she can think about, until a moment later the burn in her bicep and forearm makes its presence known.

The foreleg of the gray filly is clutched in her hand. It is no longer attached to the filly.

The thing protruding from the broken end is not a metal bar, but a snapped-off length of bone.

January knows she should scream, but apparently she’s not the screaming type. She stands there looking at the horse’s leg, at the place where the horse’s leg used to attach, at the two cleanly broken ends of bone. Human bone, she can’t help but think, but how would you know for sure? She’s read that even homicide cops have to send skeletal remains out for testing sometimes to be sure if they have uncovered the remains of a person or of an animal.

Like a child with a broken toy, she tries to slot the stiff wooden leg back onto the body of the filly. It fits, but of course it won’t stay. So January stands holding it, feeling foolish and terrified, her heart still churning residual adrenaline through her veins. In a minute, she will start to shake. She’d rather not do that while she’s still stuck on a malfunctioning carousel.

With a corpse, the helpful part of her brain volunteers.

They probably used horse skeletons as the form for the ponies. The ponies she’d been riding on. Like the real manes and tails, and she’d thought that was macabre.

Real horses aren’t this small. Real people are.

“Shut up,” she says. “We have to get off this thing.”

She can’t figure out what else to do with the filly’s leg, so she holds it in her hand as she moves to the center of the deck. The carousel is going faster than before. Inexorably, it’s accelerating. It seems as if the Wurlitzer is accelerating with it, though she can’t think of any reason why they would be geared together. The music has a hysterical edge.

Which, in fairness, January could be imagining.

Threading between horses, holding onto the brass sleeves surrounding the steel poles, January tries not to touch the glossy, brilliant paint where a few moments ago she lingered to stroke it. Is there something dead inside every one of them? Is it possible she’s tripping and none of this is real?

Holding onto the lion’s pole—easier than the gray stallion’s, because the lion does not go up and down—January leans as far out as feels safe. The carousel is whipping fast now, the wind slapping her hair to sting her cheeks and the corners of her eyes. Jeff, Martin, and the carousel operator stand in a tight huddle. Jeff gesticulates; the carousel operator shakes her head. January can’t hear a word over the Wurlitzer.

She draws a breath and shouts as she comes around. “Hey!”

Martin’s head jerks up and he’s about to shout something when she’s carried around the curve. When she comes back, he’s ready. “Sit tight! We have a plan!”

A good plan, she hopes. One that doesn’t involve damaging her or the carousel. Any more than she’s already damaged it, that is.

When she comes around again, Jeff is sprinting beside the rotating platform. Running hard, too, which gives her an idea of how fast she must be moving, because he’s losing ground. He reaches out as the lion gains on him and she steps back to make a landing zone. He jumps, arms swinging, and lands lightly beside her, one hand making contact with the lion’s support pole where hers had rested a moment before.

“Great,” January says. “Now you’re stranded too.”

He grins, flush with success. “The motor’s in the middle,” he says. “If I can reach—”

A thump cuts him off, a sharp wooden thud as the lion statue twists and lashes out with one gilt-clawed forepaw. January has a thousand years to watch Jeff’s expression of pained surprise as he topples backward off the carousel, a spray of blood scattering from his slashed thigh. January reaches for him instinctively, the broken leg of the gray filly falling to the deck, but all she feels is the brush of his warm, clutching fingertips against hers and then he’s gone. She almost throws herself after but something unyielding blocks her: the lion’s leg, extended like a crash barrier.

She withdraws, shuddering, into the second file. The tiger’s no better, objectively, but at least she has yet to see it move.

The next time the carousel brings her around she sees Martin hurtling the barrier, crouching beside Jeff. The time after that Jeff is up and hobbling, Martin supporting him, both of them holding a bandage made of Martin’s shirt over the gash on Jeff’s thigh.

“We’ll try something else!” Jeff shouts, but it sounds far away. Misty, if things can sound misty, exactly.

“Don’t!” January yells back, after one more revolution. “Call an ambulance.”

The carousel operator has her cell phone in her hand; it doesn’t look like she was waiting for instructions on that front. January blesses sensible women and looks left and right for the gray filly’s leg, but it’s not in sight anywhere. Maybe the same centrifugal force that wants to hurl her off the carousel when she leans too far out has sent it spinning over the side.

Because she doesn’t have any idea what else to do, she goes back to the gray filly. It feels like home base, and it’s farther from the lion. She has a hard time making herself touch it at first, but eventually stops snatching her fingers back as if she expected the lacquered wood to be hot and leans on the filly as she bobs up and down, trying to feel warm flesh and living bone under satin hide once more.

She didn’t imagine it. She didn’t imagine what the lion did to Jeff, the momentary glint of intelligence in its glass eye. She didn’t imagine the way the filly stretched under her petting.

The boom of the Wurlitzer hurts, now, so loud and so close. It’s almost impossible to think for the pounding of the base drum in her chest cavity. January imagines she can hear her brain ringing as it rattles from side to side against bone. She can’t think; she can’t jump; she can’t wait for rescue.

She has to do something.

Gingerly, teeth clenched, January leans on the sleeve and starts trying to fit her left foot into the iron of the undulating pony’s stirrup. She jams her clog in, her twisted ankle complaining, and takes a deep breath as the maimed filly’s ascent jerks her hip joint uncomfortably wide. As the pony comes down again, January jumps at the saddle, her skirt furling unevenly about her thighs. She’s grateful for the real horsehair tail now, because an arched carven one would have caught her hem and she would have fallen stupidly back to the deck and probably broken her leg. As it is, the skirt snags but tugs free, and she lands in the saddle only bruised on her inner thighs, clutching the pole and breathing hard through her nose.

You wouldn’t think something so simple could be so scary.

She passes beside the dispenser for the rings. A dull one sits in the socket at the end of the arm, though no one has filled the hopper. In the moment it takes for January to reclaim her composure, she cranes her head to see around the bigger horses rising and falling between her and the outside. She hopes for a glimpse of Martin or Jeff, but what she sees confounds her.

The carousel shelter is full of people once again. And not EMTs. These are people dressed as if they stepped out of the illustrations in a book on the sinking of the Titanic. The women wear tunics over long skirts, or shirtwaist blouses that give them a pigeon-breasted look. The men wear suits of gray and black woolen, cut curiously large. The children run in pinafores or short pants, the girls’ hair in ringlets and the boys’ parted razor straight and slicked. It looks like something out of a sepia-toned print.

The gray filly tosses her wire-slick mane and whinnies, harsh and loud as the scrape of the band organ. Her ears prick sharp as a carved horse’s, and January feels the crooked, staggering thud of hooves on the deck as her three-legged run struggles to keep up with the rise and fall of the pole. Her warm sides steam in the cold, muscles in her shoulder bunching and extending with each stride.

She tosses her head, fighting the bit. January finds herself rocking in time to the ragged gait, the muscle memory from long-ago riding lessons finding her balance and telling her to relax her arms and unclench her hands.

The filly calms, her ears flicked back as if listening. Alongside the carousel, a tall, rangy teenaged girl in a gray dress and high-heeled ankle boots runs skipping until January hears somebody call after her, chastising her as a hoyden and naming her—January.

“January?” January says, thinking suddenly, this is all a dream, I don’t care how detailed. But the filly’s ears flick, and the warm, grassy scent of her hide floats up as she shakes out her streaked silver mane. The filly bends her neck into an arc tight as a bow, lipping January’s knee, and January says the name again.

This time, the filly tosses her head yes.

“We’re namesakes.”

Another yes.

The animals all seem alive now. She can hear their noises, the trumpet of the elephant, the whinny of stallions, the lion’s deep cough—nothing like the sound children make to indicate lion. They seem to eye her balefully, so that she feels herself tucking her knees in tight and keeping her elbows close, as if by staying inside the footprint of the filly’s body she can protect herself from the malevolence of carved things.

The filly’s staggering fills her with remorse, though the truncated foreleg works as if it were really running and no blood oozes from the stump. As they come around again, the girl walks alongside, and January sees her face clearly. She’s plain, with mouse-colored hair and a tap-water complexion the gray dress does nothing for. When she tosses her head, January can see the filly in her.

A filly who does just that thing when they pass the dispenser again, snapping sideways with rolling eyes as if she means to grab the ring in her teeth. The pole restrains her, and she doesn’t come within three feet.

They pass the girl again, and this time January sees the man behind her. Hand in his pocket, fist clenched around something. The girl turns, a jerk of her head as startled as if somebody touched her shoulder, as if the pressure of his eyes hurt. She turns toward the doors, moving away, and like a viewer at a horror movie January wants to call after her—don’t go outside, don’t go through the door.

But the carousel carries her away again, and now she can’t make out the sound of the Wurlitzer at all. It’s lost under the cries of the animals, unless it’s become them.

The next time she comes around, she stands in the stirrups—wincing at her ankle, at the filly’s uneven gait—and reaches for the base-metal ring. Her fingers hook; she feels the tug; the ring pops free.

If she hoped it would be that simple, she is quickly disappointed. If anything, the carousel accelerates, a faster churning now. The neighs grow wilder. Something grazes her knee—a snap from the gray mare impaled beside her crippled filly. The filly snakes her head around and snaps back, and January leans as far to the outside as the stirrups allow.

Now there’s competition. Figures shimmer into the saddles of the elephant and the other ponies, but only on the inside ring. The carousel opposes her, her and the other January. Other fingers grope for rings, snap up one and then another, but they are all dull.

The cacophony persists. The carousel spins faster. The world wheels madly on.

From outside, she hears a single gunshot. Beneath her, the other January shies—but none of the people in the carousel shelter seem to hear.

She sets herself this time, leans out, her left foot solidly in the stirrup though her twisted ankle twinges. She braces with her right foot, aware that she’s reaching out too far and the mare might snap again. But there’s a brass ring in that dispenser somewhere, and if she doesn’t collect it, she doesn’t know how she’s getting off this carousel alive. The faces alongside are a blur now, the stained-glass seasons a colorful smear.

As they come up on the dispenser, she reaches over the filly’s neck. The cold ring brushes her fingertips. She snatches, sees bright metal, grabs again. Something sharp stabs up her right leg, pain like slamming it in a car door. It hauls, pulling her off balance, but she palms the ring she has already and her fingers hook the glittering circle of the next.

Momentum carries her forward, the ring snagged on her fingertips beginning to slide, the gray mare, teeth clenched in her calf muscle, hauling back.

January closes her hand before she loses the brass ring.

Silence falls, so sudden and hollow it makes her wonder briefly if she has been struck deaf. The carousel glides, slowing now.

——

Once the human element—motive, culpability, perception—enters the equation, it’s no longer so simple to trace a sequence of causality, to say—mechanistically, with confidence—here is the inciting event, and here is what caused that, and here is what caused that again.

We will never know why the finger pulls the trigger, even when it is our finger that tightens on yielding metal, our hand that jumps with the buck of the gun. We can speculate, but will never know.

It’s possible that her death was inevitable from the moment he followed her—tall and plain and smarting—from the shelter of the carousel, into the night where she died.

——

January limps away from the filly, the brass ring clutched in her palm. She has to twist and sidle to move between the animals, frozen now in contortions with reaching claws and gnashing teeth. Blood wells thick and artificial looking down her calf through the torn tights, skidding and squishing inside her Mary Jane.

Martin is waiting to catch her when she falls off the platform. The EMTs are there, gathered around Jeff, who is propped on his elbows telling jokes. The carousel operator sits beside him, head down, her hands pressed over her eyes.

Martin says to the EMTs, “I don’t know what happened. We were helping to clean up after the party, and the thing just turned itself on.”

January sits down gratefully on the plastic chair they bring. She extends her leg through the tear in her skirt. The EMT looks at it and clucks. “You’ll want to come to the ER.”

“Are the police on the way?”

The EMT nods, her blond ponytail bobbing. “They should be here in five minutes. Do you want to file a complaint?”

The carousel operator moans.

“No,” January says. “I want to report a murder. From about a hundred years ago.”

——

Firstly, he must have wanted to own her. Why else would he have found a way to keep her all this time?

As for what she wanted, what she dreamed as she rode (or ran) on the carousel that trapped her—to be seen, to be loved, to be free—as for what she wanted, no one ever asked her at all.

——

Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, and very nearly named after Peregrin Took. She is a recipient of the John W. Campbell, Sturgeon, Locus, and Hugo Awards. She has been nominated multiple times for the British Science Fiction Association Awards, and is a Philip K. Dick Award nominee. She currently lives in southern New England with a famous cat. Her hobbies include murdering inoffensive potted plants, ruining dinner, and falling off rock faces.

Her most recent books are a space opera, Chill, from Bantam Spectra, and a fantasy, By the Mountain Bound, from Tor.

| DEAD SISTER |

Joe R. Lansdale

—

I had my office window open, and the October wind was making my hair ruffle. I was turned sideways and had my feet up, cooling my heels on the edge of my desk, noticing my socks. Once the pattern on the socks had been clocks; now the designs were so thin and colorless, I could damn near see my ankles through them.

I was looking out the window, watching the town square from where I sat, three floors up, which was as high as anything went in Mud Creek. It seemed pretty busy down there for a town of only eight thousand. Even a couple of dogs were looking industrious, as if they were in a hurry to get somewhere and do something important. Chase a cat, bite a mailman, or bury a bone.

Me, I wasn’t working right then, and hadn’t in a while. For me, 1958 had not been a banner year.

I was about to get a bottle of cheap whiskey out of my desk drawer, when there was a knock on the door. I could see my name spelled backward on the pebbled glass, and beyond that a shadow that had a nice overall shape.

I said, “Come on in, the water’s fine.”

A blond woman wearing a little blue pill hat came in. She was the kind of dame if she walked real fast, she might set the walls on fire. She sat down in the client chair and crossed her legs and let her cool blue dress slide up so I could see her knees. She was wearing stockings so sheer, she might as well have not had any on. She lifted her head and stared at me with eyes that would make a monk set fire to his bible.

She was carrying a cute little purse that might hold a compact, a couple of quarters, and a pencil. She let it rest on her lap, laid her hand on it like it was a pet cat.

“Mr. Taylor? I was wondering if you could check on something for me?” she said.

“If it’s on your person, no charge.”

She smiled at me. “I heard you thought you were funny.”

“Not really, but I try the stuff out anyway. See how this one works for you. I get fifty a day plus expenses.”

“You might have to do some rough stuff.”

“How rough?” I said.

“I don’t know. I really don’t know what’s going on at all, but I think it may be someone who’s not quite right.”

“Did you talk to the police?” I asked.

She nodded. “They checked, watched for three nights. But nobody showed. Soon as they quit, it started over again.”

“Where did they watch, and what did they watch?”

“The graveyard. They were watching a grave. I could swear someone was digging it up at night.”

“You saw this?”

“If I saw it, I’d be sure, wouldn’t I?”

“You got me there,” I said.

“My sister, Susan. She died of something unexpected. Eighteen. Beautiful. One morning she’s feeling ill, and then the night comes, and she’s feeling worse, and the next day she’s dead. Just like that. She was buried in the Sweet Pine Cemetery, and I go each morning on my way to work to bring flowers to her grave. The ground never settled. I got the impression it was being worked over at night. That someone was digging there. That they were digging up my sister, or trying to.”

“That’s an odd thing to think.”

“The dirt was always disturbed,” she said. “The flowers from the day before were buried under the dirt. It didn’t seem right.”

“So, you want me to check the place out, see if that’s what’s going on?”

“The police were so noisy and so obvious I doubt they got a true view of things. No one would try with them there. They thought I was crazy. What I need is someone who can be discreet. I would go myself, but I might need someone with some muscle.”

“Yeah, you’re too nice a piece of chicken to be wandering a graveyard. It would be asking for trouble. Your sister’s name is Susan. What’s yours?”

“Oh, I didn’t tell you, did I? It’s Cathy. Cathy Carter. Can you start right away?”

“Soon as the money hits my palm.”

——

I probably didn’t need a .38 revolver to handle a grave robber, but you never know. So I brought it with me.

My plan was if there was someone actually there, to put the gun on him and make him lie down, tie him up, and haul him to the police. If he was digging up somebody’s sister, the country cops downtown might not let him make it to trial. He might end up with a warning shot in the back of the head. That happened, I could probably get over it.

Course, it could be more than one. That’s why the .38.

My take, though, was it was all hooey. Not that Cathy Carter didn’t believe it. She did. But my guess was the whole business was nothing more than her grieving imagination, or a dog or an armadillo digging around at night.

I decided to go out there and look at the place during the day. See if I thought there was any kind of monkey business going on.

Sweet Pines isn’t a pauper graveyard on the whole, but a lot of paupers are buried there, on the low back end near Coats Creek—actually on the other side of the graveyard fence. Even in death, they couldn’t get inside with the regular people. Outsiders to the end.

There’ve been graves there since the Civil War. A recent flood washed away a lot of headstones and broke the ground open and pushed some rotten bones and broken coffins around. It was all covered up in a heap with a dozer after that: sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, grandmas and grandpas, massed together in one big ditch for their final rest.

The fresher graves on the higher ground, inside the cemetery fence, were fine. That’s where Susan was buried.

I parked at the gate, which was a black ornamental thing with fence tops like spearheads. The fence was six feet high and went all around the cemetery. The front was a large, open area with a horseshoe sign over it that read in metal curlicues Sweet Pine Cemetery.

That was just in case you thought the headstones were for show.

Inside, I went where Cathy told me Susan was buried and found her grave easy enough. There was a stone marker with her name on it, and the dates of birth and death. The ground did look fresh dug. I bent down and looked close. There were scratches in the dirt, but they didn’t look like shovel work. There were a bunch of cigarette butts heel mashed into the ground near the grave.

I went over to a huge shade tree nearby and leaned on it, pulled out a stick of gum and chewed. It was comfortable under the tree, with the day being cool to begin with and the shadow of the limbs lying on the ground like spilled night. I chewed the gum and looked at the grave for a long time. I looked around and decided if there was anything to what Cathy had said, then the cops wouldn’t have seen it, or rather they would have discouraged any kind of grave-bothering soul from entering the cemetery in the first place. Those cigarette butts were the tip-off. My guess was they belonged to the cops, and they had stood not six feet from the grave, smoking, watching. Probably, like me, figuring it was all a pipe dream. Only thing was, I planned to give Cathy her whole dollar.

I drove back to the office and sat around there for a few hours, and then I went home and changed into some old duds, left my hat, grabbed a burger at Dairy Queen, and hustled my car back over to the cemetery. I drove by it and parked my heap about a half mile from the graveyard under a hickory-nut tree well off the main road and hoped no one would bother it.

I walked back to the cemetery and stood under the tree near Susan’s grave and looked up at it. There was a low limb, and I got hold of that and pulled myself up, and then climbed higher. The oak had very few leaves, but the limbs were big, and I found a place where there was a naturally scooped-out spot in the wood and laid down on that. It wasn’t comfortable, but I lay there anyway and chewed some gum and waited for the sun to set. That wouldn’t be long this time of year. By five thirty or six, the sun was gone and the night was up.

Night came, and I lay on the limb until my chest hurt. I got up and climbed higher, found a place where I could stand on a limb and wedge my ass in a fork in the tree. From there, I had a good look at the grave.

The dark was gathered around me like a blanket. To see me, you’d have to be looking for me. I took the gum out of my mouth and stuck it to the tree, and leaned back so that I was nestled firmly in the narrow fork. It was almost like an easy chair.

I could see the lights of the town from there, and I watched those for a while, and watched the headlights of cars in the distance. It was kind of hypnotic. Then I watched lightning bugs. A few mosquitoes came to visit, but it was a little cool for them, so they weren’t too bad.

I touched my coat pocket to make sure my .38 was in place, and it was. I had five shots. I didn’t figure I would need to shoot anyone, and if I did, I doubted it would take more than five shots.

I added up the hours I had invested in the case, my expenses, which were lunch and a few packs of chewing gum. This wasn’t the big score I was looking for, and I was beginning to feel silly, sitting in a tree waiting on someone to come along and dig around a grave.

I wanted to check my watch, but I couldn’t see the hands well enough, and though I had a little flashlight in my pocket, I didn’t want any light to give me away.

I twisted around and looked behind me. The fork in the tree split in the direction of the creek. It was the only direction I couldn’t see easily, so I checked it out for grins. All that mattered was I could see the grave and anything that came to it.

I’ll admit it: I wasn’t much of a sentry. After a while, I dozed.

What woke me was a scratching sound. When I came awake, I nearly fell out of the tree, not knowing where I was. By the time I had it figured, the sound was really loud. It was coming from the direction of the grave.

——

When I looked down I saw an animal digging at the grave, and then I realized it wasn’t a dog at all. I had only thought it was. It was a man in a long black jacket. He was bent over the grave and he was digging with his hands like a dog. He wasn’t throwing the dirt far, just mounding it up. While I had napped like a squirrel in a nest, he had dug all the way down to the coffin.

I pulled the gun from my pocket and yelled, “Hey, you down there. Leave that grave alone.”

The man wheeled then and looked up, and when he did, I got a glimpse of his face in the moonlight. It wasn’t a good glimpse, but it was enough to nearly cause me to fall out of the tree. The face was as white as a nun’s ass, and the eyes were way too bright, even if he was looking up into the moonlight; those eyes looked the way coyote eyes look staring out of the woods.

He hissed at me and went back to his work, popping the lid off the coffin like it was a cardboard box. It snapped free, and he reached inside and pulled out the body of a girl. Her hair was undone, and it was long and blond and fell over the dirty white slip she was wearing. He pulled her out of there before I could get down from the tree with the gun. The air was full of the stink of death. Susan’s body, I guessed.

By the time I hit the ground, he had the body thrown over his shoulder, and he was running across the graveyard, between the stones, like a goddamn deer. I ran after him with my gun, yelling for him to stop. He was really moving. I saw him jump one of the tall upright grave stones like it was lying down and land so light he seemed like crepe paper floating down.

Now that he was running, not crouching and digging like a dog, I could tell more about his body type. He was a long, skinny guy with stringy white hair and the long black coat that spread out around him like the wings of a roach. The girl bounced across his shoulder as though she was nothing more than a bag of dry laundry.

I chased him to the back fence, puffing all the way, and then he did something that couldn’t be done. He sprang and leaped over that spear-tipped fence with Susan’s body thrown over his shoulder, hit the ground running and darted down to the creek, jumped it, and ran off between the trees and into the shadows and out of my sight.

That fence was easily six feet high.

——

I started to drive over to Cathy’s place. I had her address. But I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t go there and I didn’t go home, which was a dingy apartment. I went to the office, which was slightly better, and got the bottle out of the drawer, along with my glass, and poured myself a shot of my medicine. It wasn’t a cure, but it was better than nothing. I liked it so much I poured another.

I went to the window with my fresh-filled glass and looked out. The night looked like the night and the moon looked like the moon and the street looked like the street. I held my hand up in front of me. Nope. That was my hand, and it had a glass of cheap whiskey in it. I wasn’t dreaming, and to the best of my knowledge I wasn’t crazy.

I finished off the drink. I thought I should have taken a shot at him. But I hadn’t because of Susan’s body. She wouldn’t mind a bullet in the head, but I didn’t want to have to explain that to her sister if I accidentally hit her.

I laid down on the couch for a little while, and the whiskey helped me sleep, but when I came awake, and turned on the light and looked at my watch, it was just then midnight.