The War of the Flowers

1 CLOUDS

Theo felt a small flutter of guilt as he turned the cell phone back on, especially when he noticed he'd left it off for more than two hours, and was relieved to see that there were no messages. He'd only meant to flick it off for a few minutes, just to make sure there were no interruptions while they were tuning — the young guys, especially Kris, the guitarist, got really pissy about that — but things had started happening and he'd forgotten.

Johnny stepped over the guitar cases spread across the living room rug like discarded cocoons and slid open the door to join him outside. The fog had come down the hill while they had been practicing; the fenced patio seemed an island in a cold, misty sea.

Jesus, San Francisco in March. He should have brought his jacket out. Might as well be in Minnesota. "Hey," he asked Johnny, "got a smoke?"

The drummer made a face and patted his shirt pocket, then his pants pockets. He was small but he had long, strong arms. With his paunch and his shaggy but balding head, the chest hair climbing out of his T-shirt collars, he always made Theo think of the soulful chimpanzees in that Englishwoman's documentaries.

When Johnny found the pack at last, he shook out one for Theo, then one for himself and lit it. "Man, you never have your own."

"Never buy any. I only smoke when I'm playing."

Johnny shook his head. "That's so typical, Vilmos — you always get the easy road. I'm an addict, you only smoke when you want to — like, when you're around me. I'll probably be the one who gets cancer, too."

"Probably." Theo considered calling home, but he was going to be leaving in a few minutes anyway. Still, Cat was very deep into I'm-pregnant-and-I-want-to-know-where-you-are mode… He felt another ripple of guilt and couldn't decide what to do. He stared at the phone, as perplexed as if it were an artifact of a vanished civilization.

"Your old lady leave a message?" Johnny was the only one in the band who was Theo's age but he talked like he was even older, unashamedly using words like "chicks" and "hip." Theo had actually heard him say "out of sight" once, but he had sworn later he was being ironic. Johnny was also the only one who'd even understand something as archaic as phoning home. Kris and Dano and Morgan were in that early-twenties stage where they just paged their girlfriends to announce when they were dropping by after practice to have sex.

"Nah. I gotta get going, anyway."

Johnny flipped his cigarette over the fence and out into the street, a tiny shooting star. "Just listen to the playback on 'Feast,' first. You don't want Kris's asshole to get any more puckered than it already is, do you?" He smiled deep in his beard and started peeling off the athletic tape he wrapped around his knuckles before playing because he bashed them against the rims so hard. Theo thought that he'd rather have scars than the pink, hairless patches that striped Johnny's hairy hands, but Johnny was a seemingly permanently single guy who hadn't had a date in months, so he didn't worry much about things like that.

Theo did. He was seriously considering whether it was time to cut his moderately long brown hair. It was bad enough to have turned thirty and still be singing in garage bands without looking like an aging stoner, too.

As it turned out, Theo spent at least another half an hour listening to the demo tracks they had recorded for "Feast of Fools," a sort of high-Goth processional that Kris had written, and over which the guitarist fussed like a neurotic chef preparing for an important dinner party. He had more than a few irritating things to say about Theo's vocal, wanting more rasp in it, more of an air of menace, the kind of melodrama that Theo didn't much like.

On their last listen, as Kris bobbed his close-cropped head to his own music, his expression oddly combining pleasure and pain, Theo had a sudden flash of insight: He's going to want to do the vocal on this himself — that's where this is going. And even though I'm a hundred times better, eventually he's going to get his confidence and want to do all the lead vocals himself. And that'll be it for me with this band.

He wasn't certain how he felt about that. On the one hand, much as he admired the young guys' playing and Kris Rolle's musical ideas, it wasn't anything like his ideal band. For a start, he hated the name — The Mighty Clouds of Angst. It was clumsy. Worse, it was a joke name, playing off a famous gospel group, The Mighty Clouds of Joy. Theo believed firmly that joke names equaled joke bands, the Beatles notwithstanding. Plus, it just irritated him. Kris, Morgan, and Dano weren't even old enough to remember The Mighty Clouds of Joy, so why pick that as a name to parody? It smacked a little of white suburban boys making fun of earnest, religious black people, and that made Theo uncomfortable. But if he ever mentioned it, he knew they'd just show him that fishlike stare they had perfected, the all-purpose defense against hopelessly uncool parents and teachers, and he would feel even older than he did.

So when did I wind up on the wrong side of that particular line?

He eased on his ancient leather jacket and bummed another smoke off John for the road — or for home, rather, since it was pretty hard to smoke while wearing a motorcycle helmet. He looked around, feeling like he was leaving something behind. Lead singers didn't carry much in the way of equipment. The mikes and PA belonged to Morgan and Kris. Theo could walk away from the Clouds as easily as he was strolling out the door tonight. If he was good at anything, it was leaving when things got too weird.

If he did get forced out, would Johnny quit too? Theo wasn't sure how he felt about that. This was the third band he'd played in with Johnny Battistini, following the obligatory should-have-made-it-big disaster in which they'd met and the horrible cover band in which they'd marked time until hooking up with Kris and company. Theo wouldn't mind the downtime of looking for another gig, and God knew Catherine would be happy to have him home some nights, especially with the baby coming, but ol' Johnny B. didn't have a lot else going on in his life. Besides his record store job and the Clouds, in fact, John was pretty much the kind of guy advertisers made fun of but who kept their clients in business — an amiable lump who lived on take-out food, rented porn movies in bunches, and watched wrestling by himself.

Kris looked up from yet another playing of "Feast of Fools" as Theo reached the door. "You going?" He sounded irritated. Kris had gray eyes like a sky before a storm, the kind of eyes in which teenage girls probably saw things that weren't really there at all.

No, Theo wanted to say. No, I'm going to hang around here and stay up all night smoking dope and marveling at my own brilliance, just like you guys, because I've got nothing better to do and nobody on my ass about when I come home.

"Can't stay," he said instead. "I've got a pregnant girlfriend, remember?" And for a self-righteous moment he almost forgot he had left the phone off for two hours.

Kris rolled his eyes, dismissing the entire unimaginably boring subject, then punched the buttons on the DAT deck with his long fingers, rewinding the tape to listen to his feedback-heavy solo again. Morgan and Dano bobbed their heads once each in Theo's direction, which he assumed was to save the energy of waving. John smiled at him, sharing the joke, although unlike Theo he was going to stay and hang out with these kids a decade younger than himself, sharing bong hits and loose talk about a hypothetical first album until one or two in the morning. "Stay loose, Thee," he called.

Theo's ancient Yamaha started on the first kick. It seemed like a good sign.

The bedroom light was out but the television was flickering behind the blinds, which meant Catherine was probably still up. Even though she hadn't tried to call him, he had a feeling she wouldn't be too happy with him coming in after midnight. Theo hesitated, then sat down on the porch steps to smoke the cigarette Johnny had given him. The streetlamps made little pools of light down the sidewalk that ran in front of the dark houses. It was a quiet neighborhood in the Western Addition, a working neighborhood, full of people who watched Letterman or Leno through the opening monologue and then switched off because they had to be up early. A wind sent leaves rattling and rolling up the street.

I'm dying here, he thought suddenly. I don't belong here.

He had surprised himself. If not here, then where? What was he going to find that was any better? It was true that he never felt quite alive except when he was singing, making music — he often had the disturbing feeling that in his job, his conversations, even sometimes being with Cat, he was just going through the motions — but he felt sure he was past the childish dreams of being a rock star. He would be happy just to play club dates in front of live human beings every few weeks. No, this was what he wanted, wasn't it — a house, a grown-up life? It was certainly what Catherine Lillard wanted, and he wanted her. He'd been with her for almost two years. That was nearly forever, wasn't it? Practically married, even before they'd received the test results.

Theo walked across the tiny lawn to the sidewalk and flicked his cigarette into the gutter, then went inside. The television was on, but there was only a tangled blanket in Cat's usual curling-up spot on the couch.

"Hey, honey? Cat?" The kitchen was dark, but it smelled like she'd been cooking: there was a weird, spicy scent in the air, something both sweet and a little sickening. The windows were open and it was a nice March night, but the air inside the small house felt as close as if a thunderstorm were moving in.

"Cat? It's me." He shrugged. Maybe she'd gone to bed and left the television on. He wandered down the hall and saw that the light was on in the bathroom, but that was nothing unusual — Cat hated fumbling for the switch when she was half-awake or barking her shin in the dark on something left in the hall. He took little notice of the bundle on the floor against the far bathroom wall. It was the red smears on the side of the tub that caught his eye instead, weirdly vivid against the porcelain. He pushed the door all the way open.

It took perhaps two full seconds to realize what he was seeing, the longest two seconds he had ever experienced, a sideways lurch of reality as disorienting as a hallucination. Blood was smeared across the bathroom floor behind the door, too, screamingly scarlet under the fluorescents. Cat's terrycloth bathrobe, rolled somehow into a huge lump and flung against the wall near the toilet, was soaked in it as well.

"Oh my God…" he said.

The bathrobe shuddered and rolled over, revealing Catherine's pale face. Her skin was like a white paper mask except for the bloody fingerprints on both cheeks — her own, as he found out later. But for a moment he could only stare, his chest clamped in crushing shock, his brain shrilling murder murder murder over and over.

He was right. But he didn't find that out until later, either. Much later.

Cat's eyes found his face, struggled to focus. A parched whisper: "Theo… ?"

"My God, my God, what happened? Are you… ?"

Her throat convulsed so powerfully he thought she was going to vomit — he had a terrible image of blood gushing out of her mouth like a fountain. The ragged sound that leaped from her instead was so horribly raw and ragged that he could not at first understand the words.

"IlostitIlostitIlostit… !"

He was down on his knees in the sopping fingerpainted mess of the bathroom floor, the slick, sticky scarlet — where had it all come from, all this red wetness? He was trying to help her up, panicking, an idiot voice telling him Don't move her, she's an accident victim, but he didn't know what had happened, what could have possibly have happened, did someone get in… ? Then suddenly he understood.

"I lost it!" she moaned, more clear now that there was almost no air left in the cry. "Oh, Jesus, I lost the baby!"

He was halfway across the house to the phone when he realized his own cell phone was in his pocket. He called 911 and gave them the address while simultaneously trying to wrap towels around the outside of her bathrobe, as though she were some immense wound that needed to be held together. She was crying, but it made almost no sound.

When he had finished he held her tightly against him, waiting to hear the sound of the paramedics at the door.

"Where were you?" Her eyes were shut and she was shivering. "Where were you?"

Hospitals were like T. S. Eliot poems, somehow — well-lit wastelands, places of quiet talk that could not quite hide the terrible things going on behind the doors. Even when he went out to the lobby to stretch his legs, to walk off some of the horrible, helpless tension, he felt like he was pacing through a mausoleum.

Cat's blood loss had not been as mortal as Theo had felt it must be. Some of the mess had been amniotic fluid and splashed water from the hot bath she had taken when the cramps first started becoming painful. The doctors talked calmly to him of premature rupture of membranes, of possible uterine abnormalities, but it might have been Byzantine religious ritual for all his poleaxed brain could make of it. Catherine Lillard slept most of the first ten hours, face pale as a picture-book princess, IVs jacked into both arms. When she opened her eyes at last, she seemed like a stranger.

"Honey, I'm so sorry," he said. "It wasn't your fault. These things happen."

She did not even waste her strength responding to such vacuities. She turned her face away and stared toward the dark television screen angled out from the wall.

He went through Cat's phone book. Her mother was there by breakfast, unhappy that Theo hadn't called earlier; her best friend Laney showed up just after. Both women wore jeans and work shirts, as though they were planning to roll up their sleeves and cook a church dinner or help build a barn. They seemed to draw a sort of curtain around his pale, silent girlfriend, an exclusionary barrier Theo could not cross. After an hour of manufacturing errands for himself, fetching coffee and magazines from downstairs, he told Catherine that he was going to go home and try to get a little sleep. Cat didn't say anything, but her mother agreed that was probably a good idea.

He was only able to sleep three hours, tired as he was. When he got up, he realized he hadn't called anyone in his own circle of friends and family. It was hard to imagine who to call. Johnny? Theo knew what his friend's response would be, could even imagine the exact tone: "Oh, Thee, wow. That's such a bummer, man." He would run out of things to say in moments and then the inadequate guy-talk would hang, lame and awkward. Johnny would be sincere in his sorrow, of course — he really was a good guy — but calling him just seemed so pointless. And the idea of telling any of the other guys in the band was ludicrous. In fact, he needed to pass the news to Johnny at some point just so the drummer would do that for him, so that Theo didn't have to watch Kris and the other two pretend like they gave a shit, if they even bothered.

Who else should he call? How could you lose a baby — his baby, too, he had to keep reminding himself, half his, not just Catherine's — and not tell anyone? Had it really come down to this, thirty years old and nobody in his life who he needed or wanted to talk to about the miscarriage?

Where are my friends? I used to have people around me all the time. But who were they, those people? It had seemed exciting at the time — the girls who had flocked to his gigs, the guys who had wanted to manage him — but now he could hardly remember any of them. Friends? No, just people, and people didn't seem as interested in him these days.

He wound up calling his mother, although he hadn't spoken to her since just after the beginning of February. It seemed unfair, to wait four weeks or so and then call up to deliver this sort of news, but he didn't know what else to do.

She answered before the second ring, as usual. It was unnerving, the way she always did that — as though she was never out of arm's reach of the phone. Surely her life wasn't that empty since Dad had died? It wasn't like the two of them had been party monsters or anything in the first place.

"Hi, Mom."

"Hello, Theo." Nothing else, no "It's been a long time," or "How are you?"

"I just… I've got some bad news, Mom. Catherine lost the baby."

The pause was long even by Anna Vilmos standards. "That's very sad, Theo. I'm sorry to hear it."

"She had a miscarriage. I came home and found her on the bathroom floor. It was pretty awful. Blood everywhere." He realized he was telling it already like a story, not like something that had really happened to him. "She's okay, but I think she's pretty depressed."

"What was the cause, Theo? They must know."

They. Mom always talked about the people in power, any kind of power, as if they were a single all-knowing, all-powerful group. "No, actually they don't. It was just kind of… kind of a spontaneous thing. They're doing tests, but they don't know yet."

"So sad." And that seemed to be the end of the conversation. Theo tried to recall what he'd thought when he called, what he had expected, if it had been anything more than a sort of filial duty — look, Mom, here's what's gone wrong in my life this month.

It would have been a real baby, he thought suddenly. As real as me. As real as you, Mom. It's not just a "so sad." But he didn't say it.

"Your uncle Harold is going to be in town next month." His father's younger brother was a retail executive who lived in Southern California. He had taken on himself the role of family patriarch when Theo's dad died, which meant that he called Theo's mom on Christmas Eve, and once or twice a year when he flew up to San Francisco on some other business he took her out to dinner at the Sizzler. "He would like to see you."

"Yeah, well, I'll call you about that, maybe we can set something up." How quickly it had turned into the kind of interaction they always had, dry, faintly guilt-ridden. Theo wanted to say something different, wanted to stop the whole thing and ask her what she really felt, no, what he was supposed to feel about the terrible thing that had happened to him, but it was useless. It was as though they had to force their words across some medium less rich than normal air, so that only the simplest, most mundane things could pass from side to side without disappearing into the empty stillness.

A quick and unclinging good-bye from his mother and Theo was alone with himself again. He called the hospital, wondering if Catherine was by herself and needed company. Laney picked up the phone and told him in a fairly cool manner that Cat was sleeping, that he didn't need to hurry over.

"I took the day off work tomorrow, too," she said. "I'll be here." It sounded more like a threat to him than a favor to Cat.

"How is she?"

"How do you think?"

"Hey, Jesus, Laney, you're acting like I pushed her down the stairs or something. This was my child, too."

"I know that, Theo."

"Don't you think I wish I was there when it happened? But I still couldn't have done anything about it. The doctor said so."

"Nobody's blaming you, Theo."

But it sure didn't sound like that.

He stood in the living room after he had hung up, staring at the clutter untouched since the night before, the residue of normal lives suddenly interrupted by disaster and entombed like Pompeü. She had been sitting just there, watching television when the really bad cramps came. She had bumped the table getting up — a glass was still lying on the floor, a ghost-stain of spilled diet cola visible on the shaggy, seen-better-days carpet. Was there blood before she reached the bathroom? He started to follow her track, then caught himself. It was too sick, too horrible. Like examining a murder scene.

Only three hours of sleep, but he was buzzing like he was full of bad speed. He turned the television on. The images were meaningless.

Where did my life go? How could something so small — it wasn't even really a baby yet, whatever she says — how could it change everything so much? But what kind of life was it, really, when you were only alive playing music, but you couldn't ever seem to find the right place to do that, the right people to do it with?

Things came too easy for you, his mother had told him in a resigned way a few years back. You were so good at things when you were a little boy, the teachers made so much of you. That's why you never developed any ambition.

Right now he needed to find something, anything, to keep himself busy. He wished Johnny were around so he could bum a cigarette off him, several of them, sit and smoke and drink cold beers and talk about bullshit that didn't matter. But he couldn't bear to call him and have to explain this weird, miserable thing, not right now.

Cat's face was so pale… ! Like it was her heart that came out of her, not a little dead baby.

He stood up and moved into their bedroom. They had boxes of things stacked there, waiting until he cleared out the spare bedroom — his practice room, as he sometimes called it, although he could count on one hand the times he'd actually spent in there with his guitar. The practice room was going to be the baby's room, and all those things would be the baby's things. Would have been. Now she wouldn't want to see them when she came back, the first few symbolic baby-clothes purchases, the books and stuffed toys she had picked up at a garage sale.

"It doesn't count if you buy it used," she had told him, only half-joking. Or maybe not joking at all. "It doesn't jinx the baby."

But it had. Or something had — Theo felt like he had been the jinx, somehow, although he couldn't say why, was drenched in guilt that he couldn't explain, like a mysterious stain on his clothes. In any case, here he was and there stood three big grocery-store boxes full of things that would make her cry when she got home. He could do something with them — that would be something useful he could manage. He could put them in the garage where she wouldn't have to see them right away, wouldn't have to walk in on her first day home and find a cute little stuffed dog looking back at her with button eyes.

It wasn't all that easy to find a place for the baby things in the garage, where Theo's boxes of secondhand science-fiction books and other miscellaneous crap stood in tottering piles like the ruins of an ancient city, where unused exercise equipment and unbuilt packaged bookshelves left so little room for Cat's car that once the warm weather came for good she wouldn't even attempt the difficult task of parking in there again until late autumn, at which point all the new crap that had found its way in during the summer would have to be relocated so the car would fit in the garage again.

As he was trying to squeeze the last box onto the narrow shelf above the workbench it toppled over and caught him a good shot on the temple; when he reached up, he came away with a spot of blood on his finger. The children's books had spilled out onto the steps leading down from the kitchen. Theo's head hurt. He lowered himself onto the bottom of the short stairway like a geriatric case so he wouldn't have to bend as he picked them up from the floor — old, well-thumbed and clearly loved copies of the Pooh stories, of Dr. Seuss and Where the Wild Things Are, all bought secondhand to fall within Cat's exemption. He picked up his own contribution, one that he'd bought new in a store just because he couldn't imagine raising a baby without it, and because even though he never made it up early enough Saturday mornings for Cat's garage-sale runs, he had wanted to contribute.

Was I the one who jinxed it? In his bleak state, he couldn't even laugh the thought away. He flicked the book open. The strange, flat images, crude and almost childish at first glance, caught him up as they always did. Had his mom really read this to him? It seemed impossible to believe now that he'd had a mother who held her child in her lap and read him Goodnight Moon, but the words were as familiar as a catechism, the little rabbit in his great green room saying goodnight to all the familiar nursery objects, to the mittens and kittens, the comb and the brush, and of course, strangest of all, to "nobody."

Goodnight nobody. He had never understood that — in one way it was the most magical part of the book, and in another, the most frightening. All the other pictures, the rabbit-child in pajamas, the fire, the old lady rabbit reading, all made sense. The catalog of items, chairs and cats and socks, goodnight, goodnight, then just that blank page and "goodnight nobody." But who was Nobody? It was childhood zen. Sometimes he had thought in his little-boy way that he might be the book's Nobody, Theo himself, an anonymous presence — that the book knew he was out there watching the bunny get ready for bed, looking into the warm, cozy room from outside, as through a window. His mother had contributed to that: whenever they reached that part of the book, she had always said, "Goodnight, nobody. Say goodnight." And Theo had done so. Perhaps she had only meant for him to say goodnight to the little someone known as Nobody. But he had always believed she was calling him Nobody, telling him it was his turn to say goodnight now, and so he had dutifully obeyed.

In this last winter, since the pregnancy test had come back, Theo had sometimes imagined a little girl sitting on his lap — Cat had been certain from the first that it was a little girl, even though they hadn't had an ultrasound exam yet — her head against his chest as they leafed through the book together. In his offhand dreams he had never quite been able to imagine what she looked like, had pictured only a head of soft curly hair, a warm little body pressed against him. Nobody. She had looked like Nobody. And that was who she had turned out to be.

He flicked through the pages, the drawings with their strange, dreamlike perspective. Then at the end, the final little catechism, saying goodnight to the last things — the stars, the air, and to noises everywhere.

That should go on the baby's gravestone, except there would be no stone, no grave. Cat was going to have a D C, as the doctors so artlessly called it, to remove anything that hadn't already come out. Any thing. There would be nothing to bury. Polly, Rose, all the names they had played with, taking their time because after all there had been no hurry, months to wait, and now she wouldn't be any of them. She was Nobody.

Goodnight Nobody.

Sitting on the stairs with a box of books on his lap, he cried.

Her face was still pale, framed by the straight lines of her uncombed, unstyled, dark red hair. She had told him that the D C had been all right, not too bad — she had insisted he go back to his delivery job that day, that she didn't need any hand-holding — but it looked like something more than just now-useless flesh had been scraped out of her.

"How's the pain?"

She shrugged. Her skin seemed paper-dry, as though she had lost some essential vitality. Her mother handed her a cup of ice.

Laney was gone, but both of Cat's parents had arrived for a post-operative visit. Earlier her dad had made chitchat with Theo in the hall while the nurse helped Cat with the bedpan, Mr. Lillard doing his comradely best in the current air of circle-the-wagons emergency to obscure the fact that he had never been that thrilled with his semi-son-in-law. Theo appreciated the gesture, but Cat's dad and his yachting sweater had never been a real stumbling block, anyway: his wife and only daughter treated Tom Lillard as though he were a graceless but acceptably familiar sundial in the middle of a flower bed they were gardening. When Cat had wanted him to approve of Theo, or at least pretend to, she had enlisted her mother's help and there had been dinners, family outings. He was a figurehead — an aging CEO of his own family who only showed up for the board meetings and wondered how so much got done without him.

"Can I talk to Theo for a minute, Mom?"

Her mother rose and drew her father by the hand to the door. "We'll just go down and look at some magazines in the gift shop," she said. "I'll bring you back a People."

"Thanks." When they had left, Cat closed her eyes for a long moment and let her head slump back against the pillow.

"I… I didn't think it would hurt so much," Theo said. He suddenly wanted her to know that he was grieving too, although other than the tears on the garage stairs, he wasn't completely certain that was true. "When you get home, we… did they say when we can try again?" Was that an insensitive thing to say? Maybe she would think he was talking about sex. "I mean, when you're ready inside, too. In your head, I mean."

Her eyes came open in her dry white face, slowly, like something in a horror movie. She took a deep breath. "I'm not coming home, Theo. Not like that. It's not going to be like… like that."

He stared, puzzled, but he could already feel the tide sucking away what he had thought was firm sand beneath his feet. "Not… ?"

"I'm going to stay with my parents for a few weeks. Mom wants to cook for me, you know, fuss over me."

"Well, that's… that's fine…"

"And when I come back…" She sighed, someone bravely picking up a heavy burden. "When I come back, I want to live by myself."

It felt like the time he had been hit in the back of the head with a pool cue, the innocent victim of a violent argument that he didn't even know had started behind him. For a long stupid moment after the world exploded he could only stare. "You mean… you want us to… to separate?"

Her mouth was firm, almost pinched shut, but her eyes were suddenly wet. "Yes. No. More than that. I think… it's time we went our own ways."

"Own ways? What kind of bullshit is that?"

She blinked, the sad resolve suddenly agitated by anger. "It's not bullshit, Theo. We lost the baby and it opened up my eyes. I can see now that the baby was the only reason I was staying with you — to give our child a fighting chance to have two parents who were together. But it wouldn't have fixed things between us. I can't believe how stupid I was — like I was under some kind of spell, believing that somehow we would have this rosy little family life. But in real life you would have been just the same, doing just enough to get by, a smile, a joke, oh yeah, lots of cute stuff but nothing real. Eventually we would have broken up, and then you'd have been a weekend dad, doing the bare minimum, no plan, no organization, no commitment, take the kid out and buy her an ice cream cone, drop her back off with me afterward."

He could only shake his head at this torrent of fury, judged guilty of neglecting a child who didn't even exist.

Don't pretend it would be different. The anger had finally brought color back to her bloodless face, coarse little patches of red like sunburn. It's always the same with you. You're a grown man, Theo, but you act like a teenager. 'Where are you going?' 'Out.' 'When are you coming back?' 'I don't know.' I can't believe I was going to have a kid with you."

"Is this all about me coming back late that night… ?"

No, Theo. But it's all about a hundred, a thousand other things like that. The shit you start and never finish. Your going-nowhere job. Coming home late smelling like the… the Fillmore West or something, hanging around with your teenage musician friends. You've probably got little teenage groupies, too. 'Wow, Theo, do you really, like, remember the Eighties?'"

"That's bullshit." His fists were clenched. "Bullshit."

"Maybe. Maybe I'm being unfair, Theo. I'm sorry — I've just lost a baby, remember? But I've hit the end of the road and that isn't bullshit."

"Look, I know that women and motherhood is like this sacred thing, but you're not the only goddamned person who lost a baby here, Cat! I was going to be a father."

She stared at him for a moment without speaking. "When I first met you, Theo," she finally said, "I thought you were the most amazing man I'd ever known. Beautiful — you really were beautiful, even my friends agreed on that. And you had that voice, and that… charm. Like you were someone out of a movie, with perfect lighting and choreography and good writers. You charmed me, all right, but I don't see it any more. Either it's fading or I just woke up."

Anger made him feel like his skin was tight, like he was the Incredible Hulk or something, growing muscles. But he was standing over a woman who'd just gone through a miscarriage, a woman in a hospital bed. He opened his fists, made himself take a deep breath. "So not only are you breaking up with me, you're telling me I'm shit, too? Just, what, as a going-away present? A parting gift for the losing player? You thought you should just let me know I'm a big fake and I'm not worth anything?"

"No, Theo. But I am saying that something about you has changed, and what's left isn't enough, at least for me. I don't want to spend the rest of my life hoping that things will get better, that you'll stop being a good-looking, footloose guy with potential and start being a real man. Okay, you sang 'The Way You Look Tonight' to me on our first date and I fell for you, but it's not enough to last a lifetime. I don't know why I couldn't see that until the miscarriage, but I sure see it now. I'd rather be single. I'd rather have a baby by myself, if I can even get pregnant again. So why don't you take the time while I'm at my parents' and get your stuff and find an apartment or something."

"You're throwing me out of my own house? I pay half the rent!"

"Barely. But it was my house first, anyway, remember? I only let you move in because Laney was getting a place with Brian and it was easier than putting an ad in the paper."

He stood, full of diffuse rage and with a hole in the center of him that seemed like it could never be filled. "Is that all it was, huh? Easier than putting in an ad?"

It took a moment, but her expression softened. "No, that wasn't all it was. Of course not. I loved you, Theo."

"Loved." He closed his eyes. Everything had just liquified and swirled away from him, his entire life gurgling down the drain.

"I probably still love you, if that's what you're asking. But I can't live with you any more. It's too much work, trying to believe in us. I'm too old for fairy tales."

When he passed her parents in the hallway, their embarrassed expressions showing that they knew damn well what their daughter had just told him, he wanted to say something cutting to them, something bitter and clever, but he was too empty, too angry, too sad. The only thing he could think of was "It's not fair!" and that was not the kind of thing thirty-year-old men were supposed to say.

2 THE SILENT PRIMROSE MAIDEN

Half a day's drive outside the great city, far enough away to intrude only lightly on the consciences of families and friends — consciences underdeveloped by both habit and breeding in many of the leading clans — the mansion stood. It had once belonged to a scion of the upstart Zinnia House, but the fortunes of that family had fallen as swiftly as they had earlier risen, and although it still bore their name and crest above the door, the former inhabitants had sold the huge house long ago and moved to more modest digs in the city, a collection of family apartments near the waterfront where they could keep a close watch on their shipping interests and dream of better days gone — and, they hoped, better days still to come.

But Zinnia Manor remained, nestled in a fold of the forested hills of True Arden, surrounded by grounds that although less carefully cultivated than in its happiest days were still green and sumptuous and, most important of all, large enough to create privacy.

The manor had three or four times as many inhabitants now as when the family still owned it; the administrator, Mr. Lungwort, a small, dapper fellow whose rudimentary wings had resisted all attempts at cosmetic removal, growing back several times and thus forcing him to try to hide them with carefully padded suits, claimed it was more like managing a village than a house. Besides the regular residents there were several dozen staff, including cooks, maids, janitors, and gardeners, not to mention the nurses and orderlies. Two alienists and a certified chirurgeon were on duty at all times, and other practitioners were kept on call for when things got busy, as they often did during full moons.

In such a large facility, with an impressive catalog of patients whose conditions were vivid and even occasionally dangerous — inverted shadows, spontaneous creation, infectious hallucination, and several variants of uncontrollable shapeshifting — it was strange that the most noteworthy resident should be so quiet and inoffensive. She had her own suite of rooms on the south side of the manor, courtesy of her famous and powerful family (which, except for occasional visits from one brother, wanted nothing to do with her anymore) but she might as well have been living in a ditch beside the highway for all the notice or advantage she took of her surroundings. Day after day the morning sun splashed into her room, but she never raised her eyes to the windows. Day after day attendants came and got her out of the bed where they had placed her the night before, then washed and dressed her, manipulating her slack body as though she were a corpse being readied for burial. Day after day, at least when the weather was fair, they set her in a sedan chair — not an easy task, even for some of the larger, stronger creatures on the staff, for although the patient was slender, she was tall and long of limb, and always as limp as a sack — and rolled her out to the manor's garden.

There she would remain, eyes staring straight out at nothing, the hands her attendants had folded still lying neatly in her lap, her handsome, fine-boned face as hollowly purposeless as a bell with no clapper, until someone came and took her away again.

Once, during one of the power outages, which were occurring in the city and its outskirts with worrying frequency these days, a muddled staff had neglected to bring her in. The night nurse, seeing her empty bed, had gone looking for her and found her still sitting in her chair in the garden, staring at nothing, her dress soaked with dew and her milk-white skin goose-pimpled with cold.

Mr. Lungwort had been very upset about that, not so much out of pity — it was hard for anyone with the administrator's somewhat narrow personality to pity something that showed no more liveliness than a lump of wax — but out of fear that her wealthy family might discover the mistake and remove her from Zinnia Manor, along with her sizable endowment. Two nurses were sacked and a night orderly was severely reprimanded, but the patient herself gave no sign that her night outdoors had made any difference.

Lungwort's records showed that her name was Erephine, but he did not encourage conversational familiarity between his staff and their charges — the "guests," as Lungwort called them — and especially not toward members of the highest Houses, however intimate the staff's interactions with them might be, however unprepossessing the patient. To her blank face, a face that animation might have made beautiful, they addressed her only as "Lady Primrose," or simply, "my lady." The sound of their voices and the touch of their careful hands seemed to mean no more to her than had the night dew. If she had been a mortal woman, and her caretakers mortal too, the word "soulless" might have been whispered, but fairies do not pretend to have souls, and if they do have such things, they are not aware of them.

To the nurses and orderlies of Zinnia Manor, many of them unabashed wearers of wings and unrepentant believers in the old tales and ways, it was clear that their unmoving, unspeaking charge, so pretty, so utterly lifeless, must have a story, something darkly romantic and grandly tragic, but if the administrator or anyone else knew it, the secret remained closely held. When the staff drank betony tea together and gossiped about Mr. Lungwort's padded suits and the disgusting proclivities of the Feverfew twins, they called her the Silent Primrose Maiden and tried to imagine what had happened to bring her to this terrible condition. Not even the most extravagant guesses came anywhere near the truth.

After all, it was possible to imagine that lives might once have been lost and reputations sacrificed for the light in her eyes, those eyes that were now so terribly, terribly empty, but none of the gossiping staff of Zinnia Manor could have guessed that soon an entire world might pass into eternal shadow for the sake of that same, dead stare.

3 DESCENT

It was a good day, one of very few in the two months since Cat's miscarriage — since the night his old life ended, as he sometimes thought of it, never considering how he might be tempting fate. A decent night's sleep and for once no bad dreams gave him a looseness in his heart and his step he hadn't felt for a while. (He had been having the same nightmare a lot lately, eerie and claustrophobic, where he was trapped in something like a room full of mist or smoke, staring out at the unreachable world through a thick window.) But today bad dreams seemed to have evaporated in the sunshine. Walking through a building lobby carrying a combination of flowers clearly chosen over the phone by someone, but guiltily displayed in an expensive vase to make up for it, he even found himself singing an old Smokey Robinson song. A pretty young receptionist (too young to be more than a momentary fancy for him, but that made it all the more satisfying in a way) told him he had a beautiful voice.

"Thanks," he said. "I'm a singer. That's my other job."

She didn't inquire further, but that was all right. It was enough just to be reminded that there was more to his life than this delivery job. The band hadn't practiced for at least three weeks — all kinds of weirdness going on there, but for once nothing to do with him, since Kris and Morgan were having some kind of feud. He was still a singer, though. He could pick up his guitar and go stand on a street corner and earn almost as much as he did dragging potted plants up elevators to overworked secretaries and retiring data clerks. Of course, almost as much as "very little" equaled "nearly nothing," so for the moment he'd keep driving the van, thank you very much.

As the bit of Second-That-Emotion falsetto and the receptionist's smile had reminded him, there was more to him than just an aging adolescent with longish hair and a Khasigian — the Florist patch sewn on the breast of his shirt. But the problem was, if his old life really had ended that night, where was the new one? It was one thing to have your girlfriend throw you out — even in such miserable circumstances there could still be something liberating in that kind of forced change. But not when you had to move back in with your mother.

It was only for a few months, of course, only until he had saved a little money for first and last on a decent apartment. He could have moved in with Johnny Battistini, who had invited him, but although he loved the man like a brother, the idea of living with him again was a bit much. Theo could never be called fastidious, as Catherine herself had often pointed out, but you didn't have to be a neat-freak to be uncomfortable with six-month-old fast food hardening to stone under the couch. He had shared an apartment with Johnny once, years before he'd met Cat, and he still hadn't shaken the memory of stepping on bugs in the dark.

Besides, it wasn't like his mother forced him to talk with her, or even to interact much at all. He had his own key. If he was home at dinnertime, which he rarely was, she would heat him up the same leftovers she was eating, or put a frozen meal in the microwave for him. If he wanted to watch a different program than she was watching, she didn't seem to mind; she would silently hand him the remote, take a book, and go to bed. She didn't make a mess, she didn't play loud music, she didn't force him to have long, boring conversations: if she had been a male roommate she would have been damn near ideal. As a mother, though, she was a little spooky.

When he had tried to explain her to Cat back when they were first dating he had stated, a bit archly, "Mom's flame of life doesn't burn all that bright." But, faint as it was, it had burned brighter once than it did now. He was suprised at how little she seemed to care about anything these days. Was it some kind of delayed reaction to his father's death almost six years ago? Or was it Theo who had changed — had living with Cat made him more used to how normal people behaved? He had no idea. Anna Vilmos was a hard woman to figure out.

She came to all his school plays, he remembered. Showed up every night when I had the lead in the musical — it must have meant something to her. But she never had much to say about it. "Very nice, Theo, you did well. I enjoyed it." That was about all, like she was talking about a piece of corned beef she'd got from the butcher. And his father had been too tired most of the time to say anything either except that the show or recital in question had been "pretty good," all the time making it clear that what he really wanted was to get home to bed because he had to get up early the next morning. See, Cat? Who can turn into a normal grown-up when his role models are polite strangers?

But today, driving the delivery van, even the bleakness of living back at his mother's house could not dim his feeling that a change was coming, that a sort of dormancy was over. He had been surprised how powerfully the twin blows of losing Catherine and the baby had struck him. It was more than just the weird bad dreams: for weeks he had found himself bursting into mortified tears while listening to old songs on the van radio — songs he had never liked that much in the first place. Anthems of lost love, Fifties car accident weepies and horrible, saccharine tunes about dead girlfriends and children, even things that seemed to have nothing to do with his own upside-down life could catch him like a sharp needle in the heart. Once an old chestnut from the Seventies about a drowning sheepdog (as far as he could tell, since he had never listened to the lyrics very intently) made him pull over because he was crying too hard to see. But not today. Spring had actually arrived a month ago, but for the first time he could feel himself respond to it, as though he too were full of sap being warmed by the sun, as if he were about to bud.

Don't know about budding, he thought as he pulled the van into the slot behind the store. But maybe I could go out and catch a few beers with Johnny, go listen to some music. An Irish band he had heard about was playing at a club in the Mission. He considered inviting his mother — she was Irish by birth, after all, and she had a kind of weird soft spot for Johnny B., soft for her anyway. And Johnny in turn kind of flirted with her. He had actually once said, "Your mom must have been at least a semi-babe when she was young." The whole thing had been far too bizarre for Theo to deal with, but now he found himself liking the idea of taking her out with him and Johnny. Might do her good, and he would feel a little less guilty about sharing the house with her as though he were an itinerant stranger.

"You're singing," Khasigian said as Theo hung the keys on the hook board. "Is that a good thing?"

"Guess that's for the people listening to decide."

Khasigian squinted at him, gnawed his pencil. He had a shiny bald head like an ancient tortoise, but the rest of him was surprisingly fit for his sixty-something years. He jogged, sometimes coming into the shop on hot days in running shorts and allowing the employees to make respectful jokes about his thin brown legs. "It could be worse. You sing okay. But I don't like it when my employees are happy. I think when they are not afraid they don't work so hard."

"A priceless example of your nineteenth-century management style." Theo plucked his faithful leather jacket off the rack. "That's why you win the Ebenezer Scrooge Award year after year, Mr. K. They're going to have to retire that trophy, you know."

"Go home, Singing Boy. Go annoy someone with less to do."

Khasigian could be an unalloyed bastard occasionally, and he certainly wasn't going to drown his employees in money and benefits, but he was at least middling honest and did a pretty good imitation of the Gruff But Lovable Boss when he wanted to. Too good, really — that's how you could tell it was only an act.

Theo rode back to the Sunset district with the visor of his helmet open. The wind was damp and warm and the smell of blossoming things filled the air, stronger even than the auto exhaust.

Mrs. Kraley was out in the yard next door, watering her garden. Theo waved to her. She did not wave back, although she was only using one hand to operate the hose. Mrs. Kraley was another thing that made staying at his mother's such a warm, satisfying experience.

His mother did not respond to his call when he came in. After the terrible night when he had found Cat, he had a reflexive need to know where everyone was, so he checked and found her in her bedroom, napping fully dressed, propped on three pillows, her chest moving up and down just like it was supposed to. It was strange to see her sleeping in the middle of the day, but then again he seldom came home right after work ended.

He wandered back to the kitchen, took a bottle of beer out of the refrigerator, then made his way out to the tidy emptiness of the living room. He found himself wishing that if he had to be stuck in his parents' house, it was at least the house in San Mateo in which he had grown up, a place with memories, where he would have something to react to, even if only depressive nostalgia. But his mother and father had bought this house less than ten years ago, a year after Theo had moved out for good and his father had retired — a retirement Peter Vilmos had only a few years to appreciate before the massive stroke had killed him. His picture stood by itself on the mantel, a setting too stark to be any kind of a shrine. There were moments when Theo thought he saw his own features in his father's, when the jaw or cheekbones seemed inarguably his own, but most of the time the man seemed as remote genetically as he had been paternally, a decent guy who had simply worked too many hours to have much strength left for dad-stuff.

There were no other pictures of Pete Vilmos anywhere on display, which had more to do with Theo's mother than any fault of his father. She had only one of Theo as well, a school picture from when he was in second or third grade that sat on her dresser, still in its original little cardboard frame. There were no other photographs visible in the house, and very few pictures of any kind. The large framed print of a bridge over the River Liffey in Dublin on the living room wall was the exception, and Theo believed it was mostly there because the wall would look too bare without it. Anna Dowd Vilmos was not sentimental.

In an uncharacteristic bit of disorganization, his mother had left her coat over one of the chairs and her purse lying on its side on the dining room table; a small scatter of objects had fallen out of the open top. He found himself wondering what exactly it was she did all day. She volunteered at the library, but that was only once a week. Most of her working years had been spent cooking and cleaning for her child and her fairly old-fashioned husband. What did she do with her time? A pang of guilt struck him, that he was only thinking about this now, with his own life in tatters. Dad had been dead for a long stretch. Had Theo, her only child, ever gone to her and asked her if there was something he could do to help? Had he tried to make time for her, take her out, get to know her? Sure, she wasn't the most responsive person in the world, but he hadn't done much to try to overcome that, had he?

He left the silent television, the muted scenes of car accidents and school district protests on the early evening news, and hung his mother's coat up in the closet. He could make her dinner. That would be something nice to wake up to, wouldn't it? He wasn't a great cook, but he wasn't hopeless, and even grilled cheese sandwiches and canned tomato soup would be better than her having to get up and do the cooking. Or maybe he should just take her out to a proper dinner. Call John from a restaurant, then they could all go out and see that Irish band.

He was halfway through scooping the fallen objects back into her purse when he realized he was holding a pill bottle, that he had been looking at it for some moments without quite understanding why he had paused.

Fentanyl Citrate, the label read. It also had a bright orange warning label.

It took long seconds reading through the many cautionary notations on the label before he understood that what he was looking at was some kind of morphine derivative — serious, serious pain medication. His insides went cold, as though he himself were being numbed. He stared at it a moment longer, then, not entirely conscious of what he was doing or why, dumped his mother's purse out onto the table. A lipstick rolled off and clicked onto the floor but he did not bend to pick it up. The glossy pamphlet, folded and unfolded so many times that the creases were white, had a bar across the top that identified it as a publication of the California Pacific Medical Center. The words on the cover, the typeface careful, almost respectful, read "Pancreatic Cancer: Questions and Answers."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

She gave him a look that was like something he'd expect from Kris Rolle, almost teenage in its sullenness. "I didn't know for sure. They're still not one hundred percent certain until they do a biopsy, but the what-do-you-call-it, the endoscope, showed there was a big tumor." She shrugged. "It wasn't nice, that endoscope. I didn't want to go in for it — I hoped it was nothing."

"This is bad, Mom. We have to get serious about this. This is important!"

For a moment her expression seemed to lighten, but there was an abyss behind her crooked smile. "Yes, Theo. I know."

"Sorry. Jesus. Sorry." He took a deep, shuddering breath. "What did they tell you?"

What they had told her was not good. If the biopsy confirmed it was malignant, as seemed very likely, it was probably Stage Three or Four, she said. He found out the next day, when he used the computer at the library to go online, that they were usually spelled "Stage III" and "Stage IV," as though putting the ugliness in Roman numerals made it distant, somehow, less fearful, a mere historical footnote. It seemed to have gone undetected for a long time already, the doctor had told her, which was often the way with pancreatic cancer since it was seldom noticed until the tumor began to press on the other organs, and the chances were high that it had spread into her lymphatic system, rogue cells sowing the seeds of chaos throughout her body.

"Six months," she said. "A year if the radiation and chemotherapy help."

"Jesus." He stood staring at her awful composure. "Are you telling me it's incurable?"

She shrugged again. "There are some, what do they call them, some temporary remissions. Sometimes with the chemotherapy and all that, people survive longer. It's not usual."

He couldn't understand how she could sit here talking about death, her own death, as though discussing an appliance warranty. "But there's a chance, right?"

"There is always a chance, Theo." She did not have to add what was in her voice. But probably not for me.

"Has this… oh, God, has it been hurting you a lot, Mom?"

She thought about it before answering. She was not in a hurry. He had a sudden insight into how that part must feel, anyway: there was no point in hurrying anything now. "For a while. At first, it wasn't so bad. I thought it was just aching muscles — my back, you know. Sometimes I get that when I carry things around, move the furniture to vacuum."

Another stab of guilt — no, of something closer to pure misery — at the thought of his mother dragging heavy sofas around so she could vacuum a house empty but for him and herself. But what did it matter now? He wanted to laugh at the horror of it all, but even with his mother's strange, detached mood, it didn't seem like the right thing to do. But he had a feeling that she'd like it better than if he started crying. He looked around the empty house, at the clean carpets and unprepossessing furniture, at the small dark-haired woman sitting on a chair in front of him, and tried to think of something to say.

"I wasn't very hungry either," she said abruptly. "But I've never been someone who wanted to eat a lot. Not like your father. He always had a can of nuts next to him, or something like that…" She stopped as suddenly as she had begun, finished with the thought.

"Do you… do you want to come out with me? Tonight? There's an Irish band at the Kennel Club. They're supposed to be good — real Irish music, all acoustic instruments."

She actually smiled, and because it was a real smile, for the first time he could see the pain and weariness. "That would be nice, Theo. Yes, let's go out."

After that, the descent began. What had happened with Cat and the baby had been so sudden that it had seemed more like a brutal mugging — one moment walking down the street thinking about what you were going to have for dinner, the next lying in the gutter wondering if you could manage to crawl to where someone would find you. Watching his mother die was like something else entirely, a sort of terrible, slow-motion accident that went on and on and seemed to have no ending. But there would be an ending, of course.

They spoke a different language in the land of death, he discovered. If he had thought Cat's miscarriage was wrapped around with strange arcana, he had not even begun to glimpse the possibilities. First off, it wasn't just cancer or a tumor they were dealing with, it was adenocarcinoma. They didn't examine his mother, they performed laparoscopic staging or endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography — that last word something you couldn't even fit on a Scrabble board. And there seemed to be no real treatments, just mysteries of which even druid priests would be proud, things like Gemcitabine or Fluorouracil, palliative bypass or even chemical splanchnicectomy. Sometimes the smoke would rise, the curtain part, and someone in a white coat would lean out and breathe, "percutaneous radiologic biliary stent," before disappearing again. It was like someone had opened a hole into Theo's life — his life and his mother's, but she was daily growing more and more distant in her haze of pain-deadeners — and backed up a dump truck full of spiky Greco-Latin terms, then poured them over everything in an avalanche of meaningless but still terrifying syllables.

Unresectable. That was one of the worst.

Metastasized. That was the worst.

He had to quit his job, of course, although Khasigian was kind enough to tell him he could have it back when he wanted it. His mother, frugal by nature, had stashed a bit away out of her husband's pension and Social Security over the years, enough to pay the tiny mortgage payments and put food on the table, especially as Anna Vilmos seldom ate anything now, no matter how much Theo begged her. He was so worried about her not eating that he even got Johnny to bring over a few buds of high-grade weed, which after a great deal of argument they convinced Theo's mother to smoke.

"You're trying to turn me into a dope addict like you," she said, wearily amused, clutching John Battistini's furry arm. It would have been comical, the kind of thing Theo and Johnny would have marveled over forever — "the night we got your mom stoned!" — except that there was nothing funny about the circumstances, about Anna Dowd Vilmos' yellowish skin, the bruised circles under her eyes, the headscarf that she always wore now because the chemotherapy was making her hair come out of her scalp in patches. She had just discontinued the Gemcitabine, declaring in a moment of stubborn determination, "It's not going to help anything and I'm not going to die without my hair."

Marijuana didn't have the effect Theo hoped. In fact, Anna had a sort of bad trip, the kind of thing he had rarely seen even in the most paranoid of first-time smokers. She moaned and cried and began to babble about "the night they took the baby," something that made no sense to Theo unless she was talking about Cat's miscarriage. As he held her, patting her awkwardly and trying not to think about how thin she had become, whispering reassuring nothings, he wondered if something in her own family history had triggered it. It was shocking how little he knew about the events of his mother's life before she had given birth to him.

Even when the worst had passed, she was too distraught to do anything more that night, and certainly had no interest in eating. He put her to bed at last. Johnny went home full of apologies, promising that he would find "some mellower weed" so they could try another time. But Theo knew, as he looked down at his mother whimpering in her shallow sleep, that this would be the last experiment. It was hard to say whether her remoteness in the last weeks had been denial or courage, but whatever it was, he didn't want to take it away from her again.

"I want you to sell the house," she told him one morning, a morning like every other morning of late, on their way to the clinic with hours of treatments ahead for her, tattered waiting room magazines and mediocre coffee for him.

"What do you mean, sell the house? What, are we just going to move down to the clinic full-time?"

She still had the strength to give him an annoyed look. It was one of the few pleasures she had left. "I mean after I'm dead."

"Mom, don't talk like that…"

"If I don't talk like that now, when do I do it?" She pulled down the scarf where it had begun to creep above her ears. "When? No, you just listen. That's not your house — you don't want to live there after I'm gone. You'll never keep it clean anyway."

"I don't want to think about it right now."

"You never want to think about things like that. That's why you're still doing what you're doing, Theo. That's why you're living with me."

"I could have moved out if… if you hadn't got sick."

She made a face. "Maybe. But you listen to me. You sell it, get yourself a nice apartment, then you'll have a little money. You can go back to school, get a degree. You could have done well in school if you'd ever tried — the teachers always said you were bright, but you wanted to spend all your time in those rock and roll bands. The house is almost paid off — there's the second mortgage for the kitchen remodeling, of course, but you'll still get enough to go to school."

The thought of how it would happen was ghastly, but it kindled something inside him all the same, something that might have been an idea of eventual freedom. "We'll talk about it… we'll talk about it later, Mom. You're going to beat this thing."

"You are a very bad liar, Theo." She paused for a long beat. "It's a lucky thing you're musical."

He flicked a glance at her. Yes, she was — she was smiling. It was all just weird beyond belief. Did my mother have to get cancer to develop a sense of humor? That's a fairly shitty trade-off, isn't it?

But there are no trade-offs. The universe isn't a machine for fairness. There's no Complaints Department. There's no court of higher appeal.

Pretty well sucks, doesn't it?

The descent went on throughout the spring and early summer, a free fall both agonizingly swift and yet somehow as thrashingly, stickily slow as a nightmare. Johnny Battistini quit coming over, unable to face the scarecrow figure that Anna Vilmos had become, although he still called from time to time to ask after her and to urge Theo to get out, just for an evening.

"Come on," he said the last time. "It would do you a lot of good, man. Just for a couple of hours…"

"Right. Right. And what if she falls down in the bathroom while I'm out?" Theo heard the hysterical edge in his own voice as though he were eavesdropping on someone else's conversation. "I'm supposed to just sit there drinking beers and scoping chicks and hope that doesn't happen? Easy for you to say. If it was your mom, you probably would."

"Hey, man…" John's voice faltered. They were lurching across a line they had never crossed before.

"Look, I can't do it, right? I'm sorry, man, but I can't. So just stop bugging me."

"But what about the band, Thee? The guys are asking me when you're coming back."

"Tell them as soon as my mother dies…" Even in his fury, he realized he was getting too loud — he was only assuming Anna was still asleep in the other room. "Tell them once this whole… inconvenience is over, I'll be back, cheerful and ready to play power-chord music with a bunch of twenty-year-olds. Yeah, with bells on. No need to worry about it."

"Theo…"

"I don't care. Tell them I quit. Now leave me alone."

Putting the phone down felt like slamming a door. He wanted to cry but he wouldn't let himself. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Catherine's call a day later was a different kind of misery. Someone had told her about what was happening — Theo had resisted the urge to phone her up himself a dozen times, resisted it like a drunk fighting a late-night run to the liquor store, but now there she was, that familiar voice. But there was something different in it, a careful distance as though she had scrubbed up like one of his mother's doctors before calling him, pulled on surgical gloves and a mask.

"I'm really, really sorry to hear about your mom, Theo."

"It's pretty tough. On her, I mean."

Catherine asked how he was doing, listened while he talked a little about the icy horror of the daily routine, even made a little small talk of her own — a promotion at work, a movie she'd liked — but there was an unmistakable subtext to the entire conversation. This call is about loyalty and human decency, but nothing more than that. Don't get ideas.

No problem there. His ideas were gone.

When the careful pas de deux with Catherine was over, he walked into the living room feeling entirely empty, as though something had eaten him away from the inside out, removing all the essential Theo-ness, leaving only the skin. He found his mother sitting on the couch, her head back but her eyes open. The television was off. She was so far gone most afternoons, wandering far off the map in the realms of her own pain, that she didn't even bother to turn it on anymore.

"I think it's time for me to go to the hospital," she said when she heard him.

"You had your appointment this morning, remember?"

She shook her head, but just barely, as though if she turned it too far it might simply fall off. She was having a very bad day, he could tell. "No, I mean it's time for me to move into the hospital."

Something had a grip on his innards — something chilly that squeezed. "You don't need to do that, Mom. We're doing all right here, aren't we?"

She closed her eyes. "You're doing fine, Theo. You're a good son. But the doctor thinks so too. I can't do it any longer."

"Do what?"

"Hold up my side of the bargain. I'm too tired. I hurt too much. I want to rest."

"But you can do that here…"

She raised her fingers to quiet him. "I don't want you carrying me around, Theo. You've had to do that a few times already. And I don't want to have my own son wiping my bottom. I couldn't stand that. It's time."

"But… !"

"It's time."

And so the last, pitched phase of the descent began, a voyage into the depths as bad in its way as anything Dante had imagined. But there would be no beatific vision at the end, Theo felt blankly certain. No shining city. Only the endless white corridors of the hospital ward.

She was letting go, he could feel it, spinning away from him like a moon that had broken the tethers of its orbit and would soon disappear into the empty dark spaces. He spent part of every day at her side, trying to concentrate on books he had been planning to read for months or even years. There was no point being with her all the time, but what else was there to do? He was afraid to return to his job, as if somehow that would be tempting fate, would ensure the receipt of the dreaded phone call while he was away from her more surely than if he were simply sitting around the house. The boys in the band had taken him at his own grief-maddened word and had made the split official — John had left him a halting, apologetic message making it clear without ever quite saying it, and Theo had not bothered to call him back. A sympathy call from a friend of his and Cat's, really more acquaintance than friend, had also gifted him with the unwanted information that Catherine was dating someone. When he hung up, he put on an old Smiths record and walked through the house from room to room to room trying to remember what a person was supposed to feel like inside.

It sometimes seemed to Theo that he was letting go too, cutting all ties, following his mother on his own journey into the void. Only the knowledge that she had no one else kept him connected to the Earth. Uncle Harold had come to visit once, in the early days, but he was even less gifted with sickbed chat than Johnny Battistini, and Theo knew they would not see him again.

There were still a few good days, though, days when the pain was not too bad, her mind not too fogged by painkillers. He wished he had more news of his own to offer her as distraction, but he was as barren as a stone. It didn't seem to matter, though: when she felt well enough to focus, she talked. It was as though during its destructive course the cancer had also eaten away a wall inside her, the partition that had kept in all the normal chitchat and reminiscence, so that he had only realized when she became sick what a stranger she was to him. She talked about Theo himself at first, about his childhood, his school days, his inordinate love of Hallowe'en and the work of trying to make the costumes he wanted, but then, increasingly, she began to talk about her girlhood in Chicago. She told him stories he had never heard about the large Irish family of which she was the youngest child, of all those aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers, and sisters from whom she had become estranged when her mother did the unforgivable — in a Catholic family, anyway — and divorced Anna's abusive, drunkard father. Theo knew little of this history, but it explained why he had met almost none of his relatives on his mother's side of the family, and it also explained why Theo's Grandma Dowd, a woman with seven children in Illinois, should have wound up living with her youngest out in California.

Hearing his mother talk now, he missed his maternal grandmother all over again. Grandma Dowd had been much more loving than her daughter, so much so that Theo had sometimes felt that he and his grandmother had a sort of secret treaty. Most of the childhood things he remembered fondly had her in them somewhere — trips to the drugstore that stretched to the candy counter as well, little gifts of money when his parents weren't looking, and of course all her wonderful, quirky Old Country stories about fairies and giants that made his mother roll her eyes and actively irritated his aerospace technician father, who thought his mother-in-law was filling the boy with what he called "simpleminded nonsense."

Grandma Dowd had died when Theo was twelve. At the time he had thought it didn't bother him much, had been surprised and impressed at his own sangfroid. He realized he had simply been too young to know how much it truly hurt.

And now, as though in dying her daughter was somehow assuming her essence, he almost felt he was at his grandmother's bedside, something he had been denied the first time as she lay dying from pneumonia, since his parents had thought it would give him nightmares.

This is my whole family, he thought, staring down at his mother's wasted, sleeping form. My whole family is dying. I'm the last one left.

"I want to tell you something," his mother said.

Theo sat up in the chair, startled out of a half-sleep and another of those persistent, disturbingly vivid dreams in which he was looking out through fogged glass as though he were a shut-in or a captive animal in a terrarium. He had definitely felt himself to be someone else this time — not Theo, not Theo at all, but instead something old and cold and amused. It had been terrifying, and his heart was still hammering.

At first, before he saw his mother's open eyes, he thought the whisper might have been part of the dream. She slept so much now — sometimes through the whole of his morning or afternoon visits. He had almost begun to think of her as something motionless, as an effigy, although there were also the times she moaned in pain, even after the nurse had come to give her more medication, and he found himself wishing frantically for the return of that absent, dismal quietude.

And there were still moments of lucidity, as this seemed to be.

"What is it, Mom? Do you need more meds?"

"No." It was a sound made only by the least amount of air, a sip. Deep breath pained her, made smaller the space in which the cancer grew like a dark conqueror. "I want to tell you something."

He pulled his chair over close to the bed, took her dry cold hand in his. "I'm listening."

"I'm… I'm sorry."

"For what?"

"That I didn't… didn't love you like I should have, Theo." Through the haze she was trying to see him properly; her eyes rolled a little, trying to focus. "It wasn't your fault."

"I don't know what you mean, Mom." He inched closer so he could hear her better. "You did fine…"

"No. I didn't do what I should have. It was just… something happened. When you were a little baby, practically a newborn. I suppose it was that, what do they call it… ?" She paused to get her breath, laboring in a way that made his stomach lurch. "Post-natal depression? I don't know. We didn't know about those things, really. But it just happened one day. I went to your bassinet — you were crying and crying and you wouldn't stop. Gas, maybe." She showed the ghost of a smile. "But I suddenly just felt like I didn't care, that you weren't really my baby." She frowned and closed her eyes, trying to summon the right words. "No, it must have been different than that. I didn't even understand what a baby was anymore. Just a little screaming thing. Not a part of me." She screwed her eyes more tightly shut against a wave of pain. "Not a part of me."

"You can't beat yourself up about things like that, Mom."

"I should have got help. I tried to tell your father. He didn't understand — told me I just needed more rest. But I didn't love you the way I should have. I never did. I'm so sorry, Theo."

He felt his eyes sting. "You did all right. You did your best."

"That's a terrible thing, isn't it?" Now her eyes came open, fully open, and for the first time in days he thought she really saw him, complete and true, with a terrible clarity that would make normal, everyday life a nightmare. He tried hard to hold that awful stare.

"What is, Mom? What's a terrible thing?"

"When you die, and the only thing anyone can say about you is, 'She did her best.' " She took a shaky breath, then waited so long to take another one that his heart began to race again. When she finally spoke, it was in a whispery quaver like a frightened child. "Could you sing me a song, Theo?"

"A song?"

"I haven't heard you sing… in so long. You always had such a nice voice."

"What would you like to hear, Mom?"

But she only closed her eyes and gave a little wave of her hand.

He recalled the day he had found out about her illness, when they had gone out to hear the band play. An old one, then, an old Irish tune. She liked those.

he began quietly,

She smiled a bit so he kept going. A nurse stuck her head in the room, curious about the sound, but then backed out again, staying near the doorway to listen but trying not to intrude. Theo ignored her, struggling to remember the words, the tale of some nameless poet's regret.

The words were coming back to him, which was a relief, since he didn't want to break the spell: this felt more like being called upon to perform a ritual than just singing an old song. He sang it as simply as he could, avoiding the reflexive mannerisms of pop music. Only as he finished the last verse and began the final chorus did he remember what it was really about, the poet's regrets in the face of imminent death. He faltered for a moment but saw that his mother was asleep, the smile still on her lips, faint as starlight on a still lake.

He left her there sleeping. The nurse, a young Asian woman, smiled and started to say something to him as he came out of the room, but saw the look on his face and decided not to speak.

In the end, Anna Vilmos did not get even half a year. She died in the middle of the night, August 8th. It seemed to be a good death, given the circumstances. A nurse saw that she didn't appear to be breathing, took her pulse, then began the list of procedures that would ultimately free up the bed for another patient. Someone from the hospital called Theo at home and, after giving him the news, told him there was no point in coming in before the morning, but he roused himself anyway and got into his mother's old car, feeling that it would be safer to drive in his somnambulant condition than to ride his motorcycle. They had drawn the curtain around the bed, covered her face with a sheet. He pulled it back, his thoughts fractured into such tiny, whirling pieces he felt like a snow globe, felt he had been shaken and shaken and then set down.

She did not look peaceful, particularly. She didn't look like anything.

She looks like where someone used to be, but isn't anymore.

He kissed her cold cheek, then went to find the night administrator to make arrangements.

4 THE HUNGRY THING

The warehouse district sweltered in heat unusual even for the season. A work gang of nixies, lounging on a break in the shade of one of the tall old buildings, were reluctant to move back out of the black coach's path until one of them recognized the flower-glyph on the license plate. A name passed between the lean, hard-muscled creatures, a murmur like the sea that was denied to them until their indenture had been paid, and they quickly flattened themselves against the wall to let the limousine past.

The nixies talked of it that evening in the tavern called Tide's End, but not much, and only in nervous, rippling whispers.

The coach pulled to a silent stop in front of the last building in the row, a large, windowless, ramshackle structure perched at the end of the wharf like an ancient animal sleeping in the sun. The coach shimmered in the heat-haze; when the first two figures got out the distortion made them seem even more monstrous than they were. Both wore long black overcoats which did little to hide the immensity underneath. The pair stood for long moments, motionless except for eyes constantly moving in the shadows of their wide-brimmed hats. Then, at some unspoken signal, one of them leaned and opened the coach door.

Three more figures stepped out, all in fine suits of dark, understated weave. The tallest of these newcomers looked up and down the now-abandoned wharfside road — the nixies had ended their break early and made themselves extremely scarce — then turned and led the rest into the building, pausing only to allow one of the gigantic bodyguards to pass through the door first.

The inside of the building was quite different than the rust-flecked, peeling exterior suggested. The five visitors made their way down a long hallway, through pools of light angling down from what seemed to be ragged holes in the high ceiling but on closer inspection proved to be oddly shaped skylights, each one carefully fitted. The hall itself was featureless, the walls painted a uniform smooth black, the floor carpeted in some dark, velvety material that suggested its owner had no need to be warned by the sound of approaching footsteps, no fear of anyone piercing his sanctum without him knowing about it long before they reached the door at the end of the hall.

The door had a brass plate, but the plate was blank. One of the bodyguards reached for the handle, but the tallest of the well-dressed figures shook his head. He pushed it open himself and led his two slightly smaller companions inside, leaving the bodyguards to shuffle their feet nervously, making sparks crackle in the velvety corridor.

The huge room inside was lit by more of the high, strange sky-windows, so that the distant ceiling seemed to be held up by columns of angled light. The air was hot and close and the smells that mingled there would have been unpleasant to a mortal, perhaps even maddening. The newcomers, despite superior senses, did not seem taken aback by the odor of the place, but as their catlike eyes became accustomed to the strange striping of light and dark the tall man's two companions slowed and then stopped, seemingly astonished by the jumble that surrounded them.

The vast space was a warehouse of sorts, but even in this most ancient and mysterious of cities it was unlikely there were any other warehouses like this. Although the down-stabbing light from the ceiling picked out much, it illuminated little, but what could be seen was very strange: manlike shapes, statues perhaps, frozen in a thousand different attitudes, filled the room like a crowd of silent watchers, most standing but many tumbled onto their sides, arms that once reached toward some heavenly object now seeming to grapple at the legs of their upright fellows. The silent figures were only part of the room's catalog, and many other objects were less immediately familiar: fantastic animals stuffed or reduced to rolled skins and piled bones; open crates overflowing with rusting weapons or lengths of fabric whose colors seemed inconstant; urns; caskets; and overturned cases that had spilled a wild variety of trinkets, from silver and gold jewelry to things that looked like children's toys formed from purest black carbon. Raw gems were even scattered carelessly about the floor like wildflower seeds. Shelf after shelf along the walls held jars in which things floated that did not encourage close study, things with eyes and even facial expressions, although in no other way manlike. Other jars were opaque, many extensively and carefully sealed, but some with the lids propped against the containers as though whatever was inside had been sampled in haste (or had perhaps escaped on its own). None of these containers appeared to be labeled, and even the small traces of powder sprinkled on the shelving around them in what were obviously careful patterns gave no clue as to what the contents might be.

Other mysterious objects hung from the ceiling on wires — kites made of skin, lamps that seemed to burn but gave no light; there was even a cloud of feathers that swirled continuously in one high spot near the ceiling as though caught in a whirlwind, gleaming white tufts cycling in and out of one of the columns of light but never scattering no matter how violently they blew.

The tallest of the three figures continued on until he had reached the far corner of the warehouse, a place where no direct light fell. His two companions, their first curiosity sated — or perhaps curdled into something else — moved forward with a speed that in less graceful creatures might have been mistaken for hurry, and when they stopped they stood close to their leader.

A seated shape stirred in the darkness of the corner. "Ah," it said. "Welcome, Lord Hellebore."

The tall one nodded. "I received your message."

The thing in the chair moved again, but did not rise, and — to the unspoken but obvious relief of Hellebore's companions — did not come out of the shadows. The Remover of Inconvenient Obstacles was not pleasant to look upon at the best of times and far less so at home. "And you have come. That is very kind of you, very… obliging. I do not believe either of your companions have previously visited me here."

Hellebore nodded and gestured to his fair-haired companion and to the stern-faced fellow whose hair was even darker than Hellebore's own, a black so pure it suggested artifice. "These are the lords Foxglove and Thornapple."

"Yes, I know them." There was a strange wheezing creak as the Remover stirred again. "You will pardon me, Lords, if I do not offer you my hand in greeting."

"Think nothing of it," said bearded Foxglove, perhaps a little too quickly.

"So, then." This was Thornapple, the First Councillor of Parliament — after Hellebore, the second most powerful man in Faerie. His ancient, chilly eyes were as black as his hair, but his shaggy eyebrows were snowy white, as if they were the only things on him that had aged past indeterminate middle years. "Is it time?"

"I believe so," said the Remover. "As you specified, Lord Hellebore — and as you paid for — I have kept careful watch. If we wait longer, we may miss our moment."

"Are you certain we have not missed it already?" There was no trace of impatience on Hellebore's pale face or in his silky voice, although it would have been madness to suppose he was not impatient, even eager.

"I am certain of nothing. But I think it is very unlikely."

Hellebore waved away the distinction. "Then let us begin. Tell us how to reach him."

"It is not so simple. I found him for you. You will also need me to accomplish the rest of what you wish to do."

Thornapple frowned. "Then who will we send for him? One of us? You?"

"Not who," said the Remover, and laughed his papery laugh again. "You and your companions have used up your exemption from the Clover Effect, and you must take my word that travel to that world is no longer possible for me, either. In fact, I very much doubt you can find any willing tool on our side with both the power and self-reliance needed to make the crossing and find your quarry — brute force without wit or wit without sufficient strength would both fail, and with things changing so quickly you won't get a second chance, I think."

"So there is no one we can send?" Foxglove seemed relieved.

"I did not say that — I simply said it was not a 'who.' " With a strange, wet sound the Remover settled farther back into the darkness. "Bring me what I need, please. I will describe the objects to you…"

While Thornapple and Foxglove searched for the mirrors, Hellebore stood with his hands thrust casually into the pockets of his trousers. He did not look directly at the place where the Remover sat, but that might have been courtesy, although Hellebore was not known for it. He had not seen this most honest of the Remover's various appearances before, but he had seen many things that even his most venerable colleagues could not imagine and was not in the least squeamish. "You realize that we will be crossing a line," Hellebore said at last, watching the angular Thornapple picking fastidiously through a pile of dusty framed pictures. "This will not be like what happened with the unborn child. If we fail, we may all be fed to Forgetting — you included."

"That is not much of a threat to me, my lord."

For a moment Hellebore looked troubled, but was distracted when the invisible figure stirred and even seemed for a moment about to rise and step out into the light.

"Don't touch that!" the Remover shouted, voice ragged but startlingly loud. "Put it down!"

Across the large room, Lord Foxglove, startled and a bit afraid, hastily put down the carved box he had been handling.

"The mirror is not there," the Remover said, more quietly now. "The next pile over. Do not touch that box again."

Hellebore had noticed something like pain in the Remover's words; he cocked a thin black eyebrow but said nothing.

At last the two powerful fairy lords came back, staggering like overloaded servants, each carrying a large mirror framed in ugly, coarse black wood. At the Remover's instruction they propped them facing each other on the floor with perhaps an arm's span between them.

"Here," the Remover said, and for a moment his hand appeared from the shadow holding a black candle in a dish. The two other lords quickly looked away, but Hellebore stepped forward and took the candle.

"Put it down on the floor midway between the mirrors," the Remover said. "Then light it and step back."

Hellebore touched index finger to thumb and made a flame. At the moment it ignited, the apertures in the ceiling above narrowed, or something else happened to block their light; within a few seconds the warehouse was dark except for the candle's flame.

"Silence now," said the Remover of Inconvenient Obstacles. "And I'm sure it does not need saying, but I will say it anyway — do not reach between the mirrors or in any way interfere with the light passing back and forth between them until I have finished."

He began to chant quietly, a sound only barely distinguishable from raspy breath. It seemed to take a long time. The flame above the candle shrank until it was scarcely larger or brighter than a firefly's lamp, a tiny point that nevertheless became the focus of all the darkness around it.

Something began to form in the space between the mirrors, a faintly glowing cloud, as though the original light of the candle had spread into something watery and diffuse. The cloud grew more distinct without becoming more solid, flowing from one side to the other of the light that bounced between the mirrors. It seemed constantly about to take shape, but although it never quite did so, there were shifting suggestions of a face, a dark hole of a mouth and pitted, empty eyes. It was hard to look at it for more than a few moments, even for the three gathered lords of Faerie. As the Remover's tuneless singing grew louder the thing began to move more violently, writhing and snapping within the empty space between the mirrors like something trying to find its way out of a cage. The room grew piercingly cold. The thing's mouth opened wide, then even wider, as though it could swallow even itself if it wished.

"What is it?" Hellebore's voice was perfectly modulated, not too fearfully loud, not too overawed and quiet.

The Remover fell silent. When he spoke at last, his weary voice seemed to come from far away. "An irrha — a ghost from one of the older darknesses, a spirit of pestilence unknown in the mortal world since the stones of Babylon were leveled."

"And it will… will do what we need? You said that force without wit would be useless. Are you telling me this… thing has wit?" Hellebore looked to his companions, perhaps for support, but they were staring at the shape between the mirrors with sickened fascination.

"It does not need wit. What one of you would have to do by craft, it will do by instinct, for lack of a better word. It is terrible in its implacability. It will follow its quarry wherever he goes, in whatever world, without pausing to rest and without a single qualm or hesitation. It does not think, not as you and I do, but it does not need to. It will take new bodies as it needs them to pursue its quarry, so it will never grow weary. Eventually — inevitably — it will find him and cleave to him, and then it will bring him to us. Clutched in its grip, the one you want will tell you anything, do anything, give up anything he has, just to be free of this hungry, gnawing thing."

"Ah. I see." Hellebore nodded. "It is very good."

"It is… horrible," said Lord Foxglove.

"It is both," said the Remover. "In all the spheres there are only a few perfect things. This is one of them."

When the three lords left the warehouse room, they found the two ogre bodyguards halfway down the corridor, staring up at the ceiling with mouths slack and arms dangling uselessly. Their legs worked just well enough for them to plod after their masters, but it was only when the black coach's doors had thumped shut and the horse-faced chauffeur had laboriously turned it around and driven it back out of the narrow street toward the freeway that the bodyguards began to blink their eyes and mumble. By the time the long black limousine passed out of the waterfront district they could talk again, but the huge gray creatures still could not remember anything that had happened to them while they waited in the hall.

5 BOOK

"But, hey, you'll be getting some money from the house, right? You could buy your own PA system."

"I don't know. I don't think so — not right now."

"I'm serious, man. What they did sucked. I'd quit tomorrow if you wanted me to. We could find some other musicians, no problem. Guitar players, man, they grow on trees. The world is full of skinny guys who sat in their rooms all through high school learning to play every Van Halen solo."

Theo couldn't help smiling, even though Johnny couldn't see him. "Yeah, just what I need. Hook up with another worshiper of the extended guitar break."

"Whatever, man. Hell, we could get a keyboard guy, instead. We could play anything. You used to write some cool tunes, Theo. And lyrics, too — remember that thing you wrote about your father was a storm, or lightning, something like that? You should start writing again — you were wasted with the Clouds, anyway. You need to get back to your roots, dude. When I first met you, I used to think, 'Man, this guy's definitely going somewhere,' and I just wanted to hang onto you 'til you got there. You could be that guy again."

"What is this, National Theo's-Over-the-Hill-Month or something?" Cat had said something like it, too. Potential. A great word for people to use about you when you were twenty, an embarrassment when you hit thirty.

"What are you talking about, man? I'm just saying that you got tons of talent, Thee. You need to use it."

It was hard to talk. It had been good to hear Johnny's voice, to get past the stumbling apologies and into areas in which they were both comfortable (like what an asshole Kris Rolle was), but now he was tired. He hadn't been talking much lately and he was out of practice.

"I don't know, John-O. Maybe. Maybe later on. Right now I don't feel much like playing music, anything like that. You keep playing with the Clouds boys. Kris is pretty talented, really, even though I can't stand the skinny little bastard. Maybe you really will get a record deal. Don't give that up for me."

"But you're my friend, man!"

That caught him short. It took a moment to move forward, to continue letting go. "Thanks. Really. You're my friend too, John, don't ever doubt it. I'm just not going to be very good at friendship stuff for a little while. I'm… I don't know, I'm just out of juice. My batteries are empty."

"So what are you going to do, now that… ? I mean, you gonna go back to Khasigian's?"

"Not right now. I'm going to sell the house, take a little time. You know that old joke — 'Death is life's way of telling you to slow down'? Well, it works best when you're the one that dies, but I found out it pretty much works no matter what." He hesitated, unwilling to wander too far out into the things he had been thinking about. It wasn't really the kind of shit his friend wanted to hear, or would even understand. "I'm just not ready to be in the world right now, Johnny. Give me some time, I'll be back."

"You better, or I'll come over and kick your ass."

When he was off the phone he took a deep breath, stared hard at the pile of real estate forms on the dining room table, and decided that it really wasn't too early for a second beer after all. You could pour things into an emptiness like this all day but it would never fill up.

Hey, I'm doing paperwork, selling property, right? That means I'm employed. I'm just lucky enough to have a boss who allows me to drink in the afternoon.

He emptied half the beer in the first few swallows, then rubbed the cool bottle against his forehead, wanting everything to soften up, to get smooth and simple. Sure, he was drinking too much, but give a guy a break. He'd lost his girlfriend, their baby, and now his mother, all in a few months. Not a therapist in the world would fault him. And if he bumped into one who would, well, he'd smack him in the mouth.

Shit. He stared bleakly at the forms, at the boxes of his mother's carefully ordered papers. The house was oppressing him, everything staying just where he left it each day because no one else lived there. All the clean, desolate surfaces, the empty rooms, his mother's things already stuffed into boxes and moved out to the garage because it was just too damn depressing to look at them any more. But yesterday the real estate lady had been in two or three times with clients, and seemed in her horrifyingly chipper way to think that she had a few serious buyers already.

Thank God for a strong housing market. The faster it sold, the less time he'd have to live there.

He finished off the beer, contemplated briefly getting two or three more out of the fridge and just cashing in the afternoon in front of some stupid television movie — not that he'd find anything decent, because his mom had never bothered to get cable, but that wasn't the point, was it? The point was to blot out the long hours, to smear the transition into evening, when he would have the excuse of going out to get dinner somewhere; then he could come back and safely, responsibly drink a few more beers like any normal householder, fall asleep watching the late news, and not have to think until the morning sun was blazing through the windows again.

Something gurgled in his throat. It took a moment before he realized it was a scream bottled in his innards, a blast of misery trying to force its way out. He felt a chill across his hot skin, like the first signs of a bad flu.

What am I doing? I don't belong here.

He forced himself to get up and go to the table, staggering a little as he went — had it been four beers already, or just three? He sat in front of the boxes and spread papers, the tidy big blue envelopes from the realtor, his mother's address book and card files, but he found he couldn't move. The light suddenly seemed wrong even with all the drapes pulled, as though the entire house had been lifted out of the warm but unexceptional Northern California sunshine and dropped down onto the boiling surface of the planet Mercury. Worst of all, he felt something else staring out through his eyes, as though like a television image gone out of sync there was suddenly more than one Theo. It was the dream, the terrible dream that came to him so often, but he was awake. The alien presence was just… there, no thoughts he could share, nothing but a vague, oppressive sense of connection.

Whatever the other Theo was, though, he didn't like it at all. It felt horribly cold, this phantom self, even in the midst of the heat that scorched his brain, cold as a nugget of ice dancing in the tail of a comet.

What, am I having a… a stroke or something? Oh, God, please, no…

His thoughts fizzed for a moment like a string of dud firecrackers, then the twist of strangeness suddenly loosened, leaving only the normal bleak light of a warm, shuttered living room and a single thought that remained echoing in his brain.

Dead. They're all dead.

He put his head down and waited until he felt like himself again, one single self. It was just a sort of fainting spell, coupled with depression. They weren't all dead, of course. Catherine was still very much alive, alive and dating someone else. And Johnny — shit, Johnny was immortal.

Don't even think it. Don't jinx him like you jinxed the baby…

Theo pushed the beer and also that terrible thought away, but when he tried to concentrate on the real estate papers again it was hopeless, like trying to read the grain of a piece of wood. Lender's details, fire insurance, contents insurance, title insurance. Hours of research. No way he was going to manage it with his head in this kind of shape. He looked at his mother's box of personal papers, saw the edge of an envelope with blue and yellow flowers stenciled on it, and pulled it out.

It was a card, a kitschy illustration of a kitten playing with a ball of string while the mother cat watched contentedly. The printed verse inside read,

And here came the damn tears again.

He couldn't even remember giving it to her. From the writing he must have been about six or seven. What was surprising was that she had saved it — his mother, the queen of unsentimental pragmatism. What else was in there?

He took the box back to the couch and tipped it over. Most of what fell out were the kind of things he had expected to find in the carton, insurance policies, old bankbooks for saving accounts long closed — so why the hell was she hanging onto them, then? — and a few marginally weird things like a handbook for breast self-examination, hidden in its own little manila envelope as though it were pornography. But there were also a few letters to her from his father, one of which seemed to have been written in the Fifties, before they were married, while Peter Vilmos was still stationed in the Philippines and she was still in Chicago. Any hope that it might reveal his father's lusty, romantic younger self — the self a younger Theo had wanted to believe had been there before normal life had crushed it, but had never quite been able to believe in — disappeared quickly as he read it.

Dear Anna,

Well, it's been a few weeks so I thought I should write you again, since you said you wanted me to write. Life is pretty much the same. Jenrette, the guy in the next bunk, still snores like crazy. The food is pretty bad, but at least there's not much of it! (Joke) I hope you and your Mom and Dad are good, and that your Dad isn't still having so much trouble with being sick and missing work, like you wrote. We had to put together a supply hut the other day and I was in charge, which was harder than it sounds because it is really windy here, "blowing up a gale" most of the time, and the sheet metal wants to blow away and it is really heavy! But we got the hut built OK

…

There was another page just as inconsequential, and it was signed, not "Love," not "Passionately yours," but "Sincerely."

Had they slept together yet? Theo wondered. A stolen night or two at a motel, or in a school friend's room before he shipped out? It was frighteningly close to what he'd believed of his father at the worst moments — that he really was the kind of man who would send a letter signed, "Sincerely, Cpl. Peter Vilmos" to someone he'd seen naked.

His mother had kept a few other letters from his father, and some anniversary and birthday cards, but the old man hadn't gotten any more Casanova-ish as the years went by, although he did at least abandon "Sincerely" as the years went on, and even signed some of the later ones "Love, Pete."

Other than that, there was very little to show for a lifetime. More birthday cards from Theo, but notably absent once he had turned twelve or so, some letters from relatives and, to his surprise, more than a few clippings from local papers about his own youthful career. Here was one from the Peninsula Times-Tribune about his high-school production of Guys and Dolls, one paragraph marked with a highlighting pen:

"If some of the other leads were a little shaky in both vocal range and Runyonesque accents, the same cannot be said of Theodore Vilmos, who brought verve and energy and an astonishing strength of voice to the role of Sky Masterson, the big-time gambler with the heart of gold. Young Vilmos commanded the stage, and this reviewer would not be surprised some years up the road to hear that he is playing this role and others on Broadway…"

She had saved other things, too, more local write-ups about other plays and choral concerts where he had soloed, and even a review of a performance by his first band from Shredder, a semi-punky Eighties fanzine. He had wondered once or twice where that review had got to, and here it was.

"The lead singer is fucking hot, man, and I don't usually say that about boys, if you know what I mean. I haven't heard anyone sing like that since Bono and U2 broke, pretty angry and angry-pretty. I mean, if Eaten Young hang onto their singer, these guys are seriously commercial. I don't know if that's good or bad, but it's the truth…"

The fact that his mother had carefully censored the f-word with a black felt-tip, the fact that she would even have a magazine called Shredder hidden away in her drawer just because it mentioned his singing, almost made him start crying all over again. Who knew?

But the story's clear, isn't it? Johnny, Cat, even these reviews — I didn't take it where I should have. When did it all go sideways?

He was depressed now in a way he hadn't expected to be, not just about his mother's insignificant life, but his own. He put the reviews aside and riffled through the rest of the papers. His mother had saved a few random recipes, a couple of notes from Grandma Dowd — no letters, but then she had lived with Mom and Dad the last fifteen years of her life, so why would she send her daughter letters? The notes from his grandmother were so uninteresting on the surface — one seemed to be a request for Anna to pick up a prescription, the other a page torn off an insurance company letterhead notepad that said only, "Im sorry I forgot. Please remind me to look for it tomorrow. Mama." — that for a little while Theo wondered if they might, given some momentarily absent context, actually be important, might be revealed as clues to some larger family story. It was only as he leafed through the rest of the unedifying pile of paid bills and statements that he realized the reason Anna Dowd Vilmos had hung onto those meaningless notes was because she had nothing else of her own mother's to keep.

Goodnight Nobody.

For a moment the chill seemed about to return, but it was only a shiver of despair at the thought of two people, both dead now — three people, counting his father with his quonset-hut news bulletins — who had left so little behind to mark their existence, who had disappeared into death like stones thrown into a river, the ripples gone within moments.

Everybody starts out as somebody. Then it slips away.

He wanted another beer, now. He really wanted another beer.

As he piled the papers back into the box, something he had missed the first time tumbled out of the large brown envelope of holiday recipies into which it had fallen. It was another small greeting-card envelope, but strangely heavy. His mother's name and address were written on it in old-fashioned, somewhat cramped handwriting.

What slid out of the envelope was not a card but a folded letter. The surprising weight came from a bankbook and a small key taped to the bottom of the last page of the letter with yellowed cellophane tape. Theo's eye flicked to the ornate signature, which took him a moment to puzzle out.

Your obedient servant,

Eamonn Dowd

He was pretty certain that Eamonn Dowd was one of Grandma Dowd's brothers, although he couldn't remember much of what she'd said about any of them, since she'd left them all behind when she'd moved out to California.

It was a longish letter, at least by comparison to the others his mother had saved. The postmark gave its date as January of 1971, only a couple of years after Theo's own birth. He considered another beer, then changed his mind and made himself a cup of instant coffee as he worked his way through the somewhat spiky handwriting.

My dear niece,

You will doubtless have trouble remembering me, since we have not met since you were a very young girl, but now that your mother is gone you are the only family that I have left — the only true family, that is. Your mother, my sister Margaret, was the only one of that quarrelsome, blighted brood into which I was born for whom I felt fondness. If I saw little of her over the years, and even less of you, it is because my travels did not permit it, rather than any lack of good feeling.

Having known so little of me, you will doubtless find it strange when I say I owe you and the rest of your family a debt of shame that cannot be reduced or put right. I will not explain it — I could not do so in a letter, in any case — but I will say that it weighs heavily on me now, when I am about to set out on a journey from which there will be no returning. As a small gesture of good will and regret at having been such a poor uncle, I give to you and your husband and infant son what little I have left in the way of worldly property.

Sadly, there is no family manor or chest of jeweled heirlooms. There is instead a small bank account and a few personal papers and other odds and ends. The money is yours — it is not much, but it will perhaps one day help pay for an education for your son, or tide you over some of the lean times through which most lives pass.

Again, I am sorry, even though it means nothing to you now, and most likely never will. Among my effects you will find a book. Should you be so surfeited with leisure time that you decide to read it, please do not take it as the ravings of a disordered mind. It was an attempt at fiction of sorts, although not a successful one, I fear — a type of modern fairy tale that I hoped might find some small readership. But I could think of no effective ending. Now all endings seem one to me.

I wish you and your young family healthy and happy lives.

Theo narrowed his eyes, shook his head, then read the letter again. It did not seem to fit into the rest of his mother's keepsakes any better than it had the first time. In the midst of stultifying normality, it made an odd little space for itself — like something out of an O. Henry story.

The small key had to be for a safe-deposit box: that much seemed clear. The bankbook, its ruled lines full of careful little handwritten notations, was from something called Traveler's Bank, with an address on Duende Street here in San Francisco. He'd never heard of the street, but the smudgy, carbon-paper directions to the place suggested it must be somewhere in the area of Russian Hill. The account had totaled something near five thousand dollars — not a small amount thirty years ago, but not quite the life-changing bequest from a rich uncle that people dreamed about. It had all been withdrawn a week or so after the date on the letter, and the emptied account seemed not to have been touched since. It was funny that his mother had never mentioned it, but not really out of character.

Theo now remembered that he had heard his grandmother talk about her brother Eamonn at least once or twice: she had described him as "the handsome one in the family," but also said that he "never did put down roots," or words to that effect. But she had seemed fond of him, as his letter suggested. He also recalled her saying something like, "If only he'd put all that cleverness to work," about some close relative of hers, which he guessed now might be this Eamonn, "he'd have been a millionaire. But all that reading and such is no substitute for a bit of elbow grease."

Theo stared at the bankbook. What had happened to the man? Had he been sick when he wrote this? That "a journey from which there will be no returning" didn't sound very good. And what had he done to the family that he felt he had to apologize to Theo's mother, someone he seemed scarcely to have known?

The bank account was long empty, but where were the other papers the letter had mentioned? Theo knew he had more pertinent matters waiting for him, but this letter from his great-uncle was the first thing he had come across in ordering his mother's estate that wasn't simply depressing. After that weird turn he'd just taken, he very much wanted to be doing something, anything, that might take him outside into the fresh air.

And why is this key still here, anyway? It has to be a safe-deposit box. But even if it's at this whatever-it-is bank, this Traveler's place, it won't do me any good unless I know the box number. I suppose I could do it the legal way, show them it's part of my mom's estate and ask them to tell me the number, but that means I have to wait until it all goes through probate or some damn thing, doesn't it?

Irritated and weary at the thought, he picked at the edge of the stiff, ocher-tinted strip of tape that secured the key to the letter. The ancient cellophane parted from the paper on one side and the key swung out like a hinge, giving him a glimpse of ink. Behind it, so small that it had been hidden by the key itself, was the number "612" written in his great-uncle Eamonn's cramped, careful hand.

He found it on a strange little cross street halfway up a steep hill; it was one of those San Francisco Victorian houses so narrow that it was easy to walk past it without noticing the Traveler's Bank sign beside the doorbell. His first thought was that it was pretty strange to have a bank in a house, his second that someone must have kept the name but turned it into something else — one of those bijou restaurants people don't find unless a friend tells them about it, or a graphic arts studio. It was too small to be a modern bank, and on a street like this the walk-in business must be nonexistent.

There was a glass panel in the front door, but the lights seemed to be out inside and he could see nothing of what lay beyond. There was a speaker grille with a small button next to the bank's name, so he pushed it.

"Krrawk murrkagl mornt?" The small, nervous voice that gurgled back out of the grille might possibly have been human.

"Hello? I have a safe-deposit box here, I think?"

After a few moments, the door buzzed. He popped it open, found himself in a dark stair-lobby, and walked up the steps. The door on the first floor landing was open. A plump young woman with pale, straight hair stood there, waiting nervously. "Did you say you have safe-deposit?" She had a bit of an accent, perhaps Eastern European.

"Yes. It was part of my mother's estate, given to her by her uncle, a man named Dowd." He handed her the letter and the passbook. "You can see for yourself. He had a regular savings account here, too." He held up the key. "The box number is 612."

"Oh." She said it as though he had just informed her nuclear war would begin at any moment. "Oh, no."

"What?"

She shook her head. "Mr. Root, he is not here." But she turned and led him through the door.

If it was a bank lobby, it was the strangest, smallest one he'd ever seen. The whole room was about the size of a Victorian parlor, and similarly decorated. Pictures of stern-looking men in antique black suits hung on the wall, surrounded by dusty baroque frames; in such a cramped room they seemed almost to be leaning in on top of visitors. Four clocks showing different times were displayed in a row on the wall, but instead of the usual London, Tokyo, and other financial centers, the plaques beneath the old-fashioned faces read Glastonbury, Carcassone, Alexandria, and Persepolis. Was it a musty old joke of some kind? He'd heard of most of them, but he wasn't sure why anyone would care what time it was in any of those places. There were a few other pieces of office equipment, but none of them appeared to be a great deal more recent than the Age of Steam, except for some kind of huge teletype machine with a table all to itself near the back of the room, which looked like it might have been state of the art during the Second World War.

"Do you still have the safe-deposit boxes?"

She nodded eagerly. "Oh yes. In back rooms." She gestured at the rear wall and the door there, flanked by portraits of two frowning patriarchs.

"And when will this Mr. Rude be back?"

"No, Root — like tree, yes? But I don't know." Her pleasure at being able to confirm the existence of the boxes had dissolved, plunging her into anxiety once more. "He comes in not very much. Maybe Friday? Maybe Monday?"

Theo looked around again. A stuffed crow stood in a glass case just behind the room's front door. "And you're just here by yourself the rest of the time?"

Now her slightly bovine features took on a look of alarm. "Not alone. There are other people in other offices — next door, there is Pan-Pacific Novelties."

"I don't mean any harm, I just… it seems weird. I mean, this is a bank, right? I've never seen a bank that looked like this."

She shrugged. "Most of customers very old, I think. They don't come here. Used to be very busy, this place, but years are gone. Now most of banking done by telephone, by fax." She pointed first at the rotary-dial phone, then at the massive piece of machinery Theo had noticed earlier. "Mostly I just answer questions."

"Questions? Like… ?"

She flushed, and was suddenly a much prettier girl. "Like, is fax machine on?"

He felt guilty for giving her the third degree. It wasn't her fault she was working for a company that was probably a front for some bizarre offshore money-laundering scheme. "Sorry. Let me just get into the box and I'll let you get back to your work."

"Get into box?"

"Yes. You said they're in the back, right? The safety-deposit boxes?"

"But Mr. Root not here."

"I don't need a loan or anything. There's a box in there that originally belonged to my mother's uncle. It's mine now. I've got the letter where he gave it to her, and I've got a photocopy of her letter making me executor of her estate, and I've got the key to the box. That's how these things work." He started toward the door at the back of the cramped room. "Back here, right?"

She flapped her hands a little and looked at the heavy old dial phone as if considering calling her absent boss to come save her from this madman who actually wanted to use the Traveler's Bank as a bank.

Or maybe she's thinking about stunning me with that ten-pound bakelite receiver if I get any farther out of line.

If the front room was dark and old-fashioned, Theo thought that the back room made it look like a pop-art painting by comparison. The only light came from a nest of wires which had once underpinned a spherical paper shade, the naked bulb now exposed in their midst like a glowing sun at the center of a medieval orrery. There were shelves and shelves of long, narrow boxes, but most of them seemed to be the bank's records, cartons stuffed with three-by-five cards lettered by hand.

"Mr. Root, he wants to get someone to put all this in computer," the girl said apologetically.

Theo tried hard not to laugh at the thought of some poor bastard having to do the data entry for what looked like a perfectly preserved nineteenth-century fiscal institution. If this was not the back room for Scrooge and Marley, it was a damn good imitation. "Just show me the safe-deposit boxes, please."

The metal boxes had several shelves of their own near the back, with a strip of carpet and a very old swivel chair set up for the convenience of whatever Bob Cratchit had to work with them. Theo found 612, sat down with it in his lap, and wiggled the key back and forth several times without success. The problem was an old lock, not the wrong key: after a few more tries the key scraped past whatever grit had impeded it and the lock opened. Theo would not have been surprised to see a cloud of dust billow up out of the box, as though he had unsealed Tutankhamen's tomb.

Instead of gold or jewels — not that he'd been counting on either — he found only a leather-bound notebook.

He said good-bye to the flustered young woman and walked down the stairs, the fairy-tale reader in him half-expecting to discover that his dozen minutes inside had really been a dozen hours, that he would find the moon high in the sky and the nighttime neighborhood deserted, but outside the front door it was still prosaic afternoon. He stepped out of tiny Duende Street and headed back toward his motorcycle, the sun glaring flatly and the wind curling up the steep road, carrying the scent of the bay to him as it tugged at his hair and clothes.

He went to a Denny's to get an early dinner, and while he waited for his turkey sandwich he sugared his coffee and opened the notebook.

Eamonn Dowd's cramped script was easier to read now, either because Theo was becoming used to it or because the piece of writing he had labeled an attempt at fiction had been produced in less hurried circumstances than the letter he had sent to his niece. From the opening lines it read more like autobiography than a novel, but that was well within the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tradition that seemed to have been more comfortable for Dowd than something closer to his own era. Theo wondered when his great-uncle had been born, working back from Grandmother Dowd's death in the early 1980s. If he was one of her older brothers, especially by as much as fifteen years — not impossible in such a large family — he could have been born in the late 1890s, which would make his literary influences fairly reasonable.

The 1890s. By the time he read Hemingway for the first time, he would already have been at least as old as me.

It also meant that the "journey from which there would be no returning" he was referring to in 1971 probably meant his own natural death.

The sandwich and its little nest of french fries almost dropped out of the sky in front of him as the waiter hurried on to another table. Theo ate slowly, using only one hand so he could read.

I have always been restless,

the story began.

In an earlier century, in the country of my ancestors, I would have perhaps been one of the fishermen who ventured far down the coast into the strange, foreign lands of Wales and Cornwall, or perhaps, given a slightly different cast of mind, a priest carrying the Gospel out into the small, scattered islands of the Irish Sea. Instead, I was born into a world where even the farthest reaches of Asia seemed nearer and more available to me than County Cork would have been to one of my great-great-great grandfathers. I valued the advantages of this smaller world, but even as a child I did not love what the growth of knowledge and the shrinking of distance had done to banish Mystery.

Books were the sailing vessels of my childhood, taking me out of the wind-scraped streets of Chicago and carrying me away to Baghdad and Broceliande, to Sparta and Sherwood Forest. At times — for my childhood was not a particularly happy one, and not only because of poverty — it seemed to me that such places were far more real than the dull world of cobblestone and cement that surrounded me.

There must be finer worlds, I decided, and set my own course in life without realizing it. There must be more than the chilly shadows of our home on Calumet Avenue and the rattling of trains overhead, twice an hour.

Eamonn Dowd, or at least this perhaps entirely fictional version, ran away for the first time at age twelve, riding the hobo road as far as Denver before being caught by railroad police and sent back to Chicago, where his father beat him soundly but otherwise seemed to have little reaction to his eldest son's three-month escape.

When he was fifteen he got away again, this time making it all the way out to San Francisco where, by lying about his age, he connived his way onto a cargo ship heading for China. The First World War had not begun and the ports of the Pacific were dangerous, exciting places; the young Eamonn eventually decided that, happily, Mystery was not entirely dead. He watched as a Japanese sailor who had knocked down an old woman was beaten to death by a mob in Hangchow, and had his first sexual experience with a prostitute in Kowloon who was only a little older than himself, a girl named First Rain who had run away from her farming village in Shensi. Dowd (or in any case the book's identically named protagonist) lived with her for some months, but eventually his wanderlust claimed him again and he took passage back to the States by way of a ship that stopped in Hawaii.

By the time Dowd was marveling at his first hula dance — a much more sexually inspiring experience to a young man in the early part of the century than at its end — Theo had finished his sandwich and was on his second refill of coffee. Outside the restaurant, the cars had turned their lights on as the long summer afternoon dropped into evening.

He riffled through the close-filled pages, skimming. The narrator had joined the navy when the United States entered the war in 1916. A year later he wound up as a cook on the USS Oregon, but since it was primarily a training ship he didn't see combat — he didn't seem sorry to have missed it, either. Afterward he had tried to settle in San Francisco where the Oregon was based, was even briefly engaged to marry a girl named Lizzie O'Shaughnessy, a dockworker's daughter, but his urge to travel was not so easily stifled. After leaving the navy he also left town in the mid-1920s. Several of Lizzie's brothers threatened to kill him if he ever returned, but presumably only for disappointing her: Theo didn't think Dowd would have gotten away safely if he'd impregnated a nice Irish Catholic girl and refused to marry her. He joined the merchant marine, traveling to Europe and Africa and the Middle East, always with an eye open for the sort of intrigue that in his childhood had fired his romantic sensibilities, and having adventures of which Theo could not help envying even the least interesting, if they were actually real incidents.

Theo had finished his piece of coconut cream pie and was distractedly putting money onto the shiny tabletop, just about to close the notebook and head home, when the sentence at the end of one of the book's unnumbered chapters jumped out at him.

It was while I was on shore leave in India, my pockets rather more full than usual, that I stumbled across the book and the secrets that would forever change my life.

Theo wanted to keep reading, but had a nagging feeling he'd left the house's back door unlocked. He hadn't planned to be out so long. The lights were certainly off, since he had left in midafternoon — an invitation to thieves or vandals. Regretfully, he closed the notebook and walked out to his motorcycle in the parking lot.

Drinking himself to sleep with three or four beers was no longer as compelling an idea as it had been earlier in the day: he was enjoying, or at least interested by, his great-uncle's story. Theo propped himself up on the couch in a pool of light from a table lamp and left the rest of the lights off. For the first time he could appreciate the silence of the small house.

The narrative — which despite its picaresque incidents had been to this point so realistic that he had begun to consider the book clearly autobiographical, despite its author's assertions — now took a turn toward the decidedly strange. Eamonn Dowd wrote of finding a copy of an infamous but unnamed book in a flyblown bazaar in Harappa, a discovery he described as "so lucky as to make one think more than luck was involved." Whatever the book was, it awakened in the narrator an interest in unspecified places that, like the book, he knew by rumor but had never thought possible to achieve — "magic names," as he put it, reached only by "lost tracks and highways which have mostly faded from the memory of mankind."

As the story in the notebook got stranger, its descriptions also became more vague, so full of unspecific references to Eamonn's new fascination with "experiments" and "studies," as well as his growing interest in what he called "the Outer Lands" or "the Fields Beyond," that Theo found it increasingly difficult to maintain his interest in the rows and rows of close-set writing.

He yawned and looked up from a passage about "the Gate, beyond which is the antechamber of the City and its fields," and saw to his shock that it was after midnight. Despite the purposeful obscurity of the narrative, he had been reading on the couch for over three hours. No wonder he was tired.

He looked at the page where he had stopped, reading again the description of "a city beyond anything known, more alive than any metropolis of West or East, and more frightening."

And now, at last I had found the way, or thought I had. At the next darkness of the moon I would find out whether my years of study had been in vain. I would realize my heart's desire or I would find my hopes dashed to pieces…

Something moaned outside the house. Startled, Theo dropped the book. For a moment he thought it was a child crying, then relaxed at the realization that it must be a cat on the back fence, some neighborhood tom singing a song of territory disputed or love proclaimed.

Those noises they make, sometimes — creepy little bastards…

But as he found his place again and slipped an unopened utility bill into it as a bookmark, the noise continued, even grew louder. Theo's skin goose-pimpled and the hairs on the back of his neck seemed to stand up and quiver. It was the strangest sound he could remember hearing, a moan like something in terrible pain, but oddly detached, too, with an eerily keening edge — the sound of something that knows it is terribly, irremediably lost. It unnerved him, and when he discovered that the patio light had burned out, it was all he could do to fumble the flashlight out of the kitchen drawer and step out the back door, wishing for one of the only times in his life that he had a gun.

By the time he got outside the noise had stopped. He stood for a moment, holding his breath, wondering why what was almost certainly the yowl of a horny tomcat had his heart thumping like a rave-track drum machine. There was nothing but silence now — even the crickets had gone still — but he could not shake off the irrational feeling that something had reached out for him, something even more alien than the cold presence which had touched him earlier in the day.

Theo slid the beam of the flashlight along the back fence, across the dying flower beds he had again forgotten to water, and probed the undergrowth beneath the elm tree in the corner of the yard. No cat eyes reflecting. No sign of anything at all. He must be overreacting, he told himself, and it certainly seemed logical, even though he couldn't entirely make himself believe it. Whatever had made the noise had heard him coming and run away, simple as that.

But the memory of that hungry, mournful sound had not left him even half an hour later. Tired as he was, he could not fall asleep until he had got back out of bed and turned on the little light in the hallway bathroom, so that the door of his bedroom became a faintly glowing rectangle in the darkness, a gateway to some shining country beyond dream.

6 A CORRUPTION OF MOONLIGHT

"My name ain't no goddamn Stumpy," the lost man said, even though no one was listening.

He scooted even farther back into the corner, trying to get a little more of the dumpster between himself and the wind that was scratching around the mouth of the alley like a dog trying to dig under a fence.

"Ain't Stumpy. That ain't no proper name." He patted his pocket, hoping that he had just imagined finishing the bottle, but of course he hadn't imagined it. "Goddamn."

It wasn't right to take away a man's name. Bad enough when they sent him away to Viet goddamn Nam and took away both his legs and part of his arm, but at least back then they had called him by his right and true name, even put a rank in front of it, as if to stick him even more firmly into the world — Marine Private First Class James Macomber Eggles. The fellows in his platoon had also called him "Eagles" before a short round blew him back all the way from An Hoa to Stateside. "Eagles" may not have been written in his grandmama's Bible like his real name and all his brothers' and sisters' names, but he had still liked the sound of it. Even when he had first rolled back onto the street in his wheelchair, and some of the kids down by the courthouse lawn had started calling him Stumpy Jim just to see him get upset, at least they had still partly called him by his right name. Now they just called him Stumpy, and that made him angry, real angry. You could take away a man's legs and his arm, but you didn't take away his name. That wasn't right.

"Where's that cat?" He had made a friend, of a sort, a scrawny thing that happily gnawed on his leftovers and huddled next to him for warmth, but he hadn't seen it for two days. "Damn cat run off." It had been nice to have some companionship. He hoped it would come back.

It wasn't like he wanted so much. His cat back. A second sock to roll over the stub of his forearm, because it was going to get so goddamn cold when the winter came back and the stump always pained him so when the Hawk was blowing in from the lake. Someone to fix the skateboard wheels on his cart so he could roll himself up and down the sidewalk again properly and not have to drag himself around on a sliding mat of old cardboard. That was humiliating. He was a veteran — a goddamn Marine! He ought to at least have some goddamn wheels. It wasn't like he wanted much. And a bottle of brandy. Didn't have to be expensive, just a bottle of brandy that would go down his throat smooth and easy and make the other things stop hurting. He hadn't had any brandy since that man in the nice coat had given him half a bottle two Christmases ago, but he hadn't stopped thinking about it since. That stuff beat your bullshit cheapjack cough-syrup wine all to shit.

He scrabbled through his pile of possessions, looking for the new plastic sack he had found, nice thick plastic from some uptown clothing store, not some raggedy-ass grocery store bag already splitting at the seams before he'd even found it. He was going to chew a hole in this nice new bag to put his head through, wear it high on his neck to keep the cold off at night. He thought it might look like one of those collar-things the astronauts had, the rings that their helmets screwed into, and he wondered briefly what it would feel like to sleep winter nights in an astronaut suit, with a little window over his face he could close and keep in the warmth until the morning sun began to put a little heat back into the sidewalks.

Cat, sock, skateboard wheels, a bottle of brandy, and a goddamn astronaut suit…

Something moaned quietly deep in the clutter piled at the end of the alley. The man who had once been Private First Class James M. Eggles flinched.

"Cat? That you?" But it didn't sound like any cat. The noise was too big, too rough.

They threw a body in there, but the poor bastard ain't dead yet, was his next thought. The pile of rubbish rippled, bulged, then settled. The moan became louder.

Shit, no, it's just some goddamn junkie fall asleep puking in my alley. No respect.

He pushed himself upright with his good arm and waved his stump at the quivering pile of cardboard and shredded plastic packing. "You get out of there." His voice was a little more shaky than he would have liked. "This is where a decent person sleeps. This is my place." But what if it wasn't a shriveled, bony little junkie? What if it was something worse, some kid waking up crazy with a head full of angel dust, his arms and face scratched bloody from his own fingernails, his muscles knotted up like live snakes? Or what if it wasn't even a person? Maybe a big old dog, one of those pit bulls, got bit by a rat with rabies or something. Maybe it's going to come up out of that pile of junk with its mouth all foamy and its eyes all red…

"I got a knife, you know," he lied. Frightened, he still took a moment to add that to his mental list, right after the astronaut suit. "Don't make me cut you, hear? I don't want no trouble, but I'll give it to you free if you come looking!"

The thing stood up slowly, a corruption of moonlight, a tattered, flapping shadow come to life. At first he thought that he must be more sheltered by the Dumpster than he realized, that the lakeshore wind must be blowing real hard to plaster paper bags and fast-food wrappers all over the other man that way, so that you couldn't see even a bit of his skin or clothing.

The figure lurched a little and staggered a step toward him.

"Goddamn it!" he said shrilly. "Now, I told you about my knife! You stay back!"

But when it turned toward him — slowly, strangely, as though it had not heard a thing he had said, but had only now sensed him somehow, felt him or smelled him — he suddenly realized that it looked so strange because there was no body beneath the wrinkled, flapping assortment of bags and torn newspapers, no confused junkie face hidden behind the ragged clot of papers. The crumpled, grease-smeared mask was its face, the last face he was ever going to see.

His heart climbed right up his throat like an Otis elevator, choking off his air. He turned away to drag himself away up the alley toward the sidewalk, scrabbling toward the people who must be only a few dozen yards away on the warm summer-night streets, the corner-hangers, the would-be pimps. Even the worst of his tormentors surely wouldn't leave him to this! He tried to scream, but a weight heavy as cubic yards of graveyard dirt fell on him and shoved him down, then something smelling of rendered fat and old bones wrapped itself around his mouth and nose, clamping tighter and tighter until James Macomber Eggles at last gave up his own tired, reduced body and went shrieking soundlessly into the void.

It had waited so long to feel this strange but pleasurable sensation again. Aeons in that cold dark place, in that nothingness inhabited only by other presences like itself, battening on the flickering heat of its unfortunate neighbors (while avoiding those few whose emptiness was deeper and more powerful than its own) had all but wiped away what little consciousness it had once had. Now it was free once more.

But the freedom was not complete. A compulsion ran through it like a red scar: all its hunger, its chilly hatred of that which was warm and free, was centered around a dot of life that it could sense but not immediately reach — the theovilmos thing, the quarry. For a moment as it traveled to this plane, that quarry had almost seemed in reach, although the bodiless hunter had not been prepared to engage it. But such was the fierce fire of its hunger that for a moment the two of them had almost touched across incomprehensible distance. Then the irrha had been forced to let go, swept on to another point where the planes pressed closer together and it could more easily make its transition to the physical reality in which its quarry moved.

The disease spirit flexed its new limbs, extended its new senses. Warm life surrounded it — warm life and cold geometries of stone, mixed together. So long, it had been so long since it had touched this material plane, felt these particular and exquisite pains. The irrha tried to look out the eyes of the stolen body, but could not at first make them focus. Its own peculiar senses were still sharp, though. It could taste other living presences close by, things much like the creature whose body it now wore: they were moving and making noises just beyond the mouth of this enclosure, innocent as birds flying past a branch on which a leopard pretends to sleep.

It was time to begin the hunt, but the irrha hesitated. Something was wrong with this form it had usurped: it was somehow incomplete, the limbs foreshortened and unbalanced. The irrha had chosen this body because its owner had been close to the place where the irrha's crossing had ended, and because it had sensed the owner would not fight hard for it — the irrha had been depleted by its journey and in need of conserving strength, but it had turned out to be a pointless economy.

The hungry thing paused to make repairs. There was much hard, physical travel to do now that it had become a part of this plane of existence, and the body must hold up for a long journey. This stolen vehicle must also be strong enough to capture the theovilmos thing and to carry it away to the dark places, as had been ordained.

But perhaps, it thought in its wordless way, when the ones who had summoned the disease spirit were done with the theovilmos, they would let the irrha feed on it. That would be a very pleasurable hour, when hunger was at last filled.

7 WOODS

After such exhausting researches (and after so many failed attempts!) to behold at last that fabled metropolis standing before me, the teeming streets and the shining towers that so few men have seen, and fewer still have returned from, was to understand once and for all that Science is a sham and what we call "human knowledge" a compendium of evasions and half-truths. As I stared at this breathtaking vista, even without knowing what would happen to me — and perhaps the gods or Fate blessed me by that ignorance — I understood that my life had now changed so completely that all of the experience I had so eagerly sought, in so many unusual corners of the world and among so many odd people and situations, had served only as a brief, shadowy prelude to this moment…

It seemed like a good place to pause. Theo wrapped the book in a towel and then placed it carefully in his backpack, having decided it would be better to take it in the car than to risk it getting smashed up in a box among the rest of his things. Of the small stock of possessions he was moving to the cabin, it was the only thing that could not be replaced.

While his great-uncle's story had grown more and more unlikely, Theo's respect for it as a tale well-told had grown too. While it would never be classed as a great work of fiction, or even a particularly good one — the rhetoric tended toward the florid, for one thing, heavily influenced by the pulps Eamonn Dowd had read in his youth, and it also seemed far more like a travelogue than a novel, unimportant incidents often given the same weight and detail as far more meaningful events — he had to admit that it was a pretty good book of its sort. Despite the purposeful obfuscations (the "but of that I will not speak more" bullshit, as Theo thought of it) picked up from too much Lovecraft or whoever, the protagonist's unrelenting search for some way to reach the mysterious, magical city had been genuinely entertaining. Theo was interested to see whether the fictional city, now that the protagonist had found the arcane wisdom to make his way there, would live up to the buildup — in other words, would Great-Uncle Eamonn turn out to be a real writer or just an amateur trying to spice up his own interesting but unmagical recollections with things stolen from Weird Tales?

In fact, since he now had about two hundred thousand dollars from the sale of his mother's house stashed in the bank — a reassuringly boring bank on a main street, with lots of tellers inside and ATMs on the outside walls, nothing at all like Eamonn Dowd's choice of a financial institution — Theo could afford not only to finish reading the book at leisure, but also to toy with the idea of having it published. Even living in as expensive a place as the Bay Area, two hundred thousand would keep him going for a few years. He supposed he might use the money instead as a down payment on a house of his own, but then he'd need another source of income to get a home loan, and by itself the money left over after his mother's mortgages and other debts were paid off wasn't enough to buy anything bigger than a Boy Scout tent within driving distance of the city. No, better to rent, to live off at least some of the proceeds while he figured out how he was going to get his train wreck life off the siding and back onto the tracks again.

So since he had a little money, why not publish his great-uncle's book? It was unlikely a real publisher would want it, but surely a thousand dollars or so could get him a nice little print run from a vanity press. He could even dedicate it to his mother, give a few copies to local libraries. It wouldn't exactly rescue Anna Vilmos from obscurity, but it would be something.

He looked around her tidy, anonymous living room for the last time — her truest legacy, now about to pass into the hands of some young couple she'd never met. He owed her something, didn't he?

She said she never loved me properly. But did that mean he should feel bad, or be proud of her because she'd done as well as she could, proud of himself because he'd still turned out halfway decent? Maybe not a success, but not a criminal or a wife-beater, either. Mom had done her best. Maybe some people just shouldn't be parents, he thought.

That beckoned him down some unpleasant paths. He picked up the backpack instead and carried it out to his car and the rented trailer that held his motorcycle.

Good-bye, house. Can't say I'll miss you much. Now another family would move in — the Marshalls, or whatever their name had been — and begin their own lives here. It wasn't anything to do with him any more. It should feel different than this, shouldn't it? But then again, if there had been any real memories left here — any good ones, that was — it would. He had enough of his mother's final weeks to last a lifetime. It had been another excellent reason to sell the place, more compelling even than the money.

I never really felt at home even in the old house, he thought. Or when I lived with Cat. So what's wrong with me? He climbed behind the wheel and began to back the trailer down the driveway and out into the street, turning the wheel hard to avoid taking the fender off a pickup truck that some idiot had parked a full yard and a half away from the curb. Mrs. Kraley had come out to her fence to watch him go, the hose's spray making a rainbow in the air next to her impassive face. He waved to her cheerfully, just for old time's sake. She didn't disappoint him by waving back.

Theo drove slowly down Highway 280, and not only because of the awkwardness of the trailer behind his mother's small, underpowered car. It was a beautiful late summer day at the end of the millennium, after all, and he was tired of listening to himself bitch. It might be nice to savor the moment a bit, instead. Things were a bit bleak, sure, but if he looked at it the right way, he could decide he had finally reached that oh-so-elusive bottom and was about to start climbing back up. He would have felt more certain about it with an attractive, intelligent woman in the passenger seat, sharing his new start, but as Mick and Keith had so accurately stated, you couldn't always get what you wanted.

Fifteen miles south of San Francisco he saw the first watch-out-for-deer sign, a leaping black silhouette of a stag blazoned on the yellow diamond like a medieval coat of arms. It gave him a genuinely good feeling, even though he knew from friends that most of the people who lived in the Santa Cruz Mountains thought of their local deer as something like big rats, destroying gardens and trampling newly sodded lawns.

Theo didn't care. The idea of living somewhere that wild deer lived was exciting, and he certainly wasn't going to be planting a lawn. He turned up the car radio and punched buttons until he found something loud and thumpingly exultant, some piece of jolly stupidity from AC/DC. On his right, combs of fog curled across the mountaintop like white claws, wet air from the ocean turning to mist as it passed over the cold crest, but the sky above the freeway was cloudless and the road was vivid with sunshine.

It was funny how the day seemed to wither away as you drove up into the hills, as though the time was somehow different here in the grip of the mountains. The clock in the dashboard of his mother's Toyota said it was still only 3:30, and there were stretches of road where the sky flared bright blue overhead, but in the shadows of the trees it seemed almost twilight.

He had only been to the cabin once before, on the day the real estate agent had shown it to him, and the smaller roads on either side of Skyline were often poorly marked. He made the exact same mistake he had made coming for the first visit, mistaking one winding road for another, but recovered much more quickly this time — the first error had left him completely lost and he had been forced to call the agent and let her guide him back to the right road by cell phone, a process apparently as difficult as remote brain surgery.

He was over the top and onto the coast side of the mountains before four o'clock, although he was still far removed from any views of the ocean as he turned off a narrow, meandering road named Mariposa and onto the unmarked strip of alligatored asphalt that served as a private driveway for the cabin and two or three other houses scattered back in the woods among the redwoods, firs, and red-skinned manzanita. The sun was still above the tree line, but as he reached the end of the drive it was blocked by a tall stand of evergreens behind the cabin that left it and the bumpy, weed-cluttered yard plunged in shadow and for a moment made Theo regret his decision. He stopped the car and got out, stood listening to the silence, the flat, unanswered echo of the car door closing.

It's what you wanted, right? No distractions. A place to think about things, to put things back together.

The key was hung on a nail as the realtor had promised, tucked out of sight on the rickety fence that pointlessly separated the overgrown chaos of the cabin's front yard from the overgrown chaos of the back, a tangle of weeds and grasses on all sides that flowed smoothly away into the trees and continued largely unabated to the hillcrest and beyond — right out to the ocean, for all he knew. It was weird to have left his mother's trim, orderly neighborhood a short while ago and find himself here, with no neighbors he could see or even hear unless they took it on themselves to start shooting off machine guns in their backyards.

He'd heard there actually were people like that up here in the mountains. Theo could only hope it was more the exception than the rule. It had taken him nearly half an hour to drive from Skyline, the main road. How long would it take police or an ambulance to get here?

You wanted it, man. He could almost hear Johnny's voice. Shit, stop whining.

The inside of the cabin raised his spirits a little. It was small, really just one room plus a small bathroom and smaller closet, but as nicely appointed as he remembered it, with an efficient little kitchen area, a stone fireplace, and polished wood floors everywhere except the sunken, carpeted area in the center of the room. No television, and he doubted that the small one he had brought from his mother's would get much in the way of reception out here with its tiny little aerial, but if he really started to get desperate he could always get a satellite dish. He had a one-year lease, which meant he had plenty of time to figure out what he did and did not need, in lots of different ways.

The bed was on a platform raised more than head-high in one corner of the room, almost a little separate loft with its own built-in ladder, leaving room underneath it for a bookcase and a comfortable-looking armchair, both of which the absentee owner had preferred to leave in the cabin. Theo had been happy to accept. One of the large windows displayed a tangle of trees just outside and looked like it would get good sunshine during the middle of the day. He had a brief, cheerful vision of himself sitting there, reading Moby-Dick or something else he'd been promising himself he'd get to for years — what was that Pynchon book that Cat had kept bugging him about? Crying in Lot 49, something like that? Hell, why not? He'd read that too. A couple of trips a week down to the flats to get groceries, occasional stops at the bookstore. He'd read, play guitar, maybe get back to writing songs again like Johnny had suggested. Take long motorcycle rides through the hills, cruise down to the beach now and then or even up the coast all the way to San Francisco, just to fill up the culture tanks a bit. Take it all real slow. Think about what he'd lost over the last few years and where he might find it again.

Feeling better, he started carrying boxes in from the car.

It has many names, this fabled metropolis — Avallone, Cibola, Tír na nOg, to mention but a few, and doubtless dozens more I never heard, because I spoke only the common language of the place (of which I shall say more later) although there are many other tongues also spoken there. I myself named it New Erewhon, after Samuel Butler's famous creation, but that was only a human conceit (as I suspect is true with the other names as well). Its inhabitants, and those who live in the vast countryside that surrounds it, call it only "the City," because it is the only one, and dominates all around it as no earthly city ever could…

Theo was intrigued. This was the first direct admission in Eamonn Dowd's story that the mythical land of which he had said so much, and in such glowing but guarded terms, was not to be found in some removed but still terrestrial location, like Shangri La or El Dorado, but was all the way… out there.

Avallone. That's King Arthur or something, isn't it? But Arthur only went there after he died, sort of. So is that Road that Uncle Eamonn's always going on about supposed to be, like, just a metaphor or something? And the Last Gate, too? Some kind of magical passage to fairyland? I suppose I should have guessed, since they were always capitalized.

Before I speak of the inhabitants, I should tell more of New Erewhon itself, although no words — at least no words of mine — can ever truly describe its strangeness and beauty. It rises out of a ring of thickly wooded hills, a forest that surrounds the city like a moat. That great wood, which despite its spread can be circumnavigated far more quickly than it can be crossed, so deceptive are the distances beneath the trees, is called True Arden by some, but I have heard it called the Forest Sauvage and Oldheart and the Murkwood as well.

I did not know at first whether this meant that the multiplicity of names came from the different types of magical folk that inhabit the City and its surroundings, or whether the names came originally from earthly dreamers, who somehow influenced the land's true residents. In fact, the mechanism that allowed me to speak the common language is itself quite mysterious. After having spent much time there, and learned more than most thought I would, I suspect I know the answer, but will not spend the time here to publish my speculations because they are complicated and strange.

The City itself is formed in a huge spiral like a monstrous nautilus shell, but this makes it sound simpler than it really is. The coil is crisscrossed by thousands of alleys and side streets, and all the unplanned building over the years — for instance, all through the outer rings, especially in the Morning Sky and Sunrise districts, the goblins have simply affixed their crude houses and shops like termite nests to the walls of older and more refined structures, creating a maze of tiny alleys and one-way streets — has long since broken up any chance of an uninterrupted spiral passage from the outermost rim of the City to its innermost point, which was off-limits to one such as I, in any case. But the shape still exerts an influence: the most ordinary parts of the City (or at least, what to my mortal eyes were the most familiar-seeming) are on the outskirts. As one moves closer to the center, not only do wealth and power create an increasingly intense atmosphere of their own, but there is also a more subtle alteration, as though each step toward the heart of the metropolis is also a step into something not quite definable — a magical pressure, for lack of a better word. Inside the innermost districts the families are rich and mad, but even that does not explain the volatility of experience there. And in the City's shrouded heart (a piece of remaining forest referred to as the Grove or sometimes the Cathedral, where almost no one goes, and certainly an outsider like me is not welcome) it is reported that the warping of earthly time, which begins from the moment one passes the Last Gate, is at its most powerful, and is no longer simply different than earthly time, but becomes a more plastic medium altogether…

Theo shut the book. As though himself affected by his great-uncle's time-warpage idea, he was reading more slowly as the story grew stranger and stranger. A week in the cabin and he still hadn't looked at any other books, caught up in the puzzles and fascinating invention of Eamonn Dowd's creation. He hadn't spent as much time as he'd promised himself playing his guitar either. The days had been unexpectedly full, for one thing — despite the guarantees of the real estate agents that everything would be ready for him, it had taken him half the week and several calls to the owner's management company just to get the cabin's plumbing and electricity working properly, so the long leisurely stretches of nothing to do but read and think were still largely theoretical.

He also wasn't sleeping that well. The creepy dreams, especially the ones in which he felt he was someone other than himself, or rather that he was somehow sharing himself against his will, still kept coming back like a foul odor. They didn't show up every night, thank God, but often enough to make him wonder if he needed to think about Prozac or something.

All the luckier, then, that he had the matter of his great-uncle's book to help occupy his thoughts.

As far as he could make sense of it, the story's protagonist was definitely supposed to have traveled not just to some backwater place in the real world, but through some sort of magical barrier — a process described at great but unenlightening length, with even the few grudging bits of specificity couched in terms Theo did not understand, full of references to books or other writings and their authors which might be completely fictional as far as he could tell. Eamonn Dowd's invented world itself seemed to be in some ways a standard Fairyland, but it was neither the butterflies-and-flowers place of children's tales nor even the glamorous, perilous land of Celtic and Scandinavian mythology. Instead, from what Theo had read so far, it seemed like a bizarre mirror-version of the real world, albeit in a slightly old-fashioned way. Already there had been references to office buildings and railway lines. What kind of fairyland had railroads, for God's sake?

It was original, at least — he had to give his great-uncle credit for that. Maybe he really could find a legitimate publisher.

In some ways the City's organization is unsurprising. The powerful families tend to draw their less powerful supporters close, so that a given neighborhood might belong almost exclusively to the adherents of the Starwort or Marigold clans (to name just two of the lesser High Houses.) These neighborhoods have become virtually self-sufficient towns within the greater city, centered around the towers of the leading families. In a way, I suppose, it is a bit like Florence of the Quattrocento, where nearly everyone found his or her allegiance with one of the leading family tribes, the Pazzi, Albizzi, or Medici.

New Erewhon is by its very nature a dangerous place for a mortal, but oddly, I was able to find a niche for myself. The citizens are surprisingly tolerant, perhaps because they are themselves so various in form and constitution. (Although the leading families seem to have almost completely adopted the appearance of human beings — assuming that I have the process right-way-round!) Mortals have always found their way to that place, either by themselves or as fairy-pets, but travel between there and here has become much less frequent in recent years, almost nonexistent, so I was treated as a bit of a welcome rarity — even invited to the homes of many of the leading families.

When I was not a guest of the Flower Houses themselves, I found it possible to make a living in another unusual way. Because of the present rarity of mortal visitors and the infrequency of fairy-folk traveling to our world, things that once were in common supply within the City and its environs are now very hard to find — tears, for instance, since although the fairy-folk themselves do cry occasionally, they find the tears of a human being far more useful in many of their preparations (including those that we would think magical, although everything in that place is magical just by dint of where it takes place). In fact, when I learned about this specialty trade, I found myself regretting for the first time in my adult life that I was not a woman and, especially, not a virgin, because the tears and other excreta, hair, even the fingernails and dried skin of a mortal maiden fetch a very high price all over New Erewhon, either in barter or fairy-gold. Still, I did well enough: with the whiskers I trimmed from my beard and the tears I was able to wring from my eyes with the aid of onions obtained at the weekly market in Fernwater Row, I managed to secure myself a small but pleasant dwelling on carefully chosen neutral ground in a neighborhood near New Mound House, which is the site of the Fairies' Parliament and has long been a kind of sacred place, secure from the contendings of even the most rebellious houses. Later I moved to a larger place in the Forenoon district, but often missed the bustle of the City center.

I mentioned that the leading families all closely resemble human beings (although a man would have to be almost deaf and blind to mistake them for real humans). This may give my reader the idea that a walk through the winding streets of New Erewhon would be almost indistinguishable from a tour through one of the great cities of our own world. I will take a moment here to tell you why that is not the case.

First, the Flower families, with their semblance of humanity, are but a small part of the population. Even their house servants do not, except in the richest or most fashion-obsessed houses, look much like us. For one thing, the wings that the great families have somehow discarded or at least completely hidden are still to be seen on their servitors, shining behind their shoulders, translucent as the wings of dragonflies and shot with subtle color. (They are working appendages, too, although the larger fairies seldom fly.) And these servants are among the most apparently human of the other fairy classes — one of the reasons they are allowed into service. The population of the great city is staggeringly diverse, and a journey down Fernwater Row at twilight is more like entering a Hieronymous Bosch painting than any earthly stroll: on every side tiny sprites, boggarts, pookas, elegant wisp-maidens, even beetling goblins jostle one another, argue, shout their wares, and conduct the first steps of the dance of romantic attraction — and these are but a few out of hundreds of types, thousands of strange sights. Every time I believed I had seen the strangest, I was almost instantly proved wrong.

A single anecdote will illustrate this supremely well.

I was on my way back from a moon-brandy party in the fortress-house of the Stock clan, where I had been the guest of one of the young women of the family, who had introduced herself to me on a dare from some of her friends. Moon-brandy is a distillate of dew, taken at a certain phase of the moon, and from what I can remember is highly potent, creating a surplus of both amusement and lust in even the most staid creature. Here I might note that the sun and moon, as far as I could ever be certain, are the same sun and moon that climb above our mortal world, although as with everything else beyond the Last Gate, they seem more potent in that place, more present and more magical — especially the moon. Whether they truly are the same celestial orbs that mortals see, now reduced in our present day to a giant gas furnace in the one case, and in the other a cold round stone where men in diver's costumes may swing golf clubs and erect stiffened American flags, I cannot say. I am not sure I want to know. In the city I call New Erewhon, and in all of Faerie, sun and moon are what we humans so long thought them, the heavenly brother and sister who watch over us.

In any case, I was on my way home from Stock House by way of Weavers' Row, a place that seems perpetually under cloud, although that might merely be caused by the shadows of the much taller buildings that surround it. (In any case, the darkness is healthful for the spiders in their strange artificial forests, where they spin and spin so that the city's gentry may have this most elegant of silks for their clothing.) As I lingered for a moment to look in the illuminated front window of one of the shops, I was surprised by a cry from behind me, and turned to see young Caradenus Primrose staggering toward me. He was generally a serious young fellow as befitted the importance of his family, which was one of the Seven, but at that moment he was clearly suffering from the effects of moon-brandy. Two saucer-eyed kobolds were propping him up, one at each elbow. The squat little creatures seemed a bit worse for drink themselves, but evidently had a greater capacity than the youthful laird of Primrose House, who was having trouble explaining to me where he was going and why he so wanted me to go with him because he kept interrupting himself with snatches of song…

Something went snap outside the window. Theo flinched and turned to look out. Something dark was just disappearing around the corner of the cabin — the haunch of a deer, he was almost certain. He turned back to the book, but his concentration was broken. He leafed ahead a page or two. In his wordy, roundabout style, Great-Uncle Eamonn appeared to be working his way up to some kind of brothel scene, which might be interesting, but Theo had been reading for an hour already and he was feeling restless. He put the book down, not just out of impatience with his great-uncle's old-fashioned prose, but also because the tale, however fantastical, had given him a sudden pang of dissatisfaction with his own situation.

I mean, I'm obviously not going to make it to Fairyland, but think of all the other places he saw, real places — China, Africa. I've got some money now, I could really do something, but here I am sitting by myself in a little cabin, twenty miles from where I was born.

He took his helmet off the chair by the door and headed out for a ride.

Battered by wind, buoyed somewhat by the two beers he had drunk in a roadside tavern down near the bottom of the hills, and also by a conversation with the bartender about the man's boat and the problems he was having with it — it hadn't been particularly interesting, but at least he had been talking to a live human being, something he hadn't been doing much in the last few days — Theo low-geared up the steep driveway and found an unfamiliar car parked in front of the cabin. For a moment he thought that it might be Johnny come to visit in some borrowed ride, but the dark-haired man in a short-sleeved blue shirt and a tie was a stranger. He looked to be in his forties, and also like he might spend regular time at the gym.

"Are you Theo Vilmos?"

Theo nodded. "Can I help you?"

"Maybe so. I'd like to ask you a few questions, anyway." He pulled out his wallet and displayed a badge, a gesture so familiar from television and movies that for a long second Theo did not entirely take it in. "I'm Detective Kohler, from the San Francisco Police Department. Do you have a minute?"

"Sure." The two beers suddenly felt like more. He hoped he was standing up straight. "Come on in. You're a little out of your way, aren't you?"

"Didn't mind the ride. I have books on tape in the car." The police detective said it lightly, but he was watching Theo's face as the motorcycle helmet came off. Theo had a brief moment of paranoia as he led the man inside, wondering if that eighth of an ounce of weed Johnny had given him the last time at his mother's house was out in plain view, somewhere — he had run across it the other day, unpacking.

C'mon, he told himself. Don't be stupid. I'm a solid citizen now. I've got two hundred thousand dollars in the bank. Nobody's going to send some plainclothes guy all the way up here to look for a little dope.

What the hell was this about?

"Can I offer you anything? I'd say a beer, but you guys can't drink on duty, right? That's what they always say on TV. But maybe that's bullshit, too, like most of the other stuff on TV." He felt himself flush a little. He was babbling. "But I think I have a Coke or something. Coca-Cola." He moved his Gibson acoustic off one of the chairs and into its case. "Please, sit down."

The man shook his head. His smile didn't quite seem genuine. "No, thanks. I won't keep you long. Looks like you're pretty well moved in. How long have you been here?"

The cramp of paranoia returned. Why did this guy know anything about him? "About three weeks. Well, if you're sure you don't want anything to drink…"

"Bear with me, I'll make this as quick as possible. Just out of curiosity, Mr. Vilmos, where were you the night before last?"

Theo went through a moment of panic — where had he been? — before remembering. "I drove down to the coast for the evening. Wandered around on Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz. Had some dinner. I thought about seeing a movie, but I was tired." He had a sudden idea, pulled out his wallet. "I think I've probably got the receipt in here." He found it — a yellow credit card slip for an upscale diner called Jimmy Brazil — and handed it to the cop, who surveyed it briefly. "What's this about?"

"What time did you get home?"

Theo shrugged. "Not sure — probably sometime between eleven and twelve. Nobody saw me come in, if that's what you're asking." He tried a casual laugh, wondering how he could feel so guilty with nothing concrete to feel guilty about. "You can see that it's a little tough around here to know what your neighbors are doing."

The policeman nodded slowly, as if what Theo was saying had answered a question he had nursed for a long time. "I see."

"Look, I know you're just doing your job, but this is kind of freaking me out a little. Did someone get robbed around here or something?"

Detective Kohler held his eye for a long time. He had the sharp, unhurried gaze and thin mouth of an Old West gunfighter. The shirt and cheap slacks began to seem like a disguise. "How well do you know Dennis and Stephanie Marsh?"

Theo shook his head. "Sorry, can't help you. Who?"

"They bought your mother's house."

"Oh, Jesus, them! The name didn't ring a bell. How well do I know them? Not at all, really." He tried to remember if he'd ever actually seen them. It would have had to have been at one of the viewings at the house — all the sale papers had been signed at various real estate and title company offices, and buyers and seller had never been in at the same time. "Are they… is she kind of tall?" He vaguely remembered a woman with dark hair and long legs, the skirt on her business suit surprisingly short. If that was the right couple, he had thought Stephanie Marsh was a bit sexy, but he couldn't remember her husband at all.

"You didn't meet them?"

"Only if I was there when they came to see the house. The real estate agents took care of everything. I wasn't real sentimental about the house — my mother just died there, but I had never lived in the place before that, so it wasn't like I was all worried about making sure it was going to nice people or something, like they were adopting some puppies from me or something…" He stopped. Babbling again.

"And you haven't been back to the house since?"

"No, no. Like I said, it wasn't a real happy place for me. Why?"

The detective nodded, apparently lost in thoughts of his own. "They're dead," he said at last.

"What?"

"Dead. Murdered, maybe as part of a robbery that got out of control, maybe for some other reason."

"Jesus!" He stood for a moment, overwhelmed. "Jesus. In the house? In my mother's house?"

"Yes. Did you… did anything happen while you were still there that seemed suspicious to you? Prowlers? Strange people coming to the door, or hanging around the neighborhood?"

Theo could not help a moment's flashback to the moaning sound that had brought him out into the backyard, heart thumping. But what could a randy tomcat have to do with people getting killed? "No, nothing I can remember. Christ, is that when it happened? Night before last?"

"Yes, and fairly early in the evening, as far as we can tell, so if this receipt checks out you don't have anything to worry about. Do you mind if I keep it?"

Theo waved his hand, anxious to get rid of it, as though merely by being from the same night it was somehow tainted. "But why would you think I might have anything to do with… with that? Jesus."

"We don't think anything, Mr. Vilmos. We just have to ask questions, get ideas, try to get a feeling for what happened." The detective shuffled his feet a little, looked around. "I'll get going, let you get back to what you were doing."

"Doing? I wasn't doing anything, really…" Theo frowned. "Have you talked to the lady next door? To my mom's house?"

"Why?"

"Because she's the kind of, excuse the expression, nosy old bitch who was probably watching the new neighbors like a hawk. Mrs. Kraley, that's her name. She could probably tell you everybody who went in or out of there, to the minute. She probably writes it all down."

"The neighbors haven't had anything very useful to say so far, but I'll check with her again, based on your… characterization." His smile was a grim thing; Theo suddenly wondered how you could have a job like that without it burning away parts of you.

"Can you… what happened? I mean, how were they killed?"

Detective Kohler examined him again. "We're keeping the details to ourselves as long as we can. It makes it a lot easier to sort through the good and bad information as it comes to us. But I can tell you this — it wasn't pretty."

For long minutes after the policeman's car had rumbled away down the driveway, Theo could only pace back and forth across the cabin, unable to settle, his thoughts tumbling like windblown leaves. Why should the deaths of two people he didn't know bother him so much, people less real to him than the fictional characters of a daytime soap opera, connected to his own life only by one thread of coincidence — two people out of the thousands that died somewhere every hour? Why should these two distant deaths, however awful, give him such a feeling of morbid, fearful helplessness? Was it something to do with his mother's death, with his own lost, miserable hours in the house?

Whatever it was, he didn't like it. But that didn't make it go away.

8 RUNAWAY CAPACITOR

Findus Dogwood always thought of himself as a decent chap, unlike some of the other supervisors — that Barberry, just to name one, was sour as curdled milk — so when he was told that one of the capacitors from the day shift was feeling poorly and wouldn't work, he didn't send Saltgrass or one of the other foremen to beat the slacker out of the dormitory and onto the line, but put down his cup of saxifrage tea and went to go see for himself. He walked across the station briskly, just as if Lord Thornapple himself were sitting in the big main office looking down at him. It was actually possible he could be, although it would be the first time in several years the owner had made an appearance on the premises: Aulus Thornapple was one of the most important people in all Faerie, after all.

"What's the problem's name?" Dogwood asked Snowbell, the wizened block captain.

The old fellow, who had long since given up on a promotion to management, but still harbored hopes of a little something better in the way of his eventual pension, bobbed his woolly white head up and down. "Kind of you to ask, Mr. Dogwood, very kind. Nettle comma Streedy is what the boy's called."

"Metal Comets Greedy? What sort of name is that? Is he a goblin or somesuch?"

Snowbell's rheumy eyes grew wide. "No, sir. Sorry, sir. His name is Streedy Nettle, out of some farming village in Hazel."

"What's wrong with him?"

"Couldn't say, sir." Snowbell managed to make it clear that he didn't think anything much was wrong with the shirker at all. "He didn't sleep well — his bunkmates say he moaned and groaned all through the night. Then he didn't get up for breakfast." Snowbell sucked one of his remaining teeth. He was an urisk; like many cold-climate fairies, he had aged rapidly in the warmth of the City and looked two or three centuries older than he actually was. "Lovely bit of porridge, it was, too. Fool boy."

Dogwood nodded. "Yes, yes, I see. Well, then, you can go join your line… er…" He couldn't for the life of him remember the old urisk's name, so he substituted a quick, insincere compliment, which always seemed to work. "Good job, by the way. Appreciate your help."

Old Snowbell bobbed his head so quickly as he backed away that Dogwood feared it might fall off. "Thank you, sir. Always a pleasure, sir."

To Dogwood's irritation, the boy's pallet was at the room's far end, one of two hundred beds in this dormitory alone. The pallets lay lengthwise on the floor all across the barnlike dormitory, like a mouth too full of teeth.

"Here now, young fellow." Dogwood tried to put a comforting, cheery tone in his voice as he crossed the vast, echoing room — that kind of thing always made the little chaps feel better. Perhaps the fellow was just homesick. Nettle — a farm-country name, common as mustard. There must be half a hundred working in the station.

His first surprise was that this Nettle was not in the least a "little chap": the youth stretched out on the pallet was so slender his knees seemed wider than the rest of his legs, but he was also quite startlingly tall. Dogwood's second surprise was the look of something like pure fear in the pale boy's eyes.

"I hear you're feeling a bit under the weather this morning, eh?" Dogwood smiled to show he was not that other kind of foreman, the Barberry kind. "Out with some of the other young fellows, eh? A little trip to Madame Gentian's, perhaps, and a bit too much to drink? I've been there, lad. I wasn't always what you see now, with responsibility and all." Dogwood paused, narrowing his eyes. The boy was not responding as well as he'd hoped, which was a bit irksome. "Come now, lad, you know you can't stay in bed all day, right? We've a job to do, a very important job. The City needs us — all of Faerie needs us."

The boy stared at him, not aggressively, but as though he was having trouble focusing. "I… I don't feel well." It was a mumble, and the rustic Hazel accent made it almost unintelligible. "I think I should…" His sweaty, pale face became sweatier still as he realized he had almost made an unsolicited suggestion to a foreman.

"You'd be surprised how much better you'll feel if you just get up and do your job, lad. What are you? Bulk storage? Is this the storage dormitory?" The vast sleeping rooms all looked just the same, after all, which was as it should be. Wouldn't do to have rivalries inside the machinery.

"Capacitor, sir." A whisper. The boy really was extraordinarily pale, but some of the outland fellows were like that. There were other forests besides the ancient one that surrounded the City and in which this power plant nested, and some of the country lads hadn't ever been out of the trees and into the sun properly before they came to town.

"Ah, a capacitor! So you're a bit of a specialist, eh?" Findus Dogwood laughed encouragingly at his own joke, but the boy was too dense or distracted to join in. Dogwood frowned. "Come, now, you don't want to let your mates down, do you? If we're short a capacitor, there'll be just that much more work for the others."

The boy groaned. "But… truly I'm sorry, sir, but…"

"Here, do you know how much time I've spent with you already, son?" Supervisor Dogwood leaned close. It was time to show the boy a bit of hardwood. "A capacitor? There are others out there who'd spin sunwise twice and widdershins thrice to have your job, you know. And you'd still have to work off your indenture on the power line. Or perhaps you'd rather wind up laboring in Lord Thornapple's sewage filtration plant instead?"

The boy actually sat up, although he had to struggle to do so; for the first time his oversized wings uncurled behind him — they were big as sails! Dogwood looked away. No wonder his parents had been in a hurry to get rid of him. "But… that's a nixie job, sir… !" the young fellow began to protest, but a cough interrupted him. It continued for some time.

"You'd be surprised, Myrtle." He hesitated — the name didn't sound quite right — but the boy was still wheezing and hadn't heard him. "You'd be surprised what kind of work can be found for someone who's failed at a perfectly good position like this one." It was time to give him another flick of the thorns. A boy like this could go one way or the other, and Dogwood prided himself on having saved a number of young fellows from their own worst instincts. "Or what kind of treatment someone earns when they try to back out on their indenture. I'm going to head back to my office, now. When I get there, I expect to get a call from your foreman telling me that you're on the line. You tell him I said so. And if I don't… well, there are even worse places than the filtration plant, Myrtle. Lord Thornapple's quicksilver mines get a bit close, I'm told. Not the best place for someone with a cough like that."

He turned and strode out of the room with back straight and head high, as always. As he expected, the foreman called him soon after he returned, saying the boy had staggered out to take his place on the line. Findus Dogwood enjoyed a quiet moment's pleasure at this further proof that his velvet glove had again proved more efficacious than the old-fashioned, heavy-handed approach.

He had just started sketching out the short article on friendly discipline he had decided to write for the Darkwood Generation LPB management newsletter when he got another call from the same foreman. Then the lights went out.

Foxfire lanterns had been kindled everywhere, but they cast only a thin light and smelled like rotting wood, which didn't improve Dogwood's temper. He had begged upper management for the newer, cleaner emergency witchlights, but had they done anything about it? Without the huge overhead lighting fixtures, the floor of the station looked like a will-o'-the-wisp's Midsummer dance. In the flickering near-darkness Dogwood barked his knee on a wiring stool that someone had left in the middle of an aisle, and by the time he reached the site of the accident he was in an even fouler state of mind, if such a thing were possible.

"Why haven't we gone to backup power?" he shouted. "Why are all these workers standing about?"

"We'll be back on line in a moment, sir." Saltgrass turned and slapped a resistor, who was standing over the body with wide eyes and gaping mouth. "Get out of here, you — back to your group! We don't feed you and house you so you can stand around gawking."

The other line workers now began to drift back to their own spots, some shaking their heads. Certain that they were all in some absurd way holding him responsible, Dogwood did his best not to let it bother him. "What happened?"

"Hard to say, sir." Saltgrass was heavier and more muscular than most of his kind, which suggested there might be more than a bit of human blood in him somewhere — a "mayfly in the hive," as one crude phrase had it. "We powered up and took over for Unit Three. Everything was right where it was supposed to be, then all of a sudden the impedance went wild. It was Nettle, sir. I've never seen anything quite like it. For a moment, he looked like he'd taken fire — all green and blue, sparks flying around, like that. Then he just fell down. We hauled him out and I called you. That should have been the end of it — fourteen other capacitors just in this section, and they were all working fine — but a few minutes later all the circuit breakers tripped and Ob's your uncle, everything shuts down!"

Dogwood suppressed a scowl. Bloody Saltgrass seemed awfully cheerful about all this, as if the whole thing were no more than a schoolboy lark, the excuse for an afternoon off. Instead, there would be messages flying about this for weeks, and not a few of them would be coming right through Findus Dogwood's office like hornets.

Barberry. Why couldn't this have happened on that cursed Barberry's shift?

The supervisor looked down at young Streedy Nettle. The boy's limbs were still jerking, but they had slowed a little. His eyes were open, his strawlike hair curled tight to his head by the force of the generative magics that had briefly been contained within him, like a dammed river. Nettle's once-huge wings had curled and shriveled against his back like melted glass.

"What happened?" Dogwood asked him. "What did you do, you fool?"

The boy stared at him, eyelids fluttering, teeth chattering.

"He can't talk, sir," Saltgrass pointed out. "I've seen 'em taken like this. Lucky he wasn't turned into a cinder, or a frog, or worse."

One of the company doctors, a Bitterroot who had once been in private practice but had for some reason fallen on hard times, crouched down beside the boy and dangled a pendulum above his paper-white brow. "Not good," the doctor said, shaking his head. "I think we'll have to tell his parents to prepare themselves."

Dogwood grunted. The cursed boy had not only brought down the whole line, but now he was apparently going to die and thus create hours of tedious paperwork as well. "Get him out of here. And somebody find out why we're not back on line yet!"

It was three hours before the power was restored, and many if not most of Lord Thornapple's customers were affected. Offices went dark all over the Gloaming and Eventide districts. The trolleys did not run. Factories shut down. Delicate silk-spinning spiders died by the thousands when the heating charms in their artificial grottoes failed. It was fortunate, as it turned out, that the lord himself had not been visiting, as Dogwood had half-hoped that morning, but was instead far away on a hunting holiday in Birch. There would be time enough to blur the facts before he returned, and all of middle management would work at that assiduously. It wasn't as if there hadn't been other outages lately, for reasons having nothing to do with the power plant's native functions: they could make this incident look like another of those. With luck, no foremen or supervisors would be executed this time.

Still, Findus Dogwood no longer felt the moment was propitious for his planned article, and in fact the week might have gone down as one of his worst since he had accepted the supervisorial badge from Lord Thornapple's factor, but he was a little cheered the day after the failure when the block captain Snowbell informed him through the foreman Saltgrass that not only had the Nettle boy apparently survived the night, but he had recovered enough to run away. At first Dogwood suspected that the foremen themselves had arranged the disappearance — Saltgrass' lightheartedness had faded during the extra hours they were all forced to work by the blackout — but a little questioning convinced the supervisor that Saltgrass and his comrades were just as puzzled by Nettle's departure as everyone else.

The paperwork was much easier for Indentured Worker, Escape Of than for Indentured Worker, Death Of, and no crusading society matrons or charity organizations would be asking difficult questions, either. Instead of dealing with all the rigamarole of a fact-finding emissary from New Mound House, affixing blame and computing compensation before sending Saddened Letter #4 to the family, he could turn everything over to Lord Constable Monkshood's Runaways Office and let them deal with the problem.

Enlightened management styles certainly had their place, Dogwood decided as things finally began to return to normal around the plant, but next time he had a shirker on the line he thought he might just let Saltgrass beat the creature bloody and save his own precious time for more useful and elevated pursuits.

9 VISITORS

It was a beautiful day outside, sunlight streaming down through the redwoods and pooling on the ground, but the peace Theo had begun to find here had suddenly dissolved. He had awakened several times in the silent mountain night, once from the now-familiar dream of being a helpless prisoner in his own body, another time from an equally terrible dream of being chased across a muddy sea floor by some relentless thing like a huge lamprey, all idiot mouth and muscular tail. His sheets and underwear had been so sweat-soaked that for a shameful moment he thought the nightmare had made him piss himself.

Now, as he nursed a cup of coffee in the overgrown front yard, sitting in the weathered wooden folding chair he had found in his mother's garage which now served as his de facto porch, Theo still felt exposed, almost hunted. The deaths in his mother's house had somehow corrupted everything. He had planned to spend the day working on some songs, playing the guitar, but that didn't seem even slightly appealing now. He had to get out, that was all there was to it. He had been wanting to go down to the flats and use the library, look some things up. That would certainly be better than sitting by himself all day, jumping at noises.

He found his wallet and keys, then pulled on his leather jacket and checked to make sure the windows were latched. As he stood in the doorway, something seemed to flare just above the sink, a tiny point of light like a miniature nova. Theo stared, but it was already gone. He walked back into the cabin to make sure there wasn't an electrical fire starting, but all seemed normal.

Light coming through the glass and bouncing off the faucet or something. Like what those pilots used to see and thought were UFOs. Sundog, that's what it's called, right?

He shook his head and climbed onto his motorcycle. It took a couple of kicks to get the cold engine to rattle into life.

At the bottom of Mariposa, just before turning onto the main road, he saw something move in the undergrowth — not the velvet-brown of a deer, but something green, like a military duffel coat. He slowed a little but was already past it. When he looked back he couldn't see anything except branches and dappled light.

A hunter? But they wear orange, don't they? In any case, he didn't imagine that you were allowed to hunt around here, not legally. Maybe it was some kind of paramilitary weirdo, some antitax crusader stalking the hills in his fantasy uniform. There might even be a whole platoon of them in the area, out on maneuvers. The Santa Cruz Mountains were home to all kinds of odd sorts, folks who had come up in the Seventies to take a lot of acid and live with nature and had never found their way back down, folks who just didn't like cities, not to mention people who had scarily legitimate reasons not to be too high profile. Who could say — there were probably several generations of different kinds of weirdo living up here by now…

Come on, man. All this because you saw what? Some green? In the middle of the forest? You're losing it, baby.

He was lonely, he realized. There were more problems with solitude than just being horny and bored. If you didn't have anyone to talk to for days on end, you didn't have anyone to let you know whether you were going nuts or not.

The woman working behind the reference counter was pretty in a quiet, glasses-on-a-cord kind of way. She smiled at his nervous jokes while she showed him where the back issues of the Chronicle were, and how to work the microfiche machine. It was all he could do not to ask her out on the spot.

Why not try it? The worst she can say is no.

But it seemed for some reason as though it would be very difficult to be turned down today. Maybe he could come back later in the week, let her see that he was a quiet, serious sort of guy, then ask her. Still, he felt better just for being interested, for having something like that to think about.

He wanted to do some research on his great-uncle, but found himself drawn first to the murders at his mother's house. It wasn't hard to find information in the San Francisco Chronicle, since it was a scary and so far inexplicable murder in a quiet neighborhood. It had even made the front page the first day, although only a couple of paragraphs actually showed up below the fold, with most of the article buried deep in the front section.

The pictures of the unfortunate Marsh couple jogged his memory. They were younger than he had remembered, in their late twenties. She had been the pretty one with the short skirt, and now he remembered her husband, too, although the man hadn't said much, had mostly checked messages on his cell phone while the agent led them around. In fact, the only thing he really remembered anyone saying was the real estate agent talking about what a lovely "starter house" it would be. And apparently they had agreed, since he had their money in the bank right now.

Starter house. Ending house.

He pushed away the unpleasant thought, suddenly struck by something else. Was there some way the deal could be rescinded, by their parents or something? Who would own it now? They couldn't make him pay the money back, could they? It was a petty thought, perhaps, but the two hundred thousand wasn't petty to him, and it was already less than that because he'd put down the first and last on the cabin, not to mention other living expenses.

Nothing he could do now. Maybe he'd call the real estate company later, check with them.

The articles talked a lot about what the neighbors thought — Mrs. Kraley was even quoted as saying, "This neighborhood is going downhill. You just don't know what kind of people are around," which Theo took with a sort of sour pride as referring almost as much to himself as to the actual murderers. Of the killings themselves very little was said, except that they were characterized as "brutal" and "senseless." Mrs. Kraley, with a keen eye for what was really important, also complained that the murderer had apparently thrown garbage all over the lawn and front porch. The police had not offered any possible motive beyond robbery, but it didn't say in the article if anything had been stolen.

The newspapers had nothing more to offer, and Theo was beginning to feel like a bit of a ghoul. He moved over to the microfiche machine and decided he might as well see if they had anything about his great-uncle.

He found two newspaper articles, which was more success than he'd really expected. One seemed to be a character piece from the Examiner, written in the early Seventies, the other was Dowd's obituary. As Theo browsed through the longer piece, struggling a bit with the machine's white-on-black text, he was surprised by how sad he was to know that Eamonn Dowd was really dead. It would have been very surprising if he hadn't been — the article confirmed his earlier guess that Dowd had been born at the end of the nineteenth century, so he would have been over a hundred by now — but in the past weeks Theo had come to feel very closely connected to him. The article, which seemed to be little more than one of those interesting-local-old-person puff pieces, was accompanied by a picture of his great-uncle in what the caption called his "study," but because of the microfiche it was essentially a photographic negative and Theo could make little of it. Eamonn Dowd seemed to have been slender and dapper at the time the picture was taken, and perhaps a bit younger-looking than his seventy years of age would have suggested, but it was impossible to be sure about any of it.

The obituary had no photograph — Great-Uncle Eamonn hadn't been important enough for that. It was also terse. Theo wondered who'd written it, and why. Had it been a kind of guilt-gesture from his mother after receiving the money? She was mentioned.

Eamonn A. Dowd, 76

adventurer and world traveler

Eamonn Albert Dowd, who spent much of his early life traveling the world, and much of his later life sharing his stories with others, died April 30th at his home in San Francisco. He was 76.

Mr. Dowd, who contributed to travel magazines and the travel section of this newspaper, and also spoke at libraries and schools, first went to sea at age 15 and never lost his love of exotic places.

The obituary continued with an abbreviated version of what Great-Uncle Eamonn had described in the notebook, and ended with the information that he was survived by "his niece Anna Dowd Vilmos of San Francisco, and other family in the Chicago area."

Theo sat back, staring at the screen without really seeing it any more. "Anna Dowd Vilmos of San Francisco" — it made his mother sound like someone from a famous family, like one of the old Nob Hill socialite crowd or something.

So old Uncle Eamonn was definitely dead. The obituary didn't specify, but since he'd died at his home it must have been a stroke or heart attack or something.

Feeling a bit unsatisfied, although he should have been delighted to find anything at all — it wasn't like they really were a famous family or anything — Theo located an open computer and did some searching on the Internet. He wasn't hunting more information on his great-uncle, since there wasn't any, but on some of the more obscure things and places mentioned in the notebook. He lost himself for a while in the realm of online fairy information, land of both the scholarly and the stunningly credulous, but mostly just of dippy unicorn-poets with too much time on their hands.

When he pulled himself away from the computer at last he discovered that the woman at the reference desk had gone to lunch or gone home; in either case, she'd been replaced by a glowering man with a hearing aid, so asking her out was going to have to be a long-term process whether he wanted it to be or not.

He stopped for lunch at a café near a bookstore on the El Camino, purchased copies of Graves' The White Goddess, Grimm's Fairy Tales, and a book about the Beatles, then stopped at a mall and prowled around the L. L. Bean store. He bought himself a Coleman lantern and a good flashlight in case the power went out up on the hill, and briefly considered an expensive parka — it would get cold up there when the winter came — but it was impossible to manufacture enthusiasm in summery early September for buying an expensive, heavy parka. After all, he had his trusty leather jacket, companion on many an adventure. Well, on many an excursion, anyway, some of them embarrassingly stupid when you'd reached thirty and thought back on things.

Theo realized he was stalling. He stopped at a liquor store and bought a six-pack of Heineken, then rode back up the hill in a slanting afternoon glare.

He sat with the book across his lap and three beers under his belt, tired and still heavy with the sense of impending… not doom, that was too strong a word, but impending something. It was cold in the cabin, but he didn't have the energy to get up and turn on the heater. He lifted his motorcycle jacket off the floor and pulled it on.

He was losing patience with his great-uncle's book. The descriptions were interesting, even fascinating: whatever other faults Dowd might have had as a writer, he definitely had an imagination. But the tales of his life in the fairy-city were just as anecdotal and, ultimately, pointless as his stories of real-life adventure. The book was a strange and probably hopelessly uncommercial mixture of fantasy-without-adventure (not real adventure anyway, the kind the Dungeons-and-Dragons kids wanted) and authoritative traveler's guide to a place no one could ever actually visit.

He was only fifty or sixty close-written pages from the ending now, and found himself skipping ahead, distracted by thoughts of what other people would be doing on a beautiful Thursday night like this — getting ready to go out, see a movie, go to a bar. What if he had just asked out the woman at the library? She hadn't had a name tag, so he couldn't even construct an imaginary dialogue. What would someone like her be called? Eleanor? Elizabeth?

Just my luck, it's probably Catherine.

That stung. He turned his attention back to his great-uncle's neat handwriting. Not a tremor to be seen — it didn't seem like an old man's handwriting at all. He must have written it years before he died. It was hard to focus on it, though, with the afternoon dying and the world turning dark outside.

A thick, ragged line of ink ran right across the middle of a page. It followed a seemingly inconsequential sentence about a party at a gambling club where he had again met the young lord named Caradenus Something-or-Other, who had featured in the brothel story. There was nothing beneath the black line, although there were many pages left in the book, all of them blank.

No. Here, several pages from the end, leaping out at him from all that emptiness like black paint spilled on snow, was a last addition, also in his great-uncle's handwriting, but much less steady, the lines uneven on the page, the words large and hurried.

I have come to the end. I will never finish my story, because the ending is something I cannot face. I hoped where I should have had no hope and fell into shame and darkness because of it. I was sent forth and the way back is forever barred to me, beyond even desperation.

I thought I could tell it but it is too bleak. I have lost what few men could even dream of having because of my own hubris — that courage that even the gods abhor.

It had the stark look of a confession, or a hurried last will and testament.

Puzzled and disappointed, Theo leafed back over the pages that had led up to Dowd's abrupt abandonment of the notebook, but could see no suggestion of what might have stopped him. He decided to go back to where he had begun skipping and read more carefully, but it was a less enchanting process now that he knew the story would have no resolution. He tried as always to keep up with the minutiae of invented names and places, the intricacy of invention, but he was finishing the fourth beer now and his eyes were getting heavy. The sky had gone slate blue, the trees were shadows.

I really ought to get up and turn on a light… was his last conscious thought.

Apparently he had got up and managed to turn on the light before dozing off, because although the sky outside the window was black he could see the lines of the countertop in front of the sink and the curve of the faucet and the white face of the little microwave quite clearly, all bathed in a sort of shuddering yellow light. He felt stupid, like he'd been partying seriously, and not just with a few beers, either.

Gotta change that bulb, he thought.

But the glow was coming from the shelves beside the sink, not from any of the lamps in the room, an unsteady glare that grew brighter even as he stared.

Fire… ?

Even that thought could not spring him out of his chair — he felt as though someone had draped an invisible, weighted net over him. He stared at the gleam on the bottom shelf as it wriggled and pulsed, then died. Then, in the moment before the shining spot faded and the room dropped into darkness, he saw something that finally made him lurch up out of his seat. By the time he reached the light switch he had decided it had to have been a remnant of dream, and that four beers had been a few too many.

Oh, man, what have we learned here? Maybe that depressed people shouldn't drink…

But when the light came on, the woman was still sitting on the shelf. She was still about half a foot tall. She had wings.

"Shite and onions," she said, hugging herself, then dropped lightly down to the countertop beside the sink, translucent wings beating gently to slow her descent. Her feet and legs and arms were bare, the rest of her covered by a red dress that shimmered like butterfly scales. "That damn well hurt."

"Oh, Christ," Theo moaned. "What now?"

The tiny woman stared at him, frowning. She was terrifyingly solid, not a blur, not shadow. She had short carrot-colored hair — a bad color to go with a deep-red minidress, a heretofore unsuspected part of his own mind noted — and a heart-shaped face that was somehow a little too wide across the eyes and cheeks. She looked like the type who would have freckles, but if she did they were far too small to see. She didn't look happy, although he didn't know why she should be. He wasn't all that happy himself.

"This is a dream, isn't it?" he asked hopefully.

She bent to rub her knees, then straightened up. He could not get over how small she was. It was sort of like looking at a cute girl at the end of the block, except this one was in perfect focus and only a yard and a half away. "Well, if it's a dream, then I'm dreaming too, and I'm going to put in a request for a better one next time, 'cause this one is desperate. Now are you going to sit there staring like a gobshite or are you going to offer me a thimble of tea or something? I ache all bloody over from getting here."

"You… you're a fairy."

"That's one to you. And you're a mortal, so that's sorted. Now, I'm tired and I'm hurting and I'm afraid I'm in a bitch of a mood, so how about that tea?"

If this was a dream, what did it mean? It's one thing to fantasize about women, but women half a foot high? What does that say about your sense of self-esteem, Vilmos?

"Look," she said, and suddenly he could see that imaginary or not, she was definitely exhausted. "That tea? I'm not shy. I'd get it meself, but I'm not big enough to turn the knobs on your whatchamacallit here, your stove."

"Sorry." He walked toward the countertop, turned on the burner and put the kettle on it. She still didn't disappear. When the ring began to heat up she even extended her hands toward it, warming them. "So you really… really are a fairy," he said at last. "I'm not imagining it."

"I am. You're not."

"But… why do you talk like… like you're Irish?"

She rolled her eyes and blew a minute strand of hair off her face. "Thick, you are. We don't talk like the Irish — the Irish talk like us, more or less. Get it?"

"Oh."

The unreality of the situation began to seem a little less glaring, but no more explicable. The water boiled. The fairy fluttered her wings and lifted herself back half a foot to get out of the way of the steam. He fumbled two teabags and two cups out of the cupboard.

"By the Trees, fella, I'm not going to drink that much. Just pour me a bit of yours."

"Oh. Right." He put one cup and one teabag away, then set the tea to steeping. He didn't have a thimble, so he retrieved one of the Heineken caps from the pile on the bookshelf. "Is this okay?"

She sprang up and hovered beside him, wings beating swift as a hummingbird's. She sniffed the cap. "If you wash it out. I've nothing against beer, but I don't want it in me tea, thank you very much."

He sat down with his mug, lost in a roaring internal silence of utter dumbfoundment. The fairy kneeled on the counter, blowing on her capful of tea to cool it.

"I'm sorry if I haven't… haven't been a very polite host," he began.

"Don't worry," she said between sips. "They often get taken that way, your kind. It's the glamour, I expect."

"Are you… do you… What's your name?"

She gave him a look that did not seem entirely friendly. "What's yours?"

"You don't know?"

"Of course I bloody well know, you great eejit. But you have to tell me first, then I can tell you."

"Oh." He realized he'd been saying that a lot. "I'm Theo Vilmos."

"Fair play to you. My name is Applecore."

"Applecore?"

"Don't start."

"But I just…"

"Don't start, fella, or you'll be wearing the rest of this tea."

He stared at her, alarmed but also amused at the thought of being attacked by an angry fairy. Then again, maybe it wasn't funny — maybe she could turn him into something unpleasant, a toad or a pea under a mattress. At the very least, wouldn't she sour the milk or something?

Of course, the milk in my refrigerator's probably sour already.

"I didn't mean to offend you," he said out loud. "I was only surprised because… well, because I don't know anyone with a name like that."

She gave him a stern look, then softened somewhat. "It's not my fault. I was the last born."

"What do you mean?"

"We're a big family, the Apples. Got twenty-seven brothers and sisters, I have. Seed, Skin, Pie, Pip, Doll, Tart, Tree, Wood, Bark, Blossom, even Butter, just to name a few — all the good names were taken by the time I came along. 'The mistake,' Ma and Da always called me, but it was in good fun. But there was bugger all choice left for names."

"Ah." It wasn't very clever, but it was better than "Oh." A little. "So… so what brings you here? Not that you aren't welcome," he added hastily. "But we don't get many fairies around here."

"And with these prices, I'm not surprised." She showed him a weary smile, the first from her he'd seen. "Sorry. Old joke, that." She tilted her little head to look at him carefully. "You really don't know?"

"Is it something to do with my great-uncle's book?"

"Not that I've heard. The old fella who sent me didn't tell me much. Apparently he's not the only one interested, but… Someone's keeping an eye on you."

"Someone? Someone like who?"

"Shite, man, I don't know! But the old fella's worried about it, so he sent me to fetch you. Don't ask me, ask him."

"Old fella… ?"

She put down her tea and cocked her head as though listening for something.

"You said 'old fella.' What 'old fella'?"

"Tansy, his name is. He's a sort of doctor-fella from one of the important families."

"But who is he? Where is he?"

Applecore shook her head slowly, distracted. Suddenly, he thought he knew what she was noticing — a sharp stench, sourly rotten. "God, what is that?" he asked. "A skunk?"

"Something's outside."

He stared at her, slow to catch on, but his nervous system knew it before he did: his heart was already going triple-speed. "Outside… ?" The smell was painfully strong now. His eyes were beginning to water.

She was up and hovering, her wings blurred almost to invisibility, making the air hum like the propellor of a toy plane. She shouted something in a high clear voice, words in a language he did not recognize, then turned to him, clearly frightened despite the attempt to keep her tiny features hard and expressionless. "It'll take a little time to open again — who knew we'd need it so fast?"

"Open… ?" It seemed like he hadn't finished a sentence in hours.

Something bumped the front door, one, two, three times. Theo was so bewildered that he actually reached for the knob.

"By the Trees!" she shouted, buzzing up close to his face, fists clenched. "Are you completely thick? Don't open that!"

"But there's somebody there…" Something shoved the door again, hard enough to make it creak, as though a huge animal had leaned against it. The stink was even more powerful. He reached out and flicked on the outside light, then put his eye to the peephole.

He was actually relieved to see the green duffel coat in the glare of the porch bulb, the slouched but obviously human shape huddled against the door. He could see a matted tangle of curly hair, a sheen of dark-skinned scalp and forehead. Some old black guy, a transient…

"It's all right," he called to the fairy. "It's just…"

Then the figure's head lolled back. Its jaw was broken, dangling flat against its chest. The blind eyes were not just milky-white, but like poached eggs were beginning to collapse and run out of the sockets. Theo staggered away from the door, his heart frightened straight up into his mouth so that for a moment he could not even draw a breath.

Applecore buzzed to the peephole, then swam backward in the air. "Bad," she shrilled. "This is bad!"

"Wh… what… ?"

"You don't want to know. Where is that double-cursed door?"

He didn't know what she meant. It was pretty obvious the door was right there, and hell was on the other side of it. But this had to be another nightmare, all of it, however real it seemed — that was the only explanation. He was locked in sleep — maybe he was even comatose, dying, limp on the cabin floor with his mind showing weird movies like a projector running in an empty theater. There couldn't be anything in the real world like any of this…

But if she was part of a dream, Applecore did not know it. She sped around the room like a fly in a bottle, her tiny shape little more than a shadow. "It will get in the easiest way it can. If it has to break in, we may have time. Are there any other doors, man?"

She was on about doors again and Theo couldn't stand it anymore. He sank to a crouch on the floor and clutched his splitting head. The stench was terrible, as though the thing were right in the room with them…

"The bathroom," he said, dragging himself upright again. "Oh, Christ, I think the window's open. There's just a screen…" He lurched across the room and pulled the bathroom door open. His nostrils were scorched by a blast of ammonia and sulfur.

The thing in the duffel coat was pushing at the screen. Even as Theo watched in stunned disbelief, it began to come through, the rotting meat of its hand forced through the netting like hamburger through a grinder. It stopped, impeded by bone. The wormy strands of the fingers writhed and groped a little farther forward, then the screen ripped out of the frame.

Theo shrieked and stumbled back into the main room. The bulky shape came through the high bathroom window and fell to the floor with a complicated, wet noise, then dragged itself upright. Theo snatched up his guitar and held it by the neck, trying to keep his legs under him as the stinking thing shambled out into the light.

It wasn't even a rotting corpse. Nothing that simple.

It stood, swaying, a thing of stinking tatters. Bits of bone and rags and greasy flesh and even curls of newspaper protruded from the torn pants and coat. The left foot was bloody-ragged and moldering, but where its right foot should be two smaller feet seemed to have been smashed together as a makeshift, one of them still wearing a filthy woman's shoe. One of its hands had been mangled by the screen, but was already growing back together. The other arm, raised now beside the collapsed face, did not end in a hand at all, but in the mummified corpse of a cat. Its skeletal jaws opened and closed like clutching fingers as it extended toward him.

Theo screamed and swung his Gibson as hard as he could. Part of the thing's mouth and nose flew off and it staggered but it did not fall. Air rattled in the hole of its throat. The gaping, crooked jaw twitched, tried to close, but most of the muscles were gone. As the duffel coat gaped open he saw that a suppurating hole in its chest had been bandaged over with a shredded mask of flesh — something that had once been a human face. Theo felt himself growing dizzy, saw blackness close in on him.

Suddenly the fairy was there, a winged glimmer between him and the monstrosity. The room grew brighter, until it was full of flickering light. He could even see Applecore's face, hard as a cameo brooch.

"Go on!" she shrilled, then flew at the thing's head like an angry sparrow. It leaned away from her, hissing, and swung its arm. The cat-hand clacked, the teeth just failing to close on her. "It's open, the door's open! Go through!"

A smoldering glow hung just before the kitchen sink, a seam of dripping light like a zipper in the fabric of reality. He stared at it for a stupefied moment, then flung aside his broken guitar.

"Hurry up!" Applecore screamed, but Theo hesitated. Where did it lead? Anywhere would be better than here, now… but…

Suddenly, he knew. He bent to snatch up his great-uncle's book. "Come on!" he shouted at the fairy.

"Don't be daft — the passage's about to close," she cried, although she had little breath to spare. "Just go! I'll keep it busy!" For a moment she wheeled up above the thing's head, into the full glare of the phantom doorway or whatever it was, and he saw that the fairy magic she was wielding against the undead beast was Theo's own corkscrew, as big in her arms as a painter's ladder. She spun again and dove, jabbing the sharp point at the thing's ruined face. It flinched back, perhaps out of some forgotten reflex — there was not much there worth saving — but did not seem very alarmed.

Theo's heart felt as though it were about to explode out of the top of his head like a Polaris missile. He leaped toward the glowing seam and scrabbled at the opening with his fingers. It tingled strangely but did not burn. He turned for one last look. A rotting paw just missed grabbing Applecore, but tipped her wing and sent her spinning. She landed on the floor and crouched there for a moment with her head down, clearly stunned. The thing gave a kind of squelchy huff of triumph and staggered toward her. Theo threw himself onto his knees, scooped up the fairy just ahead of the reaching cat jaws, then turned and clambered across the floor toward the door made of light.

He fell through in a most ungraceful way, into nothingness, into a colorless void that crashed like ocean waves and sparkled like stars.