This anthology is both a best of my Whispers magazine and an original anthology (with original art as well). I welcome the opportunity to place between hardcovers the choicest tales that Whispers has produced and, additionally, create another new outlet for fantasy and horror material. This was my reason for concocting my journal in the first place, and I have succeeded far beyond the dreams any little magazine editor is entitled to have.

People refer to me as the editor of Whispers magazine, but I like to think of myself as an alchemist, selecting from my unwholesome stores the proper ingredients to conjure up an irresistible volume of fantasy, terror, and horror. Whispers is a true little magazine, dedicated to the task of stimulating new and quality additions to the art and literature of our genre. I would like to think that the World Fantasy Award I recently won told me the recipe for the publication has borne fruit. It seemed quite appropriate that the trophy signifying that achievement was a bust of Howard Phillips Lovecraft whose story �The Unnameable� created a fictitious horror magazine titled Whispers, an entity I magicked to unholy life. But even an alchemist must start from somewhere and early 1973 saw my witches� brew begin to bubble�.�.�.

Whispers began with the premise that the fantasy and horror field lacked adequate outlets to induce talented writers and artists to make efforts toward the field. I came to the conclusion that offering money for material was the best way to draw qualified people�s attention to the genre and, thankfully, this spell was the proper one. By the time the first issue of the magazine appeared in July 1973, I had purchased original material by Brian Lumley, Joseph Payne Brennan, L.�Sprague de Camp, Henry Hasse, Tim Kirk, Steve Fabian, Lee Brown Coye, and others, all of them noted talents who had created new gems for the field. Whispers was off to a great start.

Just as scary, though, as the terrors and horrors in the tales I published, were the incredible logistics of editing, publishing, and distributing a little magazine. Until one is actually forced to do it, it is difficult to comprehend the entire process of producing a �simple� magazine; it includes soliciting material, evaluating submissions, perfect typing for offset reproduction, paste-up, composition, proofreading, and the very careful packing of the irreplaceable manuscript for shipment to the printer. When that is accomplished, your immediate problem is selling the journal. There are many long hours of producing ads, addressing envelopes for direct mailings, and trying to sell your magazine to the seemingly uninterested dealers. When these tasks are accomplished and the magazine arrives back from the printer, it is time to mail out everything and perform all the physical tasks that entails. When I exhaustedly finished the first issue of Whispers, I paused briefly to rest, but then realized I was already behind on the next issue and began anew. Since that time, a dozen issues of Whispers have seen print, and I have yet to pause again.

While the magazine is basically a one-man operation, the eventual brew is the result of the efforts and talents of many people. Above all others, Dave Drake towers high. His professional expertise as a writer has made him invaluable as my assistant editor. Without his aid, the magazine just would not be as good. Other major ingredients in the Whispers concoction include: Don Grant, Lee Brown Coye, Willis Conover, Tim Kirk, Karl Edward Wagner, Fritz Leiber, Steve Fabian, Kirby McCauley, Manly Wade Wellman, and Dave Sutton. And let us not forget Dave Hartwell, Gahan Wilson, Jim Pitts, Alan Hunter, Hugh�B. Cave, Robert Bloch, Henry Hasse, David Campton, John Linton, Charles Collins, Jon Lellenberg, William Nolan, Vincent DiFate, and Frank Utpatel. All of these gentlemen made vital contributions to the magazine that were above and beyond their duty as a contributor or supporter. I would like to personally thank them all for adding their individual spells to the Whispers magic. They certainly made this alchemist�s job an easier one.

The lashed together framework of sticks jutted from a small cairn alongside the stream. Colin Leverett studied it in perplexment�half a dozen odd lengths of branch, wired together at cross angles for no fathomable purpose. It reminded him unpleasantly of some bizarre crucifix, and he wondered what might lie beneath the cairn.

It was the spring of 1942�the kind of day to make the War seem distant and unreal, although the draft notice waited on his desk. In a few days Leverett would lock his rural studio, wonder if he would see it again�be able to use its pens and brushes and carving tools when he did return. It was goodby to the woods and streams of upstate New York, too. No fly rods, no tramps through the countryside in Hitler�s Europe. No point in putting off fishing that troutstream he had driven past once, exploring back roads of the Otselic Valley.

Mann Brook�so it was marked on the old Geological Survey map�ran southeast of DeRuyter. The unfrequented country road crossed over a stone bridge old before the first horseless carriage, but Leverett�s Ford eased across and onto the shoulder. Taking fly rod and tackle, he included pocket flask and tied an iron skillet to his belt. He�d work his way downstream a few miles. By afternoon he�d lunch on fresh trout, maybe some bullfrog legs.

It was a fine clear stream, though difficult to fish as dense bushes hung out from the bank, broken with stretches of open water hard to work without being seen. But the trout rose boldly to his fly, and Leverett was in fine spirits.

From the bridge the valley along Mann Brook began as fairly open pasture, but half a mile downstream the land had fallen into disuse and was thick with second growth evergreens and scrub-apple trees. Another mile, and the scrub merged with dense forest, which continued unbroken. The land here, he had learned, had been taken over by the state many years back.

As Leverett followed the stream he noted the remains of an old rail-road embankment. No vestige of tracks or ties�only the embankment itself, overgrown with large trees. The artist rejoiced in the beautiful dry-wall culverts spanning the stream as it wound through the valley. To his mind it seemed eerie, this forgotten railroad running straight and true through virtual wilderness.

He could imagine an old wood-burner with its conical stack, steaming along through the valley dragging two or three wooden coaches. It must be a branch of the old Oswego Midland Rail Road, he decided, abandoned rather suddenly in the 1870s. Leverett, who had a memory for detail, knew of it from a story his grandfather told of riding the line in 1871 from Otselic to DeRuyter on his honeymoon. The engine had so labored up the steep grade over Crumb Hill that he got off to walk alongside. Probably that sharp grade was the reason for the line�s abandonment.

When he came across a scrap of board nailed to several sticks set into a stone wall, his darkest thought was that it might read �No Trespassing.� Curiously, though the board was weathered featureless, the nails seemed quite new. Leverett scarcely gave it much thought, until a short distance beyond he came upon another such contrivance. And another.

Now he scratched at the day�s stubble on his long jaw. This didn�t make sense. A prank? But on whom? A child�s game? No, the arrangement was far too sophisticated. As an artist, Leverett appreciated the craftsmanship of the work�the calculated angles and lengths, the designed intricacy of the maddeningly inexplicable devices. There was something distinctly uncomfortable about their effect.

Leverett reminded himself that he had come here to fish and continued downstream. But as he worked around a thicket he again stopped in puzzlement.

Here was a small open space with more of the stick lattices and an arrangement of flat stones laid out on the ground. The stones�likely taken from one of the many dry-wall culverts�made a pattern maybe twenty by fifteen feet, that at first glance resembled a ground plan for a house. Intrigued, Leverett quickly saw that this was not so. If the ground plan for anything, it would have to be for a small maze.

The bizarre lattice structures were all around. Sticks from trees and bits of board nailed together in fantastic array. They defied description; no two seemed alike. Some were only one or two sticks lashed together in parallel or at angles. Others were worked into complicated lattices of dozens of sticks and boards. One could have been a child�s tree house�it was built in three planes, but was so abstract and useless that it could be nothing more than an insane conglomeration of sticks and wire. Sometimes the contrivances were stuck in a pile of stones or a wall, maybe thrust into the railroad embankment or nailed to a tree.

It should have been ridiculous. It wasn�t. Instead it seemed somehow sinister�these utterly inexplicable, meticulously constructed stick lattices spread through a wilderness where only a tree-grown embankment or a forgotten stone wall gave evidence that man had ever passed through. Leverett forgot about trout and frog legs, instead dug into his pockets for a notebook and stub of pencil. Busily he began to sketch the more intricate structures. Perhaps someone could explain them; perhaps there was something to their insane complexity that warranted closer study for his own work.

Leverett was roughly two miles from the bridge when he came upon the ruins of a house. It was an unlovely colonial farmhouse, box-shaped and gambrel-roofed, fast falling into the ground. Windows were dark and empty; the chimneys on either end looked ready to topple. Rafters showed through open spaces in the roof, and the weathered boards of the walls had in places rotted away to reveal hewn timber beams. The foundation was stone and disproportionately massive. From the size of the unmortared stone blocks, its builder had intended the foundation to stand forever.

The house was nearly swallowed up by undergrowth and rampant lilac bushes, but Leverett could distinguish what had been a lawn with imposing shade trees. Farther back were gnarled and sickly apple trees and an overgrown garden where a few lost flowers still bloomed�wan and serpentine from years in the wild. The stick lattices were everywhere�the lawn, the trees, even the house were covered with the uncanny structures. They reminded Leverett of a hundred misshapen spider webs�grouped so closely together as to almost ensnare the entire house and clearing. Wondering, he sketched page on page of them, as he cautiously approached the abandoned house.

He wasn�t certain just what he expected to find inside. The aspect of the farmhouse was frankly menacing, standing as it did in gloomy desolation where the forest had devoured the works of man�where the only sign that man had been here in this century were these insanely wrought latticeworks of sticks and board. Some might have turned back at this point. Leverett, whose fascination for the macabre was evident in his art, instead was intrigued. He drew a rough sketch of the farmhouse and the grounds, overrun with the enigmatic devices, with thickets of hedges and distorted flowers. He regretted that it might be years before he could capture the eeriness of this place on scratchboard or canvas.

The door was off its hinges, and Leverett gingerly stepped within, hoping that the flooring remained sound enough to bear even his sparse frame. The afternoon sun pierced the empty windows, mottling the decaying floorboards with great blotches of light. Dust drifted in the sunlight. The house was empty�stripped of furnishings other than indistinct tangles of rubble mounded over with decay and the drifted leaves of many seasons.

Someone had been here, and recently. Someone who had literally covered the mildewed walls with diagrams of the mysterious lattice structures. The drawings were applied directly to the walls, crisscrossing the rotting wallpaper and crumbling plaster in bold black lines. Some of vertiginous complexity covered an entire wall like a mad mural. Others were small, only a few crossed lines, and reminded Leverett of cuneiform glyphics.

His pencil hurried over the pages of his notebook. Leverett noted with fascination that a number of the drawings were recognizable as schematics of lattices he had earlier sketched. Was this then the planning room for the madman or educated idiot who had built these structures? The gouges etched by the charcoal into the soft plaster appeared fresh�done days or months ago, perhaps.

A darkened doorway opened into the cellar. Were there drawings there as well? And what else? Leverett wondered if he should dare it. Except for streamers of light that crept through cracks in the flooring, the cellar was in darkness.

�Hello?� he called. �Anyone here?� It didn�t seem silly just then. These stick lattices hardly seemed the work of a rational mind. Leverett wasn�t enthusiastic with the prospect of encountering such a person in this dark cellar. It occurred to him that virtually anything might transpire here, and no one in the world of 1942 would ever know.

And that in itself was too great a fascination for one of Leverett�s temperament. Carefully he started down the cellar stairs. They were stone and thus solid, but treacherous with moss and debris.

The cellar was enormous�even more so in the darkness. Leverett reached the foot of the steps and paused for his eyes to adjust to the damp gloom. An earlier impression recurred to him. The cellar was too big for the house. Had another dwelling stood here originally�perhaps destroyed and rebuilt by one of lesser fortune? He examined the stonework. Here were great blocks of gneiss that might support a castle. On closer look they reminded him of a fortress�for the dry-wall technique was startlingly Mycenaean.

Like the house above, the cellar appeared to be empty, although without light Leverett could not be certain what the shadows hid. There seemed to be darker areas of shadow along sections of the foundation wall, suggesting openings to chambers beyond. Leverett began to feel uneasy in spite of himself.

There was something here�a large table-like bulk in the center of the cellar. Where a few ghosts of sunlight drifted down to touch its edges, it seemed to be of stone. Cautiously he crossed the stone paving to where it loomed�waist-high, maybe eight feet long and less wide. A roughly shaped slab of gneiss, he judged, and supported by pillars of unmortared stone. In the darkness he could only get a vague conception of the object. He ran his hand along the slab. It seemed to have a groove along its edge.

His groping fingers encountered fabric, something cold and leathery and yielding. Mildewed harness, he guessed in distaste.

Something closed on his wrist, set icy nails into his flesh.

Leverett screamed and lunged away with frantic strength. He was held fast, but the object on the stone slab pulled upward.

A sickly beam of sunlight came down to touch one end of the slab. It was enough. As Leverett struggled backward and the thing that held him heaved up from the stone table, its face passed through the beam of light.

Illustration by Stephen Fabian.

Playfully, Ulf Womanslayer twitched the cord bound to his saddlehorn. �Awake, priest? Soon you can get to work.�

�My work is saving souls, not being dragged into the wilderness by madmen,� Johann muttered under his breath. The other end of the cord was around his neck, not that of his horse. A trickle of blood oozed into his cassock from the reopened scab, but he was afraid to open the knot. Ulf might look back. Johann had already seen his captor go into berserk rage. Over the Northerner�s right shoulder rode his axe, a heavy hooked blade on a four-foot shaft. Ulf had swung it like a willow-wand when three Christian traders in Schleswig had seen the priest and tried to free him. The memory of the last man in three pieces as head and sword arm sprang from his spouting torso was still enough to roil Johann�s stomach.

�We�ll have a clear night with a moon, priest; a good night for our business.� Ulf stretched and laughed aloud, setting a raven on a fir knot to squawking back at him. The berserker was following a ridge line that divided wooded slopes with a spine too thin-soiled to bear trees. The flanking forest still loomed above the riders. In three days, now, Johann had seen no man but his captor, nor even a tendril of smoke from a lone cabin. Even the route they were taking to Parmavale was no mantrack but an accident of nature.

�So lonely,� the priest said aloud.

Ulf hunched hugely in his bearskin and replied, �You soft folk in the south, you live too close anyway. Is it your Christgod, do you think?�

�Hedeby�s a city,� the German priest protested, his fingers toying with his tom robe, �and my brother trades to Uppsala�.�.�. But why bring me to this manless waste?�

�Oh, there were men once, so the tale goes,� Ulf said. Here in the empty forest he was more willing for conversation than he had been the first few days of their ride north. �Few enough, and long enough ago. But there were farms in Parmavale, and a lordling of sorts who went a-viking against the Irish. But then the troll came and the men went, and there was nothing left to draw others. So they thought.�

�You Northerners believe in trolls, so my brother tells me,� said the priest.

�Aye, long before the gold I�d heard of the Parma troll,� the berserker agreed. �Ox broad and stronger than ten men, shaggy as a denned bear.�

�Like you,� Johann said, in a voice more normal than caution would have dictated.

Blood fury glared in Ulf�s eyes and he gave a savage jerk on the cord. �You�ll think me a troll, priestling, if you don�t do just as I say. I�ll drink your blood hot if you cross me.�

Johann, gagging, could not speak nor wished to.

With the miles the sky became a darker blue, the trees a blacker green. Ulf again broke the hoof-pummeled silence, saying, �No, I knew nothing of the gold until Thora told me.�

The priest coughed to clear his throat. �Thora is your wife?� he asked.

�Wife? Ho!� Ulf brayed, his raucous laughter ringing like a demons. �Wife? She was Hallstein�s wife, and I killed her with all her house about her! But before that, she told me of the troll�s horde, indeed she did. Would you hear that story?�

Johann nodded, his smile fixed. He was learning to recognize death as it bantered under the axehead.

�So,� the huge Northerner began. �There was a bonder, Hallstein Kari�s son, who followed the king to war but left his wife, that was Thora, behind to manage the stead. The first day I came by and took a sheep from the herdsman. I told him if he misliked it to send his master to me.�

�Why did you do that?� the fat priest asked in surprise.

�Why? Because I�m Ulf, because I wanted the sheep. A woman acting a man�s part, it�s unnatural anyway.�

�The next day I went back to Hallstein�s stead, and the flocks had already been driven in. I went into the garth around the buildings and called for the master to come out and fetch me a sheep.� The berserkers teeth ground audibly as he remembered. Johann saw his knuckles whiten on the axe helve and stiffened in terror.

�Ho!� Ulf shouted, bringing his left hand down on the shield slung at his horse�s flank. The copper boss rang like thunder in the clouds. �She came out,� Ulf grated, �and her hair was red. �All our sheep are penned,� says she, �but you�re in good time for the butchering.� And from out the hall came her three brothers and the men of the stead, ten in all. They were in full armor and their swords were in their hands. And they would have slain me, Ulf Otgeir�s son, me, at a woman�s word. Forced me to run from a woman!�

The berserker was snarling his words to the forest. Johann knew he watched a scene that had been played a score of times with only the trees to witness. The rage of disgrace burned in Ulf like pitch in a pine faggot, and his mind was lost to everything except the past.

�But I came back,� he continued, �in the darkness, when all feasted within the hall and drank their ale to victory. Behind the hall burned a log fire to roast a sheep. I killed the two there, and I thrust one of the logs half-burnt up under the eaves. Then at the door I waited until those within noticed the heat and Thora looked outside.

���Greetings, Thora,� I said. �You would not give me mutton, so I must roast men tonight.� She asked me for speech. I knew she was fey, so I listened to her. And she told me of the Parma lord and the treasure he brought back from Ireland, gold and gems. And she said it was cursed that a troll should guard it, and that I must have a mass priest, for the troll could not cross a Christian�s fire and I should slay him then.�

�Didn�t you spare her for that?� Johann quavered, more fearful of silence than he was of misspeaking.

�Spare her? No, nor any of her house,� Ulf thundered back. �She might better have asked the flames for mercy, as she knew. The fire was at her hair. I struck her, and never was a woman better made for an axe to bite�she cleft like a waxen doll, and I threw the pieces back. Her brothers came then, but one and one and one through the doorway, and I killed each in his turn. No more came. When the roof fell, I left them with the ash for a headstone and went my way to find a mass priest�to find you, priestling.� Ulf, restored to good humor by the climax of his own tale, tweaked the lead cord again.

Johann choked onto his horse�s neck, nauseated as much by the story as by the noose. At last he said, thick-voiced, �Why do you trust her tale if she knew you would kill her with it or not?�

�She was fey,� Ulf chuckled, as if that explained everything. �Who knows what a man will do when his death is upon him? Or a woman,� he added more thoughtfully.

They rode on in growing darkness. With no breath of wind to stir them, the trees stood as dead as the rocks underfoot.

�Will you know the place?� the German asked suddenly. �Shouldn�t we camp now and go on in the morning?�

�I�ll know it,� Ulf grunted. �We�re not far now�we�re going downhill, can�t you feel?� He tossed his bare haystack of hair, silvered into a false sheen of age by the moon. He continued, �The Parma lord sacked a dozen churches, so they say, and then one more with more of gold than the twelve besides, but also the curse. And he brought it back with him to Parma, and there it rests in his barrow, the troll guarding it. That I have on Thora�s word.�

�But she hated you!�

�She was fey.�

They were into the trees, and looking to either side Johann could see hill slopes rising away from them. They were in a valley, Parma or another. Scraps of wattle and daub, the remains of a house or garth fence, thrust up to the right. The firs that had grown through it were generations old. Johann�s stubbled tonsure crawled in the night air.

�She said there was a clearing,� the berserker muttered, more to himself than his companion. Johann�s horse stumbled. The priest clutched the cord reflexively as it tightened. When he looked up at his captor, he saw the huge Northerner fumbling at his shield�s fastenings. For the first time that evening, a breeze stirred. It stank of death.

�Others have been here before us,� said Ulf needlessly.

A row of skulls, at least a score of them, stared blank-eyed from atop stakes rammed through their spinal openings. To one, dried sinew still held the lower jaw in a ghastly rictus; the others had fallen away into the general scatter of bones whitening the ground. All of them were human or could have been. They were mixed with occasional glimmers of buttons and rust smears. The freshest of the grisly trophies was very old, perhaps decades old. Too old to explain the reek of decay.

Ulf wrapped his left fist around the twin handles of his shield. It was a heavy circle of linden wood, faced with leather. Its rim and central boss were of copper, and rivets of bronze and copper decorated the face in a serpent pattern.

�Good that the moon is full,� Ulf said, glancing at the bright orb still tangled in the fir branches. �I fight best in the moonlight. We�ll let her rise the rest of the way, I think.�

Johann was trembling. He joined his hands about his saddle horn to keep from falling off the horse. He knew Ulf might let him jerk and strangle there, even after dragging him across half the northlands. The humor of the idea might strike him. Johann�s rosary, his crucifix�everything he had brought from Germany or purchased in Schleswig save his robe�had been left behind in Hedeby when the berserker awakened him in his bed. Ulf had jerked a noose to near-lethal tautness and whispered that he needed a priest, that this one would do, but that there were others should this one prefer to feed crows. The disinterested bloodlust in Ulf�s tone had been more terrifying than the threat itself. Johann had followed in silence to the waiting horses. In despair, he wondered again if a quick death would not have been better than this lingering one that had ridden for weeks a mood away from him.

�It looks like a palisade for a house,� the priest said aloud in what he pretended was a normal voice.

�That�s right,� Ulf replied, giving his axe in exploratory heft that sent shivers of moonlight across the blade. �There was a hall here, a big one. Did it bum, do you think?� His knees sent his roan gelding forward in a shambling walk past the line of skulls. Johann followed of necessity.

�No, rotted away,� the berserker said, bending over to study the post holes.

�You said it had been deserted a long time,� the priest commented. His eyes were fixed straight forward. One of the skulls was level with his waist and close enough to bite him, could it turn on its stake.

�There was time for the house to fall in, the ground is damp,� Ulf agreed. �But the stakes, then, have been replaced. Our troll keeps his front fence new, priestling.�

Johann swallowed, said nothing.

Ulf gestured briefly. �Come on, you have to get your fire ready. I want it really holy.�

�But we don�t sacrifice with fires. I don�t know how��

�Then learn!� the berserker snarled with a vicious yank that drew blood and a gasp from the German. �I�ve seen how you Christ-shouters love to bless things. You�ll bless me a fire, that�s all. And if anything goes wrong and the troll spares you�I won�t, priestling. I�ll rive you apart if I have to come off a stake to do it.�

The horses walked slowly forward through brush and soggy rubble that had been a hall. The odor of decay grew stronger. The priest himself tried to ignore it, but his horse began to balk. The second time he was too slow with a heel to its ribs, and the cord nearly decapitated him. �Wait!� he wheezed. �Let me get down.�

Ulf looked back at him, flat-eyed. At last he gave a brief crow-peck nod and swung himself out of the saddle. He looped both sets of reins on a small fir. Then, while Johann dismounted clumsily, he loosed the cord from his saddle and took it in his axe hand. The men walked forward without speaking.

�There�.�.�.� Ulf breathed.

The barrow was only a black-mouthed swell in the ground, its size denied by its lack of features. Such trees as had tried to grow on it had been broken off short over a period of years. Some of the stumps had wasted into crumbling depressions, while from others the wood fibers still twisted raggedly. Only when Johann matched the trees on the other side of the tomb to those beside him did he realize the scale on which the barrow was built: its entrance tunnel would pass a man walking upright, even a man Ulf�s height.

�Lay your fire at the tunnel mouth,� the berserker said, his voice subdued. �He�ll be inside.�

�You�ll have to let me go��

�I�ll have to nothing!� Ulf was breathing hard. �We�ll go closer, you and I, and you�ll make a fire of the dead trees from the ground. Yes�.�.�.�

The Northerner slid forward in a pace that was cat soft and never left the ground a finger�s breadth. Strewn about them as if flung idly from the barrow mouth were scraps and gobbets of animals, the source of the fetid reek that filled the clearing. As his captor paused for a moment, Johann toed one of the bits over with his sandal. It was the hide and paws of something chisel-toothed, whether rabbit or other was impossible to say in the moonlight and state of decay. The skin was in tendrils, and the skull had been opened to empty the brains. Most of the other bits seemed of the same sort, little beasts, although a rank blotch on the mound�s slope could have been a wolf hide. Whatever killed and feasted here was not fastidious.

�He stays close to hunt,� Ulf rumbled. Then he added, �The long bones by the fence; they were cracked.�

�Umm?�

�For marrow.�

Quivering, the priest began gathering broken-off trees, none of them over a few feet high. They had been twisted off near the ground, save for a few whose roots lay bare in wizened fists. The crisp scales cut Johann�s hands. He did not mind the pain. Under his breath he was praying that God would punish him, would torture him, but at least would save him free of this horrid demon that had snatched him away.

�Pile it there,� Ulf directed, his axe head nodding toward the stone lip of the barrow. The entrance was corbelled out of heavy stones, then covered over with dirt and sods. Like the beast fragments around it, the opening was dead and stinking. Biting his tongue, Johann dumped his pile of brush and scurried back.

�There�s light back down there,� he whispered.

�Fire?�

�No, look�it�s pale, it�s moonlight. There�s a hole in the roof of the tomb.�

�Light for me to kill by,� Ulf said with a stark grin. He looked over the low fireset, then knelt. His steel sparked into a nest of dry moss. When the tinder was properly alight, he touched a pitchy faggot to it. He dropped his end of the cord. The torchlight glinted from his face, white and coarse-pored where the tangles of hair and beard did not cover it. �Bless the fire, mass-priest,� the berserker ordered in a quiet, terrible voice.

Stiff-featured and unblinking, Johann crossed the brushwood and said, �In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti, Amen.�

�Don�t light it yet,� Ulf said. He handed Johann the torch. �It may be,� the berserker added, �that you think to run if you get the chance. There is no Hell so deep that I will not come to get you from it.�

The priest nodded, white-lipped.

Ulf shrugged his shoulders to loosen his muscles and the bear hide that clothed them. Axe and shield rose and dipped like ships in a high sea.

�Ho! Troll! Barrow fouler! Corpse licker! Come and fight me, troll!�

There was no sound from the tomb.

Ulf�s eyes began to glaze. He slashed his axe twice across the empty air and shouted again, �Troll! I�ll spit on your corpse, I�ll lay with your dog mother. Come and fight me, troll, or I�ll wall you up like a rat with your filth!�

Johann stood frozen, oblivious even to the drop of pitch that sizzled on the web of his hand. The berserker bellowed again, wordlessly, gnashing at the rim of his shield so that the sound bubbled and boomed into the night.

And the tomb roared back to the challenge, a thunderous BAR BAR BAR even deeper than Ulf�s.

Berserk, the Northerner leaped the brush pile and ran down the tunnel, his axe thrust out in front of him to clear the stone arches.

The tunnel sloped for a dozen paces into a timber-vaulted chamber too broad to leap across. Moonlight spilled through a circular opening onto flags slimy with damp and liquescence. Ulf, maddened, chopped high at the light. The axe burred inanely beneath the timbers.

Swinging a pair of swords, the troll leapt at Ulf. It was the size of a bear, grizzled in the moonlight. Its eyes burned red.

�Hi!� shouted Ulf and blocked the first sword in a shower of sparks on his axehead. The second blade bit into the shield rim, shaving a hand�s length of copper and a curl of yellow linden from beneath it. Ulf thrust straight-armed, a blow that would have smashed like a battering ram had the troll not darted back. Both the combatants were shouting; their voices were dreadful in the circular chamber.

The troll jumped backward again. Ulf sprang toward him and only the song of the blades scissoring from either side warned him. The berserker threw himself down. The troll had leaped onto a rotting chest along the wall of the tomb and cut unexpectedly from above Ulf�s shield. The big man�s boots flew out from under him and he struck the floor on his back. His shield still covered his body.

The troll hurtled down splay-legged with a cry of triumph. Both bare feet slammed on Ulf�s shield. The troll was even heavier than Ulf. Shrieking, the berserker pistoned his shield arm upward. The monster flew off, smashing against the timbered ceiling and caroming down into another of the chests. The rotted wood exploded under the weight in a flash of shimmering gold. The berserker rolled to his feet and struck overarm in the same motion. His lunge carried the axehead too far, into the rock wall in a flower of blue sparks.

The troll was up. The two killers eyed each other, edging sideways in the dimness. Ulf�s right arm was numb to the shoulder. He did not realize it. The shaggy monster leaped with another double flashing and the axe moved too slowly to counter. Both edges spat chunks of linden as they withdrew. Ulf frowned, backed a step. His boot trod on a ewer that spun away from him. As he cried out, the troll grinned and hacked again like Death the Reaper. The shield-orb flattened as the top third of it split away. Ulf snarled and chopped at the troll�s knees. It leaped above the steel and cut left-handed, its blade nocking the shaft an inch from Ulf�s hand.

The berserker flung the useless remainder of his shield in the troll�s face and ran. Johann�s torch was an orange pulse in the triangular opening. Behind Ulf, a swordedge went sring! as it danced on the corbels. Ulf jumped the brush and whirled. �Now!� he cried to the priest, and Johann hurled his torch into the resin-jeweled wood.

The needles crackled up in the troll�s face like a net of orange silk. The flames bellied out at the creature�s rush but licked back caressingly over its mats of hair. The troll�s swords cut at the fire. A shower of coals spit and crackled and made the beast howl.

�Burn, dog-spew!� Ulf shouted. �Burn, fish-guts!�

The troll�s blades rang together, once and again. For a moment it stood, a hillock of stained gray, as broad as the tunnel arches. Then it strode forward into the white heart of the blaze. The fire bloomed up, its roar leaping over the troll�s shriek of agony. Ulf stepped forward. He held his axe with both hands. The flames sucked down from the motionless troll, and as they did the shimmering arc of the axehead chopped into the beast�s collarbone. One sword dropped and the left arm slumped loose.

The berserker�s axe was buried to the helve in the troll�s shoulder. The faggots were scattered, but the troll�s hair was burning all over its body. Ulf pulled at his axe. The troll staggered, moaning. Its remaining sword pointed down at the ground. Ulf yanked again at his weapon and it slurped free. A thick velvet curtain of blood followed it. Ulf raised his dripping axe for another blow, but the troll tilted toward the withdrawn weapon, leaning forward, a smouldering rock. The body hit the ground, then flopped so that it lay on its back. The right arm was flung out at an angle.

�It was a man,� Johann was whispering. He caught up a brand and held it close to the troll�s face. �Look, look!� he demanded excitedly. �It�s just an old man in a bearskin. Just a man.�

Ulf sagged over his axe as if it were a stake impaling him. His frame shuddered as he dragged air into it. Neither of the troll�s swords had touched him, but reaction had left him weak as one death-wounded. �Go in,� he wheezed. �Get a torch and lead me in.�

�But�.�.�. why�� the priest said in sudden fear. His eyes met the berserker�s and he swallowed back the rest of the protest. The torch threw highlights on the walls and flags as he trotted down the tunnel. Ulf�s boots were ominous behind him.

The central chamber was austerely simple and furnished only with the six chests lining the back of it. There was no corpse, nor even a slab for one. The floor was gelatinous with decades� accumulation of foulness. The skidding tracks left by the recent combat marked pavement long undisturbed. Only from the entrance to the chests was a path, black against the slime of decay, worn. It was toward the broken container and the objects which had spilled from it that the priest�s eyes had arrowed.

�Gold,� he murmured. Then, �Gold! There must�the others�in God�s name, there are five more and perhaps all of them��

�Gold,� Ulf grated terribly.

Johann ran to the nearest chest and opened it one-handed. The lid sagged wetly, but frequent use had kept it from swelling tight to the side panels. �Look at this crucifix!� the priest marvelled. �And the torque, it must weigh pounds. And Lord in heaven, this��

�Gold,� the berserker repeated.

Johann saw the axe as it started to swing. He was turning with a chalice ornamented in enamel and pink gold. It hung in the air as he darted for safety. His scream and the dull belling of the cup as the axe divided it were simultaneous, but the priest was clear and Ulf was off balance. The berserker backhanded with force enough to drive the peen of his axehead through a sapling. His strength was too great for his footing. His feet skidded, and this time his head rang on the wall of the tomb.

Groggy, the huge berserker staggered upright. The priest was a scurrying blur against the tunnel entrance. �Priest!� Ulf shouted at the empty moonlight. He thudded up the flags of the tunnel. �Priest!� he shouted again.

The clearing was empty except for the corpse. Nearby, Ulf heard his roan whicker. He started for it, then paused. The priest�he could still be hiding in the darkness. While Ulf searched for him, he could be rifling the barrow, carrying off the gold behind his back. �Gold,� Ulf said again. No one must take the gold. No one must ever find it unguarded.

�I�ll kill you!� he screamed into the night. �I�ll kill you all!�

He turned back to his barrow. At the entrance, still smoking, waited the body of what had been the troll.

My most literally tangible brush with the supernatural (something I can get incredibly infatuated with yet forever distrust profoundly, like a very beautiful and adroit call girl) occurred in connection with the rape by a masked intruder of the woman who lived in the next apartment to mine during my San Francisco years. I knew Evelyn Mayne only as a neighbor and I slept through the whole incident, including the arrival and departure of the police, though there came a point in the case when the police doubted both these assertions of mine.

The phrase �victim of rape� calls up certain stereotyped images: an attractive young woman going home alone late at night, enters a dark street, is grabbed�.�.�. or, a beautiful young suburban matron, mother of three, wakes after midnight, feels a nameless dread, is grabbed�.�.�. The truth is apt to be less romantic. Evelyn Mayne was 65, long divorced, neglected and thoroughly detested by her two daughters-in-law and only to a lesser degree by their husbands, lived on various programs of old age, medical and psychiatric assistance, was scrawny, gloomy, alcoholic, waspish, believed life was futile, and either overdosed on sleeping pills or else lightly cut her wrists three or four times a year.

Her assailant at least was somewhat more glamorous, in a sick way. The rapist was dressed all in rather close-fitting gray, hands covered by gray gloves, face obscured by a long shock of straight silver hair falling over it. And in the left hand, at first, a long knife that gleamed silver in the dimness.

And she wasn�t grabbed either, at first, but only commanded in a harsh whisper coming through the hair to lie quietly or be cut up.

When she was alone again at last, she silently waited something like the ten minutes she�d been warned to, thinking that at least she hadn�t been cut up, or else (who knows?) wishing she had been. Then she went next door (in the opposite direction to mine) and roused Marcia Everly, who was a buyer for a department store and about half her age. After the victim had been given a drink, they called the police and Evelyn Mayne�s psychiatrist and also her social worker, who knew her current doctor�s number (which she didn�t), but they couldn�t get hold of either of the last two. Marcia suggested waking me and Evelyn Mayne countered by suggesting they wake Mr.�Helpful, who has the next room beyond Marcia�s down the hall. Mr.�Helpful (otherwise nicknamed Baldy, I never remembered his real name) was someone I loathed because he was always prissily dancing around being neighborly and asking if there was something he could do�and because he was six foot four tall, while I am rather under average height.

Marcia Everly is also very tall, at least for a woman, but as it happens I do not loathe her in the least. Quite the opposite in fact.

But Evelyn Mayne said I wasn�t sympathetic, while Marcia (thank goodness!) loathed Mr.�Helpful as much as I do�she thought him a weirdo, along with half the other tenants in the building.

So they compromised by waking neither of us, and until the police came Evelyn Mayne simply kept telling the story of her rape over and over, rather mechanically, while Marcia listened dutifully and occupied her mind as to which of our crazy fellow-tenants was the best suspect�granting it hadn�t been done by an outsider, although that seemed likeliest. The three most colorful were the statuesque platinum-blonde drag queen on the third floor, the long-haired old weirdo on six who wore a cape and was supposed to be into witchcraft, and the tall, silver-haired, Nazi-looking lesbian on seven (assuming she wore a dildo for the occasion and was nuttier than a five-dollar fruit cake).

Ours really is a weird building, you see, and not just because its occupants, who sometimes seem as if they were all referred here by mental hospitals. No, it�s eerie in its own right. You see, several decades ago it was a hotel with all the rich, warm inner life that once implied: bevies of maids, who actually used the linen closets (empty now) on each floor and the round snap-capped outlets in the baseboards for a vacuum system (that hadn�t been operated for a generation) and the two dumb-waiters (their doors forever shut and painted over). In the old days there had been bellboys and an elevator operator and two night porters who�d carry up drinks and midnight snacks from a restaurant that never closed.

But they�re gone now, every last one of them, leaving the halls empty-feeling and very gloomy, and the stairwell an echoing void, and the lobby funereal, so that the mostly solitary tenants of today are apt to seem like ghosts, especially when you meet one coming silently around a turn in the corridor where the ceiling light�s burnt out.

Sometimes I think that, what with the smaller and smaller families and more and more people living alone, our whole modern world is getting like that.

The police finally arrived, two grave and solicitous young men making a good impression�especially a tall and stalwart (Marcia told me) Officer Hart. But when they first heard Evelyn Mayne�s story, they were quite skeptical (Marcia could tell, or thought she could, she told me). But they searched Evelyn�s room and poked around the fire escapes and listened to her story again, and then they radioed for a medical policewoman, who arrived with admirable speed and who decided after an examination that in all probability there�d been recent sex, which would be confirmed by analysis of some smears she�d taken from the victim and the sheets.

Officer Hart did two great things, Marcia said. He got hold of Evelyn Mayne�s social worker and told him he�d better get on over quick. And he got from him the phone number of her son who lived in the city and called him up and threw a scare into his wife and him about how they were the nearest of kin, God damn it, and had better start taking care of the abused and neglected lady.

Meanwhile the other cop had been listening to Evelyn Mayne, who was still telling it, and he asked her innocent questions, and had got her to admit that earlier that night she�d gone alone to a bar down the street (a rather rough place) and had one drink, or maybe three. Which made him wonder (Marcia said she could tell) whether Evelyn hadn�t brought the whole thing on herself, maybe by inviting some man home with her, and then inventing the rape, at least in part, when things went wrong. (Though I couldn�t see her inventing the silver hair.)

Anyhow the police got her statement and got it signed and then took off, even more solemnly sympathetic than when they�d arrived, Officer Hart in particular.

Of course, I didn�t know anything about all this when I knocked on Marcia�s door before going to work that morning, to confirm a tentative movie date we�d made for that evening. Though I was surprised when the door opened and Mr.�Helpful came out looking down at me very thoughtfully, his bald head gleaming, and saying to Marcia in the voice adults use when children are listening, �I�ll keep in touch with you about the matter. If there is anything I can do, don�t hesitate�.�.�.�

Marcia, looking at him very solemnly, nodded.

And then my feeling of discomfiture was completed when Evelyn Mayne, empty glass in hand and bathrobe clutched around her, edged past me as if I were contagious, giving me a peculiarly hostile look and calling back to Marcia over my head, �I�ll come back, my dear, when I�ve repaired my appearance, so that people can�t say you�re entertaining bedraggled old hags.�

I was relieved when Marcia gave me a grin as soon as the door was closed and said, �Actually she�s gone to get herself another drink, after finishing off my supply. But really, Jeff, she has a reason to this morning�and for hating any man she runs into.� And her face grew grave and troubled (and a little frightened too) as she quickly clued me in on the night�s nasty events. Mr.�Helpful, she explained, had dropped by to remind them about a tenants� meeting that evening and, when he got the grisly news, to go into a song and dance about how shocked he was and how guilty at having slept through it all, and what could he do?

Once she broke off to ask, almost worriedly, �What I can�t understand, Jeff, is why any man would want to rape someone like Evelyn.�

I shrugged. �Kinky some way, I suppose. It does happen, you know. To old women, I mean. Maybe a mother thing.�

�Maybe he hates women,� she speculated. �Wants to punish them.�

I nodded.

She had finished by the time Evelyn Mayne came back, very listless now, looking like a woebegone ghost, dropped into a chair. She hadn�t got dressed or even combed her hair. In one hand she had her glass, full and dark, and in the other a large, pale gray leather glove, which she carried oddly, dangling it by one finger.

Marcia started to ask her about it, but she just began to recite once more all that had happened to her that night, in an unemotional, mechanical voice that sounded as if it would go on forever.

Look, I didn�t like the woman�she was a particularly useless, venomous sort of nuisance (those wearisome suicide attempts!)�but that recital got to me. I found myself hating the person who would deliberately put someone into the state she was in. I realized, perhaps for the first time, just what a vicious and sick crime rape is and how cheap are all the easy jokes about it.

Eventually the glove came into the narrative naturally: �.�.�.�and in order to do that he had to take off his glove. He was particularly excited just then, and it must have got shoved behind the couch and forgotten, where I found it just now.�

Marcia pounced on the glove at once then, saying it was important evidence they must tell the police about. So she called them and after a bit she managed to get Officer Hart himself, and he told her to tell Evelyn Mayne to hold onto the glove and he�d send someone over for it eventually.

It was more than time for me to get on to work, but I stayed until she finished her call, because I wanted to remind her about our date that evening.

She begged off, saying she�d be too tired from the sleep she�d lost and anyway she�d decided to go to the tenants� meeting tonight. She told me, �This has made me realize that I�ve got to begin to take some responsibility for what happens around me. We may make fun of such people�the good neighbors�but they�ve got something solid about them.�

I was pretty miffed at that, though I don�t think I let it show. Oh, I didn�t so much mind her turning me down�there were reasons enough�but she didn�t have to make such a production of it and drag in �good neighbors.� (Mr.�Helpful, who else?) Besides, Evelyn Mayne came out of her sad apathy long enough to give me a big smile when Marcia said �No.�

So I didn�t go to the tenants� meeting that night, as I might otherwise have done. Instead I had dinner out and went to the movie�it was lousy�and then had a few drinks, so that it was late when I got back (no signs of life in the lobby or lift or corridor) and gratefully piled into bed.

I was dragged out of the depths of sleep�that first blissful plunge�by a persistent knocking. I shouted something angry but unintelligible and when there was no reply made myself get up, feeling furious.

It was Marcia. With a really remarkable effort I kept my mouth shut and even smoothed out whatever expression was contorting my face. The words one utters on being suddenly awakened, especially from that matchless first sleep that is never recaptured, can be as disastrous as speaking in drink. Our relationship had progressed to the critical stage and I sure didn�t want to blow it, especially when treasures I�d hoped to win were spread out in front of my face, as it were, under a semitransparent nightgown and hastily-thrown-on negligee.

I looked up, a little, at her face. Her eyes were wide.

She said in a sort of frightened little-girl voice that didn�t seem at all put on, �I�m awfully sorry to wake you up at three o�clock in the morning, Jeff, but would you keep this �spooky� for me? I can�t get to sleep with it in my room.�

It is a testimony to the very high quality of Marcia�s treasures that I didn�t until then notice what she was carrying in front of her�in a fold of toilet paper�the pale gray leather glove Evelyn Mayne had found behind her couch.

�Huh?� I said, not at all brilliantly. �Didn�t Officer Hart come back, or send someone over to pick it up?�

She shook her head. �Evelyn had it, of course, while I was at my job�her social worker did come over right after you left. But then at supper time her son and daughter-in-law came (Officer Hart did scare them!) and bundled her off to the hospital, and she left the glove with me. I called the police, but Officer Hart was off duty and Officer Halstead, whom I talked to, told me they�d be over to pick it up early in the morning. Please take it, Jeff. Whenever I look at it, I think of that crazy sneaking around with the silver hair down his face and waving the knife. It keeps giving me the shivers.�

I looked again at her �spooky� in its fold of tissue (so that she wouldn�t have to touch it, what other reason?) and, you know, it began to give me the shivers. Just an old glove, but now it had an invisible gray aura radiating from it.

�Okay,� I said, closing my hand on it with an effort, and went on ungraciously, really without thinking, �Though I wonder you didn�t ask Mr.�Helpful first, what with all his offers and seeing him at the meeting.�

�Well, I asked you,� she said a little angrily. Then her features relaxed into a warm smile. �Thanks, Jeff.�

Only then did it occur to me that here I was passing up in my sleep-soddenness what might be a priceless opportunity. Well, that could be corrected. But before I could invite her in, there came this sharp little cough, or clearing of the throat. We both turned and there was Mr.�Helpful in front of his open door, dressed in pyjamas and a belted maroon dressing gown. He came smiling and dancing toward us (he didn�t really dance, but he gave that impression in spite of being six foot four) and saying, �Could I be of any assistance, Miss Everly? Did something alarm you? Is there�.�.�. er?�.�.�.� He hesitated, as if there might be something he should be embarrassed at.

Marcia shook her head curtly and said to me quite coolly, �No thank you, I needn�t come in, Mr.�Winter. That will be fine. Good night.�

I realized Baldy had managed to embarrass her and that she was making it clear that we weren�t parting after a rendezvous, or about to have one. (But to use my last name!)

As she passed him, she gave him a formal nod. He hurried back to his own door, a highlight dancing on the back of his head. (Marcia says he shaves it; I, that he doesn�t have to.)

I waited until I heard her double-lock her door and slide the bolt across. Then I looked grimly at Baldy until he�d gone inside and closed his�I had that pleasure. Then I retired myself, tossed the glove down on some sheets of paper on the table in front of the open window, threw myself into bed and switched out the light.

I fully expected to spend considerable time being furious at my hulking, mincing, officious neighbor, and maybe at Marcia too, before I could get to sleep, but somehow my mind took off on a fantasy about the building around me as it might have been a half century ago. Ghostly bellboys sped silently with little notes inviting or accepting rendezvous. Ghostly waiters wheeled noiseless carts of silver-covered suppers for two. Pert, ghostly maids whirled ghostly sheets through the dark air as they made the bed, their smiles suggesting they might substitute for non-arriving sweethearts. The soft darkness whirlpooled. Somewhere was wind.

I woke with a start as if someone or something had touched me, and I sat up in bed. And then I realized that something was touching me high on my neck, just below my ear. Something long, like a finger laid flat or�oh God!�a centipede. I remembered how centipedes were supposed to cling with their scores of tiny feet�and this was clinging. As a child I�d been terrified by a tropical centipede that had come weaving out of a stalk of new-bought bananas in the kitchen, and the memory still returned full force once in a great while. Now it galvanized me into whirling my hand behind my head and striking my neck a great brushing swipe, making my jaw and ear sting. I instantly turned on the light and rapidly looked all around me without seeing anything close to me that might have brushed off my neck. I thought I�d felt something with my hand when I�d done that, but I couldn�t be sure.

And then I looked at the table by the window and saw that the glove was gone.

Almost at once I got the vision of it lifting up and floating through the air at me, fingers first, or else dropping off the table and inching across the floor and up the bed. I don�t know which was worse. The thing on my neck had felt leathery.

My immediate impulse was to check if my door was still shut. I couldn�t tell from where I sat. A very tall clothes cabinet abuts the door, shutting the view of it off from the head of the bed. So I pushed my way down the bed, putting my feet on the floor after looking down to make sure there was nothing in the immediate vicinity.

And then a sharp gust of wind came in the window and blew the last sheet of paper off the table and deposited it on the floor near the other sheets of paper and the glove and the tissue now disentangled from it.

I was so relieved I almost laughed. I went over and picked up the glove, feeling a certain revulsion, but only at the thought of who had worn it and what it had been involved in. I examined it closely, which I hadn�t done earlier. It was rather thin gray kid, a fairly big glove and stretched still further as if a pretty big hand had worn it, but quite light enough to have blown off the table with the papers.

There were grimy streaks on it and a slightly stiff part where some fluid had dried and a faintly reddish streak that might have been lipstick. And it looked old�decades old.

I put it back on the table and set a heavy ashtray on top of it and got back in bed, feeling suddenly secure again.

It occurred to me how the empty finger of a gray leather glove is really very much like a centipede, some of the larger of which are the same size, flat and yellowish gray (though the one that had come out of the banana stalk had been bright red), but these thoughts were no longer frightening.

I looked a last time across the room at the glove, pinioned under the heavy ashtray, and I confidently turned off the light.

Sleep was longer in coming this time, however. I got my fantasy of hotel ghosts going again, but gloves kept coming into it. The lissom maids wore work ones as they rhythmically polished piles of ghostly silver. The bellboys� hands holding the ghostly notes were gloved in pale gray cotton. And there were opera gloves, almost armpit length, that looked like spectral white cobras, especially when they were drawn inside-out off the sinuous, snake-slender arms of wealthy guesting ladies. And other ghostly gloves, not all hotel ones, came floating and weaving into my fantasy: the black gloves of morticians, the white gloves of policemen, the bulky fur-lined ones of polar explorers, the trim dark gauntlets of chauffeurs, the gloves of hunters with separate stalls only for thumb and trigger finger, the mittens of ice-skaters and sleigh riders, old ladies� mitts without any fingers at all, the thin, translucent elastic gloves of surgeons, wielding flashing scalpels of silver-bright steel�a veritable whirlpool of gloves that finally led me down, down, down to darkness.

Once again I woke with a start, as if I�d been touched, and shot up. Once again I felt something about four inches long clinging high on my neck, only this time under the other ear. Once again I frantically slashed at my neck and jaw, stinging them painfully, only this time I struck upward and away. I thought I felt something go.

I got the light on and checked the door at once. It was securely shut. Then I looked at the table by the open window.

The heavy ashtray still sat in the center of it, rock firm.

But the rapist�s glove that had been under it was gone.

I must have stood there a couple of minutes, telling myself this could not be. Then I went over and lifted the ashtray and carefully inspected its underside, as if the glove had somehow managed to shrink and was clinging there.

And all the while I was having this vision of the glove painfully humping itself from under the ashtray and inching to the table�s edge and dropping to the floor and then crawling off�.�.�. almost anywhere.

Believe me, I searched my place then, especially the floor. I even opened the doors to the closet and the clothes cabinet, though they had been tightly shut, and searched the floor there. And of course I searched under and behind the bed. And more than once while I searched, I�d suddenly jerk around thinking I�d seen something gray approaching my shoulder from behind.

There wasn�t a sign of the glove.

It was dawn by now�had been for some time. I made coffee and tried to think rationally about it.

It seemed to boil down to three explanations that weren�t wildly far-fetched.

First, that I�d gone out of my mind. Could be, I suppose. But from what I�d read and seen, most people who go crazy know damn well ahead of time that something frightening is happening to their minds, except maybe paranoiacs. Still, it remained a possibility.

Second, that someone with a duplicate or master key had quietly taken the glove away while I was asleep. The apartment manager and janitor had such keys. I�d briefly given my duplicate to various people. Why, once before she got down on me, I�d given it to Evelyn Mayne�matter of letting someone in while I was at work. I thought I�d got it back from her, though I remember once having a second duplicate made�I�d forgotten why. The main difficulty about this explanation was motive. Who�d want to get the glove?�except the rapist, maybe.

Third, of course, there was the supernatural. Gloves are ghostly to start with, envelopes for hands�and if there isn�t a medieval superstition about wearing the flayed skin of another�s hand to work magic, there ought to be. (Of course, there was the Hand of Glory, its fingers flaming like candles, guaranteed to make people sleep while being burgled, but there the skin is still on the dried chopped-off hand.) And there are tales of spectral hands a-plenty�pointing out buried treasure or hidden graves, or at guilty murderers, or carrying candles or daggers�so why not gloves? And could there be a kind of telekinesis in which a hand controls at a distance the movements and actions of a glove it has worn? Of course that would be psionics or whatnot, but to me the parapsychological is supernatural. (And in that case what had the glove been trying to do probing at my neck?�strangle me, I�d think.) And somewhere I�d read of an aristocratic Brazilian murderess of the last century who wore gloves woven of spider silk, and of a knight blinded at a crucial moment in a tourney by a lady�s silken glove worn as a favor. Yes, they were eerie envelopes, I thought, gloves were, but I was just concerned with one of them, a vanishing glove.

I started Math a jerk as there came a measured knock-knock. I opened the door and looked up at the poker faces of two young policemen. Over their shoulders Mr.�Helpful was peering down eagerly at me, his lips rapidly quirking in little smiles with what I�d call questioning pouts in between. Back and a little to one side was Marcia, looking shocked and staring intently at me through the narrow space between the second policeman and the door jamb.

�Jeff Winters,� the first policeman said to me, as if it were a fact that he was putting into place. It occurred to me that young policemen look very blocky around their narrow hips with all that equipment they carry snugly nested and cased in black leather.

�Officer Hart�� Marcia began anxiously.

The second policeman�s eyes flickered towards her, but just then the first policeman continued, �Your neighbor Miss Everly says she handed you a glove earlier this morning,� and he stepped forward into the private space (I think it�s sometimes called) around my body, and I automatically stepped back.

�We want it,� he went on, continuing to step forward, and I back.

I hesitated. What was I to say? That the glove had started to spook me and then disappeared? Officer Hart followed the first policeman in. Mr.�Helpful followed him in and stopped just inside my door, Marcia still beyond him and looking frantic. Officer Hart turned, as if about to tell Mr.�Helpful to get out, but just then Officer Halstead (that was the other name Marcia had mentioned) said, �Well, you�ve still got it, haven�t you? She gave it to you, didn�t she?�

I shook and then nodded my head, which must have made me look rattled. He came closer still and said harshly and with a note of eagerness, �Well, where is it, then?�

I had to look up quite sharply at him to see his face. Beyond it, just to one side of it, diagonally upward across the room, was the top of the tall clothes cabinet, and on the edge of that there balanced that damned gray glove, flat fingers dripping over.

I froze. I could have sworn I�d glanced up there more than once when I was hunting the thing, and seen nothing. Yet there it was, as if it had flown up there or else been flicked there by me the second time I�d violently brushed something from my face.

Officer Halstead must have misread my look of terror, for he ducked his head toward mine and rasped, �Your neighbor Mr.�Angus says that it�s your glove, that he saw you wearing gray gloves night before last! What do you say?�

But I didn�t say anything, for at that moment the glove slid off its precarious perch and dropped straight down and landed on Mr.�Helpful�s (Angus�s) shoulder close to his neck, just like the hand of an arresting cop.

Now it may have been that in ducking his head to look at it, he trapped it between his chin and collarbone, or it may have been (as it looked to me) that the glove actively clung to his neck and shoulder, resisting all his frantic efforts to peel it off, while he reiterated, his voice mounting in screams, �It�s not my glove!�

He took his hands away for a moment and the glove dropped to the floor.

He looked back and forth and saw the dawning expressions on the faces of the two policemen, and then with a sort of despairing sob he whipped a long knife from under his coat.

Considerably to my surprise I started toward him, but just then Officer Hart endeared himself to us all forever by wrapping his arms around Mr.�Angus like a bear, one hand closing on the wrist of the hand holding the knife.

I veered past him (I vividly recall changing the length of one of my strides so as not to step on the glove) and reached Marcia just in time to steady her as, turned quite white, she swayed, her eyelids fluttering.

I heard the knife clatter to the floor. I turned, my arms around Marcia, and we both saw Mr.�Angus seem to shrink and collapse in Officer Hart�s ursine embrace, his face going gray as if he were an empty glove himself.

That was it. They found the other glove and the long silver wig in a locked suitcase in his room. Marcia stayed frightened long enough, off and on, for us to become better acquainted and cement our friendship.

Officer (now Detective) Hart tells us that Mr.�Angus is a model prisoner at the hospital for the criminally insane and has gone very religious, but never smiles. And he�Hart�now has the glove in a sort of Black Museum down at the station, where it has never again been seen to move under its own power. If it ever did.

One interesting thing. The gloves had belonged to Mr.�Angus�s father, now deceased, who had been a judge.

To this day I don�t know how they got me to the asylum.

The events leading up to my committal constitute a mystery which defies the probe of memory, and so it shall remain.

Family and friends spoke, at the time, of a �nervous condition,� but that is undoubtedly a polite euphemism. They preferred to call the asylum a �private sanatorium� and my incarceration was referred to as �convalescence.�

But now that I have no family�and no friends�I can at least speak freely and frankly of my situation.

I was insane.

God, what hypocrites we�ve become! The higher the incidence of insanity in our society, the more the word itself has been tabooed. In a world gone mad it is no longer possible to speak freely of madmen; in this era of lunacy there are supposedly no lunatics; the craziness compounds because we refuse to admit that anyone is crazy.

�Mentally ill.� That�s the phrase which Dr.�Connors used. �Paranoid schizophrenia� was another and more highly clinical description. Neither of which really conveys an accurate impression of the horror inherent in the reality�or the unreality.

Insanity is a long nightmare from which some never awaken. Others, like myself, eventually open their eyes to greet the dawn of a new day, rejoicing in renewed awareness. It�s a wonderful feeling to realize that the nightmare has ended. Makes you want to sing, as I did.

�Yes, we have no bananas��

Dr.�Connors eyed me dispassionately. �What�s that supposed to mean?� he said.

�That I�m all right again.� I smiled. �Bananas�the current slang for insanity. It�s a land of a joke.�

�I see.�

But Dr.�Connors didn�t really see anything.

When I assured him that I was no longer disoriented, no longer hostile or afraid, he merely nodded. And when I told him I was ready to go home, he shook his head.

�There are some problems we must work through first,� he said.

�Work�that�s my only problem,� I told him. �I�ve got to get back to work! Do you realize what staying here has cost me?�

Dr.�Connors shrugged. �Your work is one of the problems we�re going to be talking about. I think it may help us to find the cause of your difficulties.� He opened a desk drawer and took out a book. �I�ve been reading some of the things you�ve written, and there are a number of questions��

�Okay,� I said. �If you want to play games, suppose you let me have the first guess. The book you have there, the one you�ve been reading�it�s Psycho, isn�t it?�

�Yes.�

�Don�t look so surprised. Everybody seems to start out by reading Psycho. And reading things into it. I�ve been through this sort of inquisition so many times that you don�t even need to ask the questions. We can both save valuable time if I just give you the answers.�

�I�m listening.�

�First of all, I don�t hate my mother. And she never dominated me. My family background was perfectly normal�I had no hangups as far as my parents or my sister are concerned. My mother was a social worker and teacher, a very intelligent woman who encouraged me to write. I loved her dearly, but there was no oedipal fixation involved.

�Secondly, I have never been conscious of any homosexual tendencies, never felt a desire to experiment in transvestism. Or taxidermy, for that matter. I know nothing about motel operation, or hiding cars and bodies in swamps.

�So you can see I�m not Norman Bates. And as for identifying with other characters in the book�I never embezzled any money from an employer, never ran away, never conducted a long-term clandestine liaison. For that matter, I�ve always preferred a tub bath instead of a shower.�

I smiled at Dr.�Connors. �The idea for the book came to me after reading about an actual murder case. I didn�t use any of the real-life participants as characters, nor the real-life situation. What set me off was wondering how a man living in a small town all his life, under constant scrutiny of his neighbors, could manage to conceal his crimes of violence. What I did�call it the case entry, if you will�was to construct a psychological profile of such a man, just as you do in your work. Once I felt I understood the character and his motivations, the rest was simple.�

Dr.�Connors nodded. �Thank you for your cooperation. You�ve anticipated and answered all of my questions except one.�

�And that is�?�

�Let me put it this way. I imagine you read up on quite a few murder cases as a matter of course; it would be the natural thing to do, in your line of work.�

�That�s true.�

�And some of them are pretty sensational, aren�t they? Mass murders, bizarre slayings, ritual killings, weird deaths occurring under strange circumstances?�

�Also true.�

�Some of them, I�m sure, are far more shocking and violent than the particular crime which, in your words, set you off?�

�Right.�

�Then my question is simply this. Why did this one murder intrigue you? Why did you choose it rather than another?�

�But I�ve already explained�it was wondering how the killer managed to conceal his activities and get away with it�how he was able to avoid suspicion, lead a double life.�

�That�s interesting. The problem of concealment, avoiding suspicion.� Dr.�Connors leaned forward. �Do you lead a double life?�

I stared at him for a long moment before answering. �Forgive me for saying so, but you�re out of your mind.�

�Perhaps. But being out of my mind doesn�t matter. It�s getting into your mind that�s important.�

He stood up. �That�s enough for now, I think. We�ll talk again tomorrow.�

�More questions?�

�Hopefully, more answers.� He gave a little chuckle. �It appears I�m going to have to do some further reading tonight.�

�Well, good luck to you. And pleasant dreams.�

�That�s the title of one of your books, isn�t it�Pleasant Dreams?�

�I�ve written a lot of books,� I said. �And a lot of stories.�

�I know.� He walked me to the office door. �Oh, one final thought. Did it ever occur to you that all fiction writing is a form of lying? And that the only major difference between an author and a psychotic is that the former puts down his fantasies on paper? You might think that over.�

�I will,� I told him.

And I did, all that day and during the night which followed. In the end I arrived at one firm conclusion.

I disliked Dr.�Connors intensely.

NOTE: The following is an edited transcript of a taped conversation between Mrs.�Franklin Evans, resident of Woodland Hills, California, and Lieutenant Harry W. Lyle of the Kansas City Police Department.

Transcript is dated July 12, 1975, K.C., Missouri.

Halper, the village real-estate man, said with a squint, �You�re the same people looked at that place back in April, aren�t you? Sure you are. The ones got caught in that freak snow storm and spent the night there. Mr. and Mrs.�Wilkes, is it?�

�Wilkins,� Norman corrected, frowning at a photograph on the wall of the old man�s dingy office: a yellowed, fly-spotted picture of the house itself, in all its decay and drabness.

�And you want to look at it again?�

�Yes!� Linda exclaimed.

Both men looked at her sharply because of her vehemence. Norman, her husband, was alarmed anew by the eagerness that suddenly flamed in her lovely brown eyes and as suddenly was replaced by a look of guilt. Yes�unmistakably a look of guilt.

�I mean,� she stammered, �we still want a big old house that we can do over, Mr.�Halper. We�ve never stopped looking. And we keep thinking the Creighton place just might do.�

You keep thinking it might do, Norman silently corrected. He himself had intensely disliked the place when Halper showed it to them four months ago. The sharp edge of his abhorrence was not even blunted, and time would never dull his remembrance of that shocking expression on Linda�s face. When he stepped through that hundred-seventy-year-old doorway again, he would hate and fear the house as much as before, he was certain.

Would he again see that look on his wife�s face? God forbid!

�Well,� Halper said, �there�s no need for me to go along with you this time, I guess. I�ll just ask you to return the key when you�re through, same as you did before.�

Norman accepted the tagged key from him and walked unhappily out to the car.

It was four miles from the village to the house. One mile of narrow blacktop, three of a dirt road that seemed forlorn and forgotten even in this neglected part of New England. At three in the afternoon of an awesomely hot August day the car made the only sound in a deep green silence. The sun�s heat had robbed even birds and insects of their voices.

Norman was silent too�with apprehension. Beside him his adored wife of less than two years leaned forward to peer through the windshield for the first glimpse of their destination, seeming to have forgotten he existed. Only the house now mattered.

And there it was.

Nothing had changed. It was big and ugly, with a sagging front piazza and too few windows. It was old. It was gray because almost all its white paint had weathered away. According to old Halper the Creightons had lived here for generations, having come here from Salem where one of their women in the days of witchcraft madness had been hanged for practicing demonolatry. A likely story.

As he stopped the car by the piazza steps, Norman glanced at the girl beside him. His beloved. His childhood sweetheart. Why in God�s name was she eager to come here again? She had not been so in the beginning. For days after that harrowing ordeal she had been depressed, unwilling even to talk about it.

But then, weeks later, the change. Ah, yes, the change! So subtle at first, or at least as subtle as her unsophisticated nature could contrive. �Norm�.�.�. do you remember that old house we were snowbound in? Do you suppose we might have liked it if things had been different?�.�.�.�

Then not so subtle. �Norm, can we look at the Creighton place again? Please? Norm?�

As he fumbled the key into the lock, he reached for her hand. �Are you all right, hon?�

�Of course!� The same tone of voice she had used in Halper�s shabby office. Impatient. Critical. Don�t ask silly questions!

With a premonition of disaster he pushed the old door open.

It was the same.

Furnished, Halper had called it, trying to be facetious. There were dusty ruins of furniture and carpets and�yes�someone or something was using them; that the house had not been empty for eight years, as Halper claimed. Now the feeling returned as Norman trailed his wife through the downstairs rooms and up the staircase to the bed chambers above. But the feeling was strong! He wanted desperately to seize her hand again and shout, �No, no, darling! Come out of here!�

Upstairs, when she halted in the big front bedroom, turning slowly to look about her, he said helplessly, �Hon, please�what is it? What do you want?�

No answer. He had ceased to exist. She even bumped into him as she went past to sit on the old four-poster with its mildewed mattress. And, seated there, she stared emptily into space as she had done before.

He went to her and took her hands. �Linda, for God�s sake! What is it with this place?�

She looked up and smiled at him. �I�m all right. Don�t worry, darling.�

There had been an old blanket on the bed when they entered this room before. He had thought of wrapping her in it because she was shivering, the house was frigid, and with the car trapped in deepening snow they would have to spend the night here. But the blanket reeked with age and she had cringed from the touch of it.

Then��Wait,� he had said with a flash of inspiration. �Maybe if I could jam this under a tire!�.�.�. Come on. It�s at least worth a try.�

�I�m cold, Norm. Let me stay here.�

�You�ll be all right? Not scared?�

�Better scared than frozen.�

�Well�.�.�. I won�t be long.�

How long was he gone? Ten minutes? Twenty? Twice the car had seemed about to pull free from the snow�s mushy grip. Twice the wheel had spun the sodden blanket out from under and sent it flying through space like a huge yellow bird, and he�d been forced to go groping after it with the frigid wind lashing his half-frozen face. Say twenty minutes; certainly no longer. Then, giving it up as a bad job, he had trudged despondently back to the house and climbed the stairs again to that front bedroom.

And there she sat on the bed, as she was sitting now. White as the snow itself. Wide-eyed. Staring at or into something that only she could see.

�Linda! What�s wrong?�

�Nothing. Nothing�.�.�.�

He grasped her shoulders. �Look at me! Stop staring like that! What�s happened?�

�I thought I heard something. Saw something.�

�Saw what?�

�I don�t know. I don�t�.�.�. remember.�

Lifting her from the bed, he put his arms about her and glowered defiantly at the empty doorway. Strange. A paper-thin layer of mist or smoke moved along the floor there, drifting out into the hall. And there were floating shapes of the same darkish stuff trapped in the room�s corners, as though left behind when the chamber emptied itself of a larger mass. Or was he imagining these things? One moment they seemed to be there; a moment later they were gone.

And was he also imagining the odor? It had not been present in the musty air of this room before; it certainly seemed to be now, unless his senses were playing tricks on him. A peculiarly robust smell, unquestionably male. But now it was fading.

Never mind. There was someone in this house, by God! He had felt an alien presence when Halper was here; even more so after the agent�s departure. Someone, something, following them about, watching them.

The back of Linda�s dress was unzipped, he realized then. His hands, pressing her to him, suddenly found themselves inside the garment, on her body. And her body was cold. Colder than the snow he had struggled with outside. Cold and clammy.

The zipper. He fumbled for it, found it drawn all the way down. What in God�s name had she tried to do? This was his wife, who loved him. This was the girl who only a few weeks ago, at the club, had savagely slapped the face of the town�s richest, handsomest playboy for daring to hint at a mate-swapping arrangement. Slowly he drew the zipper up again, then held her at arm�s length and looked again at her face.

She seemed unaware he had touched her. Or that he even existed. She was entirely alone, still gazing into that secret world in which he had no place.

The rest of that night had seemed endless, Linda lying on the bed, he sitting beside her waiting for daylight. She seemed to sleep some of the time; at other times, though she said nothing even when spoken to, he sensed she was as wide awake as he. About four o�clock the wind died and the snow stopped its wet slapping of the windowpanes. No dawn had ever been more welcome, even though he was still unable to free the car and they both had to walk to the village to send a tow truck for it.

And now he had let her persuade him to come back here. He must be insane.

�Norman?�

She sat there on the bed, the same bed, but at least she was looking at him now, not through him into that secret world of hers. �Norman, you do like this house a little, don�t you?�

�If you mean could I ever seriously think of living here�� Emphatically he shook his head. �My God, no! It gives me the horrors!�

�It�s really a lovely old house, Norman. We could work on it little by little. Do you think I�m crazy?�

�If you can even imagine living in this mausoleum, I know you�re crazy. My God, woman, you were nearly frightened out of your wits here. In this very room, too.�

�Was I, Norman? Really?�

�Yes, you were! If I live to be a hundred, I�ll never stop seeing that look on your face.�

�What kind of look was it, Norman?�

�I don�t know. That�s just it�I don�t know! What in heaven�s name were you seeing when I walked back in here after my session with the car? What was that mist? That smell?�

Smiling, she reached for his hands. �I don�t remember any mist or smell, Norman. I was just a little frightened. I told you�I thought I heard something.�

�You saw something too, you said.�

�Did I say that? I�ve forgotten.� Still smiling, she looked around the room�at the garden of faded roses on shreds of time-stained wallpaper; at the shabby bureau with its solitary broken cut-glass vase. �Old Mr.�Halper was to blame for what happened, Norman. His talk of demons.�

�Halper didn�t do that much talking, Linda.�

�Well, he told us about the woman who was hanged in Salem. I can see now, of course, that he threw that out as bait, because I had told him you write mystery novels. He probably pictured you sitting in some sort of Dracula cape, scratching out your books with a quill, by lamplight, and thought this would be a marvelous setting for it.� Her soft laugh was a welcome sound, reminding Norman he loved this girl and she loved him�that their life together, except for her inexplicable interest in this house, was full of gentleness and caring.

But he could not let her win this debate. �Linda, listen. If this is such a fine old house, why has it been empty for eight years?�

�Well, Mr.�Halper explained that, Norman.�

�Did he? I don�t seem to recall any explanation.�

�He said that last person to live here was a woman who died eight years ago at ninety-three. Her married name was Stanhope, I think he said, but she was a Creighton�she even had the same given name, Prudence, as the woman hanged in Salem for worshipping demons. And when she passed away there was some legal question about the property because her husband had died some years before in an asylum, leaving no will.�

Norman reluctantly nodded. The truth was, he hadn�t paid much attention to the real-estate man�s talk, but he did recall the remark that the last man of the house had been committed to an asylum for the insane. Probably from having lived in such a gloomy old house for so long, he had thought at the time.

Annoyed with himself for having lost the debate�at least, for not having won it�he turned from the bed and walked to a window, where he stood gazing down at the yard. Right down there, four months ago, was where he had struggled to free the car. Frowning at the spot now, he suddenly said aloud, �Wait. That�s damn queer.�

�What is, dear?� Linda said from the bed.

�I�ve always thought we left the car in a low spot that night. A spot where the snow must have drifted extra deep, I mean. But we didn�t. We were in the highest part of the yard.�

�Perhaps the ground is soft there.�

�Uh-uh. It�s rocky.�

�Then it might have been slippery?�

�Well, I suppose�� Suddenly he pressed closer to the window glass. �Oh, damn! We�ve got a flat.�

�What, Norman?�

�A flat! Those are new tires, too. We must have picked up a nail on our way into this stupid place.� Striding back to the bed, he caught her hand. �Come on. I�m not leaving you here this time!�

She did not protest. Obediently she followed him downstairs and along the lower hall to the front door. On the piazza she hesitated briefly, glancing back in what seemed to be a moment of panic, but when he again grasped her hand, she meekly went with him down the steps and out to the car.

The left front tire was the flat one. Hunkering down beside it, he searched for the culprit nail but failed to find any. It was underneath, no doubt. Things like flat tires always annoyed him; in a properly organized world they wouldn�t happen. Of course, in such a world there would not be the kind of road one had to travel to reach this place, nor would there be such an impossible house to begin with.

Muttering to himself, he opened the trunk, extracted jack, tools and spare, and went to work.

Strange. There was no nail in the offending tire. No cut or bruise, either. The tire must have been badly made. The thought did not improve his mood as, on his knees, he wrestled the spare into place.

Then when he lowered the jack, the spare gently flattened under the car�s weight and he knelt there staring at it in disbelief. �What the hell�.�.�.� Nothing like this had ever happened to him before.

He jacked the car up again, took the spare off and examined it. No nail, no break, no bruise. It was a new tire, like the others. Newer, because never yet used. He had a repair kit for tubeless tires in the trunk, he recalled�bought one day on an impulse. �Repair a puncture in minutes without even taking the tire off the car.� But how could you repair a puncture that wasn�t there?

�Linda, this is crazy. We�ll have to walk back to town as we did before.� He turned his head. �Linda?�

She was not there.

He lurched to his feet. �Linda! Where are you?� How long had she been gone? He must have been working on the car for fifteen or twenty minutes. She hadn�t spoken in that time, he suddenly realized. Had she slipped back into the house the moment he became absorbed in his task? She knew well enough how intensely he concentrated on such things. How when he was writing, for instance, she could walk through the room without his even knowing it.

�Linda, for God�s sake�no!� Hoarsely shouting her name, he stumbled toward the house. The door clattered open when he flung himself against it, and the sound filled his ears as he staggered down the hall. But now the hall was not just an ancient, dusty corridor; it was a dim tunnel filled with premature darkness and strange whisperings.

He knew where she must be. In that cursed room at the top of the stairs where he had seen the look on her face four months ago, and where she had tried so cunningly to conceal the truth from him this time. But the room was hard to reach now. A swirling mist choked the staircase, repeatedly causing him to stumble. Things resembling hands darted out of it to clutch at him and hold him back.

He stopped in confusion, and the hands nudged him forward again. Their owner was playing a game with him, he realized, mocking his frantic efforts to reach the bedroom yet at the same time seductively urging him to try even harder. And the whisperings made words, or seemed to. �Come Norman�.�.�. sweet Norman�.�.�. come come come�.�.�.�

In the upstairs hall, too, the swirling mist challenged him, deepening into a moving mass that hid the door of the room. But he needed no compass to find that door. Gasping and cursing��Damn you, leave me alone! Get out of my way!� He struggled to it and found it open as Linda and he had left it. Hands outthrust, he groped his way over the threshold.

The alien presence here was stronger. The sense of being confronted by some unseen creature was all but overwhelming. Yet the assault upon him was less violent now that he had. reached the room. The hands groping for him in the eerie darkness were even gentle, caressing. They clung with a velvet softness that was strangely pleasurable, and there was something voluptuously female about them, even to a faint but pervasive female odor.

An odor, not a perfume. A body scent, drug-like in its effect upon his senses. Bewildered, he ceased his struggle for a moment to see what would happen. The whispering became an invitation, a promise of incredible delights. But he allowed himself only a moment of listening and then, shouting Linda�s name, hurled himself at the bed again. This time he was able to reach it.

But she was not now sitting there staring into that secret world of hers, as he had expected. The bed was empty and the seductive voice in the darkness softly laughed at his dismay. �Come Norman�.�.�. sweet Norman�.�.�. come come come�.�.�.�

He felt himself taken from behind by the shoulders, turned and ever so gently pushed. He fell floating onto the old mattress, half-heartedly thrusting up his arms to keep the advancing shadow-form from possessing him. But it flowed down over him, onto him, into him, despite his feeble resistance, and the female smell tantalized his senses again, destroying his will to resist.

As he ceased struggling he heard a sound of rusty hinges creaking in that part of the room�s dimness where the door was, and then a soft thud. The door had been closed. But he did not cry out. He felt no alarm. It was good to be here on the bed, luxuriating in this sensuous, caressing softness. As he became quiescent it flowed over him with unrestrained indulgence, touching and stroking him to heights of ecstasy.

Now the unseen hands, having opened his shirt, slowly and seductively glided down his body to his belt�.�.�.

He heard a new sound then. For a moment it bewildered him because, though coming through the ancient wall behind him, from, the adjoining bedroom, it placed him at once in his own bedroom at home. Linda and he had joked about it often, as true lovers could�the explosive little syllables to which she always gave voice when making love.

So she was content, too. Good. Everything was straightforward and aboveboard, then. After all, as that fellow at the club had suggested, mate-swapping was an in thing in this year of our Lord 1975�.�.�. wasn�t it? All kinds of people did it.

He must buy this house, as Linda had insisted. Of course. She was absolutely right. With a sigh of happiness he closed his eyes and relaxed, no longer made reluctant by a feeling of guilt.

But�something was wrong. Distinctly, now, he felt not two hands caressing him, but more. And were they hands? They suddenly seemed cold, clammy, frighteningly eager.

Opening his eyes, he was startled to find that the misty darkness had dissolved and he could see. Perhaps the seeing came with total surrender, or with the final abandonment of his guilt feeling. He lay on his back, naked, with his nameless partner half beside him, half on him. He saw her scaly, misshapen breasts overflowing his chest and her monstrous, demonic face swaying in space above his own. And as he screamed, he saw that she did have more than two hands: she had a whole writhing mass of them at the ends of long, searching tentacles.

The last thing he saw before his scream became that of a madman was a row of three others like her squatting by the wall, their tentacles restlessly reaching toward him as they impatiently awaited their turn.

It went like this: in her room at the top of the stairs in the empty sorority house she lay warm and rumpled in her bed, trying hard to sleep some more. It was now near noon and the light streaming through the open curtains had forced her awake again. She did not seem to care if she ever got up; she had no classes, not for a week. Still she could not make herself relax. The late morning flashed a granular red through her eyelids. Then she heard the front door down below open and close, the click echoing through the abandoned house like a garbage can dropped in an alley at dawn. Probably it was one of the few remaining girls returning from an overnight date or to pick up books before leaving for vacation. Lissa hoped so. Now she could hear footsteps treading up the stairs. She tried to imagine who it was. The footsteps reached the top of the stairs and stopped. Firmly, deliberately the footfalls turned and came down the hall, toward her room. Maybe it was Sharon. She wanted it to be Sharon. She kept her eyes tightly closed. The shoes thumped deep into the rug; the loose board in the middle of the hall creaked. Finally whoever it was reached her room�there, just on the other side of the door. Lissa felt ice crystals forming in her blood. She waited for the knock, for the clearing of a familiar throat, for the sound of her own name to come muffled through the door. But there was no sound. Still she waited. She held a breath. The blood pulsed coldly in her ears like a drum beaten underwater. She wanted to speak out. Then the sound of a hand on the loose doorknob. And the almost imperceptible wingbeat of the door gliding open.

I know, she thought, I�ll lie perfectly still, I won�t let anything move in my body and I�ll be safe, whoever it is won�t see me and will go away. Yes, she thought, that�s what I will have to do. Now she clearly felt a presence next to her bed. She was sure that someone was standing there in the doorway to her right, a hand probably still on the knob. She had not heard it rattle a second time. Time passed. She counted her heartbeats. At last she knew she could hold her breath no longer. She would have to do something very brave. With a rush that screamed adrenalin into her body she sat bolt upright, at the same instant snapping her head to the right and unsticking her eyes with a pop. There was no one there. The door was still closed and locked. The room was empty. Suddenly she realized that her kidneys were throbbing in dull pain. She knew what that was. It was fear.

The sunlight washed in through the window.

January 15

Dear Mom and Dad:

It has been an expectedly hectic first week; unpacking, organizing, getting scheduled in classes, and of course, fraternizing with the locals to secure promise of later aid should I need it. I don�t think I will. My room is nice though it has a view which Robert Frost would scoff at; perhaps a transfer to a better location later this semester is possible. We�ll see.

I had a little run-in with the administration when I arrived; a trivial technicality. Something about too much luggage. At least more than the other dormitory students brought with them. I cleared it up with a little glib knowhow. As always. Some of the guys on my floor look as if they might be enjoyable and if I�m lucky maybe one or two will be interesting to talk to as well. But I can�t chase after �impossible rainbows.� That should sound familiar, Dad, its from your private collection and has been gone over a �few� times. A few. But maybe this time, it�s true. Anyway, the dormitory looks as if it�s going to work out well. Pass the word to you-know-who. I�m sure it will interest him.

The dinner tonight was an absolute abomination. It could easily have been some medieval m�lange concocted by the college gardener utilizing lawn improver, machinist�s oil, and ground-up old men. And I question even the quality of those ingredients. I may die tonight of poisoning. Maybe if I�m lucky it will strike quickly and leave no marks. Don�t want Dad�s old school to lose its accreditation after all. However, I�m a little concerned that the townspeople will be kept awake tonight by the sounds of 247 �well-fed� freshmen looking at their reflections in the toilet bowl. Today while I was buying books an upperclassman called me green for not getting used ones. If he was in any way referring to the way my face looks right now, he should be hired by some psychic foundation. He can tell the future.

Anyway, Mom, I certainly do miss your cooking. Almost as much as I miss my stomach�s equilibrium. Ugh.

The room gets cold early with the snow and all. But I have plenty of blankets (remember the excessive luggage?�.�.�. you guessed it) so that poses no difficulty. I�ll probably pick up a small heater next week, first free day I get. For now I�ll manage with hot tea, the collected works of Charles Dickens, and warm memories of all of you back home. Until I write again, I send my love and an abundance of sneezes.

Here�s looking achoo�.�.�.

Copyright � 1977 by Ray Russell.

Now it happened aforetime that Zar-thule the Conqueror who is called Reaver of Reavers, Seeker of Treasures and Sacker of Cities, swam out of the East with his dragonships; aye, even beneath the snapping sails of his dragonships. The wind was but lately turned favorable, and now the weary rowers nodded over their shipped oars while sleepy steersmen held the course. And there Zar-thule descried him in the sea the island Arlyeh, whereon loomed tall and twisted towers builded of black stones whose tortuous twinings were of contorted angles all unknown and utterly beyond the ken of men. Aye, and this island was redly litten by the sun sinking down over its awesome black crags and burning behind the asymmetrical aeries and spires carved therefrom by other than human hands.

And though Zar-thule felt a great hunger and stood sore weary of the great sea�s expanse behind the lolling dragon�s tail of his ship Redfire, and even though he gazed with red and rapacious eyes upon the black island, still he held off his reavers, biding them that they ride at anchor well out to sea until the sun was deeply down and gone into the Realm of Cthon; aye, even unto Cthon, who sits in silence to snare the sun in his net beyond the Edge of the World. Indeed, such were Zar-thule�s raiders as their deeds were best done by night, for then Gleeth the blind Moon God saw them not nor heard in his celestial deafness the horrible which ever attended unto such deeds.

For, notwithstanding his cruelty, which was beyond words, Zar-thule was no fool. He knew him that his wolves must rest before a whelming, that if the treasures of the House of Cthulhu were truly such as he imagined them in his mind�s eye�then that they must likewise be well guarded by fighting men who would not give up easily. And his reavers were fatigued even as Zar-thule himself, so that he rested them all down behind the painted bucklers lining the decks and furled him up the great dragon-dyed sails and set a watch that in the middle of the night he might be roused and rousing in turn the men of his twenty ships in unto and sack the island of Arlyeh.

Far had Zar-thule�s reavers rowed before the fair winds found them, aye, far from the rape of Yaht-Haal, the Silver City at the edge of the frostlands. Their provisions were all but eaten, their swords all oceanrot in rusting sheaths; but now they ate them all of their remaining regimen and drank them of the liquors thereof and cleansed and sharpened their dire blades before taking themselves into the arms of Shoosh, Goddess of the Still Slumbers. They well knew them one and all that soon they will be at the sack, each for himself and loot to that sword�s wielder whose blade drank long and deep.

And Zar-thule had promised them great treasures, aye, even great treasures from the House of Cthulhu, for back there in the sacked and seared city at the edge of the frostlands he had heard it from the bubbling and anguished lips of Voth Vehm the name of the so-called �forbidden� isle of Arlyeh. Voth Vehm, in the throes of terrible tortures, had called out the name of his brother-priest, Hath Vehm, who guarded the House of Cthulhu in Arlyeh. And too Voth Vehm had answered even in the hour of his dying to Zar-thule�s additional tortures; crying out that Arlyeh was indeed forbidden and held in thrall by the sleeping but yet dark and terrible god Cthulhu, the gate to whose House his brother-priest guarded.

Then had Zar-thule reasoned that Arlyeh must contain riches indeed, for he knew it was not meet that brother-priests betray one another; and aye, surely had Voth Vehm spoken exceedingly fearfully of this dark and terrible god Cthulhu that he might thus divert Zar-thule�s avarice from the ocean sanctuary of his brother-priest, Hath Vehm. Thus reckoned Zar-thule, even brooding on the dead and disfigured hierophant�s words, until he bethought him to leave the sacked city. Then, with the flames leaping brightly and reflected in his red wake, Zar-thule put to sea in his dragonships; aye, even did he put himself to sea, all loaded down with the silver booty, in search of Arlyeh and the treasures of the House of Cthulhu. And thus came he to this place.

Shortly before the midnight hour, the watch roused Zar-thule up from the arms of Shoosh, aye, and all the freshened men of the dragonships; and then beneath Gleeth the blind Moon Gods pitted silver face, seeing that the wind had fallen, they muffled their oars and dipped them deep and so closed in with the shoreline. A dozen fathoms from beaching, out rang Zar-thule�s plunder cry, and his drummers took up a stern and steady beat by which the trained but yet rampageous reavers might advance to the sack.

Came the scrape of keel on grit, and down from his dragon�s head leapt Zar-thule to the sullen shallow waters, and all his captains and men, to wade ashore and stride the night-black strand and wave their swords�and all for naught! Lo, the island stood quiet and still and seemingly untended�.�.�.

Only now did the Sacker of Cities take note of this isle�s truly awesome aspect. Black piles of tumbled masonry, festooned with weeds from the tides, rose up from the dark wet sand, and there seemed inherent in these gaunt and immemorial relics a foreboding not alone of bygone times; great crabs scuttled in and about the archaic ruins and gazed with stalked ruby eyes upon the intruders; even the small waves broke with an eerie hush, hush, hush upon the sand and pebbles and primordial exuviae of crumbled yet seemingly sentient towers and tabernacles. The drummers faltered and paused and silence reigned.

Now many of them among these reavers recognized rare gods and supported strange superstitions, and Zar-thule knew this and had no liking for their silence. It was a silence that might yet yield mutiny!

�Hah!� quoth he, who worshipped neither god nor demon nor yet lent ears to the gaunts of night: �See�the guards have known of our coming and have fled to the far side of the island�or perhaps they gather rank at the House of Cthulhu.� So saying he formed him up his men into a body and advanced into the island.

And as they marched they passed him by the paleolithic piles not yet ocean-sundered, striding through silent streets whose fantastic facades gave back the beat of the drummers in a strangely muted monotone.

And lo, mummied faces of coeval antiquity seemed to leer from the empty and oddly-angled towers and craggy spires; fleet ghouls that flitted from shadow to shadow apace with the marching men, until some of those hardened grew sore afraid and begged them of Zar-thule: �Master, let us get us gone from here, for it appears that there is no treasure, and this place is like unto no other; and that it stinks of death, aye even of death and of them that walk the shadowlands.�

But Zar-thule rounded on one who stood close to him muttering thus, crying: �Coward!�out on you!� Whereupon he lifted up his sword and cleft the trembling reaver in two parts, so that the sundered man screamed once before falling with twin thuds to the black earth. But now Zar-thule perceived that indeed that many of his men were sore afraid, and so he had him torches lighted and brought up and they pressed on into the island.

There, beyond low dark hills, they came to a great gathering of queerly carved and monolithic edifices, all of the same strange design comprising confused angles and surfaces and all with the stench of the pit, aye, even the fetor of the very pit about them. And in the center of these malodorous megaliths there stood the greatest tower of them all, a massive menhir that loomed and leaned windowless to a great height and about which at its base squat pedestals bore likenesses of blackly carven krackens of terrifying aspect.

�Hah!� quoth Zar-thule. �Plainly is this the House of Cthulhu; and see its guards and priests have fled them all before us to escape the reaving!

But a tremulous voice, old and mazed, answered from the shadows at the base of one great pedestal, saying, �No one has fled, O reaver, for there are none here to flee, save me�and I cannot flee for I guard the gate against those who may utter The Words.�

At the sound of this old voice in the stillness, all the reavers started and peered nervously about at the leaping torch-cast shadows, but one stout captain stepped forward to drag from out of the dark an old, old man�and lo, all and all they fell back at once seeing the mien of this mage. For he bore upon his face and hands, aye, and upon all visible parts of him, a gray and furry lichen that seemed to crawl upon him even as he stood crooked and trembled in his great age.

�Who are you?� demanded Zar-thule, aghast at the sight of so hideous a spectacle of afflicted infirmity; even Zar-thule, aghast�.�.�.

�I am Hath Vehm, brother-priest of Veth Vehm who serves the gods in the temples of Yaht-Haal the Silver City. I am Hath Vehm, Keeper of the Gate at the House of Cthulhu, and I warn you that it is forbidden to touch me.� He gloomed with rheumy eyes at the captain who held him until that raider took away his hands.

�And I am Zar-thule the Conqueror,� quoth Zar-thule, less in awe now, �Reaver of Reavers, Seeker of Treasures and Sacker of Cities. I have plundered Yaht-Haal, aye, plundered the Silver City and burned it low. And I have tortured Veth Vehm unto death. But in his dying he cried out a name, aye, even with hot coals eating at his belly. And it was your name he spake. And he was truly a brother unto you, Hath Vehm, for he warned me of the terrible god Cthulhu and of this �forbidden� isle Arlyeh. But I knew he spake not truly that he sought him only to protect a great and holy treasure and to protect his brother-priest who guards that treasure, doubtless with strange runes to frighten away the superstitious reavers! But Zar-thule is neither afraid nor credulous, old one. Here I stand and I say to you on your life that I�ll know the way into this treasure house within the hour!�

And now Zar-thule�s captains and men had taken heart. Hearing their chief speak thus to the ancient priest of the island, and noting the old ones trembling infirmity and hideous disfigurement, they had gone about and about the beetling tower of obscure angles until one of them had found him a door. Now this door was great, tall, solid, and wide and nowise hidden to the beholder; and yet at times it seemed narrow at its top and indistinct at its edges. It stood straight up in the wall of the House of Cthulhu, and yet looked as if to lean to one side�.�.�. and then in one and the same moment lean to the other! It bore leering inhuman faces carven of its surface and horrid hieroglyphics, and these unknown characters seemed to writhe about the gorgon faces, and aye, those faces, too, moved and grimaced in the light of the flickering flambeaux.

The ancient Hath Vehm came to them where they gathered in wonder of the great door and spake thus: �Aye, that is the gate of the House of Cthulhu; I am its guardian.�

�So,� spake Zar-thule, who was also come there, �and is there a key to this gate? I see no means of entry.�

�Aye, there is a key, but none such as you might readily imagine; for it is not of metal but of words!�

�Magic?� asked Zar-thule, undaunted, he had heard aforetimes of similar thaumaturgies.

�Aye, magic!� agreed the Guardian of the Gate.

Zar-thule put the point of his sword to the old man�s throat, observing as he did so the furry gray growth moving upon the elder�s face and scrawny neck, saying: �Then say those words now and let�s have done!�

�Nay, I cannot say The Words�I am sworn to guard the gate that The Words are never spoken, neither by myself nor by any other who would foolishly or mistakenly open the House of Cthulhu. You may kill me�aye, even take my life with that very blade you now hold to my throat�but I will not utter The Words�.�.�.�

�And I say that you will�eventually!� quoth Zar-thule in an exceedingly cold voice�.�.�. in a voice even as cold as the northern sleet. Whereupon he put down his sword and ordered two of his men to come forward, commanding that they take the ancient and tie him down to thonged pegs made fast in the ground, one thong to each arm and one to each leg, so that he was spread out flat upon his back not far from the great and oddly fashioned door in the wall of the House of Cthulhu.

Then a fire was lighted of the sparse shrubs of the low hills and of driftwood fetched from the shore; and others of Zar-thule�s reavers went out and trapped certain great nocturnal birds that knew not the power of flight; and yet others found a spring of brackish water and filled them up the water-skins. And soon tasteless but satisfying meat turned on the spits above a fire, and in the same fire sword-points glowed red, then white; until Zar-thule and the captains and men had eaten their fill, whereupon the Reaver of Reavers motioned to his torturers that they should attend to their task. And the torturers came forward to retrieve their swords; aye, for of course those swords that had their tips in the fire were theirs. And Zar-thule had trained these torturers himself, so that they excelled in the arts of the pincer and hot irons.

But here there came a diversion. For some little time a certain captain�his name was Cush-had; he who first found the old priest in the shadows of the great pedestal and dragged him forth�had been peering most strangely at his hands in the firelight and rubbing them upon the hide of his jacket. Of a sudden he cursed and leapt to his feet, springing up from the remnants of his meal. He danced about in a frightened manner, beating wildly at the tumbled flat stones about with his hands. Then of a sudden he stopped and cast sharp glances at his naked forearms. In the same seconds his eyes stood out in his face and he screamed as if he were pierced through and through with a keen blade; and he rushed to the fire and thrust his hands in its heart, even to his elbows. Then he drew his arms from out the flames, staggering and moaning and calling upon certain trusted gods, and tottered away into the night, his arms steaming and dripping bubbly liquid upon the ground.

Amazed, Zar-thule sent a man after him with a torch, who soon returned trembling with a very pale face in the firelight to tell how the madman had fallen�or leapt�to his death in a deep crevice, but that before he fell there had been visible upon his face a creeping, furry grayness! And as he had fallen, aye, even as he crashed down to his death, he had screamed: �Unclean, unclean, unclean!�

Then, all and all when they heard this, they remembered the old priest�s words of warning when Cush-had dragged him out of hiding, and the way he had gloomed upon the unfortunate captain, and they looked at the ancient where he lay held fast to the earth. The two reavers whose task it had been to tie him down looked them one to the other with very wide eyes, their faces whitening perceptibly in the firelight, and they took up a quiet and secret examination of their persons; aye, even a minute examination�.�.�.

Zar-thule felt fear rising in his reavers like the east wind when it rises up fast and wild in the desert of Sheb. He spat at the ground and lifted up his sword, crying: �Listen to me! You are all superstitious cowards, all and all of you, with your old wives fears and mumbo-jumbo. What�s there here to be frightened of; an old man, alone, on a black rock in the sea?�

�But I saw upon Cush-had�s face�� began the man who had followed the demented captain.

�You only thought you saw something,� Zar-thule cut him off. �It was only the flickering of your torch-fire and nothing more. Cush-had was a madman!�

�But��

�Cush-had was a madman!� Zar-thule said again, and his voice turned very cold. �Are you, too, insane? Is there room for you, too, at the bottom of that crevice?� But the man shrank back and said no more, and yet again did Zar-thule call his torturers that they should be about their work.

�There was, of course,� Sir Jeffrey said, �the Inconstancy Plague in Cheshire. Short-lived, but a phenomenon I don�t think we can quite discount.�

It was quite late at the Travellers� Club, and Sir Jeffrey and I had been discussing (as we seemed often to do in those years of the Empire�s greatest, yet somehow most tenuous, extent) some anomalous irruptions of the foreign and the odd into the home island�s quiet life�small, unlooked-for effects which those centuries of adventure and acquisition had had on an essentially stay-at-home race. At least that was my thought. I was quite young.

�It�s no good your saying �of course� in that offhand tone,� I said, attempting to catch the eye of Barnett, whom I felt as much as saw passing through the crepuscular haze of the smoking room. �I�ve no idea what the Inconstancy Plague was.�

From within his evening dress Sir Jeffrey drew out a cigar case, which faintly resembled a row of cigars, as a mummy case resembles the human form within. He offered me one, and we lit them without haste. Sir Jeffrey started a small vortex in his brandy glass. I understood that these rituals were introductory�that, in other words, I would have my tale.

�It was in the latter eighties,� Sir Jeffrey said. �I�ve no idea now how I first came to hear of it, though I shouldn�t be surprised if it was some flippant note in Punch. I paid no attention at first; the �popular delusions and madness of crowds� sort of thing. I�d returned not long before from Ceylon, and was utterly, blankly oppressed by the weather. It was just starting autumn when I came ashore, and I spent the next four months more or less behind closed doors. The rain! The fog! How could I have forgotten? And the oddest thing was that no one else seemed to pay the slightest attention. My man used to draw the drapes every morning and say in the most cheerful voice, �Another dismal wet one, eh, sir?� and I would positively turn my face to the wall.�

He seemed to sense that he had been diverted by personal memories, and drew on his cigar as though it were the font of recall.

�What brought it to notice was a seemingly ordinary murder case. A farmer�s wife in Winsford, married some decades, came one night into the Sheaf of Wheat, a public house, where her husband was lingering over a pint. From under her skirts she drew an old fowling-piece. She made a remark which was later reported quite variously by the onlookers, and gave him both barrels. One misfired, but the other was quite sufficient. We learn that the husband, on seeing this about to happen, seemed to show neither surprise nor anguish, merely looking up and�well, awaiting his fate.

�At the inquest, the witnesses reported the murderess to have said, before she fired, �I�m doing this in the name of all the others.� Or perhaps it was �I�m doing this, Sam (his name), to save the others.� Or possibly, �I�ve got to do this, Sam, to save you from that other.� The woman seemed to have gone quite mad. She gave the investigators an elaborate and scarifying story which they, unfortunately, didn�t take down, being able to make no sense of it. The rational gist of it was that she had shot her husband for flagrant infidelities which she could bear no longer. When the magistrate asked witnesses if they knew of such infidelities�these things, in a small community, being notoriously difficult to hide�the men, as a body, claimed that they did not. After the trial, however, the women had dark and unspecific hints to make, how they could say much if they would, and so on. The murderess was adjudged unfit to stand trial, and hanged herself in Bedlam not long after.

�I don�t know how familiar you are with that oppressive part of the world. In those years farming was a difficult enterprise at best, isolating, stultifyingly boring, unremunerative. Hired men were heavy drinkers. Prices were depressed. The women aged quickly, what with continual childbirth added to a load of work at least equal to their menfolk�s. What I�m getting at is that it is, or was, a society the least of any conducive to adultery, amours, romance. And yet for some reason it appeared, after this murder pointed it up, so to speak, dramatically, that there was a veritable plague of inconstant husbands in northern Cheshire.�

�It�s difficult to imagine,� I said, �what evidence there could be of such a thing.�

�I had occasion to go to the county that autumn, just at the height of it all,� Sir Jeffrey went on, caressing an ashtray with the tip of his cigar. �I�d at last got a grip on myself and begun to accept invitations again. A fellow I�d known in Alexandria, a commercial agent who�d done spectacularly well for himself, asked me up for the shooting.�

�Odd place to go shooting.�

�Odd fellow. Arriviste, to speak frankly. The hospitality was lavish; the house was a red-brick Cheshire faux-Gothic affair, if you know what I mean, and the impression it gave of desolation and melancholy was remarkable. And there was no shooting; poured rain all weekend. One sat about leafing through novels or playing Cairo whist�which is what we called bridge in those days�and staring out the windows. One evening, at a loss for entertainment, our host�Watt was his name, and�.�.�.�

�What was his name?� I asked.

�Exactly. He�d become a student of mesmerism, or hypnotism as he preferred to call it, and suggested we might have a bit of fun probing our dark underminds. We all declined, but Watt was insistent, and at last suborned a hearty local type, old squirearchical family, and�this is important�an inveterate, dirt-under-the-nails farmer. His conversation revolved, chiefly, around turnips.�

�Even his dark undermind�s?�

�Ah. Here we come to it. This gentleman�s wife was present at the gathering as well, and one couldn�t help noticing the hangdog air he maintained around her, the shifty eyes, the nervous start he gave when she spoke to him from behind; and also a certain dreaminess, an abstraction, that would fall on him at odd moments.�

�Worrying about his turnips, perhaps.�

Sir Jeffrey quashed his cigar, rather reproachfully, as though it were my own flippancy. �The point is that this ruddy-faced, absolutely ordinary fellow was cheating on his wife. One read it as though it were written on his shirt front. His wife seemed quite as aware of it as any; her face was drawn tight as her reticule. She blanched when he agreed to go under, and tried to lead him away, but Watt insisted he be a sport, and at last she retired with a headache. I don�t know what the man was thinking of when he agreed; had a bit too much brandy, I expect. At any rate, the lamps were lowered and the usual apparatus got out, the spinning disc and so on. The squire, to Watt�s surprise, went under as though slain. We thought at first he had merely succumbed to the grape, but then Watt began to question him, and he to answer, languidly but clearly, name, age, and so on. I�ve no doubt Watt intended to have the man stand on his head, or turn his waistcoat back-to-front, or that sort of thing, but before any of that could begin, the man began to speak. To address someone. Someone female. Most extraordinary, the way he was transformed.�

Sir Jeffrey, in the proper mood, shows a talent for mimicry, and now he seemed to transform himself into the hypnotized squire. His eyes glazed and half-closed, his mouth went slack (though his moustache remained upright) and one hand was raised as though to ward off an importunate spirit.

���No,� says he. �Leave me alone. Close those eyes�those eyes. Why? Why? Dress yourself, oh God�.�.�.� And here he seemed quite in torment. Watt should of course have awakened the poor fellow immediately, but he was fascinated, as I confess we all were.

���Who is it you speak to?� Watt asked.

���She,� says the squire. �The foreign woman. The clawed woman. The cat.�

���What is her name?�

���Bastet.�

���How did she come here?�

�At this question the squire seemed to pause. Then he gave three answers: �Through the earth. By default. On the John Deering.� This last answer astonished Watt, since, as he told me later, the John Deering was a cargo ship he had often dealt with, which made a regular Alexandria�Liverpool run.

���Where do you see her?� Watt asked.

���In the sheaves of wheat.���

�He meant the pub, I suppose,� I put in.

�I think not,� Sir Jeffrey said darkly. �He went on about the sheaves of wheat. He grew more animated, though it was more difficult to understand his words. He began to make sounds�well, how shall I put it? His breathing became stertorous, his movements�.�.�.�

�I think I see.�

�Well, you can�t, quite. Because it was one of the more remarkable things I have ever witnessed. The man was making physical love to someone he described as a cat, or a sheaf of wheat.�

�The name he spoke,� I said, �is an Egyptian one. A goddess associated with the cat.�

�Precisely. It was midway through this ritual that Watt at last found himself, and gave an awakening command. The fellow seemed dazed, and was quite drenched with sweat; his hand shook when he took out his pocket-handkerchief to mop his face. He looked at once guilty and pleased, like�like��

�The cat who ate the canary.�

�You have a talent for simile. He looked around at the company, and asked shyly if he had embarrassed himself. I tell you, old boy, we were hard-pressed to reassure him.�

Unsummoned, Barnett materialized beside us with the air of one about to speak tragic and ineluctable prophecies. It is his usual face. He said only that it had begun to rain. I asked for a whisky and soda. Sir Jeffrey seemed lost in thought during these transactions, and when he spoke again it was to muse: �Odd, isn�t it,� he said, �how naturally one thinks of cats as female, though we know quite well that they are distributed between two sexes. As far as I know, it is the same the world over. Whenever, for instance, a cat in a tale is transformed into a human, it is invariably a woman.�

�The eyes,� I said. �The movements�that certain sinuosity.�

�The air of independence,� Sir Jeffrey said. �False, of course. One�s cat is quite dependent on one, though she seems not to think so.�

�The capacity for ease.�

�And spite.�

�To return to our plague,� I said, �I don�t see how a single madwoman and a hypnotized squire amount to one.�

�Oh, that was by no means the end of it. Throughout that autumn there was, relatively speaking, a flurry of divorce actions and breach-of-promise suits. A suicide left a note: �I can�t have her, and I can�t live without her.� More than one farmer�s wife, after years of dedication and many offspring, packed herself off to aged parents in Chester. And so on.

�Monday morning after the squire�s humiliation I returned to town. As it happened, Monday was market day in the village and I was able to observe at first hand some effects of the plague. I saw husbands and wives sitting at far ends of wagon seats, unable to meet each other�s eyes. Sudden arguments flaring without reason over the vegetables. I saw tears. I saw over and over the same hangdog, evasive, guilty look I described in our squire.�

�Hardly conclusive.�

�There is one further piece of evidence. The Roman Church has never quite eased its grip in that part of the world. It seems that about this time a number of R.C. wives clubbed together and sent a petition to their bishop, saying that the region was in need of an exorcism. Specifically, that their husbands were being tormented by a succubus. Or succubi�whether it was one or many was impossible to tell.�

�I shouldn�t wonder.�

�What specially intrigued me,� Sir Jeffrey went on, removing his eyeglass from between cheek and brow and polishing it absently, �is that in all this inconstancy only the men seemed to be accused; the women seemed solely aggrieved, rather than guilty, parties. Now if we take the squire�s words as evidence, and not merely �the stuff that dreams are made on,� we have the picture of a foreign, apparently Egyptian, woman�or possibly women�embarking at Liverpool and moving unnoticed amid Cheshire, seeking whom she may devour and seducing yeomen in their barns amid the fruits of the harvest. The notion was so striking that I got in touch with a chap at Lloyd�s, and asked him about passenger lists for the John Deering over the last few years.�

�And?�

�There were none. The ship had been in dry dock for two or three years previous. It had made one run, that spring, and then been mothballed. On that one run there were no passengers. The cargo from Alex consisted of the usual oil, dates, sago, rice, tobacco�and something called �antiquities.� Since the nature of these was unspecified, the matter ended there. The Inconstancy Plague was short-lived; a letter from Watt the next spring made no mention of it, though he�d been avid for details�most of what I know comes from him and his gleanings of the Winsford Trumpet, or whatever it calls itself. I might never have come to any conclusion at all about the matter had it not been for a chance encounter in Cairo a year or so later.

�I was en route to the Sudan in the wake of the Khartoum disaster and was bracing myself, so to speak, in the bar of Shepheard�s. I struck up a conversation with an archaeologist fellow just off a dig around Memphis, and the talk turned, naturally, to Egyptian mysteries. The thing that continually astonished him, he said, was the absolute thoroughness of the ancient Egyptian mind. Once having decided a thing was ritualistically necessary, they admitted of no deviation in carrying it out.

�He instanced cats. We know in what high esteem the Egyptians held cats. If held in high esteem, they must be mummified after death; and so they were. All of them, or nearly all. Carried to their tombs with the bereaved family weeping behind, put away with favorite toys and food for the afterlife journey. Not long ago, he said, some three hundred thousand mummified cats were uncovered at Beni Hassan. An entire cat necropolis, unviolated for centuries.

�And then he told me something which gave me pause. More than pause. He said that, once uncovered, all those cats were disinterred and shipped to England. Every last one.�

�Good Lord. Why?�

�I have no idea. They were not, after all, the Elgin Marbles. This seemed to have been the response when they arrived at Liverpool, because not a single museum or collector of antiquities displayed the slightest interest. The whole lot had to be sold off to pay a rather large shipping bill.�

�Sold off? To whom, in God�s name?�

�To a Cheshire agricultural firm. Who proceeded to chop up the lot and resell it. To the local farmers, my dear boy. To use as fertilizer.�

Sir Jeffrey stared deeply into his nearly untouched brandy, watching the legs it made on the side of the glass, as though he read secrets there. �Now the scientific mind may be able to believe,� he said at last, �that three hundred thousand cats, aeons old, wrapped lovingly in winding cloths and put to rest with spices and with spells, may be exhumed from a distant land�and from a distant past as well�and minced into the loam of Cheshire, and it will all have no result but grain. I am not certain. Not certain at all.�

The smoking room of the Travellers� Club was deserted now, except for the weary, unlaid ghost of Barnett. Above us on the wall the mounted heads of exotic animals were shadowed and nearly unnamable; one felt that they had just then thrust their coal-smoked and glass-eyed heads through the wall, seeking something, and that just the other side of the wall stood their vast and unimaginable bodies. Seeking what? The members, long dead as well, who had slain them and brought them to this?

�You�ve been in Egypt,� Sir Jeffrey said.

�Briefly.�

�I have always thought that Egyptian women were among the world�s most beautiful.�

�Certainly their eyes are stunning. With the veil, of course, one sees little else.�

�I spoke specifically of those circumstances when they are without the veil. In all senses.�

�Yes.�

�Depilated, many of them.� He spoke in a small, dreamy voice, as though he observed long-past scenes. �A thing I have always found�intriguing. To say the least.� He sighed deeply; he tugged down his waistcoat, preparatory to rising; he replaced his eyeglass. He was himself again. �Do you suppose,� he said, �that such a thing as a cab could be found at this hour? Well, let us see.�

�By the way,� I asked when we parted, �whatever came of the wives� petition for an exorcism?�

�I believe the bishop sent it on to Rome for consideration. The Vatican, you know, does not move hastily on these things. For all I know, it may still be pending.�

Darkness is streaming down the bare branches of elms, blackening their trunks against the snow.

The boy�s feet scuff going upstairs to bed as he fits them into the worn half-moons of the wooden steps, trying to avoid the creaky ones.

The darkness mingles with smoke from the chimney, intricate open-lace patterns, blue behind gray. It seeps into the pond behind the house and turns it, beneath the willow, to mush, the mush to bluewhite slate. Cars like colored appendages of the clouds move silently at the ends of long umbilicals of exhaust. The pale sun closes its petals on the horizon: blue deepening, the sky turns the color of plums.

Like one of those fragile, tableau nativities built of colored sugar, soft pastels in half an eggshell, Mr.�Wilson and his wife sit on a nubby couch in the old wooden house. The couch is gently yellow, the room done in burnished golds and blue, the rug a ripe wheat. Now the colors change and flicker, shifting with the light of the fire, with the firefly lights of the Christmas tree in the corner beside it, with the triumphant trumpeting of the angel at the top. Around them in dimness, corners are softened, angles bundled in shadow. Light flushes from a phone booth across the street.

(In silence: the wet hiss of cars passing, a clatter of trelliswork on the back porch, the sigh and creak of an old house walking through itself, an old house that dreams of snow, a cool white bed for sleeping.)

The uneven tideheat of the fire before them, washing up in waves, reddening, receding. From the bare white kitchen, mixing with the resinous tang of evergreen, comes the sweet nutmeg smell of eggnog, of coffee done and warm, waiting. Fire crackles like cellophane, wood shifts on a slope of embers.

(His arm around her shoulder.)

And outside, a face passing the window. A man trudging slowly home from pushing dirt across floors, warm pipe steaming, smoke eddying white against the darker gray. Streetlights shelled in rainbow. And other lights (rouge, ochre, pale soft blue) blinking open in windows, in stiff green limbs. Angels regarding the street.

(A feeling told without words, told by an arm around a shoulder, by being together now, by a shared brandy.

�Last year�.�.�.�

�Yes�.�.�.�

By a smile.)

And outside, gently, quietly, it begins to snow. First a flourish, then small flakes, then larger and quicker, till the sky is boiling with whiteness, till it is like a fine dust of flour filling the air, falling. Falling.

(His arm around her shoulder.

Talking now. About the morning.

�Will he like it?�

�Of course. For a while, at least�.�.�.�

Country music on the radio.

Nostalgia. Reminiscence of things done, of those not done, a life. Images of a child growing, so young yet, so much before him, but so much of the shaping done already. Looking back, looking forward.)

Snow stipples flat gray air, slurs the streets, shuts people into their rooms behind their windows. And suddenly with the bright snow it is:

Night�.�.�.

�So you�re on your way to Northumberland and the Farne Islands, are you?� said Aitchison, and added with genial irony, �I suppose if it hadn�t been for my having Prideaux Selby�s catalogue, you�d never have broken your journey here at all!�

�Well, I did want to check up on one or two species,� laughed the ornithologist. �And I don�t dislike sleepy little Durham, you know. For a night�s lodging, within hearing of the cathedral chimes, I can even put up with a cantankerous old sinner like you!�

With such good-natured banter and amid the comfortable surroundings of Aitchison�s library, a stranger�had there been one there, hidden for some melodramatic reason, behind an armchair�would have had no difficulty in guessing that Drury was an old academic friend with a good claim to familiarity with his aged host.

�Ah!� reflected Aitchison a few minutes later as the pair of them, like good bachelors, sat watching the fire go out, �it�s a long time since I did more than peep at Holy Island. Let�s see; it�s fifty years since the St.�Cuthbert centenary. I remember crossing to the Farne about then.�

�Is there much archaeological stuff there?� asked Drury. �Any Cuthbert relics still?�

�Fourteenth-century chapel and site of the old boy�s hermitage. But unless you�re keen there�s nothing very exciting,� said Aitchison.

�It�s the birds I�m after chiefly, of course,� said Drury, �but while I�m there I might as well kill two birds with one stone!�

�Talking of stones,� responded the antiquary quite seriously, �you really ought to see the Scallion Stone.�

�What�s that then?� asked the other. �Some ancient carved work?�

�No,� said Aitchison, �it�s more of a geological curio�in shape, something between an oblong block and a wedge�about five feet in length and nearly two in breadth at its widest, I should say�surface pretty smooth, with five elongated shapes like fossils standing out. The name comes from these, I suppose, for they look like spring onions, or scallions as they call them in these parts. The whole thing�s very curious.�

�And you say this is still to be seen on the island?� asked Drury.

�I should be surprised if anyone�s disturbed it,� rejoined Aitchison. �In fact I doubt whether many people know of its existence, and with the amount of seaweed there is, they are not likely to come across it by accident.�

Drury was quite intrigued, and very soon the two had forgotten their wine, while Aitchison was drawing sketches and setting down directions which would help his guest to locate the phenomenon which seemed so well worth searching for.

Back in nineteen thirty-five it was. Year of the Silver Jubilee. That�s when it all started. Thirty-five was a year of ups and downs for most people. It was a year of ups for dear old King George the Five because he�d lived it up for twenty-five years as Fid. Def. Ind. Imp. and it was a year of downs for my old man, downs and outs you might as well say, as this was the year he fell in the giant mixer at Bleeson�s Cement Works, which annoyed the Bleeson board of directors no end because dad�s blood and bones messed up a ten-ton consignment of cement and cost the Bleeson mob somewhere in the neighborhood of ninety quid gross profit. Not that I missed me old man much mind you (well, old I call him, he was only just forty when he toppled overboard) even though I was only a boy of fourteen at the time of the mishap. Fourteen being the start of crucial times in a boy�s life, or so all the head-shrinkers say. Well, he was a violent, drunken old pig, see, used to thump Huckleberry out of my dear, beautiful mother and she used to cry real tears and sometimes the salt tears were red-running with blood from cuts he inflicted on her pale face. And I hated him.

I love my dear mother, see. Really, I do. Some blokes think you�re a bit mad when you say things like that. Girls do too. Especially girls. Girls get jealous, see. Why, when I tell girls I can actually remember my moment of birth, they look at me all peculiar, like�.�.�. but, it�s true. I do remember! Beautiful it was. Like plunging out of a dark, silent tunnel into the light of life. Love my mother, I do. Yes.

That�s why I was a bit choked when dear mother married again. So quick, too. Only just three months and a day after father�s messy passing. Not that I was worried about the old rats memory, it was just�.�.�. well�.�.�. I liked being alone in the house with dear mother. Liked her just being with me. Near me. Close. Didn�t really want anybody else sort of intruding.

Actually, though, the bloke she married, he wasn�t too bad when I really recollect it. Used to call me �mister� instead of �sonny� or �boy� and during the first months of the marriage he bought me a cricket bat and a Hornby clockwork train set and often he would take me to see a circus or the latest Marx Brothers picture. Mind you, he had bundles of money. Hundreds! So he could afford these luxuries, really. He was in the catsmeat business, see. That�s what he was called: Hollins the Catsmeat Man. Big bloke he was, all red-faced and black, brilliantined hair and he used to wear a brown warehouse overall down to his ankles and a great pair of brown, polished boots and a brown bowler hat with a dent in the middle and round the town he would go with his great tray of meat on his head and a big bell, swinging and clanging at his side and all the time he�d holler: �Ceeeee�.�.�. aaaaaaaaaats meat for seeeee�.�.�. aaaaaale! Beeeeee�.�.�. eeeeeeest ceeeeee�.�.�. aaaaaaaaaats meat!� And people would come from all over to buy his stringy red meat at sixpence a pound for their pet moggies if they was well-off clients and for their own consumption if they weren�t.

I used to work in the shop. Well, it wasn�t a shop really�.�.�. it was the front room of Hollins�s little terraced down Mafeking Avenue, which was where me and dear mother moved soon after she was wed. The house was one of them two up-two down efforts with a lavatory out back and a yard the size of a fourpenny postage stamp. This front room was my bedroom too. I mean, I had to sleep somewhere. Hollins put the tin hat on me sharing with dear mother and him. First of all it was a bit uncomfortable having your bed set up amongst a stack of horseflesh and mutton�.�.�. especially during the summer months when the old bluebottles used to come sucking and buzzing about, crawling all over your face and hands, bloated with butcher�s blood and, cor! The stink was enough to putrefy a graveyard. But I got used to it and I even started a lucrative sideline�.�.�. breeding maggots�.�.�. which I used to sell, a farthing a pokey bag to all the fishing kids around. Always had a cunning business brain, I did�.�.�. suppose it�s that what took me where I am today. Any old rate, to cut the boasting and get back to the originals, Hollins the Catsmeat Man, also being a shrewd nut where business was concerned, told my mum that I would keep the front room rent free, plus grub and six bob a week pin money if she and me would run the �shop.� Dear mother, being as dumb as she was beautiful, agreed, not realizing that foxy old Hollins had a bounden duty to succor and provide for his stepson during his formative, early-work years and, indeed, should not have been seeking profit from the sweat and labor of one so young. Still! That�s life! And every morning come the dawn, I�d thrust up me window and slap a few trays of catsmeat on the sill and by eight, darling mum�d come and join me and whilst Hollins was out on his rounds, swinging his bell and bawling his head off, mum and me�d sit chopping up great chunks of meat into slices and slabs, all friendly and cosy together, like a couple of surgeons in the window, and folks would come from ours and the neighboring streets and buy from us and the men would say that it was a treat to be served their catsmeat by such a lovely gal as my mum�.�.�. and they�d wink and crack little jokes and that�.�.�. and as the months went by, Hollins�s trade perked up no end, but Hollins, instead of getting grateful and being pleased with dear mother and me, grew sullen and churlish and started calling my mum horrible names like: slut! and, tramp! and, Jezebel!�.�.�. and I just couldn�t understand the change in the man. Sort of just like my old feller used to be.

�I wish �e was dead, Boysie,� she said to me one hot August morning as we sat slicing up a horse steak.

�Dead, mother? Who?�

�Hollins!�

�Why, mother?�

�Cos �e�s cruel, Boysie!� She lifted one fragile white hand and pushed back the hair which framed her face. �Look! He did that to me last night with a fag.�

I felt a sudden hatred for Hollins as I looked at the four neatly placed burn marks on my mother�s cheek. �Why�d he do that, mother?�

�Cos I wouldn�t kiss him. Well �e stunk someink terrible, he did. Bin on the rum half the day, he had.� She shivered. �I hate �im more than I ever hated your father, I�ll tell yer.�

�I�ll kill �im if you like, mother.� I slashed at the meat. �I�ll slit his throat and chop his head off if you want me to.�

She let the hair flop about her face. She looked at me with a tenderness I�d never before witnessed. �I couldn�t let yer do that, Boysie. That�d be murder. Young as you are, they�d �ang you for it.�

�Not if they never find out.� I selected a cube of meat and sliced it neatly. �And I know a way that I could get rid of him for sure. No one�d never discover what happened to �im, and we could have a business and everything. Just me and you, mother. We�d be laughing. We�d be rich.�

There was a silence. I chopped more meat. Slowly. �But if I done him, mother, you�d have to make me a very special promise.�

�And what�s that, darling Boysie?� she cooed.

�You�ve got to promise never no more to go with other blokes. No kissin� and cuddlin�, like. No more getting married.�

She smiled, leaned forward and kissed me gently on the forehead. �Of course, I promise. There�s only one man I need and that�s you�.�.�. my darling little Boysie.�

I loved it.

Well, mother and me we worked it together. I done Hollins with a specially sharpened carver when he was totaling up his week�s takings in the upstairs back bedroom, then between us mother and me chopped him up into little lumps and mixed best part of him with the catsmeat on the window trays. Went down a treat with the clients, he did and old Mrs.�Sollicutts from the buildings, a regular catsmeat eater, came back a-drooling, begging for more of that �real, lovely liver, what was the best she�d ever tasted!�

In fact, before Mr.�Hollins was exhausted, mother and me were showered with flattering compliments.

�Delicious, braised!� said Beattie Flower, the barmaid from the Sailors� Haven.

�Sure and I wouldn�t be after wasting choice cuts like that on my moggie,� enthused Old Man Murphy the Irish street fiddler.

�Nicest meat pie me mummy ever made,� commented little Timmy Brown, the postman�s son.

Course, it didn�t take long for mother and me to realize the potential. If we could get a regular supply of Hollinsmeat�.�.�. well�.�.�. we could bump our prices and make a fortune. Naturally, even though he was a big bloke, Hollins didn�t go far once he was diced up�.�.�. and, I mean, there was a hell of a lot of wastage, like bones, teeth, hair�.�.�. things like that (which we just buried in the yard) and it began to look, by the end of the week, that mother and me were going to be stuck with the regular line in catsmeat.

Any old rate, one night, mother and me were sitting in the cosy little parlor, downstairs back, she combing and brushing her long, golden hair and me just sitting back in this old rocker, gaping at her and marveling at her beauty when all of a sudden she looks at me with those green-gray gorgeous eyes of hers and says:

�Y�know, Boysie, mother�s been thinking.�

�Yes, mother. And what have you been thinking about?�

�Our future, darling.�

She tossed back her head and her soft hair seemed to float about that china-doll face.

�We could make a lot of money, y�know, if we�.�.�. well, darling Boysie�.�.�. if we could obtain another consignment of meat same as Mister Hollins.�

�But Mister Hollins has all run out, mother�.�.�. �cept for that pound of rump we�ve been saving for ourselves.�

She gave me a very fond smile and my heart went boomp, boomp, boomp! She said: �There are other gentlemen like Mister Hollins.�

I frowned: �You�re not thinking of goin� a-courting again, are you, mother?�

She pouted her luscious lips: �Mmmmm�.�.�. well�.�.�. sort of!�

A sudden sort of evil-hate feeling came over me. �But you promised, mother,� I said. �No more chaps. No more kissing and cuddling. No more�.�.�.�

�There�ll be no kissing, darling. No cuddling. I�ll just go parading around the bars and backstreets where the big men gather�.�.�. and I�ll entice them with me looks.�

�Entice?� I felt this dark rage welling up. �Sounds dirty. What�s it mean, mother?�

She put her finger to her lips and thought for a moment. �Entice means�.�.�. lure!�

�Lure?�

�Well�.�.�. seduce!�

�Sounds dirty too,� I said. I frowned. �You promised.�

Like the tinkling of bells was her laughter. �Silly, darling Boysie,� she trilled. �Mother loves you. All mother�s suggesting is that she brings,� she wagged a finger, �just brings, mind you, these gentlemen home.�

I whined. �But why, mother?�

�So that you, my darling, can dispatch them, same way as you dispatched the late Mr.�Hollins!�

The evil-hatred feeling flew away from me like a passing dark raven. I felt love now. Love for this mother of genius.

�Then we chops �em up,� I enthused, �just like we chops up the late Mr.�Hollins�.�.�. and we sells �em at twice the normal catsmeat price per pound and its all profit and within a year or so we�ll be livin� in style�.�.�. wahoooo!�

She came over and draped her arms about me, pulling my face to her springy bosom, till I almost sweetly stifled in that tender flesh. �Oh, my lovely Boysie,� she cooed. �Won�t it be wonderful?�

Illustration by Tim Kirk.

�It�s not that I have anything against you personally, Davis,� the old man said. �But I simply must kill you.�

�But why, Mr.�Carver?� the young man wanted to know. He�d stopped straining at his bonds, realizing at last the futility of that. �I�ve been your faithful employee for the past two years. If I�m going to die, at least tell me why.�

�Because I�m old,� Jonathan Carver said wearily, �and ready to die myself, and my soul is in hock.�

�I don�t understand,� James Davis said.

Carver grunted. �Of course you don�t. You�re young, happily married, with children. You have your whole life ahead of you. Or you would have,� he amended, matter-of-factly, �if I weren�t going to kill you.�

The old man glanced around the soundproof basement. The two of them were alone, of course. The door was locked and bolted from the inside. Davis�s young body was securely manacled to the wall, and there was no danger of his escaping.

�I suppose I do owe you an explanation,� he admitted.

Celia�s father was old enough to be her grandfather, perhaps her great-grandfather. Notoriously, it is one of the advantages that men have over women.

He had beautiful, silvery hair, and a voice like a distant bell of indeterminate note; but, unfortunately, he could move only very slowly, and, even then, aided by a shiny black staff, with a most handsomely jeweled knob. Celia had never known her mother, and that lady�s portrait was always turned to the wall, from which position, in accordance with her father�s adjuration, she had never cared to drag it, or to set about dragging it, for it looked very heavy.

The old house was crumbling now, and something beautiful was lost to it with every year that ended: even the drawing of an unknown, smiling woman by Raphael; even the tiny box found in the Prince of the Moskowa�s fob, and soaked in his blood. In the end, one would have thought that there remained only the mirrors; the looking glasses, if you insist. The mirrors or looking glasses, and the bare utilities for the bare living which has to substitute for life.

All the looking glasses were, of course, mercury-silvered, so that, as well as reflecting, they embellished and discriminated. In each of the state rooms were three or four of the objects; on the walls, on floor stands, on bureaux and escritoires. In the state bedrooms the looking glasses were even more subtly placed and more ingeniously set, in that long ago they had been offered more curious topics to touch upon. It is unnecessary to select from the lists of past guests, because the lists included everyone.

Day by day, Celia�s father would toil round the rooms, struggling up the grand staircases, crawling perilously down them; in every room, on every landing, at every dark corner, gazing in the looking glasses, outstaring time. Sometimes, at a respectful distance, he was followed for much of the way by his old Nurse, though more commonly Nurse was confined by neuritis and weakheadedness to her bed in the little apartment under the flaking tiles that she had occupied since first she came. How old Nurse could be was a subject sedulously eschewed.

Right from the cradle (and Celia�s cradle had aforetime cradled both the shapely John Dryden and the unproportioned Alexander Pope), Celia had vouchsafed her frail, dreamlike drawings; in pencil, even in chalk; and, later, with water color finely touched in. She had studied every urn in the park, and every ancient tree, by every condition of light: the Elizabethan oaks, the Capability Brown beeches, the single exotics planted with ceremony by Mr.�Palgrave, by Bishop Wilberforce, by the Prince Imperial. The tenant farmer�s herds served well as artistic auxiliaries; and, sometimes at dusk, the Mad Hunt, which all at these times could hear but only those with the Sight could behold. It was natural that when at length Celia had arrived at her sixteenth birthday, she should wish to go to Paris in order to increase her power and widen her range.

Still in a dream, she found herself enrolled at a long-established and old-fashioned private atelier: �tien�s it had been familiarly named by many generations of students, some of them always British. One felt that Watteau and Greuze must have been among the more recent pupils; Claude, among the earlier professors. But now, as is often found with aging institutions, seven eighths of the attendants were excessively youthful; too young to be taken quite seriously as yet by anyone. The remaining one eighth was composed of shaky eccentrics and inadequates who had been attending (and, of course, contributing) since the year Dot. The professors were wayward, though one or two were geniuses, and merely at cross purposes with the times in which they found themselves. Genius, however, comes normally in inverse measure with capacity to impart. The two things are strongly opposed. One of the pupils, a very old, very tough American woman brought a sackful of cakes and pastries for consumption by all during the two breaks each day.

Celia, aged sixteen years and eleven days (�Give me back my eleven days,� she cried out in a brief moment of melancholy), was escorted to France by Mr.�Burphy, die Chief Clerk in Totlands, her father�s solicitors, and of course her own too. They even consumed an evening meal of a sort in the restaurant at the Gare de Lyon, the most gorgeous in Europe. But all the arrangements had really been made by Celia�s distant cousin, Rolf, who lived with two other men of the same generation in a beautiful house up the hill at Meudon, and who knew all the ins and outs. Cousin Rolf fixed Celia up at �tien�s and he even found her a nearby apartment: very high up, but with two rooms, though small ones, and with what amounted to a private staircase down to the sanitary facilities on the floor immediately below. Celia had no occasion ever to encounter in person her remote, though helpful Cousin Rolf. It was unexpected that a girl of Celia�s age and background should be deposited on her own in Paris, and among artists; but she had requested it, she had always spoken quantities of French, and she could not see that there was anyone to make a fuss, as all her aunts were in Ireland, about 150 miles from Dublin, and in no position to go anywhere else, even had they wished to. Fortunately, Celia could depend upon an adequate allowance. This was mainly because her father did not understand the value of money, and, throughout his long life, had made a point of refusing all advice about it, or about anything else.

The first things that Celia bought (apart from a few dresses, pairs of shoes and stockings, lovely lingerie, and even one or two hats, either very small or very large) were additional chattels for her miniature rooms, which, upon entry, she was surprised to find almost unfurnished, as if she had been living still in the days of Mimi, Musetta, Colline, and all those well-known people. In particular, there was not one single mirror or looking glass, not one; not even a cracked fragment in the downstairs cabinet, with, perhaps, MILTON at one corner, or, possibly, JEYES, such as one found in bathing machines.

So Celia went out and purchased four or five looking glasses immediately. All but one would be merely for use each day and were backed with nitrate, though certainly not mass-produced or in any way commonplace; but the last of her acquisitions might have stood in any bedroom at home.

Celia had spotted it in one of the low, dark, hopelessly untidy shops, and its capture had been an impulse of the instant, as is everything that is in any way real. Elements of nostalgia, even of plain homesickness, no doubt entered in.

The shop had proved to be run not by the usual very old man, but by an even older woman, though spryer and more grasping than Nurse at home. The aged tricoteuse had driven a terribly hard bargain, but Celia had to possess the glass; first, for the obvious reason that she could not live without it; second, because it bore extremely faded traces of mysterious male and female figures round the upper part of the frame; third, because the face that had just looked back at her from its shallows and depths had not been her own.

The short distance along which the glass had to be borne presented an even worse problem than the haggling, and the need for lugging it up so many narrow, winding, and decrepit stairs a worse one still.

But the most complex of ordeals sometimes finds its own resolution, and now Celia sat before the beautiful mirror or looking glass, now in one new dress, now in another, and intermittently without troubling to put on a dress at all. She had to seat herself for these transactions, because the looking glass was so short in the frame. She had heard that our ancestors were more stunted than we are, though even this (she knew) had been contested by a woman who owned an immense collection of very old clothes, all of which she had measured anew, giving years to the work. Possibly the beautiful looking glass had been designed for the Gonzaga dwarfs, men and women even as the faded figures gamboling round the top of the frame? Celia wondered if she would ever visit their tiny suites at Mantua; of which her father had shown her small yellow photographs taken years before with early flashlights. In the meantime, she would have to find a chaise longue that was stumpier in the shanks. Her own limbs were as long as they were lovely.

So life continued, for Celia could not quite say how long, as her father wrote letters of any kind only on formal occasions, and Totlands really had no business to transact with her beyond paying out her allowance, with their usual precise punctuality. She had been well aware that Mr.�Burphy had been more frightened of her than anything else. How long ago it began to seem! Time flies when we watch it, but has no need to fly when we ignore it.

One morning, Celia felt quite certain of something that of late she had more and more suspected: she was not merely looking older, but looking much older; older, more grained, more perceptibly skinny. The first bright light of spring must have wrought the trick.

At least, Celia presumed it was the spring; which she had always distrusted, even artistically. She knew that spring is the season of maximum self-slaughter; and who could wonder? It was the season when doubt was no longer possible. Momentarily, she clutched at the neckline of her dress, and managed to inflict an actual rent. Even the fabric of her garments seemed to have weakened slightly; and this had been an expensive garment, once.

Celia did not care to look very often in any of the glasses after that, but crept past and around them, her eyes on the jade or turquoise carpet.

All the same, life has in some sense to go forward, as long as it bears with us at all; and Celia, despite her tendency to melancholy, was perfectly courageous. Moreover, she was finding more and more of herself in her art, and had been assured that soon she might quite easily win a medal of some kind. Of course, that had been said to her privately, in order not to upset the others.

She bought many new dresses to replace the one she had torn. She even bought six fancy dresses, or costumes that were all but that; with a view to meeting life from time to time in different and selected disguises. She bought a silk tie and two pairs of silk socks for a man she knew; all in excitingly aggressive colors and patterns. Sometimes she dwelt upon what it would be like to nurture eight or nine children, the fruit of her womb; upon their complex teething and schooling; upon some brusque, shadowy figure to pay for it all and act as head of the household.

How long could it have been before Celia, despite her precautions, caught her own eye in the glass and realized that she must be middle-aged and beyond all chance of concealment? And, needless to say, it had happened at that same dreadful morning hour, when the brightness of the sun is equaled only by the blackness of the heart.

Other faces had continued glinting back at her from time to time, but now she recognized that a stranger had intruded for ever.

She opened a letter that morning from David Skelt, the senior partner in Totlands. He had never before been under any necessity to write to her personally, but had been able to leave the task to his staff, or at least to a partner who was greatly junior.

Mr.�Skelt informed her that her father had become so frail that Nurse would have to be supplemented by at least one other nurse; and that her own allowance would have henceforth to be halved at the least, in consequence. He referred to these new nurses as �trained nurses.� Presumably, that might make a big difference in some way.

Prices in Paris were said to be rising and the people to be changing in character; but Celia knew that she still had her art, as well as her beautiful looking glass. She realized that her art must mean more to her with every day that sped past. Whether strangers cared for her art or not, the other pupils could be counted upon for loyalty without flaw. Moreover, most of the pupils were nowadays little more than children, so that all could not sensibly be described as lost. There could always be a completely new generation. The future was an open question yet.

Celia even felt that she could hold her own with the looking glass by a continuous act of will: unremitting, resolute, robust. Long ago, Nurse had upheld virtues of that kind, and now the time was come to practice them. One never knew what one could do until one tried. If one tried hard enough, one could be any age one chose. In the library at home, she had come upon St.�Thomas Aquinas�s promise to that effect, even though in Latin, and in Gothic type that grew faint and gray as one watched, and never had much shape to the letters at the best of times.

Alas, there were crab-sized holes in Celia�s petticoat, and, up and down the staircase, rats on the rampage for food, however moldy and mottled. Cousin Rolf could not have known. Their delicate paws were like swift kisses on ones face and arms. It was just as in the attics at home.

Celia took to attending each year the service at the Chapelle Expiatoire, and to painting pictures entitled �Son of St.�Louis, Ascend to Heaven!� At these times, she could feel the divine benediction cloaking her shoulders, like a soft stole.

The other pupils at the art school were either complete babies, feeding from bottles containing corn flour; or, in certain cases, motionless skeletons, also fed with corn flour, though not from bottles, because they could not suck.

It did not take long by any standard for the point to be reached where Celia�s ever smaller allowance was intersected by the ever larger cost of everything. Sometimes the watchful could see her white hair and white face at the edge of the rotting curtain as she looked out at the march past for social justice. Through hunting glasses and telescopes they could see plainly that her eyes were at once animated and frightened by the coarse thumping of the drums, the amateur screaming of the brass, the bellowing of the inebriated.

She began cutting away the gangrene from her limbs, or what she assumed to be gangrene. She was too scared to use the sharpest knife she had, as no doubt she should have done. She preferred the small, elegant fruit knives, precisely because they were rather blunt; and because they were silver, though not hallmarked with a lion, as had been so many of the knives at home. A trained surgeon would have acted upon other values, though it is hard to see that they would have made much difference in the end.

The times had become so harsh, and the people so indifferent, that the art school, after all those years, was in real danger of shutting.

Celia reflected that one�s art is strictly one�s own, and that never should it mean more to her than it meant now, or shudderingly seldom.

Faces she took to belong to Raphael, Luca Giordano, and Frederick Leighton now looked upon her, exaltedly and exhortingly, from within the beautiful looking glass. When she was not at art school, or trying to buy simple things with almost no money (a dressing jacket, a pair of gloves, a flask of flowery liqueur), Celia spent most of her time gazing, as she would hardly have been able to deny. Only in that way could she be true to herself. But never until now had she seen faces or forms to which she could attach names. Too often of late she had seen shapes for which no name was possible. On occasion, they had emerged, and had had to be driven back with implements she had found on sale second-hand at very low prices near Les Halles and presumably intended for the meat trade in one of its aspects. Sometimes she was horrified by the spectacle she was compelled to make of herself, and her father might have had an asthmatic attack, had he seen it.

Celia knew perfectly well that if she was to stand any chance of making a permanent mark, as the faces expected of her, then she should practice much more, as ballerinas have to do, and ladies and gentlemen who master enormous pianofortes. She should be plucky, confident, and indefatigable, like Rosa Bonheur. She should probably look like Rosa Bonheur also, though she had enough difficulty already in hanging on to looks of any land. Still, there it was. The demands of art are notoriously boundless; nor are they subject to appeal.

�Oh, let me join you!� cried Celia, stretching out her arms to the real Celia within the beautiful mirror�s mysterious depths. The real Celia stretched voluptuously in a patterned dress on the chaise longue she had bought with such innocent ardor, and on which the beseeching Celia lay among the decayed wreckage, virtually upon the sloping floor, gazed upon by a hundred expectant eyes. The colored figures at the top of the frame had entirely faded long ago.

Celia thought that the real Celia slightly moved one pale hand and even opened her eyes a little wider. She could not remember whether the patterned dress was a silk dress for parties or a cotton dress for shopping. The pattern was known as Capet.

In any case, there would be no actual harm done if she continued to supplicate, to beseech.

Once, about this time, Celia actually heard from Mr.�Burphy. It was the very first letter she had ever received from him, and Celia was quite glad that she had opened it, even though the address on the envelope had merely been typewritten. Mr.�Burphy said that he had often thought of their romantic trip to Paris together, that he fancied there might be no harm in his recalling it now, that her father unfortunately needed more trained nurses all the time, that there was almost no money left from which to pay for anything, and that he, Mr.�Burphy, was about to retire after generations of service with the firm, and was writing to everyone he knew and could remember, for that reason. The rest of the staff had subscribed to buy him a small electric clock, which had taken him completely by surprise, and particularly when Mr.�Daniel himself had found a few moments to participate in the presentation!

Celia thought for a long, long time about the elms, and urns, and tiny bubbling springs in her fathers park; and about the tenant farmers comely, contented cows, and occasional frisky bulls. She thought about the forty-seven catalogued likenesses of her ancestors and collaterals; many of them in large familiar groups; one of them turned to the wall. She thought about the schoolroom with a dozen desks and only one occupant. She thought of the withered feathered fans in the conservatory, the property of ladies who, for her, had been dead always. She listened in memory to the Mad Hunt at twilight, and saw it take form. She smelt the rotting grapes, with the German name; and the ullaged wine, with no name at all. She felt the wet camel-hair bristles on the back of her slender hand, as she painted the world and herself into a certain transcendence.

Thirty years ago Juniper Hill was an isolated township, with a small village, dirt roads and high hilly tracts of evergreen forest�pine, hemlock, tamarack and spruce. Scattered along the fringes of wood were boulder-strewn pastures, hay fields and glacially formed, lichen-covered knolls.

Ordinarily I stayed in Juniper Hill from early June until late September. As I returned year after year, I came to be accepted almost as a native�many notches above the few transient �summer people� who stayed for a month or so and then hurried back to the world of traffic, tension and tedium.

I wrote when I felt like it. The rest of the time I walked the dirt roads, explored the woods and chatted with the natives.

Within a few years I got to know everyone in town, with the exception of a hermit or two and one irascible landowner who refused to converse even with his own neighbors.

To me, however, a certain Henry Crotell was the most intriguing person in Juniper Hill. He was sometimes referred to as �the village idiot,� �that loafer,� �that good-for-nothing,� etc., but I came to believe that these epithets arose more from envy than from conviction.

Somehow, Henry managed to subsist and enjoy life without doing any work�or at least hardly any. At a time when this has become a permanent way of life for several million persons, I must quickly add that Henry did not receive one dime from the township of Juniper Hill, either in cash or goods.

He lived in a one-room shack on stony land which nobody claimed and he fed himself. He fished, hunted, picked berries and raised a few potatoes among the rocks behind his shack. If his hunting included a bit of poaching, nobody seemed to mind.

Since Henry used neither alcohol nor tobacco, his needs were minimal. Occasionally, if he needed a new shirt, or shoes, he would split wood, dig potatoes or fill in as an extra hay-field hand for a few days. He established a standard charge which never varied: one dollar a day plus meals. He would never accept any more cash. You might prevail upon him to take along a sack of turnips, but if you handed him a dollar and a quarter for the day, he�d smilingly return the quarter.

Henry was in his early thirties, slab-sided, snuff-brown, with a quick loose grin and rather inscrutable, faded-looking blue eyes. His ginger-colored hair was getting a trifle thin. When he smiled, strangers assumed he was wearing false teeth because his own were so white and even. I once asked him how often he brushed his teeth. He doubled up with silent laughter. �Nary brush! Nary toothpaste!� I didn�t press the point, but I often wondered what his secret was�if he had one.

Henry should have lived out his quiet days at Juniper Hill and died at ninety on the cot in his shack. But it was not to be.

Henry found the book.

Four or five miles from Henry�s shack lay the crumbling ruins of the old Trobish house. It was little more than a cellar hole filled with rotted boards and fallen beams. Lilac bushes had forced their roots between the old foundation stones; maple saplings filled the dooryard. Old Hannibal Trobish, dead for fifty years, had been an eccentric hermit who drove off intruders with a shotgun. When he died, leaving no heirs and owing ten years� taxes, the town had taken over the property. But the town had no need of it, nor use for it, and so the house had been allowed to decay until finally the whole structure, board by board, had dropped away into the cellar hole. There were hundreds of such collapsed and neglected houses throughout New England. Nobody paid much attention to them.

Henry Crotell, however, seemed fascinated by the moldering remains of the Trobish house. He prowled the area, poked about in the cellar hole and even lifted out some of the mildewed beams. Once, reaching in among the sagging foundation stones, he was nearly bitten by a copperhead.

Old Dave Baines admonished Henry when he heard about it. �That�s an omen, Henry! You�d better stay away from that cellar hole!�

Henry pushed out his upper lip and looked at his shoes. �Ain�t �fraid of no old snake! Seen bigger. Last summer I rec�lect. Big tom rattler twice as big!�

Not long after the copperhead incident, Henry found the book. It was contained in a small battered tin box which was jammed far in between two of the foundation stones in the Trobish cellar.

It was a small, vellum-bound book, measuring about four by six inches. The title page and table of contents page had either disintegrated or been removed, and mold was working on the rest of the pages, but it was still possible to read most of the print�that is, if you knew Latin.

Henry didn�t, of course, but, no matter, he was entranced by his find. He carried the book everywhere. Sometimes you�d see him sitting in the spruce woods, frowning over the volume, baffled but still intrigued.

We underestimated Henry. He was determined to read the book. Eventually he prevailed upon Miss Winnie, the local teacher, to lend him a second-hand Latin grammar and vocabulary.

Since Henry�s formal schooling had been limited to two or three years, and since his knowledge of English was, at best, rudimentary, it must have been a fearful task for him to tackle Latin.

But he persisted. Whenever he wasn�t prowling the woods, fishing, or filling in for an ailing hired hand, he�d sit puzzling over his find. He�d trace out the Latin words with one finger, frown, shake his head and pick up the textbook. Then, stubbornly, he�d go back to the vellum-bound volume again.

He ran into many snags. Finally he returned to Miss Winnie with a formidable list of words and names which he couldn�t find in the grammar.

Miss Winnie did the best she could with the list. Shortly afterwards she went to see Dave Baines. Although, in his later years, Baines held no official position, he was the patriarch of the town. Nearly everyone went to him for counsel and advice.

Not long after Miss Winnie�s visit, he stopped in to see me. After sipping a little wine, he came to the point.

�I wish,� he said abruptly, �you�d try to get that damned book away from Henry.�

I looked up with surprise. �Why should I, Dave? It keeps him amused apparently.�

Baines removed his steel-rimmed spectacles and rubbed his eyes. �That list Henry brought Miss Winnie contains some very strange words�including the names of at least four different devils. And several names which must refer to�entities�maybe worse than devils!�

I poured more wine. �I�ll see what I can do. But I really can�t imagine what harm could come of it. That book is just a new toy to Henry. He�ll tire of it eventually.�

Dave replaced his spectacles. �Well, maybe. But the other day Giles Cowdry heard this funny high-pitched voice coming out of the woods. Said it gave him the creeps. He slipped in to investigate and there was Henry standing in a clearing among the pines reading out of that moldy book. I suppose his Latin pronunciation was pretty terrible, but Giles said a strange feeling came over him as Henry went on reading. He backed away and I guess he was glad enough to get out of earshot.�

I promised Dave I�d see what I could do. About a week later while I was taking a walk through the woods in the vicinity of Henry�s shack I heard a kind of chant emanating from nearby.

Pushing through a stand of pines, I spotted Henry standing in a small open area among the trees. He held a hook in one hand and mouthed a kind of gibberish which, to me at least, only faintly resembled Latin.

Unobtrusively, I edged into sight. A fallen branch cracked as I stepped on it and Henry looked up.

He stopped reading immediately.

I nodded. �Mornin�, Henry, just taking a stroll and I couldn�t help hearing you. Must be a mighty interesting little book you�ve got there. Can I take a look at it?�

Ordinarily, Henry would greet me with an easy grin. This time he scowled. �Ain�t givin� my book to nobody!� he exclaimed, stuffing the volume into a pocket.

I was annoyed and I suppose I showed it. �I didn�t ask to keep the book, Henry. I merely wanted to look at it.� Actually this wasn�t entirely true; I had hoped to persuade him to give me the book.

He shrugged, hesitated and then, turning, started off through the woods. �I got chores. No time for talk,� he muttered over his shoulder.

The next day I reported my failure to Dave Baines.

�Too bad,� he commented, �but I suppose we�d better just forget about it. If he won�t give that infernal book to you, he won�t give it to anybody. Let�s just hope he loses interest in it after a time.�

But Henry didn�t lose interest in the vellum-bound book. On the contrary, he developed an obsession about it. He went hunting or fishing only when driven by acute hunger. He neglected his potato patch. His shack, never very sturdy, began to disintegrate.

Less often during the day now, but more often at night, his high-pitched voice would be heard arising from one of the dense groves of pines or hemlocks which bordered the dusty country roads. Scarcely anyone in Juniper Hill knew Latin, but everyone who heard Henry�s chant drifting from the dark woods agreed that it was an eerie and disturbing experience. One farmer�s wife averred that Henry�s nocturnal readings had given her nightmares.

Somebody asked how Henry could see to read in the dark, since nobody ever had seen a light in the woods from whence the sounds emanated.

It was, as is said, �a good question.� We never found out for sure. It was possible that Henry had finally memorized the contents of the book, or part of it. This, however, I personally found difficult to believe.

Henry�s explanation, when it came, was even more difficult to accept.

One hot summer morning he turned up at the village general store. He looked emaciated and his clothes were in tatters, but he seemed imbued with a kind of suppressed animation. Perhaps exhilaration might be the better word.

He bought a two-dollar work shirt and three tins of corned beef. He did not appear chagrined that these purchases very obviously emptied his tattered wallet.

Loungers at the store noticed that he was wearing a ring. Some commented on it.

Surprisingly, Henry held it out for inspection. He was visibly proud of it. Everyone agreed later that they had never seen a ring like it before. The band might have been shaped out of silver, but worked into it were tiny veins of blue which appeared to glow faintly. The stone was disappointing: black, flat-cut and dull in luster.

Unusually voluble, Henry volunteered some information on the stone. �Ain�t no good in daylight. Nighttime it comes alive. Throws out light, it do!�

He gathered up his purchases and started for the door. He paused at the threshold, chuckling, and turned his head. �Light a-plenty,� he added, ��nuff light to read by!�

Still chuckling to himself, he walked out into the hot sunlight and off down the road.

The only other information we received about the ring came from Walter Frawley, the town constable, who met Henry in the woods one day. Frawley reported that he had asked Henry where he had acquired the ring.

Henry insisted that he found it, purely by chance, tangled up among the roots of a huge pine tree which formerly grew near the ruins of the old Trobish house. The great pine had toppled in a severe windstorm several years before. Natives estimated the tree was at least one hundred years old.

Nobody could satisfactorily explain how the ring had become entangled in the roots of a century-old pine tree. It was possible, of course, that old Hannibal Trobish had buried it there many decades ago�either to hide it, or to get rid of it.

As the hot summer advanced, Henry went on chanting in the woods at night, giving late travellers �a case of the nerves� and causing some of the farm watch dogs to howl dismally.

One day I met Miss Winnie in the village and asked for her opinion of Henry�s book, based on the list of words and names which he had brought to her for translation or clarification.

�The book is medieval in origin,� she told me. �And I think it was written by someone who pretended to be a wizard or sorcerer. Poor Henry is out there in the woods at night chanting invocations to nonexistent devils dreamed up by some medieval charlatan who was quite possibly burned at the stake!�

I frowned. �Why do you say �nonexistent devils,� Miss Winnie?�

�I don�t believe in such things,� she replied a bit stiffly. �I went to Dave Baines about the book because I thought it was having a bad effect on Henry. Heaven knows I�d be delighted if he learned Latin, but I don�t think he�s going about it properly. And he�s neglecting everything. People tell me his little hut is falling apart and that he doesn�t eat properly anymore.�

I thanked her and went my way, even more concerned than I had been before, but totally unable to see how I could help. I felt that Henry still liked me, but I knew his stubbornness was monumental.

Not long after my talk with Miss Winnie, I heard rumors that Henry was building some kind of stage or platform on a small knoll adjacent to one of the deeper stands of hemlock. The knoll was about a mile from one of the less-traveled country roads. It was quite high, almost level with the tops of the hemlocks. I had been on it a few times and recalled that on a clear day it overlooked a huge expanse of forest and field.

One afternoon when the summer heat had subsided somewhat, I went to have a look at Henry�s platform. After nearly becoming lost in the dark hemlock woods, I slipped into the sunlight and climbed the side of the knoll, a small hill made up of glacial stones and gravel.

It was barren except for a few stunted shrubs, ground creepers and dried lichen patches. Centered on the exact top was a twenty-foot structure built primarily out of willow saplings. A few stakes of heavier wood had been driven in around the base to strengthen the whole. The top of the bizarre lookout tapered to a tiny wooden platform, just large enough for one person. A crude hand-ladder had been attached to one side and a kind of rail ran around the perimeter of the platform.

It was, altogether, shaky and perilous-looking. Henry was no heavyweight, and he would probably survive a twenty-foot drop onto the slippery side of a knoll, but I felt, nevertheless, that he was risking serious injury.

I circled the little structure and sat down nearby for a time, but Henry did not appear. At length, as the afternoon sun beat down on the knoll, I got up and made my way uneventfully through the hemlocks and back to the road.

Dave Baines shook his head when he learned of the willow platform. �That Latin book is drivin� Henry loco. I expect he�ll fall off that thing, break a leg, or maybe his spine, and end up in the county hospital.�

I suggested condemning the willow tower since it was obviously hazardous and was, moreover, built on land to which Henry had no title.

Dave shrugged. �What good would it do? He�d be madder than a hundred wet hens, and he�d likely just go out and rig up another somewhere else.�

I let it go at that. I wasn�t a native of the town and I certainly wasn�t going to spearhead any �movement� to demolish Henry�s willow platform.

Not long after my talk with Dave, the stories started circulating. At night, it was rumored, Henry�s chanting could be heard all over town. It was becoming louder all the time.

Frank Kenmore came in with a story about Henry screeching from the top of the willow tower while it swayed wildly in the wind and �tongues of fire� floated over the hemlock trees.

John Pendle complained that his old mare had bolted and thrown him from his buggy into the ditch one night when Henry started his �crazy yellin�.�

Young Charlie Foxmire swore that he had crept through the woods at midnight and seen Henry on his tower �laughin� like a madman and talkin� to somebody in the trees.�

I determined to find out for myself what actually was taking place. Late one evening I went out to the front veranda and listened. Sure enough, when the wind was right, I could hear Henry�s steady chanting.

I turned off my lights and started out for the willow tower.

It was tough going through the hemlocks, but Henry�s high-pitched chant kept me on my course. When I reached the knoll, I circled around until I was directly at Henry�s back. I advanced only a few feet up the side of the knoll, crouched down and then very cautiously lifted my head.

Henry, book in hand, was standing on the tiny platform. The flimsy structure was swaying slightly in the wind. A bluish glow, whose source I could not at first locate, illuminated the book and part of Henry�s face. His chant rose and fell eerily. He kept glancing from the book out over the top of the black hemlock forest, almost as if he were addressing a huge unseen audience which listened among the trees. In spite of the relative warmth of the summer night, I found myself shuddering.

His chant seemed to go on endlessly, as he turned the pages of the book. His voice became stronger as he continued. The wind rose and the platform swayed a little more.

I crouched motionless until my muscles ached, but there was no response from the depths of the hemlock woods. I was shocked when I realized that I had been waiting for a response!

I saw clearly at last that the strange blue glow emanated from the ring on Henry�s finger. I experienced the weird conviction that the glow strengthened as Henry�s chant grew stronger.

At length, the tension, plus the uncomfortable position in which I remained crouched, began to tire me. I had intended to stay until Henry finished his nocturnal incantations, but on second thought I decided to leave before he descended. I was convinced that he would be furious if he found me spying on him when he came down.

Moving carefully, I slipped backwards into the trees. A carpet of hemlock needles, inches deep, effectively muffled my footsteps. I groped my way to the road and walked home. I was too exhausted to assess the full implications of what I had seen. In spite of my fatigue, I did not sleep well. Unpleasant dreams, bordering on nightmare, harried me until morning.

I reported to Dave Baines. He appeared deeply concerned.

�Henry�s going to destroy himself�or be destroyed by something, if we don�t get him away from there.�

I nodded. �That�s the way I feel�but what can we do?�

Dave began polishing his spectacles. �I�ll think of something.�

Three days later as I was returning from the village store early one morning, I met Henry. He was shuffling along dispiritedly. I inquired, casually, where he was heading.

He stopped, eyes on the ground, and began kicking at the dirt road with one foot.

�Dave Baines,� he told me, �got me on over ta Miller�s place. Extry hay hand. Says they be hard up fer help. Wants me to go�sort of a favor to him!�

He shook his head and scowled. �Wouldn�t go fer nobody else. Nobody! But Dave done me favors. Lots of favors. So I got to go.�

�That�s fine, Henry!� I said. �You�ll be well fed and earn a few dollars! The almanac�s predicting a long winter!�

He looked at me scornfully. �Ain�t worried about winter. You know what I think?�

�What�s that, Henry?�

He hesitated. �Well, I trust Dave, I reckon. But it could be somebody put him to it�so�s they could get in my shack and take my book!�

His faded blue eyes took on an unfamiliar glint. He continued before I could comment.

�It won�t do nobody no good! Because I got my book right here!� He tapped his overall pocket. �Right here!� he repeated triumphantly.

I assured him that Dave was undoubtedly acting in good faith and that nobody I knew in Juniper Hill would trespass in his absence.

Somewhat mollified, but still dispirited, he shuffled off. I noticed that he was still wearing his unusual ring with the flat black stone.

Kent Miller�s place was at the far northern end of Juniper Hill. And Miller possessed several huge hay fields. If I judged correctly, Henry would not be back for several days.

That evening I decided to pay another visit to Henry�s willow platform. As I started through the hemlock woods toward the knoll, I felt a bit like an intruder. But then I reminded myself that the knoll did not belong to Henry. And perhaps I might stumble on some clue which would be the key to Henry�s obsession.

The thick hemlock woods were like a dark and aromatic tomb. I reached the knoll with a feeling of relief. At least I was in the open; I could see sky and feel a breeze on my face.

As I glanced up at the willow tower, I almost laughed aloud. How absurd it looked! Poorly constructed, fragile, swaying in the slight wind�how foolish I was to have been so impressed by a country loafers childish obsession!

I scrambled up the shaky ladder nailed to one side of the tower and cautiously edged out onto the flimsy platform. The moon had not yet risen and there was not much to see�the dark continuing mass of hemlocks, a few fireflies and, far off, the twinkling light in a farmhouse window.

I was both relieved and disappointed. I told myself that I was a fool. What had I expected to see?

As I was about to start down the ladder, I thought I heard a faint chant somewhere in the deep distance. It was like an echo, almost inaudible�yet I paused with my hand on the platform railing and listened.

As I waited, it grew stronger, but only by a small degree. I looked out over the hemlocks and frowned. The contour of the woods seemed to have changed; the outlines of the trees seemed different.

I strained my eyes into the darkness, unable to comprehend what I thought I was witnessing. The wind rose, and the chant grew louder.

Henry was returning, I told myself, and I must hurry away before he reached the knoll with his infernal book and the ring that glowed in the dark.

Two things happened then almost simultaneously. As I started to let myself over the side to go down the ladder, I glanced once more toward the black mass of hemlocks. Only they weren�t hemlocks. They were immense, towering trees, tropical in outline, which resembled giant ferns against the sky.

And as I stared in amazement and disbelief, a figure faced me on the platform�a figure with distorted features and glittering eyes which looked like an evil caricature of Henry Crotell!

With a rush of horror, I realized that I could see through the figure to the night sky beyond.

After a frozen moment of immobility, I went over the side of the platform. I slid partway down the apology for a ladder and fell the rest of the way.

As soon as my feet touched earth, they were racing for the trees. And when I entered them, they were the dark sweet hemlocks which I knew.

I rushed through them, gouging and scratching myself on projecting branches. Henry�s chant, somewhat weak but still persistent, followed me.

I could hear it, far off in the night, when I stumbled onto my porch and opened the door.

I sat up for hours drinking coffee and at last fell asleep in my chair. I was slumped there, red-eyed and unshaven, when someone knocked.

I got up with a start, noticing that sunlight was pouring through a nearby window, and opened the door.

Dave Baines looked at me keenly, both abashed and a bit amused. �Sorry I woke you up. I�ll come back��

I shook my head. �No, no! Sit down. You�re the very person I want to see!�

He heard me out in silence. After he had polished his glasses for five minutes, he spoke.

�I�m not sure, but I�d be willing to venture the opinion that the figure you saw on that platform was what some folks call an astral projection.� Henry�s still at the Miller place; I called this morning to find out. One of the field hands came in after midnight and saw him fast asleep�he never would have had time to come down here, rant on that crazy tower of his and walk back again. Henry, consciously or unconsciously, projected part of himself back here to the knoll. A kind of intense wish fulfillment, I guess. Chances are he doesn�t even remember it this morning.�

I shook my head in disbelief. �But what did I hear?�

Dave replaced his spectacles. �You heard his chanting all right, but not with your ears. You heard it inside your head, with your mind only. No reason telepathy, or projection, can�t be audible as well as visual. It�s all the result of a mind�s�or a psyche�s�fierce desire to be in another place. The desire is so strong that part of that person�call it �ectoplasm� or what you will�actually does return.�

�But what about the trees?� I interjected. �What made the wood and the hemlocks change? Why did I seem to be looking out over a great forest of tropical fern trees�or whatever they were?�

Dave got up, rather wearily. �That I can�t explain, at least not now.� He sighed. �I wish the whole business was over with. I just have a feelin� Henry�s going to come a cropper.�

Henry did �come a cropper� the very next night. Just before dusk, as we learned later, when the haying crews at Miller�s were leaving the fields for supper, Henry, scorning both a meal and the pay due him, slipped over a fence and set out on the main road for Juniper Hill.

It was after eleven, and I was about to get ready for bed, when Henry�s familiar chant, clear and strong, came to me on the night breeze.

I told myself that he had �projected� himself again and that only an ectoplasmic caricature of him was chanting on the willow platform.

But I could not convince myself that such was the case. His voice was too high-pitched and powerful. There was none of the weak, tentative quality of the night before.

I set out for the knoll with many misgivings. I suppose I felt a kind of obligation to see the business through. Perhaps a sense of responsibility moved me. In addition, I will admit to a degree of curiosity.

As I started through the hemlock woods, however, I experienced a feeling of acute apprehension. Henry�s garbled chant, this night, was louder than I had ever heard it before. It flooded the wood. And I detected in his voice an edge of excitement bordering on hysteria.

I reached the knoll without incident and paused within the shadows cast by the surrounding hemlocks. Something seemed to warn me to keep well out of sight.

Henry, book in hand, stood on the willow platform, chanting rapidly in a shrill voice. His ring glowed more brightly than ever, bathing the book and his own face in an eerie blue light. There was a moderate wind; the tower swayed gently from side to side.

I studied the figure on the platform carefully; there was no doubt in my mind that it was Henry in the flesh. What I saw was not the projection, or apparition, of the previous night.

As he moved his head to read from the book, or to look out over the black expanse of the hemlock woods, I noticed that his expression mirrored intense agitation and expectancy.

His chant rose and fell in the night, and again I sensed a frightening transformation in the contour and general appearance of the surrounding forest. Massive trees which did not resemble hemlocks seemed to loom against the darkened sky.

Once again I felt that a vast unseen audience waited among these alien trees�and that Henry was aware of their presence.

His chant swiftly became an incoherent shriek. His eyes appeared to protrude from his head; his face became so contorted it was scarcely recognizable.

I quickly became convinced that while formerly he was chanting to invoke someone or something�he was suddenly chanting frantically in an attempt to forestall the advent of whatever he had been trying to conjure.

Too late. The thing came slowly prancing and gliding over the tops of the huge fern-like trees. It was black even against the darkness of the night sky, but it seemed to contain within itself a kind of lambent flame. An aura of cold blue fire flickered about it.

If it had a definite shape, that shape was not easily apparent, because it continually flowed in upon itself, contorting and writhing in a manner which I found intensely repellent.

In size, it was enormous. If you can imagine a team of six or eight black horses, somehow joined together and all attempting to gallop off in different directions at once, you might have some faint conception of the appalling thing�s appearance.

Henry saw it. His shrill chanting ceased and his mouth fell open. He was frozen into immobility. His face became wooden. Only his eyes remained alive�two bulging points of blue light which glazed with ultimate horror even before the monstrous entity came over the knoll.

I wanted desperately to intervene, but I was nearly as terrified as poor Henry. And I sensed that, in any case, I would be completely helpless if I did attempt to interfere.

Deliberately and inexorably, the prancing nightmare made for the knoll. Once overhead, it paused. The blue fires which animated it intensified.

It descended slowly, straight for Henry. It seemed to tread on air, very carefully, as it came down above him. I could detect neither eyes nor mouth in the fearful creature, but I knew that it must be equipped with a sensory apparatus�quite probably superior to my own.

Its convulsions almost ceased as it dropped toward the willow platform. When it was within a few feet of that upward-staring white face, its legs�or whatever kind of appendages they were�snaked down and wrapped themselves tightly around the doomed man.

Illustration by Frank Utpatel.

Night had fallen two hours ago in these mountains, but Lee Cobbett remembered the trail up from Markum�s Fork over Dogged Mountain and beyond. Too, he had the full moon and a blazing skyful of stars to help him. Finally he reached the place where Long Soak Hollow had been, where now lay a broad stretch of water among the heights, water struck to quivering radiance by the moonlight.

Shaggy trees made the last of the trail dark and uneasy under his boot soles. He half-groped his way to the grassy brink and looked across to something he recognized. On an island that once had been the top of a broad rise in the hollow stood a square cabin in a tuft of trees. Light from the open door beat upon a raftlike dock and a boat tied up there.

Dropping his pack and bedroll, Cobbett cupped his big hands into a trumpet at his mouth.

�Hello!� he shouted. �Hello, the house, hello, Mr.�Luns Lamar, I�m here! Come over and get me!�

A shadow slid into the doorway. A man tramped down to where that dock was visible. He held a lantern high.

�Who�s that a-bellowing?� came back a call across the water.

�Lee Cobbett�come get me!�

�No, sir,� echoed to his ears. �Can�t do it tonight.�

�But��

�Not tonight!� The words were sharp, they meant that thing. �No way. You wait there for me till sunup.�

The figure plodded back to the doorway and sat down on the threshold with the lantern beside it.

Cobbett cursed to himself, there on the night shore. He was a blocky man in denim jacket and slacks, with a square, seamed face and a mane of dark hair. Scowling, he estimated the distance across. Fifty yards? Not much more than that. If Luns Lamar wouldn�t come, Lee Cobbett would go.

He put the pack and roll together next to a laurel bush and sat on them to drag off his boots and socks. He stripped away slacks, jacket, blue shirt, underwear, and stood up naked. Walking to the edge of the lake, he tested it with his toe. Chill, like most mountain water. He set his whole foot in, found bottom, and waded forward to his knees. Two more steps, and he was waist deep. He shivered as he moved out along the clay bottom until he could wade no longer. He struck out for the light of the cabin door.

The coldness of the water hit him, and he swam more strongly to fight against it. Music seemed to be playing somewhere, a song he had never heard, like a muted woodwind. A hum in his head�no, it came from somewhere away from the cabin and the island, somewhere on the moonbright water. It grew stronger, more audible.

On he swam with powerful strokes. His body glided swiftly, but a current sprang up around him, more of a current than he had thought possible. And the melody heightened in his ears, still nothing he could remember, but tuneful, haunting.

Then a sudden shuddering impact, a blow like a club against his side and shoulder.

He almost whirled under. He kicked at whatever it was, shouting aloud as he did so. Next moment he was at the poles that supported the dock, grabbing at them with both hands. Luns Lamar stooped above him and caught his thick wrists.

�You damned fool,� grumbled Lamar, heaving away.

Cobbett scrambled up on the split slabs, kneeling.

�Whatever in hell made you swim over here?� Lamar scolded him.

�What else was there for me to do?� Cobbett found breath to say. �You said you wouldn�t come and fetch me, even when you�d written that letter wanting me to bring you those books. I don�t know why I should have moped over there until tomorrow, not when I can swim.�

�I wouldn�t go out on this lake tonight, even in the boat.� Lamar helped Cobbett to his feet. �Hey, you�re scraped. Bleeding.�

It was true. Cobbett�s sinewy shoulder looked red and raw.

�There�s a log or snag right out from the dock,� he said, heading for the cabin�s open door.

�No,� said Lamar. �That wasn�t any log or snag.�

They went inside together. The front half of the cabin was a single room, raftered overhead. Cobbett knew its rawhide-seated chairs, the plank table, the oil stove, tall shelves of books, a fireplace with a strew of winking coals and a glowing kerosene lamp on the mantel board. Against the wall, an ancient army cot with brown blankets. In a rear corner, a tool chest, and upon that a scuffed banjo case. Lamar brought him a big, frayed towel. Cobbett winced as he rubbed himself down.

�That�s a real rough raking you got,� said Lamar, peering.

He, too, was known to Cobbett, old and small but sure of movement, with spectacles closely set on his shrewd face. He wore a dark blue pullover, khaki pants, and scuffed house slippers.

�We�d better do something about that,� he said and went to a shelf by the stove. He took down a big, square bottle and worried out the cork, then came back. �Just hold still.�

He filled his palm with dark, oily liquid from the bottle and spread it over the torn skin of Cobbett�s ribs and shoulder.

�What�s in that stuff?� Cobbett asked.

�There�s some sap of three different trees in it,� replied Lamar. �And boiled tea of three different flowers, and some crushed seeds, and the juice of what some folks call a weed, but the Indians used to prize it.�

He brought an old blue bathrobe with GOLDEN GLOVES in faded yellow letters across the back. �Put this on till we can go over tomorrow and get your clothes,� he said.

�Thanks.� Cobbett drew the robe around him and sat down in a chair. �Now,� he said, �if that wasn�t a log or snag, what was it?�

Lamar wiped his spectacles. �You won�t believe it.�

�Not without hearing it.�

�I asked you to fetch me some books,� Lamar reminded.

�Mooney�s study for the Bureau of Anthology, Myths of the Cherokee,� said Cobbett. �And Skinner�s Myths and Legends of Our Own Land. And The Kingdom of Madison. All right, they�re over yonder in my pack. If you hadn�t flooded Long Soak Hollow, I could have brought them right into this cabin without even wetting my feet. If you�d come with the boat, they�d be here now. Why don�t you get to telling me what this is all about?�

Lamar studied him. �Lee, did you ever hear about the Dakwa?�

�Dakwa,� Cobbett said after him. �Sounds like Dracula.�

�It�s not Dracula, but it happens to be terrible in its own way. It�s what rubbed up against you while you were out there swimming.� Lamar scowled. �Look here, let�s have a drink. I reckon maybe we both need one.�

He sought the shelf again and opened a fruit jar of clear, white liquid and poured generous portions into two glasses. �This is good blockade whiskey,� he said, handing a glass to Cobbett. The liquid tingled sharply on Cobbett�s tongue and warmed him all the way down.

Lamar sipped in turn. �It�s hard to explain, even though we�ve known each other nearly all our lives.�

�You�ve known me nearly all my life,� said Cobbett, �but I haven�t known you nearly all yours. I�ve heard that you studied law, then you taught in a country school, then you edited a little weekly paper. After that, I don�t know why, you quit everything and built this cabin. You don�t ever come out of it except to listen to mountain songs and mountain tales, and sometimes you write about them for folklore journals.� Cobbett studied his friend. �Why not start by telling me what you�ve done, drowning Long Soak Hollow like this?�

�It wasn�t my doing,� growled Lamar. �Some resort company did it, to make a lake amongst the summer cottages they�re building for visitors. You remember how this place of mine was set�high above the little creek down in the hollow, safe from any flood. I wouldn�t sell out, but that company bought up all the land round about and put in a dam, and here it is, filled in. I�m like Robinson Crusoe on my island, but I�m not studying to go ashore till tomorrow.�

Cobbett drank again. �Because of what?�

�Because of one of those same old tales that makes a noise like the truth.� Lamar showed his gold-wired teeth. �The Dakwa,� he said again. �It�s in those books I asked you to fetch along with you.�

�And I said they�re across that water that scares you,� said Cobbett. �What,� he asked patiently, �is the Dakwa?�

�Its what tried to grab you just now,� Lamar flung out. �It used to be penned up in the little creek they called Long Soak, penned up there for centuries. And now, by God, it�s out again in this lake they�ve dammed up, a-looking for what it may devour.� His face clamped desperately. �Devour it whole,� he said.

�You say it�s out again,� said Cobbett. �What do you mean by again? How long has this been going on?�

�Centuries, I told you,� said Lamar. �The tale was here with the Cherokee Indians when the first settlers came, before the Revolutionary War. And the Dakwa�s hungry. Two men and a boy�Del Hungant and Steve Biggins and a teenager from somewhere in the lowlands named McIlhenny�they just sort of went out of sight along this new lake. Folks came up from town and dragged for them, and nothing whatever dragged up.�

�Not even the Dakwa,� suggested Cobbett.

�Especially not the Dakwa. It�s too smart to be hooked.�

�And you believe in it,� said Cobbett.

�Sure enough I believe in it. I�ve seen it again and again, just an ugly hunch of it in the water out there. I�ve heard it humming.�

�So that�s what I heard,� said Cobbett.

�Yes, that�s what. And once, the last time I�ve ever been out in the boat at night, it shoved against the boat and damn near turned it over with me. You�d better believe in it yourself, the way it rasped your skin like that.�

Cobbett went over to the bookshelf and studied the titles. He took down Thompson�s Mysteries and Secrets of Magic and leafed through the index pages.

�You won�t read about it in there,� Lamar told him sourly. �That�s only about old-world witches and devils, with amulets and charms against them, and all the names of God to defeat them. The Dakwa doesn�t believe in God. It�s an Indian thing�Cherokee. Something else has to go to work against it. That�s why I wanted those books, hoping to find something in them. They�re the only published notices of the Dakwa.�

Cobbett slid Thompson�s volume back into place and went to the door and opened it.

�You fixing to do something foolish?� grumbled Lamar.

�No, nothing foolish if I can help it,� Cobbett assured him. �I just thought I�d go and look at the stars before bedtime.�

He stepped across the threshold log into grass. Dew splashed his bare feet. He paced to the dock and gazed up at the moon, a great pallid blotch of radiance. Gazing, he heard something again.

Music, that was all it could be. Perhaps it had words, but words so soft that they were like a faint memory.

Out upon the dock he stepped. Ripples broke against its supporting poles. Something made a dark rush in the water, close up almost to the boat. Whatever it was glinted shinily beneath the surface. Cobbett stared down at it, trying to make out its shape. It vanished. He turned and paced back to the cabin door, that faint sense of the music still around him.

�All right, what did you find out there?� Lamar demanded.

�Nothing to speak of,� said Cobbett. �Now then, I had a long uphill trudge getting here. How about showing me where I�ll sleep?�

�Over yonder, as usual.� Lamar nodded toward the cot.

�And we�ll get up early tomorrow morning and go get my gear and those books of yours.�

�Not until the sun�s up,� insisted Lamar.

�Okay,� grinned Cobbett. �Not until the sun�s up.�

Goat Kemp knew more than was good for anybody. There wasn�t a soul in the village, except Slow Harry, who didn�t feel unease lest the old devil should blurt out something better left unsaid. If I worried less than most, it was because I had less to hide�merely certain books outside a schoolmaster�s required reading. But Goat knew about them. He whispered a title to me one evening after I had disregarded his cigarette cadging: after which he loped away with a packet of twenty. I should have stood firm�after all what could Ashbee�s pornographic bibliography have meant to my neighbors? But my poise had been shaken. How could he have known? When not in my hands, the book is kept locked in a desk. Where I shivered, though, others quaked.

It was Goat Kemp who had Sam Fernie before the magistrates over a few brace of pheasants. Sam swore revenge, but he had been a fool not to share those birds with Goat: better part with one than lose them all.

It was Goat Kemp who drove little Miss Mellat to desperation. As she waited her turn in the village shop he bleated, �What about the child?� Later, on the church porch after the service, �Where is it buried?� Then across the listening street, �Is coltsfoot-rock poison?� How all those details might have added up we never learned because Miss Mellat took her secret into the river with her. All because she once remarked that Goat Kemp needed a bath.

Which was only true. His filth had medieval quality, peeling in tiny flakes. His nickname, though, came from more than his personal hygiene. His triangular face, trailing cobweb of a beard, and slanting, red-rimmed eyes all suggested a father of either sub- or super-human origin. The villagers accepted that Kemp had been either sired by a goat or by the Devil.

No one knew how he came by his uncanny knowledge, but we all knew how he used it. �Nice to see you, Goat,� we greeted him as he shuffled up to the bar. �What are you having, Goat?� Even if we paid for every glass, it amounted to a modest tribute. He never stayed long in The Ox�particularly if Slow Harry should be there.

�Turnip!� he would spit at Harry. �Great slobbering turnip.�

Nothing worried Harry. He was content, sitting in the inglenook of The Ox, grinning, nodding, and occasionally shouting a joyful, obscene, monosyllable at the climax of someone�s joke. He did not slobber much, and anyway wiped his chin from time to time on his sleeve. Goat hated him because he had no vices. With his big hands and big head he lacked opportunities for falling into temptation. Goat could not blackmail a man without fear and beyond reproach.

In a way our two oddities canceled each other out. Goat took: Harry gave. We liked Harry and feared Goat.

Then a new fear began to haunt the district. I believe Sam Fernie�s children started it, calling after Goat in the street. They only repeated expressions learned at their fathers knee, but Goat turned on them, his slant eyes glowing like coals.

�I saw what you did to Mrs.�Bugle�s catmint,� he spat. �She thought it was the cats, but I know who.�

�Tell if you like,� retorted Young Sam. His behind had smarted from his father�s belt often enough; he knew the price and was resigned to paying. His sister, Kate, stuck out her tongue.

�Who tipped ink into the teacher�s desk?� hissed Goat.

�I did,� said Young Sam, protecting his sister while calculating that he might as well be strapped for two misdemeanors as one.

Two tongues stuck out at Goat. Two thumbs pressed against two snub noses.

�We�re not afraid,� defied Young Sam.

�You will be,� snarled Goat.

�He does frighten me,� whispered Kate.

�Don�t let him,� ordered Young Sam.

Anticipating Goat he confessed to the crimes, and was sent early to bed, where he lay face downward for comfort. No doubt Kate was thinking of Goat�s threat when she made her last call that night at the lavatory at the end of the garden.

Her cries brought Fernie and his wife running from the cottage. Young Sam watched from the bedroom window, and told me about it afterward. Kate leaned against the rough, wooden door, her face a white blob in the moonlight. She screamed and screamed, and could not be calmed.

�What had she seen?�

�Was it a rat?�

She pointed to something lying by the path. It was a crude doll, about the height of a nine-year-old girl. Its head was a mangold, and its limbs bundles of twigs.

�Is this all that scared you?� Fernie tried to laugh the terror away. �Just this old thing?�

�It walked behind me,� sobbed the girl. �It put out its arms and touched me.�

�Look. No arms. No legs. Nothing but dry sticks.�

�It touched me,� screamed Kate. �It touched me.�

They coaxed the child into the cottage, and when kitchen-cupboard remedies failed, sent for the doctor. After sedation Kate slept, but for years afterward needed a night light in her room.

Fernie accepted her story of the turnip head, but it stood to reason that a bundle of sticks could not move under its own accord. Someone had attacked his daughter; however when he searched the garden for signs of an intruder, he found nothing in the way of footprints or trampled plants. Oddly enough by next morning the mannikin, too, had disappeared.

Fernie was a sound man with a snare, and could produce a rabbit for the asking, but he always took time to add two and two together, and several days passed before he began to suspect Goat Kemp. The children talked about slanging Goat in the street; in Goat�s garden stood such a scarecrow; and in the bar of The Ox, Goat himself sneered at Kate�s nerves.

Suddenly Fernie was standing in front of Goat, and silence like a blanket had fallen.

�You know something.� Beer and the firelight reddened his face.

Goat bleated. The noise was meant for a laugh. We, like fools, instead of calling for another round, or starting a game of darts, we sat waiting for the next move, as though these were actors instead of men with blood to spill.

�If I believed you harmed my girl, I�d beat that smirk into the back of your neck,� said Fernie.

�Talk,� sneered Goat, and took another swig of bitter.

A flat-handed swipe knocked the glass from his hand, and smashed it against the far wall. Goat dabbed at the bruised corner of his mouth.

�That�ll cost you the price of another drink,� he said.

A gaping seam tore further as Fernie seized a handful of Goat�s coat. �What do you know?� he roared.

�She frightens easy, don�t she?� grinned Goat. �A scrap of kindling and an old root. As long as she meets nothing worse�.�.�.�

After which he took Fernie�s fist full in his mouth, and hurtled across the room after his glass.

�Witch spawn,� thundered Fernie.

Blood trickled from the corner of Goat�s mouth, leaving a red streak on his dust-colored beard. We waited for the threats. Instead Goat�s crooked, yellow, animal teeth were bared in the caricature of a smile, which was worse.

�Any more questions?� he creaked.

�You did it,� shouted Fernie. �You scared my girl into screaming hysterics. You and that damned scarecrow.�

�You saw me, did you?� smiled Goat. �Or perhaps she saw me. Climbing over the wall, maybe. Hiding under a gooseberry bush. Next time�.�.�.�

The old creature�s head banged against the paneling as Fernie hit him again.

�Come near her, and I�ll kill you,� roared Fernie. �I�ll�I�ll�.�.�.�

As words failed, he picked up Goat and hurled him against the wall again and again. It was Slow Harry who stopped the beating, laying a big hand on Fernie�s arm.

�Uh-huh,� said Slow Harry, shaking his head.

�You all heard him,� shouted Fernie, backing to the door. �Next time, he said. That was a threat. A threat.�

No one spoke until the street door slammed behind him. Then we heard Goat moaning like the wind in a chimney.

�Killing, is it?� whined Goat. �Killing.� He struggled to his hands and knees, and was sick.

An old man�s bruises take time to heal, and it was days before Goat limped into the street again. For that time he lay untended in his darkened cottage. The village hated Goat; Goat hated the village. On Goat�s part, during those groaning days, the hate strengthened, sharpened, and finally struck.

Sam Fernie had been troubled since Goat Kemp took to his bed. None of us wondered at that. We had learned the hard way that it did not pay to cross Goat; and Fernie�s fists had dealt more than a crossing. Indeed, remembering how we had failed to protect Goat from the beating, most of us were concocting alibis against uncomfortable revelations�though personally I had no more to worry about than an illustrated edition of The Age of Perversion.

Fernie developed a nervous tic. His head would jerk as though he were trying to catch someone peering over his shoulder. He muttered about black spots, and we advised him to have his eyes tested, even though he could still hit a fly at a hundred yards.

At the end it was a feather�a whisp of white that he swore had floated round his head all day. Some of us saw it, nestling on his coat collar. He made occasional attempts to grab it, but it always eluded him, suddenly swirling away. We chased it along the bar. As we scrambled after it, the door was opened, and the feather escaped into the night.

Slow Harry blinked on the doorstep.

�Feather,� we laughed, as though that explained everything.

�Feather,� said Harry, nodding.

Fernie sat easier that night than I had seen him for some time. Toward closing time he even joined in a couple of choruses. Harry sat in the inglenook as usual, nodding, wiping his chin. Occasionally he would repeat �Feather� as though it was important.

Last drinks finished, we ambled to the door. I can remember distinctly what happened, and my observations were clarified by repeating them again and again in the face of official disbelief.

Five of us crowded the doorway. Bert Huggins and the doctor�s son were on the pub side of the door. Charlie Wells and myself were in the street. The village lighting is not brilliant, but as I swore on oath, the street was deserted. Sam Fernie was between us, crossing the threshold.

He stopped with a grunt, his mouth wide open, and he made a noise as though gathering breath for a sneeze.

�Bless you,� I said in anticipation.

At least he died with a blessing. He crossed his hands over his chest, then crumpled. For a few moments we joked. �Take more water with it.� �Put him to bed, mother.� But when we turned him over his blue eyes were lifeless.

His hands fell away from his chest, revealing a metal ring shining against his shirt. It seemed to be a badge of sorts. It was in fact a butchers skewer, and the rest of its length was buried in Fernie�s heart.

�Feather,� said Slow Harry.

Later I tried to explain to him that the lethal instrument had been a steel spike, driven in with remarkable force. But Slow Harry repeated, �Feather.�

Illustration by George Barr.

Maybe most of it was only fear. But not the last thing, not that. To blame my fear for that would be worst of all.

I was twelve years old and beginning to conquer my fears. I even went upstairs to do my homework, and managed to ignore the chimney. I had to be brave, because of my parents�because of my mother.

She had always been afraid for me. The very first day I had gone to school I�d seen her watching. Her expression had reminded me of the face of a girl I�d glimpsed on television, watching men lock her husband behind bars; I was frightened all that first day. And when children had hysterics or began to bully me, or the teacher lost her temper, these things only confirmed my fears�and my mothers, when I told her what had happened each day.

Now I was at grammar school. I had been there for much of a year. I�d felt awkward in my new uniform and old shoes; the building seemed enormous, crowded with too many strange children and teachers. I�d felt I was an outsider; friendly approaches made me nervous and sullen, when people laughed and I didn�t know why I was sure they were laughing at me. After a while the other boys treated me as I seemed to want to be treated: the lads from the poorer districts mocked my suburban accent, the suburban boys sneered at my old shoes.

Often I�d sat praying that the teacher wouldn�t ask me a question I couldn�t answer, sat paralyzed by my dread of having to stand up in the waiting watchful silence. If a teacher shouted at someone my heart jumped painfully; once I�d felt the stain of my shock creeping insidiously down my thigh. Yet I did well in the end-of-term examinations, because I was terrified of failing; for nights afterward they were another reason why I couldn�t sleep.

My mother read the signs of all this on my face. More and more, once I�d told her what was wrong, I had to persuade her there was nothing worse that I�d kept back. Some mornings as I lay in bed, trying to hold back half-past seven, I�d be sick; I would grope miserably downstairs, white-faced, and my mother would keep me home. Once or twice, when my fear wasn�t quite enough, I made myself sick. �Look at him. You can�t expect him to go like that��but my father would only shake his head and grunt, dismissing us both.

I knew my father found me embarrassing. This year he�d had less time for me than usual; his shop�The Anything Shop, nearby in the suburbanized village�was failing to compete with the new supermarket. But before that trouble I�d often seen him staring up at my mother and me: both of us taller than him, his eyes said, yet both scared of our own shadows. At those times I glimpsed his despair.

So my parents weren�t reassuring. Yet at night I tried to stay with them as long as I could�for my worst fears were upstairs, in my room.

It was a large room, two rooms knocked into one by the previous owner. It overlooked the small back gardens. The smaller of the fireplaces had been bricked up; in winter, the larger held a fire, which my mother always feared would set fire to the room�but she let it alone, for I�d screamed when I thought she was going to take that light away: even though the firelight only added to the terrors of the room.

The shadows moved things. The mesh of the fireguard fluttered enlarged on the wall; sometimes, at the edge of sleep, it became a swaying web, and its spinner came sidling down from a corner of the ceiling. Everything was unstable; walls shifted, my clothes crawled on the back of the chair. Once, when I�d left my jacket slumped over the chair, the collar�s dark upturned lack of a face began to nod forward stealthily; the holes at the ends of the sleeves worked like mouths, and I didn�t dare get up to hang the jacket properly. The room grew in the dark: sounds outside, footsteps and laughter, dogs encouraging each other to bark, only emphasized the size of my trap of darkness, how distant everything else was. And there was a dimmer room, in the mirror of the wardrobe beyond the foot of the bed. There was a bed in that room, and beside it a dim nightlight in a plastic lantern. Once I�d awaked to see a face staring dimly at me from the mirror; a figure had sat up when I had, and I�d almost cried out. Often I�d stared at the dim staring face, until I�d had to hide beneath the sheets.

Of course this couldn�t go on for the rest of my life. On my twelfth birthday I set about the conquest of my room.

I was happy amid my presents. I had a jigsaw, a box of colored pencils, a book of space stories. They had come from my father�s shop, but they were mine now. Because I was relaxed, no doubt because she wished I could always be so, my mother said, �Would you be happier if you went to another school?�

It was Saturday; I wanted to forget Monday. Besides, I imagined all schools were as frightening. �No, I�m all right,� I said.

�Are you happy at school now?� she said incredulously.

�Yes, it�s all right.�

�Are you sure?�

�Yes, really, it�s all right. I mean, I�m happy now.�

The snap of the letter slot saved me from further lying. Three birthday cards: two from neighbors who talked to me when I served them in the shop�an old lady who always carried a poodle, our next-door neighbor Dr.�Flynn�and a card from my parents. I�d seen all three cards in the shop, which spoilt them somehow.

As I stood in the hall I heard my father. �You�ve got to control yourself,� he was saying. �You only upset the child. If you didn�t go on at him he wouldn�t be half so bad.�

It infuriated me to be called a child. �But I worry so,� my mother said brokenly. �He can�t look after himself.�

�You don�t let him try. You�ll have him afraid to go up to bed next.�

But I already was. Was that my mother�s fault? I remembered her putting the nightlight by my bed when I was very young, checking the flex and the bulb each night�I�d taken to lying awake, dreading that one or the other would fail. Standing in the hall, I saw dimly that my mother and I encouraged each other�s fears. One of us had to stop. I had to stop. Even when I was frightened, I mustn�t let her see. It wouldn�t be the first time I�d hidden my feelings from her. In the living room I said, �I�m going upstairs to play.�

Sometimes in summer I didn�t mind playing there�but this was March, and a dark day. Still, I could switch the light on. And my room contained the only table I could have to myself and my jigsaw.

I spilled the jigsaw onto the table. The chair sat with its back to the dark yawn of the fireplace; I moved it hastily to the foot of the bed, facing the door. I spread the jigsaw. There was a piece of the edge, another. By lunchtime I�d assembled the edge. �You look pleased with yourself,� my father said.

I didn�t notice the approach of night. I was fitting together my own blue sky, above fragmented cottages. After dinner I hurried to put in the pieces I�d placed mentally while eating. I hesitated outside my room. I should have to reach into the dark for the light switch. When I did, the wallpaper filled with bright multiplied airplanes and engines. I wished we could afford to redecorate my room, it seemed childish now.

The fireplace gaped. I retrieved the fireguard from the cupboard under the stairs, where my father had stored it now the nights were a little warmer. It covered the soot-encrusted yawn. The room felt comfortable now. I�d never seen before how much space it gave me for play.

I even felt safe in bed. I switched out the nightlight�but that was too much; I grabbed the light. I didn�t mind its glow on its own, without the jagged lurid jig of the shadows. And the fireguard was comforting. It made me feel that nothing could emerge from the chimney.

On Monday I took my space stories to school. People asked to look at them; eventually they lent me books. In the following weeks some of my fears began to fade. Questions darting from desk to desk still made me uneasy, but if I had to stand up without the answer at least I knew the other boys weren�t sneering at me, not all of them; I was beginning to have friends. I started to sympathize with their own ignorant silences. In the July examinations I was more relaxed, and scored more marks. I was even sorry to leave my friends for the summer; I invited some of them home.

I felt triumphant. I�d calmed my mother and my room all by myself, just by realizing what had to be done. I suppose that sense of triumph helped me. It must have given me a little strength with which to face the real terror.

It was early August, the week before our holiday. My mother was worrying over the luggage, my father was trying to calculate his accounts; they were beginning to chafe against each other. I went to my room, to stay out of their way.

I was halfway through a jigsaw, which one of my friends had swapped for mine. People sat in back gardens, letting the evening settle on them; between the houses the sky was pale yellow. I inserted pieces easily, relaxed by the nearness of our holiday. I listened to the slowing of the city, a radio fluttering along a street, something moving behind the fireguard, in the chimney.

No. It was my mother in the next room, moving luggage. It was someone dragging, dragging something, anything, outside. But I couldn�t deceive my ears. In the chimney something large had moved.

It might have been a bird, stunned or dying, struggling feebly�except that a bird would have sounded wilder. It could have been a mouse, even a rat, if such things are found in chimneys. But it sounded like a large body, groping stealthily in the dark: something large that didn�t want me to hear it. It sounded like the worst terror of my infancy.

I�d almost forgotten that. When I was three years old my mother had let me watch television; it was bad for my eyes, but just this once, near Christmas�I�d seen two children asleep in bed, an enormous crimson man emerging from the fireplace, creeping toward them. They weren�t going to wake up! �Burglar! Burglar!� I�d screamed, beginning to cry. �No, dear, it�s Father Christmas,� my mother said, hastily switching off the television. �He always comes out of the chimney.�

Perhaps if she�d said �down� rather than �out of��.�.�. For months after that, and in the weeks before several Christmases, I lay awake listening fearfully for movement in the chimney: I was sure a fat grinning figure would creep upon me if I slept. My mother had told me the presents that appeared at the end of my bed were left by Father Christmas, but now the mysterious visitor had a face and a huge body, squeezed into the dark chimney among the soot. When I heard the wind breathing in the chimney I had to trap my screams between my lips.

Of course at last I began to suspect there was no Father Christmas: how did he manage to steal into my father�s shop for my presents? He was a childish idea, I was almost sure�but I was too embarrassed to ask my parents or my friends. But I wanted not to believe in him, that silent lurker in the chimney; and now I didn�t, not really. Except that something large was moving softly behind the fireguard.

It had stopped. I stared at the wire mesh, half-expecting a fat pale face to stare out of the grate. There was nothing but the fenced dark. Cats were moaning in a garden, an ice-cream van wandered brightly. After a while I forced myself to pull the fireguard away.

I was taller than the fireplace now. But I had to stoop to peer up the dark, soot-ridged throat, and then it loomed over me, darkness full of menace, of the threat of a huge figure bursting out at me, its red mouth crammed with sparkling teeth. As I peered up, trembling a little, and tried to persuade myself that what I�d heard had flown away or scurried back into its hole, soot came trickling down from the dark�and I heard the sound of a huge body squeezed into the sooty passage, settling itself carefully, more comfortably in its burrow.

I slammed the guard into place, and fled. I had to gulp to breathe. I ran onto the landing, trying to catch my breath so as to cry for help. Downstairs my mother was nervously asking whether she should pack another of my fathers shirts. �Yes, if you like,� he said irritably.

No, I mustn�t cry out. I�d vowed not to upset her. But how could I go back into my room? Suddenly I had a thought that seemed to help. At school we�d learned how sweeps had used to send small boys up chimneys. There had hardly been room for the boys to climb. How could a large man fit in there?

He couldn�t. Gradually I managed to persuade myself. At last I opened the door of my room. The chimney was silent; there was no wind. I tried not to think that he was holding himself still, waiting to squeeze out stealthily, waiting for the dark. Later, lying in the steady glow from my plastic lantern, I tried to hold onto the silence, tried to believe there was nothing near me to shatter it. There was nothing except, eventually, sleep.

Perhaps if I�d cried out on the landing I would have been saved from my fear. But I was happy with my rationality. Only once, nearly asleep, I wished the fire were lit, because it would burn anything that might be hiding in the chimney; that had never occurred to me before. But it didn�t matter, for the next day we went on holiday.

My parents liked to sleep in the sunlight, beneath newspaper masks; in the evenings they liked to stroll along the wide sandy streets. I didn�t, and befriended Nigel, the son of another family who were staying in the boardinghouse. My mother encouraged the friendship: such a nice boy, two years older than me; he�d look after me. He had money, and the hope of a moustache shadowing his pimply upper lip. One evening he took me to the fairground, where we met two girls; he and the older girl went to buy ice creams while her young friend and I stared at each other timidly. I couldn�t believe the young girl didn�t like jigsaws. Later, while I was contradicting her, Nigel and his companion disappeared behind the Ghost Train�but Nigel reappeared almost at once, red-faced, his left cheek redder. �Where�s Rose?� I asked, bewildered.

�She had to go.� He seemed furious that I�d asked.

�Isn�t she coming back?�

�No.� He was glancing irritably about for a change of subject. �What a super bike,� he said, pointing as it glided between the stalls. �Have you got a bike?�

�No,� I said. �I keep asking Father Christmas, but�� I wished that hadn�t got past me, for he was staring at me, winking at the young girl.

�Do you still believe in him?� he demanded scornfully.

�No, of course I don�t. I was only kidding.� Did he believe me? He was edging toward the young girl now, putting his arm around her; soon she excused herself, and didn�t come back�I never knew her name. I was annoyed he�d made her run away. �Where did Rose go?� I said persistently.

He didn�t tell me. But perhaps he resented my insistence, for as the family left the boardinghouse I heard him say loudly to his mother: �He still believes in Father Christmas.� My mother heard that too, and glanced anxiously at me.

Well, I didn�t. There was nobody in the chimney, waiting for me to come home. I didn�t care that we were going home the next day. That night I pulled away the fireguard and saw a fat pale face hanging down into the fireplace, like an underbelly, upside-down and smiling. But I managed to wake, and eventually the sea lulled me back to sleep.

As soon as we reached home I ran upstairs. I uncovered the fireplace and stood staring, to discover what I felt. Gradually I filled with the scorn Nigel would have felt, had he known of my fear. How could I have been so childish? The chimney was only a passage for smoke, a hole into which the wind wandered sometimes. That night, exhausted by the journey home, I slept at once.

The nights darkened into October; the darkness behind the mesh grew thicker. I�d used to feel, as summer waned, that the chimney was insinuating its darkness into my room. Now the sight only reminded me I�d have a fire soon. The fire would be comforting.

It was October when my father�s Christmas cards arrived, on a Saturday; I was working in the shop. It annoyed him to have to anticipate Christmas so much, to compete with the supermarket. I hardly noticed the cards: my head felt muffled, my body cold�perhaps it was the weather�s sudden hint of winter.

My mother came to the shop that afternoon. I watched her pretend not to have seen the cards. When I looked away she began to pick them up timidly, as if they were unfaithful letters, glancing anxiously at me. I didn�t know what was in her mind. My head was throbbing. I wasn�t going home sick. I earned pocket money in the shop. Besides, I didn�t want my father to think I was still weak.

Nor did I want my mother to worry. That night I lay slumped in a chair, pretending to read. Words trickled down the page; I felt like dirty clothes someone had thrown on the chair. My father was at the shop taking stock. My mother sat gazing at me. I pretended harder; the words waltzed slowly. At last she said, �Are you listening?�

I was now, though I didn�t look up. �Yes,� I said hoarsely, unplugging my throat with a roar.

�Do you remember when you were a baby? There was a film you saw, of Father Christmas coming out of the chimney.� Her voice sounded bravely careless, falsely light, as if she were determined to make some awful revelation. I couldn�t look up. �Yes,� I said.

Her silence made me glance up. She looked as she had on my first day at school: full of loss, of despair. Perhaps she was realizing I had to grow up, but to my throbbing head her look suggested only terror�as if she were about to deliver me up as a sacrifice. �I couldn�t tell you the truth then,� she said. �You were too young.�

The truth was terror; her expression promised that. �Father Christmas isn�t really like that,� she said.

My illness must have shown by then. She gazed at me; her lips trembled. �I can�t,� she said, turning her face away. �Your father must tell you.�

But that left me poised on the edge of terror. I felt unnerved, rustily tense. I wanted very much to lie down. �I�m going to my room,� I said. I stumbled upstairs, hardly aware of doing so. As much as anything I was fleeing her unease. The stairs swayed a little, they felt unnaturally soft underfoot. I hurried dully into my room. I slapped the light switch and missed. I was walking uncontrollably forward into blinding dark. A figure came to meet me, soft and huge in the dark of my room.

I cried out. I managed to stagger back onto the landing, grabbing the light switch as I went. The lighted room was empty. My mother came running upstairs, almost falling. �What is it, what is it?� she cried.

I mustn�t say. �I�m ill. I feel sick.� I did, and a minute later I was. She patted my back as I knelt by the toilet. When she�d put me to bed she made to go next door, for the doctor. �Don�t leave me,� I pleaded. The walls of the room swayed as if tugged by firelight, the fireplace was huge and very dark. As soon as my father opened the front door she ran downstairs, crying, �He�s ill, he�s ill! Go for the doctor!�

The doctor came and prescribed for my fever. My mother sat up beside me. Eventually my father came to suggest it was time she went to bed. They were going to leave me alone in my room. �Make a fire,� I pleaded.

My mother touched my forehead. �But you�re burning,� she said.

�No, I�m cold! I want a fire! Please!� So she made one, tired as she was. I saw my father�s disgust as he watched me use her worry against her to get what I wanted, his disgust with her for letting herself be used.

I didn�t care. My mother�s halting words had overgrown my mind. What had she been unable to tell me? Had it to do with the sounds I�d heard in the chimney? The room lolled around me; nothing was sure. But the fire would make sure for me. Nothing in the chimney could survive it.

I made my mother stay until the fire was blazing. Suppose a huge shape burst forth from the hearth, dripping fire? When at last I let her go I lay lapped by the firelight and meshy shadows, which seemed lulling now, in my warm room.

I felt feverish, but not unpleasantly. I was content to voyage on my rocking bed; the ceiling swayed past above me. While I slept the fire went out. My fever kept me warm; I slid out of bed and, pulling away the fireguard, reached up the chimney. At the length of my arms I touched something heavy, hanging down in the dark; it yielded, then soft fat fingers groped down and closed on my wrist. My mother was holding my wrist as she washed my hands. �You mustn�t get out of bed,� she said when she realized I was awake.

I stared stupidly at her. �You�d got out of bed. You were sleepwalking,� she explained. �You had your hands right up the chimney.� I saw now that she was washing caked soot from my hands; tracks of ash led toward the bed.

It had been only a dream. One moment the fat hand had been gripping my wrist, the next it was my mother�s cool slim fingers. My mother played word games and timid chess with me while I stayed in bed, that day and the next.

The third night I felt better. The fire fluttered gently; I felt comfortably warm. Tomorrow I�d get up. I should have to go back to school soon, but I didn�t mind that unduly. I lay and listened to the breathing of the wind in the chimney.

When I awoke the fire had gone out. The room was full of darkness. The wind still breathed, but it seemed somehow closer. It was above me. Someone was standing over me. It couldn�t be either of my parents, not in the sightless darkness.

I lay rigid. Most of all I wished that I hadn�t let Nigel�s imagined contempt persuade me to do without a nightlight. The breathing was slow, irregular; it sounded clogged and feeble. As I tried to inch silently toward the far side of the bed, the source of the breathing stooped toward me. I felt its breath waver on my face, and the breath sprinkled me with something like dry rain.

When I had lain paralyzed for what felt like blind hours, the breathing went away. It was in the chimney, dislodging soot; it might be the wind. But I knew it had come out to let me know that whatever the fire had done to it, it hadn�t been killed. It had emerged to tell me it would come for me on Christmas Eve. I began to scream.

I wouldn�t tell my mother why. She washed my face, which was freckled with soot. �You�ve been sleepwalking again,� she tried to reassure me, but I wouldn�t let her leave me until daylight. When she�d gone I saw the ashy tracks leading from the chimney to the bed.

Perhaps I had been sleepwalking and dreaming. I searched vainly for my nightlight. I would have been ashamed to ask for a new one, and that helped me to feel I could do without. At dinner I felt secure enough to say I didn�t know why I had screamed.

�But you must remember. You sounded so frightened. You upset me.�

My father was folding the evening paper into a thick wad the size of a pocketbook, which he could read beside his plate. �Leave the boy alone,� he said. �You imagine all sorts of things when you�re feverish. I did when I was his age.�

It was the first time he�d admitted anything like weakness to me. If he�d managed to survive his nightmares, why should mine disturb me more? Tired out by the demands of my fever, I slept soundly that night. The chimney was silent except for the flapping of flames.

But my father didn�t help me again. One November afternoon I was standing behind the counter, hoping for customers. My father pottered, grumpily fingering packets of nylons, tins of pet food, Dinky toys, baby�s rattles, cards, searching for signs of theft. Suddenly he snatched a Christmas card and strode to the counter. �Sit down,� he said grimly.

He was waving the card at me, like evidence. I sat down on a shelf, but then a lady came into the shop; the bell thumped. I stood up to sell her nylons. When she�d gone I gazed at my father, anxious to hear the worst. �Just sit down,� he said.

He couldn�t stand my being taller than he was. His size embarrassed him, but he wouldn�t let me see that; he pretended I had to sit down out of respect. �Your mother says she tried to tell you about Father Christmas,� he said.

She must have told him that weeks earlier. He�d put off talking to me�because we�d never been close, and now we were growing further apart. �I don�t know why she couldn�t tell you,� he said.

But he wasn�t telling me either. He was looking at me as if I were a stranger he had to chat to. I felt uneasy, unsure now that I wanted to hear what he had to say. A man was approaching the shop. I stood up, hoping he�d interrupt.

He did, and I served him. Then, to delay my father�s revelation, I adjusted stacks of tins. My father stared at me in disgust. �If you don�t watch out you�ll be as bad as your mother.�

I found the idea of being like my mother strange, indefinably disturbing. But he wouldn�t let me be like him, wouldn�t let me near. All right, I�d be brave, I�d listen to what he had to say. But he said, �Oh, it�s not worth me trying to tell you. You�ll find out.�

He meant I must find out for myself that Father Christmas was a childish fantasy. He didn�t mean he wanted the thing from the chimney to come for me, the disgust in his eyes didn�t mean that, it didn�t. He meant that I had to behave like a man.

And I could. I�d show him. The chimney was silent. I needn�t worry until Christmas Eve. Nor then. There was nothing to come out.

One evening as I walked home I saw Dr.�Flynn in his front room. He was standing before a mirror, gazing at his red fur-trimmed hooded suit; he stooped to pick up his beard. My mother told me that he was going to act Father Christmas at the children�s hospital. She seemed on the whole glad that I�d seen. So was I: it proved the pretense was only for children.

Except that the glimpse reminded me how near Christmas was. As the nights closed on the days, and the days rushed by�the end-of-term party, the turkey, decorations in the house�I grew tense, trying to prepare myself. For what? For nothing, nothing at all. Well, I would know soon�for suddenly it was Christmas Eve.

I was busy all day. I washed up as my mother prepared Christmas dinner. I brought her ingredients, and hurried to buy some she�d used up. I stuck the day�s cards to tapes above the mantelpiece. I carried home a tinsel tree which nobody had bought. But being busy only made the day move faster. Before I knew it the windows were full of night.

Christmas Eve. Well, it didn�t worry me. I was too old for that sort of thing. The tinsel tree rustled when anyone passed it, light rolled in tinsel globes, streamers flinched back when doors opened. Swinging restlessly on tapes above the mantelpiece, I saw half a dozen red-cheeked, smiling bearded faces.

The night piled against the windows. I chattered to my mother about her shouting father, her elder sisters, the time her sisters had locked her in a cellar. My father grunted occasionally�even when I�d run out of subjects to discuss with my mother, and tried to talk to him about the shop. At least he hadn�t noticed how late I was staying up. But he had. �It�s about time everyone was in bed,� he said with a kind of suppressed fury.

�Can I have some more coal?� My mother would never let me have a coal scuttle in the bedroom�she didn�t want me going near the fire. �To put on now,� I said. Surely she must say yes. �It�ll be cold in the morning,� I said.

�Yes, you take some. You don�t want to be cold when you�re looking at what Father�at your presents.�

I hurried upstairs with the scuttle. Over its clatter I heard my father say, �Are you still at that? Can�t you let him grow up?�

I almost emptied the scuttle into the fire, which rose roaring and crackling. My father�s voice was an angry mumble, seeping through the floor. When I carried the scuttle down my mother�s eyes were red, my father looked furiously determined. I�d always found their arguments frightening; I was glad to hurry to my room.

It seemed welcoming. The fire was bright within the mesh. I heard my mother come upstairs. That was comforting too: she was nearer now. I heard my father go next door�to wish the doctor Happy Christmas, I supposed. I didn�t mind the reminder. There was nothing of Christmas Eve in my room, except the pillowcase on the floor at the foot of the bed. I pushed it aside with one foot, the better to ignore it.

I slid into bed. My father came upstairs; I heard further mumblings of argument through the bedroom wall. At last they stopped, and I tried to relax. I lay, glad of the silence.

A wind was rushing the house. It puffed down the chimney; smoke trickled through the fireguard. Now the wind was breathing brokenly. It was only the wind. It didn�t bother me.

Perhaps I�d put too much coal on the fire. The room was hot; I was sweating. I felt almost feverish. The huge mesh flicked over the wall repeatedly, nervously, like a rapid net. Within the mirror the dimmer room danced.

Suddenly I was a little afraid. Not that something would come out of the chimney, that was stupid: afraid that my feeling of fever would make me delirious again. It seemed years since I�d been disturbed by the sight of the room in the mirror, but I was disturbed now. There was something wrong with that dim jerking room.

The wind breathed. Only the wind, I couldn�t hear it changing. A fat billow of smoke squeezed through the mesh. The room seemed more oppressive now, and smelled of smoke. It didn�t smell entirely like coal smoke, but I couldn�t tell what else was burning. I didn�t want to get up to find out.

I must lie still. Otherwise I�d be writhing about trying to clutch at sleep, as I had the second night of my fever, and sometimes in summer. I must sleep before the room grew too hot. I must keep my eyes shut. I mustn�t be distracted by the faint trickling of soot, nor the panting of the wind, nor the shadows and orange light that snatched at my eyes through my eyelids.

I woke in darkness. The fire had gone out. No, it was still there when I opened my eyes: subdued orange crawled on embers, a few weak flames leaped repetitively. The room was moving more slowly now. The dim room in the mirror, the face peering out at me, jerked faintly, as if almost dead.

I couldn�t look at that. I slid farther down the bed, dragging the pillow into my nest. I was too hot, but at least beneath the sheets I felt safe. I began to relax. Then I realized what I�d seen. The light had been dim, but I was almost sure the fireguard was standing away from the hearth.

I must have mistaken that, in the dim light. I wasn�t feverish, I couldn�t have sleepwalked again. There was no need for me to look, I was comfortable. But I was beginning to admit that I had better look when I heard the slithering in the chimney.

Something large was coming down. A fall of soot: I could hear the scattering pats of soot in the grate, thrown down by the harsh halting wind. But the wind was emerging from the fireplace, into the room. It was above me, panting through its obstructed throat.

I lay staring up at the mask of my sheets. I trembled from holding myself immobile. My held breath filled me painfully as lumps of rock. I had only to lie there until whatever was above me went away. It couldn�t touch me.

The clogged breath bent nearer; I could hear its dry rattling. Then something began to fumble at the sheets over my face. It plucked feebly at them, trying to grasp them, as if it had hardly anything to grasp with. My own hands clutched at the sheets from within, but couldn�t hold them down entirely. The sheets were being tugged from me, a fraction at a time. Soon I would be face to face with my visitor.

I was lying there with my eyes squeezed tight when it let go of the sheets and went away. My throbbing lungs had forced me to take shallow breaths; now I breathed silently open-mouthed, though that filled my mouth with fluff. The tolling of my ears subsided, and I realized the thing had not returned to the chimney. It was still in the room.

I couldn�t hear its breathing; it couldn�t be near me. Only that thought allowed me to look�that, and the desperate hope that I might escape, since it moved so slowly. I peeled the sheets down from my face slowly, stealthily, until my eyes were bare. My heartbeats shook me. In the sluggishly shifting light I saw a figure at the foot of the bed.

Its red costume was thickly furred with soot. It had its back to me; its breathing was muffled by the hood. What shocked me most was its size. It occurred to me, somewhere amid my engulfing terror, that burning shrivels things. The figure stood in the mirror as well, in the dim twitching room. A face peered out of the hood in the mirror, like a charred turnip carved with a rigid grin.

The stunted figure was still moving painfully. It edged round the foot of the bed and stooped to my pillowcase. I saw it draw the pillowcase up over itself and sink down. As it sank its hood fell back, and I saw the charred turnip roll about in the hood, as if there were almost nothing left to support it.

I should have had to pass the pillowcase to reach the door. I couldn�t move. The room seemed enormous, and was growing darker; my parents were far away. At last I managed to drag the sheets over my face, and pulled the pillow, like muffs, around my ears.

I had lain sleeplessly for hours when I heard movement at the foot of the bed. The thing had got out of its sack again. It was coming toward me. It was tugging at the sheets, more strongly now. Before I could catch hold of the sheets I glimpsed a red fur-trimmed sleeve, and was screaming.

�Let go, will you,� my father said irritably. �Good God, it�s only me.�

He was wearing Dr.�Flynn�s disguise, which flapped about him�the jacket, at least; his pajama cuffs peeked beneath it. I stopped screaming and began to giggle hysterically. I think he would have struck me, but my mother ran in. �It�s all right. All right,� she reassured me, and explained to him, �It�s the shock.�

He was making angrily for the door when she said, �Oh, don�t go yet, Albert. Stay while he opens his presents,� and, lifting the bulging pillowcase from the floor, dumped it beside me.

I couldn�t push it away, I couldn�t let her see my terror. I made myself pull out my presents into the daylight, books, sweets, ballpoints; as I groped deeper I wondered whether the charred face would crumble when I touched it. Sweat pricked my hands; they shook with horror�they could, because my mother couldn�t see them.

The pillowcase contained nothing but presents and a pinch of soot. When I was sure it was empty I slumped against the headboard, panting. �He�s tired,� my mother said, in defense of my ingratitude. �He was up very late last night.�

Later I managed an accident, dropping the pillowcase on the fire downstairs. I managed to eat Christmas dinner, and to go to bed that night. I lay awake, even though I was sure nothing would come out of the chimney now. Later I realized why my father had come to my room in the morning dressed like that; he�d intended me to catch him, to cure me of the pretense. But it was many years before I enjoyed Christmas very much.

The artwork in Whispers is just as important to me as the fiction. In the tradition of the great fantasy artists such as Arthur Rackham, Maxfield Parrish, Gustave Dor�, Harry Clarke, Howard Pyle, and the like, others are drawing their way into the worlds of fantasy artwork. Recent years have seen Hannes Bok and Virgil Finlay pass through to brighten these worlds and todays masters will also shine when their work can be looked upon in retrospect. I feel Whispers magazine has captured some of these lights in its pages, and it is appropriate to discuss those represented in this book�s art folio.

Most obvious is cover artist TIM KIRK, who has won five Hugo Awards as science fiction�s best artist as well as having part of his Master�s thesis (twenty-six paintings depicting Tolkien�s Lord of the Rings trilogy) brought out by Ballantine Books as a stunning color calendar. Tim�s day-to-day job is as an illustrator for Hallmark greeting cards, though he finds time to do covers for both paperback and hardcover publishers, including illustrating a Whispers Press hardcover edition of Fritz Leiber�s famous Fafhrd and Gray Mouser.

LEE BROWN COYE deservedly won the first World Fantasy Award for art; his masterful use of blacks and whites in his gothic artwork has made him a great in his own lifetime. He works in all media and has had several shows at the Whitney Museum of Art. One of his watercolors is in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the State University of New York has a special collection of his work, as do several New York State museums, including the Syracuse Museum. These aggregations include his paintings, silverwork, sculptures, and scale models (that have to be seen to believe their intricacy and realism). The most amazing thing about Lee�s artwork is that it is all self-taught, although he himself has instructed art classes on a university level.

GEORGE BARR, is best known for his intricate mixed-media color artwork. He has also won a Hugo Award as Best Artist and has had a nomination for that category under the World Fantasy Awards as well. Barr has recently had published a hardcover collection of more than fifty of his color works (Upon the Winds of Yesterday, Donald Grant, 1976) and may be remembered for his poster work on the movie Flesh Gordon. His art is constantly in demand by both paperback and hardcover publishers.

FRANK UTPATEL is best known in this field for his more than fifty covers for the fabled Arkham House publishers, though his reputation as a regional artist whose lithographs, woodcuts, and engravings are widely sought is not unsubstantial. In 1936 four of his woodcuts brought unholy life to the otherwise drab production of Howard Phillips Lovecraft�s first hardcover book, the classic The Shadow Over Innsmouth (Visionary Press). That art still ranks today as among the best ever executed for a Lovecraft story. Frank is still working for Arkham House and a national publisher is now preparing a hardcover collection of his lithographs.

MIKE GARCIA is a young artist whose intricate stipple technique makes his black and white drawings a long and laborious job. His Lovecraftian folio, �The Outsider in Hollywood,� took several first prizes at science fiction conventions, including the prestigious San Diego Comic Con. Garcia�s artwork is often nonliteral, occasionally anachronistic, but always outstandingly executed. Whispers Press has put out an 11�14 collection of his twenty-five best drawings.

STEVE FABIAN is my choice as the worthy successor to the legendary Virgil Finlay. His artwork does not attempt to copy the inimitable linework Finlay was known for, but it exudes the same unearthly mood that master was able to exert in his blacks and whites. No other artist in the field comes close to doing this. Steve�s color work is also outstanding and multiple Hugo and World Fantasy Award nominations only hint at the excellence of his art today and its potential for future growth.

Lastly let me note that production methods precluded the artwork herein from being placed directly with the story and situation they illustrated. This was unavoidable and hopefully has not taken away from the impact of art and fiction.

Stuart David Schiff is the editor and publisher of Whispers, a magazine he founded in 1973 to create and preserve quality art and literature in the horror and fantasy field. Winner of the World Fantasy Award for 1975, Whispers has aroused an enthusiastic response from an appreciative audience. Dr.�Schiff holds a degree in Dental and Oral Surgery; currently he is a Major in the U.S. Army. He lives with his wife Susan and son Geoffrey in New Jersey.